by Elsa Johnson
I went to my watching spot
…found a small heron intent
fishing the first light :
the neck
uncurled the strike quick
as a snake
the woods felt deep
after …the morning
perfect
All posts by Elsa Johnson
A Walk in March
by Elsa Johnson
Everything is exposed and vulnerable ground frozen
patches of ice softening can’t expect leaves on trees
for weeks yet Movement above : raptor rides air
settles high in a bare tree stares down Cooper’s?
Red Tail? – Sharp Shinned? They all look a lot alike :
studies me large intruder in its naked kingdom It is
hungry — eats meat — prefers morsels — I’m too big
Patience hawk : small meat’s coming — better hunting ahead
Further on a chipmunk churrrs flicks her tail She’s made it
it through a hard winter I call : hawk is hunting the perfect
snack she dives into her round bare hole Take care
chipmunk — hawk is hungry : better cover is coming
Out on the lake the honking geese waddle across the melting ice
drive at rivals with rush of wings They will breed soon
lay eggs — hatch chicks Beware geese hawk is hungry :
turtle will be hungry too when he wakes up Danger
lurks below the ice snapper swims there last summer
he took down a full size goose with a squawk and a flurry
as wings wrenched air trying to lift hang on lift
Then goose went down under the water and did not
come back up : Good hunting
turtle when the water warms
A Book Review by Elsa Johnson: Richard Mabey’s “A Cabaret of Plants”
by Elsa Johnson
British Naturalist Richard Mabey’s book, A Cabaret of Plants, is not a book to which one can do justice in a mere few hundred words, nor can one truly do justice to the reading of it while drifting in and out of a haze of pain meds (recent hip replacement), hence, this essay – which is not so much a meditation as a meandering.
Here in Cleveland, Ohio, in the heart of the Eastern Broadleaf Forest, we have tended to take the abundance and diversity of our hardwood vegetation for granted – until we are reminded by loss or impending loss that, though seeming more durable than people, trees are vulnerable, too. Thinking that they are enduring, we are dismayed when they are stricken by disease. But we soon forget them. We do not even remember our native chestnut trees (chestnut blight); the American elm — anyone? (Dutch elm disease). Our memory of these once iconic trees grows limited — and it is a fact that we must remember, in order to value what we have lost. More recently: ash (ash borer); oak (oak wilt); white pine (blister rust); hemlock (wooly adelgid ). Who knows what is coming next to a tree near you. So, perhaps, it is time to consider the larger picture of what trees mean to us – so much more than just an (important) ability to sequester carbon.
Mabey is excellent at this sort of thing, so I picked out a chapter — From Workhorse to Green Man: The Oak — and drifted in.
There are, Mabey tells us, 400 to 600 species of oak spread across the northern hemisphere – a plant family that is quirky, opportunistic, mutable – and useful. From the Neolithic era on, the oak has been a crucial raw material, often used for surfacing some of mankind’s earliest walkways, like the Sweet Track, that crossed the Somerset marshes in England. That wood, well preserved, has been dated back to 3806 BCE, when it was cut. In France, an oak tree in Allouville-Bellefosse, 1,000 years old, contains, within its hollow trunk, two chapels, built in 1669. They are still used for Mass twice a year. We learn that the roof of Westminster Hall – containing 600 tons of wood spanning seventy-five feet without a central support – is essentially a ‘super-tree’ through an arrangement of trunk and branching that ’would not work unless it copied the structure of its motherlode’. And we learn that Ely Cathedral, built at the end of the 12th century, and called the Ship of the Fens, has an interior that resembles a ‘carved simulacrum of a an oak forest’ … and that the carpenter there altered his design to use several trees that were not quite long enough to reach all the way up to the roof’s spectacular octagonal lantern (well worth googling to see). In England, as in nowhere else, it seems, the oak became emblematic of nationhood and character.
Mabey also tells us it is not by coincidence that that oaks and humans share habitat preference and are coterminous – oaks having been an important food source. Eventually, Mabey gets around to the Green Man — those foliate heads that are emblematic generative figures of mythic — possibly demonic — creativity, and which, oddly, often reside in churches but fit no formulaic interpretation. Mabey calls them ‘an irresistible eye-worm for stone carvers.’ In the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral, many of the carven images of Mary were smashed or decapitated during the Reformation (the ISIS of its day) – but the Green Men and the symbolically sinful foliage were puzzlingly intact.
