Maple Leaved Viburnum | New Hampshire Garden Solutions

Posts Tagged ‘Maple Leaved Viburnum’

On The Level

Posted in Aquatics, Flowers, General gardening, Insects, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Wildflowers, tagged Aconite, Antrim New hampshire, Autumn Meadowhawk Dragonfly, Canon SX70 HS, Cheshire Rail Trail, Deer Tongue Grass Fall Color, Fall in New Hampshire, Hancock New Hampshire, Keene, Maple Leaved Viburnum, Monk's Hood, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, New York Aster, NH, November Flowers, November Hikes, November Insects, Oak Leaves, Olympus TG-6, Pickerel Weed, Poplar Fall Color, Silver Maples, Spider Web, Staghorn Sumac Fall Color, Swanzey New Hampshire, Tall Meadow Rue, Virgin's Bower Seed Head, Wetland Insects, Wetland Plants, Wetland Views, Wildlife Sanctuary at Willard Pond, Winterberries on November 4, 2023| 29 Comments »

This post was going to be about the beeches and oaks at Willard Pond in Antrim. For years now I’ve finished the foliage season by visiting this beautiful hardwood forest but this year the light just wasn’t with me on my first visit. This photo has been lightened somewhat so it doesn’t show how dark it really was, especially under the trees. Shooting photos in such conditions would have been a waste of time so I turned and left.

A week later on Halloween I returned to Willard Pond on a cold, blustery morning to find that most of the leaves had fallen. I thought this was a bit odd since Halloween has always been my time to visit but the weather has been strange and unpredictable for all of this year. To be truthful I wasn’t upset that there would be no Willard Pond post this year because the Tudor trail that I usually follow is one of the roughest I know, with a lot of boulders and other things to step over and around. Each time I went I followed the trail for a short while and found that it bothered the knee that I damaged in my recent fall on Pitcher Mountain, so skipping it this year will probably turn out to be the right decision. If you want to see what Willard Pond Forest is like just go up to the search box at the top of the page and type “Willard Pond.” You’ll find several years of posts.

On the road into Willard Pond I saw some beautiful maple leaved viburnums on the side of the road. The color range of these plants is really amazing.

I also saw some bright red winterberries at Willard Pond. The fruits of this native holly hold their color for quite a while so they are sought after by people wanting to use them for holiday decorations. I often find bushes that have had almost all the berry bearing branches cut off.

I think for a while due to leg pain and maybe some balance issues that I should stay on flat, level surfaces like this rail trail in Keene. Other than an occasional woodchuck hole there is little to trip over as long as you stay on the trail. This will not be a hardship because I grew up on this trail way back when it was a working railroad route and I know it as well as I know myself. On this day I went to see the tree colors, which were a bit muted.

The muted colors come naturally because I think there are mostly silver maples in this area. Silver maples turn different shades of yellow in the fall unlike red maples, which have a much wider color range including red and orange.

Though there are still a few isolated red maples showing color most now look like this one.

All the yellow seen in this view comes from beeches, silver maples, birches, and Japanese honeysuckles.

Even the deer tongue grasses turned yellow this year. Quite often I see a lot of purple on these plants.

The silvery, fluffy seedheads of virgin’s bower vines line the rail trail. When in flower they’re known as traveler’s joy but at this stage they’re called Devil’s darning needles. Both names are just meaningless labels we’ve put on a pretty plant. The truth is, in nature there is no good or bad, no right or wrong, no past or future; there is just the perfection of this moment called now. We would do well to learn from this.

In a college botany class I once had I did my final exam paper on poisonous plants. The plant seen here was one of the deadliest, but also one of the most interesting. It is monk’s hood or monkshood; Queen of poisons, and it has been used to kill for countless centuries. If you were found growing it in ancient Rome there was a good chance that you’d be put to death, because as far as the Romans were concerned the only use for the extremely toxic plant was to add its toxic sap to the water of one’s enemies to eliminate them.

A side view of the flowers shows where the name monk’s hood comes from. The plant is in the aconite family and its sap can be absorbed through the skin. In 2015 an experienced gardener in the U.K. died of multiple organ failure after weeding and hoeing near aconite plants. I will often hold a plant steady with one hand while taking a photo with the other hand on windy days but not this plant.

Monkshood plants can stand a lot of cold so it is often one of the last to bloom in this area. The flowers are quite unusual and very pretty but it should only be grown where there are no children present, in my opinion. Knowledge of its dangers and always working around it with gloves on means anyone can grow it. If you do it will certainly be a conversation starter. Just think, you could tell friends how the Roman Agrippina hired Locusta to poison the emperor Claudius I in 54 AD. It is said that Locusta chose aconite to do the deed.

I saw some oak leaves with odd patterns on them. Whether made by insects or caused by nutrient deficiency, I don’t know. There is an insect, a leaf miner I think, which eats all the soft tissue of an oak leaf, leaving just the ribs and a net like skeleton leaf behind.

Some of these photos weren’t used in other posts for whatever reason. One of them is this misty morning visit to the wetlands when the maples were still colorful.

I saw more dewy spider webs on that visit. It’s hard to believe how many large webs are in these trees. This one was about the size of a basketball and I’d say on average that would be the size of most of them.

The colors have been beautiful this year but they’ve also been drawn out because of the warm weather. Everyone I meet seems to have an opinion about what a strange year it has been weather-wise.

The staghorn sumac colors have been amazing this year. The reds especially have been intense. Red is often a tough color for cameras to reproduce accurately but I think this is a fair representation.

Except for the deep purples of ash and oak I can’t think of a single fall leaf color that isn’t represented here in this scene from the wetlands. They’re all there and how beautiful they are when they’re all together in this way. It can take your breath away sometimes.

This is another scene from the wetlands that I like very much. All summer long I thought it would be beautiful in the fall because of the maples, and it was.

In the past the photos I’ve taken of poplars (Aspens) in the fall have almost always been soft and impressionistic as if they had been drawn with pastels, but these trees in the foreground seemed a bit loud to me. In shape and in leaf color poplars look a lot like birches from a distance. Only the gray bark tells the story. Most birches in this area growing in large colonies like that seen here are gray birches, which have white bark.

This is why I call this place the wetlands. The road I walk on was built through a swamp and there is water all along the roadsides. There is abundant life in a swamp and this is an excellent way to stay dry while seeing it.

I’m not sure where else I’d see autumn meadowhawks still flying in November. They were everywhere yesterday, resting in the sunshine. This one landed on a stump right in front of me and I had to wonder if they could read minds. I also saw lots of bluebirds on this day but I couldn’t get any of them to pose.

I was surprised to see a few pickerel weed flowers blooming in the wetlands after all others in various places had gone to seed. I have to say that this spot is a real jewel, with an abundance of birds, animals, insects, and interesting plants and wildflowers. There’s really no telling what you’ll see on any given day and I’m very happy to have finally discovered it, right there alongside the Keene Airport of all places. The level, paved road is easy to walk but there are plenty of places where you can leave it and explore the forest.

It was there in the wetlands that I saw the fall colors of tall meadow rue for the first time. This plant always blooms just at or before July 4th with flowers that look like bursts of fireworks. The “tall” part of its common name is very true; I’ve seen it reach over seven feet.

Since we had snow flurries as I was writing parts of this post I’ll end it with a white aster. We’ve also had our first freeze, almost a month late and coming before the first frost that should have happened in mid-September. Oh well, since a friend in Michigan reported 10 inches of snow on Halloween I don’t think we have anything to complain about.

An autumn forest is such a place that once entered you never look for the exit. ~Mehmet Murat ildan

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Fall Color

Posted in Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, tagged Arrowwood Viburnum, Ashuelot River, Beaver Brook Fall Color, Beaver Brook Natural Area, Bee on Daisy, Blue Stemmed Goldenrod, Branch River, Canon SX70 HS, Cinnamon Fer in Fall, Dublin New Hampshire, Fall Asters, Fall Color, Fall Flowers, Fall Forest Color, Fragrant White Water Liliy, Half Moon Pond, Hancock New Hampshire, Howe Reservoirs, Keene, Maple Leaved Viburnum, Marlborogh New Hampshire, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus TG-6, Poison Ivy in Fall, Red Maple Fall Color, Red Maple in Fall, Solomon's Seal Berries, Surry Dam, Surry New Hampshire, Swanzey New Hampshire, Territorial Owl on October 14, 2023| 37 Comments »

The trees have transformed themselves with blazing color almost overnight this year, and the leaf peepers are here to see them. “Leaf peeper” is what all the tourists who come to see the fall colors are called. For about a month millions of them come and swell the population of the state to twice its size, and they are loved by the people who live here. They stand in awe of the colors with looks of amazement and wonder on their faces and we locals stand right there beside them with the same look on our faces, because no matter how many times we’ve seen this it’s still amazingly beautiful. It’s like being inside a kaleidoscope.

This year I thought I’d take you on a popular leaf peeper mini tour, heading east out of Keene on Rte. 101. There are lots of maple trees along this stretch and maples usually turn earlier than most other trees. Red maples especially have a wide color range and can be yellow, orange, red and sometimes even pink. This shot shows the Branch River on the way to Marlboro on a recent cloudy day. It’s one of my favorite stops to see early color. By the time the oaks and beeches come ablaze most of the trees here in this view have dropped their leaves.

Another thing I sometimes do in these fall color posts is take two shots of the same scene; one under cloudy skies and one in full sunshine. I do this because I’ve always thought that the colors were richer and more vibrant on cloudy days but to be honest that could simply be my eye trouble, because there are lots of people who think brilliant sunshine best shows the colors. It doesn’t matter because it’s all beautiful, but I’ve put some of both sunny and cloudy skies in here and there and I’ll let you decide.

