A walk in the spring woods on a day in early May is a delightful way to spend a Saturday especially when you have gotten up way too early to attend a plant sale where you buy your usual assortment of specimens that you know are going to die anyway because you’re just a plop-them-in-the-ground-and-hope-for-the-best-kind of gardener. Those horticultural society gardeners are serious folks, and early-risers too, (worse than garage sales), and usually by the time I get there everything is picked over and the half-price sale is on. They are quite horrified when I ask for something in pink, blue or lavender. The best they could come up with was some purple iris, a wilted Virginia bluebell, a day lily of unspecified colour, and a spinster gooseberry. (There was only one left, and the guy did warn me that his did not bear fruit because he didn’t have two, but hey that’s the way nature sometimes works.) He also tried to interest me in some leftover red and black currant bushes, but I passed on those as I remember having a row of those on the farm. Mainly because it was my job to pick them so my mother could make a red currant pie, which only my father ate as the currants were so sour. The birds ate the black currants. The single gooseberry bush did produce 2 or 3 berries occasionally, so I have faith.

Anyway, as the sale was winding down, several of my friends who belong to the Hort. Society invited me in for pizza, but I declined, because I didn’t really know the rest of the volunteers, and they might think I was just there for the free lunch, (people can be funny that way) so I went for a walk in a nearby park instead. It was a perfect spring day – sunny, a light breeze, not too hot, not too cold.

This particular park is about 100 acres in size and borders Lake Huron, and although I have been there many times – to the animal farm, the picnic pavilions, and of course the beach, I had never walked the densely wooded trail which is where these pictures were taken, (with my new camera which I am still figuring out). Early spring is best, when the trees are just starting to leaf out, and before tick season starts. The rest of the park contains more typical open areas, with lots of walking paths and tall trees. The wooded area is a favorite spot for birders, and there was certainly plenty of birdsong that morning, although I only saw two other people. Everyone else must have been out buying gifts for their mothers.

This area is an example of a Carolinian forest, a type of deciduous forest which spans the eastern US from Northern Carolina up into southern Ontario. (Wikepedia link) You can go either right or left on the trails, I chose right.

There were lots of pretty spring wildflowers in the woods.

And quite a bit of dead wood off the trails.

There were patches of white trilliums, which are our provincial flower, mostly seen on drivers licenses and heath cards, except for a few short weeks in the early spring. (These pictures were taken May 10). Trilliums have 3 flowers and 3 petals, hence the name, and also come in other colours. You are not supposed to pick the flowers, because they only have a few short weeks to store up enough energy and nutrients for the rest of the year, which is why they bloom in early spring when the tree canopy is lighter and sunshine is at the max.

I remember the bush on the back of my parents farm being full of trilliums and one year my cousin and I picked masses of them and brought them up to the house for our mothers for Mother’s Day, only to be told by my dad that it was against the law to pick trilliums. I was about eight and had visions of the RCMP hunting us down! White trilliums are a favourite food of white tailed deer which is why the provincial parks often use annual trillium surveys to monitor the local deer population.

It is against the law to pick them in provincial parks, where they are so plentiful they probably deserve their own blog. Maybe next spring…

I didn’t do both trails, as like the trilliums I wanted to conserve enough energy to visit the turtles, so I drove the car around to the small lake in the middle of the park, and parked in front of it, (there were no signs – I checked). There were wild crab-apple trees along the path to the spot where the turtles like to hang out.

The turtles like to sunbathe on a log that juts out into the mini-lake. They have their own fan club on sunny days. There are baby turtles too, but I didn’t see any that day. (I’m not sure why the water looks that shade?)

This was on the opposite side of the water so I was happy to have the camera with the 30X zoom lens, and the optical viewfinder so I can frame shots on sunny days. (It’s hard to find a digital camera with both – mine’s a Panasonic Lumix – Model DMC-ZS60 with a LCD rear view screen and a old-fashioned viewfinder in the top corner. I bought it in 2022, so there may be newer models out now.)

This turtle pond at a local nursery also has the same putrid looking water, but is home to 12 turtles waiting for their “forever pond.”

I’ll add one of mom’s paintings for old time’s sake. I really missed her on this first Mother’s Day without her, and the first time I hadn’t bought a card in fifty years.

When I returned to the car a group of nice young park rangers were gathered around it debating whether to ticket me for parking illegally but as they had not yet installed the warning signs, and I pleaded that I’d had heart surgery and couldn’t walk that far, I got off on a promise of good behaviour. (Really, that excuse could be good forever.) I concluded my walk with a short visit to the beach, because you know summer is just around the corner! Then I went home and had a two hour nap from all that fresh air!