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A January Thaw

Posted in Animals, Buds, Fruit, Fungi, Ice Formations, Insects, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Trees, tagged American Beech, Animal Tracks, Ashuelot River, Beech Leaves, Boston Ivy Fruit, Canon SX70 HS, Copper Beech, Daffodil Shoots, Elliot Community Hospital, European Beeachnut Husk, European Beech, European Beech Bark, European Beech Leaves, Fungus on European Beech, Gray Birch Seed, Gray Birch Strobiles, Gypsy Moth Egg Mass, Hazelnut Catkins, Hoar Frost, Keene, Nannyberry Bud, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus TG-6, Puddle Ice, Purple Beech, Red maple Buds, Rime Ice, Skunk Cabbages, Snow Depth, Swanzey New Hampshire, Tree Dieases, Turkey Tail Fungi, Winter Plants, Winter Woods on January 17, 2026| 24 Comments »

We’re having a January thaw this year so I and many others have been out enjoying the sunshine and warmer temperatures. Essentially a thaw is a warm stretch between two cold stretches. Sometimes they can be quite warm; one year I washed the car in the driveway wearing only a T shirt on January 7th and I remember it well because that’s my daughter’s birthday. But this year isn’t quite like that. We’ve hovered near and slightly above 40 degrees F. occasionally but most days have been just above freezing. It doesn’t sound like much but days like that melt a lot of snow and ice, as can be seen in this shot of the Ashuelot River. It had just started melting when this was taken but it’s ice free in this spot now.

This is what the river looked like closer to where I grew up.

There was always some animal activity along the section of river I grew up near so I wasn’t surprised to see lots of tracks in this spot. If I had to guess I’d say raccoon because of all the coming and going. Muskrat tracks always remind me of a dinosaur spine because of the tail drag in the center, so these are not those. Raccoons do like to wash their food before they eat it. Or they might have been fishing for mussels here. In any event a thaw in January brings everybody out, including the critters. I was happy just to be watching the river without shivering.

One morning we had a lot of what at first I thought was hoar frost. You can see how all the branches on these trees looked like they had been painted white.

But after some thought I decided it wasn’t hoar frost. I think it’s rime ice and I think that because rime ice forms on cold, calm nights with high humidity. The night had been cold and calm and on this morning the humidity was 96% and my lungs were asking why we were doing this. COPD and high humidity don’t play well together.

In places every twig was covered with it. I don’t see this happen often so when it does it seems like a special treat.

It isn’t easy to get good shots of that frost on the trees from a distance. My Canon SX70 camera just wanted to go home where it was warm. It’s getting old and it gets cranky when its cold.

The reason figuring out if what we see is rime or hoar frost is difficult is water vapor. Obviously there had to be a lot of water vapor in this spot and that meant either one could form. In the end I caught myself wondering why it mattered, and so then and there I decided it didn’t. I could call it white stuff and that wouldn’t change a thing.

This is the same spot as in the previous photo. It’s amazing what a little sunshine and slightly warmer temperatures can do. Long time readers might recognize this as the skunk cabbage swamp, which I show every spring.

While I was near the skunk cabbage swamp anyway I thought I’d take a look and see if anything was happening. I doubted I’d see much in January but there they were, already melting their way through the ice. Through a process called thermogenesis, skunk cabbage and many other plants are able to generate their own heat. Oxygen reacting with starch in its root is what allows the skunk cabbage to raise it’s temperature. The higher the oxygen intake the more heat is generated, and that’s how this plant melts its way through ice and snow in the spring. It might sound like something out of science fiction but humans and other warm blooded critters do it all the time.

Usually puddle ice is found everywhere in winter but this year I’ve had quite a time finding it. There is plenty of ice but it’s thick and not at all like the paper thin puddle ice I’ve been looking for. So far this has been the only photo worthy example I’ve seen.

I saw some nannyberry buds on my way out of the swamp. This native viburnum is among the easiest to identify in spring with its odd shaped buds that always remind me of the head and bill of a great blue heron. Later on they’ll have clusters of off white flowers which will become edible one seeded, purple black berries known as drupes. It’s a common shrub that likes to grow near water and it can form large colonies. You can see the pebbled texture of the bud and leaves in this shot.

Further down the line away from water I stopped to look at some hazelnut catkins, knowing they’d be as hard and inflexible as a pencil at this stage of the game. But it won’t be that long before they start to lengthen and grow in diameter, and finally open their bud scales to reveal the tiny yellow, pollen covered flowers that have been hidden since last fall. Watching them grow and expand every few days, you realize that a catkin is nothing but a string of tiny flowers spiraling around a central stalk. We can see how the bud scales show this spiraling habit.

We might think we’re seeing more catkins on this gray birch but those are actually female catkin-like strobiles that resemble small cones. They are what carry the seeds and they ripen throughout late fall and into winter. Seeds form on a central stalk and once ripe they’ll begin to fall. You can often find the snow under the trees littered with them. The snow will also most likely be filled with small birds at that point, because they love these seeds.

The true catkins of gray birch can be seen at the very tips of the branches, standing straight up or curling slightly. Later on after the seeds have dropped they’ll soften and become pliable, and then they’ll hang down. They’ll flower in May.

A few years ago I put a single gray birch seed on a white paper background. They are very small and I couldn’t think of anything to compare them to, so I put a period on the paper with a blue pen. Each tree must produce hundreds of thousands of these seeds, which are technically called nutlets. They’re a good midwinter food for small birds.

It was when I was looking over some red maple buds on this day that I realized I was setting myself up for a two month long case of spring fever. “This is nowhere near spring,” I told myself. “This is January.” Spring fever gets its name from the way it burns inside you and I could already feel its heat. It’s better to have the fever start in March and I know that, but what was done was done and time will now most likely begin to slow to a crawl until I see sap buckets on the trees and hear the first red wing blackbirds.

The snow on this stump, undisturbed, shows how little snow we’ve had. Maybe three inches in places. It’s probably gone from the stump now, but there is likely to be more on the way. I’ve seen feet of snow fall in February. I’d be happy to not see that again though.

I saw some small but nicely colored turkey tail fungi and I was happy to see them. The last two years have been hot, dry and terrible for mushrooms and it’s been a long time since I’ve done a post dedicated strictly to mushrooms. Maybe I’ll be able to change that this year, but who can know?

I stopped to admire the leaves of this beech. Dry as paper but still adding color to the landscape, a beech tree seems to me to be always giving, always saying look, winter isn’t so bad. Nobody really knows why trees like the beech hold onto their leaves all winter but the most plausible theory is that the papery leaves keep deer and moose from eating the buds. The animals don’t like the feel of the leaves on their face and they don’t like the sound they make.

Seeing the beech leaves reminded me of something I had wondered about for years and that was, does the European beech retain its leaves through winter like the American beech does? The answer is no, but there were a few leaves here and there still hanging onto this beech at the local college. This tree I know, thanks to the bronze plaque at its base, is Fagus sylvatica “Atropunicea,” the copper or purple beech. Its leaves are much smaller than those of the American beech but are still papery in winter.

Surprising is how much bigger the European beech nut husks are than those of their American cousins. Nearly twice the size, I’d guess.

I walked around the tree and stopped when I noticed this. At some point someone had cut off a branch and had cut into the bark of another branch leaving a large torn, open wound. Fungal spores had been blown in by the wind and now the resulting damage could be seen. Before the spore bearing fruit of the fungus seen here appears on a live tree it has worked on the tree’s insides and the damage has been done. Unfortunately this signals the end of the tree, it’s really just a matter of time.

Fungus on a live tree usually means insect damage is also present. Thought I didn’t see any insect damage I did see this gypsy moth egg mass on the underside of a branch. Gypsy moths don’t bore holes into a tree like some other insects but the newly hatched caterpillars will eat the leaves, weakening the tree. Gypsy moths were first introduced from Europe into Massachusetts in 1869, to breed with the silkworm moth to produce a tougher silkworm. Naturally, it escaped and has become one of the chief defoliators of deciduous trees and conifers in the eastern United States. Each egg mass can contain 100-1000 eggs. In the 1970s and 80s gypsy moth outbreaks caused many millions of dollars of damage across the northeast by defoliating and killing huge swaths of forest. I remember seeing, in just about every yard, black stripes of tar painted around tree trunks or silvery strips of aluminum foil wrapped around trunks. In theory when the caterpillars crawled up the trunk of a tree to feed they would either get stuck in the tar or slip on the aluminum foil and fall back to the ground. In fact the caterpillars just crawled over their dead brethren stuck in the tar and went on into the canopy.

A couple of years ago I saw this on the beech tree and immediately thought of an elephant’s eye, because the bark looked so much like elephant skin. Or at least, what I imagine elephant skin would look like. I don’t see a lot of elephants.

The last part of the story of the European beech lies there on the ground; possibly the beginning of a long period of branch shedding. After seeing it in a photo I’d say the tree doesn’t look healthy in general. That’s too bad; I’ve become fond of this tree over the years and I’ll miss it when it goes. It grows in front of the building I was born in, a mansion once known as the finest house in Keene. Built in 1810, it would change hands a few times before being given to the city of Keene in 1892 by the Elliot family. Previously known as the Elliot mansion, from that point on it would be known as the Elliot Community Hospital. Fourteen years after being born there I spent a week in the rehabilitation unit after falling from a tree and shattering my spine in two places. I was able to walk out under my own power but with a body cast supporting my upper body. In 1973 Keene built a new hospital and there I was again, helping to move every last thing from the old to the new. At that point it became the property of the university system of New Hampshire. Later on in life I would walk up the broad granite steps and through the ornate, Federal style front doorway of Elliot hall at Keene State College to register, finally leaving as a mechanical engineer. We can’t seem to part ways, this building and I.

The Elliot Community Hospital circa 1900. I thought I could see the house I grew up in over there on the left but no, we’d have to go just a little farther to the other side of the Boston and Maine railroad tracks. These days when I walk the grounds of what is now Keene State College I tell people who stop to chat that I was walking and playing here before most of the buildings they see were built. When I was just a pup this was my back yard.

Since I was on the college grounds I thought I take a look at some of the Boston ivy that grows on many of the buildings. The ones on this building were absolutely filled with berries. Later on a variety of songbirds will eat them up. The plant lends its name to the “ivy league” schools but the oddest thing about Boston ivy is its name, because it isn’t from Boston and it isn’t an ivy; it’s a member of the grape family and comes from China and Japan. This vine attaches to just about any vertical surface with tiny circular pads that form at the ends of its tendrils. It secretes calcium carbonate and uses it to “glue” the pads to the surface it wants to climb. Since this glue can to hold up to 260 times its own weight I’m surprised nobody has tried to bottle it. It should be noted that Boston ivy is considered invasive in some areas. Virginia creeper would be a less problematic, native choice.

As I was leaving the college grounds I passed a spot where I knew daffodils grew in spring and there much to my surprise were green shoots. Surely they’ll pay for being over anxious because this is nowhere near spring. This is January. As I write this it is 20 degrees F. and the thaw I think, has ended.

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn. ~Hal Borland

Thanks for coming by.

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First Snow

Posted in Buds, Flowers, Fruit, Ice Formations, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Things I've Seen, Wildflowers, tagged Ashuelot River in Winter, Canon SX70 HS, First Snow, Keene, Native Plants, Nature, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus TG-6, Powerlines, Putting Up New Powerpoles, Rail Trail in Winter, Swanzey New Hampshire, Under the Powerlines, Wetland Stream, Winter Plants, Winter Woods on December 6, 2025| 20 Comments »

We’ve had our first real snow. I use the word real to not mean an imeasurable amount that is called a dusting, or a quick hit that comes with a lot of wind and usually just blows away. That is called a squall. No, this was a real put on your boots and look for the snow shovel storm. I used to walk the trail seen in the above shot but it has grown over a lot. If I walk it in winter now I’m sure to get snow down inside my coat, so I just take photos of it.

Just two days before I was watching the Ashuelot river for geese but I saw none. In the past large numbers of Canada geese have spent quite a lot of winter time in the calm part of the river seen in the distance. Not able to be seen here, there is a lawn to the left that was easily reached by them and it didn’t seem that the homeowner minded them resting there.

On this day it was easy to dream of spring.

Two days later after the storm the river looked like this and any dreams of spring were forgotten. You can see ice just starting to form in the calm section of water in the distance.

The rhododendrons in the front yard showed this snow was fine powder. I’m not supposed to shovel snow because of the eye operations I had recently but it was easy to just push it out of the way, with no lifting required.

In the back yard the big hemlocks carried the weight of this powdery snow with ease. Those who live in snowy areas know that this photo shows there was no wind. Wind blows this kind of light snow right off the trees but we went two days before the trees were clear of it. Wet, heavy snow can often stick to everything for days but not usually powder.

And I do realize how fortunate I am to have such a beautiful view in my back yard every winter. It’s a peaceful setting and when it sometimes gets cold enough to still even the birds, it can be very quiet. For someone who grew up with plenty of quiet and solitude it is welcoming. It takes no effort at all to be quiet and still. The hemlocks and their cousins show us how.

First the forecast called for 4-8 inches and then it changed to 5-10 inches, but in my yard I barely made 5 inches. The forecast is more often wrong than right these days because everyone has to out-hype the others to make sure we pay attention to only their (ads) forecast. It’s all designed to frighten people into thinking they have to rush out before the storm to top off the car’s gas tank or to buy groceries they don’t really need. One scary forecast can generate many millions in spent money, and this is why I don’t believe all the “bomb cyclone” and “polar vortex” hype. What I meausure at the end of the storm is what fell, and if I wait a while even that total will go down as the snow settles into itself. We should all stop and ask ourselves when the last time was that we were actually “snowed in?” I’d have to answer just once, during a freak storm in 1987. And even then we were out the next day. We had shovels, you see.

I went out looking for ice again and finally found some on a stream that runs through the wetlands. This color ice is more slush than ice but it was the best I could do. Last year the beavers were dining on the streamside trees in this spot but I haven’t seen that yet this year.

This shot also shows how trees always lean and grow towards the light sorce, which in this case is the open space over the stream. This also explains why we see so many stream and river side trees fall into the water. If you imagine this stream as a trail or road it also explains why so many fallen trees have to be removed from trails and roads. It is always about the light.

This is the same stream from about the same spot, taken in late fall. This shot shows drought. The water should be up to the bases of those maples on the left, and there shouldn’t be so many plants growing in the stream bed.

I went to a favorite rail trail to see how the conditions were, hoping snowmobiles had gone through and packed down the snow but they hadn’t. You might not think walking through 5 inches of snow was much work but the older you get the harder it is, and this was tough on my lungs. Of course, sitting out November didn’t help.

