Month: May 2020

The woods are carrying us into summer. Two months ago the shelter-in-place order started in Illinois, and I was shocked into a sense of pandemic focus. Many people were. The trails stream this spring with people walking, talking, looking around them. I walk Maple Grove regularly throughout the year, but I am on closer terms with the rhythm of this year’s spring than I have been with previous springs. Daily, the woods change. The trees exhale and are still: warblers and vireos settle in their branches. They inhale, and sugar maple leaves inflate, flatten out, pimple with spindle galls. They take another breath, and the oak leaves grow an inch in a week, and the ironwoods shed their catkins. The leaves 30 feet above the faltering spring ephemerals capture the sunlight and cast a shadow across the fading forest floor.

Wild leeks have become variegated and flaccid. A few weeks ago they were as broad as cow’s tongues and dark green but becoming ragged. Now they are spent. False mermaid has yellowed and flattened to the soil, a tangle of branches and swelling nutlets. Dutchman’s breeches is as pallid as a manila folder. Toothwort is almost yellow, and the fruits are thickened where the seeds are growing, like a snake’s belly distended by undigested mice. White trout lily leaves are faded and barely mottled any longer, and the white, wormlike rhizomes that have been arching from the ground for more than a month have become far more common. They’ve given us a new reason to scrape aside the leaf litter as they breach the soil, ghostly white, turgid but brittle. Each one is tipped with a bulbous thickening where next year’s young plant grows, hidden in scales, packed by the mother plant with all it will need for next year. The trout lily leaves recline as they pass the baton, shunting the last of their resources to their progeny. They will be gone soon.

A veery sings, then a wood thrush. These are summer birds, leading me into the woods with the songs of indigo buntings, tanagers, red-eyed vireos and wood-pewees. The trail has spread in the rain of the past two weeks. It is lined with bristly tufts of path rush and straight-styled wood sedge, which in one stormy night this week went from springtime exuberance to the trampled clumps of midsummer. The black-throated green warbler songs I now find a little disorienting. Have they been here for weeks? days? Shouldn’t they have moved on already? A northern parula zips up along the ladder of mid-May. Moonseed leaves are as big as silver dollars. Their tendrils arch over the ground. Wood nettles and jewelweed are knee-high, and the latter’s cotyledons linger yellow beneath the foliage like chaperones at a school dance, leaning against the walls in pairs, hardly visible in the throng, dropping off one by one as the dance comes to a close. By the end of the night you’ve forgotten they were there.

I have for more than 20 years told myself that summer begins when the canopy closes and the biggest pulses of migrating warblers have passed through and the wild geraniums are in bloom. Perhaps that was correct in Dane County. There, it was also the case that in the spring I would find a few geraniums wilting, then bending over, and inside the stem a larva. I have never seen that here. Instead, I realized this weekend that I would do better to swap the geranium out and replace it with great waterleaf. They are in full flower now and are a more precise sign of summer in the woods, coming in after the geraniums, which are starting to fruit throughout the woods as the petals fall. I might have seen this years ago, but the old patterns had staying power. Virginia waterleaf came into bloom this past week as well, starting last week Sunday along the trails and now spreading through the woods.

Carrionflower (Smilax) has been vexing me this week. I had posted a photo of what I believed to be Smilax lasioneura in full flower about a week ago. Evan Barker and Matt Beatty, in a series of insightful comments on this photo that bear reading if you are interested in the herbaceous carrionflowers, pointed out that there has also been described a Smilax illinoensis, which intergrades with both S. lasioneura and the ostensibly tendril-free S. ecirrhata, the latter of which I thought I understood. The distinctions rest on the disposition of tendrils on the plant, the number of flowers per spike, the length of the stem at maturity. I had been bothered that I have never been able to clearly see distinctions between the carrionflowers in the woods I know best, and as I read the comments from Matt and Evan and looked more this past week, I was all the more aware of my ignorance. So Sunday afternoon, I took a moment to look at a 2013 molecular study by Pan Li and colleagues in which numerous populations of all of the eastern North American herbaceous carrion flowers were investigated with molecular markers. Having read it, I don’t feel so bad about my confusion. These data are not conclusive, but they are also not compatible with the idea that the species we have been trying to key out are genetically coherent entities. The authors asked the question of numerous individuals from each of these and related species, from multiple populations of each, “who are your closest relatives?” If these names we have been trying to apply referred to separate species, we would expect individuals to cluster by scientific name. Instead, in their study, Li and colleagues found individual plants clustering by geographic region. If oaks behaved this way, I would throw in the towel.¹ For now, I’m skeptical that these three carrionflower species whose names I’ve been trying to apply are separate species at all.

