This unseasonal photo is a ploy to get you to learn ‘the rest of the story’ about this secret garden. The garden itself isn’t a secret to folks who go for a walk at Grantham’s Brookside Park this time of year. For some reason, I mostly visit the park on brisk winter days with the rushing water partially covered by snow as shown in the picture above. It’s one of my go-to short walks when I need a little grounding.
 
During yesterday’s warm and sunny summer day, I strolled along the brook and then I took a path to a clearing and came upon a delightful garden full of Sweet Williams. These flowers were not escapees that happened to grow there. Someone took some time, efforts, cash, and a lot of TLC.
 
If you haven’t seen the garden, I encourage you to stop at Brookside Park on old Rte. 10 north of Rumbrook.  Cross the wonderful volunteer-constructed bridge to the trail. The beginning of the trail looks wheel-chair accessible and do-able for folks with canes or walkers. Here’s another little tidbit you might not have known about Brookside Park: Emil Hanslin, the creator of the Master Plan for Eastman back in the late 60s, donated the land to the town of Grantham in 1984 along with his son Tony. 
 
I looked around for clues for the secret gardener's identity. There were notes posted on a nearby information kiosk thanking some men for mending its roof and for bags of manure and as well as thanking Dunkin’ Donuts for bags of coffee grounds.* I suspect that these aren’t the people who made the garden. If you or someone you know planted this garden, please reply in the comments and let us all know. Or if you’d prefer, you can keep it a secret.  

*Used coffee grounds add organic material to the soil which improved drainage, water retention, and aeration.    The grounds also help microorganisms beneficial to plant growth as well as attract earthworm who enjoy a little caffeine pick-me-up. 

​While waking around gardens and hiking in the woods and bogs, I have seen a few creepy looking plants among the vast majority of attractive ones. I took pictures thinking I would never use them but decided to share them with you for a bit of fun. Some of the scary looking plants were just starting to develop and will eventually become beautiful, but I like to photograph them in their Ugly Duckling stage. Most of my photos are of that variety. Others are destined to never blossom but remain beasts their whole lives. Here’s an example:
 
While visiting the Philrick-Cricenti Bog in New London the other day with my hiking group, a keen-eyed hiker pointed out a pitcher plant. The more we looked, the more we saw—hundreds of insect eating pitcher plants. Unlike their more famous relative, the Venus flytrap, pitcher plants don't close up once an insect or small reptile wanders inside. The pitcher plant's shape doesn’t allow the prey to escape. They are stuck inside where they meet a gruesome end.

One of the bug-eating plants was surely the inspiration for Little Shop of Horrors, a very campy 60’s low budget movie that became a popular musical where humans foolishly answer Audry II's plea to "Feed Me." Ultimately these giant plants take over the world. It's a hoot.
 
By way of apology to all these plants, I realize that they all have their roles and fill important niches. Without them, we would live in a very different place. Vive la différence

New GGC member Betty Kargacos invited me to visit her property on the golf course that has an amazing array of pink lady slipper orchids. There must have been 50 in groups or pairs or standing alone all over her woodsy backyard. Betty’s neighbors on either side have similar yards but the lady slippers only grow in Betty’s. She told me that new plants pop up every year. All the pictures here are of Betty’s flowers.

Lady slippers are very difficult to pollinate. A bee that manages to navigate down the narrow opening to the pouch will be disappointed to find pollen but no nectar. The savvy bees look elsewhere for pollen but some bees give the lady slippers a few tries before giving up—just enough to pollinate a small percentage each year. The pollinated plants produce thousands of tiny seeds that are as small as dust and are dispersed by the wind. The seeds depend on wild soil fungi to germinate and grow which make them rare in the wild and almost impossible to domesticate. Another obstacle is that it takes 10 to 17 years before it matures enough to bloom for the first time.

While researching lady slippers, I learned of a folklore about an Ojibwe* girl named Aki who saved her village after most of the people came down with a horrible sickness. A well respected medicine woman who made life-saving medicine lived many miles away making it impossible for any sick person to make the journey. Although she was small for her age, Aki was a fast runner and bravely volunteered to make the trip. It took Aki many days to cross the frozen lake and find the medicine woman who lived deep in the forest. The journey back to her village was even more difficult when a blizzard hindered her progress and caused her to lose her moccasins in the deep snow but she never let go of the precious medicine. ​Aki barely made it back to her village before she collapsed. The medicine she brought saved her people and herself. That spring, on the exact spots where Aki had stepped with her bare feet on her perilous journey, lady slippers grew. The Ojibwe call the lady slippers “Moccasin Shoes.”   
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*The Ojibwe number approximately 320 thousand in the United States and 160 thousand in Canada today. They are known for their oral history of which this story is one

​I have seen hundreds of trilliums this spring and have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with them. Most of them are bashful and bend their blossoms down to the earth making them sometimes impossible to photograph. I recently learned that there are 43 known species of trillium so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I saw some different looking trilliums growing in Janie Clark’s garden. I asked Janie about her bold trilliums,  and her answer resulted in this blog. 
 
When Janie was a young mother living in Albion, Michigan, she learned that an old Victorian house nearby was going to be razed to make room for a parking lot. Janie immediately thought of the trilliums that she knew grew there. She grabbed her children, some buckets, and her trowel; and marched over to the house , carefully dug up the trilliums, and replanted them in her yard. Later, more rescued trilliums joined the pack. Janie often hiked on a trail where beautiful trilliums grew right on the path. She heard that they were going to plow the trail to widen it for hikers. You guessed it, Janie to the rescue again.
 
Many years later Janie and her husband Russ retired and moved from Michigan. The trillium plants rode more than 1,000 miles with them to their new home on Trillium Lane in Grantham, New Hampshire. I asked if she bought her house because of her street address given her affinity for trilliums but she told me that after looking a dozens of homes, she knew this was the one when she saw the fireplace. Russ did his Geological Science PhD dissertation on the granites of south-central New Hampshire—the same granite as the fireplace. 
 
Call it fate or karma or coincidence, but some things are meant to be.