Things I’ve Seen

May continues to lean more toward April than June and I think most of us would be surprised to see more than two sunny and warm days in a row. But still the fields are being harrowed and planted and it is warming up. Even on rainy days the temps reach into the 60s F. and that seems to be enough for most plants. Some are a little late but most, like the wild columbine above, have bloomed at their usual time.

I had to walk out to the ledges in Westmoreland three times again this year to see how the columbines and the other rare plants that grow there were doing. This shot shows what the last walk out to the columbines looked like. Virtually every leaf seen here is a beech leaf, just out of the bud. I was reminded that softness is another thing I like about spring.

Blue cohosh is a rare plant that I’ve seen in just one spot, and this is it. Cohosh is a name that Native Americans used for several plants it seems, and the true meaning of the word has been lost. The bluish cast of the stems, flower buds, new spring shoots, and sky blue fruit all point to the blue in its name.

Blue cohosh plants have unusual flowers that are hard to mistake for anything else. What look like  yellow-green striped petals are actually the sepals of a blue cohosh flower. Each sepal contains a nectar gland to attract insects. Six yellow stamens 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. The first time I saw this plant I had the feeling that I was seeing something that I might never see again, but fortunately it has come back year after year.

Jack in the pulpit plants were in bloom at the ledges as well. Though they aren’t rare they are unusual enough to make me stop and lift their hoods to see the beautiful stripes on the inside of the spathe and to see how Jack the spadix is doing in the pulpit. These plants are also called bog onions, which hints at the fact that they like water. It’s a good thing because this year they’re getting plenty of it. I’ve seen quite a few of them and they were all doing well.

The way tree buds usually open in this area is maples first, then beeches, then oaks, and now it’s time for the oaks. Oaks are the smallest in the new leaf / bud break category, but they’re also the most colorful. The leaves seen here were about an inch long, covered in velvet and bright red. Or white, pink, orange, yellow, or green. I like to show oak leaves here because I have a feeling that few people ever see them.

I saw an ant crawling on this oak leaf but every now and then it would stop and appear to be licking it. I wondered if it was getting a drink, but if so it was a long one. Then I wondered if maybe there was some kind of sweet honey dew or something on new oak leaves. I can’t say what it was doing but I can say that it was so focused it wasn’t about to let me scare it away.

Some oak leaves can surprise you by being white when they come out of the bud, as these were. This tree and others like it grow on the campus of the local college and I haven’t been able to identify them yet. Google lens is all over the map with them and is just as clueless as I am.

It’s easy to see that tree leaves show an endless variety of beautiful shapes, colors and textures in the freshness and softness of spring, but by fall it will all have been been forgotten. By then nature’s beauty will be displayed in an entirely different way, even in the same forest and on the same tree.

For years now I’ve wanted to show you an entire shagbark hickory tree full of newly opened buds. This is no easy task because these trees can be 80 feet tall, but I know of one spot where beavers come and cut down the young trees. Thanks to the beavers, in this spot there is almost always a fresh supply of buds opening right at eye level each spring. I wasn’t able to show an entire tree but this will give you an idea of what they look like. It’s like seeing a tree full of hundreds of fist size green and orange flowers, and they’re beautiful.

Something else I’ve never shown on this blog is what bud break looks like on a European copper beech. It might seem slightly different than what we see on an American beech but not by much. The only  differences I’ve seen are the color and shape of the leaves, and the overall shape of the tree. The trees seem shorter and bigger around than the American beech, and they can be huge in size.

The copper beech is also called purple beech, for obvious reasons. These leaves are wider than, and not quite as long as those on an American beech. They’re every bit as beautiful though. Early settlers brought these trees with them when they first came over, and European beech trees can be found in New England that are hundreds of years old. There is a very old one in Dublin, NH that I used to work under when I was a gardener. It was planted right on the edge of the road, probably when the road was just a trail, and the town used to threaten to cut it down every now and then. I hope that never happened.

If you ever order a dish of fiddleheads in a restaurant in spring and what you are served don’t have the deep groove in the stem as is seen here, send them back. As I showed in a recent post, sensitive ferns also have a groove in the stem and are the same shade of green, but their groove is shallow in comparison and they are considered toxic. Ostrich ferns are one of the last ferns to appear in this immediate area. They are said to be the only fern fiddlehead that is safe to eat, and even then only in limited quantities.

