Dearth and Plenty

or Relativity

C. chrysanthus 'Cream Beauty'

A number of years ago I found myself in Paris at the end of January and was delighted to see pansies blooming everywhere—in window boxes, public parks, tucked into private courtyards—cheerful splashes of color wherever you looked.  I commented on all the flowers to a French acquaintance, who looked at me in perplexity and said, "There are no flowers.  There are only winter flowers."  She never did quite believe me, that across huge stretches of North America "winter" and "flowers" don't go in the same sentence together.  And she never did seem particularly impressed with the pansies.

Vermont, of course, is one of those places where winter is not a flowering season.*  The snow generally arrives mid-December and doesn't melt again until mid-March.  On clear nights temperatures can drop to 25 below Fahrenheit, and some winters they don't warm above 0°F (or C, for that matter) for weeks on end.  Even the most reckless crocuses wait until spring is well advanced (in calendar terms) to make their appearance, and then only in protected spots against west- or south-facing walls.  They are truly spring flowers, blooming in early April, and mighty welcome they are.  They are loved not only for their beauty, but also because they Mean something:  winter may still have some fight left in it, but it's fading fast.  Soon the spring peepers will start calling from every pond and puddle, and from then on you're off and running.

C. chrysanthus 'Blue Pearl'

The little snow crocuses that I love are early bloomers.  In my garden they usually open at the end of February, but this year they started blooming on Groundhog Day, more than six weeks before the equinox, right smack dab in the middle of winter.  I'm wondering whether they can even properly be called spring flowers here in Albuquerque, or if they're really winter ones—not a herald of change on the horizon at all.

Thinking about the mental divide between winter and spring has set me to thinking about dearth and plenty, and how relative they can be.  In places where flowers bloom year-round, I suppose it's easy to think that even a park full of pansies makes a meager show.  Compared to the abundance of summer, winter leanness might be enough to leave you unsatisfied, wanting more.  Where flowers don't bloom for six months of the year, though, and the landscape is a blanket of white for three, any flower is a treasure.  The pinpoint of color from one little crocus can fill you with joy enough to share with the neighborhood.  Dearth—if there's hope at the end of it—teaches you the knack of turning a morsel into plenty.

Whether crocuses here belong to spring or winter is really pretty moot—they will bloom in February one way or the other.  I suppose the question is more one of attitude.  Are they "only winter flowers," not yet the real deal, or are they spring flowers that Mean something?  Do they belong to an attitude of dearth, or do they get to be the plenty at its end?

Today the weather came down on the side of winter, with snow this morning and again late this afternoon— large, sleepy flakes that kissed the flowers lightly before melting away.  The crocuses, with their colors of cream and pearl, were just as gentle with winter in their turn.  They accepted its kiss kindly, on the cheek, as between old friends.

And when the sun came out, they turned their faces toward the spring.

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* My entry for Understatement of the Year.

Kinship

or Window Dressing

Western sand cherry (Prunus besseyi)

I.

Simon was not happy, and as the boxes, furniture, and odd lots gradually disappeared into the back of the moving van, his unhappiness grew.  Change can be a worrisome thing at the best of times.  When you're blind, and elderly, and the change is not one of your choosing, and you've been shunted aside into the back yard for the duration, out of harm's way but also away from the reassuring presence of your family, worry can explode into panic.  Simon responded in the only way he could, really.  He barked.  And barked, and barked—piercing cries of desperation.  His miniature poodle soprano would have done even a wolf proud as he gave voice to the bone-deep fear of his species, the fear of abandonment and aloneness.  Poodle, pointer, or pit bull—all of those shapes and sizes are just different ways of housing the need to belong.

(The last I saw of Simon, he was sitting in the cab of the van in the arms of one of my former neighbors, eagerly sniffing the air through the open window as they all drove out of view.)

Rio Grande cottonwood (Populus wislizeni)

II.
For me, at least, blogging is basically a way of dressing up the word "Wow" for company.  Whether a tiny event in the garden or a magnificent scene in the wild, something awe-inspiring or beautiful or intriguing or comical, that moment of Wow is what prompts me to pick up camera, paper and pencil, and to look for ways to share the essence of that moment with you all.  I may have published 161 posts so far, but at heart they're almost all the same—I've just written the same post in 161 different ways.

