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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Greening Up

The intense green is what pulled me into this scene. It was easy to see of course, but not so easy to show here. When I found it I took photos and then got home and saw that I had blown it. What was in the photos is not what I had seen, so I went back and stared and wondered and walked back and forth and looked at it from different angles and waited for clouds and finally, what you see here best approximates what I saw. Actually, what I felt is a much better term to use than what I saw, but feeling is much harder to convey in a photo. Like a painter painting what they love, you photograph what you love, because if you love it someone else will too. What I felt in this scene was simply spring; the melting and greening of spring, and I love spring. If you’re a lover of the season it gets into you and becomes part of you, and you feel as much as you see.

Not too far from where I took the above photo is the skunk cabbage swamp that I visit each spring. Skunk cabbages will tolerate growing in standing water for only a short time so what happens here is essentially why they grow here. The stream that flows through the area usually floods and covers the ground in an inch or two of water in winter but then subsides in spring. The water had just dried up before I took this photo, so if I had walked much further than where I stood I would have found myself ankle deep in the black mud that these plants like so much.

This is the only time of year that you could say a skunk cabbage leaf actually resembled cabbage, but you still have to use your imagination to see it. One bite would quickly convince you that it wasn’t  cabbage, however; the plant contains oxalic acid crystals which can cause serious mouth pain. Native Americans learned how to harvest the plants at the right stage of growth and then cook them in a way that broke down the harmful compounds, so for that reason you could say that they are edible, but only if you know how and when to prepare and cook them. Before long these leaves will turn black and liquify, and disappear back into the soil they grew from. By August there will be few signs that they were ever here.

I found myself under some big sugar maples in what the old timers would have called a sugar bush, and I thought about how many of these trees would have been tapped once upon a time. The wooden sap buckets hanging from the trees would have been poured into a big vessel of some sort; maybe a hollowed out log or an iron kettle, that would have been on a sled pulled by oxen or horses. Then it would have been taken back to the sugar shack and the sap poured or ladled into another big kettle to be boiled, and all of this had to be done each day. It was a huge amount of work but the Europeans who got here first lived big. They gleaned what they could from the surrounding landscape in the way of nuts, greens, berries and maple sap, and grew, raised or made the rest. Sometimes I find myself wishing I had been there with them but more often than not I’m glad that I wasn’t.

I went under the sugar maples looking for plants of course, because many of the ones you see on this blog at this time of year grow there. One of them is false hellebore. They grow in low areas in the forest because those areas stay wet longer. These plants also made me think of the early settlers, because they are among the most toxic found in a New England forest and eating them can cause an agonizing death. But how would someone who had just stepped off a boat know that? Those luscious, big green leaves appearing at this barren time of year would have looked very appetizing, and I wonder how many died. Did Native Americans warn the new comers? I’d like to think so, but then that would mean that Natives must have died from eating them. That’s the thing with poisonous plants; every time you find one it leads you right back to the question, who went first? Someone at some point had to be willing to sacrifice themselves, otherwise we wouldn’t know they were poisonous.

Growing just a few yards away in the same forest but up on a rise where the bulbous roots can dry quickly in sandy soil are ramps, which are not only edible but are considered such a delicacy that “ramp festivals” are held at this time of year all over the world. These wild leeks look like scallions and taste somewhere between onions and garlic. Their white blossoms appear in June but I never remember to go back to see them. This place is very different in June. All that sunshine becomes dense shade and that’s why these plants appear so early. This is also where many of our spring ephemeral flowers bloom.

Fern fiddleheads are suddenly popping up just about everywhere. Here under the sugar maples I found lady ferns, easily identifiable by their brown scales covering the stalk and the shallow groove in the stalk which doesn’t show in this shot but is on the left. This is one of the earliest ferns to appear in spring. The fiddleheads grow very fast and can change from being rolled tight and compact as you see here to stretched out full length in just a day or two. Lady ferns begin to turn yellow and then turn white quite early in the fall, and they and sensitive ferns are usually the only white ferns that we see. They like to grow in places protected from the wind in rich, loamy soil that stays moist.

Sensitive ferns were just stretching through the reddish wooly covering that encases the fiddlehead as it starts life. Like lady ferns, these ferns indicate moist, loamy soil. They like to grow near water and since there is a small pond near here this place is perfect for them. They don’t mind growing in places that flood regularly and they will often be the only things found growing in such places. They are very sensitive to frost, and that’s where their name comes from. You have to watch out for confusing these toxic ferns with edible ostrich fern fiddleheads. Their stalks are smooth and just about the same color as ostrich ferns but ostrich ferns have thicker stalks with quite a deep groove in them. Ostrich fern fiddleheads also appear later than sensitive ferns.

Now we’ll go from a mostly hardwood forest to a mixed forest. Hemlock, white pine, oak, maple, birch, hickory, poplar, and a few other species grow here. This type of forest is the most common in this area and the soil is on the acidic side, which is what a lot of the plants growing here prefer. As long as the evergreen canopy isn’t too thick mixed forests can get quite a lot of sunshine in the spring and a surprising number of spring ephemeral flowers can be found here.

Trailing arbutus was my grandmother’s favorite flower but she was never able to show it to me. It had once been collected to near extinction for nosegays because of its amazing scent so it was near impossible to find by the time I came along. Its scientific name is Epigaea repens which means “trailing on the earth” and that’s exactly what it does, but since it has woody stems (and leaves) that persist through winter it is considered a shrub. It likes the acidic soil found in our mixed forests and has made quite a comeback. I see it now just about everywhere I go, and it always makes reminds me of how my grandmother and I once searched for it. Native Americans believed the plant had divine origins and used it medicinally to treat a variety of ailments.

From one of the smallest wildflowers to one of our biggest, and from one with a heavenly scent to one called stinking Benjamin. There isn’t much point in getting down on your knees to smell this one because it’s a fair bet that you won’t like what you smell. It is a scent that attracts flies if that tells you anything, but red trilliums are very worth seeking out in spring. I’ve found places where 30 or 40 plants grew and blossomed together and it was quite a sight. The flowers are about as big as your palm, minus the fingers. They are considered a spring ephemeral, so once the trees leaf out it won’t be long before they disappear.

Goldthread is another spring ephemeral which gets is name from its bright yellow roots but I don’t care much about its roots; I care more about its busy little, aspirin size flowers. It’s an interesting flower, with its tiny styles that curve like long necked birds and the even smaller white tipped stamens. The big surprise is the flower’s petals, which are not the white, petal like sepals as one would think. No, this flower’s petals are the tiny golden yellow club-like parts that look like tiny spoons. They are much like spoons; the ends are cup shaped and hold nectar; an offering to any low flying insect that happens along. They are very small with hair like stems and move in the slightest breeze, so I often have to take twenty or more shots to show what I want. This time I had to try twice over two afternoons to get what you see here.

Goldthread is also called “canker root” because Native Americans showed settlers how to chew its roots to cure mouth sores. For this reason, it was another over collected plant that was almost impossible to find when I was a boy. Shakers were paying 37 cents per pound for dried roots in 1785 and people dug up all they could find. At one time more goldthread was sold in Boston than any other plant. Goldthread has shiny, quarter size, three lobed evergreen leaves that make it easy to find at any time of year. The flower will often stand 4 or 5 inches above its leaf so getting a shot with both the flower and leaf in focus can be difficult. I have almost done it though, as this shot from 10 years ago shows.

