Elm Creek Park Reserve, first spring visit

[pameladean]

Last Friday Raphael and I went out to Elm Creek Park Reserve to look at the ephemerals. Traditionally our first spring expedition has been to Nerstrand Big Woods State Park, but for the past few years Nerstrand has been too wet for us to feel like making the drive. This year all the trails on the south side of the road were closed because of standing water, the Prairie Creek crossing above Hidden Falls was closed because of high water, and waterproof hiking boots, which neither of us has, were recommended for the north-side trails. I hope we'll go later to see the wild geraniums and yellow violets blooming, but it won't be quite the same.

Elm Creek was not especially wet. The little pond by the nature center was brimming, but not enough to prevent the frogs from singing. There were a couple of green darners patrolling the edges of the boardwalk and the emergent vegetation; some hooded mergansers; some mallards; a pile of turtles sunning on the single non-submerged log; swallows swooping over the water; and a vast horde of yellow-rumped warblers hawking insects in the maple that hangs over the water at one end of the boardwalk. The yellow-rumped warblers were all over, in fact, which cheered us quite a bit.

The ephemerals were considering the situation. There were a lot of leaves but not many flowers yet. We did find some spring beauty, which grows abundantly around the nature center. Here is a photo of some, in which I did the thing where I zoom in the cellphone camera wrongly and get some weird effects.





We're used to seeing the most ephemerals around the nature center. But there were only a few things blooming here and there: bloodroot, a bit of false rue anemone, a little cutleaf toothwort.



The trees were definitely working on things, though.




We eventually walked up onto the prairie restoration, and on the way saw much larger patches of blooming false rue anemone. We stopped at the bench at the highest point, where you can catch a nice cool breeze on a hot day. On this day, however, the wind was chilly. Every single year I am persuaded that the little oak near the bench is dead, but a closer examination, as always, revealed the merest beginnings of fuzzy red buds. I took a couple of photos of the surrounding woods. I have a lot of pictures of them in the autumn, and a few from further along in the spring. That day they were dim misty green and silver with a tree covered in very pale peach here and there. When we went on we found one of them -- a box elder in bloom, the dangling fringes of its flowers pink or red. My photos didn't work at all, so imagination must suffice.

We went along a path that leads to the bridge over the creek, and I recalled that a loop trail that leaves from and later returns to that path had been full of sharp-lobed hepatica on another spring hike. And so it was:





Raphael took the second photo, which is why that one is much better.

We wandered down the trail, not meaning to go far, but finding more patches of hepatica and false rue anemone, along with solitary bloodroot blooms. At least we came to a steep bit leading down into a morass of mud, and turned back.

We took part of the creek path on our way back, though not the low muddy part, and sat on a bench we've often sat on before. Just off to our right were three trees that looked as if they had their heads together, talking and gesticulating. I glanced at my phone and received the information that it was going to rain in about half an hour. We went reluctantly back to the car and had a sandwich, and it did start to rain. The yellow-rumped warblers around the pond went on darting about for insects. We went home and ordered Chinese food.

P.

Comments

[sartorias]

Oh, that beautiful lavender!

[pameladean]

It's so great. Hepatica comes in white, pink, and that color, which is often called blue, but come ON.

P.

[halfmoon_mollie1]

ah spring. it's been rainy and cool here, as well....such beautiful pictures even if you don't think so.

[pameladean]

I'm really glad you enjoyed them. I live with very fussy photographers, so I've learned to be conservative about assessing my photos. But you'll notice that I still put them up. 8-)

P.

[graydon]

There is something to be said for getting back to the car before the rain starts, even if it cuts the trip shorter than wanted.

That green mist on the trees is lovely. Some of the more resolute (Manitoba Maple) have started leafing out here in just the last two days. Hopefully the forecast bucketing tomorrow shan't dissuade them overmuch.

[pameladean]

Yes, it wasn't a great day to be getting wet.

