Category: Still Life

Where Winter Yields: Skunk Cabbage, Pitcher Plants, and Milky Ice at Malloryville Preserve

A late winter walk through Malloryville Preserve reveals milky ice, emerging skunk cabbage, and hidden wetland life—seen through the curious eyes of grandchildren.

MichaelStephenWills7 Comments

The morning began in that quiet register peculiar to late winter in the Finger Lakes—when the calendar insists on spring, yet the land, still half-claimed by frost, speaks in a more cautious dialect. At the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville, the woods held both seasons in tension. Snow lingered in shaded hollows, while the exposed ground, damp and rust-colored, breathed with thaw.

Sam and Rory—boots muddied almost immediately—climbed atop a great, weathered stump, its cut face fanned with the geometry of years. There is something about a stump that invites children upward, as though it were not a remnant but a stage. From their perch they surveyed a kingdom of bare trunks and quiet trails, their laughter momentarily lifting the stillness. Behind them, the forest rose in gray-brown columns, and beneath them, the history of a tree—rings like a clock no one can wind backward.

We moved downslope toward the seepage-fed lowlands that give this preserve its particular character. Here, the ground softens, water gathers, and winter lingers longer in pockets of ice that seem reluctant to relinquish their hold. The ice itself told a story—not clear and crystalline, but cloudy, milky, almost opalescent. This opacity is the signature of trapped air, minute bubbles frozen in suspension as water repeatedly melts and refreezes. Each cycle interrupts the orderly lattice of ice, scattering light and transforming transparency into a pale, diffused glow. It is ice that remembers its instability.

Threading through this ice were narrow rivulets of meltwater, tracing paths around moss-covered hummocks. These islands—bright green even in winter—rose like miniature continents in a frozen sea. On one such hummock, we found this skunk cabbage. Its mottled spathe, deep maroon flecked with yellow, pushed upward through the cold, its form both alien and ancient. I pointed out to the boys that this plant generates its own heat—a metabolic furnace capable of melting the surrounding snow. It is one of the earliest heralds of spring, though it announces itself not with color alone, but with scent—a pungency that walked with us that day.

Nearby, nestled in the sphagnum, were the pitcher plants—Sarracenia purpurea—their tubular leaves tinged with winter’s reds and greens. Even in dormancy, they held their form, each pitcher a small reservoir. I explained how these plants supplement the nutrient-poor conditions of the bog by capturing insects, their modified leaves forming a subtle trap. The boys leaned in, curious, perhaps imagining the unseen dramas that would unfold here in warmer months.

The North American genus Sarracenia are the trumpet pitchers, which have a more complex trap than Heliamphora, with an operculum, which prevents excess accumulation of rainwater in most of the species.

The wetland was a place of plants and textures. The ice thinned near the edges, revealing water beneath that reflected the vertical lines of trees above. Droplets fell intermittently from branches, punctuating the quiet with soft, irregular taps. It was a landscape in transition, each element negotiating its passage from one state to another.

Along a tangle of shrubs, I noticed an unusual growth—a dense, broom-like cluster of twigs protruding from what appeared to be a highbush blueberry. This “witches’ broom” is often the result of fungal infection or other physiological stress, causing the plant to produce a profusion of shoots from a single point. To a child’s eye, it might seem like a bird’s nest or some deliberate construction, but it is, in fact, the plant’s own altered architecture—a distortion that nonetheless becomes part of the ecosystem, offering shelter to small creatures.

Further along, a fallen log bore the layered forms of shelf fungi, each bracket extending outward like a series of pages half-opened. Their colors—muted tans and browns—blended with the wood, yet their structure was unmistakable. These polypores are the quiet recyclers of the forest, breaking down lignin and cellulose, returning the substance of the tree to the soil. I ran my fingers lightly along their surface, feeling the fine texture, while the boys, less cautious, tapped them as though testing their solidity.

On the bark of a nearby tree, we encountered a patch of what looked like pale, fuzzy insulation—the egg mass of the spongy moth. I explained that each of these masses could contain hundreds of eggs, waiting for the warmth of spring to hatch. It was a reminder that even in this subdued season, the next wave of life was already prepared, concealed in plain sight.

As we made our way back, the boys’ boots squelched in the soft ground, their earlier perch on the stump now a distant memory. Yet the morning had offered them—and me—something more enduring than a climb. It had revealed a landscape in flux, where ice is not merely frozen water but a record of change, where plants defy cold through chemistry, and where even decay participates in renewal.

Late winter, in a place like Malloryville, is not an absence of life but a study in persistence. It asks for attention, for patience, and for a willingness to see beauty in transition. Walking with Sam and Rory, I was reminded that discovery does not wait for spring. It is already here, written in ice, moss, and the quiet industry of the forest.

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The Yarb Woman of Cornell: Elfriede Abbe’s Tribute to Herbal Wisdom in the Botanic Gardens

A quiet encounter with Elfriede Abbe’s Yarb Woman reveals the enduring wisdom of herbal traditions, inviting reflection in the intimate stillness of Cornell’s Herb Garden.

