Free The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature by DavidGeorge Haskell Page B

vigil ends when the sun breaks out from behind a cloud. The morning’s soft humidity has lifted, and the snail heads toward El Capitan, or a smallish rock, depending on how you see the world. Here the snail touches a tentacle to the rock, then turns its entire head upside down and stretches up. The neck and head rubber-band into a giraffe’s, farther, a little farther, then the chin hits the rock, spreads itself into a pad, and the whole snail lifts up from the ground in a no-handed chin-up. Gravity blinks and the animal flows impossibly upward and continues its journey, upside down, into the rock crevice. I look up, out of the lens world, and the Serengeti has emptied. The grazers have evaporated in the sun.

March 25th—Spring Ephemerals
    M y walk to the mandala has become fraught. Every footstep threatens to squash half a dozen wildflowers, and so I step slowly, trying to pick out a way that does not leave a trail of crushed beauty. The mountainside is heavily peppered with green and white; half the leaf litter’s surface is covered by newly grown leaves and flowers.
    It is hard, though, to concentrate on my feet when the year’s first butterflies and migratory warblers are flying above me. An eastern comma, a rufous butterfly named for the white curl on its hindwing, flicks past my head and lands on a hickory trunk. The warm sun has roused it from its winter hibernation, hidden under a bark flake. A black-throated green warbler and a black-and-white warbler, both recently returned from Central America, sing from the bluff. The forest’s renewed life seems to crowd in on me from all sides, lifting my spirits with its unrestrained vigor.
    At the mandala I find a starburst of white flowers, a hundred blossoms shining out at the world. Spring beauty flowers with pink-streaked white petals grow low to the ground, intermixed with purple
Hepatica
. A few rue anemones emerge from the mandala’s edge, their nodding white flowers held finger-length above the leaf litter. Toothwort reaches tallest, just above ankle height, holding flowers with long white petals in clusters at the tips of sturdy stalks. Each flower trails a comet’s tail of lush green growth, erupting life from the mat of deadleaves. The contrast with the wintry trees above the mandala is dramatic. Tree buds are barely broken open.
    Spring wildflowers take advantage of the trees’ sluggishness, rushing through their reproduction and growth before the tree canopy steals life-giving photons. Although the March sun is still low, its rays are strong enough to burn the back of my neck as I sit. We have reached the peak of the year’s cycle of light intensity below the canopy. Winter’s hold is broken with blazing force, unlocking constellations of flowers and a cascade of animal life.
    The plants that festoon the mandala are collectively called spring ephemerals. This name captures their meteoric brilliance in springtime and their rapid fade in the summer sun, but the name belies their secret underground longevity. These plants grow from subterranean storehouses, some of them growing from hidden belowground stems called rhizomes, others emerging from bulbs or tubers. Every year, the plants send up leaves and flowers, then return to covert quiescence. The flowers’ push into the cool spring air is therefore fueled by food stored up from the previous year. Only after the plants have leafed out does photosynthesis boost their balance sheet. This strategy helps them persist in the choked, light-hungry world of the mandala. Some of these stems may be hundreds of years old, having slowly crept across the forest floor by growing a few centimeters of horizontal stem each year. These plants survive on the food gained during a few short weeks of springtime sun.
    Once the ephemerals have unfurled their leaves, they reap sunlight and carbon dioxide at a furious rate. The breathing holes in their leaves, the stomata, are thrown wide open. Leaves are stuffed with enzymes