Every time I see the first sessile leaved bellwort of spring I feel the urge to draw it. The usually single, buttery yellow flowers hang from curved stems and this makes for a delicate looking, very pretty plant in my opinion. It always looks like something I’d see in a painting. The word sessile describes how one part of a plant joins another and on this plant the leaves are sessile on the stem, meaning they lie flat against the stem with no stalk. The leaves are also elliptic, which means they are wider in the middle and taper at each end.  Each flower has 6 separate petals that curve out at the tip, giving them a shape which is similar to that of the leaf. Sessile leaved bellwort is in the lily of the valley family and is also called wild oats. They almost always grow in large colonies.

Bluets, also called Quaker ladies because their shape is said to be similar to that of the hats once worn regularly by women of the Quaker faith, like to come up in lawns and grassy areas, and they don’t mind being mowed. For that reason, I’ve been encouraging two or three tiny plants, hoping they’ll grow and bloom along with the white and purple violets, wild strawberries, and dandelions in my lawn. Bluets can be deep blue, white, or anything in between. They also grow in forest clearings, I’ve discovered.

Blackberries have leafed out. I doubt I’ll see any berries though. Some thing or someone always gets them before I do but it wasn’t always that way; when I was a boy I could eat blackberries and raspberries all the way from Keene to Swanzey, all along the railroad tracks.

A staghorn sumac bud looked more animal than vegetable.

New leaves and buds can be very beautiful and I love how you can often easily see things in the buds that it isn’t so easy to see in the fully opened leaves, like the beautiful veining on this Norway maple for instance. And how the bud scales, there to protect the bud in winter, open to free the bud and let it feel the warmth of the sun.

The sunshine “activates” or stimulates the new leaves, and they often have a huge amount of movement in them as they twist and spiral and unfurl themselves from the bud, reminding me of how I will sometimes stretch after a nap. Just think; all of this came from a bud like that one in the previous photo. It happens slowly so you can’t see any movement, but you don’t need time lapse photography to see what has gone on, and what will go on. It’s easy enough to see it in your mind but be careful: it’s also easy to become absolutely fascinated by it. Once that happens its hard to pass a tree in spring without stopping. Is it any wonder it can take me half a day to move a mile? There’s just one amazing thing after another to see.

The soft, velvety leaves of red oak just breaking from the bud can be very beautiful as well, and they often come in red, orange, pink, and even pure white. They have that same beautiful twisting, stretching, spiral movement that we just saw in the Norway maple leaves. A tree full of breaking buds is never boring because there is infinite variety and endless movement. No two buds ever look identical or open in exactly the same way, even though they all grow from the same tree. I hope you’ll give yourself time to just stop now and then, and look and see how life is always unfolding; always changing. It’s really too beautiful to miss.

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. ~Henri Cartier-Bresson

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Birds, Bark Beetles, and Beauty

I was on my way to see if spring beauties were in bloom when I spotted this large limb lying on the ground. I see lots of bark beetle damage on fallen limbs but about 99% of it is on white pine limbs. This one was different because it is an elm limb. The “galleries” bark beetles create have a signature much like a fingerprint, and the ones on this limb looked like those made by the European elm bark beetle. An adult female created the longer tunnel that runs parallel to the grain and then deposited eggs in smaller tunnels perpendicular to the main tunnel. When the eggs hatched the beetle grubs chewed their way across the grain before finally emerging as adults through holes they made in the outer bark, and then flying off to find another tree. What is left is lots of damage to the cambium layer just under the bark, which is the living, growing part of the tree.

The beetle calligraphy went on and on all down the branch, and it spelled death by Dutch elm disease. I’ve never seen galleries cover an entire large limb like this before but I find many things in the woods that are as beautiful in death as they are were in life, and this is one of those. I wondered what the men who will come to clear this away will think about it. Will it be just another day’s work or will they lose themselves in wonder for just a few moments and say “Wow, would you look at that.” That’s how nature hooks you; with just a few moments of wonder.

I left the calligraphy and headed toward where the spring beauties grow but I was stopped again by the neon yellow buds of a bitternut hickory, which I didn’t know grew in this place. These trees are relatively rare here and I think this is only the third one I’ve seen. I don’t even know what the leaves look like but I’ll have a good chance to get a look at them later on. Right now, the new leaves at the terminal point of the branch look like tiny hands. I could see that the new growth was quite fuzzy and that there were no bud scales, which means the buds are naked. I could also see that new lateral buds grew over large, sucker like leaf scars. These scars show where the previous year’s leaves attached to the stem, and they are usually quite large on hickories. They show where corky tissue started healing and scarring over, thereby “turning off” photosynthesizing. No more chlorophyll means each leaf turns bright yellow on hickories before falling.

And here was beauty. I first found these beautiful little spring beauties blooming on April 9^th this year, slightly later than last year when they bloomed on April 2^nd. Another name for spring beauties is “good morning spring” and it fits them well. Once I was sure I had some useable photos I got to my feet and walked back to the car. I thought of the young police officer who found me lying here taking photos last year. He had gotten out of his car, walked through ankle deep dry oak leaves, and stood right beside me, but I never heard a thing until he asked “Sir, is everything all right?” I didn’t think he’d understand my being lost in a flower so I just assured him that all was fine. He seemed relieved to discover that he didn’t have to call the coroner or the men in white coats. I showed him the first spring beauty he had ever seen and as I left on this day I remembered the kindness and concern in his expression. I hope he’ll also remember that day and come back to see the spring beauties.

Sometimes I get home and look at the photos I’ve taken and am astounded by what I see. Not because the photos are anything special, but because the subject is so very beautiful. Here is this little chickweed, a truly hated weed by most accounts, looking as beautiful to me as any other flower I’ve seen. I couldn’t see much of this “out there” because this tiny thing is about half the diameter of a pencil eraser. I saw the white petals but no real detail. To finally see what was little more than a white smudge turn into this beautiful thing almost seems miraculous. If you have good eyes take care of them so you can see all the amazing beauty that surrounds us, live and in person.

I was checking on some box elders to see how close they were to bud break when I looked up and saw this mockingbird watching me. I walked closer for a better shot; sure it would fly away…

But it didn’t fly away; it just turned its head. I don’t “do” birds so I didn’t know it was a mockingbird at the time but Google lens filled me in later. Then I wished I had heard it sing. We had one in the yard most of one summer and that bird’s songs were so beautiful I’ve never forgotten it. I had to laugh when I read that mockingbirds can mimic squeaky gate hinges, sirens, and barking dogs. The real surprise came when further reading revealed that even acoustical analysis couldn’t tell the difference between the mockingbird and the original sound. Life is just one amazing thing after another, day after day after day.

Since the days were slowly getting warmer I thought I’d check to see if the sedges were blooming yet, and I started with a plantain leaved sedge that I know of that grows in an old stone wall. This plant is a lime lover so it tells me that there is limestone in the area. When I found it years ago it was just a single plant but now it has spread to a dozen or more. I admired its crepe papery leaves. It wasn’t flowering yet but all the spiky growths coming from it meant that it was ready to.

The spiky growths are the sedge’s four to six inch flower stalks, which are called culms. The male butter yellow flowers appear at the top where the dark bud scales are seen, and the wispy white female flowers will appear lower down. You can just see the white threads of a female flower getting started on the left side of the stalk about half way down in this shot.

Just so you don’t think summer has arrived because you see so much sunshine in these photos, I’m putting this photo in to cool things off. I was at the river one morning trying to get some good wave photos but I didn’t have any gloves with me and my hands were freezing cold, so I gave it up. What this shot doesn’t show is the stiff wind that was blowing directly upstream. At about 20 degrees it was a bit cool that day but then later in the week Thursday was 88 degrees and Friday was 91 degrees, so the temperature was all over the place. Not good weather for the plants.

