Anemone's day: Blue blue hills

A hike in the Blue Hills reservation right outside Boston. Another incredibly warm, pleasant November day.

The trail moves steady upwards.

Tiny pine trees are actually mosses

A confused blueberry bush is in bloom

The Boston skyline from top of the hill - it looks so small and insignificant from up here. This magnified picture makes it look bigger and closer than it is.

Small blueberry shrub hiding from the winds

I have to come back in summer to see if the bushes are full of blueberries.

Wintergreen

Trailing dewberries, a raspberry relative

On the way down there were fragrant sweetferns

Down by the parking, I saw a lot of the invasives that I want to fight so hard... This one you might actually find in your own back yard - Winged Euonymus or Burning bush. It's widely planted everywhere because of it's gorgeous fall color. If you have one, please dig it up and replace with some beautiful native Highbush blueberries or Dogwood shrubs which can rival its fall color. Don't put it in your compost! The berries are eaten by birds and spread in the wild, but although the birds like to eat them, it does not have the same nutritional value as the plants that have evolved together with our birds for millenia, and no insects - the base of the food chain everywhere - are eating it.

Another invasive is Oriental Bittersweet - strangling both small and big trees and breaking their limbs with its weight. This sad mess is a common sight along road sides and in waste places everywhere in New England. The berries were once used for ornamental decoration, and they are very pretty indeed. But I don't see that anymore, since I'm so saddened by the sight of the impenetrable mass it creates.

And on the subject on invasives, another one that is just as bad as the others is Multiflora rose. Green, thorny scraggly stems form thickets and mounds in woods and along streams. No other vegetation gets a chance.