Still Life – Michael Stephen Wills Photography

A June Meditation at Houston Pond in Cornell’s F.R. Newman Arboretum

A June meditation at Houston Pond in Cornell’s F.R. Newman Arboretum, where water lilies, turtles, cattails, and summer light gather into green silence.

June 23, 2026June 22, 2026 MichaelStephenWills3 Comments

On June 21, 2026, just after noon, Houston Pond of the F.R. Newman Arboretum held the day in a green, breathing stillness. The sun stood high over Ithaca, bright enough to polish every lily pad, every cattail blade, every glossy fold of leaf. This light of the first summer day entered the scene, becoming part of the water, part of the trees, part of the quiet intelligence of the pond.

The pond was nearly covered with lily pads, a floating mosaic of green circles, some fresh and whole, others freckled, torn, yellowing. Between them, dark water opened in irregular channels, deep blue-black, mirroring trees and sky. These openings felt like pauses in a long sentence, small places where the pond allowed itself to breathe. Around the margins, cattails stood in dense ranks, upright and watchful, like a congregation listening to the sermon of light.

At the center of this water-world, white lilies opened with calm authority. Their petals rose cleanly from the surrounding abundance, white against green, flame-hearted with yellow. Each flower seemed impossible and inevitable at once: born from mud, rooted in darkness, arriving as a cup of light. A water lily is one of nature’s great acts of persuasion. It asks us to believe that beauty can rise without apology from what is hidden, tangled, and submerged.

American White Water Lily (*Nymphaea odorate*)

One blossom carried an unexpected visitor. A small turtle had climbed onto the flower, its dark shell resting against the white petals, one leg extended in complete confidence. The scene was both comic and profound. The lily was a raft, a chapel, a sun-warmed throne. The turtle seemed to understand what people often forget: beauty is not diminished by being used. It is completed by being entered. The flower did not become less beautiful because the turtle climbed aboard. It became more of the world.

Nearby, new lily leaves still held their rolled shapes, brown and burnished, rising like curled scrolls from the water. They had not yet flattened into the broad green plates surrounding them. In their tight forms was the promise of unfolding, the secret grammar of growth. Around them, older leaves floated with scars and stains, reminders that even in June’s fullness the season carries time within it. Summer is not a fixed paradise. It is motion disguised as abundance.

Beyond the pond, the arboretum rose in layers: meadow, shrubs, cattails, dark trees, open sky. A path climbed away through the greenery, pale and narrow, inviting without insisting. The woods stood dense and generous, every tree leafed out in the opulence of early summer. Clouds drifted over the blue, white and soft, their reflections briefly caught in the pond’s darker openings. The whole place seemed balanced between cultivation and surrender. Human hands had shaped the arboretum, named its paths, protected its plantings, opened it to walkers and watchers. Yet the pond itself answered in its own language: water, root, wing, shell, blossom, shadow.

Away from the broad view, the smaller flowers made their quieter claims. Tiny yellow blooms lifted themselves on fine stems among the leaves, little sparks in a green hush. White blossoms hovered behind them, half blurred, like memories of spring still lingering in the understory. A single white flower opened over sharply cut leaves, its petals simple, its center delicate with stamens. It had none of the dramatic presence of the water lilies, but it possessed a different power: the power of being almost missed.

That is one of the arboretum’s gifts. It teaches scale. First the eye takes in the pond, the sweep of trees, the blue sky, the mass of cattails. Then attention narrows. A petal. A turtle’s foot. A torn leaf edge. A yellow flower no larger than a thought. The place asks us to look widely, then closely, then widely again. It trains the mind away from haste. It reminds us that wonder is not always a thunderclap. Sometimes it is a small white bloom waiting at ankle height.

Northern Bush Honeysuckle (*Diervilla lonicera*)

The yellow honeysuckle-like blossoms tucked among broad leaves offered another kind of intimacy. Their pale tubes and slender filaments seemed made for visitors more delicate than us. They belonged to the hidden commerce of June: pollinators, fragrance, pollen, fruit-to-come. Much of what matters in a place like Houston Pond happens below notice. Roots thicken. Insects navigate. Turtles choose their sunning places. Flowers open and close according to laws older than memory. The pond is never still, only patient.

Standing there, I felt the day gather itself into one phrase: green silence, golden heart. The white lilies held the light. The cattails guarded the edges. The turtle rested without concern for symbolism. And all around, the arboretum offered its deep reassurance: life does not need to announce itself loudly to be complete.

June in the F.R. Newman Arboretum is a state of attention within a season. Houston Pond receives the sky, feeds the lilies, shelters the small dark bodies of turtles, and gives back a vision of the world refreshed by reflection. To walk there at midday is to be reminded that the ordinary is only ordinary until we stop long enough to see it. Then the pond becomes a mirror with roots, the lily a white flame on dark water, and the whole green world a quiet invitation to belong.

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Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

The Wonder of Purple-Flowered Raspberry: Nature’s Thornless Native Treasure

The purple-flowered raspberry is a native shrub that confounds expectations, combining rose-like blossoms, maple-shaped leaves, edible fruit, and thornless stems into one of eastern North America’s most enchanting woodland plants.

