THE FLAT STRETCH OF TEMPLE STREAM BETWEEN THE REMNANTS of the covered bridge at Russell’s Mill Road and our place is my home water. It’s intervale land, and the stream is mostly sluggish, forms several long pools between high mud banks. The juncture of woods and stream and clearing makes good habitat for wild things: in every corner there’s a world. My neighbor the dairy farmer owns the fields down there. First haying is generally in late June—cutting, drying, baling—all of it a one-man, one-tractor operation. The huge cylindrical bales are beautiful to look at, upward of thirty per field per cutting in good years, four fields of perhaps ten acres each, carved out of the rich intervale a very long time ago, first by the stream, which tends through ice and flood to keep such land open, then by the Abenakis, then by the settlers of the Sandy River Plantation. The bales on a misty morning are mirages, fugitives from some soft-lit Monet.
Farmers and beavers have had a disagreement about this land for two centuries. Where the farmers see fields, the beavers see ponds. The farmers have long practiced something that’s now called beaver management. But the beavers practice farmer management, a subtler game. All along the banks of the intervale stream are ramps and slides and bitten stumps and whole sections of cleared woods: beaver work. Bank lodges are the preferred construction in our stretch—harder to see than the familiar mound lodge, more secure, entrance tunnels dug into the mud underwater and leading back to under-ground rooms lined with sticks and patted with mud, water-tight and weather tight except for clandestine air vents opening in among the roots and flowers of the forest floor.
On a midnight beaver expedition in the moderately high water of May 1995—placid full moon—I floated my canoe quietly downstream, paddling just enough to steer. Watching, listening, breathing quietly; I got the idea to spin the boat and sneak through the meanders ass-backward so as to show as little hull as possible until I could spy around the bend. At twelve-thirty A.M., paddling thus in reverse, I caught a raccoon washing a large egg (several of my neighbors keep chickens). At sight of me, the marauder calmly stuffed the prize in his mouth without breaking it, waddled up into the moonlit trees.
But I’d hung around enough evenings and early mornings without the dogs for at least the beavers to tolerate my presence; the days of tail-slapping insults were over. Still, I seldom got a long look. I’d devised this middle-of-the-night foray as a way to get more observation time. Even if it didn’t work, I thought, there would be the consolation of bright moonlight on water. After the last bend downstream, in the pond just above the bedrock waterfall under the Russell’s Mill bridge, I nosed the boat onto a gravel bar and sat there waiting. Not long—seconds—and a silent beaver swam by, then another. A third quietly dove and swam under the boat, surfaced quietly beyond with a brief backward look in my direction, sound of bubbles.
And in the bright moonlight, four or five or perhaps more animals (hard to differentiate individuals of the same size, therefore hard to count) went about their chores. The littlest one turned out to be two little ones, identical yearlings that I finally saw together. The biggest beaver (Wally’s size) surfaced late and sat on the next gravel bar—not too close, thirty feet—and worked on a stick, peeling the bark methodically and noisily chewing it. Not entirely trusting, but tolerant, the animal stopped after each strip had been swallowed down and sniffed in my direction. The stick must have come from the remains of the winter cache—1 hadn’t heard any popple harvesting going on. The gentle animal dropped the stick in the water when the bark was gone, then spent a luxurious twenty minutes grooming. It sat up straight, patted itself aggressively around the belly, carefully wiped at its head with its little front paws like hands, patted its belly again, wiped its neck, and so on, patting and wiping till it had attended to every inch of fur.
Almost all beavers are born in late May or June (there are rare examples of fall litters), meaning that almost all beavers are Geminis (as is Juliet, and as are some five hundred million humans besides her), which must count for something. The litter size is one to five creatures—tiny, complete beavers, already showing their buck teeth. These kits nurse for up to two months. The female of the couple is the primary caregiver, mostly stays in the lodge to nurse and warm her babies. Before one month of age, they try the water and before long have learned to swim through the tunnels and out of the lodge. On the night of my canoe trip the colony’s matriarch was most likely nursing kits back in the lodge.
