Hortus Populous

ProfessorRoush was in Washington DC this week, normally my favorite city to visit, particularly if I have time between conferences to hit the mall.   I've been there a number of times and have visited almost every monument and museum, some in the days before terrorism and nannyism ruined access to them.  I have walked the steps of the Washington Monument to the top and yet lived to tell the tale.

On the plus side, the weather was decent in the early part of the week and, as you can see from pictures, I did get an afternoon to wander about, visiting a number of my favorite monuments and the Museum of Natural History.  

In fact, I ran flat into the FDR Memorial, not previously knowing it existed, and I was moderately impressed by the mountain of red granite moved for its creation into the former swamp of DC.   Certainly and appropriately the most ADA-accessible monument, I recommend walking through it, particularly spaced where it is on an almost direct line between the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials.

On the negative side, I was, as usual, too early for the cherry blossoms, seeing only a stray early bloomer or two in a protected depression near the Constitutional Gardens.  And it turned cold and windy during the latter part of the week, and I learned that the cold winds of Kansas have a rival in the winds coming off the Potomac on a cold day.

Most exasperating, however, was discovering that the United States Botanical Gardens conservatory has been closed to the public for over 2 years, at least according to its website.  The outside gardens are open, but not the USBG conservatory.  When I go to DC, I always check the schedule of lectures at the USBG, just in case I get lucky as I did when I once saw Roy Klehm lecture.  This time, however, the website has not been updated for quite some time and there is no mention of a reopening date.  It seems that the USBG is within the "U. S. Capitol campus" and the fools on Capitol Hill, elected and despotic, are deathly afraid that perhaps a massive revolutionary coup will be staged from within the Children's Garden or perhaps the Orchids Room. Good grief.

My dear Representatives, Senators, Supreme Court Judges, and Executive; 

When in the course of gardening it becomes necessary for peoples with calloused hands and sunburned faces to dissolve the political idiot-cracy and allow visitors to the public gardens to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitles them, it is our right, nay our duty, to throw open the gates and allow the people inside.  Hortus Populus, Mors Tyrannis (Let the People garden, Death to Tyrants)!  You are right to fear the peasants who are most familiar with the proper use of pitchforks and shovels. Let Freedom Grow!

Indoor February Color

February already?!   It feels like Christmas has barely past, that 2021 was still a newborn just past the birth canal of 2020, let alone now a senile monarch passing the throne to 2022.  We have yet to lock horns with winter, a few days of snow here and there, fleeting and flown, but soon I expect crocus and Scilla and budding daffodils raising their heads.  

For now, it remains the duty of the Christmas cacti, or Thanksgiving cacti, or whatever the things are, to bring color to a brown landscape and brighten the morning.   My collection, as it could be termed, of Christmas cacti expanded yet again this year, with the addition of a pale yellow cultivar to the whites, reds, and pinks, and one beautiful new small plant that bears blossoms of an unmistakably orange hue.  

All are blooming again, now for the second time this year, with the exception of two.  One is the orange variety which sulks in the kitchen where Mrs. ProfessorRoush has not allowed it enough sunlight.  It is, I'm sorry to say, a Schlumbergera which is...slumbering...in a post-gluttony phase of bloom.   And I'm chagrined because I was sure I had a picture of it, taken at the peak of color, but, alas, the picture is gone, lost I say, to the silicon and ceramic wafers of computer memory.   I'll try to edit this post later as it blooms again and add it in.

The second current nonbloomer is the very fuchsia variety I've had for a decade.   It has also bloomed, and is in bud again, but I've stolen the picture here from an earlier blog entry; purloined electrons to jog your memory.

For now, veuillez m'excuser, but you must content yourself with the white, yellow, red, and fuchsia varieties.  The reds and fuchsias are, I recognize, only distinguished from each another by subtleties, small differences in the percentage of white on each petal or the shade of carmine or cardinal it most resembles, but I celebrate the individuality of all.   The reddest is at the top of this blog entry, while two other varieties, each a little more white to the petals, also vie for the "best Christmas colors" display.

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you the colors of February, hues of life to carry you through to that first glimpse of yellow daffodils....

Near Sunset

Sometimes the "near" sunset on the prairie is more stunning than the sunset itsel

Creatures Gonna Creep

Creatures creep in my garden fair,

They sneak and crawl, go here and there.

They run, they jump, they eat, they fight,

They wander there most every night.

I think my garden mine alone,

They think the garden theirs to roam.

