Flowers Again, Prodigal, Extravagant Flowers

Over the years I've watched the banks of this creek, the red flowers of the buckeye trees show up in greater numbers. Some in clusters, some on their own, maybe to start new clusters.

Here against a fence on the bank of the creek, we see young trees in the foreground, very probably the offspring of the modest-sized tree to the right on the other side of the fence.

One sees new trees, a foot high or less, in a lot of forest understory. Few of the new trees will have the room and sunlight to grow large, but nature sows them extravagantly. In my April 10 post that came just before this one, I reflected on Loren Eiseley's observation that, over (roughly, of course) the past hundred million years or so, the wildly prolific and prodigal flowering plants provided the biomass needed to feed warm-blooded mammals and birds, thus providing the nutrition for all the species in these biological classes to flourish.

 

The trees seem to compete for ground. Within a hundred yards of these stand sycamores, red maples, oaks, hickories, sweet gums, river birches, hornbeams, and a few more I don't know the names of. They put their fruits out too, after flowering. The buckeyes put forth, well, buckeyes, also known in some places as conkers. There's a very tasty chocolate and peanut-butter candy named after them. Acorns from the oaks, nuts from the hickories.

Some of these fruits try to protect themselves from being eaten. The gum balls from sweet gums that grow widely in the American southeast are prickly, which keeps some would-be diners away from the nutritious seeds inside these fruit-balls. Here they lie among leaves which, when more decomposed, might nourish a tree that grew from one of the fruits.

In spring, the rains come with the warming air and lengthening days, filling the streams that help feed all this new life.

It's not hard to see why trees grow thickly around streams, even those that go dry for a few weeks or months during the year.

And other life is nourished by the spring water flows. Last week I crouched by the side of this stream, and saw, side by side, a very young bullfrog, no bigger than a small toad, and a large bullfrog tadpole, no doubt not far away from its movement into the final cycle of his form. I wondered where they would be, if they survived, when the creek is dry in a couple of months. It occurred to me that they probably just follow the receding water downstream, where the flows from the intermittent streams merge into one large enough to hold water all year. Downstream from that are small ponds in wet bottomlands, and eventually, a river. Prodigious numbers of eggs, like flowers and fruit, are deposited into water somewhere. Some of the frogs will make it.

A Moment In Springtime

A beautiful spring day--one of those than which no more beautiful is possible. Everything green and cool . . . . Bright sun, clear sky, almost everything now fully in leaf except that some of the oaks are still silver rather than green.
--Thomas Merton, from When the Trees Say Nothing


Here and now, most of the trees aren't fully in leaf, but they will be soon. This is the time we find trees of different species at different stages of sending forth their flowers and leaves. Most of them are just getting started, and look like the ones below, changing every day as the time of full foliage draws closer.

The sky behind these trees at this moment will be mostly obscured in a week or two.

My oaks are gold rather than Merton's silver. Gold is the color of the flowers--reproductive organs--on these red oaks.

These river birches also hold flowers.

Trees with small, briefly-appearing flowers aren't known for those tiny, ephemeral flowers, but deciduous trees are flowering plants, plants that hold their seeds in protective case-like structures, from which all the flowering plants take the name angiosperms. Their flowers are overwhelmingly prolific, as anyone who has tried to keep what we call "weeds" out of a garden knows.

The writer and naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote a wonderful essay called "How Flowers Changed the World," a part of his book The Immense Journey. Eiseley writes of

. . . fantastic little seeds skipping and hopping and flying about the woods and valleys [bringing] with them an amazing adaptability. If our whole lives had not been spent in the midst of it, it would astound us. [The new plants] glowed here and there with strange colors, put out queer, unheard-of fruits and little intricately carved seed cases, and, most important of all, produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before . . ."

The foods, Eiseley continues, came in three forms--pollen and nectar, fruits, and the food encased along with the seed itself. Until these food sources were available, nourishment for the high caloric needs of warm-blooded animals like ourselves was very limited. We're connected in our evolutionary history to these plants and owe them a great deal for the fact of our existence.

Animals that aren't warm-blooded don't have the metabolic horsepower to keep them active in cold weather. This eastern box turtle seems to have just awakened. I don't believe he's been up long, because dried mud on his shell looks like leavings of what he may have slept under through the cold months. His torpor is still evident, too. When I picked him up, he seemed unable to retract his head completely into his shell. In summer, these guys do that very swiftly.

Some of the trees are in different stages. This buckeye, or horse chestnut, has its leaves in summer form. The red flowers growing along the racemes will blossom in the coming weeks.

And finally, did A. E. Houseman see something like the image below when he wrote these lines?

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with blossom on the bow . . .

This liminal time of spring, a moment of transition in the year like dawn to a day, exhilarates. The phrase "promise of spring" means something, if only another year of growth, another year of fruits, pollen, grain, livestock, whatever becomes food for something else.

