The Blooming Mountains

I wrote these vignettes about spring ephemerals and hope back in April during the first days of spring - and immediately after our first victory in the battle against the water bottling plant. Spring ephemerals are the bridge between winter and spring. Their early blooming readies deciduous forest ecosystems for blooming. Now, on the cusp of summer, as a heatwave looms and the plant's millionaire investors try to take my community to court, I'm holding on to what spring ephemerals teach us about resistance and hope.

Close your eyes and imagine what hope looks like. What images come in to your mind?

For me? The mountains in bloom.

We think of hope as a fragile, winged thing. Precious. Enclosed in glass where an exhibit label reads ‘please look but don’t touch.’ But in a Sacrifice Zone, hope is bruised and battered from a thousand blows. Hope is the cement factory air we breathe, and the carcinogen-tainted water we drink. Hope is tended and cultivated. Hope is not a luxury - it is survival.

As the early spring sun just begins to thaw the chill, in the hollers, in the valleys, in the tuft and folds of eons-old geologic activity and in the detritus of yesterday’s greed, spring ephemerals bloom. Despite the cold, the shy sunlight, the jagged rocks, and even the long-poisoned ground - all they know how to do is grow.

And grow.

And grow.

As horrors descend and the clock of our society chimes closer to midnight, as my brain churns and every breath aches, spring ephemerals are our teachers. They are our friends. They are our futures.

Let them show us how to forage hope in a world unraveling.

Bluebells in the Ruins

The river is heavy with southern snow. A strong wind blows around the upstream bend, whipping all around. The banks are sandy and strewn with pebbles as the river tide nips and sloshes at tree roots. Old stone walls tumble down onto the banks. The river rushes and roars, raucous with thawed snow, smelling of icy seaspray as it gurgles over eons-old stone.

In the tangled pile of tree root, flooded silt, old slag, and the tumbled stone from centuries-old industry, sapphires grow.

The ground remembers the sky, and thousands of gems will grow along the river bank. But now they are just a peek, a giggle, a purple smush, a brusied egg with baby blooms inside. A tight group there. A cluster here. Emerging, winking, blinking in the bright March light. They are the first trumpet in the symphony of sapphire to come. Why do they grow here of all places? In the wash and debris of human greed? At the threshold of death, bluebells grow under my feet, reaching toward the sun.

In late March, spring ephemerals burst from the limestone hills to drink in the spring light filtering down between the leafless limbs of deciduous forests. Each species has its own adaptation for bursting through the cold ground and through the piled leaf litter. Bullets and corkscrews and springs - the force of a single plant coming from a tiny seed. They grab the sunlight while they can - and brave the early spring cold and storms to do it. Spring ephemerals like trilliums bloom only once every seven years and live for half a century (yes, fifty years!).

Virginia bluebells send forth their blue crab claws toward the sun just like other spring ephemerals, but they have extra special conditions. They only grow in floodplains (also in historic floodplains, I’ve noticed anecdotally when walking past dry stream beds). The alluvial soil is moist and rich with the eroded minerals from hills that sit hundreds of miles away.

Spring ephemerals reach for the sun not knowing the conditions they will face. They have creatively adapted to burst through the obstacles between them and their goal. And they outlast despite the odds.

Spring ephemerals teach us resistance is hope.

Toadshade on the Jagged Cliffs

The swallows catch flies above the cold stew of the river. The mud squishes down the banks as I hop on the stones worn by many millenia of floods. The river is ahead. The hills behind. And all amongst it, hope blooms.

Wildlings grasp crag and cliff to shine in the early April sun. The white stars of chickweed shine through gnarled roots. A bed of toadshade bursts from the muddy bank. The speckled fish leaves of trout lily leap through the leaf litter. Rubied columbine weeps upon the cliff face. I look upon the cliffs radiant with blooms and wonder at the wild garden made by the weavings and meanderings of billions of wildlings over centuries of toil.

