Crocus Clairvoyance

Clairvoyant.  Psychic.  Prescient.  Prophetic.  Absolutely none of those words ever pertain to the grounded, rational, and reasoned ProfessorRoush.  I am often so obtuse to hints by Mrs. ProfessorRoush that she has learned to slowly and carefully spell out her wishes and desires when she wants me to be aware of them.  If she wants to take a drive in the country, she hands me my keys and my coat and says "here, you're going to take me for a drive in the country."  If she wants to have scrambled eggs on Sunday morning, the poor neglected wife says "I'd like to have two scrambled eggs this morning.  Would you cook them for me please?  Not one, not three, just two."  You get the picture.  Some husbands would take offense at being ordered around in such fashion but I accept it as the only proven route for her to penetrate my thick skull short of a frying pan.

It was therefore with some surprise that a mere two days after my Winter Nadir post,  I found these glorious expressions of life on a walk across my otherwise brown and winter-worn landscape.  These brave new sproutlings are, of course, snow crocus (Crocus chrysanthus), otherwise hereafter known to my soul as the gentle gift of a benevolent God.  The perfect golden-yellow heads brushed on the reverse with a deep-purple brown have popped up even before the frost-bitten leaves that will sustain their beauty, but up they are, here, there, and increasingly everywhere.  Even more uplifting are the orange centers as they open, shining like a beacon of onrushing Spring. 

I was sibylline not once, but twice regarding the snow crocus this year.  In the past, I had just a few small clumps of these early yellow beauties, probably sown from a $2.00 bag of 5 at a big-box store at some unremembered time.  I've always enjoyed them when they appeared, but never felt they were extraordinary.  But last summer I somehow knew, 6 months before the onset of winter and then in the midst of scorching drought, I somehow knew that this year I would desperately need to see these foretellers of sunny days and soft rains, more desperately and deeper than previous years.  I ordered and planted over 100 of these cute little creatures, concentrating them on a spot where I'd know to look for them in Spring, and massed so that they wouldn't disappear into the sea of brown I currently refer to as a garden.  And up they have now come, each individual adding to a display that I hope by next week can be seen from more than a few feet away.

On the arid Kansas prairie, Siberian Squill and daffodils do return in dependable fashion, but they won't bloom for a few weeks yet.  Other early bulbs, such as Snowdrops, bloom as annuals or at best short-lived perennials, but fade away and disappear within several years unless carefully pampered.  Larger crocus, the Dutch crocus for example, return each year but usually are torn to bits by the winds before I can appreciate them.  It is only these little bold explorers that I can count on, that I did count on this year, to pull me from hibernation to life.  Although the view out my window still looks as bleak as the picture below, I know now that somewhere, amidst the brown grasses and mulch, life stirs again.  Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Snow Crocus.

In Defense of Garden Cats

As a gardening veterinarian, I feel obligated to defend our feline friends against the recent onslaught of poor publicity directed towards them.  I'm referring of course, to news reports that stem from a January 29, 2013 article by Scott Loss, et al in Nature Communications, titled "The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States".

As a scientist, I'd love to tell you that I carefully examined the data collection methods and statistics presented in the paper, but Nature Communications is one of those journals who publish manuscripts, usually for a fee,  from authors (who are themselves required to publish or perish from their respective academic jobs) and then Nature Communications turns around and charges everyone else to read those articles, with no kick-back to the authors or the source of research funds for the study.  I believe the for-profit-motivated proliferation of such firms is largely responsible for most of the hastily-completed and poorly-controlled bad science being published today.  Although I am at the mercy of this Professor-prostituting racket myself, I refuse to pay good money for publishers to make profits off what should be globally-available information, so I have read only the original abstract and seen other data second-hand in news reports. 

Setting aside that minor rant, Loss's paper estimates, not from their own research but by an analysis of other published studies measuring kill rates in urban and rural environments, and by using other various extrapolations and predictions of cat, bird, and small mammal populations, that "free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.4–3.7 billion birds and 6.9–20.7 billion mammals annually."  In other words, these authors take a whole bunch of assumptions, apply specific data sets to broader populations, and come up with some numbers that could be off by orders of magnitude if their assumptions are in error.  Not to mention any possibility of bias from authors who are all either employed by the Migratory Bird Center of the Smithsonian, or the Division of Migratory Birds of the U.S. Fish And Wildlife Service.  Personally, I'd like to see a little more research about unanticipated impacts before we see a massive Federal program created from taxpayer money to trap, neuter, and relocate cats.

