Tag: nature

Looking and Seeing

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I once had a job as a substitute art teacher. The class was an elective for seventh graders but, truth be told, many were there because their first choice elective was full. They really wanted to be swimming. They said they couldn’t draw. I told them the problem was, they weren’t seeing what they were looking at. I gave each of them paper, pencil, and a zinnia fresh cut from my garden. Pretend, I said, that you are an ant, crawling around the edge of each petal, all the way to the center of the flower. Draw the ant trail you will make. They did, and they were amazed at what beautiful drawings of zinnias they made.

It inspired me to write a poem about an ant on a zinnias – Magellan of ants, traveling around and around, discovering a universe mysteriously changed from what it was when he started out, in the garden. As Georgia O’Keeffe once said, “…nobody sees a flower, really – it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time…” I grow my zinnias from seed and fall in love with them, and when – as often happens – I feel I don’t have time to paint them, I take these photos.

But I see them better when I paint them. The store-bought lilies and rose dominate this painting, but that’s one of my zinnias nestled in the middle. The lilies had a fabulous scent; I can smell it every time I look at this picture. 

But my main garden flowers are zinnias and cosmos. I wrote a poem about cosmos too; it ends: “Vain petals like a pinwheel/drop in a sudden shower/who would name the universe/after such a flower?” The cosmos flower is said to symbolize order and harmony, most of them having a simple structure like the one on the bottom left of the photo. But because we can’t leave well enough alone, the outrageously ruffled beauty in more or less the center is cosmos, too. A more complex universe; it mixes well with zinnias.

I was walking through the yard, hoping to get a photo of actual ants on actual zinnias – it happens – when a gently buzzing sound made me realize what I was more likely to find on flowers. Bees. The mountain mint, in bloom now, was covered with them. Bees don’t mess around circumambulating – they head right into the center of things. Purposeful, confident, no time to stroll around. They know what they’re looking for, and they find it. 

A Sense of Time

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I’ve put the jasmine tobacco that blooms from early evening through early morning, next to the sundial that bears its witness in daylight only. It only struck me that this was possibly amusing when the first flowers began to open as the sundial, so to speak, shut down. Conservation of – well, something. The sundial, sitting there on the plinth Doug made for it, bears a legend in raised letters: “time began in a garden.” But the original Garden was a place of eternal timelessness. Time as we know it began when people left the Garden.

The sundial tells sun time, which is not the same as the time on a clock. With daylight savings time we set our clocks forward one hour, deliberately to get the clock into a new relationship with the sun. So in summer, the sundial starts out an hour behind clock time. Then there are time zones. Ann Arbor is about 700 miles from Boston, but they share the same time zone and so the same clock time. That’s about three fourths of a time zone, so the sundial and the clock are about another three fourths of an hour out of sync. When my sundial here says eleven fifteen, the clock on the kitchen wall says it’s one o’clock. The Old Farmer’s Almanac carries time zone corrections for various cities if you want to be precise. Based from Boston, of course.

But the natural world’s sense of time isn’t a clock. It’s built in; it’s a flow – bloom, set fruit, ripen, fall. Deer have their fawns when summer’s far enough under way to feed them. Mama here has led her two babies to the easy pickings of fallen fruit under the crabapple tree, more nutritious than the forage available in winter, and giving the little ones time to store up some body fat.

The milkweed’s covered in pods that will wait to burst until fall, when their winged seeds can sail out onto newly bare spots on the ground, and settle in for the cold they need in order to sprout. It’s complex, but they found a niche and filled it. The monarch butterflies haven’t quite colonized these yet, but I expect they will.

The weeping cherry tree is first to bloom in spring, early to leaf out, and early to begin losing its leaves, as it’s doing now. It makes a touch of autumn on the front path, fallen leaves next to the plumbago starting its late summer bloom. This is my favorite groundcover, because it holds back in spring while the daffodils burst into glory, then wakes up and spreads over the dying daffodil leaves, tidying the garden. I greatly admire its natural, nuanced sense of time. Also I love the color. 

