A Wildflower Walk

A couple of weeks ago I took a walk down an old road I had never been on and was amazed by all the wildflowers I found there. There was a river nearby and since it was the Asuelot River that I grew up on, I felt as if I had come home. I had never been along this section of it but I felt as if I knew every inch. The river was high; high enough to flood some of the open meadows along its banks.

Watercress grew in the shallows. This plant is edible and is said to have a kind of peppery bite but since it grows in water I’d never eat it. These days you never know what pollutants might be in the water, and when I was growing up parts of this river were terrible. We’ve done a great job of cleaning it so now even trout swim in it once again but for me, it’s hard to forget what we did to it in the past.

There were turtles. There are always turtles. My grandmother called them mud turtles but I think most of our turtles are either painted or snapping turtles. I haven’t seen any of the big snappers yet. They’ll come along in June when the females lay their first batch of eggs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this spot was full of them.

Though the old road looked like it had a wall of growth on either side I knew there were game trails and other places where you could get through. The reason the edge of a forest always looks like an impenetrable wall of growth is because that’s where the most sunshine is and the plants, shrubs and trees compete for all the sunshine they can get. The forest never seemed like a wall to me when I was a boy; it was more like a mirror. I felt at home there and knew I belonged as much as the trees, plants and animals did.

One of my favorite mosses, cypress leaved plait moss, grew on a log. I like the way it seems to reach out and explore new areas of the logs it grows on.

Plaited means braided, and a closer view shows that it is a good name for this moss, because that’s just what it looks like.

Coltsfoot plants were still blooming when I was here and they’re still blooming now. All the spring flowers are having an extended season due to the cloudy, cool weather we’ve had.

There were thousands of bluets here and these were the deepest blue I could find. They’re very cheery little things that everyone is happy to see each spring.

The first strawberry blossoms were appearing when I was here. Now I have hundreds of them blooming in my yard. In June the plants will bear some of the sweetest, juciest strawberries you could hope for. Unfortunately, they’ll also be some of the smallest strawberries ever seen. It takes a while to pick a handful.

It’s a good year for violets and I found many of the first I had seen in bloom here.

The cooler spring weather has meant that fern fiddleheads just go on and on slowly, in no hurry to reach adulthood.

Sedges also had an extended bloom but now grasses are taking their place. In this example many of the butter colored male flowers of this Pennsylvania sedge had given up the ghost and hung shriveled against the stem, but the wispy white female flowers still waited for the wind to bring them pollen from other plants.

The first butterfly I saw this year was this eastern tailed blue. I waited for it to open its wings so I could get a shot of their beautiful blue color but it refused to open them. I knew if my shadow fell on it, it would fly away but I thought if I could put just the tiniest sliver of shadow on it, it might open it wings. Carefully I moved until just a whisker of shadow fell on it but that’s all it took; it opened its blue wings and flew off before I could get a shot. I also saw a mourning cloak butterfly here and heard an amazing chorus of birds, including finches, warblers, wrens, and eastern phoebes.

Wood anemones were tucked in everywhere. I think of all the flowers I’ve gone here and there looking for and here they are, all in one spot. The only thing missing is spring beauties, but they could be here too. It’s possible I just haven’t found them yet.

I came to a clearing and there was the Ashuelot River in full view. I thought about how, when I was a boy of 8 or 9 years old this river was a barrier, but as soon as I found the courage to cross the train trestles alone my world expanded. It suddenly opened up and seemed vast and there I was, free to explore it. The first places I explored were just like this place and the world became my playground. All children should have a chance to run free and learn from nature in places like this. It was a wonderful place to grow and discover so many new things.

Dormant buds under the bark will break (or erupt) when or if something happens to the terminal bud, which in this case was an entire tree. The beavers here did exactly what my grandmother did when she pinched out the growing tip of her geraniums to make them bushier. I became interested in the study of botany by wondering about such things, and that’s why I’ve always thought that nature was the best teacher a child could have. The wonder of nature is in its ability to teach us something new each day. I was an empty jar, and nature filled me to overflowing.

