Prairie Garden Coaching Right Here

I'm looking to help you plant natives. No job is too big or too small, too messy or too clean of a slate. Give me your tired lawns and overgrown hedges, your wildlife yearning for sanctuary in a chem-free environment. Give me your new build, your deck pots, your cRaZy landscape, your right of ways and school grounds. Link on over.

Healing the Garden & Ourselves

As I ready the landscape for spring, I'm reminded of Linda Hogan's words, which we've just read in my English classes. Her book is Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, and highly recommended. 

"The word rake means to gather or heap up, to smooth the broken ground. That's what this work is, all of it, the smoothing over of broken ground, the healing of the severed trust we humans hold with earth. We gather it back together again with great care, take the broken pieces and fragments and return them to the sky. It is work at the borderland between species, at the boundary between injury and healing."

And as I cut down old sunflower stems beneath migrating snow geese and sand hill cranes half a mile above:

"In this one plant, in one summer season, a drama of need and survival took place. Hungers were filled. Insects coupled. There was escape, exhaustion, and death. Lives touched down a moment and were gone.

I was an outsider. I only watched. I never learned the sunflower's golden language or the tongues of its citizens. I had a small understanding, nothing more than a shallow observation of the flower, insects, and birds. But they knew what to do, how to live. An old voice from somewhere, gene or cell, told the plant how to evade the pull of gravity and find its way upward, how to open. It was instinct, intuition, necessity. A certain knowing directed the seed-bearing birds on paths to ancestral homelands they had never seen. They believed it. They followed."

L.A.W.N. -- Lusty Advocate for Wayward Nihilism

It has begun weeks early. As I type my walls are vibrating, and my neighbor is dripping sweat about to fall over, pushing his slave-driving mechanism back and forth over a chemically-dependent lawn, green unnaturally early. He must love it, because the instant the lawn turned this week he's out there.

The guy across the street mowed last weekend before his lawn was 50% green. Now that it's 75% he made sure to get up at 9 this morning and let everyone know 6 months of sheer hell was upon us like some starving grizzly bear looking for a mate.

I really, really must know what's with this ritual, why people enjoy this, what they get out of it, why these lawns are so important, what it does for them, what drives them. If I walked around the neighborhood taking an informal survey, I'd just end up getting punched in the face. But it beats hearing lawnmowers, smelling that exhaust, thinking about the greenhouse effect and all the money we give to petro-chemical corporations, imagining fields of wildflowers paved over with rolls of sod, watching birds flee to trees like ghosts.

The only wildlife I see in lawns around here are dogs squatting over brown patches laying chocolate eggs. 

We need an acronym, so if you come up with a good one, let me know. Here are some:

L.A.W.N.

Likely A Wonky Nationalism

Leaping Anally While Needy

Look, A-holes Waking Neighborhood

Lacking Any Wisdom (about) Nature

Lusty Advocate for Wayward Nihilism

Lusciously Against Wildlife & Nature

Sandhill Cranes in Flight

We went and saw the cranes again last Sunday, but unlike 2011, it was hard to find them. They seemed more scattered and skittish, maybe because the wind was coming out of the south at 40mph. Last year the weather was foggy and 45, this year sunny and 80.

The photos from last year have the cranes at a distance and mostly standing, but this year I got many in flight. Hence the post title. If you want to HEAR the haunting call of this ten million year old bird, migrating 500,000 at a time in the only mass crane migration of its kind in the world, link to the crane cam around 7:30 am and pm cst.

Crane on the right looks hurt.

Forms of flight?

As usual, they don't like cars.

Largest group we found, maybe 1,000 here along a hill.

Cranes, center pivot, and corn. An uneasy truce.

This is not a crane.

Talking Plants, Live

As part of Finke Garden's 2012 opening, I'll be giving a talk on some local prairie plants that work for me, and maybe doing a little reading / signing of my garden memoir Sleep, Creep, Leap. There will be art and poetry, too, as well as plants to buy and a NE guide to wildflowers book. For the full list of events, click on the link below.

Our Lives With Nebraska Wildflowers
Finke Gardens
500 N. 66th St. 
Lincoln, NE
Thursday, March 22
5-7pm

And in case you don't stalk me, here's my pictorial spread (ooolala) on Fine Gardening's blog.

Also have a guest post / story up for Timber Press about being on a garden tour last year.

Why I Hate Spring

Not just why I hate this spring, mind you, but every spring. Of course, this year it's just plain worse. Worse I says.

1) There was no winter. There was no break. There was no respite. It was dry and warm. Which means fewer seeds will germinate. It's 80 here. I got mild heat stroke.

2) I'm not rested. There is hardly a blip in my mind and heart from October to March. I swear it was a week ago I was marveling at the bright red of ninebark and the copper of bald cypress. I need my seasons, and....