On Rte. 101 in Marlboro as you’re traveling towards Dublin there is a cow pasture on the right and you can often see a line of cars parked alongside the road. The hillside on the other side of the pasture is the reason why, as you can see. It’s one of the most colorful and beautiful places to see along this road in the fall.

Leaving Marlboro and into Dublin is Howe Reservoir, where can be seen more beautiful color from maples. I went twice, once on a cloudy day which is seen above and once on a sunny day. Again, I think the colors “pop” more on cloudy days but one drawback at this particular spot is that clouds will often obscure the view of Mount Monadnock.

This is essentially a continuation of the previous shot, followed to the right. There are beautiful colors here this year.

Here is a view of Mount Monadnock from Howe Reservoir that I spoke of, taken in full sunshine. Once again, I’ll let you decide what you like best.

Here is a red maple that stands just at the edge of Howe Reservoir. In the fall red maples aren’t always red.

I took a left turn onto Rte. 137 in Dublin, heading for Hancock, and stopped at Half Moon Pond where I discovered that the view was very different from this spot than it used to be in the morning before work. At 6:30 am the sun is just coming up over the hills that were behind me, and it falls on the strip of colorful trees there at the edge of the water and lights them up as if they were on fire. I used to stop almost every morning at dawn just to see it happening. On this day the deep colors were bleached out by the bright sunshine. Two geese quickly swam away, apparently upset that I interrupted them. I’ve seen and heard geese flying overhead in formation as well.

There was color along the Nubanusit River in Hancock. This is another stop that I used to sometimes make in the morning.

I used to also drive by this tree every morning, so I could watch it go from hints of color to color on every leaf; another fine example of a red maple in the fall. Without red maples this would be a very different landscape, especially at this time of year. Old timers call these trees “swamp maples” but if you look for that name in a tree identification guide you won’t find it.

From here you can go through the small town of Hancock and return to Keene by way of Rte. 9 south, or you can go back the way we came. Either way it really doesn’t matter because there is glorious color everywhere, along all roads. The big difference between routes is how many places you can stop and get out of the car. I think the way we came on Rte. 101 has more opportunities for doing so.

I thought we could take a rest from the road for a bit and look at few other things that are part of fall in this part of the world, like this beautiful fragrant white waterlily leaf. I loved it for its beautiful color and its veining. It was one leaf on a plant with many leaves and all were green except this one, which dared to be different.

And this will most likely be the last fragrant white waterlily bloom we’ll see until next spring. I took the photo about three weeks ago, I think.

Poison ivy is beautifully red this year. You might want to touch it or pick a few leaves to dry or press, but you might want to think that over because unless you’re immune to its toxins you’ll itch like mad for a week or two. Once it’s on your hands it can spread to other parts of the body and before you know it you have it all over you. The old saying leaves of three, let them be, is true.

Growing up out of the large bed of poison ivy was a Solomon’s seal plant with fruit dangling under the leaves. I’ve tried and tried to get a shot of the berries for years without much satisfaction but this year I decided to use my cell phone and the shot I got with it is what you see here. Very carefully, without touching any leaves, I reached up and over the poison ivy, and I haven’t itched at all.

I stopped to see the asters that grow in a local park one day and I think I saw as many bees as I did flowers. We hear a lot of bad news about bees and I can’t say whether it is right or wrong, but I do know that I’ve seen more bees this summer than I can ever remember seeing. If you look closely you’ll see them in this photo. Honeybees, I believe.

Here is a close look at one of those bees. I wanted to show you the open (true) flowers of a daisy and along came this accommodating bee to show you how they worked. This is a Montauk daisy which also grows in the park, and which was originally developed in Japan. For that reason it is also called the Nippon daisy. It is like a Shasta daisy on steroids and is very hardy. I saw them blooming in a snowstorm one year in late fall.

I went to Robin Hood Park in Keene and just as I got to the trail entrance I saw this sign. Attack owl or not I would follow this trail. As I walked along I could hear the flapping of wings, as if a bird sat in a tree above and was flapping its wings, but I never saw the source of the sound and I never saw an owl.

I wanted to follow the trail because lots of maple leaved viburnums grow here, and they’re beautiful at this time of year. They come in a wide range of colors and these examples were a kind of orangey pink.

And these were a deep purple, which is my favorite. If you’re looking for a native shrub that will attract birds and other wildlife and put on a good show in the fall, you might want to consider maple leaved viburnums. They’re a “plant it and forget it” shrub that ask for nothing except an hour or two of sunlight. Here at the park they grow in the shade of old white pines, maples, and oaks.

The next day was cloudy, so I visited the Army Corps of Engineer’s Dam in Surry for this view of one of the hillsides that was blasted during the dam’s construction. It was too dim on this overcast evening for the Canon camera that I often use for landscapes so I used one of the cell phone cameras, which do better in low light. It was the evening light that was important because in this light the color of the stone changes from ash gray to the beautiful blue gray color seen here. The contrast between the blue of the stone and the many colored shrubs / trees is beautiful and I could have stood here enjoying the scene for much longer if the sun hadn’t been going down. It’s one of my favorite places to come in the fall because it speaks of the beauty that can be found in wilderness. Or what was once wilderness; if you somehow tumbled down this slope today you’d end up in the dam’s spillway, so let’s make sure that doesn’t happen. If memory serves me correctly some teenagers climbed the safety fences one day and had to be rescued from this slope.

Surry dam dams up the Ashuelot river enough to create Ashuelot Lake behind it, but what trickles through is once again called the Ashuelot River, seen here just after it leaves the dam and begins its run through Bretwood golf course.

I headed south from Surry and once again ended up back in Keene, where I stopped at the Ashuelot River again. Following the trail through Ashuelot Park that winds alongside the river, I came upon this scene. As you could see there was a cloudless sky and it was too bad I thought, that the sun shined so brightly.

I was surprised to see an arrowwood viburnum still full of berries. The birds usually strip them of the pretty berries as soon as they ripen.

I went to a spot where many cinnamon ferns grow to see if they had turned pumpkin orange yet. They had, and they were beautiful.

I remembered that I hadn’t gone up to Beaver Brook natural area in Keene to see the only examples of blue stemmed goldenrod, so I went there to see it. The only trouble was, its stems weren’t blue. The blue color comes from the same naturally occurring wax crystals that cause the “bloom” on plums, blueberries and many other things found in nature. A lot of heat can melt them and a lot of rain can wash them away, and we’ve had both. If you look closely though you can see a hint of a blue stem running just over the leaf litter under this flowering stem.

Beaver brook was as beautiful as ever, and I knew I’d have to come back when I had time to walk the full length of the road. There are lots of oaks and beeches here and as I’ve said elsewhere in this post, they’re beautiful trees in the fall.

So you’ve seen the slice of fall color in the south western corner of New Hampshire for this week but we’re just getting started, so there will be plenty more to see.

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. ~Oscar Wilde

Thanks for stopping in.

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More Early June Flowers

Posted in Nature, Wildflowers, tagged Allium, Arrow Wood Viburnum, Blue Toadflax, Bowman's Root, Bristly Locust, Canon SX40 HS, Clematis, Common Speedwell, Cow Vetch, Fawn's Breath, Forget Me Nots, Fragrant White Water Lily, Goat's Beard, Japanese Iris Rising Sun, Keene New Hampshire, Lupines, Maiden Pink, Maple Leaved Viburnum, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus TG-6, Ox Eye Daisies, Pipevine Flowers, Red Clover, Rugosa Rose, Spring Flowers, Spring in New Hampshire, Spring Plants, Spring Wildflowers, Yellow Hawkweed, Yelow Flag Iris on June 15, 2022| 10 Comments »

Since I started the last flower post with blue flag irises, I thought I’d start this one with yellow flags (Iris pseudacorus.) There is a difference other than the obvious color difference; this one is originally from Europe and is very invasive, while blue flags are native. It was introduced in the mid-1800s as a garden plant but of course it escaped and began to naturalize and was reported near Poughkeepsie, New York in 1868 and in Concord, Massachusetts in 1884. Today it considered highly invasive and its sale and distribution is banned in New Hampshire. As you can see though, it doesn’t care a hoot about being banned and grows in the Ashuelot river in Keene. I’ve seen it take over entire ponds so only time will tell what it does in the river.

Just up the river bank from where the invasive yellow iris grow is a garden bed with more yellow iris in it, but these are not invasive; they were planted. I don’t know for sure but I believe they are a Japanese Iris called “Rising sun.” (Iris ensata v. Rising sun.) You can see how the petals have pointed ends, rather than the rounded petals on the yellow flags. It’s a beautiful thing.

You might not think that forget me nots would be water lovers but the largest colony of forget me nots I’ve ever seen was growing on a river bank that flooded regularly. This small clump also grew on the riverbank, maybe a foot from the yellow flags. It might become a large colony one day.

Last year a machine came along and cut the one bristly locust (Robinia hispida) plant that I knew of that grew along a rail trail, but when I went back this year there had to have been a dozen of them. I believe new shoots grew from the roots of the original plant, which is a habit that locusts seem to have. In any event I was happy to see them because the flowers are beautiful. Bristly locust is more shrub than tree, though it can reach 8 feet. What sets this locust apart from others are the bristly purple-brown hairs that cover its stems. Even its seedpods are covered by hairs.