Walt Whitman said “There was a child went forth every day, and the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became, and that object became part of him.” Since it flowed just a few yards from our house the first “object” I looked upon was the river. As I grew older I felt as if I had found a magical painting that I could step into; an artist had painted a beautiful earthly paradise and here I was walking through it. Nature taught me to see and appreciate the beauty of life. It showed me the worth of silence and the meaning of serenity. Nature became my teacher, friend, and companion. I had plenty of childhood friends but, as author David Mitchell wrote, “Trees are always a relief, after people.” Before I had ever heard the word solitude I seemed to crave it, and here along the river is where I found it.

This particular slice of paradise was populated by more trout lilies than I had ever seen growing in one place. They weren’t all in bloom but there were many thousands of them.

On this flower the big, reddish anthers were just starting to produce pollen.

This shot is of the trout lilies covering the forest floor for as far as the eye can see, and they did this along both sides of the old road. There must be millions of plants here and I’m sure they’ve been here for a very long time. Since a trout lily colony can last 300 years or more they might even have been here when this area was first being settled.

The flowers were the biggest trout lily blooms I’ve seen; possibly 2 inches across. It’s obvious where the “lily” part of the plant’s name comes from, and the mottled leaves in this shot show where the “trout” part of the name came from.

Shadbushes were everywhere out here, some in full bloom and others just starting. Since they melted so well into the surrounding vegetation they were hard to get a good shot of.

I left the old dirt road and walked a little on the main road, where I found mother goose sleeping on her nest of cattail stalks. I wasn’t too far away when I took this photo but she seemed fine with my being there. I’ve read that Canada geese are in the top tier of parents in the animal world so I’d guess it would take quite a lot to get her off that nest. I went back a few days later to see if the eggs had hatched and two or three people told me that nine goslings were now swimming peacefully beside their mother. May they all live long and bliss filled lives.

Must we always teach our children with books? Let them look at the stars and the mountains above. Let them look at the waters and the trees and flowers on Earth. Then they will begin to think, and to think is the beginning of a real education. 
~David Polis

Thanks for stopping in. Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there!

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April (and May) Showers

It used to be we’d get a day or two of rain each week, enough to keep the lawns green and fungi growing, but now it seems everything happens in bunches. Weather comes in and stays for a week or two, and it has been like that lately. The latest low pressure system has taken two weeks to slowly creep out of the midwest and arrive, as of Wednesday, in Rochester, NY. Hopefully by the time I post this it will have moved out over the Atlantic. Its spin has brought wave after wave of rain, and it has rained at least a little almost every day. There was even a flash flood alert in there somewhere, but it never happened here. The Ashuelot River has overrun its banks in the lowest places but those places, often hay fields, are left open and empty so it can, and there is no damage done.

If you decide to be a nature blogger the first thing you learn is, you take what comes. You don’t have to sing in the rain but you do have to put up with it, so you dress for weather and out you go. I happen to like occasional days like those shown in these photos, so they don’t bother me. You find, if you pay attention, that on windy days the wind doesn’t usually blow constantly, so if you wait a bit the flower you want a shot of will stop whipping around. The same is true with rain; there are often moments or even hours when it holds off. But you have to pay attention and catch the right times, otherwise you’ll learn how to shoot with one hand and hold your umbrella with the other.

Rainy days are best for photos of things like lichens, because their color and form are at their peak when they’re hydrated. A dry lichen can look very different, so trying to match its color with one in a lichen guide can sometimes be frustrating. Foliose lichens especially, like the Tuckermannopsis in the above photo, can change drastically. Mosses, lichens, and fungi are all at their best on rainy days, so those are the best days to look for them. Species of the above lichen could be cilliaris, which is also called the fringed wrinkle lichen.

My phone camera decided this view of a shadbush needed to be impressionistic, so that’s what I got. Since I’ve always liked the impressionist artists I was okay with it. Shadbush (Amelanchier) is usually the earliest white flowered roadside tree to bloom, followed quickly by the various cherries, and finally the apples and crabapples.

The common name shadbush comes from the shad fish, which used to run in great numbers in our rivers at about the same time it blossomed. It is also called shadblow, serviceberry, Juneberry, wild plum, sugar plum, and Saskatoon, and each name comes with its own story. I used to work with someone who swore up and down that his ornamental Amelanchier trees were not shadbushes, when in fact they were just cultivated varieties (cultivars) of the shadbush. If the original tree is taken from the wild and improved upon by man by selective breeding or other means, that doesn’t mean it becomes a different tree. One look at the flowers tells the whole story.

