This is truly my favourite time of year in the meadows at our cottage on Lake Muskoka. Why? Because the flower variety is at peak and the bees are at their most plentiful and buzzy. So my 17th fairy crown for August 5th celebrates the pollinator favourites here, including the champion, pink-flowered wild beebalm or bergamot (Monarda fistulosa), as well as yellow false oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides), biennial blackeyed susan (Rudbeckia hirta), grey-headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata) with its dark cones, mauve hoary vervain (Verbena stricta), oregano (Origanum vulgare) and a few of my weedy Queen Anne’s lace flowers (Dauca carota).
I call my wild places on either side of the cottage ‘Monarda Meadows’ because wild beebalm (M. fistulosa) is the principal perennial there and in all the beds and wild places around our house, where it grows as a companion to Heliopsis helianthoides, below.
There’s a reason wild beebalm is called that; it’s a literal balm for the bees, specifically bumble bees whose tongues can easily probe the florets!
Another frequent visitor to wild beebalm flowers is the clearwing hummingbird moth (Hemaris thysbe).
False oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides) is one of the most aggressive natives I grow. I’m happy to leave it where it lands, but it often sulks in very sandy, sunny spots when summers are hot and dry. It’s much better in the rich soil at the bottom of my west meadow, and I try to ignore all the red aphids that line the stems in certain summers.
But heliopsis also attracts its share of native bees, including tiny Augochlora pura, below.
Unlike the blackeyed susan I wrote about in my last blog, R. fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’, the ones I have at the lake are all the drought-tolerant native Rudbeckia hirta, below, with a long-horned Melissodes bee. Biennials, they have seeded themselves around generously since 2003, when I first sowed masses of seed (along with red fescue grass) on the bare soil of the meadows surrounding our new house.
Sometimes they manage to arrange themselves very fetchingly, as with the perfumed Orienpet lily ‘Conca d’Or’, below.
Other times, they hang with the other tough native in my crown, hoary vervain (Verbena stricta). Both are happy in the driest places on our property where they flower for an exceedingly long time….
…… as you can see from this impromptu bouquet handful featuring the vervain with earlier bloomers, coreopsis, butterfly milkweed and oxeye daisy.
Bumble bees love Verbena stricta.
The other yellow daisy in flower now — hiding at the top of my fairy crown — is grey-headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata), also a favourite of bumble bees and small native bees in the meadows. A vigorous self-seeder, it nevertheless does not always land in soil that is moisture-retentive enough for its needs; in that case, like heliopsis above, it wilts badly. But I love its tall stems bending like willows in the breeze.
Also in my fairy crown is a familiar hardy herb that fell from a pot on my deck long ago and found a happy spot in the garden bed below: Greek oregano (Origanum vulgare var. hirtum).
Its tiny flowers are also favoured by small pollinators.
The last component of my midsummer fairy crown is the common umbellifer Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota). As much as we think of this as an unwanted invasive weed in North America, it was reassuring to see a native potter wasp, Ancistrocerus, making use of its small flowers.
As always, my fairy crown has a lovely second act as a bouquet.
Finally, I made a 2-minute musical video that celebrates these plants that form such an important ecological chapter in my summer on Lake Muskoka.
In my previous blog, ‘Garden in the Woods – Part 1’, I left you poised to walk around the lily pond of this fabulous native plant garden in Framingham, Massachusetts, outside Boston. I love a garden that features good interpretive signage, so here’s the sign for the pond. Because it’s just May 14th, these marginal plants and aquatics are not yet in flower, but there are still interesting plants to see.
A native plant that is in bloom is golden ragwort, Packera aurea. In my photo below, I show a close-up of the flowers and also a view from the far side of the lily pond of the colony at the base of the slope, illustrating the topography it prefers: moist – but not wet – acidic soil.
In the wet soil near the pond is marsh marigold (Caltha palustris).
I note the ‘Mount Airy’ witch alder (Fothergilla) near the pond and realize why my own fothergilla shrubs aren’t exactly thrilled to be in my unirrigated front garden in Toronto.
The pond edge is wild and natural-looking, with ferns, highbush blueberry and winterberry competing for space.
