Category: Still Life

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.

MichaelStephenWills32 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.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

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.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

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.

MichaelStephenWills40 Comments

Continue reading “Bells for Christmas” →

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.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

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.”

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

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)

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

The Mathematical Beauty of Autumn Leaves

Here I reflect on the mathematical beauty of falling leaves from two trees, revealing order amidst perceived chaos in nature’s patterns.

MichaelStephenWills17 Comments

Standing before these two trees on a unseasonably warm autumn day, I am struck by the intricate patterns of their fallen leaves. Against the vibrant green of the grass, the golden leaves form halos around the trunks, as if nature herself were sketching mandalas. There’s something profoundly mathematical about these arrangements—a quiet order amidst what might initially seem like chaos.

The first tree, its barren branches reaching skyward, stands on a carpet of yellow that radiates outward in near-perfect symmetry. The leaves have fallen in such a way that their density decreases as the distance from the trunk increases. It reminds me of the inverse square law—a principle in physics that governs how light, gravity, and sound diminish with distance. Here, instead of energy dispersing, it’s the leaves thinning out, their graceful scatter dictated by the wind’s whims and gravity’s pull. There’s an undeniable harmony in this seemingly random process, a convergence of natural forces creating an elegant gradient.

Stewart Park, Ithaca, New York

The second tree presents a different story, yet one equally mesmerizing. Its leaves, still clinging in part to the branches, form a looser ring at the base. The distribution is uneven, hinting at prevailing winds or the sheltering influence of nearby buildings. But even in this asymmetry, I see fractals—the self-similar patterns that repeat at different scales throughout nature. Look closely, and you’ll notice clusters of leaves mimicking the broader structure of the canopy above. It’s as if the tree’s essence is echoed in the ground below, a reminder of how deeply interconnected every part of a system can be.

Robinia pseudoacacia, commonly known as the black locust

These patterns invite reflection on the mathematical principles governing our world. Fibonacci sequences, golden ratios, and fractals—abstract concepts are not confined to textbooks. They are etched into the fabric of existence, visible in the spiral of a sunflower’s seeds, the curve of a nautilus shell, and the fall of leaves beneath a tree. Even the chaos of autumn is underpinned by order, a dance choreographed by countless variables: the angle of the branches, the strength of the wind, the moisture in the air.

I find myself wondering about the unseen forces at play. How many leaves fell straight down, obeying only gravity? How many were carried aloft by a breeze before settling farther afield? Could we model these patterns with algorithms, tracing the arc of each leaf’s descent? Would the data reveal a perfect equation, or would it remind us that some mysteries resist full comprehension?

As I stand here, I feel a deep gratitude for these natural equations. They ground me in the present moment while also connecting me to the infinite. The pattern of leaf fall is a reminder of life’s balance: chaos and order, randomness and structure, fleeting moments and timeless principles. The trees, now shedding their golden crowns, invite me to pause, observe, and marvel at the beautiful mathematics of autumn.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

Monarch Butterfly Life Cycle: Egg to Adult (Danaus plexippus) with Photos

From milkweed egg to striped caterpillar, jade chrysalis, and fluttering monarch, witness metamorphosis, migration, and our role in protecting Danaus plexippus across North America today.

MichaelStephenWills17 Comments

On the underside of a milkweed leaf, the world begins small enough to miss unless you kneel and look closely. In this first photograph the newborn is still a whisper of life, a pale pinhead egg collapsed into a glistening scrap, the tiny caterpillar beside it like a gray comma punctuating the green. It has just eaten the soft shell that cradled it—its first meal, its first thrift. The leaf’s pale roads of veins radiate around the hatchling; within that simple map lies all the geography it needs.

By the second photograph appetite has taken its proper throne. These pilgrims wear a uniform of warning: bands of yellow, black, and white—stripes as bright as hazard tape, a heraldic banner advertising the bitterness borrowed from milkweed. Each bite draws down defensive latex; yet the caterpillars feed undeterred, pausing to snip the leaf’s veins to quiet the flow. Their black, threadlike “tentacles” nod as they travel, and their peppery pellets—frass—collect like midnight hail. Five times they will outgrow themselves, shrugging off skins to reveal wider, hungrier versions within. The room is strewn with green rib and ragged edges; the air has the gentle smell of cut stems. All the while, milkweed’s poisons, the cardenolides, pass into growing bodies and become their bodyguard.

