Month: April 2020

This week in the woods, the prairie trilliums opened in rapid succession, flowers that had been closed for weeks taking turns over the course of a few days, sepals recoiling to expose the inward-arching petals within, streaks of blood splashing up from the bases of the leaves. The flowers give the impression of having snapped into maturity. They transform so suddenly from three green sepals pressed tight along the seams that join them to fully open with sepals sharply reflexed. I had imagined that turgor pressure built up in the sepals and caused them to snap open, akin to the increasing potential energy in the “crane’s bills” that fling seeds from wild geranium flowers when they are ripe. And in fact the Flora of North America treatment reports that the sepals are “strongly recurved basally and held against [the] scape by turgor pressure.” Thus my first impression in walking through the woods this year, supported by this picture I had in my mind and by the general sense that the flowers did, in fact, appear to mature so suddenly, was of colonies of prairie trillium popping into flower all through the woods over the course of a few days.

My impulse to render the world as a collection of machines that operate by simple rules is, of course, generally undermined by the actual complexity. Having imagined the prairie trilliums this way, over the past few days I started looking more closely and found that everything is more gradual than I thought. To be fair: there is a sort of determinacy about the flowering. Once started on their way the sepals are not easily bent back into place around the petals; and before they reflex, they cannot easily be forced into their final position beneath the flower. Walking through the woods, though, I find not a series of flowers in one of two states—open vs. closed—but these states plus a full range of gradation between them. I found in a single colony a plant with sepals cupped and just beginning to separate from one another, the streak of blood within showing v-like between the sepal margins; another with the bend just forming a few millimeters from the base of the three sepals, which are dialed back about half-way; and another with the sepals reflexed all the way back toward the scape, the bend crimped. So much for a binary world.

The rain and warmth have moved everything along. Jack-in-the-pulpit is spearing its way through the sheet of fallen maple and oak leaves, some individuals still entirely sheathed, others just breaking open and starting to spread their foliage. Near the east entrance of the woods are slender spikes that give the appearance of sweating in the morning sun. I found one small plant flowering Monday. I spread the hood open carefully to see what the gender was. The plant was staminate (male), the spadix densely packed with exposed stamens. As I leaned in to get a photo, a slender, long-legged fly of some kind pulled itself out over my index finger. Then, a moment later, a second emerged. Perhaps they were just resting for the night, or maybe they were trysting. In a few moments they were gone.

The staminate cottonwood aments that the warblers had been feeding on late last week started to fall over the weekend, and the trails were littered with their gummy bud scales and caterpillar-fat ropes of fertile stamens. Basswood buds opened. Looking across the woods now, you see expansive lawns of false mermaid as green and light and alive as the fresh lawns of C.S. Lewis’s world-between-the-worlds. Chokecherries in the shrub layer are fully leafed out and dark green. Above them, at eye-level, the branch-tips of sugar maple and ironwood saplings bear young leaves that drape like butterflies’ wings emerged from the chrysalis, filling with spring rain. Poison ivy leaves have split open into distinct leaflets. Ash leaves are opening.

Jewelweed leaves have overtopped the cotyledons, and the second pair of leaves has begun to emerge from between the first. Soon the cotyledons will yellow and wither. Jumpseed leaves are purpling. Annual bedstraw has overtopped the duff and its longest leaf blades are nearly the length of my pinky. Wood nettles are coming up and arching conversationally, already bristling with urticating hairs. But they are soft enough that I can twist them in my hand to be sure of what I am looking at. Leaves of white rattlesnakeroot have become fully formed while I was not watching. Spears of what I believe must be white baneberry are dark and rubbery like kelp. Blue cohosh leaves have filled in, even on most of the taller flowering plants whose leaves were limp or more or less folded a week earlier. It looks as though every last bloodroot flower petal has fallen. The tipmost leaves are unrolling on false Solomon’s seal.

On the true Solomon’s seal, floral buds have emerged from the leaf axils. Wood anemone, rue anemone, false rue anemone, and bristly buttercup are still in flower, and wild ginger has come into full flower along the trails and in a few patches in the woods. Most of the ginger flowers, however, are little more than pubescent thickenings nestled between the leaves. Wild geranium floral blooms are developing. Wood’s sedge is showier than you will see it at any other time of the year, and perigynia are starting to ripen on Sprengel’s sedge. Hairy sedge is just coming into flower. A sedge I am inclined to call Carex gracilescens is in flower. The very first spikes are forming on straight-styled wood sedge. Toothwort is near the end of blooming: already individual plants have begun forming siliques.

The black-throated green warblers and red-eyed vireos appear to have blown in Monday night; that same night, a busload of white-throated sparrows arrived to join the ones who were already here. The woods are filled with ruby-crowned kinglet songs. Winter wrens are gleaning insects in the rotting logs and singing their long, winding songs that tangle up in the hardening leaves. I hardly notice the yellow-rumped warblers any longer. I wonder whether many of them escaped before the newcomers arrived. Spring peepers are still calling from the pond downslope from the Avery Coonley School.

Early Wednesday morning, Rachel and I sat downstairs with Brooklyn and read, listening to the robins chuckle and the rain percussing the mayapple leaves. We became aware of the lisping of white-throated sparrows in the garden, and then intermittent songs. Two had flown into the oak leaf hydrangeas outside our window and were stalking in the foliage and the ditch we’d dug around the garden. They sang and moved around close enough for us to watch, then the rain came on heavier. By 8:00, everyone was quiet, even the robins. The rain let up, and Brooklyn I walked out past the wetland behind the grade school. There, the American toads were singing, the first I’ve heard yet this year.

Later that day, Rachel and Louis went to pick up a book order we had placed at Anderson’s. It was like Christmas, and Louis brought my book up to me. I had purchased The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane to read with a colleague. I had manuscripts to work on, though I would have happily spent the day in bed reading. Instead, I read just the Author’s Note before returning to my work:

This book could not have been written by sitting still. The relationship between paths, walking and the imagination is its subject, and much of its thinking was therefore done—was only possible—while on foot…. Above all, this is a book about people and place: about walking as a reconnoitre inwards, and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move.

As I lie down at night and the clamor inside my mind subsides, what drifts through is landscapes, trails and hollows, slender caverns opening in the snow alongside a log, excavations of ants, footpaths, the disintegrating bole of a tree where Cribraria grew last year, the procession of prairie trillium flowers. I’m certain Rachel and the boys and I—all of us—will be changed by this landscape through which we are moving. For now, I’m grateful the toads are back. They’re about a week or two later than I expected, and I half-feared they wouldn’t return this year.