A group of painted turtles were sunning themselves on a log and that put an end to the question of whether or not they had appeared yet. They made me wonder how cold the water was and I also wondered what they were all looking at. Maybe they were just trying to cool off. I’ve heard they cool themselves by exposing more skin to the air. It must have been hot in those shells in the warm sunlight we had that day. Of course, they could have always taken a swim to cool off but then they’d lose their place on the log. Pride of place might be important to a turtle.

A song sparrow sang like it wanted all of existence to hear its beautiful songs. It actually lifted itself almost off its branch each time it started singing. I recently read on NPR that these little birds sing 6-12 different songs, but they don’t always sing them in the same order. They can “shuffle” their playlist and start with a different song each time. Not only does this ability seem more attractive to a potential mate, it also seems to show that they can keep the entire half hour sequence of 6-12 songs in memory, and a half hour of memory is apparently a lot for a bird. There are lots of theories about why birds sing but I’ve always believed a large part of it was simply the joy of living. Maybe all things feel this joy and maybe all things sing, in their own way.

The willows are almost in full bloom now, and they’re beautiful against the blue of the sky.

I haven’t seen any female flowers yet but they can’t be far behind because the males are shedding pollen, as can be seen in this shot. There’s nothing quite like allergy season.

Glory of the snow have come up. There wasn’t any snow but they were still glorious. It looked as if each flower had a tiny light burning in its center. Just look at how they glowed.

Last week I found a magnolia with a single bud showing color and I thought that it might be pushing it a bit and would probably get frost bitten if it opened, but this week it had several flowers open. It obviously decided to roll the dice and go for broke.

These flowers are beautiful; white inside and pink outside, so I do hope they don’t get burned by frost. I’ve seen this tree before with every single petal on it the same color as a brown paper bag, its beauty all wasted. Since we’d had several nights in the mid-20s before I got back to it, I saw that it didn’t mind living on the edge and flirting with disaster.

As I was leaving the pond where I was taking photos of willows a great blue heron glided over me and looked as if it was about to land. I turned and walked back and sure enough, there it was. But it wasn’t playing statue as they so often do; this bird was hungry.

It quickly caught a fish, which after a bit of squeezing it flipped into the air. Then into its big mouth went the fish, head first. It was good at catching fish; from the time it landed until the time it caught one couldn’t have been more than 2 or 3 minutes. Though it looks like a black blob the fish is a yellow perch, and I found that out by going into Lightroom and over exposing it enough to see the dark stripes on its body. I’m not sure why it looks so dark when everything else looks normal, but perch is a very common native fish here in rivers, lakes and ponds and they’re easy to catch. It’s often the first fish caught by youngsters learning how to fish.

The bird swallowed its catch with a gulp and turned to face me with a big grin, as if to say “That’s how it’s done, son.” What a show off.

Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields…Watch now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.
~Mary Oliver

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A Little Bit of Everything

I went over to Perkin’s Pond in Troy last week to see how spring was getting on but it still looked wintery, even though the day was gloriously spring like. The view of Mount Monadnock was as good as it gets, all frosted with snow like it was. At just over 3,000 feet, It’s the tallest peak in the area and until recently it was the second most climbed mountain in the world after Mount Fuji in Japan. Now however, there is said to be a mountain in China that sees over two million visitors each year. Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson are among a few of the well known people who have climbed Monadnock, and countless poets, authors, artists, and musicians have described how it made them feel. Thoreau said that it was far more beautiful when seen from a distance than it was looking off from the summit, and I agree. Its name is said to mean “mountain that stands alone” in the native Abenaki language. In warmer months this stretch of road is often lined with painters, photographers, and tourists.

Years ago, a friend and I climbed Monadnock in mid April when the snowpack looked much like it does in this shot. You can if you’re careful, pick your way around the snow, but there are spots where you have to go through it. We climbed unprepared for the conditions, and foolish mistakes like that can be dangerous and even deadly up there. In places we found ourselves in snow so deep we had to spread ourselves out and kind of swim -wriggle -crawl over the top of it. When we finally got to the top exhausted and drenched, we found ourselves in a fog so thick we couldn’t see enough of the landscape to know if we had even reached the summit. The world had become a blank, uniformly gray nothingness. Over on the right in this shot you can see a group of maybe 7 or 8 people, and I’d guess when they got got home they were able to wring water out of everything they wore, just like we were that day. But at least they weren’t in a fog.

The ice on Perkin’s Pond was starting to melt but I could see tracks on the ice leading to or away from the open water. I hope they were made by some thing rather than some one. This is not a good time of year to be on the ice.

I saw some shy old friends, the split gill mushrooms. These true winter mushrooms are small and always wear a fuzzy coat, as can be seen here. I couldn’t call them rare but neither are they common. I might find one group of them per year if I’m lucky.

These examples were dry and quite small; the largest one in this shot might have been as big as an aspirin. The “gills” on the split gill fungus are actually folds in the tissue of its spore bearing surface that split lengthwise when it dries out. The splits close over the fertile surfaces as the mushroom shrivels in dry weather. When rehydrated by rain the splits reopen, the spore-producing surfaces are exposed to the air, and spores are released. These little mushrooms are very tough and leathery and even though they’re white they can be hard to spot.

I mentioned in that last post how subtle the start of spring can be, and these hazelnut catkins illustrate that very well. You can just see that they’ve started to turn golden from the green they’ve been all winter, and that’s just one subtle sign of spring that I look for. At this time of year, it really doesn’t matter what the calendar says.

You can look at the seasons in two ways. Meteorologically, seasons go by temperature, with the hottest three months in the northern hemisphere being summer and the coldest three months winter. This way, winter starts on December first, spring on March first, summer on June first, and autumn on September first. This is the way meteorologists prefer to see the seasons. Another way to look at the seasons is astronomically. Equinoxes are when day and night are closest to equal length; spring begins around March 21st and autumn around September 22nd. The solstices are days with the longest and shortest amounts of sunlight; summer begins around June 21st and winter around December 22nd. The dates of the solstices and equinoxes can vary from year to year, and that’s why meteorologists don’t use them. They like solid, three month intervals. I forget all of it and watch nature.

Poplar catkins look a lot like pussy willow catkins and that’s not surprising, because poplar trees are in the willow family. North American poplars are divided into three main groups: the cottonwoods, the aspens, and the balsam poplars. If the buds aren’t sticky then the tree belongs in the aspen group. These bud scales were beautifully shiny but not at all sticky so this was an aspen. Poplar catkins often appear right around the same time willow catkins do. Maybe a week or so later.

I saw signs that the alder catkins were loosening up. The grayish “glue” that keeps water from getting in under the bud scales had disappeared on the catkins that receive the most sunlight and they had also started to show some red and purple coloration. When the bud scales open and reveal the flowers the purple and green catkins sparkle as they move on the breeze, and it looks like jewels have been hung from the bushes. It’s another of those many things that makes spring so special.

Encouraged by the warm sunshine I went to the local college campus again. There I found the first snowdrops I’ve seen this spring. They bloom early but they aren’t the earliest flowers to appear.

I also saw the first purple crocus of the year, and it was beautiful. I haven’t seen any bees yet but I’ve seen a lot of other insects.

I found cress in bloom as well. I don’t know if it’s winter cress or spring cress but it doesn’t matter; all that matters is its beauty. It’s a very early flower that I always like to see.

