New Hampshire Garden Solutions

Things I’ve Seen

January 13, 2024 by New Hampshire Garden Solutions

Hello again everyone. I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and are having a Happy New Year. I thought I’d better do a post and show you the first real snow of the year, which fell on January 7th. I say it’s the first real snow because we’ve had a dusting and a nuisance storm of about half an inch, but this one was a plowable 4-5 inches. This old road is one of my favorite winter scenes so I had to get out and get a photo of it before the wind blew all the snow off the trees. I thought it was very beautiful with all the colors of the oak and beech leaves mingling with the white of the snow in the morning sunshine.

This shot of a dandelion in bloom was taken by cellphone just 7 days before that first snowy photo, on December 31st. The two photos illustrate the up and down, freeze and thaw cycle we seem to be stuck in at present. The snowy scenes didn’t last long thanks to 48 degree temps and pouring rain just 2 days after it fell. That’s the way the last two or three winters have gone. The dandelion is the only flower I’ve seen bloom in all 12 months of the year.

This just about says it all. If you can picture that little raindrop freezing at night and then thawing when the sun hits it in the morning, that seems to be the latest version of winter in New Hampshire. I read that the average winter temperature is now 3.5 degrees warmer than it was ten years ago. I’m not here to talk about right or wrong, good or bad, or this or that; I’m just reporting what is.

We had enough rain to make the river flood and when that happens thankfully much of the water ends up in unused fields like this one. I like to get out after the flood waters freeze because that’s when you can see and hear some amazing things.

When the ice begins to shatter some ice plates can be bigger than a car tire. When they’re supported by shrubs as they were here you can tell how deep the water was when it froze over. In this instance I guessed it had been about 18 inches deep. Standing here watching and hearing them break up in the warm sunshine was amazing.

The ground isn’t frozen yet so the water quickly drains away, leaving the ice high and dry. When the sun hits this ice that is left just floating in space the ice begins to shatter and when it does it sings, sometimes tinkling, sometimes crashing. Sometimes you hear loud snapping sounds made by ice cracking under pressure, and it can be startling.

That’s just what happened shortly after this killdeer landed beside me while I was standing and listening to the ice sing. All of the sudden there was a loud snap and crash when ice caved in and this bird flew straight up into the sky like it was a jet airplane. I had to laugh because I had jumped at the sound of the loud noise as well. This is not a great shot of this bird because I was surprised to see it just feet away and of course I didn’t have my camera turned on so there was a lot of fumbling going on.

Killdeer are in the plover family and aren’t seen that often, at least not by me. Its name comes from its “shrill, two-syllable call,” which someone apparently thought sounded like “kill deer.” Where people get these ideas from, I don’t know. Females lay their eggs directly on the ground, often in gravel. I’ve read that the eggs don’t get eaten by predators because they look like stones. If a predator gets too close to the nest the female will flutter on the ground pretending to have a broken wing, and lure the predator away. It’s a very clever bird.

Of course ice can be beautiful, so I always take a closer look. I love the wave like patterns that are often found frozen in ice but I’ve never been able to figure out how it happens. I’m sure wind must have a lot to do with it.

This was a large piece of ice on the shore of a small pond. I thought it was beautiful, almost like a sand dune in shape, and its color reminded me of puddle ice. Years ago I read that ice that is white like this has more oxygen in it; millions of tiny bubbles color it white. It is almost always very thin and it tinkles like the very thin glass of a fluorescent tube when it breaks.

Endlessly fascinating and beautiful, that’s what ice is to me.

I’ve seen this pond freeze over and then thaw again several times since mid-December. It always has interesting frozen bubbles on its surface.

I’ve seen a few examples of “winter fungi” including this one that I saw peeking out from under the bark on a log in a December. I haven’t bothered identifying it.

I’ve also seen lots of color so far in these colder months. This crowded parchment fungus was at its best on a rainy day and it glowed like a beacon so I could see it long before I reached it. You find this common fungus growing on limbs that have fallen from nearby trees. I always wonder how fungal spores get so high into the crown of a tree. Wind I suppose, or maybe they stick to the feet of birds.

Speaking of birds, I’m seeing lots of bluebirds this year. Years ago I saw my first bluebird sitting on a post and rail fence, and then I didn’t see another one for probably 30 years. That’s because I wasn’t looking in the right places. They like wide open spaces like old fields and wetlands, which is just where I saw this one. They’re a good reason to come out of the forest every now and then because they’re beautiful, and they’re also my favorite color. In warmer months they eat insects and in cold weather seeds and berries. This one heard me coming from a few yards away, just about when I saw him, and turned his head to see what I was up to. Often when I see something so beautiful I forget I have a camera, but on this day I had sense enough to get a shot. I love the curled markings on its feathers. They made me realize that I had never seen a bluebird’s back.

There are lots of dogwoods, many different viburnums, highbush cranberry, and other native fruit bearing shrubs here in the wetlands, so I’m sure that has something to do with the large bluebird population.

Bluebirds like to nest in hollow trees but I knew I wouldn’t find one in this hole, because it was in a fallen log.

Still, I had to take a closer look to see if anyone was home. I didn’t see anyone or hear any little feet rustling but I was happy just to see the beautiful wood grain, so it didn’t matter.

I saw this wooly bear caterpillar sauntering down a road on January 10th. These caterpillars produce their own antifreeze and can freeze solid in winter but once the temperatures rise into the 40s F in spring they thaw out and begin feeding on dandelion and other early spring greens. Eventually it will spin a cocoon and emerge as a beautiful tiger moth. From that point on it has only two weeks to live. Unfortunately this wasn’t spring; it was January and 48 degrees, so I wondered if it had been fooled into thinking it was spring. Since winter has been so warm so far, maybe it hasn’t yet felt the need to freeze.

I saw some nice staghorn clubmoss in a colony bigger than I’ve ever seen. Clubmosses are ancient spore bearing plants which have been here for millions of years. Fossil records show they once grew to the size of trees. I don’t see this one too often but they are obviously very happy in this spot.

I saw what I thought was a flattened pinecone on the road one day. While I took photos of it I convinced myself that it was a pinecone that had been run over so many times it had been cut in half. “This will be an interesting thing for the blog” I told myself, “I doubt many people have seen half a pinecone.” Then all of the sudden I realized what I was seeing was not a pinecone at all; it was simply the flattened tip of a pine branch. How could I have totally missed the reality of what I was seeing?

These are the moments in nature that are important, but most of them will go unnoticed. That is unfortunate because it is in these moments that all thought can drain from the mind, and for a second or two you can experience the silence and peace of pure emptiness. Something clicks like a key in a lock, and perhaps for the first time you see with absolute clarity. Others have said the same:

In his 1926 book The Gentle Art of Tramping Stephen Graham said it this way: As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.

Author Charlene Spretnak said it this way: There are sacred moments in life when we experience in rational and very direct ways that separation, the boundary between ourselves and other people and between ourselves and nature, is illusion.

Author Marty Rubin said this: People think in such grand terms-unconditional love, changing the world, doing the impossible. They fail to see the joy, the immense bliss, which lies in simple everyday acts.

Author Charles de Lint had this to say: Free your heart from your mind. Embrace wonder for one moment without the need to consider how that wonder came to be, without the need to justify if it be real or not.

Native American Black Elk from the Lakota tribe said this: And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell, and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of things in the spirit, and the shapes of all shapes as they must live together like one being.

They and many more over the course of countess centuries have all said the same thing in different ways, so I suppose the moral of this too long story is simply; pay close attention. When you get a glimpse of how an imagined life has fooled you into believing what is false, that is the time to see truth. You can’t make it happen and you can’t stop it from happening, but you can stay quiet and pay attention. Then, let whatever wants to happen, happen. As the old saying goes; when the student is ready the teacher will appear. My point is that the teacher doesn’t always have to be human. It can come in any form, anywhere, at any time.

I found a bush full of beautiful bluish seedpods that I hadn’t ever seen. Google lens told me it was a pearl bush and when I looked at a photo it was obvious where the name came from. The flowers remind me of mock orange but the white flower buds on leafless branches look like strings of pearls. I thought its seedpods were beautiful.

A little critter had zipped up the snow.

This blog has evolved over time I suppose, but the message is really still the same: walk slowly and look closely, and marvel at all the wonder and beauty in this paradise we find ourselves in. Anyone can do this, so why not try? Let nature gently lead you back to yourself and remind you that you don’t stop at your skin. You are so much more; beyond knowing, beyond description. Lose yourself in life’s sweet song and let life’s energy surge through you, just as it was doing in everything seen in these photos.

The splendor of Silence—of snow-jeweled hills and of ice. ~Ingram Crockett

Thanks for coming by.

NOTE: I’m not back full time yet. I will still be posting sporadically until sometime in March. Take care.

Posted in Birds, Fungi, Ice Formations, Insects, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Things I've Seen, Wildflowers | Tagged Canon SX70 HS, Critter Tracks in Snow, Crowded Parchment Fungus, December Dandelion, Dogwood Color, Eastern Bluebird, First Snowfall, Ice Bubbles, Ice patterns, Ice Plates, Keene, Killdeer, Knotholes, Native Plants, Nature, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus TG-6, Pearl Bush Seed Pods, Red Twigged Dogwood, Seeing Clearly, Seeing Reality, Seeing Truth, Snow Covered Trees, Staghorn Clubmoss, Swanzey New Hampshire, White Ice, Winter Flowers, Winter Fungi, Winter Ice Formations, Winter Plants, Winter Scenery, Winter Wildlife, Winter Woods, Wooly Bear Caterpillar | 39 Comments »

Merry Christmas

December 23, 2023 by New Hampshire Garden Solutions

I hope everyone will have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And a Happy Hanukkah too!

May you walk gently through the world and know its beauty all the days of your life. ~Apache Blessing

Thanks for stopping in.

