80AcresOnline

R- found a tall blooming plant Saturday, June 18, that he didn’t recognize: a colony growing  in the creek woods, in the ‘swamp’ area, now very wet again.  There’s a kind of “sandbar” (except it’s not sand, but alluvial mix from flash floods including black clay)  that gets midday sun.  He found a colony of these, 4 feet and more tall, and since he didn’t have a camera with him, he pulled the shortest one to bring back and show me.  It was about four feet.  By the time it got back to the house, it was fairly limp, the main stalk actually broken.  I snipped it short enough to fit in a pitcher, hoping it would perk up.  Some of the pictures were taken shortly after that; over time it did regain turgor so this morning I set it outside for a bit and took more pictures.

Clearly Mint Family–square stem, opposite leaves, flower shape.

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The rain stopped a week ago; the winter grasses are brown or browning, the early wildflowers have gone to seed.  But soil moisture is still good. The tallgrasses (switchgrass, Eastern gama, Indiangrass, big bluestem) are doing very well (switchgrass in the secondary drainage is taller than we are.)   There’s an area in the east grass we call “The Bowl” because it’s a roundish area that seeps in wet weather as it slopes down to the old drainage line.  It stays green longer.  When we got the place, it was covered with broomweed (non-native), bare under the broomweed with a few scattered grass plants, not doing well because of the chemical defense of the broomweek.  Today it looks like this:

You can see the upslope edge (pale beige of dry grass)
Every different shade of green, every native plant, reveals something about the soil where it is.

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A cool sunny day after some rain: grass is green,  fall flowers are in bloom–including some non-fall flowers, like a pear tree.  Monarchs are migrating through, and this afternoon were busy among the Maximilian sunflowers.  Most of those are short this year (dry previous winter and spring) but loaded with flowers.   In this patch alone  (a few yards across) I saw five or six monarchs at a time.

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It was a dry fall, after a dry summer, and a dry winter followed the dry fall.  Other places got rain–sometimes nearby–but we had none for months.  March brought a little–April has brought a little–and now we have some flowers.

The bluebonnets may be only 4-5 inches tall, instead of knee-high, but they’re there–in a few places–and should be able to make seed for another year.    We had more through most of the dry winter, but many finally just died–or were eaten, since they were the only green thing out there.

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I mentioned on Twitter that more trees had failed to leaf out this spring, victims of the long drought which not only did not provide them enough water to survive, but prevented us from having any supplemental water to give them.   Someone suggested what seemed reasonable–why not plant trees from the next climate zone (or two) to the south of us.    I realized then that the traditional “planting zone/climate zone” concept had taken hold to such an extent that the complexity of keeping anything alive through a rapid change of climate wasn’t being talked about.

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This is another year of brown spring and summer…though some people got more rain, we’re still behind, and the quick brown-off after the rain we did get proves it.

This is not how the land should look in early June: we should still have at least half the grass green, and the June flowers in full bloom.    This is a typical August picture: brown land, hard blue cloudless sky full of heat.   Before climate change really began to show here,  mid-June to mid-July looked more like the picture at the top of the blog.   But this is the third dry year, though we had enough rain in April and early May to produce thi river of gold (claspleaf coneflower) in mid-May, in the lowest part, where water had run for a few days.

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In our house, fencing has two meanings: the stuff I do with swords (Renaissance style) and the stuff we both do with posts and wire and clamshell posthole diggers and shovels and so on.   Often my husband works on fence alone.   I have books to write.  When he’s sick or injured, the fence projects languish…and sometimes it’s just too hot to get out there.

Winter is a fine time to work on fence, and he’s been busy on the west end fence since some windstorms dropped trees on it.

Yes, there’s a fence under that limb nearest the camera.

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An unfamiliar plant shows up every now and then (more often after rains, and really often after flood events that move seeds from upstream above our property down into the damp areas.)    Over the weekend, my husband reported a plant new to him over on Westbrook near the south fenceline: a Composite, very small flowers and bicolored, like a miniature gaillardia, he said.  Plant up to three feet tall, straggly, with narrow (lanceolate to linear) leaves.  A couple of days later he brought back a drying specimen of the flowers; I tried to revive it in water so I could look it up, but no luck.

I finally made it over there early this morning, and as usual saw more than I came for.    First, while walking through the south end of the creek woods, I heard a bird I didn’t recognize (along with white-eyed vireos, cardinals, Carolina wrens, mockingbirds…)  and then I saw a flash of yellow and black…not a bird, but a large butterfly.   We’ve had more and more tiger swallowtails in the past few years, both in the house yards and down in the creek woods, but I’ve had little luck photographing them.  They’re strong flyers, skittish, and prefer to perch (when they perch) with plenty of greenery between me and them.   Today I got lucky.

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Fall color here starts early (sometimes very early)  but slowly, moving leaf by leaf, species by species, until the final flare of rich red from the last oaks in late November (with the occasional rusty blackhaw viburnum holding on to its red leaves into December.)

Smooth sumac, green and burgundy

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Some years we get spectacular drifts of Monarchs migrating south, and some years they come in little groups of three or four…not many at a time.   Today I went out on a day of blue sky, bright sun, brisk north wind, just to see what was out there.

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