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| My famous brother-in-law, Preston Jones |
Sorry
about the hiatus. The Fitzes hit the road on July 5 to visit relatives in
Maryland and Virginia, having grand times with my Boonsboro cousins, and mom,
sister Donna and her husband Preston in Williamsburg. Preston’s the number two
craftsman at the silver shop in the restored area, by the way; if you’re
planning a visit to the vicinity, stop by and say hey. He’s waiting patiently
for the big job as master silversmith. My brother-in-law’s also famous as the
cover-guy for National Geographic’s 1776:
A New Look at Revolutionary Williamsburg by K.M. Kostyal. He wears colonial
garb well, doesn't he?
Anyway. Surviving the trip back down always-harrowing I-95, Tim and I got home the middle of last week, kissed the cats and the carpet (after a quick pass with the vacuum cleaner), hugged our pillows, and settled onto the world’s most comfortable mattress for an extended lie-in. Since then, we’ve only moved to go to the kitchen for periodic infusions of Tim’s really good coffee. I’ve ventured outside three or four times to perform absolutely mandatory gardening chores. (Hooray for irrigation systems!) I harvested another phase of our bumper crop of ripe tomatoes, trellised the pole beans, and spot-watered any particularly wilted specimens, but that's all. I can’t even imagine having to get up and go to work for the foreseeable future. (Hooray for self-employment!)
Yup, it’s official. Needing two weeks to recover from a six-day vacation makes it impossible to deny: Tim and I are Old Farts.
While motoring around in the stultifying July heat, I couldn’t help noticing the number and variety of
wildflowers edging our route, especially along the back roads. Thanks to Tim’s
infinite good humor and situational awareness, we didn’t get killed any of the
times I screeched, “Back up! Back up! Isn’t that purple fleabane?” (It wasn’t.)
He also handled traffic control and first aid as I scrambled barefoot up hillsides
and down into ditches, or crouched in the breakdown lane or on the verges of
medians to capture the perfect shot.
And here’s what we got for all
our (actually Tim's, if I'm completely honest) pains. I call your attention to the high-summer denizens of Mother Nature’s
hell-strips in the country surrounding Boonsboro, Hagerstown, Funkstown and
Sharpsburg, MD and Martinsburg, WV.
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| Hedge bindweed |
Our first photo is of hedge
bindweed (Calystegia sepium). It’s a morning-glory-like
wildflower of cultivation, only living where people do. We found this
particular specimen in the hedge of Carissa hollies bordering a McDonald’s just
east of Hagerstown.
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| Maryland's state flower |
The wild black-eyed Susan, plain
ol’ species Rudbeckia hirta, is
Maryland’s state flower for good reason: it grows everywhere. This particular
batch adorned the byway above Burnside’s Bridge on Antietam National Battlefield Park.
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| Cerulean blue chicory |
One of the things I miss about
upstate New York is chicory (the flower, not the poor-man’s coffee substitute),
probably because of my thing for blue blooms. I tried growing it from seeds I
brought to North Carolina with me, but they wouldn't grow. I think Chicorium intybus is more of an upland plant.
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| Queen Anne's lace |
Wherever there’s chicory, there’s
Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota), blooming
at the same time and nearby. The flowers are frequently confused with those of bishop’s
weed (Aegopodium podogrania), but
Queen Anne’s foliage looks like ferny carrot tops where the bishop has trifoliate
broad leaves.
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| Blue & white border, au naturel |
Looking for garden design help?
Take a page from Mother Nature’s book of companion plantings, like this one of white Queen Anne's lace punctuated by blue, blue chicory.
Adding a touch of yellow to the
blue and white composition, common mullein (Verbascum
thapsus) blends right in in its shorter incarnations, or towers above the
crowd.
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...& statuesque mullein |
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| Stubby mullein... |
The scent of clover (Trifolium spp.) revives childhood summers
for me. I grew up next door to an old dairy farm, and my dad didn’t suffer from
the epidemic of perfect-lawn-itis many of his generation of new-to-the-suburbs
men did. Killing stands of clover in the yard is a mistake, as it turns out: clovers are leguminous, fixing nitrogen in the
soil to the benefit of everything else growing in it.
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| White clover (Trifolium repens) |
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| Red clover (Trifolium pratense) |
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| Wild spearmint |
Another blast-from-the-past
field flower is spicy-smelling and –tasting wild spearmint (Mentha spicata), or horsemint, as we
called it back in the day. Chewing a leaf refreshed the palate after a lengthy
foray into the blackberry bramble patch. Dontcha feel sorry for kids today,
whose memories will feature cold, textureless, scentless electronica and summer
days spent inside pecking at tiny keyboards below LCD displays?
Never did find the purple
variety, but white Eastern daisy fleabane (Erigeron
annuus) abounded on roadsides and in wildflower meadows, there as here.
I've always loved thistle
flowers—if not their prickly stems and leaves—probably another legacy of being
a kid playing in cow pastures. There are at least three genera and about a
gazillion species of them (thistles, not kids in cow pastures) out there. This
particular one is a bull thistle (Cirsium
vulgare), photographed behind a couple of the monuments scattered over the
killing fields of Antietam.
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| ...but, ooh, those prickers |
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| Lovely thistle flowers... |
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| Cool-looking teasel |
A resident of low places, teasel (Dipsacus sylvestris)
resembles thistles on steroids; but teasel leaves are kinder and gentler, even
if their stems and calyxes are not.
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| Common milkweed |
Got milkweed? Host plant to monarch
butterfly larvae, it’s another wildflower that grows, well, wild in uplands but
gives coastal North Carolina a pass. We can grow lots of the other butterfly
weeds—Asclepias (pronounced as-CLEE-pee-us)
incarnata, A. tuberosa, A. curassavica—but
not Asclepias syriaca.
You wouldn’t guess it from the
war I used wage on the common vetch that invaded our lawn (back when we had a
lawn), but I adore the sight of the banks of Interstate drainage ditches covered
with blooming crown vetch (Coronilla
varia), sown to prevent erosion of said banks. Great stretches of large
(for vetches) globose flowers atop dainty compound foliage make for a welcome
distraction from the blinkered idiot vehicle operators who seem to set the tone
on our nation’s highways.
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| A swath of crown vetch |
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| Crown vetch, close up |
Kathy
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