 

I'm willing, however to set those concerns aside and allow for the fact that domestic cats may kill around 3 billion birds and 20 billion small mammals annually.  I don't believe it, but if I accept the premise, then my response is still, "so what?"   And for the cats, "Good on ya!"   Twenty billion dead mice means twenty billion less roses that have canes chewed away, twenty billion less rats eating seed from my bird feeders and corn from my garden, and twenty billion less snakes in my garden that would have proliferated to eat the mice if the cats didn't.   I'm sorry about the birds, but folks, that's the nature of a Darwinist environment.  There's a whole lot of killing going on out there in nature.  If the majority of those 3 billion birds are starlings and urban pigeons, then I'm not really very alarmed.  Millions of cats die annually as well, killed by cars and coyotes and domestic dogs and human psychopaths.   Yes, I am aware that cats have been responsible for the extinction of specific island bird species.  So have snakes, and both predators were introduced to those islands by Man, blundering around in our usual stupid fashion.  Man, in fact, has been responsible for the extinction of many more species than the domestic cat, so perhaps we should talk about limiting our own numbers before we throw stones at the cats.  Put a new predator in an environment where the prey don't have time to adapt before they are eliminated, and extinction happens.  Ask just about any species group, including some native human populations.

 

Regardless, my personal experiences are directly opposed to the findings of the Loss study.  I have a cat in my garden, a calico named "Patches" by my imaginative children, who is a most efficient mouser.  I find almost daily presents of prairie mice remains on my doorstep, but I never once have seen that cat catch a bird nor have I found the organic remnants of such an attack.  Even the fat little ground-dwelling quail endemic to this area seem to be able to escape the clutches of my supposedly super-lethal cat.  I'm left, therefore, in a quandary, wondering where exactly the evidence of the slaughter is?  And in the meantime, I'm searching for a couple of more cats to live in an under-construction barn.  I would, personally, rather find more mouse parts strewn around the barn floor than find the snakes that would otherwise be hunting for the mice, so if it comes to a choice between having barn pigeons and having cats, the barn pigeons are just going to have to toughen up.

Winter Nadir

Friends, ProfessorRoush has reached, at last, his Winter Nadir.  I've had it.  I've spent far more time than I can spare discussing the subtle beauty of peeling bark on bare trees.  I've sung rhapsodies to the grandeur of evergreens blanketed by virgin snow.  I've waxed eloquent over the sturdiness and form of ornamental grasses and I've proclaimed the glories of statues and trellises that form the bones of my garden.  There is only so much comfort a gardener can manufacture for himself in the depths of winter and I'm leaking hope like a garden hose run over with a lawnmower.

"Bones of my garden";  that's a pretty good description of what lies just outside the windows of my frost-bound prison.  I see only the bland, tan landscape of the Kansas Flint Hills surrounding the garden's skeleton, flesh ripped away from the carcass by a carnivorous winter and blown away to distant lands.  Left behind are twiggy blobs of roses and dried clematis, sinew clinging desperately to the backbones against the northern wind.  Tattered low remnants of iris, withered daylily, and brittle sedum litter the soil.   Here and there stand a few lonely statues, joints around which the garden revolves in summer, now reduced to frozen arthritic slumber.  Between the bones of the garden lie the paths, circulation routes around the garden's body, as dry and brown now as the plants they used to serve.

I've lost my way amidst the fog and sleet.  I need desperately to feel the pulse and flow of life beginning again from the frozen ground.  Photos of past summers, like these, provide no condolences, only grief and despair for lost gardens and lost time.  I have no remaining faith that my garden will ever again appear green and verdant, lush and bountiful.  It seems impossible that the garden can fill again with so many flowers and so much life.  My soul is with the garden, frozen in place, withdrawn to a timeless and lifeless plane, shrunk down to a dry kernel of memory.

I must, I know, endure.  I search the garden endlessly for signs of life, the first stirring of snow crocus, the first tip of a green daffodil.  I amble stooped over the garden beds, at times on hands and knees, pulling back the mulch in the search for the promise of tomorrow.  I watch the peony bed most closely, diligent scrutiny in the sure knowledge that life will first beat there again, if anywhere life remains.  Wispy and ethereal crocus and tulips and daffodils may indeed be the vanguards of warmer winds, scouts following the retreat of winter.  Yet still, it is the impossible extravagance of the peonies, buxom and luscious in youth and vitality, that herald the Spring for me, reclothing the old bones of the garden and gardener once more in bountiful flesh and leafy skin.  Hold tight yet the remnants of courage, for peonies shall surely return to save us.