Spring ephemerals live most of their long lives underground in hibernation. They shift all their energy and nutrients to their rootstock before dying back, lying in wait for the sun to tell them to emerge again next spring. So they thrive in undisturbed areas. In an area of Appalachia that has been heavily farmed for centuries, that means the cliffs where pack animals and farm equipment couldn’t reach. All among the crags of crumbling stone, emerge a constellation of blooms. Columbines high in the cliffs. Hepatica in the cracks of low boulders. Toadshade trilliums in the tumbled erosion near the river.

Spring ephemerals require the right conditions of soil and sun, yes. But they also have creatively adapted to pressures and disturbances. Pushed to the edges, learning to grow even in the jagged cliffs.

Spring ephemerals teach us creativity is hope.

Bloodroot on the Canal

Imagine “community” and tell me what you see.

Me? I open my eyes into the dappled spring sun and see a mountain blooming.

The forest floor is deep in dead leaves, but the striped, child-like stars of spring beauty shine through. The purple-white of cutleaf toothwort pokes its head out here and there. The delicate seed pods of shooting stars sway in the wind. The soft feathers of now-flower-less squirrel corn and Dutchman’s breeches carpet the soil. The hillside is so full of trout lily it looks like a stream filled with leaping speckled fish. The leaves of toadshade trillium and bloodroot and mayapple are like hands as big as my head grasping for the light.

Birdsong trills from high above. A small blue butterfly hops from toothwort to toothwort then a larger orange butterfly flutters through with someplace to be. Bumblebees fly lazily from one bloom to another. A cold wind from upstream blows upon the hills. Light peeks out from behind a cloud and gilds the waking forest. Redbud dazzles. The shining green of the budding understory gleams. Mayapple calls out sweet and clear: “I’m here! I’m here!”

Observe spring ephemerals for long enough and you start to notice clumps of species in the forest. Some fill entire hillsides. Others wind through the rocks like a river. Still other peek here and there through a decaying trunk of a long-dead tree. The patterns are the secrets of myrmecochory. In other words, most spring ephemerals are an ant’s garden.

The seeds of spring ephemerals are wrapped in an elaiosome, a fleshy structure filled with lipid and protein nutrients. Adult ants are attracted to the nutrient-rich elaiosomes and carry the seeds back to their nests where their larva feed. The ants then dispose of the elaiosome-free seed in their trash pits which are full of nutrient-rich fecal matter and contain the right humidity and warmth for seed germination.

Almost all the spring ephemerals you see - bright white bloodroot, twinleaf, mayapple - are because of a mutualistic relationship with ants. Countless flowers bloom because of the tedious, unrecognized tending by countless ants.

Spring ephemerals teach us community is hope.

Trilliums in the Rescued Forest

“Wake up,” says the mountain, smiling with a billion blooms.

“Wake up,” says the hummingbird, gathering fluff from a fern. Nearby the mountain seeps and yellow lady slippers dream in the golden haze of an April twilight.

“Wake up,” the trickling spring says. “Wake up.”

All around me the forest dims. Rays of dappled light shine here and there as the sun closes its eyes. But I walk through a forest waking, and I try to count the holiness shining all around me.

But there’s not enough time in all the long eons of the universe to bow in awe at each holy ephemerality of a mountain waking.

Ants aren’t the only friends of spring ephemerals.When ephemerals break their sleep and burst from the forest litter, they pull energy from the nearby trees through the mycorrhizal roots of fungi that connect all forests in an underground network of nutrient pathways. This movement of nutrients and the bursting of ephemerals and wakes up the soil from winter’s chill. Bacteria starts to decompose again. Insects and other underground creatures begin to move. The movement creates pathways for water to seep in the ground. And the blooms above ground feed the bees and wasps and flies just emerging from the leaf litter. Spring ephemerals wake the forest up.

When the heat comes and the canopy leafs out, spring ephemerals die back then hibernate in their roots, sending the nutrients back along the mycorrhizal network to the trees, who are just gearing up for the tiring act of creating sun-eating leaves.

Spring ephemerals teach us solidarity is hope. Though our efforts may stall for a time, we hand the baton to others just as someone handed it to us.

You are reading Entangled Worlds, a newsletter from N.A. Chapman filled with poems and poetic prose that radically imagines the more-than-human worlds beyond the Anthropocene. You can find me on Instagram and Bluesky.