Deer and Geese

or A Pause

At Bosque del Apache:  In the dappled light on the verge of a thicket of cottonwoods, a mule deer was browsing.  It wasn't in any hurry, not bothered at all by the occasional vehicle passing by on the gravel road.  I paused and watched it for a while, leaning against my car and enjoying the quiet scene while the sun warmed my back.  It was one of those moments when light filters deep inside you.

That was at one end of the refuge.  When I reached the other end the snow geese were flocking—flocking, fighting, frighting.  Something had disturbed them.  The sun caught in their wings as they whirled and flapped, a blizzard come early.  Even when they're calm their numbers can take your breath away; you have to shade your eyes against the blaze of white where they blanket the fields.  The noise they make when something has spooked them is the next best thing to deafening.  They're sure beautiful, but boy, can they raise a ruckus. 

With the aim of having life be more deer-in-dappled-light quiet than snow-goose-flapping frantic for the next few weeks, I'm going to be taking a break from Microcosm for a while.  I'll visit with you all at your own blogs when I can, and if something extra-delightful comes up that I think you would enjoy, I'll pop in for a post of my own.  I really appreciate you all, my dear readers—I'm touched and pleased that you enjoy Microcosm, and that you stop by here to read and make comments and link your life in whatever small way with mine.  I'll see you again after the New Year (if not before).

In the meantime, I wish you many of those dappled-light moments of your own.

The Giving Grass

or Generosity

One day you're talking about baseball, summer, the slow growth of grasses, and all things leisurely, and the next (or so it seems) the UNM Lobos are winning (winning!) their first football game of the season, the grasses are exploding into bloom, and you're frantically shouting, "Slow down!  Everybody just slow down!"

Licorice mint (Agastache rupestris) in the upper foreground; in the central bed, blue grama grass (Bouteloua gracilis) and angelita daisies (Tetraneuris acaulis); across the path, sand lovegrass (Eragrostis trichodes).

Well, honestly, not quite that last bit.  While I've basked in summer, I am ready to be done with 95°F temperatures and looking forward to the sleepy, satisfied warmth of a New Mexico autumn; I'm eager to move on and enjoy sunshine again.  But the grasses have definitely exploded (and the Lobos have definitely won!).*  The grasses may even have gone above and beyond the call of duty.

They've been an experiment this year:  an attempt to create less of a traditional "layered" look in my small garden and to aim for something more airy, open, western, and outdoors-y; a look that focuses on texture as much as color and that plays enthusiastically with light.  Overall I'm beginning to be pleased, though the rule of planting in threes should probably be broken for sand lovegrass. 

I actually find myself looking forward to winter because of that grass.  Winter is my least favorite season—the remnant of too much time in Vermont spent aching in every cold, damp joint for every single one of those eleven frigid months a year.  Even in milder New Mexico, hedging myself against winter is still a chore.  The garden is one of my biggest safeguards, intended to be a place of light and enjoyment in the dormant season.

Light is the key.

The patio and the Adirondack chair sit on the north side of the garden, looking south.  As the sun begins to lower again it is starting to side-light the grasses; when winter comes it will light them from behind and within.

The angelitas could bloom into December.

I can't tell you how happy I am about that.  It's ridiculous how happy I am about that.  Because of grass.  Not even specially hybridized ornamental grass, but the same kinds of plain ol' grasses that grow wild in just about every open space in the state.  Most grasses are generous, I think.  They make lovely, gracious vehicles for other things:  like the way that silky thread grass gives shape to the wind so beautifully, or a bluegrass lawn invites cool, barefoot walking on sultry evenings.  The blue grama and sand lovegrass will magnify limited winter sunlight exuberantly.  They will make it sparkle as it scatters off every tiny seed; they will burnish it until it glows golden as it passes through their dry wintry leaves. 

I've brought some lovegrass bloom stalks inside the house as a "bouquet" and have been surprised at how fragrant they are.  Outside I'm not even aware of it, but inside, the sharp, sunny smell of green hay is unmistakable.  Maybe that's what's drawn more small butterflies to my garden this summer, even in another year of drought.