I went to a pond looking for dragonflies one day and the surface of the water was so calm I could hardly tell where these cattail leaves ended and their reflections began. One of them formed a “C” with its reflection and “C” I thought, must have been for calm.

But “C” could have also been for catbird. I found this gray catbird singing in a tree and I was glad I found it because catbirds copy the songs of other birds much like mockingbirds do, and their songs can be quite beautiful. They can also mimic frogs and some animals, but their name comes from the way they can meow like a cat. I’ve read that when they sing they try to point their tail down and this causes their back to “hunch” as can be seen here.

Just a minute or two after I saw the gray catbird singing in the tree this one landed right in front of me, as if it wanted to show me what one looked like when it wasn’t all hunched up. The dark “Mohawk” like stripe on its head and dark tail feathers make them easy to identify. Catbirds are about the same size as an American robin, for those who’ve never seen one.

“C” might also have been for chipmunk. This one froze in place on a stone in a local park when it saw me, and let me get some photos. Then it ran off and climbed a tree, which is something you don’t see them do that often. They live in burrows.

A bullfrog was sure I couldn’t see it as it sat among some debris at the edge of a pond. I’ve been hearing quite a few of their deep harrumphs lately.

What I thought was a female red winged blackbird crawled up out the debris of last year’s cattail stems. The birds nest in this debris because it provides good cover and they can feed on any grubs that they find maturing in the cattail stems. But when I look at this photo I wonder if this might be an immature male rather than a female. It seemed small and thin and while I watched, a male bird came and fed it insects it had foraged from the gravel beside where I sat. Do male birds feed females that are nesting? This I don’t know.

I wasn’t surprised to find a slug on the underside of an elderberry leaf because we’ve been having good slug weather lately with rain and showers two or three days each week.

It’s already time to say goodbye to the spring beauties. They certainly live up to their name and I’m sorry to see them go. A disappointment this year came with the scant blooms of the trout lilies. In places I saw thousands last year, this year I found just a few. But just as a human needs rest after exertion, so do plants. A heavy bloom can take a lot out of them and they may have to rest for a year or two to recover.

Dandelions might need to rest next year because I’m seeing the biggest dandelion blooms I’ve ever seen this year. The largest one in this group must have been at least the diameter of a silver dollar. For those who might not know what a silver dollar looks like, they were about an inch and a half across.

The crabapple in my yard has so many blossoms on it there isn’t room for more, and that seems true of all the apples and crabapples I’ve seen locally. If all these blossoms are pollinated and become apples it’s going to be a bumper crop.

Lilacs are blooming right on time. This is the old favorite the common purple lilac (Syringa vulgaris) which, since it is the state flower, everyone thinks is native. It isn’t native; it was imported from England in 1750 by Benning Wentworth, royal governor of New Hampshire. It was chosen as the state flower in 1919 because lilacs were said to “symbolize that hardy character of the men and women of the Granite State.” I suppose that’s true enough; you can’t kill a common purple lilac. The state wild flower is the pink lady’s slipper, which should be blooming before too long.

White lilacs always take me back to my childhood, because we had one at the corner of the house and it was the plant that got me started watching buds swell and open in spring.

The legend of Narcissus tells of a beautiful youth who fell in love the reflection he saw in a pond. So taken was he by the reflection he didn’t know was his own, he stopped eating and sleeping and died there beside the pool. Legend has it that a flower grew in the spot where Narcissus died and this, the poet’s daffodil (Narcissus poeticus) is said to be that flower. Ancient poets like Ovid, Horace, and Virgil knew this flower well; it is one of the first cultivated daffodils found in botanical texts, from as early as 371 BC. It is hard to mistake for any other with its red edged yellow corona and pure white petals. Its scent is said to be so powerful that some have gotten ill from being in an enclosed room with it. Since I’m familiar with its story as soon as I see it each spring I think of ancient times, and now you probably will too. It has been well loved throughout the centuries and for that reason it is still available through spring bulb sellers.