At last a hush. A final meal, a purposeful wander. The caterpillar chooses a high eave of the world—a stem, a stick, the corner of your rearing tent—and hooks itself into a downward J. Within hours the skin splits like a soft zipper; the striped creature pours itself out of itself and seals into a smooth chrysalis.

Here, the caterpillar has attached itself to a silk pad from which it hangs. Underneath the skin, the caterpillar is transforming to the chrysalis. In these photographs the silk pad and chrysalis attachment from a previous transformation are in the foreground.
Macro of the Monarch butterfly chrysalis. The black stalk attached to the silk pad is call a cremaster.

The following photograph and video catch the moments into becoming: the jade lantern has become transparent, darkening, its gold studs glinting like constellation points, and through the thinning walls the folded wings show, orange smoldering under smoke. Inside, old tissues have dissolved into a living broth; imaginal discs—tiny blueprints carried since the egg—have flowered into legs, eyes, and flight. To call it “metamorphosis” is correct; to call it mystery is truer.

Watch on YouTube for a better experience. Please “like” and “subscribe”

When the case opens the butterfly backs into the bright. It clings while the crumpled wings fill and flatten, hemolymph pumping life into every cell. In the next image the adult drinks from a petunia trumpet, a jeweled ember with white-spotted hems. The monarch—Danaus plexippus—tests the wind with new, purposeful wings. Its scientific name nods to ancient stories: Danaus after the Greek mythic king of Argos, a father who fled with his fifty daughters across the sea; plexippus for Plexippus, a figure of the same old tales—his name carried forward into this wanderer of the sky. The English name “monarch” is said to honor both its regal size and domain, and, some say, the orange-and-black of William of Orange. Kings and myths gathered like cloak and scepter around a creature that weighs less than a paperclip.

No butterfly has entered human life more completely. Schoolchildren cradle jars of milkweed sprigs and tape handwritten labels to chrysalides lined like seed pearls along a classroom window. Taggers kneel in September light, add a tiny disc to a wing, and write down time and place so the journey south can be traced. In the mountains of Mexico, where oyamel firs hold winter like a secret, people fold the monarch’s return into the Days of the Dead, believing that souls ride home on those wafers of flame. Gardeners tuck swamp milkweed into narrow beds and call their yards “waystations.” Photographers, such as myself, record the stories that happen leaf by leaf.

In early July a Monarch caterpillar revels in milkweed flowers.

Yet our touch is not simple. Fields simplified by herbicides have shaved milkweed from fencerows; tidy mowing removes nectar from roadsides in the tender weeks of migration; captive rearing in vast numbers, though done with reverence, may carry unintended risks of disease and weakened orientation. The monarch asks us to enlarge our sense of home beyond the fence: to let patches of milkweed lift their pale crowns in rough corners; to choose late-blooming asters and goldenrod; to keep a few ditches shaggy until the travelers pass. Conservation, like metamorphosis, is work that happens inside ordinary days.

Watch the cycle again in my images—egg to appetite, appetite to stillness, stillness to wing—and hear what it whispers in the steady voice of milkweed leaves and soft fall air. Rachel Carson wrote that “those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” Here beauty wears stripes and beads of gold, sips from garden petals, and threads a continent with its frail insistence. The monarch’s life is a ribbon we can follow with our eyes and, if we are willing, with our hands—gentle hands that leave room for milkweed to rise, for caterpillars to feed, for a chrysalis to darken and a window to fill, one bright morning, with wings.

On a personal note, this season was a success. Monarchs visited our milkweed patch several times allowing me to save/harvest nineteen eggs/caterpillars and raise them until release.

