Silphium -- by Aldo Leopold

This is such a powerful little conservation story Leopold tells -- I just love the simultaneous sadness and joy it evokes (as any piece of good writing should do). How do you feel about it? I think I'll schedule this post to go live at the same moment I'll be listening to Wes Jackson of The Land Institute speak.

Silphium

Every July I watch eagerly a certain country graveyard that I pass in driving to and from my farm. It is time for a prairie birthday, and in one corner of this graveyard lives a surviving celebrant of that once important event.

It is an ordinary graveyard, bordered by the usual spruces, and studded with the usual pink granite or white marble headstones, each with the usual Sunday bouquet of red or pink geraniums. It is extraordinary only in being triangular instead of square, and in harboring, within the sharp angle of its fence, a pin-point remnant of the native prairie on which the graveyard was established in the 1840's. Heretofore unreachable by sythe or mower, this yard-square relic of original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, to a man-high stalk of compass plant or cutleaf Silphium, spangled with saucer-sized yellow blooms resembling sunflowers. It is the sole remnant of this plant along this highway, and perhaps the sole remnant in the western half of our county. What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.

This year I found the Silphium in first bloom on 24 July, a week later than usual; during the last six years the average date was 15 July.

When I passed the graveyard again on 3 August, the fence had been removed by a road crew, and the Silphium cut. It is easy now to predict the future; for a few years my Silphium will try in vain to rise above the mowing machine, and then it will die. With it will die the prairie epoch.

The Highway Department says that 100,000 cars pass yearly over this route during the three summer months when the Silphium is in bloom. In them must ride at least 100,000 people who have 'taken' what is called history, and perhaps 25,000 who have 'taken' what is called botany. Yet I doubt whether a dozen have seen the Silphium, and of these hardly one will notice its demise. If I were to tell a preacher of the adjoining church that the road crew has been burning history books in his cemetery, under the guise of mowing weeds, he would be amazed and uncomprehending. How could a weed be a book?

This is one little episode in the funeral of the native flora, which in turn is one episode in the funeral of the floras of the world. Mechanized man, oblivious of floras, is proud of his progress in cleaning up the landscape on which, willy-nilly, he must live out his days. It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life.

Earth Day Blues, Or Greens

It's Earth Day, a recognition that I feel has become as regimented, stilted, and looked over as Flag Day or Professional Assistant II Day (formally Secretary's Day). I'm by nature an introverted, melancholic, misanthropic guy; I contribute to the degradation of this planet. I'm sucking energy from coal-fired power plants right now, a resource ripped from the earth like a kidney from an abducted person for the black market organ trade. My natural gas heat just kicked in. I'll drive five miles to work in my 27mpg car. I'm sure I just ate tons of gmo junk in my blueberry muffin.

In the last day Lincoln has received over an inch of rain -- this is a miracle after last year's 12" drought which is now down to about 8". It's cool outside. The plants are barely poking up, but at least it keeps the anxious lawnmowing husband inside another day or two. I celebrate the rain as the plants ease into another potential drought.

Out here on the Plains high commodity prices are obliterating the last remnants, and I mean remnants, of the tallgrass prairie, and continuing to erode the arid mixed grass prairies. Last week in a class the same old topic came up from students, "Don't we need corn for food?" No. The beef industry needs it to fatten up cows who will some day clog our arteries. Feed lot owners have us wrapped around their fingers, then by extension big agricultural where a few large companies own the entire flyover country, pumping us full of corn syrup, spraying gmo crops that can take pesticides -- unlike the thousands of insects species, unlike milkweed that supports a monarch butterfly population on the brink.

The only hope environmentalists point to is humanity's capacity for emotion and logical thinking, sympathy, reflection, a brain so adapted and powerful it can do anything. Well, it can do anything, but it doesn't. It's easy not to care, not to fight, not to change because, in part, giant corporations have in essence written the state and federal laws that make it so hard for a common person to fight. Change never comes easy, I suppose, and most certainly not good change, not freedom, not the ideals this country presumes to be based upon.

I feel like a serf in a corrupt lord's kingdom. An Indian fighting British rule. A monarch butterfly tiring out, darting and circling among homogenous and barren fields for any milkweed at all.

Gardening is an act of defiance. It is as violent as storming the gates of congress or chaining one's self to oil pipeline equipment. Planting heirloom and organic vegetables is a flipping of the bird to Scott's and Cargill and an embracing of our respect for the planet that sustains us. Planting nearby pollinator-attracting plants like aster, milkweed, ironweed, joe pye weed, mountain mint, and coneflower will increase the number of insects -- the base of so much life in the world.

