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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More March Flowers

Red maple season (Acer rubrum) is in full swing now, and the hillside are starting to take on that reddish haze that is so common to this area in spring. It’s beautiful but so far in my experience, impossible to capture with a camera. Maybe I’ll do another climb and try again.

The female flowers, tiny scarlet stigmas, have appeared right on schedule and the male flowers continue to bloom. They might not look like much but to me they are as beautiful as any other flower, especially because they tell me that spring has arrived.

The male flowers cover the whole spectrum of blooming. Some have shed their pollen and are dying off while others are justs starting to open, as these were. Sugar maple flowers haven’t opened yet but it shouldn’t be too much longer. Once they open that will be the end of the maple sugaring season. I’ve heard it was a good year, though shortened because of the early warmth. I’m sure it was welcome after a terrible year last year.

One morning I went to one of the spots where I know coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) grows and saw nothing at all. Then that afternoon, after a day in the 50s F., there they were.

Coltsfoot isn’t native but it is still welcomed as one of our earliest blooming wildflowers. It won’t be too long before the plant’s leaves apper, and that will mean the end of their season. I was happy to see them; they helped push winter a little further back into my memory.

I know where to go to find almost all of the spring flowers that appear in these posts, but little chickweed is always a surprise. I never know when or where it will pop up. I’m not sure which one it was but it was pretty.

American hazelnuts (Corylus cornuta) continue their spring journey with the male catkins just starting to release pollen. I was happy to get this shot because it shows the transition from what the catkins look like in winter, there on the right, to what they look like in spring, on the left. As can be seen, the catkins lengthen by quite a lot and turn golden.

But that isn’t all that happens to the catkins. If you think of a catkin as a spring, when the spring gets pulled the coils are pulled apart, and that’s essentially what happens to a catkin. Each of the tiny manta ray like parts are bud scales. They have a white fringe and a blackish “tail.” As the central stalk of the catkin lengthens in spring the spirally arranged buds slowly pull apart, and under each tiny bud scale the actual flowers are revealed. The hundreds of flowers are the very small, roundish golden bits under each bud scale; maybe 3 to 5 per scale. To me all of this is simply a miracle. I can’t think of any other way to describe it.

And there were the tiny, sticky female flowers, already dusted with pollen grains.

Just after the hazelnuts start taking care of their spring business the alders (Alnus) begin, so as soon as I see golden hazelnut catkins blowing in the wind I start checking the alders. The two plants aren’t that different really, as far as strategy goes. It’s easy to see the way alder buds are arranged in spirals just like the hazelnuts, even in catkins that haven’t opened. Spirals are nature’s way of packing the most life into any given space and you see them used in everything from galaxies to our own inner ear.

I think alder catkins are more attractive than hazelnut catkins because of the contrasting purple and yellow colors. The brown and purple scales on the catkin are on short stalks and there are three yellow/ green flowers beneath each scale, each with a lobed calyx cup and three to five stamens with anthers, which are usually covered in yellow pollen. This was the only bush I found with open catkins and it was very early, I thought. Soon though, all the bushes that line pond edges will look like they’ve been strung with jewels.

I wanted to see what the plantain leaved sedge (Carex plantaginea) was doing. It looked fine but it was too early for it to be flowering. It is one of the earliest though, so it shouldn’t be too long.

The other day I saw a Forsythia trying to bloom.

And the next day it had bloomed with two or three blossoms showing, but the day after that it got cold again, with a low of 15 degrees at night, so I’ll have to go see how it’s doing. Many of the plants that grow here have built in cold resistance but since Forsythia isn’t native it might have suffered.

Scilla have started blooming as well. I love the color of these small blossoms. I once worked for some people who had a large drift of scilla, thousands of them, under some old oaks, and it was beautiful.

There was no wind but this one looked as if it was in a gale. It was also beautiful.

Reticulated irises have finally appeared. This is a strange plant, because some years it blooms before crocuses and other years after, so I’ve learned not to count on it doing anything that I expect it to.

This was my favorite iris, but there was only one. I’ve heard that they will kind of fade over the years so that what was once twenty can become just one or two.

Snowdrops have fully opened.

This little crocus is one of my favorites, but more for its beautiful outside than its plain white inside. My blogging friend Ginny tells me small crocuses like these are called snow crocuses, which I guess nobody I gardened for years ago ever grew or wanted, because I had never heard of them. They’re very pretty little things.

Hyacinths are up and showing color.

And magnolia bud scales are starting to split open, because the flowers inside are now growing. It won’t be long before they show themselves.

Daffodils, the last time I saw them, were heavily budded and I expect by now many have opened. I hope to be able to show them to you in the next flower post if the cold didn’t get them.

It’s hard to say when the hellebores will open but they were showing some fine looking big red buds. Though the buds are red, the flowers on these plants will be a kind of not very exciting light, greenish color.

I’ve met many people who didn’t think spring was anything special, and some who have even said they didn’t like it at all. I have to say that I felt sorry for them because I’ve never understood how anyone couldn’t become excited by the promise and hope of the season, and why the beautiful miracle of the earth awakening once again didn’t make them want to sing. I’ve loved spring forever; since I was a very small boy, and it still just blows my heart open and makes me want to run and play and see and smell every flower that blooms and see every new leaf unfold. While I was taking some of these photos I heard the loud quacking of wood frogs, and then the next day I heard spring peepers. The grass is starting to show green in places and all of the birds are singing their beautiful songs of spring, and how could you not love it? If you don’t love it, I hope you can at least put up with it because I’ll be showing a lot more of it in future posts.

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

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A Few More Signs of Spring

Last weekend I went looking for signs of spring again and this thin ice sign was one of those I found. Thin ice at this time of year is a good sign if you happen to be a spring lover. The town puts them up in fall as the ice starts to form, then takes them down for the winter and puts them up again in spring when it starts to thaw. It’s good to pay attention to them; there have been photos in the local newspaper of plow trucks sitting in water up to their windows after going through this ice.

