It lies, like my pastures, at the foot of a wooded hillside. At one end a small brook trickles down from a seep spring on the hillside and drains through a culvert under the road into a larger brook beyond. The road borders it on two sides. Since it was abandoned the brook’s outlet has been partly choked and it has created a small wet area, not yet a bog but possibly one in years to come. Brush from the timbered hillside has crept down farther each year. The fence rows have spread. With the wild noose tightening, the grass, last evidence of man’s domination, has been choked back toward the center of the field. Even there the grass loses ground year by year to such humble wildlings as bluets, dwarf cinquefoil, and yellow wood sorrel. In a few more years the grass will be gone and man’s signature there will have all but vanished.
That field, as I said, should be an object lesson to me when I see the brush creeping down into my own pasture. But the truth is that I admire that place, in part because it is an unplanned sanctuary for many wildlings and in part because it shows what nature will do if man turns his back for a little while.
Along the upper edge of that field are the remnants of an old stone wall, behind which the woods were once contained. Today that wall is surrounded and overgrown, all but covered with Virginia creeper, wild grape, and poison ivy. And the trees have reached over the wall. Red maples grow ten feet high in the edge of the old meadow, and gray birch and sumac have sprung up as they do on any untended land. Among the birches are pasture cedars four feet high, and every year there are more and more barberry bushes, proof that the partridges appreciate this new cover.
In early Spring I can go there, to that brushy margin, and find anemones in bloom. If I search a little farther back in the old woodland I usually find hepatica, the woolly-leafed liverwort. Until two years ago I also had to go back into the woods to find wild ginger, with its heart-shaped leaves, its hidden brownish-red cups of bloom, and its strong-scented roots; but now I find that the ginger, too, has leaped the wall and grows in the edge of the field. Jack-in-the-pulpit is also there now, and for the past two years I have been able to find bloodroot of the big green leaves and the waxen-white flowers on the field side of the wall. All these plants demand a degree of shade, but not too much. They spread their leaves and open their flowers before the leaves have fully opened on the trees above them, then settle back gratefully to a Summer of shade.
Once the trees are in leaf, I don’t even have to leave the road to see the bluets. Bluets, which some know as Quaker ladies, like the sun. They have taken over great patches of the grassy area, disarmingly humble plants with four-petaled white flowers less than half an inch across and borne on thread-thin stems. From a distance they look like frost on the ground, there are so many of them. Looked at closely, they often show a pale lilac tinge, the nearest thing to blue they ever achieve despite their common name.
Before the bluets have faded I can find columbines along the old stone wall, with their bluish-green foliage and their crimson-and-gold flowers. Columbines insist on leaf-moldy places and prefer the company of rocks, both of which they find there. And while I am looking for columbines, if I go down along the sluggish brook I almost certainly will find the narrow lance leaves of wild iris, which come to bud and purple bloom in late May. There are no cattails there, for they demand more of a bogland than has yet developed. Nor is there any skunk cabbage. Cattails, skunk cabbage, and other marsh plants won’t move in until alders and willows take root, choke the brook, widen the area of wetland, and create a real bog. But give nature time and she will have her way with that corner. Which is another object lesson to me. If I would not have my own meadows dotted with growing bogs I must keep my brooks clear.
By the time the iris are in bloom and the bluets have gone there will be blue-eyed grass twinkling where the bluets throve, tiny blue stars with golden centers. And soon I can find, there in the sunny open space, both kinds of hawkweed, the woolly-stemmed, rich orange-flowered variety and the clear yellow, smooth-stemmed one. The orange-flowered hawkweed is often called devil’s-paint-brush. In England it is known as Grim the Collier, probably because the dark, bristly hairs on the stem reminded someone of coal-dusted beard stubble on a coal miner’s face. By the time the hawkweeds have come to bloom the whole field will be flecked with the buttery yellow of buttercups. Then will come the frost of daisies, and within two weeks after the first daisies I always see the first black-eyed Susans with their warm orange-yellow petals. Close on their heels comes the first wild carrot, Queen Anne’s lace.
