The Week in Wildflowers

Enough with the bad news! No more moaning about disease or deforestation.  Let's just look at the flowers now showing up in various local woods.  The weather has been very changeable, from balmy warm to windy cold to driving rain to even a brief snow shower, with every night consistently cold, the temps dropping into the 30s.  But "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower" has not let up, no matter the daily weather, so that every day I go out I find something new.

A week ago, I found  the Leatherwood flowers had broken through their furry buds to dangle small yellow trumpets in the Skidmore Woods.

The forest floor at Skidmore is green with sedges, including this narrow-leaved, early-blooming one, with its tousled head of yellow stamens and wispy little white threads of pistillate flowers lower down on the stem.

The hepatica festival is in full swing now in the Skidmore woods, where I found both round-lobed and sharp-lobed species, their flowers displaying most of the lovely colors this wildflower is known to bloom in. I thought this one was particularly remarkable because its whitish sepals were edged with deep pink.  The more common color scheme for hepatica blooms is for the colored sepals to be edged with whitish "haloes."

Here was one of the round-lobed hepaticas displaying blooms of a lovely rich purple.

This pristinely white hepatica was blooming a few days ago at Orra Phelps Nature Preserve in Wilton.

I found this next hepatica just yesterday, Easter Sunday, at the Ballston Creek Preserve. It looks as if it couldn't make up its mind whether to produce white flowers or purple ones, so it compromised by producing white ones brushed with purple.  Lovely!

I had gone to the Ballston Creek Preserve to see if the Carolina Spring Beauties were carpeting the forest floor there.  I certainly was not disappointed! Thousands of them, each new cluster of pink-striped blooms more lovely than the last.

There were also thousands of Trout Lily's mottled green leaves all over the woods at Ballston Creek, but of all those thousands of plants, only a single one was bearing a flower.  Just wait, though.  Soon there will be a sea of these lovely yellow blooms, I imagine. Although I know that most plants never seem to bloom.

As I left the woods at Ballston Creek and came out onto a sunlit verge, there I saw a splendid  profusion of Bloodroot in bloom right next to the road.  What an incredibly beautiful flower, with pristine white petals arrayed symmetrically around a sunburst of golden stamens. A perfect flower to chance upon at Easter, its radiant bloom like a glorious ALLELUIA!!! made visible.

This last flower, which I found at the Orra Phelps Nature Preserve in Wilton, made me want to shout "Alleluia!" myself.  For this is the first of our native violets to bloom.  And I dearly love violets.  This vividly lemon-yellow one is the Round-leaved Violet, and it opens wide its flowers before its leaves have even unfurled.  Note that this yellow violet has basal leaves only.

We have another native yellow violet called Downy Yellow Violet, but that one has flowers of a paler hue, and its leaves grow from the same stems as the flowers. It also blooms later in spring than this one does.  But all these early bloomers are sharing a single message -- that the wildflower season is  now upon us in earnest.  As I said before:  Alleluia!

Is It Legal to Denude a Riverside Hill?

Another lovely day of blue skies and warm sun.  Since every day now is like a weekend day, with kids and their parents home from school and work, I guessed that every park and nature trail would be kind of crowded.  So I chose to bushwhack down to the Hudson River through a trail-less woods at the end of Potter Road in Moreau. The river here runs back behind an island and in and around little bays and rocky promontories.  Very pretty! And very serene today.

After checking to see if a patch of Trailing Arbutus I knew of might be blooming now atop some boulders  (they weren't), I decided to walk downstream toward the Sherman Island Dam, sidestepping soggy spots and pushing through shrubby thickets.  I knew of a spot where Leatherwood grew and I wanted to see how close it was to blooming.  But I never got there.  My way was definitely impeded.


Gosh, look at all these fallen trees! Did a straight-line wind come barreling through here and topple all these trees in the same direction?  That was my first thought.

But then I saw that it wasn't a wind that toppled these trees. They had been toppled by human hands wielding a chainsaw.

The entire steep bank to within a few dozen yards to the river had been denuded of trees, many of them large mature trees.  Now, why would anybody do that?  Wouldn't deforesting a bank as steep as this and so close to the water contribute to destabilizing the bank and cause the erosion of soil and the polluting of the river?

The bank was so steep I had to crawl on hands and knees and pull myself up by grasping at saplings.  When I made it to the top of the bank and onto level ground, I saw that even more trees had been cut down up here.

When I turned, I saw I was close to a house.  I wondered if now I was trespassing in their back yard. Did these homeowners own this property all the way to the river?  I had thought the banks and adjoining forested lands were controlled and managed by National Grid, the power company that operates the two hydroelectric dams (Spier Falls and Sherman Island) at each end of this river catchment.

