yowza. bloodroot, frog song, TRILLIUM…

This is from a walk in the woods in town, not where we live. Tis bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis)! Check out those leaves. So very modest. Don’t look! Don’t look!

Back at home, I visited the lone hyacinth, last seen here on March 22nd. It’s opened up a bit, eh?

The lawn is dotted with eastern blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium atlanticum).

Let the records show that our feral forsythia has finally started in – earlier than last year, to be sure, but later than the highly southern latitudes just a couple of miles from here.
When you’re lying in the leaf litter taking pictures, sometimes you come across unexpected riches, like…

…a whole stash of bonus hyacinth in the beginnings of the woods.
Have you ever wondered just exactly what an almost-open daffodil looks like? I know I have.

Not Yet.

Alllmost…

Check this out, it can’t decide if it’s white, or yellow. Sweet.
We’ve got some coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) – normally our very first wildflower, but this crazy spring, it’s scrambling to keep its place in the line-up.

 Click here to see what it looks like when it goes to seed.
Hold on to your hats, the willow (species unknown) out by the mailbox is simply crazy.
This is soooo weird, because these guys didn’t get going until a MONTH from now last year, when other things were up and running that so far I’ve seen no sign of.
And now, for the audio portion. I visited the wetland across the way. Want to hear the quintessential sound of Vermont spring? (Hint: if you are not from around here, the correct answer is “yes”.)


I admit, I got distracted by the end by a tadpole, which I didn’t capture in the video. But here’s a tadpole for you:

And-and-and I spotted something green amidst the clutter of leaf litter and and and it’s TRILLIUM.

Stay tuned on this puppy, it’ll be glorious. (Trillium erectum.)

a net of diamonds

So, does the spider say “dammit!” or does the spider say, “excellent, look at all this drinking water?”


Some kind of mold or fungus is troubling some of the evening primrose seed pods. I don’t remember seeing this last year. Of course, last year, I didn’t know this was primrose. In fact, if you look at this here post from about this time last year, I have learned a ton since then. I was taking pictures of the same species, but didn’t know what they were. Yee haw!
Anyway, back to the primrose…

The ones at the top of the stalk – this stalk, incidentally, is maybe four feet tall – are the newest, and largely still green.


Down the stalk a bit, they’re starting to ripen. Which, once again, looks a lot like “decaying”, “dying”, “getting all oogy and brown”. There’s a life lesson in here somewhere.


Until at last you come to the opened-up pods with seeds inside.
A search for life and color leads us to the world of lichens and mosses…



We live on an awesome planet.
I startled what I think is a spring peeper. Normally they have “X”’s on their backs, and I’ve sort of convinced myself that this one has the “X”, but it’s faint, which apparently can happen. All the other froggies around here are way more marked up, so I’m going with peeper for the time being.

Look at those tiny little fingers! As I told Kevin, who was chopping wood into kindling nearby, I think I’m in love.


Tasty shrooms.


This caterpillar does not seem bothered by all the spikies on the yellow foxtail. It’s eating all the seeds anyway. I took several pictures before figuring out which end’s the head, and which end’s the bum. Answer: head’s on the bottom. As for the plant: this time last year then I was calling yellow foxtail “that tall grassy thingy”. Maybe by this time next year I’ll know what kind of caterpillar that is. Or maybe it’s not a caterpillar. Maybe it’s a larva. Whatever that means. I think it means, similar stage in the lifecycle, but not going to end up a butterfly or moth.
Boatloads of mushrooms in the woods – I know nothing about mushrooms, so these will all be unidentified for now…

I took waaaayyyy more pictures of different mushroom than I’m posting, mostly because the light was crappy and they all wound up blurry, dark, etc. etc.