Gaura lindheimeri

III.
It's been a while since I've waxed rhapsodic about stems.  As winter moseys along, though, and the flowers stay away, stems and branches and trunks grab your attention—and then you remember just how fascinating they are.

French marigold (Tagetes patula)

I was looking up some information on stems the other day, as one does, and was astonished to find out how alike their innards are, no matter what their surface differences, at least across large classes of plants.  The striping along a sand cherry branch, the rugged crags of an old cottonwood, the lithe wands of gaura, the nubs on marigold stems in their tidy rows, and the Kool-aid purple of rue in winter—all that variety is just so much window dressing for one essential process:  moving nutrients around.  The outer portions of the stem or trunk protect the interior, vascular tissue—the xylem, which carries water and minerals upward from the soil, and the phloem, which carries carbohydrates downward from the leaves.  The outsides of plants may have scads of different strategies to cope with their environment, to prevent dessication and protect from disease, but at heart they're all remarkably akin.  The same processes are at work in the 80-foot tree as in the tender annual.

Rue (Ruta graveolens)

All to say—wow.
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Thanks, everyone, for the kind and supportive comments and e-mails over the last couple of weeks!

Revving Up the Engines

or Why Gardening Is Like Drag Racing.  And Cats.

Licorice mint (Agastache rupestris)

Just because you're not moving, that doesn't mean you're resting.  You might even be lying on a comfy sofa, but reclining isn't the same as relaxing.  Instead of feeling the tension melting out of your neck and shoulders, your muscles softening, jaw slackening, mind drifting, as you float one easy breath away from sleep, you could be gathering your resources for some course of action—planning a new project, nagging yourself about an old one, debating possibilities, thinking through ways and means.

Tulipa sylvestris

 I was watching Sir Marley a while ago.  He had designs on a mourning dove—a nice, fat one resting under the bird feeder in the vague stupor mourning doves do so well.  Sir Marley stayed perfectly still, but you could see him working the math problems in his head:  measuring distances, calculating trajectories, accounting for wind speed.  Once all the equations worked out, he began, in the mysterious, motionless way of cats, to gather himself together.  Energy at the ready, spine taut, he slowly shifted his weight.  Ever so slightly, his back paws began to twitch.  From stasis he went instantly for the POUNCE.

And missed.  (Vague stupors 1 - Math problems 0.)

Likewise, drag racers at the start line may just be sitting there, but they're not idling.  Their engines are revving up, roaring like Sir Marley only wishes he could.  When the starting signal flicks from amber to green, off they go like a shot, burning rubber all the way.  (And that's everything I know about drag racing.)

Blue flax (Linum lewisii)

At least where gardening is concerned (and in this climate, where the ground doesn't freeze), I've stopped thinking of winter as the dormant season—the gathering season is more like it.  Just because the garden isn't leafing and budding, that doesn't mean that it's at rest.  Winter is a time for plants to draw resources together, to build them up bit by bit, to rev up the power and get it humming, so that when spring comes, bam!  They can take off like a shot.

Those tiny leaves at the base of the licorice mint and the flax are the botanical equivalents of a cat's back feet.  They haven't begun twitching yet—the plants are still doing the math problems, measuring the angle of the sun and the hours of daylight, calculating chlorophyll-to-carbohydrate ratios, plotting their growth trajectories—but in another few weeks, they'll begin in their own motionless, mysterious way, to gather themselves together for the pounce.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here surrounded by gardening books, old catalogs, and internet printouts doing my own plotting and planning.  Don't think my feet aren't starting to twitch.

Mine aren't the only ones...

Echoes

or Alternate Realities

The story of Echo has always struck me as a sad one.  She made her mistakes, and plenty of them:  she distracted Juno while Jupiter amused himself elsewhere and then got found out; she fell for Narcissus because of his looks, despite his reputation for being conceited and heartless; then, instead of going for a brisk walk and getting over him, she pined away with unrequited love.  Really, she seems not to have done much but make mistakes.

