More Fall Color

Though we still have a lot of colorful foliage to see we are now just past peak color and leaves (mostly maple) are falling quickly. The birch trees clinging to this rock face still had plenty of their bright yellow leaves though. That beautiful blue color you see is caused by wet spots on the stone that reflected the blue of the sky.

Here is a hillside that’s considerably more populated than the one in the previous photo. Many of the trees were already bare when this was taken and by the time you see this post I’m guessing that the biggest part of this hillside will be bare. It’s amazing how fast it can happen, especially with rain and wind, and that tells me I’d better be climbing a mountain soon if I want to see the colors from above.

If you thought you saw plum purple in that previous photo you might have; white ash trees (Fraxinus americana) often turns purple in the fall.

White ash is also called American ash. Along with purple they’ll turn red, orange or yellow in the fall. They turn early along with the maples and are one of our most beautiful fall trees.

Another hillside with some bare trees. And cows.

The trees along the Branch River in Marlborough were showing some good color. Marlborough was settled in 1764 and before that it was a fort town known as Monadnock number 5. Marlborough grew to be an important quarry town and granite from here was used in buildings in Boston and Worcester Massachusetts. Today slightly over 2,000 people live there and I drive through it every day to and from work.

Up north of Keene in Surry the Ashuelot River can just be glimpsed through the trees. Surry is another small town. With a population of only 732 in 2010 in hasn’t grown much since the first census was taken in 1790. It had 448 residents then. It also has some beautiful fall foliage.

Surry also has Surry Mountain and it had quite a lot color on the day that I was there.

Surry Mountain has a lot of evergreens on it, mostly pine and hemlock, and they and the deciduous trees sometimes grow in wide swaths of one kind or the other without much mixing.

The mountain also had a few bare trees showing. Though they say that fall color was about 10 days later than average this year it seems like the maples aren’t hanging on to their leaves very long once they turn.

Our roadways still have plenty of color along them, either highways or back roads.

And so do our rail trails. This one is in Swanzey but they all look pretty much the same, bordered by a variety of trees. These happened to be maples.

Two ferns turn white quite early on in the fall; lady ferns (Athyrium filix-femina) like the one seen here are often first, and sensitive ferns (Onoclea sensibilis) usually just before a frost. In fact sensitive ferns got that name from early settlers who saw that it was very sensitive to frost and cold weather.

I’ve seen hundreds of royal ferns (Osmunda spectabilis) in the fall and they’ve all been yellow until I saw this one, which decided to be orange. I like it better than yellow but I may never see another one. Royal ferns are thought to live 100 years or more though, so I do have a chance.

There was quite a lot of red showing in Tenant Swamp in Keene. Most of the trees in this view are maples, I think, but there may be a yellow larch or two in there as well.

I took this photo looking into the forest so you could see what the woods look like at this time of year.

One of my favorite places to walk is on this trail around a local pond. On this day the trail was carpeted with newly fallen leaves and the sight, sounds, and smell of them made me 10 years old again. I used to love walking through leaves just like these on the way to school.

Many people don’t realize that certain evergreens lose needles in the fall just as deciduous trees lose their leaves. White pine needles (Pinus strobus) like those seen here first turn yellow and then brown before finally falling. These examples fell in the pond water and made interesting patterns. You can find huge amounts of fallen needles like these along our back roads.  I used to fill trash bags full of them each year for a lady who used them as mulch.

I know everyone likes to see the colors reflected in glass-like water but October is a windy month and undisturbed water is hard to come by. Luckily the pond is protected by a big hill on one side so some parts of it were sheltered from the worst of the wind.

This is about as good as it got for reflections this time around I’m afraid, but there should be more in future posts.

Like being inside a kaleidoscope, that’s what this season is. Here are more of those fallen leaves I used to love walking through so much as a boy. I wish you could smell them. There is nothing else like it.

The fallen leaves in the forest seemed to make even the ground glow and burn with light ~Malcolm Lowry

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Early October Flowers

Since my last flower post we’ve had a frost and freezing temps, so this one will probably be the last flower post this year. There will be some flowers like witch hazel and asters still blooming here and there in protected spots but I doubt I’ll find enough to do a full post.

I found a large colony of pink knotweed (Polygonum pennsylvanicum) still blooming, mixed in with grasses and clovers. As smartweeds go this one is very small and short but still pretty.

