The Garden in Full Colour
This has been a week of stunning sunrises and enjoyable garden harvests.
Even with the cooler weather, the basil is still producing well and I continue to pinch it back for more growth. I am so pleased with the Holy Basil, the smell of it, the flavor. I added some to one of the Chardonnay bottles Josh made this year and let it infuse for a day. It is the perfect chilled summer afternoon drink, all blueberry fragrance and delicately flavored deliciousness. If you are growing any I would definitely suggest trying it out.
Monday I brought some of the floral bounty into the house.
I love picking bouquets and bringing them inside! I know that the flowers can drop pollen, and sometimes house creepy-crawlies, but they make every room so much more beautiful with their presence.
The parsley went wild blooming this year so, as well as attracting many beneficial and parasitoid insects, it has entered quite a few of my bouquets with its airy, chartreuse loveliness. I never thought I liked chartreuse until parsley flowers.
I recently found The Designer’s Dictionary of Color by Sean Adams and have decided to improve my colour theory a la @gardenercook on Instagram. I love her little blocks of colour based on the garden and one of these days shall set myself a study in colour.
Tuesday was a rainy, book reading morning and I am fully enjoying Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx. It’s quite interesting how it is so interconnected with another book I’ve been reading by Christopher Cokinos - Hope is the Thing With Feathers. Both discuss the rapacity with which the entitled ravaged the new world and denuded it of most of its natural resources.
It is quite an ugly story.
I appreciated Proulx’s perspective as a historian when she speaks of trying not to judge one fellow using “presentism” (From Merriam Webster: an attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences).
It again reminded me of the essay I spoke about last week - The empathetic humanities have much to teach our adversarial culture by Alexander Bevilaqua.
Two ways of reading were presented - the first: “the reader interprets what happens on the surface as a symptom of something deeper and more dubious, from economic inequality to sexual anxiety. The reader’s task is to reject the face value of a work, and to plumb for a submerged truth.”
The second: “aims to identify and reveal a text’s hidden contradictions – ambiguities and even aporias (unthinkable contradictions) that eluded the author… Both of these ways of reading pit reader against text. The reader’s goal becomes to uncover meanings or problems that the work does not explicitly express. In both cases, intelligence and moral probity are displayed at the expense of what’s been written.”
Sidenote: For the second point the example was given: “Derrida detected a bias that favoured speech over writing in many influential philosophical texts of the Western tradition, from Plato to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” This made me think of how the bias started that those who could not “tell” you were somehow less intelligent than those who could - how it became a mark of intellectual disability, even if that was not the case. Whereas: “The fact that written texts could privilege the immediacy and truth of speech was a paradox that revealed unarticulated metaphysical commitments at the heart of Western philosophy.”
Ever since I read that essay I have tried not to be so adversarial when reading history. “Historical empathy involves reaching out across the chasm of time to understand people whose values and motivations are often utterly unlike our own. It means affording these people the gift of intellectual charity – that is, the best possible interpretation of what they said or believed. For example, a belief in magic can be rational on the basis of a period’s knowledge of nature. Yet acknowledging this demands more than just contextual, linguistic or philological skill. It requires empathy.”
Even with all of this in my head I find it very difficult to have empathy for people who chose to destroy something that they knew was unique and, eventually, not capable of regeneration (if they continued).
Proulx and Cokinos show very clearly the irreversible damage on a large, and one species of bird (Heath Hen), scale that the destruction of the Tallgrass Prairies had.
As Doug Tallamy writes in Bringing Nature Home: “We feel completely justified in sending the plants and animals that depend on those habitats off to make do someplace else… There simply are not enough native plants left in the “wild”, … not enough undisturbed habitat remaining in the United States—to support the diversity of wildlife most of us would like to see survive into the distant future.”
“Species diversity is a function of the area of suitable habitat that is available for plants and animals, as well as the time it takes to reach species equilibrium in that habitat. If you turn the clock forward to the point at which this equilibrium has been reached, you will find that the number of species that will survive human habitat destruction is a simple percentage of the amount of habitat we leave undisturbed, a 1:1 correspondence. For example, if we take 50 percent of the land in the United States for our own use, we will end up with 50 percent of the species that originally inhabited this country. If we usurp 80 percent of the land, we will lose 80 percent of the species. So the mystery is gone. We now know exactly how our actions are going to affect biodiversity if we continue on our present course.”
