Spring Knocks Louder

This week the temperature reached nearly 60 degrees on three or four days and we also had some rain, and this meant that most of the snow left in a hurry. The ice on vernal pools is melting and I was happy to see this, because places like these is where many spring peeper frogs will sing from. Much life depends on these pools; not only frogs but at least three different salamanders and fairy shrimp rely on them. They also ease the burden of finding a water source for many other animals and birds. They play a very important role in the life of the forest in spring and early summer but by August almost all of them will have dried up.

For those who have never seen one, this is a spring peeper. It is a small tree frog which might reach an inch and a half long on a good day, but its small size doesn’t mean it doesn’t have powerful lungs. Standing beside a pond full of them singing on an April evening can be almost deafening. The easiest way to identify them, if you can even find one in all the leaf litter, is by the X on its back. Some call it a cross but it looks more like an X to me. They can be tan, brown, green, or gray and have round pads on the ends of their fingers and toes. If you’d like to hear them there are videos of them on You Tube, some less than a minute long. They should start singing here any day now.

I looked at red maple buds one day and they hadn’t changed much, but then I went back two days later and saw trees full of flowers. These are male (staminate) flowers, many already laden with pollen.

The sticky red maple female (pistilate) flowers are ready for pollen. It really is amazing how fast this happens. You have to look at them every day to catch the various stages.

Part of my days have included looking at hazelnut buds and I must have looked at hundreds before I found this one in bloom. Each tiny red filament coming out of the bud is a female flower and on this day they were radiant and glowing with an inner light. If everything goes well each tiny flower will become a hazelnut.

For those who haven’t seen hazelnut flowers, here is a photo from a few years ago with a paperclip for scale. They are some of the smallest flowers that I try to photograph and they can be a real challenge.

One very windy day I went to try to get a photo of some male hazelnut catkins and this is the so-so result. It’s not a great shot but it shows that the catkins have loosened up and lost their winter stiffness, and will now move in the wind. This is important, because hazelnuts are wind pollinated. Though the catkins, which are just long strings of male flowers, aren’t releasing pollen yet it won’t be long now. This is what the sticky red female flowers in the previous shot are waiting for.

Alder catkins have started to open up and they’re beautiful as always. All the greenish parts seen here are male flower buds just starting to peek out from under the tiny red /purple bud scales. They are very beautiful the way they sparkle and shine as the wind moves them. They make the bushes look as if someone had strung jewels or lights on them. I haven’t seen any of the very tiny female flowers yet but with this happening it won’t be long.

The willows are filled with furry gray catkins But I haven’t seen any of their yellow flowers yet.

The skunk cabbages, once more released from their cover of snow, sit and wait patiently in their swamp, still leafless. Soon they will hear a signal only they can hear and this swamp will erupt with big green leaves.

A dandelion flower seemed as bright as the sun after a string of cloudy days. Botanically speaking this is a flower head made up of many small ray florets. Each yellow strap shaped petal is actually five petals fused into one, and the five notches at their ends show that. You can see the many tiny ram’s horn shaped stigmas loaded with pollen in this shot. On a dandelion blossom the stigma comes out of a tiny tube formed by the anthers. This plant is calling loudly to the bees.

But the bees are rolling around drunkenly in the crocus blossoms, spilling pollen grains all over their petals. What a life.

The bees didn’t seem to care for these pale yellow crocuses.

Hellebores are also showing their big buds. Interestingly on these plants the buds are prettier than the sickly looking greenish white flowers. That’s just my opinion but there are a lot of them in this city park, as if a nursery donated all the hellebores that didn’t sell. I’m not sure who would buy a dozen or so plants with that color flower and then scatter them here and there.

I was surprised to see scilla up and blooming already at the local college. The plants in my own yard aren’t even showing yet.

These are pretty little flowers but getting a shot looking into one can be challenging. I had to gently bend the stem back with one hand and take this photo with the other. I’m often glad that cameras have built in image stabilization these days.

The cress is flowering madly and if all those flowers are allowed to go to seed, it will do so for years to come.

Cornellian cherries often remind me of a child dipping their toes in the water to decide if they want to go in swimming or not. This bush has been slowly opening its buds and dipping its toes for weeks now so I hope it decides to bloom soon.

The beautiful plum colored reticulated irises are in bloom. At one time the only way to get this color to dye with was by boiling a certain kind of snail for three days, Is it any wonder that the color was reserved for royalty? They were the only ones who could afford it.

A robin wanted to show me that the ground had fully thawed so it hopped my way and pulled out a worm. I’ve seen this countless times but this is the first photo I’ve gotten of it. Mr. Robin had better eat his fill because it won’t be long before he has several more mouths to feed. The trees are filled with female birds that squawk warning cries when you get too close, so I assume they’re nesting.

Listen, can you hear it?  Spring’s sweet cantata. The strains of grass pushing through the snow. The song of buds swelling on the vine. The tender timpani of a baby robin’s heart.  Spring!
~Diane Frolov

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A Little Bit of Everything

I went over to Perkin’s Pond in Troy last week to see how spring was getting on but it still looked wintery, even though the day was gloriously spring like. The view of Mount Monadnock was as good as it gets, all frosted with snow like it was. At just over 3,000 feet, It’s the tallest peak in the area and until recently it was the second most climbed mountain in the world after Mount Fuji in Japan. Now however, there is said to be a mountain in China that sees over two million visitors each year. Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson are among a few of the well known people who have climbed Monadnock, and countless poets, authors, artists, and musicians have described how it made them feel. Thoreau said that it was far more beautiful when seen from a distance than it was looking off from the summit, and I agree. Its name is said to mean “mountain that stands alone” in the native Abenaki language. In warmer months this stretch of road is often lined with painters, photographers, and tourists.

Years ago, a friend and I climbed Monadnock in mid April when the snowpack looked much like it does in this shot. You can if you’re careful, pick your way around the snow, but there are spots where you have to go through it. We climbed unprepared for the conditions, and foolish mistakes like that can be dangerous and even deadly up there. In places we found ourselves in snow so deep we had to spread ourselves out and kind of swim -wriggle -crawl over the top of it. When we finally got to the top exhausted and drenched, we found ourselves in a fog so thick we couldn’t see enough of the landscape to know if we had even reached the summit. The world had become a blank, uniformly gray nothingness. Over on the right in this shot you can see a group of maybe 7 or 8 people, and I’d guess when they got got home they were able to wring water out of everything they wore, just like we were that day. But at least they weren’t in a fog.

The ice on Perkin’s Pond was starting to melt but I could see tracks on the ice leading to or away from the open water. I hope they were made by some thing rather than some one. This is not a good time of year to be on the ice.

I saw some shy old friends, the split gill mushrooms. These true winter mushrooms are small and always wear a fuzzy coat, as can be seen here. I couldn’t call them rare but neither are they common. I might find one group of them per year if I’m lucky.

These examples were dry and quite small; the largest one in this shot might have been as big as an aspirin. The “gills” on the split gill fungus are actually folds in the tissue of its spore bearing surface that split lengthwise when it dries out. The splits close over the fertile surfaces as the mushroom shrivels in dry weather. When rehydrated by rain the splits reopen, the spore-producing surfaces are exposed to the air, and spores are released. These little mushrooms are very tough and leathery and even though they’re white they can be hard to spot.

I mentioned in that last post how subtle the start of spring can be, and these hazelnut catkins illustrate that very well. You can just see that they’ve started to turn golden from the green they’ve been all winter, and that’s just one subtle sign of spring that I look for. At this time of year, it really doesn’t matter what the calendar says.

You can look at the seasons in two ways. Meteorologically, seasons go by temperature, with the hottest three months in the northern hemisphere being summer and the coldest three months winter. This way, winter starts on December first, spring on March first, summer on June first, and autumn on September first. This is the way meteorologists prefer to see the seasons. Another way to look at the seasons is astronomically. Equinoxes are when day and night are closest to equal length; spring begins around March 21st and autumn around September 22nd. The solstices are days with the longest and shortest amounts of sunlight; summer begins around June 21st and winter around December 22nd. The dates of the solstices and equinoxes can vary from year to year, and that’s why meteorologists don’t use them. They like solid, three month intervals. I forget all of it and watch nature.