June 17, 2026June 16, 2026 MichaelStephenWills10 Comments

I first encountered the purple-flowered raspberry while walking the Gorge Trail at Fillmore Glen State Park. Dry Creek murmured below, working patiently within ancient shale walls that confine its course. Waterfalls spilled from ledges overhead, cool mist drifted through the narrow passage, and sunlight filtered down in shifting patches through the summer canopy. It was a landscape dramatic enough to command all of one’s attention.

Yet it was a flower growing quietly beside the trail that stopped me in my tracks.

Purple-flowered Raspberry Growing Within Treman Gorge by the South Rim Trail

At first glance, I thought I had stumbled upon an escaped garden plant. The blossoms were impossible to ignore—large, open, and an exuberant shade of rose-purple that glowed against the surrounding green. They seemed too extravagant for the subdued palette of a northeastern woodland. The petals had the simple elegance of wild roses, but there was something else about the plant that resisted easy identification.

The purple-flowered raspberry, Rubus odoratus, is a plant of delightful contradictions. Its blossoms are among the largest in the raspberry family, often two inches across. They appear over an extended season, beginning in early summer and continuing well toward autumn. Unlike the brief fireworks of many woodland wildflowers, this plant stages an encore performance, offering fresh blooms long after others have taken their final bow.

Over the years, I returned often to Fillmore Glen. Dry Creek became an old acquaintance, its voice changing with the seasons—boisterous after spring rains, subdued during the heat of late summer. And almost every year, somewhere along the Gorge Trail, I would encounter those same remarkable shrubs. Familiarity deepened into appreciation, and appreciation eventually became affection.

The flowers also serve a practical purpose beyond their beauty. Native bees and other pollinating insects visit them regularly, gathering nectar and pollen throughout the season. The plant has become part of an intricate ecological conversation that has been unfolding for thousands of years.

Then there are the leaves. The first time I noticed them closely, they triggered another moment of confusion. Broad and softly textured, divided into five lobes, they looked uncannily like oversized maple leaves. Some can grow nearly ten inches across, creating islands of lush greenery along shaded streambanks and woodland edges.

It is as though nature, in one of her playful moods, decided to combine the leaf of a maple, the flower of a rose, and the fruit of a raspberry.

Most raspberries and blackberries demand respect from a distance. Their prickles and thorns snag clothing and skin with equal enthusiasm. Purple-flowered raspberry breaks that expectation as well. Its stems are fuzzy rather than fierce. There are no hooked defenses waiting to punish curiosity. The plant invites close examination.

By late summer, the blossoms yield to flattened red fruits. Technically, they are raspberries, though they lack the sugary richness of their cultivated cousins. I have sampled them occasionally, appreciating them more for the experience than the flavor. Birds, however, are less discriminating. The fruits provide nourishment for wildlife, becoming another thread in the web of life that surrounds Dry Creek and countless other woodland habitats.

Native to eastern North America, purple-flowered raspberry ranges from Nova Scotia westward into Ontario and Wisconsin, extending south through the Appalachian Mountains. It thrives along forest margins, rocky slopes, stream corridors, and disturbed areas where sunlight penetrates the canopy. Through underground shoots, it gradually forms colonies that stabilize soil and provide shelter for small creatures.

It belongs exactly where I first found it. There is a temptation, especially among gardeners, to seek novelty elsewhere—to import the exotic, the unusual, the unfamiliar. Yet some of the most extraordinary plants are those that have quietly shared our landscapes all along.

The purple-flowered raspberry reminds me of this truth each time I encounter it. It teaches the value of paying attention. A hurried walk through Fillmore Glen might focus exclusively on the waterfalls, the sculpted rock formations, or the cool refuge of the gorge itself. All are worthy of admiration. But along the margins of the trail stand these shrubs, offering their own quieter marvels.

My photograph captures all flowering forms of this member of the Rose family. This specimen was blooming in August within the shade of Fillmore Glen in the Finger Lakes of New York State.

A rose-colored flower where one expects white. Maple leaves on a raspberry cane. Soft stems where thorns should be. Fruit that feeds the forest. A native plant that asks for nothing more than the chance to flourish where it has always belonged. Years after that first encounter beside Dry Creek, the sight of those blossoms still stops me as I find them in all the Finger Lakes gorges.

Certain plants become landmarks in our personal geography. They root themselves not only in the soil but in memory. The purple-flowered raspberry has become one of those companions for me—a recurring presence marking the passage of summers, a familiar face in a beloved landscape.

Dry Creek continues its patient work of carving stone. The waterfalls continue to descend in silver ribbons through the gorge. And each year, as if renewing an old friendship, the purple-flowered raspberries lift their improbable blossoms toward the filtered light. In their presence, wonder becomes less an emotion than a habit of attention.

Sometimes the greatest discoveries are not rare because they are hidden. They are rare because we have not yet learned to see them. The purple-flowered raspberry taught me to look more closely. Along a trail I thought I knew by heart, it revealed that nature still keeps delightful surprises in reserve.

