Saturday’s walk took me past a fallen hornbeam whose base has been sticking up in the air for years now. I’d just never taken a close look before at this little tableau that sits about three feet above the ground, relatively isolated.

Just take a small indentation in the trunk, a few years of weather that decorks the bark, and a little bit of soil accumulates. I suppose fallen leaves and other detritus, perhaps pollen and dust, remains of moss from the little community that has been enlarging for some time, and an environment that has been kept relatively moist has produced a little substrate.

The straggly plant that has taken root is probably a bit undernourished. You don’t get too much in the way of nutrients from fallen leaves, but some probably does make its way in from tiny invertebrate animal poop and carcasses.

Straggly though it is, it did produce this elegant little fruit, and managed to nurture 37 seeds. The pedicel is still moist and fleshy, so the fruit has not been hanging around for long. We’re always told that one of the differences between dicots and monocots is that it’s the latter whose flowers and fruits come in threes, or multiples of threes. So the three-valved capsule is a little odd for the dicot that the leaves tell us that this plant is. While I don’t know what species, the rosette of leaves and capsule say that it is a violet.

And it must have flowered in late summer for the fruit to still retain the seeds - they look awfully precarious in there. Violets generally flower in the spring, but there is one species around here that flowers a little later in the summer. It might be Sweet White Violet, Viola blanda.

And now the seeds will fall out, blown or washed by the rain. The base overhangs the big gully, so some at least will fall onto the steep bank, perhaps washed into a torrent that forms after a heavy winter rainfall. That torrent may take the seed downhill into SBS Creek, and then maybe into Goulding Creek. It’s not unimaginable that the seed could find its way into the Oconee River, and maybe as much as several hundred miles away by next spring.