3) I'm sick sick sick of hearing people on social media praising spring, so excited to garden again, as if the winter was long and boring and the most terrible period of their lives ever. Get real. It was waaaaay too easy. We haven't earned spring. I feel like a massive slacker. I need to go beat my back with a whip. I'm still impure.

4) I'm not anxious for spring one bit. Spring means clean up. And since it's so hot I started nearly a month before last year, and finished on 3/10. The pressure of spring is pissing me off. Get off my back, spring. I'm warning you. Step off, punk.

5) I always boast that my 1,500 feet would require only one mad day of cleanup. Which is true. If you aren't a garden hawk. I see seedlings to move, plants to divide, mulch to place, beds to expand, branches to trim.... It's like having a frenetic disco ball inside my head. And now this year I've started seed inside and plan a veggie bed. What the sandhill crane was I thinking?

6) People leave their barky dogs outside longer, and more often. This means less sleep for me.

7) Basketballs thud well past dark. Leftover fireworks punctuate twilight. The gun range is getting busier.

8) Lawnmowers. This is inevitable, like death or bad bowel movements. Or blog posts like this one with references to bad bowel movements. Usually, the first mowers go off about April 1 even though the lawns aren't even green. Then come leaf blowers and edgers for 6 months. Then comes the cRaZy blogger.

9) Winter is for reading and writing. I did much reading. I did not do much writing. This infuriates me. I'm way off schedule. But I wasn't ready. Now I am. And now it's spring. How can I stay inside when the birds are chirping and butterflies are coming out and there are so many crocus and iris to macro? (yes, it's now a verb) It's hard to get in a groove, especially hard to discipline one's self anyway. Stupid spring.

10) Spring means summer is next. Summer is hot. Summer means many trips. Summer means insects and flowers to photograph and fawn over like Homer Simpson does donuts. Summer means even less time to write. I will never name my kid summer. Autumn would be better. Spring would imply they walk funny. Winter would be weird. Might as well name your kid wintergreen and hang a pine tree around their neck. Which I would do.

* And to add insult to injury, the willows and crabapples are turning green, chokeberry and serviceberry are breaking bud, the elm is blooming, and I think I saw a cicada the size of a football eating a junco (it was far away, so maybe not the case). Fall right on into summer this year. :(

The Sadness of Scissors

Iris reticulata began blooming yesterday, weeks early. The crocus began on 2/2, weeks early. In the garden is a sense that winter never came--the leaves are still fluffy and crisp between stalks of aster and coneflower, and many seeds still adorn stems like ornate finials.

So spring is here early, and I've begun the annual cut down not in keeping with my lazy, late March schedule. If I can let in sunlight to the bare soil now, perhaps more plants will sprout. Today I saw two silver-spotted skipper butterflies--how hungry they must be.

As I grasp the stiff neck of a liatris stem, it's not hard to remember the monarch that touched the fleshy sinews, that tasted with its feet the deep-tongued scent of a bloom. It is almost impossible for me to close the sharp blades of my scissors around the stem and snap them closed. The same can be said for the eupatorium that was a favorite ambush point for a preying mantis over several days. And there, beneath the shadow of a maple, I nursed back to health a transplanted milkweed. Up on the hill, the contorted tube of blue sage is an afterimage of a hummingbird, bent down just so against the wind as it reached for early autumn sun, and frozen in this position like some plastic flamingo's neck.

It's difficult being in the spring garden, wiping away a year so carelessly. I'm a sentimental fool. For over a year I've kept the 12' tall ironweed, laid ceremoniously against the basement foundation, tucked away like a mortar board or birth announcement. Looking at it now, two years later, I just can't break it into pieces for the compost pile. It doesn't deserve that.

On my hands and knees I poke my head into a caryopteris and find the seed head of a last black-eyed susan. Pinching it between my fingers I rub off the seeds and toss them into the breeze, letting them fall wherever spring will have them. When the garden is empty of its autumn, flat and devoid of memory, I hope the promise of new growth will carry me past myself and into the world again--as it has each of the last four years. But I just don't know. The garden is never the same, always the same, again and never again. I put the scissors in my pocket and settle on the nearby bench. I hear red-winged blackbirds. The sun is warm. Tulips are breaking through the stubborn clay soil.

Go Go Gadget Grow Lights

My wife helped me reorganize the closet under the stairs so I could fit in a grow station. It's my first ever. I've two shelves, with one to expand on, two T5 lights at 6400K, heat pads, timer, and fan. Even soil-less potting soil. Hopefully, in a few weeks I'll some native perennial seedlings to hand out at Lincoln's Earth Day, where my garden coaching business will be (coneflowers, aster, goldenrod, liatris, milkweed). Also may start some veg--I'm virginal with that, too.

