I had an idea that I’d do a post about puddle ice because thanks to Doreen, who commented on the last post, a mystery I’ve wondered about for most of my life has been solved. It concerns the wave like lines in puddle ice, and it turns out they have nothing to do with waves; they’re caused by the way the water drains out from under the ice. Capillary action causes the water to adhere to the ice above it and form thin bands. What look like wave lines from above show where the ice bands join, and if you break the ice and turn it over you can see how they are created. In essence, the band edges appear as ribs, thicker where a line appears on the surface. This can also happen with pond and lake ice. If you’d like a much better explanation than I’ve given here, here is the link that Doreen sent in. https://www.storyofsnow.com/blog1.php/why-do-frozen-ponds-and-puddles-have-lines
I should say that, as soon as I decided to do a post on puddle ice it snowed and covered all the puddles. And it hasn’t stopped; we’re seeing two or three storms a week. Some, as the above photo shows, are barely deep enough to cover a bird’s toes. But it only takes a dusting to cover the ice on a puddle, so I had to go back to older posts to find that first photo. All the way back 2013 if I remember correctly.
Other storms have dropped a few inches, but no more than 4 or 5. This photo of a spruce cone which was heated by the sun and melted its way down into the snow is a good illustration of our snow depth now. Once the sun gets a little stronger many things will melt their way into the snow. I’ve seen twigs, oak leaves, hemlock branches; basically anything dark colored melt into the snow as the sunshine heats them up.
I gave up on puddle ice and decided to show you other ice forms. A few years ago I visited this stream and found it full of beautiful lacy ice, but this time I found mostly colorful reflections.
I also saw an odd shaped ice bauble floating 3 or 4 inches above the stream.
This ice grew out from the shore but I’m not sure I know how to describe it, so it’s a good thing a picture is worth a thousand words.
This ice, made up of long needle like strands, also grew out from the stream bank. Ice can be fascinating because you never know exactly what shape you will find it in. The variety of shapes and forms seems to be endless.
I went to another stream and found what I call “curtain ice.”
This ice had beautiful clear, pointed crystals on it that looked much like quartz crystals.
Further upstream ice “flowers” had grown on the branches of a streamside shrub. Further up the stems smaller flowers showed how much the depth of the water had changed.
Small, still ponds had iced over but most water bodies with a strong current remained ice free except along their banks. I loved the colors in this ice.
There are many theories about how the spidery shapes seen in ice form but the one thing they all have in common is that they have to start with a hole in the ice. What makes the hole is not agreed upon; some say beavers and /or muskrats chew hole in the ice so they can breathe. I doubt that one. Another theory says that gasses from decaying vegetation on the bottom of the pond keep the ice from freezing in that particular spot. Having seen many vertical strings of bubbles frozen in ice, this theory seems a bit more plausible.
Anyhow, everyone agrees that it has to start with a hole in the ice. Everyone seems to agree that when it snows the weight of the snow causes the ice to sink, and when it sinks water is forced out of the hole. The water wets the snow and darkens it, causing the random spidery shapes. Then it gets cold enough to freeze it all up again, with most of the ice opaque and light colored except for the darker spidery forms.
I once worked for a man who wanted to have a skating party at the small pond on his property, but the surface of the ice was all bumpy and uneven. He hired two of us to flood the surface so it would re-freeze nice and level. We chopped a hole in the ice and with a rented gas powered pump, we pumped the water from the pond out onto the ice. The weight of the water on top of it caused the ice to sink and when it did a gusher came up out of the hole, flooding the ice with too much water to re-freeze before the skating party was to happen.
By the time we left we no longer cared about the skating party; we were freezing, soaked, and disgusted with ourselves for having fallen for such a foolish plan. But the episode makes the theory of the snow weighing down the ice enough to make water come up out of any holes in it a little more plausible to me.
On the coldest day we’ve had this winter (about 16 degrees F.) I went to the Ashuelot falls in Keene to see if there were any ice pancakes forming. Ice pancakes form from the foam that the falling water creates, and there was plenty of foam. Normally on a warmer day this foam would just dissipate and float downstream but in very cold weather it freezes quickly. If you see pancake ice you know it’s quite cold.
The current keeps the frozen foam from forming a into a single sheet by constantly spinning it in large groups that look like spiral galaxies. This also makes the loose foam come together and form circles. When the circles of foam bump into each other they form rims and start to look like pancakes. They can range in size from car tires to cantaloupes, and sometimes smaller. Most of these on this day were nearer cantaloupe size.
This example wasn’t completely round yet but if it stayed cold enough and kept moving it would be. You can see how it is made entirely of foam and how the surrounding loose foam joins the larger circles. I’ve read that pancake ice is very rare outside of the Arctic, even though I see them forming here at least once every winter. In the Arctic, the ice pancakes can stick or stack together and form ridges that pile on top of each other and reach up to 60 feet thick, but here on the Ashuelot they either melt or just float downstream. If you’d like to learn more about this ice form just Google “pancake ice.”
When I was leaving Ashuelot falls I looked upstream and saw what looked like a beaver lodge. How can that be? I wondered. I was here a short while ago and there was no sign of a beaver lodge, and I know they don’t build them that fast. When I got closer I saw that a tree had floated downstream and had gotten hung up on the relatively shallow bottom. What had looked like a beaver lodge was part of its root ball. It really is amazing how many trees fall into this river.
I went to another waterfall, this time at Swanzey lake in Swanzey, and found that the ice had sculpted itself into a strange shape so I took a couple of shots of it. When I looked at the photos later I saw that the camera settings certainly weren’t set for stop action, because the water in the waterfall looked like something I can’t even think of a word for. Silver hair? I don’t know, but I almost deleted this one. It makes me dizzy if I look at it too long.
One of my favorite things to see in the woods is a stream that sunlight has turned to gold. I took this photo last November and apparently forgot about it, but I’m putting it into this post in the hope that it might warm you up a bit after such a cold adventure. There is ice in it but it feels a little warmer than the others. A shawl and a cup of hot chocolate might be just about perfect right now.
He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter. ~John Burroughs
I thought this scene showed signs that we are moving into fall. Other signs are shorter days of course, and also cooler nights. Things are starting to quiet down and insect activity has dropped over the past few days. Last Saturday it never got out of the 50s and was cloudy all day so that put a damper on things. It was the first noticeably cooler fall-like day and nature all of the sudden, seems to have gotten quieter.
But quieter does not mean an ending. In fact it is a beginning, because this is when many of our most beautiful roadside flowers start to bloom. It is when fall starts to really make its presence known.
This Joe Pye weed says it all. Its leaves have gone yellow and will fall soon but right now its color is at its peak. It is as if it had to stop photosynthesizing so it could put all its effort into being beautiful.
And the New England asters this year are amazing. They like the soil to be very moist and this year they’ve got that and they’re responding with masses of bloom.
This shows how their bright yellow centers slowly turn red as they age and are pollinated.
They all seem to do it the same way no matter what color the petals happen to be. This dark purple is my favorite.
Bees didn’t care what color anything was as long as they could collect plenty of pollen. This one’s pollen sacs were filled to bursting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many bees as I have this year. This one area I was in when I took these photos must have had many thousands of bees of all kinds flying around.
Bees weren’t the only insects feasting on the asters. There were many clouded Sulphur butterflies here as well. Some were looking a little ragged but this one didn’t look bad. According to what I’ve read there are several broods of this butterfly hatching from spring until fall. Eggs hatch quickly; small green caterpillars will emerge in about a week and feed on leaves. If they need to they can hibernate over winter and will become a butterfly in spring.
There were quite a few monarch butterflies here as well. I counted about a dozen one day and there must have been at least that many a day or two later. We’ve been short of monarchs all summer until just recently. According to what I read on a website called Monarch Joint-Venture, monarchs that emerge in late summer and early fall are the ones that migrate to central Mexico. They’ll spend the winter clustered in trees until weather and temperature conditions allow them to return to their breeding grounds. These adults can live up to nine months while adults in summer generations live only two to five weeks. What the butterflies in these photos were doing I think, is fueling up for their upcoming journey.
Light in one form feasting on light in another form.
And how beautiful all the varying forms -are.
On (or near) the fourth of July I showed you a shot of a flooded corn field, lamenting the fact that the farmer rarely gets a crop from this particular field anymore. Then, nearly a month later the corn had all died and invasive purple loosestrife had taken over, showing how wet the soil had become. This shot was taken quickly with a cell phone and isn’t very good technically, but I don’t care because it still shows how beautiful this place is.
Once again, my goal in doing this is to show you the beauty of nature so you will want to go out and see it for yourself, and as long as a photo conveys that message I don’t get too excited about f-stops and iso settings and focal lengths. That’s why I rarely talk about them here. To be honest the technical aspects of photography really don’t interest me any more than the passing interest an artist might have in the chemical composition of his paints. A camera is a tool, like a hammer or a saw, and I use it only to show you the astounding beauty of this paradise we live in. Instead of just looking at a photo I’d like you to feel the beauty that made me want to stop and take that photo.
Another recent cell phone shot of the same cornfield from a different direction is a good example of what I’m talking about. It’s a terrible photo but I had to stop and look at how beautiful this scene was. I became so lost in the beauty of it; the photo was really just an afterthought as I was about to get in the car. When I see a scene like this love is what I feel; a love of life that has somehow snuck up on me or seeped into me over the years, I don’t know. It’s all so very beautiful and I often ask myself; how could anyone not fall in love with this?
The beautiful yellow grasses lighting up that space in the previous photo are called yellow foxtail grass. Its seed heads catch the light and magnify it tenfold. The round dark bits seen along the stem are its seeds.
I thought we could play “Do you see what I see?” Do you see that strange shape way up high in that cherry tree, over on the left?
It’s the biggest paper wasp nest that I’ve seen; bigger in diameter than the trunk of the tree that supports it. I’d guess maybe 16 inches in diameter at the top, but it’s hard to tell with it being so high off the ground. I’d hate to find it in the middle of a shrub that I was trimming, that I know for sure.
I saw a mallard on a log and looked at it through the camera, admiring its beautiful feathers. I thought that it was looking away from me and I wondered if I could get closer, so slowly and quietly I snuck up on it, thinking all the while that I was pretty slick to have gotten so close without waking it. Then I looked at the photos I had taken when I got home and saw the bird’s open red eye in all of them. The mallard had been watching me the whole time and had let me get as close as I did, so I wasn’t so slick after all. I should have known.
I was surprised when this beautiful dragonfly flew past me from behind and landed on this clump of grass in front of me. It was huge as dragonflies go and its body was like a string of multi colored jewels, so you would think that something this big and this beautiful would be easy to identify, but I’ve had quite a time of it. Finally, I’ve settled on the lance tipped darner. If you look at the tip of its “tail” (rear appendages or cerci) you’ll see why. But I also settled on the lance tipped darner because it likes to perch on / in grass. Others of its kind like the green striped darner that landed on me recently like to perch on trees. All of them, says any expert you care to listen to, are very hard to identify. It is said to be certain you really have to have one “in hand” but I don’t care about names enough to be catching them. What must being caught do to a dragonfly, even if it is released afterwards?
