Last full day before packing to return home, our week away in the White Mountains done for another spring. Our host is tractor-mowing the large tract of land nicely grassed in wide sweeps before his cottages. I've always delighted in exchanging gardening stories with him. He is an avid gardener like his father, a man from whom his son inherits his geniality. A frugal and avid gardener, he separates his hostas and grows both perennials and annuals from seed.

Apart from co-managing this enterprise with his wife, they're both gainfully employed in other ways, she sewing exquisitely designed draperies for her local clients, and occasionally working seasonally at nearby tourist sites, and he as a long-time employee of one of the better-known, privately-owned mountain-tourist sites.

Bunchberry/dogwood

The cottage we most often rent from them for our brief stays is the last in a long line, the furthest removed from the main house and where most of the other accommodation is clustered. It backs hard onto a forested slope, and the back of the cottage tends to be naturally dimly-lit as a result, while the front is exposed to full sunlight. We enjoy its more remote location.

The fresh, green fragrance of newly-mowed grass permeates the atmosphere beautifully. The sky has not yet greeted the cloud cover the weather station assured might bring some isolated sprinkles.  Sun blazing, it seems fairly hot as we set out driving past the Mad River, back to the site we visit most often, at the Waterville Valley. The parking lot is empty but for one other vehicle besides our own. Its owner could be anywhere along the network of trails that radiate out from Smarts Brook.

We plan to repeat the three-mile circuit, to go at it from the opposite end this time, but change our minds. We start out again at the stone gorge end with its gorgeous vistas of rampaging mountain stream hurtling over boulders close to the Mad River. We note new Ladies Slippers in bloom, their delicate pink-toned lanterns fresh and lovely. Among them, with similar spear-like foliage, sprays of yellow-starred straw lilies.

We notice also the presence of sumacs among the proliferation of dogwood, of a type quite unlike what we're most familiar with in our own natural geography at home. Leaving behind the forest of hemlock, spruce, pine and oak, we find blooming bunchberry among the areas of micro-ponds and wetland, where boggy ferns, raspberry canes, sorrel and strawberry feel at home. Mica glints back from flakes dispersed among the gravel littering the trail.

A young man passes us cheerfully riding a mountain bike and we wonder how he manages at some of the steep, rocky, boggy places on the trail; a challenge that youth enjoys, no doubt. A young woman with a leashed large dog, mixed breed with some hound in the admixture, a dark brindle coat, passes in the opposite direction and they are the sole people whom we come across in the several hours of our trekking cycle.

The toad is well camouflaged

But we do glimpse a small design-textured snake, likely a garter, sidling through the underbrush of the forest floor near a boggy area, no doubt searching for newts or frogs. We also see a toad a while later, possibly with an eye to avoid becoming a snake's meal.