The ice was pulling back from shore so you wouldn’t catch me skating on it.

The willows are really coming along now. The soft gray catkins could be seen everywhere on this day.

I’m not seeing any yellow in them yet though, so it will be maybe a week or two before they flower.

I did see lots of pinecone galls on the willows. This gall appears at the branch tips and is caused by a midge (Rhabdophaga strobiloides) laying eggs on them. Once the eggs hatch the larva burrow into the branch tip and the plant reacts by forming a gall around them. They aren’t very big but are very noticeable at this time of year. Galls and the insects that cause them, and the reactions of the various plants they appear on is a fascinating subject but they always lead me to two questions: how and why?

Hazelnut catkins are continuing their spring color change over to gold from green. I usually see the tiny scarlet female flowers in April but I have a feeling they might come a little earlier this year.  

This might look like an old pile of leaves but it is actually a hellebore plant. Hellebores bloom quite early so I usually start watching them at about this time of year. Another name for them is Lenten rose, because they will often bloom during Lent.

Crocuses have appeared alongside what I think are reticulated iris, and they are growing fast. A week ago there was no sign of them. The warm weather and rain this week should give them and everything else a good boost.

Daffodils are on hold, just waiting for the silent signal. The bed they’re in needs some serious weeding.

Since these are not my gardens, I can’t be positive but I do know that hyacinths grow near the front of this bed. Unfortunately an animal had dug down and eaten many of them. I’ve seen chipmunks and squirrels but no skunks, racoons or possums yet, so I’m not sure what could have done it.

There was quite a mound of good-looking soil that had been dug up. There’s nothing like the smell of newly thawed soil in spring.

This bulb had been rejected so it might be a daffodil. Daffodils are poisonous and somehow, animals know it.

I was surprised to see tulips up. No buds yet though, just leaves.

I keep checking the trails, hoping the ice will have melted. It is melting but not very quickly. Hopefully after the warmth and rain this week they will finally be clear of ice. I’ll never forget this winter. It has been one of the iciest I can remember. Even trail reports on the radio are saying that you should bring spikes.

I went to see a Cornelian cherry to see if it had woken up yet and I was very happy to see some yellow inside the bud scales of that pea size bud on the left. It won’t be long before its small but pretty yellow flowers unfold. I’ve seen them as early as late March. Last Sunday it was 65 degrees, so we might see them in March again this year.

Magnolia buds are covered by a single hairy bud scale called a cap and when the bud inside the cap starts to swell in spring the bud scale will often split and fall off, but as can be seen here by the bare space under the bud scale, the bud seems to be pushing the cap up and off. I’ve never noticed this before, but maybe it happens regularly, I don’t know. In any event it signals that magnolia buds are beginning to stir.

I took a look at the big horse chestnut buds. They’re easy to see but not so easy to get a photo of because they’re up over my head. Beautiful flowers will appear out of these buds in mid to late May.

Since most people have probably never seen a red horse chestnut blossom (Aesculus × carnea,) here is a not very technically good photo of what they look like. The tree is a cross between the red buckeye (Aesculus pavia) and the horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum.) I’ve read that bees and hummingbirds love the beautiful red and yellow blossoms.

After visiting the horse chestnut, I thought I’d wander over to the big old red maple. There still wasn’t a lot going on in its buds but they bloom in March so it won’t be long. Maybe it will be a sudden awakening. Speaking of sudden awakenings, I heard the first red wing blackbird today. If that isn’t a sign of spring then I don’t know what is. Soon the spring peepers will add their trills to the chorus.

Johnny jump ups were still blooming, even though they had been covered by snow for a week. I might apply for a part time job at the local college. That’s where some of the beds you see in these photos are located and they’re so full of weeds I’m almost embarrassed to show them. Maybe they would welcome a part time weeder. This bed is full of spring bulbs so it should be weeded before they come up.

I went to see the skunk cabbages, hoping that the spathes had opened so I could get a shot of the spadix with its strange little flowers, but they weren’t quite ready. You can just see a crack opening on the lower rights side of the bulbous part of this spathe but it’s nowhere near open enough to get my lens in. Maybe next week. I’d better bring something to kneel on though because the swampy ground had thawed and water filled every footstep.

The spring blooming witch hazels were in full bloom and I wanted you to see this one because of the translucence of the petals. Having to get so close to them to get a photo meant that I was awash in their wonderful fragrance. I find it impossible to describe but other have likened it to fresh laundry just taken down from the clothes line.

This witch hazel couldn’t have bloomed any more than it was. It had nice color too.

I chose this photo so you could see the different stages of a witch hazel bloom. On the upper right the petals are just emerging, and below that they are about half way unfurled. Finally in the center the flowers have fully opened. I’ve discovered this year that this can happen very fast. There are 4 or 5 different varieties in this group and as I wandered among them taking photos by the time I got back to where I had started many more flowers had opened on that first shrub I looked at. This was in the space of maybe 15-25 minutes.

In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against Nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth.  ~John Milton

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A Rail Trail Hike

Two days before I went on a walk down a rail trail in Keene temps were in the 50s F and the sun was shining. Then we had a storm and though some parts of the state saw eight inches of snow we saw about an inch and a half of glop. Glop, for those who don’t have to deal with it, is snow, rain and sleet all falling in the same storm. It freezes into white concrete and about all you can do with it is wait for some sunshine to come and melt it away.

As soon as I stepped onto the trail I was getting mixed messages. While someone wore Yak Tracks….

…. someone else rode a bike. I supposed I’d have to find out for myself if it was icy or not. It was certainly cold enough for ice at 30 degrees, and with the strong breeze coming over the hills to the west, it felt more like 20. You have to give weather like this a chance if you are going to be a nature nut, and you give it a chance by being smart about it and dressing for it. I was dressed for it and I knew that, once I started seeing things that grabbed my interest, I wouldn’t feel cold at all.

