Celebrating Draba: "The Smallest Flower That Blows"

We've had some rain and some really warm days this past week, which eliminated most of the snow and ice covering the ground around Saratoga.  This should certainly beckon some of our earliest spring wildflowers to start blooming. Although my knee pain still prevents me from heading out to the woods, I did drive my car this past Wednesday to a nearby site where I have always found masses of the tiny wildflower called Spring Whitlow Grass (Draba verna) blooming abundantly. Well, they weren't yet growing by the thousands I usually find at this site. I did find just one, though, the one pictured here in my hand. 

Thousands upon thousands will follow very soon, as I demonstrated in one of my old blogposts that shares some fascinating information about this little no 'count weed, which included a famous tribute to it composed by the noted naturalist Aldo Leopold and included in his Sand County Almanac. I'm reposting  here that blogpost, titled "Draba verna: A Favorite Little 'Weed' ," first posted on March 28, 2020 but probably just as accurate a description of what we might find in the same places today.  

Draba verna: A Favoite Little "Weed", Redux:

Some think of the wee little non-native Mustard-family flower called Draba verna as just a no'count weed, but darn it all, it sure says "Spring!" to me. And so it did, too, to the noted naturalist Aldo Leopold, who wrote the following wonderful words about it in his 1949 book, Sand County Almanac:

"Within a few weeks now Draba, the smallest flower that blows, will sprinkle every sandy place with small blooms. He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.

"Draba asks, and gets but scant allowance of warmth and comfort; it subsists on the leavings of unwanted time and space. Botany books give it two or three lines, but never a plate or portrait. Sand too poor and sun too weak for bigger better blooms are good enough for Draba. After all, it is no spring flower, but only a postscript to a hope.

"Draba plucks no heartstrings. Its perfume, if there is any, is lost in the gusty winds. Its color is plain white. Its leaves wear a sensible woolly coat. Nothing eats it; it is too small. No poets sing of it. Some botanist once gave it a Latin name, and then forgot it. Altogether it is of no importance -- just a small creature that does a small job quickly and well."

Yesterday, I found uncountable numbers of this tiny unassuming plant filling a most unpromising stretch of dirt between the Wilton Mall road and the cinder-block wall of a BJ's Warehouse.

And I really did have to search for it "with [my] knees in the mud," since these flowers are so tiny they truly cannot be detected from any distance.  But once I approached and peered more closely, I sure did find them, and "in abundance." Thousands and thousands of them!

With so many plants, I didn't feel too guilty about uprooting one, the better to photograph the entire plant -- flowers, stems, and basal rosette -- in one exposure.  And then I tucked it back into its sandy soil.

Here's a closer look at those basal leaves that "wear a sensible woolly coat," as Leopold describes.

Also inhabiting this patch of unpromising dirt were clusters of another little "no'count weed" called Mouse-ear Chickweed (Cerastium vulgatum), its flowers so newly out of bud that the petals were not yet clearly displaying the deep clefts that normally distinguish these flowers.

Punctuating these carpets of tiny, almost invisible plants were occasional vivid sunbursts of Dandelions, another introduced wildflower that arises as early as possible every spring.  This close-up photo reveals how generously it offers its pollen on slender scrolling pistils.

Encouraged by all this floral abundance, I dashed out to the Skidmore woods to visit the Sharp-lobed Hepatica plant I had found just breaking bud a few days ago.  And lo!  There they were: two pretty pale-purple flowers lifting their opened faces to the sun!  The wildflower season is definitely upon us  at last!

Skunk Cabbage Paradise, Redux

 Wow!  If I'd known how much this knee replacement recovery was going to hurt, I might have reconsidered it. My physical therapists, though, are telling me my recovery is progressing splendidly, insisting that my flexibility and strength are already well beyond what most folks experience just one month after surgery on February 11.  Sadly, though, I haven't felt ready to go slogging through swales in search of our very first flower of spring, our native Swamp Cabbage.  I did, though, go searching through my blog archives for evidence that these fascinating plants could very well be blooming by this date.  And I sure found some!  This post, called "Skunk Cabbage Paradise,"  appeared on March 18 just one year ago, and it contained some of my very best photos of the flowers that often are hard to see, hiding deep within the bulbous spathes and dotting the interior spadices with tiny yellow blooms.  I found these photos especially interesting because they show both sexes of Skunk Cabbage florets, the spent pistillate florets yielding to the staminate ones emerging around the base of the pistillate ones.  With daytime temps between now (March 13) and next Tuesday (March 18) remaining above freezing, perhaps I might find such marvelous specimens on the same date this year. At least this old evidence proves that it would be possible.  If my knee pain relents a bit over the next 5 days, I might just go find out.