By then it is June and I have trouble keeping up with the wildflowers. Along the fence rows all kinds of things are happening. Those particular fence rows have few early Spring plants except dandelions and violets. For some reason the violets have made little headway out in the old meadow, but they thrive in the fence-row’s shade and along the brook, the common meadow violet along the fence, the long-stemmed, lighter-colored marsh violet where it can have its roots moist but not continually wet. I have yet to find the little yellow violet in that field, but it will be there eventually. Only a few plants, however; the yellow violet doesn’t colonize in my area as it does elsewhere. I probably shall also eventually find the big white violets. They grow in the margins of my own pastures, possibly because I once moved in a few plants and set them in the garden here at the house. I am not sure how violets spread as widely as they do, but those white violets, many of them hybrids with purple streaks on their petals, now have spread to places a quarter of a mile from the house.
Along the fence row are the typical vines, Virginia creeper, wild clematis or virgin’s bower, bittersweet, wild cucumber. As yet there is no poison ivy, but it will appear soon; it grows on the stone wall just across the field and the birds eat its berries and plant them in their droppings. They have already planted a number of seedling cedars in that way.
Among the wildflowers most insistent along the fence are various members of the wild parsnip family, with their tall stems, their deeply cut compound leaves, and their large flat clusters of small white or yellow flowers. The common wild parsnip and two meadow parsnips have yellow flowers and leaves that somewhat resemble the foliage of the tame parsnips we grow in the garden. Those with white flowers, usually dull white, have a dubious reputation because they include not only sweet cicely and caraway but also poison hemlock. Poison hemlock is close kin to the plant the Greeks called hemlock, from which they brewed the poison draught with which they executed criminals and political prisoners. Socrates was put to death with the cup of hemlock. Caraway, whose seeds are used in cakes and rye bread, is rather easily mistaken for our poison hemlock. Sweet cicely’s seed pods are long oval rather than round, as are those of the poison hemlock, and cicely’s leaves are not as finely cut as those of the poisonous plant. The roots of the poisonous plant are particularly potent, but even the leaves have a poison content. None of these plants, however, is poisonous on contact as poison ivy is.
Milkweed also grows along the fence rows, as does dogbane. The botanists distinguish between the milkweeds and the dogbanes, though they are much alike in many ways including the white, milky juice common to both. And Monarch butterflies, which patronize few if any other plants, feed on both dogbane and milkweed. Dogbane is also the place to find the tiny, iridescent dogbane beetle, an insect only half an inch long and jewel-like in its lustrous metallic tones. I have never seen this beetle on any other plant.
There are a few plants of the orange-flowered milkweed, often known as butterfly weed and sometimes as pleurisy root. This plant’s blossoms are a beautiful shade of orange, and its pods are long and slim. Incidentally, the juice of this milkweed is only slightly white or milky, quite different from that of the common milkweed or even the dogbane. Butterfly weed is unpredictable. I know a field that had a dozen plants of it several years in a row; then they all disappeared, though I know that nobody picked the blossoms or dug the roots. One year I had three plants in a corner of one of my pastures and I marked the spot hopefully. The next year there
wasn’t a trace of them and I haven’t seen them there since. Perhaps by next summer there will be none in the fence row of this old meadow.
Common milkweed, on the other hand, can be counted on. There is one riverbank area where we have gathered young milkweed shoots for eight years, and they seem to have multiplied rather than diminished. I always pause at a milkweed patch when the plants come to blossom in July, in part because I like to smell their fragrance a few times each season and in part to look again at the milkweed’s insect traps. The fragrance, almost as demanding as that of the tuberose, is so strong on a damp morning that I can smell a roadside patch while driving past in a car. The insect trap is the individual blossom, which has V-shaped slits into which a visiting insect frequently thrusts a foot, and the more the insect struggles, the tighter it is imprisoned. A bumblebee can pull itself loose, but a honey bee can’t, nor can an ant. These traps serve no apparent purpose, for the milkweed is not, like the pitcher plant and the sundew, carnivorous. I sometimes wonder about these traps, which seem senseless and even cruel; then I remember that nature is neither cruel nor compassionate. Nature has no emotions, as man defines emotion.
