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Archive for August, 2021

Beaver Brook in Summer

Posted in Fungi, Lichens, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Wildflowers, tagged Artist's Conk, Beaver Brook, Beaver Brook Falls, Big Leaf Aster, Blackberry, Blue Stemmed Goldenrod, Canon SX40 HS, Eyelash Fungus, False Solomon's Seal Fruit, Frost Cracks, Hoverflies, Jack in the Pulpit Berries, Jewel Weed, Keene, Keene New Hampshire, Mountain Maple, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, Olympus Stylus TG-870, Orange Crust Fungus, Smoky Eye Boulder Lichen, Summer Flowers, Summer Fungi, Summer Hiking, Summer Wildflowers, Summer Woods, White Avens, White Wood Aster on August 28, 2021| 20 Comments »

Last Saturday more showers and thunderstorms were in the forecast so I didn’t want to be exploring any mountaintops. Instead I went to Beaver Brook Natural Area in Keene, where I knew there would be plenty of interesting things to see.

Beaver Brook itself was high. With hurricane Henri supposed to pay us a visit over the coming days I was hoping to see lower water levels, because we had so much rain through July there simply isn’t anyplace left for the water to go. I met an old timer up here once who said he had seen the water come up over the road years ago, but I’m hoping I never see that. Keene would be in real trouble if this brook got that high now.

NOTE: Henri came and went while I was putting this post together and though there was rain, thankfully there was no serious flooding in this region.

I thought I might see blue stemmed goldenrod (Solidago caesia) blooming but no, it’s going to wait a while, apparently. Its stems usually grow vertically until the flowers begin to open and then they fall over into a more horizontal position, but these had already fallen. Its yellow blooms grow in tufts all along the stem so it’s an unusual goldenrod. It isn’t considered rare but I know of only one or two places where it grows. It is also called wreath goldenrod.

There are also lots of white wood asters (Aster divaricatus) here. They are fairly common at this time of year but they start blooming in August, so by first frost most of them have already finished.

Lots of jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) grows here too, all along the old road, and most of the plants were blooming heavily. This plant had flowers in pairs, which I don’t usually see.

This one had its legs crossed, and that’s something I’ve never seen before. How strange. It’s as if it wanted to close off the access to its nectar. This plant typically blossoms right up until a frost but as day length shortens the plants will produce smaller, closed flowers with no petals and no nectar. They self-pollinate and their sole purpose is to produce plenty of seeds.

Smoky eye boulder lichen (Porpidia albocaerulescens) is one of the most beautiful lichens that I’ve seen and it does well here on the ledges. The beautiful blue / turquoise spore producing apothecia against the golden color of the body (thallus) are very striking. But light has everything to do with it; the way it reflects off the waxy coating on the apothecia are what turns them blue. Come here when the lichen is in the shade and they’ll be a smoky gray.

I don’t visit the lichens and mosses that grow on these ledges quite as freely as I once did, and this is why. This ledge collapsed a couple of years ago but more stone has fallen since. The trees above are being undercut now so they’ll fall one day as well. All along this old road if you look carefully, you’ll see seams of fractured and crumbling soft stone which is usually feldspar, running through the ledge faces. I stay away from them now for the most part. Any fallen stone in this photo is easily big enough to crush a person. It must have been a mighty roar.

One of the best examples of a frost crack I know of is on a golden birch that lives next to the brook here, and I wanted to get a photo of it. Much to my surprise the spot where I used to stand to get photos of it is now in the brook, so I was teetering on the edge when I took this one. Frost cracks happen when the sun warms the tree and the cells just under the bark expand. If nighttime temperatures are cold enough the bark will cool and contract rapidly, quicker than the wood underneath, and this stress on the bark can cause it to crack. I like this one because of the difference in color between the bark of the tree and the healing crack. It stands out beautifully and if you happen to be trying to explain frost cracks, that’s what you want.

I tried not to look down while I was hanging onto a tree with one arm and taking photos of the frost crack with the other, but since I had the camera out anyway…

While most other maples have dropped their seeds, mountain maple seeds (Acer spicatum) haven’t ripened yet. There are quite a few of these trees here but this is one of only two places I’ve seen them. At a glance the big leaves look much like striped maple leaves (Acer pensylvanicum.)

The sky was all sun and clouds and it was beautiful here. The no passing lines still on the abandoned road always seem kind of ironic to me because the only thing passing here now is time. To think my father and I used to drive through here when I was a boy. Of course the trees and undergrowth didn’t come right up to the road edge then though, so it must have seemed a much wider corridor. I can’t really remember much about it. Some people say the road was abandoned when the new Route 9 was built in the 60s and some say it was in the very early 70s but I’ve never been able to get a solid date, even from the highway department.

I was finally able to get both the leaves and flowers of big leaf aster in the same shot. The flower stalks rise about 2 feet above the leaves so you have to know a little about depth of field for a shot like this. I’m noticing more and more that these flowers are purple, when just a few years ago almost all of them I saw were white.

I’m not seeing the number of blackberries that I used to, and what I do see seem smaller now. This one looked more like a black raspberry though the canes I saw certainly were blackberry. In a tangle like this maybe there was a cane or two of black raspberry here. Maybe the birds are getting to the berries before I see them.

The strangest thing I saw here on this day was a bunch of what I think are hoverflies swarming all over a white avens (Geum canadense) flower. According to Wikipedia these small flies are also called flower flies and the adults of many species feed on nectar and pollen. They looked to be going for the anthers, which would mean pollen.

This pretty view reminded me of my father, who loved to fish for brook trout. He tried to get me interested but I cared more about exploring the woods than fishing when I was a boy. I don’t think there were too many father and son fishing trips before he realized that he could fish or he could chase after me, but he couldn’t do both. At least, not at the same time. It worked out though; I got to roam the woods nearer home and he got to fish in peace.

Orange crust fungus (Stereum complicatum) covered a log. It’s a beautiful fungus that is bright enough to be seen from quite a distance. It loves moisture but dries out within a day or two after a rain.

Artist’s conks (Ganoderma applanatum) grew on another log. This bracket fungus gets its name from its smooth white underside, which is perfect for drawing on. Any scratch made on the pure white surface becomes brown and will last for many years. I drew a farm scene on one a long time ago and I still have it. Artist’s conks are perennial fungi that get bigger each year. Older examples can be up to two feet across but these were young and not very big.

Eyelash fungi (Scutellinia scutellata) grew on a rotten birch log that was absolutely saturated with rain water, and that’s just the kind of wet wood environment that they like. This fungus gets its common name from the eyelash like hairs that grow around its rim. They can be hard to see so you have to look closely. Sometimes the “lashes” curl inward toward the center as you can see happening on the example to the right of the largest one, so another common name is Molly eye-winker. As fungi go, they are quite small. None of these examples had reached pea size.

From the road these Jack in the pulpit berries (Arisaema triphyllum) looked bright red to me but when I got closer, I saw they hadn’t ripened yet. That’s part of being colorblind, but it was okay because these berries are what led me to the log with the eyelash fungi on it. They’re so small I never would have seen them from the road.

The berries of false Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum racemosum) weren’t ripe yet either. Once they turn fully red they’ll disappear very quickly, and that’s why you rarely see ripe ones on this blog. I’ve heard they taste like treacle but I’ve never tried them. Actually I’ve never tasted treacle either, which in this country is called blackstrap molasses.

The place that gets the most sunlight here is the clear space over the road, so of course all the trees and plants lean toward that light. It doesn’t help that they also grow on hillsides as well along much of the roadway. That’s why I see fallen trees almost every time I come here. They often fall on the electric lines that you might have seen in some of these photos.

I finally made it to Beaver Brook Falls but all I can give you is a side view because I didn’t dare climb down the steep, slippery embankment. I say “finally” made it because, though the walk to the falls from the start of the trail is just 7 tenths of mile it usually takes me two hours or more, and that’s because there is so much nature packed into what is really a relatively small space. For someone who likes to study and truly learn from nature, it doesn’t get any better than this amazing place.

One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in this life, and one that many persons never learn, is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure, in the common, the near at hand – to see that heaven lies about us here in this world. ~John Burroughs

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More Mid August Flowers

Posted in Nature, Wildflowers, tagged Arrowhead, Asiatic Dayflower, Blue Toadflax, Canon SX40 HS, Daylily, Deptford Pink, Groundnut, Hancock New Hampshire, Heal All, Hog Peanut, Indian Tobacco, Joe Pye Weed, Keene, Knapweed, Lobelia Inflata, Mid August Flowers, Native Plants, Nature, New Hampshire, NH, Obedient plant, Olympus Stylus TG-870, Phlox, Queen Anne's Lace, Roadside Flowers, Rudbecia Sonora, Self Heal, Shasta Daisy, Summer Flowers, Summer Hiking, Summer Wildflowers, Summer Woods, Swanzey New Hampshire, Swanzey NH, Willowleaf Angelonia on August 25, 2021| 18 Comments »

If you happen to see something like this on a vine that is climbing over nearby plants you might want to take a closer look because they are groundnut flowers, one of our most unusual and pretty wildflowers. The outside of the flowers seen here always remind me of tiny Conquistador helmets.