Posted in Scenery / Landscapes | Tagged Canon SX40 HS, Hancock New Hampshire, Merry Christmas, Snowy Morning | 68 Comments »

Winter in the Wetlands

December 16, 2023 by New Hampshire Garden Solutions

This post completes the circular story of the wetlands for this year. We’ve seen the beautiful trout lilies and other wildflowers of spring, the birds, insects and animals of summer, and the beautiful colors of fall. Now we see winter but before we know it, it will be time to show those spring trout lilies again. This is a beautiful place, with many unusual things that I haven’t seen anywhere else, so that means I’ll have to keep coming back.

Wild raisin (Viburnum cassinoides) is a native viburnum that likes wet feet so it’s right at home here in the wetlands. In fact I’ve seen more of them here than I ever have anywhere else. They’re easy to spot at this time of year because of their dangling clusters of round blue black fruit. The fruit is edible and is said to be quite sweet, and Native Americans ate them fresh or dried.

If you aren’t sure if what you have are wild raisins, just look at the buds. The valvate buds have two long bud scales that look like a blue heron bill, but the scales don’t cover the center of the bud. There is another native viburnum called nannyberry (Viburnum lentago) that has very similar buds, but its scales cover the entire bud. It also has edible berries, but its berries are more oval or elongated than round and they ripen slightly later. The difference between the flavor of the berries I’ve read, is nannyberries have a prune / banana type flavor, while wild raisins taste more like actual raisins. In any event birds love them both so if you want to try them you might want to get after it.

Bright sunshine showed these blackberry leaves were still green.

If you aren’t sure if what you’re seeing is a raspberry or a blackberry, just feel the canes. Blackberry canes feel more square than round and mature canes will have a groove or two in them that will run the length of the cane. Just watch the thorns.

These blackberry leaves were finished with photosynthesizing so they no longer needed to be green. Blackberries and other brambles like swamp dewberry often have deep purple leaves at this time of year.

American wintergreen is another plant that turns purple when it gets cold. Oil of wintergreen has been used medicinally for centuries and a soothing tea can be made from the leaves. The fragrance of the oil is unmistakable because it is used in toothpaste, mouthwash, pain relievers, breath mints and many other products but you should note: If you are allergic to aspirin you should not eat the berries, leaves or any teas or other preparations made from this plant because it contains compounds very similar to those found in aspirin.

I saw lots of berries on these plants and thought of my grandmother as I picked a few. When I was just a small boy, after we visited my mother’s grave we would go into the woods so she could teach me about the plants that grew there. Teaberry plants grew in abundance and she always called them checkerberries. Since she often had trouble getting up from a kneeling position before long it was up to me to find the berries and I usually found a lot of them. She loved them and taught me to love them as well but on this day these berries were kind of on the mealy side. I thought maybe they had been frozen and I didn’t care for their texture, but the flavor of Clarks teaberry gum was still the same.

There are lots of gray birches here. Though they aren’t quite as pretty as the bright white paper birches they do have white bark and they’re far more common. It is rare that a day goes by without birches in it.

Gray birches have the odd habit of having upright male catkins rather than ones that hang down like so many other trees. Before they flower in spring though, they will have changed position and will be hanging down. How they might benefit by standing upright, I don’t know. Plants don’t do things just for the fun of it though; every time they use energy, there is a good reason behind it. I’ve always thought that part of the fun of nature study was trying to figure out why they do what they do. If you watch them very closely, like each day in spring for trees, their secrets are often revealed. You don’t have to stand there watching them; often just a glance each day will show you something is different. You might see that those birch catkins that were standing up yesterday are now hanging down. I don’t know this as fact but I would guess in this case that the catkins would want to be pointing downward so water didn’t get in under the shingle like bud scales when they opened. If water reaches the flowers and freezes in a cold spring it can damage or even kill them.

The female cone like gray birch strobiles are larger than the male catkins and they always hang down. A close look shows that each one bears many hundreds of seeds. The small seeds are shaped like triangles with tiny wings, and are blown about by the wind in late fall and winter. Unless that is, birds get to them first. Many songbirds love them. You can often find the snow under a gray birch littered with hundreds of tiny seeds after a storm and chickadees and other small birds will be feasting on them. If they aren’t eaten they can persist for years in the soil.

But I would guess that most birch seeds do get eaten and to make sure I knew how it was done this black capped chickadee landed right in front of me to show me. It was easy to see where the name “black capped” came from. These are beautifully colored little birds but they don’t sit still long so few of us ever get to see them up close. Quite often I’ll notice as I walk on trails they fly along beside me from bush to bush, always just out of sight of the camera.

Luckily this one wasn’t camera shy so we can get a good look. How it can find those tiny birch seeds in all that gravel and pine needles, I don’t know. They’ve got better eyes than I have, I do know that. Males and females look almost identical but you can tell them apart in spring by their song. The males have a beautiful “fee-bee” mating call that sounds both sad and sweet, and it just doesn’t seem like spring is here until I hear their call. They also have an “every day” call that sounds like “chick a dee-dee-dee,” and I would guess that’s how they came by that part of their name.

We’ve had some up and down weather lately. One day last week it was 48 degrees and as I came out of a store I noticed this cluster fly hanging out on the hood of my car, enjoying the warmth of the engine that was wafting up from the gap between the hood and fender. Google lens told me it was a cluster fly and I learned that their name comes from the way they cluster together on your window sills on sunny winter days. They get into attics and other warm spaces and spend the winter there, but unlike the common housefly they don’t lay eggs on food.

One day it was very warm and all the melting ice created a heavy mist. Since I had seen flies and even mosquitoes around I thought I’d go and see if the spiders had built any webs in the wetlands but no; apparently they all disappeared. I’ve read that orb weaver spiders die in winter but the egg sacs the females leave behind ensure a new generation in spring.

The ice was melting quickly and in a day or two there wouldn’t be any left except in places that saw no sunshine.

There is so much beauty in this world, sometimes it seems like these posts have now reduced themselves to nothing but beauty. But I’m here to report what I see in nature and beauty is what I see, because it’s everywhere I look. I find that my thoughts of whether or not something is beautiful are based more on how something makes me feel than how it looks, and the simplicity of a pickerel weed leaf tip sticking up out of frozen pond grabbed me and held me for a time. I love the colors and the minimalistic, abstract feel, and the way the leaf’s shadow looks like it has been colored in with a crayon. That’s due to tiny bubbles in the ice, I think. I must have taken twenty photos of this scene and this is the one I liked the most.

There is never ice everywhere here in the wetlands; even in the coldest winters there is always open water to be found and mallards are expert at finding it. I found the mallards seen here swimming in part of a pool that hadn’t frozen over completely. There was Mr. Mallard…..

…and there was Mrs. Mallard. I love the way they float along so serenely, and I loved the beautiful patterns in her feathers.

Actually on this day I saw far more of this than I did serene floating. These birds were hungry, and they were finding plenty to eat down there on the bottom.

There were lots of black eyed Susan seeds for other birds to eat. Goldfinches love them and there are lots of goldfinches here. Other birds that eat them are chickadees, cardinals, nuthatches, and sparrows, all of which can be found here in the wetlands.

All of the same birds also eat aster seeds. Years ago I started leaving garden plants standing for the winter so birds could eat the seeds and I usually have a yard full of birds. Most of the smaller birds hide in the big eastern white cedar out front and they fly into it when I open the door to leave. Bigger birds just fly up and perch on the many bare limbs of the maples, cherries and crab apples and watch what I’m doing. I don’t feed them but they know I won’t harm them so I’ve had generation after generation nesting here. One of the great pleasures I find in nature is in the spring when I can start opening the windows to hear their songs at dawn.

I saw lots of bird’s nests here but I chose to show this one because one side support had let go and it was tilted so we could easily see inside it. I thought back to last summer and what birds I had seen in this spot. There were lots of catbirds and a few blue jays here but I can’t say with certainty which of them would have made the nest. A baseball, which is about 3 inches in diameter, would have fit right into it. There are lots of grapevines here as well and this and other birds had used their peeling bark to build their nests, along with straw and whatever else they could find.

I always look at the grape tendrils because sometimes I see amazing things in them like horse heads or Hindu dancers, but on this day all I saw was a grape tendril. It seems like my imagination has decided to take some time off lately.

Miles off in the distance it looked like Mount Monadnock had received a dusting of snow. It usually snows on the mountain before we see any down here in the lowlands. It had rained here the day before, so I’d guess that it fell as snow up there. Once there is a buildup of snow on the mountain it will most likely stay snowy until May, depending on the weather. I’ve been up there when the snow was so deep I had to kind of swim / crawl through / over it. It’s a good thing I was young because it was exhausting. I felt tired right down to my bones.

I couldn’t stand around thinking of mountains for very long because there were some dark clouds moving in, and it was cold enough to snow. I snapped this one last shot of the clouds and stayed dry all the way to the car, but I woke the next morning to find that we’d had a dusting of snow overnight.

Beauty, joy, serenity, simplicity, and wonder; I found them all while making this post and I found them without really even trying. I know you’ll find them too, and much, much more as you travel through life.

Go to the winter woods: listen there; look, watch, and “the dead months” will give you a subtler secret than any you have yet found in the forest. ~ Fiona Macleod

Thanks for coming by.

Note: As I did last year at this time I’m taking a short break from regular blogging, so posts will be sporadic until they resume in March. I need to just be quiet for awhile so I’ll post the usual “Christmas card” post next week and then, unless something comes up I’ll be back in March. I expect something will come up before then though. Last year all of the sudden I was writing poetry. And don’t forget-you can always go to the archives up there on the right hand side and wander through them. There are 12 years worth of blog posts there.