When I turned and looked back down the bank, I could see all the way to the river and the mountains beyond through the now-thinned forest. Was it possible these homeowners were clearing the woods from their house to the river so that they would have a better view?  Would this be legal? Did they need a permit to do so? Would such a project require an environmental impact review?

I am trying now to reach the power company and ask them about this deforestation project.  I hope they can answer my questions.

UPDATE: After many attempts, I finally reached a representative from the power company, who told me that the company had sold all the property they owned along the river in this catchment.  This person did not know who owned the land, suggesting I contact the Moreau town administration to find out.  But the town offices are now closed for the duration of this pandemic, so my queries will go unanswered for the time being. And why should I bother to pursue this issue? Nothing can be done about it now, even if the tree-cutting occurred on land that did not belong to the adjacent property owner. 

Considering the much greater problems we are all facing right now, I must just let this one go.   But I can't help grieving the loss of all these mature trees for no good reason, especially since mature trees are among our greatest defenses against climate change.  As I look around the housing development that has grown up along this part of the river, I see little evidence that these homeowners are particularly concerned about environmental issues, anyway. When I first started exploring this area over 20 years ago, I approached it along a dirt road where giant trees spread their canopy over the road from the forest that closed in on either side.  All those trees and the roadside forests were sacrificed when the road was paved and building lots were cleared.  Dozens of houses were built, and the people who came to live in those houses have cleared whatever remained of the forest to plant large lawns of turf grass, monocultures that require pesticides and weedkillers to maintain, plus the release of many hydrocarbons from all the power equipment used to mow the useless grass.  Makes me wonder why people move to the woods, only to destroy it.

All Is Not Well With (Some of) the Violets

Sadly, I found more evidence this week that all is not right with the world. For more than 20 years, I have been visiting a patch of white English Violets (Viola odorata var. alba) that grow along a woodland trail in the Skidmore woods in Saratoga Springs. These lovely pure-white, purple-spurred, exquisitely fragrant violets are very early bloomers, so I imagined they might be blooming already. And indeed they were. But most of their petals were shredded, having been eaten by some pest I could not see. Never in all the years I've been visiting these violets have I seen any insect damage to the flowers. It seems that some new threat is stalking the violets in these woods, just as this new and terrible virus is stalking the humans of this world. Alas! I did not need another omen of disease right now.

Here's an old photo of an English Violet when healthy and intact, with a pristine white face that shows no trace of dark veining, although it does have a purple spur.

And here's what these violets looked like today, with petals and leaves shredded by some creature feeding on them. I can only hope it was some desirable creature like a butterfly larva that's been feasting here, but I wonder why they never feasted here in years past. I know that Fritillary larvae feed on violets, but I do not recall ever seeing a Fritillary flying about these woods this early in spring.

After grieving this larval damage to the white variety of English Violets, I went over to the other side of the Skidmore campus, where I knew of a patch of the purple ones that grow along Daniels Road. How delighted I was to find them thriving undamaged and in full bloom!   I could find no sign of any larvae having fed on either flowers or leaves. What a gorgeous deep-purple these violets are! And as fragrant as they are beautiful.

Since these violets grow wild by the side of the road, where they are being encroached upon by masses of Garlic Mustard, I felt no guilt about picking a small nosegay to bring home to perfume my kitchen.  (I also weeded back a considerable swath of that Garlic Mustard.)  Considering how this wee little bouquet filled my car with their scent in just a few seconds, I can imagine that the Victorian ladies who once lived at this very site might have cultivated this violet species for the sole purpose of their fragrance.

Apparently, these violets are just as tasty as they are fragrant -- or at least they were to my cat, who promptly leapt on the table and began to chew on them.  To protect my little bouquet, I had to cover it with a glass. I lift the glass now and then to release that glorious perfume. 

Okay, this violet is not a native species.  And I am a native-wildflower snob. So shouldn't I regard it with disdain?  But oh, it's so lovely, and oh my gosh, that fragrance!  And while it's non-native, I've never really experienced it as invasive.  So who could resent its presence?

Rare Find in the Woods

Can't go to the movies, can't go out to eat, can't visit my friends or hug my grandkids or go to church, but I can still go for a walk in the woods, as long as I walk alone. And what a treat I found in the woods this week: the adorably tiny Snow Trillium (Trillium nivale). 

The native range of this miniature trillium species does not extend into New York State, but a naturalist planted some in her own woods many years ago, and they have continued to persist and even thrive. This very early bloomer lives up to its name by daring to bloom very early, sometimes while snow still lies deep in the shady hollows of the woods. 

