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
I’ve been waiting for the Ashuelot River to return to normal levels so I could visit the forest I used to spend a lot of time in as a boy. It’s a beautiful place on land now owned by the local college, and they’ve mowed a trail through it. The trail runs very close to the river and that’s what the fence posts seen in this shot are for; to warn people that the river is right there, just feet away. It’s hard to tell due to all the growth but I learned years ago that there are otter slides and muskrat tunnels and sink holes that are easily fallen into. I stayed on the trail and in all the time I spent here I saw only an occasional glimpse of the river. I was too busy enjoying the beauty of the place.
When I was a boy there were no mowed trails here so my friends and I just found our own way through the woods, using game trails or other natural pathways. There have always been lots of birds and animals here and now the land is a designated wildlife management area. Since it floods badly when the river is high it really couldn’t be used for anything else. Though the sign points to wildlife “management” I think the management consists of letting the wildlife just be and do as it will.
I immediately started seeing insects when I got here, including this ebony jewelwing damselfly. They like to hunt around forested streams. There is also a river jewelwing which hunts riverbanks but I didn’t see one of those. There was certainly plenty for it to eat here. Never in my life have I seen swarms of mosquitoes like I did here. Even with bug spray on they got me. All the rain and flooding this year has led to a perfect storm of them and when you meet someone on a trail that’s all they talk about.
What I think might be a cloudless sulfur butterfly sat on a leaf, looking a bit like a leaf itself. It also looked as if it was having antennae problems. There are also clouded sulfurs, but they have black edging on their wingtips.
I saw what seemed to be very early New England asters in bloom. Many of the asters that grow here have the deepest colored purple flowers that are my favorites, but I don’t usually start looking for them until the end of September.
An eastern cottontail warmed itself in the morning sunshine. It let me have a few photos and then hopped off into the tall grass. I felt sorry to have disturbed its peace.
Something that surprised me was finding marsh bellflowers here. This is only the second place I’ve seen these small flowers, each time very near the river. I’m not surprised that they would like it here in this wet ground.
I found a Japanese beetle on a hedge bindweed blossom. As I pointed the camera at it, it reared up on its hind legs in challenge. “This is my flower,” it said. By the end of the day the blossom had most likely been chewed full of holes.
The trail closes in a bit in places and that’s because the river is close on one side and old silver maples crowd in on the other. Most of the trees here are silver maples with a few red maples. They’re the only trees that can stand the almost yearly flooding. In many places all the undergrowth had been flattened by the flood water but it wasn’t too bad right here.
This tall grass was very beautiful caught in a sunbeam like it was. I think it is tall woodreed, which is a grass that likes shaded, boggy places. It must have been about six feet tall and it stopped me in my tracks. All the gray in the background is caused by plants that were under water not long ago. The rain hadn’t washed the silt off them yet.
What I think might be a hairy footed flower bee sat on a leaf. These solitary bees are said to be the first to emerge in spring and like to visit pulmonaria flowers, which are some of the earliest to appear. They are native to Europe and North Africa, but have been introduced into Canada and the U.S. This is the only one I’ve seen.
This was another unusual bee because it was as big as the end of my thumb; easily the biggest bee I’ve seen. I think it must be some type of carpenter bee but I’m not sure.
Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius once recommended that we “Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” That was just what I was doing here; a universe full of Stellaria pubera, the star chickweed, bloomed all along the trail and into the woods.
Woodland sunflowers, which had apparently been flattened by rain, were starting to lift up their heads.
I think there were more tall blue lettuce plants out here than I’ve ever seen in a single place. They like a bit of shade and wet ground to do their best, and they find both here. The flowers, each about the size of a pencil eraser, have leaned more toward white than blue this year.
For the first time I was able to get a fairly good photo of tall blue lettuce that shows where the “tall” in the name comes from. The undergrowth was about six feet tall and these plants soared many feet above it. I’d guess they were at leat twelve feet tall. It seems odd that such small flowers would appear on such a tall plant.
