Bud Break and Other Wonders

Bud break is a very special time on this blog and I try to show as much of it as I can each spring as trees wake up. These are horse chestnut leaves which had just opened out of a thumb size bud, and if you look closely you can see the grape like cluster of flower buds as well. I hope this post will show that while spring is certainly known for flowers, there are other things going on that are just as beautiful.

Bud break is defined as when the tip of a leaf can be seen protruding from the open bud scales, so this red maple bud is a little beyond that. It’s still quite beautiful though.

I could almost hear this red maple yawning as it stretched out its arms in the sunshine. How is it possible to not love life when there are things like this going on all around you?

Older established maples look more like this. Red maples are a very prolific tree. It is estimated that one tree 12 inches in diameter can produce a million seeds. That must mean that we have uncountable trillions of seeds falling each year in our forests. It’s no wonder we have so many red maples.

Other maples are waking up as well. Here a striped maple is in the process of opening its new leaves. As maples go these leaves are among the largest, and that is because it’s an understory tree with leaves that will never see the bright sunshine of the forest canopy, so it has had to adapt to lower light intensity. If you pay attention you’ll notice that plants that can survive in shade almost always have larger leaves.

On Norway maples the flowers appear just before the leaves. Since these flowers have many parts that are all one color they can be challenging to get a good photo of. I had to try several times.

And then of course there are the beech buds, which open to reveal new leaves that look like silvery angel wings. They are among the most beautiful things found in a New Hampshire Forest in the spring. In spring all the beauty, mystery and miracle of life can be found in a single bud, and I suppose that must be why I’ve watched them since I was a boy, and why I’ve always enjoyed this season more than any other. It’s so full of promise and possibilities.

Red elderberry flower buds are nearly ready to open. The flowers will be white and the flower head will be the same shape seen here, not at all like the larger, flat flower heads of common elderberry. These berries will be bright red and the birds will eat them just as soon as they ripen. That’s why you never see photos of them here; I can never get to them before the birds do.

These rose colored blueberry buds will turn white as they open and become flowers. This is when they’re at their prettiest, in my opinion.

Leatherleaf is blooming. This early spring bloomer is in the heath family, as are blueberries, huckleberries, mountain laurel, and of course heaths and heathers. Leatherleaf flowers might look similar to blueberry blossoms at a glance but the growth habit of the two plants is very different. The shrub’s speckled evergreen leaves are very tough, and that’s where its common name comes from.

As with blueberries, the best place to find leatherleaf is along pond shorelines and sometimes along rivers and streams. It likes wet feet so it is one of the first plants to colonize bog mats. You’ll never see blueberry blossoms hanging all along the stem like these flowers do though, so once you know the plant’s habits it’s easy to spot from a distance. I’ve read that leatherleaf provides nesting cover for mallards and other waterfowl. Each flower, after pollination by a bumblebee, produces a single round capsule that will turn brown as it ripens. Birds are said to eat the fruit but there seems to be very little in print about that.

Right alongside leatherleaf and blueberry, you often find sweet gale. These are quarter inch long male sweet gale catkins, with their pretty triangular bud scales. I didn’t see any female plants but there were probably some nearby. Sweet gale is also called bog rosemary. Touching the foliage releases a sweet, pleasant scent from its resinous leaves which have been used for centuries as a natural insect repellent.

Wild ginger flowers have appeared. The plants flower quickly, almost as soon as the leaves appear, so you have to watch for them at this time of year. You can see this plant’s flower in the lower right at ground level. All parts of the plant including the heart shaped leaves are very hairy.

Wild ginger flowers have no petals; they are made up of 3 triangular calyx lobes that are fused into a cup and curl backwards. Reproductive parts are found in a central column inside. Wild ginger flowers are thought to self-pollinate and are said to produce 6 seeds per flower. I’d love to see the seeds but I can never remember to go back and look. Native Americans once used this plant for seasoning just as ginger is used today, but wild ginger has been found to contain certain toxins like aristolochic acid which can cause liver damage, so it shouldn’t be eaten.

This is what bud break looks like on a wild ginger flower bud. This will open to be like the flower seen in the previous photo. The buds are about the size of a blueberry and perfectly round. I found this small colony of plants on a sunny patch of ground in what used to be a homestead, but which has been abandoned for many years. It’s the only place I’ve ever seen them.

Dwarf ginseng takes the prize for the rarest plant in this post. These plants are quite small and easy to miss when they aren’t blooming. The plant at the top could easily fit in a teacup. Individual dwarf ginseng flowers are about 1/8″ across and have 5 white petals, a short white calyx, and 5 white stamens. The entire flowerhead is usually about 3/4″ across. If pollinated the flowers are followed by tiny yellow fruits. This is not the ginseng used in herbal medicine so it should never be picked.

Years ago I found a spot that had 5 or 6 dwarf ginseng plants. Now the colony seen above has grown from those plants. Hopefully one day the plants will cover the forest floor in this spot.

I happened upon a painted turtle convention. There were just as many as what we see here off to the right; so many they wouldn’t all fit into this view, all soaking up the sun. I think this was the most turtles I’d ever seen in one place. Any time now the much bigger snapping turtles should appear.

The above photo is of a hemlock root. That’s all; just an old tree root, but that’s not all of the story. It was in the middle of a trail and it had been worn down by countless feet stepping on it over who knows how many years. The traffic first wore off the bark and then slowly made its way down through the layers of root until it reached the heartwood. You can count the rings in the bark that show how many times it tried unsuccessfully to heal itself. That describes the mechanics of it but it’s hard to describe its beauty. It wasn’t purposely made; it all happened by accident, but it looks like it has been carved and sanded, and then colored with wood stain. In my opinion it’s worthy of having a place in an art gallery as a piece of sculpture. Beauty is where you find it, and you find it everywhere.

There was a time when friends and I used to fish from this spot just below the Ashuelot River dam on West Street in Keene but now I’m more interested in watching the foam patterns on the river than in catching fish. I’ll say it again: Beauty is where you find it, and you find it everywhere.

Google lens tells me this is an eastern pine elfin butterfly so since I don’t know a lot about insects I have to go with that. I do know that it was quite small and fidgety, so I had to take this shot quickly from a yard or so away before I scared it away. That’s why it’s not a very good shot, but I like those eyes so I’m showing it to you. I also liked how furry it was. I’ve read that this butterfly is about the size of your thumbnail and blends into its surroundings so well it isn’t often seen. The caterpillars feed on the needles of the eastern white pine and the butterflies sip the nectar from blueberry blossoms. Pine elfins are said to like to bask in the sunlight on chilly spring days, just as this one was doing.

Sensitive fern fiddleheads have a papery covering over them when they first come out of the soil. Other ferns like the ostrich fern also have this covering. Sensitive ferns also have the same shade of green and a groove in the stem like ostrich ferns but sensitive ferns are not edible and ostrich ferns are, so foragers should know them both well. Sensitive ferns contain toxins that have caused liver and brain damage in horses. That’s probably why deer don’t eat them.

Here is a sensitive fern unfolding from the fiddlehead. Sensitive ferns get their name from their sensitivity to frost, so one cold morning now could wipe out any that aren’t protected by overhead trees. This is one of those ferns that is so common nobody seems to see it.

I think it was two weeks ago that I said I thought coltsfoot flowers wouldn’t last much longer, but nature had other ideas and cool weather kept them going for nearly a month. Coltsfoot gives signals though and one signal is the appearance of leaves. When you see leaves it’s a fair bet that the flowers are on their way out.

Seed heads reinforce the thought that coltsfoot is done for the year. These seed heads are very different than those of dandelion, even though at a passing glance they might look the same.

It’s time for grasses to start flowering and I know that because sweet vernal grass is flowering. It’s one of the earliest grasses to flower in this area. In this photo you can see its deep purple male flowers and its wispy white female flowers. It is also called vanilla grass because it is said to be scented by the same substance that gives sweet woodruff its vanilla like fragrance. This is not the same sweet grass that Native Americans used for making baskets. This grass is short, only growing to about shin high, and forms small clumps with dark, easily seen flower heads as can be seen here. Its flowers are pretty and they’re another sign that spring is really here.

I meant to do my work today, but a brown bird sang in the apple tree, and a butterfly flitted across the field, and all the leaves were calling. ~Richard le Gallienne

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A Few More Signs of Spring

Spring is happening slowly again after a warm spell two weeks or so ago that got everything moving quickly. I saw maple sap flowing a couple of weeks ago but they just put out the sap buckets this past week. Warm days and cold nights are what keeps the sap flowing so hopefully it won’t get too hot too fast and spoil the season. Right now it’s just about right, with daytime temps in the 40s and nights getting down into the 20s. Much higher than the 40s during the daytime means the sap won’t run.

The red and silver maples are beautiful, loaded as they are with bright red buds.

I haven’t seen any maple flowers yet though, even though the buds are swelling. Maple trees can flower quickly and a tree that doesn’t have any flowers one day can be loaded with them the next. Maple syrup producers are in no hurry to see the trees flower because that means syrup season is just about done. Red maple sap especially, gets bitter once the trees start flowering, but luckily all the trees don’t blossom at the same time. Blossom times are naturally staggered so you can find trees just coming into flower as much as a month after you saw the first one blossom. Nature has it all figured out.