Sure enough though it was a gray, bleak looking day there were plenty of warm colors to be seen and all thoughts of cold left me when I saw a tree full of bright orange-red crap apples. Not a single one had been touched by birds and that may have been because they were quite large for a crabapple. I doubted any bird I know could swallow one. Also, though it grew here “wild” it might not have been a native crabapple. Many crab apples are ornamental cultivars that birds just don’t like. Some other cultivars have fruit that birds will eat only after it has frozen and thawed several times. For whatever reason they didn’t like these, even though there are usually birds everywhere out here.

These hazelnut catkins were encased in ice and that told me that it must have rained and then gotten cold fast. I can’t explain the hair. Maybe it’s not a hair at all. It could be a bit of silk left by a spider. Whatever it is I see things just like it everywhere I go, on all types of plants.

Virgin’s bower (Clematis virginiana) grows long feathery filaments called styles on its seeds (fruits) so the wind can carry them long distances. Botanically speaking these “seeds” are achenes, which are fruits with one seed. But how can the wind carry them away when they’re always wet, as they have been this year? Now they aren’t just wet, they’re frozen together. Maybe they’ll just wait for spring. Meteorological spring, which starts on March first, is only 69 days away. Astronomical spring will take a bit longer and that’s why I prefer meteorological spring. Meteorological spring is based on temperature cycles for a three-month period when temperatures are similar, as in March, April and May. Summer is June, July and August and fall is September, October and November. Winter of course, is what is left.

Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) grows all along this trail and though its berries add a bright spot of color in winter it is terribly invasive.

Almost all of this mass of vines seen here is Oriental bittersweet. They twine around trees with the strength of steel cables to get to the tree’s crown where there is more sunlight. Once there they compete with the tree for light while strangling it from below. Eventually the tree dies and falls over, and I’ll never understand how that benefits the bittersweet, which wants all the sunshine it can get.

This hole was probably six to eight inches across, and I thought it looked like a woodchuck’s hole. I didn’t see any tracks around it though so it might just be an escape tunnel, but someone falling into it could break an ankle.

A birch polypore lived up to the name of “shelf fungus.” There was a group of them at the base of this tree which had all had bites taken out of them. I’d guess by squirrels, but specific information about which animals eat this fungus is very hard to come by.

A tree had fallen and I was surprised to see that its upper branches had fomed a witch’s broom. The only other tree this big that I’ve seen with a witches’ broom was an old white pine that has since fallen. Witches’ broom is a deformity described as a “dense mass of shoots growing from a single point, with the resulting structure resembling a broom or a bird’s nest.” Witches’ broom can cause desirable dwarfism and increased branching in some plants. In fact, many well known dwarf evergreen shrubs are the result of witches’ broom.  For example, Montgomery Dwarf Blue Spruce is one of the best dwarf blue spruces, and it is from a witches’ broom. Though this tree had lost almost all its bark I think it was a black birch (Betula lenta).

Mount Monadnock off to the east had its head in the clouds. I had my head in the clouds too whaen I was a teenager and one of my major dreams as was to pick up where Henry David Thoreau left off and finish cataloging the wildflowers that grew on the mountain. Then one day I helped the ladies of the Keene Garden Club plant wildflowers on the mountain’s flanks to reestablish some species which were thought to have once grown there and that’s when I saw that, even if you lived three lifetimes you wouldn’t have time to find and catalog every flower that grew there. That’s a big mountain.

The wide ditch that runs alongside the railbed has been full of water all year long. We’ve had more rain than I can ever remember.

Often in the fall deer tongue grass (Dichanthelium clandestinum) will turn many colors, with maroon, purple and orange or yellow sometimes on the same leaf. It’s quite pretty and I’ve searched high and low to find some so I could show it to you but every plant I’ve seen has been uniformly tan, just as these were. It seems kind of odd after seeing them so colorful all of my life.

There are lots of staghorn sumac berries (Rhus typhina) out here that the birds haven’t eaten but they’ll probably be gone by spring. I’ve read that they’re low in fat so they aren’t a bird’s first choice.

Sumac means red in many of the old languages and that makes perfect sense because everything about it is red. Even these long dead staghorn sumac leaves still held their red color. The plant is said to be rich in tannins and dyes in colors like salmon and plum can be made from it.

Sumacs fall over regularly and whenever I see one, I look at the inner bark to see the rich red color but the color only lasts for a short time and I found none of it on this tree. I did some reading about sumac wood when I got home and found that wooden flutes can be made of it.

I can’t remember ever seeing invasive burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) out here when I was younger but there are a few here now. Usually the bracts that cover the berries are black but on this plant they were bright red. I’ve never seen this on a wild (escaped) plant.

These Virginia creeper berries (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) made me shiver but I wondered why they hadn’t been eaten. They and the Oriental bittersweet and burning bush berries we’ve seen are usually among the first to go. I’ve seen hawks flying around in this area and I wonder if they’ve scared all the birds away.

Common greenshield lichen (Flavoparmelia caperata) is very common and can be found on many of the trees here. It’s a large lichen and colonies of them often grow big enough to cover entire trees. They often wrinkle like the example seen here. Like many lichens they change color, and go from grayish when dry to yellow green when wet. They often have patches of granular soredia on them as this one did. A soredium is a tiny granular ball of fungal hyphae and algal cells. They can grow on the body of the lichen or on its margins and might eventually fall off to make new lichens. No matter what living thing you find in nature it’s always about the continuation of the species, and the will to survive is strong in all of the things I see.

Leaves shivered and rattled in the strong breeze. Though they were maple they spoke beech. A man came walking down the trail as I was taking this photo and said good morning. I retuned his greeting and remarked on the cold. “Yes” he said, “it’s cold, but it’s white.” Must be a winter lover, I thought. I’m not a winter hater but at that point I’d had enough to last for a while, so I turned for home.