Don't ask me to tell you where I go to visit this beautiful little flower. The site could be the only place it grows in all of New York State, although it is known to carpet the woodlands in states further south and west.  Many, many fewer specimens grow at this location.  Sadly, I have caught poachers illegally digging up other plants from this woods, so I am grateful the Snow Trillium population here has as yet remained intact.

Out and About. All Alone

I really can't complain.  I am safe at home and have everything I need:  a roof over my head, hot and cold running water, a clean warm bed, plenty of food in the pantry and freezer, a house-full of books,  computer and cable TV and Netflix, a cat for my lap, a husband by my side, and a telephone to connect with our kids and grandkids, every one of whom is still healthy.  I even have plenty of toilet paper!  What I don't have, though, are my nature buddies to join me out in the woods, since we're all "social distancing" from anyone not already in our households.  And until today, when the sun shone at last, a series of cold rainy days has not exactly urged me to get outdoors.  But I did go out.  Alone.

One place I went was the Ballston Creek Preserve, a many-acred woodland bordering a swamp a few miles south of Ballston Spa.  It's a good thing I wore my waterproof boots, since the trails were pretty soggy.  We've had a LOT of rain!

I was hoping to visit the colony of Great Blue Herons that have nested here for many years, building their giant nests in the many snags that stand in the swamp that is watered by Ballston Creek.  But no sign of them yet this year.  And most of their nests are gone or blown to tatters.  Oh dear!  Little by little this colony has diminished over the past few years.  I wonder if they will not return at all this year.  There used to be Ospreys here, too, as well as a Great Horned Owl. But not anymore.

Well, THAT hardly cheered me up!  Thankfully, there were a few other things to delight in as I made my muddy way back to my car.  This fallen log colonized by colorful fungi and lichens was a happy sight to see.

And here was a lovely green abundance of both moss (Anomodon minor) and liverwort (Porella sp.) sharing the living bark of a standing tree.

I also found a dead twig dotted with tiny Split Gill Fungi only about a quarter inch across.  This is a pretty fungus that is even prettier viewed from underneath.

Today the sun shone bright and warm all day, so the trails through the Skidmore woods here in Saratoga Springs were dry and passable.  And I found a SECOND hepatica in bloom, this one of the round-lobed species, Hepatica americana.

What an enchanting flower, with its explosion of stamens surrounding a green hedgehog of pistils, and such a beautiful shade of purple!

I found no more hepaticas blooming yet, nor any other wildflower.  But I did find the buds on the Leatherwood shrubs quite swollen and covered with fur.  So it won't be long before the scales part to release the small yellow trumpets packed within.

As I strolled along through the sunlit woods, that sunlight caused this moss-covered boulder to glow a beautiful green and picked out a generous patch of Walking Fern that spread across the top.

A closer view of that Walking Fern reveals how the tips of its long skinny fronds embed in the moss and cause new plants to sprout from the point of contact. This is how the fern "walks" across the face of the rock.

The warmth of the sun today inspired a number of early lepidoptera to flutter about the woods.  Having wintered-over as an adult, this Mourning Cloak Butterfly looked a little worse for wear.  I wonder if a foraging bird had nibbled its wings as it hid under bark or leaf litter during the winter. At least it still had enough left of its wings to take to the air today. I couldn't get any closer than this before the butterfly wafted away.

The  Eastern Comma is another butterfly that winters over as an adult and frequently can be seen fluttering about the woods on the first warm days of early spring.  I first spotted this one flashing its bright-orange wings some distance away, but it disappeared as I approached it, perfectly camouflaged where it landed among the dead leaves. My nearing footfalls caused it to take to the air once more, and lucky for me, it landed on this twig where I could see it perfectly, even after it closed its colorful wings to become nearly invisible.  I could certainly see it well enough to detect the diagnostic white "comma" on its underwing.  The almost-identical Question Mark Butterfly would have a white dot near the comma.

At first, I thought I was "seeing things."  I kept detecting some motion just above the leaf litter, but I could see nothing but leaves when I turned to look.  Must be the wind, I thought.  But there was no wind in the woods today.  I turned to go, but suddenly I sensed that motion again!  This time I bent near the ground and searched,  and this time I saw the moth! Oh ho, how well camouflaged you are, little Common Oak Moth!  And in such perfect condition.  That's because this moth has only recently emerged from its wintering-over pupa, just in time to lay eggs on oak trees so its larvae can start feeding on the leaves as they bud out.

I was glad to read later that the Common Oak Moth larvae don't cause much damage to the trees. Now I can be genuinely happy I saw this moth today, just one of the signs that life is once again re-emerging in the woods. I need to cling to that hopeful thought as we go through these stressful times.

Draba verna: A Favorite Little "Weed"

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!

