“Let me just say this. We talk about Coltrane as this, you know, iconic figure who put his pants on differently than anyone else, you know. No, no, no, no, no. At forty years old, Coltrane was still reaching. You know, he hadn’t, he hadn’t gotten there so to speak. At forty years old, he was still trying to find that other moment, that next thing which most improvisors reach for. You know, we don’t necessarily play tunes, we don’t necessarily, you know, break our back to entertain. We’re playing for the next thing to happen. And that’s what he was doing.”
— Hanah Jon Taylor, March 1, 2024, WORT; the eight o’clock buzz (52:30)
March 4, Lyman Woods
Mourning doves are singing at 4 p.m. It’s about 70°F. I have been away for a few days, and everything seems to be moving above ground. Buds are extended into spearheads on the honeysuckles lining the trail into the preserve. About half have broken open and are producing leaves as long as my pinky nail. Baby tooth moss sporophytes range from spear-straight and upright, topped with needle-like hoods; to tipping, bent at 10° or so at the base of the capsules; to fully nodding. The capsules are becoming plump and lustrous, glowing pale green in the afternoon sun. Rain has come and gone, and clumps of this moss crawling over hummocks of rotted wood are in some places dried out, leaves wadded up along the stem. Others have tapped a little more water and have unfurled. Hydrated or desiccated, all are reproducing.
Lisping songbirds—white-throated sparrows? I am not sure—flock into the last enclosure of honeysuckle before the main trail. Light is canting in from the west. The birds are all within a few feet of me, but I cannot tell how many there are. I see branches twitching, but I don’t see the birds themselves. I watch and listen for a few minutes as they move around. Perhaps there are five of them, or twice as many, or only two and moving around quickly.
Iris leaves piercing the bank have stretched and begun to fan out. Each leaf enfolds the leaves emerging above it. A week or two ago, these were just spear tips. The wet, open edge of the forest smells like the remnants of a fire. Red-winged blackbirds are singing.
Wild garlic shoots are six inches tall in the uplands. Annual bedstraw cranes up over the oak leaves, leaves whorled around its stems, still stubby but sharp-tipped. White oak acorns from the fall’s abundance are continuing to slough their shells. Sprengel’s sedge forms pale green crowns floating in pools of leaf litter. Speed through the years, and the forest would flicker with this species as new plants established from a fallen seed, expanded from a few leaves into a ring of shoots, dispersed to form new colonies. Each individual plant would grow year after year as it sent new rhizomes outward, contract as the earthworms raised the soil surface around it, fire set it back, or the canopy closed in. Each would eventually wink out as it was outcompeted or conditions no longer suited it. You could trace its descendants through the forest from decade to decade.
Silver maple and sycamore are flowering on the neighborhood roads. Rachel meets me on my walk, and we head home together. Thunder starts that evening around the time we are heading to bed. In Lyman Woods, the mosses rehydrate.
March 5, East Woods
Chorus frogs sing during my bike ride into work. In the uplands, they nearly trill. In the marshes, they call so slowly I can almost count the cricks. Jim Bowhay, one of our herbarium volunteers, reports hearing them yesterday at Cap Sauers preserve. A bluebird is singing along the north edge of the woods. Juncos whirl past. Clumps of field garlic grow calf-high with twisted leaves. Blue-green orchard grass leaves grow ankle-high along the road.
March 9, Maple Grove
False mermaid plants have elbowed their way between the dry oak leaves throughout Maple Grove. They are paving the interstices where soil was visible a week ago, caulking in the gaps around the leaf margins. Soon they will grow tall enough to overtop the dry leaves. For now, they are painting the floor a tentative green.
Virginia bluebells have formed glaucous rosettes. False rue anemone plants form dark green colonies, their short, spreading canopies pocked with flower buds. Carex squarrosa is sending up glaucous, bluish spears along the wet trail edge.
