Garden Weasel At Work

It's a thing, going from a grayish green house to a bright barn-red house. I never thought much about what color flowers I'd put up against the old dull siding. I really have to think about what I'm using this year, and I'm loving every minute of it.

The old gray siding is still on the garage. Sigh. We ran out of money. I can't believe our house was ever this color. But I picked it. It seemed safe. Yawn.

Our friend and my hero Marilyn Ortt gave me a start of her Missouri primrose about 22 years ago as a housewarming gift. It's never been more beautiful than this spring, the spring when we lost her. She did more for Marietta than almost anyone I can think of. Started and maintained our recycling program way back before it was cool. Served on the Tree Commission. Started, with my MIL Elsa Thompson, the Marietta Natural History Society. Fought for open spaces and nature preserves and clean air and water...she was amazing. I think of her every time I look at these primroses. Treasured plants are like that. You remember the people who gave them to you.

They say that redheads shouldn't wear pink. Hmm. I disagree. I'm diggin' this magenta and green petunia, with white heliotrope, pink Cape mallow, red Cuphea, pink verbena, and yellow and rose-throated petunias. I don't put pink right up against the siding, but it's fine a ways out.

 I ventured a little red in geranium "Wilhelm Langguth," then swung over to my favorite petunia, "Papaya." I think it looks fine against the siding. Maybe not the red geranium. Still tinkering.

A better shot, in shade. An astute observer will note Kalanchoe or Paddle Plant "Fantastic" in the rear basket. I love those things.

Cobalt blue, as in my beloved lobelias, is the PERFECT accent color for barn red. Yum!!

I'm learning...

Here's my favorite tangerine hibiscus, frozen to the soil, representing with her first blossom since November 23, 2013. It  took a LONG time for her to pick herself up by her bootstraps and send up some shoots. Man, that was a long wait. But she's coming back at last. Her two cutting kids are, too.

While the single orange hibiscus hasn't been replaced in my heart, I have to admit that my ultrafancy hibiscus "The Path," a Logee's Greenhouse specialty which was a gift from my dear friend Donna Quinn, is coming into her own...

TA-DAAAAA!! That's a six-inch blossom there. I like big buds and I cannot lie.

Not only that, but each one lasts two entire days! I've never had a hibiscus last more than one day in warm weather. She's extrasexyspecial. That pink throat kills me. Everything about this plant kills me. She tried to die three whole times in the greenhouse--hated the cold nights. But she hung in there and so did I. She doesn't much like winter, but loves summer. Hey, me too. 

Here's that awesome green and pink petunia again, paired with New Guinea impatiens and lobelia. I'd love to slip a Persian shield plant in there, come to think of it...

A bit of a plant collector...a crazy monkey plant collector. Lori, there's the beautiful variegated agave you sent me!

And the Ruby Red grapefruit tree is in the bottom blue pot. The two grapefruits it's bearing are the size of navel oranges now!! Phoebe has threatened me with harm if I dare eat one without her. Maybe Christmas break they'll be ready? I don't know how long it takes. Anyone? Months? A year? They set fruit sometime in February.

Another planter in the making, with Fuchsia "Betty," Abutilon "Blushing Belle" and Rex begonias "Ring of Fire" and "China Curl." Very pretty combo.

If I have one complaint about the abutilon, it's that it makes too darn many flowers. Imagine that. But really, it gets in the way of its growth pattern! Weighed down by its own blossoms.

Logee's. This one is a bit overbred, if you ask me.

A new discovery for me, also from Logee's, is a tropical spiderwort (Dichorisandra pendula) they call "Weeping Blue Ginger." Well, it's not a ginger, but I adore the growth habit. So very elegant and Oriental. It's covered in blue three-petaled buds that are taking their own sweet time opening. I just dig the shiny dark green leaves and its angular habit. It's going to be awesome when it blooms. I think this is going to be a huge plant. Already two feet tall and reaching for the stars.

Phoebe has developed a penchant for cutting flowers, so I'm planting 40 Blue Point florist's zinnia plants for her. Our little nascent cutting garden, soon to be set out in the beds.

I lost so many perennials to cold (ALL of my beautiful cardinal flower that the hummingbirds loved so much) that I'm going to have to fill in a lot of holes with zinnias, which they also love. Must look for some good cardinalflower. I will miss it so in July. 

The view out the kitchen window. Garden Weasel paradise. Adore my mini Phalaenopsis and Doritaenopsis orchids inside on the windowsill.  If you wonder why so many are in pots, it's because the rabbits eat pretty much every annual I try to plant in the ground. They leave most of my perennials alone, though they devoured my creeping phlox and Virginia bluebells this year, dammit!  They'll reduce a geranium to a pile of leaves overnight. Eat it to the ground. Lobelias, same deal. Impatiens, forget it. We have a LOT of rabbits. Chet, get on that. Little dude goes on bunneh and chipmunk runs about a dozen times a day. No effect.

Yep, looks like somebody lives here, somebody who, after the worst winter ever, can't get enough flowers, sunlight, color and June.

