Tag: native plants

Spring Wildflowers and Weeding: Medicine for the Spirit

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One of the things I love about my new neighborhood is that it's not manicured. And an arroyo–a stream channel that is usually dry on the surface but channels water underground–runs along one edge of the neighborhood.

This waterway serves as a pathway for wildlife and humans alike (oh, the nighttime coyote chorus!). At this time of year, birdsong fills the air when I walk at dawn, from the trilling of spotted and canyon towhees to flocks of busy bushtits, hoarse chickadees, and the sweet whistles of western bluebirds. 

The hills above the arroyo are polka-dotted with piñon pines and Rocky Mountain junipers, forming a dwarf woodland of short, wide trees. In between the trees, shrubs, bunchgrasses, and wildflowers stipple the adobe-colored soil.

The houses and condo developments sit within this still-more-wild-than-not landscape, rather than obliterating it. Which delights me, since I can walk out my door and be immersed in nature. While still living walking distance from the neighborhood Sprouts grocery and other urban amenities.  

A winter of abundant precipitation has sprouted a glorious progression of spring wildflowers. Some are familiar from the years Richard, Molly, and I lived in southern New Mexico; others are new. Here are photos of the blooming as I have witnessed it:

Woolly milkvetch (Astragalus mollisimus), the first spring flower to appear on my walking route. It's hard to imagine a more vivid antidote to winter than those magenta flowers.

Unless it is the sunshine yellow cushions of this diminutive bladderpod (Physaria species), which I'll be able to identify once it has seedpods.

I thought the bladderpod flowers maxed out yellow until the fringed puccoon (Lithospermum incisum) started to bloom! 

And then the perky sue (Tetraneuris argenteus) upped the ante to pure gold, like splatters of earthbound sunshine. 

Perky sue en masse, a chromatic splash of color. 

Then more purple flowers began to bloom, starting with plains verbena (Glandularia bipinnatifida), which broadcasts a lovely sweet scent. 

Scorpionweed (Phacelia integrafolia) unfurls its lilac blossoms with the outrageously long dancing stamens… 

Just as wax currant's dangling ivory bells open (Ribes cereum). Scorpionweed appeals to native bees, wax currant flowers' abundant nectar feeds  migrating hummingbirds.  

More milkvetches bloom. Thanks to help from Al Schneider of Southwest Colorado Wildflowers, I think the carpet-former with the dainty flowers above is Nuttall's milkvetch (Astragalus nuttalliana).

This ivory milkvetch may be Astragalus bisulcatus, but I'll have to wait for seedpods to make a definitive ID. 

The surprise on this morning's walk was this charming and very tiny bristly nama (Nama hispida), with purple flowers the size of my thumbnail on a plant all of two inches tall!

Of course, all of that wonderful winter and early spring moisture sprouted seeds of invasive weeds too. So I am–of course!–pulling weeds around my neighborhood to help control these aggressive plants that germinate en masse and crowd out the wildflowers that our pollinators and songbirds depend on.

I started with tansy mustard (Descuriana sophia), an annual that sprouts over the winter, and then shoots up a flower stalk with tiny yellow cross-shaped flowers as the soil temperatures warm up. Like all annuals, it seeds prolifically, but is easy to eradicate by pulling the shallowly rooted plants and bagging them, seeds and all, for the trash. 

Now I'm working on cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), another Eurasian invasive annual weed. Its nodding seed-heads are quite distinctive, and it is also easy to pull until it dries out. Cheatgrass gets its common name because it is often the first grass to green up, making whole swaths of landscape look deceptively lush. Until the the grass plants dry out and die a few weeks later, and shatter, scattering their abundant seeds and leaving the soil bare. It cheats grazers of forage and cheats the landscape of nutrients. 

Me, weeding cheatgrass from under the cottonwood trees at the entrance of my neighborhood. 

Helping control the invasive weeds in my neighborhood is my way of giving back to these high-desert landscapes for the gifts they give me. The bird-song, coyote choruses, the wildflowers in spring, the butterflies and hummingbirds now fluttering and hovering past my window. Weeding helps keep the relationships that sustain the world I love intact and healthy. It's also deeply rewarding to see the wildflowers return in the space I've freed for them. 

As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in the journal Humans and Nature:

Ecological restoration is an act of reciprocity, and the Earth asks us to turn our gifts to healing the damage we have done. The Earth-shaping prowess that we thoughtlessly use to sicken the land can be used to heal it. It is not just the land that is broken, but our relationship with land. We can be partners in renewal; we can be medicine for the Earth.

Pulling invasive weeds is my way of being partner in renewal; it is medicine both for Earth and for my battered spirit. 

What is your way of being medicine for this living planet, the only home our species has ever known?

Lessons from Nature: Picking Up Roadkill Redux

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I'm writing this from my space at Mammoth Campground in Yellowstone National Park, with rain thrumming on Red's roof, and me drying out after a wet morning of digging invasive weeds. (The photo above is the partial rainbow that just appeared in a brief patch of sun between showers.) The good thing about a couple of days of wet weather is that it's easier to pry stubborn perennial weed plants out of the soil. The bad thing is that all of the plants are soaking wet, so I end up getting pretty wet too. 

