A LOVELY SPRING BOTTOMLAND

     A successional, wooded bottomland in the forested Welsh Mountains near New Holland, Pennsylvania is a lovely place to visit in mid-April because of flowers and leaves developing on trees, shrubbery and smaller plants in the moist soil of those woods.  

     Several kinds of deciduous trees and other, smaller kinds of plants obviously adapted well to damp soil and shade.  Dominant trees in those low woods are black gums, red maples, shagbark hickory, black walnut, pin oaks, white oaks and tulip trees.  Spicebushes are common in the shrub layer.  On the dead-leaf covered forest floor, skunk cabbage leaves carpet lower spots on the woodland floor with their tall, broad, lush leaves in the middle of April.  Leaves of May apple plants grow in colonies here and there, and looking like the umbrellas of elves gathering in the woods.  Little groups of fiddle heads on cinnamon ferns grow and unfurl near the skunk cabbage and May apples.  And there are little patches of spring beauty plants, with their small, pink blossoms, hugging the forest floor for warmth..  

     During April, red maples develop beautiful red blooms, and reddish seeds toward the end of that month.  The seeds twirl down on thin wings like the blades of helicopters, which spreads those seeds far and wide.  However, rodents ingest many of them.

     Meanwhile, the shrub layer in bottomland woods is pale-yellow with innumerable flowers on many spicebushes.  In September, those spicebushes will bear many red berries where the flowers were.  Many of those striking berries will be consumed by rodents, American robins and other types of berry-eating birds.  The birds digest the pulp of the berries, but pass the seeds far and wide, thus spreading spicebushes from woods to woods.    

     A few clear trickles of water drain this wooded bottomland.  The bottom is gravelly and covered by fallen, dead leaves.  Algae grows in the slower currents of these tiny waterways.  Black-nosed dace, which is a kind of minnow, water striders, which are insects walking on the water's surface and two-lined salamander larvae live in those bitty rivulets.  

     A black-top, country road, with little traffic, bisects this wooded bottomland.  And the vegetated shoulders of that road are mowed occasionally, about ten feet back from the road to the edge of the woods.  The result of that mowing is a green strip of grass on both sides of the road, like a lawn, between the road and the woodland.  I must confess those grassy shoulders are more lovely and interesting to me than the woods, including during mid-April, because several species of flowering plants bloom beautifully in them.  

     Some native plants, including May apples, blue violets and spring beauties flourish in the full sun on those green, roadside "lawns".  But most of the plants blooming beautifully in those grassy strips are alien plants from Eurasia.  Lesser celandine plants, a bottomland species, and dandelion, have abundant, cheery-yellow blossoms on those green roadsides early in April.  Lovely scatterings of small, blue Veronica blooms, purple ground ivy flowers and pink blossoms of purple dead nettles peek beautifully from the grass in April.  Three-foot-tall garlic mustard bears clusters of white flowers and five-foot-tall field mustard sports cheery yellow blossoms in April, all of which provide beautiful flowers through that spring month.  

     Bees, cabbage white butterflies and other kinds of early insects visit these flowers to sip nectar and gather pollen, fertilizing the blooms in the process.  And those insects help provide more interest to those human-made, lawn-like strips of vegetation in bottomland woods.

     Many human-made habitats are interesting to experience because of the adaptability of plants and wild animals.  Lucky are the people who realize that.