Late Bloomers

If you google "wild violet", most of the first hits will be how to eradicate this "invasive species" from your property.

Eradicate this species?  That puzzles me greatly, because I love the diminutive, fragrant flowers, and would like nothing more than to have them spread all over the place.  I mean, what's not to like?  With their simple heart shaped leaves, pretty color and their graceful form, I just can't help but be happy when they first start blooming in early spring.  Stepping through their colonies gingerly, I pick a handful to bring beauty into my  house.  I have even *weeded* some of the colonies to make sure they remain strong (false strawberries, while pretty and a good ground cover, are no match for violets).  The summer heat ends their bloom here, and it is with mixed feelings that I witness this, because in there place are seed heads, which whisper to me, "more violets"...

Three years ago, I noticed something unusual: in October, the violets put out a second bloom.  At first I thought they were duped by the weather, but plants are not so easily duped.  It had been I who had been mistaken; they rebloom every year.  I had just never noticed it before.  What a pity!

Today, the violets surprised me again.  While weeding a bed of hostas (it is against a north-facing wall  deprived of sun), I thought of what a boring bed it was, and wondered what I might put between them to give it a bit more appeal.  The bleeding heart I had planted had gone dormant long ago. Suddenly I had my answer: a volunteer violet was nestled between the hostas.   Nature is a far better gardener than I am.  It was a perfect solution.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, I will transplant some violets from a healthy colony into my bed of hostas.  And I will pick another handful for my kitchen window.  As I watch the golden, bronze and red leaves fall, the dainty, cheery faces of the violets will remind me that spring is not so very far away.

 

A face any mother could love...

“Schlepherdess”

Does this dog intimidate you?

"Schlepherdess" is definitely an unusual appellation.  I chose it mostly its because all the good names were already taken.  Honest.  So I was forced to make one up.

I was looking for something that would express an idea I have of my relationship to the part of Nature I occupy, as well as Nature as a whole.  It also has something to do with passions of the past, and who I am now.

Back in college, I was introduced to the exciting then-new field of ecology.  Of course, I had to do a paper on Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”.  I am happy to say that it was not a new book then.  It *was* available in paperback.  In that class, I fell in love with our Earth.  I have been so ever since.

I’ve since tried to live ecologically-minded.  For a few years, I gave up driving my VW in favor of a 12-speed bike.  I read Euell Gibbons and Tom Brown.  I toted a backpack with a guide to edible wild plants, a sheet of plastic, a knife and a book of matches, all must-haves if one gets lost in the wilderness. (The closest I ever came to entering that condition was when I took a detour off the Appalachian Trail to attend to urgent matters.  Desperately wanting to avoid detection, I wandered farther and farther.  Afterwards, I couldn’t find my way back. Twenty minutes of walking downhill - one survival tactic - landed me back on the trail.  So much for those fantasies.)  When other women I knew were reading Cosmopolitan, Jacqueline Susanne and Erica Jong, I was reading about how to build passive solar, straw bale, and envelope houses (along with Jacqueline Susanne and Erica Jong.)  For decades I have dreamt of being off the grid electrically. 

When we were able to, my husband and I bought a pocket of woods for our children to grow in.  We raised a lot of our food.  We had milk goats, which, until I met my first Border Collie, were my favorite animals ever.  In fact, I only met my first Border Collie because I wanted some animal help with my goats.  It turns out that goats don't respect dogs.  If appearances mean anything, goats are mystified by dogs.  They will watch dogs retrieve balls, sticks and frisbees like refs at Wimbledon.  It's as if they're asking themselves, "What on earth is that animal wasting it's time for if the humans keep throwing something away?  How long will this inanity last?"  Otherwise dogs did not interest (or intimidate) them.  If a dog had the temerity to try to block a goat's path, they got a solid head-butt.

Every year in these woods, I have become more respectful and observant of the Earth.  As I was once a goatherd, I want to ‘shepherd’ the earth, which provides us with sustenance.  Throw in the fact that I’m pretty much like everyone else, a person trying to do good but not always succeeding, and you have it: Schlepherdess.

Autumn...

Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Poetry is a beautiful medium of expression, and in Robert Frost's hands, it's stunning.  The meaning of the above poem has been debated by scholars much more qualified than I, but that's the thing about poetry, like art in general: you see in it what you bring to it.  Another Robert (Francis), in a poem named Catch, likens a poem to a baseball ("Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together, Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, everyhand...High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop, Make him scoop it up...")

No English Major,  I (like the boys) am uncoached in Poetry, and that's OK.  Here is what I see in this glorious poem.

'Nature's first green' is the swelling bud on the branch, which, when it first unfurls, briefly resembles a flower.  But the golden hue now gracing the leaves is a beauty so very transient in the world of plants... Green lasts a long time (palm trees, anyone?) but gold?  I think of daffodils, lilies, pears, bees, even dandelions and goldenrod, their existence so brief in the scheme of things.  In Autumn, these golden leaves must fall, they cannot sustain themselves any longer.  So far,  we have seen these things so often that, while spectacular, they are "normal".  Then Frost does what he does so well... he morphs a natural occurance into a universal theme: anything glorious is transient.  Man's innocence was transient, and it's loss resulted in the loss of the Garden of Eden (and one presumes great grief in the heavens as well as on Earth).  A beautiful, brief dawn becomes a plainer day.  Nothing gold can stay.

Frost wrote and published this poem in 1923.  In 1924, it was again published in a collection - New Hampshire, which included "Fire and Ice" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" - which earned him the 1924 Pulitzer Prize, when that really meant something more than it does today.  I would have loved to have gotten that small volume as a gift.

So Autumn has arrived here on the land I inhabit, with all it's attendant beauties.  The golds and reds, the rose hips, apples, spicebush berries, the scarlet Virginia Creeper and the red & gold oriental bittersweet berries (the latter plant choking the woods in places such that I am cutting down as much of it as I can every year.  If I slack off, soon my trees will disappear as well as their leaves.)  The butterflies have gone for the most part, the song birds are migrating through, and I am glad I let the field go to weed, for birds of all kinds eat there all day long.

I need to cherish these beautiful golden days and evenings, because they will not last.  I am grateful that the written word remains.