White Now, Not Brown

ProfessorRoush's last post was about how brown the prairie has turned and now (with extreme misgiving), how sorry I am for posting that!   Because yesterday morning, it started to snow.

And snow and more snow came falling from the heavens, blanketing the yard and wiping out the uglies. 

And this morning, 5 inches later, you can see the results for itself, a bumpy thick covering of snow over the backyard, turning a drab landscape into a jeweled foreground for sunrise.   I shouldn't complain, but since snow means cold and shoveling and a general mess of the cars and garages, I find that I actually prefer the drab brown of fall to the icy breath of winter, even if I momentarily forgot while wallowing in my loss of gardening time.

Except for what snow does for the house.   My brick eyesore on the prairie now looks like a scene out of a Norman Rockwell scene in the snow, don't you agree?

And at night, better yet!   I took this one returning home from the pre-game function for the Kansas State-Iowa State game last night; a game played in the snow as some people (not me) think football is meant to be played.   I'm doubly pleased, both because I held the phone steady enough for almost no blurring on this 3-second exposure (it was much darker out than this photo shows), and because the Christmas Tree that we just put up yesterday is visible in the window.

We may have snow, but all seems right in the world this weekend.  I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving holiday and is looking forward to Christmas!

Brown Out There

Geez, Louise, our fall color sure went away quickly.   It was looking at least a little fall-ish out there a week ago, oranges and russets and reds and yellows and browns everywhere, and now it's gone.   Fade to brown, fade to drab, goodbye leaves.   The weather doesn't show it as it's beautiful and sunny everywhere and still days where it hits 70ºF, but that last cold spell hit the trees hard. 

I'm still encouraged on some warm mornings by the occasional fogs, though.   We had one this week and it set the colors back in place.  Except for this little redbud volunteer off my back patio.   It has given up its leaves but it is holding on hard to those proliferate brown seed pods.   I'll have a bumper crop of redbuds next spring!

On my drive to work, I was struck by the wispy clouds on the east side of town.   This picture may not do it justice, but it was surreal in real life, a landscape draped in the middle of the sky.

I did notice, outside on this foggy morning, that my bald cypress looked particularly drab and around it, the warm morning looks somehow more like winter.   It normally has a little more golden color, but not this year.   Just yesterday, driving, I was listening to a Saturday morning garden show that comes from Topeka and the host was lamenting the lack of fall color in Kansas this year and whining about how fast the leaves came down.   He blamed it on the drought we've had in the summer and fall, and on the quick cold snap of a week ago.   I blame it on Kansas.

Not so bad, it is though, when the fog hides the greater world away and leaves me with a nice, sheltered, view of my garden.   And a warm feeling that it was a good year.

For the Children

Oh, you thought ProfessorRoush had forgotten about it, my semi-annual rant against STATOMIC, the Seasonal Tyrannical Attempt To Obliterate My Internal Clock?  Well, in vain you hoped, and I tried, I really did, to ignore my feelings and not bore you with my oft-repeated rants and grumblings.   And then came yesterday morning.

It was a beautiful brightly sunny Monday morning yesterday, when, under governmentally-mandated biannual fiat, I awoke once again at an ungodly hour, forcing myself to fitfully wait until the un-Daylight-Savings-time moment came to actually get out of bed and go downstairs and exercise.   Sleep-deprived, of course, even though I fell asleep Sunday night at 9 p.m., the usual diurnal bedtime of my internal clock if not now that of my bedside clock.  Properly limbered up after biking (or, as it is now called "spinning"), shaved, showered, dressed and fed, I went forward into the blinding sunlight to face anew the increased risks of heart attack, stroke, and vehicular accident that kills extra hundreds of Americans in the week after each first Sunday of November.

It's the Children that I worry for most on these time change weeks, the collective, capitalized and cherished Children, who, walking to school, must risk a brush with eternity and my Jeep each day as, stricken by the morning sun, I drive oh-so-carefully to work.   You see, my drive to work in the mornings is directly to the east, near the walking paths to school, and in the evening directly to the west, so I'm treated by the time change to not two such periods yearly, but four, doubling up with a sun who just last week wasn't quite awake when I went to work but now blares again into my face for a few more weeks.  I'll do it all over again in reverse next Spring.    And each time the time changes, the Children are at risk.