The chocolaty brown insides of the groundnut flowers (Apios Americana) are very pretty. They are borne on a vine that winds its way among other sunny meadow plants and shrubs like blueberry or dogwood. This plant is also called potato bean because of the walnut sized, edible tubers that grow along its underground stem. They are said to taste like turnips and were a favorite of Native Americans. Henry David Thoreau thought they had a nutty flavor.

This year I was able to watch how these flowers work, and I noticed that the two maroon colored “wings” start out tucked up inside the “helmet” (standard) and slowly, over a few days, they unfurl into the position we see here. They are landing pads for visiting insects and they, along with black angular lines inside the flower, direct the insect to the prize inside. These flowers must be loaded with nectar, because I’ve seen maroon “teardrops” of nectar on their outside surfaces. Groundnuts are legumes in the pea/ bean family and this one was taken across the Atlantic very soon after Europeans arrived. It was listed as a garden crop in Europe in 1885.

Pretty little blue toadflax (Nuttallanthus canadensis) has quite a long blooming season but I’m seeing fewer flowers each week so I think they’re nearing the end of their run. I’ll miss seeing them swaying in the breeze, especially in the morning when they sparkle with dew.

So where have all the Shasta daisies been hiding this year? Here it is August and these are the first I’ve seen. I’m guessing two years of drought have slowed them down a bit but here they are, back with the rains. I’ve always liked their brilliant white flowers. White and gray are important in gardens with a lot of color in them, because they allow the eye to rest a bit between colors. I always tried to have white, gray and/ or silver in any garden I built, especially perennial borders.

Centaurea is sometimes called basket flower or cornflower but it’s still a knapweed used in a garden setting. I’ve always liked it.

I showed this flower in a recent flower post and called it a rudbeckia, but someone wrote in and thought it was a Gaillardia. I planted some Gaillardia for a customer probably 40 years ago and they were disappointing, so I haven’t ever used them since and really don’t know them well. Since I couldn’t say for sure that it wasn’t a gaillardia I searched for its name and found that it is indeed a rudbeckia like its leaves told me it was. It is called Rudbeckia hirta, “Sonora.” Essentially a hybridized black eyed Susan.

I saw a colorful daylily that seems to be gaining in popularity, if I go by how many different gardens I’ve seen it in.

All the little heal all plants are still shouting yay! Do you hear them? Yay! How can you not feel joy in your heart when you see something like this? Heal all has been used medicinally since ancient times and the plants were once thought to be a holy herb sent by God to cure man’s ills. Or maybe they were sent simply to bring happiness. Maybe happiness is a large part of the cure.

I was surprised to find some beautiful little Deptford pinks (Dianthus armeria) still blossoming. I usually see them in July and they never seem to have a very long blooming period but you can occasionally find them still blooming in September. Though they originally came from Europe they can hardly be called invasive. I find them blooming in tall grasses usually in threes and fours.

This common arrowhead (Sagittaria latifolia) plant grows in a wet ditch behind a shopping center. They usually grow just offshore in ponds but I didn’t see a single one blooming in a pond this year. This plant is also called broadleaf arrowhead and duck potato, because ducks eat its small, potato like roots and seeds. The pretty, clear white flowers are about an inch across.

Native hog peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata ) flowers are small but pretty, and unusual. Like the groundnut that started this post this plant is a legume in the pea/ bean family. Like a true peanut, after pollination some of its flowers bury themselves in the soil and form a small, edible, bean like seeds that give the plant its common name. Mice collect these seeds and store them in large caches that Native Americans used to search for. They can be eaten raw or cooked. The plant also forms inch long, pea-like, above ground pods that contain three or four inedible seeds.

As usual I tried many times to get a photo looking into these tiny but pretty flowers, but this is the best I could do. They’re such an odd shape sometimes it’s hard to know which way is up. Hog peanut is a strong, wiry vine that can cover large areas of forest floor and choke out other plants. It is also good at tripping up hikers.

Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium) starts blooming in late July but it is another flower that seems late to me this year. This is the first one I’ve seen that could be said to be in full bloom and it’s now almost September. This is a good plant for gardens because monarch butterflies love these flowers.

The little lobelia called Indian tobacco (Lobelia inflata) blooms quite late but is almost finished for this year. Its small flowers are about 1/3 of an inch long and pale lavender to almost white. It is the only lobelia with calyxes that inflate after the flowers have fallen and to identify it, I just look for the inflated seedpods.

Indian tobacco gets its name from the way its inflated seed pods resemble the smoking material pouches that Native Americans carried. The inflata part of its scientific name also comes from these inflated pods. The pods form so quickly that they can usually be found on the lower part of the stem while the upper part is still flowering.

I found this beautiful white phlox blooming in a local garden. Tall garden phlox is often very fragrant but I couldn’t smell any scent from this one at all.

Even though they are everywhere I go I’ve had to search all summer for a queen Anne’s lace flower head (Daucus carota) with a tiny purple flower in the center, and I finally found one recently. They aren’t usually so hard to find.

Legend says the tiny purplish / reddish flower at the center of the flower head is a drop of blood shed when Queen Anne pricked herself while making the lace. A more believable story says that it helps attract pollinators, but the truth is scientists don’t really know why it’s there. I’ve seen lots of insects go to them but then turn away as if there was nothing of interest there for them. These flowers are so small I can’t think of anything to compare them to. A tick, maybe? I’ve never seen one with white specks on it like this one had. I assume they must be pollen from the white flowers.

For years now I’ve found one or two Asiatic dayflowers (Commelina communis) in a local park but that bed has now been dug up, so I was happy to find a large colony of this pretty little flower at the local college. It’s supposed to be highly invasive but it really doesn’t fit that description in this immediate area.

Obedient plant (Physostegia virginiana) gets its common name from the way it will stay in position for a while after the stems are bent. Individual flowers will do the same. Though it is native to central and southern U.S. it’s a very aggressive plant and can take over a garden if it isn’t kept under control. Flowers can be white, pink, or purple and there are cultivars available. An particularly unusual thing about this plant is how I can’t find any reference to it being used by Native Americans, medicinally or otherwise. I think I can only say that about two or three plants, after years of searching to see what uses plants had.

I found willowleaf angelonia (Angelonia salicariifolia) growing in a local garden and had no idea what it was at the time. After some digging, I found that it is a perennial native to Puerto Rico and grows year-round there. The plant is covered with sticky hairs and has spikes (racemes) of small, pretty 5 lobed flowers that come in a few different colors including pure white. Another name for it is granny’s bonnets. This is a hard plant to find any good information on but it would be worth searching for. It’s about a foot or so tall and in my opinion is very pretty. Because of the location I found it in I would guess that it wants plenty of sunlight.

Here is this week’s look at our late summer roadside flowers. No New England asters yet but there is boneset, Joe Pye weed, Goldenrod and purple loosestrife here. They made a beautiful scene, I thought.

I’m going to leave you with two quotes today from two men born more than 60 years apart; one a physicist, the other a naturalist, each saying the same thing.

Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star. ~Paul A.M. Dirac

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. ~John Muir

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Time for a Climb

Posted in Fungi, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Things I've Seen, Wildflowers, tagged Butter Wax Cap Mushroom, Canon SX40 HS, Corrugated Cort Mushroom, Gray Reindeer Lichen, Keene, Lady Fern, Little Bluestem Grass, Mount Caesar Swanzey NH, Mount Monadnock Jaffrey NH, Mountain Climbing in New Hampshire, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Photography, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus Stylus TG-870, Polypody Fern, Polypody Fern Sori, Purple Cort Mushroom, St. John's Wort, Summer Fungi, Summer Hiking, Summer Plants, Summer Wildflowers, Summer Woods, Swanzey New Hampshire, Toadskin Lichen, Trailing Arbutus, Wild Sarsaparilla on August 21, 2021| 32 Comments »

Last Saturday I realized that I hadn’t climbed Mount Caesar in Swanzey this year so I decided it was time, but not that day; it was near 90 degrees with air so thick you could cut it with a knife. By Sunday morning it had cooled off considerably with very low humidity, but as this photo shows there was plenty of mist.

I was hoping I’d get to see the mist from above but the sun had burned it off by the time I got to the river of reindeer lichen. This is one of my favorite places to stop for a bit on this mountain, though you really haven’t even started the climb at this point.

