I heard recently that trail improvements were underway at Goose Pond in Keene and since I’m all for improving any trails anywhere, I decided to go and see what was being done. I stopped and got this shot of the island just after I got there. This is one of only two or three islands in the immediate area that I never camped on. Now I don’t think you’re allowed to camp on any of them.
It was clear right off that some serious changes were being made. This hauler was moving crushed stone to wherever it was needed. Since the trails here are very muddy in places I was happy to see it.
It looked to be inch and a half to two inch stone, which isn’t too bad to walk on because it packs well. It’s certainly better than mud.
Drainage diches, much like those used by the railroad, had been dug. It looked like they were already doing their job of giving any water on the trail a place to go.
Wherever there are breaks in the trailside growth the trails stay relatively well lit and dry but there are places where thick evergreens mean little sunshine, so the trail gets muddy. This trail mostly follows the contour of the pond, but there are a few places where you lose sight of the water and I’ve met people out here who were confused and had lost their way.
New trail signs should help people find their way.
The trails here have always been blazed with white blazes on the trees but many people lose sight of them easily. The way to prevent that is to make sure you can see the next blaze from the one you’re closest to, but in practice that doesn’t always happen.
There were many new bridges that had been built over streams and muddy spots and this was the longest and most elaborate. I tried to count them but I lost count at 7. If I had to guess I’d say there were twice that many that had been built. That’s a huge amount of work when you’re doing it way out here.
Other signs made sure people knew what was going on. I believe the city of Keene received a $45,000 dollar grant to pay for all of this.
This forest has always been a good place to find mushrooms and slime molds and I saw a few on this day. I really thought there would be more though, considering how much rain we’ve had. I did see lots of yellow finger coral fungi. They look like small yellow flames licking up out of the dark soil they prefer growing in.
I also saw a few blue staining boletes. Some of these get quite big and are easy to see.
The underside of the cap is what stains blue and you can see how my fingerprints have done just that. There are many boletes that stain blue and they are easily misidentified, so I’ll just say that this is a bolete that stains blue. Many blue staining boletes are also poisonous. Though there are gilled boletes most have pores or tubes on the undersurface as this one did. Sometimes the underside of the cap is a different color but the color of this one was fairly uniform all over.
Pretty little purple cort mushrooms are everywhere this year but this is the first one I’ve seen growing on a log. All the ones I’ve seen have appeared to grow in soil but there might have been wood buried just under the soil surface that I didn’t see. Purple cort fungi have a rather bitter slime on their caps and that most likely accounts for their not being eaten by squirrels or other critters.
What I believe is a coral fungus called Clavaria ornatipes grew up out of the soil in a darkly shaded spot. These fungi are spatula or club shaped, colored greyish to pinkish gray though these looked white to me. They often shrivel when they dry out and revive after a rain. There are usually hundreds of them and there were many in this spot on this day. Though I’ve searched for years now I can find no common name for this one.
Here was another new bridge, placed off to the side of the trail so the hauler and other equipment could get through. The bridges were being lifted into place by a small excavator; what used to be called a “steam shovel.”
A new bridge like the one in the previous photo had been built upstream from this one, which is out of sight to the left in this view. A new trail leg had been built to it, so it will apparently be a replacement for this one. You can just see the new trail coming down a small hill out beyond the bridge.
Many of the older bridges had been chained to trees to prevent their being washed away by flooding and I wondered if the people building the new bridges knew this. Surely they must. I hope so, otherwise the pond might be full of floating bridges one day.
I was sorry to see that this particular older bridge was going to be replaced, because this view from it out into the pond has always been one of my favorites. I doubt that this view will be able to be seen from upstream at the new bridge but we’ll see. Those are royal ferns growing in the stream and soon they’ll be turning yellow.
White wood asters bloomed in sunny spots. They will soon be followed by whorled white wood asters, which have leaves that do not grow in a true whorl. I’ve always wondered how the person who named them couldn’t have known what a whorl of leaves looked like.
An Indian cucumber root plant caught in a sunbeam looked as if it was floating in space. I can’t think of a better example of a true whorl of leaves than what is seen on this plant. All leaves radiate from a single point on the stem and wrap around it so if seen on edge they will look like a single line. Sepals, petals, stamens, and other plant and / or flower parts can also grow in whorls.
Something that was very surprising was seeing this swamp loosestrife blooming here in a spot I must have walked by at least 50 times. I got here a little late but there were a few flowers still in bloom. This plant is rare in this area in my experience. It is also called water willow.
I’ve never seen a goose on Goose Pond but I know they come here because I’ve seen their feathers. That feather on the right has a fishing spider on it but I didn’t see it until I saw the photo, otherwise I would have zoomed in for a closer look.
One of the dancer damselflies was tired of dancing and rested on a sun warmed stone. Google lens says this is a spring water dancer but I haven’t been able to verify that. What I can say is the spring water dancer likes to congregate around springs and seeps and there are plenty of those here.
I don’t see many fungi growing on stone but here were some small corals doing just that. Of course they were actually growing in the accumulated forest litter that had broken down enough to support them. It shows that some fungi don’t need much soil to grow in. I think these were crested corals.
When I visit Goose Pond I always follow the trail clockwise for no particular reason and when I do that this stone is one of the last things of interest I see. This stone is an enigma because it isn’t natural and doesn’t seem to have a reason for being here. I used to build stone walls and I’ve worked with enough stone to be sure that it took some time and effort to get 90 degree smooth sides on this one, especially in the 1800s. Since it is buried under tree roots its hard to know its length or if it has any hardware holes in it. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.
When was the last time you spent a quiet moment just doing nothing – just sitting and looking at the sea, or watching the wind blowing the tree limbs, or waves rippling on a pond, a flickering candle or children playing in the park? ~Ralph Marston
Now that fall is almost here we’re having some summer weather so I’m getting out more. I went to where I used to work in Hancock recently and one of the first things I stopped to admire was this view of Half Moon Pond. For seven years I started each work day standing in this spot, looking out over the pond and drinking in the quiet. Since I grew up awash in quiet that part of the job was a perfect fit from the first day. The experience was a unique one for me though, because working so close to the pond meant I could watch all of its changes as they happend. It reinforced what I’d had an inkling of as a boy growing up along the Ashuelot River; life is a circle and from hour to hour, day to day, and year to year it is in a state of constant change, like a great wheel slowly turning. Following that lead you discover something that is unchanging, and it is found inside us all.
As I was leaving Hancock I saw a small stream with its banks full of flowers of all kinds. There were white asters, pink Joe Pye weed, purple loosestrife, white boneset, and yellow goldenrod growing there. It was a natural garden; a beautiful spot.
There were flowers everywhere, like a roadside Monet painting. Who needs riches when we have places like this? We are already rich, but most of us don’t see it.
I didn’t see any purple asters there but I am starting to see them in other places.
I’m also starting to see monarch butterflies, but not here in Keene. This one was in Hancock, probing for nutrients in a gravel road. There seem to be few to none in Keene this year.
I also saw a white admiral that day, looking a bit tired. In fact I thought it might have died but it slowly lifted its wings when I moved closer so I knew it was alive. I took a couple of shots and moved away to let it rest.
The clear white flowers of arrowhead have appeared. Each one of these had tiny flea like black insects on it but since they grew just offshore I couldn’t get close enough to see what they were. The centers of the flowers look like little clown noses.
There are plenty of great spangled fritillary butterflies in Keene. They love Joe Pye weed, and we have lots of it.
Great Spangled fritillaries look to be about the same size as monarchs, but I find them to be much more approachable. This one let me get quite close. I thought of trying a shot or two with my phone but I decided I might scare it away.
I was able to get a shot of this one’s eyes but when I got home and saw that they were an orangey-reddish color I was surprised, because I have other shots of them with blue eyes.
In this shot I took on Pitcher Mountain years ago this fritillary butterfly’s eyes are obviously blue. Why would one have blue eyes and the other red? According to Butterflies of the Adirondacks “The Atlantis Fritillary has blue-green or greyish blue eyes, while both the Great Spangled Fritillary and the Aphrodite Fritillary have amber to yellow-green eyes.” So the blue eyed one shown here is an Atlantis fritillary and the other in the previous shot isn’t. I obviously saw amber eyes as red so I’m going to stop there, because according to Butterflies and Moths of North America the other differences between the butterflies are slight, as in shading of certain colors and slight variations in markings. For me it’s their eyes that tell the story so from now on I’ll just look them in the eye, tell them how beautiful they are, and let it be.
I wasn’t going to say anything but I thought you should know. As I’ve said before, fall starts on the forest floor and this hobblebush shows it.
This young white ash tells me that fall is creeping up into the understory.
I stopped at the Ashuelot Falls one evening to see if the light had turned them to gold. It had, but there were other things going on as well.
A heron fished below the falls. It had spotted something and as I watched it caught what I think was a small frog. Down it went with a flip and a gulp. Canon bridge cameras are notoriously inefficient in low light and though the light was really too poor to be taking photos, I tried anyway.
When I saw this over my shoulder I decided to leave the heron to its hunting. It was a good thing too, because as I got to the car those extra-large raindrops that make a loud splat! started falling.
On another evening I tried a blue vervain plant in low light. I loved the way the small blue flowers glowed with a light that was more in them than on them. They were so beautifully blue; truly the center of attention, but though they took center stage it was the light that put them there. Sometimes it is the quality of light more than what it falls on that can stop us in our tracks.
I forgot to look for the flowers of white baneberry this past spring but I remembered to look for the plant’s berries this year. White berries at the ends of pink pedicels are hard to miss. They’re called “doll’s eyes” for obvious reasons and they’re very toxic. They’re also very bitter, which makes it doubtful that anyone would eat enough to be harmed by them. These plants are having a good year.
Tansy is just coming into bloom and before long each flower head, shown as a disc shape in this view, will grow into a fluffy mound of tiny blooms. The aromatic leaves were once used to repel insects like bedbugs, and it was brought to this country by the first settlers for that reason, as well as for its medicinal uses.
Some turtlehead plants are covered in mildew, and that is no surprise considering all the rain and humidity we’re having. In a garden mildew usually means poor air circulation and not enough direct sunlight. Both are conditions that can often be remedied my moving the affected plant or by creating more “breathing” space around it by moving any plants that might be crowding it.
