Nature is Never Spent

The roadside flowers have been riots the past few weeks: crimson clover, showy evening primrose, purple vetch, Queen Anne's lace, oxeye daisies, and most recently coreopsis.

The woodland flowers aren't quite as showy, but they're in their prime as well. I love the half-mile dirt road through the little woods by the farm. The high banks are mossy, the trees' branches arch out over the road touching each other, and some of the flowers are almost at eye level as I walk past. Here's a visual tour.

( Woodland spring )

This afternoon, driving home, I smelled it: sweet, floral. I always smell the wisteria before I see it. Later, walking in a tiny pine wood area, I could smell it again, but tracking the wind, I still couldn't find the blossoms. Finally, I saw the spiral-twisted vines hanging from the pines and looked up. There they were, high in the trees hanging like a bunch of grapes.

I pruned fruit trees yesterday. I had been waiting until we got a good cold snap, hoping to catch them when the sap wasn't running. But I'm not sure a cold snap is a reasonable hope at this point. The sap may never have really stopped. A couple of the trees have the beginnings of blossoms on the branches already, tiny round buds. I felt I'd better go ahead since the timing will only get worse.

Pruning trees isn't hard really, if you have reasonable strength and mobility. It's more of a mental exercise. I never really understood the point of bonsai until I taught myself to prune fruit trees. It takes a little knowledge -- which types of branches are desirable, which aren't, what overall shape you're aiming for with each type of tree. You can have those general ideas in your mind, but when you're standing in front of an actual tree with shears in your hands, what you have is a series of dozens of individual decisions, each a little different from the one before. Every tree is different, every branch is different. Every time is a little risk. Is this a good decision? Will it ultimately help the fruit or hurt the tree? Every time you snip those shears, you're making a commitment. There's no going back.

So it's an exercise that takes concentration, and concentration takes calm. Or makes calm, I'm not sure which. You don't even know your results right away; you have to wait months, and the larger process is a work of years. It takes patience. I can see how pruning could become a kind of spiritual ritual.

---

Springwatch: the frogs sang all day Saturday, and today I saw feral daffodils blooming all along the road back to the city.

Let's see, I recently posted about snow, didn't I? It's pretty typical for the winter weather here to swing between cold-ish and a bit too warm. The day before New Year's Eve, I was out and about in short sleeves. Then January 1, I found what is normally one of the first signs of spring: Spring Beauty blooming in the lawn. I'm concerned that the trees will get confused and not even have their necessary dormant time if this continues. But from a purely human point of view, despite my disappointment in not getting to use my winter hats and scarves yet, I have to say it's been pretty pleasant. It's not like spring, which is often humid and uncomfortable. It's chilly at night, dry and sunny during the day and usually just cool enough for a light jacket. I've been putting houseplants out on the porch to get some extra light.



Yesterday, I spotted winter-blooming jasmine on the bush growing "wild" at a cabin in the woods. It's like spring in January.

A few of the summer flowers continue to recover and bloom, some for the first time, now that the weather is more moderate. My dad's poor zinnias were pitiful looking through July and August, but two weeks ago I went out in the morning, and in the rich, early light they were beautiful. I caught a little brown skipper butterfly resting on one.





This week, it's colder and in the mornings, frost. The grackles are back for the winter: some are passing through, some will stay, filling the oak trees with their squeaky-door cries.

Now it's night, clear as a bell, and I can see the Milky Way.

I think flowers are still pretty after their petals turn brown. It's a different kind of beauty. The bees don't come anymore, the color isn't eyecatching, the seed are spiky and look almost like thorns. It's more like a memory, but those seeds will fall and scatter eventually, and next year they'll be come-hithering their own bees.

I'm at the farm, and this morning I was out early. The sun is too bright before it even clears the trees on the horizon, but its color is honey gold, the shadows are still long, and the air pleasant. The birds enjoy it; I could hear a mourning dove crying as well as maybe ten other kinds of birds, busily singing at whatever tasks of sex or territory or homemaking they were engaged in. It was all very lively.

But by ten in the morning, the heat had descended like a wave from an oven. The birds had dropped out and it was almost eerily quiet. It was the sound of merely surviving. A dog in the distance. Two squirrels crashing through some huge oak trees. A single crow. ...And the insects. Dozens of grasshoppers flying with every step you make through the grass, a cicada in a tree, and of course the bumblebees and dragonflies and butterflies. They're not bothered, even when the grass is withered, the pasture is full of dried weeds, and even the honeysuckle is wilting.

The trumpetvine is back and blossoming with gusto. There are big, knobby orange trumpets hanging over the cars in the parking lot, vines and flowers covering utility poles and trees... while many plants (including trees) are already wilting in this early-season heat wave, the trumpet vine seems to be quite happy.



The heat and lack of rain seems like just what we wanted after the rains and floods in April and May. But it's more like insult to injury, unfortunately; we entered the year with drought conditions, and the rains alleviated that a little but not completely. Now we have some farmers whose fields are still under water and others who got their seeds in late and now the seedlings are dying in the ground. Any young trees and plants without deep roots are suffering too. We usually see this in July and August. What a year!

A week or so back, I mentioned stopping by the road to take pictures of some coneflowers. Yup, that's echinacea, famous for possible medicinal effects. The ones I see in the wild here are pale-purple coneflowers, and they're kind of striking: they have the raised cone center like any coneflower, but the petals are long and thin and droopy, as if the flower had long hair and had pushed it back from its eyes.



The ones in gardens are usually the common purple coneflower.



At the zoo, there were some white ones, and I was charmed to meet a bumblebee with a heavy-laden leg of pollen. He clearly was loving the coneflowers.

From the cosmos seeds I planted last month, the first flower bloomed today! It's a shockingly bold color of pink.



I finally put out the hummingbird feeder this evening. It's been about three weeks since I first saw a hummingbird and I've been feeling guilty that they keep stopping by and finding nothing.