Into the Maelstrom

Posted by New Hampshire Garden Solutions

https://nhgardensolutions.wordpress.com/2026/05/23/wild-things-2/

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Remember that song? “Wild thing, you make my heart sing?” Well, everything in this post does indeed make my heart sing, wild or tame. It begins at a local pond where one of our most beautiful native shrubs grow. The rhodora is in the same family as azaleas and rhododendrons but it likes wet feet. Or at least, it doesn’t mind wet feet. I don’t like wet feet but I’ll risk them if it means being able to see these beautiful flowers again.

But though I saw some colorful rhodora buds I never did see any flowers that day. Instead I saw leatherleaf (Chamaedaphne calyculata) in bloom. This small shrub is in the heath family along with blueberries, heather, and many other well known natives. The plant gets its common name from its tough, leathery leaves, which are lighter and scaly on their undersides.

Each leatherleaf flower is about half the size of a blueberry blossom. The evergreen plant likes to grow in boggy ground right on the water line and hang its long flowering branches out over the water, I’d guess so waterfowl can get at the seeds. Mallards nest in stands of leatherleaf.

How beautiful these new oak leaves were. Reaching for the light with so much energy and movement. Just climbing all over each other to get there. The magic in this is, each leaf will position itself in just the right place on the branch to receive the most sunlight. Until that happens the leaf stems (petioles) will be relatively flexible but once they find their place in the sun the leaf stems will stiffen so the leaf stays in position and gets as much light as possible. It’s always about the light. If you can’t figure out the why or how plants grow the they way they do, always look to the light.

I hesitated for a moment when I saw a tree full of breaking beech buds because I know how lost I can get in such things, but then I relented and got lost.

In the end I was glad that I did go to the beech tree because I had taken maybe five photos of buds breaking when an American lady butterfly landed on a stone beside me. It was a sunny but windy and cold day in the 40s, so I thought maybe it was trying to get some warmth from the sun warmed rock. As I was taking photos I saw how beat up the butterfly’s wings were, apparently from bird attacks.

Then it closed its wings and I saw the beautiful patterns on their undersides. I always have trouble identifying this one so seeing this I knew would help. I was surprised to see a butterfly or any other insect on such a cold day.

A few days later when it was warmer I met an elderly gentleman at the pond who was birding, he said. He said he had been watching birds for all of his life and was now 82. I told him I had come looking for rhodora and painted trillium, and told him I had been studying plants for all of my life. As we stood there I saw a single painted trillium in bloom and showed it to him, and he watched as I took the above photo. I told him I thought this was our most beautiful trillium and he agreed. We heard a distant screech. “Red tail” he said, meaning red tailed hawk. At some point the subject of seeing came up. He saw by standing in one spot and listening, he said. I told him my way was to walk slowly and look closely. We agreed that each way was useful. If you’re looking for something that moves you stand still and watch. If what you seek doesn’t move then you have to move. Just plain old common sense, appreciated by us both. Before we parted he showed me where a phoebe sat on her nest. It was in a spot I had walked by many times. Next time I walk by it I’ll most likely remember that day.

Sunlight on the ripples made it seem like lightning flashed through the water, and it was mesmerizing.

It was quite early in the day when I walked a rail trail looking for two leaved toothwort plants in bloom. I never did find any with flowers on them but this is what I saw when I looked off from the rail trail to the sunlit forest beyond. Immediately the song Morning Has Broken by Cat Stevens began to play in my mind. It’s a beautiful song that I’ve always loved and as I walked along with the song playing in my mind I was a teenager again.

If you’d like to hear this beautiful song which was originally written as a hymn, just Google Morning Has Broken by Cat Stevens.

In a different forest by a stream I found a small patch of fringed polygala (Polygala paucifolia,) the plant with flowers that always remind me of tiny airplanes. The small 3 inch tall by inch and a half wide plants usually bloom in pairs, as can be seen in the photo above. Fringed polygalas are in the milkwort family and are also sometimes called flowering wintergreen and / or gaywings.

Each blossom is made up of five sepals and two petals. The two petals form a tube and two of the sepals form the little wings. The little fringe at the end of the tube is part of the third sepal, which is mostly hidden. When a heavy enough insect (like a bumblebee) lands on the fringe the third sepal drops down to create an entrance to the tube. You can see in the blossom on the left in this shot how it has dropped a bit, meaning it has probably been pollinated. Once the insect crawls in it finds the flower’s reproductive parts and gets dusted with pollen to carry off to another blossom. The slightly hairy leaves were once used medicinally by some Native American tribes to heal sores.

