Category Archives: Nature and Gardens

Early blooms

photo by Ann E. Michael

Quince blossoms.

The strangely warm weather around this equinox has sped spring along. Above, one of my favorite ornamental shrubs, a quince (Chaenomeles speciosa) in the named variety “Tokyo Nishiki.” I love its pale blossoms that lack the orange-y hue of the more common varieties of chaenomeles.

While it’s lovely to see the sun, blue skies, and so many flowers, it is worrisome because an open winter requires–in our temperate region–a rainy spring to make up for the lack of snow-melt. Instead, we are three inches below the average precipitation for March. It is unusual to have to water the spinach bed; usually, I am instead dealing with sprouts that pop up far from the intended rows because heavy rains have dislodged them.

Of course, everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it, as the old saying goes. I am just going to wait and see what happens. Will we get our blackberry frost? Will it be a hard frost that kills off the redbuds and damages the early blossoms? Will we get a freak April blizzard to bookend our freak October blizzard? Or will we have a dry, too-warm spring that means the daffodils wilt early, few blossoms in May, and a tough summer for food crops?

I have some thoughts about gardening in drought years, but I am crossing my fingers that maybe we will get spring rains after all.

Anyone know a rain dance, chant, or prayer?

5 good things

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes psychological research that strongly suggests human beings have stronger responses to negative events or stimuli than to positive ones. That makes sense; for survival reasons, it is “wise” to be able to recognize threats or aggression rapidly. Once humans understand this fact of our natures, however, we ought to be able to put its effects into rational perspective…if we are rational human beings.

Kahneman cites a study that looked at marriages and found that, in a marriage the spouses described as “happy,” each partner said or did five pleasant things for every one unpleasant comment or action. The five-to-one ratio turns out to be a steady one in other types of psychological research into mood, threat-response, and attitude assessments among employees, family members, and groups.

In other words, we have to do five nice things to outweigh the emotional effect of one unpleasant thing. Which is, by the way, irrational. A rational equation would be one-to-one for a neutral emotional grounding, and two nice events would (rationally) make up for one nasty remark. Philosophers would agree, but given that human nature is not as rational as we often like to believe, philosophers also readily understand the problem of what Stephen Covey has called “the emotional bank account.” That one negative situation taints our moods pretty severely, even though it should not. The emotional bank account draws down very rapidly if we consider that 5-to-1 ratio.

I propose that we learn from this research to practice five actions as we navigate the challenges of getting along with other people:

1) Try harder to do those so-called random acts of kindness. Smiling is a good start.

2) Repress at least a few of our negative markers (frowns, sarcastic remarks, resentful sighs).

3) Identify more good things people do so we realize that good things do occur.

4) Try to teach ourselves to be more rational when negative things happen.

5) Remember that others are recalling the one bad thing, just as we do, and let it go.

It’s harder than you’d think, but it isn’t impossible. Neither easy nor hard: the middle way.

Here are five good things I encountered today:

Pansies (viola × wittrockiana). Daffodils (narcissus). Chickadees (poecile atricapillus). Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55. Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances Suite No. 3 (1932).

daffodil photo Ann E. Michael

Snow scene

photo Ann E. Michael

winterhazel

Temperate regions in zones 5 and 6 benefit from snow cover, which moistens soil as it melts and insulates the living things that depend upon soil–a cold “open” winter is particularly hard on plants. Except for an unusual late-autumn blizzard, this season has been mild; so I welcome today’s snow even as signs of spring become visible: a few blooms on the hazel boughs, some snowdrops, reddening stems in the hedgerow shrubs.

phot Ann E. Michael

winterberries

Winterberries are beginning to shrivel, and soon bluebirds and the earliest robins will pick them off for sustenance before the grubs and insects are plentiful. Today, as winter gently asserts itself, there are revelations in the outlines of white against shadow. The squirrel dreys are visible, loaded with dollops of snow, amid treetops. The deer paths and deer beds are more obvious because those areas are flattened by use and thus blanketed more evenly than the surrounding grassy spots.

Meadow’s stalks droop in criss-crossed patterns. If I look closely enough, I can identify the species, dry and broken, tangled together and covered in snow: solidago, eupatoria, aster, clematis, ryegrass, penstemon, milkweed. The snow’s ephemeral, yet I find myself thinking of Steve Tobin’s Earth Bronzes.