River silt, as fine as talcum powder, covered the trail where it had flooded, and then dried and cracked. When I see silt like this I always think about how many thousands of years it must have taken to build up the rich farmlands that are almost always found along our rivers.
This place has always been a source of wonder and as I walked along I thought of how lucky I was to spend my boyhood in such a beautiful place. Bordered by the railroad tracks I walked almost every day, it was an easy place to get to and I spent a lot of time exploring and learning from nature here. Anything a boy could want in nature I found here but I’ve always thought my friends and I came mostly because we simply loved the place. Even after all these years it’s still an easy place to love and now with the mowed trails, it’s even more beautiful than it used to be. I’ve never forgotten the silence, natural beauty, and freedom that I experienced here. It all led to a lifelong love of life.
Tall asters weren’t so tall after the rain was done with them. This one could barely lift its head out of the ferns, and it should be six feet tall.
Broom sedge isn’t a plant I see a lot of but there were large colonies of them here so they must like moist ground. I like its bristly, reddish seed heads.
Goldenrod glowed in the bright sunshine. There has always been goldenrod here for as far back as memory will take me, and it has always been beautiful. One thing I thought of that is lacking here these days are the big black and yellow spiders that used to be here. I used to love watching them but I haven’t seen one in a long time.
I spent parts of two different days here. On the first day it was so windy everything was thrashing around and branches were falling off the trees but it kept the bugs away. This little pearl crescent (I think) butterfly hung on with all it had as the goldenrod it clung to thrashed back and forth in the wind gusts. It took quite a few tries to get this not so great shot. Every time the wind would stop I’d bring the camera up, ready to get the shot, but as soon as I clicked the shutter it would start in again. I spent a lot of time just standing and waiting, using the patience the great blue herons taught me.
On the second day when the winds had calmed down I noticed that many of the thistles that live here had gone to seed and thistle down floated in the air. Since thistle seeds are a favorite of gold finches I thought I’d better walk over to the place where I usually find them.
I wasn’t disappointed; the beautiful little birds were here as they are every year, enjoying the fruits of the bull or spear thistles. I never noticed how their black forehead “hair” fell down over their eyes like it does. This one is a breeding male. The bad boy look must help him attract females.
He wasn’t going to waste time watching me watch him; he dug right in and the thistle down was flying. I’ve also watched them pull garden zinnias apart, throwing petals everywhere to get at the seeds. They also go for evening primrose and any other small seeded plantss. According to the Cornell School of Ornithology their natural habitats are weedy fields and floodplains, so it makes perfect sense that they would come here every year.
He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her. ~Friedrich Von Schlegel
Well, I’ve finally had to buy a new camera. If a camera can survive hanging around my neck in the woods for 4-5 years it’s a tough camera, and the two Cannon PowerShot SX-40s I’ve used for several years performed admirably. But I’ve worn out both of them, so this time I went with the Cannon PowerShot SX-70. These cameras are “bridge cameras,” so called because they bridge the gap between a DSLR and a Point and shoot. This one has a 65X optical zoom with a 20.3 Megapixel CMOS sensor and DIGIC 8 Image processor. In my style of nature study I can’t be carrying a bag full of heavy lenses with me while I crawl around on the forest floor. I want to be ready for anything at any time, and this camera has the finesse it takes for shots of insects as well as the reach it takes for shots of animals. My line of thought is, since I don’t “do” birds I don’t need the great reach of a $5,000.00, 600 mm lens but as you will see in this post, I was going to do birds. Or more accurately, birds were going to do me.
This is the first “blog worthy” shot I took with the new camera: a female wood duck. This encounter was strange, since wood ducks don’t usually sit still and let me take photos. They swim or fly away at top speed. Or they used to anyway. This one just sat on its tiny island and let me move as close as I could and I was happy that it did, because it’s only the second shot I’ve gotten of a wood duck. I love their chubby little cheeks and their beautiful colors. Though the females are pretty the males are amazing, and I hope to get a photo of one of them someday.
I was back in the wetlands when I saw the wood duck. This is a shot I took a while ago with my old Cannon SX-40. I like its dreamy, impressionistic appearance but you don’t always want dreamy and impressionistic; sometimes you want sharp. In any event this place has become one of my favorite places because you just never know what you’ll see here. There are often whitetail deer out there in the distance.