The big beaver on the gravel bar—Papa? some bachelor uncle?—finished barking his stick and slipped into the water with it firmly in his teeth, headed upstream to the dam: more lumber. The yearlings swam by in tandem, up and down, back and forth, paying me no mind, disappearing underwater for minutes at a time. Then, in a particularly quiet moment, one of them startled me by leaping loony out of the water and onto the bank full speed, as if chased by a shark. The shark in the skit turned out to be his sibling, who appeared as suddenly with a hiss like laughter, leaping onto the gravel. The first character parried and leapt and bowled the second over, scurried into the water. The shark tumbled and hissed and leapt into the current after his prey, and the two of them sped at me, dove under the boat effortlessly, surfaced in the shallow water beyond, wrestled there a full minute in splashing abandon loud as a city fountain, dove suddenly and were gone, leaving moonlit ripples and plain silence.
THE TROUT LILY IS NAMED FOR ITS LEAF, A BROWN-MOTTLED, fishy shape that leaps from leaf-litter rapids in large schools throughout our woods, often through a layer of late snow. The flower—a limply epicene hand bedizened with sweet spots of red—appears later, fades quickly, dries, falls. The leaf loses its mottling as summer comes in, grows tattered, settles back into the forest floor. Later in summer, adventuring white roots show aboveground like so much strewn spaghetti as the essential plant below works to increase its domain.
I’d known the trout lily from childhood, though not by name. Inspired by Connie Nosalli’s sense of precision, I went to look it up but found that the Peterson Wildflowers my mother had given me when I was in college had gone missing. At Twice Sold Tales (an inviting forest of used books in a beautiful old storefront in downtown Farmington), Peterson was between visits. But I found a stem little handbook dated 1910: hardcover, faded lettering, nice paintings of specimens, old-fashioned handwriting in brown fountain-pen ink on the fly-leaf—This hook belongs to Muriel Winter.
Right in the store I looked up my plant, discovered its name and, further (rightly or wrongly—there’s still plenty of lively disagreement even in botany, the settled science), that it was a spring ephemeral. Spring ephemerals, the encyclopedic voice of the handbook explained, are plants that arise and bloom and fade in earliest spring, all before the leaf canopy above comes to rob light.
The trout lily led me to a closer inspection of the forest floor. I was pleased to find that nearly every odd leaf was familiar to me—not always by name, but by the simple expertise of boyhood, which was the last time I’d spent so much of each day just looking hard at everything. I’d had my own names for the little plants of the woods: “thumb things,” for example, which fuzzy leaf I still recognize wherever I see it (field or sheep sorrel, according to Muriel’s handbook—if you are a kid they are good to eat, if adult, quite sour); “frog belly” (or live-forever, a sedum—I used to put the thick leaves in my mouth to loosen the skin, then blow them up—thus the name); ’ “eyeballs” (deep-purple berries, dusty bluish leaves, not in Muriel’s book). I know more about these plants now, but keep the old names anyway. And as a boy I knew actual names, too, and the generic names of many things. My mother taught me a great deal informally on walks, and I’d been a Boy Scout, too, and been to summer camp, aced contest quizzes for prizes like lanyard kits: trillium, Indian pipe, club mosses, poison ivy, Jack-in-the-pulpit, wild violets (in yellow, white, purple, or blue), wild cucumber (those spiny fruits great for practical jokes), bluets (darling little light-facing stars, blue, white, or blue and white), coltsfoot (flower something like a dandelion, but no leaves around it, and for that reason called son-without-father in England, where it’s from, a pharmacy escapee, once used as a cough remedy).
Later in life I wanted to know more, and book learning—even with Muriel over my shoulder—was slow and often inconclusive, so: I invited an old acquaintance named Nancy Prentiss to have a look at spring plants with me. She lives in Industry, the next town north of Farmington, on a settler farm set amid lots of good forestland that backs up Norton Mountain and the True Mountain Ridge. Her husband, Mark, is a cabinetmaker who’s evolved into a log specialist—he searches out, cuts, dries, and sells only the most musical wood from Maine trees to makers of violins and guitars (few trees, even within a given species, are instrument quality, he told me: in the heyday of Maine logging, all work would stop when a melodious log came gonging down the flume, and it would be saved for the fiddle shop), also baseball bats (some of the heaviest hitters in the major leagues are using Mark’s flawless maple now: it’s hard as George Steinbrenner’s heart).
