There is a lot of Northern Hemisphere Christmas imagery in this month’s zooming series. It is the time of year that we bring green indoors for decorating - to contrast with the view from most of our windows of bare tree branches. We notice the subtle changes in color and texture now that the leaves are brown mulch on the forest floor - raked away from the lawn.
Enjoy the zoomed images…and take a closer look at decorating in your area too!
The last raking of our yard was done this weekend. I put it off until the loud noises from leaf blowers ended. I prefer to hear the noises of leaves and small animals in the yard and forest while I work. There were only a few places where the leaves were deep enough that the lawn mowing in a few days (the last of the season) would not shred them enough to feed the grass rather than smother it. The base of the maple was the largest area; I had already raked once but the tree still had half its leaves at that point.
I left the leaves in the flower bed. The mint seems to be enjoying the protection of the leaves through the recent temperatures in the teens and twenties; this calls for another small mint harvest to create a pot of fresh mint and ginger ‘tea’.
I am putting leaves around the base of the sycamore that came up in our backyard a few years ago. It is growing up: the bark is beginning to peel and it had one seed ball this year.
In a little over an hour, the job was done - mostly. I stopped because the base of my thumb felt raw under my work glove; sure enough - a few layers of skin had been rubbed away by the friction of the rake handle.
I’ve participated in several programs at the Belmont Manor and Historic Park as a Howard County Conservancy Volunteer over the past month. September is a good month to see maturing seeds - in the trees: Maple
Dogwood
And sweet gum.
There are other plants going to seed: grasses
And fluffy seed pods in the meadows.
The flowers are mostly done for the year although I did photograph a chicory that was growing at the edge of mowed path.
But it is the very air of the place - looking up to into an old sycamore,
The top branches of other trees,
And starlings swirling - that is the most special.
Belmont is a place with a long history and one looks out from the mansion that is somehow not as important as the vista.
The Chaos Garden gets relatively little attention from me. I pull plants that I recognize as not wanting at all: grape vine, stickers, honeysuckle, blackberry canes. Everything else I simply leave alone.
The hydrangea is recovering from the late (and hard) frost last spring that killed all its buds. It has no blooms this year but is coming up from the roots and should be almost back to normal for next spring/summer. I'll trim away more of the dead stems in my next weeding pass through the chaos garden.
There is lemon balm but it is not as overwhelming as in previous years. I cleared a lot of it away last summer. I like it in salads and to add to mint ‘tea’.
The chives and onions come back every year. I need to remind myself to harvest them more frequently. The chives bloom in the spring and the onions are blooming now.
There are some flowers that are remnants of the butterfly garden phase of this plot: cone flowers and black eyed Susans. There don’t seem to be as many butterflies these days but they do attract the bees.
The rosemary I bought last spring has grown quite a lot and I am hopeful that it will overwinter. Last winter, all the rosemary plant in my area dyed form the repeated blasts of very cold temperatures.
The sycamore is shading the chaos garden more all the time. The hydrangea won’t mine - they thrive just fine in shade - but many of the other plants will not do as well. The old patch of day lilies never blooms any more but its progeny bulbs are doing quite well in the front flowerbed where I moved them last summer.
There is a robin that flies to the sycamore beside my deck and complains with the same style vocalizations every time I walk out onto the deck. I think its nest is underneath the deck. Why is it so alarmed? On the positive side - it is easy to get pictures of the bird while it vocally defends its turf!
Now that I’ve viewed the pictures on my larger monitor - it is easy to see that it is a female. She is quite insistent about keeping me away from her nest. I supposed she feels like there is an earthquake when I walk on the deck since her nest is on one of the support beams. But why is it that the nest is so important in August? Surely it is past the time for a new clutch of eggs and young.
And the bird seems to recognize me. It makes eye contact. If I stay out long enough it flies to the maple and continues to stare even if the vocalization stops after a few minutes. And then I go back inside and the robin - apparently - has what it wants.
Maryland has had a variable summer so far: a few hot days with thunderstorms in the later afternoon and then relatively cool days that start out in the low 60s. The yard always seems to need mowing. The flower beds are better than ever.
The day lily bulbs I dug up last fall from a place that had become too shady for them to bloom are blooming profusely - where buds survived the deer back in June. They are a bright splash of orange around the bird bath (along with the purple blazing stars) and around the base of the oak tree where there branches are trimmed high enough that they get a little morning sun.
There is a dahlia with one flower open and loads of buds.
There are a few leaves on the lawn. Some were jettisoned by the tree like the sycamore leaf on the right and some were torn off by our recent storms (like the small brach of oak leaaves below).
The patch of cone flowers is always good for some insect photography.
As I walked around, I noticed mint growing in some unexpected places. It’s probably time for another harvest!
Our area is in a weather pattern that brings gusty winds and thunderstorms every afternoon - and it is taking a toll on our trees. There is a large branch that has been torn from the upper part of the tulip polar at the edge of the forest. It hasn’t fallen all the way to the ground yet but seems to get lower with each storm. I won’t be venturing underneath until it falls all the way. It is most likely to land in the forest rather than our yard.
