NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA: St JOHN AND IRVING NATURE PARK

I have no idea where I took this photo, but it shows up between our whale watching trip (see last post) and the next pictures, and I love murals, so here it is, just because.

After our whale watching trip, we headed east along the Bay of Fundy towards Saint John:

We stopped at Reversing Falls, a spot where the water changes direction because of the rise of the tide in the Bay of Fundy.

However, we would have had to pay a fee just to access the viewpoint where we could see the water, and we didn't have hours to wait for the shift in the tide. We had other plans for the rest of the day.

However, the wildflower garden there was worth the stop:

After checking in at our hotel in Saint John, we headed out for some late afternoon strolling in Irving Nature Park, a 600-acre preserve on a peninsula that stretches out into the Bay of Fundy:

Well-maintained trails wind through the spindly trees:

Strips of bark hang limply from toppled trees in a way that reminds me of the bandages peeling off a mummy:

We seemed to be alone in the park. It was so quiet that it was hard to believe we were just ten miles from New Brunswick's busiest port.

Our son, an avid mushroom forager, was in his element:

One of my favorite plants, which we've only seen while mushroom hunting with our son, is the eerie, albino ghost plant. It is a saprophyte, meaning it does not engage in photosynthesis, but rather draws its food through its roots from nearby fungi, which must be why I've only seen it growing around mushrooms:

Emily Dickinson was fascinated by this flower, which she called "Indian Pipe" (it's also known as "corpse plant"), and it graced the cover of the first book of her poetry, which wasn't published until after her death. Emily herself wore white almost exclusively in her later life, and perhaps that is one of the reasons she loved this strange plant.  

Emily Dickinson wrote two poems that included the Indian pipe. This one was written in 1873:

White as an Indian Pipe

Red as a Cardinal Flower

Fabulous as a Moon at Noon

February Hour --

And this one was written ca. 1879:

'Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe -

'Tis dimmer than a Lace -

No stature has it, like a Fog

When you approach the place -

Not any voice imply it here -

Or intimate it there -

A spirit - how doth it accost -

What function hath the Air?

This limitless Hyperbole
Each one of us shall be -

'Tis Drama - if Hypothesis

It be not Tragedy - 

But I digress. Back in Irving Nature Park, 750 miles northeast of Dickinson's Amherst, we found a few more spectacular mushrooms:

The light was beginning to get that eerie quality that occurs just before dusk when colors are brighter, deeper, richer:

That's my cute hubby gazing out to sea:

The light seeped away off the edge of the horizon: