John Pepin

“Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing.”

— Pete Seeger

In a shadowy and clipped scene that continues to fade with age in my memory, I recall our line of middle-schoolers marching up the sidewalk single file.

We had left the big and protective confines of the brick and stone schoolhouse – with its seemingly watchful and owl-like clock tower face – to hike a block and a half east and three blocks north.

When we reached our destination, we stood before a greenhouse that was tucked into a predominantly residential area along one of the old town’s busiest streets.

I remember it being warm and stuffy as we walked between rows of plants in various stages of growth. In addition to the humidity, I recall the smell of the potting soil and the good greenness of everything growing.

We left that day with seeds and small, netted planting balls of soil that were about as big around as a Duncan yoyo.

The seeds were for flowers, like marigolds, zinnias and snapdragons, that we would grow in cups in the weeks that followed.

Eventually, we would take the flowers home from school.

In those days, that meant to our mothers. Dads could be farmers, but dads weren’t typically thought of as flower people – especially during the 1960s.

That phrase had an entirely different meaning back then. Think San Francisco, music, acid and other drugs, a gentle youth subculture and free love, baby – yeah.

When I smell potting soil today, or visit a greenhouse, I am invariably drawn back to that middle school field trip and our experience that day.

For me, an affinity for the dirt, the honesty of hard work and the concept of eventual reward took root in watering and watching those few species of annual domesticated house plants grow and flower.

The lessons were reinforced at home in our backyard.

My mom is an avid gardener, even as she closes in on 90 years old.

From my earliest memories of her, she was always equipped with a vast knowledge of what plant this was, where to plant that and how to maintain the many flowers and vegetables we grew within small plots in the front and back of our old two-story house.

Helping her weed, plant, water and harvest these garden plots taught me a lot of things – including, perhaps most importantly, how to get dirt underneath my fingernails and not let it bother me.

Those kid gardening days I grew up with, under the tutelage of my mom, are the second thing I reliably think about whenever I smell the earthiness of potting soil or plants growing.

I spent a lot of time in those gardens as a kid, and even though it was indentured servitude, I learned to love it and to look forward to it.

On a recent visit from Canada, my mom bought several plants for the home gardens we now have at my house. Beautiful pink roses have been blooming on one of those bushes she planted all this past week.

She said the flowers she planted would help us remember her.

She was right about that.

I was reminded of all these things yesterday when I went out on a woods-fishing trip under sweltering conditions.

With the sun beating down on even the deepest holes, the temperature hovering just under 80 degrees and the stream depths down to shallow levels in most places, the fishing conditions were poor.

I soldiered on but didn’t end up with any fish to bring home.

As I walked along shorelines and pushed into, through and around thick green growths of bushes, vines and trees, I couldn’t help but be drawn to the beautiful colors all around me in the form of blooms and berries.

Pinks, purples, reds, yellows, oranges and creamy off-whites.

The blackberries were still lagging, as they always do this time of year, but they were on the brambles in their olive-green color, hanging down, waiting to ripen.

The raspberries were ripe and ready. I bit into one, feeling a squirt of fresh and delicious flavor shoot into my mouth. It was so good.

A seed got stuck between my teeth, but I didn’t mind.

In hindsight, with how poor the fishing was, I would have made a better use of time by stopping to pick raspberries instead. I easily could have filled up a gallon-sized plastic bag to bring home with me.

High and low and everywhere in between there were flowers in bloom in an incredible display. Clearly, it was the peak blooming period for these woodlands.

Even the white of the Queen Anne’s lace almost jumped out from the greenery around me. There were pinkish-red blooms on the red columbine, the deep purple and light lavender of the wild irises growing up and out of a cattail marsh and the gold and brown of the black-eyed Susans.

Everywhere I looked there were countless blooms to see. In fact, I don’t ever remember this many blooms on the bushes in other trips to the woods.

At one place along a stream, fledgling robins were hiding in the green leaves surrounding my feet. One bird jumped up from my immediate right to my left and then disappeared back into the deep foliage.

It was only a few seconds later that a second fledgling hopped over my feet and walked-ran into the bushes. In the distance, I could hear the mother robin calling to her brood to join her on the other side of the river.

Later, I saw one wild turkey stick its head up from the tall green grass alongside the dirt road I was driving on.

Overhead, young flickers flew from one side of the road to the other.

At an outflow of a culvert, dozens of chubs and shiner minnows were dashing to nibble at anything dropped into the water. They made bite-marked noodles out of a nightcrawler I had presented in hopes there was a hungry trout huddled among them.

Even though this hole was rather deep, compared to waters I’d seen elsewhere during the day, the bright, penetrating sunshine shone all the way to the creek bottom, making it easy to see my sinking worm even when I casted it 30 feet out in front of me.

At this high-growth time of the year, when the stream banks and roadsides are overgrown with vegetation and everything is blooming, it seems like a jungle garden.

I even had flowering vines grab ahold of my arm and fishing rod as I tried to pass by, feeling the overgrown trail I couldn’t see with my feet.

I half expected to hear or see a tiger or some other jungle cat at any moment.

I encountered numerous plants that I couldn’t identify as I marveled at their beautiful blooms. This pointed out my gaping knowledge gap when it comes to plant identification.

I don’t even know if my mom would have been much help, with her expertise lying within the realm of domesticated plants and vegetables.

In the past, I’ve tried to approach wildflower plant identification, but the plant identification keys seem daunting to me.

However, after this trip, I have recommitted to bringing one of my wildflower field guides with me on my next trip to the woods.

Doing so should afford me at least a little headway in learning more about the blooming wonders around me. It will likely leave me thinking that I should have done this a whole lot sooner.

These days, I seem to be moving too fast or too slow, somehow out of sync.

I think on this day, it would have been better if I would have found a shady, cool spot in a flowery meadow somewhere. I could have studied my wildflower book, comparing the numerous colorful blooms around me, slowed down and relaxed.

Pushing myself to fish, seems to have been a clear mistake today, even though the cold water of one creek I fished felt good flowing around my legs as I waded.

I think I would serve myself better sometimes if I was more deliberate about my decisions on what to do when and where.

But deciding what I did today put me in places to experience nature’s tremendous gardens up-close. And after the roads got narrower, the number of cars I encountered shrunk to only a couple all day.

I had the chance to stand under the blue skies, listen to the water slurp and sluggishly drag past. There was a buzz of deer and horse flies, grasshoppers and mosquitoes to hear, along with occasional birds, but nothing more.

Those are the kinds of conditions that nourish me deep inside. It’s a process that I often don’t even realize is happening.

That cure itself is another satisfying wonder of nature.

Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.