The pistillate flowers of Jack-in-the-pulpit are ripening into fruits. Davis’s sedge perigynia are swelling and the spikes are starting to nod. Veins are inscribed distinctly into the perigyia of Hitchcock’s sedge, and the lower sheaths bristle with hairs. False Solomon’s seal flowers are on the cusp of opening. The leaves of cow parsnip are enormous, and bur marigold seedlings whose cotyledons I have been wondering about have shown their true identity. Grasses of a few species are coming into flower. Orchard grass inflorescences have emerged from the sheaths. White baneberry are in full bloom. False rue anemone flowers are still hanging on, but most have dropped their tepals and sport ripening fruits that radiate out like stars. False mermaid and annual bedstraw are heavy with fruits.

It’s Memorial Day as I write this, and everyone is on the move again. Not just people, either: monarchs came back to the garden yesterday. This morning, we had terrific rain, then it cleared up. Brooklyn and I walked past the school and watched a fox trot by with a rabbit dead and lying crosswise in its mouth. Brooklyn was beside herself and spent two minutes waking the neighborhood up, then rolled in the grass out of sheer excitement. We passed the home of a woman who waves out the window almost every time we walk by. She and I gave each other a thumbs up. We passed the park that fills with water when it floods. We looked for catkins on a friend’s new ironwoods, just planted a year ago.

We are gearing up to head back to work, little by little, beginning in June, and I find that the focus I had only two months ago, when everything changed so abruptly, has begun to dull a bit. I still notice more than I did before, but my attention in the woods is no longer heightened as it was when we were first all sent home from work and school and were so disoriented and so upset all the time. With no good reason, only acclimation, we are growing accustomed.

When Brooklyn and I were within a few blocks of home, the wind kicked up and rattled the leaves of the trees. The rain started up again, but only beneath a Norway maple shaking straight ahead of us. Rain fell out of the tree and nowhere else, as though the tree itself were the cloud. You could have drawn a curtain around the tree and had a shower inside. Then the wind stopped, the rain stopped, and Brooklyn and I headed home.

Plants referenced

• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Actaea pachypoda – white baneberry
• Allium tricoccum – wild leek
• Arisaema triphyllum – Jack-in-the-pulpit
• Bidens sp. – bur-marigold
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Carex davisii – Davis’s sedge
• Carex hitchcockiana – Hitchcock’s sedge
• Carex radiata – straight-styled wood sedge
• Dactylis glomerata – orchard grass
• Dicentra cucullaria – Dutchman’s breeches
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Galium aparine – annual bedstraw
• Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
• Heracleum sp. – cow parsnip
• Hydrophyllum appendiculatum – great waterleaf
• Hydrophyllum virginianum – Virginia waterleaf
• Impatiens sp. – jewelweed
• Juncus tenuis – path rush
• Laportea canadensis – wood nettle
• Maianthemum racemosum – false Solomon’s seal
• Menispermum canadense – moonseed
• Ostrya virginiana – ironwood
• Smilax ecirrhata, S. illinoensis, S. lasioneura – greenbriar, carrionflower; these are names for a few of the herbaceous species in our flora, if indeed they are separate species

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1. But they don’t! By contrast with the eastern North American herbaceous carrionflowers, the eastern North American white oaks–considered by many to be the posterchild for ill-behaved species–behave very nicely indeed.↩

For most of last Thursday, we could barely get Brooklyn outside. It rained almost incessantly. In the afternoon, we took a soggy walk around the neighborhood illuminated by a brilliant cedar-apple rust that had burst out on the neighbor’s juniper. The rain continued through the night and was so loud that everyone in the house was awoken at least once. By the time we walked through the neighborhood Friday morning, the heavy rain was passed, and in its wake entire flocks of migratory birds had blown into town. Brooklyn and I heard chestnut sided and golden winged warblers, an eastern wood pewee, and what sounded to me like a yellow throated vireo within two blocks of our house. The toads droned from the marsh north of the school, full throated and invigorated by the warm, damp morning.