Plants referenced

• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Actaea pachypoda – white baneberry
• Anemone quinquefolia – wood anemone
• Arisaema triphyllum – Jack-in-the-pulpit
• Asarum canadense – wild ginger
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Caulophyllum thalictroides – blue cohosh
• Carex gracilescens
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge
• Carex radiata – straight-styled wood sedge
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge
• Carex woodii – Wood’s sedge
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Fraxinus sp. – ash
• Galium aparine – annual bedstraw
• Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
• Impatiens sp. – jewelweed
• Laportea canadensis – wood nettle
• Maianthemum racemosum – false Solomon’s seal
• Nabalus albus – white rattlesnakeroot
• Ostrya virginiana – ironwood
• Persicaria virginiana – jumpseed
• Polygonatum biflorum – Solomon’s seal
• Populus deltoides – cottonwood
• Prunus virginiana – chokecherry
• Ranunculus hispidus – bristly buttercup
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Thalictrum thalictroides – rue anemone
• Tilia americana – basswood
• Toxicodendron radicans – poison ivy
• Trillium recurvatum – prairie trillium

Brooklyn and I arrived at Maple Grove on Friday morning to find a workman spraying Roundup in the St Joseph Creek floodplain. I asked him if he was spraying for Ficaria. It is beautiful, but invasive: I’ve seen it taking over in the neighborhood where it has become established. Yes, he said, they fight against it all the time. It’s flooding in from all sides. We talked about Japanese stiltgrass and Japanese knotweed, which they also control. I’d have talked to him for much longer, but he had work to do. I was caught between cheering and mourning.

Large-flowered bellwort blooms appear to have shaken themselves out from their enclosing foliage sometime on Thursday. I first noticed the species on the 9th, and when I did, the anthers were peeking around the edges of the leaves. Undoubtedly the plants were up several days earlier, cryptic only in the sense that I hadn’t noticed them, or hadn’t been paying attention; very little is unidentifiable, but there is always a great deal that has not yet been recognized or noticed, often growing right beneath our noses. The flowers are excessively demure, borne at the tip of a plant bowing so deeply that its flowers never have a chance to open upright. The petals descend and twist, concealing everything, eyes cast downward, considering their options right until the dance is over, and then the flowers wither and you find they are ripening. The whole plant is a bit understated like this. If I have any excuse for not noting it here in the first week of April, this is it.

The bloody petals of prairie trillium have been popping into view. They are mostly still closed, but I noticed my first one in flower on Friday. But Rachel and a colleague of mine saw flowering prairie trilliums at Maple Grove earlier in the week. In full flower, the sepals are strongly reflexed, aimed downward like the petals on a prairie shooting star. I believe—perhaps “imagine” is more correct—that during the weeks in which the flower is developing, turgor builds within the closed sepals, which snap open when they cross a threshold. I have found plenty of flowers with petals peeking out between gaps in the sepals, a bend developing at the base of the calyx over the course of two and a half to three weeks, at the point where the sepals will be crimped at maturity. I have found nothing intermediate between this stage and fully open. This week might be a good time to mark one or two to follow. The nodding trillium flowers are still completely closed, so we might as well keep an eye on them as well.

The downy yellow violets came into flower this week. They are overlapping with the flowering wood violets. The few that I found seem very short, leading me to wonder whether (1) the trailside downy yellow violets that I have watched in past years, mostly on my walks through the East Woods, are on average taller and branchier than violets growing in the middle of the woods; or (2) downy yellow violets continue to put on millimeters after they flower. Both seem plausible to me, but as I look through my photos of this species, which are not many, I am betting on the second. Based on my photos from last year, I’m also betting on three weeks to fruiting and about a month after that till the capsules dehisce, opening like miniature peapods.

Sugar maple leaves, which opened to become reasonable just one week ago on the smallest samplings, are opening now on midstory trees of a few inches diameter and twenty or so feet tall. Black elderberry leaves are branching and becoming recognizable. Jewelweed leaves are surpassing the cotyledons. Poison ivy petioles are stretching out, and the leaflets are spreading. Solomon’s seal and false Solomon’s seal leaves are continuing to fill out and diverge. False mermaid, ever the star of the spring understory show, is up to six inches tall and branching, bright green, with leaflets in some places nearly as broad as a pencil eraser. The plants are as lush as I believe I have ever seen. It is blanketing the woods, thick as a down comforter but skeletal, a duvet in the making. What is it in this creepy spring that makes the false mermaid so happy? Perhaps the early warmth, ample rain. They’re getting what they need.

And Sprengel’s sedge, in one twenty-four hour day, went from producing closed spikes to fully flowering. Wood’s sedge and bristly buttercup are now flowering throughout the woods. The sporophyte capsules on woodsy thyme moss look fat enough to pop with a stick pin. This should be a perfect Sunday for a walk in the woods.

Plants referenced

• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge
• Carex woodii – Wood’s sedge
• Ficaria verna – lesser celandine
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Impatiens capensis, I. pallida – jewelweed
• Maianthemum racemosum – false Solomon’s seal
• Microstegium vimineum – Japanese stiltgrass
• Plagiomnium cuspidatum – woodsy thyme moss
• Polygonatum biflorum – Solomon’s seal
• Ranunculus hispidus – bristly buttercup
• Reynoutria japonica – Japanese knotweed
• Sambucus canadensis – black elderberry
• Toxicodendron radicans – poison ivy
• Trillium flexipes – nodding trillium
• Trillium recurvatum – prairie trillium
• Uvularia grandiflora – large-flowered bellwort
• Viola pubescens – downy yellow violet
• Viola sororia – wood violet

Monday morning, frost was baking off of the honeysuckle leaves and lawn grass. But sunlight was hitting the canopies squarely, and at 7:00 a.m. Maple Grove was alive with birds. A brown creeper worked his way through the canopy of a cottonwood that was packed with flowers at the entrance to the preserve. Red-bellied woodpeckers and yellow-rumped warblers were calling from every direction. Robins were warbling, chickadees feebeeing, a blue jay screaming from off toward the yards at the west edge of the woods. Red-winged blackbirds seemed to be particularly energized, invigorated by the combination of cool and bright sunshine, stamping their feet and shouting at one another from the marsh below the Avery Coonley School, where teachers weren’t prepping their rooms and students weren’t starting to arrive for morning activities. The birds were going about their lives.

An ash tree that had been excavated by a pileated woodpecker three weeks earlier was fallen over, snapped off in the gully left by the woodpecker. False mermaid formed a green haze through much of the woods. Why is it in one spot, but absent in another? Twenty years ago, I would have said, disturbance, for I learned the plant on an old quarried slope in Madison. But now I am not so sure, for even beneath the maple leaves where there seems to be little disruption, it germinates and grows up through the litter to form a carpet. Mayapple leaves were the size of dessert plates. Bloodroot flowers were almost all gone, perhaps a fifth of them left, the rest with leaves spreading open to collect summer sun, butterfly wings swelling and hardening in the minutes after they leave the chrysalis, when they are at their most vulnerable. The maple seedlings were festooned with palmate leaves opening to the sky, ready to get to work, impatient for summer.

Poodle moss was pilling like an old sweater on the bases of the white oaks. New growth was massing up at the tips of the shoots. Ironwood leaves were as long as the distal joint of my index finger. Poison ivy petioles were hairy and tipped with tiny leaves ribbed like Ernst Haeckel’s embryos. Rue anemone was blooming. A skein of downy feathers was tangled up with broken dried oak leaves and strewn across the forest floor. Perhaps they had blown out of a nest. Perhaps the whole nest had blown out of a tree.

