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!

Faith in a Seed Part 2

I couldn't believe my eyes in late June when, searching Geepop's grave for the dozenth time, I found a dozen good-looking plants of Sabatia angularis in bud. Where in the Sam hill had they come from? Heaven?

It would be almost another month before they would bloom. But bloom they have.

They're the smaller pink flowers to the left, beneath Bill. He put a bench out there, and it's one of his favorite places to sit and think and talk to his dad.

A mighty nice big bunch at Geepop's feet.

A dozen of them!

You  may be sure that I will keep sowing that dust-fine seed, to try to have Sabatia in bloom every summer out there. It's the least I can do. How I wish I could do the same to remember my dad, but he wanted to be buried in Thornton, Iowa, and that's where he is.

I miss my dad something fierce, and we sure miss GeePop, his music, his humor, his genuine warmth and his wisdom. It is a comfort to have a place to go in the orchard to feel all that coming through.

Bill and I sat for awhile out with Geepop on Sunday evening, present in the moment for once, waiting for a thunderstorm, listening to the thunder, savoring the long-awaited success of my little Sabatia ranch. 

Chet listened to the thunder, too. He didn't much like it. 

We got up and walked a little farther in the orchard, and we found a beautiful male box turtle, very old, but unscarred by cars. Unscarred box turtles only occur well away from roads. It seems like every one I help across a road has some dreadful scar from a car encounter. It's nice to find a traffic naif like this one, especially an old one.

Did you hear that? Was that thunder again?

Yes, Chet Baker. But I am here. You don't need to tremble. 

Sometimes, if you keep trying and you don't give up, you can make magic happen. It surely seems like magic when these amazing, fragrant pink flowers sneak right past you, then suddenly spring into bloom. But it's not. It's work and hope and care and most of all love. 

It's faith in a seed. 

Faith in a Seed

Longtime readers of this blog will recall that I have a favorite wildflower. Sabatia angularis, Rosepink, or Rose Gentian, or Bitterbloom, or Pure Heaven (my name for its scent).

It's a big blustery showgirl of a wildflower when it's happy, each plant making a great big perfect bouquet of spectacularly fragrant pink five-petaled flowers. 

It blooms every year on my birthday. True. 

It grows on dry roadside banks and meadows in poor soil, companion of Queen Anne's lace and black-eyed Susans.

What is not to love? 

I've had my struggles protecting favorite stands from mowing, and I've seen rosepink come and go, mostly go. I decided I had to try growing it from seed so I could spread its rare and precious joy around. Little did I know what I was getting into. 

I first planted its dust-fine seeds in a long planter in the fall of 2010. They came up the following April in my Garden Pod, and the seedlings looked like this. Essentially invisible. 

By the next spring, the ones that lived all that summer and through the winter on the floor of my Garden Pod looked like this.

Lest you get excited, here is a year-old Sabatia with my fingertip for scale.

In the spring of 2011, I steeled myself and planted the precious surviving seedlings out on Bill Jr.'s grave in our orchard. I carried watering cans out there (more than a quarter mile away) all summer long, trying not to wash the minuscule plants away with the flow. I mulched them lightly with straw and prayed for rain that never came. As far as I know, all but one withered away despite my care. It grew to about three inches and made a tiny miniature bloom in July 2012, and that was that. It wasn't meant to be.

I did not give up. In the fall of 2011, having roped off the plants so they wouldn't get mowed, I gathered a honkin' bunch of seedpods in my favorite roadside patch.

The darn things don't even come ripe and dry enough to split open until November!

 Split pods, dust-fine seeds.

Yes. Those are seeds on my thumbnail.

I decided that something in my soil, water, light regime, or general karma was amiss. I couldn't grow decent Sabatia seedlings. So I'd let Mother Nature do it herself. I'd just sow those dust-fine seeds where I wanted them and see what happened. It'd be two more years before I'd know...Sabatia is a biennial, blooming in its second year of life, spreading seeds, then dying that winter. The seeds sown in the fall would make those tiny rosettes the following spring, and the plants would just sit there, growing roots and getting bigger, until they were ready to burst into bloom in their second summer of life.

 Let's see...that would mean that I wouldn't know if it worked until sometime in the summer of 2014.

In the spring and summer of 2013, I got down on my hands and knees and weeded Geepop's grave, peering intently at the soil for the tiny rosettes of Sabatia. I found nothing. I didn't understand how I could sow thousands of dust-fine seeds on suitable soil in full sun and get nothing. But again, it appeared that it wasn't to be.

I didn't give up. If I had to sow a million seeds there, I would see rosepink raise its beautiful blossoms. I gathered more seed in the fall of 2013.

I planted purple coneflower there, and it flourished and bloomed beautifully. I could only hope that someday there might be an understory of rosepink.

In my next post, come walk out to the orchard with me and see what happened.