More To See Each Day

More glory of the snow flowers have come along. This is another under used spring flowering bulb that I can find only in one spot in a local park. I think it must be another of those flowers that people simply aren’t aware of. It’s too bad we don’t have a public garden here where people could go to learn the names of flowers they like and to see how they can be used in a garden.

It’s already time to say goodbye to the crocuses. They were beautiful this year despite the snow and cold they went through.

New flowers have taken over for the crocuses. Hyacinths and daffodils dominate this bed at the local college. I wish I could add fragrance to photos.

Most of the daffodils are in full bloom now. This one was fading a bit already but it was still pretty.

Bleeding hearts are up. These are the tall old fashioned bleeding hearts that disappear in the heat of summer. I like their spring foliage but sometimes it can be hard to catch it in this stage because it grows so fast. These plants will be blooming in no time.

Scilla blossoms are at their peak right now and since they’re my favorite color, I’m happy that they are. This spring bulb always looks better planted in large numbers, as these were.

I think it’s safe to say that lilacs are going to have a great year. As long as we don’t have another freeze, that is.

The Japanese magnolia buds that I showed in the last post have opened. As I mentioned they are this plum color outside….

…and white on the inside. As I also said, the petals tend to flop around a lot.

Violas seem tired this year. I can remember plants full of flowers but these plants at the local college are getting old so they can only manage one or two blooms at a time now. They were show stopping when they were in their prime.

It’s getting to be time now for the flowering shrubs and trees to add to the beauty. Japanese andromeda are one of the first shrubs to bloom and this year they are heavy with flowers that look like tiny fairy lights mounted in gold. They must like mild winters; I’ve never seen them bloom like they are now.

Once just by dumb luck I took a photo of a henbit flower and saw lots of hairs that I couldn’t see with my eyes, so every now and then I try for the hairs. This shot is this year’s the result. It’s a tiny but very hairy flower. It’s in the deadnettle family and some call it henbit deadnettle. The red parts seen under the hood are its four stamens. It has two long and two short stamens, much like ground ivy. I’ve read that its name comes from the way hens peck at the flowers but it isn’t the flowers they’re after; it’s the four tiny seeds the flowers produce.

Dandelions haven’t stopped since February. It seems like each time I go out I see even more. Many this year have had huge flowers on them but I’d say these were average.

I went to the wetlands hoping I might see some dragonflies but it must have been too early. I did see some red maples shining in the morning sunlight though, and they were beautiful. I also saw a small orange butterfly but it was too quick for me.

I sat on a picnic table on the side of the road and this bird flew into a bush beside me. Google lens says it’s a song sparrow but I wonder, because it squawked but didn’t really sing. Last year while I was sitting on the same picnic table a bird that looked like this one flew into the same bush, but that one sang beautifully.

When I got up to leave after sitting for a while I saw that a muskrat had come up out of the pond to eat some of the fresh green grass shoots. Its front paws looked just like little hands but with long claws. Muskrats must be famished for something green in spring; I’ve seen them do this once or twice before but it’s rare to see one expose itself in daylight when people are around. Muskrats can be aggressive if they feel threatened, so it’s best to give them plenty of space.

Muskrats are smaller than beavers and their ears are small, flat against the head and hard to see while a beaver’s ears are larger, protruding, and easy to see. The tails are the best way to tell them apart but the tail isn’t always visible. A muskrat can curl its rat like tail around its body as this one had but I don’t think beavers are able to do this with their longer, flat tails. Any time I’ve seen a beaver on dry land its tail was obvious.

On Tuesday it reached 70 degrees F. and the turtles came out in large numbers to soak up some warmth. At first I thought I was seeing just that larger turtle but then I moved a little and saw another one behind it. Then I got home and looked at the photo and saw another one coming out of the water. The scene looked like they had wrecked a bamboo raft and were scrambling to safety but it was really just last year’s cattail stems scattered around. While I was getting shots of turtles I heard a deep throated bullfrog croaking off in the distance; the first I’ve heard this year.

I think the mourning doves have been taking turkey lessons, because as I walked down a road recently I watched two doves stopping traffic. Anyone who knows these birds knows how skittish they can be but this particular pair were so interested in something in the road, they had no fear. A car came along at speed but the driver had to hit the brakes, letting the car creep along until the doves moved slowly out of the way, just as turkeys do. After taking a couple of shots I kept walking, but when I looked back there they were again, right back in the middle of the road. I’ve read that the name “mourning” dove comes from the mournful sound they make.

Willows were absolutely glowing on a recent cloudy day. I was surprised because they were female flowers, which in willows aren’t as showy or as brightly colored as male flowers.

This is what the female (pistillate) flowers look like. They’re smaller, paler, and obviously evenly spaced.

This is what the male (staminate) flowers look like. They’re a bright, banana yellow and are bigger than the female flowers. Though they are also evenly spaced it isn’t readily apparent. They often look kind of chaotic and one sided.

I went to see how the hobblebush flower buds were coming along. They aren’t very big yet because they bloom in May but they’re bigger than the last time I saw them. Each flower bud is between two young leaves that look like they’re made of corduroy. They are in their bunny face mode right how but soon the leaves will flatten out and uncurl and the beautiful snow white flowers will start to open. Hobblebushes are one of our most beautiful native viburnums.

The male flower bud scales on box elders have opened to reveal the reddish brown colored stamens within. They should grow quickly out of the buds now, and before long each stamen will dangle at the end of a long filament. A week or so after they have fully developed, the female flowers, which are sticky lime green pistils, will appear along with the leaves. Box elder flowers are quite beautiful but since the trees are considered “weed trees” they are becoming increasingly hard to find and get close to. Box elder is in the maple family and is considered one of the “soft maples.” The oldest intact Native American flute ever found was made from box elder.

Next time you’re walking under a tree why not stop for a moment and reach up and pull down a branch? Just take a look at the buds; it takes little effort and even less time, and you might be amazed that you have been walking right by something so beautiful for so long. These slightly hairy, richly colored Norway maple buds are about at their peak of beauty right now. Soon they’ll open and large clusters of yellow flowers will spill out of them. Norway Maple is actually an invasive tree but so many towns and cities have planted them as landscape specimens, it’s far too late to do much about it now. I find them in the woods fairly regularly.

Every bird, every tree, every flower reminds me what a blessing and privilege it is just to be alive.
 ~Marty Rubin

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The First Spring Wildflowers Appear

The biggest surprise this week was finding beautiful spring beauty flowers in bloom a full two weeks ahead of the earliest date I had ever seen them, which was April first. The most beautiful things in nature are almost always right there in plain sight but to find them we have to look carefully, and we have to see. Spring beauty blossoms are about the size of an aspirin and can be very hard to see when they first appear. Later on though, when the forest floor is carpeted with them it will be an unforgettable sight. They are usually the first true ephemeral wildflowers to appear in the forest in this area, so nothing says spring quite like they do.

I had to stop when I saw this dandelion blossom shining like a miniature sun. It was twice as big as all the others in the area and so very bright and beautiful more light shined out of it than on it. It was producing pollen and the bees were rejoicing. I joined them as I knelt to take its photo, so happy that spring was here once again. The Taraxacon part of the scientific name comes from the Greek taraxos, meaning disorder, and akos, meaning remedy. Dandelions have been used as both food and medicine for thousands of years and there was even a time when grass was torn up to make more room for them. A weed is an opinion, nothing more.

Signs that spring is here are everywhere now. Female American hazelnut blossoms are about as big and numerous as they ever get.

The brownish, triangular, manta ray like bud scales have opened on many of the American hazelnut catkins. Under each bud scale are three to five tiny yellowish male flowers, so there can be hundreds of flowers per catkin, wound in a spiral formation around a central stalk. Just a touch and this bush released clouds of pollen.

Female red and silver maple flowers look much like the female hazelnut flowers; just single forked threads called stigma or stigmas. Though I’ve seen many insects they don’t rely on them; they’re sticky so they can catch the pollen that the male flowers release to the wind.

Pollen production is now in full swing on male red and silver maple flowers. Some were producing pollen before they had even grown out of the bud.

Like the American hazelnut catkins, alder catkins have also started opening. Alder catkins have beautiful deep purple bud scales which contrast nicely with the tiny yellowish flowers. These flowers weren’t quite fully opened yet and weren’t releasing pollen but you can see how the buds spiral down the central stalk. Nature uses spirals almost everywhere, from spiral galaxies billions of light years across to the tiny spiral cochlea in our inner ear. That’s because the spiral, it is said, is the most efficient way for something to grow. More can be packed into a spiral than into other shapes and one of the easiest ways to see and understand this is to look at a sunflower that has gone to seed. If you look closely you see that much of nature is all about spirals.

As I poked around looking at this and that one day I had the feeling that I was being watched and I was, by a robin. This was the first one to get close to me this year. They’re very inquisitive birds and I usually have one or two land very near me each spring. One spring I was looking at maple flowers and a robin landed right beside me and began kicking up leaves, making all kinds of noise. They want to see you and they want to be seen by you.