I stood for about a half hour watching this lance tipped darner fly from plant stem to plant stem. Finally as I watched, it landed higher than we see it here and slowly slid itself down the stem until its tip reached the water. Then it shuddered. That’s the only way to describe it; it shuddered several times and each time it made ripples on the surface of the water. These dragonflies slit a plant stem with their scissor like rear appendages (see previous photo) and then lay an egg in the slit. The eggs hatch and the young naiads or nymphs live underwater, finally emerging sometimes as long as four years later, when they will shed their skin and become adults. The tricky thing about these particular dragonflies is how male and females can look so much alike.
About a week before this shot was taken I saw a red dragonfly land on this log for a few seconds and then fly away. I thought it was probably just another red meadowhawk but wait a minute; its wings weren’t clear like the other red meadowhawks I had seen. That’s because, I was to find out later, there is a red meadowhawk called a “saffron winged meadowhawk” and I believe that is what is shown here. The problem was, the saffron coloring (for me at least) was impossible to see unless it landed on something light colored like this log. I stood near here day after day wondering if one would land and finally, this one did. Compared to the 3 inch long lance tipped darner we saw previously this dragonfly is tiny at about an inch long.
I stopped at the river in Swanzey one day and saw what I at first thought was just a pile of walnut size rocks. I wondered why anyone would have collected them and put them there, but then I saw why. There was a stone with an unusually shaped pocket in it and someone had tried to find a stone with the same shape as the pocket. Finally they found one that fit perfectly, as you can see. Someone sat here for who knows how long working at creating something beautiful and then just left it behind. This once again affirms something I’ve thought for a very long time; it isn’t what we create that’s important, it’s the act of creation. I think all of us, whether we know it or not, are just trying to create something beautiful in this life any way we can.
There can’t be an award for longevity among the flowers because there are several that will bloom from June right up until a freeze, and Black eyed Susans are one of them. They get a little lost among all the other beautiful flowers of summer, at least in my mind they do, but as all the other beautiful flowers slowly fade there they are with their cheery yellow blooms; often the only flower left to see.
Another long flowering plant is heal-all, also called self-heal or prunella. The happy little flowers are always at their best in the fall, in my opinion. They do all they can to attract insects and in so doing they make themselves beautiful, but they are very small and easily missed.
The birds have eaten all the elderberries and what is left always remind me of star charts.
Some signs of fall are quite subtle, like the beautiful splash of red that appears on the top tier of leaves on an Indian cucumber root plant. Not all plants have it but those that do almost always have ripe, deep purple berries standing just above the splash. I’ve always suspected that this splash of color was there to alert and attract birds like turkeys, which eat the berries. The ripe berries appear at just about eye level of a turkey so it makes sense, but I doubt we’ll ever really know for certain.
If you are lost inside the beauties of nature, do not try to be found. ~Mehmet Murat ildan
I heard recently that trail improvements were underway at Goose Pond in Keene and since I’m all for improving any trails anywhere, I decided to go and see what was being done. I stopped and got this shot of the island just after I got there. This is one of only two or three islands in the immediate area that I never camped on. Now I don’t think you’re allowed to camp on any of them.
It was clear right off that some serious changes were being made. This hauler was moving crushed stone to wherever it was needed. Since the trails here are very muddy in places I was happy to see it.
It looked to be inch and a half to two inch stone, which isn’t too bad to walk on because it packs well. It’s certainly better than mud.
Drainage diches, much like those used by the railroad, had been dug. It looked like they were already doing their job of giving any water on the trail a place to go.
Wherever there are breaks in the trailside growth the trails stay relatively well lit and dry but there are places where thick evergreens mean little sunshine, so the trail gets muddy. This trail mostly follows the contour of the pond, but there are a few places where you lose sight of the water and I’ve met people out here who were confused and had lost their way.
New trail signs should help people find their way.
The trails here have always been blazed with white blazes on the trees but many people lose sight of them easily. The way to prevent that is to make sure you can see the next blaze from the one you’re closest to, but in practice that doesn’t always happen.
There were many new bridges that had been built over streams and muddy spots and this was the longest and most elaborate. I tried to count them but I lost count at 7. If I had to guess I’d say there were twice that many that had been built. That’s a huge amount of work when you’re doing it way out here.
Other signs made sure people knew what was going on. I believe the city of Keene received a $45,000 dollar grant to pay for all of this.
This forest has always been a good place to find mushrooms and slime molds and I saw a few on this day. I really thought there would be more though, considering how much rain we’ve had. I did see lots of yellow finger coral fungi. They look like small yellow flames licking up out of the dark soil they prefer growing in.
I also saw a few blue staining boletes. Some of these get quite big and are easy to see.
The underside of the cap is what stains blue and you can see how my fingerprints have done just that. There are many boletes that stain blue and they are easily misidentified, so I’ll just say that this is a bolete that stains blue. Many blue staining boletes are also poisonous. Though there are gilled boletes most have pores or tubes on the undersurface as this one did. Sometimes the underside of the cap is a different color but the color of this one was fairly uniform all over.
Pretty little purple cort mushrooms are everywhere this year but this is the first one I’ve seen growing on a log. All the ones I’ve seen have appeared to grow in soil but there might have been wood buried just under the soil surface that I didn’t see. Purple cort fungi have a rather bitter slime on their caps and that most likely accounts for their not being eaten by squirrels or other critters.
What I believe is a coral fungus called Clavaria ornatipes grew up out of the soil in a darkly shaded spot. These fungi are spatula or club shaped, colored greyish to pinkish gray though these looked white to me. They often shrivel when they dry out and revive after a rain. There are usually hundreds of them and there were many in this spot on this day. Though I’ve searched for years now I can find no common name for this one.
Here was another new bridge, placed off to the side of the trail so the hauler and other equipment could get through. The bridges were being lifted into place by a small excavator; what used to be called a “steam shovel.”
A new bridge like the one in the previous photo had been built upstream from this one, which is out of sight to the left in this view. A new trail leg had been built to it, so it will apparently be a replacement for this one. You can just see the new trail coming down a small hill out beyond the bridge.
Many of the older bridges had been chained to trees to prevent their being washed away by flooding and I wondered if the people building the new bridges knew this. Surely they must. I hope so, otherwise the pond might be full of floating bridges one day.
I was sorry to see that this particular older bridge was going to be replaced, because this view from it out into the pond has always been one of my favorites. I doubt that this view will be able to be seen from upstream at the new bridge but we’ll see. Those are royal ferns growing in the stream and soon they’ll be turning yellow.
White wood asters bloomed in sunny spots. They will soon be followed by whorled white wood asters, which have leaves that do not grow in a true whorl. I’ve always wondered how the person who named them couldn’t have known what a whorl of leaves looked like.
An Indian cucumber root plant caught in a sunbeam looked as if it was floating in space. I can’t think of a better example of a true whorl of leaves than what is seen on this plant. All leaves radiate from a single point on the stem and wrap around it so if seen on edge they will look like a single line. Sepals, petals, stamens, and other plant and / or flower parts can also grow in whorls.
Something that was very surprising was seeing this swamp loosestrife blooming here in a spot I must have walked by at least 50 times. I got here a little late but there were a few flowers still in bloom. This plant is rare in this area in my experience. It is also called water willow.
I’ve never seen a goose on Goose Pond but I know they come here because I’ve seen their feathers. That feather on the right has a fishing spider on it but I didn’t see it until I saw the photo, otherwise I would have zoomed in for a closer look.
One of the dancer damselflies was tired of dancing and rested on a sun warmed stone. Google lens says this is a spring water dancer but I haven’t been able to verify that. What I can say is the spring water dancer likes to congregate around springs and seeps and there are plenty of those here.
I don’t see many fungi growing on stone but here were some small corals doing just that. Of course they were actually growing in the accumulated forest litter that had broken down enough to support them. It shows that some fungi don’t need much soil to grow in. I think these were crested corals.
When I visit Goose Pond I always follow the trail clockwise for no particular reason and when I do that this stone is one of the last things of interest I see. This stone is an enigma because it isn’t natural and doesn’t seem to have a reason for being here. I used to build stone walls and I’ve worked with enough stone to be sure that it took some time and effort to get 90 degree smooth sides on this one, especially in the 1800s. Since it is buried under tree roots its hard to know its length or if it has any hardware holes in it. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.
When was the last time you spent a quiet moment just doing nothing – just sitting and looking at the sea, or watching the wind blowing the tree limbs, or waves rippling on a pond, a flickering candle or children playing in the park? ~Ralph Marston
Now that fall is almost here we’re having some summer weather so I’m getting out more. I went to where I used to work in Hancock recently and one of the first things I stopped to admire was this view of Half Moon Pond. For seven years I started each work day standing in this spot, looking out over the pond and drinking in the quiet. Since I grew up awash in quiet that part of the job was a perfect fit from the first day. The experience was a unique one for me though, because working so close to the pond meant I could watch all of its changes as they happend. It reinforced what I’d had an inkling of as a boy growing up along the Ashuelot River; life is a circle and from hour to hour, day to day, and year to year it is in a state of constant change, like a great wheel slowly turning. Following that lead you discover something that is unchanging, and it is found inside us all.
As I was leaving Hancock I saw a small stream with its banks full of flowers of all kinds. There were white asters, pink Joe Pye weed, purple loosestrife, white boneset, and yellow goldenrod growing there. It was a natural garden; a beautiful spot.
There were flowers everywhere, like a roadside Monet painting. Who needs riches when we have places like this? We are already rich, but most of us don’t see it.
I didn’t see any purple asters there but I am starting to see them in other places.
I’m also starting to see monarch butterflies, but not here in Keene. This one was in Hancock, probing for nutrients in a gravel road. There seem to be few to none in Keene this year.
I also saw a white admiral that day, looking a bit tired. In fact I thought it might have died but it slowly lifted its wings when I moved closer so I knew it was alive. I took a couple of shots and moved away to let it rest.
The clear white flowers of arrowhead have appeared. Each one of these had tiny flea like black insects on it but since they grew just offshore I couldn’t get close enough to see what they were. The centers of the flowers look like little clown noses.
There are plenty of great spangled fritillary butterflies in Keene. They love Joe Pye weed, and we have lots of it.
Great Spangled fritillaries look to be about the same size as monarchs, but I find them to be much more approachable. This one let me get quite close. I thought of trying a shot or two with my phone but I decided I might scare it away.
I was able to get a shot of this one’s eyes but when I got home and saw that they were an orangey-reddish color I was surprised, because I have other shots of them with blue eyes.