All I saw were footprints and cross country ski tracks, so I tried to stay in those. I’m thinking that the three or four low snow winters we’ve had might have discouraged the snowmobilers. Even the gates that give them access to the trail were still locked.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen sumac leaves do this before. They were colorful, but speckled.

I found old man’s beard using an invasive multiflora rose scaffold for support. Old man’s beard is one of many names given to the native clematis known as virgin’s bower, and at this stage the seeds (achenes) with long feathery tails do look like an old man’s beard. Soon the individual seeds will break off and go flying on the wind. Another name for this native vine is traveler’s joy, and it certainly can be that as well.

The only real burst of color I saw on this day came in the form of buckthorn leaves. I believe this is invasive glossy buckthorn (Frangula alnus) because of the prominent leaf veins that look like a fish skeleton. This is yet another European shrub that forms impenatrable thickets in wetlands and crowds out natives. Its foliage can stand quite a lot of cold but it will be leafless in spring like all the other shrubs.

And then there was this; a pile of timbers 10 feet high.

And very long. Though they vary some, most look to be 6 X 6 timbers if you’d like to count them up and do the math. There are several piles of timbers here under the powerlines.

And the timbers are being used to build a corduroy road so the trucks don’t sink into the wetland. Why are trucks rolling through a wetland? Because all the wooden poles holding up those very alive power lines are being replaced by steel poles.

Six by six timbers, five of them, are laid side by side and holes drilled, and then long steel rods are inserted into the holes and large nuts squeeze them together into platforms. This means instead of moving them one by one they can be moved as platforms or rafts, all done by machine.

About six by six I’d say, with some variations. Each raft is about 30ish inches wide or with variant timbers used maybe 36 inches wide, and maybe 8 -10 feet long. Without a tape measure it’s all just an educated guess really, but I have walked the corduroy roads.

Here is a look at the wooden poles in the foreground and what their replacement will look like behind and to the left. I don’t know how long these wooden poles have been here but I grew up here and they’ve been here all of my life. I just read that it was in 1903 that the first long-distance high-voltage transmission line connected Quebec Canada and New England with very high voltage 735-kilovolt alternating current power lines. All this power is generated by water and sold to New England by Hydro-Quebec. I’d guess that it was probably in the 1920s that these poles were installed because the local power company PSNH (Now Eversource) started operations in 1926.

And this shot taken previously shows what the new poles will look like. If I stood with my arms at my sides I’m fairly sure I’d fit inside it. My question is, if steel conducts electricity so much better than wood, why the change?

And every pole will have one of these signs on it. I know of at least one person who was electrocuted here when one of the lines fell to the ground, so they don’t have to tell me twice.

Why you may ask, am I showing all of this on a nature blog? Because many of the flowers and insects you see on this blog are found in the wetland that these power poles grow out of, including the beautiful New England asters in the above photo. (And because it was a chance to see flowers in December.)

I hope winter is being kind to all of you. If you’d like to see an entire post about this place filled with flowers and bees and butterflies that I did a couple of years ago, just click here: https://nhgardensolutions.wordpress.com/2024/07/27/a-power-trip/ I called it “A Power Trip.”

The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found? ~ J. B. Priestley

Thanks for stopping in.

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Nearly Leafless

Posted in Birds, Fungi, Ice Formations, Lichens, Mosses & Liverworts, Nature, Orchids, Scenery / Landscapes, Trees, tagged American Wintergreen, Artist's Conk, Beech Fall Color, Blue Pine Sap, Blue Staining Boletes, Canon SX70 HS, Chicken Fat Mushroom, Delicate Feather Moss, Downy Rattlesnake Plantain, Eye Surgery, Fan Clubmoss, Frost Crack in Oak, Gratitude, Ice Baubles, Juniper Berries, Keene, Laake Sedge, Little Bluestem Grass in Fall, Maple Dust Lichen, Mount Monadnock, Native Plants, Nature, New Hampshire, NH, November Dandelion, Oak Fall Color, Olympus TG-6, Star Rosette Lichen, Stiff Clubmoss, Striped Wintergreen, Swanzey New Hampshire, Tree Clubmoss, Tufted Ramalina Lichen, Turkey Tail Fungi, Winter Plants, Winter Woods, Winterberries on November 29, 2025| 36 Comments »

Hello again, I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving day. For those of you who didn’t catch why I suddenly went quiet; I’ve had to hole up for most of November due to eye surgery. I’ve taken a few short walks but most of the month was spent letting these eyes heal with minimal strain. This particular surgery was for both cataracts and glaucoma, and though the cataract portion seems to have gone well, so far the glaucoma portion appears to be less than satisfactory according to the doctors, so for now it’s wait and see.

Meanwhile while I’ve been cooped up I see that many of the trees have lost their leaves, especially the red and silver maples, birches, ash, sumacs, and others that are on the tender side.

Tougher trees like beech and oak still hold some color. I was amazed by the colors in this huge swath of oaks on the foothills of Mount Monadnock. This shot was taken from many miles away so it looks almost as hazy as my eyes were when I took it.

The beautiful and unexpected colors that the various oaks turn in the fall are always amazing.

Leaves like these always catch my eye and I hate to pass them by without getting a photo or two. I’ve had some people tell me that oak leaves never turn purple but they sure look purple to me. If there is one thing I’ve learned by studying nature it is that the words “never” and “always” don’t apply. You’re better off just dropping them from your vocabulary, because they’re meaningless. The moment you think you’ve got it all figured out nature will show you that you haven’t.

Something that always brightens winter is the bright red of winterberries. Winterberry (Ilex verticillata) is a native holly that likes a lot of water. Birds love the bright red berries and it is an excellent choice for a landscape plant to attract them, especially if your yard has wet spots or if you live on the edge of a wetland.

Berries on trees in the juniper family are usually quite colorful as well. Juniper berries are often used by hunters to flavor wild game dishes, and are also used to flavor gin. Without the flavoring from juniper gin would be pretty much the same as vodka, so by law gin must contain juniper berries as flavoring. According to Wikipedia “In the United States of America, “gin” is defined as an alcoholic beverage of no less than 80 proof that possesses the characteristic flavor of juniper berries.“

Many birds love these berries as well. Last year I saw my first yellow rumped warbler on this bush.

Have you ever stood and watched the wind blow lake sedge this way and that? It’s an amazing show of light and color.

I took a walk along a trail through a small forest one cloudy day and found a few rarities, along with some very colorful leaves.

Tree clubmoss (Lycopodium dendroideum) grew everywhere along the trail.

Fan clubmoss (Lycopodium digitatum) grew in a good size colony in these woods but they stay to themselves and don’t seem to mix with other clubmosses. These and other clubmosses were once collected almost into oblivion so they could be used to make Christmas wreaths. People still do this in certain areas and the best way to stop the practice is to stop buying the wreaths. A Christmas or two with no sales would really get their attention, because there is a huge amount of hands on labor involved in making wreaths with clubmosses.

I saw some fairly fresh boletes. I didn’t try to identify them but if I had to bet I’d say they were one of the blue staining boletes, which usually have yellow stems and yellow flesh that will turn deep ink blue almost as soon as they are touched.

Chicken fat boletes (Suillus americanus) can grow in large numbers as these did. I secretly call them flapjacks because the way they stack on top of each other makes me think of a stack of pancakes. The common name comes from their color. They are edible and are said to have a “savory mushroom flavor.” They are also slimy and usually have forest litter stuck all over them. You wouldn’t catch me eating them no matter how much butter and maple syrup they had on them.

I thought maybe if the slip of the scalpel nicked the right nerve or if one of the many eyedrops I use worked in unexpected ways maybe my colorblindness would miraculously fade away but no, that feather moss still bright orange as it always does at this time of year. I didn’t pay a lot of attention with my hazy eyes but I think the fungi might have been artist’s conks (Ganoderma applanatum,) so called because you can draw on the pure white underside with a sharp stick. These bracket fungi can get as big as a dinner plate and once dry they, and whatever is drawn on them, can last for many years.

The leaves of striped wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata) change from green to purple when it starts to get cold. The colder it gets the more purple the foliage becomes and you can see that happening in this photo. This plant is on the rare side here but I noticed the two or three small groups I found 12-15 years ago have grown larger and now are spreading throughout the forest.

We haven’t had any real cold yet but ponds are freezing over and occasional snow squalls blow through. Winters are far from “average” these days.

American wintergreen is also called teaberry or checkerberry, and its leaves also change color when it gets cold. They first go from green to red and then slowly turn to deep purple. My daughter had to drive for an hour and a half one way each of the many times I went to see the eye surgeon, and we saw huge colonies of these plants all wearing dark purple along the sides of the highway. They and many other plants change color in winter to protect themselves from sunburn and in places that are mowed regularly they really stand out.

Downy rattlesnake plantain orchid (Goodyera pubescens) will stay just like this all winter, happy under the snow. (If we get any.) It’s a pretty plant that seems indestructible.

Stiff clubmoss (Spinulum annotinum) is so rare here I’ve seen only one small colony in this one spot. I misidentified this one as shining clubmoss until I found spore bearing “clubs” (strobili) on it one year. Shining clubmoss produces spores on its leaves and reproduces vegetatively so it doesn’t need clubs.

Dandelion is the only flower I’ve found blooming in every month of the year. Here is the entry for November this year.

Native little bluestem grass (Schizachyrium scoparium) foliage can indeed appear blue, but at this time of year when stems and seedheads are all that’s left it glows in luminous pink ribbons along our roadsides and in old pastures. After a frost it can take on a darker reddish purple hue, which makes it even more beautiful.

It is the way little bluestem’s silvery seed heads reflect and scatter light that makes it glow so beautifully. I’ve been thinking a lot about eyes and light lately while sitting in all those waiting and recovery rooms and this photo reminds me that everything we see with our eyes is really just reflected light. The brain converts this light into electrical signals in the retina. Those electrical signals are are transmitted through the optic nerve to the visual cortex where they are sorted out into “pictures,” both moving and still. Glaucoma can destroy the optic nerve if left untreated and once that happens there is no longer any light being transmitted to the visual cortex. No light means no sight.

I hope I’ve helped all of you realize the importance of yearly eye exams. I watched my father go blind from glaucoma and I can say with all sincerity, it ain’t no fun.

I found a maple dust lichen (Lecanora thysanophora) on a tree. These are one of my favorites, beautiful in their simplicity. There is a pale greenish body with a white fringe around it, so it doesn’t bend the mind when trying to identify it. The white fringe is called the prothallus and seeing it is a great way to identify this lichen. This lichen likes to grow on smooth barked trees. The spidery leaves encroaching on it are Frullania liverworts, which are very common.

I had to go to the local hospital for a physical the other day and since I know the lichens that grow on the trees there I was glad to have the chance to see them again. But of course I forgot my camera and I had just a few extra minutes, so I had to do a quick “snatch and grab” with my cell phone camera. I was especially interested in the the tufted ramalina lichens (Ramalina americana) because everything I’ve read about them says they shouldn’t be growing here in a parking lot surrounded by cars. They are very susceptible to air pollution and many have died off because of it. In fact this is the only place I’ve ever seen them.

Tufted ramalina lichen has a green body (thallus) with flattened strap like branches and white fruiting bodies (apothecia) and there are many here in all stages of growth. The only thing that makes sense to me when I see this lichen in this spot is that they can thrive here because lead has been removed from gasoline. Unleaded gas might be why these “very susceptible” lichens are thriving where they are, bathed in car exhaust all day every day. Maybe it was the lead that was killing them off. And not only are they thriving but many other lichen species are as well. They really seem to love it here, and since lichens are a in general a good indicator of air quality, that just seems odd. I’ve never seen a study done on how lead affects lichens. Starting one could turn out to be a feather in the cap of a first year biology student.

Star rosette lichen (Physcia stellaris) is another of my favorites. It’s another I find on the trees at the local hospital and it’s usually easy to spot with its big dark, eye like apothecia. Though their natural color is brown they can be gray and sometimes they appear more blue than gray. That’s because they have a powdery wax coating that can cause their color to change depending on the light. Plant parts with this powdery waxy coating are said to be pruinose and a good example of it is the “bloom” on blueberries, grapes, plums, and other fruit. This example seen here shows nearly their whole color range. The trees in this spot are so covered with lichens and mosses in places you can’t even see their bark.

I went to Beaver Brook thinking I might see icicles on the ledges but instead I had to settle for Ice baubles hanging from fallen branches. This was a very dim, cloudy day and my camera (and my eyes) struggled in the low light.

Earlier this month I sat at a picnic table and left when I realized that I was late putting eye drops in my eyes. I walked away leaving my camera on the picnic table, not catching my blunder until hours later. I thought it was gone for good but with the help of social media and three helpful people, it was returned to me. There’s always something to be thankful for.

It isn’t hard to find something to be thankful for each and every day without having to think too hard about it. Gratitude comes easily, and it is a key that will open many doors. I know of people my age who are housebound, or worse. The other day I ran into an old friend who’d had a stroke and had spent months in a hospital. Knowing such things, it’s easy to be grateful for just being able to still see, and to be able to get out and walk.

This colorful turkey tail was my favorite find on this day, but it really doesn’t matter because no matter where you go at any given time there is beauty to be seen, and that’s because everything has beauty. How can you lose? Time spent with nature is never wasted.

I didn’t think it had been cold enough to turn white pine sap blue as often happens in winter but I saw a tree that was just dripping with it. When I got close I saw that there was also a feather on the tree. Since there were a lot of pileated woodpecker holes in the tree I thought it might be a woodpecker feather. All the sap I saw was leaking from those woodpecker holes.

Near the pine was an oak with a deep frost crack in it. These cracks happen when temperatures cause rapid shrinkage or expansion in the wood as opposed to the bark, and when walking down winter roads at night you can sometimes hear them go off with a loud crack like a rifle shot. What will happen on this young strong tree is tissue will grow and heal over the crack to the point where it will stand proud of the surrounding bark, and then it will be known as a frost rib.

A beautiful, colorful beech tree in the sunlight on a cold November day. It was enough, and I was grateful for it.

If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. ~Tecumseh, Shawnee

Thanks for coming by.