What a price to pay, though, to be cursed by Juno only to repeat what others say.  Echo lost her own voice and the power of originality; she turned into a shadow of a person.  She may have learned to be resourceful, finding ways to lure Narcissus to her with his own words, and kind, giving him himself in his self-absorbed grief.  And yet she faded away to nothing, to an aura of sorrow and regret, and the endless awareness of what once-was/might-have-been.

I've been thinking about echoes lately in the garden, looking at seed pods and dried leaves and stems.  The marigolds have turned into scarecrow versions of their glowing, summer selves, and the sense of once-was resonates from every papery husk and bract.

And yet, they haven't faded away to nothing, not by a long shot.  Those husks have the power to call out in their own voices, a different power than they had when they were green.

I have a sudden craving for tamales.

The petals sing their own tune in the mild winter sun.

Each one has its own inimitable shape.

I tend to think of plants' flowering form as their "real" one.  I'll wonder what a seedling will become and forget that it already is a marigold, just not one in bloom; I'll look at a faded blossom and think, "That used to be a marigold," forgetting the seeds that lie within, turning the blossom into dozens of marigolds, even if they're not marigolds in flower.  Marigolds in seed don't resound with once-was or might-have-been, but with what-will-be (Lord willin' and the crick don't rise).  They have the power of originality like nothing else.

In these enlightened times we're less likely to think of echoes as the voice of a hubristic nymph who irritated the wrong people, than as sound waves reflecting off a hard surface—nothing faded about them, just the original sounds heard another way.  A marigold's genetic identity reflects differently off the warmth of summer than it does off the hard surface of winter.

And it's hard to find anything sad about it.

Luck

or Doing the Work

Posole has become one of my favorite foods of all time.  A hominy stew thick with New Mexico red chiles, it will warm you up when nothing else can.  Posole is a traditional food here during the darkest, coldest time of year (though this week the weather has been sunny and unseasonably warm, but I can't help that), and it's served at New Year's to bring good luck through the coming months.

The Sasebo Japanese Garden at the Albuquerque BioPark

I was thinking about luck at the Albuquerque Botanic Garden the other day.  I'd been admiring the red stems of the dogwood in the Japanese garden when my eye was caught by a sudden movement:  a roadrunner hunting among the rocks.  (It's almost in the exact center of the photo above.)  (Also the one below.)

It had found some snails and was enjoying quite a feast, breaking the shells open against the pebbles so that it could get to the meat inside.

Roadrunners are fast enough to kill rattlesnakes and hummingbirds.  And snails.

Roadrunners aren't rare around here, but they aren't exactly common, either, not like sparrows or pigeons.  Usually when I see them they're in a hurry, running (believe it or not) across the road.  It felt like a bit of luck to be able to watch this one at its leisurely meal.  (It also felt a bit like cheating, since the roadrunner wasn't really in the wild, even though it certainly wasn't tame.)

When they feel cold, they turn their backs to the sun...

Speaking of luck, how lucky did this bird get, to have hatched at the Botanic Garden in the first place?   Acres of naturalistic plantings providing habitat for its natural prey; acres of lusciously watered, less xeric plantings, giving snails and other delicacies a niche; shelter that is protected from the worst ravages of weather by a staff that keeps the gardens in good trim; an absolute lack of predators, except perhaps for the Biopark's train, which putters along slowly enough that even I can get out of its way; handy landscaping pebbles on which to break open the occasional escargot... Really, how much luckier could a roadrunner be?

...and fluff up their feathers.  Their skin is black and soaks up the sun's heat. 
(Some dignity may be lost in the process.)

Well, to the roadrunner it's luck.  To the garden staff, not so much.  They've done the labor to put in the acres of naturalistic plantings and to water the thirsty ones; they've pruned and nurtured even the prickly pears, run the trainlet (it's such a little train) at slow speeds, and spread all those pebbles around...and lo and behold, there are roadrunners.  The gardeners have created the situation from which this particular roadrunner's good luck could emerge.

I'm not big on New Year's resolutions.  If I were to make a gardener's resolution, though, a lifelong one, it would be to do the work that makes some goldfinch's or lizard's or toad's lucky day possible—to create the garden that lets them hit the jackpot and thrive.  (Note:  rabbits, squirrels, voles, moles, and leaf-rollers need not apply.)