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

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To Find New Things

John Burroughs said “To find new things, take the path you took yesterday,” and that was to prove very true last Sunday. I followed a rail trail in Swanzey that I’ve followed more times than I can count but saw many things that I’ve never seen here before.

Male American Hazelnut catkins swayed lazily in the slight breeze. They had lengthened to three times their winter length and were still heavy with pollen.

The tiny female flowers were waiting for a good dose of that pollen so they could become the hazelnuts that so many birds and animals eat.

There is a nice little box culvert out here that I always like to stop and see. There was quite a lot of water in the stream it carries safely under the railbed on this day. It’s amazing to think these culverts are still keeping railbeds from washing away 150 years after they were built, and without any real maintenance.

The stream rushes off to the Ashuelot River, which is out there in the distance.

The first thing I saw that I had never seen here were trout lily leaves (Erythronium americanum). I didn’t see any flowers but I found the leaves growing all along the trail, and I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t ever seen them.

You can get a glimpse of the Ashuelot River here and there along the trail. This was where I was to get another surprise. I saw something swimming quickly toward me from those fallen trees you see in this photo. I thought it was ducks but I couldn’t see anything except ripples.

And then up popped a muskrat. At least I’m fairly certain it was a muskrat. Though it never showed me its tail it was much smaller than a beaver and nowhere near as skittish. It saw me up on the embankment but still just sat and fed on what looked like grasses. It probably knew I was far enough away; this photo isn’t very good because my camera was at the limit of its zoom capability. At least you can see the critter, and that matters more to me than a technically perfect shot.

I knew that apple moss (Bartramia pomiformis) grew here and I was able to find it. Its reproduction begins in the late fall and immature spore capsules (sporophytes) appear by late winter. When the warm rains of spring arrive the straight, toothpick like sporophytes swell at their tips and form tiny globes that always look like pearls to me, but someone thought they looked like apples and the name stuck.

Beech buds (Fagus grandifolia) are beginning to lose their straightness and that means the beautiful new spring leaves will be appearing before long. Beech bud break begins when the normally straight buds start to curl, as in the above photo. The curling is caused by the cells on the sunny side of the bud growing faster than those on the shaded side. This creates a tension that curls the bud and eventually causes the bud scales to pull apart so the new leaves can emerge. The buds literally “break” and at the bud’s location on the tree branch an entire year’s new leaves and stems will often grow from a single bud.

New maple leaves were everywhere but every one I saw was green. That was unusual because young maple leaves are often red for a while.  

Raspberry plants were also showing their new leaves but blackberry buds had barely broken.

I saw native cherries in all stages of growth. Cherries usually leaf out and blossom quite early.

Some of the willows along the trail had thrown in the towel and were finished for this year.

This is what the flower buds of a shadbush (Amelanchier canadensis) look like. After shadbushes come the cherries, closely followed by the crab apples and apples, and then the peaches and plums. Shadbushes bloom earlier than the other shrubs and trees but are often still in bloom when the others bloom. The flowers appear before the leaves, unlike apples and some native cherries. Small, reddish purple to purple, apple shaped fruits follow in June. The fruit is a berry similar in size to a blueberry and has from 5-10 seeds. They taste best when they are more purple than red. Shadbush flowers are pretty but their fragrance isn’t very appealing. I can’t remember ever seeing them bloom along this trail but there they were.

Forsythia has escaped someone’s garden and was blooming happily beside the trail. Another surprise.

Trailing arbutus (Epigaea repens) is also called mayflower because that’s often when its small white to pink, very fragrant flowers appear, but here they were blooming beside the trail. This is another plant I can’t remember ever seeing out here before. Trailing arbutus was once collected into near oblivion but these days it can be found at many nurseries so there is no longer any reason to dig it up. Since it’s very fussy unless it’s given the right amount of light, water, nutrients and soil type it won’t grow except where it chooses to anyway. The reason it was collected so much was because its small pink to white, very fragrant flowers were used in nosegays.

I reached the trestle and found that someone, most likely a snowmobile club, had overlaid the flooring, which was starting to rot out. This was a another welcome surprise because that little square that juts out to the right was a hole right through the boards. It’s quite a drop down to the river.

This trestle is the last one I know of with its tell tales still in place. These are pencil size pieces of soft wire that hang down low enough to hit the head of anyone standing on top of a freight car. They would warn the person, or “tell the tale” of an upcoming trestle. I can walk from the trestle to this one in under a minute, so whoever was on top of the train wouldn’t have had much time to duck before they’d hit the trestle, and that would have been too bad. Tell tales used to hang on each end of every trestle in the area, but this is the last one I know of.

The river has come up some since the recent snowfall and a few rain showers. I was surprised I didn’t see any kayakers. They like to paddle the river in spring when the water is high because in that way they can float over all the submerged fallen trees.

It still has to gain more run off before it reaches its average height, by the looks. We’re still in a drought according to the weather people.

I was surprised to find a small colony of bloodroot plants (Sanguinaria canadensis) as I was leaving. This is another plant I’ve never seen growing here, so this day was packed full of surprises.

Bloodroot flowers don’t usually open on cloudy days and I couldn’t tell if this one was opening or closing, but I was happy to get at least a glimpse of its beautiful inside. These flowers aren’t with us long.

In a forest of a hundred thousand trees no two leaves are identical, and no two journeys along the same path are alike. ~Paulo Coelho

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Rail Trail Mysteries

Sometimes when you walk a trail you come back with more questions than answers, and that’s what last Saturday was like.

I chose a rail trail in Swanzey because the snowmobile traffic had packed the snow down, and that made for easy walking. I saw a few riding the trail that day. There goes one now.

The snow in the woods wasn’t all that deep but if you strayed too far off the trail you’d get a shoe full.