Pink knotweed is also called Pennsylvania smartweed. The flower heads are made up of many petal less flowers that grow densely on the stalk. Smartweeds get their name from the way your tongue will smart if you bite into them. Native American used smartweeds medicinally to treat a variety of ailments, and also used the chopped plants as a seasoning, much as we use pepper today. Some species are extremely hot while others are said to be milder. I almost always find smartweeds near water but these examples were not.

I’ve seen this pretty bi-color phlox in quite a few gardens. Many phlox blossoms are very fragrant but I always forget to smell this one. What would a fall garden be without a phlox or two? They’re so beautiful, it’s hard not to love them.

I was surprised to find peppers still blooming in a vegetable garden. This example had dark purple anthers.

False dandelion (Hypochaeris radicata) is a plant that is still thriving and I see it blossoming everywhere I go. This plant gets its name from its resemblance to the dandelion, but it would be hard to mistake one for the other. The yellow flowers are smaller than the dandelion’s and stand atop wiry, 6-8 inch long stems.

False dandelion leaves look like miniature versions of dandelion leaves and are nowhere near as wide or as long.

When I first saw this plant blooming while snow was falling a few years ago I thought it was a Shasta daisy on steroids, but it turned out to be the Montauk daisy (Nipponanthemum nipponicum) which is a Japanese creation also called the Nippon daisy. It is extremely hardy; I’ve seen it bloom after a 28 degree F. night and it is also a very late bloomer. It would be an excellent choice for a fall garden.

Many roses will usually bloom right up until a hard freeze and these pink ones still had a lot of buds coming along.

A friend complained about how weedy her morning glories had become, creeping throughout her vegetable garden and self seeding everywhere. I thought back about what poor luck I always had with them. Though I tried many times in various gardens they just refused to grow and bloom. That’s frustrating for a professional gardener but I suppose it’s good to have things in life that keep us humble.

I saw this zinnia still blooming in a friend’s garden. It might be the last one of the season.

New England asters (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae) have just about finished now and I’m seeing fewer and fewer of them, so I thought I’d better grab a photo. It was on a roadside that had been mowed earlier, but even after being cut it still bloomed. I’ve seen other plants do the same.

Pink turtleheads (Chelone lyonii) still bloomed in a local park and I was surprised to see them. Mine stopped blooming a week or two ago. I don’t know the origin of this plant and have never known if it was a native or a cultivar but it does very well and asks for nothing. Pink turtleheads are native to the southeastern U.S. and don’t seem to mind dryness in spite of naturally growing near water.

I’ve never been able to look so deeply into a turtlehead blossom. There’s a lot going on in there. I’m going to have to read up on this plant.

I don’t see scabiosa very often; it doesn’t seem to be very popular here. This example was growing in a local park and seemed to be doing well, with many flowers. Actually I should say many flower heads, because what you see in this photo is a flower head containing many small florets. I’ve read that the name scabiosa comes from the plant’s use in the past to treat scabies, which causes severe itching. It is native to Africa, Europe and Asia.

Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota) had a good year but their time seems to be just about over now. Though another name for this plant is “wild carrot” you had better know exactly what you’re doing if you dig and eat the root because there are very similar plants like water hemlock (Cicuta maculata) that are among the most toxic plants known.

I still see various species of goldenrod blooming here and there but the huge fields of them I saw in August and September are finished for this year. Native Americans used goldenrod for treating colds and toothaches, and it has been used for centuries to treat kidney stones and urinary tract infections.

The last thing I expected to see in October was an orchid in bloom, but there it was blooming away under a powerline cut I was passing through. It grew in what is essentially an unmown meadow, in full sun but surrounded and shaded by plants three times its height. To say it was a surprise would be an understatement.

I believe, because of the dry conditions it grew in and its nodding flowers, that it might be nodding lady’s tresses (Spiranthes cernua.) That orchid blooms in October with white flowers that nod toward the ground. There are at least two other orchids that look nearly identical though, so I could be wrong. I don’t get to see as many orchids as I’d like.

Many people have never learned to see the beauty of flowers, especially those that grow unnoticed. ~Erika Just

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More Fall Color

I had three days off due to the Columbus Day holiday but a heavy cloud cover decided to park itself over the entire region, so most of the photos you’ll see here were taken under gray skies. But this makes things interesting for me, because there is a long running argument that says colors “pop” better on cloudy days than they do on sunny ones. For me it depends. If the sun is behind me and I’m looking at the sun shining on the foliage the scene can be very beautiful, but on cloudy days you don’t have to worry about where the sun is. The colors still “pop” but in a different way, as this view from Howe Reservoir in Dublin shows. Mount Monadnock would have shown in the background if not for the low clouds.

