Another American Adventure: Lettuce for the deer?

Friday, April 8, 2011

Lettuce for the deer?

I'm curious about this green plant that is coming up along the banks of the stream. It looks like Romaine lettuce. We saw 2 deer today, the first time that we have seen deer in Knob Hill park.

I am also charmed by the little white and golden leafed bushes that highlight the woods. Those leaves hung on through the winter. I wonder what will happen to them as spring progresses ...

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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.