When you think about it, even posole, amazing as it is, doesn't rely on luck alone to get you through the new year in style.  It has vitamin C and iron, and the kick in the pants the chiles give you, to galvanize you into action and make luck a little more likely to happen.  All those robust nutrients and warming spices help you buckle down and do the work so that you, too, can make the most of good fortune when it comes along.

I'd better have another bowl...

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.

End Runs

or Fooling Old Man Winter

I think of it as my "stealth gardening" outfit—the multiple layers of black that make sitting in the sun enjoyable this time of year.  In summer black gets hot enough that it almost burns you.  In December, as long as you're out of the wind, it keeps you roasty-toasty, especially in a small, walled garden.  This weekend the temperature was only about 30°F when I went outside in the mornings, but wearing black in the sunshine let me make an end run around the cold.

Gardening is like dressing to outwit winter in a way—a set of tricks of the trade that let you make the most of nature's gifts while circumventing its extremes.  You grow things that will thrive in your climate, but you also water new plantings more carefully than nature would so that they grow deep, strong root systems.  You loosen and amend the soil.  And you mulch.

Since losing a fair amount of newly laid pecan shell mulch in a recent windstorm, I've been stealthily tracking the portions of it that just went into hiding to their lairs:  in the mess of suckering growth beneath the largest sand cherry, tucked into the corner with the scariest spider webs (why couldn't they blow away?) beneath the blue bench, or drifted up against the grasses.  I coax it out with a gentle hand fork and then rehome it to the barest spots.  It's not much insulation, but it might be enough to fool Old Man Winter if he doesn't look too closely.

As I was sidling around the garden hunting for errant patches of mulch, I spotted this in the central bed:

One of the sylvestris tulips (I think) is coming up—actually, quite a number of them are.  I've never grown them before so don't know if they normally break ground before the first day of winter or if this is jumping the gun.  Did I plant them too shallowly? too early? too late?  I'm not sure whether they have a clever strategy for making an end run around winter or whether they're trying to steal a base—to sneak over to third while the pitcher isn't looking.  If the latter, I'm dubious.  How often does that succeed?

You can do a lot to trick Old Man Winter, but I don't know if he's going to fall for this one.

A Change of Clothing

or Autumn Slips Away

I wonder sometimes whether hummingbirds recognize people.  My guess is that they don't—I'm not sure whether they even recognize people as people, let alone have the ability to recognize individuals.  If I wear pink or orange out in the garden, the hummingbirds are much differently aware of me than if I'm in green or blue.  Pink and orange qualify me as Potential Dinner.  Yellow might let me be Worth a Shot.  But blue and green?  They just make me blue Not-a-Dinner or green Not-a-Dinner, equally uninteresting in either case.  A change of clothes is worth a whole new role in the ecosystem.  It's practically an existential makeover, in hummingbird terms.

__________________________________

The 'Wild Thing' autumn sage looks thoroughly chastened.  Winter stalked through the garden this week in a grumpy-neighbor "Some of us have to work tomorrow" sort of way and shut down the party, slam!  Now the riotous blooming by the patio is at an end, and the loud outbursts of color have gone quiet.  Let's hope 'Wild Thing' doesn't look in the mirror until it's gotten some rest.

'Wild Thing' autumn sage (Salvia greggii) when it's at home

Winter really did let us have it, at least in the Albuquerque scale of things.  On Monday the temperatures reached record lows for that date, dropping to the single digits F; some parts of town (though not mine) had several inches of snow.  The unusual cold pushed the garden forward into winter by about three weeks, if not into a whole different growing zone altogether.  The Jupiter's beard and 'Goldflame' honeysuckle, usually green through December, are blackened mush.  The ipheion, which comes up in fall and was beginning to make a bright, grassy (if somewhat threadbare) carpet under the sand cherries, is limp and flattened.  Even the more or less evergreen 'Lady Banks' rose has lost most of its leaves.

The changes are a little disappointing this early in the season—I was hoping for more life in the garden this winter and am sorry to lose it before winter even starts.  The changes are also a signal, though, that it's time to reframe my idea of beauty, to reset it to winter's standards and let autumn's slip away.

