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On Monday two weeks ago, my son David and I drove with 9 other Boy Scouts and parents from our Troop to Montauk State Park in the Ozarks. We were there to canoe the notoriously beautiful, spring-fed Current River. We arrived to Zebra swallowtails and calls of Northern Parula warblers, which have already migrated through our area but breed in much of the forested east, American redstarts and red-eyed vireos. A tufted titmouse perched on a colleague’s car and pecked with some irritation at its reflection in her sideview mirror, repeatedly staring, then darting forward the few inches to engage with its colleague, only to bounce off the mirror and come back. After three or four times it flew off and buzzed angrily in the woods over the car hood. We camped that night within a few feet of the river and had steak and potatoes for supper… wonderful. While we sat by the campfire, barred owls monkey-called to each other for several minutes and then were silent.

The next morning, phoebes and towhees were singing loudly at about 5 a.m. There was a fog low over the river in both directions from the camp. By 7:15 it had largely burned off and catbirds were singing. We broke camp, had Fruity Pebbles and Lucky Charms for breakfast and drove to the Baptist Camp canoe launch. A group of three adults drove to pick up the canoes; the six scouts, myself and one other adult, John, waited and had 2 1/2 hours to relax. One of the boys caught a couple of crayfish, which he bagged goldfish-at-the-fair style and brought down the river with us (one for bait, one for hors d’oeuvres). The boys swam and fished, skipped rocks, sat on the shore and chatted. I talked with John about river, as he had done this trip three times previously. The first day is the hardest, he told me, lots of turns, but looking at the river here, almost babbling at our toes, I couldn’t imagine that there was much challenge to be had. I waded across the river to the mossy, fern-covered bluff on the opposite bank. A spring fed into the river along the base of the bluff, feeding a vein of aquamarine that ran downstream along the bank of the river for about 50 or 100 feet, where the surface broke out into riffles.

The canoes arrived, and we packed them with some sense of order but almost as much sense of urgency. We were eager to get onto the water, overpacked, and not sure yet how everything would fit in. We did however get it all in, and then we headed downstream. It was clear very quickly that this was not quite the lazy river I had expected: with substantial debris in the river and a group with varying levels of expertise, the first day of the trip was exactly as John had characterized it. Within a mile or so, one boat flipped and was pinned against a log. It was not easy to extract, but we did so and emptied it out relatively quickly. Everyone was left feeling a bit rattled and gun-shy at the strainers and snags along the edges. We all began to hit each turn and riffle more strategically, casing out even the seemingly innocuous turns carefully, heading in aggressively and pulling out deliberately. My son David quickly came to enjoy the tension of getting into the maneuver, the pleasure of executing it precisely, and the rest afterwards as you are pushed down the river.

We camped on a gravel edge of the river, barely above the edge of the water, with a bluff across the way. There were no mosquitoes. I slept outside, the moon over my right ear and my nose pointed at Sirius. A Chuck-will’s-widow sang as I fell asleep, and I awoke in the middle of the night with my glasses still on, watching the stars winking in and out from behind the clouds. The Milky Way was bright. I took my glasses off and fell back asleep, only to be awoken by something scrabbling across my camping pad, brushing against my hair. Surely it was a raccoon; the next morning it turned out everyone had heard or seen one, and there were footprints all over. I’ve had mice scurry over my sleeping bag and once a tarantula in my hair as I slept, but I don’t care to be scratched by a raccoon. I crawled into my tent and dozed on and off till the morning, when an indigo bunting perched outside my tent door and sang to awaken the morning. I got up and made a fire.

Everyone awoke refreshed and dried out, ready to canoe. We headed into the morning emboldened by our successes of the previous day, and David and I promptly took a turn too tight and flipped our canoe. We filled it right up with water, soaked our tents and bags. I had followed the person ahead of me too closely, tried to squeeze between his boat and a streamside strainer more precisely than I had the chops to do. I’d been too confident, and I realized that even this fairly popular river is not to be underestimated. Fortunately, our personal gear was triple-bagged, so our things stayed dry, and we emerged none the worse for wear. David was not at all rattled; I confess I was a little embarrassed.

We stopped at Welch Hospital, a small, two-story sanitorium enclosing a cave. The cave exhales from between the stone-and-concrete walls abutting the hillside into the old hospital. The “hospital” had been established as a place for asthmatic patients to breathe the wholesome, cool, moist air coming from the cave straight into their chambers, but I cannot help thinking of all the bat guano and its attendant fungi and mold and bacterial spores. With the roof gone, the inside of the hospital is now a garden of redbud and poison ivy, hackberry and dogwood. Outside its front doors, Welch Spring runs cool and clear, pooling with aquamarine water behind a dam that the doctor had erected to raise the water level above the entrance to the spring, forcing more air out through the hospital. The water tumbles down from the spring and gushes into the river.

As we left the hospital, the rush from the water moving into the river propelled us along to a cave that we could canoe into, jet black but not deep, cliff swallows (I believe… I don’t know swallows well, but the coloration and habitat looked right) swooping in and out of the cave entrance. As we went further on, an older couple appeared at the edge of the river and waved to us to see if we could retrieve a lost paddle, which was lodged in a snag about 50 feet upstream. We called to each boat in our group, but no one heard in time. David and I turned our boat around, paddled upstream to the far edge of the river, then ferried across the river slowly and deliberately. This was a tricky maneuver and one that I’d read about but never tried–my experience with canoeing is almost all on flat water with plenty of portaging, and only brief rapids and rushing water–and I wouldn’t have tried it with just anyone in the bow. David was a rockstar, paddling strong and steady, and as he got nearly even with the paddle, I told him he’d have one shot to grab that paddle, and that if it didn’t come easy, he was to let go so he wasn’t pulled off center. When we reached the paddle, he set his own paddle down, extracted the lost paddle, and we pulled out without tipping. It was a thrill, and I tried to express to David how well he had done. When we delivered the paddle, the gentleman said, simply, “I don’t know how you did that.” This trip was exceptional for the degree to which it made David and I feel as though we were working as a team.

Right around the corner we found our group pulled in at the ideal campsite, sand along the bank and rock above, already laying out tents and gathering firewood. There was ample time for fishing, and that night we ate spaghetti with sausages and, for dessert, a taste of rainbow trout caught by one of our group, the same scout who had caught the crayfish on the first day. The fish was perhaps 15-20 inches long, a fighter, and the scout landed it and fileted it with help from an adult and then an older scout, pan fried it in sausage grease, buried the entrails about two feed deep along the beach. We hung our trash from a tree branch, and it’s good we did: that night raccoons were into our food, there was a midnight adjustment of canoes and coolers to keep them out, and when we awoke the next morning, we found the fish entrails excavated, the sand around the hole dotted with raccoon prints.

We awoke to cicadas calling, the first I’ve heard this season. There were turtles sunning themselves on the branches, an otter swimming, a mink bounding around on a branch at the edge of the water, a blue-winged warbler calling from an unseen tree behind a spring, Northern parula warblers and common yellowthroats and ovenbirds, a dragonfly painstakingly taking down a butterfly, flying off with it. At our lunch stop, the rocks were covered with tiny black snails, which David had pointed out to me on our first day and we had both thought were tadpoles come to roost, until they failed to rouse when we plunged our paddles in after them. After lunch, one of our canoes did the most graceful sideways slips down a riffle, then jetted backyards downstream when it hit the main channel… thrilling! We kept looking for just the right campsite that night, our last night on the river, and after several failed attempts found a gravelly flat facing a maple-rimmed bluff of perhaps 70–100 feet or more in height. We were buzzed by a couple of motorboats; it was Thursday now, and the weekend crowd was starting to build. The anglers in our party saw good-sized trout in the water, but no one pulled anything in. Rain started, we got firewood and tents set up, then the rain stopped after 30 minutes. We made foil packets and folks fished, chatted. Two scouts hung a plastic gallon milk jug from a rope on the far bluff, with a glow stick inside to fire at with slingshots later that night. We ate, cleaned, and as the sun was going down and the candles and fire dominated our view, a whip-poor-will started up, incessantly. The milk jug glowed like a lantern outside someone’s home.

