The Jester's Cap and Bells

The delightfully complex shape of columbines always reminds me of a harlequin's chapeau or a medieval court jester's cap. The architecture is splendid stuff, and there is a blithely capering choreography to the columbine's dancing "to and fro" movement on gracefully arching and swaying stems. With sunlight shining through them, the petals and sepals of the flower seem to be made of stained glass.

Their dwelling places are like woodland cathedrals, and the stained glass analogy is apt. The ceilings are up in the sky somewhere, and the nave's soaring green arches disappear into the clouds. The clerestories, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses would make any architect proud, and the leafy chapels seem to go on and on forever.

I am reading John Crowley's fabulous Little, Big for the nth time, and a sentence about the forest at the heart of the book comes to mind: “The further in you go, the bigger it gets.” If you have never read Crowley's novel, make a beeline for your nearest book shop or library and grab a copy. It is one of the most delightful pieces of fiction ever written, and perfect summer reading too.

Columbines often seem to be wearing at least one spider web, along with bits of fluff from nearby cottonwood trees and slender filaments of milkweed silk. I am always astonished and captivated by what my macro lens "sees" and records in its sylvan ramblings. At times, its loving eye seems to linger and caress everything it encounters, and that is particularly so when columbines are in bloom.

As I drifted through the woods on the weekend clicking ecstatically, the first dragonflies of the season whirred around my head and spiraled off into the sunlit trees in search of prey. There were clouds of black flies and mosquitoes, and the little dragons of the air were dining very well indeed.

Another summer of  wildflowers, dragonflies, butterflies and bumbles... There are almost too many wonders for one old hen to take in.

Sequestered, Week 296 (CCXCVI)

 Common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)

Sometimes I do the talking. Other times, the camera takes over, and the images it captures prefer to speak for themselves. This was one of those mornings, and I should have bowed to my lens and moved to the edge of the scene.  What on earth can I possibly say about the dandelions in my garden?

Weeds they may be, but bees love dandelions, and that is enough for me. Running the mower over these golden wonders would be heartless, and I keep putting it off. For heaven's sake, the little dears are asters. What would the bees think?

Thursday Poem - May

May, and among the miles of leafing,
blossoms storm out of the darkness—
windflowers and moccasin flowers. The bees

dive into them and I too, to gather

their spiritual honey. Mute and meek,

yet theirs is the deepest certainty that

this existence too—this sense of

well-being, the flourishing of the

physical body—rides near the hub

of the miracle that everything 
is a part of, is as good as a poem

or a prayer, can also make luminous

any dark place on earth.

Mary Oliver

Thank you to my friend Frances at Beautiful Strangers for reacquainting me with Mary's exquisite poem.

Wordless Wednesday - Trinity

Froth and Fragrance

One day there are no leaves or flowers on village trees, and the next day the same trees have embraced the season, their voluptuous canopies alive with birds who dish out madrigals at sunrise and trip the light fantastic from branch to branch until the sun goes down. Their pleasure is obvious, and oh, the fragrance, the splendid pinks!

Crabapple trees, magnolias, flowering almonds and plums seem to leaf out and flower overnight, and wonder of wonders, they are alive with madly buzzing bumbles, honey bees and wasps. Dusted with pollen from stem to stern, the little dears are in constant motion, ecstatic to feel sunlight on their wings and forage for nectar on a balmy morning in May.

Here comes another fine summer of prowling about in gardens wild and domestic with camera and lens, drinking in light and gathering nectars of my own. Now and then, I will put down my stuff and dance with the joyous bumble girls. Ungainly creature that I am, I hope no one is watching, but the bee sisters won't mind.

Sequestered, Week 294 (CCXCIV)

Pot of Gold

The Dutchman's Breeches

Dutchman's Breeches

(Dicentra cucullaria)

One can barely see them at reduced photo size, but draped along the stem and flowers in the second image are the season's first strands of spider silk. Since the north woods are still cool and wet, perhaps the spiders wore coats and gloves to do their work and sheltered under leaf umbrellas. I applaud their determination to get out there and spin in such brisk weather conditions. In a week or so, Dicentra cucullaria will carpet the woods, but these early bloomers were blooming in a protected alcove against a rock face warmed by the sun.