The green mist phase of spring is one of my favorites. I'm still hoping to get a decent photo of it. I need to remember to charge up the battery for the actual camera and then use the camera. I'm sure that would help.

P.

[graydon]

I like the green mist very much, but I do wonder if it's perhaps one of those extremely challenging photographic subjects where what's actually there isn't what people see, and you have to try to take a picture that will contain the correct thing to make the viewer's brain do the thing, which is usually just frustrating. (Sort of the converse of those photographs of hummingbirds where the buzzy, blurred thing is suddenly still and crisp and shining; real, but real in a way no human ever actually saw a hummingbird; the green mist is real, but blurred not with motion but diversity of distance and the camera insists on a single distance in a way brains maybe don't.)

Which is not (I do not intend it as!) an argument for not taking the actual camera. Trying to photograph the primal brain thing's trigger state will get one out in the greening spring.

[pameladean]

I think you're right about the nature of that green mist. I've certainly seen a number of professional photos that show it with the same sort of suspended clarity that you describe in the hummingbird photos (and I've never seen that aspect of photos of hummingbirds described so precisely, so thank you).

And I don't know what those professional photographers did; but I've occasionally managed equally difficult-seeming shots by pure chance, so it will be entertaining to try.

P.

[graydon]

Thank you!

Those moment-of-impact diving kingfisher photos are like that, too.

Something I think like it happens with bluebirds and shrikes and cardinals in winter; the observable bird, sitting for bluebirds and cardinals, flying for shrikes, comes out that little bit too vivid for its surroundings, as though this one creature has burned through the wall between the worlds, come in from the next one over, one where the saturation is set higher. (Black-throated green warblers on goldenrod in the fall. So very rarely, swans with their necks rising out of the line of shadow over the water.)

I find myself thinking that the green mist is a bit like that; the green world rise, and ok, it didn't actually end, this time, we're not all gone down into the dark and the waters haven't receded from the scattered bones of giants, but one needs must look twice to be sure, because this moment and that moment remember one another.

[green_knight]

Thanks for sharing. slightly fuzzy or awkwardly-angled pictures beat no pictures any day.

Hadn't come across Hepatica. They're very pretty.

[pameladean]

They are early bloomers and the flowers don't last long, though the leaves persist all year. It's not hard to miss them. It's also possible that you aren't in their range. They don't seem to occur west of the Minnesota-Iowa-Missouri-Arkansas stack of states, and are also absent in Florida and Louisiana.

P.

[pameladean]

Forgot to thank you for preferring imperfect photos to none. I cherish many snapshots that aren't right because they did capture the moment.

P.

[kore]

These posts are so lovely. And I love the pictures.

[pameladean]

Thank you! I hope to continue them. It's being a very slow spring, so there's lots of opportunity before the mosquitoes come out.

P.

[asakiyume]

Ahhh, lovely. It's hard to catch that beautiful mix of so many shades of green and yellow--and even red and orange--from newly leafing trees, which is like a spring echo of fall colors (or maybe a spring foreshadowing), but you captured that beautiful tender green that I love so much, that we only get now, and then it changes.

And how pretty the sharp-lobed hepatica is!

[pameladean]

I love that green too, and it is so sadly short-lived. Even in this chilly spring, once the leaves start, they just keep growing until they assume their summer hues.

I love the hepatica. It's curiously hard to see until suddenly you realize that it's all over the slope. The purple flowers stand out more, but even with those one tends to walk past and then do a double-take.

P.

Plant Seed Pr0n

[lsanderson]

https://www.prairiemoon.com/

Re: Plant Seed Pr0n

[pameladean]

I just saw a link to their site when I was checking the range in which hepatica grows. I haven't had much luck with woodland ephemerals, though. Either the squirrels dig them up repeatedly or they just don't thrive; I might be missing some bacterial or fungal element that they need.

P.

[dd_b]

The first photo looks to me like "digital zoom" (which means just enlarging the image, faking resolution; same thing you can do later). Pushed to an extreme, admittedly. Note the actual sawtooth edges to the flower petals.