Wood’s sedge and Pennsylvania sedge were in full flower, and the inflorescence spikes of Sprengel’s sedge were just appearing, silvery in the morning sun. Clumps of what I believe to be eastern few-fruited sedge were shedding over the edge of a ditch margin. Their red bases are as distinctive I think as those of Wood’s sedge, but more slender, more rust-colored. They are perhaps orange; I’m no good with the names of colors, nor even the colors of colors, but I think I’ve got this one locked into my mind now. I’ll be watching this colony over the coming months.

The next morning, Brooklyn and I arrived at 8:00 instead of 7:00, and the woods were mostly quiet. Wild ginger flowers were developing at the bases of the plants, as big around as marbles, with a small pore opening at the tip. The wild garlic was up to the middle of my calves. There was one last bloodroot flower. There was a sparse colony of Pennsylvania sedge in textbook flowering condition, behaving just as you would think a flowering sedge should, if you think at all about flowering sedges. The spring beauty flowers were fading and the leaves had grown bitter. Blue cohosh were mostly tall and flowering with leaves still folded; or short and not flowering with leaves fully expanded, ready for the canopy to close. It seems the cohosh chooses what battle to wage right now: starting a family, or photosynthesizing. You can’t be great at everything, can you?

At the southwest edge of the woods, where I’d seen the scattering of feathers the morning before, a thrush I had noticed one week earlier hopped across the road. I watched it for perhaps 10 minutes this time. It moved to the base of a tree and stood. It straddled a log and turned away from me, then back to me. It moved up into a shrub, then back to the forest floor. With enough watching and a few poor photos, I concluded it wasn’t a veery, as I had thought the week before, but a hermit thrush. And with close inspection of the photos, I thought it might be carrying an insect of some kind in its bill. It’s reassuring to know where I can go to see a hermit thrush. I hope he’s there next time I visit.

Wednesday, Brooklyn and I stuck to the neighborhood. There were clouds, and it was 40F, and there had been some drizzle, and mostly we just heard flickers and house sparrows and perhaps the robins, I couldn’t tell for sure. Brooklyn had found an old tattered tennis ball in the school yard a couple of blocks into our walk and was thoroughly content. I was thinking about a conversation from the previous day, and one Rachel and I had had earlier in the morning, both centered around the question of what we’ll retain from this time. What habits will we hold onto five years from now? How will we be doing things differently? And how much will we just relax to our old ways as soon as things are back to normal? I wasn’t paying much attention.

So when we passed a home and saw a woman inside, knocking on the window, waving at me, and at the same moment Brooklyn stood dead in her tracks and bristled, I did not know what to think. The woman looked as though she wanted to say hello. I wondered if something was wrong. And why was Brooklyn agitated? Then I saw out of the corner of my eye a red fox trotting westward on the sidewalk across the road, a squirrel clamped in its mouth, lying crossways in its jaws, limp. I looked at the woman again, and she shrugged. What do you make of something like that? she seemed to ask, and I could not tell if she was worried, troubled, delighted, uncertain. I turned back to the fox, which by now was already 50 or 100 feet down the block, moving steady, right down the center of the sidewalk, neither turning toward the yard nor stopping, not slowing at the crossroad. I gave the woman a big thumbs up, to tell her, It’s okay, to signify that we had both really seen the same thing. She smiled at me with what I imagined to be either solidarity or relief.

Brooklyn and I followed the fox for about three blocks, but we did not run to keep up, and the fox did not waver, and then at some point the fox and its squirrel were gone. The people on our side of the road were adjusting their phones and chatting, and I did not know who had seen the fox. Perhaps only us and the lady in her house, and of course the squirrel, but a moment too late.

This morning, Rachel and I sat reading in the living room. I was reading the second chapter of Tim Dee’s Four Fields, and I read this passage aloud:

There were peregrines over the fields: even I sensed them, like a bee down my shirt the moment before it stings; and here was one now throwing down the grey anvil of itself through its prey, lowering all of the sky as it arrived, squeezing time into a tight ball and tripping up the light. Only then, but then obviously, did I see the meat in front of me. Thirty woodpigeons, just now stolid on the green, were smashed apart and directed hellwards, shell-shocked mad men grabbing at their dressing gowns as they rose in panic in their day room, pushing their chairs from under them in a clatter, always too slow and stupefied by the peregrine’s unavoidable terms and conditions. The falcon turned, looking as ever casual and at ease, and moved, an intensifier of the air, spinning the globe beneath it, from the grass field to the bare soil where the nervous golden plovers were now due their terror. The pigeons had splattered into the sky, as if hit from above, and dispersed…

We recognize in these words the drama that goes on all the time in the natural world while we are going about our lives. The habit of natural history is good for us because it reminds us of these parallel worlds. Are there naturalists among the birds, skulking around the neighborhoods to see what humans and their yards are doing? Have the squirrels of Maple Grove noticed how quiet the Avery Coonley School is?

This morning, the chipping sparrows and the white-throated sparrows were back in town, and the silver maples in the neighborhood were shedding developing samaras onto the sidewalk. In this way, at least, it is a spring like any other.

Plants referenced

• Acer saccharinum – silver maple
• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Allium canadense – wild garlic
• Anomodon attenuatus – poodle moss
• Asarum canadense – wild ginger
• Carex oligocarpa – eastern few-fruited sedge
• Carex pensylvanica – Pennsylvania sedge
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge
• Carex woodii – Wood’s sedge
• Caulophyllum thalictroides – blue cohosh
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Fraxinus sp. – ash
• Lonicera sp. – honeysuckle
• Ostrya virginiana – ironwood
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Populus deltoides – cottonwood
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Thalictrum thalictroides – rue anemone
• Toxicodendron radicans – poison ivy

Saturday morning, the false rue anemone flowers were a cleaner white than the melting snow that covered about three quarters of the Maple Grove forest floor. Brooklyn and I had walked from our house to see if we could find false mermaid in bloom. But all the nodding flowers I could find were clamped shut, the seams between the sepals raised like a bead of glue. They were perfect in form. Young nature is often like this, drawn with a fine-tipped brush in a steady hand. Old nature, by contrast, is ragged around the edges, made of rotting sugar maples and shredded evergreen sedge leaves, red oak acorns cracked open by a squirrel and left in a bed of mosses on a decomposing stump. I don’t favor one over the other. I love the range. It creates a space for your spirit to navigate. It gives the forest a long axis of variation that you can’t see in a single visit.

A brown creeper ratcheting upward on the bole of a red oak allowed me to get close enough to photograph it, even with a macro lens, the worst kind of lens for getting a bird at any distance. Creepers are moderately tolerant of people, not in my experience at all inquisitive, as I think the chickadee is, nor wary, as I take the ovenbirds to be. They seem to be simply unconcerned with people. So while I don’t see creepers as often I suspect I ought, I have gotten quite close to them on street trees and in the forest. This one worked his way carefully up the bark, cocking his head or rotating his entire body to get at insects in the furrows and under sheaves of bark. Nearby was a yellow-rumped warbler on the base of a sugar maple tree, the first I’d seen for the year but not, I think, the first I’d heard. Robins were flipping leaves in the understory. Cardinals, white-breasted nuthatches, red-bellied woodpeckers were calling. Ruby-crowned kinglets were singing in the bottoms along the west edge of the preserve, where the wide trail bends to the east and Brooklyn and I often debate momentarily whether to hike upward along the north-facing slope or follow the broad trail out into the neighborhoods, toward home.