I spent that day in the Arboretum’s East Woods, on a permit to collect oak leaves that had been harvested on our behalf by the gray squirrels. Red oaks and Hill’s oaks were flowering. The trees were filled with birds. Wood thrushes and veeries sang as I scouted the ground beneath towering red oaks, collecting shoot tips with fresh leaves still attached. Oven birds called. Warblers and vireos moved constantly. Indigo buntings and eastern wood pewees had arrived to join the great-crested flycatchers for the summer. I could not concentrate on the birds as I would have liked, because I had oaks to focus on. The work went more slowly than I expected. In my walks over the past week and a half, it had seemed that every oak was pitching shoot tips down onto the ground. But on Friday, I could find shoot tips with leaves in good enough condition for sequencing beneath something closer to one in four or five trees.

By the end of the day my concentration was flagging, and I was distracted by the yellow reticulum of false mermaid that is everywhere right now, pulling my eyes along to blooming Jacob’s ladder and pools of wild ginger. Wood poppy flowers had been battered in the rain, but the capsules were full and hairy and sopping it all up. White trilliums were still blooming but also looked beaten. A prairie violet was flowering in an opening in the woods. Spathes had formed on the wild garlic. Wild hyacinth had begun to flower. Black currant, chokecherry and wayfarer’s bush were in bloom. A solitary mayapple was flowering. Rue anemone fruits were hardening up. I wrapped up the oak collecting and headed home, in short sleeves by this time, backpack full of collections.

Sunday was another day of nonstop rain, and when I returned to the Arboretum Monday morning I found the East Woods saturated. Running water had dragged entire logs across the road. The red oak and Hill’s oak leaves had grown to several inches long and were all spreading. White oak leaves by contrast hung from the shoot tips like shrouds. All were festooned with aments, but only in the red and Hill’s oaks were the anthers dangling from their filaments: in the white oaks (and the bur oaks as well, I suspect, though I didn’t look closely at their catkins), the stamens were bound into tight little knots. Eastern wood pewees and indigo buntings sang from morning till late afternooon, joined intermittently by scarlet tanagers (chick-burr), rufous-sided towhees (drink your tea), and field sparrows. Aside from the woodpeckers, the birds of winter were mostly quiet, but not inactive: over the course of about five minutes I watched a white-breasted nuthatch return three times to feed caterpillars to its baby, which was resting in a cavity in the side of a white oak.

Wild geranium seemed to have gone over the hill since Friday. While it was still blooming throughout the woods, the cranes’ bills had started to form, obvious on flowers that had shed their petals. The other flowers had all inched along just a bit. Blackhaw, whose inflorescences had been masses of mungbean-sized buds on Friday, was open for business. Curly-styled wood sedge stigmas had emerged and were arched, heading into position. Bur-reed sedge and awl-fruited sedge were flowering. White baneberry flowers had begun opening at the bottoms of the inflorescences. Mayapple flowers were full-faced alongside the road. Hairy sweet cicely and aniseroot were white with flowers finer than baby’s breath or lace. Openings in the woods had exploded with shooting stars, wild hyacinth, or starry Solomon’s plume.

At the end of the day, I tramped through a section of marsh I had never been in before and found a good collection of Hill’s oak. I started working on this species 15 years ago this spring, and I find it comforting to come back to. I am fond of the shape of its leaf, of the tiny acorns that were fertilized last year developing now on the branch, of the places where it likes to grow: dry slopes with perhaps a touch of ground water, bumps on the landscape overlooking a marsh, woodland edges just beyond the sugar maple shade. I was reminded of a passage I read this past week in Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways, written in 1697 by a traveller and writer named Martin Martin: “It is a piece of weakness and folly merely to value things because of their distance from the place where we are born.” Hill’s oak is one of the most familiar trees in the region. It could be a poster-child for commonness. Yet standing with my feet in the muck, I felt I could spend decades more getting to know this species and still have a lifetime’s worth of work to do on it.