MichaelStephenWills7 Comments

We did not come upon her the way you come upon a monument. On a late winter morning my sister and I chose to walk through the pergola alongside the Richard M. Lewis Education Center and there she was.

There is no plaza, no axial approach, no insistence. Instead, the Yarb Woman statue waits in a corner of the Robison New York State Herb Garden, where paths narrow and attention shifts from spectacle to detail. The pergola frames the space, the beds lie dormant or fragrant depending on the season, and there—almost at eye level with the plants—is the woman herself, bent into her work.

Yarb Woman, Elfriede Abbe, sculptor, The Auraca AHerbarists, May 6, 1980. Robison New York State Herb Garden, Cornell Botanical Gardens, Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State.

Her posture is one of reguard. That is the first instruction. Her posture is a study in intention: forward-leaning, balanced, attentive. One hand gathers, the other steadies. She is caught mid-action, not posed. This is a figure practicing herbal knowledge.

Right hand on spade handle

And because of that, she alters the space around her. Standing there to regard the statue the garden becomes a workplace—a field of quiet labor. Each plant is no longer merely labeled but noticed. The dried hydrangea beside her, the winter stems, the low green groundcover—everything begins to feel like it belongs to her attention.

Left hand grasping plants, pockets full

We began to notice the small offerings at her feet—stones, a tiny object left by a passerby—that suggest that others have felt this shift. Not worship, exactly, but recognition. A kind of informal acknowledgment that this figure gathers more than herbs; she gathers meaning from the overlooked.

There is something deliberate in her scale. She is not monumental. She does not dominate the garden. Instead, she invites you downward—to stoop, to look, to consider what is beneath your habitual line of sight.

This is consistent the sculptor, Elfriede Abbe’s, larger artistic life. She was not drawn to grand gestures but to process: carving wood, printing pages, observing the minute structures of plants. In “Yarb Woman”, that ethic becomes embodied. The sculpture is less about a person than about a way of being in the world.

To gather. To attend.To work with care.

Standing there, you may feel the subtle inversion: the garden becomes something you enter into, as she has. The distance between observer and participant narrows.

And time shifts slightly. The date on the plaque—1980—anchors the piece historically, but the figure herself resists that anchoring. Herbal practice stretches backward through centuries of unnamed practitioners, most of them women, most of them unrecorded. She could belong to any of them. Or to all.

Yarb Woman, Elfriede Abbe, sculptor, The Auraca AHerbarists, May 6, 1980. Robison New York State Herb Garden, Cornell Botanical Gardens, Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State.

Even the word “yarb” participates in this temporal layering—an old word surviving in a modern garden, just as old knowledge survives in new forms.

Yarb Woman, Elfriede Abbe, sculptor, The Auraca AHerbarists, May 6, 1980. Robison New York State Herb Garden, Cornell Botanical Gardens, Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State.

What we encountered, then, was not simply a sculpture. It was a quiet proposition:

That knowledge can be gathered slowly.
That attention is a form of reverence.
And that in the midst of a university—of speed, abstraction, and analysis—there remains a place where understanding begins with kneeling close to the ground.

And noticing what grows there.

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Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

A Strange Orchard at Cornell: Discovering Rona Pondick’s Untitled Tree Sculpture

On a March afternoon at Cornell University, I encounter Rona Pondick’s surreal sculpture Untitled Tree, where scattered aluminum “fruit” reveal unsettling human teeth beneath bare branches.

MichaelStephenWills11 Comments

An encounter with Rona Pondick’s Untitled Tree (1997)

One March afternoon on the lawn near the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell, you might notice a small, leafless tree rising from a circle of red gravel. At first it seems merely dormant, another tree waiting for the long Ithaca winter to loosen its grip. But as you approach, the scene grows quietly unsettling. Around the trunk lie dozens of smooth gray forms—small, rounded objects like stones or fruit that have fallen from the branches.

Then you see the teeth.

The objects scattered beneath the tree are cast aluminum forms bearing unmistakably human molars. They appear to have dropped from the tree like strange metallic apples, a harvest that belongs less to botany than to anatomy. This disquieting grove is Untitled Tree (1997) by the American sculptor Rona Pondick.

The Artist of Hybrids

Pondick, born in Brooklyn in 1952 and trained at Queens College and the Yale School of Art, has spent decades exploring the language of the body in sculpture—often literally. Her work frequently uses casts of body parts, particularly teeth or her own head, creating forms that merge human anatomy with animals, plants, or everyday objects.

The result is a sculptural vocabulary that feels simultaneously ancient and uncanny. Critics often describe her work as “hybrid”—a blending of the human body with other forms, echoing mythic creatures such as sphinxes or centaurs while remaining distinctly contemporary.

Teeth have been a recurring motif in Pondick’s art since the 1980s, when she began casting them and embedding them in unexpected contexts. These fragments of the body carry a peculiar emotional charge: they evoke childhood, appetite, vulnerability, and mortality all at once.