The feathery gray-green foliage and nodding white flowers like upside-down pantaloons were endearing, and the filaments of spider silk held my attention for some time with their shimmer and floating windblown motion. Larger and more lavish clumps were in bloom several feet up on the rock face, and I briefly considered either climbing up or dangling from the top to capture them with the camera, but decided to avoid such assuredly risky pursuits and shoot from right where I was standing. No fancy footwork or rock climbing this year...

The woods are slow to leaf out and bloom this time around, but these images were perfect for a late April week, a few days before Beltane or May Day.  They need no description from this doddering photographer and occasional wordsmith, although I have done just that this morning and tried to describe them.

Friday Ramble - Following the Sun

In summer, young sunflowers turn their heads and follow the sun around the sky all day long. When they grow up, the blooms face the rising sun, and they no longer move in what is, to me anyway, summer's most engaging dance. When I drove by a field of sunflowers a few days ago and found they had turned their backs and were facing east, I tried not to take it personally, but part of me was wistful. The kids were all grown up and getting ready to leave home.

It's all a matter of circadian rhythms (or the circadian clock), the internal 24 hour cycle that regulates our gnarly metabolisms and keeps us in tune with the natural state of affairs, with the ever changing hours of light and darkness in the parts of the great wide world where we make our homes.

The word circadian comes from the Latin circa (about) plus diem (a day), and most living things have circadian clocks of some kind. Circadian protocols tell us when we should sleep, prompt bears, bats and squirrels to go into hibernation, advise trees to lose their leaves and withdraw into themselves for the winter, let birds and butterflies know it is time to migrate. The science of circadian rhythms is called chronobiology, and it is lovely stuff indeed.

Fledgling sunflowers drink the sun's warmth to fuel their journey to maturity and turn their heads to follow it around the sky. As they mature, they take in more light, heating up early in the day and releasing a heady fragrance that attracts pollinating insects like butterflies and bees and ensures future generations of sunflowers. Grownups have fulfilled their prime motivation (dynamic purpose) and attained their highest and most complete expression. They have done what they were put here on earth to do, and they no longer need to follow the sun. They do not turn.

Members of the helianthus family are amazing. What seems at first glance to be a single sunflower is actually more than a thousand tiny florets arranged in a perfect spiraling sequence. Each floret is inclined toward the next floret by approximately 137.5°, a measurement known in mathematics as the golden angle. The arrangement creates an elegant series of interconnecting spirals in which the number of left oriented spirals and the number of right oriented spirals are successive Fibonacci numbers. It's arty, scientific and just plain beautiful, stunning in fact.

A lifelong admirer of spirals, golden angles and Fibonacci sequences whenever and wherever they turn up, I'm always delighted to come across sunflowers in my rambles. Finding a few in someone's garden is a happy thing, and discovering a whole field flowering along a quiet country road is dazzling. It boggles my mind to think that such glorious creatures are blooming without anyone around to admire them.

In autumn, faded sunflowers are wondrous in their imposing stature, earthy coloration, spikiness and sculptural complexity. Determined to engender legions of progeny and perpetuate their particular genetic brew, they birth thousands of seeds every autumn, mothering whole dynasties of towering stalks, fuzzy leaves and beaming golden faces that will appear when springtime rolls around next time. In the depths of winter I try to remember that somewhere, legions of tiny, unborn sunflowers are sleeping and dreaming under Himalayan heaps of snow.

In "Enriching the Earth", Wendell Berry describes the earth's cycling as "slowly falling into the fund of things", and I am fond of the notion. Going to seed is a good thing, a fine thing, a natural and necessary thing. Every coin in nature's wild unruly banking is kin, whatever its size, shape or denomination.

The Jester's Cap and Bells

Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis)

Catching the Sun

Oh, how they capture and hold the sun within, these buttery yellow gerbera blooms. Kin to dahlias, daisies, marigolds, calendulas, coneflowers, chrysanthemums, zinnias, and the great towering sunflowers, they drink in morning light and store it within the frilly tutus of their lavish petals. Like sunflowers, their capitulum appears to be a single flower, but each is a community made up of hundreds of tiny individual blooms.

