WALKING ON SKIES OF BLUE

May 2015

Nature, with a splash of blue taken from the sky, covered the scars of the old logging road

until it looked like a meandering stream with bouquets of flowers tucked between the trees along its banks. 

Wood anemones

and trilliums

with yellow bellworts

followed the stream on down the hill

until it reached the valley below.

AUTUMN SLIPS IN

Autumn slips into our lives during warm, butterscotch days

and creates ripples of rainbow waters.

Blue skies tease into eternity

And foggy mornings kiss the earth.

 Then leafy flowers rest on pastel colored trees

 

while mountains sculpt their image

 across the sky.

           The leaves begin to drop one by one 

from tree to ground

till trees stand dark and shiver in the cold

and winter bears down with claws of ice.

EARTH DAY 2014

This view from Bickle Knob in Randolph County, WV, is a reminder of the fragile yet magnificent beauty that we enjoy. Although it has changed much over the years due to logging and commercialization, we must protect what remains and keep it the unique place that it is. Greed for oil, gas,wind power and other more subtle forms of destruction must not prevail.

A Glorious Morning

What a beautiful morning. 

About 7:00, the clouds diffused the early

 morning  sun giving everything a pink hue.

Even this weathered pole had a soft, warm glow. 

Jewelweed, browneyed Susans, phlox, asters and goldenrod.

Disorganized and weedy, a chaos of color, yet delightfully
 pretty in the early morning's light. The butterflies
 gracefully drifted about this buffet of  flowers, while
 hummingbirds performed aerial combat overhead
 for the rights to the nectar plants.

This feels just like the mood set in  a 

famous poem by Robert Browning:

Morning's at seven;

The hillside's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn;

God's in his heaven--

All's right with the world!

And the Sun Spilled Onto the Mountains

The sun spilled onto the mountains,

 and they reflected back to the heavens.

Just Flying By

A Magnolia Warbler in the birch tree.

In May, while I was fixing dinner, I saw a pretty, little, yellow and black bird looking back at me through the kitchen window. I grabbed my camera and took a few pictures.

I had no idea about the species of this bird because I am a neophyte in birding. This visitor wasn't hard to identify with the yellow stomach and distinctive head coloration and eye band.

I learned that my new friend was a Magnolia Warbler, a wayfarer on the way to Canada and the summer breeding grounds. Although it was new to me, the bird is considered one of the most common of the warblers.

The Magnolia Warbler was given this name because the first specimen was collected among the magnolia trees in Mississippi around 1800. An insect eater, the female will lay three to five green or white eggs with brown markings.


I finally decided that this was possibly a female beyond her second calendar year. I used an interesting website for identification that was created by the McGill Bird Observatory, a project of the Migration Research Foundation in Montreal, Canada.

http://www.migrationresearch.org/mbo/id/mawa.html#asymb

ON THE EVE OF SUMMER

The Lady Slipper: Spring's Beautiful Maidens

The spring orchids, especially the lady slippers, (Cypripedium acaule) are among the biggest treats in store for the person who ventures into the woods on a May or June day. They have long been the subject of folklore.










A native American chief was going off to war, and to comfort his young daughter, he promised to bring pink moccasins to her when he returned. He was killed, and she then died of grief. The mother fell asleep on the girl's grave, and when she awoke, she saw the pink moccasin flower. Thus she knew that the father and his loving daughter had been reunited.

The scientific name for these delicate and beautiful flowers has an equally interesting origin. "Cypripedium" is the Greek name for the slipper of Venus, the goddess of love. Other common names for it are not so flattering. They include camel's foot, squirrel's foot, steeple cap, whippoorwill shoes, two-lips, and the worst of all, old goose.

The pink one is not found west of the Mississippi River.



The lady slipper will only survive for a year or two if transplanted because it depends on a symbiotic relationship with a the Rizoctonia fungus where it is growing. The rhizomes for it can be as much as three feet long. Also, the flower should never be picked because it will interfere with the plant's life cycle and it's chances for reproducing. It is illegal to pick or dig these plants in several states.

