Author: importFromPhenologyOfEastWoods

In late afternoon of July first, working in the yard, I heard the buzz-saw of a cicada calling from our neighbor’s silver maple. I had sworn I’d heard a false start or two in the latter half of June, isolated individuals firing up their engines alone in some tree at the far end of the neighborhood. But this was the real deal, a long, sustained tone that took breathing in and saying, “let’s do this,” then reverberating from the treetops to be heard by everyone within a mile or so. That night on the bike ride through the neighborhood with a friend, I saw fireflies patrolling the road. Midsummer is here.

The East Woods was resplendent with sun and summer birds when I arrived just after sunset the next morning. Pewees, indigo buntings and robins were calling, along with house wrens, red-eyed vireos, white breasted nuthatches. Field sparrows were still singing after months of being here. Enchanter’s nightshade had turned from bristly ovaries to open flowers, white like confetti strewn along the trail. Wild yam flowers were draped like slender chains of creamy to greenish garland, reminiscent of baby’s breath but nowhere near as white. Shining bedstraw was a tangle of foliage and tiny white stars. Smooth wild licorice was bristling with fruits. Tall thimbleweed was flowering along the roadside. Wood nettle inflorescences were stretching out, white and lanky, not flowering quite yet. On half a dozen nettles in the spruce plot, I found clusters of Dasineura investita galls, but I didn’t find them elsewhere; perhaps this midge is relatively rare after all. Joe-pye weed inflorescences were branching out as well and had gone from relatively tight clusters to gangly and leggy during the last days of June, though they were still white and not yet bearing open flowers. Along with the white flowers were white moths: I had been noticing morbid owlets since June, and this day Leconte’s Haploa moths were out. Hop hornbeam fruits were hanging like lanterns from the tips of the branches.

Large white trillium berries were as big as California black olives; nodding trillium berries were swelling as well, but only about as large as little red grapes. They are sharply three-winged, tipped with blackened stigmas, skirted with greenish sepals and withered, twisted, browning petals. I find in looking through the books that I have been incautious in distinguishing T. grandiflorum, T. cernuum and T. flexipes. I’ll have to be on the watch for these next year when they are flowering to make sure I’ve got the characters right. Small-flowered buttercup fruits were chestnut brown and about half dispersed; by the time you read this, they will probably all have fallen. Sprengel’s sedge was sprawling, fruiting stems almost flat on the ground, perigynia mostly gone. Wood’s sedge was looking better, relaxed, grassy, still clinging to its fruits. Yellow violet fruits were also still hanging on, though a few had started to explode. Watch for the capsules as they spring open, revealing a line of tiny seeds inside, like peas in a pod. Jacob’s ladder sepals are still hiding their seeds. The flowers look empty, and I had thought everything was gone. Crack one open, though, and shake the contents into your palm: out tumble black, crescent-shaped achenes. Smooth Solomon’s seal berries were filling out. Blue cohosh seeds were starting to turn blue. A few immature walnuts had fallen onto the trail.

That night there was a torrential thunderstorm with hail. Two days later, July 4, I walked through Maple Grove Forest Preserve and found St. Joseph Creek had risen by perhaps four feet to knock down the jewelweed, wood nettle, wingstem and everything else to about 30 feet from the river bank. On the south side of the bridge, the floodplain was cleared all the way to the slope. The wild leeks in the uplands were largely still closed, scapes arching over the ground. A few had split open their spathes to reveal a tiny fist of white flowers, and within a few days they would open more quickly into spreading fingers. I do not remember the flower stalks arching like this when they have come up in past years. Perhaps I am catching them early? or forgetting? Or perhaps they were beaten down by the thunderstorm two days earlier and were just recovering. They were covered with cottony scale insects that sprung away or launched parsimonious short flights when I reached for them. Wild ginger had nearly all dispersed, though a few chestnut colored seeds persisted in the spongy fruits. Beside one clone of about four feet in diameter I found seedlings with leaves about the size of silver dollars. Fruits were still swelling on black snakeroot. Spathes had disintegrated from the Jack-in-the-pulpit, leaving hard, green fruits maturing slowly on the spadix. These will swell for weeks before they are ready to drop. Doll’s eye berries were still filling, slowly. Bottlebrush grass, which I thought had flowered while I wasn’t watching, had unfurled its anthers just in time for Independence Day. Path rush capsules were filling with seeds. Clearweed was up to my ankles and stickseed was up to the top of my calves. Neither was flowering yet. The forest floor was littered with fallen basswood blooms.

I came across a brown, spongy, decaying maple that I check regularly for fungi. It was bristling with what appeared to be bright red, tiny toadstools with caps less than a millimeter in diameter and threadlike stalks. Crawling among this fur of filaments and pinheads was a flat-backed millipede, and emerging from the side of the log was a white, fleshy fungus that I take to be a species of Crepidotus, a large genus of wood-eating fungi. Nestled among the base of the bristling fur on the top of the log was what I thought must be tiny puffballs a bit larger than mung beans. On a nearby log, the Xylaria were dying back, blackening at the tips.

Rachel had her doubts about the “toadstools” when I showed her the photos, and I found within hours of posting the photos to iNaturalist that while the Crepidotus and Xylaria were fungi, the others were not. They were slime molds. Slime molds! A Tasmanian naturalist¹ who specializes on this branch of life quickly put me onto the right genera: Cribraria for the “toadstools,” wolf’s milk (Lycogala epidendrum) for the “puffballs.” I was delighted: I’ve been missing a whole branch of the tree of life as I’ve been walking through the woods, and it seems to be an important one. I opened the Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on slime molds, found the genera I had been looking at, and read this:

Science fiction did not invent the slime molds, but it has borrowed from them in using the idea of sheets of liquid, flowing protoplasm, giant voracious amoebae, engulfing and dissolving every living thing they touch. What fiction could only imagine, nature has evolved, and only their sharp dependence on coolness, moisture and darkness has kept the slime molds from ordinary observation, for they are common enough.

Coolness, moisture and darkness are found in the soil and in logs, twigs and leaves decaying on the forest floor; there also are found the slime molds. An old log turned over—preferably a few days after a warm summer rain—may reveal on its underside a white or yellowish fan of almost liquid consistency, a sheet of slowly flowing protoplasm. The drier upper side of the log may be covered with what look like pinehead-sized toadstools that when touched give off clouds of dust-fine spores.²

That is exactly what I was finding. Friday was busy, but Saturday I returned to the woods to find that there are at least five slime molds out there that I can distinguish without having to culture them. There are the Cribraria, the pin-sized “toadstools;” wolf’s milk, the mungbean-sized “puffballs;” Arcyria cinerea, which looks like blown-glass protists or grains of rice suspended by threads; Tubifera, pincushions on the sides of the logs; and an undifferentiated yellow plasmodium that might be Physarum or Fuligo or something else altogether. I slapped the colony of Cribraria: spores drifted off along the length of the log. Next year, I’m hoping for slime molds everywhere.

*

As I write this, it’s Sunday in mid-July, a week since I was enthusing over the slime molds in Maple Grove Forest Preserve, and there’s been little time to think about them again until this morning. I came back last night from three days of sampling an experiment we planted at Prairie Moon Nursery, where on one side of a strip of old field grows a neighbor’s crop of soybeans, on the other a narrow bed of Monarda bradburiana and a double or triple bed of fully flowering New Jersey tea that, as fecund as it is, has shed not one plant into our experiment just 30 feet away. For a few days, four of us were lost for hours at a time crawling on our hands and knees identifying vegetative plants, questioning why Gaura shows up in almost every plot while Carex grows in only one… and that a Carex we didn’t plant. Tree frogs called from the woods down below, song sparrows sang from the fields around us, and the 358 acres of the Wiscoy Valley Community Land Cooperative filled the rolling hills around us.

On the way home, I stopped off at the UW Madison Arboretum. I parked at the Grady Tract on the south side of the beltline and walked in through the Evjue Pines with the highway roaring over my left shoulder. I headed south around the edge of the kettle pond hidden among the oaks, up to the edge of the west Grady knoll, then south along a trail that leads through a transition that is today exceptionally rare, from bona fide sand prairie to black oak savanna, with rose-breasted grossbeaks and Froelichia, pasqueflower and porcupine grass. I once walked this knoll with a blind Boy Scout who was working on the environmental studies merit badge. “Here’s a groundhog hole,” I told him, and he tromped in to feel how deep it was. Surveying this knoll after a spring burn, woodcocks spinning overhead and Jupiter burning in the south, sends you back 500 years.

In my 20s, when I patrolled this trail on a regular basis, the whole world seemed to hum from the grasses and the trees and the migrating warblers. Everything back then was a taut wire, vibrating back to the dawn of life and off in all directions. That was an idealistic time of my life, as one’s 20s should be. Walking through it last night, however, it struck me that things I see all still brim with meaning and recollection, and all resonate laterally, forward and backwards. Does a fungus mean anything? Does a sedge have something greater to teach us about life? Of course not. But when I study a phylogenetic network or an ordination, I feel a thrill akin to reading tea leaves. I am dragged backwards in time and across the landscape by a slime mold, genomic structure in the differentiation of oaks, or the attrition of species in an experimental prairie. Maple Grove and the East Woods and Winona and Dane County all layer on top of one another and plow backwards to the origins of the universe. Everything still vibrates.

I drove home listening to Richard Powers’ novel The Echo Maker, which is about the life of science, about growing older, about going back to your family, about the mystery of memory and consciousness. Powers fills his characters with the knowledge of the scientist, then of the musician, then of the activist, then of the computer programmer, every character with a generous portion of wisdom. The novel turns on connections, everything radiating out from one February night on the Platte River, where time runs backwards 60 million years, forward to an unknown, only partially knowable unfolding future, laterally to New York and Italy and California. Everything turns on everything else.

Today there are data to enter from yesterday, presentations to get ahead on, groceries to buy. Tonight my older son will be home for an evening before he goes back to work for another month. Tomorrow my wife and son will be home from a trip as my older son and I drive north. In the evening, though, we’ll all be watching fireflies, and they’ve been around about as long as flowering plants³.

