Turn off Highway 2 at the Home Hardware, down Old Enfield Road, cross the big highway, and eventually you’ll find the little gravel parking lot that marks the start of the Nine Mile River Trails. This forested park is the closest wilderness style park to Enfield, Nova Scotia. Since moving to the province earlier this year, I’ve visited the trails several times. I find some things new and some things the same each time, as the park changes with the seasons.
Boardwalks protect the boggier parts of the forest from you and you from the bog. Watch for loose planks!The intriguing Monotropa uniflora, “Indian pipe”, has no chlorophyll. It gets energy via a parasitic relationship with mycorrizal fungi, such as those pictured below, which are in turn themselves symbiotic with trees.
Strangely to this westcoaster, summer is mushroom fruiting season in Atlantic Canada. Nine Mile River Trails host an abundance of mushrooms as there are several forest types, from boggy to hardwood dominated to hemlock and pine.
A beautiful creamy-apricot-pink Bolete.Craterellus ignicolor – edible and choice, and a relative of the more famous chanterelle. Look for them growing on dead wood, often in association with hemlock. Watch out for not-so-nice lookalikes!Strange little earthtongues, not a typical “mushroom” but a fungus nonetheless.Pretty red Russulas marking their own tiny forest trail.Innocent white, but deadly poisonous. This is the Eastern North American destroying angel, Amanita bisporigera.Late afternoon sunlight made these little mushrooms glow. They really were this firey orange colour.Another nice bolete – perhaps Boletus edulis? I wish I knew my Bolete ID better.A few wild blueberries were fruiting. We had very, very late frosts in June that decimated the flowers, resulting in widespread crop failures for the blueberry farmers.