In this shot I took on Pitcher Mountain years ago this fritillary butterfly’s eyes are obviously blue. Why would one have blue eyes and the other red? According to Butterflies of the Adirondacks “The Atlantis Fritillary has blue-green or greyish blue eyes, while both the Great Spangled Fritillary and the Aphrodite Fritillary have amber to yellow-green eyes.” So the blue eyed one shown here is an Atlantis fritillary and the other in the previous shot isn’t. I obviously saw amber eyes as red so I’m going to stop there, because according to Butterflies and Moths of North America the other differences between the butterflies are slight, as in shading of certain colors and slight variations in markings. For me it’s their eyes that tell the story so from now on I’ll just look them in the eye, tell them how beautiful they are, and let it be.
I wasn’t going to say anything but I thought you should know. As I’ve said before, fall starts on the forest floor and this hobblebush shows it.
This young white ash tells me that fall is creeping up into the understory.
I stopped at the Ashuelot Falls one evening to see if the light had turned them to gold. It had, but there were other things going on as well.
A heron fished below the falls. It had spotted something and as I watched it caught what I think was a small frog. Down it went with a flip and a gulp. Canon bridge cameras are notoriously inefficient in low light and though the light was really too poor to be taking photos, I tried anyway.
When I saw this over my shoulder I decided to leave the heron to its hunting. It was a good thing too, because as I got to the car those extra-large raindrops that make a loud splat! started falling.
On another evening I tried a blue vervain plant in low light. I loved the way the small blue flowers glowed with a light that was more in them than on them. They were so beautifully blue; truly the center of attention, but though they took center stage it was the light that put them there. Sometimes it is the quality of light more than what it falls on that can stop us in our tracks.
I forgot to look for the flowers of white baneberry this past spring but I remembered to look for the plant’s berries this year. White berries at the ends of pink pedicels are hard to miss. They’re called “doll’s eyes” for obvious reasons and they’re very toxic. They’re also very bitter, which makes it doubtful that anyone would eat enough to be harmed by them. These plants are having a good year.
Tansy is just coming into bloom and before long each flower head, shown as a disc shape in this view, will grow into a fluffy mound of tiny blooms. The aromatic leaves were once used to repel insects like bedbugs, and it was brought to this country by the first settlers for that reason, as well as for its medicinal uses.
Some turtlehead plants are covered in mildew, and that is no surprise considering all the rain and humidity we’re having. In a garden mildew usually means poor air circulation and not enough direct sunlight. Both are conditions that can often be remedied my moving the affected plant or by creating more “breathing” space around it by moving any plants that might be crowding it.
Garden phlox is a plant that is often very susceptible to mildew but I haven’t seen any yet this season. This one was very pretty, I thought.
Here was another pretty phlox that was mildew free. The plant is also called “tall phlox” and many varieties are very fragrant. I think plant breeders have also bred them for mildew resistance over the years.
Pretty little blue toadflax is still blooming and probably will into October. One story says that the “toad” part of the name comes from the way the flower opens like a toad’s mouth when each side is pressed with the fingers. I’ve done this with yellow toadflax and it is true but with the tiny flowers of the blue, I’m not sure. Another story says that toads took refuge among the branches, but I haven’t seen many yellow or blue toadflax with branches.
If I had to offer advice to those who are just starting out in gardening it would be to beware of friends bearing plant gifts. Oh, they mean well enough; they have more of this plant than they can use so they might as well share. Right there is where you should stop and ask yourself why they have so much of this plant. Is it aggressive? Will it take over my garden? If it is an obedient plant the answer to these questions is YES. Obedient plants get their common name from the way the flower stalks stay where they are bent for a short time, so in this way they are “obedient.” The name does not come from the way the plants stay in one place. No, they are a native member of the mint family and they can act just like an invasive and take over a garden. The solution is, if you’re given a plant you don’t know anything about, plant it off by itself somewhere where it can’t overrun other plants. Just let it be and watch it for a year or so, and when you are satisfied that it doesn’t want to rule the world, move it into the garden.
Though the native obedient plant is everything I’ve said above plant breeders have been working on it, and I just read about a cultivar called “Miss manners” which is said to form upright clumps that don’t spread. It sounds truly obedient and would be a great addition to the garden if it was. The snapdragon-like flowers are very beautiful and they attract plenty of bees. Obedient plants grow naturally along riverbanks from Canada South to Virginia and west to Texas, but I’ve never seen one in the wild. Plants I’ve grown in the garden never seemed to need any extra watering as you would expect a riverside plant would.
Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all come. ~Michelangelo
The Ashuelot River in August is usually so low in places you can walk across it without getting your knees wet, but when I went there last week it was about as high as we like to see it. I have a feeling that someone somewhere opened the gates on a dam or something since then though, because two or three days after I took this shot the water had gone down considerably, and mud showed on the banks.
I went to the river to see if the beautiful cedar waxwings were there. At this time of year the sun has a certain slant at this location. In the evening insects are lit up by the light and I assume that the waxwings have an easier time seeing them. They wait in the trees and bushes and fly out and snap up mosquitoes, dragonflies, and other insects that happen to be flying through the shafts of light. There is a small maple tree there that has died and it’s a favorite perch, so I wait for them to get used to my being there and then try to get their photo when they land in it.
The waxwings love many of the berries that grow along the river such as the arrow wood viburnum berries seen here. Other berries that grow along the river in this immediate area are silky dogwood, pokeweed, wild grapes, Virginia creeper, and poison ivy, and waxwings love them all.
I like the way this waxwing was peeking up over the branches with its eyes probably on an unwary insect. I’ve seen them snatch dragonflies right off the bushes a few times. The waxwings move in small flocks and can strip a crabapple tree of its fruit in no time at all. The name “waxwing” comes from the way the tips of their wings look like they’ve been dipped in red wax. The undersides of their wings flash bright white in the evening sun and they are very beautiful. I love their little bandit mask and how sleek they are and how they dive, swoop and twirl in the air when chasing insects. If I had to make a list of favorite birds, cedar waxwings would be near the top.
I hope everyone is seeing and hearing their favorite birds this year. I downloaded the “Merlin” birding app from Google Play and it has opened a new world. Now, though I might not see a bird, I can record it and identify it with the app. It’s both amazing and fun, and I now know which songs are by which birds. I believe the free app also comes in an Apple version.
I went to a local park the other day to visit the small pond there. Usually there are hundreds of dragonflies there but on this day I had to struggle to find any. I sat on a bench wondering where they had all gone and then I saw several cedar waxwings streaking out of the trees and I knew. All the dragonflies were in hiding. From what I’ve seen of waxwings, they were wise to hide.
I’ve been trying to get better shots of the emerald spread wing damselflies. I’ve discovered a spot where they gather so I sit on a boulder on the pond shore and learn their habits, which are much the same as dragonflies. One noticeable difference is, these insects don’t have the same great speed as dragonflies. The “spread wing” part of the name comes from the way they keep their wings spread when at rest.
Unfortunately the spot where they gather at the pond is heavily shaded so I haven’t been completely happy with any shot I’ve gotten so far. This one does show the underside of its abdomen but doesn’t show the sky blue color that I had hoped to get. One day I’ll catch them perching in the sunshine and then I’ll be able to show you their beautiful colors the way they should be seen. Meanwhile I’ll wait.
One of the things that you come to understand quite quickly in nature study is that you will spend a lot of time just waiting and watching, because 99% of it is simply being in the right place at the right time. Knowing the habits of that which you study helps, but nature will always teach us patience one way or another.
I found a staghorn sumac with a deformed flower head at the end of a branch. You can pick out 2 tiny flowers in full bloom there in the lower right. This is something few people ever see.
A fern shadow spilled over a log. This is what I mean when I say that no matter where you look there is beauty. It is always there, waiting for us to discover it.
A few of the Indian cucumber root plants are throwing in the towel and taking on their beautiful deep purple fall colors. The berries will soon be ripening on plants that have them.
Purple loosestrife is one of our most invasive plants but I always have to admit that they’re quite pretty, even if do they look like someone hung them on the stalk before ironing them.
Joe Pye weed is blooming, with its wispy, thread like flower petals calling to all the insects. Bees and butterflies love them. Depending on which version of the story you believe a Native American named Joe Pye used this plant to heal, or the name of the plant he used was named Jopi. Either way the story points to the plant’s one time medicinal use.
I was happy to see what I thought was a monarch butterfly on some Joe Pye weed but no, it was a viceroy, and I know that because of the black lines on its hind wings. Still, it’s a beautiful butterfly and there haven’t been many of those around this summer. I imagined that two months of rain had a lot to do with that but that can’t be it because Maryland is in drought and they have as few butterflies as we do.
It was a very windy day when, as I walked through some tall grass, two pearl crescent butterflies flew a few feet ahead, always staying out of the wind by staying down low in the grass. This shot was a challenge because the camera kept wanting to focus on the grass and leaves instead of the butterfly. This butterfly is small and seems to be about the size of one wing of the bigger butterflies like monarchs or admirals.
One day I saw a very strange bird asleep on a log at a pond. You couldn’t see its face but one eye stared out of the photo I sent to a birding friend. He came back with the name Muscovy duck, which is a domesticated bird that will occasionally fly off into nature. It can’t fly as well as a wild duck or goose so it just kind of hangs out near water. The next day it was still there and it let me get a shot of its face. I saw then that it was an odd duck indeed. The Jimmy Durante of waterfowl. It was as big as a Canada goose.
A few days later I saw posters about a lost pet duck and sure enough, this was the duck I had seen. The poster said “she was very old, lost and probably scared” but she didn’t seem scared when I was near her. More curious than scared, I’d say. But anyhow, I called the phone number on the poster but didn’t get an answer, so hopefully they’ve found her.
Canada geese were in sight of the Muscovy duck, eating the same pond weeds that it eats. The duck will bully smaller wild ducks but it didn’t seem to want to tangle with the geese. That is probably wise.
Soon they’ll all be eating the seeds of American bur reed, which dots the shallows here and there.
Tall white rattlesnake root was once used in a poultice by Native Americans to cure headache, fever, and rattlesnake bite. A tonic made from its bitter roots was also used in place of quinine by early settlers and it is also called gall of the earth due to its bitterness. I like its beautiful lily like white flowers, which always speak of quiet serenity to me. Nothing seems to bother this plant; I never see it eaten by insects or harmed by munching animals, and that could be because it is toxic. It is native to the northeastern and midwestern U.S. and will grow as far south as North Carolina.
I like this scene for two reasons. The waterlily is obvious, but not so obvious is the pattern in the pickerel weed leaf. As fall gets closer these leaves will develop some beautiful and colorful flowing patterns. The light was also beautiful on this day. It looked like it was shining out from the water rather than on it.