At that moment, in quick succession, a least flycatcher and an olive-sided flycatcher called from the woods just uphill from me and the Hill’s oak: Che-bek! Quick three beers! Two cousins, these Empidonax flycatchers, whose familiar calls are, like the Hill’s oak, become more precious to me as they become more familiar each year. With each call, I advance one more step along the year.

The rain was starting up again. I visited one more field, collected my last Hill’s oaks for the day, and headed home.

Plants referenced

Actaea pachypoda – white baneberry
Allium canadense – wild garlic
Camassia scylloides – wild hyacinth
Carex rosea – curly-styled wood sedge
Carex sparganioides – bur-reed sedge
Carex stipata – awl-fruited sedge
Dodecatheon meadia – shooting star
Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
Maianthemum stellatum – stary Solomon’s plume
Osmorhiza claytonii – hairy sweet cicely
Osmorhiza longistylis – aniseroot
Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
Polemonium reptans – Jacob’s ladder
Prunus virginiana – chokecherry
Quercus alba – white oak
Quercus ellipsoidalis – Hill’s oak
Quercus rubra – red oak
Ribes americanum – black currant
Stylophorum diphyllum – wood poppy
Thalictrum thalictroides – rue anemone
Trillium grandiflorum – white trillium
Viburnum lantana – wayfarer’s bush
Viburnum prunifolium – blackhaw
Viola pedatifida – prairie violet

A late-season frost near the end of the first week of May withered the youngest sugar maple leaves throughout the region. The damaged leaves were widespread: on street trees, in the canopy, in the midstory, in saplings down at eye-level that I would have thought would be protected from the worst of the cold. Some fraction—a twentieth? maybe a bit less?—of Maple Grove’s sugar maple leaves curled to uselessness in a single night. Leafing out early in the year in the temperate zone puts you at risk of finding yourself outdoors without protection before winter has had its last laugh.

In spite of this loss, the sugar maple foliage had nearly closed in the canopy and the midstory by Monday. In synchrony with the maples, the young white bear sedge leaves appeared to have inflated to full width over the course of a few days, sprinting as though in anticipation of how much harder they will have to photosynthesize in the near-total shade of summer. Many other species responded by running to the end of their annual cycle. Toothwort were yellowing, and the wild leeks were becoming pale, yellow or variegated and flattened, as though they had been sat on by elephants. The false mermaid was yellowed and recumbent. The canopy wasn’t completely closed, though: red oak leaves were about an inch long and the anthers looked ready to open, though they weren’t shedding pollen yet; the bur oak leaves were still perfect in miniature, but identifiable at a distance of fifteen feet or so without binaculars; a single basswood leaf filled my palm; hackberry leaves were draped from the tips of the branches. We still have a week or so to go, maybe a bit more, before the canopy is filled in completely.

Inflorescences had formed on nearly all of the false Solomon’s seal by the beginning of the week. Floral buds were out on white baneberry, and the first leaves were emerging on moonseed. Wood nettles had grown large enough to sting one’s hand, but not large enough to cause real pain. Petals had fallen from the blue cohosh flowers, and the false rue anemone was producing sharp-tipped achenes. The scapes of Dutchman’s breeches, the same ones that looked like blown-glass miniatures less than an inch tall with incipient white floral buds the week we went into isolation-by-household, were hung with capsules. Downy yellow violet corollas were dropping as the capsules swelled. Missouri gooseberry petals were reflexed like shooting stars. Wild ginger flowers seemed to have peaked, but the ovules inside were still pulpy-white. Lady fern was almost unfurled. Wood’s sedge culms stood erect and in full flower like high-quality, fine-tipped paint brushes stuck into the soil. Hairy sedge was heavy with fruit, while the pistillate flowers of James’s sedge ranged from newly receptive to ripening. Pennsylvania sedge, which I’d given up on weeks earlier, was still ripening on the culm.

