Before the Storm

Well, we're supposed to get walloped with a double-whammy of a storm in a couple of days:  Hurricane Sandy joining forces with a big nor'easter to slam us with lashing wind and rain and possibly sleet and snow.  Sounds bad.  There will probably be power outages all over the Northeast.  So did I spend today making preparations to ride out the storm and its aftermath?  No, I did not.  Instead, I spent the day chasing after what's left of autumn's colorful foliage, since this storm will most likely strip all the trees of whatever leaves still remain.  The winters here are long and dark and dreary.  Gotta soak up that gorgeous color while we can.

As it happened, my friend Sue and I had already planned to visit our favorite bog this week, so that's where we met to start the day today.  Low, dense clouds darkened the sky and shrouded the mountains from view, but here in the bog the Tamaracks filled the air with a golden glow, as if the sun were hiding out in here until the clouds cleared.  A ruby carpet of Sphagnum was dotted with dancing  puffs of Cottongrass,  bobbing and swaying on long thin stalks, in constant motion, even when there was no breeze.

Whatever scarlet leaves still clung to the Highbush Blueberry shrubs were reaching skyward, like tongues of flame.

Bog Rosemary leaves had changed from their soft blue-green to knock-your-eye-out red.

The masses of Leatherleaf shrubs were a marvelous mix of red and green, providing a beautiful foil for the Tamarack's golden boughs.

This little mushroom, too, held a rosy glow, tucked in among cordovan Sphagnum and touched by a slender stem of Large Cranberry.

 After walking about in the bog for an hour or so, and then later exploring the woods and rocks around the site of the original Ft. William Henry on the southern shore of Lake George,  Sue had to leave to get ready for work, but I still had the rest of the day to chase after the remnants of autumn.  I decided to drive up the western shore of Lake George to Hague, then take Rte. 8 west through the mountains to Brant Lake,  and then take the Northway home.  Everywhere I looked along the road I was met with beautiful vistas.

I stopped in Bolton Landing for lunch, then walked down to the public beach to view the lake and the mountains.

The day continued cloudy and dark, but Lake George is gorgeous whatever the weather.

Continuing north toward Hague, I remembered a waterfall off in the woods that my son had taken me to many years ago.  I wondered if I could still find it, so I stopped in a parking area near Tongue Mountain and set off into the woods.  It wasn't hard to find at all; I simply followed the sound of rushing water.

Just south of Hague is a road that leads down to Silver Bay, a historic retreat center now operated by the YMCA.  I didn't stop at the center today, but enjoyed the rustic beauty of the road itself.

Not to mention the beauty of the lake views visible from the road.

The trees near Lake George still held many more of their colorful leaves than did the trees in the mountains I passed through to reach Brant Lake.  At Brant Lake, most of the forest colors were muted, except for a few explosions of gold I could see on the hillsides across the lake.

Just beyond Brant Lake is the hamlet of Horicon, whose most distinctive landmark is this tiny stone library that's built out into the water.  Picturesque, indeed, but I would think all that dampness would not be good for the books.

Another pretty building in Horicon is this sweet little church, which used to serve a Catholic congregation but which is now for sale.  I was enchanted by its beautiful windows.

Despite the frost we had a couple of weeks ago, I found a few flowers still bravely blooming at various sites I visited today.  This pretty Herb Robert was growing in the rocks that lined the Warren County Bike Path near Lake George.

Great Lobelia added its intense blue to a still blooming flowerbed on the beach at Bolton Landing.

Bright yellow Dandelions starred the grass near the public beach at Lake George.  Renowned as one of the first flowers to bloom in the spring, this sturdy little weed will again set bloom when the daylight hours in fall are similar to the length of days when Dandelions bloom in spring.

The Orchids Are Up!

I had a very pleasant task today:  to show noted wildflower author Carol Gracie and her botanist husband Scott Mori the secret passage into this wonderful bog where hundred of Grass Pinks were blooming.  My friend and fellow wildflower enthusiast Bob Duncan also came along, and we must have made quite a curious sight, all us grown people crawling about the bog mat, cameras clicking.

