A Lot of Gall...

Natureman will do anything to get me out of the house and onto a walk with him. It's not that I don't like walks as a rule but last week I had sprained my foot. I have no clue how I did it really, not that that matters but the fact remains that I had spent the past 4 days not really wanting to put all my weight on that one foot.

Our road/ driveway as you may remember is a far cry from being paved, just a dirt road (translation = rocky), so I wasn't real excited about exacerbating the pain/ re-injurying it. But Natureman can be real insistent or as his youngest put it this week on a FaceBook comment, " What Natureman wants, Natureman gets. "I saw something really that looks like an orchid but I don't recognize it." Now that did pique my interest and he promised it was not far, down by the first mudslide. (We have new land markers since that first 500 yr flood.)

So I put on sturdy walking shoes and off we went down the road. Being late August our road is flanked now by head high goldenrod which is actually quite pretty with its yellow blooms.

But I was actually beginning to doubt that he would really find the place where he had seen the unknown bloom amidst all that goldenrod. See I wasn't kidding.

But sure enough as we approached the designated mudslide area, we found the one white blooming plant amidst the multitude of goldenrod. I was a bit disappointed because I was really looking forward to discovering a new plant and the process of plant ID.

"Oh that's Chelone," I declared, " Turtlehead. The bloom looks like a turtle's head, it's a native plant."(See that Master Gardener training really did pay off.) It is truly amazing what does turn up growing alongside the road as each year new plants appear and sometimes just as quickly disappear after being choked out.

We walked a tad farther and Natureman grabbed a stem of ragweed. "See this, do you know what this is?
It's a gall. (I knew that) It's where the deerfly lay their eggs and then the larvae feed on the plant all winter before hatching in the spring.? (In case you missed it, you should read my 'Bugged? You think You're Bugged?'June 12th blog entry sometime.)

Any how out comes a Natureman story that I had never heard before. You see in his younger days Natureman would cut off the galls, slice them open to extract the larvae in order to sell them to the fishermen as bait for a nickel no less since there were no worms at that time of year. Now we could say that took 'a lot of gall.' SORRY, I couldn't resist.

And so my friends, the hobble down the End of the Rainbow Valley road was certainly worth hearing this great new Natureman story. You just never know when a gem can be found along the path...