Posted in Birds, Ice Formations, Insects, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Things I've Seen | Tagged American Wintergreen, Aster Seeds, Bird Nest, Black Capped Chickadee, Black Eyed Susan Seeds, Blackberry, Blackberry leaf Colors in Winter, Canon SX70 HS, Checkerberry, Cluster Fly, Frozen Landscapes, Grape Tendril, Gray Birch, Gray Birch Female Stobiles, Gray Birch Male Catkins, Ice Covered Water, Identifying Blackberries by Canes, Mallard Feeding, Mallards in Winter, Melting Ice, Mists Rising From the Forest, Mount Monadnock, Nanny Berry, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus TG-6, Pickerel Weed in Ice, Storm Clouds, Swanzey New Hampshire, Teaberry, Wild Fruits and Berries, Wild Raisins, Winter Plants, Winter Woods | 45 Comments »

Rail Trail Discoveries

December 9, 2023 by New Hampshire Garden Solutions

I’d heard rumors about more rail trail improvements going on here and there, so I thought I’d go and see how they were coming along. This trail, for local people who’d like to follow it, runs between the Ashuelot River and Eaton Road in Swanzey. I had also heard that there were also some serious washouts along this trail during the heavy rains and flooding last summer, and I hoped that part of the rumor wasn’t true.

The first improvement I noticed was that the drainage channels had been cleaned out. This was good and bad, because though the water would flow better, the cleaning out had widened the ditch I had to cross over. I stood at the top of the hill you see on the right, wondering what the best way was for me to get to the other side. I thought about running and jumping but then I decided to just walk down the hill and step over the ditch. Unfortunately when I lifted my right foot to step over it my left foot slipped in the mud and I landed with a splash and both feet in the water.

As I stepped up out of the ditch I noticed this boulder in a hazelnut thicket. I thought it was odd that I had never seen it before since I come here to get photos of hazelnut flowers in spring. Even more puzzling was the round spot on it. I couldn’t tell if it had been painted on or if it was natural. Back in my rock and mineral hunting days I split open a honeydew melon size rock that had a large, perfectly round spot in its center that looked just like this, caused by iron deposits I believe. I saved that rock and still have it but this one was too big to carry.

Christmas ferns are flattening themselves against the earth for warmth as they do every year. They’ll stay green under the snow all winter and were named “Christmas” ferns by early settlers who brought them inside in winter. The long, cold, dark winters and several feet of snow must have been hard for them to bear. I would imagine that any green growing thing would have lifted their spirits.

Raspberry leaves lit up this day. Because of the blueish stems I believe this is a black raspberry.

Neat rows of small holes told me a sapsucker had visited this maple tree. Sapsuckers are in the woodpecker family. When sap is running many other birds, bats, insects, and animals sip the sap that runs from these holes, so they are an important part of the workings of the forest. This tree has problems with rot and looked to be ready to fall over, so I doubt much sap will weep from those holes. I usually see sapsucker holes on wild fruit trees. These may be the first I’ve seen on a maple.

The washouts proved to be reality rather than rumor, and this was a big one. What happened was, for the first time in 150 years the stone box culvert under the trail couldn’t handle all the water trying to flow through it at once and the force of the water washed soil away.

For those who have never seen one, this is a photo of a box culvert taken a few years ago. The railroad would put down a thick granite slab for a floor, then add two side walls and a roof, and then pile massive amounts of gravel and packed earth on top of the culvert to make a level bed. Length depended on the width of the railbed. They’re built to last; beyond sturdy, and I’ve never seen one fail. But the railroad engineers didn’t have a crystal ball and they had no way of knowing what type of storms there would be in a century and a half into the future. Today we don’t have to see very far into the future to know that we’re going to have to re-think a lot of our infrastructure. Culverts of any kind should be a priority because there is a lot more water trying to flow through them now and they can’t handle it.

If you see a stream that seems to come out of nowhere when you’re on a rail trail you can be sure there is a box culvert right under where you’re standing. The stream seen here is maybe 30 feet below the rail bed so you can imagine how much soil had to be brought in to raise and level it. Box culverts were built on site by stone masons using granite taken from nearby ledges or boulders and they were built according to how big the stream was. The one in the previous photo, which is the one this stream runs through, is about 2 feet square.

And there are a lot of box culverts along this section of trail.

Here was a huge washout that didn’t affect the trail because it was on the far side of a deep ravine. It was interesting because I could see how sandy soil had been deposited on top of a bed of gray clay. Clay deposits on the banks or beds of rivers are called alluvial deposits. Since the only way that clay could have gotten there was to be deposited by the river, it shows that the river channel was once quite far from where it is now. Time and pressure will eventually turn the clay into shale.

I’ve heard all kinds of opinions on how long it takes to build up an inch of topsoil (100-1000 Yrs.) and in the end I doubt anyone really knows for sure because the rate depends on many different factors. But for the sake of argument I’ll say 500 years. From where I stood it looked like there was about 4 feet of topsoil over the clay bed, so 48 inches X 500 years = 24,000 years since that clay last saw the light of day. Of course that is provided the area wasn’t disturbed by man. If someone trucked all that soil in at some point that changes the whole scenario but it’s safe to say it has been there a long time. Closer to where I lived along the Ashuelot there was an exposed clay deposit in the river bank. I used to dig the clay and make all kinds of things with it but of course I had no way to fire it so it all just crumbled away.

I saw the first good example of a maple dust lichen this year. Some lichens wait until cold weather to really show themselves but I don’t know if this is one of those. This lichen’s appeal is in its simplicity; just a pale greenish body with a white fringe around it; simple beauty. The white fringe is called the prothallus and seeing it is a great way to identify this lichen. Though named the maple dust lichen it grows on several species of tree.

Script lichens are visible year round as white spots on trees but only when it gets cold enough do their squiggly apothecia appear. They’re usually black against the body but these were on the gray side because I think they had just appeared. I’ve wondered for years why some lichens, ferns, mosses and even some fungi wait until winter to release their spores. There has to be some benefit in it but I’ve never been able to even guess what it is. Figuring that out would be a nice feather in a biology students cap, I would think.

I tend to notice delicate fern moss more than others at this time of year because they always look bright orange. That’s due to color blindness, so I always have to ask my color finding software what color it really is. In this case it says yellow-green. From a distance I thought it was tree skirt moss, but it fooled me in that way too.

It’s easy to see how the shagbark hickory tree got its name. There are quite a few of them growing along this trail. These two were quite young; too young to drop nuts, I would guess.

And here was another trail washout, bigger than the first. I’m not sure who is responsible for repairing things like this but they have quite a job ahead of them.

It’s a long, long way down to the river from up here and that’s quite a pile of rubble and trees that washed away in the flooding when all the rain tried to get to the river. Every brook, stream and trickle eventually finds its way to the Ashuelot River in this part of the state, and the Ashuelot eventually empties into the Connecticut River which in turn empties into the Atlantic Ocean, so we’re sending a lot of soil to the sea.

Ocher Bracket Fungi grew on a log. Though these bracket fungi resemble turkey tails in shape and habit they don’t show the same color variations. The versicolor part of the scientific name of turkey tails means many colors, and these brackets had only various shades of a single color, which was a kind of yellowish brown.

As I always do when I follow this trail, I saw lots of partridge berries and I surprised myself by being able to get a shot of this pea size berry’s two dimples with my cell phone. The dimples are left by the plant’s two flowers, which share a single ovary. I find this little ground hugger’s leaves very pleasing; they always look like hammered metal.

The ovary found at the base of the flowers, as can be seen here. When the ovary becomes a berry, that berry grows around the base of the flowers, which leave dimples in it. This is an unusual arrangement; the only other plant I know of that does this is the fly honeysuckle, which is one of the first shrubs to bloom in spring.

This sign wasn’t a big surprise.

I had heard that some of the rail trail trestles were being re-decked and that’s what was going on here. This work is all done by volunteers, many from snowmobile clubs, so they deserve our thanks. (And our donations if we can afford them.)

It looks like they’re using 4X4 lumber to re-deck this trestle, so that should last a few years. It looked like they were about half done with the decking, but then they’ll also have to replace the guard rails along the sides, which keep people from falling into the river. Since they can probably only work at this on weekends now that it gets dark so early, I think it will be a while before I cross this trestle again. If I kept following this trail in this direction for a few more miles I’d walk right behind the house I grew up in in Keene.

Here were the old guardrails.

I wanted to get a shot of the river from the trestle but that wasn’t going to happen on this day so I had to settle for this shot. The way the river rises and falls so quickly these days makes it hard to know exactly what “normal” is anymore. Raging or placid, I can always count on is its beauty.

The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it. ~Chinese philosopher

Thanks for stopping in.

Posted in Flowers, Fungi, Lichens, Mosses & Liverworts, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes | Tagged Alluvial Clay, Ashuelot River, B&M Railroad Trestle, Box Culverts, Canon SX70 HS, Cheshire Rail Trails, Christmas Fern, Clay Deposits, Delicate Fern Moss, Flooding, Maple Dust Lichen, Mosses in Winter, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Ocher Bracket Fungus, Olympus TG-6, Partridge Berry, Raspberry Leaf Fall Color, Sapsucker Holes, Script Lichen, Shagbark Hickory, Swanzey New Hampshire, Trail Improvements, Trail Maintenance, Trail Wasouts, Winter Plants, Winter Woods | 33 Comments »

Things I’ve Seen

December 2, 2023 by New Hampshire Garden Solutions

I started these “things I’ve seen posts” years ago because I had lots of photos that just didn’t seem to fit in other posts. I think this is the first one I’ve done this year but these are all recent photos that also didn’t fit in, like this milkweed seed resting on a branch that I saw just the other day. It was most likely taken by the wind not too long after I’d left. According to the University of Maine Native American used milkweed as medicine to treat a variety of ailments, made the stem fibers into yarn, and ate the plant as well, ingesting the young shoots, flowers, and young green fruits of milkweed. The shoots have been compared to asparagus and the unopened buds to broccoli.

Since the corn fields near here began to flood the farmer started planting wheat, so I thought these plants I found growing under the powerlines nearby were wheat escapees but Canada wild rye, native to the great plains, looks very similar after the leaves have died back. Wild rye seeds are edible and were used as food by Native Americans.

I also found some Canada lily seed pods under the powerlines. They had opened and were releasing seeds. They split into three sections when they open, and each section has two rounded lobes which the seeds fit into perfectly.

