Prickly Pear: Handle With Care
Prickly pear cactus. A quiet, well-behaved plant, as house-plants go. These guys have been living meekly in their pots for more than twenty years—just getting taller and taller. They’re in an upstairs room, and I keep forgetting to water them, and every six months or so I go upstairs with a watering pot, fully expecting to find shriveled corpses. But prickly pear is a plant that’s hard to kill. This spring, I decided to take pity on the poor things and let them enjoy a pleasant summer soaking up the sun on the front porch. As I maneuvered one of the lanky plants down the stairs and out...
Read MoreOn the Banks of Plum Creek
I almost didn’t go to Plum Creek. I knew it was gone. I knew the creek as described in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic book must have been swamped by the tide of progress. There’d be a trickle of polluted water, a Wal-mart on one side, a used car dealership on the other, and a small rusty historical marker saying Laura Ingalls Wilder once lived near here. But we drove through the rain-drenched Minnesota farmland for miles, immense green fields and lonely farms. Then turned down a dirt track by a tidy, white-porched, deserted house. Put $5 in a small metal box on a post...
Read MoreBee Balm: Hummingbird Heaven
Hummingbirds are attracted to the color red. And bee balm is red. Red, red. Fire engine red. Bee balm is a member of the mint family, as can be seen by its squared-off stems and paired leaves; like most mints, it’s hardy, and spreads readily–pretty easy to grow. My kind of plant. It’s a native wildflower–at least it was originally a wildflower, though I’ve never seen it growing in the wild–what I’ve got in my garden is a nursery-bred variety of the original wild plant. And it’s red. Blood red. Hummingbirds, which have keen color vision, are...
Read MoreCatnip: Cats Behaving Badly
Cataria nepeta. That’s some strong stuff, man. You don’t want to let your cat drive or operate power tools for several hours after a hit of this stuff. Catnip is a member of the mint family, bland and unobtrusive in the garden, with dull gray-purple flowers. Humans rarely notice it. But for some reason, giving a sprig of catnip to a cat is like handing a human an uncorked bottle of Jack Daniels. It seems to affect individual cats differently. Some cats are rowdy drunks, reeling around the house yowling and swinging from the chandelier. Others quietly collapse in a heap and sleep...
Read MoreNature’s Crayons
There’s a chemical which is found in every green plant–every tree, grass blade, bush, cactus, moss, rosebush, lettuce, whatever. It’s called chlorophyll, and it’s a pigment, actually, a green pigment which absorbs just the right wavelength of sunlight to jumpstart the complex chemical process whereby plants make food. Chlorophyll is the key to photosynthesis, enabling plants to magically transform air, sunlight, and water into sugars that nourish the plant and anything that eats it. Chlorophyll is, really, the basis of life on this planet. Chlorophyll is also the stuff that puts grass...
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