Spectacular Mid-Spring Wildflowers at Headwaters Park

Today I hiked at Headwaters Park at East Branch Reservoir in Geauga County, Ohio. This park is near the headwaters of the Cuyahoga River--by the way, pronounce it right: CUY-uh-HOG-uh--remember to "keep the HOG in CuyaHOGa." O yes, we pronounce "hog" around here something like /hawg/. We don't like people who say CUY-uh-HOE-guh or CUY-uh-guh (for God's sake!). The pronunciation is like a shibboleth (check out the etymology of that word). We detect outsiders by the pronunciation of this word.

This park is one of the best in the area for wildflowers. The spring wildflower season comes to an end when the leaf canopy closes up. This year the spring is developing later than usual, but the canopy is starting to close now. The early wildflowers are nearly gone. Today I saw lots of bloodroot foliage--but no blooms. I saw massive areas of gigantic skunk cabbage. I believe the jack-in-the-pulpit are still in bloom here, but I didn't see them from the trail. Still, this late in the season I saw about 10 species of wildflowers. I saw masses of wild geranium, blue violets, white violets, marsh marigold. I saw phlox, three types of violets, foam flower, false solomon's seal, and other flowers that I can't identify. Oddly, I didn't see any dogwood (about 10 miles north of Headwaters Park, at Girdled Road Reservation, I have seen hundreds of dogwoods in full bloom). Here are some photos from today's walk:

Great fields of violets!

Hiking, and being with the wildflowers, brings me great comfort during this time of political distress, when we have legitimate worries about America being taken over by a fascist political movement.

How Do You Pronounce "Cuyahoga"?

I'm just going to tell you this once. Despite what you might be hearing on television and radio these days, "Cuyahoga" is pronounced something like this: /ky-uh-HAUG-uh/.

It's not pronounced /ky-uh-HOGE-uh/--this is how many of the current TV and radio people say it. That third syllable receives the accent and sounds, at least in Northern Midwest American English, like the words hog or dog or the first syllable in the word Awful. There is an International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbol for this sound, but I don't have that symbol on my computer. The IPA symbol looks like a rounded /a/ sound, and that's exactly what it is.

Some people from outside Cuyahoga County (in Summit or Portage Counties) pronounce Cuyahoga something like /KY-uh-guh/. We look down on those people and their pronunciation.

It is said (in many, many places) that Cuyahoga comes from an Indian word that means "crooked" or "crooked river." Of course there is no one Indian language; my guess is that Cuyahoga comes from the Iroquoian group of languages, and the most likely source would have been the closest Iroquoian tribe, the Seneca. The Erie Indians were also Iroquoian, but they were annihilated by the Iroquois Confederation around 1654, a war of genocide.