Winter Haze

Winter.  Frost and fog outside.  Warmth and fire inside.  The calendar and the movement of the planets falsely claim the season is fall, but ProfessorRoush says it's winter.

Winter.   What is it good for? Pictures, perhaps, like the one above, the sun captured, weakened by distance and the inclination of this orb, unable to penetrate the haze of humid air the night has frozen into submission.   No breeze, not a creature stirring here, all waiting for the sun to penetrate and soften the icy knives of frost.  

Or pictures, perhaps of happier thoughts and colorful moments, the annual home Christmas tree shining glorious even in the morning light.   Mrs. ProfessorRoush and I decided this year to leave the tree unburdened by ornaments, the plain lights a symbol, perhaps, of our innate desire for simple quiet and peaceful stars, a holiday of joy and rest.  We've left off the hundred collected ornaments, some homemade, others a treasured gift or purchase.  It may be a fake tree of metal and plastic, but it serves the purpose, lit each night in the front window as a beacon to faraway children and friends; "Here is home."

Odd?  Or not, perhaps, for a gardener to prefer artificial trappings for Christmas rather than a collected and distantly transported tree.  This year I won the annual tug-of-war between Mrs. ProfessorRoush, who prefers the dying, pine-scented, needle-dropping "natural" tree, and myself, who prefers my negative environmental impact displayed through the manufacture of plastic and LED's.  This tree may be phony, it may be fabricated, but at least it isn't singing the song of death in the house as it slowly dries and dies, snatched from a forest of others to perish alone.

Ten o'clock, and the sun seems to be losing the battle against winter today, rather than gaining.  The predicted high for today has already been cut by 4ºF and I fear it will soon cede more to the fog.  My planned trek to clean out bluebird houses may have to wait, wait for a warmer day and a braver caretaker.   I feel the weight of responsibility for my bluebird trail, but not at the expense of stiff fingers and frostbit toes.  There is time enough to wait on the sun to lead me out, to beckon me from a clear horizon and warm the air.   Time enough for winter to come and be gone, away like the fog and the frost, if the sun gets its way.

Christmas Conspiracies

While ProfessorRoush is usually a reasoned and contemplative individual (please pay no attention to Mrs. ProfessorRoush's cackling in the background), I am not ashamed to admit that the occasional attractive conspiracy theory does obtain some small foothold of territory in my mental processes.  In contrast, however, to those crackpots who insist that there was never a moon landing or those who maintain that the earth is flat, despite all the growing evidence against either view, I feel compelled to reveal, here for the first time, a real, personally documented, grand conspiracy. 

I'm positive that all of you, all gardeners and shoppers, all homeowners and plantspeople, have been experiencing a great sense of unease as Thanksgiving approached and local store aisles filled with holiday decorations and unwanted unnecessities, yet you've all likely been unable to pinpoint the cause of your disquiet.  I'll admit that I shared that underlying apprehension with you, until suddenly a great revelation appeared to me last week and, to my eternal shock I became aware, you might say "woke", that one of the great mysteries of civilization had been developing right in front of my eyes; a mystery I shall now reveal.

WHERE THE HECK ARE ALL THE CHRISTMAS CACTUSES THIS YEAR?   Normally, by this time, every checkout aisle and every floral display area would be filled with wilting but blooming $6-$9 pots of colorful red and white and pink and fuchsia Christmas cacti raised especially to capture your whimsy and your excess cash during your vulnerable moments of holiday shopping.  This year, there are none available, not one anywhere near Manhattan Kansas, a fact which I confirmed by personally visiting every big box store, grocery store, and hardware store in the area this week.  

I started out on this conspiracy track innocently, merely wanting to see if a new color or variety was available to add to my collection and brighten Mrs. ProfessorRoush's windows, yet the absence of the cacti became more evident with every store I searched.  Querying the internet for an explanation has been similarly unsatisfactory.  There have been no media reports of mass destruction of Christmas Cactus nursery facilities, nor scientific papers on sudden mutations of fungal wilt that threaten the extinction of the cacti group.  Asking Google the simple question "Where have the Christmas cacti gone?" is rewarded only by 10,591,251 occurrences inanely explaining how to make a cactus bloom, and it undoubtedly results in one's name being added to some secret list somewhere as well as causing your mail and social media feed to fill up with hundreds of ads for plant sales and fertilizer.  

We will call it the Great Missing Christmas Cactus Conspiracy of 2022, or "CCC-22", and later generations will remember this blog entry as the initiation of the movement alerting the world to their loss.  It is a fact that Government officials are completely silent on the issue and appear to be taking no action to investigate the mystery.  This is surely an occasion for Congressional inquires and appointment of special prosecutors if ever there were, don't you agree?  The President, Dr. Fauci, or at least the Illuminati must be behind the disappearance.  No, wait, it's COVID-19, isn't it?   SARS-CoV-2 was not developed to destroy democratic societies, save Medicare, and unleash the New World Order, nay, the ultimate goal by some powerful fiendish billionaire Christmas-cactus-hater was for the virus to wipe out annual production and commerce in Christmas cacti, wasn't it?

