It started with the lupine.
Last spring, I started taking the hound to Thompson’s Field, a 57-acre conservation area off Route 137 in East Harwich managed by the Harwich Conservation Trust.
Thompson’s has winding trails that go through meadows and woods and intersect with the Cape Cod Rail Trail. The conservation trust is incredibly tolerant of dogs, even if they are off leash, as long as owners are respectful of one another and pick up the waste. The hound and I started hiking there after he jumped the fence at the dog park because he apparently has “containment issues.” At Thompson’s however, he’s happy to sniff his way through two or three miles of trails, never meandering too far off, happy to follow his nose from discovery to discovery.
And I was content to be sorting through the voices in my own head until mid-May when I spotted a patch of blue lupine blooming in the meadow off Chatham Road. Then I noticed the lily of the valley and the lichen and discovered I had a new mission as we walked: wildflowers.
Just to be clear, if you want a nature expert, you should be listening to classic Robert Finch or Dennis Minsky or some of my other fellow Cape Cod Notebook writers. While I love the outdoors and flowers, my wildflower expertise extends to printed shower curtains and a few mostly unopened guides on my bookshelves. But, I have a smartphone. And that – insert irony here – has opened up the world of the outdoors.
To be clear, I never listen to music or anything else on my phone when I’m walking. I like being immersed in whatever is around me. I carry it mostly for reassurance – or at least because it makes my kids feel safer about me being out in the world. That said, I do have the Merlin birding app, which I can turn it to the sound of a bird and then usually find out what I’m hearing, be it an eastern phoebe, screech owl, or pine warbler.
But my smartphone has another tool that helped as the lupine and lilies died off and the summer flowers started to bloom in the meadows. I realized I was looking at flowers I’d seen for years but never known by name. So I started taking photos of them with my phone, which through the magic of artificial intelligence – one of the few uses that dazzles me – identifies the plant. If that doesn’t work, I can upload it into iNaturalist. Or to Google when I get home.
So as we moved from May into July, I spotted orange butterfly weed, yellow St. John’s Wort and the invasive brown knapweed, which is actually purple. I identified a bright orange sea-urchin looking pathogen on the junipers. There was hoary alyssum – another invasive – and fleabane, small and daisylike, and blue chicory.
By August, yellow toadflax, which look like tiny snapdragons, were blooming. Sadly, they are another invasive and their roots can have a 10-foot spread. The Queen Anne’s lace, or wild carrot, was blooming and the milkweed had formed pods. If I walked slowly I could spot red campion, with petals that are actually a soft lavender. And as an added bonus, one very rainy day the hound and I came across a yellow and brown eastern box turtle in a damp woodland path. The hound was confused. I was delighted.
Come September the whites and yellows took over: daisy-ish asters, yellow evening primrose, and goldenrod. And the milkweed pods burst, creating occasional billowy clouds of white in the meadows. Next will come the frost. The colors will die down, but I expect winter will have its own discoveries, shapes and beauty. And I’ll know to pay closer attention in early spring.
Look, I still don’t purport to be any kind of expert. And if you give me a pop quiz on some of these plants, I might flunk. But paying attention to what was growing around me made me look differently at a place that I had mistakenly thought was just a place to walk for the sake of the hound. Now, as he sniffs along, I can move from discovery to discovery of my own.