Hi River Roaders,

This month’s blog gives a tip of the hat to an early Robert Burns song. Many of the Grounding Blogs focus on “what’s blooming now,” and feature bright-colored flowers. May in our shade garden is different. Gone are the blooms from the spring ephemerals that use the sunlight before being shaded out by the forest canopy. The highlight now is the varied textures and colors of our grasses, sedges, rushes, ferns and herbaceous plants. Let’s take a look.

The hillside behind our property is filled with large stands of jewelweed. It will have bright orange flowers later in the summer, but now is a fresh, saturated green.

This is a piece of a dead ash tree that fell earlier this year, surrounded by grasses and rushes.

We have many different species of sedge in our garden. Here is a Gray’s sedge with its mace-like seed heads.

We have many fox sedge on our property, named because the seed-head resembles a fox tail.

Sedge are notoriously difficult to identify down to the species. I can’t identify this, but it lines the banks of our springs and is really pretty.

Flower heads on soft rush.

We have about ten different species of fern on our grounds. My favorite is this maidenhair fern.

Delicate leaves of our lady ferns.

And no blog with fern photos would be complete without the jungle of ostrich ferns beside the playground.

If you can, try to find time for a walk in Springsview Garden behind our building. It can be refreshing.

Joe