A Sculpture That Feels Like a Dream

Created in 1997, Untitled Tree belongs to a group of works where Pondick began experimenting with trees as sculptural forms. She has explained that she sometimes uses actual branches or trunks as starting points for casting in metal, translating natural textures into aluminum or steel.

The Cornell sculpture is monumental yet restrained:

  • a cast-aluminum tree,
  • surrounded by dozens of small aluminum objects,
  • each about the size of a stone but bearing human teeth.

Seen from a distance, the scene reads like a quiet landscape intervention. Up close, however, it feels like a fragment from a surreal dream—a tree that has shed something disturbingly human.

The Poetry of the Fallen Teeth

Standing before it on that March afternoon, one might think of the sculpture as a botanical riddle.

Trees drop fruit.
They drop leaves.
In autumn they drop seeds.

But this tree has dropped teeth.

The idea is both playful and faintly macabre. The small aluminum forms resemble seeds, yet their teeth suggest the human mouth—the place of speech, hunger, laughter, and loss. The sculpture seems to whisper that the natural world and the human body are not separate realms but entwined systems of growth and decay.

In the red gravel circle beneath the tree, the objects appear almost archaeological, as though a curious species once grew here and shed fragments of itself into the soil.

Cornell’s Quiet Surrealist Grove

Placed on the lawn near the Johnson Museum’s striking I. M. Pei building, the sculpture forms a gentle conversation between art, architecture, and landscape. In winter the bare branches echo the skeletal trees around it. In summer the aluminum trunk gleams among living foliage.

And the scattered teeth remain—silent, patient, and oddly humorous.

They remind us that nature, like art, can be unsettling and beautiful at the same time.

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Stones That Traveled: Glacial Erratics, Deep Time, and the Stories They Leave Behind

Glacial erratics are immigrant stones—carried south by ice, dropped without explanation, and left behind to challenge our sense of permanence, place, and deep time.

MichaelStephenWills22 Comments

There are rocks that merely sit where gravity has placed them, and then there are rocks that arrive with stories already embedded—foreign syllables carried south on ice, dropped without explanation, and left for us to puzzle over. Glacial erratics belong to the second category. They are migrants with no passports, refugees of deep time, whose presence quietly contradicts the landscape that hosts them.

Long before anyone reached for a hand lens or an ice-flow diagram, people answered such contradictions with imagination. In Ireland, a boulder perched just so on a mountain side is not a geologic problem but a resting place. Leprechauns, we are told, favor such stones—high enough to observe human intrusion, solid enough to outlast it. Skepticism, as folklore reminds us, is not always a stable position. Kevin Woods—better known as McCoillte—found that out the hard way when doubt collided with experience on the slopes of Slieve Foye. What followed was not merely a conversion story, but an act of modern mythmaking: folklore translated into bureaucracy, imagination petitioning regulation, and “The Last Leprechauns” entering the unlikely language of conservation. Stone, story, and belief hardened together into something oddly durable.

Rocks such as this are a favorite perch for leprechauns to rest and contemplate the works of man who have invaded their world. Inhabitants of Carlingford who wander Slieve Foye have come upon them often enough, their stories and certitude in the existence of the Little People are resistant to manifold doubters with their reasons and arguments. Kevin Woods, aka McCoillte, was a doubter until worked on a stone wall on property he owned on Ghan Road, Carlingford. His belief did not arise on the discovery of the leather purse, covered with ages of dust and lime, nor with the gold coins inside. McCoillte pocketed the coins for luck. As luck would have it, McCoillte loved to walk on Slieve Foye. It was on one such walk he and his dog encountered Little People who paralyzed them to escape. His unexplained absence led to troubles with the wife. This experience brought McCoillte around to enough of a belief that he, with lots of help, succeeded in petitioning the E.U. European Habitats directive to recognize leprechauns a protected species. A reserve was establish on Slieve Foye to protect the “Last Leprechauns” and you can google this phrase to learn more about McCoillte’s stories.

Back in the Finger Lakes, we tend to use a different grammar when confronted by an out-of-place rock. We name it, classify it, and trace its lineage northward. Erratics scattered across Tompkins County are geological sentences that begin somewhere else entirely. The bedrock beneath Ithaca—Devonian shale and sandstone—cannot account for crystalline intruders left behind like forgotten punctuation marks. These stones speak of ice sheets thick enough to erase valleys and decisive enough to transport mountains in fragments.

Some of those fragments have been domesticated. Cornell, for example, has never been shy about rearranging its stones. An unremarked erratic along the Allen Trail may once have been shrugged off as inconvenient rubble, while another—dragged from the Sixmile Creek valley—was carved into a seat and made eloquent. The Tarr memorial boulder, resting near McGraw Hall, transforms erratic stone into deliberate monument. It invites rest, contemplation, and perhaps gratitude for those who taught us how to read landscapes written by glaciers.

