Have you seen...

Each morning, we gathered for breakfast under a small shelter at the edge of a nearby park. In the dark and dense fog, heavy eyes scanned only as far as the tables, set with food—and a coffee station doling out warmth, and life, to the 6:00 a.m. crowd.
By afternoon, on our return here, this large cedar beside the structure was catching the full midday sun—illuminated all across its great size.
And, orange balls, glowing.

It’s Cedar-Apple Rust.
And these great fingers, telia, extending from the purple knobs on every branch, reminded me of playdough squeezed through a child’s toy, extruded in long, cool, floppy forms.
This wet spring prompts them forth.

From them, the bright orange teliaspores will be carried, on a breezy day, to find an apple or quince tree nearby. In the fall, from lesions there, aecia, growing on the apple’s leaves and fruit, aeciospores are blown, back to cedar again—the cycle between the two plants completed in 24 months.

This tree is heavy beneath them.
Their soft, gelatinous strands, bending the branches low.
But I find something very strikingly beautiful about them.
Orange balls of fire.

Cedar-Apple Rust,
caused by fungal pathogen, Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae

"Have you seen...." is an effort to discover the unusual beauty in things not usually appreciated for their beauty.

More information about Cedar-Apple Rust may be found here.

From the Blog... to the Bog (SWF)

It’s the places, small in name, immense in value, that intrigue me.
Places like fens, and bogs, where the lives evolved within are rare.
Worlds unto themselves,
remnants from ages past--
these are true treasures to explore.


The Cranberry Glades sit high within the Allegheny mountains of the Monongahela National Forest, bounded as a bowl at an elevation that allows this rare community, resembling arctic tundra, to exist as far south as Pocahontas County, West Virginia.

The Bog Plains

A cranberry hides within

Within its 750 acres, dense stands of Red Spruce and Hemlock interrupt the broad, rosy bog plains of prostrate cranberry vines and bog rosemary, a woven, 10-foot deep peat base, their anchor.

False Hellebore, Veratrum viride

Quiet pools of dark, water, lumps of felled trees at their edges, sprout glowing patches of marsh marigold and false hellebore, the pleated leaves playing with shadows on a bright and sunny late April morning.

Marsh Marigold, Caltha palustris

From a boardwalk protecting the fragile, acidic ground beneath it, I watched as a small gray bird announced his territory’s edge—the sun on a bare branch from within the cover of dark evergreen, illuminating his raised golden crown.

Golden-crowned Kinglet, buried in branches

And, minutes later, my first Blackburnian Warbler, throat glowing orange, the same thick green woods, home to him, too.

Eastern Skunk Cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus

Golden mounds of carnivorous pitcher plants, dot the sun-filled plains.
Skunk cabbage unrolls its first small leaf.
And, soon wild orchids and sundew will be visible here.


For one day, we were all in one place.
Bloggers to the bog— treasures wonderfully remembered.

The Nature Bloggers:
Nature Remains, Wrenaissance Reflections, Hasty Brook, Susan Gets Native, KatDoc's World, Sycamore Canyon, From the Faraway, Nearby, Mary's View

See more Skywatch here.

Picking Postcards

I’ve never been especially good at making decisions.
Often, it seems, given more thought, the lines become blurred, hopelessly tangled in an inseparable mass.
The simplest task,
never quite that.

Like spinning the rounds of postcards,
standing, unsteadily beside the worn counter,
shop clerk, patiently waiting,
or perhaps not.

Is it prettier to me,
one who feasts ravenously for a handful of days,
and remembers it with a handful of postcards?

View from Hawk's Nest State Park

Flowering White Dogwood

Infinite shades of Green

Flowering Pink Dogwood

Glade Creek Grist Mill, Babcock State Park

New River Gorge Sunset from Smokey's on the Gorge