Doug built a “Little Free Library” for me. He decided on a model with two shelves, since I go through a lot of books. He dug two post holes for it, cemented the posts in, and up it went. While we were out there putting the finishing touches on it, several neighbors stopped by. Every one of them said, Oh good, I have books to put in it. Um, I was thinking this was how I was going to get rid of books – I mean, disperse them. Distribute them. I wanted people to take the books out. Now I could just see a whole neighborhood’s worth of books crammed in, spilling out, piled up on the grass, getting rained on, turning into pulp, coming to an ignominious end. Well, at least the Wet Paint sign would keep people from filling it up before I got my books out there.

It was foggy in the morning when I picked up my big bag of saved books, and stocked the little library. I used to save books I’d read and enjoyed, thinking I would re-read them, but all the while acquiring new books, stacks of them tottering in random places around my workroom, swaying precariously as the cat wove her way in and out of the nooks they created. Eventually I realized I have enough new stock to last approximately two lifetimes, thus rendering the re-reading theory less than realistic. I still have some favorites I do re-read and will keep – The Joy of Cooking, Emily Dickinson, The Lord of the Rings – but for most others, better to find new readers for them than have them languish, unenjoyed.

Next morning Doug took the Wet Paint sign off, and waited for me in the fog while I lined the books up on the new shelves. We went for our walk, came home, and I sat by my window – reading, of course – and saw two different people stop by the Little Library. Our street doesn’t have much traffic but it has a lot of walkers. After the second visitor I went out to see how the books were doing. I was prepared for either an increase or a decrease; but I was not prepared for the notes people had left: a thank you; a promise to bring me some Icelandic poetry; a business card with a smiley face. It made me smile, too.

The fog had lifted now and it was a bright day, the early autumn colors coming out in the trees. It turned out that a Little Free Library was an occasion for gratitude and conversation. It’s only the first day –  piles of books may yet appear – but it won’t be so bad if they come with more of these nice notes.

Sorry to be posting late – Doug and I were on a delightful road trip across upstate New York. We’ve often driven this route going east to visit family, but never had time to stop at any of the intriguing places along the way. This time we planned on it, and so last week made our way to  Lockport, on the Erie Canal near Buffalo.

At Lockport the canal meets the edge of the Niagara Escarpment at a place where the westbound canal has to rise 50 feet to meet Lake Erie. It does this with two locks in a row – called a “flight,” as in stairs – each lifting a boat 25 feet, or lowering it the same if eastbound. We boarded our canal boat and soon were sailing (well, motoring) into Lock 34. The concrete walls loomed over us as the gate closed behind us, and water flowed into the lock, bubbling up under us exuberantly.

I stood in the bow – behind that curved railing in the photo – to take pictures as the boat rose, the concrete wall appearing to get shorter and shorter as we bobbed like a bath toy, and the lower, dark section of the gate disappeared under a foamy froth. Then the gates ahead opened, we motored into Lock 35, and the process repeated.

And then we were out into the canal. Even though we were motoring it was very peaceful, calm, and quiet-seeming. Our captain narrated the history of the place, and played a song he said we would all know. We did: “Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal.” How did we all know this song? We were a mostly older crowd, at mid-week after Labor Day – do people still know this song? Fifteen miles was the distance a mule could pull a canal boat along the towpath before needing to rest. Never thought about that before when I sang it. The boats, said our captain, carried another mule for swapping out. Mules traveled at the stern for esthetic reasons.

We didn’t know all the verses of the song – I didn’t even know it had all those verses – but we all knew the first verse, and we all knew the chorus. Low bridge, everybody down… It wasn’t necessary to duck for this particular bridge, but you sort of felt it was.

We came back through the locks again, then continued on down the canal, passing ducks, geese, bits of the towpath, and canoes and kayaks. The canal, said the captain, is free to pleasure boats, and kayaks and canoes can travel through the locks, no need to portage around them. “From Albany to Buffalo,” as the song says.