There are lots of reindeer lichens (Cladonia rangiferina) here. Huge drifts of them line both sides of the trail at its start. These lichens are quite fragile, especially when dry, and should never be walked on. Reindeer lichen is very slow growing at about an eighth to three eighths of an inch per year and if overgrazed or dug up, it can take decades to reappear. I’ve always thought that the large colonies found here must be hundreds of years old.

The trail starts with granite bedrock.

Trailing arbutus (Epigaea repens) reminded me of my grandmother. When I was young she wanted me to be able to see and smell this plant’s flowers, but we never did find any because almost all of it had been picked. Now, 60 years later. It’s everywhere I go. She’d be very happy about that.

Lady ferns (Athyrium filix-femina) are one of the earliest to turn in the fall but I’ve never seen one half turn like this one had.

Wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) was wearing its fall spots. This is one of the earliest plants to whisper fall in any of the forests I visit, and it is often spotted with yellow at this time of year.

My phone camera usually takes better trail photos than my regular camera, but on this morning I wasn’t really happy with the results. To be fair though, it was a bright sunlight, high contrast situation and every camera I’ve owned has had trouble with that.

I found these small mushrooms growing out of a living tree, which is never good for the tree. I haven’t been able to identify them. I see green but my color finding software sees pink, so they must be pink. They were kind of cute, I thought. All the sawdust that had fallen on and around them tells me that this tree is probably full of carpenter ants. Fungi and carpenter ants in and on a living tree is never a good thing for the tree.

I saw lots of purple corts (Cortinarius iodeoides) along the trail but the purple mushroom I hoped to find, the beautiful violet coral fungus, was nowhere to be seen. I’ve seen it here before at just about this time of year.

Another “cort” mushroom is the corrogated cap cort (Cortinarius corrugatus.) It is also called the wrinkled cort for obvious reasons. When fresh it is orangey brown but this one had gone beyond fresh. It’s an inedible but interesting mushroom that people like to find.

I can’t pass by a group of butter wax cap mushrooms (Hygrocybe ceracea) without getting some photos of them. They’re one of the most photogenic mushrooms in the forest, in my opinion. Very cute and shy little things; I never would have see them hiding behind this log if I hadn’t left the trail to look at something else. As is often the case if you let nature lead, one beautiful thing will lead you to another.

The trail here is very rough in places and is a constant uphill grade with no level places, so I think of it as the most challenging climb of any I do. I once saw a high school track and field member run up and down it before I had reached the halfway point but it usually takes me about an hour and 15 minutes or so. It would anyway even with healthy lungs, because I make a lot of stops to see things of interest. With me “things of interest” means just about everything I see.

Piling stones on top of a tree that has been cut about 7 or 8 feet above the ground doesn’t seem like a good idea to me, but maybe that’s just me. I hope they don’t fall on anyone.

Once I saw these polypody ferns (Polypodium virginianum) near the summit I realized that I had never seen them on this moutain before. They’re called “rock polypody” because they like to grow on top of boulders and there really aren’t any stones big enough to be called boulders along this trail. These seemed to be growing on the ground, which is unusual for this fern. Or maybe there was a buried stone I couldn’t see.

I always look on the polypody’s leaf undersides at this time of year to see the tiny spore cases (sorus) which shine like beacons. Henry David Thoreau liked polypody ferns and said that “Fresh and cheerful communities of the polypody form a lustrous mantle over rocky surfaces in the early spring.” Of course they do exactly that and that’s how they come by another common name: rock cap fern.

The tiny sori are made up of clusters of sporangia and are naked, meaning they lack the protective cap (indusium) that is found on many ferns. Each will turn a reddish-brown color when ripe and ready to release its spores. The spores are as fine as dust and are borne on the wind. Sorus is from the Greek word sōrós, and means stack, pile, or heap, and each sorus is indeed a round pile of sporangia. As they begin to release spores the sori (plural of sorus) are very pretty and look like tiny baskets of flowers.

NOTE: A helpful reader pointed out that I had my wires crossed and had the meanings of the words sori and sorus backwards. I do know the difference but it’s easy to become confused these days. I hope I got it correct this time and hope my mistake didn’t cause you any confusion.

The end of the trail, the last few yards to the summit, shows more solid granite bedrock and when you reach this point you realize that you’ve been climbing a huge, dome shaped granite monolith with a thin skin of soil on it. It makes you feel small, and feeling small is a good thing now and then.

It was a fine morning for views from the summit but I found that a lot of brush has grown up, so you don’t see a 180-degree panorama any longer.

I was surprised to find little bluestem grass (Schizachyrium scoparium) up here. It caught the light and glowed beautifully pink in the bright sunshine. This is a common grass that grows in every U.S. state except Nevada and Washington, but is so uncommonly beautiful that it is also grown in gardens. After a frost it takes on a reddish-purple hue, making it even more beautiful.

I was surprised to find St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum) growing on the summit. I also saw lots of goldenrod, sumac, honeysuckle, and even forked blue curls. It’s amazing how all those seeds find their way up here. I suppose if you knew which birds ate which seeds you could get a good idea of what birds regularly visit this mountain.

This view shows what I mean about the brush blocking some of the view. I’m sure someone must cut it but I don’t know how often.

Of course I had to visit with the toadskin lichens while I was up here. They surprised me by being quite dry, even though we’d had rain just the morning before. These lichens feel just like potato chips when they’re dry and they crack just as easily so I try not to disturb them. I learned on this climb that they dry out quite quickly and I’d guess that they must be dry for most of their lives.

The black dots you saw on the lichens in that previous shot are this lichen’s apothecia, where its spores are produced. In toadskin lichens they are tiny blackish discs with a sunken center that makes them look like a bowl with a thick black rim. I’ve been imagining that I’m having problems with the camera I use for macros, but the toadskin lichens showed me that there was really nothing to worry about. The head of a pin is .06 inches (1.5 mm) in diameter and one these tiny discs could easily hide behind one.

The view of Mount Monadnock over in Jaffrey was as good as any I’ve seen from up here on this day, and I as I sat for a while enjoying it I thought it was a good bonus for all my huffing and puffing. And while I sat there catching my breath and admiring the view, I thought about what an easy thing it is to appreciate the simple things; those everyday things that cost nothing but touch you somehow. I’ve learned from experience that appreciation leads to gratitude, and gratitude leads to joy. I do hope your days are joy filled.

The climb speaks to our character, but the view, I think, to our souls. ~Lori Lansens

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Early to Mid August Flowers

Posted in Nature, Wildflowers, tagged Black Nightshade, Blue Vervain, Canon SX40 HS, Catsaear, Clethra, Eastern Forked Blue Curls, False Dandelion, Flat Topped Aster, Fragrant White Waterlily, Hancock New Hampshire, Jewelweed, Keene, Late Summer Flowers, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus Stylus TG-870, Orange Hawkweed, Pearly Everlasting, Pickerel Weed, Summer Flowers, Summer Hiking, Summer Wildflowers, Summer Woods, Summersweet, Swanzey New Hampshire, Sweet Pepperbush, Tansy, Virgin's Bower, Wild Cucumber on August 18, 2021| 18 Comments »

Our most beautiful time of year is almost here, when there are scenes like this just about everywhere you look. It’s much like living inside an impressionistic painting for a while until the hillside forests break into the full, blazing glory of fall.

Our late summer asters keep coming and the tall white aster (Doellingeria umbellata) is one of the most common and easily seen due to its 3-4-foot height. Large, mostly flat-topped flower heads give it another common name of flat-topped aster. They sway in the breeze and are usually covered with bees.

Jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) seemed a little late this year but when I say that about a flower, I often find that it’s me who is expecting to see them earlier than they want to appear. In fact if I look back year to year on this blog, I find that most flowers are fairly consistent in their bloom times and jewelweed is no exception. It usually blooms in early to mid-August so it’s right on schedule.

Hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies pollinate these little flowers. You need a long tongue to reach all the way into that curved nectar spur but I watched an ant trying to come up with a way to get at that sweetness one day. Jewelweed typically blossoms right up until a frost but as day length shortens the plants will produce smaller, closed flowers with no petals and no nectar. They self-pollinate and their sole purpose is to produce plenty of seeds.

I think most people who read this blog know this, but for those who don’t; these are the jewels that give jewelweed its name. Raindrops sparkle like diamonds on the wax coated leaf surfaces. When you come upon a large colony of them after a rain it can be a very beautiful thing.

Since I’m seeing seedpods forming on our beautiful little eastern forked blue curl plants (Trichostema dichotomum) I’m going to say that it’s time we said goodbye, even though in a good year they might bloom through September. If so, it’ll be a bonus. When a heavy enough insect lands on that spotted lower lip those curved anthers, each carrying several white pollen grains smaller than grains of salt, will dip down and dust the insect with pollen. It’s another miraculous event in a world filled with them.