It’s also a very small flower. A bouqet of four or five of these could hide behind a pea. I wanted to put a flower on a penny for scale but I didn’t have a single coin with me. They are so hard for me to see it took me a few tries to get a shot that was useable.

This was the strangest thing I saw on this day. Blue leaf buds? I’ve never heard of such a thing, but I tried to just forget the color and looked the plant over. From what I saw I believe it was some variety of big leaf hydrangea but I couldn’t swear to it. There were several plants in a group, all maybe two to three feet tall, and they baffled Google lens as well. I’m hoping someone might know what it is; maybe one of the master gardeners out there? I’d love to hear about it. I’d plant it just for that beautiful blue bud color.

One of my favorite spring flowers is reticulated iris and here they were in full bloom. When I first started visiting the college campus to see the spring flowers that bloomed there I often saw these little irises coming up and blooming right through the snow. Back then they were the earliest of all the flowers on the campus but no longer. Now they’re well behind crocuses, and I can’t imagine why.

In the last post I showed you some crocuses trying to bloom under the snow, and this is what I found in that spot on this day. After a long New Hampshire winter, a scene like this can melt even the hardest of hearts. Flowers give so much and ask so little. They are precious jewels, and I try to remember to be grateful for the richness they bring to life each time I see them.

I saw a new spring blooming witch hazel in bloom. It was very showy and looked much like its cousin the native fall blooming witch hazel. These spring bloomers are extremely fragrant and their scent always says spring to me.

But then there was another bump in the road to spring this week. This is what we woke up to Wednesday morning: more heavy wet snow. The snow pasted on the trees said the wind had come out of the northeast and I’ve heard that in places, it howled. It often does when we have a nor’easter.

One of my favorite snow quotes is by William Sharp, who said “There is nothing in the world more beautiful than the forest clothed to its very hollows in snow. It is the still ecstasy of nature, wherein every spray, every blade of grass, every spire of reed, every intricacy of twig, is clad with radiance.” That is a perfect description of what I saw, and it was amazingly beautiful.

The trouble is, the same thing that makes this kind of snow so very beautiful also makes it problematic. It is so wet it sticks to everything and when you get several inches of it, it gets very heavy. Everywhere I went I heard tales of snow blowers that had broken down and plow trucks that could just barely move it. In the view above, birch trees were bent right down to the ground under the weight of it. Sometimes they will recover and stand up straight again but more often than not they have to be cut. I’m thankful that we don’t see storms like this one very often, and that I was able to shovel what fell at my house.

I was lucky as far as snow totals go. Though the official total was supposed to be 17 inches here, I measured slightly less than 7 inches in my yard. Snow this wet and heavy can compact itself though, so that might account for the difference. I didn’t lose power here but many thousands of people did. About 12 miles to the northeast in the town of Nelson, they saw 40 inches, according to the local news station. That’s an incredible amount of snow from one storm, even for New Hampshire. I’d bet there are a lot of sore backs among the unlucky folks in that part of the state. It will most likely take about a week for it to all melt depending on the weather, so I probably won’t be seeing flowers again for a while. If there is one thing you learn quickly when you take up nature blogging it is that you can’t pick and choose. You learn to take what comes without complaint. I have been known to whine about the #$+&@^!* weather now and then but I won’t do that today. Instead, I’ll think about calendar spring, which starts in two days. My 12th year of blogging also starts on that day.

Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy – your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself. ~Annie Leibovitz

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Spring Happens, But Slowly

There is a day when spring comes. You can sense it; the way the sun slants through the blinds in the morning and calls you outside. You feel a certain warmth on the breeze that hasn’t been there for months. Streams are fuller. Bird songs are slightly more urgent and the birds busier. You realize you are overdressed and should have left a layer or two behind. It is that day when you know for certain winter is over and spring has arrived, and even a foot of snow the next day can’t convince you that it hasn’t. This year, in this small corner of the world, that day was Monday, March 6th. It was a day when I went out and wanted to never go back in. The day the madness called spring fever took hold.

Spring often comes silently. Hushed and just barely noticeable. Snow melt happens not on the surface but lower down where the snow contacts the soil, and you see it happening by looking at the streams and rivers, not at the snow. We had a storm drop about six and a half inches of wet, heavy snow two days before I took this shot, but it is melting fast. When snow is as wet as this was it is little more than white rain, so it doesn’t usually last long unless we get more on top of it.

This is what I saw when I looked out the kitchen window the morning of the day spring came. These blue shadows always remind me of my art teacher Mrs. Safford, who taught me to see them. Shadows can be gray and that’s what I saw, but they can also be blue and that’s what she taught me to see. Blue shadows in a painting of a winter scene gave it much more interest she said, and so I painted blue shadows. (Which sometimes turned out to be purple.) It’s all in the light, she would say, and that’s when I started to look at light and how it fell. I can draw a ball, but without shadow it is just a circle. Shadow is what makes it a sphere, and shadow is what makes this life so very interesting.

This shot has absolutely nothing to do with this post but it shows a cloud and its shadow. I’ve loved watching cloud shadows move over the land since I was a very young boy but this was the first time I had seen both the shadow and the cloud from this point of view. I could see both the darkness of the shadow and the sunlight falling on the cloud that caused it at the same time. In my mind Joni Mitchell sang “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now” and I realized that, even though I’ve never been on a plane, by climbing mountains I have seen clouds from both sides.

I went to the skunk cabbage swamp again to see what they had been up to. Flourishing, is what they have been up to. This group had melted a nice oval through the snow so it looked like they were a still life with a platter. Leaf buds have appeared and you can also see how thin the snow cover in the swamp is. By now it has most likely all melted.

Here was one I might be able to get a peek into, I thought.

I didn’t want to kneel in the muck and come away from the swamp with soaking wet knees so I got out my small macro camera, bent over and and pointed it at the gap in the spathe. Considering that I was shooting blind it didn’t come out all that bad, so I was pleasantly surprised. You can see how the tiny skunk cabbage flowers dot the spadix, and how the splotchy outer spathe protects it all. The flowers were shedding pollen and I had seen a few insects about, so maybe this will be the year that I finally find a skunk cabbage fruit.  

The beautiful curl at the tip of a cinnamon fern’s leaf tip grabbed at my attention for a bit. Everything seems to spiral.

I had a look at some wild azalea buds while I was in the swamp. They are also called wooly or early azaleas and they’ll bloom toward the end of May with some of the most beautiful, most fragrant flowers found in the forest. To stumble upon a seven foot tall bush full of beautiful pink flowers off in the middle of nowhere is to know what it means to be stunned into silence. These moments of awe can happen when we look off from a mountain top or when we look at the ice on a puddle in spring; anytime, anywhere. Everything is simple in the forest, uncomplicated and beautiful. There is a gentle, silent serenity found there, evident in all things, and it is there that I fell in love with life so many years ago.

I don’t look at red or silver maple buds until spring is near because when I do they make me wish spring was nearer. When I looked at this group of buds I could see that the bud scales, though they hadn’t fully opened, were loosening their grip on the buds. Everything in nature including myself, kind of sighs and relaxes when spring gets here.

I always tell people that it doesn’t matter how many times they walk through a place. If they walk slowly through nature and look closely they’ll almost always see something new, and that proved true on this day when I found an elm branch sticking up out of a snowbank. I’ve walked here many hundreds of times and have never noticed the young elm tree I’ve been walking right by. The tree might be 10 or 12 years old but it’s doubtful that it will get much older. At one time Keene was called the Elm City because of the beautiful old elms that lined the streets, but in the 1960s they started to die off from Dutch elm disease and had to be cut down. From then on finding a 200 year old elm has been rare event, but I do know where a few are, scattered here and there.  

