Spring moved slowly, but once summer decided to show up, everything happened at once. Miss Sadie, the Cowboy and I have been following developments closely. The roadsides are full of flowers and critters and the occasional berry. The bluff is covered with equisetum, an ancient life form that crowds out practically everything else, but has somehow made space for the wild rose. Those wild roses have grown in Michigan for a long time, too. Their images were worked in porcupine quills on birchbark baskets. Here is your slideshow.
I am pretty sure the berries in the slideshow are going to grow up to be black raspberries, but I could be wrong. Your thoughts on the subject are welcome.
Torch Lake Views 
dawnkinster
July 2, 2016
Saw lots of wild flowers and things up north too. Pictures coming to a blog near you sometime.
Gerry
July 2, 2016
I will look forward to it. Probably too early for thimbleberries, eh?
Giiid
July 2, 2016
Thank you Gerry, for a nice and interesting slide show. everything looks almost like here in DK, except for the charming chipmunks. The lovely wild roses, is it the same as rosehip rose? Nature Agency will exterminate rosehip rose in DK, because of its invasive nature, but never the less I enjoy to see it along the coasts.
Gerry
July 2, 2016
Well this is interesting. I went looking for information about roses invading Denmark and found studies of Rosa rugosa on the dunes of the North Sea Coast. Astonishing. The great irony is that on the dunes on Grand Traverse Bay of Lake Michigan we have two aggressive species–equisetum and wild roses–growing together. And then there’s this – in the midst of worries about bees disappearing, there were bees on the roses. Happy bees. (I did not get good photos of the bees. You will have to take my word for it.) I often ponder the question of invasiveness. When is something or someone adjudged invasive? And by whom?
And then I think of Robert Frost, who by all accounts was a fairly miserable old grouser, but wrote some fine poetry, including these lines:
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.”
Martha J
July 2, 2016
Well, who needs National Geographic when we have your slide shows? Beautiful pictures. Thank you. The weather is the most beautiful I can remember ever this time of year. I would love to have a ‘pause’ button for Mother Nature right now!
Gerry
July 2, 2016
And here I am with “paws” buttons! What a good idea. I’m glad you liked the pictures. I remember weather like this from a long and lovely time ago. I will take every day like this I can get and be grateful for it.
tootlepedal
July 2, 2016
A very nice set of pictures. We saw a lot of horsetails today too.
Gerry
July 2, 2016
Thank you. I ran over to see the Wild West, wondering whether you were talking about horsetails, horse tails, or politicians–and found that you had seen quite a lot of Cumbria. I’m going to go back to look at that beautiful sea holly again.
Martha
July 2, 2016
Lovely wild roses. When I lived in Sturgeon Bay I cleared out an area in my woods to let in the sun. I took out honeysuckle (as well as one can), buckthorn, small and medium dreadful poplars, dogwood, grape vine on and on. What I kept were some small white pines, small oaks and lovely, lovely wild roses. The fragrance is the truest rose I know. No rose is prettier than fragrance.
So good to see all your lush beauty up there. It looks so much like springtime. Those aren’t thimbleberries, but I’d vote for blackberries.
Gerry
July 2, 2016
Thank you Martha. Honeysuckle is a pest, but a pretty pest. Wild roses are . . . wonderful.
I agree, not thimbleberries. I have to go to the U.P. to find those. (Did you have them in Sturgeon Bay?) I’m going to keep an eye on the canes – maybe I can get at the berries before the birds do.
Martha
July 3, 2016
I ate thimbleberries by the fistful in Door County. I found more farther north in the county than the Sturgeon Bay area. So nice to go for a bike ride on forest trails and stop for berries as refreshment.
Gerry
July 3, 2016
Another thing to like about Door County then. Ah, the Freshwater Nation.
WOL
July 2, 2016
I love the wild roses. In the duplex where I used to live, the sisters who built the place had planted tea roses in two places along the back fence. Common practice is to graft tea rose stems onto the hardier wild rose rootstock. All the tea rose grafts had died back to the rootstock and when I cleared off the dead wood, red and pink climbing roses grew out from the rootstock. After several years, I had large swatches of red and pink climbing roses over my back fence. They only bloom once in late spring, but WOW!
Gerry
July 3, 2016
The climbing roses must have been wonderful. There was an old garden at the house we bought when Rob the Firefighter was a toddler. The rose canes were a hazard to health, whipping around in the wind at eye level, tangling themselves every whichway. Armed with heavy gloves and a tree pruner I whacked them back to the ground. One came back and was just as you say a prolific bloomer for a short time every year. It smelled wonderful, too, but oh my, those thorns.
Carsten
July 4, 2016
Thank you for the summer tour picture show. I think your berries are some kind of “Rubus”. Black raspberries is a good name that express exactly how they look. Do they have lots of sharp thorns?
As for Rosa Rugosa, it has some of the finest scent of all the roses. At least in my nose.
Gerry
July 4, 2016
You’re welcome. I’m inclined to agree that the berries are some kind of Rubus, although when I did a little research I failed to find one with six petals. Maybe mine is a “sport”! Definitely thorny.
Craig Smith
July 5, 2016
Great show. Those look very like the black raspberry bushes that grew in the woods behind our house in Farmington. They gave me many a Euell Gibbons moment. The thorns made for a satisfying challenge.
Gerry
July 5, 2016
Thank you. I am astonished to find a Euell Gibbons reference here. He taught me how to stalk wild asparagus – and how to avoid things I couldn’t identify. Thus my extreme age.
shoreacres
July 5, 2016
I was wondering if you might have dewberries. They’re native here, and a close, close relative to blackberries. I finally found my photos, and discovered that while most of the flowers have five petals, many do have six, or even seven. On the other hand, blackberries could have variation in the number of petals, too, since some variations are natural within a species. What really stopped me was “black raspberry.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard of those.
Here are the important questions: are they sweet? are there a lot of them? and can you get them before the birds? If the answers all are “yes,” who cares which they are?
Gerry
July 6, 2016
Once again you have sent me on a fruitful voyage of discovery. It’s possible that the “wild blackberries” that grow in my neighborhood might, in fact, be “swamp dewberries,” which are native tro Michigan. They are not particularly sweet, the quantity varies from year to year, and the birds manage to get most of them. That last is the appeal, of course. I must be wily and attentive to snatch any of them.
Karma
July 7, 2016
I’ve just finished reading Nature Walk 1 and Nature Walk 2 in reverse order – and I’m glad I did – much prefered Nature Walk 1. I’m a much more flower-y girl than fun-gi! See what I did there? 😉 Laughing at myself because no one else likely will! 🙂
Gerry
July 7, 2016
I noticed. You are a rascal. An endearing rascal, but a rascal.