Charismatic Invertebrates

Daddy long-legs on spicebush leaf, mid-August

“Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

Isn’t it funny?  I started to write to you yesterday afternoon, but as far as I got was the heading, ‘Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,’ and then I remembered I’d promised to pick some blackberries for supper, so I went off and left the sheet lying on the table, and when I came back, what do you think I found sitting in the middle of the page?  A real true Daddy-Long-Legs!

I picked him up very gently by one leg, and dropped him out of the window.  I wouldn’t hurt one of them for the world.  They always remind me of you.”

That is what the orphan Judy writes to an anonymous benefactor who is sending her to college in the novel Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster.  Because Judy catches a glimpse of a long-legged man leaving the orphanage office just before she learns of her good fortune, she nicknames him Daddy-Long-legs.  His only request is that she writes him occasional letters, which reach him through a third person, about her college experience.

As a sentimental teenager, I greatly enjoyed this old-fashioned romance written in 1912.  That may be why I, like Judy, wouldn’t hurt a daddy long-legs either.  Whenever one crawls over me, I watch fascinated as it deftly uses its four pairs of long, thread-like legs to propel itself forward.

Usually, daddy long-legs appear on our veranda in late September and early October during harvest time, which is why another common name for one is “harvestman.”  Most visitors shudder and assume they are giant spiders.  They are not reassured when I tell them they are not.  Like spiders, they have their own Order in the animal class Arachnida.  Spiders are in the Order Aranae; daddy long-legs are in the Order Opiliones, so they are also known as “opilionids.”

“Opilio” in Latin means “shepherd,” and experts say taxonomists chose that name because daddy long-legs look as if they are walking on stilts just as European shepherds used to do so that they could more easily oversee their flocks. At least 6,400 species have been identified in the Order, but there may be more than 10,000.  Although there are four suborders, the slender, long-legged, delicate harvestmen in temperate regions are in the suborder Eupnoi.

Daddy long-legs on bergamot, late July

These are incredibly ancient creatures.  Well-preserved fossils have been found in 400 million-year-old rocks.  Those preserved in the Rhynie cherts of Scotland look modern despite their age.  Not only have they not changed much over the eons, but also species have been restricted to small regions because they don’t disperse farther than 50 miles.  These ancient arachnids are probably most closely related to scorpions, pseudoscorpions, and solifugeae, which include wind scorpions and camel spiders.

Their heads, thoraxes, and abdomens grow together to form compact, oblong bodies, usually no longer than 5/16^th of an inch, that come in hues of brown, if they are mostly nocturnal, or yellow, green, or reddish-brown if they are diurnal species.  They have a knob or black turret on top of their heads with a tiny eye on each side that can detect movement several feet away.  But they use their second pair of legs, which are longer than the others, as antennae to explore, search for food, and warn of danger. In front and to the sides of their eyes are two pores from which a chemical scent is emitted that deter large predators and ants.  Beneath their bodies, they have a pair of pedipalps or pincers with which they grasp, tear, and stuff food in their mouths, fight other harvestmen, and clean their legs.

They can easily discard a leg if it is caught and grow a new one.  The detached leg twitches in some species for a minute, in other species for as long as an hour.  In order to move, they have so-called “pacemakers” in the end of the first long section or femur of their seven-jointed legs that sends signals through nerves to the muscles in their legs to stretch.  Between signals the legs rest.  Some researchers believe that the twitching leg keeps a potential predator occupied while the daddy long-legs escapes.

Birds, mammals, amphibians and spiders, some of which are not deterred by their chemical defense, prey on them.  Thus, some species of daddy long-legs may defend themselves by gluing debris on their bodies or by playing dead.

Two daddy long-legs on horsebalm, early July

They, in turn, are omnivorous and eat small insects, plant material and fungi.  Some species are scavengers that specialize in dead creatures, bird dung and other feces.  Most ambush their prey and, unlike other arachnids, which must liquefy their prey before ingesting it, daddy long-legs can eat chunks of food.

