ditch | nichepoetryandprose

poetry and prose about place

Posts Tagged ‘ditch’

colour: solemn, sombre

October in New Brunswick is an explosion of colour. However, as the red and orange leaves fall, browns and yellows begin to dominate the landscape.

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View of Nerepis marsh looking south. The ferry is crossing the river, barely visible in the mist.

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Colour variety in the marsh grasses.

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Hay-scented fern adds yellows and browns to the ditches.

solemn, sombre

walked out to see you

once again as you

lay dying, somber

the soft light, marsh grass

leaning in the rain

autumn colour fades

tones solemn, ochre

of poplar and birch,

straw-pale, hay-scented

fern, Solidago

and tansy, shadows

in the ditch, the heads

of Typha

burst to seed

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Best wishes everyone!

Jane

Written by jane tims

October 19, 2019 at 7:00 am

Posted in natural history

Tagged with autumn, brown, change, colour, ditch, marsh, poem, sombre

along the country road #5

with 4 comments

Not far from where I live is a new road, built a few years ago along the edge of a field. When it was first built, it was a scar on the land, its ditches unlovely smears of muck.

This year, the weeds of the roadside have moved in to fill the empty spaces with green. At one place, where the new road joins the old, it is particularly wet and the ditches have been overwhelmed with a green and orange explosion of Jewel Weed.

Jewel Weed growing with cattails in a wet ditch

Jewel weed grows in wet springy places, in swampy woods, along brooks, and in ditches. Its masses of green foliage are hung with spurred, lobed flowers, orange, yellow or cream coloured with spots at the throat.

Jewel weed is also called spotted snapweed, spotted touch-me-not, lady’s earrings, Celandine, Solentine, impatiente (the French name for the genus), and chou sauvage. The names snapweed and touch-me-not, as well as the generic name, Latin for impatient, refer to the sudden bursting of the seed capsule when it is touched.

a profusion of Jewel Weed

The botanist, Nicolaas Meerburgh, who first named the plant, called it capensis, meaning “of the cape” since he wrongly thought it had been introduced from the Cape of Good Hope into European gardens.