I slept outside again that night. The whip-poor-will kept up until late, but when I awoke in the middle of the night to a bright Milky Way, he had stopped. He started up again a bit before dawn, and as light was just appearing on the horizon, a solitary pewee called. A few minutes later, phoebes, ovenbirds, cardinals. Rain started, and I packed my things into my tent and put my coat on, made a fire before things got too wet. By the time tea water was ready, the rain was dissipating, and then the moisture burned off and the sun illuminated the bluff. Phoebes started flycatching, sallying forth from the trees perched on the bluff face. Near the base of the bluff, a waterthrush–northern? Louisiana? I wasn’t close enough to tell for sure, and my binoculars were safe and dry at home–foraged for insects on interconnected ledges, tail bobbing slowly. It was our last day on the river. We had a marvelous breakfast of Hansen hash–sausage and apples and onions and canned sliced potatoes–and packed up for the last leg. We had as nice a view as one could hope of a bald eagle perching on a branch, then flying off to a tree upstream. Fluffy seeds tumbled across the water’s surface, rolling, not at all wetted. It was an easy paddle, but many of us were tired. David and I lagged near the end of the group.

Suddenly we were at the confluence of two rivers where the trip was to end, and we docked. As happens at the end of every backcountry trip, the feeling of being on the river evaporated. The even pace of paddling gave way to hauling and unpacking and getting into cars, setting up camp in a congested site, surrounded closely by tents and trailers, strings of lights, and more poison ivy than I have ever seen on the lawn in a campground. We inadvertently laid our shovel down in the poison ivy, then we washed it off with cold soapy water to avoid any risk. A few boys went off to fish, a couple of adults went into town to get groceries, and two stayed back to mind camp. I took the occasion to walk the horse trail uphill into a forest of sassafras and red oak, scarlet oak, Carya, serviceberry, sugar maple and red maple, black oak and white oak and post oak. There were reindeer lichen and huckleberry in fruit, not yet ripe, blue-eyed grass and wild onion in fruit, a panic grass (Dichanthelium) dispersing achenes, and at least four bedstraw species (Galium concinnum, G. circaezans, G. pilosum, and some narrow-leaved thing that I didn’t have good enough fruits to identify). Thimbleweed (Anemone virginiana) fruits were developing, not ripe.

The next morning was our last day. I headed out for a walk about 5:00. There was a nice fog over everything that grew thicker as I walked uphill along the road. The whip-poor-will started singing as I was reaching the crest of the hill. I took the horse trail into the woods. White spikes of bugbane flowers floated at eye-level in the woods. Two turkey vultures flew up from the trail ahead of me; when I reached the spot where they’d been hunkered down, I found a small deer at the edge of the trail, partially eviscerated. I walked further along and left the National Park Service property. The forest road I was now on cut through bright red soil, but the forest turned from second growth oak to pine plantation, and I grew disinterested. I returned and entered an oldfield of Queen Anne’s lace and orchard grass and daisy fleabane that ran parallel to the woodland trail. The field overlooked a fog-filled valley. The eastern horizon was now glazed with luminous clouds, undersides orange. The sun was about to rise. I stood and watched as the east gradually started to glow more intensely. I kept an eye on a distant hilltop tree, the highest tree around, which I expected to burst into radiant light as the sun rose. A catbird called. The sun crested the horizon, and instead of a sudden illumination, the indistinct light of dawn gradually sharpened into shadows and sunlight against the trunks of the pines and oaks behind me. The field continued to brighten, and when the sun was halfway up, I headed back to camp. A prairie dock leaf was growing near the edge of the woods, tucked under the oaks.

Back at camp, we awoke the group at 7 a.m., and remarkably they were all ready to leave by 7:30. We ate at a restaurant in town and hit the road. As we drove north, the forests turned to cornfields packed with ears, then to shorter cornfields. There were sunflowers with enormous leaves as tall as a grown man, chicory in bloom, cattails with inflorescences as big around as sausages, ditch bottoms filled with foxtail barley, blooming wild parsnip, bolting teasel. We passed three signs reading “Thugs won’t stop… to wait for a cop… guns make sense,” then four more reading “Criminals menacing… A lady alone… She needs… More than a phone… gunssavelives.com.”

Our thoughts were all on home by now, but as we passed Braidwood, I thought of the small Tully Monster, which 300 million years ago in this very spot bred and fed in tropical seas. At this time, our ancestors were reptilian-looking synapsids. It struck me as we drove past that they, like the Tully Monster, were bound to the same laws as canoers. They were spun around and borne forward by currents, and they made their futures by acting. Their lives, like ours, were a balance between where they found themselves and where life propelled them on one hand, and the other, doing. For them, as for us, pulling into and out of a turn in the river would dictate exactly where they ended up, and consequently they shaped their own evolution as we shape ours. This is the balance between calling and action, between opportunity and volition. We, like the creatures whose fossils we were driving past, have something we are best equipped to do, but we also have to act to get anything done. Let ourselves be simply dragged along by circumstance, and we’ll make no impact. Force ourselves against what life presents us, and we’ll spend unnecessary time bailing our boat and drying out our gear.

We made it home and unpacked. We slept exceptionally well that night.

I spent Friday morning with my colleague Dr. Christy Rollinson and our summer research intern Liz Gibbons, visiting a few of the fixed plots in the East Woods. These are plots that Christy and her collaborators are monitoring for phenology, getting data of relatively high resolution in space and time, plots of 1 m² inventoried for flowers, fruits, and vegetation cover by species about once per week. Joe-pye weed (Eupatorium purpureum) is about waist-high now, Helianthus decapetalus is up to my nose, the most common Solidago sp. along the trails (which I ought to know but don’t… I’ll try not to be ignorant of it this time next year) is nodding at the tip, and hog-peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata) is looping over everything in the woods; it may be even more aggressive a couple of weeks hence, but you notice it now almost everywhere you go. Enchanter’s nightshade (Circaea lutetiana) is about shin-high. There are spittlebugs on the Geum canadense and Rosa and sowbugs trundling through the leaf litter. Red-eyed vireos and wood pewees were singing. Mosquitos were pretty swarmy, especially in the lower parts of the forest.

Achenes have hardened up on rue anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides; leaves on many of the plants are yellowing) and are nearly all fallen from early meadow rue (Thalictrum dioicum). By contrast, the purple meadow rue (Thalictrum dasycarpum) in Schulenberg Prairie is in full bloom. Fruits were falling from a buttercup I believe to be Ranunculus recurvatus, but checking our herbarium database I find that the species has not been collected from the Arboretum, so I’ll have to return to voucher it and double-check my identification. Geranium maculatum fruits are starting to ripen and curl, launching the seeds off into the adjacent woods, and the so-fuzzy-you-want-to-use-them-as-a-pillow downy yellow violet (Viola pubescens) fruits are beginning to dehisce, seeds lined up like peas in pods. Fruits are developing on Jacob’s ladder (Polemonium reptans) and hop-hornbeam (Ostrya virginiana). Solomon’s plume (Maianthemum racemosum) berries are pinking up, and bottlebrush grass (Hystrix patula or Elymus hystrix or Asperella hystrix… H. patula Moench seems to be the favored name now) is almost ripe, some of the spikelets breaking off easily, but none flinging themselves off at a touch. Some of the sedges are beginning to look bedraggled: Carex blanda perigynia are perhaps 1/3 dispersed already, C. rosea perigynia are darkening and the culms are beginning to grow weary. But most are still looking good: Carex woodii and C. oligocarpa, the latter of which I am noticing more this year than in the past, are ripe and holding their own. Carex vulpinoidea, C. sparganioides, C. molesta and C. normalis are in a slightly earlier stage. The latter is visible along the southern leg of the Heritage Trail and the east side of the road that bisects it as you walk south to the main road, and the morphological variation you’ll find in it along that walk is instructive to say the least. Carex cephalophora, C. stipata, and C. tribuloides are not quite as far along, at least the individuals I passed.

