Category: Uncategorized

This past week, temperatures dropped from the 40s to the 20s. Biking through the East Woods, I noticed shelf fungi twenty feet up in dead trees, fallen stalks of touch-me-not (Impatiens spp.), mosses bright green on fallen logs and at the bases of trees, the whiteness of air trapped beneath ice in the puddles and waterways that run under the road. On Thursday, I talked for nearly an hour with Wayne Lampa about mosses. He agreed that mosses and evergreen sedges really are the brightest things in the woods now. I was reassured, because I am both color-blind and often attracted to details that turn out to be peripheral to the main action in a given context. These two personal attributes sometimes conspire to make me think that I am observing generalities when in fact I am noticing particularities or coincidences. But Wayne agreed: right now is the time for mosses in our woods, because they jump out at you against the pale brown leaves, on a cut stump at the trail’s edge or the upper surface of a decomposing log. Against my better judgment, and in spite of the raft of oak writing I need to get done in the next couple of months, I took a break that afternoon and checked out Ralph Pope’s Mosses, Liverworts, and Hornworts: A Field Guide to Common Bryophytes of the Northeast and Conard and Redfearn’s classic How to Know the Mosses and Liverworts, which I think I once snagged at a booksale and then let go, unused, after several years.

This week, I realized there were egg cases of Chinese praying mantis (Tenodera sinensis) on the goldenrods in our back garden. Who knew? More praying mantises visited our garden this summer than we’d ever seen before, including one who systematically devoured a monarch butterfly as we watched (I would never have seen this if Rachel hadn’t called me out; the photos here I think are hers). Having egg cases in the backyard is icing on the cake. The dog started going for them, so I pulled them into the garage to overwinter. I’m hoping for 100s of mantids come summertime.

Snow started this morning. A cardinal and a few nuthatches were singing at 6:45 as Rachel and I walked the dog through Maple Grove. The snow continued through most of the day. When I returned for a walk at 3:30, the hill beside the forest was thick with kids sledding. Snow coated the east side of all the trees. The squirrels appeared to be waiting it out, holing up in their trees and descending only to excavate a cache. Squirrels are said to remember where they have cached their food¹, and the way that they were operating this afternoon in light of the snow leads me to believe it. The stems of calico aster (Symphyotrichum lateriflorum) are everywhere, glazed with snow, and sugar maples and wild leeks emerge above the snow’s surface throughout the woods. Musclewood (Carpinus caroliniana) leaves and privet berries are hanging on. The soil that a week ago was teeming with centipedes is frozen now, decorated with snow flakes.

Tonight I walked the dog in the backyard at about 8:30. Last night it was dark at this time, Orion overhead, and I had the lights strung along the side of our garage turned on so we could see as we took the dog out. Tonight, between the clouds above and the snow on the ground, it was light enough outside to read by. As the dog rolled in the snow, I thought of this passage from John Burroughs “The Pleasures of a Naturalist,” in Under the Maples:

… meadow mice… live on grass and roots and keep well hidden beneath the ground during the day, when there is a deep fall of snow coming out of their dens and retreats and leading a free holiday life beneath the snow, free from the danger of cats, foxes, owls and hawks. Life then becomes a sort of picnic…. When the snow is gone, their winter picnic is at an end, and they retreat to their dens in the ground and beneath flat stones, and lead once more the life of fear.

In a few days there will be mouse and vole tracks to follow in the snow. For now, all is quiet, and I imagine the social life under the snow, rodents feeding on tubers and plant stems, bedding down under a translucent ceiling. Perhaps they are safer from owls and coyotes than they would be without the snow. Is it really the party down there that Burroughs makes it out to be? Years ago I saw a small grove of shrubs in Curtis Prairie at the UW Madison Arboretum that had been girdled under the snow while no one was watching. Perhaps the mice in Maple Grove Forest Preserve will feed on the spring beauty shoots and bulbs that I was wondering over last week. I look forward to watching their tunnels and trails appear over the coming days.
——————
¹ Jacobs LF, Liman ER. 1991. Grey squirrels remember the locations of buried nuts. Animal Behaviour 41: 103–110.

The afternoon before the winter solstice was warm and foggy, and it seems the unseasonably warm weather of the week or so before had tricked the spring wildflowers into action. Bullet-shaped mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) less than a centimeter high and sprawling, partially etiolated shoots of Virginia spring beauty (Claytonia virginica) were hiding under leaf litter at the base of the red oaks. The spring beauty particularly surprised me: the straplike leaves are unmistakable, and with them were the floral buds curled up like tiny fists, bunched together. I went back a week later and found them still there. Is this typical? Do spring beauty and mayapple typically persist under the snow all winter long? The husks of stump puffballs that I first noticed in August had turned honey-brown; fungal mycelia were frosting the woodchips underneath the leaf litter; a great horned owl was calling from the north edge of the woods. The brightest green in the woods was the moss (Entodon seductrix) covering a cut stump alongside the trail.

A Virginia opossum was patrolling the oak collection. I saw her from 30 feet off waddling behind one of the planted oaks and ran to get a photo, thinking she would race off. Instead, she climbed up the oak to eye level and watched me, casually, just keeping an eye on me. I got within about 5 feet and stopped shooting photos so I could get a proper look at her. She was in beautiful shape. I confess that opossums scare me a little: those sharp little teeth, and so many of them; the naked, ratlike tail; the divots out of their ears where they’ve been frostbitten and don’t even seem to mind… they’re tough animals! But this one was lovely, and it’s changed my thoughts about opossums a bit.