The ways shrubs and trees collect snow fascinate me, too; I love the fractal sketching of dogwood and Japanese maple, the calligraphic hatchwork of long-needled pines and the way thorns embrace little cups of ice along vine-y stems. I love the larch and birch that create the perfect image of lacework when a light snow coats their branches:

photo by Ann E. Michael

larch and birch

Overhead, vines rope trees together, creepers that take on a creepy mien, ghostly and dripping, when snow-covered. Vines have become a hazard in our region, with both native varieties (poinon ivy, wild grape) and non-natives (too many to name!) choking wooded areas, killing off tree crowns, usurping the niches of native plants, and adding to the hazards of storm damage.

Maybe that is why the ice-draped vines appear sinister to me.

And yet. A plant is neutral, alive, neither good nor bad, possesses no conscience, cannot be evil, plays its role in the environment–and can serve as inspiration. One woody tendril sways high above the ground, a line drawn against the featureless sky. Using a stick, I copy its shape in the snow at my feet. It might be part of an alphabet I do not know, an ideogram I have yet to decipher, the course of a river. Imagination steers from that point on: I take up my pen and write.

Inspiration

The word “inspiration” is from the Latin inspiratio: to blow into, to inflame. I began musing on inspiration today while on a walk with Spouse and Dog, during which the idea of muse came up in conversation (with Spouse; Dog kept her own silent counsel). He observed that he had never had a muse and asked if I had ever had one. I said I cannot think of ever having a person serve as my muse, but perhaps other things have played that role.

“Isn’t a muse a person?” he asked. We discussed, then, the difference—as each of us saw it—between a muse and a mentor. He has had mentors at various stages of his life; I think most of us encounter someone along the way who serves as a sage, a guide, a teacher, or as a role model. That person certainly offers a kind of inspiration. A muse, however, seems to connote inspiration of a different character or quality from mentorship. The muse acts as trigger, someone or something whose mere presence elicits a creative urge. The muse inflames, blows on the spark of creativity and ignites it.

Richard Hugo’s book The Triggering Town is justifiably famous among creative writers, particularly poets, for its author’s sensitive explanation of a source for the creative process and his description of how inspiration percolates into the creative act. He uses the example of American towns that act as triggers for memories or conjure of specific details of place and personhood. The town becomes muse. In a similar way, works of ekphrastic poetry may employ art as muse (though not always). For other creative people, music provides that initial flicker of inspiration—which seems especially fitting, given the word “music” originates from the word for the Greek muses themselves: mousike techne “art of the muses” from mousa, “muse.”

Mousa itself derives from the ancient proto-indo-european linguistic base *mon-men-mn, most closely associated with the meaning “to think, to remember.” Inspiration, though we feel it emotionally, psychologically, even physically at times, takes us into our minds, where the creativity takes place and can be formulated into art.

Much of my inspiration over the years has come from what people tend to term “the natural world”—as if we humans were not a part of that. But other things spur my creativity, including art and things I read. Having finally completed Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, I am now consuming more easily-digestible fare and finding much to inflame my interests in Alberto Manguel’s 1995 book A History of Reading, which I highly recommend.

Perhaps I will later find time to discuss the joys and pitfalls of reading several books at once. Meanwhile, I plan to spend the last light of a late winter afternoon observing hawks and woodpeckers.

Kalliope or Calliope, Athenian-style, the muse of epic poetry.

The seed of disorder

“I am the seed of disorder.” –Paul Eluard

From an essay by Ezra Pound (published in The Exile):
“The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius. It consists in establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without specific effort.”

As Lewis Hyde, who excerpts the above passage in The Gift notes, Pound offers an implicit paradox here that he apparently could neither acknowledge nor accept. If “good” is order, how can it spread by “a sort of contagion”—surely a chaotic method of disseminating something supposedly well-structured?

Hmm. I turn now to Wallace Stevens—or rather, to Helen Vendler on Wallace Stevens—to examine further this “idea of order.” Vendler’s interpretation of the order in Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West” includes several approaches. There is order as in organization: the singer in Stevens’ poem creates and hence organizes her physical world. There is order as in command: she orders her world into being by singing, by language. Then there is order as magnitude: “The two Wordsworthian orders of mind and world…exquisitely fitted and yet subtly uneasy with each other,” notes Vendler. The tension Hyde finds and explicates in Pound’s Cantos also exists in Vendler’s examination of Stevens.

Eluard, a poet completely different in style, sensibility, and background from Pound and Stevens, identifies in his poem the workings of that tension, the DNA carrier, the seed of disorder which, it can be plausibly speculated, might well spread its own form of harmony without specific effort, traveling as seeds do through a myriad of dispersal mechanisms such as wind, burrs, digestion and expulsion, burial by mammals, flotation, and the like. (As a gardener, I am constantly amazed at these marvelous mechanisms.)