Garden phlox is a plant that is often very susceptible to mildew but I haven’t seen any yet this season. This one was very pretty, I thought.
Here was another pretty phlox that was mildew free. The plant is also called “tall phlox” and many varieties are very fragrant. I think plant breeders have also bred them for mildew resistance over the years.
Pretty little blue toadflax is still blooming and probably will into October. One story says that the “toad” part of the name comes from the way the flower opens like a toad’s mouth when each side is pressed with the fingers. I’ve done this with yellow toadflax and it is true but with the tiny flowers of the blue, I’m not sure. Another story says that toads took refuge among the branches, but I haven’t seen many yellow or blue toadflax with branches.
If I had to offer advice to those who are just starting out in gardening it would be to beware of friends bearing plant gifts. Oh, they mean well enough; they have more of this plant than they can use so they might as well share. Right there is where you should stop and ask yourself why they have so much of this plant. Is it aggressive? Will it take over my garden? If it is an obedient plant the answer to these questions is YES. Obedient plants get their common name from the way the flower stalks stay where they are bent for a short time, so in this way they are “obedient.” The name does not come from the way the plants stay in one place. No, they are a native member of the mint family and they can act just like an invasive and take over a garden. The solution is, if you’re given a plant you don’t know anything about, plant it off by itself somewhere where it can’t overrun other plants. Just let it be and watch it for a year or so, and when you are satisfied that it doesn’t want to rule the world, move it into the garden.
Though the native obedient plant is everything I’ve said above plant breeders have been working on it, and I just read about a cultivar called “Miss manners” which is said to form upright clumps that don’t spread. It sounds truly obedient and would be a great addition to the garden if it was. The snapdragon-like flowers are very beautiful and they attract plenty of bees. Obedient plants grow naturally along riverbanks from Canada South to Virginia and west to Texas, but I’ve never seen one in the wild. Plants I’ve grown in the garden never seemed to need any extra watering as you would expect a riverside plant would.
Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all come. ~Michelangelo
On a recent visit to my daughter’s garden I saw these glass baubles in one of the beds. They had spilled out of a flower vase and they just happened to be my favorite color, so I took a photo of them. What I didn’t see at the time was the lily reflection, which can be seen in the upper left corner of the photo.
This isn’t the lily that was reflected in the glass bauble but what a lily; it was beautiful, as were several others she grew. Clearly she has gardening in her genes but thankfully, she doesn’t want to make a living at it as I once did. It is a hugely rewarding but also an exhausting career that can make your body old before its time, especially when you work with stone.
She grows a lot of plants that I haven’t seen, like this “snap dragon vine,” which was a beautiful thing. Apparently it is native to Mexico and the southwest. Since my son lives in New Mexico at the moment, I asked him about it. I couldn’t imagine such a lush thing growing in such heat but he says northern parts of the state are forested and mountainous, much like here.
I noticed one of those metallic blow flies on a false sunflower. I’m seeing a lot of them this summer.
She has a lot of beautiful zinnias in her garden. I was hoping to see butterflies visiting them but we have a serious lack of butterflies here this year, so all I saw were bees and dragonflies. She puts pans of water out so the birds and insects can drink but still, no butterflies on this day. I’ve seen one or two great spangled fritillaries, a few white admirals, and a single viceroy, but no monarchs yet. I’ve been wondering if the drenching downpours we’re having have shredded their wings.
Another flower she grows that I hadn’t seen is the fiddleback. I looked them up online and saw some that looked just like a fern fiddlehead uncurling in spring. They’re in the borage family and are quite pretty.
She grows lots of vegetables and herbs as well as flowers. Since I’ve been talking about legumes this summer, here is a pea blossom, with the expected standard and keel. She also had pole beans but for some reason I couldn’t get a shot of a flower. Everything she grows is in raised beds full of wonderful things like cow and horse manure and compost. The plants obviously love it; these pea plants had climbed up over my head.
She also grows my favorite oxalis. I’m surprised that she doesn’t grow more housplants, because she grew up in an indoor jungle. I once grew so many housplants that I used to tell people who were coming to visit that they had better bring a machete, and I was only half joking. There were trees, ferns, vines, and everything in between. Come to think of it maybe that’s why my daughter doesn’t grow very many houseplants.
She grows some white petunias that have this curious deep purple marking in them. She grows all her plants from seed and I think she said these were saved seeds from last year. In any case it was a petunia I had never seen, and I’ve had my nose in an awful lot of petunias. I had my nose in these as well, because they’re fragrant petunias.
This is one of many sunflowers that my daughter grows. I realized after I had left her house that I hadn’t gotten wider views of the gardens, but I think that showing flowers rather than the gardens they grow in comes naturally to a gardener. I spent a large part of my life on my hands and knees weeding and deadheading gardens and when you’re in that position your eyes are right at flower level, so you look into them rather than at them and focus on the health of each plant rather than the garden as a whole. Depending on the cause one sick plant can make an entire garden sick, so I always made sure I watched each plant closely. I was right there on my hands and knees anyway so it wasn’t as hard as it might seem. But I’ll have to go back again and see if I can’t get some wider shots. I’d like to see those fiddlebacks unfurling as well.
I haven’t spent all my time in my daughter’s garden. I’ve also been out exploring places like this. The growing season is far from over and we have an explosion of growth going on right now.
The wild lettuces are blooming. Giant ten foot tall plants will have a few pencil eraser size flowers, colored green or blue, at the very top. This was a blue one but it was more white than blue. Maybe ice blue. The green ones are far more common than the blue, so I have to search for the blue ones.
Tall asters are one of the first of the asters to bloom and here they are, right on schedule. Next will come big leaf asters, white whorled wood asters, New England asters, and many more. I’ve seen tall asters that towered over my head but these were right at eye level.
Dragonflies are still flying everywhere I go so I will often stop and see if I can get a shot of one. They are always a challenge but this blue dasher was willing to pose.
Slaty skimmers are also still very active. I do all I can to get those wing patterns in a shot because I think the ones on this dragonfly are very beautiful. Somehow I got 3 out of 4.
I’m seeing more bees, flies, and dragonflies this year than I ever have. And mosquitoes; bug spray is a must if you’re going to spend time in the woods.
While I was there I thought I’d try to show you a single Queen Anne’s lace flower. I think there are actually two or three here but it was the best I could do with so many bees flying around.
I saw a bird in a bush, and I believe it was a catbird. These birds have been flying from bush to bush, following me as I walk along in this area. You would think that they’d be easy to see but it was all I could do to find this one with the camera at a few yards away. When I finally did find it I had one hand held shot, and this is it. Birds, dragonflies, and many other insects will stay still and watch you fumble with your camera settings, but as soon as you point that lens at them they’re gone in a streak, just as this bird was. It might be colorblindness that makes them so hard for me to see, I don’t know.
I’m seeing a lot of Canada goose families with goslings almost as big as their parents now. I don’t say much about it but many goslings are lost to snapping turtles, hawks, foxes, bobcats, and other predators each year. I’ve seen large families reduced to one gosling when I was able to watch them each day. This year though, they seem to be doing well. Humans also prey on adult geese so they are wary. They’re a bird that will sometimes put up with you but more often than not they’ll turn and show you their tail. It seems to depend on how quietly you move and how close you are to them. This bird swam in liquid sunshine and I thought it might be too lost in bliss to notice me but no, it turned away.
Our wild clematis called Virgin’s bower has just started flowering. This vine, with its masses of small white flowers, drapes itself over the tops of shrubs to get maximum sunlight and it’s very common along railtrails and roadways. Another name for it is traveler’s joy, and that it is. Sweet autumn clematis, which is a cultivated variety of small, white flowered clematis, comes closest in both habit and flower size.
Shy little Deptford pinks have started blooming. These plants are not as showy or as prolific as their cousins the maiden pinks, and the flowers are smaller. I always have to look in places I know they grow in to find them. They’re quite pretty though, and always worth looking for.
I’ll go from the tiny Deptford pink to this beautiful daylily, which was the biggest daylily blossom I’ve ever seen. It grows in a local park and is so big I couldn’t cover it with my hand, even though I had stretched out all my fingers. Every gardener has an image in their mind of what a daylily looks like but I had to stand for a while and give my mind time to discard the old image and build a new one. This will surely be the flower size that all future daylily breeder introductions will be measured against. It’s amazing.
Jewelweed has just come into bloom and this is the first blossom I saw. They appear at the end of long thin stems (Pedicels) and they move with the slightest breeze, so they can be a challenge to photograph. The common name of the plant comes from the way raindrops sparkle on its leaves, not from its flowers. The leaves have a wax coating that resists water absorption, and that’s why raindrops sit and sparkle like drops of mecury on jewelweed leaves.
Imagine a bee having to crawl down through a pincusion of pistils to get to a flower’s pollen and you have the button bush flower head. Crawling down through all those sticky pistils means it will brush against some of them and leave any pollen it has on its body with them, and that’s exactly the strategy that has evolved in the buttonbush. I see lots of seed heads on buttonbush plants so it must work well. Later on ducks, geese, and songbirds will come along to eat up all the seeds, and they’ll spread them far and wide to make new button bushes. If you have wet spots in your yard or are lucky enough to have a stream running through it, plant a buttonbush or two. If nothing else it will surely be a conversation starter.
The old school of thought would have you believe that you’d be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn’t what being in nature is all about. Rather, it’s about feeling free, unbounded, shedding the distractions and barriers of our civilization—not bringing them with us. ~Ryel Kestenbaum
Here’s where all the rain we had went. The Ashuelot River roared mightily as it went rushing by on its way to the Atlantic, carrying countless tons of soil with it. In flood the river deposits fine silt it over all the land that is flooded and then, sometimes many years later, rains wash it back into the river. It’s all a circle.
One of the flowers that like growing in the soil deposited by the river is the monkey flower, and I’ve seen more of them this year than I ever have. I haven’t seen a monkey in one though.
It is said that whoever named the monkey flower saw a monkey’s face in it, but I don’t see a monkey any more than I see a turtle in a turtlehead flower. Maybe its just lack of imagination on my part, I don’t know.
Here is where I found a monkey; in the face of a blue dasher dragonfly.
