On my walk through Downers Grove, bur oak all over town are weighed down by heavy crops of acorns. They’ve been shedding runty acorns for awhile, but the big ones will start dropping soon. When I reach Maple Grove, ripe red oak acorns have started to fall. Path rush and Carex hirtifolia are sprawling along the trail edge, sloppy with the abundance of rain we’ve had this month. A bur-reed sedge culm is fallen, still hanging onto its seeds. A bolete mushroom has been gnawed on by a mouse or something else small, leaving a patchwork of continents inscribed on its upper surface, the molds of mountains grading to the shores, an island floating off shore. Pour in the plaster, let it dry, and you’d have a landform. A dead fly lies next to one of the carved shorelines.
Two-year-old white oak seedlings are growing in healthy dispersed clumps, still thriving from the 2023 mast year when both the bur and the white oak populations in our region bore acorns in abundance, so much that one homeowner whose house I pass regularly raked the bur oak acorns up into a mulch around the base of a tree and a nearby telephone pole; some of the latter germinated and are still growing today. White avens seeds are ripe, the inflorescences resisting just a few ounces of pressure before they crumble into a sprinkle of achenes between my fingers. Cerodontha trails on the white bear sedge leaves have coalesced to the point that the leaves are pale from edge to edge, the excavations flecked with black spots: fungi, perhaps, or frass? The leaves are pricked too with spots from a virus or insect eggs, or something else I cannot imagine. There is more texture on these leaves than I’ve ever seen. Everywhere in the woods, I find white bear sedge with its leaves inscribed in this elaborate intaglio, except for one north-facing slope west of the ephemeral pond that fills up with barnyard grass. On this slope, the white bear sedge leaves are not touched at all.
A pewee calls from a cloud of cicada screams overhead. A fallen, decomposing tree trunk along the trail is lined with common coral slime mold, Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa, in drooping-tentacles form. Orange peel fungus is growing thin and curled among decomposing chips of tree trunk, the puckered bases nestled a millimeter into the soil, attaching to mycelia that stretch who-knows-how-far off beneath the forest floor. The cups are soft but brittle, bending just a bit as I fold my hand around them until they break into shards. I think I see spores waft off as I do this, but I flick a second and then a third and see nothing. A day later, they will be shattered and partially mixed into the soil.
Broad-leaved wild leek seeds are developing inside their sheaths on scapes that lean as they did when the plants were about to flower. The seeds are pulpy inside black seed coats, these inside green coverings. Common yellow wood sorrel capsules are translucent and turgid, their margins filling with darkening seeds lined up like candies packed in cellophane. Wood nettle is flaunting flowers of both sexes, at least on some plants. Staminate (male) inflorescences are present on every flowering nettle I find, lacy, white anthers like crumpled tissues, what appears to be a pistils in the middle of each flower reduced to a style with a white knob at the tip, presumably defunct. Many plants also have pistillate (female) inflorescences, more compact, emerging higher on the plant but not always held as high as the staminate inflorescences, which are sometimes raised above the pistillate. The female flowers are barely more than a horn-like stigma emerging from the ovary, interspersed with green, flattened achenes.
In the south half of the forest, about midway between the footpath that runs past Avery Coonley and the trail that runs north from the parking lot a tree I have probably walked past scores of times is a solid, rich brick red, the color I used in lieu of a more uninteresting moose brown one summer when I was visiting my grandparents and had a Rocky and Bullwinkle coloring book and a 64-crayon Crayola box (with the built-in sharpener) to keep me occupied in the down times. The tree is clothed in white slime mold and exuding fungi from a few of its moister pockets, and slowly shedding blocks of decomposing wood.
White baneberry fruits are ripe, thin white skins tipped with a black scar where the stigma was attached—the pupil, if you prefer to call this plant doll’s-eye—tightly wrapped around 8 wedge-shaped black seeds, fallen apart in my hand like the wedges of a tiny, dark-chocolate orange. A grape vine is plagued with galls that are roughly the color of the stem but swollen as big around as blueberries, tipped with a point, densely juicy inside with a bony core. I break one open but do not find the larvae.
On the way out, I am about ten feet from the bridge over St. Joseph Creek when I catch the movement of a spider retreating upward along its web. Does it see me or detect the vibrations? I do not know: I remember spiders doing the same thing when I worked up in the Apostle Islands verifying vegetation maps and came crashing through the forest on my way back to the lighthouse or ranger station at the end of the day, hungry as the sun was going down. I walk around to the other side of the railing to find the spider, and as I do she walks back to the center of her web and shakes, rattling the cage as I stand there. She is a magnificent spider with black-and-white barred legs and an abdomen patterned like glazed ceramic, cream with black waves undulating lengthwise to her spinnerets. She vibrates for a few seconds before retreating back beneath the handrail. I take a few photos before walking out over the bridge crossing a colony of lanky, yellow-flowered wingstem; American pokeweed beginning to fruit; and a floodplain filled with wood nettles, all lacy with long-armed staminate inflorescences salted with white anthers.