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Plants referenced:

* Actaea pachypoda – doll’s eye, white baneberry
* Allium tricoccum – wild leek
* Anemone virginiana – tall thimbleweed
* Arisaema triphyllum – Jack-in-the-pulpit
* Asarum canadense – wild ginger
* Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge
* Carex woodii – Wood’s sedge
* Caulophyllum thalictroides – blue cohosh
* Circaea canadensis – enchanter’s nightshade
* Dioscorea villosa – wild yam
* Elymus hystrix – bottlebrush grass
* Eutrochium purpureum – Joe-pye weed
* Galium circaezens – smooth wild licorice
* Galium concinnum – Shining bedstraw
* Hackelia virginiana – stickseed
* Juglans nigra – black walnut
* Juncus tenuis – path rush
* Laportea canadensis – wood nettle
* Ostrya virginiana – hop hornbeam
* Pilea sp. – clearweed
* Polemonium reptans – Jacob’s ladder
* Polygonatum biflorum – smooth Solomon’s seal
* Ranunculus abortivus – small-flowered buttercup
* Sanicula odorata – black snakeroot
* Tilia americana – basswood
* Trillium cernuum or T. flexipes – nodding trillium
* Trillium grandiflorum – big-flowered trillium
* Viola pubescens – yellow violet

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¹ Lloyd, Sarah. 2019. Tasmanian Myxomycetes, accessed 2019-07-14. URL: https://sarahlloydmyxos.wordpress.com/.

² Cohen, Arthur Le Roy. 1969. Slime molds (slime fungi). In: Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Volume 20. William Benton, Publisher, Chicago.

³ Ellis, E.A., and Oakley, T.H. 2016. High Rates of Species Accumulation in Animals with Bioluminescent Courtship Displays. Current Biology 26: 1916–1921. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.05.043.

Sunday morning we greeted the week with an early morning thunderstorm. Was it 5 a.m.? The rain beat against the roof and windows for perhaps 30 minutes, then it was done for the day, which turned sunnier, hot and muggy. I went to Maple Grove about 12 hours after the thunderstorm expecting to find St. Joseph Creek running high, but it was settled between its banks. The floodplain, on the other hand, was brimming with the tall species of summer: wood nettle, jewelweed, wingstem, cutleaf coneflower fill the lowland between the slope that runs down from the east edge of the forest and the river, alluvial soils that spill over with creek water in the worst rains. We have developed this floodplain so badly now that the river goes from a slow-moving creek to a rushing river within an hour of storming. It seems to settle down quickly after the storm passes.

Bouncing above the foliage were a pair of ebony jewelwings. This damselfly is the only member of its order–Odonata, the dragonflies and damselflies–for which I have a particular affinity. I probably ought to have a unique affection for each of many species in this fantastic group. Adult dragonflies are acrobats, voracious and skilled predators on the wing. The nymphs are terrors of the pond, huge-jawed monsters that can devour little snails and fish. When they crawl up onto boardwalk piers to molt, you can hardly believe that such things live in your neighborhood. It is as though you had an annual emergence of alligators from the ditches that you only learned about in your 20s. Be that as it may, I don’t have much connection with the individuals that make up the order.

But the ebony jewelwing has a certain flair, a casual way of moving among the low branches along the riverbank, a careless gait that I appreciate. No other damselfly I know flies quite like this: it comes as close to flapping and gliding as any that I know, which makes it stand out in a group we generally associate with speed, efficiency, and rapaciousness. It is pretty faithful, too, a reliable sight in the low forests that I love, populated though they are with mosquitoes. I find ebony jewelwings with river birch and buttonbush, hop sedge and Gray’s sedge and touch-me-not, alder, silver maple. I first became acquainted with the species along the lower Wisconsin River, where I was hunting for Carex tribuloides in bottomland forests. I didn’t realize it was anything special until I then started running into it regularly along rivers in the Sand Counties of glacial Lake Wisconsin, further north, where little roads in Adams and Juneau and Wood Counties veer down to the river and you can find all the sedges your heart desires. The spring we were in France, I followed what I thought was, remarkably, the same species on my bike ride from the train station through the spring-fed forest on the south side of the train tracks between Gazinet and Pierroton. There was a little creek, and there again was the ebony jewelwing. It was comforting to see an old friend on my bike ride into work in another country. It turns out that I was wrong on the species, as ours, Calypteryx maculata, is endemic to Eastern North America¹. But the genus has Eurasian relatives as well. It seems most likely I was following the beautiful demoiselle, Calypteryx virgo, which lives along fast-flowing streams across a wide range of Europe². What a fitting name for an insect you follow to work when you are living in Bordeaux.

A great horned owl called as I walked into the green calm of the summer woods. Summer in a maple forest lacks the excitement of April and early May, when there are new flowers every day and warblers moving through, the risk of a late-season snow, the potential for overnight frosts followed by t-shirt weather in the early afternoon. This is the season when plants expand and stretch and put on carbon. The trees photosynthesize and respire almost palpably. The fallen trees decompose just as rapidly. On a fallen sugar maple log I found Xylaria peeking out from rifts in the bark, doll-sized fingers in rows and fascicles, their bases fading into nothing. Their mycelia fill the decomposing wood, diffuse and become as dark as topsoil beneath the surface of the bark. How massive is this fungus that so methodically digests trees and returns them to the soil?³. On top of the same log was a smallish scat filled with seeds. I thought at first blackberry, but that’s not right: the seeds were much too large, and the blackberries weren’t ripe enough. At the base of a nearby red oak, I swept aside the maple leaf litter to find a lawn of worm castings, one earthworm lurching away in the light. Why, with so much worm activity, are there any maple leaves left? Teaching sedges in Maine about 10 years ago, I realized with a start that the leaf litter there was entirely intact: no earthworms. Here, the maple leaves are inexorably devoured, along with small plants, and the soil churned relentlessly. Yet there is still a gauzy canopy over the earthworm farms. A great centipede coiled and scuttered away. A moth, a morbid owlet I believe, flew low over the leaf litter, settling down here and there in gaps between the plants.

Summer spreads out in front of the plants who nonetheless continue to tick off the weeks, vaguely cognizant of the coming winter. Hop sedge was in massive flower at the west edge of the pond near the middle of the wood. The stigmas were feathery, perhaps still receptive when I was there. The plant is the dominant graminoid along that entire edge. Within the pond, there is more standing water than I recall this time last year, and the rough cockspur is filling space wherever the water is shallow enough. By August last year, this was a rich lawn of the species. In the dense shade of the forest, bloodroot mothers are shading seedlings. Ants disperse these and many other woodland seeds, but it may be that the chance of finding babies is still highest beneath the mothers. Likely as not, however, I recognize the babies more readily where I have an adult to which to compare them. Perhaps they are everywhere. Blue cohosh seeds are developing. They are not hard and blue yet. If you find one, break it open: the endosperm inside is creamy white and rubbery, a sensory delight. It’s like finding a toy in the woods. The capsules of Virginia waterleaf are maturing, bristly. Early meadow-rue has set seed but still looks regal. Carex blanda has dropped all its perigynia and has taken to lying on the couch in its pyjamas all day. It looks dreadful, but it will do just fine all the same. Enchanter’s nightshade ovaries are bristling with hairs.

Monday night, I sat outside with the dog at my feet and read a passage from Annie Dillard that started, “The woods were flush with flowers…”⁴, and I wondered how many sentences I have written that start essentially that way. Seriously. How many different ways can I say “flower” or “fruit” or “bloom” or “blossom?” The niche space for descriptions-of-the-woods-in-June is infinitesimally divided, but I fear at times that the volume of that space is small. I suspect it’s just broad enough to squeak through on my way out the door to anywhere else I need to go. “The woods were flush with flowers.” When Annie Dillard writes those words, she is consciously giving you one draught off the cup of woodland spring, and, deliberately, only one. She sets you up with a glance to orient you before she takes you by the elbow and walks you further down the trail. I am reminded of a long, extended solo on Miles Davis’s live performance at the Fillmore East that I listened to many times when I was in high school. I listened, I think, not because I understood it, not even because I enjoyed it, but because I was in awe of the texture of it. I couldn’t detect in it the architecture or flow of Pharaoh’s Dance or Miles Chases the Voodoo Down, a shape that I only much later found was a product of both the performance and the deliberate post-recording production. But I think now that it is this texture or something like it that I see in the woods and am after in my own writing, these paragraphs of flowers and leaves and centipedes and fallen logs.

As I was considering all this, a tiny red mite, not much larger than a comma, dropped onto the page facing the one I was reading and commenced scuttling around the margins. I say “commenced” as though there had been a moment when the mite wasn’t moving. Probably there had been, but I didn’t witness it. The mite entered my awareness as a scuttler and did not stop moving, neither accelerated nor decelerated, weaving through letters and back to the margins, across the gutter to the page I was reading, across that page in a winding course like that of a marble on a sheet of plywood being tilted back and forth, left and right. It disappeared over the edge and I thought for a moment it was gone, then it materialized on the due-date card tucked 100 pages in, and still it was moving exactly the same speed. The mite was a marvel of mobility. The dog by contrast was lying down with her head on my feet and I was sitting still, and had been for about 30 minutes. Yet I had so much to do! And still I was sitting! The mite would eat and reproduce and be gone by the fall, with nothing to show for all its hard work, its incessant roving, but still it moved, up my notebook, then along my finger, back to the book, senselessly composing messages ouija-board-like across page 111 of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This must be how I looked to my grandpa when he was sitting in his chair in the dark, and I was going on walk after walk after walk. This I know is what free jazz and some flavors of fusion sounds like to many people. This is what my own sentences look like to me so often, scuttling and roaming and rolling and moving. They’ll be gone by and by. But for now they just keep going.

And if you compressed the seasons, ran backwards through the years in a single woodland at the rate of a year per second, scrolled back through a human lifetime every minute and a half or so, what would you have? It would all be texture, just like this. The woods would be flush with flowers for a moment. There would be a crash of lightning, but you wouldn’t be able to put it into context of the season. Warblers would career across the screen from south to north and then north to south, and your ears would fill with breeding calls twice per second. The forest floor would suddenly fill with leaves when the earthworms were driven back across the ocean. The prairies would spread out and then contract, then be replaced by mesic forest and then boreal forests. For moment you would see mammoths and giant sloths, and then the screen would go white, and it would be all glaciers for a long long time. You might be relieved, as I often was when I took the headphones off and looked around, and Miles and his group went silent, for just a moment. And then you’d rewind and watch it again, trying to find a little more detail this time.

Something familiar, deliberate, knowable, and present in the places I love wherever I go. That’s what the ebony jewelwing offers, and it’s quite a bit to give. What more could I hope for?

——–

¹ http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/misc/odonata/Calopteryx_maculata.htm
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beautiful_demoiselle
³ https://xylaria.net
⁴ Annie Dillard “Spring,” in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The Midwest has had an unseasonably rainy spring. The plum tree in our backyard seems to have broken loose of its roots and is wobbling in the hole it was planted in 4 or so years ago. Did the roots rot? Has it floated upward in the hole we planted it in? The tree seems to be faring well but needs to be staked and the soil tamped back down. The holes the dog has dug in the backyard were full of water most of the month of May. Fallen logs in the woods are still sprouting dead man’s fingers and collared parachute mushrooms. But not until a week ago, the Saturday before summer solstice, when the rain came down and soaked Brooklyn and I on our walk around the block, did it seem we had a summertime rain instead of a spring shower. The toads in the marsh beside the school must have thought so as well, for they sang through the rain while Brooklyn sat down on the sidewalk and looked up at me, dripping, ears limp. We headed home.

