I finally added the Bloodroot article to our Native Plants section here. These days our annual crop of Sanguinaria has long ago dropped its blossoms and has settled into respectable child-rearing mode. Looks like a good crop of seeds this year and I’m hoping to get photos later of mature seeds and maybe even of them being dispersed by ants (see the article).
Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) Leaves
Maturing Seedpods
Even in the relative peace and quiet of our backyard, my mind buzzes. While a titmouse is making its monotonous, but very determined, call to attract a mate, while the wind whooshes through tree branches, and a red-shouldered hawk cries out a block or so to the west, my mind is rattling on about things I should be doing and running a well-worn Moody Blues tune in the background.
Sometimes, if I work at it, I can quiet it down, but it takes an effort and I can only do it for a couple minutes at a time. In those brief periods, however, the world around me seems to snap into a sharper focus—sounds are clearer, colors stand out that I hadn’t noticed before, I can smell the grass and soil. Then here it comes again, “Lovely to see you again my friend. Walk along with me to the next bend…”, “I really need to get that fence fixed….”, “I have to cut mats for five prints before Thursday…..”. Off to the races.
I bet a few years in a Zen Buddhist monastery would help with this. Nadia might object, though.
It’s a distracting world and our minds need very little excuse for reveling in that. If things on the outside get too tame, we’re pretty good at cooking up constant distractions on the inside and not so good at shutting them off. We try mindfulness and meditation exercises to focus our attention on what’s there and get our internal and eternal chatter under control, but it’s major effort, not be taken lightly.
I suppose that’s why I’ve never understood why so many folks seem to try to increase the distractions that wall us off from what’s around us.
Standing on a trail a few days ago, I was absorbed in trying to plot the movements of a woodpecker of some kind, following the sounds of its hammering as it moved rapidly around what may have been its territory. I couldn’t see it at all, and when I looked in one location where the sound was coming from, it was already quite a ways off in another direction. It was moving so fast and frequently that I figured the hammering probably wasn’t a search for food, but maybe was for establishing boundaries.
Glancing down the path, I saw a man climbing uphill toward me, followed by his dog. He was staring fixedly at the trail, so as he got closer I gave a little cough to let him know I was there. Didn’t want to startle him. No reaction. A little closer, then I called out “Good morning!”.
Nothing.
Finally, I stepped just off the path, and when he came opposite me, no more than three feet away, he suddenly jumped, startled, and said a nervous “hello!”. That’s when I saw the earbuds.
Now, the vegetation hadn’t really leafed out yet, and I was wearing a fairly bright, blue shirt in the brown woods and standing in the open. If he couldn’t detect me, I wonder if he saw anything at all during his walk in the spring forest? Why even be there? Exercising while that distracted would be much safer and easier on a treadmill, seems to me.
When I described this little incident to Nadia later, she said “He was there for the dog.” Ah, yes. That’s probably right. I do know that the dog wasn’t startled when he came up alongside me and probably had me spotted way back on the path. That pooch was in the moment.
On another occasion, I was walking across the University of Missouri campus when a red-tailed hawk sailed overhead about fifteen feet off the ground, calm and serene. I stopped to watch, but noticed that, not only were no other people watching, but apparently nobody even noticed the hawk was there. Lots of earbuds all around and lots of fixed stares directed at cellphones. That hawk had the place all to itself, except for me.
I fight a more or less constant battle to lessen my mental noise and let the world in, but many people seem to dislike, or maybe even fear, the kind of silence that can result from that. I don’t know if it’s the outside that makes them uncomfortable, or something internal that needs to be kept at bay, but there must be something. None of my business, I guess.
I never did see that woodpecker or figure out what it was doing, but it kept doing it after man and dog had passed. Flickers called farther out among the trees. The breeze sighed through the almost bare branches, and down by the creek, water murmured over stones. Harbinger of Spring and Spring Beauty blossoms peeked up from the leaf litter. For a few precious minutes, the Moody Blues shut up and the world tiptoed in….