It’s a bit odd that the smooth bud scales of striped maple can open to such velvety buds, but hairy or not they’re beautiful in varying shades of orange and pink. The bud scales have their own beauty; they always look like they’ve been sanded and polished.

I couldn’t resist showing those who might be new here what the bud scales in that previous shot will open to reveal; some of the most beautiful buds in these spring woods. Anyone who says that magic doesn’t happen in the forest hasn’t been in the woods in spring. That’s when the real magic happens.

Someone found out the ground was thawing, the hard way. I don’t think the frost went very deep into the ground this year because winter was relatively mild, so mud season shouldn’t be too challenging in this area. Still, most towns in the area will impose a weight limit of 6 tons on all gravel and other roads susceptible to damage. Food, fire and heating oil trucks are an exception, but all logging and heavy delivery trucks will have to sit idle until May first.

If you look closely you can see buds on these daffodils.

The spring blooming witch hazels are still going strong. They might go for a month or more depending on the weather. I think they’d rather have cool than hot because it seems to me that they bloom longer.

Crocuses shrugged off the snow and said no thanks, it’s spring.

Some did anyway. These yellow ones were still trying to bloom under the snow.

The crocus plants I’ve shown here grow on the campus of the local college, which at its essence is a huge mass of concrete and brick. This mass absorbs heat from the sun during the day and releases it slowly at night so plants are coddled in a way, and they tend to bloom slightly earlier than they would elsewhere. This shot is of the same yellow crocuses that appeared in the previous shot, taken about 24 hours later, and it shows how fast the snow is melting on the campus.

I decided to walk around and see if I could find any other flowers blooming on the campus. I remembered where there was a large bed full of purple and yellow crocuses. When I got there I saw that some of  the yellows were out but there was no sign of the purples. Once it starts it moves quickly, so I’ll have to go back tomorrow and check again.

Most of the yellow flowers had red (or orange) in the center but this one didn’t. It didn’t matter, it was still beautiful.

The big excitement on this day came in the form of dandelions. Call them what you want, I call them wildflowers, and there were several of them soaking up the sunshine. Their appearance is a signal, so now I’ll watch for the blossoms of spring cress, ground ivy, henbit and violets.

Blossom by blossom the spring begins. ~Algernon Charles Swinburne

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Exploring the Deep Cut

Last Thursday I went up to the deep cut rail trail in Westmoreland to see if there was any ice in the man-made canyons. I really didn’t expect to see much because we’ve had such a mild winter but there it was. I’ve seen this place in February when there was so much ice you could hardly see any stone, and other times when there was hardly any ice at all. The temperature this morning on the outside was about 37 degrees but down here it’s usually about ten degrees cooler. Once the ice grows the place almost makes its own weather and it stays cold until the air temperature on the outside reaches into the 50s. That’s why ice climbers call it the ice box.

On the shaded side the ice is good and solid and climbable but the side that sees sunshine can melt quicky on warm days.

Without people the scale of the place in photos is deceiving, so here are some ice climbers from a few years ago. That year saw a real lack of ice. Many of the people who climb here are trainees from the New Hampshire Branch of the Appalachian Mountain Club. Unless they’re standing around and not climbing I rarely speak to these people because I don’t want to break their concentration. They are “in the zone” and I’d like them to stay there, so I take a couple of quick long shots and leave.

I don’t believe they ever climb the colored ice. This ice grows like this in this same spot each year and I’ve never seen any signs that it has been climbed. There are usually a lot of footprints at the base of ice that has been climbed.

What colors the ice is I believe, mineral laden ground water. This water seeps from cracks in the stone year-round and in places like the one in the photo, it pours off the walls in small waterfalls. The sound of falling, splashing, tinkling water can be heard here always.

This deepest canyon with climbable ice is to the north but there is also a southern canyon, and this view looks out of the northern canyon in that direction.

This stretch of railroad once ran from Bellows Falls, Vermont to various towns in northern Massachusetts after being built in the mid-1800s. When the route runs through, rather than over or around a hill it is known as a deep cut. This photo shows what the deep cut looked like circa 1870 when it was relatively new. If I had to guess I’d say the man on the right was either picking berries or clearing the drainage channel. You can see a pile of unused rails there in the lower right. Did they bend the rails around curves as they laid them or did they come with the required radius already in them, I wonder. The Cheshire Railroad was swallowed up by the Fitchburg (Massachusetts) Railroad, which in turn was bought out by the Boston and Maine Railroad. This photo is from the Cheshire County Historical Society. I believe it looks toward the southern end of the northern canyon, just as the previous shot does, but from further back in the canyon.

A stainless steel 3 car diesel streamliner with “Cheshire” (for the Cheshire Railroad) proudly displayed on its nose ran through here from 1935 until it was retired in 1957. According to the description a big 600 horsepower Winton engine was in the first car. The second car was a combination baggage / mail / buffet dining car, and the third car had coach seating for 188 passengers with rounded glass on its end that allowed 270 degrees of countryside observation. Though I’ve written the historical description here you’ll note that there is actually and engine and three cars on this train, not an engine and two cars. A sister train called The Flying Yankee ran on another part of the railway.

There is a lot of stone left over when you blast your way through a hillside and this is how some of it was used. For someone who has built stone walls, this huge retaining wall is a thing of beauty as well as quite an engineering marvel. It leans back into the hillside at about ten degrees to keep the hillside from falling or washing onto the railbed, and it has worked just as it was designed to for 150 years or more. Not a stone has moved, and there isn’t a single teaspoon of mortar in it. These men were true craftsman, most likely from Scotland from what I’ve read. They built some beautiful things off in the middle of nowhere where nobody would see them because they took great pride in their work.

Though the southern canyon seen here gets more sun because of its shorter 20–30-foot walls, there is usually more ice on this end. These walls are always wet in summer but you don’t realize what that means until you come here in the winter. There are huge amounts of groundwater flowing through the earth in this spot and it can turn into ice columns as big as tree trunks. Though it looks like a lot of ice in this shot there might be less than half what there is in an average year.

And it was starting to fall. When these tree trunks made of ice start to pull away from the walls and fall, some of them can fall all the way across the trail, so it’s a good idea not to be here when it happens. I saw evidence of falling ice here on this day in various spots and any one of the larger pieces in this photo could kill a person. It’s a dangerous situation so when this starts, I stay away. On this day I heard the tinkling sounds of small icicles falling all along the trail so I stayed in the middle and kept moving.

You have to look carefully to see what is happening in this photo but the darker color in the center is stone showing through the ice. Sun shines through the ice and warms the stone and in this case about 4 inches of ice that once grew against the stone has melted away, leaving a gap between the ice and stone. What this means is that the stone is no longer supporting the ice, so some of these masses of ice have become self-supporting. Since we have temperatures in the mid-40s F. as far out as the forecast goes, that’s not good for the ice or anyone using the trail. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time wouldn’t be good.

Blue ice is the densest and most solid, but once its grip on the stone melts away even it will fall. The top of the mass on the left doesn’t appear to be attached firmly to the stone.

In contrast to the shiny, dense blue ice in the previous photo the ice seen here is rotten, meaning water, air bubbles, and/or dirt have gotten in between the grains of ice and cause it to honeycomb and lose its strength. Instead of a sharp ringing crack when it is struck it produces more of a dull thud. The ghostly grayish white color and matte finish are a sure sign that you should stay away from it when it’s hanging over your head.