Because they kept landing in the shade I had to try many times over several days to get a shot of what I think might be an emerald damselfly. It’s the only useable shot I’ve gotten of one. I like its big blue bug eyes and its green metallic shine. This one, if I’ve identified it correctly, is a male and its abdomen and tail are powder blue, though they look white in this shot. The “tree” it is hanging on to is really just a twig, smaller in diameter than a pencil. This long bodied damselfly reminded me of the old wives’ tales about it and others of its kind that I heard as a boy. They were called “sewing needles” or “devil’s darning needles,” and were supposed to be able to sew your eyes and lips closed if you weren’t careful. Why would anyone tell a child such foolishness? I can’t see that doing so would serve any useful purpose. It would only make them afraid of a beautiful part of nature, and of what possible use is that? I can’t remember ever believing any such stories but memory can’t always be trusted, so I may have.
According to what I’ve read flies like hoverflies, or blowflies like the one seen in this photo, visit flowers to sip their nectar and taste their pollen. Flies sip the nectar for strength, which they need to keep flying, and the pollen helps them produce healthy eggs. Since they are hairy, bottle or blowflies help with pollination by carrying pollen from one flower to another. I walked though a field of Queen Anne’s lace flowers one day and saw as many flies as I did bees.
Some of the dogwoods are whispering things I’d rather not hear, so I didn’t listen. I just admired their beautiful colors.
A few posts ago I talked about the legume family and how you could identify them by the flowers, which have a standard and a keel. Here, on showy tick trefoil flowers you can see the vertical, half round standard and the keel, which juts out at about 90 degrees or so from the standard. Inside the keel are the reproductive parts. When ready the keel opens and lowers, and the reproductive parts show themselves as they’ve done here. Strong, smart insects like bumblebees will often force open the keel to get to the goodies ahead of time.
Every time I see a bicolor hedge bindweed blossom I remember when I had to search high and low to find one, because 99% of them were plain white. Now it’s just the opposite; all I see are bicolor ones and I have to search for the plain white ones. It’s an interesting lesson on how flowers evolve to attract more insects. More insects mean more pollinated flowers and that means more seeds. More seeds increase the likelihood of the continuation of the species, and continuation of the species is a driving force in nature.
One evening this cottontail saw me and crouched down to make itself small, as if it wanted to melt into the earth, but as I stood and watched it relaxed and made itself “big” again. I like it when animals sense that I mean them no harm, as this rabbit did. After taking a couple of shots I thanked it and left as it went on munching white clover. I could have artificially lightened this shot but I wanted you to see what I saw. I liked all the lights in the grasses.
Eastern amber wing dragonflies are very pretty but also quite small; I’ve read that they are only about an inch long. I saw them swarming around a pickerel weed plant at a pond and noticed that they never seemed to land. They were always in motion, so I gave up trying to get a shot. Then one day when I wasn’t near water the one shown above flew in front of me and landed on this grass stalk. As you spend more time with nature you find yourself becoming increasingly thankful for what once seemed small or insignificant things, like a dragonfly or a rabbit willing to pose for a photo. Gratitude tends to seep in quite naturally, as do love and joy.
A bee foraging on pollen had its pollen sacs filled to almost overflowing, by the looks. Knapweed pollen is white, as we can see. It’s a beautiful but supposedly invasive flower. I say supposedly because in this area it stays mostly on the embankments the highway department planted it on. I do see it in the wild occasionally but usually just a plant or two.
I’ve always liked the buds on Joe Pye weed as much as the flowers but of course the butterflies and bees prefer the flowers. Last year I found a colony of several plants that were covered in monarch and great spangled fritillary butterflies. I hope I see the same this year, because I still haven’t seen a monarch.
One day I found a little orange skipper butterfly probing for nutrients in the gravel along the side of a road. I got home intending to try to identify it and found so many species of little orange skippers it seemed like it would take forever to identify it, so little orange skipper will have to do for a name.
Pretty little pale spike lobelias have started blooming. Though their color can range from white to deep blue, most I’ve seen this year have looked like the one in the photo. This plant reaches to about knee high and grows in what can be large colonies. Each single flower could hide behind a standard aspirin. Next will come their cousins, Indian tobacco lobelia.
I don’t know who Barbara was but this plant is called Barbara’s buttons. It’s a native perennial plant (Marshallia) in the aster family. The flowers ae quite pretty and unusual, and probably about the same diameter as a large hen’s egg. I’ve read that it grows on roadsides, bogs, or open pine woodlands but it is said to be rare, even in its native southeastern U.S. It can be found for sale at nurseries specializing in rare, unusual and / or exotic plants. I first found this one last year in a garden at a commercial business building.
Like most other plants flowering raspberry is blooming well this year. I’ve known them for a very long time so they seem like old friends. I always like to see their cheery blooms, but even though their fruit looks like a giant, end of your thumb size raspberry, they seem tasteless to me. People have said that you have to put them on the very tip of your tongue to taste them but I’ve tried that as well, and all I’ve tasted is nothing. It was as if I was trying to taste air.
Invasive Japanese honeysuckle berries go from green to this electric, neon orange, and then to bright red, and the birds love them. That’s why I say once the genie is out of the bottle it’s near impossible to get it back in. True, you’d need an army devoted to nothing but honeysuckle control, but why not organize one?
It appears to be a great year for hazelnuts but in some places the blueberry crop has failed. In other areas like hilltops and mountainsides they’re doing fine. I met someone just the other day who told me the apple crop has also failed in certain orchards because of the late freeze, and he said his hay crop will only bear a single late cutting this year. You can’t cut hay in the rain.
I found this plant growing in the garden of a local business and realized that I didn’t know its name. The flowers looked like small hollyhock or rose of Sharon blossoms, but only half the size. The scalloped, basal leaves were shiny and stem leaves were narrow, like willow leaves. The plant was about 3 feet tall and loaded with flowers. I took a couple of shots of it and Google lens told me it was a false mallow.
With flowers like these I was sure it had to be in the mallow family because it had “that look” but false mallow was one I had never heard of. After a little reading I found that it doesn’t like real hot weather and goes dormant until it gets cooler unless it gets regular watering, so I think I’d try it first where it got mostly cooler morning sun, even though some instructions say full sun. It blooms in mid to late summer and is drought tolerant and deer resistant, which would make it valuable in this area. If you like hollyhocks but don’t have the room this one might be for you; another name for it is “miniature hollyhock.”
I found a peachy daylily in my yard that I had forgotten I had. That’s the beauty of daylilies; you can fuss with them if you like but they are in fact a “plant it and forget it” perennial. If you’re looking for a low maintenance garden, daylilies should be near the top of your list. With early, midseason, and late varieties that come in just about any color but blue or black, you can do a lot with them.
Beautiful swamp milkweed is still blooming. One of the benefits of the overcast skies and rain has been longer blooming times for many plants. Some I’ve seen have been blooming for close to a month, and that’s unusual.
I was crawling around on the forest floor, getting shots of mushrooms when I noticed something blue in the cleft of a large boulder. Prying it out with my finger wasn’t easy but I got it out and saw that it was a painted stone. There in the woods it looked like a waterfall falling over the edge of the stone. Whoever painted it has some artistic ability; I thought it was nice how they got the feel of falling water with their brush. Now though, when I see it in a photo, it looks like snowy mountain peaks and trails, trees, and sky. Unless someone was on their hands and knees as I was they would never have seen it, so I wonder what the point of hiding it there was. In any event it I enjoyed seeing it, so I owe a thank you to whoever put it there.
If you want a photographic challenge try enchanter’s nightshade. Not only are the flowers smaller than a pea, but the plants usually grow in deep shade. I’ve had years when I just couldn’t pull it off even after trying many times, but this year after maybe a dozen tries I got lucky. Enchanter’s nightshade isn’t a nightshade at all, but is related to evening primroses. Its small round seed pods readily stick to your clothes and I sometimes find that I’m covered with them when I get home.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe the enchantress drugged Odysseus’ crew and turned them into swine. Circe, who was the daughter of the sun and granddaughter of the oceans, gives enchanter’s nightshade its scientific name Circaea.
As children, we are very sensitive to nature’s beauty, finding miracles and interesting things everywhere. As we grow up, we tend to forget how beautiful and magnificent the world is. There is magic and wonder for eyes who know how to look with curiosity and love. ~ Ansel Adams
This post is about the mushrooms and slime molds that have appeared recently. Warm, humid weather is ideal for their growth and I’ve learned that about two days after a heavy rain is the best time to look for them in this area. I don’t know or care about the science behind this; I’m just speaking from experience. The more mushrooms you find and try to identify the more you will learn about them. When I see a mushroom with a pea size, pleated cap for instance, I think of pinwheels and parachutes. Once I know this I need to know if it grows on decomposing leaves or on decomposing wood, as these did. If I’m lucky I might come up with a name like the leaf parachute mushroom (Marasmius epiphyllus) shown here, but I don’t get too hung up on names of things these days. I just enjoy the beauty and wonder of it all.
Fungi can take you on some incredible journeys, and you don’t have to eat them to experience it. This photo is of one I’ve never seen before and luckily it was very easy to identify as the Asian beauty fungus (Radulodon copelandii.) It is thought to be an invasive fungus native to Asia which was first documented in this country 10 years ago in Massachusetts. It is a toothed crust fungus with long, flat teeth which can be white, yellowish, or the tan color seen here. It likes to grow on hardwood logs, sprouting out of the furrows in the bark.
I found it growing on an oak log from a tree cut a few years ago and the above shot shows it on the butt end of the log, looking like a fungal waterfall.
Cinnamon fairy Stools (Coltricia cinnamomea) are also called tiger eye mushrooms. They get their common name from the concentric bands of cinnamon brown coloring on their one inch diameter caps. They are a tough, leathery polypore which, if picked when fresh, will hold their color and shape for a long time. They usually grow very close to the ground, just high enough for a fairy to sit on, but as I was putting this post together I saw some growing out of a tree stump, with their short stalks parallel to the ground.
I believe this mushroom I found growing on a decomposing pine log is a common rustgill. The cap is kind of orange red and has scales, and is darker in the center.
