botanizing

Tulips

There were large red tulips on the table this week.  In the mornings, the low sun in the east comes through a spruce, breaking-up the rays, and the light glances sharply over the table.  The sun this week was in the tulips.  The sun could turn a red petal orange or simply put a lavender sheen the dark roll of a margin.  A velvety light passed through the petals. I watched against the light to see the gradation of shadows through different layers of petals.  There was a soft play of light and dark.

The Yellows and Whites

Winter lingers.  Little squalls of snow come most days.  Despite the persistence of cheek-turning cold and wintery precipitation, the hillsides show the changeover to spring.

The past two weekends, I have driven up the Clearwater River from its confluence with the Snake.  Two weeks ago, the slopes above the Clearwater had only patchy green.  The rest was the brown remains of vegetation dried last summer and matted over the winter.  Much of the green was the fern-leafed desert parsley (Lomatium dissectum).  This desert parsley forms dense populations on the steep south-facing slopes above the river.  Two weeks ago, its finely dissected leaves made airy balls—larger than a softball but smaller than a basketball—that spotted the slopes.  Sticking through center of most leaf balls was a stiff inflorescence, an umbel of small yellow flowers just above the leaves.  There weren’t enough of the flowers for the yellow to have much presence on the hills.  The hills above the Clearwater become more yellow, when the balsamroots (Balsamorhiza sagittata) bloom.  Two weeks ago, the balsamroots were no more than soft spots on the slopes.  Their fuzzy, white-haired leaves were up but still rolled rather that offering much lamina to sunlight, and there were no heads of open flowers.

Last weekend the hills above the Clearwater River had both yellows and whites.  The sunflower yellows of the balsamroots were out.  Over the week, the heads had curved up and over to face south, and they had expanded, popping-out ray flowers.  The slopes were forming islands of yellows among the greening grasses—their were the sunflower yellow islands of the balsamroots and bigger, paler yellow islands of the fern-leafed desert parsley, whose flower stalks were two feet or more in length.

The whites on the hills were serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia), Lewis’s mock orange (Philadelphus lewisii), and hawthorn (Crataegus).  On the dry hills, which have steppe vegetation, composed of grasses, herbaceous perennials, and small shrubs, the whites run up the ravines.  These ravines collect a little extra water, providing an abode for the head high shrubs of serviceberry, mock orange, and hawthorn.  These three make lines of big white dots at the bases of the hills, where the sharp slopes meet flood plain, where water also collects.

This weekend, I shall return to the Clearwater River, going beyond its middle fork, where I anticipate the scents of the white flowers.  I look forward to the sweet, fruity scent of the mock orange and to skunky late afternoon scent of the serviceberry if those afternoons become warm.  Yes, I look forward to the scents of flowers on a warm afternoon.

Creek Bubbles

A bubble slides over a lip of stone and down a flat trough in a sheet of water. Where rough stones lie across the creek, the water rumples, folding like drapery; here vortices of water must curve up from the bottom and twist around as they rise and fall back to the disheveled stones below because, here, the bubble becomes stationary, riding a round face of water.  The bubble is not still so much spinning in place.

I know the bubble spins when a string of smaller bubbles tumbles from the trough to be trapped in the vortex, where they curve round and inward, touching and cohering to the surface of the large bubble. The whole assemblage turns like a fast little planet with many moons.  The ease of this coherence, in a planetary dance, where little energy is needed to hold the whole together is simply a pleasure to watch.

Leaning over the creek edge from its sand margin, I see myself in the bubble. I am distorted slightly by the bubble’s curved surface.  Despite the spin of this mirror, my reflection remains stationary.  This miniature system reflects the Earth, whose rotational spin does not disturb my stationary seat at the creek margin.  The stillness of my image and body in these spinning worlds is, despite the rules of physics, momentarily amazing.  It is amazing especially because my tilt over the water for a best view of the bubble has a delicate equilibrium—I teeter between muscle strain and falling into the water.

Another big bubble slips over the stone lip and through the trough, it rolls over the rump of the cascade to the center of the whirlpool, causing the first big bubble to carom down creek. The delicate equilibrium on the face of the cascade is gone fast. The displaced bubble shoots over the surface of the duodenal water.  What had seemed secure, the bubble spinning, holding to the cascade despite the roil of the water, was easily shot. Little force was involved.

