The dogwood outside my window has turned bright pink, speckled with green as the chlorophyll machinery deploys to process the warming sunlight. Nearby, a plethora of ground plants have for weeks decorated the forest floor. Some of them soon will disappear or fade-to-green as the taller hickories and oaks leaf into sun-blocking umbrellas.
Bees have begun to find the blossoms of the ground-hugging Spring Beauties, Dead Nettles (so-named because they do not sting the way real nettles do) and other ephemeral decorations. And the show-offs of the springtime plant world, the daffodils.
My four-footed companion becomes super excited digging in the duff, with the unintended consequence of harvesting an average one or two ticks a day. In the other hand, those must have been the winter ticks because recently we caught a really nice t-shirt day and brought home at least eight of the pesky arachnids. The good news was ticks love tall grass, which is where we found that afternoon’s crop. We don’t go there any more, much to the pup’s disappointment.
Our forest has been a well-stocked playhouse, with its almost daily presentation of surprise life. Most obvious has been the carpet of Spring Beauty flowers. Only about four to six inches from the ground, they come out early for the foraging pleasure of whatever bees happen to be about. They also use of passing fauna — including Wood mice, Whitetail deer, a family of bunny rabbits and a small herd of feral cats — to spread the posies’ pollen.
The Spring Beauty flowers, in some places known as the Fairy Spud, were, and still are, only the lead act of the springtime performance, their white blossoms accented with light purple giving a rich color texture to the forest floor.
Elsewhere, pods of new Shagbark Hickory leaves stand on the end of their tapered limbs like pale green candle flames. Blue violets and Periwinkles peek out from among taller clumps of green grass. In one area a small patch of Azure Bluets — similar to the Spring Beauty but only four petals instead of five and accented with blue stripes rather than purple; a few days later I could not find them, but I had pictures to prove their fleeting presence.
One morning, a Forsythia bush shouted its golden blaze like a spot of early sunlight, around its lower third a wrap of Flowering Japanese Quince put forth its red, leaning toward orange, blooms. Neither Forsythia nor Quince are officially invasive, but they can spread rapidly. On the other hand, dense Forsythia bushes provide great cover for small birds.
Throughout the forest, Winged Euonymus. marked by the four equally-spaced thin fins along its branches, mounts an invasion on any available open ground. It’s greenish-yellow, four-petaled flowers have begun to appear, their clusters lying flat among the leaves as though to disguise their expansionist intent.
The past few days, hickory trees have burst open their leaf pods. I may even try to harvest some nuts in the fall.
Wandering the woods is like a drug, calming the soul, an opportunity to notice the lifely sequence without the pressure of an impending classroom exam, inviting the curious wanderer to ask, “What’s that.” I got in the wandering habit when I was young, but a smartphone has added an element of wonder to the experience.
I favor PictureThis, but PlantNet also has proven reliable. Google Lens is amazingly informative. Any of the three have proven useful for Android users. Readers with iPhones might leave a note in the comments about favorite plant identification apps for that platform.
Text and images ©2024 John Messeder. John is an award-winning environmental storyteller, nemophilist and social anthropologist living in Gettysburg, PA. He may be contacted at john@johnmesseder.com