I found some low growing, potato like plants with lots of leaves and just a few small white flowers. It was obvious by the flowers that it is in the nightshade family but that’s about as far as I got. I think it might be the European invasive black nightshade (Solanum nigrum.) Solanum nigrum has been recorded in deposits of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic eras of ancient Britain, so it has been around for a very long time. It was used medicinally as mankind grew and learned and was even mentioned by Pliny the Elder in the first century AD.

Do you see that tiny white flower to the right of center in this shot? All those leaves and one tiny flower? Clearly this plant doesn’t seem that interested in seed production.

But it does produce fruit, and these black berries are what leads me to believe it is black nightshade. There is an American black nightshade (Solanum americanum) but it is native only to the southwest of the country so I doubt this is that plant. There is another that I’ve read about called Solanum L. section Solanum which is nearly hairless but otherwise has the same features. And then there is still another plant called eastern black nightshade (Solanum ptycanthum) but there seems to be much confusion over which plant is which. Though they have been used medicinally for thousands of years Solanum berries contain powerful alkaloids. They are considered toxic and have killed children who have eaten the unripe green berries. A few people do eat the ripe black berries but I think I’ll pass.

NOTE: A helpful reader has identified this plant as Eastern black nightshade (Solanum emulans,) so I can stop wondering about that. Thanks Sara!

Many of the plants in this post are not native and are considered invasive in many instances but only a few like purple loosestrife are truly pests in this region. In a large percentage of cases these plants were brought here because their flowers were beautiful and I can see that beauty, so I can understand the why of it. Many plants were also used medicinally and people went to a lot of trouble to get them here. Imagine bringing plants over on a wooden ship where extra deck space was nearly nonexistent. You’d have to present a very convincing argument I think, though in the case of tansy (Tanacetum vulgare,) which is pictured above and which has a long history of being used as an insect repellant, the ship’s captain might have been a little more understanding. Recent research shows that tansy repels ticks, moths, and other insects, so it might have gotten a free pass on deck space. And of course it might have arrived in the form of seed.

Pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea) is a plant I don’t have any memories attached to because before a year or so ago I never saw it growing here. Then all of the sudden there it was, and now I see it regularly. It’s a pretty little plant that Native Americans used to treat sores and rheumatism, and they also smoked it to treat colds, and as a tobacco substitute. What I see far more of is sweet everlasting (Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium,) and they used that plant in much the same way. The name everlasting comes from the way the dried flowers will last for years in a dry vase. I keep forgetting to check these flowers for scent but the flowers of sweet everlasting smell like maple syrup.

Orange hawkweed (Hieracium aurantiacum) is another “invasive” that most pay little attention to in this part of the world, but I’ve heard that it can be a real pest in pastures. It was introduced from Europe as a garden ornamental and, as the old familiar story goes, has escaped and is now considered a noxious weed. A single hawkweed flower head can produce between 12 and 50 tiny black seeds, so when you do the math, it is obvious that these plants are here to stay. They are said to be much harder to control than dandelions. Though it’s easy to find many reasons to hate such a plant, we don’t have many orange wildflowers in this part of the country and I enjoy seeing it.

False dandelions (Hypochoeris radicata) are another imported plant but unlike orange hawkweed I see these plants almost everywhere I go at this time of year. If you look at the yellow flowers on tall wiry stems without paying attention to the foliage this plant might look like yellow hawkweed, but its leaves are very different and look more like narrow dandelion leaves. Yellow hawkweed and false dandelion also bloom at different times, which helps when trying to identify them.

Both dandelions and false dandelions have a rosette of edible leaves and a central taproot. The flower stems of false dandelion are solid, tall and wiry while those of true dandelions are hollow and much shorter. Another name for this plant is cats ear.

Native virgin’s bower (Clematis virginiana) drapes itself over shrubs so it can get all of the sunshine that it wants. I’ve also seen it climbing into trees. It is also called old man’s beard and devils’ darning needles. Both names refer to the twisted, feathery seed heads. An extract made from the plant is hallucinogenic (and dangerous) and was used by Native Americans to induce dreams. Mixed with other plants like milkweed, it was also used medicinally. It is a toxic plant that can cause internal bleeding so you have to know what you’re doing to use it.

Another name for virgin’s bower is traveler’s joy and I can say that it is that. Its small white but pretty flowers are another reminder that fall is near. Clusters of them often cover the entire plant. Many bird species eat the seeds and goldfinches line their nests with the soft, feathery seed coverings.

Wild cucumber (Echinocystis lobata) is another white flowered vine that drapes itself over the tops of shrubs to get more sunlight. It climbs using tendrils like a grape vine, unlike virgins’ bower which climbs by curling its leaf stems (petioles) around whatever it is climbing. Both strategies work well and each vine gets plenty of sunlight. You’ll note that the leaves on wild cucumber are two or three times as big as those on virgin’s bower though, and that’s because this vine prefers partial shade over full sunlight.

The flower spikes (Racemes) on wild cucumber grow to 6 inches or more all along the main stem. The greenish white, star shaped male flowers of wild cucumber have 6 petals that are twisted slightly. The female flowers are yellowish green and not at all showy. They grow at the base of the male flower stems. There is usually only one female flower for every 5 or 6 male flowers, which is why there are so few fruits seen on each vine.

If you’d like a native shrub that will attract pollinating insects clethra (Clethra alnifolia) is a very good choice. It’s also called summersweet because of its sweet fragrance. If you have low spots in your yard that get wet occasionally, this is a good shrub to plant in them because it likes moist soil and grows naturally along stream banks and in swampy ground. Insects love it and this one was covered with just about every one that I could name.

Each long upright clethra flower head is packed with small white flowers. Small yes, but also very fragrant; it has the name summersweet for a reason. Some older nurserymen might also know it as sweet pepperbush; whoever gave it that name thought its fruits resembled pepper corns.

The flowers of blue vervain (Verbena hastata) bloom from the bottom of the flower head up, so you can tell how much longer they’ll be blooming. Sometimes a stray plant will make it to first frost but usually not. This is a plant that doesn’t mind wet feet and that’s a good thing because the field that it grew in was flooded by all the rain. I couldn’t get near it so I had to use a lot of zoom for this shot. I love the color of the flowers so I was happy to see so many on this plant.

Pickerel weed (Pontederia cordata) has just about reached the end of its flowering season I thought, when I noticed the third of an inch, brown winged fruits forming. Each mature fruit has a loose skin covering a rather large starchy seed. Native Americans snacked on the raw seeds or roasted them and ground them into flower. They’re said to be quite tasty but you have to be quick, because they’re a favorite of waterfowl.

There are far fewer fragrant white waterlilies in this pond than last time I was here and that tells me that they’re nearing the end of their time with us for this year. They’re very beautiful and I’ll be sorry to not be able to visit them for a few moths. To sit with them is to learn; they ask for nothing but have everything.

He is richest who is content with the least, for contentment is the wealth of nature. ~Socrates

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More Summer Fungi

Posted in Fungi, Nature, tagged American Slippery Jack Mushroom, Berkley's Polypore, Blue Staining Bolete Mushroom, Butter Wax Cap Mushroom, Canon SX40 HS, Chicken Fat Fungus, Clavaria ornatipes Club Fungus, Fuzzy Foot Mushrooms, Hancock New Hampshire, Jelly Baby Fungi, Keene, Keene New Hampshire, Lilac Fiber Cap Mushroom, Nature, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus Stylus TG-870, Pin Mold on Mushroom, Purple Cort Mushroom, Scaly Rustgill Mushroom, Scaly Vase Chanterelle Mushroom, Summer Forest, Summer Fungi, Summer Hiking, Summer Mushrooms, Summer Woods, Swanzey New Hampshire, Tiger's Eye Mushroom, Vermillion Waxcap Mushroom, Witch's Hat Mushroom, Yellow Fly Agaric Mushroom on August 14, 2021| 23 Comments »

First come the yellow, red and orange mushrooms and then come the purples, and I’m seeing a lot of purple cort mushrooms (Cortinarius iodeoides) this year. I’ve noticed that this mushroom and virtually all of the orange ones are left untouched while white and other colors seem to be eaten almost as soon as they appear. Eaten by what I don’t know, but I assume it’s probably squirrels and chipmunks. Purple cort fungi have a rather bitter slime on their caps and that most likely accounts for their not being eaten.

A purple cort mushroom’s color lightens a bit as it ages, and it will often develop white or yellow streaks and spots as it ages. This is a good way to identify them.

The underside of a purple cort is very beautiful, in my opinion.