A close look at a bristly locust shows that it is in the pea family. It is native to the southeastern United States but has spread to all but 7 of the lower 48 states, with a lot of help from nurseries selling it for ornamental use. The beautiful pinkish purple bristly locust flowers are very fragrant and bees really love them. Every time I’ve see it in bloom it is absolutely covered with bees but this year there were just a few buzzing around.

Fawn’s breath I think is a great name for a flower, and it has just come into bloom. The flowers dance at the end of long, slim stems in the slightest breeze, as in the breath of a fawn. It is also called bowman’s root (Gillenia trifoliata) but though I search each year for the origin of that name I’ve never been able to find it. I like the asymmetrical appearance of the flowers. They look as if a chubby fingered toddler had glued them on. This is a native plant that really should be used more than it is, in my opinion. I know of just one place where it grows.

Ox-eye daisy blossoms (Leucanthemum vulgare) appear in June and very rarely before then, in my experience. It’s another European native that escaped gardens and is now found in meadows in every state in the U.S. including Alaska and Hawaii. A vigorous plant can produce up to 26,000 seeds. In tests 82% of those seeds remain viable even after being buried for 6 years, so don’t look for this one on the endangered list any time soon. I see them everywhere and I’m happy that I do.

The highway department planted the daisy in the previous photo alongside a highway in town, and when they did, they also planted lupines. The daisies thrived but the lupines did not, and now there are only five or six plants left. The flowers in this photo may be the last I see in this spot but thankfully I do see them in other places.

I saw more single flowered pink roses but these had a white eye. I believe they are another rugosa, the old standby, and just about the toughest rose known.

I saw a white allium but the Olympus macro camera saw it differently.

I’ve heard that pretty maiden pink flowers (Dianthus deltoids) get their common name from the way the petals look like they were edged with pinking shears, but did pinking shears exist when they were named? This plant is a European native that has escaped gardens and can be found in lawns and meadows in many states in the U.S. A very similar plant is the Deptford Pink (Dianthus armeria) but its flowers have much narrower petals and it blooms a bit later.

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

Arrow wood viburnums (Viburnum dentatum) have come into bloom. These shrubs get large, often growing to 6-8 feet tall and 10 feet wide at the edge of the forest, but each individual flower is hardly bigger than a pencil eraser. An easy way to identify viburnums is to look for the five petals (or lobes) that they all have. Native dogwoods, which should be blooming any time now, will always have 4 petals. The glossy, toothed leaves are a good indication that this plant is an arrow wood viburnum. The name “arrow wood” comes from just what you would expect; the straight, hard wood is excellent for making arrow shafts. The white flowers are followed by small, dark blue fruit that birds love.

Maple leaf viburnums (Viburnum acerifolium) have also started blooming. They and most of all the other viburnums are valuable plants to wildlife. Many songbirds eat the berries and beavers, rabbits, deer and moose eat the bark, twigs and leaves. What I like most about this plant is the way its leaves change colors in the fall. They can go from deep maroon to orange red to light, pastel pink and can be mottled with several different colors at once. Note how different they are from the viburnum dentatum leaves we saw in the previous photo. But also notice how alike the flowers are.

Clematis have also just started blooming. Unfortunately I don’t see many of these beautiful flowering vines.

Dutchman’s pipe vine (Aristolochia durior) has just started blooming but you have to search for the flowers under the very large, heart shaped leaves. The vine has historically been used as a privacy screen or for shade on porches and arbors. You can still see it used that way today, but most don’t see these small flowers. They’re mottled yellowish-green and brownish purple with a long yellow tube, and are visited by the pipevine swallowtail butterfly, and other insects.

But I think an insect would need a very long tongue to get in there. The heavily pebbled, rough surface must be to help insects hang on, I would guess. Dutchman’s pipe is native to some south eastern hardwood forests and has been cultivated in other parts of the country and Canada since the 1700s. All it needs is something strong to climb on. I would definitely not fertilize it, because once it gets going it grows fast.

I find goat’s beard (Tragopogon pratensis) growing in a meadow in full sun. This is an oddly behaving flower that closes up shop at around noon and for this reason some call it “Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon.” I remembered to go and see them at around 11:30 am, and many had already hung out their do not disturb signs. Why the one in the photo was still wide open, I don’t know. Another name for goat’s bead is meadow salsify and its spring buds are said to be good in salads, but since a kind of bubble gum can be made from the plant’s latex sap you may find your salad is a bit chewy. It is a biennial, which means it grows a low basal rosette of leaves the first year and then flowers and dies the second year. It is native to Europe, Central Asia and Turkey but it could hardly be considered invasive here; I have a hard time finding it. It has a large, fuzzy seed head similar to a dandelion seed head and that’s where the “beard” part of the name comes from.

Yellow hawkweed (Hieracium caespitosum) is blooming better than I’ve ever seen it this year and I’m seeing large clumps like this one wherever I go. They should bloom right into October.

There was a time when I hated having to deal with red clover but I once was blind, and now I see.

I found a small group of blue toadflax (Nuttallanthus canadensis) and every plant was covered with insect webs. They looked more like a spider mite than a spider web. I almost always find blue toadflax growing in hot sandy waste areas and along roadsides but I’ve even found it on mountain tops and in woodland clearings. It will bloom all summer, right up until a killing frost.

Common speedwell (Veronica officinalis) is blooming better than I’ve ever seen it. This creeping “weed” is a European native that is very common here in lawns, pastures and along roadsides, which is where I found the one in the photo. It has been used medicinally for centuries in cough medicine and its leaves have also been used as a tea substitute. In France they call it “Europe tea.”

The flowers are tiny, fused into a tube with the lower petal (lobe) smaller than the others as is common in all speedwells. They grow in a spike (raceme) and can be white, blue or purple with darker stripes. They are about 1/4 inch across and have 2 stamens and a single pistil. They’re very pretty little things and masses of flowers like I’m seeing this year can put on quite a show.

In this area fragrant white waterlilies (Nymphaea odorata) start to bloom in June, and I know of a pond near a highway that has many hundreds of them in it. I’ve noticed over the last two or three years that more and more people are showing up there when they come into bloom. Some just walk slowly, some fish, some take photos and some just sit. With a busy highway so near you couldn’t really call it a tranquil spot but still they come, and several of them have become regulars now, I’ve noticed. It’s always nice to see more people getting outside and I wouldn’t wonder that they’d come out to see such a beautiful thing.

I’ve seen great blue herons, geese, ducks, all kinds of songbirds, and even a mink here. I know there are beavers here too, though I’ve never seen one. The naked flower stalks with all the flowers and leaves gone tell me there is also a woodchuck living here and I always hope to see it. Of course I also come to see the waterlilies, and I always look for that one might be tilted just right so I can see the beautiful golden flames that burn in its center. I can’t say why the others come but I come for the beauty of the place and I always find it, in all seasons.

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful. ~Edgar Allan Poe

Thanks for coming by.

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Willard Pond in Spring

Posted in Birds, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Things I've Seen, Wildflowers, tagged Beaver Tree, Blue Flag Iris, Canon SX40 HS, Fly Fishing, Hancock New Hampshire, Hobblebushes, Maple Leaved Viburnum, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus TG-6, Pale Corydalis, Peace, Rhodora Blossoms, Shadbush, Solomon's Seal, Spring Fern Fiddleheads, Spring Flowers, Spring Hiking, Spring in New Hampshire, Spring Oak Leaves, Spring Plants, Spring Tree Colors, Spring Wildflowers, Stony Pond Bottom, Trout Pond, Violets, Willard Pond on May 28, 2022| 19 Comments »

Every year around Halloween I go to Willard Pond over in Hancock to see what in my opinion, is some of the most colorful foliage in the region. Every year I tell myself that I’ll come back in the spring to see what it looks like then but I never have, until now. We’re going to be walking through a beautiful hardwood forest of oak, beech, and birch right along that shoreline over there behind that boulder.

Though the forest looked leafless in that previous shot there were plenty of spring leaves to see. This is the start of the trail that I follow. It is called the Tudor trail but I think I would have named it serenity, because that’s where it leads.

There were lots of new, velvety oak leaves.

Shadbushes (Amelanchier canadensis) still bloomed.

Ferns were in all stages of growth.

And everywhere you looked there were the big white flowerheads of hobblebushes (Viburnum lantanoides). It was hard to get a shot of them in the bright sunlight so I had to underexpose this shot. White is a tricky color for a camera on a sunny day. I’ve had several questions about cameras and how to use them lately and if this situation seems tricky for you, you might want to read about “bracketing exposures.” It’s a simple tip that covers a lot of bases and helps you get more used to changing the settings on your camera.

Another native viburnum, maple leaved viburnum (Viburnum acerifolium), showed how it got the name. In the fall these leaves can turn pink, purple, red, yellow, and orange and combinations of two or three, and are really beautiful. The Native American Chippewa tribe used the inner bark of this plant to relieve stomach pains.

The beavers had cut down a big beech and were in the process of stripping all its bark from it.

I stopped to look at the hillside across the pond with its soft, hushed hints of green. I saw what I had suspected; that this place is beautiful no matter what time of year it is. I could hear a loon laughing and giggling over there somewhere and I wondered what the early settlers must have thought when they first head loons. With all of their many superstitious beliefs it must have scared them half to death. If you’d like to hear what I heard, just click here: www.loon.org/the-call-of-the-loon/

A fly fisherman was fishing for trout from his kayak and he heard the loon too. The loon was most likely also fishing for trout. Willard pond is considered a trout pond and there are rainbow and brook trout, as well as with smallmouth bass. No boats with motors are allowed, and fly fishing is the only form of fishing allowed. Since it is part of a wildlife sanctuary the land surrounding the pond can never be developed. It is about as close to true wilderness as you can find in this area and it is beautiful.