 Carol has a particular interest in the relationship between flowers and their pollinators,  so she and Scott spent quite a bit of the time crouching among the Grass Pinks, watching to see what bugs might arrive to dine.  I can't remember which one of them (or was it Bob?) alerted me to this Katydid nymph perched on a Grass Pink bloom, because I forgot everything else as I focused on watching the insect completely devour the hairy part of the flower, its tiny jaws going nom nom nom!.

I, too, had a quest in visiting this bog today, because I wanted, I needed to find the White Fringed Orchids  I knew, I just KNEW grew in here.  I had promised a fellow orchid enthusiast who was coming here all the way from Ohio that we would find them here easily.   But up until today I hadn't yet seen any sign of them.  My friend Evelyn had assured me she had seen them up already, so Bob and I set to searching, and lo and behold, we found one!  Shining like a beacon it was, lit up by the sun against the dark shade of the shrubbery.

That same bright sun and dark shadows made it hard to get a clear photo, but I think this one is clear enough to show that distinctive fringed lower lip that gives this lovely orchid its common name.
Its scientific name is Platanthera blephariglottis. (Got that?)  We also found quite a few stalks still in tight green bud, so there should be plenty of flowers in bloom when my friend from Ohio arrives next week.

Carol is a wonderful photographer of flowers, as the illustrations for her two most recent books can attest.  (Wildflowers in the Field and Forest: A Field Guide to the Northeastern United States and Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast: A Natural History)  Not every wildflower photographer is so lucky as to have a husband who's not only a botanist (Scott works with the New York Botanical Garden), but also a very helpful photography assistant.  I'll bet that, thanks to the filtered light, she got a much clearer photo than I did of that White Fringed Orchid.

At least I got a pretty clear photo of one of that orchid's pollen bundles, called pollinia, which Scott extracted from one of the flowers and held up on his finger for all of us to see.

Unlike most other flowers, which have powdery pollen, orchids hold their pollen together in 2 waxy bundles connected by a thread, which are attached to a sticky pad on the orchid's reproductive structure.  A visiting insect gets stuck with these pollinia when it lands on the flower.  When that insect visits another plant's flower, this same reproductive structure, combining both pollen-producing and pollen-receiving functions, then snatches the pollinia from that insect and fertilizes itself.  (If I didn't get that quite right, I hope some botanist who reads this will correct me.)



After a while, it started to get pretty hot in that bog, and I had neglected to bring any water, so I was extra delighted to find lots of sweet juicy Highbush Blueberries getting ripe.

There were water-filled Pitcher Plants here and there, but I don't think I would want to drink that water, filled as it was with the insects trapped by the slippery sides of the plant's tubular pitcher.

This Monarch Butterfly could drink the nectar out of the Common Milkweed flowers by sipping it through its proboscis.  I couldn't quench my thirst that way, although I could certainly drink in this milkweed's delicious fragrance.

Orchids in Their Glory

Kind of chilly and damp today.  A good day to check out the bog where hundreds of Grass Pink orchids grow, now that friends have been reporting them from other sites.  I won't say exactly where this bog is, since I have to cross private property without permission to get to it.  But aside from making me feel a bit sneaky while trespassing, it's the easiest bog I've ever accessed or walked on.   You just slip through  a hedge, and there before you lie orchids as far as the eye can see.

I just couldn't stop taking photos.

I'd hoped to find at least some budding stalks of another orchid, the White Fringed Orchis, that also blooms profusely in this same bog.  Not a trace of them yet.  But then I remembered I'd found them before when the Highbush Blueberries were ripe enough to fall into my hands at a touch.  The blueberries today were a long way from being that ripe.  Oh, how I love the colors of unripe blueberries, those pale aqua spheres topped with rose and lime ruffles.

There were Lowbush Blueberries and Black Huckleberries, too, with only a few ripe fruits here and there.  While hunting for at least a small handful, I noticed these odd little velvety puffs on many of the leaves. (I can't recall now if the growths occurred on the blueberry or huckleberry shrubs or both.)

I've seen blueberry stem galls before that look like red berries, but these growths were only on the leaves, and rather than being solid hard berry-like galls, they were hollow underneath, as I could see when I turned the leaf over.

How odd!  Almost all the low berry shrubs were affected.  I hope it doesn't affect the quality of the fruit, which I hope to enjoy when I return in two weeks or so to find those White Fringed Orchids.