Tag Archives: Ontario

Into the May Woods Once Again

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On Victoria Day weekend, with almost two warm weeks having elapsed since my first May wildflower foray into the woods flanking the dirt road near our cottage on Lake Muskoka, near Torrance, Ontario I was curious to see what else had come into bloom.  This time, knowing the blackflies and mosquitoes would be active, I came prepared with a Coghlan’s head net for my hat.  What a lifesaver that was!

As I left our place on the Page’s Point peninsula, I noticed the sand cherry in flower down by the shore. Prunus pumila is a plant not only of sandy shores along the Great Lakes, but of smaller lakes, too. It also emerges from soil in granite outcrops, like Lake Muskoka.

Spring bees love the sand cherry flowers. This is an andrena mining bee.

Lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium) were in flower, too. Fingers crossed for sufficient rain to produce fruit.

I also noticed the rather subtle flowers of limber honeysuckle (Lonicera dioica), another Muskoka native.

Further down the path was a little stand of gaywings, aka fringed milkwort (Polygala paucifolia).

Back on the dirt road, hepatica, spring beauty and dogtooth violet were all finished, but I found some sweet little downy yellow violets (V. pubescens) in the grassy centre of a neighbour’s driveway.

Wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) was now in full bloom.

False Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum racemosum) was just about to flower…..

…. .and across the road, little starflower was becoming used to its new name, Lysimachia borealis (formerly Trientalis).

I stepped down into the wetland on either side of the road to get a better look at the violet that my Field Botanists of Ontario Facebook page had identified for me in my last blog. You can see it in the mud under the emerging royal ferns (Osmunda regalis var. spectabilis). It’s called Macloskey’s violet or small white violet (Viola macloskeyi) and is native to much of northeast N. America. This is when I really appreciated my bug veil!

Here’s a close-up look at the violet.

In the wetland on the opposite side of the road, cinnamon ferns (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) had mostly unfurled since my last visit.

There were masses of Macloskey’s violets here too, but what was that white flower at the edge of the swale?

It was wild calla or water arum (Calla palustris) – my first time seeing this lovely marginal aquatic plant.

Wild calla bears the spathe-and-spadix floral arrangement typical of the Arum family (Araceae). According to the Illinois Wildflowers site: “The spadix has mostly perfect (bisexual) flowers… These small flowers are densely arranged across the entire surface of the spadix and they are numerous. Each perfect flower has a green ovoid pistil that is surrounded at its base by 6-9 white stamens”. Flies are its principal pollinators. After flowering ends, the spathe and spadix both turn green. As fruit develops, it turns bright-red.

I actually made a little video of my foray into the wet areas and you can hear the mosquitoes in the blue violet segment, as well as the lovely Muskoka birds. It ends with the chokecherries (Prunus virginiana) further up the dirt road.

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The chokecherries had just been in bud two weeks earlier, but were now in full flower….

….. and hosting native bees as well as this little beetle.

In the woods, beaked hazel (Corylus cornuta) had leafed out.

Eastern columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) grew here and there on shallow soil atop rock outcrops.

I saw exactly one rock harlequin (Capnoides sempervirens) but it was difficult to capture with my cellphone so I’ve added a camera closeup from a previous spring behind our own cottage.

And of course loads of wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana).

The forest floor under this sugar maple seedling (Acer saccharum) was thickly carpeted with the leaves of countless species still awaiting their time to shine – or perhaps never rising at all, but merely part of the great fabric of nature here.

There were also seedling oaks, both red oak (Quercus rubra) and white oak (Quercus alba). The latter, in this neck of the woods, never seems to get bigger than a small scrubby tree.

Those oak photos were the last ones I made for 30 minutes because I got turned around and lost in the woods. It was only for a half-hour, but it felt like hours. I climbed over and under downed trees and came to hemlock stands and fairly high cliffs, beyond which lay… more forest. Since it was mid-afternoon, I followed the sun, thinking I needed to go south – but I was in fact walking more west than south.  Nothing looked familiar – I was really lost, and getting thirsty in the heat!   Feeling a growing sense of panic, I called my husband Doug back at the cottage. “You need to veer left as you’re looking at the sun to find the dirt road,” he said. Within 10 minutes I started to recognize some of the plants I’d seen earlier and then I heard the voices of children and saw the roof of a truck heading down the dirt road. Whew!  Next time I won’t wander without taking water and leaving a trail of cookie crumbs! (Note to self: also get compass and GPS apps on phone.)  The arrows below with our cottage marked in red approximate my wanderings.

