I paid more attention to the vegetation along the trail this morning.  I saw at least twenty plants I hadn’t listed yesterday, although there are a couple I can’t really identify.  Some I just ignored yesterday: forget-me-not, dandelion, sorrel, plantain, buttercup, because they are so common and ubiquitous.  Today I took note of rhodora, pineapple weed, a stunted little plant of yellow sweet clover, hop clover (I think), groundsel (probably), butter and eggs (toadflax), wild mustard, thistle, St Johnswort, bracken, Deptford pink, Queen Anne’s lace about to open, a little creeping plant with white starlike flowers which I think is a kind of chickweed (not mouse ear chickweed), fleabane, evening primrose, something which might be crown vetch although it doesn’t look quite like the plant in my book, and several more of those dandelion-like species.  Fruiting spires are starting to form on the staghorn sumac. There’s also a shrub with bright pink flowers, I even have some growing in my garden, wild-seeded, but I have no idea what it is.  And, for the record, the birds were in more evidence: the usual pigeons, starlings, a couple of crows, but also sparrows, robins and I caught a fleeting glimpse of something which was probably a “confusing warbler”.

It makes me wonder, with all this amazing diversity, why so many of us are intent upon maintaining lawns of only one or two types of grass and wage war upon all other species which dare to sprout amongst the blades.