After I had taken photos of the polygala flowers I saw a red squirrel in a tree and I made squirrel sounds to get his attention. He apparently liked the sounds I was making because he came down the tree and sat on a branch just a few feet away. “Hi squirrely, you’re a cute little guy.” I told him. I made more squirrel sounds but this time he shrieked and ran back up the tree, so I must have said something he didn’t like. I didn’t know they could shriek like that. It sounded like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock film.

At yet another small pond I followed this newly hatched dragonfly from plant to plant until it finally came to rest on a dandelion stem. I knew it was freshly hatched because it flew slowly only for short distances, and its wings hadn’t stiffened yet. When dragonflies emerge from their exoskeletons they usually fly to a quiet spot and hang from vegetation until their wings expand and strengthen. Juveniles can resemble females and they change color as they age but if I had to guess I’d say it was an eastern pond hawk juvenile, but really I’m not sure.

Much of a dragonfly’s life is spent underwater; sometimes as long as two or three years as a nymph. The nymphs breathe through gills and eat just about anything. Insect larvae, worms, snails, crayfish, tadpoles, and leeches are all food for a dragonfly nymph. Once the nymph climbs out of the water, after a few minutes rest the dragonfly form that we’re more familiar with will begin to emerge from the exoskeleton. It will then breathe through holes in its abdomen called spiracles. The entire process of emergence can take hours, with many rest periods. What is left behind is called exuvia, the remains of an exoskeleton, and that’s what we see here.

There is a hole in each exuvia located behind the head and between the wing pads where the adult dragonfly made its escape, literally crawling out of itself. The white threads often seen dangling from this exit hole are the tracheal tubes. Since I saw about 20 of these on cattail leaves in one day I’m expecting to see a lot more dragonflies soon.

Then I discovered that following that dragonfly had led me right into a redwing blackbird nesting site. A female bird thought I needed a good talking to and told me in no uncertain terms that I was not welcome so close to her nest. “Yes mother” I said. “Yes mother, yes I know, but I’m just passing through. I didn’t mean to… Yes, I’m leaving. Yes, I promise I won’t come back until your babies have flown.”

I’ve accidentally stumbled into red wing nesting sites before and have been warned off by male birds hovering in front of my face and slapping me with theirs wings, but this was the first time I had gotten such a tongue lashing from a mother bird. They don’t usually say much. In fact they rarely even show themselves, so this was a rare encounter. And a loud one.

A gray catbird had nothing to say, which was odd since they can mimic just about any sound, even a rusty hinge. It just sat and stared accusingly, and I wondered if it had been speaking with the mother red winged blackbird. I was waiting for it to say “I’m very disappointed in you.” It had that look in its eye.

I’d been told of a good place to see birds so I went there and I did see yellow warblers and other migratory birds but colorblindness was a real hindrance on this day because as soon as a bird flew into a bush with leaves it disappeared and I never even got off a shot. I had been leaning against my car and when I decided to leave I looked down and found that I had little birds hopping all around me. This one was a white crowned sparrow and as I learned by watching it, it was here for seeds.

From what I’ve read these birds were heading north, so just passing through. I also learned that they fly at night so they’re a bit winded in the morning. That explained its behavior on this day. It was morning and it was refueling by eating every seed in sight. It didn’t matter if I was there or not. They were hungry but friendly little things.

But the white crowned sparrows appeared to be getting some competition from their cousins the chipping sparrows. For me a sparrow has always been a sparrow so I had to read more to find out that these birds were most likely not migrating. They were probably Keene residents but like their cousins they were here for seeds.

The chipping sparrows were ripping into dandelion seed heads and the seeds were flying. The white crowned sparrows appeared to be eating seeds they found on the ground, so maybe these cousins weren’t competing for food after all. The good thing was, they were all finding plenty to eat and they were getting along as a family. And hopping all around me, enough so at one point I feared I’d step on one if I moved.

Native Robin’s plantain (Erigeron pulchellus) almost always booms in late May and is the earliest of the fleabanes to bloom in this area. Its inch and a half diameter flowers are larger than many fleabane blossoms and its foot high, hairy stalks are shorter. The flowers can be white to pink to lavender and are made up of ray florets surrounding yellow disk florets in the center. Though native they act like weeds and often come up in lawns in large colonies. But they’re much loved, and the evidence of that is shown by the way they’re left standing when lawns are mowed. Even cemetery crews mow around them, and that’s where I found these blooming. Their beauty speaks of the coming summer.