The flowering scapes of wild leek (Allium tricoccum) are becoming more obvious, though the white flowers are only visible as buds, not yet open. Meadow garlic (Allium canadense) and tall thimbleweed (Anemone virginiana) are in full flower. The bedstraws are good now. While cleavers (Galium aparine) is well past — I don’t barely notice the pale dying stems in the woods now, while the yellowing stems were quite obvious this time last week — you can find the broad-leaved licorice bedstraw (Galium circaezans) with wiry inflorescence stalks and widely-spaced cream-colored flowers on the Heritage Trail right next to the delicate, densely-flowered shining bedstraw (Galium concinnum), whose pure white corollas are reminiscent of baby’s breath. In the marshy area along the road that bisects the heritage trail, I believe a third species is growing, much more airy and densely flowered than G. concinnum, which I suspect is Galium tinctorium. I have struggled with bedstraws in the past, however, and I will reserve final judgement on this until I have plants in fruit.

This morning I biked to Maple Grove Forest Preserve just as the sun was coming up over the trees. Pewees, robins, red-bellied woodpeckers, great-crested flycatchers, and red-eyed vireos were singing. Nutlets on the musclewood (Carpinus caroliniana) have become crunchy. Morbid owlet moths were flitting around in the fallen leaves. A cranefly dangled from a touch-me-not (Impatiens capensis); leaning down to get a good look at it, I found that the entire stand of touch-me-nots was bejeweled with water droplets, not dew but guttation water extruded from the plant by root pressure in the high humidity of this already-hot morning. The wood nettles (Laportea canadensis) growing right with it are of roughly the same size and height but did not exhibit the phenomenon, perhaps because their hairs break the surface tension of the water droplets. Fungi have come out: dead man’s fingers were emerging from a fallen branch, midges or gnats or some other small diptera swarmed up as I poked at a stand of decomposing mushrooms. A few crown-tipped coral mushrooms (Clavicorona pyxidata) lined the ridge of a fallen trunk with other mushrooms that I don’t know.

A fallen sugar maple that appears to have been knocked down by a larger Fraxinus americana that fell on top of it is sending up anemic, yellowing leaves at the crown, about 45 feet up from the splintered base of the tree, where shards of wood stand to more than six feet tall. Will the tree survive, shoots connected to the ground by 40 feet of horizontal vessels? At the base of the tree, American pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) and stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) stand chest-high in a field of touch-me-not.

Stickseed (Hackelia virginiana) foliage has become obvious throughout the woods, along with Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia). The white snakeroot (Eupatorium rugosum) leaves have filled with leaf-miner trails, and young inflorescences are rallying in the leaf bases of a few of the enchanter’s nightshade (Circaea lutetiana), which you can see everywhere now. Scapes of leek are evident along a few of the trails, at the same state they are in at the Arboretum. Looking at one, I was stopped by a gentleman who told me that the leeks have been poached from these woods in the past year by folks collecting to eat them. I hope they were collecting leaves only, and just one leaf per plant… this might be sustainable, even if it’s not legal within the forest preserve (which it wouldn’t be without a permit). Seeds on the blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides) are the size of chickpeas, and capsules on the large-flower bellwort (Uvularia grandiflora) are swollen, dragging the plants down: seeds inside are hardening up. Fruits on the upright carrion flower (Smilax ecirrhata) are pea-sized. Wild yam (Dioscorea villosa) was twining around the plant I observed in fruit, and further along the trail I found the prickly Smilax hispida, which I hadn’t seen here previously. Fruits are developing on the jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum), and fruits on the downy yellow violet are, as at the Arboretum, starting to dehisce.

The great waterleaf (Hydrophyllum appendiculatum) straddles flowering and fruiting right now. On some plants, a few flowers persist near the base while the upper flowers have gone to fruit. The fruits are downy with short hairs, armed with longer, wiry hairs that remind me of the lemmas of Leiberg’s panic grass (Dicanthelium leibergii). Squeeze them, and the pulpy seed inside pops out, slippery and pearly white, perhaps not ripe yet but too hard to easily bite into. The Virginia waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum) fruits are very similar in appearance, if perhaps a bit further along.

As I am studying Hydrophyllum fruits, a chorus of American toads erupts from the pond close by, strident, or at least insistent, and keeps up for a few minutes before they are silent again. It is Father’s Day. I walk out past flowering nightshade (Solanum dulcamara) and elderberry (Sambucus canadensis), a solitary fruiting Carex grayi displaced upslope about 20 feet from where it belongs–making me suspect, again, that there is something hydrologically funny about this place–and Carex rosea dispersing along the road. I arrive home to find my younger son ready to chat about music and games and the baseball game of last night. My older son is sleeping, then he wakes up, tells me they are going to cook breakfast for me, and closes the door so I can continue writing. As I finish these notes, the boys are cooking breakfast downstairs. The bacon smells good, and I hear David coming up right now. “Is it ready?” I ask. “Almost… the eggs are still cooking.” He looks over my shoulder and talks about the day to come, but I know he notices everything. They both do. They catch things I’m not even aware are going on and infer much of the rest.

And now breakfast is ready. Happy Father’s Day to you.

We arrived home Friday night at about 10 p.m. to find a square, muddy scar in the ground roughly 8 inches deep and seven feet on a side where our burning bush had been just two hours earlier. We were delighted. We had cut the bush out earlier in the week and our neighbor, who possesses a backhoe, had unexpectedly found time to scrape away the leftover stubble and landscaping stone that the previous owner had installed, which made it almost impossible to dig through by hand. The burning bush stumps were laid to the side and lengths of metal and plastic edging were peeled out and lined up along the edge of the opening. This would have taken me a couple of weeks to remove. Jupiter was a fist’s height above the southern horizon, and the sky was gauzy but filled with stars.

At 3:00 a.m. we were awoken by thunder, and when the sun rose, the scrape where the burning bush had been was filled with water to the height of the sidewalk. The rain seemed to be done for the morning by the time we were up, forecast to the contrary, but it was still dreary out. I made a cup of tea, thumbed through Andrea Wulf’s biography of Alexander von Humboldt, wrote a note to my mom, almost settled in for the morning. But I could tell I’d be antsy, so I biked to Maple Grove.

Of course the rain was not done, and it was coming down slowly in relaxed, plump drops by the time I reached the entrance to the forest. The upper surfaces of the ironwood (Carpinus caroliniana) leaves at the entrance glistened, and I regretted that I hadn’t brought my raincoat. I was glad I was there all the same. I am always glad to be out when it rains, even when I’m not particularly in the mood to go.

The forest has ripened just a little since Wednesday. The wild leek (Allium tricoccum) flowering stalks that eluded me then are evident on a trail I hadn’t got to along the east edge of the woods, in height ranging from about the length of my middle finger to the length of my hand, from wrist to fingertips. The flowers are mostly still shrouded in the papery spathe, some just emerging, the leaves now completely gone. I didn’t see even remnants of them at the bases of the scapes, which I rarely notice. The flowering stems only emerge after the leaves die back, and they are subtle, dark and inconspicuous against the leaf litter. I don’t have the timing quite figured out yet.