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Things I’ve Seen

Posted in Amphibians, Birds, Flowers, Fruit, Fungi, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Things I've Seen, Trees, Wildflowers, tagged American Hazelnut Catkins, American Hazelnuts, Ashuelot River, Beech Fall Color, Bird's Foot Violet, Blue Jay, Burning Bush Fall Color, Canon SX70 HS, Cosmos, Dandelion, Fall Oyster Mushroom, False Turkey Tail Fungi, Female Bullfrog, Field Milkwort, Garden Asters, Halloween, Keene, Monkshood, Mushrooms, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Oak Fall Foliage, Olympus TG-6, Oriental Bittersweet Berries, Otter Brook, Otter Brook Dam Complex, Pink Maple Leaf Viburnum Foliage, Robin Hood Park Keene, Robin Hood Pond Keene, Staghorn Sumac Fall Color, Swanzey New Hampshire, Turkey Tail Fungi, Wooly Bear Caterpillar, Yellowing Curtain Crust Fungus on October 25, 2025| 69 Comments »

As I said in a previous post, there was a time not that long ago when I could have easily done two mushroom posts by now but those were wetter days than we have now. I did see a big clump of what I think are fall oysters on a living tree, which is not a good sign for the tree. Since oyster mushrooms prefer growing on dead and dying wood they’re a sign that this tree isn’t doing well, dying inside.

I don’t remember ever seeing turkey tail fungi on a living tree but I have seen lots of them on recently cut stumps. The ones seen here were on a log. They caught my eye because there was a lot of purple in them.

In the past I’ve met people who have had strange ideas about how plants work. I once worked for a lady who thought if she drove a nail into a tree 6 feet off the ground it would “grow with the tree” and one day be 12 feet off the ground. No I told her, it doesn’t work that way. It’s the tips of the branches that grow taller. I’ve met lots of people who think that buds on trees and shrubs appear in spring rather than fall and that’s why I like to set the record straight if I can. The American hazelnut catkins shown here are really just strings of tiny flower buds that spiral up a central stalk. The catkins always appear in the fall and that means the bushes are all set for flowering next spring. When the time is right each dark diamond shaped bud scale will open to reveal two or three small yellow flowers loaded with pollen, and if the wind blows and everything works the way it should we’ll have a fine crop of hazelnuts next year.

Actually, since this year’s crop is so big next year’s crop will almost surely be smaller. The bushes have more nuts on them this year than I’ve ever seen. I’d say that this year for hazelnuts is a “mast year” which essentially means a massive harvest, and that most likely means the bushes will need to rest for three to five years. Beech and Oaks appear to be having a mast year as well. The bears will eat well.

I don’t know if they eat beechnuts and hazelnuts but I’ve read that blue jays are known to carry off 100 acorns a day during harvest and a single jay may hide 3,000 – 5,000 nuts in one season. They can carry 5 acorns at a time and play a large part in the spread of oak forests. But how many do they eat? Nobody seems to know. I think this jay was watching acorns falling in the grass from above. These birds are very smart and hard to get a shot of in my experience so I was happy that the nuts were keeping it occupied.

I saw a female bullfrog hopping down a road one day. “Is froggy goin’ a courtin’?” I asked, but she didn’t have much to say so I assumed it was none of my business. When I looked at the photo later I saw what appeared to be white growths on her foot and leg but they also could have been just white bits of something stuck to her skin. I’ve read that there are lots of mites and other parasites that attach to frogs and turtles but I don’t know if that’s what we’re seeing here.

I also saw a frog of a different sort playing a fiddle in a local children’s park one day.

I went to the park to see if the cultivated asters were blooming. They were but not like they used to. I think their roots have formed a solid mat, and that means they should be lifted and divided, with the bulk of what is there being replanted in another park or given away. Amend the soil with some compost and replant the divisions and they should be good for years. There used to be so many flowers you could hardly see any green but that’s no longer true. I also used to know their name but I’ve forgotten.

In another park I found bird’s foot violet (Viola pedata) which though native, I had never seen before. It is tolerant of dry shade which makes it valuable in the garden but here they had planted it in full sun. It’s a very pretty plant with unusual leaves that look sort of like bird’s feet. The flowers were about one and a half times bigger than what you’d expect to see on a common lawn violet.

I was surprised to find more field milkwort (Senega sanguinea) plants along a local rail trail than anywhere else I’ve seen them. What look like petals arranged on a central stem are actually individual flowers packed into a raceme no bigger than the end of an average index finger. Each tiny overlapping flower has two large sepals, three small sepals, and three small petals that form a narrow tube. Several different kinds of bees help pollinate this plant. Its flowers can be white, purple, pink, or green. It’s a beautiful little flower.

Cosmos is a common garden flower that is often uncommonly beautiful.

If you lived in ancient Rome and were caught growing or possessing monkshood (Aconitum napellus) you were put to death. That was because the only use the Romans knew for the plant was assassination. Monkshood was called the “Queen of poisons” and caused a slow, agonizing death. Just what you would want for your enemy in those days, I suppose. It’s hard to believe that people thought that way.

These days people seem to either use it for suicide or die from it accidentally. In 2014 a 33 year old gardener in England named Nathan Greenway died after “working around the plant.” He apparently got the sap on his skin. It was probably absorbed through his skin into his bloodstream and he died 5 days later. Any time I go to take photos of this plant I wear gloves in case I want to hold it when the wind blows, and I tell you this so you’ll know never to touch it barehanded. It’s an extremely beautiful but dangerous plant. Professional gardeners and landscapers should know it well.

For the first time I saw a monkshood flower bud. Its shape reminded me of the amniotic sac that a fetus occupies before birth.

Just so you don’t think all our flowers are purple, here’s a dandelion. They’ve come back after taking a vacation to beat the summer heat. They’ll bloom all summer long in a cool year and all winter long in a warm one, and for that reason I can say that dandelion is the only wildflower I’ve seen blooming in all twelve months of the year.

I met some women who were out sightseeing and they told me I should go to Otter Brook State Park. They said that there was a lot of color there and there was, but it was spotty like it is everywhere this year. I hadn’t been there for probably 45-50 years but I can’t tell you why. It used to be a great place to swim but swimming isn’t allowed anymore due to the presence of cyanobacteria and heavy erosion due to flooding.

This is all part of the Otter Brook Dam complex, built by the Army Cops of Engineers and begun in 1956. I saw one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen here one year when there was heavy flooding. The water had almost reached the top of the huge dam and was flowing with a thunderous roar into the spillway. Keene teetered on the edge of disaster for a week or two that year but to look at this view you’d hardly believe it. Everything you’ve seen in this and the previous photo was under many feet of water and when it was over they had to get several picnic tables out of the treetops. I’ve never forgotten the pounding roar that went right through me. Note that very few trees in these views have any real age.

The oaks are being beautiful this year. From deep maroon / plum purple to…

…a little bit of everything. My color finding software sees pink, rosy brown, orange, dark yellow, sea green, and plum in these leaves.

All the gravel and exposed banks in this shot of the Ashuelot River north of Keene are normally under water. It’s been a very dry year and I’m hoping nature isn’t going to make up for that this winter. My roof shoveling days are over.

I’m seeing lots of wooly bear caterpillars this year. This one was walking down the same road as the bullfrog we met earlier. According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the wider the brown stripe in the middle of the wooly bear caterpillar is, the milder the winter will be. “Between 1948 and 1956, Dr. C. H. Curran, curator of insects at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, collected these caterpillars and counted the number of brown segments on each. Average brown-segment counts ranged from 5.3 to 5.6 out of the 13-segment total, meaning that the brown band took up more than a third of the woolly bear’s body. As those relatively high numbers suggested, the corresponding winters were milder than average.” The one in the photo has only one black band and since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says this region has a 50/50 chance at a warmer and drier or colder and wetter than an average winter, I’m hoping this caterpillar will tip the balance in the right direction.

It seems like such an odd year, or maybe it’s just me. Beeches are just turning and invasive burning bushes have barely turned pink. I could have looked back at blog posts to find out if this is normal at this time of year but I haven’t.

I did finally look back at burning bushes on the blog and found that they looked like this even into November last year, so I guess I’m confused. It’s hard to remember what every plant you saw was doing at any given time, especially when you’ve seen thousands of them. Eventually though, the burning bush leaves will be completely pastel pink; almost white. Once that happens one really cold night will see all those leaves falling to the ground. I know a place in the woods by the river where there are hundreds of bushes, and seeing them all with light pink leaves is quite a sight.

Invasive Oriental bittersweet is thriving and strangling trees wherever I go. If you use it for holiday decorations I hope you’ll cut it up and put it trash bags afterwards instead of throwing it out in the woods. This vine is a real nuisance and we humans don’t need to help its spread.

Native staghorn sumac has tuned beautifully red as it almost always does. The fresh inner bark and the berries are also red. These small trees often just fall over when they die and when I see one that has just fallen I always peel some bark to see the bright red color. You’ve got to be quick though, because it isn’t long before it turns brown. Native Americans used the bark to dye cotton.

This is a bit of wild-ness I pass occasionally. I don’t think it could really be called wilderness, though I suppose that opinion might change if I tried to make my way through it. There is a stream down there somewhere hidden by all the undergrowth, probably dry as a western arroyo right now. And though I’ve taken many photos of the place I’ve never been happy with a single one. It was only the colors that saved this one from the delete key.

I went to a children’s park called Robin Hood Park in Keene to try once again for mushrooms. In the past I’ve found lots of unusual mushrooms and slime molds here but though this day wasn’t a complete bust the pickings were slim.

I’ll usually visit a place at least twice for a blog post and this time was no different. The previous shot was taken in late afternoon and the one above in the morning, so there’s quite a difference in lighting. In fact I rejected the morning shots of the pond itself because the light was too bright to look at and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. How I’d love to see a nice overcast day. From a photographic point of view strings of days with nothing but bright sunshine and cloudless skies are just as boring to see in photos as strings of rainy days.

The only fungi I saw worthy of a blog entry were these false turkey tails (Stereum ostrea) growing on a log. Though they appear to be bracket fungi like turkey tails they’re actually considered a crust fungus not a polypore, and another name for them is curtain crust. In fact once you get used to looking at them you find that they really don’t look anything like turkey tails. To be sure look at the underside. It will be smooth, without the tiny pores found on a true turkey tail.

Well, you can forget some of what I said above. I just read that recent DNA testing has shown that they’ve discovered that Stereum ostrea grows only on the island of Java. Because of that the fungus in the photo is probably yellowing curtain crust (Stereum subtomentosum.) A good way to identify this one is by scratching the underside with a twig or a fingernail. If it stains yellow and looks like what is seen here it is probably Stereum subtomentosum.

I saw a very pink maple leaf viburnum. Quite often you find that these shrubs have been damaged by insects but this one was near perfect. When I see them I always wonder how many people think they’re seeing strange colored maple leaves.

Bony Maronie stopped and asked me to tell everyone Happy Halloween. Despite walking every day I can’t lose a pound so I was a bit envious of her thin frame. Yes, Bony Maronie is a lady. She said she wore the man’s hat because it did a better job of keeping the bright sunlight out of her eye sockets. She was a big hit on Jukebox vinyl back in 1958 when Larry Williams sang I got a girl named Bony Moronie / She’s as skinny as a stick of macaroni… She’s done well keeping her weight down.

An autumn forest is such a place that once entered you never look for the exit.
~Mehmet Murat ildan

Thanks for stopping in.

NOTE: I’ll be having surgery for glaucoma on each eye, two weeks apart in November and I’m fairly certain that I won’t be doing any blog posts during that time. While they’re in there tinkering around they’ll also be doing cataract surgery on each eye so it’s a little complicated to try and explain.

Meanwhile, if you would like to visit an interesting nature blog that is new to me just visit Gary Walton’s blog Not Very Far Away. I knew after reading just a couple of posts that Gary is the real deal and I think you’ll enjoy hearing what he has to say. He’s located in Minnesota, the land of snow and cold, so I’d bet that his winter posts will be quite interesting. He can be found at https://notveryfar.net/

Another blog, an old favorite of mine, is Tootlepedal’s blog from the border regions of Scotland. This blog has just about anything you could think of in it, from baking cookies and gardening to hill climbing. As I’ve said before, it’s the blog that showed me years ago that a rich, full life has nothing at all to do with money. Tootlepedal and all his family and friends can be found at https://tootlepedal.wordpress.com/

And of course there is always the favorite links menu over on the right, though I fear a few of the blogs listed have passed on from old age. There are a few there that I really miss.

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Beaver Brook Natural Area

Posted in Flowers, Fungi, Lichens, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Trees, Wildflowers, tagged Abandoned Places, Annulohypoxylon cohaerens Fungi, Beaver Brook, Big Leaf Aster, Birch Polypore, Black Birch, Blue Stemmed Goldenrod, Blue Wood Aster, Dame's Rocket, Fallen Leaves, Feldspar Ledges, First Year Black Raspberry Canes, Keene, Marginal Wood Fern, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, New Hampshire Geology, NH, Oyster Mushroom, Polypody Fern, Red Maple, Rose Moss, Smoky Eye Boulder Lichen, Swanzey New Hampshire, Turkey Tail Fungi, White Flowered Aster, Witch Hazel, Witch Hazel Blossoms on October 18, 2025| 35 Comments »

Do I hear groaning? “Oh, not another post about Beaver Brook” some of you might be saying. And it isn’t only you. I have friends who laugh when I tell them I’ve come here. One says I must know every plant, bush and tree here. That’s the point. That’s why you visit a place again and again. You have to see it in all seasons and in all kinds of weather to be able to say that you truly know it.

I have friends living here and as you do with any friend I go to see how they’re doing. Like the brook itself, for instance. I knew it would be low because of how dry it has been. Though it might look alarming it isn’t. I’ve seen it this way many times. And the trees; mostly red maple and black or sweet birch (Betula lenta) live in this spot. The birches turn bright lemon yellow and then pale a bit before falling. At the right time they lend the brook a golden glow. Along with the beautiful blue of the reflected sky this kind of natural beauty can strike you dumb. Stuff your eyes with wonder Ray Bradbury said, and this is the perfect place to do that.

I stopped at a popular spot where you can easily get close to the water, popular especially among dog walkers who let their dogs swim here, but on this day I was the only one here. I wanted to see what leaves had been falling and much to my surprise almost every one was a red maple leaf. I thought there might also be some birch or witch hazel or striped maple or even elm, but not yet.

Almost all the leaves blowing around on the old abandoned road were also maple leaves. I was happy to see the place getting its wild, abandoned look back after the slow motion train wreck of a few years ago when the parks department suddenly decided the old road should look like Main Street in downtown Keene and “cleaned it up.”

The value of this place apart from its natural beauty, lies in how people can see what happens when man just walks away and leaves what he has built to nature. Author Scott Westerfeld noted that “It’s amazing how quickly nature consumes human places after we turn our backs on them. Life is a hungry thing.” Exactly. That is precisely what people come here to see. That’s what they ask about if I happen to get talking to them, and that’s why the local New Hampshire Public Radio people were interested enough to come here to see it and do a story on it. That’s the draw, and when you remove that people lose interest. If you come along and string new cables and paint the guard posts on the old bridge over the brook you’ve wiped out the visible history of the place.