So it’s not just the Seton-Karrs of the world. It’s happening right now, even with a more ‘enlightened’ view. Michael Rosenzweig’s “reconciliation ecology”* is an interesting option for management instead of re-wilding.
Side note: An interesting reason why you may not want to add non-native birds to your EBird, or other, reports - “Naysayers like Dixy Lee Ray (Ray & Guzzo 1994) and Ronald Bailey (1993) have countered those who express alarm at such findings with their own statistics. The United States has more birds than ever before, they claim. What they don’t mention is that the birds they are counting are European starlings and house sparrows, both invasive species from European cities. Scientific consensus is that our native birds are in deep trouble, and we are going to have to improve their habitats quickly if they are to survive at all.”
Bringing Nature Home, by Doug Tallamy pg. 35
Reading three books at a time is a bit crazy, well I’m down to two because I finished Bird Cloud, but the connections you can gain and then the new things you learn and connect back make for a much more well rounded perspective.
If only they had known what we know now - would it have made a difference I wonder?
* “Rather than insist on protecting habitat from human use, reconciliation ecology works in and with the human dominated habitats that cover most of the terrestrial surface of the Earth. Reconciliation ecology gives us the realistic hope that we can prevent most losses of species.”
Reconcilliation ecology and future of species diversity by Michael Rosenzweig
Wednesday started with Monet’s Impression Sunrise in real life, sans water and boats.
I really must learn to paint. Beautiful things must be more creatively expressed than a quick snapshot with a smartphone. It seems demeaning somehow. Not quite grand enough a gesture to the actuality of awesomeness before you.
The native flowers and cutting garden are doing quite well.
The Wild Bergamot I planted along the East fence is blooming and attracting all sorts of bugs. There are some different wild mints. @earth.revival identified one as possibly Hemp-nettle (Galeopsis tetrahit), a non-native from Europe and eastern Asia. I also found some Pleated Ink Cap mushrooms (Parasola plicatilis), I believe, that are native. I’m going to have to get a little pocket microscope so that I can better observe the myriad necessary features for proper identification of tiny objects. I thought birds through binoculars hard enough because they are always moving, but with this the identifiers can be microscopic. I found some Horseweed (Erigeron canadensis) growing in the Potager, hoping it was Figwort (Scrophularia spp.), but it is not. Apparently it is a native annual and one of the first plants to have developed glyphosate resistance in Delaware.
Then there are Calendula and Borage, Nigella and Poppies for beauty and the bees.
I can’t tell which poppies are which. I know I planted Giganthemum from Seeds of Imbolc and then a mix from Hawthorn that my sister gave me. I can’t tell the difference between the Lavender Breadseed and the Sokol White Breadseed, other than I know she told me that the Sokol White seed pods don’t open up and spread seed everywhere, they stay closed until you open them. And the seeds are white not black or grey like usual poppy seeds. She put pictures on the packets for me so that I could see what they’re supposed to look like.
I'll have to try to decipher petal color, maybe one is more white than the other, or the spots at the base of the petals are more lavender/pink.
None of the Blue Breadseed have bloomed yet but I hope that some took because they were the ones I was most excited about. I thought they might be an edible close enough to Lauren’s Grape - but maybe I’ll just have to get them too.
The Gray-headed Coneflower (Ratibida pinnata) and Anise Hyssop (Agastache foeniculum) in the front garden are doing well as well as the Culver’s Root (Veronicastrum virginicum).
The Butterflyweed (Asclepias tuberosa) and Lance-leaved Coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata) that I planted from seed in the spring mostly survived the random chicken attacks but won’t bloom until next year, if it survives.