In late summer and early autumn, after most daddy long-legs’ species have gone through six nymphal stages, they are ready to mate.  It is then that they emerge from their usual habitat under leaf litter, logs and rocks in damp forests to search for mates.  After mating, the female may lay her eggs immediately or wait for months.  The smaller male drives away rivals while she lays eggs a few at a time in soil or under rotten wood until nothing is left of her but an empty shell.  Only one known daddy long-legs’ species in eastern North America hibernates as an adult.  The rest die and leave their eggs to hatch into new daddy long-legs the following spring.

The other early autumn charismatic (to me) invertebrate is the walkingstick, distant cousin of crickets and (ugh!) cockroaches.  Walkingsticks belong to the Phasmatodea or Phasmida Order of insects, which includes European stick insects, walkingsticks, and leaf insects, among others.  “Phasma” comes from the Greek meaning “phantom” because their resemblance to sticks or leaves makes them difficult to see.  But when they appear on our white board house or on our screens, as they do in October, their stick-like bodies always impress me.

I’m not the only person who finds walkingsticks intriguing.  Some people keep them as pets, the most popular being the Indian stick insect — Carausius morosus — because it (or rather she) eats a wide variety of easily obtainable foods such as lettuce and privet and thrives at room temperature.  Also, that species consists only of females that reproduce by parthenogenesis and easily lay fertile eggs.

walking stick close-up, by poppy2323 on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC license)

But most likely, the walkingsticks I see every year are northern walkingsticks Diapheromera femorata, also known as “stickbugs,” “specters,” “prairie alligators,” “devil’s horses,” “witches horses,” and “devil’s darning needles,” among other quaint names.

Although I’ve never noticed any harm from these insects, they are defoliators of deciduous trees in the eastern half of the United States and Canada.  As young nymphs, they eat a wide variety of low-growing shrubs such as rose, juneberry, sweet fern, blueberry and strawberry.  As older nymphs and adults, they prefer the leaves of black oak species, basswood and wild cherry but will also eat quaking aspen, paper birch, hickory, locust and apple tree leaves.  However, this species does not fly and so even a stream or road will stop their spread.  Two parasitic flies — Biomya genalis and Phasmophaga antennalis — destroy the nymphs.  The former lays its eggs on a walkingstick nymph that hatches and eats the nymph, but the latter lays its eggs on foliage that a nymph eats.

The northern walkingstick, like daddy long-legs, mates in late summer, and the female continues laying up to 150 black and white eggs that look like miniature beans, three every day, until cold weather arrives.  She drops them wherever she happens to be on a tree, and they fall to the ground.  The eggs overwinter in the leaf litter and stay unhatched through the following spring, summer, autumn, and winter, only hatching into pale green miniature adults the next year in May or early June.

Northern walkingsticks go through six larval instars before maturing in late July or early August.  The female is larger than the male — 2 ½ to 3 ½ inches long — and he is brown and she is greenish-brown.  Both have long antennae that are two thirds the length of their bodies.

walkingstick on sycamore at French Creek State Park, PA, by Colin Purrington on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license)

To defend themselves, the young nymphs drop to the ground or jerk back-and-forth, but the older ones and adults remain still, stretching their front legs beside their antennae so that they look even more like harmless twigs.  They sometimes release a bad-smelling liquid too. Birds, such as common grackles, blue jays, wild turkeys, American crows, American robins, white-breasted nuthatches and Carolina chickadees, often prey on them, especially during an infestation when they are more noticeable. Five-lined skinks, Chinese mantids, white-footed mice, eastern chipmunks, and eastern gray squirrels also find them tasty.

With more than 3000 species worldwide, most of which live in the tropics, walkingstick life histories are diverse.  For instance, Eurycantha horrida (its species’ name hints at its ferociousness), has large spines on its hind legs that it uses to defend itself and to compete with other males. Some species, like the southern United States species, the American or two-lined walkingstick (Anisomorpha buprestoides), have defensive glands and spray a noxious chemical that repels birds and other insects, not to mention curious entomologists like Thomas Eisner who describes the spray as a “fine mist”  that had a piercing stench.  “My eyes hurt, as did my lungs when I got a whiff.  This was evil stuff.  I started coughing,” he writes in his book For Love of Insects.  The species is nicknamed “musk mare” and “devil’s rider,” because the small male spends much of his time astride the much larger female.  “They are not necessarily mating when thus found,” Eisner writes, “although the pairing is sexual, and the two do eventually mate and produce eggs.”

walkingstick nymph, SW Ontario, by jclucier on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC license)

Many stick insects that drop their eggs on the ground, including the northern walkingstick, have eggs with a large food body called a capitulum, which contains substances attractive to ants, similar to some plants that have food bodies called “eliasomes” on their seeds to entice ants to take them back to their nests so they will have a more fruitful place to germinate and grow.  In the case of stick-insects, the ants take the eggs back to their nests, cut off the capitulums, and feed them to their brood.  Then the ants discard the rest of the eggs in their garbage, where they will hatch and live in the ant nest, safe from predators.  Some species are even ant mimics.

