Search Results for: shag bark hickory

Since nothing, absolutely nothing was happening in my studio, I decided to go for a walk in the woods.

But I didn’t want to go on my neighbor’s path that I’ve been walking lately.   I needed to get off the path and into the woods. I was craving wandering without knowing exactly where I was going.

I wanted to go to The Orphaned Woods.

I hadn’t been to the woods behind the farm since the grasses and bushes grew so tall I couldn’t get through them early in the summer.  This year I didn’t mow a path as I had the past couple of years.  To get from the farm to the woods, I’d have to hack my way through the tall grasses and bushes while getting covered in ticks at the same time.

So I loaded Fate and Zinnia into my car and drove to the path that would take me to the woods that connects to The Orphaned Woods.

As if in affirmation, as soon as I stepped off the path into the woods, I saw the Barred Owl flying from one tree to another. Then I saw the bird, which I think was a bluejay, chasing it. I watched for a while, as the blue jay squawked and the owl silently moved out of its way, without giving up ground.

When the owl vanished from my view, we headed up the hill towards the Orphaned Woods.

“I missed you”, I said out loud as I stepped over the stone wall into the woods, my heart softening.

I visited the Big Old Hickory and the Maple with the broken branch. I squatted down to get a close look at the many mushrooms with taking a picture of them. Zinnia splashed through the small pond created when a Shagbark Hickory uprooted last summer.

Fate led the way back to the farm, but I called the dogs back as the bushes started to get thick. We had to go home the way we came.

The woods get by fine without my visits.  I had the feeling they had to adjust to my coming back.  Or maybe it’s that I felt as if I were a bit of a stranger.  Because I didn’t get to see the gradual changes that the summer brings, a part of me expected the woods to look as I last saw them in the late spring.

Now that I’ve been, I know I’ll want to go back again before the path from the farm is clear enough for me to walk it.

Wandering those woods was just what I needed to bring myself back.  To empty my mind of the voices and ideas that have been lodged there.  I think mostly that what I let go of was my own expectations of myself and what I should be doing.

Jon calls it recharging the creative self.

That’s a good way of thinking about it.  A letting go, so I can start again.

If Zinnia were with us she would have jumped into the little pond the uprooted Shagbark Hickory made.  But since she had a bad stomach from the from whatever she ate in the woods on our last walk,  I thought it best to leave her home and let her recover.

I visit the toppled Shagbark Hickory whenever I’m in The Orphaned Woods to see how it changes with time and the seasons.  Today, the little pond finally started to freeze over. This also allowed me to see how the earth surrounding the tree roots is dropping to the ground, or in this case onto the ice.

Over time, I’ll be able to witness more and more of the root system as it’s exposed.

I was trying to remember what the fallen tree looked like the first time I saw it.  When I looked back on my blog for a photo of it, I was so surprised  how different it looked in the summer.  Surrounded by green, it seems a whole other place.

I could also see how the tree is laying just about parallel to the ground now and the root ball is standing straight up, not leaning over like it was when the tree first came down.

Spending time in the Orphaned Woods and seeing the constant changes that occur there has helped to make me more accepting of the less desirable changes that occur in my life.

There is no lamenting in the woods.  But there is plenty of adapting for the new growth that comes with the changes.

“The modern world worships the idea of the self, the individual, but it is a gilded cage: there is another kind of freedom in becoming absorbed in the little life on the land.” from Pastoral Song by James Rebanks

Overcast and breezy, wearing long sleeves and socks, I made my way back to The Orphaned Woods. The mosquitos are gone, the mud drying, and the tall grasses tickle instead of tug at me as they did in the damp heat a couple of weeks ago.

A wildflower that I’ve never seen before greets me just over the Gulley Bridge. Later I find out it’s a Turtlehead, traditionally used as a medicine for digestive issues.

Over the fallen stones and into the woods, the footpath is overgrown and the  White Snakeroot blooming.  The earth is welcoming beneath my feet, and I breathe in the trees feeling once again that this is where I belong.

I look around me to see what has changed.

A dead branch, the size of a small tree has fallen on a tall thin Hickory, bending it to the ground.  I remove the branch and the hickory springs up reaching way over my head.  Still hunched from the experience, I push the thin tree with both hands and all my body weight, trying to straighten it.  I imagine it eventually finding its place again in the canopy.

There are more fresh leaves on the forest floor than the last time I was here.  But also, hickory nuts in their bright green outer shells, deep red Hawthorn berries, and acorns in more shapes, sizes, and colors than I knew existed.

There are fewer and smaller mushrooms, but more puffballs. Textured yellow ones with long oval openings like a cartoon mouth, the spores cupped inside waiting to be released.

Since the fallen maple has blocked the path I’ve been walking for a couple of years, I’m finding new paths.  Mostly ones made by deer.  Fate leads the way, looking back to make sure I’m following her. The new path does not go by the little waterfall, or under the Japanese honeysuckle with the Robin’s nest.

