ShareThisWhen my family scooted into a Connecticut mall, I found sanctuary from the sales racks in a ribbon of wet woods that split the property in two.
The sunny, 60-degree morning felt more like spring than a week in January.
The air smelled of moist earth. I thought of looking for skunk cabbage, which is one of the year's earliest plants to emerge and flower. Skunk cabbage usually does not appear until late February or early March.
Like a pair of cartoon birdies, two black-capped chickadees chipped and flitted in my face.
A white-breasted nuthatch repeated its nasal "ha-ha-ha-ha-ha." A tufted titmouse whistled "peter-peter-peter" while a Carolina wren crooned "tory-tory-tory."
The forefront of the forest canopy and understory contained just one species: the tulip tree, which showed off some diagnostic winter characteristics.
On the tallest trees, cup-shaped clusters of brown, dried, upright seeds tipped the twigs. Some seed cups were complete. Others were splayed, missing several seeds. Soon, all of those seeds will fall, fluttering down like flattened wings.
The tulip tree is the tallest-growing hardwood tree in the eastern United States, so you don't always get a chance to examine its twigs at face level.
Twigs on the seedlings were a distinct reddish-brown. They were somewhere between stout and slender, and at the end of each twig was a single, relatively large, mitten- or duck-billed-shaped gray bud. Some of the buds were reddish-gray.
I've read that each bud at the end of a tulip-tree twig contains next year's leaves, which unfurl in spring like the wings of a butterfly.
The tulip trees gave way to another single-species stand. This new tree was red maple. There were tall, small and in-between-sized red maples. At a glance, the maples looked like a fortification of gray bark, branches, trunks and twigs.
Up close, however, I could see that the red maple twigs were actually reddish and somewhat lustrous. The twigs contained numerous lenticels, and the small, scaly buds at the branch tips were red.
How common is red maple? The U.S. Forest Service notes, "Red maple can probably thrive on a wider range of soil types, textures, moisture, pH, and elevation than any other forest species in North America."
A lichen-encrusted stonewall ran perpendicular to the path. I sat on one of the wall's stones.
The presence of the stonewall was strong evidence that someone once used this land for something other than merchandising. I wondered who built the wall, when and why. Was this construction a former boundary line, a livestock barrier or the edge-line of a long-gone roadway?
What I did know was that the wall served as animal lodging.
That's what stonewalls do year-round, but especially in winter, when all sorts of creatures seek its shelter. I bet that there were chipmunks, snakes and other creatures within the recesses and crevices on each side of me.
The wet soil underfoot was unfrozen. I dug into it with a stick. It was nearly black and relatively rock-free. Maybe the stones under my rump once came out of this soil. I would not be surprised if this rich earth was tilled in the 1700s and 1800s.
It made me sad to think that just about all of the soil here was now beneath concrete and asphalt. What native plants or food crops did this land once produce, what wildlife or livestock did it once sustain?
I guess that for most visitors to the mall, the sense of place was a brand name. However, the little strip of wet woods between the stores was my premium outlet. It defined my cultural landscape for that morning, providing me with my own version of "retail therapy."
(Scott Turner (scottturnerster(at)gmail.com) is a nature writer. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The Providence JournalComment
