Compostable Matter

The First Time

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:09:00 +0000

A recent issue of our local newspaper carried a photo with the following caption.
"On his second visit this summer to the rose garden at Hartford's Elizabeth Park, Wednesday, R* plays a recorder." (Hartford Courant print edition, 8/14/08)

"The world famous rose garden is the oldest municipally operated rose garden in the country. It is a two and a half acre garden which has about 800 varieties of roses that amount to 15,000 plants. Rambling roses cover arched walkways in the garden and the beds are filled with roses of every shape and color. Along the border, fences of climbing and shrub roses provide a colorful background for the bedding plants." (http://www.elizabethpark.org/)

There was no reportage of his initial trip, possibly because nothing out of the ordinary occurred.

Perhaps the first time -
Adrift without a purpose -
He smelled the roses.

Walter

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:43:00 +0000

I am becoming concerned about Walter -- the pigeon who has been showing up, unaccompanied, in our yard for most of this year. I'm also a little nervous about my own wellbeing. And that's entirely due to the hordes of Walter's peers who make their appearances when I service the bird feeders each morning.

As I was retrieving sunflower seeds from their galvanized storage pail the other day I looked up at the roofs of the house and garage and started counting pigeons. I stopped at twenty-one but more were still arriving -- attracted either by the gathering of their species-mates, or the sound of oily, black, kernels pouring into a red plastic bird seed scoop. There were probably ten or so rock doves when I began my census.

With a little more serious analysis and study I could probably determine if this gang of ten are the "serious regulars" who show up every morning -- same time, same place, no matter what -- while the next eleven are neighborhood hoverers who fly their regular morning route looking for signs of action. The remainder, whatever that number turns out to be, would be itinerants who just happened upon the scene.

It was a little foggy on census day so the effect of more than a score of short-legged, large-bodied, small-headed, cooing silhouettes pacing back and forth was pretty unnerving. It became even more so when I approached the feeders and a subset of the mob descended onto the ground immediately behind me.

When I scattered a small amount of food onto a dead spot in the lawn they leapt upon it like sharks drawn to blood. Once there they squirmed and pushed themselves against each other to form one large, writhing, multi-pigeon feeding machine. The frenzy lasted for quite awhile after I left and, to me anyway, took much longer than the size of the entree required.

I interrupted the banquet when I returned to refresh the birdbath that hangs nearby. As I got within about two feet of the group they flew up in a panic, making little high-pitched sounds and bumping into each other in midair, then correcting themselves without falling back to earth.

They maintained that two-foot social distance by landing on nearby branches or circling back behind me onto the feeding spot. And they rapidly readjusted themselves when I turned back from the watering hole to leave the scene. I could feel the air being moved by their wings and sense the feathers floating past my face.

I am not a huge fan of pigeons. They are fine in their place, which to me is some downtown urban area far enough away to prevent accidental discoveries of my suburban bird feeders. Nor, at the other extreme, am I pigeon-phobic -- as long as I keep providing them food.

These daily feeding parties continue intermittently throughout the morning even without me adding any more sustenance to the pot. "Special events", such as discarded stale baked goods, also always draw a crowd at pretty much any time of the daylight hours. But in general the pigeons are gone by around ten a.m..

Then in mid afternoon there is Walter -- pacing back and forth nervously in the general area of the food arena, but not acting as if he is presumptuous enough to find his own seating. The other day about four p.m. it had just stopped pouring rain -- and I mean really, really pouring -- many inches in a small number of hours.

And Walter was there -- alone in the yard, wet feathers plastered to his body, eyes darting existentially -- the poster-bird for forlornness. I tossed him some sunflower seeds. He discreetly darted in to digest them.

Truthfully Walter could be among those morning masticators and I just don't notice him. He really doesn't stand out in a crowd. And this mob doesn't countenance much individuality. But I doubt it. It's just not his style.

Some of us are joiners and some are not. Some of us would rather serve a quiet meal than feed the masses.

The Best Tears

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 19:08:00 +0000

In 1994 Mars and I went to the Taos, New Mexico Art Festival. We have the poster -- a print of an R.C. Gorman painting -- hanging next to the doorway of the room in which I am typing this.

Like much of this New Mexican artist's work the subject matter is a Native American woman -- frequently looking as if you had just come upon them. Each pose is unique. In this instance she is standing, facing the viewer with her left hand on her left hip, and wearing a sleeved garment decorated in maroon stripes on a purple and blue background. The hues are muted and bleed off into the background in several areas. The overall effect is one of softness. And the color combination, which could be quite jarring, is instead a gentle blending of the three colors, enhancing the fact the one of the colors is formed by the mixture of the other two.

The Art Festival was not the focal point of our visit. It was just something that we decided to do while we were there. Our main purpose was to do some trekking in the high desert country alternated every other day with urban hiking amidst the southwestern architecture -- the former with frequent breaks to hydrate and/or breathe and the latter with intermittent retail rest stops.

We spent the second half of our two-week trip in the Taos area. The Arts Festival was winding down when we came upon it in the gymnasium of the local high school.

Our basic rule for art purchases is that we both have to really like it. That was clearly the case with the poster. It was quite the opposite with some landscapes by a local artist that were a part of the show. The shapes and lines perfectly emulated the soft, layered, sine waves of the neighboring Sangre de Cristo Mountains. But the colors of the light were absolutely, totally, one hundred percent wrong -- well off the reality scale and then some. The purples, blues and reds of the skies were from the same family of colors as in the festival poster but their presentation was just too unsettlingly unworldly to have any basis in the parts of existence with which we were familiar. The poster was to be our only artistic acquisition at this festival.

A day or two later both Mars and I inexplicably awoke about an hour before sunrise. And spontaneously decided to take a drive north of town to the Rio Grand Gorge Bridge to watch the sunrise. We stood uninterrupted on the crown of U.S. Route 64 with our backs to the great rift, waiting for the first sign of sunrise over the Taos Mountains.

Because of the three thousand foot difference between the mountaintops and us the sun had risen well before we were able to see it. What we saw while we were waiting were the changes in the color of the sky and of the mountainsides. They slowly morphed from total blackness, to barely visible lines on a graph, to a kaleidoscopic display of the very same colors that we had so quickly discounted at the Taos Art Festival.

We shot many pictures but none of them came even close to portraying the vibrancy and assortment of hues that we were seeing with our eyes and minds.

Lessons learned: (1) just because you don't know about something, it doesn't mean that it's not true and (2) sometimes it takes a more than a carefully aimed camera to capture reality.

I had this in the back of my mind as Mars and I headed out recently for our "Arts in the Hudson Valley" Elderhostel. One of the topics of study on this intellectual junket was the work of the Hudson River School of Painting. We both are longtime fans of this style, particularly the portrayal of the natural light therein. Having never been to the area I surmised that, although these landscapes look quite realistic, they were in fact either amalgams of various locations or spruced up replicas of the subject matter. To me the light seemed not to be believable.

On the other hand we had been to Malta in the Mediterranean and seen the play of light in that sun-drenched, limestone-structured island. And having seen real life first, if memory serves as opposed to being self-serving, that illumination pretty much tracked with that which the H.R.S. artists showed in their own works set in that region. And there was our northern New Mexico experience.

This time we didn't see the light -- at least not one with the intensity and goldenness portrayed by Thomas Cole or Frederic Church.

Part of the reason could have been the rain and accompanying clouds that overshadowed about one and one half days of our five-day trek. And we were kept pretty busy at venues that did not necessarily show off the Hudson River area in its best light -- so to speak.

But I think the main reason was that we were looking for it. We were not searching for it at that sunrise in Taos. Nor when we went to Malta. I suspect that Thomas Cole was likewise taken unawares by his first encounter with the illumination of that region. And perhaps expressed some of this sense of surprise with artistic exaggeration.

As it says on another objet d'art that Mars and I acquired in Taos, "The best tears are unrehearsed."

(Taos Sunrise Collage by Dannielle Genovese)

So Is It Not With Me As With That Muse

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:58:00 +0000

At our most recent "Arts in the Hudson Valley" Elderhostel we studied the sonnets of William Shakespeare. Much to my surprise they actually had a story to tell.

This breakthrough discovery in critical analysis apparently occurred in the past forty years. In the 1960's there certainly was no thoughtful content to distract us captive high school scholars from ferreting out the real meaning of these fourteen line poems -- namely, how many figures of speech did they have?

With promised rewards of ten points per metaphor, fifteen for a simile, and a whopping twenty-five if you found a personification or a metonymy, we eager young scholars charged like Bloodhounds past whatever thoughts, nuances, and sentiments the Master of Avon might have left on the trail in our quest for the certainty of countable contents.