Several times when I came here in the fall, I saw the seed heads of rhodora (Rhododendron canadense). They’re one of our most beautiful shrubs and I hoped to find them in bloom, but all I saw were buds. I had to go back to get these photos of them but it was worth it because this is not a common shrub.

Rhodora is a small, two-foot-tall native rhododendron (actually an azalea) that loves swampy places. It is native to the northeastern U.S. and Canada and both its western and southern limits are reached in Pennsylvania. The flowers appear just before the leaves, but only for a short time in spring. They bloom just before irises in this area, and by mid-June their flowers will have all vanished. Henry David Thoreau knew it well, and wrote “The splendid Rhodora now sets the swamps on fire with its masses of rich color.” He would have loved this place.

Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum commutatum) grew all along the trail and on some of the boulders. I saw plenty of buds but no flowers yet. In the fall dark blue or purple berries will hang where the flowers were.

I’m including this view of the trail to show that if you come here, you’d be wise to wear good sturdy hiking boots. Mud, stones and roots are some of the things you’ll have to scramble up and over. I tell you about trail conditions in these posts so you won’t get here and wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into. I often wish someone had done the same for me. Every hike has its own set of challenges, and their difficulty seems to increase with age.

For years, each fall I’ve seen what I thought was a species of dicentra growing on a boulder. But which boulder, I wondered on this trip. Then up ahead I saw that a tree had fallen across the path, stopped only by a boulder. When I got to the boulder sure enough, it was the boulder with the plant I was looking for on it. Luckily the tree hadn’t crushed the plants, so I was able to see them flowering. I could see that they weren’t dicentra.

Though I could see that they weren’t dicentra I didn’t know what they were because I had never seen them before. I took photos of the flowers and leaves from all sides as I always do and when I got home, I found that they were pale cordyalis. (Corydalis sempervirens.) They are a native which, from what I’ve read likes sandy, stony soil along pond and river banks. They are also called rock harlequin and why is perfectly clear, since this one grew on a boulder.

The small flowers of pale corydalis have two pairs of petals, which are bright pink with yellow tips. Some were white, but I’m not sure if they fade to white or come out white and turn pink. They are a biennial, which means that the plants appear in the first year and flower in the second. Flowers are small and appear in clusters (Racemes). They are related to Dutchman’s breeches, which is a native dicentra.

When I got home and saw this photo I took of the forest I thought my camera had lost its marbles, but then I checked the shots I took with the other two cameras I carried and they all showed the same; the most intense green I’ve ever seen. Colorblindness makes it hard to understand what color I’m seeing sometimes and sometimes the colors I see just don’t seem possible. “Find that on a color wheel” my mind taunts.

I’m always awe struck by this huge boulder. In relation to the glacier that scraped it up and brought it here it must have been little more than a grain of sand, and it’s hard to even imagine that.

Violets grew out of the moss on a stone at the water’s edge.

Blue flag irises grew close enough to the water to have wet feet, and that’s what they like. I haven’t seen any in bloom as of this post.

Over the years a few people have told me what I’ve missed by not following the trail past this old oak with its rickety little bench but I’ve seen, heard and felt enough, and I usually have more photos than I would want or need by the time I get here, so this is where I end my hike. I could go on to what is called “the point” or I could climb Bald Mountain, but I don’t feel a need to do so. This spot always calls to me to come and sit so that’s what I do, and it has always been enough.

I sit on the ground these days because the bench is getting wobbly, but it doesn’t matter. The view is the same and the sounds are the same. There is just the lapping of the waves and bird song, and maybe an occasional chuckle or hoot from a loon.

I watched the shadows from the waves move over the stone covered pond bottom. There was just enough of a breeze to kick them up a bit and thankfully, to keep the biting bugs away. In this region you would be hard pressed to find a day when there wasn’t a breeze coming across a lake or pond.

The one thing that is most abundant here is silence, and the simplest lesson nature teaches is the most valuable: silence heightens awareness. Once we have learned this silence becomes the teacher, and silence teaches peace. When I come upon the kind of beauty that makes me quiet and still, be it a tiny flower or a mountain top, I find that peace is always there, waiting. I do hope that you find the same.

The best places aren’t easy to see; instead of following light one must follow silence. ~Hanna Abi Akl

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Time for a Climb

Posted in Lichens, Nature, Orchids, Scenery / Landscapes, Wildflowers, tagged American Wintergreen, Canon SX40 HS, Common Toadskin Lichen, Indian Tobacco, Indian Tobacco Seed pods, Ink Cap Mushroom, Lady's Slipper Seed Pod, Lichens, Maple Leaved Viburnum, Mount Caesar Swanzey NH, Mount Monadnock Jaffrey NH, Mountain Climbing in New Hampshire, Mushrooms, Native Plants, Nature, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus Stylus TG-870, Sarsaparilla Fall Color, Shining Clubmoss, Summer Wildflowers, Swanzey New Hampshire, Teaberry, Virginian Tiger Moth Caterpillar, Wild Mushrooms on September 12, 2020| 19 Comments »

Last weekend I felt the urge to climb, so off I went to Mount Caesar in Swanzey. I know better than to deny the urge because it only gets stronger as time passes. The town History of Swanzey, New Hampshire says that Mount Caesar was named after Caesar Freeman, a freed black slave and one of the original settlers here. Some believe that he is is buried somewhere on it.

One of the first things I saw was a nice clump of lady’s slipper (Cypripedium acaule,) one of our most beautiful native orchids. Its beautiful pouch like pink flowers appear in May and last for a week or two, depending on the weather. I was happy to find them growing all along the trail, almost to the summit.

Botanically orchids are considered the most highly evolved of all flowering plants because of their unique reproductive strategy; they have both male and female reproductive structures fused into a single structure. This one had apparently been pollinated because it had a seed pod.

The little lobelia called Indian tobacco (Lobelia inflata) bloomed in sunnier spots along the trail. Its small flowers are about 1/3 of an inch long and pale lavender to almost white. It is the only lobelia with calyxes that inflate after the flowers have fallen and to identify it I just look for the inflated seedpods.

Indian Tobacco gets its name from the way its inflated seed pods resemble the smoking material pouches that Native Americans carried. The inflata part of its scientific name also comes from these inflated pods. The pods form so quickly that they can usually be found on the lower part of the stem while the upper part is still flowering.

I saw a bright yellow, very hairy caterpillar on a twig. I believe it might be a Virginian tiger moth caterpillar (Spilosoma virginica.) This caterpillar is also called yellow bear and I think this is the first time I’ve seen one. I’m not sure what those four yellow bumps are.

Up and up I went. Mount Caesar is the most difficult climb I do these days but by normal standards it really isn’t that difficult unless you have breathing issues. I saw two or three people race up and down it before I even made it to the top but they weren’t interested in what they might see along the trail. Only the end of the trail is important to many people and they miss a lot of the beauty of nature by thinking that way. Some are even more interested in listening to their phones than the birds and I saw that happening here as well. All I can say about that is, if you are in the woods to enjoy nature racing through them as fast as you can go and plugging your ears so you can’t hear anything is not considered being in nature. Being in nature means allowing it to fill all of your senses while you are there. It means being completely immersed in the experience. When you are there be there, fully. You’ll enjoy it more and you’ll get far more out of the experience.

What I believe were ink cap mushrooms grew in the middle of the trail, but just because something is obvious doesn’t always mean it is seen and I doubt anyone noticed them because a few had been stepped on. I think they might have been the hare’s foot ink cap (Coprinopsis lagopus) but I could be wrong. I do know from personal experience that ink caps can appear very different at different times; even at different times of the same day, because their lives are very short. I liked the maroon shimmer of these examples. These mushrooms often grow in the forest, as these did.

Once they produce spores they’re done, and that usually takes one day but on this day there were plenty more coming. They’re called ink caps because their caps liquify and turn into what looks like ink.

I saw things here on this day that I’ve never seen before and one of them was shining clubmoss (Lycopodium lucidulum) producing spores. The yellowish club like spore producing sporophylls at the tip of each plant are where the spores are produced and once the spores are released to the wind they can take up to 20 years to germinate. In my experience sporophylls aren’t common on this clubmoss. The leaves, called microphylls, resemble scales more than actual leaves and for some reason they are very shiny. Shining clubmoss is unusual and easy to identify because it is unbranched and grows fairly erect.

Note: A helpful reader has pointed out that this is actually bristly clubmoss (Spinulum annotinum,) which I’ve never heard of. Shining clubmoss doesn’t produce sporophylls, which explains why I never see them.

Another thing I discovered on this day was that the unripe berries of American wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens) are white. This plant is also called checkerberry and it is the first plant I ever learned well enough to know on sight, probably when I was just 5 or 6 years old. My grandmother and I would pick the small red berries until we each had a handful, and then we would have a refreshing, spicy feast in the forest. Chewing the leaves can also be refreshing when hiking on a hot day. In the past, the leaves were also chewed to relieve pain because they contain compounds similar to those found in aspirin. Since I’ve known these berries as red my entire life seeing them white was quite a surprise. I don’t suppose I’ve ever wondered what they would look like in their unripe state.

I was trying to capture the beautiful luminosity of the forest when I heard a loud crashing behind me. I thought “Oh great, another bear” but no, it was a deer. It stopped and watched me for a bit, blending into the forest so well that I couldn’t get a shot of it from where I was. Of course as soon as I started moving so did the deer, and it was off like a shot. The odd thing was it didn’t really run away; I could hear it jumping and thrashing in the woods for a while afterwards as I continued climbing, as if it was running along beside me.

