Rosepink Birthday

Longtime readers of this blog know that my favorite wildflower is Sabatia angularis, Rosepink or Rose Gentian. Not only is it spectacular, but it smells like honeysuckle in heaven, with a distant forest fire smoking away somewhere down beneath the sweetness. Sabatia is a biennial, meaning it perks along as a small plant for a year before bursting into bloom, going to seed, dying, and starting the whole glorious cycle over with dust-fine seeds again. 

 

July 18, 2018. Just coming out.

 

The same plant on July 27, 2018. You see why I revisit things...

I check my nearest Sabatia spot, one I can walk to, obsessively as my late July birthday approaches, the goal being to find a plant in bloom on my birthday, to drop to my knees and inhale that fragrance, to give thanks for another year on the planet, and for this marvelous plant that somehow survives all our insults and smiles back at us from dry roadside meadows and banks. This year, I found one, count it, ONE plant that had escaped both the township's roadside mowing in early July and the landowner's vigorous and unaccustomed mowing of the area, just off the road banks, that formerly harbored this fabulous plant. I plunged into despair. ONE PLANT??  The Lord giveth, and the mower taketh away.

And what doesn't get mowed gets smothered around here. My two other nearby Sabatia patches--my little July chapels-- have been taken over by the enormous, razor-edged "ornamental" Asian Miscanthus grass that I despise, that has robbed so much great habitat in Washington County and many other places in southern Ohio.

Ooh, isn't that pretty? Well, the towhee is. Each puffy seedhead is poised to scatter several thousand fluff-topped seeds to the winds. And each of those thousands of seeds, ready to spawn ecological havoc on native plants and wildlife wherever it lands. This photo taken on Dean's Fork, my church, my sanctuary, also rapidly being taken over.

People and their mowers, people and their ornamental plants. People. They're still planting that horrid grass, coming to my road to dig it up and take it to their yards so it can continue spread like wildfire everywhere else. They think it's pretty. They don't notice, as they dig up plants for their yards, that everywhere it occurs, it forms solid, razor-sharp, 6' tall monocultures that not even a deer can walk through. Nothing eats it. Nothing can live in it. There are people right on my road that are still planting it in their yards and along their driveways. They cannot perceive what's happening right under their noses. Or maybe they think monocultures of impenetrable grass are pretty, to be preferred over trillium and rosepink.

 I hate this grass, and the ignorance that keeps people planting it, with the fire of a thousand suns. Trace such ecological devastation down to the root, and you'll always find people. Scratch a naturalist, especially an older one like me, and you'll find despair at the heedless damage people do to the natural world.

I work, in this blog and in my Facebook and Twitter posts, to emphasize that which is beautiful, and what is still here. I try not to bemoan stuff like invasive exotics too much, and I stay completely out of politics, though Lord knows there's plenty to bemoan in this world gone barking mad. If you want to sum up my blog and social media philosophy, it might be: Nobody needs more angst and negativity.

Celebrating what's here; rooting out the beautiful and good in this agrarian landscape; spreading beauty: I see that as my job. It's not entirely altruistic. It helps me appreciate the abundant gifts that shower down on me, every day. Focusing on what's good and true and beautiful keeps me moving forward and deepens my quality of life. If it brings you happiness, that makes me happy. When you tell me you like it, it just makes me want to give more.

I'm always looking for things to celebrate, and it isn't hard. I love this place so fiercely that I find myself photographing it as I photograph my children (and as I depicted my beloved Bacon)--in every mood, light and setting. So, but for a short rant about Miscanthus, this is a celebratory post. Because I kept visiting the one Sabatia plant I'd found in my favorite spot. And each time I did, I'd range a little farther to try to find more. There had to be more. Maybe it just wasn't in bloom yet.