I think this one might have been working on a nest because it didn’t seem to want to leave this spot. I didn’t want to upset it so I took a quick shot or two and let it be. This shot would have been okay one if I hadn’t cut its tail off.

Speaking of birds, in that last post I showed what I thought was a purple finch but this week I was walking through the campus of the local college and heard that wonderful song again. This time I used the Merlin bird identification app on my phone and it said “house finch.” I was quite far away from where I heard it the first time but what are the chances of both a house finch and purple finch being on the same campus? I can’t answer that but it may be that Susan’s thought that it was a house finch last week had been correct. When I was just a boy I decided I would never be able to be a “bird person” because of colorblindness, so any uncommon bird name you find on this blog should be taken with a grain of salt. I try hard not to misinform but I certainly don’t know all the bird names. Really the whole point of the story of that bird was me hoping you would want to go and hear its song online. I still hope that, because you’ll hear one of the most beautiful sounds that nature has to offer. It is like spring being presented in song.

I looked at lilac buds and noticed that the bud scales were relaxing and starting to open. I’ve been fascinated by the way buds open in spring since I was a small boy. Lilacs were the first ones I watched because they were everywhere and easy to get to.

I saw something entirely different on these lilac buds; squirrel hair blowing in the breeze.

The lilac with squirrel hair was on the grounds of the local college, and so was this squirrel. This must have been an educated squirrel because as I watched it looked both ways before crossing the road. Squirrels that live on the college campus have an easy life. Not only are there millions of acorns falling from the huge old oaks; there are also hickory, black walnut, hazelnut, butternut, and other nut bearing trees growing there. Even a blind squirrel could find nuts there.

Call it creeping Charlie or gill over the ground or ground ivy; no matter what you want to call it is one of the most common “weeds” in these parts, and it’s in full bloom. This plant grew at both may father’s and grandmother’s houses so it was one of the first plants I ever paid any real attention to. As far back as memory can take me, it’s there. It is in the mint family and is related to henbit. It has a powerful and unusual odor when it is mowed, with the kind of odor that gets in the back of your throat and stays there for a while. I think that’s what I remember most about it; that strange scent.

Speaking of henbit, here it is now. This plant’s name comes from the way chickens peck at it. Like ground ivy it is in the mint family and I’ve heard that all parts of it are edible. I like its tiny cartoonish flowers that always look surprised. Surprised that spring is here? Surprised by their own existence? I can’t say.

I haven’t seen any willow flowers yet but poplar catkins have appeared. Poplar trees are in the willow family but the catkins are usually two or three times as big as those on willows. Instead of bright yellow flowers the male poplar flowers will be a beautiful chocolate brown. The shiny brown bud scales are also bigger than willow bud scales and since those bud scales weren’t sticky I know this tree was an aspen, which like cottonwood is just another variety of poplar.

One of my favorite spring garden flowers is this beautiful crocus, called the vernal crocus. Some call them “Tommys” due to their scientific name, which is Crocus tommasinianus. I like the delicate shading inside.

I think the person who planned this bed at the local college might have miscalculated the bloom times of the crocuses because the yellow flowers always bloom two weeks before the purple, so by the time the purples show themselves the yellows are passing on. Of course that might have been the plan but in my opinion it is the contrasting colors that make the show. But that’s just another opinion.

I watched the bees fly quickly from purple to purple flower, not stopping to sample them at all. Clearly, they prefer the yellow flowers, for whatever reason. It can’t be pollen because I saw a few purple flowers that had pollen spilled on their petals.

The daffodils are promising to be beautiful this year as long as we don’t get a cold snap.

The scilla at the college are fully out in places but in other places there isn’t a sign of them. Mine aren’t showing at all yet.

More reticulated iris have come along. I love the color of these flowers but the foliage grows quite fast to twice the height of the flowers and gets in the way, especially if you’re trying to photograph them.

This beautiful reticulated iris suddenly appeared in my yard recently and there are quite a few more on the way. They came from Maryland, from my blogging friend Ginny, so once again I’ll say thanks Ginny! Your flowery gift just keeps on giving and I’m very happy to have them. Nobody I used to garden for ever grew reticulated iris.

I went to the swamp where skunk cabbages grow to see how they were doing and I took a step backward and heard a crunching sound. I knew what that meant and sure enough when I turned around I saw that I had accidentally stepped on one of the plants. Though the damage might look severe I only damaged the outer spathe, so none of the actual flowers were harmed. The flowers are the tiny white bits that spiral around the spadix, which is the thing that looks sort of like a brain. These flowers are special though, because they are the female flowers of the skunk cabbage, and you’ve never seen them before on this blog.

In all the years I’ve been doing this blog each spring I’ve shown you skunk cabbage flowers, and in all those years not once did I find female flowers. Every spring they’ve been male flowers like those seen in this photo. So what are the odds of seeing female flowers only once in 13 years? Quite high, apparently. The odd thing is, not once did I tell myself that I really should show you the female flowers. That I think, is because I’m always so relieved to have gotten a photo at all. To get photos of skunk cabbage flowers you are in a swamp, usually standing or kneeling in mud and/or water, trying to train your lens through an opening that might be two inches wide if you’re lucky. It’s a bit like shining a flashlight into a cave and It gets more challenging each year, so I’m usually happy to leave the swamp.

With the weekly rains we’ve been having the rivers are running quite high, so I thought I’d go and see if I could catch a wave. Here it is.

I hope you are having good weather and are seeing plenty of signs of spring, wherever you are.

If you listen to the birds, every day will have a song in it. ~Kyo Maclear

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Things I’ve Seen

Right after I told you in that last post that crows flew away as soon as I pointed anything at them, this one landed in a tree right above me and posed for as many photos as I wanted to take. Even so I never did get a good one, but this reminded me once again that the words “always” and “never” have no place in nature study. As soon as you start thinking you have it all figured out nature shows you that you don’t.

After I walked down the trail for a few yards I stopped and looked back and saw the crow still sitting in the same place, looking as if it was admiring the red maple on the other side of the trail. I noticed that it kept looking over its shoulder and upwards so I wonder if there might have been a hawk nearby. There are cornfields very nearby so there are many squirrels living here. Because of that it has become a well known hawk hang out. The squirrels eat the corn and the hawks eat the squirrels and the crows hope everyone just leaves them alone.

The tree the crow was sitting in was a poplar. They have large, shiny buds that will open to reveal catkins that look almost like gray, fluffy, giant willow catkins. These bud scales were not sticky and that tells me this was a quaking aspen because that is the only member of the poplar family with buds like these that don’t have sticky bud scales. Balsam poplar buds look much the same but their brown bud scales are very sticky to the touch. I have touched huge numbers of poplar buds but only a few were sticky so we don’t seem to have a lot of balsam poplars in this immediate area.

The willows are going strong now with more buds opening every day. It won’t be long now before we see their beautiful, bright yellow flowers.

American hazelnut catkins are growing as well. I wanted to visit this particular rail trail because I know there are a lot of hazelnuts growing here. I had hoped to find some of the tiny female flowers but it got cold again after that last flowery post you saw, so spring flowers have been on hold for most of the week.

I saw a few hazelnuts that hadn’t been eaten but most were gone. At least a few have to fall to the ground and grow so future generations of birds and animals will have them.

I saw some beautiful leaves as well but I couldn’t be sure that they were hazelnut leaves. Hazelnut leaves will often stay red-brown all winter. They seem very warm on a cold February day.

Staghorn sumacs are covered in velvet like hairs like a deer’s antler, and when the light hits them in a certain way they glow as if lit from within. For the first time this year I noticed that cattails do the same.

A large mower had mowed the sides of the trail and when it did it scarred an older staghorn sumac, tearing its bark. This had most likely happened last fall and here was the inner bark turning bright red, just as I’ve seen it do so many times. As it ages it will slowly turn to gray but for now it’s beautiful. There is a lot of red in sumacs, including their beautiful fall color. Native Americans used all parts of this plant for everything from a kind of lemonade from its berries to dye from its bark and twigs.

I was surprised to find a wild privet with green leaves still on it out here. I grew up walking this trail when it was a working railroad and have never seen a privet here. I’ve read that birds love the berries so it will be appearing everywhere, I’m sure.

There are lots of grapevines along this trail and I always like to stop and have a look at the tendrils, wondering where my imagination might take me. It’s easy to get lost in this so you have to keep your wits about you so you don’t come down with a good case of tendrilitis. I can easily spend hours doing things like this. This one looked kind of like an S with an extra squiggle or top knot.

I went to where the trout lilies bloom so beautifully in the wetlands and saw what looked like a buck rub on an old alder. Since the way the alder grew would prevent a tractor or mower damaging it in this way, a buck rub is the only answer I could come up with.

A buck rub happens when a male deer rubs its antlers on a tree trunk or branch. It does this when the blood supply to its antlers decreases in the fall. The velvet on the antlers dries and begins peeling, and to get rid of it the deer rubs them on a tree or branch. It is also thought that this may be a way that young bucks practice fighting other young bucks. Quite often the same tree, or in this case a shrub, is used again and again, rubbing the bark right off it. Since I saw two bucks and four does in this area one day I suspect that this was probably a prime hunting spot before a public road was built very nearby.  