When I got back to the dirt road, I found the first instar of the gypsy moth caterpillars that will  ravage our Muskoka oak and pine trees this summer. Very tiny, it was crawling up the leaf of striped maple or moose maple (Acer pensylvancum) which was also sporting its pendant green flowers. Some of my readers will recall my 2020 blog A Gypsy Moth Summer on Lake Muskoka in which I described how I used a homemade oil spray to kill the egg masses.

Heading back to the cottage, I found maple-leaf viburnum (V. acerifolium) in bud…..

….. and a few trilliums that had not yet withered in the unseasonal May heat. And I had learned a few valuable lessons about going into the Muskoka bush alone!

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If you want to read about my meadow gardens in Muskoka, have a look at this blog from 2017, Muskoka Wild – Gardening in Cottage Country.

Into the May Woods on Lake Muskoka

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What a beautiful weekend I enjoyed recently. Not only was it Mother’s Day and I had my first-born, ‘two-days-before-Mother’s Day’ son nearby, but we enjoyed a walk up the dirt road behind neighbouring cottages on Lake Muskoka near Torrance, a few hours north of Toronto, and found a treasure trove of native spring wildflowers on both the lake side and the crown land side. The photo below is of the road from another May. This year, the sustained, cool weather meant leaves were just breaking on the trees and best of all the blackflies had not yet emerged!

Ecologically, the address of the dirt road near Bala marked with the red arrow, below, is (broadest to narrowest classification) Ontario Shield Ecozone, Georgian Bay Ecoregion 5E, Huntsville Ecodistrict 5E8.  According to the provincial classification: “The Huntsville Ecodistrict is an undulating to rolling landscape underlain by Precambrian bedrock. The terrain, particularly in the west, has been heavily influenced by glacial Lake Algonquin that inundated the area about 11,000 years ago. As the land emerged from underneath the ice, morainal material was deposited. The area was then submerged under the glacial lake, which removed or reworked much of the material through wave action and fluctuating lake levels. The western portion of the ecodistrict is characterized by a mosaic of bedrock ridges with a discontinuous, shallow layer of morainal material, bare bedrock, and pockets of deeper glaciolacustrine sediment.”  Most of our district is covered by deciduous and mixed forest, including northern red oak, red maple (sugar maples predominate in the east part of the ecodistrict), yellow birch, paper birch, American beech, basswood, eastern hophornbeam, eastern hemlock and eastern white pine.  

Though we’ve had our cottage for two decades, it was precisely the right moment to enjoy a bounty of spring wildflowers I’d never seen flowering all together, most of them dependent on the dappled light under deciduous trees before the leaves emerge to cast heavier shade. Plants like round-lobed hepatica, Anemone americana, both the white and purple forms.

Many gardeners think they need to do a clean-up in autumn or spring, removing every leaf to expose bare soil; indeed, I heard a leaf-blower droning away on a cottage property nearby. But nature is under no such misapprehension; the spring understory here on Lake Muskoka is thick with successive years of red oak and beech leaves, all contributing to the health of the soil and the richness of the forest. Hepatica has no trouble emerging through them, pushing fresh new leaves and fuzzy flower stems up through last year’s bronzed foliage which then withers away.

Like many plants, DNA sequencing has resulted in hepaticas undergoing a scientific name change. They’re now placed in the Anemone genus.

Carolina springbeauty (Claytonia caroliniana) was showing its mauve-striped face here and there too, the flowers so tiny they’re easy to overlook. It grows from a corm and is one of our spring ephemerals, plants that disappear and become dormant by summer.

I was struck by the proximity of the spring beauty and the decomposing stump bedecked by turkey tail fungus (Trametes versicolor)…..

….and another fungi-rich stump flanked by masses of red maple seedlings (Acer rubrum). The coming and the going, the cycle of decomposition and renewal in this mixed forest.

Birches (Betula spp.) are not long-lived compared to other deciduous trees, usually around 50-70 years in our northern climate. Sometimes decomposition begins when they’re still standing, like this trunk with tinder fungus (Fomes fomentarius) all the way up.  It’s called tinder fungus because it can be used to make a fire; in fact the Tyrolean Ice Man Ötzi, whose 5000-year-old corpse was revealed by melting glaciers near Bolzano, Italy in 1991, had a piece on a cord around his neck.  

When birches fall, it takes little time before moss spores find them and begin to spread their green tentacles.  Before long, the birch becomes part of the forest floor.