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Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Holding Out, A Day Off, and Nice to See You: Seward Johnson and the Quiet Theater of Time

A selection of photographs from our January 2019 visit to McKee Botanical Gardens, Vero Beach, Indian River County, Florida

June 3, 2026June 7, 2026 MichaelStephenWills7 Comments

Seward Johnson’s figures have a way of surprising us, they seem to have been waiting for us all along. They stand on sidewalks, lean into ordinary errands, pause in gestures we recognize before we understand why. In Holding Out, A Day Off, and Nice to See You, the artist gives us not heroes, saints, or rulers, but people caught in the small ceremonies of daily life: carrying groceries, taking a pause, greeting another human being. They are bronze, yet they seem to breathe the air of our own passing afternoons. Our grandson’s first impression of Nice to See You was, “How often do they wash his clothes?”

Johnson, born in New Jersey in 1930, became known for life-size painted bronze figures that bring art out of the museum and into public space. His Celebrating the Familiar series does exactly what the title promises. It asks us to look again at what we normally overlook. A person resting. A woman burdened with bags. A meeting on the street. These are not dramatic events, yet they are the substance from which a life is made.

That may be why these sculptures move me. They are comic, playful at first glance. One expects the figure to turn, shift weight, apologize for blocking the way. But the longer I look, the more the humor gives way to tenderness. Johnson’s realism is emotional as well as technical. Postures are caught before the sentence, the hand before the reply, the pause before someone walks away.

Holding Out suggests the labor of ordinary devotion. The figure carries the evidence of errands, appetite, domestic obligation, perhaps generosity. Groceries are never merely groceries. They are meals not yet cooked, tables not yet set, bodies cared for, conversations expected. To carry food home is to participate in one of the oldest forms of love. There is fatigue in such a pose, but also purpose. The sculpture reminds me how much of family life is carried without ceremony.

A Day Off speaks in a different key. A day off is supposed to be freedom, yet even leisure has its burden. Time, once unstructured, can feel strangely precious. We plan to rest, then discover that rest asks something of us: the courage to stop, to let the world proceed without our supervision. Johnson’s figure becomes a meditation on the fragile privilege of an unclaimed hour. The sculpture seems to ask whether we know how to receive such a gift when it comes.

Then there is Nice to See You, a title so simple it nearly disappears into politeness. Yet those four words contain an entire philosophy of relationship. To say “nice to see you” is to acknowledge absence, survival, return. It may be said casually on a sidewalk, but beneath it lies the deeper knowledge that people do vanish from our daily routes. Friends move away. Children grow into distant schedules. Parents and grandparents become memories. Even neighbors, once familiar as weather, can pass out of our lives without a formal goodbye, not to be returned by a simple cleaning of the glass.

The greeting matters because time has been at work between meetings. The person we see again is never exactly the one we last saw. Nor are we the same person doing the seeing. Every reunion, however ordinary, is also a small reckoning with change.

That is the quiet power of Johnson’s public art. His figures appear fixed, but they make us aware of motion: our own. We walk around them. We photograph them. We return years later and find them unchanged, while we have altered in ways both visible and hidden. Bronze preserves the gesture; life revises the viewer.

In this way, the sculptures become companions in memory. They do not explain relationships; they stage them. They show that affection often lives in errands, pauses, greetings, and shared streets. A life together is rarely made of grand declarations. More often it is made of carrying, waiting, recognizing, and returning.

Perhaps that is why these works linger after the first amusement fades. They restore dignity to the unmonumental. They suggest that the passing of time is not only loss, but accumulation. The grocery bag, the free afternoon, the familiar greeting—each becomes a vessel. Each holds what we have given, received, forgotten, and remembered.

Johnson’s people stand still, but they point us toward movement: toward the next errand, the next meeting, the next chance to say, with more feeling than the phrase usually carries, “Nice to see you.”

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Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Jack-in-the-Pulpit at Sapsucker Woods: A Woodland Wildflower Meditation

A quiet meditation on Jack-in-the-Pulpit at Sapsucker Woods, where spring birdsong and woodland shadows surround one of the Finger Lakes’ most quietly mysterious wildflowers.

May 22, 2026June 2, 2026 MichaelStephenWills3 Comments

There are plants that announce themselves with banners and trumpets, and there are plants that exist in a vow of secrecy. The Jack-in-the-pulpit belongs to the second order. One does not so much find it as gradually become aware of being observed by it. There in the leaf litter of Sapsucker Woods, among last autumn’s oak leaves and the gray ribs of fallen branches, it rises like a small green minister in a woodland chapel.

The flower is not showy in the usual sense. It has no bright face lifted to the sun, no petals flung open in invitation. Instead, it is architectural, hooded, inward. The striped spathe bends over the hidden spadix like a pulpit canopy, green outside and darkly veined within, as if the forest itself had written a sermon in shadow and chlorophyll. The longer I looked, the more it seemed less a flower than a presence: a woodland oracle with its hood drawn low.

Sapsucker Woods. Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

In one plant, the pulpit flares open, dark-rimmed and luminous inside, its pale ribs running upward like the beams of a tiny cathedral. In another, the hood folds forward modestly, nearly concealing the chamber beneath. A third rises darker, with maroon stems and a striped throat, standing between two leaves like a figure pausing mid-speech. The photographs catch these variations beautifully: the open herald, the shy novice, the cloaked elder, each rooted in the brown memory of last year’s leaves.