Luckily, northern walkingsticks have never released a bad-smelling liquid when I pick them up, as I do with the daddy long-legs, and show them off to visitors.  Youngsters are particularly intrigued by both of them.  Then I place the northern walkingstick on a tree to demonstrate its excellent camouflage, and put the daddy long-legs back in the woods, knowing that both critters will soon be dying as the season of warmth ends.

All daddy long-legs photos taken on the mountain by Dave. Please click the walkingstick photos to see the larger originals on Flickr.

October’s Bright Blue Weather

Another October has come and gone and Dad was not here to see “October’s bright blue weather.” Even though he was born in January in the midst of a blizzard, I always thought of October as his month. Maybe that’s because not an October went by without him reciting Helen Hunt Jackson’s “October’s Bright Blue Weather.” At 88, when he had trouble remembering people’s names, he could still recall all eight stanzas of Jackson’s mid-nineteenth century poem, beginning:

O suns and skies and clouds of June

And flowers of June together

Ye cannot rival for one hour

October’s bright blue weather.

Dad loved poetry and he loved the outdoors. Most of the poems he memorized, the old-fashioned poems he learned as a boy in school, were connected to nature, gardens, or rural life. In April it was William Wordsworth’s “Daffodils“–”Ten thousand saw I at a glance/ Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”

James Russell Lowell’s “June” heralded that month.

And what is so rare as a day in June?

Then, if ever, come perfect days…

Whether we look, or whether we listen,

We hear life murmur, or see it glisten.

September inspired the recitation of Jackson’s poem by the same name.

The golden-rod is yellow;

The corn is turning brown;

The trees in apple orchards

With fruit are bending down.

Still, it was “October’s Bright Blue Weather” that inspired him the most. He continued to work in his showcase garden, aglow with flowers and shrubs, from early spring to late fall, but he also took time to “leaf peep” on foot and in his car. His wedding anniversary was the sixteenth of October, and he and Mom usually spent it taking a drive and looking at the leaves. Mom was not an outdoor person, but even she was moved by the glory of October. Then, after 55 years of marriage, Mom died and Dad lived alone in his mountaintop home near State College until he broke his hip while out in his garden and had to move to an assisted living facility.

When he could no longer drive, my husband Bruce and I took him for autumn drives through the central Pennsylvania countryside. I especially remember an October day when I had planned to spend the afternoon traveling the gravel roads of Rothrock State Forest with him. But it threatened rain and we almost didn’t go. Just as we arrived at Rothrock, the sun broke through the cloud cover and the leaves glowed.

“I guess God knew that two nature lovers were out,” he said happily.

We saw no one during our two-hour drive in the forest, and I barely nudged the gas pedal, moving slowly enough so that he could identify the colorful trees and shrubs.

Dad and I shared a love of the outdoors, of poetry, and also of operettas. As a teenager, I would sit up until midnight with him, watching the old Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy movies on television. One of our favorites was Sigmund Romberg’s Student Prince. As we drove that October day, I sang Romberg’s “Golden Days“–a song of remembering the “golden days, in the sunshine of our happy youth.” And, indeed, Dad reminisced about other Octobers as he “oohed” and “aahed” over the spectacular color. Now that he is gone, a golden October woods reminds me of that “Golden Days” afternoon with him when the sun backlit a shimmer of golden, scarlet, purple, and orange leaves. And every time I look at our stream, I remember Dad reciting Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Brook” whenever he drove up our road.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

He was part of my life for 63 years, and now he is only a bright memory. Born in a poor, anthracite mining village above Mahanoy City called The Vulcan, he was the oldest of three boys in a working-class family that had always been connected with the coal mines. When he was four years old, his blacksmith father moved the family to Pottstown for a better job. But every summer Dad took the train to the mountains and spent weeks with his mother’s youngest sister, Mary Dresch, a high school English teacher.