On July 27, I forged down an overgrown powerline cut near the lone plant. Stepping over fallen logs and snaky tangles, I came upon a scene that heretofore had occupied only my dreams. I found Sabatia Valhalla. 65 blooming plants! My subsequent count on July 31: 79!! There, tucked away where nobody could get to them to ruin them, in a powerline cut that had only been cleared about three years ago, was the finest population I'd ever found. People again at the root, this time for the good; it wouldn't be here if the cut hadn't been cleared. All along, those plants had been setting their super-fine seed and broadcasting it around--how I'm not sure, since it's fine as dust. Maybe the wind carries it. Maybe ants carry it. I don't know. I'm just grateful and so, so thrilled that it's found a place where it can grow, away from humans, and under the adoring eyes of those who appreciate it enough to seek it out. Phoebe and I wandered around in the stand, oohing and aahing and stooping to smell and admire, until it was almost dark.

This is just one section. So fine, so fine. There's even a nearly white one there.

What could be better than my woodland sprite, thigh-deep in rosepink?

 

It smells as good as it looks. 

 That little lime-yellow star in the middle kills me. 

  

Phoebe baked me a cake for my birthday.

 

 I insisted on making the icing beforehand, because I wanted a buttercream-cream cheese-almond flavored icing and it was my birthday so I could be as fussy as I wanted. I also had a specific color in mind that I wanted to mix, one we'd never made.  She took the icing and the cake away to frost it and decorate it. She brought it back and Oh!! OH!! I had no idea she was going to use Sabatia to decorate my cake!

 

When I saw how perfectly the Sabatia stars coordinated with my lime-yellow icing, my jaw dropped. Meant to be!

My kids and my friends made this birthday extra special. It kinda needed to be. And it exceeded all expectations by miles. I'm still glowing from the love they poured over me.

 Sabatia? That was the icing on the cake. 

 

Look for it now. Gobs of it in Athens and Hocking Counties, OH, right along Rt. 33!

Smooth Water, Mystery Globs, Deer, Vultures and Wildflars

Summer fairly demands her due. You cannot let these crystal days pass unappreciated.

Just get some friends together, throw some canoes in the car and go. Rent a couple if you run short.

And watch what happens to your beautiful hardworking friends when they are rocked gently on the water.

Meander around with no purpose.

which turns out to be the greatest purpose of them all. 

Wonder at the weirdly firm jellied masses anchored on underwater snags.

Which, because you're a Science Chimp, you've already figured out are bryozoans, a species called Pectinatella magnifica. Only a few species inhabit freshwater (the vast majority are marine). They are the ecological analogs of corals, though they aren't related. They feed by extending tentacles into the water and snagging little critters floating past. Basically an intestinal tract, an oral opening, and a ring of tentacles, times several hundred, all glommed together in a cluster. Animals, not plants. Or something kind of in between. Why they're here, what if anything eats them, I dunno. One of nature's mysteries. Native, at least, and now spread from a primarily eastern distribution throughout the country's waterways. 

Bryozoans. Whaa? A life form that has simply never occurred to most of us, in full glory at North Bend.

We can only wonder. 

A juvenile Cooper's hawk bullets low over the water and snags his talons on a low limb. 

A doe works up a steep slope with her little family of twins.

Sun lights the fawn's ears and the blood vessels running through them. A little pink tongue flickers.

The doe casts one look back at me to tell me she sees me and they'll be moving along.

Cardinalflower lights up the muddy bank. I'm so glad to see it's found its way into the waterway.

We come upon a juvenile turkey vulture, newly fledged, who appears to be sitting on his (her) wing. Notice that he has yet to attain the red head of the adult turkey vulture. Also note the immaculate fresh feathers with pale fringes. Not a bit of raggedy on this bird!

Everyone expresses concern for it, hoping it isn't injured. I look at it for awhile and pronounce it fine. First off, a vulture with an injured wing is not going to be able to get 30' up into a tree. 

Second, baby vultures  do weird things, and if this baby were still in the hollow log or cave he was born in, he'd probably be flat out on his belly with his legs out behind him. 

He's just doing the best he can to relax while perched like a big boy. That apparently includes using his own wing as a bolster pillow. 

Weird as it looks. 

Sure enough, he rights himself and calmly preens his bolster pillow, then flaps easily off to another snag. Whew!! I don't know what I was planning to do about it if he was hurt. Something. But I knew he was fine.

How do you cap a paddle like that? You stop by a rose gentian meadow on the way out of Harrisville.

And exhort your friends to inhale that mysterious perfume, that nasal nirvana they emanate.