People had told me that there were bitterns here in the wetlands. Bitterns are rarely seen birds and I had no idea what they looked like, so I came home and read about them. What stayed in my mind most of all was how they had stripes and a long neck, so when I saw this bird I thought it was a bittern. I was confused though because it wasn’t a bittern at all, it was a juvenile green heron. I had seen exactly one green heron before and it was an adult in such deep shade my camera couldn’t even find it, so experience didn’t help.
Here is what I believe is a more adult looking green heron with some traces of juvenile color still left on it. At one point there were 5 of these birds in different stages of maturity in this one place and by the time they had all flown away I was confused enough to have not really known what I had seen. So it was back home to do more reading. Green herons are much smaller than great blue herons; just slightly bigger than a crow I think, but like their cousins they can spend quite a bit of time playing statue. If you don’t scare them off like I did, that is.
After all that I felt that I’d had enough of birds for a while but no, here was the World’s Cutest Duck sitting on a log one evening. I took a few shots of it and then, sure it would fly away, I went on looking for other interesting things. This duck was on one side of a tiny pond and I was on the other side. I walked by it several times but it just sat and smiled; the very picture of serenity. The birds I kept running into weren’t behaving like I thought they would and I wondered if maybe this little duck was sick. It was small enough to hold in two cupped hands and cute enough to melt your heart but all I could do was wish it a peaceful night ahead. I still haven’t been able to identify it as anything but a tiny duck.
One of the things I saw while I was stumbling around the duck was this bladderwort; the only one I’ve seen this year. The light was going fast but the camera coped.
I went to a brighter place out in the open where I knew some purple morning glories grow but I was too late and there wasn’t a single open flower. But what beautiful buds! I got out the camera I use for macros, took one shot, and got the dreaded “card full” message. There was nothing to do but try the new camera on them. I doubted it would be able to get a shot of something so small but here it is. I love the way these buds spiral but what really surprised me was the shine. And I hadn’t used a flash.
This is what a morning glory flower looks like when it is finished. It kind of falls in on itself. I was surprised that the new camera could get this shot without being in macro mode.
It also got a shot of a hedge bindweed flower that didn’t have pink stripes.
I finally found an emerald spread wing damselfly hanging on to a pickerel weed stem in sunlight, so now you can see their beautiful colors. The new camera did a fairly good job of reproducing them, I thought.
I was able to crop the photo to give you a better look. I like those big blue eyes and that metallic green. I also wanted you to see the tiny red “blob” under its abdomen. It’s a water mite, which is a parasite in the tick family that feeds on the blood of dragon and damselflies. It / they will eventually drop off when the damselfly is over water.
This shot I took a few years ago shows the immature water mites on a banded wing meadowhawk dragonfly. When one organism transports another organism of a different species it is a symbiotic process called “phoresy.” This information on water mites was confirmed by the folks at Bug Guide.net and Kathy Keatley Garvey and the bug squad from the University of California. Thanks also to Ginger Wells Kay for her help.
I was happy that the new camera was able to shoot dragonflies. The first one I tried was this widow skimmer. I chose this photo for this post because this dragonfly was hanging onto some Joe Pye weed buds. In my experience dragonflies don’t seem to perch on flowers that often.
Later on I ran into yet another bird; this time a great blue heron, wading through the weeds in the Ashuelot River. I couldn’t understand how it could wade here without tripping over all the growth but it did. A curious thing happened this year; pickeral weeds lined the river banks and bloomed as always, but then it started raining and didn’t stop. The river got so high that it was far over the “heads” of the blooming pickerel weeds, and it killed them all off. All that is left is the mass of dead leaf stalks seen in this photo.
The big heron stuck out its long neck and I thought it was going to make a spectacular catch but instead it froze and stayed that way, as if mesmerized. It seemed like it was ready to play statue, so I thanked it for letting me take photos and left it there staring at its own reflection.