Touching the soil is recalling a memory as rich and soothing and mesmerizing as being in the womb. Dirt under our nails invokes a primal memory, a latent gene we shove forcibly to the side when we plug in and tune out, when we give up and head indoors, or insist on battling and subduing our suburban kingdoms with petrochemicals and lawns. Gardening is warfare. Gardening is a battle. Native plants are a flag placed on a hill, a line drawn across the Jeffersonian grid that blankets our nation. Gardening is an act of democracy, it produces freedom of body and mind and soul. Gardening brings us home to the pulse of bumblebee wings celebrating with us the power and the glory of creation, and our ability to use our best selves to liberate the planet, which in turn liberates ourselves.

Touch My Beard at Two Big Events

I hope you'll come talk to me at two local events this next week. My native prairie plant garden coaching business, Monarch Gardens, will have a table at:

Lincoln Earth Day, party at Antelope Park -- 4/21, Noon to 5pm, free. 75+ exhibits and plenty of food trucks.

Spring Affair plant sale, Lancaster Events Center -- 4/27, 9am to 4pm, free. The largest plant sale in the Midwest (get there early and wear padding or body armor!). Lots of vendors selling even more garden stuff.

I'll have seed bombs, seed pills, seed packets, my monarch butterfly and personal garden books, bee houses, info on gardening for pollinators, and more.

LEGO My Garden

Last Saturday I read from my new poetry collection at the Nebraska Book Festival in Omaha, and before the reading my wife and I swung by Lauritzen Gardens for the Nature Connects exhibit. Being a Saturday, the place was swarming with kids admiring the LEGO creations. Some day, I'll have a LEGO room again.

I suspect that if stung by a bee this size one would explode.

Perfect.

Not at all perfect. Grrrrr.

A dusting of snow also left this on the last of the iris out back:

As for life, let me tell you. It's insane. Teaching four classes with lots of prep and grading, giving talks on native plants, garden consulting, planning a trip, putting together two books with a hint at a third, trying to figure out the next stage in my life, what to risk and how much. You know how it is. I hope I'll see local folks at Earth Day on 4/21 in Antelope Park, and again on 4/27 at Spring Affair!

It's Time

As the air warms I fall in love again with a new season. It's unlike fall, which is my deepest, most passionate affair every year. Spring is more a delirious spark of temptation. Yesterday I sat on a stone in my garden, about twenty feet from the bird feeder. Juncos, grackles, finches, sparrows, mourning doves, blue jays -- everyone was there. They darted from the feeder to the last cover in the garden I've not yet cut down. One junco would call and suddenly the rest joined in, a loud crescendo like a wave over the landscape.

The crocus are nearly gone. The iris reticulata are bending over to touch their sweet-smelling petals to the soil. The other day I passed people embracing beneath a crabapple that will soon bloom. On campus the shorts and flipflop set are in full flare. It seems that any touch, any smell, any sensory perception can creap up on me and suddenly catapult me into another plain of existence. I don't know why. I don't know how a season does this, let along a walk in the prairie, the bluestem grazing arms, a butterfly settling on a shoulder.

"Suddenly I realize / that if I stepped out of my body I would break / into blossom." Those are lines from James Wright's poem A Blessing.Yet I fear that blossoming, too. It exposes me to the world in an overt way. I could have never been a flower, seductive, flamboyant, having so many insects reach into my heart like that--I'd grow fond of each one and feel the loss deeply when they left, hundreds of times each day. I couldn't be spent like that, yet this is what spring promises -- giving one's self up in the hope of a glorious fling, the shedding of our conceptions about self and world. Let go, spring says. Fly away and taste the fleeting nectar of a coneflower or prairie clover. Settle into the bloom and listen to the hum of wings crashing against the shore of senses we don't fully know but feel pulsing subtly within everything.

See the bee on the iris, nestled between the lips of petals, rubbing its body like a violin bow against the pollen? Carry the world home with you. Be at home in the world. This is your one great chance to be born again.

Milk the Weed -- Create a Wildlife Refuge

I'm not a glass is half full kind of guy -- if you've been visiting me here for a while you've figured that out. I know I'm fighting a tide that will overwhelm and consume me. The push for more ethanol, the high commodity prices, the farm subsidies, the nation of lawns... I know we're losing biodiversity at a pace that will mean we wake up one day and a switch has been flipped in our evolutionarily-unique brains: "How'd that happen? Boy, I wish I had something to eat, or at least clean water." Some believe that switch flipping will happen before 2040, when we add another 2 billion humans (see the link in the third paragraph below).

