Field guide · flora

🌿 The green side

What you're actually walking through, day by day. ★ = the plant that explains the place you're standing in. Maine's coast is where two forests collide — the northern spruce-fir and the southern oak-pine — and almost every view on this trip is really a view of that boundary. Two entries here are edible and one will ruin your week; both are flagged. Tap any photo for the full Wikipedia entry.

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Tue 4 Wed 5 Thu 6 Fri 7 Sat 8 Sun 9 & Mon 10 Know these 3

Learn poison ivy before Tuesday. It is abundant along the Maine coast — trail edges, dune backs, stone walls, the scrubby margin of every oceanfront lawn. Three leaflets, the middle one on a longer stalk, glossy, often with a reddish tinge at the stem. It grows as a low plant, a shrub and a hairy climbing vine, so "it doesn't look like a vine" proves nothing. It is the single most likely way to damage this trip, and an outdoor oceanfront wedding where people wander off for photos in formalwear is precisely the scenario. If exposed: wash with dish soap and cool water within an hour or two — the oil is what does it, not the leaf.

Tuesday, Aug 4

Sheepscot estuary · Wiscasset · Boothbay Harbor

Eastern white pine Pinus strobus — Maine's state tree and the reason for a good deal of Maine's history. Five soft needles per bundle, which you can remember as W-H-I-T-E. The tall straight ones were reserved by the Crown as Royal Navy masts and marked with the King's Broad Arrow; the resentment that caused was a real ingredient of the Revolution. That soft blue-green haze on every ridgeline you drive past today is this tree.

Rockweed Ascophyllum nodosum — the olive-brown seaweed with air bladders that drapes every rock below the high-tide line. It is the smell of the Maine coast, full stop. It's also a working crop: harvested here for fertilizer and food additives, and it's the habitat that shelters juvenile lobsters and crabs. Walk it carefully — wet rockweed on granite is the most reliable way to fall down on this trip. Look: any low-tide shoreline, Boothbay Harbor

Beach rose Rosa rugosa — the dense thorny hedge with big magenta or white flowers and deeply wrinkled leaves, everywhere along the coast. Postcard-Maine, and not native — it's from East Asia, planted for erosion control and now naturalized hard. In early August you get flowers and the fat orange-red hips at the same time. The hips are edible and intensely tart.

Staghorn sumac Rhus typhina — roadside shrub with fuzzy velvet stems and upright dark-red fruit cones. Harmless despite the name, and the first thing to turn scarlet in September. If it's velvety, it's safe; the poison sumac of legend lives in bogs and has drooping white fruit.

Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens — if the "probably cut" stop survives, this is 300 acres in Boothbay and the best formal introduction to the region's native plants you'll get anywhere. Peak bloom is exactly now.

Wednesday, Aug 5

Camden · Mt Battie · Rockland · Union

Lowbush wild blueberry Vaccinium angustifolium — the highlight of the plant list and the reason the timing matters. Early August is peak. Maine grows nearly all the wild blueberries in the United States, and unlike the cultivated highbush kind these are ankle-high, grow from centuries-old rhizomes on thin acid soil, and taste about four times as strong. The summit ledges of Mt Battie have them growing wild in the cracks. Eat them off the plant — this is a legitimate, free, once-a-year experience and it will be the thing Sean remembers. Look: Mt Battie summit ledges, roadside barrens toward Union

Red spruce & balsam fir Picea rubens / Abies balsamea — the two trees that make Maine smell like Maine. The trick: spruce needles are square and roll between your fingers; fir needles are flat and won't. Fir is the friendly one — soft, blunt, and the source of that Christmas-tree scent. Grab a needle at the Mt Battie trailhead and settle it in ten seconds.

Reindeer lichen Cladonia rangiferina — the pale grey-green coral-like crust on the open summit rock. It is not a plant and not a moss; it's a fungus and an alga living as one organism, it grows a few millimetres a year, and a single footstep destroys a decade of it. The reason summit trails ask you to stay on bare rock is almost entirely this. Look: Mt Battie summit, on the exposed granite

Sheep laurel Kalmia angustifolia — low shrub with narrow leaves and whorls of pink flowers, common on the barrens with the blueberries. Its other name is lambkill, which tells you it's toxic to livestock. Pretty, don't chew it.

Bracken fern & hay-scented fern — the waist-high ferns filling the light gaps on the Mt Battie trail. Hay-scented fern genuinely smells like fresh hay when crushed, which is a nice party trick on a hot climb.

Apple orchards, Union — the town sits in old orchard and blueberry country, and the fields you'll pass on the way to the dome are the working agricultural version of everything above.

Thursday, Aug 6

Acadia · Cadillac · Jordan Pond · Bar Harbor

The 1947 fire line — this is the single best thing to understand in Acadia, and almost nobody notices it. In October 1947 a fire burned more than 10,000 acres of the park's eastern side. The dark spruce-fir forest that burned did not come back; birch, aspen and oak took it instead. That's why the east side of the island — the Park Loop, Sieur de Monts, the slopes above Bar Harbor — is bright, open and deciduous while the western side stays dark, dense conifer. It's also why Acadia's fall color is so good. Once you can see the line, you can't unsee it. Look: compare the Park Loop Road forest to the Seawall/western side

Pitch pine Pinus rigida — the scrubby, twisted, three-needled pine gripping bare granite on Cadillac's ridges. Fire-adapted: it will resprout directly from the trunk after burning, which is a rare trick for a pine. Everything about its wind-flagged shape is a record of the weather up there. Look: Cadillac summit loop and the south ridge

Summit heath — three-toothed cinquefoil, mountain cranberry, black crowberry, bearberry — Cadillac is only 1,530 ft, but the exposure up there imitates a mountaintop hundreds of miles north, so it grows a genuinely subalpine mat of tough little plants. Mountain cranberry is the shiny dark evergreen leaf with red berries; it is edible and sour. This community is thin, slow and easily killed, which is the whole argument for the cairn-marked paths.