Looking at the seeds it’s easy to see how the rounded parts fit into the rounded lobes in each section of seed pod. The pointed part points toward the center of the pod and the flat seeds are stacked into each lobe, meaning that each seed pod carries many seeds. Canada lily bulbs are edible but they were a famine food, used by Native Americans only when other foods weren’t available. When roasted they are said to taste like an ear of unripe corn. The seeds remind me of American elm seeds.

I like to see the beautiful blue of juniper berries but they don’t last long because bluebirds and other birds eat them up as fast as they ripen. A waxy coating reflects the light in a way that makes the deep purple black berries appear to be a bright and beautiful blue. Though called a berry botanically speaking the fruit is actually a seed cone with fleshy, merged scales. The flavor of gin comes from the juniper plant’s unripe berry and the ripe berry is the only part of a conifer known to be used as a spice. Whole and / or ground fruit is used on game like venison, moose, and bear meat. The first recorded usage of juniper appears on an Egyptian papyrus from 1500 BC. Egyptians used juniper medicinally and Native Americans used the fruit as both food and medicine. Stomach disorders, infections and arthritis were among the ailments treated. Natives also made jewelry from the seeds inside the berries, which I keep telling myself I’ll look at but never do.

A dead Queen Anne’s lace flower head looked like a starburst in the bright sunlight.

I went to the river several times this past summer to see the beautiful iridescent colors of mussel shells. There was no question that they would be there because raccoons go there to fish and when they’re done eating the meat of the mussel they leave the shells behind. But this year every time I went to see them the shells were broken into pieces. Who or what was breaking them? They’ve never been broken in past years and I can’t imagine an animal doing it. I’ve noticed footprints in the sand now and then though, so I have an idea that it might be the work of a someone rather than a something. Too bad; if they stopped for a moment to see how the light brought out the beautiful colors of the shells maybe they’d see what they had been depriving themselves of by breaking them.

I found a great illustration of a branch collar. The dark part sticking up is obviously the dead branch but what is maybe no so obvious is the branch collar below it, which is shaped like a volcano. When pruning trees it is always best to cut the branch and leave the branch collar intact because this exposes less of the tree’s surface area to insects and fungal spores. It’s easy to see the difference between the diameter of the branch compared to the base of the branch collar.

I went out one cold night to get something out of the car and saw this half moon shining brightly so I went back in and got the camera, steadied it on a post and took this shot. It would have been better if I had used a tripod. I remember as a boy in 1969 I used my father’s binoculars to see if I could see the Lunar Orbiter circling the moon, but I never did see it. The thought of people actually up there walking on the moon was awe inspiring. Everything stopped as the people of earth (650 million) watched the lunar landing on television. We all came together as one people then, and it seemed such a great time to be alive.

Two mallards swam blue streaks across a golden pond. This photo is right from the camera just as it happened, without any re-touching. I’ve seen golden water and I’ve seen blue water, but I’ve never seen this. Of course it’s all about the light; it is the light that makes things beautiful. Ponds are starting to ice over, so mallards and geese will have a harder time finding open water soon.

Long, faceted spears of ice formed along the shore of another pond. They were barely noticeable unless the light fell on them in a certain way, so it took a few tries to get a shot of them.

There were a few ice baubles along the river shore on this day. It has to get quite cold for them to form. It seems to take at least a couple of nights in the 20s F. to get them started.

On another day many ice baubles were catching the bright sunlight beautifully and acting like prisms with colors both in them and shining out of them but try as I might, I couldn’t catch them in the camera. I was finally able to get the blue of the sky reflected in this one though. I wanted to try a cellphone camera but the rocks on shore were covered in ice and I would have had to kneel on them while I held the phone out over the water. It didn’t seem like a very good plan.

This was a strange, hand shaped ice bauble. The wind howls up and down the river at times so I can only guess that the wind was the sculptor. It must have been a very cold and windy night. The sun’s light was again beautifully colored by it but again, I couldn’t catch it so I’ll have to keep trying. Quite often you find that the camera can’t see what your eyes can.

Hoar frost covered much of the grass on the riverbank.

From what I’ve read, hoar frost is a type of feathery frost that forms by condensation of water vapor to ice at temperatures below freezing. The word ‘hoar’ comes from old English and refers to the old age appearance of the frost: the way the ice crystals form makes it look like white hair or a beard. One of the best places to find hoarfrost is on exposed plants near unfrozen lakes and streams. There are times when you can walk along a stream and see all the stream side shrubs covered with it.

Since it was cold enough I went to the outflow of Swanzey Lake. The small waterfall there always makes good splash ice at this time of year.

Though I’m not sure why, splash ice is usually more opaque than the ice baubles along the river that are made by waves washing over a twig or plant stem. It’s never as clear, but it is just as interesting. If I had to guess I’d say the whitish color is due to large concentrations of oxygen, much like white puddle ice is.

The ice that grew on a big boulder looked like what I imagine the barnacles on a ship’s hull would look like.

I had forgotten about the iron rich seep in this place. Seeps don’t flow; they just sit on the surface like a puddle. I know of some that have been where they are for many years, but none I’ve seen are as richly colored as this one. The water in a seep reaches the earth’s surface from an underground aquifer and apparently stays somewhat warm, because I’ve never seen a seep freeze over. In a way though I wish they would; I’d like to see red puddle ice.

Another small pond had mostly frozen over but the ice was thin. A goose landing on it would have probably broken through but geese swim in the river at this time of year, where it takes longer for ice to form.

A fragrant white waterlily leaf had been caught in the ice. In summer the surface this pond is covered by many hundreds of them. Pond and lake ice always looks perfectly smooth but it rarely is because the wind sculpts and forms it.

I don’t see sun dogs often but last Saturday afternoon I saw what looked almost like a vertical rainbow to the right of the sun. Sundogs happen when there are ice crystals in the atmosphere. The ice crystals act much like prisms and color the light, which is often red closest to the sun, yellow in the center and white at the farthest edge. I could see two sundogs, one on either side of the sun, and an arc or “bow” overhead, but I couldn’t get far enough away to get them all in one photo. The scene covered a huge area.

I found this photo of sundogs on Wikipedia. It was taken in Saskatoon, Canada by Carlos Enrique Díaz Fecha last year. If I had been far enough away I could have gotten a shot much like this one, but I could only get the sundog on the right side of the sun. As I drove under the arc I watched the one on the left, hoping for a good place to stop but I never did find one; I was just too close. Sundogs get their name from the way they follow or “dog” the sun. This isn’t new; Aristotle (384-322 BC) once noted that “two mock suns rose with the sun and followed it all through the day until sunset.” He said that “mock suns” are always to the side, never above or below, most commonly at sunrise or sunset, and more rarely in the middle of the day.

I zoomed in a little closer, thinking I’d see something different but I didn’t. Just color; an amplification and bending of the light. Though sundogs warn of coming storms it was nice to see them; an interesting and beautiful end to the day.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. ~Henry David Thoreau

Thanks for coming by.

Posted in Ice Formations, Nature, Things I've Seen | Tagged Astronomical Winter, Branch Collar, Canada Lily Seed Pod, Canada Lily Seeds, Canon SX70 HS, Fragrant White Waterlily Leaf in Ice, Freshwater Mussel Shells, Hoar Frost, Ice Baubles, Ice Formations, Ice on Pond, Iron Rich Seep, Juniper Berries, Keene, Mallards, Mallards in Winter, Milkweed Seed, Moon, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus TG-6, Oxygen Tainted Ice, Queen Anne's Lace Seedhead, Splash Ice, Sundogs, Swanzey Lake, Swanzey New Hampshire, Wheat or Wild Rye, Winter Plants, Winter Woods | 36 Comments »

Big Changes in the Deep Cut

November 24, 2023 by New Hampshire Garden Solutions

It has been nearly a year since I last visited the man-made canyon on the deep cut rail trail up in Westmoreland, because the last time I visited there had been a rockslide in the southern end of the man-made canyon and it had flooded the canyon badly. The northern canyon seen here remained mostly untouched.

I say mostly untouched because rock falls were also happening in the northern canyon. If you look closely up ahead on the right side you can see a caution sign, there so snowmobiles don’t crash into the rock fall in winter.

The largest stone seen here is about half the size of a Volkswagen beetle, and it surely would have crushed one if one had been there when it fell.

Above the rock fall is a scary scene, because huge stones have detached from the wall and are ready to fall. You can see marks from the old steam drills and the stone has come loose from the face of the canyon along the line of one of the drill marks. This is a dangerous situation that I will stay away from until that loose, car crushing stone has fallen.

The reason so many stones fall is because there is a lot of groundwater here. The water seeps into any crack in the stone and when it gets cold enough it freezes and expands, and ever so slowly the stones are pushed apart. Eventually they fall, but this never would have happened when the trains were running because the railroad would have regularly inspected the route.

Though some features, like that beautifully built retaining wall on the left, need little maintenance the drainage channels that run through here need regular cleaning of leaves, silt and branches or they dam themselves up and flood into the trail. This has happened in several spots along this section of trail. There is a lot of water here and if it doesn’t have a way to run off, it causes problems.

The reason I started regularly coming to this place is because I found plants here that I couldn’t find anywhere else, like the wild chervil seen in the photo above. Its leaves were still nice and green and I think that was because there hadn’t been a frost here yet. This place has its own weather and usually runs about 10 degrees cooler, but on this day it was warm and so humid the camera lens kept fogging up. I was also swatting mosquitoes in November, which was a first. Wild chervil isn’t the same as the cultivated chervil used to flavor soups so it should never be eaten. In many places it is called cow parsley and it closely resembles many plants like water hemlock that are extremely poisonous. It’s a good plant to admire and just leave alone.

I saw some late fall oyster mushrooms on a log. On this side they had just appeared and were whitish colored…

…and on the other side of the log they had some age and had darkened. These mushrooms almost always form in overlapping groups. They are sometimes said to be the last mushroom seen before winter but there are many others that fruit in late fall. Though I didn’t show them here the gills are yellow to yellow orange. When quite young they also have a yellowish color where the cap meets the stem and that is the “glow” seen in the previous photo.

There are lots of ferns here, including the evergreen wood ferns seen here. These ferns are true evergreens, holding on to their green fronds under the snow until spring.