Here is another example of rotten ice. It just doesn’t look like what you would expect from good, healthy ice. Beware of ghostly fingers of ice, maybe?

This is good, healthy ice of the kind that will make a ringing, almost cracking sound when it is struck. Shiny, clear, and dense, it won’t fall right away. The ice that grows in this spot always imprisons the fern seen behind it, year after year since I’ve been coming here.

For years this orange patch, caused by the green algae called Trentepohlia aurea, has been on one wall of the southern canyon but its spores must have crossed the gap because now it is on both walls. Though it is called green algae a carotenoid pigment in the alga cells called hematochrome or beta- carotene, which is the same pigment that gives carrots their orange color, hides the green chlorophyll.

You can also see the straight, vertical pocket in the stone left by a steam drill there in the upper right in this photo. You drilled the hole, filled it with black powder, lit the fuse, and ran as fast as you could go. Of course, they would have been on what is now the rim of the canyon, so they could just run off into the woods and hide behind trees. That’s what I would have done anyway.  

I hoped I’d see some lacy ice patterns on the drainage channels but instead I saw either reflections in them or white sheets of ice covering them.

This formation looked like icicles had formed and then had an ice column form around them. I’ve never seen this happen before.

And this is something I hoped I wouldn’t see. We had rain that froze into a coating of ice and then several inches of wet snow fell on top of it, and I wondered about the lineman’s shack when I was trying to shovel it in my yard. It tore limbs from trees and knocked other trees down completely and thousands lost power. Here all it did was flatten an old shack that few cared anything about. I cared about it because I saw it as an irreplaceable part of the history of the place, but short of somehow getting a team of carpenters out here there was little I could do to save it.

The more expensive slate on the roof shows how much the builders thought of the place, and the hole through the peak of the roof for a stovepipe answered a question I’ve had for a long time, and that was, did people stay in this building for some length of time waiting for something to take place. They must have, otherwise a stove wouldn’t have been needed. If you think about the possibility of all that ice, some two or three times taller than a train in places and as big around as a tree, falling when a train went through it becomes plausible that someone would have had to remove it somehow, though I couldn’t guess how. It might have been as simple as shooting at it to break it up and then wheeling the bigger pieces down the track in a hand cart to be dumped outside the canyon. If that were true the ice would have had to have been removed through January and February if the weather then was anything like it is now.

Here is the place as I first found it years ago. Not much, but much more than it is now. The stove would have been what looks like about 5 feet out from the back wall.

For years I thought juveniles had gotten into the building and written their initials on the back wall but I know now that what is seen here would have been almost behind where the stove was, so I’d guess that the people who once used this building probably did it. They might have had a lot of time on their hands, sitting and warming up before the next cold job in the canyons.

The best thing about the cold was the comfort that came from escaping it. ~ Claire Lombardo

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This and That

This post is a kind of hodge podge of things I saw last summer when I was taking a break from blogging and things I’ve seen recently. If there is any continuity at all, any thread that runs through it, it is I hope how the beauty of this world can be found everywhere you look. The photo you see above happened just last week as I was going into a store to do some grocery shopping. I wasn’t surprised to see many people just walking right by without seeing it. We live in a paradise that is absolutely filled with beauty all the time, night and day, and we should give ourselves time to at least notice it. How long does it take to appreciate the beauty of the frost crystals on your car windows before starting the car in the morning, or to simply look up at the sky now and then?

This shadow of a staghorn sumac reminded me of the palm trees I saw when I lived in Florida. The first time I crossed over from Georgia into Jacksonville, Florida it was about two in the morning, and the palm trees that lined the center of the divided road, lit up as they were by streetlights, seemed like the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I felt as if I were driving into a postcard. I felt electric, and more alive than I had ever been.

Here is another kind of shadow. The town put in a new sidewalk last summer and last fall of course the falling leaves landed on it. This leaf, from a maple, leached out its tannins and left its silhouette on the newly poured concrete. Maple leaves are one of the species used for botanical or “eco-printing,” which is where leaf and bark shapes and colors are transferred or bled onto fabric or paper.

When the town put in the new sidewalk they tore up lawns all up and down the street, so to finish the job they brought soil in from somewhere, and what you see above is what sprouted from that soil on the corner of the street; a forest of what are commonly known as weeds, like lamb’s quarters.

One of the plants that sprouted from the soil that was brought in was jimson weed. When I first saw it its big, beautiful white and purple flowers were just about to open. Jimson weed is considered poisonous to both humans and livestock so I was surprised to see it growing here, on the lawn of a children’s daycare center. This hallucinogenic plant in the nightshade family is also called loco weed and was used by Native Americans on spiritual quests. The original common name was “Jamestown weed” which was given to it after English soldiers in the Jamestown colony began to behave oddly after eating leaves of the plant. It is said that they “behaved like animals for several days.” This plant is considered exceedingly dangerous due to poisonings and deaths by people trying to get high. I was going to say something about it but the daycare wasn’t due to open until school started, so there was nobody to say anything to.

Another plant that grew from the foreign soil was wild mustard, which I never used to see much but now see fairly regularly. Because of the plants that grew from it I have a feeling that this soil must have come from old pasture land. There is old pasture south of here and I’ve seen these same plants growing there. In any event, I went back a few days later to see the beautiful Datura flowers and everything had been mowed down to something resembling lawn. I was a bit disappointed because Datura blossoms are very beautiful.

I went to a pond that I had been to a hundred times last summer and found this small, foot tall fern that I had never seen growing in the water right at the shoreline. The rounded over edges of the sub-leaflets didn’t look familiar but they, along with the way the leaflets twisted along the stem helped identify it.

I turned one of the fronds over and saw something I had never seen. The curled over edges of the sub-leaflets formed cups filled with what looked like blackberry jelly, but of course these were the fern’s spore cases (sori) and there must have been many hundreds of them. With all the hints it gave me it was easy to identify it as the marsh fern (Thelypteris palustris pubescens.) It has fertile and sterile leaves but the fertile ones tend to be smaller, according to what I’ve read. It likes wet feet and full sun. This isn’t a very good shot of the spore cases so I hope to return this coming summer and try again.

According to the book Identifying Ferns the Easy Way, A Pocket Guide to Common Ferns of the Northeast, by Lynn Levine, the caterpillars of the marsh fern moth feed on the leaves of this fern and it is the only known host plant of what is an uncommon moth.

And speaking of uncommon moths, here is a large maple spanworm moth (Prochoerodes linolea.) I found it relaxing on the siding of the local post office and was amazed by its resemblance to tree bark. I’d guess that I’ve probably walked right by them thousands of times in the woods but here on this bright white wall it was easy to see. Life is such a beautiful and amazing thing. Emily Dickinson said it best: To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.  

I’ve known tansy for a very long time but for years if I wanted to see it, I had to visit a garden. Only over the last few years have I found it in the wild, so as an invasive plant it has failed miserably in this area, even though it has excelled elsewhere. In colonial times tansy was used as both a flavoring in tea, cakes and puddings and an insect repellant, used especially for bedbugs. It was also used to make green dyes and was thought valuable enough to be brought over on a three-month voyage. It is also toxic, so though I don’t have a problem with using it to repel insects I doubt I’ll ever flavor anything with it.