While the average life span of the plant is twenty years, it may take at least five years to go from seed to flowering stage.

Although the lady slipper does not produce nectar, its pollinators are attracted by its color and fragrance. There is speculation that it produces a pheromone scent that attracts the males to mate. Bees enter from the front of the pouch but can't get back out that way so they must exit through a narrow passage. It is here that they get pollen on their back hairs.

The seeds are as tiny as a grain of powder.

The lady slipper was so popular during Victorian times and dug so frequently, that it was thought to be extinct.

The roots have been used for a number of medicinal purposes including pain relief. Native Americans used it to treat toothaches.

There are lots of hairs on this plant to keep it from being eaten. They contain a fatty acid that can cause a rash similar to poison ivy, another good reason not to pick it. This same fatty acid is also poisonous to people and animals.

And this reminds us of a quote by President Theodore Roosevelt.

"Wildflowers should be enjoyed unplucked where they grow"

The Snow Trillium

With petals peeking from the ground

as if standing on tiny toes,

the snow trillium reaches upward

embracing winter's cold

while warming in a mellow sun.

The first flower of the season,

the hope and promise of regeneration

of a cold and sullen earth

emptied by snow and windswept chill,

now shivering with life's new vibrations.

CHAOS IN WHITE: Sandy Blizzard 2012 in North Central West Virginia

The storm was supposed to begin on Monday, October 29, and the weather forecasters predicted three or more feet of heavy wet snow. Of course, I was hoping they were wrong, very, very wrong. By 8:30 a.m., just as they had said,  wet snow was mixing with the rain.

I spent the day doing laundry and cooking things like pumpkin pies (without the crust), applesauce, and homemade granola.  These are all things that would keep for a while without refrigeration.

By 3:00 p.m. it began to snow heavily, and the ground had cooled enough that the snow was accumulating.

I was concerned that our Japanese Bloodgood Maple was still in leaf.  It is very special because  I bought it in 1979 for my dad as a Father's Day gift at a garden center in Louisville, KY, where we were living. It was little more than a twig at that time.

A wispy, ethereal quality was present as a giant, snowy paintbrush left
everything colored in a  delicate white.

As darkness approached, the snow came down unbelievably fast.  My husband, daughter and I went outside with flashlights so that we could shake some of the snow off the maple and other shrubs.

The earlier picture of our birch had changed to this as it bent
closer to the earth.

By 8:30 our power was gone, and we were not to have it restored until November 11, thirteen days later.

There is a special uneasiness, an eerie feeling when the weather is bizarre, and this night had that quality. We rested on couches downstairs in case a tree came crashing through our roof.  No one really slept, and my husband and I dutifully fed our wood stove throughout the night.  Without electricity, it was our only source of heat.

The snow kept falling and so did the trees and branches with loud cracks. Twice during the night we saw red-yellow pulsing lights that seemed to echo across the sky, ending with a stabbing, bright light as transformers for the power line blew.

The next day when daylight came, we saw trees bent downward under the weight of the heavy, wet snow. This is the same birch tree of the day and night before.

The trees created bazaar shapes as they arched under the weight of the nearly two feet of snow we had received.

Everywhere we looked, it was a scene that seemed as if it had been created on the movie set of a science fiction film.  Our beautiful trees with downward bent tops swayed like a strange, hoary creature trying to make it's way into the field. Eventually, almost all of these would sustain some damage.

During the previous night, one vehicle had made its way along the road before the trees began to break. Now the road was impassable with downed trees and large broken branches.

It continued to snow heavily the entire day, and by the morning of the third day, we had received at least three feet.

By Thursday, the road was plowed, and it had warmed enough to create a great deal of thawing. Life began again, stores opened in town as their electricity was restored, but for some, the winter hung heavily upon us as we waited and hoped for our electricity to be restored.