Being wet and cold while doing hard physical work is nothing new for me. I've been an outdoors person all my life: I grew up hiking, backpacking, and cross-country skiing; I worked in the backcountry as a field ecologist when I was younger, walking miles every day as I mapped and described forests and grasslands. In recent years, I've done carpentry and renovation, and now I spend my "vacation" time in Yellowstone hand-digging invasive weeds in bone-hard, muscle-aching sessions.  

Bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva), one of my favorite spring wildflowers and the state flower of Montana, is one of the native plants that flourishes where I've removed invasive weeds in Yellowstone. 

What's new is that I'm learning to notice when my body has had enough. Enough stopping and digging, enough being cold, enough wet. And once I notice I'm beginning to tire, instead of pushing myself to do more, I do something I would never have done back in the days when I believed myself entirely invincible: I stop working. Not immediately, of course.

I'm not that good. But sooner than I once would have, usually soon enough to keep my Lupus from kicking in and sending me into a state of feverish shivers and muscle aches that make me feel like someone beat my whole body with a ball-peen hammer.

You'd think I would have learned that lesson long ago, since I've had this autoimmune condition all my adult life. I have learned to mind my energy and my limitations in many ways.

But not with work I love, work that puts a smile on a my face and a light in my soul. When I'm digging in new perennial plants for the pollinator habitat in my yard or wielding tools to do finish work on my house; when I'm digging invasive weeds to restore wild communities in Yellowstone, I am in the zone, making a positive contribution in the world, and I am so not paying attention to my body. That's when I'm likely to work beyond exhaustion and make myself sick, and then have to pull back and take it easier for a few days or a week. 

Rocky Mountain penstemon (Penstemon strictus), another native wildflower that flourishes where invasive weeds are removed. I dig weeds to restore these plants and their community.
Only since I've been here in Yellowstone this week, I've noticed myself paying attention to my body and my physical condition, and pulling back before I am exhausted, not after. I'm surprised, but I like it. 

It could be age bringing some belated wisdom–I'll be 62 this September, unarguably a senior. 

Or it could be the badger I saw on my way to Mammoth on Friday afternoon. I was three hours into my drive, thinking ahead to getting to the campground and claiming my site, and getting my first look at my weeding areas. It was a showery afternoon, and I had just slithered through a bear jam (a mama black bear and three cubs near the road) that had traffic stalled for half a mile south of Tower Junction, and I just wanted to get on my way. 

I passed a car stopped dead on the road to shoot a video of an elk, and then swooped around a corner with clear road ahead when I saw a hump of salt and pepper fur fronted by a wide head bisected by a black slash in the middle of my lane: a badger. Motionless.

The body was under my truck and gone before I had a moment to respond, and when I did, I thought, I can't stop. I have to be in Mammoth by four. 

Only that was a badger, dead on the road. The last badger I saw dead on a highway was thirty years ago, and that one set me on this path of speaking for those whose voices we fail to hear and atoning for the thoughtless destruction we cause to Earth, our home. 

The essay I wrote about that first badger, "Picking Up Roadkill," a piece that appeared in the Denver Post, and also formed part of one chapter of my last book, Walking Nature Home, still ranks as one of the best pieces I've ever written. It opened a door in my life, and gave my work new purpose. 

And here was a second badger, and I was in a rush. I cursed under my breath, found a place to turn around, drove back and pulled Red as far as I could off the narrow highway. I reached behind my seat and found my weed-pulling gloves, waited for a break in the traffic, and dashed onto the road. As I  carefully lifted the badger's body from the pavement, I was surprised by how limp and warm the body was, as if the animal was simply sleeping.

For a moment I thought the badger might wake and snap at me. There was no blood, no skid marks, no broken bones. Just the badger's heavy form, soft fur, and brown eyes. Just death.

Tears filled my eyes as I carried the badger off the road and laid it gently on the ground between two fragrant sagebrushes, lupine blooming nearby. I lingered a moment, my hand on that thick fur, saying good bye. And then dashed to my truck, peeling off my gloves. 

"Thank you, badger," I said, as I pulled Red back onto the road and drove on. "I get it. I'm slowing down." 

As I spoke the words, I felt the badger in my hands again, felt the weight of the limp body and that soft fur, felt both badgers, thirty years apart, and I promised my own body that I would pay attention, go slower, be more mindful. Take my time. 

And now, with rain thrumming on Red's roof and the windshield steaming up from my out-breaths, I am doing just that. Taking my time, letting my body rest between bouts of pulling invasive weeds. Savoring my moments. I can't wake that badger, killed crossing the road in its home territory of Yellowstone, theoretically a protected place.

But I can live my life in a way that honors the lives of badgers and all other wild beings by taking my time and doing what I can to mend this battered world and all who share this extraordinary home, our Earth. Me too. 

An elk calf who watched me weed for a while, along with her mom.

The Balm of Bobcats and Wildflowers

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In times when the human world seems to have gone crazy, I head outside for the balm of nature nearby. I always return inspired and energized, humbled, and remembering (again) that life, the capital L kind, the web of interacting species which make this planet a vibrant sphere, is an astonishingly creative and tenacious community.

Tuesday, a baby Bobcat lured me outside. Not the feline kind with four paws and a deadly pounce, the diesel kind with tracks and a bucket. (That's a selfie of me grinning as I operate the machine.)