The dying cleavers (Galium aparine), by contrast, form patches of yellow reticulum a few feet in diameter that are obvious throughout the woods. They have died back but haven’t given up their seeds yet. Perhaps there is no need: it may be better for the languishing plant to give every last resource to the developing fruit, then sink together into the soil. I’ll have to watch for this.

I noticed several bloodroots (Sanguinaria canadensis) whose capsules have swollen in just a few days to the point of dispersing. The capsules seem to snap open, the sides flattening out into elliptical panels that dangle from the top of a central open frame. The seeds inside have ripened to a deep chestnut, and the whitish elaiosome looks good enough to eat. Of course, to the ants it is. I first got to know this this plant well in prairie- and savanna-dominated Madison, where it had been planted in the sites where I most often encountered it, and where the ants that disperse the seeds are lacking. There, at the UW Madison Arboretum, a place that probably last hosted native sugar maple forest 10,000 or so years ago, before the prairies really spread out, bloodroot that had been planted 20 years or more earlier persisted right in place and spread slowly if at all. I’ve enjoyed getting reacquainted with the species in a place where the ants are ready for it.

Glossy buckthorn (Frangula alnus or Rhamnus frangula… it’s not clear to me right now which is the favored name, and the Flora of North America treatment leads me to suspect it may be a somewhat stylistic decision) is flowering. May-apples (Podophyllum peltatum) are in various states of disarray, many yellowing and falling over, many with fruits swelling. I found withering flowers on one blackberry (Rubus allegheniensis). Geranium maculatum fruits are nearly ready to pop, the seeds swollen at the bases of the turgid crane’s bills. Cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum) is in flower. Black cherry (Prunus serotina) is in fruit. A sedge I missed on my walk Wednesday–Carex cephalophora, a common species of dry-mesic forests that I have probably seen here previously but forgot–is in fruit, bringing the number of carices that I am aware you can see on a casual walk through Maple Grove to seventeen.

As I was approaching the ephemeral pond in the center of the forest, the rain was coming down more steadily. Mosquitoes were being batted out of the air by raindrops. I found the slough I had looked at on Wednesday filled with water, edged with Carex grayi in fruit and a few C. tribuloides without any obvious flowers. American toads were calling full-throatedly. The forest was filled with their song, and I recalled a morning more than 20 years ago when I was working as a naturalist at Preschool of the Arts in Madison. I was teaching the students about frogs and toads and had the good fortune of having in my possession a dehydrated American toad on loan from Sue Bridson, a great educator and naturalist with as fine a personal collection of naturalist’s artifacts as I have ever seen. I was playing a tape of toads singing as we talked, and we had reached the end of the story. We were sitting in a circle on the floor looking at the dehydrated creature. There were Christmas lights hung around the classroom, and no one was speaking. After a moment, one of the students stood up and turned out the lights. She returned to the circle, and as we sat in the semi-darkness, the chorus playing in the background, the dried toad on the table in the middle of our group was transformed from a cadaver to a relic. We were displaced to a forest somewhere else, at night, perhaps just to the north of us, perhaps 10,000 years back in time. The teacher and the children and I all became older than our years for a minute, as everything stood still.

It’s Monday now and the rain appears to have let up. Enjoy the week.

It had been two weeks since I was last at Maple Grove Forest Preserve, and yesterday it seemed summer had arrived. The sedges are in their glory: at least 16 species can be found here now in flower or fruit. Carex hitchcockiana, C. albursina, C. jamesii and C. sparganioides greeted me in full fruit at the Gilbert Park entrance yesterday morning, with flowering Virginia waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum), Solomon’s plume (Maianthemum racemosum) near the end of flowering, fruits developing, and wild ginger (Asarum canadense) with flowers spent, the seeds inside starting to develop. In the uplands, Carex rosea is forming dark green clumps nearly a foot tall, and right next to it in some places you can find the similar C. radiata sprawled across the ground, culms and leaves nearly flattened, as though they’d be trampled (they haven’t: this is just what C. radiata does). Carex hirtifolia is laden with fruits, seemingly exhausted, arched over and largely hidden in the forest understory. There is a colony of C. woodii that I’d never seen before. I paced it off to about 20 feet across. There are scattered fruiting culms throughout; I wondered if it might be a single clone. There are few species growing interspersed, though I didn’t wade through the thicket of foliage as I would have liked, loathe to disrupt it. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such a perfect stand of this species, which has long been one of my very favorites for the lush burgundy of its basal sheaths and its gracile, fountain-like habit. Beside it, I found Carex oligocarpa, a relative of C. hitchcockiana that I didn’t realize grew here. Both are sweet, svelte plants with slender perigynia etched with dozens of fine, narrow, impressed veins. They are a joy to find.

In the flat leading out of one of the ephemeral ponds I try to visit most Sunday mornings, a small grove of Carex grisea is growing with a few C. blanda. I hadn’t realized before yesterday that this was a drainage, but it is evident how happy the sedges are, and the vegetation along its keel appears to have been flattened by occasional runoff from the pool just uphill. These two sedges have produced a garden of sedge seedlings, a few upslope, but most within the drainage, and a particularly dense patch lodged along the edge of a branch that has fallen onto the forest floor. A solitary C. tribuloides is flowering, a floodplain species that shows up in depressions throughout our forests. In southern Wisconsin, I know this species primarily from floodplains, but the soils there are of coarser texture than the clayey soils of Downers Grove. Following the drainage upslope to the pond margin, I found several more friends I made in Wisconsin floodplains: C. squarrosa; bushy C. lupulina in full flower, anthers spread wide; the comely C. grayi in fruit; a modest-sized clump of C. crinita, inflorescences arched and flowing like water. Growing with them are fowl manna grass (Glyceria striata), ragwort (Packera paupercula), a giant knotweed (Polygonum sp.), hairy wild rye (Elymus villosus). Poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) is coming into bloom. Maple Grove is wonderful for these little wetlands, and they are in their early-summer splendor.

The floodplain along St. Joseph Creek is a bed of knee-high wood nettle (Laportea canadensis) and flowering dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis), with honewort (Cryptotaenia canadensis) and black snakeroot (Sanicula odorata) flowering along the overlooking trail. Annual bedstraw (Galium aparine) is scrambling up through the nettles, heavy with paired fruits: in the uplands, the bedstraw is sprawled across the forest floor. Beside the fallen bedstraw you can find the shriveled stems of false mermaid. At first glance you may not notice it, but look closely for the brownish threads tangled mycelialike on the leaf litter. I sat and considered a patch of this stuff for several minutes. There were Virginia bluebells growing strong here a few weeks ago, but now they are yellowed, reclining against adjacent trees and fallen logs, lying out on the trail, a few shriveled nutlets remaining in the bases of the spent flowers. Elsewhere in the woods, the large-flowered trilliums have lost their petals while prairie trillium petals are desiccated and blackened. The last fruits are hanging onto Enemion biternatum. Hydrophyllum appendiculatum flowers are past. Some shrub I did not recognize has been devoured by what looks to have been tent caterpillars: had I not been watching it consistently this spring, I would assume the webbing was old enough to be last year’s. As I write, I recall the Psalmist: “My heart is smitten, and withered like grass.”

