Common Mullein: The Vertical Garden
The Schoharie Creek, at the bridge in Burtonsville, NY. So mild-mannered now, a calm little rural river minding its own business. But every now and then this quiet stream goes berserk and floods like crazy, toppling trees and destroying houses. They built this new bridge high for a reason. Anyway, here’s the old bridge, or at least the remains of it. I’m not sure if it washed away in a flood many years ago, or if it was dismantled when they build the new bridge. But the remnants of the stonework have become a really interesting place to look for plants. A vertical garden. The...
Read MoreGoldenrod: 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 MoreAsters: The Options Are Narrowing
Any flowers left around here? I like to have a few flowers in a jar, sitting on my desk or on the kitchen table. Zinnias, clovers, roses, thistles, doesn’t matter what. On afternoon strolls I pick a few blossoms to stick into water when I get home. But now, in mid-November, the options are narrowing. Hardly a flower left. Green leaves, yes, still quite a lot of photosynthesis going on. But the flowers’ work is done. The honeybees have packed it in for the year. The hummingbirds have split. The flowers have pretty much called it a day. A few exceptions, though. Red clover is very frost hardy....
Read MoreDandelions: On the Road
The road goes ever on and on. Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the road has gone And I must follow, if I can… Or maybe I’ll just germinate right here in the middle of the road… Is there anywhere—anywhere!–dandelions won’t grow? A dandelion seed landed here, and somehow found enough specks of dirt and moisture in the cracks to enable it to sprout, and grow, and survive. Dandelions are perennials, and this looks like a...
Read MorePine Hollow: A Dinosaur at the Arboretum
Okay, maybe you can’t tell from the picture, but this was a cold day. I mean a middle-of-January can’t-feel- your-toes kind of cold. Wind chill probably in the 20s. And this hardy class from the Bethlehem Children’s School in Delmar NY braved the weather to explore the Pine Hollow Arboretum. Pine Hollow is the ultimate unmowed backyard. It’s the product of decades of work by Dr. John Abbuhl, who turned his suburban Slingerlands home into a living museum. More than 3,000 plantings of trees, shrubs, and vines. Twelve ponds. Trails, paths, valleys and hills. It’s...
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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