Poplar catkins look a lot like pussy willow catkins and that’s not surprising, because poplar trees are in the willow family. North American poplars are divided into three main groups: the cottonwoods, the aspens, and the balsam poplars. If the buds aren’t sticky then the tree belongs in the aspen group. These bud scales were beautifully shiny but not at all sticky so this was an aspen. Poplar catkins often appear right around the same time willow catkins do. Maybe a week or so later.

I saw signs that the alder catkins were loosening up. The grayish “glue” that keeps water from getting in under the bud scales had disappeared on the catkins that receive the most sunlight and they had also started to show some red and purple coloration. When the bud scales open and reveal the flowers the purple and green catkins sparkle as they move on the breeze, and it looks like jewels have been hung from the bushes. It’s another of those many things that makes spring so special.

Encouraged by the warm sunshine I went to the local college campus again. There I found the first snowdrops I’ve seen this spring. They bloom early but they aren’t the earliest flowers to appear.

I also saw the first purple crocus of the year, and it was beautiful. I haven’t seen any bees yet but I’ve seen a lot of other insects.

I found cress in bloom as well. I don’t know if it’s winter cress or spring cress but it doesn’t matter; all that matters is its beauty. It’s a very early flower that I always like to see.

It’s also a very small flower. A bouqet of four or five of these could hide behind a pea. I wanted to put a flower on a penny for scale but I didn’t have a single coin with me. They are so hard for me to see it took me a few tries to get a shot that was useable.

This was the strangest thing I saw on this day. Blue leaf buds? I’ve never heard of such a thing, but I tried to just forget the color and looked the plant over. From what I saw I believe it was some variety of big leaf hydrangea but I couldn’t swear to it. There were several plants in a group, all maybe two to three feet tall, and they baffled Google lens as well. I’m hoping someone might know what it is; maybe one of the master gardeners out there? I’d love to hear about it. I’d plant it just for that beautiful blue bud color.

One of my favorite spring flowers is reticulated iris and here they were in full bloom. When I first started visiting the college campus to see the spring flowers that bloomed there I often saw these little irises coming up and blooming right through the snow. Back then they were the earliest of all the flowers on the campus but no longer. Now they’re well behind crocuses, and I can’t imagine why.

In the last post I showed you some crocuses trying to bloom under the snow, and this is what I found in that spot on this day. After a long New Hampshire winter, a scene like this can melt even the hardest of hearts. Flowers give so much and ask so little. They are precious jewels, and I try to remember to be grateful for the richness they bring to life each time I see them.

I saw a new spring blooming witch hazel in bloom. It was very showy and looked much like its cousin the native fall blooming witch hazel. These spring bloomers are extremely fragrant and their scent always says spring to me.

But then there was another bump in the road to spring this week. This is what we woke up to Wednesday morning: more heavy wet snow. The snow pasted on the trees said the wind had come out of the northeast and I’ve heard that in places, it howled. It often does when we have a nor’easter.

One of my favorite snow quotes is by William Sharp, who said “There is nothing in the world more beautiful than the forest clothed to its very hollows in snow. It is the still ecstasy of nature, wherein every spray, every blade of grass, every spire of reed, every intricacy of twig, is clad with radiance.” That is a perfect description of what I saw, and it was amazingly beautiful.

The trouble is, the same thing that makes this kind of snow so very beautiful also makes it problematic. It is so wet it sticks to everything and when you get several inches of it, it gets very heavy. Everywhere I went I heard tales of snow blowers that had broken down and plow trucks that could just barely move it. In the view above, birch trees were bent right down to the ground under the weight of it. Sometimes they will recover and stand up straight again but more often than not they have to be cut. I’m thankful that we don’t see storms like this one very often, and that I was able to shovel what fell at my house.

I was lucky as far as snow totals go. Though the official total was supposed to be 17 inches here, I measured slightly less than 7 inches in my yard. Snow this wet and heavy can compact itself though, so that might account for the difference. I didn’t lose power here but many thousands of people did. About 12 miles to the northeast in the town of Nelson, they saw 40 inches, according to the local news station. That’s an incredible amount of snow from one storm, even for New Hampshire. I’d bet there are a lot of sore backs among the unlucky folks in that part of the state. It will most likely take about a week for it to all melt depending on the weather, so I probably won’t be seeing flowers again for a while. If there is one thing you learn quickly when you take up nature blogging it is that you can’t pick and choose. You learn to take what comes without complaint. I have been known to whine about the #$+&@^!* weather now and then but I won’t do that today. Instead, I’ll think about calendar spring, which starts in two days. My 12th year of blogging also starts on that day.

Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy – your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself. ~Annie Leibovitz

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Spring Happens, But Slowly

There is a day when spring comes. You can sense it; the way the sun slants through the blinds in the morning and calls you outside. You feel a certain warmth on the breeze that hasn’t been there for months. Streams are fuller. Bird songs are slightly more urgent and the birds busier. You realize you are overdressed and should have left a layer or two behind. It is that day when you know for certain winter is over and spring has arrived, and even a foot of snow the next day can’t convince you that it hasn’t. This year, in this small corner of the world, that day was Monday, March 6th. It was a day when I went out and wanted to never go back in. The day the madness called spring fever took hold.

Spring often comes silently. Hushed and just barely noticeable. Snow melt happens not on the surface but lower down where the snow contacts the soil, and you see it happening by looking at the streams and rivers, not at the snow. We had a storm drop about six and a half inches of wet, heavy snow two days before I took this shot, but it is melting fast. When snow is as wet as this was it is little more than white rain, so it doesn’t usually last long unless we get more on top of it.

This is what I saw when I looked out the kitchen window the morning of the day spring came. These blue shadows always remind me of my art teacher Mrs. Safford, who taught me to see them. Shadows can be gray and that’s what I saw, but they can also be blue and that’s what she taught me to see. Blue shadows in a painting of a winter scene gave it much more interest she said, and so I painted blue shadows. (Which sometimes turned out to be purple.) It’s all in the light, she would say, and that’s when I started to look at light and how it fell. I can draw a ball, but without shadow it is just a circle. Shadow is what makes it a sphere, and shadow is what makes this life so very interesting.

This shot has absolutely nothing to do with this post but it shows a cloud and its shadow. I’ve loved watching cloud shadows move over the land since I was a very young boy but this was the first time I had seen both the shadow and the cloud from this point of view. I could see both the darkness of the shadow and the sunlight falling on the cloud that caused it at the same time. In my mind Joni Mitchell sang “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now” and I realized that, even though I’ve never been on a plane, by climbing mountains I have seen clouds from both sides.

I went to the skunk cabbage swamp again to see what they had been up to. Flourishing, is what they have been up to. This group had melted a nice oval through the snow so it looked like they were a still life with a platter. Leaf buds have appeared and you can also see how thin the snow cover in the swamp is. By now it has most likely all melted.

Here was one I might be able to get a peek into, I thought.

I didn’t want to kneel in the muck and come away from the swamp with soaking wet knees so I got out my small macro camera, bent over and and pointed it at the gap in the spathe. Considering that I was shooting blind it didn’t come out all that bad, so I was pleasantly surprised. You can see how the tiny skunk cabbage flowers dot the spadix, and how the splotchy outer spathe protects it all. The flowers were shedding pollen and I had seen a few insects about, so maybe this will be the year that I finally find a skunk cabbage fruit.  

The beautiful curl at the tip of a cinnamon fern’s leaf tip grabbed at my attention for a bit. Everything seems to spiral.