Actually, he’s probably a buck. A stag, I find out, is older and grander than an eight-point buck, which is what I’m talking about here. But “Mystery Buck” sounds like a tv game show, so I’m sticking with my title. This time of year the deer stop traveling in twos and threes and start bunching up into herds for the winter. I was watching several does and fawns in the back yard when I spotted the buck, moving among the trees. He had a lovely set of antlers, so I reached for my camera, meaning my phone, which, rare for me, was in my pocket. Most everyone else smiled for the camera, but the buck kept his head in the canopy. Bet he was training that little guy beside him.

I went back inside, and a little later here they all came, munching their way through the huge crop of fallen crabapples on my front lawn. The buck, in the manner of bucks, was standing a little way behind them – anything that wanted to chase the herd would have to deal with him first – so I went to get my camera, meaning my phone, no longer in my pocket. By the time I had it in hand the buck had once again positioned himself in full view except for his antlers. This went on for some time – I moved, he moved, and always the leaves came between us.

So what was going on? Was this really random motion, or did this guy have some reason why he didn’t want me to see his rack? Did he have an exclusive deal with Shutterstock? An instinct to avoid trophy hunters? Had he heard that cameras “shoot”? I began to see how easy it was to fall prey to conspiracy theories: surely the buck had no interest in whether I got a great photo or not, but after several thwarted efforts it began to feel deliberate on his part.

I kept taking pictures anyway hoping he’d miscalculate, and backed away to try for a better angle around the foliage. This was the best I managed: out of the trees, just barely; further away so having to be cropped to within an inch of its life, sacrificing resolution; and only a profile, not a full head-on shot. You’ll have to take my word that in addition to the four antler points you can see, there are four more on the other side. And yes, they are sort of fuzzy right now – still covered with “velvet” until he destroys some of my saplings, using them to scrape it off. Seems like the least he could do is drop those antlers in my yard come antler-dropping season. It hasn’t happened yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

Mid August in Michigan is summer with a breath of autumn in it. Our weather has been cooler than usual this summer – tomatoes are still rolling in, but more slowly than usual; the squash seem unaffected. I cook them together, with onion and bacon, then mix it into spaghetti. Yum.

Out on the deck, this is the first time my nasturtiums have exploded like this, keeping the marigolds company in splendor. Is it the weather? It’s been more like spring than summer, which is especially strange compared with how hot it is elsewhere across the country.

Bugs, sadly,, are flourishing in my yard. The Japanese beetles are easy to spot, pick off, and drown in a dish of soapy water, but whatever the crickety chewers are, I never find them. Only the damage they’ve done, curse them. Have they increased because of the weather, or is it that the new fox family has cut back on the bird population? I won’t spray insecticides, out of concern for the bees. The bees are crazy about my zinnias, and ecstatic about the large-leafed mountain mint in the front yard, that blooms from now till frost. Bees can be a little hard to see in photos – there are two in this picture – but in real life the whole mountain mint patch is a blur of dozens of them. Busy doesn’t tell the half of it.

Meanwhile, the deer were eating my rudbeckia in the front yard, so I planted some inside the fenced garden. So of course now they’re leaving the ones out front alone. Well, if that’s what it takes… I saw an eight point buck under the crabapple tree yesterday, but that’s okay if the deer eat the crabapples. Keeps them out of the flowerbeds. I still resent it, though, that with all the bucks tromping through my yard, rubbing bark off the trees and decimating the hydrangeas, not one has had the courtesy to drop his antlers in my yard.

The buck had left when I went outside with my camera. Beside the front door the ceratostigma has begun to flower, but overhead the leaves of the weeping cherry have started to turn and fall. The front path and the driveway are edged with blue and maize. Football season can’t be far behind.

A gardener is always happy to see the flowers on blueberry bushes, tomato vines, and squash plants that will grow into good things to eat. It’s a joy, but mainly a practical consideration.

Up here on my deck where I will see them all the time, I’ve planted flowers whose whole point is to be beautiful. They are attractive to bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies, yes, but more modest flowers would please those pollinators just as well.

There’s evidence that people have valued flowers for more than producing food, for thousands of years. Traces of flowers have been found in paleolithic tombs. There are very few drawings of flowers in cave art, but once we get to the age of agriculture flowers are everywhere: in murals, reliefs, jewelry designs, pottery, and then in our oldest, most sacred texts. “I am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley” says one Testament; “Behold the lilies of the field,” says the other, “not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these.”

