some type of adult girl

headspace-hotel:

headspace-hotel:

Pawpaw trees! I went down a little used trail and found some even bigger pawpaw groves. Pawpaws grow in clonal colonies, so the slender trunks in the third pic are most likely all the same pawpaw tree (like Pando, but on a smaller scale).

They need shade to sprout, but they flower and make fruit only when the sunbeams can touch them! They often form splendid little groves in areas where a large tree was cut down or felled in a storm.

Pawpaws are an example of a tree that thrives best with human caretakers. When the canopy closes up and the forest floor becomes dark and shady, the pawpaw trees no longer flower and make fruit. Cutting an occasional tree and/or managing the forest as a more open woodland creates good conditions for lots of pawpaw.

Which makes good conditions for other life! The pawpaw groves were filled with frolicking zebra swallowtail butterflies.

The zebra swallowtail butterfly’s caterpillars can only eat the leaves of the pawpaw, much like monarch caterpillars need milkweed! There were many of them flying around in the sunlight.

…i tried, okay

There were loads of wasps, but they didn’t bother me at all, they were too busy with their wasp business. The flies were numerous too—which makes sense; pawpaws need flies to pollinate their flowers! I saw tons of electric green tiger beetles and big tiger swallowtail butterflies. I hope the big beasts like elk and bison will be able to return soon…

I also saw other cool plants like Trilliums, violets, ferns, some BIG woodsorrel, and mayapples (the big, shiny, lobed circular leaves in the fourth picture).

The forest shows many signs of being adapted to human presence and caretaking! All along the trails, blackberry brambles are in bloom, and small trees are covered in wild grapevines. Pawpaws dominate the understory, along with occasional red mulberries. The forest is full of plants that make food, and they all depend on a little disturbance to thrive—whether that is trails being cut through the woods, controlled burns creating open understory and meadows, or the occasional cutting of a tree to allow more sun.

All of these things happen naturally, but humans can do them intentionally and with care and purpose, which is what makes us such a cool species.

Do you want to see the site of a controlled burn?

That bigger tree’s bark has been a little scorched, but it will be totally fine. However, the smaller plants and dead brush have been killed and/or cleared out by low creeping fire.

As you can see, the leaf layer isn’t gone, just scorched and broken up a little bit. Unlike tilling the ground or driving over it with heavy machinery, the soil (and the mycorrhizal network, I presume) is practically unharmed.

The mayapples are already springing back up, and a few baby elms as well. No sign of wintercreeper, Amur honeysuckle, or tree-of-heaven! The burning makes the ground fertile and ready for new growth by releasing nutrients immediately.

Importantly, this also uses up the fuel that a bigger, more dangerous wildfire could use to spread all throughout the forest. Sad for the little trees that got burned up, but that’s a very quick way to go, on tree timescales…