It always seems to me that no sooner do I hear the first frog trill than I find the first cloud of frog’s eggs in a wayside pool, so swiftly does the emergent creature pour out the libation of its cool fertility. There is life where before there was none. It is as repulsive as it is beautiful, as silvery-black as it is slimy. Life, in short, raw and exciting, life almost in primordial form, irreducible element. – Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns (1935)

Much of nature’s pageantry occurs at night. In April, for example, following three consecutive nights of temperatures above freezing, a warm rain raises the curtain on a drama repeated each night for a week or more, a scurry of wood frogs and salamanders leaping and crawling from forest floor to vernal pool, frantic with the urge to expel masses of eggs into the only environment that will allow the future of this drama, returning the next night to the woods, abandoning the future to a race against dryness, a gamble on snowmelt and spring rain against summer drought.

This drama plays each spring in productive vernal pools across Maine. Such pools are typically found close to upland wooded areas where the adult frogs and salamanders spend most of their lives, returning to the pools each year to mate and lay their eggs. The vernal pool is an essential habitat for the survival of these species.

Wood frogs, spotted salamanders, and blue-spotted salamanders are obligate amphibians in Maine vernal pools – they must have access to vernal pools in order to survive and reproduce. A tiny crustacean, the fairy shrimp, is also an obligate species. Unlike the amphibians, fairy shrimp spend their entire life cycle in vernal pools, their eggs surviving long periods of dryness and freezing winters before hatching in spring.

Because they dry out each year, vernal pools do not support fish or bullfrogs. The success of the vernal pool species depends on the absence of these predators.

Lucky is the gardener with a vernal pool on the property. A focal point of the natural landscape, a vernal pool can be a living classroom for the study of an ecosystem that is endangered by development and urban sprawl. It can provide the gardener an opportunity to enjoy native woody plants that thrive in seasonally flooded landscapes, truly ornamental species including winterberry holly (Ilex verticillata), mountain holly (Nemopanthus mucronatus), speckled alder (Alnus incana ssp. rugosa), elderberry (Sambucus canadensis), swamp azalea (Rhododendron viscosum), buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), and many more. These shrubs can be planted between the vernal pool and surrounding upland to form vegetation corridors essential to the spring migrations of wood frogs and salamanders.

This year the first amphibious wave may find its breeding pools less than full, lacking the snowmelt of normal winters. Still, gelatinous clouds of salamander eggs will soon envelope the tips of submerged leaves and stems in the shallows while lumpy mats of frog eggs lie just below the water’s surface. This gardener, for one, will be spending time at the edge of such pools, treading softly, peering intently into the shallows, hoping for rain.

Send queries to Gardening Questions, P.O. Box 418, Ellsworth 04605, or to reesermanley@shead.org. Include name, address and telephone number.