morning after the storm

I don't want to exaggerate - it wasn't that big a storm, although it was perhaps the first one of the season (though it looks dry dry dry in the forecast, so a maverick forerunner) - plenty of lightning splitting the sky up and down and horizontally, and maybe a quarter of an hour of soaking heavy rain, that bent some plants, although not badly - and the ground was so dry that everything had turned back to parched by the end of today.  But everything smelt and felt wonderfully fresh, and so I was inspired to carry on writing about dandelions, and how their long tap roots go down to 10 or 15 feet (that explains a lot), and bring up nutrients to the surface for other plants, and how the plant is designed to gather water in its center so that it then goes down the hole made by the main root, and acts as an irrigation device.  It is possible that I wrote two whole paragraphs of dandelion propaganda.

 

this evening's sky

Two different views and sets of clouds, taken maybe thirty seconds apart.  And yes, it really was this bluebell and buttercup colored sky.  I take no credit for this - the sun and clouds and incipient rain did it all.  (And so far - maybe a minute's worth of rain?  I'd appreciate some more ...).

 

patio flower bed (and a restaurant review)

I break with my normal pattern of dandelion obsession (not a single one in sight) to bring you breakfast at the Jambo Bobcat Bite.  I'd been looking forward to the reopening of the Bobcat - long-timers will remember it as a diner that served the most wonderful green chile cheeseburgers, and that then went through a convoluted change of owners, ventures, and now, at last, has been taken over by Ahmed Omo, who runs the African restaurant Jambo in town (where I've had both very good (lentils) and more indifferent food over the years).  This is - American diner meets New Mexico meets African.  

So - the patio is really lovely.  The service was terrific - laid back, friendly, efficient, all at once.  The food - I had the breakfast burrito (I mean, it was breakfast, after all, and it's New Mexico) - roti instead of tortilla, which was fine, although since I never eat much of the tortilla, usually, I didn't eat much of this - stuffed, or at least filled, with some rather solid scrambled egg, and maybe some cheese.  There must have been some cheese?  Unmemorable cheese.  Instead of NM red sauce, pili pili sauce - ok, not special.  The black beans were a bit watery.  The potatoes ... next time maybe I could just have potatoes?  The potatoes were wonderful - "curry roast red potatoes."  Coffee was diner coffee.  So - fine, although for a breakfast burrito I'd go to Harry's or Cafe Fina any day, or the Pantry if I was heading into town and hadn't eaten for three days.  

But it was completely worth it for the ambience and the view.  Next time, maybe lunch ... they have the old green chile burger recipe, they say.  And even if I eat red meat about once a year (ok, I exaggerate, I eat buffalo burger), maybe this will be one of those occasions: they claim it's locally sourced Native American raised, so it probably had a good enough life (even if it would have farted as much methane as the next bovine), and almost certainly would be healthier than the Impossible burger. But maybe it'll be the curried falafel burger ... indeed, that sounds very likely.  In other words, if I'm plotting my return, it's probably worth giving it a try.

 

watching the weather

As you can tell from these grey and curdled clouds at breakfast time, it was hard to judge what the weather was going to do today - so hard to plan when best to go for a walk.  In the end, the answer was just before sunset, after a number of almost dry storms had rolled through - rainbows visible, to be sure, but negligible precipitation here.  The result was that I stewed with writing and unwriting the central part of a chapter that looks, right now, like a very badly organized storage unit.

 

verges

These are out on the verges all up Cuesta Road - these are exceptionally pretty in pink and white (most are white, or white with the very palest of pink stripes).  Technically, I think they are Field Bindweed, but they may be escaped Morning Glories - they are the same family, in any case.  Morning Glories are not native to New Mexico, though Field Bindweed is ... so it seems appropriate to be thinking about them alongside dandelions, or at least alongside the part of my dandelion chapter where I talk about the whole controversial vocabulary (which goes way back into the nineteenth century) of "invasive" species - and "native" species, and whether "invasive" species are always bad (we're back with tumbleweed, and stuff like Giant Hogweed and Japanese Knotweed - indeed, on the forms for selling the Wimbledon house I had to promise that there wasn't any Japanese Knotweed anywhere on the property).  So whilst it may be Bad if huge plants take off and smother all other vegetation, and allow no space for anything to grow underneath it (like rhododendrons murder young trees, so are very bad for forests) - what if you have some Morning Glories meandering apparently harmlessly up a roadside?  They might even act as soil stabilizers.  I don't in fact think that my invasive/native etc writing is going to occupy more than a few paragraphs, so I have a huge accumulation of facts that aren't going to make it in there - like the people in the dustbowl who survived in the 1930s on canning young tumbleweed shoots.  Maybe I should be careful when I despise it, after all.

