Elusive Nature

I admit I'm not the most patient of photographers, but I'm completely convinced that Nature herself conspires to keep me from capturing a number of what would be really great images. 

Take for example the picture at the right.  This is a photo of an upper level window in our stairwell that faces due East.  I was downstairs and calmly browsing the web a few minutes ago, trying to keep quiet so that the wife, daughter, and visiting son could sleep in, when suddenly I heard "flutter, flutter, flutter"....."flutter, flutter flutter"...repeated over and over.  As I got up to see what was going on, I found what I think was a Mockingbird flying into the window, presumably fighting its own reflection.  In the growing morning light, snapping on the light didn't make any difference, so I thought, "okay, if you want your picture taken, I'll oblige by going to get my camera."  A quick trip downstairs, a quick trip upstairs, and I'm ready.  Evidently the bird was ready too because it never appeared again from the moment I got the camera turned on.   Fink.

I've had a similar problem all Fall and Winter trying to get a picture of a hawk.  They're everywhere on the prairie in winter, watching over the fields by day for the slightest mouse-like creep or squeak.  But every time I try stopping the car or getting close enough to grab a picture with even my long-range lens, off they go.  And I've got such a good blog planned around a hawk picture.  I'd hate to waste the writing on a picture of a stark, empty tree limb.

Why, oh why, can't Nature just cooperate?

Ornamentation

A mere mention of the word "ornament" to a gardener usually brings forth a variety of mental images of garden gnomes, gargoyles, naked statues, cement rabbits, or abstract art laying around the garden.  I confess that it is no different for ProfessorRoush, who has detrimentally overpopulated his garden with beloved cement statues that range from the thoughtful to the absurd. 

But, it occurred to me this week, during the Christmas season I practice a different form of garden ornamentation, although to no less excess.  You can essentially forget about "stewardship of the planet" during Christmas at my house.  

  

The other members of my household, Mrs. ProfessorRoush, the absent son, and my diminutive clone of my mother, all are in agreement that the annual Christmas tree in our house must be "live," or rather, one of those cut-off but once-living classic Christmas trees. In fact, it must be a Frazier fir, preferred by all for the stiffness of the branches and the longevity of the needles.   I've personally been tempted to obtain the orderliness and ease of an artificial tree, but I've been overruled for a number of years now. And, due to my confusion caused by the various advocates for potted living trees or for the plight of poor Christmas Tree farmers and the distractive screaming of the WEE (Wild-Eyed Environmentalists) who bemoan the fossil fuel consumption represented by an artificial tree, I'm not sure what is the ecologically correct solution anyway.  So every year, I'm hauling in another dying tree to hope that it doesn't become a fire hazard before I can dump it into a pond (for fish shelter) after New Year's Day. 

  

  

 Regarding ornamentation, however, that poor dying tree is gaudied up to the nines every year.  And the ProfessorRoush household isn't into the scene of a purchased set of matching Christmas ornaments or a store-bought, designer approved, ornamentation schema.  No, our tree gets decorated with a hodgepodge of ornaments, all individual and all weighty with family meaning.  

They start at my favorite, the Kansas Wheat Ornament pictured at the very top right of this blog, handmade by my daughter in nursery school.  This one, so special to me, represents Kansas and my former toddling daughter all at one time. There are a number of other homemade ornaments as well like the one pictured to the right, this particular one made by ProfessorRoush himself in a ceramics store to which he was dragged against his better judgement at the time.

There are ornaments to commemorate vacation visits, from the White House and other areas.  And friendships, like the one given to my wife by her best friend and carrying each of their names. There are a whole bunch of soft cloth ornaments like the one at the left that were handmade by my mother one year early in our marriage, most of which still make the tree.

 A very special group of ornaments that decorate our tree represent a tradition started by my father, to give an ornament as a gift most every year to the children, so there are various anonymous ornaments representing a child's age (as for my son's 3rd Christmas at the right) or some that are more professionally done that are personalized to each child, like the one pictured below.  The latter group, of course, will follow the children someday to their homes and I'll be left missing the ornaments at Christmas, probably almost as much as the children.

Alas, it may be a dying tree that provides holiday cheer in the ProfessorRoush home, but it is given the best prettying up we can give it, with each bauble and bangle cherished all.  Merry Christmas to all!

    

Christmas Cactuses (or is it Cacti?)

I feel that I must confess.  I'm a crazy collecting Christmas Cactus closet connoisseur. (Yes, I also have a fondness for alliteration).  I can't help but purchase any new color of Christmas cactus I run across.  There surely must be some twelve-step program to help me.  Hi, I'm ProfessorRoush and I am a Christmas Cactus addict....

