Ramps: Spring Vegetable
Ramps. A strange name for a plant. It’s a pretty spring wildflower, with flat green leaves. I’ve seen them sprouting in earliest spring, popping out of the dried leaves on the forest floor along with trout lilies, anemones, and hepatica. Wild leeks is another name for them. Odd to think of the pretty spring flower as a vegetable. There were baskets of them for sale at the Greenmarket in Union Square, New York City. They’re quite delicious–a spicy, oniony taste, but light and delicate. I’ve nibbled them raw, and I imagine they’d be delectable when...
Read MoreRed Osier Dogwood: Winter Fire
This time of year, all the color seems to have drained from the world. No flowers yet, no butterflies. Even the birds are hiding till the warm weather comes. In the early spring drabness, this shrub stands out like flame against the dried brown grasses. Red Osier Dogwood–one of many species of dogwoods, with juicy berries much beloved by fall birds. The berries are long gone, but the twigs still glow like embers. It’s a native plant, a cold-weather-lover. It grows all over the US, but can even tough it out way up north in Alaska and the Yukon, where it does its best to warm the...
Read MoreBurdock: Hooked Like Velcro
One day in 1941, a Swiss scientist was walking his dog, and noticed with annoyance, like so many other dog-walkers before and since, that his pet had blundered into the tall prickly plant called burdock. And as he was picking the infernal little hooked seeds out of the dog’s fur, he had a bright idea. What if this idea–sharp curved hooks binding two things–was used by people? It took him years to get anyone to take the idea seriously, and even longer to develop a model that would work–not surprisingly, since he made his first attempts out of cotton. But finally he...
Read MoreTropical Color
Tropical fruit. It appears in grocery stores like magic. Bright sparks from the tropics to brighten an upstate New York winter. With a more homely fruit like, say, apples, I grasp the idea that someone picked them, packed them, shipped them from an orchard. But somehow tropical fruit doesn’t seem like it came from an actual plant. I mean it’s hard to think of bananas as something that grows on trees. Here’s a sun-drenched banana orchard, with a handy clothesline strung through it. Every Sri Lankan town has dozens of open-air fruit...
Read MoreQueen Anne’s Lace: Carrots and Butterflies
No, the train isn’t barrelling down the track here. The weeds growing up through the railroad tracks and under the wheels show how many months or even years it’s been since this train went anywhere. Railroad tracks are interesting little habitats. They cut, straight as an arrow, through cities, meadows, forests, mountains. Back in the days when people first built railroads all across the country, the rail embankments were the first road for plants to travel. Dozens, even hundreds of species of plants moved along the tracks–not puffing along at sixty miles an hour like the...
Read MoreWild Strawberry: Creeping Around the Graveyard
Graveyards are so filled with life. They’re perfect places to study the natural world. They’ve got lots of trees. Lots of birds. Not a lot of traffic. And they’re certainly quiet. The grass is usually well-mowed, true, but at least in a country graveyard like this, the grass is herbicide-free and filled with a pleasing diversity of plants. And a graveyard seems like an appropriately eerie place to find a creeper. Just on the edge of a blacktopped path, there’s an edging of plants with three jaggedly-toothed leaflets. Not poison ivy, which never has saw-toothed leaves, but...
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