Spring Daffodils----(Just because I had room for a picture)
Stuff is popping out all over, almost too fast to keep up with. So far we have over twenty Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) blossoms either open or coming up in our yard. I am now inspired to add this handsome citizen to our Native Plants section in the extremely near future, with a page of its own. A favorite of herbalists and commercial root-gatherers, Bloodroot has legends and stories to tell. Coming soon.
Bloodroot Blossoms (Sanguinaria canadensis)
NOTE: This posting has an error. The apple-like oak leaf gall is caused by a midge, not a wasp. The leaf gall of the wasp is an elongated gall along the veins of the leaf. I will update the photos at some future time when I can find some good galls. This issue will be discussed in a later post.
The main point of the post is independent of this error, so I have not (yet) rewritten the entire piece. But please be aware of the mistake.
RT
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I once read about a researcher in a national park, a field biologist, who said his goal was to “understand” the park, in terms of its ecology. I’m not sure what “understanding” a vast ecosystem meant to him, but I know one of the places he started his search.
Owl barf.
He teased tiny bones and fur and other miniscule clues from the upchucks of nocturnal predators and tried to reconstruct the lives of the puker and the puked and how those lives blended into the vast and intricate matrix of the wilderness. He started his quest for large wisdom from small and humble evidence, because he seemed to believe that all is connected. Start small and large will follow.
How does this work? Well, mouse bones in owl pellets might lead to pondering the habits of wild mice—what they eat, how they reproduce, what else might depend on them for food. If the mice eat certain grass seeds, for example, then we have connected the grass to the owl and to the other connoisseurs of mice, like, maybe coyotes. And if the mouse’s favorite grass grows mainly in mildly wet terrain with a southern exposure to the sun, then we have a connection between grass, owls, coyotes, and mice to the weather, soil drainage patterns, and even the orbit of the earth around the sun and, therefore, the origins of the solar system. And on and on. The trail leads up to the universe and down to the quantum particles of life and matter.
Me? My aims are smaller, or at least the geographic scope of them is smaller. I would like to get some kind of grip on our backyard. The task is no less infinite, but at least I can see from one side of the study area to the other while pondering it in a hammock. I often do that, in fact. Hardly have to turn my head.
Sometimes for days, even weeks, I have trouble thinking of something to write about in our backyard. It’s not for lack of subject matter, because I could never exhaust that no matter how long I tried. Maybe it’s the vastness of it that intimidates me.
Sometimes when I’m stuck I remember something from the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, by Robert Pirsig. Remember that? For years, I’ve been a little ambivalent about this tome, about whether it is a cute piece of pop lit from the 1970’s or if it is a work of real, lasting significance. These days I’m leaning toward the latter.
One part in particular has remained in my mind over the decades. The author as a professor of rhetoric was stymied by his students’ difficulties with finding topics to write about. One girl, in particular, expressed her frustration to him when she couldn’t get started on a 500-word essay she wanted to write on the United States of America. He advised her to narrow it down—write about Bozeman, Montana, he suggested.
She came back later, still frustrated. No good. She couldn’t come up with anything inspiring about Bozeman, Montana. Nothing clicked. Getting increasingly irritated, he told her to pick a street in Bozeman and write about that, for pete’s sake.
She came back again. Same problem. This time he was getting angry and said, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”
The next time she came to see him she was somewhat awed and handed in a five thousand word essay. She said she had “started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop.”
There it is. There are lots of “bricks” in our backyard, from trash-hoarding spiders, to pill bugs that scurry around every time I move a pot or turn the compost, to galls on oak leaves. These are things I can wrap my limited mental capacity around, at least enough to get me started asking a few questions.
Take those galls. I was rummaging around in the backyard the other day and noticed all the old fallen oak leaves with remnants of galls on them. Looking closer, I noticed what must be exit holes caused by emerging wasps leaving their unmade beds behind.
Empty Oak Leaf Gall
Now, I strongly suspect that these galls were caused by the horned oak gall wasp (Callirhytis cornigera), since the other type of gall they cause on woody tissue has, well, horns, like those I see on our pin oak. This is a two gall wasp, an organism born of two wombs, with two generations leapfrogging into the future. The woody-womb wasp is all female (agamic), and the leaf-womb wasp is the old, reliable sexual model.
