Reading between the Lines

or Histories

You'd think that anything written on a scroll of papyrus would bristle with the wisdom and experience of ancient cultures:  chronicles of might and conquest, disputes on philosophical matters, records of scientific discoveries.  Tales of battle and love among the gods, or maybe gossipy anecdotes of misbehavior in high places—those would be OK, too.  While there's a fair amount of all that, a lot of papyri are plain old financial records.  Household accounts.  Numbers and lists.  They were just thrown out on the ancient Egyptian dust heaps, there to await discovery by future generations.  (And 2,000-year-old Egyptian dust heaps must by now be very dusty indeed.)

To romantics, lists of income and expense don't have much appeal.  To historians, though, they're meat and drink.  When you find out how people made and spent money, you find out something about what they valued, how they ran their households, what they ate.  You might not learn much about that culture's most epic achievements, but by reading between the lines you can learn a lot about what people did every day, and what their lives were like.

Sand lovegrass (Eragrostis trichodes)

I was thinking about papyrus and scrolls (and Piroulines) while looking at new growth in the sand lovegrass.  Young shoots are beginning to come in with enthusiasm, and they are a bright, lively, unscarred green.  The wide blades of fresh grass hardly resemble last year's growth, though.  The older blades curled inward as they dried; each one is ridged and hollowed.  Seasonal death took each blade and seed stalk in a unique way, giving the old growth texture and character.  It has a history, a tale to tell.

Tales aren't only the province of the old, of course.  Many of the bright young things in the garden have stories of their own.  This crocus, for example, lost part of a petal, on only its second day of blooming.  (I don't know how long that is in crocus years.)

Crocus tomasiniana 'Ruby Giant'

What happened?  What hungry insect stopped in for a bite, or what wind took advantage of a weak spot to shear the petal off as it opened in the sun? 

This tulip, too, has already had a hard-knock life:

Tulipa praestans 'Shogun'

It hasn't even gotten around to budding yet, but its leaves are battered and misshapen, especially compared to the pristine curves of its neighbors.  What happened to it, all those inches underground, between its fall planting and the day it broke the surface a few weeks ago?  What obstacle did it struggle against as it grew?  I know about as much as if I were looking at Egyptian hieroglyphs with no Rosetta Stone to guide me.  A story lies within, but what?  Without knowing the language of flowers, I can't read between the lines. 

What do they matter anyway, the small stories of the daily lives of plants?  What do they matter, any more than the daily lives of people who lived so many centuries ago?  What difference does knowing the price of lentils in ancient Egypt make to the price of lentils today?  Maybe none.  But maybe, knowing that someone went to market and paid hard-earned cash for food, thinking about menus and servings and the possibility of leftovers, maybe knowing that could ignite some spark of realization—an insight, a sense of connection, of continuity.

The sense that in some small way, we are akin.

Pre-Emptive Strikes

or A Little Help Goes a Long Way

As inspirational garden photos go, this one ranks pretty far down the list:

Exhibit A

It won't be gracing the cover of National Geographic any time soon.  The sky is nice and blue, sure, but you can look outside and see blue sky any day of the week.  Day in, day out, from one horizon to the other, nothing but blue, blue, blue.  Hardly worth wasting pixels on.*

And OK, the trees are losing some leaves up there at the top.  October is galloping toward the finish line, and many of us in the northern hemisphere do expect our deciduous trees to lose a leaf or two in October (although these particular trees generally wait until November).  Then again, we also expect them to be picturesque, not all scraggly and haphazard.  But this isn't seasonal leaf loss, not the disheveled loveliness of autumn, nothing that would make you want to go for a tramp in golden woods, kicking up fallen leaves as you go.

Sadly, this is just what the top branches of all three desert olives (Forestiera neomexicana) look like from mid-August on, until some windstorm in November mercifully tidies the rest of the leaves away.  The bareness can't even be blamed on the leaf rollers that plague these trees every year (just mine for some reason; the rest in the neighborhood—and apparently the entire southwest—are fine).  The culprits are actually some of my otherwise favorite garden visitors, ones I go out of my way to court:  the cheerful, gregarious, brightly-colored, overly communicative, endlessly hungry lesser goldfinches.

"Who, me?"

One goldfinch in spring is a mighty fine thing; a mated pair quite exciting.  Two pairs make your heart go pitter-pat with hope and delight.  When both pairs clutch in late summer, you're thrilled at the wonders of nature.  You enjoy seeing the couples become families, and you laugh sympathetically at the fledglings' accidental antics.  Then the pairs produce a second clutch apiece, and before you know it, two dozen lesser goldfinches are perched in your desert olives, impatiently waiting their turn at the feeder.

Except "perched" isn't quite it, is it.  They're clinging to the vertical upper branches, and sometimes their unpracticed feet slip a little, taking a leaf or a bud with them as they slide down.  One leaf here, another bud there, and pretty soon, what with gravity taking its toll and all, those upper branches have no leaves left.  Since the finches have done the same for several years running, long, bare gaps show on older branches, too, where the buds were sheared off by little bird claws, back when those branches had their turn being the slender ones at the top.

