Good Mowing
Here’s a meadow at the Landis Arboretum in Esperance NY. Mowed flat. The brush-hog has done its work thoroughly. Everything cut down, all those gorgeous wildflowers. Nothing left but stubble. Yes! I’m not kidding. Mowing is sometimes a great thing. A field of wildflowers is a lovely sight, but a meadow doesn’t stay a meadow forever. Everything changes. Shrubs move in, then tree seedlings, and after a few decades or so, your meadow has become a forest. What could be better than a deep, dark forest? For oaks and wood ferns and red-eyed vireos, nothing. A forest is the habitat they need. But a...
Read MoreCommon Milkweed: Early Snow
A bright and windy October day. Leaves flying, flags flapping. And a sudden drift of snowflakes across the busy highway. Snowflakes? No, no, it’s 65 degrees, the sun is shining… The “snow” appears to be coming from this abandoned (but spectacularly colorful) gas station. I look closer to investigate the white puffs flying through the air. And discover, not snow, but Milkweed. The seeds have ripened inside the big warty pods. On a dry day like today the pods crack open, and the seeds are laid bare. The breeze dries out the damp silky filaments attached to each seed, and fluffs it up into a...
Read MoreBasal Rosettes: Life in the Flat Lane
Amsterdam High School. I spend quite a lot of time in this parking lot, waiting waiting waiting for soccer practice to be over. So today I looked around to see who else is hanging around the blacktop. This little opportunist is a species of thistle, I believe—not sure which one. The leaves are spread out flat, hugging the pavement—a very successful growth pattern, called a basal rosette. This growth pattern is common to a lot of the members of the Compositae (also called the Asteraceae), a huge group of plants that includes thistles, asters, daisies, knapweeds and dandelions....
Read MoreArt in the Weeds
The parking lot of Dunkin Donuts, and fifteen minutes to kill. This is bad. Try to resist going inside. Try to resist eating three glazed doughnuts with a large coffee. Take a brisk stroll around the parking lot instead. In my usual quest for odd and unloved plants, I poke around the edges of the lot, potter in the corners, mosey through the knee-deep weeds that fringe the cars. Finally I happen to glance at a spot where no one ever looks—behind the dumpster. No one, that is, except an artist searching for a canvas. This was painted on the back of the dumpster wall. Unsigned....
Read MoreLichens: Fresh-Air Fiends
Another graveyard, if you don’t mind. After all, ’tis the season–the Halloween season. This one is the Old Burying Ground in Rockport, Massachusetts. I feel like I’m on a first-name basis with some of the folk resting here, because I made them into characters in my novel The Invasion of Sandy Bay. The burying ground is right near the sea. You could literally throw a rock into the water from here. The salt air is fresh and cold. It’s fresh air, all right, as testified by the presence of one of the world’s weirdest organisms—lichens. What are lichens anyway?...
Read MoreDinnertime: Guest Photographer Zach Baldwin
Thanks to Zach Baldwin for this photograph! My resident birder tells me it’s most likely a ruby crowned kinglet, and I can tell from the bright pink stems and the clusters of berries that the bird is sitting on a pokeweed stem. Ruby crowned kinglets are acrobatic feeders, climbing around plants, hanging upside down and even hovering to glean small insects from the foliage. They love insect and spider eggs that are often attached to the undersides of leaves. In winter, they’ll occasionally feed on berries. The more I look for the hot-pink stems of pokeweed, the more I notice them. There seems...
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