This butter waxcap (Hygrocybe ceracea) seemed to glow brightly in the dark of the forest. In this area I will now be seeing fewer and fewer orange and yellow fungi from this point on. Mushrooms have a “bloom time” just like flowers and the appearance of the purples tells me that the time for yellow and orange mushrooms is nearing an end.

Witch’s hat (Hygrocybe-conica) fungi have been everywhere this year. They’re quite small and easy to miss, or maybe I’ve just ignored them in the past. They’re also called conical wax caps. According to Mushroom expert.com they bruise to black quite easily. They start out bright red to bright orange, fading to orangish or yellowish and finally black. Though this one was dry they can sometimes look wet or slimy.

Yellow nolanea (Entoloma murrayi) is also known as the yellow unicorn mushroom because it sometimes has a knob, called an umbo, on the top of its conical cap. Mushroom books say that they are common in the woods, but they aren’t that common in this immediate area. I think this is the first one I’ve seen.

American slippery jack (Suillus americanus) mushrooms are also called sticky buns or chicken fat fungi. They are known for their yellow, slimy caps with reddish brown scales, and how they usually appear in great numbers under eastern white pine trees. There must have been a dozen or more in this spot when I took this photo; enough so it was hard to get a shot of a single example.

The stem of the American slippery Jack is narrow with reddish spots and large yellow, angular pores are found on the underside of the cap. It’s a very stiff, tough feeling stem. Science has found that this mushroom has anti inflammatory properties.

The lilac fiber cap mushroom (Inocybe geophylla var. lilacina) is the lilac color seen here but it has a white cousin. Even Mushroom Expert.com says this genus is “filled with confoundingly similar species,” and is impossible to be sure of without a microscopic look at its spores, so I could be wrong about its name. It’s a pretty mushroom that people like to find for just that reason. What I noticed beside its pretty color was how the cap did indeed look fibrous. It starts out purple and fades to brown.

Here is the underside of the lilac fiber cap. The gills start off white and slowly turn brown, but you can also see a hint of purple in these examples. This is a poisonous mushroom.

According to Wikipedia scaly rustgill fungi (Gymnopilus sapineus) grow in dense clusters on conifer logs. The yellowish caps are darker at the center with a dry, sometimes scaly surface which can be fibrillose. According to Mushroom Expert.com some guide books will say that the cap is scaly and others will say that it is smooth. I wanted to test Google lens on it to see how it did with mushrooms. It was close but it had the species wrong and the description it gave didn’t match what I’ve read elsewhere. DNA testing has shown that it is very similar to Gymnopilus penetrans, which is called the common rustgill. This common mushroom is often a bright spot in dark forests.

Clavaria ornatipes is described as a spatula or club shaped fungus, colored greyish to pinkish gray. These fungi shrivel when they dry out and revive after a rain. They grow directly out of the ground and there are often hundreds of them. I haven’t seen many coral type fungi this year so I was happy to see these.

In my last mushroom post I showed a Berkley’s polypore (Bondarzewia berkeleyi) that I had been watching grow for weeks. Now, more than a month later here it is, fully grown. I put a pocket knife up in the left corner so you could see how big it was. You can also see standing water in its center. Now this giant will begin to slowly decompose, and the odor will be easily detected from several yards away.

The scaly vase chanterelle (Turbinellus floccosus) is also called the wooly chanterelle. Sometimes it can have an orange cap like that seen in the above photo and sometimes it can be vase shaped. It likes to grow near conifers, and that’s where I found this one and several others. Though they might have chanterelle in their common name they can make you sick. They are said to be more closely related to stinkhorns than chanterelles.

Here’s a look at the outside of a younger scaly chanterelle, completely vase shaped. It is described as “shriveled looking but stout” and this one felt solid and heavy, like a club. The outside is creamy when young and then turns brownish.

There are many boletes that stain blue and they are easily misidentified, so I’ll just say that this is a bolete that stains blue. Many blue staining boletes are also poisonous.

Though there are gilled boletes most have pores or tubes on the undersurface as this one did. Sometimes the underside of the cap is a different color but the color of this one was fairly uniform all over.

Uniformly colored that is until it was cut, and then the flesh turned blue. I’ve seen boletes stain a beautiful, indigo blue instantly when damaged but this was a lighter blue that took a minute or two to show. If you happen to know its name, I’d love to hear from you.

Seeing big mushrooms is easy, but to see small ones you need to re-train your eyes. (And your mind, somewhat.) Jelly babies (Leotia lubrica) taught me that one day when I accidentally saw them; they helped me see that forests are full of things just as small and sometimes many times smaller. Once you train your eyes to see small things before long, you’ll be able to see them everywhere and a whole new chapter in the book of nature will open for you. Despite their name jelly babies are sac fungi rather than jelly fungi.

I thought I’d never see a mushroom smaller than jelly babies but I was wrong. These fuzzy foot mushrooms (Xeromphalina campanella) were the smallest I’ve seen. Many of the mushrooms seen in this photo were barely as big as a pea and some were even smaller. The Xeromphalina part of the common name means “little dry navel” and points to the dimple that forms in the cap as it grows and expands. This mushroom grows on wood and this particular species prefers conifers. There is another that prefers hardwoods called Xeromphalina kauffmanii. Both are known for their ability to fruit in large numbers. I think there was an eastern hemlock stump under all that moss.

Everything in nature gets eaten, but something that is rare to see is a mushroom with another fungus feeding on it, like this one with a mycoparasite called Syzygites megalocarpus growing on its cap. A mycoparasite is essentially a fungus (pin mold) that feeds on other fungi. This one has been found on over 65 species of mushroom and it was the first fungus found to be capable of sexual reproduction. It can appear overnight if heat and humidity levels are just right. You can’t plan to see something like this. You have to be there when it happens, and that’s a good reason to spend as much time as possible in nature.

On older vermillion waxcaps (Hygrocybe miniata) the penny size cap can become a bit scaly and fade to orange a bit, as this one had. The margin also becomes scalloped with age as this one showed but even with all of that Mushroom Expert.com says that this pretty little mushroom can be confused with several others. In fact the web site says that miniata should mean “many look-alikes.” Actually it means red or vermillion.

The gills on a vermillion waxcap are pale yellow but fade a bit with age. The underside of this mushroom is very pretty, in my opinion. It looks like a very tiny spider might have been living among the gills.

I put this photo of a yellow fly agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria var. formosa) here in this post to remind me to tell you that we’ve never seen as many of this mushroom as we’ve seen this year. They’re just about everywhere you look and some of the caps have flattened out and grown as large as dinner plates. This tells me that they like lots of rain and they do better when they get it. The white spots (called warts) are what are left of the universal veil that covered the mushroom when it was in the immature “egg” stage.

Another mushroom that is having a great year is the tiger’s eye mushroom (Coltricia perennis.) Something that makes it unusual is how it is one of the only polypores with a central stem. Most polypores are bracket or shelf fungi. The concentric rings of color are also unusual and make it look like a turkey tail fungus with a stem. The cap is very thin and flat like a table, and another name for it is the fairy stool. They are very tough and leathery and can persist for quite a long time. I find them in August through October. This year they have a lot of red in them.

I hope you enjoyed this second look at the summer fungi that have been popping up in this area. You don’t need to be a mycologist to enjoy their many interesting shapes and beautiful colors, so I hope you’ll look out for them.

Go out, go out I beg of you
And taste the beauty of the wild.
Behold the miracle of the earth
With all the wonder of a child.
~Edna Jaques

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Early August Flowers

Posted in Nature, Wildflowers, tagged Asiatic Lily, Big Leaf Aster, Boneset, Cabbage Rose, Canon SX40 HS, Coneflower, Hancock New Hampshire, Keene, Lady's Thumb, Mexican Sunflower, Narrow Leaved Gentian, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Nodding Onion, Olympus Stylus TG-870, Pink Rose, Purple Flowering Raspberry, Purple Morning Glory, Rudbeckia, Summer Flowers, Summer Hiking, Summer Plants, Summer Wildflowers, Summer Woods, Sundrop, Swanzey New Hampshire, White Wood Aster, Wild Basil on August 11, 2021| 24 Comments »

Narrow leaved gentians (Gentiana linearis) grow alongside an old dirt road up in Stoddard, so it takes a bit of effort to see them. It’s always worth it though; gentians of any kind are extremely rare in these parts and I’m always as excited to see them as I would be to see a field full of orchids. They’re such a beautiful shade of blue.

The gentians were coming up through ferns and I’m hoping the ferns aren’t choking them out. Narrow leaf gentians like moist, calcium rich soil and that’s one reason you don’t see them on this blog very often, because our soil is generally acidic. The flowers never really open so insects have to force their way in, and it takes a strong insect like a bumblebee to do so.

