Trees blaze red or orange and light up the landscape. Asters grace golden fields with dashes of royal purple. Woodland asters are mostly white, but leaves and goldenrods cast an autumnal glow.



Leaves come down in shimmering displays, or drop noisily when the air is calm. This morning I took the dogs for their wood walk among dancing branches. When we reached the dry creek bed it was a mosaic of yellow and orange leaves instead of bare stones.



Yesterday I was out in the woods wearing the baby in a carrier. I looked up and discovered little yellow streamers adorning a shrub no taller than myself. A witch hazel was blooming, if such a grandiose term could be used for such pale, haphazard flowers. I’ve wanted to see this for two years and now I realized why I’d overlooked them. The leaves they shared branches with were more striking. I had pictured something similar to spring-flowering shrubs, like serviceberry which blooms white against a leafless forest.



The more I looked around, though, the more witch hazel I noticed. The flowers became little treasures which rewarded my closer looks. An understated pleasure in a flamboyant season.

Leaves aren’t the only things turning. Male goldfinches look tattered with pale green showing through the gold. Warblers dart among winter residents in cryptic fall plumage, no longer singing boastful songs.

This is a time of metamorphosis. Alchemy weaves through the fabric of life. Forms change and colors shift. But modern technological societies regulate this alchemy. Birth and death, the most personal changes of all, are supposed to occur in hospitals out of sight. Smaller transformations take place in factories, laboratories, and giant farms. Much of the time people manipulate virtual objects, or at least human generated ones, rather than create from scratch.

So I try to dabble with natural forces. I cook and bake with whole ingredients. Soon we’ll fire up the woodstove, our only method of heating the house aside from leaving the oven open after the bread comes out. If there is a more human activity than taming fire, we have yet to find the archaeological evidence for it. Even using matches, we need to coax the flames as they grow and shrink along their path from newspapers to sticks to hunks of (hopefully) dry and cracked wood. I love our cast iron poker, which is simply yet ingeniously designed with a pointy end and hook that facilitate pulling and prodding logs into place.

The most important thing about working with natural forces is that the result is collaboration. We adapt our expectations and keep our mind nimble. The garden this time of year is a good illustration. Some plants never sprouted, or like the beans were grazed by slugs and rabbits until they grew stunted. Cabbage planted too late in the spring is making heads in the fall weather behind a backdrop of goldenrods.

Where are they now?

Above and to the left of the leaf bud are the pieces of the brown fruit heads of a skunk cabbage.


Hepatica leaves.


Wild leek seed head.


Berries of a false solomon's seal ripening. Unlike the skunk cabbage fruit, these are calling attention to themselves to attract seed dispersers.

I’ve been going in the woods while wearing the baby in a sling. Sometimes she sleeps, but other times she soaks it all in. Leaves are especially fascinating. Her motor skills are continuously developing so that soon we’ll have to stop her from stuffing the closer ones into her mouth. Most forest leaves are probably just inedible. Some pack nasty surprises specifically designed for mammal browsers.

Like the single baneberry I came across on a random woods walk. It was a surreal addition to a familiar background with its fruit shaped like eyeballs on red stalks. The name comes from the fact that it’s a bane to those who sample its berries, thanks to some cardiac glucosides found in all parts of the plant. Birds and some mice, however, are immune. This is the sort of discovery I want to share with our daughter. The way the forest can be experienced in different scales and layers. I like to observe intersections of multiple histories, including both “natural” and “human.”

I love old, evocative names for plants which were obviously applied by those who paid more attention to such things than most people nowadays. These names can be based on incorrect assumptions. Take the spring flower hepatica, whose liver-shaped leaves are scattered in clumps throughout the forest where they will be green all winter before being discarded. Despite the origin of the name, this plant is not at all effective at curing liver disorders (hepat- = liver). The boneset scattered along the driveway with its strong, fused leaves adds possible liver toxicity to its lack of demonstrated effectiveness against “bone-break fever.”

A related plant, white snakeroot, is definitely toxic. I can’t find studies of its use against snakebites, but it’s infamous for spreading deadly “milk sickness” among early European settlers. Cows grazed in woodland when pasture was unproductive or unavailable would eat snakeroot and their milk would become contaminated with a toxin if they lived. Cows always seem to be eating something toxic in the annals of poisonous plants. The story of milk sickness felt much less distant when I came across this bit of the past growing on our land. White snakeroot seems particularly lush where the stream crosses the ghost of a boundary road.



But not all the stories I want to show our daughter involve humans. Nor are all the interactions in the forest antagonistic. Species can compete with, cooperate with, exploit, avoid, or even ignore each other. Interactions spread out and converge. This snag has fed fungi and insects. Woodpeckers have pockmarked the surface to find the insects, creating holes which spiders use as they weave webs to catch more insects. Poison ivy climbs up to replace the leaves which once belonged to the live tree. Poison ivy flowers cooperate to be pollinated by insects and the seeds are spread by hungry birds.

Sometimes these stories are easy to read, other times they play out over long time periods, or below the soil surface. Cooperation may not be readily apparent, like the trans-kingdom, more or less equal partnerships of fungi and algae or cyanobacteria which make up the lichens tinging many tree trunks or rocks green in our forest. In the soil, mycorrhizal fungi partner with plant roots, increasing their access to nutrients and water in exchange for carbohydrates manufactured by the plants. Little, ghostly Indian pipes actually parasitize these fungi, not the plant roots, to make up for their lack of chlorophyll.



But that’s not the first thing I think of when I stumble across a random cluster of Indian pipes in the forest. There’s the joy of discovery and recognition. I feel a connection, however brief. I want to share with my daughter a love of life and delight in all its variety. Whatever I share, she’ll find her own way.

Two days ago I borrowed a truck to haul two cords of wood home. Burning wood can be hard for me – I get so much from living trees and the act of burning anything puts various particles into the air. Fortunately our local supplier mostly cuts trees that are already slated for removal. The wood isn’t moved very far, so theoretically we’re not helping disease causing organisms spread far and wide. Some pieces were gutted with tunnels from before the wood was cut. I tried to avoid the various beetles, pill bugs, and spiders, but one spider hitchhiked on my shirt until my partner noticed the quarter-sized spread of legs and freaked out. I’m sorry to say that it was killed in the confusion.

We’re all preparing for winter. The yard was littered with brown leaves as the trees begin to shed their photosynthetic apparatus. Clouds and brisk air added to the autumnal feel. Summer and fall have been playing tug of war with the weather. Last week I stepped out of work into a steamy, oppressive haze. The landscape blushed orange, yellow and pink. Many trees had sparse canopies of brittle leaves, and goldenrod leaves had collapsed in on the stems to conserve water.

I walked into the dappled shade of the forest, where the air was warm but comfortable. The last bout of cool weather also brought our precipitation back to normal. In the rain soaked aftermath, the mulch paths smelled of damp earth and mushrooms. Now mushroom patches erupted along sections of the trail. Individuals crowded against each other, turning round caps into many-sided polygons. Patch color ranged from white to smoke-tinged. Some were sacks of brown spores which puff into the air when disturbed.

I walked across the boardwalk that passes over wetlands. Frogs announced their presence with shrieks as they flung themselves into the dredges of water clinging to depressions. The thick prehistoric undergrowth of ferns was tinged yellow, and some edges were burned brown. Before returning to work I passed through a younger section of forest with a more open canopy. The temperature rose noticeably. Sensitive ferns lay withered along the trail, not even waiting for the frost which their name refers to. Much of summer’s glory is conquered by her own excesses long before winter closes in.