I had a look at some wild azalea buds while I was in the swamp. They are also called wooly or early azaleas and they’ll bloom toward the end of May with some of the most beautiful, most fragrant flowers found in the forest. To stumble upon a seven foot tall bush full of beautiful pink flowers off in the middle of nowhere is to know what it means to be stunned into silence. These moments of awe can happen when we look off from a mountain top or when we look at the ice on a puddle in spring; anytime, anywhere. Everything is simple in the forest, uncomplicated and beautiful. There is a gentle, silent serenity found there, evident in all things, and it is there that I fell in love with life so many years ago.

I don’t look at red or silver maple buds until spring is near because when I do they make me wish spring was nearer. When I looked at this group of buds I could see that the bud scales, though they hadn’t fully opened, were loosening their grip on the buds. Everything in nature including myself, kind of sighs and relaxes when spring gets here.

I always tell people that it doesn’t matter how many times they walk through a place. If they walk slowly through nature and look closely they’ll almost always see something new, and that proved true on this day when I found an elm branch sticking up out of a snowbank. I’ve walked here many hundreds of times and have never noticed the young elm tree I’ve been walking right by. The tree might be 10 or 12 years old but it’s doubtful that it will get much older. At one time Keene was called the Elm City because of the beautiful old elms that lined the streets, but in the 1960s they started to die off from Dutch elm disease and had to be cut down. From then on finding a 200 year old elm has been rare event, but I do know where a few are, scattered here and there.  

It’s a bit odd that the smooth bud scales of striped maple can open to such velvety buds, but hairy or not they’re beautiful in varying shades of orange and pink. The bud scales have their own beauty; they always look like they’ve been sanded and polished.

I couldn’t resist showing those who might be new here what the bud scales in that previous shot will open to reveal; some of the most beautiful buds in these spring woods. Anyone who says that magic doesn’t happen in the forest hasn’t been in the woods in spring. That’s when the real magic happens.

Someone found out the ground was thawing, the hard way. I don’t think the frost went very deep into the ground this year because winter was relatively mild, so mud season shouldn’t be too challenging in this area. Still, most towns in the area will impose a weight limit of 6 tons on all gravel and other roads susceptible to damage. Food, fire and heating oil trucks are an exception, but all logging and heavy delivery trucks will have to sit idle until May first.

If you look closely you can see buds on these daffodils.

The spring blooming witch hazels are still going strong. They might go for a month or more depending on the weather. I think they’d rather have cool than hot because it seems to me that they bloom longer.

Crocuses shrugged off the snow and said no thanks, it’s spring.

Some did anyway. These yellow ones were still trying to bloom under the snow.

The crocus plants I’ve shown here grow on the campus of the local college, which at its essence is a huge mass of concrete and brick. This mass absorbs heat from the sun during the day and releases it slowly at night so plants are coddled in a way, and they tend to bloom slightly earlier than they would elsewhere. This shot is of the same yellow crocuses that appeared in the previous shot, taken about 24 hours later, and it shows how fast the snow is melting on the campus.

I decided to walk around and see if I could find any other flowers blooming on the campus. I remembered where there was a large bed full of purple and yellow crocuses. When I got there I saw that some of  the yellows were out but there was no sign of the purples. Once it starts it moves quickly, so I’ll have to go back tomorrow and check again.

Most of the yellow flowers had red (or orange) in the center but this one didn’t. It didn’t matter, it was still beautiful.

The big excitement on this day came in the form of dandelions. Call them what you want, I call them wildflowers, and there were several of them soaking up the sunshine. Their appearance is a signal, so now I’ll watch for the blossoms of spring cress, ground ivy, henbit and violets.

Blossom by blossom the spring begins. ~Algernon Charles Swinburne

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Another Taste of Spring

It was nice to see green grass again this past week. It came in so many different shades I felt filled with green, which is not at all unpleasant in the early spring. It had still been warmish for the past week so I thought I’d see what other signs and wonders I could find. I also immediately ordered some color correcting glasses for colorblindness.

I saw some beautiful lilac buds but I wasn’t happy to see their bud scales opening. It’s far too early and they’re liable to pay a heavy price if they open now. We needed some cold weather to stop plants from thinking spring had come and luckily, by mid-week we got it.

Willows of course can stand the cold and often open in early spring. These catkins were in the process of breaking through their bud scales when I found them. Each furry catkin is protected by a single black or brown bud scale, which is called a cap.

The catkins grow and expand inside the bud scale until there is no room left and then the scale splits open to release it. Soon the yellow willow flowers will appear, growing up out of each fuzzy catkin. It’s one of my favorite spring things to see.

While I was visiting the willows I looked at a few pinecone galls. This one was about the size of an acorn and very hairy. Willow pine cone galls appear on the very tips of willow branches, because that’s where a midge called (Rabdophaga strobiloides) lays its egg. Once the eggs hatch the larvae burrow into the branch tip and the plant reacts by forming a gall around them.

I went to where I know a lot of sumacs grow, thinking I’d see a flock of robins eating the seeds, but I didn’t see a single robin and I didn’t see any sign of them or any other bird having eaten the seeds. I’ve heard that sumac berries aren’t the first choice of birds because they’re low in fat, and fat translates to energy. I don’t know how true it is though. I’ve heard in other places sumac fruit gets eaten all winter. Maybe it depends on how cold it gets. It can get mighty cold here so maybe the birds need something more substantial to keep them warm.

The spiraling leaves on this plant reminded me of the spiraled horns of the giant eland from Africa that I had just seen on television recently. The spirals in their horns help them lock together when fighting over a mate, but I don’t why these leaves twisted like they did. They made me stop and look and wonder, and that was enough.

As I neared these honey locust seedpods from over on the right they looked like a big snake in the grass, and I thought of how my grandmother would have climbed the nearest tree if she had been with me. I smiled as I thought how I would have taken her by her trembling hand and walked her over to where I was when I took this photo. “See,” I might have said, “it’s not a snake at all.” Just a simple change of perspective and she would have seen through the illusion, but there must have been a time when it wasn’t an illusion to make her so afraid. She never told me the story but she did tell me to keep away from snakes. I think it must have seemed perfectly natural to her that I would inherit all her fears but I never did, so I enjoy seeing snakes.

I used to think a scene like this one meant that the sun had warmed the stone enough to make it melt into the frozen earth but by watching closely over the years I saw that what really happens is, the saturated soil freezes and heaves up around the stone, which doesn’t move. The hole always has the very same shape as the stone. This is a sure sign that the ground is thawing.

I went to the campus of the local college to look at their flowers beds and was surprised to see a lot of green shoots, like those of crocus seen here. The seedpods you see in some of these photos are from native redbud trees.

I was even more surprised to see crocus flowers. These are the earliest I’ve ever seen.

Tulips were also up but thankfully I didn’t see any buds yet. There are some beautiful red, yellow and purple tulips in this bed. I also saw daffodils up but no buds on them yet either. The coarse mulch used at the college is I think from fallen trees chipped up by the electric company. I’d never use it here but it’s most likely free so they use lots of it.

Tradescantia or spiderwort leaves were showing. The leaves always show quite early even though they won’t bloom until late May or early June. I’m looking forward to seeing the one with white flowers that have a slight blueish blush named “Osprey.” I might even have to buy one, because it’s very beautiful.

I didn’t need this stone to remind me to smile when I saw those crocus blossoms.

This magnolia bud looked a little odd but for the most part the ones I looked at were playing it safe and not opening. The flowers on this tree are a beautiful deep purple on the outside of the petals and pure white on the inside. It’s a semi dwarf tree, I think. When the flowers don’t suffer and turn brown from the cold it’s a beautiful thing.

Cornelian cherry buds offered no surprises. They looked just as they always do in early spring, with their two outer bud scales partly opened.

But then I looked a little closer and did get a surprise when I saw yellow flower buds. This is the earliest I’ve ever seen them and I was a little concerned at first, but as I thought about it I realized that I have never seen these small yellow flowers damaged by cold, no matter when they’ve opened. Cornelian cherry is an ornamental flowering shrub related to dogwoods. It blooms in early spring (usually in March) with clusters of blossoms that have small, bright yellow bracts. Apparently they can stand a lot of cold.

