The first thing to note about our forest is age. Not the centuries of the pacific northwest, granted, but our large trees tend to maple, ash and hickory, not fast-growing aspen and willow. I once encountered a large maple that had fallen long ago and played nursery log to several other maples, now grown just as big. Age is spoken by the lush undergrowth of native and knee-high skunk cabbage flourishing in the shade.

The second thing to note about the forest is that you are not entirely welcome guest. This is suggested by the delicate succulent stems popping up everywhere you want to step, and underscored by the scattered poison ivy that occasionally reaches up on vines toward you. I’ve read some things suggesting that even the native Americans who had lived in this area were not entirely comfortable in the deep forest.

The theme of this season is busyness, seen in the proliferation of green solar panels making sugars from sunlight. Every individual is a selfish, separate world, yet interconnected. Even the birds going about their business are more native than you though they may spend most of the year somewhere else. They’re following their own agendas. Phoebes are busy feeding young. Later-arriving eastern wood pewees are still plighting their troth, singing away even late morning when the phoebes are mostly silent. Then there are the migrators that find temporary solace here, like the blackpoll warbler which still has to travel north to the boreal forest before he can start breeding.

In the green world of the forest, I find solace from my own busyness.

On flowers

The trilliums have become ragged in the woods around our yard. Flowers are a study in impermanence. We often conflate the flower with the plant, but a flowers is merely a means to an end - sexual reproduction. A flower is a free loader on the leaves, roots and stems that pay their way. Many of our forest flowers don't even bother with the business of sexual reproduction until they've established themselves as a root system. The thick patches of mayapple in our forest are mostly the result of colonization by underground rhizomes - i.e. asexual reproduction. An individual may labor at this honest work for four years or so before entering the sordid world of flowers, pollinators, and seeds.

In the relatively stable environment of the deep forest, there's a good chance that a site which was hospitable last year will be the same this year, whereas seed set and dispersal is more risky. Sexual reproduction is a luxury in the short term. Jack-in-the-pulpit decides how much energy to spend based on its age and condition. Younger or stressed plants make male flowers , while older and more healthy plants can invest in female flowers which will also entail producing costly seeds and berries.

Many flowers are alluring to our eyes with their colors and symmetry, even though we are not the intended audience when it comes to wildflowers. Jack-in-the-pulpits are easy for humans to overlook, but their attraction to insect pollinators come from a mushroom-like odor which fools gnats into entering by mistake. Ultimately a flowering plant has its own agenda, and one can't believe all its pretty promises.

My childhood was spent in suburbia among house sparrows and dandelions. As a result, sometimes native species seem more exotic than the invasives. Scarlet tanagers bring a dash of the tropics to our temperate deciduous forests, although this is appropriate since they spent our winter in South America. Flowering skunk cabbages seem to belong to some alien planet. Later blooms like jack-in-the-pulpit defy a simple flower diagram.



Mayapple is one of my favorite plants to watch. I noticed it last month popping out of the ground leaves and all, like little umbrellas.



They've only just begun blooming, but you have to crouch down to discover the subtle pleasure of their concealed flowers.

Spring foliage

This is the first year I've noticed that the colors of emerging leaves evoke the colors of the autumn leaf show. The colors are more pastel, but no less beautiful to me.



Many of the colors have been diluted since these pictures were taken a couple weeks ago. We still see yellows and oranges at the edges of the forest, but the leaves around our house surround us in a curtain of emerald green.

April flowers - Part 2

May has hit its stride, but I wanted to revisit April before too much time passes. Our Internet connection was glacially slow that month, but out in the forest things were moving at a fast clip. Fortunately my camera was still working well.

Taking certain pictures turned out to be tricky. I've never learned much about photography, so it was only this year that I realized that flower pictures taken during lower light conditions are better than those taken with the sun high in the sky on a cloudless day. However, spring flowers don't open randomly. Many stay closed when the air temperature is too cool for pollinators to be flying around, such as during mornings, evenings, and cloudy days when my camera was all ready to record their beauty. Even when I was out when the flowers where still open but the sunshine had started to fade, blossoms would be drooping instead of all facing in the same direction.

