Between Wet and Dry and Hot and Cold: Spring

I’ve been to the Beaver Brook Natural Area several times lately, watching for the trees to go green and for the flowers to bloom. It has been so cool and wet things are still moving very slowly, but spring is rolling along and finally, the trees here are green once again. This shot is of the old abandoned road, closed off in the 1970s, that parallels Beaver Brook through the narrow, natural ravine. The hobblebushes here, one of our most beautiful native viburnums, are now in full bloom. The larger sterile, pure white flowers around the perimeter are there to entice insects into visiting the smaller fertile flowers in the center. If pollination is successful each of those tiny flowers will become a berry which will turn from green to red to dark purple. Then the deer will come along and eat them and we’ll have more hobblebushes. Unless that is, people get to them first. The fruit is edible raw or cooked and is said to taste like raisins. I’ve never seen blue bead lily plants here so I…