I didn’t think I’d see any vernal witch hazel blossoms but these were just opening. When it gets warm enough the yellow, strap like petals unroll themselves out of the bud and if it gets cold again they roll themselves back up, much like a window shade. You can see the fuzziness of the bud scales that protect the tender blossoms in this shot. Some plants use hairs for protection and this is one of them. Magnolia is another.

I was really surprised when I found several witch hazels loaded with open flowers. The day was warm but still, I wasn’t expecting to see so many flowers. It was great to smell them again. They have such a fresh, clean scent which someone once described as like clean laundry, just taken down off the clothesline. These are very tough plants and if the petals roll up in time they can take a lot of cold, but I have seen them with petals all brown and hanging when they opened too early in the past. I’m hoping I don’t see that this year.

If you want to send your spirits soaring after a long, cold winter, just plant a few spring blooming witch hazels. I certainly had a spring in my step after spending some time with them. Each year I’m sorry that I don’t have a few in my own yard.

So hooray, it was spring. But then it wasn’t. This is what we woke to last Thursday morning; about 3-4 inches of snow with sleet on top of that and then freezing rain over that. In fact, we were still getting freezing rain when I took this shot of Mount Caesar in Swanzey with my cellphone, and that’s probably why it looks more like a painting than a photo. There was probably water on the lens.

You might think, after a two-week taste of spring, that waking up to snow and cold would be depressing but it’s a good thing, because it will slow most plants down and keep their flowers from opening too soon. This coming week the forecast is for temps in the mid-30s, and that means the snow will melt slowly, as it should. The witch hazels will be fine I think, but the crocuses that have bloomed will be finished and the others will just sit and wait. I still haven’t seen a sap bucket hanging on a maple tree but I do know that the sap is running. I’ve even heard that one person was boiling already. I hope you’re staying warm and dry wherever you happen to be.

People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy. ~Anton Chekhov

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Thinking Spring

Last Monday I felt that burst of love for the out of doors that I always feel at this time of year, coming in the form of what is known here as spring fever. It’s love, happiness, and a bit of madness all rolled into one, and it makes me ache to be outside. It was a beautiful day; partly sunny and warm at 46°, so I went to the skunk cabbage swamp to see if there was any sign of them yet.

All swamps come with challenges and walking into one is where the madness comes into play. In this swamp there are a lot of hummocks to negotiate and you can either jump from hummock to hummock or walk between them and hope you don’t get your feet wet. I got one foot wet even with waterproof hiking boots on when I sank into the mud over my boot top. But that didn’t matter; my hummock jumping days are over so I expected to come away with wet feet.

One of the hummocks had this curious bright green plant growing on it. I don’t recognize it but it must be tough. The leaves resemble basil but obvously it can’t be that.

And there were the skunk cabbages, coming up through the snow. Through a process called thermogenesis a skunk cabbage plant can raise its temperature to melt through ice and snow. They’re very determined once they feel the pull of spring and will even melt their way through frozen soil.

Here was one I could get a little closer to. It displayed something I’ve wanted to show here for a few years now and that is how, when it first comes up, the skunk cabbage spathe is enclosed in a gray green, pointed sheath.

If you look closely where the sheath has opened you can get a glimpse of the splotched maroon and yellow spathe inside. This is the first time I’ve been able to get a shot of this. There are those who think that the gray green sheaths enclose leaf buds and I thought so too years ago, but this shows otherwise.

The thin sheath quickly rots away, almost liquifying, leaving the spathe to slowly expand and open. Inside the spathe is the spadix, which holds many tiny, greenish flowers. There are few insects around at this time of year but some do eventually enter through the split in the spathe; whether to pollinate the flowers or to just warm up isn’t known. The flowers, much like those of wild ginger, which is another very early bloomer, could be self-pollinating. The pea green leaf buds will show themselves before too long.

A little further in there was the open water of a stream, and two unseen ducks startled me when they exploded from the swamp, quacking loudly and flying as fast as their wings would take them. You can find many different creatures around open water in February because in a normal winter open water is scarce.

Skunk cabbages can grow in standing water as these show, but the one on the left came up too early and was blackened by the below zero cold we had. These plants are tough but there aren’t many spring plants that can stand that kind of cold for long.

One of the animals enjoying the open water of the swamp is the resident beaver, who has been busy cutting trees and dragging them off. This one was a red maple and there wasn’t a sign of it left; no log or branches.

Here was the log from another tree a beaver cut, red maple again with a lot of the outer and inner bark chewed off. How they can drag away logs this big is beyond me. I know they cut them into pieces but stll, a log of this diameter even just two feet long is heavy. Maybe they just roll them into the water and float them off like the lumberjacks used to do.

We pass right by beech buds, never giving them a second look, but as soon as it is warm enough the stronger sunlight will stimulate their growth and they will open and become one of the most beautiful things in the forest. For a time, it looks like silvery-green butterflies have landed on every twig. It’s hard to believe that all the current year’s growth for this particular branch is inside that little bud, but it is.

I was surprised to find maleberry growing here. I think this was the first time I’ve found it not growing on a river or pond bank. The seedpods shown here formed last July or August and will release their seeds by the end of April.

I’ve always liked finding a pile of last year’s leaflets from a cinnamon fern but I’ve never really known why. They just please me somehow, and it’s easier to just leave it at that than it is to wonder why. They dry on the stem in the fall and then slowly fall into a pile at its base, with the one at the very tip the last to fall.

Bracken ferns weaken at the base of the main stem and the whole plant just keels over. The fallen leaves have at times reminded me of miniature dinosaur skeletons, but I suppose it must depend on mood. On this day they just looked like bracken fern leaves.

I found a few goldthread plants here and there, still with last year’s shiny green, three lobed leaves showing. These little plants are evergreen and must get a jump start on photosynthesizing. Their pretty little flowers, which have golden petals that look like like tiny spoons full of nectar for insects to drink, will appear in late April or early May. Getting a good photo of the flowers is always a challenge, which means it’s a flower you can lose yourself in. I recommend doing so as often as possible; there is great peace to be found there.

A colony of American wintergreen grew beside a tree. Though the plant is an evergreen it doesn’t photosynthesize in winter so it doesn’t need green leaves. In fact, many evergreen plants have purple leaves in winter but they’ll be greening up before too long. This plant is also called teaberry and checkerberry because of its minty, bright red berries. I saw where these plants had once had berries but it looked like the turkeys had gotten them all.

Every year in early spring I come across what I see as orange delicate fern moss. I’ve always brushed it off as colorblindness, thinking “That moss is green but I see it as bright orange. Strange.” But the thing is, according to my color finding software, it really is orange. That’s what colorblindness can do; it can make you unsure of almost any color you see. But there is good news for the colorblind. Color correcting glasses are down to $119.00 per pair on one website and after taking a simple online colorblindness test, you can get yourself a pair. You can choose from several styles and if they don’t work for you, you get your money back. Also, there is an app called “Colorblind Pal” for Android users and the color finding computer software I use is called What Color? I know there are a lot of us out there so I like to keep the information I’ve found up to date. I hope it helps. Those are deer droppings on the moss. I saw a lot of them here. I’d guess that the deer are coming to drink from the open water.

According to the calendar spring is more than a month away but I’ve never paid much attention to calendars when it comes to seasons. I’ve always let the land and the plants and animals on it tell me when spring is here, and there are already a lot of signs pointing to it. We could still see some cold and snow but each day that passes makes that less likely. Once we get through mid-March winter’s back is broken, but I think it might happen earlier this year.