Rabbit Life

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A few days ago I strolled out to the garden, intending a peaceful time staking up tomato plants. Instead: outrage! I opened the gate and a rabbit zoomed out of my gladiolus and streaked across the garden! She wasn’t very big, but she was insidethe garden. This could only mean a new hole in the chicken wire. Outraged, yes, but I watched carefully to see where she went, hoping she would lead me to the hole. She vanished into the clump of daylilies against the fence, put there for some reason by previous garden owners. I could see they would make good cover for a bunny, and behind them I could see a long, low break in the chicken wire.

I picked up the hoe that lives in the garden and poked and stomped around the daylilies, listening for bunny rustles. Satisfied that she wasn’t in there any more, I pushed some bricks against the hole to block it, went inside for a spool of wire and some cutters; wired the gap shut from the outside, and finally staked up my tomato plants. 

I had planted gladiolus in the garden because otherwise the deer ate them, and I wanted them for flower arrangements. The rabbit’s technique seemed to be to pull them over sideways, and nibble away. It was very interesting to note that, while decimating the gladiolus, she had totally ignored the ox-eye daisies. They’re volunteers, and plant them selves both inside and outside the garden. Nothing, not the deer, not the rabbits, not even the woodchuck eats them. And as a bonus they’re wonderfully long-lasting in flower arrangements. Maybe I should give up on the gladiolus and let these little daisies take over.

The next day I strolled out to the garden again and yikes! The rabbit was still in there – and now I had closed up her escape hatch. I called in reinforcements. Doug. With a hoe each we propped the garden gate open and herded the rabbit, like a pair of Mr. Mc Gregors, except we were laughing more than we were angry. What a comical sight we must have made, hoes flailing, me squeezing in between the now tall and ferny asparagus, Doug blocking her way to safety like the angel with the flaming sword at the gates of Eden. The rabbit ate of the wrong fruit, and we expelled her from the garden. This is my point of view. Hers, I suppose, would be that the whole yard is her territory, and we’re the interlopers. 

Weather and Heat

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July weather has arrived, and Doug and I are having our usual disagreement about it. Eighty degrees is hot, he says, a typical Michigander view. Eighty degrees isn’t even warm enough for a sleeveless dress I say, a Southern Californian. Dry California heat is different from humid Michigan heat, he tells me. Yes, I say, but I’m sitting right next to you here in humid Michigan and I say it’s not hot. Then I go sit in a shady spot under a tree among the ferns, and he misses out, though he doesn’t consider that he’s missing anything. And I do worry that if I sit there too long the ferns will engulf me – look at them trying, inching up between the bricks, swamping even the lilies of the valley. 

The poinsettias, like me, enjoy coming outdoors for the summer. They had grown so thin and weepy indoors, this vacation was just what they needed, pulling a new green summer wardrobe over their heads; summer camp for Christmas plants. But I know I can rely on them. Indoor winter light will turn them red again when the time comes.

In a Michigan summer it doesn’t get dark till after nine at night. There’s plenty of light to grow things like this gigantic swath of burgeoning shrubbery, four feet high and about as wide. One search engine thinks it’s catnip and one thinks it’s lemon balm, but I didn’t plant either of them so, whatever else, it’s definitely a volunteer. I brought some in and Frassy rejected it as catnip, but she’s picky about her treats.

Last year’s milkweed was from deliberate seeds, but this year they have added to their number on their own account. They look ready for entire flocks of monarchs, but as yet I’ve seen only two dancing attendance on them. Is it too hot for butterflies? Milkweed is toxic to most animals, so I was surprised to find some of the mid-height leaves munched off, as if by deer. We have three new fawns, inexperienced enough to eat something like that. I’d be happier if it was the woodchuck but she’s too wily.