I moved along the shoreline of the reservoir trying to get shots of the best color. An Asian couple did the same, taking selfies with their phones, presumably because the people back home would never believe this. Actually I’ve heard that there are people who think it couldn’t be real; that the colors had to have been faked somehow, but then they came here and found that nature can indeed be pretty colorful.

We still haven’t reached peak color yet so many trees like oak and beech are still green. It seems to start in swaths or pockets throughout the forest before finally the entire forest is ablaze with colors of every hue. I watch the hillsides that surround Keene and when they are showing quite a lot of color that’s my signal to start climbing and try to photograph it from above. So far I haven’t had much luck but I keep trying. My breathing is ragged this year so I’ll probably only get one try. I’ll try to make it a good one.

Birches tend to grow in groves, often mixed in with other species, so it’s hard to isolate a single tree to show you their fall leaf color, but this one conveniently leaned out over the water all by itself. They don’t vary much from the clear yellow that you see here, although I have seen red and orange leaves on birch trees occasionally.

In the fall blueberries come in yellow, orange, red, and the plum color seen here. They grow wild around our lakes and ponds. I can’t think of a single body of fresh water I’ve been on in this state that didn’t have blueberries on its shores. They are very common and their numbers are staggering.

In the last fall color post I showed some cinnamon ferns that were orange. Usually their cousins the interrupted ferns (Osmunda claytoniana) also turn orange but this one at Howe Reservoir was bright yellow.

Sometimes just a single tree seems enough.

But a single tree can never match the beauty of an entire forest wearing its fall colors. The asters were a bonus.

Red maples (Acer rubrum) don’t mind wet feet so they are often found it wet places, and that is why they’re also called swamp maples by many people. In fact some swamps are called red maple swamps. As this view into a swamp shows they come in various shades of yellow, orange, red and are one of our most colorful fall trees. They’re also called soft maple and scarlet maple. These trees can get quite big; the largest known red maple lives in Michigan and is 125 feet tall with a circumference of over 16 feet.

Both main roads and back roads are getting colorful now.  You don’t realize how many people come to see the foliage until you drive a road like this one. Usually you can walk on this road and not see a car all day, but on this day it was like a super highway. I had to wait a while to get a shot with no cars in it.

False Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum racemosum) had colorful leaves but no berries. They get eaten fast and I haven’t been able to find any ripe ones yet this year.

I still haven’t seen any scarlet poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) leaves but I did see some that I thought were pink. Unfortunately my color finding software sees the sky reflected off the leaves and thinks the few leaves in the lower right corner are several shades of blue.

Wild river grape leaves (Vitis riparia) turn yellow in the fall and this is a great time to find them because they stand out better now than at any other time of year.

I couldn’t let a warm and dry fall day go by without visiting the Ashuelot River. I started in the northern part of town and sure enough the tree that always changes before all the others had done it again. I can’t get close to it so I have no idea what it is, but it’s always early.

After visiting the northern part of town I visited town center at Ashuelot Park. This stretch of river is one of my favorites in the fall because the banks are lined with colorful maples. You have to come here relatively early though, because many maples change early and that means they drop their leaves early. In a week or so when I’m at other places admiring colorful foliage the trees here might be all but bare.

The falls over the old Colony dam on West Street turned to molten gold in the afternoon sun.

One of the reasons I love to come here at this time of year is because of the way the afternoon sun sets the trees ablaze with color. It’s beautiful and seeing people just standing and staring or taking photos is common. One girl with a camera told me she comes here every day. It’s a place people come to immerse themselves in the beauty of fall.

But which is more beautiful, the sunlight coming through the trees or falling on the trees? I can never decide so I always get shots of both. The colors are amazing no matter how you look at them.

I’ve been looking at this shot of a turtle on a log for nearly a week now, trying to think of what I wanted to say about it. What a lucky turtle is about all I can come up with. Not profound maybe, but I wouldn’t have minded spending some time on that log myself. I can’t imagine being any more immersed in nature than that.

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

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Fall Mushrooms

I saw quite a few mushrooms in September, including some I’ve never seen before, and I’m still finding them in October. This chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus) mushroom was the biggest and most colorful. Another common name for them is sulfur shelf though I’ve worked with sulfur and this mushroom doesn’t remind me of it. I’ve read that as they age they lose the orange color but I don’t believe it now because I was able to watch these examples every day and they never lost their orange, even as they rotted away. The name chicken of the woods comes from the way they taste like chicken when cooked. Finding bright colors in the woods at any time of year is always a surprise and I always feel grateful that I was able to see them. This fungus was a beautiful thing and about as big as a soccer ball.