Royal fern (Osmunda regalis) on the left and cinnamon fern (Osmandastrum cinnamomeum) on the right also grow in the woods near our cottage north of Toronto.
Early-blooming eastern leatherwood (Dirca palustris) is already bearing fruit in the moist soil adjacent to the pond.
I’ve never seen drooping laurel, aka doghobble (Leucothea fontesiana) before, another denizen of damp soil – but normally native further southeast.
As I leave the pond area to continue along the main path, I admire a lovely rustic post and railing. Simple and beautiful.
On the predominately alkaline slope, yellow ladyslippers (Cypripedium parviflorum) are in flower.
There are loads of wild leeks or “ramps” in the valley (Allium tricoccum), a native edible onion that is common in Ontario as well.
Appalachian barren strawberry (Geum fragarioides) grows in the dappled shade down here, too.
Throughout the garden, flowering dogwood’s (Cornus florida) white flowers light up the shadows in May.
A violet I know well with a large native range, common blue violet (V. sororia).
In the Habitat Display area in the valley, there are a few bogs where eastern skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) is plentiful, but its wine-red flowers are long gone…..
….. though the lovely pink flowers of pink-shell azalea are making up for it.
Thanks to the excellent habitat tour on the Native Plant Trust’s website, I’m able to understand a little more about the ecology of some of the areas. Signage is educational, too. This one explains how regional pH determines which ferns require which kind of soil.
This custom limestone habitat was lovely with tall, white-flowered two-leaf miterwort or bishop’s cap (Mitella diphylla) combined with northern maidenhair fern (Adiantum pedatum).
Eastern columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) is familiar to me, since it grows on our cottage property on the Canadian Shield.
I love these vignettes – here is maidenhair fern with rue anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides), a plant that does like acidic soil.
A closeup of rue anemone. Isn’t it lovely?
Nearby is starflower. It also grows in acidic soil in the forest near us though it has a new name, not Trientalis any more but Lysimachia borealis.
Walking on, I come upon box huckleberry (Gaylussacia brachycera). Native to the Atlantic coastal plain and points south, it is a self-sterile shrub that spreads clonally. According to Wikipedia, it is “a relict species nearly exterminated by the last ice age”.
Here and there I spot little pools of pale blue, lovely Quaker ladies or bluets (Houstonia caerulea), another denizen of moist, acidic soil.
The path leads on through rhododendrons not yet in flower.
The Calla Pool has a colony of native wild calla or water arums (Calla palustris) thriving in the muck and sharing the same rhizome, but not in flower quite yet. I am very familiar with this one from our acidic woods on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto.
As the forest clears we come to sunnier areas and a sign describing a meadow ecosystem, which is not much in evidence in mid-May. As the Native Plant Trust says in its video tour: “This meadow provides an example of succession, the gradual change from one ecological community to another. In the colorful foreground you may notice favorite native plants such as partridge sensitive-pea, little bluestem, gray goldenrod, and northern blazing star. Behind the flowers are woody pioneer species such as gray birch, eastern red cedar, and sassafras. Landscapes are constantly changing due to ecological succession, climate change, and disturbances such as natural disasters. These changes allow invasive plants to move in and crowd out native species. Our conservation work includes controlling invasive species, banking native seeds, and augmenting populations of rare plants to ensure their survival.”
For me, the most interesting low-lying habitat in this valley bottom is the ‘Coastal Sand Plain’, which mimics the lean soil of the Atlantic Coastal Pine Barrens ecoregions of Cape Cod and the coastal islands off New England. Two plants of the sand plain grasslands threatened by development are the sundial or perennial lupine (Lupine perennis), below….
…. and prairie dropseed grass (Sporobolus heterolepis).
Another plant of the coastal pine barrens is American holly (Ilex opaca). It prefers moist, acidic soil and, like all hollies, it is dioecious, having male and female flowers on different trees. Thus, if you want those lovely red fruits, you need a male holly to pollinate the female flowers.
Canada rosebay or rhodora (Rhododendron canadense) is showing off its pretty flowers in this habitat, too. Though somewhat scrawny, it is an iconic shrub and lends its name and image to the 120-year-old journal of the New England Botanical Club, fittingly titled Rhodora.