Knowing I had yard-healing to do, my contractor had put us on the waiting list at the rental center for the MT55, a walk-behind mini-bulldozer. On Tuesday morning, Jeff got the call that the machine was ours for the afternoon. I asked if I could play. 

"Sure," he said. He showed me the throttle (a lever with a range between a turtle symbol and a jackrabbit symbol!), forward and reverse, how to steer the tracks, and how to use the bucket.

And then he set me loose. So there I was in my sandals, skirt, and nice sweater (I know, I know, but I was dressed for a meeting and I was very careful), moving and dumping fill, smoothing it with the bottom of the bucket, and running the baby dozer back and forth to tamp things down.

And grinning like a maniac, because using that baby Bobcat to mend the utility-trench scar in my backyard surely is fun. (Who knew?) 

When Jeff came back, I had to go to my meeting. By the time I returned, he was at work scalping turf from the front yard for my lawn replacement project, carving out the paths and patio I had outlined with fluorescent green spray paint. 

I grabbed a shovel and tidied edges, cut roots, and cleaned up stray bits of turf. 

By the end of the evening, the two paths and the patio were ready for gravel, and the robin mama who insisted on building a nest over the side door to the garage had figured out that the newly scraped soil made perfect worm-foraging territory.

(She was completely unafraid of the noisy mini-dozer.)

Today I led the second wildflower walk I've offered in a week. A snowy winter and wet spring have made this one of the best bloom years in decades for the high desert, and I want share this ephemeral miracle–its beauty and its balm–with as many others as I can.

Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis) dotted with sulphur yellow western wallflower (Erysium sp.) and prairie Junegrass

Including you. Here's a quick tour of what's blooming in my "nearby wild":

Bessey's locoweed (Oxytropis besseyi)

Fuzzytongue penstemon (Penstemon erianthus)–you've got to love that common name, which alludes to the furry stamen that leads bumblebees inside the flower

a fleabane (Erigeron sp.) I haven't identified yet

An annual lupine (Lupinus sp) that's only about three inches tall!

Scarlet guara or lizardtail (Guara coccinea)

And the adult bald eagle we unintentionally disturbed from her perch in a cottonwood tree on the canyon rim. Look for the white spot of bald eagle tail in front of the cliff mid-photo.

The wonder of nature–spring wildflowers, bald eagles, and all–is in just that flourishing of diverse forms of life, growing and blooming, hunting and eating, mating and dying, each in their own unique way. Spending time outside reminds us that even at our worst (and global climate change certainly falls in that column), we are not everything.

Life continues despite us. Not unchanged, but determined and creative, impelled by the need to thrive. In every corner and pocket and place.  

That determined flourishing as exemplified by the myriad kinds of wildflowers blooming among the sagebrush this spring gives me great hope. Hope in the active sense, the sense of encouragement to redouble my work of spreading love in the world, of healing this battered planet and my species in the doing.  

For me, that's the balm of bobcats and wildflowers, bald eagles and the miracle we call life. 

scarlet globemallow (Sphaeralcea coccinea), also called cowboy's delight

Restoring a Yard

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Progress on my house and backyard is stalled right now. The backyard is still partly torn up from trenching for my new underground electric service because we’re waiting for the City to re-connect my raw water line (Cody has two distinct sets of water delivery pipes, treated for in the house and raw or untreated for irrigation water).


(Backyard destruction: The photo at the top of the post is my contractor, Jeff Durham, smiling from the trench he just dug, and his son, Allen, on the left holding the sawzall for cutting tree roots. In the background are Sam and Dustin, hooking up the new electric service and meter box to my house.) 


In the house, we’re waiting for my plumber to rough in the fixtures for my en-suite bathroom. 


While I’m practicing patience–never my best talent–I’m getting started on the front yard, which is basically on the lawn-and-shade-tree landscaping plan.


There’s one skinny flower border along the fence by the garage, and an oblong bed in the middle of the other side of the lawn with a teenage spruce tree beginning to shade it. Both are over-run by lawn grasses, with numerous volunteer Russian-olive sprouts plus a few Canada thistle sprouts too, just to liven things up. 



Lots o’ lawn–boring! But what are those green lines? Read on… 


As you can imagine, I’m planning a complete yard makeover. I envision colorful landscaping that uses less water, provides more habitat for pollinators and songbirds, and is less welcoming to ambling deer and munching cottontail rabbits. No easy task, but I’m beginning to see a plan. 


Inspired by two small, triangular, rock-edged beds (also over-run by lawn) on either side of the drive where it meets the front sidewalk, I decided to plant a rock garden along the front edge of the yard between one of the new access paths (outlined in green above) and the sidewalk along the street. 


My neighbor Jane Dominick donated two wheelbarrow loads of local rock from her yard, and my friend Connie Holsinger, visionary co-founder of the Habitat Hero project, gave me a generous gift certificate to High Country Gardens.



I ordered more than two dozen native plants plus a few non-native lavender (which will serve as deer and rabbit-deterrent), piled the rock near the rock-garden-to-be, and thought for a couple of weeks. 


Yesterday afternoon, I got started laying out plants, and cutting through dead turf to plant them. I worked for a couple of hours, and then, before I had entirely worn myself out, I cleaned and stowed my tools, and went for my regular Sunday run. 



The bricks mark the edge of a new path; the rock garden extends from the path to the sidewalk, to the existing triangular bed–also newly planted, and to the driveway.