As if to confirm my suspicions, here was an old tree stand; so old that it was falling apart. In those days they were built, not bought. Imagine sitting on that for hours on a cold fall morning, lashed to the tree, waiting for a deer to come by. It was a good choice though; that buck rub wasn’t too far from here.

The way the sunlight lit up this beech tree was so beautiful, I had to stop and take a photo of it. This is an example of why I often say beauty is everywhere you look. But you have to look, and you have to see. Unless you are power walking for exercise what harm could there be in just walking slowly and looking closely at your surroundings? When something captures your eye (or your heart) just go and see. And yes, looking is different than seeing. Anyone can look, but few seem to be able to really see. All it takes is a little practice.

I saw a very red colored seep. According to what I’ve read this red color in seeps and on river and stream banks is usually caused by iron hydroxide. A seep happens when ground water reaches the surface. It doesn’t flow; it just sits, and will usually stay in liquid form all winter without freezing.

There were lots of skunk cabbages in the seep with their mottled maroon and yellow spathes just starting to show. I went and saw the skunk cabbage with an open spathe that we saw in the last post, thinking I might see the flowers inside, but instead I found that the spathe had closed. That was a first; I’ve never seen them close their spathes before and have never heard that they could do so, but apparently if it gets cold enough they will. I think it got down to around 16 or 17 degrees F. on a couple of nights, so they must have closed up shop in a hurry. Plenty of plants get fooled in spring but I’ve never known skunk cabbages to fall for early warmth.

Lilac buds are getting big and beautiful now. Lilac buds normally have a natural whitish “glue” that keeps the overlapping bud scales from allowing water into the bud where it could freeze and kill the bud. These buds instead had this strip of tan (?) tissue on their leading edges, which was very pretty, I thought.

Yesterday it warmed up again in the afternoon and I must have seen two dozen dandelion blossoms. Here are two of them. Dandelions seem to be raring to go so far this year.

I can’t tell you how happy I was to see these two little yellow crocuses blossoming yesterday. Unfortunately it was supposed to get cold (23 degrees F) last night and it’s supposed to stay cold all of today, so there’s a good chance I won’t see them again. There are plenty more on the way though. As I said in the last post; once spring gets going there is no stopping it.

You must, in order that it shall speak to you, take a thing during a certain time as the only one that exists, as the only phenomenon which through your diligent and exclusive love finds itself set down in the center of the universe. ~Rilke

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Eden Revisited

I’ve been waiting for the Ashuelot River to return to normal levels so I could visit the forest I used to spend a lot of time in as a boy. It’s a beautiful place on land now owned by the local college, and they’ve mowed a trail through it. The trail runs very close to the river and that’s what the fence posts seen in this shot are for; to warn people that the river is right there, just feet away. It’s hard to tell due to all the growth but I learned years ago that there are otter slides and muskrat tunnels and sink holes that are easily fallen into. I stayed on the trail and in all the time I spent here I saw only an occasional glimpse of the river. I was too busy enjoying the beauty of the place.

When I was a boy there were no mowed trails here so my friends and I just found our own way through the woods, using game trails or other natural pathways. There have always been lots of birds and animals here and now the land is a designated wildlife management area. Since it floods badly when the river is high it really couldn’t be used for anything else. Though the sign points to wildlife “management” I think the management consists of letting the wildlife just be and do as it will.

I immediately started seeing insects when I got here, including this ebony jewelwing damselfly. They like to hunt around forested streams. There is also a river jewelwing which hunts riverbanks but I didn’t see one of those. There was certainly plenty for it to eat here. Never in my life have I seen swarms of mosquitoes like I did here. Even with bug spray on they got me. All the rain and flooding this year has led to a perfect storm of them and when you meet someone on a trail that’s all they talk about.

What I think might be a cloudless sulfur butterfly sat on a leaf, looking a bit like a leaf itself. It also looked as if it was having antennae problems. There are also clouded sulfurs, but they have black edging on their wingtips.

I saw what seemed to be very early New England asters in bloom. Many of the asters that grow here have the deepest colored purple flowers that are my favorites, but I don’t usually start looking for them until the end of September.

An eastern cottontail warmed itself in the morning sunshine. It let me have a few photos and then hopped off into the tall grass. I felt sorry to have disturbed its peace.

Something that surprised me was finding marsh bellflowers here. This is only the second place I’ve seen these small flowers, each time very near the river. I’m not surprised that they would like it here in this wet ground.

I found a Japanese beetle on a hedge bindweed blossom. As I pointed the camera at it, it reared up on its hind legs in challenge. “This is my flower,” it said. By the end of the day the blossom had most likely been chewed full of holes.

The trail closes in a bit in places and that’s because the river is close on one side and old silver maples crowd in on the other. Most of the trees here are silver maples with a few red maples. They’re the only trees that can stand the almost yearly flooding. In many places all the undergrowth had been flattened by the flood water but it wasn’t too bad right here.

This tall grass was very beautiful caught in a sunbeam like it was. I think it is tall woodreed, which is a grass that likes shaded, boggy places. It must have been about six feet tall and it stopped me in my tracks. All the gray in the background is caused by plants that were under water not long ago. The rain hadn’t washed the silt off them yet.

What I think might be a hairy footed flower bee sat on a leaf. These solitary bees are said to be the first to emerge in spring and like to visit pulmonaria flowers, which are some of the earliest to appear. They are native to Europe and North Africa, but have been introduced into Canada and the U.S. This is the only one I’ve seen.

This was another unusual bee because it was as big as the end of my thumb; easily the biggest bee I’ve seen. I think it must be some type of carpenter bee but I’m not sure.

Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius once recommended that we “Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” That was just what I was doing here; a universe full of Stellaria pubera, the star chickweed, bloomed all along the trail and into the woods.

Woodland sunflowers, which had apparently been flattened by rain, were starting to lift up their heads.

I think there were more tall blue lettuce plants out here than I’ve ever seen in a single place. They like a bit of shade and wet ground to do their best, and they find both here. The flowers, each about the size of a pencil eraser, have leaned more toward white than blue this year.

For the first time I was able to get a fairly good photo of tall blue lettuce that shows where the “tall” in the name comes from. The undergrowth was about six feet tall and these plants soared many feet above it. I’d guess they were at leat twelve feet tall. It seems odd that such small flowers would appear on such a tall plant.

River silt, as fine as talcum powder, covered the trail where it had flooded, and then dried and cracked. When I see silt like this I always think about how many thousands of years it must have taken to build up the rich farmlands that are almost always found along our rivers.

This place has always been a source of wonder and as I walked along I thought of how lucky I was to spend my boyhood in such a beautiful place. Bordered by the railroad tracks I walked almost every day, it was an easy place to get to and I spent a lot of time exploring and learning from nature here. Anything a boy could want in nature I found here but I’ve always thought my friends and I came mostly because we simply loved the place. Even after all these years it’s still an easy place to love and now with the mowed trails, it’s even more beautiful than it used to be. I’ve never forgotten the silence, natural beauty, and freedom that I experienced here. It all led to a lifelong love of life.

Tall asters weren’t so tall after the rain was done with them. This one could barely lift its head out of the ferns, and it should be six feet tall.

Broom sedge isn’t a plant I see a lot of but there were large colonies of them here so they must like moist ground. I like its bristly, reddish seed heads.

Goldenrod glowed in the bright sunshine. There has always been goldenrod here for as far back as memory will take me, and it has always been beautiful. One thing I thought of that is lacking here these days are the big black and yellow spiders that used to be here. I used to love watching them but I haven’t seen one in a long time.

I spent parts of two different days here. On the first day it was so windy everything was thrashing around and branches were falling off the trees but it kept the bugs away. This little pearl crescent (I think) butterfly hung on with all it had as the goldenrod it clung to thrashed back and forth in the wind gusts. It took quite a few tries to get this not so great shot. Every time the wind would stop I’d bring the camera up, ready to get the shot, but as soon as I clicked the shutter it would start in again. I spent a lot of time just standing and waiting, using the patience the great blue herons taught me.

On the second day when the winds had calmed down I noticed that many of the thistles that live here had gone to seed and thistle down floated in the air. Since thistle seeds are a favorite of gold finches I thought I’d better walk over to the place where I usually find them.

I wasn’t disappointed; the beautiful little birds were here as they are every year, enjoying the fruits of the bull or spear thistles. I never noticed how their black forehead “hair” fell down over their eyes like it does. This one is a breeding male. The bad boy look must help him attract females.

He wasn’t going to waste time watching me watch him; he dug right in and the thistle down was flying. I’ve also watched them pull garden zinnias apart, throwing petals everywhere to get at the seeds. They also go for evening primrose and any other small seeded plantss. According to the Cornell School of Ornithology their natural habitats are weedy fields and floodplains, so it makes perfect sense that they would come here every year.