Nancy is a field botanist. She earned her master’s in marine invertebrates from the University of Maine at Orono, but her first love (and the subject of her B.A.) is botany. At seven she had a flower book like Emily Dickinson’s, in which she pressed flowers from the abandoned fields around her family’s house, each with the Latin names penned in her “little scrawny handwriting.” She’s tall and athletic, strong, walks with confidence—hard to imagine anything about her being little and scrawny. Driving, she watches the road verges. In fact, she’s full of stories of rare and remarkable plant species encountered just down an inviting path during a lull in a Little League baseball game (she and her husband have three boys, who, the first time I met them, were dressed up as beavers for Halloween) or, by way of contrast, above the tree line in alpine arctic-tundra zones with one or another dean of area botany. I knew that Nancy was besieged by friends and fans and news-papers looking for identifications of odd plants, and indeed she sounded ambivalent on the phone when I called.
But she agreed to help me. And on a Friday morning, just before the start of her popular May-term field botany class at UMF, she rearranged her schedule to come identify Temple Stream ephemerals. Ephemerals, she had explained to me, grow fast from extensive root systems, throw leaves up, make all the photosynthetic nutrients they need for root growth and sustained life in a month or so, and then disappear from the upper world entirely. The rest of the year, that long period of leaf senescence, ephemerals spend in improving the root and slowly spreading. During the short leaf-and-flower season the plants are operating in cold temperatures, diverting nutrients to the brief green growth at a high rate that requires rich soil, the kind found in healthy forests.
Nancy arrived on that cool, bright May morning and pulled her sweater over her head immediately, dropped it back in her car, tucked her turtleneck into her blue jeans, fixed her shining auburn hair, put a special little necklace magnifier around her neck, all business, and finally gave me her cocked smile. She’s got a good nose, solid chin, wore a look of harried confidence, but with something a little suspicious in her gaze (like a mom whose child is being awfully nice to her and taking an interest at last: What’s this kid really want?).
She said, ’’I’m pretty busy this week. We’ll have to be efficient!”
So I trotted to the barn for canoe paddles, and then we were off. Right behind the break in the stone wall that is the entrance to our little woods, she spotted a nodding, somewhat limp plant with pleasingly blue-green leaves standing all by it-self: “Blue cohosh,” she said. And, delicately, she showed me the unassuming flowers, which were mostly green, with a hint of yellow. “They have blue berries later,” she said, and flipped expertly through her Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide to show me dramatic blue beads that stand on upright stalks, each with its own stem, six or so in a group, delicious-looking but inedible, even mildly poisonous: the eyeballs of my youth!
“It’s not an ephemeral,” Nancy said, meaning Let’s stay focused.
We moved on, eyes to the ground, me following, absently using my canoe paddles as walking sticks. A certain pretty-leafed plant caught her attention. “Three-lobed leaflets,” she said, crouching to caress it fondly. “Tall meadow rue, which won’t flower until midsummer. Thalictrum puhescens. Bursts of white stamens, no petals. Buttercup family. Not an ephemeral.”
She pointed offhandedly to a very familiar arched stem of alternate ribbed leaves. She shook the stem for me. “Do you know this?”
Not intimately—but I recognized it.
“False Solomon’s seal. And this one is false hellebore.” Another familiar plant, large leaves on a thick stalk growing in a wet spot. “Could be called false skunk cabbage, too. People around here do call it skunk cabbage, but it’s not. Skunk cabbage simply doesn’t grow here.”
I got a superior feeling because I’m from Connecticut and I know from skunk cabbage. Nancy is from Connecticut too. She built her wry smile efficiently—she’d found someone who liked a skunk cabbage story. “And people around here know I’m looking for skunk cabbage, in order to establish its range in Maine, and they call me all the time, and sometimes I go out to look, and it is always, always, false hellebore. But there is skunk cabbage down along the coast. I’ve seen it there.”
False Solomon’s seal and false hellebore are not ephemerals—they would be around all summer, the leaves getting more and more torn and frayed and broken, but hanging on. The false Solomon’s seal flower is a tall white spray. The false hellebore flower is a greeny-yellow, star-shaped thing, and the plants get very tall, over my head in places. Why “false”?
“That just means they were once mistaken for something. There’s no judgment implied.”