Crocus speciosus, on a bed of cotula and cat hair

The days of leaves and seed pods are yielding to the days of stems and trunks, stalks and buds, to the play of light and shadow, to grass seeds backlit against a low, white sun.  A new wardrobe, a new role in the ecosystem, an existential makeover.  The new clothes may well turn out to be striking, shapely, and chic.

But they won't be party clothes any more.

Bringing Out the Life

or Rejecting Neutral Gray

November 12

I don't know whether the sunsets are actually more glorious at this time of year or whether they just show up in more attractive places.  A little of both, probably.  The clouds (if any) in summer are usually thunderheads—impressive and sometimes beautifully colored, but fairly localized.  In late autumn and winter, on the other hand, the clouds (if any) tend more toward the altostratus or cirrus side, lighting up huge stretches of sky in the middle or upper atmosphere as soon as the sun skims the horizon.  At this time of year, too, with the sun setting farther to the south—at the end of a long, open street rather than tucked between roofs—I have a better view from the upstairs window of those vivid colors, if you can overlook a few telephone poles and wires.  And antenna towers and commercial buildings.  Sunsets are among the few real perks of the cold months.

People sometimes ask me whether I fiddle with the colors of sunset photos before posting them.  I don't.  They usually turn out more orange than I expected and less pink, but that's just the whim of the camera.  I do, however, always take them ⅓-⅔ of a stop (do we still call them stops?) darker than what my camera's light meter suggests, which brings out the life, the wonderful depth and vibrancy, in the colors.

As I understand it, in its default mode, a camera's light meter is the Goldilocks of the photographic world, wanting a visual porridge that's neither too hot nor too cold.  "Just right" to a camera is "18% gray" (or 12%, depending on who's talking):  a neutral shade halfway between the light that reflects off black objects and off white ones.  When the meter tells you that a photo is correctly exposed, it's telling you that with the current settings you'll get a picture where the overall balance is at that 18%-gray middle point between dark and light.

You have to feel for the poor light meter, trying to make the best of situations when it has no way of knowing what the parameters really are; at one time or another we have all been in that boat.  Faced with a sunset, no matter how dramatic the darkening upper atmosphere or how brilliantly glowing the clouds, the camera will do its living best to neutralize the whole scene, to find the intensity that is equivalent to that medium gray.  It means well.  Unfortunately, if you heed its advice it will also give you a sunset that's pale, drab, and washed out—a fair-to-middling sunset, when the one you saw was spectacular.

November 20

I was thinking about all of that, looking at sunsets this week, and looking beyond into winter.  I still dread this time of year, even here where the season is sunny and relatively mild.  The problem isn't the weather or the shorter days.  It's the isolation—the way closed windows shut you away from the sounds connecting you to the world:  the ambient noise of neighborhood life that in warmer weather, at least to those of us who spend most of our free time alone, resting, is a kind of company.  Without those connections, the world can look a little pale and drab.

So the goal this winter is to override the norm of neutral gray, to live ⅓ of a stop more intensely than average—maybe even ⅔, if I really want to kick up my heels.  I don't know quite how I'll do that in a way that's quiet, low-energy, and has me home on a sofa by 6.  If cameras are a good role model for life, though, and I don't see why they can't be, ⅓ of a stop is all it takes to go from fair-to-middling to spectacular.  One-third of a stop:  nothing radical, nothing extreme.

Just one little flick of the dial, to bring things into warm, vibrant life.

Vestiges

or Skeletons in the Closet

A few years ago I was hanging out with an international group of friends, trading favorite figures of speech and laughing at the way the idioms translated into our different languages.  Somehow the phrase "fixin' to" came up, and I can still see the delight on one friend's face—his joy at this manner of saying that no, you're not doing anything yet, but you might be at any time; that while you may look idle, you're actually working on thinking about getting ready to accomplish something.  Soon(ish).

Of course, it's a lot more fun being the one who's fixin' to do something than the one waiting for it to happen.  Right now, when winter is fixin' to head for another hemisphere and spring is fixin' to arrive, there's a lot of anticipation floating around without anything to attach itself to.  It's actually one of my favorite times of year, despite how painful the suspense can become.  Every day the excitement builds, and some tiny but significant change rewards your vigil—a twig that's come to life with richer color,  a bud that's opened up a hairline fracture in a bleary, Monday-morning peek at the world, a single leaf flaunting its green enthusiasm amid the skeletons of winter.