Skunk Cabbage Paradise ! (March 18, 2024)

I know, I know, I've been posting photos of Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) for a couple of weeks now. But all those specimens were total wimps compared to the gigantic ones that thrive in a swale at the Orra Phelps Nature Preserve in Wilton.  I'm not sure what kind of nutrients this particular mud provides, but the Skunk Cabbage plants that grow here are prodigious both in size and in the number of spathes that constitute a cluster.  By my count, I discern EIGHT flowering spathes in this one.

As for size of individual spathes, just look at how tall these gorgeously scarlet ones have grown!

And this was my lucky day for photographing a cluster with spathes so wide open that their flowering spadices within were completely visible.  How often have I found examples where both sexes of the florets -- pistillate (top left) and staminate -- were displaying within the same plant at the same time?  Never, before I encountered this remarkable clump.

Sadly, while trying to get close enough to photograph these plants, I inadvertently stepped on another one. In that mishap,  my big foot crushed the spathe but did not damage the spadix within.  And what a find this spadix was!  Never before had I encountered a spadix displaying the fading pistillate florets  yielding to the yellow pollen-laden staminate ones emerging around the base of the pistillate ones! How cool it that?

A Virtual Walk Into Spring, Redux

Ah, here it is at last: the first day of March!  Yes, I know, winter's not officially over yet, snow still lies thick on the ground around here and the trails are slick with packed ice. But the day started out mild with bright sunshine, and I would have loved to go out for a walk in the woods.  But my knee is still too stiff and painful to carry me much further than from the couch to the kitchen or bathroom.  And besides, the clouds rolled in, the temps dropped, and the wind is now tossing the treetops wildly around.  So I took a walk through my old blog posts instead, feasting my eyes on those photos that reassure me that spring will indeed be here soon.

Here's a pretty post I found from March 1, 2020: A Virtual Walk Into Spring.

Even though it's only the first of March and snow still covers the ground, it's possible that Skunk Cabbage is already melting the snow around its Morocco-red spathes and offering its pollen-laden spadices to early pollinators.

It soon will be time to rummage through American Hazelnut twigs, hoping to discover the bright-ruby-red female flowers hiding among them, so tiny as to be almost invisible to anyone but the most persistent seeker. But this flower doesn't need to lure pollinators with showy blooms, since abundant male catkins are wafting their powder-fine pollen toward them from neighboring shrubs.

Next to come will be the striking sunbursts of Coltsfoot, the first flower of spring that actually looks like a flower -- the kind we would draw as kids with a bright-yellow crayon.  Coltsfoot is not a native wildflower, but the bees and other bugs are sure happy to find its abundant pollen while our native floral offerings remain exceedingly scarce. And it often grows abundantly in nutrient-poor "waste places" where few other flowers would thrive.

Sharing similar "waste place" habitats and early bloomtimes as the Coltsfoot, the Mustard Family wildflower known as Whitlow Grass (also known as Draba verna) is about as invisible as that Coltsfoot is showy, thanks to its minuscule size.

Soon to follow are the wildflowers of the forest floor, the ones that need to bloom and set seed before the tree canopy closes over and gobbles all the sunshine for itself.  Leading this parade of beauties are two species of Hepatica, sharp-lobed and round-lobed, in all their lovely shades of purple and pink and sparkling white.

Although April can still bring sub-freezing nights, it's not too early to search out banks where Trailing Arbutus covers the ground, as fragrant as it is beautiful.