The ferns aren’t ephemerals, either, but there they were, curling up from the ground, most at the fiddlehead stage. The first one we saw was a sensitive fern, which did look rather moody with its naked red stalk. Nancy pointed out the previous year’s fertile fronds, which stood up dryly, tall brown sticks with long clusters of brown beads at their tops. I knew these fronds from Juliet’s late-fall bouquets—they’d been in our blue vase all winter. To tell the truth, they looked like seventies-vintage Thai sticks, buds of serious marijuana tied to satay skewers that soldiers stuffed into their green underpants and brought back in prodigious quantities from Vietnam.
I moved toward the stream, could smell the stream, but Nancy walked only a few yards before she was squatting again. “Now, this is running dewberry,” she said. “Or dwarf raspberry,” a pretty, viny thing growing along the ground. When you stopped to look at it, it did have a sense of speed. I ventured the opinion that the flowers looked like strawberry blooms.
“Good, good,” Nancy said. “Rose family. Raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, too. Dewberries are like underweight blackberries, very seedy and sour.” She moved on, looking at everything. A vision of my mother came unbidden, my younger mom, that wavy dark hair crossing her eye, cigarette at her lips, 1959, saying the names of plants so tenderly. I basked in her warm presence, those rare chances to be with her alone: gentian, mustard, horse-balm, rose. Wild sweet william, she’d say, and that was a flower, and me.
Nancy said, “Club moss. Star moss. Nice mat of it there. These lichens are pretty. I find them interesting, but I’m waiting until I can invest some time in learning them. This is more blue cohosh. There’s that false Solomon’s seal again. Good rich soil. And, oh ... a silvery spleenwort. And this.” She kneeled, pointed out a small leaf pushing its way up through a hole in a large pad of moss. “This is Canada mayflower.”
Nancy was visiting with old friends now, visibly relaxing. Al-most dreamily: “See, it’s just a leaf at this point, but it’ll end up with two or three leaves on a stalk that will culminate in a white raceme, which is small individual flowers each attached to the main stalk by a little stem. Some people call it wild lily of the valley, and it grows like that, spreading, forming large patches if the habitat is any good. It’ll bloom by late May.”1
While she inspected the foliage, I poked around and found a hidden little white flower of my own, pointed it out tentatively.
“Good, good,” Nancy said. “Oh, that is interesting.”
I beamed.
She said, “Goldt hread. Coptis trifolia.” She squatted down and dug quickly, carefully pulled a tangle of bright yellow rhizomes and roots up out of the leaf mold without detaching them from the soil: threads of gold indeed. She said, “I taught an elder hostel once and these great older folks knew all these important things we’re forgetting. When I showed them goldthread, an elderly man—he’d been very bored—got all excited and said he remembered digging goldthread for a penny a pound for the pharmacist. These were all medicines then. Can you imagine what it would take to get a pound of this stuff?”
We passed through an old loggers’ clearing filled in with bracken, a tall fern with strong stems, very upright. I said the name, proud of myself. Nancy merely nodded. “You know English novels? When they say they’re off in the bracken? And Peter Rabbit? He was always lost in the bracken. It forms these dense colonies and gets waist-high. Good place to hide.”
We moved on, but not far. I pointed out a nice patch of bluets, white flowers the size of blouse buttons standing on lank stalks no thicker than pine needles.
“The settlers called them Quaker-ladies,” Nancy said. “Also innocence.” And the flowers did seem to nod modestly, intent on the good.
We made a brief effort at hurrying, made some progress toward the stream, but Nancy stopped again: “Oh, you know this stuff,” and bent to pluck a single leaf, which she popped in her mouth. “One of my very favorites. And good in salad.”
“Trout lily!” I said triumphantly, I hadn’t known they were edible.
The hundred or so feet to the stream was slow going—plant after plant, name by name. When we finally got there, Nancy gazed briefly at the high water. The sun reached us there and it was hot. A common yellowthroat, newly arrived, sang somewhere among the ice-flattened alders. The buds on all the trees were ripe to bursting, tinting the naked branches of the forest canopy across the way fresh green, a distinct softening of the sharp contrasts of winter. “Nice,” Nancy said. But seconds later her head was down again and she was pointing out a single leaf with the size and shape and bend of a goose-quill pen. “Clintonia borealis, named after Governor Clinton of New York.”