I looked at some of the beautiful powder blue box elder buds but they didn’t seem to be doing too much yet. They’re one of the last trees in the maple family to flower. The powdery blue color on the new twigs and buds is cause by the same natural wax like crystals that cause the bloom on blueberries, plums, and many other things. It’s there essentially to protect from sunburn.

I took that shot of the box elder branch at the river, where I also saw a large gathering of ducks and geese. This Canada goose was alone but there were also pairs there as well.

This is unusual. Ducks and geese don’t usually come onto the shore when there are people around. In fact they usually swim or fly to the other side of the river as soon as they see someone coming. It didn’t take long to see what had removed their fear though; someone had dumped something they liked on shore and they all wanted it. From a distance it looked like it might have been cracked corn but I couldn’t be sure. Every time Mr. and Mrs. Mallard got too close the geese would run them off, so it must have been tasty. Feeding wildfowl isn’t usually done here so I can’t even guess what this was all about.

After the mallards got the geese really bothered one goose stood guard while the other ate. You can see the mallards over there on the right, plotting their next move.

The waterfowl are happy the ice is gone but really, there wasn’t much to go. Nobody was able to skate on this pond at a local park this year and the annual ice fishing derby on Wilson Pond in Swanzey was cancelled because what little ice there was never got thick enough to support all the fishermen. This is the first time that has happened, I think.

I gave up on winter and went looking for spring, and I was glad I did. I found this grouping of crocus at the local college. A lady saw me with my camera and stopped me to ask if I was there to get photos of the locust. “The locust?” I asked. She must have thought I looked confused because she said “You know; the flowers.” I told her that I thought she might mean the crocus and if so yes, that was what I was there for. “Oh yes, locusts are insects, right?” “Yes, that’s right,” I replied. I didn’t want to explain that certain trees are also known as locusts. “Well, have fun,” she said with a smile, and off she went.  

This one was my favorite.

The ones that are white inside and have three petals that are purple on the outside is another favorite. I think this is the first time I’ve ever found them wide open like this. For years I’ve always found them closed.

At another part of the college there are groups of yellow crocus planted with groups of purple ones. The yellow ones always seem to come up first and there are a lot of them blooming right now.

Bees were enjoying the flowers too.

I was surprised to see the bees because I didn’t think it had warmed up enough for them. They left these crocus flowers covered in pollen, so their timing was perfect.

I saw one or two purple crocuses but there are lots more to come. I always like to see the beautiful feathery designs inside these flowers.

I saw just one wrinkled viola blossom, which is odd. In years past these plants often bloomed before the crocuses, and it was colder then.

There are a few snowdrops in bloom with many more of them to come as well.

Dandelions started blooming two or three weeks ago and they haven’t stopped since. Not even snow can slow them down this year.

The Cornelian cherries are taking it slow. Like a child dipping one toe at a time in the water to feel its temperature, they seem to open one bud at a time to feel the air temperature. Then one day, as if a silent signal was given, you’ll walk by one of the trees and all its flowers will be open.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the spring blooming witch hazels with so many flowers on them as they have this year. I stopped to see them one day and found bees all over them. The flowers seen here seemed to be what they preferred. Possibly because they’re the most fragrant. You can smell them from a block away when the breeze is right.

I like this one because of its long petals. On cold nights they roll up each of the four petals and tuck them in for the night. In the morning when the sun warms them they unroll them again. That’s why the petals always look so crinkly, almost like crepe paper. Other than to attract insects and look pretty, they serve no real purpose.

Go out in nature and you will find yourself in love with all of nature’s kind. ~Wald Wassermann

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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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Ice and Snow

I had an idea that I’d do a post about puddle ice because thanks to Doreen, who commented on the last post, a mystery I’ve wondered about for most of my life has been solved. It concerns the wave like lines in puddle ice, and it turns out they have nothing to do with waves; they’re caused by the way the water drains out from under the ice. Capillary action causes the water to adhere to the ice above it and form thin bands. What look like wave lines from above show where the ice bands join, and if you break the ice and turn it over you can see how they are created. In essence, the band edges appear as ribs, thicker where a line appears on the surface. This can also happen with pond and lake ice. If you’d like a much better explanation than I’ve given here, here is the link that Doreen sent in. https://www.storyofsnow.com/blog1.php/why-do-frozen-ponds-and-puddles-have-lines

I should say that, as soon as I decided to do a post on puddle ice it snowed and covered all the puddles. And it hasn’t stopped; we’re seeing two or three storms a week. Some, as the above photo shows, are barely deep enough to cover a bird’s toes. But it only takes a dusting to cover the ice on a puddle, so I had to go back to older posts to find that first photo. All the way back 2013 if I remember correctly.

Other storms have dropped a few inches, but no more than 4 or 5. This photo of a spruce cone which was heated by the sun and melted its way down into the snow is a good illustration of our snow depth now. Once the sun gets a little stronger many things will melt their way into the snow. I’ve seen twigs, oak leaves, hemlock branches; basically anything dark colored melt into the snow as the sunshine heats them up.

I gave up on puddle ice and decided to show you other ice forms. A few years ago I visited this stream and found it full of beautiful lacy ice, but this time I found mostly colorful reflections.

I also saw an odd shaped ice bauble floating 3 or 4 inches above the stream.

This ice grew out from the shore but I’m not sure I know how to describe it, so it’s a good thing a picture is worth a thousand words.

This ice, made up of long needle like strands, also grew out from the stream bank. Ice can be fascinating because you never know exactly what shape you will find it in. The variety of shapes and forms seems to be endless.

I went to another stream and found what I call “curtain ice.”

This ice had beautiful clear, pointed crystals on it that looked much like quartz crystals.

Further upstream ice “flowers” had grown on the branches of a streamside shrub. Further up the stems smaller flowers showed how much the depth of the water had changed.

Small, still ponds had iced over but most water bodies with a strong current remained ice free except along their banks. I loved the colors in this ice.

There are many theories about how the spidery shapes seen in ice form but the one thing they all have in common is that they have to start with a hole in the ice. What makes the hole is not agreed upon; some say beavers and /or muskrats chew hole in the ice so they can breathe. I doubt that one. Another theory says that gasses from decaying vegetation on the bottom of the pond keep the ice from freezing in that particular spot. Having seen many vertical strings of bubbles frozen in ice, this theory seems a bit more plausible.

Anyhow, everyone agrees that it has to start with a hole in the ice. Everyone seems to agree that when it snows the weight of the snow causes the ice to sink, and when it sinks water is forced out of the hole. The water wets the snow and darkens it, causing the random spidery shapes. Then it gets cold enough to freeze it all up again, with most of the ice opaque and light colored except for the darker spidery forms.

I once worked for a man who wanted to have a skating party at the small pond on his property, but the surface of the ice was all bumpy and uneven. He hired two of us to flood the surface so it would re-freeze nice and level. We chopped a hole in the ice and with a rented gas powered pump, we pumped the water from the pond out onto the ice. The weight of the water on top of it caused the ice to sink and when it did a gusher came up out of the hole, flooding the ice with too much water to re-freeze before the skating party was to happen.

By the time we left we no longer cared about the skating party; we were freezing, soaked, and disgusted with ourselves for having fallen for such a foolish plan. But the episode makes the theory of the snow weighing down the ice enough to make water come up out of any holes in it a little more plausible to me.

On the coldest day we’ve had this winter (about 16 degrees F.) I went to the Ashuelot falls in Keene to see if there were any ice pancakes forming. Ice pancakes form from the foam that the falling water creates, and there was plenty of foam. Normally on a warmer day this foam would just dissipate and float downstream but in very cold weather it freezes quickly. If you see pancake ice you know it’s quite cold.

The current keeps the frozen foam from forming a into a single sheet by constantly spinning it in large groups that look like spiral galaxies. This also makes the loose foam come together and form circles. When the circles of foam bump into each other they form rims and start to look like pancakes. They can range in size from car tires to cantaloupes, and sometimes smaller. Most of these on this day were nearer cantaloupe size.

This example wasn’t completely round yet but if it stayed cold enough and kept moving it would be. You can see how it is made entirely of foam and how the surrounding loose foam joins the larger circles. I’ve read that pancake ice is very rare outside of the Arctic, even though I see them forming here at least once every winter. In the Arctic, the ice pancakes can stick or stack together and form ridges that pile on top of each other and reach up to 60 feet thick, but here on the Ashuelot they either melt or just float downstream. If you’d like to learn more about this ice form just Google “pancake ice.”

When I was leaving Ashuelot falls I looked upstream and saw what looked like a beaver lodge. How can that be? I wondered. I was here a short while ago and there was no sign of a beaver lodge, and I know they don’t build them that fast. When I got closer I saw that a tree had floated downstream and had gotten hung up on the relatively shallow bottom. What had looked like a beaver lodge was part of its root ball. It really is amazing how many trees fall into this river.

