Happy National Pollinator Week!
Seriously. It’s National Pollinator Week, June 16 – 22, 2014. It’s a national…well, not exactly a holiday–a national time to stop and think about it. Of course they have National Everything Week–not a day goes by but it’s National Something Day or Week or Month. National Women’s History Month (we only have enough history to fill up one month). National Jazz Appreciation Month. There’s National Pig Day (March 1, put it on your calendar for next year). National Ice Cream Month, a worthy cause indeed, officially designated in 1984 by Ronald...
Read MoreDandelion Seeds: Prickly Fluffballs
Dandelion are a little like porcupines. Each dandelion seed is a dry, hard, brown speck an eighth of an inch long, known in botanical terms as an “achene.” They’re stuck into the puffy top of the dandelion flower head, like pins stuck into a pincushion, or quills that are loosely attached to a porcupine’s skin. Tiny barbs zig-zag along each edge of the seed. One puff of air, and the seed pulls loose from the plant and heads off into space. The wind blows the little fluffy parachutes for thousands of miles, over rivers and oceans and mountain ranges–or over the...
Read MoreGood Lawn
I saw a sight this morning that froze my blood. There was a toddler, a hapless infant, sitting on a lawn. Not even a blanket underneath him, mind you—the poor child was sitting right on the grass. Made my blood run cold. Why? Because it was a bad lawn. It was nothing but blades of grass. Close-cropped and bristly as a Marine’s haircut. Not a weed to be seen, not a leaf of clover, not a dandelion, not a plantain leaf. Nothing but grass. So what? That’s what a lawn is supposed to be, right? I suppose so. But it doesn’t stay that way naturally. Weeds like dandelion, clover and plantain are...
Read MoreBlue Moon
The moon in a clear blue sky. Many thanks to Diane Hale Smith for lovely moon shots! The moon looks so unfamiliar swimming in a turquoise sky–like a fish out of water. Makes me feel uneasy, like seeing a day-flying owl or bat. My first instinct is to report it to someone (not sure who) so something can be done to put things right. What’s the moon doing up there at high noon??! But of course the moon is often in the daylight sky. I just never notice it. We tend to take for granted that things are the way we expect them to be–I got the sun in the morning and the moon at...
Read MoreDaffodils: Who Doesn’t Love Them?
Daffodils are my kind of flower. Easy to plant. Stick a bulb in the ground in fall, thirty seconds and you’re done. Spring comes, and the green spears magically appear, shoving through the dead grass and remnants of dirty melted snow, spearing dead leaves. And then, those bright yellow bursts of live-saving color in the drabness of early spring. They spread, all on their own–naturalize, it’s called–creeping throughout the grass. They don’t need all that weeding, fussing, and dividing and fertilizing and all the stuff that most perennials need. And the best thing...
Read MoreSpring Wildflowers: Fighting Back
Spring at last! We’ve survived the long bitter winter of snow and ice and bare branches. For us humans, winter is the rough season. But for plants, winter is spent dormant and snug under the snow. Spring is the time when they have to battle for survival. The first greenery is a welcome sight, not just for humans, but for rabbits, deer, slugs, insects and other herbivores, all thin and hungry and longing for a square meal. The first spring wildflowers unfurl into a world of hungry mouths waiting to eat them. An April trillium or hepatica runs a much greater risk of ending up in an herbivore’s...
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