Common rustgill fungi (Gymnopilus penetrans) have gills that are crowded and rusty orange. Though in this shot the gills don’t appear to attach to the stem (stipe) they attach at about hallway up their width. To get this shot I put my camera under the cap and clicked the shutter, and I was surprised to see so much light coming through what appeared to be a dense cap. Mushrooms almost always come with surprises.
I was walking down a hillside trail that I had walked up a few minutes earlier when I saw these ebony cup (Pseudoplectania nigrella) fungi growing in the moss. I had missed them on the way up but I don’t know how because they were easily seen against the moss. The maple leaves in the foreground should give you a good idea of their size.
Cup fungi are in the sac fungi family and usually have a shiny side and a dull, matte finish side. The shiny side is where the spores are produced and I was reading how, if you blow gently on the shiny side of an ebony cup it would suddenly shoot many thousands of spores up into the air. I’ve never tried this but I can say that inhaling mushroom spores isn’t wise, so I’d be holding my breath after I blew on one. Mushroom spores love to land on warm, moist, dark places to get their start and the interior of a human lung sounds like it would be a perfect spot. The inside of the cup is the shiny surface of these fungi but this one didn’t have much of a shine so it might have already released its spores.
These pinwheel mushrooms (Marasmius rotula) had just started growing when I found them. They were young enough to be nearly see through and so tiny all of what you see in this group would have easily fit into an acorn cap with room to spare. I was amazed that my camera was able to get a photo of something so tiny with detail that I had never seen before.
Not all small white mushrooms with pleated caps belong to the Marasmius family. The dripping Bonnet (Mycena rorida) is one of those that doesn’t. It is also called the slippery mycena because the lower half of its stem is very slimy. It appears fairly unremarkable until you learn that it is bioluminescent, which means that it emits an eerie green glow in the dark, much like the light of a firefly. It is one of many species responsible for the glowing lights seen in a nighttime forest, called foxfire or fairy fire.
One of the most common slime molds is the scrambled egg slime (Fuligo septica,) which likes to grow on wood chips, rotting logs, and sometimes even lumber. When it is spotted it is usually bright yellow as it is in the photo above, and many people’s first encounter with it is when they find it growing on their garden mulch. It is unusual among slime molds because it can grow in full sunlight. Fuligo septicaproduces the largest spore-producing structure of any known slime mold; some of them can be quite big and spread over a large enough area to scare people who don’t know slime molds. “What is this stuff growing in my mulch?” is a question most people in the gardening business have heard.
I recently met a woman in the woods who seemed interested in what I was doing so I started explaining slime molds to her. She wrinkled her nose and said “ugh,” as soon as she heard “slime molds.” I explained that they weren’t slimy or moldy; it was just a name that really didn’t apply. Finally she said “It’s very strange to know these things,” and walked off down the trail. I had to laugh; maybe she was right.
I’m seeing insect egg slime mold (Leocarpus fragilis) quite frequently, always growing on fallen branches, twigs, and even tree bases. As can be seen in this photo each tiny, yellow or orange pill shaped structures (sporangia) hangs from a kind of stalk. Before this stage the slime mold was a mass of plasmodium slowly moving over the forest floor, searching for yeasts, bacteria and whatever else it could feed on. When the plasmodium has run out of food it will form into separate sporangia, as can be seen here. From this stage the sporangia will turn brown and harden and start to crack open before releasing their spores to the wind. Each of the tiny sporangia seen here would measure less than the diameter of the head of a common pin. The green stick like object is a white pine needle, which might help with scale.
One of the most common slime molds is the wolf’s milk slime, which is always found growing on wood in groups and which always looks like tiny pink or brown puffballs. When young they have a pink or orange liquid inside which over time becomes the consistency of toothpaste. As this “paste” ages it dries and becomes the slime mold’s spores. When the outer shell is torn or stepped on they are released to the wind.
Red raspberry slime mold (Tubifera ferruginosa) is another slime mold that can take full sun; it was sunny, very humid, and close to 90 degrees when I found it growing on an old stump. Most slime molds would immediately dry up and fade away in full sun but this one looked pristine. It gets its name from not only its color but also from the way it will grow bumpy as it ages and resemble a raspberry. This one was quite young.
I’ve gotten a few photos of eyelash fungi over the years but this time I wanted to get a closer look at the tiny hairs that give them their name. Bright red eyelash fungi (Scutellinia scutellata) are in the cup fungus family and are edged with hairs can that move and curl in towards the center of the disc shaped body. For that reason it is also called Molly eye-winker. I’ve never been able to find out what the hairs do or why they are there, even from the Mushroom expert web site, so it’s another mushroom mystery. I’ve always found the tiny, pea size fungi in deep shade on saturated twigs or very wet tree wounds but I’ve read that they can also grow on wet soil along streams. They’re cup shaped when young but flatten as they age. I’ve never found more than four or five in a group but I’ve seen photos of large numbers growing together. On this day the flat, pea size example shown was the only one I saw.
The brittle cinder fungus (Kretzschmaria deusta) is striking in gray and white. I always find it growing vertically on standing wood; here it was growing on an old beech stump. It not only changes color but shape over time. In fact by the time it is ready to release its spores you would never guess it had once looked as beautiful as this.
Here is the brittle cinder fungus again in a previous photo, aged to what looks like a lump of coal. It has lost most of its beauty but it is ready to do what it must. It has a hard, shiny shell that will crack open and release thousands of tiny dark spores to the wind. The shell always reminds me of that liquid chocolate you pour on ice cream, which makes a thin shell. Maybe next year I’ll find it at its most beautiful once again.
Fly agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria) can be as big as a dinner plate. This one’s “patches” are white as is the stem, and its cap is often chrome yellow as can be seen here. It is a close relative of the red and white European fly agaric that most are familiar with, and it has much the same hallucinogenic properties. The “fly” part of the common name comes from the way pieces of the fungus were put in a plate of milk. When flies drank the milk they would die. It is said that this mushroom also has the ability to “turn off fear” in humans. Vikings are said to have used it for that very reason, and those who used it were called “berserkers.”
Slugs have appeared as I was sure they would with all the rain, and they love certain mushrooms. Sometimes it can be hard to find a mushroom to photograph that they haven’t already found.
The mushroom called yellow patches (Amanita flavoconia) is related to the fly agaric we just saw but it is less than half the size. The tissue hanging from it is part of the universal veil that covered it completely when it was young. The mushroom tore through it as it grew and it was shredded into pieces, some of which remain as yellow patches on the cap. You’ll note that these patches were white on the fly agaric, and so was the stem. It can be easy to confuse the two because the stem on yellow patches can sometimes be white; I’ve done so a few times. If the mushroom is small and lemon yellow with yellow patches on the cap it is most likely this one.
So, would you eat this? I didn’t think so. Mycologists often label mushrooms like this one LBMs, which stands for “little brown mushrooms,” and since they can all more or less look alike and be a real pain to identify, the LBMs get dumped into a too hard basket; left for another day. But I saw so many of these in this one area this year I thought I’d give them a try. If I’ve done the job correctly I think it’s a mushroom called the deadly web cap (Cortinarius colymbadinus.) They’re in the same family as pretty purple corts, which should be showing themselves any time now. Cortinarius is a large family of mushrooms and many of them will make you sick. Some can kill, so the advice from mushroom people is to not eat any of them.
The coral fungi have started to appear and one of the first I’ve seen is this one, which I think this might be Clavaria ornatipes. It is described as spatulate, which means flat and wide like a spatula. They shrivel when they dry out and revive after a rain. They grow directly out of the ground and there are often hundreds of them. Books don’t have a lot to say about this one so I’m not sure it has a common name.
We’ve seen some tiny mushrooms in this post but here is one of the biggest that I know of; Berkley’s polypore. The young one in this photo was already nearing a foot in length and it’s common to find them three feet in diameter.
Here is the same fungal cluster that is in the previous photo. In just 6 days it had doubled in size and with all the rain, it will most likely keep growing until it is king of the fungal forest. Once it has stopped growing it will release its spores and slowly decompose until finally its stench will be able to be detected from several yards away. Although these giants can look as if they’re sitting on the ground they do have a short, thick stalk. This mushroom should not be confused with the edible chicken of the woods which is usually bright orange red. It can also sometimes be more yellow than red and as you break off pieces of it you’ll notice that they have yellow undersides and tiny round pores.
Here is a chicken of the woods for comparison; I found it one a few years ago and it was quite big, but not as big as a Berkley’s polypore. It was also very colorful, like a giant flower, but the color can vary and it will fade with age. I’ve been able to watch two of them age and one, which got a lot of sunlight, faded to stark white. The other was shaded and it kept some color until it finally rotted away. I’ve heard that these mushrooms can get as big as a Berkley’s polypore but I’ve never seen one get that big. Size isn’t all of it though; there are many differences between the two, and if you scroll up and down between this one and the Berkley’s polypore in the previous shot you’ll see that the differences are obvious.
Though I love flowers there are many other things as beautiful and in my opinion mushrooms are one of those. Due to drought it has been about two years I think, since I was last able to do a mushroom post. We certainly aren’t seeing drought this year so I hope to be able to do one or two more. I do hope you enjoy them.
Live this life in wonder, in wonder of the beauty, the magic, the true magnificence that surrounds you. It is all so beautiful, so wonderful. Let yourself wonder. ~Avina Celeste
In the last post I said that the plants I showed there weren’t the kind you would find just kicking around on the side of the road, but in this post these plants are exactly what you will find on the side of the road. They’re called weeds, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t beautiful. Just look at the crown vetch seen above. I’ve said here before that if I (as an engineer) were to design a flower, I couldn’t come up with one as simple, pure, and beautiful as this. It’s considered invasive now but it was originally imported to be used to stabilize embankments, and I see it still being used in that way today.
The crown vetch in the previous photo is a legume, in the same family as a pea or a bean, and you can tell that by the shape of the flower. I could bury us in botanical speak but the only thing to really know to identify a legume is that their flowers have a standard and a keel. The standard in this case is the half round part with the dark lines on it and the keel pokes out at us from the lower middle part of the standard. That’s really all you need to know to identify a legume when it is flowering. The reproductive parts are inside the boat shaped keel, and that’s why you see insects trying to pry it open. Sometimes “wings” can appear on either side of the keel, but not always. Just scroll back and forth between the crown vetch and bird’s foot trefoil and you’ll see that the flowers closely resemble each other.
