Pancakes and bacon

Sometimes, a person just has to eat a real breakfast.

Yes. There was maple syrup.

Pelham Bay Park in early April

The woods, the weekend.

This is the Bronx. Funny, ain't it? Early spring up there on the mainland resembled a pale, washed out fall, until you looked at your feet, and at the low lemony branches of spicebush.

We saw, in the grassy bits, the wildflower called spring beauty - Claytonia virginica. The bulbs are edible and the flowers were plentiful but how, as an urban forager, could I start digging them up? I could not. I unearthed just one for research purposes and it sits in an old milk bottle now, collected from Dead Horse Bay, the translucent striped flower looking at the sun on the terrace, the bulbs and roots dipped in water. I let the rest be. Wildflowers in the city are too unsual, too lost, too overlooked, to sustain any tampering. The bulb is small, like a smooth beach pebble. As the weather warms the plants retreat, summer-dormant.

Below, this was new to me, and delicately exciting. Stems like burgundy thread with winestained petals opening to palest striped pink. It is Anemone quinquefolia. The leaves are five-lobed, hence the name, but I had been thinking along the lines of Thalictrum.

They were just beginning to open; most the of fragile-looking plants were only just in bud. Imagine these in the untended and abused woods of Prospect Park. They'd be stomped into oblivion.

Below, wood betony - Pedicularis canadensis (see comments).

Low on the forest floor the earliest shoots of native Solomon's Seal, Polygonatum biflorum.

No obvious sign of spring in the marshes around Hunters Island.

...except for the beginning of blueberries.

The rocks that edge the water are striped and complex.

Tide out, on another grey day. I have never seen this park beneath a blue sky. Does the sun ever shine on the Bronx?

We sat on a chilly rock over the water of the Sound to eat our baguettes and saucisson and sip our glasses of wine. We were accompanied by the cries of hysterical oyster catchers and the aerial ballet of gulls dropping shellfish onto the rocks to shatter them for their own lunch.

On our way back we stumbled upon some serious birders. Big lenses like red sports cars. Mine's bigger than yours? They were pointing at a tall tree trunk, snapped off and hollow, in which blinked a fluffy and sleepy-looking owlet. 

After admiring the sweet baby (offspring of a great horned owl, who apparently nests here every season) for a while I snuck off into the undergrowth and occupied myself with Japanese knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum) shoots. The most invasive of invasive weeds. And delicious. All of us a New York City pastoral scene.

The old, hollow stalks (excellent pea shooters) were still in place, unlike in Central Park, where their absence points to mechanical or chemical control. This knotweed is clearly beyond control, but a boon to people like me. The fat young stalks looked so much like asparagus it was hard to stop my mouth watering. Unlike asparagus, they collapse into a sour, sorrel-y cream when cooked.

More new spring wildflowers. The pretty, submissive flowers of cutleaf toothwort - Cardamine concatenata, quite prolific. I found the name quite fast after Googling "trifoliate spring ephemeral."

And our old friend, lesser celandine or fig buttercup, Ficaria verna (I think I've called it Ranunculas ficaria, elsewhere - its old name), native of Eurasia. Yes, I did steal some flowers. Here's why:

Fig buttercup is a vigorous growing vernal [occurring in the spring] plant that forms large, dense patches in floodplain forests and some upland sites, displacing many native plant species, especially those with the similar spring-flowering life cycle. Spring ephemerals complete the reproductive part of their life cycle and most of their above-ground development in the increasing light of late winter and spring, before woody plants leaf out and shade the forest floor. Some examples of native spring ephemerals include bloodroot, wild ginger, spring beauty, harbinger-of-spring, twinleaf, squirrel-corn, trout lily, trilliums, Virginia bluebells, and many, many others. These plants provide critical nectar and pollen for native pollinators, and fruits and seeds for other native insects and wildlife species. Because fig buttercup emerges well in advance of the native species, it has a developmental advantage which allows it to establish and overtake areas rapidly

- from the Plant Conservation Alliance

We headed back to the wide scoop of Orchard Beach and its empty sand, which always looks post-apocolyptic and leaden. We were cold, so skipped walking over to City Island and headed instead back to our traffic circle and bus to the subway (6 train, end of the line), skirting the massive parking lot which must be visible from space, and keeping an eye out for the two wild turkeys we had seen earlier, on our way in. See the Frenchie's will post of those. Handsome feathers.