We find boulders of crystalline rock, commonly derived from Adirondack sources, left behind on the surface of ablation moraine, in the Finger Lakes Region. Cornell finds some and move them, maybe the case for this unremarked erratic found along the Allen Trail of FR Newman Arboretum. Another enormous erratic, brought in from the Sixmile Creek valley, was carved into a seat as a memorial to Professor R.S. Tarr who deciphered much of the glacial history of the Finger Lakes Region. Find it at the southwest corner of McCraw Hall on the Cornell University Campus. Reference: “The Finger Lakes Region: Its Origin and Nature,” O.D. von Engeln, Cornell University Press, 1961 page 106

Glacial Erratic, Fillmore Glen

Elsewhere, erratics remain defiantly themselves. In winter, one along Fall Creek alternates between anonymity and revelation, depending on whether snow smooths its surface or retreats to expose lichen constellations. Bridges pass overhead, traffic flows, semesters turn over, yet the rock remains unimpressed. It has already endured pressure sufficient to rearrange its crystals; a passing academic calendar is not likely to trouble it.

Glacial erratic with and without a snow covver and spotted by lichen along Fall Creek in a winter afternoon as seen from Cornell Botanic Gardens. That is the bridge over Fall Creek on Forest Home Drive. Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

Closeup of the same boulder

This boulder, a glacial erratic, was found near Fall Creek and the Cornell Botanic Gardens Horticulture Building. Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

This rock, a glacial erratic, was found near Fall Creek and the Cornell Botanic Gardens Horticulture Building. Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

Then there are the stones that confront us most directly—those we stumble upon in fields, pulled from soil by plow or frost, demanding explanation. A white, iron-stained marble boulder in a Tompkins County field is not subtle about its foreignness. It does not belong to the local vocabulary of shale and sandstone. Its pale surface, crystalline texture, and mineral scars point insistently north, toward the Grenville terrane of the Adirondack Lowlands. The Balmat–Edwards–Gouverneur marble belt offers the most persuasive origin story: metamorphosed carbonate rock carried south by Laurentide ice, released when climate and physics finally lost patience with one another.

I found this white marble erratic in a Tompkins County field. The highest-probability source is Grenville marble from the NW Adirondack Lowlands / St. Lawrence County (Gouverneur/Balmat–Edwards marble belt), delivered by southward-flowing Laurentide ice. I say the most probable source is metamorphosed carbonate (marble) from the Grenville terrane to the north—especially the northwest Adirondack Lowlands / St. Lawrence County marble belt (the “Gouverneur Marble” and related Grenville marbles), transported south by the last Laurentide ice sheet. Why that’s the best bet: Ice-flow geometry favors a northern source. In the Finger Lakes, glacial ice advanced with a flow direction that was very close to due south, guided by the north–south bedrock valleys. Tompkins County erratics are “exotic” imports. Local bedrock around Ithaca/Tompkins is Devonian shale/sandstone, but the region contains many nonlocal (“exotic”) glacial erratics carried in from much farther north (including southern Canada and beyond). Marble isn’t local to the Ithaca area, but it is abundant in the NW Adirondack Lowlands. The Balmat–Edwards/Gouverneur area in St. Lawrence County is a classic Grenville Lowlands district with marble belts (the same province that yields cream/white building marble around Gouverneur).

What makes this particular erratic compelling is not just its provenance, but the improbability of its journey. Ice moved with purpose here, flowing south along bedrock valleys like Fall Creek and Cayuga troughs, turning the Finger Lakes region into a conveyor belt for distant geology. When the ice melted, it left behind evidence that refuses to blend in. Erratics are geological truth-tellers. They announce that this place was once unrecognizable, that what seems permanent is merely provisional.

Perhaps that is why folklore clings so naturally to stone. Whether leprechauns or Laurentide ice are credited, erratics insist on a larger frame of reference. They ask us to imagine landscapes in motion and beliefs under revision. A boulder can be a seat, a marker, a perch, or a puzzle—but never merely background. It waits, quietly confident, for us to catch up to its story.

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Winter Walking at Taughannock Falls: Finding Connection and Quiet Along the Gorge Rim Trails

Winter distills Taughannock Gorge to stone, water, and silence, where careful footsteps along icy rim trails reveal deep connections between landscape, memory, and quiet joy.

MichaelStephenWills35 Comments

Winter pares the world down to its essential lines, and nowhere is that more apparent than on the rim trails of Taughannock Falls State Park. On a Wednesday afternoon walk, a three-mile pilgrimage, the gorge revealed itself as a living corridor of connections—between water and stone, past and present, effort and joy. The season sharpened every sensation: the crunch and slip of ice underfoot, the hush of leafless woods, the long exhale of the falls echoing unseen below.

From the overlook, the gorge opens like a vast stone book, its pages written in shale and time. Taughannock Falls drops away in the distance, not so much seen as felt—its presence announced by scale and gravity. Even before stepping onto the trail, the walk establishes its rhythm: pause, look, breathe. Winter insists on this slower tempo. Ice dictates caution, and caution invites attention.