It was so interesting to see this xeric community of the Coastal Sand Plain with prairie dropseed, shooting stars and prairie thistle growing near New England’s (and Ontario’s) only native cactus, eastern prickly pear, Opuntia humifusa.
I’m not sure why I thought of shooting stars (Primula meadia, formerly Dodecatheon) as woodlanders, but these were clearly happy in the sand plain habitat….
…. and included a stunning, dark-pink form.
I’m sure most gardeners would be itching to weed out this thistle, but it is the native pasture thistle (Cirsium pumilum) which is found from Maine to South Carolina. A biennial or monocarpic perennial, it bears scented flowers (its other common name is fragrant thistle) that attract pollinators and its seed provides food for many birds. (But it might not be appropriate for a small garden of natives.)
I am happy to see wavy hair grass (Deschampsia flexuosa) here, a familiar grass in my own rocky, red oak-white pine woodland edge ecosystem at our Lake Muskoka cottage north of Toronto.
And I make the acquaintance of two sand plain violets, coast violet (Viola brittoniana)…..
…… and bird-foot violet (Viola pedata) with its distinctive leaves, whose seed is spread by ants.
There is a different wetland habitat as part of this sandplain and it features Atlantic white cedar (Chamaecypaaris thyoides).
I have never seen swamp pink (Helonias bullata) before, an endangered coastal plain species whose habitat is freshwater swamps and seepage areas. A rhizomatous perennial, its pink flowers with blue stamens are very showy!
Golden club (Orontium aquaticum) is the only extant species in its genus, but there are several identified fossil species from the west coast. It grows in streams, ponds and shallow lakes with acidic soil.
Highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum) grows in the moist soil edging the pond here.
Heading onto drier ground, I find familiar little Canada mayflower (Maianthemum canadense)…
…. and wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) hiding under a skunk cabbage leaf.
Pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea) has found boggy soil and is patiently awaiting an unsuspecting fly.
Evergreen Christmas fern (Polystichum acrostichoides) is an old favourite of mine, perhaps because it stays in one place, unlike ostrich fern.
Circling around to head back to the entrance, we walk through the Beech Forest. As the Native Plant Trust’s virtual tour says: “Maple-beech-birch forests are a classic northern hardwood forest type, representing about one-fifth of forested land in southern New England. Nearly half of beech trees in southern New England have been affected by beech bark disease since the mid-20th century. Despite this insect-fungus complex, the resilient northern hardwood forest thrives in a spectrum of soil and moisture conditions and is home for a diversity of plant and animal species”.
I love this rustic arch leading into the Family Activity Area.
There are no red and yellow plastic slides and swings here – it’s all au naturel and wrought from the forest.
No matter where you travel in North America, if you tour public gardens you’re likely to come upon one of my friend Gary Smith’s magical environmental art creations. This one, part of “Art Goes Wild” completed in 2007 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Garden in the Woods, is called “Hidden Valley” and it was crafted from fallen logs and branches arranged in a serpentine line.
As we climb out of the beech woods and circle up the hill towards the Visitor Center, I spot sweet white violet (Viola blanda)….
…. and the curved inflorescence of red baneberry (Actaea rubra)….
…. and the white form of crested iris (I. cristata)….
…. and finally, a drift of Allegheny spurge (Pachysandra procumbens), which surely should be a widely-marketed alternative to invasive Japanese spurge (P. terminalis).
We arrive back at the gift shop and I take a quick look at the plants for sale. This one is intriguing taxonomically, because for a long time purple chokeberry was considered a hybrid of red and black chokeberry (A. arbutifolia x A. melanocarpa). But its range outside those species, its viable fruit and unique morphology have resulted in it being given its very own species name, Aronia floribunda.
And with that bit of botanical trivia, we depart Framingham’s beautiful Garden in the Woods, filled with respect for Will Curtis’s fulfilled dream and for the breadth of New England’s spring flora. If you want to learn more about what natives can be grown in New England and further afield in the northeast, consider the new book by Native Plant Trust director Uli Lorimer, “The Northeast Native Plant Primer – 235 Plants for an Earth-Friendly Garden”.