In the middle of the week, Brooklyn and I watched two squirrels build a nest in a white oak cavity in the neighborhoods outside the forest preserve. One shuttled mouthsful of dried leaves up from the ground and disappeared into the oak with them, then reappeared and ran back down. The other gathered twigs and leaves from the upper branches. Brooklyn was beside herself watching all this squirrel activity, and she devoured the soft orchard grass foliage along the roadside in her excitement.

It was dark and quiet in the center of the forest. Blue-gray gnatcatchers were calling. We found a small patch of early meadow rue in full flower, the male flowers dangling with stamens that rustled in the barest breeze, the female plant a few feet away frosted with stigmas. Basswood leaves had grown just a bit and were hanging and slightly cupped. Prickly gooseberry fruits were developing, and bristly fruits were choking off the corollas at the tips of annual bedstraw. Largeflower bellwort fruits were swelling. Bloodroot capsules were as thick as green beans. Spring beauty flowers had almost all fallen, and seeds inside their capsules were as dark as buckeyes. A least flycatcher called che-bek!

On the walk out through the neighborhoods, we stopped to watch a bumblebee patrolling low over a neighbor’s garden of Solomon’s seal and white trout lily fruits and withering leeks. A blue-winged warbler called bee-buzzz from the trees flanking the road. I don’t know if this is quite right, but when I hear the blue-winged warbler sing for the first time each spring, I think we are somewhere near the midpoint of migration.

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Saturday morning, end of the week, Brooklyn and I could hear the chorus of American toads from the center of the woods as we stood at the end of the bridge over St. Joseph Creek. Brooklyn tensed as we crossed over the bridge. We stopped in the middle and watched the samaras stretching out at tips of the silver maple branches above us. We followed the toad song inward toward the pond in the center of the woods, passing a burning bush in flower, great waterleaf floral buds massed up like spiders’ egg sacs, and the leggy prairie trilliums. The pond was not in our line of site, but the toads’ song carried over the hill, following the contours of the land and filling the spaces between the flowering buckeye, the yellowing wild leeks, the calf-high jewelweed whose cotyledons have paled and grown useless as they lean out over the wreckage of false mermaid in fruit. Brooklyn grew increasingly agitated as we approached the pond. She bucked and pulled, then trotted beside me anxiously as I ran her the last 50 feet to the crest overlooking the pond.

When we could finally see the water, Brooklyn relaxed. Perhaps having the noise so clear was a relief, overwhelming the high-pitched, distant sound with a nearby hum, the whine of a distant truck’s wheels spinning on the pavement drowned by the engine roar at close range. We stood for several minutes and listened to the ancient song of the toads, a song that precedes humans, as most animals’ songs precede humans. The toad song is about the short migration of individual toads and their feverish love. It’s about hibernation in the mud and emergence from a watery nest. It’s a song that does not know humans or dogs. It knows only toad things, but it knows them utterly.

We walked west from the pond. The first dead man’s fingers of the year had emerged from a spongy fallen log on the trail that runs behind the houses bordering the western forest edge. The fruiting bodies were a few millimeters high, no thicker than pencils. A black-throated blue warbler flew into the tree above the fungi, darted into and out of view, picking at insects along the branch, then was gone. Doll’s eye flowers were poised to open. Carrion flower was opened at last—I have been watching it for perhaps two weeks—and stunk of putrefaction. I know how it will smell, but I cannot see it in flower without leaning in for a whiff, just as if it were a flowering viburnum. We hiked past the eastern few-fruited sedge, whose perigynia were slender but inflating, and James’s sedge, the perigynia of which have gone this week from slender to orbiculate. We passsed knee-high Sprengel’s sedges draped with fully loaded pistillate spikes. We passed a sedge I have been wanting to call curly-styled wood sedge, but whose stigmas I am still watching for.

Near the end of our walk, we stopped for a few minutes to watch a warbler in the top of a narrow sugar maple. Brooklyn became restive after a few minutes. She has a good disposition and is a very good botany dog. She will stand for us while we take photos or study a plant with the hand lens. But with birds, where you have to stand for 20 minutes for one individual, she grows anxious. What is wrong? she wants to know. Aren’t we supposed to be moving by now? Perhaps she could become acclimated to birding. But not this morning.