A fiery skipper (Hylephila phyleus) on Jupiter's beard (Centranthus ruber)

While the adults need nectar, the larvae of many skippers eat grass leaves.  For lawn owners they can be a pest, as the caterpillars' feasts can leave brown, dead patches.  Looking at the bank of sand lovegrass, I say, "Chow down, guys. Help me out."

A little generosity seems to be in order.

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* But then, the Lobos have won one game in each of the last three years, too. 

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.

Fifteen Minutes

or Transformations

Photography may be all about light, but townhouses are all about shadows.  In a tiny garden surrounded by walls, with the neighbors' houses spitting distance away*, shadows are eternal.  They may move throughout the day, but they never vanish altogether.  Sunlight is likely to enter the picture as mid-day glare, not the "golden hour" of sunrise or sunset.  In my garden, for a couple of weeks in April and September, the rising sun does shine through the narrow space between houses; for 15 minutes or so the flowers in its path glow in a gentle radiance.  The rest of the year, the sun doesn't top the walls until mid-morning.  For living in, that's just dandy; for taking photographs it isn't ideal.  (And if that's the worst thing I have to complain about, life is pretty darn good.)

I'm certainly not complaining about an excess of shade in July.  It's a welcome respite in the afternoons, generally cool enough to be enjoyable even when the temperature is in the low 90's.  The garden at this point of the season is primarily a green garden, an effect I rather like in mid-summer when so much else is brown.  Like shade, greenery is a welcome respite:  cooling, soothing.  None of the foliage is particularly dramatic—no eye-popping purples or limes—but I often prefer my dramas quiet in any case, more about slight changes of expression, and less about car chases and explosions.  Subtle greens in shade are just the right kind of drama, I think.  Each change in texture or color is like a lifted eyebrow, an upward tug at the corner of a mouth, a speculative tilt to the head.

Not that there's anything wrong with a good car chase, of course.  Or with explosions.  (In movies!  I just mean in movies!)  One of the nice things about a townhouse garden is the stark contrast between light and shadow.   (Nice for photography, at any rate, if not always for plants.)  At almost any sunlit time, you can find a deep, velvety backdrop not too far away.  When the sun is just right, even if only for 15 minutes every other Sunday, it lights up the few flowers in the garden like fireworks, from the normally gentle salmons of licorice mint

Agastache rupestris

to the delicate stars of gaura.

Gaura lindheimeri 'Whirling Butterflies'

The contrasts between dark and light, foliage and flowers, lifted eyebrows and explosions:  I'm still amazed at what extremes a small space can hold, at what transformations a few minutes of sunlight can work.  I'm in the mood to be amazed, because even as I'm writing this, rain is falling.  It's not the first rain of summer (and hopefully not the last), but it's the first to soak through the cushions on the Adirondack chair, the first with potential to fill the rain barrel.  If it lasts for more than 15 minutes I'll be surprised, but the sky suggests (with a subtly lifted eyebrow) that there may be more where this came from.  Suddenly the air is fresh, and the trees are dripping.  Thunder is rumbling across the whole great arc of the lower atmosphere.  The breeze smells sweet.  Dry, dusty New Mexico looks clean and alive.  What a transformation; what a lightning-fast journey from one end of the spectrum to the other.

It's been every bit as good as a car chase.
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* Note:  spitting is rude.

Brightening

or Relative

California poppies with 'Wisley Primrose' sun roses (Helianthemum nummularium)

My favorite forecast (in a twisted sort of way) when I lived in the northeast was for "brightening."  Not clearing, mind you.  Brightening.  On brightening days, the skies would stop being dark and dreary and turn plain old dreary, a change of degree rather than kind.  The light might not have been become strong, but at least it became stronger.  Sometimes you're grateful for small graces, like the sight of what might be considered shadows by those who have become inured to shade.

I've never heard a forecaster in New Mexico call for brightening, but I still think the term applies.  It's such a handy, relative word, a qualitative rather than a quantitative one.  It allows for growth and for nuances of strength.  With the tulip days of spring behind us and the poppy days upon us, the sky hasn't gotten sunnier, precisely, but it's certainly brightened. The light is ratcheting up a notch, strengthening from a glow to a blaze.  When the sun is overhead at noon, north of the trees in the garden now, and high, it's...well, it's bright.  The garden is brightening, too.  The pastels I love in the gentler days of spring are yielding to stronger, more saturated colors—colors that can hold their own in the sunlight and pitch it right back.