This one is for those who have never had the pleasure of looking up through the branches of an eastern redbud tree. This is the kind of experience that leaves you feeling as if you’ve been totally immersed in the beauty of life.

And this one is for those who have never seen a pond through the branches of a shadbush tree. They and most other trees have blossomed beautifully this year. The shadbush trees are done now, but hawthorn, wild cherry, wild apples, and crabapples are filling in the blanks along roadsides. I’ve never seen so many flowers on the trees as there are this year. A mild winter obviously agrees with them.

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. ~William Blake

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In My Daughter’s Garden (And Other Places)

On a recent visit to my daughter’s garden I saw these glass baubles in one of the beds. They had spilled out of a flower vase and they just happened to be my favorite color, so I took a photo of them. What I didn’t see at the time was the lily reflection, which can be seen in the upper left corner of the photo.

This isn’t the lily that was reflected in the glass bauble but what a lily; it was beautiful, as were several others she grew. Clearly she has gardening in her genes but thankfully, she doesn’t want to make a living at it as I once did. It is a hugely rewarding but also an exhausting career that can make your body old before its time, especially when you work with stone.

She grows a lot of plants that I haven’t seen, like this “snap dragon vine,” which was a beautiful thing. Apparently it is native to Mexico and the southwest. Since my son lives in New Mexico at the moment, I asked him about it. I couldn’t imagine such a lush thing growing in such heat but he says northern parts of the state are forested and mountainous, much like here.  

I noticed one of those metallic blow flies on a false sunflower. I’m seeing a lot of them this summer.

She has a lot of beautiful zinnias in her garden. I was hoping to see butterflies visiting them but we have a serious lack of butterflies here this year, so all I saw were bees and dragonflies. She puts pans of water out so the birds and insects can drink but still, no butterflies on this day. I’ve seen one or two great spangled fritillaries, a few white admirals, and a single viceroy, but no monarchs yet. I’ve been wondering if the drenching downpours we’re having have shredded their wings.

Another flower she grows that I hadn’t seen is the fiddleback. I looked them up online and saw some that looked just like a fern fiddlehead uncurling in spring. They’re in the borage family and are quite pretty.

She grows lots of vegetables and herbs as well as flowers. Since I’ve been talking about legumes this summer, here is a pea blossom, with the expected standard and keel. She also had pole beans but for some reason I couldn’t get a shot of a flower. Everything she grows is in raised beds full of wonderful things like cow and horse manure and compost. The plants obviously love it; these pea plants had climbed up over my head.

She also grows my favorite oxalis. I’m surprised that she doesn’t grow more housplants, because she grew up in an indoor jungle. I once grew so many housplants that I used to tell people who were coming to visit that they had better bring a machete, and I was only half joking. There were trees, ferns, vines, and everything in between. Come to think of it maybe that’s why my daughter doesn’t grow very many houseplants.

She grows some white petunias that have this curious deep purple marking in them. She grows all her plants from seed and I think she said these were saved seeds from last year. In any case it was a petunia I had never seen, and I’ve had my nose in an awful lot of petunias. I had my nose in these as well, because they’re fragrant petunias.

This is one of many sunflowers that my daughter grows. I realized after I had left her house that I hadn’t gotten wider views of the gardens, but I think that showing flowers rather than the gardens they grow in comes naturally to a gardener. I spent a large part of my life on my hands and knees weeding and deadheading gardens and when you’re in that position your eyes are right at flower level, so you look into them rather than at them and focus on the health of each plant rather than the garden as a whole. Depending on the cause one sick plant can make an entire garden sick, so I always made sure I watched each plant closely. I was right there on my hands and knees anyway so it wasn’t as hard as it might seem. But I’ll have to go back again and see if I can’t get some wider shots. I’d like to see those fiddlebacks unfurling as well.

I haven’t spent all my time in my daughter’s garden. I’ve also been out exploring places like this. The growing season is far from over and we have an explosion of growth going on right now.

The wild lettuces are blooming. Giant ten foot tall plants will have a few pencil eraser size flowers, colored green or blue, at the very top. This was a blue one but it was more white than blue. Maybe ice blue. The green ones are far more common than the blue, so I have to search for the blue ones.

