Posts Tagged ‘trillium’
Other Views
There used to be two pine trees above the pond fountain, but they were outgrowing the space available and not really thriving, so Cyndie’s parents had them cut down. In a moment of inspiration that is very familiar to me, they chose to leave a few feet of the stumps as pedestals. It’s a perfect spot for a couple of flowering plants.
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With the trees gone, I was able to capture a rare view of the “cabin” from the back side.
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I arrived to the house from that direction because I had been walking through some of the trillium carpeted woods that surround us. This forest is one that feels so perfect for me. There are other natural landscapes over the world that are spectacular, but these trees and all that comes with them resonate the most profoundly with my soul.
I must have spent a few past lives in places just like this. I know the smells and the sounds, the colors, the critters, and the majority of growing plants somewhere deep in the cells of my body.
There are many a days when I dream of what this area was really like when the first tribes of people were able to call this home, long before the time when logging on an epic scale ravaged the growth.
I’m particularly pleased with the “Wildwood” name this property holds. It couldn’t feel more appropriate.
The stroll that brought me through these trees had started down at the beach, below the front side of the house. Camera in hand, I walked onto the footbridge that crosses our little boat lagoon and looked out at the lake and up toward the lodge.
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These are both views I don’t usually capture. As leaves open, the sight lines will become more obscured. The views are no less spectacular, but the camera doesn’t come close to what the eyes perceive.
I will never take for granted how lucky I am to be able to visit this space in person, where I can see, smell, hear, and touch a natural environment to which my soul feels so emotionally attached.
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Springing Forth
The multitude of flora on our property is springing forth at a variety of rates this year. To our surprise, some of our trillium are flowering earlier than we’ve seen before. That’s particularly thrilling for us because most of the bloomers are transplants we brought from Cyndie’s family vacation home up north.
We’ve had a good run of consecutive dry days, followed by a perfect evening rainstorm Monday night and it is making growing things very happy.
Getting the water right is key to a lot of things. I went for a scouting bike ride on Sunday to investigate a route that didn’t involve gravel roads. I was successful in that, but in so doing, I out-rode my water supply. The last spot I was planning to get a refill hadn’t yet opened for the season.
I decided to push for the finish on limited rations.
It’s not that hard. I limped home safe and sound, but I was unsurprisingly under-hydrated. What intrigues me is how long the evidence has lingered. Two days later, despite consciously increasing my usual daily intake in hopes of catching up, my primary barometer (urine color) revealed I was still behind.
Working on a long game toward optimal health involves an unending series of small daily efforts. It involves making corrections along the way for intermittent deviations.
As I prepared my breakfast and lunch last night for today’s shift in the mine, measuring the amount of cereal to meet my goals for grams of sugar, it hit me again how different my diet is from just a couple of years ago. I don’t expect I’ve yet reached a point of undoing what decades of a high sugar intake produced in me.
It was probably in the late 1980s that I attended a lecture that touted a mantra of eating like a king for breakfast, a queen for lunch, and a pauper for dinner. I embraced that part about breakfast with gusto, figuring my high activity sports habit was more than enough justification to eat whatever I wanted.
Portion sizes swelled, guilt-free. Meanwhile, my body tended to swell, too –despite the constant exercise of soccer and cycling. I miss eating too much cereal for breakfast whenever I felt like it, but I don’t miss how it made me look and feel.
Pondering the difference helps to reinvigorate my inspiration for staying on course for the long haul.
I’m feeling renewed energy to spring forth into another year of living well. Maybe it will bring me into full bloom sooner than I expect.
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Short Week
May comes to a close today on the first day of a shortened work week. We rolled into the driveway yesterday from the lake in decent time, successfully avoiding getting swept up by a speed trap in the middle of a passing zone.
Peeve: When drivers speed up as they reach a passing zone, and then slow down again at the end of it. Their slow speed is frustrating for me, but their fast speed in the passing zone forces me to really exceed the limit if I hope to get around them. The added factor of being policed for speed in the short sections with an extra passing lane further inhibits my ability to squeak past the slower-downers.