Chicken of the woods is yellow on the underside and has pores rather than gills. The pores are there in this photo but they are far too small to see.

We’ve seen the chicken so now for the hen. Hen of the woods (Grifola frondosa,) is an edible polypore that often grows in the same spot year after year. They are said to look like the back of a brown hen’s ruffled feathers, and that’s how they come by their common name. Though they’re said to be brown I always see green. My color finding software sees bands of gray, peach puff, and rosy brown, which is a surprise. I’ve seen a lot of these this year and every one grew at the base of an oak.

There is a whitish tan mushroom that grows on lawns and in the woods and isn’t very exciting so I’ve always ignored it.  After some research I found that it’s called the bluing bolete (Gyroporus cyanescens,) and if I had known that it turned a beautiful cornflower blue where it was bruised I would have looked more closely.

The bluing bolete is said to be edible but I certainly wouldn’t eat it or any mushroom without an expert’s identification. This mushroom contains a compound called variegatic acid which is colorless until it is exposed to oxygen. Once exposed it quickly turns blue, in this case. It can also turn red, I’ve read.

Dyer’s Polypore (Phaeolus schweinitzii) is also called the velvet topped fungus because of its hairy appearance. These fungi are parasitic on the roots and heartwood of living white pines in the eastern U.S. and cause root rot. They also change color as they age. If found when young as this one was it can be used to dye wool a soft yellow or orange and older examples will dye wool brown.

This is what an older dyer’s polypore looks like. As you can see the color difference between young and old examples is dramatic.  Some of these mushrooms can get quite large but this one was only about 5 inches across. Though they sometimes look as if they’re growing on the ground as this one does, they’re really growing on conifer roots or buried logs.

If you saw this growing on a fallen branch would you know what it was? I wasn’t absolutely sure until I turned it over.

I knew it was some type of shelf or bracket fungi from the back but I didn’t know it was turkey tails (Trametes versicolor.) I never knew their undersides were so pure white when they were young. When older the underside is kind of off white and full of pores. I also always thought they grew singly, but in clusters. The back view shows they’re actually all one body.

Golden pholiota (Pholiota limonella) mushrooms grew on a birch tree, which is something I’ve never seen before. In fact there are very few mushrooms that I’ve seen growing on a living birch, but these mushrooms can grow on living or dead wood. They appear in the summer and fall and usually form in large clusters. Their orange-yellow caps are slimy and covered in reddish scales. The dim morning light really brought out the golden color of these examples.

Wolf’s milk slime mold (Lycogala epidendrum) starts out as tiny pink globules but as they age and become more like what we see in the above photo. As they grow the globules look more like small puffballs growing on a log.

Wolf’s milk slime mold is also called toothpaste slime and that’s because there is a pinkish orange material inside each globule with (usually) the consistency of toothpaste. It can also have a more liquid consistency as it does here, and that’s the way I usually find it. As it ages it will turn into a mass of brown powdery spores.

Some coral fungi come to a blunt, rather than pointed end and are called club shaped corals. I thought these might be Clavariadelphus truncatus but that mushroom has wrinkles down its length and these are smooth, so I’m not sure what they are. They were no more than an inch tall.

Crown coral fungi come in many colors but I usually find the tan / white varieties. The example in this photo was as big as a baseball (about 3 inches) and had a touch of orange, which I was happy to see. The way to tell if you have a crown coral fungus is by the tips of the branches, which in crown coral look like tiny crowns rather than blunt or rounded. They grow on dead wood but if that wood is buried they can appear to be growing in soil.

Mushroom spores are carried by the wind so it is unusual to see them dropping to the forest floor like they have in the above photo. I’ve only seen this happen three times and twice it was on a still, hot, humid day. This time it was on a cooler but still humid day, without a hint of a breeze to blow the spores away.

An unusual mushroom that I’ve never paid attention to before is the black tooth fungus (Phellodon niger.) One of things that I find unusual about it is how, when they grow close enough together, their caps fuse together creating a large misshapen mass. But as this photo shows they also grow singly, as most of the ones I saw on this day did. Another odd thing about it is how the caps seem to split open on top.

On the underside of the black tooth’s cap are the black “teeth” that give it its common name. The teeth are called spines and the mushroom’s spores form on them. It’s easy to see how the spore bearing surface increases when a mushroom grows pores or spines on its cap. I’ve read that this mushroom is endangered in many countries like Switzerland and parts of the U.K. and there is a danger of its extinction in certain parts of the world. They seem to be abundant in this area.