I am a firm believer that our home landscapes can radically stall the tide, maybe help us transition into the new world we're creating -- this switch is already being seen in public landscape architecture. Native plants instead of lawn mean insects. Insects mean more plants. More plants mean more mammals and birds and other species. More other species means higher quality of life for humans because the miracle of our environmental diversity to this point has, to some degree, been a spring cushioning this 6th great extinction event now in motion (you can read E.O. Wilson for more on that topic).

So when Chip Taylor, director of Monarch Watch, speaks to the above so candidly, I hear the connection I want ALL of us to have -- because we all have the potential to create wildlife refuges three feet out the front door and do something massive quite easily (and cheaply if you use seeds):

"It is very clear that the monarch population is declining. It's declining very, very rapidly and that decline is statistically significant and it's associated with the loss of milkweed in corn and soybean fields. I'm really concerned about what's happening in the United States because to lose monarch means that we are losing habitats that are shared by a large number of other organisms. To lose monarchs means we are losing a lot of other species and the species we are losing are predominately the ones that are doing the pollinating.

...pollinators keep the system together. They provide transfer of pollen for about 70% of the vegetation out there. If we don't have pollinators, we're going to lose a lot of the plants. If you don't have the plants, you don't have the products that pollination. You don't have fruits, nuts, berries, seeds and foliage everything else feeds on. So, you don't have your small mammals. You don't have your ground-nesting birds and you don't have much of anything. We're already moving into that condition in several states in this country where we really have huge areas where agriculture is so intense that there isn't much in the way of wildlife or pollinators. That's to our peril, I believe."

So I started a website and Facebook community called Milk the Weed -- in less than two weeks 250 people on Facebook have pledged to do something. The hope is to get folks planting milkweed native to their area (maps and plant lists are on the website), and once they do this they'll get hooked. The insects that nectar on milkweed, the monarchs that feed on its leaves -- hey, milkweed is a gateway drug to gardening with native plants for wildlife. It sure was for me.

Snow Geese, Sandhill Cranes, Sunset

I've lived in Nebraska since 2003, but only during the last three springs have my wife and I driven 90 minutes west to a choke point on the Platte River. Here, millions upon millions of birds migrate through each year. The first year it was a cloudy, cold day, and we were just floored by the number, size, and haunting call of the cranes in the corn fields -- these are here, in NEBRASKA? The following year, it was sunny and the cranes seemed restless and sparse. This year we set out in the late afternoon aiming for the time when, just before sunset, tens of thousands flock to the Platte to roost for the night among lost friends and family.

On the I-80 exit for Grand Island we found snow geese. People were pulling over off the interstate to see this large group.

We stood there in the unseasonable cold (it's snowing today, should be 55), watching the massive flotilla hold tight to the center. After a few minutes I felt shamefully bored. I'd marveled at the geese flying above my house for weeks, headed west toward the Platte migration area. Then suddenly my wife whispers "oh look look look" and a wave of hundreds, thousands rise up in a cacophony of alarm, or as if an itch went through one side of the lake. Up they rose and settled again like a blanket being placed over a bed. Amazing. They did this several times.

We drove the back fields for cranes. Their calls surrounded every nook and cranny of the otherwise quiet back country. Some danced, spreading their long wings and lifting a few feet, settling, and lifting again. They've come for hundreds of thousands of years, just as the sun has risen and set. By god I hope they come for a hundred thousand more. Looking at the linear fields, the center pivots, the grain silos, the roads and transmission lines, it doesn't seem possible that this wildness can overtake our stilted creation. This drives some people mad. For others, it lifts them for a moment beyond their self-imposed rules and reminds them that being human is being animal, connected to the earth and not something apart -- and so it is deeply right.

We drove for an hour before sunset, trying to find a good place to park, to pinpoint the landing of the first flocks. 20 minutes before sunset and they came from the south -- line after line after line headed for the Platte a mile north. Finally we parked in the middle of a two lane paved road with one eye in the rear view mirror, another to the west where a shadowed tree line seemed to lift off the ground and push north -- a forest of wings.

