SLOW DOWN

                              “I can’t drive 55.”—Sammy Hagar

                               “…you move too fast,

                                Got to make the mornin’ last.”—Paul Simon

Decompose faster!!!!!

            This envelope arrived in the mail last Wednesday. I looked at it, turned to Tim and huffed, “We stupid Americans even want stuff to rot faster these days. Hmph.”

No one could ever mistake me for a ball of fire. Speed holds no appeal for me whatsoever, unless the activity being referenced is childbirth. And maybe not even then. Tim upgraded our Internet service from a moderately glacial pace to one more like Al Gore’s prediction that that the Himalayas will be iceless by 2035; I barely noticed. When we’re staying at a hotel and Tim remotely blips through all 700 TV channels (30 damn times before deciding nothing’s worth watching), I get a headache.  Amusement-park rides make me nauseous. Back in the day when I piloted small planes, I liked to keep pace with the traffic on roadways, at reasonable altitudes of between 2000 and 5000 feet. (You have to be able to see the cars.) And Sammy, I can’t drive 55 either: whizzing along at such a rate unnerves me.

            Nope, don’t care for the gallop. I’m most comfortable with the amble, the stroll, the mosey. This phenomenon arises partly from my timid nature, partly from a congenital lack of ambition, partly from a Zen-ish proclivity to feel the moment. People who live in hyper-drive miss too much, in my opinion. Where do they think they’re going so quickly anyway? We all end up in the same place—dead—in the end.

(Click to enlarge. Please.)

            In keeping with my walk-in-the-park world view, yesterday I leavened housecleaning chores with a ramble around the rain-soaked yard, looking at stuff. Plants viewed from ground level are so amazing, so ordered, so perfect. The live oak on the north side had dropped a beautiful lichen-covered twig that stopped me in my tracks. See?

            A few words about lichen. Often people will point to or bring Tim and me branches to diagnose, worried that lichens are a sign of disease or decline. Not to worry, y’all. Lichens are as benign as that iconic Southern epiphyte, Spanish moss (Tilandsia usneoides), which, by the way, is neither Spanish nor a moss. It’s also not a lichen, although the specific epithet means “lichen-like.” True lichens are—are you ready for this?—symbionts, a cozy arrangement between a fungus and an alga and maybe a cyanobacterium thrown in for good measure. (Cyanobacteria used to be called blue-green algae, but the taxonomists feared we’d forget they were still out there, beavering away.) The fungus collects water and nutrients from the surface it's attached to, which is why it can live without soil or roots; the alga enables photosynthesis. Together, they function as a single organism. How incredibly cool is that?

            Lichens come in three main forms: crustose, the low-growing, crust-like (duh) ones that we usually associate with rocks; foliose, with leaf-like structures; and fruticose, or shrubby growths. My oak twig grew the latter two types.

Parmotrema hypotropum

      This is Parmotrema hypotropum, the foliose powdered ruffle lichen. It’s one of the aptly monikered shield lichens. Do yourself a favor and check out the University of Georgia website linked here: Their picture shows the tiny eyelashes on the edges of the “leaves.”

Usnea strigosa

            And here is the delicately lovely fruticose beard lichen, Usnea strigosa. Those suction cup-like structures are the fungus’ fruiting bodies, called apothecia: their presence means these particular lichens reproduce sexually. Not all lichens have that pleasure.

Tortula ruralia

            So far, my perambulations had taken me about 30 feet from the back door. Not bad for 20 minutes. I trundled back inside for the camera, collecting the trash for take-out on the way. (I was meant to be cleaning house, after all.) After dumping the week’s bio-bagged garbage—just the one bag, since we compost or recycle most of our refuse—and wheeling the cart to the curb, I wandered over to peer at the emerald moss adorning the base of a willowleaf cotoneaster (Cotoneaster salicifolius, pronounced “coh-TONE-ee-ass-ter,” not “cotton-easter”: see how easy it is to go off-topic when you’re moving at the speed of molasses?). 

Stalked spore capsules of star moss

I’ve always liked mosses, so tiny, so velvety, so secretive. There are eight classes of these miniature bryophytic (i.e., non-vascular) plants and dozens of species, both terrestrial and aquatic. The specimen in the photo above is, I believe, your basic star moss, Tortula ruralia. Mosses are as non-threatening to their hosts as lichens, absorbing water and nutrients through their leaves, not their roots. They do not flower, and so produce neither fruit, nor cone, nor seeds. Reproduction occurs by wind-disseminated spores from capsules carried on stalks.

(Wanna grow or encourage moss chez you? Both Artistic Garden and EHow websites provide salubrious recipes. And just for fun, take a gander at the work of practitioners of moss graffiti at Environmental Graffiti.)

