"Wild Bleeding Hearts = Resilience!" Walking Stick #3 (2025)

The Last Greens of the Bleeding Heart Plant are Just Below the Stick!

Stick # 3

Walkabout Talk About Stick Project

Released on September 4, 2025

Location:  Winter Trail in the Lehigh Gap, Walnutport, PA

Link for Directions:

https://www.mypacer.com/routes/oi19j2/winter-trail-walking-and-running-walnutport-pennsylvania

This “Wild Bleeding Heart” walking stick tells the story that boundaries in the natural world are often fluid depending upon the health of the environment.

Another story I think it tells is that the restorative power of nature is incredible.

In the spring of 2021, this Wild Bleeding Heart (Dicentra eximia) painted on this walking stick was surprisingly discovered on the forest floor during a family hike at the Lehigh Gap. Specifically, we found the pink beauties on the Winter Trail right near the towns of Walnutport and Slatington, PA. In late summer, Bleeding Heart plants stop blooming, but you can still find them growing. Their leaves "look a little bit like carrot" leaves," my hiking companion Lilly remarked as we dropped the stick near a patch just yesterday. It was so much fun looking for all the native plant species (many were flowers playing host to migrating monarchs) as we looked for evidence of the years' last bleeding hearts.

Wild Bleeding Hearts are considered endangered in Pennsylvania, but today they flourish along this trail and are playing a valuable role in nature as a tolerant native shade garden plant and boundary-free resource for beneficial pollinators to visit.

The more incredible aspect of this find is that in the early 1980’s the land where this trail now exists was near one of America’s first superfund sites designated so by the EPA. At the time the surrounding environment was like a  lunar landscape incapable of hosting most plant life due to decades of heavy metal deposition and acid rainfall created accidentally by nearby smelting operations. Beginning in the 1990’s habitat restoration  efforts in the area were employed by concerned community members and conservationists. In 2003, a native prairie grass revegetation effort by the Lehigh Gap Nature Center was implemented. These native plants began taking up the heavy metals and improved the land’s ability to host plant life.  This restoration has become a key project associated with the rejuvenation of the area’s ecology.  The Wild Bleeding Heart and the magnificent landscape where it lives are beautiful testimonies to how resilient the environment is - and especially when we work together with nature. You might notice a beautiful poem writtend in a spiral around the stick. It's Mary Oliver's, "The Bleeding Heart." If you can't read what's penned on the stick, please look it up. It's a good one.

I hope you enjoy hiking with the “Wild Bleeding Heart” stick. Please consider sharing your special “Walkabout” story/artwork/poem/musing/photo with the project by emailing me at jchylack@joliechylackstudio.com