The Ravine's Summer Wildflowers
Each season greets us with its own display of colourful flowers. We've said goodbye to the trilliums, foamflower, jack-in-the-pulpit, lilies-of-the-valley, red baneberry, bunchberry, Saskatoon berry flowers, trout lilies, to name those most familiar to sight. They've gone the way of spring, 2006. We've now greeted summer of 2006; the very first day of summer at that, and the longest day(light) of the year.
Now we've got a new crop of flowers, those of early summer, and they include cowvetch, potentilla, thimbleberries, hawkweed, fleabane, daisies, buttercups. We've got thistles growing so large they seem to reach to the sky, all thanks to the very wet, humid and often-sunny-and-hot weather we've been bouncing back and forth from. The weather may be exasperating to us, but it's the stuff of life to the flora abundant in the ravine (not to speak of our gardens, and farmers' crops).
This year there's a bumper crop of hazelnuts on the bushes proliferating throughout the ravine. Whereas last year, much drier, there was nary a nut to be seen. Those very same nuts that no doubt the resident squirrels will make haste to lay away in preparation the coming fall for the dire winter months. Those very same hazelnuts that we were too slow to action when our grandchild tried to clasp one in her then-little hands. Her visible distress, her obvious dismay at the treachery of nature! It was an impulse not likely to be repeated.
The ravine has become a high summer (early this year) jumble and jangle of understory plants like horsetails and false Solomon's Seal, of clover, and strawberry, blackberry and raspberry canes, American bittersweet winding their way around slender tree trunks. Those trees so badly bent out of normalcy by the 1998 Ice Storm still display those deadly arcs, but the trees refuse to give up the ghost and send up new branches reaching for the sun.
Song sparrows, robins and cardinals keep reminding us of their presence. An oven-bird is throbbing out those high notes that seem to celebrate oncoming rain. High in the overhead branches nestlings are quiveringly beseeching parents to do their duty: "I'm hungry, feed me! feed me!" Damselflies flit about, showing off their iridescent bodies as they search, like the dragonflies, for insects.
The bedding grasses are now also in bloom and send their heady fragrance throughout the ravine. The creek is now, finally, in decline, although a series of thunderstorms predicted for this evening will once again bring the level up, helping to wash out yet more of the detritus that gets deposited in the creek bed. And wash out the mosquitoe larvae as well, so good on that turn of events.
Our daily jaunts in the ravine provide us with the opportunity to observe nature at a certain urbanized level while offering us pleasant exercise, and our dogs the opportunity to feast on their first salad of the day.
Urp.
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, June 21, 2006
<< Home