On May 14th, I was able to cross off an entry on my “Gardens To See Before I Die” list. It was a supreme pleasure on our spring road trip from Toronto to New Jersey for my husband’s college reunion to detour eastward in order to visit Garden in the Woods in Framingham, Massachusetts 20 miles outside Boston. I had heard so much over the decades about this garden featuring native New England plants that I couldn’t imagine being so close in spring and missing it. So we expanded our trip to spend two nights in Framingham in order to meet old Wooster, MA friends for dinner and visit the New England Botanic Garden (formerly Tower Hill Botanic Garden) in Boylston, but more on that later. Right now, let’s head into the parking lot on 180 Hemenway Road in the leafy suburbs of the town of Framingham. Walking towards the visitor entrance, we pass a spectacular carpet of mayapple (Podophullum peltatum) under airy pink-shell azalea (Rhododendron vaseyi) and flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) and I’m delighted to discover……
…… that I can photograph a shy mayapple flower without getting down on my hands and knees!
The flowers of pink-shell azalea, endemic to the Appalachian highlands. are simply exquisite.
I spot a little crested iris (I. cristata) in the entrance gardens and I am excited about what is to come!
We pay our admission and I take a fast glance around the beautiful little gift shop and the plants for sale, below, before heading out. (I’ll talk about the history of the garden and Native Plant Trust later, but the plants are grown at the Trust’s native plant nursery Nasami Farm 93 miles west in Whately MA.)
It is 1:15 pm when we start our visit and we will spend 2.5 hours here on the main loop, which is probably an hour less than the time I would like to have had to explore the various satellite trails. I’ve shown our route with red arrows on the map below. (Note that the garden recommends an hour to do the mile-long main loop, but that might be for visitors without cameras!)
I photograph the What’s in Bloom display for the various garden areas so I can refer to it as we make our way around. We are at peak bloom for the spring ephemerals, including trilliums; in fact the garden boasts a collection of 21 species of trillium!
The path is wide and flat here and bisects sun-dappled woodland with lots of signage to identify the native plants, like the spotted cranesbill (G. maculatum), below.
You can see brown autumn leaves between the plants – they are left on the garden to act as nature’s mulch. Now…. imagine this as your wild back yard, for that’s what it was to Cornell-educated landscape designer Will C. Curtis (1883-1969). One of his foundational roles was with Warren Manning, sometimes called the “Dean of Landscape Architecture”, renowned for his informal, naturalistic ethos in design. Later, he worked as the general manager of a tree farm in Framingham, and in 1931, while out hiking, he came upon this 30-acre piece of land in the rural north part of the city. Owned by the Old Colony Railroad and used as a gravel mine, it featured “undulating eskers, tumbling brooks and varied woodland with two bogs and one pond, plus an ever-flowing spring” (Dick Stiles).
Will Curtis was able to purchase the land for $1,000. At 48 years of age, he set about building a rustic cottage, felling trees, clearing garden areas, laying out trails, expanding the lily pond and making a rock garden. Soon, with the help of volunteers, the Garden in the Woods was opened to the public. In 1933, Curtis was joined by Howard O. (Dick) Stiles and in 1936 they began a full partnership, giving tours, selling plants and raising exotic, award-winning plants under glass. Over the next 30 years, Will Curtis (right, below) and Dick Stiles (left) became experts in native American plants while maintaining seed and information exchanges with international botanical gardens.
Photo – Native Plant Trust
As Framingham grew and houses sprang up nearby, they turned down offers to sell to developers. In May 1965, the decision was made to transfer the Garden in the Woods to the New England Wildflower Preservation Society, with Will and Dick staying on as director and curator respectively. But after a period of ill health, Will Curtis died in 1969 at his home in the garden. As Dick would write later, “This man was a most unusual character; rugged, determined, resourceful, undeviatingly honest with no use whatever for so-called ‘diplomacy’. He was a man with vision, a true artist who knew exactly what he wanted and went to any amount of time and labor to achieve it, whether doing landscaping for a client, or working at the Garden. He never used a plan—not once—for it was all in that brain that could envision and feel and know just how it should be.”