One day I saw a lot of ferns with fern balls on them. Fern balls are created by an insect called a fern leaf roller. The rolled up leaves appear at the tip of a fern frond and look like a ball, and inside the ball are caterpillars of a moth, possibly in the herpetogramma family. The caterpillars pull the tip of the fern into a ball shape and tie it up with silk. Once inside the shelter they feed on the leaflets. Nature is always full of surprises.
Speaking of ferns, here is this year’s example of a royal fern. I like to always show this fern because many people don’t know that it is a fern. I almost always find royal ferns along river and pond banks. They turn a beautiful yellow color in the fall.
The acorn crop looks like it is going to be big this year and I’m so glad that I no longer have to rake them all up.
August is usually the time when our first asters appear. This one is a marsh aster; the first I’ve seen this season. There will be plenty more of them soon. They often grow in or very near the water at pond shores.
The unusual flowers of the ground nut plant also appear in August. They’re very pretty and always remind me of the helmets once worn by the Conquistadors. It always seems odd to me that we have “invented” so many things that have the same form, color, or function as the things found in nature. Nature has to be the inspiration behind many of the things man came up with in earlier times.
Plants release their seeds to the wind not knowing or caring whether or not they’ll fall on fertile soil, but still they grow into beauty like this. It strikes me that a blog is much the same; you let your words flow freely out into the world never knowing where they’ll land or what they might grow into. All one can do is hope that maybe one day something beautiiful might come from them.
If you come upon a spot where it looks like someone dumped a bowl full of orange spaghetti all over the plants then you’ve found a parasitic plant called dodder. It is an annual plant which, once it starts growing, quickly covers plants in what might look like the silly string that used to come in spray cans. Since it has no leaves it is easily seen.
Dodder doesn’t need leaves because it sucks all the life giving nutrients it needs from its host plant. In this photo taken earlier you can see how the orange stem of dodder, just to the left of the tiny flower, has penetrated and entered the stem of a goldenrod. Once this happens it gets all its nourishment from its host and it no longer needs to contact the soil it once grew from. Out in the field as I found it, it does no real harm but it can severly damage crops and for that reason farmers have given it names like devil’s guts, devil’s hair, devil’s ringlet, hail weed, hair weed, hell bine, pull-down, strangle weed, and witch’s hair. It’s hard to control; all the tiny green spheres you see in this photo are seed pods.
The only bird in this post I’ve tried to find is this cedar waxwing, which I found sitting on a stone in the middle of the river one evening. Many of you wrote in after the last post to say how much you loved these beautiful birds so I thought I’d show another one. It sat in the evening sun waiting for insects to happen by. Due to all the rain there are more mosquitoes this year than I’ve ever seen, so the waxwings won’t go hungry.
In the trembling grey of a spring dawn, when the birds were whispering in mysterious cadence among the trees, have you not felt that they were talking to their mates about the flowers? ~Kakuzō Okakura
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
Three years ago this farmer’s fields flooded so he stopped growing corn and grew wheat instead. Through two years of drought the wheat did fine but this spring things seemed to change. It seemed like it would be a more “normal” spring; I felt it and apparently so did the farmer because he went back to planting corn. Then the heavy, slow moving rains came and not only flooded the cornfields again but they’ve devastated Vermont and New York. I think about the people I know who live out that way and hope those in the hardest hit areas are safe. Here in New Hampshire 4.5 inches of rain fell in one day. We have large sections of roads completely gone and water flowing over the tops of smaller dams, and the storms keep coming. The local river, the Ashuelot, can’t hold much more. If there is anything good about getting this much rain it is the mushrooms and slime molds that have started appearing everywhere. They’ll appear right here too, in a future post.
But despite all the cloudy, wet weather the flowers haven’t stopped blooming, as this meadowsweet shows. Meadowsweet is in the spirea family and that family always has a slightly fuzzy look from all the stamens. The flowers are white, even though those in the photo appear pink. I think they were colored by the low light. This year there is more meadowsweet blooming than I’ve ever seen so it must like lots of water.