The weekend dried out, and Monday morning Maple Grove was full of summer birds: red-eyed vireos, blue-gray gnatcatchers, robins, wood pewees, red-breasted woodpeckers, great-crested flycatchers. This solstice week has felt like summer through and through. The second flush of wildflowers is starting to retire, the third flush is beginning to flower, while the earliest spring wildflowers have mostly withered. One of the last of our woodland sedges to fruit, Carex tribuloides, has filled out its inflorescences while I wasn’t watching, momentarily standing as stiffly upright as it ever does–this species rapidly goes from the stock-upright culms of early childhood to slouching against any door frame it can find in early adolescence, when the inflorescences put on a little weight–while the achenes harden up. Upslope a bit, Carex radiata is shedding perigynia and looks as though it’s been trampled. Perhaps it has, or perhaps it hasn’t: Carex radiata always looks about the same by now either way. Blackberry and white avens came into flower, homely white in shaded disturbed trail edges, and started turning to fruit. Hooked buttercup achenes have hardened. Schizocarps on wild geranium are taut, poised to fling their seeds off into the world if they’ll just dry a bit more; in our garden, they already have, and I expect that by the time you read this they’ll be kicking around the woods as well. Wild ginger berries are spongy, filled with lustrous green seeds that are browning, still maturing. A bubbly, gelatinous ruff of fatty tissue clings to the crest of each seed, a reward for the ant that will only take the seed and bury it in soils that are nitrogenous and actively churned. What’s good for the ant is good for the ginger. Hard young berries are reddening at the tip of the false Solomon’s seal, about the size of BBs. The first berries of hairy Solomon’s seal are bursting out of the corollas. We started eating Juneberries and white mulberries this week.

Great waterleaf was the pale blue princess of the woods near the beginning of June; but now the petals have fallen, and the spidery inflorescence branches are tipped with capsules that ooze pulpy white ovules when you pinch them. Pale touch-me-not forms groves that have grown from thigh-high to my chest in the past two weeks, shading plumes of Carex jamesii. I found one in fruit Monday in Maple Grove, a surprise as I have not yet seen the plant in flower. The more I thought about it this week, the odder it seemed. It took me until a walk through the Arboretum’s East Woods on Friday, where I was finding the same thing, to realize that these capsules must be produced by cleistogamous flowers. Cleistogams are closed flowers in which the stigmas and anthers are tucked in together, external pollination is excluded, and the plant is almost guaranteed some fruit. They are the plant’s answer to the risk of not getting pollinated. Many species produce cleistogams, perhaps most famously in our flora in the violets, but there is a cost: without sex, recombination is limited to the genes mom and dad gave you. The opportunity to innovate new solutions to environmental challenges is reduced. You might consequently expect a plant to hold out until late in the season to produce cleistogams, but capsules of touch-me-not are already starting to explode before I’ve seen a single outcrossing flower (chasmogam). It turns out that cleistogamous flowers, presumably because they are less costly to build—no allocation to attractive structures, including showy corollas and nectar designed to entice bumblebees and ruby-throated hummingbirds, and less pollen needed per successful pollination—go from floral bud to mature capsule on average 10 days faster than chasmogams.¹ In fact, each chasmogamous flower costs the plant 100 times as much energy to produce as each cleistogamous flower. Little wonder, then, that touch-me-nots produce on average more cleistogams than chasmogams. Some plants produce only closed flowers. This year, I’ll have my eyes open for the timing of the showy flowers.

I found a translucent gall on the surface of one wood nettle leaf this week. It looked a bit like cloudy tapioca pearls with a dark heart. Inside grows a gall midge, Dasineura investita from what I’ve been able to tell. Dasineura is a genus of tiny flies that afflict conifers and flowering plants alike, including blueberries, maples, wheat, and a host of other genera. Last year I didn’t notice them until the end of August, when I found them dangling in the inflorescences. They may have appeared a bit earlier this year, but I suspect not too long ago. Last year was first I’d ever noticed them. It looks as though I’m not alone in this: in iNaturalist, the pot into which almost every naturalist, botanist, entomologist, mushroom and moss and lichen enthusiast armed with a camera or smartphone is pouring georeferenced photos, the species seems to be widespread in northeastern North America but very sparse (all of 21 records in total on iNaturalist as of 22 June 2019). Either these galls are very infrequent, or they are being badly underreported. Perhaps they aren’t even noticed. I find it hard to believe that a map of all the individuals in a given year wouldn’t carpet the woodlands of eastern North America. There’s one more thing to watch for this year.

What would our forest be like without this gall midge and the cleistogamous flowers of touch-me-not? Profoundly different, I suspect, as these two species, which almost invariably co-occur in rich woods and floodplains throughout northeastern North America—get a slap from wood nettle, and you can almost always find a touch-me-not within arm’s length to crush and rub on the affected skin—form an awful lot of biomass. Why am I noticing the midges only the past two years, the timing of cleistogamous fruits only this year? I think it’s in part because I’ve been taking pains to write down these casual observations. Writing brings the world into focus more sharply than any hand lens (of which I’ve had and misplaced more than my fair share). Writing isn’t universally favored as a means to clear-sightedness. Socrates objected to writing on the grounds that, in his account, it blathers mutely. Written words “seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever.”² With writing, Socrates worried, people would mistake hearing for understanding. And writing supplants memory! Socrates recounted how Thamus, the Egyptian god and king, reacted to the invention of writing: “If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.”³

Maybe so. But when I write about things, I see them more clearly, because I have to fit them together. “I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing,” Flannery O’Connor wrote. “Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.”⁴ What I write about I understand better.

Summer rolls on. Goldenrod leaves are inscribed intricately with leaf miner trails. Silky wild rye and bottlebrush grass bristle with spikelets. Foul manna grass spikelets appear to be nearly ripe. Last week, on my bike ride out, smooth brome was festooned with yellow anthers. This aggressive plant is doing a number on our experimental prairie, so I’m not fond of it, but when it blooms, it is something to behold. This past week, there were still a few stigmas poking out, but the fireworks are over now. Honewort has come into full bloom. The scapes of wild leek have come up and are tipped with floral buds. The spathes of wild garlic at the beginning of the week were just splitting open to show the flowers inside; by the end of the week, the first plants were in full flower. False nettle and Joe-pye weed and enchanter’s nightshade inflorescences are emerging while false rue anemone is reluctantly giving up the ghost. Poison ivy is flowering. Large flowered bellwort fruits, by contrast, have continued swelling. I thought they were done when they hit chickpea size, but this week they are larger than marbles, as big around as my thumbnail. And the fruits of summer have begun: black snakeroot, with its bristly schizocarps clustered together with tiny flowers; sweet cicely fruits are rigid and pungent; carrionflower umbels are packed with tough berries; jack-in-the-pulpit berries are forming, green and tough. Green dragon is just flowering inside the spathe. Pondweeds are in flower.

This morning opened with a thunderstorm, and more rain looks to be on its way this afternoon. I’ll leave you with a poem from a collection by Charles Simic⁵ that Rachel picked up for me this week:

To boredom
 I'm the child of rainy Sundays.
 I watched time crawl
 Like an injured fly
 Over the wet windowpane.
 Or waited for a branch
 On a tree to stop shaking,
 While Grandmother knitted
 Making a ball of yarn
 Roll over like a kitten at her feet.
 I knew every clock in the house
 Had stopped ticking
 And that this day will last forever.

Enjoy the first full week of summer.

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Plants referenced:

• Allium tricoccum – wild leek
• Amelanchier sp. – serviceberry, Juneberry
• Arisaema dracontium – green dragon
• Arisaema triphyllum – Jack-in-the-pulpit
• Asarum canadense – wild ginger
• Boehmeria cylindrica – false nettle
• Bromus inermis – smooth brome
• Carex radiata
• Carex tribuloides
• Circaea canadensis – enchanter’s nightshade
• Cryptotaenia canadensis – honewort
• Elymus hystrix – bottlebrush grass
• Elymus villosus – silky wild rye
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Eupatorium purpureum – Joe-pye weed
• Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
• Geum canadense – white avens
• Glyceria striata – foul manna grass
• Hydrophyllum appendiculatum – great waterleaf
• Impatiens pallida – pale touch-me-not, pale jewelweed
• Laportea canadensis – wood nettle
• Maianthemum racemosum – false Solomon’s seal
• Morus alba – mulberry
• Polygonatum pubescence – hairy Solomon’s seal
• Potamogeton sp. – pondweeds (the ones I was seeing were, I believe, P. illinoense, but I didn’t key them out)
• Ranunculus recurvatus – recurved buttercup
• Rubus allegheniensis – blackberry
• Sanicula odorata – black snakeroot
• Solidago sp. – goldenrod
• Toxicodendron radicans – poison ivy
• Uvularia grandiflora – large-flowered bellwort

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References cited

¹ The natural history and evolutionary ecology details in this sentence and following come from Doug Schemske’s (1978) Evolution of reproductive characteristics in Impatiens (Balsaminaceae): the significance of cleistogamy and chasmogamy. Ecology 59: 596–613. For more information on cleistogamy in grasses: Campbell, C.S., Quinn, J.A., Cheplick, G.P., and Bell, T.J. 1983. Cleistogamy in Grasses. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 14(1): 411–441. doi:10.1146/annurev.es.14.110183.002211.

² Socrates to Phaedrus, in Phaedrus 275d, e. Translation from Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (1961), editors, The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

³ Ibid., 275a, b.

⁴ Letter from Flannery O’Connor to Elizabeth McKee, near the outset of their lifelong friendship, July 21, 1948. In: Sally Fitzgerald (1979), editor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, p. 5. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York.

⁵ Charles Simic (2017) Scribbled in the Dark. HarperCollins Publishers. New York.

The first Thursday night in June, every bird’s-foot trefoil along the road I ride into the Arboretum squeezed out spittlebugs. That day I hadn’t noticed even one: Friday, the nodes were glorious with them, each hiding a froghopper nymph. One week earlier, I had found dead man’s fingers in the chips along the trail at the east end of the woods. They were like lights along the edge of a runway on the trail running west from Big Rock Visitor Station. Caterpillars were rolling the raspberry leaves. Pruinescent common whitetail dragonflies patrolled the roads and our garden. Bumblebees meandered low over the forest floor. Rice cutgrass had become sharp enough to cut my calves, and woodland sunflower was knee-high. Tendrils were prominent on carrion flower. Great-crested flycatchers and eastern wood-pewees and red-eyed vireos were singing. Ticks and mosquitoes were out in their glory.