I didn’t see large numbers of monarch butterflies this year but I saw a few, and I found a patch of Joe Pye weed that they and spangled fritillary butterflies seem to prefer over all the other flowers in the area. I would revisit this spot every few days and each time these flowers had several butterflies and bumblebees visiting.  You have to look closely to see them but there are many bumblebees in this shot.

What was it, I’ve wondered, about these particular plants that made them so attractive to so many insects?

I also saw a monarch butterfly caterpillar on a milkweed plant last summer. I don’t see very many of them so it was a surprise.

The unusual berries of the white baneberry plant (Actaea pachypoda) called doll’s eyes, have over the past two or three years turned black and shriveled up for reasons I can’t fathom, but last summer they were nearly pristine when I found them. The remains of the flower’s black stigma against the porcelain white fruit is striking, and I can’t think of another plant with fruit quite like these. The hot pink pedicels are pretty as well. These plants are toxic but luckily the berries are so bitter one bite would be enough to make anyone spit them out. Finding baneberry in the woods tells the story of rich, well drained loamy soil and a reliable source of moisture, because those are the things that it needs to grow. I almost always find them at the base of hillsides.

I saw very few mushrooms last summer because it was so dry, but I did see a few Indian pipes, which is odd since they’re parasitic on certain fungi.

Here is a rarely seen (by many) look into the inside of an Indian pipe flower. At the tips of the 10 stamens surrounding the center stigma are the anthers, colored yellow, which contain pollen. The anthers are open and shedding pollen at this stage. In the center of the flower is the pollen-collecting stigma, which looks like a funnel between the yellowish stamens. Each flower will stand straight up when it is ready to be pollinated, and once pollinated will eventually become a hard brown seed capsule. You can find them sticking up out of the snow, usually in groups, at this time of year and they are always fun to look at.

If you walk in certain places at certain times, you might see things that you will only see once in a great while, if at all. People often ask me how I do this; how I see what I see. The answer is to simply be there. I spend as much free time outdoors as possible. I also walk very slowly and pay close attention. Many times, I just stumble onto the greater part of what you see here on this blog. If I had been just a few minutes earlier or later I might have missed the sunlight highlighting the hairs on this staghorn sumac. That would have been too bad because it shows how the plant got its name, with its velvety softness just like that of a deer’s antler.

With other things found in nature, you can often do some planning ahead. For instance, if you know that the “bloom” on black raspberry canes is made of a kind of natural wax, and if you know that it “melts away” in warm summer weather, you know that your best chance of seeing it is in the cooler months. You will also find this same beautiful blue, which is a result of the way sunlight is reflected by the wax crystals, on blueberries, plums, lichens, and many other things.

This photo of American hazelnut catkins might not seem like much but it is special to me because it was taken with a cell phone. Since I’ve struggled with getting a shot of these little things even with a macro camera in the past, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the phone camera got it. The depth of field could have been better but all in all I was happy with it. You can see how the triangular bud scales spiral up the catkin. When the catkin swells and the bud scales begin to open in spring the tiny, beautiful golden flowers will do the same. They are among the earliest spring flowers and I look forward to seeing them each year. It won’t be long now.

Many will most likely think big deal, it’s just an old leaf, but if you had lived through 60+ New Hampshire winters like I have you would know that any splotch of color is beautiful in the often stark black and white world of January. Any color anywhere will stop you in your tracks and you’ll be thankful that it was there for you to find.

How does a child see the world? What is childlike wonder? Everything a young child sees is fresh and new; they’ve never seen it before so they have no history; no file cabinet full of memories to search through and compare what they see now to what they saw then. A child sees a branch or a rock and becomes enraptured by it because it is fresh and new. They see what is right now, as it is. We adults on the other hand, compare what we see to what we’ve seen before and instantly decide that it’s better or worse than the one we saw previously. Once we do that all the freshness, the newness, and the wonder is gone, and what we see becomes old. Children see as much with their hearts as with their eyes and if you follow their lead great beauty will appear, seemingly out of nowhere. The more beauty you see the more you will see, and before long you will have to say, as I did, “My gosh, everything is so very beautiful. Just look at it!”

If we have relegated vision solely to a function of the eyes, we are blind indeed.
~Craig D. Lounsbrough

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Exploring Along Beaver Brook

Toward the end of November I decided to take a walk up the old abandoned road that leads through the Beaver Brook natural area in Keene. I hadn’t been there in a while and since I had just tangled with Covid I thought the slight gradient of the old road would let me gently test my lungs and make sure they were still working as they should. Surprisingly I didn’t get winded at all; good news I thought, considering all I had heard about Covid.

I saw many beautiful things there that day but I would have been happy just seeing the mosses. They always seem so much greener and more vibrant in colder weather.

The brook was rushing along, not quite as high as I had imagined it would be but still with a bit of a roar to it. It has many voices, this little brook. In summer it becomes tame and moves slowly, giggling and chuckling shyly as it spills over the rocks in its bed. In winter it often becomes nearly mute, its voice muffled by a covering of thick ice. It can still be heard, but as if from a distance. In spring and fall, due to snow melt or excessive rain it swells up and shouts, sometimes with a deafening roar. Only one thing about it never changes, and that is its beauty.

There are a few pretty views along the brook and this is one of my favorites. I hadn’t gone there that day with a blog post in mind but I had a cell phone camera and the small Olympus I use for macro photos and in the end, I was glad I had brought them.

Of course, I had to stop and see my old friend the smoky eye boulder lichen that lives here because it is a beautiful thing. Both the way the light falls on it and the color of the thallus or body of the lichen make it stand out from other examples I’ve seen. Why it has this golden, orangey brown color I don’t know, and I also don’t know why the fruiting bodies always seem so blue or lavender when they are usually gray. It has to be the special way the light falls on it in this particular spot. Seeing it again is always like finding a jewel.

The squiggly black apothecia have appeared on the script lichens, as they always seem to do in the cold weather. If you look at them extremely closely, they look like the body of the lichen has been torn or cut open, and they erupt from it rather than sitting on it. But whatever happens when they appear, they leave no trace when they disappear. If you come here in warmer months all you will find are the white / gray body of these lichens, like spots on the tree’s bark.

I stopped at what I call the boulder fall. I’ve found mosses here that I’ve never seen anywhere else.

And one of those mosses is the pretty little rose moss. This moss likes limestone and since this area isn’t rich in limestone it always leaves me guessing. Somehow two or three of the boulders must have at least some limestone in them. I first found this moss on just one stone years ago and now it is on at least three of them, so it must be happy here.

Another rare moss that grows here is the glittering wood moss, also called stair step moss because of the way new growth comes up out of the midrib of the previous year’s growth. It looks delicate but I’ve seen it encased in ice in winter and still looking fine in spring. Not surprising since it can withstand conditions in the Arctic tundra. It sparkles in the light so “glittering” is a good description.

For years I’ve thought that snow load was what made our evergreen ferns splay out on the ground but this year we have no snow and they are still hugging the ground, so that theory has to be let go of. I recently read this on Westborough Massachusetts Community Land Trust page: “When the green fronds are on the ground, warmth from the earth keeps them warmer than they would be if they stood up in the wind and cold air. The fern’s stems weaken near the ground in autumn, helping the fronds to fall over.” That does make sense but I wonder where that information originally came from. I believe the fern in the photo is a marginal wood fern, but I didn’t check for spore cases.

A big old red maple tree had fallen and someone had come along and cut off all its branches. This tree had target canker but that doesn’t kill trees, as far as I know.