After work this evening, I took some time to admire what I had done, and to start placing rocks. I’m going to need a lot more of them, and more plants, but with plants and gardening, I can be patient.


Renovating this yard is a long project, but oh, how rewarding it will be!  



The future rock garden viewed from the other direction. The new plants are in dark circles of removed turf.


In the meantime, I am inspired by the sagebrush desert just outside town where I run. This year’s spring green-up is the best in decades, colored by the prairie junegrass (Koeleria macrantha) and dotted by an ever-changing show of wildflowers. 



The Shoshone River and its canyon from my running route. 


I am taking notes and photos, and planning to collect seed for my rock garden. Who could resist attempting to grow these charming and beautiful native mat-plants? Not I!



Hooker’s sandwort (Areneria hookeri) with its starry flowers, all of two or three inches tall



Stemless four-nerve daisy (Tetraneuris acaulis), a minature blast of spring sunshine



Waxleaf penstemon (Penstemon nitidus), not a mat-plant, but oh, that blue!, growing in front of Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp. Wyomingensis).

Wildflowers for Mother’s Day

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I had a lovely Mother's Day, and I hope you did too. Mine was quiet and mellow, just the way I like it: I spent time with friends, caught up with my family, and then worked in my yard, planting new plants, grubbing out invasive weeds, and seeding in the beginning of a native meadow in the backyard that last week was torn up for my new underground electric line. 

After I finished playing with plants–something that never fails to make me happy–I headed out for my usual Sunday evening run.

I can't say that running makes me happy the way working with plants does, but that particular form of self-torture, er, exercise, does get me outside and into the nearby wild, which always lifts my spirits. And once I finish the run, I feel quite virtuous. (And completely worn out.) 

I hadn't been out for a run in almost two weeks because of travel and house renovation, so I wasn't sure whether the spring wildflowers would still be dotting the sagebrush outside town. 

Indeed they were: Oh, not the same Nuttall's violets, wild parsley, and spiny phlox that were blooming a few weeks ago. The next wave of wildflowers had taken over the spring bloom. 

I spotted the creamy flower clusters of wild onion first.

I think this is Allium brandegeei, Brandegee's onion

And then this cute yellow composite (daisy-family plant) with its mats of thumbnail-sized fuzzy leaves and outsized flower heads with notched rays.

(I haven't identified this one yet.) 

And these evening primrose blossoms, opening to invite late-flying pollinators in for a meal. 

This is probably whitestem evening primrose, but I'm not entirely certain

And who could miss the brilliant scarlet bracts on this indian paintbrush! The prairie junegrass (Koeleria macrantha) next to it on the left is a big part of what makes the landscape in the photo at the top of the post look so green. 

Castilleja angustifolia var. dubia

As I huffed and puffed my way through my 3.5-mile route, I spotted more wildflowers: chrome yellow stoneseed, ivory bastard toadflax, starry white Hooker's sandwort, and the sulfur yellow of prairie rocket or sand-dune wallflower dotting the sagebrush in the photo below. 

Erysimum capitatum among the Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp Wyomingensis) and prairie junegrass

At the end of  my run, I turned back toward town a little reluctantly because I was so enjoying the wildflowers. Most are familiar, old friends I have known since childhood or since college field botany classes. Some, like that mat-forming composite with the outsized golden flower heads are new ones I have yet to learn. 

Either way, they're a wonderful Mother's Day gift, a blessing from this landscape that holds my heart. 

My word for this year is "gratitude." It is easy to be grateful for each day now that I am home. Of course, there are challenges; in particular, house renovation, which always brings surprises, and always costs more than I expected, as well as earning a living from my writing, which I haven't really mastered since Richard died. 

But those challenges can't dent my joy in being here, among a community of friends, both human and wild. In a place where I and the ravens and bluebirds belong in a cell-deep way, along with the aromatic big sagebrush, the prairie Junegrass, and the blessing of wildflowers.

All of us part of Earth's time of spring and renewal.

I wish you all that heart-whole sense of belonging and the rich connection of being at home on this extraordinary planet. 

And because it's Mother's Day, I can't forget a shout-out to my mom, Joan Cannon Tweit (1931-2011), the California girl who passed to me her passion for all plants, domestic and wild, especially native wildflowers. Thanks, Mom!

Mom, on her honeymoon in Lassen National Park, June 1952

Road Report: Awards and Teaching

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Last Friday morning, I backed out of my garage promptly at nine am, headed for Colorado. Specifically, for the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities to attend the annual Colorado Authors’ League Awards banquet. It’s an eight-hour drive to Arvada, and the first six hours were glorious. (The photo at the top of the post is the Wind River Canyon, about two hours south of Cody.)


Wyoming has many spring moods, ranging from howling wind to blizzard, to bluebird-blue sky and mellow. Friday was the latter, and my state had on its spring green, freckled with wildflowers and grazing pronghorn. As I drove, I watched for soaring hawks (I saw two golden eagles and three balds), counted pronghorn until 200 and then lost track, thought about geology (it’s hard to drive through Wyoming and ignore the geology, because rock layers and the structures they form are so obvious), and mused about writing and life.  


Then I got to Colorado, and I-25 turned into a major traffic jam. Those final two hours of the drive were not fun. Still, Red and I made it to the Arvada Center, where I changed into my dress and sparkly sandals, and went inside to join the throng.



