The Persistence of February

February is the month of the Cold Moon, said my naturalist guide Boot Boutwell, who shared this during a winter plant identification walk at Bellevue Pond in Middlesex Fells this morning. Last night I noticed that moon, a bulbous waxing gibbous, bright bright next to Orion in a black sky, standing in the front yard of my parents’ house in the southern suburbs. The sky at my home is never this black. The moon glow felt like a spotlight from straight above, its aura forcing me to stop and look up and around for the source, presumably because I’m not used to moonglow in my neighborhood a mere 20 miles north from there.

I walked down the Somerville bike path, my stride vigorous—a girl’s best defense against the cold. Though the day was full of sunshine, the cold consistently nipped through. I guess this is just the persistence of February, fighting to keep winter tight under our chins.

I thought about the little bits of art and culture that hide along that very popular path, in a town of quietly creative, irreverent people. The

ornate design of a stone paver that began a little path to nowhere. The stack of ice tablets someone had constructed next to its apparent source, a large half-frozen puddle that reminded me of a vernal pool, if one could exist on asphalt. A sticker depicting a rodent with an Egyptian headdress placed too high on a lamppost for someone to have done it without a ladder. The googly-eyed sock puppet with red scarf adorning the fencepost of the community garden entrance. On a nature walk of Somerville, these little tidbits would be the flora and fauna of our offbeat local culture, the staples of a vibrant ecosystem of humor and questioning.

Compare that community with the Fells woods this morning, attended by Boot, the lively jester of the winter woods, with his black knit hat slouched and crooked like an elf’s, and the group of elder women who all seemed to be Boot’s biggest fans, sporting knowledge they’d learned from his previous walks and a jocular familiarity with one another’s names. The treasures we inspected were all members of the plant kingdom, but each spelled a story of survival just the same as any piece of human-created art.

We learned to look closely for terminal buds on branches, and inspect their color, shape, and size. We looked for “leaf scars” showing where leaves would be growing in warmer seasons, and noted whether their placement was opposite or alternate. Even the size of a leaf scar tells a story: a larger “shield-shaped” leaf scar, such as that of the ash tree, is indicative of compound leaves, which, having more surface area than simple leaves, need more water, and therefore have a larger stem for transporting the larger volume.

We used the few deciduous leaves still clinging to branches, called “marcescent”, as further clues. The only marcescent species we found were white oak, hop hornbeam, witch hazel, and American beech. Why do some plants hold on to dead, dry leaves, while others efficiently make themselves bare? That I never found out, and will have to keep searching for that answer.

Other plant accessories to inspect? The thousands of acorns littering the ground tell us it was a “mast” year, which comes every 4-8 years and is a cruel ecological strategy for oak trees to boost the predator population (squirrels, acorn weevils) one year, only to facilitate a die-off the next year when the acorn production dwindles. “Galls” on witch hazel leaves, shaped like little witch hats, are like little houses for female aphids, who shelter and lay their eggs inside. The burly burrs of burdock plants, the balls of Velcro that hook onto we mammals for rides to a good place to plop down and grow. (Boot showed us a sad picture of a bird who got stuck in burdock burrs and perished, it was so trapped).

My favorite way to identify a plant is the sniff test. We smelled three wonderful smells: the citrus-mint of sassafras, the wintergreen of black birch, and the spicy brew of spicebush. I want to collect all of them and make a nice tea of all three. Yum.

We slowly made our way around frozen Bellevue Pond. We heard a woodpecker and a few chips of a familiar songbird I can’t identify. We happened upon some folks with kids, dogs, or maps, all happy to be here on a cold winter Friday. We’re alive, everyone was quietly whispering, even the naked trees and bare plants. We are hiding, dormant, but our buds are here waiting until the Earth progresses a little farther on its orbital path, tilting the Northern hemisphere closer to our Sun, into the path of more direct rays of heat-giving light.