Category: Spring

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.

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

A Ride to Reavis Ranch

Some history and exploration

MichaelStephenWills16 Comments

….continued from the chapter “Desert Luxuries”

After hitching the saddled buckskin, named “Nugget,” and lightly packed pinto to trees beside the trail, The Searcher climbed up to my camp for a visit. I started water for tea and soon we were chatting. Right from the start The Searcher asked for privacy. Devoted to searching the Superstitions for the gold of the “Lost Dutchman Mine,” he organized his expeditions from a staging point near Phoenix and spent nearly sixty days each year in the wilderness. Part of his preparation was a desert survival course provided by the Reavis Mountain School, conducted by Peter Bigfoot.

An Invitation from The Searcher

The Searcher described a place near Pine Creek, he called it “Circlestone,” a large, almost perfect circle of precisely fitted stone walls, on the slopes of Mound Mountain above the headwaters of Pine Creek. My sister, Diane, and I found Circlestone on backpack expeditions March and November 2006. WThe site exceeded our expectations, the walls appeared less built than patiently persuaded from the mountain itself.

Here is a panorama from March 2006, southwest from the forests of juniper and pinion on the slopes of Mound Mountain.. The southern tip of Reavis Valley is to the right, from there Arizona Trail lead to White Mountain in the distance. It was taken on a later trip, in November of 2006 when my sister, Diane, and I visited Circlestone.

Click any photograph for a larger image.

The Searcher also told of Elisha Marcus Reavis, who settled the Valley west of Pine Creek in 1874. At one point, a band of Apaches planned to kill Reavis, but were respectful of his reputation as a rifle shot. They were waiting him out across from the his dugout, when Reavis stripped naked and, with wild hair and a flaming red beard, charged their camp, knives in both hands. The Apaches rode off, wary of his insane behavior, and never bothered him again.

We talked about my prospects and plans when The Searcher offered to take me to the Reavis Valley the next day, on horseback. There is a large apple orchard there and, this being April, we’d be treated to masses of apple blossoms. The day after Reavis Ranch, I could pack out with him down the Arizona Trail, past the Reavis Mountain School, over Campaign Creek and drive back to the Lost Dutchman Park. I readily agreed.

To Reavis Ranch on Horseback

The following morning rose slowly from colorless darkness, accompanied by thin birdsong and the whitening glow of high clouds. When the Searcher arrived around 8 am he was leading the pinto, introduced as Colorado, equipped with a western saddle instead of a pack. As an absolute novice trail rider, I rode while The Searcher held Colorado’s lead rope. The reins were wrapped around the saddle horn, leaving me to hang on and enjoy the view and the swishing tail of Nugget, the buckskin.

The 2.5 mile trail to Reavis from Pine Creek is typical of the eastern Superstitions, minimally improved, dramatically uneven, littered with boulders polished smooth by decades of hooves, floodwater, and erosion. From Pine Creek there’s a climb of a 631 feet to a 5,278 foot elevation, where the trail meanders beneath a dramatic red cliff with a view of the pinyon/juniper forests on the slopes of Mound Mountain. As he picked our way, The Searcher pointed out the sights. “Circlestone is somewhere over there, a ring of stones overgrown with Alligator Juniper.” I could do little more than observe; photography was entirely out of the question. The trail twisted around the mountain like a dry stream remembering water.

A cliff along the trail to Reavis Ranch offered the ledges and shadowed cover preferred by cougars. In daylight it posed little danger to mounted riders, and attacks against horses were rare. In all our years in Arizona, neither of us had seen more than the tip of a tail slipping behind brush.

This had been a lush April after a wet winter, and small game was plentiful. Only a sick cat would have been desperate enough to stalk horses. The darker possibility—a cougar infected with rabies after encountering a diseased animal at a water source—was a thought neither of us lingered on for long.

Eventually, the path descended steeply to Reavis Creek, the valley floor and intersected with the Reavis Ranch trail. Heading south the Reavis Ranch trail passes the site of a long abandoned ranch. What remained of the adobe and stone ranch house stood on a level bench overlooking what had once been the corral and a broad open meadow.