One of my favorite summer flowers is chicory and I’m happy to see plenty of them blooming this summer. I once worked as a gardener for a man who used to grow chicory in large window box type containers he had built in his cellar. But I never saw them bloom; in fact he would have been horrified to see them blooming because he grew them for the roots, which can be eaten as a vegetable. Leaves can be blanched to remove bitterness, and he did that as well.
Our big Canada lilies are in bloom. Once again they remind me of chandeliers, as they always seem to do. This plant towered over my head and its flowers were a good five inches across. Everything about it is big.
I found this flower when it was young, and I know that because its huge anthers hadn’t opened. Once the outer casings seen here split apart they open to reveal their abundant pollen. They will change to a deep maroon color, aging to brown, and insects will flock to them. You can see that color on the anthers in the previous photo. Years ago I worked for a lady who did a lot of flower arranging, and she told me that if you were going to use lilies in an arrangement you should always cut off the anthers because if the pollen ever got on your tablecloth it would stain it permanently. I had the feeling she spoke from experience.
The big orange daylilies called “ditch lilies” are blooming and they can be seen just about anywhere. They’re a plant you’ll find growing near old stone cellar holes out in the middle of nowhere and along old New England roads. They are also found in cemeteries, often planted beside the oldest graves. They’re one of those plants that were passed from neighbor to neighbor and spread quickly because of it. They were introduced into the United States from Asia in the late 1800s as an ornamental, and plant breeders have now registered over 40,000 cultivars, all of which have “ditch lily” genes and all of which have the potential to spread just like the original has.
Coneflowers, from our native prairies, are well known around the world. I’ve seen a few hybrids; white flowered ones, red flowered ones, and bicolor ones with green on the petals, but I prefer the native purple flowered plants. We (mankind) are able to make our own version of just about anything these days and we often change something just because we can. I’ve seen man-made hybrid plants that were incredibly beautiful but I always lean more toward the natural “as found” plants. That’s not to say that nature can’t improve upon itself. One of the ways we find “new” plants is by planting many thousands of seeds and looking for that one plant out of thousands that is different from the rest. That plant is called a sport, which is a natural genetic mutation. Some sports can be very beautiful but my personal preference in coneflowers is for purple, the way nature originally intended it.
The big bull thistles bloomed a little later this year, probably due to lack of sunlight. I’ve been pricked by these plants enough times to think “ouch” by just looking at the photo. I like to see lots of these bloom though, because when they go to seed goldfinches come to eat them and it usually means an easy photo of a very pretty bird.
There are drifts of daisy fleabane brightening the landscape almost everywhere I go. They will bloom from June sometimes into November, so it is one of our longest blooming plants. It is considered a pioneer species, meaning it is one of the first plants to grow in unused pastures, or cleared or burned areas. Fleabanes get their name from the way the dried plants repel fleas. Native Americans made a tea from them which was used as medicine for digestive ailments.
Humble little narrow leaf cow wheat often grows in the forest or on forest edges and almost always blooms in pairs. Though it looks innocent enough it is really a thief that steals nutrients from surrounding plants. A plant that can photosynthesize and create its own food but is still a parasite on surrounding plants is known as a hemiparasite. Its long white, tubular flowers tipped with yellow-green are very small but seem bright in a low light forest.
Curly dock, a common roadside weed, has gone to seed and its small seeds look like the tiny seed pearls you see in portraits of royalty, sewn onto their clothes. Each seed has a wing attached to it and as they age these wings often turn a deep maroon color, which makes them even more beautiful. Once they ripen and fall the wing will make it easier for the wind to scatter the seeds around.
White admiral butterflies are still with us but I see fewer of them now. I think they must be slowing down, because this one had lost part of its wing to a bird. They pick up a few battle scars and look a little more ragged as they age. It must be hard for them to out fly a bird, especially one as sharp as a king bird.
A great spangled fritillary butterfly sipped from a knapweed blossom. These beautiful butterflies just appeared this week but like the white admiral in the previous shot this fritillary already had a small piece of wing torn. These orange butterflies remind me that I still haven’t seen a monarch butterfly.
