Growth, Decay, Growth

Early spring: the time of year when I spend most of my time in the vegetable garden, preparing rows, planting seeds and home-grown seedlings, weeding and weeding again. It is also a time when I am struck with wonder at the miracle of it all: the seeds germinating, the growth patterns, the yearly emergence of asparagus spears, the delicious fruits and vegetables I'm able to grow. 

 

Although I do understand––a little––about DNA, it still seems remarkable that this teeny broccoli seed, put in soil and watered, will grow into the broccoli plant in the first photo; it is mind-boggling to think about it.

These more recognizable seeds of corn will grow into six foot tall plants. Of course other life forms, including Homo sapiens, have tiny beginnings, all wondrous. 

Working in the garden, and walking in the woods,  also reminds me that decay has a major role in the life cycle. A compost pile is a clear lesson in how scraps of food and plant remains can be transformed over time...

,,,,into a nutrient rich soil supplement.

In a more natural way, years of decaying plant material creates a forest floor welcoming to new plants and trees. 

Over a long period of time I've seen an old pile of logs become more and more part of the forest floor, covered with mosses and lichen, small plants, and young trees; it is now a mound of new green growth, softened in outline.

The plant-covered pile of logs above began just like this one, and I expect that in several years these bare dead logs will be covered with plant life.

Decaying tree stumps are also hospitable to new plants, which create a lively mix of greens, and rich textures.

Many mushrooms grow on dead wood, such as these hemlock varnish shelf mushrooms brightening a tree stump. 

Decaying trees support more than other members of the plant family, and fungi: when I see wood chips scattered over the forest floor, I look for the telltale holes made by pileated woodpeckers drilling for insects. I've often heard the loud rat-a-tat-tat of these large birds hammering in the woods.

This cycle of life to decay to new life reminds me of John Cage's words: 

The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.                                                       

 

A Renewal

 

It's been several years since I've posted on this blog, but some reading I've been doing lately has got me thinking that I might enjoy writing again. It's early spring here in northern Vermont, the ice is receding from the edges of the pond, green leaves are visible under the shallow pond water: a time to start afresh. 

The poems of Alberto Caeiro, a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa are making me aware again of the value of looking closely at the world around me: 

The astonishing reality of things

Is my daily discovery.

Each thing is what it is,

And it's hard to explain to someone how much joy this gives me,

And how much that joy suffices me. 

And

In my gaze, everything is clear as a sunflower,

I'm in the habit of going for walks along the roads,

Looking to the right and to the left,

And now and then looking back...

And what I see at each moment Is something I've never seen before,

And I'm very good at that...

I know how to feel the profound astonishment 

A child would feel if, on being born, 

He realized that he truly had been born...

I feel newborn with every moment

To the complete newness of the world...

Caeiro asks us to look, to truly see, with no preconceptions, no thought. I've also been reading several modernist French writers, such as Jean Frémon, Pierre Reverdy, Franck André Jamme, and Philippe Jaccottet whose prose styles are inspiring. It is Jaccottet's Seedtime, selections from his notebooks, that also made me think about making notebook-like entries in my blog, along with photographs. Although the blog is titled Studio and Garden, I don't think I'll post my artwork here, but will leave that to Facebook and Instagram. But I do hope to write about art that I see in museums and galleries, once I'm back to visiting those wonderful, much-missed places.

In the woods, the mosses have been refreshed by yesterday's rain, and their intense greens can't be matched in the natural world. Their shapes vary, from tiny tree-like forms to soft cushiony shapes, some that make resting on a moss-covered rock inviting. 

In the first entry in Jaccottet's Seedtime, he urges us towards a "complete forgetting": 

Attachment to the self renders life more opaque. One moment of complete forgetting and all the screens, one behind the other, become transparent so that you can perceive clarity to its very depths, as far as the eye can see, and at the same time everything becomes weightless. Thus does the soul truly become a bird. 

Dried Plants: Color, Shape. Pattern

Before the ground is covered with snow I want to celebrate the browns and grays and dirty yellows, the interesting shapes and patterns, of plants whose growing season is over. It's a very different beauty from the greens of spring and summer, but the subtleties I see now have very attractive qualities. The mallow seed heads above are delicately veined and translucent, opening to show the black seeds inside. There's a burst of weathered red, worn and shrunken, of a rose hip.

Thin lines of dried daylily leaves make paths across a granite rock.

The cut-back leaves of Siberian iris are a burnt sienna hue, and have a texture like a head of unruly spiked hair.

There are also tall columns of stately leaves....maybe phlox?

One of my favorite plants––baptisia, or False Indigo––has leaves and seed pods that turn black in the fall.

Some leaves curl upwards, like gently closed hands, showing different colors inside and out.

The dried leaves of the annoyingly invasive Canary reed grass are a bright light ochre at this time of year, and seem to catch light.

