In a River’s Silent Epiphany

The rivers are retreating. Or rather, their liquid state.  With January finally depositing some single digit air masses, the rivers are donning their ice skirts, thin mottled gray and white fabric inching out from the banks for eventual junction. Much to the delight of ice fishing enthusiasts, who have been risking their returns on an inch or two at most of solid surface on lakes and backwater sloughs.

In a week or two the black channels and leads will be under ice, and snow machine tracks will scribe the white boulevards of the Fox, Des Plaines and Rock Rivers. But the rivers will not be still, just unseen. And a few unfortunate snow machine drivers will discover that the ice varies on any stretch of channel (shoreline being the weakest).  On the lakes, fishing shanties are popping up, which make any nighttime snow mobile excursion something like a pinball game (in January 2010 a 43-year-old male with a .263 blood alcohol level died after ricocheting off two fish shanties near Salem, Wisconsin; and a week later a 30-year-old male, with half the inebriation, vanished when his machine went through the ice on the Winnebago River).

So rivers can kill us, but with the right approach, where we plant our feet and our conscience, they can also comfort us, and clear our vision.  In summer the unceasing flow of intermingled streams turned blue, or black, or brown become a parade of possibilities: what will float by next, if we are planted bank side; or what will we encounter up ahead, if we are in the flow.   We are grounded or ungrounded; serene in the world pulling away, or content in pulling away from the world.

The experience is different in the winter when all is seemingly still,  whether on the bank or on the river.  There we stand in a silent epiphany between two incarnations:  New Year’s freeze-up, and April’s break up. It appears we are at a standstill with the world, nothing moving or changing. Just waiting.

Perhaps for more snow, or deeper ice, to disguise or forestall the transfiguration pulsing below.

 

Katsura or Kudzu

The Katsura tree, native to Japan and China, has been cropping up at nurseries the past few years, and I took a liking to it two years ago, and brought home a five foot high clump for a spot along our backyard fence, just a few feet from the sump drainage channel where the willows and cattails have staked their claim.  Moist soil is a must for Katsura which will drop its leaves when the earth becomes semi-dry. In autumn their leaves are said to smell like burnt sugar, but I find that difficult to detect given all the other odors from the growth around it.

Hardy in zones 4 to 8, the Katsura thrived in the late Paleocene period, survived the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, but disappeared in Europe and North America during the Pleistocene when glaciers scoured the land.

The tree was introduced to North America in 1865 by Thomas Hogg Jr., a U.S. marshal serving on a diplomatic mission to Japan. Hogg’s discerning eye also settled on a far less endearing specimen: kudzu, which he introduced to U.S. gardens as a ground cover and erosion control agent. It is now out of control from Alabama to Florida.

That’s nature: a well mannerd Katura struggles to survive, while an unruly Kudzu pretty much conquers everything.

The architecture of death

Autumn is upon us and things are falling apart, falling out and falling down, as cells shut down in falling temperatures and thinning sunlight. The ashes, maples, cottonwoods and redbud are now stark skeletons in our backyard and the birches are reduced to a thin net of yellow leaves. What dressed the branches now litters the ground. It is the great brownout, when the circuit breaker for photosynthesis has tripped, and plants metabolism has geared down to a pilot light.

Dormancy has set in for the leaf bearers and the conifers, and that is a good thing. Six months of reaching for sunlight, gasping for irrigation and suffering aphids and beetles has earned a sabbatical. Even in the sunshine zones, plants need a break, as we learn from wikipedia:

Going through an “eternal summer” and the resultant automatic dormancy is stressful to the plant and usually fatal. The fatality rate increases to 100% if the plant does not receive the necessary period of cold temperatures required to break the dormancy. Most plants will require a certain number of hours of “chilling” at temperatures between about 0°C and 10°C to be able to break dormancy (Bewley, Black, 1994).

Life as we knew it—in our beds and borders—is moving toward monotone. Form is withered, stature stunted, as a forced anorexia sets in for astilbe and anenome. It’s becoming the valley of dry bones. The stands of grass grow brittle, and the overlapping layers of hostas begin a slow cascade to the ground. So our suburban yardman or yardwoman, divorced from any appreciation of the process at hand, strips their beds of any evidence of the desiccation and diminution that describe the descent into dormancy, and in some cases death. Not only do they ditch the wake, they level the cemetery.

I say let it stand or lay, as the case may be. Not just as cover and food for the wildlife, but as a reminder of what came before, the labor of both garden and gardener, and as testament to nature’s enduring promise and elegant destiny in its architecture of death.

