Matters of Degree and Kind

or Small Fires

Outdoor thermometers—the old-fashioned kind, not the digital kind—may be accurate as to temperature, but they're misleading about experience.  That line of red creeping bit by bit up the scale, filling the space slowly from bottom to top, gives you the idea that temperatures ease gradually into one another.  Since the hot temperature marks are right next to the warm ones only higher, surely a hot day should feel like a warm one, only more so.

When you're standing in blazing sunshine on the west side of a building on a summer afternoon, though, heat is not at all like warmth.  It is a whole other animal, one that snarls at warmth and sends it scampering to cower under the covers.  It does not fill you with a cozy glow as if from within.  It beats at you from without.  It is an alien, different from warmth not only in degree (ahaha) but also in kind.  It lives by its own rules.

I was thinking about that quantum leap from warmth to heat while wandering around at Plants of the Southwest a while ago.  The parking lot at the nursery has a long mixed border filled in an easy-breezy way with dry-climate plants.  On a hot, hazy afternoon, the silvery blues and grays of their leaves shimmered like heat waves rising from the gravel.  Scattered yellow daisies radiated light like miniature suns.  The lavender looked dusty and faded.  All but one of the plantings spoke the inarticulate, panting language of heat.  The lone exception, the Mexican hats (Ratibida columnifera), gave voice to a poetry of warmth.  The flowers' rich mahogany invited heat back into the fold.  They reduced it to a human scale and did what they could to tame it.  They tethered it to something comfortable and comforting.

A few Ratibida came home with me, where they've taken up residence in the small, central "I Wish I Were a Shortgrass Prairie (But I'm Not)" bed.  I trimmed the blossoms off to help the plants settle in, and they are slowly beginning to flower again.

Two tiny Mexican hats in the left foreground, with blue grama grass (Bouteloua gracilis) and angelita daisies (Tetraneuris acaulis); across the path is a much larger patch of sand lovegrass (Eragrostis trichodes) than I expected.

I love watching them bloom.  First the cones form, in a pale green that echoes the blue grama grass.

For some reason this just makes my heart sing.

A few days later the sterile ray flowers begin to reach out, their petals lined with gold.

Soon the disc flowers come to life.

They mosey slowly on up the cone.  Once the whole cone is alight, the ray flowers fade and fall.

Watching them bloom is like watching a fire start.  Not a conflagration—not one of the wildfires that have devoured so much of the west this year—but a small fire, a campfire, a cozy warmth rather than the wildfires' white heat.  The kindling catches, and flames slowly lick around the smaller twigs and then the larger logs.  They sashay on up through the whole stack of fuel until everything is dancing merrily with light and color, and then die back down again to the embers. 

Seeing these flowers, you remember that, like fire, heat colored with warmth can be a domestic thing, and a good one.  You remember firelit evenings in the mountains when you would watch the shadows playing, and the light shining redly on faces gathered in a circle, where you held out your hands to the flames.

Overhead, almost close enough to touch, the stars would kindle, until the night sky was gently, quietly ablaze.

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Ratibida columnifera is one of my favorite garden perennials, so I'll sing its praises in a practical way, too.  I've grown Mexican hats before and will only warn against treating them kindly.  Given little luxuries like water and compost, they get waist high, and are not welcome in the front of the border.  Otherwise, they're 18" tall or so and not quite as wide.  In Albuquerque they bloom from roughly the end of May until mid-August or September.  Like most long-blooming members of the aster family, they are short-lived, but they self-seed in an easy-going way, so that stands of them can live for a long time.  The mahogany-with-yellow form (R. columnifera var. pulcherrima) also has a sister form that is golden yellow (R. columnifera).  They grow naturally from Mexico to British Columbia and so can take just about any garden conditions, including cracks in the sidewalk, except extremes of pH and heavy clay.  (And kindness.)  They like heat and sun, but they're hardy at least to zone 4 if not colder and will still bloom well in light shade.  In my morning-sun conditions, these tap-rooted plants need some but not much supplemental water once established; they would no doubt want more in all-day sun in a dry climate (10" moisture or less per year).  They're fine in wetter climates where they will probably grow larger.  Leaves are finely cut and a good blue-grama-grass green.  They grow mostly around the base, not along the stems, so the overall effect is fairly airy.  The plants have a winter form that I could take or leave, but the basal leaves stay green.  Goldfinches will eat the seeds, if they can get to them before the ants do.

Quenching and Slaking

or A Dry Heat

Not All of N.M. Burning 

Or so said the headline of a recent article in the Albuquerque Journal.  The governor had issued a message encouraging tourists to visit, pointing out that the wildfires raging in the southern part of the state really cover only a small part of the whole, and that most places are still open for business as usual.  But the headline made it sound as if the fires are so bad that saying what isn't burning is easier than saying what is.

The largest fire, the Whitewater-Baldy fire in the Gila Wilderness, has seared almost 300,000 acres, or 464 square miles.  It's 87% contained, but in the most rugged, inaccessible terrain, "islands" of fire are still burning.  The Gila will have to wait for the monsoon rains in July to quench the blaze, to extinguish it completely.