Though rare, a lightning strike can also kill a birch.  This one would have made a loud crack in one of our summer thunderstorms.

I found this juxtaposition poignant: a young American beech sapling (Fagus grandifolia) growing against the decaying trunk of a beech killed by beech-bark disease, a terrible insect-fungus plague taking a toll on our central Ontario forests, especially those where beeches grow with hemlocks. The vector is a beech-scale insect (Cryptococcus fagisuga) which, like many killers of our native species (e.g. Dutch elm disease) is an invasive from Europe. It admits a canker fungus called Neonectria faginata.

Groundcedar or fan club-moss, Diphastriastum digitatum is a lycopod, a throwback to the Carboniferous era (360-300 million years ago) when spore-forming plants like these formed forests of giant trees. Their decomposition and burial over millions of years gave the world its coal deposits.

In low-lying areas, we found another spring ephemeral: dogtooth violet or trout lily Erythronium americanum which is not a violet but is a member of the lily family, Liliaceae.  The “trout” part is because the mottled leaves resemble brook trout.

Although it looks like the flower has six yellow petals, in fact the reverse view shows the three brownish sepals. 

The ecology of dogtooth violet is fascinating. In some parts of these woods, it made up almost the entire ground layer, but only a few plants bore flowers, the rest just had leaves. In fact, Erythronium americanum takes 4-7 years to flower, and researchers have calculated that in any given population only 0.5% will bear flowers.

There’s a little wetland along the road that drains the forest from the west. It’s where spring peepers sing in April and mosquitoes gather when the weather warms.

I went down onto the boggy mosses to get closer to the hummocks of cinnamon fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) which had just emerged….

….. with their croziers wrapped in gauzy hairs. Cinnamon and royal fern (Osmunda regalis) are the principal wetland ferns here.

In springtime and after heavy summer rains, ground water moves through this wetland, passes under the dirt road in a culvert and wends its way as a creek through our friends’ property before splashing down into Lake Muskoka as a small waterfall. I made the video below to show it.

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We found coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) in flower at the edge of the road.

 Native to Europe, Asia and North Africa, coltsfoot was used as a medicinal by early settlers – its name comes from the Latin “tussis” for cough and “ago”, meaning to act upon – and seed has made its way to throughout the region.

Ferns unfurled their croziers from the moss in the low spots.

We noticed that several of the hemlocks and pines along the road had an orange-red flush to their bark, but only on the side exposed to the light. Some research revealed that this is a fairly recent condition called Red Bark Phenomenon or RBP, having been discovered and named about 10 years ago in New England. It is caused by a filamentous green algae (Chlorophyta) tentatively identified as Trentophilia whose cytoplasm contains an orange-red pigment.

Patrick leaned into a little thicket of chokecherry (Prunus virginiana)….

….. not quite in flower.  He detected a minty-basil fragrance, though the twigs are occasionally described as having an ‘almond’ aroma.

It was at this point that we left the road and walked towards a rocky outcrop about 30 feet away. Maintaining the overhead hydro line here requires tree and brush cutting that provides a little more light than normal……

……and this area was rich with loads of spring ephemeral Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria)….

…. and the occasional common blue violet (Viola sororia).  

I loved this exposed bit of rock, typical of the metamorphic banded gneiss on this part of the Canadian Shield, a remnant of the Grenville Orogeny and more than a billion years old. (If you want a lot more amateur geology, have a peek at my recent blog memoir, ‘My Jaded Past, My Rocky Present’).  

I spotted an unfamiliar shrub on the lake side of the road and wandered in to check it out. It was American fly honeysuckle (Lonicera canadensis) with its paired, pendant, pale-yellow flowers.

The shrubs grew on top of the outcrop nearby – not showy, but an integral part of the ecosystem.

Finally, as we got close to the back of the East Bay Landing property, there were trilliums (T. grandiflorum). Not the vast colonies we would see on rises along Highway 38 and 400 later, just a few here and there with lots more getting set to bloom.

It was the perfect way to end our walk into the May woods on Lake Muskoka.

Pigments of My Imagination

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I’ve spent the past three weeks getting in touch with my inner child.  Seriously… or not so seriously. Maybe it’s Covid.  Maybe it’s the prospect of five months of winter with no travel and few opportunities to be with family and friends. Or maybe it’s just my enduring passion for the explosive foliage colours of fall.  This autumn, I felt the need to be more playful; it’s been so grim, all the news. So I acted as impresario and asked my autumn leaves to dream up their own dance acts. They were all so creative – I was terribly proud of them (only my geisha declined to dance). Thus, on October 25th a few brilliantly-coloured leaves from my backyard Washington thorn tree (Crateaegus phaenopyrum) suggested a line dance. Why not?  