There’s also a mix of the deliberate and the accidental on the deck. The purchased petunias, taking the opposite route from the poinsettias, are going for a hot, summery red. Behind them the bougainvillea, after sulking tragically indoors the last few months, is stretching every finger in the sun and heat, just beginning to get the polish on its nails. The other pots are mostly full of greenery from zinnia and cosmos seeds I started a few weeks ago, but there in the middle of them is a glorious flash of California poppies, volunteer repeats from last summer. The seed must have survived the Michigan winter and frosty spring, waiting it out until the soil warmed up and local conditions matched its native needs. The poppies rose to the occasion. They’re split decision between me and Doug – eighty degrees is not too hot for daytime, but way too hot at night. As nights warm up they fade, waving goodbye in a fall of petals and fine seed. They’ll be back.

Summer A-Coming In

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It’s been an especially lovely week to be out in the yard and garden. We’ve had a run of gorgeous weather, so that prepping the raised beds for their tomato plants and flower seeds was less like a chore and more like sunbathing. I cleared off the weeds, sheared the clover, spread compost, and glanced down idly, wondering if there would be four-leaf clovers this year. Yes! There they were, laughing up at me – half a dozen good luck omens, casually waiting to be noticed and carried into the house. Why should flowers have all the fun? 

In the front yard all the perennials are showing up in order. The crabapple finishes flowering, the pear tree finishes flowering, and the iris knows it’s next. How do they do that? The bearded iris toward the back, the Siberian iris in front, and the pear tree off to the left make a joint project of shadows together on the newly bright lawn.

And once the iris are underway, the peonies chime in. It’s turning out to be an excellent year for peonies – many blooms and many buds on every bush. This is a close-up of the peonies, so you can’t tell they’re interspersed with more irises. They seem to enjoy each other’s company. That inspired me to look into companion planting – the idea that certain plants do better together than separately. The classic example of this is the Three Sisters of native American farming practice: beans, squash, and corn. Beans fix nitrogen in the soil for the squash and corn, corn provides a support for the beans to climb, and squash shades the ground with its broad leaves, blocking out weeds. Since I don’t have room in my garden for corn and I don’t like beans, I’m looking for other combos instead. 

Meanwhile I found a different companion right at my front door. The shaggy part appeared first and I had my doubts, but once the gap between lantern and wall was filled in, a neat little nest appeared on top. It’s very touching to see that a bird feels safe from predators when close to people. We may be disturbing their flyways and disrupting their climate, but indeed the foxes, owls, and hawks flee when they see us coming. Birds have figured this out. You’d expect a creature that started out as a dinosaur to be adaptable like that. 

Perennial Thoughts

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The weather’s been up, down, and sideways this spring, uncertain enough to keep my seedlings stuck in the house, looking out their sunny window as erratic frost rolls and unrolls over the lawn. But out in the yard, the perennials are not confused. The reliable chives wave their purple goodbyes to the daffodils, while the last of the wild hyacinths refuses to cede ground. Nice try, but nothing can stop the chives. 

Across the lawn from the herb garden, at the edge of the woods, I’ve made a tiny patio of a few rows of bricks. It’s just big enough for a single chair, me, and a cup of tea, maybe a book. The lilies of the valley would like me to know, though they look dainty and possess the scent of sweet innocence, that they are a power to be reckoned with, and should have been consulted. Their outrider will move that brick if I don’t stop him.

The asparagus, another perennial, has been poking its fingers up through leaf mold for weeks now, and the time has come for me to stop cutting and carting them off for dinner, and let them feed themselves instead. They’re at the stage now where they look like, well, sort of skanky Christmas trees – the tightly-closed tips expanded into branches, but the ferny leaves not yet fluffing them out. 

Sturdy, reliable, undemanding, how nice that these trusty plants come back every year with no effort on my part. My lamium, for example – such an excellent groundcover. But what’s that little purple flower sneaking into the picture from the upper right hand corner? Creeping Charlie! A weed! Alas, a perennial too, and just as determined to come back as all the others. The traits so wonderful in a plant you want, so aggravating in a plant you don’t. It’s hard to see their habits as the same, but they are.

Take garlic mustard, for instance. Early colonists brought it with them as a desirable salad green, but few here today consider it palatable. Including me – I’ve tried it. It’s not perennial, but so profligate of seed it might as well be. When I first moved to Michigan and saw stands of garlic mustard blooming in spring, I thought it was lovely. Then I discovered its aspirations to world dominance. Its specialty is swamping the opposition in a bid to turn diversity into monoculture, as though some mega-chemical company were in charge. If only my basil would do that.