What a pleasant shock to discover after all these years that these literary devices were merely tools to convey complex themes, meaningful thoughts, and deep emotions. Who knew?

It almost makes you want to emulate the man -- or at least write a haiku about trying to.

Not writing sonnets
Too hard! Got the beloved,
I'm just not a bard.

The Way God Meant It To Be

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:51:00 +0000

Mars and I went on an Elderhostel in Newburg, New York to see the paintings of the Hudson River School on their native turf and the Brobdingnagian sized "Minimalist Art" pieces of sculpture that by happenstance also inhabit that neck of the woods.

We had seen other examples of each of them before. The canvases are amply represented in the permanent collections of two local art museums to which we belong, the Wadsworth Atheneum and the New Britain Museum of American Art. And each has had one or more special exhibits highlighting these works. We both really like this stuff.

Our exposure to the stripped down sculptural pieces has been less extensive. Alexander Calder's forty foot tall, orange "Stegosaurus" has stood in a public space next to the Wadsworth since 1973. We took our then four-year-old son Bram to see it on probably the first of his "forced culture" trips to Hartford. I asked him what he was looking at. "A dinosaur" he replied without hesitation. I was impressed -- mostly by Calder's apparent ability to construct such a realistic monster based on just its most fundamental features. Bram's love of this style of sculpture has continued into adulthood -- not that his obligatory aesthetic education played any role in that.

Sort of across the street from "Stego", next to an Eighteenth Century cemetery, are thirty-six boulders some as heavy as 19,000 pounds, arranged in a triangle by the Sculptor Carl Andre.

I worked nearby, and saw both of these works several times a week. I preferred the orange dinosaur, at least partially because its location allowed me to pass under its body and around its legs -- as long as I kept my eye out for the pigeons. The rocks were configured such that any meaningful passage within them was impossible.

They did form an interesting pattern when viewed from the upper floors of my office building. But I never thought that was how such works of art were supposed to be appreciated.

About twenty years later -- at the urging of Bram and his wife Monica -- we went to the Chinati Foundation in Marfa Texas. Thanks to the hospitality of Steffen, a college friend of theirs who was interning there, Mars and I were able to live for a week on the grounds and wander freely among the sculptural works of Donald Judd (who totally disavowed the "minimalist" label in spite of his strict adherence to the credo of that club).

When it comes to sculpture, this is the way God meant it to be -- hiking among large concrete cubes placed in an open field, and prowling among an indoor arrangement of smaller mill aluminum pieces.

Two years later we returned to Chinati for the opening of an installation of colored fluorescent lights by Dan Flavin. We braved the screaming winds of a "Blue Norther" to trek from downtown Marfa out to the museum, and then back outside from building to building in order to stroll inside among the warm neon luminescence

Since that time we have seen several pieces of such sculpture but never in an environment that made us feel that both they and we were at home. Then Monica and Bram visited the Riggio Galleries at DIA:Beacon and, with the same degree of passion they had shown for Chinati, told us that we had to go there. Mars noticed an Elderhostel trip that included DIA and the Hudson River Painters as well as the Storm King Art Center, which M & B did not get to -- and so here we are.

DIA did not allow the taking of photos, Storm King did. ("Official" photos from this trip will soon appear on Mars' blog -- http://www.viewmars.blogspot.com/.)

Both Mars and I have gotten used to looking at the world through our viewfinders -- or more accurately viewing all the subject matter that we come in contact with as potential photo-ops. It is, I think, a different way of seeing that causes us to look at (1) parts of objects rather than the whole thing, (2) from all angles (standard and non) and as a result (3) see the abstract and geometric patterns that exist therein. As a result, even without looking through the camera, we still saw objects as if we were.

At the Storm King Art Center Mars and I each got our third eye back. But I don't think that I necessarily saw any more or less than I did when I was without the digital picture taker. Sculpture the way God meant for it to be viewed.

I recently heard someone say, "The older I get, the better basketball player I used to be." Since I have to rely totally on my own mind's ROM instead of my computer's the pictures that I did not shoot at DIA will definitely be among the best I have never taken.

TANSTAAFL

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:41:00 +0000

For most of this spring and summer Mars and I have been watching the bird babies on our property progress from nestling to fledgling to juvenile. It is one of the rites of passage that we get to witness each year because we bribe the animals to stay and perform for us by keeping our bird feeders up and running all four seasons. Those that leave for the colder months always seem to return at the appropriate times when the weather warms.

Our Republican friends frown on this year-round indentureship saying that the birds need to learn to become self-sufficient. And providing a quick and easy food to them when other more natural sources of sustenance are readily available in the wild weakens their character and will eventually turn the entire species into whiney victims.

Our bleeding heart liberal amigos, on the other hand, say that we cannot do enough for Mother Nature's creatures to atone for turning their physical world into a human-centric amusement park of dubious value and leaving them to struggle for survival in the shards that we have left for them.

Not being terribly political however Mars and I do it purely for the entertainment. And watching the kids grow up and leave home is a big part of it.

We don't really have that much land -- about one quarter acre -- but the bushes and trees that decorate the property apparently provide a friendly enough environment to support a decent amount of avian procreation. Still we really do not see the young 'uns during the time of their nestling confinement. With rare exceptions the stick houses are placed in nook and crannies that neither Mars nor I come in contact with during our daily rounds. And if we do accidentally intrude we are loudly scolded for our miscreant behavior and immediately absent ourselves from the scene.

The one exception this year is a family of sparrows that has taken residence in the hollowed out core of a dead branch on the Flowering Crab tree just outside of our family room window. We have not actually seen the nest itself, or the eggs, or even the little nestlings in their entirety. We have however caught glimpses of their endlessly open beaks poked hopefully out of the front door opening. And watched the fruitless efforts of the dutifully beleaguered parents to satisfy their demands. This has gone on for weeks and weeks. Either the babies have gotten too big to leave, or sparrows breed multiple times per season at an alarmingly rapid rate.

The main attraction of the moment is however the baby grackle. These blue-green glossy blackbirds are really too large to eat at our feeders. But the experienced adults persist in trying and occasionally succeed in twisting their oversize bodies around the perch in such a way that allows them to contort their beaks onto the seed trough.

Not so with junior who, like most fledglings, is the same physical size as its parents. There is a thin, dead branch hanging about eight inches in front of the feeder. The bottom of the branch is just about eye level with the feeder's perch. Other birds -- cardinals, chickadees, and sparrows -- use the branch as a waiting room while others are dining. When seating does become available they hop delicately onto the metal base and begin eating.

The baby grackle however, either because he is not able to master the short leap of faith to the feeder or, once there, is not sure how to wrap himself into position, attempts to straddle the space with one foot on the branch and the other on the perch. Of course both the branch and the feeder begin to move further apart at this point, usually resulting in a sudden, inglorious descent to the ground on the part of the grackle. He then flies up to our birdbath (presumably to cool his temper), returns to the branch, and sits in that spot screeching for his parents to feed him.

In the beginning they took pity and provided seeds to him by reaching across from the feeder. Lately they have taken to sitting on an adjacent branch and rotating their heads around, looking everywhere except at their offspring. Sometimes the unanswered whining goes on for thirty minutes or more before they all give up and go home.

The young grackle is hardly emaciated looking, so he is getting his nourishment someplace -- perhaps even where nature intended that he should. And eventually he will become able to feed himself and leave home

Until then we are just happy that he is getting enough to eat to give him enough energy to come entertain us at our avian soup kitchen. And hopefully learning that, even though the food is provided, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Fate Happens

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:46:00 +0000

I will try my utmost to capture digital proof, but based upon past experience you are just going to have to take my word for it - our squirrels have perfected the art of dual, synchronized, seed stealing. I knew it was bound to happen.

I saw it going-down the other day when I went outside to perform my early morning bird and tree-rat rituals. If you care, the series of actions performed according to a prescribed order are: (1) put sunflower seeds into the two small horizontally hanging feeders (theoretically too small and constricted for anything larger than a chickadee but in reality...); (2) replace the corn on the metal spike of the only cafeteria section deliberately devoted to the squirrels; and (3) empty the bird bath and refill it with fresh water. Repetitive, orderly behavior is believed by some to delay the inevitable - whatever that means.