Yellow violets were branching but still vegetative, beside wood violets that have been flowering since at least late last week. Jewelweed cotyledons ranged to the size of quarters, and on some plants the new foliage leaves were as long as the cotyledons, which they will soon eclipse. Flowers were starting to form nubbins at the bases of the wild ginger, where the leaves diverge and the scales are still visible on the exposed rhizomes. In our yard, they are a bit further along, and a clean pore is opening at the tips of the nascent flowers. A clean white root arched from the soil like the coil of a sea serpent. I gouged it out with my index finger and found it was connected to a trout lily that had been buried in the soil. I replanted it and hoped for the best. Prairie trillium bud scales were just separating so that the flowers could be seen inside; will they be open a week from now? Spikes were emerging on hairy sedge, no anthers or stigmas showing yet, and Pennsylvania sedge was in full bloom. An army of lily of the valley was putting out inflorescences at the south edge of the woods, near the parking lot, foliage rolled like paper cones.

Sunday morning, the yellow-rumped warblers were singing within 20 feet of the church lot where Rachel and I parked the car, and they accompanied us on our walk through the woods. They called from the canopy while Brooklyn was getting duckweed on her snout. They moved around low enough in the understory trees that we could get a glimpse of them while we were talking or looking at a prairie trillium ensnared in a dead oak leaf, which it had heaved off the ground but could not seem to get its leaves loose of. There were chickadees singing and red-bellied woodpeckers barking. A spring peeper sang for 20 seconds and then was quiet. Ruby-crowned kinglets declaimed in the shrubs filling in around the sloughs and ephemeral watercourses throughout Maple Grove. And the nodding floral buds of false mermaid were suddenly opening on the hilltop where three weeks ago a pileated woodpecker lured me into believing I might be able to watch him all summer long, while a winter wren gleaned insects from a rotting log.

At home, I read an email from an old friend. He had called me the first week of our shelter-in-place order, out of the blue, while I was in the woods with Brooklyn. He’s one of the best readers I know, and we’ve been corresponding a bit about natural history writing over the past month. In this last email, he recommended I look up Tim Dee. I found an excerpt from Dee’s Four Fields on Amazon and find it very close to how I think about things, and very clear. The second paragraph of this excerpt begins, “Throughout my life much of my happiness has come from being outside.” You couldn’t say it more directly than that. Dee goes on in the next paragraph:

Indoors, looked at from the field, seemed at best to be talk about life instead of life itself. Rather than living under the sun it fizzed – if it fizzed at all – parasitically or secondarily, with batteries, on printed pages, and in flickering images. I realised this around 1968 in my seven-year-old way. At the same time, however, I learned that I needed the indoor world to make the outdoors be something more than simply everything I wasn’t. I saw it was true that indoor talk helped the outdoor world come alive and could of itself be living and lovely, too. Words about birds made birds live as more than words.
…
Without fields – no us. Without us – no fields. So it has come to seem to me.

Indoor talk helped the outdoor world come alive. The passage reminded me of John Burroughs’ point about observation in “A Sharp Lookout”:

… it is with the thoughts and half thoughts that the walker gathers in the woods and fields, as with the common weeds and coarser wild flowers which he plucks for a bouquet, — wild carrot, purple aster, moth mullein, sedge, grass, etc.: they look common and uninteresting enough there in the fields, but the moment he separates them from the tangled mass, and brings them indoors, and places them in a vase, say of some choice glass, amid artificial things, — behold, how beautiful!

We’re all stuck talking about the world, and we hold the world at arm’s length when we do it. But in so doing, in grinding the world through our minds, we imbue it with beauty. We stop participating in the world, but when we do, we can see that the world is itself a participant in beauty. The joy of beauty is a joy that is uniquely ours as humans. Words about birds make birds live as more than words.

This past week, robins have been building a nest on top of an air conditioning unit built into the wall of our back room, one that hasn’t worked for at least 6 years but that at least for now we’re glad we didn’t remove, for the sake of having robins to watch. We have dismantled our old rotting compost heaps and distributed the compost among the garden beds, giving the garlic and onions something to smile about. This week we’ll pitch the rest into the driveway and sort it into the burnable, the pilable, the spread-over-the-soilable, and the scraps of plastic bag and lost-and-decomposing workgloves that we’ll relegate to the landfill.

As I write this, the sun has just gone down. Robins are singing in the neighborhood. Tomorrow it’s work and school again, with articles to revise and lectures to prepare, students and teachers and classmates to meet with, and all done at arm’s length, over the phone and internet. We are among the very fortunate. We can afford to hold the world at arm’s length for the time being. But if we don’t see the world differently and more clearly at the end of this time, we’ll have missed an opportunity. We’ll have only expended words.

Plants referenced:

• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Asarum canadense – wild ginger
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge
• Carex pensylvanica – Pennsylvania sedge
• Convallaria majalis – lily of the valley
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Quercus rubra – red oak
• Trillium recurvatum – prairie trillium
• Viola pubescens – yellow violet
• Viola sororia – wood violet

It’s been a cold week since Easter. Tuesday morning was around 30 degrees and sunny when Brooklyn and I got to Maple Grove, and the chickadees were singing. Robins were flipping the autumn’s fallen leaves, and sugar maple flowers littered the trails. The three maples I see the most often have bloomed in succession: silver maple on March 10; boxelder on April 12; sugar maple a couple of days later. What is it that gives silver maple such a lead? Perhaps there is nothing adaptive about it. Or maybe as a floodplain tree it likes to get a jump on the season. Sugar maple leaves had just unfolded for the spring on some of the saplings that are lowest to the ground. By the time you read this, they will be opening on saplings throughout the woods.

White trout lily was blooming everywhere. Wood anemone flowers were not yet fully open for the day, but they are at or close to their spring peak, huddling beneath the trees in clusters of three to a dozen. False rue anemone were in full flower, dark rafts strewn with white, floating out across the forest floor. Dutchman’s breeches had just come into bloom, the nascent flowers that had emerged as condensed white teardrops, mung-bean sized spores on the scape three weeks earlier swelling to their full size in the days following Easter, but only on some plants; the rest have perhaps already caught up as I write this. Toothwort were in full bloom. Petals had been knocked off many of the bloodroot, which stood denuded, leaves and capsules swelling. A single flower was open on one plant of blue cohosh, and every stem in the forest was arching like the maître d’ in The Triplets of Belleville, arms flowing, leaves flopping as they start to expand.

In my years of sedge-watching, this is the first spring that I’ve noticed how abruptly straight-styled wood sedge bristles up in the spring. A week or so ago I noticed it, and again Tuesday, how as the tillers emerge from each clump, the plants become suddenly echinate, prickly with sharp-tipped leaves that without warning emerge through the tussock of the previous year’s foliage. New shoots of white bear sedge had surpassed the previous year’s evergreen leaves humped around the plant like discarded socks. Hairy sedge was ankle high and straightening up. Wood’s sedge was, for the first time this year, bristling with stigmas.