Temperatures dropped for the next four days, and Christmas eve day there were ice crystals 2 mm long in the upper layers of exposed soil at Maple Grove Forest Preserve. Oak leaves were frozen into a mat, but the soil beneath was merely cold, pliable like clay. Just after lunch, the soil in our garden was still frozen in the upper layers in the shady parts, mostly thawed in the sun. I turned over a four-by-four-foot section of garden and planted four rows of garlic that we had meant to plant two months ago. I mulched with pin oak leaves and leaves from our apple tree. Too tannic? perhaps… I never mulch the garden with oak leaves, but this year we had no straw left over from Halloween.

Since Christmas, temperatures have ranged from the high teens to the low 50s. The days are only 10 minutes longer than they were on the solstice, but cardinals have been singing as late as 9:30 in the morning. Orion is rising over the horizon as the sun goes down and stands upright in the south by 9:30 at night. Saturday morning it was just below freezing when Rachel and I took the dog to Maple Grove Forest Preserve. We found fiberlike ice crystals about an inch long just under the soil’s surface, cylindrical crystals packed together like bundles of straws, clear, pushing clods of soil up to make a ragged, brittle surface. By the afternoon, temperatures had risen to over 50 degrees. A small swarm of some species of gnat or midge (I think; I did not succeed in grabbing one or getting a good photo) was bouncing over the bridge through the margin of floodplain forest along St. Joseph Creek. For several minutes they traced a slender ellipse up and down over the handrail, sparkling like flecks of snow in the setting sun. The underside of a brick of rotten wood was glazed with minute frost crystals, but the ice crystals at the soil surface had mostly collapsed. At the bases of the trees, under dried piles of maple and oak leaves, full-sized centipedes tunneled through lawns of earthworm castings alongside mites and pill-bugs. Almost every spot where I pushed aside leaves, whether dried up at the bases of the trees or limp and matted over the soil surface, I found earthworm castings and centipedes. The centipedes must be active throughout the winter, any time the temperature rises, like the mourning cloaks who lie in wait under the bark or in crevasses of trees for the first warm days of spring, and emerge fully formed, ready for action.

There is more to see in the understory than I had expected. Evergreen sedges I knew I would find: Carex blanda, C. jamesii, the broad-leaved C. albursina, and most of the other woodland sedges maintain their late-season foliage under the snow throughout the winter, presumably photosynthesizing when they can. Carex sprengelii appears to be an exception to the rule, as the one in my garden is only a pale green at the base right now. The evergreens also include Hepatica, white avens (Geum canadense), many of the woodland ferns, and a few other understory herbs. These were no surprise. But two spring wildflowers I had not expected were also coming up: hidden in the white oak leaf litter was a fully developed leaf of false rue-anemone (Enemion biternatum) and the exposed bulb of another Virginia spring beauty, shoots emerging serpentlike from its crown. Again I ask myself, is this the norm? are there always spring herbs emerging in December and January? are the plants that emerge just in warmer spots? predisposed to earlier growth? a hair shallower than their classmates? just lucky, or unlucky as the case may be? And will the particular plants I’ve found survive to March, when I expect to start seeing them? I need to get some twist-ties to mark these plants for a revisit.

One small area of the forest floor was cleaned of leaves, exposing a clone of wild ginger. Scratched with a thumbnail, because I wasn’t certain I had the identification right, the rhizomes were pungent. The prostrate stems were tipped with leaf scales about the size of a fingernail; the lateral shoots were the size of a pencil eraser or perhaps a bit longer. Laid bare like this, the clone was easy to follow, rhizomes surfacing here and there like segments of a slender, many-armed creature swimming beneath the forest floor.

Further on, a large sugar maple had fallen onto the forest floor. The whole tree was spongy, soft and soaking wet, rotten brown. It was topped with a healthy, fresh-looking moss that was bristly with sporophytes. I presume these had opened in 2018, sending the spores off to the wind while the stalks (formally, setae) and capsules remained, like marcescent crabapple stems in midwinter. At one end of the tree trunk was scat of what I suspect was a red fox, nestled in fissures in the bark right at the broken base of the tree. Near the middle of the trunk was the husk of an acorn deposited, most likely, by a squirrel after eating the nut out. At the far end was a particularly fresh patch of orange mycena mushroom, as fleshy as if it were a rainy week in early September. Were they persisting all the way from late summer? or newly emerged from the rotten wood in an unseasonably warm week? On the hike out, I heard a great horned owl call.

In his essay “The Pleasures of a Naturalist,” John Burroughs wrote: “But the naturalist finds his pleasures everywhere. Every solitude to him is peopled. Every morning or evening walk yields him a harvest to eye or ear. The born naturalist is one of the most lucky men in the world. Winter or summer, rain or shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, his pleasures are always near at hand.” I sometimes tire of quoting John Burroughs, but honestly, I don’t think anyone says it better than he does. In an hour and a half, I didn’t make it much more than a 1/4-mile down the trail; who captures that better than Burroughs? I don’t know.

That’s 2018, done. Is 2019 the year I get bored botanizing my own neighborhood? If this week is any indication, it’s not. I still have plenty to do right here.

Once a man brought me a story which began with a cut-off head which spoke. And I said to the man, “Isn’t it miracle enough that a head which is not chopped off can talk? — Isaac Bashevis Singer [1]

The snow was about a half-inch thick this morning when I headed over to Maple Grove Forest Preserve. Tussocks of Carex jamesii wore the snow as though they were wigs laid over half-buried rocks, and the tree branches and arching stems of calico aster looked as if they had been spread liberally with icing in the early hours. Ironwood and honeysuckle and marcescent canopy oaks are hanging onto their leaves, but the other trees have mostly let theirs fall. The shin-high sugar maple youngsters on the forest floor stand out in sharp relief against the white snow. The infructescences of wild leek seem to be mostly battered down, though perhaps I was just missing them. Golden-crowned kinglets, white-breasted nuthatches, and hairy woodpeckers were calling.