Among his chores was the job of picking wild blueberries on mountains recovering from the clearcutting early in the twentieth century. Picking blueberries was something he enjoyed doing well into his seventies. When he lived in southern New Jersey with Mom and their four children during the almost four decades he worked as a chemical engineer for Mobil Oil, he took me and my siblings to his own secret place in the Jersey wetlands to pick highbush blueberries. When he retired and moved to his country place near State College, Bear Meadows was his favorite berry-picking spot. It also recalled his days as a student at Penn State from 1932 to 1936 when he often hiked from campus out to the “Tusseys,” as he called the mountains in Rothrock State Forest.

Picking blueberries at Bear Meadows meant wading through bog water and carrying a berry bucket. One day he lost his footing and his berries. By then our eldest son Steve, who had inherited Dad’s “berry-picking gene” through me, was picking with him and pulled him out. Dad went home covered with muck from head to toe and, as he always did, laughed at his mishap. My Mom was not amused and put her foot down.

“No more berry-picking for you. You are too old for that.”

Dad, ever the peacemaker, agreed, but his face always lit up when I told him we had been picking blueberries at Bear Meadows.

As I walk through “October’s Bright Blue Weather,” I think of Dad’s life and how it has affected mine. When I was a child he told enticing stories about his Boy Scout camping adventures in the “Fancy Hills” near Pottstown. I was enthralled and joined the Girl Scouts, hoping for the same outdoor adventures. Except for one time when our troop camped at a state park cabin for a week, we mostly cooked, sewed, and gossiped at Girl Scout meetings. Still, I persisted, and with Dad’s help I earned every nature badge the Scouts offered.

Dad bought me Chester Reed’s bird guide and a pair of binoculars and I was off in pursuit of my bird badge. I easily identified 40 species in the park below our house and the large tract of wild lakes and woodland at the end of our block. Even today, when I hear the song of a mourning dove, I can conjure up the park, and when I hear a wood thrush I remember my childhood home, tucked in an oak forest, where I sat in a screened porch and listened to wood thrushes singing. With more guides and Dad’s help, I also earned my tree badge and my wildflower badge in the nearby forest.That wonderful tract, where I spent my happiest childhood hours, morphed into an enormous housing development the year I left for college. When I returned home, I could not recognize my old haunts–gone were the woods, and the lakes were surrounded by houses. It was poignantly reminiscent of Dad’s confusion when he took us back to his old haunts from the 1940s and 50s near Pottstown, and found houses instead. We had to imagine, just as our sons had to imagine, the way their parents’ natural landscape had once looked.

Now, our son Mark brings his daughter back to his childhood home on a central Pennsylvania mountaintop and he too records changes–the valleys on either side filling up with homes and highways and shopping malls. Even the mountain itself is being gouged apart for an interstate in one direction and still another shopping mall in the other.

When Mark was a boy, most of the mountain still contained 100-year-old trees, but one by one the property owners around us had their land logged. A few were shorn of every possible tree; others had only those 12 inches and above cut, what foresters now deplore as “high-grading,” taking the best and leaving the rest. As they predicted, not much has grown up in their place and invasives such as ailanthus, Japanese barberry, and multiflora rose fill the empty spaces. In some cases, striped maple, black birch, and even red maple have also germinated, but the forest has not regenerated as it should. Blame it on an overpopulation of white-tailed deer, poor logging practices, acid rain, or even unknown forces. Whatever the reasons, the forest we had around us, except for our land, is gone and Mark, who was intimately familiar with the tree species on our mountain, has a difficult time convincing his daughter Eva of his loss. To her, the forest looks great. It’s the only forest she knows here. What memory will she hand down to her children? What will be there for them to see? As each generation passes away, memories of what once was pass away with them.

Remembering all this and more is probably an appropriate exercise for October. October–month of loss–is like a brilliant meteor that burns itself out. The nights are frosty; the days clear and crisp. Birds flee south ahead of the impending winter. From the ridgetop I watch raptors sail past and wish that I too could ride those updrafts with such grace and beauty.