The first leaves were just beginning to grow on poison ivy. Ohio buckeye was leafing out. Jewelweed leaves were approaching the cotyledons in length, beginning to assert themselves beyond the margins of the seed leaves. Stinging nettle was about four inches tall. Flower buds were green and swelling on Missouri gooseberry. False mermaid was also in floral bud, and I was struck once again at how much yellow there already is at the bases of the plants. They seem to be pouring resources toward two ends: elongating and flowering. In the coming week or so they’ll become a little branchy and spindly as they stretch upward in search of sun. Then the flowers will open, and the month-long process of filling in the nutlets will begin. I love this little plant.

Wednesday we awoke to snow, but Thursday morning was lovely again, if a little cold. There were frost and needle ice in the soil when Brooklyn and I arrived at 7:30. Most everything looked fine, but some of the Virginia bluebells and wild leeks had wilted in the freeze, and even a few prairie trillium. One patch of wild leek in particular looked as though it had been crushed by an elephant. What appeared to be a veery was flipping fallen leaves alongside the robins, and I followed it for awhile. But Brooklyn was antsy, and we didn’t last long. A ruby-crowned kinglet sang from down by the culvert where the Wood’s sedge grows. An enormous woodpecker drummed, and I wondered whether it might be a pileated woodpecker, but I did not see it and only heard it once.

The leaves had started to spread on the three tallest monocots of Maple Grove’s spring forest understory: Solomon’s seal, false Solomon’s seal, and large-flowered bellwort. You can tell them apart pretty easily now. Solomon’s seal is the slenderest of the three, slightly glaucous, red-stemmed beneath the leaves, becoming green as the leaves mature and begin to curl outward. False Solomon’s seal has stouter leaves that are more divergent, with deeply impressed veins and ciliate margins (use a hand lens to see the hairs along the leaf edges). And large-flowered bellwort has begun to nod, and flowers are poking out from around the edges of the leaves. Before it begins to nod, the leaves of this species are also keeled, unlike the other two.

Carex woodii was particularly prominent as Brooklyn and I walked out, anthers just poking out from behind the staminate scales, shoots glaucous, tall and slender. We passed a man walking his dog. He waved, we chatted in passing, we comfortably kept our distance. Everyone seems to be growing accustomed to social distancing. These ways of interacting grow more familiar by the day. It may be hard to get used to being close to one another again after a year and a half of this, until the world is vaccinated.

At home, reading a section of Martin Buber’s I and Thou, which I am going through much more slowly now than I did in my early 20s, I came across this:

Knowledge: as he beholds what confronts him, its being is disclosed to the knower. What he beheld as present he will have to comprehend as an object, compare with objects, assign a place in an order of objects, and describe and analyze objectively; only as an It can it be absorbed into the store of knowledge. But in the act of beholding it was no thing among things, no event among events; it was present exclusively.
…
Not that scientific and aesthetic understanding is not necessary—but it should do its work faithfully and immerse itself and disappear in that truth of the relation which surpasses understanding and embraces what is understandable.

Which I take to mean: there is knowing for knowing, making for making, doing for doing. Ultimately, though, it is all making and knowing and doing so that we can become human.

Friday night, Rachel and I took a short walk through Maple Grove with Brooklyn. It had snowed again, but there was a solitary false mermaid in bloom. It may not be the very first of the year, but it’s the first I’ve seen. It stands in for spring, one of the first plants I look for in February, one of the later flowers I find each year in April. It gets its place in the order of objects, and still it greets me each year.

Plants referenced:

• Acer negundo – boxelder
• Acer saccharinum – silver maple
• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Aesculus glabra – Ohio buckeye
• Allium tricoccum – wild leek
• Anemone quinquefolia – wood anemone
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Carex albursina – white bear sedge
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge
• Carex radiata – straight-styled wood sedge
• Carex woodii – Wood’s sedge
• Caulophyllum thalictroides – blue cohosh
• Dicentra cucullaria – Dutchman’s breeches
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Impatiens sp. – jewelweed
• Maianthemum racemosum – false Solomon’s seal
• Mertensia virginica – Virginia bluebells
• Polygonatum biflorum – Solomon’s seal
• Ribes missouriense – Missouri gooseberry
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Toxicodendron radicans – poison ivy
• Urtica dioica – stinging nettle
• Uvularia grandiflora – large-flowered bellwort

Joan Wildman was a brilliant teacher. I took the first semester of her jazz improvisation class as a sophomore in 1990 and the second semester as a graduate student in 1999. I was not a music major, and pretty much everyone in the class was better at their instrument than I was, and I loved these classes all the more for it. They were not like anything I had encountered before. We would improvise in small groups or individually, wrestle with constraints Joan tossed us, variously succeed or fail. Joan would take every solo seriously and identify places where it sounded as though we had reached some understanding musically, push us to rethink and revisit, ask whether there were some different way of doing things. I once watched her listen to one of my classmates play a solo that I thought sounded great. After he was done, she shook her head and asked a few questions, then said, “You’re too young to start copying yourself,” and asked him to be careful of landing on the same solutions to musical problems. Several times, in different ways, she made the point that people will often tell you to play traditionally for many years before you try playing more experimentally. In her view, if we didn’t do it now, when we were young, when were we going to?

Joan combined a rigorous and no-nonsense view of the relationship between one’s vision and one’s art—see it clearly, and work hard to say it clearly—with the view that no two people could possibly share the same vision. This is probably what we all think, but Joan combined this with a third view: she held that the artistic endeavor does all humans good and can be taken rigorously and seriously in a way that crosses disciplines. She didn’t seem to be in it to create musicians to follow in her path: she was in it to help us become humans who could make art. On the few times I saw her upset in the classroom, it was because a student had failed to take himself or herself seriously enough. It was never simply because someone had made a mistake, but more because a student played a passage with sufficient slop that it was clear they hadn’t worked enough to think it through.

When Joan retired, I asked if I could take private lessons with her, and she welcomed me graciously. At our first lesson, she asked me what I wanted to accomplish. I said something about wanting to play a few bebop standards competently and keep playing without running into problems with tendonitis, which had stopped me from taking the second semester of her course in the early 90s. Joan looked a little disappointed in my answer. “That’s okay,” she said. “But I had hoped you’d say you wanted to find your musical voice.” Remarkably, I had not once thought of that as a goal in my musical education. Those 30 seconds had more impact on how I think about my work as a teacher, writer, naturalist and researcher than any other conversation I had in graduate school.

It might seem odd to have this remembrance of Joan Wildman in A Botanist’s Field Notes. But when I write natural history, I write it with the same part of my mind with which I play piano. I think about writing in large part as a musical problem, and the joy I take in it is most kin to the joy I find in music. It has different constraints of course. In Richard Powers’ novel Orfeo, the composer Peter Els says, “Music isn’t about things; it is things.” The same is true of writing, and in fact the great naturalist John Burroughs made a similar claim about Walt Whitman’s work that I suspect he meant to apply to natural history writing as well: “He works as Nature does, and gives us reality in every line.” But along with the desire to make a thing rather than talk about things, a natural history writer has a strong constraint: the natural history essay parallels in structure the natural world, and its statements about the natural world should be verifiable by observations of the world. Within that constraint, the rest is music.