He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her. ~Friedrich Von Schlegel

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Drying Out

Here’s where all the rain we had went. The Ashuelot River roared mightily as it went rushing by on its way to the Atlantic, carrying countless tons of soil with it. In flood the river deposits fine silt it over all the land that is flooded and then, sometimes many years later, rains wash it back into the river. It’s all a circle.

One of the flowers that like growing in the soil deposited by the river is the monkey flower, and I’ve seen more of them this year than I ever have. I haven’t seen a monkey in one though.

It is said that whoever named the monkey flower saw a monkey’s face in it, but I don’t see a monkey any more than I see a turtle in a turtlehead flower. Maybe its just lack of imagination on my part, I don’t know.

Here is where I found a monkey; in the face of a blue dasher dragonfly.

Because they kept landing in the shade I had to try many times over several days to get a shot of what I think might be an emerald damselfly. It’s the only useable shot I’ve gotten of one. I like its big blue bug eyes and its green metallic shine. This one, if I’ve identified it correctly, is a male and its abdomen and tail are powder blue, though they look white in this shot. The “tree” it is hanging on to is really just a twig, smaller in diameter than a pencil. This long bodied damselfly reminded me of the old wives’ tales about it and others of its kind that I heard as a boy. They were called “sewing needles” or “devil’s darning needles,” and were supposed to be able to sew your eyes and lips closed if you weren’t careful. Why would anyone tell a child such foolishness? I can’t see that doing so would serve any useful purpose. It would only make them afraid of a beautiful part of nature, and of what possible use is that? I can’t remember ever believing any such stories but memory can’t always be trusted, so I may have.

According to what I’ve read flies like hoverflies, or blowflies like the one seen in this photo, visit flowers to sip their nectar and taste their pollen. Flies sip the nectar for strength, which they need to keep flying, and the pollen helps them produce healthy eggs. Since they are hairy, bottle or blowflies help with pollination by carrying pollen from one flower to another. I walked though a field of Queen Anne’s lace flowers one day and saw as many flies as I did bees.

Some of the dogwoods are whispering things I’d rather not hear, so I didn’t listen. I just admired their beautiful colors.

A few posts ago I talked about the legume family and how you could identify them by the flowers, which have a standard and a keel. Here, on showy tick trefoil flowers you can see the vertical, half round standard and the keel, which juts out at about 90 degrees or so from the standard. Inside the keel are the reproductive parts. When ready the keel opens and lowers, and the reproductive parts show themselves as they’ve done here. Strong, smart insects like bumblebees will often force open the keel to get to the goodies ahead of time.

Every time I see a bicolor hedge bindweed blossom I remember when I had to search high and low to find one, because 99% of them were plain white. Now it’s just the opposite; all I see are bicolor ones and I have to search for the plain white ones. It’s an interesting lesson on how flowers evolve to attract more insects. More insects mean more pollinated flowers and that means more seeds. More seeds increase the likelihood of the continuation of the species, and continuation of the species is a driving force in nature.

One evening this cottontail saw me and crouched down to make itself small, as if it wanted to melt into the earth, but as I stood and watched it relaxed and made itself “big” again. I like it when animals sense that I mean them no harm, as this rabbit did. After taking a couple of shots I thanked it and left as it went on munching white clover. I could have artificially lightened this shot but I wanted you to see what I saw. I liked all the lights in the grasses.

Eastern amber wing dragonflies are very pretty but also quite small; I’ve read that they are only about an inch long. I saw them swarming around a pickerel weed plant at a pond and noticed that they never seemed to land. They were always in motion, so I gave up trying to get a shot. Then one day when I wasn’t near water the one shown above flew in front of me and landed on this grass stalk. As you spend more time with nature you find yourself becoming increasingly thankful for what once seemed small or insignificant things, like a dragonfly or a rabbit willing to pose for a photo. Gratitude tends to seep in quite naturally, as do love and joy.

A bee foraging on pollen had its pollen sacs filled to almost overflowing, by the looks. Knapweed pollen is white, as we can see. It’s a beautiful but supposedly invasive flower. I say supposedly because in this area it stays mostly on the embankments the highway department planted it on. I do see it in the wild occasionally but usually just a plant or two.

I’ve always liked the buds on Joe Pye weed as much as the flowers but of course the butterflies and bees prefer the flowers. Last year I found a colony of several plants that were covered in monarch and great spangled fritillary butterflies. I hope I see the same this year, because I still haven’t seen a monarch.

One day I found a little orange skipper butterfly probing for nutrients in the gravel along the side of a road. I got home intending to try to identify it and found so many species of little orange skippers it seemed like it would take forever to identify it, so little orange skipper will have to do for a name.

Pretty little pale spike lobelias have started blooming. Though their color can range from white to deep blue, most I’ve seen this year have looked like the one in the photo. This plant reaches to about knee high and grows in what can be large colonies. Each single flower could hide behind a standard aspirin. Next will come their cousins, Indian tobacco lobelia.

I don’t know who Barbara was but this plant is called Barbara’s buttons. It’s a native perennial plant (Marshallia) in the aster family. The flowers ae quite pretty and unusual, and probably about the same diameter as a large hen’s egg. I’ve read that it grows on roadsides, bogs, or open pine woodlands but it is said to be rare, even in its native southeastern U.S. It can be found for sale at nurseries specializing in rare, unusual and / or exotic plants. I first found this one last year in a garden at a commercial business building.

Like most other plants flowering raspberry is blooming well this year. I’ve known them for a very long time so they seem like old friends. I always like to see their cheery blooms, but even though their fruit looks like a giant, end of your thumb size raspberry, they seem tasteless to me. People have said that you have to put them on the very tip of your tongue to taste them but I’ve tried that as well, and all I’ve tasted is nothing. It was as if I was trying to taste air.

Invasive Japanese honeysuckle berries go from green to this electric, neon orange, and then to bright red, and the birds love them. That’s why I say once the genie is out of the bottle it’s near impossible to get it back in. True, you’d need an army devoted to nothing but honeysuckle control, but why not organize one?

It appears to be a great year for hazelnuts but in some places the blueberry crop has failed. In other areas like hilltops and mountainsides they’re doing fine. I met someone just the other day who told me the apple crop has also failed in certain orchards because of the late freeze, and he said his hay crop will only bear a single late cutting this year. You can’t cut hay in the rain.

I found this plant growing in the garden of a local business and realized that I didn’t know its name. The flowers looked like small hollyhock or rose of Sharon blossoms, but only half the size. The scalloped, basal leaves were shiny and stem leaves were narrow, like willow leaves. The plant was about 3 feet tall and loaded with flowers. I took a couple of shots of it and Google lens told me it was a false mallow.

With flowers like these I was sure it had to be in the mallow family because it had “that look” but false mallow was one I had never heard of.  After a little reading I found that it doesn’t like real hot weather and goes dormant until it gets cooler unless it gets regular watering, so I think I’d try it first where it got mostly cooler morning sun, even though some instructions say full sun. It blooms in mid to late summer and is drought tolerant and deer resistant, which would make it valuable in this area. If you like hollyhocks but don’t have the room this one might be for you; another name for it is “miniature hollyhock.”

I found a peachy daylily in my yard that I had forgotten I had. That’s the beauty of daylilies; you can fuss with them if you like but they are in fact a “plant it and forget it” perennial. If you’re looking for a low maintenance garden, daylilies should be near the top of your list. With early, midseason, and late varieties that come in just about any color but blue or black, you can do a lot with them.

Beautiful swamp milkweed is still blooming. One of the benefits of the overcast skies and rain has been longer blooming times for many plants. Some I’ve seen have been blooming for close to a month, and that’s unusual.

I was crawling around on the forest floor, getting shots of mushrooms when I noticed something blue in the cleft of a large boulder. Prying it out with my finger wasn’t easy but I got it out and saw that it was a painted stone. There in the woods it looked like a waterfall falling over the edge of the stone. Whoever painted it has some artistic ability; I thought it was nice how they got the feel of falling water with their brush. Now though, when I see it in a photo, it looks like snowy mountain peaks and trails, trees, and sky. Unless someone was on their hands and knees as I was they would never have seen it, so I wonder what the point of hiding it there was. In any event it I enjoyed seeing it, so I owe a thank you to whoever put it there.

If you want a photographic challenge try enchanter’s nightshade. Not only are the flowers smaller than a pea, but the plants usually grow in deep shade. I’ve had years when I just couldn’t pull it off even after trying many times, but this year after maybe a dozen tries I got lucky. Enchanter’s nightshade isn’t a nightshade at all, but is related to evening primroses. Its small round seed pods readily stick to your clothes and I sometimes find that I’m covered with them when I get home.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe the enchantress drugged Odysseus’ crew and turned them into swine. Circe, who was the daughter of the sun and granddaughter of the oceans, gives enchanter’s nightshade its scientific name Circaea.

As children, we are very sensitive to nature’s beauty, finding miracles and interesting things everywhere. As we grow up, we tend to forget how beautiful and magnificent the world is. There is magic and wonder for eyes who know how to look with curiosity and love. ~ Ansel Adams

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Walking Near Water

These trees aren’t pines but I thought of John Muir when I saw them. He said “Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.” This is the kind of place I’ve been spending time in lately and he was right, but I don’t think the species matters. There’s a doorway to a new world between every two maples as well.