Also in that fence row are most of the wild asters of my area, from the tiny light lavender calico aster to the big-flowered New England aster with its deep purple bloom, from the early many-flowered aster with its small white bloom to the late-flowering heath aster or Michaelmas daisy. There are about 250 species of aster in the United States, close to fifty in New England. The non-botanist who learns to identify a dozen of them is doing very well.
Close kin to the asters are the goldenrods, which are even more numerous in that old fence row and along most roadsides. At least seventy-five species of goldenrod are known in the United States, and most of them can be found in the Northeast. Like the asters, they bloom early and late. Large-leafed goldenrod blooms in my area as early as July, and so does rough-stemmed goldenrod, whose flowers bloom in loose clusters rather than in plumes; late goldenrod, whose stems have a lilac-colored “bloom” or glow, is still in blossom here well into October. Sweet goldenrod, one of the smaller species, has a strong anise scent when the leaves are crushed. White goldenrod, or silver-rod, not common in my area, has white blossoms, the only member of the family whose bloom is not some shade of yellow. Canada goldenrod grows as much as seven feet tall.
Curious about such matters, I once spent several hours counting the blossoms on several plumes of sweet goldenrod. They averaged 3,000 individual flowers to the plume. But that was only a base count, for each of those tiny flowers was made up of five to ten even tinier florets grouped in a head like the center of a daisy. Each floret has its own pistil, ovary, and pollen. So the average goldenrod plume, those I counted at least, has a minimum of 15,000 to 20,000 individual florets, each of which is capable of producing seed.
Equally curious about Queen Anne’s lace and milkweed, I did some counting with them, too. I counted several average heads of Queen Anne’s lace and came out with an average of 2,450 individual florets to the head. That was about twice what I would have guessed. And I counted the seeds in three milkweed pods chosen at random. I opened these pods while they were still somewhat green, when they were just showing the first cracks of ripeness. The floss was damp, not yet fluffy, but it made a mess of the room where I was counting. Those three pods averaged only 272 seeds to the pod, only about half what I would have guessed. But the plants from which I picked those pods had from four to six or eight pods, so each plant was producing more than 1,500 seeds. I have never had the patience or the eyesight to count the separate florets on a flourishing wild aster plant, but they must run well into the thousands.
That fence row along the old meadow also has Joe Pye weed, of the tufted crimson-magenta blossom, and ironweed with its madder-purple heads of bloom, both of which come to flower in late August. And boneset, the white-flowered cousin of Joe Pye weed, which I have seen grow to a height of eight feet, but not there in the edge of that meadow. Both meadowsweet and hardhack, or steeple-bush, have begun to flourish there, the meadowsweet with its loose tufts of pinkish little blooms, each like a miniature apple blossom and with a faint, delicate fragrance, the hardhack with its more tightly packed spike of deeper pink florets. Hardhack’s flower spike comes to bloom from the top down, the reverse of most spike flowers. And for the past two years there have been two tall plants of goatsbeard—a cousin of both hardhack and meadowsweet—which is not too common in my area. Goatsbeard blooms in a group of spikes about the size of my finger, each spike a mass of very small yellowish white florets.
And now the sumac is spreading to that fence row. When it takes over, the whole flora will change, of course, because the sumac will create shade and drive these sun-loving plants out into the open. They will spread out, yard by yard, toward that last remnant of grass in the middle of the old meadow.
There are also the various mints. It seems incredible to me that, with the variety of mints we have growing wild—they range from catnip to bee balm, from Gill-over-the-ground to selfheal—there is only one native American among them. That is wild mint; for some reason it never acquired another common name, though it is a sturdy and persistent plant with a strong odor and flavor. All the other wild mints, as we now know them, are European natives that were brought here by early colonists for their own use as herbs. They found American soil to their liking and spread everywhere.
But the mints are not alone in having a foreign origin. The list of native wildflowers in New England, for example, is very short: milkweed, robin’s plantain, cranesbill or wild geranium, steeplebush, the asters and goldenrods. That seems to cover them. The others are imports which came here with the alien settlers either by choice or by accident—the clovers, bouncing Bet, the buttercups, the daisies, hawkweed, Queen Anne’s lace, chicory, dandelion, and a long, long roll of others. Some were brought as garden flowers, some as herbs, and some came as stowaways, uninvited. But here they are, and here they will be as long as green things grow.