Make no mistake:  those skeletons still predominate, old snake-skin remnants of the previous year—the trimmed stalks and leaf-mulch, the sprawling dead growth on plants that still need cushioned against frost, the bare earth where the mulch has blown away.  This is actually the one time of year when I'm embarrassed to have people see the garden, as if all those skeletons are skeletons in the closet—as if this phase of transition is something to hide from all but the most tolerant eyes.

And yet, the vestiges of winter have their beauty, too—a decomposing leaf with its warp and woof unraveling, a study of tensile strength and fragility; the haphazard palisades of tarragon stalks, protecting tender new growth; the paisley swirls of dried leaves punctuated by dots of green.

I will not miss winter when it goes, but despite the suspense and the eager wait for greenery and blossoms, I may as well enjoy it while it stays.  To try to see winter beauty on spring terms is to miss it altogether—almost as pointless as berating winter because it hasn't yet yielded to spring.

After all, it's fixin' to.

Drama?

or A Matter of Perspective

I can't figure out whether last week in New Mexico was one big, mad scramble or whether everything came to a screeching halt.  It felt like both, really.  Perhaps that's the essence of an emergency—a lot of frantic activity in an effort not to lose ground.

We actually had some severe weather, you see, the kind that seldom happens here, with snow, ice, Arctic winds, and bitter cold all at once.  Record-breaking sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures combined with natural gas shortages to deprive some 30,000 homes of heat, and led the governor to declare a state of emergency.  Schools were closed for four days; the universities, national labs, and state offices shut down to conserve gas.  Pipes froze and burst, furnaces went on the fritz (I had a little of that drama myself), some cities even had rolling blackouts.  Churches and school buildings turned into impromptu emergency shelters.  In Albuquerque, where many people don't own ice scrapers, let alone serious mittens or boots, many chose not to venture out at all.

So once the cold eased up and I'd had a chance to inspect the garden for damage, I just had to laugh at the contrast.   Yes, a couple of plants that weren't really thriving seem to have received the coup de grâce, and the ones that are only semi-evergreen have lost their leaves, but look what the Lady Jane tulips accomplished this week:

They've grown a good two to three inches since the last time I looked.  And the tarragon—one of the most tender plants I grow—broke ground in some new places:

The little nubs of crocuses coming up have turned into definite leaves, the catmint has fuzzy new growth at its base, and generally, most of the plants are acting like this weather never happened.

While all this drama has been carrying on in the human world, while we've all been fussing and worrying and hunkering down, the garden has been quietly getting on with things.  The realization made me catch my breath—it was one of those moments when you catch a brief glimpse into something alien and beautiful, when you realize what a different rhythm plants are attuned to and catch the faintest echo of it yourself.  The frantic tempo of wind and weather—so dangerous to us—doesn't really seem to matter to them.  Secure in their rootedness, pacing themselves to the slow ebb and flow of seasons, their priorities are elsewhere.  The days are lengthening; the sun is getting stronger.  And so, snow and wind and cold notwithstanding, buds are fattening, tulips leafing out, and new growth stirring underground.  It's as if the weather that affects us so powerfully is completely beyond their ken.

In the rock-paper-scissors game of gardening, of course, sometimes weather does trump seasonal instinct.  (I would encourage any plants that are listening to remember that our average last frost date isn't until the middle of April.)  But what a lovely manner of living—to be attuned to something beyond the fuss and bother of momentary squalls, to respond to a larger pull and tug toward life.

I almost want to say, "Amen."

A Study in Scarlet

or A Conundrum

(After a brief derailment last Wednesday, I am back on track today, ready to remember that when we struggle to find beauty in our circumstances, looking at them more closely often helps—as does counting our blessings.) 


In the very first of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries, A Study in Scarlet, the great detective tells Watson, "There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."  Then, in what one can't help but feel is an anti-climax, he adds, "And now for lunch..."