At the end of January last year, Joan and I had a brief renewed correspondence. She had started reading this blog, and she wrote me, “You were always willing to explore new sound possibilities, no matter how divergent the path might be or how precarious the result. Yet, you almost always were able to juggle those dissimilar rhythmic, harmonic or melodic elements into a convincing whole. It was striking to me to recognize the same qualities in your writing about the natural world.” Staring across nearly 30 years of my life, from a very green undergrad to a middle-aged man who mainly writes about plants, Joan saw the same person with the same set of concerns. This was typical Joan Wildman. What she cared about was the person inside the student, and what that person had to say, uniquely. That person is likely to be more constant than one’s vocation.

Joan and I never really talked plants, but one time we talked very briefly about how she had decided on the position of her piano in the living room. It was oriented so a person sitting at the bench could look out the back window onto what I remember to be a massive weeping willow in the yard. Joan told me that she liked having the piano there because she could watch the willow branches swaying in the wind, and she could play along with it. It couldn’t have been more than a passing comment, but after that, I often imagined her sitting at the piano while the wind pulled at the willow, music coursing out of the piano, spilling out through the window and down the hill, carrying grass trimmings and ripening elm seeds all the way to Cherokee Marsh.

Joan passed away on April 8 at 82. I started writing this three days later, when the boxelders and musclewood were just coming into bloom. American elm seeds were fringed with hairs. Pennsylvania sedge was crossing from closed on north-facing slopes to full flower where the sun was hitting it full in the face. Bullfrogs were jumping into the water along the trail at Fullersburg Woods. Fragile ferns were unfurling. Petals had dropped from the bloodroots in Maple Grove Forest Preserve and their capsules were swelling. Dutchman’s breeches were in full flower. The rains had knocked willow flowers onto the sidewalk. It was a day Joan would have appreciated.

I often hear Joan’s voice when I sit down to write. She admonishes me to be honest and to be clear, to be fresh. She scrutinizes what I write and finds the good in it, leaves the dross behind. I miss her, but I feel grateful. I’ll have her voice with me all the rest of my life.

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Joan Wildman was born on 1/1/1938 in Nebraska and passed away in Madison, Wisconsin on 4/8/2020.

The header image for this post is a snapshot of one of Joan’s animations, which she sometimes made to accompany her recordings. This one is entitled Straight Shapes.

I encourage you to read Scott Gordon’s remembrance of her life in Tone Madison.

The first half of this week was warm, shorts weather, temperatures rising to the mid-70s with thunderstorms and sun. The woods responded. The forest floor in Maple Grove Thursday morning was green with trout lily still guarding their flowers, which I had wrongly predicted would all be open by now; wild ginger leaves a third or half open, grading from silver-dollar-sized to as large as the smaller burdock leaves, which will surpass them by severalfold over the next few weeks; understated colonies of wood anemone; dark green islands of false rue anemone displaying a third of the flowers that they’ll show in a week, when white blooms will be strewn across the tops of every colony; and false mermaid, which have grown to the middle of my shins with floral buds still wrapped up tight, waiting for another two inches of height to open, leaves yellowing at the bases of some of the plants, which perhaps are already moving resources out to their tips. What other plant more fixedly insists spring?

The leeks are a close second. They have reached middle age and are starting to look ragged, some leaves curled at the tips, others frayed by a dragging deer hoof. They have been growing as aggressively as any understory species in the woods the past few weeks, jogging along even as temperatures dropped and other species slowed their pace, and it may be that the price they pay for such rapid growth is susceptibility to damage. They are at their foliar peak now, sopping up as much sunlight as they can, packing it away before the leaves come out on the trees. And the tree leaves have started to move. Terminal buds have broken open to reveal the tips of sugar maple leaf blades on saplings sticking up like switches snipped and planted butt-first, the calf-high to knee-high ones that are inconspicuous in fall but pop into relief when the first snow gathers around their ankles. Buds have broken on ironwood, which dropped its senescent leaves sometime in the past week or so. Musclewood buds have only started to swell. A boxelder sapling this morning bore a miniature compound leaf. Chokecherry leaves are longer than my thumbnail. The long, compound leaves of black elderberry in the floodplain of St. Joseph Creek are a few inches long and folded like paper cutouts in a greeting card, slowly revealing themselves as we open onto mid-April.

Blue cohosh branches have started to spread, giving the balled-up inflorescences room to grow. The plants still have to put on weight, but they will have to continue branching as they attain their final height. Solomon’s seal spears are rising veined and bluish from their sheaths, angling as they emerge, rolled primly in their pinstriped leaves. Large-flowered bellwort is opening more casually. The leaves are looser and more vulnerable, a brighter green, not girded in waxy bloom against the sun. The tips of the anthers are visible beyond the leaf margins. Mayapples are opening, branches spreading on the larger individuals, floral buds veined and nestled between the apices of the folded leaves. The first flowers of Virginia bluebell have opened. One of the white-flowered trilliums is in floral bud. Dutchman’s breeches have bloomed.

In wood chips nestled in a groove atop a long, broad, decomposing trunk that has fallen adjacent to the northernmost trail in the woods, a sugar maple seed has germinated. Its root trails out for a few inches and bristles with root hairs, hanging onto the dust of decomposing wood when I pull it out to look. Its cotyledons are still crimped from their time in the seed, like a butterfly’s wings damaged after emergence from the chrysalis and before they could fully dry. Young shoots of Wood’s sedge are about six inches long and arise erect from long-spreading rhizomes, forming loose colonies. Hairy sedge shoots are about the same length but inclined away from the center of the plant, and cespitose, clump-forming instead of colonial. The first jewelweed foliage leaves are growing beneath the coin-shaped cotyledons.

Brooklyn and I nearly tripped over a winter wren who was feeding, I believe, at the margin of the water tumbling out of the culvert north of Avery Coonley. It chipped and hopped out of view as I watched it, little and brown like a vole with wings. I could hear it after I could no longer see it. By the bridge over St. Joseph Creek, as we walked back to our car, another winter wren sang for three seconds, then paused, then sang again.

Last night before bed, I reread Nan Shepherd’s chapter on the animals of the Cairngorms and was struck by this passage:

Imagination is haunted by the swiftness of the creatures that live on the mountain—eagle and peregrine falcon, red deer and mountain hare. The reason for their swiftness is severely practical… But their grace is not necessity. Or if it is—if the swoop, the parabola, the arrow-flight of hooves and wings achieve their beauty by strict adherence to the needs of function—so much the more is the mountain’s integrity vindicated. Beauty is not adventitious but essential.

Beauty is not adventitious but essential. And perhaps the reciprocal is true as well: one of our human functions is to learn to see the beautiful, to be “haunted by the swiftness of the creatures that live on the mountain.”