I admit I left feeling unfulfilled. I want to go back. I want to live there. I want to know the world more by knowing the seasons more, like this season of migration. I wanted to see the birds land on the Platte, but they stayed a mile east of the viewing platform (for good reason, as it was filled with cameras). But in the silence of an empty road the sky was literally filled with cranes -- bodies and voices, echoes of echoes as far as the eye could see. As this late snow falls I remember the centering I felt as a kid in Minnesota, alone outside during a storm, everything soundless, distances distorted through the white haze so I only knew the small space where I was in that moment. Sometimes I feel this in my small garden as I pass my arm over an aster or joe pye weed, when hundreds of insects rise up and settle again in the silent focus of their purpose. I pray in nature. I pray when I don't know it. I pray hope and faith that I will not be the only one to know such moments of agony and rapture out here in these rows of corn.

Brought to You by the Letter M

I was on the tv last week for the first time ever, talking monarch butterflies. You can see my grey hair below.

A lot is going on in my world: gave a talk on butterfly gardening this past weekend, giving one on native wildflowers next. Then it's the Nebraska Book Festival and more events -- including a slew of grading coming up for the English classes I teach. Busy, good work. In the background of all this noise I'm planning a research trip, working on two books, and assuming I have to do some garden cutting down if it ever warms up. A hard life. :) Here's to the thousands of snow geese I've seen passing over my house the last week -- to journeys that begin deep within us and we feel compelled to carry out no matter the physical cost.

Birds on Radar

Today area radar returns showed storms moving north in central Nebraska -- but these are storms of birds, perhaps millions of geese, cranes, ducks, you name it. I am honored to be near this flyway along the Platte River as life cycles thousands of miles north. Every day if I stand outside my back door and wait a few moments, a flock of something flies overhead, sprinting to this meeting ground 90 minutes west of Lincoln. Can you imagine standing under one of these radar returns? Maybe if you can you'll lift off and follow their call.

Nebraska Prairie Land Owners -- I Need You!

I've posted the below call on all my social media, and the last stop is here. Can you help me?

I'm looking for a Nebraska land owner who lives within an hour or two of Lincoln who is fighting to have prairie -- flora and fauna. I need to find someone who's been thwarted in some way by neighbors or officials, someone who believes to the core in prairie ecosystems, and someone who is having trouble along with victories. This implies they know a good deal about how a prairie works and why we need it. Why is prairie important to you? What does it mean? What's your history and experience with prairie? What benefits does prairie have over other landscapes? The acreage size can vary, but can't be miniscule. Know anyone? Message me or email bervogtATgmail.com.

Giveaways, Book Party, Die Lawn Die

So many of my recent posts have been, well, you know, serious -- so I'm happy to lighten the atmosphere and celebrate the release of Lawn Gone by Pam Penick. I contributed some lawn alternative choices for the northern Great Plains, and I am pleased as punch to be part of a book that advocates more sustainable, cheaper, and just plain exciting examples on lessening our typical lawns.

Lawn Gone is full of encouragement and advice -- the section I think is particularly neat is on tips for dealing with neighbors and cities, and converting lawn a bit at a time to ease folks into the transformation. Of course, regional plant picks from around the country are also a good starting point for anyone wanting to get there feet wet with a new kind of gardening that, it seems, is sweeping the country like the harlem shake.

You have until midnight on March 10 to enter for 7 great prizes at 7 great blogs. Leave a comment on this post with an email address (no email, no win -- replace @ with AT to avoid spam bots), and I'll use a good ole random number generator to pick one of you to win my prize from Prairie Nursery (see below). Winner must reside in the U.S. and will be announced on this post on March 11 -- unless I'm too busy ripping out my lawn, or my neighbor's lawn.

WINNER -- Peter! -- WINNER

Here's my giveaway:

Ready to seed a No Mow lawn? Win a 5-lb. bag of No Mow Lawn seed mix from Prairie Nursery (valued at $35). Prairie Nursery's specially designed blend of fine fescue grasses is an ecological alternative to a traditional, high-energy-input lawn. No Mow grows in sun and shade and also performs well as a footpath or border with moderate traffic. With deep roots, it’s drought tolerant and well suited to regions with temperate to average summers.  

The Other Lawn Gone Book Party Giveaways:

1) As a nod to cultivating a moss “lawn” in lieu of grass, Meems at Hoe & Shovel is giving away an adorable Moss Rock in a medium/Cobble size and Toadstool color (valued at $30). Moss Rocks are living sculptures and zen moss gardens all rolled into one. Donated by Moss and Stone Gardens, a design firm in Raleigh, N.C., specializing in moss landscapes.