Blueberry buds

Down the path from the cotoneaster, the blueberry bush our neighbors gave us waved its plump, pink buds in the northerly breeze. They look like tight, tiny rosebuds, even though they belong to the heather family (Ericaceae) and not Rosaceae. This particular specimen is a highbush blueberry, Vaccinium corymbosum: the rabbit-eyes (V. ashei) perform better in the South, but are unusual in the trade. The tag doesn’t name a cultivar—blueberries bear better if they have other cultivars’ pollen in the near-neighborhood—but I’ve got a patch already going, so we should be okay.

Toddling over in the direction of the New Bed, I spotted a surprise under the crabapple. Last summer’s experimental purchase of several allegedly cerise-blooming lungworts (Pulmonaria ‘Raspberry Splash’) had borne fruit, er, flower. Who expected that in February? In fact, who expected them to survive a droughty summer, especially as new transplants? The cunningly spotted foliage rosettes hug the ground, and if I hadn’t been taking my time I might have missed them altogether, blended as they are with the flashier ‘Sweetness’ daffs.

Pulmonaria 'Raspberry Splash'

Find the lungwort

 

Someone on a mission also would have passed right by the cache pot containing a drowning Artemisia ‘Silver Mound.’ Not slow-poky me. Always on the lookout for things to brighten winter containers, I bought this plant in September to see if it would hold its foliage when the cold weather hit. It didn’t, gradually devolving into a tangle of slimy black leaf remnants and stems. And that was okay, as I’m not a huge fan of the wormwoods anyway. But when I knelt down to inhale the scent of pansies in the adjacent pot, this lovely promise of renewal caught my eye. Now that the standing water’s been dumped out, ‘Silver Mound’ may live to see another autumn. Good thing I wasn’t in some almighty hurry, huh?

Poor ugly thing...

...or is it?

Respectable at last

Take this bottlebrush, Callistemon citrinus. Tim and I bought it our first summer on Oak Island because we loved the flowers. We planted it smack dab in the middle of the big bed in the front yard, inordinately pleased with it and ourselves. That was 13 years ago. Alas, Callistemon is only marginally hardy in our area: that first winter it froze back to the ground. Like it did the second winter. And the third. The fourth season, I moved the ratty-looking thing over to the south side and more or less forgot it, except for cutting off dead branches every May. But look at her now! Hardly any cold-scorched leaves, much less the massive dieback I’ve come to expect by February each year. Thirteenth winter lucky, I guess. Good thing I’m not a member of the instant gratification club.

The same is true of this little patch of hardy cyclamen (C. hederifolium) that started out as a single four-inch pot in 1999. It’s not exactly in the same class as kudzu when it comes to spreading, but it takes over another square inch or so of ground every year. We’re both pleased with the progress.

Gardening’s a good vocation for people like me. Very little in the world of flora requires human intervention before noon, before 4 p.m., before bedtime, before Thursday, before next week. There’s always next year. Or the one after that. We get there. And we know in our souls the journey is the reason for the trip.

Thanks for dropping by. Be slow.

                                                                        Kathy

HAVIN' A GOOD TIME

Yesterday it was my birthday,

I hung one more year on the line;

I should be depressed, my yard’s a mess,

But I’m havin’ a good time.

I’m digging and weeding and planting,

I’m exhausted from gard’ning so well;

I should go to bed but a voice in my head

Says, “Oh, what the hell.”

                               with apologies to Paul Simon

            I have conducted a life-long love affair with Paul Simon’s music. His lyrics have spoken to me since the 1960s, when I knew all the words to all the songs from “Bookends,” “The Sounds of Silence,” “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme,” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” (Still do.) I convinced my teenaged self that I was the Kathy on the bus from Pittsburgh in “America,” sans cigarettes. A term paper entitled “Themes of Alienation and Loss in the Songs of Simon and Garfunkel” turned in when I was a junior in high school brought me my first important accolades as a writer: so impressed was the English teacher that she made it required reading for her senior classes.

Fortunately, I had no social life at the time anyway so repercussions were insignificant.

What angst-filled adolescent didn’t thrum in harmony with “And a rock feels no pain / and an island never cries”? Or “You read your Emily Dickinson / and I my Robert Frost, / and we note our place with bookmarkers / that measure what we’ve lost.”  And “The Boxer”!

In the clearing stands a boxer

And a fighter by his trade,

And he carries the reminders

Of every glove that laid him down

Or cut him till he cried out

In his anger and his shame,

‘I am leaving, I am leaving’

But the fighter still remains.

Only the Beatles (with “Hey, Jude’s” nah-nah-nah-nah nahnahnah-nah), could command three minutes of radio airtime with nonsense syllables the way Simon did in “The Boxer”—lie-la-lie, lie-la-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie lie-lie-lie-lie-lie, over and over as the orchestra swelled in the background. Tears still prick my eyes when I hear it.

