Time Change, Seasons Change

 ProfessorRoush will spare you, this fine November morning, from his usual diatribe about the biannual time change (Fall Back, Everyone!) and the toll it takes on physical health, well-being, and our soul.  I maintain my offer, however, to not only vote for but to tirelessly campaign for any party or politician who abolishes it....not who promises to abolish it, but who actually makes it happen.  No promises trusted here, please; I don't trust anyone in a position to pander to the public.  One might ask, isn't pandering just another word for "begging," but Dictionary.com defines it as (Definition #1) " to cater to or profit from the weaknesses or vices of others."   Definition #2 is "to act as a pimp or procurer of clients for a prostitute."  I put it to you, is there a better explanation of politicians anywhere?

But enough of that.   Fall is a dozen days old now and with the change in seasons, after two months of drought, came rain, glorious and bountiful, cleansing and quenching rain.  I forgot that in my fall garden cleanup I had left out one rain gauge to chance freezes, but this morning it held 4 inches from either the rain Thursday night or the rain all day yesterday.   I celebrate so much rain because it is life itself for the prairie and the soil needed a good soaking before winter sets in.  Rain also washes the autumn dust away and makes the prairie come alive with color.  My back garden, if you don't look too closely at the disorder and unsheared shrubs, looks like a Norman Rockwell watercolor today from my kitchen window.   And that view will continue all week as, unusually for our area, we have rain forecast for 6 of the next 7 days.

As one perfect example of the native prairie response to rain, I give you this completely natural, native clump of Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) growing among the Switch Grass, Indian Grass and Side-Oats Grama common to this area.   This clump is right out front as I drive up to home each evening, one clump in a large "rain border" that edges my front yard, welcoming me home.   At least it did prior to today when it was still likely light as I came home.  From here on to spring, I come home from work in darkness, just one of many hated moments to our loss of daylight savings time.

And a few tough plants continue to bloom and provide fragrance.  I had some French lilacs rebloom unexpectantly a couple of weeks back, and today, the English rose 'Heritage' (at top) and some lavender (at left) are still trying to hold back winter.  I confess that I can't tell one lavender from another, but I treasure the soft gray foliage and scented blooms whenever they appear. 

My garden, my reading garden, is withdrawing its life beneath the soil now, waiting for spring.  Waiting along with this, one of my favorite statues, for warmer days and a return of shade.  It is aging too, my garden.  I noticed today the rain has nourished the green algae of this aging cement statue, softening it and helping it to join the garden as a full member.   Now not an ornament, but another beloved element in my garden, waiting, like me now, for Spring.  

Housebound Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving, yes, and outside the wind is howling and the rain is coming down in sheets.  We had planned to visit my son in Colorado today, but a bad forecast and a winter storm watch convinced me that the return trip tomorrow might be a dangerous thing, and so, here we sit, Bella and I, staring out the window into the storm.  The photo to the right is from a happier moment, yesterday, when we took advantage of the last warm day to play in the sun.  Bella likes to hold the frisbee with her paws and doesn't give it up easily after she retrieves it.

Thankfully, my fall garden-related chores are essentially complete.  Hoses are drained and stored, peonies and irises and daylily beds hacked down, and the lawn mower oil has been changed, blades sharpened, and gas preservative run through.    Out the back window, the garden has entered dormancy and has turned to sienna, ocher, and umber, colors that are enhanced when the fall rains come to the prairie as you can see in the garden and distant hills below.   I wish I had not yet cut down the tall native prairie grasses in the foreground (see the bottom picture below), but in the midst of this dry fall I had given up on seeing any moisture and I wanted to stem the incursion of the field mice and rabbits this winter.  And "plant" the seeds of this year's penstemon.

Along with the fall chores of the cultured garden, one of my annual chores is to clean out the eighteen birdhouses that I've placed on the the periphery of the twenty acres I call home.  The trek up and down the property provided a perfect opportunity for me to photograph the house and gardens from the back hill, a clear Kansas sky presiding over the scenery on a gorgeous fall day early in November.  This is an overview that I don't think I've shown on this blog before.  The hill in the foreground falls away to a farm pond, hidden out of the bottom frame of the photo below, and then rises again to the house and barn.  The overall garden looks small from this vantage.

My "bluebird trail" and the Professor-Roush-customized bluebird houses were unusually successful this year, perhaps due to the extra moisture of this past spring.  Thirteen of 18 houses appeared to have fledged bluebirds, containing the thin grass nests characteristic of the species.  Four other houses, all near the woods and pond, contained the deep stick-formed nests of wrens, and one decrepit old commericial house contained only a dead wasp nest.  Thirteen bluebird nests is a PR for this little spot of land, a moment worthy of contemplation and celebration.

On the morning of the bluebird-house-cleaning, the back garden was just waking with the sun, long shadows aimed west, and somehow duller, and ready for winter.  Seen here, below, you can see the shoulder-tall height of the native bluestem that I have since mowed off.  I am always torn between leaving them unmown to capture the moisture of the winter snows and to witness the joyous rusty tones they exhibit when wet, but one of the reasons I cut them down is so that the seeds of the forbs among them drop closer, spread only by the whirring mower and hidden in the debris in hopes of increasing their density.  Spring penstemon and fall echinacea are always welcome and appreciated here in my prairie garden.   Now if only next spring would hurry up and come along.

   

 

Red Rain

By a strange coincidence, "Rev" of Red Dirt Roses blog commented on yesterday's post and asked for more pictures of my southern view just as I was examining this morning's Ipicture of the same view with the intention of showing everyone how a little (very little) rain makes the red colors of the bluestem predominate.  We had a little dampness, almost a very wet dew last night:

Unfortunately, this picture just proves to me that I need to dump the iPhone for taking pictures and go back to dragging out the good digital camera, especially in the morning, because I can't hold the phone still enough in the early morning light to keep things from being blurred.  Maybe this picture of this morning's view from my house to the north, in a little better focus, will help show what I was trying to portray:

The most dramatic morning picture I intended, a closeup of a stand of Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) is, of course, hopelessly out of focus, so I took my thought from yesterday about making these into impressionistic-type photos:

How about that?  Now I'm wondering exactly what the object is about 3/4ths of the way across the picture just above the right end of the grass.  Doesn't look like much on the original, and I saw nothing when I took the picture, but in the modified picture it looks like I caught a raccoon sneaking away.  The same "face" appears when I try to sharpen the focus.  This is almost like one of those UFO pictures where somebody is taking a shot of a transformer junction and notices the saucer hovering nearby.  I wouldn't suspect this was real, except that coming home two nights ago, I definitely startled a pair of raccoons crossing the gravel near this point.