Anyhow, I’d better get down off that stump before I really get going. As I said, I have friends here and one of them is the blue stemmed goldenrod (Solidago caesia) seen above. Though it wasn’t very blue when I was here, whitish wax crystals like those that cause the “bloom” on grapes, plums and other fruits are what often make the stems blue. Like any wax, hot summers can melt it off, and heavy enough rain can also wash it off. To see its blue stems you just have to catch it at the right time, and that means coming here frequently. This is the only place I’ve ever found this plant and I was happy to see that what was a single small colony years ago has spread to become other small groups here and there all the way up the old road.

To get my fill of blue stems on this day I had to look at black raspberries. According to what I read years ago, among the brambles the first year canes of black raspberry are the only ones to turn blue like this, and that’s because of the same whitish, waxy crystals found on blue stemmed goldenrod. It’s there to protect the plant from sun scald and as we see here, it can appear amazingly blue. Now that I see this photo I wish I had run my finger along part of the stem to show how easily the color can be wiped off. Once its wiped off these stems show themselves to be very dark. That means they absorb more sunlight, which increases the possibility of sun scald.

Yet another life form found in nature that uses wax crystals to protect themselves are lichens, like the smoky eye boulder lichen (Porpidia albocaerulescens) seen here. You can find this lichen in certain places and all the blue bits seen here will be smoky gray, and that’s because that particular lichen doesn’t see direct sunlight so it doesn’t have to protect itself in the same way. The blue color seen here is on this lichen’s fruiting bodies (Apothecia) where its spores are produced. Blue is said to be the rarest color found in nature, so maybe that’s why it’s always so beautiful. The first time I saw this lichen years ago it was as if a wood sprite must have spilled its bag of jewels here on this stone.

Another beautiful thing I find only here is the little rose moss (Rhodobryum roseum,) with leaves that form what look like tiny flowers. Rose moss is a good indicator of limestone in the soil so it’s wise to look for other lime loving plants in the area if you find it. It’s a relatively rare moss in this region; this is the only place I’ve ever found it. If you look up in the left corner you can see what it looks like when it dries out. Kind of forlorn, but this little moss is tough and it’ll come right back when it rains.

Blackish male organs produce sperm which will be splashed out of the center of the rose moss rosettes by rain drops, and when they land on female structures that produce egg cells, called archegonium, a drooping, pear shaped spore capsule (sporophytes) will grow. Rose moss also reproduces by horizontal underground stems and that is more efficient for this moss so spore capsules are rare. This is also why new clumps of this moss are so hard to find. It’s growth habit is mat like, right on stone.

Polypody ferns (Polypodium virginianum) do well here, almost always growing on top of the many boulders. That habit gives them the name rock-cap fern. The leaves are very tough and leathery. Henry David Thoreau said these fern mats were “fresh and cheerful communities” and they are, even in January.

I always look on the underside of fern leaves for signs of spore production. Polypody fern spores grow in tiny mounds called sori, which are made up of clusters of sporangia (receptacles in which spores are formed) and are naked, meaning they lack the protective cap (indusium) that is found on many ferns. Once they ripen they are very pretty and look like tiny baskets of yellow and orange flowers. Some of these had gone past ripe and fallen off the leaf, leaving a tiny indentation behind.

If I don’t get moving it’s going to take us forever to get through this post. Rustling through all those leaves and smelling that indescribable fall fragrance made me feel like a school boy again. The day became a game.

This is usually a great place to find lots of fungi in the fall but it’s just too dry this year. I often see so many turkey tails (Trametes versicolor) here I have too many photos of them to fit in a blog post. On this day however, I saw a lot of them that were dry and shriveled up. The ones in this small group were the only ones worthy of a photo.

I saw a few small oyster mushrooms on a log but there were barely enough for a chipmunk to make a meal from.

I liked the texture of this birch polypore (Fomitopsis betulina.) It looked like a fresh hot dinner roll, right out of the oven. Or maybe I just needed some lunch. The odd thing about it was how it had grown on a fallen yellow birch, which I’m not sure I’ve seen before. I think those I’ve seen were all on white birch.

The way to know if a bracket or shelf fungus grew on a standing tree or a fallen log is to look at the spore surface. It will always point toward the ground. If you see a log full of brackets with all their spore surfaces pointed down the length of the log toward the root end you know they grew when the log stood vertically as a tree. If they grow from the side of the log like this one did they’ve grown since the tree fell. Another way to say it would be that the side of the cap opposite the spore bearing surface will always face the sun. When you’re in the woods look closely. Touch things, smell things. Give yourself time to really see before rushing off to the next thing. Looking is one thing but seeing is another, and the two can sometimes be quite far apart.

In a nutshell, a pegmatite is a course textured igneous rock containing large crystals easily seen with the naked eye. Many pegmatites are made up of quartz, feldspar, and mica, and that’s what is found here along this section of Beaver Brook. Some of the largest crystals ever found were found in pegmatites, including quartz, mica, spodumene, fluorite, beryl, and tourmaline. Mineral hunters flock to pegmatites in search of the perfect crystal but the ledge collapse shown in this photo illustrates why this is not a good place to hunt minerals. That huge rectangular piece of stone in the left foreground would have crushed any car or pickup truck I ever drove, and that’s why I stay away from the ledges here. Feldspar breaks easily and these ledges are cracking and slipping all along the road. Water seeps into the cracks, freezes and expands, and tears apart even the toughest stone. That’s how Native Americans are said to have broken stone without iron or steel tools, in fact.

I found a piece of broken feldspar near the road. When I picked it up the first thing I saw was that naturally faceted garnet seen in the lower center of this shot. Veins of quartz can also be seen running through the pinkish feldspar, along with some dark biotite mica fragments. You can also see feldspar “plates” stacked like a deck of cards just under the garnet. If magma was a soup in this case feldspar would be the base or the stock and garnet, quartz, mica and other minerals would be the vegetables. There are lots of garnets in this feldspar but they are low quality. I’ve never seen a gem quality garnet here. What I used to love though, even if I didn’t find gem quality minerals, was splitting open a rock and being the first to ever see its inside since it formed however many billions of years ago. That’s what we’re seeing right now in this photo; something nobody else has ever seen. Just let that sink in and then tell me why nature is so boring.

I have a feeling that this is Dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis) but so far that’s all I have so I’ll have to watch it. Pretty yes, but dame’s rocket can get out of hand in no time at all in wild places.

Blue wood asters (Symphyotrichum cordifolium) grew here and there from the beginning to the end of the road. They’re a very small flower but there are so many of them on one plant, they’re hard to miss.

Big leaf asters (Eurybia macrophylla) also grow here and when you see their big, heart shaped leaves the name seems obvious. These flowers can be white or purple, and there were both colors in this group. They had just about gone by and you know that by the lack of yellow centers.

From a distance I thought this was one of those rare white New England asters I was talking about a post or two ago but then I decided it wasn’t, and then I decided I didn’t care. It’s not a big deal. When I’m out walking through nature I don’t carry around a head full of names. If I see something interesting I take enough photos of it to identify it later on. Names are great if we are communicating with someone, but who am I communicating with when I’m alone in the woods?

Native witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) is having a great year everywhere I’ve gone. Though the spring blooming witch hazels seen in gardens are also natives they aren’t native to this part of the country. Fall blooming plants are our only natives. They are very cold hardy and in relatively mild winters will often bloom well into December. Seeing flowers in New Hampshire in December is a wonderful experience. These flowers are pollinated by owlet moths, which are active in winter and are called winter moths. The moths raise their body temperature by shivering, and can raise it by as much as 50 degrees F. This allows them to fly and search for food when it’s cold.

I also saw lots of seed pods ripening on the witch hazels and that made me wish I had safety glasses on, because these seed pods are explosive and they can shoot seeds several yards. They open with a snap and let go. It takes a year of ripening before that happens though and these pods looked like this year’s crop. They look a bit like fuzzy acorns. The “hama” part of the plant’s scientific name means “at the same time” and is used because you can see leaves, flowers, and fruit all at once on the same plant.

I tried to get a shot looking upstream but this was the best I could do without falling in the brook. When I saw the photo I noticed that I had inadvertently gotten a shot of the frost crack on that golden birch in the distance. It shows as a whiteish, vertical scar on the trunk. Frost cracks happen when the sun warms the tree and the cells just under the bark expand. If nighttime temperatures are cold enough the bark will cool and contract rapidly, quicker than the wood underneath, and this stress on the bark can cause it to crack. Sometimes it can happen with such force it can sound like a rifle shot. Technically, this healed frost crack is now a frost rib, and it’s the only one I’ve ever seen on a birch.

There are lots of ferns here at Beaver Brook Natural Area and a few are evergreen. A few of the more common evergreen ferns found in New Hampshire are the Marginal wood fern (Dryopteris marginalis), Intermediate wood fern (Dryopteris intermedia), Christmas fern (Polystichum acrostichoides), and Polypody fern (Polypodium virginianum.) These are the ferns most likely to be seen in the winter months in this area, and they all grow here along Beaver Brook. The fern seen above is the marginal wood fern, which almost always grows in rocky areas and on ledges. It usually has a kind of blueish green cast and when you feel it, it feels tough and leathery like polypody.

The clincher that you’ve found a marginal wood fern comes when you see the fern’s spore case clusters (sori) on the margins of its sub leaflets. That’s where the common name comes from. Each individual sorus wears a little protective cap made of thin tissue called an indusium that protects the sporangia. When the time is right off comes the cap and away go the spores. I think they might have been just about ready when I took this photo.

As it gets colder this fern’s fronds will flatten to the ground and stay that way through winter. I always thought snow load did it but according to the Westborough Massachusetts Community Land Trust page, “When the green fronds are on the ground, warmth from the earth keeps them warmer than they would be if they stood up in the wind and cold air. The fern’s stems weaken near the ground in autumn, helping the fronds to fall over.” That makes perfect sense. Other ferns like Christmas ferns do the same.

Here we are at the turn around or parking spot at the top of the falls. The brook is dead ahead and Beaver Brook Falls, which I couldn’t get a good shot of, is to the right. You want to pay close attention to your surroundings in this spot because you can walk right off the ledge and fall into the falls, and that wouldn’t be good. When this was an actual road I can remember driving past here with my father on our way to my cousin’s house just up the road in Sullivan. On this day I chose it as my turn around spot. From here the road becomes a trail and the trail runs smack into the biggest mound of dirt you’ve ever seen. The mound of dirt is what the new highway is built on, and it is why this old road was abandoned.

In putting this post together I made three or four trips here, mostly due to the poor, high contrast quality of the bright sunlight, and on one of those trips I saw a familiar black growth on a fallen beech limb (Fagus grandifolia) that I recognized as an unusual little fungus that I rarely see.

This fungus is called “cramp balls” (Annulohypoxylon cohaerens,) which I’ve never fully understood but I don’t name them, I just tell you about them. Anyhow, this fungus seems to prefer freshly fallen beech limbs and logs because that’s where I always find them. They start life colored brown and mature to the purplish black color seen in the photo, and they always remind me of tiny blackberries. Each small rounded growth is about half the diameter of a pea and their lumpy appearance comes from the many nipple shaped pores from which the spores are released. The fruiting bodies seen here are described as “cushion like round or flask shaped masses of fungal tissue with nipple or pustule shaped pores.” It took me about three years to identify this fungus so if it’s names you’re after in nature you’d better be both patient and persistent. I’ve never found this one in any mushroom guide I have, and I have a few.

One last look at the brook from the old bridge as I was leaving. This was a great day for reflections. Actually, it was a great day for just about anything.

I’m sorry this post is so long but I don’t really plan length, it just happens. Anyhow congratulations, you’ve made it to the end. I hope you enjoyed it and if you ever happen to visit Keene I hope you’ll take the time to see Beaver Brook Natural Area in person. The time of year doesn’t really matter because it’s always beautiful here.

Leisure is a form of silence, not noiselessness. It is the silence of contemplation such as occurs when we let our minds rest on a rosebud, a child at play, a Divine mystery, or a waterfall. ~Fulton J. Sheen

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From the Wetlands

Posted in Aquatics, Birds, Fruit, Insects, Nature, Reptiles, Scenery / Landscapes, Things I've Seen, Trees, tagged American Cranberry Bush, American Hornbeam Fruit, American Lady Butterfly, Autumn Meadowhawk Dragonfly, Bald Eagle, Calico Pennant Dragonfly, Canada Geese, Canon SX70 HS, Cedar Waxwings, Clouded Sulfur Butterfly, Fall Color, Fall Fruits, Fall Plants, Great Blue Heron, Green Heron, Highbush Cranberry, Immature Wood Duck, Ironwood, Keene, Lance Tipped Darner Dragonfly, Mockingbird, Muscle Wood Bracts, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Northern Crescent Butterfly, Olympus TG-6, Painted Turtles, Raainbow, Silky Dogwood Berries, Slaty Skimmer Dragonfly, Spangled Skimmer Dragonfly, Spider Webs, Swanzey New Hampshire, Wetlands on October 4, 2025| 16 Comments »

Fall colors have made it from the understory up into the trees but there will be plenty of time to show fall colors later on. This post is about wetlands. Not “a” wetland but any wetland I might visit with features or inhabitants that catch my eye, like these colorful red maples did. This post is more about wetlands and all the critters and plants that inhabit them than anything else, but there might be some fall color seen here and there.

This is the shot I was going to open this post with before the fall colors came along. I looked out the window one morning and saw that it was foggy, so I rushed over to a local swamp before the sun had time to burn it off.

Why would I want to rush out into a swamp first thing in the morning? For the spider webs, of course. The mist highlights them beautifully and you find that there are hundreds of them draped in the trees. The funny thing is, you can’t see them on dry days even though these are huge webs. I don’t know what these spiders are up to but these webs are big enough to catch birds in. Easily as big as a basketball.

And as I discovered this year, the webs aren’t only in the trees. This spider built its huge web in the cattails along the edge of the water. Maybe hoping for flying fish?

The turtles certainly don’t have to worry about spider webs. This shot of hundreds of painted turtles was taken on a sunnier morning.

The turtles wake up early here to practice their yoga. This one appeared to be in a deep meditative state.

Though I’ve never seen it happen I’ve wondered if dragonflies like this slaty skimmer ever get caught in those huge spider webs. I would bet a web that size would hold a dragonfly.

There were lots of slaty skimmers around this year but I only saw a handful of spangled skimmers. It would be a shame to lose such a beautiful creature to a spider when there are so many mosquitoes and deer flies around.

Small butterflies like the northern crescent would make a nice meal for one of those spiders but I’ve never seen a butterfly caught in a web either.

I had a chance to practice my butterfly eye photography on this American lady (Vanessa virginiensis) but it didn’t turn out that well. Capturing a butterfly’s eye can be done but it takes practice and patience. Patience I have but these skittish butterflies don’t give you much time to practice. This is a butterfly I rarely see.