Well-fitted but uneasy together, disorder through its contagion moves harmony and order to grounds on which what inheres in the seed can survive, even thrive, as it organizes itself into maturity. The seed “follows orders” nature has imposed through genetics. Mind and world, order and self, establish themselves as “good.”

Without that seed of disorder, all is stasis. No art, nor mind nor world, can be produced unless the rebellious seed slips from stem, twig, womb, sac, or lamellae to sing its own idea of order into the world.

For some fabulous photographs of lamellae, see:

Hive Mind on FlickR

Lawn vs. meadow, and a doe

I was outdoors this morning, raking leaves and silently cussing the grass. Spouse and I hold different viewpoints about the necessity and maintenance of a lawn, and while I gave into his desire for a lawn many years ago, my argument has proven correct over time: we live in a meadow, and lawn-grass is not happy here. Now, as I rake leaves from the spotty, weedy, too-long ryegrass, I get exhilarated by the exercise and the crisp autumn air but steamed at the need to rake at all.

We don’t rake the meadow; it takes care of itself. This is what “low-maintenance lawn” means, that nature takes care of things without human intervention.

Besides, I have never harbored a yen for the classic British lawn—acres of clipped greensward don’t appeal to me. I always feel the great lawn is missing something: trees, a bed of flowers, a crescent of blooming shrubbery. Great lawns’ main appeal for me is that there are edges all along them. Edges are interesting. Large, plain, even swaths work mostly to draw my eye elsewhere. While our meadow acts like an open space, it is ever-changing and often full of movement. Lawns, by contrast, are static. We mow the meadow once a year; the lawn requires considerably more time and gasoline consumption to stay in bounds because it is meant to be more-or-less unchanging.

Except that we live in a meadow. The expensive grass seed loses out to plantain and dandelion, chickweed, henbit, ivies, wild onion, queen-anne’s-lace, cinquefoil and other invaders that thrive on acidic soils that go dry in summer and turn to mud for months, circumstances that the thin-rooted, superficial, stoloniferous lawn-grasses cannot abide for long. I don’t relish the fight against nature, and my suggestion is to “naturalize” our lawn, even though—of course—the majority of these weeds are non-native species. But then, so are the lawn grasses.

I should mention the grazers, as well. Rabbits. Mice and voles that tear  up the root systems of lawn grasses. Deer:

A digression on the subject of deer—

This morning, I was startled by the sight of a large doe skirting the frost-covered goldenrod stalks quite close to the house. It’s deer-hunting season here, and there’s often an increase in the herd activity around our property as individuals and small herds lie low or avoid areas where there are hunters. This is one individual with whom I have long been familiar, a three-legged doe whose territory has included our yard for at least five years.

(In the photo, she is third from the left, the largest one; her right foreleg is missing)

She has borne a fawn every year but this past spring (the year before, she had twins—a male and a female). Some years back, I watched as she delivered her offspring in the meadow, which elicited a poem. In fact, she’s inspired several of my poems, so I owe her a debt of gratitude.

She was back-lighted by the early sun and, as usual, a bit graceless as she ascended the hill on her three good legs. The sun behind her outlined her in white, just as the  dry weeds were also rimmed with white, and she didn’t seem to mind that I had joined her. She just kept going until she vanished into the woodlot. I walked to the bottom of the hill and looked for her tracks in the soft lawn, followed them along the edge of the meadow, three hoof prints instead of four, one a bit deeper in the soil.

Well, we make our compromises, we do what we can with what we have, we choose our battles. My spouse has his lawn, I have my meadow, the doe treads her uneven path through survival at the edge of the suburbs.

I may as well pick up my rake and stop cussing the grass.

Gleaning

Glean.

I love this word and its related agricultural cohort, winnow.

Driving to work this morning, I ended up behind a gleaner moving from one soybean field to another situated slightly south on the same road. The link below, thanks to Flickr, takes you to a nice photo of a soybean gleaner at work.

Photo of a gleaner.

Glean: to gather grain or other produce left by reapers. Or, to gather information or material bit by bit.

Winnow: to remove (as chaff) by a current of air. Or, to get rid of, remove (as of something unwanted); to sift or separate. [Merriam-Webster].