The petunias aren't really this color, but they are definitely bright.

When a bubble of hot-air balloons floated by the other day, my heart flew right along with them.  The sky was such a deep blue, and the balloons' envelopes so brightly colored, that somehow on a spring morning with a glorious day stretched out ahead I felt for a moment like I was 18 again.  Maybe you know the feeling I mean, of being young and strong and confident, like you have the world at your feet—for no particular reason, of course, except that you're young and confident, which at the time seems like plenty of reason and to spare.  You're beginning to flex your muscles and stretch yourself, to test your strength.  You're ready to ratchet life up a notch.  The brightest of adventures awaits, because...why wouldn't it?

Out the kitchen door

But of course, you can't take on the world singlehandedly; even good choices have flip sides of loss; life doesn't wait until you're looking before it starts throwing curveballs at you.  At some point you realize that the chance to soar isn't necessarily your special birthright.  Still, the feeling was gorgeous at the time.  It's a springtime feeling, and one we have the pleasure of reliving every year, as the sun begins to flex its muscles and stretch itself, and the garden begins its first, surging flush of growth.  The remembrance is a small grace, a brightening, a feeling of what might be considered flying, to those inured to going on foot. 

A relative term, brightening.  It means something different in middle-age than it did at 18.

Then again, so does strength.

Soft

or A Pleasantly Unvarnished Truth

The word "soft" takes up a lot of space in the dictionary.  It's a broad-shouldered, good-natured word, and so naturally ends up doing a lot of extra work.  A quick glance down the list of definitions shows that most of the work is pleasant, at any rate, even relaxing.  Soft can mean:  pleasing, agreeable; bringing ease, comfort, or quiet; mellow, subdued, gentle, smooth, delicate; balmy, mild or clement; not violent; demanding little work or effort; leisurely, curved, unassuming, low-key; marked by kindness or tenderness... Such lovely ideas, all redolent of ease, and all wrapped up in that one word, "soft."

'Lady Jane' tulips and grape hyacinths

One of the things I love most about spring is that it gives us back the gift of shade.  All winter the east-facing patio and garden are sunny and comfortable in the morning but off-limits for casual enjoyment after noon.  In the morning, the sun is happy to tell tall tales and let you pretend that the temperature is much warmer than it actually is.  Then it crosses the roofline and leaves you with shade, which always tells the cold, unvarnished truth.   Shade sends you inside to put on another sweater and behave yourself.

In spring the shade has kinder truths to tell.  Unseasonably warm weather this week has made the patio a comfortable place to sit again in the afternoons, to work the crossword puzzle, draft a blog post, watch the goldfinches.  But the biggest enjoyment has been the soft light of shade—not the glow of winter sun or the blare of summer, not the dark shadows against the north-facing wall, marked off from the sunlight by a straight, hard line, but the gentle, even light of New Mexico's ambient brightness.

In winter the sun is our haven; in summer we take refuge in shade.  In spring both sun and shade are equally soft—they are mild, clement places to enjoy the soft colors, soft fragrances, soft temperatures.

No other refuge is necessary.

Center Stage

or Changing Priorities

Western sand cherry (Prunus besseyi)

The bee wasn't desperate, just impatient.  She had crocuses, scilla, and grape hyacinths to choose from, but she was crawling over the fat, tightly closed buds of the largest sand cherry, digging at the patch of white just showing between the sepals.  Her eagerness had all my sympathy.  Spring is so near, and the cherry so close to bursting into flower that I feel ready to nudge those buds along myself, and I don't have a craving for sand cherry pollen.

A few days ago I was admiring the deep blue of a dawn sky, framed by the cherry's branches.

Since then the fattening buds have brought the branches from the margins to the foreground of my awareness.  The way those pale green nubs gleam in the sunshine has taken center stage.

Shifting between background and foreground—a lot of that happens in the garden this time of year.  The 'Winter Gem' boxwoods, which have been so delightfully green all winter, bless them, are now less interesting than the patch of ipheion at their feet (no buds yet, but soon).  The burnet in the main garden, which has been lush and shapely through the spare, lean months, is suddenly just a backdrop for grape hyacinths.  Even 'Wild Thing' autumn sage has been standing meekly by for once, while the crocuses get the glory.