When nighttime falls, then out they come,

They're feeding off of my green thumb.

Deer and skunks and squirrels and coons,

The garden mine in afternoons.

At night, the garden, creatures own,

They sit upon my garden throne.

Share I must, I must not kill,

The creatures linger out there still.

I surrender all to them each night,

They cede the garden, mine each light.

ProfessorRoush collected his game cameras last month and I was surprised, as always, by the life of my garden at night.   I was less enthused at the skunk that made an appearance, but she seemed to be just wandering through.   The coyotes  are the most frequent visitors, patrolling the beds for rodents and generally just slinking around every night.   

But, I recognize that life in the garden is fleeting, here one minute and gone the next minute, just like the sudden starlings in the photo above and the empty ground a few seconds later of the photo below.  Notice the time stamp on these two pictures.  Life is fleeting in the garden.

 

Sounds of Sage

Oh, how ProfessorRoush misses the garden.  I wandered out today, warmed prior from indoor exercise and enticed by sunshine.  The air seemed warmer than its measured temperature of 23ºF at 1:30 p.m., and yet it is all still and damp out there, snow drifts melting away to a frozen ground beneath, brown and tan foliage remnants of past plants as far as I can see beneath clear blue skies.  Bella, too, misses our moments of exploration, glued to my side as she sniffs for changes and danger in her garden.

I can only offer you garden pornography today, the photos here taken in the high moments of summer, the prickly white poppy a beacon of delicate lace and yellow pollen and Russian sage drawing in bumblebees frantic to store food then for this month, this season right now.   These photographs of a garden now dead, now stiff remnants and seedheads to mark their passing, these are all I have for you, memories of a world months past.

Where are, I wonder, these bees today, happily buried in warm nests, or dead husks beneath the snow?  I don't know enough about the life cycle of these corpulent flying workers and I should; I should know enough to help them survive and thrive, being that knowledge is power and all that.  I have a "bee house" up, an artful name for a board with 1/4" holes drilled in it, and some of the holes are plugged with mud suggesting the hope of pupae inside, but am I a helper or hindrance?  Truly, in gardening and in our relationships with nature, we can never have enough knowledge about the world around us.  There are surely been enough blunders and unintended consequences of well-meant but unenlightened action.

Oh, what I'd give today to hear the buzz in this Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia), black and yellow busy-ness flitting among the light blue flowers.  The 'Champlain' rose at its feet is shockingly red, screaming for attention, but the honeybees ignore the sterile rose, it  lacks the attraction of the dusky sage above it for the bustling insects.  Here is my Sunday epiphany, this cold Sunday of beginnings and doorways, of Janus: We gardeners, we think of flowers as silent, as colorful or artful elements to arrange over our gardens, but sage is more, sage is noise, the buzzing of a hundred visitors at once, the transformation of color into motion.  Today in memory I can recall the flowers, but I miss the sounds, the sounds of vibrant life now absent in this cold season, the sounds of sage trading pollen for propagation, the garden fertile and fecund. 

S'now a New Year

...and a happy snowy New Year!   I got my Christmas wish answered a little late, in the early morning hours of the new year, but I'm still happy to see it arrive.   ProfessorRoush is, by no means, a snow creature, but I do like to see one snow a year, a nice white snow to wipe the slate of summer clean and cover the debris of fall.  This front came in a little growl-ley, a little blizzard-y, but off the Rockies it came, sweeping the plains of Kansas clean.

But once a year is enough, dear Old Man Winter, so stopping it here would be fine, mind you.  The same scene as above, taken yesterday and shown below, is bland for a winter view, but quite desired over the arctic alternative.  This past weekend, outside in 60ºF and cleaning up the crushed remains of my trellis, I was eyeing the perennial beds and thinking I should get a start on them and get ahead for the season.   Today, and probably for the next month, I won't be thinking that again.  I like to see snow, but too much cold weather and I start dreaming of retiring south, a South home of my imagination at present, but I see no reason to spend a winter hibernating once my days of employment are past.  Someday, I want a home up north, here perhaps, perhaps closer to my boyhood home in Indiana, and I'll wait until the first snow fills that empty spot in my soul and then I'll skedaddle south without bothering to shovel the walk.

