A Website about Urban Environmental Restoration in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia
Our backyard Mayapples are finally blooming! Most of the ones in the Fairmount Park forests behind our house are finished blooming.
These Mayapples are cultivated and sourced from a native plant nursery that specializes in shade plants. They last throughout the season and can be used for decorative landscaping as opposed to the local populations here that only last into June.
I went to the Brimfield outdoor antique show and ended up driving over and crushing some of these flowers. I was directed to park on this spot. I still own what I did to those little delicate flowers but in a strange way I was actually helping the local population of that species. You will have to read on for that explanation!
This beautiful spring wildflower is tiny, colorful and elegant, floating above the ground on the thinnest and most spindly of stems. They thrive on moist flat areas where the grass is diminished and mowed moist fields where the grass is continually kept at bay. The world renowned Brimfield Antique Show in Brimfield Massachusetts is a great place for them to thrive because acres of moist soils are continuously mowed to make way for the largest antique extravaganza in the world to take place three times a year. Many of them do get run over by tents and parking cars but the the conditions are still so favorable that they continue to thrive! I drove over a bunch of ‘em and when I loaded my van with all of my recently acquired antique finds I took great care to not crush any more! I did feel guilty for the ones I ran over with my automobile.
However, interestingly enough the huge show is helping the species locally by requiring the continuous mowing of fields to park cars on, even if many of them ending up getting crushed.
The complicated world of species survival, local species extirpation, and unintentional species codependency grinds on.
In 1985 I acquired two acorns sourced from Thayer Road in Monson Massachusetts. I planted them at my home on Moulton Hill Road, about 8 miles away as the crow flies. I got them in the fall and put them in some dirt filled pots and se5 them in the damp basement for the winter. By spring the acorns were swelled up and ready to sprout. I chose two locations that today I would not have picked, because they are too close to 1, a drainpipe and 2, a septic leach field. Over the years I have watched the two trees grow, sometimes suffering from too much water nearby, the occasional insect infestation and one of them was accidentally mowed over in its sapling state.
This is the one that got mowed down in 1986. It looks about 45 feet tall. Below is the one planted near the septic system.
A nice place to sit, in front of the Mayapple patch featured in yesterday’s post.
The circumference of the mowed down one is clocking in at 7 feet!! Measured in the trunk about a foot above the end of the flare.
