It's Not Just about the Blooms, Birds, and Bugs

It's also about man-made spaces: gardens and buildings, streets and towns.

I come from a family of gardeners. My grandmother's lush yard in Virginia offered the lemony smell of old boxwood and deep shade of old trees. My mother's garden brought loose order to the woods and rocks of our hilly yard. My deceased sister-in-law grew into her gardening, and her daughter, my niece, is an organic farmer/native garden designer/floral designer. I am not a gardener of living plants like them, but I love gardens and make my own in words and pictures. I come by this pleasure naturally.

Mother's Rock Gardens

My first love, though, was buildings. Throughout elementary and junior high school, I wanted to study architecture and create beautiful spaces. I grew up in a home I loved, one that my parents and their architect friend designed for our own wooded yard. In childhood, I attended church in two beautiful spaces, one plain and simple like a country church and the other soaring and modern. The same architect designed the latter St. Luke's, and he and my father created the altar and processional crosses that are still used today. Home was cozy; church was austere; both were beautiful.

Home

St. Luke's Episcopal Church

Now I live where beauty thrives in nature and architecture. Each day, I surrender like bee on flower to the perfume of color and line and space and volume, to the blooms, birds, bugs, and buildings that set me abuzz.

Convocation Hall, Sewanee

"A New Madness"

In her 2010 article about an exhibition at the Sir John Soane's Museum in London, Anna Pavord recorded that Mary Delany wrote to her sister about her "new madness." As of an hour ago, I too have "new madness," thanks to a review of Molly Peacock's new biography The Paper Garden: An Artist (Begins Her Life Work) at 72.

Why didn't I know about Mary Delany's luminous "paper mosaiks"? I've been to The British Museum. I read The New York Times every day. How did I miss the review of the Yale show?

Until I can acquire Peacock's book, I shall feast on British Museum images and dream of cut flowers, cut paper, and milles-fleurs fancywork.

Twofers

We think we see what's there. Today I did not, until I saw what I saw with my naked eyes coupled with what the camera saw and then showed me.

To wit: I spotted two tiny butterscotch skippers, each half the size of a clover flower on which they dined. Zooming in on one, moving closer and closer, I finally spooked it. When he flew off, I saw his companion sharing the yellow canyon-bloom: a teeny tiny katydid nymph. Two for one!

Then I spotted something shiny and wet, translucent, brown, clinging to a reed. And a second on another blade. Spiders? I couldn't tell. They were beyond reach in the reeds, darkening after the sun had retreated. I snapped anyway, extending my arm out as far over the lake's edge as I dared. When I got home and downloaded my pictures, I found not spiders, but dragonflies in their exuviae, beginning their transformation, with dragonflies I never saw behind them.

How could I be so blind?

But surely we are all blind to most of the lives unfolding, beginning, and ending in the air around us, in the ground and water, in ourselves and on our skin, in our towns and country and alien lands beyond our boarders; we are blind to most of the companions riding on our own blossom, Earth.

Hamlet was right: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in [my philosophy]."

Classic in Black-and-White

Click on the classic!

Linked to the Evolution of Life

"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads." -- Henry David Thoreau

Summer Sounds

Summer's first katydids
sawed their songs
last evening, and this morning's
hermit thrush warbled
a three-note refrain.

On the music of their wings,
my father returned
in memory: sculptor
of cicada shell jewelry,
whistler of a three-
note family call,
trilling "I'm home!
Are you?"

What Afterglow?

Survival of the fittest looks like this among dragonflies:

First: Males stake out territory and patrol it with the vigor of a special forces unit of one. When another approaches, the patrolling male defends his space by flying right at the other, wings clashing.

Second: Males have two sets of genitalia. Read that again. Males have two sets of genitalia.

Third: The male prepares sperm at the tip of his abdomen and then touches that tip to his secondary genitalia, where he deposits sperm packets.

Fourth: The male flies to a female and grasps her head with his claspers. They fly in tandem, he doing the flying, she being flown by him.

Fifth: When she's ready, the female curls the tip of her abdomen up to meet the male's accessory genitalia. Females often reach up and grasp the male's abdomen with their legs. The result is the wheel.
Sixth: The male scoops away any sperm left from a previous mating or matings.

Seventh: The male deposits his sperm packets.

Eighth: If the female is lucky, she can oviposit her eggs. If not . . .

Ninth: . . . another male might grab her and the whole thing will begin again.