Sitting alone, sipping twenty-one year old whisky and editing photos while rocking out with Pandora.  I'm trying to wrap up spring's photoblitz before summer gets here.  It seems that in orchid hunting, there's a richness of easy-to-find orchids in spring and summer, but there's this empty space in June where only really rare things flower.  We ( Read more... )

More backlogged pictures. Continuing the great yellow lady's slipper hunt, we took a trip to Whittingham Wildlife Management Area and the adjacent Muckshaw Ponds nature preserve. The former had spectacular scenery, and we found a number of Galearis spectabilis in bloom. The latter was suffering from some serious invasive species trouble. The ( Read more... )

Time passes, the world turns, life moves on. The early bits of orchid season have been a mixed bag, finding plenty of the easy stuff and none of the hard stuff. Work has been dragging down on me, but it's more politics than science; I've got some fantastic discoveries in asymmetric hydrogenation with first-row transition metals that will in time ( Read more... )

Yesterday, winktwice and I returned to the Plainsboro Preserve for a little early-season orchid hunting. We were hunting the elusive Listera australis, a small and inconspicuous orchid that had defied location several times before. I though it might be too early in the season, but spring seems early this year. Well, we found it, maybe fifteen or twenty ( Read more... )

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We've had an unusually mild winter, for which I am grateful. The early crocuses started flowering earlier this week but I didn't get to see them until today, as I've been out of town on business. Who needs the first flowers of spring when you can have the first flowers of midwinter?


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This is still my least favorite season, and I'm biding my time doing research for the next hiking season.  I've uncovered a number of new leads on places to search for orchids, and I'm looking forward to trying a few of them out.  My spreadsheet of orchid locations currently has 521 species sightings at 213 different locations.  For the next few ( Read more... )

New Year's Day was brilliant and beautiful and fifty-three degrees outside, so winktwice and I took a little trip to the nearby Sourland Mountain Preserve for a little wintertime orchid hunting.  There is one evergreen orchid and two that do their vegetative growth during the cold season in New Jersey.  We were hunting one of the latter, and we were not ( Read more... )

Another blink, and another two months have swept by.  Time flies, it seems, whether you're having fun or not.  I've been doing my best to partake in the former rather than the latter.

This weekend, we planted a thousand daffodils along the front fence line and five hundred muscari under the two trees in the front yard.  My favored bulb purveyor ( Read more... )

Last weekend, I took a hike at the Wildcat Ridge Wildlife Management Area.  It's a very pretty place, and doesn't tend to have people on most of the trails.  I was searching for one of our latest blooming orchids (and I use that term loosely), though I didn't think I'd find it.  I was pleasantly surprised.


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