Sapsucker Woods in late spring is seldom silent, though its quiet is deep. Overhead, the trees are leafing into their first full confidence. The air carries the flute-notes of wood thrushes from farther back in the green shade, those liquid phrases that seem to fall from a height and then echo somewhere inside the listener. Red-eyed vireos begin their patient, conversational preaching from the canopy. A catbird gives its slate-gray improvisations from the understory, while chickadees stitch the edges of the path with quick notes. The season has a thousand small voices, but the Jack-in-the-pulpit listens more than it sings.

That is part of its charm. It is a plant of composure. Around it, the forest spends itself freely: trillium leaves widen, violets brighten the ground, ferns loosen their green scrolls, and mosquitoes rehearse their thin insistence. But Jack remains collected. Its sermon is not declaimed; it is withheld. It asks the passerby to kneel inwardly, to meet it at its own scale. In a hurried world, it is a lesson in standing still.

Georgia O’Keeffe might have understood this flower’s power: the way a close gaze enlarges the small until it becomes monumental. Seen from a distance, the Jack-in-the-pulpit is easily lost among leaves and stems. Seen closely, it becomes a world of line, chamber, curve, and shadow. The pale vertical striping inside the hood has the force of deliberate drawing. The dark rim of the spathe feels almost painted in, a border between secrecy and revelation. Its form is not delicate so much as concentrated—nature’s own green abstraction, folded around a mystery.

The woodland floor around these plants is a text in itself. Dry beech and oak leaves lie curled like old parchment. Sticks and roots cross the scene with accidental calligraphy. The fresh green leaves of the plant rise cleanly from this litter, making a contrast between decay and renewal so perfect that no moral needs to be supplied. The forest does not discard its past; it feeds upon it. Beneath every new hood and leaf is the slow generosity of what has fallen.

The Jack-in-the-pulpit is exactly the sort of neighbor that repays attention. It does not demand admiration; it rewards intimacy. Bend close and the lines appear, the subtle color, the strange animal vitality of the hooded form. Step back and it disappears again into the leafy congregation. It is a flower with the manners of a secret.

I was struck, especially, by how human we make it. We call it Jack, give it a pulpit, imagine it preaching. Yet perhaps the plant is not humanized so much as we are humbled into plant-like patience. Its chambered flower, its folded canopy, its upright poise—all suggest a ritual older than our metaphors. Before churches, before pulpits, before sermons, there were green hoods rising from the spring earth, gathering insects, light, and rain into the quiet business of being alive.

By the time I left, the birdsong had thickened. The woods were awake in layers: high song, low leaf-rustle, the soft give of the trail underfoot. Behind me, the Jack-in-the-pulpits remained at their posts, small sentinels of the damp shade. They seemed to keep their own counsel, and that was their gift. Some flowers brighten the day; these deepen it. They are not exclamation points in the forest, but parentheses—curved, shadowed, and full of meaning.

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Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Cutleaf Toothwort and the Pure Green Sweat Bee: A Woodland Encounter in the Mundy Wildflower Garden

A close look at Cutleaf Toothwort and a Pure Green Sweat Bee in Cornell Botanic Gardens’ Mundy Wildflower Garden reveals a small but remarkable drama of spring pollination, adaptation, and woodland renewal.

April 28, 2026June 2, 2026 MichaelStephenWills8 Comments

That afternoon of April 14, 2026, in the Mundy Wildflower Garden, I was moving slowly enough for the woods to begin revealing their smaller intentions. Mid-April in Ithaca is a season of thresholds. The leaf litter still holds the color of last year’s weather—oak brown, beech tan, the dry parchment of a forest not yet fully wakened—but through it rise the first green declarations. Nothing shouts. Everything announces itself in a near-whisper.

It was in that spirit that I came upon the cutleaved toothwort.

Cardamine concatenata, the cutleaved toothwort, crow’s toes, pepper root or purple-flowered toothwort, is a flowering plant in the family Brassicaceae. Mundy Wildflower Garden, Cornell Botanic Gardens, Ithaca, Tompkins County, Finger Lakes Region, New York State

At first glance the plant seemed almost improbably delicate, as if it had been assembled from a set of fine green gestures and then topped with small white crosses of bloom. The flowers hovered just above the leaf litter, each with four petals, clear evidence of the mustard family to which the plant belongs. The leaves were deeply divided, sharply cut, almost hand-like in their spread, giving the plant its common name. There is something elegant in that foliage: not the broad, self-confident green of summer, but a more intricate, provisional architecture, suited to the brief bright interval before the forest canopy closes.

This was Cutleaf Toothwort, Cardamine concatenata, one of the spring ephemerals, those woodland plants that have evolved to live by speed and timing. Their season is narrow. They rise, leaf out, flower, attract pollinators, set seed, and begin to withdraw before the trees above them fully leaf out and cast the deep shade of late spring and summer. To see one is to witness a life shaped by the economy of light. It does not waste time. It cannot.

And then I noticed the bee.

I had first been looking at the flowers themselves, admiring the small white petals and the poised buds still waiting to open, when a glint of green—alive, metallic, almost jewel-like—caught my eye. There on the bloom was a Pure Green Sweat Bee, almost certainly Augochlora pura, one of the loveliest native bees of eastern woodlands. The name hardly prepares one for the reality. “Green” suggests leaf or moss or some dull vegetal shade. But this bee wore green the way a gemstone wears light. It seemed less colored than illuminated, as though the afternoon sun had condensed into a living body and taken to wing.