This bracket fungus had all the makings of a dryad’s saddle (Cerioporus squamosus) except for color. Dryad’s saddle is usually brown but I can’t find any information on whether or not they start out life white before turning brown. I have seen photos of them online where they looked whitish, but that could be due to lighting or camera settings. This one was definitely white all over and as big as a saucer.

One of the things about nature study that some people seem to have trouble with is leaving things dangling, with no answers.  When I go into the woods I almost always come back with more questions than answers but quite often, sometimes even years later, the answer comes to me. The question on this day was this grouping of grayish mushrooms growing on a stump. I’ve looked through three mushroom guides and a few websites and haven’t found a single small grayish mushroom with a frayed cap edge. I was fairly sure I’d have trouble identifying them but I wanted their photo anyway, because I thought they were very pretty. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that mystery is a big part of living, and I’ve had to do so yet again.

These little white mushrooms presented another conundrum but I think they might be one called Xerula megalospora. Unfortunately I’ll probably never be 100% sure, because you need a microscope to see the big, lemon shaped spores and I don’t have one.

What leads me to think that this example might be a Xerula megalospora is how mushroom expert Michael Kuo explains that “its gills are attached to the stem by means of a notch and a tiny tooth that runs down the stem.” For me though, their beauty is more important than their name and this one was quite beautiful; even more so upside down.

There is no end to wonder once one starts really looking.― Marty Rubin

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Fall Comes to New Hampshire

We’re seeing some fall color now but it’s still spotty and you have to look for it, rather than it being everywhere like it will be soon. The colors weren’t too bad at Perkin’s Pond over in Troy where this photo was taken, though there wasn’t any color to be seen on the flanks of Mount Monadnock. I suspect those are mostly all white pines on the mountain itself.

I always like to zoom in on the summit of Monadnock to see how many climbers are up there and I was surprised on this beautiful day to see none at all. Mount Monadnock is the second most climbed mountain in the world after Mount Fuji in Japan and it can get quite crowded, especially in the fall. I expected it to look like a Manhattan sidewalk at lunchtime up there on this day, but maybe everyone is waiting for more tree color.

You can see blazes of golden yellow here and there on the hillsides; signs that ash trees have put on their fall colors. Ash is one of the earliest to change and a good sign that autumn has begun.

Not every ash tree turns yellow. Some like white ash become yellow, orange, red and purple.

Our ferns are starting to change and among the most colorful are cinnamon ferns (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum.) The common name for this fern comes from its upright reddish brown fertile fronds which someone thought looked like cinnamon sticks. It often turns bright pumpkin orange in the fall.

Royal ferns (Osmunda spectabilis) turn yellow in the fall, but many people don’t realize that they are ferns. In fact they are thought to be one of the oldest living things, with fossil records dating back dating back over 300 million years. Individual plants are believed to be able to live for over a century and they live on every continent on earth except Australia.

Wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) usually turns yellow in the fall but every now and then you’ll see one that is purple / bronze like this one.

This is more what we expect wild sarsaparilla to look like at this time of year. Yellow spots form on the leaves and slowly grow larger until the entire leaf is yellow. This is one of the earliest plants to start turning color in the fall.

More often than not poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) turns yellow in the fall but it can also be bright scarlet and sometimes bronze / purple as it is here. I like the scarlet color but I haven’t seen any plants wearing it yet. No matter what color it is or even if it has no leaves at all poison ivy will give most people an itchy rash they won’t soon forget, so it’s best to know it well and stay away from it.

The burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) along the Ashuelot River are changing slowly this year and most still look like this one. Though the shrub is extremely invasive there’s nothing quite like seeing huge swaths of the forest understory awash in soft, pastel pink.

Here and there you can find burning bush foliage that has turned white. This is usually what the leaves look like just before they fall.

The wind kept blowing these maple leaves in my face when I was mowing one day, apparently trying to wake me up to the fact that they had put their fall colors on. I finally did wake up to their beauty and took this photo. Maples can be red, yellow or orange.

Trees along the river in Keene are just starting to turn so the colors weren’t spectacular yet.

In late afternoon the sun is behind these trees and at times it looks like the forest is ablaze with colors. On this day it was all more muted and soft.

This tree couldn’t seem to make up its mind what color it wanted to be. You don’t often see yellow, orange and red on a single tree.

Our native maple leaf viburnum shrubs (Viburnum acerifolium) can change to any of many different colors including the maroon / burnt orange seen here. The foliage will continue to lighten over time until it wears just a hint of pale pastel pink just before the leaves fall.