At about the same time, wetlands and roadside ditches will be exploding with gold, as the stunningly generous Marsh Marigolds burst into bloom.  Many of our other spring wildflowers are rather shy and retiring, needing to be diligently sought if we want to enjoy their beauty.  Not so for this gorgeous bloomer, so showy it's hard to believe it could be a wildflower.

An equally generous bloomer in its woodland habitat is the more-demure Spring Beauty, with its candy-striped flowers crowned with baby-pink anthers. When this lovely wildflower finds a habitat it likes, it sure doesn't hold back, but often decorates the forest floor as far as the eye can see.

No flower signals Spring more beautifully than Bloodroot, with its haloes of pure-white petals circling sunbursts of golden anthers.  Sadly, we have only a small window of opportunity to marvel at the gorgeousness of this native wildflower, since it seems it has only opened its petals before they begin to fall.  Luckily, they often bloom in such abundance along roadsides that we know when they have arrived and we can feast our eyes on their beauty without having to run to the woods.

This is just a small sampling of all the floral joys to come in the marvelous months of spring.  As I look forward to our re-encounters not that many weeks away,  I feel better already, resolved to rest up for the woodland walks that await.

While enjoying this virtual wildflower walk through old blog posts, I happened upon this photo of Scotch Pine bark, and I thought it was so stunning I wanted to share it again.  I know that most lumbermen hate Scotch Pine for its useless timber, and botanists disdain it for its alien status. But oh my, isn't this lovely? If we put a frame around this section of bark, we could hang it in a museum and call it abstract art.

February Thaw, Redux

Well, knee replacement surgery went well, my surgeon and physical therapist are elated by how rapidly I am recovering, but my knee itself still tells me, "Oh hell, NO!" when I try to bend it.  Or when I force it through the exercises that feel like medieval torture to perform. So obviously, I have not ventured out except for knee-related appointments, and it still is not comfortable to sit at my computer with my desk chair poking knives into the back of my knee.  But Facebook Memories dragged this 7-year-old post called "February Thaw" out of computer storage, and I was delighted to see that, what with the freeze-and-thaw vacillations we've been experiencing this winter, I could have posted similar adventures if I had visited the same woodsy or watery sites this week.  I enjoyed this trip down memory lane myself, and I hope my faithful readers will, too.

So here it is: February Thaw, Redux (from 2/27/2018):

Thanks to a whole string of above-freezing days this past week, it feels as if winter is losing its grip and spring is on the way.  When I walked along the Hudson River above the Spier Falls Dam last Sunday, I was pleased to see that the ice was breaking up even in the long-frozen bays.  Then, as I walked along Spier Falls Road where the mountains rise sharply from the road's edge, the music of splashing water greeted me from tumbling creeks and many tiny spring-fed rills.

Just across from the dam, where a creek comes bounding and crashing down the mountainside, the lower part of the waterfall was still encased in ice.  But higher up, where the sunshine has had more opportunity to warm the rocks, the water was freely flowing over moss-covered boulders. (Update, 2025: I sure look forward to when my knee is restored to strength and I can once again ascend the course of this beautiful waterfall!)

Many people think of the shrill calls of Spring Peeper frogs as the first music of spring, but the sounds of splashing water, dancing as if in celebration of its liberation from imprisoning ice, sure sings of springtime to me.

By Tuesday, the air was warm and the sun brightly shining, tempting me out to take a walk along Bog Meadow Brook Trail near Saratoga.  Although most of our roadsides and open fields are now bare of snow, the woods are still deep with it, and the well-trodden trails remain quite icy.  Ice grippers on my boots, I set off along the trail that leads through wooded wetlands.

I had searched several muddy swales this week, finding the Skunk Cabbage shoots still tightly swaddled in the pale-green bracts that had protected the undeveloped spathes all winter.  But here in the tiny brook that runs by the Bog Meadow trail, some spathes had swollen to burst free of those enveloping bracts and had already turned their gorgeous Morocco-leather red.  Some of the spathes had opened a little, so I could peer inside to see the developing spadices, which were still smooth and bald and not yet producing pollen.  So I can't yet call these the first flowers to bloom in spring.  But it won't be long before I can!

I continued along Bog Meadow Trail to where it leads to a boardwalk over an open marsh, the boardwalk lined with willows and alders and red-twigged dogwoods.