In the woods I encounter flocks of foraging songbirds pausing to fuel up for their nightly migration. Day by day the forest is quieter. Chipmunks, wild turkeys, deer, bears, squirrels and other wild creatures harvest the acorn crop from our mature black, red, white and scarlet oaks.

Near the end of the month, I sit enveloped in the dark gold of several sugar maple trees that still hold on to most of their leaves as I cling to the last remnants of warmth and sunshine. Another year almost gone; another winter almost here. My life is ticking away faster than I could have believed possible when I was young.

I give thanks for my Dad’s life and for his love of the natural world that formed our strongest bond and I watch the leaves sift down around me, a golden carpet soon to molder so that more life can spring from the soil to which we all return.

When springs run low, and on the brooks,

In idle golden freighting,

Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush

Of woods, for winter waiting…

The Leaves of Autumn

Weeks before the maples and oaks turn color, I have already been satiated by the brilliant hues of the understory trees, shrubs, and vines. From the time I spot the first scarlet and purple leaves on black gum trees in late August until the understory leaves fall in mid-October, I am surrounded by gold, purple, orange, pink, and every shade in between during my daily walks.

Scientists have known for years how plants turn color by flooding their leaves with an enzyme that breaks down the green of chlorophyll and carries certain chemicals, such as nitrogen and magnesium, out of the leaves before they drop. This process unveils colorful pigments that have been in the leaves throughout the growing season. Carotene pigments make leaves orange and yellow while the pigment anthocyanin is responsible for red and purple leaves. Whether leaves turn purple or red often depends on the acidity or alkalinity of the tree. For instance, the more acidic red maples turn red and the more alkaline ash trees turn purple.

ALthough the signal to turn color is related to longer nights and cooler weather which eventually stop the trees’ growth system, each species has a different response time. Here on our mountain, black gum, striped maples, witch hazel, and black birch turn first and all the oak species and quaking aspen last. In between is the grand pageantry of red and sugar maples.

For a long time, scientists hadn’t a clue about why leaves turn color. One researcher, James Poling, back in 1977, wrote in LEAVES: THEIR AMAZING LIVES AND STRANGE BEHAVIOR that …”as far as botanists can determine, the chemical energy that goes into the painting of a leaf is of no benefit at all to the plant…”

Since then, several scientists have been looking at the question and coming up with a variety of answers. Botanist Edmund Stiles has been particularly interested in many of the trees, shrubs, and vines that turn color early such as black gum, flowering dogwood, Virginia creeper, spicebush, poison ivy, sumacs, wild grape, and sassafras. He believes they would have to have a good reason to give up a month of photosynthesis and thinks that their leaves, which he calls “foliar fruit flags,” are signaling to migrating fruit-eating birds that their fruits are ripe.

Many of these plants, such as spicebush, dogwood, black gum, and sassafras, have fruits high in fats that rot quickly if they are not eaten. And since birds are the dispersers of the seeds of these plants, it is important to them that the birds eat their fruits and defecate their seeds while they are still viable.

Furthermore, migrant birds would not know, as resident birds would, where the fruits are, so the bright leaves, seen against a mostly green landscape, would serve as signals to migrating fruit-eating birds including robins, cedar waxwings, eastern bluebirds, veeries, brown thrashers, gray catbirds, and hermit, Swainson’s, gray-cheeked, and wood thrushes.

Most of Stiles’s “foliar fruit flag” species also have inconspicuous fruits hidden by leaves. Without the colored leaves, the birds might not look for the fruit. The green vines are particularly difficult to spot as they twine along the ground or up tree trunks, but when they turn color, they are strikingly beautiful and easy to see. Poison ivy has clusters of gray or whitish fruits and compound red leaves. Virginia creeper hides its flat-topped clusters of bluish-black fruits with scarlet leaves while wild grapevines produce compact clumps of purple grapes beneath golden leaves. Spicebush too has gold leaves and contrasting red clusters of fruit that, when crushed, smell like allspice.

Black gum trees sometimes produce small clusters of half-inch long, bluish black fruits beneath their flamboyantly colored leaves. The fruits of sassafras are dark blue and shiny under a veil of yellow and red leaves while the purplish red leaves of flowering dogwood hide showy clusters of red fruit. Staghorn umacs leaves also turn red and have showy, upright clusters of fuzzy, red fruit.