Great blue herons have been easy to spot this summer but things are slowing down for them, by the looks. I haven’t seen one in a couple of weeks. This old granddad heron just stood and stared.

It was the same with green herons. They were everywhere all summer and now, not so much. At least I was able to finally get a shot that showed the green on a green heron. I’ve read that the green is iridescence that shows only in certain light, much like the iridescent colors on a blackbird. It’s a hard thing to catch in a photo.

At a different spot I saw a white something fly out of a cattail swamp and land in a tree so I walked over to it and there it was, a northern mockingbird. At least that’s what I’m told by bird apps. It looked kind of scruffy I thought, but maybe that’s the way they always look.

The bird seemed very interested in the sounds my camera was making and appeared to be listening intently. In fact it listened so intently it never made a sound, which was too bad. We had a mockingbird in the back yard one summer and that meant we heard every beautiful bird song that bird knew. It was amazing, as if all the birds with the most beautiful songs had moved into the surrounding forest. If you’d like to hear what I mean just click this link to a YouTube video or Google “Northern mockingbird sounds” and prepare to be amazed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc-37LHiS4I

Beautiful silky dogwood berries were everywhere near the cattail swamp and I was finally able to get a shot that shows how they turn from white to blue. If I was a pottery maker living in China 1500 years ago and I saw a similar scene I might wonder “How can I use that beautiful blue color to decorate my plain white porcelain? The answer was the cobalt found in copper and nickel ore, mined in Iraq and Iran and brought to China by Mongolians. It was near that time that cobalt blue decorated white porcelain and pottery was born, first made by Islamic potters and then by the Chinese. It proved to be so popular, even though it was made by the shipload in China, the Netherlands, and England the demand was so great all the potteries the world over couldn’t keep up. That’s just one example of what the beauty of nature and human imagination can do.

Seeing those berries made me want to go to the river to see how the cedar waxwings were doing. This bird posed beautifully so we could see its wax tipped wings and tail. I’ve read about how and why this happens and the most plausible theory seems to be that the red “wax” depends on time and what the bird eats. According to Cool Green Science by the Nature Conservancy, if the bird eats enough of the right kind of berries over time it will secrete the organic pigment astaxanthin, which is a carotenoid that gives red fruits their color. As the bird ages more wing tips grow and it secretes more of the pigment to coat them in red. The color tells the female bird that this is an adult male that is high in the pecking order and knows how to play the game, so if she wants to sit on a nest full of eggs she had better fly with him. Since it’s always about continuation of the species she does just that, and life goes on.

Apparently juveniles don’t have wax tipped secondary wings but adult females will, depending on age. They’re said to be fewer in number than on males though so as you’d expect the alpha males have most of the flashy colors. According to Cornell University’s All About Birds, “Cedar Waxwings with orange instead of yellow tail tips began appearing in the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada in the 1960s. The orange color is the result of a red pigment picked up from the berries of an introduced species of honeysuckle. If a waxwing eats enough of the berries while it is growing a tail feather, the tip of the feather will be orange.” I don’t know if what I’m seeing here is this bird’s tail or a wing tip but it looks more orange than yellow to me. My “What Color” color blind app also sees orange.

I saw a log full of Canada geese and the feathers were flying. Or something.

A few weeks before I saw the geese on a log I was watching calico pennant dragonflies at the same pond. They’re cute little things but they don’t usually pose as this male did on this day.

This is the usual pose for a calico pennant dragonfly. Or any pennant dragonfly, for that matter. The name “pennant” comes from the way they grasp a leaf or a twig so they can be blown this way and that by the wind, just like a flag. I’ve wondered if doing this cools them off as well. These photos were taken in full sunlight on a hot afternoon.

Yet another try at a butterfly’s eye and yet another miss. There should be dark spots on the eye of a clouded sulfur. The lighting was strange so maybe that’s why they don’t show.

Photos of bald eagle eyes are much easier to get than butterfly eyes but I see about one eagle sitting still every five years or so. I just happened to see this one out of the corner of my eye as I drove past. It was high in a tree and quite far away and I doubted my small Canon Powershot SX-70 HS camera could handle it but I got lucky.

This is one of my favorite fall “swamp scenes.” I’ve heard that what looks like a trail is what remains of an old road that was there when this was all farmland. It must have been a lot drier here then.

An American cranberry (Viburnum trilobum) grows near that spot in the last photo. That wouldn’t be anything of note if this wasn’t a plant that is on the rare side here. In fact this is the only place I’ve found one in the wild. It’s producing bright red berries and the birds are eating them, and that gives me the idea that I might see more of them in the future. This plant is not related to the cranberry at all, it is actually in the viburnum family. Years ago when I was learning the nursery trade we used to sell these tall, upright shrubs for foundation plantings and they used to sell so fast people had to order them. That was mostly because of their beautiful large white flower heads but also because the berries attract birds. If I was planning a garden with only native plants the viburnum family is the first place I’d look.

Female ironwood tree (Carpinus caroliniana) seeds always appear in pairs at the ends of the branches and are called nutlets. According to the Arnold Arboretum “The light brown nutlets mature in October and have a three-lobed bract appearing as an umbrella over the nuts. Nutlets and bracts are borne in dangling clusters.” As can be seen in the above photo the bracts look like leafy butterflies, and they do fly when the wind is strong enough to tear them from the trees. This is the way the seeds of this tree are scattered. Ironwood is also called American hornbeam, blue beech, and musclewood. It’s in the hazelnut family and the name ironwood comes from its dense, hard and heavy wood that even beavers won’t usually touch.

Right after I wrote that I hadn’t been seeing many great blue herons I watched this one catch a fish. It looked like a small horned pout, which are plentiful in our ponds and rivers. It must not have been enough because the bird went on fishing.

I thought of the story of the ugly duckling when I saw a juvenile wood duck wearing a Mona Lisa smile. I thought, you don’t fool me. I know you. When you grow up you’ll be the most beautiful duck in the pond.

A little autumn meadowhawk wondered what I was doing and came to have a look. These small red dragonflies are probably the most inquisitive of all dragonflies in this area. They are also the ones that land on me more frequently than any of the others.

I’m not sure I’d want this dragonfly to land on me though, because it must have been at least four inches long. These are easily the biggest dragonflies I’ve seen and also one of the hardest to identify but last year I settled on the name “lance tipped darner.” It has a beautiful body, as if it was covered in jewels. Its pinched wasp like waist and rear appendages are other clues but even experts have trouble with this one so I just enjoy its beauty.

It seems strange to say it but one of the rarest things to appear in this post is a rainbow. I see so few of them I can’t ever remember when or where I saw the last one. And look at that sky. There isn’t a cloud in it, and it wasn’t raining that day. Maybe it was misty up there.

We belong to no cult. We are not Nature Lovers. We don’t love nature any more than we love breathing. Nature is simply something indispensable, like air and light and water, that we accept as necessary to living, and the nearer we can get to it the happier we are. ~Louise Dickenson Rich

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Fall Flowers

Posted in Flowers, Insects, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Wildflowers, tagged Bird's Foot Trefoil, Black Eyed Susan, Blue Hydrangea, Butterfly Bush, Canon SX70 HS, Fall Flowers, Great Blue Lobelia, Keene, Knapweed, Mexican Sunflower, Monarch Butterfly, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New England Asters, New Hampshire, NH, Nodding Burr Marigold, Nodding Smartweed, Olympus TG-6, Petunias, PJM Rhododendron, Purple Coneflower, Purple Stemmed Beggar Ticks, Purple Turtlehead, Royal Catchfly, Sedum, Soapwort, Swanzey New Hampshire, White Aster, White Heath Aster, Yellow Sulfur Butterfly on September 27, 2025| 21 Comments »

For many in this part of New Hampshire September is aster month, so I’m starting this post with some beautiful New England asters. Though they are sometimes grown in gardens the plants seen in this post were all found in the wild. Above is a light purple aster with flowers about an inch and a half in diameter on a plant that was about five feet tall. Things that affect flower and plant size are drought and how much direct sunlight they receive. These plants grow in full afternoon sunlight so they’re usually at their best.

New England aster flower colors range from shades of purple to white, with white being the rarest seen in nature in this area. My favorites are the dark ones seen here. I see more of these each year. They seem to be overtaking the lighter purples seen in that previous shot. It seems odd because I can remember when the darker ones were the hardest to find. In any event they’re all beautiful and we’re fortunate to have so many in the wild.

I thought I’d show you how these plants grow naturally. Their strategy for gathering light is to grow taller than surrounding goldenrods, Joe Pye weeds, and other tall native perennials. These examples towered over me. I had to wade through shoulder high growth just to get to them. Thankfully ticks are done for this year but there are still some mosquitoes about. All of this growth is found under high voltage power lines and will be mowed to the ground before new growth starts next spring. This is a wet / damp area near the river and plants here grow very fast once they get going.

Though I don’t see a lot of white among the New England asters, white is probably the most common color among all the other asters combined. This is a heath aster, the smallest flowered aster I know of. Each flower is probably about the size of a standard aspirin or maybe just a bit bigger, and the flowers cover each stem so fully that sometimes you can barely see green. They appear very bushy and with countless flowers and bees love them.

Heath asters grow their branches both vertically and horizontally. When the flowers bloom they all turn to face the sun so it appears that they’re on only one side of the stem. If you look closely you’ll see how the flower stems on the shaded side of the main stems bend around so even flowers that appear on the shaded side can get sunlight. It’s an amazing thing and it’s always about light, everything is driven by light, and when you finally figure that out you can better understand why plants do what they do. Not only plants though. Watch insects fly in bright sunbeams in the evening, and watch as birds dart out of the shadows to catch them. Look closely at tree trunks lit up by bright sunlight as the sun goes down and see the dragonflies sleeping on them there in the light. Watch as a mother turkey leads her babies through bars of bright warm rays at the edges of fields in the evenings, close enough to the shadowed forest to quietly disappear when she sees you watching. Cottontails and woodchucks do the same. In one way or another light is behind the movement we see in nature.

I could fill this post with all the various asters that grow here but readers might get bored with that so here is an old autumn standby, nodding bur marigolds (Bidens tripartita.) This native plant usually stays about a foot tall but this year I’ve seen them reach two feet, which is taller than I thought they grew. These plants love to grow right at the edge of streams and ponds in full sunshine and when the water rises they often find themselves growing in it, which they don’t seem to mind. They all turn their faces toward the sun so getting a good shot of them can be trickier than it might appear at times.

Nodding bur marigold gets its common name from the way the flowers nod toward the ground as they age. The one to one and a half inch flowers look like small sunflowers, with deeply pleated petals. Plants are annuals which grow new from seed each year, and they may be “planted” where they grow by mallards, which are said to love their seeds. They also “move around” I’ve noticed. One spot beside a stream last year had hundreds of plants growing there and this year there’s not a single plant. They bloom quite late, sometimes just before a frost, but since we often have later first frosts now they have a little longer to beautify stream edges.

Nodding bur marigold is in the bidens family of plants, and so are beggar ticks (Bidens frondosa,) seen above. Plants in this family have barbed seeds that stick to your clothes and animal fur just like ticks do. That’s why they have names which include the word tick or bur, like tickseed or stick tight or devils pitchfork. Beggar tick plants almost always grow near water and can get huge. I’ve seen them as tall and as wide as a man in perfect conditions but usually they get about waist high. The leaves resemble those of marijuana plants but have no relation that I know of. This one grew in a ditch so I could see its flowers, otherwise it would have been taller than I was.

The bidens family of plants is made up of over 200 species which in turn are included in the much larger aster (Asteraceae) family. The small red, orange, or yellow flowers of beggar ticks can be thought of as an aster without petals.

It’s easy to see how beggar tick seeds got the superstitious name “devil’s pitchfork.” This not very good shot of a tiny seed was taken previously in a spot where several dozen plants grew and of course I had the seeds all over me by the time I had finished. Their strategy is, when you try to get them off your clothes the weak spot between the barbed fork and the seed breaks and the seed falls to the ground while you try to get the fish hook like barbs out of your clothes. Many plants have learned to let animals and humans move their seeds from place to place, and this is one of them.

I’m seeing more monarch butterflies than thistle plants now but I still find them getting together occasionally.

One cool, very dewy morning I saw a small yellow flower that I couldn’t remember ever having seen before. I couldn’t even guess what it might be. It looked like half a flower.

A closer look showed that the small yellow “half flower” was actually four or five bird’s foot trefoil flowers that had been bent down by the heavy dew. I was seeing flowers that I had seen a thousand times before but I was seeing the backs of them, which I had apparently never seen. Nature never fails to surprise and amaze. And teach.

Some flowers hang on until we have a heavy frost and knapweed is one of them. It’s considered an invasive plant but its seeds are still used by the highway department to stabilize embankments. I’ve always liked the airy look of the flowers. It reminds me of ragged robin in some ways.

Nodding smartweed (Persicaria lapathifolia) is also called pale smartweed and curly top smartweed. It is another plant that grows right at the water’s edge or sometimes in the water. It is very common and is said to be native throughout most of the world, which seems unusual. Like all smartweeds finding an open flower on its drooping racemes requires good eyesight. If you find one it should be greenish white to pink and small enough to easily hide behind a pea. Its seeds are quickly eaten by ducks and other waterfowl. I didn’t want to get wet so I didn’t bother looking for an open flower on this plant.

Black eyed Susan is another of those plants that hang on until the bitter end. You can often still find them blooming under trees in mid to late October, protected from frost by the tree canopy. They now appear toward the end of June but if we say July first to October first that’s three months of bloom time. A good run for any plant.

Soapwort (Saponaria officinalis) is a plant that is almost always found near water, and that’s just as it should be because if you chop the plant into small pieces and scrub them together in water a soapy lather forms. That’s because the plant’s leaves contain sapronin, which is a natural soap. In the past soap was made from an extract of the plant and it was used for clothes washing. I’m sure it must have been a lot gentler than lye soap. Soapwort plants were first grown here in gardens from seed carried from Europe by early settlers. Like so many other plants it quickly escaped and naturalized along river banks, where it is still found today. The sapronin it contains is toxic to animals and humans.

I saw this view and my first thought was “nature’s garden” so that’s what I’ll call it. There was several kinds of goldenrod, boneset, purple loosestrife, Joe Pye weed, swamp milkweed, pickerel weed and white waterlilies all in this smallish area near a local pond.

