Clethra alnifolia

At long last, another mystery shrub in my swamp is identified! Sweet pepperbush!  There is a large area full of beautiful twisting stems in my wet woods in the winter. In the summer, I kept missing the blossoms somehow. The foliage just blends in otherwise. But here, I finally caught it in bloom - and how had I ever missed such a spectacular show before? I bet because I melt like a popsicle in this heat. The flowers are abuzz with bees, and smell so sweet as to almost be sickening.

Someday I will have time to get out there with a real camera again.

Lady Slippers at WW1 Memorial Park

I also spotted many at the Franklin State Forest.

Success!

Lookee!




Unicorn One has been pollinated! See the paper bags? There are 11 of them that I could see.




The nuts under these bags will be collected when ripe, and used to grow the next generation of Restoration Chestnuts. There are somewhere between 11 and 44 pollinated female blossoms in there, each blossom could make up to three nuts. So that's as many as 132 future trees here!



These nuts are developing higher on the tree. I don't know if these nuts are viable for growing new trees.

This is the American chestnut tree growing next to the Upper Charles Trail in Milford, MA. It turns out the Friends of the Trail group had already spotted the tree, but I guess they didn't know to pass the info along to the American Chestnut Foundation.




I feel like I have done something deeply good for humanity and the environment. :) Someday the wilderness will be full of these trees again, and I have now played a small part.

A Blooming Chestnut!

While I was out with a friend walking the Milford Section of the Upper Charles Trail, we stopped so that I could nurse Kaylee. While shooing away mosquitoes, I noticed that there was a lot of American chestnut regrowth in the area. And then I saw that the largest of them was covered in catkins.

Kathy Desjardin at the American Chestnut Society has confirmed from a photo I sent that this is an American Chestnut, and that it has female flowers, which means that if they can get permission in time, and if it has enough female flowers to be worth their while, they can pollinate this tree as a part of their breeding program.



The bike path starts from a parking lot off of Dilla Street, at Louisa Lake.



This is the gate leading to the path. (And a note for the folks at TACF, the path is large enough for a truck. Turning the truck around in there would be difficult, however, and the gate is locked.)



The tree is here, by a "pull off area", less than a mile down the path. The backpack on the path marks the location of the tree.



Here it is, by the end of the fence, with my son as scale reference.
The tree is ten or fifteen feet from the path, down an incline, and surrounded by raspberry brambles and other plants. (But there was no poison ivy that I could see, at least.)



I was wearing Kaylee at the time, so I couldn't safely get in there to make a measurement or assess the health of the trunk. But I could see this much from the path.



Here is a view showing a slightly lower segment of the trunk. I don't know if that vertical mark is a feature of chestnut bark, or evidence of blight.

Fiddling around with a piece of string and a ruler, I guestimate the diameter of the tree at 4.5 feet from where I think the ground is to be about 16 inches.


Kathy was curious if we could figure out from my photos how many nuts the tree is making. I couldn't see female flowers on all of the clusters of catkins. . .



. . .but this one has four.



Here is a close-up of the female flowers. Each one will become a nut.



This one has four as well.



Here is another shot of the tree.



This is the same photo, cropped in close. I have placed a purple dot at the location of every catkin cluster I could see in the photo. There are about fifty dots. So, my conservative estimate would be fifty nuts. More wishfully, two hundred. I don't know how many potential nuts would make this tree worth the TACF's time, since pollinating a tree requires a large truck and someone with a lot of patience.



This is the remains of another American chestnut tree nearby. This one also made it to a good 20 feet tall before it was killed by the blight. The live one is 25 or 30 feet. Hopefully it lasts a few productive seasons before dying.




I never thought I would see an American chestnut blooming in the wild, much less find one myself. I don't have adequate words to describe how I feel right now. I had to tell my friends that this is like seeing a unicorn.

Tomorrow I plan on going to the Cranberry Bog at Patriot Place, because there is another American chestnut there, too, that I spotted last month. It is of a similar size, and appears to be suffering from blight. I'll get some photos for TACF. Hopefully it is blooming, too.