I saw the deer clearing stone walls with ease, jumping so high it had feet to spare. I was wishing I had legs that could do that.

A young oak had fallen and split lengthwise to reveal that it was completely hollow, most likely chewed up by carpenter ants. There are far more hollow trees in the woods than most people realize. If you have a tree on your property and you see what looks like sawdust around its base you should call an arborist, especially if it is near your house. Friends of mine had their barn cut in half by a hollow white pine that fell on it just a few years ago.

I could look at this all day. It is worthy of hanging in an art gallery, in my opinion.

Maple leaved viburnum (Viburnum acerifolium) is also called arrow wood. Its beautiful white flowers turn into blue-black berries, which aren’t often seen. This plant’s fall foliage is some of the most colorful in the forest and I always look for it in the fall. The shrub is called arrow wood because its branches grow very straight and some believe that Native Americans used it for arrow shafts.

Yellow spots form on wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) leaves before fall even arrives, and they slowly grow larger until the entire leaf is yellow. This is one of the earliest plants to start turning color in the fall.

I couldn’t get over the beautiful light coming through the trees. At times it was hard to focus on anything else.

Before you know it (unless you’re climbing with me) you’re at the summit. I remember how surprised I was the day I realized that I had been climbing a huge piece of granite. The trail ends just as it begins; with bare granite bedrock.

There is a glacial erratic up here that is nearly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. It is said to rock back and forth like the 40 ton glacial erratic over on Hewe’s Hill called Tippin Rock, but I didn’t feel like heaving and grunting over boulders on this day.

Instead I wanted to visit with my friends the toadskin lichens (Lasallia papulose.) Toadskin lichens get their common name from their many “warts.” They attach themselves to stone at a single point that looks like a belly button, and that makes them umbilicate lichens. When wet toadskin lichens are rubbery and pliable and feel much like your ear lobe but when they dry out they are much like a potato chip, and will crack just as easily. They are naturally a deep pea green but when dry they turn ash gray as this one has. They will simply sit and wait for rain for eons if necessary and they, along with great blue herons, have taught me a lot about patience.

All those black dots on the lichen in the previous photo are this lichen’s fruiting bodies, where it’s spores are produced. I’ve noticed that they often seem to form where the lichen stays wettest longer after a rain. The head of a pin is .06 inches (1.5 mm) in diameter and one of the toadskin lichen’s fruiting bodies (Apothecium) could easily hide behind one. The apothecium is where the lichen’s spores are produced and in this case it is tiny black disc with a sunken center that makes it look like a bowl with a thick black rim. The way that they sit on the body (thallus) of the lichen makes them look like they’d blow away in a breeze, but they are attached. This photo isn’t great but I was happy that it showed the detail that it does. What looks like a piece of wood in the upper right is actually a bit of a white pine needle, if that tells you anything about scale.

The views weren’t very good but that didn’t bother me. As I’ve said before, if I climbed for the view I’d be disappointed most of the time, because views are weather dependent. On this day there was a milky sky and that almost always means that far off scenes and landscapes will not reproduce well in the camera. In fact it isn’t that I don’t enjoy the views, it’s the trying to reproduce them that I don’t enjoy. If I ever stop blogging I can easily see myself no longer carrying a camera when I’m in the woods.

This is what I mean by a milky sky; almost pure white. Still, in my opinion there’s no such thing as a bad photo of Mount Monadnock, so I’ll just leave you with this one.

No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied – it speaks in silence to the very core of your being. ~Ansel Adams

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Goose Pond

Posted in Nature, Things I've Seen, Wildflowers, tagged Beech Seed Leaves, Blackberry Flowers, Blue Flag Iris, Calico Pennant Dragonfly, Canon SX40 HS, Dragonfly Metamorphosis, Drooping Sedge, Fringed Sedge, Goose Pond, Hemlock Varnish Shelf Fungus, Hobblebush, Indian Cucumber Root, Keene, Maple Leaved Viburnum, Mushrooms, Native Plants, Nature, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus Stylus TG-870, Red Trillium Seed Pod, Royal Fern Fertile Fronds, Summer Wildflowers on June 13, 2020| 19 Comments »

Since it had been about a year since my last visit and since I was interested in seeing what aquatic plants might be blooming, I decided to go up to Goose Pond last weekend. The pond is part of a five hundred acre wilderness area that isn’t that far from downtown Keene. Goose Pond was called Crystal Lake and / or Sylvan Lake in the early 1900s. The pond was artificially enlarged to 42 acres in 1865 so the town of Keene would have a water supply to fight fires with. Wooden pipe fed 48 hydrants by 1869, but the town stopped using the pond as a water supply in the 1930s, and in 1984 it was designated a wilderness area. The vast forest tract surrounding the pond has been left virtually untouched since the mid-1800s.

One of the first things I saw were these fungi growing on a fallen hemlock log and despite their odd shapes I believe they were hemlock varnish shelf fungi. Hemlock varnish shelf fungi (Ganoderma tsugae) can be quite big and their color can vary greatly but they’re almost always shiny on top, hence the “varnish” part of the common name. In China this mushroom is called the Reishi mushroom and it has been used medicinally for centuries. It is considered the most important of all the herbs and substances used in Chinese medicine and scientists from around the world are researching its anti-cancer potential.

I think we’ll have plenty of blackberries this year. I’ve never seen them bloom like they are now.

Beautiful blue flag irises (Iris versicolor) bloomed in the shallow water along the shore.

Unless you own a nursery or spend a good deal of time in the woods, there’s a good chance that you’ve never seen the seed leaves of an American beech tree (Fagus grandifolia.) Seed leaves are called cotyledons and appear before a plant’s true leaves. If the plant has 2 seed leaves it is called a dicot (dicotyledon), and if only one it is called a monocot (monocotyledon.) The cotyledons are part of the embryo within the seed and contain stored food that the young plant needs to grow. As the food stores are used up the cotyledons might either turn green and photosynthesize, or wither and fall off. That’s the quick botany lesson of the day. It’s hard to make it any more exciting.

What is exciting, at least for me, is how this was only the second time in my life that I’ve seen this, and since I’ve spent a lot of time in nurseries and forests I’m guessing this is a rare sight. Seed leaves, as anyone who has ever started vegetables or flowers from seed knows, often look nothing like the true leaves. In the case of American beech they look more like flower petals than leaves and feel tough and leathery. If you know of a beech tree that produces nuts, take a look underneath it in the spring for seedlings that still have their seed leaves.

In places the trail is one person wide but generally two people can pass easily. If you come here you should wear good stout hiking boots because there are a lot of roots and stones and in places it gets muddy. I’ve had questions from people afraid of getting lost out here and I did on this day as well. A man asked about following the trail all the way around the pond and I pointed out that the trees were blazed with white rectangles. But even without the blazes I told him, if the pond is on your right side when you start make sure it stays there the whole way around, and don’t leave the main trail. That way you’ll never get lost. Even though the trail does leave the water’s edge in a couple of places you can still tell where the pond is. It sounds like common sense but I’ve caught myself wandering off the trail before, especially when looking for slime molds or fungi. You need to pay attention to the trail as well as what grows along it.

A large colony of hobblebushes (Viburnum lantanoides) had been eaten down to about a foot high by deer. They’re one of our most beautiful native viburnums but they’ll never bloom while being constantly pruned like these were. Deer have to eat though, so I don’t fault them for doing a little pruning. At least they aren’t pruning someone’s vegetable garden.

I think is the best shot I’ve ever gotten of the tiered and whorled growth habit of the Indian cucumber root (Medeola virginiana.) It’s a very pretty plant and I saw a lot of them here. Since I just described their flowers in my last post I won’t put you through that again.

Fringed sedge (Carex crinite) grew in wet spots along the trail, and sometimes right in the water. It’s a large sedge that grows in big, 2 foot tall clumps. I like its drooping habit and I’m not the only one, because it has become a popular garden plant. Many animals and waterfowl eat different parts of sedge plants, especially the seeds. Other names for this plant are drooping sedge and long-haired sedge.

I’m not prone to blisters thankfully, but all of the sudden I felt what felt like a painful blister on the bottom of one of my toes, so I thought I’d sit down for a bit. I’ve had bouts of back pain for most of my life so I know a little about how to get past pain. Watching dragonflies helped me get my mind off it and trying to photograph them put me in another place altogether. When I got home and saw the photos though I saw something else on the cattail leaf under the dragonfly, so I thought I’d try to figure out what it was.

The toe was still bothering me when I started out again but not as bad as it had been and it didn’t matter anyway because I was half way around the pond and the only other way out of here was by boat or helicopter.

The bridge in the previous photo is chained to a nearby tree and I’ve heard people laugh about how “they must think that someone will steal it,” but that isn’t it. The chain is there to keep it from washing away in flooding, which has happened. It’s amazing what our small streams can do after a few inches of rain has fallen.

Royal fern (Osmunda spectabilis) grew near the stream that the bridge crossed. This is the only fern that grows on every temperate continent except Australia, which makes it one of the most widespread of all living species. They are also thought to be one of the oldest living things, with fossil records of the Osmundaceae family dating back over 300 million years. Individual plants are thought to be able to live 100 years or more. They like wet feet and grow along stream and river banks in low, damp areas. Another name for this fern is “flowering fern,” because someone once thought that the purple, fertile, fruiting fronds looked like bunches of flowers.

At their early stage the spore cases of royal ferns are green but they soon turn a beautiful purple color, and that’s why the plant was named flowering fern.

