White Fringed Bog Orchid

 

The lovely white fringed bog orchid is blooming in the New Jersey pine barrens now.

I found a little group of them last Thursday. They were just as the poet, Joseph Pullman Porter, said they would be in his poem Wild Orchids: "Under the pines near a murmuring brook..." Click to enlarge.

To celebrate the sighting, a poem by Wendell Berry, from Given Poems, Sabbath II:

"I dream of a quiet man

who explains nothing and defends 

nothing, but only knows 

where the rarest wildflowers 

are blooming, and who goes, 

and finds that he is smiling 

not of his own will."

Sunday Morning Walk in the Pine Barrens

 

I took a walk in the pine barrens near Chatsworth, NJ, this morning. It was hot but lovely.

Some of the old cranberry bogs were full of fragrant white water lilies. Thousands of them. Click to enlarge.

Some of the bogs were full of clouds.

 The sky is twice as pretty that way, but it feels a little topsy-turvy. Like going through the pine barrens looking glass. 

Dead trees loom from some bogs, like the masts of sunken ships.

The working cranberry farms have red pumping stations and wide open spaces.

This gnarly old tree was up to its knees in a blue bog. Like an Ent on vacation.

Fabulous scenery.

More fabulous scenery.

And a tiny toad. I think it's a fowler's toad, one of many that were hopping along the paths today. This one is so small that it could sit on a dime and not hang over the edges!

Here's a picture with a ballpoint pen for scale. The cutest tiny toad ever, right?

And here's an eastern painted turtle. Check out its pretty orange trim. 

The New Jersey pine barrens. Close. Free. Full of beautiful and interesting things.

Harvester Butterfly

 

Behold the Harvester butterfly! Click to enlarge. Its wingspan is just over an inch. It has black and white ringed antennae and white-ringed eyes. It sits with its wings closed over its back, so we see the underside, which is orange-brown with darker spots edged in faint white. This is the first Harvester I've ever seen, although I have been looking for years. The small, uncommon butterfly is famous for being the only strictly carnivorous butterfly we know of. In its caterpillar stage it eats aphids, scale insects, and treehoppers. Female Harvesters lay eggs in colonies of these insects, so when a little Harvester caterpillar hatches, it is surrounded by tasty prey. 

The Harvester was sitting on a low branch overhanging this pretty pond. Nice place he's got there, eh?

Fruit Week

 

I spent the heat wave picking fruit. As usual, I remembered strawberry season just as it was about to end. Click to enlarge. 

But I got to the field in time for the last of them. It was hot, though there was a breeze and I wore my shade-making straw hat. I always process fruit on the same day I pick it, to preserve the just-picked goodness, so this all got washed and hulled and measured into bags and frozen to make jam with later.

Then it was time to pick sour cherries.

They are my favorite fruit to pick because they are so pretty. Looks like a tree full of candy, doesn't it?

I pitted cherries for hours...

And, because I was running out of room in a freezer already half-filled with strawberries, I preserved a bunch of little jars of cocktail cherries in lightly spiced sugar syrup. These are as delicious as they look.

Then I noticed that red raspberries were already mid-season. Raspberry is my best flavor of homemade jam, so I headed out to another hot field.

I put raspberries through a food mill to remove the seeds. That took hours, but at least at home in the air-conditioned kitchen. So, phew. Fruit week snuck up on me and was the hottest week of the year, but it was a big success.

When the heat dies down a little, I will begin to make jam. Here is my jam jar rainbow from a previous year: strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, peach, plum. All the jars above have been eaten. They were wonderful. Looking forward to this year's.

Summer on Thursday

Astronomical summer will officially begin this Thursday, June 20. I hear that it will hot and humid around Philadelphia and South Jersey -- a perfect day for the beach.

It should also be good weather to look for interesting insects, like this Golden Northern Bumblebee -- the plushy teddy bear of bees, and my personal favorite. Click to enlarge.

And here's a thought to remember from John Lubbock, who said: "Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time."

White Squirrels

 

I was on a road trip from New Jersey to St. Louis, Missouri, last week. Of all the roadside attractions along the way, the white squirrels of Olney, Illinois, were the best. Behold the white squirrel! Click to enlarge.

Here's more.

The town promotes and protects its special squirrel population. The road through the city park where many of the squirrels live is named White Squirrel Drive. There's a law that grants right-of-way to white squirrels on streets and sidewalks.

There are also regular Eastern Gray Squirrels in Olney; white ones are pink-eyed albinos of that species.

You can find white squirrel images all over town, like on the wall of a donut shop.

In the corner of a mural.

There are statues.

And this!

And souvenirs.

I bought myself a white squirrel cookie cutter. I'll show off what I bake with it in a later blog. White and pink icing will be involved.

Olney, Illinois, is worth a visit.

Brood XIX Hits St. Louis

 

I have the good luck to be in St. Louis, Missouri, while a big emergence of periodical cicadas is happening. There are billions of buzzing cicadas out there. People are calling it "Cicadageddon." This brood emerges every 13 years, so they were last seen in 2011. They'll be back in 2037. Click here to read my eyewitness account of the emergence of a periodical cicada brood. Click on the photo to enlarge. Gotta love that face, right?