The contortions are fully worth it.

Hope for the Monarch, and a Great Golden Digger Wasp

The summer of 2013 was one of the saddest ones I've ever lived through, if you're talking about butterflies. All that summer, I saw exactly four monarchs, and no caterpillars. 

I am elated to report that 2014 is a different story. I've seen 25 monarchs this season so far. They're still scarce enough for me to count and treasure and try to photograph every one. I couldn't bear the thought that this magnificent butterfly might vanish from our meadows. I remember seeing endless streams of them along the Connecticut shoreline in September, all heading for Mexico. I hope to see that again someday.

This gorgeous male (identified by the thickened vein, second from bottom on his hindwing) was nectaring on narrow-leaved mountain mint in Harrisville, WV, not far from my beloved North Bend State Park. 

That thickened vein translates to a little black dot, which is a scent gland, on the upper surface of his hindwing. 

For whatever reason I've seen many more males than females this year. Male again (see the thickening?)

The monarch was a serendipitous add-on. I left North Bend first, and David and Mary Jane followed. I was driving along Rte. 16 when my eye was arrested by a stand of rose gentian so thick and fine I squealed! I pulled off and waited for David and Mary Jane to catch up. Flagged them down and introduced them to my favorite wildflower. It was new to them. New no more. Now they'll look for it wherever they go. A little gift I could give them, for turning me on to North Bend. I'll never be able to repay that giant present.

We wandered in the meadow, bending down to bury our noses in its delicate perfume.

A particularly nice combo with Queen Anne's lace. This is the best QUAL year I can remember. Best rose gentian year, too.

And enjoying the gentian and monarchs, I noticed this spectacular wasp, more than an inch long. It took me a little while with The Google, calling up images with tagwords like "orange black spider wasp" and finally "spider wasp Queen Anne's lace" to finally find an image that matched it. That led me to digger wasps, and I finally figured out what I had. It's a different kind of 21st century field guide I've got in my laptop. Leafing through it is kind of like playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, but eventually I get there. Having a little knowledge aforehand helps immensely.

Great Golden Digger Wasp, Sphex ichneumoneus, nectaring on Narrow-leaved Mountain Mint. A nectar feeder as an adult, the GGDW feeds its young on more proteinaceous stuff. This wasp makes vertical tunnels in sandy soil, into which she drags crickets and katydids that she has stung and paralyzed. There are several chambers at the bottom of her tunnel, a paralyzed insect deposited in each one. She lays an egg on each immobilized insect, and in the grand manner of parasitic fly and wasp larvae, the grubs eat around the hapless victim's vital organs until the very last minute, when the wasp grub is ready to pupate, thus keeping its food source fresh for the duration. Eating its host alive, as it were. Eeesh! Insects are the coolest, the most macabre, the most terrible and wonderful things on the planet. I find this sleek, peaceful fighter jet of a wasp captivating. Now I look for it on wildflowers, where it sips nectar, belying its katydid-paralyzing nature.

You beautiful thing, you make my heart sing. 

Beauty: my #1 motivator. Sharing it: #2.

You're welcome!

Is She Really Going Out to Maine?

I've made it a policy since starting this blog in December 2005 not to apologize when I miss posting. I do my darnedest to get three posts up each week, but sometimes life rolls right over me like an ocean comber and it doesn't happen. I know that if you're here in the first place you probably are happy to see a new post whenever it goes up. Especially if it has a dog in it.

Gratuitous Chet/Demon photo.

Silver-browed Chet's finally mellowing at 9 1/2. He only bites Demon about once out of every four times we see him now. But note his spraddle-legged power stance. Turd-tail out straight. Gotta be The Boss. Always overdressed in a starched tuxedo shirt, too.

Chet and his best friend Wally get along great because Wally doesn't care who's boss.

Back to the blogpost at hand. Part of what's got me so tizzied and tied up is Phoebe's imminent departure for Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Which feels like a very, very long way away from Whipple. And is. Good for her. She's stepping out fearlessly on the untraveled path.

We're buying things like detergent and desk lamps and little rugs and extra long twin sheets. And seeing other parents buying those things too, a slightly lost and stunned look on their faces. Is it really all over, this fast? In August?