Spurred on by the skunk cabbage sightings, I went to see how the hazelnuts were doing. They too had heard the whisper of spring, and the catkins had elongated and become flexible. In winter they’re short and stiff but a good sign that they’re preparing for spring is when they loosen and flex, and start to dangle and blow in the wind. I didn’t see any of the tiny female flowers and that was good, because we could still get some below freezing nights and that might finish them off. It’s too early for the more tender spring flowers to appear so as much as I’d love to see them I hope they aren’t tricked into blooming by this February thaw. Something I noticed while taking this photo was spring birdsong, including that of red winged blackbirds. They’ve come back about a month early but I’ve read that we could see more cold a week from today, so I hope they’ll be able to stand it.

Go to the winter woods: listen there; look, watch, and ‘the dead months’ will give you a subtler secret than any you have yet found in the forest. ~ Fiona Macleod

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Exploring the Deep Cut

Last Thursday I went up to the deep cut rail trail in Westmoreland to see if there was any ice in the man-made canyons. I really didn’t expect to see much because we’ve had such a mild winter but there it was. I’ve seen this place in February when there was so much ice you could hardly see any stone, and other times when there was hardly any ice at all. The temperature this morning on the outside was about 37 degrees but down here it’s usually about ten degrees cooler. Once the ice grows the place almost makes its own weather and it stays cold until the air temperature on the outside reaches into the 50s. That’s why ice climbers call it the ice box.

On the shaded side the ice is good and solid and climbable but the side that sees sunshine can melt quicky on warm days.

Without people the scale of the place in photos is deceiving, so here are some ice climbers from a few years ago. That year saw a real lack of ice. Many of the people who climb here are trainees from the New Hampshire Branch of the Appalachian Mountain Club. Unless they’re standing around and not climbing I rarely speak to these people because I don’t want to break their concentration. They are “in the zone” and I’d like them to stay there, so I take a couple of quick long shots and leave.

I don’t believe they ever climb the colored ice. This ice grows like this in this same spot each year and I’ve never seen any signs that it has been climbed. There are usually a lot of footprints at the base of ice that has been climbed.

What colors the ice is I believe, mineral laden ground water. This water seeps from cracks in the stone year-round and in places like the one in the photo, it pours off the walls in small waterfalls. The sound of falling, splashing, tinkling water can be heard here always.

This deepest canyon with climbable ice is to the north but there is also a southern canyon, and this view looks out of the northern canyon in that direction.

This stretch of railroad once ran from Bellows Falls, Vermont to various towns in northern Massachusetts after being built in the mid-1800s. When the route runs through, rather than over or around a hill it is known as a deep cut. This photo shows what the deep cut looked like circa 1870 when it was relatively new. If I had to guess I’d say the man on the right was either picking berries or clearing the drainage channel. You can see a pile of unused rails there in the lower right. Did they bend the rails around curves as they laid them or did they come with the required radius already in them, I wonder. The Cheshire Railroad was swallowed up by the Fitchburg (Massachusetts) Railroad, which in turn was bought out by the Boston and Maine Railroad. This photo is from the Cheshire County Historical Society. I believe it looks toward the southern end of the northern canyon, just as the previous shot does, but from further back in the canyon.

A stainless steel 3 car diesel streamliner with “Cheshire” (for the Cheshire Railroad) proudly displayed on its nose ran through here from 1935 until it was retired in 1957. According to the description a big 600 horsepower Winton engine was in the first car. The second car was a combination baggage / mail / buffet dining car, and the third car had coach seating for 188 passengers with rounded glass on its end that allowed 270 degrees of countryside observation. Though I’ve written the historical description here you’ll note that there is actually and engine and three cars on this train, not an engine and two cars. A sister train called The Flying Yankee ran on another part of the railway.

There is a lot of stone left over when you blast your way through a hillside and this is how some of it was used. For someone who has built stone walls, this huge retaining wall is a thing of beauty as well as quite an engineering marvel. It leans back into the hillside at about ten degrees to keep the hillside from falling or washing onto the railbed, and it has worked just as it was designed to for 150 years or more. Not a stone has moved, and there isn’t a single teaspoon of mortar in it. These men were true craftsman, most likely from Scotland from what I’ve read. They built some beautiful things off in the middle of nowhere where nobody would see them because they took great pride in their work.

Though the southern canyon seen here gets more sun because of its shorter 20–30-foot walls, there is usually more ice on this end. These walls are always wet in summer but you don’t realize what that means until you come here in the winter. There are huge amounts of groundwater flowing through the earth in this spot and it can turn into ice columns as big as tree trunks. Though it looks like a lot of ice in this shot there might be less than half what there is in an average year.

And it was starting to fall. When these tree trunks made of ice start to pull away from the walls and fall, some of them can fall all the way across the trail, so it’s a good idea not to be here when it happens. I saw evidence of falling ice here on this day in various spots and any one of the larger pieces in this photo could kill a person. It’s a dangerous situation so when this starts, I stay away. On this day I heard the tinkling sounds of small icicles falling all along the trail so I stayed in the middle and kept moving.

You have to look carefully to see what is happening in this photo but the darker color in the center is stone showing through the ice. Sun shines through the ice and warms the stone and in this case about 4 inches of ice that once grew against the stone has melted away, leaving a gap between the ice and stone. What this means is that the stone is no longer supporting the ice, so some of these masses of ice have become self-supporting. Since we have temperatures in the mid-40s F. as far out as the forecast goes, that’s not good for the ice or anyone using the trail. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time wouldn’t be good.

Blue ice is the densest and most solid, but once its grip on the stone melts away even it will fall. The top of the mass on the left doesn’t appear to be attached firmly to the stone.

In contrast to the shiny, dense blue ice in the previous photo the ice seen here is rotten, meaning water, air bubbles, and/or dirt have gotten in between the grains of ice and cause it to honeycomb and lose its strength. Instead of a sharp ringing crack when it is struck it produces more of a dull thud. The ghostly grayish white color and matte finish are a sure sign that you should stay away from it when it’s hanging over your head.

Here is another example of rotten ice. It just doesn’t look like what you would expect from good, healthy ice. Beware of ghostly fingers of ice, maybe?

This is good, healthy ice of the kind that will make a ringing, almost cracking sound when it is struck. Shiny, clear, and dense, it won’t fall right away. The ice that grows in this spot always imprisons the fern seen behind it, year after year since I’ve been coming here.

For years this orange patch, caused by the green algae called Trentepohlia aurea, has been on one wall of the southern canyon but its spores must have crossed the gap because now it is on both walls. Though it is called green algae a carotenoid pigment in the alga cells called hematochrome or beta- carotene, which is the same pigment that gives carrots their orange color, hides the green chlorophyll.

You can also see the straight, vertical pocket in the stone left by a steam drill there in the upper right in this photo. You drilled the hole, filled it with black powder, lit the fuse, and ran as fast as you could go. Of course, they would have been on what is now the rim of the canyon, so they could just run off into the woods and hide behind trees. That’s what I would have done anyway.  

I hoped I’d see some lacy ice patterns on the drainage channels but instead I saw either reflections in them or white sheets of ice covering them.

This formation looked like icicles had formed and then had an ice column form around them. I’ve never seen this happen before.

And this is something I hoped I wouldn’t see. We had rain that froze into a coating of ice and then several inches of wet snow fell on top of it, and I wondered about the lineman’s shack when I was trying to shovel it in my yard. It tore limbs from trees and knocked other trees down completely and thousands lost power. Here all it did was flatten an old shack that few cared anything about. I cared about it because I saw it as an irreplaceable part of the history of the place, but short of somehow getting a team of carpenters out here there was little I could do to save it.

The more expensive slate on the roof shows how much the builders thought of the place, and the hole through the peak of the roof for a stovepipe answered a question I’ve had for a long time, and that was, did people stay in this building for some length of time waiting for something to take place. They must have, otherwise a stove wouldn’t have been needed. If you think about the possibility of all that ice, some two or three times taller than a train in places and as big around as a tree, falling when a train went through it becomes plausible that someone would have had to remove it somehow, though I couldn’t guess how. It might have been as simple as shooting at it to break it up and then wheeling the bigger pieces down the track in a hand cart to be dumped outside the canyon. If that were true the ice would have had to have been removed through January and February if the weather then was anything like it is now.

