Wordless Wednesday - Bumble Girl in the Gold

Pot of Gold

Recipe books rest on every flat surface, a sure sign that days are getting cooler and autumn is on its way. There are local vegetables everywhere, and they cry out to come home in one's basket, for careful attention and a spell of imaginative culinary alchemy. Ritual undertakings? Oh yes, kitchen magics are afoot. 

There is nothing better than a bowl of homemade soup on a cool night, and hallelujah, it is finally cool enough in the house for cooking. One of this week's exercises was a curried squash soup which was shared with a dear friend for lunch yesterday, and she took two containers home for lunches at work. When I make this recipe for the tribe, there is seldom anything left for me, but dinner last night was a small bowl of liquid gold with a sprinkle of paprika and a frill of rosemary from the pot on the deck. Yum. I could have been dining in a cordon bleu restaurant, it was that good.

On the weekend, a large cauliflower came home from a local farmer's market, and roasted cauliflower soup is next on the menu. It will be followed by a crock pot of sweet potato and black bean soup. Since the Roma tomatoes in my garden are finally starting to ripen, there will be a nice batch of minestrone early next week.

There is something uplifting about turning veggie odds and ends into a cauldron of something tasty and nutritious. It feels good to be stirring the pot again.

Sequestered, Week 304 (CCCIV)

Male American Goldfinch at the Birdbath

(Spinus tristis)

Wordless Wednesday - Summer's Golden Coin

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?

Wordless Wednesday - Heart of Gold

Pot of Gold

A Later Shade of Gold

And so it goes... Many trees in the Lanark highlands have already lost their leaves and fallen asleep in their leaf-strewn alcoves, but others are just starting to turn now. Still others hold their turning in abeyance until late in November, and we are always happy to see them on our rambles.

Whole hillsides of birch and lacy tamarack turn gold, and their foliage dazzles the eyes. When I remember their splendor in the depths of winter, the memory will leave me close to tears and hankering for a long trip on foot into the forests north of Lake Superior. No, not this year, perhaps next year...

Butternut trees are always the first to drop their leaves, but the great oaks along the trail retain their bronzey leaves well into winter, and native beeches are still wearing a delightful coppery hue. One of our favorite old maples puts on a magnificent golden performance at this time of the year, and we attend her one woman show with pleasure. While in her clearing, we remember to say thanks for her efforts to brighten a subdued and rather monochromatic interval in the turning of the seasons.

It has been a windy autumn, and we were delighted to discover this week that the north wind has not plucked Maple's leaves and left her standing bare and forlorn on the hill with her sisters. It (the wind, that is) has been doing its best, but the tree is standing fast. I would be "over the moon" if I could photograph or paint something even the smallest scrip as grand and elemental and graceful as Maple is creating in her alcove. Every curve and branch and burnished dancing leaf is a wonder, and the blue sky is a perfect counterpoint.

Writing this, I remembered that as well as being an archaic word for a scrap or fraction of something, scrip also describes a small wallet or pouch carried by medieval pilgrims and seekers. That seems fitting for our journey into the woods and the breathless standing under Maple in all her golden glory. Oh, to belong to the woodland sisterhood of tree and leaf...

Bumble Girls in the Gold

Friday Ramble - Going for the Gold

It's the reds that grab our attention in late September and early October. When maple trees in the Lanark highlands turn, its gorges, hills and quiet coves are ablaze with color. Other trees are dazzling in their own right, but their earthier hues are always upstaged by the riotous, cavorting red maples.

There is an elemental chemistry at work in the woods. In summer, the green pigment in leaves (chlorophyll) helps converts sunlight into energy in the elegant chemical process called photosynthesis. (That word comes from the Greek phōs meaning "light", and suntíthēmi meaning "putting together".) Trees retain the carbon dioxide extracted during photosynthesis and use it to manufacture nourishment, together with water taken in through their roots. Oxygen extracted at the same time is released back into the earth's atmosphere for us to breathe. It's a wild and earthy magic of the very finest kind, trees and sentient beings all breathing in and out together and sharing the bounty of light. That there is magic is without question, and trees are sentient beings too, not just woody things with leaves and branches and roots.

When autumn arrives, deciduous trees withdraw into themselves. Chlorophyll production slows down, allowing the anthocyanin and carotenoid pigments also in leaves to come into their own. Leaves high in anthocyanins and low in carotenoids turn scarlet, and those with high levels of both flavinoids flash bright orange. Leaves high in carotenoids and low in anthocyanins do a sky dance in honeyed golds and yellows. Absent both anthocyanins and carotenoids, tannins rule, giving us the burnished russets, ochres, umbers and bronzes of the great oaks, hickories and beeches.

Like most northerners, I have a passion for scarlet, claret and ruby in autumn, but it always seems to me that the golds, bronzes and russets of our other native tree species don't get the attention they so richly deserve. The oro (gold) on display here in late September and early October is anything but pallido (pale or light). It dazzles the eye; it sings and struts and dances; it kicks up its heels. It rocks.

Poplars, ashes, elms and birches wear radiant saffron, and so do ginkgo trees in the village. Beech leaves are coppery coinage, and oak leaves turn an alluring rosy bronze. In Lanark, the aspens and tamaracks down by our beaver pond wear a delightful buttery gold. Nearby, late blooming goldenrod sways back and forth until it goes to seed and offers its fuzzy children to the wind. A few tenacious bumbles ride its plumes. Yellow daisies and hawkweed bloom in protected nooks among the rocks, and everywhere, there is fine contrast from spruces, pines and cedars in the background. An ambrosial, blue-green, evergreen fragrance fills the air.

And then there are all the smaller bright entities down on the forest floor among the fallen leaves. Eastern yellow fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) glows like a hundred watt bulb in the woods, and one can spot it in autumn as at no other time of the year. From the shadows, the lovely but poisonous fungus dishes out its frothy, studded golden incandescence like a halogen lamp set on high beam.