I went to another waterfall, this time at Swanzey lake in Swanzey, and found that the ice had sculpted itself into a strange shape so I took a couple of shots of it. When I looked at the photos later I saw that the camera settings certainly weren’t set for stop action, because the water in the waterfall looked like something I can’t even think of a word for. Silver hair? I don’t know, but I almost deleted this one. It makes me dizzy if I look at it too long.

One of my favorite things to see in the woods is a stream that sunlight has turned to gold. I took this photo last November and apparently forgot about it, but I’m putting it into this post in the hope that it might warm you up a bit after such a cold adventure. There is ice in it but it feels a little warmer than the others. A shawl and a cup of hot chocolate might be just about perfect right now.

He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter. ~John Burroughs

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Things I’ve Seen

Hello again everyone. I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and are having a Happy New Year. I thought I’d better do a post and show you the first real snow of the year, which fell on January 7th. I say it’s the first real snow because we’ve had a dusting and a nuisance storm of about half an inch, but this one was a plowable 4-5 inches. This old road is one of my favorite winter scenes so I had to get out and get a photo of it before the wind blew all the snow off the trees. I thought it was very beautiful with all the colors of the oak and beech leaves mingling with the white of the snow in the morning sunshine.

This shot of a dandelion in bloom was taken by cellphone just 7 days before that first snowy photo, on December 31st. The two photos illustrate the up and down, freeze and thaw cycle we seem to be stuck in at present. The snowy scenes didn’t last long thanks to 48 degree temps and pouring rain just 2 days after it fell. That’s the way the last two or three winters have gone. The dandelion is the only flower I’ve seen bloom in all 12 months of the year.

This just about says it all. If you can picture that little raindrop freezing at night and then thawing when the sun hits it in the morning, that seems to be the latest version of winter in New Hampshire. I read that the average winter temperature is now 3.5 degrees warmer than it was ten years ago. I’m not here to talk about right or wrong, good or bad, or this or that; I’m just reporting what is.

We had enough rain to make the river flood and when that happens thankfully much of the water ends up in unused fields like this one. I like to get out after the flood waters freeze because that’s when you can see and hear some amazing things.

When the ice begins to shatter some ice plates can be bigger than a car tire. When they’re supported by shrubs as they were here you can tell how deep the water was when it froze over. In this instance I guessed it had been about 18 inches deep. Standing here watching and hearing them break up in the warm sunshine was amazing.

The ground isn’t frozen yet so the water quickly drains away, leaving the ice high and dry. When the sun hits this ice that is left just floating in space the ice begins to shatter and when it does it sings, sometimes tinkling, sometimes crashing. Sometimes you hear loud snapping sounds made by ice cracking under pressure, and it can be startling.

That’s just what happened shortly after this killdeer landed beside me while I was standing and listening to the ice sing. All of the sudden there was a loud snap and crash when ice caved in and this bird flew straight up into the sky like it was a jet airplane. I had to laugh because I had jumped at the sound of the loud noise as well. This is not a great shot of this bird because I was surprised to see it just feet away and of course I didn’t have my camera turned on so there was a lot of fumbling going on.

Killdeer are in the plover family and aren’t seen that often, at least not by me. Its name comes from its “shrill, two-syllable call,” which someone apparently thought sounded like “kill deer.” Where people get these ideas from, I don’t know. Females lay their eggs directly on the ground, often in gravel. I’ve read that the eggs don’t get eaten by predators because they look like stones. If a predator gets too close to the nest the female will flutter on the ground pretending to have a broken wing, and lure the predator away. It’s a very clever bird.

Of course ice can be beautiful, so I always take a closer look. I love the wave like patterns that are often found frozen in ice but I’ve never been able to figure out how it happens. I’m sure wind must have a lot to do with it.

This was a large piece of ice on the shore of a small pond. I thought it was beautiful, almost like a sand dune in shape, and its color reminded me of puddle ice. Years ago I read that ice that is white like this has more oxygen in it; millions of tiny bubbles color it white. It is almost always very thin and it tinkles like the very thin glass of a fluorescent tube when it breaks.

Endlessly fascinating and beautiful, that’s what ice is to me.

I’ve seen this pond freeze over and then thaw again several times since mid-December. It always has interesting frozen bubbles on its surface.

I’ve seen a few examples of “winter fungi” including this one that I saw peeking out from under the bark on a log in a December. I haven’t bothered identifying it.

I’ve also seen lots of color so far in these colder months. This crowded parchment fungus was at its best on a rainy day and it glowed like a beacon so I could see it long before I reached it. You find this common fungus growing on limbs that have fallen from nearby trees. I always wonder how fungal spores get so high into the crown of a tree. Wind I suppose, or maybe they stick to the feet of birds.

Speaking of birds, I’m seeing lots of bluebirds this year. Years ago I saw my first bluebird sitting on a post and rail fence, and then I didn’t see another one for probably 30 years. That’s because I wasn’t looking in the right places. They like wide open spaces like old fields and wetlands, which is just where I saw this one. They’re a good reason to come out of the forest every now and then because they’re beautiful, and they’re also my favorite color. In warmer months they eat insects and in cold weather seeds and berries. This one heard me coming from a few yards away, just about when I saw him, and turned his head to see what I was up to. Often when I see something so beautiful I forget I have a camera, but on this day I had sense enough to get a shot. I love the curled markings on its feathers. They made me realize that I had never seen a bluebird’s back.

There are lots of dogwoods, many different viburnums, highbush cranberry, and other native fruit bearing shrubs here in the wetlands, so I’m sure that has something to do with the large bluebird population.

Bluebirds like to nest in hollow trees but I knew I wouldn’t find one in this hole, because it was in a fallen log.

Still, I had to take a closer look to see if anyone was home. I didn’t see anyone or hear any little feet rustling but I was happy just to see the beautiful wood grain, so it didn’t matter.

I saw this wooly bear caterpillar sauntering down a road on January 10th. These caterpillars produce their own antifreeze and can freeze solid in winter but once the temperatures rise into the 40s F in spring they thaw out and begin feeding on dandelion and other early spring greens. Eventually it will spin a cocoon and emerge as a beautiful tiger moth. From that point on it has only two weeks to live. Unfortunately this wasn’t spring; it was January and 48 degrees, so I wondered if it had been fooled into thinking it was spring. Since winter has been so warm so far, maybe it hasn’t yet felt the need to freeze.

I saw some nice staghorn clubmoss in a colony bigger than I’ve ever seen. Clubmosses are ancient spore bearing plants which have been here for millions of years. Fossil records show they once grew to the size of trees. I don’t see this one too often but they are obviously very happy in this spot.

I saw what I thought was a flattened pinecone on the road one day. While I took photos of it I convinced myself that it was a pinecone that had been run over so many times it had been cut in half. “This will be an interesting thing for the blog” I told myself, “I doubt many people have seen half a pinecone.” Then all of the sudden I realized what I was seeing was not a pinecone at all; it was simply the flattened tip of a pine branch. How could I have totally missed the reality of what I was seeing?

These are the moments in nature that are important, but most of them will go unnoticed. That is unfortunate because it is in these moments that all thought can drain from the mind, and for a second or two you can experience the silence and peace of pure emptiness. Something clicks like a key in a lock, and perhaps for the first time you see with absolute clarity. Others have said the same:

In his 1926 book The Gentle Art of Tramping Stephen Graham said it this way: As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.

Author Charlene Spretnak said it this way: There are sacred moments in life when we experience in rational and very direct ways that separation, the boundary between ourselves and other people and between ourselves and nature, is illusion.

Author Marty Rubin said this: People think in such grand terms-unconditional love, changing the world, doing the impossible. They fail to see the joy, the immense bliss, which lies in simple everyday acts.

Author Charles de Lint had this to say: Free your heart from your mind. Embrace wonder for one moment without the need to consider how that wonder came to be, without the need to justify if it be real or not.

Native American Black Elk from the Lakota tribe said this: And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell, and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of things in the spirit, and the shapes of all shapes as they must live together like one being.

They and many more over the course of countess centuries have all said the same thing in different ways, so I suppose the moral of this too long story is simply; pay close attention. When you get a glimpse of how an imagined life has fooled you into believing what is false, that is the time to see truth. You can’t make it happen and you can’t stop it from happening, but you can stay quiet and pay attention. Then, let whatever wants to happen, happen. As the old saying goes; when the student is ready the teacher will appear. My point is that the teacher doesn’t always have to be human. It can come in any form, anywhere, at any time.

I found a bush full of beautiful bluish seedpods that I hadn’t ever seen. Google lens told me it was a pearl bush and when I looked at a photo it was obvious where the name came from. The flowers remind me of mock orange but the white flower buds on leafless branches look like strings of pearls. I thought its seedpods were beautiful.

A little critter had zipped up the snow.

This blog has evolved over time I suppose, but the message is really still the same: walk slowly and look closely, and marvel at all the wonder and beauty in this paradise we find ourselves in. Anyone can do this, so why not try? Let nature gently lead you back to yourself and remind you that you don’t stop at your skin. You are so much more; beyond knowing, beyond description. Lose yourself in life’s sweet song and let life’s energy surge through you, just as it was doing in everything seen in these photos.