We used to call this a Turk’s cap lily but I don’t know if they’re still called that now when people are so easily offended by terminology which in truth, usually comes from ignorance rather than malice. But names don’t matter. It’s an unusually shaped flower in the lily family and one that I’ve never loved enough to grow. I found these growing in a local park.
When I walk through public gardens I’m always surprised to see plants that the people I used to work for wanted nothing to do with. Anything in the allium family was hands off, probably due to the way garlic chives could take over a garden. That meant nodding onion was also left out, which I think is too bad. It’s a plant that I could have used in some of the gardens I worked in.
I saw a petunia that made me think of a cloud.
I like the tree branch patterns in a balloon flower. They’re almost always there, as if the shadows of overhead branches are falling on the flower. I also love that shade of deep blue.
For those who don’t know, balloon flower gets its name from its balloon like buds, which look as if they’re full of gas. Really there is just air inside but they will make a soft popping sound if you squeeze them. They are native to Japan, Korea, China, and parts of Russia but are now grown all over the world. Cough syrup was once made from the plant’s roots but I’ve never heard how effective it was.
I see far more of this color bee balm than I do red these days, and I think that’s too bad because I liked the native red. I used to grow the red ones and I had bees and hummingbirds all over them. I’ve never seen a bee or a hummingbird on these plants but I can’t sit and watch for them like I could when I grew the red ones, so maybe they do attract the birds and bees. I hope they do.
In summer, the song sings itself. ~William Carlos Williams
On a recent visit to my daughter’s garden I saw these glass baubles in one of the beds. They had spilled out of a flower vase and they just happened to be my favorite color, so I took a photo of them. What I didn’t see at the time was the lily reflection, which can be seen in the upper left corner of the photo.
This isn’t the lily that was reflected in the glass bauble but what a lily; it was beautiful, as were several others she grew. Clearly she has gardening in her genes but thankfully, she doesn’t want to make a living at it as I once did. It is a hugely rewarding but also an exhausting career that can make your body old before its time, especially when you work with stone.
She grows a lot of plants that I haven’t seen, like this “snap dragon vine,” which was a beautiful thing. Apparently it is native to Mexico and the southwest. Since my son lives in New Mexico at the moment, I asked him about it. I couldn’t imagine such a lush thing growing in such heat but he says northern parts of the state are forested and mountainous, much like here.
I noticed one of those metallic blow flies on a false sunflower. I’m seeing a lot of them this summer.
She has a lot of beautiful zinnias in her garden. I was hoping to see butterflies visiting them but we have a serious lack of butterflies here this year, so all I saw were bees and dragonflies. She puts pans of water out so the birds and insects can drink but still, no butterflies on this day. I’ve seen one or two great spangled fritillaries, a few white admirals, and a single viceroy, but no monarchs yet. I’ve been wondering if the drenching downpours we’re having have shredded their wings.
Another flower she grows that I hadn’t seen is the fiddleback. I looked them up online and saw some that looked just like a fern fiddlehead uncurling in spring. They’re in the borage family and are quite pretty.
She grows lots of vegetables and herbs as well as flowers. Since I’ve been talking about legumes this summer, here is a pea blossom, with the expected standard and keel. She also had pole beans but for some reason I couldn’t get a shot of a flower. Everything she grows is in raised beds full of wonderful things like cow and horse manure and compost. The plants obviously love it; these pea plants had climbed up over my head.
She also grows my favorite oxalis. I’m surprised that she doesn’t grow more housplants, because she grew up in an indoor jungle. I once grew so many housplants that I used to tell people who were coming to visit that they had better bring a machete, and I was only half joking. There were trees, ferns, vines, and everything in between. Come to think of it maybe that’s why my daughter doesn’t grow very many houseplants.
She grows some white petunias that have this curious deep purple marking in them. She grows all her plants from seed and I think she said these were saved seeds from last year. In any case it was a petunia I had never seen, and I’ve had my nose in an awful lot of petunias. I had my nose in these as well, because they’re fragrant petunias.
This is one of many sunflowers that my daughter grows. I realized after I had left her house that I hadn’t gotten wider views of the gardens, but I think that showing flowers rather than the gardens they grow in comes naturally to a gardener. I spent a large part of my life on my hands and knees weeding and deadheading gardens and when you’re in that position your eyes are right at flower level, so you look into them rather than at them and focus on the health of each plant rather than the garden as a whole. Depending on the cause one sick plant can make an entire garden sick, so I always made sure I watched each plant closely. I was right there on my hands and knees anyway so it wasn’t as hard as it might seem. But I’ll have to go back again and see if I can’t get some wider shots. I’d like to see those fiddlebacks unfurling as well.
I haven’t spent all my time in my daughter’s garden. I’ve also been out exploring places like this. The growing season is far from over and we have an explosion of growth going on right now.
The wild lettuces are blooming. Giant ten foot tall plants will have a few pencil eraser size flowers, colored green or blue, at the very top. This was a blue one but it was more white than blue. Maybe ice blue. The green ones are far more common than the blue, so I have to search for the blue ones.
Tall asters are one of the first of the asters to bloom and here they are, right on schedule. Next will come big leaf asters, white whorled wood asters, New England asters, and many more. I’ve seen tall asters that towered over my head but these were right at eye level.
Dragonflies are still flying everywhere I go so I will often stop and see if I can get a shot of one. They are always a challenge but this blue dasher was willing to pose.
Slaty skimmers are also still very active. I do all I can to get those wing patterns in a shot because I think the ones on this dragonfly are very beautiful. Somehow I got 3 out of 4.
I’m seeing more bees, flies, and dragonflies this year than I ever have. And mosquitoes; bug spray is a must if you’re going to spend time in the woods.
While I was there I thought I’d try to show you a single Queen Anne’s lace flower. I think there are actually two or three here but it was the best I could do with so many bees flying around.
I saw a bird in a bush, and I believe it was a catbird. These birds have been flying from bush to bush, following me as I walk along in this area. You would think that they’d be easy to see but it was all I could do to find this one with the camera at a few yards away. When I finally did find it I had one hand held shot, and this is it. Birds, dragonflies, and many other insects will stay still and watch you fumble with your camera settings, but as soon as you point that lens at them they’re gone in a streak, just as this bird was. It might be colorblindness that makes them so hard for me to see, I don’t know.
I’m seeing a lot of Canada goose families with goslings almost as big as their parents now. I don’t say much about it but many goslings are lost to snapping turtles, hawks, foxes, bobcats, and other predators each year. I’ve seen large families reduced to one gosling when I was able to watch them each day. This year though, they seem to be doing well. Humans also prey on adult geese so they are wary. They’re a bird that will sometimes put up with you but more often than not they’ll turn and show you their tail. It seems to depend on how quietly you move and how close you are to them. This bird swam in liquid sunshine and I thought it might be too lost in bliss to notice me but no, it turned away.
Our wild clematis called Virgin’s bower has just started flowering. This vine, with its masses of small white flowers, drapes itself over the tops of shrubs to get maximum sunlight and it’s very common along railtrails and roadways. Another name for it is traveler’s joy, and that it is. Sweet autumn clematis, which is a cultivated variety of small, white flowered clematis, comes closest in both habit and flower size.
Shy little Deptford pinks have started blooming. These plants are not as showy or as prolific as their cousins the maiden pinks, and the flowers are smaller. I always have to look in places I know they grow in to find them. They’re quite pretty though, and always worth looking for.
I’ll go from the tiny Deptford pink to this beautiful daylily, which was the biggest daylily blossom I’ve ever seen. It grows in a local park and is so big I couldn’t cover it with my hand, even though I had stretched out all my fingers. Every gardener has an image in their mind of what a daylily looks like but I had to stand for a while and give my mind time to discard the old image and build a new one. This will surely be the flower size that all future daylily breeder introductions will be measured against. It’s amazing.
Jewelweed has just come into bloom and this is the first blossom I saw. They appear at the end of long thin stems (Pedicels) and they move with the slightest breeze, so they can be a challenge to photograph. The common name of the plant comes from the way raindrops sparkle on its leaves, not from its flowers. The leaves have a wax coating that resists water absorption, and that’s why raindrops sit and sparkle like drops of mecury on jewelweed leaves.
Imagine a bee having to crawl down through a pincusion of pistils to get to a flower’s pollen and you have the button bush flower head. Crawling down through all those sticky pistils means it will brush against some of them and leave any pollen it has on its body with them, and that’s exactly the strategy that has evolved in the buttonbush. I see lots of seed heads on buttonbush plants so it must work well. Later on ducks, geese, and songbirds will come along to eat up all the seeds, and they’ll spread them far and wide to make new button bushes. If you have wet spots in your yard or are lucky enough to have a stream running through it, plant a buttonbush or two. If nothing else it will surely be a conversation starter.
The old school of thought would have you believe that you’d be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn’t what being in nature is all about. Rather, it’s about feeling free, unbounded, shedding the distractions and barriers of our civilization—not bringing them with us. ~Ryel Kestenbaum
Here’s where all the rain we had went. The Ashuelot River roared mightily as it went rushing by on its way to the Atlantic, carrying countless tons of soil with it. In flood the river deposits fine silt it over all the land that is flooded and then, sometimes many years later, rains wash it back into the river. It’s all a circle.
One of the flowers that like growing in the soil deposited by the river is the monkey flower, and I’ve seen more of them this year than I ever have. I haven’t seen a monkey in one though.
It is said that whoever named the monkey flower saw a monkey’s face in it, but I don’t see a monkey any more than I see a turtle in a turtlehead flower. Maybe its just lack of imagination on my part, I don’t know.
Here is where I found a monkey; in the face of a blue dasher dragonfly.
Because they kept landing in the shade I had to try many times over several days to get a shot of what I think might be an emerald damselfly. It’s the only useable shot I’ve gotten of one. I like its big blue bug eyes and its green metallic shine. This one, if I’ve identified it correctly, is a male and its abdomen and tail are powder blue, though they look white in this shot. The “tree” it is hanging on to is really just a twig, smaller in diameter than a pencil. This long bodied damselfly reminded me of the old wives’ tales about it and others of its kind that I heard as a boy. They were called “sewing needles” or “devil’s darning needles,” and were supposed to be able to sew your eyes and lips closed if you weren’t careful. Why would anyone tell a child such foolishness? I can’t see that doing so would serve any useful purpose. It would only make them afraid of a beautiful part of nature, and of what possible use is that? I can’t remember ever believing any such stories but memory can’t always be trusted, so I may have.
According to what I’ve read flies like hoverflies, or blowflies like the one seen in this photo, visit flowers to sip their nectar and taste their pollen. Flies sip the nectar for strength, which they need to keep flying, and the pollen helps them produce healthy eggs. Since they are hairy, bottle or blowflies help with pollination by carrying pollen from one flower to another. I walked though a field of Queen Anne’s lace flowers one day and saw as many flies as I did bees.
