Marcia Bonta

  • The Beautiful Beech

    Ghostly leaves of American beech trees sway in February storms like tiny spirits alive in a frozen world.  But only small and medium-sized beech trees hold on to their leaves throughout the winter. In the fall, I watch the toothed, leathery, single beech leaves turn from green to gold.  Then the gold leaks from them…

  • Pennsylvania Hiking Week

    By the time my husband Bruce and I learned that our 13-year-old granddaughter Eva was going to spend the summer with us, most of the state park cabins were booked up.  But we were able to snag a few days at Hills Creek State Park between Mansfield and Wellsboro in north central Tioga County. We…

  • Different Worlds

    What a difference a few miles can make.  From our home on the westernmost ridge of the Ridge and Valley Province to the Allegheny Front is only a couple miles as the crow flies, yet, as I teetered across a log and cable bridge over Bell Gap Run on State Game Lands 108, I felt…

  • Redbud Valley

    We live just above the redbud line that stretches across the middle of Pennsylvania.  But we only need to descend our mountain road and head south a few miles into the rich limestone valleys to see field edges and hillsides of redbud covered with clusters of pea-shaped lavender blossoms that have sprouted along their branches…

  • 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…

  • Grasses Wear Robes

    We never get very far when we go on a Pennsylvania Native Plant Society field trip.  But we always learn and see more than we bargained for.  Take the grass field trip to Rothrock State Forest in central Pennsylvania that my son Dave and I joined last July.  Let by Sarah Miller of the Penn…

  • Mountain Meadows

    Imagine receiving a gift of 113 acres on Tussey Mountain.  That’s what happened to Mike and Laura Jackson back in 1988 when Laura’s parents, Richard and Phyllis Hershberger, gave them a portion of their farm.  The Jacksons named their property Mountain Meadows and built a home with large windows for wildlife viewing. Part of the…

  • Making Connections

    Our plane dropped through the momentary hole in the clouds and made a perfect landing on the St. John’s runway. After a day’s delay, because of fog, we had finally arrived in Newfoundland. Place of my dreams, this island in the sea is halfway to Ireland. And yet here is where our beloved Appalachian Mountains…

  • May Journal Highlights

    May Day Musings May 1. 47 degrees at dawn and overcast with a shower before breakfast. Three deer foraged in the flat area and did not flee when I set out the bird feeder. Halfway along Black Gum Trail, the first ovenbirds finally sang. Our springs are later and later; England’s are earlier and earlier–three…

  • Grasslands of Central Pennsylvania

    On a day in late August, members of the Pennsylvania Native Plant Society visited what ecologist Roger Latham calls “wild-ungulate pastures” in Clearfield County’s Quehanna Wild Area. Latham, who has been working on a meadow and grass inventory of Pennsylvania, was searching for “meadows and grasslands that have persisted for a long while and for…

  • 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…