The trees on our ridge-top are just starting to make their leaves so the hillsides still look bare. The spring-fed streams look more alive with the skunk cabbage developing their huge green leaves.
The skunk cabbage has already bloomed for the year and is one of the only noticeable green things out here. No doubt this creek was much higher after the deluge of rain the other day.
A sunfish scooted away as we approached the edge of a pool in this little stream.
Skunk cabbage growing next to a spring-fed stream that trickles through the hollow between hills of the mountain ridge. Photo taken 21 April 2011.A downstream look at the babbling brook. Photo taken 21 April 2011.Skunk cabbage leaves are already bigger than a dinner plate and they'll get bigger yet. Note how the leaves start out curled up like a cigar. Photo taken 21 April 2011.
In this lowland area there were ferns beginning to roll out their fronds and other small plants growing green. Brambles and garlic mustard are some of the first plants to really get growing at this time of year.
Skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, is surprisingly edible. Crushing a leaf releases a skunky odor, so you wouldn’t think to eat this stuff. Eating a raw leaf will cause intense burning in the mouth because of the presence of calcium oxalate crystals. Drying the leaves or rootstock thoroughly will remove this property. Dried leaves can be reconstituted for use in soups or stews or used as a cooked green. According to Peterson’s Edible Wild Plants Guide, the rootstock can be dried and pounded to make a flour that is somewhat cocoa-like.
Walking past bare fields to get to the woodland trail, we couldn’t help but notice all the weeds growing in the place of corn or soybeans. On this walk we saw chickweed, purple dead nettle, speedwell and henbit among the ground covers flowering in the sunshine of the day. As you drive down the highway and see barren fields, the ones with a haze of purple on the ground are home to purple dead nettle.
Most of the green ground cover growing in this old corn field is chickweed. Photo taken 21 April 2011.Chickweed grows low to the ground, a.k.a. groundcover. Photo taken 14 April 2011.
Chickweed flowers have five narrow, white petals with a unique feature. Each petal is cleft or split down the middle. The Common Chickweed, Stellaria media, that is photographed here, appears to have ten petals because the cleft is so deep.
Common Chickweed flowers with five cleft white petals. Photo taken 14 April 2011.
There are over a dozen kinds of chickweed and they’re all edible. Gather up the tender stems and flowers for a salad or just add a few sprigs to a lettuce salad. Lettuce has been growing for about a month now out in the garden, so it’s time to enjoy it. Some chickweeds have fuzzy leaves and they’re better eaten after cooking. Boil the leaves for five minutes and serve as greens.
The fields around here will be planted just as soon as the tractors can get past all the rain and mud. According to the forecast it doesn’t look like much planting will done this week.
The Hummel Nature Trail in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania is a wide, gravel-covered trail that follows the Swatara Creek for a short distance. The footing seems easy enough for anyone and the distance to the trail is a short one from the parking lot next to a baseball diamond. The trail is very popular as a dog walk and nature trail.
The low lands next to the creek are home of an awesome display of Virginia Bluebells, Mertensia virginica, in mid to late April. Photos taken 18 April 2011.
Bluebells in a mudflat next to the creek.Bluebell flower buds will turn light pink as they open and then turn to blue.Bluebells showing flowers getting ready to open.
Spring beauties, Claytonia virginica, can be seen in many places along the trail. Spring-beauty has small, five-petaled white flowers that rise up only a few inches off the ground. The plant is a trailing one with long, wide, grass-like leaves. Several flowers bloom in succession on one plant.
Spring beauty flowers as it creeps along the forest floor.Spring beauty blooms are more delicate in appearance than their thick, linear leaves.
Take a walk along a creek near you or find a trail in a nearby park. Leave us a comment if you find Virginia Bluebells or Spring Beauty.
One of my favorite spring ephemeral flowers makes an appearance in woodlands of the Eastern United States during April. Hepatica americana, or just hepatica, is a perennial spring-flowering plant.