Today, the expanded 45-acre garden is owned by the Native Plant Trust, the new name as of January 2019. According to director Uli Lorimer in an interview with Margaret Roach, the name was changed from the New England Wild Flower Society “to better align with the conservation, horticulture and education work we have been doing for years, and will continue to do in the future”. But for the average visitor, it’s simply a place to be inspired with the native plants of New England and how to use them in design, like the yellow wood poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum) with Jacob’s ladder (Polemonium reptans) below. On that note, just days before our visit, Uli Lorimer’s book ‘The Northeast Native Plant Primer – 235 Plants for an Earth-Friendly Garden’ was published
I’m excited as I spot my first trillium, large toadshade (Trillium cuneatum)!
Some plants are familiar, like the white foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia), below with Christmas fern (Polystichum acrostichoides), while others….
…. like the goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis)….
…. and the green-and-gold (Chrysogonum virginianum var. brevistolon) are not.
Not far along the trail, we check out the Idea Garden, with its residential scale.
I love the shed’s green roof of native plants, with chokeberry and redbud tree in flower at right.
Although the garden is virtually 100% native, I note a little drift of Anemone nemorosa ‘Vestal’ alongside the ferns, Solomon’s seals and wood poppies (one of the ‘well-behaved’ non natives that made its way in).
Pink flowering dogwood (Cornus florida ‘Rubra’) lights up the woodland.
For visitors looking for a native lawn substitute, swards of Pennsylvania sedge (Carex pensylvanica) are there to inspire!
Native plant cultivars are used here and there. This lovely combination is mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) in a carpet of bright-pink creeping phlox (Phlox stolonifera ‘Home Fires’).
I see my second trillium, yellow wakerobin (T. luteum)….
…. and note how lovely it looks with the pink creeping phlox.
We pass by Carolina rhododendron (R. carolinianum)….
…. and Piedmont rhododendron (R. minus)…..
…. under towering yellow birch trees (Betula allegheniensis). The birdsong here is amazing.
We descend to a valley (though this entire part of New England is referred to as the Connecticut River Valley) and the topography hints clearly at the property’s use as a gravel quarry a century ago. There’s a little enclave with a stone wall that acts to retain the hillside above….
…. and a stone bench where visitors can sit and contemplate the native flora.
And here I find a treasure trove of trilliums, including bent trillium (T. flexipes) and…
….the pink form of showy trillium or wakerobin (T. grandiflorum var. roseum) and….
….. sweet white trillium (T. simile) and…..
….. toadshade (T. sessile) and…..
…… showy trillium (T. grandiflorum), here with long beech fern (Phegopteris connectilis)…
….. and finally nodding toadshade (T. cernuum).
How tranquil it is here, without the hordes of visitors I expected, given the peak bloom.
The most brilliant show at the moment is decidedly creeping phlox (P. stolonifera). I believe this is ‘Sherwood Purple’…..
….. pairing beautifully with yellow wood poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum) in one area….
….. and foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia) in another.
I see one of my own garden’s… um… more aggressive plants, ostrich fern (Matteucia struthiopteris) looking quite well-behaved in the midst of creeping phlox. Perhaps all I need are a few dozen gardeners to help me control it?
A little andrena bee is foraging on star chickweed (Stellaria pubara).
I find fringed bleeding heart (Dicentra eximia) down here, both the light-pink form…
…. and a raspberry-pink form, here with wild leeks (Allium tricoccum).
Look at this valley. Isn’t it stunning?
We’re now at the Rock Garden and I find Phlox subulata ‘Emerald Cushion Blue’ making good use of the outcrops.
Nearby is a little colony of plaintain-leaf pussytoes (Antennaria plantaginifolia). Like all members of the genus, its leaves are a larval food for the American painted lady butterfly (Vanessa virginiensis).
And a new-for-me plant, stiff amsonia (A. rigida).
On Victoria Day weekend, with almost two warm weeks having elapsed since my first May wildflower foray into the woods flanking the dirt road near our cottage on Lake Muskoka, near Torrance, Ontario I was curious to see what else had come into bloom. This time, knowing the blackflies and mosquitoes would be active, I came prepared with a Coghlan’s head net for my hat. What a lifesaver that was!
