25 October finds me among the Tamaracks at the tracks on Bedell Road south of Kemptville Ontario.
22 October finds us looking up at the Scarborough Bluff freshly illuminated by the sunrise, from the east end of the parking lot of Bluffer’s Park in Scarborough, east of Toronto. My back is to the lake and the breeze is brisk and cold. The cloudy sky protected us from frost last night but now the cloud is clearing and the rising sun picks out the pale clay bluffs and burnishes the autumn red trees and bushes.
At the base of the bluff is a veritable sea of Phragmites, in shadow now except for the fluffy plumed seed heads. An invasive reed introduced from Europe, Phragmites, is also climbing the bluffs in places and Fred is keeping track of its progress, and measures three of the tall stems to be 392 cm, 452 cm, and 451 cm – the tallest is four and a half metres! The Phragmites rhizomes as well as the roots of the constantly spreading Coltsfoot, also an European introduction, will stabilize the clay which is constantly eroding so that woods, yards and gardens at the crest of the bluffs are being undercut.
A little to the west of the view I have chosen, a strange wasp-nest-like structure with a gaping hole in it poises, exposed, at the top edge of the pale clay wall, high above the rows of autumn-empty Bank Swallow holes. Binoculars reveal it to be a brick lined well. Through the big hole in its side we can see the wooden planks of its cover. A hump of long-grassed sod covers the well.
Last night we saw a Fox at the foot of the bluffs, and heard wild howling and yapping of nearby Coyotes.
19 October finds us visiting the Lake Ontario shore in Burlington Ontario, after Fred’s first day of meetings on the conservation and recovery of rare fresh water mussels.
It is sunny, but windy and cool. Autumn mating chironomid midges hover in dancing clouds and single individuals brush against my hair as I walk down to the water’s edge to watch a big Great Lakes ship pass imperceptibly, lit by the late afternoon sun across the pale blue lake. I am composing a painting of the grapevines draped over willow bushes and a low dune bracketed by drifts of fallen leaves, with the pearly blue lake behind with pinkly glowing skyscrapers of Hamilton along a high horizon.
The beach edge thickets are alive with little birds, hopping and peeping softly among the grape vines and scuffling the fallen leaves for insects – sparrows and warblers of many kinds. Ducking inside the nearest thicket, I brush aside a few vines and notice something black lying like a small cast off jacket. Stepping closer it changes fantasy-like into a dwarfed waif draped in a dark blanket, sleeping – or dead. And so it is, a Cormorant who crept in here to die, blanketed by its dark wing iridescent in purple and green.
Protected by legislation from near extinction, Cormorants are hated by some fishermen, who regard them as competitors. This will be my subject for today’s painting. On its other side I see an open wound, attesting to a violent death. It reminds me of the Gannet I painted at Cap Lumiere, New Brunswick.
11 October finds us looking for Wood Frogs in Limerick Forest, east of Bishops Mills Ontario. We have walked back into the Red Pine plantation behind the “Chalet” building – pines that were planted in the 1940s to stabilize blowing sand after farming failed in the area. At this time of year the Wood Frogs are leaving the sunny open spots in the woods where they have been hunting for insects all summer, and heading for low, moist spots where they will hide in the leaf litter, raising their blood sugars in order to survive freezing solid for the winter.
First I notice a tall Amanita mushroom with a gleaming egg-shaped cap flakey with the white scraps of its old veil, and then begin finding more and more brown Boletus with their soft suede caps and spongy porous undersides. This one still wears the fallen pine needles that it pushed up as it emerged from the fine network of mycelium that fills the forest floor, breaking down buried rotting wood and feeding the trees.
This species lives for most of the year as hidden thread-like mycelia in the quickly rotting wood of most of the Manitoba Maples in eastern Ontario. About Thanksgiving time fruiting bodies slowly blossom from scattered knotholes: whitish caps with pale tan gills, held up on stout curved white stalks. Their flesh is firm and dry, not easily damaged by autumn frosts. This delicious and safely-edible wild mushroom is easy to identify, as no other gilled, stalked, white fungus grows on Manitoba Maples at this season in our area.
