I retreated to the cottage for the weekend. Sunday morning I photographed these three butterfly species within five minutes and five paces along the road. I couldn’t see the jewellike Blackburnian warbler in the tall hemlock overhead, but heard his high-ptiched wheezy song. And from a remote, verdant gallery of the woods came a shimmering effervescence of music, the song of a winter wren. So much beauty! There were other, perfect tiger swallowtails, but I liked this one best.
On Easter Monday my partner and I went for a stroll at University of Guelph Arboretum. Nowhere is resurrection evident as in gardens and woods, where buds swell on stark branches, and glorious bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) erupts magically from dead leaf litter. This is the promise of life.
This winter I got in the habit of feeling tree bark. One weekend on a stroll through cedar woods along the Grand River, I discovered the bark of these trees is extremely soft to the touch and not especially cold, even on a bitter winter day. On my walks around the city I began taking my gloves off to explore the sensation of various trees. Smooth-barked trees like cherry and beech feel as sharply cold as the surrounding air. This gallery shows a visual exploration of bark I have made over the years.
Today I walked up to a maple I had groped a few weeks ago. The bark is rough, and I expected it to feel warm in the early spring sunshine. But my hand strayed into the unseen shady side and found instead cool moisture: either from rain earlier in the day, or perhaps sap seeping down from overhead buds. In the shadows it was coated with a patchwork of lichen like blisters of emerald and jade. On the sunny west side, the bark was indeed warm and comparatively barren.
I was reminded of the epiphytic lichens that coat the upper branches, or entire cloud forests such as this one I visited in Pukaskwa National Park on the north shore of Lake Superior last spring. A single tree is a miniature ecosystem, holding innumberable organisms in the halo of its branches.
It’s too bad we have to worry about energy efficiency. As new windows replace old ones in our homes, fern frost is becoming a lost memory. Fern frost is the stuff that forms on glass when humid air inside meets cold air outside. The first two images in this gallery show the enchanted sapphire forest I found on my bathroom window yesterday at dawn.
We used to see it in the windows of the house where I grew up. After I left home, I forgot these fanciful visions from childhood. Many years later I moved into a flat in an older building. The place was poorly maintained, in fact it declined during the years while I lived there. It was hard to keep the place warm in winter. One benefits of living there was seeing the winter window displays.
The structure of the formation depends on dirt or other particles or imperfections on the glass. One of the windows in the apartment featured distinctive striated feathers like those in the fifth image. Sometimes it looked more like strings of pearls. The dark third image shows the same window one night, back lit by the streetlight. Another window in the same apartment usually had a pattern of jagged plates like a jigsaw puzzle (sixth image). Every window has a unique way of expressing itself. The glowing fourth picture appeared on my office window at dawn on February 20, 2008, the day my mother died. It reminds me of milkweed seeds.
Some people call these patterns frost flowers, however that term may also be applied to a different phenomenon. When the weather turns sharply cold over unfrozen ground, it may cause plant stems to squeeze out, by capillary action, layers of ice resembling leaves or petals. I have yet to observe this peculiar beauty.
I was glad to move out of the old dive, but sorry to say goodbye to those windows. My current apartment has mostly newer ones. Fern frost can form on double-paned glass when the air outside is extremely cold, but this seldom happens. This place still has two old windows in the bathroom and hall, and I was delighted to discover this glass attracts foliage patterns much like fern fronds. It’s a nice sight to discover when I crawl out of bed on a winter morning and head for the toilet.
I must pay for the show. A lot of heat must escape through these windows. Maybe I should petition the landlord to replace them, but I’d rather not.
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