There is a lot of water where I’ve been walking and on June first, just like clockwork the big female snapping turtles came up out of the water to find some warm, soft soil to dig their nests in. This one was there beside the road, waiting to start digging when I happened by. From what I’ve seen egg laying seems an exhausting process for a turtle and it didn’t appear that she was in any hurry to start. At least once each year she must sacrifce the lightness of her existence for the good of her kind. Here she is no longer bouyant. She bears the full weight of gravity because the continuation of her species is all that matters.  

I looked a little closer when something didn’t look right and saw that she had lost an eye. I’ve debated whether or not to show you this photo and I finally decided that yes, you should see it. I’m here to report on nature, not to sanitize it or to lie to you about it and the truth is, when you spend a lot of time in nature, you regularly see death and injuries. It is something you have to be able to stand apart from, just as at times you must be able to stand apart from yourself. Death is a natural part of living and when I see a dead animal I know it was its time. Often I also know that because of its death another animal was likely able to stay alive, or maybe even feed its family. It’s just the way it is; every living thing gets eaten eventually, be it by predator or microbe.

I walked around this mother turtle and saw that her other eye was fine. I also saw deep peace in that eye; an eternal peace, and I knew she would be well. I wished her an easy time of her egg laying and left her to get on about her business.

All of the sudden pretty little blue toadflax is lining the sides of roads. It’s funny how so many things seem to wait for June. All of the sudden it’s June first and there they are, just like the turtles.

I’m seeing lots of nannyberry blossoms this year. This native viburnum is common and easy to find, especially in spring when it blooms. The numerous small, five lobed white flowers are very pretty with their five yellow tipped stamens. They’ll be followed by edible dark blue, juicy one seeded berries (drupes), which are sometimes called wild raisins. They and many other native viburnums and dogwoods are great for attracting birds and wildlife to the garden. They’re also strong native plants that don’t need any special pampering. In fact most of them do best when just left alone, so they’re a great choice for the occasional gardener.

Blue eyed grass is another plant that just seems to appear one day. First you can’t find it anywhere and the next day it’s everywhere. I found this one in the shade and I admired the way its petals looked as if they had been cut from satin cloth. The plant is in the iris family and has nothing to do with grass but I don’t name them, I just introduce them.

Ox eye daisy. Is this really what an ox’s eye looks like? I suppose I haven’t paid attention, but I can’t remember the last time I saw an ox. One thing I’m sure of when it comes to this flower is, even if you put them directly into water they’ll wilt as soon as you cut them. When I was married (In June) we didn’t have money for flowers from a florist so we picked daisies. The next day at the wedding reception every table had a vase full of wilted daisies on it. My father in law wore a crown of them.

Our native blue flag iris is another flower that waits for June. It likes wet feet so it can be found in ditches and along riverbanks or pond edges, sometimes growing right in the water. They’re very beautiful and I look forward to seeing them each year. When I see them I know it’s June, so who needs a calendar?

Vetch has come into bloom and since I see purple as blue and blue is my favorite color, I’m happy to see it. The only thing I might have an itch about when it comes to vetch is how, from a distance I always wonder if it might be some other rarer blue flower, so I always have to walk over to it and find out. It’s not a real problem; I get to see a lot of vetch that way.

A rabbit looked over its shoulder as if to ask “What are you doing here?” If I had spoken rabbit I would have said “I’m part of all this, just as you are.”

Blackberries seem to be having a good year so far. Blueberries have blossomed heavily as well, so the bears will be happy.

When I went by them the first time it was early in the morning so the yellow hawkweeds were closed against the dew. When I retuned later they burned as bright as the morning sunshine.

A damselfly hugged a grass seed head, hoping to get some of that morning sunshine for itself. This day started off quite cool, but it warmed up quickly.

All of the sudden red clover blossoms have appeared and I’m enjoying seeing them in the morning all covered in dew. It wasn’t always this way; I once despised them because I saw them with a gardener’s eyes; I saw how two or three of them could make a garden seem disheveled and uncared for, the way they sprawled all over. You couldn’t pull them because their roots seemed to reach to the earth’s core and if you weed wacked them you were left with an ugly stump, so you had to dig each one, and that took extra time. They were high on my list of despised weeds until one evening I saw the day’s last ray of sunlight falling directly on a red clover, as if it was lit by a spotlight. I walked over to it and knelt to take its photo and everything changed.

Can you lose yourself in a flower? Yes you can, the same way you can lose yourself in music or art or mathematics. And you can find yourself as well. That evening I saw for the first time how very beautiful each tiny orchid like flower was. As I knelt there in the grass before this once despised weed it was as if a space had opened in my mind. There was room for everything in this space and I saw how beautiful life was, and how much easier it became when nothing had to be excluded. All traces of plant snobbery washed out of me that evening and I have loved all flowers ever since, be they roadside weeds, rare wildflowers, or prized garden specimens. In case you were wondering, that is why you find them all here on this blog.

There was no breeze so English plantain was still, quietly offering its flowers to any passers by. Maybe when the breeze came up and it could once again dance there would be more takers.

I sat on a log beside the water waiting for a dragonfly to come along, and this one did. I think it was a chalk fronted corporal. They’re skimmers and they have two vertical white bars just behind their head that don’t show well in this photo. As you can tell by its shadow the sun was fully out at this point. It had gotten hot quickly and I was starting to feel it so I took a couple of quick, not very good shots and left. It would reach into the 90s F. on this day but I made sure I was inside by the time that happened.

I went back to the same spot a couple of days later when it was cooler but this time instead of dragonflies I saw a great blue heron fishing. It stood playing statue, watching me for about 15 minutes before deciding I wasn’t a threat. I watched it catch a nice fish but I didn’t get any good shots of it happening. I also saw an American bittern this day but I wasn’t able to get a shot of it either, because it quickly disappeared behind a clump of cattails. That was too bad, because I’ve heard that bitterns are rare birds, rarely seen.

In another spot this white admiral butterfly landed on a dry gravel road in the hot sun, which butterflies seem to do a lot. I believe this one was “puddling,” which is drawing up moisture and nutrients from the soil. It tried several spots before it found one it liked and then it went into a trance, as if it was mesmerized.

It would slowly raise and lower its wings as if keeping time with a heartbeat so I walked slowly around it, trying to get a shot of its wings fully open. Open or closed they were very beautiful and there wasn’t a mark on them from birds. This butterfly has several variants so if it doesn’t look like the white admiral you know, that could be why. Some of them are quite plain.

The freeze we had in mid May killed off most of the black locust flower buds but I found a couple of protected trees blooming beautifully. I love these native trees with their fragrant flowers that hang like wisteria blossoms. Black locusts are another plant in the huge pea / bean family and like many other legumes its leaflets fold together at night and when it rains.

Bristly locust blooms when black locusts do but are really more shrub than tree, though they can reach 8 feet. What sets this locust apart from others are the bristly purple-brown hairs that cover its stems, which are easily seen in this photo. Even its seedpods are covered by hairs. Bristly locust is native to the southeastern United States but has spread to all but 7 of the lower 48 states, with a lot of help from nurseries selling it for ornamental use. The beautiful pinkish purple flowers are very fragrant and bees really love them. Every time I find one in bloom it is absolutely covered with bees, which makes getting photos a challenge. If you’re looking for a beautiful “plant it and forget it” native small tree that would do well on the edge of the woods and which pollinators would love, this might be it.

I went by the local college to see what was blooming and found some huge oriental poppies in bloom. They’re beautiful flowers that are even more beautiful when massed together. They’re also easy to grow.

For years I’ve thought that the beautiful berries of silky dogwood, which are blue and white for just a short time, must have influenced the blue and white porcelain made in China. But the wheel? I never thought much about it until I looked inside this poppy. I had looked at thousands of poppies, but I had never really seen one until this day and imagine; this pattern perfectly reflects that of a wheel found on an archeological dig near Edinburgh Airport in Scotland. A well preserved charitiot fron 475-380 BC was unearthed and on its wheels were 12 spokes with the same symmetry seen on this poppy. It is said that Roman chariots were influenced by Celtic chariot design. I thought about that and realized that there was once a time when one person’s design couldn’t influence another, because man and nature were all there was. All creative inspiration had to come from the patterns, forms, and shapes found in nature, because there was nothing else. Maybe the poppy was part of that.

I found a beautiful river of rocket. Dame’s rocket that is, and it was early enough in the morning to smell its fragrance. I had heard about how fragrant it was in the evening but apparently it is sunshine or heat that turns off its fragrance, because on this cool morning most of the plants were in the shade and they were heavenly fragrant. They aren’t native but no matter where they grow they’re another wonderful gift from nature.