2) Loree Bohl of Danger Garden is giving away a $50 gift card from Plant Delights, a mail-order nursery that’s a plant lover’s dream. Since 1988, Plant Delights Nursery has been the choice of serious gardeners and plant collectors looking for the best and rarest perennial plants. They have an enticing selection of groundcovers, ornamental grasses, and small perennials, all of which make excellent substitutes for lawn grass.

3) For those in temperate-summer climates, you’ll want to try the 5-lb. bag of Eco-Lawn seed (valued at $55) that Rebecca Sweet is giving away at Gossip in the Garden. Eco-Lawn, donated by Wildflower Farm in Ontario, Canada, is a beautiful, sustainable turf alternative that consists of fine fescues and rarely needs mowing. This giveaway is available to readers in Canada as well as the U.S.!

4) To dig out grass or to weed your new garden, you’ll want a nice set of tools, and Dee Nash at Red Dirt Ramblings is giving away a fantastic tool package from CobraHead: a CobraHead Weeder and Cultivator, a CobraHead Long Handle Weeder and Cultivator, and a set of 15 BioMarker weatherproof plant markers (valued at $115). CobraHead is a family-run business that produces and sells “The Best Tools In Earth.”

5) Genevieve Schmidt at North Coast Gardening is giving away a $50 gift certificate to the charming and tempting online nursery Annie’s Annuals. Annie’s specializes in rare and unusual annual and perennial plants, including cottage garden heirlooms and native wildflowers. They also have a wonderful selection of grasses and succulents, which make great substitutes for lawn.

6) At Digging, Pam Penick is giving away the only patch of lawn you may ever need – a tongue-in-cheek, 13x13-inch “grass” pillow (valued at $60) from Potted, a stylish Los Angeles garden shop and online store. Made from a high-quality synthetic grass, with Sunbrella fabric on the back, these pillows stand up to life out-of-doors beautifully. And doesn’t it look comfortable? Plus you’ll never have to mow this bit of lawn.

Snippets

I've been posting some "wisdom" on my facebook page lately, and I know not everyone who reads the blog follows TDM on facebook. So here you are -- nuggets of thought from your prairie sage (if only I smelled half as good):

I believe that gardens are wildlife preserves. Gardens are moral acts of civil disobedience, the same as if we chained ourselves to tractors digging pipelines or tearing down forests or unzipping last vestiges of prairie. Gardens (native perennial and veg) say no to big ag, big oil, and misguided government owned by special interests. Gardens say no to continuing our violent history with this planet and each other. Gardens are freedom and democracy in the truest spirit. Gardens save lives -- human, bee, bird, wasp, fly, spider, frog.

Out here in Nebraska you can be tarred and feathered for decrying big agriculture. But agreeing that big agriculture destroys just about everything in the environment means we're then complicit -- that the glory days we're in now will not belong to our progeny as we use up everything good; this is a lot to swallow. I don't believe in slowly winning over people, I'm just too impatient and misanthropic. Only through the deliberate work of writing can I order my ranting and raving into something that, perhaps, will slip under the radar and move us back into the world as caretakers and not pillagers. Only through growing prairie plants alongside my writing can I become the language I most want, where words become action then fall away to the glory of butterflies, bees, birds, and some bittersweet taste of hope.

For 5.5 years the subtitle of my blog has been "Poetry, Nonfiction, Gardening, Environment -- All in the Prairie." Today, I changed it to "Living and Writing in the Prairie Echo." It's not a big deal, but I think I finally discovered a term that suits the disconnect between corn fields and prairie preservation / the myth that prairie still exists here. Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Dakotas -- we all live in the prairie echo, and it's getting harder and harder to make out what the echo is saying. 

Farming Away Our Future

I'm enraged. I'm just so angry. I want to blow up tractors and burn cornfields. When I read articles like this, showing images of the last vestiges of northern prairie being converted to corn and soybeans, I just can't take it. Millions of acres in just a few years?* My god. My god.

Why is prairie important? Water filtration. Prevents erosion. A nursery for native insects which do the core of pollinating 70% of our food and are the base of the wildlife food chain. Grasslands also used to be incredible carbon sinks hedging against climate change, and cleaning the air like the Amazon rain forest; you've read my rant about that I hope. Lot's of graphs and stats there.