If you’re interested in knowing what fern it is you happen to be seeing a good guide book is Identifying Ferns the Easy Way: A Pocket Guide to Common Ferns of the Northeast by Lynn Levine. When I bought it, it was $10.95, which is a low price for a guide as good as this one. One of the things she explains in detail is how to use a fern’s spore case locality on the leaf to identify it.

On another log there were some brown cup fungi growing on a log and they must have been tasty because something, probably a squirrel or chipmunk, had been nibbling at them. According to Michael Kuo at Mushroom Expert. Com these are among the most difficult fungi to identify. I call them brown cup fungi because they are brown and cup shaped but they could be one of several different species.

I looked up to the rim of the canyon and there was a young beech so bright against the background trees it looked to be on fire. Though the walls of the canyon look barren at this time of year in summer they are lush and green, with masses of violets and other flowers growing anywhere they can get a foothold. It transforms itself into a beautiful Shangri-La.

One of the most unusual things I’ve found growing on these walls is algae. Even though what you see is colored carrot orange it is called green algae. Over about a dozen years it has grown to about twice the size it was when I first found it and has even started growing on the opposite wall of the canyon. I keep hoping I’ll see it producing spores but I haven’t yet.

I found lots of beech drops here. They grow near beech trees and are a parasite that fasten onto the roots of the tree using root like structures. They take all of their nutrients from the tree so they don’t need leaves, chlorophyll, or sunlight. Beech drops are annuals that die off in cold weather, but they can often be found growing in the same place each year.

Tiny pinkish purple flowers with a darker purplish or reddish stripe are the only things found on a beech drop’s leafless stems. On the lower part of the stem are flowers that never have to open because they self-fertilize. They are known as cleistogamous flowers. On the upper part of the stem are tubular flowers which open and are pollinated by insects. The flowers seen here never really opened, possibly because it is so late in the season. I usually find them blossoming in September.

I was surprised to find leaves on this young maple. I think it was an invasive Norway maple, which hold their leaves until most other maples have dropped theirs. Their fall color is yellow as well. The real test is to break a leaf stem. If it has white latex rather than clear sap it is a Norway maple.

These leaves had a good case of powdery mildew. Like tar spot, which is another leaf attacking disease, it is unsightly but it doesn’t harm the health of the tree.

Since I knew how wet the trail ahead was, and since I wasn’t going “thru,” I skirted the sign so I could see what had been done over the summer.

The answer was, not much. They had broken up the huge stone slab that had slipped off the hillside though, so that was a start. I had spoken to one of the people who were going to do the work so I know there are big plans for the place. I’m guessing they’re waiting for the ground to freeze so the heavy equipment doesn’t destroy what is left of the trail. In this photo you can see by the stone standing upright how thick the slab was. When it slipped it came to rest in the drainage channel, plugging it tight and flooding the trail.

There were three of these huge slabs of rock along this section of trail and now there are two. If the others let go and slide into the trail I hope I’m not here when it happens. This shot of one of the two slabs still left gives you an idea of how big they are. You could park a Volkswagen beetle on this one. In winter they are covered in sheets of ice about 6 inches think, and I always hoped the ice wouldn’t give way when I was here in the winter. That the stone would let go and slip never crossed my mind. It must have made quite a rumbling sound.

This view gives an idea of how thick the slabs are; I’d guess about 18 inches. The slab of rock that fell was about the same thickness as what is seen here but it was bigger, if I remember correctly. It was also covered in ice when it fell. The green you see here and there in this shot are great scented liverworts. There was a lot of water between us so I couldn’t get any closer.

For the first time since I’ve been coming here I found great scented liverwort growing in soil beside the trail. I’ve always liked its reptilian appearance and its clean, fresh scent. I hope it continues to grow in this spot but it is a very fussy plant that will refuse to grow if the conditions aren’t right. It demands clean, unpolluted water, for instance.

Also for the first time, I saw a yellow jelly fungus growing on a leaf. Or it might have grown through holes in this beech leaf. I’ve never seen them grow on anything but wood. There is always something unusual to see, every time I come here.

I had to reach out and run my hand over this white tipped Hedwigia moss. It seems more animal than plant and it begs to be petted. When it looks like it does in this photo it is at its optimum; it has had plenty of water and is good and healthy, and is at the top of its game. When dry it looks completely different. The white tips are caused by young leaves that have no chlorophyl. They turn green as the age.

I’ve never shown you how I get into the canyon. This is the view just as you come out of the canyon, looking toward the road, so we’re leaving rather than arriving. The ice climbers who come here kindly built boardwalks to get over the washouts that get bigger each year. You really have to watch your step through here because after the heavy rains of last summer the washouts have become deep enough in places to break a leg if you fell into one. When I’m moving through here I walk slowly and keep my eyes on the ground at all times. Just off to the left of that nearest boardwalk there is a washed out hole that could swallow a car.

There are seeps in this area as well, and this one had an iridescent sheen on it. Seeps are groundwater that lies on the surface like a huge puddle, but they never freeze no matter how cold it gets.

Looking forward, it will be nice to have the trail restored to its former condition with working drainage channels so it is not so muddy here, but for the next few months this will be a good place to stay away from.

It’s amazing how quickly nature consumes human places after we turn our backs on them. Life is a hungry thing. ~Scott Westerfeld

I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving Day. Thanks for stopping in.

Posted in Flowers, Fungi, Insects, Mosses & Liverworts, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Wildflowers | Tagged Beech, Beech Drops, Beech Fall Colors, Brown Cup Fungus, Canon SX70 HS, Cheshire Rail Trails, Evergreen Wood Fern, Falling Rock, Great Scented Liverwort, Green Algae, Groundwater Seepage, Ice Climbing in New Hampshire, Land slippage, Late Fall Oyster Mushroom, Learning FRom Nature, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, Nature's Beauty, New Hampshire, NH, Norway Maple, Olympus TG-6, Powdery Mildew, Rail Trail Restoration, Railroad Engineering, Seeps, Westmoreland Deep Cut, Westmoreland NH, White Tipped Moss, Wild Chervil, Yellow Jelly Fungus | 10 Comments »

Trees (And Friends)

November 18, 2023 by New Hampshire Garden Solutions

This past week one interesting / beautiful tree led to another, so there are a lot of trees in this post; and not always for their leaf color. I was happy to find a young larch tree recently. This is the only evergreen that I know of in this area to lose all its needles in winter. Before the needles fall they turn color just like autunn leaves, and they’re beautiful. It’s rare in my experience to find a larch in the wild.

This is what most of our maples look like now. Except for an occasional holdout they are free of leaves and the landscape is opening up. At this time of year you can really see the lay of the land; what I’ve always called the bones of the forest.

One day in late spring / early summer another man and I watched a Baltimore oriole fly in and out of this red maple. Sure it was building a nest we looked and looked until we convinced ourselves that no, this bird couldn’t have built a nest, otherwise we’d surely see it. But it was there, so well hidden behind leaves that we couldn’t see it. Once the leaves fell, there it was.

Note all the flower buds on this tree, ready for spring. Once the ground thaws enough so the roots can begin taking up water in April, the buds will swell and then open; some of the year’s first blossoms. So can you see spring in November? Yes, everywhere.

This maple for some reason split into two trees right at the stump, but that’s not what I want you to see.

These are kissing trees, also known as wedded or married trees. When two trees of the same species, or in this case two leaders of one tree, grow close enough together to rub when the wind blows, the rubbing can wear away the outer bark. When the outer bark is gone and the inner bark, known as the cambium layer, of both trees comes together they can grow together as one as these have. You can see the “kiss” in the middle of the photo where a branch shadow crosses both trees at an angle. These two trees, or more accurately two leaders of the same tree, are forever “wedded.”

Something I’ve never seen before is married white pine trees. These were big trees and you can see how the way they grew meant that, once they got big enough, they would surely rub together.

And here is the kiss. Something I’ve never seen white pines do.

Above where the trees emraced they once again became two trees. These trees, both maples and pines, have grafted themselves together naturally by way of a process called inosculation. Did man learn grafting from seeing things like this? I would guess yes, and today grafting is done on everything from roses to fruit trees. In nature the process isn’t as rare as we might think.

Far more common and much easier to see is this kind of tree marriage, when one branch from a tree somehow becomes grafted to another. If you’ve ever seen a tree grow around and engulf a steel cable or wire fence, I suspect the same thing has happened here. A branch rubbed against another tree and finally grafted itself to that tree. Over time the tree grew enough in diameter to absorb or engulf the branch from the first tree. I’ve seen this happen on other trees as well.

This maple limb had an itch and when it reached back to scratch itself it froze there for all time. Or maybe I just made that up. Watching for married trees is just another fun thing to do in nature, especially when children are involved. There is no point, no meaning; just seeing all of the things nature is capable of.

The wind blew an oak leaf into the road I was walking on. The leaf looked as if it had been sculpted and polished. And the color was amazing.

Beyond its beauty this leaf shows why it takes oak leaves so long to break down once they fall. They have a waxy coating that prevents water loss, but this coating also prevents moisture absorbtion. When water falls on an oak leaf it runs off, taking any dirt or air pollution particles with it, and that’s why this leaf looks so clean. The amazing shine also comes from that wax coating, and it gives a good hint of why oak leaves are so slippery. If you climb a hill in an oak forest you’d better have something to hang onto, because it can be like walking on ice. I’ve come across hillsides so slippery I’ve had to sit and slide down, digging in my heels so I didn’t get going too fast. A waterfall I often visit called Forty foot falls in Surry tumbles down a hillside that is very slippery.

Here is another look at oak leaf color. They have as wide a color range as red maples but of course change a month or so later so they extend the season.

This is probably the strangest oak leaf color that I see. I believe it belongs to a swamp white oak. My color finding software sees plum, steel blue, rosy brown, and thistle; all; colors I’ve never seen on a red maple.