Wonderful words for writers, useful as metaphorical or concrete actions, these terms have etymological roots going back to that ancient and particularly human business–agriculture. Lately, I’ve been working on revising some poems, and winnowing is part of that process.

I’ve also been helping my parents to “downsize” as they move from the house they’ve lived in for years into a much smaller apartment. Significant winnowing was involved in several aspects of the word: we got rid of, we sifted through, and we separated. We did a bit more vacuuming than allowing currents of air to sweep away the dust that lingered in the closets, however.

But we also gleaned. Or, shall I speak for myself here--I gleaned. Sorting through books and photo albums and drawers full of things we feel we should save for some reason offers a means of gathering information bit by bit. What for my parents was likely a review of life was, occasionally, revelatory for my siblings and me.

(Etymological aside: review and revelatory have different sources, the latter being much older).

My father’s sermon file and his school ribbons for elocution or winning debates and the books he just couldn’t bear to part with vs. the books he reluctantly let go–these are gleanings.

My mother’s elementary school report cards, her childhood drawings of Japanese ladies with parasols (I never knew she used to draw), faded photos of the high school trip to Washington D.C., the prom invitation, the letters we wrote from college–also gleanings.

From these gleanings I have reaped more than I expected.

So we reap and then we glean and then we winnow and, from that winnowing, we glean again and reap again. Sounds like what I do in my garden annually. Sounds like what the farmer does every year, too, though these days the reaping and gleaning, and much of the winnowing, are done in one go with a very large piece of farm equipment…such as the one which slowed me on my commute to work this morning and which led to this digression.

Haiku Break

October blizzard—
along the fence, red rose
in snow.

—I didn’t have my camera with me at the time, so I took the image away by haiku.

Interruptions

The recent freak snowstorm brought silence to my house in the form of power losses: no refrigerator humming, no dishwasher or washing machine, no furnace fan, no well-pump running, no electronic sounds. After working outside to clear fallen boughs and cut back broken shrubs, I felt physically tired each evening.

I find that physical exhaustion often inspires me to write because I am mentally alert but able to find physical stillness. I can pick  up a notebook and a pen and stay in a cozy chair–or under a pile of warm blankets–and jot down poems and ideas. I don’t get as “antsy” as I do when I have not exerted myself so much.

Today, the power came on again after almost three days. I had cut back the broken buddleia stems and cleaned the house. I had a few quiet hours for reading and concentration.

I was interrupted by picoides pubescens, the downy woodpecker. A pretty bird that hammers at our wood-sided house, especially when the weather’s been nasty. I find it difficult to get my thoughts onto paper when a one-ounce feathered creature is pounding away at the cornerboards, drilling 2-inch holes into the cedar and distracting the writer at her work.

Blame the bird for my lack of productiveness today? Well, maybe I needed to mull over my ideas a bit longer.

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/downy_woodpecker/videos

In the Garden

Redbud leaf in fall

“[T]o be worldly… is to be outside the gift of poetry, to be, in some measure, too human for comfort.” Peter de Bolla

A teacher of mine once defined a nature poet as a writer whose subjects and metaphor are nature-based. The majority of my work does fall under that definition, though not all of it. At a recent meeting of my writing group, one member who considers herself a beginning poet asked me, “What do you do if an idea for a poem comes to you while you are gardening?”

As in my work, her poetry often centers on images and inspirations that visit while walking, weeding, sowing, and so forth. So it was a simple and sensible question. Generally, I keep a small journal and a pen nearby when I work. There’s a porch swing near my garden gate, and often I keep my writing tools as well as my gardening tools on the swing.

But today I forgot. I was drawn to the vegetable garden by a break in the soggy weather, a glorious day before first frost, zinnias and marigolds still in bloom and all the weeds going riotously to seed. I pulled up undesirable annual grasses, polygonum, crabgrass and queen-anne’s-lace, wild asters, elderberry stalks, and vines along the edge of the fence. I’m fond of goldenrod and chicory in the meadow, but they make poor companions for asparagus; out they went. A northern mockingbird heading south stopped to perch among the walnuts trees and trilled as cheerily as it would have done in spring.

And I had ideas. And I forgot to write them down.

I cannot recreate that pleasant hour now, but the time spent among the weeds and the late bees and the big spiders catching their last prey and hanging their egg sacs in possibly-safe places while the hawks cry high overhead is comforting and inexpressibly valuable to me. But being in the world—what we tend to call “the natural world”—keeps me from becoming too worldly. Keeps me attuned to the gift of poetry, and keeps me from becoming too human (too rational) for comfort.