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@taluswalker

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Mostly plants. Mostly western Massachusetts.

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This month on @thewildstory_podcast by @nativeplantsocietynj is a special Emily Dickinson-themed episode!

We welcome multi-Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano @joycedidonato one of the most celebrated artists of our time, to our poetry segment.

Joyce joins Ann to discuss her latest album and touring project, Emily – No Prisoner Be (Platoon), a collaboration with the Grammy Award-winning string trio @timeforthree comprised of violinists @nickkendallviolin and @chazzviolin and double bassist @ranaanmeyer composed by Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award-winning composer @composerkevinputs Together, they bring new life to the extraordinary poetry of Dickinson. Throughout the episode, we will be sharing selections from the album.

The Ask Randi segment is introduced by “A Bee I Personally Knew (Scherzo No. 1)” Randi Eckel of @toadshade_wildflower_farm explores the remarkable diversity of garden visitors, including butterflies, wasps, flies, beetles, and some of the roughly 400 native bee species found in NJ.

“I Dwell in Possibility” is a fitting introduction to our next guest Peter Grima. @taluswalker is a botanist specializing in rare plants and an Emily Dickinson scholar based in western MA. Peter has contributed to regional floras and lectured internationally on Dickinson’s renowned herbarium. He joins @kimcorrero and @annwallace409 to explore Dickinson as a botanist.

We selected “Her Face” a beautiful reflection on nature and the passage of time for Kate Irvine a Therapeutic Horticulture Practitioner, mixed media artist, and Creative Director of @pleasant_run_nursery Her work explores how native plants and nature can help us navigate grief and find healing. She also leads workshops at Laurel Hill West Cemetery in PA, home to a natural burial sanctuary where green burials and sustainable practices allow the body to return to the earth while supporting conservation and ecological restoration.

We close the episode, with our final selection “Hope is the Thing,” one of Dickinson’s most beloved poems, and a beautiful reminder of the enduring power of hope and resilience.

The entire album of Emily – No Prisoner Be is available on streaming services. by @taluswalker

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Rhetorical questions only: How are these in the gentian family?!? What is the equivalent human experience for the inundation-induced dormancy of Sabatia campanulata during kettlepond high water years? Why the curly stigmas? Does the name Sabatia have any etymological relation to ‘sabbath’, the day of rest and reverence? Probably, yes.
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#sabatiacampanulata #floraofnantucket taken in Nantucket, Massachusetts by @taluswalker

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2 months ago

Prickly gooseberry - that pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? Why would a fruit arm itself against consumption?!? It seems self-defeating, unless big berry-gulping mammals like myself make for poor seed-dispensers (guilty as charged), and only some better consumer (birds, probably) can handle the prickles and also do the sowing of seeds. Maybe a bird’s gut is the right environment to prep the seeds for germination (that’s a thing)? I don’t need answers - I just like talking to myself in the woods, and sometimes that takes the form of an endless series of rhetorical botanical queries, such as these.
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#ribescynosbati #pricklygooseberry by @taluswalker

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3 months ago

The first rare species report I ever submitted wasn’t for a plant - it was a box turtle! That was in a bygone era where paper field forms were filled out by hand and I had to print a few digital photos to submit with the form by snail mail (or turtle mail?). That was 20 years ago now… Anyway, here are a few of the box turtles I’ve met since then.
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#terrapenecarolina #easternboxturtle taken in Pioneer Valley - Western Massachusetts by @taluswalker

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3 months ago

Share your theories if you must, but isn’t it enough to be handed this ineluctable proof that ghost pipes are capable of attaining a dusky lavender hue? by @taluswalker

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3 months ago

In the grassy, sedgy hump of land between ATV tracks, far up in some rural unpeopled mountain town, I found this clutch of eggs just twenty or thirty feet beyond a gap in the trees where I had parked my truck. A blur of rusty-brown had bolted from the ground when I walked past, disappearing into the woods. In its place, this clutch of eggs, cerulean blue, sky-colored, robin-like - a hermit thrush’s annual effort entrusted to the concealment of this patch of green. The nest a microcosm of its home acre, with mosses from the brook, grass & fine twigs from the woods and wood road, a slight fringe of green sedge for drapery. I spent three hours in the woods here attending to the details of human intentions, and then only thirty seconds with this nest, which strikes me now as grossly out of proportion. Something to improve upon, surely.
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#hermitthrush #thrushnest #hermitthrushnest taken in Florida, Massachusetts by @taluswalker

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4 months ago

Black maple (Acer nigrum) - not a myth! Shows up in calcareous floodplain forests, and this week saw it in what I would describe as a calcareous “bottomland” forest, or as close to bottomland as Massachusetts can claim. The leaves look like fat, droopy, boxy sugar maple leaves, like if they were made of plastic and had melted under a heat gun. And the undersides are velvety soft. I got to show this tree to two foresters this week, teaching them a new species, which I’d say is some kind of accomplishment. “Triumphs can be small - cherish these as well.”
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#blackmaple #acernigrum #floraofberkshirecounty by @taluswalker

