Ahhh, the Ides of March! Beware (especially if you are Caesar…otherwise it’s not so bad!).

In the dead of a pandemic winter, what to do? You guessed it -take another workshop! This time, Winter Ecology through the North Branch Nature Center. One of my most favorite places on earth. The workshop was on Zoom but we were encouraged to go out and explore the winter world outside. I know I’m supposed to be able to identify the plants I saw but I can only name a few – Rudbeckia, Burdock, Queen Anne’s Lace. Much more interesting to me though to know about their structures, their life cycles, how they survive and recreate themselves. Guess I’m not much of a scientist (at least not an IDer type scientist). Oh well, I still like taking the workshops…and the photos.

Here is a photo collage I made of my photos of winter weeds. Their seeds are dispersed in a variety of ingenious ways: blown by the wind, catching a ride in an animal’s fur, swallowed but not digested by birds or other small animals then released in their droppings. Some are scattered when a creature just brushes by them. Some explode.

And here’s a poem:

Borne On the Wind

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How I wish I could lighten up,

Be like a milkweed seed

Borne on the wind to land and take root

Wherever Nature may please.

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There would I grow upright and strong,

Host to a hungry one

Who’d eat it’s fill of me and then

A chrysalis become.

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Soon the Monarch would emerge

Hold fast to my stem and wait

For it’s wings to dry until it could

Fly eagerly off to mate.

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My fragrant flowers turned to pods,

The pods dried up and when

From each two hundred seeds burst out

Borne on the wind again.