I try to recall lessons I should have learned well. Long ago in a freshman physics course taken during summer school, we experimented to understand vectors, velocities, and collisions—the rules of displacement.  A body’s place is tenuous.  A bubble, holding our image, can slip over the fleshy surface of water at the slightest provocation.  The rules of physics are filled with provocations.

*  *  *

I watched the bubbles in the creek that runs through Devil’s Canyon in west, central Colorado.  It was a day in April in 2006, when I was on sabbatical.  As I prepare for my field season in the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau, I have been thinking about my experiences in that landscape.

Spring Light

The Widening Gyre / The Narrowing Ring

For there’s no human life at the full or the dark.
From the first crescent to the half, the dream
But summons to adventure, and the man
Is always happy like a bird or a beast;

        William Butler Yeats
        From “The Phases of the Moon”

There is a half-moon this afternoon.  I walk in bright sun, under the white, waxing moon, along the Selway River.  Where they are exposed to sun, the shoulders of rock outcrops are perches for nests of moss, lichen, and club moss in which buttercups flower.  The orangey yellow petals of the buttercups reflect the sun in white shines. There are larkspurs on other stones.  Their flowers have not yet opened—the buds could be miniature cones of boysenberry ice cream.  Four, round-topped scoops to each cone.  The gravel pockets around the outcrops have numerous spring whitlow grasses, which are tiny mustards.  Each flower has four cleft petals, and the few flowers of each plant stand on a stalk as thin as thread.

The trail curves to a creek.  There is a cedar grove along the creek.  A trail crew has recently passed through. They have used chainsaws to open the trail, clearing a passage through the trees that fell during the winter.  The cut faces of the fallen cedar are fresh, the wood still orange and unweathered, and I stop to count the rings of one.  From center to bark the cut trunk is the span of my two hands together with fingers spread, a radius of 16 1/2 inches.  I count 105 rings where the cut was made 15 feet above the base of the fallen cedar.  The early years were lush times.  The growth rings of those years are wide. The temperatures must have been cool and the rains abundant.  The later rings narrow.  Climate has tightened on these cedars—the rains have diminished, and the temperatures have warmed; there was much less growth in the last 30 years of this tree, where the rings are tight upon one another, than in its first 60 years.

On the ground in the cedar grove, I find a broken snail shell.  Some predator has chipped away one face of the shell, but the columella—the central stalk around which the shell curves—is intact and has a helical fringe along its length.  The helical curve of the columella—a nacreous gyre—with a shadowy cavity near its top, offering a hint of passage to some dark infinity, makes me think of the poet William Butler Yeats.

Yeats, after a spell of automatic writing, sought to explain the universe, or at least the symbolism of poetry and the passage of history, in gyres.  I recall Will Jumper, the professor in a poetry course I once took, diagramming Yeats’s gyres on a blackboard.  Jumper’s hands shook with age by that time, making the gyres have jitters.  The diagram of Yeats’s gyres consisted of two superposed cones.  The cones, which Yeats called vortices, because he must have imagined them swirling around, tracing a gyre from point to broad top, were the same size; but one cone pointed one direction and the other the other; thus, one cone converged to a point where the other was broadest.  Yeats explained all of this in his book A Vision, in which he constructed from his superposed cones, one a vortex of discord and the other a vortex of concord, a new astrology, based on the phases of the moon and the symbolism of the body, that was both retrospective, offering a reading of history, and prospective, offering a prophecy for the future.

Part of that prophecy was described by Yeats in his poem “The Second Coming.” “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” Yeats tells us, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”  The discord in the widening gyre would lead to ‘a second coming’ when evil, incarnate as a “rough beast,” imagined to be sphinx-like, would at birth slouch toward Bethlehem.

I slouch under a cedar that leans toward the Selway River to have a late lunch.  An otter swims upriver.  The sleek otter, its body an umber line from head to the long, sharp V of its tail, is hardly a sphinx, but the widening gyres of Yeats’s “Second Coming” turn in my thoughts.

The gyres in which Yeats found himself dated from 1050 A.D., a phase of history, he noted, in which “faith no longer sufficed.”  It was an age of trouble, when Gothic architecture suppressed freedom, and as his contemporary phase curved, gyre after gyre, to his own time, he was, he wrote, “filled with excitement.”  In his time . . . “Having bruised their hands upon that limit, men, for the first time since the seventeenth century, see the world as an object of contemplation, not as something to be remade, and some few, meeting the limit in their special study, even doubt if there is any common experience, doubt the possibility of science.”