Heading along the Rim Trail my progress became deliberate. The path, glazed in places with solid ice, turned each step into a negotiation. Yet this was no impediment to pleasure. Slowness allowed for noticing the quiet labor of the park maintenance crew, whose careful clearing and repairs spoke of spring already anticipated. Their work stitched the present moment to the coming season, a reminder that parks, like stories, are maintained through this unseen devotion.

The gorge itself is a system of thresholds. A bridge crossing the creek marks the transition from North to South Rim, but it also frames one of the most dramatic views in the park. Standing above the chasm, one senses connection: water flowing beneath, trails diverging and rejoining, human passage layered lightly atop geological endurance. The gorge is a conversation between forces, ongoing and unresolved.

Gorge Road, early November
Gorge Road, early November
From the South Rim Trail. Taughannock Falls, New York State Park, Ulysees, Tompkins County, Finger Lakes Region.
Click any photograph for a larger image

Ice eventually nudged my walk onto Gorge Road, which parallels the South Rim Trail like a quieter narrative strand. Here, the landscape shifts from wild drama to human memory. A curve in the road reveals a farmhouse, modest and fragile beside its outsized barn. In winter, the absence of leaves makes the scene stark and honest. The farmstead buildings do not ask for nostalgia; they simply stand, bearing witness to lives tethered to this steep land. The structures emerge gradually as I walk downhill, as if the land itself were choosing when to reveal them.

Overview of this small cemetery overlooking Cayuga Lake

A short detour leads to a small cemetery perched on a shelf above Cayuga Lake, near the Taughannock Farms Inn. In winter, cemeteries feel less like places of mourning and more like rooms of quiet conversation. Headstones rise from frozen ground, their inscriptions softened by time and distance. From this vantage point, lake and sky merge in pale bands, and the lives commemorated here feel gently folded into the larger story of the landscape. The dead, too, are part of the park’s web of connections.

Another detour brings the lower falls into view—a more intimate expression of the same water that plunges dramatically upstream. Here the sound is closer, the movement more conversational. It is easy to imagine this water traveling, moment by moment, linking ravine to lake, winter to spring, memory to presence.

One of many Rim Trail overlooks. That is the Gorge Trail, below.

Rejoining the rim trail for the final climb north, the gorge offers repeated overlooks where the Gorge Trail can be seen threading below. These moments collapse distance: walker and walker, above and below, bound by the same route at different elevations. Over the course of roughly three miles and almost 600 feet of cumulative elevation change, effort becomes its own reward. Two hours pass not as measured time but as a sustained attentiveness, a gift winter offers to those willing to meet it on its terms.

Walking these trails in winter is about entering a conversation with the land—listening to ice, stone, water, and history speak in a quieter register. The joy lies in connection: trail to trail, gorge to road, past to present, and walker to place. In winter, Taughannock invites, gently and honestly, those who are willing to walk slowly enough to see.

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Glacial Kettle Bog Wonders: Photographing Pitcher Plants at the O.D. Engeln Preserve in Freeville

Step onto Freeville’s O.D. Engeln Preserve boardwalk and meet purple pitcher plants in a glacial kettle bog—carnivorous beauty, hidden blooms, and macro-photo magic.

MichaelStephenWills3 Comments

Seen from 1000 feet above in Google Earth, the O.D. (Von) Engeln Preserve at Malloryville Road lays itself out in two glacial “kettles,” pond and bog; a simple diagram drawn by ice and time, then complicated by everything that has happened since. In my photograph, taken from the bog observation platform on a July morning, the sky is rinsed blue, clouds billow, conifers stitch along the rim around open space. Step closer, or lower your lens, and the openness resolves into a crowded, intimate architecture of sedges and moss, twigs and standing water, sunlight and shadow.

I came here for a plant that does not announce itself the way wildflowers often do. The purple pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea, is a quiet scandal: a green vessel in a place where green should be satisfied simply to survive. I arrived equipped for attentiveness—an iPhone for the broad scene, and a Canon DSLR with the F2.8 100 mm macro lens for the stars of this bog. The macro lens is an instrument of humility. It forces you to admit that the important drama is often no bigger than your palm.

In earlier years, the pitchers could be found right where a visitor naturally looks—within the central cut-out of the observation deck, close enough to lean over and study. But the bog is not a museum display; it is a living negotiation. This season, highbush blueberries pressing in from the margin had crowded the pitchers out, pushing the flowering plants into the grasses eight to ten feet away. The shift is small in human terms, the kind of distance you cross without thinking. In bog terms, it is displacement—an erasure of a familiar scene, a reminder that rarity is not only about numbers but also about space.

The pitchers themselves—those “turtle socks,” as they’ve been nicknamed—sit at ground level in a rosette, their mouths open to weather. Sunlight floods the cups and turns them into something both domestic and uncanny: a set of green, veined slippers left out to air, or a cluster of small amphorae awaiting an offering. In the bog’s thin soil, nourishment is hard-won. The pitcher plant answers that poverty with invention. Instead of arguing with the chemistry of peat, it borrows from the animal world—luring and taking what the air can spare. The cup is a trap, yes, but also a reservoir: rainwater gathered and held, a miniature wetland that mirrors the preserve’s larger one.

