Late Summer Flora

Today I spent a little time in the woods behind my house. Pnny came along in case there were any sticks that needed retrieved. There were.

Here is a wintergreen (some call it teaberry, but I prefer to call it wintergreen) in bloom. This stuff is thick at my place, and I like that.

Wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens) in bloom

I strayed from my trail and cut across the woods in hopes of seeing something different. Score! We have purple mushrooms:

Purple!

And orange ones too:

Orange!

At several points in my “walk” I would kneel down in the forest and just look at my surroundings, scanning only about three feet in each direction. Sometimes I find neat things that I would miss if I were just walking through with my eyes nearly 6 feet from the ground. This is the kind of stuff you can find when you do that:

Starflower (Trientalis borealis) fruit

I recognized it immediately as a starflower. They have pretty flowers in the early spring, but I find their fruit even more interesting. This one was only about a 16th of an inch across (which is typical). The shot is cropped, but not not scaled much. I think it looks like a blue soccer ball.

In the front woods I checked out the hazel.

Beaked hazel (Corylus cornuta)

Not many nuts on them this year. I have tried harvesting them in the past with little luck. The squirrels and/or chipmunks here tend to harvest them before they get ripe, leaving none for me. The husks are covered with tiny prickers. If you grab one and pull you will be rewarded with a handful of spines. They detach from the husk and are so tiny that makes them nearly impossible to remove from the skin. But if I see a ripe one, I will pick it anyway. If I can ever get them in quantity, I’m sure I could figure out a good way to avoid the prickers.

We also have some Indian tobacco (Lobelia inflata) growing here:

Indian tobacco (Lobelia inflata)

It is the lobelia I see most often, and it’s fairly prolific around the edges of the yard.

Maybe next week I will go to Sandogardy Pond to look for aquatic lobelia (Lobelia dortmanna).

 

Blueberries

This evening we Jonathan and I got home, we saw Beth and two of the neighbor kids (Haylee and her little brother) standing at the end of their driveway holding a sign. I couldn’t read it, so I figured I’d walk over there after we parked the car.

But there was no need. Beth came immediately to share her excitement. They had set up a lemonade stand, and had raked in nine dollars. From two customers. On our unpaved, low-traffic road. I don’t know if they sold any lemonade or not. They were also offering bottled water which they got from the Haylee’s mom, and I think some orange juice. They also had some ice cream, but the staff ended up eating that before it melted.

The first customer was our neighbor from across the street. He and his wife each bought something and paid two bucks each for whatever it was they got. (I’m counting them as one customer). The second customer was the UPS delivery guy who paid them five. Nice people! The kids were over the moon.

After dinner I invited Beth to come and look at my dewdrop patch. A new one had opened, and Beth took this photo of it, which is very decent!

Beth's dewdrop (Dalibarda repens)

So now she’s one flower closer to earning the honor we started on Saturday. I think Haylee must have come back out about then, and Beth lost all interest in flowers and in old Dad.

I went out again later, just before sunset. By then Beth was in the living room playing a video game, and Penny was so intent on herding Beth, that she did not hear me put on my shoes (she usually does, and comes running). I slipped out of the house unnoticed.

I checked on a patch of lowbush blueberries, and found a handful that were ripe already:

Lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium)

I picked pretty much all of these that were ripe and ate them on the spot. They were fantastic. Then I headed into the woods.

I didn’t stick to my trail this time. Every now and then I like to walk through the middle of the woods, because there’s a chance I’ll see something I don’t see every day. I was walking very quietly when the neighbor’s dog started barking. I wasn’t sure if it was barking at me or not, so I froze in place. Then I heard something crashing through the woods. It was a whitetail deer!

That would not have been exciting when I lived in Virginia. It was an unusual day back then when I did not see one. I see maybe three a year here in NH.

I remained frozen and slowly turned my head to follow her. She stopped. My camera was still in its bag slung over my shoulder. I slowly went for it. I managed to get it out and get it turned on, but by then she had moved into some thick brush, and I couldn’t get a decent shot. I don’t think she noticed me, but she well may have. Her life literally depends on her ability to do that.

Had Penny been out there with me, the doe would have continued her high-speed escape, and I’d have hardly gotten a glance.

