Month: November 2020

Since I have headed home for Thanksgiving, my goal was to find a new phenology place here at home and compare it to my phenology place in Burlington. I am from a small, woodsy, area in southern Vermont, so my new place is quite similar to the Centennial woods in northern Vermont. There are a bunch of pastures in the middle of the woods right by my house, so I decided to walk out there for my phenology spot.

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The spot I ended up choosing was this spot right at the entrance of the pasture. It has a lot of Northern Hemlocks and Eastern White Pines and it also has a little stream that goes down into a larger brook. I visited this spot on a very dreary day. It was cloudy and only 30 degrees out. I took a picture of the view of the pasture from my spot too:

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One of the biggest differences between my spot here and my spot in Burlington, would be that this spot is very obviously less often visited by humans. This spot is almost never visited by humans, and Centennial has humans using it for recreation all of the time. My spot here is also way farther from any civilization and way deeper in the woods than centennial is as well. Here is a picture showing the location of my new phenology spot on google maps:

Another difference I noticed between my spot here and my spot in Burlington would be that there are a lot more larger trees here than in Centennial. I think this tells me that these woods have a lot more older trees than Centennial, which makes sense to me.

On the journey to my spot, I saw these really cool Yellow Birch trees that grew together and are covered in moss. I feel like the bark is extra peel-y.

I also remembered an observation that I have always found really interesting. There is barbed wire that has been around some of these trees for so long, that the tree grew around the wire so now the wire is inside of the trees.

One of my favorite things about this spot is all of the old stone walls and stone foundations that it has. They can be seen all along the trails and in the pasture. This is something we talked about a lot in class. This shows that people used to live here and I think that’s really cool and special to think about. This land used to be so much different than how it is today and it is crazy to think about what it might have been like back when it was a farm and settlements were here because today it is in the middle of the woods and cars could barely even get to where the settlements used to be.

The Phenology assignment for this week includes creating an event map for my place. From what I gathered after reading “The World as Events” By Hannah Hinchman, an event map is a map with the purpose of recording the things that are natural and unnatural in a place through your own personal experience and observations there. Here is my best attempt at creating an event map for my phenology place:

It has already snowed this year here in Burlington. We had a lot of snow earlier in the week. My place in Centennial will definitely have been snowed on already this year. As fall comes to an end, the woods is a lot less bright and starts to look dreary. Especially on cold, cloudy days. Without snow covering the ground and branches, everything is dull and sad looking this time of the year and the woods feel a lot darker.

Along with my event map, this week’s assignment has challenged me to write an original poem about my phenology place. I wrote my poem about getting away from the stress of life by going into the woods. I was inspired by how even though there is a whole college campus, city, highway, and even an airport right outside of Centennial, when you are in the woods you can almost escape that chaos.

Erasing Time

The woods is a leisure, a peaceful home

As a kid, it’s where I spent all my time

It was my ladybug umbrella, or the sunshine

The woods here feel like home because of this

When you sit and smell and listen,

The outside of the woods could be anything when it isn’t in sight.

People could be non existent.

And so could the worries and stresses of life.

I feel like I am a kid again. Imagining I’ve erased time.