There is a tension here that never quite resolves: the plant’s beauty, and the plant’s appetite. We admire the cup’s red veining, the glossy rim, the way the opening flares like a lip; then we remember what the lip is for. We admire the flower’s elegant sheltering forms; then we realize the shelter is also a funnel, a choreography. This is not cruelty—no more than winter is cruelty. It is adaptation made visible, a lesson in how form follows need, and how need can produce something unexpectedly lovely.

And yet the real marvel—the reason I came that day—rises above the traps on a strong stalk, lifted clear of the dangerous mouths below. The flower is not purple in the obvious way its common name promises. It is subtler and stranger: a suspended structure with the poise of a lantern and the protective logic of armor. It struck me as a flower unlike any I have experienced, resembling an insect carapace, with the reproductive element underneath a hood. That hooded design feels less like ornament than strategy—an architecture that guides a pollinator’s route, controlling entrances and exits the way the pitcher controls the fall of an insect.

Even the flower’s back side refuses to perform for the camera. From the posterior angle, “there are only bracts”—plain supporting structures, the botanical equivalent of scaffolding left in place once the facade is finished. The bog, too, shows its scaffolding everywhere: dead stems, old wood, peat-dark water, last year’s leaves. A preserve is never only what is blooming. It is what persists.

I found myself thinking about the details I wanted but could not quite capture that day: the downward facing hairs inside the pitcher—those one-way bristles that make retreat difficult once a victim has slipped in. I or my lens was not up to this challange. The shortcoming was minor, but instructive. The bog offers glimpses, not guarantees. It invites return visits, different light, different seasons, a different kind of patience.

Standing on the platform I felt the preserve’s central truth: these are landscapes shaped by constraint—by ice, by water, by nutrient scarcity, by the slow encroachment of shrubs—and yet they keep producing improbable forms. The purple pitcher plant is one of those forms: a green cup that drinks rain, a flower that wears a hood, a turtle sock that turns hunger into design. In a place where the ground itself seems to refuse abundance, the plant answers with a different kind of richness—an elegance that is also a solution.

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Bells for Christmas

The symbolic power of the numeral three, reflected in various cultural, religious, and secular contexts, underscores its universal significance. From the mystical trinities of gods to the practical applications in rhetoric and storytelling, and the fundamental structure of our physical world, the number three resonates with a sense of completeness, balance, and harmony. Its pervasive presence in different aspects of human thought and culture attests to its enduring and profound symbolism.

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Exploring Malloryville Preserve: A Hidden Glacial Wetland Gem in New York’s Finger Lakes

Explore the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville, a hidden Finger Lakes wetland where glacial eskers, kettles, and springs reveal the deep story of ice and water.

MichaelStephenWills20 Comments

In the heart of upstate New York, the Finger Lakes region stretches out like a handprint left by the last great ice sheets—long, narrow lakes aligned north to south, their steep-sided valleys feeding into a lattice of creeks, waterfalls, and wetlands. It is a landscape defined by water and time: glaciers grinding south, then melting back north some 12,000 years ago, carving deep troughs, piling up ridges of gravel and sand, and leaving behind a terrain that is anything but simple.

The O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville, near the small village of Freeville, is one of the quiet places where that story is written most clearly on the land. It doesn’t shout like Taughannock Falls or Ithaca’s famous gorges. Instead, it whispers—through the curves of its hills, the softness of its ground, the unexpected appearance of a spring at the base of a gravel ridge. Here, in a relatively compact area, you can see how ice and water worked together to shape the Finger Lakes region we know today.

Overflow from a Kettle Pond threads through a meadow before feeding Fall Creek. The O.D.von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville.

By the time the preserve officially opened in 1997, the name O.D. von Engeln was already familiar to anyone curious about local geology. His classic book on the Finger Lakes helped generations of readers understand that the scenery around them was not random, but the result of powerful, understandable processes. Reading von Engeln, the rolling hills and quiet valleys near Freeville become more than background—they become evidence: of buried ice, rushing meltwater, and the slow settling of sediments into the forms we walk on now.

Malloryville is an outdoor classroom for that lesson. The preserve is built around a cluster of glacial landforms—eskers, kames, and kettles—that create a three-dimensional mosaic of ridges and hollows. Eskers, those long, winding gravel ridges left by rivers that once flowed inside the glacier, snake through the forest like frozen currents of stone. Kames—steep, irregular hills of sand and gravel—rise suddenly from the surrounding lowlands. Kettles, the depressions left behind when buried ice blocks melted away, now cradle wetlands and pools.

Beneath and between these features, groundwater is constantly on the move. It seeps through layers of sand and gravel, emerges as cold springs at the foot of slopes, and spreads out into swamps, fens, and marshes. In the Finger Lakes, water is always telling a story; at Malloryville, it’s simply easier to hear. Follow the trail and you move through a succession of wet worlds: a seep-fed fen with delicate mosses and sedges, a shrub swamp where skunk cabbage thrusts up in early spring, a cattail marsh that hums with birds and insects in summer.

