6,000 miles and So Many Friends Later

I have been back in Texas a week, trying to acclimate once again to a “cool day” being one that is only in the low 90’s.  Hard to accept after being in the truly cool weather of New England, but then, in time I will see that as “cool” too. Not just yet though.

Where to begin.  Clearly you don’t want ALL the details, for this is a nature blog, not really my life and times, but oh how good to be driving through nature that I know again.  The roads of New England, and really much of the East are lined with lace in August- Queen Anne’s lace, growing in thick waving lines along the side of the roads.  You wonder sometimes why one particular species seems to dominate a roadside like that.  Clearly there is something about them that thrives there.  Perhaps with the Queen Anne’s Lace it is the fact that it can produce several stalks and flowers even if mowed down, so bring on those highway mowers, it can take it.

My Stokes book on Wildflowers claims the name comes from a legend that Queen Anne challenged her ladies in waiting to make a lace as lovely as the flower for her wedding.  If anyone of them did, they didn’t get their names in print although the Queen did.  And the Latin name lets you know this is a wild carrot,  Daucus carota.   It is the wild precursor of the carrot they would later develop for our gardens.  However, this wild one is stringy and tough and takes hours to cook so stick with your supermarket variety.  They are so abundant in most places that pulling one up to scratch and sniff the root really is an acceptable thing to do.  Try it, it smells just like carrot.  As do the leaves, rub them between your finger and you will also get a carrot scent. 

If you don’t get a carrot scent, beware, for Poison Hemlock, of being used to kill Socrates fame, might be the plant you have.  It looks like a Queen Anne Lace on steroids reaching as high as 8’.  Its stalk has purple spots and is smooth, not hairy, like the Queen.  Not to be trifled with.  It grows abundantly here along the Guadalupe River.  I saw it in the spring and there is another difference, for the Queen’s Lace, appears later in the summer. 

Either way, it felt like a constant companion from Eastern TN through Maine and on the Cape and along the road through Canada.  Its distribution is supposedly throughout the US but I seemed to lose it in western TN and it certainly isn’t around here.  Or at least I haven’t seen it.

Interesting, that for all the adventures of this trip; broken down cars, my dog with a face full of porcupine quills, a cold front that attached to my bumper for the 4 day trip home with such heavy rain that I had to put on my flashers, I choose to write about Queen Anne’s Lace!  Guess that is the Nature blog part taking over.  I did intend to write from the road, but there really never was time, too many friends to see and laugh and talk with and then on the way home, that front and its accompanying “Severe Thunderstorms” would uncannily knock out the electricity each night as I settled in.  An amazing “Groundhog Day” feel to those last four day.  Perhaps I will follow this up with some other vignettes.  At least that will be my intention, providing a storm doesn’t hit!    

The Road Grows Ever Greener

TN, living up to its reputation of “Greenest state in the land of the free”, made the green of TX look pale in comparison.  Wow, the rainstorm the night before that pummeled my little Motel 6 room, left grass that seemed to have grown an extra 6” by the roadside.  The trees got ever taller, fuller and the world seemed to be swimming in chlorophyll.  However, the “green” of my wallet was pretty diminished after the car’s latest surgical procedures.  The tax alone seemed to be about what I would have expected the total cost of replacing an alternator to be.  But then, when my husband and I do these things, we use rebuilt parts and pay in sweat and tears, not currency.  Ah well, this 11 yr old car now has a platinum alternator I guess.  Either way, I was back on the road and that’s a good thing.

Hustling to get to my daughters, I didn’t stop to hike anywhere but the hills rose on both sides of the road and it was a lovely drive, one of those “4-wheeled”, walk in the woods.  Once in TN there were children to play with, more things to be packed and a house to clean from top to bottom.  The good thing of having the dog with me is that even with everything else going on, I was up early walking him, and doing so a few times a day, meant I could enjoy the sounds of so many familiar birds. A constant “drink your tea” of the Towhees could be heard and the scolding and territorial calls of the Carolina Wrens too.  People’s gardens, both floral and vegetable, looked far more like the cover of Miracle Grow than ours in TX.  It has stormed here almost daily so plants look deliriously happy.

