This year I was originally intending to try to relocate all the orchids I'd found in the past.  But, life threw a few curveballs and the person that I wanted to share them with is no longer a part of my life.  Like so many plans we had, that one didn't pan out.  Not that I haven't been out hiking, but I have been taking things at a more relaxed ( Read more... )

Rewind a month, to the end of the ISHC conference in Ottawa.  I hightailed it out of the city to the nearby Marlborough Forest, searching for a really rare plant.  And after an extremely tough slog through a hostile wetland with an incessant onslaught of mosquitoes and biting flies, I found it:


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I spent the past week in Ottawa attending the International Symposium for Homogeneous Catalysis, where I had the tremendous privilege of sharing the single stage with so many distinguished scientists.  I gave a talk on cobalt-catalyzed asymmetric hydrogenation, the subject of my Science paper last year.  During the off times, I hit the great ( Read more... )

More snow, more cold.  So much snow and ice have accumulated outside that my shed collapsed under their weight.  But, the days are getting longer and warmer.  Here's another find from last July:


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It's been a cold, dreary winter, and I've got a serious case of gloom from the perpetually frozen weather.  We've had so much snow this winter that I haven't seen my yard in months, and it's grey out more often than sunny, it seems.  What better way to try to find some cheer, than look back to pictures of summer?


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It's been frozen and wintry for weeks now, even though the season doesn't start until tomorrow, and I'm already pining for spring.  What a fantastic time to edit some old pictures, and bring back the warm season.  Here's a set from July, at the Peaslee WMA:


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Taking advantage of a quiet night, I finished up a set up pictures from June.  The location was the Whiting WMA and the target was Calopogon tuberosus, the common grass pink:


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There's a lull in orchid hunting in late June and early July as all the easy stuff in the woods stops flowering before some of the really showy stuff in open pinelands begins.  That's not to say that there isn't anything blooming, but the stuff that is becomes quite hard to find.  Also, the start of summer is frequently marked by an unpleasant heat ( Read more... )

Yesterday, winktwice and I took a long trip to the far southern reaches of the Pinelands to visit Peaslee WMA.  We were in search of Liparis liliifolia, which is perhaps the most common species of orchid in Indiana, but one that is getting quite rare out here.  It favors young successional forest, and we don't have so much of that here these days.  At any ( Read more... )

Sill about two weeks behind editing pictures.  We went to Wharton State Forest at the end of May, which is probably my favorite place in New Jersey.  It's the largest preserved property at well over 100 000 acres, and it's remarkably diverse.  We were hunting the elusive Arethusa bulbosa, an S2 species that I'd only seen two other places, and we ( Read more... )