They’re not talking about useful date palms or parables of vineyards here. They’re talking about beauty, specifically useless beauty, in the expectation that readers will agree. Did early hunter-gatherers have no time to stop, while searching for food, to pay attention to the inedible? It takes time, as Georgia O’Keefe said, to see something small like a flower. Or maybe they did see, love, and gather them, but being flowers no trace of them stayed behind.

Why do we see beauty anywhere, in flowers or anywhere else?

 The Theory of Art

“All art is quite useless.”
Oscar Wilde

Outside the march of progress,
it lifts you from your feet,
a burst of unpurposed joy
that cures no cancer,
builds no instrument,
leads you only to yourself,
forgetting the artist,
ink, paper, paint, clay,
free of their practical callings,
like dolphins pulsing from the sea,
not to save you from drowning,
not to show you the way,
just dancing,
because the elements are there.

I love the way Maria Newman set this poem of mine to music. You can listen to it here.

Of course there are more weeds. They come back, sometimes with a vengeance. Many sources claim that weeds tell you about conditions in your soil, but there’s a lot of confusion around what they’re trying to say. Goldenrod and ox-eyed daisies are supposed to grow in wet, poorly drained soil, but they love my sandy, dry, fast-draining yard. I do like these two, but do they know that? Goldenrod lights up the end of summer, and ox-eyed daisies make excellent bouquets. The daisies get very happy standing in a vase of water all week, soggy at last.

Plantain, said to indicate clay soils, grows in the sandy stuff right next to the ox-eyed daisies; Queen Anne’s lace is supposed to like poor soil, but out along the road edges here it grows mixed in with chicory, which is supposed to indicate rich soil. More interesting is the claim for dandelions, which grow in compacted soil but get right to work loosening it up.

I’ve always pulled and tossed purslane, but having recently come across a trove of new purslane recipes  here  I may bring some of it into the kitchen and give it a try. And I was surprised to learn that woodruff is sometimes considered a weed. I like it as a groundcover, twining with the lamium.

So, for weeding, first you have to decide which are the weeds, retaining the right to reclassify as you go along. Then, remember weeding is an ongoing practice, not an event with a beginning and an end. It’s lovely to sit and enjoy a garden at the end of the day, but the real pleasure is in the gardening.

The lawns of my suburban childhood were planted with a mix of grass and white clover. I remember being told this was because clover “fixes nitrogen,” which made me wonder what was wrong with it. You had to be very careful walking through the clover because it was full of bees, and since bees were said to be busy, I figured they were busy helping the clover fix nitrogen.

Bees or not, the best thing about clover was spending long afternoons looking through it for four-leafers. If you found a four leaf clover you had good luck and – in our neighborhood’s culture – you got to make a wish.

Having the internet right handy as I write, I looked this up: the probability of finding a four leaf clover is one in 5,000 or 1 in 10,000.  Lucky me! In the last couple of years since I spread clover seed in the yard and garden, I have found dozens of four leaf clovers, possibly a hundred of them, plus many five-leafers and the occasional six leafer. They come from the same two clumps every time, so I’m assuming this is genetic rather than something weird going on in my garden. The tomatoes seem normal.

I bring the lucky clovers indoors, make my wishes (one per stem), and put them in small vases. When they fade and dry I collect them in this basket. I can’t tell you what I wish for, because naturally if you tell anyone, your wish will not come true. But I will say it’s ambitious, it’s in the public interest, and so far it’s making headway.

Green, everywhere green. All the plants that held back in the Michigan winter have come barreling out of the ground, pushing bricks aside, enthused by sunlight, encouraged by rain. It’s exhilarating to see the peonies and iris returning to bloom, sage flowering blue, chives purple, rudbeckia and coneflowers that will bloom later beginning to leaf up, and stalwart groundcovers holding their own. But then there are the weeds.