Next lap of the journey continued through the mountains, with the Smokies on my right and later Appalachian’s and Blue Ridge bracketing either side of the road.  The breathtaking part of this day’s journey was the combination of rain clouds wreathing the hills, fog rolling down hillsides and filling valleys and a sun that wasn’t so much as rising but just slowly illuminating the scene, to reveal cows in hillside pastures with grass up to their waist, horses frisking along fence lines and the occasional deer, also melting in and out of the woods edge and the fog.  Gorgeous!  And, amazingly, I came across an obscure College radio station playing Celtic music that fit the scene like a sound track.  These are the sorts of things I thank God for!  The announcer had the heaviest Scottish accent and played almost exclusively Scotch tunes.  When I think that is who settled these hills it seemed nothing less than magical.

Later, I would chose to go off the expedient path, to take a hike along the Blue Ridge itself but through mistakes only I, possibly a true descendent of “Wrong Way Corrigan” could make, I spent 45 min heading AWAY from the Blue Ridge rather than towards it! In my defense, with mountains before you and behind you and curvy roads that all look pretty much alike and no real towns or street names, it is easy to get turned around.  Stubbornly though, and because the dog is now standing in anticipation for he senses a walk coming, I backtrack over all the wrong miles, get to where I meant to be, only to find the trails that have you walking the ridge are so socked in with fog that I could be walking in Hoboken NJ for all I know.  Later, through more wrong turns, I ended up down the mountain with all trails leading straight up it again!  Stink!  But there was a trail along a stream and picnic area that would have to do and in fact turned up wonderful mushrooms, and dew lined spider webs, so, I was happy.  A perfect cup and saucer web was so etched in dew that it came out pretty clearly in the picture.

Presently I am in Baltimore, with my daughter, and early morning walks to Harbor side are our delight.  A young Night Crown heron is stalking the trash collected at this little side canal and a Great Blue heron is perched on the edge of a dock looking out at the harbor like any other morning tourist.  And Swifts fly overhead at night making Little Italy pretty much like the real thing.  Another day here, seeing a dear old friend from Boston Science Museum days and then on to CAPE COD!!  Yeah!

Traveling the Emerald Highway

Two days ago, I started on a month long sojourn that will take me from TX to Maine, then west to Michigan and home again to TX.  Helping a daughter move to Maine is the main excuse (no pun intended) behind this, but the chance to visit scores of old friends and favorite places is what is extending this to a month long voyage.

 After a constant drumbeat on the news about how serious drought is throughout the nation, I fully expected to just see fields of fried grass, crispy crops and a general beige blight from sea to shining sea.

 So, imagine my surprise, when my first day’s trip, crossing TX from San Antonio to Texarkana, was more like a trip through New England in early June.  The grass was growing lush and green in the pastures, streams and ponds topped off with water and a beautiful blue lake on either side of Rte 30, seemingly full, shore to shore.  Not what I expected. 

In Arkansas, a state featured nightly on our news with images of cracked earth, cattle at auction, and corn the size of those little ears found in Chinese stir fry, the highway was also bordered with green, waist-high grass, flowers (looked like the marsh mallows of Cape Cod) filling the ditches.  More puzzlement on my part.  Either, I was just, amazingly, following the one strip of land in both states untouched by the drought, or, and I think this might be the case, the 3” of rain we received in TX earlier this week, perhaps had drenched this area too.

And to me, the amazing part of that, is how quickly, how almost chameleon-like, the scenery can go from mostly brown, back to a dazzling green in such a short time.  You really have to hand it to chlorophyll.  One moment, dormant and shutting down, then, wham!, water arrives, heat and sunlight show up, and “Houston, we have a go” and all hands are on deck, so to speak, mixing those ingredients that suffuse the plant with a green glow of healthy chlorophyll again. The rejuvenating spirit of nature, it never ceases to astound me.  Again, I am not a card-carrying botanist, but I do believe that is the simple explanation for why this trip has been so lovely so far.  Rain has preceded me and greened up the earth just in time for me to pass through.  It brings to mind the Verna Aardema ,wonderful children’s story “Bring the Rain to Kapiti Plain” 

“The big, black, cloud all heavy with rain, that shadowed the ground on Kapiti plain…

to green up the grass, all brown and dead that needed the rain from the cloud overhead”

And so it has.

Now, I am in TN, momentarily sidelined by a car whose alternator chose the outskirts of Nashville to die in, so an extra day added while I wait for repairs and, what happened last night?  Another 3” of rain fell in a wild storm that probably would have washed away my “little red wagon” had I been plowing through it, so it’s probably for the best that I was forced to stop. 