 

one of these birds is fake

Our standing bird feeder has a little iron bird silhouette in the center - very, very similar to a bluebird in size and shape.  Here two members of our bluebird family have joined it, very symmetrically, this evening.  As you can see, it's at rather a slant - the winds have been very strong this year - and the spiral and cage that I put bird food in during the winter have disappeared ... I should go for a walk around the land to see if they ended up tidily in a catcus bush, and then straighten the pole.  The canes in the foreground are waiting for this year's crop of morning glories to start twining up them - they've suddenly spirted off.  Other than that - I filled a 30 gallon tub twice over with weeds and grasses and the chopped off branches of our Christmas tree, and am now seriously contemplating (as I do every year, at this point) the advantages of flagstones.  On the other hand, I'm feeling a little weary with back-yard renovation projects ...

 

penstemon!

The first that I've seen fully out this summer, in one of the Eldorado culverts.  Having been thinking a lot about wild flowers and biodiversity this week (cf dandelions), I'm glad to celebrate it.  I was sorry, in the dusty gale that was blowing yesterday evening, not to be able to find any dandelion flowers - I have an unsourced note in my Dandelion folder that helpfully tells me "If you gather dandelion flowers on June 23rd, the eve of the feast of St John, they’ll repel witches."  So I guess I've got a nervous year in front of me, having failed on that front.  I have no idea what flower, if any, would repel La Llorona - googling reveals nothing, although I did learn that San Diego Zoo last year called their Corpse Flower La Llorona, and understandably, as a result, I would think, she didn't bloom properly.

Also a little later in my walk I saw a white rabbit (no pocket watch).  Huh?  It was rather a surprise encounter.  I could only take a picture of it straight into the sun, and at a distance - but blowing up the image now, its arched Roman nose with, I think, a pink tip suggests that it's a pet, rather than the usual wild Eldorado bunny.  She was in a driveway right outside a house, so I'm hoping someone knew she was there.

 

drowned but beautiful

Face downward in one of the bird baths this evening - the tiniest of cream and very pale fawn moths.  This image makes it look huge, but it wasn't a lot larger than my thumbnail.  Identifying moths isn't really my thing (though I seem to have been doing rather a lot of it this week), but I think this is probably Eucaterva variara - its caterpillars feed on the desert willow, and there's one of those very close by.  They flutter around - if you blow this up even more you can see the pollen on its thorax - like the good pollinators that they are, so are probably happy with my gardening efforts ...

 

pieces of the sky

(now I've gone and earwormed myself).  The clouds were pretty good this evening ... in both directions.  After writing about dandelions almost all day, it did me good to look up!

 

my favorite shopping outing ...

is to Agua Fria nurseries - an observation that I'm sure that I make every year, but it doesn't get any less true.  I'm cautious, this year - it's already mid June, and we'll be leaving in good time for the semester in August, and there's a limit to how much money, energy, and emotional investment I can face putting in for seven weeks.  At the same time ... I love having flowers outside.  The Morning Glories have just started sprouting, so they should supplement today's purchases, and then, for whatever reason, catmint has started growing rampant (I'm hoping for an incursion of bobcats ...).

I would have said that there wasn't a dandelion in sight - although, because it's such a wonderfully proliferating green and floral space, there probably was - but that wouldn't, strictly speaking, be true.  The woman who counted up my plants had a whole flourishing patch of them tattooed on her arm - I admired them enormously, and she said they'd very much been her favorite flower as a child.  That meshed with great serendipity with my dandelion writing this morning.

 

back to the dandelions

To be sure, this isn't a regular dandelion, a taraxacum officinale, but yellow salsify, or Tragopogon dubius

- which has a tighter yellow flower that taraxacum o, but is, broadly speaking, dandelion-adjacent.  To quote the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory website, "Salsify looks like a dandelion on steroids," and it disseminates its seed in just the same  big puffball like way. It's also known as "western goat's beard," or "yellow goat's beard," or "goat's beard" - not hard to imagine why.  It's not a native, but an invasive plant, originating in south and central Europe and Western Asia, and does tend to crowd out native flowers in wildflower meadows.

