Marcia Bonta

  • Wildflowers of a June Forest

    Now that the flush of forest spring wildflowers has passed, it’s easy to overlook most of the late bloomers.  Yet our June woods produce some lovely native wildflowers, beginning with the pink lady’s-slipper. Although it starts to bloom in mid-May, it holds its single crimson-pink slipper for three weeks.  The pink lady’s-slipper orchid (Cypripedium acaule)…

  • A Wild Resource Festival

    Thunder rumbled ominously as my husband Bruce and I rushed to join Dr. Jim Bissell on a Dune Walk at Presque Isle State Park.  Under a lowering sky spitting rain, we waited anxiously at Beach 10 Parking Area.  Cars pulled in and out, but no one arrived for the 10:00 a.m. field trip.  Then, Bissell…

  • The Tree of Great Peace

    The Iroquois called it the “Tree of Great Peace.” Its cluster of five needles to a bundle represented the five nations of the Iroquois and its spreading roots, reaching east, north, west, and south were the roots of peace that extended to all peoples. We call this tree, more prosaically, eastern white pine — Pinus…

  • A Fruitful Year

    Some years are more fruitful than others.  Last year was one of those years.  From mid-June until mid-August I never set out for my morning walk without slipping a pint jar into my pocket.  I wanted to be prepared to pick first the low bush blueberries, then the huckleberries on the powerline right-of-way, and later,…

  • August Natives

    Joe Pye is back.  Not the Native American herbalist for whom the wildflower is named, but the gorgeous wildflower itself that towers above a sea of goldenrod in our First Field. Once we had dozens of joe-pye-weeds lifting their clusters of tiny, purple-colored blossoms above the lesser field flowers in August.  Then they disappeared.  We…

  • Return of the Shrubs

    The good news is that our shrub layer is making a comeback in some places.  The bad news is that most of the shrubs are growing in places inaccessible or inconvenient to deer. Take common elder.  When we first moved here, 36 years ago, a line of common elder shrubs grew behind a barberry hedge…

  • Green Immigrants of June

    In June our home is afloat in a sea of orchid or so it seems because dame’s rocket blankets the back slope. Locals call it phlox, but wild phlox is a native wildflower that has five-petaled flowers and dame’s rocket is a Eurasian immigrant with four-petaled flowers that forms a showy cluster along its two-to-three…

  • Eternal Evergreens

    Now that the deciduous trees have shed their leaves, the woods seem bare and dreary. Maybe that is why I spend much of the winter down in the hollow among the hemlocks or up in the Norway spruce grove. Both offer shelter and comfort on the coldest, bleakest winter days. The birds and animals, too,…

  • Scents and Sensibility

    Forty years ago. It’s early autumn and I’m sitting behind my boyfriend on his motorscooter. We bump along a dirt road winding through the mountains of central Pennsylvania. “Stop!” I yell suddenly. The scooter slides to a halt. “I smell New Jersey tea,” I say as I hop off and rush through the shrubby mountaintop…