The sugar maple leaves that were frozen and limp from frost damage at the beginning of the week were now shriveled and dried to a crisp. I squeezed one, and it crumbled to pocket scraps. I tucked the binoculars into my backpack, and Brooklyn and I left the warbler in the canopy unidentified. The toad songs faded as we walked out, bridging the weeks from spring to summer. One of the singers hopped by, and Brooklyn paid it no mind. We walked home surrounded by black-throated green warblers, the canopy closing overhead behind us and a summer full of eastern wood pewees and indigo buntings spreading out before us.

Plants referenced

• Acer saccharinum – silver maple
• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Actaea pachypoda – white baneberry, doll’s eye
• Aesculus glabra – Ohio buckeye
• Allium tricoccum – wild leek
• Asarum canadense – wild ginger
• Athyrium filix-femina – lady fern
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Carex albursina – white bear sedge
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge
• Carex jamesii – James’s sedge
• Carex oligocarpa – eastern few-fruited sedge
• Carex pensylvanica – Pennsylvania sedge
• Carex rosea – curly-styled wood sedge
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge
• Carex woodii – Wood’s sedge
• Caulophyllum thalictroides – blue cohosh
• Celtis occidentalis – hackberry
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Dactylis glomerata – orchard grass
• Dicentra cucullaria – Dutchman’s breeches
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Euonymous alatus – burning bush
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Galium aparine – annual bedstraw
• Hydrophyllum appendiculatum – great waterleaf
• Impatiens sp. – jewelweed
• Laportea canadensis – wood nettle
• Maianthemum racemosum – false Solomon’s seal
• Menispermum canadense – moonseed
• Polygonatum biflorum – Solomon’s seal
• Quercus macrocarpa – bur oak
• Quercus rubra – red oak
• Ribes cynosbati – prickly gooseberry
• Ribes missouriense – Missouri gooseberry
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Smilax illinoensis – carrion flower; we also have S. lasioneura in these woods, which is quite similar; see iNaturalist page for taxonomic discussion of these species
• Thalictrum dioicum – early meadow rue
• Tilia americana – basswood
• Trillium recurvatum – prairie trillium
• Uvularia grandiflora – largeflower bellwort
• Viola pubescens – downy yellow violet

The redbuds were blooming on the first Saturday of May. Carex blanda flowered in a sidewalk crack and a great-crested flycatcher whistled in the neighborhood as Brooklyn and I walked to Maple Grove. At the forest, straight-styled wood sedge was flowering, and curly-styled wood sedge was about a week behind, spikes out but not yet opened. Anthers were flying proud the entire length of the staminate spikes on hairy sedge. White avens had bolted. Bur oak floral catkins were condensed and the leaves were tiny but immaculate, as though modelled for a tree staged outside the window of one of the Thorne Miniature Rooms. They had been nipped by squirrels and were falling all over the woods. White oak branch tips seen through binoculars were knobby with young leaves and catkin nubbins. I found a Hill’s oak shoot tip near the edge of the forest, dripping with flowers. The first wild geranium flowers were open. A northern parula warbler was dragging its short song upward along the teeth of a tuned comb. The great-crested flycatcher was crying through the woods.

With every new species of wren, sparrow, flycatcher and warbler that flies into town in the month of May, we ratchet one tooth onward toward summer. March and April always feel a bit like a train between cities, a time in which “here and there does not matter”¹ and outside the window everything is constantly shifting, so much so that it is essentially standing still. This year, it feels especially so. Wood anemone and prairie trillium are still in flower, but the spring beauty have begun to fruit and the toothwort have almost all dropped their petals. American elms are shedding samaras into the gutters. We are still in spring, with hairy yellow violets, rue anemone and false rue anemone in beautiful full flower, but we’re barreling toward June.