Target canker won’t kill a tree but it can certainly keep one busy by causing its bark to grow in circular patterns of new, thin bark plates, which helps protect it from the canker. According to Cornell university: “A fungus invades healthy bark, killing it. During the following growing season, the tree responds with a new layer of bark and undifferentiated wood (callus) to contain the pathogen. However, in the next dormant season the pathogen breaches that barrier and kills additional bark. Over the years, this seasonal alternation of pathogen invasion and host defense response leads to development of a ‘canker’ with concentric ridges of callus tissue—a ‘target canker.’” You can see the pattern of new, thin bark plates the tree grew each year in this photo. I count at least ten, so that means this tree fought off the invader for at least ten years. There are some things which once seen can never be forgotten, and target canker is one of those.

I saw what I think was a white cheese polypore on a fallen branch. It grows on hardwood logs and causes white rot, and gets its common name from its scientific one (Tyromyces chioneus). Tyromyces means “with a cheesy consistency,” and chioneus means “snow white.” These mushrooms are big enough to be seen from a distance and when they are fresh, they have a pleasing fragrance that some think is like cheesecake. Mushroom Expert. com says it is “just about the most boring mushroom going,” but it is a winter mushroom and I’m always happy to see mushrooms in winter. There is also a blue cheese polypore and a green cheese polypore.

From boring to beautiful; this must be the most colorful display of turkey tail fungi that I’ve seen. It was beautiful, with its many different colors all in the same growth. No matter how many times I come here I always see something I’ve never seen before, and that is why it pays to revisit the same places again and again.

I was surprised to find a little ice on the ledges. It has been cold some nights but all in all this has been a very mild winter so far. I doubt there is any ice to speak of in the deep cut rail trail where ice climbers usually practice.

This is one of my favorite reasons to visit Beaver Brook; to see what I call the “disappearing waterfall,” because it only appears when we’ve had enough rain to get it going. It’s a beautiful thing and in the spring, I’ve seen people standing in line waiting to get to the spot where you can get the best photo of it.

I saw two splotches of color on the end of a log and I thought I recognized them.

As I thought, they were wrinkled crust fungi (Phlebia radiata) but they weren’t quite as colorful as others I had seen. I suspected they were young examples which might change as they aged, so I decided to return in a week to see if they had. These winter fungi are rare in my experience and well worth a second look.

This photo of a wrinkled crust fungus I took years ago shows what I was hoping to find upon my return but no, the fungi in the previous photos hadn’t changed at all. A quick online search showed that they can be very beautiful like this example or rather plain like the previous example. Like many things in nature, finding them is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time and paying attention. Unlike some fungi it’s hard to predict where or when they’ll choose to grow, though they do seem to like cold weather.

And speaking of being in the right place at the right time; as I was leaving Beaver Brook after my second look at the wrinkled crust fungi the afternoon sun decided to shine right up the brook. It was something I had never seen happen before and it seemed like a final, beautiful exclamation point to mark the end of my journey through a place filled with beauty.

Look at places no one looks at, so you can see the things no one sees.
~Mehmet Murat ildan

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By a Stream

We’re having another one of those strange, almost snowless winters so far this season but even though it hasn’t been snowy it has been cold enough for ice to form, so in early December I decided to visit a stream near my neighborhood. Last year I found beautiful lacy ice all along it but this time as you can see, there was no ice.

There was frost on the lawns, so I thought for sure there would be ice on the stream.

A little neighborhood pond had a thin film of ice on it.

But there was little to no ice to be found here at the stream. No matter; there are always interesting things to see, like this pronounced meander in the stream. When I first started coming here it was nothing like this but over the years flooding has dumped a lot of sand and gravel in a pile over there on the left, forcing the stream to move more and more to the right. As it moves it washes soil away from tree roots and many trees have fallen.

I stopped to admire some beech leaves. The beech is a tree that gives beauty to the forest all year long.

I also saw some colorful turkey tail fungi on a stump. Part of their scientific name is versicolor, and it’s a good one. I’ve seen these come in pink, orange, blue, purple, and everything in between. They’re one of the most colorful fungi I know of and winter is a good time to find them. As far as I know no one has ever discovered what causes their many variations in color.

I looked back to where I had come from and saw how the stream meander is slowly cutting into the hillside and washing it away; a mountain slowly turning to sand. I thought the low sun falling on the green plants was a beautiful scene. It showed how, around every corner, there is the very real possibility of finding staggering beauty of the kind we’ve never seen. We need to learn to stop and let the beauty of life seep into us until it fills every part of our being; until the word Hallelujah comes to us naturally, without a thought.

One of the things I come here to see are the tree mosses. When I first started coming here there was a group of maybe ten plants right at the water line but now, they have grown away from the stream and there are hundreds of them. They must like wet ground because this place floods regularly and they often spend part of their life underwater. They’re beautiful little things and I’d like to see them in more places but so far this is the only place I’ve ever found them.

This unknown creature grew on a tree and though I was sure I had seen it before I couldn’t remember its name. It looks almost like a crustose lichen with an area of something else growing through it but I can’t imagine what that something else would be. In the end I decided it didn’t matter. Memories are like dogs that come when you call them but otherwise lie silent and still. Sometimes they don’t come at all, and seem so far off I can’t tell if they are even there anymore. The effort it takes to recall them doesn’t seem worth whatever limited value they may have. They are like things stored in the attic; not worth climbing the stairs to see, but seemingly still too precious to throw away. They sit gathering dust but one day they will have to go, so why bother adding to the pile by gathering up more of them? Let each day start fresh and shining brightly, unobscured by the film of dust that is yesterday.

This is a two-part post; what you’ve seen so far happened one day and what you will see from here on happened on another. Luckily the sun was shining brightly on both days. I would have loved to have been able to see it the way this NASA photo shows it.

On the second day I went to the stream, about three weeks later, there was ice. Strangely though, at nearly 40 degrees F. this day was warmer than the first.

Last winter when I came here, I found beautiful, lacy ice covering the surface of the stream but this year I saw mostly splash ice. Splash ice forms when running water splashes droplets up on cold surfaces, where they freeze almost immediately. It can be beautiful; all of what we see here is splash ice.

Ice curtains along the banks showed how the water level had dropped, with ribbons of ice forming at each different level.

This view is looking down on ice similar to that in the previous photos.

This ice sculpture grew on a twig that hung out over the stream.

This very thin, clear pane of ice had water droplets hanging from its underside.

This ice reminded me of the bullseye glass windowpanes you can still see in very old houses. Before modern glass making came along glass windowpanes were blown from a gob of molten glass that was spun at the end of the blowpipe until it formed a large disc. Rectangular windowpanes were cut from the disc with the outer, thinner, clearer panes sold to the wealthy and the inner, thick, wavy panes with the pontil mark bullseye in the center sold to the poor. You couldn’t see anything out of them but they did let in light and that was what was important. I can’t even guess how this ice would have formed to look just like them.

Neither can I explain why this bit of dead grass had a ray of sunlight falling on it.

I’ve heard that very white ice is white because it has a lot of oxygen in it, so maybe all the bubbles in this piece go along with that theory. It must have gotten very cold very quickly to freeze bubbles in place.

The only thing you can expect from ice is the unexpected, because no two pieces will ever be alike. Ice helps teach us that we should go into nature with no expectations and just enjoy what we see.

On the way home this scene looked more like March than December. Now into January without plowable snow in my yard, it looks to be another unusual winter. I hope you enjoyed coming along through the snowless woods. In a normal winter we wouldn’t have been able to go without snowshoes.

The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world. ~ Zhuangzi (c. 369 BC – c. 286 BC)

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