Or, you can just ignore all of the above and simply enjoy them. My knowing what their names are and how they function doesn’t mean I can love them any more deeply than someone who knows nothing about them. In fact, carrying around a sack full of botanical baggage can at times get in the way of seeing a flower for what it truly is, which is simply one of the many ways that nature expresses itself.
Now come the lupines, which are also legumes. I’m not sure what has gotten into our lupines this year. I’ve never seen them stand so straight and tall. In the past this group, which grows on a roadside embankment, has been much shorter and almost deformed. It must be the rain. It’s easy to see what a year of below average rainfall is like when you have a year of average rainfall to compare it with. After two summers of drought this month we’ve had at least some rain for 22 out of 30 days, and though that’s above average we’re seeing plants respond well, without any symptoms of over watering. Historically, we average about an inch per week.
I like the crepe paper appearance of mallow petals but I don’t see them very often. I know of only two places where they grow beside the road. I know nothing about how they can grow wild in such a limited way, but I have a feeling the plants I know must be garden escapees. Other well-known plants in this family include hibiscus, hollyhocks, and rose of Sharon; all plants with large flowers like this plant has.
But this plant, a dwarf mallow, has flowers that are only about an inch across. I found a few plants growing near the foundation of an old mill building last year and though the maintenance man weed whacks the place regularly he can’t keep them down.
Though spreading dogbane doesn’t look like a milkweed it is in the same family and if you cut its stem you’ll see the same white, sticky sap come oozing out. Milkweeds are notorious for trapping unwary insects and I’ve seen plenty trapped by dogbane. The pretty little fragrant, pink striped flowers might be the diameter of an aspirin at their opening. Native Americans pounded the stems and made a strong thread from the tough fibers which they used to make nets for hunting rabbits, among other things. I find the plants growing in clearings and the shaded edges of forests. It prefers partial shade.
I like to see flowering grasses and I’ve admired them for many years but I didn’t recognize this one so I had to look it up. It’s called wheat grass and though I’m sure I must have seen it hundreds of times, it seems new to me. Its bright yellow flowers mean it stands out from any surrounding vegetation.
The name “Jack go to bed at noon” taught me to watch for goat’s beard flowers in the morning, because all you’ll find is closed buds in the afternoon. I can think of a few flowers that have similar quirks; marsh St. Johnswort won’t open unless it is in full sunshine, which is often about 3:00 pm. Goat’s beard isn’t really common here and I only know of one place to find it. The flowers are followed by huge, spherical seed heads that look like giant dandelion seed heads. They always seem cartoonish like a child’s drawing, and they make me smile.
Golden hop clover is another legume. It’s a small plant that might reach ankle high on a good day and, since bird’s foot trefoil blossoms at the same time, it’s an easy plant to miss. But the flowers make it worth taking a closer look; this one’s inner light was so bright it actually lit up the underside of the leaf beside it. This is another invasive plant that was imported on purpose in 1800 to be used as a pasture crop. It now appears in most states on the east and west coasts, and much of Canada, but it is not generally considered aggressively invasive. Each pretty yellow flower head is packed with golden yellow pea-like flowers. I see it growing close enough to roadsides to be run over, and in sandy waste areas as well.
Though some plants in the nightshade family are edible, others are highly poisonous. The bittersweet nightshade in the above photo falls somewhere in between. Even toxic plants can have medicinal value if used in a certain way and this one has been used since ancient times. These days it is used to treat ringworm, skin diseases and even asthma. If its flowers are pollinated the plant will have small, shiny, bright red berries that look like tiny Roma tomatoes in late summer, and they are why the plant can be dangerous. The berries at first taste bitter and are usually immediately spit out but if kept in the mouth before long their taste becomes sweet, and that’s where the name bittersweet comes from. I remember as a boy I could never get past the strange foul odor the plant has, so I was never tempted by its berries. Bruising it in any way releases this odor and it’s a real stinker, with an odor that can be detected from a few feet away.
As this arrowwood shows, viburnums are still blooming. But their time is almost done, just in time for the native dogwoods to start blooming. The simplest way to know which is which is to look closely at the flowers. Viburnum flowers have five petals and dogwoods have four petals. One thing distinctive about arrowwood that separates it from other viburnums is its leaf’s shape and shine. It is said that this plant’s common name comes from Native Americans using the straight stems for arrow shafts. They also used the shrub medicinally and its fruit as food.
I was just reading that insects prefer a single, rather than a double flower because they don’t have to work as hard to get at what they want, and after looking at a single rose I can believe it. A single flowered rose is defined as having four to eight petals per flower. A double flowered rose has seventeen to twenty five petals, according to the American Rose Society. This flower says “here I am” and there is hardly any work involved in getting at its reproductive parts. We have three native roses and a few others which are garden escapees, so roses are one of those flowers that are easy to stumble upon.
This particular bush had so many bumblebees on it they were bumping into my arms as I tried to get a shot of a flower and I remembered how my son as a boy of probably five or six, was convinced that bumblebees couldn’t sting. One day he caught one and closed his hand around it and found that they could indeed sting. Luckily on this day they were too busy to bother with me.
Multiflora rose is a common small flowered rose from China that is seen just about everywhere, and that’s because it is very invasive. Birds eat the small, bright red hips and plant it everywhere. I’ve seen it climb 30 feet up into trees but it doesn’t climb with tendrils like a grape, or by twining itself around trees like oriental bittersweet. It just winds its way through the branches of surrounding shrubs and trees and uses them to prop itself up. It’s all about getting the most sunlight, and this one is an expert at it.
Though multiflora rose is one of the most invasive plants we have in this part of the country it’s also highly fragrant and I’ve always loved smelling it as I walked along rail trails. You wouldn’t think that a flower only an inch across could pack so much scent but they do, and walking by a bush full of them in June is something you don’t forget right away. The trouble in controlling this rose comes by way of its very numerous, sharp thorns and extremely long branches. Cutting just one full grown plant and pulling all of its branches out of the surrounding vegetation can take the better part of a day, and then you still have to dig the stump. By the time you’re done you’ve almost filled a pickup truck. That’s just one plant, and there are many thousands of them. That’s a good reason to pull them when they’re just getting started. Late November after the leaves have fallen is the best time to do it. But not without gloves!
Partridgeberries are ground huggers; they couldn’t grow any closer to the ground than they do, so you’re always looking down at the flowers. Looking down you don’t see how hairy they are, so to see their hairiness as you see it in the photo you have to become a ground hugger too. The tiny flowers blossom in pairs and share a single ovary, so any time you find a pea size red berry on a ground hugging plant you can check to see if it’s a partridge berry by looking for two dimples. The dimples show where the flowers grew. If the berry has no dimples it is probably an American wintergreen berry, also called a teaberry, and its strong wintergreen scent should give it away. My favorite part of a partridge berry plant is its leaves, which look like hammered metal.
Heal all is recorded in the histories of several countries before travel was recorded, so nobody seems to agree on where it originated. The name heal all comes from the way that it has been used medicinally for centuries on nearly every continent to cure virtually any ailment one can name. It is also known as self-heal and is still used today for healing wounds, throat ailments, and inflammation. Several major universities are researching its possible use in the treatment of breast and liver cancer, diabetes, and other serious illnesses. Native Americans used the plant as a food and also medicinally, treating bruises, cuts, sore throats, and other ailments. I often find it in mowed lawns or along roadsides and I call them nature’s cheerleaders, because the small purple flowers always seem to be shouting Yay! Just look how happy they are; always smiling.
St. John’s wort gets its common name from the way that it flowers near June 24th, which is St. Johns day, and that’s just what it did this year. Originally from Europe, the two foot tall plants with bright yellow flower clusters can be found in meadows, waste places, and along roadsides, growing in full sun. Man has had a close relationship with the plant for thousands of years; the Roman military doctor Proscurides used it to treat patients as early as the 1st century AD, and it was used by the ancient Greeks before that. It is still used today to treat depression, sleeping disorders, anxiety, and other issues.
Sulfur cinquefoil is a rough looking, knee high plant that grows in waste places and on the edges of corn fields where few people ever go, but its heart shaped, butter yellow petals are quite beautiful, in my opinion. They have that deeper yellow center that always makes them seem to shine like the summer sun.
Flowers can come with some very powerful memories and one of the most powerful for me comes with black eyed Susans. My first thought as soon as I see it is “fall” no matter when it blooms, and that thought always seems to come with a touch of melancholy, especially when it comes in June. This year thanks to this plant I was thinking of fall even before summer had officially arrived. None of this means I don’t like the plant; I think its flowers are very pretty, especially those with a splash of maroon on the petals. I suppose if life wasn’t occasionally tinged with a little sadness then joy wouldn’t seem so precious, but someday I’m going to have to sit with this one and ask “why do you do this to me?’
Shy little wood sorrel barely reaches your boot tops and its pretty flowers often hide behind its leaves so you have to do a bit of hunting if you want to see them. Heavy rain had dirtied the face of this one a bit but we can still see its beautiful stripes and the yellow spot on each petal. I always have to smile when I see the spots because they look as if they were painted on as an afterthought, there only to attract insects. The plant likes shady, moist places. I’ve only found it in only two places so I couldn’t say it was common, but it’s out there.
Yarrow is a common roadside weed now considered by many to be the lowest of the low, but it was once so valuable it was traded throughout the world, and today it is found on almost every continent on earth. It is mentioned in the Chinese I Ching, which is said to pre date recorded history, and has been found in excavations of neanderthal graves. It was a valuable healing herb; one of the nine “holy herbs,” and was known as the soldier’s woundwort and herbe militaris for centuries; used even during the American civil war to stop the flow of blood. Native Americans knew it well and used it for everything from snake bites to deodorant. Once so highly prized throughout the known world by emperors, healers, and sages, today people don’t even pretend to try to not run it over when they park their cars on the roadside.
Roadside weeds aren’t special things or magic things, but they are things that can put just a little magic into everyday life and help make it a little more special. They ask for nothing but bring pleasure, and help us slow down so we can get our share of life’s beauty in full measure. There is more than enough to go around, so we might as well see all we can. Just walk along a roadside and see if they don’t put a smile on your face.
