Reading · Red-Tails on the Fire Escape

I didn’t grow up in an outdoorsy kind of family. Our vacations to New Hampshire were all about water slides and arcades and French fries and ice cream, not long hikes in the White Mountains. But my dad loved birds, and he knew the plants growing around us in the leafy suburb where we lived in the house he grew up in.

The lot where the house sat was 33% one-story cape house, 33% grassy lawn, and 34% giant chunk of granite. The hill, as we called it, was where I spent all my free time. It was covered in white pines and ivy. And for several weeks a year, it was home to one single pink lady’s slipper.

My dad taught us that the lady’s slipper was a rare thing, something to be treasured and taken care of. It had bloomed in the same spot since my father was a child, and now it bloomed for me. Every spring I would vaguely remember which tree it grew under, and I would hold watch, wanting to make sure I didn’t build a fort over the plant and cause it any harm. The flower was pure magic. It looked like a fairy slipper, puffed and pink, spotted and delicate, floating on the end of a single green stem. I would create a border around it out of dried pine needles. Caring for that wild orchid was my introduction into stewardship, my first experience of viewing the natural world as something I could be a part of—a place where I could give as much as I received.

Now I live in the city, and I have several places I go to watch the seasons unfold. I love all natural habitats, but I feel the most like myself when I am under a canopy of trees. I’ve been out walking in the woodlands of several parks these past few weeks, hoping to stumble upon a lady slipper. It has been a wonderful mission, an excuse to go to the woodsy places, and it has led me to discover many woodland flowers that, like me, bloom in the places where the light is dappled and the air is cool.

Here are some of the woodland beauties I’ve encountered in the wooded corners of Boston over the past several weeks.

trillium