Nature is Never Spent

Happy Autumn! Or Spring, if you're in the southern hemisphere. Either way, I bring flowers...

( Large image under the cut. Gold, purple, red. )

Our nights have been cooler, though days are still warm and other than individuals stressed by the drought, the trees won't start to change for another few weeks. My favorite thing to do this day is go out at sunset and refresh my memory of True West in relationship to my house.

Only one week into December, we got a couple of inches of snow! I almost couldn't believe it. It started to snow before midnight, and when I woke in the morning, it wasn't melted as I had expected; the ground and the trees were white. It stayed long enough for some pictures, and in shady spots it was there for more than a day.

One day I was taking pictures of raindrops, the next, snowflakes. It's not something we expect around here.





( From rain to scenes of snow )

Really, the reason it felt so odd to have had snow was that we still had all these pretties on the trees. It looked an awful lot like winter was butting in on autumn!

( Autumn color )

However the trees and other creatures were affected by this year's drought, the oaks in the city have managed to produce a bumper crop of acorns. Some places, it's hard to walk without becoming a cartoon-style slipping-on-marbles casualty.



Every spring, I see crowds of adorable little oaks coming up beneath the white oak trees across the road from my apartment, and I think about trying to dig up a couple and raise them. But it never works out. So this fall, I thought I'd start from the beginning, with the acorns. I chose a few of the large, solid-feeling warm brown nuts and carried them home in my pocket. I put them on a table until I could decide what to do with them for the winter. Put them under some leaves in a pot of dirt, I figured. But a day or so later, my dog started barking at what turned out to be a tiny, white worm on the carpet. It looked like a beetle larva, but I didn't find out for sure until the next day when I discovered some suspicious holes bored in a few of the acorns...



...and two more escapees crawling away from them. One of the larvae actually turned around again, inched its way back to its nut, and started burrowing against it like it could roll its old home away to safety. I'm impressed with the ability of such a tiny, soft-looking thing to bore through a hard nut shell! And amazed that the mother hid her entry so well; I hadn't seen any indication that the acorn wasn't entirely whole before the larva came out. I deposited them all outside where they belong, but I'm still going to try with the remaining acorns. I've now learned that I should have done a "float test" right after bringing the acorns home, and discarded the ones that didn't sink in the water.

Speaking of insects, I'm sitting outside right now watching a few. We're in our autumn weather cycle: a few crisp days then several more warm, muggy ones. We've had two frosts, but nothing hard enough to really kill plants or send bugs hiding for good. This morning, there's a ladybug crawling on the balcony rail and a large, beautiful red wasp floating from the roof line to the nearest sweet gum tree and back. Wasps love warm autumn days. To be more accurate, they're probably hungry and they need to find sugar. There's not much nectar around anymore and they're going to die soon. (Only the next year's fertilized queen survives the winter.) I'm not sure if this is true of Polistes perplexus, the larger of the red wasps, but some adult paper wasps eat a nectar secreted by the larvae after the adults feed the larvae masticated animal protein. It's a nice arrangement, until there are no more larvae left in the nest.

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.

The wind was so strong on Sunday that it blew the last of the leaves off of the water oak in the front yard. No big whoop in December, but it appears most of those remaining leaves were still green. It's the strangest thing, piles of dead winter leaves in which a third of them are still summer green.

Most of the deciduous trees are bare now. The half-a-tree white oak I pass on campus still has all its leaves, which have turned a lovely, even brown, and there is another oak variety that hangs onto a few of its leaves, mainly in the lower branches, until the new buds open in the spring. (Note to self: identify this variety when time permits.)

Again, the leaves have been "cleaned up" and carried away in the places where people care about such things. But in the other places, they're still happily piled up and collecting in corners, blown by the wind.

Leaves, leaves everywhere! They're dropping in great piles, especially the oaks now, great springy piles that make you want to kick up your feet when you walk through them to make the rustling noises. And just when I think the colors can't get any more brilliant, they do. It must be like this just before the trees go bare.


Intergenus couple, just as I found them

This time also reminds me how much I dislike leaf blowers. What's wrong with a good old fashioned rake, I ask? It sounds nice and it doesn't smell bad or pollute the air. A leaf blower may be more efficient for huge jobs, but I would contend that often when there are that many leaves to gather, it's under a group of enormous or densely growing trees that don't allow much to grow under them anyway. Why not allow the leaves to moulder rather than blowing them away and leaving bare soil?

Whoops, a bit of a rant there, sorry!

Spring and Fall: To a Young Child
~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?






Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?






Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.





Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:






It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.




I memorized this poem in college, back when I thought I "knew why." These days, I think I was still a child then. But no matter. Incidentally, Natalie Merchant recently published a lovely setting of this poem.

When I walk from the parking lot, I cross a high footbridge, go down some stairs, cross another footbridge in the courtyard, and the proceed up the stairs to my apartment. In the courtyard just to the east of the path I take are two oak trees. I can see their tops over Building 3, from the parking lot. One is a willow oak and is a good solid yellow while the other is a red oak and is a nice orangey rust. It's pretty striking with them right there together. The diversity of oaks is amazing--so many leaf shapes, sizes and colors of acorns, and even colors in the fall.



The white oaks are finally changing color, and they're a deep red. When it rains (more on that November 16) they darken to burgundy.


This isn't one of the aforementioned white oaks, but I thought it was worth showing the change
from November 5 to November 12, when I took this picture.

I'm at the farm, and I think we're probably at the peak of the autumn leaves colors right now. As I was driving around town doing errands this morning, I could pretty much just stick my camera out of the window at any point and take a picture of pretty pretty trees.