Mincers Pipe Shop on the Corner,
Charlottesville, Virginia

Never attended a concert given by the boys, but I did once see Art Garfunkel. He drove into town from his home near Charlottesville, Virginia, every Sunday morning to pick up his copy of the New York Times from Mincers Pipe Shop on The Corner, hard by the University’s Rotunda. Mincers was just up the street from the U Diner, where “grills-with”—fried-ice-cream-with-glazed-donut-heated-on-the-grill—could be had for a dollar or so all day. On my way home from a post-Saturday-night sugar fix, I spotted Art (may I call you “Art”?) getting into his car, a hefty hunk of newsprint under his arm.

In later years, I wondered by what Machiavellian contortions he managed to get the New York version of the Sunday New York Times delivered on Sunday. Mere mortals had to wait until Wednesday.

*****

In one of those simple twists of fate (old, pre-Christian Dylan’s a favorite, too), I recently rediscovered knitting. I grew up in a crafty family, and don’t remember not knowing how to knit, crochet, embroider, crewel, cross-stitch, needlepoint, petit-point, macramé and sew. Never cottoned to machine sewing, because it requires, well, a machine; but I’m still pretty adept with any sort of hand-held needle. This has come in useful over the years, especially for keeping beloved jeans and overalls in service.  I’m one of probably six people left in the world who actually knows how to darn socks.

Blue penguins wearing their protective jumpers

A few weeks ago, Tim, who trolls Google News most mornings, sent me an Attention All Knitters appeal for tiny sweaters for oil-coated blue penguins, victims of the latest disaster to befall New Zealand. The coverings keep the birds from ingesting the crude oil clogging their feathers until rescue workers can dip them in Dawn. Tim thought I’d like the picture of the jumper-clad birds: to his amazement, I leapt out of my chair to rummage around in the old blanket chest where I keep memories and things I might use again. Someday.

Piglet modeling my best effort

Ah, vindication! I emerged with 30-year-old knitting needles, single-pointed, double-pointed and circular, insisting we drop everything to go to our nearest JoAnn’s Fabrics—in Wilmington—to buy 100% wool yarn. (You see, the last time I knitted anything was around the same time double-knit polyester was all the rage, so the billions of skeins of yarn I kept are all acrylic or some even-more-sinister synthetic fiber.)

After a few false starts (like about 20), the stitches came back to me, as did casting on and binding off. Had lots of practice in picking up dropped stitches, and in un-knitting to correct mistakes. Must be like riding a bike, kinetic knowledge stored in one’s cells. The tiny penguin jumpers took shape. More or less.

Checked in with the lady at Skeinz, The Natural Yarn Store in Napier, NZ—a town I remember with great fondness for superlative fish-and-chips—who said the response from all over the knitting world had been tremendous, and every oil-coated penguin had an extensive wardrobe at his/her disposal. Oh, dear. No, no, she said, send your creations on: we’re dressing stuffed-toy penguins to sell, with a hundred percent of the profits going to the Penguin Rescue Fund. (I've already ordered two, at $25US a pop, for Christmas gifts. Click on "Take Flip Home" under Featured Products on the website linked above.)

Another penguin day, another penguin dollar
on the Otago Peninsula (photo by John Burke)

Why did I care? I’ll never forget the late afternoon I stood on a windy escarpment of the Otago Peninsula, watching yellow-eyed penguins coming home from another day of making a living in the Pacific. They resembled nothing so much as city workers disgorging from trains as they trudged out of the wave-break and trundled up the shore. All that was missing were the rolled-up newspapers and the briefcases.

Will I use some of my precious time to help them in their time of need? You betcha.

****

Marvelous Allium schubertii

            Anyway, yesterday was my 58^th birthday, and I spent a chunk of it outside in the garden, personalizing lyrics to Paul Simon songs, such as the one in the epigraph. I’m trying ornamental alliums again, despite years of one-season ponies (Simon, sort of, again), excepting the chive twins, garlic and onion. A sucker for any species of onion, I ordered Allium flavum, a 1759 heirloom, yellow-flowered, mid-summer bloomer; A. carinatum pulchellum, A. flavum’s younger (1810), red-violet-flowered cousin; and the Brent and Becky’s web-exclusive A. hyacinthoides, which was a no-brainer choice for me because it’s supposed to have blue blooms. Well, duh. Splurged on another five A. schubertii, an 1896 introduction with the most bizarre of all of Allium's bizarre flowers that, despite its cold-hardiness Zone 7-9 reputation, refuses to perennialize chez Fitz. Also treated myself to five more Scilla peruviana bulbs, a scilla with a secret yen to be an allium.

Happy birthday to me!

*****

 
            Since recovering (to a large extent) from the hormone-induced miseries of adolescence and the self-induced dramas of adulthood, my love for Paul Simon’s way with words endures. Unsurprisingly, his solo opus “Still Crazy After All These Years” provides the soundtrack to my maturation.

            So I sit by the window and watch the cars,

I fear I'll do some damage one fine day;

But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers,

Still crazy after all these years,

Still crazy, still cra-aaa-zy,

Still crazy after all these years.

You better believe it. Thanks for dropping by.

                                                                                    Kathy