It was a delight to reconnect with nature writer Mary Taylor Young, childrens’ fiction and non-fiction writer Nancy Oswald, writer Carol Grever, and sociologist Eleanor Hubbard, among many others. And to share a table with poet Art Elser, and memoirist, fiction writer, and writing teacher Page Lambert and her husband John Gritts, artist and educator. 


We ate, we talked writing, we listened to keynote speaker and former Rocky Mountain News sports cartoonist Drew Litton on the creative process of cartooning. And then came the awards. 


I was a finalist in two categories: Blog (for this blog), and Essay (for “No Species Is An Island” in Humans and Nature). The competition was stiff, with fine writers in both (including Page in Essay), so I didn’t expect to win either. I hoped for one award–we always hope, I think. I was honored when my name was called as the winner for Blog, and then stunned when it was called again for Essay. Wow–Thank you, Colorado Authors’ League!



The next day I drove over the mountains on the familiar route between Denver and Salida, a drive Richard and I took dozens of times in our last years together as we commuted back and forth for his cancer treatments, and to care for my mom, who died the winter before Richard did. 


I reached Salida just in time to rush to my first meeting of a weekend packed with meetings, teaching, and catching up with Salida friends. When I agreed to return to work with the finalists for the Kent Haruf Memorial Writing Scholarships, I imagined having time to hang out and read and write.


Not a moment! Still, it was a rewarding, if intense weekend. Especially the time working with four talented high school writers: teaching them in workshop and consulting with them individually on their work, and then selecting a Scholarship winner and another writer as Honorable Mention. (Congratulations, Berlin VanNess of Buena Vista High School and Mike White of Cañon City High School!) I also MCed the Awards Dinner…


By the time I left late yesterday afternoon, I was exhausted. And very eager to be home in Cody. 



North Park and the Park Range yesterday evening


It’s a 9-plus-hour drive home, so I wisely didn’t try to do the whole thing last night. Instead, I drove to tiny Walden, in Colorado’s North Park, a sea of sagebrush rimmed by mountains that reminds me a bit of my home territory. I tucked Red into an inconspicuous spot behind at the Forest Service Work Center there, climbed into my nest inside the topper, and fell asleep to the chorus of spring peepers from a nearby pond. 


My treat for getting an early start this morning was an extended stop at Split Rock National Historic Site between Rawlins and Riverton. (Split Rock is a gloriously eroded granitic dome rising above the Sweetwater River that was a landmark on the South Pass portion of the Oregon Trail.) 



Spring wildflowers blooming on Split Rock


The “seams” in the nubbly granitic dome were bright with wildflowers and I happily climbed and wandered, reconnecting with plant-friends just as I had reconnected with writer friends on Friday night and Salida friends through the weekend: spring buttercups and chickweed, round-leafed saxifrage and stoneseed, Nuttall’s violets, and wax currant. 



Ranunculus (buttercup) and Cerastium (chickweed)


Meadowlarks fluted their bubbling songs over the voices of sage sparrows, and tiny fence lizards hunted for insects among the rocks. It was the perfect way to recharge my batteries for the last four hours of the drive home. 



I pulled Red into the garage at four pm and began to unload the truck. Inside, I found Shantel Durham, my wonderful painter, at work on the finishing touches of the new paint in the bedroom hallway. Once that hallway was a dark and uninviting corridor. Now, as Shantel said, “it’s like the sun came out.” 



The newly painted bedroom hallway (I refinished that floor myself, by hand).


That pretty much sums up how I feel about my life since moving home to Cody: It’s like the sun came out. And I am very, very grateful to be here at home at last. 

Wildflowers: Hope for Hard Times

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My word for this year is gratitude, chosen to remind myself to notice and appreciate the good in the world even in–especially in–the tough times. For me, one of the best ways to prompt myself to be grateful for this life and my place in it is to get outside, preferably out of town into wilder landscapes nearby. 


Which is why after several weeks of difficult news personally and in the larger world, I went for a run yesterday afternoon instead of writing this blog post.


It worked: I started to smile when I spotted the first Easter daisies (the common name honors the season when this ground-hugging member of the Composite family blooms) flowering on the sagebrush-dotted bench between town and the Shoshone River, along with two kinds of desert-parsley, and abundant cushions of the unbeautifully named but quite lovely spiny phlox. 



Easter daisy, Townsendia exscapa, is in the photo at the top of the post; below is spiny phlox, Phlox hoodii. Notice the native bee pollinating the starry white phlox flowers on the left side of the photo.


This afternoon, a new friend and neighbor, Jane, took me on a hike up in the Shoshone River Canyon, ten minutes from town, where she had seen even more wildflowers than I saw on my Easter-afternoon run. I don’t normally play hooky on a work-day, but my intuition said loudly, “Just go!” 


And what a wonderful ramble it was: We began near the Shoshone River, rushing cold and cloudy with spring runoff, and climbed up through layers of rounded glacial cobbles, soft tan shales, cliff-forming ivory and gray limestone, and then followed a draw up through more shale layers toward a distant cliffs of limestone stained pinkish-red by iron leaching from the rocks. 


The wind sweeping down the canyon was chill, the sun warm, the sky blue with fingers of cloud appearing frm the west. I could feel my spirits rise just being outside.  