When June comes...

Spread them shadders anywhere.

I'll get down and waller there!

Rench my throat in wild honey 

and whoop out loud!

Part of the James Whitcomb Riley poem my father loved to recite. He'd trail off there, having forgotten the rest. Like father, like daughter...

Being Iowa born, he generally didn't have much good to say about Hoosiers, but he loved JWR's poetry. Me, too. The poetry. Got no beef with Hoosiers. 

Not a Sparrow Peeps...

I make a fresh bird list every morning. In the heady days of mid-May I could break 70 species on a morning run. Now in early June, I'm lucky to break 60, having lost almost all the migrants. (The morning of June 2 being a fluky exception. 74 species ?!? Including a skein of honking Canada geese (where did they come from??), a keening killdeer, a slow-flapping great blue heron, and a singing male BLUE GROSBEAK at the corner of our dirt road. Whaaa??? That's birding for you. You never know what's going to be in the box of chocolates. Might get a truffle.

I've been following one lone migrant, one wannabe resident, since mid-May. He first started singing in a field full of butterflyweed and dogbane along our county road. I had stopped to take my seven hundredth photograph of The Three Graces, the dancing trees that so captivate me, and his song floated down this hill to me as I stood by my car.

 I caught his dry, insectile 

tick-trilllllllll-tick

and was instantly, wistfully transported to the North Dakota prairie. 

It could only be a grasshopper sparrow, a very rare bird around here. 

I walked up into the meadow and found him singing on dogbane at the crest of the hill. 

Even if I didn't know his song, I could've told he was a grasshopper sparrow before I got him in the binoculars, because he was round, perfectly and almost comically flat-headed, and he fluttered one wing as he sang. Grasshopper sparrows have a bewitching little patch of yellow on the leading edge of the wrist, which they expose when they display. Mannerisms like that are useful in identifying the little brown jobs. They're the same mannerisms that other grasshopper sparrows use to tell that they're looking at one of their own kind.

I've been following him ever since. He deserted the Three Graces hill and moved about a half-mile to a large hayfield near the old farmstead I run to. Sang there for a couple of days. I went to visit him in his new spot the morning of  June 2, and found the hayfield silent. But he was singing in another field, halfway between the original and the second. Making the rounds, hoping to find a little round grasshopper sparrow gal somewhere in that grass.

My rational mind tells me he probably won't. They're too rare around here. And the way he bops from field to field, uncontested, singing king of all he surveys, tells me there are no companions for him here. But I can hope for him, and for me, because that barely noticeable song touches a place in my heart. I would so love to hear it all summer long. I would love to see him find that someone.

 Lately, the only time I feel at all like myself is when I'm running these roads, moving and breathing and seeing new things with every mile. Running takes my mind to another place, puts it in the back seat for once, where it can't ask me a million questions I can't answer. I would run all day if I didn't have stuff I have to do at home. Sometimes I run half the day. It feels to me like the answers might be out on the road somewhere, if I just keep listening and looking. I listen for birds and make neat little lists of everything I hear. I've got drifts of those little folded pieces of paper with NOCA PIWO DOWO EAME EABL written on them. Poems, thoughts, polemics, diatribes and lyrics sometimes, but mostly bird lists. It's a compulsion; I'm self-aware enough to recognize that, but I tell myself it's a healthy one, at least, better than gambling or shopping.  Certainly cheaper than those. Free. 

 Every day I see and hear a different combination of 58, 63, 74 birds...I never know what the day might grant me, but I know every toot, peep and wheedle of every bird that breeds or flies through here. That has to be a good thing. 

I get so caught up in it all, I have to give Chet a break now and then because, it turns out, 7 miles is too much for him.

He doesn't want to stay home, and I purely hate to go without him, but I know when he's tuckered out. If he's stiff and hobbly when he wakes up, he gets a day off.

I don't hit it too hard or fast. But I do go far. We stop and rest at the church, talk to Ada, check on her rose.

I sing in the resonant space, and it vibrates all around us. The song of a catbird floats in the door, and Chet listens to both.

We had to come back three times before the mystery peonies bloomed.

Peter Gruber's peony turned out to be a raggedy pink one just like ours at home. No surprise there.

Same with the Stauch peony. 

Every day I get up feels like a new one, a new chance at figuring something out. I put my shoes on and

 go out fully intending to do a short run, and find myself going farther and farther, soothed by the soft air and the scent of fresh-cut hay, pulled along by the next song I hear.

How can I not, when it looks like this? When the beauty flows through me and over me, and every bird is in its rightful place and joyous and singing like mad? This world makes sense to me, has an ordered abundance that draws me in.

When days like this offer themselves to me
When the meadowlark's on the wire and the oriole flies over like a bright burning brand
How can I not partake?
I come to see a world in balance
Where the tanager's in the woods and the sparrow's in the grass
And the green frog twangs from the mirror-still pond.

Things That Cross the Road

May's such a banquet, such an overstuffed portmanteau of good things, that the writer in me sputters and fusses, trying to find a theme in it all.