I didn’t see a bumblebee on the gentians but I did see one on a Mexican sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia) I found growing in a local garden. This is another flower that I have never seen here before this and I wonder why more people don’t grow it. It’s a pretty flower but the plants were a bit wilted on the day I saw them, so maybe they need a lot of water? I don’t know them well, so I can’t say. They certainly do attract insects.

I realized that I hadn’t been keeping up with the roses this year so here is a pink one I saw in a local garden.

This one reminded me of the cabbage roses I grew up with. My mother planted them before she died and the fragrance was unbelievable. Sitting out on the porch on a warm summer evening smelling the hedge full of hundreds of fragrant roses is a pleasant memory I’ve carried with me my entire life.

Google lens tells me this is a northern sundrop (Oenothera tetragona.) I’m okay with the sundrop part but northern sundrops have red buds and the buds on this plant were green. This plant is in the evening primrose family and there is a northern evening primrose (Oenothera parviflora) but it has flowers that do not open during the day and this flower was fully open at about 11:00 am. There is a narrow leaved evening primrose (Oenothera fruticosa) with 4-petaled bright yellow flowers which are 2-3 inches across, so that fits. It blooms in April through August in sandy soil along roadsides so that fits as well. Even though I can tick off a few positives there is a big negative, and that is that Oenothera fruticosa is rare in New England. Though it is listed as present in New Hampshire it is also listed as unranked, so in the end all I can tell you is that I found a sundrop plant beside an old dirt road and I can’t tell you its name. It’s very pretty though and there are sundrop cultivars for gardens.

Before the lily beetles came and finished them off, I used to grow Asiatic lilies. I planted them under each window so their wonderful fragrance would fill the house and it did until it didn’t. I grew stargazer lilies which were much pinker than these I found in a local garden. These were a bit over done as far as color I thought, but the fragrance was still heavenly. If you want wonderful fragrance in the garden Asiatic lilies will get you there.

I was looking for sunflowers but instead found these rudbeckia plants in the same garden as the Asiatic lilies. I do enjoy seeing what plant breeders are doing, so I was pleasantly surprised to see them. They’re quite different from any I’ve ever seen.

NOTE: A reader believes this might be a Gaillardia rather than a rudbeckia. Since I don’t know Gaillardia I’ll ask all of you what you think. I based my identification on the leaves, which couldn’t be any more rudbeckia like. But then maybe Gaillardia leaves look like that too. What do you think?

These nodding onions (Allium cernuum) I found in the same garden as the rudbeckia and Asiatic lilies were quite beautiful, I thought. They were dainty little things and I loved their colors. These plants are native to the U.S., with a range from New York to Michigan down to Georgia and the mountains of Arizona.

White wood aster (Aster divaricatus) is known for its drought tolerance and will grow under a heavy leaf canopy. The stalked, coarsely toothed leaves help with identifying this plant. The small, one-inch flowers of white wood asters can have red or yellow centers and they always look a bit wonky, like like a chubby fingered toddler had glued the petals on. This aster is very easy to grow and makes an excellent choice for a dry shaded woodland garden. It is best used in mass plantings, which is how it grows naturally. Where I work, they’ve come up under lilacs and they’re very pretty there, so I just let them be.

In a normal year I would see big leaf asters (Eurybia macrophylla) like those in the above photo blooming before the white wood asters we just saw but this year things are reversed and big leaf asters came in second. The flowers of big leaf aster are about the size of a nickel and are usually white but you can find an occasional plant with purple flowers as I did in this instance.

Big leaf asters get their common name not surprisingly, from their big, hand size leaves. Big leaves gather more light and since this plant grows in forests under trees that is how it has evolved. The leaves on this plant are very different from other asters, so it’s a hard plant to misidentify. I should also say that these leaves are not at all shiny. The only reason they look shiny in this photo is because it was a dewy morning and they were wet. Normally they would have a kind of dull, matte finish.

Bees were loving the purple coneflowers, which are now at their peak of bloom. They’re another native plant, native to the prairies of the mid west.

It’s just about time to say goodbye to our native purple flowering raspberries (Rubus odoratus.) Or at least, the flowers. The fruit comes next of course, and it will look like an oversize raspberry. These 2-inch diameter flowers look like roses at a glance but a closer look at the leaves and stems tells the story.

I wanted you to see the variations in color you can find on a single flowering raspberry plant. The flowers can look quite different even when they grow side by side. I’ve always thought the age of the blossom must have something to do with it but of course I can’t prove it.

Boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum) has just come into bloom. At a glance you might call it white Joe Pye weed and in fact the two plants are closely related, but the thread like flower styles are really the only shared feature. The leaves look quite different than those found on Joe Pye weed. I find boneset on river, pond and stream banks; almost always near water.

Wild basil (Clinopodium vulgare) is a first for this blog. Though I must have walked by it for years I just noticed it where I work one morning. The silvery looking things that the flowers are growing out of are the spiky flowerheads, covered in dew. The flowers are very small and it took several tries to get a useable photo of them. The plants sprawl a bit but are quite short. I’d have to call them maybe shin high.

I’m not thrilled with this shot of the wild basil flower but the plants have been cut so it’s all I have. The plant is in the mint family and the leaves are edible. They are said to have a minty, peppery taste. I’ve also read that a sweet and aromatic herb tea can be made from the fresh leaves. It is said that the plant probably came from Europe because it is very common there, but nobody seems to know for sure. Since I’ve seen it exactly once in 60+ years I doubt it could be called invasive, even if it did originate in Europe.

As the story goes, once upon a time a lady (with a dirty thumb?) made an impression on this plant and it has been called lady’s thumb (Polygonum persicaria) ever since. Though it doesn’t show very well in this photo, the base of each leaf forms a clasping sheath where it joins the central stem. Clasping leaves and the spots on each leaf are helpful identifiers. This plant is originally from Europe.

The small whitish-pink flowers are hard to find fully open and often aren’t seen when they are open. This is a small, unobtrusive plant that might reach 2 feet tall on a good day.

And there is the lady’s thumb print. Lady’s thumb is very similar to other knotweeds and smartweeds, but is the only one with the brownish black “thumb print.” I found the plant pictured growing in the rocky, sandy soil by a pond. Smartweeds get their name from the way they’ll make your tongue smart if you bite into them. The name knotweed comes from the sheath that encircles the nodes on the stems.

NOTE: A helpful reader has identified this plant as Persicaria extremiorientalis, far-eastern smartweed. Thank you Sara!

Regular readers of this blog know that I believe that all flowers have a divine inner light. In some flowers it’s easy to see and in others it’s not so easy, but one of the flowers that always shows it best is the purple morning glory (Ipomoea purpurea.) I always have to stand in awe of its amazing ethereal light, just for a few moments. If a flower’s inner light can shine so brightly just imagine what yours might do.

Your inner light is what makes you beautiful. ~Mary Davis

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Things I’ve Seen

Posted in Animals, Insects, Nature, Scenery / Landscapes, Things I've Seen, tagged Banded Net Winged Beetle, Blue Bead Lily Berries, Calico Pennant Dragonfly, Canon SX40 HS, Crab Spider, Dodder, Doll's Eyes, Great Egret, Hancock New Hampshire, Japanese Beetle, Keene, Keene New Hampshire, Large Lace Border Moth, Mayfly, Monarch Butterfly on Hyssop, Monarch Butterfly on Milkweed, Native Plants, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus Stylus TG-870, Possible Owl Feather, Red Trillium Berry, Slaty Skimmer Dragonfly, Starflower Seed Pod, Summer Forest, Summer Hiking, Summer Woods, Swanzey New Hampshire, Swanzey NH, Turkey Feather, Underwing Moth, Wet Grass, Widow Skimmer Dragonfly, Witch Hazel Nipple Gall on August 7, 2021| 27 Comments »

We had lots of rain here in July; well over a foot in some places but luckily no serious flooding as of this writing. Since it’s raining hard as I write this near the end of the month though, that could change.

I’ve been lucky because on most of the days that I’ve had a chance to get into the woods, it hasn’t been raining. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been wet though. Most of the grasses and undergrowth have looked like what you see in the above photo for quite a while now, and many lawns have standing water on them because the ground is so saturated the water has nowhere to go.

The rains have made many moths and other insects seek shelter under the eaves of buildings, and that’s where this one was one morning when I arrived at work. I think it might be one of the underwing (Catocala) moths, so called because when they spread their upper wings their underwings show a flash of color, but I haven’t been able to satisfactorily identify it. They have names like “charming underwing,” “girlfriend underwing,” “betrothed underwing,” and “bride underwing,” so it sounds like whoever named them had something other than moths on their mind at the time.