Here's to the glorious golds of the fall panoply. When the long white season arrives and snow covers the countryside, it is the golds that will turn up in my dreams. Long may they delight these old eyes in dazzling array.

Radiant Daughters of the Sun

Jerusalem Artichoke or Earth Apple

(Helianthus tuberosus)

Wordless Wednesday - Golden

American goldfinch (Spinus tristis)

Wordless Wednesday - Golden

Friday Ramble - Golden

Large Yellow Lady Slipper

(Cypripedium parviflorum var pubescens)

I sign on here in the morning, look at my photographic efforts, utter a silent "meh" and decide to say (or write) as little as possible. That is happening more often than it used to, a lot more often. There are times when I post an image or two and don't scribble any words at all, just letting the images speak for themselves.

Plunking myself down in front of the computer with a mug of something or other, I skim the early news, and I cringe. I think about what is happening in the great wide world and am left speechless by the hatred, barbaric acts and deliberate cruelty of recent human doings. How can we be doing this to each other? I can't find words for what is going on, or at least not the right words. I finish my mug of hot stuff and go out to the garden. Luckily, the bee sisters are good listeners. They offer wise words when I need them. They uplift my spirits and gladden my heart.

As I write this, lady slippers are blooming in the Lanark highlands, as they have for time out of mind. In their flickering alcoves on the Two Hundred Acre Wood, they sing a capella in their own lilting voices, a testament to wildness and belonging and community. Whole hillsides of nodding beauty express the indwelling incandescent spirit of the living earth without any help at all from This Old Thing.

My departed soulmate and I watched over our wild orchid colony for years, protecting them from being eaten by deer and trampled by bears. Every year, I stretched out in the grass when they were blooming and marveled at their perfection, captured them with my lens and had long conversations with them. Now it is just Beau and I hanging out with the orchids, and we still do that, every year. In the midst of greed, global disease and human brutality, here they are again. Here too are we.

Events on the world stage are breaking many of us wide open, and we are confronting aspects of our humanity (or inhumanity) that we would rather not acknowledge, let alone address. My wild golden orchids are a powerful reminder of what it means to be alive in this beautiful world, and I am grateful for their counsel. 

Wordless Wednesday - By the Pond

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.

Sequestered, Week 212 (CCXII)

Wordless Wednesday - Pot of Gold

Going for Gold

After several rainy days (and migraine headaches), it was lovely to round a corner yesterday morning on our way back from the first walk of the day and discover that a neighbor's magnificent trumpet daffodils were in full, riotous, golden bloom. The corner of her garden looked like a display of lighted candles, and the sight was breathtaking.

In the park, the overstory was full of amorous birds singing their hearts out. Trout lilies and Dutchman's breeches were rising through last autumn's fallen leaves, and the first tiny bloodroot and hepatica leaves were up.  Our favorite trail through the woods was dappled with tiny, fuzzy red maple flowers, and the pollen tickled my nose. I sneezed.

We (Beau and I) can hardly believe our eyes and our good fortune. On morning walks, we stop every few feet to stare at the riches around us, and with all the splendor along the way, it is a wonder we ever find our way home again. 

The gnarly old crabapple in the front yard is wearing magenta buds, and the day lilies in the garden behind the house are already a few inches  high. When I pulled the draperies closed last night, the alder buckthorn along the fence was bare. This morning it is sporting thousands of miniscule green leaves.

Introduced to North America from Europe a few centuries ago, the alder buckthorn (Frangula alnus) is an invasive species here, and by rights it ought to be removed from my garden, but that is not going to happen. I love its glossy leaves. The flowers are valuable sources of nectar for bees, and the berries provide nourishment for winter birds. The needs of bugs and birds come first around here, and they always will. I prune the little tree vigorously from time to time and try to keep it in line.

Repairs on the crumbling chimney of the little blue house are supposed to begin today. Bricks in good condition will be mortared back into place and a few replaced entirely, then a fetching new metal cap set in place. I am going to miss the present arrangement, most of all, the crooked little tin hat sitting up there now. It has such character.

While the work is in progress, there will be much thumping and clattering on the roof, but that is quite all right. Everything may change if a weather front moves in from the Gatineau hills across the river, but skies are clear this morning. So far, so good. 

A Little Sunlight in the Kitchen

It all started with a trip to Costco a few days ago for such things as laundry detergent, dish soap, dish washer pods, potty paper and facial tissues. There was no intention of coming home with any food items at all. Indeed, both pantry and refrigerator are well stocked, and I had firmly resolved NOT to bring any edibles home.

Then bags of Meyer lemons came into view, and that was the end of that. I simply had to have them. Meyers are sunlight in a bowl, and seeing a whole dish of them on the kitchen counter lights me up. Ditto, their sublime fragrance, and besides, they pose for photos cheerfully, always a happy thing. I told myself that they were an absolute necessity and tucked a bag into my shopping cart.  What other shoppers thought of the dotty old hen muttering to a towering display of golden fruit, I have no idea.

Whenever I lurch out to the kitchen to make yet another pot of tea or throw some sorry culinary effort or other together, the Meyers make me smile. Zen teacher, writer and chef Dana Velden says that a bowl of lemons can offer us the world, and I agree with her. On a dismal morning in the depths of winter, a little sunlight in a bowl is a fine old thing, especially when there is a whopper of a snow storm in the offing.

Sitting in a bowl, floating in beakers of tea, or tenderly squeezed into muffins, scones, pudding cakes and salad drizzles, Meyers delight the eye and gladden the senses. Like clementines, another splendid seasonal offering, they conjure warm climes, gentle breezes and faraway places. One should indulge, every chance she gets.