Friday night we threw a party for her and her school friends. 44 people showed up. Almost everyone we invited came. It was amazing. Bill and I were hopping for two whole days beforehand. When your catering staff is but two, and you're determined to cook, if not grow, everything you serve yourselves, it's a lot of work. But we'd have it no other way, and it's so worth it. Because in our world, growing and serving delicious food is a way to love your friends and family. 

The morning of the party, I got a call from someone on our county road that there was a hawk hopping around her meadow, and it had a hurt wing. Well, what I didn't need with 44 people on the way was a busted hawk. But who ya gonna call? I couldn't say no.  Out I went, gloves and cat carrier in hand. The second I stopped the car and raised my binoculars to look at this young red-shouldered hawk, it began hopping toward the woods. So pitiful, to see a hawk brought low. It knew I was coming for it. Hawks miss nothing. And they put two and two together. They are not slow.

I had no trouble catching it before it made cover. It was pitifully emaciated, and according to the homeowner a wandering cat had attacked it. The cat had been hunting rabbits in her field for several days. It takes quite a cat to kill a rabbit, and I believed her about that cat, because a cat like that would attack a grounded hawk. When I examined it, I found that the @#$#%#$ cat had broken the hawk's right wrist and dislocated its elbow, too. No hawk worth its salt should be attacked by a feral cat.  I knew from its painfully thin condition this bird had been struggling for awhile. Some young ones just don't get the hang of hunting, or they get hurt. And they don't make it. 

Hoping I could reverse this craptastic turn in its short life, I took it home and stuffed it full of raw chicken thigh and Ensure. Chet Baker told it that I was OK, that it was safe now, and with a full crop for the first time in weeks it slept peacefully in our basement while we went on cooking for the party. 

I put out an appeal on Facebook, and within minutes our wonderful Managing Editor at Bird Watcher's Digest, Dawn Hewitt, volunteered to take it to the Ohio Wildlife Center that same evening. I met her at a gas station as she drove on her way to Indiana, handed her a cardboard box full of hawk and a plate of nice party food, and she dropped the bird off that same evening. It needed antibiotics and perhaps surgery, and it would get that at OWC. If I had any extra  money I would send it to Ohio Wildlife Center.  Thank you Dawn. Thank you, OWC. Even if it doesn't make it back to the wild, we will all have done our best by it. 

When I looked up from feeding and housing and preparing the hawk for its journey, it was noon. And 44 people would arrive in five hours. YIKES! I started dragging ingredients out of the fridge, made two quiches, prepped a watermelon to chill, set the kids to shucking some of the 50 ears of corn Bill had brought home, made two confetti cakes and the frosting to go on them (Phoebe loves my almond buttercream!), helped Bill peel potatoes for mashed (she loves those too). Bill was grilling the chicken and vegetables and icing the drinks and bam! the party started.

Arrive they did, and it was wonderful. I really tied one on. Had two beers. I'm usually a party with one. Two? Look out. Sumpin' gonna go down.

Bill climbed up in the tower (you can see his shadow!) and got a rare photo of me sitting down (just beneath his shadow!) Oh, it was magical. Phoebe's in the middle of the little clot of girls at the left side of the circle. They're all playing with her hair. The almost full moon rose on the gathering and nobody wanted to leave, but eventually they straggled back down the driveway, bellies full of smoked chicken and garden vegetable quiche, mashed potatoes, Witten's sweet corn, homemade tomatillo salsa, watermelon and birthday confetti cake. 

Liam and Bill and Phoebe and Chet and I sat around the little fire Bill had built, and the katydids rang so loudly we could hardly hear the coywolves howling. And I thought about what a magical life these kids have had, growing up here, and I was grateful to have been blessed to raise them here.

As I was finishing this post, Phoebe came in, fresh and smelling of ozone, from a long bike ride on our steep foothill roads. She was bursting with the news that she'd found two stands of rose gentian and a red-headed woodpecker. 

She's going to do fine in Maine. She is a creature of the moment, a creature of place, one with roots that go deep and strong. And I will miss her like I miss the summer when November rolls around.

