Lone Tree Hill

This is town of Belmont Conservation Land, fomerly McLean Hospital land, now called Lone Tree Hill. McLean is a famous psychiatric hospital with a long history of treating famous creative people including Sylvia Plath, James Taylor, Ray Charles, David Foster Wallace and so on. They used to own a lot of land and at some point they sold a lot of it.

We crossed Route 60 on foot from the Star Market parking lot and hiked about a third of the way to Mill Street. This area is popular with mountain bikers, so the trail is marked with numbered signs, which is great for knowing exactly where you are on the map. Plenty of plants and crumbling stone walls to look at, and we saw a deer.

You know fall is upon us when Aster divaricatus lines the trails. Actually the taxonomy was changed and it is now Eurybia divaricata. An understated beauty! It looks really pretty interplanted with ferns.

Aster divaricatus

Green briar--Smilax rotundifolia

Maple leaf viburnum

This maple leaf viburnum was my favorite 'find' today, meaning a satisfying plant i.d. You think you're looking at a maple sapling, and then you notice the fruit. 

I'm trying to pay closer attention to tree bark to be able to identify trees at different stages of maturity (without leaves.) Here are three different white oak trunks, small, medium and large. 







Other trees we saw included hop hornbeam, white pine, hickory, sassafras, beech, and birch.