But while the spring flowers are past, many are swelling into fruit, and summer flowers are coming out. Ovaries are swelling on the Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum). Yellow violet (Viola pubescens) has gone to fruit along with sweet cicely (Osmorhiza longistylis), blisterwort (Ranunculus recurvatus), large-flower bellwort (Uvularia grandiflora) and bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), whose green capsules are swollen with nearly-ripe, lustrous, honey-brown seeds crested with whitish elaiosomes to attract ants. Blue cohosh (Caulophylum thalictroides) seeds are developing but not yet blue, and green dragon (Arisaema dracontium) is starting to flower even as the staminate inflorescences of its cousin Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) are giving up and falling over. Shining bedstraw (Galium concinnum) is in flower here and there. I found one inflorescence of wild leek (Allium tricoccum) emerging on its naked stalk, leaves already gone. The woods are filled with pewees and indigo buntings and great-crested flycatchers.

Our warblers have mostly retreated northward. Last weekend I heard them in Door County, where I was teaching at the Festival of Nature in Ridges Sanctuary. Black-throated green warblers, black-and-white and chestnut-sided warblers were all singing. Things up there are behind us by at least a couple of weeks, which I must confess I recognize mainly by the sedges. Bristle-leaf sedge (Carex eburnea) has fruited in our garden but is just flowering there, where it belongs (C. eburnea is a cedar-glade species, thriving to my surprise in our DuPage County garden). Pennsylvania sedge (C. pensylvanica; yes, the species epithet really is spelled with one ‘n’) is still in full fruit in the dry uplands, while ours appear to have dropped their seeds. Inflorescences on the lovely Carex arctata — aren’t they all lovely? — are threadlike, while the kind-of-look-alike C. gracillima in our garden is in full fruit. Topping them all, in my book, was a find of the aptly named beautiful sedge, Carex concinna, on the property of the friends with whom we were staying. The species is state-threatened, diminutive, and a treat to find thriving beneath the white cedars within spitting distance of the lake shore. But these are all a bit outcompeted by the gardens of dwarf lake iris (Iris lacustris) and gold-thread (Coptis trifolia) that line the trails, the twig-rush (Cladium mariscoides) carcasses in the sloughs, and the ferns, ericads (bog rosemary! Labrador-tea!) and mosses that remind you you’re really up north.

As I review my notes from my walks of yesterday and last weekend, I am in the loop, having just finished a PhD defense at UIC. The defense took us to Argentina and Peru, and afterwards my colleague Robie and I walked out to the bike racks together. She reminded me of eating lunches outside together as a lab group when she was doing her sabbatical at the Arboretum five years ago. That was a delightful fall and feels about as long in my memory as a summer afternoon. As I left her and biked toward downtown, I passed students hoeing up a garden bed on campus, dressed for planting, tending the tomatoes in their concrete raised bed. Now, eating lunch in the park just north of the public library, under the shade of a fully leafed-out European alder, looking up at what appears to be a stone eagle or pelican or some kind of bird perched on the northeast corner of the library — not the gargoyle I expected to tell you about — I am surrounded by people walking in the sun, a dog in arm, a friend by their side, a child in hand, an envelope tucked under their arm to mail. Two seagulls are stalking towards me, curious to see if I have a sandwich. At the corner of the park an older man is reclining against a bedroll. Two girls are sitting and talking; a middle-aged man is sitting on the curb, smoking. On the retaining wall along the sidewalk is a quote from Goethe: “Nothing is worth more than this day.” This, I think, could be the punchline of every one of these blog posts. Door County, Downers Grove, Chicago, all coming into summer together in their own way, each one giving you exactly the day that you get, and it’s more than enough.

Into the library now, and back to work.

I am late getting out this morning. The sun has just risen as I arrive at the Arboretum to watch a coyote give me a look, turn on his heels, and disappear before I can unlock the gate. As I ride through the woods, the pewees and indigo buntings are singing. Trout lilies and toothwort are all yellowed, and the fruits on the trout lilies are about an inch long by up to half an inch in girth. Geraniums have taken over the woods.

I lock up at Parking Lot 8. Field sparrows, song sparrows and chipping sparrows are calling, and a solitary wood thrush. As I eat my breakfast, a blue-gray gnatcatcher calls from overhead. I start down the trail. Carex rosea has come into bloom, and C. hirtifolia culms are arched over from the weight of their ripening fruits. Hyacinths (Camassia scilloides) are blooming in the field of Helianthus decapetalus east of P8. Moonseed (Menispermum canadense) is twining over everything. A golden-winged warbler sings in the woods to the south.

Fully open flowers are dangling from the leaf axils on the Solomon’s seal, which has distinctly hairy leaf undersurfaces (is this really Polygonatum pubescens? By description, yes… but I’ll need to look at herbarium material to be certain). Wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana) is flowering, as is the fernlike and decidedly hairy sweet-cicely (Osmorhiza claytonii). I crush the flowers, which smell of anise. Ovaries are beginning to swell on a female Jack-in-the-Pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) and a knee-high carrion flower (Smilax). Swamp buttercup (Ranunculus hispidus) flowers have, after two weeks in the spotlight, passed their prime.

Joni Mitchell’s “Other People’s Parties” has been running through my mind for the past two days, and these lines intrude on the morning:

Photo beauty gets attention, then her eye-paint’s running down
She has a rose in her teeth and a lampshade crown
One minute she’s so happy then she’s crying on someone’s knee
Saying, “Laughing and crying, you know it’s the same release.”

The Starry Solomon’s plume (Maianthemum stellatum) is flowering. I stand looking at the two plants in front of me, the almost indescribably precise little white flowers, then realize the whole field in front of me is filled with the plant, flowers frozen like snowflakes accumulating on a lawn. A common yellowthroat calls, and I think I hear a chestnut-sided warbler, but I am not sure: no bird fools me as badly as that one. Black currant (Ribes americanum) is in bloom, flowers like bells with tiny sepals turned back, loosely reminiscent of the Polygonatum flowers of a few moments ago.

Monday night I was at Maple Grove with a group of Boy Scouts as the thunderstorm started rolling in. False mermaid (Floerkea proserpinaca) was nearly at its peak, bright green and tall, paired fruits swelling. Today it is all yellowing and giving up, reclining on the ground and giving everything it can to its seeds. While some flowers have produced two full-size seeds of roughly 1-2 mm diameter, the majority are producing one large seed at the expense of the other, which huddles atrophied beside its swollen sibling. In a couple of weeks there will be nothing to show of it, and we’ll have to wait until next year to find the first seedlings huddling beneath the fallen leaves and snow.

There are numerous sedges in bloom or fruit. Carex hitchcockiana, I find, is more common in the East Woods than I had realized. This is one of my favorite sedges, with stiffly hairy leaf sheaths and slender-beaked perigynia, impressed nerves. It is svelte but sturdy, a plant that seems well suited to woodland slopes and trail edges. Carex blanda and C. albursina fruits are pretty well developed. The exotic Carex jamesii is looking great, bright green grassy clumps coddling globose, ripening perigynia. Carex cephaloidea and its cousin C. sparganioides are in bloom and beginning to ripen, while the superficially similar but unrelated C. normalis is just in first flower. Carex tribuloides is forming bright green swards but not yet showing inflorescences.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I have run through the sedges for the whole walk, but in space I’m still on the trail east of Parking Lot 8, just past the false mermaid colony, where I noticed the C. hitchcockiana. The sun is high now, and a white-breasted nuthatch starts calling, then the first great-crested flycatcher of the morning. Thalictrum thalictroides flowers are still hanging on, and I come across the other sweet-cicely, Osmorhiza longistylis, in full bloom. The early meadow-rue (Thalictum dioicum) has gone to fruit, as have the annual bedstraw (Galium aparine) and Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica). I follow the trail around to the northeast corner of the big loop around the East Woods, where a great broad river of Mertensia blooms each year. It’s the only time of the year I really like this plant. I pass a nodding trillium (Trillium flexipes) in full flower, the ovary ridged, thickened white stigmas arching backwards, plant bases dark. I listen to the squeaky wheel of what I suspect is a black-and-white warbler, but the bird is high enough that I do not see it. Staminate catkins from the white oaks (i>Quercus alba) have fallen everywhere in this part of the woods.