 


We saw wildflowers right away, clinging to the steep walls of in the canyon, including the blue-purple Penstemon nitidus (waxleaf penstemon) in the photo above. 


As we turned up the draw and away from the road, the real show began. Two kinds of desert parsley hugged the ground, one sulfur yellow (leafy wild parsley, Musineon divaricatum in the photo below), the other creamy with purple accents (salt and pepper, or Lomatium dissectum).  



And then Jane spotted the first stunning carmine flowers of desert paintbrush (Castilleja angustifolia var. dubia). First just one stalk, and then clumps of stalks, and soon we saw neon-bright paintbrush stems everywhere in the grassland around us, including growing right through the wind-sheered form of a Wyoming big sagebrush in the photo below. 



Can you tell by its brilliant red color and tube-shaped floral bracts that desert paintbrush is a hummingbird-pollinated plant? Even from high overhead, that flash of red would be hard to miss, especially for hovering migrants needing a fuel stop.


Then I spotted a magenta dot on the grassy hillside above the draw, and another and another. Shooting stars! (Dodecatheon pulchellum in the language of science, and one of my all-time favorite wildflowers.)



I tried to shoot an individual shooting star with its dark “beak” of anthers and back-swept pink petals, but it wouldn’t hold still in the wind. 


Just up the drainage a ways, I spotted another favorite wildflower, Nuttall’s violet (Viola nuttallii), host plant for one of the classic sagebrush-grassland butterflies, Coronis Fritillary (Speyeria coronis). 



We wandered uphill, finding more wildflowers, looking at rocks, and just enjoying being outside. Jane found some limestone with mussel shell fossils, and her Golden Retriever found a toothsome chunk of deer pelt to carry and chew. 


We were discussing whether to follow a game trail farther up the drainage toward the cliffs in the distance when I looked up the canyon.


“Those clouds fingering over the ridge from the West look serious,” I said, pointing. Jane agreed that it was probably time to turn back. 



A rainwater-pitted limestone boulder growing four kinds of lichen (one is silver-gray, one blaze orange, one flagger-yellow, and the smallest is black). 


We didn’t hurry, taking our time to admire more wildflowers, rocks, and a trio of mountain bluebirds that appeared on a juniper snag below us, one sky-blue male and two gray females. By the time we reached the dirt road, the wind was blowing hard down the canyon, the warm sun had gone behind clouds growing from the West, and the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees. 


When we hit the paved road in the canyon bottom just below the river, we were glad to turn out backs to the wind, and to the fat drops of cold rain beginning to fall. In the time it took us to walk the last quarter-mile to the car, the wind began to gust so hard we were bent over, the rain changed to a full-out deluge mixed with hail, and the rapids in the river below threw off a fine mist of cold spray. 


Once in the shelter of her car, we laughed about being soaked on our backs and dry on front–the contrast between windward and lee sides very evident. 


Ten minutes later, I was in my own cozy house, shivering just a little from being half-soaked, and still smiling. Even the tick I found when I changed into dry clothes didn’t dent my joy. 


And now, as I look over my wildflower photos to share them with you, I am still smiling, still grateful to be part of this wondrous world. 


Taking time to nurture our spirits is always important, especially when the news is grim and life full of rocky spots.


So please give yourself the gift of doing whatever makes you smile, and makes your heart sing. It’ll do us all good. 



 

Writing, Wildflowers, and Community

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I’m home after five days in soggy Austin, Texas, where I participated in “Stories From the Heart,” the every-two-years national conference of Story Circle Network, an organization whose mission is to nurture women’s voices in writing. 


The conference was packed full of information and wisdom, encouragement and connections, friendships made or renewed, and just plain fun–like the opening to the workshop on marketing by Deborah Winegarten, where she had us up and dancing to a video featuring teenagers rapping “It’s all about the book…”


Which of course was the point of the workshop–marketing is in fact, all about the book and our message. (I have no idea what I was doing with my mouth while dancing in the photo above–apparently finding my rhythm required a lot of concentration!)


My comadre-in-writing, Dawn Wink, and I taught our popular “Place as Character” workshop on finding and articulating the heart of the landscapes that inspire our work, to an enthusiastic group so large that I ran out of handouts. (If you’re one of the participants who didn’t get a handout, or if you just want to get a sense of the workshop, my handout is here.)



And since we roomed together, Dawn and I got in a lot of catching-up time, and also reviewed the editor’s suggestions on our first joint publication, an essay called “Mother Tongues.” (More on that closer to publication time.)


Brooke Warner, Publisher of She Writes Press, opened the conference with a rousing talk about why she left Seal Press to found an author-supported publishing company focused on finding and nurturing great women’s writing. In describing the changes in publishing as the big houses have consolidated into bigger houses and then into international publishing conglomerates, Brooke said that the increasing focus on blockbuster books and celebrity platforms has often marginalized women’s voices and left editors unable to publish “passion projects,” those books that might not sell huge numbers right off, but might still be extraordinary stories, writing that could change our lives and the world. 


Susan Wittig Albert, New York Times bestselling mystery author and founder of Story Circle Network, closed the conference with a talk on why community is crucial to women writers. While writing is inherently a solitary pursuit, she said, we write better with each other’s support, encouragement, and shared wisdom.


