Killing Thyme

or Dumbo's Feather

In Disney's 1941 animated film, Dumbo is a baby elephant with ridiculously oversized ears.  Both his own life and his mother's are made miserable by the other circus animals' cruel teasing, until some crows and a mouse convince him that he can use his ears to fly.  To shore up his confidence, they give him a "magic" feather to carry.  His belief in the feather encourages him to take the leap into flight when he doesn't quite believe in himself.

All to say, I can never get thyme to overwinter.  Culinary, ornamental, creeping, woody—it doesn't matter.  It grows beautifully all summer, looks great through fall and the first half of winter, and then sometime between about now and the middle of February, it dies.  I suspect water issues, but which ones?  Sometimes I give the garden a little water in February if we haven't had any moisture for a couple of months, and that's probably the culprit.  On the other hand, it could be the months of preceding drought.  Plagued by indecision, I solve the problem by growing speedwell instead.

Thyme-leaf speedwell (Veronica oltensis)

Thyme-leaf speedwell is easy and reliable, and it's perfectly happy to stay alive all winter long and then keep growing come spring.  A tolerant plant, it doesn't seem to care one way or the other about water, soil, temperature, or light.  (I do think it cares about drainage, for what it's worth.)  It spreads a few inches a year and makes itself unobtrusively at home.  Then, somewhere around tulip time, it turns into a carpet of delicate, blue blooms.

April 2011

I was looking for more information about it online, though, and came across one site (which I can't find again) that said something to the effect of, "If you can grow thyme, you can grow this plant."

Augh!  No!  I can't grow thyme!  If I'd known the two had the same requirements, I'd never have planted speedwell!  Suddenly Dumbo's feather has been whisked out of my hands.  The last few years of growing V. oltensis successfully have obviously been a fluke, an accident, never to be repeated.  The poor little things are doomed.

What did I do last year to manage not to kill it?  I page frantically through my garden journal.  On February 9, 2011:  "Thinking about watering."  Then nothing.

Great.  What does nothing mean?  Did I do nothing?  Or did I do something and not write it down?  If an oncoming car doesn't have its turn signal on, does that mean it's going to go straight at the intersection?  Or is the driver being careless about turn signals?  Surely there's a better way of communicating "I have nothing to communicate" than just...not communicating.  Maybe something on the lines of "This page is intentionally left blank"?  Then again, if I have to start keeping track of every time I don't do something in the garden... No.  That's too much work.

Pressured now to decide the late-winter water issue one way or the other, and with the suddenly keen awareness that lives hang in the balance, I'm opting in favor of dry roots.   To be perfectly clear, just so that my next year's self has no doubt:  I am not going to do anything.  I will not water the speedwell until spring.  At least if it dies no water will have been wasted. 

Does anyone have an extra magic feather they'd be willing to loan out for a few weeks...?

Much Ado about Nothings

or The Power of Fluff

Such a tiny feather, just a 3/4" bit of down that was as white and billowy as a fair-weather cloud.  It came to roost among the thyme-leaf speedwell early last month and stayed for several days.  Next to its airy softness, the speedwell leaves looked thick and heavy; not for them the joy of floating effortlessly on a breeze.  The feather rippled in winds so slight that they were imperceptible to me, dressed against a November morning.  Even when I set my hand right next to it, I wasn't sure whether I was feeling a breath of wind or of imagination.  But then, down is especially good at trapping air, at holding it close against a beating heart, a small body of hollow bones and flight feathers and hunger, where it can warm and insulate.  It is a cushion against the jagged edges of frost.

Butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa)

Late in November the lone seedpod on the milkweed finally burst.  I have never yet been able to resist the feel of the seeds' downy floss, and its touch sent me instantly back to childhood:  pressing my thumb along the inside seam of a seedpod to break it open, easing apart the featherbed inside and teasing out the individual seeds, then sending them flying, one by one, on a breath.  Those days, I wasn't particularly interested in the seeds, only in the parachutes that held them so magically aloft in ways that the swingsets at school just couldn't manage. I didn't give a thought to the responsibility those bits of fluff carried with them, to keep their own lifeline going.  But they did teach me the joy of occasionally casting your fate to the winds.

Thyme-leaf speedwell (Veronica oltensis)

The speedwell didn't mind the frost the other morning any more than it had minded the feather.  Just to give you a sense of scale, its leaves are only about 1/8 inch across.  The ice crystals on them are tiny, indeed.  Some had been just pinpoints of water vapor before alighting on the colder surfaces of the leaves, where they condensed and froze.  It's hard to believe such delicate particles had the power at their backs to fell the milkweed overnight, to cast it into a deep sleep as surely as a bite from a magic apple.  

Even mid-December has days of fair-weather clouds—"decorative clouds", as one of my favorite weather forecasters calls them.  You don't expect any moisture from them, and they don't really get in the way of the sunshine.  They just cast softly shifting patterns across the sky that mesmerize you with their fluidity.  They float along in such an easy way, like milkweed seeds held aloft and slowly spinning, drifting on the wind.   That effortless buoyancy, though, belies their enormity.  They carry 350,000,000,000 water droplets per cubic foot (according to the The Cloudspotter's Guide).  "Modest-sized clouds" weigh as much as a 747 or possibly 6,268.75 blue whales—about as many as you can shake a fish at in a day.  Even smallish clouds stretch to a kilometer in diameter.

And from here they look as light and insubstantial as a bit of down.