Spring, with its small, pleasant upheavals, is good at making you see things differently.  Daily routines change as activities move from indoors to out; Daylight Savings Time shuffles morning and evening light around; windows opened to the breeze let a little life and movement back into the house.  (Pardon me while I go find a paper weight.)  When you have snow in the morning and lunch on the patio at noon, a little mental flexibility (not to mention layered clothing) is your friend.

I've been thinking about the garden lately while poring over bulb catalogs for fall planting* and thumbing for the umpteenth time through regional books and catalogs before the spring frenzy begins.  Ideas I was working with last summer when I started replanting the garden (and which many of you helped me with) have taken clearer shape over the last few months, and now New Mexico's famous spring winds are blowing away some old, lingering assumptions.  As a result, my excitement about sand cherries and crocuses notwithstanding, flowers have begun to take the back seat in my garden.  (I would never, ever have thought I'd say that.)  A number of things have moved forward to take their place, but the biggest factor, the one that's taking center stage at the moment and dancing an enthusiastic buck-and-wing on it, is light.  (Texture is warming up in the wings.)

In Plant-Driven Design, Lauren Springer Ogden and Scott Ogden talk about light as a feature of western gardens, but until recently I thought of light as an accessory to a floral-print outfit, not the other way around.  Now I see it differently—or realize that I've done so all along.  The reason I'm always as impatient as that bee for the sand cherry to bloom is because I love the blossoms' incandescence in front of the shady north-facing wall...

I have yet to take a picture of them that isn't either over-blown or too damped down, though.  March, 2011

I've been sitting on a sunny patio almost every weekend morning through fall, winter, and now early spring, looking south over the backlit garden and being dazzled as the sun glowed through turning leaves, ricocheted off grass seeds and blades, made the desert olives' pale gray trunks gleam, and set the oils in the autumn sage leaves to glistening.  Seeing the crocuses glowing with light this spring was the last step in moving background to foreground for me.  The garden and its leaves and flowers are lamps; they collect and shape light.

So as I consider new plants, I'm wondering how they'll play with dappled light under the olives, or how they'll give back summer radiance; whether they'll glow in the warm backlighting of autumn or in the low, white gleam of winter.  In some ways it's complicating matters; in others making them quite easy.  (There's no point in planting a grass with light-catching seed heads behind the winter shade line, no matter how sunny that spot is in summer.)  Every so often I make a note of what color the flowers are, in case that matters, too.

(And somehow, I suspect that it might.)
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* It turns out that spring really is the best time to make your bulb list—another thing they say in gardening books that ends up being true.


Has anyone ever grown ornamental comfrey (Symphytum grandiflorum)?  I was thinking of it for the deep shade under the big sand cherry but don't know if I'll regret it.  Other dry shade (think really dry, like, really, REALLY dry) suggestions would be welcome.  Thanks for any advice!

Luminarias

or The Grand Finale

The tarragon came back unexpectedly.  A little inconveniently, too.  I thought I had removed it all last summer while re-doing the central bed, but that's what I get for thinking.  This past week the tarragon began to put on a serious flush of growth amid the bed's newly sprouting seedlings.  Something needed to be done about it, say, to put it in a pot until some other plan shows up.   While mixing sand into potting soil then this morning, I found my mind drifting far from spring and herbs and seedlings and back all the way to Christmas.  The sand is left over from this past year's luminarias, one of the southwest's most beautiful Christmas traditions, and it reminded me of arranging the bags, and candlelight glowing through paper on the front step, and Old Town bright with festivity.

Really, though, was it the sand, or was it the light this morning, filling the bowls of the last 'Cream Beauty' crocuses, that made me think of luminarias?

C. chrysanthus 'Cream Beauty'

A pleasant synchronicity, in any case.  And isn't a crocus a kind of luminaria, a "festival light" showing the spirit of the season to your door?  We celebrate so many holidays with light—with birthday candles, fireworks, bonfires—that cheering on the advent of spring with a flower that shines brightly just seems right.

