abundance

every year i wrestle with how to convey the utter exuberance that is crabapple blossom season. and every year the images i photograph look like colorful chaos, and not joyful abundance. this year was no exception. i spent an hour posing branches this way and that before i finally admitted defeat. so i plucked the blossoms from the stems and tossed them on white paper, and click click click. i like the results. yay chaos. joyful abundance, you can kiss my ass.

crabapple blossoms (Malus)

grounded

these are the wing feathers of a mallard drake who had strolled through our yard twice a day with his mate since their joint arrival this spring. we had come to look forward to their early evening passeggiata, and made inane conversation with them as they wandered by. then one day, it was just mama duck walking toward us across the back yard. and the next day we discovered a pile of feathers next to the dock. in this season of so many losses, we took this one particularly hard.

mallard wing feathers

merrybells keep ringing

one of my discoveries after i spent a weekend cleaning up our woods was a scattered collection of these bellworts, aka “merrybells.” my neighbor tells me the woods used to be full of them, before the buckthorn took over. she also said that there were so many bracken ferns that a local nursery arrived every year to dig more up and sell them. the bad news is that the carpet of bracken ferns is gone. the good news is that mary jo hoffman loves ferns, and just discovered that she can carpet her woods with them.

sessile-leaved bellwort (Uvularia sessilifolia)

division day

trillium is my husband’s favorite flower. it is a native minnesota woodland wildflower. for as long as we can remember, we have had one healthy and hardy bunch of trillium in our side-yard. last night we learned that the best way to propagate trillium is through division. and that, counter to conventional wisdom, spring is as good a time as any to do it. so, today you get trilium. just dug up. about to be divided. beautiful. and ephemeral.

trillim

wild bleeding heart

owning too many things makes me feel heavy and weighted down, and lingering messiness in my environment leads to a feeling of messiness inside my own head. i like the promise and possibilities of an empty shelf and a clean table top, and as a result, i do regular clutter clearing sweeps throughout my home. however, i had never done that outside, in the three acre woodland that surrounds us until several weekends ago. i had convinced myself that letting nature be herself was the best way to manage the woods. let her be wild, i thought. but instead what gradually happened was an invasion of nonnative and aggressive understory plants (think European buckthorn, raspberries, blackberries) who performed a slow-motion land grab, and then claimed squatters’ rights. so with time on my hands, thanks to shelter-in-place, i decided to clutter-clear our woods. i of all people should not have been surprised at the result, but all i have to say is wow. steve and i are daily discovering little deposits of native plants that had been buried by the invaders and are now lifting their heads, wondering if it’s safe to come out again. just this week we discovered: wild ginger, trout lily, bloodroot, trilium, hepatica, jack-in-the-pulpit, may apple, two kinds of anemones, wild geranium, gooseberries, and marsh marigold. these dutchman’s breeches (aka wild bleeding heart), were the prize find. i had always wanted to see this plant, and never new i had it, quite literally, in my backyard. i am currently scanning the horizon for more patches of buckthorn. they’d better watch out.

dutchman’s breeches flowers and leaves (Dicentra cucullaria)