Walking Near Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Summer Flowers Come A Little Early

Pink lady’s slipper orchids, our state wildflower, are blooming a little early this year. They usually bloom when ox-eye daisies and lupines bloom but this year they were a bit earlier than both. And there are fewer of them. Where I often find a dozen in bloom this year I’m finding only two or three. This photo shows five or six plants with only one blooming, and that seems to be the way it has been going in this area. I have a feeling the lack is connected to the past two summers of drought; so dry there was hardly a mushroom to be seen. That’s important, because these orchids depend on a soil borne Rhizoctonia fungus. This year so far we’ve seen what I would call average rainfall, so maybe that will mean more blooms next summer.

When plants are weakened by drought they are less likely to bloom prolifically but life is a circle and the woods will surely be full of them again in the future. The blossoms on pink lady’s slippers are especially beautiful with their darker, vein like insect guide lines that will guide the insect, hopefully a bumblebee, right to the slit seen here at the top of the pouch. Once inside the bee finds there is only one way out, which is through the top of the blossom. While squeezing through the hole in the top it has to brush against the sticky stigma and it leaves behind any pollen it might have collected from other flowers. It will also have picked up pollen from this flower, ready for transport to another. It all seems complicated but orchids are the most highly evolved of all plants and their method works; I see quite a few seed pods in late summer.

Shy little bunchberries seem to be blooming well this year. They are associated with wood and grow on stumps, logs, and even live trees. Even when they appear to be growing on the ground there is usually an old log or something made of wood beaneath them. Why this is isn’t known but it is thought that they must receive nutrients from the wood they grow on. Bunchberry is in the dogwood family and is also called creeping dogwood or bunchberry dogwood. White bracts surround the actual flowers, which are greenish and very small. The entire flower cluster with bracts and all is often no bigger than an inch and a half across. If all goes well the flowers will become a bunch of bright red berries.

When you see dogwoods flowering you know it’s time to look for bunchberries, because being in the same family, they almost always bloom at the same time. Once again on this tree there are large white bracts surrounding the much smaller flowers in the center, just as we saw on the bunchberry.

Some dogwoods were hit hard by the freeze we had on May 18th, as these blossoms show. The leaves don’t seem to have been bothered though, so the trees should do okay. In certain areas many trees like catalpla and black locust had all their leaves and flower buds killed or damaged by the freeze so we’ll have to wait and see how they recover. I should be seeing catalpa trees blossoming all over right now and I haven’t seen even one.

Golden ragwort is in the aster family and is considered our earliest blooming aster. It doesn’t mind growing in wet soil and tolerates shade so it always seems like a beacon with its bright yellow flowers shining in the dappled shade I find it in. It isn’t a common plant so I’m usually surprised by it as I was this time when I found it in a place I’ve walked by hudreds of times. It seems to be a plant that “gets around.” You’ll see it in a spot for a year or even three and then it will disappear, only to be found in a different spot.

Tatarian honeysuckle is one of the prettiest of the invasive honeysuckles, in my opinion. It is originally from Siberia and other parts of eastern Asia and in the fall its pretty pink flowers become bright red berries. Of course, birds eat the berries and the plant spreads quickly.

Morrow’s Honeysuckle is another invasive honeysuckle. It has sweetly fragrant, pretty white flowers that turn yellow with age. Unfortunately, it spreads by its berries like Tatarian honeysuckle and it can form dense thickets and outcompete native shrubs. It seems more aggressive than Tatarian honeysuckle and I see it far more often.

It’s a shame to have so many invasive plants and I would never make light of it, but the truth is once the genie is out of the bottle from what I’ve seen, it is nearly impossible to put it back in. Invasive honeysuckles have been around since I was just a small boy and I know that the only way to truly be rid of them is to dig them up and pull all the seedlings. But I can attest to the fact that digging up a honeysuckle is very hard work, and who will do it?

Does that mean we shouldn’t fight invasives? No, what I’m saying is, maybe Instead of setting out to “rid the world of the scourge” we should just be at peace with whatever we can accomplish. A lot of littles can add up to a lot. People seem ready to get together and “do the big thing” and then when they see more invasives growing where they’ve done so much hard work they get discouraged and give up. This is not the way to win. Everyone doing what they can when they can is the way to win.

An eastern swallowtail butterfly appeared to prefer the white Morrow’s honeysuckle but there were no tatarian honeysuckles in the area, so that probably isn’t a fair assesment. I doubt it has any real preference.

I hadn’t seen any dragonflies yet this spring so I went to Hancock one day, back to the nature camp I once worked for, just to take a walk and see what I could see. There is a pond there and there used to be so many dragonflies I had them land on me and even fly alongside the tractor when I mowed the meadow. They did that because they knew the tractor was going to scare up insects for them to eat. That’s when I discovered that dragonflies are not only smart but they must have at least a hint of a memory.

