nature and place
Author Sandra Cisneros reflects on the influence of nature and place:
I was one of those children who felt more at home sitting in a tree reading a book than with another child. I felt when I was a child that trees could talk, and I understood what they could say. I could talk to the trees. And because of their age and wisdom, they told me to persevere, to "keep, keep, keep." They were also sympathetic and kind and friendly in a way that human beings were not; and they laughed and nodded a lot. But most of all, their lesson was one of patience.
interview with Bill Moyers
Via ::: wood s lot ::: this excellent Grist interview with Bill Moyers on Republican anti-environmentalism:
It stuns me that the people in power can't see that the source of our wealth is the Earth. I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a capitalist. I don't want to destroy the system on which my livelihood and my journalism rest. I am strongly on behalf of saving the environment [in no small part] because it is the source of our wealth. Destroy it and the pooh-bahs of Wall Street will have to book an expedition to Mars to enjoy their riches. I don't understand why they don't see it. I honestly don't. This absence of vision as to what happens when you foul your nest puzzles me.
Read the whole interview here.
garden update
We've had Mexican petunias (Ruellia brittonia) for years but recently I got these dwarf Ruellia species. They have the same flowers but only get a few inches tall, which makes the foliage look denser. I like the way the flowers look against the dark foliage. Another plus is that they are not as invasive.
Also blooming in our garden on Labor Day weekend: esperanza, blackfoot daisy, salvia greggii in several colors, zexmenia, pavonia, lantana in blue, gold and the pink and yellow, turk's cap, bachelor buttons, sunflowers, four-nerve daisy, mistflower, flame acanthus, gaura, salvia coccinea, mexican milkweed and jimson weed. The only rose blooming is the roulettii near the front walk.
a garden story
Perhaps I am descended from the people in this story.
rain lily day
The first chapter of Scott Ogden's wonderful little book Garden Bulbs for the South is about the amazing day in late August or September after thundershowers have drenched the parched land.
The electrical storms bring nitrogen from the atmosphere in the spattering drops of rain. Rain lilies know the difference between this thunderstorm water and the bland effluent from the hose. They have patiently reserved their blooms for the real thing.These miniatures have sputtered in flower all summer, but nothing like what is to be. Five days after the deluge comes a miracle of the floral year: rain lily day. On this prodigal morning every unspent Zephyranthes and Hebranthus in the garden explodes in blossom.
Today is rain lily day. There may be even more in bloom tomorrow, but today was the day they noticeably seemed to be everywhere. On the way to work I saw hundreds of them sticking their heads above the mown grass along the side of the Tollway. Mostly they are white but there is a house down the street from me with a lawn full of pale yellow ones. We just have the small common white ones ourselves. Luckily the grass was just mowed because now I can leave it for awhile. Otherwise I would risk chopping some down.
Ogden's book is arranged chronilogically through a year in the garden. I like it that it begins with rain lily day. Here no doubt there are still a few hot afternoons to come, but the evenings have started to cool and the garden is coming to life again.
bachelor buttons
This is turning out to be a very busy week for me. We have some deadlines to meet at the office and I've had to put in some extra hours. That always drives up the stress factor. Luckily there is a long weekend ahead. We don't have anything special planned but I sure need a break.
Here's a plant that seems to be able to deal with stress. Gomphrena globosa is popularly known as bachelor buttons or globe amaranth. The one-inch wide flowers come in purple, orange, white and various shades in between. It is also one of the easiest plants to grow there is. Save the seed heads and plant them next summer. It thrives with little or no water in the heat of August in Texas. It is actually an import from Europe I believe but has been a staple of American gardens since colonial days.
posting
Not much time to post these days. For the second day in a row the new laptop has been giving me problems. When I tried to turn it on yesterday the power light came on but it never booted up. I called Dell Support and they walked me through a procedure that involved removing and replacing the memory cards. Finally it worked right. Tonight I had to do the same thing again. This is a nice machine but having to dismantle and reassemble it every time I use it is not going to work for me.
