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Agastache.

26-Jul-12

A piece on one of my favorite plants for the Denning Denizen.

Terror.

25-Jul-12

A few nights ago I slept little, as a thunderstorm rolled through the area and was sending down bolts all over the mountaintop.  Two bolts whacked trees just on the other side of the field, crackling through the air most impressively.  I was convinced of course that my cabin would be next.  As I’ve said before, the cabin has been hit in the past, and I always worry that the next bolt will do some real damage.  The perils of living on the mountaintop.

“Who has never eaten his bread in sorrow,

Who has never spent his hours

Watching and waiting for the morrow,

He knows ye not, ye heavenly powers.” – Goethe

Return of the Monarchs.

23-Jul-12

Another monarch butterfly caterpillar on my Asclepias this year.  It seems to have pretty thoroughly defoliated the plants, however, and I’m inspired to plant more of these butterfly weeds.  The ones I have I raised from seed, and that year I had so many come up from seed I didn’t know what to do with them.  Since then, however, I’ve tried to grow Asclepias from seed with no luck whatsoever.  I’ll have to keep trying.  I apologize for the blurry image, I need a new camera.

Fritz Haber.

23-Jul-12

This is undoubtedly one of the great stories I have come upon recently: Haber, the inventor of fertilizer and hence one of the great benefactors of mankind, also the inventor of chemical weapons.  A thorough tragedy and utterly Faustlike and amazing.  I heard the Radiolab story; other resources are here.

The Garden Grows.

23-Jul-12

Some of my lettuce has bolted, but other than that things looked very good in my garden on my return.  The gift of much rain.  I’ve been loving the purple basil this year.  Looks great and tastes great too.

Native Plant Gardening in the Catskills.

21-Jul-12

A piece I wrote for The Denning Denizen.

The Apostolic Succession of Generations.

08-Jul-12

I saw this turkey on my drive in to the cabin yesterday, leading an adorable cohort of little giblets.  (I don’t know the proper term for a baby turkey, so “giblet” will have to do.)  I love the way the parents speak to the little giblets, the little clucks and coos that make the little ones either scatter and hide or run behind the parent.

Beebalm Season.

08-Jul-12

I love these flowers.  And so do the hummingbirds, who wage a continual battle with each other to get at them.  Also known as Oswego Tea, I sure do use these leaves to make drinks.  Latin name is Monarda didyma.

I Think I Just Found A New Dish…

08-Jul-12

Daylilies!  These things are taking over the Catskills, so maybe I can fight back by eating them.

Newman, and Burton.

08-Jul-12

I found this in Burton’s commentary to his Kasidah.  The exclamation point I am sure is Burton’s.  From Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua:

To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history and the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of longstanding facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution (!) of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes; the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims and short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, that condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s words, “having no hope and without God in the world” – all this is a vision to dizzy and appal, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely without human solution.

Burton says, “I cannot refrain from quoting all this fine passage, if it be only for the sake of its lame and shallow deduction.”  (Newman uses this passage to prove the existence of Original Sin.)

One of those days.  It’s extraordinarily beautiful here, but I cannot avoid the feeling today that all my hopes must miscarry.  I see here also the flip side of the beauty: it’s great hiking weather, sunny and dry.  But it’s been so dry for so long – the past forty days – that the seedlings are dead, the herbs are wilting, and even the trees have stopped growing.  My raspberries have all aborted their fruits – the little fleshless cells hanging crisped up and down the stems.