Perhaps "Things I See Crossing the Road" is as good as any. 

After a travel-enforced break this spring, I've rediscovered running. Totally ignoring my wise friend Hodge's admonition that "More is the enemy of good," I now feel like I'm slacking if I don't clock 4.5 miles a day. There's just so much to see and hear and smell and discover. It all pulls me along and down the dirt roads. The weather has been incredible. I'm brown as a berry and feeling more fit. Kind of a human red eft, looking for new water to swim in.

The tiniest red eft I've ever seen. Red efts are the juvenile dispersal unit of the red-spotted newt. Red efts are how newts get their DNA to new wetlands. They have thick, dessication-resistant granular skin with loads of toxins in it. That's aposematic, or warning coloration there. Don't eat me. I'm on my way.

I couldn't imagine where this little fellow had come from, crossing our driveway. The nearest pond is 1.3 miles away. How does something like this make its way through a gigantic thick hayfield? Well, he had to have. Underfoot, unseen, tiny creatures are making incredible journeys that we cannot even imagine. Everybody has a journey, whether we see it or not.

So tiny, so determined, going I know not where. Headed in this direction, he

 would hit our stream eventually. I suspect he knows that. Perhaps downhill=water?

The next morning I found another eft, but this one much older, darker, nearing adult coloration. I checked--skin still thick and grainy, but thinning, moister. When this animal hits a suitable body of water, he'll stay there for good. His skin will become membranous and thin, and he'll hang suspended, his legs dangling, just beneath the surface, watching for a mate. I think I can see the beginnings of his manparts at the base of his tail.

I picked him up and carried him across. Good luck with that hayfield, my friend. Navigating that would have to be like me making my way through a canebrake or a bamboo jungle. I guess part of how I look at wild things is putting myself in their bodies for the time that I observe them, thinking about how the world looks and feels to them. But I don't presume to make a judgement and take them to "better" habitat. This eft was headed away from the only pond in the area, headed who knows where. He's an eft. He knows. Who am I to short-circuit his plan? Lemme go!! I got places to go, people to see.

She's a box turtle. She knows, too.

But she is definitely getting a lift in the direction she's headed. When she saw me she turned around quickly and tried to go back, but I carried her in the direction she was originally heading, knowing she'd attempt her journey again when the coast was clear. Chetty saw her first, sprinted to her, gave her a quick tap with his nose, and kept going. Wanted to make sure I noticed her. 

What a beautiful jewelbox she was, with those amazing golden peacocks displaying all down her back. She also had slug guts smeared all over her beak and throat. Nice breakfast. No car would get her this time.

Speaking of slugs, I lost my beloved rehab box turtle Sluggo this winter. He had been injured by a lawnmower in August 2011, and I was waiting, years it turned out, to see if he'd ever really walk again. My best guess is that he overheated in his hibernation tank when the January sun slammed into it. I had set a bat tank atop it and had them both in the basement by the glass door because it was too bitterly cold to keep them in the garage. Well, the sun came out and the 2" airspace I'd left wasn't sufficient to keep the lower tank cool. He couldn't really bury himself in the deep moist medium, and he cooked.  It was a cruel lesson, to lose him that way. I reminded myself that Sluggo was going into his third year of rehab after his spinal injury, and still hadn't regained any meaningful use of his hind legs. He couldn't right himself when he turned over, could only drag himself with his front legs, couldn't dig, and would in all likelihood never be releasable. I didn't want to keep him until I was too old to care for him, and saw that coming down the pike. Sadly, that's probably what would have wound up happening. He'd have outlived me, but he never could have been a wild turtle again.

That didn't keep us from loving him.

Such is rehab. You win some, you lose some. My heart sinks and breaks a little every time someone calls me with a broken turtle. It's always such a long and often sad road. I remember a young hippie couple who drove all the way from Athens to bring me one who was literally in about six separate pieces.

 "We got all the pieces!" they said hopefully.
 I looked at them and nodded. I guess they thought I could wave a magic wand and put her back together, like Humpty Dumpty.

On to happier things. I helped this giant leopard moth caterpillar across the road the same day I found the elder eft. This one looked as if it were about to pupate, and was perhaps on walkabout looking for the perfect spot. I see gobs and gobs of these big bristly black cats in fall.

And I'd always wondered why I never see the adult moths. People who've tried to raise them report that a tachinid fly parasitizes them, such that few ever make it to pupate.

This fellow looked healthy and clean to me. I wished him well and set him down on the other side.

Just the night before, I'd found an adult giant leopard moth under my porch light! What a piece of kismetic coinkydink is that? 

It was so beautiful, with these awesome false eyes on the pronotum. A big, clumsy, sort of friendly moth, not so different from the caterpillar to handle. A bit pinchy in the leg department. Less ooky, though. 

Maybe I'd helped him across the road last fall. 

Like our Rain Crows' song "Little Soldiers" says,  Pick him up, carry him across.  

Give it a listen.

CD's with free song samples in the right sidebar of this blog.