There is, in my estimation, no easier houseplant to grow than the Schlumbergera sp. epiphytes, otherwise known as Christmas, Thanksgiving, or Crab Cactuses (Cacti?). I should reveal that at one time I grew over 30 orchids, 15 Christmas Cacti, a handful of African Violets, and some assorted other houseplants.  When we went away for Christmas one year, somehow the heat for the house got turned off and upon our return one week later, I found one frozen upstairs toilet that had to be replaced and a whole bunch of dead orchids and violets.  The supposedly tropical Christmas Cacti survived somehow.  Or maybe it wasn't such a miracle since one plant hunter has described collecting specimens in areas of overnight temperatures down to 25F.  I've got one fuchsia Christmas Cactus that's been alive for 20 years and has produced umpteen offspring.  How many other houseplants do you grow that can claim such longevity in the face of the desert-like house conditions and the poor care of a typical homeowner?

Most of the year, they sit there in my windows, dark green and healthy, needing water only about every other week and a repotting in organic matrix every third year or so.  But now, around Christmas, they bloom forth to add to the colorful holiday.  I know there are lots of instructions available for bringing them into bloom by exposure to cold nights and decreasing photoperiods, but mine are right on schedule this year, aided only by the decreasing light level of the insulated windows they sit next to.  They're even quicker to bloom if you've got them in an old house with single-pane old-style windows.  If you have to resort to trying to force buds, flower buds will form reliably by providing 16 hours of darkness daily for 8 days at 61F temperature. 

I've seen no insect predators on the plants and the biggest danger to their survival is by overwatering them;  remember that these are succulents and treat them as such.  An overwatered Christmas Cactus will shrivel up and become limp, which just encourages more watering by the unwary, killing the plant.  Most sources say to keep them away from strong light sources such as South-facing windows, but yet mine seemed to thrive this Summer outside, placed in a corner of the house where they got full Eastern and Southern sun exposure from sunrise through about 1:00 p.m. 

The easy reproduction by rooting stems of Christmas Cactus makes me look like a genius to the friends who have benefited from the divisions I've given away.  To propagate them, twist off pieces of stems one to three segments long and then allow them to dry for 3-4 days to allow formation of a callus at the broken end.  Planted into a suitable humus-rich medium, they'll usually then root quickly in warm environments.

Native to the moist coastal mountain forests of south-eastern Brazil, Schlumbergera are leafless epiphytes with segmented green stems.  The tubular downward-facing flowers, composed of 40 or so petals that are actually "tepals", are adapted for pollination by hummingbirds, although my Christmas Cacti won't ever benefit from the arrangement here in Kansas.  You can find named cultivars, but typically all the cacti we ever see for sale locally will be labeled only by color.  The white Christmas Cactus above is, however, named "White Christmas", and I think the true red one at the left may have been "Kris Kringle".  But, whatever their names, at this time of year when everything outside is bleak, brown and drab in Kansas, I welcome the color they bring to the interior of my house.  And at least I can say that I'm able to keep a houseplant alive. 

By the way, according to the dictionaries I can find, either "Cacti" or "Cactuses" is the correct plural.  Evidently, for once, we're allowed to choose.   

Pineing Away

I saw Greggo's recent beautiful sunrise picture and post about the recent marriage and move of his son shortly before my bluebird trail cleansing Sunday and while browsing onto parts of my land I don't see routinely, I happened across a large reminder of my own son.

This Scotch Pine (Pinus sylvestris) was planted, as I recall, when my son was about a 4th grader, or about 14 years ago.  He came home excited from school with the gift of a small seedling tree for his father, provided to him during a demonstration by some local foresters at school.  When we planted it, down near the pond, it was approximately 4 inches tall and I protected it then, and still protect it, by mowing the tall grass around it every summer so that the lower branches don't catch fire during a Spring prairie burn.  The pine overlooks a small fishing dock that we built together and from which I used to watch him fish the small bass in the farm pond.  You could call this area and this pine my "memory bank" of my then young son. 

Now towering over 10 feet tall,  it is healthy as can be, either resistant to the pine wilt disease that has run rampant all over central Kansas in recent years, or more likely, just lucky.  Certainly, the disease incidence seems tied to drought and high summer temperatures and we've had enough of those lately to stress this one to the limit.  I knew about pine wilt even as I planted the tree with my enthusiastic son.  You would have thought that the foresters knew better in the late-90's than to give a bunch of kids a susceptible tree to plant, but I guess they didn't.  Most of the pines in Manhattan have died of the disease over the past decade, so perhaps the disease has passed my son's tree by and moved on without a reservoir of susceptible trees around.  I had hopes that its isolation, about a mile from landscaped Scotch pines in town, would save it from pine wilt and the associated Sawyer beetles and nematodes, but I was discouraged recently to read that pine wilt disease usually only attacks trees that are more than 10 years old.  So it is possible that I've protected this tree through childhood and young adulthood and I still might lose it soon.  Just when I thought we were beyond the danger.

I was surprised recently to see that the tree has  made it to puberty and now develops pine cones, as pictured at the left.  I'm hoping that the development of pine cones is not a sign, since the tree and my son seem to have matured at the same rate, that Mrs. ProfessorRoush's dreams of grandchildren are to be fulfilled anytime soon.  I'm happy to plant a few seemingly wilt-resistant Scotch pine offspring around, but this gardener is not ready for grandfatherhood.  I'm not nearly that old or cantankerous yet.