Yesterday I collected scent samples with Elliot Gardner in the oak collection. It’s a slow business, involving plastic bags and twist-ties and glass pipettes and a tightly-coiled paper trap for scent that will be incinerated in analysis, and little vacuums the mass of shotgun shells still full of lead. We had time for two trees, a white oak and a bear oak (Quercus ilicifolia), the latter of which is not native here. The oaks were mostly past their prime: they had gone quickly this year, and we were lucky to find the two we did. We had searched for a chestnut before starting work on these, and failing to find it, I said, “Onward, Christian soldier.” Elliot responded in kind, quoting Martin Luther: “Sin boldly.” Was it Bonhoeffer who scolded us for disregarding the second half of that quote? Weil? I can’t remember… in any case, I can’t imagine a much more life-affirming imperative.

I’ve been daydreaming since the bluebells, but thinking of Luther always reminds me how much work I have to do. I start walking more briskly and making quick notes. Spring beauty (Claytonia virginica) is dying back. Enchanter’s nightshade (Circaea lutetiana) is ankle-high, not flowering yet. Uvularia grandiflora has gone to fruit, while white baneberry (Actaea pachypoda) has come into bloom. Carrion flowers are in bloom atop the Heritage Trail and stinking. Orchard grass (Dactylis glomerata) inflorescences are emerging from the uppermost leaf sheaths. False rue-anemone (Enemion biternatum) is barely holding on, mayapples (Podophyllum peltatum) is flowering, and flowers are about to open on the honeysuckle (Lonicera) and wild raspberry (Rubus occidentalis). A red-eyed vireo, a black-throated green warbler, and a towhee call, along with chickadees and buntings. A blue-winged warbler calls from the distance.

I am suddenly in a second field of wild hyacinth, and it seems immense. I am surrounded by spikes of white flowers. They are like a pool around me for a full minute. Pewees call nearby. Red-winged blackbirds and blue jays sing in the distance.

Then the hyacinths have passed. I am almost back to work, and Joni Mitchell is back for one more line: “I feel like I’m sleeping / Can you wake me? / You seem to have a broader sensibility.” We all have these moments when we are startled out of our thoughts by a field of hyacinths and find we have woken up just in time to step back into our lives. “I’m just living on nerves and feelings / With a weak and a lazy mind.” Who could say it more clearly than that? For whatever reason, I arrive to work ready for the day.

After weeks of cold weather, this past week has seen temperatures of 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit above average almost every day. Tuesday, there were palm warblers and field sparrows, small-flowered buttercup (Ranunculus abortivus) in bloom, and warbler reports a-plenty (if you want a good list from the East Woods, take a look at Jay Sturner’s eBird report from his Saturday tour). Friday I heard American toads calling. Sugar maples have gone from buds about to emerge to leaves fully out, drooping curtainlike, and leaves on their seedlings are overtopping and nearly as long as the cotyledons. Catkins are out on the ironwood (Ostrya virginiana), musclewood (Carpinus caroliniana), birches and many of the oaks. Leaves on the red oak (Quercus rubra) seedlings are about an inch long. Bloody butcher (Trillium recurvatum) is in prominent bloom everywhere, and false mermaid (Floerkea proserpinaca) is calf-high and has gone to fruit. There’s almost too much to keep track of.

In Maple Grove Forest Preserve Sunday morning, tiny Poa annua was blooming along St. Joseph Creek, and reddish poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) leaves were nearly an inch long. Wood nettles (Laportea canadensis) are ankle-high. A wood thrush was singing from the woods beside the road that follows the railroad tracks. Several woodland sedges were in full bloom: Carex blanda and its cousin white-bear sedge (C. albursina), C. radiata, the soft leaves of C. hirtifolia and the dense, grasslike clumps of C. jamesii. Carex woodii is already producing fruits. Almost all of the trout-lily (Erythronium albidum) have gone to fruit and their fruits are swelling up, stigmas attached like tiny adder’s tongues (which is, as you may know, one of its common names). Fruits are turgid on the bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) and almost concealed by the leaves, which give the impression that they are still growing. Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria), large-flower bellwort (Uvularia grandiflora), and false rue-anemone (Enemion biternatum) were still in full flower (they had been the previous weekend), while spring beauty (Claytonia virginica) flowers had mostly given up, capsules ripening in the bases of the persistent sepals, and a few toothwort (Cardamine concatenata) were producing the slender siliques that remind us they are mustards. Downy yellow violet (Viola pubescens) and blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides) had come into full bloom. Large-flowered trillium (Trillium grandiflorum) were beginning to bloom. The first flowers of wild ginger (Asarum canadense) were resting beneath the foliage on the forest floor, and a few cleavers (Galium aparine) were in flower. I found one Geranium maculatum flower. The first floral buds were evident on the may-apples (Podophyllum peltatum), which in our yard seemed to gain an inch or two over the course of the weekend. Floral buds were evident on great waterleaf (Hydrophyllum appendiculatum) and Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum). Carrion-flower (Smilax) had come up from nowhere to be suddenly calf-high, but I can’t tell you for sure which species. Inflorescences were developing on the choke-cherries (Prunus virginiana). Near the end of my walk, the cloudy morning opened up and the woods were sunny for a minute. A great-crested flycatcher called from above and white-throated sparrows started singing from the woods behind the neighbors’ homes.

This morning at the Arboretum was perfectly clear. I started walking from the edge of Meadow Lake about 15 minutes before sunrise. In order, I noted chipping sparrows, a muskrat, red-wing blackbirds, a pileated woodpecker (right overhead!), great-crested flycatchers, blue-grey gnatcatchers (everywhere, hopping like mad, insatiable), towhees, red-bellied woodpeckers, the casual, almost lackluster call of the blue-winged warbler, white-throated sparrows, eastern phoebe. The red oak leaves are short but pendulous. Along the main trail, Loop 2, Dutchman’s-breeches has all gone to fruit. Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) has appeared from out of nowhere and is already in flower, stigmas apparently receptive while the anthers are on the verge of opening. Woodland sunflower (Helianthus strumosus, I believe, though see notes here and here) is above the tops of my boots, and carrion-flower is up here as is in Maple Grove, only with floral buds about to open. Fronds of a fern I take to be Cystopteris are almost fully open at the base of a sugar maple, as is the fern-like foliage of Osmorhiza claytonii. Virginia creeper leaves are up. Early meadow-rue (Thalictrum dioicum) is in full but very subtle flower, and rue anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides) is forming beds of beautiful, full-faced blooms. Nightcaps (Anemone quinquefolia) is in flower throughout the woods. Wild onion or meadow garlic (call it what you will: either way, it’s Allium canadense) is in floral bud, as is starry Solomon’s plume (Maianthemum stellatum). Missouri gooseberry (Ribes missouriense) is in full flower.

I reached the pond by Parking Lot 14 and followed the road that plunges north through Heritage Trail. As I stood beside the pond, the sun illuminated the brush on the west side of the pond, and it was a sudden riot of song sparrows, field sparrows, and goldfinches. An oriole was tearing at the catkins in the top of a red oak and piping at full volume, not obviously claiming territory or looking for a mate, but just eating and singing for all his might. Tree swallows were darting around the field. A yellow-rumped warbler, a yellow warbler, and a common yellowthroat (no joke!) darted around the brush collecting insects. Beside them, at the top of a white oak, a blue-grey gnatcatcher collected insects beside some other warbler with a yellow belly and breast and a bluish back… I’m a novice, and I’ll look this up later (any ideas?). Behind me, a towhee started calling, just eight feet away. I pivoted to watch him, then there was an indigo bunting in the ironwood above me on the other side of the road. It was a kind of pandemonium.