Hepatica is a Spring Ephemeral because the plant grows, flowers and completes its life-cycle before the tree canopy is filled in with leaves. Once that happens the amount of sunlight reaching the forest floor is nil. Most plants won’t be able to receive enough sunlight in the woods, but the Spring Ephemerals start out early enough to prosper.
White flowers of Hepatica americana open in the sunshine.
Check out some other hepatica pictures in the video below:
Hepatica is a delicate woodland flower with white, pink or lavender flowers that open in the sunshine. The purple to maroon flower stalks have long, soft hairs. Petals appear long with rounded tips. Stamens are cream-colored and of different lengths.
Hepatica leaves are larger than the flowers and usually have three rounded lobes, reminiscent of Mickey Mouse Ears. The leaves tend to lay flat on the ground, often hiding among the leaf litter.
The other day I was outside to do a little yard clean up. I borrowed a tarp that was covering some firewood for moving raked leaves to the compost pile. A tarp makes this job very easy. Just lay the tarp near the area to be raked, rake the leaves on top of the tarp, grab a couple of corners and drag the tarp to the compost heap and dump it. A large enough tarp will hold a lot more leaves than a garbage can or bucket.
When I was finished using the tarp I returned it to cover the stacked firewood. A few pieces of wood were laid on top to keep the tarp from blowing away. It was then that I noticed something floating on small pools of water on top of some black plastic. Contractor garbage bags and black plastic sheeting had been used to cover other stacks of wood. In a few spots the plastic sheeting had been crinkled or curled in a way that allowed rainwater to pool.
At first I didn’t like seeing the water as it could be a mosquito breeding ground. But other insects breed in water, too. Here, the something that was floating on the water were thousands of Springtails or Collembola. Springtails were once classified as insects, but they now are considered to be in their own group, Class Entognatha.
Springtails are sometimes called water fleas because of their fantastic jumping ability. They are small and light enough to run around on top of the water and not break the surface tension. Photos taken 14 April 2011.
Roundish flotillas of springtails.The inch-long maple flower gives a good size comparison. The Springtails are less than a millimeter long!Floating springtails.
Other places that you can see springtails include planted fish tanks and snow banks.
The tiny insects probably hitch a ride on vegetation and get transported from fish tank to fish tank. There’s no telling where the springtails in my fish tanks originally came from, but at least a few of them have been evading the fish for years now. I found a cup and scooped some of the springtails from the puddle and poured them into a tank to treat the fish to something different.
Seeing any insect on top of a snow bank seems odd because most of them are dormant during winter. Snow fleas, as they are called, can sometimes be seen as jumping black specks on top of newly fallen snow. During winter in New York State they would appear out of thin air and then disappear just as quickly. I have no idea what they were doing on the snow or where they went when they disappeared. These were black springtails and they were about twice as big as the brown springtails of the wood pile.
Take an aquatic entomology class and you can learn all about the insects and related arthropods that inhabit our watery world. In lieu of that, keep your eyes open when you’re outside. You’ll never know what you’ll find!
Coltsfolt was in full bloom in the sun yesterday, yet hardly noticeable the previous few cloudy days. The first I saw it blooming this year was on 15 April.
Spring continues to bring out the posies. In the flower beds the crocus blooms are dying back and the anemones and hyacinths are taking their turns blooming. Tulips are still making leaves and starting to push up their flowers. Forsythia buds grew out last week to first blossom on 14 April.
Red-spotted newts were seen floating around in the pond, too!
Another plant showing the elevation effect on bloom time is a Star Magnolia on our ridge. It had half-opened three or four blossoms on 15 April, while another one down in the valley was in full bloom on the same day.
Now that we’re almost a third of the way into Spring, the dandelions are out. This past weekend the first dandelion flower was picked. Once the dandelions show their happy faces, it’s notable for kicking off the lawn care season. Some people can’t stand to see the bright yellow flowers “messing up” their yards. We don’t mind them and prefer to leave things in more of a natural state.