The buds of the shadbush, as far as I know, are unique and hard to confuse with any others, so if your Amelanchier has buds like these it is a shadbush. People get upset when they discover that their high priced ornamental tree has the heart of a roadside tramp, but that’s because they don’t understand how many years and how much work it took to “improve” upon what was found in nature. Cultivars can have double the number of flowers that roadside trees have but they are also often bred for disease resistance and other desirable, unseen characteristics as well, and that’s why they cost so much. It can take 20 years or more to develop a “new” tree, and even longer to profit from the time and effort.

Wood anemones have sprung up but with all the clouds it has been hard to find an open flower. Finally, one cloudy day this one said “Hey, look at me,” so I grabbed a shot while I could. If ever there was a sun lover this is it, but on this day it could wait no longer.

I went to the Beaver Brook natural area to see if the hobblebushes that lived there were blossoming, and found them in full bloom, along with many trilliums. This one pictured had taken on an unusual upright shape. I usually see them grow low to the ground with their branches hidden by last year’s fallen leaves. They’re easy to trip on, and that’s how this bush hobbles you. I was careful not to trip and end up in the brook.

Or at least, the bushes were half way blooming. All the unopened buds in the center are the fertile flowers that do all the work and the larger, prettier flowers around the outer edges are the sterile flowers, just there to entice insects into stopping in for a visit. Hobblebushes are a native viburnum, one of over 200 species worldwide, and they are one of our most beautiful spring flowering shrubs.

Red elderberries go from purple buds to white flowers, so I’d guess by now I should go back and see the flowers. The flower heads are pyramidal; quite different from the large, flat flower heads of the common elderberry.

While I was at Beaver Brook I decided to check on the disappearing waterfall, which runs only after we have a certain amount of rain. What draws me to this scene is the mosses. Mosses grow slowly here, often taking many decades to cover a stone wall, and that’s because it has always been relatively dry with a normal average of an inch or so of rain each week, but turn up the rainfall and what you see here will happen. Most of that moss is due to splash over from the stream and or/ water runoff from above, and it’s beautiful and unusual enough to sometimes make people stand in line, waiting to get a photo. I saw them stacked three deep here one day, but if ever we live in a time with twice the average rainfall people will walk right by this spot without giving it a second glance, because then everything will look like this.

By the way, if you’re interested in mosses the BBC did a fascinating one hour show about them. Just Google “The Magical World of Moss on BBC.”  It’s well worth watching.

Beaver Brook was rushing along at a pretty good clip and the trees along its banks were greening up.

But not all the new leaves were green.

Beech buds are breaking and there are beautiful angel wings everywhere in the forest.

In the garden the cartoonish flowers of henbit have finally appeared. Not that long ago I could count on them being one of the first flowers I showed here in spring but now they bloom as much as a month later. Why hens peck at them I don’t know, but that’s why they’re called henbit. They’re in the mint family and the leaves and flowers are edible, with a slightly sweet and peppery flavor.

How intense the blue of scilla was on a cloudy day. This and other spring flowering bulbs are having an extended bloom this year I’ve noticed, most likely because it has been on the cool side for a week or two.

The blue of grape hyacinths was just as intense. My color finding software calls it slate blue, indigo or royal blue, depending on what area I put the pointer on. These plants have nothing to do with either grapes or hyacinths. They’re actually in the asparagus family, but more beautiful than their cousins, I think. I like the small white ring that surrounds the flower’s opening, most likely there to entice insects.

A slightly different colored glory of the snow has come along. These are very pretty flowers, almost like a larger version of scilla, but not quite the same shape. If I had more sun in my yard I’d grow them all.

The small leaved PJM rhododendrons had just come into bloom when I took this photo. The plants were originally developed in Massachusetts and are now every bit as common as Forsythias in this area. In fact, the two plants are often planted together. Forsythia blooms usually a week or so before the rhododendron but yellow and purple flowers blooming together is a common sight in store and bank parking areas in spring.

The old fashioned bleeding hearts are blooming nicely. They can get quite big in the garden but they die back in summer. This can leave quite a big hole in a perennial border, so they take a bit of planning before you just go ahead and plant one anywhere. They are native to northern China, Korea and Japan and despite a few drawbacks are well worth growing. They also do well as stand alone plants due to their size, and since they don’t mind shade they look good planted here and there under trees. That’s the way the plant pictured above is used in a local park.