I spent some time at the pond hoping to see dragonflies, but didn’t see any. That’s because they were all here on this dirt road, apparently. Google lens says this one is a lancet clubtail, which likes to rest on gravel roads, so that fit. Two things bother me about that identification though; eye color, and the photo isn’t good enough to see the “tail.” If I understand what I’ve read this dragonfly’s eyes should be blue or gray, not brown. The color might just be caused by the harsh lighting though, because I’ve had trouble finding dragonflies of any kind with brown eyes online.

There were lots of fringed polygala at the camp when I worked there but I didn’t see many this time so I went to another spot and found these. These plants are in the milkwort family and aren’t really common but if they like a spot they can grow into a good size colony. I could explain how they’re pollinated but it’s quite a convoluted process so I’ll just ask that you trust me; they are pollinated. And it all starts when a heavy enough insect lands on that little fringe.

When I was looking for winged polygayla flowers I found a rag lichen. Despite a recent rain it was quite dry and, as is often the case with lichens, most of its color had changed as it dried. It wasn’t its color that I was interested in though; it was its amazing net like texture. This is the first time I had seen this lichen so I spent quite a lot of time getting photos of it. If you click on the photo you’ll be better able to see what I mean about its texture.

I thought I’d show one more shot of new spring oak leaves. They’re probably the last I’ll see this year. This shot shows how they finally turn green while still wearing their velvet coats. Once green and photosynthesizing they’ll lose their velvet and shine.

The male flowers of pine trees are called pollen cones because that’s what they produce. Pine trees are wind pollinated and great clouds of pollen can make it look like the trees are burning and releasing yellow green smoke each spring. Pine pollen is a strong antioxidant and it has been used medicinally around the world for thousands of years. Its health benefits were first written of in China nearly 5000 years ago and they were said to be numerous. You can still buy it today.

I love to see Robin’s plantain, which is one of the fleabanes, bloom in spring because it reveals all the flower lovers among us who, rather than mow it down, leave it to bloom. It is a common “weed” that comes up in lawns everywhere but it’s beautiful, so you’ll see large islands of unmowed grass with pink flowers poking up out of them on otherwise manicured lawns. For a week or so the weeds win and it always makes me smile. If only people could understand that it is these “weeds” that are normal, not their lawns. There was a time when grass was the weed, and it was dug up so the weeds, mostly used for food or medicine, would have more room to grow. The world must have been even more beautiful then.

Germander speedwell is another beautiful weed that is one of the larger flowered “lawn” speedwells. It is also called bird’s eye or cat’s eye speedwell and is considered invasive but I always find it growing in the unmown grass at the edge of the woods, so I don’t know why it would be a bother. It can make rather large colonies so maybe if it got into the garden it could be a pest, but after a lifetiime in gardens I’ve never seen it in one, so I say just enjoy its quiet beauty and let it be. I would welcome it in my own yard.

Lesser stitchwort is blooming among the tall grasses. This plant is originally from Europe and is also called common or grass leaved stitchwort. It likes disturbed soil and does well on roadsides, old fields, and meadows. The common name stitchwort refers to the plant being used in herbal remedies to cure the pain in the side that we call a stitch. The stellaria part of its scientific name means star, and these beautiful little stars twinkle all summer long, just about everywhere I go. They and so many other weeds call me out of the shade of the forests and into the sunny meadows. There is great beauty found in both places but I learned as a boy that a meadow was much easier to walk through. When I wanted sweet and soft rather than rough and tumble I chose a sunny summer meadow.

Tradescantia, also called spiderwort, has come into bloom. I took this photo because I thought I had found a pale blue one which I’d never seen, but my color finding software tells me it’s purple and I’ve seen plenty of those. I keep forgetting that I have a color blind helper app on my phone. It works well in the field but only if you remember to use it. The same could be said for the color blind glasses I have; they’re great, but you have to remember them.

I was a little disappointed when I saw this white tradescantia blossom because last year it had blue streaks in its petals along with the blue in the center. It was a beautiful thing and it still is, but I do miss the blue in its petals. I looked at several different plants and all the flowers looked just like this one. If you’d like to see what I saw last year just Google “Tradescantia Osprey.” Apparently they can revert back to the solid white.

If you could somehow look back into the past to Ancient Greece at about 371 BC, you’d probably see this beautiful daffodil there. It’s called the poet’s daffodil and is such an ancient plant that many believe it is the flower that the legend of Narcissus is based on. It is one of the first cultivated daffodils and is hard to mistake for any other, with its red edged, yellow corona and pure white petals. It has naturalized throughout this area and can sometimes be found in unmown fields. Its fragrance can be compared to that of the paper white narcissus; so intoxicating that being in a room with 2 or 3 flowers in a vase can give some people headaches or make them sick. It blooms a bit later, just as most other daffodils are giving in. is also called the pheasant eye daffodil, for obvious reasons.

Lupines have just started blooming. I found this one at the local college. Anyone who has spent any time in a garden knows that lupines are in the pea / bean family. It’s a huge family of plants and you see its representatives just about everywhere.

Five swans came together on the back of a columbine blossom.

One of my favorite spring shrubs is the rhodora. It is a small, native rhododendron that loves swampy places. It’s native to the northeastern U.S. and Canada and its flowers appear before the leaves for a short time in late spring. By mid-June they will have all vanished. On May 17, 1854 Henry David Thoreau wrote “The splendid Rhodora now sets the swamps on fire with its masses of rich color,” and that is exactly what this beautiful little plant does.