My eyes, though, were filled with sedges. I had taught a two-day Carex workshop the last two days of May, and I’d been drilling the students on what they were seeing from ten feet away. I teach like I write: about things that puzzle or otherwise interest me. Right now, I like to be able to recognize a species from a distance, especially a small species. It is marvelous to me that the actions of genes expressed in concert manifest in cells that differ in somewhat predictable ways in size, shape, chlorophyll content, and consequently in a form that I can recognize from across a field. A die cast thousands of generations ago meets one that was thrown last week, and these together determine the finest points of morphology, subtleties of form that we then detect out of the corner of our eye as we turn from one trail to the next.

So I spent our walks teaching aspirationally, wanting to see more clearly from a distance. I would see characteristics of a plant and ask the students to identify it from where they stood on the trail, coaching them and myself at the same time. They would see what I was describing, or they would not, and I would find what traits I myself was not able to see. In only two days, I found I could see attributes of the whole plant that previously I hadn’t known. And eyes so filled, I found the next week that our woods are filled with sedges I had been missing on my walks of the previous 14 summers. Wood’s sedge, which I already knew was more abundant in the East Woods than many realize, is even more common in the East Woods than I had thought. Its leaves rise fountainlike and fall moplike, especially, as far as I can tell right now, from Big Rock Visitor station eastward. It favors moist draws and protected depressions, though not the truly wet areas where Carex tribuloides is flowering now. I notice it this year farther off the trail than I have before. Along the west side of the hill near the far end of the woods, just before you reach the gated service road leading out toward Finley Road and the interstate, I first noticed Carex hitchcockiana as a single plant several years ago. Now, on my bike ride home in the evenings, I see its lanky culms radiating out from central points across the hilltop, stiff, sparse, occupying gaps in the understory matrix. I have started noticing it on the south side of the road as well, standing beside the soft and crumpling Carex hirtifolia as I race past. And Carex normalis has, I think, ceased to be quite the enigma it’s been to me for a number of years. Its culms lean over the trail, shedding perigynia at each step, more common in the west half of the woods.

“I cherish mental images I have of three perfectly happy people,” Annie Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “One collects stones. Another–an Englishman, say–watches clouds. The third lives on a coast and collects drops of seawater which he examines microscopically and mounts. But I don’t see what the specialist sees, and so I cut myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the various forms of happiness.” I am not Dillard’s cloud-watcher or stone-collector. If the world is our garden, then I am often like a dog set loose in it who snuffles and snorts at every plant and stone and then falls asleep exhausted, only to start again upon waking. But my affection for sedges and the narrow spaces they inhabit has lasted more than 20 years, long enough to teach me the happiness of gradually accruing understanding. I have collected them in places both homey and remote, and when I find them now, I often think of some sedge relative in Japan, China, the Smokey Mountains, Alaska, Mexico. Sedges are almost everywhere, and as a consequence, on almost every walk I take, I run into old friends. It’s fine with me not to be working on orchids: I don’t see them so often. With sedges, I encounter the objects of my particular affection every day.

Practically every sedge in the woods was in its glory in this year’s first week of June: Carex jamesii, C. hirtifolia, C. normalis, C. blanda, C. albursina, C. radiata, C. rosea, C. hitchcockiana and C. oligocarpa, C. sparganioides, C. woodii, C. sprengelii, C. cephalophora, and C. grisea could all be found in full fruit along the East Woods trails. But with the recording of sedges coming into flower, fruiting, flourishing and senescing, then greening up again in the spring, I’m hanging onto all the other wildflowers as well, most especially the ones in the woods. The first week of June brought schizocarps erect on wild geranium, about to disperse; developing drupes on chokecherry; and toothwort capsules dehisced, seeds shed to next year. The fleshy fruits of prairie trilliums thickened up at the bases of the withering maroon petals, and the large-flowered trillium fruits swelled where the petals had dropped off altogether. Mayapple berries hung beneath the leaves, and white baneberries nearly at chest-level were starting to swell, not yet recognizable as doll’s eyes. The burry schizocarps of cleavers were as big as BBs. Sweet cicely schizocarps were hard but not quite brittle, pungent. The capsules of big-flowered bellwort hung like cooked chickpeas. The achenes on rue anemone were rubbery, black snakeroot was shedding seeds. Solomon’s seal flowers were just opening up and the inflorescences of honewort were pinpricks of light.

It’s the middle of June as I write this, and we’re past the height of sedge season. I have turned my attention to other matters. Yet on our walk through Maple Grove Forest Preserve tonight, after listening to a pair of great horned owls call back and forth, Rachel and I stopped to look at a colony of Carex davisii along the trail, one of only two known populations of the species in DuPage County, and one I had failed to notice in numerous walks there over the past 10 years. Annie Dillard was right when she wrote that knowing sedges makes the “least journey into the world… a field trip, a series of happy recognitions.” Having noticed the species once, I’ll see it every time I walk that trail, no matter how long I live.

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Plants referenced:

• Actaea alba – white baneberry
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Carex albursina
• Carex blanda
• Carex cephalophora
• Carex grisea
• Carex hirtifolia
• Carex hitchcockiana
• Carex jamesii
• Carex normalis
• Carex oligocarpa
• Carex radiata
• Carex rosea
• Carex sparganioides
• Carex sprengelii
• Carex woodii
• Cryptotaenia canadensis – honewort
• Galium aparine – cleavers, annual bedstraw
• Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
• Helianthus strumosus – woodland sunflower
• Leersia oryzoides – rice cutgrass
• Lotus corniculatus – bird’s-foot trefoil
• Osmorhiza claytonii – sweet cicely
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Polygonatum biflorum – Solomon’s seal
• Prunus virginiana – choke cherry
• Rubus sp. – raspberry
• Sanicula odorata – black snakeroot
• Smilax sp. – carrion flower
• Thalictrum thalictroides – rue anemone
• Trillium grandiflorum – large-flowered trillium
• Trillium recurvatum – prairie trillium
• Uvularia sessiliflora – big-flowered bellwort

This moment reigns as far as the eye can reach.
One of those earthly moments
invited to linger.
— from “Moment” by Wislawa Szymborska, Monologue of a Dog

Temperatures last week fluctuated between the low 50s and the low 80s. The forest canopy has filled in almost completely. By Monday the basswood leaves were the size of teacup saucers, and by Thursday the lowest sugar maple leaves were fully expanded. It is darker in the morning forest understory now than it was even a week ago, and the wildflowers have picked up on it. False mermaid has flattened like seaweed clinging to a rock. It is yellow and bedraggled, but the nutlets at the tip of each shoot are continuing to harden up, senselessly drawing what resources they can from their expiring parents. Leaves on toothwort, trout lily and wild leek are streaked with pale green or white, starting to senesce. The cotyledons on touch-me-not are yellowing. Everything that was brightest and most beautiful two weeks ago is being overrun by summer, as wild lettuce and foul manna grass reach to my knees, carrionflower threatens to climb over all the adjacent plants, and orchard grass stretches out along the road.

On the drive home Wednesday, maple and elm seeds rained down on the car as I stood at the stoplight. I met my younger son at home, and after bagels we walked the dog. Silver maple seeds were brittle and brown in the gutters. They appear all to have fallen in one 24-hour period. In the forest, about half of the sedges are going to seed: Carex blanda, Carex albursina, Carex grisea, Carex hirtifolia, Carex jamesii are all filling in. Carex blanda is a funny one, as it seems to lag behind Carex albursina, which is a very close relative and overlaps with it in our woods. I doubt that phenology is needed to keep them separate, and I wonder what developmental peculiarity or climatic adaptation accounts for this difference. Most of the other half are flowering. Carex radiata and Carex sparganioides are bedecked with anthers. It’s a good time to see the coiled stigmas on Carex rosea, tails of little springs poking out of the perigynium tips. A few have yet to go: the wetland sedges in the depressions, things like Carex tribuloides and some big husky tussock that I haven’t been able to put a name to (give me a week) weren’t yet showing inflorescences this past week. The spikes on a somewhat out-of-place upland Carex stipata Thursday morning were gliding out from between the leaf sheaths, still closed; in a wetter, lower spot, I expect it would be 3 or 5 days slower. Wild garlic spathes have emerged.

Mayapples have come into magnificent flower and are the light of the woods. Sweet cicely went from barely blooming to nearly full flower over the course of the week. Miraculously, rue anemone is still in bloom. How long does that thing last? Last year I noted it blooming as late as the 18th of May, but I don’t know when exactly it stopped, because for a couple weeks I didn’t make local notes. Fruits are continuing to swell on annual bedstraw.

The birds are jumbled up together. This past week I heard golden-winged and black-and-white warblers, northern parulas, black-throated greens, all on their way through. Beside them were the songs of summer: pewees and great-crested flycatchers, kingbirds, phoebes, gnatcatchers and red-eyed vireos, tanagers, ovenbirds, buntings and wood thrushes, orioles.

Thursday evening I took a walk in Maple Grove. The robins were chuckling their goodnights as I arrived. Dame’s rocket was in bloom in the St. Joseph Creek floodplain. Across the bridge, yellowing trout lily leaves stood out in the darkening understory beside the last flowers of a false rue anemone. An olive-sided flycatcher called an insistent quick three beers! The first flowers of great waterleaf had opened from among the hairy, spiderlike inflorescence branches unrolling at the tops of the plants. Beside them were the last flowers of Virginia bluebells. Black snakeroot was in flower. Bloodroot leaves were as large as my hand with fingers fully outstretched. The solitary burning bush along the trail backing up onto the adjacent homes was in full bloom.

I walked to the barnyard grass marsh I frequent in the northeast quarter of the preserve and, as the mosquitos were becoming pesky, received my first wood nettle sting of the year, from a plant only as tall as my knee. There has been a lot of rain this spring, and the lawn of barnyard grass seedlings was completely under water. I walked up the hill to the south, toward a fallen white ash tree that I have walked past dozens of times, but never at this time of night, and I was struck at how large a hole was left in the canopy when it fell. It has been down for a couple years or perhaps a few, and there are sugar maples ready to fill in, but the gap is still prominent, especially so in the crepuscule, when openings in the woods often appear to glow. Nighttime affects how things look, and it took me several minutes of circling the tree and peering along its trunk before I was convinced that nothing had changed since I was here last, that really this was the same fallen tree I see almost every time I visit Maple Grove. A buck snorted from 50 feet uphill and darted eastward, toward the backyards that line the preserve, but not far enough to get into them nor to be completely hidden from me.

