Summer Memories and Pine Plantations

We got very busy moving at summer's end, so I never got to post some of these observations, but one of my memories is of the flowers blooming in the meadow. They vary over the year, with the yellow kind devil in the late spring, goldenrod in the fall, and these daisies and brown-eyed susan's in mid-summer. We watched with great enjoyment the changing colour of the meadow beside us over the season, as it switched from green to yellow to blue to white to light brown in the fall.

Many of the Hanlon Creek trails pass or go through pine plantations, and another pattern I noticed over and over again was the triangle of light you'd spot at the distant end of the rows of pine trees. Planted in straight lines, and now grown 40-50 feet tall, the pines still had many lower branches that made walking through them difficult; but you could look down the long dark line of white pine and see a bright triangle of light from the meadow at the end.

Moving On..........!

As you may have guessed, we have moved on (to retirement) and no longer visit Hanlon Creek often. We're now located in the Beaver Valley, and my new blog is 'seasonsinthevalley.blogspot.com'. I invite you to take a look if you're interested.

So these will be my last few posts to the Hanlon Creek Journal, highlighting a few things I remember - like the mushroom trees.

A little earlier in the fall, a year ago, I came across several pine and cedar trees along the trail decorated with small mushrooms, tucked in the crotches of branches. It was certainly one of the more surprising things I'd seen while walking the trails. Presumably squirrels were picking the mushrooms, growing nearby, and putting them there to dry, or as a food stash.

I was reminded of this recently when I found apples stashed in the very same way in our own old apple trees in the fencerow. The squirrels have been busy here too. Now that winter's here I wonder how often the squirrels actually go back and retrieve their stash for lunch?