Our neighborhood has been crawling with emerging cicadas this past week, but there’s not one to be seen in the East Woods on Sunday morning. I park my bike at Big Rock Visitor Station and am set upon by mosquitoes. Pewees and indigo buntings are calling. Gossamer is tangled in the tree branches. Oak pollen swirls dreamily through sunflecks, like sediment in a pond when the sun streaks through the trees and you are swimming beneath the water, and the light pouring into the water illuminates every speck of dirt suspended in the lake.
Wild garlic is massed up on slopes and in the ravines, slender green with a pale hood—the spathe—cinched around its inflorescences. A few, perhaps 5% of the plants, have torn through the hood, and the bulblets in their inflorescences are sending shoots toward the canopy. Its cousin, narrow-leaved wild leek, has died back, but only the leaves: the inflorescences are emerging now on scapes, naked flower stalks that emerge straight from the ground. Like those of the wild garlic, these inflorescences are enclosed in papery sheaths. Give them time. They’ll open in a few weeks and fill the forest with fireworks.
5/19/24, Morton Arboretum East Woods.
A pileated woodpecker hammers slowly at a sugar maple tree as I work my way east along the trail. Fruits on hairy sweet cicely are starting to swell, some still tipped with flowers. Fruits on smooth sweet cicely are almost fully developed. A pale beauty moth perches on a poison ivy, as still as a bird dropping but far lovelier. Woodland bluegrass is blooming, a species I’ve seen in Maple Grove but never here, and I realize on returning home that we need a specimen for the herbarium. Black snakeroot is flowering. Mayapple fruits are drooping beneath the leaves. Annual bedstraw is sprawling, heavy with bristly fruits.
False mermaid, which carpeted the forest last time I walked this trail, has died back for the year and is flat, crisp, and annealed to the soil. Sifting through several handfuls, I find only one tiny fruit, probably aborted. The rest have dispersed. Looking closely below the plants, I find the soil dotted with the species’ rugged seeds. They all roughened at the tips, smoother toward the base, and look to me to be about half the diameter of a mung bean. A few are pale green, the color of the wild garlic spathes. Most are the color of soil. All are hardening off to wait for winter. They will bide their time, let droughty July and thunderstorms pass, leaves fall, temperatures drop before they put out a tiny root, and then wait a few more months through winter until the shoots extend and extract the first leaves from the seed.
Toothwort leaves have died back, leaving only the radiating bouquets of capsules with long, slender tips, packed with seeds, angling outward from thick stalks. Pale jewelweed is thigh-high. Rubus canes are flowering, and Solomon’s seal flowers are dangling, still closed. The cut face of an eastern white oak log that has fallen across the trail is dotted with copulating oak timberworm weevils. From what I read this evening, the adults likely just arrived and are mating on the surface of the wood, where the female will oviposit. Her children will perforate the rotting wood with excavations. I approach close enough to take a photo, and they abandon their perches, drop to the ground and scutter away into the sawdust. Further on, an American copper underwing moth is curled on a white ash leaf. Slippery elm leaves are pinched with elm finger gall mite galls.
On the walk out, I pass little clusters of white oak seedlings that are ankle high with thick, tuberous tap roots and barely-lobed leaves. Last year was a mast year, so they are abundant. In other mast years I have not noticed the oak seedlings like I do now, near the end of a three-year project writing a book on oaks. I tend to notice things in juxtaposition to my thoughts, and thus to notice things more clearly if I’m thinking about them already. Perhaps we all do. I’ve been reading William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels this week, and I’m reminded of this quote from Werner Heisenberg: “… what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning” (p. 115). If this is true, then my method of questioning in the woods is walking around, variously wondering and strolling, linking up photos and notes and observations across sites and years, writing it down (where I notice things I missed the first time around). If you can call that a method.
I don’t carry the thought to completion, as I’m cut short by the mosquitoes. They haven’t stopped pestering me since I started walking.
Plants referenced
- Allium burdickii — narrow-leaved wild leek
- Allium canadense — wild garlic
- Cardmine concatenata — cut-leaf toothwort
- Floerkea proserpinacoides — false mermaid
- Fraxinus americana — white ash
- Galium aparine — annual bedstraw
- Impatiens pallida — pale jewelweed
- Osmorhiza claytonii — smooth sweet cicely
- Osmorhiza longistylis — hairy sweet cicely
- Poa sylvestris — woodland bluegrass
- Podophyllum peltatum — mayapple
- Polygonatum biflorum — Solomon’s seal
- Quercus alba — eastern white oak
- Rubus sp. — raspberry
- Sanicula sp. — black snakeroot
- Ulmus rubra — slippery elm