Yet, wherever I go, even the area surrounding a Motel 6, there are interesting things to be seen.  I can’t believe it, but right over the door next to my room is a family of barn swallows, babies all crowding the nest and looking as though they would spill out at any moment.  My guess is this is the second brood of the season.  Good for them.

  An early walk with the dog through a nearby field for sale, showed the red, red, earth of clay that is present here, with a Grand-Canyon-like ravine created by the gush of rain rushing through it last night.  I am back to east coast plants of Queen Anne’s Lace and Chicory, absent from the TX landscape but lining the roads here; dragonflies and swallows snapping up early morning insects. Lovely. 

Now, if the mechanic would just call and say all is well, I could be on my way through this, the state of song and ballad, admittedly, the “greenest state in the land of the free” and on to see my grandchildren!

 Let the journey continue!  And may green highways lead me home to my blue ocean again.

Some Like It Hot

 Some may like it hot, but that wouldn’t be me.  And perhaps it isn’t you either.  In this overheated summer of 2012 many of us are dragging limply through the sweltering days, our jug of water by our side as we accomplish needed outdoor tasks.  Yesterday I was taking a water break in our gazebo, faced flushed and feeling like I was radiating heat from every pore.  It was in the high 90’s and I had just been pushing a mower around our convoluted walking paths for over an hour, when I noticed the cool-as-a-cucumber Queen butterflies sipping nectar from the flowers at high noon in direct sunlight and not even breaking a sweat.

Now, of course, I know that insects are in that “cold blooded” category where internal temperatures are regulated by external means, but STILL.  Aren’t they hot?  So I did a little reading, enough to know, there is no way I am going to be able to wrap up “thermoregulation in butterflies” or insects in a general way here.  I have said before, I am not a card-carrying entomologist and one read of one abstract explains why!  Although, here is a fun word we can all understand.   Butterflies are “heliotherms”, deriving their heat from the sun.  Many of my Cape Cod friends probably see themselves the same way, “heliotherming” on the beaches every day.

We have all seen butterflies spreading their wings out to bask in the sun, to raise their temperature so that they are able to get those flight muscles going, but I just wonder when is too much, too much?  Clearly they have a greater tolerance for the heat than I do, for even in the triple digit weather I see these dozen or so Queen butterflies sipping from blue mist flowers planted around the gazebo with no sign of stress.  Clearly I think they can take the heat better than I can.

Speaking of these Queen butterflies, they are new to me, a close relative of the Monarch, also laying their eggs on milkweeds and also absorbing the toxins into their bodies so that they are not something birds should add to their menu.   What amazes me is how long they have been here, almost two months now.  Perhaps they are long lived, or perhaps I am seeing successive generations.  I see milkweed, a TX variety called Antelope milkweed along the road when I walk the dog and it is there that I should search for the caterpillars.  I would love to find one, for being noxious they have the same warning colors as the Monarch, black yellow and white, and like the Monarch they have fake antennae to confuse the predator. “Is this my head or is this my head?”  Only the Queens have thrown in an extra pair midway down for good measure. 

 

At any rate, they have been omnipresent on these blue mist flowers and I just wonder how long it will last.  And, in reading about the flowers, they are supposed to bloom from late summer through the fall but they have been out since early summer.  Hmm, is that unusual I wonder or not?  All the things that stump the newly transplanted person.

Well, it is that matutinal time of day (another word gleaned from “thermoregulation in insects” research, all it means is early morning) and I have birds to feed. I believe it is going to be hot, no surprise there.  And the insects will be all around me, soaking it up without compliant.  What I need is an ability to add a little “vernier control” to my life with some “cooling dominant” thrown in and I should be good.

Staying Limber Doing The "Spider Limbo"

I didn’t see it coming.  There is a small portion of my daily walk with the dog that I can actually have him off-leash, and I was lost in thought, when, wham, my head and upper torso were completely swathed in spider webbing.  Even I say, “Yuck!”  Followed by, “Sorry, I am so sorry, I wasn’t paying attention”. I was encased in webbing from my head to my waist, complete with all the victims of the past nights hunt, wrapped in their spider saran wrap.  Double yuck, and for the next 10 minutes of the walk I am trying to peel it off my white shirt, and untangle web wisps from hair wisps.