C. chrysanthus 'Blue Pearl'

Since beginning the Thirteen (or Fewer) Ways of Looking at a Crocus (or Some Equivalent) Challenge last month, I've tried to explore different facets of this charming spring flower.  Some of you have been kind enough to join me, and very enjoyable I've found the exchange.  Most recently, kininvie at Gardening at the Edge has posted Fewer than Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Crocus—a set of wise observations that could not be any more true.  And Dave, the Anxious Gardener, offers a wide-ranging view of the blooms in the Tudor Priory gardens he tends in Not Quite Thirteen Ways of Looking at Crocuses.

Previous posts include Wishing For..., a lovely meditation on time by Donna at Garden's Eye View; and the five very different Views of Forsythia, from herald to nuisance to exotica, by Jean of Jean's Garden. B-a-g at Experiments with Plants explores different qualities of saffron in Crocus, and Holley at Roses and Other Gardening Joys values crocuses for their very smallness in A Bloom of Significance.  My own posts have wandered through attitudes toward dearth and plenty, evocations of shy wildness, arrivals and departures, and mild but ecological comic relief.  Between us all, a far-flung set of approaches.

Now, for the grand finale, I'd like just to offer a festival of crocuses, to revel in these flowers for their own astonishing selves:  for the petals' delicate shadings from icy paleness to candlelit warmth, and the startling solar flare of style and stigma;

'Cream Beauty'

the transformation from sheath to petal in the first moments of opening;

C. tomasiniana 'Ruby Giant'

the whorls the petals make as they unfold in the sunshine (though these are blooming in full shade, but that's a technicality);

C. ancyrensis 'Golden Bunch'

and the colors that are so deeply saturated that they're just a step away from being pure light.

'Ruby Giant'

Last year I wrote one post about crocuses and felt that I'd said...not all that could be said, of course, but what I wanted to say about them.  This year I've found myself in a blogging quandary—how can (or why would) you keep posting, year after year, about a garden when the cycle of the seasons is the same?   How do you keep from growing stale?  How do you know when you already have, and when it's time to stop?

The "Thirteen Ways" and all of your contributions, kininvie, Dave, Donna, Jean, b-a-g, and Holley, have been delightful on their own.  They've also been incredibly helpful to me in my quandary, and I thank you all in a huge, huge way.  I suppose this endeavor is once again proof of that old truism:  if you're doubting your commitment to something, you should just engage with it more closely.  One way or another, you'll know.  The crocuses obviously still have plenty of material inside them, plenty of ways of prompting that “wow” that somehow turns into prose.  Meanwhile, we have Twelve Remarkably Different Ways of Looking at a Crocus (or Some Equivalent).

That leaves at least one for next year.

Pools of Light

or Intensifying the Flame

Light is so cheap and easy these days.  You flip a switch and brightness leaps to do your bidding:  fluorescent, incandescent, LED, neon, halogen. Darkness has been consigned to the back of the closet, to the space under the bed with the dust bunnies.  It comes out to roam the house during our sleeping hours, but it doesn't govern our waking ones.  We can work or play games or read fluffy novels until 3:00 in the morning if we want to (or even later!), all without damaging our eyesight, because we have all the light we want at our disposal.

Before Thomas Edison changed the world, though, light was a precious commodity.  When night fell, darkness waltzed right indoors as if it owned the place.  It reigned everywhere except in the small pools of luminance that radiated around a flame.  One way to broaden those pools was to place a candle in front of a reflective surface—a metal wall sconce, perhaps, polished to a shine—that would intensify both the flame and the hazy glow around it.

Sand lovegrass (Eragrostis trichodes) with silky threadgrass (Nassella tenuissima) behind

Light at the end of December is still a precious commodity, no matter what electricity can accomplish indoors.  We may have turned the corner, as one of my friends always says; we may have passed the solstice, putting the longest night behind us and turning eagerly once again toward the light; but just barely.  The days will begin to stretch out longer in front of us, but so far the difference is still imperceptible:  tomorrow will have only a few seconds more daylight than today.  We appreciate those things that intensify the sun, that broaden its pool of influence, that give the chill light of winter a little of the hazy glow of warmth.

This is the time of year for celebrations of light. To those of you who join me in celebrating the Light come among us, the birth of the Christ child, I wish you a very merry Christmas!  To those of you from other traditions, I open my arms in warmth and friendship.  May it be a time of joy for us all.