This little angel of mine, a gift from my father many years back, sits by the front steps, blessing visitors as they pass.  It's seen better days, a wing knocked off by an errant child or pet and glued precariously back, but it has good days yet ahead of it.   Dusted by the storm, it seems to welcome the sunlight of the 2nd day of January, the warm Kansas sun out to begin to melt that snow down into life-changing moisture for the prairie.  Or was it merely watching over me as I cleared the walk, protecting this old man from the strenuous shoveling demise that fells so many?

One the other side of the house, my terra-cotta maiden faces unflinchingly east, a little rouge from her core showing on her weathered cheeks, but otherwise protected from the northern blizzards and drifts that the angel faces.  She doesn't need to look for Gandolf to come from "the east on the first light of the fifth day," for the sun rose here at dawn on the 2nd day of 2022, beginning the cycle of thawing.  The maiden faces a new year, a new fresh garden to grow again, bones in place, awaiting warmth and flesh and moisture to grow and flourish in another year of summer.




  

Trellis Overboard!

 I'm sure a few of you caught the national news about the little blow that swept through Kansas and Nebraska on December 15th.  This was my radar picture at 5:35 p.m. as it was about peak, just about an hour after the storm ahead of it, the latter accompanied by a tornado warning for Manhattan.  I've seen a lot of radar pictures over my years in Manhattan, but that long very narrow rain front stretching from northern Oklahoma into South Dakota and the wind following it was unique.  And scary.

I'm also sure a few of you are wondering what this has to do with ProfessorRoush's garden?   There seemed, on the surface, to be little damage from the 70-80mph sustained winds both here at home and in Manhattan, primarily lots of small limbs down and lots of broken pieces of roof shingles laying around here and there.   But, when it warmed up a few days after the storm, when I got out and actually wandered around the garden, I saw that it had taken down my long-standing wisteria trellis.   I know this thing was old, but breaking off 4 six-inch treated posts that were cemented in the ground was not a trivial piece of damage.   Thankfully, I had already taken down the Purple Martin houses earlier this fall or they would have been in Missouri, or the Atlantic ocean.

I took this damage casually with a shrug of my shoulders, but already lamenting what will surely be an abbreviated wisteria showing this spring.   To disentangle this maze of vines will be impossible, so I'll be forced to merely chop the wisteria vines wherever they enter the trellis.  I'll undoubtedly end up with a 5-foot tall pair of wisteria's, and I'll have to decide about building another trellis.  This one was placed to be a "gateway" into or out of the back area of the garden and I've gotten used to its presence so I'll probably do something there.   And also the wisteria have to have something to grow on.   Normally, I'd put the cleanup off until spring, but since it is sunny and supposed to reach 65ºF this Christmas Eve afternoon, I can already hear it calling me.

Here is a picture of the trellis in its better days, already old in this 2019 blog post it came from, but certainly functional and beautiful in a light-lavender sort of way.   I thought the frame was unbreakable, but clearly I was flat-wind wrong.  The lattice-work was decaying when this picture was taken and I think I replaced it that year, but the posts, in cement, should not have broken down.  Or so I believed.

ProfessorRoush will have to up his engineering game for the next trellis.   I'm thinking maybe steel I-beams extending down into the bedrock might actually have a chance at standing longer than a decade?

Token poinsettia picture to wish everyone holiday cheer!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone!

Jewels Outside & Within

 ProfessorRoush woke up to a thanks-filled morning after a cold night on the prairie covered the grass with a heavy frost, bejeweling it with ice for the sun to caress.   I know they may be difficult to see in the photograph below, but when I took the picture, the sun, already well above rising, was reflected in little starry points all over the grass, gleaming diamonds among the frosted chaff. The tans, umbers, ochers and reds of last season's grasses all provide a proper blasé background for the new jewels among it.

I awoke to the ice jewels outside and to the soul-filling contrast of all the colors in our decorated house, the reds and greens of Christmas within at odds with the blander world normal of the prairie outside.   I'm thankful for many jewels within the house as well, the carefully chosen emblems of the holiday artfully arranged by Mrs. ProfessorRoush.   This year, this fake poinsettia wreath magically popped up from somewhere into our living room near the TV, and it brings me joy daily with its cheery welcome from the wall.  

I found joy myself recently, and added it to the house, this wooden painted snowman purchased on a recent impulse at a hardware store.  There have been occasions in life, like this one, where I've seen something and inexplicably want to own it, instantly coveting some simple thing whose beauty may only be seen by me and overlooked by others.   I've lived long enough now to listen to these urges, these desires, which burn like fire if unfilled.   Times were, my will always strong, I resisted them, parsimonious to a fault, foolish in my frugalness, only to later rue and regret the lost chance.   Today, with more money available above the necessities and niceties of life, I often give in, collecting joyful things in a twisted version of Marie Kondo's question that she originally asked to help us simplify life, "Does it spark joy?"    Yes, this extravagant $25.00 snowman, added now to our mantle, brings me joy, even when I can't explain it.

