A Vernal Dam

         I'm at that point in the year when I need the soil to warm and bring the trillium and mayapples and the goddamn daffodils, and especially the ramps…and the chickweed and the violets and wood sorrel and the cattail laterals and the asparagus and the basswood leaves and the trout lily bulbs and the dandelion and chicory greens and roots and the milkweed shoots and the cow parsnip and carrot biennial shoots and roots and solomon’s seal and amaranth & goosefoot tips and prairie dock and honewort and dandelions and pursulane and sheep sorrel and wild grape and mulberry and hazelnut and mallow and wapatos and the american locust and the spring beauty corms and field mustard and wintercress and garlic mustard  and hog peanut and groundnut and sow thistle and wood nettle and virginia waterleaf and dill and elderberry and burdock and the ostrich fern and the primrose and black locust flowers and staghorn sumac shoots and pollen…all of which happen to be edible (except for daffodils). ugh I don’t want to do anything else.

      “Another researcher in the 1970’s, this time in a New Hamsphire northern hardwood forest, studied many apsects of yellow trout lily (Erythronium americanum) ecology, including its nutrient dynamics. Trout lily is a delicate but not particularly useful plant, at least on the surface: it is edible only after prolonged boiling, and it may cause vomiting, which is one of its medicinal uses. It is, however emblematic of all ephemeral wildflowers in another way.
      Ephemerals have adapted to a nice that is very short on time but long on nutrient and sun resources. High nutrient availability and leaching in the spring results from cold-season organic matter decomposition followed by high rainfall and snowmelt, at a time when most plants have not yet started to grow. The sun is strong, but not for long, as the trees will soon leaf out. In response to this environment, ephemerals quickly grow, flower, fruit, and store reserves for the following year’s dormancy and growth. All of this requires many nutrients.
       This researcher looked at the nutrient dynamics of trout lily over a whole watershed to assess its impact on an ecosystem scale. He compared the nutrient intake of all the trout lily plants in the watershed to the total leeching losses from the watershed. It turns out that potassium uptake by trout lily equaled 82 percent of the amount lost to streams in the spring, and 53 percent of the total lost for the whole year. For nitrogen, the amounts were 91 percent of spring losses and 21 percent of yearly losses. By guzzling these nutrients and then releasing many of them as readily decomposed littler a short while later, when other plants are actively growing, trout lily becomes a “vernal dam” that holds nutrients back from leaching away in the spring. We can assume that other ephemerals function in a similar way, though we don’t know for sure. However, many ephemerals are highly nutritious spring edibles, and this supports the assumption.
       Both of these studies point us toward herbaceous plants as key actors in the nutrient dynamics of forest gardens and support the strategy of using dynamic accumulator plants to help gather and conserve nutrients in our garden.”
                                                         - Dave Jacke

       Studying agroecology is just like reading bedtime stories that carry ya into dream. It’s like hearing the world narrate your strolls: Here, we’ve brought you everything you need, and we’ve done it more gracefully than you could ever hope to imitate. So put down your books and your tools and anxieties. Take a walk in the forest, and be rewarded for happening.

"At first I would ask myself, "Can this be?" Later, I knew it could.
     We would not see each other maybe for many days. When I went to the Nest Egg, I went only to be there, to see what was there, to grow quiet enough to hear its sounds and voices. And then one day again she would be there. Our paths would cross and we would go along a ways together while the season warmed and the leaves unfolded overhead, while the leaves fell or the snow. We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw. As we went along, ways would open before us, alleys and aisles and winding paths, leading to patches of maidenhair ferns or to a tree where pleated woodpeckers nested or to a place where a barred owl gazed down at us backward over his tail. The woods showed us its small brakes of cane (especially lovely when their green foliage was laden with snow), its ascending vines, its lichens and mosses and ferns, its nests and burrows. We saw warblers, wood ducks, thrushes, deer. Around us always were the passing graces of moving air, lights and shadows, birds flight, songs, calls, drummings. Each of us knew what the other  saw and heard. There was no need to ask, no need to say.
        We went from paths to pathlessness. The woods has many doors going in and out. It is full of rooms opening into one another, shaped by direction and viewpoint. Many of these rooms are findable only once, from a certain direction on a certain day, in a certain light, at a certain time. They could not be returned to either now, after years, or then, after an hour. Windows opened in the foliage, through which, maybe, we would see a hawk soaring or a distant treetop suddenly shaken by a gust of wind. Sometimes these walks and rooms and vistas seemed arranged for us, for our pleasure, as in a human garden. But these, of course, do not constitute the woods, which is not a garden and is not understandable or foretellable even so much as a garden is.
      We would come sometimes into a place of such lovelieness that it stopped us still and held us until some changing of the light seemed to bless us and let us go.
     We came in April to a slope covered with bluebells, and knelt to smell their cool perfume, so fresh and delicate and unrememberable as to seem to have come from another world.
     One afternoon in the spring when we were standing still and silent by the side of Coulter Branch where the water fell with a hundred voices down steps and glides among the rocks from pool to pool, where the mosses were bright green on the rocks and the tree roots and the stonecrop was in bloom, we saw a red fox step out of the undergrowth into a shaft of sunlight where he paused a moment, glowing, and disappeared like a flame put out.
     It was a winter afternoon and the snow was falling without wind, straight down. The snow was gathering like blossoms on the green leaves of the cane. In the woods beyond us, we could hear woodpeckers calling. We had not said much. We were standing as still as the trees. The only thing we saw that was moving was the snow.
     I said, "It's like time falling, and we and the trees are standing up in it."
    "No," she said. "Look. It's like we and the woods and the world are flying upward through the snow. See?"
    We stood without saying any more for a long time, flying higher and higher to meet the feathery big flakes as they fell. The evening began to darken. I looked and saw that she had gone, her tracks leading away through the deepening snow. And then I too went away."