A time to intensify the flame.

Ambient Brightness

or A Good Explanation for Everything

The nursery worker looked at me strangely.  "Where did you move here from?"  "Vermont," I answered.  "Ah," she said wisely, as if that explained everything.  "Forget the plant tags.  You can grow a lot of things here in less sun than they say, because of the ambient brightness."

"Ah, yes," I thought wisely, "the ambient brightness."  As if that explained everything.

I had just moved to New Mexico, to an apartment with a north-facing balcony, and was looking for suitable plants at a local nursery.  The first person I chanced on there was the kind of worker you trust automatically.  She may not have had a floppy hat—the gold standard for knowledgeable plants-people in these parts—but she did have the right sort of outdoorsy, weathered smile-lines around the eyes.  She suggested 'Winter Gem' boxwood (Buxus microphylla japonica), even though the plant tag recommended full to part sun and the balcony only knew sunlight by hearsay.  And she was right:  the boxwood bushes were perfectly happy and didn't resent the shade at all.  Not that they resent much of anything, but they seemed actively pleased with all that ambient brightness.

Over the next few months I paid close attention to the plants I saw growing and blooming smack up against the shady north sides of houses:  lilacs, roses, Russian sage.  The ex-Vermonter in me was astonished and took the lesson to heart.  When I moved to my townhome a year later and toddled off to a nursery specializing in plants of the southwest (Plants of the Southwest, it's called) looking for natives for my part-sun garden, a worker in a floppy hat stopped me from making a purchase:  "That one needs full sun."

"Oh," I said brightly, "Isn't that just what the tag says?  It ought to do OK in less sun, because of the ambient brightness."  He looked at me strangely.  "Where did you move here from?"  "Vermont," I answered, dimming a trifle.  "Ah," he said.  Because that explained everything.

Since then I've learned a thing or two about provenance.  "Full sun" means something different to a desert plant than it does to one from a milder climate, where skies can be cloudy all day (or even longer!) and sometimes ambient brightness is the most a light-hungry little photosynthesizer can hope for.

My appreciation for these nuances of meaning ("sun":  it's complicated) got bumped up another notch when I planted an ivy this past spring.  Ivy is well-behaved here, not invasive, and useful in full-shade areas where you have a wall to cover.  I'd been growing this one as a houseplant in the sunny upstairs bathroom for several years—the only place humid enough to keep spider mites at bay—enjoying its bright green leaves, but finally decided it would be happier in the Sanctuary for Shadows along the garden's north-facing wall.  It's settling in well, but it isn't bright green any more:

It's variegated.  I'd forgotten that.  For several years the ivy had received a couple of hours of direct sun a day, with bright indoor light the rest of the time, and even with all of that the variegation had long since disappeared.  Now, outdoors, in December, on the north side of a wall in full shade, it's well-enough lit that those beautiful highlights have come out again.

Sometimes you need a tangible object lesson to understand apparently simple things like "light."  On the scale of brightness, I would have put a half-morning's direct indoor sun about on a par with full, outdoor shade—maybe even a little ahead.  In terms of my own appreciation of light, I'd vote for a sunny east window over a shady northern exposure any day of the week.  Apparently, though, human perception doesn't have much to do with botanical reality.  Maybe the difference lies in the gap between luminous flux—the amount of light visible to the human eye—and radiant flux—the total power of light across its spectrum (if I'm using those terms correctly); maybe it's just a charming quirk of chlorophyll. 

But it's probably because of the ambient brightness.

Up in Flames

or Fourth of July Canyon

A day of contrasts.  The color wheel spun between fiery orange and cool blue, pine green and luminous gold.  In a shining cloud of dust on Forest Road 55, the skeletons of old trees, burned by a previous summer's fire, stood guard; at their feet, young growth played with flames of sunshine.  In the open the sun was warm by mid-morning, but in the dappled shade on the trail, seasons came and went from one step to the next.