I saw lots red trillium (Trillium erectum) seed pods, so I’m guessing there will be lots more of them in the future.

The flowers on our native viburnums like the maple leaf viburnum (Viburnum acerifolium) shown will almost always have five petals and the leaves, though quite different in shape throughout the viburnum family, are usually dull and not at all glossy. In fact I can’t think of one with shiny leaves. What I like most about this little shrub is how its leaves turn so many colors in fall. They can be pink, purple, red, yellow, and orange and combinations of two or three, and are really beautiful. Each flattish maple leaved viburnum flower head is made up of many small, quarter inch, not very showy white flowers, which were just starting to open here. If pollinated each flower will become a small deep purple berry (drupe) that birds love to eat. This small shrub doesn’t mind dry shade and that makes it a valuable addition to a native wildflower garden. The Native American Chippewa tribe used the inner bark of this plant to relieve stomach pains.

I sat beside the water again for a while to rest my toe and watch the dragonflies and saw another one of the husks on the same cattail leaf that the dragonfly was perched on, just like last time. I was fairly sure that I had seen this before and that was confirmed when I did some reading on the Dragonfly Woman’s blog. According to what I read I was seeing dragonflies not too long after they had emerged from the water. They crawl up a leaf or stick (with great effort) as nymphs and shed their exoskeletons, and that’s what the husks are. A part of metamorphosis is what I was seeing and I’m very grateful for having had the chance to see it. By the way, the Dragonfly Woman is a very knowledgeable lady. If you are at all interested in insects you can visit her here: https://thedragonflywoman.com/

A few years ago I found the only example of a northern club spur orchid (Platanthera clavellata v. Ophioglossoides) that I’ve ever seen here. On this day I found its single leaf, so I know it’s still alive and well. I hope to see it bloom again in late July.

By the time I had made it to the odd stone that doesn’t belong here, my toe pain was gone. I’ve never been able to figure out what kind of rock this strange thing was made from but a lot of work went into making it square, with perfect 90 degree corners and very smooth faces. It’s about 5-6 inches on a side and dark colored like basalt, which makes it even more of an enigma. It’s too short to be a fence post but in the 1800s people didn’t spend hours of their time working on something like this for a lark, so it was used for something. How it ended up partially buried in the trail is a mystery. I’d love to be able to dig it up and see, but of course that isn’t possible. I wonder if it’s just the very top of a marker of some sort.

Or maybe the odd stone is the very top of a gravestone. People did live out here at one time, as evidenced by the stone walls that are found crisscrossing the landscape. In fact this entire forest was most likely pastureland in the 1800s, probably abandoned when the men went to work in the woolen mills, furniture, or shoe factories that had suddenly sprung up everywhere. They made more money in the mills for less strenuous work and many left farming altogether. Piling up all those stones and cutting down trees with an axe is hard work; I’ve done both and I hate to say it but I probably would have followed them to the mills.

As I was leaving this dragonfly flew toward me and landed right on the trail between my feet and stayed there, letting me take as many photos as I wanted. It had the same markings as those I had seen earlier on the cattail leaves, and I think it’s a calico pennant dragonfly (Celithemis elisa.) I also think it’s a male, but with my poor record of insect identification I wouldn’t bet the farm on it. Juvenile males look different than adults so it can be confusing, especially if you’re colorblind. In the end it really didn’t matter what its name was because it and others of its kind had taken me on a fascinating journey, and that was enough.

It is very important to go out alone, to sit under a tree—not with a book, not with a companion, but by yourself—and observe the falling of a leaf, hear the lapping of the water, the fishermen’s song, watch the flight of a bird, and of your own thoughts as they chase each other across the space of your mind. If you are able to be alone and watch these things, then you will discover extraordinary riches which no government can tax, no human agency can corrupt, and which can never be destroyed. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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The Last of the Fall Color?

Posted in Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, tagged Beech Fall Color, Blacberry Fall Color, Black Birch, Burning Bushes, Canon EOS Rebel T6, Fall Color, Full Moon over Half Moon Pond, Gray Birch, Half Moon Pond, Keene, Maple Leaved Viburnum, Mount Monadnock, Native Plants, Nature, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus Stylus TG-870, Pitcher Mountain, red maples, Smooth Arrow Wood, Staghorn Sumac Fall Color, Swanzey New Hampshire, Witch Alder on November 6, 2019| 33 Comments »

Well, the growing season is about finished here since we’ve had a freeze, but we were very lucky to have fall colors go on and on the way they did. This photo of Mount Monadnock was taken from a spot where I’ve never viewed it before. It was early on a cloudy morning, bordering on twilight, but boosting the camera’s ISO function showed me what you see here. The mountain had its head in the clouds again but there was plenty of color to be seen.

There was mist on Half Moon Pond in Hancock one morning. It’s been a very misty fall, I’ve noticed.

You could barely see the hill on the other side of the pond.

But when the mists cleared it was beautiful.

I’ve been trying for several years now to get a shot of the full moon over Half Moon Pond, and this year I finally got it.

I’ve known witch alders (Fothergilla major) for a long time but apparently I never paid them any mind in the fall. They’re quite pretty. This is a native shrub related to witch hazel which grows to about 6-7 feet in this area. Though native to the southeast it does well here in the northeast, but it is almost always seen in gardens rather than in the wild. The fragrant flower heads are bottlebrush shaped and made up of many flowers that have no petals. What little color they have comes from the stamens, which have tiny yellow anthers at the ends of long white filaments.

The yellow leaves are from black birch and the white bark is from a gray birch, so we have black, white, and gray subjects in color.

Blackberries can be quite beautiful in the fall with their deep maroon / purple leaves.

The maple leaved viburnums (Viburnum acerifolium) have been beautiful this year. Their leaves seem to start out colored just about any color you can name in the fall, but after their red / yellow / orange/ purple phases all of the leaves eventually become a very pale, ghostly pink, making this shrub’s fall color among the most beautiful in the forest, in my opinion.

Maple leaved viburnum berries (drupes) are about the size of raisins and I’ve heard that they don’t taste very good, but many birds and animals eat them. They disappear quickly and getting a shot of both fall colored leaves and fruit is difficult.

What else can I say about the red maples? They’re just so beautiful with their many beautiful colors at various times of year.

This bracket fungus had the autumn spirit.

I had high hopes that I’d see the burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) along the Ashuelot River in Swanzey go all the way this year, showing leaves of the lightest pastel pink before they fell, but unfortunately a freeze saw all the leaves drop overnight last week, so this photo of them in much darker pink will have to do. Burning bushes might lose their leaves quickly some years but the berries will persist until birds have eaten every one of them. That’s what makes them one of the most invasive plants in the area and that is why their sale and cultivation have been banned in New Hampshire.

Here’s a closer look at the burning bushes. It’s too bad that they’re so invasive because they really are beautiful, especially when massed in the thousands as they are in this spot.

We’ve had some ferocious winds this year but I’ve been lucky enough to find still waters for tree reflections.

The beeches have also been beautiful this year but once they started they turned fast and most now wear brown. I thought this young example was very beautiful.

There are over 200 viburnum varieties and many grow as natives here. Smooth arrow wood (Viburnum dentatum) is one of them. It has yellowish white, mounded flower clusters and blooms along stream banks and drainage ditches. The flowers become dark blue drupes that birds love. You can see some of them in this photo. 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 for food. It’s quite pretty in the fall as well.

Staghorn sumacs (Rhus typhina) are one of our most colorful shrubs in the fall. They can range from lemon yellow to pumpkin orange to tomato red, and anything in between. These examples were mostly orange.

But this sumac was very red.

I thought I’d end this post with a leftover photo from my last trip up Pitcher Mountain in Stoddard. I finally hit the peak color up there at just the right time this year and it was so glorious I hated to come down. They were truly some of the most beautiful views I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few.

So many hues in nature and yet nothing remains the same, every day, every season a work of genius, a free gift from the Artist of artists. ~E.A. Bucchianeri

Thanks for coming by.

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Late June Flowers

Posted in Nature, Wildflowers, tagged Ashuelot River, Bittersweet Nightshade, Brown Knapweed, Canon SX40 HS, Common Milkweed, Gray Dogwood, Heal All, Heartsease, Mallow Flower, Maple Leaved Viburnum, Mountain Laurel, Native Plants, Nature, New Hampshire, NH, northern catalpa, Olympus Stylus TG-870, Ragged Robin, Rose, Summer Wildflowers, Viola Tricolor on June 28, 2017| 36 Comments »

Imagine a tree 80-100 feet high and 50 feet wide full of orchids and you’ll have a good idea what the northern catalpa (Catalpa speciosa) looks like in full bloom. Of course the flowers are not orchids, but they’re very beautiful nevertheless. At 1-2 inches across they are also large, and so are the heart shaped leaves. These trees have long, bean like seed pods and when I was a boy we called them string bean trees. Luckily we were never foolish enough to eat any of the “beans” because they’re toxic. The word catalpa comes from the Native American Cherokee tribe. Other tribes called it Catawba.

Each beautiful catalpa flower is made up of petals that have fused to form one large, frilly petal. Yellow, orange and purple insect guides can be seen in the throat. The opening is quite big; easily big enough for a bumblebee.

If the berries taste anything like the plant smells then I wouldn’t be eating them from a bittersweet nightshade vine (Solanum dulcamara.) It’s a native of Europe and Asia and is in the potato family, just like tomatoes, and the fruit is a red berry which in the fall looks like a soft and juicy, bright red, tiny Roma tomato. The plant climbs up and over other plants and shrubs and often blossoms for most of the summer. Bittersweet nightshade produces solanine which is a narcotic, and all parts of the plant are considered toxic. In medieval times it was used medicinally but these days birds seem to be the only ones getting any use from it. I always find that getting good photos of its small flowers is difficult, but I’m not sure why.