This species lives for most of the year as hidden thread-like mycelia in the quickly rotting wood of most of the Manitoba Maples in eastern Ontario. About Thanksgiving time fruiting bodies slowly blossom from scattered knotholes: whitish caps with pale tan gills, held up on stout curved white stalks. Their flesh is firm and dry, not easily damaged by autumn frosts. This delicious and safely-edible wild mushroom is easy to identify, as no other gilled, stalked, white fungus grows on Manitoba Maples at this season in our area.
For sale at Burlington Art Centre $425 framed
30 September finds us at the historic site of Fort Beausejour south east of Sackville, New Brunswick, looking out from the rolling grass knolls of the fort, over the Tantamar Marshes to the misty reach of the Cumberland Basin.
Saltmarsh ponds glint in the sun along the shoreline and beyond its sharp edge the seawater is pink with red mud – I think it becomes even pinker with the receding tide.
A red-rutted track runs between the sloped grassy lawn of the fort and a field of lush long grass, crouched in by large round bales of hay, and beyond that field the land drops away again to flat scrubby variegated fields that may have been farmed at one time, dyked and drained, now threaded through by dark lines and dashes of brushy ditches and gullies. In the distance a small herd of scattered cattle are mere dark dots, but the breeze brings me a faint bovine bellow. It is very quiet up here at the top of the world, until a train clatters along the tracks that were barely visible beyond the edge of the field.
Fred has returned from his walk along the rail line to scan the marshes for the puffy domes of Phragmites stands. He didn’t see any. This is the one place in the Maritimes where the invasive European Phragmites australis subspecies australis has been reported, so we are interested in seeing how conditions here compare to what we’d observed elsewhere in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Watching the traffic on TransCanada Hwy 2 beetling along to the north we figure that the place that would be most informative would be the roadsides, since traffic and earth-moving machinery are the vectors of the spread of the invasive kind.
Fred reported later: “When the painting was done, we drove the busy road across the marshes both ways, waypointing stands and taking representative specimens (and giving the artist plenty of time to reflect on the prospects that might be opened up by widowhood as she watched me crossing between long strings of very fast traffic).
29 September finds us driving the winding, hilly Nova Scotia highway #215 east along the north coast as evening falls. Each tiny community has its own old white frame community hall and every road to the right winds up into forested hills. The trees are compact in shape, not fluffy and rangy as they are farther inland, and the crowns of big trees are smoothly rounded.
We drive slowly. I am looking for a high seaside view for today’s painting. The crest of each hill shows us the gleaming sea beyond sloping fields of small farms. Some hayfields all frosted with blueish asters and others uniform green.
Then I see them and we stop. Two stout, creamy-coloured horses, one following the other up to the barn from their seaside pasture. The leader has a black stripe up the centre of its stiff upright mane. Perhaps this is the Fjord Horse, an ancient breed from Norway.
27 September finds me on the bank of a brook near Ellershouse, Nova Scotia, gazing across a dark pool formed as the brook turns at a massive wrinkled and water carved bedrock wall. The rock is a greenish grey metamorphic, stained rusty-pink in places, with four little “caves” along a bedding fault, which reflect ripples on their ceilings. From the water to its forested crest, the nearly vertical wall is 15-20 metres high. I look straight up to Pines of half a century or more waving long arms of sunlit needles against the cobalt sky. The forest has crept half way down the rock face. Spruces, Maples and Pines perch on ledges and find roothold in crevices. To my right a large Maple with lichen-whitened bark leans over the pool to reflect its ‘fluorescent’ leaves from lime at the bottom to crimson at the top. It is matched by a Red Maple whose leaves haven’t started to turn yet.