Red = a ton of conversion going on

Yes, let's plow up marginal prairie land that's highly erodible, that may or may not get enough rain year to year, because we have crop subsidies -- the farmer will make money no matter what. And let's be clear the farmer is not the Super Bowl ad's romantic version, it's big ag companies. It's lobbyists in government. The farmer is dead and died half a century ago.

Yes, let's plow it up. We need more corn, 80% of which goes to feedlots to fatten up animals as soon as possible, and those fat animals increase our risk for heart disease because they're so fatty. This is not the bread basket of the world (if it was we wouldn't be growing monocultures), it's the bread basket of corporate greed and genocide on a scale I thought we'd left behind: give us our beef, our diabetes-inducing high fructose corn syrup snuck in to almost every product. What a killing Cargill makes.

Yes, genocide. We did it once with the Plains Native Americans, and in the process were pretty thorough with countless species of flora and fauna. But we didn't finish the job. There's still land left in the northern Plains. The prairie pothole region where some 90% of North America's waterfowl breed. But why do we need ducks? We need ducks because they need prairie. Bible-thumping conservative rural folks, scripture says what you do the least of these you do to Me. Me = God. If you take away homes, cause extinction of species, you are eradicating any hope of heaven. You are eroding divinity.

Look at the lesser prairie chicken, an animal now relegated to northwest Oklahoma and southwest Kansas almost exclusively. One chicken needs literally tens of thousands of acres of open prairie to survive. If you save the prairie chicken, you save countless other species -- you also save us. You save us from the dust bowl and real starvation, you save us from climate change (for a while), you save us from our darker selves. We are better than this.

Maybe we should stop chaining ourselves to oil pipeline equipment and move to the prairie. Let's see thousands of people in a field chained together, preventing that last habitat from vanishing forever. Why? Because damn it, we can't be this bad. We can't be this evil. We can't be this stupid. We can't.

If we don't value the land that sustains us, we don't value each other and ourselves. We might as well start jumping off buildings and shooting each other -- end the misery our children and grandchildren will endure because of us, this culture. We are better than this. We love our children, don't we? We value our lives, don't we? Must our rage and ego condemn all life to just hanging on? Must our own insecurities be forcibly echoed on the landscape around us until all creation suffers the human condition of doubt, longing, and fear? If you can't love the least of this planet, there's little hope you can genuinely love anything at all.

 
*Mother Jones came out with a piece that has lots of fun facts: 

-- If farmers set aside some land for pasture we'd have healthier and tastier beef, and that grassland would mitigate farming greenhouse gas emissions by 36% since it'd be a carbon sink.

-- Prairie loss from 2006-2011 was on a pace similar to that of the AMAZON RAINFOREST. So where's a "save the prairie" campaign with sad tv commercials? Prairie is our rainforest!

-- This level of rapid conversion has not been seen since the 1920s and 1930s. We all know what happened as a result. If we plow up erodible land, fill in ponds, and take down trees, we're undoing everything the government made farmers do to prevent a dust bowl repeat! Lordy we are stupid.

-- Prices for corn and soybeans doubled between 2006-2011, thanks to ethanol mandates (you know it takes as much energy / resources to produce the equivalent amount of ethanol) and crop insurance.

-- This month the USDA issued a report, "Climate Change and Agriculture in the US" which states that it won't be until mid century when climate change starts to inflict serious yield declines. (But if we plow up more prairie, won't we be releasing more stored carbon and creating more temperature increases? We have to leave prairie alone NOW and pray to God, that's what the report really should say.)

Bald Eagles in Lincoln

My wife and I were coming home from the grocery store, zipping along at 50 on an interstate off ramp, and she says, "Are those eagles? Yes, yes, those are eagles!" She was just like Tweety Bird. So we went home, emptied the car, turned around with camera and binoculars, ran into an eagle by some houses and parked while another couple pulled up, got out, and the man shook his binoculars in the air like we'd just won the World Series. All of this action was within 1/2 mile of Capitol Beach Lake just west of downtown.

Ripping apart a meal as bits of something fell to the ground.

Full and off to join some friends.

Yes.

There are the friends. I see five. Right?

These were the first bald eagles I'd ever seen. Wish I had a really nice telephoto lens -- say 600mm.

I'm Not Ready

I admit a great sense of loss when the snow melts. I do not look forward to spring. I have not had my time of rest and introspection, I have not replenished my reserves and deepened my roots, and already the warm sun and temperatures in the 50s are coaxing me out of my depths. I feel strung out in this weather. Overwhelmed. In a few weeks the crocus leaves will shoot out from the brown lawn--already iris reticulata are an inch tall. And now, too, seeds must be started in the basement. It was only a little over 2 months ago that the garden had bright fall colors and glistened with the memory of a hot, dry year which still draped itself over me like a heavy shadow. And now spring? Yes, we will dip and rise, but like last spring the season feels early.

