Something New Every Time….           By: Claudia Corona     10/02/09

Twenty-five days. That’s the difference between my first journal entry and my present one. A month hasn’t even passed since I first came to Hopkins Forest, but I’m already starting to see things that my eyes had ignored before. I think back to my first encounter with this forest and I marvel at how the forest shows me something new every time I come back.

In my first entry I proclaimed that there were few different plant and wildflower species in Hopkins Forest, but as I walk down the trail and towards the brook, my eyes show me differently. I identified over 20 different plant species in my site along the Ford Glen Brook (with the help of my peers and professor).

One of the first things that caught my eye was a Jack In The Pulpit, a plant with an onion-like stout shooting up from the ground with a cluster of berries all around the top. I could see why birds were so attracted to this plant, the berries were bright red, as if to say, “Eat Me!”, and I would have, had I not been previously told it wasn’t tasty to humans and when I squeezed the berries, they didn’t have an edible smell to them.

However the Northern Bedstraw I had seen earlier, recognized by their long plant stems with clustered white flowers in a ball-shaped form, had a sweet smell to them and apparently are edible (good for survival purposes).

Continuing on the trail, I felt like I was in a game of hide-n-seek with the plants, since I was trying to discern what they were. I looked closer at the plants cluttered about the sides of the trail, and I immediately spotted some Northern Lady Fern, with its fronds (fern leaves) tripinate (feather-like leaves) still dark green. This is not to be confused with the Christmas Fern, another plant I saw, known by its stout stalks and evergreen lanced-shaped toothed fronds.

Next to the fern was a Striped Maple, spotted because of its huge leaves (of 6 inches). The leaves were crown-shaped with 3 pointy elf-like ear lobes. On the left side of the path, I spotted (gotcha!) some white wildflowers. But upon closer observation, they were two different plants of the Aster Family. One was White-snake root; white rayless, toothed flowers, clustered together on firm smooth branches. The other was White-wood aster, with many white rays around a yellowish disk, there were few flowers per branch.

Ahead there were some other white flowers but with a purplish center and heart-shaped leaves known as Heart-leaved aster. Next to it was the dreaded shrub honeysuckle (an invasive species) with its simple oval evergreen leaves. I was not able to discern much more about it as the shrubs no longer had their infamous bell-shaped flowers. Opposite that, on the left side of the road were various shrubs of Japanese Barberry, known for their long tree stems that grow very small leaves (about 1-2 cm) as with bright red egg-shaped berries hanging from the stem.

At the beginning of my journaling, I was under the impression that there weren’t rocks here, but boy was I wrong!  As the trail slopes down at the beginning there is a tough patch of dirt, tougher than the dirt farther into the forest. I decided to check it out and removed the dirt from one small site. To my surprise, I found a rock-solid floor! Apparently, the fact that this was on a slope eroded most of the soil and leaves here, which left a thin layer of dirt on solid rock. I wasn’t able to take a sample from the rock, but later on, down by the brook, I found two types of rocks. One could easily be scratched by my pocket knife, this was phyllite, known for being shiny, with crinkly brittle rocks layers. The other almost broke my knife’s edge, leading me to believe it was quartzite; light, hard, and knife-proof.

I noticed that the ground was still damp from the recent rain. The air smelled of moist wood bark and wet soil. It smelled of dead plants and rotten leaves. The rain must have kicked up dust from the ground because there was definitely a stronger earthly smell than usual. But it no longer smelled of summer flowers, but of autumn fresh, a scent I’ve never familiarized being from a downtown urban city, but now find comforting, crisp, and calming.