The splendor of Silence—of snow-jeweled hills and of ice. ~Ingram Crockett

Thanks for coming by.

NOTE: I’m not back full time yet. I will still be posting sporadically until sometime in March. Take care.

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Winter in the Wetlands

This post completes the circular story of the wetlands for this year. We’ve seen the beautiful trout lilies and other wildflowers of spring, the birds, insects and animals of summer, and the beautiful colors of fall. Now we see winter but before we know it, it will be time to show those spring trout lilies again. This is a beautiful place, with many unusual things that I haven’t seen anywhere else, so that means I’ll have to keep coming back. 

Wild raisin (Viburnum cassinoides) is a native viburnum that likes wet feet so it’s right at home here in the wetlands. In fact I’ve seen more of them here than I ever have anywhere else. They’re easy to spot at this time of year because of their dangling clusters of round blue black fruit. The fruit is edible and is said to be quite sweet, and Native Americans ate them fresh or dried.

If you aren’t sure if what you have are wild raisins, just look at the buds. The valvate buds have two long bud scales that look like a blue heron bill, but the scales don’t cover the center of the bud. There is another native viburnum called nannyberry (Viburnum lentago) that has very similar buds, but its scales cover the entire bud. It also has edible berries, but its berries are more oval or elongated than round and they ripen slightly later. The difference between the flavor of the berries I’ve read, is nannyberries have a prune / banana type flavor, while wild raisins taste more like actual raisins. In any event birds love them both so if you want to try them you might want to get after it.

Bright sunshine showed these blackberry leaves were still green.

If you aren’t sure if what you’re seeing is a raspberry or a blackberry, just feel the canes. Blackberry canes feel more square than round and mature canes will have a groove or two in them that will run the length of the cane. Just watch the thorns.

These blackberry leaves were finished with photosynthesizing so they no longer needed to be green. Blackberries and other brambles like swamp dewberry often have deep purple leaves at this time of year.  

American wintergreen is another plant that turns purple when it gets cold. Oil of wintergreen has been used medicinally for centuries and a soothing tea can be made from the leaves. The fragrance of the oil is unmistakable because it is used in toothpaste, mouthwash, pain relievers, breath mints and many other products but you should note: If you are allergic to aspirin you should not eat the berries, leaves or any teas or other preparations made from this plant because it contains compounds very similar to those found in aspirin.

I saw lots of berries on these plants and thought of my grandmother as I picked a few. When I was just a small boy, after we visited my mother’s grave we would go into the woods so she could teach me about the plants that grew there. Teaberry plants grew in abundance and she always called them checkerberries. Since she often had trouble getting up from a kneeling position before long it was up to me to find the berries and I usually found a lot of them. She loved them and taught me to love them as well but on this day these berries were kind of on the mealy side. I thought maybe they had been frozen and I didn’t care for their texture, but the flavor of Clarks teaberry gum was still the same.

There are lots of gray birches here. Though they aren’t quite as pretty as the bright white paper birches they do have white bark and they’re far more common. It is rare that a day goes by without birches in it.

Gray birches have the odd habit of having upright male catkins rather than ones that hang down like so many other trees. Before they flower in spring though, they will have changed position and will be hanging down. How they might benefit by standing upright, I don’t know. Plants don’t do things just for the fun of it though; every time they use energy, there is a good reason behind it. I’ve always thought that part of the fun of nature study was trying to figure out why they do what they do. If you watch them very closely, like each day in spring for trees, their secrets are often revealed. You don’t have to stand there watching them; often just a glance each day will show you something is different. You might see that those birch catkins that were standing up yesterday are now hanging down. I don’t know this as fact but I would guess in this case that the catkins would want to be pointing downward so water didn’t get in under the shingle like bud scales when they opened. If water reaches the flowers and freezes in a cold spring it can damage or even kill them. 

The female cone like gray birch strobiles are larger than the male catkins and they always hang down. A close look shows that each one bears many hundreds of seeds. The small seeds are shaped like triangles with tiny wings, and are blown about by the wind in late fall and winter. Unless that is, birds get to them first. Many songbirds love them. You can often find the snow under a gray birch littered with hundreds of tiny seeds after a storm and chickadees and other small birds will be feasting on them. If they aren’t eaten they can persist for years in the soil.

But I would guess that most birch seeds do get eaten and to make sure I knew how it was done this black capped chickadee landed right in front of me to show me. It was easy to see where the name “black capped” came from. These are beautifully colored little birds but they don’t sit still long so few of us ever get to see them up close. Quite often I’ll notice as I walk on trails they fly along beside me from bush to bush, always just out of sight of the camera.

Luckily this one wasn’t camera shy so we can get a good look. How it can find those tiny birch seeds in all that gravel and pine needles, I don’t know. They’ve got better eyes than I have, I do know that. Males and females look almost identical but you can tell them apart in spring by their song. The males have a beautiful “fee-bee” mating call that sounds both sad and sweet, and it just doesn’t seem like spring is here until I hear their call. They also have an “every day” call that sounds like “chick a dee-dee-dee,” and I would guess that’s how they came by that part of their name.

We’ve had some up and down weather lately. One day last week it was 48 degrees and as I came out of a store I noticed this cluster fly hanging out on the hood of my car, enjoying the warmth of the engine that was wafting up from the gap between the hood and fender. Google lens told me it was a cluster fly and I learned that their name comes from the way they cluster together on your window sills on sunny winter days. They get into attics and other warm spaces and spend the winter there, but unlike the common housefly they don’t lay eggs on food.

One day it was very warm and all the melting ice created a heavy mist. Since I had seen flies and even mosquitoes around I thought I’d go and see if the spiders had built any webs in the wetlands but no; apparently they all disappeared. I’ve read that orb weaver spiders die in winter but the egg sacs the females leave behind ensure a new generation in spring.

The ice was melting quickly and in a day or two there wouldn’t be any left except in places that saw no sunshine.

There is so much beauty in this world, sometimes it seems like these posts have now reduced themselves to nothing but beauty. But I’m here to report what I see in nature and beauty is what I see, because it’s everywhere I look. I find that my thoughts of whether or not something is beautiful are based more on how something makes me feel than how it looks, and the simplicity of a pickerel weed leaf tip sticking up out of frozen pond grabbed me and held me for a time. I love the colors and the minimalistic, abstract feel, and the way the leaf’s shadow looks like it has been colored in with a crayon. That’s due to tiny bubbles in the ice, I think. I must have taken twenty photos of this scene and this is the one I liked the most.

There is never ice everywhere here in the wetlands; even in the coldest winters there is always open water to be found and mallards are expert at finding it. I found the mallards seen here swimming in part of a pool that hadn’t frozen over completely. There was Mr. Mallard…..

…and there was Mrs. Mallard. I love the way they float along so serenely, and I loved the beautiful patterns in her feathers.

Actually on this day I saw far more of this than I did serene floating. These birds were hungry, and they were finding plenty to eat down there on the bottom.

There were lots of black eyed Susan seeds for other birds to eat. Goldfinches love them and there are lots of goldfinches here. Other birds that eat them are chickadees, cardinals, nuthatches, and sparrows, all of which can be found here in the wetlands.

All of the same birds also eat aster seeds. Years ago I started leaving garden plants standing for the winter so birds could eat the seeds and I usually have a yard full of birds. Most of the smaller birds hide in the big eastern white cedar out front and they fly into it when I open the door to leave. Bigger birds just fly up and perch on the many bare limbs of the maples, cherries and crab apples and watch what I’m doing. I don’t feed them but they know I won’t harm them so I’ve had generation after generation nesting here. One of the great pleasures I find in nature is in the spring when I can start opening the windows to hear their songs at dawn.

I saw lots of bird’s nests here but I chose to show this one because one side support had let go and it was tilted so we could easily see inside it. I thought back to last summer and what birds I had seen in this spot. There were lots of catbirds and a few blue jays here but I can’t say with certainty which of them would have made the nest. A baseball, which is about 3 inches in diameter, would have fit right into it. There are lots of grapevines here as well and this and other birds had used their peeling bark to build their nests, along with straw and whatever else they could find.

I always look at the grape tendrils because sometimes I see amazing things in them like horse heads or Hindu dancers, but on this day all I saw was a grape tendril. It seems like my imagination has decided to take some time off lately.

Miles off in the distance it looked like Mount Monadnock had received a dusting of snow. It usually snows on the mountain before we see any down here in the lowlands. It had rained here the day before, so I’d guess that it fell as snow up there. Once there is a buildup of snow on the mountain it will most likely stay snowy until May, depending on the weather. I’ve been up there when the snow was so deep I had to kind of swim / crawl through / over it. It’s a good thing I was young because it was exhausting. I felt tired right down to my bones.

I couldn’t stand around thinking of mountains for very long because there were some dark clouds moving in, and it was cold enough to snow. I snapped this one last shot of the clouds and stayed dry all the way to the car, but I woke the next morning to find that we’d had a dusting of snow overnight.

Beauty, joy, serenity, simplicity, and wonder; I found them all while making this post and I found them without really even trying. I know you’ll find them too, and much, much more as you travel through life.

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

Thanks for coming by.