The old stock fencing along the trail still looked as good as the day the railroad put it up.

An animal had come out of the woods on the other side of the trail. I couldn’t tell what it was but it wasn’t a deer. The prints looked more like a fox or coyote, but they weren’t clear.

A window had opened up into the drainage channel that ran along the trail.

A quarter size beard lichen floated in the channel. These interesting lichens fall from the trees regularly.

An evergreen fern had stood against the weight of the snow. These delicate looking ferns are anything but delicate.  

I was going to tell you that these lichens were common greenshield lichens (Flavoparmelia caperata) but something about them tells me they may not be that lichen. The branching and the lobes don’t seem quite right but it could be just because they were dry. I wish I had walked over to them instead of taking this photo from the trail but for now I’ll just say they are large round, green foliose lichens. Close to 20,00 species of lichens are said to cover 6% of the earth’s surface but few pay any attention to them, and that’s too bad.

The lichens will most likely be there when I get back; this land is protected.

I’ve taken photos of both alder and hazelnut catkins this winter and both have had a reddish cast to them that I’ve never seen. These American hazelnut catkins (Corylus americana) were a pinky-brown according to my color finding software, so it isn’t my imagination. They’re usually green and this was just one of a few mysteries that I came away from this particular trail with.

And here was another mystery. I found this strange growth on the same hazelnut that I showed in the previous photo. I believe that it must be some type of gall but I’ve never seen anything like it before on a hazelnut and I’ve looked at a lot of them.

It seemed to be a bunch of deformed leaves, which some galls are, but it was small; about the size of a grape. It was also quite furry.

This was not a mystery. Even in silhouette shagbark hickory trees (Carya ovata) are easy to identify because of their peeling, shaggy looking bark. These trees produce good crops of nuts each year and help feed many different birds and animals.

I looked at a hickory bud but I didn’t see any signs of swelling yet. It has still been quite cold but it won’t be long now before the sap starts to flow.

If you find what looks like a big clearing in the woods in winter you had better walk around it until you are sure, because this clearing is a river. When you can’t tell where the land stops and the water starts it’s easy to find yourself walking on ice. I’ll never forget walking down the middle of this very river as a boy and hearing the ice start cracking under me. I don’t think I have ever moved that fast since.

This would be a good indication that what you might think is a clearing isn’t a clearing.

It’s funny how in spots the river is clear of ice and in others it is frozen over. Another mystery. I’m guessing that the speed of the current has something to do with it.

The leg of rail trail crosses a road several times. The tire tracks of one of the monster machines that plowed the road were fun to look at but not so much fur to walk in.

I expect to see beech and oak leaves falling at this time of year but not maple. We do have a couple of sugar maples where I work though that are still clinging to a few of their leaves.

I saw a single white pine seed scale, which is odd. I usually see piles of many hundreds of them, left by squirrels. White pine seeds grow two to a scale. It takes them around two years to mature, and they usually ripen in August and September. They are light brown, oval in shape and winged so the wind can disperse them. I’ve tried to get the seeds, with their thin wings intact, from a scale and I can tell you that it is all firmly attached together. Squirrels can do it all day but I have yet to get one in good enough condition to show you here.

At first this was a mystery but after I looked at it for a while I thought it might be the seed head of a white flowered turtlehead plant (Chelone glabra linifolia). When I got home and looked it up there was no doubt and I was happy that I finally found the seedpods for this plant after so many years of finding the flowers. They look a little like the flowers and that makes them relatively easy to identify.

In the end I went home with a pocket full of mysteries but that was fine because it was a beautiful day, with the sky that shade of blue that only happens in winter and puffy white clouds to keep it interesting. I hope everyone is still able to get outside and enjoy. There is such a lot of beauty out there to see.

Outdoors is where the great mystery lies, so going into nature should be a searching and humbling experience, like going to church. ~Skip Whitcomb

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A Needle In A Haystack

A few years ago I found a beautiful lichen on one of the trees you see in this photo and then I went back later on and found it again, but since then I’ve never been able to find it, and that’s what this post is about. The lichen post I did a while back reminded me that the fruiting (spore producing) bodies of some lichens only appear in the winter. I had been looking for it in the summer and hadn’t seen a thing, so on this coldish day I had high hopes of finding it.

I walked here two days before Christmas so the rain hadn’t yet washed away the 16 inch snowfall. Thankfully snowmobiles had packed it down. My days of breaking trails through knee deep snow are over so I wait for them to do it for me. They make winter walking much easier.

The weather people said partly cloudy and I had to let them get away with it, even though it was more cloudy than not.

I didn’t see any change in the American hazelnut catkins but it’s early. In February they’ll start to lengthen and soften and then will finally turn yellow with pollen and flower when the female blossoms appear at the end of the month. It’s an event I look forward to each year.

I saw a branch covered with milk white toothed polypore (Irpex lacteus). This fungus is common and easily seen in winter. It is a resupinate fungus, which means it looks like it grows upside down, and that’s what many crust fungi appear to do.

The “teeth” of a milk white toothed polypore are actually ragged bits of spore producing tissue which start life as pores or tubes and then break apart and turn brown as they age.

Last year when the corn in the nearby cornfields was ripe I came out here and saw 15-20 squirrel’s nests in the trees. This year the corn didn’t grow due to the drought, and I saw just one dilapidated squirrel nest that looked like it had been abandoned.

Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina), covered with fine velvet like hairs, glowed in the dim sunshine.

The velvet on a staghorn sumac is much like that found on a summer deer antler and I wondered if a male whitetail had tangled with this sumac stem. “Buck rubs” happen when a male deer rubs its antlers on a tree to get the dry, shedding velvet off its antlers. This velvet covering is soft and blood filled through summer but once the antlers mature and start to harden the velvet dries and begins to peel in strips.

But a deer didn’t do this; this sumac looked like it had been through a sickle bar mower.

