Wild Thyme: Bee Harvest
Funds are tight everywhere these days, and one thing that must have gotten slashed from the budget of the Florida, NY Town Hall is mowing. Of course there’s not a lot of lawn to mow in front of the town hall, it’s just a tiny oval island of green in a sea of blacktop. Usually it’s scalped into a brutally short crew cut, but this year they’ve let it run wild. Which is to say, the grass must be quite two inches long. And intermixed with the grass are several large purple patches of thyme. Lying on my stomach on this sun-warmed savory blanket, I can see the honeybees bumbling around among...
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Good Lawn/Bad 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? Yes. But it doesn’t stay that way naturally. Weeds like dandelion, clover and plantain are highly...
Read MoreMilkweed: Tough Native
Usually when I spy a plant bursting forth from a crack in the cement like this, it’s a non-native plant, an invasive “weed” of some sort. I tend to think of native plants as timid souls, needing shade and rich forest loam–dainty wildflowers, fragile ferns, like that. But milkweed, a native American plant, packs a bit of muscle, it seems. It pokes up in all sorts of unexpected places. Milkweed is the plant where Monarch butterflies are concerned–common milkweed and a few other closely related plants in the Asclepias genus are the only plants Monarchs will lay...
Read MoreFirst Day of School
A beautiful day–not a cloud in the sky, sun pouring down. Seems like the universe is needlessly rubbing it in, as kids line up for the bus and head off to school. When I was in high school, I remember reading the ending lines of Romeo and Juliet and thinking that they applied perfectly to the first day of school. A glooming peace this morning with it brings, the sun for sorrow will not show his head… A rainy first day of school made the return to penal servitude easier somehow. What do we tell the reluctant scholars clambering onto the bus, depressed at the end of summer freedom?...
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