I almost forgot to include fireworks in honor of Independence Day. Nature’s fireworks that is, in the form of tall meadow rue. I’ve always thought that the orange tipped male flowers, which always appear on or near the 4th, looked just like exploding fireworks. I hope everyone who wants to, gets to see the real thing this year. It’s looking like a chance of showers here this year but as I remember it there was almost always a chance of showers when firework displays were involved.
Take the time to observe the simple and ponder upon the seemingly insignificant. You’ll find a wealth of depth and beauty. ~Melanie Charlene
Thanks for stopping in. I hope everyone has a safe and happy 4th!
I’m starting this post on aquatics with blue vervain (Verbena hastata,) only because I like its color. It isn’t a true aquatic but every time you find it there will be water very nearby. Blue vervain provides a virtual nectar bar for many species of bees including the verbena bee (Calliopsis verbenae.) Butterflies also love it. It likes wet soil and full sun and can reach 5 feet when it has both. I find it in wet ditches, on river banks and just about anywhere where the soil stays constantly moist.
Wild calla (Calla palustris) is also called water dragon or water arum, and it is a true aquatic. It is an arum like skunk cabbage or Jack in the pulpit, both of which also like wet places. I don’t know if I could say this plant is rare but it is certainly scarce in this area. It’s the kind of plant you have to hunt for, and you have to know its habits well to catch it in bloom. Like other arums its flowers appear on a spadix surrounded by a spathe. The spathe is the white leaf like part seen in the above photo. This plant is toxic and I’ve never seen any animal touch it.
I missed the tiny greenish white flowers this year. They grow along the small spadix and are followed by green berries which will ripen to bright red and will most likely be snapped up by a passing deer. This plant was in the green, unripe berry stage. One odd fact about this plant is how its flowers are pollinated by water snails passing over the spadix. It is thought that small flies and midges also help with pollination, because the odor from the blossoms is said to be very rank.
Pickerel weed is having a bad year and gone are the beautiful ribbons of blue flowers along the river’s banks. I’m not sure what is causing such a sparse bloom but I hope it rights itself because large masses of this plant in bloom can be truly spectacular.
One of the things that always surprises me about pickerel weed is its hairiness. I don’t expect that from a water plant. Its small blue / purple, tubular flowers on spikey flower heads will produce a fruit with a single seed. Once the flowers are pollinated and seeds have formed the flower stalk will bend over and drop the them into the water, where they will have to go through at least two months of cold weather before being able to germinate. If you see pickerel weed you can almost always expect the water it grows in to be relatively shallow and placid, though I’ve heard that plants occasionally grow in water that’s 6 feet deep.
I haven’t seen any berries yet but elderberries (Sambucus nigra canadensis) have bloomed well this year so we should have plenty. This is another plant that doesn’t grow in water but it grows as close as it can to keep its roots good and moist. This native shrub can get quite large and its mounded shape and flattish, off white flower heads make it very easy to identify, even from a distance.
A floating plant that is attached by roots to the pond or lake bottom is an aquatic, and that description fits floating hearts (Nyphoides cordata) perfectly. Floating hearts have small, heart-shaped, greenish or reddish to purple leaves that are about an inch and a half wide, and that’s where their common name comes from. The tiny but very pretty flowers are about the size of a common aspirin and resemble the much larger fragrant white water lily blossom. They grow in bogs, ponds, slow streams, and rivers. This flower was having trouble staying above water because it had rained and the water level had risen.
Forget me nots are not an aquatic plant but I keep finding them in very wet places. This one grew right at the edge of a pond so its roots must have been at least partially in water. The ground they grew in was also so saturated my knees got wet taking this photo. Many plants that are thought of as terrestrial are able to tolerate submersion in water and can live where they’re exposed regularly to water and from what I’ve seen, this is one of them.
Water lobelia (Lobelia dortmanna) is probably the rarest of all the aquatics that grow in this area. I still know of only one pond it grows in and there are only a handful of them there. I’ve read that the plant has the unusual ability of removing carbon dioxide from the rooting zone rather than from the atmosphere. It is said to be an indicator of infertile and relatively pristine shoreline wetlands. This year I saw only 4 or 5 plants in a small group. The small, pale blue or sometimes white flowers are less than a half inch long and not very showy. They have 5 sepals and the base of the 5 petals is fused into a tube. The 2 shorter upper petals fold up. I’ve read that the flowers can bloom and set seed even under water. True aquatic plants are plants that have adapted to living in aquatic environments (saltwater or freshwater) and this one has adapted well.
I saw a strange looking bubble which had ripples coming from it, as if it were moving. It was in a pond, just off shore.
Of course if you go looking for aquatic plants, you’re going to see dragonflies like this widow skimmer.
I’m also seeing lots of what I think are spangled skimmers this year. On this day all of them were watching the water.
Pipewort plants (Eriocaulon aquaticum) are also called hatpins, and this photo shows why perfectly. Pipewort plants have basal leaves growing at the base of each stem and the leaves are usually underwater, but falling water levels had exposed them here. Interestingly, this photo also shows the size difference between a floating heart, which is there in the center, and a standard water lily leaf, which you can just see in the top left. Floating hearts are tiny in comparison.
Pipewort stems have a twist and 7 ridges, and for those reasons it is called seven angle pipewort. The quarter inch diameter flower head that sits atop the stem is made up of minuscule white, cottony flowers. I think it’s interesting how their leaves can photosynthesize under water.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter if there are any flowers in view. The light is enough.
I saw what I thought was a pretty clump of grass right at the very edge of the river bank but when I looked closer, I saw that it wasn’t any grass that I had ever seen before and I think it is reed sweet-grass(Glyceria maxima,) which is invasive. It is native to Europe and Western Siberia and is a semi-aquatic, perennial grass with unbranched stems that get up to 8’ tall. There is a reddish tint on the lower parts of the stems. This plant towered up over my head but I can’t swear it had red on the stems because I have trouble seeing red. Reed sweet-grass invades wetlands and crowds out natives, and is not suitable for nesting. It is also a poor food source for our native wildlife.
Meadowsweet (Spirea alba) grows in the form of a small shrub and is in the spirea family, which its flowers clearly show with their many fuzzy stamens. It’s a common plant that I almost always find near water.
Meadowsweet flowers are fragrant and have a sort of almond-like scent. A close look shows that clearly, they belong in the spirea family. Before long their pretty purple cousins the steeple bushes will come along.
In my opinion swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) is the most beautiful milkweed of all. It grows onshore but a few yards away from the water’s edge on land that rarely floods. Many insects were visiting it on this day. I know of only a single plant now, so I hope it produces plenty of seeds. The flowerheads always remind me of millefiori glass paperweights.
Swamp candles (Lysimachia terrestris) are not true aquatics but they do grow close enough to water to have their roots occasionally flooded. They are common along the edges of ponds and wetlands at this time of year. Their name comes from the way their bright color lights up a swamp, just as they did here.
Swamp candles have a club shaped flower head (raceme) made up of 5 petaled yellow flowers. Each yellow petal of a swamp candle flower has two red dots at its base that help form a ring of ten red dots around the five long stamens in the center of the flower. The petals are also often streaked with red and this is common among the yellow loosestrifes. Reddish bulbets will sometimes grow in the leaf axils. I’ve read that our native yellow loosestrifes were thought to have soothing powers over animals so people would tie the flowers to the yoke of oxen to make them easier to handle.
Pretty little sheep laurel (Kalmia angustifolia) will sometime grow in standing water but only when it rains and the water level rises. By choice they live right at the water’s edge. On the day I saw these I saw thousands of flowers blooming on the banks of a pond.
Here is a closer look at the flowers. Sheep laurel is part of the Kalmia clan, which in turn is part of the very large heath family, which includes rhododendrons, blueberries and many other plants. I know of only three Kalmias here and they are Mountain, Sheep and Bog laurel. The flowers of all three, though different in size and color, have ten spring loaded anthers which release when a heavy enough insect lands on the flower. It then gets dusted with pollen and goes on its way.
You can always tell that you’ve found one of the three Kalmias by looking at the outside of the flower. If it has ten bumps like those seen here you have found one of the laurels. Each bump is a tiny pocket that the tip of an anther fits into. If the flowers are anything but white it is either a sheep or bog laurel. If the flowers are white it’s a mountain laurel, though I’ve seen mountain laurels with pink flowers in gardens for the first time this year.
Fragrant white water lilies (Nymphaea odorata) are having a good year, I’m happy to say. They’re one of our most beautiful native aquatics. If you could get your nose into one you might smell something similar to honeydew melon or cantaloupe, but getting your nose into one is the tricky part.
I went to a local pond and saw what I thought were two-foot-tall white flowers on an island offshore. The pickerel weeds growing near the island told me the water could be up to six feet deep, so I certainly couldn’t wade out to them. My only choice was the zoom on my beaten-up old camera so I put it on the monopod and gave it a shot. When I looked at the photo I was stunned to see that the flowers weren’t white, they were pink. That was because they were rose pogonia orchids (Pogonia ophioglossoides,) a most rare and beautiful flower that I had been searching for in the wild for probably twenty years. And here they were, at a pond I had visited a hundred times. Why had I not seen them before? Because I had never come to this exact spot on the shore at this exact time of year before. That’s how easy it is to miss seeing one of the most beautiful flowers found in nature in bloom.
I’m sorry these are such poor photos but if you just Google “Rose Pogonia” you will see them in all their glory. This is a fine example of why, once you’ve started exploring and studying nature you feel that you really should keep at it, because you quickly learn that right around that next bend in the trail could be the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. I hope you have found that this is true in your own walks through nature.
Away from the tumult of motor and mill I want to be care-free; I want to be still! I’m weary of doing things; weary of words I want to be one with the blossoms and birds. ~Edgar A. Guest
On the fourth of July at just after 7:00 am I started the climb up Pitcher Mountain in Stoddard. The sunshine hadn’t reached the trailhead yet so it seemed dark to the cameras.
There were many blueberries ripening there along the trail but they were small. So far, we’ve had a dry summer and since they are mostly water, they haven’t been able to plump up. There were lots of them though so if we get some rain, it’ll be a good year for blueberries.
Hay scented ferns had yellowing tips, meaning they were being stressed by dryness.
I was catching up to the sun. This was the first hike up this mountain in recent memory when I didn’t have to stop to catch my breath. I did stop to take photos of course, but the stopping wasn’t due to low lung power and that was encouraging.