Before I begin, I try to notice what is happening at the feeders lest I throw open the door like a proverbial bull and totally frighten away a Bachman's Warbler (or some other rare species) on its only-ever appearance in our yard. This time I spotted the familiar pelt of gray draped along the house-facing side of our bottle feeder. Thinking, "same old, same old" I continued through the door until I spied either the early signs of an inevitable age-induced decline into Diplopia, or a second swatch of fur hanging on the other side of the plastic container.

It was the latter. I stopped immediately and, as silently as possible, backpedaled into the family room to notify Mars. She affirmed that I did not need to proceed directly to the Ophthalmologist Ophthalmologist. Instead, we were both witnessing yet another step in the evolution of Cirque du Squirrel performance art.

There was also a second sighting later in the morning. Once could be an aberration. Twice is definitely a trend.

Interestingly, in recent weeks, there had been quite a bit of squirrel squabbling at the feeders. While previous generations of the furry little critters totally understood their place in the pecking order and waited if not patiently, then at least nonviolently, while their betters gorged their gourmand urges - the latest gang-of-gray seems unwilling to cede any territorial or other rights to their peers. And is quite willing to fight for their right to party. So they do.

While lying in bed listening to Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep, Mars and I are frequently disturbed by the chomping sound of multiple sets of rodent teeth on the seed bottle's metal hanger and/or the scratching noise of more than two pairs of little clawed feet fighting to hang on to the slick polymer surface - plus occasional squeaks de combat.

Later, sitting at breakfast in our family room-with-a-view, we see the pushing and shoving that generates the above to-dos. And the agitated and angry cessations in violence that usually leave both of the pugilists unsatisfied and wanting more.

But now calm prevails.

It's like that stuff we believed in the sixties - "Give peace a chance" - somehow, suddenly, actually worked - like we of course knew it would all along. Obviously the squirrels - who basically concern themselves with only two things (and one of them for just a few seconds) - inevitably realized that they got just as much food for themselves when they shared the feeder as when they dined alone. After all the feeding perch has two openings and the tree rats have only one mouth.

The question now is how far Siegfried and Roy (the nom momentanement of this dynamic duo) will carry this togetherness. As George Carlin once asked, "If one member of a synchronized swim team drowns, do they all?"

Will the squirrels slowly climb down the wire hanger in unison, each perfectly matching the downward movements of its living mirror image?

Will they chew at the same rate and inflate their cheek pouches to equally skin-stretching diameters? Will the pile of discarded hulls under each one be of the same size?

When they dismount, will they fly away at the same moment, propelling them equidistantly into the air before crashing to the ground with one simultaneous thud?

And most importantly, is this new behavior to become the destiny of all squirrels? Or was it merely a one shot fluke, executed by two squirrels each so self-absorbed in its own digestive needs that they totally failed to notice the other.

Who knows! Evolution, like predestination, can only be seen in the rear view mirror.

"I'm a believer that things happen. Fate is what happens." (George Carlin)

Catch And Release

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:33:00 +0000

We caught our first two birds of the season. There were both Gray Catbirds, a.k.a. Dumetella carolinensis, a.k.a. Monqueur chat (French), a.k.a. Mimido gris (Spanish). They were captured in the usual way - inside the black, plastic netting that we place around our blueberry bushes in order to keep them, and others but mostly them, out.

I knew it before I saw it. As soon as I opened up the garage to bring out my lawn mower I could hear the SOSs - a rapid-fire series of frenzied, loud, shrill, catlike screams coming from various directions but centered on the copse of blueberry bushes in the southeast corner of our yard. It sounded like one of Cher's Italian family gatherings from the movie "Moonstruck".

I rushed to the scene of the crying, fighting my way through the wall of sound that surrounded the area. There were two Dumetellae flying frantically back and forth inside the caging that surrounded our largest bush. Each bird was screeching non-stop. There also seemed to be, judging by the sound, an audience of two or three more - moving just as frequently but more successfully than the pair of captives. And screaming just as often. The advice from their peers, however, did not seem to be helping the situation.

I walked to one side of the makeshift cage and rolled back the sheet of mesh that covered that end. One of the prisoners immediately flew out the open end. The cacophony diminished somewhat.

The remaining catbird, which up until that point had been flying back and forth, to and from the now unclosed enclosure wall, altered its pattern to exclude that end of the cage and instead ping-ponged his body in a triangle composed of the three remaining, locked-down barriers. A couple of times he landed directly on the netting and seemed momentarily to be caught therein. Then, at the point I was thinking about which gloves to put on in order to handle him, he freed himself and continued his tripartite excursion within the blueberry cage.

I decided to go cut the grass and check back on my prisoner in thirty minutes or so. The noise of the internal combustion engine drowned out the demonstrative fretting, but one half hour later, when I shut it down, I did not hear any catcalls coming from the back yard. I wandered back, affirmed that all was indeed well, and returned the flap of plastic to its protective position.

As soon as I had put back the concrete pavers that held the mesh snug to the ground I heard two of the catbirds shouting. They bobbed belligerently on an adjacent pine tree branch looking me in the eye and scolding me. I told them it was their own damn fault and that if they just stayed away from the blueberries that they wouldn't have any problems at all. They appeared not to understand a word I was saying.

The Monqueur chats have lived on our property for at least as many years as we have. The blueberry bushes, although not necessarily the same ones, almost as long. And other breeds of birds - some of them with similar longevity and all of them much quieter - have likewise taken their shots at blueberry picking

In the beginning the birds were kept from the berries by layers of tobacco netting that were wound around the bushes like mummy-wrap. Other than the occasional piece of fruit that popped out through a torn piece of white fabric, the berries were pretty much immune to the assaults of the outside fauna.

Pretty much - but not completely. Even then, with the bushes protected by multiple layers of thick cotton, the catbirds would somehow find their way into the fruit-laden inner sanctum. And need to be let go.

As I think about it, this catbird catch-and-release ritual only seems to happen once a year. It is preceded by several weeks of Mars and me wondering if the catbirds are coming back - and then one or two casual sightings of the medium-sized, gray songbird.

And it is immediately followed by a spring-and-summer long series of multiple-times-per-day public appearances by the feathered chat family in our yard - each one comprised of bravado flights and landings of astonishing closeness, and cacophonous serenades of verbal abuse.

Which means of course that the whole "help I'm trapped in the net" routine is not an instance of hunger-driven stupidity but instead a carefully orchestrated a rite of passage - followed by an apparently never-ending celebration of that event.

And apparently every year, including this one, I have successfully passed it. Which is why, of course, the catbirds will be back next spring. And why, for the rest of the summer, they will talk to me like I am a member of the family - everyone all at once, loudly and contentiously.

I'm cool with that. I am more than happy to do my part to keep the natural order of things going. Even if it means going to bed on several nights with an endlessly repeating chorus of whiney "mews" reverberating in my head.

Eh! I am part Italian. I mean it should feel like home to me. YouknowhatImean.

Carp Diem

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:16:00 +0000

Marsha found a carp
On the fourth fairway today -
Bright orange, quite dead.

No water nearby.
We wondered. How could it be -
A fish near a tee?

A Good Flight Ruined

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 17:39:00 +0000

I thought that I was having a bad time on the eighth hole until I heard the hawk.

He was screaming for help as he flew over my head, about thirty feet up, with a small bird perched on his shoulders, pecking at the back of his head. Both the predator and his attacker were pretty much identical shades of gray and white making it difficult at first to detect the latter. But Mars and I have seen scenes like this many times in the past so I knew what to look for and where. In fact I had witnessed the beginning of this drama three holes earlier while she was intently hitting her second shot from the middle of the fairway.

At that time the hawk was hightailing it across the golf course heading for the shelter of one of the few trees that dot the landscape and occasionally deflect my drives. As he rapidly descended into the confusion of branches the smaller bird released its grip and flew upwards. It swooped threateningly towards the quivering bird-of-prey four times and then flew away to the top of another perch, about a decent nine iron away from the beleaguered member of the twosome.

Twenty minutes later they were at it again. It kind of makes you wonder what it would take for the hawk to "get it". I mean isn't that how those "Invisible Fences" for dogs work - one or two zaps and the canine is trained? Pecked once, twice shy - done!

Apparently it is all about territory. The smaller birds are simply defending theirs. And, in fairness to the hawks, the borders of each little avian's homeland apparently changes throughout the year - and not just because of their resident's innate flightiness. During the nesting season the birds need to set up and maintain a "Green Zone" for their fledgling familial activities.

Sometimes the initial nesting locations don't work out for whatever reason - noisy neighbors, unanticipated maintenance costs, high taxes, etc. So the boarders move and the borders change. When the little ones actually arrive the defense of the homeland becomes even more intense. And then there are the remaining nine months when they could care less.