Then there's the short blooming period. This bloodroot flower will pollinate itself if cold weather or other factors inhibit insect pollination so it can move along to seed formation.



The speckled leaves of trout lilies carpet many areas of the forest floor and even the edges of our lawn, but only plants old enough to have two leaves will flower. I watched the buds for days, waiting for them to open, then could only look on as they opened so wide in the blazing spring sunlight that the petals touched in back. The few pictures I did take were nice but not as impressive.



Finally, five days before the end of April, waves of trillium opened. Perhaps because temperatures had warmed, I haven't noticed trilliums to close, making them ideal subjects for me to photograph.

Brave new spring

The forest in spring is the forest primordial. Everything seems new and untouched, especially by humans. This morning I set out with my camera into the forest gleaming with the remnants of overnight rain. I stepped gingerly over carpets of single trout lily leaves. Islands of lush blue cohosh and wild leeks rose from the leaf litter, populated with scattered native flowers like trilliums and mayapples.

I had been wandering and snapping random pictures for while when I stumbled across a familiar tall plant with white flowers – garlic mustard, an invasive species we tend to find near the road and along our driveway. Aghast, I spent the next ten minutes or so pulling every plant I could find, both tall and tiny, trying hard to coax all their roots from the wet soil. Finally I set out towards home with a wad of fragrant plant material held tight in one hand.

Except that I wasn’t entirely sure where I was. After casting about for a bit, I ended up having to cross through an unfamiliar stream bed. This area was wreathed in the most brilliant green. Huge skunk cabbage and young jewelweed decorated the hillocks where fern heads were unfurling. Horsetails stuck out of the dark, still water, glistening with rain drops. And there I was, stomping through this prehistoric scene like Godzilla, clutching a whole mess of invasive species which had not managed to reach this oasis on their own.

As far as I know I didn’t drop any, but this incident reminded me that sometimes we are the most immediate danger to these woods. All I can hope is that by managing invasives when we can, we are doing more good than harm.

The change in daylight hours is driven by the orientation of the earth in relation to the sun. The changes in the plant community on the forest floor, while ultimately due to this relationship, are shaped by more local factors. April began with an almost barren canopy except for evergreens. Someone fair-skinned such as myself had no refuge from the sun in the middle of a hot, cloudless day. Today the forest rivals autumn leaf shows for beauty. New growth, especially in the understory, gives the forest a green blush. Yellow and white flowers remain along with more showy flowering trees in peoples' yards. The deep red flowers of red maples have become orange clusters of winged fruit. Willows drape long yellow locks over the pond at work, betraying green roots as the leaves come in.

This is the timeline which spring flowers are constrained by - the return of the summer canopy. They need enough warmth and sun to grow flowers and attract pollinators (although some species have ways around the latter problem). But if they flower too long and the trees cast them into shade, they won't have enough energy to produce fruit. Many spring flowers respond by being ephemeral, which is a poetic way to say short-lived. They grace the forest floor with a burst of beauty before melting away.

April flowers - Part 1

The change in daylight hours happens more quickly around the equinoxes. Similarly, change in the forest seems to have moved at a lightning pace since the spring equinox on March 20th. Even early April was a different world. Plants that littered the forest everywhere one looked have been completely altered, yielding the stage to the next eye-catching flower. At first skunk cabbage had the most obvious reproductive structure.



Now these gnome hoods have been replaced by lush leaf spreads.



The first of the more stereotypical flowers were the small white or purple flowers of hepatica I noticed tucked among the leaf litter on April 3.



In mid-April, while hepatica was wide open in a last burst of color before turning to seed pods, the real diversity began to emerge. One native among many was blue cohosh, whose stems rose in stooped forms reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss book.



Blue cohosh has settled in after a couple weeks, retaining just a tint of blue as it mingles with the trilliums and mayapples that dominate the forest floor.



To be continued...