So, grade me on a scale of 1-10: 1 it's ugly and won't work and I think you stink at gardening (you're mother was a hamster and smelt of elderberries), and 10 it's awesome and makes me want to strip naked howling through the streets in joy for you and all creation glory be amen.

Crocodile Crocus Crosses Circus

I like alliteration. So much so that many nachos were sacrificed for my lunch time crocus sandwich. (eh) The crocus have been blooming since 2/22, a full three weeks earlier than normal. I even trimmed tree branches and began cleaning up in prep for my vegetable experiment (a new bed, and I don't believe you people who say growing veg is easy. Ornamentals are easy.).

I ate some of the flowers, so here are what's left:

 

You're thinking: "Wow, so that's what crocus look like! I had no idea. I haven't seen any others in my garden, or on 50 other blogs this week. Thank you. You have the best gardening / writing blog ever. And you're so attractive. Man. You got the whole package going on. Are you married?" 

 

Prairie Dog Executions--LB473

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior, 1890

Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, Oklahoma

Today the Nebraska state senate is, most likely, passing a bill--LB473--that will allow the government to go on to private land and poison prairie dogs, which are being classified as noxious weeds (don't ask, you know how government works). If pdogs on your land spread to adjacent land, then the government has the right to go poison your animals and then bill you later. Not only is private property being disregarded, but more importantly, so is the health of a keystone Great Plains species.

Prairie dogs once numbered 3-5 billion across the mixed and short grass prairies. One town in Texas was estimated to be 100 x 250 miles, or 16 million acres and 400 million pdogs. Meriwether Lewis called them barking squirrels.

Historic Range of all Prairie Dog Species

Since pdogs constantly clip plants and flowers in their towns in order to keep an eye out for predators, their towns were prime grazing land for bison, as fresh forage was always guaranteed. Prairie dogs also improve the soil, constantly turning it over, bringing up minerals for plants. In fact, prairie dog towns increase biodiversity and stabilization across a range of species--grasshoppers love the towns and feed birds, vacant holes provide nesting sites and shelter for all sorts of amphibians and owls and rodents and insects, and all that prey feeds endangered hawks and foxes and ferrets. My favorite childhood toad in Oklahoma, the Texas horned lizard, has seen its population fall over 50% in the last few decades as ant colonies, their primary food source, vanish. Ants love prairie dog towns.

Prairie dogs are what biologists call a keystone species, much like the bison were--that is, such a large number of other species depend on their existence that without them whole vast ranges of the ecosystem simply vanish. Gone. Gone. Gone.

If we poison prairie dogs, we poison the health of the land we depend upon, and we erode our very own culture. This is a tired argument no one listens to, though. Certainly not ranchers, whose major claims against pdogs is that they destroy the grazing land by eating forage and creating holes for cattle to fall into. I have yet to drive by a prairie dog town strewn with fallen cattle, crying out into the void, starving with their legs broken. If anything, cattle should be poisoned--they foul fresh water streams, erode those stream banks, and trample away grass and wildflowers. The amount of water, drugs, and fattening corn they demand in a beef culture severely taxes our environment in ways we can't even begin to address here. We've been duped.

All of this reminds me of the anecdote where a rancher caught a coyote he thought was preying on his sheep, tied a stick of dynamite to it, lit the stick, and let the coyote run off to explode. The coyote ran for cover under the rancher's new truck.

I'm so disgusted by our society and our culture, to the blindness of our governments established to protect us, to watch out for us, to correct the blindness of our greed and set a higher example, to hold us to our most basic moral and ethical beliefs even when we turn a blind eye to them. Pipe dreams that maybe never existed. Right now lobbyists for ranchers are cashing their checks, and life on this planet continues to be manipulated in ways that simply dwarf the genocide we commit on our own species (our oceans are near death being over harvested, soon we will grow chicken breasts in petri dishes). Yet there will be no books, no speeches, no monuments to the fallen prairie dogs, to the blowout penstemon of the sand hills, to the salt creek tiger beetle. What difference is there, in the end, to a pile of emaciated humans in a concentration camp and bodies of poisoned prairie dogs spelling out the word "US Biological Survey?"

1933

What we do to life "beneath" us we will do to ourselves, and often worse. It's an indicator. A warning. A keystone signal that we should go in for psychiatric evaluation.  

Here's a piece by Paul Johnsgard noting in what ways the prairie dog is morally superior to humans, and so should be placed on the state flag. It's tongue in cheek. Or is it. 

