HORT travels

Exploring the horticultural beauty in every adventure.

Tag Archives: Rail Trail

Back on the Trail

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A golden Sugar Maple leaf, Acer saccharum, manages to perch perfectly on a twig between the creek and the trail.

For many the pandemic inspired people to get out on the trails, into parks and exploring nature, maybe for the first time, maybe to places they have never been. For me, the pandemic had the opposite effect. All of the places I usually find solace in a quiet exploration I found teeming with people, uncomfortable, crowded and unpleasant. The trails that brought me peace and an opportunity to contemplate and observe were now obstacle courses of bikers, joggers and walkers. And so I avoided my favorite places.

6 months into the pandemic, my friend and I began venturing on early morning bike rides. The area was opening up. Group activities and businesses were finding their new way to engage people and less people were hitting the trails, especially early. Eventually, after quite a few bike rides, I felt I could walk, and contemplate and recharge and observe out in my favorite natural places again.

Ahhhhh… Breathe in…. Breathe Out…

Listen to the crunch of the gravel under your feet…

Listen to the rippling of the creek down below…

Stop every five seconds to take another photo of the beauty that surrounds you.

Pale purple flowers of Blue Wood Aster, Symphyotrichum cordifolium, and the bright yellow leaves of Spice Bush, Lindera benzoin. Note the empty trail.

The Perkiomen Trail, my favorite stretch being the Crusher Road Access to Spring Mount, felt peaceful and accessible and enjoyable again.

Poison Ivy Toxicodendron radicans crawls up a homeowner’s fence putting on a bicolor show.

It is not that I stopped exploring nature during my Pandemic Pause from the Perkiomen Trail. Interestingly early on in the pandemic car traffic became so light I felt comfortable walking the narrow, unlined, hilly, curving roads around my home and began taking suburban safaris finding two 3.5 mile routes that took me past all kinds of nature I hadn’t noticed before. Over the months I discovered native plants I thought I had to drive someplace else to see and watched the changing of the seasons right close to home.

Blue Wood Aster Symphyotrichum cordifolium edges the trail and a lone jogger in the distance.

On this day I managed to time my morning walk just right to capture the essence of autumn in the sunrise and the wildflowers. Back to my happy place, a little bit of feeling normal, in this crazy new world.

Dewy Spiderweb

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PS

There was some evidence of the crazy I missed while avoiding the trail over the summer. Notice the trashcan stuck high up on the trees in the photo below. A remnant of the intense flooding storms we experienced over the summer.


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Change Along the Perkiomen Trail

The past lives on in art and memory, but it is not static: it shifts and changes as the present throws its shadow backwards. The landscape also changes, but far more slowly; it is a living link between what we were and what we have become. This is one of the reasons why we feel such a profound and apparently disproportionate anguish when a loved landscape is altered out of recognition; we lose not only a place, but ourselves, a continuity between the shifting phases of our life. 

~ Margaret Drabble A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature

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The Perkiomen Trail is close to home and a regular haunt for me. The 20-mile trail is a place of recreation, exhilaration, peace, reflection, solace, and education. In the 9 years I have walked and biked the trail it has changed. It changes seasonally, trading carpets of spring ephemerals for the russet and burgundy of fallen leaves in Autumn. But I have not witnessed anything so drastic as the change I saw upon returning to my favorite local outdoor place in early June this year.

While away visiting the big trees of northern California at home destruction was being wrought by straight-line winds gusting up to 110 miles per hour.  The storm also came with flash flooding of the Perkiomen Creek and the many other smaller tributaries coursing through the region. Luckily, my woodland home was spared damage from downed trees, but the same cannot be said for many in the area. Homes along the Perkiomen Creek were particularly hard hit by both flooding and the strong winds toppling trees. Unlike Ms. Drabble’s statement above – in this case the landscape changed drastically and quickly.

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Transition

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The late afternoon autumn sun setting over a meadow. At this time autumn is beginning to look wintery.

“Kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaathy!!!!” my sister would yell across the 2 1/2 pine barrens acres we called a playground growing up. This bellow could easily take the tone of joy or anger. We often yelled across the yard to each other and, in the silence of the rural pinelands, I am sure the neighbors heard our calls too. When we would do this within ear shot of my dad he would find us and remind us that we had “two legs and one mouth which means you can walk twice as far as you can yell.” I am not ashamed to say I have used this exact same phrase with students and interns in the past. Seems logical to me.

Just the other day I took a gentle walk along my favorite rail trail and instead of having a goal of miles or a time to beat or number of steps to worry about, I ventured on this day with the specific intention of using my two legs and just looking.

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The sun highlights a swath of goldenrod seedheads. Insects and mammals alike will find refuge here, protection from winter winds and snow. Birds find nourishment here in the fluffy seeds.

There have been a lot of words lately, an overwhelming amount of opinions and facts, love words and hate words and one word that keeps popping up: transition. Of course this realization of transition of political leadership coincides with the transition of seasons from fall to winter. It occurred to me, in addition to having two legs, I have two eyes. This means, by my father’s logic, I can see twice as much as I can say. So I decided to quietly witness this transition of fall to winter, during this time of transition for the country and, if I am going to be honest here, during personal transition of my own. Remembering with every dormancy theres comes a rebirth, after every winter follows a joyous spring, that autumn leaves provide the nourishment for next year’s wonderment, and that winter snow sustains us all.

So what follows are some snapshots of my small wander through transition, acknowledging we all are transitioning all the time; sometimes in small ways, sometimes in ways we have never imagined. Remembering none of this is permanent and if we stop talking and start looking, seeing, we will find the beauty and potential in the change.

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