If you see a flat topped flower cluster on a native dogwood it’s either a silky dogwood (Cornus amomum) or red osier dogwood (Cornus sericea.) If the flower cluster is slightly mounded it is most likely a gray dogwood (Cornus racemosa,) as is the one in the above photo. All three shrubs bloom at about the same time and have similar leaves and individual white, four petaled flowers in a cluster and it’s very easy to mix them up. Sometimes silky dogwood will have red stems like red osier, which can make dogwood identification even more difficult. Both gray and red osier dogwoods have white berries. Silky Dogwood has berries that start out blue and white and then turn fully blue.

Native dogwoods are also sometimes confused with viburnums, but viburnum flowers have five petals and dogwoods have four. Its flowers become white, single seeded berries (drupes) on red stems (pedicels) that are much loved by many different birds. Most of our native dogwoods like soil that is constantly moist and can be found along the edges of ponds, rivers, and streams.

Once you get used to seeing both dogwoods and viburnums you can tell them apart immediately. The flowers on our native viburnums like the the maple leaf viburnum (Viburnum acerifolium) shown will almost always have five petals and the leaves, though quite different in shape throughout the viburnum family, are usually dull and not at all glossy. In fact I can’t think of one with shiny leaves. What I like most about this little shrub is how its leaves turn so many colors in fall. They can be pink, purple, red, yellow, and orange and combinations of two or three, and are really beautiful.

Each flattish maple leaved viburnum flower head is made up of many small, quarter inch, not very showy white flowers. If pollinated each flower will become a small deep purple berry (drupe) that birds love to eat. This small shrub doesn’t mind dry shade and that makes it a valuable addition to a native wildflower garden. The Native American Chippewa tribe used the inner bark of this plant to relieve stomach pains.

Heal all (Prunella lanceolata) has tiny hooded flowers that remind me of orchids. The plant is also called self-heal and has been used since ancient times. It is said to cure everything from sore throats to heart disease, and that’s how it got its common name. Some botanists believe that there are two varieties of the species; Prunella vulgaris from Europe, and Prunella lanceolata from North America. Native Americans drank a tea made from the plant before a hunt because they believed that it helped their eyesight.

Brown knapweed (Centaurea jacea) has started to bloom. I’ve always thought that knapweed flowers were very beautiful but unfortunately this plant is also from Europe and according to the U.S. Forest Service is a “highly invasive weed that is capable of forming large infestations under favorable conditions.” The large infestations crowd out native plants including those used for forage on pasture lands, so it is not well liked by ranchers. The brown bracts below the flower are what give the plant its common name. This one had a friend visiting.

Common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) has just started blooming here but I haven’t seen any monarch butterflies in the area. I keep hoping they’ll make a comeback and we’ll once again see them in the numbers we did when I was a boy. I’ve only seen a handful each year for the past several years.

Several times I’ve meant to write about how complicated milkweed flowers are to pollinate but the process is so complicated the task always ends up in my too hard basket. Instead I’ll just ask that you trust me when I say that it’s nearly a miracle that these flowers get pollinated at all. I’ll enjoy their beauty and their wonderful scent while trusting that nature will see to it that they’re pollinated, just as they have been for millennia.

Heartsease (Viola tricolour) has been used medicinally for a very long time as an expectorant, diuretic, and anti-inflammatory. Used both internally and externally, the violet is said to be helpful for cystitis, rheumatic complaints, eczema, psoriasis, and acne. Though Viola tricolor, the parent of today’s pansy, is native to Europe the medicinal qualities have been found to be the same for all of the species. Native Americans used our native blue violets for cancer treatment. American pioneers thought that a handful of violets taken into the farmhouse in the spring ensured prosperity, and to neglect this ceremony brought harm to baby chicks and ducklings.

June is when our native mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) blooms and you can see certain roads that are lined with the glossy leaved, white flowering shrubs. They seem fussy about where they grow but when they find a spot that they like they can form dense thickets that are nearly impossible to get through. In this spot they grow to about 10 feet tall.

The pentagonal flowers of mountain laurel are very unusual because each has ten pockets in which the male anthers rest under tension. When a heavy enough insect lands on a blossom the anthers spring from their pockets and dust it with pollen. I saw several bumblebees working these flowers and you can see some relaxed anthers in this photo. Once the anthers are released from their pockets they don’t return to them.

What once may have been five petals are now fused into a single, cup shaped blossom. A side view of a single mountain laurel blossom shows the unusual pockets that the anthers rest in. Another old name for mountain laurel is spoon wood, because Native Americans used the tough wood to make spoons and other small utensils.

I find mallow plants (Malvaceae) growing in strange places like roadsides but I think most are escapees from someone’s garden. The flowers on this example look a lot like those of vervain mallow (Malva alcea), which is a European import. Like all plants in the mallow family its flowers were large and beautiful. Other well-known plants in this family include hibiscus, hollyhocks, and rose of Sharon.

I found this white mallow looking for all the world like a white hibiscus.

I sample the fragrance of roses every chance I get because they take me back to my childhood and our hedge full of gloriously scented cabbage roses. Those poor roses attracted rose chafers by the billions it seemed, but if you sat out on the porch and closed your eyes on a warm summer evening you didn’t have to imagine what heaven would smell like. You knew that you were smelling it right here on this earth.

A very special guest flower for this week is the rare (here) and beautiful ragged robin (Lychnis flos-cuculi), a plant that I’ve searched for for many years and could never find. Where I finally found it was amazing; one of the lawns where I work had construction going on near it and couldn’t be mowed for two weeks, and in those two weeks up popped several ragged robin plants. It is said to prefer disturbed habitats like meadows and fields and I guess the fact that it grew in a lawn proves it.

Though there are native plants called ragged robin in the U.S., like the very beautiful Clarkia pulchella shown recently on Montucky’s blog, this particular plant was introduced from Europe into New England. It might have come as a garden ornamental, but when ships arrived from foreign lands it was once common practice to dump their ballast of gravel and stones on our shores so they could take on cargo, and this plant was reported growing in ship’s ballast in 1880. However it got here I was very happy to see it. This is the kind of thing that makes my pulse quicken and my breath catch in my throat and is what can take me out of myself to a higher place, much like art or music might do for you. The chance of seeing something so beautiful is part of what keeps me going back to nature day after day, year after year.

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray. ~Rumi

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Early June Flowers

Posted in Nature, Wildflowers, tagged Bittersweet Nightshade, Blue Eyed Grass, Bowman's Root, Canon SX40 HS, False Solomon's Seal, Fringe Tree, Goat's Beard, Keene, Lesser Stitchwort, Maple Leaved Viburnum, Meadow Flowers, Native Plants, Nature, New Hampshire, NH, Panasonic Lumix DMC-527, Peony, Purple Spiderwort, Roses, Spiderwort, Spring, Tradescantia, Vetch, Wildflowers, Wildflowers of New England, Wood Sorrel, Yarrow on June 11, 2016| 43 Comments »

The tree leaves have fully unfurled and the forests are shaded, and that means it’s time to get out of the woods and into the meadows where the sun lovers bloom.

There aren’t many flowers that say meadow quite like vetch. I think this example might be hairy vetch (Vicia vilosa,) which was originally imported from Europe and Asia to be used as a cover crop and for livestock forage. It’s now found in just about every meadow in New Hampshire. I think of vetch as very blue but this example seemed purple so I checked my color finding software. It sees violet, plum, and orchid, so I wasn’t imagining it. Maybe it is cow vetch (Vicia cracca,) which is kind of violet blue.

Bowman’s root (Gillenia trifoliata) is a native wildflower but it only grows in two New England Sates as far as I can tell; Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which seems odd but explains why I’ve never seen one in the wild. This example grows in a local park. The dried and powdered root of this plant was used by Native Americans as a laxative, and another common name is American ipecac. Nobody seems to know the origin of the name bowman’s root or whether it refers to the bow of a boat or the bow part of the bow and arrow.

The white flower petals of bowman’s root are asymmetrical and always look like they were glued on by a chubby fingered toddler. But they are beautiful nonetheless and dance at the end of long stems. And they do dance in the slightest movement of air. Some say that all it takes is the gentle breath of a fawn to set them dancing, and because of that another of their common names is fawn’s breath. A beautiful name for a flower if there ever was one.

I missed getting a photo of Solomon’s seal this year but there are plenty of false Solomon seal plants (Maianthemum racemosum or Smilacina racemosa) blooming right now. The largest example in this photo was close to three feet tall; one of the largest I’ve seen.

False Solomon’s seal has small white, star shaped flowers in a branching cluster (raceme) at the end of its stem. Soon the blossoms will give way to small reddish berries that provide food for many birds and other wildlife. It is said that a Native American tribe in California used crushed false Solomon’s seal roots and used them to stun fish. Others used the plant medicinally.

Humans have used common yarrow (Achillea millefolium) in various ways for thousands of years. It is mentioned in the Chinese I Ching, which is said to pre date recorded history, and yarrow has also been found in an excavation of a Neanderthal grave site. Yarrow was known as the soldier’s woundwort and herbe militaris for centuries, and was used to stop the flow of blood. Yarrow was a valuable healing herb, one of the nine “holy herbs,” and was traded throughout the world since before recorded time, and that is believed to be the reason for the plant being found in nearly every country on earth today. Native Americans used it for everything from snake bites to deodorant.