Little earthbound suns on stems, gerbera dish out light as if it is warm honey. They are the essence of summer, and all the other garden flowers behind them are uplifted by their frothy golden magnificence, by their almost imperceptible swaying movement, by the soft, sighing music of their duet with the wind.

Now and then, I falter as all living creatures must from time to time. On dreary days, I mourn the paucity of light in the world beyond my windows. I think about the injustice and suffering in the great wide world, and I am sad, very sad. Then I remember how my garden loves the light in early summer, and I resolve do a little inward blooming of my own, to take in light and send a little joy and comfort out to others. 

If only I could take in light and store it as flowers do in summer! I haven't a clue how to go about it, but I am working on it. Perhaps all that is required is to stand in the garden with my face to the sun as the gerbera do, all day long. I could become a garden myself. Now there's a thought.

White Empress in Bloom

Great White Trillium (Trillium grandiflorum)

Bunch of Gladness

Froth and Fragrance

One day there are no leaves or flowers on village trees, and the next day the same trees have embraced the season, their voluptuous canopies alive with birds who dish out madrigals at sunrise and trip the light fantastic from branch to branch until the sun goes down. Their pleasure is obvious, and oh the fragrance, the splendid pinks!

Crabapple trees, flowering almonds and plums seem to leaf out and flower overnight, and wonder of wonders, they are alive with madly buzzing bumbles, honey bees and wasps. Dusted with pollen from stem to stern, the little dears are in constant motion, ecstatic to feel sunlight on their wings and forage for nectar on a balmy morning in May.

Here comes another fine summer of prowling about in gardens wild and domestic with camera and macro lens (or the camera on the Samsung S24), drinking in light and gathering nectars of my own. Now and then, I will put down my gear and dance with the joyous bumble girls. Ungainly creature that I am, I hope no one is watching.

Sequestered, Week 212 (CCXII)

Thursday Poem - May

May, and among the miles of leafing,

blossoms storm out of the darkness—

windflowers and moccasin flowers

The bees dive into them and I too,

to gather their spiritual honey.

Mute and meek, yet theirs is the deepest

certainty that this existence too—

this sense of well-being, the flourishing
of the physical body—rides near
the hub of the miracle that everything
is a part of, is as good as a poem

or a prayer, can also make luminous
any dark place on earth.

Mary Oliver

The Music of What Happens

Around the corner, three song sparrows are trilling their hearts out from a rooftop.  Their pleasure in the day and the season is echoed by a construction worker a few doors away belting out Doug Seeger's “Going Down to the River” as he installs drywall in the old Victorian house on the corner. The door of the place is wide open, and his rendering of the gospel classic is somewhat off key, but it's soulful and fine stuff indeed.

This morning, the crows left an offering in the birdbath, a tiny, dead field mouse with its entrails spilled out and floating forlornly around in limp spaghetti-ish circles, assuredly not the way one likes to start the day. Somewhat downcast, I went back to the deck and held my nose resolutely over the aromatic mug of Italian dark roast waiting for me there. Later I donned rubber gloves, gave the wee mouse back to the earth, scrubbed out the birdbath and refilled it with clean water. The crows will probably return with new booty tomorrow, and we will commence clean up operations all over again.

Tulips in every shade of the rainbow are starting to bloom, but it is the reds that dazzle truly - the blooms are almost incandescent in the early sunlight and so bright they hurt one's eyes. Frilly daffodils and scarlet fringed narcissus nod here and there, and violets sprinkle the garden in deep purple and creamy white. A neighbor's bleeding heart bush is covered with tiny green buds swaying to and fro on artfully arching stems. Magnolia trees in the village are flowering and rain fragrant petals like snow, their perfume lingering everywhere. Wonder of wonders, the first few bumble girls of the season have arrived, just in time to partake of the crabapple blossoms that are starting to appear. When Lady Spring finally shows up here, she hits the ground running.

What an amazing trip this season is, and what wonders there are to feast one's eyes on; trees leafing out, wildflowers popping up everywhere, feeders in the garden full of songbirds. If I were to stop and take photos of every splendid thing we (Beau and I)  see on our morning walks (and everything is splendid at this time of the year), we might not get home again for weeks.

Asclepius On the Edge

Swamp Milkweed or Butterfly Weed (Asclepias incarnata)

The Tangled Garden

Here's to the Magnificent Susies!