Native little bluestem grass (Schizachyrium scoparium) catches the sunlight and glows in luminous pink ribbons along our roadsides in the fall. This common grass grows in every U.S. state except Nevada and Washington and is beautiful enough to be grown in many gardens. After a frost it takes on a darker reddish purple hue, which makes it even more beautiful.

It’s the way its seed heads capture and reflect sunlight that makes little bluestem glow like it does.

This photo isn’t really about fall colors on the trees. It’s more about how the water in streams and small ponds darkens at this time of year until it appears almost black. When leaves of different colors fall and float on such dark water it can be a very beautiful scene.

Just in the short time since I started taking photos and writing this post things have changed dramatically, and there is now color along just about any road you care to follow. That’s how quickly it can happen sometimes. This view of Half Moon Pond in Hancock is one of my fall favorites.

This shot is of more color along the shoreline of Half Moon Pond. Most of the colorful trees are maples I think, and the colorful shrubs along the water’s edge are blueberry bushes.

This is another view of Half Moon Pond; it was so beautiful I couldn’t stop taking photos. The tourism bureau here in New Hampshire expects that millions of people from over 70 countries will come to see the foliage this year. Though the change is coming a bit later than usual so far the colors look to be breathtaking. If you come chances are you’ll find many of us standing and staring, awestruck by the incredible beauty. That’s what it does to you, no matter how many times you’ve seen it.

Over everything connected with autumn there lingers some golden spell–some unseen influence that penetrates the soul with its mysterious power. ~Northern Advocate

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More Late September Flowers

I wish I could say our roadsides looked like this right now but no, this is a garden aster that grows in a local park. I don’t know its name but it’s a huge plant with many hundreds of beautiful blossoms. The wild ones come close but they aren’t anywhere near as compact and bushy.

Here again is that hillside full of flowers that I drive by every morning. It’s hard not to take too many photos of something so beautiful. It’s such a beautiful time of year, when the wildflowers go out with a bang.

I happened to drive through the company parking lot where I worked years ago and found these New England asters and many other plants growing up through the cracks in the asphalt paving. The owners of the building and grounds have been looking for a buyer for years with no takers, and now the place looks all but abandoned. As nature often does it saw a blank canvas and wanted to fill it with color. I sometimes parked my car right where these grew.

Most jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) plants are finished for the season but I still see plants blooming away here and there. There are still plenty of pollinators about too, and I’m sure they’re happy to see more flowers blooming. This plant typically blossoms right up until a frost but as day length shortens the plants will produce smaller, closed flowers with no petals and no nectar. They self-pollinate and their sole purpose is to produce plenty of seeds.

And they have produced plenty of seeds. Right now I see far more of these seedpods on jewelweed than I do flowers. They look like little pea pods.

And if you touch those seedpods this is what happens. This plant gets its common name touch me not from the way its seed pods snap and release the seeds at the slightest touch. The edible seeds can fly as far as 4 feet. Other names include orange Jewelweed, common jewelweed, spotted jewelweed, and orange balsam.  The name “jewel weed” comes from the way that raindrops sparkle on its wax coated leaves.

Pee Gee hydrangea (Hydrangea paniculata) blossoms are turning into their fall pink and when that is done they will go to brown. Eventually each flower petal will start to disintegrate and for a short time will look like stained glass. If cut at the pink stage however, the color will hold for quite a long time. These huge blossom heads dry well and make excellent dried flower arrangements.

A story I’ve told here before is how there was a time when all red clover (Trifolium pretense) plants meant to me was more hard work. I didn’t like having to weed it out of lawns and garden beds but it was so unsightly with its long, weak flower stems and sprawling, weedy habit. And then one evening a single ray of sunshine came through the clouds and fell directly on a red clover plant at the edge of a meadow, and when I knelt in front of it to take its photo for the first time I saw how beautiful it really was. I saw that it had an inner light; what I think of as the light of creation, shining brightly out at me. I’ve loved it ever since, and since that day I don’t think I’ve ever truly thought of another flower, no matter how lowly, as a weed.

Jerusalem artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus) were cultivated by Native Americans for thousands of years for their tuberous roots, which they cooked and ate much like we do potatoes. They are said to be starchy with a nutty flavor and they were immediately adopted by the early settlers. The tubers have fewer calories than potatoes and the plant’s carbohydrates and sugars can be assimilated by the digestive tract without insulin. This makes them an excellent choice for diabetics. I used to dig them for clients of mine that grew them for food and I’ll never forget how very tall these plants can be.

