80AcresOnline

For the past week, I’ve been in New York State, first visiting a friend in Oswego, with several walks through the woods at the Rice Creek Field Station, and then traveling by train down the Mohawk and the Hudson Rivers, and finally here in NYC, where I spent several hours yesterday at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

I managed to hit peak color in Oswego, with maples aflame, and beautiful color on the train to NYC–hard to know which side of the train to look out of.   The trees on the street in Brooklyn where I’m staying (again with friends) are just now turning; the maples in the Botanical Gardens have only a few branches showing much color.

I enjoyed prowling in the woods in Oswego–not only the color, but the smells and textures of a northern autumn, and the very different flora.    (They have running water and ponds that do not dry up all year!)  I also enjoyed prowling the botanical gardens, though I wonder why they planted canonical climax prairie grasses (switchgrass and little bluestem) in the *shade*.  Yes, shade.  Under trees, with full light at best for a few hours in the morning.   The switchgrass was half the height of ours, and the little bluestem was flopping limply to the sides.   Their “pollinator plantings” are delightful, though, and I saw both honeybees and bumblebees and maybe another kind of bee busy in all those.  They have them in patches here and there, very wisely.

On the bird side, we saw white-throated sparrows and at least one ruby-crowned kinglet in the botanical gardens.  The sparrows were acting as they do at home, diving into cover and scratching around on the ground most of the time.  The kinglet was busy on some dill (or near relative) down by a pond.

And I finally saw gingko trees, a lot of them, including females with fruit.  And yes, it does stink to high heaven if you step on it.