I'm afraid I don't have anything quite as racy as revenge or poison pills to offer with the toasted cheese sandwiches and tomato-cumin soup, but really, that's probably for the best.   We shall content ourselves with enjoying the more benign scarlet threads that run through the colorless skein of winter, savor our meal with perhaps a cup of tea afterward, and go on from there.  (And we will not wax rhapsodical about some violinist's transcription of a "little thing of Chopin's," chirping "Tra-la-la-lira-lira-lay" and "caroling away like a lark," as Holmes apparently did, so you can all relax.)

Or are the scarlet threads benign?  I find myself tugging at a moral thread these days.  (You can all tense up again.)  It is tied to Nandina domestica or "Heavenly bamboo," an ornamental shrub introduced from east Asia.  I love this species for its winter color in many shades of red—a color that enlivens stems, leaves, and berries—as well as for its delicacy and for its translucent glow in sunshine.  But as with so many introduced species, it is invasive in the right circumstances.  While I don't think that the dry climate of Albuquerque counts as the right circumstance, I can't be sure.  It doesn't seem to invade in people's yards, but birds do eat the berries and spread the seeds elsewhere, where vigorously growing seedlings might disturb the balance of an already fragile ecosystem.  And yet those gorgeous scarlet stems and tangerine-orange leaves...I'm almost willing to be immoral and grow an invasive species for their sake.

Well, really, I am willing.  I do grow it.  I have it growing in a large container, which is one of those compromises that pleases no one, including the Nandina domestica.  On the one hand, in a pot its root system can't possibly spread out of bounds and invade; on the other, it requires extra water in order to thrive.  It hasn't flowered and produced berries yet, but surely it is only a matter of time until it does.  Once it does bear fruit and the birds find it, then the seeds will be dispersed far and wide.  And yet, without delving too deeply into the mysteries of birds' digestive systems, birds do seem to function in an, um, "easy in, easy out" sort of way.  "Far and wide" can be that far and wide:  I can't imagine that the birds will carry the seeds far enough to deposit them in any damper, more congenial climate.  Common sense and mildly deductive reasoning would indicate as much, but I don't know whether that's the case.

I'm not actually losing sleep over this (I expect I'll just trim any berries before they ripen—another compromise that pleases no one), but it does illustrate in a way that never fails to disconcert me how small choices can have broad effects—effects for which we are responsible.  It's a conundrum, but one, frankly, that I care about more in June than I do in January, when Nandina domestica casts a glow over the landscape.  During the dead season it's a pleasure to unravel the scarlet threads, isolate them, and expose every inch of them—a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. And now for dinner.

(It's still anti-climactic.)

Islands

or Above and Beyond

Everyone knows that if you walk up to a cottonwood tree in January and ask it for dramatic color it will tell you, "No."  Complaining about the brownery in my last post was actually a little unreasonable of me.  I know full well what "dormancy" means and wholly sympathize with the impulse.  If anyone were to knock at my door at 2:00 in the morning looking for verve and enthusiasm they would be turned away just as disappointed.

So I'm taking extra pleasure in those garden plants that are offering a little color these days without being asked, so to speak.  They are islands of intensity in a sea of blah, and they are all the more lovely for the contrast.  Take rue, for example:

Rue in winter (click on the collage to enlarge for a better view)

In warm weather the stems and leaves are a cool blue-green, and they really kind of disappear unless you look for them—they're charming but not striking, and no competition for "Wild Thing" autumn sage.  As winter deepens, though, the stems darken and turn this vivid, ripe-grape purple.  You actually have to get surprisingly close to notice the color; once you do you can't believe it isn't visible from outer space.  (As I mentioned in one of my very first posts, rue's winter self is what made me love it in the first place.)

One of the things I love about plants that offer winter color is the sense that they have gone above and beyond—that not only have they filled our world with beauty for the growing season, cleaned our air, and fed and sheltered the wildlife, but now they will hand us this pleasant surprise as well.  It's like when you opened your sack lunch at school as a child and found a cheerful note from your Mom, or when a friend sideswipes you out of nowhere with a quick hug, or someone does a small, unexpected kindness that sees you through a rough patch.  It's a bonus, a grace.

The kind that may well keep you from demanding unreasonable things of trees.

