A Hawk's Garden

It never fails.  Every spring, ProfessorRoush is a neat freak in his garden, and then, come every autumn, I'm exhausted by the constant effort to stay atop the endless chores, acceding to the clamor of chaos, and waving the white flag in surrender to the wildness of weather and weeds.  And yet, somewhere in between spring and autumn, there always appears an opportunity to choose.  To choose between anarchy and intent in my garden, to choose between disorder and design, between entropy and enlightenment.

Such was my choice, this past summer, to perhaps remove this blackened Cottonwood stump or to leave it in place.  Once a mighty, young, and hearty tree, its health was wrecked by an ice storm years ago and it spent a decade struggling to regrow damaged limbs from exposed heartwood and then, last year, the final large branches fell and it failed to grow any leaves at all.  I let it burn with the prairie around it this spring, and indeed encouraged it to burn by piling dry debris at its base, hoping to erase its presence and its memory from my landscape, but this blackened and hardened stump persisted.

For some time, I contemplated asking a friend to fell this stump along with another dead and starkly-branched tree in the back yard, but then one day I saw a plethora of Tufted Titmouse (Titmice?) using the latter as a gathering spot and decided on the spot to postpone removing these blights from my yard.  Blessedly, what was once a spur-of-the-moment random decision has become a monument to my garden's nature.  Thank you to the Titmice and the Hawk.

The Red-Tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) pictured here and above has been hanging around for the past few months, using the cottonwood stump as a primary hunting perch as it lives out its hawk-life existence on the prairie.   I've also caught it sitting higher on the house roof twice as I came home from work, and once on the frame of my shade house, as you can see pictured here and below.  In the meantime, the eternally hungry rabbits have all but disappeared from my garden beds and I have high hopes that the local pack rats are quaking in their urine-soaked, disgusting debris-pile homes.  Red-tailed Hawks are the most common and the largest bird of prey on the tallgrass prairie and you can see that this one believes it is King (or Queen?) of all its domain.

Once, while mowing, I barely missed snapping a picture of what I call "my" Hawk lifting off from the ground, snake carcass in its talons, but I will never forget the thrill of that final "swoop" and the calm Hawk sitting in the grass looking satisfied at its catch. Gardening friends, if you face a similar choice, I promise you won't regret letting hawks be hawks, and in a broader sense occasionally allowing nature to be in control for a day, for a week, maybe even for a season.  Some say a garden is defined by its boundaries, by the vision of the Gardener, but I submit for your consideration that our best efforts are spent in concert with the natural world around us, not fighting against it. And I can't help but feel that this Hawk agrees with me.    

Clear Skies and Long Views

It occurs to me that some of you may fear that this blog is, at times, in danger of becoming a "weather report", justifiably so since ProfessorRoush shares that same fear with you, and yet I still cannot resist showing you this view, as it presented to me a couple of evenings back as I turned onto my road:

In the west, I saw this view and thought, "that's a rain cloud," and yet we had no rain predicted.  I was not prepared, however to check the weather on my phone and see that this thunderhead belonged to a single isolated cell that was still more than 60 miles distant (radar screenshot taken at 6:49 p.m.)!   Salina Kansas, to the storm's south, is 66 miles from me!  How's that for clear air quality?

I haven't calculated the earth's curvature over that distance, and I know this storm probably reached tens of thousands of feet into the air, but, still, I can scarcely believe I was able to see it coming at that distance.  The world is a wonderful place, full of surprises if we only let them in.

I watched the cloud through the evening as the storm tracked from our direct west.  At 8:07 p.m., it was still more than 25 miles away to our west, but it ended up passing barely to the south later that evening.   My  last view of it below is at dusk, 8:07 p.m., still to the west and at the same time as the radar capture seen to the left, with barely enough light from the setting sun remaining to outline the storm cell.  Lightning was flashing in the storm itself as I watched, and it is no wonder that the Vikings could conclude that Thor was angry in the center of that cloud.

Perhaps now you can better understand my fascination with weather events here in my view from these semi-arid, rolling grasslands where rain is sometimes measured in drops and the wind can strike fear in a brave heart.   Better at times, I wonder, would we be if we were this garden spider, a Yellow Garden Spider (Argiope aurantia)  that has patiently tended its web in this exact spot near my back patio for over a month.  I can't tell you how many times I've almost shortcut across this bed into this web, but so far it has survived obliteration from myself, Bella, the neighbor dog, and the weather.  I'm happy for the spider's presence because  it is another sign that Fall is coming and it seems to justify my seasonal neglect and provides some natural pest control for my garden.

Everything's Alright

Believe me, ProfessorRoush is very aware that he's been "blog-absent" for a couple of weeks, but life sometimes makes other plans for us.  This past 2 weeks, the "other plans" have included some emergency medical visits and surgery and hospitalization of Mrs. ProfessorRoush, and the mere fact that I'm blogging now should be taken by all as a clear sign that she is mending.  Slowly, but progressively.

