Monadnock Ledger-Transcript - Words About Wilton: Gail Hoar – Mushrooms, mud, stone and trees

Gail Hoar COURTESY PHOTO

Stones and leaves along the trail. —PHOTO BY GAIL HOAR

A mushroom on the trail. —PHOTO BY GAIL HOAR

A trail winds through the woods. Picasa—PHOTO BY GAIL HOAR

When a dog is a member of your family, morning walks are part of life. Our most frequent destination is the trail in the woods behind our home in Wilton.

While Max sniffs each new patch of ground, I embrace the forest surrounding us. This often means I’m aware of the maple, oak, pine, birch and ash trees and the ferns and mountain laurel along the path, but I may miss the smaller details below my knees.

On one walk, this wasn’t the case. Our path was splotched not only with sunlight but with colorful mushrooms emerging from the trailside mulch. A few days before, newly fallen leaves, stirred up by my shoes, grabbed my attention, and that was only because it felt far too early for the trees to be shedding. Now ivory-hued mushrooms, some as large as grapefruit, seemed to be everywhere.

As I continued to walk, I looked more closely along the edges of the trail. I spotted small, steeply domed, pale fungal growths I would have missed if I wasn’t paying such close attention to where my feet were landing. Further along, red to deep-red mushrooms caught my eye. It was as if they were yelling, “Look at me!” I noticed they overshadowed the more subtle, small brown and grayish, platter-shaped mushrooms that easily blended in with old leaves. In contrast, those that were yellow and orange didn’t seem to grow near their red counterparts. Perhaps they didn’t want the competition.

The trail drops down toward one of the three streams that flow through culverts, keeping the path dry when water rises. Sometimes these streams resemble raging torrents, overflowing their banks after a particularly heavy rainstorm. On this day, they were as you would expect at the end of a warm summer, barely moving streamlets with as much mud as there was water. If I’m not careful, our dog will pick these spots for a cooling mud bath, and the resulting session with a hose when we return home. Otherwise, when the pools are full, it merely takes a good toweling off to make things right.

Until recently, there was something I hadn’t given much thought to – the stones embedded in the trail. Once I began noticing their many shapes, colors, textures and sizes, I began thinking about the granite for which New Hampshire is known.

Until I moved to New Hampshire, somewhere around 50 years ago, I had never had to think about gardening on top of stone. My earlier life had been in the Pacific Northwest, with natural loam many inches or feet deep in our gardens. The house we recently left in the hands of new owners was built upon a slab of granite that made gardening a creative challenge. To meet that challenge, I learned to build high stone walls backfilled with loamy soil that hosted raised-bed gardens. Several were filled with perennial shrubs, flowering crabapple trees, lilacs and a smoke tree. A few were home to perennial spring and summer flowers and some annuals. One was dedicated to growing vegetables.

Now that we’ve changed houses, we’re faced with a little loam and lots of sand, another New Hampshire staple. This gives a different challenge to gardening, although I did construct a very small stone wall that some would refer to as edging around a future herb garden. When we first moved, I intended to plant a large vegetable and flower garden with a few flowering trees. Those plans were mostly foiled once winter storms took a toll on two 100-year-old pines that stood in our backyard. These two trees fell and took three others with them. That’s when we called in an arborist. We needed to remove the trees that remained an issue, particularly those that were dead or dying. Later this summer, we were still able to plant a few flowering trees and shrubs, but other plans had to be put off until the work was completed.

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Now, when I walk in the woods, I take with me our recent experience with the trees we lost. I look at those along the trail and wonder how long we’ll still be able to enjoy the forest as it is today. The trees that fell were rotten in the middle, probably due to a pine bark beetle infestation, just as the other pine, birch, poplar and ash trees we had removed were also infested with destructive insects or had reached the end of their life for other reasons.

One of the things that makes Wilton the town we’ve chosen to live in is the natural beauty of its landscape, complete with old trees, mushrooms, granite and even its muddy streambeds. Because of these recent events, although I thought I was observant, I’ve become more aware of what I may have passed without notice. Now I walk a bit slower to not miss something of beauty that previously may not have caught my eye – the things that give so much character to Wilton’s woodlands.

My hope is that this beauty will be there for generations to come just as it is today. My fear is that the stewardship necessary to ensure this is not yet in place.