I think about the experience of tree rings.  Each cedar in this forest will make largely matching rings out of their common experiences over the years.  We can read the good years and the bad, but they make no prophecies.  We know how climate and rainfall make rings wide or narrow, we can predict tight rings if we forecast hot years and little rain.  But prediction is not prophecy, and we have built our knowledge of tree rings out of ages of experimentation with tree growth (rather than automatic writing).  Although I delighted in thinking about Yeats’s gyres and poems as I walked, what we can trace in nature through the possibilities of science is much richer than his mystical constructions.

Bluebells, which have pushed recently through the duff, are surely a delight as great at the poetry of Yeats.  As I walk downriver, I contemplate the pitch of their elegant blue flowers.

*  *  *
Notes

I walked along the Selway on Saturday, 12 April.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre . . .” is from the poem “The Second Coming” published by W. B. Yeats in 1921.

I have quoted extensively from W. B. Yeats’s A Vision, which was published in 1938 in the United States by McMillan.  These quotes include the epigraph taken from the poem/chapter “The Phases of the Moon” and materials from the chapter “Dove or Swan.”

Histories of Wilderness

“No one has written a history of any wilderness area,” my friend said.  I thought about this for a couple of minutes, trying to come up with an exception. We were sitting at our campfire.  The night chill kept us huddled near the flames. “People have written about the concept of wilderness, and they’ve written about the history of the Wilderness Act; but there is no history of any particular wilderness area.”  A river behind us flowed gently from a wilderness area. “They are so new,” she said.  “It’s only because they’ve been in existence since 1964.  In a hundred years, these wilderness areas will have histories.”

As I rolled in my sleeping bag in the night, I thought about the absent histories of wilderness areas, and, the next day, as I walked in a wilderness area, I stepped on and over and through notions of its history. 

The Wilderness Act, passed by Congress in 1964, established a system of wilderness areas.  These were located mostly in the American West, where roadless public land remained.  The congressional act offered the following definition of wilderness:

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this chapter an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.”

“[W]here man himself is a visitor who does not remain” must be a place with a holey history, I thought as I walked.  I thought narrowly about history as something inherently human—I wanted to think that way.  The geology, biology, storms, and fires and such are features of a place, and they change over time.  When stories of those physical and biological features are written they are sometimes called histories, but I wanted to distinguish those geologies, biologies, climatologies, and catastrophes from the idea of history as a record of human experience.  History and wilderness areas were incongruous in the bright sun in which I walked.  Wilderness areas must, I thought as I shuffled down the trail, lack human histories. The primary effect of “forces of nature” in shaping wilderness areas as well as the human transience at the center of the Wilderness Act should set those designated landscapes outside of history.

My thoughts had snags. 

The first snag was human prehistory.  People of indigenous American cultures may have had significant lives in what are now wilderness areas.  They were people who were likely to have lived differently on the landscape than we do now and they lived in what can be called ‘prehistory’—in a cultural time before writing.  There was undoubtedly prehistoric human activity in what are now wilderness areas and some of that activity may have substantially modified the environment. When we ‘dig’ into the times and effects of those indigenous cultures, what is written might be called archaeology.  How those prehistoric cultures affected the environments of what are now wilderness areas raises great questions.   Questions about those prehistoric effects on what we regard as natural environments were on my mind as I walked in the wilderness.  How do we know where the effects of prehistory ended and historical effects on landscape began? 

My thoughts snagged also on the knowledge that our current wilderness areas may have encompassed significant historical populations.  There had been trappers, hunters, loggers, and miners of European descent for well over a century in most of the landscapes that were designated as wilderness areas.  There were also less transient human populations in some of the wilderness areas—they had held once ‘permanent’ populations centered at least loosely in communities.  These historical populations may have dwindled as resources slimmed or economies changed, and the people largely left what became wilderness areas before road systems were built.  Their stories could be written, and they would legitimately be histories of landscapes that became wilderness areas.

The story of a wilderness area would have its geology, biology, climatology, and natural catastrophes, but it would also have a prehistory and a history up to the time of the Wilderness Act.  Since its designation as a wilderness area, how much history could a particular landscape have gained?  How much historical human activity could a wilderness have and still be wilderness?  We will want to write histories of wilderness areas, and I am unsure what those histories will mean for wilderness.