(Stats and figures taken from Prairie Dog Empire by Paul Johnsgard and Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild by Michael Forsberg)

Someone Else's Life--On (My) Memoir

I've spent the last two days frantically looking for a photo I set aside months ago (note to self, when you find something, put it back where you found it--especially since I have a photographic memory). After 2-3 hrs of searching I found the photo that will start the book. Of course, along the way I rediscovered other photos and letters to / from my grandmother, notes, news clippings, gifts, a record in low german. Things I would have yawned over like some giant yak not even a decade ago. Now I hold on to each speck as if they were bits of my soul, smatterings of unlived memory (someone else's life) like a fog I reach for but that dissipates in my eager embrace. I need to live my own life now--and I wonder if writing a memoir about another time and place really counts. 

Me (tube socks), Grandma, Sister on Corn, OK Homestead

I'd like to think the above image was taken before we moved from Oklahoma to Minnesota in 1986, but I suspect it may be a year or two later. In any case, it's an act of desperation and love--there's such earnestness behind it. "Please," it seems to say, "please remember what I remember, even though we both know it's impossible. Story is all we have, even if that story is a fragile ghost itself that's more fiction than truth."

Homestead Around 1930

And the above is a clipping from Corn, OK's paper in 2003 celebrating the centennial (click to read). My great aunt contributed the facts, though my research has shown some are wrong--for example, Elizabeth's first husband, Peter, and her daughter died in Kansas in the early 1880s. I wonder how much is true, how much is false, and if it matters any more. It's my job to accept the mix of the two, to then mix them up even more with my own memory and research, and make some sort of greater truth that supersedes it all. That's what we call memoir, folks. 

If you want to know more about Turkey Red, my 6th book in progress, link here why don't you.  You can read about Custer and oil wells and windmills.

Certain Uncertainty

Over the last six months I've been feeling an overwhelming pressure on my bones, muscle, and blood. I think I've felt this before--in periods of my life of stagnation and fear. I've let it go too far this time and it's hell getting back. Usually, the way to overcome such invisible weight is to do something, but I feel like I don't know what to do. But I also feel like I do, and that's what scares me the most. The older we get, the higher the stakes it seems, the more we have to risk, the more we have to lose and we forget what it is we can gain by risking everything. And I'm talking in vague abstractions, something I tell my students to never do. This was an introduction to upheaval.

Yesterday my last grandparent, my grandmother, was moved into assisted living. The only idea I have of what this place looks like is the one my other grandmother died in nearly 6 years ago in Oklahoma, a woman who would be 90 tomorrow (2/22/22). The physical distance I've had from both events, both places--nursing homes in Oklahoma and now Minnesota--are reliefs and forms of torture. There is nothing any of us can do about tomorrow, it's true, and I've been a poor example of carpe diem. But to me, in the face of such changes in my family, and at 35 and unsecure in employment or even place, the only real answer to living in the present seems like a giving up and cashing in. That is, thinking seriously about risking everything--home, car, everything we are taught we need to be happy, and that, of course, do bring real joy and necessity. I do like having air conditioning and reliable transportation. I am blessed and fortunate.

See, I'm rambling. I feel like I've been in a coma for a year, maybe years. In that time I've surfaced for gulps of air--write a poem or essay, finish a book, host a garden tour. But these events are like the aftertaste of good chocolate in your mouth, and you want more. I want more. More than whatever this is. Purgatory? No man's land? I need a kick in the butt.

I'm nearing the realization that, at least in this point of my life, I won't be a college teacher. And this is maybe an essential step to my evolution as a person, that might, someday, make me an even better college teacher--or simply lead to something else just as or more rewarding. Maybe I've dumped too much energy into a machine I can't be a part of. See, I don't know. I wish I could do this on television (bad joke at the wrong time?) and make some money off of it, get myself that acreage and prairie. But maybe that's too much. I'm not ready for that kind happiness if I can't find it in my 1,500 foot paradise.

I look at my grandmother who was so happy, seemingly, with so little. A small apartment, but near family. She walked and lived (walks and lives, why the past tense) with rose-colored glasses both to be admired and concerned with. But as Alzheimers slips over her I feel with great urgency, a great restlessness pushing against my skin from somewhere deep inside, the need for a massive change. A change I might not be prepared for. I don't want to forget who I am, and I think over the last year or so I have begun to forget, lost some wonder, lost some carpe diem. I am a mirage to myself.

I don't know what such rambling posts mean to this blog. Both I and the blog seem to be in some pre mid life crisis. I can see it in the sedum and bluestem, too, in the garden. We need dividing.

Today I notice the snow receding from the garden through the window. It is very much like a bed sheet, exposing warmth to cold. The cloud line has moved east, the sun is out, I feel entombed and fenced in by the nearby stand of trees. This is why I could never live anywhere but on the plains--if I lived in the mountains or forest I'd feel breathless and afraid. Hunted. Stalked. Our species' primal memory is of emerging from the jungle into a savanna where we could see danger coming and escape.