What moved me most was the scale of it. The bee was tiny beside the flower, and the flower itself was small in the wide republic of the forest floor. Yet in that little meeting—bee and toothwort, insect and ephemeral—there existed an entire system of ancient reciprocity. The bee had not arrived there by accident. Nor had the flower opened in innocence. Each belonged to the other’s world.

Here is the Pure Green Sweat Bee in a detail of the previous photograph.

The life of a sweat bee is far more complex than its modest size suggests. Augochlora pura is one of our native solitary bees. Unlike honey bees, it does not belong to a great colony with combs and a queen. A female builds and provisions her own nest, often in rotting wood or soft decaying logs, an apt choice for a woodland species. She gathers pollen and nectar, forms a food mass for her offspring, lays an egg, and seals the chamber. Her labor is quiet, uncelebrated, and essential. She is one small carrier of spring fertility, moving genes through the forest one flower visit at a time.

The common name “sweat bee” comes from a habit some species have of landing on human skin to sip salts from perspiration, but there was nothing comic or pesky about this one. On the toothwort it was wholly itself: intent, methodical, radiant. It moved with a professional seriousness from bloom to bloom, entering the white flowers where the reproductive parts stood ready. Pollen clung to its body. The flower offered nectar and pollen as food; the bee, without contract or plan, carried the plant’s future outward. Evolution has made such meetings beautiful, but beauty is not the goal. Continuance is.

And yet beauty is what we are given to see.

The Cutleaf Toothwort has its own intricate life history. It spreads not only by seed but also through underground rhizomes, toothed in form, which gave rise to the older name “toothwort.” Those pale subterranean stems hold stored energy from previous seasons, allowing the plant to rise quickly when soil temperatures soften and light still reaches the woodland floor. It is a plant of patience and timing, of long preparation for a brief display. Its flowers are modest, not showy in the garden-center sense, but perfectly fitted to the early spring woods: visible enough to pollinators, pale enough to stand out against the brown duff, structured for efficiency.

There is also an evolutionary poignancy in the fact that many spring ephemerals depend on the first wave of insect activity after winter. Bees like Augochlora pura emerge into a world that is only beginning to supply forage. A flowering woodland plant in April is an opened pantry, a signal fire, a necessary event in the calendar of survival. Likewise, a native bee visiting those flowers is a participant in a relationship shaped over vast stretches of time. Forest floor, rhizome, petal, pollen grain, bee body, hollow wood nest—all of it is linked.

Standing there with my camera, I felt once again how often wonder arrives disguised as minuteness. The grand spectacles of nature announce themselves: waterfalls, hawks, autumn hillsides, a full moon lifting over a ridge. But this was a smaller magnificence, requiring the humility to stoop, to wait, to look closely enough for significance to emerge from what many walkers would simply call “little white flowers.” The Mundy Wildflower Garden, on an afternoon like this, was displaying as well as conducting spring.

The leaf litter around the plant only deepened the impression. Last year’s fallen leaves were still present, curled and dry, forming the brown text from which the new season writes its first green sentences. Out of that apparent dormancy rose the toothed leaves and white flowers of Cardamine concatenata, and upon them came the emerald bee, a living spark of pollinating purpose. Death feeding life; old canopy nourishing new growth; a forest renewing itself not through spectacle but through a thousand precise exchanges.

I lingered longer than I meant to. That happens to me often in spring. One flower leads to another, one patch of sunlight to another, and then some small drama of natural history arrests the day. But this encounter felt especially complete. The Cutleaf Toothwort embodied the speed, discipline, and elegance of the spring ephemeral strategy. The Pure Green Sweat Bee embodied the brilliance and necessity of native pollinators, creatures upon whose unrecorded labor the health of so many ecosystems depends. Together they made visible a truth the woods are always speaking: survival is collaborative, and beauty often arises where need and adaptation meet.

When I finally moved on, I carried with me the feeling that I had witnessed a brief transaction in the old woodland economy, a little shining exchange older than any path through the garden, older than the institutions built around it, older even than the names we now give to bee and blossom. On an April afternoon, among the leaves of last year, I had found a subject for a photograph within a moment in which evolution, ecology, and grace stood together in one small white flower.

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Discovering Large-Flowered Bellwort Near Mundy Wildflower Garden in Ithaca, New York

On an April afternoon along Fall Creek near Cornell Botanic Gardens, I found my first colony of Large-flowered Bellwort, Uvularia grandiflora—a quiet woodland wildflower shaped by spring light, pollinators, and rich forest soil.

April 21, 2026June 2, 2026 MichaelStephenWills7 Comments

On an April afternoon in 2026, walking along Fall Creek near the Mundy Wildflower Garden at Cornell Botanic Gardens, I came for the first time upon a colony of Large-flowered Bellwort, Uvularia grandiflora, and stopped with the immediate feeling that spring had spoken in a new dialect. I had seen the season gathering itself all around me in buds, in damp leaf litter, in the first loosening of the woods from winter’s gray restraint. But this was different. These flowers did not announce themselves with bravado. They hung quietly beneath their leaves, as though the forest had shaped small yellow lanterns and then thought better of showing them too openly.