I brushed aside the leaves in search of false mermaid (Floerkea proserpinacoides). In Quebec, its seeds are reported to germinate in November or December, with leaf emergence in the spring [2]. I found shoots 1/4″ high under the leaf litter on March 14 this year, though they may have been up a bit earlier (I had taken an interest in the soil when it was freezing and thawing, but I believe I went a few weeks in March without paying attention to anything under the litter). I cleared out the leaves in about a dozen spots today where I recall the plants growing, but I found nothing. A few spots had a short seedling or two growing with very vanilla-looking cotyledons. I’m certain that’s not false mermaid, but I don’t know what it is. Do you have any ideas?

The snow is just wet enough to glaze the oak leaves on the trail, leaving the soil wet but not snowy. Squirrels are digging up acorns, perching on the branches to eat them. I trooped up the hill to the south, and as The Avery Coonley School showed up on my left I veered off-trail into the woods. Everything looks different off trail. Trails are designed to get you somewhere: when you walk off trail, you may daydream, but you walk through, not past. I don’t recall exactly what I saw, nor what I thought about, but I have these impressions: white oak trunks mottled with wet snow; broad leaves clinging to the hybrid honeysuckles; wilted, frozen nettles; goldenrods etched with snow; then, unaccountably, an opening with grasses, in a slough that I knew I shouldn’t have come across. I had walked without realizing it over one trail and dropped back down to the base of the hill, and came back across my own footsteps. How did that happen? I blame the snow.

When I returned home, my younger son was just waking up. We ate, and I had my coffee as he put his snowpants on and raced outside, stockpiled snowballs, waited for me. He came to the window several times and mouthed, “are you coming?” Five minutes is forever when you are young. When you are older, the days fly by. I brushed my teeth and we had a vigorous snowball fight for about an hour, then he and Rachel headed downtown for a morning at the Art Institute.

On my walk out of the forest preserve this morning, I thought about the fact that I am 48 this year, halfway to the age at which my great-grandfather Grover Cleveland Hendrix Hipp passed away. I think I’ve always aimed for 96. I consider the things I’ve done already and all the things I still want to do, and I am grateful that here, at my halfway point, on a snowy day like this, I can look forward to one more of these, one more stretch of 48 years, each packed with 12 months. 576 months! I don’t want to set the bar too low, but what if I were to do just one good thing each month? One thing worth remembering in that last year, when I may do more sitting than biking, and I can look back at 576 good things: a snowball fight with my younger son; canoeing with my older son; walking with my wife in the dark, in the early morning before the boys are awake, watching the moon set; being with my family, exploring the city or the woods or seeing a movie; walking around the woods, writing more of these, whatever these are; watching the garlic come up in the garden. Is that too humble a goal? Is that too little to want? Just to have that seems miracle enough.

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1. Singer IB, Pondrom CN. 1969. Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Interview and a Biographical Sketch (Part I). Contemporary Literature 10: 1–38. [LINK]

2. Mckenna MF, Houle G. 1999. The effect of light on the growth and reproduction of Floerkea proserpinacoides. New Phytologist 141: 99–108. [LINK]

“In introgression, what often seems at first sight to be the appearance of something totally new usually proves to be a recombination that one had not had the wit to anticipate. Hybridization ordinarily results not in the new, but in the unexpected.” — Edgar Anderson 1949, Introgressive Hybridization

When I left for California on October 20, the leaves had just started turning in our area. When I returned five days later, it was the peak of fall color. Everyone the past few days has been raving about yellow. I ran into a friend at the Field Museum today who confessed that before this past weekend she’d never been to the Arboretum. She spoke in a reverie of the leaves falling like snow. What are they, she asked. She is a tropical botanist and knows, I suspect, more plants than I ever will; tropical botanists always seem to. They are sugar maple leaves, I told her. She had spent two and a half hours in the East Woods, just walking around. Friday, my wife sent photos of trees and puffballs, also from the East Woods. I have run into colleagues on the path outside our building smiling at nothing this past week, looking up into the air. We seem to have been caught off guard by beauty.

The streets are slick with foliage. Leaves are piling up in Maple Grove Forest Preserve. The paths and forest floor and riverbank are mottled in shades of yellow, brown and white, irrespective of what lies beneath. On my Sunday morning walk, I missed the turn onto my typical path and had to retrace my steps to find the entrance. The wood nettles and touch-me-nots that hemmed the trail edges here a few weeks ago are shrouded in frost-withered foliage. Poison ivy and carrion flower leaves are cracking from the stems. Zigzag and elmleaf goldenrods have gone to seed, carrion flower berries are still hanging onto a few plants. Burning bush fruit valves are clinging to the branches. The margins of wild ginger leaves are glowing yellow, and the darkest greens on the forest floor are the evergreen leaves of Carex albursina and C. jamesii. Soon they’ll be lying under the snow, waiting patiently for spring, while the less hardy forest herbs are hiding under ground.