If you don't hear from me again, you'll know I touched a nerve somewhere.   Wake up, everyone, before it's too late to save the cacti!  Write your Congresspersons, call your Senators, and let's make our Christmas-cactus-loving-voices heard!

November Notes

Dr. and Mrs. ProfessorRoush set out on a quick run for tacos and Crumbl Cookies® last night, a quest for the perfect Saturday night snack combination.  Well, that, and Mrs. ProfessorRoush has developed an addiction for the aforementioned establishment's iced sugar cookies and we needed to lay in a reserve stash in case she developed a craving when they're closed on Sunday.   Happy wife, happy life and all that.  Anyway, we had no more pulled out of the driveway than we saw a beautiful stag and doe framed in perfect sunlight in the neighbor's front yard.

Unfortunately we missed the chance for an equally perfect photo of the pair, but on our return home a mere 45 minutes later, I spotted this lurker hanging just around the back corner of the neighbor's house.  In the way of deer, he was probably just waiting to see if he could hang around until the cover of darkness when he would happily nibble away on the neighbor's landscaping, so I foiled him by driving down a side lane and spooking him.  Not before, however, I captured these images in the closing light of day, through the dirty windshield, but still not a bad picture.  He's beautiful and I hope his proximity to town allows him to escape the hunting season since most folks around here don't shoot into the random horizon for fear of hitting a house.  Most folks, anyway.

I've got a busy week ahead, so I'm not making it a long post today.   I've got to spend some of today preparing for a Johnson County Master Gardener presentation about Rugosa and Old Garden Roses.  Since they're all that Rose Rosette disease has left me, you can bet that I'm going to touch on that hell-borne scourge as well.  Happily, I was in Kansas City a few weeks back and, in a large outdoor mall, captured this image (below) of three 'Knockout' roses in their landscaping, right, so-to-speak, in my audiences' back yard.   Most of the 'Knockout' roses on display there were exhibiting signs of RRD, so I think this picture will drive home my point about growing and breeding RRD resistant roses.

Seasonal Shifts

'Morden Sunrise'

Yes, friends, it's that time again.  That cursed time of time change, Daylight Savings to Standard, welcome to the world of waking at 5:00 a.m. while your body thinks it's 6:00.  That world.  ProfessorRoush wishes a face-melting pox on all the mealy-mouthed politicians who promised that last year was the last time they would confuse our biorhythms and increase our statistical chances of heart attacks and car accidents in the next week. Oh, wait, another promise from the same people who promised us 2 weeks would "flatten the curve" and save us all from COVID?  More's the fool, me.

'Heritage'

My garden has seasonally shifted color and mood as well.   Two weeks have taken me from the last two roses pictured here on October 17th, to completely bare trees and the tans and umbers of autumn.   It seemed like it was overnight, one sudden drop into the mid-20ºF ranges and the world died, trees suddenly bereft of leaves who seemed to have come to their senses and dropped en masse, morphing their supporting structures from clumps to skeletons before I could prepare to mourn the change.  I'll bet the spider on this 'Heritage' was just as dismayed as I am.



 

'October Glory'

However beautiful the maple, it's a hard moment for a gardener to go from the sunny tones of 'Morden Sunrise' to the purple-red of 'October Glory' without warning.  This red maple is the only colorful tree still holding leaves, the strutting rooster among a few oaks clinging to leaves the shade of mud and dust.  I can turn from the computer and see it out the window, there in full sun, a beacon calling from my yard to the horizon.

Euonymous alata

The only match for the maple is my burning bush, Euonymous alata, who finally, after all these years, is reaching the potential that I saw for it.  This bush has been in its spot for two decades but never before this colorful, usually stripped of its leaves by winds and rodents before I can notice it.  It beckons me further into the back yard, calling me to its side, where the subtle oranges and yellows of the viburnum beside it on the right promises more subtle pleasures.

I'm resigned to winter, waiting for the first snowfall, already tired of the lack of life in the garden.  And yet this morning I planted hope, hope in the form of these bulbs and corms, small patches of color to march with Spring as it returns.  These crocus and puschkinia are now planted on either side of the driveway entrance, where they'll be noticed if the prairie winds don't pulverize their petals before they can appear.  It's an act of faith, this planting, for I planted a like number of crocus in the same spot last year, only to see just a few poor specimens survive to bloom.  Perhaps the waxy puschkinia will do better is the heartless prairie winter.   My garden, an experiment in patience, continues.....