Early Autumn Beauty at Lens Lake

I usually wait until the second week of October to re-visit Lens Lake in autumn.  That's when the mountains and forests and shoreline surrounding this southern Adirondack lake are most likely to reach their peak of colorful splendor. But this year, our friend Ruth Brooks will be leaving unusually early for her winter home in Florida, and she wanted to experience at least the beginnings of this splendor before she goes.  So our mutual friend Sue Pierce and I accompanied Ruth last week to paddle this quiet lake studded with acres of Sphagnum-carpeted bogmats.

The spectacle of colorful leaves was just beginning, with Red Maples offering the opening act of the extravaganza yet to reach its peak.

While Sue and Ruth hugged the edges of the bogmats searching for some unusual mosses and liverworts they remembered thriving there in the past,  I hugged the rock-bound forested shore, enjoying the bursts of vivid color the shoreline shrubs and forest-floor plants put forth.

 

Although most of the flowering plants had retired for the winter by now, this trio of bright-yellow Grass-leaved Goldenrod (Euthamia graminifolia) still bloomed atop a fallen log, their pom-pom-like  flowerheads and slender stalks waving in the brisk wind.

The textures and colors along the shore were exquisite, punctuated by the vividly colorful fading fronds of Cinnamon Fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum).

The shrubs of Labrador Tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum) also looked quite colorful, with a few of their evergreen leaves turned orange, as if to match the furry orange stems of their flower stalks.

Here's a closer look at the furry orange undersides of the otherwise evergreen leaves of Labrador Tea. Not only are these leaves quite colorful, they are also quite fragrant when crushed to breathe in their scent, a fresh piney smell that I think of as the signature fragrance of bogs and fens.

Each flowering stem of the Labrador Tea was tipped with these pretty pink winter buds, which will open in spring to release clusters of small white flowers.

Leatherleaf (Chamaedaphne calyculata) is another shoreline shrub with evergreen leaves and twigs that  already hold the buds of next spring's flowers.  Other twigs on the same shrub held the small apple-shaped fruits produced by this year's flowers.

Here's a closer look at those small round Leatherleaf seedpods.

Sheep Laurel (Kalmia angustifolia) is one of the most abundant shrubs along the lakeshore. I could detect the remains of the spent flower clusters surmounted by terminal leaves.  And I also could find a few new flower buds atop the leafy twigs.  It always amazes me that this native shrub that normally blooms in early summer, also produces occasional flowers in the fall, but this time in clusters atop the leaves, not surmounted by them.

Here's a photo of fall-blooming Sheep Laurel flowers surmounting the leaves, which I took in mid-October at Lens Lake a year ago:

Close to shore, I encountered many remains of old tree stumps, now covered with vegetation as colorful as this vivid Sphagnum Moss, offering a blast of gorgeous color in miniature.

One of the most interesting organisms I find in the shallow waters close to shore are these masses of transparent greenish jelly.  They are formed by the colonial microscopic single-celled protozoan called Ophrydium versatile.  The individual cells line up side-by-side in the "blob"and attach themselves to a jelly-like substance they secrete.  They are symbiotic with microscopic Chlorella algae that live inside the Ophrydium cells and give the blob its green color.  Over the years of paddling on Lens Lake, I have found masses of it as small as a golfball and as large as a bathtub. The largest blob in this group was about the size of a soccer ball.

Having explored the shore for a while, I ventured out to join my friends along the edges of the bog mats. This lake is one of the most interesting I have ever paddled because of the presence of the bog mats. They stretch for acres, many of them covered with large populations of Tawny Cottongrass (Eriophorum virginicum). On this breezy day, each individual cottongrass stalk appeared to be swaying and dancing to a music all its own.

The Sphagnum mosses that cover the bogmats are vividly colorful in hues of scarlet (above) and gold (below) and also share their space with many other colorful plants. The bristly yellow spikes emerging from this bed of Sphagnum are the spore stalks of Bog Lycopodium (Lycopodiella inundata), rising above its green leaves snaking across the Sphagnum mound.

Although the flowers of Purple Pitcher Plants (Sarracenia purpurea) are fading by now, their vase-like, insect-drowning leaves remain as colorful as ever,  a vibrant scarlet lined with red-veined orange.  Note how the red and gold Sphagnums intermix, resembling the vivid colors and patterns of Persian carpets.

I missed seeing the pretty pink flowers of Marsh St. John's Wort (Hypericum virginicum) this summer, but their rosy-coral autumn leaves and deep-scarlet seedpods are just as beautiful as the flowers were.

White puffy dots of Pipewort flowers (Eriocaulon aquaticum) and the sparkly crimson leaves of Spatulate Sundew (Drosera intermedia) added beauty and interest to a muddy patch of bogmat.

As we paddled past what seemed to be an abandoned beaver lodge, I noticed many small plants had made this woody mound their home.

I have never seen the stems and leaves of the plant called Swamp Candles (Lysimachia terrestris) massed in a heap like this, but I know of no other plant that bears such red chili-pepper-shaped bulbils in the leaf axils. These bulbils will eventually fall off and sprout in the underlying mud to produce clones of the original plants. The massed leaves and bulbils looked quite beautiful atop this old beaver lodge.

Another once-flowering plant spread across the surface of the old beaver lodge, and I recognized the small size, red seedpods, and opposite oval leaves of Dwarf St. John's Wort (Hypericum mutilum). When in bloom, each of those tiny red pods was a tiny bright-yellow flower.  Considering how abundant this plant was growing here, that must have been lovely to see. But not any lovelier than the sight of its autumn-colored abundance now.

I do want to post a photo of the full crazy-quilt splendor of autumn color at Lens Lake, just in case I don't return to this special lake again this year.  (This photo was taken in mid-October a few years ago.) Pretty spectacular, I would say! But I hope our earlier paddle here gave Ruth plenty of memories of its already-vivid beauty to please her as she heads south.