He Mows Around the Ferns

Mowed for no one, this farmstead, and yet there’s an aesthetic working, one I appreciate. The owner, I understand, is a well-known former basketball coach for a local high school. He keeps the place nice. I look at the traces of his presence all around.

He lets the elderberry bloom around one old outbuilding. For the birds? For wine?

 I don’t know, but I’m grateful for the lacy spray of buds that will mature to flowers, then to red-purple fruits that birds love.

 

There hang the Concord grapes I’ll eat come late fall. They saved me last September when I was thirsty and tired. So sweet, ichor to a runner miles from home. They and the well with its water tasting faintly of iron got me home again. I cleaned the grapes up, unashamed. Nobody else was using them. A possum might object, however.

We move on to the big barn, the one I photographed in a March snowstorm. He’s left clumps of ferns at the front, and I smile at the aesthetic operating; that, unlike some country folk on a mission to clean, he spares these lovely plants as he whacks his way around the building’s perimeter.

 

I smile again at the hulk of a door, twisted and collapsed, that serves no useful purpose, but is somehow allowed to hang in space from its tired hinges. It’s part of the landscape now, and he cleans up around it and leaves it be.

 

A golden-backed snipefly rests on a blue spruce. What a lovely fly. There have been many this spring, most of them mating, little F-16 bombers making more bombers.

 

I can’t wait to see the barn interior in summer light. It does not disappoint. I’m fascinated by the lush glimpses of the outdoors I get through its jagged broken siding. 

I can ask the iPhone to focus on the trees outside, just by touching the screen on the area of interest. Try that with any other automatic camera. That feature alone makes it an indispensible companion on my runs. No. Don’t focus on the grass. The bug. I want the bug. Or the newt, or the toad, the mushroom, the blossom. I find myself vainly poking at the screen on my point-and-shoot Canon G-12, wishing it would serve my needs as well as my little phone does.

In a comment on my last post, Donna said that famed photographer Annie Liebowitz, when asked what kind of camera to buy, replies, "iPhone." Yeah. Its major virtue? Being with you all the time.

This blog is brought to you by an intense mix of old-fashioned romanticism and modern technology, applied in a thin layer over Nature herself.

The Mighty Mighty Bluet

There is great power in a tiny flower. The common bluet, Houstonia caerulea, triumphs over drought, frost, neglect and active persecution. It's a member of the Rubiaceae, a very cool family that includes partridgeberry (Mitchella repens), quinine (Cinchona), gardenia (!) and coffee (!!) Oh my!
How all those plants fit in one family beats me--tiny wildflowers and economically important shrubs that dictate land use all over Latin America.

There is a barren hillside on Rte. 821 not far from our house that blooms in early spring with blue. Misty blue, running down like water.

It's barren because the man who lives in the house above it takes a weedwhacker to the wildflowers that try to grow there. He has weedwhacked the Trillium grandiflorum and Solomon's seal into extinction. I see him, balancing on the rocks, whacking away, and I want so badly to stop and talk to him, but I don't. I think it wouldn't go so well.  Besides, I find it interesting that someone would object to bluets. I'd rather watch than intervene, because the bluets are winning.

He prefers daffodils and variegated hostas, his close-mown lawn, to bluets. These rocky steep dry  ledges are no doubt his despair. He can't get the grass to take on them, no matter how he cuts and whacks.

But the bluets don't mind. They don't listen to him and his machines. They go on growing there anyway. 

You see, by eliminating everything else that once grew there, he's creating a monoculture of bluets. And they like that just fine.

And though I mourn the trillium, I like it, too. It's a little victory. He can't kill the bluets. They're too little to bother with. They bend their slender necks and let him have at it. They sing of life and springtime.

Take that! And thank you for your help, Sir!

 Ta-DAAAAA!