Is this snail not gorgeous? Look at the almost phosphorescent bits – is that in the shell? Are these body parts we’re looking at? Snails have – get this – lungs! Well, only one lung per. Also? Livers. Who knew?
It was a damp and occasionally drizzly day today. Not the greatest weather for putting laundry out on the deck to dry (oops!). And not so great for our friends, the windblown seeds.

cattail

thimbleweed (tall anemone)

OK, that was my afternoon. Happy rest-of-the-weekend, world!

not shown: charlie eating the grasshopper

Busy, busy, busy, busy, busy day. Also? Exhausting. Apparently you can’t change your schedule to get up two hours earlier in the morning, without also adjusting your bedtime. Who knew?  Need a frog to cheer you up? I sure do.

A spring peeper. Hi, buddy!
Here’s lobelia – Indian tobacco (Lobelia inflata)

…and here’s what it looks like when it goes to seed.

Those seed pods just get fatter and fatter! Oh, that’s one of the kayaks in the background.
One more shot of color:

That’s Dianthus sp.
Yawn.

spring peeper, ripening jewel weed, dive bombing dragonfly

The half marathon – the first-ever Monadnock Half Marathon – last Saturday went pretty well. It was hot and humid, and after about four or five miles I began feeling like my head was on fire. I ran with a nurse from the chemo unit where I volunteer every week giving Reiki to people – somehow I conned Carol, who’d never even done a 5K before this year, into giving this a shot. She was a champ! Every time we got to a water station, I poured half a cup of water over my head and drank the rest.
At about mile 10.5 we came to a pretty big hill – comparable to the steepest one I’ve got along my regular routes – which normally, I run up. (“Run” in the liberal sense of the word. A decent speed walker would overtake me.) But all of us within sight took this hill at a walk. Fortunately, it was pretty much downhill from mile 11 to the end.  And whaddaya know, I beat my previous best time by a handful of minutes. Although I trained to do just that, I’d given up hope of making a decent time when we went through that ghastly heat wave a few weeks ago and I realized the inherent silliness of trying to set a personal record in New England, in August, on a hilly course. VICTORY!
That was my third half marathon. The next one is an informal one this fall on Hilton Head, when I’ll be on vacation with my family. It won’t be a USTAF-certified course – it will be whatever my brother, sister-in-law, and I invent, and we’ll just persuade my mom, my sister, and sweet Kevin into standing in strategic places with water bottles.
Yesterday I lounged about indolently. Today, while hunting for monarch caterpillars, I found someone else entirely hiding under the wavy curve of a milkweed leaf:

It’s a spring peeper (Pseudacris crucifer)!  This completely made my day. He was panting quite visibly, so I zoomed in a made a short film of it. Naturally, he stopped breathing while I filmed, and – trying to hold the camera steady – so did I. It was a frog vs human show down. He won. I stopped filming, and he resumed breathing.

This is what a black-eyed susan looks like when it’s all done flowering.
New species alert! This is boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum):

It’s similar to joe-pye weed – different leaf configuration, but same general idea – only it’s white, instead of pink. How many petals would you guess these flowers have?

Answer: five. They’re joined together in little cups, and the stringy things are presumably the stamens.
There’s a disturbing amount of purple loosestrife in the wet areas. Disturbing, because they outcompete the native cattails.

They’re pretty, sure…but evil.


I came across this dead dive bombing dragonfly.

Isn’t that wild?
Oh, I lied, I did do something yesterday. I’d noticed a big branch had fallen into the brook that we cross over to get to our house, so yesterday we waded in and dragged it up onto the bank…where I noticed a whole SLEW of jack-in-the-pulpits. We positioned the branch to not squash any of them. Today I went back with the camera.

That’s the branch in the background.
OK, back to today. My other goal for today (aside from finding monarch caterpillars – FAIL), was to capture the moment when a jewel weed flower opens. Victory! Let’s review:
Not Yet Open:


Open:


VICTORY! Just opening up!


And, another time-lapse special, here we have bud to seed, all on one plant.

Let’s have a closer look:

I found a whole slew of sensitive fern spores, still green:

Like money in the bank.
And got another new-to-me species, willow herb perhaps Epilobium coloratum.



In other news, the roundleaved dogwood berries have been ripening. July 5 – they were still green.

A month later, the berries are ripening and stems going red


And just a few days later, they’re nearly all BLUE!