Jack pine Pinus banksiana — a genuine rarity. Acadia holds some of the only jack pine stands in Maine, well south of its normal range, hanging on from a colder era. Short paired needles and small curved cones that mostly need fire to open. A relict, sitting on the ridge.

Wild Gardens of Acadia, Sieur de Monts — twelve habitat sections and roughly 400 native species, all labeled, free, and about fifteen minutes to walk. If you want one place where this entire page is laid out with name tags, this is it, and it's right next to the Nature Center. Look: Sieur de Monts Spring, off the Park Loop Road

Sphagnum bog — Big Heath near Seawall is a raised peat bog: sphagnum moss, pitcher plants, sundews and cotton-grass, growing on ground so acid and nutrient-poor that some of the plants eat insects to compensate. A completely different world from the rest of the island.

Tide-pool algae at Thunder Hole — Irish moss, rockweed, kelp and the crusty pink coralline algae that lines the pools. The black zone on the rocks above the water is a cyanobacteria film and it is lethally slippery — that band is the actual hazard at Thunder Hole, not the waves.

Friday, Aug 7

Cape Elizabeth · Fort Williams · Peaks Island

Salt marsh cordgrass & salt hay Spartina alterniflora / S. patens — the two grasses that build a salt marsh, and the easiest ecology lesson on the coast. The tall one stands in the creek edges that flood twice daily; the short, swirled, cowlicked one carpets the higher ground that floods only on spring tides. Two species, one drawing a contour line for you. Salt hay was mowed for livestock bedding for three centuries here. Look: the marshes between Portland Head Light and the ferry

American beachgrass Ammophila breviligulata — the stiff blue-green grass on every dune. It is not decoration; it is the dune. It traps blowing sand and grows up through it, and when it's trampled the dune simply leaves. That's why the boardwalks exist.

Seaside goldenrod Solidago sempervirens — thick waxy leaves, tall yellow plume, blooming now along the Fort Williams cliff walk. It's also the critical late-summer fuel stop for migrating monarchs, so goldenrod and butterflies show up together. And no, it doesn't cause hay fever — that's ragweed, blooming at the same time and taking none of the blame.

Beach pea & sea rocket — the sprawling purple-flowered pea and the fleshy little mustard growing right at the wrack line, both surviving on salt spray and sand. Fort Williams' shoreline edge has them.

Hydrangea — Peaks Island and the Cape are full of them in August, and the coastal ones lean blue because the soil here is acid enough to make aluminium available to the plant. Same shrub in limey soil goes pink. Greenwood Garden will be surrounded by them.

Saturday, Aug 8

The wedding · oceanfront, Cape Elizabeth

Poison ivy Toxicodendron radicans — repeating it here on purpose, because this is the day it matters. Oceanfront ceremony, formalwear, and people stepping off the mown grass into the scrubby edge for photographs. Three leaflets, middle one on a longer stalk, glossy. Look before anyone kneels, sits or backs into a hedge for a picture. It's on the plant list for the same reason a fire extinguisher is on a kitchen list.

Rugosa hedges — the flowering thorn hedge screening most Cape Elizabeth oceanfront property. Beautiful, and it will shred formalwear. The thorns are dense and recurved.

Sea lavender Limonium carolinianum — if the venue sits on the marsh edge, look for a low haze of tiny pale-purple flowers over the high marsh. It blooms right now, and it reads as a lavender mist across the grass at golden hour. Best plant in Maine for a 4:00 PM oceanfront ceremony.

Sunday & Monday, Aug 9–10

Portland · South Portland · Scarborough · Kennebunkport

Glasswort Salicornia — the leafless, jointed, succulent little plant in the bare salty pannes of Scarborough Marsh. It stores salt in its tissue and turns brilliant crimson in late summer, so by now it should be starting to blush across the flats. It's edible — sold in restaurants as sea beans — and tastes exactly like the marsh smells. Look: bare pans in Scarborough Marsh, at the grass margins

Purple loosestrife & common reed Lythrum salicaria / Phragmites australis — the tall magenta spikes and the 12-foot feathery reed you'll pass on the Greenbelt. Both are handsome and both are the reason parts of these wetlands are in trouble; Phragmites forms monocultures that push out the Spartina the saltmarsh sparrow needs. Worth recognising as a problem rather than a view.

Maritime oak-pine forest — Timber Point and the Kennebunkport end sit in the southern forest type: white and red oak, pitch pine, more open and warmer than anything you saw on Thursday. In 150 miles you will have driven the entire transition from the boreal forest to the eastern hardwoods.

Wild blueberry, again — every pie, muffin and pancake on the Portland food list this weekend is running on the plant from Wednesday. Ask whether it's wild or cultivated; the answer tells you a lot about the kitchen.

If you only learn three

1. Poison ivy — three leaflets, middle one stalked, glossy. Costs nothing to learn, saves the trip.

2. Wild blueberry — ankle-high, small blue-grey berries, on every summit ledge and barren you'll cross Wednesday and Thursday. Free, ripe, and better than what you can buy. (Acadia allows berry picking in small quantities for personal use; nothing else in a national park comes home with you — no rocks, no plants, no cuttings.)

3. Spruce vs fir — square needles roll, flat needles don't. It's the difference between the northern forest and the southern one, and once you have it, every hillside on this trip is legible.

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