May I say, again, “Everything’s bigger in Texas” and this orb weaver was THE biggest spider I think I have ever seen.  Larger then the Black and Yellow Garden Spider I was familiar with on the Cape,

 it is omnipresent along the path I take through the Ashe Junipers with the dog.  I did some research and it is called, appropriately, a Giant (amen to that) Lichen (for its beautiful green camouflage that looks lichen-like) Orb Weaver.  (Araneus bicenterairius) 

Named by one, Rev McCook, who went from Civil War chaplain as part of his family, the “Fighting McCooks”, to later a civilian minister who loved all things Arachnid and would write a three volume set on the Orb weavers alone. (This fact and so many others used in this blog were gained by reading a most wonderfully in-depth Bug blog by Jerry Cates, found at BugsInTheNews.com )

It turns out that this is a fairly rare spider (not on my trail it isn’t!).  However, the recent spring rains produced a bumper crop of grasshoppers and has provided more food than even a spider of this size can eat, and so, they are flourishing.  Good for them.  It is an Orb weaver, but one that leaves the center of the circle open instead of filling it with “writing” as in the garden spider I mentioned above. (new fact to me: that “writing” is termed “stablimenta”) 

  But its huge body fills the space nicely when it is there, and it makes the web easier to spot and to dodge.  Which brings us to the title of this little piece.  I find I have to “limbo” under them, and as there are 5 in a row, as I walk up this hill it is quite a workout!  Singing the Chubby checkers song “Doing the Limbo rock”, I go on my way.

Yesterday the encounter brought one of those serendipitous moments where I arrived just as dinner was being “wrapped up” as it were.  The spider was spinning the latest victim turning it in silk so quickly you would have thought it was on a lathe. 

 Wow, I love that and again, if you can find it in your heart to be wowed by spiders, do some reading on their silk production.  They can spin so many different types of silk, all different strengths for different uses.  The silk is stronger than steel, yet flexible, and when they utilize all their different kinds of silk to wrap the egg cases; the eggs can easily survive through the harshest of climates. And as I can testify, the webbing clings to clothes and hair with a stunning tenacity.

For that matter, I am just in from, “walking the land” and I repeated the “wham, oh yuck, oh sorry” episode in my own yard, for one is stringing a web across a path that I use every day to get to a bird feeder.  I explained it would not be wise to continue with this web site, but I can’t say it was listening.  If not, I may be shimmying under this one at the crack of dawn when bird feeders are filled.  “How low can you go?” We shall see.

Under the Texas Sun

Every summer, since I first discovered Francis Mayes book, ”Under the Tuscan Sun” and all the other books that would follow, I have begun my summer listening to one or the other on CD’s and it takes me away to a Piazza where I am talking and gesturing with my hands and kissing bambinos and strolling and laughing.  She makes her experience come alive and it is easy to imagine yourself there.   And when I am cooking, I give an extra flourish to my chopping while I listen to her simple and elegant, fresh from the market or garden, dishes.  It doesn’t matter if I am only making macaroni and cheese, just listening makes me feel I am beside her as a great Italian cook.

So I love them, I love them all.  My grandfather came from Bologna and I love embracing this heritage, although, if the truth be known, I am also half Scotch and English back to the Mayflower days.  But I always thought the Italians lifted their glasses in a toast far more often than the British so they are the DNA I will claim.

Now, here I am living in the Hill Country of TX where many a development is named “Tuscan Heights, Tuscan Hills, Tuscan Ranch” etc.   Truly the topography is similar, even the plants probably have their cousins across the sea there, and the homes are made of TX limestone and a few have Spanish tiles and there are even vineyards, so when I want to mentally escape, that is where I go- to Tuscany without ever leaving the driveway.

Imitation being the highest form of flattery, I could easily have a run down of my own“Under the Texas sun” impressions:

-Under the Texas Sun my plants that are not from these parts are wilting.

-Under the Texas Sun the insects are humming and thrumming and mating and somehow not coming up desiccated.

-Under the Texas Sun the birds that visit the porch are panting.

-Under the Texas Sun the squirrels are splayed on the live oak branches that dangle over the open plate feeder, too hot to make the effort.

-Under the Texas Sun I am going nowhere, my husbands car is out of commission this week. Fine, have mine, for without AC I am more than content to stay in my own Tuscan villa.