I'm not ready. Go away. Come back winter, seal me in with your cocoon of snow, give my full measure of the seasons so that I am whole again, truly ready for my spirit to embrace the good green changes. 55, you are like eating frosting out of a can before dinner--you make me feel empty and sugary. Let me earn you, spring. Let me earn the first pasque flower with all my soul. Teach me patience yet again, a lesson I need more and more. Hold off. Hold me at a distance. Be still.

Lawns, "Weeds," and the New Nature

A post in the New York Times on a lawn's / garden's ability to sustain us -- as in, lawns are dumb. The writer is talking about vegetable gardening almost exclusively, but I may fudge those thoughts with native perennials and shrubs.

-- "True, a lawn is a living, growing thing, a better carbon sink than concrete (though not as good as a vegetable garden or a meadow), and even more so if you leave the clippings in place, which also reduces the need for chemical fertilizer. And most people find a well-tended lawn pleasant-looking."

My neighbor across the street mows three times a week and bags his clippings most of the time. Another neighbor bags exclusively, setting out those bags for trash collection. I thought we were two decades past not mulching lawn clippings. I suppose this is why my neighbors fertilize 3-4 times a year and water every other day -- even as our rivers run dry amidst the warmest summer ever and top-category drought that covers 95% of Nebraska.

-- "But when it comes to the eye of the beholder, weeds are the same thing as beauty: to a gardener, grass is a weed; a row of lettuce surrounded by dark, grassless soil a thing of beauty. To some gardeners,  including me, dandelions are a crop. The situation, then, is not black-and-white. A yard is not either unproductive and “beautiful” — as a lawn — or, as a garden, productive and “ugly.” Many of us can thrill to the look of dead stalks, and even enjoy watching them rot. This is a matter of taste, not regulation. “In a way, that’s what these battles are about,” says Fritz Haeg, the Los Angeles artist who initiated Edible Estates and wrote the book of the same name (subtitled “Attack on the Front Lawn”). “They’re about reconsidering our basic value systems and ideas of beauty.”

 
For a wildlife gardener like me, I have a double battle to wage: the first is that native plants and the insects they sustain are better suited to our environment and thus potentially easier to maintain (the former), and the presence of a food source for diminishing bird and amphibian numbers is massive to overall environmental health (the latter). The second battle is that to NOT clean up the garden in fall is as important as having the native plants in the first place. Wildlife finds shelter in the standing winter garden, and there is far, far more interest in the garden as the russet, auburn, and tan colors dance in winter sunlight amidst falling snow (not to mention the insulating benefits of snow for plants that can suffer frost heave). Talk about easing the winter blues.

-- "They’re also about a relationship between us and nature. Lawns are an attempt to dominate and homogenize nature, something that hasn’t worked out very well. Gardens, however, especially urban ones, make visible “the intimate relationship between people, cities and food, constantly reminding us of the complexities and poetry of growing food and eating,” says Haeg. From which, just about everyone who’s thought about the subject agrees, we’ve all become alienated.

Even my students freely admit to the disconnect they have with the "wild" world. When is the world torn from our hands? When is it beaten out of our souls? And how can you possibly get it back when education and employment stifle creativity in favor of fixed methods of performing daily routines?

-- "And small-scale suburban and urban gardening has incredible potential. Using widely available data, Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International[3] estimates that converting 10 percent of our nation’s lawns to vegetable gardens “could meet about a third of our fresh vegetable needs at current consumption rates. Ten percent is optimistic; even 1 percent would be a terrific start, because there is a lot of lawn in this country. In fact it’s our biggest crop, three times as big as corn, according to research done using a variety of data, much of it from satellites. That’s around a trillion square feet — 50,000 square miles — and, since an average gardener can produce something like a half-pound of food per square foot (you garden 100 square feet, you produce 50 pounds of food), without getting too geeky you can imagine that Doiron’s estimates are rational."

Wow. I hate corn with a passion. Which means I must now hate lawn three times as much. No problem. And this is neat:

"Gardening may be private or a community activity; people garden together on common land, and most gardeners I know share the bounty freely. (In parts of England and France, people grow vegetables in their front yards and encourage their neighbors to take them.)"

