This week in the woods, our boots squelched as we made our way to a colony of twinflowers spreading beside a wetland in Strafford, Vermont. This weak woody “subshrub” – or what the US Forest Service calls in its account “a little waif of a plant” – spreads asexually via stolons to create patches of clones and has trouble cross-pollinating with so many related individuals. The “twin” of its common name comes from the nodding pink, trumpet-shaped flowers that share each Y-shaped stalk as well as the paired round, leathery leaves along each branch. The twinflower belongs to the honeysuckle family and is the only species in its genus, Linnaea, named after the father of modern taxonomy and binomial nomenclature, Carl Linnaeus, who called this plant his favorite. Find this flower blooming for a week this month in cool, damp coniferous forest or a variety of other settings in its circumpolar distribution.
Striped maple (or moose maple or goose foot) also blooms in the understory this month, with yellow-green flowers hanging in drooping clusters. “A striped maple tree may produce only female flowers, only male flowers, or both sexes in one year,” writes Susan Shea, in a 2022 Outside Story article. “Some striped maples have even been found to switch sex from year to year in response to stressors such as injuries and changing environmental conditions.” Female trees have a higher mortality rate, having not only to make flowers as males do but also to put energy and nutrients into seeds.
Like other wood sorrels, mountain wood sorrel has sour, citrusy leaves that can go into any dish requiring lemon or vinegar. The shamrock-like leaves, made of three heart-shaped leaflets, fold and unfold in response to sunlight in cool, rich, moist woods. The plant produces a flower not unlike a springbeauty’s, albeit with deeply notched petals and many weeks after the spring ephemeral does. Some populations might produce no flowers or seeds in a given year and reproduce only asexually, by spreading into large colonies via rhizome. Around this time of year, small pussytoes put out inflorescences with up to seven whitish, finely bristled flower heads. Like twinflowers, they can spread into mats through stolons, but wood sorrel may also reproduce sexually.
Downy rattlesnake plantain, an orchid, won’t bloom until later in the summer, but its evergreen leaves nevertheless fascinate. To us, the thick criss-cross of its venation resembles Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the cracks with precious metal. However, its common name comes from the leaves’ supposed snakeskin-like pattern (and the summer inflorescence that looks like a rattlesnake tail).
Nearby, we spied a real-life snake – a rattleless, venomless common garter snake – absorbing the sun coming through a gap in the forest canopy. The garter snake’s cold tolerance and bearing of live young rather than eggs allow it to range farther north than any other snake, and its status as the most common snake in the Northeast means that many of us encounter this species fairly often. However, as Alan Pistorius reminds us in this Outside Story article from our archive, we still might miss their most interesting activities: foraging garters hunt by both the chemoreceptor-rich roof-of-the-mouth Jacobson’s organ, and when they breed, in “mating balls” of dozens of writhing snakes, males turn their sex organs inside out to connect with females.
In an additional reptile encounter, we helped this common snapping turtle cross from Lake Fairlee in West Fairlee, Vermont, to the other side of Route 244. Between mid-May and early July, snapping turtles travel from their underwater winter hibernation sites to different territory for food and nesting. Turtles have a keen sense of direction and may be on their way to new wetlands or open, upland sites for nesting. Female snappers can travel over a mile to find an ideal sandy site to lay their eggs, which can entail dangerous road crossings (as with striped maples discussed above, this means a higher mortality rate for females). To protect these vulnerable animals, the Harris Center for Conservation Education advises slowing down while driving near wetlands during this time and stopping to let turtles cross or even helping them in the direction they seem to be traveling (see this US Fish & Wildlife article on how to move them).
Also on Lake Fairlee, where Middle Brook meets it, we encountered this obliging common loon, which Ann Little photographed. Loon couples usually lay two eggs per breeding season, sharing incubation duties for four weeks, a period ending just about now. Look out for the hatchlings in the coming days, sometimes riding on their parents’ backs.
What have you noticed in the woods this week? Submit a recent photo for possible inclusion in our monthly online Reader Photo Gallery.