That same day, a few of the tiniest, uppermost red leaves from my neighbour’s Freeman maple (Acer x freemanii) requested my help with a maypole. “But it’s almost Halloween,” I said. It didn’t matter – they were so keen on the alliteration!  So I agreed and made them a canopy from yellow ginkgo leaves.  “But where’s our maypole?” they asked. “I’m sorry, I’m tired of drawing with a mouse. Make do with what you’ve got,” I replied.  They were a little sad at first, but once the Morris music began they just started whirling those ribbons as if it was the first of May.

Then Señora Fothergilla got into the act. “Necesito bailar!” she cried, which I understand is Spanish for “I must dance!”  So I helped her fashion a sexy flamenco gown from the multi-hued leaves of some of the fothergilla shrubs in my pollinator gardens. She was suitably impressed that there were so many colours! “Olé!”   Así se baila Señora!

A few days later after a big wind, my boulevard ginkgo tree (Ginkgo biloba) tossed down masses of yellow fall leaves. Suddenly, nine little ballerinas were doing their pliés right in front of me. None were quite ready for principal roles, but they all agreed to be part of the Corps de Ballet.

A pair of perennial geranium leaves asked if they could be in my autumn show. They were so lovely, even with that tongue-twisting name, Geranium wlassovianum.  They asked if they could do a  “pas de deux”.  I said it’s usually a man and woman, but…whatever. It’s a modern world.

Look who sashayed in from my front garden hedge! Yes, Miss Burning Bush Belly Dancer herself, aka Euonymus alatus, jingling and jangling her beads. I reminded her that a lot of people wanted her gone, invasive exotic that she is. “Who cares,” she said, “These people are boring. I come from the Sultan’s palace wearing autumn red! I dance!”  We left it there.

Things lightened up considerably when I heard the tip-tapping feet of The Chorus Line: the pinnate dancers of the Kentucky coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus). Aren’t they sweet? “One singular sensation, every little step she takes/One thrilling combination, every move that she makes…” Ah, dear Marvin Hamlisch.

Then, before I could say, un, deux, trois, out came the Katsura Can-Can Dancers (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) trailing a whiff of cheap, burnt sugar eau de cologne. In between high kicks, they complained that they’d been gold the week before, but I was late picking them up and they’d already started to age a little. I assured them they were still très jolie.

The can-can dancers had barely left the stage when I heard steel drums! Yes, it was the Liquidambar Limbo trio (Liquidambar styraciflua) chewing sweet gum, as they do, and showing how me just lowwww he can go.

I told Cherry Charleston (Prunus serrulata ‘Kanzan’) there was no smoking indoors but she said, “Stop your gaping, I’m only vaping!”  What could I do? I let her off with a warning.

Oh my goodness. What a spectacle when the Ziegfeld’s Follies gal swanned out in her ridiculous costume. I mean, come on, I like Zelkova serrata too but couldn’t she have worn something a little less ostentatious?

The Busby Birchley (Betula papyrifera) girls lay down on the stage to do their routine, even though the floor was still sticky from the limbo trio. So sweet, those little paper birch leaves when they spin around like a kaleidoscope.

I was in Kyoto once, but it was springtime and the cherry blossoms were in bloom. Seeing this geisha walk under momiji, which is what the Japanese call their native maples (Acer palmatum), as it was turning colour on the first day of November kind of took my breath away. She declined to dance – “I only do that onstage in Gion with the other geishas.”  Who could argue?

And then it was time for the last act: three little wild strawberry sock-hoppers (Fragaria virginiana) from my cottage on Lake Muskoka. I brought them down in the car in November and they were a little intimidated by the big city. “You’ll get used to it,” I said. “Just keep dancing.”

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My make-believe leaf dancers aside, I do love the season, almost as much as spring. I’ve given some thought to that and have come to the conclusion that when you live in a climate that gives you 5 months of winter, you learn to savour both the first stirrings of the growing season and also its last hurrah. For that reason, I’ve paid attention in my own garden not just to a two-month succession of spring-flowering bulbs, but to trees and shrubs that turn colour in fall. This is my front garden in October, with its Japanese maple and burning bush hedge.

My little pollinator garden features fothergilla, which turns every shade from pale yellow to deepest wine – as you see with Señora Fothergilla, above.