I'll end with a quote from Thomas Rainer's post on the new nature being our backyard and small public spaces:

"The front lines of the battle for nature are not the Amazon rain forest or the Alaskan wilderness; the front lines are our backyards, medians, parking lots, and elementary schools. The ecological warriors of the future won’t just be scientists, engineers, or even landscape architects.  The ecological warriors of the future will be gardeners, horticulturists, land managers, Department of Transportation staff, elementary school teachers, and community association board members.  Anyone who can influence a small patch of land has the ability to create more nature.  And the future nature will look more and more like a garden."

On June 8 come see my garden, and let's talk about four seasons of sustainable native plants and wildlife habitat, about how the battle for nature is out my back door. And what a gorgeous, spirit-enriching battle it is.

Quotes on Writing / Living Memoir

Some of these speak so closely to me right now as I struggle through a first first first draft; I'm all lost one day and found the next, losing faith about form only to say screw it and find faith again. Then I lose the narrative thread because the fog of words conceals them -- when I cut out superfluous, rambly, preachy sentences and rely on the images and description, the fog lifts and I see the road again. Know your subject. Do research. Watch that fog turn into a plasma cutting beam 'o' precision, power, and grace. Find the story in everything -- everything. (below quotes from this piece here)

"Memoir is the only second chance you ever get at life. It is a willful turning back of the clock, a logical impossibility, and yet you do it, because your mind exists outside of time. If your memoir is really good, really honest, really from the roots of your heart, you yourself will not even know what is invention/reinvention and what is “really real” because the act of remembering imaginatively blurs those distinctions for you, forever." -- Lauren Slater

"Right now in American writing there is no genre as exciting as memoir — the writer can do anything, as long as it works. It’s like the 1920s up in this joint. So, I’d say, experiment with how you tell the story. In the best memoir it’s not the what, it’s how the writer tells the what — meaning and effect through form." -- Anthony Swofford

"Also: Do research. Bring in other eyes, other voices. Interview other people who saw what you saw, or who have some perspective on your story, and listen closely to how they tell their version of things. This deepens your account. Stories based on facts are more interesting and truthful and beautiful when placed within a prism of facts. Be a student of your subject. If you’re writing about an experience in a sober house, learn the history of rehab, the history of the specific sober house in which you lived, the chemical composition of benzodiazepine, etc. Everything has a history. Your personal story always intersects with larger subjects and may benefit by weaving them together, even if only by a fine thread. You may choose not to include research material in your story, but it should be at your fingertips." -- Avi Steinberg

"Accept the limitations and boredom of your life as the challenge of writing. Accept your profound lameness as the wages of your craft. The problem is never that your life isn’t interesting enough, it’s that you aren’t looking (or writing) hard enough. Don’t lie. Not to your readers. And not to yourself. Be a skeptic of your own recollections. Ask your family and friends how they remember things." -- Ta-Nehisi Coates

"The most important advice I could give to aspiring memoir writers is that it’s pretty much all hopeless. There is very little chance that you will get your memoir published by a mainstream publisher (or, for that matter, your novel). Also, if you do get published, the process will make you way more mental than you already are.... Just do it. No one cares if you write or not, so you have to." -- Anne Lamott

New Poetry Book

I'd like to announce the publication of my first full-length poetry collection. Here's what some say:

Afterimage is an unsentimental but heartfelt elegy for the landscape and the people of the twentieth-century Midwest. The poems preserve the lost place, the lost time, and lost inhabitants, but Benjamin Vogt also celebrates the earth's own ability to flower and return, with human assistance and without.  These firm and carefully measured poems are a thoughtful delight, one that should not be missed.
-- Andrew Hudgins

Benjamin Vogt's rich, transporting gift is to see deeply, generously considering moments and scenes that preceded and sustain the lives we know, to dig curiously and calmly, alert for clues and remnants--to harvest more than any seed promised.
-- Naomi Shihab Ny

Using family photographs from the last century, Afterimage moves from the southern to northern Plains and the eastern Midwest, where the natural world calls out through open fields and dark woods, then through transient moments framed by gardens: a butterfly nectaring on a coneflower, planting lavender with his future wife, or autumn leaves crashing against a morning window. In a rich array of forms and evocative imagery, the poems in Afterimage reach through prairie history until grass becomes skin, and light becomes shadow.

You can buy it on Amazon or straight from the press. Then, do let me know what you think, either on Amazon, Goodreads, email, or here. Please? I'll give you a prairie.