Before we left the lake, I dug up about 15 trillium plants to bring home with us. Upon arriving to Wintervale, our agenda was to get the transplants in the ground as quickly as possible. Our plan went off without a hitch. Now all we need to do is wait about a year to find out if they are survivors or not.
One flowering plant that looks to be doing very well at home right now is the clematis vine that is on one of our trellis arches by the back deck. It is very photogenic when it is in bloom.
Our animals seemed very glad to see us again and gave us a good amount of affectionate attention. The lawn already needs mowing again and the pine trees are starting to show some significant new growth sprouts.
It feels very much like everything is ready for the arrival of the month of June. It’s the birthday month around here, as everyone but Julian turns another year older in the 6th month.
Makes it feel like more than a short week. It feels like it’s been a short year!
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Nascent Blossom
It looks like we have some mixed success with our transplanting of last year. The maple sapling we hoped would be our 3rd-time’s-a-charm in the center of the labyrinth is not showing signs of life. For comparison, I check the trees of similar size back in the area from which we moved him, to see progress of buds and leaves. They already have a lot of buds.
Sad.
The good news is with our trillium. I’m not sure we have 100% success, but any is better than none, and we definitely have a couple groups of blossoms.
It’s a long way from the carpet of flowers we get in the woods up at the lake place, but it’s a great start! The next excitement to celebrate will be the day we see them spreading naturally and bringing up new shoots nearby. That’s what we are hoping for anyway.
Since we have success transplanting small plants, I am tempted to just transplant a little seedling of a maple tree to the labyrinth to increase my odds of success. If I would have done that a few years ago, we’d probably now have one about the size of what I keep trying to move.
It is just so tempting to see a nice crown of leaves overhead in that spot. I’ll probably try again next fall. First, we’ll find one that looks like a good candidate when it is fully leafed out this summer, and we’ll mark it. Then when it drops its leaves and goes dormant, we’ll dig it up and move it.
Hoping the 4th time will be the charm.
Place your bets on which we will achieve first: a naturally spreading carpet of trillium blossoms in our woods, or a surviving transplanted maple tree in the labyrinth garden.
I’m going to keep trying to accomplish both. Practice makes perfect.
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Springing Considerably
The forest floor is sprouting forth with an abundance of white trout lilies this week. It made me curious about the trillium that we transplanted from our lake place last year. I should have marked them better, because the complete transformation of the woods in a year’s time has me confused now over where I put them.
I planted the “borrowed” trillium in several small groups in a section of woods just below the house. Surveying the area late yesterday, it seemed like the only growth was trout lilies, but I eventually spotted a grouping of the distinctly different leaves.
In a few weeks, flowers will make the trillium much easier to spot.
Up north, it is obvious how prolific trillium is in naturally propagating to carpet the woods and create a dramatic visual. We are hoping to seed our spaces with enough starters to enable the natural process to do the rest.
After some passing gentle rain showers on Thursday, the pasture that I mowed last weekend is greening up nicely. I strung the webbing between posts yesterday to complete the divider fence that will allow us to rotationally graze the horses on that precious field.
The point where I connected the new webbing to electricity is right at the paddock, and the horses took great interest in what I was doing. I had the charger turned off to work, and while I experimented with several methods of connection, Legacy and Cayenne took turns putting their noses right into the business at hand.
I sure hope they are keen enough to sense the hazard of doing that when the electricity is on.
Even though they already had a stint on the alley grass earlier in the day, Cyndie talked me into letting them come out on the pasture with the new divider for a short nibble after so patiently watching me fix it up all afternoon.
I can’t really say whether they even noticed the new divider, because their attention was exclusively focused on the succulent green blades immediately available just steps beyond the opened gate.
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Wonderful Wetness
We have received several days of light-to-moderate precipitation which is soaking in more than running off, and the plants around here seem pretty thrilled with the conditions. The grass sure is growing fast.