March 10, Lyman Woods
Cardinals and chickadees and red-winged blackbirds are all singing in the neighborhood trees as I walk toward the woods this morning. The sidewalks are littered with flowers of silver maples that have completed their first spring tasks. The large cultivated yew along the Sterling Avenue sidewalk likewise appears to have finished shedding pollen. I have never paid planted yews much attention. There is an irony in this: the cultivated yew in front of the house where I grew up represented one of the first two plant genera I recall recognizing from place to place (the other being the spruce that dominated our front yard, and under which my friends and I played). Today, the Sterling Avenue yew is festooned with what looks like tiny beige eggs nestled among the leaves. Up close, each resolves into a filigree of split-open microsporangiophores, splayed like the petals of a rough-hewn dahlia, borne on a stalk planted in a cone of scales.[1]
On the trail into Lyman Woods, the Fissidens capsules are all bent over. A clump of baby tooth moss I have been watching near the entrance to the woods gets a lot of sunlight, and the capsules have broken off, leaving just a hook of tissue at the tip of each filament. Farther down the trail, other colonies of this same species have swollen capsules whose hoods pop off at a brush. The irises along the creek are scarcely larger than they were when I walked through last week.
March 12, East Woods
Temperatures rose to 65°F by midday today. Spring beauty is blooming sporadically along the Woodland Trail that loops north and east from Big Rock Visitor Station. There are two bloodroot in bloom as well, wrapped in diminutive leaves. My earliest sighting of this species previously was spring of 2017, when bloodroot was coming into bloom at the beginning of April.
March 15, East Woods
I arrive about 8:30 and park my bicycle at Parking Lot 8. A phoebe is singing as I pull in. A pileated woodpecker startles from the ground onto the trunk of an oak. False mermaid overtops the dried oak leaves. Annual bedstraw is stout and dark green in the burned sections of the woods, about three inches tall. The flaccid foliage of Atlantic camas twists in the leaf litter just north of the road. Buttercup, not flowering yet, is scattered across the forest floor. The soil at the base of a bur oak is blanketed with acorn caps and shells, millipedes trundling beneath. Spring beauty pokes through. Wild garlic foliage is ankle-high.
I have been watching for white oak epicotyls to begin growing. The epicotyl is just the shoot, everything above (‘epi’) the point where the cotyledons attach. Today, many that I look at don’t appear any longer than they did a week ago, but they all seem especially green and fresh, alive. Perhaps this is wishful thinking.
Toothwort leaves have expanded from the threads and needles they were a month ago into broad, finger-like lobes. They are everywhere in the woods, and a few flowers are fully out of the bud, on the cusp of opening. Many are peeking out from behind barely-spreading sepals. False rue anemone floral buds are whitened at the tips. Bristly buttercup, Virginia waterleaf, great waterleaf, Drummond’s aster, Virginia bluebells, Jacob’s ladder, and wild geranium are all putting out leaves but no flowers yet. White bear sedges are an inch tall, surrounded by last year’s evergreen leaves.
Past the Big Rock Visitor Station, where the forest was burned earlier this spring, grass blades have greened up beneath their charred tips. The forest floor is carpeted with white oak and bur oak acorns, some blackened by fire. Many have been chewed up a bit and then abandoned by the squirrels, who have become desultory in this year of plenty. I nibble on one of the acorns. It does not cause me to pucker, as raw acorns in our area usually do. Perhaps the toasting leached out some of the tannins; most likely some of the tannins drained away over the course of the winter as well, beneath occasional snow, absorbed into the damp earth.
The woods open on the route up to and over the moraine, and I check the acorns every few feet. I push the cotyledons of embedded acorns to the side, looking for the shoot tips, and the cotyledon stalks regularly break off as I do so. I suspect the food is all moved down into the roots now. The cotyledon has become superfluous, bait for squirrels who probably know by smell alone that they won’t find much to sustain them here. A few peepers are calling in the pond between the moraine and Hidden Lake.
There is a riot of blackbirds in the canopy. I find a white oak acorn that was burned a few weeks ago, but only after its shoot tip had grown a full inch. It is dislodged from the ground and brittle. Beside it, I find another that started growing probably more than a month ago. The shoot is about two-thirds as long as the acorn itself. It is weathered, but alive, and I wonder whether it might have broken dormancy during the warm December. These are the first two oak stems I’ve found growing from the 2023 mast. An earthworm climbs around the edge of the trail, stretching its nose far enough to get purchase on a wood chip, then pulls its hindquarters along. It descends between the ridges in the trail and finds soil, and then it is gone.
After the work day is over, I walk back to my bike. Juncos are flitting among the planted Austrian pines east of the research building. Robins are pulling earthworms from the lawn. The peepers in Crowley Marsh marsh let loose a volley of song as I approach, then stop, then fire up again as I cross the bridge on my way home.