Chickens scratch. If you don’t want them to scratch in the garden, you just can’t let them in the garden. I spend a rather large proportion of my time outside trying to thwart them and the turkeys from jumping fences, or gates, and have used all manner of obstacles - branches pruned from the apple tree, grapevines wrapped like slinkies around the tops of fences, etc. They still get out somehow. Two especially - Maverick, one of our first Black Copper Marans we hatched out and an as yet unnamed girl from last year’s hatch that I think lays dark brown eggs as well. They are wily.
Thursday was another rainy reading day.
I finished Bird Cloud and got back into Hope Is The Thing With Feathers.
The next section, after the Carolina Parakeets, was on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker and it’s unfortunate demise. Though considered extinct there are still regular reports, unverified, and apparently if there has been a report in the last two years a bird cannot be named extinct.
It reminded me of all of the research I had done earlier this year on the Pileated Woodpecker.
It’s interesting how fire suppression affects so many aspects of an ecology. I never thought of it in relation to Ivory-billed Woodpeckers or Heath Hens (the section after the woodpeckers) but Cokinos makes the connection.
Also how much of a loss was the downing of our old-growth forests. Trees that will never be replaced because of newly imported diseases and predators, changes in weather patterns and water levels, reduction of floodplains for the “improvement” of agricultural land.
I was incredulous at the reaction and actions of Chicago Mill, perhaps that is presentism again and I should try to see things empathetically.
In my mind, old-growth timber for tea crates just doesn’t seem reasonable when a specialist bird with specific “psychological requirements” (Richard Pough, an Audubon staffer sent to the Singer Tract to assess the situation) only existed on that land.
Pough stood for nearly 10 hours in the rain watching an Ivory-billed female who would not fly across the newly logged land, becoming so faithful to her patch that she would not leave it, even though all of the trees housing her food had been removed.
It is most likely just me (and probably my sister a la candle only my brother would buy), but Chicago Mill definitely took on the role of Count Olaf here, trying to tell Mr. Poe (Pough) - “another time perhaps” (at the end of this clip) as he pushed him out the door.
Unfortunately, for this series of events, there was not going to be another time.
Friday the sun shone again and in the afternoon I was able to lay the rest of the cardboard down and then put mulch over top in the Rose Garden. The shape is now set and as the year progresses the grass and weeds under the cardboard will die because of lack of light allowing for competition free soil for my roses and the native species under-planting.
I have started to stratify some of the seeds from Prairie Moon and some I will just plant out in the fall. I’m considering trying the overwintering method that I used with the Onions this year because if I just sow them out in the garden one foray by Maverick may destroy all the little plants. I had none of the Verbascum ‘Sixteen Candles’ grow this year because of her.
Wandering around the house and yard I am feeling more at home here.
I have made a little reading nook in the front room by the East window where I see the first rays of the sun colour the sky pink in the morning. That impels me outside to soak in all of the glorious colour and mood. Especially this morning with the threatening grey storm clouds above the brilliance of the sunrise.
The sun made the flowers glow in a particularly appealing way this morning - la vie en rose in actuality. I took far too many pictures, as I often do. Google continues to warn me about my storage limits.
I think I need to do another pass over the basil and dry more for cooking and tinctures or tea.
The beans need to be harvested again, I already dried the first batch.
And the peas are drying nicely on the vine. I don’t know when dried peas should be harvested?
Next year I think I'm going to make some sort of grid for the bush beans to grow up through because any that I leave to dry on the bush can get smushed by a good rain storm and if they touch the ground some will mold. I have left the Orca to dry on the bush and they’re all saggy. I’ll have to find some branches or something to prop them up on so they can dry properly.
Wonder of wonders while checking the peas the other day I found one of the Mexican Sour Gherkins seemed to have survived and was in fact producing flowers and fruit. Whether that continues or not remains to be seen but I’m so excited. I may actually be able to pickle them this year as lovely little balls of pickle.
Some of the runner beans have reached the tops of their tripods and are covered in flowers. Soon they will need to be harvested as well. Good thing we love beans - butter and garlic, and some of our profusely flowering winter savory. What’s not to love?
The joys of the summer garden are never ending.
The wonders of stewardship, forever to be learning.
It is a pleasant life.