Even the ferns are being held back by the cool, wet weather; this sensitive fern is one of only two or three I’ve seen trying to open. A sunny day or two will perk them up and will also mean an explosion of growth, so I’m hoping I can bring you a sunnier post in the near future.

Cinnamon ferns are in all stages of growth but I have yet to see one fully opened.

Lower down on its stem this fern had a visitor. I was near a pond and mayflies were hatching. According to what I read online the dull opaque color of the wings means this mayfly was at the “subimagio stage,” halfway between the nymph and adult stages. This is when they are most vulnerable, so that explains why it was in hiding on this fern. A single hatching can produce many millions of them, so there were probably others around. They are among the most ancient types of insects still living, having been here since 100 million years before the dinosaurs. I’m glad they’re still with us; I think they’re quite beautiful. I hope everyone is able to get out and see all of the wonders of spring.

As I stood and watched the mists slowly rising this morning I wondered what view was more beautiful than this. ~Hal Borland

Thanks for coming by.

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Some Fall Color

Some of you who came here expecting to find flowers might be a little disappointed but I’ve been taking a lot of fall foliage photos and I need to put them in a blog post, otherwise I’ll still be showing them in December and everyone will be confused. On this day I wanted to take just a short walk by the Ashuelot River to see if the cinnamon ferns had changed into their beautiful fall pumpkin orange color yet, but everything was so beautiful, what started as a short walk turned into a complete blog post. Sometimes it seems as if nature just throws itself at you and this was one of those days.

Not only was the forest beautiful, the weather was as well. So far we’ve had a very warm October and that has meant that the leaves are changing later than they usually do, so this might be an extended fall foliage year.

I saw a few orange cinnamon ferns but most hadn’t turned yet, which is unusual.

Turtles were even out, still soaking up as much of the weakened autumn sunshine as they could. These were painted turtles, I think. It’s unusual to see them in October.

Other creatures were active as well. Do you see the great blue heron walking along the far shore? It’s over on the far left, just by the last tree on the left side.

The big bird was hungry and on the move. Here it approaches a fallen tree from the left. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to watch the heron or the trees so I stopped to get shots of both.

But then it saw me and froze. I thought it would stay that way but it continued on, very slowly.

I hoped it would see a fish or a frog but it didn’t catch a thing while I was there. I know there are still frogs to catch because I scared a few into the water while getting these photos.

I’ve watched enough blue herons stalking food to know that this wouldn’t be over soon, so I moved on.

When I left it was watching what I was doing rather than looking for food.

I had leaves to see, so I left the bird alone. I didn’t come here looking for colorful foliage but since the trees surprised me by being so beautiful already, I stayed. My color finding software even sees salmon pink in this view.

They were beautiful no matter if you looked forward or back.

I liked this view but it might have been better if if duckweed hadn’t covered the blue of the water.

It was hard to watch where I was going instead of looking up.

The branches on the old sunken tree still looked more like the ribs of a a sunken ship.

The way these polypores were spaced on this tree made me think of squirrel steps.

The forest glowed and beckoned, so I had to go and see. I love walking into scenes like this that have such soft, beautiful light.

I found a fine old American hornbeam, also known as iron wood or muscle wood (Carpinus caroliniana.) The latter name comes from the way it looks like tendons are rippling under its bark. It is common along our rivers but seeing one this big is not common because these trees don’t seem to live long. Low down on its trunk I can see a good example of a maple dust lichen (Lecanora thysanophora) in this shot that I didn’t see in person. It’s that light grayish spot. The tree also had lots of spidery Frullania liverworts on it. They are the darker blotches. They like places where the humidity is high, like here along the river.

New England asters bloomed here and there but they won’t last too much longer.

Many asters looked more like these.

Well there wasn’t peak color here yet, but when leaves start turning they can do it quickly and most of these have started. Sometimes in just a day or two a tree, especially a red maple, can change from green to red or orange so you’ve got to be on your toes if you want to catch them at thier most colorful. I hope you have plenty of color where you live, if not from leaves then maybe flowers. I’m still seeing flowers here so there should be at least one more flower post soon.

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

Thanks for coming by.

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