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From my living room window, I can watch the colour change on the Japanese maple (Acer palmatum), which provided the backdrop for my geisha.

When the city asked me what trees I wanted to replace an aged silver maple that had to be removed from our boulevard, I asked for a red maple and a ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba), below, which turns bright yellow in autumn.

The gate leading from the driveway into my back garden has Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) climbing across it, which turns red in late October.

In my back garden, there are ornamental grasses and azure-blue autumn monkshood and spectacular apricot-orange Tiger Eyes sumac (Rhus typhina ‘Bailtiger’) and wine alternate-leaved dogwood (Cornus alternifolia).

I love fall colour so much, I made a poster a decade ago featuring photos of the autumn leaves of 90 different trees and shrubs found in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, the 200-acre arboretum just a mile from my house. .

Speaking about the cemetery, I’ve written a blog about the spectacular display of fall colour there in October and November….

…. and more generally, I’ve done blogs on plants with red autumn leaves….

….and plants that turn orange and bronze in autumn.

I love fall colour so much I went up in a small yellow plane with an open window….

…. to photograph the red and sugar maples in the forests near our cottage on Lake Muskoka! (Thanks Doug Clark)

I love fall colour so much I had a 2018 photography show featuring my fine art photo canvases of brilliant autumn leaves….

…. that I arranged like ephemeral tapestries…

… and abstract still lifes.

I love fall colour so much I gather handfuls of leaves each autumn to paint with light…

…. and  arrange in geometric designs that please my eye….

…. and simply celebrate in all their brilliant glory. For by the middle of November, the show is over, the leaves are beginning to decompose on the damp, cold ground and winter beckons with its icy breath.

But while they’re around, we can all dance.

A Gypsy Moth Summer on Lake Muskoka

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Back in late June, I noticed the odd dark, spotted caterpillar here and there on our property on Lake Muskoka, 2-1/2 hours north of Toronto. On July 2nd, my son informed me I had a caterpillar on my leg.  Looking down, I saw a European gypsy moth caterpillar (Lymantria dispar) resting on my pink capris.  Knowing how I love photographing insects, my son actually said, “Or… did you put it there?” Uh, no!  Recalling that the bristly caterpillar can produce an allergic dermatitis, I used a paper towel to remove it and toss it outdoors. Perhaps it was a sign, a portent of the next month as I discovered the extent to which the caterpillars had laid future claim to the trees – mostly oaks and white pines – on our 2 acre property.  Though I had heard from friends about massive defoliation of poplars and other hardwood trees in the farming areas northwest of Toronto, I could detect little or no damage where we were.  Yet. But given the large numbers of female moths and egg masses I found in July, it seems that the caterpillars on Lake Muskoka were just preparing for their assault for 2021, a cyclical peak that normally occurs every 8-10 years..

This last stage of the caterpillar’s spring/early summer existence is quite beautiful, if destructive insects can be said to be beautiful. The studio shot below is by Dr. Didier Descouens of France, via Creative Commons.

Lymantria dispar

“France” and “gypsy moth” have another connection: the scenario that saw an invasive forest pest introduced accidentally by a French artist/entomologist/astronomer named Etienne Leopold Trouvelot.

He was not yet 30 when he emigrated from France in 1857 and settled in the house below on Myrtle Street in Medford, Massachusetts. For a decade, he attempted to raise caterpillars for silkworms, especially those of the North American native Polyphemus moth, a giant silk moth with a 6-inch wingspan.  Silkworm experimentation was something of a fad at that time and it was noted that at one time he had a million larvae in a netted woodland behind his house. Sometime in the late 1860s, he travelled to Europe and returned with gypsy moth eggs, evidently hoping to hybridize them with natives to be disease-resistant.  Around 1868-69, some of the eggs or larvae reportedly blew out his window, a fact to which he confessed in professional circles. However, there was no USDA in those days, no means of inspecting animal or plant species imported from other countries.   It took a few decades for their population to build but by 1889 Medford’s trees were being defoliated by a caterpillar that required massive eradication strategies. And, as we know, that hasn’t worked very well as gypsy moths have made their way north and west in North America, decimating forests as they go. As for Trouvelot, he gave up on moth-rearing and in 1872 was invited to join Harvard College’s astronomy department, where he became renowned for his celestial illustrations and published some fifty papers. By the time he returned to France in 1882, his gypsy moths were well into their reign of terror in Medford.   

