Nature is Never Spent

At the farm this weekend, I went out in the early morning and smelled sweetness on the air. It was the black locust trees in bloom, caught in a breeze. I went out in the afternoon in the sunny driveway and immediately could feel a thrumming above my head. A busy drone. When I looked up, bumblebees. So many, so busy and happy.



( Bumblebee bum )

It's been less of a Southern spring this year: cooler, less humid, fewer early season storms. Blue, blue skies with ragged white clouds, the trees still mostly looking bare, though if you inspect them closely you can see that tiny buds are swelling.

Apr 20: ( Blossoms above my head )

April 21: Around this time, most of the fields are yellow with buttercups.

Not that I'm wishing for summer, but it's getting to that time of year when walking in the woods can be a little too hot and sunny, and there are no leaves for shade yet. But on today's hike, for the first time I saw a few smatters of green up in the branches.

Also! Pine sap from one of the trees that fell in the December storm; maple seeds; fern fronds unfurling; and birdsfoot violets.

Last week, a friend brought me an oak leaf and wondered if I could identify the unusual, furry ball attached to it. I suspected it was an oak gall, but the kind I'm most familiar with are the smooth, tan-colored ones with red spots. Those are hollow in the middle with membranes of fuzzy material connecting the center to the outer shell. I've always assumed they're caused by some fungus or microbe.



Just a little research told me this fuzzy one was a woolly oak leaf gall. But what I also learned surprised me more: these galls and many other types, are caused by an insect! A tiny Cynipid wasp deposits her egg (oviposits) in the leaf, then the egg secretes growth hormones that cause the tree to create a chamber around the egg, a safe place for the wasp larva to develop. The gall itself is parasitic, but it doesn't harm the tree very much. Here's a great description of the Cynipids' life cycle, and there's a nice gallery of the wasps, galls, and larvae here. So fascinating. I love insects!

In less bizarre leaf news, the maple seedling I adopted and allowed to grow in one of my balcony pots several years ago is as tall as me now, and the leaves are changing rather dramatically this year.

It's nice returning to places at different times of the year. You might think it would be boring, say, hiking the same trail several times, but there are always new things to notice. Today I returned to a trail I discovered in April.

It's an urban hiking trail, but except for one end of the park where you can hear traffic on a busy road, you'd think you were in the middle of wilderness. It's just a narrow path through the forest, winding down a ridge, crossing a stream several times and running along a small gorge. Quiet, birds calling, lots of wild plant diversity, evidence of wildlife. Most prominently, today I heard chipmunks giving warning calls as I passed, several places along the trail. If I didn't know better I'd say they had some sort of Midnight Bark network! I also saw a couple of big, gorgeous millipedes, one dead and one decidedly alive--when it realized it had been discovered, it started flipping and twisting itself up into a curl. I see lots of centipedes, but millipedes, not so often, and they're always larger than I remember.

The biggest difference on the trail, last month to this month, is that the creek is almost dry now. It was flowing along happily in early April, but now it's not flowing at all in most places. There's really only water left in the deepest pools. I don't know if it's always seasonal, or if last year's drought and this month's relative lack of rain is affecting it. This spring hasn't been nearly as wet as last, when we had an unusual number of tornadoes and floods.


Millipede | Raccoon jawbones in a creek bed


Dogwood bent by a fallen tree

Last summer during the drought, one of the first trees to react was the dogwoods. Their leaves shriveled up and turned ashy brown, and the dead leaves never fell in the autumn, just stayed on the dead branches through the winter and into the spring. We figured there was a 50/50 chance the trees would survive. Apparently one of the commonest question to the local forestry expert got last year was "Is my tree dead?" The answer was "Wait til next spring to see."

Here's what we learned this spring:



:)

I pruned fruit trees yesterday. I had been waiting until we got a good cold snap, hoping to catch them when the sap wasn't running. But I'm not sure a cold snap is a reasonable hope at this point. The sap may never have really stopped. A couple of the trees have the beginnings of blossoms on the branches already, tiny round buds. I felt I'd better go ahead since the timing will only get worse.

Pruning trees isn't hard really, if you have reasonable strength and mobility. It's more of a mental exercise. I never really understood the point of bonsai until I taught myself to prune fruit trees. It takes a little knowledge -- which types of branches are desirable, which aren't, what overall shape you're aiming for with each type of tree. You can have those general ideas in your mind, but when you're standing in front of an actual tree with shears in your hands, what you have is a series of dozens of individual decisions, each a little different from the one before. Every tree is different, every branch is different. Every time is a little risk. Is this a good decision? Will it ultimately help the fruit or hurt the tree? Every time you snip those shears, you're making a commitment. There's no going back.

So it's an exercise that takes concentration, and concentration takes calm. Or makes calm, I'm not sure which. You don't even know your results right away; you have to wait months, and the larger process is a work of years. It takes patience. I can see how pruning could become a kind of spiritual ritual.

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Springwatch: the frogs sang all day Saturday, and today I saw feral daffodils blooming all along the road back to the city.

However the trees and other creatures were affected by this year's drought, the oaks in the city have managed to produce a bumper crop of acorns. Some places, it's hard to walk without becoming a cartoon-style slipping-on-marbles casualty.



Every spring, I see crowds of adorable little oaks coming up beneath the white oak trees across the road from my apartment, and I think about trying to dig up a couple and raise them. But it never works out. So this fall, I thought I'd start from the beginning, with the acorns. I chose a few of the large, solid-feeling warm brown nuts and carried them home in my pocket. I put them on a table until I could decide what to do with them for the winter. Put them under some leaves in a pot of dirt, I figured. But a day or so later, my dog started barking at what turned out to be a tiny, white worm on the carpet. It looked like a beetle larva, but I didn't find out for sure until the next day when I discovered some suspicious holes bored in a few of the acorns...



...and two more escapees crawling away from them. One of the larvae actually turned around again, inched its way back to its nut, and started burrowing against it like it could roll its old home away to safety. I'm impressed with the ability of such a tiny, soft-looking thing to bore through a hard nut shell! And amazed that the mother hid her entry so well; I hadn't seen any indication that the acorn wasn't entirely whole before the larva came out. I deposited them all outside where they belong, but I'm still going to try with the remaining acorns. I've now learned that I should have done a "float test" right after bringing the acorns home, and discarded the ones that didn't sink in the water.

Speaking of insects, I'm sitting outside right now watching a few. We're in our autumn weather cycle: a few crisp days then several more warm, muggy ones. We've had two frosts, but nothing hard enough to really kill plants or send bugs hiding for good. This morning, there's a ladybug crawling on the balcony rail and a large, beautiful red wasp floating from the roof line to the nearest sweet gum tree and back. Wasps love warm autumn days. To be more accurate, they're probably hungry and they need to find sugar. There's not much nectar around anymore and they're going to die soon. (Only the next year's fertilized queen survives the winter.) I'm not sure if this is true of Polistes perplexus, the larger of the red wasps, but some adult paper wasps eat a nectar secreted by the larvae after the adults feed the larvae masticated animal protein. It's a nice arrangement, until there are no more larvae left in the nest.

Crepe myrtles are in full bloom now. The only color I haven't seen is fuschia. Some of the white blooming trees are really covered, prettier than usual, it seems to me.