Good Buds at Mud Pond

I went looking for spring flowers today at Mud Pond.  Would Shadblow be blooming, in drifts of white that look like clouds have settled on the mountainsides?  Or maybe Trailing Arbutus, exuding a heavenly fragrance worth falling on your knees to enjoy? Or those tiny white violets that grow near the edge of the pond, also fragrant, but only at certain times of day?  But nope.  No flowers today  (unless you count the rosy floral puffs on the Red Maple trees).  But I did find some buds just as pretty as flowers.  And other buds of interest, as well.

First, the buds I long to see every spring, the elegantly symmetrical, finely flocked, ample leaf buds of the Striped Maple tree.

I just can't get over how gorgeous these leaf buds are, pale jade touched with rose and covered with a fine down. The terminal buds are held aloft like a scepter, and all are borne as erect as candle flames on braceleted twigs that can range from a deep mahogany red to a dark forest green to a deep gray. In the dim light beneath a towering overstory, the velvety buds cast a pearly glow as if they were lit from within.

Here were some other buds that caught my attention, not for their beauty but because I had never seen such a thing before.  Oh, I have seen the clusters of buds at the terminal tips of oak saplings before.  But never with twisting golden threads streaming from them like this.  I just cannot guess what might have caused these unusual growths.  Maybe one of this blog's readers will solve this mystery for me.

UPDATE:  My friend Bonnie Vicki believes she has solved the riddle of these mysterious thread-like remnants.  She had seen similar threads on oaks that still held some dried leaves.  The stems of some of the leaves were disintegrating, revealing a similar threadiness to the interior of the stems.  Recent strong winds had ripped many leaves from the twigs, leaving behind the remnants of the leaf stems.  Great detective work, Bonnie!


These tobacco-brown, scimitar-shaped buds hold the leaves of a Witch Hazel shrub.  I know of no other tree or shrub that bears leaf-buds of this distinctive curving shape, so that makes Witch Hazel easy to identify, even before its leaves unfurl.

There were hundreds of Toothwort plants sprouting up near a stream that was pouring into the pond today.  And it won't be long before we see clusters of white, four-petaled flowers emerging from those closed buds.

I already mentioned the rosy floral puffs of the Red Maple trees that surround Mud Pond. But most of those flowers were too high up in the trees for me to get a good photo.  So I was delighted to find a branch hanging low over the water.

And there in the water, another sign of spring: a congregation of Whirligig Beetles.  They were mostly clustered tightly together, as if to keep each other warm on this chilly day.  But now and then, one or another would be overcome with an urge to "do his thing," and away he would swirl, around and around, setting circles to dance on the surface of the water.