Doomscrolling

In keeping with this blog's penchant for naturalistic fallacy, what we found on a first trip to the New York Botanic Garden in two months seemed to reflect the mood two hundred days into a national calamity. A friend told me he'd spent the summer doomscrolling. We're all trying hard not to, too.

Pollinator prairie

After No Mow May, NYBG's "daffodil hill" is doing just fine!

これももみじ

Lilies of the uncanny valley

As the internet fills with AI-generated images, the more refined ones plagiarizing the best of actual images taken by actual humans of actual things, there's an unexpected uncanny valley when a picture you were lucky enough to take looks too good to be true. How to keep it real?

 

For now, at least, a messy composition, with some leafless branches, 

 

or sun flares and leaf shadows through other fresh green leaves might work (or in a pinch, the not-quite-hidden form of another human)...

but the shadows of these forest floor lilies of the valley are sadly just perfect enough that AI might have cribbed them somewhere; luckily tree flowers photo-bombing from above might come to the rescue.

But with these preternatural beauties you'll have to take my word for it.

And with a sci-fi aspirant like this jack-in-the-pulpit, I just give up!

By your leave

 

 

Just some trees springing at the NYBG, mostly native, all wondrous!

Forest spring

The pleasure of a wet morning walk in the Thain Family Forest at NYBG took me back to North Carolina's daily wonder walks just a year ago...

Snap!

Me disappearing into a tree

Fall wallpapers

 

Autumn colors at NYBG

Colors of the season

A whiff of fall in the woods and some Van Gogh vibes over the native plants garden at the New York Botanical Garden

Smile

New York Botanical Garden's Alice in Wonderland-themed summer show is a little thin on the ground... but I found the Cheshire cat!

Primary colors

We depart tomorrow for three weeks in the forests of western North Carolina. The rationale for the trip: to see a deciduous forest through spring - something I've never had (or taken) the chance to do, despite much fall leaf-peeping. But I thought I should check in on our local deciduous forest, so popped over to the NYBG. While cherries

 

were in spectacular bloom, native plants are taking their time. These little blue flowers - squill, I think they're called - aren't native, and the woods beyond them, across the Bronx River, seem to offer the same the grey-brown scene they've offered for months. Not quite...

There's a yellow-greenish glow as some bushes in the understory leaf out. But the tips of many tree branches high overhead are well into spring, too. It's something you can't really see except when a tree, like this red maple, topples but decides not to give up the ghost.

The big surprise came in a somewhat wetter section of the woods: a lush carpet of trout lilies! These are flowers I'd only seen before in the Adirondacks and had assumed rare. No such thing! They bloom across eastern North America from Louisiana to Newfoundland! Confirms that I'm an eastern deciduous forest illiterate, ready to learn more!

Blueskying spring

Breeding lilacs out of the dead land

April used to be the cruellest month, but (one of our alums writes) now plants bud an average of 18 days earlier than in the 1950s.

Signs of spring