Summer Sloth Series…. The Turn

POETRY

After my work-crew teens went home I stayed at

the bridge indulging my perfectionist tendencies 

scraping the last of the moss and woody weeds

from the stone’s joints  … and so discovered tucked

within a crack a tiny ring-necked snake   pencil slim   

perfect in its neat grey skin    Minutes later riled

yellow-jackets swarmed from a hole   stinging through

my gloves   my clothes  …and chased me from the bridge   

They could not be allowed to live where people pass so

close each day  …but later I thought…  is the wasp less

perfect then the snake …are not all nature’s children

innocents   living obedient to their calling… ?  Each day

begins without fanfare    is engaged unsuspecting    not

knowing when the turn will come  …if there will be one

Catalogue of Sins Summer Sloth Series

PASSION, PRACTICE, PUNCHY

Sloth Wears Pajamas

With regard to gardeners’ sins, I would like to put in a good word for Sloth.  In particular, I think that there is something to say for Pajama Gardening. Does everyone do it, or just the members of my extended family? I know that in England there is a Nude Gardening Day, but that is only one day per year. One can garden in some variation of pajamas almost any time of year,  especially in the summer, when morning and birdsong begin early. What could be more pleasurable than wearing one’s nightie, carrying a cup of coffee and plucking the spent daylily flowers?

coffee cup:column

 

Watch for future posts…we have a lot to say about Sloth.

Summer Sloth Series Upside of a Messy Park

POLLINATION, PRACTICE

Sloth: The Upside of a Messy Park 

Sometimes what looks like sloth is not. How a park should look is really about what a park should be and who it is for. Banish the uptight model of golf-course neatness and nature-friendly things begin to happen. This summer several deliberately ‘messy’ areas in Forest Hill Park have been filled with bees, butterflies, birds — and teenage kids.

The bees, butterflies and birds are there because both Cleveland Heights and East Cleveland have adopted a few pollinator-friendly maintenance strategies (based basically on sloth) in a few specific areas that have been set aside for pollinators.

Continue reading Summer Sloth Series Upside of a Messy Park →

Aphid Festival

Uncategorized

Now that the aphids have been fruitful and multiplied all over my butterfly garden (they seem to be feasting on the diet of soap and alcohol that I have been blasting them with,) I think I’m going to have to fork out for the Green Lace Wings. The price isn’t much, but the shipping is, so I decided  to try first the soap and alcohol recipe that I found on the internet. It definitively did not work. Who else eats aphids? Ladybugs? Is anyone else having this problem? Any good, garden-healthy hacks? Please send them to our Comments section. 
 FullSizeRender (4)
 FullSizeRender (2)

 

green-lacewing-adult_0 The Green Hope

 

Hummer

POETRY

hummingbird

Thrummmm     !

announces he’s calling

He’s hovering thin air

in front of me     wings

a-blurr

          appraising

                        my red shirt

for possibility as some

outrageous flower

thrummmm     !

he’s coming

             he’s going     

      pulled here

                          pulled there    

wings a-blurr    drawn

to beyond

violet     the to-me-merely

red trumpets of

crocosmia

              

His own trumpet

probes

magnet  to  magnet

Thrummmm     !

Catalogue of a Gardener’s Sins: Plant Gluttony

PASSION, PUNCHY, ,

Gluttony

You know that feeling, deep in your belly, when you walk into a plant nursery?

It tingles and it commands action…quick and a lot of it. Right? 

Well, I’ve got it bad.

I have to have that little red Echinacea…it’s calling to me…really, three (3) or five (5) would be better….isn’t that the rule: odd numbers?…well, maybe seven (7.)

salsa redIf there really is no reason for another Echinacea, how about that Cimicifuga? Five (5) of those would fit. 

cimicifuga

And that adorable Sedum, just one of those. But, I’ll need  a small pot for it.

sedum plant gluttony

Luckily, I have found that there is a limit to my gluttony—that’s when my car is topped up with plants. The scent of the  flowers, leaves and bark, the moisture in the air, and the oxygen filling my lungs. That’s satisfaction…I hope you have it, too.