It takes some knowledge and much attention, to weed a bed of perennials. The first year I gardened in Michigan I pulled up all the monarda shoots, because we don’t have monarda in California and I didn’t know what it was. I had put in a couple as bedding plants, and though I was told they would self-seed I didn’t know it when I saw it. Many perennials, as they emerge in June, give little clue to their identities, leading to confusion and chagrin. I’ve started noting their positions with plant markers, metal ones with long legs so they go deep into the ground and don’t get frost-heaved out of place.

A weed, it has been said, is any plant growing where you don’t want it. I understand that chickweed can be used to feed chickens; that plantain makes a good poultice; and that purslane is human-edible. I did once try to make pesto from garlic mustard, but concluded that the colonists who brought it to these shores on purpose were unfamiliar with Italian cuisine. Weeds all; out they go.

But I actively encourage the milkweed and goldenrod, and I let the Dame’s Rocket stand and bloom. It looks like its common name, wild phlox, but unlike tame phlox the deer don’t eat it.

This is my concept of a garden, layering my sense of order and beauty onto the dirt, sun, rain, and seeds that have a sense of their own. When I move them, feed them, water them, they respond, often by trying to get back to what they were doing before I interfered. Unsure I speak their language, I try to listen to the plants. They’re the experts on what they need.

It was a good nesting site when she built it, but a little over a week after the duck settled beside our front steps, a fox moved into the backyard next door and had four kits. One morning shortly thereafter I came downstairs to find the nest abandoned uncovered, and this time I did not see Mama Duck lurking twenty or thirty feet away. When she wasn’t back in a couple of hours I went out with a stick and gently nudged the leafy-downy edges of the nest back over the eggs, hoping to help keep them warm, or at least camouflaged, till Mama Duck returned. But Mama Duck did not come back.

Doug went out and searched for signs of a struggle, but found not a single feather, neither here nor next door. The internet said a duck would abandon a nest if it sensed danger or was disturbed too often, and said the eggs were not likely viable after being abandoned for a whole day. Should we try to incubate them? Best, said the internet, to let nature take its course. The next morning the eggs were gone, too.

At least the lack of feather evidence made me think Mama Duck is safely somewhere else. My sources say she will probably build another nest soon, and try again. Mallard Ducks are still abundant, but their numbers are declining through loss of wetlands, both from climate change and from development. In other words, the real problem is my own species, not the foxes. It’s our human curse and glory that we’re so bad at letting nature take its course – great on destroying viruses, planting gardens, inventing tools, art, and cuisine. Not so great on backing off excessive improvements, or sharing the planet with other creatures. We’re willing to help, but we find it hard to get there.

Doug says next time we have a duck nesting in our yard, he’s going to sleep outside to keep it safe.

One of my tree trimmers was standing in the driveway looking startled. I went out to ask what was wrong.

“Did you know you have a duck nest under that tree?” he asked. “She flew up at me when I got close, nearly scared me to death.”

I did not know. But there it was, a nest dug into the flowerbed, lined with leaves and bits of down, with four large white eggs. I had noticed a pair of mallards strolling about my lawn a few days earlier, but I’d seen that before without seeing a nest. There’s a creek two houses over, and the river’s a little further off. I asked the tree guy if he thought he could work without hurting the nest, and he said yes. This was good, because it had taken all this time for the trimming team to come clean up our damage from February’s ice storm (everyone in town had damage from the February ice storm) and I was relieved not to have to put it off. He was as good as his word. The duck was lurking maybe twenty feet away. When the tree crew moved off to a different part of the yard, she came back and settled on the nest.

A day or two later she flew up to scare a random solicitor away – thank you, Duck – and I saw there were more eggs in the nest. Every evening before dusk she covered the nest carefully with leaf litter and down, and left for a while to feed, the nest so well camouflaged I sometimes wasn’t sure I was really looking at it (second photo). It was hard to see when she was on it, too, unless you saw her head move (third photo). The internet informed me that it was going to take a month for the eggs to hatch.

Why did she build her nest so close to the house? Because the duck knew what she was doing. Predators were unlikely to come so near the house, and people, charmed by the cuteness factor of potential baby ducklings, were willing to concede a little space for a little while. I would give up using my front door for a month. Mama Duck had taken the habitat-trashing, ecological catastrophe of the human race, and promoted us to the role of Duck Protectors.

I find I am very proud of the promotion.