Here is the place as I first found it years ago. Not much, but much more than it is now. The stove would have been what looks like about 5 feet out from the back wall.

For years I thought juveniles had gotten into the building and written their initials on the back wall but I know now that what is seen here would have been almost behind where the stove was, so I’d guess that the people who once used this building probably did it. They might have had a lot of time on their hands, sitting and warming up before the next cold job in the canyons.

The best thing about the cold was the comfort that came from escaping it. ~ Claire Lombardo

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This and That

This post is a kind of hodge podge of things I saw last summer when I was taking a break from blogging and things I’ve seen recently. If there is any continuity at all, any thread that runs through it, it is I hope how the beauty of this world can be found everywhere you look. The photo you see above happened just last week as I was going into a store to do some grocery shopping. I wasn’t surprised to see many people just walking right by without seeing it. We live in a paradise that is absolutely filled with beauty all the time, night and day, and we should give ourselves time to at least notice it. How long does it take to appreciate the beauty of the frost crystals on your car windows before starting the car in the morning, or to simply look up at the sky now and then?

This shadow of a staghorn sumac reminded me of the palm trees I saw when I lived in Florida. The first time I crossed over from Georgia into Jacksonville, Florida it was about two in the morning, and the palm trees that lined the center of the divided road, lit up as they were by streetlights, seemed like the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I felt as if I were driving into a postcard. I felt electric, and more alive than I had ever been.

Here is another kind of shadow. The town put in a new sidewalk last summer and last fall of course the falling leaves landed on it. This leaf, from a maple, leached out its tannins and left its silhouette on the newly poured concrete. Maple leaves are one of the species used for botanical or “eco-printing,” which is where leaf and bark shapes and colors are transferred or bled onto fabric or paper.

When the town put in the new sidewalk they tore up lawns all up and down the street, so to finish the job they brought soil in from somewhere, and what you see above is what sprouted from that soil on the corner of the street; a forest of what are commonly known as weeds, like lamb’s quarters.

One of the plants that sprouted from the soil that was brought in was jimson weed. When I first saw it its big, beautiful white and purple flowers were just about to open. Jimson weed is considered poisonous to both humans and livestock so I was surprised to see it growing here, on the lawn of a children’s daycare center. This hallucinogenic plant in the nightshade family is also called loco weed and was used by Native Americans on spiritual quests. The original common name was “Jamestown weed” which was given to it after English soldiers in the Jamestown colony began to behave oddly after eating leaves of the plant. It is said that they “behaved like animals for several days.” This plant is considered exceedingly dangerous due to poisonings and deaths by people trying to get high. I was going to say something about it but the daycare wasn’t due to open until school started, so there was nobody to say anything to.

Another plant that grew from the foreign soil was wild mustard, which I never used to see much but now see fairly regularly. Because of the plants that grew from it I have a feeling that this soil must have come from old pasture land. There is old pasture south of here and I’ve seen these same plants growing there. In any event, I went back a few days later to see the beautiful Datura flowers and everything had been mowed down to something resembling lawn. I was a bit disappointed because Datura blossoms are very beautiful.

I went to a pond that I had been to a hundred times last summer and found this small, foot tall fern that I had never seen growing in the water right at the shoreline. The rounded over edges of the sub-leaflets didn’t look familiar but they, along with the way the leaflets twisted along the stem helped identify it.

I turned one of the fronds over and saw something I had never seen. The curled over edges of the sub-leaflets formed cups filled with what looked like blackberry jelly, but of course these were the fern’s spore cases (sori) and there must have been many hundreds of them. With all the hints it gave me it was easy to identify it as the marsh fern (Thelypteris palustris pubescens.) It has fertile and sterile leaves but the fertile ones tend to be smaller, according to what I’ve read. It likes wet feet and full sun. This isn’t a very good shot of the spore cases so I hope to return this coming summer and try again.

According to the book Identifying Ferns the Easy Way, A Pocket Guide to Common Ferns of the Northeast, by Lynn Levine, the caterpillars of the marsh fern moth feed on the leaves of this fern and it is the only known host plant of what is an uncommon moth.

And speaking of uncommon moths, here is a large maple spanworm moth (Prochoerodes linolea.) I found it relaxing on the siding of the local post office and was amazed by its resemblance to tree bark. I’d guess that I’ve probably walked right by them thousands of times in the woods but here on this bright white wall it was easy to see. Life is such a beautiful and amazing thing. Emily Dickinson said it best: To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.  

I’ve known tansy for a very long time but for years if I wanted to see it, I had to visit a garden. Only over the last few years have I found it in the wild, so as an invasive plant it has failed miserably in this area, even though it has excelled elsewhere. In colonial times tansy was used as both a flavoring in tea, cakes and puddings and an insect repellant, used especially for bedbugs. It was also used to make green dyes and was thought valuable enough to be brought over on a three-month voyage. It is also toxic, so though I don’t have a problem with using it to repel insects I doubt I’ll ever flavor anything with it.

I didn’t see large numbers of monarch butterflies this year but I saw a few, and I found a patch of Joe Pye weed that they and spangled fritillary butterflies seem to prefer over all the other flowers in the area. I would revisit this spot every few days and each time these flowers had several butterflies and bumblebees visiting.  You have to look closely to see them but there are many bumblebees in this shot.

What was it, I’ve wondered, about these particular plants that made them so attractive to so many insects?

I also saw a monarch butterfly caterpillar on a milkweed plant last summer. I don’t see very many of them so it was a surprise.

The unusual berries of the white baneberry plant (Actaea pachypoda) called doll’s eyes, have over the past two or three years turned black and shriveled up for reasons I can’t fathom, but last summer they were nearly pristine when I found them. The remains of the flower’s black stigma against the porcelain white fruit is striking, and I can’t think of another plant with fruit quite like these. The hot pink pedicels are pretty as well. These plants are toxic but luckily the berries are so bitter one bite would be enough to make anyone spit them out. Finding baneberry in the woods tells the story of rich, well drained loamy soil and a reliable source of moisture, because those are the things that it needs to grow. I almost always find them at the base of hillsides.

I saw very few mushrooms last summer because it was so dry, but I did see a few Indian pipes, which is odd since they’re parasitic on certain fungi.

Here is a rarely seen (by many) look into the inside of an Indian pipe flower. At the tips of the 10 stamens surrounding the center stigma are the anthers, colored yellow, which contain pollen. The anthers are open and shedding pollen at this stage. In the center of the flower is the pollen-collecting stigma, which looks like a funnel between the yellowish stamens. Each flower will stand straight up when it is ready to be pollinated, and once pollinated will eventually become a hard brown seed capsule. You can find them sticking up out of the snow, usually in groups, at this time of year and they are always fun to look at.

If you walk in certain places at certain times, you might see things that you will only see once in a great while, if at all. People often ask me how I do this; how I see what I see. The answer is to simply be there. I spend as much free time outdoors as possible. I also walk very slowly and pay close attention. Many times, I just stumble onto the greater part of what you see here on this blog. If I had been just a few minutes earlier or later I might have missed the sunlight highlighting the hairs on this staghorn sumac. That would have been too bad because it shows how the plant got its name, with its velvety softness just like that of a deer’s antler.

With other things found in nature, you can often do some planning ahead. For instance, if you know that the “bloom” on black raspberry canes is made of a kind of natural wax, and if you know that it “melts away” in warm summer weather, you know that your best chance of seeing it is in the cooler months. You will also find this same beautiful blue, which is a result of the way sunlight is reflected by the wax crystals, on blueberries, plums, lichens, and many other things.

This photo of American hazelnut catkins might not seem like much but it is special to me because it was taken with a cell phone. Since I’ve struggled with getting a shot of these little things even with a macro camera in the past, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the phone camera got it. The depth of field could have been better but all in all I was happy with it. You can see how the triangular bud scales spiral up the catkin. When the catkin swells and the bud scales begin to open in spring the tiny, beautiful golden flowers will do the same. They are among the earliest spring flowers and I look forward to seeing them each year. It won’t be long now.