I had gone to college in Upstate New York, so knew something about the governor and ventured it, sounding like a schoolboy: “He was mayor of New York City for ten years at the beginning of the nineteenth century, then a U.S. senator and a failed presidential candidate, then sponsor and commissioner of the Erie Canal project, and author of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution.”
Nancy dismissed all that with a wave of her hand: “He was an amateur botanist, too.”
We ducked through the tangle of alders and red osier dog-wood, eyes on the ground. A stick poked my ear. I said, “Here is some more Canada mayflower.”
“Canada mayflower,” Nancy said, straightening. She kept her voice efficient even while the muscles of her face relaxed in fondness for the plant, said, “Exactly right.” And then she told me the next thing, the inefficient thing: ’You know, I’ll never ever forget where I was when I first saw it. Canoe trip with my family. And I had my little field guide and looked it up and there it was. I pressed it in my collection. Wrote the scientific name, Maianthemum canadense. Never forgot it.”
She straightened, pushed along the stream into thicker undergrowth yet, said, “Hobblebush.” She opened a passage through blackberry branches and alder shoots with her hands, stood intimate with the blooming shrub, pointed out the large clusters of white flowers. “Now, look at these—the big, showy flowers around the outside are just that, just for show—the real flowers are in the middle here.” They were tiny indeed. “Honeysuckle relative, a Viburnum. A shrub. There’s another Viburnum you probably have around here, northern wild raisin, it’s called—has an edible fruit the settlers collected.”
She crouched obliviously down through the scratching branches of the hobblebush to show me further treasures, the first a tiny thing with drooping leaves: “Windflower. Anemone quinquefolia. Also known as wood anemone.” Next, a slightly bigger plant, more upright: “Sessile-leaved bellwort, Uvularia sessilifolia. See how the leaves wrap the stalk? That’s what sessile means. Uvularia means bell-like, referring to the flowers. Not an ephemeral. Also known as wild oats.”
We broke out of the verdure and onto the old beaver path to the water, where my canoe waited. Aware of how much of her time I’d already taken, I suggested we cross the stream.
Nancy grinned. “So that’s what the paddles are for.”
“What’d you think?”
“Oh, I don’t know. People are so eccentric. I just thought you carried paddles around.”
New Englanders are always sure someone else is doing something stupid for show!
The stream is never terribly wide there, but had been quite high after rain. We dragged the boat down the beaver ramp through a small forest of false hellebore, big ribbed leaves on tall stalks, just the height to soak our thighs with dew. “Also called Indian poke,” Nancy said, reaching into the hawthorn brambles and parting the thorny branches without a care to re-veal nodding leaves. “More wood anemone,” she said, then pulled gently at a tangle of vines: “And here’s a wild cucumber.” That brought her face-to-face with a prickly, spiky plant still sporting last year’s red berries: “Yuck, barberry. Invasive!” She backed out, looked up, took a serrated heart-shaped leaf in hand. I might have guessed dogwood, but she didn’t give me the chance: “See this? That’s your wild raisin.”
I slid the canoe into the water, tossed the paddles in, the one life jacket, and Nancy climbed aboard. I hopped in the stem and pushed off such that the current caught the bow, and we were quickly dragged downstream. Nancy paddled expertly, draw stroke, cross-draw, brought the bow into the current, and we headed up.
“I didn’t expect a canoe ride,” Nancy said happily. “I grew up canoeing—I was the kid who would go with my father most often. We’d go white-water canoeing with some die-hard canoeists from the Appalachian Mountain Club—caught the spring runoff on some wild rivers.”
We pulled into a cow ramp. The day had grown balmy, nice breeze from the west. The banks are high there, where the stream has cut through the bottomland. We climbed up to the hayfield. “Buttercup,” Nancy said. “Yuck. An alien from Europe.” Long pause. “Well, now we’re being encouraged to call them ’naturalized.’ And I guess you can’t ignore aliens in Maine. They make up a third of the plants around here. And I’m basically an alien here, too, being from Connecticut, so I shouldn’t be so snobbish. I’m going to have to shift, not make them out to be such bad guys.”
“Coltsfoot,” I said, pointing to the familiar naked stalk and yellow flower growing in the middle of the path.