Green

Green has begun.

Snowmelt has allowed the wheat to grow.  Although green through the winter beneath the snow, exposure to sun and rain and warmer days must surely have urged the wheat leaves to make new chlorophyll.  The swoops of hills are green pools. The color is more that of algal bloom than agricultural field.

As I drove across the state last weekend, the riparian galleries caught my attention.  They flashed yellow green.  The new leaves along the ochre branches of cottonwoods were parallelograms—they had pointed tips and a span of lamina held in the V of spreading brown bud scales.  Yellow green also spotted the red, wand-like branches of willows.

Finding My Medieval

The medieval is shuttered.  Through the shutter louvers little is visible, although I try to look.  The medieval is shadowy and obscure.  Some years ago, I read Norman Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages, in which he cautions that contemporary quests for the Middle Ages are “perilous and never-ending.” 

I’m not on a quest and don’t feel imperiled, although I am disoriented when I step from the bus in San Gimignano. I do not have a map.  I do not know where our B & B is or how to get to it.  When we step from the bus, we face a high wall built in the Middle Ages to protect the city.  A gentle rain begins, which adds to my disorientation.  We walk on the sidewalk around a Medieval tower at a corner of the wall and go up hill to look for an entrance.

San Gimignano is advertised as a ‘medieval dream.’  It is a hill town in Italy located not far from Florence.  It has a myth for its origin and Etruscan artifacts in its museum, but mostly it retains the architectural structure of its medieval boom.

The High Middle Ages, Norman Cantor suggested, date from the First Crusade of 1095-1099, but the flourishing of that era, extending from the 12th to the early 14th centuries, was surely tied to expansions of wealth and food resources.  The churches and many other buildings of San Gimignano were built in the High Middle Ages.  Its city wall reflects the power struggles and violence of that time.  Beyond the High Middle Ages, as in much of the rest of Tuscany, devastating plagues, especially in 1464 and 1631, reduced the population of San Gimignano and the people’s wealth diminished. Part of the story of this ‘medieval dream’ is that plague and insufficient wealth in a small population left little opportunity for the development of San Gimignano over the 500 years since the end of those High Middle Ages.

I walk the streets of San Gimignano, half expecting and mostly hoping that I will meet the medieval on someone’s stoop.  Is it ridiculous that I want to find a concept like the medieval on these streets? Indeed, how could I expect to find an era 500 years past in my contemporary travels?

I like to touch the stones of old places.  Each place has it own stoniness, and I grasp at the roughness. The various textures open my senses to the possibilities of a place and its times.

In San Gimignano, I feel closest to the medieval in the narrow lanes. The stone facades that enclose the lanes are close.  I wonder about the medieval sense of ‘closeness.’ How did these narrow lanes with their high stone facades contribute to senses of safety as well as confinement in that time?  There is comfort now in the tightness of the place and its proportions favor the pedestrian.  Of course, the ‘closeness’ and density of San Gimignano’s population may 500 years ago have promoted susceptibility to plague. 

Stoops in the lanes are washed in the mornings.  The medieval lanes must have run with gutters for sewage.  The smells of that age are gone.  Today San Gimignano smells of sausage and pizza and cotton candy on market day.

My medieval in San Gimignano is as thin and sweet as cotton candy.  It is as cool and rough as stone.  It has the elegance of simple angles and the beauty of an old place.

*  *  *

Notes

Middle Ages are “perilous and never-ending” from p. 39 in Norman Cantor, 1991, Inventing the Middle Ages.  Quill, New York.

I have used Gianna Coppini’s San Gimignano:  A Medieval Dream published in 2000 by Edizione Il Furetto for information on San Gimignano.

I was in San Gimignano on 11 to 14 March.

Irrigation

San Gimignano

Blackbirds sing before the first bells of St. Agostino.  They sing again after the bells, too.  The Blackbird’s vigorous song is like that of the American Robin and, in drowsy reverie, I braid the peels of Blackbirds, Robins, and bells. 

A slant of light comes through the lace curtains to make a lace of shadow on the wall. I have forgotten to set my alarm.  This doesn’t matter.

I walk later in the sun. Veronicas and violets bloom among the grasses below the town wall.  Hairs of fresh, dark nettle leaves catch the sun.  I am drawn to them but don’t touch.  Stalks of nettle flowers bend like purple tongues from the tops of plants.  Green stigmas of the females are recurved against the purple.