phenology friday

alderleaf viburnum, continued.

Viburnum lantanoides

To be continued...

 ~~~~~

thankful thursday

It was cold enough to keep the black flies at bay for a couple of hours this afternoon.

It was also sunny enough to be very pleasant indeed.

A perfect opportunity to do Daily Markmaking outdoors!

I had help.

I had an audience.

I had a critic.

I had a deep blue sky and bright clouds and buds on thousands of branches.

 Buds become leaves in the blink of an eye,

and soon I'll be looking up into a closed canopy of many greens.

What better time to sketch branches of the massive red oak I admire every day?

I focused on a small section of the tree,

and used one watercolor pencil and one waterbrush.

The result: Daily Markmaking 858

An hour like this is such a gift.

~~~~~

wordless wednesday

~~~~~

sunday saunter

After a long series of raw or rainy days that had me coaxing small fires in the woodstove to take the chill off the house, yesterday was sunny, humid, and hot. Really hot. It may have topped 70F but I didn't check the thermometer. The black flies, which have been toying with us ever since the last snowfall, appeared en masse and in battle formation. I knew before I opened the door, as I could see the goats shaking their ears and making sudden short sprints in the paddocks.

Here we go.
Black flies, mosquitoes, deer flies, horse flies.
The hair is standing straight up on my head just from typing those words.

I'm going to try to start taking Piper for short walks very early in the morning. Piper has never been a morning person. Like LeShodu, who kept the whole herd on a Brunch, Not Breakfast schedule for her lifetime, Piper won't eat first thing in the morning. And even though dawn has always been one of my favorite times of day, after I've been up - not just awake, but up - on average every three hours throughout every night, I am not particularly sparky in the morning myself. So it will take a bit of effort, this experiment in early walks to see if we can avoid some of the biting bugs.

Today was Day One, and I persuaded Piper to come outside with me when the sky was greying but the sun had not yet come over the stone wall and through the woods. There was no one else walking on the road (I have seen more people and dogs on this road in the past few weeks than in the past decade) and the Invisible Dog That Always Barks At Us was silent. Our route was a narrow triangle of slightly more than a mile, and when the sun dazzled through just past the half-mile point, we began to see a few black flies. So...tomorrow I'll try to get my lazy self out a little earlier. Piper is a better sport than I am about getting out of bed and staggering toward the door, but only if I "go first," so I will have to be the driving wheel in this endeavor. Wish me luck.

~~~

p.s. I'm planning to get the Candy Roaster squash seeds in the mail this week.

Six people in three states have already emailed their mailing addresses, and I have LOTS of seed to share, so please feel free to join in! 

~~~~~

happy trails

 On one of our short walks along our road last Autumn,
Piper and I noticed a patch of Epigaea repens: trailing arbutus, or mayflower.
This is what a section of it looked like on 16 September 2019:

(You can left-click to embiggen all these images.)

This patch of arbutus does not have an easy life.

In early April, the plants looked like this:

I didn't know how early it might bloom
so we've walked that way often to check on it.

We had a fairly heavy snowstorm
shortly before these three pictures were taken,
on the 19th of April.
 The first shows the entire patch of arbutus,
on the slope in the right side of the photograph:

Something caught my eye.
Can you see it?

I put the camera on the ground for a closer view.

These delicate buds had been buried in snow one day earlier.

And six days later, yesterday:

This last picture is my favorite:

The little flowers peeping out from beneath tough, tattered leaves,

amongst a criss-cross tangle of pine needles and twigs,

finding a small beam of sunlight.

I hope you are also finding all the sunlight you need.

~~~~~