May 10, 2022

Our Yard – May 2022

May 10, 2022/ Gwen Morrison

Damp weather has been my excuse for not doing yard work…but I finally did a walk around and an hour of work a few days ago. The holly at the corner of the house was hiding the weeds behind it. They are gone now. The front flower bed had quite a few little trees: red maples and tulip poplars; they’ve been pulled.

I appreciated the oak near out mailbox. The tree has been declining but it looks like the spring rains have helped it come alive for another year. The Virginia creeper on its trunk has leafed out as well.

The azalea that drapes itself over a side of the front porch is blooming. I’m going to trim the bush beside it to give it more room….or maybe that will make it easier for the deer to nibble the tender azalea stems.

The nine bark bush is blooming. I will trim it after the blooms are done.

A branch broke in one of the bushes…I cut it out and the bush looks lush and green. There were also some vines growing up through the bushes…which I removed.

My goal in the chaos garden was to cut down everything except for the spice bush and, of course, the sycamore. I started but didn’t make much progress during my hour. I discovered some irises getting ready to bloom – which I won’t cut down!

Overall – I had a wheelbarrow of vegetation that I cut or pulled that was added to the brush pile at the edge of the forest. On the way I noticed that the violets are beginning to bloom. I dodged the ferns coming up under the deck as I returned the wheelbarrow to its place; there seem to be more ferns every year.

April 18, 2021

Mini Road Trip: Mt Pleasant – April 2021 (1)

April 18, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

Before one of my volunteer shifts at Howard County Conservancy’s Mt Pleasant, I hiked a little. It had changed a little since March. The spring beauties were in bloom along the trail.

A tree had fallen over the trail. It was so rotten that the upper part had broken apart. It was relatively easy to step over.

I took some zoomed pictures of the loose bark and knots with moss growing around them on the part of the trunk that crossed the trail..

A little further down, a male woodpecker was working a shallow hole. It was so focused that it didn’t notice me walking by.

The furthest point on the loop hike was the patch of skunk cabbage I’ve been monitoring the past couple of months. The leaves are unfurling now although sometimes the purplish reproductive parts are still visible in the much at the base of the leaves.

In the picture below, there is maturing a maturing seed pod in the lower part of the picture…the next stage of the ‘golf ball’ structure inside the decaying spathe.

The spice bush is blooming in the same area.

Tomorrow I’ll write about the second part of the hike.

April 21, 2020

Filling a Day of Social Distance – 4/20/2020 – Walk in the Forest

April 21, 2020/ Gwen Morrison

Continuing the blog post series prompted by COVID-19….

The unique activity for yesterday was a very pleasant walk in the forest behind our house all the way down to the river (a winding path of at least 1/3 mile down…and then back up the same way.

We entered the forest at the back of our yard on a path made by deer between a black walnut – just beginning to leaf out - and a large tuple poplar. There were many violets on both sides of the narrow path. I had tucked my pants into my socks to make a barrier to ticks.

The forest floor seemed to be covered with garlic mustard (invasive) with a few spring beauties where it wasn’t so dense. A large tree had fallen recently with dirt still clinging to the roots. The red maple in our yard keeps me from seeing the area from my office window.

There were several dogwoods just beginning to bloom.

2020 04 IMG_9067 (7).jpg — We joined a trail used by horses from a nearby stable…wider than the deer trail. Spice bush is the most prevalent understory tree.

Flowers were blooming, there were sounds of moving water, and a few bugs were around too. We heard two different woodpecker sounds.

There were several different kinds of ferns. I always like to photograph fiddleheads!

And then the small stream we had been following joined the river. It was quite different from the last time we had been there more than a decade ago. Two trees had fallen recently (one still had green leaves on it). The trunks spanned the river. The trees had made what had been a riverside path into a cliff. There were some alternative places down to the water level but not in the immediate vicinity. We took a few pictures of flowers and headed back up the hill.

Along the way, I noticed that there was a stand of hemlock that appeared to be healthy – no wooly adelgid. The hemlocks that we had been able to see from our house when we first moved to the area 25 years ago died years ago.

I also stopped for every jack-in-the-pulpit I noticed on the hike uphill. There didn’t seem to be as many of them as there should be. Probably the overgrowth of invasives like garlic mustard makes it harder for them to propagate.

We got back to our yard and I took a picture of the samaras on our red maple…closer to being ripe.

I saw what I thought was a spider web in the grass but when I took a closer look, I realized it was dandelion seeds! My husband probably mowed it yesterday….dispersing the seeds.

I’m glad we took advantage of the great weather since rainy days are forecast….but we’ll take more hikes into the forest as the weather warms. I’ll use insect repellent next time since there were a few flying/biting insects even at the relatively pleasant 60 degrees. It’s great to have a forest to hike into from our own back yard!

Links to my previous “filling a day of social distance” posts here.