Exhibit B

Don't get me wrong:  I love the lesser goldfinches.  They are not only enjoyable but useful, and I'm quite grateful to have them around.  They're not strict vegetarians like the American goldfinch, and they have dined on many a pest (we'll assume that they were pests—why would a goldfinch eat beneficial insects?) in the trees when the feeder was occupied.  They've even helped keep the leaf rollers under control, and in the most ingenious way.  Not content with just eating the little caterpillars, the finches have gone one step better, making sure that there are no leaves for the rollers to eat.

Is that brilliant or what?  Talk about thinking ahead.  It's almost as clever as taking the gas tank out of your car to make it more fuel-efficient, or turning chickens (gently) upside down so they lay their eggs over-easy.

Almost as clever, and even more effective—and yet, somehow, maybe missing the point?
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*Disclaimer:  I wrote this last week, in the middle of a long spell of sunny weather.  We've seen a cloud or two since then.

Mistaken Identities

or Comedy Tonight

For low-brow humor, it's hard to beat well-placed weeds.  Not that weeds are usually knee-slappingly funny all by themselves, but it turns out that they're mighty fine prompts for funny behavior in others—as good as a ladder and a bucket of whitewash to a clown.  When I wrote last month about wanting to see what would happen if I let an unexpected evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) go to seed in the middle of the desert olive tree where it's been growing, my expectations were really pretty feeble.  I mean, I thought that perhaps new seedlings would come up in other unlikely places.  Is that lame or what?  What's actually happened is that the primrose has turned my little garden into a nonstop Vaudeville act that has had me laughing for weeks.

The primrose itself is about six feet tall, growing up through the ten foot desert olive.  Its stems stick out through the tree branches at unlikely angles; on random days they bloom at the tips.  (I've been taking some plants out, so the ground in the photo is embarrassingly bare.)  The upper stems blend into the tree—even those of us who know what we're looking for don't find it easy to tell where one ends and the other begins.  For those like, say, the two families of fledgling lesser goldfinches who hang out in the trees and who haven't yet learned that things are not always as they seem, it's flat-out complicated.

The thing about a tree branch is, it's sturdy.  When you're not entirely sure of your wings to begin with, sturdy is good.  But when you land on what you expect to be a sturdy tree branch and get a flexible primrose stem instead, things can get a little slapstick.  Down bob the stems—whoops!  Frantic flapping.  Up bounce the stems—surprise!  More frantic flapping.  Squawk!  Squawk some more!  Bob, bounce.  Equilibrium returns at last, and then along comes one of your siblings, to land on that nice, sturdy "tree branch" with you.  Bob, bounce, flap, squawk. 

Over the last few days, the goldfinches' balance has improved.  They've learned that the primrose stems have tasty seed pods, and all is well again.  Perhaps half a dozen of them, juveniles and adults, are seated on the stems or in the tree at a time, yellow feathers radiant, looking like fluttery primroses themselves.

Make that scruffy primroses.

But as entertaining as the finches are, they are just the warmup act.  Our star comedian is this young fellow, a black-chinned hummingbird:

Doesn't he look gullible sweet?  He's spent quite a lot of time exploring the garden the last couple of weeks.  After making the rounds, he comes to rest on the lowest branch of the olive by the patio, maybe five feet from where I sit.  He makes himself comfortable:

Lately he's been trying—successfully, so far as I can tell—to impress this little charmer:

A hummingbird needs some serious feeding to support all that activity.  Fortunately our hero is an enthusiastic, undiscriminating eater.  He has been taste-testing every blossom in sight—the 'Wild Thing' autumn sage (at last!), agastache, gaura, dwarf plumbago, 'Blue Twister' allium, arugula, basil, the primroses...  The primroses.  To the hummingbird, the primroses grow on what is apparently a primrose tree.  And there are two other trees just like it in the garden.  He checks them over regularly for flowers.  He doesn't find any.

What he does find is a lot of goldfinches.  Primrose-colored goldfinches.  In the "primrose" trees.  If they are primrose-colored in the primrose trees, they must be primroses, right?  You can practically see the "Q.E.D." flashing through his mind.  He dives in enthusiastically for his dinner.

And lo and behold, his dinner objects.  When I wrote last year about a hummingbird trying to feed off a goldfinch, I thought that was a fluke.  Apparently if you're a goldfinch it's just an occupational hazard.  As the hummingbird—not a quick learner—tries to sip at every single finch, each one swats him away with the kind of bored irritation you or I might use on a housefly.  But some of them are still sitting on those flexible primrose stems, which the swatting sets in motion.  Bob, bounce, flap, squawk.

They've been performing this routine at least once a day.  Sometimes the squawk comes before the flap; otherwise they don't really vary the schtick.  Is it wit?  Is it irony?  Is it subtlety?  Well, no.

But when you want a good laugh, sometimes you just can't beat a pratfall.