Winter Woodland Seep

     Today was the first day in my life that I knowingly saw and identified a few poison sumac trees in a wooded bottomland of constantly moist or wet ground.  The successional deciduous woods in southeastern Pennsylvania where the sumac sprouted had been timbered at some point, leaving open spaces where sunlight reaches the ground, encouraging the growth of shrubbery and ground plants, much of which I could see because of a lack of foliage on this winter day.  The young sumac trees each had at least a few clusters of grayish-white berries, which identified this species of shrubbery that causes intense rashes on the skin of people exposed to it.  There was nothing grandiose about the small poison sumac trees or their berries, but I was happy to see them just the same.
     Other kinds of young trees inhabited this wooded bottomland, including red maples, a couple of crack willows and tulip trees.  The maples were the most common trees here, being adapted to damp soil of bottomlands.  There were only a couple of young willows because that tree species needs more sunlight than those trees probably were receiving.  Sapling tulip trees were present also, but they won't thrive as well there as they would on well-drained, upland slopes.
     At least four kinds of shrubbery, besides the sumacs, are in this bottomland woods of wet soil, including spicebushes, speckled alders, winterberry bushes and multiflora rose bushes.  All these but the rose bushes are wetland plants and native to this area.
     Spicebushes have a sweet, lemony scent in their leaves, berries and twigs.  That scent can be detected when those parts of spicebushes are crushed and sniffed.
     Alders in winter have several dark-purple and closed catkins hanging decoratively from twigs and ripened, open cones that had already released their many tiny seeds.  Though these shrubs were dormant, as were all the woody plants, they were still quite attractive.       
     Rose bushes and winterberry shrubs have many red berries that brighten swampy woods in winter.  Many of those berries are eaten by rodents and berry-eating birds such as American robins, cedar waxwings and other species through winter and into spring.
     Because the current winter has been mild, a few kinds of plants were still green and growing on the soil and tree bark.  A few kinds of mosses, including sphagnum moss, and clumps of green grass grew around the seepage and trickles.  And lichens were green on the bark of tree trunks and limbs.
     The rivulets and seeps of inches deep water on the woodland floor also had a few kinds of plants growing in them.  Several pointed hoods of skunk cabbage plants were just emerging from the water.  I had never seen them poking above the water so early, again because of the mild winter, so far.
     Plants adapted to wet or moist soil and little seeps and trickles on the floor of a beat-up, bottomland woods was interesting to see in winter.  Those plants created a unique community of themselves in the habitat that suited all of them.  And there are other such vegetative communities in southeastern Pennsylvania because they are too wet to cultivate or develop.