From nature’s garden I decided to visit a few local gardens open to the public. In a local children’s butterfly garden I turned a corner and saw a beautiful shade of blue in the buds just opening on a big leaf hydrangea. Theses plants are common in this area now but I can remember when you had to go south to Massachusetts to see them. My grandmother loved hydrangeas but she never lived to see blue ones. Slowly they started appearing here, in the late 1970s I think, but I never had anyone I gardened for even ask about them. For a long time hydrangeas, any hydrangea, were considered old fashioned. Other plants like snowberry were also thought to be out of date and went unused.

The blue color is not genetic in big leaf hydrangeas so the soil they’re planted in has to be amended. There are many sites online that explain the process. Just search for “Blue hydrangeas and aluminum sulfate.” Since I’ve never grown one I can’t say how well any of the methods work but I do see a lot of blue hydrangeas.

In another park I fond another blue; the beautiful great blue lobelia, which appeared to be suffering from dryness. Though native I’ve never seen it in the wild. Luckily they grow a few dozen plants here, otherwise most people wouldn’t know what it looked like.

In a local business garden red was well represented by Mexican sunflowers. The last time I showed one of these flowers someone wondered about the yellow streaks on the petals. I think that’s just the way the sunlight fell on them. Of all the flower colors red is the hardest to keep true in a camera and because this one is surrounded closely on all sides by other plants there’s no way to find better light. I suppose an overcast day would be best but it’s been wall to wall sunshine for so long now I can’t remember the last time it rained.

Another red flowered garden plant I saw was called royal catchfly (Silene regia.) It is one I’ve never seen but from what I’ve read it is native to the central U.S. Though it might have been a bit past its prime it was beautiful. It likes dry, rocky soils at wood margins and prairies. It can reach four feet and blooms in July to August. If you’re interested in having more red flowered perennials in your garden you might want to look this one up. If nothing else you’ll see photos of mature flowers. The plant seen here had just been planted and was fenced off, so this isn’t a very good representation of what is a beautiful native flower. If you’ve ever seen our native cardinal flower, this is that same red, I think.

Sedums are flourishing this year, probably because they can store moisture in their succulent leaves and stems. Their flowers are said to be nectar rich, which explains why there are almost always bees on them. This one had two or three on it but the camera ran them off.

I used to spend quite a lot of time in nurseries and garden centers but every time I see something like this petunia I realize that it has been years since I’ve really looked at what they have to offer. Once it was tough to slip new plants past me but now they all seem new. I’ve never seen anything like this petunia. Actually though, I think I have seen a blue one in this pattern as well.

I showed a turtlehead flower to my friend Dave on a hike years ago and he saw a turtle immediately. “That looks just like a turtle” he said before I even told him the name of the plant. I was a bit surprised because I had never seen a turtle in this plant. Until just a while ago that is. I looked at the photo above of a plant in my garden and there was the turtle, after so many years. I suppose that says a lot about the limits of my imagination but I wasn’t imagining the browning of these flowers. Turtleheads like a lot of water which is why they usually grow in swamps, but we’re very dry right now and I haven’t seen a single flower in the wild. I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to “un-see” the turtle now.

Purple coneflowers are still blooming but it looked like the endless sunshine had bleached most of the purple out of them.

PJM rhododendrons decided to give it another go with a second bloom. These plants usually bloom just after Forsythias get started in spring. They are also called small or little leaf rhododendron. The PJM in the name is for Peter J. Mezitt who developed the plant and also founded Weston Nurseries in Weston, Massachusetts. It’s a very pretty plant but it is overused in my opinion. They’re seen at many banks, shopping centers, and other public places. Some plants are seen so often they aren’t really seen any longer, and this is one of those.

Everywhere I went butterfly bushes (Buddleia) bloomed but there were no takers. Or I should say there were no butterflies. There were plenty of bees visiting.

Most of the butterflies seem to prefer native plants this year. A large group of asters growing in a ditch had three or four sulfur yellows flying around it, and the buzzing of many bees could be heard from a distance.

I saw this small flowered white aster in a garden of a local business that I enjoy walking through now and then. For me it is proof that, even though we are surrounded by asters in nature and couldn’t escape them if we tried, we still love them enough to grow them in our gardens. That’s no surprise to me because they’re very beautiful.

What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us…we find ourselves falling into a deeper embrace with all that is open to encounter, both internally and in the surrounding, breathing world.
~John O’Donohue

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Down By the River

Posted in Animals, Aquatics, Birds, Flowers, Fruit, Fungi, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Trees, Wildflowers, tagged Allegheny Monkey Flower, Ashuelot River, Ashuelot River Dam, Ashuelot River Trail, Beaver Swimming, Blue Vervain, Bottle Gentian, Broad Leaf Arrowhead, Buttonbush, Canon SX70 HS, Cedar Waxwing, Clinkers, Closed Gentian, Fall Plants, False Nut Sedge, Fragrant White Water Liliy, Great Blue Heron, Joe Pye Weed, Keene, Keene Roundhouse, Locomotive Repair, Mad Dog Skullcap, Mallards, Marsh Bellflower, Marsh Skullcap, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Oak Bracket Fungus, Olympus TG-6, Pickerel Weed, Swamp Milkweed, Tall White Rattlesnake Root on September 13, 2025| 24 Comments »

This is the time of year when you’ll see most of the flowers along the Keene section of the Ashuelot River in bloom, so I’ve been walking along it now and then. The river is very low now but that’s typical. It usually reaches its lowest point in August.

Tall white rattlesnake root is almost always the first flower I see in bloom along the river at this time of year, but that’s only because of where it grows along the trail. This particular plant didn’t look too healthy. I could see where an impatient insect had chewed through the side of a flower to get at the pollen. The Native American Choctaw tribe used the tops of the plant in a tea that they used to relieve pain. It is said that the common name comes from the way that some Native American tribes used the plant to treat snakebite. We still have wood rattlers here but they’re rarely seen. Still, I don’t go sticking my hand in holes.

This is mostly a winding trail that follows a very winding river. The trail isn’t that far from where the railroad repair depot used to be in Keene, and it is black because it was “paved” with the unburned slag from the big steam locomotive fireboxes. Most of the ballast used on city railroad beds was this slag, so there must have been huge amounts of it coming from the roundhouse that once operated near here.

The slag is usually called “clinkers” or “clinker ash” and it is made up of pieces of fused ash and sulfur which often built-up over time in a hot coal fire. I found one and took a shot of it so you could see what they look like. Firebox temperature reached 2000 to 2300 degrees F. in a steam locomotive but they still didn’t burn the coal completely. A long tool called a fire hook was used to pull the clinkers out of the firebox. You don’t want to walk barefoot here, and I know that from painful experience. Clinkers always remind me of meteorites.

From the trail I saw some oak bracket fungus (Pseudoinonotus dryadeus,) which is also called weeping oak polypore. What it weeps is a golden liquid which can, depending on the light, look a lot like blood. The weeping process is called guttation, and in fungi the liquid exuded is a mixture of water and metabolites produced by fungal cells. The oak bracket is parasitic and causes heart rot, which means certain death to the tree. Thankfully I found these examples on an oak log, not a living tree. This fungus is considered rare in certain areas and in my own experience this was only the second time I had seen it. It was unexpected, and it held my interest for a while. This fungus is very hard.

Broadleaf arrowhead flowers (Sagittaria latifolia) blossomed in large groups here and there along the river bank.

Arrowheads are one of my favorite aquatics. The inch size three petal flowers are always the purest white. These plants were an important food for Native Americans, who sliced the roots thinly and dried them and then ground them into a powder that was used much like flour. Ducks, beavers, muskrats and other birds and animals eat the seeds, roots, and leaves. Another name for the plant is duck potatoes, which comes from the small potato like roots that ducks love.

Then all of the sudden I had reached one of my favorite places along the river. It’s a short side trail off the main trail that leads to a small, maybe 10 X 10 foot out of the way space right at the edge of the river where people fish. I don’t fish anymore but I still like to go there because it is absolutely packed with wildflowers. On this day I was greeted by Allegheny monkey flowers (Mimulus ringens.) Lots of them. Don’t ask me how they got their name. I don’t see a monkey in them so I’ve never been able to figure it out. It is said that hummingbirds love this flower but I didn’t see any sipping from them on this day.

In fact I think there are more monkey flowers in this small place than I’ve seen anywhere else. It’s easy to forget yourself here but this is not the place for that because you are right at the river’s edge. If you weren’t paying attention and fell in, that would be too bad.

Falling into the river here would mean you’d have quite a long swim back to where you started. If you had the breath for it, that is. I do all I can to stay out of deep water these days. Though I used to walk in and across this river in various places as a boy that never happened here. Parts of this river were dredged in the past so steamboats could travel it, so the channel through this area could be quite deep.

The small blue / purple flowers on the riverbank in that previous shot are marsh skullcap (Scutellaria galericulata,) which is a common wetland plant in this area. Usually if it likes a certain spot it will grow in large numbers. Another skullcap often found growing in the same places is mad dog skullcap (Scutellaria lateriflora.) Both plants get their common name from how the flower calyx resembles the medieval helmet called a skull cap. “Mad dog” skullcap was once thought to cure rabies caused by a mad dog. Mad dog skullcap blossoms are slightly smaller than those pf marsh skullcap.

When Native Americans wanted to go on a spirit walk or vision quest skullcaps were one of the plants they chose. I tried mad dog skullcap years ago and didn’t see any real difference between it and tobacco as far as the mind goes. What it might have done to the body remains unknown, and that is why you don’t eat (or smoke) plants you know next to nothing about. It’s really just not a good idea.

This is a closer look at the marsh skullcap flowers, which almost always appear in pairs. These examples were just opening. They’re quite hairy little things.

Another flower with the word marsh in its name is the marsh bell flower (Campanula aparinoides,) which in my experience is a rare thing. I’ve seen it in only two places, and this is one of them. Though some blue flowers the ones that grow here are always white. They are in the campanula family and have the familiar bell shape, along with wiry stems. They’re also very small and tricky to get a photo of. Though I tried all three cameras, this was the best I could do. There are hundreds of them here in this tiny space.

Buttonbush flowerheads were just starting to pass on when I was here. They always seem to grow near water and that’s a good thing, because all those seeds will feed any waterfowl that happen by.

Blue vervain was also on its way to becoming seedheads. These flowers bloom from the bottom of the spike upwards, so when you see them at this stage you know they’re just about done. The seedheads that look like zippers will feed cardinals, swamp sparrows, field sparrows, song sparrows, juncos, and other birds. If you have a better memory than I have you can over time learn to make educated guesses as to what birds you’ll see in any given area, just by noting which plants grow there.

Joe Pye weed still had a full head of its pretty, thread like, dusty rose flowers. This is another plant that almost always grows near water or in places that flood occasionally. Goldfinches, black-capped chickadees, tufted titmice, and dark-eyed juncos are said to eat this plant’s seeds.

There is a small channel or ditch that connects the river to a sort of backwater, and pickerel weeds called it home. It was hard to tell how deep the water in the ditch was but it might have been knee deep. I certainly didn’t want to fall in and find out. This is another plant that feeds a lot of waterfowl with its seeds. Usually when you see pickerel weed going to seed you’ll also see ducks and geese.

I stopped and admired a beautiful swamp milkweed and marveled at how there was so much beauty packed into this relatively tiny 100 square foot space. Even more amazing to me was the fact that I had seen it underwater just a few months ago. This spot floods each spring and if you come here right after the water subsides everything is flattened and covered with silt, so that means all this amazing growth happens in what seems like no time at all. Three to four months to turn a mud hole into a slice of paradise. Given time nature can transform any space into a garden.

False nut sedge is a plant I haven’t seen much of in the past few years but I’m seeing quite a lot of it this year. This is a plant that will grow on lawns that are watered daily by irrigation systems. In that context they’re considered a weed but out here is where they belong.

In the shallows near the river’s banks white water lilies bloom, and on this day there were hundreds of them in bloom all along the trail. How could this day get any better? I remember asking myself.

At one point I saw a young beaver swimming by. It was small enough to have me thinking it was a muskrat at first, but then it slapped its tail (thump, splash) and dove, so I knew for sure it was a beaver. Muskrats will just silently disappear.

This waterlily grew so close to shore I could see into it, and that’s something that doesn’t happen often. They’re even more beautiful when you can see all of them, I think. They can grab your attention and hold you for a few moments, and you get a lesson in silence, stillness, and peace right then and there, standing on the river bank.

The bottle gentians weren’t blooming on previous walks along the river so I went back one evening later on and there they were. They are also called closed gentians and they’re closed so tight only a strong insect like a bumblebee can pry them open. I remember how happy I was the day I found them here. Before that I had to drive for 45 minutes and drive up an old gravel road to see them. Now it takes just a few minutes of walking in this beauty filled place. They’re quite a rare plant in this area so it’s always good to see them in bloom.

Some of the flowers hadn’t darkened to their beautiful deep blue color yet. Or maybe it’s purple? I’ve heard people call them purple but being color blind I’m not one to argue. And in the end what does it matter? I met a teenage boy and girl fishing from the river bank near the gentians and showed them a phone photo of what to look for. Then they showed me photos of a bass and a pickerel they had caught that evening. Since I can remember when this river was so polluted it seemed dead, their photos were wonderful to see. And it was great to see young folks fishing here again.

In the low evening light under clouds this great blue heron fishing just off shore appeared very blue indeed. As I was taking photographs of the heron a man stopped and asked if I had seen “the white one.” The white one he spoke of was most likely the egret that was here last year, but though I’ve gone back to the river a few times since that day I haven’t seen it. When I asked him where on the river he had seen it he pointed at the ground and said “right here.”

I almost always see mallards on the river and this day was no exception. These looked like beautiful young birds.

Cedar waxwings come and go here at the river but as I watched them on this day I was reminded of the time years ago when they first introduced themselves to me. I was very near this spot standing on shore just at the edge of the water and all of the sudden this bird came flying fast like a rocket, right at my face. It pulled up at the last minute like a jet fighter, close enough so I could have tickled its belly. And then another, and another did the same. What is with these birds? I wondered. Finally I’d had enough ducking and throwing my arm up over my face so I turned to leave and there was the answer; a silky dogwood bush filled with ripe berries. I had unknowingly been standing between the birds and their food. That was the day I learned how much cedar waxwings liked silky dogwood berries and what they’ll do to get them. I also learned later on that sometimes birds will get intoxicated on overripe, fermented berries. I thought back to the way those waxwings behaved that day, and I wondered if maybe they had been a little tipsy. Even if they were flying while drunk they were amazing to watch. So sleek and beautiful.

It looked like this pair might be thinking of teaching me another lesson, so I decided to hit the road.