On a positive note we have had rain the last two evenings. It's hurricane season and moisture is coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. I usually unplug the computers whenever we get lightning storms which has further reduced my on-line time. The rain has also kept me from spending much time in the garden after I get home from the office, but I know the plants are liking it. As usual it's driving the cats bananas.
sensible lawn care
There is some sensible lawn care advice described over at Zanthan Gardens. I have mixed feelings about lawns myself. On the one hand they are unnatural and wasteful of resources. But I have a wide expanse of St Augustine across the front and I plan to keep it. Grass is the easiest thing to maintain. All you have to do is mindlessly cut it all to a certain height. I have known quite a few people who have taken out all their lawn grass and put in plantings. I just don't have the time to maintain that much garden. I would wind up being one of those hauled into court for violating weed laws.
masked and anonymous
We went to see Masked and Anonymous, the Bob Dylan movie. Yes, I am still a fan of his after all these years. There was a time when I thought the wisdom of the ages were hidden in rock lyrics and more so in Dylan's than any of the others, an attitude that began to embarrass me after I started working and paying bills. Lately I've been listening again to some of the music I liked then and enjoying it. I've even bought one of Mr Dylan's more recent albums.
Like a lot of his songs, this movie doesn't really make any narrative sense. It's best to think of it as more like an extended video. But you do get to hear some unusual covers of his songs. The theater was not exactly crowded - there were only seven of us at the early evening show. The long lines were next door at Le Divorce, which looks to be a hit.
eviscerating the clean air act
The Bush administration is about to change the rules of the Clean Air Act to allow thousands of older industrial plants to upgrade without having to install new air pollution equipment.
Current rules require installation of pollution control equipment whenever plant owners undertake anything more than "routine maintenance." The new rule will allow plant owners to spend as much as 20 percent of the cost of replacing production equipment before they have to install new controls.
Quoting Katherine Q. Seelye via Common Dreams:
The exemption would let industrial plants continue to emit hundreds of thousands of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere and could save the companies millions, if not billions, of dollars in pollution equipment costs, even if they increase the amounts of pollutants they emit.
The old rule has long been opposed by industry. This is just one more example of the White House changing the regulations to benefit its friends.
purple sage
Cenizo (Leucophyllum frutescens) is beautiful this time of year shortly after a rainfall or even when it is heavily humid. That is the only time it flowers and it is difficult to trick it by watering. We've had a few scattered showers lately so maybe that's why suddenly they seem to be blooming all over town today.
This is another example of a plant that is native to a drier, more alkaline environment than we have here in North Texas, but it seems to be able to make the adaptation as long as it gets sufficient drainage. The late horticulturist Benny Simpson promoted the use of this plant for landscaping and now it is becoming quite common to see it. It's silvery grey foliage makes a nice contrast to traditional landscape plants. It is evergreen (or ever-grey) and can even be sheared into hedges if you are inclined that way.
This one has grown larger than I expected it to. It was advertised as a "compact" version, but it is nevertheless about six feet tall. I do shear it once a year in the winter to help it stay in shape and keep it out of the driveway.
cedar elm
This is one of the cedar elms (Ulmus crassifolia) lining our street which are dropping the golden leaves I mentioned yesterday. They are really pretty nice trees. More vertical than horizontal so they don't produce a great deal of shade. Unfortunately they are infested with mistletoe and there is nothing that can be done about that.
This is actually the view directly south from our front porch. Across the street behind that other foliage was a very large wild area when we first moved here. Rumor was that a house there had burned years ago, killing the inhabitants and that the heirs intended it to remain unbuilt on forever. I am not sure any of that was true. There was an old foundation there; but the property was sold to a builder a couple years ago and now there is once again a very fine house there. It faces a different street so we can't really see it from here.
When it was a wild area it was popular with neighborhood kids. There were huge shrubs you could hide under in spaces as big as a small room. There was also a very nice stand of Eves' necklace, one of my very favorite small trees. They left a few of them standing.
golden coins
Looking down at the front sidewalk this morning you could almost be excused in thinking that it was Autumn. Actually the evenings are only beginning to hint at Autumn and the afternoon temperatures are still in three-digits. What is happening is that stress is causing the cedar elms to lose their leaves.
One of the many good things about cedar elms is the size of their leaves. They are scarcely larger than pennies. Someone once called them "golden coins." Just sweep them into the grass and they disappear.
Further north though it really is starting to seem like Fall. Kathy at Cold Climate Gardening was talking about maple leaves turning and goldenrods blooming in her last post. I am used to things blooming down here in the south before they do up north. I had to remind myself that this time of year the order is reversed.
reflecting on disaster
The news lately about the blackouts in the Northeast got me to recalling my own single experience with disaster, which was Hurricane Alicia exactly 20 years ago today.
Of course we had a little advance warning that it was going to hit. I went to KMart for candles and batteries along with most of the rest of the population of Houston. At home I taped the windows and rearranged the garage enough to get the car in and then waited it out alone inside with my cat. We lost not only the electricity but also water and the phone. But they were only out a day or so for me and it felt more like an adventure than a disaster. Many others had far worse experiences.
