Goldenrod: Fill Up the Feeders
So where’s the seed already? The birds are waiting… (Thanks to Wells Horton for this lovely photo of an impatient customer.) http://wells-horton.smugmug.com/) Personally, I don’t do bird feeders. My resident birder does, but not me. I’m just too darn lazy to get out there on a cold morning and lug pounds of sunflower seed and do battle with the squirrels. I prefer to let someone else do the work. Like the goldenrod plants. At the edge of my yard is a meadow full of birdseed. Goldenrod, no longer golden but brown and crisp. A few asters are in there, too, and grasses...
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...
Read MoreCommon Plantain: Wayfarers All
Cruising down the Massachusetts Turnpike on a nice fall day. I’ve travelled this way so often I can recite the stops on the toll card from memory. The New England town names have a pleasing sort of rhythm to them: Framingham, Natick, Ludlow, Palmer, Weston, Newton… Eventually I stop, as all travellers do, at one of the rest areas. Impossible to tell them apart, they all look alike. Not very restful places, really. Not much here for an enterprising botanist. Lots of green, all of it mowed close as a crew cut. Weed whackers have whacked every weed into submission. The shrubs are all planted at...
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