Month: June 2025

18 June 2025

Saint Joseph Creek is running high and brown when we arrive. I let Brooklyn off her harness and she races into the water, then crouches down to wallow up to her chin and bite at the water. It has been raining on and off much of the day. The creek is high enough to drown the stones that yesterday were trapping catalpa flowers, the grass growing high along the bank bent over and trailing downstream like wild rice or floating bur-reed. The stormwater swirls, giddy at its release from beneath the village streets, waving at us as it passes by, pirouetting around downed logs and gushing beneath the bridge, taking the corner at full speed to disappear into the canal between the road and the homes, then off to the DuPage River. I clap, and Brooklyn scrambles up the muddy slope to meet me.

She does not want to walk in the rain, which is picking up, but we walk anyway, past the sugar maple that fell off its pedestal a few years ago and now lies parallel to the trail, squeezing out dumpling-sized artist’s bracket fungi from between the ridges of bark; past a pokeweed growing fast with inflorescence white and lacy, uncoiling, floral buds small as full-size knotweed flowers; past the last flower of a great waterleaf hiding gauzy blue beside a fallen log; past narrow-leaved leek flowers opening lantern-like along the trail, lighting up the darkening woods as rain increases to the volume of lentils spilled carefully, slowly, but steadily from between the fingers, a fistful every 15 seconds or so.

A pale moth—perhaps a morbid owlet; I have seen them here several times before in early summer—flies alongside us and settles among the calf-high enchanter’s nightshade plants. I reach in to find it, and it flits up above the nightshade canopy before plunging in again to settle beneath a great waterleaf. I tap that plant as well, and the moth crosses our trail and disappears into the backyards where, on other walks in other seasons, the great horned owls have nested. Brooklyn is often uneasy here, and I wonder if the memory of owls is the cause.

The forest is darkening with late afternoon light and shade from the increasing rain. The leaves shudder at otherwise-invisible raindrops: doll’s-eyes with berries not yet ripe; Virginia creeper crawling on the forest floor; a colony of shortish Carex grisea; jumpseed. Moisture highlights the grain of a decorticated, standing dead sugar maple whose sapwood spirals counterclockwise upward to the branches that flare outward at the foundation of the canopy. Wild ginger colonies are placid and unmoving. The ferns twitch. Wood nettle and sugar maple leaves at eye level have grown glazed and glossy as tin. White jelly fungus is squeezing out along the ridges of a rotting ash tree.

The rain is increasing. The paths pool as Brooklyn and I walk back out over the bridge, but the river is no higher than it was when we arrived 30 minutes earlier.

Plants referenced

• Acer saccharum — sugar maple
• Actaea pachypoda — doll’s-eyes
• Allium burdickii — narrow-leaved leek
• Asarum canadense — wild ginger
• Carex grisea — gray sedge
• Circaea canadensis — enchanter’s nightshade
• Fraxinus sp. — ash
• Hydrophyllum appendiculatum — great waterleaf
• Laportea canadensis — wood nettle
• Parthenocissus quinquefolia — Virginia creeper
• Persicaria virginiana — jumpseed
• Phytolacca americana — pokeweed

17 June 2025

Catalpa trees are carpeting the streets with flowers as though they were preparing for the second coming. Two-inch-wide, long-necked white flowers tumble down overnight with constellations of speckles coloring the margins of the petals, aggregating into stripes that lead down their throats to the stamen bases. Inside, the walls of the floral tube converge in the distance, pure white, recede to become a canvas for a dense freckling of stars. Galaxies of flowers fall each night and each windstorm, scatter to form white and black and yellow lawns over the lawns of grass, pile up bruised along the curbs, dam up against the rocks in St. Joseph Creek, pooling quietly, pollen staining their sides as the water runs by and Brooklyn and I stand overhead, staring in for a few minutes before we leave the creek behind and enter Maple Grove.