The sycamore is a larger problem. The tree is not that old. It came up in a garden plot and I decided to let it grow. It has two trunks and had done very well until recently. Its branches would be whipped around by the wind but it would always straight up afterwards. Now one of the trunks does not straighten up and the branches are starting to sweep the stairs to our deck. A few weeks ago I noticed a wound in the trunk and I suspected that it had happened from the bending during storms....and had reduced the tree's resilence.
But when I inspected the tree more closely, I discovered that the bending is further up the trunk (the trunk to the left in the picture below; the tree may just be top heavy with its big leaves.
I'll try trimming the branches above the bend. I do not want to cut it down! I liked where the tree is growing because it provides summer shade for a basement window and the dining room on the first floor…..and in a few years it would have shaded the top floor of the house.
Rather than carrying all the self-pruned branches from our oak back to the woods, I decided to use the longer ones to form a border for my Chaos Garden. I used some gold garden stakes to make brackets about every 3 feet and then wove the sticks through them. I got more enthusiastic and retrieved some sticks from the branch pile I’d made in the woods from previous years’ trimming.
I was thrilled when one grew shelf fungus within weeks of becoming part of the garden border.
The border grew dramatically with the plum and oak trimmings of the past week. I left the branches on the limbs but bent them down into the other branches - increasing the connectedness of the branches so that the brackets were not the only elements holding the whole together. Some parts are not high enough that I will have to wait before I add anything more. Of course - this is a garden border that will naturally decay. Will it simply settle slowly so that I can refresh it from the top? I’ll enjoy the month/years of observing the garden border.
More about the Chaos Garden in another post…..
Back in mid-February, I cut some twigs from the trees around our house and posted some photographs of the buds. The sycamore twig was not very interesting so I didn’t include a photograph of its bud but I kept the twig in my collection and kept water in the cups. A few days I took a look at the basket and noticed that the sycamore twig had a tiny leaf!
And there is another bud that looks about ready to burst open too!
We’ve had such cold weather recently that the sycamore buds outside are still in their winter forms so this little green leaf indoors is way ahead of the tree.
Like the Chinese, who divide the solar calendar into twenty-four rather than 4 seasons (among them, fortnights called “excited insects,” “grains fill,” “cold dew,” and “frost descends”), a practiced tree watcher knows there are dozens of seasons and that one of them could be called “acorns pumping out.” - Nancy Hugo Ross inSeeing Trees
It isn’t often that a coffee table book (large format with beautiful pictures) prompts action or behavior change. This one is the exception for me and I suspect it is for others as well. I attended a lecture by the author at the Howard Country Conservancy on February 8th and promptly started planning my forays around the yard and nearby gardens for this spring…and naming the ‘seasons’ that I am seeing. The first blog post prompted by the lecture was on February 13th (I’ll call that season ‘fuzzy buds’. The book arrived in the mail that afternoon and I am savoring reading it and the pictures now….adding more details to the plans.
I’ve always enjoyed botanical photography but have tended toward flowers rather than trees. And I haven’t done the magnified looking at trees all that often. My husband had an old loupe he used during the days his photography was slide based that has now been repurposed and he ordered a new one that has higher magnification for be to experiment with as well.
To celebrate the prospect of learning a lot more about trees over the next year or so - I’ve created the slide show below of the best tree pictures I’ve taken over the past 12 months. Enjoy!
February is a stark month in Maryland. On a sunny day, I bundled up to take pictures - noticing that there is a lot of drab brown - texture becomes important in the scenes: the forest,
Hydrangea flowers from last summer,
And wood grain on the deck in the afternoon sun.
I’ve bought a bird feeder - advertised as ‘squirrel proof’ - and hung it so that we can see it through several windows.
A few days ago there was ice and that added a glistening coat to everything. I took pictures standing in doorways rather than venturing out on the icy surface: the frozen drips on the sycamore,
The tangled branches of the cherry with a pine providing background,
And a pine weighed down with a burden of ice.
That’s the outdoors scene from our area of Maryland for this month!
Outdoors in January is cold and the eye searches for colors other than brown or white. The green of the pines under snow is a relief the eye. Our mind conjures comparisons for the snow: whipped cream, flocking, blankets. It was very cold after our first snow of the year and the yard stayed pristine and windswept for more than a day; we didn’t venture out and neither did the deer.
When the sun came out, the melt began even though the air was still well below freezing. I ventured out to take pictures of seed heads from last summer’s blazing stars looking very much like a bottle brush,
A twig blown from the oak tree standing upright in the snow,
A woodpile topped with snow in a yard trampled by deer and children,
Icicles that formed on a bush from the drips off the gutter above, and
The frozen gush from one of the downspouts.
Most of the snow was gone within 24 hours. The gutter was clear and the only snow remaining was from piles created by snow plows.
I prefer the trees with green leaves…but being able to see the large wasp nest built last summer in a nearby maple is some consolation.
And the sycamores always seem even more beautiful in the winter with their white bark. These lean over the street as if it were a river.
Celebrating the whole of life....
Thanks for visiting my blog! Enjoy the photo picks from 2023:
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