There’s nothing else quite like this flower blooming on pond shorelines in spring, so it’s close to impossible to confuse it with any other shrub. It often grows so close to the water that the best way to see it is by boat or kayak.

If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden. ~Frances Hodgson Burnett

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Mid May Flowers

Since trilliums are all about the number 3 or multiples of it, it seems appropriate, I thought for the first time, that I know of only three native trilliums in this area. They are, in order of bloom time, red trillium, nodding trillium, and the beautiful painted trillium seen here. This one surprised me by having a feature I’ve never noticed; dark red anthers frosted with white pollen. My color finding software actually calls the anther color “indian red” and sees the red on the petals as either crimson or deep pink, depending on where I put the pointer. It is those splashes of color on the petals that give this trillium its name and also make it the most beautiful of the three, in my opinion. It’s always a joy to find one because they don’t come easy.

This is a very busy time of year for someone doing a nature blog, because many flowers can appear each day. Apple blossoms have come and gone quickly, and though I haven’t heard anything official yet, I’m wondering if the below freezing nights we had last week might have damaged this year’s apple crop. We had another quite heavy frost just yesterday moning so it looks like nature is going to hold us to our traditional last day of May planting date. You can get tender plants in the ground before then but you’d better be prepared to cover them at night.

The crabapple in my own yard suffered from the 27 degree night we had on the 18th. All its flowers quickly disappeared and that was too bad, because it blossomed better this year than it has in a while. Apple trees aren’t native but crabapples are, so I thought they’d better withstand the cold. Some native and ornamental cherries also had a hard time, and some didn’t blossom at all.

Lilac flowers hadn’t opened yet when we had the freeze and it didn’t look like their buds had been damaged. I caught these just as they started opening two or three days later when temps were back to normal.

White lilacs usually bloom a week or so later than purple ones but this year for some reason they bloomed together. My mother died when I was an infant but before she did she planted white lilacs, so they and a few other flowers she planted always remind me of her.

Lily of the valley flowers on the other hand, always remind me of my grandmother. When I was young I’d run up her stairs with a fist full of violets, dandelions and lily of the valley blossoms, all wilting badly before I could even give them to her. Welch’s Grape Jelly used to come packaged in small glasses that could be re-used as drinking glasses, and she always put the flowers in one of those. She had a few of those glasses that I remember, all with Flinstones characters on them.

When Mayflowers grow naturally they can form large colonies. Their large, umbrella like leaves touch and overlap between the two foot tall plants so they create their own shade underneath. This makes getting a shot of the flower tricky. You have to open the canopy of plants with one hand and hold it open while you try to get a shot of the flower, which nods at the ground. What you see here is this year’s attempt. Not one of the best but since most people don’t even know there are flowers under the solid canopy of leaves, it’s always worth a try. This plant is also called American mandrake, which is legendary among herbalists for the root that supposedly resembles a man. Native Americans boiled the root and used the water to cure stomach aches but this plant is toxic and should never be eaten.

This red horse chestnut tree in a local park is a cross between the red buckeye and the horse chestnut, and it isn’t real common. In fact this is the only one I’ve seen. It’s quite a big tree and at this time of year it looks like a tree full of orchids. I’ve read that bees and hummingbirds love the flowers and I wouldn’t wonder. They’re beautiful.

Every now and again I meet up with a flower that grabs me and pulls me in so deeply that there is nothing else, and that’s what this one did. I found it growing in a local park. It was the only one of its kind and was planted far too close to other plants, so it looked as if someone had just dropped it there accidentally. At that moment I thought it was the most beautiful flower I had ever seen so I got down on my hands and knees and took photo after photo, lost in its beauty. I find that it’s good to lose yourself in a flower now and then. They always remind me that we come from the same place.

For gardeners out there who’d like to grow this beautiful flower, I’ve tracked it down as an Italian anemone called “Mistral Plus Blu.” Everywhere I’ve checked it has been sold out, so if you’re interested I’d ask a reputable nursery email me when they got more in. There are other colors but I’d have to go with this incredible blue, which looks like someone painted it on each petal.

If you’re looking for a good reason to spend more time in nature I’d recommend nature photography. Since school vacation is coming up why not get the children interested as well? It doesn’t have to be a big expensive thing; everyone has a phone these days and I see many people using their phone cameras with good results, even for birds. I’d love to see what young people could do with their phones cameras in nature; I think I’d be surprised and delighted.

Black chokeberry flowers are about as big as an aspirin and have plum colored anthers which help tell them from some of our other white flowered trees and shrubs. The plant might reach 5 feet tall on a good day and is really more shrub than tree. It is considered an important forage plant and bear, birds, rabbits, mice, chipmunks, deer, elk, and moose eat various parts of it. Ants, butterflies, honeybees, flies, and hummingbirds drink its nectar. Native Americans used all parts of the plant medicinally. The fruit was used for canker sores and sore throats and the roots were dried, chewed, and placed in wounds to stop bleeding. The stems were boiled to make tea to treat fevers. The small drupes have an edible outer fleshy layer but the single seed contains high levels of hydrogen cyanide so children should be warned against eating too many of them.