I could see the willow catkins were just beginning to emerge from their buds, the "pussies" almost ready to fluff out their silken "fur."  A sure sign of spring!

I noticed that almost all of the willows were sporting at least one of two kinds of galls.  The Shoot-tip Rose Gall looks like a dried flower at the tip of each branch, and is caused by a tiny fly (Rhabdophaga rosaria) laying its egg in a slit in the branch.  The tree then produces this flower-shaped rosette of tissue surrounding the egg, to protect the larva as it matures.

Other small willows were bearing multiple hard, brown, spindle-shaped swellings on their twigs, each one with a bud protruding out of the top of the gall.  

These Willow Beaked Galls are caused by another tiny fly called Mayetiola rigidae.  The larva is wintering over within the gall and will emerge in the spring.  Willows play host to more kinds of galls than any other woody plant,  and now is the best time to find them, since once spring comes, they will be hidden among the leaves.

A Winter Walk Around the Pond

Oh, we've had some lovely snow since I last posted here, nearly ten inches of pristine fluff, but because of a knee-pain issue I did not venture out on snowshoes to enjoy it.  But I did venture out on Saturday, the day before the most recent deep snowfall, to join my friends Sue and Dana for a walk around Mud Pond at Moreau Lake State Park. The snow on the trail was packed without being icy, so we needed neither snowshoes nor ice grippers to stride along, enjoying the views of the snow-covered frozen pond, distant mountains, and beautiful blue sky. 

Because of a large population of beavers that make Mud Pond their home, we stayed to the trail, rather than venture out on the ice.  Although we could see a lodge on the pond, I am also aware that beavers also burrow into the steep banks that ring this pond, keeping patches of open water near the entrances to their dens. We noticed the open water or water-covered ice near their lodge out on the pond.

Our pond-side striding often came to a halt, for many eye-catching organisms did catch our eyes.  This massive population of Violet-tooth Polypore (Trichaptum biforme) was especially striking, with snaking pillars of stacked striped caps emerging from every fissure in the bark of a trailside tree.

Many sapling oaks line the trail, and since oaks are among the most frequent hosts to numerous kinds of galls, we were treated to several of them.  This one looked like a frozen powder puff, and suggested to me that it might be the remains of the furry gall produced by the Wool Sower Wasp, a distinctive plant growth induced by the secretions of the grubs of this tiny wasp, Callirhytis seminator.  

Here were more galls on a second oak sapling, these clustered spheres resembling bunches of grapes.

Even dead and dying trees offered instances of beauty, such as this marvelous mix of fungi and lichens ornamenting a broken-off twig, probably of a conifer.

Thanks to Sue's way around the iNaturalist site, we now know that this group of itty-bitty fungi occupying a fallen treelimb is Porodisculus pendulus.  This fungus has no known vernacular name, but the Latin name is perfectly descriptive of a fungus that is pendulous (hanging downward) and with tiny pores on the underside of its rather wrinkly whitish discs. Sue noted that there weren't too many reports of it on iNat, nor any mention of it in her mushroom books.  That sent her to searching for it on Google, where more than one web hit described it as "The World's Smallest Polypore."   A little bit bigger than the head of a pin.  But not much.  Easily overlooked, I would bet, because of its tiny size.

This little twig had broken off a dead limb and was lying atop the snow.  I do not know the name of the shaggy green moss with its minute spore stalks, I simply found it cunning and cute enough to take its picture.

I DO know the name of the tree that bore these vibrantly red twigs.  It's Striped Maple (Acer pensylvanicum), and I find twigs of such vibrancy only in winter.  And not all specimens of Striped Maple produce twigs of this color, even in winter. Often, the twigs are a dark bronzy green.   According to one source on Google, the twigs "turn vivid red in winter due to the presence of anthocyanin pigments, which are produced in the bark as a response to cold temperatures, giving the twigs their striking red color, especially noticeable during the winter months when leaves are absent; this is a natural protective mechanism against harsh conditions."   Yeah, but not all Striped Maple twigs in the same forest do this.