There are two incredibly important tasks at hand for me: writing a book on the Plains and Oklahoma and family, and whatever this thing is behind the fog that lays over me. I can sense it. Hear its breath. Feel its eyes centered on me. Is it predator or prey? Strange, but I believe that until I write a memoir I won't know. How can writing a book set you free? Physically free, not just emotionally or spiritually. And how afraid I am of it--this big experiment, this leap of faith which in the end will be only a small step, yet one that will deplete me. The real leap is beyond and unimaginable. We tend to call it faith.

We leave memories. Moments. Feelings in walls some people pick up on and call ghosts. We are echos the moment we speak or move, even before we are physically gone. We trail off in our thinking and passions, our love is a conditional uncertainty that is certain. I love the prairie that is now only an echo in our landscapes. I love my family in the remnants of barns and stories, memories of warm 7up in plastic cups and sweet juniper after a rainfall. I think that if I leave only one thing behind, my marker, my echo, I want it to be a piece of writing. And yet writing is in everything--a garden, a child, a wife. Not just a book. Writing is that red-winged blackbird perched on the fence eying the feeder, the flash of its body, the ricochet sound of its warning call and its wings in the air like a pebble in a pond. Slowly, our rippled presence blends into the world around us if we remain still enough to settle our spirits into one moment that can be forever. I think, right now, it is a prayer.

Nebraska Blooms

Did I miss GBBD? Well, here ya go.

Is that the first hummingbird?

Actually, it's quite lovely outside. Low 40s and sunny. Our 12" of snow is now about 2-4", and will be gone this weekend. I no longer order plants--growing my old, from wild seedlings to cuttings to divisions to closet propagation. Still, shouldn't plant catalogs have seeds embedded in their pages?

Sketch the Shadows

My family has grown up on the prairie, in the Midwest, on land that, according to author Kathleen Norris, rubs off on us to make us feel that we don’t need to connect. Norris, who grew up and lives in North Dakota, frequently stays at upper Midwest monasteries for reflection and to continue her monastic-influenced spiritual education. These monasteries, according to Norris, often “follow silence at certain hours, but I had never before immersed myself in the kind of silence that sinks into your bones…. To live communally in silence is to admit a new power into your life. In a sense, you are merely giving silence its due. But this silence is not passive, and soon you realize that it has the power to change you.”

There are places for silence, moments in our days that we require, not that we want, but that we absolutely need. And the more we have them, the closer we get to ourselves and the world. I know that when I am dusting or cooking, the world drops to the side, but not completely away, and I am absorbed in the focus of my work, just as those monks who are finding praise and glory in their silent prayers of work. But most of all, I find the kind of silence Norris speaks of so deeply and transformatively right here, in this moment, writing out these words. I suppose that I have mini moments where I allow myself to daydream on the garden bench or on the porch, but they are soon interrupted by other thoughts. Here, the focus is intense, onrushing, consuming, it sinks into my bones to the point that every part of me is aerated and I breathe deeply some fresh, new life—as one might do on a cool summer’s evening after a hard rain.

In these silences, these deep breaths, there is a necessary mystery I follow, sometimes discovering new roads, new ideas, sometimes ending up in a place I’d never dreamed of, sitting back, and feeling blessed for having had that moment. It is an intense shuddering through my body, it reverberates, it’s like a limb warmed up after coming inside form the winter cold, tingly, pulsating, coming alive again. 

I get in trouble all the time for being silent. Even after nine years of grad school and being silent in classrooms, and being chastised by peers and teachers alike, no one has ever suggested—and me neither until just right now—that my silence wasn’t ever so much about shyness (though certainly it played a part) as it was about respect for language and the search for belonging and understanding in this chaotic world. In my personal relationships I’ve noticed a tension of silence in my refusal to chit chat with those closest to me about things that seem to be already implied or said. Words can fail when there are too many of them, and frankly, there are too many of them. They confuse the issue of being alive, of being alive not “with” but “in” the world.

I don’t understand people who jog or garden with headphones on, and I certainly don’t understand and even despise the construction workers with loud stereos fixing the siding on the house down the street. There is so much language around us everyday that there’s an overload of perception in place before we wake up, and I’m not talking about human language at all. Here’s Thomas Merton, talking about his arrival at a hermitage in a rain storm. “All that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.”

When I’m in the garden I learn the names of birds without having to turn my back, or shutter with the seemingly large shadow moving over me. I don’t jump back (as much as I used to) when I’m dive bombed by a bee. I’ve learned to comfort myself outside by the presence of the wildness around me. I know the call of the red wing blackbird, the cardinal and blue jay, house finch and grackle and yellow finch and mourning dove and so many more. The other day a  streaking black and yellow mass buzzed me and I thought for sure I’d stumbled across a hornet’s nest, but it was just a dragonfly come to perch atop a penstemon. How beautiful it was, clear shoji screen wings, pencil like abdomen and tail. And how beautiful they are at dusk, plastered along the west side of the fence in the fading sunlight, a full warmed silence until the crickets and frogs take over at dusk. Yes, language is all around us, and so much of the time we tune it out and call it silence when in fact it’s not even a fraction of true silence—it’s an echo or afterimage only. 