Some of the dogwoods are whispering things I’d rather not hear, so I didn’t listen. I just admired their beautiful colors.
A few posts ago I talked about the legume family and how you could identify them by the flowers, which have a standard and a keel. Here, on showy tick trefoil flowers you can see the vertical, half round standard and the keel, which juts out at about 90 degrees or so from the standard. Inside the keel are the reproductive parts. When ready the keel opens and lowers, and the reproductive parts show themselves as they’ve done here. Strong, smart insects like bumblebees will often force open the keel to get to the goodies ahead of time.
Every time I see a bicolor hedge bindweed blossom I remember when I had to search high and low to find one, because 99% of them were plain white. Now it’s just the opposite; all I see are bicolor ones and I have to search for the plain white ones. It’s an interesting lesson on how flowers evolve to attract more insects. More insects mean more pollinated flowers and that means more seeds. More seeds increase the likelihood of the continuation of the species, and continuation of the species is a driving force in nature.
One evening this cottontail saw me and crouched down to make itself small, as if it wanted to melt into the earth, but as I stood and watched it relaxed and made itself “big” again. I like it when animals sense that I mean them no harm, as this rabbit did. After taking a couple of shots I thanked it and left as it went on munching white clover. I could have artificially lightened this shot but I wanted you to see what I saw. I liked all the lights in the grasses.
Eastern amber wing dragonflies are very pretty but also quite small; I’ve read that they are only about an inch long. I saw them swarming around a pickerel weed plant at a pond and noticed that they never seemed to land. They were always in motion, so I gave up trying to get a shot. Then one day when I wasn’t near water the one shown above flew in front of me and landed on this grass stalk. As you spend more time with nature you find yourself becoming increasingly thankful for what once seemed small or insignificant things, like a dragonfly or a rabbit willing to pose for a photo. Gratitude tends to seep in quite naturally, as do love and joy.
A bee foraging on pollen had its pollen sacs filled to almost overflowing, by the looks. Knapweed pollen is white, as we can see. It’s a beautiful but supposedly invasive flower. I say supposedly because in this area it stays mostly on the embankments the highway department planted it on. I do see it in the wild occasionally but usually just a plant or two.
I’ve always liked the buds on Joe Pye weed as much as the flowers but of course the butterflies and bees prefer the flowers. Last year I found a colony of several plants that were covered in monarch and great spangled fritillary butterflies. I hope I see the same this year, because I still haven’t seen a monarch.
One day I found a little orange skipper butterfly probing for nutrients in the gravel along the side of a road. I got home intending to try to identify it and found so many species of little orange skippers it seemed like it would take forever to identify it, so little orange skipper will have to do for a name.
Pretty little pale spike lobelias have started blooming. Though their color can range from white to deep blue, most I’ve seen this year have looked like the one in the photo. This plant reaches to about knee high and grows in what can be large colonies. Each single flower could hide behind a standard aspirin. Next will come their cousins, Indian tobacco lobelia.
I don’t know who Barbara was but this plant is called Barbara’s buttons. It’s a native perennial plant (Marshallia) in the aster family. The flowers ae quite pretty and unusual, and probably about the same diameter as a large hen’s egg. I’ve read that it grows on roadsides, bogs, or open pine woodlands but it is said to be rare, even in its native southeastern U.S. It can be found for sale at nurseries specializing in rare, unusual and / or exotic plants. I first found this one last year in a garden at a commercial business building.
Like most other plants flowering raspberry is blooming well this year. I’ve known them for a very long time so they seem like old friends. I always like to see their cheery blooms, but even though their fruit looks like a giant, end of your thumb size raspberry, they seem tasteless to me. People have said that you have to put them on the very tip of your tongue to taste them but I’ve tried that as well, and all I’ve tasted is nothing. It was as if I was trying to taste air.
Invasive Japanese honeysuckle berries go from green to this electric, neon orange, and then to bright red, and the birds love them. That’s why I say once the genie is out of the bottle it’s near impossible to get it back in. True, you’d need an army devoted to nothing but honeysuckle control, but why not organize one?
It appears to be a great year for hazelnuts but in some places the blueberry crop has failed. In other areas like hilltops and mountainsides they’re doing fine. I met someone just the other day who told me the apple crop has also failed in certain orchards because of the late freeze, and he said his hay crop will only bear a single late cutting this year. You can’t cut hay in the rain.
I found this plant growing in the garden of a local business and realized that I didn’t know its name. The flowers looked like small hollyhock or rose of Sharon blossoms, but only half the size. The scalloped, basal leaves were shiny and stem leaves were narrow, like willow leaves. The plant was about 3 feet tall and loaded with flowers. I took a couple of shots of it and Google lens told me it was a false mallow.
With flowers like these I was sure it had to be in the mallow family because it had “that look” but false mallow was one I had never heard of. After a little reading I found that it doesn’t like real hot weather and goes dormant until it gets cooler unless it gets regular watering, so I think I’d try it first where it got mostly cooler morning sun, even though some instructions say full sun. It blooms in mid to late summer and is drought tolerant and deer resistant, which would make it valuable in this area. If you like hollyhocks but don’t have the room this one might be for you; another name for it is “miniature hollyhock.”
I found a peachy daylily in my yard that I had forgotten I had. That’s the beauty of daylilies; you can fuss with them if you like but they are in fact a “plant it and forget it” perennial. If you’re looking for a low maintenance garden, daylilies should be near the top of your list. With early, midseason, and late varieties that come in just about any color but blue or black, you can do a lot with them.
Beautiful swamp milkweed is still blooming. One of the benefits of the overcast skies and rain has been longer blooming times for many plants. Some I’ve seen have been blooming for close to a month, and that’s unusual.
I was crawling around on the forest floor, getting shots of mushrooms when I noticed something blue in the cleft of a large boulder. Prying it out with my finger wasn’t easy but I got it out and saw that it was a painted stone. There in the woods it looked like a waterfall falling over the edge of the stone. Whoever painted it has some artistic ability; I thought it was nice how they got the feel of falling water with their brush. Now though, when I see it in a photo, it looks like snowy mountain peaks and trails, trees, and sky. Unless someone was on their hands and knees as I was they would never have seen it, so I wonder what the point of hiding it there was. In any event it I enjoyed seeing it, so I owe a thank you to whoever put it there.
If you want a photographic challenge try enchanter’s nightshade. Not only are the flowers smaller than a pea, but the plants usually grow in deep shade. I’ve had years when I just couldn’t pull it off even after trying many times, but this year after maybe a dozen tries I got lucky. Enchanter’s nightshade isn’t a nightshade at all, but is related to evening primroses. Its small round seed pods readily stick to your clothes and I sometimes find that I’m covered with them when I get home.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe the enchantress drugged Odysseus’ crew and turned them into swine. Circe, who was the daughter of the sun and granddaughter of the oceans, gives enchanter’s nightshade its scientific name Circaea.
As children, we are very sensitive to nature’s beauty, finding miracles and interesting things everywhere. As we grow up, we tend to forget how beautiful and magnificent the world is. There is magic and wonder for eyes who know how to look with curiosity and love. ~ Ansel Adams
This post is about the mushrooms and slime molds that have appeared recently. Warm, humid weather is ideal for their growth and I’ve learned that about two days after a heavy rain is the best time to look for them in this area. I don’t know or care about the science behind this; I’m just speaking from experience. The more mushrooms you find and try to identify the more you will learn about them. When I see a mushroom with a pea size, pleated cap for instance, I think of pinwheels and parachutes. Once I know this I need to know if it grows on decomposing leaves or on decomposing wood, as these did. If I’m lucky I might come up with a name like the leaf parachute mushroom (Marasmius epiphyllus) shown here, but I don’t get too hung up on names of things these days. I just enjoy the beauty and wonder of it all.
Fungi can take you on some incredible journeys, and you don’t have to eat them to experience it. This photo is of one I’ve never seen before and luckily it was very easy to identify as the Asian beauty fungus (Radulodon copelandii.) It is thought to be an invasive fungus native to Asia which was first documented in this country 10 years ago in Massachusetts. It is a toothed crust fungus with long, flat teeth which can be white, yellowish, or the tan color seen here. It likes to grow on hardwood logs, sprouting out of the furrows in the bark.
I found it growing on an oak log from a tree cut a few years ago and the above shot shows it on the butt end of the log, looking like a fungal waterfall.
Cinnamon fairy Stools (Coltricia cinnamomea) are also called tiger eye mushrooms. They get their common name from the concentric bands of cinnamon brown coloring on their one inch diameter caps. They are a tough, leathery polypore which, if picked when fresh, will hold their color and shape for a long time. They usually grow very close to the ground, just high enough for a fairy to sit on, but as I was putting this post together I saw some growing out of a tree stump, with their short stalks parallel to the ground.
I believe this mushroom I found growing on a decomposing pine log is a common rustgill. The cap is kind of orange red and has scales, and is darker in the center.
Common rustgill fungi (Gymnopilus penetrans) have gills that are crowded and rusty orange. Though in this shot the gills don’t appear to attach to the stem (stipe) they attach at about hallway up their width. To get this shot I put my camera under the cap and clicked the shutter, and I was surprised to see so much light coming through what appeared to be a dense cap. Mushrooms almost always come with surprises.
I was walking down a hillside trail that I had walked up a few minutes earlier when I saw these ebony cup (Pseudoplectania nigrella) fungi growing in the moss. I had missed them on the way up but I don’t know how because they were easily seen against the moss. The maple leaves in the foreground should give you a good idea of their size.
Cup fungi are in the sac fungi family and usually have a shiny side and a dull, matte finish side. The shiny side is where the spores are produced and I was reading how, if you blow gently on the shiny side of an ebony cup it would suddenly shoot many thousands of spores up into the air. I’ve never tried this but I can say that inhaling mushroom spores isn’t wise, so I’d be holding my breath after I blew on one. Mushroom spores love to land on warm, moist, dark places to get their start and the interior of a human lung sounds like it would be a perfect spot. The inside of the cup is the shiny surface of these fungi but this one didn’t have much of a shine so it might have already released its spores.
These pinwheel mushrooms (Marasmius rotula) had just started growing when I found them. They were young enough to be nearly see through and so tiny all of what you see in this group would have easily fit into an acorn cap with room to spare. I was amazed that my camera was able to get a photo of something so tiny with detail that I had never seen before.
Not all small white mushrooms with pleated caps belong to the Marasmius family. The dripping Bonnet (Mycena rorida) is one of those that doesn’t. It is also called the slippery mycena because the lower half of its stem is very slimy. It appears fairly unremarkable until you learn that it is bioluminescent, which means that it emits an eerie green glow in the dark, much like the light of a firefly. It is one of many species responsible for the glowing lights seen in a nighttime forest, called foxfire or fairy fire.
