March 20/28, 2010

One in four known species of animals in the world are beetles. There is a good story – and like many good stories it just might be true – that the biologist J.B.S. Haldane was once asked by a theologian what his studies in the natural world had revealed about the Creator. Haldane replied, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”



Judging by the woods today, you could say the Creator, at least when working on certain spots in this forest, also had an inordinate fondness for mayapples.

Mayapples stand sprung up among dead leaves, in various states of unfurl, and there is something umbrella-like and tropical about their spreading leaves.



Mayapples. Everywhere.



The woods are a mix of the dead and the living right now, like a braided river, the brown and bare swath of winter’s main channel threaded by the green of tiny leaves and first shoots.



Thoreau wrote, "Nature never makes haste; her systems revolve at an even pace. The bud swells imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as though the short spring days were an eternity. All her operations seem separately for the time, the single object for which all things tarry. Why, then, should man hasten as if anything less than eternity were allotted for the least deed?”



Seasons may be governed from above, by the angled sun, but spring moves from the ground up. To see the spring on these first days of spring, you have to look down.



Down at the first wildflowers emerging through the leaf litter. Wood Poppies. Trillium. Cutleaf Toothwort. Wood Violets.



And up a little higher at the uncurling Red Buckeye leaves and swelling leaf buds on thin limbs.



The other morning I heard a mockingbird outside my window at four in the morning, an eternity of spring saturating his voice.



Words by Stephen Black
Pictures by Jenn Allmon

More pictures from March 20th can be found here, and March 28th pictures can be found here.