Chokecherry trees are blossoming everywhere along our roadsides and they’re very easy to see. Chokecherries are small trees that sometimes can resemble shrubs when they grow in a group but the sausage shaped flower heads are very different from the chokeberries that we just saw. The racemes full of flowers are very fragrant. If pollinated each flower will become a dark purple one seeded berry (drupe) which, though edible but can be bitter or sour. Many Native American tribes used the fruit as food and used other parts of the tree such as the inner bark medicinally. They also used the bark in their smoking mixtures to improve the flavor.

Hobblebushes can be said to have fully bloomed now that the small, fertile center flowers have opened. They open a few days after the big, showy but sterile outer flowers. They are one of our prettiest native spring blooming shrubs. If pollinated each tiny flower will become a fruit that will be green at first, and will then change to bright red before finally ripening to deep, purple black. This is a fairly common shrub that can be seen on roadsides and streamsides.

Each year I challenge myself to find a five flowered star flower but so far, no luck. I found a four flowered one right away though, and that’s unusual. Evey now and then you can stumble into places where the forest floor is covered with thousands of these small blooms, and it’s always beautiful. The scientific name of a starflower is Trientalis borealis, and the Trientalis part means “one third of a foot” and relates to the plant’s 4 inch height. Borealis means “of the northern forests,” but since it grows quite far south, nearly into Georgia I think, it isn’t entirely accurate.

I like the way the flowers sparkle in the sunlight, almost like they’re made of sugar.

I’m lucky to have a Hawthorn growing in my yard because I like their showy anthers. The blossoms aren’t much in the way of fragrance because the flowers have a slightly fishy odor, but they’re big on beauty. Hawthorn has been used to treat heart disease since the 1st century and the leaves and flowers are still used in that way today. There are antioxidant flavonoids in the plant that may help dilate blood vessels, improve blood flow, and protect blood vessels from damage. There are over 100 species of native and cultivated hawthorns in the U.S. and they can be hard to identify. Native Americans used the plant’s long sharp thorns for fish hooks and for sewing. The wood is very hard and it was once used for tools and weapons.

Foam flowers (Tiarella) are blooming beautifully this year. They like to grow in damp and sometimes even wet places, so their abundant blooms most likely are coming because so far, we’ve had plenty of rain this spring. Shady, damp places can be problem areas in gardens, so these plants might be a solution.

It isn’t easy to isolate a single foamflower for a photo but it can be done. They’re tiny little things but all together they can make quite an impact. There are many cultivars that have been developed for gardens and I think most nurseries sell them now.

One year I knelt down to take a photo of some forget-me-nots and when I stood up the knees and lower legs of my pants were soaking wet, and that’s how I discovered that this little plant loves wet feet. But it also loves full sun and that’s a little tricky in a garden. The plant was introduced into North America, most likely by early European settlers, and now grows in 40 of the lower 48 states. In some states it is considered a noxious weed, but I hardly ever see it in the wild here. I like all the little stars in this shot of them.

Wild geraniums are native to this part of the country but I had seen many more in gardens than I ever had in the wild until recently. I found a spot where there are dozens of them spread out along a road. They looked happy there and looked as if they had been spreading, and I was happy to see them. They seem to like living just at the edge of the forest.

A sharp intake of breath and then you stand there, mesmerized by the beauty. When something in nature stuns me into silence I always pay attention because one hour of silence alone in nature is worth more than a hundred conversations about it. Finding an early azalea in the woods is always special and luckily it happens a little more frequently these days because I’ve found them thriving in three different places now. I once knew only one plant so I thought they were quite rare but if they like a spot you can find several in the area. This native shrub is extremely fragrant so you often smell it before you see it.

Early azalea goes by a few different names including wooly azalea, and it gets that name from the hairiness of its buds, as seen here. The backs of the flowers are also very hairy and it is the hairs that emit the wonderful fragrance. They’re beautiful things; another gift of joy and amzement tucked away in the woods for you to find, and finding them is something you never forget.

You’re only here for a short visit. Don’t hurry, don’t worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way. ~ Walter Hagen

Thanks for stopping in.

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A Few Rarities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for coming by. Have a great week.

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A Wildflower Walk

A couple of weeks ago I took a walk down an old road I had never been on and was amazed by all the wildflowers I found there. There was a river nearby and since it was the Asuelot River that I grew up on, I felt as if I had come home. I had never been along this section of it but I felt as if I knew every inch. The river was high; high enough to flood some of the open meadows along its banks.

Watercress grew in the shallows. This plant is edible and is said to have a kind of peppery bite but since it grows in water I’d never eat it. These days you never know what pollutants might be in the water, and when I was growing up parts of this river were terrible. We’ve done a great job of cleaning it so now even trout swim in it once again but for me, it’s hard to forget what we did to it in the past.