The inner bark of dead staghorn sumacs is often bright red for a time but it does fade as this example was. I’ve heard that a rich brown dye can be made from sumac bark.

There was the beautiful blue of black raspberry canes and I wasn’t surprised. These old rail trails are a great place to pick berries in the summer, just as they were when the trains were running. I used to eat my way down the tracks when I was a boy.

I saw a bird’s nest so small you couldn’t have fit a robin’s egg in it. I don’t know which bird made it but it was very well made. It would have fit in the palm of my hand with plenty of room to spare.

Virgin’s bower seed heads (Clematis virginiana) glowed in the sunlight. This shows how this native clematis vine grows up and over shrubs, trying to reach as much sunlight as it can.

Virgins bower seed heads remind me of feeding furry tadpoles. It is said that the plant is toxic but early settlers used parts of the vines as a pepper substitute. Native Americans used it to treat migraine headaches and nervous disorders, and herbalists still use it to treat those same illnesses today.

Someone marked a gray birch tree with a bow. Trees are often marked for cutting, especially those that are in danger of falling, but not usually with a bow.

My favorite view of Mount Monadnock can be seen from here, and it’s my favorite because it’s the one I grew up with.

A plane droned by overhead and it reminded me of those lazy summer days as a boy when I would lay on my back in the grass and watch the clouds. Summer seemed like it would never end back then.

Finally I was at the spot where I thought the lichens grew. Luckily I had taken a photo of the group of trees that I had originally found the lichen on so I was able to find the group of trees, but I had no pointer to which tree in the group I had to look at, so the first trip was fruitless and I didn’t find the lichen. I tried again the next day and finally found it, slightly bigger than a pea growing on the smooth bark of a young red maple it was unmistakable with its yellowish body (Thallus) and blue apothecia. The first one I found years ago was dime size but this smaller one tells me there is more than one here. If I have identified it correctly it is the frosted comma lichen (Chrysothrix caesia) and this is the only spot I’ve ever found it in.

Also known as Arthonia caesia, this photo shows its granular thallus and blue gray apothecia (actually  called ascomata on this lichen) which get their color from the same waxy “bloom” that colors the black raspberry cane we saw earlier. They make this lichen easy to identify, but don’t make it any easier to find. Though it might seem a lot of work for little reward I now know that this lichen only fruits in winter and I’ve also read that some of them can be sterile. I also know that it’s a waste of time to look for them in summer, so I learned a lot about another being that I share this planet with.

Live this life in wonder, in wonder of the beauty, the magic, the true magnificence that surrounds you. It is all so beautiful, so wonderful. Let yourself wonder. ~Avina Celeste

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Everything is Light

There is a rail trail in Swanzey that I drive by occasionally and I noticed this past summer that there was heavy equipment all along it. There were piles of what I first thought were pipes, but they turned out to be new power poles. I noticed that the heavy equipment was finally gone last week so I thought I’d go see what had gone on. In other words I was being nosey.

What had gone on was new power poles had been put in place and the growth under them had been removed. All the plants that once grew under them had been replaced by grass but luckily, along the side of the rail trail that the power company doesn’t have rights to, the plants were left alone. It is very common here to have high tension electric wires follow right along beside what once were railroad tracks. The railroads in turn, often followed rivers. I suppose materials to build railroads could have been floated down rivers and then, once electricity came along, the materials for power lines could have been shipped by rail. I don’t know this as fact but it would explain why rivers, railroads and power lines always seem to be side by side.

These new poles are made of steel and are very tall. They are also 12 sided, with the upper pole section slipping down over the lower section. They’re then bolted together. Lining those holes up to get the bolts in must be quite a chore when everything is dangling from a crane.

I would guess, since steel is an excellent conductor and wood is not, that the poles would have been much less hazardous if they had been made of wood as they have always been.

Many of the new poles are right there on the side of the rail trail, so how they expect that people will stay away from them is anyone’s guess. I’m sure children will be all over them. I was when I was a boy, but those were wooden poles. You can also see in this shot how, where the poles go into the ground they’re coated in some type of rubberized material, most likely to keep them from rusting. Since the coating was already scratched away in many places I have little faith that there will be no rusting going on.  

There is an old railroad bridge out here that once carried cars over the railroad tracks. I’ve driven over it many times myself.

The timbers are stout and still appear to be strong but the highway department has closed it to all but foot traffic.

They could have closed it because the road was put down over wood, as this view of the underside shows. All the paving of the road over the years was actually being supported by simple wooden boards. Of course when this bridge was built the traffic might have been chiefly made up of horse drawn wagons and model A Fords.

Though a brush cutter cleared the sides of the trail recently you’d never know it from this shot. You can see lots of the old wooden poles that hadn’t been replaced yet.

These old poles still look solid to me but I’m not a power company engineer. They could all be like hollow trees.

It was cold enough for there to be frost in the shade on this morning.

I saw that horses had used the trail.

Deer had used it as well.

There is lots of old farmland out here. I’d guess it is probably all used for hay fields now.

It was clear that this cattle gate hadn’t been used for a while.

An old stone boundary marker had been cut by hand and was shaped like the state of New Hampshire.

I saw a few American hazelnut (Corylus americana) catkins, and that made me think of spring.

The hazelnuts themselves had been bored into and the meat eaten, either by a bird or an insect. I’ve never seen this before. I have seen birds pecking at goldenrod galls though, so maybe that’s what has happened here.

I was surprised to see a young goldenrod plant looking like it thought spring was here.

Most goldenrods looked like this; long gone to seed. These tall plants that stand up above the snow are an important source of food for the birds in the winter after snow covers all the seeds on the ground. There were several chickadees scolding me as I took this photo so I wondered if they were eating the seeds already.