The high whistle of a golden-crowned kinglet moves among branches in the canopy. Bottlebrush grass, anthers gone now, stands forehead-high, radiating spikelets that are firm and rubbery but not yet ripe. Carex jamesii sprawls flat. Pale jewelweed is half its full-grown height and bears at its waist paired cotyledons, yellowing, remnants of last year. There are no flowers yet that I can see. There will soon be seeds.

The crepidotes that were fresh and cool and rubbery on the weekend are drying and curling on the rotting logs. A few Solomon’s plume are becoming variegated. Sugar maple seedling leaves are spotted with patches hollowed out by leaf miners.

Enemion fruits—false rue anemone—have almost all fallen. Their leaves have yellowed and begun to fall as well. I find one curved achene and pinch it between my fingers. It is as brittle as a porcupine grass seed in midsummer. Carex grisea grows knee-high at the base of a tree that the trail wraps around, as green as grass, almost blue. I bite a perigynium and find it two-thirds as hard inside as the Enemion achene, ripe but not quite done yet. There are chips from a decomposing log on the trail, the work of gnawing or digging or burrowing or hammering animals, along with bacteria and fungi breaking down the wood. Tiny flowers of honewort are past their prime, balanced atop turgescent capsules. An entire colony of wild ginger bears, so far as I can tell, not a single ripening flower. But I am not confident that I looked long enough.

Chatting bikers barrel down the narrow trail. A lawnmower buzzes in the adjacent back yard. Bellwort berries are bigger than chickpeas, smaller than marbles, but still not ripe. The seeds inside are white and pulpy.

Narrow-leaved wild leek scapes line the trail like lanterns about to flick on for the night, the inflorescences barely emerged from their spathes. Wild garlic bulblets ripen on the stem. Carex woodii leaves grow long and lax, slender fingers intertwined as they casually explore the ground around them. A peewee whistles in the canopy. A bunting sings from the pond. A tufted titmouse calls from the backyards at the far side of the forest, near the edge of the cardinal flower population that runs up the saturated bottom and muddy sides of the slough. Spittlebug goop is globbed up two inches long on a poison ivy stem.

I run across a second ginger colony and find fruits ripening beneath nearly every plant. The flowers are dry and brittle as old sponges. I break one open. Seeds spill out into my hand, chestnut brown and frosted with lard for the ants. Mayapple berries dangle beneath the leaves, tough as radishes. A wispy brome is coming up on the bare soil where they installed the culvert last year, maybe the year before last, maybe this year, I cannot remember. The soil is bare, and this grass is weak and spilling out but will not go far. On a second berm it grows with wood nettle.

Brooklyn and I reach the bridge again. She strains at the leash, and I unhook it. She is disbelieving for a few seconds, then sees her situation and bolts to the river, where she crouches down to chin height and bites at the water. A boy walking over the bridge asks if I am the father of his neighbor. I tell him I am not. He says I look like him and seems to want to say something else, but then he walks off. I watch him go for a few seconds. Then I turn back to the river, clap for Brooklyn, and turn to walk up slope. As I walk, I hear her pause a moment in the water, and I know she is watching me and wondering for just a second, considering her options. Then she races up the hill like mad so that, just as I am reaching the crest, she is passing around me, as though she would race on past me down the bridge. Instead, she turns and watches, a little out of breath, and waits. I put the harness on her. She shakes the water off. A chickadee calls as we walk back across the bridge to the parking lot.

Plants referenced

• Acer saccharum — sugar maple
• Allium burdickii — narrow-leaved wild leek
• Allium canadense — wild garlic
• Asarum canadense — wild ginger
• Catalpa speciosa — northern catalpa
• Carex grisea — gray sedge
• Carex jamesii — James’ sedge
• Carex woodii — pretty sedge
• Cryptotaenia canadensis — honewort
• Elymus hystrix or Hystrix patula — bottlebrush grass
• Enemion biternatum — false rue anemone
• Impatiens pallida — upland jewelweed
• Laportea canadensis — wood nettle
• Maianthemum racemosum — Solomon’s plume
• Podophyllum peltatum — mayapple
• Toxicodendron radicans — poison ivy
• Uvularia grandiflora — largeflower bellwort