Hell’s Hollow, PM

I couldn’t believe how many were flowering. I’ve never seen so many blooming in one location. All the more impressive considering they can take seven to ten years before producing a flower. A gift to witness.

#SpringEphemerals #Trillium

Sawmill Creek, PM

Rainy but warm all day. I spent the first part of the week in North Carolina and it felt good to be back in my own time and place. Traveling south 500 miles moved the wheel of the seasons forward two moons and turned the calendar back over 15 years at the same time. We left a few hours before sunrise and the world didn’t start to lighten until we were well into West Virginia. The majority of the hardwood trees were just starting to leaf out, bright green highlights on the mountains. Most striking were the smaller redbud trees lining the highway. I hadn’t driven this route since I lived in West Virginia in 2008-09 but I remember the redbuds and the ramps and the spring ephemerals, the wet snow that fell in huge flakes but never lasted longer than a day or two, the cold snap that nearly froze the Cherry River, the way the mountains hid the sun even in the summer and made me claustrophobic—I commented once to a local that I needed to see the horizon, to find a place where I could stretch without feeling I was being confined, to let myself expand into the ether. They said living in the mountains felt safe to them, like they were being held.

Once we passed through Virginia and into North Carolina summer welcomed us with open arms. Or at least summer as I know it. There is an inherent connection between the temporal and the spatial. Other than physicists discussing general relativity I’ve only ever seen this acknowledged in the writing of indigenous authors (Thoreau notwithstanding). I tried to explain to my friends in North Carolina why I’ve been somewhat obsessed with phenology lately, trying to be as attentive as I can be to the subtle changes in my environment, watching for the first flowers to bloom, tracking skunk cabbages and wildflowers. But this, from Rowen White’s substack, does a much better job than I did:

Phenology is the time-honored art of listening to the Earth's song through the turning of seasons. It is our ancestors' calendar—not marked by paper dates, but by the unfurling of buds, the return of songbirds, and the dance of frost across morning meadows.

When we attune ourselves to phenology, we enter into intimate conversation with the land, noting when the first maple trees weep their sweet sap, when the monarchs begin their great journey home, when the fireflies first illuminate summer evenings with their silent language of light. These are not random events, but a carefully orchestrated symphony that has kept time for millennia.

Our grandmothers and grandfathers knew that planting time wasn't determined by a date on a calendar, but by when the oak leaves were the size of a squirrel's ear, or when the peepers began their twilight chorus from the wetlands. This knowledge—this way of marking time through relationship—carries the wisdom of countless generations who understood that our survival depends on our ability to dance in rhythm with the Earth's own heartbeat.

In these times of climate chaos, phenology calls us back to the practice of patient observation, of noticing the subtle shifts in timing—the early blooming, the delayed migrations—that tell us stories about our changing world. By rekindling these relationships with the seasonal beings around us, we remember our place in the mycelial web of life and our responsibility to future generations who will read these same signs long after we have returned to soil.

Rowen White

This is of course why, in part, I love Thoreau, who spent the last decade of his life devoted to knowing his place and its timings and patterns. I always come back to this journal entry from December 4th, 1856:

I remember gazing with interest at the swamps about those days and wondering if I could ever attain to such familiarity with plants that I should know the species of every twig and leaf in them, that I should be acquainted with every plant (excepting grasses and cryptogamous ones), summer and winter, that I saw…

Still, I never studied botany and do not to day systematically, the most natural system is still so artificial. I wanted to know my neighbors, if possible,—to get a little nearer to them. I soon found myself observing when plants first blossomed and leafed, and I followed it up early and late, far and near, several years in succession, running to different sides of the town and into the neighboring towns, often between twenty and thirty miles a day. I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened, beside attending to a great many others in different directions and some of them equally distant, at the same time.

Back in my own place and time I went looking for my ephemeral neighbors, the ones who only bloom near the end of April just before the leaves on the forest trees emerge completely—their time and place are so intimately connected. This is spring’s last and glorious fullness. The death of these blossoms covers the threshold to summer.

#SpringEphemerals #Phenology