What I remember most is the feeling of togetherness, of everyone focusing on a common purpose, both before and immediately after it hit. All other concerns were put aside. The differences we had felt just a couple of days before were forgotten temporarily. We were in this together and everyone seemed willing to help their neighbor. It's the only time I remember experiencing that and as a result I recall Alicia almost as an enjoyable experience.
fritillaries
The temperatures are starting to climb again. For a brief wonderful period it felt like Autumn. Now the ground is already dry and the plants are starting to wilt again.
This Gulf Frittillary (Agraulis vanillae ) is one of the more common butterflies, but nevertheless beautiful. She seemed to be posing for me as she opened and closed her wings in sync with my flash. There is a swarm of them that seem to make their nests in a dark and low part of the yard among coralberry, white avens and red buckeye, in the shade of pecan trees. Neither their larval nor nectar plants are there, so I assume that they go there for shelter or for the moisture.
weblog as place
When I think of my weblog as a "place" I think of this little rectangle into which I type my words. It seems like I look at this side of it much, much more than I look at the "public" side where the results are displayed. I've never really understood why this box that I type in must be so narrow. It takes up such a small part of the real estate of my screen. At least it's bigger than the comments box.
I've been blogging for about six months and I still haven't quite determined what my relationship is with the blog. I've kept journals off and on for years and I expected it to be somewhat like that but it isn't. At least not for me. At times it seems like producing a column for a newspaper. Although I've never done that so how would I know? Even though I try not to be, I frequently feel pressured to write something. And I am much more particular about what I write than I ever was in a journal. At other times however I feel that I am writing to certain people who I know read my weblog as I read theirs.
To explain how I got into this I would have to go back about two years. One day at work I went into the snack bar to get a soft drink and found a book on HTML that had been abandoned there. I got interested in it and took it home for the weekend. Our ISP provided us with a small amount of space for a "home page." Like most people I had never even thought of using it, but over the next week I started building a site. Tricia had recently given me a digital camera and I needed a forum to display my pictures. It didn't have a lot of words at first. Later, when Tricia and I remodeled our kitchen, I started to document that project. Unfortunately only about a dozen of our closest friends and relatives ever visited any of those pages, and of course nothing linked to them.
I didn't know anything about weblogs then. That came much later after I started to follow links in online news magazines. When I first started blogging myself, I modeled my writing after those political news blogs, but that didn't seem right for me. What I did feel comfortable about was writing about my garden. For years I had been intending to start a garden journal, so I decided to make my garden the main focus. That limits it's appeal. I may never have a lot of readers, but I am having a lot of fun with it.
Part of the Ecotone series on "Blogs and Place."
amaryllis
At lunchtime today I stopped at a sandwich shop where I had never been before and talked a bit with the man behind the counter who was from South Africa.
I came home and walked out into the garden and discovered another import from South Africa was blooming in the garden. This is Amaryllis belladonna, sometimes called 'naked ladies' because they bloom on bare stems that just shoot out of the ground a day or two before the blooms appear. When I moved here I found a mass of these big bulbs growing in a very dark corner where they did not bloom. I moved a few of them here and later some others to diferent spots. These are the only ones that have done well, possibly because they are in a raised bed where they can stay dry.
More bulbs come from South Africa than from anywhere else. Bulbs are possibly the most inert of plant forms, which enables them to conserve energy in hot, dry conditions.
garden site
Surfing the web tonight I followed a link to this extremely impressive garden site. I am really envious, especially because of the index to all the plants in her garden. This is one of the things I wish I had the time and energy to do.
Thomas
Recently I read Elaine Pagel's book Beyond Belief and reported on it for the study group that Tricia and I go to on Sundays. That lead to the group's expressing a desire to learn more about the Gospel of Thomas. For today's meeting I brought along Stevan Davies' translation The Gospel of Thomas which has comments opposite each saying. We read and discussed about ten of the sayings. The group we take part in is rather varied and so were the reactions. A few found it interesting and one was delighted that it contradicted traditional teaching. Most just found the sayings weird or puzzling. One claimed not to see any difference between Thomas and traditional Christianity.
It seemed to me that the group felt let down. They did not doubt that the early church had suppressed opinion and documents concerning Jesus with which it disagreed but on the other hand they were not ready to acknowledge the same level of credibility for Thomas as for the more familiar writings. The lack of a narrative was a serious problem. But mostly I think the group felt let down because in Thomas they were hoping to find the pure and simple truth about who Jesus was. In that respect Thomas is just as faulty a document as the orthodox writings because it is equally obscure and pursues its own particular agenda as much as any of the others.