Here in the meadow was where all of the sunshine was, and it was bright. I usually take this shot more to the left but that was impossible on this day. I think the light would have destroyed the sensor in my camera.
I could see cloud shadows on the distant hills. They’re something I’ve always loved to watch move over the land. What a beautiful morning it was. Just a little on the cool side made it perfect weather for climbing. I think it was 55 degrees F. when I started.
Mount Monadnock is the highest point in the region so no matter where you stand you are looking up at it, even if you’re standing on top of another mountain.
But I wasn’t at the top yet. I still had to negotiate the worst part of the trail. This leg has many stones and roots to trip over.
The state owns the 5 acres at the top of Pitcher Mountain and they tell you that, but I’d guess that about 99% of the people who pass this sign never see it.
There were potential blackberries but they were small and stingy like the blueberries. We really need to see some rain.
Orchard grass had bloomed itself out and now hung its head to drop its seeds.
Here was the final approach to the summit. The wide road finally becomes just a footpath.
There were lots of bush honeysuckles blooming along this section of trail. Not a true honeysuckle but a pretty splash of color just the same.
As I climbed the last few yards to the summit, I turned to take a photo of the ranger cabin and found that the sky had turned to milk. A strange light fell over everything for a time.
The views especially, were affected by the unusual light. I saw that the wind turbines over in Antrim were spinning as fast as I’ve ever seen them go, but I didn’t feel even a hint of a breeze.
I wasn’t happy when I got home and saw this photo on the computer. What? I said to myself, the sky didn’t look like that. And the shading on the hills isn’t right! All the grousing and whining I was doing reminded me of a quote by artist Justin Beckett that I’ve always liked very much. He said “I could paint these mountains the way they look, but that isn’t how I see them.” So true, and I had to laugh at myself. In the end the photo stayed just the way it was. Not what I saw, but reality instead.
Finally the milky sky passed and things were back to blue again. I was surprised to find that I had the entire summit all to myself on a holiday. For a while, anyhow; it wasn’t long before a gentleman about my age came up the trail. I told him that the only other time I’d had the summit to myself was in winter. In January two or three years ago was the last time, I believed. “You come up here in January?” he asked. “Isn’t it a little icy?” “It can be, yes.” I told him. “I’ve had to crawl up those last few yards on my hands and knees.” By the look on his face you’d have thought I had just told him that I was from the crab nebula. I should probably have just kept my mouth shut. Only another nature nut could understand someone clawing their way up a mountain in January. In any case it wasn’t long before I had the summit to myself again.
I could just make out the cuts for the ski slopes on what I believe is Stratton Mountain over in Vermont.
The view of the near hill is being blocked by growth. Every now and then someone, or a group of people, comes and cuts the undergrowth to restore the views. I like to see the near hill. It rises up out of the forest like an ancient burial mound.
The old dead birch was still standing. It has become like a landmark to me so when it falls, I’ll miss it.
The morning light turned some of the mountain cinquefoil flowers in this shot blue but they are actually white. This plant also called three toothed cinquefoil because of the three large teeth at the end of each leaf.
They’re also very small. Just about the size of an aspirin I’d guess, but though small they certainly aren’t dainty. They survive some nasty weather up here; everything from being coated in ice to baking in the sun.
Common goldspeck lichens cover the exposed bedrock of the summit beautifully. If you want to talk toughness, I can’t think of another living thing as tough as a lichen. Science says they are about as close to immortal as any earth-bound being can be. They’ve even survived the vacuum of space.
In all the years I’ve been coming up here I’ve never seen the depressions in the bed rock that I call the bird baths dry up. Even in the bad drought we had three years ago there was water in them but now, all but this one had dried up, and this one looked like was going fast. There were lots of small birds like chickadees and juncos in the bushes watching me, just waiting for me to leave so they could use it, so I didn’t hang around the area long.
The blueberries on the summit were ripening quickly but they were small. Pitcher Mountain is known for its blueberries and many people and families come to pick them each year.
I thought I saw a dragonfly on a fern but it was a tiny feather. I get fooled by feathers a lot but this one was worth being the fool for. I thought it was beautiful and I wished I had seen the bird that dropped it. It must have been beautiful as well.
And then it was time to go down. When I got here earlier, the first thing I saw was three college age men running down this trail at full tilt. I suppose they must have run up it first, and that would have been near the twilight of dawn. More power to them. I was young once, too. May they all lead long and healthy lives.
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
In July all the big flowered sun lovers like chicory (Cichorium intybus) start coming along. The plants, originally from Europe, are considered roadside weeds by many but chicory is one of my favorite summer flowers because of its beautiful color. They seem to be having a good year this year and are flowering well. I found this one right on the side of a very busy road and every time a car went by it would blow back and forth, so this shot was a challenge. Each flower is about as big as a half dollar, or about 3/4 of an inch. They will close up and look like a shriveled bud in the early afternoon and then open again the next morning. Chicory plants like full sun all day long, so you’ll only find them growing where they get it.
This plant prefers shade. Fringed loosestrife (Lysimachia ciliate) is the largest and latest blooming of our native yellow loosestrifes. It can grow in large colonies of knee-high plants, and can be found along roadsides and wood edges, and along waterways. The flowers are about the size of a quarter and nod to face the ground.
Luckily the plant’s stem is flexible and can be gently bent back so you can get a good look at the pretty flowers. The flowers are unusual because of the way they offer oils instead of nectar to insects. The oils are called elaiosomes and are fleshy structures that are attached to the seeds of many plant species. They are rich in lipids and proteins. Many plants have elaiosomes that attract ants, which take the seed to their nest and feed them to their larvae. Fringed loosestrife gets its common name from the fringe of hairs on its leafstalks, which can just barely be seen in this shot.
This tickseed coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata) was used to help keep a road embankment in place. It’s a native plant that gets its common name from the way its seeds cling to clothing like ticks. The plant is also called lance leaved coreopsis and that is where the lanceolata part of the scientific name comes from. Coreopsis is found in flower beds as well as in the wild and can form large colonies if left alone. You should take note of that fact before planting one in your garden. I’ve spent a lot of time pulling the seedlings in the past. The yellow flowers are about an inch across and stand at the top of thin, wiry stems. This plant has a cousin known as greater tickseed that grows in the south.
Showy tick trefoil (Desmodium canadense) is another plant with seeds that like to stick to clothing using little barbed hairs that cover the seed pods. Though its flowers weren’t fully open it’s still easy to tell that this is another plant in the pea family. There is no nectar to be had but bumblebees collect the pollen. The “showy” part of its common name comes from the way that so many of its small pink flowers bloom at once. As the plant sets seeds its erect stems bend lower to the ground so the barbed seed pods can catch in the fur of passing animals.
The big bull thistles (Cirsium vulgare) have come into bloom and are as full of thorns as ever. I remember at the end of the growing season one year I saw a single flower left on a plant but it was right in the middle of the plant, and I paid for that photo with a few drops of blood. These plants are originally from Europe and are considered invasive but since nobody really want to touch them, they have been fairly successful. Goldfinches will be along to eat the seeds later on.
What I believe was a halictid bee was covered in thistle pollen. I loved its metallic sheen. These tiny bees are also called sweat bees, and when I did some reading about them, I was astounded to find how many of our fruits and vegetables they pollinate. It seems safe to say that if it wasn’t for them, we’d be eating a lot differently, and possibly a lot less.
Our native wintergreens are blooming now and the first to bloom is usually shinleaf (Pyrola elliptica). I saw only a few blooming though; this seems to be a bad year for the wintergreens. Where I usually see hundreds of blossoms, this year I’m lucky to see a dozen. Shinleaf’s common name comes from the way Native Americans used it as a poultice to heal wounds. Like several other native wintergreens it contains compounds similar to those in aspirin and a tea made from it was used to soothe many ailments.
The big J shaped flower styles of shinleaf make it easy to identify. Since it persists through winter it is even a help when the flowers aren’t blooming.
Pipsissewa (Chimaphilla corymbosa or Pyrola umbellata) is also having a bad bloom year. It is related to the shinleaf and striped wintergreen that also appear in this post and like them it likes things on the dry side. I find it in sandy soil that gets dappled sunlight. It is a low growing native evergreen that can be easily missed when there are only one or two plants, but pipsissewa usually forms quite large colonies and that makes them easier to find. The leaves are also very shiny, which also helps. The white or pink flowers are almost always found nodding downwards, as this photo shows.
If you very gently push the stem back with a finger you can get a look at the dime size, pretty flowers. They often show a blush of pink, as this one did. Five petals and ten chubby anthers surrounding a plump center pistil make it prettier than most of the wintergreens, in my opinion. This plant, like many of the wintergreens, is a partial myco-heterotroph, meaning it gets part of its nutrition from the fungi that live in the surrounding soil. Odd that a plant would be parasitic on fungi, but there you have it.
In the summer striped wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata) is almost invisible, and even though I knew right where to look for it I had to walk back and forth several times to find it. It is a plant that is quite rare here; I know of only two or three small colonies. It likes to grow in soil that has been undisturbed for decades and that helps account for its rarity. Like other wintergreens It isn’t having a good year this year. There were maybe 8 plants here and this was the only one with flower buds, but its buds look as if they’re failing, so this plant probably won’t blossom.
Puffy, pretty little bird’s foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) has been blooming for a while now. This is another plant in that huge pea (legume) family of plants. It was imported from Europe for use as a forage plant, but it has escaped cultivation and is now found just about everywhere. Its common name came about because someone thought its seedpods looked like a bird’s foot.
I mentioned a few posts ago that, as far as I knew plant breeders hadn’t been able to come up with a truly black flower, but nature has. I’ve looked at the flowers of black swallow wort (Cynanchum louiseae ) in all kinds of light and they always look black, not purple to me. This is a very invasive plant; a vine that likes to grow in the center of shrubs and will twine around the shrub’s branches, climbing up to the top where it can get more sun. The plant is in the milkweed family and like other milkweeds its flowers become small green pods that will eventually turn brown and split open to release their seeds to the wind. It also has a sharp, hard to describe odor that is noticed when any part of it is bruised. It originally came from Europe sometime around 1900 as a garden specimen and of course has escaped. In places it has covered entire hillsides with its wiry, tangled stems and is called the dog strangler vine.