Open field at near the juncture of the trail from Pine Creek with the Reavis Ranch trail.

Apple trees in bloom sween from the former site of the ranch house. There used to be a pond near this spot. With a little imagination, the trail from Pine Creek can be seen on the far ridge.

Reavis Ranch Trail, foreground, traverses the valley length north to south. The Arizona Trail from Pine Creek following below the red rock cliffs in the distance.

The US Forest Service razed the building after it “burned to the ground” Thanksgiving 1991. I would not call what is left “a foundation,” it is a platform where the house stood. In the photograph, the surviving tiles still suggest the modest warmth of a lived-in home. I’ve seen old photographs of the structure with a large pond to the left of this view, a door and simple porch face east and the pond used to hold irrigation water. The leveled ruin possessed the melancholy geometry of abandoned human hope.

Turning from the ruin, another structure came into view. Built into the western slope above the valley floor was a hexagonal adobe foundation overlooking the remains of the ranch house across the trail.

My interpretation rests partly on the surrounding terrain. South of the structure runs the shallow trace of an excavated canal, suggesting that water from upper Reavis Creek—or one of its tributaries—was diverted into a catchment basin before being stored or directed toward irrigation.

Whatever its exact purpose, the site commands sweeping views of the central valley and is a beautiful place to watch evening settle over the orchard.

Turning from the ruin, another structure came into view. Built into the western slope above the valley floor was a hexagonal adobe foundation overlooking the remains of the ranch house across the trail.

The Searcher led me to a place a few hundred yards south, in a narrowing of the valley, where he let Colorado and Nugget roam free. The horses appreciated the level, open spaces and I enjoyed the Ponderosa pines on the west valley slope. We sat on the smooth trunks of fallen trees, 4 feet in diameter, near Reavis Creek.

Colorado took this opportunity to bolt, headed south. We took off after him into and through a thicket of locust trees where The Searcher cornered Colorado to regain control. “He was abused by a previous owner and can be difficult at times” was how The Searcher put it.

We were close to the end of Reavis Valley where Reavis Creek originates from the drainage of White Mountain, to the west.

We headed north here, back to the ranch house site, to the lush new grass of the apple orchard.

Nugget in Horse Heaven

Nugget grazed, tethered with plenty of slack, with the calm assurance of an animal that knew it had arrived in horse heaven. This photograph of the pair shows their personalities, Colorado edgy, Nugget content to feast while the grass is available. The orchard grass rolled in waves around their legs like green water beneath anchored boats.

Colorado on the alert while Nugget grazes, typical of their personalities.

Click me for the next post for photographs and more history of this Apple Orchard in the Superstition Wilderness.

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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.

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.

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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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.

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.

Lavender Hepatica Blossoms, closed

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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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.

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.

The path is flooded
Your task: find pitcher plants in the middle distance

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.

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

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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The Dún Aonghasa cheval de fries field

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

MichaelStephenWills17 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MichaelStephenWills17 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking back while climbing the steep bluff

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moss, grass and pinecones on an overlook of Fall Creek

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

References

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

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Historical Wonders of Ashford Castle and Its Natural Surroundings

At Ashford Castle, swans glide on the Cong River’s glassy waters, weaving together myth, history, and cinema in a timeless reflection of Ireland’s enduring spirit.

MichaelStephenWills9 Comments

Headed south from Cong Village, past the venerable Cong Abbey then Saint Mary’s Church of Ireland, the road bends into the Ashford Castle estate. Time seems to shift here. The stonework of the abbey lingers in memory, only to give way to manicured parkland, ancient trees, and the shimmer of water. The road itself, aptly named Ashford Castle, carries the traveler to a place where history, nature, and imagination meet.

I do not recall passing a guard box on my first visit, though one now stands firmly on the roadside, manned and proper, as though the estate were never meant to be entered without ceremony. In truth, Ashford Castle has always carried the air of a threshold—between village and wild, past and present, myth and reality.

Soon the road brings one to the banks of the Cong River. Here the water widens, flowing calm and sure, and across it rises the battlemented silhouette of Ashford Castle itself. Its towers, turrets, and stony walls seem to grow from the riverbank like something inevitable, a fortress transformed into elegance. The castle’s mirrored reflection on the water doubles the grandeur, as though the real and imagined castle exist side by side.