Last week’s trip to UC Davis for the International Oak Society conference was filled with friends and walks along the river edge from the hotel to the conference, further on to the magnificent oak collection. I’ve never been fond of cultivars, but the hybrids there are arresting: crosses between bur oak of eastern North America and valley oak of California; Quercus turbinella of the southwest and Q. virginiana of the southeast or Quercus robur of Eurasia and northern Africa. That making such a thing should result in beauty is remarkable to me. There is something stark about these hybrids, something moving about the way the characters of one species stand out in relief against the genetic background of another. The enormous acorn caps of bur oak seem somehow larger when they are darkened, bell-shaped, with the marginal scales inrolled instead of forming a fringe around the edge; and yet the apices of the scales shingling the back of the cap are slender and elongate. That, evidently, is the effect of putting Quercus macrocarpa into a Q. lobata background. A hybrid is like the final cut of “Pharaoh’s Dance,” so heavily edited that at first you don’t notice as you glide over a splice from one take to the next. Which species contributed this acorn stalk, this leaf apex? I can look a dozen times before I even start to think of asking this.

The beauty of maple leaves notwithstanding, my head is packed full of oaks and phylogenies and hybrids these days. I have just finished Edgar Anderson’s Introgressive Hybridization, and I don’t know if I’ve ever met a more clear-headed person. Pick it up if you haven’t read it, if only for sentences like, “This is one of those simple techniques that are more important than they seem. Everyone who has tried it has learned unexpected things about the material he was studying.” Does the subject matter even concern you if you get sentences that universal out of the deal? So much the better for you if you are interested in hybridization. You’ll glide through the day on wet maple leaves.

“We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world.”
— Carl Sagan, introduction to A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking

A week ago I found myself scrounging for bur oak acorns under blackberries and poison ivy in several of the DuPage County Forest Preserves. I was aiming to get 160 or more acorns from each of 20 trees for a colleague who is planning a set of common gardens. The preferred way of making these collections would be to pick the acorns directly from the tree, but by the first week of September, storms had already knocked acorns off the trees by the bucketful. They are still falling, but they are nearly done. Collecting from beneath the trees turns out to be more my speed, anyway. I love activities that involve grubbing around on the ground, where there is cool and shade, where earthworms drag leaves into their burrows, where pillbugs and centipedes scuttle and mushrooms keep popping out. Berries of jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum), Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum), and Solomon’s plume (Maianthemum racemosum) had become ripe since I was last out and were mostly dispersed. The husks of stump puffballs (Lycoperdon pyriforme) were frozen in their last breaths, spores already excerned through the pores torn open in their caps. In Blackwell Forest Preserve, I came across a bright white giant puffball as big around as a volleyball, fleshy and perfect. I would love to have brought it home to cook up, but my collecting permit extended only to acorns.

I spent about 40 minutes under each tree, crawling on my hands and knees, picking up acorns individually, inspecting them for insects or mold, dropping them into a bag. Here and there would be a batch of ten or more acorns. Squirrels were active overhead, raining nuts down around me. I would move towards them to try to get them fresh. Underneath a tree in Danada Forest Preserve, one fell particularly heavily, landing beneath a raspberry bramble. I crawled under to collect it and found not an acorn, but an infant gray squirrel, hairless, eyes closed, curled on its side, a contusion appearing on its right temple. The squirrel twitched and took a few short breaths. After a few minutes it stopped moving. The sky was blue and people were biking the trail about 30 feet behind me. I filled a gallon bag with nuts and walked out to the trail, back to my car.

With the passing of the equinox on Saturday night, fall has arrived in earnest. Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) berries are ripe, easily crushed between the fingers. Wild ginger (Asarum canadense) is yellowed and reclining. Calico aster (Symphyotrichum lateriflorum) and elmleaf and zigzag goldenrods (Solidago ulmifolia and S. flexicaulis) and arrowleaf asters (which I realize this year I am going to have to learn properly before I put any names on them, based on how the Flora of the Chicago Region treats them) are in full bloom. A lawn of annual grass seedlings I first noticed in a depression in Maple Grove Forest Preserve in mid-August has grown into a thicket of chest-high barnyard grass (Echinochloa muricata). Meadow grasshoppers are calling. Wild lettuce has gone completely to seed and white snakeroot (Ageratina altissima) is not far behind. Turkey-tail fungi are bright white around the margins.

On my morning ride in yesterday, as the harvest moon was dipping toward the horizon, the neighborhood was filled with crickets. No birds could be heard until I crossed I-88, where a killdeer was crying over the ditches on the east side of Finley. A great horned owl called. As the last stars faded, a nighthawk twisted and banked over the field west of Big Rock. The sparrows were just rustling and lisping in the grasses. I walked the remaining way to work, and a flock of geese flew overhead as I was settling in at my desk; I heard them but could not tell what direction they were heading. Later that day, I found the overcast afternoon filled with the cricket calls of nighttime. The cicadas of late summer were gone. In dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis) clumps at the edge of Meadow Lake, an exceptionally loud grasshopper was calling, which I take to be a robust conehead grasshopper based on call and Cindy Crosby’s photo of the species from 12 days earlier on the Arboretum’s west side. The call is like a circuit arcing loudly and without pause, or a first try at synthesizing the sound a buzz-saw. On the walk out to my bike, there were still fresh acorns under a white oak tree, apparently just fallen.

It is still dark as I write this. The crickets are calling outside and the work I have to get done today is becoming distracting. I can hardly believe the summer is past. I risk not posting this at all if I don’t do it now. I’ll leave you with the best thing I’ve read this week, a poem by Billy Collins, from his collection Picnic, Lightning:

In the Room of a Thousand Miles
by Billy Collins

I like writing about where I am,
where I happen to be sitting,
the humidity or the clouds,
the scene outside the window—
a pink tree in bloom,
a neighbor walking his small, nervous dog.

And if I am drinking
a cup of tea at the time
or a small glass of whiskey,
I will find a line to put it on.

My wife hands these poems back to me
with a sigh.
she thinks I ought to be opening up
my aperture to let in
the wild rhododendrons of Ireland,
the sun-blanched stadium of Rome,
that waterclock in Bruges—
the world beyond my inkwell.