Tall asters are one of the first of the asters to bloom and here they are, right on schedule. Next will come big leaf asters, white whorled wood asters, New England asters, and many more. I’ve seen tall asters that towered over my head but these were right at eye level.

Dragonflies are still flying everywhere I go so I will often stop and see if I can get a shot of one. They are always a challenge but this blue dasher was willing to pose.

Slaty skimmers are also still very active. I do all I can to get those wing patterns in a shot because I think the ones on this dragonfly are very beautiful. Somehow I got 3 out of 4.

I’m seeing more bees, flies, and dragonflies this year than I ever have. And mosquitoes; bug spray is a must if you’re going to spend time in the woods.  

While I was there I thought I’d try to show you a single Queen Anne’s lace flower. I think there are actually two or three here but it was the best I could do with so many bees flying around.

I saw a bird in a bush, and I believe it was a catbird. These birds have been flying from bush to bush, following me as I walk along in this area. You would think that they’d be easy to see but it was all I could do to find this one with the camera at a few yards away. When I finally did find it I had one hand held shot, and this is it. Birds, dragonflies, and many other insects will stay still and watch you fumble with your camera settings, but as soon as you point that lens at them they’re gone in a streak, just as this bird was. It might be colorblindness that makes them so hard for me to see, I don’t know.

I’m seeing a lot of Canada goose families with goslings almost as big as their parents now. I don’t say much about it but many goslings are lost to snapping turtles, hawks, foxes, bobcats, and other predators each year. I’ve seen large families reduced to one gosling when I was able to watch them each day. This year though, they seem to be doing well. Humans also prey on adult geese so they are wary. They’re a bird that will sometimes put up with you but more often than not they’ll turn and show you their tail. It seems to depend on how quietly you move and how close you are to them. This bird swam in liquid sunshine and I thought it might be too lost in bliss to notice me but no, it turned away.

Our wild clematis called Virgin’s bower has just started flowering. This vine, with its masses of small white flowers, drapes itself over the tops of shrubs to get maximum sunlight and it’s very common along railtrails and roadways. Another name for it is traveler’s joy, and that it is. Sweet autumn clematis, which is a cultivated variety of small, white flowered clematis, comes closest in both habit and flower size.

Shy little Deptford pinks have started blooming. These plants are not as showy or as prolific as their cousins the maiden pinks, and the flowers are smaller. I always have to look in places I know they grow in to find them. They’re quite pretty though, and always worth looking for.

I’ll go from the tiny Deptford pink to this beautiful daylily, which was the biggest daylily blossom I’ve ever seen. It grows in a local park and is so big I couldn’t cover it with my hand, even though I had stretched out all my fingers. Every gardener has an image in their mind of what a daylily looks like but I had to stand for a while and give my mind time to discard the old image and build a new one. This will surely be the flower size that all future daylily breeder introductions will be measured against. It’s amazing.

Jewelweed has just come into bloom and this is the first blossom I saw. They appear at the end of long thin stems (Pedicels) and they move with the slightest breeze, so they can be a challenge to photograph. The common name of the plant comes from the way raindrops sparkle on its leaves, not from its flowers. The leaves have a wax coating that resists water absorption, and that’s why raindrops sit and sparkle like drops of mecury on jewelweed leaves.

Imagine a bee having to crawl down through a pincusion of pistils to get to a flower’s pollen and you have the button bush flower head. Crawling down through all those sticky pistils means it will brush against some of them and leave any pollen it has on its body with them, and that’s exactly the strategy that has evolved in the buttonbush. I see lots of seed heads on buttonbush plants so it must work well. Later on ducks, geese, and songbirds will come along to eat up all the seeds, and they’ll spread them far and wide to make new button bushes. If you have wet spots in your yard or are lucky enough to have a stream running through it, plant a buttonbush or two. If nothing else it will surely be a conversation starter.

The old school of thought would have you believe that you’d be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn’t what being in nature is all about. Rather, it’s about feeling free, unbounded, shedding the distractions and barriers of our civilization—not bringing them with us. ~Ryel Kestenbaum

Thanks for coming by.

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