I fall asleep many nights thinking of the woods. And when the writing becomes stale and I grow unfocused in the middle of the day, my mind drifts out along the trails that loop through the maples and beside the pond in the middle of the woods. Sometimes there is a great horned owl there. Sometimes there is a winter wren. Sometimes the pond is full of American toads and the woods are flooded with false mermaid, tall and branching, coming into flower. Maybe being haunted by creatures has a human function.

Plants referenced

• Acer negundo – boxelder
• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Allium tricoccum – wild leek
• Anemone quinquefolia – wood anemone
• Arctium sp. – burdock
• Asarum canadense – wild ginger
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge
• Carex woodii – Wood’s sedge
• Carpinus caroliniana – musclewood
• Caulophyllum thalictroides – blue cohosh
• Dicentra cucullaria – Dutchman’s breeches
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Impatiens capensis – jewelweed; I. pallida is also in these woods, but the individual I photographed was in the St. Joseph Creek floodplain, which I believe to be dominated by I. capensis.
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Mertensia virginica – Virginia bluebells
• Ostrya virginiana – ironwood
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Polygonatum biflorum – Solomon’s seal
• Prunus virginiana – choke cherry
• Sambucus canadensis – black elderberry
• Trillium sp. – trillium
• Uvularia grandiflora – large-flowered bellwort

It rained Sunday night, and Maple Grove was soggy when Brooklyn and I arrived this morning. Spring peepers were singing from the pond at the bottom of the hill north of The Avery Coonley School. This morning was the first I’ve heard them going strong this year: I’ve heard isolated individuals a few times, but their trills and chirps this morning were my first chorus of individuals for the spring. Chorus frogs were singing as well, though nowhere near as loud. Flickers were squeaking from the tops of the dead ashes, red-bellied woodpeckers were drumming, cardinals and robins and chickadees were singing. The sun was playing in the canopy, and I heard a warbler of some kind far up, too far for me to see what it might be, and it was one of the warblers whose calls I do not remember. Perhaps it was a yellow-rump. The wood ducks whistled.

The pond has turned abruptly green with duckweed over the past few days. When duckweed first starts growing, before its resource is saturated, it grows exponentially. The pond is not fully covered, but perhaps the growth has started to slow all the same. White trout lilies are forming lawns of hundreds of individuals. Flower stalks are free of the leaves on some of them, but the flowers were not open this morning. They were however far enough along that I’d expect them to have opened during the day. Archipelagos of flowering bloodroot are spread out across the forest floor. The closed flowers of Virginia bluebells are mostly exerted from the foliage, staring at the ground, considering their next move in the sprint of a woodland wildflower’s spring.

The shrubs, mostly honeysuckles, are leafing out like a mist sprawling between the trees, dying the air green, reflecting the puddles of false mermaid. Great waterleaf rosettes have become crisply variegated, the core of each blade white, the margins a light, hairy green, roughly the color of the cotyledons that have been out on the seedlings for a few weeks. Wild ginger gives the appearance of slicing up through the soil, the paired leaves folded over one another and just beginning to open in places, leaning backwards to catch the sun.

I found a single flower open on one toothwort this morning, but many are on the cusp of blooming. By the time you read this, I expect that you’ll be able to find plenty of toothwort in flower. Leaves of wild geranium and swamp buttercup and wood anemone are fully formed. Inflorescence scales on Pennsylvania sedge are dark and ready to open, a few days behind the plants growing beneath Downers Grove street trees. In our yard, ebony sedge is already flying its anthers. Carex radiata is bristling with new shoots like a cushion plant. The spears of blue cohosh tipped with fine, folded leaves look like feather dusters stuck handle-first into the soil.

The mayapples have all emerged from their buds and are massing in armies of 200 or more, leaves still folded umbrella-like. The bud scales are pulled up high around their ankles. I don’t see any still in claw form, but some are undoubtedly concealed alongside tree trunks or beneath the duff.

I have been reading this week about the Eocene forests of North America, transitioning from the tropical forests of roughly 56 million years ago to the temperate, nearly-modern forests into which the oaks we know moved and diversified.¹ These accounts of ancient forests read to me like movie scripts, in which the forests flow southward like the water of the everglades, slowly to the sea, where the tropics are squeezed down into Mexico or out of existence up against the gulf, and the boisterous new deciduous forest trees come in and clamor for a little ground to grow in. Everything takes so long. But all those long times are, remarkably, composed of springs just like this one. Go back through 50 or 60 million of them, and you reach the birth of oaks. Go back through 130 or 150 million springs, and you reach the birth of flowers.

As I write this, we’ve just had another thunderstorm, and the moon came out from behind the clouds for a few minutes. It’s a super-moon, closer to the earth than usual and therefore especially bright. Temperatures will be dropping over the next few days, drawing spring out a little. I hope you and your families are able to get out and enjoy it this week.

Plants referenced

• Anemonoides quinquefolia – wood anemone
• Asarum canadense – wild ginger
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Carex ebenea – ebony sedge [planted in our yard; not native]
• Carex pensylvanica – Pennsylvania sedge
• Carex radiata – straight-styled wood sedge
• Caulophyllum thalictroides – blue cohosh
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
• Hydrophyllum appendiculatum – great waterleaf
• Lemna minor – common duckweed
• Mertensia virginica – Virginia bluebells
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Ranunculus hispidus – swamp buttercup
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot

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1. My primary source for this has been Graham, Alan. 1999. Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic History of North American Vegetation North of Mexico. Oxford University Press, New York.↩

False rue anemone has bolted this week. Last weekend, there were a few plants visible where the fallen leaves were scratched away to bare soil; by this past Saturday night, the first weekend of the long April to come, with the waxing gibbous moon about three-quarters full lodged in the white oak canopy, the false rue anemone at Maple Grove ranged to ankle high and mostly bore floral buds. The wild leeks, which I thought had already reached full size, have continued to fill out and are clustered like bunches of broad ribbons throughout the woods. Round-lobed hepatica is flowering along the road edge at Fullersburg Forest Preserve. Leaf tips are emerging from the boxelder buds. Leaves are still growing on the honeysuckles, slowly, leisurely even, as though they had no concern in the world. They seem to know they’ve got the upper hand along the sunny woodland margins where hazelnut and dogwood might have dominated a few generations ago.

As of Sunday evening, Maple Grove has come even further along. The spring beauties are just starting to open their eyes, anthers pink, stigmas arching, petals streaked with veins. Bloodroot has come into flower, perhaps overnight, as I believe the trail on which they grow we walked on Saturday as well. The plants themselves aren’t ephemerals — their leaves will swell and lie back to catch the sun well into summer — but bloodroot flowers are perhaps the most ephemeral of all flowers in the forest understory: if we have a good rain overnight this week, the flowers will shatter and petals will lie on the ground in the morning. A few mayapples have stretched far enough to tear open their bud sheaths and are about as thick as a sharpie marker. A very small number of blooms are open on the false rue anemone: if Monday and Tuesday are warm, I would expect a quarter of the population to be in flower by midweek. White flowers are visible in the just-unfolding trout lily leaves. Floral buds are nestled at the bases of the opened prairie trillium leaves and in the lower branches of false mermaid, which has grown about as high as my sneaker. Virginia bluebells are about to flower. Carex radiata is bristling with new shoots.