One of the most common slime molds is the scrambled egg slime (Fuligo septica,) which likes to grow on wood chips, rotting logs, and sometimes even lumber. When it is spotted it is usually bright yellow as it is in the photo above, and many people’s first encounter with it is when they find it growing on their garden mulch. It is unusual among slime molds because it can grow in full sunlight. Fuligo septicaproduces the largest spore-producing structure of any known slime mold; some of them can be quite big and spread over a large enough area to scare people who don’t know slime molds. “What is this stuff growing in my mulch?” is a question most people in the gardening business have heard.
I recently met a woman in the woods who seemed interested in what I was doing so I started explaining slime molds to her. She wrinkled her nose and said “ugh,” as soon as she heard “slime molds.” I explained that they weren’t slimy or moldy; it was just a name that really didn’t apply. Finally she said “It’s very strange to know these things,” and walked off down the trail. I had to laugh; maybe she was right.
I’m seeing insect egg slime mold (Leocarpus fragilis) quite frequently, always growing on fallen branches, twigs, and even tree bases. As can be seen in this photo each tiny, yellow or orange pill shaped structures (sporangia) hangs from a kind of stalk. Before this stage the slime mold was a mass of plasmodium slowly moving over the forest floor, searching for yeasts, bacteria and whatever else it could feed on. When the plasmodium has run out of food it will form into separate sporangia, as can be seen here. From this stage the sporangia will turn brown and harden and start to crack open before releasing their spores to the wind. Each of the tiny sporangia seen here would measure less than the diameter of the head of a common pin. The green stick like object is a white pine needle, which might help with scale.
One of the most common slime molds is the wolf’s milk slime, which is always found growing on wood in groups and which always looks like tiny pink or brown puffballs. When young they have a pink or orange liquid inside which over time becomes the consistency of toothpaste. As this “paste” ages it dries and becomes the slime mold’s spores. When the outer shell is torn or stepped on they are released to the wind.
Red raspberry slime mold (Tubifera ferruginosa) is another slime mold that can take full sun; it was sunny, very humid, and close to 90 degrees when I found it growing on an old stump. Most slime molds would immediately dry up and fade away in full sun but this one looked pristine. It gets its name from not only its color but also from the way it will grow bumpy as it ages and resemble a raspberry. This one was quite young.
I’ve gotten a few photos of eyelash fungi over the years but this time I wanted to get a closer look at the tiny hairs that give them their name. Bright red eyelash fungi (Scutellinia scutellata) are in the cup fungus family and are edged with hairs can that move and curl in towards the center of the disc shaped body. For that reason it is also called Molly eye-winker. I’ve never been able to find out what the hairs do or why they are there, even from the Mushroom expert web site, so it’s another mushroom mystery. I’ve always found the tiny, pea size fungi in deep shade on saturated twigs or very wet tree wounds but I’ve read that they can also grow on wet soil along streams. They’re cup shaped when young but flatten as they age. I’ve never found more than four or five in a group but I’ve seen photos of large numbers growing together. On this day the flat, pea size example shown was the only one I saw.
The brittle cinder fungus (Kretzschmaria deusta) is striking in gray and white. I always find it growing vertically on standing wood; here it was growing on an old beech stump. It not only changes color but shape over time. In fact by the time it is ready to release its spores you would never guess it had once looked as beautiful as this.
Here is the brittle cinder fungus again in a previous photo, aged to what looks like a lump of coal. It has lost most of its beauty but it is ready to do what it must. It has a hard, shiny shell that will crack open and release thousands of tiny dark spores to the wind. The shell always reminds me of that liquid chocolate you pour on ice cream, which makes a thin shell. Maybe next year I’ll find it at its most beautiful once again.
Fly agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria) can be as big as a dinner plate. This one’s “patches” are white as is the stem, and its cap is often chrome yellow as can be seen here. It is a close relative of the red and white European fly agaric that most are familiar with, and it has much the same hallucinogenic properties. The “fly” part of the common name comes from the way pieces of the fungus were put in a plate of milk. When flies drank the milk they would die. It is said that this mushroom also has the ability to “turn off fear” in humans. Vikings are said to have used it for that very reason, and those who used it were called “berserkers.”
Slugs have appeared as I was sure they would with all the rain, and they love certain mushrooms. Sometimes it can be hard to find a mushroom to photograph that they haven’t already found.
The mushroom called yellow patches (Amanita flavoconia) is related to the fly agaric we just saw but it is less than half the size. The tissue hanging from it is part of the universal veil that covered it completely when it was young. The mushroom tore through it as it grew and it was shredded into pieces, some of which remain as yellow patches on the cap. You’ll note that these patches were white on the fly agaric, and so was the stem. It can be easy to confuse the two because the stem on yellow patches can sometimes be white; I’ve done so a few times. If the mushroom is small and lemon yellow with yellow patches on the cap it is most likely this one.
So, would you eat this? I didn’t think so. Mycologists often label mushrooms like this one LBMs, which stands for “little brown mushrooms,” and since they can all more or less look alike and be a real pain to identify, the LBMs get dumped into a too hard basket; left for another day. But I saw so many of these in this one area this year I thought I’d give them a try. If I’ve done the job correctly I think it’s a mushroom called the deadly web cap (Cortinarius colymbadinus.) They’re in the same family as pretty purple corts, which should be showing themselves any time now. Cortinarius is a large family of mushrooms and many of them will make you sick. Some can kill, so the advice from mushroom people is to not eat any of them.
The coral fungi have started to appear and one of the first I’ve seen is this one, which I think this might be Clavaria ornatipes. It is described as spatulate, which means flat and wide like a spatula. They shrivel when they dry out and revive after a rain. They grow directly out of the ground and there are often hundreds of them. Books don’t have a lot to say about this one so I’m not sure it has a common name.
We’ve seen some tiny mushrooms in this post but here is one of the biggest that I know of; Berkley’s polypore. The young one in this photo was already nearing a foot in length and it’s common to find them three feet in diameter.
Here is the same fungal cluster that is in the previous photo. In just 6 days it had doubled in size and with all the rain, it will most likely keep growing until it is king of the fungal forest. Once it has stopped growing it will release its spores and slowly decompose until finally its stench will be able to be detected from several yards away. Although these giants can look as if they’re sitting on the ground they do have a short, thick stalk. This mushroom should not be confused with the edible chicken of the woods which is usually bright orange red. It can also sometimes be more yellow than red and as you break off pieces of it you’ll notice that they have yellow undersides and tiny round pores.
Here is a chicken of the woods for comparison; I found it one a few years ago and it was quite big, but not as big as a Berkley’s polypore. It was also very colorful, like a giant flower, but the color can vary and it will fade with age. I’ve been able to watch two of them age and one, which got a lot of sunlight, faded to stark white. The other was shaded and it kept some color until it finally rotted away. I’ve heard that these mushrooms can get as big as a Berkley’s polypore but I’ve never seen one get that big. Size isn’t all of it though; there are many differences between the two, and if you scroll up and down between this one and the Berkley’s polypore in the previous shot you’ll see that the differences are obvious.
Though I love flowers there are many other things as beautiful and in my opinion mushrooms are one of those. Due to drought it has been about two years I think, since I was last able to do a mushroom post. We certainly aren’t seeing drought this year so I hope to be able to do one or two more. I do hope you enjoy them.
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
It’s that time of year when all the water loving flowers bloom and with 22 out of 30 days in June rainy, they’re loving life and blooming well, as this pickerel weed shows. I usually like to show a closeop of the fuzzy flowers with their yellow spots but water levels in all the ponds are high enough to keep me from getting close enough. This group grew just off shore but was still in two feet of water.
Pickerel weed as the story goes, gets its name from the way pickerel fish hide among the stems. Like so many stories I always thought that though there might be some truth to it, it had probably been “enhanced” over the years, so I always took it with a grain of salt. Then one day I happened to be walking by a fisherman whose rod suddenly bent almost double. I stopped and watched as he reeled in a good sized pickerel that had put up quite a fight. He thanked me for bringing him luck even though I had done nothing, and I asked him where the fish had taken his bait. “Right out there in those pickerel weeds,” he said.
American bur reed has just come into bloom. The spherical bur like parts are its flowers. This plant grows in shallow water near shore and can form huge colonies that can take over small ponds. There are two types of flowers on this plant. The smaller and fuzzier staminate male flowers grow at the top of the stem and the larger pistillate female flowers lower down. Even the larger flowers are less than a half inch across. After pollination the male flowers fall off and the female flowers become a bur-like cluster of beaked fruits that ducks and other waterfowl eat.
If you spend time near ponds in summer in New Hampshire you’re going to see plenty of dragonflies, like this twelve spotted skimmer. To get to 12 on this one you count only the dark wing spots, not the white ones. Skimmers usually fly just above the water looking for flies, mosquitoes, beetles, and other flying insects, but the name “skimmer” comes from the way they can scoop up water to help with egg laying by using two flanges on the underside of the abdomen. This one was perched on shore and would fly out, circle, and return to its perch. All I had to do was be still, watch, and wait.
Swamp candles is the name given to one of our yellow loosestrife species. Though most grow on dry land this one prefers to have its feet wet and it is often found growing just off shore where the ground is more mud than soil. It grows to about knee high and can form quite large colonies. I also see it in ditches and at the edge of forests where the soil stays very moist. The plants pictured here were growing in water at the very edge of where the land met the water.
If you look closely you usually find at least a bit of red somwhere on a swamp candle flower, and on other yellow loosestrife flowers as well. They’re very pretty, even from a distance, and they do indeed light up a swamp or anywhere else they grow.
Joe Pye weed isn’t blooming quite yet but it’s still beautiful with its purple leaves. It is said that the color is there to protect the new growth from sunburn but it will quickly fade to green once the leaves become accustomed to the bright sunlight. The plant almost always grows near water and is known for its large, dusty rose flower heads that butterflies and bees love. There are two legends about the origin of its name. The best known says Joe Pye was the name of a Native American healer who used the plant to heal, and the second says that the true name is Jopi, which is the native name of the plant, not the healer. I’m more inclined to believe the latter version but in the end I don’t know and it really doesn’t matter. The moment now when I become lost in its beauty is all that matters.
I was walking through some knee high growths of grasses, sedges, and rushes at the edge of a pond and up flew a widow skimmer. I wasn’t thinking of dragonflies at the time but I shouldn’t have been surprised because I’ve read that off in the knee high growth near water is just where this dragonfly likes to be. I’ve noticed by watching them that they like to hang or perch vertically as this one did. I’ve read that females don’t have the white patches on their wings like this one displays. They are called “widows,” it is said, because the males don’t guard the females while they’re laying eggs like other dragonflies do. This one might be an immature male.