Narrow leaf cow wheat is blooming right on schedule and forest floors are covered with it. A plant that can photosynthesize and create its own food but is still a parasite on surrounding plants is known as a hemiparasite, and that’s what cow wheat is, a cute little thief.
Cow wheat’s long white, tubular flowers tipped with yellow-green are very small, and usually form in pairs where the leaves meet the stem (axils). I mostly find this plant growing in old, undisturbed forests.
The coneflowers seem to be blooming early this year, but it’s probably just me. It’s another plant I think of as a fall flower, so seeing them in June is a bit of a jolt. I’m really not ready to think of fall just yet.
Hollyhocks are a great old fashioned garden flower that used to be used in the backs of perennial borders and the like, but I don’t see them used much anymore. It’s too bad because they have beautiful flowers.
This hollyhock had so much pollen it was falling off before the bees could get to it.
I found this purple bee balm in a local park but I’m of two minds about the flowers. They’re much fuller and robust than the native red bee balms but I think I still like the red flowers best.
Though I found a good size colony of it at the local college last year I’d still say that Asiatic dayflower (Commelina communis) is rare here. The single plant I knew before I found this colony had a single small flower. From the photos I had seen I always thought the flowers would be as big as a tradescantia blossom, but it was only half that size. It is an introduced plant from China and Japan but it could hardly be called invasive in this area because I just never see them. I love its colors.
I’m still waiting for our native Canada lilies to start blooming but that doesn’t mean I’m not seeing any lilies. This one was in a public garden and was very beautiful, I thought. I used to grow lots of lilies here but then the lily beetle came to town and that finished that.
None can have a healthy love for flowers unless he loves the wild ones. ~Forbes Watson
It had been about six years since I followed an old class 6 road in Swanzey and something brought it to mind the other day, so I thought I’d give it a go. I remembered it being very shaded and since it was a hot, humid day shade was called for. Here in New Hampshire a class 6 designation means that a road isn’t maintained by either the state or the town so traveling it could be rough going. Though they are public ways they are roads that are more or less forgotten except by hikers and snowmobilers. This one dates from the mid-1800s and if you walked it for maybe 2 days, you would eventually come out on the road to Chesterfield, which is now route 9.
The road follows along a brook which is named California Brook, for reasons I’ve never been able to uncover. It has its start in the town of Chesterfield and runs southeast to the Ashuelot River in Swanzey. There were at least two mills on the brook in the early 1800s, and it was said to be the only waterway in Swanzey where beavers could be found in the 1700s. They’re still here, almost 300 years later.
The forest is made up of young trees, mostly hemlock but some maple and birch as well.
Stone walls tell the story of why the forest is young. This land was all cleared at one time and I’ve read that at least three families lived out here. Most likely in the 1800s. It might have been sheep pasture, which was a common use for this stone filled land.
But the road was very different than it was the last time I was out here, and I wondered who would go to all of the expense of making an old abandoned road useable.
The road had been hardened with 1-inch crushed stone, which is terrible stuff to walk on if it hasn’t been compacted. This hadn’t been compacted so in places it was almost like walking on marbles.
Even the old rotted bridge had been replaced. There is only one reason someone would go to all this trouble and expense to get out here.
And the reason is logging, just as I suspected. It looked like they were taking the softwood and leaving the hardwood to grow. In any event, it certainly wasn’t the first time this land had been logged off and I couldn’t worry about what was being done on someone else’s land.
Colonies of heal all (Prunella lanceolata) grew on both sides of the road and I was happy to see them. They are also called self-heal and have been used medicinally since ancient times. They are said to cure everything from sore throats to heart disease, and that’s how the plant got its common name. In fact the plants were once thought to be a holy herb sent by God to cure man’s ills. Native Americans drank a tea made from the plant before a hunt because they believed that it helped their eyesight.
Maybe happiness is a large part of the cure that heal all brings to man. Seeing them certainly brightens my day. Their happy faces and wide-open mouths always seem to be cheering life on. I can almost hear them shouting yay! As I’ve said before, I think all flowers are happy simply because they’re alive; they exist. All of nature is in a state of ecstasy because it simply is. We could learn a lot from its example.
Hobblebushes have set fruit. The berries will go from green to bright red and then deep, purple black as they grow and ripen. They won’t last long once ripe.
I saw a big, soccer ball size burl on a red maple. It would have been the perfect size to make a bowl out of. They’re valuable to woodworkers because just about anything made from burl is beautiful and commands top dollar. A burl is an abnormal growth on a tree that grows faster than the surrounding tissue. Scientists don’t fully understand why it happens but burls are thought to grow on trees that have been weakened by stress or damage. Once the tree’s defenses have been weakened insects and/or fungi can attack and cause the abnormal growth. That’s the theory, anyhow.
Partridgeberry (Mitchella repens) grew all along the roadside in large numbers. This one still had a raindrop on it.
Coltsfoot also grew in great numbers out here and if I can remember that, next spring I’ll come back and find some of the earliest blooming flowers.
My find of the day was this many headed slime mold (Physarum polycephalum) I saw growing on a log beside the road. It was in its plasmodium stage and was quite big. When slime molds are in this state, they are usually moving-very slowly. Slime molds are super sensitive to drying out so they usually move at night but they can be found on cloudy, humid days as well. It was a hot and humid day and this particular spot was very shaded, so it was just right for slime mold activity.
Through a process called cytoplasmic streaming slime molds can reach speeds of up to 1.35 mm per second, which is the fastest rate recorded for any micro-organism. Scarcity of food is what drives them on, always searching for bacteria and yeasts to feed on. As this photo shows, slime mold plasmodium is a mass of glistening vein-like material (actually a single-celled amoeba) that creeps across dead leaves, wood, or soil. They are fascinating beings that behave like a flock of birds or a school of fish, and science just can’t seem to figure them out.
I was hoping that I might also see some fungi out here but all I saw were these tinder polypores (Fomes fomentarius) on a very dead beech. They do like beech trees. I see them more on beech than any other tree. This one was so old its bark was flaking off but the fungi were still able to get what they were after from it. Since woodpeckers had been at it too, I’m sure it was full of insects. Most likely carpenter ants. Tinder polypores produce huge amounts of spores; measurements in the field have shown that they release as many as 800 million spores per hour in the spring and summer.
The first time I came out here I saw the biggest beaver dam I’ve ever seen. It was high enough to be over my head in height, but the last time I came out here it was gone. I thought that if the dam had let go there had certainly been some serious flooding somewhere, but I’ve never seen any signs of it. Anyhow, here was another beaver pond. I couldn’t see the dam but they’re at it again.
I should say that I’m not happy with many of the photos that I took with my new cell phone. I went into a phone store hoping they could fix a small issue I was having with an app on my Google Pixel 4A phone and the person behind the counter noticed that I had a 3G sim card in the phone. “You really should have a 5G sim card,” he said. “This is a 5G phone.” To make a long story short the 5G sim card he put in apparently destroyed the Pixel’s ability to connect to the internet, so they had to give me a new phone of “equal or greater value.” Well, the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE they gave me as a replacement is indeed of greater value because it cost $200.00 more than I paid for the Pixel, but the Samsung’s camera can’t touch the Pixel’s camera, and for that reason it has little value to me. In my opinion it’s okay for making phone calls, but not much else.
There are ditches alongside the road and since it had rained that morning they had water in them, and they also had northern water horehound (Lycopus uniflorus) growing beside them. This plant is in the mint family and has a square stem as so many of the plants in that family do. Soon the plants will have tiny white flowers blooming where the leaves meet the stem. The foliage is said to be very bitter and possibly toxic, but Native Americans used the tuberous roots for food. I don’t know what birds or animals eat the seeds, but muskrats love the roots. Another name for the plant is northern bugleweed and I almost always find it near water.
I saw lots of mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) and I ran my hands through it hoping for lucid mugwort dreams, but I can’t remember anything special. Mugwort is supposed to make dreams much more vivid and also increases the chances that the dreamer will rmember their dreams. A year or two ago I ran my hands through it a few times and really did have some wild dreams, so there must be something to it. The plant has mild hallucinogenic properties and is considered a “magic herb.” It has been used by man for thousands of years; the earliest writings regarding it are from 3 BC. in China. It is also one of the herbs recorded in the Anglo-Saxon nine herbs charm from the tenth century and by all accounts was and still is considered a very important plant. If you enjoy reading about plants mugwort lore could easily fill an entire book. When you have a spare hour or two just Google “mugwort.”
Purple flowering raspberry (Rubus odoratus) grew in the shadiest places because the big, hand size, light gathering leaves lets it do so. Its common name comes from its fruit, which looks like a raspberry but is about as big as the tip of your thumb. I tasted one once and tasted nothing but there are people who say they’re delicious.
I was happy to see this cave at the side of a still pool in the stream again. From a distance it looks big enough to walk into by ducking a little, but not small enough to have to crawl into. Every time I see it, it calls loudly to the hermit in me, but it also looks big enough to easily hold a bear or two so I haven’t ever dared go near it while out here alone. Maybe if someone was with me to get me back if anything happened, or maybe if I had a rifle and a strong flashlight, but not alone. It’s too bad; I wouldn’t mind spending some time here. It’s an idyllic spot with the stream running just outside the entrance and a mossy bank to lounge on, and a cave to stay dry in. Inside myself I know living here for a while wouldn’t be a hard choice to make but this is known bear country, so I suppose you would always wonder what was going to come through that entrance, and that might be a hard way to live. I’ll just have to live it in a dream, I guess. Maybe a mugwort dream.
I was surprised to see that branch still sticking out of the tree on the right. It has been that way for many years, but when I first came out here the branch was still attached to the tree on the left. I think the tree with the wound grew up through the branches of the tree on the left and the wind made the wounded tree rub against the other’s branch. Over time the tree grew and its wound got deeper until now it has partially healed over the offending branch. When I first saw it, I thought that one day it would heal over completely but now I doubt it. It’s an unusual thing to see and this is the only time I’ve seen it happen.
I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected to everything. ~Alan watts
Thanks for stopping in. I hope everyone has a happy 4th!
New Hampshire Garden Solutions 