As I left our place on the Page’s Point peninsula, I noticed the sand cherry in flower down by the shore. Prunus pumila is a plant not only of sandy shores along the Great Lakes, but of smaller lakes, too. It also emerges from soil in granite outcrops, like Lake Muskoka.
Spring bees love the sand cherry flowers. This is an andrena mining bee.
Lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium) were in flower, too. Fingers crossed for sufficient rain to produce fruit.
I also noticed the rather subtle flowers of limber honeysuckle (Lonicera dioica), another Muskoka native.
Further down the path was a little stand of gaywings, aka fringed milkwort (Polygala paucifolia).
Back on the dirt road, hepatica, spring beauty and dogtooth violet were all finished, but I found some sweet little downy yellow violets (V. pubescens) in the grassy centre of a neighbour’s driveway.
Wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) was now in full bloom.
False Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum racemosum) was just about to flower…..
…. .and across the road, little starflower was becoming used to its new name, Lysimachia borealis (formerly Trientalis).
I stepped down into the wetland on either side of the road to get a better look at the violet that my Field Botanists of Ontario Facebook page had identified for me in my last blog. You can see it in the mud under the emerging royal ferns (Osmunda regalis var. spectabilis). It’s called Macloskey’s violet or small white violet (Viola macloskeyi) and is native to much of northeast N. America. This is when I really appreciated my bug veil!
Here’s a close-up look at the violet.
In the wetland on the opposite side of the road, cinnamon ferns (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) had mostly unfurled since my last visit.
There were masses of Macloskey’s violets here too, but what was that white flower at the edge of the swale?
It was wild calla or water arum (Calla palustris) – my first time seeing this lovely marginal aquatic plant.
Wild calla bears the spathe-and-spadix floral arrangement typical of the Arum family (Araceae). According to the Illinois Wildflowers site: “The spadix has mostly perfect (bisexual) flowers… These small flowers are densely arranged across the entire surface of the spadix and they are numerous. Each perfect flower has a green ovoid pistil that is surrounded at its base by 6-9 white stamens”. Flies are its principal pollinators. After flowering ends, the spathe and spadix both turn green. As fruit develops, it turns bright-red.
I actually made a little video of my foray into the wet areas and you can hear the mosquitoes in the blue violet segment, as well as the lovely Muskoka birds. It ends with the chokecherries (Prunus virginiana) further up the dirt road.
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The chokecherries had just been in bud two weeks earlier, but were now in full flower….
….. and hosting native bees as well as this little beetle.
In the woods, beaked hazel (Corylus cornuta) had leafed out.
Eastern columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) grew here and there on shallow soil atop rock outcrops.
I saw exactly one rock harlequin (Capnoides sempervirens) but it was difficult to capture with my cellphone so I’ve added a camera closeup from a previous spring behind our own cottage.
And of course loads of wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana).
The forest floor under this sugar maple seedling (Acer saccharum) was thickly carpeted with the leaves of countless species still awaiting their time to shine – or perhaps never rising at all, but merely part of the great fabric of nature here.
There were also seedling oaks, both red oak (Quercus rubra) and white oak (Quercus alba). The latter, in this neck of the woods, never seems to get bigger than a small scrubby tree.
Those oak photos were the last ones I made for 30 minutes because I got turned around and lost in the woods. It was only for a half-hour, but it felt like hours. I climbed over and under downed trees and came to hemlock stands and fairly high cliffs, beyond which lay… more forest. Since it was mid-afternoon, I followed the sun, thinking I needed to go south – but I was in fact walking more west than south. Nothing looked familiar – I was really lost, and getting thirsty in the heat! Feeling a growing sense of panic, I called my husband Doug back at the cottage. “You need to veer left as you’re looking at the sun to find the dirt road,” he said. Within 10 minutes I started to recognize some of the plants I’d seen earlier and then I heard the voices of children and saw the roof of a truck heading down the dirt road. Whew! Next time I won’t wander without taking water and leaving a trail of cookie crumbs! (Note to self: also get compass and GPS apps on phone.) The arrows below with our cottage marked in red approximate my wanderings.