Stiles studied staghorn sumac in detail to prove his hypothesis because it is a dioecious species (one that has male and female flowers on separate plants) which forms clones of plants. He hypothesized that nonfruiting male clones would not have many foliar fruit flags because they have no fruit.

On October 3, 1981 he drove three transects–from Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania to Palmerton along route 209, Palmerton to Easton on routes 248, 512, and U.S. route 22, and from Easton to Oldbridge, New Jersey along route 178, noting both the fruiting and nonfruiting clones of staghorn sumac. Along all three transects the fruiting female clones had many more colored leaves than the male clones, strengthening his theory.

Stiles offered his explanation for early leaf color in some plants in THE AMERICAN NATURALIST in 1982. More recently other scientists have been tackling why leaves color in general. Two British scientists think that bright colors signal sap-eating aphids to let the trees alone because they will get a mouthful of thickening, unpalatable leaves to chew on and encounter heightened chemical defenses. The leaves are producing “‘pick on someone else’ signals to specialist autumn-flying insects,” researcher Sam Brown claims.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin have a another theory about why leaves turn scarlet and, in addition, why some colors are more vibrant one year than another. They believe that the red pigments (anthocyanins) act as sunscreens by shading sensitive photosynthesis tissue in the autumn while trees reabsorb nutrients from their leaves.

In an anonymously-authored paper entitled “Fall Color Acts as Sunscreen,” which they published in December 2001, they wrote that “the pigments protect leaves dwindling ability to generate energy. Besides high light levels, plant stressors such as near-freezing temperatures, drought, and low nutrient levels trigger increased pigment levels.”

This theory is plausible because autumn color is brightest when the weather is dry and sunny and the nights cold but not freezing. Also, the scientists pointed out that “the outer leaves of trees such as maples are more colorful than leaves shaded inside the canopy or those with a northern exposure,” which further strengthens their hypothesis.

Clearly scientists are still working on this theory and others to understand why leaves turn color. To those of us afield, what really matters is that the leaves do turn color and we have a front seat for the almost two-month-long, light and color extravaganza. The leaves brighten the forest even when it is raining, and after they fall we have color beneath our feet as well for a few days. In early October, I feel as if I am trodding on fields of gold created by black birch, witch hazel, and the other yellow leaves that fall then. The red and gold maples leaves form a similar carpet in mid-October. At the end of the month, the wine-red, burnt orange, brown, and beige leaves of the oaks and bright gold leaves of the aspens are finally blown to the ground.

The color quickly fades, though, because even before leaves fall, they have been colonized by saprophytic fungi. These fungi can start the leaves’ rotting by breaking down their cellulose and lignin, creating a cloying, sour smell that I detect after the first late autumn rains. Then their decomposition is taken over by litter fungi primarily of the Basidiomycetes class of most gilled mushrooms.

“Mushrooms are a symbol of renewal and a symbol of the season. THEY are the shining fruits of the great autumn leaf harvest,” writes Peter Marchand in his excellent book AUTUMN: A SEASON OF CHANGE. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the variety and colors of fall mushrooms are almost as amazing as those of autumn leaves.

The fungi are joined by earthworms, snails, small arthropods, nematodes, slime molds, and other decomposer organisms which can amount to five tons an acre in productive forest soil. For instance, earthworms in rich leaf compost can weigh 900 pounds an acre and slugs and snails 400 pounds. In most northern, mixed deciduous forests, it takes approximately ten years for the total decomposition of leaves to occur, but every year the leaves that fall return a little more than 100 pounds per acre of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and magnesium to the soil, supplying from 75 to 85% of the trees’ needs for these elements every year.

No matter what scientists may eventually discover about why leaves turn color, and I suspect there will be many reasons, once leaves fall they are immensely important to the continuing life of the forest. They are also important to streams and rivers, feeding aquatic insects and crustaceans called “shredders” which, in turn, feed fish.

“Consider,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal in 1853, “what a vast crop is thus annually shed upon the earth. This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year.” A great harvest that not only brightens our October days but reminds us that from death comes a renewal of life.