Nancy tried to hide it, but she distinctly made that face—coltsfoot an alien—a snobby grimace that went against her natural cheerful lineaments. We crossed the field on muddy tractor ruts. “Oak ferns,” Nancy said as we reached the forest edge. “These are my favorite little ferns.” They were small, like miniature bracken, delicately branched, stood erect on their dark stalks, leaves horizontal to the ground, a handsome little group.
We continued up the hill, left the tractor path halfway up, ducked into a long-uncut section of my dairying neighbor’s forest: mixed hardwoods, tall and stately, a few white pines. We crunched through the dry leaf mold, eyes cast downward. “Well-drained habitat,” Nancy said. “Depauperate, meaning: kind of barren. Let’s move.” She pointed down through the wood to the edge of the hayfield, a large boggy area, greener. As we made our way, she said, “his whole ridge was probably in cultivation up to fifty years ago or so, seventy years. So you’re not going to find unbroken speciation, undisturbed forest soils—none of that.”
The second we reached the edge of the wet area she crouched to caress a small plant with triple-lobed, egg-shaped, serrated leaves hiding amid spring-pale poison ivy, which we both ignored: “This one is toothwort, a toothache medicine, Cardamine diphylla. It’ll bloom soon. It’s not an ephemeral. Also called crinkleroot, guess why. Worts were medicines. The word stems from the Old English for root.”
The ground beneath our feet grew wet, then wetter, and we slogged into a thick stand of balsams and hemlocks rising from rocky soil, ferns coiling up from every hump and crevice, every rock a moss garden. Several balsam firs had fallen over and their root masses stood in arcs like dark crèches. Nancy said, “This is a nice rich spot here. And oh! Oh, look.” She hurried to where the ground rose into a dry hump not twenty feet from the field’s bright edge. The hump was covered thickly by tall leaf-pairs newly emerged, pale green, not so much goose quills as angel wings. Nancy knelt among them: “Remind you of Clintonia? I’ve made that mistake before. But do you know what these are? Let me try that knife of yours.”
I handed it over. Quickly she dug down along the white, deep stem of one of the plants. She rooted with the knife blade and with her expert fingers a long, careful time, eventually came up with a slender white bulb. “Wild leek.” She cut it and held it to my nose and it was good—smelled of garlic and onion both. “Oh, delicious,” she said. “These are really rare. Very special. They speak of a habitat long undisturbed. And they’re true ephemerals, Bill.”
A mosquito buzzed in my ear, landed on my neck—the first of spring. The sun bore through the budded branches above us and warmed my shoulders, seemed indeed to warm my soul. The field was bright with sunlight, just ten paces distant, but a universe away. Far across those brilliant grasses lay the bed of the stream. The sky was bluer for the juxtaposition with the high branches of the firs around us. The fragrance of the leek lingered and I felt myself urging toward the light, toward the open, even as Nancy bent lower, moved deeper into the bog and darkness—the leeks had won her over. She muttered, “See how green the floor of the forest is here? I knew it. From the ridge this just looked hold.”
We mucked along through vernal puddles and rotted leaves, in and out of the warmth of the sun, over an old stone wall, around fallen firs, under a broken popple trunk, finding specimens of nearly all the plants we’d seen so far, ignoring the aliens more and less vehemently (I am one to quickly adopt the prejudices of a teacher). Then a new one, just getting started, two different kinds of leaves, one heart-shaped, one with sharply elongated toes: “Small-flowered crowfoot. Now, that’s a native. It’s a buttercup, but not the European that you see everywhere in the fields here—it’ll bloom in June.”
Another deeply lobed leaf lurked a little further along, and I would have missed it without my guide, mistaken it for crow-foot. Nancy said, “Wild geranium.”
I said I had some in my garden.
“Oh, no. People think so around here, but what you’ve got is actually just a garden variety—that purply stuff that makes great mounds of vegetation? That was cultivated long ago. But this is truly wild. It’s called spotted cranesbill. Geranium maculatum. The flower has a bit of a beak, thus the common name. Very special.”
