4:30 p.m., ca. 70F, sunny, a little wind

I was away this week for two nights in Washington, D.C. I had forgotten how exciting the city is. Decades intermix on the Metro, the 1970s shoulder-to-shoulder with this week, everything belowground hurtling toward a future that’s being carved out right now by pairs of young people on their phones and individuals lost in a book or staring ahead, thinking. Then, the train stops, and I ascend to street-level slowly on one of the unimaginably long escalators and step off at Capitol Hill.

I walked toward my hotel, passing a small, planted overcup oak, then a small bur oak, then a southern magnolia in magnificent flower. I checked in and took a slow meander past the Capitol Building; stopped at Olmsted’s Summerhouse to get out of the heat for a few minutes and fill my water bottle; walked westward across the National Mall; lunched in front of the Chagall mosaic in the National Gallery’s sculpture garden; walked past the Washington Monument and followed the west edge of the White House property past the fighting arena being erected in on the south lawn for the President’s birthday, looking for all the world like a giant bounce house; browsed Second Story books for an hour; then headed back to my hotel for the night.

The next morning, a colleague and I walked to the Natural History Museum for the 23rd National Botanical Symposium, at which we would both be speaking later that day. The topic was “American Botany: 250 Years of Discovery.” Our route to the museum took us south of the Department of Labor, where, had we been walking just a block further north, we might have seen an enormous banner with an image of the President staring us down above a caption reading, America 250: American Workers First. He was missed at the symposium. About 300 attended in person, 200 online, making for a day of good conversation about plant exploration, collections, the evolution and conservation of plant diversity, the future of the forests and prairies we know, the long history of humans living and thinking with plants. The panel discussion ranged widely. Afterwards, the group walked to a reception at the National Botanic Garden.

After about an hour of conversation I wandered out of the main room and, unexpectedly, had the conservatory to myself: the desert room with bristling euphorbs, prickly pears and Parodia, Ferocactus and Mammillaria, Brighamia sprouting from pumice with Portulaca, duckweed strewn across the surface of a pool. A mesmerizing carnivorous plants video played on a loop, showing a sundew coiling slowly around a fly, engulfing it, then a Venus flytrap leaf closing while the insect inside struggles for a second and then gives up. I walked on and found myself in front of two titan arums towering beside each other, a handsome and intimidating couple. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Their pleated spathes cradled the base of each spadix. I studied them for a few minutes and felt myself breathing as easily as I had in several days. I walked back to the main room and chatted some more before we left for supper.

On the flight out the next morning, the plane banked so that I could see the capitol below and the Washington Monument with the White House so small to the north of it, the armature of the mixed martial arts arena perched on the south lawn like a tarantula about to crawl beneath the south portico to sleep away the afternoon. I returned home about noon. My son and I had lunch, made a grocery list, did groceries, had an afternoon snack. I napped for a bit, then Brooklyn and I walked to Maple Grove.

Goutweed was flowering in the shaded yards of Denburn Woods. Brooklyn had a swim in the ditch, then we walked into the forest. Bent-tipped achenes were packed onto the receptacle of a hooked buttercup. The last flowers were clinging to the north edge of the honeysuckles that form a wall along the path in from the neighborhoods, flaccid leaves as big as poppy petals. Clusters of four-petaled flowers clung to the margins of a privet backed up against the honeysuckle. A man about my age passed me with two dogs, brown moppy types, warned me that they might bark and uttered a stern “leave it! leave it!” to his dogs, in reference to Brooklyn and me. We continued minding our own business.

Wild geranium were going to seed. Their fruits were stiff, stout crane’s bills braced below by four rubbery nutlets. Fruits of large-flowered bellwort were swelling but still pulpy. An oriole was piping. Robins were frisking around on the forest floor. A house wren called.

In the five days that I had been away from this forest, roughly 80% of the great waterleaf flowers had shed their petals, leaving the sepals tangled in long, capillary hairs. Virginia waterleaf fruits had swollen up against the cups formed by the collar of sepals at the base of the flowers, clothed in long guard hairs and a dense coat of short bristles. Bulblets had begun to germinate in the inflorescences of Canadian meadow garlic, spathes bright white in the dark understory. Honewort had begun to produce sparse, delicate sprays of white flowers. A colony of long-bristled smartweed was flowering along the trail at the base of the Gray’s sedge I had noted earlier in the week. Virginia bluebells had gone from languishing to almost completely died back. Brooklyn and I walked home slowly, in no hurry.

As I write these notes two days later, the sun is going down and robins are hopping around our yard. It is dark enough under the tree, where I am sitting, that I can just see the outlines of things: socks balled up next to the chair (mine), a pair of shoes abandoned (mine), gardening gloves I tossed on the mulch, a short stack of books, my reading glasses. I pack up my things to head inside. As I do, a white dot the size of a pea glides past my foot to the edge of our chair and rests there. I flip on my phone light: the white dot is a spider with a bright, swollen abdomen. She perches on all fours, raises herself so that she is arched over the wood chips for a moment, then flattens herself. She waits just a moment and then slides beneath the chair, and then she is off in a world all her own, where she will spend her night tucked comfortably into the mulch while we sleep warm inside.