Thursday, August 27, 2009

A Walk in the Meadow

Today over lunch I took a walk on the path that Rog weed-whacked through the meadow. We have been so busy and it's so overgrown I hadn't walked out there for a long time; when I saw all the wild strawberry plants I regretted missing out on the berries.
The prairie has some beautiful specimens of invasive species - such as this humongous buckthorn, one of perhaps a dozen large, mature buckthorn trees --the mothers of thousands of buckthorn saplings.
A branchlet of the buckthorn, covered with berries. Birds eat the berries and scatter the seeds in their droppings. Buckthorn grows thickly and chokes out everything else inthe understory. We have a mighty buckthorn control challenge ahead of us on about half of our 10 acres.
I don't know what this lovely flower is...
Dogwood. Another attractive nvasive species.
Seeing the gorgeous fall color on the sumac leaves is a bittersweet reminder that summer is almost over.
Honeysuckle berries (yet another invasive species) glowing in the sun.
The trails ends by winding through a lovely stand of white pines, complete with a healthy patch of poison ivy we will have to try to eradicate.

2 comments:

Bearly There said...

The white bottle-shaped flower is creamy gentian.

Susan said...

Thanks for the identification, Bill!