Wordless Wednesday - Going Gold

 

Golden Daughters of the Sun

Jerusalem Artichoke (Earth Apple or Sunchoke)

(Helianthus tuberosus)

Jerusalem artichokes are a species of wild sunflower native to the northern part of the continent, and there is a fine, tall stand of them growing along a village hydro easement that runs down to the river.

Golden daughters of the sun, the artichokes are a treat for the eyes when they are flowering. In places our stand is almost eight feet high and it is covered with golden blooms at the moment. The bees and bumbles are ecstatic. Beau and I admire both the flowers and the bees whenever our walks take us in their direction.

The tubers (roots) of Jerusalem artichokes are edible and taste like water chestnuts, delicious when lightly sauteed or thinly sliced (raw) in a salad. I've eaten them once or twice and liked them so I occasionally consider digging up a few, but I just can't bring myself to do it. I would rather look at them than eat them.

Having such splendid, towering creatures living nearby is a fine thing, and it affords us much pleasure. Digging them up would be shameful.

Wordless Wednesday - Just Dandy

Friday Ramble - Golden

Greater Yellow Lady Slipper

(Cypripedium parviflorum var pubescens)

I sometimes sign on here in the morning, survey my efforts, utter a silent "meh" and decide to say (or write) as little as possible. That seems to be happening more often than it used to. When I plunk myself down in front of the computer and skim the early news, I cringe. 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. Lately, I can go several days at a clip without surfing digital newspapers.

This week, I thought of my wild orchids. In the eastern Ontario highlands, lady slippers are blooming as they have for time out of mind. In their flickering, sunlit alcoves, they sway and sing a capella, a testament to wildness and belonging and community. Whole hillsides of wild golden grace express the indwelling incandescent spirit of the living earth without any help at all from This Old Thing. Wild orchids are a balm to this world weary spirit.

My departed soulmate and I watched over our wild orchid colony for many years, protecting them from being eaten by deer and trampled by bears. Every year, I stretched out in the grass nearby and marveled at their perfection, had long conversations with them and captured them with my lens every chance I got. In the midst of global disease and rampant human brutality, here they are again in all their golden perfection.

Events on the world stage are breaking us wide open, and they compel us to confront aspects of our humanity that we would rather not acknowledge, let alone address. The orchids are a powerful reminder of what it means to be a sentient being on this dear little planet, and I am grateful for their counsel. Time for us to get to work.

Heart of Gold

Spring's Golden Lily

Trout lily or Dogtooth violet

(Erythronium americanum)

A single bright golden flower tops a slender solitary stem above two mottled green and purple leaves. The lilies open only on bright sunny days, bending toward the ground with gently nodding heads - it always seems to me that they are listening to the awakening earth. The three petals and three sepals with their burgundy streaked outward surfaces curl gracefully backward like tricorns or Turkish hats, disclosing six stamens with rusty red, sometimes brownish anthers. 

We call it "trout lily" because its artfully dappled leaves resemble the coloration of a brook trout, sometimes “adder’s tongue” because the shape of its sharply pointed leaves resemble a snake's forked tongue as they poke through the detritus of last autumn. The lily is sometimes called "fawn lily" because it blooms just as spring fawns are being born, and “dogtooth violet” for the toothy appearance of the underground corm, although the plant is not a violet by any means.

Trout lilies are some of the first springtime blooms, and they play a vital role in maintaining sylvan balance by capturing nutrients from decaying leaf matter. They do it long before the woodland around them has awakened from its winter slumber. When their blooming time has passed, and the lilies have died away for another year, the nutrients are returned to the trees, nourishing them as they stretch their branches skyward and leaf out exuberantly.

The woods are filled with golden trout lilies at the moment, and I am sad to say that the other tenants in their leafy alcoves are dense biting clouds of black flies. We go out and visit them anyway - it is something we would not miss for all the world, bugs or no bugs. Out comes the lemongrass lotion, and off we go.

Sunday was Mother's Day, and the Old Wild Mother (Earth) is the mother of us all. Here's to you, Mama. Deep bows and heartfelt thanks from an elderly (and somewhat creaky) daughter who loves you more than words can say. 

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.