Category Archives: wildflowers

Real flowers and imaginary creatures.

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It’s the season in California when one is likely to encounter wildfire smoke blowing in from somewhere, hopefully distant. It happened to us this week when I was up at my daughter “Pippin’s” in the way north part of the state, but it wasn’t thick enough to keep us indoors, or prevent us from going on a wildflower walk.

Tolkien

Are you familiar with the custom of the traditional walking tours that C.S. Lewis and some of his friends would take through the English countryside, about a hundred years ago in their case? The first book of the fictional Ransom Trilogy by Lewis opens with the protagonist on a solo walking tour; it sounds like a wonderful kind of recreation. I am reading a book by Humphrey Carpenter titled The Inklings, about some members of this group, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Hugo Dyson, Owen Barfield and others. Lewis’s brother Warren (“Warnie”) was one of them, too.

Here is an excerpt about how it was on these long walks:

Tolkien ought, on the face of it, to have been an ideal companion for Lewis and Barfield on their walking tours, but when he did accompany them, he found that twenty miles or so a day carrying a heavy pack was more than he liked….  Tolkien’s own idea of a walk in the countryside involved frequent stops to examine plants or insects, and this irritated Lewis.  When Tolkien spent some time at Malvern on holiday with the Lewis brothers in 1947, Warnie remarked, “His one fault turned out be that he wouldn’t trot at our pace in harness. He will keep going all day on a walk, but to him, with his botanical and etymological interests, a walk, no matter what its length, is what we would call an extended stroll, while he calls us ‘ruthless walkers.’”

I had made a point of copying that section to read to Pippin and her family this week. The relative ruthlessness of our walking styles is a continual factor to be dealt with when we are on a walk or a hike. Not just their family, but all of my children and extended family. Pippin was remembering as an example our stay in Greece last summer, when three of our group were on the ruthless side of the scale, while Pippin and I as usual lagged behind, looking at one more flower or leaf.

On this recent walk, however, it was just Us Girls. No one was in a hurry, but only two of us were paying much attention to the flora and fauna. Ivy was reading aloud to me from the book at right, Pembrick’s Creaturepedia, and trying not to stumble on the path that wound uphill through a meadow with mossy streams flowing alongside.

She’s been telling me for years about her favorite series of books, The Wingfeather Saga or Tales, by Andrew Peterson. This little encyclopedia of creatures illustrated by Peterson goes along with those stories, and the word descriptions and illustrations are all clever, well written and drawn, and often very amusing. Online I found one page from the book to show you as an example, a more poignant entry that Ivy didn’t read to us.

The narrator tells a story from his youth: While on a campout with a friend, he had foolishly eaten all the available food too soon, and was quite famished. Just then, “I spotted a bright yellow sweeft, aperched on the branch of an apple tree, and though hardly believing myself able to hit such a tiny target [with his slingshot], I knocked it from the tree with a single blow. It landed in a swump of sweefty feathers, dead. I held it in my hands and wept for shame. My father commanded me to honor the bird’s death by eating it, and thus I did….”

In each Creaturepedia entry is a description of how the animal tastes. For the sweeft, it is “Like sorrow.”

We strollers were neither hungry nor hunting that day; Pippin and I were admiring what wildflowers had not faded already, and I saw several that were new to me, including two types of yellow monkeyflowers. (Monkeyflower makes me think of the Creaturepedia again, though there is no animal in there that is named anything like monkey. I found a listing for gunkees, though…)

Though the larger landscape was blurry with smoke, we gave our attention elsewhere, to Ivy’s introduction to fantastical beasts, and making friends with the bright flowers at our feet.

A Widow’s Weeds

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I doubt anyone would label me a “poor old widow,” but I can relate to many things in this little poem. It’s given me a brand new idea, too, of sewing in my garden. Today would be fine day for that…

A WIDOW’S WEEDS

A poor old Widow in her weeds
Sowed her garden with wild-flower seeds;
Not too shallow, and not too deep,
And down came April — drip — drip — drip.
Up shone May, like gold, and soon
Green as an arbour grew leafy June.
And now all summer she sits and sews
Where willow herb, comfrey, bugloss blows,
Teasle and tansy, meadowsweet,
Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit;
Brown bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;
Clover, burnet, and thyme she smells;
Like Oberon’s meadows her garden is
Drowsy from dawn till dusk with bees.
Weeps she never, but sometimes sighs,
And peeps at her garden with bright brown eyes;
And all she has is all she needs —-
A poor old Widow in her weeds.

-Walter de la Mare

Bee on Narrow-Leaf Milkweed

 

 

Coastal Botanical

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Son “Pathfinder” came from Oregon to see his sister Kate’s family, and we six packed into his truck to drive out to the coast for the day, to hike along a ridge trail and also picnic on the beach. As usual, I lagged behind half the time, making discoveries every few feet of interesting grasses and flowers, and trying to learn or remember their names.

California Aster a.k.a. Pacific Coast Aster

The wind was blowing up on the bluffs, but on the beach the air was still, and Kate was able to slice cheese in her lap and pass it around to the rest of us with nary a grain of sand involved.

Black Mustard

I’m showing several instances of Coastal Buckwheat, one of my favorite plants, with blooms more or less faded from the original pastel pink. It just now occurs to me that one reason I love it may be that those gray and pink colors were also featured in my grandma’s bathroom when I was a child. The bees appreciate it for their own reasons.

Below, a mixture of catsear and lotus combined to create a carpet of yellow:

Another contributor to the sunny tone was the Seaside Woolly Sunflower:

Seaside Woolly Sunflower

The grasses were swaying back and forth in the wind — European Marram Grass, my Seek app told me — and my favorite Rattlesnake Grass was abundant.