Note: As I did last year at this time I’m taking a short break from regular blogging, so posts will be sporadic until they resume in March. I need to just be quiet for awhile so I’ll post the usual “Christmas card” post next week and then, unless something comes up I’ll be back in March. I expect something will come up before then though. Last year all of the sudden I was writing poetry. And don’t forget-you can always go to the archives up there on the right hand side and wander through them. There are 12 years worth of blog posts there.

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Things I’ve Seen

I started these “things I’ve seen posts” years ago because I had lots of photos that just didn’t seem to fit in other posts. I think this is the first one I’ve done this year but these are all recent photos that also didn’t fit in, like this milkweed seed resting on a branch that I saw just the other day. It  was most likely taken by the wind not too long after I’d left. According to the University of Maine Native American used milkweed as medicine to treat a variety of ailments, made the stem fibers into yarn, and ate the plant as well, ingesting the young shoots, flowers, and young green fruits of milkweed. The shoots have been compared to asparagus and the unopened buds to broccoli.

Since the corn fields near here began to flood the farmer started planting wheat, so I thought these plants I found growing under the powerlines nearby were wheat escapees but Canada wild rye, native to the great plains, looks very similar after the leaves have died back. Wild rye seeds are edible and were used as food by Native Americans.

I also found some Canada lily seed pods under the powerlines. They had opened and were releasing seeds. They split into three sections when they open, and each section has two rounded lobes which the seeds fit into perfectly.

Looking at the seeds it’s easy to see how the rounded parts fit into the rounded lobes in each section of seed pod. The pointed part points toward the center of the pod and the flat seeds are stacked into each lobe, meaning that each seed pod carries many seeds. Canada lily bulbs are edible but they were a famine food, used by Native Americans only when other foods weren’t available. When roasted they are said to taste like an ear of unripe corn. The seeds remind me of American elm seeds.

I like to see the beautiful blue of juniper berries but they don’t last long because bluebirds and other birds eat them up as fast as they ripen. A waxy coating reflects the light in a way that makes the deep purple black berries appear to be a bright and beautiful blue. Though called a berry botanically speaking the fruit is actually a seed cone with fleshy, merged scales. The flavor of gin comes from the juniper plant’s unripe berry and the ripe berry is the only part of a conifer known to be used as a spice. Whole and / or ground fruit is used on game like venison, moose, and bear meat. The first recorded usage of juniper appears on an Egyptian papyrus from 1500 BC. Egyptians used juniper medicinally and Native Americans used the fruit as both food and medicine. Stomach disorders, infections and arthritis were among the ailments treated. Natives also made jewelry from the seeds inside the berries, which I keep telling myself I’ll look at but never do.

A dead Queen Anne’s lace flower head looked like a starburst in the bright sunlight.

I went to the river several times this past summer to see the beautiful iridescent colors of mussel shells. There was no question that they would be there because raccoons go there to fish and when they’re done eating the meat of the mussel they leave the shells behind. But this year every time I went to see them the shells were broken into pieces. Who or what was breaking them? They’ve never been broken in past years and I can’t imagine an animal doing it. I’ve noticed footprints in the sand now and then though, so I have an idea that it might be the work of a someone rather than a something. Too bad; if they stopped for a moment to see how the light brought out the beautiful colors of the shells maybe they’d see what they had been depriving themselves of by breaking them.

I found a great illustration of a branch collar. The dark part sticking up is obviously the dead branch but what is maybe no so obvious is the branch collar below it, which is shaped like a volcano. When pruning trees it is always best to cut the branch and leave the branch collar intact because this exposes less of the tree’s surface area to insects and fungal spores. It’s easy to see the difference between the diameter of the branch compared to the base of the branch collar.

I went out one cold night to get something out of the car and saw this half moon shining brightly so I went back in and got the camera, steadied it on a post and took this shot. It would have been better if I had used a tripod. I remember as a boy in 1969 I used my father’s binoculars to see if I could see the Lunar Orbiter circling the moon, but I never did see it. The thought of people actually up there walking on the moon was awe inspiring. Everything stopped as the people of earth (650 million) watched the lunar landing on television. We all came together as one people then, and it seemed such a great time to be alive.

Two mallards swam blue streaks across a golden pond. This photo is right from the camera just as it happened, without any re-touching. I’ve seen golden water and I’ve seen blue water, but I’ve never seen this. Of course it’s all about the light; it is the light that makes things beautiful. Ponds are starting to ice over, so mallards and geese will have a harder time finding open water soon.

Long, faceted spears of ice formed along the shore of another pond. They were barely noticeable unless the light fell on them in a certain way, so it took a few tries to get a shot of them.

There were a few ice baubles along the river shore on this day. It has to get quite cold for them to form. It seems to take at least a couple of nights in the 20s F. to get them started.

On another day many ice baubles were catching the bright sunlight beautifully and acting like prisms with colors both in them and shining out of them but try as I might, I couldn’t catch them in the camera. I was finally able to get the blue of the sky reflected in this one though. I wanted to try a cellphone camera but the rocks on shore were covered in ice and I would have had to kneel on them while I held the phone out over the water. It didn’t seem like a very good plan.

This was a strange, hand shaped ice bauble. The wind howls up and down the river at times so I can only guess that the wind was the sculptor. It must have been a very cold and windy night. The sun’s light was again beautifully colored by it but again, I couldn’t catch it so I’ll have to keep trying. Quite often you find that the camera can’t see what your eyes can.

Hoar frost covered much of the grass on the riverbank.

From what I’ve read, hoar frost is a type of feathery frost that forms by condensation of water vapor to ice at temperatures below freezing. The word ‘hoar’ comes from old English and refers to the old age appearance of the frost: the way the ice crystals form makes it look like white hair or a beard. One of the best places to find hoarfrost is on exposed plants near unfrozen lakes and streams. There are times when you can walk along a stream and see all the stream side shrubs covered with it.

Since it was cold enough I went to the outflow of Swanzey Lake. The small waterfall there always makes good splash ice at this time of year.

Though I’m not sure why, splash ice is usually more opaque than the ice baubles along the river that are made by waves washing over a twig or plant stem. It’s never as clear, but it is just as interesting. If I had to guess I’d say the whitish color is due to large concentrations of oxygen, much like white puddle ice is.

The ice that grew on a big boulder looked like what I imagine the barnacles on a ship’s hull would look like.

I had forgotten about the iron rich seep in this place. Seeps don’t flow; they just sit on the surface like a puddle. I know of some that have been where they are for many years, but none I’ve seen are as richly colored as this one. The water in a seep reaches the earth’s surface from an underground aquifer and apparently stays somewhat warm, because I’ve never seen a seep freeze over. In a way though I wish they would; I’d like to see red puddle ice.

Another small pond had mostly frozen over but the ice was thin. A goose landing on it would have probably broken through but geese swim in the river at this time of year, where it takes longer for ice to form.

A fragrant white waterlily leaf had been caught in the ice. In summer the surface this pond is covered by many hundreds of them. Pond and lake ice always looks perfectly smooth but it rarely is because the wind sculpts and forms it.

I don’t see sun dogs often but last Saturday afternoon I saw what looked almost like a vertical rainbow to the right of the sun. Sundogs happen when there are ice crystals in the atmosphere. The ice crystals act much like prisms and color the light, which is often red closest to the sun, yellow in the center and white at the farthest edge. I could see two sundogs, one on either side of the sun, and an arc or “bow” overhead, but I couldn’t get far enough away to get them all in one photo. The scene covered a huge area.

I found this photo of sundogs on Wikipedia. It was taken in Saskatoon, Canada by Carlos Enrique Díaz Fecha last year. If I had been far enough away I could have gotten a shot much like this one, but I could only get the sundog on the right side of the sun. As I drove under the arc I watched the one on the left, hoping for a good place to stop but I never did find one; I was just too close. Sundogs get their name from the way they follow or “dog” the sun. This isn’t new; Aristotle (384-322 BC) once noted that “two mock suns rose with the sun and followed it all through the day until sunset.” He said that “mock suns” are always to the side, never above or below, most commonly at sunrise or sunset, and more rarely in the middle of the day.

I zoomed in a little closer, thinking I’d see something different but I didn’t. Just color; an amplification and bending of the light. Though sundogs warn of coming storms it was nice to see them; an interesting and beautiful end to the day.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. ~Henry David Thoreau

Thanks for coming by.

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End of Summer Beauty

Due to all the rain we’ve had I think, we have an abundance of fruits, seeds and nuts this year. Silky dogwood berries like those in the above photo are everywhere this year. Heavy clusters of them weigh down the branches and their varying shades of blue and white as they ripen always remind me of Chinese porcelain.

Elderberry bushes are also heavy with ripe fruit but it won’t last long because these are a real treat for birds. I was surprised that I was able to get a shot of this bunch before they were eaten. I grew up across the street from an Italian lady who used to tell me of all the benefits of eating and drinking anything elderberry. She’s the one who got me thinking about the health benefits of certain plants. Elderberry bushes grew by the hundreds all along the river and when she was younger she said, she would gather as many as she could and make elderberry wine and other things from them. I just saw a small bottle of elderberry syrup selling for $19.99.