For my family, the story of Malloryville began even before the preserve had a name. We lived nearby along Fall Creek, itself a thread in the larger fabric of the Cayuga Lake watershed. My son and I camped for the first time on top of an esker just beyond our front door, our tent perched on what I would later learn was the remnant of a stream that once tunneled through the base of a glacier. At the time, it was simply a magical narrow ridge in the woods. Only later, with von Engeln’s guidance and the preserve’s interpretive signs, did that ridge become a sentence in a much older, longer narrative.

That is one of the great gifts of the Finger Lakes: the chance to move from simple admiration—“this is beautiful”—to understanding—“this is how it came to be.” The steep slopes along Cayuga, Seneca, or Skaneateles; the drumlin fields near the north ends of the lakes; the hanging valleys and waterfalls; and the quiet wetlands of places like Malloryville are all chapters in the same glacial chronicle. Once you learn to read one place, you begin to read them all.

Walking into the O.D. von Engeln Preserve, you enter that story at a small, intimate scale. The parking area and trailhead give way quickly to a world where the ground feels different—sometimes firm and gravelly, sometimes soft and yielding underfoot. Wooden walkways and narrow paths thread through shady forest and open wetland. Each bend offers a subtle shift: a new plant community, a change in water clarity or flow, a small sign explaining what lies beneath your feet.

Fall Creek meanders through the esker fields of the Malloryville Preserve. Here is the view from an abandoned railroad bridge. The preserve is near Freeville in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State.

This is not grand scenery in the postcard sense; it is something quieter and deeper. Malloryville invites you to slow down and notice. To ask why a particular ridge is so narrow, why water emerges here but not there, why one hollow is filled with shrubs and another with moss and sedge. In learning those answers, you gain not only an appreciation for this modest preserve but also a richer understanding of the entire Finger Lakes region.

The Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum) is named for the mottled brown leaves resembling marking on trout.

In the end, the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville is a lens—a way of seeing. Through it, the familiar landscapes of central New York—valleys, hills, streams, and lakes—come into sharper focus as the lasting work of ice and water. Stand on an esker, look across a kettle wetland, listen to the quiet trickle of a spring, and you are standing inside the very processes that shaped the Finger Lakes.

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The Dún Aonghasa cheval de fries field

…this defensive structure evokes the enormous scale of the struggles around this place of defense. 

MichaelStephenWills17 Comments

A span of 10,000 years spreads between now and the first possibility of settlement on the island of Eire, then swept clean to bare rock by the weight of ice.  Current scholarship of the Dún Aonghasa ruins, Inishmore, County Galway, the Irish Republic place a settlement within the inner of the four dry stone rings after 6,500 years (1,500 BC or 3,500 years ago).  By way of scale, the first settlement took about 30 times the duration of the U.S. Constitution ratification through 2025: the last state, Rhode Island, ratified the Constitution 1789.

By 700 BC, 2,700 years ago, a series of upright, closely placed stones, were erected between the second and third rings called a cheval de fries field (“Frisian horses” in English) today, this defensive structure evokes the enormous scale of the struggles around this place of defense.  

This is a portion of that field, I believe, taken as Pam and I approach the inner ring entrance, walking a wide path cleared of barriers.  Click the photograph for a larger image with caption.

Click the link for my Getty IStock photography of the Aran Islands
Click me for the first post of this series, “Horse Trap on Inishmore.”

References: search wikipedia for “Dún Aonghasa” and Google “cheval de fries definition” and “Dún Aonghasa.”

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Cornell Botanic Gardens’ Monkey Run: History, Geology, and Scenic Fall Creek

A contemplative walk along Monkey Run where Fall Creek writes the valley’s history—sycamores, bridges, and Devonian stone speaking across seasons in Cornell’s living classroom.

MichaelStephenWills17 Comments

On a morning in late March, when the hills about Ithaca still hold the night’s frost in their shaded folds, I took the path called Monkey Run and went to see how Fall Creek spends its winter earnings. The air had the bright sting of thaw, a kind of vernal austerity that keeps a man honest in his steps. Along the high bank the sun spilled its coin onto the water, where it broke and flickered like a school of silver minnows. A rim of snow clung to the shale ledges, and the leaves of last year’s oaks—curled, fox-red, and faithful—whispered as if to keep the woods awake until spring fully claimed them.

Sunlit bend of Fall Creek viewed from a high bank at Monkey Run in early spring.

Monkey Run is one of the outlying parcels tended by Cornell Botanic Gardens—once called the Plantations, and now, more fittingly, named for the living charge it keeps. These gardens do not end at beds and borders; they encompass the wilder rooms of the county, more than a thousand hectares of glens, pastures, and ravines where the university’s first and oldest teacher—nature herself—still holds class. Fall Creek is one of her principal lecturers. Rising beyond the high country of Cayuga Heights and slipping under stone and snow, it shoulders its way across the campus, idles a while in Beebe Lake, and turns turbines of memory at Triphammer Falls before shouldering on toward the lake that receives nearly everything here—Cayuga—long, deep, and glacial in its thinking.