Moments like these remind me of a high school art teacher who once told me that in drawing and painting you should first sketch the shadows, and then the forms of what you intended to draw would reveal themselves more truthfully on their own.

What 12" of Snow Looks Like

Biggest snow in 3 years. Heavy and wet, equal to 1.25" of rain. It's absolutely gorgeous outside--warm ski weather.

Have a seat

This is not a weeper--it's an althea in dire straits

Garden entrance

Not much "interest" left, let alone bird cover

Cool elm trunk

Snow took down a feeder

Click and expand

Rotate upside down to see through

Off the rain chain

1870s Advertising

I've finished looking over some archives of the Herald of Truth, a 19th century Mennonite newspaper based in Indiana and devoted to aiding Mennonites on their way from Europe. There are reports from those preparing to come over, lists of collections taken by American citizens to help pay for passage, warnings to immigrants about scam artists at the NYC docks, updates about new communities in the Plains, and climate reports. And then there are the ads:

Gray’s Special Medicine

The Great English Remedy. An unfailing cure for Seminal Weakness, 

Spermatorrhea, Impotency, and all Diseases that follow as a sequence of self–abuse: 

as Loss of Memory, Universal Lassitude, Pain in the Back, Dimness of Vision, 

Premature Old Age, and many other diseases that lead to 

Insanity of Consumption and a Premature Grave.

Full particulars in our pamphlet, which we desire to send free by mail to every one. 

The Specific Medicine is sold by all druggists at $1 per package, or six packages for $5, 

or will be sent free by mail on receipt of the money, by addressing 

The Gray Medicine Co, Sold in Topeka.

----------

[a variant of the below is still sold in Walgreens and CVS]

Lydia E. Pinkham’s

Vegetable Compound.

Is a Positive Cure

for all those Painful Complaints and Weakness

so common to our best female populations.

           

It will cure entirely the worst forms of Female Complaints, all ovarian troubles, 

Inflammation and Ulceration, Falling and Displacements, and the consequent Spinal Weakness, 

and is particularly adapted to the Change of Life

            

 It will dissolve and expel tumors from the uterus in an early stage of development. 

The tendency to cancerous humors is checked very speedily by its use.

             

It removes faintness, flatulency, destroys all craving for stimulants, and relieves 

weakness of the stomach. It cures Bloating, Headaches, Nervous Prostration, 

General Debility, Sleeplessness, Depression, and Indigestion.

            That feeling of bearing down, causing pain, weight and backache, 

is always permanently cured by its use.

             

It will at all times and under all circumstances act in harmony with the laws 

that govern the female system. For the cure of Kidney Complaints 

of either sex this Compound is unsurpassed.

[$1, six bottles for $5. Pills or lozenges. Mrs. Pinkham freely answers all letters of inquiry.

            No family should be without Lydia T. Pinkham’s Liver Pills. 

They cure constipation, billousness, and torpidity of the liver. 23 cents per box.

----------

A Preventive for Chills, Fever and Ague.

a sure cure for

Dyspepsia, Indigestion, Liver Complaint,

Headache, Dizziness, Loss of Appetite,

Languor, Sour Stomach, etc.

Especially adapted for Kidney Disease

and all Female Weaknesses.

The Dandelion Tonic is principally composed

of fresh Dandelion Root, Juniper Berries,

Red Peruvian Bark, Prickly Ash Bark, Iron and

Alteratives; also an antacid, which will remove

all belching sensations that are produced from

sour stomach.

Price, $1.00 per Bottle, or Six for $5.00

For Sale by all Druggists and Dealers in Medicines.

If your dealers do not keep it, sens direct to

the proprietors with money enclosed

Sole Proprieters,

Leis Chemical Manufacturing Co.

Lawrence, Kas

Aren't they fascinating? Clearly the first one is for teenaged boys. I'd like to see contemporary ads try this style on for a change, especially when discussing female weaknesses and how the tonic works in harmony with the laws of health.

Guilted Environment

Warning--this post has no stats, no links, no proof. Just thoughts, experience, belief. Unfortunately, belief is something easily poo-pooed in a culture that more and more is cynical toward groups--whether that be a religion, a bunch of garden writers, or a corporation. We have good reasons for cynicism; look at our federal government / special interest figure heads. Look at your last girlfriend who left you for a Packers fan.