To compound the problem for the hawks there are no clear geographic or artificial demarcations to pay attention to. Their borders are all drawn in the air - unlike golf courses that likewise are arbitrary rearrangements of the natural world but with the purpose of moving its voyagers in an orderly manner from one sub-region to the next, each pilgrim in sequential pursuit of their own personally-propelled white orb.

For example the one from which I was watching this saga unfold. Popularly called "The Flat Nine" it is a links layout of the most rudimentary design. The land has been left level, no water hazards or sand bunkers have been created, and (with one incredibly maddening exception) it is a straight line from tee to green. And six of the fairways line up parallel to each other with nothing but high-cut grass in between.

Just prior to noticing the hawk incident I hit a shot from the far side of the ninth fairway onto the eight green, the hole from whose fairway I should have been playing. Such boundary incursions are common practice on The Flat Nine. And are graciously incorporated into the ebb and flow of each golfer's pace of play. Because other courses have wider fairways, similar shots there would not impinge on those groups playing ahead or behind, but would instead be swallowed up by various forms of adjacent man-encouraged vegetation.

These golf course hole demarcations are, I am sure, perfectly obvious from the air. For some mysterious reason however the birds are unwilling to use them as a template for defining their own territories.

Conversely - and I think that this is a good thing - the earthbound golfers seem equally averse to copying the behavior of their territorially impinged upon, higher altitude neighbors. Definitely a plus for those of us who otherwise would end each round of play with a series of serious neck and shoulder wounds and a thundering headache.

Staying within the lines is sometimes a good thing. A bad day on the golf course is definitely better than a potentially worse one above it.

Dishing The Dirt

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:29:00 +0000

I just bought some dirt.

It is not the first time that I have done this - nor will it be the last. If I weren't a gardener I would think that anyone who spent their money on bags of something that, other than water, is the most plentiful compound on our planet was just plain crazy. But I am a gardener. And therefore I not only think that my financial investment in this stuff on which we stand is not only not insane but is in fact one of the best uses of my disposable income that I am likely to make in this entire fiscal year.

Because this is really important to me I want you to read this very slowly and emphatically - IT IS NOT JUST DIRT, IT IS TOP SOIL!

Dirt, as one of the members of my garden club would say, is something that you find in your kitchen. This is soil. And moreover this is not just any soil; this is the very topmost soil - not bottom soil, or middle soil, or even upper-middle soil - but top-of-the-line topsoil.

And organic too.

Maybe you are saying, "What in the world is inorganic soil? Is it some glow-in-the-dark earth from the farms surrounding Chernobyl? Or perhaps a laced-with-lead, man-made dirt substitute manufactured in China?

Not to worry, this soil is from Canada, from the same company that produces the Tourbe de Sphaigne Canadienne that I also purchased along with it. I have been using Sphaigne Canadienne for many years and, in spite of its country of origin, have never found even the slightest trace of the dreaded "Four Canadian Ps" - Pucks, Poutine, Pork Pie, or Pea Soup in the peat. (There is a slight underlying maple syrup aroma, but hey, nobody's perfect.)

Although it took me a while to become comfortable with the concept of buying dirt, purchasing peat has always made sense to me - even when I was just a neophyte jardiniere and had no real idea of what it was or what it did. I knew that it came from bogs and, probably due in part to my Irish heritage, that was plenty good enough for me.

I was however pretty shocked to discover that it came in bags. I was expecting something more like a dripping bale of wet black, foul smelling stuff inefficiently bound together by hemp cords and oozing organic matter like an overexcited volcano. But I was even more stunned when I cut the shrink wrap container open and discovered that it had been mistakenly filled with old, stale cigarette tobacco. It did however smell great and my lungs instinctively reverted to that happy feeling of fullness that I remember so well from my Lucky Strike / Camel days.

This was all of course before I knew that:
"Prior to a peat bog being harvested, it is first drained of near-surface water and cleared of all surface vegetation. The bog is then harrowed to a depth of three to four inches to expose the top layer of peat to the sun and wind. Once dried, the peat is vacuumed with harvesting machinery. A vacuum harvester can harvest an average of 100 acres per day and ideally the number of harvesters per bog should enable the entire exposed portion of bog area to be harvested each day" (www.sungro.com)

This probably results in a pretty impressive bog-to-bag ratio but it does take a lot of the romance and excitement out of the consumer's usage of the product.

Nonetheless dried and vacuumed peat has proven to be just as addictive as its nicotine laden look-alike. I have pretty much never been without an open bag of Sphaigne Canadienne on the premises and I have used it faithfully to prepare every planting site on my property since my very first vegetable garden back in 1977.

So not surprisingly, according to experts in the horti-addiction field, my use of "soft" soil supplements quickly led to further experimentation with more potent, and more expensive additives such as mulch, vermiculite, composted cow manure - and ultimately imported Canadian topsoil. Once you've experienced that transcendent gardening high you will pay whatever it takes to keep it going.

Obviously the person who coined the phrase "dirt cheap" was not a gardener.

Double Black Diamond Golf

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:52:00 +0000

Mars and I are flat-landers.

Connecticut, where we live, while not totally lacking geographic ups and downs is nonetheless by no means mountainous. Its high point is about 2,380, feet, and an elevation map of the state shows most of the land in the zero to six hundred foot range.

When we skied it was cross-country - relentlessly gliding across the snow neither helped nor hindered by gravity except for an occasional downhill snowplow or uphill herringbone of thirty seconds of less in duration. It's what our native terrain gives us.

Likewise golf. The course on which we have played probably ninety percent of our games is familiarly known as "the flat nine" because, other than one hole where the tee is probably twenty feet higher than the green, it is.

So when we decided to go on a golf mini-vacation to celebrate Mars' birthday and rehab-generated quick recovery from hip replacement surgery (like Jack Nicklaus she was hitting balls at eight weeks and playing at twelve), we chose the golf course at Mount Snow - one of Vermont's leading downhill ski areas.

It was a Black circle, Double black diamond course. "Difficult. This is where the [holes] start getting scary. You don't want to take off your [soft-spiked shoes] on one of these [holes] because you never know if you'll be able to stand safely on the slope without them. Usually very steep."

The degree of difficulty of a golf course is indicated by two numbers - its "rating" and its "slope". "The Course Slope value is a two- or three-digit integer, always between 55 and 155, with 113 being the average or 'standard" value.'" This course had a "slope" of 117 to 129 depending upon from which tees your were hitting. That seemed low to us until we realized that "The Slope is a measure of how much difference a course's difficulty is for the average bogey golfer compared to the scratch golfer." - i.e. it really has nothing to do with the course's "slope". If it did, Mount Snow Golf Club would have a slope somewhere north of 308 - slightly less than Mount Everest but much higher than other courses which when they are shut down for the winter can only be used for Nordic skiing. This place would be just right for the X Games hot dog snowboarding events.

At the Pro Shop, when we asked, we were told that the altitude there was "about seven thousand feet". This turned out of course to be ridiculously incorrect - it is in fact about one thousand five hundred feet - but that piece of misinformation, plus our (we assumed altitude-induced) dry lips, and the fact that you could not see over the mountain into the valley from the first tee to the first green led us to believe that we were in for our first experience with the sport of "Extreme Free-Range Golf Trekking". It was terrain more suited to a funicular or a four wheel drive ATV than a golf cart.

Since Mars and I were playing as a part of a special off-season, midweek package we were not assigned any Sherpa Guides or Llama caddies. On the first day we were playing by ourselves and stood on the first tee looking hopelessly for some target to aim at - nada, nil, zilch.

The scorecard told us that there should be a green 372 yards off in the distance. I walked as far to the left as I could without falling off the side of the earth, stood on my toes, and saw what I thought was the very top of a white flag down in a valley off in the distance. So I gave up on my quest, took aim at the center of the part of the fairway that I could see, "gripped it and ripped it!". Mars did the same. Both balls disappeared from sight. For all we knew they could have rolled fifty yards, gone over the edge, dropped straight down, and landed in the first hole located three hundred twenty-two yards immediately below the drop off point.

They didn't.

We left base camp and moved onward, expecting to find scores of abandoned oxygen tanks and left-behind rope ladders. Instead we found both of our balls. One swing apiece later and we saw the green. Six more shots each and we both heard the little rattling sound. Not the best start, but no balls had been lost, no one had fallen into a chasm or been attacked by a Yeti, and the sun was shining. On to number two. Three holes later we stopped keeping score and we started to play much better - really.