 

The View From 35,000 Feet

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I’m a little late with this post because I just returned from a visit to friends and family in San Francisco. I like a window seat when I fly, and no matter how much reading material I bring, I mostly look out the window. I like to watch the maze of taxiways resolve into a map of the airport, and when it disappears in clouds I hear Joni Mitchell in my head: angel hair, ice cream castles, feather canyons, she said. She didn’t mention this one, a teddy bear, or maybe my cat waiting for me at home. 

Then we’re above the clouds looking down. I watch for mountains carrying snow maps of their canyons and ridges, as natural as the crinkly lines of rivers, or the clouds and their shadows. But what about the big smooth snowfields – treeless due to landslides, or landscaped into ski resorts? The hand of nature or the hand of man? 

There’s no question about it when we come to the green circles of irrigated farms. The first time I saw these they made me laugh – could anything be more incongruous with natural landscapes? It’s blatantly obvious that they’re not natural, but why is that? Nature pulls off perfect form with flowers, and likely with some of the plants being grown in those circles. These are on a grid and straight lines are another tip-off of human activity, but I’ve seen circles randomly placed and they looked just as unnatural as these.

Earth, we’re told, is not a perfect sphere, but a lumpy one. From cruising altitude you can just see the curve in the earth’s horizon, a small version of those photos of earth from the moon. For me it packs the same message: we all live here; we’re all in this together. We share the sky, too. On cross country flights it’s not unusual to pass a plane going the other way, whose progress in the opposite direction gives the illusion that it’s zipping along much faster than we are. Then I think of a woman in that plane looking out her window and seeing our plane zipping past hers. Maybe she’s taking a photo of us.

Some four and a half hours after we lifted into the sky, we came back down again. One last view of Detroit area street grids, and the big picture so clear from our high perspective fragmented back into the tangle of details we live in. I’ll be knee deep in them tomorrow, but right now I’m going to fix a cup of tea, sit here, and think about the sky.

Not Winter, Not Spring

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When Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow six weeks seemed like a long stretch of time, but like all stretches of time it has passed. Faint signs of spring are accumulating. Stuff that looks like snow still escapes from the clouds, but by the time it’s on the ground it’s rain, and has even melted the big snow berms the plows pushed up. The hellebores whose blooming I doubted, have unfurled themselves in plenty of time to stake their claim as Lenten Roses. 

The foxgloves in the front yard are also waking up. They looked so dead for so long, but the bright green whorls stashed in their hearts have escaped into sunlight. The deer are attracted by the fresh color and step up with hopeful hearts, but when they get close enough they realize this is digitalis, and poisonous to eat. Which has a positive impact on the flowerbed, because while they’re standing there in their disappointment they deposit a lot of manure. 

The milkweed in the back yard launched many seeds last fall, but held some back for spring. Winter laid the tall stalks on the ground, where the last winged white seeds fell out into snow and flew nowhere. Seeing them once the snow melted off, I thought – what’s that, dryer lint? Feathers? But it was milkweed seed, staking a claim to its parental territory, while the early crowd prospected further afield. 

Through the last few weeks of up-and-down weather I’ve been checking for progress in the fenced garden. Several of the raised beds that grow tomatoes in summer spend the winter months nurturing tulip bulbs, and they need to send shoots nosing up a few weeks before they intend to bloom. So they had to be getting ready. I looked – nothing – looked – nothing – and then pop, a whole gang of them, fat tulip leaves like donkeys’ ears standing up out of the dirt of tomatoes past. It seemed to have happened faster than it could possibly have happened.

But however fast or slow, it was certainly expected. What I didn’t expect was two tatsoi plants in the next bed over, acting like perennials. Cold hardy is one thing, but surviving a Michigan winter is something else. Not all the tatsoi did. What made the difference? Mini-micro climate?  Different snow cover? Good genes? Random luck? Will this survivor tatsoi differ in taste, toughness, or texture from tatsoi eaten in season? I would find out, but I don’t want to reward its efforts at resilience by ripping it out of the ground. For now I’m content to marvel at it. Resilience is a wonderful thing.

