All kinds of mushrooms: the otherworldly morels that have started to appear in the moist morning of the Great Lakes, yellowfoot chanterelles in the steep woods of the northern states, rugged Hen of the Woods mushrooms on the East coast.
Karen led us up the steep, wood-panelled stairs to our room, The Macallan, in the eaves.
THE tiny village of Bongha, in south-eastern Korea, is surrounded by rice-paddies and steep woods.
In those steep woods blossom on isolated cherries appears ghostly, and here too beech with its distinctive, pale, leaves shines out from the viridescence of other trees.
VISITORS to Great Dixter, an old, rambling, timber-framed house among the steep woods and pastures of the High Weald, on the borders of Kent and Sussex in the south of England, would find it haunted by several tutelary spirits.
The late Poet Laureate spent his boyhood here, and many local features play a central role in his poetry – the moors, the woods, the canal, and the dark cliff of Scout Rock – "A wall of rock and steep woods half way up to the sky" - which continues to give this part of the valley a sombre aspect.
Every time it rains the muddy lanes are washed with run-off; from the adits of mines the flow is iron-orange; streams rush beneath the steep woods and derelict market gardens to converge towards the weir and pond of Cotehele mill.
After years of steep decline, wood heat is back, with people flocking to dealers to buy new wood stoves, wood boilers and stoves that burn pellets made of wood byproducts.
Another brisk rain-forest walk brings us to the amazing Monserrate Gardens, acre upon acre of Olmstedian wood-and-stone fantasy set in steep, dense woods.
In a converted soap factory near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, in a studio down a hallway paved with glistening whorls of mosaic glass and up three steep flights of wood stairs, a motley collection of dancers were gyrating and chanting on Saturday as they summoned the powers of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning and the arts.