Selected references
Carson, Rachel. The Sense of Wonder. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. (Reissued: HarperCollins, 1998; Open Road Media e-book, 2011.) The quoted passage (“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth…”) appears early in the book; the Open Road edition places it on p. 41.
Wikipedia contributors. “Monarch butterfly — Etymology and taxonomy.” (useful overview with primary citations).
Oberhauser, K. S., and M. J. Solensky, eds. The Monarch Butterfly: Biology and Conservation. Cornell University Press, 2004.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

Buttonbush: The Secret Geometry of Wetlands

Discover the Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), a wetland shrub of spherical blooms, sustaining pollinators, birds, and waterfowl while reminding us of life’s enduring cycles

MichaelStephenWills9 Comments

In the quiet wetlands of late summer, when cattails lift their brown torches above the reeds and dragonflies skim the still water, there is a shrub that speaks in spheres. Its language is not the pointed spear of grass or the broad fan of lily pads, but the perfect symmetry of globes—round, intricate, and startling in their precision. This is the Buttonbush, Cephalanthus occidentalis, a native of swamps, pond margins, and the soft, yielding soils where water shapes the land.

At first glance, its clusters might be mistaken for something fashioned by human hands: spiky balls arrayed along slender stems, each one a small planet bristling with tiny cells. Only in memory can we recall their summer incarnation, when each ball was a constellation of snowy blossoms, white tubular flowers extending like delicate pins from a spherical center. Bees and butterflies crowded them then, drunk on nectar, wings glinting in the sun. Hummingbirds darted in as though drawn by an unseen magnet, their beaks fitting perfectly into the narrow blossoms, a partnership written long ago in the shared script of evolution.

Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) at Sapsucker Woods, Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Now, in August’s waning light, those blossoms have folded back into seed, transforming into the russet orbs captured in the photograph. What was once nectar is now promise—food for ducks, shorebirds, and the small lives that depend on wetlands for sustenance. In the hands of buttonbush, time itself is circular. Flower becomes fruit, fruit becomes seed, seed becomes shrub, and the cycle spins quietly on, just as the spheres themselves suggest: complete, unbroken, eternal.

A Wetland Companion

Buttonbush is rarely alone. It thrives where cattails whisper, where pickerelweed thrusts up spikes of purple bloom, where the air holds the scent of waterlogged earth. Its roots grip the muck at the edges of ponds and rivers, holding soil against the restless tug of currents. In doing so, it becomes part of the unseen architecture that holds wetlands together, slowing erosion, filtering water, providing shelter for fish in the shade of its stems.

Pickerelweed (Pontederia cordata) at Sapsucker Woods, Cornell Lab of Ornithology

This shrub, unassuming in stature, is an engineer of stability. It creates thickets where red-winged blackbirds perch, where frogs crouch in shade, where turtles bask on half-submerged branches. The wetlands of North America would be poorer without its presence, for it provides not just beauty but the scaffolding upon which entire communities of life depend.

The Human Thread

To the human eye, the buttonbush’s spherical blooms are so striking that they demand metaphor. Some have called them pincushions, others tiny planets, others fireworks arrested in mid-burst. Native American peoples, however, looked beyond metaphor to medicine. The bark and roots were used in remedies for ailments ranging from headaches to fevers, though with caution, for the plant holds mild toxicity when consumed raw. It is a reminder that many gifts of the natural world are edged with danger, and that wisdom lies in balance.

Today, gardeners and conservationists plant buttonbush intentionally. It is welcomed into rain gardens, where its thirst for moisture makes it a perfect ally for absorbing stormwater. It is used in wetland restoration projects, where its deep roots anchor new life. And it is cherished by those who walk the edges of ponds and discover in its round blossoms a geometry that feels both wild and deliberate, a gift of design from the living earth.

Fourth of July, 2019, Stewart Park

The Sphere as Symbol

Rachel Carson once wrote that in nature, “nothing exists alone.” The buttonbush embodies this truth with clarity. Its spheres are invitations, junctions where plant and pollinator meet, where flower and bird share a moment of mutual necessity. They are offerings to the eye as well, challenging us to see patterns where we might otherwise see only happenstance.

Standing before a buttonbush in bloom, one feels an almost childlike wonder: how could such symmetry arise unbidden from soil and sunlight? Yet this is the miracle of evolution, that order may spring from chance, that beauty may serve survival, that what pleases our senses also sustains life.