I often see moths resting on leaves during the day and that’s what this pretty one was doing when it caught my eye. I think it might be a large lace border moth (Scopula limboundata,) which is found only east of the Rocky Mountains. From what I’ve seen online wing colors and patterns can vary considerably on this moth. Their caterpillars are a type of inchworm that feeds on clover, blueberry, apple, and black cherry.

Early one windy morning I saw this dragonfly hanging on to a blueberry leaf, blowing in the wind like a flag. That’s why I think it’s one of the pennant dragonflies. Maybe a calico pennant. It wasn’t the least bit spooked by me and just kept hanging on as I took photos. I wish they were all so willing.

Note: A knowledgeable reader who knows much more about dragonflies than I do tells me that this may be a female banded pennant dragonfly. Thanks Mike!

Widow skimmers don’t seem to stay still very long. This one flew off and returned to its perch several times before I was able to get a decent shot of it. It wasn’t the shot I was hoping for but it does show off this dragonfly’s beautiful wings.

Slaty skimmers are another beautiful dragonfly. I think this is a mature male, which are dark blue with black heads. Females and juveniles look quite different, with brownish bodies and a dark stripe down their backs. These large dragonflies are fairly common here and can usually be found on pond shorelines.

What I believe is a Mayfly hung onto the wall of a building where I work. It was under the eaves, probably trying to get out of the rain. Mayflies are very interesting creatures that can be seen anytime in summer, not just in May. From what I’ve read they are part of an ancient group of insects that includes dragonflies and Damselflies. People have been fascinated by them for a very long time; Aristotle and Pliny the Elder wrote about them. Adults, if I understand what I’ve read correctly, do not eat. Their sole function is reproduction, so I’d guess that maybe this adult male was just hanging out, waiting for his mate to come along.

Banded net wing beetles also waited under the eaves of another building, but they were still getting wet. At first, I thought this was just one beetle but I couldn’t figure out why it had its wings spread so wide until I saw the photo. There are actually 3 beetles here. Two are hiding under the wings of the first, possibly mating? Males are smaller than the females but these three looked to all be about the same size to me. These beetles contain defensive chemicals and most birds and spiders leave them alone. They feed on plant juices or sometimes other insects.

Japanese beetles cause a lot of damage to plants but they aren’t very remarkable otherwise. They’re common and fairly easy to control, even by hand picking. But this one surprised me by turning into a lion.

The beetle turned, lifted its hind legs, and roared. Or at least I thought that when I saw this photo on the camera’s screen. It looked like the beetle had opened its big mouth and roared at me, but then I thought wait a minute, beetles don’t have big mouths. It was a trick of the light, with the bright sunlight shining on the beetle’s “snout” or nose, or whatever it is called. I had to laugh at my own foolishness.

A white crab spider hung upside down among the blossoms of a swamp milkweed, hoping it wouldn’t be noticed by any visiting insects. Crab spiders can change color from white to either yellow or pink but it takes anywhere from 2 to 21 days. They’re very patient little things and if you pay attention creatures like spiders, great blue herons, frogs, and many other creatures will teach you all about what it means to be truly patient.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I saw this great egret wading through a flooded cornfield. Usually when I see things like this I don’t have the right camera with me, but on this day I had it. Without a thought I slammed on my brakes, jumped out and started shooting, so it was a good thing there was nobody behind me. I’ve really got to stop doing that.

I’ve been wanting to see an egret my whole life and never had, even when I lived in Florida, so this beautiful bird was an exciting find. I looked up how to tell which egret you were seeing and from what I read the orange bill and black legs mean it’s a great egret. It looked to be about the size of a great blue heron, but it was quite far across a cornfield so that might not be correct. We’d had quite a storm the night before and I wondered if maybe it had been blown off course. It kept pecking at the ground so it was apparently seeing plenty of food.

I didn’t find any egret feathers but I’ve seen plenty of turkey feathers. We have lots of turkeys around and I’m always seeing feathers but not usually tail feathers like this one.

I found this feather hanging from a grass stalk, gently twisting in the breeze. Google lens has said repeatedly that it is from a long-eared owl but I have a hard time believing it because, though we do have long eared owls here they’re exceedingly rare and are hardly ever seen. On the other hand, I’ve read that they nest in the woods near open fields where they like to hunt, and that was the type of terrain I found it in. I’m hoping some knowledgeable reader might be able to sort it out.

The blue of blue bead lily berries (Clintonia borealis) is quite different from the blue of blueberries; what I call an electric blue. They don’t seem to be doing very well this year though; this is the only berry I’ve seen. The seeds in these berries can take two years to germinate and adult plants can take twelve years to finally show their yellow, lily like blossoms. This plant is also called “cow tongue” because of the shape of its leaves. Deer, chipmunks and many other animals and birds love the berries and I often have trouble finding them because they get eaten so fast. Native Americans used the plant medicinally to treat burns and infections, and bears are said to be attracted to its root.

The berries of the white baneberry plant (Actaea pachypoda) are called doll’s eyes, for obvious reasons. The remains of the flower’s black stigma against the porcelain white fruit is striking, and I can’t think of another plant with fruit quite like these. These plants are toxic so no part of them should ever be eaten. Luckily the berries are so bitter one bite would be enough to make anyone spit them out. Finding baneberry in the woods tells the story of rich, well drained loamy soil and a reliable source of moisture, because those are the things that it needs to grow.

Red or purple trillium (Trillium erectum) seed pods turn bright red in late summer, but few people ever seem to see them. Trilliums are all about the number three or multiples of it, and the seed chamber has six parts. The fleshy seeds are prized by ants because they have a sweet, pulpy coating that they eat, so many of the trilliums we see have most likely been planted by ants. It takes about five years for a trillium to go from seed to flower.

Tiny starflower seedpods (Trientalis borealis) look a bit like soccer balls. They’re very small so you often have to look at the plant’s leaves to find them. The few brown seeds inside need a cold period to germinate and will not do so until the fall of the second year. Ants and other insects “plant” the seeds.

This photo from a few years ago gives a good idea of how small a starflower seed pod really is; about as big as Abraham Lincoln’s ear on a penny. They’re a challenge to get a good shot of.

Witch hazel gall aphids (Hormaphis hamamelidis) have been doing their work. These cone shaped galls are where the gall aphids grow and reproduce. When they’re ready they leave the gall and fly off to find birch trees. The young aphids feed on birch leaves until they give birth to nymphs, which develop wings and fly back to witch hazels, where the process begins again.

The galls are called nipple galls or cone heads and each year, usually around Halloween, they turn black and look like witch hats. For some reason this one was early.

I went to see if I could get some shots of goldenrod flowers and instead found dodder attacking the goldenrod plants. Dodder (Cuscuta) is an annual and grows new from seed in the spring. It is a leafless vining plant that wraps and tangles itself around the stems of other plants. It is a parasite that pushes root like growths called haustoria into the stem of the host plant. Dodder can do a lot of damage to food crops and some of its other common names reflect how people have felt about it over the years: devil’s guts, devil’s hair, devil’s ringlet, hail weed, hair weed, hell bine, pull-down, strangle weed, and witch’s hair.

In this photo from 2013, if you look just to the upper left of the white flower in the photo you can see how the orange dodder stem (haustoria) has burrowed into a goldenrod stem. Once it is feeding on its host it loses all connection to the soil and from then on will survive by sucking the life out of the host plant. Dodder has no chlorophyll and its stems can be bright orange, yellow, or red. The round growths are seed pods. One of its favorite hosts seems to be goldenrod.

Here is a close look at the dodder’s flowers. They’re among the smallest I’ve ever photographed but I’d guess that they produce plenty of seeds.

While I was getting photos of the dodder, I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye and it turned out to be 3 monarch butterflies flying around some milkweed plants. Of course, they all flew away when I walked over but this one returned and hid under a leaf. I’ve seen quite a few monarchs this year but most have been wary and hard to get good shots of.

I saw more monarchs on some hyssop plants and I tried and tried to get a photo of their open wings, but this was the best I could do. They were almost all the way open.

I ended up with most shots looking like this one but with wings open or closed they are still very beautiful things. Hyssop is a very pretty plant that would be happy in any garden and it would attract butterflies too, so it isn’t hard to do something to help these creatures survive. There are many ways in fact, and a helpful reader was kind enough to send me some information on how we can help monarchs and many other insects simply, with no real effort other than putting some thought into which plants we select for our gardens. If you’re interested you can find a wealth of information by clicking this link: https://homegrownnationalpark.org/faq

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. ~Henry Miller

Thanks for stopping in. I’m sorry this post is so long but there are just so many beautiful things to see out there. I do hope that you’re seeing as many of them as I am.