This shot of the great spangled fritillary’s spangles was taken on a different day. It’s beautiful but I thought it was too bad I hadn’t gotten a shot of its eyes when I looked at these photos, because they’re really amazing.
This shot of a great spangled fritillary’s eyes is from a few years ago up on Pitcher Mountain when the fritillaries were loving the orange hawkweed. If you click on the photo you can see its beautiful jewel like eyes close up. How I’d love to see through those eyes, just once.
A female red winged blackbird had what looked like a beak full of insects, but I can’t be sure. I’ve seen females dig fat white grubs out of rotted cattail stems before but that doesn’t look like what this bird has. Despite the white sky background it was a hot, humid, and completely overcast day. We’ve had a lot of those lately.
Love grass is turning purple. From here it will darken and then turn brown. Once the seeds ripen the entire seed head will break off and go rolling away like a tumbleweed, scattering seeds as it goes. It’s a short, pretty grass common on roadsides.
Creeping bellflower is in the campanula family and it has pretty flowers that all appear on one side of the stalk, making it easy to identify. I hope you don’t have it in your yard but if you do you might as well learn to love it, because it is impossible to eradicate without using weedkillers. Actually, since I’ve never used weedkillers on it I’m not positive that even they will finish it off. It’s very persistent but not super aggressive. I know of one small plot of it at the edge of the woods that hasn’t expanded in the decade that I’ve watched it. It comes back every year but doesn’t take over more space, even though it’s in full sun. Originally from Europe, the leaves and tuberous roots were used as food in places like Siberia. Once in this country it almost immediately escaped gardens and has now naturalized.
I tried to get a bee’s eye view into some foxglove blossoms and I saw spots.
Many years ago a lady I worked for gave me a piece of her beautiful Japanese iris. It has lived here ever since but it only blooms when it has had enough rain, so this is the first blossom I’ve seen on it in probably four or five years now. This year it’s loaded with buds but every time it has blossomed in the afternoon it has poured rain at night and the heavy rain has broken the stem. These flower are bigger than my fist so there is a lot of surface area for rain to fall on.
Tall thimble weed gets its name from its seed heads, which you can just see over on the right. They can get quite big and when they do they look like thimbles. These flowers are close to the diameter of a quarter; about an inch. The plant often reaches waist high so the flower’s white sepals stand above surrounding vegetation. You’ve got to be quick with this one because they don’t last long.
I had my camera pointed at this wild rose when a bumblebee flew in to forage. I couldn’t understand why it would bother; its pollen sacs looked to be filled to overflowing.
I like the hairy flowers on motherwort but each one is so small it could hide behind a pencil eraser. They’re always a challenge but it’s worth it to be able to see everything that’s going on in the orchid like flowers. At a glance this plant might resemble one of the nettle family but the square stems show it to be in the mint family. Originally from Asia, it’s considered an invasive weed but it was originally brought to this country because of its long history of medicinal use in Europe and Asia. It’s common along roads and in fields.
Fringed loosestrife is easy to identify, with its masses of bright inch to half inch flowers all nodding toward the ground. It starts blooming just as swamp candles, another yellow loosestrife, start to fade. These plants are much bigger than swamp candles and they don’t grow in or near water. They like to be high and dry and I often find them along rail trails. The only other plant fringed loosestrife might be confused with is whorled loosestrife, but that plant blooms slightly earlier and isn’t as tall or as bushy, and its flowers face outward rather than downward.
Sometimes the flower petals look fringed on fringed loosestrife but that’s not where the plant’s name comes from. The plant gets its common name from the fringe of hairs on its leafstalks which, if you look closely you can see in this photo. The yellow flower petals fade from lemon to pale yellow as they near the center, and red is found at the very center. Red is found on all yellow loosestrife flowers that bloom in this area and it is a good way to identify this family of plants. Fringed loosestrife is easily overlooked because so many plants are blooming at this time of year, but it’s worth looking for. When it blooms alongside purple flowered plants like showy tick trefoil or vetch it’s even more beautiful.
What is beautiful? Whatever is perceived joyfully is beautiful. Bliss is the essence of beauty. ~Nisargadatta
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 