Monthly Archives: June 2015

Naming and claiming wildflowers.

nature, wildflowers
California Coneflower Crane Flat Yosemite 7-09
California Coneflower – Yosemite – 2009

 

If you’ve read my blog very much you know that I love to take pictures of wildflowers.

 

 

 

 

I also like to identify the flowers, so I know what to call them. I can’t enjoy them half as much if I don’t know their names or relations. If I know a flower’s name I feel more the reality that we are both creatures of our Father, and it is my own kin.

lupines varicolored Yos 6-10 89
Lupines – Yosemite – 2010
shooting star East Sierra 7-11
Shooting Star – Eastern Sierras – 2011

Plant identification was slow going until ten or so years ago. Our outings usually included a few children and a father who wanted to get to the mountaintop or some other destination. There never seemed to be time to stop and look through a wildflower guide to see if we could find a picture of what was before us next to the trail. That is, if we had even brought a guide.

If we even owned a guide. Several years of marriage and children passed before we invested in a wildflower guidebook. I hadn’t learned the names of these plants as a child, but when I married Mr. Glad he started teaching me the ones he knew, and that’s how my love of wildflowers began: Blue Dicks, Sticky Monkey, Tiger Lily, Lupine….those were my first flower friends.

I suppose it wasn’t until I had the tools for digital photography that I got inspired, surely by Pippin first, to take pictures of blooms and then go home to work further on the fascinating task of figuring out the name — if not of the exact species, at least the family or genus.

flax crp Smith Rock OR 6-10
Flax – Oregon – 2010

My findings were often published on my blog. Then months or years would go by, and I would see the flower in the wild again, and not be able to retrieve its name from the corners of my brain — even if I had spent hours looking in multiple guides and on websites. So I would go back to my blog and try to find it there, if I had time for that job.

Sierra primrose - Yosemite summer 09
Sierra Primrose – Yosemite – 2009

A few years ago I got the idea of sifting through all those picture files, to scroll through scores of pictures from every hike or trip and find flowers that I had photographed and managed to identify — then I would copy them all into a big Wildflower folder (still on the computer) so I could easily find them again when my ailing memory failed me.

For a couple of days last month when I was too weary and sad to do anything else, I worked on that project, and it didn’t take as long as I’d expected.

Many flowers remain unidentified, maybe more than I know the names of. I put some of them in the folder, too, with a “Q” in the file name, for Question. A question mark would be ideal but it’s not allowed in those file names. If the date and place the picture was taken are known, I add that information.

Tincture Plant – Collinsia Tinctoria -Feather Falls trail 7-11
Tincture Plant – Feather Falls CA – 2011
Scarlet Gilia - close Yosemite summer 09
Scarlet Gilia – Yosemite – 2009

I am sharing a few of the pictures I put into this new folder, not the recent ones, but specimens that haven’t been on my blog for several years. Some of these flowers I haven’t yet encountered again since I first made met them, but I hope there will be many more chances in my future.

These are not the lines.

poetry,

This poem just now became an instant favorite. Oh, if we all could write half so well about the things we’ve forgotten!

LINES LOST AMONG TREES

These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway.

They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic

I devised to hold them in place —
all gone and forgotten
before I had returned to the clearing of lawn
in back of our quiet house

with its jars jammed with pens,
its notebooks and reams of blank paper,
its desk and soft lamp,
its table and the light from its windows.

So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of syntax,
the jazz of the timing,

and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door.

This is my envoy to nothing
where I say Go, little poem —
not out into the world of strangers’ eyes,
but off to some airy limbo,

home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,

which, like a fantastic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.

~ Billy Collins, poet laureate 2001-2003

Florentine picnic food

food and cooking, , ,

Pippin and family were in town for a day. In the evening I went to a birthP1000393crpday party for The Professor that featured a wild cake. Scout decorated it in a fashion that made lighting the candles a little challenging.

But before that, in the afternoon Pippin and I took the kids to the beach for the kind of bread-cheese-grapes picnic that can be thrown into a shopping bag at the market and taken as-is to dig into on the beach blanket.

 

P1000385

This is what a June afternoon often looks like on our North Coast beaches. At least the wind wasn’t blowing, until later when it was time to leave anyway, so as we ate we didn’t consume too much sand. Pippin had to reassure Ivy several times, “At the beach, sand is o.k. on your bread.”

Though it wasn’t ideal picnic weather, it reminded me that I’ve been wanting to Florentine pasties 09post this recipe that is one of my favorite things to take on a summer outing, though maybe not to the beach, where the fruits of my labors always risk spoiling by incoming grit.

The source of this recipe is unusual: a newsletter that our power company used to send with the bill, and which always included a recipe or two. They stopped this practice 20 years ago, but these pies became a tradition for me. They keep well and I think they taste best at room (or picnic cloth) temperature.

Florentine pastie bitten

Changes I made to the recipe below: Use butter, of course, never margarine, and add some salt to the pastry dough. Or just use your own recipe for pie dough. I like to make the filling the day before assembling the pies. I thought of trying to use fresh spinach next time, but I don’t know how I would figure out the conversion ratio.

Also, I would never say “pah-stees,” because my husband’s Cornish ancestors made pasties nearly every day for the men to take into the mines for their midday meal, and they pronounced the word “past-ease.” Are we to think that Florentines would say anything different?

Florentine Pasties crp

wandering in dreams

philosophy, quotes, reality

The following paragraph comes at the end of Part I of David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. Perhaps some readers wonder why he didn’t make a stronger case for the theistic point of view while he was comparing humans’ pictures of the world; here he explains:

…as I have begun to grow somewhat older than I really want to be, I have also begun to vest less faith in certain forms of argument, or at least in their power to persuade the unwilling, and more in certain sorts of experience — certain ways of encountering reality, to phrase the matter with infuriating vagueness. My chief desire is to show that what is most mysterious and most exalted is also that which, strangely enough, turns out to be most ordinary and nearest to hand, and that what is most glorious in its transcendence is also that which is humblest in its wonderful immediacy, and that we know far more than we are usually aware of knowing, in large part because we labor to forget what is laid out before us in every moment, and because we spend so much of our lives wandering in dreams, in a deep but fitful sleep. 

–David Bentley Hart