Our woodland wildflowers are ephemeral, providing a seasonally unique magical experience of bright colors in the woodlands. Diminutive blues, whites and pinks pop up throughout the brown leaves of winter like candy sprinkles on a donut (but don’t eat them). In another month, the leaves will unfurl on the oaks and the maples, creating too much shade for the spring ephemerals to continue to flourish. They will store their nutrients underground and disappear from our view until next spring. But for now, they add a rich layer of color, and are providing an early valuable food source for our native pollinators.
For a truly immersive experience, I recommend starting on the west side of Amazing Space and heading north (uphill) along the Cedar Overlook trail. For something a bit less hilly, I recommend parking at the wetland parking lot and walk east along Wood Duck Way, paying attention to the oak ridge that will be on your north.
Go for a walk in the woods. Leave the trail. Explore a nook you haven’t found before. Take your shoes off and let the cold spring mud squish between your toes. For the adventure below, we ventured up Bena Brook.
The stinging nettles are up.The skunk cabbage is flowering. Thank you, Gabe Anderson, for being my photographer.
Bena Brook has melted, creating open pools of clear, cold water. Photo credit goes to Gabe Anderson (thank you!).
The spring melt has also created isolated vernal pools where trees have uprooted.
The fungus are thriving in the newfound moisture and relative warmth.
The skunk cabbage are finely up! It looks like they may have come up several weeks ago, based on their nibbled appearance and the leaves that have appeared next to the purple flower.
As if aware of the equinox, the first snow trillium of the season has flowered. It is usually the second native woodland ephemeral to emerge, after the skunk cabbage.
The mullein has also emerged. While the plant won’t flower for months, its big fuzzy leaves have a great deal of medicinal value. It is not native, but grows readily in disturbed, barren ground, helping stabilize disturbed soil.
Prairie plantings are preferably done in the fall. Nature works the seeds into the soil; the frosting and thawing of the ground (have you been outside recently?) breaks up hard seed coatings, and the cold wet soil stratifies the seeds. Sometimes, schedules don’t allow for that. For this spring’s planting, we ordered in the fall and are now busy sorting, scarifying and stratifying. Some seeds need boiling water poured over them, others need sandpaper scraped over them. Some prefer to be refrigerated for 30 days; others prefer to be refrigerated, thawed, and then refrigerated again. Others are already sprouting in the sacks they came in.
Gabe and Syd are sorting out the seed order.
With more than 100 different species going in around the edge of the wetland, I hope to share a handful of species at a time, with my intention of having them all shared prior to the planting in April. Initially, I had planned to purchase a diverse mix from one of our regular vendors, such as Prairie Moon Nursery. If you are starting from scratch, that is a good plan. Because we already have well-established prairies from which to gather seed from, purchasing individual species enabled us to increase the diversity we could buy. There is no point in us buying things like Andropogon gerardi (big bluestem) or Pycnanthemum virginianum (mountain mint), for example, as we already have them in abundance and they are easy to hand-gather in the fall. Because the wetland has an overflow, we can plant species along its border that like medium wet to medium dry soils. It seldom truly floods, and when it does, the water usually doesn’t stay high for very long. We will be planting some water loving species in the wetland itself.
What’s going in the ground this spring for the prairie? To get us started:
Alliums are a good addition to any planting. They are edible by people, loved by pollinators, and well-adapted to a wide variety of sites. One might go so far as to say they are aggressive. A few of these have already started to sprout in the sack.
The site was prepped (with a bulldozer) last fall, and we put down an oat cover crop and straw to prevent erosion over the winter. Oats are good choice for a fall cover crop, if you don’t want them to start growing again in the spring. In this case, we don’t want them to compete with the new prairie grasses, so that was fine. The oat straw we will leave on-site. It will still prevent erosion, and gradually decay into the soil.
The site is ready for prairie seed. I wish there was more water in the wetland coming out of the winter, but the rain we are supposed to get this weekend, and subsequent spring rains in general, may yet change that.
When does spring start? Does it start when the chickadees change their call? Does it start when the red-winged blackbirds return to the Lynch Wetland? Or does it start with the first harvest of the year?
A small snap of warm weather this year in mid February, combined with the enthusiasm of my colleagues Gabe and Syd, sent us into the forest. Vecny Woods has a ravine full of old sugar maples.
The blue tape on the drill bit takes the guesswork out of drilling to the right depth.The sap started flowing immediately, which is both tasty and rewarding.
The sap from a sugar maple is usually 2%-3% percent sugar, and we set 26 taps in the Vecny Woods sugar maples. We will also be tapping silver maples in the floodplain (77) and box elders (a handful) in the former barnyard of the Penningroth Barn. While all three types of maple trees provide good sap, the silver maple sap has a sugar content of 1.5%-1.75% and the box elders have 1% sugar content. That sap requires longer boiling time, which in turn makes a darker syrup with a more robust flavor.
Reducing that sap to syrup requires a lot of firewood, a lot of boiling, and a lot of steam. It also requires a lot of patience. While the sap was flowing on February 11, our night time temperatures have been hovering around freezing, and the days have been cloudy. Those are not conducive to sap flow, and the trees have just been trickling. We might have enough to make three gallons of syrup. Fortunately, sap season has only just started, leaving us with a good month left for the weather to start cooperating. Next week is looking promising.
February 28. The fog is so thick the horizon between prairie and forest, between snow and air, is subtle. I got in what would be my last snowball fight of the season.
March 7. The maple sap stopped flowing. The skunk cabbage is up. This morning, we sit in the open doorway, feeling the world wake up between the first raindrops of spring. Nitro, Peaches and Jeff pause in an unspoken moment of truce. They are not in pursuit of peace, they are just entranced by that delicate, ephemeral moment when the warmth of the furnace on their backs shares equilibrium with the warmth of outdoor air on their faces.
March 15. The sound of clattering ice wakes me up. It is being driven by a solid 25 mile per hour wind into the side of the house. Tree tops, unattached but suspended in the air since August, have been wrenched down to the ground. The precipitation vacillates all day between snow, ice, and rain. Spring lies buried under a layer of frozen slush.
I am lying on my back under the sun, under the sky.
I am lying on the snow, suspended above the soil, above the prairie I burned last fall.
The flames of fall reduced the grass we think of as prairie to ash, reduced the grass we think of as prairie to the air I am now lying in.
Underground there is still a massive tangle of roots, woven together by mycorrhizal structures.
I can feel the transformation of spring through the sun on my face, through the snow on my back.
The snow insulates the prairie from the seasonal shift; I suspect the roots feel nothing yet.
I wonder if the air feels the emptiness of the space, if the air misses curling around the silicon-laced stalks of big bluestem and gliding over the petals of the gentian, if the air misses flitting through the styles of the prairie smoke.
I wonder if the air around the unburned autumn prairie was more dense than the open air I now lie in.
I wonder if the barred owls, chattering and hooting night and day now, are calling the prairie roots awake through the snow.
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