This is the time of year when I start looking for signs of spring: black-capped chickadees singing “spring’s here”, skunk cabbage flowers poking up through the ground, and buds swelling on trees and shrubs like this swamp azalea. But I can still appreciate the benefits of winter, namely that I can easily traverse a frozen swamp (rather than sinking into shoe-sucking mud) without getting devoured by mosquitos. 

During yesterday’s frozen swamp exploration, I ran into one of the many evergreen members of the heath family: leatherleaf (Chamaedaphne calyculata). Leatherleaf is a common shrub found in bogs and acidic swamps, where is can form dense thickets. A small shrub, it rarely reaches more than 3 feet in height. Mostly green in the summer, its leathery, elliptical leaves transition to a brownish-red color, speckled with numerous white spots on the upper surface, and a pale yellowish color on the undersides in the winter. The small white and pink buds seen at the base of each leaf will each produce a single small white bell-shaped flower in the spring, similar to that of a blueberry. Together, these flowers will form one-sided rows of dangling flowers along the tips of the branches. Like blueberries and bearberries, bumblebees are leatherleaf’s chief pollinators. In addition to the leaves and buds, the remaining seed pods from last year, which form generally upward facing racemes, can also be used as a helpful identifying feature. 

The Book of Swamp and Bog by John Eastman mentions that a heavy snow cover in the winter seems to encourage full flowering in the spring, while prolonged exposure of the bare stems to cold winds will inhibit flowering. Although Cape Cod rarely experiences “heavy snow cover”, neither do we tend to have prolonged periods of extreme cold. As a plant that extends into polar regions, I expect that it finds the winter temperatures here quite agreeable, snow or no snow.