A View From The Woods

A woodsy walk

A cool, still morning dawned. After a quick breakfast, I make sandwiches to wrap for lunch. As I tuck my pants into my socks to keep the ticks out, cars begin pulling up the driveway for the annual Harmony Garden Club wildflower walk. A stroll around the garden and a quick refresher on the names of trout lilies, yellow bellwort and rue anemones blooming near our front door has the ten of us primed to set out on our journey. What will turn up today?

We start out down the sunny side of the hill behind the garage, spotting Greek valerian (which many people call Jacob’s ladder) and violets in blue, yellow and white, which even fanatical botanists don’t bother to identify specifically, because the differences are so subtle.

As we enter the walnut forest, we spy a large colony of mayapples. These shiny umbrella leaves hide a solitary white flower, and are said to grow in patches where an animal (or human?) died at some time in the past. It makes for imaginary ghost stories, but it also makes sense that certain minerals required by mayapples might be present there.

Mitrewort, with its delicate stalks of tiny feathered white flowers, requires that we get right down on the ground and peer in. Spring beauty, bloodroot and hepatica linger on this north-facing slope.

We make our way down to the hayfield below and creep into the woods to follow Wisel Creek upstream. Evidence of last year’s fierce rainstorms is plain to see, including clogs of brush caught on the banks and trees which denote how high the water got in this high-banked creek.

We round yet another curve in the creek, and I gleefully point down to an oddity and ask, “what do you think that is, and how did it get there?” It is a small island, maybe 20 feet across and standing about three feet higher than the water, with full grown trees and blooming wildflowers. At the creek’s edge up above, there is a smear of bare dirt. Everyone figures it out. Apparently in the high waters of last year, the bank was undercut to the point where this hunk of land slid straight down 20 vertical feet, with the trees still upright, and landed in the creek, where everything is still growing today in its new home.

Onward to a long stretch of a dry creek bed, long ago abandoned by the serpentine waterway as it carved a new path now many feet deeper than this old route.

We come onto one of the few woodland floodplains in this area that has never been grazed or cropped. It is a magical place of widely spaced old  trees under which millions of ostrich ferns and wildflowers flourish. We get busy collecting fiddleheads, coiled up emerging ostrich fern fronds, which are easy to cook and simply delicious, especially with a large handful of chopped wild leeks, called ramps.

The adventures continue as we rediscover yellow trout lilies which only live on one hillside in our woods, amongst a hundred acres of white trout lilies. I read that spring ephemeral flowers serve an important function as nutrient pools for the entire forest. Taking up spring rains and nutrients, trout lilies are growing fast at low soil temperatures and trapping the runoff. When warmer summer weather hits and the leaves die back, nutrients are released back into the soil where actively growing trees and plants can then take them up.

Finally, the hikers decide to go silent for the last quarter mile as we stroll slowly across a hayfield to what I have promised will be a new and special phenomenon in the woods.  A solitary great blue heron soars overhead, and as we creep slowly into the woods, more herons appear. They circle and call out raucous warnings as they hold their slender necks in an S-shape and extend their gangly legs behind them. Then we see several stick nests high in the tops of a tree. One brave mama bird glides in and drops her legs as she lands on the nest, and poses her graceful neck for us to see. This is the second year they have nested here, and the number of nests is increasing, so hopefully it is a safe rookery to which they will return for many years.

Exhausted, we make our way back to the yard to enjoy our sandwiches and memories of an exquisite spring morning. Not a single tick is found.