Grass is starting to get long enough to cut in some areas and the downed wood from winter and windy spring weather has to be picked up. Gardening activities can resume when the weather allows, but the early spring salads have already been enjoyed. Including dandelion!
Ham and dandelion dinners are common around these parts in the week or two just before Easter. The idea is to pick the leaves before the blossoms emerge because then they are too bitter to enjoy. A fellow who was involved with making ham-n-dandelion dinner for 300 people admitted that his group buys the dandelion commercially. I’m sure there are a lot of country people and Amish that pick their own dandelion leaves.
Dandelion salad is a leafy salad with a hot dressing. Hot bacon dressing gives a nice flavor and wilts the greens just enough to soften them a little…a real Spring time treat.
April weather can be very exciting. On the first of April it snowed on our mountain ridge, to be followed in two weeks time by record high temperatures!
Sometimes the plants don’t know what to do and put off growing or blooming until the conditions are better. My photos from last Spring show that we’re about a week to 10 days behind last year’s blooming times. Those that flower first in April are likely to be dusted with snow or harmed by a frost. Spring bulbs don’t seem to mind though.
Crocus flowers covered by snow in April.
Cold hardy crocuses can take the cold and the snow. These flowers were in bloom another week after this photo was snapped. Photo taken 1 April 2011.
In the woods I think the hepatica has been waiting for a little sun to open its flowers. The past week was rather cloudy and wet, until Thursday when the temperature rose up to record highs in central Pennsylvania. Harrisburg hit 84 degrees. People were outside everywhere!
Hepatica blossoms blooming in the sunshine.
The nice weather has really brought in the feeling of Spring, where you want to be outside and feel the breeze on your face and the warm sun on your skin. Enjoy it and look around – you never know what you’ll find!
In central Pennsylvania the elevation of the Appalachian Mountains delays the blooming times of many plants. Traveling around the Ridge and Valley Province you can see the mountain ridges look bare as the trees haven’t leafed out yet. They still have the brown and grey barren appearance of Winter. As the temperatures warm and the days get longer the trees will burst forth with their greenery.
We're located in the Ridge and Valley Province of the Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania.
The trees are not yet leafing out on our ridge top, nor are they leafing out down in town near the Juniata River, which is more than three hundred feet lower in elevation. Soon, we’ll be able to see the trees in the valley leaf out and the trees on the mountain ridges will still be holding onto their winter buds. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be able to see the progression of the trees awakening as their green colors rise up the mountains.
A short distance in longitude can make all the difference in the kinds of plants that are blooming in late March and early April. We took a weekend drive of a couple hundred miles and saw that we’re a bit behind in blooming compared to places south of us.
About 40 miles south we saw the redness of maple leaves developing but otherwise the landscape still appeared barren. Driving further south we saw forsythia in bloom as we crossed the state line into Maryland. In this region the daffodils or narcissus were already blooming.
By the time we got down to central Virginia, in the Piedmont Region, many of the spring-flowering ornamental and fruit trees were in bloom, including crabapples, pears and cherries. The redbuds along Route 64 were blooming, too. The first bloomers were already dropping petals and developing their leaves.
In flower beds the bulbs were showing their pretty colors along with moss phlox. A lone azalea bush was spotted in bloom, too. Henbit, dandelions, violets and purple dead nettle were some of the yard weeds blooming in the south, but not yet in the north.
There are no specific rules regarding the blooming times of plants. Each individual plant has several factors affecting its flowering time, including elevation, longitude, microhabitat, soil fertility, local weather and individual variation.
Microhabitat refers to the location of the plant and its surrounding cohorts. A plant in a shady or drier location may bloom later than a similar plant nearby that receives more sun or water. The soil fertility may dictate whether the plant blooms at all. Early Spring can be tumultuous with respect to weather, so if a cold front rolls in with a late snow the blooming of many plants may be delayed. Finally, each individual plant has a genetic makeup that dictates when it will bloom.