Red Hawthorn (Crataegus crusgalli)

And I also worry for the decrepit but hardy crew of morning joggers who poorly choose my gravel road as their path these days.   Just around the bend, I come over a hill and then stare straight into the sun for a few moments.   One day, someday, it's inevitable that I'll bounce a runner off into the grass alongside the road, no matter how carefully I drive, a dull thud and an "oomphf" heard from an unseen obstacle who shouldn't even be there.   I shouldn't be there either but for the arbitrary and senseless control exerted by our witless governments on our every waking moment.

Is there no courageous leader, no champion of legislative processes, who will take on the challenge of ending this insanity?   Who will protect the innocent Children and marathoners from doom by vehicular homicide?  Who will leave my biorhythms and cardiac rhythms untouched and unlegislated so that I don't die on a Monday morning right after the change from Daylight Savings?   I despair, despondent that my tombstone will read "he died on Monday after Sunday" and no one will understand, someday, some future day, in a more sane time when hopefully this madness ends.   Please end it, for the Children if not for me.

(These pictures, of course, have nothing to do with the Time Change, they're just more garden pornography that I wanted to share from my trip to the Amarillo Botanical Gardens.)  

Cranes are good luck!

I love a banana in flower!

Amarillo Botanical Garden

(warning, picture heavy).  ProfessorRoush was away this week at a conference in Amarillo, Texas, a delightful excursion to nowhere in particular, but a nice city, as they say, to visit.   The area was clean and the weather pleasant and the north Texans were laid-back and welcoming.  Would recommend 10/10 (as my Gen Z students would say) if you find yourself in the area.   

The hosts for my travels scheduled a afternoon side excursion for my group to the Amarillo Botanical Gardens, a cooperative municipal venture created by and supported by the local garden clubs (who "set out to prove gardening was possible in the challenging high plains of Texas") and located since 1968 in the Medical Center Park.   I could hardly have planned for a better side-trip for myself and in the course of just a couple of hours took over 60 pictures with my trusty iPhone, a few of which I'll share here.   This one was taken inside the Mary E. Bivens Tropical Conservatory and the Ringed Teal ducks at the bottom of the waterfall were real.   Since these ducks are native to South America, I presume they are captive within the conservatory.

The vistas of the garden were clean and open, with focal points throughout the many separately-themed gardens.   Here, near the entrance, is a broader view from the Franklin Butterfly Garden looking towards the Dusty McGuire Japanese Garden.  

I also thought the view down this isle, towards a very large butterfly mosaic, was quite nice, and the mosaic is a spectacular garden feature.

As per my pattern, I took pictures of almost every statue, but I did not plan for the accidental optical illusion from my lens catching the "heavenly" light rays on this frog. It stands, in real life, almost 7 feet tall.  The bronze plaque at his feet reads "MELODIUS TOADIUS"

Another massive statue in the Gardens was this clay/stone large rabbit just outside the ABG's Harrington Gallery.  This handmade creation was a good 6 feet tall and long.

I did notice, and strongly-approved, of the use of pumpkins and gourds throughout the ABG, placed everywhere in abundance to brighten up and "autumnize" other focal points like the rabbit above and even mundane objects such as this bird bath and the bronze garden bench below. 

Of course, placed in the Panhandle, cold hardy cacti and succulents were flourishing in the Britt High Desert garden, impervious to the blinding sunlight and freezing winds common to the area.  I thought Amarillo was in a low-lying area, but I was surprised to discover that the city itself is at an altitude of 3662 feet.

The Attebury Amphitheater is a nice use of space in the gardens, a place where music and yoga and other activities occur regularly.   My group had a short meditation training there, a not unpleasant break in my usual frantic pace.

The whole of the Amarillo Botanical Gardens is a restful place and full of nice easy to navigate pathways and interesting focal points.  

All in all, as I previously stated, don't forget to make the Amarillo Botanical Gardens a stop if you're ever in the Texas Panhandle.  The hard-fought efforts of generations of Amarillo gardeners should be recognized and appreciated by the suffering gardeners of the greater world!