For one thing, like when you first look up at the mountain you are about to hike, we had initially been intimidated by the geography of the course. Secondly we accepted the fact that we would just never be standing on level land at all during our projected two-days / thirty-six holes of play, and adjusted our swings accordingly. And most importantly we began to enjoy the scenery. These are after all the mountains of Vermont.

Well-designed golf courses are landscaped to discompose, disconcert, disquiet, distress, and disturb. Hitting a small dimpled ball one hundred yards in the air over water is no more difficult or easy than whacking it the same distance over land - but it sure feels different when you are doing it. Objects are closer than they appear - or farther. Openings between trees are made to look narrower than they really are to discourage - or wider to seduce. You have to look very closely and analytically at all of your surroundings to realize where you really are, and where you are going.

It also seems that the relative elevations of here-to-there are fiddled around with to make one hundred forty yards uphill longer than that same distance on level land, and conversely much shorter downhill.

This concept of variable distances based on non-comparable altitudes I totally do not understand. In fact I never even thought of it until the second day of our foray. We were paired up with Lee and Dave, two really nice retired guys from Albany who were on one of their weekly golf trips to courses within two hundred miles of their home. Before and after very shot they verbalized their club and swing selection - "The scorecard says one hundred forty yards, but it's downhill so that's one less club."

Mars and I ignored their analysis, largely because we didn't understand it. Sometimes we "over-clubbed" (hit it too far), sometimes we "under-clubbed". I suspect that was more likely caused by our innate inconsistency than any esoteric aerodynamics - but who knows?

We started that second day with drives right down the middle of the fairway and celebrated with a modest terrorist knuckle tap. And we played better than we did on the first one in spite of being forced to perform in front of an audience of two better golfers.

It is possible that we might have even played within the "Course Slope" - or that may be what they call in golf "a good lie". We would know for certain if we had kept score. I lost several balls. But we did make some pars, and seemed to each hit at least two really good shots on every hole.

It was our first experience with Alpine Golf and a deliberately devious course. A good walk ruined, or an opportunity to see the natural world in a different way? Like any well-designed landscape, it all depends on how you look at it.

Who Knew?

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:17:00 +0000

Who knew that a little sunlight could make such a big difference?

Over the winter we had a tree cut down on the southern border of our property. It was a fir that, like all of its fellow flora in that section of our property, was suffering from the surfeit of shade that each plant was inflicting on each other. The other major inhabitants of the region effected by the daytime darkness were several hosta of varying hues and variegations which we had been hoping would bulk up and fill in the area - but never had. Along with some woodruff, various ferns, and a patch of Aegopodium podagraria (a.k.a. goutweed) - each of which flourished but, like the hosta, never really grew to its full potential.

For the tree the lack of sunlight evidenced itself as an escalating abandonment of life in its lower branches; a decided anorexic quality to its mid-height ones; and a desperate reaching for earth's life-sustaining star at the top. With regrets, because the tree had a longer claim on this property than we did, we decided to have it taken down. (Had our roles been reversed I like to think it would have done the same thing.) We also thought perhaps the removal of the small amount of shade that it generated might lead to some minimal improvements in the health and growth of its shorter neighbors.

This May we noticed that the hosta were taller, more vibrantly colored, and no longer provided a convenient walking path between themselves. Then, a week or so ago, the goutweed opened the side door, marched into the family room, pushed me off the couch, and grabbed control of the television remote. Fortunately there was nothing good on at the time. After surfing the dial twice-around, the vigorous, rhizomatous perennial sighed and returned to its home in the south forty. And quietly began to take over that area.

We became aware of the vigorous growth of the groundcover when we heard what we thought was a choking sound from the area just to the left of where the shade-producing tree used to live. Just in the nick of time or it would have been not just "hosta manana", but "firme hosta la muerte" for the two "Plantain Lilies" that had the misfortune to reside right next to the goutweed. Now they were up to their peduncles in podagraria and quickly going down for the count.

Our preferred style of floral landscaping is what we have been told is a Monet Garden - named after the French impressionist painter whose gardens looked like his paintings (or vice versa) - large quantities of flowers merging into each other with little or no visible space between them.

We had hoped that the multiple blends of hosta would do just that, giving us a canvas replete with subtle variations in color and texture. Mars and I got the Goutweed over five years ago to fill in the little empty spaces within the area. We were told at the time that it would "take off everywhere" but figured that, since very few other plants went wild in our little shaded wood-let, we would take a chance. And for all these years the Goutweed docilely stayed close by to its original home, cautiously venturing perhaps a foot or two into the realm of its fellow flora - but never exhibiting the least lust for Lebensraum.

Now suddenly, instead of Claude Monet's Garden, we were being confronted with Thomas Hobbes' State of Nature. And it looked as if the life of the hosta was going to become "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Violent action was required. Rolling up my sleeves I tapped into my inner Noble Savage and gently but firmly tore into the pushy podagraria, removing its tenacious tendrils from any hosta contact, and redirecting the survivors either outwards toward one of the few remaining blanks spots or inward back into themselves. After thirty minutes of ripping, tossing, cursing, and sweating I had restored spaces for the hosta to breathe and a sense of order to the garden - although probably only temporarily.

One of the tenets of Claude Monet's Impressionism was an "emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time)..." Legend has it that he would set up a series of easels in front of a single subject matter and move from canvas to canvas as the visible results of the radiation began to change - thereby capturing the precise impression of each exact moment.

As an artiste, and probably also as a jardinier, Monet was in tune with the consequences of sunlight or the lack thereof. Something that Mars and I, as tenders of our plot of earth, apparently are just beginning to learn.

284 East-West

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:32:00 +0000

It is spring. The lawn grass is thick. And the squirrel bypass is open.

According to my online dictionary a bypass is (1) a road passing around a town or its center to provide an alternative route for through traffic. (2) a secondary channel... or (3) an alternative passage made by surgery...

1) Although this bypass actually pretty much goes through the center of town, it does function as THE one alternative route to the branches-and-wires beltway that encircles our yard, potentially providing access to every bushy tailed tree-rodent on the planet. This high-speed/high-altitude route leads into a network of "blue highways" within our property that allows any one who uses them an easy entrance to all of the tourist sights therein.

2) It is most definitely a channel. Again borrowing from my computer-based list of words and their meanings, a channel is:
- a narrow gap or passage...
- a tubular passage or duct...
- a groove or flute...

That's exactly what we've got - a groove in the grass.

3) It was created by an act of surgery - albeit not one that was performed with the noble goal of reestablishing a life-nourishing flow of blood to an artery-clogged patient but rather done with the intent of providing its practitioners with even faster and easier access to free food. So I guess, in at least some sense of the word, it does aid circulation.

The squirrel bypass is most visible in a lawn needing mowing but is of sufficient depth to be easily discerned even when the grass has been freshly cut to its recommended height of five inches. In fact I would calculate the depth of the ditch (DotD) as: DotD = (H - M) where H = the current height of the lawn and M = the matted down thickness of several blades of grass repeatedly run over by rapidly moving squirrels laden down with pouches and stomachs full of sunflower seeds.

The path of this pedestrian parkway runs from the base of one of our oak trees to the base of the flowering crab apple that holds our cache of birdseed feeders. It is, I am absolutely certain, the most direct route from one point to the other. The thoroughfare has existed for probably as many years as we have had feeding stations and squirrels to raid them - about thirty. Although invisible during the grass dormancy months (except when snow covers the ground) the tree-rats seems to have no trouble at all staying on the road as they dash across the yard in single-minded pursuit of their sunflower seed prey.

I have never scientifically determined it, but I would suspect that it has followed, within a fraction of an inch, the exact same track all of those years. While we may think that the squirrels' food procurement antics are amusing, acrobatic, and even artistic I suspect that they approach these meal missions with an obsessive efficiency matched only by that of a deadly heat-seeking missile, honed in inexorably on its hapless target. Extra travel time means less time at the dinner table - lack of haste makes waste.

Mars was saying just the other night that we ought to do something to make the squirrels' dinner theatre more challenging and hence more entertaining to us. Maybe we should decorate the path with some tiny little barriers such as those used in dog agility trials - tunnels, teeter-totters, tire jumps. weave poles, and orange plastic cones.

Faced with the choice of altering their beeline byway or learning new tricks, I have no doubt that they would choose the latter. And, after a momentary increase in the pace of their commute, they would quickly learn to negotiate their newest challenges with no resulting loss of face-time with the feeders.

Who knows - it might actually increase traffic on the thruway. After all I'm sure that even Tiger Woods, known for his extremely intense focus on the putting green, would enjoy the challenge of hitting one through the windmill blades and into the clown's mouth every so often.