 

-Under the Texas Sun the native plants are miraculously thriving.  Sending out wheels of white, the , interestingly named, black-foot daisy, blooms and re-blooms from nothing but rubble. It seems nothing less than miraculous to me.  Amazing-plant adaptations, take off your hat in respect as you pass by.

-Under the Texas Sun I no longer care that all the birds have eaten the apples, the peaches, the plums.  It’s too hot to can anyways.

-Under the Texas Sun I am somehow surviving though I thought I never would.

And it is only June 13^th.  Wait till summer arrives.

Frances, thank you for making all these impressions, not just hot, but evocative of living in my “people’s” home- Bella Tuscany!!

June- Harvest Time in Texas

Now in my mind, that does not compute.   JUNE, harvest time?  Don’t you mean September?  Not in Texas apparently. I think, soon, my garden will just be a crispy critter. If these temperatures hold up, I shall be picking stewed tomatoes, that is, if there are any tomatoes left to pick. Who knew that Golden-fronted Woodpeckers liked tomatoes above all else?  Lets back up a bit here and share what this first year of Texas gardening has been like. 

First, the notion of planting the garden no later than mid-March was wild.  I am used to putting in a potato by St Patrick’s Day but the rest always had to wait for at least late May.  But of course, here things heat up quickly, so in it went.  And then because sun and heat were abundant, things grew in a “Jack and the Beanstalk” manner -tomatoes shot up and through their cages in no time.  I was double-checking that I knew where my canner was and thinking, along with the peppers, that I could make enough salsa to go to market with.

Also, the previous owner had been kind enough to plant fruit trees, something I always had wished we had had, but in our active-duty military life, moves of every 2-3 yrs made that pretty impractical.  Now, here I was, proud owner of peach, plum, apple, pomegranate, loquats and then some.  Wahoo!  But, hold it right there Tex, don’t reach for the canner too soon, for what I had failed to factor in was my wily competition. 

I have always fed the birds, but I had forgotten how varied their diet could be.  Plums? Yum, peaches, well, there used to be an old song, “Going to the Country Going to Pick a lot of Peaches”. It was popular when my children were young and we lived in PA where people DO pick a lot of peaches, maybe it was just a local hit.  Either way, here it could definitely be re-mastered to say “Going to the Country, Going to PECK a lot of Peaches”.  

 As we speak, what was salvaged from the pecked over crop is resting under cotton sheets attempting to ripen from its still-to-green state.  A pair of Mockingbirds were the confirmed culprits.  My neighbor was out of town for a week and sadly I see their once heavily laden tree is now empty of fruit.  Somewhere in the bushes lie some pretty bloated birds.

With my tomatoes, I had managed to get a small basket of Celebrity tomatoes and cherry tomatoes and they were DELICIOUS.  Clearly though, I wasn’t the only one to think so, for soon, even the tiniest hint of color would appear and next day it would just be a hollowed out shell. Mockingbirds again, but then I started to see the aforementioned woodpecker clinging to the tomato stick and for one naïve moment I thought, good it will help with the squash bugs, but no, wham, wham, it started hammering right into a green tomato.  

What’s a non-violent gardener to do?  Finally wise up and buy netting.  I did, and now I watch as it sits upon the stick looking frustrated, if a bird can look frustrated, that these tomatoes below him are ripening and he isn’t getting a beak full. HA! But now I feel guilty, so watch I hang some suet today or some offering to soften the blow.

More disturbing though, are my cucumbers that are growing and flowering to beat the band but no cucumbers appear.  Ditto the pomegranate tree that was covered with flowers but only has three pomegranates developing on it.  One plum tree produced prodigiously, another, only three.  My mind goes to pollinators, or lack there of.  I hope it is because of something else, but bees that were buzzing all over the acacia tree in April, seem completely gone now.  Its rare that I hear any buzzing (maybe they can’t be heard because of the continuing katydid din –see previous blogs), and so sadly, I fear my garden is the poster child for what life looks like without pollinators.  Maybe someone clever will read this and can tell me what else it might be.

I have said before that thankfully my livelihood isn’t linked to my success as a gardener and that I really should just see this as very kind of me to make sure that even our feathered friends are meeting the requirement to “strive for five”.  Just doing my part to make it a healthier America for everyone, birds included.