Life and Times at Cranberry Lake

This blog is about the life, wild and otherwise, in this immediate area of Northeast Pennsylvania. I hope you can join me and hopefully realize and value that common bond we share with all living things... from the insect, spider, to the birds and the bears... as well as that part of our spirit that wishes to be wild and free.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

GILL-OVER-THE-GROUND

Years ago I decided to get to know my wild flowers, (a.k.a. bloomin' weeds). My general knowledge extended to daisies and black eyed susan. What my mother called flag lily turned out to be a brook iris called blue flag.

I would take a picture with my 35mm camera, and then cut the flower, pressing it between two pieces of paper towels, noting the date on the towel. After giving it time to dry between the huge dictionaries Tom has had forever, I would take the dry flower, place it in an album with those stick-um pages under the film of plastic... those albums that perhaps have destroyed people's perfect family pictures when they adhered too well and got ripped when one would want to read what had been faithfully written on its back.

The year I did the bulk of the album... a big one with many, many pages, I would keep my camera handy and snap the picture on the first day its petals opened. This was an easy chore until about the middle of May when everything that hadn't already bloomed was rushing to show its inherent beauty like racks of beautiful clothing at an end of season sale. Pictures were beginning to pile up along with the drying flowers. I had to use some of the encyclopedias and other books that usually sat useless on the shelf... I put them to good use, flattening the flowers all over the house. In the meantime, I noticed that there were special tools for doing a proper job of pressing flowers, and my good old paper towels sometimes left an interesting pattern on some of the blooms, but I continued to do it my way.

Some blooms were too big to press... too moist and mushy. I carefully split them in two with my craft knife and pressed their silhouette ...that turned out nicely for the Jack-in-the pulpet. For the Day lily, a garden flower turned wild, it made almost a modern picture which hardly resembled the flower, but I had the picture of that. I liked the form it took as a dried flower, so it went in as is. Something called indian pipe, a plant without any chlorophyll which was as white as snow, turned black as pitch after being pressed and dried.

In the process of this book, I was getting to know the names of everything from coltsfoot to beebalm (bergamot). Coltsfoot is one of my favorites, as it is so resilient and bears up under the throes of the residue plowed to the roadside as it rears up their little yellow heads on the least fertile soil, like tiny sun-yellow-flashlights from the first warm day in Spring. Tom, not being as serious about my hobby, but having the same difficulty remembering names whether people or flowers, dubbed the cheerful spring celebrant, "Horses Ass." The reason it's called Colt's foot, is that long after the yellow heads have turned white and fuzzy, blowing away like a dandelion look-alike--when the rows of collective teeny elders with white hair are long gone--the large leaves form in the shape of the imprint of a colt's foot grow thick where the first blooms of spring once lit up the road's edge.

In the course of all these pictures and presses, I found a tiny, small, but beautiful flower where thousands would burst into bloom in the fields with an almost iridescent blue. The iridescence was mostly caused from its numbers in the deep green leaves of their stems making a scatter rug with its teeny pale blue flowers piercing upwards through the darker green as if lit from underneath.

I would step into its center and look down, almost getting dizzy, as it gave me the impression of movement without my moving. ...The same feeling I get when the waves wash over my bare feet, when the backwash streams down to the ocean's edge, and it looks like I'm swiftly moving backwards. It may just be me that these little flowers, which I found in my book to be bird's eye speedwell, leave me with the impression that I've stepped on a flying carpet.

Years later, later on in the summer, when weeding my rock garden, I thought that it was the bird's-eye speedwell that was growing throughout my rock garden. Later I looked it up and found it was gill-over-the-ground. It has a different type bloom, but still a pretty blue, and just as tiny as the speedwell. It was no problem the first year, but after a few years it seemed to be just a weed battling with my Vinca minor, or ground myrtle, otherwise known as periwinkle. I love periwinkle, as its leaves are evergreen--nice looking even in the heart of winter--and it seems to keep the elbow-shaped rock garden hill that boarders the driveway from eroding. Two years ago I was determined to get rid of the damned gill-over-the-ground. Its vines mimicked the trailing stems of the periwinkle and like the gardener finding out which is a weed and which is the wanted plant, when you pull the easier one, it's the good plant, I'd pull the periwinkle vine, and it would suffer perhaps more for my work at trying to eradicate the gill... weed. Meanwhile Bear, my English spaniel would be "helping Mama," by digging holes looking for chipmunk dens harbored in the same hill, and doing even more damage to the periwinkle than the weed ...Or the weeder (me).

This spring so far the gill-over-the-ground is beginning to show up more dense than ever. I remember thinking while doing this weeding each year (which, by the way, weeding seems to be the greatest form of meditation),"What if the Gill-over-the-ground is good for the periwinkle?" But I started the impossible job of pulling up and out the trailing vine that seems to be competing for a Championship Wrestling Belt of the garden, but then thought, "No... I'm not going to pull it up this year. I'll get rid of the dandelions and the plantain, but I'm going to let 'gill' grow over whatever-the-hell-ground it wants to go over. The hell with it!" And when it's in full bloom, as it will be after the ground myrtle has had its season of periwinkle blue, I'll just appreciate the blooms. The Gill... has a lovely bloom, but small, a color like the blue of the bird's-eye speedwell, without such piercing light. It isn't an evergreen, but it probably fights erosion also. At the end of this season, I'll take a census of what has gained, and what has lost, and see if I'll ever have to contend with the gill-over...stuff again.

Monday, April 05, 2010

A SPRINGTIME POEM ENTERED FOR THOSE WHO APPRECIATE MY POETRY.... [and thank you for that.]

(Written in Spring, 1995)

The days are growing longer;
The fields are turning green;
The birds came North
to build their nests,
They sit around and preen.

I love the springtime weather-
The air is brisk and cool.
I also love the Winter-
I am a skiing fool.

But when it comes to Summer,
It simply gets too hot!
I must sit back and take it-
a war that can't be fought.

Soon flowers will be sprouting,
their blooms will scent the air;
Mosquitoes, gnats and horseflies
will buzz around my hair...

The air will get real muggy,
and sweat will wet my brow-
I guess I'll live through summer
But sometimes I don't know how!

[...and predictions tell us we'll sample some summer heat before this week is over... hmm, fun!] (?)

Love you,
"Cranberry Jo"