I raised my Canon EOS 5D Mark IV with the Canon EF 100 mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens and photographed them handheld at 1/640 second, f/8.0, trying to honor both their delicacy and their poise. Macro work often feels like an act of courtship with detail. One does not seize the subject; one approaches, waits, adjusts, breathes. In the bellworts, I found a plant that rewarded just this kind of attention. At first glance they seemed merely graceful. Then, looking more closely, I began to see their architecture.

These Largeflower Bellworts (Uvularia grandflora) are flourishing on the Cornell University Campus along Fall Creek, adjacent to the Mundy Wildflower Garden. Cornell University, Tompkins County, finger Lakes Region, New York State

Large-flowered Bellwort is a woodland perennial of rich deciduous forests, and it wears that identity in every part of its form. The stems rise smooth and pale, slender but assured, each seeming to carry its burden effortlessly. The leaves clasp the stem in that distinctive bellwort manner, as though the plant were being held in green hands. Beneath them hang the flowers, elongated and drooping, their six yellow tepals twisted and tapered into points. They are not the symmetrical stars of more open-faced blossoms. They are pendants, streamers, tassels of sunlight. In these flowers, yellow becomes motion. Even when still, they seem to trail the memory of a breeze.

The plant’s drooping habit is part of an evolutionary strategy. In the spring woods, before the canopy fully leafs out, ephemeral light reaches the forest floor in a brief annual inheritance. Bellwort rises into that window. It gathers energy quickly, blooms early, and makes use of the few bright weeks before the trees above turn the woodland dim and green. Its season is a narrow one, but not a meager one. This is a plant shaped by timing, by patience, by fidelity to a recurring opportunity. It lives where sunlight is not constant but bestowed.

There is something deeply moving in such an existence. We humans often admire the grand gestures of nature—the waterfall, the hawk, the thunderhead. But woodland wildflowers teach another lesson: that persistence may take the form of exquisite brevity. Uvularia grandiflora does not dominate the landscape. It waits for its rightful hour, then enters the year with quiet authority. It is one of spring’s soft-spoken triumphs.

Ecologically, the bellwort belongs to a community rather than a spectacle. It grows in moist, humus-rich soil, among the remains of last year’s leaves, where decay has become nourishment. Around it are the signatures of a healthy eastern woodland: filtered light, fungal work below ground, the gradual release of nutrients from the forest’s own past. Its roots do not stand apart from this economy of return. They participate in it. The beauty of the flower is inseparable from the labor of decomposition, the unseen commerce of roots and microbes, the long winter’s accumulation of leaf mold. Even here, elegance rises from compost.

And then there are its relationships with other living things. The flowers, nodding and somewhat enclosed, invite a certain intimacy from insect visitors. Bellwort is not a billboard flower. It asks a pollinator to come close, to enter its hanging chamber. Bumblebees, mason bees in the genus Osmia, sweat bees in Halictus and Lasioglossum, and mining bees in Andrena are among its visitors. One bee, Andrena uvulariae, bears in its very name the mark of this botanical relationship, having evolved a close association with Uvularia. To stand before these flowers is to imagine that hidden commerce of spring proceeding just beyond the edge of one’s notice: a queen bumblebee nosing into a drooping bloom, a small Osmia working deliberately among the tepals, an Andrena bee moving with ancient purpose through a plant lineage it has learned by evolution to trust.

What we call a wildflower is also an agreement, a contract written between blossom and insect long before we arrived to admire it. Even after flowering, the bellwort participates in the forest. Its seeds bear fleshy appendages that attract ants, which help carry them away and disperse them through the woodland.

Human beings, of course, enter this world differently. We bring names, lenses, curiosity, memory. We kneel in leaf litter with cameras. We identify, compare, and sometimes misidentify. We make gardens to protect what once grew without us, and then discover that our finest role is not mastery but attention. Finding Large-flowered Bellwort near Fall Creek reminded me that our relationship to such plants is at its best when it is grounded in humility. We do not improve these flowers by naming them; we improve ourselves by learning to see them.

And seeing them, truly seeing them, is no small thing. The petals in these photographs are veined with light. The stems carry a woodland grace, as if drawn in one uninterrupted line. The colony as a whole had the look of a little parliament of bells, each one bowed, each one speaking in silence. They seemed to me like fragments of sun that had slipped through the trees and decided to remain rooted there.

I left Fall Creek that afternoon with the feeling that I had been admitted to a finer scale of perception. Large-flowered Bellwort asks little of the passerby except slowness. Yet in return it offers a great deal: form, adaptation, timing, kinship, restraint. It shows how life in the spring woods is built from tact. Not only from survival, but from style.

Some plants shout the season into being. Bellwort lets it ring softly. And once heard, that note stays with you.

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Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Hepatica at Fillmore Glen: Quiet Wonders Beneath the Leafless Trees

On a quiet April walk in Fillmore Glen State Park, I found Hepatica acutiloba blooming beneath leafless trees—small, luminous flowers that turned the still-brown woods into a meditation on patience, renewal, and grace.