As the conversation over the National Wildlife Federation and Scotts joining to save wild spaces and get kids outside simmers down into more rational emotion, I feel full of guilt. My own, and others. Am I a nut for believing that we have happier, healthier, smarter people if our home landscapes had more wild habitat and less lawn? That depression and anxiety and ADHD would ease? That our kids, following a butterfly or making mud pies might be more creative, abstract, and fearless thinkers in whatever profession they choose? That they'd be more effective leaders? Shouldn't I just shut up?

Do you remember playing in the mud? With sticks? Do you ever sit and play with sticks now? Grab a piece of mulch and pretend it's a bulldozer? Am I the only one? Maybe I played with my Lego sets too long past high school.

Homeowners are guilted into thinking they need a pristine lawn or landscape. Anything wild is wrong, you won't fit in, people walking their dogs will give you the evil eye. Whole neighborhood associations have policies towards stringent landscape appearances of green earth and bulbous boxwood. Where did this come from? A religious-based fear of the wilderness? The Puritanical idea that nature tests our morality? And if it does, we've failed. In our attempt to exorcise personal demons over class, race, wealth, sex, and intense emotions, we do everything we can to recreate the environment to what we need or want, to what our ideal is, pillaging as we go. We've cut down the forest to make it a savanna so we can see the predators coming at us, but now we are even more wary and uncertain. We are even more afraid of each other (who's the predator now?).

I was just thinking this morning about my Mennonite family, burned and torutred during the Spanish inquisition, forced to leave the Netherlands for Prussia, forced to leave again for Russia, then again centuries later in 1874 for America. Each time they relocated they rebuilt their villages and homes in the same way. They kept their culture close to them, and remade the land into familiar ideals that helped preserve their identity. This is why the prairie vanished so swiftly from Kansas and Oklahoma--a sense of home, not of adaptation or patience. And perhaps a sense of guilt, a built in wanderlust that seems innately human. We are nomadic and it hurts us, keeps us from the world and from our deeper selves. (If you want readings on these environmentally philosophical thoughts, look at The Machine in the Garden by Leo Marx, This Sacred Earth by Roger Gottlieb, anything by Lawrence Buell.)

Lawn care companies make us feel guilty for weeds in the lawn, for brown lawn, for not fertilizing and mowing and watering religiously. At the hardware stores it's 50% tools and 50% lawn care products, especially from April to July.

I don't use a drop of chemical anything, and I've only been gardening for four years--I just dove in and went trial by fire. I've created a habitat of mostly native plants, of various sizes and textures and blooming times, and the diversity brings in good bugs who eat bad bugs, insects who feed baby birds, and seeds that feed migrating and winter birds. Everything supports each other. Each year more life rushes in like a broken dam. I know I spend less time in my landscape than my neighbors because I can hear it from inside my house--the guy next door mows 2-3 times per week and waters every morning. The folks across the street mow at least as often, edging and blowing for hours on a once-tranquil Saturday morning, wasting away their weekends. (Do they really enjoy it I wonder? Even when it's 90?)

Maybe you see this as a judgement, but I see it as an opportunity--I spend about 2 days in March cutting down the garden, and that's it for the year. Maybe 1 day I'll top dress with compost. My mulch is cut down perennials. My joy is sitting back on Saturdays, watching the three-dimensional life swoop in and out, crawl around, I sitting in the deck chair sipping lemonade, letting my thoughts take me wherever and grounding me, all the while trying my best to tune out the whirl of fertilizer spreaders, the chug of sprinklers, and the vibrations of mowers spewing exhaust my way. Actually, I don't even go outside on weekends anymore. There's no point--everyone is outside working. I mean relaxing.

My Writing / Gardening Shed

I don't have my mythical 100 acres to restore to prairie yet, but I found the cloister I'd like to build among it. Which one do you prefer?

Just imagine the books I could write and gardens to imagine in my little haven. And these are just some of the designs by a firm in the UK. You can have a green roof if you like, a wet bar, a bathroom. Whatever. If you have $40,000, send it my way? (Actually, one million would be better--need the land and a tractor and geothermal and solar and wind turbine and walkie talkies to contact the wife and ask when she's leaving me since I never walk the 200 feet to the main house to say hello).

NWF in Garden Bed with Scotts

I'm sure most of you have heard that the National Wildlife Federation, promoters of the backyard habitat certification program, have partnered with Scotts of Miracle Gro and fertilizer and insecticide fame. Two programs are key: increasing wild songbirds (by buying Scotts birdseed) and getting kids back out into nature (where they can absorb all kinds of Scotts products). I apologize for my snark. Go read Tallamy's Bringing Nature Home, and Louv's Last Child in the Woods. That's all you need to light a fire under you.

The president of the NWF proclaims lawns as carbon sinks, useful places to help curb global warming. This is a joke. Please, do not dump chemical fertilizer produced with oil from Iran (hyperbole, maybe) on your lawn four times a year, most of which kills good soil bacteria and other life, then runs into our streams and lakes killing aquatic life. Instead, top dress with free compost from your local city. But, that wouldn't make any money for Scotts.