Gazing Into The Present

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:33:00 +0000

Victorians spied
on their daughter's dates, while we
reflect on ourselves.

ponddoc.com

Rescue Me

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:51:00 +0000

Mars and I have started a "Rescue Garden" on the parcel of earth that in previous years has been the site of our vegetable plot. That wasn't what it started out to be - it is however what it has become.

After thirty years of competing with them, we finally decided that the local farmers in our neck of the woods can in fact grow a greater variety of higher quality fresh produce than we are able to generate in our little thirty feet by six feet piece of ground.

And of course there were the rabbits that on several occasions during those years have decimated our burgundy bean crop.

In the morning we would see several rows of newly sprouted shoots ready to germinate. By evening it had become a trail of stubs neatly gnawed off with the precision of an automated grim reaper. One time we caught one of the floppy eared decimators in flagrante delicto. Mars rushed up to him in the garden shouting obscenities in transit and stopped within a foot of the rapidly moving rodent mouth. She continued her tirade. He looked up at her as if she were a crazed religious zealot interrupting the peaceful meditations of the Dalai Lama, and left. Later that night the remainder of the beans was destroyed.

But the Rescue Garden really got started with Monica's hollyhocks. Last October we were visiting Monica and Bram in Santa Fe when Mars noticed the tall Eurasian plant of the mallow family, widely cultivated for its large showy flowers growing along their driveway. Since it was seed harvesting season she liberated some of the plant's little reproductive units with the intention of redeploying them somewhere in what was then still planned to be our mostly vegetable garden.

After a little thought we decided to convert the entire plot to flowers with the hollyhocks being the centerpiece and the majority of the remainder being perennials.

My first plan was to have every flower in the garden be cut-able. Actually "plan" is way to strong a word. I had a vague notion that we could have a flowerbed filled with a combination of perennials and annuals that would reach bloom in carefully ordered succession beginning in mid spring and extending through the autumn and thus provide a steady supply of flora to decorate the vases within our domicile. I actually even looked in a couple of brochures that had been given to me by one of the speakers at the men's garden club of which I am a member. In reality the only plan that we had was to go to our favorite local nursery on Memorial Day weekend, purchase some stuff, and plant it.

Then I saw the peonies. I had been working at the town rose garden. It is our garden club's major civic project. And as I walked back to my car I spotted several of the burgeoning plants sitting neglected and abandoned in what was once the town's "Heritage Garden" at the adjacent town hall. The building is undergoing significant renovations. The work that is involved and the consequent placement of equipment have largely decimated the area. Prior to the construction our club relocated many of the plants to various other public spots in town. Somehow we had missed the peonies.

I checked with the appropriate authorities and went back later that day, with Mars, to save them. After I had dug them up Mars asked that always-fateful question, "What is that maroon feathery plant up there against the wall?" And I gave my traditional answer, "I don't know. Let's bring it home, plant it, and see."

So we did. Along with the wispy, white-flowered plant next to it and the green-leaved, possibly Daisy bush to its other side.

Since we already had three peonies I potted them for future disbursement to other parts of town. The three unknown plants, however, looked pretty desperate so we planted them immediately. The plumed plant still was not looking well so we gave it extra water and cut off its dead-looking appendages. Two more days and it looked as healthy as the other two.

Then, during the week before Memorial Day I, along with several others, received an email from one of my fellow garden club members.

"Subject: Inventory reduction event
Giving away assorted perennials and andromeda, burning bush, azalea (red, white, pink), yews (upright and spreading), globe thistle, white pine, lilly of the valley, arborvitae, juniper, rhododendron, astilbe, jack in the pulpit, boxwood, tiger lilly.
All in pots and ready to go....Be there."

Mars and I have seen stories like this on local television - house overrun by hundreds of cats or dogs; overwhelmed pet owner shown with their sweatshirt over their head being led away by the authorities; pitiful pictures of orphaned pets; plaintive pleas for willing adopters from the news anchors. If it happens with fauna it could happen with flora. This was obviously an SOS in advance of the crisis. And we were there within hours to help.

We rescued a globe thistle, a trio of jacks-in-the-pulpit, and three other plants the names of which we no longer remember although we think one is "kind of like" a sunflower and should be pinched off early in the season to encourage growth, and another is "probably" low-growing and ground-spreading.

We placed the plants with the erect spadix overarched by the spathe that resembles a person in a pulpit into the small woodland area along our south border. And we put the others into our rescue garden. Because we couldn't go completely cold turkey in the homegrown vegetable department we also put in eight tomato plants. And we placed an octet of Zinnia plants in some of the remaining empty spots.

The centerpiece Hollyhock seeds were installed in a side altar abutting our Iris and Chive bed. Thus far we have seen no signs of life from them. Perhaps the plane flight from the southwest to the northeast was just too traumatic. Or maybe the surfeit of water has proven to be more than they can handle.

"In the language of flowers, hollyhock stands for fertility and wealth... A stalk of hollyhock is sometimes incorporated into celebrations of Lammas [the festival of the first wheat harvest of the year] as a way of ensuring the fertility of fields." (alchemy-works.com)

Including themselves we hope. Although not really a rescued plant, the hollyhocks were the initial inspiration for the new garden. It would be both ironic and dispiriting if instead of being the stars of the show they instead became its first - or even worse, only - casualty.

Now You See It...

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:56:00 +0000

It is really hard to remain hidden in today's technological world.

I would call it accidental ego-Googling. When I used that Internet search engine to look for the phrase "stephen wright spider in shower" the fourth entry in my results list was http://www.compostablematter.com/2006_04_01_archive.html.

"It's like the old Stephen Wright comedy routine [about] taking a shower and seeing a spider scurrying across the white tiled wall. The spider stops and seems to crouch down thinking 'Yeah. I'll just stay still and press my little black body down against this shiny all white surface. Nah! He'll never see me.'"

I was trying to find the quote because of a picture that I took recently at one of our bird-feeding stations. It made me wonder - "does he really think that no one can see him?"

It seems that he does. Feigned invisibility is actually one of the squirrels' principal forms of self-defense against predators - "The coloring of the squirrel serves as a camouflage, especially when on the trunk of a tree."

Some of their other tactics are:

"The squirrel will also quickly move to the opposite side of the trunk, so the predator does not knew it has moved up to a different location."
[Also known as "fleeing the scene" - changing places is hardly unique to tree rodents. Its success does depend however upon having a predator who is easily convinced that "out of sight, gone for good" - like a dog who is totally mystified by the apparent disappearance of a fake-thrown ball.]

"Squirrels have the ability to turn their feet one hundred and eighty degrees, which allows it to quickly scurry up the nearest tree to escape."
[This one took me a while to conceptualize - and I'm still not certain that I understand it. This sounds too much like a scene from a Road Runner cartoon with the squirrel's body rising up on ankle-springs. How does having your feet facing in the opposite direction from your body make it possible to move any faster? And when you go forward are your really going backward?]

"A squirrel will flick its tail from side to side to distract a predator. When caught by a predator, the tail will actually break off, allowing the squirrel a chance to escape. This defense mechanism is also seen in lizards."
[Apparently the sight of a swishing bushy tail is quite mesmerizing to some of those who would prey on squirrels. Like the immediately above escape tactic I have never witnessed any voluntary (or involuntary) squirrel tail severing - nor have I found any evidence of it in my yard. I am assuming of course that the duped predator would be too embarrassed to keep their culinarily useless trophy and would just leave it behind.]

All of these squirrel stratagems however pale in comparison to the gift of self-invisibility. It's an ability that a lot of us would like to have - at least once in a while. For a while I thought that I did. After all I can still ego-Google my name and come up empty. But there is apparently a backdoor method of tracking me down.

I probably should begin some twisting exercises to make my ankles more flexible. You never know when I might need to be able to literally spin on my heels and move rapidly to another out-of-sight location.

One That Does Not Wither

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:16:00 +0000

Every garden has the history of itself within it.

It is, at all times, the sum total of the peat moss, compost, topsoil, cow manure, fertilizer, and sweat with which the gardener has laboriously changed the clods of hard, red clay into a bed of dark brown fertility that sifts softly through his bare, dirt-lined hands.

It is also the latest generation of earthworms - few in number in the early days of the hardened earth but now appearing in multiples-per-shovelful, made momentarily motionless by the upturning of their home then slithering swiftly in search of new soil samples with which to nourish themselves and their surroundings.

And it is all those uninvited former residents whose descendents voluntarily appear in unexpected and sometimes totally unwanted locations year after year after year.