During a period where I was traveling back and forth from home to hospital, missing my wife and worrying about her surgery and recovery, I was struck one evening by the likely Divinely-inspired appearance of the Sweet Autumn Clematis that grows on my now-neglected gazebo.  I built this hexagonal gazebo nearly two decades ago merely to have a place deep in the garden to escape from the sun and sit on a swing on a hot day.   Surrounded by a honeysuckle on the south, a struggling 'Romona' clematis on the west, and the Sweet Autumn clematis on the north, I've neglected the gazebo a bit, especially the last couple of years, and it is beginning to show its age.

Hence, as I have not paid any notice to it this summer, I was surprised when I saw it suddenly in bloom from my bedroom window and I realized the clematis had climbed through the top of the gazebo.  In my tired and lonely mental state, I was struck speechless by the gift and the perfectly-timed message from nature, and I received that message loud and clear.  I took this sweet-smelling, perfectly-white, delicate but determined floral display as a certain sign that my beautiful bride of  nearly 43 years would be okay, and my fears and worries melted away at the sight of it. 

A view of the inside of the gazebo reveals the path of the clematis as it sought out the sunlight and clung to the cross beams.  "Life", as Michael Crichton wrote, "always finds a way".   This Sweet Autumn clematis is the only one I have allowed in my garden for several years because I've learned it will self-seed everywhere here in this climate and become invasive. But now that it has demonstrated its resolve to thrive, and superimposed itself on my mind's eye alongside my love for Mrs. ProfessorRoush, it is likely that I'll allow others to grow here in the future.  After all, who am I to deny the forces of life and ignore heaven-sent messages? 

Mowing Musings

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (dark form)

If you've followed this blog long, you have probably guessed that many of my photo inspirations, and the majority of my "musing" time occurs during mowing.  That means that while he gathers his thoughts and the materials for these blogs, ProfessorRoush is often sitting atop steering a rapidly spinning knife moving at 2-4 miles/hour across the lawn and around, over, or through various obstacles, some of which turn into lethal projectiles when they exit the mower deck.  And this all occurs while my attention is distracted to the borders or plants beside my path of mowing rather than staying focused on the task.  It is a miracle that I have yet to injure anything more dear than an errant clump of groundcover.

Flowers, animals, insects, weather, and my general sense of the world are all fair game for my attention and interest while mowing.   For instance, within the last two weeks,  I've mowed while simultaneously racing the absolutely beautiful rainstorm encroaching from the northwest (photo at left), and I've had the (I believe) newly hatched, dark form Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus, photo at top) fall from an ash tree right into my lap as I passed.   The "dark form" of this dimorphic butterfly means that this specimen is almost certainly a female.

In the former instance, I kept one eye on the sky as I mowed, both hoping for rain and hoping it would hold off a few extra minutes until I could finish.   In the former, this beautiful and delicate creature that my passage disturbed was unable to fly, and so, afraid that the circling Purple Martins would spot it struggling in the grass, I stopped the mower and gently lifted it back into the lower branches of the ash, under concealment and away from the hungry Martin eyes.   After, of course, I took an extra moment to photograph and document its presence and beauty.

Flannel Mullein

As I mow near the periphery of my influence, where the "yard" changes over to bovine-grazed or bush-hog-mowed native prairie, I keep an eye out for blooming wildflowers, learning their identities and habitats, timing my worldview by their annual growth and bloom cycles, and discovering which insects or fauna each attract.  On a recent mowing,  the bright yellow, nonnative, drought-tolerant biennial  Flannel Mullein (Verbascum thapsus) was blooming (above and at left).  This woolly-leaved plant is said to have been traditionally boiled with lye to make a hair dye, presumably for use by those who believe that "blonds have more fun"/  Left alone, unmowed unlike the clump above, those yellow eye-catching spires reach taller than my head and spread enormous, soft, hairy leaves across their base.  

Blue Verbena (Verbena hastata) was also blooming on "mowing day" and was attracting an energetic Clouded Sulphur (Colias philodice) butterfly to pollinate and feed from it.  Blue Verbena, also known as Blue Vervain, is a native, very drought-tolerant plant and a common tall perennial of my prairie.   Its seeds are a major source of feed for the finches and sparrows of the area, and, as you can see, its nectar attracts its own admirers.

Blue Verbena & Clouded Sulphur butterfly

The complimentary coloring of the  light yellow butterfly and violet Verbena naturally-form a nearly perfect color-wheel contrast, and I couldn't resist stopping the mower once again to grab these photos.  Capturing this rapidly-moving butterfly in a still moment takes patience and time, both of which I provided and yet I was still unable to capture a suitable photo of it with wings outspread. 

Some weeks, my mowing time is extended from around 2 hours to 3 or 4 hours depending on the scenic distractions and the number of times I stop for photos or to remove random offensive weeds.  But can you really blame me?