Horned Oak Gall Caused by Cynipid Wasp (Callirhytis cornigera)
Oak Leaf Gall
Now the problem is, should I write about the next brick over and follow the trail of the alternation of sexual and agamic generations begetting each other down through the ages? What is the evolutionary advantage of this complex strategy? Is there such an advantage (or many), or would something else, something simpler, work just as well? As a graduate student I got used to the attitude that every structure, behavior, and trait of an organism is assumed by many biologists to be “adaptive”, meaning that it leads to more offspring than that species would leave without it. But really? Really? Everything is adaptive? Or not? Pretty soon, I realized, natural selection (evolution) often seemed to be used as the biological equivalent of deity, a convenient explanation for everything observed, a way to mentally tie up unsatisfying loose ends. This deserves a closer look….
Or how about that third brick in the row: the interesting finding that chemical control of these little wasps proved both effective and ineffective. Effective in reducing their numbers immediately, but ineffective in that the treatment also decimated the numbers of another wasp which parasitized the gall wasps, killing the larvae and pupae, and keeping them in check. Although there were fewer wasps all-around after spraying, more of the eggs survived to become mature adults, resulting in a net gain of nada, zip, zero—a fine little lesson in how natural checks and balances should be considered before tinkering. There were just as many “unsightly” galls as before, plus you’re out the cost of the chemicals and application. There’s a wider lesson in there.
Fourth brick: seems that leaf and stem galls don’t just contain the gall wasps that started them, but lots of other things, like moth larvae, ants, spiders, beetles, mites and more. We could get in there and try to unravel that, but I know that I’d just find another wall with a few thousand more bricks to consider. A world in a gall. Worlds in everything.
Fifth brick? Like cicadas, these wasps spend, by far, most of their time out of
13-Year Cicadas
sight, in their sealed chambers, absorbing nutrients, working their way through their various phases, engaged in obscure dramas of survival, and lazily dreaming their waspy little dreams of—-what? Months in the leaf galls. Up to three years in the stem galls. Then they pop out, do their procreative stuff for a few days, days mind you, and fade back into the universal murmur. Yet, we refer to the free-flying, free love, stage of cicadas and wasps as the adult phase of their existence. It was all leading up to this, we say. Seems backwards to me in some way. Seventeen years underground for some cicadas and over three years in their cells for these wasps, and we count the brief hours of boisterous buzzing around as the focus of their lives? A question of perspective, methinks.
I think, for me, being blocked isn’t because I can’t think of something to ponder, it’s because I have trouble sometimes grabbing onto a starting place out of the overwhelming totality of what’s there. There’s not much to say about everything, but one can chatter on for hours about the details that make up everything and reflect it like countless little mirrors.
In other words, don’t get me started. Existence is huge. I may never shut up.
February 23, and we have non-native crocuses blooming and native wild leeks peeking up in our backyard. Talk about your winter wonderland…
Note: the leeks link has a couple recipes. It’s Nadia’s article in the newsletter of the Hawthorn Chapter of the Missouri Native Plant Society.
(The wild leek stock came from Missouri Wildflowers Nursery. Check it out, because Merv sometimes has a small supply of these.)
Crocus in February
The Little Stinker----Wild Leek (Allium tricoccum)
I looked out into the backyard one recent frosty morn and saw mist, so Bonita and I went out into Rock Bridge Memorial State Park to see if the mist was there, too. It was. There was frost on the sumacs and a nip in the air. Perfect.
Misty Morning Landscape
In an act of shameless self-promotion (while I’m getting my next REAL post ready), I would like to present my Etsy photography store, right here.
FYI, if anyone sees an image they would like a print of on this blog, including the Gallery section, I can create a custom Etsy listing for it. Just contact me (n7919g@gmail.com) to identify the image and specify a size.
Which is, I guess, a good excuse to throw another photograph up on Nadia’s Backyard. This was taken on a fall hike at the Prairie Garden Trust, a beautiful piece of land owned and maintained by Henry and Lorna Domke near Fulton, MO. See the link to the right. Go visit!