A Closing Reflection

In the wetlands, where water mirrors the sky, the buttonbush offers its own reflection of completeness. Its seed heads persist through autumn and winter, small orbs clinging even when leaves fall, reminders that the cycles of life turn steadily beneath the stillness.

To linger with buttonbush is to be reminded of nature’s quiet insistence on wholeness. It speaks in forms: round, repeating, enduring. To walk away from it is to carry a sense of connection, to know that in the pattern of its blooms we glimpse a truth both humble and profound—that life is not a line but a circle, and in every turning there is renewal.

For Further Reading

USDA NRCS. Plant Guide: Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis L.). United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. Available online: https://plants.usda.gov
– Provides detailed information on identification, habitat, and ecological role.

Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. Cephalanthus occidentalis (Common Buttonbush). Native Plant Information Network. Available online: https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=ceoc2
– Covers botanical features, bloom time, wildlife value, and landscape use.

Dirr, Michael A. Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, Propagation and Uses. 6th Edition. Stipes Publishing, 2009.
– Authoritative horticultural reference on Buttonbush and other shrubs.

Peterson, Roger Tory, and Margaret McKenny. A Field Guide to Wildflowers: Northeastern and North-central North America. Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
– Classic field guide covering buttonbush’s wetland habitat.

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
– Source of the quoted passage: “In nature nothing exists alone.” (Chapter 2, “The Obligation to Endure”).

Moerman, Daniel E. Native American Ethnobotany. Timber Press, 1998.
– Comprehensive reference documenting traditional medicinal uses of Buttonbush among Native American peoples.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

The Secret Life of Woodland Plants: Jack-in-the-Pulpit Insights

In the hush of the forest, Jack-in-the-Pulpit speaks—not with sound, but with form and patience, reminding us that some sermons rise quietly from the earth.

MichaelStephenWills19 Comments

You could walk past it a hundred times and never notice. There, beneath the low canopy of midsummer, where light is sifted through green, Arisaema triphyllum stands with the discretion of a shadow. Jack-in-the-Pulpit, they call it—a name as strange and gentle as the plant itself. But neither common name nor scientific binomial quite captures the feeling that you are being addressed when you encounter one.

A young Jack-in-the-pulpit under its leaf canopy along the gorge trail of Filmore Glen.

A mature Jack-in-the=pulpit flower with purple trillium, Fillmore Glen.

Earlier in the year, it raised a hooded spathe above the forest floor, curving protectively over a pale central spadix—the “Jack.” It looked like a figure delivering a sermon to the moss and littered leaves. Now, that sermon has passed, and the speaker has fallen silent. What remains is a column of tight green berries, glinting softly in the dappled light. They are not yet ripe, but the promise is there. In time, they will glow red like embers in the undergrowth.

Summertime, Sapsucker Woods. I might use a colloquialism and call this plant a “Jill”….and the real twist? Jack might’ve started out giving sermons but give them a good season and a strong root system, and Jack becomes Jill. It’s sequential hermaphroditism at its finest—Mother Nature’s version of career flexibility.

There is something ancient about this plant, as if it remembers a forest before our footsteps came. Its roots delve deep, not just into the soil, but into time. A corm, nestled beneath the leaf mold, waits out the harsh seasons, unseen but enduring. It is not a showy plant. It is a plant that trusts quiet. That survives on patience.

A closer look at the unripe berries.

The forest is full of these secret lives—beings that do not shout to be known. Jack-in-the-Pulpit speaks softly, in a dialect of leaf and shade and seasonal return. It is a plant you find when you have slowed down enough to belong again to the forest’s rhythm, when you’ve traded the voice in your head for the breath of leaf litter underfoot.

From Fillmore Glen

Some would call it just another spring ephemeral, a curiosity among many. But to walk away from it without feeling a kind of reverence would be to miss the point. It is not there to impress. It is there to remind.

That not all things are revealed at once.
That sermons come in many forms.
And that in the hush of the forest, something is always speaking—if only we remember how to listen.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.