Nature is not a place to visit, it is home. ~Gary Snyder

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A Few More Signs of Spring

Longfellow once wrote: “The spring came suddenly, bursting upon the world as a child bursts into a room, with a laugh and a shout and hands full of flowers,” and that is often just how it is, but not this year. This year spring seems to be giving us only a flower or two each day, and those seem to come begrudgingly. But spring isn’t just about flowers. There are many other signs to watch for, and they seem to be right on time. Canada geese for instance, have returned. The goose in the above photo seemed to be all about making waves, so I watched what it was doing. The waves came from its body rocking back and forth, and it was doing that because it was stamping or dragging its feet on the pond bottom.

And then: plink; it would drop its head into the water to feed on whatever it happened to kick up. Last years cattail leaves seem most likely to be what it was feeding on in this spot. They must still contain some nutrients if the geese eat them. My question was, with all that kicking up of the silt how could the goose see anything?

There is still a lot of melt water pouring off the hillsides. This stream helps feed the pond that the goose was in.

I stood looking at the beautiful jewel like catkins of the alders lining the shore of the pond and suddenly I felt a rush of something familiar that I have never been able to explain. It was the same feeling I used to have as a boy in spring. I’d walk or ride my bike to school at this time of year and see lawns greening up and see new leaves and flowers here and there, and hear all the birds singing, and by the time I got to school I was often just about as close to ecstatic as a 10 year old boy could be, and for no other reason than experiencing all the things that make up spring. The season has always had a powerful hold on me and if anything, it has gotten stronger as I’ve aged. I open the door in the morning and step outside and bang, instant happiness. I think if I were blind I would still know it was spring because part of it is here, inside me.

American hazelnut bushes are loaded with so many catkins this year I don’t know if I could find a spot to hang another one.

The catkins are strings of male flowers that spiral around a central stalk. What look like tiny manta rays with a black tail and white fringe on either side, are the bud scales that protect the flower buds over winter. When the catkins soften and lengthen the bud scales open, and that is the signal that the flowers will be opening to release their pollen to the wind any day now. Under each bud scale are three to five tiny yellowish flowers, so there can be hundreds of flowers per catkin. How many there are on a single bush is a question that boggles the mind.

If I go by the white specks on some of the sticky female hazelnut flowers, they are already catching some of that wind borne pollen. Each of those tiny red stigmas is smaller in diameter than a piece of kite string, but in the fall if everything goes according to nature’s plan the birds and animals will have plenty of hazelnuts.

Here comes a little more pollen. Poplars are also showing their male flowers, which will also be opening any day now.

The reddish bits are the male stamens, which will split open to release the pollen. Once the female flowers receive the pollen they’ll produce fluffy white seeds which will blow on the wind and give these trees another name: cottonwoods. When the seeds let go you had better have your house and car windows closed. If not you’ll be vacuuming, because the seeds blow everywhere.

Night temperatures are still dropping into the 20s and daytime temps are between 45 and 55 degrees on average, so maple sap is still flowing. I’ve seen flowers on the red maples though, and I’ve heard that once a tree flowers the sap becomes bitter, so I suppose it must depend on the ratio of red to sugar maples you’ve tapped. A few red maples probably don’t make that much difference in the quality of the syrup.

I was happy to see new green the shoots of cattails. Muskrats will be happy, too.

A little friend was enjoying a left over nut from last year, and making quite a mess of the job too, if I may say so. He was also molting. At least I think so; I’ve read that gray squirrels lose all their hair from their head to their tail twice each year. And then it all grows back, of course. This one looked to have lost most of its hair down to its waist, but there is still plenty left to go. I thought about suggesting that he might lose it faster if he didn’t sit around eating nuts all day but then I decided it wasn’t any of my business.

I love the color of the willows in spring. They’re usually a bright golden color but this orangey kind of color is what 2 different cameras saw on this day. It’s not what I thought I saw but I can’t explain it.

Last year’s oak leaves have become the rich, warm, orangey brown that they often do once they dry on the tree. They look like soft leather but are crisp, like a potato chip. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: if you can find beauty in simple things, then you’ll find beauty wherever you go. Life is full of beautiful things but you have to give yourself time to see them.

I woke up one morning and found a beautiful reticulated iris in the yard. My blogging friend Ginny sent me some seeds and bulbs from Maryland last year and I planted some of the bulbs where I had cleared out a huge old Japanese honeysuckle. This was the first flower to appear but now there are also what look like white scilla blossoms coming along as well. Since I love reticulated irises, I was very happy to see this one, even if it is the only one so far.

I’ve seen exactly one Johnny jump up blossom this year and this is it. In years past I would have seen hundreds by now.

This is one of my favorite crocuses so I was happy to see that they had come up.

Two or three days before I took this shot there wasn’t a flower in sight and then all of the sudden there were snowdrops everywhere.

This is another favorite crocus. I love the delicate shading inside the flower but the light on this day was too harsh to show it well. Many crocuses close when it’s cloudy but if you hit this bed just as it begins to cloud over, that’s when the shading is at its most beautiful.

On this day there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but there was a pale moon hanging there. I didn’t have a tripod with me but I thought I’d try anyway. It’s not the sharpest photo I’ve ever taken but I was happy that it came out at all. Next week is supposed to be relatively warm so there should be a lot more flowers to see.

Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! ~Sitting Bull

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Thinking Spring

Last Monday I felt that burst of love for the out of doors that I always feel at this time of year, coming in the form of what is known here as spring fever. It’s love, happiness, and a bit of madness all rolled into one, and it makes me ache to be outside. It was a beautiful day; partly sunny and warm at 46°, so I went to the skunk cabbage swamp to see if there was any sign of them yet.

All swamps come with challenges and walking into one is where the madness comes into play. In this swamp there are a lot of hummocks to negotiate and you can either jump from hummock to hummock or walk between them and hope you don’t get your feet wet. I got one foot wet even with waterproof hiking boots on when I sank into the mud over my boot top. But that didn’t matter; my hummock jumping days are over so I expected to come away with wet feet.

One of the hummocks had this curious bright green plant growing on it. I don’t recognize it but it must be tough. The leaves resemble basil but obvously it can’t be that.

And there were the skunk cabbages, coming up through the snow. Through a process called thermogenesis a skunk cabbage plant can raise its temperature to melt through ice and snow. They’re very determined once they feel the pull of spring and will even melt their way through frozen soil.

Here was one I could get a little closer to. It displayed something I’ve wanted to show here for a few years now and that is how, when it first comes up, the skunk cabbage spathe is enclosed in a gray green, pointed sheath.

If you look closely where the sheath has opened you can get a glimpse of the splotched maroon and yellow spathe inside. This is the first time I’ve been able to get a shot of this. There are those who think that the gray green sheaths enclose leaf buds and I thought so too years ago, but this shows otherwise.

The thin sheath quickly rots away, almost liquifying, leaving the spathe to slowly expand and open. Inside the spathe is the spadix, which holds many tiny, greenish flowers. There are few insects around at this time of year but some do eventually enter through the split in the spathe; whether to pollinate the flowers or to just warm up isn’t known. The flowers, much like those of wild ginger, which is another very early bloomer, could be self-pollinating. The pea green leaf buds will show themselves before too long.

A little further in there was the open water of a stream, and two unseen ducks startled me when they exploded from the swamp, quacking loudly and flying as fast as their wings would take them. You can find many different creatures around open water in February because in a normal winter open water is scarce.

Skunk cabbages can grow in standing water as these show, but the one on the left came up too early and was blackened by the below zero cold we had. These plants are tough but there aren’t many spring plants that can stand that kind of cold for long.

One of the animals enjoying the open water of the swamp is the resident beaver, who has been busy cutting trees and dragging them off. This one was a red maple and there wasn’t a sign of it left; no log or branches.

Here was the log from another tree a beaver cut, red maple again with a lot of the outer and inner bark chewed off. How they can drag away logs this big is beyond me. I know they cut them into pieces but stll, a log of this diameter even just two feet long is heavy. Maybe they just roll them into the water and float them off like the lumberjacks used to do.

We pass right by beech buds, never giving them a second look, but as soon as it is warm enough the stronger sunlight will stimulate their growth and they will open and become one of the most beautiful things in the forest. For a time, it looks like silvery-green butterflies have landed on every twig. It’s hard to believe that all the current year’s growth for this particular branch is inside that little bud, but it is.

I was surprised to find maleberry growing here. I think this was the first time I’ve found it not growing on a river or pond bank. The seedpods shown here formed last July or August and will release their seeds by the end of April.

I’ve always liked finding a pile of last year’s leaflets from a cinnamon fern but I’ve never really known why. They just please me somehow, and it’s easier to just leave it at that than it is to wonder why. They dry on the stem in the fall and then slowly fall into a pile at its base, with the one at the very tip the last to fall.

Bracken ferns weaken at the base of the main stem and the whole plant just keels over. The fallen leaves have at times reminded me of miniature dinosaur skeletons, but I suppose it must depend on mood. On this day they just looked like bracken fern leaves.

I found a few goldthread plants here and there, still with last year’s shiny green, three lobed leaves showing. These little plants are evergreen and must get a jump start on photosynthesizing. Their pretty little flowers, which have golden petals that look like like tiny spoons full of nectar for insects to drink, will appear in late April or early May. Getting a good photo of the flowers is always a challenge, which means it’s a flower you can lose yourself in. I recommend doing so as often as possible; there is great peace to be found there.