It is no wonder filmmakers found inspiration here. Scenes from the classic 1952 film The Quiet Man—the tale of Sean Thornton, played by John Wayne, and the fiery Mary Kate Danaher, embodied by Maureen O’Hara—were shot on the far bank of this very river. To watch them walking by these waters is to see Ashford Castle woven into Hollywood’s Irish dreamscape, a backdrop both romantic and enduring.

Yet long before cinema, the river was already a stage. The Cong River is a natural marvel. It emerges from the same Carboniferous limestone that shapes the Burren of County Clare—an austere landscape of limestone pavements etched with fossils and caves, where rare alpine and Mediterranean plants thrive among ancient tombs. Through fissures in this ancient bedrock, the waters of Lough Mask find their way underground before rising again at Cong. This subterranean journey, through stone filters laid down some 350 million years ago, leaves the water clarified, luminous, and cold. By the time it slides past Ashford Castle, it has the purity of glass.

It is in this clarity while walking the opposite bank on a different morning I found a parent swan and its cygnet feeding. The adult glided, immaculate, its long neck bowed as drops of river fell from its beak. At its side, the cygnet paddled with earnest strokes, gray down still clinging, a fragile shadow of what it would one day become. Together they traced a quiet path across the water, ripples fanning behind them.

Few images so perfectly match their setting: a medieval castle, guardian of centuries, reflected in the same waters where these swans carried on their timeless rhythm of nurture and growth. It was as if the river itself composed the scene—a blending of stone, water, bird, and sky that belonged nowhere else but here.

The swan has long been a symbol in Irish lore. The Children of Lir, cursed to live as swans for nine hundred years, are among the most haunting figures of Celtic mythology. To see the white bird with its offspring before Ashford Castle was to glimpse that myth breathing still, alive on the Cong River.

Photographers know the difficulty of capturing water and stone without losing the life between them. On that morning, however, the river gave freely—its surface alternately smooth as glass and dappled with breeze. Stones at the water’s edge appeared like stepping-stones into history. Each frame revealed another face of the estate: the wide reach of the Cong, the castle framed by trees, the play of cloud shadows across the current.

The castle itself, though reshaped as a luxury retreat, still speaks of older times. Founded in the 13th century by the Anglo-Normans, Ashford passed through centuries of conquest and change before becoming, in the 19th century, a romantic Victorian pile. Today its battlements remain picturesque rather than defensive, but the sense of continuity—of lives unfolding along these banks—has not faded.

Standing there, camera in hand, I was struck by the layered meaning of this place. The Cong River flows from unseen caverns, purified by limestone older than memory. It nourishes swans, reeds, and trout alike. It reflects both a castle and a sky. Along its opposite bank, legends of cinema and Celtic lore alike find footing.

As the swan and cygnet drifted slowly downstream, I thought of them as part of the same enduring thread. Parent and child mirrored castle and village, past and future, permanence and change. The ripples they left widened until they touched both banks, an unbroken gesture across centuries.

Click this link to read another Ireland story “The Cloigtheach of Glendalough.”

Click this link to read another Ireland story “Killeany Bouy.”
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Discover Cushendun: A Coastal Gem in Northern Ireland

MichaelStephenWills7 Comments

Cushendun (from Irish: Cois Abhann Doinne, meaning “foot of the River Dun”) is a small coastal village in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. It sits off the A2 coast road between Cushendall and Ballycastle.

It has a sheltered harbor and lies at the mouth of the River Dun and Glendun, one of the nine Glens of Antrim. The Mull of Kintyre in Scotland is only about 15 miles away across the North Channel and can be seen easily on clear days.

In the 2001 Census it had a population of 138 people. Cushendun is part of Causeway Coast and Glens district.

SONY DSC

Here are several of the information placards near the harbor explaining some local history.

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Ballyteerin townland, where Shane O’Neill was killed, is on the road to Torr Head.

Reference: Wikipedia, “Cushendun.”

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