NOTE: Raw elderberries and their juice is toxic so they should always be cooked or processed before use.

Virginia creeper berries are another favorite of birds, especially songbirds. It is said that deer, gamebirds, and small critters also eat them. Before she died my mother planted Virginia creeper on wire that was attached to the porch on our house, so I grew up with a view much the same as the one seen here. When the leaves turn bright red in the fall and there are still plenty of blue berries left it’s beautiful.

All the ripe fruit got me thinking about the birds that would eat it all so I went to see how the cedar waxwings were doing. It looked to me like they were still eating mostly insects but I did see a couple of them high up in a cherry tree eating cherries, so it’s just about that time. A flock of them can strip a crabapple tree of apples in no time at all, so all the wild fruit growing along the river should go fast.

This is the rock in the river that many of the cedar waxwings call home base when they’re feeding on insects. They blast off from here and go swooping and twirling through the air with some amazing acrobatics before coming back to rest on the stone. They’re really amazing to watch so once I get here sundown is often the only reason I leave.

I’m seeing a lot of native wild grapes dangling from the trees this year as well. They’re usually frost or river grapes but these were quite big so I think they’re probably Concord grapes. I wondered what bird could open its mouth wide enough to get one of these in so I looked up which birds ate grapes and the list is long. It includes cedar waxwings and Baltimore orioles. Of course there are many grapes smaller than these and I’m sure they would be the first choice.

I can imagine birds pecking at grapes. Or if it wasn’t a bird it must have been something else that made juice drip out of the grapes dangling above this grape leaf. I watched a yellow jacket licking up the grape juice and moved in closer for this shot. And then I was surrounded by flying yellow jackets, so there must have been a nest in the tree above. In dry years they’ll nest in the ground but when it’s rainy like it has been this year they’ll nest above ground. I was thankful that they let me escape un-stung. I mowed over a nest in the ground once and was stung many times. And I had shorts on. You don’t forget that.

One very foggy morning I found myself out in the wetlands again. It was so foggy I couldn’t get any long landscape shots but the mist revealed that the trees were draped full of spider webs like the one above. I thought that all that water on its web must bother the spider but I’m sure like all of nature they are patient and would just wait for the sun to dry things out. I walked on, wondering what else I’d see.

Slowly the sun was burning its way through the mist. I stopped at a small roadside pond and saw turtles out of the water. It looked like one of these turtles was getting impatient and pushing the one in front of it up the log. The scene showed me that the sun was gaining strength quickly now as I thought it would, and strong sunlight often means insect activity.

I went to a spot where I knew some beautiful red meadowhawk dragonflies hunted. I had seen them and had even gotten a couple of not so good photos of them the previous week but red is very hard for me to see, so they usually just blended into the vegetation and disappeared. On this day I walked into the bushes where I had seen them before and just waited. Meadowhawks like to hunt in vegetation so they sit and watch the grasses rather than the water like some other dragonflies. When I walked into the area I scared up lots of insects out of the grass so I thought the dragonflies would be around. I was right; before long the one in the above photo came along and landed on a deer tongue grass leaf in front of me, and I finally got the shot I wanted. It’s a beautiful creature.

While I was taking shots of the meadowhawk I felt a tap on my midsection but paid it no real mind. Finally, I looked down and saw this face looking up at me. A large dragonfly had landed on me and was giving me a hug. So what to do now? In my left hand was the Canon camera I had used on the meadowhawks but it was useless up close like this and if I let it dangle from its strap it would scare away my visitor, so with my right hand I slowly reached over the dragonfly and into my shirt pocket for the little Olympus I use for close shots. I was able to turn it on and take off the lens cap without disturbing the dragonfly, and I took this shot. If you click on the photo and zoom in on its face, you will see what looks remarkably like an abstract representation of a human face.

With my right hand I held the camera out to my side and, shooting without being able to see this view of the dragonfly, I took several shots. Not surprisingly most of them were terrible; this is the only one worth showing to you. Then I thought that maybe if I tried my cell phone camera I’d have better luck so I reached into my back pocket for it. When my visitor saw the phone it immediately flew off, so that was the end of this encounter. I’ve had dragonflies land on me before and once, when one landed on my shoulder, I put my finger up to it and it climbed on and perched there like a canary. In fact, I had quite a time getting it to let go. Luckily a coworker came over and helped. This dragonfly, if I’ve done my homework correctly, is called a green striped darner. It seemed huge at about 3 inches long; twice as big as the meadowhawk. Its wingspan is said to be about 4 inches, so everything about it just seems really big. It is one of the “mosaic” darners and you can see where that name comes from if you study its beautiful body. It is native to the northeastern U.S. and I’ve read that they “may be found resting on tree trunks or hanging from branches.” And on people too, apparently.

I could see that this was going to be one of those days when one thing happened right after another. Out of the corner of my eye when I was getting photos of the friendly dragonfly I saw a great blue heron glide by, flying low as if to land, and here it was. I wondered if it was waiting in line to have its photo taken but no, it was just fishing. All the plants you see below it, which are smartweeds, are growing right at the edge of a stream, and that’s where the big bird was fishing. It waded around paying no attention to me so I took a few shots and wished it good luck as I left.

I had walked just a few yards when another red meadowhawk landed in the gravel at the side of the road. I should say that “red meadowhawk” isn’t this dragonfly’s official name. I thought it was an autumn meadowhawk at first but that one has yellow legs so I tried to look up what its real name was and found that there are so many species of red dragonfly even experts have trouble identifying them, so for now I’m staying with red meadowhawk. You can see how this beautiful dragonfly holds its little “hands” together in front of itself. If you scroll back to the first one I showed you’ll see the same pose. They look as if they’re clapping to a beat only they can hear.

It seems to me that these gentle, intelligent creatures are as curious about us as we are about them, so I’ve learned to walk into a spot where they’re active and then to just stand or sit still. They’ll hover in front of you and fly by for a bit, and when they’ve decided that you aren’t a threat, they’ll feel comfortable enough to land very near. Let them study you first and then they’ll usually let you study them.

Beautiful little forked blue curls, an end of summer wildflower, grew alongside the road. Barely as high as your shoe tops, they make up for their small size by blooming prolifically. These plants are annuals that grow new from seed each year. They seem to like sandy soil and I find them growing along river banks and sometimes roadsides, and sometimes in my own yard.

The insect is guided by the spotted lower lip of the flower and if it is heavy enough the arched anthers spring down and dust it with pollen. Their pollen is white, as can be seen at the ends of the anthers in this shot. Each pollen grain looks to be about the size of a salt crystal.

New York asters have started blooming. These flowers are smaller than those of their cousins the New England asters but are still quite showy.

New England asters are about 2-2.5 inches in diameter and the New York asters are about 1 to 1.5 inches. My favorite New England aster, the dark purples like the one seen here, are just coming into full bloom.

Little bluestem grass has gone to seed and its light catching seed clusters can be seen everywhere right now. The way the light falls on its seed clusters and its pink / bronze stems is very beautiful. In fact people love it enough to plant it in their gardens and several cultivars have been developed. In the Native American Lakota tribe their word for little bluestem meant “small red grass.”

Here is a light catching cluster of seeds, which are valuable food for songbirds, game birds, and many small mammals. We have little bluestem growing along our roadsides and sometimes when the sun hits them just right, it looks as if you’re driving between two ribbons of pure light.

Turkeys are one of the birds that love little bluestem seeds and I’ve wondered if the grass evolved its light catching ability to make it easier for birds and animals to see them. This bird and a few others were just off the roadside in a beautiful field of light one day. When I pointed the long barrel of the zoom lens at them they must have thought I was a hunter because they all immediately crouched their heads down and walked quickly away, still in a crouch. Wild turkeys will chase people; that’s something that has been documented many times, so I thought they’d be fine with my being there, but they weren’t. I left feeling sorry to have disturbed them. We should be very grateful that these gentle birds are here, because they eat a lot of ticks.

I was going to sit on a park bench at a local park but it was already taken by this red eyed blowfly, so I moved on.

This cabbage white butterfly took me for a ride into the Twilight Zone for a time. Every time I looked at it through the camera it had this black spot on its wing as is seen here but when I went back and looked at the photo I had taken there was no black spot. Are there two butterflies here? I wondered but no, there was just this one. I finally realized that it could move its hind wing and cover the black spot, and it just so happened that it did that every time I clicked the shutter. Finally when the black spot appeared and I was in sync, I got the shot, but I never knew they could do this.

Here’s the cabbage white with its black spot covered. Clever little rascal.

I had the thought that there had been a noticeable lack of flowers in these posts lately so this post would be about flowers, but nature had other ideas. This post is an example of what I mean when I say that sometimes it seems as if nature “throws itself at you.” All of the sudden there are photos waiting to be taken everywhere you go, and you begin to see things you’ve never seen before. It always seems a shame to pass up such opportunities so you just let nature lead you from one amazing and beautiful thing to another until you realize that you have just been along for the ride while nature has been doing the driving. It’s wonderful when it happens and it is one of the reasons I keep doing this. But you are also part of this and I hope you don’t mind the lack of flowers. There will be more along soon.

Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love. ~Rabindranath Tagore

Thanks for coming by.

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A Few Rarities

Well here it is, Saturday again already. Since last Saturday I’ve been here and there visiting a few old friends, many of which are quite rare, like the beautiful wild columbine shown above. I hope readers realize that when I say rare I mean rare to me; in my own experience, and a few of the plants in this post are like that. For all I know there could be fields of thousands of columbines just a few miles away but in my experience this small colony on some ledges in Westmoreland is the only one I’ve ever seen after 50+ years in these woods. I always imagine I hear someone out there saying “Rare? Those aren’t rare.” so I just wanted to clear that up. Usually when I say a plant is rare that means I’ve found it only in one or two places.

And this one is exceedingly rare, because this single blue cohosh plant is the only one I’ve ever seen. The bluish cast of the stems, flower buds, new spring shoots, and sky blue fruit all point to the blue in its name. The word “cohosh” comes from either the Abenaki or Penobscot Native American tribes. It is said to mean “rough” but I think its true meaning has been lost to the ages because it is used as a name for several different plants. The plant was once also called “papoose root” because of the way Natives used it to help in childbirth, but the latest reseach shows it should not be used in this way because it can induce miscarriage.

Each of the yellow green striped sepals of a blue cohosh flower contains a nectar gland to attract insects. Six yellow stamens (sometimes fewer) form a ring around the center ovary and the true petals are the shiny green parts that ring the center between the sepals and the stamens. It’s an unusual flower that is hard to mistake for anything else. When you find this one you know immediately that you’ve found something rare.

Dwarf ginseng is another rare plant that I’ve found in only tw places. The colony in this photo has gone from two or three plants several years ago to what you see here. Each single plant is small enough to fit into a teacup, and each spherical flower head is only about 3/4 of an inch across. This is not the same ginseng that herbalists use, so it should never be picked.

Wild ginger is rare enough in my experience that I have seen just the single colony that contains the plant seen here. I saw it in a garden once as well, but just once in the wild. The soft, heart shaped, matte finish leaves with their hairy stems are hard to mistake for any other spring blooming plant. Do you see the brown, cup shaped blossom in this photo?

This is the blossom which was down in the lower right in the previous shot. It’s a little odd as flowers go and though it’s easy enough to think they do the job I’ve never come back to look for seed pods, so for all I know this large colony of plants might have come about vegetatively with runners, sort of like strawberries. The flowers have no petals; they are made up of 3 triangular calyx lobes that are fused into a cup and curl backwards. Reproductive parts are found in a central column inside. Because they grow so close to the ground and bloom so early scientists once thought that wild ginger flowers must be pollinated by flies or fungus gnats, but they have been discovered to self-pollinate and are said to produce 6 seeds per flower. I’ll have to go back and see if I can find a seed pod to show you.

You might walk past a plant with hardly a glance, get a few yards further on down the trail and then stop, wondering “did I just see stripes?” So you go back, looking carefully for something with stripes. Finally, there it is; a Jack in the pulpit flower. Peering inside you see Jack, but you also see beautiful zebra stripes.

Carefully you open the hood of the spathe and see the spadix (Jack) and the beautiful stripes. But wait, you might wonder, “why are the stripes bolder on the inside than on the outside?” Since the plant emits a fungus like odor and is pollinated by tiny fungus gnats, the stripes aren’t insect guides. So why are they there? Maybe they’re there just to get you to stop and admire them. Maybe they’re there to get you to think like a child again and to remember how it was to live in a world full of wonder, where everything was new and happiness came in this instant, not some day. Maybe a simple thing like a flower can show you how, when you welcome each instant as it happens, life becomes full of joy and wonder, and beauty and love. Maybe flowers can do these things. Maybe they can even lead you back to yourself by reflecting the stillness and beauty that is there inside of you.

Nodding trillium is another plant you might walk right by, seeing the leaves and thinking it was too bad this trillium wasn’t blooming. But look a little closer, under the leaves, and there you find a single small white flower pointed at the ground, like a mayapple blossom.

And this flower has six delicious looking, plum colored anthers. These plants are relatively rare in this area. A friend gave me a tip a few years ago about a place that had a small colony of maybe a dozen plants, and that’s all I’ve ever seen. They bloom just as the red trilliums end and just before painted trilliums bloom. Nodding trilliums are also called whip-poor-will flowers because they bloom when the whip-poor-wills return in spring. They like to grow near rivers, and I’d guess probably streams and ponds as well.

Seeing buds breaking is one of the things I most look forward to in spring. Beech bud break is always especially beautiful and this spring they didn’t fail to amaze. See how they unfold themselves like an accordian from what was once a tiny bud. Once out of the bud the new leaves grow very quickly and lose their downy, silvery hairs before melting into the green of the forest. For just a short time they are like the wings of angels.

It might be accurate to say that I’ve seen millions of oak leaves in a life of 60+ years, but why I’ve never seen them wear neon colors like these is a mystery. They were very beautiful, as only new spring leaves can be. I’m always amazed by how beauty like this is everywhere you care to look. But you have to stop and look, and then you have to see.

Spring leaves wear unusual colors to keep sunlight from damaging them. These little oak leaves wear red, and not only do the have a color to protect them, they also have a velvety coat as well. Fully protected, they grow on until they can take the bright sunshine and slowly they’ll lose their velvet coat, turn green and begin to photosynthesize.

Oak leaves especially, are among the most colorful of new spring leaves but they’re small and easy to miss. They are part of the softness of spring, and I believe they help give nature its expressionist painting appearance at this time of year. It’s all softness, color, and light, and it’s beautiful.

Something that is not small and easy to miss is bud break on a shagbark hickory tree. I’m always surprised by how colorful the bud scales are. They look like flowers but like a Jack in the pulpit spathe, all the color is on the inside where nobody can see it until they burst open, as this one has. Seeing a tree full of these you might easily think you were seeing a tree full of beautiful flowers, but they’re often quite high up in the tree and it’s hard to tell. The reason I can see these buds so easily is because the beavers cut the trees back every few years, so the new branches are closer to the ground. Seeing them so close doesn’t detract from the peace found there along the river. They add to it, like a whispered exclamation of joy.

Things seem to be happening slowly this spring. I still haven’t seen any ripe red maple seeds twirling down out of the trees yet. That’s fine though, because they’re beautiful as they ripen on the trees.

A red winged blackbird sat on a cattail, singing a song of joy. Though this view was tame these robin size birds can be fierce. I’ve stumbled into their nesting sites before and suddenly found a male bird hovering right in front of my face, beating its wings so fast their sound was all I could hear. It’s always enough to make me turn and go back the way I came, which of course is just what the bird wants. They have a way of speaking to you that quickly drives home the point.

A female red winged blackbird eyed me warily from the top of a cherry tree. They nest in last year’s cattails at the edge of the water and fly away from the nest as soon as they hear you. And they have amazing hearing.

Shin high sweet vernal grass is usually one of the first grasses to bloom in spring. The feathery white filaments seen here are its beautiful female flowers. Smelling it reminds you of fresh cut hay with a bit of vanilla mixed in, and for that reason it is also called vanilla grass. I’ve read that its scent comes from the same substance that gives sweet woodruff its fragrance. You can dry sweet woodruff and put it in a drawer with your clothes to make them smell sweet but I don’t know if it would work with sweet vernal grass. It might be worth a try, but I could end up smelling like a bale of hay. That wouldn’t be all bad though, I don’t suppose. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

Meadow foxtail grass can fool you because from a distance its shape and its flowers look much like Timothy grass, which blooms later on in mid June. A closer look reveals the truth; this grass is rough and coarse, while Timothy is quite fine. Both are beautiful when they blossom and both are non-native. Meadow foxtail, as shown by its spring bloom time, is a cool season grass from Europe and Asia. It is perennial and fussy about where it grows, preferring moist, fertile, neutral soil. In this country it is useful as pasture hay, just like Timothy. I love its easily seen purple flowered beauty on walks.

Poison ivy has grown its beautiful spring leaves and as this photo shows, it isn’t long before the tiny flower buds appear as well. I haven’t gotten a rash from it yet this year but I’m sure I will because I get it every year. It’s very easy to see something beautiful and without thinking kneel down to get a shot of it. Then as you stand up you notice that you’ve been kneeling in poison ivy. It happens every year but luckily I’ve never been super allergic to it. I’ll get it on my knees or hands and it will stay there without spreading. Some aren’t so lucky.

Bees have been busily foraging on all the dandelions and if the pollen grains seen on this one are any indication, their work has been successful. Actually, you don’t really even need to see a bee; all the dandelion seeds being blown around by the wind tell the story.  

The seed head of a dandelion is sometimes called a clock, because how many puffs it takes you to blow all the seeds away is supposed to equal the time of day. Dandelion seeds are bristly where they attach to their round receptacle so it can take quite a few puffs. Above the seed is a thin, hollow tube called a beak, and above that is a “parachute” made of even thinner hairs, called the pappus. When still fresh but empty of seeds, the round, pillow like receptacle is full of dimples that show where the seeds were attached. The dimples spiral outward from the center, and the pattern the spiral makes is known as a fractal. In a nutshell fractals are never ending patterns, and nature is full of them. They appear in pinecones, ferns, snowflakes, forests, river deltas, galaxies, and just about everything I see. They’re very beautiful and nature uses them to efficiently fill a given space. Note how so many seeds can sit on the receptacle without touching one another. This means each seed can blow away freely without disturbing its neighbor when its turn comes.  