When I got back to the dirt road, I found the first instar of the gypsy moth caterpillars that will ravage our Muskoka oak and pine trees this summer. Very tiny, it was crawling up the leaf of striped maple or moose maple (Acer pensylvancum) which was also sporting its pendant green flowers. Some of my readers will recall my 2020 blog A Gypsy Moth Summer on Lake Muskoka in which I described how I used a homemade oil spray to kill the egg masses.
Heading back to the cottage, I found maple-leaf viburnum (V. acerifolium) in bud…..
….. and a few trilliums that had not yet withered in the unseasonal May heat. And I had learned a few valuable lessons about going into the Muskoka bush alone!
What a beautiful weekend I enjoyed recently. Not only was it Mother’s Day and I had my first-born, ‘two-days-before-Mother’s Day’ son nearby, but we enjoyed a walk up the dirt road behind neighbouring cottages on Lake Muskoka near Torrance, a few hours north of Toronto, and found a treasure trove of native spring wildflowers on both the lake side and the crown land side. The photo below is of the road from another May. This year, the sustained, cool weather meant leaves were just breaking on the trees and best of all the blackflies had not yet emerged!
Ecologically, the address of the dirt road near Bala marked with the red arrow, below, is (broadest to narrowest classification) Ontario Shield Ecozone, Georgian Bay Ecoregion 5E, Huntsville Ecodistrict 5E8. According to the provincial classification: “The Huntsville Ecodistrict is an undulating to rolling landscape underlain by Precambrian bedrock. The terrain, particularly in the west, has been heavily influenced by glacial Lake Algonquin that inundated the area about 11,000 years ago. As the land emerged from underneath the ice, morainal material was deposited. The area was then submerged under the glacial lake, which removed or reworked much of the material through wave action and fluctuating lake levels. The western portion of the ecodistrict is characterized by a mosaic of bedrock ridges with a discontinuous, shallow layer of morainal material, bare bedrock, and pockets of deeper glaciolacustrine sediment.” Most of our district is covered by deciduous and mixed forest, including northern red oak, red maple (sugar maples predominate in the east part of the ecodistrict), yellow birch, paper birch, American beech, basswood, eastern hophornbeam, eastern hemlock and eastern white pine.
Though we’ve had our cottage for two decades, it was precisely the right moment to enjoy a bounty of spring wildflowers I’d never seen flowering all together, most of them dependent on the dappled light under deciduous trees before the leaves emerge to cast heavier shade. Plants like round-lobed hepatica, Anemone americana, both the white and purple forms.
Many gardeners think they need to do a clean-up in autumn or spring, removing every leaf to expose bare soil; indeed, I heard a leaf-blower droning away on a cottage property nearby. But nature is under no such misapprehension; the spring understory here on Lake Muskoka is thick with successive years of red oak and beech leaves, all contributing to the health of the soil and the richness of the forest. Hepatica has no trouble emerging through them, pushing fresh new leaves and fuzzy flower stems up through last year’s bronzed foliage which then withers away.
Like many plants, DNA sequencing has resulted in hepaticas undergoing a scientific name change. They’re now placed in the Anemone genus.
Carolina springbeauty (Claytonia caroliniana) was showing its mauve-striped face here and there too, the flowers so tiny they’re easy to overlook. It grows from a corm and is one of our spring ephemerals, plants that disappear and become dormant by summer.
I was struck by the proximity of the spring beauty and the decomposing stump bedecked by turkey tail fungus (Trametes versicolor)…..
….and another fungi-rich stump flanked by masses of red maple seedlings (Acer rubrum). The coming and the going, the cycle of decomposition and renewal in this mixed forest.
Birches (Betula spp.) are not long-lived compared to other deciduous trees, usually around 50-70 years in our northern climate. Sometimes decomposition begins when they’re still standing, like this trunk with tinder fungus (Fomes fomentarius) all the way up. It’s called tinder fungus because it can be used to make a fire; in fact the Tyrolean Ice Man Ötzi, whose 5000-year-old corpse was revealed by melting glaciers near Bolzano, Italy in 1991, had a piece on a cord around his neck.