April 14, 2026April 20, 2026 MichaelStephenWills11 Comments

On April 11, 2026, I walked Fillmore Glen State Park beneath trees still bare, their branches opening the woods to the cool, unguarded light of early spring. The forest had not yet put on its full green speech. Last year’s leaves still covered the ground in shades of russet and tan, and among them, close to the earth, I found Hepatica acutiloba beginning to bloom.

These are flowers that ask for slowness. No one hurrying through the woods would fully see them. I had to kneel, lower myself into their world, and let my eyes adjust to their scale. Only then did they begin to reveal themselves: first as closed buds, pale and self-contained, then as opened white blossoms shining from the leaf litter like small votives in the dim cathedral of the spring woods.

This flower was a light lavender blossoms, still closed, rising from the forest floor on a delicate stems. The sun had reached in, and I made the image handheld, steadying the camera on the ground. Even unopened, it seemed to hold light within itself, as though the day had touched it but not yet persuaded it to unfold. I have always loved that about hepatica. It does not fling itself into spring. It listens first. It waits with an old intelligence, answering warmth and brightness in its own time.

A second cluster of closed blossoms rested among evergreen fern fronds, which appear to be Christmas fern, Polystichum acrostichoides. Their leathery green pinnae, carried through the winter, formed a fitting companion to these early flowers. Together they seemed to embody one of the quiet truths of the April woods: that renewal does not come as a sudden trumpet blast, but by degrees. First the fern still holding its winter green. Then the bud. Then the opening. Then the day when the whole hillside begins to feel like a promise being kept.

White Hepatica Blossoms with Christmas Fern

The last three photographs showed the same group of white hepatica blossoms growing on a south-facing slope beneath a tree root. By then I had placed the camera on my Manfrotto BeFree tripod, and I worked more deliberately, grateful for the patience that such flowers invite. One image was made in sunlight; the others when the sun had passed behind a cloud. That change mattered. In the sun, the white blossoms seemed almost to ring like little bells of light. Under cloud, they grew quieter, softer, more inward. The mood deepened. The exposed root above them became a rough shelter, a woodland lintel, and the blossoms beneath gathered into a hidden chapel of spring.

Hepatica acutiloba in sunlight on an early spring afternoon. Fillmore Glen New York State Park, Cayuga County, Finger Lakes Region, New York State. April 2026

I stood there for a long while, looking not only at the flowers but at the place that had made their blooming possible. A south-facing slope gathers warmth earlier in the season. The root held the bank in place and offered a small measure of protection. The leaf litter insulated the soil. The ferns kept their green nearby. Nothing in such a scene is accidental. The woods are full of these small negotiations between light, temperature, shelter, and time. Hepatica, for all its delicacy, is a master of them.

Here a cloud hid the sun, the blossoms in side view.

We call these flowers spring ephemerals, and the name is true in one sense. Their season of bloom is brief. Before long, the trees overhead will leaf out, and the bright interval in which they thrive will begin to close. Yet “ephemeral” can sound too fragile a word for a plant so well adapted, so seasoned in its timing. Hepatica does not merely appear and vanish. It endures. Its leaves persist through winter. Its flowering is tuned to a narrow ecological opening, one shaped by the still-bare canopy of the deciduous forest. For a few precious weeks, before shade deepens, it steps into the light and makes use of what the season offers.

The sun still hidden by a cloud, the blossoms face on.

Perhaps that is why hepatica has so often found a place in literature and nature writing. It carries a symbolism that feels earned rather than assigned. It arrives when the world still bears winter’s austerity, and so its bloom seems less decorative than revelatory. Generations of observers have seen in such flowers a sign that the year turns first in whispers. Not through spectacle, but through fidelity. A small flower opening under bare branches can change the whole moral weather of a walk.

That was how it felt to me at Fillmore Glen. The woods were still mostly brown and gray, still waiting for leaf and shade and birdsong in full chorus. Yet these blossoms had already crossed some invisible threshold. They were spring in its purest form: not abundance, but inception. Not the full choir, but the first clear note.

Photography, in such moments, becomes for me an act of receiving. The changing light, the choice of aperture, the longer exposures when the sun went behind a cloud, the shift from handholding to bracing to tripod—all of it asked for attention. Hepatica does not yield itself to haste. It asks me to be present enough to notice what kind of light it is standing in, what kind of slope it has chosen, what old leaves still surround it, what green companions remain from winter. The camera only deepens that act of seeing.

I left Fillmore Glen feeling that I had witnessed something both small and immense. These flowers were no larger than a coin, yet they altered the whole forest around them. The leaf litter no longer seemed merely dead, but sheltering. The bare trees no longer seemed empty, but expectant. In the presence of hepatica, the woods felt poised on the edge of utterance.

That may be the lasting wonder of these early blooms. They do not overwhelm. They steady. They remind me that beauty often comes close to the ground, half-hidden, speaking softly. In the leafless woods of April, that soft speech can feel like grace.

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Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

McLean Bogs in Early Spring: Pitcher Plants, Skunk Cabbage, a Quiet Walk with Grandchildren

A quiet early spring walk through McLean Bogs reveals pitcher plants, skunk cabbage, and the subtle beauty of glacial wetlands shared with grandchildren.

