Flowers Again, Prodigal, Extravagant Flowers

Over the years I've watched the banks of this creek, the red flowers of the buckeye trees show up in greater numbers. Some in clusters, some on their own, maybe to start new clusters.

Here against a fence on the bank of the creek, we see young trees in the foreground, very probably the offspring of the modest-sized tree to the right on the other side of the fence.

One sees new trees, a foot high or less, in a lot of forest understory. Few of the new trees will have the room and sunlight to grow large, but nature sows them extravagantly. In my April 10 post that came just before this one, I reflected on Loren Eiseley's observation that, over (roughly, of course) the past hundred million years or so, the wildly prolific and prodigal flowering plants provided the biomass needed to feed warm-blooded mammals and birds, thus providing the nutrition for all the species in these biological classes to flourish.

 

The trees seem to compete for ground. Within a hundred yards of these stand sycamores, red maples, oaks, hickories, sweet gums, river birches, hornbeams, and a few more I don't know the names of. They put their fruits out too, after flowering. The buckeyes put forth, well, buckeyes, also known in some places as conkers. There's a very tasty chocolate and peanut-butter candy named after them. Acorns from the oaks, nuts from the hickories.

Some of these fruits try to protect themselves from being eaten. The gum balls from sweet gums that grow widely in the American southeast are prickly, which keeps some would-be diners away from the nutritious seeds inside these fruit-balls. Here they lie among leaves which, when more decomposed, might nourish a tree that grew from one of the fruits.

In spring, the rains come with the warming air and lengthening days, filling the streams that help feed all this new life.

It's not hard to see why trees grow thickly around streams, even those that go dry for a few weeks or months during the year.

And other life is nourished by the spring water flows. Last week I crouched by the side of this stream, and saw, side by side, a very young bullfrog, no bigger than a small toad, and a large bullfrog tadpole, no doubt not far away from its movement into the final cycle of his form. I wondered where they would be, if they survived, when the creek is dry in a couple of months. It occurred to me that they probably just follow the receding water downstream, where the flows from the intermittent streams merge into one large enough to hold water all year. Downstream from that are small ponds in wet bottomlands, and eventually, a river. Prodigious numbers of eggs, like flowers and fruit, are deposited into water somewhere. Some of the frogs will make it.