Walking a Wooded Wetland Trail

Spring regained its senses this past week, delivering cooler temps and the April showers that would be bringing those proverbial May flowers if many hadn't already bloomed and were now fading, thanks to some unseasonably hot weather the week before. But with many of our spring wildflowers still in store, I set off on a trail through the Skidmore woods I rarely explore, one that follows a tumbling creek down into a hollow and offers more of a wetland habitat than other trails in this woods.

Some very helpful trail-maintenance folks had constructed this stone causeway to continue the trail across the creek.

Although a few Sharp-lobed Hepatica plants (Hepatica acutiloba) still held some fading flowers, most flowers were now replaced by attractive seed pods, nestled within a three-parted wreath of bracts and held above the new crop of this year's leaves, some leaves all-green but many others mottled a pretty red and green like the ones in this photo.

I was happy to find American Fly Honeysuckle (Lonicera canadensis) dangling its pale-yellow twin trumpets.  This is not a rare native shrub, but neither is it abundant in every woodland.  It's also a very early bloomer, so its flowers are often already fading by the time I go looking for it. The browning edges of these delicate blooms indicate that I was truly lucky to catch them still in reasonable shape this year. Each flower pair will yield a united pair of bright-red oval berries, joined at the top and pointing in opposite directions. This is one of our very few native bush honeysuckles.

Quite a few scarlet-flowered Red Trilliums (Trillium erectum) were visible along the trail, but many of the flowers were beginning to look a bit worn around the edges. In other years, they would just be emerging this last week of April, but this year they've already been in full flower for over a week. (Sharing this photo are the unfurling fiddleheads of two of our native woodland ferns, Maidenhair Fern on the left, and Christmas Fern on the right.)

As the Red Trilliums start to fade, the Large-flowered White Trilliums (Trillium grandiflorum) are just beginning to come into their glory. There are areas of this woods where hundreds will bloom all at once in a glorious display, but I loved this solitary specimen, nestled within a niche of a boulder, the dark rugged rock providing an impressive contrast to the delicate flower.

As for delicacy, can any other wildflower rival the Two-leaved Miterwort (Mitella diphylla), with its tiny fringed blossoms? Again, a foil of dark moss-covered rock displayed this lovely flower to best advantage.

Here was another native wildflower, the Kidney-leaved Buttercup (Ranuculus abortivus), whose tiny blooms might go unnoticed, even when displayed against a dark background. The wee little star-shaped flowers are shiny and bright yellow, though, so they almost appeared to twinkle against the dark of this moss-covered tree trunk.

More tiny florets, but massed together, these florets form the globular flower clusters of Dwarf Ginseng (Panax trifolius) and are easily seen, strewn in masses across the forest floor.

There's nothing at all shy, though, about the large shiny yellow flowers of Marsh Marigold (Caltha palustris), growing here in the saturated soil of the creekbed. These flowers are so showy and bright, it's hard to believe they are a native wildflower and not some horticulturist's creation.

Not so showy, but colorful in their own spiky way, were these pollen-laden staminate flowers thrusting up from the center of a patch of Broad-leaved Sedge (Carex plataphylla), one of several species of sedge at home in the limestone-underlain Skidmore woods.

Here are more staminate flowers, no petals but only long anthers dangling on slender filaments, masses of them hanging from the stems of a male plant of Early Meadow Rue (Thalictrum dioicum).  When the pollen is ripe on those anthers, the slightest breeze will cause these flowers to shimmy, wafting the pollen on the air to land on the pistillate flowers of female Early Meadow Rue plants nearby.

And here (in the photo below) are the pinkish-white pistillate flowers of Early Meadow Rue, open and ready to receive that pollen and thus get to work producing this year's crop of seeds.

Clusters of yellow flowers  have yet to emerge from the budding flower stalks protruding from these deeply cut leaves of Canada Wood Betony (Pedicularis canadensis). But the leaves are so beautiful in their own right, they hardly need their flowers to further ornament the plant.  The leaves remind me of acanthus scrollwork often seen in Victorian plaster moldings.

As for leaves, these deeply pleated red-rimmed baby leaves of Alternate-leaved Dogwood (Cornus alternifolia) are just as lovely, to my eye, as will be the shrub's white flower clusters when they emerge. I love how the branches and leaves of this native dogwood are held horizontal to the sky, a trait that suggested this shrub's alternative name, Pagoda Dogwood.

More lovely leaves, the furry red-colored baby leaves of an oak (species unknown).  The young leaves of many trees will be colored red for a short time because they contain anthocyanins, protective chemicals that protect the fragile new leaves.  These reddish pigments have a sunscreen function, which shields the leaves against excess sunlight, and they may also be a signal to insects not to eat them.

Note the reddish color, also, in these emerging Shagbark Hickory leaves (Carya ovata).  Not just emerging, but seemingly exploding! How could all that leaf tissue have been enclosed in that single red-satin bud, huge as that bud indeed was? This eruption of new leaves in the spring forest is one of the major delights of living here in the north.

The unfurling of ferns, too, is one of this season's delights. The tightly curled fronds of all species are called "fiddleheads," although the edible item called "Fiddlehead Fern" refers only to the uncurling young fronds of the species called Ostrich Fern.  The fiddleheads pictured here are those of Christmas Fern (Polystichum acrostichoides), their identification made easy by the presence of last-year's still-green fronds wreathing the newly emerging fronds. This is one of our easiest ferns to ID, with the individual leaflets (pinnae) resembling Christmas stockings.  I would say the general furriness of the fiddleheads could also be a clue, resembling somewhat the fur of Santa's hat.

These tiny Twizzler-red hairy-stalked fiddleheads will uncoil to reveal the delicate green fronds of Maidenhair Fern (Adiantum pedatum), which spread their fluttering fan-shaped pinnae horizontally in near-perfect circles, a graceful pattern that is unique among our native ferns.  The stems will change color and texture, from hairy red like those pictured here to shiny black at maturity.  

For many years, this complete change from tiny red fiddlehead to sizable green mature fern made it hard for me to figure out what these wee curled wormy things were.  It took several return visits to observe such a total transformation before this fern revealed its identity to me. I feel very lucky to live near this lime-rich forested habitat, the very kind of habitat that Maidenhair Fern prefers.  The very kind of habitat, too, that many of the other wonders I found today prefer.