I tell her I will try again
and travel back to my desk
where the chair is turned to the window.
I think about the furniture of history.
I consider the globe, the lights of its cities.
I visualize a lion rampant on an iron shield,
a quiet battlefield, a granite monument.

And then—just between you and me—
I take a swallow of cold tea
and in the manner of the ancient Chinese
pick up my thin pen
and write down the bird that I hear outside,
the one that sings,
pauses,
then sings again.

In 9 years, I believe I have never heard a katydid in my Downers Grove neighborhood. I heard them all the time when we lived in Madison, and I have heard them in Millennium Park, but never here. At around 11:30 p.m. this past Tuesday, getting off the train, I found they are hanging out down by the railroad tracks, calling from the treetops. Why should they be in Dane County, downtown Chicago, the Downers Grove train depot, seemingly everywhere else in the world, but not in my neighborhood? Perhaps they are missing something they need here. Perhaps someone is eating them up along the residential roads. As I walked away from the train station, chatting with a friend who happened to be on the train as well, the katydids faded out behind us. They hardly penetrated into the neighborhoods. By the time we reached Lincoln Avenue, I could no longer hear them.

I dreamt that night that the white-throated sparrows and cranes were just coming through on their March journey northward, and Jay Sturner and I were talking birds in his living room. It was a disorienting dream to have in late August. I awoke at 4 a.m. Orion was tilting over the southeastern horizon. Tree crickets were singing. At 4:40, a cardinal started singing, then grew silent after about 10 minutes. By 5:30, the sky was starting to light up. On my bike ride in, the drive through the east woods was littered with bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) acorn caps. Two chipmunks were fighting over one, or courting, I couldn’t tell which. Crickets were tramping off to bed, singing their final rounds. This is the sound of early fall.

The acorns on the bur oaks are still green, but developing into shooter-size nuts. The ones falling now I think are aborted acorns that the trees have given up for dead. White oak (Quercus alba) acorns are also still green, but red oak (Quercus rubra) acorns are ripe and starting to fall. Two wood nettles (Laportea canadensis) I’ve come across this week in both the East Woods and Maple Grove bear nearly spherical, translucent galls that I initially found on the fruiting stalks and thought to be berries… foolishly of course, as wood nettle produces achenes. Laura Rericha, in Flora of the Chicago Region, reports that “Dasineura investita, a gall midge, causes both globose-apiculate semi-translucent galls and pyriform-acute galls on both surfaces of the leaves.” This matches what I’m seeing (see also this report from Turkey Run State Park, Indiana: https://bugguide.net/node/view/335222). The last seeds on blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides) are bright blue. Hog-peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata) has finally started blooming after its twining vegetative sprint of the past two weeks. White rattlesnake-root (Nabalus albus, the old Prenanthes alba) has bolted and gone from ca. 1/3 in flower to fully flowering over the past week. Giant ragweed (Ambrosia trifida) anthers are transitioning from clenched little fists to fully open and dehiscing. Joe-pye weed are in fruit, sunflowers are still flowering, burdock fruits are just sticky, not yet dispersing. Stickseed (Hackelia virginiana) fruits have just started clinging to my pants and socks on walks through the woods. In the fields and wetlands, meadow grasshoppers have started to call, climbing-black bindweed (Polygonum scandens) and dodder (Cuscuta gronovii) are flowering. Near bur-reed marsh, a red turtlehead (Chelone obliqua) is in bloom, presumably escaped from planting, not native to the area.

 

A clone of brownish puffballs appeared on the mulched trail west of the spruce plot in the East Woods this week. On Wednesday they were still moist inside but furry, a few towards the center of the clone dispersing spores. Pressure builds as you squeeze them, then a pore splits open at the center of the puffball and a tiny jet of spores shoots out, then flattens into a plume before it wafts away. They were covered with gnats. By Friday, the clone had gone completely to dust. Beneath a wood nettle in the spruce plot, I found an exquisite cup fungus that I haven’t identified. Reaching for it, I brushed against the wood nettle, and the back of my hand stung ferociously. My go-to plant in this case is usually jewelweed (Impatiens), the juice of which is a balm for nettle stings, but the plants have become so woody and dried out that you can not use them effectively for this any longer. Later, I popped a jewelweed flower into my mouth–the nectar spurs are delicious–only to find a tiny bee inside that stung the inside of my lip.

In Maple Grove Forest Preserve, orange mycena (Mycena leaiana) has appeared on fallen logs, and after several days of damp heat, white slime molds have erupted on the bare soil trails like clumps of white flour wetted by the week’s rain. Wild leek (Allium tricoccum) fruits are perched atop the withered calices, as shiny as black ceramic beads. Doll’s eye (Actaea pachypoda) berries have dried out, some blackened on the plants. The soil is crumbly with earthwork droppings under the skeletons of maple leaves. Buckthorn berries are ripe. A great-horned owl called from the forest on my walk through the other night, about 7:30.

Yesterday morning, Rachel and I found several cicadas dead or dying on the sidewalk as we walked to and from the farmer’s market. There were thunderstorms in early morning, and perhaps these were blown from the branches. By 7 p.m., sitting in the front yard, we could hear cicadas all over the neighborhood, and they seemed no quieter than usual despite all the mortality. Rachel suddenly pointed up at the swamp white oak along the tree. It was swarming with little insects that looked like sweat bees. They were in fact brownish-red ants, perhaps 5 mm in length, that appeared to have emerged from the canopy of our tree (though I’m not certain that is where they originated). One flew down to the top of our little free library box, sat still, seemingly stunned, then after 15 seconds regained composure and flew off. Others were doing the same on the hydrangeas, on our lawn chairs, on the table. Many landed in the soil. One I was watching on the soil under our chairs sloughed her wings off against a piece of bark mulch. I have read of ants doing this, but I’d never seen it before. Rachel and I followed them out to the pin oak next door, to the lot across the streets, then back again. A dragonfly darted around overhead, plucking them out of the sky. Where were the nighthawks? They would have been so happy.