A colony of American wintergreen grew beside a tree. Though the plant is an evergreen it doesn’t photosynthesize in winter so it doesn’t need green leaves. In fact, many evergreen plants have purple leaves in winter but they’ll be greening up before too long. This plant is also called teaberry and checkerberry because of its minty, bright red berries. I saw where these plants had once had berries but it looked like the turkeys had gotten them all.

Every year in early spring I come across what I see as orange delicate fern moss. I’ve always brushed it off as colorblindness, thinking “That moss is green but I see it as bright orange. Strange.” But the thing is, according to my color finding software, it really is orange. That’s what colorblindness can do; it can make you unsure of almost any color you see. But there is good news for the colorblind. Color correcting glasses are down to $119.00 per pair on one website and after taking a simple online colorblindness test, you can get yourself a pair. You can choose from several styles and if they don’t work for you, you get your money back. Also, there is an app called “Colorblind Pal” for Android users and the color finding computer software I use is called What Color? I know there are a lot of us out there so I like to keep the information I’ve found up to date. I hope it helps. Those are deer droppings on the moss. I saw a lot of them here. I’d guess that the deer are coming to drink from the open water.

According to the calendar spring is more than a month away but I’ve never paid much attention to calendars when it comes to seasons. I’ve always let the land and the plants and animals on it tell me when spring is here, and there are already a lot of signs pointing to it. We could still see some cold and snow but each day that passes makes that less likely. Once we get through mid-March winter’s back is broken, but I think it might happen earlier this year.

Spurred on by the skunk cabbage sightings, I went to see how the hazelnuts were doing. They too had heard the whisper of spring, and the catkins had elongated and become flexible. In winter they’re short and stiff but a good sign that they’re preparing for spring is when they loosen and flex, and start to dangle and blow in the wind. I didn’t see any of the tiny female flowers and that was good, because we could still get some below freezing nights and that might finish them off. It’s too early for the more tender spring flowers to appear so as much as I’d love to see them I hope they aren’t tricked into blooming by this February thaw. Something I noticed while taking this photo was spring birdsong, including that of red winged blackbirds. They’ve come back about a month early but I’ve read that we could see more cold a week from today, so I hope they’ll be able to stand it.

Go to the winter woods: listen there; look, watch, and ‘the dead months’ will give you a subtler secret than any you have yet found in the forest. ~ Fiona Macleod

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Things I’ve Seen

June is when the big female snapping turtles come up out of the ponds and swamps to find some warm sand to lay their eggs in. This one had just done so and still had wet mud clinging to her when I saw her on one of my walks. Egg laying seems to be quite a project for the big reptiles but every year many thousands of eggs are lain, so they always find a way.

Seeing this garter snake might have stopped the snapper in its tracks, because they are omnivores and eat snakes, frogs, fish, crayfish, insects, plants, birds, small mammals, and even other turtles. It was on another walk that I saw this snake and what was really odd about it was how it was out in the open in daylight. They often come out to the edge of the woods to sun themselves during the day but are always within easy reach of cover, and will slither off quickly if you approach them. This one had no cover at all, not even high grass.

I kept trying to get a shot of the snake with its forked tongue out, but I missed every time. Garter snakes are timid and nonpoisonous, so they are nothing to worry about. Still, if my grandmother had been there, she would have been up a tree. Garter snakes eat crickets, grasshoppers, small fish, and earthworms. They do have teeth, but they’re no real danger to humans. I’ve read that the saliva of some garter snake species contains a mild neurotoxin that causes paralysis, making small prey easier to swallow.

While I was taking photos an 85 year old lady stopped and rolled down her car window and told me how she was deathly afraid of snakes but, she said, when she was just a girl she once let them drape a boa constrictor over her shoulders at a circus for a free candy bar. I told her she and my grandmother would have gotten along quite well.

That garter snake probably would have like to have met Mr. bullfrog, but I doubt it could have swallowed him. This was a big frog, but I never would have seen it if it hadn’t croaked loudly after a neighboring frog did the same. They do talk to each other. One will start it off and then they’ll all start croaking, one right after the other. It can be quite loud.

On the same day I saw the frog in the previous shot I saw a bullfrog jump right out of the water and snatch something out of the air before landing with a splash, and I think it might have been a cousin of this spangled skimmer dragonfly. The “spangles” are the black and white markings on its wings, otherwise it closely resembles the slaty skimmer, which is what I thought it was at first. It was quite far away when I took this shot. I also saw lots of pretty twelve spotted skimmers on this day but I couldn’t get a shot of any of them.

I saw 3 or 4 eastern swallowtail butterflies probing the damp sand at the edge of a dirt road recently. They’re pretty things and at about the same size as a monarch butterfly, big enough to see easily. They often show up just before the mountain laurels bloom and I see them hanging from the laurel flowers almost every year.

Usually I have to wait for butterflies to fold their wings but this time I had to wait for this one to unfold them. I was hoping it would have more blue/purple on its wings than it did.

I hike in the woods but I walk on roads, and on one of those walks a hawk flew out of the woods, swooped down right over my head, and landed on a wire ahead of me. I thought as soon as I got too near it would fly off but no, I walked over and stood right under it and it didn’t move. I don’t carry my “big” camera with me when I walk because I walk fast and its constantly bumping into my chest bothers me, so I had to get this shot with my small macro camera. That’s why it isn’t a very good shot, but it does show a hawk. I’m not very good with birds but it might be a cooper’s hawk. If you know what it is for sure I’d love to hear its name because I think it lives here and I’m fairly sure I’ve seen it before.

In this shot I took of the evening sky with my phone camera there was a bird flying up there to the right that I never saw until I looked at the photo. I wondered if it could be a hawk, but the detail isn’t fine enough to tell. It’s just a silhouette.

I saw a familiar sight on an oak branch on a recent walk. Wooly oak galls are usually about the size of a ping pong ball when I find them, but have a kind of felt feel, like a tennis ball. The gall is caused by secretions from the grubs of the wool sower gall wasp (Callirhytis seminator) and they only appear in spring.

There are small seed like structures inside the gall which contain the wasp larva, and that’s why these galls are also called oak seed galls. What I want to point out about these galls though, is how books will tell you that they will only grow on white oak trees, and that isn’t true. Though they almost always do grow on white oaks I’ve also seen them on red oaks, so don’t be fooled by the galls like I have been; check the leaves. One thing I’ve learned from studying nature is the words always and never do not apply.

White pine (Pinus strobus) pollen cones have come and have opened, and have released their yellow-green pollen to the wind. It settles on everything, and if you leave your windows open you find that it even comes into the house. My car is covered with it but luckily it is like dust and just blows away.

This year I went looking for red pine pollen cones (Pinus resinosa) and the ones I found before they had opened were very beautiful, but they were also in someone’s yard so I didn’t get a shot of them. Then I remembered where there were others that I could get close to and here they are in this photo, but they had already opened. They are much bigger than white pine pollen cones.

Pollen cones are the male flowers of the tree and this photo shows the female flowers. When the male pollen finds them, if all goes according to plan they will be fertilized and will become the seed-bearing pine cones that I think we’re all familiar with. Some flowers on coniferous trees are very small; so small that sometimes all I can see is a hint of color, so you have to look closely to find them.

The Ashuelot River gets lower and lower and still no beneficial rain comes to refill it. I’m starting to get the feeling that it may not be a good year for mushrooms, but I hope I’m wrong.

Another name for royal fern (Osmunda spectabilis) is “flowering fern,” because someone once thought that the fertile, fruiting fronds looked like bunches of flowers. You can see them here on the fern in the photo but though they are often purple they don’t look much like flowers to me. Royal fern is the only fern that grows on every temperate continent except Australia, which makes it one of the most widespread of all living species.

Here is a closer look at the spore capsules of the royal fern. They aren’t something that many people get to see.

For the first time, this year I was able to find and get a shot of a royal fern fiddlehead. Even at this stage it’s a beautiful fern. In the fall, at the other end of its life, it will turn first bright yellow and then will become a kind of beautiful burnt orange color.

Three bracken fern fronds (Pteridium aquilinum) appear at the end of a long stem and flatten out horizontally, parallel to the ground. They also overlap and shade the ground under them. These growth habits and their ability to release chemicals that inhibit the growth of many other plants means that almost nothing will grow under a colony of bracken fern. They will not tolerate acid rain, so if you don’t see them growing where you live you might want to check the local air pollution statistics.

Ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris) is not a fern that I see a lot of. It likes damp ground and shade but even beyond that it seems to be very choosy about where it grows. It’s a very beautiful fern that I wish I’d see more of.

Ostrich fern fronds are narrower at the tip and base and wider in the center. The leaf stalk of an ostrich fern is deeply grooved, much more pronounced than others. Sensitive, interrupted fern and cinnamon fern have grooved leaf stalks but their grooves are much shallower. If you like to eat fern fiddleheads in spring you should get to know ostrich fern by that groove.