Many will most likely think big deal, it’s just an old leaf, but if you had lived through 60+ New Hampshire winters like I have you would know that any splotch of color is beautiful in the often stark black and white world of January. Any color anywhere will stop you in your tracks and you’ll be thankful that it was there for you to find.

How does a child see the world? What is childlike wonder? Everything a young child sees is fresh and new; they’ve never seen it before so they have no history; no file cabinet full of memories to search through and compare what they see now to what they saw then. A child sees a branch or a rock and becomes enraptured by it because it is fresh and new. They see what is right now, as it is. We adults on the other hand, compare what we see to what we’ve seen before and instantly decide that it’s better or worse than the one we saw previously. Once we do that all the freshness, the newness, and the wonder is gone, and what we see becomes old. Children see as much with their hearts as with their eyes and if you follow their lead great beauty will appear, seemingly out of nowhere. The more beauty you see the more you will see, and before long you will have to say, as I did, “My gosh, everything is so very beautiful. Just look at it!”

If we have relegated vision solely to a function of the eyes, we are blind indeed.
~Craig D. Lounsbrough

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Seed Collector(s) Needed

Hello Everyone,

This special post is intended for any would be seed collectors out there. I was recently contacted by a seed company that is looking for someone to collect maleberry (Lyonia ligustrina) seeds. Their regular collector is no longer available and they are running low on seed. If you would be interested in doing this, please contact me through the “Contact Me” tab at the top of this page and I’ll send you the contact information for the seed company. This is a unique opportunity for the right person(s) and I hope this post will generate some interest.

This photo shows what can be large terminal clusters (elongate inflorescences) of maleberry flowers. It also shows the shrub’s leaves, which look very similar to blueberry leaves. In fact, maleberry and blueberry often grow side by side along pond, river, and wetland shores and are essentially the same size. If it wasn’t for the fact that blueberries bloom about two months earlier, if the two shrubs were in bloom side by side, at a glance you’d think they were both blueberries. One noticeable difference between the two is how blueberries will grow on mountains and hilltops and maleberries won’t. At least, in my experience they don’t. They seem to like moist roots because I always find them right along shorelines. I often find them growing near or under red maples along shorelines as well.

If you know what a blueberry blossom looks like you quickly see that, though maleberry blossoms might appear the same at first glance, they are really very different. Whereas blueberry blossoms are relatively long and narrow, maleberry blossoms are short and squat, and only about half the diameter.

Just about the time blueberries are ripe enough for picking, the seed capsules of maleberries begin to form. Each maleberry seed capsule is 1/8 to 5/16 inch in diameter and hard and woody. They ripen from green to brown and when ripe start to split open into 5 segments, as this photo taken in January 2020 shows. They form in July or August here in New Hampshire and mature through summer and fall and finally start to open in January or February of the following year. Seed capsules can be collected through April of the following year but waiting much after that will increase the chances that they will have already released their seeds. I have seen many hundreds of capsules on a single shrub. Even after the seeds are released the dry capsules turn to a grayish color and will stay on the shrub in some form or another year-round, and are helpful for identification. Plants live for about 20 years.

There are certain considerations that a seed collector must think about. Number one is, never take all the seeds. A good rule of thumb is, take one out of every twenty. If you come upon a colony of black eyed Susans for example, you would take one seed head out of every twenty. The same is true for maleberries, you would take one group of 5 or 6 seed heads for every twenty groups. You do not cut all the seed heads from a single plant, ever.

Maleberry flowers grow on the previous year’s stems, which means they should be pruned in late winter or very early spring, which is exactly when the seedpod harvest would take place. You need to know how and when to prune any flowering shrub, and I would guess that this information would be easily found online.

Since I haven’t spoken to the seed company in depth about this all I know is they want the seeds so they can sell them. I don’t know or care who they will sell them to; I’m just doing this post as a favor to both them and the maleberries. Maleberries are at risk in certain places. In Nova Scotia for instance there are only 33 known mature plants, and they are being threatened by off road vehicles and invasive plants. Throughout Canada maleberry is now considered an extremely rare species. In the United States plants grow up and down the east coast from Maine to Florida, and west to eastern Texas and Oklahoma. If you live in any of these places collecting seed would be possible. Does the seed company need more than one collector? This I can’t answer but I can’t see that it would be a problem.

Please save questions like “How much will I be paid?” for the seed company, because I don’t know. I would guess that you would be paid by the volume of seed collected and sent in, as in dollars per ounces or grams.

Since right now is the time to collect maleberry seed, time is of the essence.

If you’d like to peek into the life of a seed collector, you can read an interview done with seed harvest and restoration technician Keith Bennett by the Nature Conservancy here: https://www.nature.org/en-us/magazine/magazine-articles/seed-collector-missouri/

One seed births a thousand forests. ~Matshona Dhliwayo

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Exploring Along Beaver Brook

Toward the end of November I decided to take a walk up the old abandoned road that leads through the Beaver Brook natural area in Keene. I hadn’t been there in a while and since I had just tangled with Covid I thought the slight gradient of the old road would let me gently test my lungs and make sure they were still working as they should. Surprisingly I didn’t get winded at all; good news I thought, considering all I had heard about Covid.

I saw many beautiful things there that day but I would have been happy just seeing the mosses. They always seem so much greener and more vibrant in colder weather.

The brook was rushing along, not quite as high as I had imagined it would be but still with a bit of a roar to it. It has many voices, this little brook. In summer it becomes tame and moves slowly, giggling and chuckling shyly as it spills over the rocks in its bed. In winter it often becomes nearly mute, its voice muffled by a covering of thick ice. It can still be heard, but as if from a distance. In spring and fall, due to snow melt or excessive rain it swells up and shouts, sometimes with a deafening roar. Only one thing about it never changes, and that is its beauty.

There are a few pretty views along the brook and this is one of my favorites. I hadn’t gone there that day with a blog post in mind but I had a cell phone camera and the small Olympus I use for macro photos and in the end, I was glad I had brought them.

Of course, I had to stop and see my old friend the smoky eye boulder lichen that lives here because it is a beautiful thing. Both the way the light falls on it and the color of the thallus or body of the lichen make it stand out from other examples I’ve seen. Why it has this golden, orangey brown color I don’t know, and I also don’t know why the fruiting bodies always seem so blue or lavender when they are usually gray. It has to be the special way the light falls on it in this particular spot. Seeing it again is always like finding a jewel.

The squiggly black apothecia have appeared on the script lichens, as they always seem to do in the cold weather. If you look at them extremely closely, they look like the body of the lichen has been torn or cut open, and they erupt from it rather than sitting on it. But whatever happens when they appear, they leave no trace when they disappear. If you come here in warmer months all you will find are the white / gray body of these lichens, like spots on the tree’s bark.

I stopped at what I call the boulder fall. I’ve found mosses here that I’ve never seen anywhere else.

And one of those mosses is the pretty little rose moss. This moss likes limestone and since this area isn’t rich in limestone it always leaves me guessing. Somehow two or three of the boulders must have at least some limestone in them. I first found this moss on just one stone years ago and now it is on at least three of them, so it must be happy here.

Another rare moss that grows here is the glittering wood moss, also called stair step moss because of the way new growth comes up out of the midrib of the previous year’s growth. It looks delicate but I’ve seen it encased in ice in winter and still looking fine in spring. Not surprising since it can withstand conditions in the Arctic tundra. It sparkles in the light so “glittering” is a good description.

For years I’ve thought that snow load was what made our evergreen ferns splay out on the ground but this year we have no snow and they are still hugging the ground, so that theory has to be let go of. I recently read this on Westborough Massachusetts Community Land Trust page: “When the green fronds are on the ground, warmth from the earth keeps them warmer than they would be if they stood up in the wind and cold air. The fern’s stems weaken near the ground in autumn, helping the fronds to fall over.” That does make sense but I wonder where that information originally came from. I believe the fern in the photo is a marginal wood fern, but I didn’t check for spore cases.