Shaggy soldier (Galinsoga quadriradiata) still blooms prolifically. How this plant got from Mexico to New Hampshire is anyone’s guess, but it seems to love it here. People however, do not love seeing it; everyone agrees that it’s a weed, even in its native Mexico. The plant is also called common quick weed or Peruvian daisy and is common in gardens, where it can reduce crop yields by as much as half if left to its own devices.

Shaggy soldier has tiny flowers that are about 3/8 of an inch across and have 5 white ray florets widely spaced around tiny yellow center disc florets. They are among the smallest flowers that I try to photograph.

Cow vetch (Vicia cracca) is a native of Europe and Asia that loves it here and has spread far and wide. According to the Invasive Plant Atlas of the United States the vining plant is present in every U.S. state. Cow vetch can have a taproot nearly a foot long and drops large numbers of seeds, so it is hard to eradicate. It is very similar to hairy vetch, but that plant has hairy stems. I like its color and it’s nice to see it sprinkled here and there among the tall grasses.

Carolina horse nettle (Solanum carolinense) is a plant that I’ve never seen anywhere before.  From what I’ve read it is not a true nettle, but instead is a member of the nightshade family, like the black nightshade I showed in my last flower post. The flowers have five petals and are usually white or purple with yellow centers. There is a blue variant that resembles the tomato flower, which makes sense since tomatoes are also in the nightshade family. The flowers have no scent but the foliage has a certain odor that I find disagreeable.

The fruits resemble tomatoes and are sometimes called devil’s tomatoes. Unripe fruit is dark green with light green stripes, turning yellow and wrinkled as it ripens. Each fruit contains around 60 seeds but the plant spreads successfully by underground stems (rhizomes.)  All parts of the plant are poisonous and eating it, especially the fruit, can cause death. Pheasant, Bobwhite, Turkeys and Skunks are said to eat the fruit.

Horse nettle’s stem and undersides of larger leaf veins are covered with spines and I can attest to their sharpness. It’s hard to grab it anywhere and I got pricked several times just trying to turn a leaf over. This plant is native to our southern states, so why it is growing here is a mystery. It seemed to like where it grew; there must have been 30-40 plants growing there. I can see its spreading becoming a real problem.

Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense) blooms in the tall grass of unmown meadows usually in large colonies but this one bloomed alone and I think it might be the last blossom I see of this plant this year. This plant isn’t covered with sharp spines like the larger bull thistle but it does have small spines along the leaf margins and stem. Despite its common name the plant is actually a native of Europe but has spread to virtually every country in the northern hemisphere. It has a deep and extensive creeping root system and is nearly impossible to eradicate once it gains a foothold. For that reason it is considered a noxious weed in many states.

The last thing I expect to see at the end of September in New Hampshire is an azalea flower but here was a yellow flowered one that was blooming as if it were spring. I’ve read about azaleas that bloom in October in southern states but I didn’t know they would bloom that late here.

Dandelions are still blooming and I’m not surprised because I once saw one blooming in January when we had a mild winter. This one had a tiny visitor.

Witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) is our latest blooming shrub. I’ve seen it bloom as late as January in a warm winter, but I can’t remember ever seeing it bloom this early in September. Some Native American tribes steamed witch hazel twigs over hot stones in their sweat lodges to soothe aching muscles and others made tea from it to treat coughs. As is often the case Natives had a use for virtually every part of the plant and witch hazel is still in use today. It can be found as a lotion in almost any drugstore.

Witch hazel blossoms are pollinated by owlet moths, which are active in winter and are called winter moths. The moths raise their body temperature by shivering, and can raise it by as much as 50 degrees F. This allows them to fly and search for food when it’s cold. But it isn’t cold now, and this year the moths may have help from several other insects I’ve seen still flying. I’m still seeing bees, wasps, butterflies and dragonflies.

I thought I’d end with one more look at what I drive by every morning on my way to work. This will probably be the last time we see this for this year because most of these flowers have now faded. They were so beautiful!

Beauty is something that changes your life, not something you understand. ~Marty Rubin

Thanks for coming by.

 

 

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Searching For Fall Color

There is a rail trail in Swanzey that runs between the main road and the river and the trees along it often change into their fall colors slightly earlier than others, so last weekend I decided to go and see if fall had paid a visit yet.

It was a beautiful day, with full sunshine, temps in the 60s, and very low humidity. Asters in blue, purple and white lining the trail helped beautify the hike.

These blue ones were small; about the size of a regular aspirin, but beautiful.