However for me the existence of Thomas demonstrates that the orthodox teachings are just opinions and not necessarily what Jesus taught. That makes it more comfortable to disagree with some or all of it and still be able to join in without feeling like an imposter or an anthropologist. Why would someone want to do that? Well, I don't exactly know. Perhaps it's just because I enjoy the music and the ritual. Maybe it's nostalgia.
Then this afternoon in The Sideshow I came across a link to an interesting and wide-ranging interview with Elaine Pagels entitled The Politics of Christianity. Among many other things she touches on the question of why we have religions at all. Maybe it has something to do with brain function or the way in which groups organize. That's a subject I want to learn more about.
my church windows
The assignment was to pick something green to photograph for the Ecotone photo topic, but it was hard to choose. We are surrounded by green (even though the heat has already turned much of it brown). Green is also my wife's favorite color which means we have quite a bit of it inside as well as outside.
These windows however came with the house. Although I like the colored glass I don't know that I would have picked green. To me they've always seemed like church windows. Because they frame the back garden view that seems appropriate, since Nature is surely divine.
lazy rainy afternoon
Just what the doctor would have ordered. A slow drizzling rain has been replenishing our parched garden all day. From inside we watch the birds frolicking in the mist and splashing in the birdbath.
Our cats keep demanding attention. They go to the door and want out and then they turn away and follow us and get in the middle of whatever we are doing. About fifteen minutes later we do the same routine over again. If it was a sunny day they would just curl up and go to sleep. I seem to remember that we acted the same way as children on rainy afternoons. We would never know how to entertain ourselves. Mom would suggest activities, bring cookies and try to referee the arguments that would inevitably break out.
The hummingbirds are active too. They don't seem to be coming to our feeder but they are enjoying the flame acanthus (Anisacanthus quadrifidus). I would love to get a picture of a hummingbird but with this digital camera I think there is not much chance.
The numerous long red trumpets of flame acanthus are ideal for hummers. The three-foot tall shrub itself is shaped somewhat like a flame, and this time of year it has so many flowers that it does seem to be a burning bush. It's native to a more southwestern part of Texas but does well in our yard. The first winter after it was planted it froze to the ground and I thought it was dead. But by summer it had come back.
heat wave
Yesterday's high was 108 and today is not far behind. All the tender green plants will soon be brown if they are not already. All we have left in the vegetable garden are the peppers.
Luckily we have a lot of native plants in the flower beds that can endure the heat, but we still need to water. For one thing we have favorites that are not native. We are also willing to feed a little water to the lawn grass too to keep it alive but a few more days of this and that will become a losing battle.
We still have flowers though. The lantanas and the flame acanthus are doing their part to draw butterflies and hummers.
meeting neighbors
Yesterday evening I went to a neighborhood get-together at our local park. Despite the almost 100-degree heat there was a good turn-out.
I met a young couple who have lived in the same home for 65 years. They bought the lot (for $250) when they married and rented a room nearby while the house was being built. We talked a bit about the history of the neighborhood. I had always thought of it mostly as a post-war development. But it turns out there was more going on before that than I had realized. Something else that I did not know was that the area had been a separate town then with it's own services.
Another useful bit of information I gleaned - apparently there is a secret path, or an easement, down to the creek below the bluff. From the description of the location I have passed it a thousand times and never seen it. Now I have to go look for it.
They pass our house on their regular walks together, carrying a folding stool for rest stops. I have often observed them, seeing Tricia and me in our twilight years. I hope that we have their energy and openness to strangers when we are that age.
happy birthday dad
My dad always had a vegetable garden. He always claimed that the vegetables bought in stores didn't taste right. Other than that he was never particularly interested in nature or the outdoors.
Here he is showing some type of crop to me. Not his. Maybe my grandfathers or an uncles. I can't tell what it is though.
esperanza
Yellow bells or esperanza (Tecoma stans) is a plant native to a drier and sunnier part of Texas than where I live, but I've heard it does somewhat okay here. It's become a popular nursery plant and it's easy to see why.
This is my first time to try it. I saw this display in the nursery and had to take it home. Many times the problem with trying to grow a plant like this is keeping it sufficiently dry in the winter. For that reason I'm thinking about putting it in a large pot instead of planting it in the ground.
It may turn out that it only works as an annual here. If so that's okay too.