And I feel joy and thankfulness also for the half-dozen Christmas cacti that adorn our south windows.   I've purchased them over the years and all have been in bloom recently, each a unique color, bright red, white, pink, fuchsia, yellow, and orange represented in their delicate and fleeting beauty.   The sun outside catches them in the morning, gloried like the fuchsia-touched blossom at the top of this blog, yet other jewels in my world.   Some mornings, mornings like this one, I can scarcely catch my breath at the beauty of the world, so many jewels that life gives us each day.

Sad Houses

 ProfessorRoush has had quite the week;  a week that seems to be continuing even as I write.  

It all started last Sunday.   My intention that day was to get a number of things done around home, but most of the afternoon got delayed when Mrs. ProfessorRoush's car got two flat tires, one of which disintegrated before we could get to an air pump.   But I did get out for my main goal and cleaned out all the bluebird boxes while the weather was good.   One bad surprise; this bluebird box with 3 sweet little light blue eggs present.   These weren't a new brood out of season, these were very light, dried out, old eggs that didn't make it to hatch.  I'm guessing Mama Bluebird had an accident and never returned to care for them.   So sad.  And my bluebird houses didn't seem to do as well this year.   Eight bluebird nests for over 20 boxes is way under normal.  

Even sadder, one of the first year DVM students was killed last weekend, hit by a vehicle after she witnessed a rollover accident and tried to help; a true Good Samaritan lost to the world.   I got the call of hospital personnel looking for emergency numbers for her parents shortly after I finished the Bluebird Trail.   There are some things that happen in this life that I can't explain or understand and never will.  What a loss to her family and to her classmates and to all the pets she would have helped.

Things were looking up today as we put the house back in order this morning after our kitchen and sunroom were painted.   Mrs. ProfessorRoush is in the kitchen making caramels as we speak and I'm anticipating running out into the sunshine soon on this warm, breezy afternoon.   But then, as I started to write, I got a text that a young child of the host of our work Christmas party started a fever this morning and tested COVID positive.   Our entire surgery service was there for three hours last night, huddled in a small kitchen together.  Lots of COVID boosters are about to get tested for efficacy!

So, if I'm gloomy today and not my usual positive gardening influence, I'd like to make a formal apology and leave you with this picture of the ProfessorRoush home abode from the far end of the pasture; a view of the dry and brown back garden and prairie and of the back of the house from a vantage that I seldom get to see.   Those hills are too much to walk regularly without the excuse to tend to the BlueBird Trail.  

Bedding Down & Tidying Up

 ProfessorRoush accomplished several main fall chores last weekend and during the week. Last Sunday was a windy, but pleasant and sunny day which I took full advantage of in a fit of tidiness.  Of highest importance, I covered the strawberries with a nice thick bed of straw to protect those tender buds from any further frosts and freezes.   Last winter I neglected it as the bed was in poor condition anyway, but this year, with 50 new plants out, I thought a nice golden blanket was in order for the patch.  It looks so nice and cozy and protected now, don't you think?

I also bustled around the yard and ran the mower over some late invasive cool season grass and mulched up a few leaves in the process.   I do like a lawn with a nice even trim, don't you?   I also realized there were a couple of hoses that needed draining, the purple martin houses needed to be cleaned out and brought indoors, and my pack rat-bait stations near the house were empty.  All the usual and none too soon as, sometime between the strident warnings about new COVID variants and the apocalypse, the frantic media voices tell me that winter is coming.   Sure, except for the 70ºF temperatures predicted this week.   Those strawberry plants must think I'm nuts and just cut off their sunlight.

Also completed was the annual "over the rivers and through the woods" to our Indiana past trek of Thanksgiving, in our case the "over-the-river" being the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and the "through-the-woods" was of the forested Illinois and Indiana I-70 corridor.   A few days gone in a cloudy and colder Indiana landscape where it actually even rained one day, and Mrs. ProfessorRoush and I were never so glad as to come back Friday into this gorgeous sunset, occurring just as we made those last few miles through the Flint Hills to home.  Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home....err Kansas.