Last time I was out here I found a well-constructed hideout some kids had made. They would have to crawl on their stomachs to get through that small hole but that wouldn’t have bothered me when I was a boy. I thought, since all the growth along the sides of the trail had been cut, that it would have been destroyed but no, the mowers went around it and left it alone. I’m guessing whoever was driving the tractor once had a hideout too.

The last time I walked a rail trail a flock of robins was busy eating all the staghorn sumac berries but out here the fruit was untouched. It’ll be good winter food.

I saw some escaping pumpkins. I’m guessing that they wanted to get into the drainage channel. From there they could get to a stream and from there to the river and from there to the Atlantic. Once in the ocean well, the world is your oyster.

Everything is light, everything is warmth, everything is electricity, everything is a magnetic field, everything is you.~ Md Anisuzzaman

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More Spring Flowers

Daffodils have finally arrived so it must really be spring. And spring, at least as it is spoken by flowers, is early. I went back to previous posts and this appears to be the first daffodil to show itself in March since I’ve been doing this blog. Most have appeared in mid-April.

There were more daffodils. Lots more.

I was also surprised to see hyacinths blooming. They’re also very early this year.

Crocuses get more beautiful each time I see them. I loved the color combination seen in this one.

Inside a crocus the central style branches into three feathery stigmas, which are its female pollen accepting organs. Below these and unseen in this photo are three anthers, which are its pollen producing organs. You can see how the pollen has fallen onto the petals. Many people don’t realize that the garden crocus is a very toxic plant which can kill through respiratory failure. The only crocus with edible parts is the saffron crocus (Crocus sativus,) which is unknown in the wild. Human cultivation of saffron crocus and the use of saffron has gone on for more than 3,500 years. 

Crocus buds have an upside down tear-drop shape formed by six petals in two whorls of three. The outer whorl’s petals are slightly larger than the inner whorl’s. But I forget all that when I see their beauty. I chose this one as the most beautiful I saw on this day. Pastel, quiet, and understated it easily loses itself in a bed full of cousins, but my eye was drawn right to it.

Last week I saw two or three grape hyacinths. This week there were more than I wanted to count.

I love the beautiful cobalt blue of the flowers with their little insect guiding white fringe around the opening.

The snowdrops have opened enough to show their little green spots on their inner petals. Snowdrops aren’t common here so I see very few of them. I have seen them blooming while surrounded by snow though, so they live up to their name. I read once that the plant is in the amaryllis family, which was a surprise.

The Cornelian cherries (Cornus mas) are finally blooming. The buds have been showing color for over a month but they refused to bloom until they were sure it was warm enough, and that was probably wise. This shrub is in the dogwood family and gets its common name from its red fruit. In northern Greece early Neolithic people left behind remains of meals that included cornelian cherry fruit. Man has had a relationship with this now little known shrub for about 7000 years. Cornelian cherry often blooms at just about the same time as forsythias do. Its yellow flowers are very small but there are enough of them to put on a good show.

This year the Cornelian cherries have beaten the Forsythias into bloom, but it won’t be long.

Aquatics are just starting to show and they were beautiful to see coming up in this little pond. It’s rare to see very much real cold weather once they start to appear. The trees, the sunlight and blue of the sky reflected in nature’s mirror made me want to just sit and enjoy this scene.

I thought for sure that I’d find seed pods (samaras) of the red maples (Acer rubrum) but I didn’t see a single one. It was a cool week so that might have held them back a bit. After a very warm February March has been a bit anti-climactic, as far as spring goes.

There is a very old tree by a highway, standing all by itself. It’s an oddity because of how it was left standing when all of the trees around it were cut down when the highway was built. I like to think it was left because of the beautiful flowers it is positively loaded with each spring. They are male flowers and come into bloom slightly later than the red maples, and I think it must be a silver maple (Acer saccharinum.) I keep forgetting to go back and look at its leaves in the summer but this year I’ve written myself a note. I did notice when I took this photo that its bark looks different than a red maple, so we’ll see.

There is little that catches the eye like the catkins of the American hazelnut (Corylus americana) hanging golden in the low evening sunlight. It is one of the first signs of spring I look for each year.

Each male flower on the catkin consists of a pair of tiny bracts and 4 stamens but they’re almost impossible to see under the horseshoe crab shaped bud scales. You can see the golden colored flower buds at the very top of this catkin though. The male staminate flowers will bloom from the top down.

The female hazelnut flowers have been blooming for weeks, waiting for a dose of pollen. I’m not sure why they would open so far ahead of the male flowers. For those who don’t know, the bud that the scarlet stigmas come out of is usually about the same diameter as a piece of cooked spaghetti.

Poplar catkins have limbered up and lengthened and they will continue to do so for a while. A tree full of the gray, 3 or 4 inch long, fuzzy catkins is impressive.

If you look closely you can see, in this case, the reddish brown male anthers. Once pollinated the flowers will release their cottony seeds into the air and they will settle on everything. If you leave your car windows open near one you’ll have a fuzzy surprise inside.

Our willows are in full bloom now. I wish I could tell you this one’s name but I don’t know it. It doesn’t matter; you don’t need to know its name to appreciate its beauty. They’re so welcome in early spring when there are so few flowers to see.

It’s hard to explain what happens when I see the first spring beauty of the season but I go away for a while. I go to that joyous place you go when you are lost inside a painting or a beautiful piece of music, or when you lose yourself in your work. It’s a special place and while I’m there I wouldn’t even know if a parade passed me. I hope you also have such a place where you can go now and then.

Who would have thought it possible that a tiny little flower could preoccupy a person so completely that there simply wasn’t room for any other thought? ~Sophie Scholl 

Thanks for coming by. Stay safe and be well and if you can, think of creative ways to help one another. I’d guess that your abilities are far beyond what you believe them to be.