A brilliant blue butterfly flew across the trail this evening in Maple Grove, a spring azure I think. The squill are flowering throughout the woods, piercing the maple leaves and raising them from the ground. And lesser celandine, a Eurasian species that I did not know, is in full and beautiful bloom in the St Joseph Creek floodplain. It promises to be a week of rapid growth in the woods.

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I have been listening this week to Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. She balances a scientific understanding of the world with more ancient understandings about our relationships with living things. In her account, science teaches us precision and careful observation, but it misses something: it discounts non-objective relationships between human and non-human. I recalled Martin Buber as I listened to her this weekend, and I was surprised to find as I picked him back up that one of the earliest passages in I and Thou takes a tree as its illustration of the dichotomy between object and subject:

I contemplate a tree.
I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.
I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air–and the growing itself in its darkness.
I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its way of life.
…
Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition.
But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me.
This does not require me to forego any of the modes of contemplation. There is nothing that I must not see in order to see, and there is no knowledge that I must forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and instance, law and number included and inseparably fused.
…
One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relationship: relation is reciprocity.
Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.¹

And I recalled that when I returned to graduate school to study botany, I initially did not mean to become a scientist. I was adamant that I was returning to become a naturalist, just a better-informed one. But I found science and its way of approaching the world captivating and enriching. I found it engaged my imagination and senses in a way I couldn’t have imagined. I found, as Kimmerer writes, that “To name and describe you must first see, and science polishes the gift of seeing.”² Science brings me face to face with the tree: even now, when it is hard at times to make sense of what our work means when the world is shaking around us, looking closely at the woods and being in the woods jointly make clear that everything is inseparably fused.

On the hike through Maple Grove yesterday evening, I realized that the marcescent ironwood leaves have fallen. Quietly, without fanfare, the cambium has begun to grow beneath the bark, releasing the leaves that the tree failed to cleave off in the fall. If that’s all the evidence we had, just the dropping of last year’s withered leaves from the ironwood saplings, it would be enough to know that summer is coming to the woods.

Plants referenced

• Acer negundo – boxelder
• Allium tricoccum – wild leek
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Enemion biternatum – flase rue anemone
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lilty
• Ficaria verna – lesser celandine
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Hepatica americana – round-lobed hepatica
• Lonicera sp. – honeysuckle
• Mertensia virginica – Virginia bluebells
• Ostrya virginiana – ironwood
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Trillium recurvatum – prairie trillium
• Scilla sp. – squill

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1. Buber, Martin, transl. Walter Kaufman. 1970. I and Thou, pp. 58-59. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.↩
2. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, ch. 7 [“Learning the Grammar of Animacy”]. Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis.↩

Cornelian cherry has been flowering all week in the yards backing up onto Turvey Road, which leads to the entrance to Maple Grove, and Thursday morning I noticed that annual bluegrass and common chickweed have started blooming along the gravelly roadside.

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On our walk into Maple Grove this morning, Brooklyn and I were flanked by drumming red bellied woodpeckers. A downy woodpecker looped across the trail and perched on a slender maple. A phoebe was calling, and a wood duck protested from the pond at the entrance. We had awoken to frost on the lawn, and it carried into the woods. There was frost on the logs and frost lodged between the leaves of the wavy starburst moss, which still bears the desiccating stalks of sporophytes that were ripe and spilling clouds of spores four weeks ago or so. Frost rimed the margins of the false rue anemone, dotted all around with guttation droplets that were full and plump when we arrived at a bit after 7, and that slowly evaporated as the sun hit them through the trees. I watched as they shrank, and Brooklyn waited patiently for me until they were almost gone, and as I shot photo after photo trying to get this moment locked away for later.

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The wild ginger leaves I have been watching for have squeezed out of the rhizome tips under the leaf litter and are no larger than my fingernail, folded into a slim soft promise that spring is really coming. Their rhizomes snake beneath the soil and surface so that you can scratch them and smell where you’ve broken the skin. The wild garlic leaves are as long now as my hand from the wrist to the tip of my middle finger. A wood anemone has put up its first leaves, but they are curled and unhappy, as though they regretted stepping forward so early. The bloodroot flowers are stretching upward on plants that have had a lot of sun and the right kind of protection, but they are not opened yet. Many of them are still wrapped up in their leaves.

Wood violet leaves are open; in neighborhood lawns they are flowering. Leaves are expanding on the short honeysuckles in the woods; in people’s yards, many are barely opening. Chokecherry leaves are reaching out from their buds. The woodsy thyme-moss capsules are bright green and just dying to burst open. Poodle moss appears to be putting on branches and thickening up on the bases of the white oaks, taking advantage of these cool moist days of spring before the heat of summer favors those that have roots and can draw moisture from the soil.

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Around the pond, hop sedges are greening up while their perigynia lie on logs and in the mud, papery and brown, dropped last year and waiting to form beds of more hop sedge. Blunt broom sedge is forming fresh new shoots on decomposing logs. Duckweed is covering the surface of the water.

Brooklyn and I hiked out the same way we came in, serenaded by a phoebe and a wood duck.

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That night, my son and I biked west from Downers Grove. We passed the train station, and the 7:01 Metra stopped; there was no one aboard to get off that we could see. We passed the red-bellied woodpeckers calling in Maple Grove, passed Belmont, passed under 355, and scooted north through Lisle to Warrenville Road. On the way home, we biked up the hill toward the bridge over I-355. There were red-winged blackbirds calling, and I thought I could just make out the humming chorus frogs over the roar of the interstate. Just as we passed over the edge of 355, a song sparrow’s bouncing song started up and carried us over several lanes of traffic. They’ve surely been in town for weeks: I generally hear them in early March and have recorded them as early as late February. But I always notice them on my bike ride in through the fields carved into the East Woods. I somehow missed them this year, and it’s good to know they’re around.

As I crawled into bed that night, I read these lines from “Frost and Snow,” the fifth chapter of The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd:

The freezing of running water is another mystery. The strong white stuff, whose power I have felt in swollen streams, which I have watched pour over ledges in endless ease, is itself held and punished. But the struggle between frost and the force in running water is not quickly over. The battle fluctuates, and at the point of fluctuation between the motion in water and the immobility of frost, strange and beautiful forms are evolved.

Motion is frozen, at this moment in this spring, on the margins of the expanding leaves. We are all together now in this point of fluctuation.

Plants referenced

• Allium canadense – wild garlic
• Anemonoides quinquefolia – wood anemone
• Anomodon attenuatus – poodle moss
• Asarum canadense – wild ginger
• Atrichum altecristatum – wavy starburst moss
• Carex lupulina – hop sedge
• Carex tribuloides – blunt broom sedge
• Cornus mas – Cornelian cherry
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Lemna minor – duckweed
• Lonicera sp. – honeysuckle
• Plagiomnium cuspidatum – woodsy thyme moss
• Poa annua – annual bluegrass
• Prunus virginiana – choke cherry
• Sanguinaria canadense – bloodroot
• Stellaria meadia – common chickweed
• Viola sororia – wood violet