So I’m becoming familiar with new places in the woods, finding new favorite spots to visit and watch as they change with the seasons. Although it’s still months away I can already picture the forest covered in the snow, the trees bare, the sky finding its way into the Orphaned Woods.

The stream is flowing right over the Gully Bridge.  My boots have a hole in them so my feet get wet, but the cool water feels good.  Over the bridge, mud sucks at my feet till I get to higher ground.

Moths flutter furiously like an early-winter snow flurry.  I can’t tell if I’m disturbing them or if they’re just constantly in motion.

My path to the little waterfall is blocked by the top branches and leaves of a maple tree that came down in the last windstorm.  It’s too hard to climb over, and I wonder if I will come back with a clipper and bow saw to clear it away or just make a new path.  So many trees are down, dead ones mostly.

I detour up the small hill and when I look up I’m faced with a dark archway of earth.

A Shagbark Hickory toppled over roots and all.  Where the tree once stood there is a depression in the earth with about six inches of crystal clear water in it.  I wade in the water to get a closer look at what used to be under the ground and is now visible.  Earth, rocks, roots, insects.  The mosquitos biting.

A small birch toppled over by the stream and I pulled it back up, hoping it will stay.   I wish I could do the same with the hickory.  I begin to wonder what it and the area around it will look like as the season’s change.

Mushrooms are everywhere.  I take a few pictures of the most interesting then spot the Indian Pipe.

Ghost pipe (also known as Indian pipe) isn’t a mushroom.  It’s a flower that gets its nutrients from the fungus in the ground instead of through photosynthesis. That’s why it’s white not green.

Fate led me out of the wood on a different path than usual.   The ground cover was low and I didn’t have to duck under the arch of the Japanese Honeysuckle.  This new way also took me past the Witch hazel tree which I’ve been watching with each season.  I now has the seed pods which will burst into little yellow flowers in the fall.

The snow in the Orphaned Woods is mostly melted now.  Although it lingers in long swaths and small patches of shadowed places.

The sun was bright and warm and the wind hadn’t kicked up yet, so I sat on the knee the old Maple tree offered.  The height of a low stool, the top of this massive root is almost flat.  I leaned back easily, my body taking up little space on the wide trunk.

A perfect seat in the woods.

I looked to see what the maple saw and immediately there was a flash to my left.

I knew it was a woodpecker, not because I could actually distinguish the shape or markings of the bird, it was too small and moving too fast, but by the way it flew.  A quick straight line interrupted by a jerky movement, that seemed to throw it off balance for a moment, then back to its swift forward streak.  A dash, dot, dash…

After it was gone from my sight, I turned my head, and it was a Black Cherry tree that greeted me next.

I’ve been aware of the Black Cherry trees for some time.  It is the tree in the Orphaned Woods with the easiest bark to identify next to the Shagbark Hickory.

Rough oblong hunks of dark gray and black, scaly bark lift from the trunk.  The Black Cherry trees in The Orphaned Woods, both big and small, shoot straight up to the sky rarely forking before they reach the canopy.  They’re not thick like the old maple, the biggest maybe a foot in diameter.

And there are many small dead ones still standing, their bark falling off in clumps.

There’s a small circle of two older and one younger Black Cherry trees on entering the Orphaned Woods

I like to stand in the middle of them, and reach my hands out touch two at a time.  I think of the roots connected to each other under my feet exchanging nutrients as Peter Wohlleben writes about in his book, The Hidden Life of Trees.  They “are perfectly capable of distinguishing their roots from the roots of other species…” he writes.

Wohlleben writes that trees are social beings and that helping each other, no matter the species, makes for a healthier forest which is better for all the trees growing there.  I like to imagine that I am part of their social circle and wonder if they can sense my energy as I lay my hands on their trunks.

Black Cherry trees also known as Wild Cherry trees, aren’t the same Cherry trees that produce the fruit we buy in the grocery store.  Their cherries are much small about 3/8″ and grow in clumps.  They can be used to make jelly or wine.

The Black Cherry trees that I know are all so tall, I’m not even sure I’d be able to see the fruit.  And I imagine they’d get eaten up quickly.  In the spring and late summer, I’ll bring my binoculars with me when I look for the drooping white flowers and fruit.

Black Cherry trees are native to North America.  And it’s from them that we get the cherry kitchen cabinets that were so popular some years ago.  According to my Audubon Field Guide, the wood was so valued it was one of the first trees brought to England, from the “New World… as early as 1625.”

It was Zinnia who got me up from the knee of the Maple when she interrupted my meditation by bringing me a deteriorating deer skull.

“Thank you,” I said to her taking the skull from her mouth. I placed it on the fallen limb of the Maple, as Zinnia sniffed the air trying to figure out where it had gone.

Shortly after that, I walked through a low hanging curtain of grapevines into the forest that extends beyond the Orphaned Woods.  I was focused on finding more Black Cherry trees, while Zinnia and Fate scouted out more deer bones exposed by the melted snow.