I returned to my Dandelion chapter today after a long gap, and have both shredded and re-written.  It's a chapter that allows me, among other things, to examine the whole set of nationalist assumptions that underpin the nomenclature of "native" and "invasive" species, and to balance the demands of long-lasting habitats with the uneasy linkages between the celebration of species that have long been found in a certain region or country with proto-fascism.  Of course, it lets me do other things as well, not least to investigate what gets called a weed and what doesn't (and why), and to celebrate the dandelion as a model for resistance (something that it shares with kudzu, and, alas, with tumbleweed.  They both will get their paragraphs, at least ...).  

This summer - or what's left of it - is firmly designated a writing summer: it's good to have made a real start, and to be returning to a whole lot of dandelion paintings.  I'm super grateful to the grad student who introduced me to Emily Mary Osborn's The Bal Maidens this semester - gathering dandelions and other wild flowers from the wayside, and blowing on a dandelion seed head, on their way to work in the Cornish tin mines - it gave me just the chapter opening that I needed.

miller moths

Eleven years ago - to the very day! June 19th, 2012 - we adopted Phany.  And Gomez (that's Walter Gomez, who has his very own special people and No Other Cats in St Paul, MN - we continue to adore from afar). But ... who could possibly have a cat called Phany? (we subsequently speculated that Santa Fe Animal Shelter must have thought of "Epiphany," and shortened it.  So what to christen this adorable little kitten?

[she's quite a bit larger, now].  2012 was, like this year, a Miller Moth year - these inch-long moths come out in droves - indoors - and flap around pathetically for a little while, presumably mating and laying eggs that will lie dormant for a number of years more.  I arrived yesterday to scatterings of dead moths on the floor, on the window sills, in the bath, in any stray container - and then when one pulls down a blind, say, out one flutters, still alive.  As you'll see, even from my imperfectly blurry shot, they are different shades of grey and brown - much like that new kitten.  And that is how Moth came to be called Moth.  Happy Gotcha day, Mothy!

 

hollyhocks

Before I hit the road today, I had fun taking portraits of hollyhocks - if there isn't such a thing as a Hollyhock Appreciation Day, there should be.  The ones at La Posada are numerous, and very varied, and are all over the place on their grounds.  Given how well they were flourishing, I had high hopes of the ones here at home in Santa Fe ... there are about three that have decided to come up this year, two as stunted as last year, and none yet in flower.  But I will celebrate them when the time comes.

The tumbleweed, however ... never have I seen such a thick forest of it on the driveway, advertising to the world that no one is at home.  I attacked it with shears this evening - made a start, at any rate.  Tomorrow will be all out war, not just with sharp blades, but with vinegar and salt ...

 

heading eastwards

The usual just-past-mid-way stop between Los Angeles and Santa Fe at La Posada, looking at its summer best.  Without Cats (this journey will be repeated in two weeks time, with Alice and with them), I'm in a wonderful patio room that I've always envied when walking past - pure happenstance - and very relaxing to sit outside on a swinging seat (if you don't mind trains, of course).

And I stopped for lunch at my favorite, ridiculous picnic spot - the Goff's Road exit, ten miles or so before Needles - complete with cracking and abandoned pools and concrete nymphs ...

 

very orange

 

Inside a Californian poppy (continuing my infatuation with the genus).  This year, happily, the mowers left a couple of poppy clumps, which are still, impressively, flowering - testimony to a very damp spring.

He missed me

... and I missed him.  But Gramsci is a very forgiving cat, luckily.  A little bit of a reserved distance when I cam back on Tuesday evening - but by the morning he was, I'm happy to say, sleeping in my arms.  And yesterday and today - it's as though I've never been away.  Much though I like travelling; much though I've needed to be in Wimbledon, the hard part is leaving these guys (and little does he know - a little more separation is coming up very very soon ... don't tell him).

