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A small mystery, half-solved June 30, 2016

June 30, 2016

One thing that confused me practically every time I’ve walked past it the last two years is this little patch of plants on one side of the road:

The reason I was confused was because those plants are a mimosa species that grows along the shores of the wetland. Not only is the road fairly far away from the wetland here, but the mimosas are growing on the wrong side of the road. During the drought, I could never figure out how there could be enough water there for the mimosas to survive, let alone thrive.

This year, the mimosas turned out to be perfectly aligned with either an extremely shallow pond or an extremely wide part of a creek that passes under the road at that point. There’s been flowing water there for the entire month, even though it hasn’t rained for a week.

However, this raises two questions: First, where is all that water coming from? Given the limestone ridge close behind it, I suspect a spring. Second, how on earth did I not notice this stream in 2013? Unfortunately, that remains a mystery.