After not seeing any goat’s beard (Tragopogon pratensis,) for a couple of years I recently found a good stand of it growing in a meadow in full sun. Luckily I was there in the morning because goat’s beard closes up shop at around noon and for this reason some call it “Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon.” A kind of bubble gum can be made from the plant’s milky latex sap and its spring buds are said to be good in salads. Another name for goat’s bead is meadow salsify.

Lesser stitchwort (Stellaria graminea) flowers are very small but there are enough of them so the plant can’t be missed. They grow at the edges of fields and pastures, and along pathways. The stems of this plant live through the winter so it gets a jump on the season, often blooming in May. This plant is a native of Europe and is also called chickweed, but there are over 50 different chickweeds. The 5 petals of the lesser stitchwort flower are split deeply enough to look like 10 petals. This is one way to tell it from greater stitchwort (Stellaria holostea,) which has its 5 petals split only half way down their length. The flowers of greater stitchwort are also larger.

If the berries taste anything like the plant smells then I wouldn’t be eating them from a bittersweet nightshade vine (Solanum dulcamara.) It’s a native of Europe and Asia and is in the potato family, just like tomatoes, and the fruit is a red berry which in the fall looks like a soft and juicy, bright red, tiny Roma tomato. The plant climbs up and over other plants and shrubs and often blossoms for most of the summer. Bittersweet nightshade produces solanine, which is a narcotic, and all parts of the plant are considered toxic. In medieval times it was used medicinally but these days birds seem to be the only ones getting any use from it. I find that getting good photos of its small flowers is difficult, but I’m not sure why.

I can’t say if wood sorrel (Oxalis montana) is rare here but I rarely see it. Each time I find it it’s growing near water, and the above example grew in a wet area near a stream. It’s considered a climax species, which are plants that grow in mature forests, so that may be why I don’t often see it. It likes to grow where it’s cool and moist with high humidity. Though the word Montana appears in its scientific name it doesn’t grow there. In fact it doesn’t grow in any state west of the Mississippi River. It’s a pretty little thing that reminds me of spring beauties (Claytonia virginica,) thought its flowers are larger.

My grandmother had a great love of flowers that rubbed off on me at an early age. I used to walk down the railroad tracks to get from her house to my father’s house and when I did I saw flowers all along the way. One of those was spiderwort (Tradescantia virginiana,) and I loved them enough to dig them up and replant them in our yard, despite my father’s apparent displeasure. He didn’t care much for the plant and he often said he couldn’t understand why I had to keep dragging home those “damned old weeds.” He said he wasn’t pleased about a stray cat that I brought home either but it wasn’t a week later that I saw the cat on his lap with him stroking her fur, so I think he really did understand why I kept dragging those damned old weeds home. Though he could have he never did make me dig them up and get rid of them. That’s why spiderwort became “dad’s flower,” and why every single time I see one I think of him.

Spiderworts can be blue, pink, purple, or white so I don’t know if this one growing in a local park is a native natural purple flowered variety or if it’s a purchased cultivar. It’s nice but I like the blue best.

While I was at the park visiting the purple tradescantia I saw this saucer sized peony blossom. It was a beautiful thing to stumble upon and very easy to lose myself in for a while. When you’re taking photos of a flower or object it’s easy to become so totally absorbed by the subject that for a time there is nothing else, not even you.

Do roses smell like peonies, or do peonies smell like roses? Either way we win, but I smelled a rose before I even knew what a peony was because we had a hedge full of them.

Fringe tree (Chionanthus virginicus) is a beautiful native tree that few people grow. It’s one of the last to leaf out in late spring and its fragrant hanging white flowers give it the name old man’s beard. Male flowered trees are showier but then you don’t get the purple berries that female flowered trees bear. Birds love the fruit and if I had room I’d grow both. I’ve read that they’re very easy to grow and are pollution tolerant as well.

I showed a photo of blue eyed grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium) recently but here is one with seed pods. I’ve never seen them. Blue eyed grass is in the iris family and isn’t a grass at all, but might have come by the name because of the way its light blue green leaves resemble grass leaves. The flowers are often not much bigger than a common aspirin but their color and clumping habit makes them fairly easy to find.

Our viburnums and native dogwoods are just coming into bloom. The flowers above are on the maple leaf viburnum (Viburnum acerifolium.) Each flattish flower head is made up of many small, quarter inch, not very showy white flowers. If pollinated each flower will become a small deep purple berry (drupe) that birds love to eat. What I like most about this little shrub is how its leaves turn so many colors in fall. They can be pink, purple, red, yellow, and orange and combinations of two or three, and are really beautiful. The Native American Chippewa tribe used the inner bark of this plant to relieve stomach pains.

I thought I’d tell local readers that the new wildflower guide by Ted Elliman and the New England Wildflower Society is in stores. I got my copy about a week ago and I find it really clear and easy to read. It also has photos rather than line drawings, which I like and another thing I like about it is how some of the more common non-native plants are also included. Some of my own photos can be found in it as well, and I feel honored to have had them included. I hope everyone will want a copy.

To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat. ~Beverly Nichols

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Exploring Nature in New Hampshire

Posts Tagged ‘Maple Leaved Viburnum’

Botanically orchids are considered the most highly evolved of all flowering plants because of their unique reproductive strategy; they have both male and female reproductive structures fused into a single structure. This one had apparently been pollinated because it had a seed pod.

I saw a bright yellow, very hairy caterpillar on a twig. I believe it might be a Virginian tiger moth caterpillar (Spilosoma virginica.) This caterpillar is also called yellow bear and I think this is the first time I’ve seen one. I’m not sure what those four yellow bumps are.

Once they produce spores they’re done, and that usually takes one day but on this day there were plenty more coming. They’re called ink caps because their caps liquify and turn into what looks like ink.

Note: A helpful reader has pointed out that this is actually bristly clubmoss (Spinulum annotinum,) which I’ve never heard of. Shining clubmoss doesn’t produce sporophylls, which explains why I never see them.

I saw the deer clearing stone walls with ease, jumping so high it had feet to spare. I was wishing I had legs that could do that.

I could look at this all day. It is worthy of hanging in an art gallery, in my opinion.

Yellow spots form on wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) leaves before fall even arrives, and they slowly grow larger until the entire leaf is yellow. This is one of the earliest plants to start turning color in the fall.

I couldn’t get over the beautiful light coming through the trees. At times it was hard to focus on anything else.

Before you know it (unless you’re climbing with me) you’re at the summit. I remember how surprised I was the day I realized that I had been climbing a huge piece of granite. The trail ends just as it begins; with bare granite bedrock.

There is a glacial erratic up here that is nearly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. It is said to rock back and forth like the 40 ton glacial erratic over on Hewe’s Hill called Tippin Rock, but I didn’t feel like heaving and grunting over boulders on this day.

This is what I mean by a milky sky; almost pure white. Still, in my opinion there’s no such thing as a bad photo of Mount Monadnock, so I’ll just leave you with this one.

No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied – it speaks in silence to the very core of your being. ~Ansel Adams

Thanks for stopping in.

I think we’ll have plenty of blackberries this year. I’ve never seen them bloom like they are now.

Beautiful blue flag irises (Iris versicolor) bloomed in the shallow water along the shore.

I think is the best shot I’ve ever gotten of the tiered and whorled growth habit of the Indian cucumber root (Medeola virginiana.) It’s a very pretty plant and I saw a lot of them here. Since I just described their flowers in my last post I won’t put you through that again.

The toe was still bothering me when I started out again but not as bad as it had been and it didn’t matter anyway because I was half way around the pond and the only other way out of here was by boat or helicopter.

At their early stage the spore cases of royal ferns are green but they soon turn a beautiful purple color, and that’s why the plant was named flowering fern.

I saw lots red trillium (Trillium erectum) seed pods, so I’m guessing there will be lots more of them in the future.

A few years ago I found the only example of a northern club spur orchid (Platanthera clavellata v. Ophioglossoides) that I’ve ever seen here. On this day I found its single leaf, so I know it’s still alive and well. I hope to see it bloom again in late July.

Thanks for stopping in.

There was mist on Half Moon Pond in Hancock one morning. It’s been a very misty fall, I’ve noticed.

You could barely see the hill on the other side of the pond.

But when the mists cleared it was beautiful.

I’ve been trying for several years now to get a shot of the full moon over Half Moon Pond, and this year I finally got it.

The yellow leaves are from black birch and the white bark is from a gray birch, so we have black, white, and gray subjects in color.

Blackberries can be quite beautiful in the fall with their deep maroon / purple leaves.

Maple leaved viburnum berries (drupes) are about the size of raisins and I’ve heard that they don’t taste very good, but many birds and animals eat them. They disappear quickly and getting a shot of both fall colored leaves and fruit is difficult.

What else can I say about the red maples? They’re just so beautiful with their many beautiful colors at various times of year.

This bracket fungus had the autumn spirit.

Here’s a closer look at the burning bushes. It’s too bad that they’re so invasive because they really are beautiful, especially when massed in the thousands as they are in this spot.

We’ve had some ferocious winds this year but I’ve been lucky enough to find still waters for tree reflections.

The beeches have also been beautiful this year but once they started they turned fast and most now wear brown. I thought this young example was very beautiful.

Staghorn sumacs (Rhus typhina) are one of our most colorful shrubs in the fall. They can range from lemon yellow to pumpkin orange to tomato red, and anything in between. These examples were mostly orange.

But this sumac was very red.

So many hues in nature and yet nothing remains the same, every day, every season a work of genius, a free gift from the Artist of artists. ~E.A. Bucchianeri

Thanks for coming by.

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