At Lake Muskoka, we have a lot of oaks.  They grow all around our cottage, a mix of the predominant red oak (Quercus rubra) and scrubby white oak (Quercus alba).  It’s on the oaks that we see blue jays cracking acorns and woodpeckers, flickers, thrashers and nuthatches scaling the trunks looking for insects. Red-eye vireos nest in oaks. In fact, as entomology professor and best-selling author Doug Tallamy says in his book Bringing Nature Home, oaks are the best trees you can grow to sustain wildlife in your garden.

We have oaks up near our septic field….

…. and at the back of our cottage facing the little bay to the north of us.

I started to pay attention to the gypsy moths flying around. I checked the trunks of the oaks and found a few of the late-stage larval caterpillars….

…. and lots of the next stage — the reddish-brown pupae, below, the bigger ones being the female moth, smaller ones the males.

Some caterpillars had even pupated on the leaves of oaks.

I looked at the sign I had made for our cottage displaying the big white oak trunk in the centre of our main room….

…. and lifted it up to find pupae on the wall behind.

I even found a pupa on a window frame.

I began to inspect the trees and found a female gypsy moth newly eclosed from the pupa. Isn’t she lovely? (Or she would be, if she wasn’t the mother of 200-500 destructive leaf-eaters.)

Down near the lake, on the bark of trees we had previously wrapped with wire mesh to protect from the teeth of beavers, I found a female moth hanging onto the wire.

Not long after the female moth emerges from the pupa, she produces a pheromone which attracts male moths, sometimes more than one at a time.

Male moths spend their lives flying around looking for females, while non-flying female moths often walk upon the bark of the tree, first to find a suitable place to attract males; later, after copulation, she might walk about to find a place to lay her fertilized eggs and cover them with hairs.

Once she has fulfilled her role and produced the distinctive, rusty-brown egg mass, the female falls off the tree and dies.  Though many authorities recommend removing or spraying the egg mass in autumn or winter, I realized that it was much easier to try to control the egg masses while the female was still clearly visible. Our hillside is often under many inches of snow by November, and I didn’t relish slipping and sliding over rocks trying to scrape off egg masses.

Where I saw unhatched pupae, I used a stick to squish the bigger female ones.

Broadleaved trees defoliated by gypsy moth caterpillars in spring will refoliate in mid-summer. Provided there is enough rain, the trees should survive. But conifers do not have this ability, so it was particularly depressing to find a few white pine trees hosting egg masses.  However, I have read research that indicates that white pines are very poor hosts for larval development, compared to oaks.  

For the female moths and egg masses, I made up my own horticultural oil, aka “dormant oil”.  There are many recipes on the internet with various ingredients, but I mixed ½ cup of vegetable oil with 2 tablespoons of liquid dish soap. I then used a tablespoon or two of this concentrated mix in 2 cups of water to make my spray.  My oil will not damage plants but is intended to suffocate the eggs. (You can also buy horticultural/dormant oil formulations at garden centres and big box stores; these generally use refined paraffinic oils.)

It was satisfying to spray the female moth and egg mass.  I also used a stick to squish the moth.

I discovered that moths often favoured a particular tree, where I would find ten or more clustered together.’

This moth had made her nesting spot in the centre of a patch of moss high up an oak trunk. It became my challenge to figure out a way to reach these high locations without killing myself on a ladder.

I adapted an 11-foot telescoping pole used to change the pot lights on our high cottage ceiling, tying a sponge to the mechanism and soaking that in the diluted horticural oil.

That allowed me to reach moths and egg masses some 16 feet up a trunk….

…. soaking the moth and her egg mass with the saturated sponge, below.  For the moths further up on trees, I can only keep my fingers crossed that next winter will be severe enough to damage the eggs. In observations in Michigan, it was found that eggs on southern and western aspects were much less likely to survive severe winter temperature swings than those on northern and eastern aspects.

Some of the literature on gypsy moth control recommends removing litter under trees. That might work in suburban or urban yards, but it isn’t realistic or desirable in a forest like ours, below, where a diverse understory supports all kinds of insects, birds and other life.  

In fact, while moving around under my trees looking for moths, I was rewarded with the sight of two interesting parasitic (non-chlorophyll-producing) plants that are sustained by the mycorrhizae on the roots of oaks: Indian pipe or ghost plant (Monotropa uniflora), below….

… and bear corn or American cancer-root (Conopholis americana).

I did a lot of videography while I was preparing this blog, and made an 11-minute video that provides a little more information.