I was wearing my color blindness correcting glasses when I saw this amazing view for the first time. When I lifted the glasses up though the colors were muted, almost as if I were seeing them through dirty glass. I’d lower the glasses and the colors would pop, raise them and the colors would lose their vibrance. I did this several times and thought about how for all of my life I thought what I was seeing was normal and now here was proof that it wasn’t.

When I got home and looked at the photo it looked muted, more like it did when I didn’t have the glasses on than when I did, so by small increments I lightened it to try and match what I saw with the glasses on. I think it’s fairly accurate but I’m talking about color, not quality. This was taken with my camera at the full extent of its zoom capabilities from miles away, and though I used a monopod it’s far from sharp. I’ll call it impressionistic.

This beech tree caught the only ray of sunlight in the forest and it was beautiful. Whenever I see sunlight highlighting something I always pay attention and walk over to whatever it is. It’s as if a spotlight was aimed at it so I would pay attention to it. All I saw this time was beauty, and I stood and admired it.

Beech leaves are starting to turn brown and they’ll stay that color all winter long, rattling and whispering in the winter winds. Once the buds begin to lengthen and swell in spring it’ll be time to make room for new leaves, so all of this year’s leaves will finally fall off. It is thought that beech trees, and a few oak trees as well, hang onto their leaves in winter to discourage foraging moose and deer from eating their buds.

For the first time I saw beech leaves with black spots on them. When I looked up its possible cause I was a bit stunned by what I was reading. According to the New York State Department of Conservation it is called beech leaf disease (BLD) and affects and kills both native and ornamental beech tree species. It is associated with a nematode, Litylenchus crenatae mccannii. This disease has only been discovered in recent years and much about it, including the full cause and how it spreads, is still unknown. The photo they showed of an infected tree looked much like what you see above. Here is a link to their web page: https://www.dec.ny.gov/lands/120589.html

You should look closely again at the previous photo of infected beech leaves and compare it to this photo of tar spot on maple leaves. Tar spot has a very different cause and does not affect the health of the tree. As far as I know beech leaves do not get tar spot.

I’m seeing plenty of catkins on the hazelnuts. They’ll lengthen and turn gold before shedding their pollen in spring when the tiny female flowers open.

Last spring’s female flowers produced quite a good crop of hazelnuts. I like the way the bracts always have so much movement in them, even though they’re as stiff as a starched collar at this time of year.

If you ever happen to notice a tree losing its bark, take a look at it once each week or so. Doing so will mean you can watch how a fascinating process progresses. White pines like the one in the photo shed their bark in quite large plates so it isn’t wise to stand too near the tree. White pine bark can be surprisingly heavy. Smaller trees often lose their bark in long strips that curl and puddle at the base of the tree like a nest of snakes. There are many reasons a living tree can lose its bark but when a tree looks like the one in the above photo it has died, and dead trees have no need of bark. The wood of a dead tree dries out and shrinks over time but the bark doesn’t shrink at the same rate, so it eventually becomes detached and gravity does the rest.

Of course once a tree falls and touches the soil fungi and other organisms go to work, breaking it down so its nutrients can be returned to the forest. The bracket fungi working on this birch limb are cinnabar polypores, which in my experience are rare in this area. They are often deep red but I think these were aging and had lost some of their red coloring.

The moss in this photo is native big red stem moss, which grows faster than any other moss I’ve seen. It has taken over this Norway spruce forest floor in the time I’ve been doing this blog, but it might as well do so because this forest floor is too dark for anything other than a few fungi. The moss will overrun other mosses and engulf any branches that fall. This spot is a great example of how the trees above can affect the forest floor below. According to the U.S. Forest Service, “Schreber’s big red stem moss typically occurs as a dominant or codominant ground cover in stands dominated by white spruce (Picea glauca) or black spruce (P. mariana).” Big redstem moss forms a monoculture of thick, cushion like growth that would probably be great to sleep on when camping. At one time it was collected and used to block chinks in the walls of log homes in Scandinavia, and is still used for chinking log homes in Russia. It was also used for lining fruit and vegetable storage bins.

If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. ~Tecumseh, Shawnee

I hope everyone has a safe and happy Thanksgiving Day Thursday. Taking a walk in the woods is a great way to walk off all that food! Thanks for coming by.

Posted in Nature, Trees | Tagged American Hazelnut Catkins, American Hazelnuts, Baltimore Oriole Nest, Beech Fall Color, Beech Leaf Disease, Big Red Stem Moss, BLD, Canon SX70 HS, Cinnabar Polypore, Eastern Larch, Kissing Trees, Larch Fall Color, Married Trees, Native Plants, Native Trees, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, Oak Leaves, Oake Fall Color, Oaks on Hillside, Olympus TG-6, Red Maple, Swanzey New Hampshire, Tamarack, Tar Spot on Maple, Thanksgiving, Trees, Trees Losing Bark, Wedded Trees, White Pine | 37 Comments »

First Frost

November 11, 2023 by New Hampshire Garden Solutions

It got cold here last week; down into the 20s F at night, so I thought I’d go to the river and see if any ice baubles had formed overnight. It must not have gotten cold enough though, because I didn’t see any ice baubles. I did see plenty of beauty though, including the way that the early morning light played on the water of the river. The water was like liquid silk and so very beautiful; I could have watched it all day.

Before I go too far I should explain what ice baubles are for newer readers. The easiest way to explain them is to think of a candle. You dip the wick in hot wax over and over again, letting the wax harden between dips. If you think of the twigs in this shot from a couple of years ago as wicks, you can see how every wave crest “dips” the twigs in water and the cold air hardens that water into ice. Over time, often overnight, ice baubles like those seen here form. They are very clear and pure and often act like prisms when the sunlight hits them.

If it had been cold enough the lower parts of the aster and other plants here at the water’s edge would have been covered in ice. Even the stones get ice coated so you have to be careful where you step.

But I forgot about the ice when I saw how the sunlight was falling on the ripples. It was electric and mesmerizingly beautiful, as if bands of pure electricity were dancing over the surface of the water. Like the river had somehow captured lightning.

I watched this amazing dancing light for a while and I thought about how we at our essence, are pure energy. I think if someone had come walking along the riverbank and said “I am the light” I would have said “Yes, I can see that. And so are we all.”

The light was so beautiful, everywhere I looked.

Though it was cold enough for gloves and a hat I didn’t really see anything that would signify a freeze. I did see some nice frosty leaves on the mouse ear hawkweeds though. It showed how hairy these leaves are.

Fallen leaves had a bit of frost on them as well but I certainly wouldn’t say we had a “heavy frost.”

Beavers had been busy during the night and had dropped several trees including three or four oaks. These aren’t just any trees; they were bought and planted when the 200 year old timber crib dam was removed from the river at this site in 2010. I don’t know who chose or planted the trees but they really should have hired a botanist. They planted pines so close to the deciduous trees the pines are now shading them out. Since pines grow almost twice as fast as trees like oak, maple and ash, the deciduous trees have never really had a chance to get off to a strong start. Unless the pines are removed the beavers might as well take them.

The evidence left behind by the beavers was easy to find and hard to deny.

There are lots of invasive Japanese barberry bushes here that form a prickly, impenetrable thicket that you can’t walk through; you have to walk around them. They choke out native plants but I’ve noticed that small animals like rabbits like to hide in them, most likely because predators can’t find a way through the thorns.

The birds didn’t get all the grapes. Or maybe they purposely left some behind.

Along with invasive Japanese barberry and Oriental bittersweet, the Asian burning bush is taking over this entire area. It’s a pretty thing that first came over as an ornamental but each plant grows many seeds and the birds love them. The plant is also known as “winged euonymus” and if you look closely at its branches in this shot you can see the corky “wings” that gave it that name.

I was hoping the burning bushes would have all turned soft pastel pink by this time but there was still a lot of green on them. I’ll have to watch carefully because once it gets cold enough all those leaves can drop off overnight. What you see here is just a small portion of the total number of bushes but this was the first time I’ve seen them from this spot. I would have been chest deep in water in this spot, probably hanging on to a tree, if the river had been high.

And here are the berries that make burning bushes so invasive. Each berry is smaller than a watermelon seed but birds come from all over to eat them.

Most of the clubmosses had let their spores go but this one’s “clubs” had refused to mature, for whatever reason. The clubs are actually called strobili, and are filled with sporangia. These plants are ancient, having been on earth for many thousands of years. They are also called “ground cedar” or “ground pine” but they have nothing to do with pine or cedar. They were once collected almost to extinction by people making Christmas wreaths. If I saw displays of wreaths made of clubmosses I would refuse to buy one, and I would tell the seller why.

Beavers cut the witch hazels every few years and then let them grow back before harvesting them again, but I did find one old enough to have a blossom on it.

A beautiful young beech peeked out from behind a maple.

I was surprised to find a small colony of big leaf asters here. I’ve been coming to this spot for many years and have never seen them here. Colonies of them can get quite large. It would be nice if this one did the same. They have beautiful two foot long sprays of white or sometimes purple flowers. The plants seem to have a habit of suddenly appearing in the least expected places but I find the largest colonies on sunny hillsides.

There are lots of American hornbeam trees here but they die young and don’t reach any great size, possibly due to the flooding that goes on here. Another name for the tree is muscle wood, because someone thought they saw “tendons” rippling underneath the tree’s “skin.” I don’t know if it’s a fact but these trees seem to retain lots of water. I’ve seen them so rotten inside it seemed like the bark was the only thing holding them together. The odd thing about that is how another name for the tree is ironwood, because it is so heavy and strong. I could see many lacy frullania liverworts on this tree’s bark. When it gets cold their color darkens so they’re much easier to see. Most reach to about baseball size.

American Hornbeams have lost their leaves by this time but they’re still easy to identify by their winged seeds, which hang at the end of young branches. The “wing” on each seed (nutlet) is a three lobed bract which catches the wind and takes the seed with it. The bracts and seed coating are light brown when ripe and most should be stripped from the tree by the gusty fall winds at any time now.

Some of the oaks that were planted here are swamp white oaks. In the fall their leaves can be quite colorful.