Tall white-barked sycamores leafless against a blue March sky at Monkey Run.

If you would learn a valley’s mind, walk a meander. The creek here composes with easy cursive, laying down a bar of gravel, nibbling at a bank of clay, then sweeping back to consider its work from the opposite shore. The geologist says the rock is Devonian, pages laid flat and damp with time, and the ice of ten thousand winters ago scoured them into the open. A creek is a patient mason, working without rest and never in anger. I admired these sycamores—their clean bones shining through the leafless canopy like the ribs of an old cathedral. Winter reveals their whiteness; summer grants them shade. A stand of white pines keeps a dark counsel in the background; on the muddy edge, green tongues of skunk cabbage push up, pledges made by the swamp to keep faith with the sun.

Rust-stained steel pier above calm water on Fall Creek along Monkey Run trail

I came down to the water near an old steel pier, a bridge remnant, hanging on each end without purpose. It wears graffiti the way a boulder wears lichen; human wishes, briefly rooted, coloring what they can. The river accepts it all, the pilings and the scribbles, the cast limb and the bottle’s glint, and continues its one unarguable gesture downstream. That is the old instruction of Fall Creek: use, refuse, endure. Before the university drew students from every quarter, the creek turned wheels and powered the small ambitions of a frontier town. Even the name Triphammer speaks of iron struck to purpose. Now the water powers something quieter: the studies of herons, the almanacs of kingfishers, the quick arithmetic of minnows over limestone.

Looking back while climbing the steep bluff

Steps cut from logs ascend the bluff, each tread pegged with iron, each rise a short confession of breath. I climbed to the ridge, paused halfway, and through the gray lace of March branches saw the creek shining at a bend far below. A man cannot help but measure his own life against such a course. The path goes up and down in obedient red blazes, but the water keeps its own counsel. Where the bank slumps the river shoulders through; where the bottom rises it lays down a mirror. In my youth I wanted the straight run, the short work. Now the curve pleases me. To go with the current and not be carried away—that is a lesson suitable to the grey in my beard.

Clear, shallow run of Fall Creek with shale bottom and pine stand in distance
Bluff overlooking Fall Creek in summer

When I returned five months later, on August 23, the same path had forgotten the word austerity. The cathedral of sycamore was fully leafed, the white pillars now vanished behind a nave of shade. The pines perfumed the air without trying. A new footbridge—clean timber arching like a bent bow—spanned one of the wet flats. Its braces, black-bolted and handsome, looked as if they would hold the weight of an ox team or a file of schoolchildren. Such crossings are a kind of promise from the present to the future: we found a way through here; may you, too. Below, the floor was upholstered with moss, oak leaves, and a scatter of pinecones—the slow currency of the woods accumulating interest.

Arched wooden footbridge in summer forest on Cornell’s Monkey Run trail.

Summer makes a confidant of every plant. Ferns unrolled their scripture at the bridge abutment; jewelweed held its tiny lanterns along the seeps; a kingfisher rattled downstream, blue lightning with a bill. The creek, glassy over its shale pavement, showed every wrinkle of its stride. I waded a little, feeling with the sole what the eye could not—where the current took an extra thought around a stone, where it forgot itself in a warm eddy. Trout lingered in the dimmer reaches, quick as commas; a great blue heron lifted off with that surprising tidiness of wing, ungainly only in our imagination.

In all seasons the trail carries two histories: one written in rock and water, the other in the footfall of people. Cornell’s founders, Ezra and Andrew White, believed the university should place the hand near the thing studied; here that principle is plain. Botany students take their lectures in leaf and bark; geologists read the creek banks as if the pages might soon turn by themselves; children learn the oldest calculus—how long a stick will float before it catches in the weeds. The caretakers from the Botanic Gardens mark, mend, and interpret, but they do not overtalk. The woods speak enough.

Moss, grass and pinecones on an overlook of Fall Creek

As the afternoon eased toward evening, I climbed once more to the bluff. The light had gone honey-colored and the leaves of the maples, those careful accountants of September, were just beginning to weigh their green against gold. I looked down on the bend where I’d stood in March—cold, bright, expectant—and felt the year’s circle gently close. As John Burroughs wrote, “The power to see straight is the rarest of gifts… to be able to detach yourself and see the thing as it actually is, uncolored or unmodified by your own… prepossessions… that is to be an observer and to read the book of nature aright.” Monkey Run obliges that humility. The creek moves as it always has—glacially taught, mill-forged, campus-wise, and freedom-loving—and the trail, with its modest stairs and honest bridges, invites us to walk beside it, to match our breath to its turnings, and to leave, if we can, a lighter trace than we found.

References

Ways of Nature (1905), “Reading the Book of Nature,” pp. 275–276 (The Writings of John Burroughs, Riverside ed., vol. XIV, Houghton Mifflin)

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