I started working at the nursery in 1977. The property lies under a commercial jet corridor. You can’t hear ‘em but you can see them and the contrails for hours afterwards. I’ve been looking up at them for DECADES. Today I was there for a few hours and did not see one jet, not one contrail, and the traffic on the highway out front was a tiny fraction of normal flow. I did not have one customer either. See with your own eyes the way the skies looked 100,000 years ago. Looks like the airline industry is out of business for the foreseeable future. They pollute an ungodly amount of nasty shit and despite the circumstances, it’s a literal breath of fresh air to see actual unmolested blue sky. Same thing happened after 9/11. Hellebores care not about coronavirus. This winter flowering tough perennial does what it does regardless of the pitfalls of mankind. Did our way of life bring hell raining down upon us? If so, there is comfort in Mother Nature. Go outside and look for signs of life in your yard, take the epidemic off your mind for a while, it feels good. Born on date- 1986, specially grafted for me. My old friend is called “Tsuga canadensis aurea nana,” or dwarf golden hemlock. It is an irreplaceable, impossible tree to acquire. It’s stature in my yard is ancient and sturdy on a four foot tall plant. If you fantasize for a moment, you’ll imagine this to be a 450’ tall tree towering over your head. Dwarf trees attain the same shape as giants- everything in proportion just smaller. I’m lucky to have this tree- did you ever say that to yourself about a tree of yours? Pink dogwood left over from last year. In the bakery business, leftovers break your teeth. In the grocery business, leftovers get discarded. In the tree business (at least here), left over trees are repriced to a higher price because they are bigger and fuller than when they came in. As soon as our dogwood trees come in, they are planted in mulch- the very same day. Within a month, they are fed with the best food money can buy. Two months later, the unsold trees are respaced and the strapping cut away from the neck of the tree to prevent girdling of the ever expanding trunk. Fall brings flower bud development, and spring then brings flower bud swelling. I have a particular love for dogwoods- they’re native. They support native pollinators (highly endangered), they feed native birds in the fall with their large red berries. Their fall color is breathtaking, then there is their flower!!! Heart stopping! This is what dogwood buds are about to look like. Swelling, cracking open their protective shell. Teentsy tiny pollen filled buds about to provide food to endangered pollinators. Magnificent bracts (pink part) are vegetative neon signs waving their virtual arms- hey pollinator!!! Over here!!! Come pollinate me!!! The actual flowers are the yellowy balls in the center that turn into Red Bull energy berries for evening grosbeaks, robins, cardinals, wrens, etc, in the fall. A partial collection of my surfing rocks. Every time I go surfing, I pick up a rock on my way out of the water. They are nice reminders of good times. Sometimes I go over to them and pick them up. They feel good in my hands- HEAVY, often sun-warmed, various tones of grey and tan and white, and smoothed by the underwater forces of nature over hundreds or thousands of years. In the various stages of sunlight during the day, they take on many different personalities as the sun is muted, then strong then muted again. I find solace, beauty, and happiness when I see them, even though they are just a pile of rocks. Beauty is in the beholder, I guess. In September of 2017 I was surfing for the twentieth day in September in Rhode Island. That was the best surfing month in my long history (check out the September 2017 entries in the surfing blog on this website).My body was as jacked up as it’s been in decades from constant exertion, and I was strong as hell yet tired also. That one day I had been in the water for a few hours and was pretty tired. The wave faces were ten to fifteen feet tall and perfect on a rainy cloudy day. I was paddling back out after riding one and I saw this wave headed towards me. It was not going to break in front of me, nor behind me- it was going to flop over right on TOP of me. Since there was nobody behind me, I broke a surfing rule- I ditched my board and dove straight down deep, as deep as I could in the little time I had. On the rare occasion that I ditch my board, my eyes are always tightly squeezed shut to keep out the salt water and the only sensory input is sound, the feel of the swirling water around me, and the tumbling my body endures as the force of the wave molests my helpless body. As predicted, I heard the giant wave implode directly above me. None of you probably have ever heard that noise but it’s LOUD and lasts for a long time as the wave goes towards shore. This wave-noise was different though. Added to the space shuttle-like rocket engine noise of the charging tumultuous white water was the grinding sound of an avalanche of boulders crashing down a steep slope above my head as my imagination looked up. That wave was so damn powerful it stirred up the boulders on the ocean floor. Because my eyes were shut my brain has been able to focus on my thoughts at that moment and has been able to remember every single detail about that one deep dive, like it happened yesterday. The rock I took home that day is inside with other notable surfing rocks from singularly memorable days, and when I allow myself moments of reflection my mind drifts back to better times spent paddling in hurricanes. Will I be around for the next hurricane season? Aconitum foliage from last year, coming back nicely.
We dyed brown and black mulch Wednesday. That’s hard work, keeping up with that machine. You can buy products from us, and have them delivered to you without ever coming into our store, if you are concerned about the above picture.