There were turtles. There are always turtles. My grandmother called them mud turtles but I think most of our turtles are either painted or snapping turtles. I haven’t seen any of the big snappers yet. They’ll come along in June when the females lay their first batch of eggs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this spot was full of them.

Though the old road looked like it had a wall of growth on either side I knew there were game trails and other places where you could get through. The reason the edge of a forest always looks like an impenetrable wall of growth is because that’s where the most sunshine is and the plants, shrubs and trees compete for all the sunshine they can get. The forest never seemed like a wall to me when I was a boy; it was more like a mirror. I felt at home there and knew I belonged as much as the trees, plants and animals did.

One of my favorite mosses, cypress leaved plait moss, grew on a log. I like the way it seems to reach out and explore new areas of the logs it grows on.

Plaited means braided, and a closer view shows that it is a good name for this moss, because that’s just what it looks like.

Coltsfoot plants were still blooming when I was here and they’re still blooming now. All the spring flowers are having an extended season due to the cloudy, cool weather we’ve had.

There were thousands of bluets here and these were the deepest blue I could find. They’re very cheery little things that everyone is happy to see each spring.

The first strawberry blossoms were appearing when I was here. Now I have hundreds of them blooming in my yard. In June the plants will bear some of the sweetest, juciest strawberries you could hope for. Unfortunately, they’ll also be some of the smallest strawberries ever seen. It takes a while to pick a handful.

It’s a good year for violets and I found many of the first I had seen in bloom here.

The cooler spring weather has meant that fern fiddleheads just go on and on slowly, in no hurry to reach adulthood.

Sedges also had an extended bloom but now grasses are taking their place. In this example many of the butter colored male flowers of this Pennsylvania sedge had given up the ghost and hung shriveled against the stem, but the wispy white female flowers still waited for the wind to bring them pollen from other plants.

The first butterfly I saw this year was this eastern tailed blue. I waited for it to open its wings so I could get a shot of their beautiful blue color but it refused to open them. I knew if my shadow fell on it, it would fly away but I thought if I could put just the tiniest sliver of shadow on it, it might open it wings. Carefully I moved until just a whisker of shadow fell on it but that’s all it took; it opened its blue wings and flew off before I could get a shot. I also saw a mourning cloak butterfly here and heard an amazing chorus of birds, including finches, warblers, wrens, and eastern phoebes.

Wood anemones were tucked in everywhere. I think of all the flowers I’ve gone here and there looking for and here they are, all in one spot. The only thing missing is spring beauties, but they could be here too. It’s possible I just haven’t found them yet.

I came to a clearing and there was the Ashuelot River in full view. I thought about how, when I was a boy of 8 or 9 years old this river was a barrier, but as soon as I found the courage to cross the train trestles alone my world expanded. It suddenly opened up and seemed vast and there I was, free to explore it. The first places I explored were just like this place and the world became my playground. All children should have a chance to run free and learn from nature in places like this. It was a wonderful place to grow and discover so many new things.

Dormant buds under the bark will break (or erupt) when or if something happens to the terminal bud, which in this case was an entire tree. The beavers here did exactly what my grandmother did when she pinched out the growing tip of her geraniums to make them bushier. I became interested in the study of botany by wondering about such things, and that’s why I’ve always thought that nature was the best teacher a child could have. The wonder of nature is in its ability to teach us something new each day. I was an empty jar, and nature filled me to overflowing.

Walt Whitman said “There was a child went forth every day, and the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became, and that object became part of him.” Since it flowed just a few yards from our house the first “object” I looked upon was the river. As I grew older I felt as if I had found a magical painting that I could step into; an artist had painted a beautiful earthly paradise and here I was walking through it. Nature taught me to see and appreciate the beauty of life. It showed me the worth of silence and the meaning of serenity. Nature became my teacher, friend, and companion. I had plenty of childhood friends but, as author David Mitchell wrote, “Trees are always a relief, after people.” Before I had ever heard the word solitude I seemed to crave it, and here along the river is where I found it.

This particular slice of paradise was populated by more trout lilies than I had ever seen growing in one place. They weren’t all in bloom but there were many thousands of them.

On this flower the big, reddish anthers were just starting to produce pollen.

This shot is of the trout lilies covering the forest floor for as far as the eye can see, and they did this along both sides of the old road. There must be millions of plants here and I’m sure they’ve been here for a very long time. Since a trout lily colony can last 300 years or more they might even have been here when this area was first being settled.

The flowers were the biggest trout lily blooms I’ve seen; possibly 2 inches across. It’s obvious where the “lily” part of the plant’s name comes from, and the mottled leaves in this shot show where the “trout” part of the name came from.

Shadbushes were everywhere out here, some in full bloom and others just starting. Since they melted so well into the surrounding vegetation they were hard to get a good shot of.

I left the old dirt road and walked a little on the main road, where I found mother goose sleeping on her nest of cattail stalks. I wasn’t too far away when I took this photo but she seemed fine with my being there. I’ve read that Canada geese are in the top tier of parents in the animal world so I’d guess it would take quite a lot to get her off that nest. I went back a few days later to see if the eggs had hatched and two or three people told me that nine goslings were now swimming peacefully beside their mother. May they all live long and bliss filled lives.