Together, we reach farther with our writing, go deeper, and dream bigger–our stories expand as our vision of our work does. (Clearly, we dance more fearlessly, too!) 


The day after the writing conference, Jude Whelley, another attendee and a writing friend and I braved rain and flooding creeks to drive out to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center for an immersion in a different community, the community of the land. We spent a glorious–if quite soggy–late morning touring the Center with Andrea DeLong-Amaya, Director of Horticulture.



Texas Paintbrush (red), composites (yellow), and Texas Bluebonnets (blue) swirl around a prickly pear cactus in the prairie around the Center’s parking lot.


The wildflowers blooming in the Center’s formal gardens and restored Texas prairie and woodland areas were so breath-taking that Jude and I kept stopping to shoot photos, which meant that the short walk from the parking lot to Andrea’s office took us almost 20 minutes, making us quite late. 


No matter: Andrea greeted us warmly and was generous with both her time and her deep knowledge of the Center and its work restoring native prairie, harvesting rainwater, pioneering sustainable landscaping, and reconnecting kids and families with nature in its inspiring new Luci and Ian Family Garden, an inviting place where natural prairie melds with play lawn, and woodland becomes playground, where watering cans demonstrate how aquifers work, and wildflowers peep out of every nook and cranny. 



Texas Bluebonnets, rain-drenched, but still beautiful.


As Jude and I drove back to the hotel to catch the shuttle to the airport, I thought about how the community of those who love and nurture native plants and the land is as warm and welcoming as the community of women writers. I am blessed to belong to both, and both keep me sane–and hopeful–despite the craziness of politics and world events today.


May we all find such community in our lives, networks that inspire us to add to the ocean of love and kindness in this world, and help us to leave our part a more beautiful, blooming, and nurturing place for all…  


Native Plants: Essential “Terroir” of Place

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Walking between my hotel and the conference center for Colorado's first annual Native Plants in Landscaping Conference yesterday morning, I crossed a large expanse of boring turfgrass lawn, an even larger parking lot, and then a smaller area of closely-mowed grass. As I traversed the mowed area, I looked and listened for signs of the shortgrass prairie that once stretched from horizon to horizon, defining the High Plains.

Over the roar of traffic from the nearby interstate, I heard a familiar flute-like whistle: a male meadowlark, tuning up for spring–a true prairie sound. I looked down at the soil underfoot and saw dots of sunshine yellow: an alyssum, a tiny prairie mustard in bloom already. 

I set down my briefcase and book bag and bent close to admire these first prairie flowers. The plant's small leaves sparkled in the sunlight, thanks to their water-saving and insulating cover of star-shaped hairs. The miniature flower stalks barely rose two inches above the sun-warmed soil, each miniature four-petaled blossom blooming brightly before spring has even come, bright yellow to signal their presence to pollinators. My mother would have called them "belly-flowers," dwarf wildflowers best admired from a prone position. Like alpine plants, these prairie natives hug the soil both for warmth in the harsh climate of the open plains and for protection against the constant wind. 

I thought of those tiny wild alyssums as I gave my keynote talk, persisting even as the prairie around them is scraped away by development after development, proclaiming that whatever we do with the landscape, it is still prairie and will always be. 

Their tenacity and fidelity to place illustrate for me why native plants matter to we humans. As I said in my talk,

I've come to think of plants as the living vocabulary of landscapes, the language that lends colors, shapes, and structures which define and give character to whole regions, the way words shape, color, and construct our language. Plants are the pioneers in constructing and also reviving the language of nature in any place. 

Native plants provide the core of that language. Their gifts include aesthetics (their beauty through the seasons), biology (they are durable and adapted to the conditions of their specific places), health (both in terms of ecoystem health and the very real benefits we humans derive from time spent in nature), and what I would call "terroir" or dialect. 

I am borrowing the word "terroir" from the French word used to denote specific wine regions and meaning roughly "the flavor of the land." It's a word now applied to local food as well to denote the unique taste that comes from soil, sun, climate, and the whole community of nature characteristic of particular places or regions. It seems to me that native plants speak the terroir of their specific landscapes and regions. Think of the towering redwood trees of the fog-draped Pacific Coast for instance, or the raised-arm saguaro cactus of the Sonoran Desert in the southern Southwest and Northern Mexico. Those plants clearly evoke the spirit and particulars of their places. 

A saguaro cactus, its silhouette unmistakable at sunset, in the desert near Tucson, Arizona. 

I believe that making space for native plants in our yards, parks, and nearby landscapes is essential for human survival, not just for the beauty and aesthetic benefits, nor even for native plants' powerful ability to reweave the fabric of healthy nature and healthy communities.

It is that connection to terroir that touches me most deeply. The cell-deep recognition within each of us of these rooted beings as the vocabularly of place, the very ‘flavor’ of soil, environment and landscape, and the connection they give us to the earth right where we live. 

As I said at the end of my talk,

If plants are the living vocabulary of landscapes, those lives that restore the structure and function of healthy nature, native plants are the vernacular, the dialect, the terroir of individual places. In our gardens and landscaping, these “local” voices not only heal and transform, they reconnect humanity—breath, cell, and soul—to this singular, living planet. They bring us home.

