A Walk in the Woods: Lush Life

This winter was very dry, almost devoid of snow cover, and the lack of precipitation continued into early spring. The woods looked parched; the usual vernal pools were dry, mosses were a parched and brittle gray-green. But in May the rains came and life in the woods has revived. Feathery ferns are an ocean of bright green.

Mosses are plumply brilliant again, and this hairy coat covering an exposed tree root shines above the duff of the woodland floor.

Tree stumps again have their fuzzy green meadows climbing the decaying wood.

The lichens are sending up their spore bearing fruiting bodies, looking like a miniature crowd of nodding figures.

The mushrooms too are beginning to get into the act. These teeny tiny globes of chocolate and salmon have a strange presence amid the green.

And water! vernal pools have returned, at least for a short while, and the plants are reveling in the moisture.

Seeing a pool of sun dappled water confuses reality, space and time. The light moves, changes, becomes more present than earth or water or leaf as it penetrates surfaces. I stand transfixed by the richness of layered color and the shifting patches of sun, and by the surface and depth of water; I am lost in a luxuriant place.