Must we always teach our children with books? Let them look at the stars and the mountains above. Let them look at the waters and the trees and flowers on Earth. Then they will begin to think, and to think is the beginning of a real education. 
~David Polis

Thanks for stopping in. Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there!

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April (and May) Showers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not all the new leaves were green.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for coming by.

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Greening Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A staghorn sumac bud looked more animal than vegetable.

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

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

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

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

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Acceleration

All of the sudden we have bloodroot flowers. They’ve appeared five days earlier than last year and last year’s post said that was the earliest I had ever seen them. That’s what four days of above average heat can do; everything is accelerated. I had a feeling I should go and see if they were blooming and it’s a good thing I did because these flowers don’t last long. On this day I found what seemed to be a very formal grouping for what are entirely native plants.

The flowers were as beautiful as ever. Quite often you find that yellow pollen has spilled onto the white petals but I didn’t see any of that going on so I’m guessing these blossoms must have just opened. Capturing the faint veins in the petals is tricky. Both the light and the camera’s settings have to agree, but it’s worth the effort I think, to show them as they are. The name “bloodroot” comes from the bright red sap in the plant’s roots.

Though I saw only one trout lily blossom it was about 2 weeks earlier than I’ve seen them before. I noticed that it had a friend over, most likely for a meal of pollen. The big yellow anthers seen here can be yellow, orange, or dark maroon. Nobody seems to know why they are different colors on different plants but I’ve always suspected that they changed color from yellow to maroon as they aged.

My favorite part of a trout lily is the maroon coloring on the backs of three of the tepals. Another name, dog tooth violet, comes from the shape and color of its roots. It is said that a colony of these plants can be hundreds of years old.

The trout lilies grow near where the spring beauties live. In just a week these small flowers have gone from a smattering of blossoms to many thousands of flowers carpeting the forest floor. One day a few years ago the thought that all of creation must rejoice when a flower blooms came into my mind, probably when I was in this place, and I realized just this spring that the thought must have come from the pleasure I feel when I find flowers in bloom. I do rejoice, and my thoughts become elevated; free from all but the beauty of life. It’s easy to imagine songs of joy, love, and exaltation ringing throughout the forest when I see something so beautiful. Reverence and gratitude come easy, especially in spring.

Violets have appeared suddenly, in large numbers. I’ve always thought of this favorite of mine as just a white violet but I think it’s a variant of the common blue violet. Violets can be hard to identify and I’m no longer interested enough in knowing the names of things to spend hours (or days) trying to find one. These violets seem to be more common each year. The more, the merrier.

Yellow violets are also blooming. Though they’re said to prefer rich woods I think these I found growing in a local park are round leaved violets. The round leaves never completely unfurl until the flowers are out and that’s a characteristic of the round leaved violet. I found one or two plants a few years ago but now there are several in this group. I hope they keep expanding in number because yellow violets are on the rare side here.

Female willow flowers are blooming and they look very different from male flowers in just about every way. If you don’t know what a bud scale is, it is that dark object on the left at the base of the flower stalk, and not too long ago all of what you see here fit into it as a willow catkin.

Here are some male willow flowers for comparison. If you go just by color the difference between male and female bushes can be seen by quite far off. Male flowers are much brighter yellow.

I looked at the male flower buds on box elders one day and saw no signs of flowers and then just three days later there were flowers everywhere, and that’s the way spring is going so far. Box elders are in the maple family and are considered a soft maple. They are also considered weed trees because they come up everywhere. I pulled one up that was growing in the foundation of my grandmother’s house and carried it home to my father’s house when I was probably 8 years old or so. I dug a hole and planted it and last I knew that tree was still there, still shading that house.

Female box elder flowers consist of lime green, sticky pistils. They’re very pretty things but they don’t last long. It’s unusual to find the female flowers further along than the male flowers but this year everything is a little off track. Usually, the male flowers appear and then the leaves and female flowers will appear a week or so later. This year the male flowers haven’t even produced any pollen yet but the female flowers are ready to go.

The colorful buds of striped maples have grown quickly and I almost missed seeing their beautiful colors this year. For a short time, they’re one of the most colorful things in the forest and a tree full of them looks like a tree full of tiny colored lights.

Striped maple buds are a good example of why, when a bud or flower catches your eye in the spring, you should watch it every day because changes come quickly. In a day or two your beautifully colored bud might have become leaves. That’s what happened this year to the ones I was watching but luckily bud break is staggered so it doesn’t happen on all trees at once.

Last week I showed a plantain sedge about to bloom and this week they’re in full bloom. This is a flower that grows to about ankle level so most people walk right by them without seeing them, even though the woods are full of various sedges blooming at this time of year. The butter colored flowers at the top are male flowers and the wispy white bits lower down are the female flowers. They are wind pollinated and this is a good year for wind pollinated plants because we’ve had plenty of it.

The seeds (samaras) forming on the silver maples wear furry white coats for just a very short time before becoming a beautiful, vibrant red. I’d guess there must be many billions of seeds getting ready to let the wind take them to new places. They love to grow near rivers and wetlands.