Scents and Sensibility

Forty years ago. It’s early autumn and I’m sitting behind my boyfriend on his motorscooter. We bump along a dirt road winding through the mountains of central Pennsylvania.

“Stop!” I yell suddenly.

The scooter slides to a halt.

“I smell New Jersey tea,” I say as I hop off and rush through the shrubby mountaintop understory.

My boyfriend follows more slowly, a bemused smile on his face. I quickly sniff down my quarry, break some fern-like leaves off a small shrub, crush them, and inhale appreciatively.

“Smell this,” I tell him. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“I can barely smell it,” he answers.

Despite our obvious incompatability, we marry, and Bruce still tells the story of how I tracked down New Jersey tea by using my nose.

“Only it wasn’t New Jersey tea,” I remind him.

What my Dad had always called New Jersey tea turned out to be the aromatic shrub sweetfern that forms low, mat-like thickets on dry, sandy, sterile soils.

Forty years later, in early November, Bruce and I walk through our forest which is infused with the fruity scent of witch hazel blossoms.

“Isn’t that a wonderful odor?” I ask him.

“I can barely smell it,” he answers.

Some things never change. After forty years I should know better. Apparently my olfactory area, in the upper end of each nostril, is a much deeper yellow than Bruce’s, because the deeper the yellow, the keener the sense of smell. Furthermore, since sense of smell is emotional rather than intellectual and more intuitive than logical, my logical, intellectual husband should expect to have a duller nose than his emotional, intuitive wife.

No matter. We both have only five million olfactory cells compared to a sheepdog’s 220 million. Yet, with a little practice, humans can learn to discriminate between hundreds of different odors. Back in 1752, the great Swedish taxonomist, Karl Linnaeus, in his Odores medicamentor, divided odors into seven classes: fragrant, goaty, ambrosial, foul, nauseating, aromatic, and garlicky. But one person’s “fragrant” is another’s “ambrosial” as writers who try to describe how something smells have discovered.

Perfume makers have their own descriptive terms for scents. In one survey they claimed to have discovered what scents appeal to women based on their hair color. Blonde women like fresh, stimulating odors such as mimosa and hawthorn. Redheads prefer exciting smells like orange blossom and honeysuckle. Raven-haired women choose the sultry odors of orchids and magnolias.

Then, there are brunettes, like I used to be before my hair turned gray. We love every fragrance from “soothing” lavender to “intoxicating” violet which explains why, when I am outside, I am led around by my nose. Like the Andaman Islanders in the Bay of Bengal east of India, odor marks the passage of time for me. They name the seasons of the year after fragrant flowers in bloom at the time. This calendar of scents reminds me of my own yearly ritual of tracking down old, familiar odors and discovering new ones.

“Ah, those fugacious universal fragrances of the meadows and woods,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal. “How much excited we are, how much recruited, by a great many particular fragrances!” Which is why, in early spring, I sniff along the trails like a bloodhound, happy that the long, almost scent-less months of winter are over. No odor is more ambrosial to me than a thawing earth.

On an early April day, I kneel on the wet, mossy trails, almost prostrate like a religious petitioner, and inhale the faint, fragrant odor of trailing arbutus or walk down the hollow road to smell the tiny, yellow blossoms of common spicebush. Also called “wild allspice,” its blossoms, twigs, and bright red fruits are redolent of the spices Columbus sought when he accidentally discovered the New World. Later, pioneers dried its fruits and used them as a substitute for allspice.

Odor is known to evoke memories. “Smells are surer than sights or sounds to make your heartstrings crack,” Rudyard Kipling once wrote and the reason why I rush to smell the first opening daffodil. I am a small child again who, entranced by the cherry yellow flowers, has picked all the daffodils but one in our yard. Or the young girl who dreamed of getting married in a church smothered in daffodils.

The smell of peonies is even more poignant to me, evoking happy memories of Memorial Day in Mahanoy City. Early in the morning, my grandmother cut huge bouquets of peonies from her yard in Pottstown, put them in containers of water, and packed them carefully in the trunk of our pale green, 1940 Oldsmobile. Then my parents, my grandparents, my three siblings and I squeezed into our car and traveled to the “coal regions.”