 

Last light on the green fuse

A late afternoon sun on an autumn sedum is a reminder that these forms and colors are fleeting. This is one of the last bloomers in the garden, and on a sunny afternoon is a magnet for various bees and wasps. It’s one of the last gas stations open for the order Hymenoptera.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

—Dylan Thomas, The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, 1937

Autumn Affirmation

Intrepid? Resourceful? Resilient? Or just a genetic predisposition?  This sweet pea continues to grow and bloom into the third week of October. The same plant that was hitting its stride in mid-August (see second photo).  All around it are the bones and debris of the prairie drift–gay feather, cone flower, penstemon, rubeckia–which will serve as winter’s pantry for sparrows, juncos and chickadees. Forage out of fallow. Thanksgiving for that, and for unexpected demonstrations of audacity.

So in the season of brown-out, let us see more and feed more on random affirmations.

October sweet pea

August sweet pea

Falling into autumn

If spring is about hope, promise, potential; then what do we drape autumn with?  Plans gone awry? Promises unfulfilled?  Expenditures in vain?  Treelines are on a slow trim from yellow to gold and soon burnt sienna, while a few cold tolerant species are cracking sprays of color in the borders and beds. Spirited defiance tempered by the grudging acknowledgment that nothing much will be growing after the last cabbage is cut from the field.

A funeral is approaching but first there is a wake. Let’s toast April’s hopes falling into autumn.

boltonia flows to a breeze and camera movement

A ginko branch turned lemon yellow in early autumn.

Purple pickerel weed blooming in late September on a southern Wisconsin garden pond.

 

Grasses like maiden hair have their most strking coloration in the fall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Low rain clouds move over Wisconsin cornstalks in late September.

 

Summer rising

Meteorological autumn has arrived, which means mums and bundles of dried cornstalks at the garden centers. But nature isn’t calling it quits. Cloverbush, boltonia and asters are blooming, as are sweet autumn clematis, butterfly bush, rubeckia and sedums. Then there are the laggards: the stray Shasta daisy, or cranesbill geranium, or petulant phlox.

Here and there a few demonstrations and celebrations in the waning daylight, refusing to fold and fade before the northern breezes and our falling expectations. In our garden, it’s time for planting and transplanting. Skip the mums, go for the 50 percent off perennials. This weeks collection included globe flower, anemomes, butterfly weed. day lilies, coreopsis, coral bells, New England asters, and a few autumn red miscanthus. Among the errant upstarts relocated:  gayfeather, joe pye weed.

Summer is not gone, but still rising.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Variations on Viewing a Pond

Familiarity with places, objects, plants, and relationships can be beneficial, but also blinding.  We may only understand what we expect to see, and see only the dimensions that fit our understanding of something. New concepts, new constructions, new movements tend to challenge our assumptions and models. We may find them discomforting, destabilizing, and profoundly threatening to our worldview.

Five variations on viewing a pond with reeds and lily pads. Which is truer to the nature of the elements in this scene, and which is truer to the experience of observing this scene?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What would the pond say?

 

Nature and fractals

In William Paul Young’s The Shack, the protagonist Mckenzie Allen Philips is given a tour of the garden surrounding the shack by the Spirit, who goes by Sarayu. It is a vibrant, complex patchwork of color and texture, a random conglomeration of flowers, grasses and vegetables. Sarayu calls it a fractal, a geometric shape or pattern that repeats itself at smaller scales, and, as Sarayu points out, is “infinitely complex.” She loves them, she tells Mack, so she puts them everywhere. And Mack responds, “Looks like a mess to me,” prompting a thank you from Sarayu who agrees it is a mess, as well as a fractal.

The natural world may seem random and indeterminate at first glance, but careful study will confirm there is a structure to the apparent chaos. Nature is always in process, but a process channeled through pattern and rhythm. Recognition of this goes beyond sight; it calls for listening. You have to hear, or rather absorb nature’s rhythm. Letting your breath and pulse be merged with the movements in earth, leaf, water and air.

It was chaos in color. His eyes tried unsuccessfully to find some order in this blatant disregard for certainty. Dazzling sprays of flowers were blasted through patches of randomly planted vegetables and herbs, vegetation the likes of which Mack had never seen. It was confusing, stunning, and incredibly beautiful.
— The Shack, William Paul Young

 

Land of the Lakota

Most accounts of the Pine Ridge Reservation dwell on the depressing socioeconomic conditions: 80 percent unemployment, 49 percent of the 20,000 plus residents living below the poverty line, an infant mortality rate five times the national average, and life expectancy averaging just 49 years for men and 52 years for women. Yet, there is strong tribal and cultural cohesion among the Oglala Lakota people, and ownership of their role as stewards of the badlands and grasslands.

Over the 150 years since the creation of the Great Sioux Reservation, the lands given the Lakota have shrunk by two-thirds, including the loss of the Black Hills. Only 84,000 of the remaining three million acres are suitable for farming, and much of that land is held by non-native trusts.  So in place of grain, there are cattle and horses. And vast, unbroken swaths of mixed grass prairie, not so different from the mid-19th century.

The images below are scenes encountered along BIA highway 2 that runs east-west on the southern border of the badlands.

 

A church stands alone on Cuny Table.