I’ve blogged this bog a few times before (April 2015, June 2014) and it’s time now to revisit the place, a new world so close, so changeable.

I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum… I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place…far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings

*

Since my last visit in April, the bog has dried up quite a bit, in spite of the regular rains.

*

Flourishing now are blueberry bushes, full of fruits (less full today than yesterday after our feasting),

*

and the white-fringed orchid (Platanthera blephariglottis), here among spruce and larch:

And in closer view:

*

The bright red berries of the bunchberry (Cornus canadensis) enliven the shadows.

And the Clintonia borealis exhibits the reason its common name is “blue bead lily.”

A couple of the goldthreads (Coptis trifolia) are still in bloom.

*

A pair of hairy woodpeckers flitted quicker than the camera could catch, but I finally found the male hiding behind some branches.

*

A forest fairy looks out from a spider-web-filled snag.

*

A rock I like, with a crack through it (that’s how the light gets in):

*

Some rotted boards have been replaced with new ones, a welcome improvement.

*

The contrasting colours of the bog — right now, the deep spruce green, chartreuse larches, red peat moss and cranberries, white orchids, blue of the sky against these others — always beguile, whatever the weather and season.

*