European Marram Grass
Rattlesnake Grass

European Searocket

To eat our snacky lunch, we gathered around a minimalist and rickety teepee someone else had built, because there was a nice log beside it that seated five nicely. In the foreground here is Tetragonia tetragonioides, which I’ve always known as New Zealand Spinach, but the actual New Zealanders usually call it  warrigal. There’s a better-watered specimen of this plant that keeps volunteering in my backyard garden:

A pink sport from the usual white native yarrow.

Pathfinder patiently discussed with me ways to tell two members of the Carrot Family apart, plants that grow in a similar habitat and that I’ve repeatedly mixed up over the decades. He noticed the different leaf shape and type: Cow Parsnip has large, deeply toothed leaves:

Cow Parsnip

…while Angelica — in this case Henderson’s Angelica — has pinnately compound leaves.

Henderson’s Angelica

Their flowers aren’t exactly the same, either, and there are other differences. Once I saw the two plants growing right next to each other; that helped, for a time. Unfortunately the Seek app that I use a lot does not have a search feature; but if it did, I would probably be even more distracted from enjoying the plants themselves. So I guess it’s just as well.

Coastal Buckwheat with yarrow and more.

It was a very satisfying outing, even if several of us did get sunburned. That was opportunity to take advantage of a backyard botanical: my Aloe Vera plant, the leaves of which we peeled on one side, revealing the gelatinous interior, which we applied to red arms and neck. Oh, so soothing.

Our whole crew slept well that night!

chickory

Weeks and weeks of homebody bliss.

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I’ve been home from my travels more than two weeks already, and before any more trips loom on the horizon, I have eight more weeks of homebody bliss remaining. It’s still high summer, when the days –or at least, the afternoons — are of the warm sort that energize and call me to the garden. This is the greatest good fortune. Glory to God, that I have a garden. Glory to God!

Stinking Chamomile

Other things besides the garden have helped to fill my days, and are filling my calendar into the near future. When I am home, I can be a host, and have guests! My house is happy when extra people are enjoying its spaces, and feeling the breezes blow through. That’s happened twice already in the last two weeks, and I’m expecting it to happen more.

When guests come in the summertime, they can stroll about the garden and pick a plum, and younger guests can play in the playhouse. The last one who did that made a soup entirely of tarragon and fountain water, and then dumped it into the fountain. Speaking of the fountain, when I am home I can keep it running, and keep it clean. It’s not very cheery to have a fountain turned off.

Lesser Goldfinch – internet photo

The birds are enjoying the summer. I hadn’t noticed the goldfinches much in the last couple of years, but this week they have been frolicking around the fountain; they seem to have plenty of time to play, probably because they’re not burning so many calories to keep warm. Today the house finches came along to drink and bathe as well. And one goldfinch made a side trip to the arbor, to perch on a long wisteria runner that was reaching out horizontally. He made short and quick jumps down toward the tip, which dropped a couple of inches in elevation with each jump, pecking at the buds, or maybe at insects, until he was at some critical point, after which I suppose he’d have found himself upside down if he’d held on — so he flew away.

Spanish Clover

It was a wet spring here, and the early summer was cool, but now everything not in watered gardens is crisping up. I took my friend to one of my favorite parks for an easy hike, but it was so dry that the trail in many places had deep and wide cracks that made walking difficult, even in my boots. I guess I’d never been there at this time of year before? It did smell good out there, I must admit, and amid the crackling grasses we saw lots of wildflowers — first, masses of Yellow Star-Thistle, Centaurea solstitialis, an invasive plant that is in bloom now.

Yellow Star-Thistle

Star-Thistle is one of the many invasives that one can learn about on the website of the California Invasive Plants Council website, which I only just discovered. I think I’ll like to return there. The website of Yosemite National Park also features articles about such plants locally, and one of them tells about the great lengths different agencies go to, to control what is in California considered a weed. A Wikipedia article is unclear about whether the star-thistle is considered noxious in six or in 23 of the U.S. states where it is present. Are you my U.S. readers familiar with it? Evidently the purple star thistle is essentially the same thing, except for the color.

Star Thistle

The pennyroyal that amazed me at Tomales Bay also grew along the path in less spectacular displays; and Spanish Clover, and Stinking Chamomile (Anthemis cotula), photo above. That chamomile was new to me; Gwen sniffed it and said that indeed it did not smell good.

Domesticated and not-stinky chamomile is growing in my planter box, just one specimen that sprouted from the old seeds I threw in there before I went to Greece. I should plant it every year, it is so cheery.

Last week we celebrated the Procession of the Cross, and the festal cross stayed in the middle of the temple until the Forefeast of Transfiguration. Now we will celebrate Transfiguration for about a week until the Leavetaking of Transfiguration which is the day before we celebrate Dormition (Assumption) of the Theotokos in the middle of the month. I love the way the calendar anchors me to the church, and reveals the abundance of saints and events who fill the year with the glory of God.

Before the service, before all the fruit had arrived.

As usual we brought baskets of fruit, and after Liturgy processed through the vineyard singing. It wasn’t as prickly as the trail I walked on last week, but it required careful stepping around grape prunings and blackberry brambles.

I pruned the lavender this week, and set it aside to take to a friend so she can add it to the straw in her chicken coop, to sweeten up the atmosphere:

A different friend came for lunch, and we were able to eat outside on the patio, after a leisurely tour of the garden. It was just warm enough to thoroughly relax, but not to wilt. I added snips of my parsley and tarragon to the salad we made together. I could have put a few calendula petals in as well, but I didn’t think of that.

This has been a pretty unfocused ramble, I’m afraid, so rambling that I don’t know how to sign off. So, let’s just pretend we were talking together next to my planter boxes, and looking at the zinnias, and then I went into the house and didn’t come back.

But I will return eventually!