If you have a U.S. penny handy, look at Abraham Lincoln’s ear. That will give you a good sense of the size of these red sandspurry flowers. At about 1/16 to 1/4 inch across tiny is the word. The leaves are flat and narrow and are said to resemble fir needles. It grows low to the ground in small clumps. I find it growing in the sand at the side of the road. It always has sand stuck all over its buds and leaves so I thought that might be where the name came from, but I haven’t been able to confirm that. I did discover that it’s in the carnation family.

Introduced from Europe and / or Asia some time before 1860, red sandspurry is a “weed” now found throughout New England and some other parts of the country. It is said to be of interest only to botanists and nature nuts, meaning most people walk right by it.

Blue bead lily (Clintonia borealis) is blooming and that in itself is something a bit remarkable because this plant takes more than 12 years to produce flowers from seed, and more than two years for seeds to germinate. A close look at the flower shows why the plant is in the lily family. Each one looks like a miniature Canada lily. The flowers give way to a single, electric blue berry, which is toxic. As a good general rule of thumb it can be presumed that most plants in the lily family are toxic and shouldn’t be eaten. Even the water in a vase full of lilies becomes toxic, so it should never be given to pets.

One Native American legend says that when a grass snake eats a poisonous toad, it slithers in rapid circles around a shoot of blue-bead lily to transfer the poison to the plant.

Yellow rocket cress, (Barbarea vulgaris) has started blooming. This plant is native to Africa, Asia and Europe and is found throughout the U.S. In some states it is considered a noxious weed but in other places it is eaten much like spinach. It is also known as scurvy grass due to its ability to prevent scurvy because of its high vitamin C content.

Yellow rocket is also called winter cress because its basal leaves stay green under the snow all winter. It flowers at about knee high and is one of the first flowers to bloom in our meadows. The four petal flowers show that the plant is another in the mustard family (Brassicaceae.) The straight green growths seen on this plant are its seed pods. The plant is said to have a slightly bitter, peppery flavor. I see lots of it but I’ve never tasted it.

I went out the other day and found a Mayfly on my car. Of course it flew off as soon as I tried to get a shot of it, but seeing it tells me the fish will be biting. And the fish hunters like herons and king fishers (and anglers) will be busy and maybe, if the hatching is enough, swallows and waterfowl will come from all over to join in. I got this shot of a Mayfly hiding on a fern stalk a few years ago. According to what I read about them online the dull opaque color of the wings means this Mayfly was at the “subimago stage,” which is halfway between the nymph and adult stages. This is when they are most vulnerable, so they will often hide in the undergrowth at pond edges. At the adult stage they have no mouth parts and cannot eat. They mate and the female lays her eggs in water, and both she and the male will die after having lived for just a day or two.

I went back to where I started at the beginning of this post to see if the rhodora had come into in bloom but before I could get to them I saw a Canada goose family. And then I saw another, and another. Geese are usually more wary than mallards. I can’t remember any time a mother has swam over to me to show off her babies.

But if you’re quiet and stay still they’ll tolerate your presence. There were little golden balls of fluff everywhere, I even saw parents leading them through the woods. It was a great year for geese at this pond I’d say.

I had seen a rhodora with color in its buds when I had been here previously but when I went to see it I found that the flowers had opened and had passed quickly. The ground was littered with petals under the bush and I blamed their quick passing on the three days of extreme heat we’d had. It was in a position where it saw a lot of sunshine but I don’t really know if that was what caused the petal drop or not. All I could do was walk the shoreline and hope I found another one in bloom, and the photo above shows the one I found.

Rhodora (Rhododendron canadense,) is a small, native rhododendron that loves swampy places. It is native to the northeastern U.S. and Canada and both its western and southern limits are reached in Pennsylvania. The beautiful flowers appear before the leaves, but only for a short time in spring. By mid-June they will have all vanished. It can be a tough shrub to find initially, but once you’ve found a spot where they bloom you will almost always find them blooming there year after year. It’s always worth the effort because their beauty is unmatched by any other small native shrub that I know of.

Just imagine becoming the way you used to be as a very young child, before you understood the meaning of any word, before opinions took over your mind. The real you is loving, joyful, and free. The real you is just like a flower, just like the wind, just like the ocean, just like the sun. ~Miguel Angel Ruiz

Thanks for stopping in.

https://nhgardensolutions.wordpress.com/2026/05/23/wild-things-2/

http://nhgardensolutions.wordpress.com/?p=35875