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Though some panicked property owners and civic officials call for aerial spraying of the biological control agent Bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki or Btk in late spring when the caterpillars begin their climb into tree canopies, it is non-specific and will kill the larval stage of all lepidopterans (caterpillars of moths and butterflies) active at that time, including many native insects that co-evolved with our native plants and feed our birds.  Some will say it’s not going to harm the summer caterpillars of monarch or swallowtail butterflies, but that is to ignore a vast web of life that exists in our environment without us noticing.

If you’ve made it this far, you’ll be happy to know I have had rewarding experiences with native caterpillars in the past, especially the monarch love affair I wrote about in last summer’s blog “Bella and Bianca: Our Monarch Chrysalis Summer”.  I only hope that the steps I’ve taken this summer will curtail some of the damage we can expect to see next spring. I’ll be thinking about that as I gaze up at our beautiful oaks when their leaves change to russet and scarlet this autumn. And I’ll report back next year.

Gordon Lightfoot on a Snow Day

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I used to think I was lucky to live in a part of the world with four distinct seasons. How could I appreciate the swan song of autumn without the colourful abundance that is summer?  How could I love summer, if not for the delicate opening act of spring that promised such fullness? And how was it possible to revere the first warm days and blossoms of spring, without living through the long months of winter, when hope seems as far underground as the resting shoots and roots?   But as I age, that last seasonal quid pro quo seems less attractive. Five to six months of winter is a long time. And the first snow, often as autumn leaves are still changing colour on the trees in November, is a shock to the system.

WINTER ON LAKE MUSKOKA

I am very fortunate, for I get to enjoy the beauty and rigour of winter in two places: at our cottage on Lake Muskoka a few hours north of Toronto, and at the house in the north end of the city where I’ve lived and gardened for more than 37 years now. Driving north to Muskoka in winter, we often pass cornfield stubble dusted with snow. Hopefully the roads aren’t bad for driving….

….. but sometimes, it’s a little scary.

Snow tires are a must and all-wheel drive is important, too, for the hills on the dirt road we have to negotiate to get to where we park. (Do you like my licence plate? That was the logo I used on my first business card and letterhead back in the late 1980s. It’s a good thing no one tried to speak to me en Français…)

We drag toboggans packed with our food and wine on a path through the forest. Hopefully the snow isn’t too deep because we’re getting a little old for tramping down a foot of powder.

And then we arrive. The deck and my summer pots are covered with fresh snow, the white pines look lovely.

I gaze through my bedroom window and….

….. down the hillside to the frozen lake, and the outdoors beckons.

I glance at my little west meadow as I head out. Another year I didn’t get to chop down the plants in November.

Then I pick my way carefully down the stairs towards the lake.

Sometimes, after freezing rain, the white pines on the dock wear a fringe of icicles…

… and above the frozen lake floats a soft mist.

Deep snow on the lake is beautiful, but it insulates with its warmth and works against the thickening of ice.  Extreme caution is needed and an official measurement of lake ice thickness before heading out on snowshoes or cross-country skis.

I am not an early riser, but once in a while I’ll catch a Lake Muskoka sunrise and it is definitely worth being on time for that after a fresh snow.

The swim ladder should be lifted each year to avoid mangling when the ice starts to thaw and move in spring. But sometimes we forget….

Showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa) is a beautiful, late season lifeline for all the bumble bees that call my meadows home. Its fluffy spires always last through the first few snows.

When we’ve been assured that the ice is thick enough, we set off down the lake with our hiking poles and sometimes our snowshoes too.  It’s easy hiking.

Or we follow the path through the forest and walk the dirt road around the end of the lake and sneak a peek at our place from across the bay.  That’s the screened porch where we eat our summer dinners.

If we’re feeling energetic, we might get into the car and drive the 12 kilometres to the Torrance Barrens, where I like to hike in summer.  My four kids looked kind of like Goths invading the Barrens one December a few years ago.

It is so very peaceful in winter, all the sounds muffled…..

…. all the bog grasses sculpted into snowy hummocks.

The back of the cottage often looks like this after hikes….

….. and if we’re lucky there might be a rosy sunset as day turns to night and we retreat indoors with our books.

I made a little video that captures the flavour of winter in our little bay on Lake Muskoka.  (Listen for the train whistle at 32 seconds.) Oh, did I mention the wind-chill can sometimes freeze your skin in minutes?

