Pennsylvania Game News - November 2012 - 53

continued eating, even burying most of its body beneath the grass and seeds in its quest for food. A full moon illuminated the sky on the 10th of December when Bruce startled a flying squirrel on the back porch. It zipped up the porch railing and sailed over near the juniper tree where it made a rough landing and disappeared down slope. The next evening I surprised the flying squirrel on the back porch steps, and it performed the same maneuver as it had for Bruce the previous night. We saw at least one flying squirrel at our feeder area throughout December, and we thought it was only fair that we should feed flying squirrels at night because we hosted at least 11 gray squirrels by day. Whether or not the flying squirrels were affected by the unusual warmth, at least one woodchuck was. Below the back porch a fat male woodchuck continued to emerge from his hole every afternoon to eat the fresh greenery on the slope into December. The last time I saw him was mid afternoon on December 22, again a record breaker here for a woodchuck. Usually they are tucked into their hibernation dens by mid-November and we don’t see any until the following February, when the males are busy visiting females in their dens. Plants also responded to the continual warmth. Several so-called green immigrant flowers, those that came from overseas, bloomed later than I could remember. On November 27 I found a pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea) blooming beside Alan’s Bench. A member of the Composite family, it was once dried and used in making memorial wreaths and for decorating vases and wall brackets. Today it still
NOVEMBER 2012

appears in dried flower arrangements. Its small, white, globular-shaped flowers grow in clusters atop a cottony stem with thin, toothless leaves that are sage-green above and woolly-white beneath. Other names for it are silverleaf, cottonweed, lady-neverfade, Indian posy and ladies’-tobacco. Because it came from Europe, Indian posy seems inappropriate, and I doubt whether ladies smoked it. But t h e y did use it for coughs and as a poultice for bruises in pioneer days. Its latest blooming month, according to Rhoads’s and Block’s The Plants of Pennsylvania, is October, which was why I was amazed to find it flowering in late November. On that same day several forsythia flowers blossomed on a scattering of branches. Forsythia originated in south China where it grew wild. The Chinese called it golden bell. Robert Fortune, a young Scot, was sent into China to collect new plants for the Royal Horticultural Society of London in 1845, three years after the Opium War, when westerners were resented and mistrusted. So Fortune, disguised as a Chinese man, dressed in native garb and wearing a pigtail, explored the south China coast with a crew of Chinese workmen in springtime. There he found the countryside filled with forsythia. Although he later named it for the second curator of London’s Chelsea Gardens — William Forsyth — who was also a Scot, golden bell is a more evocative name that was quickly forgotten. Dandelions also thrived in our driveway, and during this longest autumn I found a dandelion blooming on Butterfly Loop on December 5. It, too, came over with the
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Pennsylvania Game News - November 2012

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