This first week of May has wobbled between frosty evenings and days warm enough for ice cream on the walk home from downtown. The sugar maple leaves started the week clotted in the canopy and hanging limp from stiff petioles in the midstory. By Thursday night, they were nearly fully expanded, and the sugar maple canopy was about halfway toward closed if not more. Basswood has progressed from obtuse buds barely opening to leaves a few inches across. Musclewood catkins have loosened up and are shedding pollen. In just one week, the leaves of poison ivy, Virginia creeper, and wild grape have gone from creased or crumpled and embryonic to fieldguide portrait quality, crawling over the logs and stumps and the bases of the standing trees. The muddy sloughs and springy slopes throughout Maple Grove are illuminated with the full-faced flowers of swamp buttercup, and that first wild geranium bloom opening on Saturday morning is now a forest full of geraniums coming into full flower over the course of the week

The understory is darkening and pivoting toward the solstice. False mermaid grew shaky and pale this week and stumbled as the nutlets growing inside its flowers began to sap what it had worked hard to sequester away. Already the plants are leaning against one another and growing weary under their own weight. Every bloodroot has shrugged off its petals and is leaning back to sop up the last sun before the maple leaves fill in the canopy. Wild ginger is doing likewise, squatting in colonies over meat-colored flowers. Trout lily capsules are turning toward the sky. The leaves will soon start yellowing. Wild leek leaves are becoming dilapidated.

I heard a report this week that people’s travel nationwide turned abruptly back toward their pre-COVID levels on the first of May. We are already becoming comfortable with what seemed so foreign to us a few weeks ago. Kids rarely ask to pet Brooklyn any more, and they know to wave politely from a distance. On our walks, she will often stop if she smells or hears something funny. If it worries her badly, she’ll sit down and refuse to move. She’ll look up at me. We have to wait for Brooklyn to decide it’s okay before we can move on. If there’s anything amiss, anything at all, she stops dead in her tracks. She’s pretty consistent in this way. Myself, I don’t whether to sprint down the trail at times or stand in one place, watching the leaves unfurl.

In the meantime, nodding trillium and Missouri gooseberry flowers have opened. Black currant is in floral bud. Prairie trillium is shedding pollen. Cleavers is in bloom and stands upright in stiff colonies thick with individuals or sprawls against rotting logs and grows whorls of leaf blades as long as my pinky. Sprengel’s sedge pistillate spikes has begun to nod. Small-flowered buttercup is up to my knee and producing achenes. The twisted yellow petals of largeflower bellwort have paled and are falling to the ground, and the ovaries inside are nearly as big as green peas. Common yellowthroats and toads are singing from the marshes along with the occasional peeper. A pair of thrushes is frequenting the pond in the middle of Maple Grove. Water striders are fishing in the eddies of St. Joseph Creek.

The plants have gone on living their lives as though humans’ lives had not changed. As a consequence, we’ll tic our way into summer plant by plant, just as we always do. It just isn’t the same summer.

Plants referenced

• Carex blanda – a common sedge of mesic woodlands, and one that crops up occasionally in shaded damp sidewalk cracks.
• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Allium tricoccum – wild leek
• Anemone quinquefolia – wood anemone
• Asarum canadense – wild ginger
• Cardamine concatenata -toothwort
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge
• Carex radiata – straight-styled wood sedge
• Carex rosea – curly-styled wood sedge
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge
• Carpinus caroliniana – musclewood
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Galium aparine – cleavers
• Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
• Geum canadense – white avens
• Parthenocissus quinquefolia – Virginia creeper
• Quercus alba – white oak
• Quercus ellipsoidalis – Hill’s oak
• Quercus macrocarpa – bur oak
• Ranunculus abortivus – small-flowered buttercup
• Ranunculus hispidus – swamp buttercup
• Ribes americanum – American black currant
• Ribes missouriense – Missouri gooseberry
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Thalictrum thalictroides – rue anemone
• Tilia americana – basswood
• Toxicodendron radicans – poison ivy
• Trillium flexipes – nodding trillium
• Trillium recurvatum – prairie trillium
• Ulmus americana – American elm
• Uvularia grandiflora – largeflower bellwort
• Viola pubescens – hairy yellow violet
• Vitis riparia – wild grape

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1. T.S. Eliot. “East Coker.” Originally published in the March 1940 New English Weekly.↩

Last night, a little over an hour before sunset, the sky had cleared out and the sun was bright, and the young leaves of the canopy sugar maples and red oaks in Maple Grove Forest Preserve were aflame. Sugar maple buds in the understory had started to break at the end of the first week of April, and leaves have been opening progressively from the forest understory upward through the midstory to the canopy over the past three weeks, but this was the most action I’d seen in the canopy yet this year. Young shoot tips of red oaks sprouting tiny leaves and catkins were strewn all over the trails. The squirrels seem to love chewing the ends of branches particularly when the catkins are out, and they had clearly had a good day of it.