Though many female trees have formed seeds the male maple flowers are still going off like fireworks in many of the trees. This staggered bloom time from tree to tree over a month or more is all about seeing to the continuation of the species. If we have a hard freeze not all of the flowers on all trees will die. It’s a plan that works well as long as we humans just let them be.

Lilacs really got ahead of me this year. It looks like they’ll bloom early.

Forsythias are blooming about a week early I think but from what I’ve seen most have just their lower flowers blooming. This is common with Forsythias because any buds that aren’t protected by snow will die off if it gets too cold. If we had two feet of snow depth you’ll see bushes everywhere you go with flowers blooming two feet off the ground and the rest of the bush with none at all. I have a feeling that the below zero cold we had in February must have done it but how this one in a local park and a few others I’ve seen escaped, I don’t know. It could be that evergreen tree cover protected them enough.

This magnificent magnolia lives at the same park as the Forsythia and it is also blooming about a week early.

The wrinkly flowers of Tibetan cherries have appeared about a week early. They always remind me of someone who didn’t have time to iron their clothes. Cherry blossoms are very susceptible to frost so I’m hoping we won’t see frost until next fall. This cherry is also called the paper bark cherry because of the way its bark peels as it ages, much like a birch. It is used as an ornamental tree as much for its bark as for its flowers.

Years ago, when this country was young and people had next to nothing, they would trade plants from neighbor to neighbor, and one of those plants was vinca, also called myrtle. I often find it flourishing out in the woods as the patch in this photo does, without any tending at all. It’s usually near old cellar holes along with lilacs, orange daylilies, and peonies, all still blooming away as if they received daily loving care. They are the toughest of garden plants, of the plant it and forget it type.

One of my favorite spring flowering bulbs is the little scilla size striped squill. It’s a very beautiful thing and I’m determined to find some and grow them here. I find this one blooming in a local park each spring.

Japanese andromeda is an early spring flowering shrub but I think even they are earlier than usual this year. I’ve always liked the way the porcelain white flowers hang from golden bracts. If someone could make a chandelier or lamp out of these shapes done in porcelain or alabaster and gold leaf I think it would be a beautiful thing.

Speaking of beautiful things, this hellebore grows in a friend’s garden. Though hellebores are called “Lenten rose” this one missed lent and Easter too. But it was worth the wait. I think its easily the most beautiful hellebore blossom I’ve seen.

Those who find beauty in all of nature will find themselves at one with the secrets of life itself. ~L.W. Gilbert

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Note: While I know that this post is already too long something just fell into my lap that I think should be shared. If you haven’t seen the newest photos of Jupiter by NASAs Juno Spacecraft just scroll down for a few photos of something miraculous.

This is Jupiter, the largest planet in out solar system, seen like it has never been before. The black spot on the left is a moon shadow.

The detail and colors in these photos are amazing, especially when you consider that Jupiter is 552.94 million miles from earth and we would never see them otherwise. How I’d love to swoop down over the (ammonia) cloud tops and see this in person. It looks like something peeled from the mind of a deranged artist but it is all very real.

It’s just amazingly beautiful, in my opinion. If you think so too and would like to see more just Google “Juno spacecraft photos of Jupiter.” I think there are close to 40 photos in all. I hope you enjoyed seeing these few and I hope I this post hasn’t eaten up too much of your day.

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Birds, Bark Beetles, and Beauty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Late March / Early April Flowers

Back in 2013 a day long September deluge dumped 6 inches of rain and there was plenty of flooding. None in this area was severe but there were some local road washouts. I was disappointed at the time to see a spot near a road by my house had washed away because there was a large colony of coltsfoot plants growing there, and I thought they had all been washed into the brook. When the town came along and dumped truckloads of 4 inch crushed stone in the spot, I said goodbye coltsfoot. I didn’t think they’d ever get through all that stone but then one year I noticed one or two flowers, and another year five or six, until this year the colony looks almost as good as it did before the flood. What is seen here is only part of it.

But the really odd thing is how, though the colony has been returning over the past several years, the plants always bloomed about two weeks later than all the other coltsfoot colonies I knew of. Then, all of the sudden this year the plants bloomed first, before I saw any others. I can’t explain it but it made me happy to think that, once again I have only to walk down the road to see one of our earliest blooming wildflowers. It isn’t a native plant but nobody seems to care. They couldn’t even be called common here.

Just so you don’t confuse coltsfoot with dandelions as some seem to, here is a dandelion. If you scroll up to the coltsfoot blossom in the previous shot you’ll see plenty of differences in the flowers, but there are other difference as well that aren’t seen in these photos. Easiest to remember is that coltsfoot leaves don’t appear until the flowers are about to fade, so if you see leaves it isn’t a coltsfoot. Another difference is, coltsfoot flower stems are very scaly and dandelion flower stems are smooth. Really though, one look at the flowers should tell you all you need to know.

Red maples are still in full swing but that isn’t surprising because blossoming from one tree to the next is staggered, so if we have a freeze not every flower will be killed. I think I first saw male blossoms like these about a month ago.

