Flowers and Flooding: Early Fall Finds at Orra Phelps

Sometimes I think Mother Nature saves her finest flowers for fall.  Recalling summer's floral glories, I know that's not truly true,  but it sure is easy to make that claim when I first encounter in early September the Royal-Blue beauties known as Fringed Gentians (Gentianopsis crinita).  

The preferred wet-meadow habitat of this spectacular native biennial wildflower grows scarcer every year, lost either to commercial development or encroaching forest.  I know that the volunteer stewards for the Orra Phelps Nature Preserve in Wilton have to work hard almost every year to keep the pines and poplars from shading out the once-abundant population of Fringed Gentians that struggles to persist at this site.  How grateful I am for all their work, each September when I step from the woods onto this sunny spot to be dazzled by dozens of radiantly gorgeous blue blooms!

After paying my annual respects to the Fringed Gentians studding the open meadow, I wandered the forested parts of this small preserve to seek out whatever else might be blooming here this late in the  growing season.  I found very few flowers in bloom this week (aside from a few small white asters), but the developing seed pods on this Rosebay Rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum) were every bit as striking now as their gorgeous big flower-clusters had been last July.

I found many signs of fading abundant fungi, but only a few mushrooms looked to be newly sprouted. This roughly-ruddy Painted Suillus (Suillus spraguei) glowed like an ember along the moss-covered bank of the Little Snook Kill, the stream that runs through the center of the Orra Phelps Preserve.

I couldn't immediately put a name to this sturdy fungus -- or is it a tightly fused cluster of individual fungi?  It had sprouted up near where I over the years had found the firm-tissued, ground-hugging fungus call Black Tooth (Phellodon niger). But this sure wasn't black!

But it certainly WAS a toothed fungus, as I discovered when I pried up a cluster from where it was tightly hugging the ground. And, as I searched my various mushroom guides, I did discover that Black Tooth can sometimes be browner than black (even a pale tan, like this), and one of its distinctions is the way its individual specimens can fuse together to make one sturdy clump. And this was certainly a sturdy clump!  Almost as hard as wood.  If a reader should recognize this fungus as something other than Phellodon niger, I hope you will offer your suggestion in a comment.

As I walked along the creek, I noticed many signs of significant recent flooding. Many plants and much of the grasses and sedges that lined the creekbanks were nearly flattened by rushing water, and this evidence extended well beyond the edge of the creek.  I even noticed that several new channels had been furrowed across some areas that had previously been dry.

Where two weeks ago, patches of False Solomon's Seal (Mayanthemum racemosum) had stood tall, bearing still-green leaves and terminal clusters of ripening berries, the plants now lay flattened to the ground, leaves, stems, now-ripe berries and all.

And here was a genuine surprise: a single multi-stemmed plant of Closed Gentian (Gentiana clausa) toppled flat but with flower clusters that had turned themselves upright. I never even realized that this species actually grew here along the Little Snook Kill's banks.

Another late-season floral treasure, the beautiful blooms of Closed Gentian.

As I wandered the creekbanks, I saw much more evidence of the force of recent flooding.  Some trees, their roots undermined,  had fallen across the stream, providing barriers that collected the on-rushing flood-borne rocks. The flow of the stream now dammed, the torrents formed channels around the normal streambed and spread the forceful flow across the forest floor.

It must have been quite a forceful flood, to have heaped up tangles of tree trunks, downed limbs, and dislodged boulders.

The creek ran so serenely today, it was hard to imagine how turbulent had been its flow just days before. In all the more than 20 years I've been visiting this preserve, I have never seen evidence of flooding like this.  As I think of the horrors that recent flooding has caused in cities like New Orleans and Philadelphia and New York City, with terrible loss of property and human lives, I am grateful that we here in Saratoga County have suffered so little.  And I'm also reminded of how much we humans have to do to address the ever-more evident issue of climate change.