As I walked back to my hotel, across the mowed expanse of not-yet-subdued prairie, I stopped again to admire the tiny alyssums, dots of sunshine hugging the sun-warmed earth. And thanked them for connecting me to prairie and meadowlark, sun and sky, to the wild world that sustains our lives on this astonishingly green planet. 

Radical: Returning to My Roots

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Eve was a radical. And how I love the word radical because it means going to the roots. –Eve Ensler, from her 2014 talk for the Bioneers Conference


I’ve been nurturing a radical notion for some time now, one that isn’t quite clear yet. But I’m starting to see it take a kind of diaphonous form.


I mean “radical” in the sense Ensler was using the word in her talk about reimagining the story of Adam and Eve; the way Botany uses the word radical, as a term for something that springs from the root. (The word comes to English from the Latin radicalis, itself from radic– or “root.”) 


The photo above illustrates radical plants: Cobra lilies, Darlingtonia californica in the language of science. They look like something out of science fiction, and they are carnivorous, supplimenting the meager amounts of nitrogen in the coastal swamps where they live by luring insects, especially flies, into those skylit “hoods” where the insects buzz around, confused by the light, and eventually fall into the pool of liquid at the base of the modified leaves and are digested by the microbes that live there and share in the nutrients harvested. That’s a radical but very practical adaptation to thriving in a difficult environment. (The photo is from the Darlingtonia Wayside north of Florence, Oregon, a stop on my recent trip. )


My roots as a scientist are in Botany. But my affinity for plants goes deeper than that, originating at least partly in a childhood spent learning wildflowers with my mother, who loved all flowers, but especially those native to this continent, from inches-high “bellyflowers” she knelt to admire on alpine tundra to the head-topping Silphium, Compass plant, of the tallgrass prairies. 


 


Pursh’s milkvetch (Astragalus purshii), all of three inches high in bloom, and just the sort of alpine wildflower Mom took delight in. 


Plants, I like to say, are “my people.” Plants aren’t demanding, though they do reward attention, and they don’t overhelm me the way humans–especially en masse–sometimes do. I’d say that plants don’t talk back, but given what we now are beginning to understand about plant communication and behavior, that’s not exactly true. We just may not recognize their back-talk yet. 


The radical notion that is beginning to take shape in my mind is about going back to my roots in restoring nature. In addition to learning to identify wildflowers from my mother, I also learned to rescue them in clandestine raids to vacant lots slated for development. Mom and Dad would load our bike baskets with plastic bread bags, trowels and gloves, and off we’d pedal to a location slated for bulldozing, where we would dig up wildflowers to carefully transplant into Mom’s garden. 



A young Lupine plant (I don’t know the species) sprouting from volcanic gravel at Crater Lake National Park. 


The notion is rooted (sorry, I can’t resist the pun!) in the field research I’ve done informally over three decades of restoring nature, whether burning patches of prairie or planting a bluff at a coal-fired power plant in a gritty industrial neighborhood to provide habitat for hummingbirds and bluebirds–and inspiration for the human employees; whether restoring a narrow ribbon of riparian shrubs and trees along a channelized creek to clean the water of urban pollutants, or re-wilding the abandoned and degraded parcel where I now live. 


This radical idea also draws on what I’ve learned over the years about nature as a healing force, both from my own experience of living with a chronic autoimmune disease and in the research I’ve read on the positive effects of “nature exposure” on all manner of conditions, from kids with ADHD to adults with high-blood pressure or mental illness.


Time in nature, we are begining to understand, has a powerful healing effect on all manner of ills, physical and mental to emotional. Restoring our bond with soil and water, animal and plant also restores our balance in the world, and heals the wound that being estranged from the community of life has dug in our souls.


 


A flower fly sipping nectar from the Blanketflower (Gaillardia aristata) in my restored mountain prairie yard.


Plants are the pioneers in restoring nature, the living architecture on which life builds. Native plants, in particular form relationships as soon as their roots touch the soil, “calling in” the other species, from microscopic microbes to winged, finned, furred and scaled being, who together heal soil, water, and land, creating the natural society that brings such joy and surcease to we humans. 


I speak “plant,” I have personal experience with the healing power of nature, I practice habitat gardening, I do urban nature restoration, I write and give talks and teach. The idea forming in my mind is both rooted in and integrates those sometimes separate areas into a mission given urgency by Barry Lopez’ comment over our lunch a week and a half ago that he feels we are in a time of perilous unraveling–unraveling of human culture, of our connection with each other and with the planet that is our home. 



Wholeleaf indian paintbrush (Castilleja integrifolia) recolonizing my formerly degraded industrial yard.


I believe that plants are key to restoring not only the glorious web of life that animates this blue planet, but also our own health and spirits. And I am beginning to envision a way I can be help a re-ravelling of sorts to revive we humans, our neighborhoods and cities and culture, and our relationship with each other and with the rest of the species on this planet. 


That way involves becoming an evangelist for estoring nature where we live and work, and recruiting and training others to help spread that renewal, plant by plant, plot by plot, across the country and the globe, a corps of people who know how to weed and seed, water and nurture the very roots that will help re-grow a vibrant planet and healthy humanity. A “Restore Corps” as it were. 


I don’t know how this radical idea, this vision of sprouting a world-renewing movement from my own roots in nature, Botany, and writing will take shape. But I do know it is calling me to act from my deep love and respect for the community of humans and nature and for this glorious living earth, the only home our species has ever known.