Just Twisted.

It's been a great while since I've sat down and written. We went through weeks of no rain and wilting plants, but made up for it last night, as I shall explain. At 10:45 pm, which is nearly my bedtime over the summer (and past it during the school year), we received an automated phone call from the fire department. It notified us that tornadoes had been sighted in our area and that all residents should seek shelter in their basements or interior areas of the house. So, we gathered our cats -- not an easy task... though they are in general quite loving and social, especially for cats, they seem to know when they are being pursued for the purpose of containment. Although they cannot tell the difference between the evil carrier-to-vet type of containment and the benign go-to-basement-(where-you-spend-time-anyhow)-to-save-your-life type of containment. Anyhow, with only one scratch on Chris, we got them, and ourselves, downstairs.

For almost an hour, we sat there, cleaned and chatted and puzzled and whatnot, sometimes jovially and other times -- like when we heard loud booms from above -- in fear. The booms turned out to be thunder, not the house falling down or some sort of disaster-burglar taking advantage. So. I finally asked when this little drill would be over. You see, I sort of had to pee. We don't have a bathroom in the basement, although, as Chris pointed out, there is both a litter box AND a floor drain. Not amusing. So, would the fire department call back? Chris thought they would, although neither of us had any experience with this form of tornado alert system. For everyone's future reference: They don't call back.

But we didn't know this, so we sat there and waited a bit longer. Eventually, we decided to venture upstairs and check some sort of media to determine if it was safe... and use the bathroom. It seemed fine outside and inside, but the television told us that our area was in a tornado, flood and thunderstorm warning zone until 7 am. OK, then... We gathered pillows and a DVD, and headed back down stairs. I creatively commandeered some camping gear and set up a sleeping mat and blanket bed under a table (in case the house fell while we were sleeping). And so, around 12:30, we settled in for a long night on the floor of the basement with the spiders and the millipedes.

This lasted about 1/2 hour. The sleeping mat, which fit perfectly under the table, was really not large enough for two people, even on our sides. The blanket wasn't warm enough. But we toughed it out until we heard, right by our heads, a retching sound. And another. Ah, bueno. Cat barf. And it was smelly. Chris found the light (it is really dark in the basement at night) so that we could see to clean the vomit, which was on my puzzle. Really, kittens?

In the end, we decided that we probably weren't going to be in the path or a tornado. In fact, when we went upstairs, it was so calm that the tree branches weren't even moving, and it pretty much remained that way for the remainder of the night. We got some hard rain this morning, as well, and by 11 am it was sunny.

Time to assess the damage. In the time I've lived here I've had tomatoes and peppers blow over, sunflowers fall down, large branches land on the lawn, all the normal things you'd think would occur in Illinois summer storms. But this storm? Hardly did a thing. One pepper plant snapped off -- it was already staked because of its tendency to fall over under its own weight -- so now I have many, many too-small peppers to use. Otherwise, everything is fine. Including a lone sunflower I have that is, no exaggeration, 12 feet tall, and not surrounded by other plants or staked. So, it was a bust. I haven't talked to anyone else who experienced any damage, but I haven't talked to that many people.

I feel pretty lucky that all this happened last night, and it's supposed to rain some more tonight and tomorrow, and then Sunday is supposed to be sunny and high around 80 F. We are getting married outside on Sunday, so I sure hope that prediction rings true! Perhaps I"ll post pictures, at least of what flowers are blooming that day. (Note to self: charge camera.)

Other things that have happened since I've last blogged:

• I have seen a lot of dragonflies, including a few unusual ones like a halloween pendant or a painted skimmer -- something with orange and black mottled wings -- what did not let me photograph it.
• We have whiteflies in the garden, mostly on the cucumbers, which I'm sort of OK with since I've already made a whole year's worth of pickles and we're going out of town next week, but I don't want them to move to my birdhouse gourds, which are doing GREAT and I want to get a lot of gourds so that I can make a lot of birdhouses. We got lacewings and set them free today, so we'll see.
• Also in the garden, we harvested garlic and are getting some tomatoes, tons of beans, some peppers, carrots, etc. In addition to lots of jams and pickles, this year I have canned carrots, green beans, and jalapeno peppers.
• Silphium of all varieties are in full bloom. But my own compass plant is not blooming, because its head was tragically chopped off by friendly fire in a rain barrel installation incident. It is growing a new one, so I may get flowers yet.
• Joe Pye weed is blooming, and... on and on and on... it's mid-summer. It's hot and lots of things are blooming!

Time Marches On ...

The first blazing stars opened maybe a week ago. Ironweed opened a few days ago. Silphiums are in full bloom... I'm not sure why I haven't felt like writing about it.