March 16, Black Oak Trail near Little Red Schoolhouse
Song sparrows are back in town. Peepers and chorus frogs are singing. Tree swallows are flying over the slough. There is a bluebird in the trees, and Pennsylvania sedge is greening up. Honeysuckle leaves are twice as long as my thumbnail. A mourning cloak lands on the trail and walks around, tasting the dry, bare dirt.
March 30, Maple Grove
Two weeks have passed, but things have advanced only a little. Blue wood violets are flowering along the trail into Maple Grove. Sugar maple cotyledons have emerged from their seeds but are mostly still kinked in the middle, like the still-crumpled wings of newly emerged butterflies. Jewelweed cotyledons are nickle-sized but already bitter. Virginia bluebell flowers are clustered among the leaf blades and mostly closed; a few are open, solitary trumpets warming up before the extravagance of April. Squill is flowering everywhere.
Nearly every false mermaid plant has started branching. White trout lilies that speared the maple leaves and pushed aside the oaks on their way out of the ground have begun to unroll. They form stout, sparse lawns holding the fallen leaf litter in place. Broad-leaved wild leek leaves have expanded to about six inches long and an inch or so broad. The young leaves of agrimony are replacing last year’s evergreen leaves. Dandelion rosettes are several inches in diameter. Burdock leaves are one to three inches long, not quite as tough as they’ll be at full maturity, when they’ll measure a foot or more in length with their taproots buried about as deep.
False rue anemone is massed up on the cusp of full flower. Some patches in partial sun are fully in bloom. Others in the shade are still in bud. Spring beauty flowers pepper the forest floor. A few toothwort flowers are open. Prairie trillium leaves are opening, hardly more than rosettes at this point.
On the walk southward through the center of the forest, Brooklyn and I pass a standing dead ash largely denuded of bark and dimpled with excavations. The wood is dry-rotted enough to pick apart with my fingers. We go over the top of the hill, pass a lawn of Carex hirtifolia leaves as we walk down the north-facing slope, cross the main trail that arcs from west to southeast, and get into the muddy part where the spring runs down the middle of the trail. Brooklyn jumps into the ditch running through the culvert and wallows in the duckweed that is greening up along the water’s edge. We head upslope and pass black cherry saplings covered with glossy, fleshy leaves one-quarter to a half-inch long.
We pass a dead red oak broken off at about 20’ up. I have never heard owls here so far as I can remember, but the leaves beneath this oak are splashed with whitewash. Two bloodroots are still flowering along the west edge of the trail, within spitting distance of the backyards whose houses line Lee Avenue. As we walk out, two mourning cloaks are gliding between the trunks. A robin is flipping leaves.
Plants referenced
- Acer saccharinum — silver maple
- Acer saccharum — sugar maple
- Allium canadense — wild garlic
- Allium vineale — field garlic
- Camassia scilloides — Atlantic camas
- Cardamine concatenata — cut-leaf toothwort
- Carex albursina — white bear sedge
- Carex hirtifolia — hairy-leaved sedge
- Carex pensylvanica — Pennsylvania sedge
- Carex sprengelii — Sprengel’s sedge
- Claytonia virginica — spring beauty
- Dactylis glomerata — orchard grass
- Enemion biternatum — false rue anemone
- Erythronium albidum — white trout lily
- Galium aparine — annual bedstraw
- Geranium maculatum — wild geranium
- Hydrophyllum appendiculatum — great waterleaf
- Hydrophyllum virginianum — Virginia waterleaf
- Lemna sp. — duckweed
- Lonicera ×bella — might not be this hybrid, but probably
- Mertensia virginica — Virginia bluebells
- Plagiomnium cuspidatum — baby tooth moss, woodsy thyme moss
- Polemonium reptans — Jacob’s ladder
- Quercus alba — eastern white oak
- Ranunculus hispidus — bristly buttercup
- Rosa multiflora — multiflora rose
- Sanguinaria canadense — bloodroot
- Symphyotrichum drummondii — Drummond’s aster
- Taxus sp. — yew
- Trillium recurvatum — bloody butcher, prairie trillium
- Viola sororia — wood violet
Literature referenced
[1] There is a nice overview of the male reproductive structures, including photos and illustrations, in: Dörken VM. 2023 [online early]. The structure and vasculature in pollen cones of Taxus (Taxaceae, Gymnospermae) and its evolutionary significance. Feddes Repertorium. doi:10.1002/fedr.202300041.