I felt again the sunny pull of the field, so near, but Nancy crept yet deeper into the bog. “Foamflower,” she called. I trotted to catch up to her. ’’I’m looking for one in bloom for you And here we are.” Tall fuzzy stem, flowers on a raceme, only one open. “It will make a show,” she said. Then, with her grin: “Not a true ephemeral. “
We climbed over the remains of a tremendous yellow birch trunk, skirted a pool by hopping rock to mossy rock to stump to hummock. Everywhere I stepped I was suddenly aware of the forest floor, of what I was trampling, could suddenly name the victims of my boot, could not always avoid stepping on some lovely flower, tender plant.
Abruptly, my guide was splashing off across the rocks in the direction of a certain wide hummock. I followed, Watson after Sherlock Holmes, under the branches of a small beech still rattling with last fall’s dried leaves. At the hummock—an old stump buried in moss—Nancy crouched, sighed, gently tipped up a tiny palmate leaf for me to admire: “Dwarf ginseng. The prettiest thing you’ve ever seen. So fragile. One of my favorites. Cutest little thing! So fleeting,” she said, meaning that in their fleetingness all plants are ephemerals, despite whatever official classification. I found myself wondering if Earth itself is but something in bloom for a billion-year moment.
That grin. The plants were indeed cute, each leaf whorled around a slight stem and divided into three leaflets like charms on a bracelet, two plants on each side of the hummock, which was a fairy-ground. We searched the immediate vicinity then, but found no further examples of the dwarf ginseng. Those few, those four, about to bloom, showed precious beads like pearls, buds for the flowers to come. “Any day now,” Nancy said. “Oh, the flower is so delicate.” She opened her Newcomb’s guide to show me the bloom as it would soon be, a tiny explosion of white flowers. “It’s in its own family. Araliaceae. This is Panax—P. trifolium, for the three leaves. Very rare around here. Oh, you are lucky to have this habitat nearby.”
Without Nancy, I would have trampled the uncommon little plants without notice. We lingered over the ginseng awhile, stood up from it only reluctantly, climbed back over the stone wall, back under the broken popple, back around the vernal pool on stepping-stones and stumps, under the reaching branches of a white birch, and into the field and bright sun-light. Three hours had passed since we’d crossed the stream, three hours like no time at all. We struck out through timothy grass to the water, trying to love the naturalized buttercups as we went, the settlers’ clovers. At streamside we walked the wrong way to get to the canoe—I was following Nancy; she was following me. But the diversion brought us to another rich plant patch, up in an uncultivated area on the high bank of the stream, wild leek abounding, that new friend.
“Ah,” Nancy said, “and this is bloodroot.” This one I knew well from a patch deep in our backyard. It was in bloom, the single wide leaf of each plant folded around the single stem as if presenting to the world of sky the single white flower. Nancy pulled up a specimen, broke the root, dabbed a little of the pale blood on the back of my hand by way of etymology.
“Okay, and here.” Just at the crumbling edge of the bank, the stream flowing fast below us, my guide squatted once again and cupped a tiny plant, showed me the tender flowers—white, five petals, lovely striations of pink on each. “Spring beauties—that’s the common name. Claytonia virginica.
“These are true ephemerals.”
Happy too, I stopped to inspect the beaver stump I’d seen chickadees attending—and found a nice cavity and a few shreds of nesting material, but not the actual nest. Nancy, no bird head, called me over to something more important: “Here we go,” she said. “Dutchman’s breeches. Another true ephemeral. You look all day, and finally here they are.” This one had a nice, well-divided leaf, looked tender indeed. ’There will be no sign of these guys in a few weeks.” She splayed the foliage over her hand, unfolded her necklace magnifier for the first time that morning, squatted down to look closer. “So fleeting,” she murmured.
I squatted with her, head to head, shared the eyepiece back and forth, found the next plant, shifted on our popping knees to look. The flowers were puffed, pretty, creamy yellow, shaped something like their relative the bleeding heart, two distinct horns making the legs of a little pair of short pants. We looked and looked more.
I was a boy, a boy with his mother, and Mom knew the world.
Footnote
1. “May-Flower,” by Emily Dickinson: “Pink, small, and punctual / Aromatic, low, / Covert in April, / Candid in May, // Dear to the moss, / Known by the knoll, / Next to the robin / In every human soul, // Bold little beauty, / Bedecked with thee, / Nature forswears / Antiquity.”