WINTER IN THE CITY

In Toronto, winter is a time to work on projects that require long periods of time at my computer. And I can often convince myself to bring my camera outdoors – at least for those initial few beautiful snowfalls of winter – perhaps with a first stop at the living room window to view the Japanese maple through my witches’ balls…
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…. then a walk down the front steps to check on the pollinator island under a snowy blanket.

Maybe wave to the snowplow operator.

If I turn the corner down the driveway to the garden gate…..

…. I might peek through just to get that same ‘secret garden’ thrill I felt when I first installed the heating grate in the 1980s…..

….. then I open the gate and head down the side-yard path that was a driveway once, back when cars were narrow and fit this restricted space.

Under the arch of orange-fruited bittersweet, I see my six pots on the lower deck. They’re planted with hardy sedums and grasses that benefit from that snowy blanket, but it won’t last long since this winter, like 2010 and 2012, is forecast to be relatively mild.

The fruit of my Washington thorn tree (Crataegus phaenopyrum) and bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) — yes, the evil Asian one — wear sweet little snow hats.

I wear a winter hat too, and snap a snowy selfie.

The pond garden looks so lovely when snow covers up all the weeds I didn’t get to pull in autumn and the yews I didn’t manage to prune.

And the sundeck looks pristine until my footprints mess up all the perfect snow. But that’s okay… it’s time to go indoors and take off my boots and turn on some music.

Speaking of music, have a little look at this video of my Toronto garden in winter. I actually forgot that when I filmed the snow falling from inside my kitchen, I was playing a favourite song by Greg Brown on my stereo, sung here on a tribute album by Leandra Peak and Neal Hagberg. Somehow, the lyrics reminded me of the power of winter snow to wash clean the detritus of autumn and this song captures that idea so beautifully. “Wash my eyes that I may see/the yellow return to the willow tree“.

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Song for a Winter’s Night, Gordon Lightfoot (1967)

It wouldn’t be a blog in #mysongscapes of 2020 without a song. This time, I’m featuring Canadian musical icon Gordon Lightfoot and his beautiful ‘Song For a Winter’s Night’. Though it sounds like a love song he might have written late gazing out a window at the falling snow, the story goes that “the song was written on a hot summer night in Cleveland while Lightfoot was performing there. He was missing his wife of the time, Brita Ingegerd Olaisson, and his thoughts turned to winter.” As to his first wife, there’s actually a neighbourhood connection here. Gordon Lightfoot is a singular talent who has been writing and performing for more than 50 years with classic songs such as If You Could Read my Mind, Early Morning Rain, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, etc.  But when his first marriage to his Swedish wife Brita was ending in the early 1970s (he was married three times with numerous relationships in between), they were living in a rambling house on the corner of the Blythwood ravine just two blocks away from our house in Toronto. It’s long gone and redeveloped now, sold as part of what was (at the time) the largest divorce settlement in Canadian history. The final straw in the marriage breakdown was his affair with Cathy Smith, the subject of his song ‘Sundown’, and the femme fatale (literally) who injected John Belushi with his last speedball.

Okay, enough of the supermarket magazine gossip. Here is Gordon singing his lovely winter song live back in 1967. Try to ignore the goofy introduction and the fact that the audience looks to be hypnotized or perhaps temporarily drugged and just concentrate on the song.  And note the jaunty rhythm.

Now, to illustrate how a song’s arrangement can make a profound difference in how we experience it and connect to it emotionally, listen to fellow Canadian Sarah McLachlan sing the song 27 years later for the 1994 film ‘Miracle on 34th Street‘.

Need I tell you which version I prefer?

SONG FOR A WINTER’S NIGHT, Gordon Lightfoot (1967)

The lamp is burnin’ low upon my table top
The snow is softly falling
The air is still in the silence of my room
I hear your voice softly calling

If I could only have you near
To breathe a sigh or two
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
On this winter night with you

The smoke is rising in the shadows overhead
My glass is almost empty
I read again between the lines upon the page
The words of love you sent me

If I could know within my heart
That you were lonely too
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
On this winter night with you

The fire is dying now, my lamp is growing dim
The shades of night are lifting
The morning light steals across my window pane
Where webs of snow are drifting

If I could only have you near
To breathe a sigh or two
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
And to be once again with with you
To be once again with with you

***********

This is the seventh blog in #mysongscapes series that combine music I love with my photography. If you liked it, check out the others beginning with Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’; Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography; Vietnam and Songs of Protest; a visit to Ireland and Galway Bay; Simon & Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. The last one recalled a John Denver lullaby I sang to my first grandchild, Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine.

And please feel free to leave a comment below. I love to read them.