Drive through the parking lot and see which mulch or soil you want, and order it over the phone. We can deliver it to you. We never need to touch! Clean glass just might be more of a threat to birds than cats and cars are. I've caught two exotic birds here this year- first time ever. We totally take our bodies for granted, of that I am 100% sure. The sensory perception sensitivities that we are endowed with are so acute it's not even funny, and we walk through our lives not fully appreciating how finely tuned we are to detect the slightest movement in the landscape with our eyes, to sense a tiny tick crawling on our legs even though we can't see it, to hear the slightest sound at night as we lay in bed, or to smell the honeysuckle flowering hundreds of feet away.
I was working this am and caught a split second movement out of the corner of the corner of my eye. I glanced over and saw nothing, but then it happened again. Finally I saw it- a hummingbird caught in the store against the large plate glass window. I opened the doors then got a rake to usher the bird out the doors but the dummy was unusherable, choosing to keep banging against the glass. I reached forward two dozen times before I was able to make contact, ever so gently squeezing enough to capture, not hard enough to break the fragile little thing. I was (obviously) able to grab my phone to record an event that I am sure will never ever happen again. My eyes and brain told me that I was holding a live wriggling object, but my hand and arm denied that reality, with muscles telling me that I was holding absolutely nothing. Hummingbirds are an engineering masterpiece. They weigh almost nothing so they can perform high speed maneuvers as they dart from blossom to blossom then migrate to Brazil for the winter. How can something that teeny-tiny be so aggressively territorial yet so delicate and lightweight? It's just one more example of Mother Nature's engineering of our environment, mysterious, complex, not fully understood, fragile, and worthy of our appreciation. Domestic honey bee busy tonight on a creeping groundcover Veronica. So many flowers to pollinate, so little time! Wild honey bees are totally wiped out because of you-know-”whomans.” Humans SUCK. I stopped spraying our nursery preventatively over a decade ago so I would no longer kill innocent insects. Glad I did- lotsa-life around now! Fragrant dianthus next to bellflower. Smells like sweet sugar in the air around this plant. Unfurling, uncurling, wish I had time lapse to catch the order and perfection of mother nature’s magnificent design. Black and blue annual salvia- our very best hummingbird flower. Hummers come to this plant many times a day and stay for a very long time. It’s the very best hummingbird plant available. Black flower bud sheath and profuse violet-blue flowers give this awesome plant it’s name. Another hummingbird plant- red hot poker- with downward pointing tubular flowers offering constant nectar to butterflies also. Insane arrangement of florets, couldn’t pack one more flower onto this stalk. I do not know much about clematis other than they live FOREVER. Let’s not ignore an unflowered sedum with a tiny unknown pollinator cleaning pollen off him/herself in the warm afternoon setting sun Delphinium has its own pollination strategy, starting with mind-numbing violet-blue coloration. Classic delphinium. Insect crawls up to get nectar and the hair grabs pollen from other delphiniums, thus ensuring DNA is swapped for genetic diversity in the species. Cool! Pink Veronica spires in profuse display on a 5” tall plant. Leathery flawless leaves of fall flowering aconitum hint at a tough durable plant’s ability to endure harsh environments all summer till flowering time, saving up energy for one of the most stunning flowers of all. Delosperma flower (ice plant) and flower bud covered in sparkles. Desert-like plant looks like tortoise food. All of the above flowers flower for a reason, and the reason is to continue the existence of their species for yet another year. All the “pretty” flowers just happen to be pretty for us in our visible spectrum. Insects see differently than we do. Maybe insect/flower relationships are so entirely complex that some insects see only one flower species. Out of all the diversity on our planet, some bugs just see one color spectrum, just one flower, with the flower entirely relying on one insect and vise versa, a marriage made in heaven. A dangerous strategy now-a-days, with mankind destroying the environment with global warming and incredible pollution.
Im positive that unknown insects have gone extinct and their plant-partners going extinct not long afterwards. I just found the answer. Trollius evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in synch with a species of fly called Chiastocheta. The structure of the trollius flower is designed to keep larger pollinators like bumble bees out of the flower so the tiny fly is the only one who gets in. The adult fly is the one who does the pollination. The juvenile larvae is teentsy, and feeds on the seeds of trollius after pollination. Isn't that weird? The flower is designed totally around letting only one species of insect pollinate it, insuring it's survival... then the offspring of that very same insect eats half of the seeds produced. Kinda makes no sense, but there is certainly an evolutionary reason for this but we humans cant figure that out yet. I just thought that I would add some interest to some of the perennials that we sell so people look at them and see more than "It's such a pretty flower!" Everyone knows the ant/peony relationship exists because the peony feeds the ants as a reward for killing each insect that dares to threaten a peony plant when it is flowering. This relationship took millions of years to develop. The ants help to open the flower buds and the plant feeds the ant colony with sugary sap. How do the ants know to go to a peony plant? Why isn’t this little bee/fly killed by the protector-ants while I took this picture? Did the ants know the bee/fly was helping the peony and not hurting it? These and other questions add an entire world of intrigue to the complicated world of flowering plants. New cultivar of ‘gaura’ that attracts pollinators with the colorful backsplash of four brachts and nothing below for a pollinator to cling to whilst feeding on nectar. Again I ask: Why, for whom, how long did it take to evolve? Mankind does not know the answers to the evolution of most of the species we share this earth with, even as these species die off because of our lack of respect/knowledge for them. |
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