I looked at the old granite dam before I left. You don’t see it dry like this too often so it’s always worth a look. After all the rain we had for the three months of spring seeing it this way was a surprise. Last year as I stood here I watched a white egret walking in the water on the holding side of the dam and that told me it had silted up, almost to the top. Built in around 1777 by the Faulkner and Colony company to power their woolen mill, it has certainly withstood the test of time. But its usefulness has long since passed and I’m in favor of removing it. So are lots of other people, but it is one of those ideas that gets kicked around occasionally without anything ever actually being done about it so here it sits, high and dry until it rains.

I’ll end this post with a mallard on the rocks. I hope it was worth the read.

It is very important to go out alone, to sit under a tree—not with a book, not with a companion, but by yourself—and observe the falling of a leaf, hear the lapping of the water, the fisherman’s song, watch the flight of a bird, and of your own thoughts as they chase each other across the space of your mind. If you are able to be alone and watch these things, then you will discover extraordinary riches which no government can tax, no human agency can corrupt, and which can never be destroyed. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Thanks for coming by.

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More August Flowers

Posted in Flowers, Fruit, Insects, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Wildflowers, tagged Blue Cohosh Flowers, Blue Cohosh Fruit, Bumblebees, Butterfly Weed, Canon SX70 HS, Carpenter Bees, Dinner Plate Hibiscus, Forget Me Nots, Hedge Bindweed, Hog Peanut Flowers, Ironweed, Keene, Lady's Thumb, Late Summer Flowers, Monarch Butterfly, Monarch om Goldenrod, Native Plants, Native Wildflowers, Nature, Nature Study, New England Asters, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus TG-6, Red Eyed Fly, Slender Fragrant Goldenrod, Smartweed, Summer Woods, Swanzey New Hampshire, Sweet Everlasting, Tansy, Verbena, Virgin's Bower, Virgin's Bower Seed Head, Wild Cucumber, Wild Cucumber Fruit on September 6, 2025| 11 Comments »

Monarch butterflies still seem quite easy to find this year. I’m seeing them just about everywhere I go. In gardens on butterfly weed…

….and in the wild on goldenrod. On this day the bright sunlight shined through this one’s wings. Or tried to, anyway. These butterflies are like flowers; they like lots of sunshine. It’s rare in my experience to find them in the shade.

I’m also seeing huge numbers of bumblebees, carpenter bees, and others. The honeybees have a way to go to catch up with their numbers, but they had a hard spring with a late freeze and lots of rain.

We have somewhere around ten species of bumblebee in New Hampshire and only one of carpenter bee, according to the State Fish and Game Department. It is said that historically there were once eighteen species of bumblebee, which means that their numbers have fallen by almost half. This carpenter bee was enjoying bee balm flowers. Carpenter bees have shiny black abdomens. The Xylocopa part of their scientific name means “wood-cutter” and that’s where their common name comes from. They nest in perfectly round holes they chew in wood.

Though it would be nice to see more honeybees they are not native to this country and they aren’t the only insect pollinating flowers. That’s why I don’t get too concerned about bee species. The way I see it, if a bee (or hoverfly or wasp) flies from flower to flower it is pollinating them. From the amazing amount of fruit I’ve seen this year on native bushes and trees, I’d say they’re all doing a great job.

This verbena plant in a local garden reminded me of the blue vervain I find in the wild with its tiny flowers, and that’s as it should be since both plants are in the Verbenaceae family. With 150 species known it’s a good size family of plants. Some verbena plants used in gardens are tall and sprawling but the plant shown here was only about three feet tall.

I saw another “dinner plate” hibiscus. This one was pretty, with large white flowers edged in very delicate pink. It’s every bit as beautiful as the red one I showed in that last flower post, in my opinion.

This shot shows some of the local wildflowers that are blooming now including asters, goldenrod, Joe Pye weed, purple loosestrife, boneset and tear thumb.

Wild cucumber has tendrils so instead of growing tall and falling over like some vines it can climb like a grape. Long flower spikes (racemes) grow up from the vine and look a bit odd standing up so straight. The greenish white, star shaped male flowers of wild cucumber have 6 petals that are twisted slightly. The female flowers grow at the base of the male flower stems and are yellowish green and not at all showy. There is usually only one female flower for every 5 or 6 male flowers, which is why there are so few fruits seen on each vine. Its leaves are quite big, so it can grow in partial shade as well as in full sunlight. This is a common plant in this area.

I haven’t seen any wild cucumber fruit yet this year so I’m using this photo taken previously, which shows the vine’s tendrils along with the fruit. Each fruit or seed capsule is about four inches long and oval. Each has two seeds that look like large cucumber seeds, or maybe pumpkin seeds. Though the spines look sharp they’re actually pliable and bend easily. My friends and I used to throw them at each other when we were in grade school and I can’t remember anyone ever getting hurt. I can however remember friends getting hurt by thrown snowballs, so if you feel the need to throw something at someone wild cucumber fruit is probably the safest.

I’m going to veer away from flowers for a moment to show you something few ever get to see, which is blue cohosh berries ripening. Each small pea size berry turns slowly from green to blue, but this was the first time I had ever seen it actually happening. It seems to be a hemispherical process rather than random blotches like in some other berries. The berries are actually seeds with a fleshy blue coating that protects them, and it is the seeds that are considered the plant’s true fruit, so the plant is a bit unusual.

It is said that nothing will eat the berries of blue cohosh because they’re toxic and I have indeed found them untouched in early spring, but it looked like something (or someone) had been picking them in this location. Or maybe they had simply fallen off.

This shot is one I took years ago of berries I found in the spring and I’m using it to show how the dark blue berries become lighter colored over time. They end up kind of sky blue due to waxy white crystals that cover the berries and reflect the light in a way that makes them appear lighter colored. This waxy, dusty “bloom” is why some describe them as “blueberries dipped in confectioner’s sugar.” In fact the same pruinose coating can be found on blueberries, plums, grapes, and even a few lichens and insects. The word pruinose has its origins in the Latin word for hoarfrost. You can see how it has worn off in one or two places on this berry, showing the actual dark blue color below.

These are the blue cohosh flowers that produced the berries in the previous photos. I found several plants in bloom last May 24th. They’re some of the most unusual flowers in the forest. Now I’ve just got to remember that the plants bloom at the end of May and ripen their fruit in late August. They’re so rare I don’t want to miss them. Each flower is about the size of an aspirin.

Hog peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata) is another of those plants that people seem to walk right by without seeing. The plant’s flowers are small but colored a beautiful blue and sometimes hard to see, so that could be why it doesn’t get much attention. You can see the flower on the right in the photo just starting to open. Like the groundnut plants I showed in the last flower post this plant is a legume in the bean family. Like a true peanut, after pollination some of its tiny flowers bury themselves in the soil and form a small, edible bean like seeds that give the plant its common name. Mice collect these seeds and store them in large caches that Native Americans used to search for. They can be eaten raw or cooked. The plant also forms inch long, pea-like, above ground pods that contain three or four inedible seeds.

Large amounts of small, heart shaped leaves give hog peanut’s presence away. I’ve walked sections of rail trail where they grew for a mile or more along the length. After every yard or so there would be what looked like a small tendril or flower stalk twining around a nearby taller plant. The end of this stalk is where clusters of six or eight beautiful but tiny flowers would appear. Flower stalks might reach a foot tall but the leaves are barely above your shoe tops. The leaves in this shot look like they might have been a bit sunburned.

Imagine how important a plant would have to be to take up space on a small wooden ship about to cross the Atlantic. Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare) was one of those. For centuries In Europe dried tansy plants were added to the straw in mattresses to keep bedbugs away. It was also used in vegetable gardens for pest control and in the days before insecticides were known, that was important. But of course once it came to be grown here it escaped cultivation in no time, and by 1785 it had naturalized in New England. It could hardly be called invasive though. I know of only a handful of plants growing naturally. If you can imagine an ox-eye daisy with only its central yellow disc flowers and no white ray flowers, that’s what tansy looks like.

In the last flower post I showed pearly everlasting, so in this post I’ll show another everlasting called sweet everlasting. One big difference between the two is while pearly everlasting flowers open wide, sweet everlasting flowers seem to refuse to do so. That’s because on sweet everlasting the bracts that enclose the true flowers don’t open until after the flowers have been pollinated. The actual flowers are the yellow bits seen here, and just enough of them show outside the white bracts to allow insects to reach them. Once pollinated they’ll open into the flower shape we all carry in our minds. They’ll also smell just like maple syrup by then, and that’s another difference between sweet and pearly everlasting. Sweet everlasting was once called rabbit tobacco, and its maple syrup flavored leaves were chewed and smoked by both native Americans and early settlers. Everlastings get that name from the way they’ll last for years after they’re cut and dried.

After searching all summer I finally found some white bindweed flowers with no pink in them. When I was a boy I used to have to search all summer for flowers with pink in them. For that reason I think the future will be filled with bi-color pink and white bindweed flowers. Pure white flowers will become just a story told by the same old folks who tell stories about Woodstock, and when there were no computers or cell phones.

Goldenrods are notoriously difficult to identify but some, like slender fragrant goldenrod (Solidago tenuifolia) seen here are easier. Its long slender, single veined, willow like leaves and its pleasant, vanilla like fragrance make it stand out from others. It is also called flat topped goldenrod.

Native virgin’s bower (Clematis virginiana) is a vine that clings by curling its leaf stems around the branches of nearby shrubs and then drapes itself over them so it can get plenty of sunshine. An extract made from the plant is hallucinogenic and was used by Native Americans to induce dreams, but it is considered quite dangerous. Mixed with other plants like milkweed, it was also used medicinally. It is a plant that can cause internal bleeding, so you have to know what you’re doing to use it. The plant’s small white flowers can cover entire hillsides, and that helps give it the name “traveler’s joy.” Sweet autumn clematis is a cultivated variety of small, white flowered clematis that comes closest in both habit and flower size to this native.

Virgin’s bower grows long feathery filaments called styles on its seeds (fruits) so the wind can carry them long distances. Botanically speaking these “seeds” are achenes, which are fruits with one seed. In the early stage seen in the above shot they look like twisted wire, and this gives them the name “devils’ darning needles.” Later on they’ll become feathery and then cotton like, and this phase gives them the name “old man’s beard.” They often persist in the final cottony phase through winter. It’s a plant that changes common names several times, according to the opinion of the one describing it.

A shiny red eyed fly landed on a nearby milkweed leaf to watch me and I know my friend Dave likes them, or at least likes to see them, so I’ve included a photo of it here.

Some species of smartweed are called lady’s thumb (Persicaria maculosa) because of the dark spot seen on each leaf, said to have been left by a lady with a dirty thumb. But the problem is, several different species have this dark spot on the leaves, and they all seem to resemble each other in one way or another. To make matters worse, some are native and some are not. That’s why I just call them smartweeds, which they are, unless they’re a knotweed. The name smartweed comes from the way their peppery flavor makes your tongue smart if you bite into them. I’ve heard the experience of eating an entire leaf compared to eating a piece of burning paper, but I can’t say. I do know that certain Native Americans ate certain smartweeds, so the burning sensation must vary among the group. Even more likely is that Natives knew how to prepare them in ways that removed the worst of the peppery mouth burn. They were experts at knowing how to leach toxins out of plants so they could be used medicinally, or as food.

When you see a flower spike that looks like this, filled with light to dark pink flowers, you’ve found one of the smartweeds. These flowers are without petals and though it might not seem it, they open a few at a time. They’re said to be pollinated by flies, bees and butterflies. The plant’s seeds are edible but I leave them for the critters. Game birds, song birds, waterfowl and small animals eat the seeds and deer will eat the leaves. The growth of smartweeds is encouraged in many places because they attract migrating bird species. I hope a little smartweed education will reduce the urge that many seem to have to “be rid of those ugly weeds.”

Forget-me-nots still bloom here and there along trails. In the past I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of plants growing beside the river but on this day I saw only one. To see that beautiful clear blue again, even in such a small dose, was enough.

As a boy growing up in New Hampshire I never saw or heard of ironweed, and then as a gardener for many years I never saw it for sale in nurseries or ever had anyone ask me to plant it for them. Then many years later on this blog my blogging friend Ginny said she wished she had some in her garden. She had sent me a huge amount of bulbs and seeds collected from her garden so I thought I’d return the favor and get her a nursery gift certificate so she could buy some ironweed. Then a strange thing happened. One day I found this 7 foot tall plant with purple flowers on the side of the road and Google lens said it was ironweed. Then I found it in another location beside the road, and that is the eight foot plant tall plant that you see in the above photo. You can see how the people who cut all the grass on the side of the road let it be. How strange to not see something for all of my life and then start seeing it everywhere. It’s even growing at the local college.

For a moment or two I thought that I might have seen it in the past and maybe just thought it was another New England aster but no, the giant size of the plant and the color and shape of the flowers means this plant could never be confused with asters. I can’t help thinking that if Ginny hadn’t brought it up I never would have known ironweed, so I’m glad she did. There’s always room for another beautiful flower in my life, and I have thoughts of what the roadsides might be like when they’re lined with ironweed in late summer. I’ve noticed that the flowers darken as they age, so they get even more beautiful with time. If you’d like to screen a spot in your yard with a flowering plant that dies back to the ground in winter, maybe ironweed is for you.

This is the first New England aster I’ve seen blooming and I was lucky because it was my favorite aster color.

But if you don’t happen to like the dark colored New England asters I’m sure your favorites will be able to be found as well. Just have a look around. There will be plenty more coming along.

Flowers construct the most charming geometries: circles like the sun, ovals, cones, curlicues and a variety of triangular eccentricities, which when viewed with the eye of a magnifying glass seem a Lilliputian frieze of psychedelic silhouettes. ~Duane Michals

Thanks for stopping in.

A LITTLE FACT CHECKING ON POLLINATION:

Pollination happens when pollen from one flower is transferred to the stigma of another flower of the same species. It doesn’t matter how the pollen is transferred or what kind of animal or insect transfers it. It can even be transferred by paintbrush.

There are over 200,000 species of animal pollinators and the majority are insects. At least 75% of all flowering plants on earth are pollinated by insects and animals. Beetles pollinate 88% of the 240,000 flowering plants on earth. Other pollinators are bees, butteries, moths, birds, bats, water, wind and even the plants themselves.

Pollinators by Numbers

Three-fourths of the world’s flowering plants and about 35 percent of the world’s food crops depend on animal pollinators to reproduce. More than 3,500 species of native bees help increase crop yields. Some scientists estimate that one out of every three bites of food we eat in the U.S. exists because of animal pollinators like bees, butterflies and moths, birds and bats, beetles and other insects.

Honeybees represent only a small fraction of all 20,000 bee species worldwide. They are not native to the U.S. Colonists brought them over in the 1600s.

There are more than 3,600 species of bee in the U.S. and approximately 70% percent of these bees nest in the ground.

Almonds are the only U.S. crop that relies 100% on pollination by honeybees.