This view looks downriver and shows a relatively open riverbank there on the left, but it is slowly being taken over by willows, which form a thicket like a wall. They prevent access to the water and that’s too bad, because fishers, swimmers, picnickers, children, and people like myself come here precisely so they can get close to the river. Easy access to the river is the draw; the true value of the place, but town planners can’t seem to see it.

But just the same, the willows are beautiful too. I’ll let nature do what it will and be at peace with it. This area floods each year and over the past four or five years the floods have crept further up the bank to create a river width that I never thought I’d see. I come here in spring each year and the high water mark is always easily seen, often at least a few inches or so higher than it had been the previous year. If it continues to go the way it has been I’m guessing that eventually much of what we’ve seen in this post will simply be washed away. There are already signs of it happening.

I’ll leave you with another look at the beautiful morning light on the water. I hope you enjoyed seeing it as much as I did.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. ~Rumi

Thanks for stopping in.

Posted in Aquatics, Ice Formations, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes | Tagged American Hornbeam, American Hornbeam Seeds, Ashuelot Flooding, Ashuelot River, Ashuelot River Colors, Asian Burning Bush, Beaver Damage, Beech, Bigleaf Aster, Burning Bush Fruit, Canon SX40 HS, Clubmosses, Fallen Leaves, First Frost, Ice Baubles, Japanese barberry, Light on Water, Morning Light, Mouse Ear Hawkweed, Musclewood, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Oak, Oak fall Colors, Olympus TG-6, Oriental Bittersweet, Pure Energy, River Ripples, Swamp White Oak, Swanzey New Hampshire, Wild River Grapes, Willows, Winged Euonymous, Witch Hazel Blossoms | 22 Comments »

On The Level

November 4, 2023 by New Hampshire Garden Solutions

This post was going to be about the beeches and oaks at Willard Pond in Antrim. For years now I’ve finished the foliage season by visiting this beautiful hardwood forest but this year the light just wasn’t with me on my first visit. This photo has been lightened somewhat so it doesn’t show how dark it really was, especially under the trees. Shooting photos in such conditions would have been a waste of time so I turned and left.

A week later on Halloween I returned to Willard Pond on a cold, blustery morning to find that most of the leaves had fallen. I thought this was a bit odd since Halloween has always been my time to visit but the weather has been strange and unpredictable for all of this year. To be truthful I wasn’t upset that there would be no Willard Pond post this year because the Tudor trail that I usually follow is one of the roughest I know, with a lot of boulders and other things to step over and around. Each time I went I followed the trail for a short while and found that it bothered the knee that I damaged in my recent fall on Pitcher Mountain, so skipping it this year will probably turn out to be the right decision. If you want to see what Willard Pond Forest is like just go up to the search box at the top of the page and type “Willard Pond.” You’ll find several years of posts.

On the road into Willard Pond I saw some beautiful maple leaved viburnums on the side of the road. The color range of these plants is really amazing.

I also saw some bright red winterberries at Willard Pond. The fruits of this native holly hold their color for quite a while so they are sought after by people wanting to use them for holiday decorations. I often find bushes that have had almost all the berry bearing branches cut off.

I think for a while due to leg pain and maybe some balance issues that I should stay on flat, level surfaces like this rail trail in Keene. Other than an occasional woodchuck hole there is little to trip over as long as you stay on the trail. This will not be a hardship because I grew up on this trail way back when it was a working railroad route and I know it as well as I know myself. On this day I went to see the tree colors, which were a bit muted.

The muted colors come naturally because I think there are mostly silver maples in this area. Silver maples turn different shades of yellow in the fall unlike red maples, which have a much wider color range including red and orange.

Though there are still a few isolated red maples showing color most now look like this one.

All the yellow seen in this view comes from beeches, silver maples, birches, and Japanese honeysuckles.

Even the deer tongue grasses turned yellow this year. Quite often I see a lot of purple on these plants.

The silvery, fluffy seedheads of virgin’s bower vines line the rail trail. When in flower they’re known as traveler’s joy but at this stage they’re called Devil’s darning needles. Both names are just meaningless labels we’ve put on a pretty plant. The truth is, in nature there is no good or bad, no right or wrong, no past or future; there is just the perfection of this moment called now. We would do well to learn from this.

In a college botany class I once had I did my final exam paper on poisonous plants. The plant seen here was one of the deadliest, but also one of the most interesting. It is monk’s hood or monkshood; Queen of poisons, and it has been used to kill for countless centuries. If you were found growing it in ancient Rome there was a good chance that you’d be put to death, because as far as the Romans were concerned the only use for the extremely toxic plant was to add its toxic sap to the water of one’s enemies to eliminate them.

A side view of the flowers shows where the name monk’s hood comes from. The plant is in the aconite family and its sap can be absorbed through the skin. In 2015 an experienced gardener in the U.K. died of multiple organ failure after weeding and hoeing near aconite plants. I will often hold a plant steady with one hand while taking a photo with the other hand on windy days but not this plant.

Monkshood plants can stand a lot of cold so it is often one of the last to bloom in this area. The flowers are quite unusual and very pretty but it should only be grown where there are no children present, in my opinion. Knowledge of its dangers and always working around it with gloves on means anyone can grow it. If you do it will certainly be a conversation starter. Just think, you could tell friends how the Roman Agrippina hired Locusta to poison the emperor Claudius I in 54 AD. It is said that Locusta chose aconite to do the deed.

I saw some oak leaves with odd patterns on them. Whether made by insects or caused by nutrient deficiency, I don’t know. There is an insect, a leaf miner I think, which eats all the soft tissue of an oak leaf, leaving just the ribs and a net like skeleton leaf behind.

Some of these photos weren’t used in other posts for whatever reason. One of them is this misty morning visit to the wetlands when the maples were still colorful.

I saw more dewy spider webs on that visit. It’s hard to believe how many large webs are in these trees. This one was about the size of a basketball and I’d say on average that would be the size of most of them.

The colors have been beautiful this year but they’ve also been drawn out because of the warm weather. Everyone I meet seems to have an opinion about what a strange year it has been weather-wise.

The staghorn sumac colors have been amazing this year. The reds especially have been intense. Red is often a tough color for cameras to reproduce accurately but I think this is a fair representation.

Except for the deep purples of ash and oak I can’t think of a single fall leaf color that isn’t represented here in this scene from the wetlands. They’re all there and how beautiful they are when they’re all together in this way. It can take your breath away sometimes.

This is another scene from the wetlands that I like very much. All summer long I thought it would be beautiful in the fall because of the maples, and it was.

In the past the photos I’ve taken of poplars (Aspens) in the fall have almost always been soft and impressionistic as if they had been drawn with pastels, but these trees in the foreground seemed a bit loud to me. In shape and in leaf color poplars look a lot like birches from a distance. Only the gray bark tells the story. Most birches in this area growing in large colonies like that seen here are gray birches, which have white bark.

This is why I call this place the wetlands. The road I walk on was built through a swamp and there is water all along the roadsides. There is abundant life in a swamp and this is an excellent way to stay dry while seeing it.

I’m not sure where else I’d see autumn meadowhawks still flying in November. They were everywhere yesterday, resting in the sunshine. This one landed on a stump right in front of me and I had to wonder if they could read minds. I also saw lots of bluebirds on this day but I couldn’t get any of them to pose.

I was surprised to see a few pickerel weed flowers blooming in the wetlands after all others in various places had gone to seed. I have to say that this spot is a real jewel, with an abundance of birds, animals, insects, and interesting plants and wildflowers. There’s really no telling what you’ll see on any given day and I’m very happy to have finally discovered it, right there alongside the Keene Airport of all places. The level, paved road is easy to walk but there are plenty of places where you can leave it and explore the forest.

It was there in the wetlands that I saw the fall colors of tall meadow rue for the first time. This plant always blooms just at or before July 4th with flowers that look like bursts of fireworks. The “tall” part of its common name is very true; I’ve seen it reach over seven feet.

Since we had snow flurries as I was writing parts of this post I’ll end it with a white aster. We’ve also had our first freeze, almost a month late and coming before the first frost that should have happened in mid-September. Oh well, since a friend in Michigan reported 10 inches of snow on Halloween I don’t think we have anything to complain about.

An autumn forest is such a place that once entered you never look for the exit. ~Mehmet Murat ildan

Thanks for coming by.

Posted in Aquatics, Flowers, General gardening, Insects, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Wildflowers | Tagged Aconite, Antrim New hampshire, Autumn Meadowhawk Dragonfly, Canon SX70 HS, Cheshire Rail Trail, Deer Tongue Grass Fall Color, Fall in New Hampshire, Hancock New Hampshire, Keene, Maple Leaved Viburnum, Monk's Hood, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, New York Aster, NH, November Flowers, November Hikes, November Insects, Oak Leaves, Olympus TG-6, Pickerel Weed, Poplar Fall Color, Silver Maples, Spider Web, Staghorn Sumac Fall Color, Swanzey New Hampshire, Tall Meadow Rue, Virgin's Bower Seed Head, Wetland Insects, Wetland Plants, Wetland Views, Wildlife Sanctuary at Willard Pond, Winterberries | 29 Comments »

Fall Comes to Beaver Brook

October 28, 2023 by New Hampshire Garden Solutions

Before I get started on this walk through the Beaver Brook Natural area I’d like to thank all of you who wrote in with kind thoughts and well wishes after the last post. I won’t go on about it but I will say that it meant a lot, so thank you. I saw a doctor on Thursday and he said I should take some vitamins for brain health but otherwise my progress is as expected. Post concussion syndrome can apparently be a slippery thing, hard to get a handle on.

I should also like to apologize for adding information about my fall in such a shocking manner, but the point was to show how easily and quickly serious injuries can happen on trails, even to someone very familiar with the trail. All it takes is one misplaced step, so having a plan B is most important, as many of you pointed out.

Anyhow, after my fall I was having some pretty strong pain in my left leg, so after a couple of days of resting and nursing it I decided that walking might be better for it. I wanted a place where I could enjoy the beauty of the season while not having to worry about tripping and falling. That place could only be Beaver Brook Natural Area in Keene, and here we are just inside the gate in the photo above. The beauty was immediate and stunning, as I suspected it would be.