As I write this, Rachel has just called me over to the goldenrods in our front yard. They are flowering at last, buzzing with wasps, soldier beetles, flies and bees. When the goldenrods flower, it must be almost September.

Saturday morning, earthworms at Maple Grove Forest Preserve reclined on the surface of the churned soil under a canopy of wild ginger, the air saturated with water vapor. There were no clouds in the sky, but the air was murky, and the sun crested over the trees as orange as if it were coming at us through dense smog. A few widely branching Verbesina alternifolia were flowering in the sea of touch-me-not and wood nettles that fill the St. Joseph Creek floodplain. A red-eyed vireo was calling and the crickets were wrapping up their night’s work as I arrived at the woods.

In the past 10 days, jumpseed (Polygonum virginianum) fruits have started to ripen: about one third of them will snap off when you shake the plant roughly (which I hope you don’t). Honewort (Cryptotaenia canadensis) and lopseed (Phryma leptostachya) are nearly ripe as well: they can easily be gathered by hand, though they don’t spring off readily at the touch. Beggar’s-lice (Hackelia virginiana) fruits are almost ready to go. I brushed past numerous plants Saturday morning and found at the end of my walk a single spike stuck to my pants. I’d guess that within a week or so, it won’t be possible to get through a walk without picking up substantially more hitchhikers. Bottlebrush grass (Hystrix patula) has dropped half of its spikelets. False nettle (Boehmeria cylindrica) inflorescences are bristling with achenes. Doll’s-eye berries (Actaea pachypoda) are fully ripe now, filled with pulpy flesh and chestnut-brown, wedge-shaped seeds. I tend to a nibbler while I’m out walking, but I’m glad I didn’t with these… I’d forgotten until I got home that they are toxic. Japanese barberry (Berberis thunbergii) is festooned with little green berries, soft agrimony (Agrimonia pubescens) is shedding its bristle-margined, crownlike fruits, and the wild leeks that I have been watching all year have finally started fruiting. They are so patient! All those weeks underground after photosynthesizing and dying back, only to flower for a few days and then fruit.

In the middle of the forest preserve there’s a wet depression ringed with Carex grayi and C. lupulina, with big clumps of rice cut grass Leersia oryzoides. A few individuals of water plantain (Alisma subcordatum) are in fruit along the edge, producing what look like little cheese-wheels of wedge-shaped achenes. Others, however, are sending up asparaguslike shoots that I presume will produce a second flush of flowers. Do they do this all through the summer? Surrounding them, filling the opening in the woods, is a carpet of delicate grass seedlings. It is exquisite. I don’t know what this grass could be, but as soon as I stepped into it a few feet, I regretted having sullied the otherwise perfect carpet. The grass appears to be an annual, otherwise the marsh would be a forest of it all summer long. I should know what this thing is. At the edge of the depression, clearweed (Pilea pumila) is flowering. Craneflies and skippers were patrolling the margins of the marsh as I walked through.

Calico aster (Symphyotrichum lateriflorum) is branching in the woods in anticipation of autumn. Moonseed (Menispermum canadense) is looping over fallen logs. The lovely purple sheaths of Carex woodii have paled as the leaf blades have elongated. Carex radiata clumps are flattened to the ground. The wet forest sedge Carex tribuloides is sending up shoots from its nodes, endeavoring to spread around the woods. This is a nice trick that is unusual in the genus, which mostly lacks specialized stolons, but found in this species as well as the closely related C. projecta and a distant cousin from California, C. harfordii. The common white bear sedge (Carex albursina) has aged remarkably in the past few weeks. Its leaves are tattered and darkened, much as they look under the snow in midwinter, and etched with whitish leaf-miner trails. The mayapples (Podophyllum peltatum) have all but given up: some are still yellow, others have withered altogether.

There are a few new beauties in the woods. Great blue lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica), northern bugleweed (Lycopus uniflorus), and mad-dog skullcap (Scutellaria lateriflora) have come into flower. Artist’s bracket (Ganoderma sp.) and one of the gilled mushrooms (possibly Oudemansiella megalospora, according to a colleague) have emerged. Throughout the western suburbs, bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) acorns are swelling and look as though they may be ready to drop within the next two weeks or so.

By midday, the moisture had largely blown away, and by evening temperatures had dropped into the 70s. Rachel and I sat outside with friends and ate and talked, lit a fire, watched the moon and stars shining. I imagine the earthworms were back out in force.

The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the ‘world is my world’.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.641, transl. C.K. Ogden

Tuesday morning, I sat outside at an hour before sunrise and heard only the cardinals singing against a quiet pulsing of crickets. A nighthawk flew overhead. Monday had been the same, and yesterday as well: cardinals whistling, a downpour, then again cardinals, and no robins. How is it that I am finding only at the age of 47 that the cardinals replace the robins in the early mornings of late summer? Are the birds behaving differently this year? I doubt it. There are just more corners of the world that I don’t know than that I do. Many of them are quite obvious and right in the neighborhood.