Of the ten major crops produced in the U.S. only alfalfa relies on insect pollination.

The ten are corn, soybeans, wheat, alfalfa, cotton, hay, tobacco, rice, sorghum, barley. Cattle, corn, and soybeans are the top three U.S. farm products. Corn is wind pollinated and soybeans are self pollinating.

Americans throw away about 25% of the food they purchase for at-home consumption.

40% of all food grown and produced in the U.S. is never eaten.

Dandelions are the first food for bees emerging in the spring, yet we do all we can to make sure they don’t grow in our yard.

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On the Edge of the Forest

Posted in Amphibians, Birds, Insects, Lichens, Nature, Orchids, Scenery / Landscapes, Trees, Wildflowers, tagged American Basswood Fruit, American Hazelnuts, American Toad, Arrowwood Viburnum Fruit, Beech Nut, Canon SX70 HS, Catbird, Crumpled Rag Lichen, Doll's Eyes, Downy Rattlesnake Plantain Flowers, Downy Rattlesnake Plantain Orchid, Elderberry, False Solomon's Seal Fruit, Forest Trail, Ground Nut Flowers, Hobblebush Fall Color, Hobblebush Fruit, In the Forest, Indian Cucumber Fruit, Jewelweed Blossom, Keene, Narrow Leaf Cow Wheat, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus TG-6, Pink Earth Lichen, Purple Asters, Purple Flowering Raspberry, Purple Flowering Raspberry Fruit, Reindeer Lichen, Silky Dogwood Berries, Swanzey New Hampshire, Sweet Fern, Sweet Fern Fruit, Sweet Fern Tea, Wet Bumblebee, White Baneberry Fruit, Woodland Plants, Woodland Sunflower on August 23, 2025| 14 Comments »

Since I essentially grew up in a forest I just naturally gravitate towards them. When I feel the need for quiet and solitude I often walk along roads like that in the above photo. I think of it as total immersion in nature; a good way to clear the mind. I walk slowly and scan the verges for whatever, and I’m almost always surprised by what I see right there on the side of a road. Everything in this post was found that way and I’m putting it all here together to show you how you don’t really have to do anything but walk to see those sometimes small, always beautiful bits of nature that many miss.

You might think that forest edges are too shaded to see flowers but a surprising number of them can be seen in sunny spots along forested roads, like these woodland sunflowers. I had to wade through waist high bracken fern to get close to them but that was alright. Butterflies and dragonflies will often land on the large flat tops of bracken ferns to catch the sun.

For some plants the forested edges of roads seem to be their favorite place to grow. Elderberry is one of those and this year they’ve just exploded with growth and are carrying heavy loads of deep purple black berries, which the birds are eating as fast as they can. These berries have been used by man for thousands of years, as both food and medicine. They are still in use today.

Beech trees are a big part of any forest in this part of New England but since they are so big it’s a rare thing in my experience to be able to find a beech nut still on the tree like this one was. I often find hundreds of dried husks on the ground but this one was just starting to open and reveal the nut inside, which I’m sure a squirrel snapped up quickly.

Hazelnuts are having a great year. There are more nut clusters like the one shown here on the bushes than I’ve ever seen, so the bears will eat well too. It’s always amazing to think that those tiny red female flowers I saw last spring, hardly bigger than a hair, became these huge clusters of nuts. Hazelnut is another shrub that loves to grow on the edge of the forest and there are many thousands of them in this area weighed down by their heavy fruit.

Down at shoe top level you find the speckled fruit of false Solomon’s seal. The berries start out green and slowly turn red randomly, which creates this speckled effect seen here. Soon they’ll be all red and nice and ripe and mice, turkeys and many other creatures will eat them up. I look for their yellowed leaves with dark stripes that point to ripening berries. They’re usually easier to see than the fruit, which often hangs right down to the ground. Another name for them is treacle berry, because they are said to taste like molasses. This is one of those plants that show how spring and fall start on the forest floor.

Silky dogwood berries are often among the most beautiful, but this year something isn’t right with the ones I’ve looked at closely. They’re smaller than usual and are hard and lumpy. Normally they start out green, then turn white and finally, deep blue. There is a point as they ripen where they are both white and blue and they look just like white Chinese porcelain decorated with cobalt blue glaze. Cedar waxwings will stand on their heads and twirl like a top to get at these berries and many other birds eat them as well, so I hope they don’t all look like these did. They’re not looking very nutritious.

Hobblebush fruit go from green to red and then to deep purple black, so they’re right on schedule, and beautiful. As far as I know these native viburnum berries are not for us to eat. Only the animals will enjoy them and once ripe they disappear fast. Deer will eat the plants right to the ground but I’m not sure if they eat the berries.

Fall starts on the forest floor with plants like sarsaparilla and false Solomon’s seal turning first and then it slowly creeps up into the understory, as the leaves on the hobblebush seen above show. From there it will move up into the shorter trees like the striped maples, cherries and hawthorns, and then all of the sudden it will jump up into the red maples, and full on autumn will have begun. Are you ready?

Basswood berries are still green but they’ll ripen to blue and start falling to the wind. Each group of berries has its own sail in the form of a long yellow bract. They don’t look like much but those bracts can ride the wind for quite a distance and if everything goes well we’ll have more basswood trees. These trees are also called linden, and since they’re shorter than oaks and maples they love to grow in the understory at the edge of the forest. Basswood is very easy to carve and Native Americans carved spoons and many other utensils from it. Larger trees were hollowed out for canoes and the fragrant flowers were used in tea to ease cold symptoms.

The berries of the white baneberry plant (Actaea pachypoda) are called doll’s eyes for obvious reasons. They and all other parts of the plant are toxic and can kill, but the berries are so bitter one bite is all it takes to convince you that there will never be a second bite. The plant’s foliage resembles that of bugbane or black cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa) but neither it nor red baneberry are related to true cohosh. This plant likes rich, loamy soil at the base of hillsides. It’s fairly common to find it growing at the bottom of a slope at the edge of the forest. Ruffed grouse are thought to eat the berries but they aren’t considered a major source of food for wildlife. Some call them creepy but really, they’re just berries. Nature doesn’t come with labels like good and bad, it is we who own those words.

Arrowwood viburnum berries are a favorite of many birds. Just recently I watched two kingbirds fighting over them and I’ve seen sparrows and cedar waxwings eating them in the past. This smallish native understory shrub gets its name from its straight stems which Native Americans used for arrow shafts. It’s another one that loves to grow at forest edges. The strongly toothed oval leaves make it very easy to identify. White flowers and then blue fruit appear above the foliage, as is seen here.

I find the berries of Indian cucumber plants at just about knee high, or at about the height of a turkey’s eye. Though green when I took this photo some were beginning to turn dark purple. You have to look closely to see it but the upper tier of leaves just under the berries has started to turn a bright scarlet red. The purple dark berries against that red background make them very easy to see, and I’ve always suspected that this happens so turkeys and other birds will see them. It’s like a red flag to alert birds. This is another forest edge, relatively easy to find plant. Just look for two tiers of whorled leaves. Its common name comes from its small, cucumber like root.

If you go walking after a good storm with lots of wind you’ll often find limbs have fallen from the trees. If you look those limbs over closely, especially pine or hemlock limbs, you’ll often find foliose lichens like the crumpled rag lichen (Platismacia tuckermanii) attached to the bark. At least I think that’s what it is. Identifying plants can be a little difficult at times but I used to invest far more time in trying to identify lichens, sometimes many months, only to find in the end that I had something other than what I first thought. There are chemical tests where you put a drop of this or that on a lichen and it turns color but that’s not of much use to the colorblind, so I had to let it go.

Pink earth lichen likes to grow on sandy, almost nutrient free soil. It forms a kind of crust (thallus) on the sand, sometimes pink and sometimes leaning more toward grayish blue, depending on the quality of light, I think. When the time is right all these little spherical fruiting bodies (Apothecia) on short stalks appear. There’s only one other lichen that I know of that is like it, and it’s called the bubblegum lichen. The length of the apothecia stalk is what determines which one it is.

You can bet dollars to doughnuts that when you see pink earth lichen you’ll also see reindeer lichen somewhere nearby, because they like the same conditions. If you look closely you can also see a pixie cup lichen or two in this photo. They also like poor soil that’s on the dry side.

Another plant you’re likely to find growing in the conditions we’ve been talking about is sweet fern (Comptonia peregrina.) This plant is not a fern, it is a small native deciduous shrub with very aromatic leaves. You can make a pretty good tea with sweet fern by putting well rinsed, undamaged leaves in a mason jar, filling it with water and capping it loosely, and then leaving it on a windowsill in the sun for a few days. Boiling the leaves can make them bitter so gentle sun warming is best. There are many different methods described online but back in the 70s we used the simplest. It’s easy to make anything more complicated but you don’t have to.

Sweetfern fruit is found in a smallish grape size burr that holds varying numbers of small nutlets. Different people say different things about the flavor of both tea and nutlets, so you’re better off trying them yourself. The nutlet burrs aren’t easy to find at first but you might see one or two per plant if you look closely. That doesn’t sound like much but these plants usually grow in colonies that can be quite large. It’s hard to confuse them with other plants. I can’t think of another small shrub that looks and smells like them. Just rub a couple of leaves between your palms and sniff. On a hot day you won’t even have to do that, so strong is their scent.

Narrow leaf cow wheat is a plant that wants the best of two worlds. Though it has leaves and will photosynthesize it is also a parasite that will rob surrounding plants of nutrients. Plants that do so are known as a hemiparasites. Tiny white, tubular flowers tipped with yellow-green bloom at about shoe top height. It’s an easy plant to miss but they often grow in large colonies and that makes the easier to find. Look for them right at the very edge of roads and trails.

Downy rattlesnake plantain (Goodyera pubescens) is a small native orchid. Though some websites will tell you that it is deciduous, it is not. Its leaves will stay green under the snow all through winter and in the spring it will add new leaves and shed any old ones that need to be shed. There are about 800 different species of goodyeara orchids and many cross pollinate so I just admire their beautiful foliage and move on. This large clump must have come from seedpods that fell here. That beech leaf to the right will give you an idea of how small they really are. One plant wouldn’t even fill a teacup. These plants were found just off the side of a road.

This photo of the downy rattlesnake orchid’s flowers was taken with a phone camera so it isn’t very good but you can see how the tiny white flowers spiral up the top third of a foot tall, central stalk. These flowers always remind me of tiny teapots because that’s what their shape suggests. This is another plant that, when the light is in its favor, I can walk right by without seeing. You would think those leaves would jump right out at you but they’re don’t. They actually blend in quite well.

Purple flowering raspberry can take a lot of shade but no plant can live in the dark. If you could stake out a spot beside any plant, mushroom, or lichen in the woods and watch it all day long you would find that anything you care to watch will get its moment in the sun. Sometimes it might be only an hour of direct sunlight per day but that’s okay, it’s enough. That’s what made me want to take this photo of the flowering raspberry with its huge light gathering leaves in the bright sunlight. Those leaves will photosynthesize even in dim light but every day they get their moment in the sun and that’s the time to recharge.

Purple flowering raspberry fruit looks like a huge raspberry, about as big as the tip of your thumb. They are quickly eaten by birds so I was surprised to find this one. I find them tasteless like water but some say they have a mild raspberry flavor if you put them on the very tip of your tongue. I’ve eaten a few and have never really tasted anything I could call a flavor.

Some birds and animals like chipmunks and chickadees will follow you. While you walk along they’ll fly from bush to bush or hop from stone to stone in an old wall, watching you closely the whole time. The gray catbird is twice as big as a chickadee but they’ll do the same thing. I’ve been followed by quite a few of them lately and have heard them make sounds that do indeed sound like a cat, but I’ve read that they can also mimic other birds, frogs, animals, and even machinery. This all sounds like the mockingbird but the difference I’ve read, is that catbirds don’t usually repeat phrases and mockingbirds do, sometimes three or four times. I’ve talked to both mockingbirds and catbirds and sometimes when it is quiet they’ll sit with their heads cocked and listen intently to everything you say. Whether or not they fly off and repeat what you’ve said to all the other birds, I can’t say.

A little American toad hopped into my path one day. I realized it was the first I had seen in quite a while but they blend into the forest litter so well sometimes I can look right at them and not see them. I can remember when I worked near Half Moon Pond in Hancock sometimes I’d see so many tiny, just hatched toads hopping on the beach it looked as if the sand had changed color. There must have been many thousands of them swarming together and none were even as big as my thumbnail.

After a heavy rain shower one day I saw a bumblebee that was absolutely drenched. I was surprised that it wasn’t shaking itself off. I know that bumblebees will sleep in this position clutching onto a plant but could one really sleep through such a soaking?

One of my favorite summer flowers is ground nut (Apios Americana) and I always look for them at the edge of the woods. In fact they were the inspiration for this post. I like the little grayish, pinkish flowers that look like tiny conquistador helmets with deep chocolate or maroon insides. They’re unlike any other flowers I’ve seen. Insects also love the flowers, which are filled with nectar. So much nectar in fact that the flowers will actually sweat it out on hot days, as can be seen in the photo. They grow on vines that arise from walnut sized, edible tubers that grow along an underground stem. They were a favorite food of Native Americans and are said by some to taste like turnip. Native Americans used the roots of the plant in the same ways we use potatoes today, but groundnut “potatoes” contain about three times the protein. Natives taught the early colonials how to use the groundnut and the plant helped save the lives of the Pilgrims during their first few years as settlers. Not surprisingly another name for the plant is Indian potato. Henry David Thoreau thought they had a pleasant nutty flavor.

This jewelweed blossom has been pollinated, and I know that because of all the white pollen that’s been spilled on its landing pad, probably by a bumblebee. This is another plant that can take a lot of shade and if conditions are right it can grow into huge colonies.

I saw the first purple aster of the year blooming in a sunny spot along the edge of the woods. The flowers might have been an inch across on bushy plants that stood about four feet tall and all of that points to the New England aster but the low petal count makes me think it’s something else. I haven’t bothered with trying to find its name. I learned a long time ago that trying to identify most asters could make you crazy. Some are easy but most are not so I just stop and admire them for a few minutes, thank them for being so beautiful, and move on.

So now that you know what can be found at the edge of a forest just imagine what might be found inside one. Why not just go ahead and see?

Some of the best advice you will ever hear will come from the forest. ~Dacha Avelin

Thanks for coming by.

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New Hampshire Garden Solutions

Exploring Nature in New Hampshire

Posts Tagged ‘Native Plants’

A January Thaw

First Snow

Nearly Leafless

Things I’ve Seen

Beaver Brook Natural Area

From the Wetlands

Fall Flowers

Down By the River

More August Flowers

On the Edge of the Forest

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