Good day, far from home.

Ranunculus ficaria

Lesser celandine graces the table.

Martha Stewart Blogger Gardens

Photo: Juliana Sohn

Here's a slideshow of the blogger gardens in the story that also features 66 Square Feet in Martha Stewart Living's March 2012 edition.

Flowers in March

That was March in flowers - from hellebores to magnolias, just like that.

Spot the invasive aliens? Spot the well behaved ornamental aliens? Spot the natives? Gets complicated, doesn't it?

The Edgeworthia papyrifera (top right - Brooklyn Botanic Garden), Viburnum x bodnantense (aka dawn viburnum, second row, left - Warren Street, Cobble Hill) and Magnolia soulangeana (bottom row, right - Central Park) vie for the fragrance award.

The Dicentra cucullaria (Dutchman's breeches, bottom, left - Inwood Hill Park) and Sanguinaria canadense (bloodroot, second row, middle - Midwood, Prospect Park) compete for prettiest native spring ephemeral.

The Pyrus calleryana (aka callery pear, third row middle - Clinton Street, Cobble Hill) perhaps loses to the more cherry (species unknown - Red Hook) for beauty of blossom but wins the quantity award...Does the spicebush (Lindera benzoin, top, middle - Inwood Hill Park) win because it is native species?

Ranunculus ficaria (second row, right, lesser celandine - Midwood, Prospect Park) and Vinca minor (periwinkle, bottom, middle - Inwood Hill Park) can tough it out for most successful invasive: Dude - how many native species did you smother today?

And the hellebore? The hellebore never speaks. It is far too afraid of being noticed.

See last March's flowers. They were very yellow.

Seeing it through

My parents have been married 58** years today.

A toast to them. Through thick and thin.

Two people as different and individually remarkable as the two cocktails that Vince and I sipped on the roof. And neither of them a hensopper.* My parents, I mean.

*Boer War (late 19th and early 20th century) reference. The hensoppers (from, Hands up!) were Afrikaners who chose to surrender to the British. The bittereinders wanted to fight to the bitter end. (Don't read too much into that last part...)

The drinks? Vermouth with cassis and lime and a gin martini with field garlic and garlic-stuffed olive. You may assume that I drank the pink drink.

** My mother says it is 57 years! I thought I flew out there for a jet set five days in 2004 for the big 50th bash. Clearly my mother's mind is better than mine. I asked them if they went out to celebrate and she wrote: "We didn't go anywhere and ate in the kitchen with a bottle of pink Moet."

I can't think of anything better.

Borough Hall farmers market

Peach blossom. Our apartment does not have the necessary scale to pull off four foot long branches, but I did buy some small parsley plants, something labelled green thyme* (which has huge succulant leaves and clearly is not thyme. I asked the vendor about it and he started, "See, there are three kinds of thyme...", and I knew it was a lost cause), and a nemesia, in honour of the homeland, where it blooms in spring. Some fat red winesap apples from last fall, and a bag of dwarf kale. The farmers and stall holders were cold and wind nipped.

* Good grief. Post Google. The "green thyme" is a Plectranthus, apparently P. amboinicus (Wikipedia, hedge your bets) and listed as native from East Africa through Southern Africa? Really? Why've I never heard of it? Also known as Caribbean thyme, Spanish thyme, Mexican mint and Indian borage. It's confused!

Now we're off to the mainland, to visit the forest on the Long Island Sound: Pelham Bay. It's a long ride, a good walk, and we have baguettes to sustain us, books to read and many cameras to play with when we arrive.

May your Sunday journeys be fruitful whether you go inside or out.