I can't believe summer break is 1/2 over. So not fair.

Another Dreary Day

(ironweed seeds, bergamot seeds, m. mint seeds, compass plant leaves)
The prairie is getting browner and seedier. (Though not drier. It is, again, raining and in the 40's! Yea!) I, like a little kid, love the seeds of milkweed, pictured above. It's not the flying and spreading that draws me to them, but rather how they look like fish scales when the pod has popped open but the seeds haven't yet escaped.
Despite the less-than-hospitable weather, there are still some creepy-crawlies about. In addition to these beetles, I also found a sluggish but moving grasshopper, and a very active jumping spider.

Endings

Crickets chirp in the still, humid night air, welcoming the darkness that comes earlier as the days march on. The air is heavy with heat and the weight of the world.

In phenological recordings, people generally note firsts, peaks, and lasts... as in, the purple coneflower first bloomed on June XX; peak bloom was July XX, and the last bloom was August XX. Loyal readers may have noticed that I am diligent about recording firsts. They are exciting and new! Who wouldn't record a first? Peaks I sometimes mention, because they do tend to be pretty. But lasts? I am not so good at making mention of the lasts. Besides lacking the excitement of a first, they are often harder to record with certainty. How do you know that monarch is the last? What if I see another tomorrow? In fact, I falsely reported the last strawberry this June, and ended up getting quite a large handful a few days later. So lasts... not my thing.

But coming home from England, I have noticed some lasts. Queen of the Prairie no longer rules the "wet prairie" located at the end of my drain spout. Spiderwort is completely finished flowering (and probably was before we left). Bergamot is looking pretty sad. While some things are just getting started -- Joe Pye bloomed while we were gone; my sweet brown-eyed susans, much later bloomers than their black-eyed friends, are finally in full bloom; big bluestem and Indian grass are flowering; and better late than never, my compass plant finally got itself a flower -- but anyhow... while these things are starting, summer for some things is winding down.

Perhaps I am taking note of this especially because summer is also winding down for me. Hard to believe, what with the fact that I am practically melting (A/C malfunction, that's another story); the fact that I just today made my first, small batch of tomato sauce; and the fact that the summer solstice is like a month and a half away... but summer for us officially ends as we go back to work this week. Pfffft. It's been a fun, but short, ride. How depressing.

Rollins Savannah

A pair of sandhill cranes in a prairie pothole. We didn't see a colt.
Milkweeds are making their seedpods, but they're tiny (1-2 inches long) at this point. Cute, like miniature milkweed seedpods.

Compass plant blooming. Mine seem to be doing extremely well, full, several stems... but they're slow. No flowers yet, when all the others have several. It's a mystery.

Ode to a Phenology Master

It's hard, of course, for a plant person to choose a favorite plant. I surely couldn't, but if pressed... I might well choose the compassplant. Some have started blooming, but those in my garden are slow this year. (I hope they're OK.)

In his A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold writes about silphium in July.

Prairie Birthday

During every week from April to September there are, on

the average, ten wild plants coming into first bloom. In
June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a
single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no
man can ignore all of them. He who steps unseeing on May
dandelions may be hauled up short by August ragweed
pollen; he who ignores the ruddy haze of April elms may
skid his car on the fallen corollas of June catalpas. Tell me
of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell
you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay
fever, and the general level of his ecological education.