Passing an area where I know that throngs of Mapleleaf Viburnum (Viburnum acerifolium) grow, I found that many shrubs still held clusters of the fruit that matured in autumn.  Because the berries's seeds are so large, the fruit is ignored by wildlife until all other, more palatable fruits are gone.

And as far as I know or can discover, the fruits of Maleberry (Lyonia ligustrina) don't appear to be eaten by any wild animal, but remain on the shrubs until they produce these hard and dry pods that will eventually shed the seeds within.  I think the little pods are quite pretty, with their star-shaped openings.

Much of the land surrounding Mud Pond is populated with both White Pines and Pitch Pines, and the needle-carpeted soil beneath those pines is quite sandy.  This is exactly the habitat preferred by the Pink Lady's Slipper (Cypripedium acaule), and that beautiful native orchid abounds here in May. Even in winter, we can find evidence of their presence, with fat pods atop slender stalks protruding from the snow.

Finding this evidence that gorgeous pink orchids will be blooming here in spring, I carry that expectation with me tomorrow (February 11), when I will be receiving total knee replacement surgery. I am hoping that by the time the Pink Lady's Slippers flower in spring,  I can wander these woods without the pain that has hobbled me ever since I smashed my kneecap 10 years ago.  Since I probably won't be having new woods or waterways adventures for a few weeks to come, I probably won't be producing new posts for this blog in the meantime.  But with more than 16 years' worth of blogposts, I think I might find some posts among the more than 2,000 in blog archive that might be worth a second look and read. So, dear readers, stay tuned to see what treasures I might dig up from the comforts of my couch.

A Snowy Day in 'Toga Town!

Oh man, this is why I love living here in northern New York State:  Snow!  Beautiful snow!  Here's my inner-city Saratoga Springs backyard today:

When we first moved to Saratoga in 1970, snow was a given.  And lots of it, too.  That first winter we lived here, we had record snowfall, 120 inches total for the season.  When our then five-year-old daughter walked the four blocks to kindergarten, she disappeared between snowbanks as soon as she turned from our front sidewalk.  "Oh boy," I thought, "this is REAL winter!" 

We haven't had that kind of snow for more than 50 years now. Just yesterday, I could still see the grassy ground everywhere, showing between meager patches of crusty old snow.  But it started snowing in earnest last night, and by this morning the trees and shrubs were heaped with the fluffy stuff that was glittering in the sunlight.  These Winterberry shrubs grow by my front steps.

Ah, but with rain and temps rising into the 40s two days from now, this may be the last time we'll enjoy snow's beauty again this winter.  A quick trip to nearby Saratoga Spa State Park allowed me to fully experience it before it gets washed away.

On this long allee, the snow-covered branches of tall White Pines formed a canopy over the trail.

At the edge of the lawn near the Ferndell Pavilion, the beauty of these snow-crusted trees took my breath away.

That fairyland beauty persisted as I made my way down the Ferndell Ravine, a woodsy trail that passes between steep forested banks, a tiny creek rippling alongside it.

After walking through the park's picnic area, the scene along Geyser Creek was exquisite, as the rushing creek rollicked along past the Island Spouter.

The name "Geyser Creek" was no doubt inspired by the mineral-water spring that spouts from the center of this island, an enormous limey accretion called a "tufa." But this is not, in fact, a geyser, since geysers obtain their energy from geothermal heat. Better referred to as a "spouter," this skyward-shooting spring obtains its energy from a subterranean buildup of carbon dioxide gasses. The water is quite cold.

While the water that emerges from the spouter and spreads across the tufa is itself crystal clear, the dissolved iron in the water reacts with the oxygen in the air to turn the surface it floods across a rusty red.

But the icicles ornamenting the tufa's edge confirm that the mineralized water remains uncolored.

This snowy trail along the creek tempted me to follow it, but my aching knee began to tell me it was time to go home.

I am scheduled to have a total knee replacement surgery on February 11, so I am afraid it will be some time after that before I can venture out to the woods for extensive walks. But I do hope the healing will be complete by the time the waterways will be warm enough to tempt me to manage getting in and out of my canoe.  I'm so happy I got out today to experience this beautiful snowfall.  As climate change continues unabated, this may be my last opportunity to witness such beauty this winter.