Perhaps, Mabey suggests ‘ the exuberant carving seems a celebration of the unbroken connectivity of the living world’. So I leave you with that, and a poem , which also celebrates the organic vitality of the Green Man.
Green Knight
by Elsa Johnson
Look …here are the marks of hooves and a spot
of blood on the packed snow He’s come It is
that coldest time before the tide of spring
sweeps in : time of the green night that swells
the buds of the redbud tree the shadblow
and the maple In the backyard late last
fall I cut spent heads off hydrangeas —
they stood all winter in this amputated state
Yesterday I saw in passing below the
truncated stems swollen buds : that green
devil pushing that thick fluid through the tube
Morning — pale moon gone from the platinum
sky — the birds erupt in pagan chorus
There is no no that force knows
Oak Wilt in Northeast Ohio
by Elsa Johnson
Ok, dear readers, I’m sorry – but this article is about a downer. Oak wilt is a devastating fungal disease affecting oak trees and it is here in Northeast Ohio. Once trees are infected by the fungus there really is nothing one can do to save the tree. The tree must be cut down and disposed of properly so that it does not infect other trees.
The first symptom is leaf margin browning. Also, fungal mats may form under the tree bark and may crack and lift the bark. Trees that show symptoms during the summer are usually dead by the following spring.
Oaks in the Red Oak family (red oak, scarlet oak, black oak, pin oak) (all with pointed lobes) are more susceptible. Oaks in the White Oak family (white oak, swamp white oak, burr oak) (with rounded lobes) are less susceptible – but once they are infected they also die, just more slowly.
This fungal disease is transmitted in two ways. # 1 — Insects, primarily beetles, are attracted to damaged or cut wood and carry the disease from tree to tree. # 2 — The fungus can also be spread via roots. Oak trees growing in proximity to the infected tree can become infected through their interconnected root systems. In situations such as one finds here in our older residential neighborhoods with many large old oak trees, the disease can spread in an ever expanding circle.
Control is challenging and preemptive. When a tree has died due to oak wilt, that infected tree must be removed. The wood can be used for firewood but should be debarked. Or if not debarked it should be stacked and covered and sealed during the warm months (April to October).
Preemptive treatment of healthy oaks is possible through application of a fungicide. However, once a tree shows symptoms, it is too late to do this.
Other things you can do? Avoid compaction under trees. Mulch under trees (preferably out to dripline) – but no ‘volcano’ mulching please (that means no mulch piled up around the base of the tree – that is precisely where the tree does not need it).
Do not prune or have your oak trees pruned during the warm months, roughly April to October.
And — If you suspect you have a tree with oak wilt, have your tree (s) looked at by an ISA Certified Arborist. Help protect one our most vulnerable natural resources – our venerable old oak trees.
The Biting Lilt The Rush
by Elsa Johnson
The first transcendence is a reaching out as chest
expands to create pull for the first breath drawing
all that is other inwards a bellows sparking
marriage : air — fueling flesh Our beginnings —
like this — depend on words and on the worlds of
others : immanence and exhalation similar for tree
and fig and the black-cap chickadee and us We
know that the tree breaths silent and unseen and
the nipple of the fig begins at the throat swell
where the bee pillaged pollen and the sweetness
entered and was stored Desire : as in the bright eyes
of the black-cap chickadees whose small breasts —
lifting — take inward clean bare breaths and
Sudden! Songs of the world fling outward
Controversy–The Grumpy (Permaculture) Gardener
by Elsa Johnson
I come by my grumpiness honestly – I am the child of grumps . . .and they came by it honestly too. But I mostly blame my dad. Both my parents were young adults at the start of the Great Depression: she was 19, attending Flora Stone Mather; he was 22, going to Antioch College on the work-study program… in the course of which he became an English major, worked on a Great Lakes ore boat, taught at a progressive school in Michigan, and learned architectural drafting (which turned out to be far more marketable than English over the long haul). Somewhere in all that he was exposed to the agricultural writings of Louis Bromfield, which inspired a dream of having land of his own on which to develop a self-sufficient place. The dream did not die. After my parents met and married my mother’s father sold them the 40 acres he had bought in Twinsburg to run his hunting spaniels. They moved there in 1944 to begin their great adventure — in rather primitive circumstances. I was 20 months old.
