4:15 p.m., 65F, sunny
A white-breasted nuthatch is calling as I enter Lyman Woods over the toothwort-clothed crest of the berm crossing the trail that leads from the hospital parking lot into the forest. Red-winged blackbirds are singing. Craneflies or big mosquitoes are lollygagging on the flaccid wild garlic leaves and landing platforms formed by the colonies of wild geraniums. Wild hyacinth is putting up an inflorescence of tightly-balled fists, each subtended by a scale, ripening to the moment. It seems early, and I do not remember having seen the species here. Across the trail from it, a Jack-in-the-pulpit spear has speared the leaves and is standing shin-high, and further down the trail a male jack is in flower, in the middle of a bed of wild onions.
Rue anemone—Thalictrum thalictroides, perhaps better called “the thalictrum-like thalictrum”—is still flowering, though it looks a little dilapidated. So does the false rue anemone—Enemion biternatum, perhaps better called simply “Enemion” or its older name, “Isopyrum”, because as the late, great Ken Wood pointed out: it isn’t false anything, but is what it is—which still bobs w/ flowers in patches here and there, bowing on its way off stage. A chokecherry is putting up spikes of white flowers. A fallen black cherry I have walked past a dozen or more times since winter is split open and perforated with ant galleries, thoroughly excavated but resprouting vigorously from the base. White flowers the size of saucers in a child’s tea set are perched between the paired leaves of mayapples. Geraniums are in bloom.
The flower stalks on narrow-leaved wild leek are less than an inch high, spear-tipped, embedded among the pale leaf bases, detectable only if you know to look for them. White trout lily flowers are fallen, the capsules turning their tips to the sky. Spring beauty seeds have mostly dispersed, sepals open at the tips of arched sepals, like a cluster of moray eels with their mouths open, waiting. Prairie trillium is flowering with erect maroon petals, arched, enclosing the staments. Bladdernut flowers hang in clusters. Moonseed stems arch over the edge of the trail. Jewelweed leaves have grown larger than the cotyledons. Sensitive fern leaves have unrolled and are flattening out by the minute.
Tufted titmouse are singing in all directions. Buzzing blue-gray gnatcatchers filling the lower ranks of the canopy. A yellow-rumped warbler climbs between the catkins spilling out from the swamp white oak buds, picking at insects feeding on pollen that developed inside the anthers that lay dormant at the tips of unborn flowers inside the buds all winter, predetermined by last summer’s rains and the growth of the tree over the several decades before it. Robins and squirrels are hopping around everywhere I look.
Carpets of hispid buttercups flower where the ground cups to hold the rainwater or the groundwater comes closer to the surface. Carrion flower leaves are whorled at the tips of plants that are growing more or less erect; a single umbel of unopened flowers has burst from the side of one of the plants. A single milkweed—poke milkweed? I believe so, don’t know what else it could be, but am not certain at this stage—stands slender, reminiscent of an asparagus stalk that has sprouted paired ears along its length. At first I see just one, standing beside a joe-pye weed with emerging leaves angled upwards, nodes dark. Then I realize I am standing beside an entire colony of them, packed shoulder-to-shoulder.
I look around me and cannot keep up with the green stretching out toward the sun, over the moraine dipping upward and downward. Everything is growing: sunflowers, mayapples, golden alexanders, phlox, carrion flower, jack-in-the-pulpit, wild garlic, wild leek, Solomon’s plume, woodland violet, rue anemone, bellwort, toothwort, Virginia waterleaf, white rattlesnake root, bloodroot leaves expanding to the size of my hand, fountains of bottlebrush grass. I feel I cannot write fast enough to keep up with the plants and the light changing as the path turns upward and downward over the hills and robins hopping through all the foliage like puppies in an enormous, overgrown spring lawn.
On the walk out, I pass fairy rings of Sprengel’s sedge as big around as dinner plates and hog peanut shoots getting started, flower on Carex rosea. One Jacob’s ladder is flowering.
References
For more on resprouting trees, take a look at Sproutlands by William Bryant Logan, a book about resprouting trees in all their glory. For Ken Wood? I’m afraid I don’t have any of his old writings; his obituary will have to do.