There are a score of lesser flowering plants in that old meadow—chickweed, of course, and ground ivy and several species of cinquefoil and at least two species of oxalis. In the moist corner I always find the knot-jointed, pink-flowered smartweed, cousin of domestic buckwheat. Several cresses are also there, and the straggling wild forget-me-not with wonderfully blue little flowers. And an early-blooming wild phlox and an occasional Deptford pink. As yet there are no marsh marigolds, which demand a real bog, water around and over their roots. But if a bog develops, marsh marigolds will be there eventually.
For a time I wondered at the swiftness with which the wild plants took over that meadow. Then I saw what was happening right under my nose, within fifty yards of my own house.
A small brook flows across one corner of our vegetable garden. The brook dries up in Midsummer, but it makes that corner difficult to plow and tend. Those who lived here before we came apparently used it, but since it is a tiny plot, a triangle not more than twenty feet on a side, I wrote it off as a part of the garden. On one edge it had a few clumps of day lilies and a few ostrich ferns, nothing else.
The first Summer it grew up in a tangle of chickweed, purslane, and what we call German weed, with a few pigweeds. The next year I noticed a few violets there and a couple of Solomon’s-seal plants, and before the Summer was out there were several young goldenrods and asters. At the edge of the brook there was a shoot of elderberry, a seedling.
The next time I paid any attention a stand of jewel-weed was taking hold, and hedge nettles had appeared. And the elderberry shoot had become a bush six feet high. Over in one corner was a wild blackberry bush three feet high, and the ferns and day lilies had begun to fight back as the newcomers throve.
After that I lost track. That little triangle became a tangle of wildlings, fighting, leaf and stem, for root space. The Solomon’s-seal shot up seven feet tall. Joe Pye and ironweed appeared. Great lobelia, with its strong, deep blue flowers, came from somewhere. Daisies and bla
ck-eyed Susans appeared. And finally I took a plant census, just to see what was there, what had come unbidden to take over that little abandoned corner. I identified forty-two species of wild flowering plants, even including two yellow meadow lilies and one wood lily. The only tame plant I found there was rhubarb, and it was having a struggle. A few years ago I dug out a clump of rhubarb that had been sulking in the garden, and I must have tossed a part of the root over into the triangle. It had taken hold and grown there, but the competition was almost too much for it. The stalks were spindly and the leaves pale and undersized. It probably will be choked out in another year or two.
That’s what happens to many cultivated plants when thrown on their own in a wild environment. Not many of them have the vigor to survive, though there are notable exceptions. I have found venerable lilac bushes beside the cellar holes of houses abandoned fifty or seventy-five years ago, and now and then I find a few clumps of hollyhocks and even a clump or two of peonies there. All the day lilies along the margins of country roads are “escapes,” too, which thrive on their own. Phlox is notorious for its habit of running away—and reverting to magenta in its blooms. And, to repeat, most of the wildflowers we know in America today once were tame and cultivated in garden or dooryard. They, however, have now undergone many generations of adaptation to life in the wild. Perhaps that clump of rhubarb in my abandoned triangle will prove that it, too, can survive. Perhaps I underrate it.
Most meadows and pastures, even those kept under control by an energetic farmer, are good bird habitat. I always know when Winter is near its end by watching for the robins in my home pasture. A few small flocks of robins always Winter over here, finding both food and shelter in the brush and thin woods, but when March begins to thin away I watch for the big flock of migrants that comes up the valley and scatters over the Winter-sere pasture grass. The robins arrive and stalk about the open ground, merely surveying it for an hour or so, twittering among themselves. Then they look for food, poking into every clump of grass, cocking their heads, and plunging their beaks down for worms and grubs. Sometimes they arrive before the last patches of snow are gone, and one year they came on the eve of a whirling snowstorm. But once here, they stay, and I have never known them to arrive long before the steady mild spell that signals the breakup of Winter.