Nature is Never Spent

Wild strawberries are so neat because they're unexpected. Just a normal, grassy weedy area like a park, and suddenly there are these bright red fruits growing there.



Another red I keep running across, a new one to me, is red buckeye. It grows chestnuts, apparently, but usually doesn't reach tree size. The ones I've seen have been in swampy areas, shrub-sized with large, shiny serrated leaves and distinctive shoots of narrow brick-red flowers.

Yesterday I spent a little bit of time cleaning up a few pots on my balcony. In December or January, I mulched everything and pulled the perennials up under the eaves to protect them a bit from frost. It looks like they've all done well. The mums and peppermint are starting to put on new green leaves, last year's baby pines survived, and there are buds on the willow trees. My rosemary bush that almost died over the summer also survived, but it's spindly and sad. I had to cut off so many dead branches, it will never be the same beautiful full bush it was before. So I bought a couple of new young plants and put one in the pot with the old rosemary, and a climbing variety in a hanging pot I found. I also finally trimmed and pulled up the dead tomato and cockscomb plants I'd been leaving for the birds. Overall, the balcony still needs a lot of work, but it looks better, which is satisfying.

Elsewhere around my apartment complex, bushes are just starting to bloom, including the azaleas, which will soon be covered in big fuschia blossoms, and the holly, which has tiny waxy white blossoms that I'm fond of.

I went out this evening to stalk birds in the front yard. Of course when I walked out, the doves whistled away and the flitting birds flitted off and everything went quiet for awhile. But I sat down and settled my back against an oak at the bottom of the yard, and in a couple of minutes the birds started returning -- sparrows first, then cardinals and nuthatch, and finally the doves. It was that time of day in the middle of winter when the sun is well on in its short march across the horizon, the light is bright but a bit watery and it makes the colors and shadows stark. It's lovely for being itself.

All of the photos I was taking of the birds were turning out to be blah, though, so eventually I moved up closer to the birdfeeder, behind some shrubs I hoped would screen me. It was a long wait before I realized the birds weren't buying it. They knew I was there and didn't want to risk coming back around.

For a photography session, it could have been disappointing, but there's always something. After a minute or so I noticed the tip of an odd-pinnate leaf hanging down from the shrub I was hiding in. One leaflet was red and dying the others were still green, and there was the barest thread of spiderweb clinging to them. The way they glowed, backlit by the sun, was a jewel in the day.

For a couple of years I've been noticing a particular shrub with narrow, gray-green leaves and masses of silvery tufts in late summer and autumn. There's a stand of these shrubs in a wasteland area near the hospital where the maintenance crews dump piles of construction and landscaping materials for storage, and there are a lot of them inside the great ape enclosures at the zoo.

There aren't as many sources for identifying shrubs as there are for trees and flowers, so it's harder to do a blind search. I finally found it in my new field guide: sea-myrtle (Baccharis halimifolia). It's a moisture-loving but drought-tolerant plant, also salt-tolerant which is I suppose where it got its name, and the female plants are the ones with the silvery seed fluffs.



This is what the seeds look like when they mature and start flying on the wind. Last year when I approached the chimpanzee habitat in late November, the first thing I saw was fluff in the air, almost like snow.

I had a window open overnight, and when I got up in the morning, there was a heavy floral perfume in the room. The privet shrubs are blooming. They're covered in large sprays of tiny white flowers, and where there are a lot of the shrubs the scent can be almost overwhelming. It's not a pure, sweet scent like honeysuckle — it's more... powdery, somehow. I read that it can aggravate asthma and other respiratory conditions, and I'm not surprised. I also read that, as I suspected, privet is not native to North America. While it's not exactly a kudzu level of invasion, privet is certainly not suffering either.