Then there are the ferns, whose rich red-browns add a deeper tone to the landscape. Some ferns are a complex tangle....

....and others have simpler, more elegant curves. This dried frond looks especially beautiful alongside the gray-green lichen. Even the dying end of the year has its loveliness.

A Walk in the Woods: November's Brilliant Mosses

Today was a beautiful day, and my walk in the woods was a delicious experience: yesterday's rain enhanced the spicy-sweet scent of autumn, and heightened the intensity of  mossy greens.

Nestled amid browns, the bright greens of moss are startling. In spring and summer, when the world is green, the mosses seem more ordinary.

Looking closely, we see varied textures; here, frothy, like an unkempt head of hair.

Along with the greens are the delicate red stalks of fruiting bodies....

....which carry the spores for mossy reproduction.

Here, another kind of moss, a beautiful mound with a different texture, and pointed little green fruiting bodies.

I'm actually not sure what these are, but they're wonderful looking, like Kali, the many-armed goddess, rising a couple of inches above a rock.

Finally, here are two mossy plants that I believe aren't actually mosses, but are clubmosses (I think). They are different from true mosses in that they have a vascular system, meaning stems to carry water and nutrients. They are more "sophisticated" in this than mosses, which lack this system.

But whether mosses or clubmosses, the bright greens amid the browns are heartening. They remind us that life of all kinds continues even though it seems in suspension during late fall and winter.

A Walk in the Woods: A Vast Small World

Looking closely at the tiny details of a woodland habitat can confuse a sense of scale: clumps of moss become wooded hillsides; masses of mushrooms rise above the forest like water towers or oddly shaped wind turbines; the lines of pine needles are downed logs.
(click click click to enlarge and see the scale shift)

A small army climbs up the steep rounded slopes.

Waving above the frothy mosses are the tall red stalks of their fruiting bodies.

Lichens too have tall reproductive structures: pillars topped with shallow cups.

Alongside the mushrooms, lichens, and mosses, new plants have beginnings: a small leaf....

....a maple....

....a conifer.

All this life, this variety of species, is growing on a pile of decaying logs about 5 feet long and 2 wide. Decay is not an ending.

Spring Hope

No other season brings with it the excited anticipation, or the hope of Spring. After months of cold within nature's suspended animation come signs that life will begin again. It is very easy to understand how the myth of Persephone was formed, with her living in the underworld for part of the year, and her return to earth in spring; the stirrings of growth do seem to ask for a magical intervention. I returned home yesterday after several days away, and although there was some fresh snow on the ground, there was also a large sweep of bare lawn. This means the robins will soon return to peck at the frozen ground.

At the edge of the pond a spring is running with fresh water.

At another clear circle a tiny shoot of Yellow Flag iris pokes up bravely.

Along the south facing foundation daylilies have emerged, even warming holes in ice.

Snowdrops, the earliest and most hardy of flowers, are raising their pristine heads.

In the woods, the receding snow has exposed mosses at the base of trees, vividly green after the winter's moisture.

Above my back door is a line of Phoebe nests. Each year a female builds a new nest, though I've read that they sometimes use an old one. They'll return soon and soon there will be eggs, then little beaks sticking up above the nest's edge. Sometimes I wonder why they return to this spot, since I annoy them by using the door to go out to the backyard. Then I see the female sitting in the ash tree, bobbing her tail and waiting for me to leave.

When I took a close look at the nest I was surprised that the nest was anchored by mud on its bottom, with grasses and mosses and feathers above. Birds' nests are beautiful things, and a sign of the persistence and hope of life.

As for the other members of my household, Poppy and Blinky have decided that it is indeed spring, and mild enough, though still chilly, to go outside and get some fresh air. We in the animal kingdom, and our friends in the plant kingdom are all full of joy at this turn of seasons, as fitful as it may be.

Snow Melt

A touching phenomenon happens in the woods at this time of year: the temperature is warm enough that natural objects begin to sink into the snow as into a soft enveloping cushion; there's a feeling of tenderness in the way each small thing is held.

A bit of evergreen stem rests beneath an ice-rimmed hole.

Dried leaves have settled into the footstep of a deer.

Scattered needles make a pattern on and in the snow.

Circles bare of snow have widened around the warmth of trees.

Snow and ice have retreated from the bark of an ancient apple tree, and mosses have emerged, looking like a miniature hilly landscape.

The temperature was in the mid 40s today, a beautiful and delightful day. It feels as though it's been 6 months since we've experienced that mildness, though it's probably been only 3. It was a perfect day to begin pruning my apple trees, so after my snowshoe in the woods, I took my hand pruner out to my old lady tree, the first tree I prune each year.

She's very old and bent over, and I don't expect her to live much longer, but there are vigorous new shoots every year, heading straight up, that have to be pruned off. This tree seems so wizened, yet has so much life left in it, that it's a lesson in aging gracefully and with energy.