Autumn Prairie Landscape
There is a new post in our native plants pages on Rhus aromatica, sometimes called Aromatic Sumac. Defend your chickens and tan some leather. Or just grow a nice plant or two. It’s here: https://nadiasyard.com/our-native-plants/sumac-aromatic-rhus-aromatica/.
Aromatic Sumac Leaf
Also, Nadia is working on the recipes for her Sumac jelly and pancake syrup. Stay tuned.
Sumac Jelly
We had pancakes for breakfast this morning, watching out our dining room window as a small hawk—kestrel, I think—tried to catch its own breakfast in our backyard. And on our pancakes was what? Pure maple syrup from Vermont? Nope. That is, like, sooo L.L. Bean.
No, sirree, we had Dr. Nadia’s Famous Old Timey Missouri Sumac Jelly, and it was delicious. Lovingly hand-crafted from a mix of Smooth and Winged Sumac berries picked with the care of Juan Valdez, you won’t find this in stores. The good news is that it’s not at all hard to make your own.
Sumac Berries
Now, many people know that sumac can be used to make a tart, citrusy-tasting drink, often called “sumac-ade” or “Indian Lemonade”. But, why stop there? Nadia didn’t. She tossed in more sugar, added pectin, cooked, strained into sterile jars and, voila!, Dr. Nadia’s, etc., etc., etc.
Smooth Sumac Fruits
We got the idea for using it on pancakes when a couple jars didn’t set up completely, but thickened to a consistency just right for syrup. An experienced jam and jelly maker could probably make this concoction any consistency s/he wants. Even if it’s too thick for syrup, just spread it on your pancakes like they were toast (which also tastes great with Sumac Jelly, by the way).
So what’s not to like? Beautiful color, wonderful flavor, home-made goodness, and YOU know what’s in it (and what’s not— like preservative chemicals or profits for some evil multi-national jelly company that could be doing who-knows-what-to-who-or-what). Sumacs are plentiful and free (you can collect the seed heads in the fall and keep them in cool conditions or break them in pieces and freeze them in sealed plastic bags), sugar is cheap, jars are reusable, and pectin is found in most grocery stores and many other places that stock canning supplies.
So, let’s get out those canning supplies and get jammin’!
NOTE: We will post an exact recipe or two when Nadia meets a couple of other deadlines and gets around to making another batch. This time she’ll write down the exact procedures, measurements, times, etc. She promised.
This is not really about our backyard, except that that’s where I was when the memory washed over me, early one morning, about 4 a.m. or thereabouts, as I shivered and stared up at the sky, hoping to see the show from the Quadrantid Meteor Shower. Upstairs was a warm bed, with a warm (and smart) Nadia in it.
“Let me know if there’s something to see,” she mumbled when I got up, her nose poking out of the blankets.
There were lots of stars this night, for a city sky, at least. I stood out there awhile, listening to the nocturnal city growl, the murmur from I-70 a couple of miles north, the slight rustle of leaves in our pin oak. A couple of upstairs lights were on in a nearby house—insomnia? Or another watcher? Nearby security lights were on, guarding back doors. There is a peace to early, early morning that is hard to describe. It sort of feels like the whole world is yours, like you’ve got it all to yourself.
I watched for falling stars—the Quadrantids are known for fireballs, flaming meteors leaving trails across the sky. Nothing fell, but I watched anyway.
At one point, I looked straight up and saw a rapidly moving light, pulsing regularly, moving west to east. Very fast. It didn’t look like a commercial airliner, but it wasn’t really odd. Military aircraft, maybe. But it triggered something deep in my memory.
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We were far out beyond where the casual traveler usually goes, deep into southern Mexico. Chiapas, way out in the isolated highlands south of Altamirano, a little-known town on the edge of the past. Summer, 1977.
We three gringos, Pam, the Dutchman we knew as Kris, and I sat around a small fire in the mountain hamlet of El Triunfo. We had come to this small village the hard way, walking with heavy packs over miles and more miles of mountain paths from Altamirano.