Hopefully, the horses have properly adjusted to all the greenery available for grazing, as we are now leaving the gate to the back pasture open 24/7 again. They don’t seem to like the noise made by rain on the metal roof of the barn, so when precipitation is falling, they move away, either to the bottom of the paddock or way out in the pasture.
I was in the city working yesterday, and when I got home in the afternoon, Delilah was laying in the gate area of her kennel, which is beyond the tarp that covers the main area, so she was soaking wet. Silly dog.
We walked down to feed the horses, but they didn’t show any interest in coming in from the far side of the pasture. Since it was raining steadily, I didn’t wait around for them, taking Delilah on an abbreviated walk back toward the house.
After having just mowed last Saturday, there are places where it already looks like it needs cutting again, just 3 days later. On our way in, I stopped to empty the rain gauge, which had 2 inches of rain in it since Saturday.
Before going to the horses, we had stopped by the labyrinth to see that the maple tree looked okay (hard to tell exactly when the leaves are drooping from the wetness), and the trillium in the woods was looking very good.
I’m grateful for the rain not coming all at once in a gully-washing downpour, but instead has soaked in enough to help fuel growth in everything around here. It’s making things a sloppy mess in some places, but overall, it is a wonderful wetness.
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Another Transplant
The woods up around our lake place are replete with the white and purple blossoms of wild trillium, which is such a beautiful sight. Just before we left to drive home yesterday, Cyndie’s nephew, Beck, helped her dig up a few of the plants for us to bring home. We hope to seed our woods for a shot at a similar magical landscape down here in a few years.
We tried to minimize the hours they were out of the ground by getting them planted as quickly as possible after we got home.
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I noticed in the second picture there is a worm, which is unfortunate, since, as I recently wrote, they are not trillium’s friend, because they consume the duff layer of decaying leaves and rob the soil of nutrients. I’m hoping our situation is not that extreme yet, and the two can coexist for some time.
I was so excited about the new plantings that I forgot to go check how the recently transplanted maple tree is getting along. Now we have two areas that I will be anxiously observing for signs of success.
There is such a variety of growth that springs forth in our woods every year, we are hopeful that our attempt to add trillium to it all will be met with success and the wonderful beauties will begin propagating unassisted in years to come.
Wish us luck!
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Worm Lesson
Yesterday I learned something that surprised me, especially for the extent of time —basically, my lifetime— about which I have been clueless. I assumed earthworms were native to my region and entirely beneficial. They provide food for our birds and other critters, and they aerate and enrich the soil.
Au contraire! I spotted an article in the sports section of a local newspaper aiming to educate people who fish about not dumping their leftover angle worms on the ground. Worms should be disposed of in the trash.
Why? First of all, the terrestrial earthworms are a non-native invasive species from Europe and Asia! I had no idea. Second, they are harming our hardwood forests. They actually disrupt the natural decomposition of leaf litter on the forest floor and turn good soil into grainy, dry worm castings (poop), which then can’t support the understory plants of our forests.
Apparently, they are welcome to help in my compost pile, but they are not friendly to our woods. Up at our lake place in Hayward, WI, our favorite flowering woodland plant on the forest floor is the trillium. Around Memorial day at the end of May, when we head up for “work-weekend” to open up the property for the summer, we often find a carpet of white blossoms covering the ground.
I have dreamed of seeing the same thing occur in our woods at Wintervale, but we can’t find hardly any here. Cyndie spotted one all by itself recently with 3 blossoms, capturing this shot with her cell phone.
According to the literature I have reviewed, trillium is one of the plants that is lost to the earthworms.
All of my life I have assumed that earthworms were a good thing. I’m afraid I will no longer think of them the same way at all. I would much rather have a thick, healthy layer on our forest floor that could support a robust undergrowth, than a dry, leafless surface of worm poo.
Anglers, contain those crawlers!
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Relative Something 