I continued walking, heard a wood-pewee call. The sun had set as I studied the fallen ash, and it was dark now. Mosquitos were buzzing around my legs. Without warning, American toads began droning from the marsh at the bottom of the hill. They filled the air between the trees with toad-song, like monks chanting in a monastery courtyard, their monotones spilling out into the adjacent forest. They stopped, started again, called intermittently as I continued south to the main trail. The spring peepers in the marsh below the Avery Coonley School had started up, and I sat listening to them before I took the main trail north back toward my bike. As I walked, the toads started up again, and now they continued without ceasing, emboldened by the darkness, layering tone onto tone to make a buzzy, distorted chord that swelled out of the marsh and rolled through the woods like mist. The sound was everywhere, knitting together the springs of my adulthood so that, as I walked toward my bike in the darkness, there was no current spring and no past spring, no this woods and that woods, no life-I-might-have-lived and life I am living, but only one eternal May evening in this particular woods.

Then a bicyclist raced past in the dark, and a group of high-schoolers on their phones, giddy at being out at night, walked past, noisily. I retrieved my bike and headed out, surprising a few kids in the baseball field as I biked past.

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Plants referenced:

• Acer saccharinum – silver maple
• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Allium canadense – wild garlic
• Allium tricoccum – wild leek
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Carex albursina
• Carex blanda
• Carex grisea
• Carex hirtifolia
• Carex jamesii
• Carex radiata
• Carex rosea
• Carex sparganioides
• Carex stipata
• Carex tribuloides
• Dactylis glomerata – orchard grass
• Echinochloa muricata – rough barnyard grass, rough cockspur
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Erythronium sp. – trout lily
• Euonymus alatus – burning bush
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Fraxinus americana – white ash
• Galium aparine – annual bedstraw, cleavers
• Glyceria striata – foul manna grass
• Hesperis matronalis – dame’s rocket
• Hydrophyllum appendiculatum – great waterleaf
• Impatiens sp. – touch-me-not
• Lactuca sp. – wild lettuce
• Laportea canadensis – wood nettle
• Mertensia virginica – Virginia bluebells
• Osmorhiza claytonii – sweet cicely
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Sanicula odorata – black snakeroot
• Smilax herbacea – carrionflower
• Thalictrum thalictroides – rue anemone
• Tilia americana – basswood
• Ulmus sp. – elm

What sensation do you associate with a particular walk? Sometimes it is a smell. Sometimes it is a view. Sometimes it is not a sensation at all, but a state of mind, a realization you had as you walked, or the aim of the walk, or the aim you thought you had as you left the house, as Virginia Woolf’s evening walker walks out ostensibly to buy a pencil, perhaps even thinking the pencil is the aim, but in fact sets out to watch London settling in for the night.¹ For me, it is often a song that ran through my mind as I walked, or a bird song that rang through the woods. Thursday morning, it was the call of the eastern wood-pewee, my first of the year, a bird I love, one whose song Rachel wrote out in a book she made for me years ago: “pee-eh-wee… peewrrrr” — first a rise, then a pause, then a descent. It is the sound of anticipation followed by content. It is one the many background sounds of the summer woods.

The winds that morning had filled the gutters in our neighborhood with cottonwood seeds and brought the redbud blooms to the ground, where they spattered the mulch and sidewalks with purple. When I arrived at the Arboretum, I docked my bike by the oak collection and found the leaves on the blooming bur oaks the size of my palm and the redbud leaves as big as nickels and quarters. Bladdernut, viburnum and chokecherry were blooming. Almost all the tree flowers, come to think of it, were white, save for the yellowish green flowers of sugar maple and oak dangling on filaments. The white baneberry flowers were bright on stout thick stalks. The flowers on bloodroot, Dutchman’s breeches, and toothwort had ripened into capsules and siliques respectively. The pearly black seeds of spring beauty were ripe and shook easily into my hand. The mayapple flowers were about to open.

The sedges were in their glory. Sprengel’s sedge was gaudy with drooping spikes. Carex hirtifolia perigynia were gravid, dragging the spikes downward on arching culms. White bear sedge perigynia were filling, nestled beside the staminate spike, resting inside the spathe like baby deer mice in a grassy nest. Anthers were just peering from behind the staminate scales of Carex rosea. Goldenseal and starry false Solomon’s seal were flowering, the brightest white stars of the forest floor right now, beside the pinpricks of light still glinting from the annual bedstraw flowers. Nodding trilliums had come into bloom, a week or so behind the big-flowered trillium. The fetid blooms of erect carrionflower had opened fully, and they smelled of sweetly rotten meat. Tendrils started forming in the past two weeks on the common vining carrionflower, which I have been taking to be Smilax lasioneura, but the flowers are a few days slower than their non-tendril-forming cousin: most have umbels of flowers squeezed tightly shut, but a few on a plant at the edge of the woods, getting a little extra light, were beginning to open and offered a hint of stench. Jacob’s ladder was in full bloom.

Sensitive fern fronds were fully open in the spruce plot. A leaf miner had traversed the leaf of a slippery elm sapling, gorging itself on mesophyll then perforating the epidermis on its way out. The stem subtending the foliage leaves of the touch-me-nots had grown so high that the cotyledons branched from the stalk at about the plant’s waist; a couple of weeks earlier, the leaves had been crammed in next to the cotyledons. Bugbane leaves were curled like wet and still-unfolding butterflies’ wings, the flowers just opening. The inflorescences of wild hyacinth were tipped with violet. Jumpseed leaves were as long as my thumb. Great waterleaf floral buds had formed. Largeflower bellwort was still flowering.

When I arrived at the frog pond just north of Parking Lot 12 it was about 8:30. I was already getting anxious for the day. I was in a hurry to get to the herbarium, where colleagues would soon be meeting me to look through Mexican oak specimens. I was hustling through, when a solitary “peewrrrr” caught me by surprise. Just the descending note of an eastern wood-pewee, I thought. I stopped to listen, but birds don’t always cooperate when you need them to. Indigo buntings were singing and blue-gray gnatcatchers were buzzing from the canopy. A great-crested flycatcher called from north of the frog pond. The burry question-and-answer of what I take to have been a yellow-throated vireo intruded from the east. A least flycatcher (chebek! chebek!) called from the southwest, enough times that I felt pretty certain I’d been hearing it all week. A golden-winged warbler sang from the road. Then, finally, the pewee started up again. Pee-uh-wee… pee-uh-wee… Half a dozen calls like this, each leaving the listener in suspense. Is it? Is it?! Yes, there’s nothing else it could be, right? But I am a casual birder, and I need a little more. Finally the descending call, “pewrr.” There it was. It’s one of several calls I look forward to each year and think to myself when I finally hear it that summer has come. I walked into work past the Big Rock Visitor Station serenaded by a northern parula warbler. I arrived at the herbarium and turned my attention to oaks for the remainder of the day.

That afternoon on the walk back to my bike, aniseroot was in bloom and wild strawberries were flowering along the trail. The next day temperatures dropped to the high 40s and we all froze. But I can’t be disabused of my sense that it’s really summer now, early summer of course, but not really spring any longer.

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Plants referenced:

• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Actaea alba – white doll’s eye, white baneberry
• Actaea racemosa – bugbane
• Camassia scilloides – wild hyacinth
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Carex albursina – white bear sedge
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge
• Carex rosea – curly-styled sedge (I think)
• Cercis canadensis – redbud
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Dicentra cucullaria – Dutchman’s breeches
• Fragaria virginiana – wild strawberry
• Galium aparine – annual bedstraw
• Hydrastis canadensis – goldenseal
• Hydrophyllum appendiculatum – great waterleaf
• Impatiens sp. – touch-me-not
• Maianthemum stellatum – starry false Solomon’s seal
• Onoclea sensibilis – sensitive fern
• Osmorhiza longistylis – aniseroot
• Persicaria virginiana – jumpseed
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Polemonium reptans – Jacob’s ladder
• Populus deltoides – cottonwood
• Prunus virginiana – chokecherry
• Quercus macrocarpa – bur oak
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Smilax ecirrhata – erect carrionflower
• Smilax lasioneura – Midwestern carrionflower
• Staphylea trifolia – bladdernut
• Trillium flexipes – nodding trillium
• Trillium grandiflorum – big-flowered trillium
• Ulmus rubra – slippery elm
• Uvularia grandiflora – largeflower bellwort
• Viburnum prunifolium – plum-leaved viburnum

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¹ From the essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” in The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf: “No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: ‘Really I must buy a pencil,’ as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter — rambling the streets of London.”

Monday morning the sun burned like a crown over the car dealerships, as though the hosts of Heaven were gliding in over Ogden Avenue. When I came in the Finley Road gate, a common yellowthroat was singing from the wetland under the power lines, the first I’d heard this year. On the road through the East Woods I heard a golden winged warbler and a black throated green. These golden wings. Sweet sweet sweet sweet Susie. Just after sunrise Wednesday, there were oven birds in Maple Grove Forest Preserve, calling teacher teacher teacher teacher! A blue-winged warbler sang its lackadaisical beeeee-buzzzzz from the edge of the baseball field. The squeaky wheels of the black-and-white warblers have been going on and off around the frog pond under the buzzing of blue-gray gnatcatchers. What would the birds think if they could read and hear the nonsense we make up to remember their songs by? It would be as if they had given humans names corresponding to the shapes of their skulls seen from above, after objects that they resembled from the birds’ world. Crows egg. Kettle pond. Robins nest. And then said them in their own languages. Perhaps they do. If so, we’re missing it.

The far east corner of the woods is clouded with blooming redbuds. The songs of veery and wood thrush fill the forest around the spruce plot each morning. Virginia bluebells are pooling along the roadsides. On my ride out Friday, a hummingbird was feeding in the colony of bluebells near the top of the hill by Parking Lot 10. It moved from flower to flower, industrious, intent. In 2001 I watched a hummingbird do this same thing in Forest County, Wisconsin, where I was tagging shoots of Carex projecta to see what their lifespan is. The edge of the plot was marked with blue flags, and as I finished for the evening, and the light was growing too dark to see clearly what I was doing under the maples and red oaks, a hummingbird entered and visited one blue flag, buzzing loudly. It of course drew no nectar. It visited another, then another, growing increasing petulant as each one failed to yield any nectar, finally lighting on a wire to glower as evening descended.

A colony of celandine poppies is in full bloom along the road at the northeast corner of the woods, and swamp buttercup is flowering in every seep and hollow. Prairie trillium is in its glory right now, tall and fully flowering. Big-flowered trilliums have begun to bloom as well with nodding trillium just a few days behind, white petals still peeking out from between the sepals. Mature leaves have filled out on Hepatica. Woodland phlox is in full bloom. Jacob’s ladder flowers have unrolled while the false rue anemone has gone mostly to pieces, flowers unravelling, shedding white petals by dribs and drabs. White trout lily has turned its ripening capsules toward the sky. Capsules are swelling on downy yellow violet.