The old road we’re following remains pretty much as it was back in the 1970s when it was abandoned after all traffic was re-routed to the new route 9 north. The place remains frozen in time, with no passing zone lines, guard posts, a waterfall, and even a bridge over the brook still able to be seen. Now it is used as more of a park where local nature lovers can come to see the amazing beauty of the area. On this day the old road was nearly covered by fallen leaves and I felt like I was in grade school again as I shuffled through them and smelled their familiar warm, sunburnt, earthy scent.

I stepped off the road after making certain there were no stumps or branches to trip over so I could get a shot of these false Solomon’s seal berries, now fully ripe. It is said they taste like treacle, which is essentially molasses, and that eating more than a handful can lead to time for some bathroom meditation. I was surprised the turkeys hadn’t gobbled them up; there are quite a few turkeys here.

Something I didn’t talk about in the last post was watching my brand new camera slam into the gravel of the trail when I fell, and seeing my macro camera and one of the cell phones I carry in my shirt pockets go skittering across the stone filled trail. The second cell phone was in my left pants pocket and my left leg now has large purple bruises all over it after apparently taking the brunt of the fall, so when I finally got home that day I thought all four cameras were done for. But I tried them all here at Beaver Brook, and as you will see I was wrong; they all seem to have come through unscathed.

If you’re looking for tough field cameras able to stand up against anything a trail can throw at them I suggest the Canon PowerShot SX-70 and the Olympus TG-6. They’ve certainly proven themselves to me, again and again. You can have both for just over eleven hundred dollars and you won’t have to carry heavy lenses. They may not be the best choice for shooting fine art photos but they get the dirty, everyday jobs done without complaint.

All these thoughts come now as I sit and choose which photos to show and what to write but in truth on the day I was here there were no such thoughts. Many times a post will write itself in my mind right on the trail but on this day my mind just wanted to rest quietly so I simply enjoyed the beauty I saw, like my old friend the smokey eye boulder lichen that lives here. Sometimes, depending on the slant of the light, it looks as if someone has hammered a thin slice of gold onto the rocks and then burned a blue candle, letting its beautiful blue drops fall at random on the golden background. If someone ever asked me what I thought were the world’s most beautiful lichens this one would easily make the top ten.

In the last post my friend Cheri reminded me of the “Stuff your eyes with wonder” quote by Ray Bradbury. The entire quote says Stuff your eyes with wonder … live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. That is just as true today as it was in 1953 when he said it, and if you’d like to practice what he preached this is a great place to do it. You don’t have to search for beauty because it is absolutely everywhere you care to look, and you can’t help but stuff your eyes full of the wonder of it all.

Hobblebush leaves have turned pink and orange this year and they were beautiful. This is the first time I’ve seen this. Hobblebush is one of our most beautiful native viburnums, especially in May when they’re loaded with hand size white flowers.

There are a lot of black birch trees here. They’re also called sweet birch or cherry birch and they were once almost wiped out by people wanting to harvest their essential oils, which smell like wintergreen. At one time toothpaste and just about anything else that smelled like wintergreen had black birch oils in it. They are the smaller trees with yellow leaves in the foreground, with taller beeches in the back. There was a lot of yellow here on this day.

The big hand size leaves of striped maple were still yellow, which was a surprise since they’ve usually gone over to white by this time. It’s such an odd year; as I write this we still haven’t seen a real frost. Usually by this time we’ve seen one or two freezes and the growing season would be finished, but this year it just goes on and on.

Beeches rule the hillsides here, and what beautiful and mighty rulers they are. Every now and then one will fall into the road but not this day. I didn’t see any beechnuts in the road either.

This place is beautiful at any time of year but in the fall nature just pulls out all the stops. Edward Abbey once said: There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep, and this is one of those. What he didn’t say, at least not that I have heard, is that you don’t weep from sadness or loss; you weep out of gratitude and love. In my experience when tears are wept in nature they come by way of revelation, and they are tears of joy.

Lemon drops brightened up the darkness of a rotting log. These flat, disc shaped fungi look like they lie flat on the log but they have a short stalk. Each one is smaller in diameter than a baby pea but when together in a group they can be seen from quite a distance. They are in the sac fungi family. The term “sac fungi” comes from microscopic sexual structures which resemble wine skins. There are over 64,000 different sac fungi, including cup and “ear” fungi, jelly babies, and morel mushrooms.

I saw the biggest caterpillar I’ve ever seen on a tree here. It was as big as my index finger and Wikipedia says after it winters under the bark of a tree it will become a giant leopard moth. The caterpillar is 3 inches long and its hairs don’t embed themselves in the skin as those of some other caterpillars will. It has red / orange rings on its body that make it easy to identify. It eats dandelion, plantain, and violet leaves.

I found this photo of a very pretty giant Leopard moth taken by Jeremy Johnson of Toronto on Wikipedia. According to what I’ve read these moths have a range covering most of the eastern U.S., the southern part of Ontario, and south to Columbia. They are said to be attracted to bitter, unripe vegetables and broccoli flowers. They have a body length of about 2 inches and a wingspan of 3 inches, so they are big. They are also strictly nocturnal and fly only after nightfall, which might be why they are rarely seen. I’d love to find one and get a better look at its iridescent blue spots. Maybe the caterpillar I found will become a leopard moth next spring right here at Beaver Brook.

More of those hillside beeches, so beautiful you just have to stop and admire them. I had a hard time not taking photos of them.

I saw a stone that I really wanted to carry home but I knew better than to try that. The swirls in it reminded me of the beautiful ammonia clouds of Jupiter as seen by NASAs Juno spacecraft.

I saw some nice colored turkey tail fungi here, as I expected I would. The number of trees that fall here is astounding and when they fall the town cuts them into logs and leaves them off to the side of the road. These logs are great places for all kinds of fungi to grow, so I always check the log piles to see what is growing this time. Today it was turkey tails, everywhere. These fungi play an important role in the decomposition process of a forest. Without them and other “wood eating” fungi, nutrients would not be released back into the forest. If you think of a forest as a giant composter for a moment it isn’t hard to understand. Nothing is wasted in nature.

Turkey tails are considered “winter fungi,” meaning they grow in the fall; often late fall, and persist through winter. They finally shed their spores and slowly lose much of their color over winter and in spring are often just shadows of their once colorful selves. Finding them on a cold blustery January day is like finding colorful jewels in the snow.

White might have been golden pholiota mushrooms grew on a log. They can grow on living or dead wood in the summer and fall and usually form in clusters. Their orange-yellow caps are slimy and covered in reddish scales. I had to take this shot from a distance because the log they grew on was in a tangle of other logs and I didn’t want to risk being tripped up.

I was very close to Beaver Brook Falls when I took this shot. I thought for just a moment how nice it would be to be able to get one more shot of them from down at brook level but I quickly disregarded that. This was only a few days after taking a fall and the pain in my leg wouldn’t let me think about climbing down to brook level. Even on a good day you have to climb / slide / fall down the trail, and then you get to crawl back up again. If you’re not in fairly good shape I wouldn’t recommend it.

Since the leaves had fallen off most of the smaller trees that lined the old road I could get a good look at the falls from an angle I hadn’t seen previously. It clearly shows how, about halfway up the falls is a flat, roughly triangular stone, the downstream point of which cuts the flow in half when the water is low. The darker part of the flow seen here in its center shows that this “parting of the falls” was about to take place unless we had some rain. I’ve seen the water so low there was just a dribble on either side of the triangular stone and I’ve seen the water roaring over the falls with such volume that neither the triangular stone or the step it creates could be seen. Based on that I’d say the flow on this day was probably near average.

I warned you that there would be a lot of yellow in this post and I think that almost every leaf in it is indeed yellow, Including the bright yellow witch hazel leaves seen here. I love these leaves because they turn a deep, reddish brown and persist on the bushes throughout winter. Their warm tones are always welcome in the cold of winter.

Unlike the busier flowers on spring blooming witch hazels, the flowers on fall blooming plants are simple and no fuss; almost business like, because they have just a short time to carry out the business of pollination. The flowers of both plants are beautiful, but in different ways.

I remember when I first started this blog years ago someone wrote in and said “Nice leaning trees!” presumably implying that the leaning trees were leaning because I didn’t know how to correct for it with my camera. But the fact is, trees really do lean. They lean into any open space where there is sunlight, just as that string bean plant you probably grew in grade school kept leaning toward the sunny window no matter how many times you turned it. This is called phototropism, and I don’t know of any place better than this to see trees displaying it. Trees on both sides of the old road lean into the open space created by it, because that’s where the brightest sunlight is.

What is most amazing about this place is how, though the walk from the gate to the falls is under a mile, all of the beauty you’ve seen here and so very much more is contained in what is really a comparatively small space. It’s like walking into a painting where each brush stroke is absolutely beautiful, and I hope you enjoyed seeing it.

The fallen leaves in the forest seemed to make even the ground glow and burn with light. ~Malcolm Lowry

Thanks for stopping in.

Posted in Fungi, Insects, Lichens, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes | Tagged Abandoned Places, Abandoned Roads, Beaver Brook Fall Color, Beaver Brook Falls, Beaver Brook Natural Area, Beech Fall Colors, Black Birch, Canon SX70 HS, Fall Color in New Hampshire, Fall Colors, False Solomon's Seal Fruit, Giant Leopard Moth, Giant Leopard Moth Caterpillar, Golden Pholiota Mushroom, Hobblebush Fall Color, Keene, Lemon Drop Fungi, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, Nature's Beauty, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus TG-6, Smoky Eye Boulder Lichen, Striped Maple Fall Color, Turkey Tail Fungi, Witch Hazel Blossoms | 34 Comments »

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New Hampshire Garden Solutions

Exploring Nature in New Hampshire

Things I’ve Seen

Merry Christmas

Winter in the Wetlands

Rail Trail Discoveries

Things I’ve Seen

Big Changes in the Deep Cut

Trees (And Friends)

First Frost

On The Level

Fall Comes to Beaver Brook

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