In the East Woods, White oak (Quercus alba) acorns are starting to fill out. They have grown to about marble size under their nobby caps. Pin oak (Q. palustris) acorns are also swelling up, though they are barely larger than chickpeas with caps that just cover their scalps. Black walnuts hang thick on the trees (Juglans nigra; for a great individual close to the visitor center, check out accession 572-30*1, south of Parking Lot 2). Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum) fruits have darkened in the past week to a waxy bluish-green. Three dark lines running lengthwise from stalk to fruit tip, marking the septa between the three locules of the berry. The seeds inside are a rich, creamy color. They stand in sharp contrast to the seeds of pokeweed (Phytolacca americana): the fruits of this species are still green but bruise when you squeeze them, breaking the juice sacs inside and pressing the black, lenticular seeds against the fruit wall. Elderberries (Sambucus canadensis) have ripened in the past 5 days, and honewort (Cryptotaenia canadensis) fruits have hardened to the point that a thumbnail dents them only with difficulty. Touch-me-not (Impatiens) fruit are at their ripest, springing open at a touch. Sporophores have withered on the rattlesnake fern (Botrychium virginianum), leaving the bright green sterile blades, the trophophores, to sop up sunlight for the remainder of the season. Turkey-tail fungi are fleshy and seem to be spreading over logs, field mushrooms have unfurled like umbrellas. In the marshes, swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) and boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum) and cordgrass (Spartina pectinata) are in full flower.

At 8:40 last night, I realized that the cicadas, which had been calling while I weeded along the side of the house a half hour earlier, had given way to crickets about 10 minutes earlier than they did a week ago. Jupiter was low in the southwest, and through the telescope I could pick out three of its moons, two trailing off to the west of Jupiter, one straggling off to the east. The great Dane County naturalist Ken Wood, when he was in the Peace Corps, decades before I knew him, used to have his students sketch Jupiter’s moons over the course of a few nights to show themselves that the moons revolved around the great planet. In the car yesterday afternoon, my sons and I had discussed whether it does people any good to know about the world, or to know about other worlds. I argued that it does, and I said something vague about how knowing about other planets tells us about our own. It’s true, of course: we do learn about our world by studying other planets, and this is often the stated reason for studying the universe. Neither of the boys were compelled by this, however, nor was I. I don’t spend time studying the world primarily because of the things I can do with that knowledge. I do it because I like it, and any justification I could give you that strayed far from that wouldn’t be entirely true.

My sons came home from the park at about 9:00 p.m. and looked through the scope with me. Venus was sinking below the horizon. We found Jupiter again, and while we tried to get the planet and its moons in focus, the boys told me about their visit to the park. They could hardly contain their excitement and were talking over each other, but from what they said I believe they simply hung a hammock between two trees and took turns swinging. They appear to have had the place to themselves, and they got to watch night coming on in a park they know well, but only by daylight. It sounded lovely.

Becoming aware of any corner of the world gives you a new part of the world to love. When you become familiar with the timing of the constellations, with where the deer mouse tracks run across the road after a light snow and where the wood thrushes like to hang out in the spring, with the sounds of park around the corner after nightfall, with the birds waking up in your backyard, you build a new room in your imagination. Your love of life becomes richer. You become a little bit larger.

A nighthawk started calling Wednesday night at around 7:45. The nighthawk’s call, its catlike appearance in repose on the edge of a flat roof, its nimble, erratic flight low over the suburban rooftops all recall the summers of my early adulthood. Watching the bird career around after insects, I feel I am in the sky with it, thinking not of the wet meadow that must have been here 200 years ago but only of the mosquitoes close at hand. Ten minutes later the cicadas started tuning up, and their sound was soon almost all I could hear. At 8:40, the moon filtered through the branches of our neighbor’s tree and fireflies began winking in and out. At 8:55 I noticed the cicadas had stopped. All was still and the neighborhood was filled with cricket songs. The moon filled my son’s window, and he came downstairs to tell us how bright it was. My wife Rachel and I sat on the bed with him and looked out the window with him at the moon filling the sky, Mars perched just beneath it.

It is midsummer in the woods. I can go weeks, it seems, and notice hardly a change, and as a consequence I am less able to tell you when things happen this time of year than I can from mid-March to mid-June, when I can almost click off the weeks until the carices have all started to drop their fruits. Yet behind the carpets of woodbine and the chest-high forests of nettle, the trees and herbs are packing sunlight into seeds and rhizomes, treading through the hot but shortening days of July. Musclewood (Carpinus caroliniana) nutlets have hardened and are still nestled in their bracts, not ready to drop yet. Jumpseed (Persicaria virginiana) achenes are swelling inside the white flowers. Lopseed (Phryma leptostachya) fruits are reflexed and developing, not yet ready to jump from the plant. Black snakeroot (Sanicula odorata) fruits–“subglobose, abundantly beset with hooked bristles“¹–are almost as large as BBs. Honewort (Cryptotaenia canadensis) schizocarps are rubbery to the touch, compressible with a thumbnail, while those of the closely related sweet cicely (Osmorhiza claytonii) are blackened and brittle, like hardened resin. Bottlebrush grass (Hystrix patula) spikelets break from the stem at a touch while hairy wild rye (Elymus villosus) is just ripening. Doll’s-eye (Actaea pachypoda) berries are about twice as thick as the pedicels bearing them. American pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) berries are beginning to form, and black nightshade (Solanum nigrum) berries are darkening. White avens (Geum canadense) bristles with long-beaked achenes. Enchanter’s nightshade (Circaea lutetiana) burs bristle up and down the slender stems. Touch-me-not (Impatiens capensis, I. pallida) capsules are turgid: some explode at the touch, others peel back only when twisted between the fingers. Blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides) seeds are chickpea-sized, hard and mostly ashen with fresh wax, some dark blue. The forest floor is littered in some places with small, aborted basswood (Tilia americana) fruits tipped with blackish styles; on the trees themselves, the fruits are as large as peas but not quite ripe. Trillium fruits have mostly fallen off, but you can still find a few attached to the plant. Cracking one open two days ago, I felt a pleasure at the whitish, slippery seeds spilling out into my palm, crested with creamy elaiosomes. I suspect that the joy I feel at a find like this an ant cannot experience. Yet unlike the ant, I can’t make any particular use of the oils nor do the seed any good by planting it. Aesthetic experiences, often momentary, may reset a mood, adjust a course, derail the most cautiously laid plans. I suspect this sets us off from the other animals, though how could I know for sure?