At the beginning of the week, I noticed nickel-sized leaves of moonseed along the roadside, but by Friday the vines were starting arch. Carrion flower is growing like Jack’s beanstalk, leaves spreading outward and expanding. The sedges are showing their true colors: Carex woodii, C. pensylvanica, and C. sprengelii fruits are swelling, anthers and stigmas are waving around on hairy sedge and white bear sedge (C. albursina), and spikes are growing whitish-silver in advance of opening on Carex rosea. Our two prominent winter annuals are feeling quite differently about life right now. The last week of April, the false mermaid bolted and flowered. At the beginning of this past week, the stems were stock upright and heavy with swelling nutlets, the spreading sepals clinging to spindly stems reminiscent of the submerged traps on a bladderwort in midsummer. Over the course of just five days, this plant that was the dominant green of the East Woods started to yellow and sprawl across the forest floor under the rapidly greening canopy. But that dying back is a sacrifice, not a surrender: the plant appears to be pouring its last resources into the tiny fruits paired inside the flowers. Annual bedstraw, by contrast, is turgid, aggressive, and in full flower. The little white stars on your walks over the next few days will be amassing pollen to make summer seeds.

Toads were calling this week in the pond behind the greenhouses, sometimes in the mornings, sometimes in the afternoons, sometimes not at all. One morning I thought I heard them calling from the marsh underneath the powerline, but I wasn’t sure over the din from I-88. Most afternoons on my bike ride out, I heard them calling from the Carex atherodes marsh on the left side of the road just past the crabapples, where until last year there was a great shingle oak, and on the other side of the road where the aquatic buttercups flower in June. This week I started hearing orioles piping along the Heritage Trail and in the oaks behind the research building. Indigo buntings have been singing from the edges of the fields. Great crested flycatchers are calling from the far end of the East Woods. These are birds of summer. Friday night Rachel and I came home late and stopped at Fresh Thyme. From over the parking lot came the buzzing roar of a nighthawk. A nighthawk on the 10th of May! This is a bird I learned in my 20-something Junes in Madison, when they were clearing the skies of mosquitoes over East Washington, standing guard on the flat rooftops of the old factories, marking summers as a naturalist and bike rides with books and watching the stars reflected in the lakes.

Summer is not a month early, but we are on the turn from spring. The geraniums and phloxes are in bloom and false mermaid is senescing. Starry Solomon’s plume is on the cusp of on flowering and Solomon’s plume did bloom by the end of the week. But only Monday morning I found the Solomon’s plumes just unrolling, and every third or fourth plant dotted with guttation droplets at the tip of each leaf. Stigmas appear to just be receptive on Jack-in-the-pulpit. Camassia floral spikes have just emerged, but the flowers are not open yet. Flowers are forming on sweet cicely. Jewelweed leaves have surpassed the cotyledons in length. I began seeing poison ivy leaves fully open this week, and they are still filling. The leaves are mostly out on the trees, but the red oaks and bur oaks are shedding catkin-laden branch tips like rain when the squirrels take to them. Catkins have just descended on the shagbark hickories. And while the false mermaid is dying back, this week I witnessed the finest show of toothwort flowers I’ve seen all spring.

I am finishing this up at night on the second Sunday in May. Tomorrow morning begins a week of work with collaborators from Mexico. Our talk will be of gene flow and lineage diversification, speciation, adaptation, biogeography. My thoughts will flit among populations differentiating in the Sierra Madre Occidentale, tiptoe between genomes, open and close by turns as I consider possibilities and then look for evidence. My colleagues and I will look at checklists, specimens, maps. I’ll shuttle between our conversations and a few manuscripts at various stages of revision, heavy on the oaks with a dash of sedges. The sun will rise tomorrow morning over Ogden Avenue as it does every Monday, and the week will roll once more, a week of noticing things one moment, trying to make sense of them the next.

Opening the kitchen window tonight as the boys read themselves to sleep, I hear no frogs, and of course the crickets haven’t started yet. No birds twittering tonight in our neighborhood. Perhaps they’ll be on the move again when I wake up tomorrow. It is still spring.

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Plants referenced:

• Camassia scilloides – camassia
• Cardamine concatenata – toohwort
• Carex albursina – white bear sedge
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge
• Carex pensylvanica – Pennsylvania sedge
• Carex rosea – curly-styled sedge
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge
• Carex woodii – pretty sedge
• Carya ovata – shagbark history
• Cercis canadense – redbud
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Floerkea properpinacoides – false mermaid
• Galium aparine – annual bedstraw, cleavers
• Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
• Hepatica acutiloba – Hepatica
• Impatiens sp. – jewelweed, touch-me-not
• Maianthemum racemosum – Solomon’s plume, false Solomon’s seal
• Maianthemum stellatum – starry Solomon’s plume, starry false Solomon’s seal
• Menispermum canadense – moonseed
• Mertensia virginica – Virginia bluebell
• Osmorhiza claytonii – sweet cicely
• Phlox divaricata – woodland phlox
• Polemonium reptans – Jacob’s ladder
• Quercus macrocarpa – bur oak
• Quercus rubra – red oak
• Ranunculus hispidus – swampe buttercup, bristly buttercup
• Smilax sp. – Carrion flower
• Stylophorum diphyllum – celandine poppy
• Toxicodendron radicans – poison ivy
• Trillium flexipes – nodding trillium
• Trillium grandiflorum – big-flowered trillium
• Trillium recurvatum – prairie trillium
• Viola pubescens – downy yellow violet

Snow returned the last Saturday of April, wet and sloppy, but aside from the bent-over mayapples, the flowers hardly seemed to mind. The snow was largely melted in Lyman Woods by the next afternoon. White oak leaves were just breaking from the bud, wrapped around each other like beetles’ wings. Bur oak and red oak leaves were the size of pinky nails, the branch tips festooned with immature catkins. The white oaks were not yet in flower. Lanky, long-legged leaves of shagbark hickory strained their way out of the enormous endbuds. Poison ivy was curling off the white oak trunk like tentacles terminating in tiny, red, pubescent leaves, beautiful small things opening to the spring, lovely as flowers. Soft young hackberry leaves dripped from the branch tips. Cottonwood leaves were soft and glossy, fallen to the ground from trees all along the edge of the marsh. Gray dogwood leaves were an inch long. Missouri gooseberry had finally bloomed. Sprengel’s sedge had come into full flower along trails throughout the woods: everywhere the trees were sparse the anthers were flying, and the leaves had grown long enough to start bending in the middle, giving the plant the broken-arm look by which you can often recognize the species from across a field. Multiflora rose leaves were filling out. Buckthorn leaves were almost mature. Honeysuckle leaves were fully unfurled. Winter bittercress and small-flowered buttercup were flowering. The first floral buds were creeping out of the leaf bases on Lily-of-the-valley, the gift that keeps giving, whether you want it or not: like squill, you’re never rid of Convallaria. The leaves on annual bedstraw had grown as long as the summed lengths of the distal and middle phalanxes of my pinky. Solomon’s plume was out and easily distinguished from the true Solomon’s seal, though not yet producing floral buds. There were Jacks-in-the-pulpit spearing the leaf litter everywhere. Bloodroot fruits and leaves were swelling.

Much of the southern half of Lyman Woods was under water. I overtopped my boots getting a good look at the inner band of the leaf sheath on Carex vulpinoidea. The sheaths are corrugated, puckered crosswise, wrapped tightly around the culms or the other leaves within them. Here’s a common species I’ve seen probably at least 600 times (assuming I’ve seen it 20 to 40 times in each of the last 20 years, which seems pretty conservative). And yet I still ask myself, “any chance this is something else that I’m not thinking of?” While I worried over the plant, a Cooper’s hawk called “kek-kek-kek” from a tree above me. He flew off, and then from the overspilling marsh behind me a sora rail sang out. There are a few birds whose songs make me feel as though I were far from civilization: the sandhill crane, the woodcock, the pileated woodpecker, the sora rail. Part of the effect is association. I learned these birds in places or contexts other than where I live now, and so my rational mind, my knowing self, conditions me to feel as though I were being transported by their call. But I believe some of it is visceral, the sound itself. You don’t have to learn what Shostakovich was thinking to find his 8th string quartet haunting. You don’t have to be told how personal it is, that he encoded his name in this piece and others, to find it wrenching. The music itself does that. Your analytical mind only contributes to it.

Warblers do not have this effect on me. The weekend of foul weather may also have been a weekend of migration, for Monday a black and white warbler hit the herbarium window. It struck hard enough to get the attention of everyone in the office, but not hard enough to make it bleed. The bird landed on its back on the concrete ledge outside and laid feet up, a caricature of a dying bird. We removed the screen, reached out onto the ledge, turned it upright. The warbler rested immobile with his eyes wide open. It was cold outside, so we cut foam for the bird and slid it out onto the ledge. He did not move toward it and was alert, twitchy even. I was reluctant to pick him up and slide him onto the foam, for fear he’d writhe out of my hands and fall. Then his eyes started to shut as though he were expiring. There wasn’t much we could do, so I reached out again to pick him up and place him on the foam. As my fingers brushed his feathers, the bird jumped straight off the ledge and flew recklessly about 20 feet into the European beech whose reflection had undoubtedly lured him into the window in the first place. He disappeared. I’m hopeful that he recovered quickly. We taped hawk silhouettes to all the windows and put the foam away.

Monday and Tuesday, there was nothing but rain with nowhere to escape to. The DuPage River overtopped its banks and filled the elm collection nearly to the road. I took a walk on Tuesday that started dry and ended saturated, and still there was plenty to see. White trout lilies had started going to seed, stigmas thrust out of the fruits like adders’ tongues (which of course is not my image: that is one of their common names). The capsules of Dutchman’s breeches had started to swell. Spring beauty were fruiting, and the first flowers were coming out on Solomon’s seal. Largeflower bellwort were in bloom. Cystopteris fronds were unfurling. Things dried and warmed up near the end of the week. Friday, great-crested flycatchers were calling in the sunny morning of the East Woods. There were geranium leaves as big as my palm, some with flowers. Sugar maple leaves were drooping like handkerchiefs at the tips of spindly branches. Wild sarsaparilla was knee-high, hairy sedge was blooming, large white trilliums were coming into flower if they had a good view of the sun. If they didn’t, they were still just showing a little petal between the sepals. The first bloody thumbprints were showing on jumpseed. Woodland sunflowers were ankle-high. There was a bouquet of Christmas fern by the frog pond and a scattering of earth stars along the edge of the chipped trail.