Every July I watch eagerly a certain country graveyard that I pass in driving to and from my farm. It is time for a prairie birthday, and in one corner of this graveyard lives a surviving celebrant of that once important event. It is an ordinary graveyard, bordered by the usual spruces, and studded with the usual pink granite or white marble headstones, each with the usual Sunday bouquet of red or pink geraniums. It is extraordinary only in being triangular instead of square, and in harboring, within the sharp angle of its fence, a pin-point remnant of the native prairie on which the graveyard was established in the 1840's. Heretofore unreachable by scythe or mower, this yard-square relic of original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, to a man-high stalk of compass plant or cutleaf Silphium, spangled with saucer-sized yellow blooms resembling sunflowers. It is the sale remnant of this plant along this highway,· and perhaps the sole remnant in the western half of our county. What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked. This year I found the Silphium in first bloom on 24 July, a week later than usual; during the last six years the average date was 15 July. When I passed the graveyard again on 3 August, the fence had been removed by a road crew, and the Silphium cut. It is easy now to predict the future; for a few years my Silphium will try in vain to rise above the mowing machine, and then it will die. With it will die the prairie epoch. The Highway Department says that 100,000 cars pass yearly over this route during the three summer months when the Silphium is in bloom. In them must ride at least 100,000 people who have 'taken' what is called history, and perhaps 25,000 who have 'taken' what is called botany. Yet I doubt whether a dozen have seen the Silphium, and of these hardly one will notice its demise. If I were to tell a preacher of the adjoining church that the road crew has been burning history books in his cemetery, under the guise of mowing weeds, he would be amazed and uncom- prehending. How could a weed be a book? This is one little episode in the funeral of the native flora, which in turn is one episode in the funeral of the floras of the world. Mechanized man, oblivious of floras, is proud of his progress in cleaning up the landscape on which, willy- nilly, he must live out his days. It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life. ..... Silphium first became a personality to me when I tried to dig one up to move to my farm. It was like digging an oak sapling. After half an hour of hot grimy labor the root was still enlarging, like a great vertical sweet-potato. As far as I know, that Silphium root went clear through to bedrock. I got no Silphium, but I learned by what elaborate underground strategems in contrives to weather the prairie drouths. I next planted Silphium seeds, which are large, meaty, and taste like sunflower seeds. They came up promptly, but after five years of waiting the seedlings are still juvenile, and have not yet borne a flower-stalk. Perhaps it takes a decade for Silphium to reach flowering age; how old, then, was my pet plant in the cemetery? It may have been older than the oldest tombstonem which is dated 1850. Perhaps it watched the fugitive Black Hawk retreat from the Madison lakes to the Wisconsin River; it stood on the route of that famous march. Certainly it saw the successive funerals of the local pioneers as they retire, one by one, to their repose beneath the bluestem. And on it goes, describing how the silphium comes back when destroyed, for a while, anyhow, until it doesn't. But I feel like that's an awful lot of copying someone else's writing, (an awful lot of words in general, actually). It's good, though. Makes me wonder what's the point? I mean, of me writing anything, ever, when he has done it so masterfully already. Oh, well.

A million things to say.

Lilac leaves.

As I sit and write this, I listen to the steady patter of rain through the window, punctuated by an occasional distant thunderclap.  This morning, we got up and worked in the garden, savoring the warm weather that had hung on since yesterday.  We went to the farmer's market, and the car thermometer read 72 degrees (this was 10:30 or so).  As we finished our shopping there, huge, splattering raindrops began to fall -- and soon were mixed with hailstones!  I saw lightning streak across the sky.  By the time we got home from several errands, the temperature was 54 degrees.  But from inside it is actually pleasant, the sound calming.  And the world 

looks green and almost summery.  

This is, in reality, an illusion.  A lot of the green that is starting to pop out is not the leaves emerging, but rather the trees flowering (see photo of maple flowers at right).  These flowers are what gave Crayola the color "spring green," in my opinion.  This shade that hugs the tree branches now won't appear at any other time of the year.

After all the anticipation, my bloodroot is essentially finished flowering,  Spring ephemerals, they call this group of wildflowers.  Ephemeral.  Fleeting, short-lived.  An appropriate name, but even more appropriate for the connotation than the denotation.  To me, the very word has a shimmering quality.  Like a mirage.  You see it, it is beautiful, but if you reach out to touch it, you will find it isn't there at all.  

In other spring ephemeral news, I thought that my Dutchman's Breeches were not coming back.  Turns out, they emerged yesterday or the day before, but they are quite small and definitely

 won't flower this year.  I don't know if they are growing bigger by the year, or smaller by the year, but I am hoping for the former.  My May apples (seen emerging at right) have been spreading like wildfire, apparently.  Where one used to be, I now have a circle of 5 emerging; another one has turned to a circle of 4.  (And 2 others continue to be solo acts.  Perhaps they don't have such prime locations.)  I am not sure if a circle of 5 constitutes a fairy circle yet, but I am on my way in the future!  I quite like the idea of tiny fairies dancing around my spring

 ephemerals, perhaps napping under the colorful glass mushrooms that I put back into the yard yesterday...

I am also happy to report that my silphium is coming back. 

 For days I have been looking and not seen it; today I pulled back the leaves and found that there are as many as 10 tiny, deeply lobed leaves that are already probably 6 inches tall.  This compass plant just may be my favorite thing in my yard... maybe... so I am thrilled and relieved to have it returning.  (See photo at right.)  Other updates to briefly

 mention:

1. the ash tree in my yard has swelling buds, but no leaves to speak of; just three houses down, there are emerging leaves from an ash tree.  Don't ask me...
2. Honey locust buds and redbud buds (the flower ones) are also swelling and ready.  As compound leaves tend to leaf out late, these are notable!
3. Oak buds continue to swell, but no leaves there, either.

Below are a few photos from previous updates:  The first tulip, pasqueflower, some cool mushroom gills, emerging wild ginger,two turtle shells, and Virginia bluebells almost flowering.