Scary Times, Nature's Comforts

It's almost as if a neutron bomb has gone off downtown.  The buildings still stand, the shop windows full of merchandise, but except for a few dog-walkers, all of the people that normally throng the sidewalks  of Saratoga Springs are gone.  You could even find a parking place on Broadway!  In many ways, this Corona-virus pandemic and its consequent order to "shelter in place" hasn't changed my husband's and my life much at all, except that our dinner-and-a-movie date-night out has become a take-out and Netflix-movie-night in. Both of us are retired, anyway, and each of us enjoys solitary activities, my husband reading his books, and I going out to the woods to walk alone. And yet, everything has changed.  People the whole world over are facing the very same threat, and none of us knows how long the danger will last, or if we will ever go back to things the way they used to be.  Or even if we should.  Could it be that Mother Earth has fallen ill from all the ways we have abused her, and this virus is like her immune response trying to heal herself from human infection? Or just her out-of-patience demand that we go to our rooms and STAY THERE!

Strange and scary times, indeed! And so I have sought to comfort myself the way I know best, by heading to the woods and the waterways. Usually alone. But sometimes with a friend.

Last Wednesday, my pal Sue and I met to wander Moreau Lake State Park, agreeing to keep at least a six-foot distance between us. The day was sunny but cold, but we were delighted to see that the lake was mostly free from ice. There were ducks out there that looked interesting (this being migration time), but all kept their distance too far from us to determine what species they were with any certainty.  In this photo, Sue is watching a Spotted Salamander wriggle out of view beneath an underwater leaf.

Soon we left the lakeshore and headed up the nearby mountain, following a stream that bounded from boulder to boulder. See how responsible we were, not standing close enough to share any possible germs, Sue on one side of the stream, I on the other.

I have read that turbulent water like that found near waterfalls, rushing streams, and crashing waves is actually health-promoting, producing negative ions in the surrounding air that somehow help us heal. (Here's an article about this effect.)  I certainly love how such rushing water looks and sounds, and thus can attest to how it promotes my happiness, so why shouldn't it also promote good health?

Except for some budding shoots of Plantain-leaved Sedge, we found no evidence of spring flowers about to emerge.  But I found the lovely shapes and colors of these wintered-over Foamflower leaves a heartening testament to this species' ability to endure unscathed through the harshest of winters.

Saturday stayed quite chilly despite a high sun beating down out of a cloudless sky.  But this rainbow of colors along the Spring Run Trail in Saratoga  -- red-twigged dogwood, yellow-branched willows, green conifers, deep-blue sky -- certainly indicated that the season was definitely Spring.

And if I needed further and even more definite proof of Spring, here it was!  Masses of Coltsfoot lifted their bright-yellow sunbursts of bloom from out of the dead-leaf litter along the trail.

Yet one more emblematic sign of Spring:  silvery puffs of Pussywillow gleaming against that blue, blue sky.

And here on a fallen log along Spring Run Trail, I once again found a testament to nature's ability not just to revive but also to endure: This brilliantly colored fungus called Cinnabar Polypore had made it through at least one winter (and possibly more) without losing any of its intense orange-red color. I turned one small piece of it over, in order to display the richness and depth of its saturated hue.

We had a balmy day or two this past week, but Sunday was not one of them.  I'd heard reports that the Spring Peepers and Wood Frogs were trilling and croaking (respectively) from the still-ice-ringed ponds in the Skidmore woods here in Saratoga. Of course, I just had to go out there to celebrate the return of this froggy chorus.  But not a peep nor a croak did I hear.  Was this day too cold for them to poke their heads above water? Ah well, another day! And meanwhile, I went looking to see if the Sharp-lobed Hepatica that thrives in this woods was showing any signs of new growth.  The deep-red of their leathery wintering-over leaves made their presence easy to spot.

And look!  Some pinky-purple hepatica blooms were peeking out from their furry bracts.  I bet if the day had been just a bit warmer, these flowers would have opened wide to show their pretty faces to the sun.

Well, if hepatica blooms were almost open, might I find Snow Trillium already up at Orra Phelps Nature Preserve in Wilton? This is a super-early bloomer, often thrusting up from just-thawed soil while snow still lies deep in the hollows.  Since Saratoga County is well out of the native range for this more-southerly tiny trillium, this preserve is the only place in all the state where we are likely to see them, since Orra herself once planted them here, and they have happily thrived. But not yet this year, I soon discovered, when I hurried to the spot where I usually find them.  And yet, I was happy to wander along the pretty stream that meanders through this preserve, delighting to note that all the snow is now gone from the woods.

Ah, but that wintry cold still lingered on icicle-festooned banks along the stream!

And then THIS happened today!  So much for signs of Spring!