Snow and Shadows

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I put on my insulated snow pants, Doug’s thick, heavy alpaca sweater that he found too warm to wear, wool socks, snow boots, down-filled gloves, and my great big hooded down coat, and went out to take pictures of this beautiful, if hyperactive, winter. The sky was bright, the snow was brilliant, and the shadows were deep. Even the tracks of Christen’s truck, where she plowed our driveway, made a dramatic statement. The world was black, white, and blue.

The snow became a record of everything happening in the yard. I walked to the mailbox and back to put a letter out, leaving a swoopy swath, a frozen wake. When I went out again to bring in arriving mail I saw my footprint trail and got inspired – or maybe goofy. The cursive loop on the upper right is my path back.

The deer made more sensible trails, skirting the crabapple tree where, alas, there was no more fallen fruit, on their way from the river to the woods. Some clouds passing through moved the shadows around. My gloves were supposed to work on touchscreens, but my phone failed to recognize them. I pulled one oversize sweater sleeve out from my coat cuff over my hand, slipped off the glove, and snapped the shutter. Except a phone doesn’t have the kind of shutter that snaps. I think I activated it to scan.

Winter shadows bring out so much structure we otherwise don’t see. Documenting it reminded me of another function of shadows. Tomorrow will be Groundhog’s Day! The premise is ridiculous in Michigan, where starting at February second we are absolutely going to have six more weeks of winter, shadows or not. Furthermore, our local groundhog comes out of her burrow at random times during the winter, for her own woodchucky reasons. She makes amusing, long wallows as she shuffles through the snow between the woods and the deck. But a bit of the ridiculous to lighten up life in its coldest moments is not amiss.

Then I came inside, removed my insulating layers, fixed a cup of tea, and scrolled through my photos. They were full of animal tracks, but the only critter out there was me, protected by fur, wool, and feathers, whose providers perhaps found shelter under our decks, sheds, and woodpiles. A mutual aid society. The sun slid off to the west and the string of lights on the deck came on, both muffled and emphasized by the softly folded snow. The lights burn for six hours and then the timer turns them off, leaving the sky undisturbed and whoever’s sleeping under the deck in peace. I feel a lot more charitable toward the deer and woodchucks, and even squirrels, in winter. It’s hard times for them, and after all I have no flowers or tomatoes to worry about. In hard times everyone needs all the friends they can get.

The Deer in the Yard

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It’s mating season for white tailed deer and Mr. Eight-point, the buck on the scene with my local herd, had a challenger. Mr. Six-point came along prospecting for the last of the fallen crabapples. It’s hard to tell from these pictures, but in real life he was clearly the smaller of the two. Nevertheless, when the older buck showed up the younger stood his ground. They bowed their heads and engaged, as I watched from my window.

I would call it locking horns except they were deer, so they were locking antlers. They seemed intent on the process, until a car came down the street toward them. Then they broke off the tussle with one accord, watched until the car was past, and went right back to it.

There were no running starts, just a walking approach to each other, entanglement, and some pulling up and back that looked pretty indecisive. They engaged, disengaged, and engaged again. It was slow, even stately, and went on for ten or fifteen minutes, and then it was over. 

Mr. Eight-point rejoined the does and fawns, who were off under my neighbor’s trees practicing their Christmas Sleigh Procession technique, totally ignoring the fight, or argument, or whatever it was, between the males. Mr. Six-point lingered under the crabapple tree for a few more minutes, saving face, then wandered off into the woods. How civilized, I thought, but considering how civilization is doing these days, the bucks were ahead.

By now the sun was setting, giving good evidence for the advantages to deer of being crepuscular. There’s a latecomer doe in this photo, but she’s hard to see. I didn’t know she was there when I took the photo – just a photo of a nice sunset – until she emerged from the skirts of the evergreens and trotted off to meet her kin. Startled, I checked the photo and yes, she was there all the time. My eyes were on the sky. You can only see what you are looking at.