Valley of the Tzeltal Maya, Chiapas, Mexico
The village headman, Presidente Antonio, was a young man, handsome, with friendly, penetrating eyes. He made us welcome, put us up in the local schoolhouse, a wattle-and-daub thatched building with tables big enough for our sleeping bags. Food was provided for the exotic visitors, tortillas and beans and coffee. It was good, and we were grateful.
That night around the fire there were a few curious hangers-on willing to sacrifice sleep to be around visitors who almost never came here. Blancos, gringos, were pretty much unknown in these parts, and we were a powerful draw. We murmured and chatted into the night, watching the stars as they went from faint to fierce as the sun went down and night advanced.
I think that one who has never seen a true night sky has never fully lived. Up there in the mountains of southern Chiapas, many miles from the nearest road or town with electricity, we could see stars. The firmament glowed with them. The sky was radiant. They almost reached down to grab at us.
Conversation murmured around the little fire. I missed most of it, my Spanish being somewhere south of bad, but Kris was fluent. He was there to visit his wife’s people—the Tzeltal Maya—and here they were. Like most people, I had read about the mysterious disappearance of the Maya in ancient times, but it was no mystery to me on this night. They were here, with us, sitting around this fire. chatting softly in the night air. I don’t know where their empire went, but the Maya remain. Their ancient language murmured in the darkness when they spoke amongst themselves, but when they spoke to us, they politely switched to a simple Spanish.
Tzeltal Mayan Boy
It is hard not to watch that kind of luminous sky, and watch I did. The glow was captivating and suddenly among it I saw a small point of light moving in a straight line. It didn’t blink or diverge from its path, but it moved steadily on, from one horizon to the other. A satellite. I pointed at it, and said something like, “Mira. Esta estrella is una maquina.” Look, this star is a machine.
I’m not really sure, all these many years later, but I suppose I was bragging about our technology. I did not get the reaction I expected.
“Si, yo se.”, said Presidente Antonio, translated by Kris. “Los hombres de arroz vienen de estas maquinas”. Yes, I know. The Men of Rice come from these machines. He said it like he would say that the sun comes up in the morning. Matter of fact. He wasn’t even very interested. The talk moved on.
The fire and conversation died down after a while. The villagers had to get up early to reach their distant fields and do their work. This life was not an easy one.
Water Supply for Tzeltal Village
Tzeltal Children
I don’t recall, these many years later why we didn’t question Antonio further about these strange men who come from the machines in the sky. Kris was dozing and we were all tired from miles of hard walking. It just didn’t seem to dawn on me that we may have heard something profound. For 35 years it has remained to me as a mystery from a mysterious people, and I have never been able to find out more. There are persistent legends about celestial visitors to the Maya in ancient times (and here and here) influencing their advanced culture and helping devise their uncannily precise calendar, but as a tedious realist and a former student of a prominent Mayan archaeologist, the late Dr. Robert Rands, I put no stock in them. But I would like to know….
A week or so later, we literally stumbled out of that valley, thoroughly exhausted after a forced march of what we later estimated to be 45 miles in one day. Eventually we found our way back to our ‘normal’ lives in El Norte. My immediate legacy of that time was a fierce case of dysentery. The longer one is a puzzle that still nags at my mind. The nonchalance of a Tzeltal Maya Indian confronted with a miracle of modern technology, as if he knew about it before we did, still tugs at my imagination.
I don’t know what happened to Presidente Antonio over the decades, but I fervently hope it was good. He had very kind eyes, seeming older than his young face. I hope he still does.
Cloud Forest in Tzeltal Country
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The cold brought me back. Twenty minutes or so into my backyard search for fireballs, I gave in to the shivering and decided to go back to bed. My search was in vain. The neighbors’ security lights glowed on. Distant traffic rumbled.
Turned out I was a day late for the meteor shower anyway. I had the date wrong. No fireballs for me. No Rice Men. Not this night.
But, damn….I still wonder. I think I will always wonder. About lights in the sky. About ancient peoples and what they may know.
I left our backyard for the warmth inside.
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Note: This area was home to part of the Zapatista rebellion of the 1990’s. I have often wondered about how many of the children we met among the Tzeltal and Tojolobal Maya fought in this rebellion and how many lived or died.
Nadia’s Backyard