A big old red maple tree had fallen and someone had come along and cut off all its branches. This tree had target canker but that doesn’t kill trees, as far as I know.

Target canker won’t kill a tree but it can certainly keep one busy by causing its bark to grow in circular patterns of new, thin bark plates, which helps protect it from the canker. According to Cornell university: “A fungus invades healthy bark, killing it. During the following growing season, the tree responds with a new layer of bark and undifferentiated wood (callus) to contain the pathogen. However, in the next dormant season the pathogen breaches that barrier and kills additional bark. Over the years, this seasonal alternation of pathogen invasion and host defense response leads to development of a ‘canker’ with concentric ridges of callus tissue—a ‘target canker.’” You can see the pattern of new, thin bark plates the tree grew each year in this photo. I count at least ten, so that means this tree fought off the invader for at least ten years. There are some things which once seen can never be forgotten, and target canker is one of those.

I saw what I think was a white cheese polypore on a fallen branch. It grows on hardwood logs and causes white rot, and gets its common name from its scientific one (Tyromyces chioneus). Tyromyces means “with a cheesy consistency,” and chioneus means “snow white.” These mushrooms are big enough to be seen from a distance and when they are fresh, they have a pleasing fragrance that some think is like cheesecake. Mushroom Expert. com says it is “just about the most boring mushroom going,” but it is a winter mushroom and I’m always happy to see mushrooms in winter. There is also a blue cheese polypore and a green cheese polypore.

From boring to beautiful; this must be the most colorful display of turkey tail fungi that I’ve seen. It was beautiful, with its many different colors all in the same growth. No matter how many times I come here I always see something I’ve never seen before, and that is why it pays to revisit the same places again and again.

I was surprised to find a little ice on the ledges. It has been cold some nights but all in all this has been a very mild winter so far. I doubt there is any ice to speak of in the deep cut rail trail where ice climbers usually practice.

This is one of my favorite reasons to visit Beaver Brook; to see what I call the “disappearing waterfall,” because it only appears when we’ve had enough rain to get it going. It’s a beautiful thing and in the spring, I’ve seen people standing in line waiting to get to the spot where you can get the best photo of it.

I saw two splotches of color on the end of a log and I thought I recognized them.

As I thought, they were wrinkled crust fungi (Phlebia radiata) but they weren’t quite as colorful as others I had seen. I suspected they were young examples which might change as they aged, so I decided to return in a week to see if they had. These winter fungi are rare in my experience and well worth a second look.

This photo of a wrinkled crust fungus I took years ago shows what I was hoping to find upon my return but no, the fungi in the previous photos hadn’t changed at all. A quick online search showed that they can be very beautiful like this example or rather plain like the previous example. Like many things in nature, finding them is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time and paying attention. Unlike some fungi it’s hard to predict where or when they’ll choose to grow, though they do seem to like cold weather.

And speaking of being in the right place at the right time; as I was leaving Beaver Brook after my second look at the wrinkled crust fungi the afternoon sun decided to shine right up the brook. It was something I had never seen happen before and it seemed like a final, beautiful exclamation point to mark the end of my journey through a place filled with beauty.

Look at places no one looks at, so you can see the things no one sees.
~Mehmet Murat ildan

Thanks for coming by.

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By a Stream

We’re having another one of those strange, almost snowless winters so far this season but even though it hasn’t been snowy it has been cold enough for ice to form, so in early December I decided to visit a stream near my neighborhood. Last year I found beautiful lacy ice all along it but this time as you can see, there was no ice.

There was frost on the lawns, so I thought for sure there would be ice on the stream.

A little neighborhood pond had a thin film of ice on it.

But there was little to no ice to be found here at the stream. No matter; there are always interesting things to see, like this pronounced meander in the stream. When I first started coming here it was nothing like this but over the years flooding has dumped a lot of sand and gravel in a pile over there on the left, forcing the stream to move more and more to the right. As it moves it washes soil away from tree roots and many trees have fallen.

I stopped to admire some beech leaves. The beech is a tree that gives beauty to the forest all year long.

I also saw some colorful turkey tail fungi on a stump. Part of their scientific name is versicolor, and it’s a good one. I’ve seen these come in pink, orange, blue, purple, and everything in between. They’re one of the most colorful fungi I know of and winter is a good time to find them. As far as I know no one has ever discovered what causes their many variations in color.

I looked back to where I had come from and saw how the stream meander is slowly cutting into the hillside and washing it away; a mountain slowly turning to sand. I thought the low sun falling on the green plants was a beautiful scene. It showed how, around every corner, there is the very real possibility of finding staggering beauty of the kind we’ve never seen. We need to learn to stop and let the beauty of life seep into us until it fills every part of our being; until the word Hallelujah comes to us naturally, without a thought.

One of the things I come here to see are the tree mosses. When I first started coming here there was a group of maybe ten plants right at the water line but now, they have grown away from the stream and there are hundreds of them. They must like wet ground because this place floods regularly and they often spend part of their life underwater. They’re beautiful little things and I’d like to see them in more places but so far this is the only place I’ve ever found them.

This unknown creature grew on a tree and though I was sure I had seen it before I couldn’t remember its name. It looks almost like a crustose lichen with an area of something else growing through it but I can’t imagine what that something else would be. In the end I decided it didn’t matter. Memories are like dogs that come when you call them but otherwise lie silent and still. Sometimes they don’t come at all, and seem so far off I can’t tell if they are even there anymore. The effort it takes to recall them doesn’t seem worth whatever limited value they may have. They are like things stored in the attic; not worth climbing the stairs to see, but seemingly still too precious to throw away. They sit gathering dust but one day they will have to go, so why bother adding to the pile by gathering up more of them? Let each day start fresh and shining brightly, unobscured by the film of dust that is yesterday.

This is a two-part post; what you’ve seen so far happened one day and what you will see from here on happened on another. Luckily the sun was shining brightly on both days. I would have loved to have been able to see it the way this NASA photo shows it.

On the second day I went to the stream, about three weeks later, there was ice. Strangely though, at nearly 40 degrees F. this day was warmer than the first.

Last winter when I came here, I found beautiful, lacy ice covering the surface of the stream but this year I saw mostly splash ice. Splash ice forms when running water splashes droplets up on cold surfaces, where they freeze almost immediately. It can be beautiful; all of what we see here is splash ice.

Ice curtains along the banks showed how the water level had dropped, with ribbons of ice forming at each different level.

This view is looking down on ice similar to that in the previous photos.

This ice sculpture grew on a twig that hung out over the stream.

This very thin, clear pane of ice had water droplets hanging from its underside.

This ice reminded me of the bullseye glass windowpanes you can still see in very old houses. Before modern glass making came along glass windowpanes were blown from a gob of molten glass that was spun at the end of the blowpipe until it formed a large disc. Rectangular windowpanes were cut from the disc with the outer, thinner, clearer panes sold to the wealthy and the inner, thick, wavy panes with the pontil mark bullseye in the center sold to the poor. You couldn’t see anything out of them but they did let in light and that was what was important. I can’t even guess how this ice would have formed to look just like them.

Neither can I explain why this bit of dead grass had a ray of sunlight falling on it.

I’ve heard that very white ice is white because it has a lot of oxygen in it, so maybe all the bubbles in this piece go along with that theory. It must have gotten very cold very quickly to freeze bubbles in place.

The only thing you can expect from ice is the unexpected, because no two pieces will ever be alike. Ice helps teach us that we should go into nature with no expectations and just enjoy what we see.

On the way home this scene looked more like March than December. Now into January without plowable snow in my yard, it looks to be another unusual winter. I hope you enjoyed coming along through the snowless woods. In a normal winter we wouldn’t have been able to go without snowshoes.

The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world. ~ Zhuangzi (c. 369 BC – c. 286 BC)

Thanks for coming by.

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