I generally think of blue and gold as the west's autumn colors—the deep, unclouded blue of mountain skies, the gold of a sun like hot honey, and the joyful, answering glow of aspen and cottonwoods, Maximillian sunflowers and rabbitbrush.  But tucked away in the Cibola National Forest, in the Manzano Mountains about 55 miles southeast of Albuquerque, is a canyon alive with bigtooth maples (Acer grandidentatum) that turn into embers and sparks, reds and oranges that smolder against the ponderosa pines.

For a while over the summer, all of Cibola Forest's 1.6 million acres were closed to recreational use, because the fire danger was so extreme.  Just idling a car for a bare instant too long over fallen pine needles in a road, or letting live cigarette ashes drift on the wind, could start a fire that would send whole mountainsides up in flames.  How lovely, then, to see the wilderness harmlessly catching its own seasonal fire, in a canyon named for a day of fireworks, of sparking, thundering, crackling celebration.

The Fourth of July trail climbs to a spring and continues on to the mountain crest.  I only walked a short spur of it called the Crimson Maple Trail, and even so spent much of the time sitting on the occasional bench.  (One especially lovely clearing had so many benches I wondered if they'd pupped.)  These photos, then, are only of the tiniest part of the canyon, and we may never know what hidden wonders we missed.

Even that fraction of a trail did not run short of wonders, though.  On one stretch of the path you'd walk amid the clean, resiny scent of junipers, or catch the faintest trace of vanilla from a stand of ponderosas.  Around the next curve you'd encounter the sweetness of deciduous forest; each step would release the must of fallen leaves from beneath your feet.  The wind sent white noise rushing through the pine trees' crowns.  It pattered among the maples' dying leaves; branches rubbed together high overhead, creaking.  A gust might fling a host of leaves into flight all at once and then let them settle in a whirl of color and light.  The forest floor, sheltered from the currents in the treetops, let only a light breeze pass, just enough to have hands seeking the warmth of pockets, and to prove the jacket to have been a wise choice after all.  In some places the season was just taking hold, in others the flames already dying out.

And everywhere the light was diffused, deflected, magnified by storms of translucent leaves, by the almost-invisible haze of dust shimmering in the air.

Amid the kaleidoscope of light and shadow, a bench offered a moment of quiet among the trees, a time to listen to the silence behind the wind, behind the hiss of leaves touching down, or the call of a mountain chickadee, the hoarse bark of an Abert's squirrel in the distance.

A day of contrasts, when cool and quiet could make your heart catch fire.

Clean

or Ambivalence

In the last moments of darkness Orion is almost straight overhead, his stance firm as he tracks the night westward.  He steps across the roofline, and the sky lightens behind him.  His belt and shield gradually fade from view; soon only Betelgeuse at his shoulder and Rigel at his foot remain.  After lingering alone for a while, Cheshire cat-like, they, too, wink out in the growing dawn.

Mornings on the patio have a different flavor these days.  In summer, by the time I settle in the Adirondack chair with a mug of tea, the day is already moving along.  The goldfinches are working on their second course, the hummingbirds on their second squabble, and the garden is lively with light and sound and color and motion.

Now it is still dark when I go outside, the sun barely up when I head back in to get ready for work.  The hummingbirds have taken their squabbles south for the winter, and the goldfinches are still abed.  The crickets have gone silent.  These mornings I cradle the hot mug gratefully between my hands, both for warmth and for company; I had forgotten what the garden is like when it's quiet.  The only sound is the white noise of the highway, the sleepless truck traffic on the long haul to California or Tennessee.

Most mornings are clear, and the distant stars yield gracefully to our own in skies of pale, liquid gold and pink, of Alice blue.  Other mornings are thick with constellations of clouds, nebulae that pulse with energy as the sun glances off them.

Yesterday morning was altogether different, with pearly skies and fresh, moist air.  We had had rain the night before, the kind that lulls you to sleep with its quiet music on the roof and takes care not to wake you when it goes.  It left behind an inch of moisture and washed even the sky clean—the morning was white with thinning clouds, lustrous in the dawn light.

It wasn't a morning for flowers, even though the autumn sage and marigolds and agastache were glowing like jewels under water.  Instead it was a morning for leaves, washed clean of a month's worth of dust, gleaming in the diffused light, gathering, funneling, clinging to each droplet of rain before finally releasing it to quench the earth below and satisfy the thirsty roots at their feet.  A morning for greenery and the cool of serenity.  A morning just right for quiet.