I moved to the front woods after a bit and found an old piece of rope that the kids had abandoned out there. I decided to use it to mark a couple of maple trees I had found earlier this summer. I thought I had only one maple big enough to tap, but I’ve found three more now (quadrupling my potential syrup production).

I also found a couple of nut-bearing beaked hazels on my place. I’ll keep an eye on them too. I’d like to get a couple handfuls of nuts off them this summer. Actually, I’d be happy to get even two or three nuts, much less a whole handful. I am not that hard to please!

 

Early Morning

Yesterday evening I noticed that one of the dewdrops (Dalibarda repens) in my woods had finally bloomed. It was missing two of its five petals, but since it was the first one, I got out the camera. As I was adjusting it, Penny came tearing along the path, doing 90 miles per hour. Since I was standing on the path, Penny veered around me and stepped right on the dewdrop. That took it down to a single, mangled petal. I did not take a picture. Instead, I went looking for more. There are three patches of this stuff in my woods, all within 50 feet of each other. Patch number two had no blooms, but patch number three had this one:

Dewdrops (Dalibarda repens)

This is hands-down my favorite flower. It is the species that taught me how to take photos of flowers, because I found it totally impossible to photograph using the automatic settings of my previous camera. I had to learn the manual controls. This is kind of a rare plant. It’s endangered in Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina and Rhode Island. Actually, I just pasted most of that sentence in from the Wikipedia article, but that’s OK, because I’m the one that wrote it there in the first place. I started that article and put together the initial content. The photo in the article is also mine, and I don’t think I have ever taken a better shot of anything. That, my friends, is my best work. I use it as wallpaper on my computer.

So now that I have established my love affair with this plant for you, you can perhaps understand why I was so pleased to find one in bloom yesterday. I’ve been keeping an eye on those three patches for a couple of weeks. They have bloomed a little later this year as compared to previous years. I would have posted this last night, but my other news had me even more excited.

So excited, in fact, that I didn’t get much sleep last night because I couldn’t shut off my brain. I woke up early thinking about it too, so I did something most unusual for me – I got up. It was about 5:15 as I recall. I got dressed, went downstairs, got Penny’s leash, and we set out for Sandogardy Pond. Along the way, I spotted some beaked hazelnuts (Corylus cornuta):

Beaked hazelnuts (Corylus cornuta)

Sandy, if you’re still wondering if you found American or beaked hazel, this would be a good time to go check.

I also found some Pyrola along the way:

Pyrola (Pyrola spp)

I’m not sure what species of Pyrola this is – they are all pretty close to one another. Maybe roundleaf (P. americana), but I’m just not sure.

It was quiet at the pond. Foggy too:

Penny wades

I walked along the beach and saw that the floating heart (Nymphoides cordata) was in bloom now:

Floating heart (Nymphoides cordata)

It’s not hard to tell how it came about its common name, is it?

The swamp candles (Lysimachia terrestris) had bloomed too:

Swamp candles (Lysimachia terrestris)

That can only mean that the pickerelweed should be blooming soon too.

At the end of the beach we turned right and headed into the woods along Cross Brook (which drains the pond). There is a patch of Indian cucumber-root (Medeola virginiana) growing there, and it’s been in bloom for a while now. But I don’t think I have posted any photos of it this year, so here we go:

Indian cucumber-root (Medeola virginiana)

This plant has a delicious tuber which tastes just like… yes – cucumber. If you don’t like cucumber, you should probably eschew Indian cucumber-root. I don’t eat much of it because there’s never much of it around.

Penny and I headed back home after that. I took a shower, and Jonathan and I headed to the office. I napped in the car a bit. I guess the walk helped me turn off my brain. 🙂

When we got home I went out and admired my Dewdrop blossom again. Then I went to the catchment pond where there’s a bit of Pipsissewa (Chimaphila umbellata) growing. This plant has been threatening to bloom for about two weeks now. But today, I found a single blossom open (out of about two dozen).

Pipsissewa (Chimaphila umbellata)

This flower is pretty closely related to wintergreen and pyrola, but it looks a lot more like pyrola. And like pyrola, it doesn’t present its best side to humans. That privilege is reserved for ants. I tipped the blossom upwards to get a shot of its innards:

Pipsissewa (Chimaphila umbellata)

Nice!