The graveyard was on a mountaintop above the city, Protestants on one side, Catholics on the other. It was always cool in the mountains, the air crisper and brighter. To a child from the flatlands of southern New Jersey, those mountains seemed stupendous.

Later, we had a splendid dinner at my great Aunt Mary’s house that featured homemade bread, cut thickly and spread with strawberry jam. Other cousins of my Dad’s crowded into Aunt Mary’s small row house and if we had time, we would drive up to “The Vulcan” above the city where my Dad had been born on a snowy night in January and where some of his uncles and cousins still lived.

Except for my 87-year-old Dad, all the elders are gone now, and yet, when I smell peonies, I see and hear them clearly. Smell, as Helen Keller once wrote, is indeed, “a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived.”

Here on our mountain I have lived for thirty years, making a study of natural odors. One thing I have noticed is that certain kinds of odors seem to repeat themselves in unrelated plants. One is wintergreen, chemically known as methyl salicylate. Both the twigs and bark of black and yellow birches smell and taste of wintergreen. So do the leaves and red berries of the small, evergreen plant known as teaberry, checkerberry, or wintergreen.

Another repetitive natural scent is that of anise or licorice which I can smell faintly in the crushed, fern-like leaves of the dainty, spring wildflower sweet cicely, although the roots are apparently more strongly scented. One of the goldenrods, sweet goldenrod (Solidago odora), is primarily identified by the anise-like odor of its crushed leaves.

I am particularly fond of many members of the mint family, each of which has a different odor. Native mints include such wonderfully aromatic plants as American pennyroyal, the lemon-scented horse-balm, and the “knock-your-socks-off” mountain-mints. Those mints brought over from Europe have also gone wild such as spearmint, peppermint, gill-over-the ground or ground ivy, and catnip. As an added bonus, the leaves of all of those mints, except horse-balm, can be used to make tea.

In May and June I go from one giddy scent to another as first the air is permeated with apple blossoms, then lilacs, then wild azaleas, then dame’s rocket, all of which are wholly pleasing odors. The acrid, cloying smell of blossoming wild black cherry trees in late May overpowers all other scents in the forest while the fruity odor of hay-scented ferns wafts from the powerline right-of-way.

The catlapa tree flowers in June have a cloying odor similar to wild black cherry flowers, but the sweet scent of blossoming wild grapes is pure heaven.

Then there are the roses, both the native pasture rose and the alien multiflora rose. For days the air is saturated with the scent of roses drifting up from the valley where whole pastures have been taken over by multiflora rose bushes. Although farmers hate them, those of us obsessed by roses, as the Romans were said to be, appreciate the rose-scented breezes of early June.

Even the hot, humid days of summer that spawn thundershowers are ambrosial to my nose. I stand outside before a storm begins, sniff the air, and say, “It smells like rain.” Only I learned recently, from Jerry Dennis’s delightful book It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes, that I’m actually smelling oils “given off by plants and absorbed in the soil, where they blend with earthy odors. The oils and the odors,” Dennis says, “are released into the air when the relative humidity at ground level increases to more than about 80 percent. Because humid air transmits odors more readily than dry air, we are made more receptive than usual to the heady, musky scent of the air.”

Another writer, Gilbert Klingel, author of Inagua: An Island Sojourn, who was camped out on a remote Caribbean Island, was so intrigued by a strong, pungent odor close to the ground, reminiscent of locust flowers, that he crawled in the moonlight in search of the smell. On the way he encountered a host of other odors, the “rich hay smell of beach grass, the dry parched aroma of sun-caked earth, the musty reek of dead leaves and rotten wood.” After an overwhelming olfactory experience “hundreds of …strange perfumes that I did not know existed,” he traced the original smell to a “stunted tree from which hung thousands of tiny blossoms.”

While I have not yet crawled on the ground in search of a strange scent, I do discover new ones every year. My latest were the ripened-apple scent of crushed mayapple blossoms and the faint, sweet odor emitted by an entire blackberry shrub.

Certain smells can decrease stess and increase alertness according to researchers at Yale’s Psychophysiology Center and the New Age practice of aromatherapy apparently works for many sick people. What works best for me is walking in an autumn woods on a wet day just after the leaves have fallen. Is there any scent that relieves stress and evokes more happy memories than that?