Late August: Just passing through

24 August 2024
We have passed midsummer in the forest. Ride out through the Arboretum’s East Woods this week, and you’ll find woodland sunflower in full bloom. Walk the Maple Grove Forest Preserve trails, and you’ll pass sloughs of great blue lobelia, flowers raised to shoulder-level. Joe-pye weed has already passed full bloom, its spindly-armed flowers intermixed with tufts of achenes. Elm-leaf goldenrod began flowering just this week. Drummond’s aster flowers will open soon.

But on most walks through the forest this week—through almost all of summer—I think of Edgar Anderson’s “green lull,” his term for the midsummer forest, after the spring wildflowers have senesced and the canopy has closed, but the fall flowers are not in bloom. Most trails are still a wash of green right now, pricked with white or colored flowers. On my bike ride into work on Tuesday, I stopped in the East Woods to find all the seeds shed from white grass along the right side of the trail that leads north from Parking Lot 10, the pale jewelweed flowers and fruit abscised and flowering stalks mostly dropped on the left side. White snakeroot leaves were etched with leaf miner trails; a few were in full flower. Enchanter’s nightshade fruits were brown. White avens seed-heads crumbled easily between the fingertips into nickel-sized palmfuls of slender, obovate achenes with long-slender tips. Early meadow-rue was yellowing. This time last year, the trail was littered with eastern white oak seeds germinating, the fruit of a mast year strewn over the forest floor by squirrels who would take a bite here and there and toss the rest to the side. This year, the trails are littered with red oak acorn shells.

This morning’s walk into Lyman Woods from the hospital parking lot is sticky-warm. The woods are buzzing with cicadas, humming with crickets. Eastern wood pewee whistles hang in the humid air. Jumpseed spikes are mostly lined with white fruits about ready to spring off into the trail edge, but there are a few young flowers at the bases of many of the inflorescence stalks. Woodland tick-trefoil seeds have mostly fallen, but several stalks bear a few depauperate purple flowers. Honewort schizocarps are rounded at the bases, arched outward in the middle, narrowed to pencil-sharp tips, plump, rigid, almost brittle. White vervain flowers have crept slowly upward along the spikes nearly to the tip. The leaves of one vervain plant are cloaked in powdery mildew. Flowering hog-peanut winds around the stalks of goldenrods and grasses. The wood nettles are draped with flowers lacier than doilies, lacier than even Queen Anne’s lace, implausibly delicate for a plant that inflicts a painful sting when it is only weeks old and becomes stout and heavily armed by early summer. I might have expected the greens of oak catkins for a plant like this, not a profusion of tiny white flowers sized perfectly for a ladybug’s bouquet. The leaves of a bitternut hickory are pimpled in aphid galls.

There is a new-fallen northern red oak branch across the trail on the loop I like to take through the forest’s southern end. It fell some time after the leaves were full-size. It is roughly two feet in diameter, a massive limb to have cleaved off the side of a tree. The sapwood at the tip is sprawled out into slivers that became frozen in place by the trauma of breaking, arched as though the branch were photographed in mid-fall, before the xylem could snap back into position. Wedged between two shards of bundled vessels is a red oak acorn that has been decapped, shucked, and nibbled cleanly from the base to just a third of the way up the acorn. The seedling at the tip—just the germinal root and shoot—is untouched and might survive if the seedling hasn’t already dried out too much to grow. I pull the acorn out from between the broken margins of the branch. It feels very light, so perhaps the seedling is dead already. I toss it to the ground to give it a chance. Scattered across the log are scores of red oak acorn shells, etched with the markings of squirrel teeth and claws.

The forest opens up at the base of the hill to a wetland that grows thick with willowherb and common jewelweed. A buck snorts off to my left, toward the houses. As I hike out, I pass a black cherry tree about six inches in diameter that has cracked open and fallen across the trail. It is thoroughly excavated with galleries, capacious enough for tens or hundreds of thousands of I-know-not what. Beetles? Ants? Maybe. Whatever its denizens, however, the black cherry leaves me wondering how many hundreds or thousands of homes this tree has served as after its death. How many more insects will it host before it rots away? For how many decades will this fallen black cherry continue returning carbon, nutrients, and sustenance to the forest?

Plants referenced

• Ageratina altissima — white snakeroot
• Carya cordiformis — bitternut hickory
• Circaea canadensis — enchanter’s nightshade
• Cryptotaenia canadensis — honewort
• Desmodium glutinosum — woodland tick-trefoil
• Eutrochium purpureum — joe-pye weed. Three Eutrochium species are fairly common in the area, but this is the one encountered most frequently
• Geum canadense — white avens
• Helianthus sp. — woodland sunflower (here I am including H. strumosus and H. divaricatus, both of which I run into in the East Woods)
• Impatiens capensis — common jewelweed
• Impatiens pallida — pale jewelweed
• Laportea canadensis — wood nettle
• Leersia virginica — white grass
• Persicaria virginiana — jumpseed
• Prunus serotina — black cherry
• Quercus alba — eastern white oak
• Quercus rubra — northern red oak
• Solidago ulmifolia — elm-leaf goldenrod
• Thalictrum diocium — early meadow-rue
• Verbena urticifolia — white vervain