A pretty little yellow warbler landed in a poplar tree and seemed to want its photo taken. It was quite small and was a challenge for my old camera. I knew it wasn’t a goldfinch but I don’t “do” birds due to color blindness so I only knew what it wasn’t. Luckily a friend who is a lifelong birder happened along and told me what it was when I showed him the photo. Though I often have trouble seeing birds thankfully I’ve never had any trouble hearing them. And now, with a phone app called Merlin I can finally identify what I’m hearing. One day I stood and listened to two rose breasted grosbeaks have a conversation. First the one nearby would sing its beautiful song and then another bird far off would sing a similar song. It was a beautiful thing to hear, and now I know what I was hearing.

Birch trees are not rare in this area, but I thought the sunlit white trunks of these young trees were beautiful against the varying shades of green. The word birch comes from the root word bhereg, which means “to shine, bright, white,” and of course that’s just what they do.

I meant to do my work today, but a brown bird sang in the apple tree, and a butterfly flitted across the field, and all the leaves were calling. ~Richard le Gallienn

Thanks for coming by. Have a great week.

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April (and May) Showers

It used to be we’d get a day or two of rain each week, enough to keep the lawns green and fungi growing, but now it seems everything happens in bunches. Weather comes in and stays for a week or two, and it has been like that lately. The latest low pressure system has taken two weeks to slowly creep out of the midwest and arrive, as of Wednesday, in Rochester, NY. Hopefully by the time I post this it will have moved out over the Atlantic. Its spin has brought wave after wave of rain, and it has rained at least a little almost every day. There was even a flash flood alert in there somewhere, but it never happened here. The Ashuelot River has overrun its banks in the lowest places but those places, often hay fields, are left open and empty so it can, and there is no damage done.

If you decide to be a nature blogger the first thing you learn is, you take what comes. You don’t have to sing in the rain but you do have to put up with it, so you dress for weather and out you go. I happen to like occasional days like those shown in these photos, so they don’t bother me. You find, if you pay attention, that on windy days the wind doesn’t usually blow constantly, so if you wait a bit the flower you want a shot of will stop whipping around. The same is true with rain; there are often moments or even hours when it holds off. But you have to pay attention and catch the right times, otherwise you’ll learn how to shoot with one hand and hold your umbrella with the other.

Rainy days are best for photos of things like lichens, because their color and form are at their peak when they’re hydrated. A dry lichen can look very different, so trying to match its color with one in a lichen guide can sometimes be frustrating. Foliose lichens especially, like the Tuckermannopsis in the above photo, can change drastically. Mosses, lichens, and fungi are all at their best on rainy days, so those are the best days to look for them. Species of the above lichen could be cilliaris, which is also called the fringed wrinkle lichen.

My phone camera decided this view of a shadbush needed to be impressionistic, so that’s what I got. Since I’ve always liked the impressionist artists I was okay with it. Shadbush (Amelanchier) is usually the earliest white flowered roadside tree to bloom, followed quickly by the various cherries, and finally the apples and crabapples.

The common name shadbush comes from the shad fish, which used to run in great numbers in our rivers at about the same time it blossomed. It is also called shadblow, serviceberry, Juneberry, wild plum, sugar plum, and Saskatoon, and each name comes with its own story. I used to work with someone who swore up and down that his ornamental Amelanchier trees were not shadbushes, when in fact they were just cultivated varieties (cultivars) of the shadbush. If the original tree is taken from the wild and improved upon by man by selective breeding or other means, that doesn’t mean it becomes a different tree. One look at the flowers tells the whole story.

The buds of the shadbush, as far as I know, are unique and hard to confuse with any others, so if your Amelanchier has buds like these it is a shadbush. People get upset when they discover that their high priced ornamental tree has the heart of a roadside tramp, but that’s because they don’t understand how many years and how much work it took to “improve” upon what was found in nature. Cultivars can have double the number of flowers that roadside trees have but they are also often bred for disease resistance and other desirable, unseen characteristics as well, and that’s why they cost so much. It can take 20 years or more to develop a “new” tree, and even longer to profit from the time and effort.

Wood anemones have sprung up but with all the clouds it has been hard to find an open flower. Finally, one cloudy day this one said “Hey, look at me,” so I grabbed a shot while I could. If ever there was a sun lover this is it, but on this day it could wait no longer.

I went to the Beaver Brook natural area to see if the hobblebushes that lived there were blossoming, and found them in full bloom, along with many trilliums. This one pictured had taken on an unusual upright shape. I usually see them grow low to the ground with their branches hidden by last year’s fallen leaves. They’re easy to trip on, and that’s how this bush hobbles you. I was careful not to trip and end up in the brook.

Or at least, the bushes were half way blooming. All the unopened buds in the center are the fertile flowers that do all the work and the larger, prettier flowers around the outer edges are the sterile flowers, just there to entice insects into stopping in for a visit. Hobblebushes are a native viburnum, one of over 200 species worldwide, and they are one of our most beautiful spring flowering shrubs.

Red elderberries go from purple buds to white flowers, so I’d guess by now I should go back and see the flowers. The flower heads are pyramidal; quite different from the large, flat flower heads of the common elderberry.

While I was at Beaver Brook I decided to check on the disappearing waterfall, which runs only after we have a certain amount of rain. What draws me to this scene is the mosses. Mosses grow slowly here, often taking many decades to cover a stone wall, and that’s because it has always been relatively dry with a normal average of an inch or so of rain each week, but turn up the rainfall and what you see here will happen. Most of that moss is due to splash over from the stream and or/ water runoff from above, and it’s beautiful and unusual enough to sometimes make people stand in line, waiting to get a photo. I saw them stacked three deep here one day, but if ever we live in a time with twice the average rainfall people will walk right by this spot without giving it a second glance, because then everything will look like this.

By the way, if you’re interested in mosses the BBC did a fascinating one hour show about them. Just Google “The Magical World of Moss on BBC.”  It’s well worth watching.

Beaver Brook was rushing along at a pretty good clip and the trees along its banks were greening up.

But not all the new leaves were green.

Beech buds are breaking and there are beautiful angel wings everywhere in the forest.

In the garden the cartoonish flowers of henbit have finally appeared. Not that long ago I could count on them being one of the first flowers I showed here in spring but now they bloom as much as a month later. Why hens peck at them I don’t know, but that’s why they’re called henbit. They’re in the mint family and the leaves and flowers are edible, with a slightly sweet and peppery flavor.

How intense the blue of scilla was on a cloudy day. This and other spring flowering bulbs are having an extended bloom this year I’ve noticed, most likely because it has been on the cool side for a week or two.

The blue of grape hyacinths was just as intense. My color finding software calls it slate blue, indigo or royal blue, depending on what area I put the pointer on. These plants have nothing to do with either grapes or hyacinths. They’re actually in the asparagus family, but more beautiful than their cousins, I think. I like the small white ring that surrounds the flower’s opening, most likely there to entice insects.

A slightly different colored glory of the snow has come along. These are very pretty flowers, almost like a larger version of scilla, but not quite the same shape. If I had more sun in my yard I’d grow them all.

The small leaved PJM rhododendrons had just come into bloom when I took this photo. The plants were originally developed in Massachusetts and are now every bit as common as Forsythias in this area. In fact, the two plants are often planted together. Forsythia blooms usually a week or so before the rhododendron but yellow and purple flowers blooming together is a common sight in store and bank parking areas in spring.

The old fashioned bleeding hearts are blooming nicely. They can get quite big in the garden but they die back in summer. This can leave quite a big hole in a perennial border, so they take a bit of planning before you just go ahead and plant one anywhere. They are native to northern China, Korea and Japan and despite a few drawbacks are well worth growing. They also do well as stand alone plants due to their size, and since they don’t mind shade they look good planted here and there under trees. That’s the way the plant pictured above is used in a local park.

Even the ferns are being held back by the cool, wet weather; this sensitive fern is one of only two or three I’ve seen trying to open. A sunny day or two will perk them up and will also mean an explosion of growth, so I’m hoping I can bring you a sunnier post in the near future.

Cinnamon ferns are in all stages of growth but I have yet to see one fully opened.

Lower down on its stem this fern had a visitor. I was near a pond and mayflies were hatching. According to what I read online the dull opaque color of the wings means this mayfly was at the “subimagio stage,” halfway between the nymph and adult stages. This is when they are most vulnerable, so that explains why it was in hiding on this fern. A single hatching can produce many millions of them, so there were probably others around. They are among the most ancient types of insects still living, having been here since 100 million years before the dinosaurs. I’m glad they’re still with us; I think they’re quite beautiful. I hope everyone is able to get out and see all of the wonders of spring.

As I stood and watched the mists slowly rising this morning I wondered what view was more beautiful than this. ~Hal Borland

Thanks for coming by.

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