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More Late July Flowers

Posted in Nature, Wildflowers, tagged Anise Hyssop, Blue Hydrangea, Canada Lily, Canon SX40 HS, Field Forget Me Not, Field Milkwort, Hancock New Hampshire, Indian Tobacco, Joe Pye Weed, Keene, Keene New Hampshire, Low Baby's Breath, Marsh St. John's wort, Native Plants, Native Wildflowers, Nature, Nature Study, New Hampshire, NH, Olympus Stylus TG-870, Pink Bee Balm, Purple Daylily, Purple Loosestrife, Rose of Henry, Slender Fragrant Goldenrod, Steeple Bush, Summer Flowers, Summer Hiking, Summer Plants, Summer Wildflowers, Summer Woods, Swanzey New Hampshire, Trumpet Creeper Vine on August 4, 2021| 16 Comments »

Whether you think Joe Pye was the name of a healer who used the plant to heal or jopi, the Native American name of the plant that did the healing, doesn’t matter. All that matters is its beauty. The plant is having a fairly good year because it likes a lot of rain, and some tower over my head. This example was just starting to flower, and you can tell that by the tiny thread like flower styles that give the flower head its fuzzy look. The flowers smell a bit like vanilla to me, and they attract many insects including monarch butterflies, so this plant (Eupatorium) is a great choice for a wildlife garden.

Steeplebush (Spiraea tomentosa) is easy to recognize because of the way its erect stems are unbranched, with steeple shaped flower clusters at their ends. They are usually found near water, as this one was, but I’ve also found them in very dry places. This native plant is available commercially and is an excellent choice for butterfly gardens. Native Americans used a tea made from steeplebush leaves for easing childbirth.

Slender fragrant goldenrod (Solidago tenuifolia) is similar to lance leaved goldenrod, but the two can be told apart by leaf veining; slender fragrant goldenrod has only one vein running down the center of each leaf and lance leaved goldenrod has several veins. Other common names are sweet goldenrod, wound weed, Blue Mountain tea, sweet-scented goldenrod, anise-scented goldenrod, and true goldenrod. Goldenrods like dry, sunny places and don’t mind sandy soil. This native grows much shorter than most; usually about knee high. The flowers are quite fragrant and many insects love them.

Marsh St. John’s wort (Hypericum virginicum) flowers are very pink for a St. John’s wort. As its name implies this plant likes saturated soil and will even grow in standing water at the shoreline of ponds. The flowers are quite small; about 3/4 of an inch across on a good day, but usually more like 1/2 an inch. This little shin high plant often has dark colored maroonish leaves like those seen here. It isn’t rare but it isn’t easy to find either.

The pin striped flowers are unusual and beautiful but you have to be patient to see them because they will only open when the plant is in full afternoon sun.

Field milkwort (Polygala sanguinea) is a pretty little shin high plant that usually blooms in August. What look like petals arranged on a central stem are actually individual flowers packed into a raceme no bigger than the end of an average index finger. Each tiny overlapping flower has two large sepals, three small sepals, and three small petals that form a narrow tube. Several different kinds of bees help pollinate this plant, including bumblebees. Its flowers can be white, purple, pink, or green and I’ve noticed that the color can vary considerably from plant to plant.

Several years ago, I put a field milkwart raceme on a penny so you could see how small these flowers really are. Small or not they’re very pretty and worth seeing. Milkworts get their name from the ancient Greeks, who thought they increased milk production in nursing mothers. The polygala part of the scientific name comes from the Greek polugalon or “much milk.”

Native trumpet vine (Campsis radicans) flowers are showy, waxy, trumpet shaped, and big; up to 3 1/2 inches long. They can be orange, reddish orange, or sometimes pink and they attract Ruby throated Hummingbirds and many insects. If you plant this vine near your house, you’d better give it something very sturdy to climb on. I once saw it pull a trellis right off a porch. Trumpet creeper can grow 35 feet tall when it has something to climb on. It climbs using aerial roots which, like some other vines like English Ivy, can damage wood, stone, or brick. Other names are cow vine, foxglove vine, hellvine, and devil’s shoestring, so you either love it or hate it. This one grows on an old rusty chain link fence so I just admire it. If I was going to plant one, I’d let it grow up a pine tree. It wouldn’t pull that down.

I like the flower buds on a trumpet creeper as much as the flowers. They look like red satin balloons.

I found a small plant, about as big as a baseball, in a lawn. It was covered in a large number of tiny flowers which were obviously in the forget me not family but much smaller. I think it might be field forget me not (Myosotis arvensis,) which I’ve never seen before now.

The flowers are about 1/8 inch across, much smaller than the forget me nots I’m used to finding. They are saucer shaped, which is an identifying feature as is the hairy, 5 lobed calyx at the base of the flower. If you know that I’ve misidentified it I’d love to hear from you.

Low baby’s breath (Gypsophila muralis) is blooming in sandy waste places in quite large numbers this year. The flowers are tiny; about the same size as those of red sand spurry, and blossom on the ends of wiry stems. Its leaves are also small and sword shaped. Most of the plants I’ve seen would fit in a tea cup with room to spare, but there are usually lots of plants growing together. It is an annual plant native to Europe and available commercially, sold as cushion baby’s breath. I had never seen it before a couple of summers ago but now I see it quite regularly. I’m guessing it re-seeds itself prolifically. This is another plant that was identified by readers of this blog, so once again I say thank you for the help.

I saw some of the lobelia plants that are called Indian tobacco (Lobelia inflata) but there was a black spot in the center of some of the flowers which didn’t look right, and that was because this little guy and his cousins were buried up to their hind legs in the flower tubes. As I watched this one crawled out and that’s how I found out what was happening. The flower seen here was about a quarter inch long so this was a tiny critter. It looks like a beetle of some sort but I haven’t been able to identify it.

Note: A helpful reader has identified this creature as a weevil, and I think it might be the stem miner weevil (Mecinus pyraster.) Thanks Ginny!

Invasive purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) has come into bloom. Three species of non native plant feeding beetles have been said to show promise in biological control of purple loosestrife and biological control has begun in the southern part of the state. I haven’t seen any great loss of purple loosestrife yet but it is said that it will take 5 years before we’ll see any real impact.

My first question is, what will the introduced insects eat when there are no more purple loosestrife plants? My second question is, when will we ever learn?

It’s time to say goodbye to Canada lilies, which are our biggest, showiest wildflower. Stumbling into a clearing in the woods where dozens of these plants, some 7 feet tall, are blooming is just unforgettable.

The blossoms themselves are pretty unforgettable too. Everything about them is big.

Years ago, when I first saw blue hydrangeas I thought they were the greatest thing, but since then I’ve grown into a more take it or leave it frame of mind. I found this one growing beside an abandoned building in Keene and I kind of liked the white in the flowers, rather than solid blue. I don’t know if the white is just a fluke or if it means the flowers are fading but it was a nice touch, in my opinion.

It’s rare to see anything but red bee balm here so I was surprised and happy to find this one in a local park. It had a bit of powdery mildew on its leaves but it looked good otherwise.

I was also surprised to find a huge anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum) plant in full bloom at the local college. It’s a pretty plant that I’ve never seen before, but it was easy to see that it needs a lot of room. I’ve read that it’s a native plant in the mint family that is said to attract many insects and butterflies but, though there were plenty of both flying around that day I didn’t see a single one land on this plant. I wondered if they, like me, just weren’t used to seeing it. When I find plants I don’t know like this one I sometimes think of what I could have done with them back when I was gardening for a living.

Rose of Sharon shrubs (Hibiscus syriacus) have come into bloom. There seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding this plant each year at this time. People don’t know if it’s a hibiscus or a mallow or a hollyhock, and that’s because all of those plants are in the mallow family (Malvaceae) and have similar flowers. The easiest way to identify a rose of Sharon is by looking at the plant the flowers are on. If the flower is on an upright, often tall woody shrub it is a rose of Sharon. Mallow and hollyhocks are perennials and / or biennials and will usually die back to the ground each year. Hibiscus resembles rose of Sharon but you’ll only find it growing outside year-round in the southern states because it is very tender. I think of rose of Sharon as a hardy hibiscus. This is about the only time of year I think of hibiscus because I used to have to trim what seemed like miles of hybiscus hedges when I worked as a gardener in Florida, so I don’t really miss them.

And here was a double flowered one. I’m not usually partial to double flowers but this one wasn’t too bad.

And here is this week’s beautiful daylily. My color finding software tells me its colors are thistle, orchid and plum. It has a divine light shining out of its throat and anthers of flame. If you could take a tray of flower parts and build your own, I’m not sure you would end up with a flower more beautiful than this. It’s a flower I can easily lose myself in.

In joy or sadness flowers are our constant friends. ~ Kakuzō Okakura

Thanks for coming by.

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