I took with me on this day a slim volume called Going to Seed Dispatches from the Garden and a file folder of some of my old poetry. I used Going to Seed as a palate cleanser. (OK so some of my old stuff wasn’t that bad. It was bad, but not bad if you know what I mean. No Vogon-worthy verses.)

I did love Goodrich’s book I have to say. What a delightful sense of humor he has. And most of his stuff is just a few stanzas, something I prefer to be honest.

Going to Seed
        by Charles Goodrich

        January evenings, I sit by the fire, salivating over the latest
fashion magazines—Burpee's, Wayside Gardens, Johnny's Selected
Seeds—dreaming that I'm still a young stud, still up for double-
digging a new bed, getting it on with the latest hybrids.

        Once I was biodynamic. I used to do a lot of heavy mulching.
I tried my hand at companion plantings, played around with French
intensive. There was a time I'd dibble seed into any dirt I came
across.
        But I'm done sowing wild oats. I'm not planning to graft a
branch on some other guy's tree. Anyway, who cares who can raise
the biggest zucchini. I'm happy just looking at the pictures.

A delight heh?

Here’s another that’s more reflective.

The House of February

        On the far side of the river, there's a grove of old
cottonwoods, ragged trees with worm-splintered crowns. Some have
toppled into one another's arms, and all are bare now in early
February. Here and there in the crotches of the branches, the canopy
is clotted with big, messy baskets—nests of the great blue herons.
        When the trees begin budding in another month, the birds
will return, carrying sticks as long as their beaks. They'll line the nests
with feathers and moss, lay clutches of eggs, and hatch their naked,
ungainly chicks.
        But today, I don't want to think about eggs, or hopes, or
starting over. I just want to savor the desolation of those trees, the
slate sky, the empty nests.

I really do like prose poetry of this kind and caliber.

The thing is that the pods are here, starting, as the blossoms did, at the bottom of the stalk. Before long the flowers will be gone and the pods will have taken over and that means fall is not far away.

Pictures courtesy of George.

Thanks George. Feel free to go take more.

But what I really wanted to tell you is that after the doctor, a friend and I went to a local nature center. It is based around a bog environment and so the plants that grow there are the kind that like acidic soil and water. It was a lovely little walk (can’t go that far yet.) Here’s just a few pictures.

Here’s their webpage.

via Eideard. Thanks to you.

taken by peardg

I love locust trees. The photo wasn’t taken by me and the tree itself is no where near me so I can’t check for the thorns, but I  think this is a black locust.

I love locust trees, in part because of the leaf shape, but mostly because of the way the thorns and the name fit together in my head. I’m not a cuddly-bunny kind of person, you know, I prefer badgers. And ravens to robins. So the same goes for trees. I like thorns. Of course the honey locust beats the black locust as far as thorns go, but still what a name – “black locust” – I mean how goth can you get?

Of course the word “locust” comes from the Latin word locusta that signifies both the insect we know as the locust and the lobster. That’s kind of cool. The visual parallel of the hard shell of the lobster and the insect was what must have been significant. The tree got the name because someone thought the seed pod looked like the insect—named though visual metaphor. I find that fascinating; it says something about folk classificatory systems don’t you think?

I think there is another layer though. The biblical place of the locust and the idea of a plague, and the hardship of the locust being your main food source. Both seem very thorny, with respect to the possibility of human comfort. And yet the leaves of the locust are wonderfully graceful and somehow soft and sensuous. The individual blades of the compound leaves even look like the straight wings of the insect. They are both fully strong and fully graceful. For me its the combination of the thorn and the grace that makes the parallel between the insect and the tree both meaningful and apropos.

Standing below this tree; moving through the surging air, I realized that willows spit in the wind. Not saliva of course, but catkins.

Oregon grape in bloom