I thought I might see a frog to include in this post and I saw many just as they jumped into the water, so instead I settled for a slower moving turtle. Something about this one seems odd to me but I can’t put my finger on what it is. It’s as if there is too much yellow on it, or maybe that the yellow seems brighter than usual, I’m not sure. Maybe its just me and this turtle looks just the way it should. It’s always funny how you can see something like this thousands of times and then one day you pick something out that makes it seem like you’re seeing it for the first time.
One of my favorite wet feet, swampy flowers has just come into bloom and I’m happy to see it. I’m told that blue vervain is actually purple but I didn’t name it. Native Americans had many medicinal uses for the roots, seeds, and leaves of this plant. Its leaves were dried and then used in a tea that was used as a spring tonic. Seeds were roasted and ground into flour, and the roots were used to ease headaches and calm the nerves. I’ve read that even the flowers can be eaten in salad, but I’ve also read that ingesting the plant can interfere with some blood pressure medications, so as is always the case when using wild or unknown plants, care should be taken.
Cattails are flowering and since a single stalk can produce an estimated 220,000 seeds, it looks like a good year. Female green flowers appear near the top of the tall stalk and the fluffy yellowish green male pollen bearing flowers above them. Once fertilized the female parts turn from green to dark brown and the male flowers will fall off, leaving a stiff pointed spike above the familiar cigar shaped seed head.
Cattails were an important food for Native Americans. Their roots contain more starch than potatoes and more protein than rice, and native peoples made flour from them. They also ate the new shoots in spring, which must have been especially welcome after a long winter of eating dried foods. They had uses for every part of this plant; even the pollen was harvested and used in bread.
One of the most unusual and rare aquatic plants in this area is the water lobelia. I’ve seen it in just one spot and that might be because it is said to be a more northern species. It is said to be an indicator of infertile and relatively pristine shoreline wetlands. The small, pale blue or sometimes white flowers are less than a half inch long and not very showy. As is true with larger lobelias like cardinal flowers, the bases of the 5 petals are fused into a tube and the 2 shorter upper petals fold up. I’ve read that the flowers can bloom and set seed even under water. The seed pods are said to contain numerous seeds and that might be why I saw that there were many more plants this year than there have been in the past.
Chalk fronted corporal is kind of a tedious name for a dragonfly but as I’ve said; I don’t name them. I keep taking photos of this one so I can show you the “corporal stripes” that give it its name and you can just see them there behind the head. It’s not a great shot of the stripes but since I can’t get one to face me it’ll have to do. I’ve noticed that many dragonflies prefer having me behind them or off to the side, not face to face. The white on its body does look chalky so that fact along with the stripes makes its name sensible, even if it is a little tedious. This dragonfly is another skimmer; one of the “king skimmers,” so called because of the way they dominate dragonfly activity at a pond. I’ve seen them chase off many other dragonflies that I was trying to get shots of so again, the name fits. I like to see the patterns in a dragonfly’s wings and these are quite beautiful.
This shot is for those who’ve never seen a fragrant white water lily bud.
Those buds will open into what I think of as the queen of the aquatics, which is the beautiful waterlily seen here. I saw something strange happen this year, speaking of water liles. A small fire pond next to a shopping center is full of fragrant white waterlilies and that’s my usual “go to” spot when I feel like taking photos of them. I went one day and decided it was just too cloudy to do anything worthwhile. Then a couple of days later after some heavy rain I went back to find that the water level of the pond had risen so much not a single flower could be seen. Were they all under water? I don’t know; I’ve never seen it happen before. Hopefully they’ll bloom again when the water level drops.
I call it frog jelly but a more correct name would be frog spawn. How it got on top of this lily pad I don’t know. If you click on the photo and look closely you can see tadpoles, but I wouldn’t think they’d be doing very well under the hot sunshine we had this day. By the way, you can buy jars of frog jelly online. I didn’t read the ingredients, and I’m not really sure I want to.
I believe this dragonfly is another skimmer called the slaty skimmer but I’m not sure because of its blotchy body color. Mature males have dark blue bodies and black heads but since the blue coloration is a bit splotchy on this one I think it must be an immature male growing into its adult body color. In any event it’s a beautiful dragonfly and is supposed to be another “king skimmer,” even though I’ve seen the chalk fronted corporals chase them off many times.
From a distance I thought I was shooting another slaty skimmer but then I saw the white “spangle” on its wing in the foreground and I realized it was a spangled skimmer. It’s hard to see but there is a black spangle on the outside leading edge of the wing and a white one on the inside, toward the body. The spangles are called pterostigmata, which is why I call them spangles. This dragonfly, if I understand what I’ve read correctly, is a mature male. Its blue color shows that; immature males and females are brown with yellow stripes. It was amazingly hot and humid when I was taking some of these photos but it didn’t seem to bother the dragonflies.
I always feel fortunate when I find floating heart plants growing close enough to shore to get photos of them, but even then I have to use a zoom lens. This is our smallest water lily, with small, heart-shaped, greenish, or reddish to purple leaves that are about an inch and a half wide. They are what give the plant its name. The tiny flowers of floating heart are about the size of a common aspirin, but never seem to open fully. I look for them in shallow, still water but they aren’t common. I saw a lot of insects visiting the flowers on this day and I was thinking that the flowers might not open fully so water doesn’t get in. The cup shape might prevent some splash over.
Floating hearts grow a foot or two (sometimes more) off shore and in this spot forget me nots grew in the water right at the shore line. The forget me nots were so lush and tall they actually kept blocking my shot of the floating hearts. I never thought much about forget me nots and water until I saw them at this spot a year or two ago. Since then I’ve remembered the time I found a huge colony of thousands of plants growing on a river bank that floods regularly, so there is no doubt that these plants like a lot of water.
Pale St. Johnswort flowers are sometimes quite pale and at other times bright, lemon yellow, but they always seem to grow new branches just under the terminal flower cluster, as can be seen here. The plants are usually in colonies where they grow, with some right at the water’s edge and others a foot or two away. The plants grow to about shin height with flowers that are about half the size of a standard St. Johnswort, or about a half inch across. I’ve never seen this plant grow anywhere but in or near water on pond shores or in wetlands.
I’m far from being an authority on insects but most of the dragonflies in this post are fairly common so I didn’t think any of them would trip me up. Until I met this one, that is. At first I thought it was an eastern pondhawk because of the powdery blue color, but they don’t have amber on their wings, so it couldn’t be that. You can see how the leading wing edges are colored amber and they’re the same color where they meet the body. I have a bad shot that shows yellow on the side of the body, so I’ve settled on the yellow sided skimmer, and I think it’s an immature male. If I’m wrong with this or any other dragonfly identification I hope someone will let me know.
NOTE: Thanks to some help from a friend I went and looked up blue dashers, and I think this dragonfly is one of those. They have the same amber on the wings and other features match the male blue dasher as well. Thanks Georgette!
This looks like a side view of the yellow sided skimmer in the previous shot but there is no amber on the wings, so that can’t be it. It has white appendages (ceri) at the very tip of its “tail,” its wings are clear and it has a greenish thorax, which is the part where the wings meet the body. It has a green face and blue green eyes, and likes to perch on the ground, so all of that points to an immature male eastern pondhawk. Males are at first green, slowly changing to powdery blue over several weeks, and this one had apparently almost completed the process. Pondhawks are said to be “ferocious hunters” which will eat just about any other insect, including other dragonflies and damselflies. Though they’re found near water they can also be found in meadows, away from water. I sat and watched this one fly off and return to this spot a few times but I never saw it eating. It was tough to get a clear shot of it with such a busy background so I was hoping it would land on a twig or leaf, but it never did.
One of my favorite “pond flowers” is swamp milkweed. It normally grows a few feet from the water up on shore but this year for the first time I found it growing in the water of a slow moving stream. It’s a beautiful thing that always reminds me of millefiori paperweights. Millefiori means “thousand flowers.” I have a small paperweight collection from years ago and I often think of how nice it would be to have something like this encased in glass on a desk, but as far as I know it has never been reproduced. The “flowers” seen in paperweights are sections of colored glass rods, so maybe this color is hard to get. Too bad; it would be a wonderful thing for a nature lover to see on those below zero winter days.
There are certain rare flowers that I always hope to see and one of those is the rose pogonia orchid, so imagine my surprise last year when I came upon this small bog mat / island full of them just a few yards offshore in a local pond. I was stunned, and what stunned me more than anything was how I had visited this place so many times before and never seen them. That was because I had never been here at just this time of year. Last year when I first saw them I tried a monopod and didn’t get a very good shot of them so this year I used a tripod, but still didn’t get a very good shot of them. Next year waders?
I’m showing this close up from a few years ago, taken when I went to Distant Hill Gardens in Walpole, so you can see how beautiful they are. This encounter illustrates once again why it’s important for anyone interested in nature study to get out there every day, and to revisit the same places time and again. All of life is in a state of constant change and the best way to become aware of those changes is to simply pay attention.
Next year when I see native dogwoods and tall meadow rue blooming I’ll know that the orchids should also be blooming. Great spangled fritillary butterflies will appear, blueberries will start to ripen, and elderberries will start setting fruit at the same time the orchids bloom. Life is a circle, and when it’s time to see the orchids again I’ll know by watching for these and other signs. This isn’t anything new; it’s how nomadic peoples got to a place at just the right time to find food. Nature set the table but they had to provide the transportation. Get there at the right time and sleep with a full belly. Miss it and go hungry. Learn what signs to watch for and you’ll never miss out.
Anyhow, now I know that if I want to see rose pogonia orchids in bloom all I have to do is visit this spot when I see the swamp milkweeds and the other plants in this blog post starting to blossom. I’ll be there, because they’re such a rare and beautiful thing to see. If they aren’t disturbed they should be there for many years to come.
The dome of coolness above the pond throbs with croaking. Dragonflies and damselflies pierce the slanting light that burnishes the surface of the water with fire. At the edges frogs wait to spring. ~Grace Dane Mazur
In the last post I said that the plants I showed there weren’t the kind you would find just kicking around on the side of the road, but in this post these plants are exactly what you will find on the side of the road. They’re called weeds, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t beautiful. Just look at the crown vetch seen above. I’ve said here before that if I (as an engineer) were to design a flower, I couldn’t come up with one as simple, pure, and beautiful as this. It’s considered invasive now but it was originally imported to be used to stabilize embankments, and I see it still being used in that way today.
The crown vetch in the previous photo is a legume, in the same family as a pea or a bean, and you can tell that by the shape of the flower. I could bury us in botanical speak but the only thing to really know to identify a legume is that their flowers have a standard and a keel. The standard in this case is the half round part with the dark lines on it and the keel pokes out at us from the lower middle part of the standard. That’s really all you need to know to identify a legume when it is flowering. The reproductive parts are inside the boat shaped keel, and that’s why you see insects trying to pry it open. Sometimes “wings” can appear on either side of the keel, but not always. Just scroll back and forth between the crown vetch and bird’s foot trefoil and you’ll see that the flowers closely resemble each other.