April 7, 2026April 20, 2026 MichaelStephenWills14 Comments

The path into McLean Bogs begins without ceremony, a narrowing of the world. The road falls away, the trees gather closer, and the ground softens underfoot, remembering water. You arrive at a threshold. The air seems altered, quieter, carrying a faint mineral stillness, as though the glacier that shaped this place has not entirely withdrawn its presence.

McLean Bog, Tompkins County, New York State part of Cornell Botanical Gardens

The pond holds the sky with patient fidelity. Its surface is dark, reflective, contemplative—mirroring a band of bare trees and the pale sweep of early-spring cloud. Nothing disturbs it. No wind, no bird, no ripple of urgency. It is the kind of water that asks nothing of you except attention. And in giving it, you feel the pace of your own thoughts begin to slow, as if they too must match the bog’s ancient tempo.

At the edge, grasses stand in muted gold, last year’s growth bowed but not broken. They frame the water as do an unfinished sentence. You can imagine how, in another month, this quiet will be interrupted by green—by the rising insistence of life. But today, the landscape is held in suspension, between endings and beginnings.

On the boardwalk, my grandsons, Sam and Rory, find what the place offers most readily: evidence. A small gray pellet of fur and bone delicately assembled and then discarded. Nearby, a twisting length of scat, marked with the unmistakable language of survival. These are not the symbols we teach in books, but they are legible all the same. The boys lean close, curious, unbothered by what adults might turn away from. To them, this is not unpleasant—it is a clue, a message left behind by an unseen life moving through the same narrow corridors of forest and marsh.

There is something honest in that exchange. The bog does not disguise itself. It offers no curated beauty, no ornamental flourish. What it gives instead is continuity—the quiet assurance that life persists in forms both delicate and stark. And the children, without pretense, receive it as it is.

Deeper in the woods, a small structure of branches rises against the trunk of a tree, a lean-to, improvised and incomplete. Its architecture is simple, almost instinctive, a tentative answer to the question of shelter. Sam and Rory stand before it, boots sunk slightly in the soft ground, their bodies close together in that unconscious gesture of kinship. One leans into the other, not for support exactly, but for connection.

Behind them, the forest extends in gray and brown, a lattice of trunks and fallen limbs. It is not the lush abundance of summer, but something more revealing—a stripped-down anatomy of place. Here you see the bones of the landscape, the structure beneath the surface. And in that exposure, there is a different kind of beauty, one relies on form, on persistence, on time itself.

The boardwalk carries you out into the open bog, where the ground gives way to water and moss. It is a narrow path, elevated just enough to allow passage, and it bends gently, as though respecting the terrain rather than imposing upon it. Rory walks ahead, small against the expanse, following the curve without question. There is trust in that movement—the simple faith that the path will hold, that it leads somewhere worth going.

Around you, the bog stretches in subtle variation. Patches of standing water reflect a green that seems almost improbable in this season, the work of mosses and algae that thrive where others cannot. The vegetation is low, dense, textured—a mosaic rather than a meadow. And here and there, like small embers against the muted field, the pitchers rise.

The pitcher plants are both beautiful and unsettling. Their deep red forms, veined with intricate patterns, hold themselves open to the world. They are vessels, yes, and thresholds, invitations with consequence. Insects, drawn by color or scent, enter and do not leave. It is easy to think of them as passive, but they are anything but. They are active participants in the exchange of life, taking what the poor soil cannot provide.

You kneel to look more closely, drawn in despite yourself. The interior of the pitcher is a map of intention—every line, every curve serving a purpose. And yet, there is an elegance to it, a precision that feels almost artistic. It is not cruelty, exactly, but necessity rendered with a kind of quiet grace.

Elsewhere, the first signs of skunk cabbage emerge, their dark, curved forms pushing through saturated ground. They are early risers, indifferent to cold, generating their own heat to break through frost. They do not wait for spring; they create their own version of it. Scattered across the forest floor, they resemble a field of small, listening shapes—each one a declaration that life does not always arrive gently.

And so you move through the bog as a participant in its slow unfolding. Sam and Rory run ahead, then return, their boots muddy, their hands full of nothing in particular. They do not need to name what they have seen. The experience is enough.

As we return to the preserve edge, this sign stands—formal, declarative, assigning significance in the language of designation: Registered Natural Landmark. This place is important, rare, worthy of protection. But the words feel almost secondary after what you have just walked through.

McLEAN BOGS has been designated a REGISTERED NATURAL LANDMARK

This site possesses exceptional value as an illustration of the nation’s natural heritage and contributes to a better understanding of man’s environment.
National Park Service, United States Department of the Interior 1973.

Because the true measure of McLean Bogs is not in its classification, but in its effect. It changes the rhythm of your thinking. It draws your attention downward—to the ground beneath your feet, to the subtle movements of water and growth, to the quiet negotiations of life that continues with or without witnesses.

And perhaps that is what Thoreau meant, though he said it more simply: that heaven is not only above us, distant and abstract, but also here, immediate and tangible, woven into the fabric of the earth itself.

In the bog, that idea does not feel like metaphor. It feels like observation.

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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.

April 1, 2026April 20, 2026 MichaelStephenWills9 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.

March 25, 2026 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.