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A Place in the Woods

Every day I drive by a wooded area that has had some changes come to it over the past year. About a year ago a huge machine came along and chewed its way through what was once a nearly impenetrable forest. Okay I thought, let’s see what they do next. But they did nothing, and what you see above is what is left. Why, I wondered, would they go to all that trouble to chew their way into the woods and then not do anything with the now empty space? I had an idea, so I decided to go exploring.

This particular piece of forest borders a large wetland and as the above stump shows, there is quite a lot of beaver activity here. I saw more stumps like this one than I could count. I wondered if the machine chewed through the forest to get at a beaver dam, so I kept going to see where it would lead.

They didn’t finish this one.

The ripples under the bark of the muscle wood (Carpinus caroliniana) tree are what give it its common name. It is also called American hornbeam, blue beech, and ironwood. It’s in the hazelnut family and the name iron wood comes from its dense, hard and heavy wood that even beavers won’t usually touch. At least I’ve never seen them touch it until this day; virtually every tree they had cut was ironwood. How odd is that? I asked myself.

Female iron wood catkins form in pairs at the ends of the branches and are about a half inch long with a leaf-like bract. Last year’s bracts are  what is seen in the above photo. The bracts eventually grow to 1 inch or more long, becoming 3-lobed with smooth or irregularly toothed edges. They look like leafy butterflies.

The forest eating machine had come quite a way into the forest, I was surprised to see. It had to stop somewhere though, or it would sink into the swamp. I kept following the trail.

I noticed that all the evergreen ferns had magically lain themselves flat on the forest floor. Quite often snow will flatten them but we really haven’t had much snow. Maybe it was the three or four ice storms we had. In any case new fiddleheads will be along to replace them at any time now.

Well, here was the swamp and as I thought it marked the end of the forest chewer’s progress. But I didn’t see a beaver lodge or dam. Do they put on waders and walk in from here? I wondered.

I think the reason for all of this worry about beaver activity is because of this stream that flows into the swamp. It flows under a busy road and when we’ve had a lot of rain it can flood quickly. I’ve seen it washing over the road several times. If there is a beaver dam on it it’s even more likely to flood.

Since I was here I decided to explore along the stream. This entire area is a drainage for the surrounding hills and smaller streams join the larger one all along its length. Eventually all of the water finds its way to the Ashuelot River, then the Connecticut River, and then on to the Atlantic, so all the water that passed me on this day will join that great sea before long.

The water here is very clean and clear and the stream bed is gravel with very few aquatic plants growing in it.

There are so many river grapes (Vitis riparia) along this stream you often have to weave your way through the old, thick vines that grow into the treetops. I always like to see what I can see in their tendrils. I’ve seen Hindu dancers, fanciful animals and many other things. On this day I saw the beckoner, which held its arm out as if to beckon me close to it so it could give me a hug. River grapes are known for their ability to withstand cold and have been known to survive -57 degrees F. That makes them a favorite choice for the rootstock of many well-known grape varieties. We have about 20 native species of wild grape in the U.S. and Native Americans used them all. The fruit is usually too acidic to eat from the vine so they mostly made juice and jelly from them. They were also used to dye baskets a violet gray color.

Tree mosses (Climacium dendroides) grow along the stream but it’s getting harder to get to them all the time because what was once a streamside trail has become a brushy maze that I have to weave my way through. They are cheery mosses that look like little palm trees, and they always glow with a beautiful inner light, so they’re worth the effort. By this stream is the only spot I’ve ever found them so they aren’t common in this area, but I’m happy to see that they’ve spread quite well where they grow. They must not mind being under water for a time because this stream floods once or twice a year.

Rough horsetails (Equisetum hyemale) also grow along the stream, and like the tree moss this is the only place I’ve ever seen them. These are ancient plants that are embedded with silica. Another common name is the scouring rush because they are sometimes used to scour pots when camping, and they are also used for sanding wood in Japan.

I like the way they look as if someone had knitted them fancy little socks.

Japanese honeysuckles (Lonicera japonica) are already leafing out but I wasn’t surprised. Many invasive plants get a jump on natives by leafing out and blooming earlier.

I saw more hazelnut catkins (Corylus americana) turned to gold but none of the male flowers were peeking out yet.

I’m seeing more and more female hazelnut blossoms though. I’m surprised that they don’t wait until the male flowers open before appearing. That’s the way alders do it.

I saw some willow catkins but they weren’t anywhere near as far along as others I’ve seen. It could be the shade here that’s holding them back or it could be the plants themselves. If every willow bloomed at the same time and we had a frost there would be no seed production, so willows and many other shrubs and trees stagger their bloom time so that can’t happen.

The biggest surprise for me on this day was finding what I believe is a marsh marigold plant growing in the sand beside the stream. I searched for marsh marigolds (Caltha palustris) for many years and never found a single one until I found one growing in a roadside ditch a couple of years ago. The ditch was reconstructed the following year and there went the plant so I lost hope of ever seeing another one. They are rare here in my experience and I was very happy to finally see another one. I’ll come back in early May to see if it’s old enough to bloom. I’d love to see those pretty yellow flowers again.

It is very important to go out alone, to sit under a tree—not with a book, not with a companion, but by yourself—and observe the falling of a leaf, hear the lapping of the water, the fishermen’s song, watch the flight of a bird, and of your own thoughts as they chase each other across the space of your mind. If you are able to be alone and watch these things, then you will discover extraordinary riches which no government can tax, no human agency can corrupt, and which can never be destroyed. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Thanks for stopping in. I hope everyone is healthy and doing the best they can in these unusual circumstances we find ourselves in. From what I’ve read most states and countries, even when they say you should self-quarantine, say that people can get out for some exercise. I can’t think of any better way to get some exercise and calm yourself down than taking a nice walk in the woods. There is a difference between intelligence and wisdom and though 21st century man may be clever he isn’t very wise, and that’s because he has lost touch with nature. In any event whatever you do and wherever you do it, please stay safe and try to be calm. This too shall pass.

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