Of course, at that age I can’t remember being saved from falling off the hay-wagon and almost being run over by a tire. I only vaguely remember being chased by the geese (a year later). But I do happily remember family excursions through the fields to the woods, ledges, and forest; the beauty of bloodroot and hundreds of trillium in the spring wood; the scent of black walnuts in their pulpy cases; the juice of peaches fresh off the trees, warmed by the summer sun.
What I missed as a young child was an awareness of the hardship and hard work — that the cow had to be milked every day; that butchering a rabbit took a toll; that half an acre of garden meant hours of weeding (which included me…and I didn’t like it!); that fields had to be tilled, planted and harvested; vegetables and fruit processed and canned; and that despite all that, we really couldn’t live self-sufficiently on 40 acres. My father took a job as a draftsman (and modeled tractors!). Piece by piece the dream began to fall away… first the rabbits; then the geese; then the cow; until, by the time I was 7 or 8 the chickens, the orchard, and the garden were all that was left, and much reduced in size. There wasn’t much canning going on. My mother also took a job (law degrees help). Piece by piece, I became aware.
But there was always a garden up until the year my father, in his seventies, broke his hip.
So I come to permaculture with not the enthusiasm of the idealist and convert, but with suspicion and grumpy pessimism. I know that, unlike a building, something created of nature is not static. In permaculture the model of a food forest that is used is that of a young forest/meadow intermix. But I know forests do not stay young. They grow and change and as they do so, they change the environment of everything around them. And what then, I ask? So I am skeptical that there is such a thing as ‘permanent agriculture’ (and at any rate, I think, it is definitely for someone younger than I am).
That is not to say I do not see value in permaculture. There is much I value. In particular I value what permaculture has to say about soil, soil structure, soil organisms, how soil functions, and how important it is to have healthy, living soil, because that is the one thing on which everything else depends. ThIs knowledge informs a deeper understanding that I incorporate into my landscape design practice today.
Sonnet to a Spider
by Elsa Johnson
It was a strange place to call home If you’d been
bigger you’d not have fit the gap in the passenger
side mirror where you’d anchored one end of your
filigree web I’d glance over as I sped down
the road and there you’d be — not tucked safe in your
den but gale tossed scrunched to a blip a small
ship clutching threads When I’d arrived where I
was going thinking to find you desiccated –
dead – you’d unfurl your spider legs no worse
for wear I began to think you liked it You
went everywhere with me until the day I
chose for you a less dangerous life (I hoped)
Miss you — see you still : goggles jacket
thin silk scarves trailing in the slip-stream wind
BE (Before Electricity)
by Elsa Johnson
Our friend in Iceland sent the scene : a grave
yard stone-cross studded grey-sky-grey-sea and
in another shot a rainbow muted —
melting — pale cold sun a-slant old stone walls
It is always changing he says That was
on the Solstice — two hours and fourteen minutes
of diluted daylight My mind boggles
over this : twenty-one hours and six
minutes of dark winter night after night —
all of them tunnel hours Our northern sires
knew nothing else Perhaps it was a gift —
that slow time : to sing : to carve : to love in
darkness No – no – no turning back you say
not for us We are through the looking glass
Twisted: A Wish for Children
by Elsa Johnson
Perhaps it is the wind.
You cannot see a tree grow
a twist. If a tree is started on a turn
it spirals over time, a right hand
whorl or left, movement taking years
to reach visible effect. You can walk
in a grove of old trees, all standing
straight, spot one, then two, twisted
in opposite directions. Why trees do this
puzzles: once the turn has started
so must it go on. Is it like this also
for children? Does the twist toward fear –
suspicion – hurt – happen early
and unnoticed, and is then bound
to the growing grain?
O Changing wind: give my buddings
a veer toward joy. Twist
them gentle.