Some of these interlopers are weeds of the classic definition, "a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants". These unwelcome weasel-inners are, of course, forcibly removed on sight and consigned to the Ninth Circle of Horticultural Hell, a.k.a the bottom of the large green town-supplied trash collection barrel. Others however are not that easily dismissed.

Tomatoes for example. Here is a portion of the dialog on "volunteer tomatoes" from "answers/yahoo.com".

"I feel bad for I am pulling these as weeds. what do you think? out of garden space. (Oreo)

"For some reason I also feel bad and a little curious about weeding volunteer plants. Since most tomatoes are hybrids they don't grow 'true' from seed, but that's the fun, to see what the new tomato will look like after the plant is open pollinated. I've had normal looking tomatoes most of the time but one year I had one that produced ribbed fruit like little red pumpkins. If you can find the room, save one for fun. (RScott)

"If there is little room, they won't grow well. Rip them out. (sncmom20)

"I usually leave the volunteer tomatoes. My regular tomatoes are caged to 1) support them, and 2) protect them from critters. I view the volunteers as a bonus if they survive, and it gives the critters (squirrels, rabbits, cats) something to get to so that they don't go after my 'good' plants. But, if you don't want them, and are concerned about the space in your garden, then pull them. Technically, a weed is just an unwanted plant. (B.B)"

Our volunteer tomatoes normally generate nothing more than a tower of compound leaves with healthy looking, albeit seriously undersized, leaflets arranged attractively along equally pint-sized rachises - but no fruit. The reappearing Amaranths however are totally the real deal.

Named from the Greek word "amarantos" meaning "one that does not wither" Amaranths are often used in literature and poetry to symbolize immortality. This plant has more families (sixty) than the Providence Mafia. And a big enough variety of distinguishing characteristics as to earn it the label of a "difficult genus" among horticultural systematists - those Latin speaking scientists who try to impose a difficult-to-remember-and-pronounce nomenclature on things that the rest of us have a hard enough time remembering whether we just watered or not. Amaranths are also know as "Pigweeds" which I think gives everyone a good idea of just how these official plant name-makers really feel about them.

Some Amaranths are considered weeds. However people around the world do value other varieties as leaf vegetables, cereals, and ornamentals. I believe the variety that grows in our garden is called "Amaranthus cruentus" or "Purple, Red or Mexican Amaranth". It may not be, but the pictures that I found for this model sure look like what happens to our yard every summer. Unlike the tomatoes that appear in groups of two or three, the volunteer Pigweeds arrive in mobs of thirty or forty at a time. Each plant can grow to a height of about five feet with a thin but muscular stalk (some have required a pruning saw) topped by a one to two foot tall maroon feathery flower - think Tina Turner as a maroon shaft of wheat.

I also came across a website for the "The Order of the Amaranth...a social, fraternal, and charitable organization whose membership is open to both men and women with a Masonic affiliation." And a music video called Amaranth by a "Finnish symphonic metal band" called Nightwish. In this three minute and fifty-four second movie two 18th Century looking young men find an injured female blonde angel (with really big wings) and bring her back to their house. The home is then set ablaze by the angry villagers, and the angel ascends from the flames. Any questions?

It is discoveries like these that are the real reason I haven't determined what the actual Pigweed variety that resides on our property is - along with the fact that I don't really care that much. Telling people that what there are looking at is an Amaranth is more than enough to impress 99% of the visitors to our gardens.

We saw identical Amaranths to our home-growns on our trip to the Mediterranean island of Malta. There they were actually the centerpiece of many of the public gardens that decorated the town of Sliema and other parts of the limestone isle. Our personal Pigweed plague preceded this journey abroad so we recognized them when we saw them. And, since we already had them, we made no attempt to smuggle seeds back with us - not that we would have, it being illegal and all that. It did however move the purple plant up quite a bit in my personal estimation seeing as how it was such an important part of the ultra-cool Euro-Horti-Cultural scene.

Our Amaranth collection came from Mars' parents in whose vegetable garden it had likewise grown unsolicited for years. My recollection is that they snuck it in among our vegetables one day while we were at work. If true, while it would not be in keeping with the their normal behavior, it would be consistent with the stealthy way that Amaranth spreads itself around - at least here in "the States". I do not believe that either of my in-laws was in the Order of the Amaranth (although they may have secretly belonged). I am however quite certain that they never saw the music video.

The next year we probably had fifteen or twenty of the thick-stalked scarlet imposers. And from then on at many times that number annually. Although I feel badly about it, I rip most of them out of the dirt at first sight - not because I don't appreciate their beauty and attitude (Tina Turner, remember) but because of space constraints. Because the Amaranths just keep on coming this culling out process continues throughout the summer and beyond - even when the rest of the garden crops have packed it in for the year.

I have used dirt from my vegetable garden to fill in other spots around the yard and - you guessed it - the Pigweed shows up there also. These uninvited but welcome intruders are as much a part of the soil as the compost, peat moss, topsoil and worms. And they probably will be forever - even if the next property owners are not gardeners and do not appreciate them.

I mean what are they going to do - incinerate the insistent Amaranths out of existence? We saw in the Internet music video how well that works!

Walter

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:56:00 +0000

Then of course there is Walter.

Walter, as you may have guessed from his name, is a pigeon. He, or his doppelganger, has hung out at our house for the past three years - spring, summer, fall and winter - always by himself. Walter appears to be a genuine "confirmed bachelor" - only the second one of these I believe I have ever come across.

The other was my Uncle Bill. He was one of my father's three brothers and lived on the first floor of a three story flat with his sister and her husband. My parents and I lived on the third floor from the time I was in fifth grade through my senior year of high school when my father died and my mother moved us in with one of her own sisters.

Uncle Bill was a beer salesman (Schmidt's of Philadelphia); a hunter with a gun rack of several rifles; and a raiser and breeder of beagles, whom he kept in a series of wire kennels in the backyard. The small-hound population ranged from five to twenty-or-so, depending. He sold most of the puppies, keeping one or two from each litter if he thought they had game-dog potential.

When he was home, which he was every night, Uncle Bill was either: in his bedroom cleaning his guns or reading his hunting magazines; out back tending to his Beagles; or doing some hunting-related activity in the center bay of the three car garage in our backyard. His carport contained a refrigerator (for storing beer and game), a small stove (for cooking game), and at various times during the appropriate season, the skins or whatever of the game he had killed. I can remember eating squirrel stew and rabbit stew, and tasting venison - in the garage, but never in the house.

At work Uncle Bill always wore a white dress shirt, tie, and suit. At home he was always in some variation of his hunting clothes. I actually cannot picture him in anything other than his dress clothes or a red plaid wool shirt - but I am sure he didn't wear the latter in the hot summer weather of Connecticut. I imagine that we wore some third outfit to sleep in but that would be an assumption.

It was probably my youth but I always felt like you could feel a circle of peaceful solitude around my uncle - and Walter gives off much the same feeling.

He normally arrives shortly after sunrise and begins picking dutifully among the sunflower seeds that lay scattered under our bird feeders - then leaves quietly after thirty minutes or so. Over the course of a day he repeats this routine several times. Walter looks like a generic pigeon - no dramatic black or white markings, no funky head feathers, not too big or too small - just your average pigeon.

When others arrive on the scene, whether of his or other breeds, he quietly hangs around with them, maintaining a social distance that seems to say, "I am being friendly but not familiar". The squirrels and other birds seem to honor his request for privacy - or at least they don't knock him down or run him over. If some of the other pigeons get romantic Walter simply continues his quiet quest for food, skillfully maintaining his space without impinging on the adjacent tango

Sometimes Walter flies up to the peak of our gable/hip roof and stares down at the yard below. Although all we can make out of the rooftop watchers are their silhouettes, we can always recognize Walter by the amount of space between him and his cohorts.

It's difficult for me to understand the joy of a solitary life - or even the possibility of joy therein. Still I believe that my Uncle Bill, by his nature, was happiest in his solitude. And he was able to carve out a niche in the everyday world that allowed him to live within that circle, as he wanted to.

At least I hope so. And Walter too.

Ducks Redux

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:51:00 +0000

A while back I wrote about some robins, ducks and sparrows that dropped in on our property earlier this spring - the land birds deciding to stay, the water ones not. Later I followed up on the apparently successful efforts of "Guido" the Robin to attract a mate to the homestead that he was trying to establish in our neighbor's Star Magnolia.