Sugar maple seedlings that have borne only straplike cotyledons for a couple of weeks are producing bumpy, misshapen foliage leaves that only weakly resemble the adult leaves. Give them time. The foliage leaves on great waterleaf opened while I wasn’t watching, cotyledons retiring beneath them on skeletal long petioles that stretch out perpendicular to the emerging leaves. Virginia creeper leaflets are awakening furry-backed at shin-height, pointed upward or drooping at the ends of branches scrambling over the forest floor and up along the sides of fallen logs. One of the carrion flowers is growing straight up and producing inflorescences. White baneberry has spread in only a couple of days from a knot of tiny leaflings to a spray of foliage, the flowers clotted up at the edge. Herds of jewelweed are massing up in the mesic hollows. They are the long bridge from leaf-out to leaf-fall in late September. Jewelweed will carry us all the way, senescing only when summer is really over.

White trout lilies have begun to fruit. Most still bear petals, but about a third have dropped their corollas and are straightening out, thickened ovaries bearing the elongate style with coiled stigmas at the tip that gives this plant one of its common names, adder’s tongue. Solomon’s seal floral stalks are beginning to droop. False mermaid nutlets are swelling inside the tiny flowers. Toothwort petals have almost all dropped as the narrow siliques elongate, seeds hardening inside. Sepals on nodding trillium are curling back at the tips to expose the white flowers, which are nearly ready to open. Hairy sedge is furred with anthers and stigmas.

A shaft of sunlight canting between the trees that line St. Joseph Creek struck a white bear sedge in full flower, casting a silhouette of the coiled stigmas and inflating perigynia against the bract that forms a hood around the inflorescence, like a shadow puppet playing out the end of the second act of spring. Chimney swifts gurgled and darted around the first quarter moon, above the leafing-out canopy where young insects were on the wing, and where the blue-gray gnatcatchers buzzed and picked around for food. Gnats danced above the forest floor. Flickers squeaked and fussed. Red-bellied woodpeckers barked. Chickadees and white-throated sparrows were trading fours.

I inadvertently scared a black squirrel up into a red oak. He dashed out from under my shadow and disappeared up the bole of the tree before I could pace around the opposite side and see where he’d gone. I couldn’t see him, but he was up there somewhere, standing still, perhaps watching to see if I might be a big cat or a coyote. I looked for the squirrel for several minutes but didn’t find him again. It occurred to me that this was the last night of April, and I thought of what a strange, hard month it’s been for our world. I am sorry to say that since high school, I almost never think of the word “April” without T.S. Eliot’s lines chasing along behind:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.

The forest floor was carpeted all around with tangles of lanky false mermaid as high as my ankles, swamp buttercup and false rue anemone still blooming in the woods, two-toned hummocks of James’s sedge on the cusp of putting up inflorescences. As I left the red oak and walked out of the woods, the squirrel’s memory of me likely disappeared more quickly than the memory of a buried acorn. I imagined, as I drove home, the black squirrel alone in the red oak he’d dashed up, separate from every other squirrel in the woods, moving out to the shoot tips to nibble and clip, glean what nutrition he could from the inner bark and end buds, or just feed the incessant desire to gnaw.

Plants referenced

• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Actaea pachypoda – white baneberry
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Carex albursina – white bear sedge
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge
• Carex jamesii – James’s sedge
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Hydrophyllum appendiculatum – great waterleaf
• Impatiens sp. – jewelweed
• Parthenocissus quinquefolia – Virginia creeper
• Polygonatum biflorum – Solomon’s seal
• Quercus rubra – red oak
• Ranunculus hispidus – swamp buttercup
• Smilax sp. – carrion flower
• Trillium flexipes – nodding trillium