Earlier this week I stopped by Maple Grove Forest Preserve and found the wild leeks (Allium tricoccum) that were obvious as broad green leaves earlier in the spring, but whose flowers have been mostly eluding me, illuminating the forest floor. The clones of 200 or more white, spherical inflorescences are showstoppers right now, perhaps all the more so because I’ve been waiting for them: by June 4 the leaves were almost fully back, a full seven weeks before I found the plants in full flower. Flowering scapes started to emerge at around that time, and I had expected to see colonies of flowering scapes as I walked the trails, just as I had seen colonies of broad leek leaves in my walks this spring. And I have noticed floral buds lurking at the bases of ferns and poison ivy around the woods, relatively inconspicuous. But the inflorescences now are outstanding and worth a trip just to see. I don’t know how long they’ll last. On the west side of the woods, some have already gone to fruit.

American bellflower (Campanulastrum americanum) is stunning right now, a single style snaking out from the white-target center of each blue flower. Burdock (Arctium) is in bloom, stigmas presenting pollen to the bees, purple disc flowers tipping the swelling bur, surprisingly lovely. Also unexpected, at least to this naturalist, are the tiny white flowers of beggar’s-lice (Hackelia virginiana), best known (and named, with disrespect) for its persistent, crownlike burs, which are just beginning develop. A few of the flowers, however, persist, and they are a treat, delicate, 5-petalled jewels, in diameter about the size of a lesser duckweed frond, with slightly off-white nectaries ringing the bases of the petals. Nimblewill (Muhlenbergia schreberi) has come into bloom and started filling up grains along open trail edges while I wasn’t watching. False nettle (Boehmeria cylindrica) is packing its stiff inflorescences with flowers while wood nettle (Laportea canadensis) is airing its lacy ones. White cutgrass (Leersia virginica) has come into bloom in shaded sloughs, and at the Arboretum its leaves host a scale insect of some kind that is producing plumes of extravagant white waxy cotton. American spikenard (Aralia racemosa) is blooming. The woods are filled with head-high sunflowers (Helianthus strumosus, H. decapetalus) and sweet Joe-pye-weed (Eutrochium purpureum).

In the face of all this new growth, however, the woods are turning towards autumn. White snakeroot (Ageratina altissima, which I learned as Eupatorium rugosum) has started to set out white flowers. The late-summer-flowering white lettuce (Prenanthes alba) and elm-leaf goldenrod (Solidago ulmifolia are in floral bud. Calico aster (Symphyotrichum lateriflorum) is spreading in advance of blooming. While some of the spring herbs are still bright green–wild ginger (Asarum canadense) and bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) look as happy as I’ve seen them all year, the latter with leaves swollen to the size of a bass-player’s hands–Geranium maculatum is becoming yellow and lax. I found a ripe mayapple the size of a fresh black walnut on the ground in the East Woods Thursday morning, lying along a trail where the plants were mostly yellowing and buckling at the knees. This year’s leaves on white bear sedge (Carex albursina) are hardening up for winter, and the foliage of C. woodii, which emerges perfectly erect in the spring, is now arching like tufts of hair, resembling a giant toupee spread across the forest floor.

Many species are showing marks of insect damage. On the midribs of touch-me-not leaves (Impatiens capensis), translucent swellings conceal larvae of the gall midge Neolasioptera impatientifolia, which grows as a tiny yellow larva inside the gall. Other leaves are riddled with leaf-miner tunnels, while still others are criss-crossed with slime trails that I might have thought were left by slugs or snails, but that show no evidence of chewing or scraping damage. A Smilax ecirrhata hides a leaf-rolling spider. I came across a hermit flower beetle almost as large as the terminal joint of my thumb in Maple Grove Forest Preserve on Friday. It was moving slowly, and when I picked it up by the sides it stood stock still. At first I thought it was merely playing dead, but as I held it its right mandible quivered seemingly uncontrollably, and it seemed unable to move. I set it down and it did not race away, but cocked its head forward as though to wash its face, then stumbled away with no obvious aim. It faltered on a twig, rested under a leaf, ambled out over bare soil toward the trail. Is it closer to the elm-leaf goldenrod’s stage of the year, or the mayapple’s? I feel less kinship with beetles than with flowering plants, and I’ve little intuition about this question.

Last night we sat outdoors with friends as the sun was setting and watched Venus slowly burn a hole in the western sky. Jupiter shone bright in the south soon after and Saturn perched to the left of it. An hour or so later, Mars rose in the southeast, and then the moon. We talked about injustice and parenting, about what a meaningful life looks like, about fire ordinances. We talked about where all the summers go, about where this summer has gone. The days are 45 minutes shorter now than they were on the solstice, and already I feel fall is around the corner. But the plants have a lot of energy left to pack away before snowfall. There will be plenty more to see next week.

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¹ From the description of Sanicula in Wilhem G and Rericha L. 2017. Flora of the Chicago Region: A Floristic and Ecological Synthesis, p. 1007. Indiana Academy of Science, Indianapolis.