Lawns are antiquated dreams of a 19th century American middle class wanting to have small, private Versailles. And the democratic idea of Olmsted, where lawns create a large park bringing us together, is ludicrous--we have fences, I don't know my neighbors, et cetera. Kids may play in lawns, but they learn nothing about themselves or the natural world, its processes, its lessons. That happens among the brush. It cures ADHD. It speeds a patient's recovery from surgery. We don't need more lawns, we need more habitat, shrubs and trees with berries, flowers with insects--insects that are key protein sources for songbird chicks. In Nebraska, we need prairie like we need love and forgiveness and oxygen. Prairies are carbon sinks.

The best article so far, summing up the outrage, the backlash, and the corporate brush off, is right here. (This post also has links to NWF's Facebook and Twitter feeds if you're so inclined to say something to them.)

Feel free to check out this link about Scotts new GMO lawn seeds that resist Roundup, so anyone can spray willy nilly, and in the process create super weeds. 

Also, Scotts trying to overturn bans on nitrogen lawn fertilizer in Florida during rainy summer months.

Obviously, I don't agree with NWF--who claim not to support all of the Scotts products, and see this as a way to work from the inside out in a company that wants to change (so why don't they?). The chemicals we spew on this planet are immense--we really have no idea. From lawns to gardens to big crops, to the feed in cattle and chicken and hogs, to what we put into ourselves and release into the sewers to be "treated" but is never really gone--Tylenol, antidepressants, estrogen, the gmo food we eat.  When you refinish a bookcase. When you paint your house. Most anything you toss in the trash.

Now the NWF appears to be supporting (and is financially supported by) a company whose basic raison d'etre is "Buy chemicals. They will save you. Have a spider? Spray it. A brown patch of lawn? Treat it." We spray before we think, and NWF tripped up. My garden and lawn pests are treated, often within days, by natural predators, all because I invite in those predators with non-lawn habitat.

I have little to no faith in our government. If we want things to change for the better, whether they be environmental or social or economical, the private sector must do it, must turn the tide and create such an uproar the government may finally act. Unfortunately, I don't have enough money to buy politicians and get stuff done sooner. All I have is this blog. This post. Some anger, confusion, and sadness. Sometimes it gets me hoping through writing, but not today. I am so disheartened. As I will be again, I'm sure. I'm going to go start some liatris seeds.

The Hawk in the Garden

For ten minutes I watched a sharp-shinned hawk try to snatch songbirds from my garden. It was an awesome experience. Guest post with pics over at Wildlife Garden.

Low German Mennonite Sayings

I bet I get about two comments on this post. But it's interesting to me as I might include some of these in the next book. I try to imagine each being quite clever, moving, funny, instructive, even scolding in their day. But were they? And what sayings do we have today that will be thought strange or hard to understand in one or two hundred years? "Like shooting fish in a barrel."

1) Wan du friee jeist,
dan besee die eascht de Mutta.

When you go courting to get married,
first observe the mother.

2) Waa lang lawe well mot Tsemorjest ate
aus en Kjeisa, opp Meddach aus en Kjeenijch,
on Tseowent aus en Pracha.

He who would live long must eat like an
emperor in the morning, at noon like a king,
and in the evening like a beggar.

3) De Kjaakjsche onn de Kaut senn emma saut.

The cook and the cat are never hungry.

4) Aules haft en Enj,
Bloss ne Worscht nijch.
Dee haft twee Enja.

Everything has an end
except a sausage.
It has two ends.

5) Wan’t emm Winta kracht
Can buschelt’t emm Somma em Sack.

When you hear the cold in winter crack
The summer harvest will fill the sack.

6) Dee weet nijch fal;
Dee es blooss hinj’rem
Owe oppjewosse.

He doesn’t know much;
He grew up behind the oven.

7) Onnmaajlich aus Kjielkje ute Kruck ate.

As impossible as eating noodles out of a jug.

I'm not sure what dialect of Low German these are specifically, and Low German has no set standard (likely because it became an oral language giving way to High German). Still, good advice on #1, wouldn't you say?

Macro Orcam

I recently did two things against advice I received: 1) bought a 15x 70mm binoculars and 2) at Christmas asked for and received a 25mm Canon SLR lens tube extender. I'm pleased with both, since I can now see birds much further away (and into neighbor's windows) with the former, and the latter produces such images as the below (click on to expand):


Marble in garden gate



River Birch



Copper bird feeder

Invasive rush

I do need to take these macro shots with a tripod, even on a still day--the images would be crisper, and I'd be less dizzy. I suspect a macro lens would require less fine tuning and hand holding--I'm still trying to figure out aperture and f-stops--but I'm having a good time, especially as it's in the 50s.