Or, you can just ignore all of the above and simply enjoy them. My knowing what their names are and how they function doesn’t mean I can love them any more deeply than someone who knows nothing about them. In fact, carrying around a sack full of botanical baggage can at times get in the way of seeing a flower for what it truly is, which is simply one of the many ways that nature expresses itself.
Now come the lupines, which are also legumes. I’m not sure what has gotten into our lupines this year. I’ve never seen them stand so straight and tall. In the past this group, which grows on a roadside embankment, has been much shorter and almost deformed. It must be the rain. It’s easy to see what a year of below average rainfall is like when you have a year of average rainfall to compare it with. After two summers of drought this month we’ve had at least some rain for 22 out of 30 days, and though that’s above average we’re seeing plants respond well, without any symptoms of over watering. Historically, we average about an inch per week.
I like the crepe paper appearance of mallow petals but I don’t see them very often. I know of only two places where they grow beside the road. I know nothing about how they can grow wild in such a limited way, but I have a feeling the plants I know must be garden escapees. Other well-known plants in this family include hibiscus, hollyhocks, and rose of Sharon; all plants with large flowers like this plant has.
But this plant, a dwarf mallow, has flowers that are only about an inch across. I found a few plants growing near the foundation of an old mill building last year and though the maintenance man weed whacks the place regularly he can’t keep them down.
Though spreading dogbane doesn’t look like a milkweed it is in the same family and if you cut its stem you’ll see the same white, sticky sap come oozing out. Milkweeds are notorious for trapping unwary insects and I’ve seen plenty trapped by dogbane. The pretty little fragrant, pink striped flowers might be the diameter of an aspirin at their opening. Native Americans pounded the stems and made a strong thread from the tough fibers which they used to make nets for hunting rabbits, among other things. I find the plants growing in clearings and the shaded edges of forests. It prefers partial shade.
I like to see flowering grasses and I’ve admired them for many years but I didn’t recognize this one so I had to look it up. It’s called wheat grass and though I’m sure I must have seen it hundreds of times, it seems new to me. Its bright yellow flowers mean it stands out from any surrounding vegetation.
The name “Jack go to bed at noon” taught me to watch for goat’s beard flowers in the morning, because all you’ll find is closed buds in the afternoon. I can think of a few flowers that have similar quirks; marsh St. Johnswort won’t open unless it is in full sunshine, which is often about 3:00 pm. Goat’s beard isn’t really common here and I only know of one place to find it. The flowers are followed by huge, spherical seed heads that look like giant dandelion seed heads. They always seem cartoonish like a child’s drawing, and they make me smile.
Golden hop clover is another legume. It’s a small plant that might reach ankle high on a good day and, since bird’s foot trefoil blossoms at the same time, it’s an easy plant to miss. But the flowers make it worth taking a closer look; this one’s inner light was so bright it actually lit up the underside of the leaf beside it. This is another invasive plant that was imported on purpose in 1800 to be used as a pasture crop. It now appears in most states on the east and west coasts, and much of Canada, but it is not generally considered aggressively invasive. Each pretty yellow flower head is packed with golden yellow pea-like flowers. I see it growing close enough to roadsides to be run over, and in sandy waste areas as well.
Though some plants in the nightshade family are edible, others are highly poisonous. The bittersweet nightshade in the above photo falls somewhere in between. Even toxic plants can have medicinal value if used in a certain way and this one has been used since ancient times. These days it is used to treat ringworm, skin diseases and even asthma. If its flowers are pollinated the plant will have small, shiny, bright red berries that look like tiny Roma tomatoes in late summer, and they are why the plant can be dangerous. The berries at first taste bitter and are usually immediately spit out but if kept in the mouth before long their taste becomes sweet, and that’s where the name bittersweet comes from. I remember as a boy I could never get past the strange foul odor the plant has, so I was never tempted by its berries. Bruising it in any way releases this odor and it’s a real stinker, with an odor that can be detected from a few feet away.
As this arrowwood shows, viburnums are still blooming. But their time is almost done, just in time for the native dogwoods to start blooming. The simplest way to know which is which is to look closely at the flowers. Viburnum flowers have five petals and dogwoods have four petals. One thing distinctive about arrowwood that separates it from other viburnums is its leaf’s shape and shine. It is said that this plant’s common name comes from Native Americans using the straight stems for arrow shafts. They also used the shrub medicinally and its fruit as food.
I was just reading that insects prefer a single, rather than a double flower because they don’t have to work as hard to get at what they want, and after looking at a single rose I can believe it. A single flowered rose is defined as having four to eight petals per flower. A double flowered rose has seventeen to twenty five petals, according to the American Rose Society. This flower says “here I am” and there is hardly any work involved in getting at its reproductive parts. We have three native roses and a few others which are garden escapees, so roses are one of those flowers that are easy to stumble upon.
This particular bush had so many bumblebees on it they were bumping into my arms as I tried to get a shot of a flower and I remembered how my son as a boy of probably five or six, was convinced that bumblebees couldn’t sting. One day he caught one and closed his hand around it and found that they could indeed sting. Luckily on this day they were too busy to bother with me.
Multiflora rose is a common small flowered rose from China that is seen just about everywhere, and that’s because it is very invasive. Birds eat the small, bright red hips and plant it everywhere. I’ve seen it climb 30 feet up into trees but it doesn’t climb with tendrils like a grape, or by twining itself around trees like oriental bittersweet. It just winds its way through the branches of surrounding shrubs and trees and uses them to prop itself up. It’s all about getting the most sunlight, and this one is an expert at it.
Though multiflora rose is one of the most invasive plants we have in this part of the country it’s also highly fragrant and I’ve always loved smelling it as I walked along rail trails. You wouldn’t think that a flower only an inch across could pack so much scent but they do, and walking by a bush full of them in June is something you don’t forget right away. The trouble in controlling this rose comes by way of its very numerous, sharp thorns and extremely long branches. Cutting just one full grown plant and pulling all of its branches out of the surrounding vegetation can take the better part of a day, and then you still have to dig the stump. By the time you’re done you’ve almost filled a pickup truck. That’s just one plant, and there are many thousands of them. That’s a good reason to pull them when they’re just getting started. Late November after the leaves have fallen is the best time to do it. But not without gloves!
Partridgeberries are ground huggers; they couldn’t grow any closer to the ground than they do, so you’re always looking down at the flowers. Looking down you don’t see how hairy they are, so to see their hairiness as you see it in the photo you have to become a ground hugger too. The tiny flowers blossom in pairs and share a single ovary, so any time you find a pea size red berry on a ground hugging plant you can check to see if it’s a partridge berry by looking for two dimples. The dimples show where the flowers grew. If the berry has no dimples it is probably an American wintergreen berry, also called a teaberry, and its strong wintergreen scent should give it away. My favorite part of a partridge berry plant is its leaves, which look like hammered metal.
Heal all is recorded in the histories of several countries before travel was recorded, so nobody seems to agree on where it originated. The name heal all comes from the way that it has been used medicinally for centuries on nearly every continent to cure virtually any ailment one can name. It is also known as self-heal and is still used today for healing wounds, throat ailments, and inflammation. Several major universities are researching its possible use in the treatment of breast and liver cancer, diabetes, and other serious illnesses. Native Americans used the plant as a food and also medicinally, treating bruises, cuts, sore throats, and other ailments. I often find it in mowed lawns or along roadsides and I call them nature’s cheerleaders, because the small purple flowers always seem to be shouting Yay! Just look how happy they are; always smiling.
St. John’s wort gets its common name from the way that it flowers near June 24th, which is St. Johns day, and that’s just what it did this year. Originally from Europe, the two foot tall plants with bright yellow flower clusters can be found in meadows, waste places, and along roadsides, growing in full sun. Man has had a close relationship with the plant for thousands of years; the Roman military doctor Proscurides used it to treat patients as early as the 1st century AD, and it was used by the ancient Greeks before that. It is still used today to treat depression, sleeping disorders, anxiety, and other issues.
Sulfur cinquefoil is a rough looking, knee high plant that grows in waste places and on the edges of corn fields where few people ever go, but its heart shaped, butter yellow petals are quite beautiful, in my opinion. They have that deeper yellow center that always makes them seem to shine like the summer sun.
Flowers can come with some very powerful memories and one of the most powerful for me comes with black eyed Susans. My first thought as soon as I see it is “fall” no matter when it blooms, and that thought always seems to come with a touch of melancholy, especially when it comes in June. This year thanks to this plant I was thinking of fall even before summer had officially arrived. None of this means I don’t like the plant; I think its flowers are very pretty, especially those with a splash of maroon on the petals. I suppose if life wasn’t occasionally tinged with a little sadness then joy wouldn’t seem so precious, but someday I’m going to have to sit with this one and ask “why do you do this to me?’
Shy little wood sorrel barely reaches your boot tops and its pretty flowers often hide behind its leaves so you have to do a bit of hunting if you want to see them. Heavy rain had dirtied the face of this one a bit but we can still see its beautiful stripes and the yellow spot on each petal. I always have to smile when I see the spots because they look as if they were painted on as an afterthought, there only to attract insects. The plant likes shady, moist places. I’ve only found it in only two places so I couldn’t say it was common, but it’s out there.
Yarrow is a common roadside weed now considered by many to be the lowest of the low, but it was once so valuable it was traded throughout the world, and today it is found on almost every continent on earth. It is mentioned in the Chinese I Ching, which is said to pre date recorded history, and has been found in excavations of neanderthal graves. It was a valuable healing herb; one of the nine “holy herbs,” and was known as the soldier’s woundwort and herbe militaris for centuries; used even during the American civil war to stop the flow of blood. Native Americans knew it well and used it for everything from snake bites to deodorant. Once so highly prized throughout the known world by emperors, healers, and sages, today people don’t even pretend to try to not run it over when they park their cars on the roadside.
Roadside weeds aren’t special things or magic things, but they are things that can put just a little magic into everyday life and help make it a little more special. They ask for nothing but bring pleasure, and help us slow down so we can get our share of life’s beauty in full measure. There is more than enough to go around, so we might as well see all we can. Just walk along a roadside and see if they don’t put a smile on your face.
I almost forgot to include fireworks in honor of Independence Day. Nature’s fireworks that is, in the form of tall meadow rue. I’ve always thought that the orange tipped male flowers, which always appear on or near the 4th, looked just like exploding fireworks. I hope everyone who wants to, gets to see the real thing this year. It’s looking like a chance of showers here this year but as I remember it there was almost always a chance of showers when firework displays were involved.
Take the time to observe the simple and ponder upon the seemingly insignificant. You’ll find a wealth of depth and beauty. ~Melanie Charlene
Thanks for stopping in. I hope everyone has a safe and happy 4th!
New Hampshire Garden Solutions 