*

Saturday’s snow and the rain at the beginning of the week gave us a little extra time for reading. Robert Moor had tweeted a quote the night before the snow from a book review by Nicholas Lemann, in which Lemann writes, “The relationship between fiction and nonfiction is like the one between art and architecture: fiction is pure, nonfiction is applied. Just as buildings shouldn’t leak or fall down, nonfiction ought to work within the limits of its claim to be about the world as it really is. But narrative journalism is far from artless.” Lemann is writing about Jeremy Treglown’s Mr. Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima. It made me wonder again what distinguishes the nonfiction I have been most interested in this past few years from the fiction I was reading almost exclusively when Rachel and I first got together. Scientific writing — by which I mean scientific articles, mostly peer-reviewed stuff, reporting new findings — is not what I’m talking about. Like most academic writing, this kind of writing is about conveying information efficiently, interpreting it to explain how the world works, advancing hypotheses, pushing knowledge forward. That’s mostly what I’ve been writing since starting graduate school 20 years ago, and it seems obvious to me that structurally and in subject matter it differs from the fiction I was writing and reading as an undergraduate.

But when it comes to essays, the line is fuzzier to me. Essayists take as their subjects some portion of the world that they are uniquely poised to report about. They describe it, ruminate on it, compare something they’ve seen here with some other thing they’ve run across over there. What comes out of it is a new understanding, hopefully, arising in the reader as a consequence of the juxtaposition of images, stories from the world. I think this account of essays is fairly non-controversial. But that’s exactly how I would describe the fiction and poems I like as well. Essays and even book-length works of nonfiction operate to my eye much like poems. They are occupied with, as Billy Collins put it, comparing “everything with everything else.” You can read them for information, of course… but you can read them just as much for the change in perspective they effect in you, irrespective of whether you remember a thing from them. Dylan Thomas wrote, “A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.” Isn’t it the same with non-fiction? and for that matter with fiction? Fiction writers and non-fiction writers are in the same boat: they take as their subjects worlds that they are uniquely situated to see. They are obliged to describe them accurately. The worlds they are describing just happen to be in different places.

Why write another nature essay? I don’t think it’s to teach you something. If it were, I wouldn’t spend so much of my time writing about common knowledge, things that are familiar to me and many other people: robins, flowering buttercups, Carex woodii coming into fruit on a knoll I’ve walked past for fifteen springs, come to expect it on, always look for it and always find it, always grateful. I don’t think it’s primarily to get you outside, either. If these essays are to do anything, it’s to add something new to the world. John Burroughs saw it similarly. Look at what he writes:

Or one may say, it is with the thoughts and half thoughts that the walker gathers in the woods and fields, as with the common weeds and coarser wild flowers which he plucks for a bouquet, — wild carrot, purple aster, moth mullein, sedge, grass, etc.: they look common and uninteresting enough there in the fields, but the moment he separates them from the tangled mass, and brings them indoors, and places them in a vase, say of some choice glass, amid artificial things, — behold, how beautiful!

I can’t see the difference between fiction and nonfiction as a distinction between the basic and the applied. There is very little of “now I want you to learn something from what I’m saying” in anything I write after 10 p.m. on weekdays or Sunday mornings before the boys are up. Each one of these little essays is me muttering, “Don’t forget this.” They’re phone calls to Rachel telling her she’s got to see this thing over here. They’re notes for my boys. They’re notes to myself, to pull out of the drawer when I’m 90. I don’t know precisely what they are, but I know they’re not fiction, and I know they’re also not applied. They’re just what I want to think about, and it’s happenstance that I want to keep thinking about these things I see in the woods. In a sense, the essays I read and the things I write are only accidentally nonfiction. They are about the world, and they are true. But fiction is as well. It’s just about a different world.

*

A week after our freaky late-April snow, DuPage County is warming up, and leaves have been filling out all weekend long. Saturday night, a week after the snow, I sat in the backyard by the fire. It was getting hard to read. Arcturus was just visible in the east, the only star I could see. There was a party in the neighborhood, and I leaned my head back to listen to the music. Queen was playing, and “We will Rock You” mixed with the chuckling of a robin. There was some other sound I didn’t recognize. Then I realized that the robin was not a robin at all, but a wood thrush. Could that be right? A wood thrush in our neighborhood? I listened for a few minutes, and it was unquestionable. I’d never heard one on our street, but now I wonder whether every year they come through. Is there a lineage of wood thrushes that comes and sings in our backyard every May, right as trees are filling up their leaves for summer? Was I the only one to hear it? These things happen: surprisingly ordinary things that are surprising in one way go unnoticed by everyone but you sometimes, which makes you wonder how often they go unnoticed by everyone in the world.

Take this as you like. If you want it as information, you can have it. A wood thrush on Otis Avenue is certainly news to me. A late-season snow, the order of flowering week by week, what day the black-and-white warbler hit her herbarium window: it’s all information. And at the same time, that won’t be why I care about it when I’m 96, and knowing about it isn’t enough for me. This is non-fiction, but it’s not applied. It’s the first week of May. That’s the main point I’m trying to make here.

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Plants referenced

• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Aralia nudicaulis – wild sarsaparilla
• Arisaema triflorum – Jack-in-the-pulpit
• Barbarea vulgaris – winter bittercress
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge
• Carex vulpinoidea – fox sedge
• Carya ovata – shagbark hickory
• Celtis occidentalis – hackberry
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Convallaria majalis – lily-of-the-valley
• Cornus racemosa – gray dogwood
• Dicentra cucullaria – Dutchman’s breeches
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Galium aparine – annual bedstraw
• Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
• Helianthus occidentalis – woodland sunflower
• Lonicera x bella – honeysuckle
• Maianthemum racemosum – Solomon’s plume
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Polygonatum biflorum – Solomon’s seal
• Polygonum virginianum – jumpseed
• Polystichum acrostichoides – Christmas fern
• Populus deltoides – cottonwood
• Quercus alba – white oak
• Quercus macrocarpa – bur oak
• Quercus rubra – red oak
• Ranunculus abortivus – small-flowered buttercup
• Rhamnus cathartica – buckthorn
• Ribes missouriense – Missouri goodeberry
• Rosa multiflora – multiflora rose
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Toxicodendron radicans – poison ivy

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¹ Richard Powers, “What Does Fiction Know?” Places Journal, August 2011. Accessed 05 May 2019. https://doi.org/10.22269/110802

Wildflowers flooded the woods over Easter weekend, like water spilled over the edges of the creek, running in sheets across the fallen oak leaves and overtopping the foliage that has carpeted the woods the past two weeks. The spring beauty in the woods caught up with its cousins under the planted oaks, where the mulched beds are still pooling with white and pink. The yellow trout lilies in the north half of the East Woods are deep yellow, deeper than the yellow of marshmallow Peeps or egg yolks, tulips or Forsythias. Bristly buttercup is flowering in seeps, and large-flowered bellwort, wood anemone, rue-anemone and false rue-anemone are blooming in the uplands. Downy yellow violets and wood violets flower beside each other under the oaks. Marsh marigold fills the springy seeps. Virginia bluebell flowers have gone from closed at the beginning of the week to perhaps a quarter of them open on Thursday.

This is the week for woodland wildflowers. There are still far more leaves than flowers, however. For every square foot of white trout lily flowers, there are perhaps 4 more of unflowering trout lily lawn. For every toothwort bloom there is a garden of groundcover. Bloodroot flowers have already gone to pieces while the leaves continue to expand, sopping up sunlight to provision the swelling capsules. Wild leeks are unabashedly soaking it up. Wild garlic and broad-leaved bedstraw haven’t so much as thought of flowering. Duckweed is spreading across ponds. It is perhaps a sedge taxonomist’s conceit, but I cannot help thinking of the flowers as an incidental part of life in the woods. I know better, of course: without flowers we don’t have sex and recombination, and there are all sorts of reasons to want those. But when I look at the woods, even in this week of flowers, I see autotrophs, photosynthesizing behind their finery.

On my walk out on Monday evening, about 5:00 p.m., I followed my typical shortcut, out the back side of the research building, up the path through the conifers, then northeast around the Pinus densiflora toward the Children’s garden and the four pillars at the top of the hill. I typically think of this lawny no-man’s land as a place to hustle through and scan for flowering weeds, use the steps to check my camera, get my head calibrated for a few minutes of looking once I get back into the woods, where I’ll gather up observations on the way back to my bike. Rounding the Pinus densiflora, I entered a sort of room of spruces to the west, the Children’s garden 100 feet to the north, a Pinus cembra to the south. The Picea koyamae was tall enough to crack its crown over the fence if it fell toward the garden. The noise of I-88 died down with the pine between us, and I saw a butterfly moving around. I thought at first it was a mourning cloak, but there was too much color. Painted lady? No… red admiral? Probably, but there wasn’t much time for wondering about that, because I realized after focusing on the one that in fact I was in a clearing with many, all apparently involved in some kind of chase, flying around each other into the air.

I’ve seen individual butterflies doing this, meeting each other in midair and then flying up and around one another, spiraling higher and higher before they split off or a third comes in. But at this moment it seemed to be all around me. At first I felt I’d walked into utter chaos, a riot of butterflies, but within a minute or two what I was seeing sorted out a bit, and it seemed perhaps just two or three red admirals were taking turns patrolling this little spot. Or maybe each was patrolling a subarea within a larger room closed in by trees and shrubs. The others appeared to be interlopers or playing tag-team, so there were always just a couple or a few in charge of the opening. The core butterflies at any given moment would rest periodically on a patch of matted dead grasses in the otherwise greening lawn, only for a second at most, then fly into the air to greet an incoming butterfly. They would circle upward in a helix, and often a third would come in and that one and one of the first two would go barreling off toward the south, up near the treetops, almost as fast as a hummingbird patrolling between flowers–is that possible?–while the remaining butterfly settled down to rest for his allotted 1/2-second.

They were ceaseless, and I could not get a decent photo. I crouched for several minutes by the dead grass where they would perch, waiting with camera in hand, but I landed only one photo, a horrible one, enough however to identify the butterflies positively as red admirals. After 15 minutes or so, I had to go. I wasn’t able to get back to thinking about this until the next day, but with a little reading I found that Vanessa atalanta L., the red admiral, is notoriously territorial. In a 1979 article in the Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera, Royce Bitzer and Kenneth Shaw describe observations made on the Iowa State University campus, where they identified five red admiral territories. Their observations were uncannily like what I observed: males occupied territories, generally ellipses of 12-24 m long, with a few resting spots on bare ground or sidewalk, invariably lighter than the surrounding grass. Intruders (or, perhaps for the scientists’ amusement, dry floating leaves) were intercepted by the resident males, who charged from beneath and forced the potential invaders upward in a spiral to the level of the surrounding treetops, boosted them over the rim of their shrub- or tree-enclosed room, and went back to patrolling. They did not feed, oviposit, mate, or roost within their defended territories. They were fast and intent.