 

different country, different poppies

These - seen on our evening walk round the block, or, rather, round several hilly blocks, are Matilija Poppies, native to Southern California and northern Mexico - huge white petals with a yellow center that makes them look very, very like a cross-section of a Cadbury's Creme Egg.  It would be great to have some of these in our own garden - we planted some, a few years ago, but they never really took off.  Maybe now that we're re-doing things out back ... It's been hard, today, not living mentally still back in Hillside - not least when the poppies have morphed into entirely different sorts.

 

blurred and obscured

The garden, in the post-dawn light, with the grass flattened by yesterday's storms; passing Wimbledon Common in an Uber; and descending into Los Angeles through a thick marine layer.  But blurred suits me very well right now - I've been up for over 23 hours, and that's all you're getting from me tonight ...

 

"Pond LIfe: Albertopolis and the Lily"

These are so wonderful!  Monster Chetwynd's sculptures on the disused platform at Gloucester Road station - based on Jospeh Paxton's design for the Crystal Palace; the water-lily network of ribbed veins that inspired the structure for the glass - and then here are a whole lot of pond creatures constructing it.  I exited a train to have a good look at it - my favorite bit of public art work this summer ...

 

the meadow, by sun and by storm

The back garden - maybe 8 hours apart.  This pretty. much sums up how my house packing and clearing has gone today (all ... let's say 14 hours of it, minus a wonderful tea break with an old friend who just happened to be doing a similar task in his mother's house two roads away ...) - in other words, oscillation between sunny cheerful activity, and wild despair.

Also - when was the freezer last defrosted?  Huge - really huge - chunks of ice keep dropping down.  Yes, I should have attended to this earlier ... I will be looking for a dramatic impact on the electricity bill ...

 

more poppy, more clearing

It's exciting seeing how many poppies are in bloom when I get up - they are full of bees, too (who knew that poppies were such good pollinator-attractors?) - but the petals have all fallen off by lunchtime.

Meanwhile, I really am on the last leg of sorting and clearing and chucking.  Today I found a three-quarters empty bottle of peppermint essence - who, and why, ever drank peppermint cordial in this household?  Expiration date November 1989 ... It seems like a cold remedy, perhaps?  The two open bottle of Benylin cough medicine had expiration dates of 2016 and 2018 respectively, so one wonders about their effectiveness.

But I Google, of course: "What is peppermint cordial good for?

Several studies support the use of peppermint for indigestion and irritable bowel syndrome.

Indigestion. ...

Flatulence/Bloating. ...

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) ...

Itching and Skin Irritation. ...

Tension Headache. ...

Colds and Flu."

A universal panacea, no less!  Maybe I shouldn't have poured it down the drain.  On the other hand, maybe it'll be good for the plumbing ...

 

poppies

There's been a sudden poppy explosion in the back garden - both the ordinary big orangey-red kind, and then this fringed one today - with a bee happily at work in it.  This meant that when I went to the Rossettis exhibition at Tate Britain, I had poppies on my mind:

Beata Beatrix: the poppy is conventionally interpreted as an opium poppy, since Lizzie Siddal died of a laudanum overdose, and this painting effectively memorializes her;

These are in Lucrezia Borgia, and therefore might also be taken as dangerously narcotic;

and these are in the right hand top corner of Sibylla Palmifera.  I'd read such scathing reviews of the show that I was pleasantly surprised by how much there was in it that was relatively new to me - yes, indeed, the wall narratives and captioning were horribly Pre-Raphaelites 101 (although they made me so irritated that I ended up photographing a whole lot of them thinking that they could be turned to good pedagogical use.). But it's always good to see stuff that's briefly been released from private collections - and from some, like Wightwick Manor, that aren't all that easy to get to - and this was especially true of the drawings - I loved one (normally at Tullie House, in Carlisle) of George Price Boyce with Fanny Cornforth in Rossetti's studio.  There was a valiant attempt to give a lot of prominence to Christina Rossetti, but I felt that William Michael R's importance as a critic (both of painting and literature) was dreadfully underplayed.  But - worth a visit - don't let the reviews put you off!

And here are a few more details ...

hens from Frederic George Stephens, The Proposal (The Marquis and Griselda);

a drain cover (and whip) from an early version of Found;

a rather dented apple from Venus Verticordia;

and some shoes from The Daydream.  I had several pairs of shoes very like this - in different colors - around 1970, from Anello and Davide - basically tap dancing shoes - I'd forgotten them until now ...