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4 months ago

Mari is 81, maybe 82, and I first walked in the woods with her about 13 years ago. She scribbled down the names of plants as fast as I could say them, and she still remembers everything I’ve ever told her, even if I don’t remember myself! The other day she pointed to this flower, which she hadn’t seen in the woods before, and was delighted to know its name (Galearis spectabilis, showy orchis) and hear that it is rare and precious, a mark of ecological integrity that her woods have retained despite a history as pasture and potato farm. Overjoyed, she looked up at the canopy of sugar maple overhead and exulted “it’s all been worth it!” Hard to beat sharing in a moment like that 😊.
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#galearisspectabilis #floraofberkshirecounty by @taluswalker

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5 months ago

Puttyroot orchid, Aplectrum hyemale, announced itself to me from a trailside in the mountains of north Georgia, just one plant in flower growing in the leaflitter-filled shoulder of an old logging road. Some orchids are like that, setting up camp in the eddies of human activity, making a home out of the offenses to hillslope and soil, a kind of slow but deliberate healing.
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This orchid is nearly extirpated from New England, and I’ve been daydreaming hard and searching for it at old locations for many years now…alas, in vain! There is just one extant population (I believe), just a handful of plants lingering in the shade. But now we are acquainted, thanks to this encounter, and I feel it’s just a matter of time before I run into some new plants here hiding under our noses.
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(Some pics are of a 2nd plant I found in a rich cove forest a few days later)
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#aplectrumhyemale #puttyroot #puttyrootorchid #floraofrabuncounty taken in Rabun County by @taluswalker

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5 months ago

It’s so much more enjoyable to find cool plants by surprise than to be promised something that doesn’t materialize. Such was our luck one chilly morning in the mountains of north Georgia, our group moving so slowly we almost didn’t make it to our destination, but at last finding a dozen or more yellow lady’s-slippers in perfect bloom! All were in agreement that these were the small variety, Cypripedium parviflorum var. parviflorum, even though not one of us took out a ruler to check our assumption – not even the GA state botanist! I’ve seen some individual flowers of var. pubescens that were pretty small, but were they smaller than the tip of my index finger?? I don’t think so. So I’ll just notch this as another new-to-me orchid courtesy of the Georgia mountains, a taxon that is supposed to be in Massachusetts too, or at least it was (another one of those next post).
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#cypripediumparviflorumparviflorum #gabotsoc #floraofrabuncounty #georgiabotsoc taken in Rabun County by @taluswalker

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5 months ago

I was going to make a post for each new trillium I saw during my recent visit to the mountains of north Georgia, but at the pace I’ve made posts in recent years, who am I kidding? So instead of a grid-gratifying series, here they are all crammed into a triple-decker sandwich.
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1-2) I’ll start with Trillium vaseyi, the most voluptuous trillium I’ve ever laid eyes on! And it was having a banner year in the sweet little cove forest where I was staying.
3-4) Trillium catesbaei, which was common across a wide range of habitats and elevations, flowers pale pink to bubblegum pink, and pleasantly abundant on rural roadsides.
5-6) Trillium discolor, the official flower of the 2026 Georgia Botanical Society Spring Wildflower Pilgrimage! This patch of roadside plants in the national forest probably originated from a nearby cultivated setting, but we weren’t about to turn our noses up for that! Speaking of noses, this species has a faint sweet fragrance which helps distinguish it from the lemony-scented Trillium luteum (which I’ve only seen in gardens).
7) GA BotSoc 100th anniversary cake!!!
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#trilliumvaseyi #trilliumcatesbaei #trilliumdiscolor #georgiabotsoc #floraofrabuncounty taken in Rabun County by @taluswalker

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5 months ago

🧡🧡🧡 Once upon a time, I was finishing grad school and applied for a Park Service job in the Smokies that I was sure was meant for me. I daydreamed hard about tromping through cove forests and mountaineering across countless heath balds, and I specifically fantasized about meeting this species, the flame azalea (Rhododendron calendulaceum). Spoiler – I didn’t get that job, and I still haven’t visited the Smokies. But, I did finally get to meet the azalea of my dreams while in the Georgia mountains last week. What it lacks in fragrance it more than makes up for in vibrance, truly illuminating the understory in stark contrast to the deep shade of their evergreen rhody relatives. I saw lots of rare and precious plants during my weeklong stay in Rabun County (maybe I’ll even make posts for them), but this one seemed to literally greet me as soon as I arrived, as if to say “we’ve been waiting for you!” And maybe they were. 🧡🧡🧡
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#rhododendroncalendulaceum #flameazalea #floraofgeorgia #floraofrabuncounty taken in The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences by @taluswalker

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