OMG

I found an American chestnut in flower. The tree appears to my untrained eye to have female flowers. Posting this for the TACF folks. . . more photos of the tree and location coming shortly. . .

Ick

Today I spent a half hour cleaning the woods of poison ivy. I picked up a deer tick for my trouble. I wish I knew which plants they tend to climb on. But I suppose if they are anything like the wood tick Gabe is looking at above, on our screen door, they'll climb whatever they find themselves at the foot of.



Really? The screen door? The inside of the screen door? You are one dumb bug.




I guess I've lost my energy for getting all squeamy when encountering ticks. The best I could muster was a tired sigh. I fetched a wood chip to carry the critter, and learned something new: playing with wood ticks is rather fun.

What amused me so was transferring the tick back and forth between the screen and wood chip. How easily the tick rolls from one surface to another! The way they grab on is somewhat like a monkey crossed with Velcro.

I'll be getting a poison ivy rash on my elbow in a few days, no doubt, since I let a vine smack me there. But I think it will be worth it. The infestation back there diminishes every year. Now if only I could say the same for the ticks.

Trillium

My two eenie weenie trilliums are guarded by a teepee of sticks. A determined deer won't be stopped by such a pitiful measure, but my hope is that this will prevent casual browsing.



The flower turns out to be a lovely, deep maroon.

Unless I am mistaken, which is a possibility, this is Trillium Cuneatum, also known as toadshade. I should have kept better records. But for all I know the seller didn't even know exactly which type of trillium they were selling. At the time I bought these, I didn't know how smarmy plant dealers could be. Most likely these were taken from the wild.

My mother bought trilliums recently. At three or four bucks a piece, she thought they were expensive. I had to be the one to give her the bad news: hers were likely dug from the wild, too. It takes years to grow these from seed, and no grower could make a profit at four dollars a pop.

Her anti-deer measures have got mine beat, though. She uses netting to wall off large swaths of her yard. I may try the same, eventually.

Skunk Cabbage Adoration

I go out every day now to watch my skunk cabbage grow. It's far and away the most lush thing on the landscape now.



As far as I know, all wetlands in this area are protected. Since there are strict rules preventing the development of land a certain distance from wetlands, it's not often that you get to walk right up to the edge of skunk cabbage swamp.

. . .at least, not without picking up ticks, and getting mud up to your knees.

I have a dry path leading out to a flat rock, where I can safely get a good close look at the plants.



Skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, only stinks if you crush it.



The plants are done flowering for the year, and are now vigorously growing their leaves to catch the sun before the trees shade them out.



The leaves unfurl in elegant curves.



Like lotus blossoms, they emerge from the mud sparkling clean.



My photographer's assistant, hard at work.

Skunk Cabbage

One of my favorite plants.



My hasty photos don't do it justice.

This was last week. It is already far greener out there.

This was a week ago.

Unexpected Joy!

I had thought I would be too exhausted from baby #2 this spring to be excited by plants, but the plants have proved me wrong! I am so excited to see our common violets in bloom. These are some that I planted in the cactus bed. The cactus are still looking pitiful, and I believe the yucca are dead, but at least something is growing!



The spicebushes (Lindera species) in the woods are covered in delicate yellow blossoms.



But the real excitement is this: my ramps, Allium tricoccum, are growing! I bought these on a whim last year at Whole Foods. Out of the dozen I planted, eight have grown.



Well, six. One couldn't quite get its leaves up through the leaf litter, and the one on the left above appears to have been sampled by a deer. I can only imagine that the deer wanted some tums afterward.



Another unexpected delight: my two weenie little trilliums are growing! And this one has a bud!



And the other trillium is putting up two sets of leaves! I wasn't expecting it to do that. I wasn't expecting them to come back at all.



And my mayflower, Epigaea repens, is in bloom! I hope this is evidence that it is doing well, and not some last reproductive hurrah brought on in desperation.



I would love to be able to establish a big enough colony of this plant to be able to share it. Everyone in Massachusetts should have the Massachusetts state flower in their yard! Here's hoping.