That night I sat on the bedside with my son and listened with him to the story of Icarus and Daedalus, which was playing on the CD player beside his bed. As Icarus fell into the water, I recalled W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”. The poem centers around a visit he describes in a letter to a friend thus: “I have been doing the art gallery and trying to appreciate Rubens. The daring and vitality take one’s breath away, but what is it all ABOUT?” His poem begins with lines that follow you around on your afternoon walks:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…

and then closes with a scene from Breughel’s depiction of the death of Icarus, in which the entire painting is filled with doing and life and activity, and far off in the background we see the smallest and most insignificant of splashes. He tells us:

… the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Daedalus circles over the water watching for his son while late April blooms bob above the foliage. Blue-gray gnatcatchers bizz and wheeze along the tree branches. Flies buzz through the yard. Bumblebees patrol low over the tops of the plants. Bur oak leaves have emerged from the bud but are hugging each other tightly, backs ridged, tummies hidden, the size of voles’ tongues. In only a few days, false mermaid has bolted and flowered, upright carrion flower has formed fists of floral buds, prairie trillium has started blooming in a few places, the petals of great white trillium have peeked out from between the bud scales. Blue cohosh is about to flower. Wood’s sedge and Sprengel’s sedge and Pennsylvania sedge are in full flower.

Wednesday afternoon at around 2 p.m., I returned to the place where the red admirals had been sparring. There were painted ladies flitting around, but none interacting, and no red admirals. I know from years past that there will still be flowers in the woods next week. But I have no idea about the red admirals. I don’t know if they’ll be fighting next week or if they’re done for the year. I’ll check on my walk out on Friday.

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Plants referenced:

• Allium canadense – wild garlic
• Allium tricoccum – wild leek
• Anemone quinquefolia – wood anemone
• Caltha palustris – marsh marigold
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Carex pensylvanica – Pennsylvania sedge
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge
• Carex woodii – Wood’s sedge
• Caulophyllum thalictroides – blue cohosh
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Enemion biternatum – false rue-anemone
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Erythronium americanum – yellow trout lily
• Galium circaezens – broad-leaved bedstraw
• Mertensia virginica – Virginia bluebells
• Quercus macrocarpa – bur oak
• Ranunculus hispidus – bristly buttercup
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Smilax ecirrhata – upright carrion flower
• Thalictrum thalictroides – rue-anemone
• Trillium grandiflorum – great white trillium
• Trillium recurvatum – prairie trillium
• Uvularia grandiflora – large-flowered bellwort
• Viola pubescens – yellow violet
• Viola sororia – wood violet

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Image from: Bitzer RJ, Shaw KC. 1979(80). Territorial behavior of the red admiral, Vanessa atalanta (L.) (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae). The Journal of research on the Lepidoptera. 18: 36–49. Shared by the Smithsonian Libraries and Biodiversity Heritage Library under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Sunday one week ago we had five inches of snow. I’m not a weather watcher, and it caught me by surprise, right in the middle of April. By Monday morning the snow had started to melt, but it was still several inches thick in the East Woods. The mayapples stood in bunches, like passengers waiting for the bus in a blizzard, coats wrapped tightly under their chins, stiff, silent. The white fawn lilies were half-buried, but their leaf tips were spiky atop the surface of the snow. False mermaid clustered under fallen logs and at the bases of the trees, where the snow had melted down a bit or not accumulated in the first place. Only the spring beauty gave the impression of having been beaten down by the snow; perhaps not set back, but disappointed, slowed a bit. Spring beauty is lovely, but it is not strong.

Monday afternoon, much of the snow had melted. Rachel saw mourning cloak butterflies in the garden. By Tuesday morning, the snow had almost all melted away. At sunrise the field sparrows and robins and song sparrows were all going strong, and by an hour later I was hearing towhees. On the north-facing slope overlooking the frog pond, patches of snow about the size of a boot print were nestled at base of every third tree, downslope, protected from the sun. There were no frogs calling, but a ruby crowned kinglet insistently sang and sang from down near the pond, where a pair of wood ducks were coming in for a landing. Botanizing, eyes on the ground, I stumbled upon a Cooper’s hawk that had caught a flicker. As raptors will do, the bird sized me up before flying off with its quarry, low through the trees, leaving a cloud of feathers in the middle of the chipped trail. When Rachel and I met for lunch that day, we saw bumblebees and painted ladies.

The burned woods have turned green with lawns of trout lily and Virginia waterleaf, whose leaves have expanded rapidly in the past few days. Everything has gone nuts with the melting snow and warm temperatures. The blue-green tips of Carex hirtifolia and the burgundy-based Carex woodii shoots are nearly three inches tall. Pennsylvania sedge has started to flower, only the stigmas visible, whitish filaments emerging from the dark scales at the bases of the inflorescences, sinuous, arching inward near the tips. Inflorescence spikes are up on the Sprengel’s sedge, but still closed. Carex sparganioides shoots are almost as big around as lead pencils. Jacob’s ladder forms bunches in the drier, more open areas of the woods. Some Asteraceae (zigzag goldenrod?) is coming up here and there at the north edge of the spruce plot. Hepatica is still flowering, and the spring foliage has started opening. Common wood violet leaves started unrolling along the edges of the trails and at the bases of trees at the beginning of the week, and by Friday morning they were in bloom. American elm has come into fruit. Early meadow-rue leaves are stacked like hands of playing cards, the margins purple, the floral buds packed as densely as the flowers on grape hyacinth. Blue cohosh stems arch like dancers. Foliage of wood anemone is about 3 inches high and glossy; foliage of bristly buttercup is sprawling. Dutchman’s breeches opened for business this week. The sea of Virginia bluebells at the far east end of the East Woods before the power lines is about to bloom. Ridged backs of the ironwood leaves have gone from just pushing out of the buds to being out, still folded, a little larger than a grain of orzo. Buckthorn leaves have grown to the size of mouse’s ears.

Thursday morning the American toads started singing in the slough behind the local elementary school. In our warm spring of 2017, toads were singing in this same slough on April 15, so perhaps this year is on track from the toad standpoint, even if the wildflowers are lagging. In the East Woods, ironwood catkins were descending. Sugar maple leaves were expanding in the understory (not yet on the grown trees) and the beltlike cotyledons were snapping out of the seeds. Wild ginger leaves were fully out of the soil and spreading, quarter-sized cotyledons were spread wide on seedlings of great waterleaf. Toothwort flowers were opening—they seem to me to be particularly slow this year, but maybe it is my imagination—and whorls of leaves on the annual cleavers were as big around as a fifty-cent piece. There were slugs climbing the false mermaid and earthworms writhing on the sidewalks. In the wetlands beneath the power lines at the east end of the Arboretum, chorus frogs and peepers and American toads were singing together while a belted kingfisher crackled overhead.

Friday I came in to find the ravine sloping down into the woods just beyond the east edge of the oak and maple collections awash with green. Along its shoulders grew an enormous colony of Dutchman’s breeches in full bloom. I found fourteen species in the understory on the east-facing slope of the ravine: a matrix of false mermaid with wild garlic up to the middle of my shins, wild leeks fully expanded, toothwort in early flower, Carex rosea not yet flowering, wild geranium, dogtooth lilies coming into flower, wood anemone, bristly buttercup near the base of the slope, prairie trillium, mayapples unfurling, big-flowered trillium about to flower, spring beauty. And of course the Dutchman’s breeches. Elsewhere in the woods was foliage of sweet cicely and herb Robert, boot-high Canada bluegrass, shoots of Solomon’s seal eight inches tall, leaves just starting to spread open. Peachfuzz was evident on the rosettes of Carex hirtifolia from several feet away. A patch of fleshy scurfy twiglet was sprouting from the wood chips.

On my walk out on Friday I saw several mourning cloaks moving around among the ruby-crowned kinglets fly-catching in the shin-high wild hyacinth foliage and the brown creepers on the tree trunks (I think I saw one last week as well but didn’t get a good look… how long have they been in town?). Bur oak and Hill’s oak end buds were swelling. Floral buds had started forming on the wood anemone. Trout lilies were flowering along the edges of the trail. Marsh marigold was in bloom. The spring beauty was in full bloom under a Quercus x jackiana in the oak collection.

There are a couple of weeks like this each year when I find it almost impossible to keep up. I walk and take pictures, write in my notebook, try to get every name in there, to not forget the state of the leaves and buds and flowers, and I feel I’m just storing stuff up. I recalled as I walked in on Friday a passage from J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey in which Zooey is worrying over his sister, but to his sister, kind of berating her over the phone: “As a matter of simple logic, there’s no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who’s greedy for material treasure—or even intellectual treasure—and the man who’s greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure’s treasure… and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.” And what am I doing? Laying up treasure. The way I walk through the woods scribbling down names and conditions of individual plants is essentially piling up dimes and quarters.

And yet it makes me so happy, all this counting and recording and writing it down, like when I was 24 and just realizing that this was what liked to do: catch some little thing about the natural world that I hadn’t noticed and describe it. This is the season for stockpiling observations, laying aside notes and recollections for later in the summer when I can think about it more clearly, or for when I’m 98 and don’t get around so well. This was an exceptionally good week to be doing it.

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Plants referenced

• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Allium canadense – wild garlic
• Allium tricoccum – wild leek
• Anemone quinquefolia – wood anemone
• Asarum canadense – wild ginger
• Caltha palustris – marsh marigold
• Camassia scilloides – wild hyacinth
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Carex hirtifolia – a hairy-leaved sedge, the hairiest thing in the woods right now
• Carex pensylvanica – Pennsylvania sedge
• Carex rosea – curly-styled sedge… maybe. It’s what you may have learned as Carex convoluta, whereas what you may have learned as Carex rosea is now Carex radiata. Confusing! Give a holler and I explain it to you. It’s a good story
• Carex sparganioides – bur-reed sedge
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge, but he doesn’t own it. You do, if you know it (think of Allen Ginsburg: “Who digs Los Angeles is Los Angeles”… so it is with sedges)
• Carex woodii – sometimes called lovely sedge, which isn’t fair, because they are all lovely
• Caulophyllum thalictroides – blue cohosh
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Dicentra cucullaria – Dutchman’s breeches
• Erythronium albidum – fawn lily, dog-tooth violet, trout lily
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Galium aparine – cleavers, annual bedstraw
• Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
• Geranium robertianum – herb Robert
• Hepatica acutiloba – Hepatica
• Hydrophyllum appendiculatum – great waterleaf
• Hydrophyllum virginianum – Virginia waterleaf
• Lemna minor – duckweed
• Mertensia virginica – Virginia bluebells
• Osmorhiza claytonii – sweet cicely
• Ostrya virginiana – ironwood
• Poa compressa – Canada bluegrass
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Polemonium reptans – Jacob’s ladder
• Polygonatum biflorum – Solomon’s seal
• Ranunculus hispidus – bristly buttercup
• Rhamnus cathartica – buckthorn
• Solidago flexicaulis – zigzag goldenrod
• Thalictrum dioicum – early meadow-rue
• Trillium grandiflorum – big-flowered trillium
• Trillium recurvatum – prairie trillium
• Ulmus americana – American elm
• Viola sororia – common wood violet