Suddenly Winter

How did I miss it?  Was I asleep, beginning hibernation at the onset of cold weather, plodding in stupor through the daily cycle of wake-eat-work-eat-sleep?  Was I distracted, preoccupied with the mundane tasks of life and inattentive to the greater world?  Is this how empires crumble, marriages collapse, and friendships end, with inobservance and insouciance?

Regardless, I realized with shock this week that Fall was past and Winter was suddenly present.  Perhaps it was the first recent chance to walk the garden in daylight on 11/18/21, the first time for the past week since nighttime now begins at 5:00 p.m. and I'm seldom home in daylight.  I only made it early on Thursday because I'd gotten my COVID booster the previous day and had run a fever and chills for the past 24 hours.  It will, by the way, be a cold day in hell or in winter before I get another COVID booster.  Why take an annual vaccine that certainly makes me sick every year to prevent the small chance I get sick? Three days later and I'm still not normally controlling my internal temperature when active. 

But I digress down the deep slope to COVID anger.   More pertinent to the subject of today, the leaves all dropped, seemingly overnight, from trees and shrubs galore.  I'm not ready, not prepared at all mentally and emotionally, for winter.  The granite bench in front of my River Birch no longer is hidden in shade by the protective limbs of the birch (above, top), and my 'Jane Magnolia' (left) is bare but for the fuzzy light green buds that I'll have to protect from the equally fuzzy lips of hungry deer.  Even the 'October Glory' maple of my last blog post has dropped a huge portion of its leaves, an unusual occurrence this early in winter.   All that remains of Fall in the garden are the still-shimmering shafts of the ornamental grasses.  The small clump of Miscanthus sinensis 'Malepartus', pictured below, remains a pleasing sight, catching the last rays of sun in a cooling world.

'Malepartus' is, however, a symbol of hope for me this winter.  I received him as a very small division given away by the K-State gardens last fall and in a single year of planting it is already a reasonably substantial garden presence.  Only time and winter will tell me if he can hold on to these silvery seedheads or whether they, too, will be quickly dispatched by the cruel onset of the first "polar express."  All I can do is wait now, and watch, and try to be present in the garden for its trials and triumphs.  I'm out there now, hurrying to spread new straw in the strawberry patch before the cold can dash my hopes for next spring's harvest.   A gardener never fully rests.

Sun, Clouds, and Glory

The changes in setting and mood according to ambient light sometimes astounds ProfessorRoush, particularly in relationship to photographs and camera settings.   Take, for instance, this 14 year old 'October Glory' (Acer rubrum) maple out to the left front of my driveway as I leave for work every morning.   On Veteran's Day this year, 11/11/2021, at 7:20 a.m., the sun was just rising up and 'October Glory' was, indeed, glorious in its observance of Veteran's Day this year.   I don't think I've ever seen this tree in better foliage and, as I leave for work, these mornings brighten my day and set me on a happy path through the weekly turmoil.   Thankfully, although the color diminishes somewhat over time, this tree holds its leaves through early winter.

On a cloudy day, however, the tree broods, begrudgingly showing only dusky purples against the brown prairie behind it, leaving my own mood murky and dark as I take that same morning path to work.   This picture, STDD or same-tree-different-day, 11/10/2021 and at the same time (7:20 a.m.), shows the dampening effects of clouds and winter.  The whole scene dulls my morning commute, leaving me dispirited and soul-worn to start the day.  I, for one, would much rather either leave in total darkness, as it was just last week before the annual "fall back" nonsense, than to leave to this sight on cloudy days.  Thank you again to our political so-called "leaders" for their misguided help in that regard.

The prairie is colored this year far better than most.   Always, in fall, we hear written or television media talking about expectations for fall color in various parts of the country, usually discussing the effects of moisture or warmth on sugar production, and often telling us that it isn't going to be an exceptional fall in the usual way of our depressing national media.   I have a friend, a former news-junky, who recently told me she had sworn off the news because it only reports stories that keep us riled up or upset about the state of the world.   So it seems and I cannot disagree.   But fall in Kansas has been exceptionally colorful this year and I'm thankful for whatever natural processes or the harvest gods that influence the beauty.   

Sunlight, however, helps always, and I'm thankful for the Kansas sun every day.  Searing in summer, spiritual in spring, fitful in fall, and warm in winter, this morning it streams in through all the windows of the house, warming the walls and making a home of house, a warm nest for a pleasant Sunday.