When birches fall, it takes little time before moss spores find them and begin to spread their green tentacles. Before long, the birch becomes part of the forest floor.
Though rare, a lightning strike can also kill a birch. This one would have made a loud crack in one of our summer thunderstorms.
I found this juxtaposition poignant: a young American beech sapling (Fagus grandifolia) growing against the decaying trunk of a beech killed by beech-bark disease, a terrible insect-fungus plague taking a toll on our central Ontario forests, especially those where beeches grow with hemlocks. The vector is a beech-scale insect (Cryptococcus fagisuga) which, like many killers of our native species (e.g. Dutch elm disease) is an invasive from Europe. It admits a canker fungus called Neonectria faginata.
Groundcedar or fan club-moss, Diphastriastum digitatum is a lycopod, a throwback to the Carboniferous era (360-300 million years ago) when spore-forming plants like these formed forests of giant trees. Their decomposition and burial over millions of years gave the world its coal deposits.
In low-lying areas, we found another spring ephemeral: dogtooth violet or trout lily Erythronium americanum which is not a violet but is a member of the lily family, Liliaceae. The “trout” part is because the mottled leaves resemble brook trout.
Although it looks like the flower has six yellow petals, in fact the reverse view shows the three brownish sepals.
The ecology of dogtooth violet is fascinating. In some parts of these woods, it made up almost the entire ground layer, but only a few plants bore flowers, the rest just had leaves. In fact, Erythronium americanum takes 4-7 years to flower, and researchers have calculated that in any given population only 0.5% will bear flowers.
There’s a little wetland along the road that drains the forest from the west. It’s where spring peepers sing in April and mosquitoes gather when the weather warms.
I went down onto the boggy mosses to get closer to the hummocks of cinnamon fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) which had just emerged….
….. with their croziers wrapped in gauzy hairs. Cinnamon and royal fern (Osmunda regalis) are the principal wetland ferns here.
In springtime and after heavy summer rains, ground water moves through this wetland, passes under the dirt road in a culvert and wends its way as a creek through our friends’ property before splashing down into Lake Muskoka as a small waterfall. I made the video below to show it.
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We found coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) in flower at the edge of the road.
Native to Europe, Asia and North Africa, coltsfoot was used as a medicinal by early settlers – its name comes from the Latin “tussis” for cough and “ago”, meaning to act upon – and seed has made its way to throughout the region.
Ferns unfurled their croziers from the moss in the low spots.
We noticed that several of the hemlocks and pines along the road had an orange-red flush to their bark, but only on the side exposed to the light. Some research revealed that this is a fairly recent condition called Red Bark Phenomenon or RBP, having been discovered and named about 10 years ago in New England. It is caused by a filamentous green algae (Chlorophyta) tentatively identified as Trentophilia whose cytoplasm contains an orange-red pigment.
Patrick leaned into a little thicket of chokecherry (Prunus virginiana)….
….. not quite in flower. He detected a minty-basil fragrance, though the twigs are occasionally described as having an ‘almond’ aroma.
It was at this point that we left the road and walked towards a rocky outcrop about 30 feet away. Maintaining the overhead hydro line here requires tree and brush cutting that provides a little more light than normal……
……and this area was rich with loads of spring ephemeral Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria)….
…. and the occasional common blue violet (Viola sororia).
I loved this exposed bit of rock, typical of the metamorphic banded gneiss on this part of the Canadian Shield, a remnant of the Grenville Orogeny and more than a billion years old. (If you want a lot more amateur geology, have a peek at my recent blog memoir, ‘My Jaded Past, My Rocky Present’).
I spotted an unfamiliar shrub on the lake side of the road and wandered in to check it out. It was American fly honeysuckle (Lonicera canadensis) with its paired, pendant, pale-yellow flowers.
The shrubs grew on top of the outcrop nearby – not showy, but an integral part of the ecosystem.
Finally, as we got close to the back of the East Bay Landing property, there were trilliums (T. grandiflorum). Not the vast colonies we would see on rises along Highway 38 and 400 later, just a few here and there with lots more getting set to bloom.
It was the perfect way to end our walk into the May woods on Lake Muskoka.