Plant Gluttony photo

–The Plant Glutton Has Spoken

Next Blogs: Garden Sloth

Permaculture in Leipzig 1

PERIPATETIC, PERMACULTURE, PERTINENT

scything in Germany

Permaculture in Leipzig I

On a recent trip to Germany, my wife, Carol, and I decided to forgo the usual hotel/Gasthaus travel routine and test the alternative economy. In that economy people tend to live simply and earn their livings via multiple income streams—maybe, for example, raising most of their own vegetables, selling goat cheese, and holding a part-time job in the mainstream economy.  For us the question boiled down to:  What permaculturist will rent us shelter? 

The answer turned out to be Rainer Kühn, a charismatic and innovative leader in Leipzig’s very dynamic alternative economy milieu. Rainer has built an active web presence, both via Facebook and his own site, under the name of Rainer Blütenreich (which translates as “Realm of Blossoms” http://bluetenreich.jimdo.com/).  Like many on left in the former East Germany, he feels no nostalgia for the former dictatorship and its spy network (the much hated “Stasi”), but also has a deep skepticism of Western capitalism.  He has helped start Leipzig’s alternative currency, the Lindentaler, and is laying the groundwork for a future intentional community. Continue reading Permaculture in Leipzig 1 →

Tree Lawn Conversation

PERTINENT, POLLINATION, PRACTICE

I like to think of my tree lawn as chatting in a neighborly fashion with Jane’s, across the street.  Hers is wild and wooly, grown from seed, self-seeding. a haven for pollinators.  Mine is a bit more conventional, with plants native and otherwise, flowering and edible–aiming for eye-candy in all seasons. We are both a bit rebellious, the only ones on our block to have  transformed our tree lawns, so really we are more alike than different; different enough, though, to have a lively dialogue (see below for Eutrochium purpureum (Joe-Pye Weed)/Asclepias Incarnata  and Rudbeckia Maxima/Echinacea Paradoxa color correspondences)

jane and catherine pink jane and catherine yellow 2 

Did you know that it is only in Cleveland that the term “tree lawn” is used? In other cities  they may be called “hell strips,” or “devil strips.”  I like our term because it evokes some pleasant possibilities for greater greenery, bloomery, and a kind of reckless cheerfulness. Continue reading Tree Lawn Conversation →

Tree Lawn Conversation-Ann McCulloh Responds

PERTINENT, PRACTICE
GRASSY TREE LAWN
I see my treelawn as neighbor space. It doesn’t enhance the wildlife ecology or aesthetics of the street in ways that please me. (I try hard to accomplish that in the rest of my landscape.) But I live in a neighborhood where people love their dogs, walk their dogs, and, bless them, pick up after them. An important part of that happens on that little strip of grass under the shade tree in the tree lawn.
I have dozens of wonderful neighbors whom I’ve only met because they walk their dogs on my street and stop to say hello, or comment on my garden. I meet others because they need on-street parking, and appreciate a shaded, mowed area when they get out of their cars. Do I love the look of my conventional treelawn? Not really. But it’s a little sacrifice I offer in the name of community and sociability. And that’s a kind of ecology too.

High Summer

POETRY, Uncategorized

High Summer

It is not the noise of cicadas but that

other underlying sound    drone    that hum

as of the energy of many bees at work

in an unseen hive  …almost resonance   almost

vibration   almost palpable as it seeps through

the pores    into every living and non-living

core   In the thick heat the red daylilies turn

greasy…  sunflowers wilt…  the yet-to-bloom

phlox and actea weigh down from sound   Dirt

cracks   Dry meadow grasses tassel to seed   

Milkweed turns blossom to pod   One blood red

leaf from the black gum tree falls to ground

Overnight some peak   it seems   has come then

gone   …even as it arrives it’s leaving