Guido's good luck seems to have gone south - at least I hope it's that direction, being as that's where the other eligible bird apartments on our premises are. A few days after the Star Magnolia went into full blossom, and his female friend went into the nest, the white flowers, as they are wont to do, began falling - re-exposing the bowl-shaped twig assemblage to the light of the outside world. And Lucia (as Mars had chosen to call her) decided that she no longer wanted to live there.

She has however continued to appear with her apparent main squeeze around the bird feeders so we suspect that Guido has established another residence more to her liking somewhere else nearby. I will probably discover their new home when I inadvertently come to close to it during my summer bush-pruning activities.

It has happened before - not with Robins but rather with roosts of both Catbirds (which have not yet been seen this year) and Mockingbirds (which have).

There are a number of thick, green, leafy bushes in our backyard ranging in tallness from three to five feet at this time of year to potentially double those heights.

I try to keep the bunch of them at a maximum of seven feet - my stature plus a comfortable pruning shears' reach. They grow quickly so it is not uncommon for me to cut them back every other week during the warm weather. And at least one of those trimmings will, guaranteed, occur during the brooding season.

I have never actually been attacked - although my former neighbor John was chased by contentious Catbird couples at least twice. But I am acutely aware of the possibility and as a result pay close attention when one or more adult birds pop suddenly out of the darkness of a shrub and begin to belligerently berate me for my proximity to whatever it is that I can't see inside. I quietly back away. The end results are (1) a family of undisturbed avifauna and (2), for a period of time, a kind of abstract topiary look to one or more of my bushes.

I expect that I will see Guido and Lucia, in similar circumstances, sometime during the summer. Along with the Mockingbird couple that arrived over the past week and some Catbirds who will undoubtedly reappear when the weather becomes warmer.

We also have the two Sparrows continuing to renovate the Downey Woodpecker constructed tree-hole; the pair of Downeys who have evinced no interest at all in reclaiming their vacated space but who do continue to appear daily in the feeding area; plus the male and female Cardinal that grace our seed-bottle at sunrise and sunset.

And I received the following email from our across-the-street neighbor who saw my original posting:

"The ducks also feed at J* and G*'s feeder, and at ours occasionally. Because we capture much of the rainwater runoff into our 3 rain barrels, our back yard doesn't form the usual deep puddle-pond for the ducks to swim. I* told us that the female duck is nesting in their front shrubs, and the original 12 eggs in the nest are now down to 7 (I believe). The female won't budge from the nest now, so the eggs are soon to hatch."

In other words, all of the usual suspects are back for another year. I guess familiarity breeds.

All By Myself

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Sat, 03 May 2008 17:23:00 +0000

Solipsism is the philosophical belief or theory that you yourself are all that can be known to exist - i.e. you may actually be more than just the center of the universe, you yourself may be the whole shebang. And you thought we Philosophy majors wasted our time and energy on meaningless things.

The very best thing
In being a Solipsist -
No one else complains.

And the very worst -
Believing that you can cross
Against the traffic.

What's on his mind...

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:54:00 +0000

...as he sits up on his haunches staring vacantly into space for several minutes?

The Buddha Squirrel
calmly contemplates his world -
decides to eat seeds.

Meanwhile on the west coast - "... somewhat fuzzy picture taken by Michelle Wheeler of the 'Buddha Squirrel,' who is known to frequent a San Diego park. The Buddha Squirrel is a figure of squirrel mythology, a rodent of great and terrible power whose appearance signals that the final uprising of squirrelkind is about to begin. When the Buddha Squirrel is sighted, squirrels everywhere begin to file their teeth and sharpen their claws in preparation for war.In case you doubt that this squirrel is something special, I quote this chilling detail from Ms. Wheeler's missive: 'The other squirrels seem to like him so much that they bring HIM food and he never has to move an inch!'"
(http://www.moretv32.com/entertainment/3663852/detail.html)

They're Baaaaaack!

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:38:00 +0000

Mars and I are trying really hard to be ecologically conscientious stewards of the land. We don't spray chemicals on our flowers or vegetables, or add them to our soil. We grow only those things that are native to our neck of the woods. And we use an organic lawn care service. We like the results and we feel good about the horticultural footprint that we are leaving.

But damn it, the dandelions are back - almost exactly twenty-four hours after our grass received its first corn gluten treatment of the year. I know it seems inconsistent with our efforts to be green - but the sight of even one of those dumb blonde weeds in the yard really pisses me off.

It's not rational. As far as I can remember they never did anything bad to me. I was required to eat some of them as a youth, apparently some sort of Italian family rite. But now that is only a distant, bitter memory. I think I may have even liked to look at them once upon a time - when they were a part of other peoples' landscapes.

But if absence makes the heart grow fonder then sometimes proximity has the opposite effect - perhaps one of the reasons that we in the northeast feel differently than many living on the southwest border in regard to illegal Mexican immigrants. When you are trying to create your own little sovereignty you tend to get a bit paranoid about those annoying pieces of reality that keep popping up and preventing you from having things just the way you want them - no matter whether you are striving for a society built upon the ideals of justice, bravery and truth, or an aesthetically pleasing, totally healthy landscape.

A weed-free lawn is often perceived as the Holy Grail of grounds keeping - and not just because of its appearance. Healthy lawns are evidently also good for the environment.

"healthy lawns:
* Reduce noise by serving as a natural filter
* Cool the environment
* Improve infiltration, reduce runoff and filter the water which helps recharge groundwater supplies
* Provide better air quality by converting greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into oxygen
* Act as a natural air cleaner, trapping an estimated 12 million tons of dust and dirt from the air annually
* Stabilize the earth by knitting the soil together with grass roots and stems to prevent soil erosion and runoff"

So however are dandelions.

"Dandelions can be beneficial to a garden ecosystem as well as to human health. Dandelions attract beneficial ladybugs and provide early spring pollen for their food...Dandelions long roots aerate the soil and enable the plant to accumulate minerals, which are added to the soil when the plant dies."

But "The best defense against dandelions is a healthy lawn, since 'a properly maintained lawn' is less susceptible to weeds, insects, and diseases..."

An ecological conundrum? Not necessarily.

We simply need to look at the facts if not logically then at least syllogistically - remembering that a syllogism is just of a form of reasoning in which a conclusion is drawn (whether validly or not) from two propositions. Syllogisms are, of course, well known for their ability to resolve conundrums

So here we go:
A) Healthy lawns are good for the environment:
B) Dandelions cannot survive in a healthy lawn.
Therefore
C) It is a good thing to kill dandelions. - KILL! KILL! KILL! (Sorry about that.)

But, to be truly environmental our motives and actions must be pure. Other than a dandelion slaying device called "Killer Kane" (a large, hypodermic-type dispenser that allowed you to apply toxin directly to each weed) we have never actually used chemicals on the lawn during our thirty-one years of gardening. Instead I have used the manual power of my hand-weeding tool to extricate the flaxen interlopers from the premises. But corn gluten is a far, far better thing than the seductively easy, Morgan le Fay-like super-syringe, or the Sir Gawain-ish brute force method of dandelion decimation. It is in fact the Sir Galahad of the all-natural landscaping world's herbicides - immaculately pure and ruthlessly deadly.

"Corn gluten meal is a by-product of processing corn to make corn starch and corn syrup...[it] prevents sprouting seeds from developing normal roots. This does not directly kill the seedlings, but makes them susceptible to dehydration if the soil gets dry. Established plants are not affected. The developing roots of a number of common weeds are affected by corn gluten meal: crabgrass, creeping bentgrass, smart weed, dandelions, redroot bigweed, purslane, lambsquarter, foxtail, barnyard grass, and Bermuda grass."

But apparently, like many knights in shining armor turn out to be, it is less than one hundred percent effective.

I can see the golden gluten flakes lying in between the blades of grass on my lawn. And on top of several thriving, jagged dandelion leaves! But I have to look really closely - just like moments ago when I was crouched down with my weeding tool trying to discern the underground origins of these lingering, uninvited lawn dis-ornaments.

So I (A) pay money to have manmade natural ingredients put on my lawn, in order to (B) prevent the growth of vegetation that naturally belongs there but which, if left to its own devices, would (C) prevent my lawn from being naturally healthy - and, as a result, (D) being all that it could be, environmentally. And (E) I still have to have to draw my sword in battle.

Camelot - or not?

And I still have to ask the produce associate.

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:07:00 +0000

I guess it's progress
When the self-checkout tells us,
"Move your cilantro."

April Showers

noreply@blogger.com (Jim) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:00:00 +0000

In the gray downpour,
Under warm, pink crab-blossoms,
Gold-feathered drowned rats.