In some plants the same pigments that color leaves in the fall when they stop photosynthesizing also color their leaves in the spring before the leaves have started photosynthesizing. Once they start producing more chlorophyll, they’ll quickly turn green. This coloring of new spring leaves is a form of protection from the weather that some plants and even trees use. Heavy cloud cover, cold snaps, and even too much sunlight can cause some leaves to slow down their greening process in spring, but plants like the Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium) seen in this photo do it almost every year, I’ve noticed.

Another plant with purple leaves in spring, every spring in my experience, is the native clematis called virgin’s bower or traveler’s joy (Clematis virginiana). It won’t be long before its small white flowers decorate the roadside shrubs as it climbs over them to reach optimum sunlight but by that time all of its leaves will have turned green. An extract made from the plant is hallucinogenic (and dangerous) and was used by Native Americans to induce dreams. Mixed with other plants like milkweed, it was also used medicinally. It is a very toxic plant that can cause painful sores in the mouth if eaten.

There are many grasses starting to flower now and I hope you’ll go out and see them. Never mind your hay fever; I have allergies too. Nature doesn’t mind being sneezed at. Take a pill, grab some tissues and become one of those who sees the beauty that most never see. Even if you have to see it through watery eyes now and then, it’s still beautiful.

A native smooth carrion flower vine (Smilax herbacea) grew beside a trail and it seemed as if it just flung itself into existence and went wild, with leaves and tendrils and great arching stems everywhere. I thought it was a beautiful thing, and it stopped me right in my tracks. No matter what is going on in life, no matter where you are, there is always beauty to be seen. You don’t even have to search for it; it is just there, like a dandelion blooming in a crack in the sidewalk as you hurry along, or a white cloud floating across a blue sky reflected in the glass of your car window. It is there I think, to remind us to just slow down a little and appreciate life more; to take the time to enjoy this beautiful paradise that we find ourselves in.

If you Love all Life you observe, you will observe all Life with Love.  ~Donald L. Hicks

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Things I’ve Seen

I thought I’d take a break from flower posts this week, not because I’m tired of flowers but because my California friend Dave asked when he would see photos of shagbark hickory buds breaking. They’re easily as beautiful as a flower, but to see them I had to go to the banks of the Ashuelot River. This was no hardship because I started playing on the banks of this river when I was a boy and have loved doing so ever since.

It was beautiful along the river with all the new spring green leaves, but the water level has dropped considerably since the last time it rained. I think it has been close to two weeks since the last substantial rain, and many smaller streams are starting to dry up.

I saw lots of what I think were muskrat tracks in the mud along the shore.

And there were the new shagbark hickory leaves. I couldn’t catch the color I wanted on the bud scales (actually inner scales) in the bright sunshine so I went back the following day when it was cloudy. On this day the beautiful pinks, reds and oranges were easier to capture. It’s not just the light though; some inner bud scales are a single color and others are multi colored like these were. They also lose color quickly as they age so you just have to walk along the river bank and look until you find the one that speaks to you. Fortunately a lot of shagbark hickory buds usually break at the same time so they aren’t hard to find. They’re worth looking for because in my opinion, they’re one of the most beautiful things you’ll find in a spring forest.

This is what they look like when they have spread out to unfurl their leaves. It’s unusual to be able to see this because it usually happens far up in the tree tops, but for some reason in this area the beavers keep cutting the trees. New shoots regrow from the stump and the beavers leave them alone for a while before coming back and cutting them again. Thanks to the beavers there is always a good supply of buds at eye level.

The oaks have also broken their buds, and more new leaves appear each day. Oaks are one of the last buds to break.

Like the maples, oaks can have very colorful new leaves. I’ve seen them in white, pink, red, and just about every shade of green imaginable.

Some new oak leaves even have stripes, as these did. I saw a lot of these leaves in all stages of growth and they appeared to be changing from white to red, which accounted for the stripe. New oak leaves are always velvety and soft.

Some oaks are even showing flower buds already.

Here was a young oak that had barely unfolded its leaves and it was already being eaten by something. It also had three or four oak apple galls on it. They’re caused by a wasp (Amphibolips confluenta) called the oak apple gall wasp. Galls that form on leaves don’t harm the tree so they can be left alone. They’re always interesting to see.

Striped maples (Acer pensylvanicum) are also flowering, with their green bell-shaped flowers all in a string. Sometimes they dangle under the big leaves and other times the wind blows them up and over the leaves as these were. There is only one maple in this region that flowers later, and that is the mountain maple (Acer spicatum).

If you want to see a beautiful, non-flowering plant called the woodland horsetail (Equisetum sylvaticum) you’ll have to leave the trail and go into the forest, but it will be worth the effort to see the delicate, lacy foliage of what is considered the most beautiful of all the horsetails. I was happy to see that they had grown from what was a single plant a few years ago to ten or more now, so they like it here. I originally found them by following a beaver pond outflow stream into the woods.

Woodland horsetails like to grow in bright sunshine in very wet ground. Here they grow right along the water’s edge by this stream. They blend in easily with the foliage of other plants, so you have to walk slowly and look carefully. The sylvaticum part of the scientific name is Latin for “of the forest”, and that’s where you have to search for them.

I found what was left of a wild turkey egg shell by the stream where the woodland horsetail grows. Turkeys nest directly on the ground but I didn’t see any signs of a nest so I wonder if a predator didn’t carry the egg here to eat it. According to the New Hampshire Department of Fish and Game turkeys lay an average of a dozen eggs in early to mid-May, only one per day, and they hatch after about 28 days, so either this hen laid her eggs early or this egg didn’t hatch. If a predator gets to her eggs she’ll lay another clutch in July or August, but normally they lay only once per year. This egg was tan colored, about the size of a hen’s egg I think, with brownish speckles all over it. New Hampshire has an estimated population of 45,000 turkeys. I see them everywhere but they’re almost always running into the woods as I drive by.

If I’m lucky I might see one beech seedling with its seed leaves still intact each year. Here is this year’s seedling. Seed leaves often look nothing like the true leaves. In the case of American beech they look more like flower petals than leaves but feel tough and leathery. On a beech seedling they will photosynthesize until the true leaves appear, and then once they are no longer needed, they will wither and fall off. In my experience they are a rare sight.

Each spring I look for the shoots of the white baneberry (Actaea pachypoda), and each spring they look absolutely identical to the ones I found the spring before. They always look to me like a small hand is holding the plant’s flower buds while an older “parent” gazes down lovingly at them. It always seems like a tender moment has been caught and frozen in time, and it’s always as if I’m seeing the exact same thing I saw the year before. I’ve seen lots of new spring shoots but these are the only ones I know of that never seem to change. They’re like an old friend who comes around once a year to remind me that some things never really change, even though it may seem as if they do.

Mr. robin wondered just what it was I was doing and hopped over to get a better look. Though most robins will hop or fly away if you get too close there are some that are very curious. If you let them come to you they’ll often get quite close, as this one did. I was on my knees taking photos so maybe he wondered why this human’s eyes were so close to the ground while others were not. I didn’t realize what eye movements could do to animals until I watched a show on PBS television that showed border collies herding sheep by using only their eyes. They never bark; it’s all done with eye movements. I’m hoping I remember never to stare into a bear’s eyes again.

I don’t know if this was two trees or one tree that split and grew this way but either way, I’m not sure what would have made it do this. Trees do some strange things.

A big dead white pine fell into a pond and stretched two thirds of the way across it. White pine (Pinus strobus) is New Hampshire’s tallest tree but you often don’t realize how tall they really are until they fall.  

A painted turtle looked like it was practicing its yoga exercises on a log, but really it was just releasing heat. I read that when they raise their feet like that it cools them off. Sometimes they look as if they’re trying to fly.

I went to the skunk cabbage swamp and not surprisingly, found it full of skunk cabbages. But that’s not the only reason I come here. Nearby, higher up on drier ground, our beautiful native azaleas (Rhododendron prinophyllum) bloom so I wanted to check their progress. It’ll be another week or so before we see the flowers, depending on the weather.

I saw something bright yellow in a drainage ditch and when I looked a little closer, I saw that the color was coming from swamp beacons (Mitrula elegans). Swamp beacons are interesting “aquatic” fungi and I find them in seeps and ditches where ground water stays on the surface year-round. They will be my first fungal find of the season.

Swamp beacons use a process called soft rot to decompose plant material in low-oxygen areas. Since they only decompose soft tissue, they aren’t found on twigs or bark. I almost always find them growing out of saturated oak leaves, as these were. They are small; about the size of a wooden match, and another name for them is matchstick fungus. These were some of the brightest colored examples that I’ve seen.

Treasures are hidden away in quiet places. They speak in soft tones and often become silenced as we approach. They don’t beg to be found, but embrace us if we do happen to find them. They are the product of completely ordinary circumstances unfolding in wonderfully extraordinary ways. They are found hidden in the nooks and crannies of our existence; all around us if we quit allowing our attention to be captivated by that which is noisy and listen for that which is quiet and still. ~Craig D. Lounsbrough

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