Shimmer

or A Theme and Variations

Truth be told, by this time of year we are growing weary of the color brown.  Our native landscape has enough fluff, tufts, stalks, and bristles that its textures are wonderfully rich, but the palette is all but monochrome.  It is a theme (brown) and variations (golden brown, bronze, buff, khaki, sepia, fawn, ecru, camel, tan, chestnut, cinnamon, tawny, beige...), and the problem with a theme and variations is that it tends to get predictable after a while.

I was thinking about that while looking through some photographs I took at the Rio Grande Nature Center here in town over the Martin Luther King holiday.  The photos struck me as drab and uninspired, as if I had left the salt out of them.  Except for the gorgeous New Mexico sky, all the colors are—not to put too fine a point on it—brown.  Shades of brown, sure; variations of brown, yes; but when all is said and done, they are the same old brown, repeated from the top one more time.

When I was actually standing at the wetlands' edge, though, or meandering through the bosque, or kneeling at the river bank to dangle a stick in the water, the experience was anything but drab and uninspired.  The colors were just as brown, but they weren't flat and two-dimensional.  Admittedly, I have a bad habit of taking pictures in the middle of the day, rather than at sunrise or sunset when the light is kinder, and a photograph can't possibly capture the purr of the sandhill cranes from the cornfield, or the irritated exclamations of ducks, or the clatter of wind in the dried cottonwood leaves—all the things that make an experience a feast.  But I think what's really missing is the shimmer.

Light is another kind of theme and variations here—so many things reflect or refract it.  It shimmers, gleams, glows, flashes, sparkles, glints, glitters, glares, dances, flickers, twinkles, scintillates... In winter it plays a counterpoint with the variations on brown in ways that make all those tawny colors come alive.  The undersides of the cottonwood leaves twinkle in the sunshine on a windy day, the fallen ones gleam on the path through the bosque.  The faint whiff of dust in the air shimmers like mist; blowing sand sparkles in a gust of wind.  Dried seed heads and grasses glow from the bosque floor, their tips haloed with light.  It's that shimmer that I don't know how to capture.

The photo of the bench comes close, and maybe the one of the dried grasses among the cottonwoods—the sense of an ambient glow as well as directional sunlight.  But the look of wintery deadness, the brown in them, still predominates in a way I don't remember  it doing.

Of course, the problem may well be that sometimes a beautiful day shimmers even more in memory than it did in reality...

Hearing a Who

or From Microcosm to Nanocosm

In Horton Hears a Who, the 1954 children's book by Dr. Seuss, Horton the elephant hears a cry for help coming from a speck of dust.  It's made by a Who, one of the many Whos in Whoville, a tiny city on the tiny bit of fluff that is in danger of drifting into the cool of the pool in the jungle of Nool.  Horton saves it and, after many difficulties, he and the Whos convince the harder-of-hearing animals in the jungle that the Whos really do exist.  At long last, the other animals agree to help protect the tiny world.  It sticks in my mind (though I may be mistaken) that the 1970 TV special ends with a Who, on its just-rescued dust mote planet, hearing a cry for help from an even tinier atom of a world, starting the process all over again.

I found myself thinking about ever-decreasing, nesting worlds as I was looking at frost patterns on leaves in the garden, especially on the salad burnet, Susanna Mitchell marguerite daisies, and oregano.  The frost had been so particular, so choosy about where it settled:  on the ruffled edges of the salad burnet, with only a light tracery elsewhere on the leaves, and on the very tips of the hairs on the daisy and oregano leaves—hairs I wasn't really even aware of until the frost caught them.

Here I've just been learning to recognize the microclimates in the garden—to trace the patterns of light and wind and cold from one square foot to the next—and along come the nanoclimates, clamoring for attention, showing that the conditions from one millimeter to the next on a leaf can be just as varied.  I wonder, if we were to descend one level of awareness further, whether we would find that each micrometer has its own set of climatic conditions, too.  And so on, and so on, and so on.

Sometimes, the smaller a world gets, the larger it gets.  Those delicate patterns of ice were so precise and so intriguing (not to mention beautiful) that I found myself (in a mild sort of way) researching frost, nanoclimates, broadleafed evergreens, botanical protections against climatic conditions, and several interesting dead ends and charming byways en route.  I've never done that for mere "leaves"... Sometimes, when a world becomes small, it can expand exponentially.

Does anyone hear a Who?