Backwoods Blog

SPRING WILDFLOWERS

Backwoods Blog;

in the woods and on the road…

Trout lily in spring…

Although the arrival of warming temperatures has been a bit sluggish this year (including scattered snow in the air yesterday), the inevitable movement towards spring cannot be suppressed. Walking in the woods along the river last week I noticed spring wildflowers close to blossoming. They are welcome companions as we transition to warming and lengthening days, even if blackfies and mosquitoes are included in the deal. Here is a journal entry I came across from our early days of living in the woods. Enjoy spring everyone!

Journal Entry:  May 24, 2002

Linda and I are enjoying the spring wildflowers around the cabin this year. We’re using her grandmother’s paperback copy of Pocket-Guide to Wildflowers from 1951 to identify a few. Usually I simply refer to flowers as “cute little yellow ones” or “nice flower.” Now I have names. (I’ll try not to be too annoying with my new-found knowledge.) Two of the most prevalent wildflowers along the stream are the Trout Lily Erythronium which has tiny yellow flowers and a mottled leaf that feels like a sticky rubber mat, and Bloodroot Sanguinaria canadensis which has little white flowers and a red liquid that leaks out of the stem and onto your hand if you’re not ready for it. They are everywhere! (And they require no work or placement on our part.) I would probably pay good money for these plants if they sold them in a store. I’m starting to appreciate them more all the time. Here is a journal entry of monastic Thomas Merton speaking about the value of local place from his 1965 book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

More and more I appreciate the beauty and the solemnity of the “way” up through the woods, past the barn, up the stony rise, into the grove of it all, straight oaks and hickories around through the pines swinging to the hilltop and the clearing that looks out over the valley. Sunrise: hidden by pines and cedars to the east: I saw the red flame of the kingly sun glaring through the black trees, not like dawn but like a fire…It is essential to experience all the times and moods of one good place. No one will ever be able to say how essential, how truly part of a genuine life this is: but all this is lost in the abstract, formal routine of exercises under an official fluorescent light. 

In the woods,

Dave

May 17, 2023

Bloodroot in the north woods

Trout lily alongside the Meduxnekeag