And then it was over. I walked north toward the intersection of the road and the Heritage trail. Two mallards settled into the pond in the field, and a red-tailed hawk called. Phlox divaricata was in bloom. Shepherd’s purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris) is already going to fruit. Atop the moraine, Geranium maculatum is in bloom. A black-throated green warbler started calling from the south, but otherwise it was quiet. Jacob’s ladder (Polemonium reptans) is ready to bloom, a couple of floral buds tipped with blue. Pennsylvania sedge (Carex pensylvanica) is in full bloom, and woodland bedstraw (Galium circaezans) is about five inches tall. I walked past the visitor station to the intersection of Loop 3 and Loop 4, just north of the spruce plot. A grove of Trillium grandiflorum is in full bloom there. In the spruce plot, wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) is putting up inflorescences, and wood fern (Dryopteris carthusiana) fronds are uncoiling. On the walk back to the work, I find that the purple has gone out of the patch of Galium aparine I had my eyes on a week ago, and the shagbark hickory (Carya ovata) buds have opened.

I realize this is a woodland blog, not a prairie blog, but I did end the morning with a drive out to our experimental prairie on the west side, to find a few things in bloom: Jacob’s ladder here is in full bloom, at least a few days ahead of the woods. Vernal sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata), Viola pedatifida, Zizia aurea, and shooting star (Dodecatheon meadia) are in bloom. Pretty nice: out of 127 species planted, we have 5 in bloom now in this experiment. Just a reminder that while the prairies are great–I do love them–the woodlands win it hands down when it comes to spring blooms and birds.

Yesterday morning was just above freezing, but the previous week saw temperatures to the mid 50s and 60s most days. In Maple Grove, the Enemion is in full bloom. Virginia bluebells have extended their necks up above the tips of their foliage and appear ready to bloom. The first true leaves are hiding between pennylike cotyledons at the tip of the jewelweed (Impatiens pallida) shoots. Blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides) leaves and stems are unrolling while the bloodroot petals are falling off in droves, exposing the ripening capsules. Sugar maple buds are 2 to 3 times as long this week as they were just 7 days ago, about to open, and on their seedlings, foliage leaves are starting to take shape between the straplike cotyledons. Wild ginger (Asarum canadense) leaves are flattening out, flower buds closed on the soil at their bases. Flowers have begun opening on the Uvularia grandiflora. Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) leaves are unfurling. Swamp buttercup (Ranunculus hispidus) is in bloom. The spring sedges are about to flower: Carex pensylvanica with its dark spikes and the gracile inflorescences of Carex woodii, while the slender erect shoots of Carex sprengelii show no flowers. By afternoon the temperatures were in the 50s. At about 7 p.m., I realized that every car in line at the carwash was filthy. Tree pollen? Dirty rain? By 8:45 the moon was full, and Sirius was bright in the west. We slept with the windows open.

As a consequence, my wife and I awoke at 3:45 this morning to singing robins. I arrived at the Arboretum and started walking out through the conifer collection just as the sun was rising. Tree swallows, chipping sparrows, red-wing blackbirds, song sparrows and chickadees were all going strong. The big Quercus montana just west of the research building is in bloom, and staminate flowers on the blue ash (Fraxinus quadrangulata) east of the Children’s Garden are dark and packed full of stamens waiting to open up. Pyrus ussuriensis is in bloom along the trail out through the East Woods. Cleavers (Galium aparine) has overtopped the trout lilies, leaf tips purple in at least one colony west of Crowley Marsh. Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum) leaves have unfurled as high as my boot-top. About a third of the Geranium maculatum leaves are about fully open, and floral buds are closed at the bases of the petioles. Ohio buckeye (Aesculus glabra) leaves have burst open, reflexed scales an inch or so long, individual leaves to three inches in diameter, clusters of leaves making a handful of six to ten from each bud. Poms of yellow stamens decorate the Spicebush (Lindera benzoin) branches. Viola sororia, Thalictrum thalictroides and swamp buttercup are in bloom. Marsh marigolds (Caltha palustris) are blooming at the base of the boardwalk overlooking Bur Reed Marsh. The first pistillate flowers are out on a single blackened spike of Carex pensylvanica, and floral buds have formed on Jacob’s ladder (Polemonium reptans) and Anemone quinquefolia. Chorus frogs are creaking, slowly this morning.

Through almost the whole walk, I had lyrics from The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead running through my head. As I rounded the trail back toward the Research Building, just west of Parking Lot 15, I squeezed the Smiths out of my head long enough to realize that the birds were no longer singing. Why? Time of day? It was now about 45 minutes past sunrise, and perhaps the birds were in need of a break. Or is there something about this stretch of woods between P15 and P16? In the Arbor Vitae plantation to the north I might have expected silence, but here was a small ravine, a colony of Dutchman’s breeches in bloom, flowers hovering above the foliage, a little brush in the understory… it seemed a perfect place to be a bird. Whatever the reason, as I walked in the silence toward the road, the opening stanza of Canterbury Tales appeared suddenly where the The Smiths had been just a few minutes earlier:

Whan that April with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swiche licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
What Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inpsired hath in every holt and heethe
The tendre croppes, and the younge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours y-rronne,

… and here I had forgotten the middle lines. I repeated these over to myself till I had them right, then picked up two more as I through the ground cover garden and made my way into work:

So priketh hem nature in hir corages:
Than longen folk to goon on pilrimages…

It’s that season now, when you wake up to robins and don’t know quite what will have happened in the previous few days. April has soaked the place down, Zephyrus has inspired the wildflowers and is working on the trees, and the solar year is young. It’s the time of year when I simultaneously miss the silence of winter and can’t wait for the next day.

I spent Friday afternoon at Lake McMurtry in Stillwater, Oklahoma. I had given a seminar in the Department of Plant Biology, Ecology and Evolution the previous day, and this afternoon Mark Fishbein and his dog Amelia and I had a few hours to prowl around in the woods. Post oak (Quercus stellata), blackjack oak (Q. marilandica) and chinkapin oak (Q. muehlenbergii) were in bloom: the first two had flowers about a half inch long, while the latter was already producing silver-dollar sized leaves. The lawn was filled with nondescript leaves of Ophioglossum engelmannii, limestone adder’s-tongue, and flowering Northoscordum bivalve, false garlic. I would undoubtedly know these if I had spent any amount of time botanizing in the southeast. The soil was a red clay, with sandstone outcroppings along the trailside giving rise to a fern I would have taken for Cystopteris, but that Mark informed me later was Woodsia obtusa. We walked through a dry oak forest along the edge of the reservoir. On our walk, there were Sisyrinchium angustifolium, Oxalis violacea, Antennaria, Claytonia virginica, Viola sororia, Houstonia, Lithospermum incisum, Chaerophyllum tainturieri and blooming Sherardia arvensis, along with foliage of Galium circaezans. There were at least four sedges: Carex blanda, what I believe were Carex muehlenbergii ($50 bet on this one, though the inflorescences were immature with closed, silvery spikes) and C. albicans ($30 bet until I can get a look at some decent material in the herbarium), and a C. rosea relative that I didn’t get sufficient material of to put a name on. Tufted titmouse and, I believe, blue-gray gnatcatchers were calling. There was no snow.