These female red maple flowers look like they might have been frost nipped, since the tips are blackened here and there. There are still plenty of buds coming along though, so before long we’ll see millions of seeds twirling down to earth.

Just look at all the flowers blossoming on one tree, and there are too many trees to count.

It isn’t hard finding a windy day at this time of year so during a recent blow I went to get a shot of alder catkins blowing in the wind. Just like hazelnut catkins but a bit later, alder catkins begin to lengthen and soften and become supple, and the movement in the above photo shows that. When they form in the fall and all through winter they are about a third the length of what you see here, half the diameter, and quite stiff. I was glad that I came to this particular pond where they grew because I heard the first spring peepers of the year here on this day, April 3rd. Since then, I’ve also heard the quacking of many wood frogs.

In a closer look you can see the bud scales have opened along with some of the male flowers. Flower buds, along with their scales, spiral around a central stalk in in hazelnut and alder catkins, and I believe it is the lengthening of this central stalk that pulls the bud scales apart so they open, much like you would see the coils open if you pulled on a both ends of a spring. There are three tiny yellow/ green flowers beneath each reddish purple bud scale, each with a lobed calyx cup and three to five stamens with anthers covered in yellow pollen. It won’t be long before that pollen is being blown around by the wind.

The willows seemed late to bloom this year but I proved it was only my impatience by checking last year’s blog entry on willows. Last year they bloomed almost the same day that they bloomed this year.

They weren’t quite fully in bloom but they were close. These happen to be male flowers but I didn’t see any shedding pollen yet. Female willow flowers usually blossom not too long after the males. It was a cloudy, cool, and windy day when I saw these but we’ve had several warm ones since so I’d guess they’re now in full bloom. I’ll go back and see today. 

Tiny little ground ivy flowers have appeared. Like many other flowers they sparkle in the sunlight, as if dusted with confectioner’s sugar. Ground ivy can cover large areas if not kept in check. When I was a boy I discovered that when ground ivy was mowed it left a strange, heavy scent or flavor in the back of your throat. Since it’s in the mint family that should have been no surprise. Ground ivy is another plant that was brought over by European settlers because of its medicinal qualities. It is said to be rich in vitamin C and a good appetite stimulant, and was one of the plants used in spring tonic. It is known to be useful in the treatment of digestive disorders like gastritis, acid indigestion and diarrhea and its gentle healing powers meant that it could be used to treat children and the elderly, often in the form of tea. These days it is being studied for use in preventing leukemia, bronchitis, hepatitis, different kinds of cancer, and HIV.

A drift of crocuses at the local college caught my eye, and they caught the eyes of the many bees flying around them too. The various colors blended well, I thought. I wished I could lift the whole thing and plunk it down in may yard. I’m going to have to stop wishing and do something about it this fall when the spring bulbs go on sale.

This was my favorite crocus of the day. It looked like someone had dipped a feather in ink and stroked it delicately along each petal.

The first daffodil I saw was a backlit bicolor. By now there must be hundreds in bloom at the local college.

This beautiful hyacinth was the first I’ve seen. I have trouble getting back up when I get down on my hands and knees these days unless there is something to hang onto, so I wasn’t able to smell its heavenly scent.

The color of this hyacinth was even more beautiful than the first in my opinion, but there was only one of this color. Last year an animal had dug up a lot of the hyacinths in this bed and took a nibble out of each one and left them on the surface of the soil to dry out, but thankfully I haven’t seen that going on this year.

Here was another drift of crocuses with contrasting colors that also worked well. It was a cheery scene.

A magnolia bud was rushing it a bit, I thought. All the others must have decided it would go first, because they were all still closed. If it gets frost bitten that will be too bad because there are beautiful flowers on this tree.

I saw a vernal witch hazel with orange / red flowers, which is something I haven’t seen. Another bush had deep red petals. And the fragrance was really amazing. Witch hazels have such a clean scent, with maybe just a faint hint of spiciness in some of them. It’s a scent that’s hard to describe because nothing else smells like it.

A Cornelian cherry bud is about as big as a standard pea, but when it opens it might have six or seven flowers come out of it, all which are about the size of BBs you would put in an air rifle. They get harder to see every year, and I’d guess that it probably took twenty tries to get this shot. I laughed when I caught myself asking “Was it worth the wait?” because I think I first saw yellow showing in these buds about five weeks ago. Since it lives at the local college and I live about 15 minutes away it’s always an adventure because you never know what you’ll see. This year they bloomed about a week earlier than last year. And yes, I think it was worth the wait.

I don’t know if anyone notices such things but as spring goes on these spring flower posts go slowly from garden flowers to wild flowers. This post is about half and half so it won’t be long before we’ll be seeing mostly wild flowers. Soon will come the violets, elms, bloodroot, box elders and if I’m very lucky, spring beauties. Whatever we see it will be beautiful, because everything is beautiful in spring.

Spring in the world!  And all things are made new! ~Richard Hovey

Thanks for stopping in. Have a Happy Easter!

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