But we will still have the irreproducible and irrepressible Liam here, and he's going to get all that extra love, and we get to watch him blossom as we did his sister.

You don't get luckier than that.

Success is Relative

The mower laid this plant down in June but somehow didn't cut it off. It's blooming while lying on its side. I know how it feels. My arthritic toe's been acting up lately. Cortisone shot I got in March has worn off. I still run, but I'm grateful nobody's around to see how. Not much looking forward to another shot, but I see one on my horizon. Kind of like hoping a ten-foot long wasp will fly down and sting you in the big toe.

You will recall that I have been trying to "grow" rose gentian, Sabatia angularis, from seed. For two years I've been trying.

Nature is forever trying to explain to me what is possible and what isn't. I just won't listen. See toe, above.

For two summers and one winter I have nurtured teeny tiny seedlings of this plant, grown from seed gathered in November of 2010. I started with over 120 seedlings. That got narrowed down, and narrowed down a few more times. The marvel is that any lived.

So this spring I planted them out, all nine or so that made it for two years. They were so pitiful, so tiny. Nothing like the robust two-year-old plant shown above that's currently blooming its head off, untended, unwatered--nay! practically mowed to pieces on a dry bank along my running route. 

At the same time, I planted out another hundred or so rose gentian seedlings started in April of this year that were so tiny I had to take off my glasses to see them. I lugged water out to them in 5-gallon jugs, in the garden cart.  Big Toe didn't like that much.  I tried to keep them alive. But when we had to go to Maine, the temperatures soared and they went unwatered for over a week. And they all simply disappeared. Withered away. And so did the nine two-year old plants I'd worked so hard to bring along. 

A lot of other stuff happened here at the farm in that week. It wasn't one of my favorites. 

But some good things happened, too. When we came home, the royal catchfly I'd been growing for a couple of years was finally in full bloom. All its leaves have since turned yellow. I guess it doesn't like 103 degree blazing sun so much. Tough summer. BUT it is setting seed, and for that I am grateful. This plant may not survive, but I'm going to take its seed and start over this fall. This plant, I think, I have a hope of growing. After all, one of my two plants lived long enough to bloom. For me, that's a pretty good batting average.

Here is the bank where the rose gentian grows without anybody caring for it but me. And all I do is mark it off so the guy won't mow it AGAIN. Phoebe is coming back down from smelling the fabulous cluster shown in the first photo.

Phoebs has always loved flowers, like I do. We've been admiring the chicory. Chicory is one huge reason to get up early in the summer, because it's done by noon.

 This chicory has been cruelly mowed once this summer. It sulks for a couple of weeks and then sends up a zillion bushy stalks and blooms more beautifully than ever. Wow, what a show. I don't give a fig that it's Eurasian. You could never call it invasive because it grows where nothing else will--in the compacted, bone-dry gravelly soil of roadsides and waste places. Chicory is my second favorite wildflower, right behind rose gentian. There is no blue like chicory blue.

 Our chicory comes in pink, too. I photographed a little girl by a pink chicory plant a bunch of years back. Now she's driving her brother to Open Track and the pool. And I am beginning to believe that they will come home again each time I watch them roll down the driveway, talking and laughing and listening to the songs they like on the radio. I watch my whole world drive away, and I force myself to have the faith that it will roll back home again.

She's a good driver. 

If I look hard, I can usually find a purple intergrade between the pale pink and the true blue chicory. Bewitching.

They go so well with goldfinches.

I'd make a lousy plant breeder because I don't appreciate things just because they're different or rare. I don't find the pink an improvement on the blue. It's kind of wimpy. But I love to spot the pink plants in our population.

Anyway. Back to the rose gentian. When we left our heroine she had squandered approximately two hundred rose gentian seedlings by transplanting them out on Bill's dad's grave. None, apparently, had made it. At all. 

And then on the evening of July 15, 2012, she walked out to check once more. To see if the catchfly was setting seed. To see if she could find any trace of the gentian seedlings. 

And there was one. She laughed aloud to see it there.  One rose gentian plant that had made it through the storm and the drought and the neglect and the general ineptitude of this wishful wildflower horticulturist. 

It is three inches tall, but it is going to bloom.

 Success is relative.