Quench is such a wonderful word, wet but with a snap to it:  as if squelch and crunch are in cahoots. It's a word that's crossed my mind often this week, the first of summer, with the sun at its zenith and temperatures in Albuquerque mounting to 99°F/37C while humidity levels sink to 4 or 5%.  This is the one time of year when walls around a small garden, trapping and concentrating heat, do not help.  The garden is thirsty.  The spring plantings are struggling.  While the established things can take the heat, I'm doing a lot of hand-watering to keep the new ones alive.  Every so often I forget one—or two, or three—or don't judge its needs quite right.  (Prairie smoke/Geum triflorum:  who knew it would be so fussy?)  After two or three days the survivors among the younglings, despite thick mulch and deep watering, are already thirsty again.

I know how they feel.  I don't think I've stopped being thirsty since moving to New Mexico, and summer is something else again.  Summer is thirsty with exclamation points.  With ashes from the latest fire in the bosque blowing on a hot wind, stinging your eyes and catching in your throat, a drink of cool, clear water is a precious thing.  One glass follows another, all day long.

Thirst isn't really something you can quench.  Slake, yes—another wonderfully wet word; a slurp in league with a lake.  Slake comes from slacken, to let up, to ease.  You can slacken thirst, offer it a little more play on the line.  But you can't extinguish it.  You can't put it out.  You may think you have, but in a little while you, like the garden plants, will be thirsty all over again.  The only way to quench thirst for good and all is to stop being alive.

I've always seen thirst, whether my own or the garden's, as kind of a nuisance.  It's a need, a neediness, when there are more interesting things to do than to stop for a drink of water.  In a way, though, needs like thirst are really signs of life.  If we stop needing, we'll have stopped living.  As the old saying goes, where there's life there's hope—and what is hope but another kind of thirst?  You certainly don't want to quench it as if it were a wildfire, something dangerous and out of control.  Instead you rejoice when it's slaked by even a trickle of whatever is water to your spirit.   That trickle satisfies like a long, tall drink of water in a dry heat.

Trickle:  a drip befriending a tickle.

At least for a while.

A Long Reach

or Dispersed on the Wind

I.

The smell raised hackles on the back of your neck you didn't even know were there.  Fire—fire—powerful, immediate.  Smoke pooled on the roads and dimmed streetlights; its acridity caught in your throat and stung your eyes. The city's emergency lines were flooded with calls, and officials must have had a sleepless night before ascertaining that no fire was burning in town.  The smoke, so fresh that you could taste the pine in it, had blown in from the White Mountains in eastern Arizona, more than 200 miles away.

Since Thursday, the night when we first encountered its smoke here in Albuquerque, Arizona's Wallow Fire has burned more than 180,000 acres and is still zero percent contained.  What it must be like closer to its source I shudder to think.  Yet even though the fire has grown, for us the effect has dimmed.  We've had haze and ash, but not that powerful sense of presence.  It was only the first night that wind conditions were right to give the smoke such a long reach.

Sunrise through smoke (and an upstairs window screen—sorry about that...)

II.

I'm always amazed at how deeply into an ecosystem a single plant can reach.  Take Apache plume (Fallugia paradoxa), for example.  It's a native shrub of the rose family that grows on mesas and gravelly slopes from Texas to California, a range of maybe 500 by 800 miles, spanning a stretch of country that does not molly-coddle its plants with such luxuries as, say, water.

Apache plume with color-coordinated spider

Apache plume can endure just about anything, including cold, heat, drought, salt, excessive calcium, malnutrition, alkalinity—anything except for wet feet in winter (and really, who can blame it).  It blooms with varying degrees of enthusiasm from April until Octoberish, its flowers and seed plumes gracing the plant at the same time.  The seeds generally cling tightly but eventually disperse on the wind (especially if you run your fingers through them as you walk past).

This little shrub stabilizes slopes, prevents erosion, provides forage for deer and other browsers, offers nectar to insects, and gives shelter to small birds.  At a conservative guess, a good score of species depend on it for their survival.  A couple of winters ago I saw a small flock of ruby-crowned kinglets taking cover and lunching on some incidental insects in an Apache plume here in town; they barely moved the leaves as they worked out their complicated seating arrangements.  They had such bright, interested eyes.

III.

I've been thinking about things that have a greater reach than you expect as I've been writing this, my 100th post, on the eve of my blog's one-year anniversary.  When I started writing I wanted Microcosm to be three things:  a creative outlet, a reason to look more closely at everyday beauty, and a way to connect with people with similar loves and interests.  On all three counts it has more than met my expectations.  I have loved the whole process of looking, thinking, photographing, writing, crafting.  Having ("having") to look closely and see things afresh for an admittedly self-imposed but still twice-a-week deadline has given me a passion for looking closely that, if anything, has grown beyond its starting point.

Somehow all of these thoughts, dispersed on the winds of cyberspace, have found readers.  And you, my dears—you have opened up your lives and gardens in turn and offered a camaraderie that is beautiful and precious.  Bless you.  After all, you've been with me as I've mused about the nature of weeds, gone dreamy-eyed about hot-air balloons, fretted about the coming of winter, and waxed rhapsodic about spring migration.  What reward can I give you? 

None, except that of appreciation, and my companionship in return.

Sometimes I wonder how much more interpretation a scant 400 square feet of garden (including patio space) can sustain.  I've begun to wonder that with every single post—what can I say new about flowers or leaves or stems or fruit?  What does the patio have to offer today that I haven't already shared with you?  Somehow, Mother Nature always comes through.

You'd be surprised what a long reach she has.