I returned Saturday to temperatures in the low 50s. A mass of Geranium maculatum rhizomes have been exposed by water spewing from the sump-pump this spring. Leaves are emerging from the tips of the branches, about the size of squirrels’ ears. Wild ginger leaves are as big around as a quarter, folded in half around each other, their backs felty. Solomon’s seal leaves are opening, and the May-apples are emerging from their bud scales. Dark green Carex gracillima shoots are four inches high, and the C. sprengelii and C. typina are a mass of light green foliage. Along the north side of the house, our cup plants are one to three inches high. Golden Alexanders (Zizia aurea) has opened up into a rosette about as big around as my hand, and one has produced flower buds. Viola sororia leaves are just starting to flatten out. The Carex eburnea in our front garden is bristling with silver spikes.

The next day in Maple Grove Forest Preserve, I found the slopes bright green with false mermaid (Floerkea proserpinacoides), anthers hiding in the floral buds nestled near the bases of lateral branches, which are tipped with especially narrowly lobed leaves. Jewelweed leaves were as big around as nickels. Maple seedlings are everywhere, straplike cotyledons to 1.5 inches long, one capped with the brown, fibrous remnants of the winged fruit. Phoebes were singing. Leeks had expanded to full size, leaves to 3 finger-widths in breadth and in length extending from the tip of my middle finger to below my watchband. Buds were swelling on the black cherry and burning bush. There were new leaves on the Geum and Ranunculus hispidus and May-apples further emerged from their buds than in our garden, the centers of their leaves whitish against the dark green blades folded umbrellalike beneath them.

This week, the East Woods are well beyond where they were a week ago. Sugar maple seedlings are everywhere. Lonicera leaves are nearly an inch long, gooseberry leaves are penny-sized. The woodland sedges are popping up: Carex hirtifolia shoots are four inches high, the new leaves on C. albursina are about two inches long, and the slender, white-striped dark green shoots of Carex sparganioides can be found along the trail west of P10. Early leaves of Sanicula, Phlox, Alliaria and Arctium, Osmorhiza and bright green Agrimonia can be found throughout the woods, along with leaves of Geranium maculatum to nearly two inches in diameter. Cleavers (Galium aparine) is protruding upright to several inches above the leaf litter, turning lighter green as it grows more quickly. There are floral buds on the white and yellow trout lilies (Erythronium albidum and E. americanum respectively), dogtooth violets (Cardamine concatenata) with flowers splayed open, about a third of the false rue-anemone (Enemion biternatum) in full bloom and, just west of Bur Reed Marsh, a lovely patch of nearly 20 rue-anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides) is blooming with perfect white flowers. Further down the trail west of the marsh, there is an archipelago of bloodroot Sanguinaria canadensis in the burned woods, perhaps 15 islands of 6–50 or more blooming plants each, petals erect as I walked by them this morning, leaves enfolding their scapes. Dutchman’s-breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) flowers are mostly still developing, but one plant this morning had two flowers mature and five more on the way, ranging from 2–10 mm in length. Virginia bluebells are almost ready to bloom, flowers opened from the tight little fists they were a week ago to Wood anemone (Anemone quinquefolia) is in floral bud. Claytonia virginica is still in bloom. A few magnificent patches of Hepatica acutiloba are in bloom, flowers white to lavender, hairs dense on the lower two-thirds of the scape.

From the beginning of my trip to Oklahoma through my walk this morning, John Burroughs’ deliberate and inspired Whitman: A Study has been humming in the background. I picked the book up somewhat on accident, largely because it’s what I had at hand as I was leaving, and I started reading it almost reluctantly as I boarded the plane Thursday morning. Burroughs affects a person very differently than Whitman (though it is no surprise to find they were friends), and I wasn’t quite in the mood for Burroughs. But his account of Whitman as a human, traversing the hospital wards of the Civil War, writing, observing, is haunting. For no good reason other than that I am still thinking about it, and altogether unrelated to phenology of the East Woods, I’ll leave you with two quotes from the book: First, from the section entitled His Self-Reliance: “Emerson reasoned and remonstrated with [Whitman] for hours, walking up and down Boston Common, and after he had finished his argument, says Whitman, which was unanswerable, ‘I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way.’ He told Emerson so, whereupon they went and dined together.” And then, from Burroughs’ introduction to the book: “… my main purpose in writing about Whitman, as in writing about nature, is to tell readers what I have found there, with the hope of inducing them to look for themselves.”

Enjoy the woods, and, if you have the time and inclination, Whitman and Burroughs.

The temperature was about 20 degrees Fahrenheit at sunrise on Sunday a week ago, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the cardinals and robins and mourning doves were singing when I stepped outside. At Maple Grove Forest Preserve, the woodpeckers and flickers and nuthatches were going strong. The ground was frozen. Ice crystals in the soil were as much as a centimeter long. The wild leeks and Virginia bluebells were rigid, frozen in mid-expansion, but perfect in appearance: they looked and felt like wax plants. I wondered if they would suffer from having frozen so hard. The false mermaid had advanced slowly over the previous week even with the cold and had just begun spreading across the leaf litter. It was frozen less completely than the leeks and bluebells, probably because such a small plant is proportionally more protected from the cold by the blanket of oak leaves.

The next day I awoke to snow on the ground and the sound of our neighbor’s yard sprinkler running on automatic. But on Wednesday temperatures rose into the 60s, and by Thursday it appeared that everything had grown by a few inches after weeks of holding tight. In the East Woods, Camassia scilloides shoots were five inches high. Trout lily (Erythronium albidum), jumpseed (Polygonum virginianum), basal leaves of Symphyotrichum drummondii and violet (Viola sororia)were all visible. Spring beauty (Claytonia virginica) floral buds were turning white at the tips. Friday, a few colleagues and I found Galium concinnum a few inches tall, flowers on a bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), and floral buds almost ready to open on the toothwort (Cardamine laciniata), which had unfurled dramatically in just a couple of days. Foliage of Virginia waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum) was about half-size, and its close cousin H. appendiculatum showed foliage about 1/4-size or smaller. Anemone quinquefolia leaves could be found at the bases of many of the trees. A very small clump of Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) peeked up above the leaf litter.

It is Sunday again, and temperatures are hovering just above freezing. It has been raining on and off for the past 36 hours and rained almost incessantly overnight. Water was funneling through every channel in Maple Grove this morning, collecting in the low spots and racing through the culverts. I needn’t have worried about the wild leeks: they look fine, though they appear not to have grown much in the past week. Prairie trillium (Trillium recurvatum) is up. There are clones of short, sharp trout lily leaves scattered throughout the woods. False rue anemone (Enemion biternatum) is in bud, and I found one bloodroot with closed flowers. The forest is carpeted with false mermaid, but none appear to be in flower. It seems odd that the first plant to come up in the woods, one of the first to die back in early May, is not also the first to bloom. Did I just miss it? I’ve been watching this plant since it first showed up this year, and I don’t think I would have missed it, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled.

On the way out of the woods this morning, I came across a brown creeper moving from tree to tree, seemingly unconcerned at my presence. From one tree to the next, he made no effort to move away from me. I drove home listening to the rain on the road and the Irish poet Michael Longley on the radio. He was talking about a cabin he’s been visiting since his children were young. We always think that travel broadens our horizons, he was saying, but going from one place to another also makes us more shallow. Longley was saying how he often thinks that he’s written the last poem he could possibly wring out of the place where his cabin stands, but then he invariably finds there’s another poem waiting for him there. Spring in a familiar place is a particular joy, perhaps because the pleasure of the season resides in the nuances of its trajectory from winter to summer and back again. The vagaries of the local climate are most palpable when you are attuned to past seasons in that same place. I arrived home to have breakfast with my sons. We were in the city yesterday, and they are happy to be home today with the sleeping cats, rain tapping endlessly on the side of the house.