Monday, February 16, 2015

Seven Sentence Natural History: A February Day at the Bird Feeder.

Goldfinch
In the endtimes of winter, after a weekend of plummeting temperatures and frigid winds, a bit of sunshine, no matter how tentative, is welcomed by bird and human alike.  But make no mistake about it, every puddle of water in the yard remains frozen, not a particularly happy situation for any creature in need of quenching its thirst but without access to an indoor faucet.  

Dark-eyed Junco
Still the birds show up, congregating in the bare limbs of an apple tree next to the bird feeder - black-capped Carolina chickadees, slate-gray dark-eyed juncos and a solitary goldfinch.  The goldfinch should long ago have migrated south, but obviously found the living good enough here to stay.  Darting from branch to branch, the birds check out their surrounding before descending on the two cylindrical feeders hanging nearby in mid-air and stuffed with seeds. While the goldfinch prefers black thistle, the chickadees busily crack open seed after seed of millet and sunflower before swallowing their kernels. The juncos, on the other hand, do not mind at all pecking around in the grass below for the leavings.  Overhead, a turkey vulture flying in great, lazy circles reminds me that not all birds are as nervous and abrupt as those at the feeder, which is to say, not all birds are as likely to end up in the talons of the sharp-shinned hawk who shows up at times to perch on the topmost branches of the black-cherry trees towering over the yard.

Carolina Chickadee
Goldfinch up close on an apple tree branch with swelling buds.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

Introducing the Salisbury University Environmental Studies Studio Garden for Ecological Awareness

Hummingbird feasting on a butterfly bush.
Plant it, and they will come - hummingbirds, woolly bears, goldfinches, mitre bees and all the rest.  And, yes, the not so happily welcomed interlopers also make their appearance: harlequin and Japanese beetles, potato bugs and aphids.  Even an occasional black widow spider, not to mention many, many "weeds," wire grass and mugwort among them, show up.  The garden, our garden, is a cacophony of species, a noisy interchange biologically of the domestic and the wild, the invited and the reviled, the familiar and the strange.

But most importantly, be wary: this garden is in search of your soul.

Woolly Bear on a Summer Afternoon
Our garden plot was first tilled and planted by environmental studies and philosophy students at Salisbury University, along with their clueless professor, in the spring semester of 2009.  Organic gardener Jay Martin generously offered his expertise and loaned us many of his tools to prepare the garden for its first crops.  Over the last seven years the garden has grown in size and variety as each wave of students has added their particular flourish to the garden.  Environmental Studies alumnus Christopher Martin left a sculpture-a knight of metal with a strawberry head of blown glass.  Another built a box for our compost pile.  An entire group of students, led by John Bodnar, raised funds for our greenhouse that is dedicated to the memory of Ric Maloof. We now have perennial plantings of grape vines and thornless blackberry, raspberries and asparagus, as well as a peach, a pear and a fig tree. Recently the southern end of the garden has been dedicated to more than human hungers and includes Joe-Pye weed (which is an indigenous plant and not a weed), mint, sweet grass, butterfly bush, lemon balm, turtlehead, penstemon, cinnamon fern and phlox.  Two beds in the back area of the garden are now dedicated to towering plantings of Jerusalem artichokes, which are harvested every fall but return persistently every spring.

We are hoping for even more variety in the future.  Feel free to share your ideas!

Goldfinch briefly Pausing to Survey the Domain

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

The Garden is a Dao, a Way.

Rosinweed Blooming and Bumblebee Bumbling
The garden is a dao, a way.  Even as I write these lines framed by the soft glow of a computer screen, outside beyond the curtained window under a nearly-full August moon, trumpet vine and scarlet runner are scaling their wire cages, tomatoes and peppers are metabolizing the day's production of sugar, and somewhere, sprawled on a leaf, an exhausted carpenter bee is spending the night rather than returning to its nest.  The garden brings together innumerable creatures involved in innumerable processes and relationships of which its human cultivator directly perceives only bits and pieces, the proverbial tip of the iceberg.  Inevitably, the garden demands of the gardener an exercise in imagination that is both daunting to and nurturing of an all-too-human mind.

The garden is a dao, a way. And so, the adept garden speaks, and the inept gardener listens.  The garden, it might be argued, begins in the crucible of human doing. Several years ago, the earth was turned, nutrients were added, and seeds were planted.  All of this my doing. For one brief moment under the sun, when the confines were sketched out and the interior sewn in, the garden was perhaps mine.  But in every moment since then the 10,000 things of the garden have been going their own way as they engage in their subtle and pervasive work.  And, yes, even yesterday I carried water to several containers holding the roots of thriving eggplants and cantaloupes, as well as to a kiwi vine that is still putting down its tap root as reddish tendrils are lifting it curl by curl up a trellis. This too is very yang (active, illuminating, male, ego asserting) on my part. But more-than-human energies have also been summoned, and uncanny realities have been stirred into existence.  White filaments of fungi are lacing through the hidden earth as billions of microorganism beyond my capacity to see with a naked eye alter the inorganic debris of a continent into black gold, the hyper-actively alive soil in which a garden's plants thrive.

The garden is a dao, a way.  And the dao of the garden is not solely meant for its human practitioners. The garden offers itself to all comers, to plant and arthropod, to bird and mammal, many of whom spend their every hour, both waking and sleeping, in its folds and niches. The garden is their hatching ground, their birthing place, their house, their food, their society, their grave.  Compared to these, I can only claim the garden as my own by proxy. And while I am inclined to roust out the potato bugs and harlequin beetles, the wire grass and mugwort, I am also in awe of how these know when and where to turn up and how quickly they can make themselves at home. I think of the milkweed patch, which has been planted in a plot dedicated to the appetites of other creatures. These thick leaves and sturdy stalks offer refuge to red milkweed bugs cut by dark diagonal stripes, to Virginia tiger moth caterpillars with black, yellow and white bristles, and  to mating ladybugs with their carefully plotted spots on orange shells.  And one should not forget to mention the tribes of small black ants, tending herds of yellow, pulpy aphids who roam the higher, more tender leaves, gathering each day in a new location to feast on the juices of creation. Once placing my eye too close to a patch of ants arrayed on a leaf, they quickly formed themselves into a circle with their proboscises pointed outward and their front legs raised in a defensive posture.  I quickly retreated.  

The garden is a dao, a way.  And a place of visions.  I have dreamt of waters both sour and sweet drenching the earth, of black beetles shaped like pears waddling up green stems, of whiskered roots searching out the dark reaches of the earth and translucent leaves growing sunward.  And in a thick haze of afternoon sun, gold finches have descended to perch on spent cone flowers, stuffing their beaks with seeds.  .

The garden is a dao, a way.  With this thought in mind, this blog begins an initiation into gardening to be shared with a class of 25 students at Salisbury University in a curiously-named course: "Environmental Studies 205 - Art Nature Culture."  Stay tuned.