Counting My Blessings

I was supposed to wake up today on the shores of Lake Huron, up in the Bruce Peninsula of Ontario, sharing a spacious lakeside home with five amazing botanical buddies.  My friends have sent me photos, and boy, is it gorgeous there!  I can't wait to see more photos of all the rare plants they'll be finding there on the limestone shores,  and hear of all the fun the guys are having without me.  So, do I feel a bit sorry for myself that I'm laid up with a broken kneecap?  Well, sure.  But as they say, those are the breaks (pun intended!). At least I have a comfy couch, with kitties for cuddly companions, a dear attentive husband who caters to my every need, adequate Oxycodone to deal with the pain, and a view out the window on this sparkling morning of Mountain Laurel in full bloom and a pair of Cardinals in a lilac shrub.  And even more, I have years of botanical adventures closer to home to look back on, all recorded here in my blog.  So I think every day in the long recovery weeks ahead I will look back in my archives and see what I was doing about this time of year on other years.

It was just about a year ago I found myself teetering from log to log in a cedar swamp up near Johnsburgh, searching for the almost -invisible Naked Miterwort (Mitella nuda).  And thanks to the better eyesight of my companions Evelyn, Bob, and Sue, I was actually able to find it.  Isn't it adorable?

With its hair-fine stems, delicate yellow-green flowers, and leaves no bigger than pennies,  this is a flower that easily hides from view -- even when it's in plain sight.

Here was another lifetime find for me that day:  a liverwort I mistook for a moss.  (It's a good thing we had at least two folks along who were well-schooled in liverworts.)  As this photos reveals,  the liverwort Trichocolea tomentella sure would be easy to mistake for a moss:

If it hadn't been quite so wet as it was in that cedar swamp, this liverwort's leaves would have been more fluffed up, revealing how it came to have its common name of Handsome Woolywort.  I love that name!