As autumn grows I am aware of night not so much as the waking sphere of hawk-moths and crickets, the appointed time for secret feline rendez-vous, but as the realm of dormancy, of quiet and dreaming.  Dawn is no longer a shifting continuity, the changing of the guard between one set of lives and another, but a boundary between stillness and activity, a line dividing oblivion from alertness.  In the last minutes of darkness out on the patio I am aware of upstairs lights coming on as alarm clocks go off, the rumble of a car starting and the crunch of gravel under tires, the first chirp of the earliest bird turning into a sleepy chorus—aware of each day really being something new, clean, its own, isolated thing, and not the continuation of the moments before.  I'm not sure whether this is good or bad or neither.

Lately, by the time I finish my tea, the last swallow has grown cold.

Warm Welcomes

or A Foot in Two Worlds

Just having the curtains open is a pleasure.  All summer we do our best to block out the sun, and now to welcome it with open arms, to let it stream unhindered through the kitchen window, is sheer joy.

Out on the patio this morning, the sun's warmth felt good again:  good early on, over a cup of tea, while it took away the dawn chill; good later, over the crossword puzzle and decaf, and later still over a notepad and pencil, when those golden rays dispensed sleepy contentment with a generous hand.  And oh, what that sunlight did for the colors in the garden—instead of being washed out in a harsh overhead glare they were backlit and glowing with warmth, filled to the saturation point with light.  They aren't showing fall colors but summer's colors refreshed.

They're a reminder that this is still just September.  Morning may have leaped into autumn wholeheartedly, but afternoon is still clinging hard to summer.  Highs are in the mid-80's F, close to breaking records yet again this year.  For now, at any rate, we still have a foot in both worlds. 

It's time to replant the microgarden.  More than time, really—two or three weeks later than I'd have liked.  Some of the summer veggies are just picking up steam, though, having waited until the worst of the heat passed to start setting on.  Now they're in a race with frost, trying to ripen in a part-sun garden in ever-shrinking hours of sunlight.  The tomatillos and summer squash may yet make it.  Meanwhile the marigolds are blooming their hearts out, and the amaranth seeds are feeding the goldfinches while its stems and leaves provide a windbreak on the little garden's north side.

Even with the things that will remain in the microgarden, plenty of others are ready to be ousted and replaced by chard, arugula, radishes and carrots.  The soil is still warm enough that the seeds should sprout quickly.  Managing new seedlings' space and light requirements will be tricky in that 2' by 4' space with the summer plants so tall around them, but it ought to be do-able.  For a while the garden will just have a foot in two worlds.

I never find seed planting as compelling in fall as it is in spring.  In spring you're thrilled when the seeds come in the mail, aware of their potential and eager to see them grow, impatient with those last few frosts.  Planting seeds is an Essence of Spring Experience like no other.  The hope outweighs every other consideration.

In fall I'm more aware of lugging soil around and of the mess of emptying out the microgarden and refilling it.  Those things are fine—they're part of the overall pleasure of gardening—but they're not the same as that rush of hope in spring, and they don't quite radiate the golden glow of autumn like, say, pumpkins and apples and turning leaves do.  Composted cotton burrs and cow manure—I dunno, there's something kind of mundane about them.  When I think of what makes up the glow of autumn, and what goes into an Essence of Autumn Experience, composted cotton burrs and cow manure just aren't it.  They're a necessary first step, however, making more glowing, harvest-y parts possible.  I will be grateful for them in December when I pull up a handful of carrots and can relive a little of fall's golden warmth.

This is the one season I can wax endlessly rhapsodic about.  Spring is delightful when it behaves, summer is lovely but has to be coped with, winter—I'll just growl now and get that out of the way.  But fall...it's the light.  It's that beautiful, golden sunlight.  I could spend hours just soaking up the rich warmth of that light. In a sense being aware of the mundane, earthy stuff like (composted)  manure is a good counterweight for autumn's heady enjoyment.  It anchors you occasionally in practical, everyday reality instead of letting you stay immersed in a world of shining, living colors.  Sometimes you want to bask in wonder at the beauty around you, but sometimes you need to get things done.

It doesn't hurt to have a foot in both worlds.