I saw what I thought might be Jack O’ Lantern mushrooms (Omphalotus olearius) growing from a log. These mushrooms usually grow in large clumps and get their name from their bright orange color. They are toxic and unfortunately are sometimes confused with chanterelle mushrooms. Jack o’ lanterns probably won’t kill but they can put you in the hospital for a time so mushroom foragers would be wise to know them well. This mushroom is also bioluminescent, and the gills are said to glow with a faint blue-green light in the dark.

There are a few nice old box culverts out here but the railbed is about 50 feet above the streams that run under them so they’re hard to get photos of. To see this one I only had to scramble down a 10 foot embankment so it was relatively easy. It still works just as the railroad engineers designed it 150 years ago. There are massive amounts of soil over it but the thick granite slabs haven’t moved an inch. These are called box culverts because they have 4 sides like an open ended box.

There’s a good chance that the granite for the box culverts came from this ledge that the railbed was cut through. Railroad stone masons often used stone that was as close to the project being built as possible. They didn’t want to haul it very far.

Long, straight drill holes still show in the face of the ledge. This one was probably drilled with a steam drill. Once you had a hole you filled it with black powder, lit the fuse and ran as fast as you could go.

I was happy to see a lot of pink lady’s slipper orchids (Cypripedium acaule) with seed pods out here. I’ve got to remember to come back in June to see if I can find others blooming.

Lady’s slipper seeds are very small and each seed pod can contain as many as 20,000 seeds. The seeds have no stored starch for food so they have to rely on certain fungi in the soil to grow, and without the fungi the plant won’t make it. That’s why digging them up to plant in gardens never works; the symbiotic connection between orchid and fungus is lost. It can take 10-15 years for a lady’s slipper grown from seed to flower. Setting seed like this example has done weakens the plant enough so it probably won’t blossom again for a year or more, so each plant only sets seed about 5 times in its lifetime.

The most unusual thing I saw on this outing was a native turtlehead plant (Chelone) with bicolor blossoms in lavender and white. I’ve seen pink turtleheads and white turtleheads but I’ve never seen this one. I’m guessing that it must be a natural hybrid, created by the bees. It was pretty and I would be happy to have it growing in my own garden.

The turtlehead’s blossoms had just started to open.

Chanterelle wax cap mushrooms (Hygrocybe cantharellus) grew on a moss covered stump. These mushrooms are quite small; I don’t think I’ve ever seen one much bigger than a penny, so you have to look closely and carefully to find them. Every time I see them they are growing in groups either on a stump or a log. They’re fairly common at this time of year.

One of the people who live along the rail trail built a bridge over the drainage ditch so they could get to the trail. They’re lucky; I’d love to be able to reach a rail trail from my back yard.

This trail is popular with bike riders. I didn’t count how many passed me but it was quite a few. I was the only one walking.

I saw a lot of fallen trees out here too. The top of this big poplar was hanging by just a few branches onto a white pine it had fallen against. It didn’t look like it would take much of a breeze to bring it all the way down and I hope nobody is under it when it happens.

Even without much in the way of fall colors there was still plenty to see out here, like this maple dust lichen (Lecanora thysanophora.) Lichens and mosses start calling to me at this time of year because once the leaves fall they become more visible. As the name implies the maple dust lichen grows on the bark of maples but I’ve also seen it on beech, oak, basswood and poplar, so don’t be afraid to look for this one on just about any tree. They can be large and easy to see at about 3/4 of an inch and the white fringe around their perimeter makes them easy to identify. They’re pretty little things that are worth searching for.

Before I knew it I was at the old trestle over the Ashuelot River, which was my turn around spot. The wooden deck and side rails have been added to many trestles by snowmobiler clubs for safety. The decks make these old trestles much easier to cross.

Trestles give you views of the river way out in the middle of nowhere that you’d most likely never see if the trestles weren’t there and that’s one of the things I like most about rail trails. I didn’t see much fall color on this side of the trestle, just some trees on the yellow side of green.

But on the other side of the trestle some trees were very yellow. Maples, I think. It’s odd how colors can vary so much in just a few yards.

On the way back there was another yellowish tree up ahead on the left but all in all I can’t say that fall has come to this section of trail just yet. Before too long though, there will be reds and oranges along with the yellows. I have to say that I’m in no hurry. I love to see the fall colors but I’m not too crazy about what follows. I hope you’ll have a gloriously colorful fall season wherever you may be.

Summer is leaving silently. Much like a traveler approaching the end of an amazing journey. ~Darnell Lamont Walker

Thanks for stopping in.

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