But it's not just a promise. It's a moment. One to be appreciated because of its beauty, and because it won't be around long.

Beauty in the Moods of a Creek

"The world did not have to be beautiful to work. But it is."
--Mary Oliver

I liked Mary Oliver's statement about beauty not being exactly necessary when I first heard it on NPR, and I still do. But what she's also saying is that human beings find the world beautiful. We may find it beautiful because we're created by it and embedded in it. So it resonates through us strongly enough to strike us with awe. And the more we realize we aren't really separate from it, the more we appreciate it.  

To find beauty, pay attention. It's all around, in your backyard, in the eyes of a friend, in the passing clouds. Look into a wild place, even a small one. You can see there what billions of years of evolution have prepared you to see. 

It's safe to say that at any time, somewhere in the world, rain is falling on the surface of a stream. And rain makes life possible, makes our blue-green home a living thing. We're don't just live in that home. We're part of it. 

My much-watched creek has moods. It doesn't fall into the emotional states we call moods, but it evokes them in those who watch it. The moods are affected by the light, the extent and color of surrounding vegetation, water levels that run from dry to flood. Changing seasons influence all of these elements. The tilt of the earth in relation to sunlight, then, shapes the sensations that enter my mind and body when I look on this tiny patch of earth. And the sensations shape my mood. A late-evening mood, a springtime mood, a winter mood. A mood very similar to those of others, but in the last analysis, one all my own.

I am not separate from all these mood-molding elements. My existence takes its shape and form from them. Why would I not find them beautiful? 

The ivy in the foreground above hints at something unseen, whatever supported its climb to the level it holds here. The picture is partial, but suggests something beyond it--everything else it's connected to. 

Beauty enters awareness, too, when we see these interconnections in the world, the links that tell us we aren't isolated, that we're part of a great unity. It often takes years of reflection to realize this. We are, after all, " . . . only ourselves, and that promise." But the promise is so very rich. 

A Corner of My Neighborhood Park

The park has a busy playground, a paved walking trail around a lake stocked with fish and frequented by geese. But it's been a park for just a little while. The neighborhood the park was built for has only been around for 20 years or so. This ground had a different look before that, having been part of a plantation begun early in the 19th century, with much of it farmed until sometime in the mid- to late 20th century.

A weathered old gate stands where wagons and cattle passed in other times.

An old fence post stands near the gate. No one needs it, but it's not in the way. The three strands of rusted barbed wire have cut deeply into the post, still a live tree when the wire was fastened to it, a tree that lived a few years as it grew over the wire. Now it sits out of place in time, unnoticed by any but the few who might pass it on foot. But it says something about how people once used the land.

Beyond the gate and the post, a copse of trees remains in a low-lying area drained by a small intermittent creek. All my life I've wandered to spots like this, more curious about nature's arrangements than the useful but somewhat sterile human constructions nearby.

An Osage Orange tree growing by the stream holds its ground with large, powerful roots, though the roots are eroded, as some I pointed out recently on the bank of another stream.

Nearby, a still winter-bare honeylocust tree reveals its long thorns. In a few weeks, white flowers among the green leaves will obscure the thorns that grow up and down the tree-trunk.

In the distance, the playground's brightly painted equipment marks another, more prominent, and undoubtedly, more attractive place for young children.  

But for now, I'm keeping it in the distance.

Boy By the Water

The boy, three years old, is my grandson. He might be me, as well, sixty years ago. Or any child exploring some available nook of a world that abounds in wonder. In the long course of human history, play is ancient, as it is with other animals. Toys, by comparison, are a novelty.

   
Here, the boy just needs a stick. It could as easily be a tool as a toy.

The stick serves to stir the waters, propagating watery patterns as rippling waves overlap and interfere in each others' progress. The child watches what happens, knowing he's causing an effect in the world. The doing and the watching are inseparable, and absorb him completely.

A moment before the stirring of the waters, he dug in the sandy soil, and excitedly called my attention to his discovery of an earthworm. A moment later, he will use the stick to dig out a rock embedded too deeply in the sand for him to pull out without moving some of the sand with the stick, then levering out the chunk of gravel. Another moment, and he'll enjoy throwing the gravel in the water and watching the splash.

He sees water respond quickly to the thrown rock, picks up another rock, repeats. Watches the surface of the water as it quickly returns to stillness.

Like most boys his age, he moves around energetically, constantly seeking novelty and stimulation. Inside, among his toys, he's at or near a frenetic pace much of the time. Out here, he seems more absorbed by his surroundings, by his explorations, pushing against the objects around him to see what they feel like, how they act, how they respond to his interventions. The pace moves with a rhythm that's natural and pure. He breathes, his heart beats, his acute senses show him a little more of the world. And in the joy of his own vital body, he plays.