Pumpkin Art

This is our Halloween pumpkin for this year, carved by my daughter.

A reader commented last year that pumpkins are truly folk art. People make an effort to acquire a perfect pumpkin and carve into its orange flesh a truly unique expression, one that hasn't been seen before. And then we share our creative projects, proudly, by displaying them on front porches for everyone to see. When else do we feel so unselfconscious about displaying the fruit of our artistic efforts?

Last year I went crazy photographing pumpkins in my Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle. It seemed like there were many more than there are this year. This year I have only seen two on my way to work. I wonder if that means anything.

Rose Hydrosol

I haven’t posted anything about making my rose hydrosol because I was disappointed in the end result. I have yet to make anything from roses that actually captures the amazing fragrance they exude.

I’ve been using the petals of an old red rose that grows in the abandoned lot across the street. It’s my secret treasure, since it’s hard to find a rose in my urban neighborhood that I can be sure isn’t sprayed. Since this rose is entirely neglected (except for my feeble attempts at pruning it this year), I know it’s safe to harvest the petals.

They smell absolutely marvelous and look beautiful in the vase when first picked. But they don’t last long—they wither and go limp within a few days, as is true for many older roses. The newer varieties have been bred to last longer in the vase at the cost of the scent. The very chemicals that diffuse fragrance also age the flower.

The rose petals smelled wonderful while cooking in the pan but the rose water I collected had a slightly musty smell. I bottled it and put it in the refrigerator anyway, thinking maybe it would get better. A few days later I added glycerin to the hydrosol to make it last longer but it still smelled unpleasant. I realized I was never going to use it, so I poured it out.

I don’t know the secret of how to capture the fragrance of the rose but maybe I will learn next weekend when I attend Jeanne Rose’s workshop on Natural Perfumery in Los Angeles.

Bay Laurel Hydrosol

If you read my last newsletter

you know I’m taking a herbal preparations class at my local natural pharmacy, Rainbow Natural Remedies. The class combines all the pleasures of crafting, cooking and working with plants. The fabulous teacher, Crystal Stelzer, makes something every week and shows us how to do it, then gives us the opportunity to taste it, test it and bring samples home. I’ve set myself the task—I love homework—of making each of the things we’ve learned about every week. I’m about two weeks behind, still working on the assignments from Week 2 when we learned to make hydrosols, spritzers and flower essences.

Yesterday I made my first hydrosol. I love that word. It sounds so official. So scientific. Hydrosol is the term for the water that is left over after the distilling process by which essential oils are extracted. Rose water is a hydrosol; so is orange (blossom) water. Those two have always been saved and used for centuries, but most other hydrosols were thrown away after the distillation process. Now people are recognizing that they can be used. For one thing, because they contain only tiny amounts of the essential oils, so they can be taken internally or used in cooking. I’ve used rosewater for years on my Christmas kourabiedes cookies. Hydrosols can also be used as mouthwash (think mint hydrosol), antiseptic sprays (rosemary and thyme hydrosols), air fresheners (for instance, lavender hydrosol).

I wanted to try making a hydrosol from my bay tree. I have a lovely tree, about seven years old, that I’m shaping into a topiary. Because of that I trim it frequently and end up with many more bay leaves than I can use in cooking. So I covered the bottom of a stainless steel saucepan with a one to two inch layer of fresh bay leaves, added water to cover it, and put a stainless steel strainer with no center pole on top. I set a porcelain collection dish in the middle of the strainer, then got the water boiling with a lid on top to help capture the essential oils.

Once the water was boiling, I turned it down to a simmer, turned the lid of the pot upside down, and put a plastic bag full of ice on top of the inverted lid. The steam condensed on the inside of the lid and ran down to the lowest point of the lid from which point it dripped down into the collection dish. The most wonderful aroma filled the house. It was spicy. Shaw, my daughter, thought it smelled like Christmas trees. I thought it smelled like eucalyptus.

After about ten minutes, I turned off the pot and let it cool. After a long time, and working very carefully, since everything was still hot, I removed the bag of ice, the lid and finally the collection dish. I poured the liquid I had collected into a sterilized glass jar which I labeled and placed in the refrigerator.

Then I had to figure out what to do with bay hydrosol. It smelled great. I can imagine it would make a great aftershave. It has that woodsy, spicy scent to it. I wasn’t sure what else it could be used for. The article at Wikipedia

informs me that bay laurel has antioxidant, analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties. It might also be good for rubbing on sore muscles (though then I would probably rather infuse it in an oil) since it has analgesic qualities.

The fragrance come from the essential oils which include 45% eucalyptol (that was what I was smelling) and also eugenol (one of the main ingredients in clove cigarettes, an old vice of mine), pinenes (that's what my daughter was smelling--the scent of pine trees), linalool, geraniol and terpineol.

I wish I could spray some your way. It’s a marvelous scent. Next I’m going to try to make rose hydrosol from the roses in the abandoned lot across the street. They’re almost gone for the year so I have to make this in the next few days. I'll let you know how it works in my next post.

Birthday Flowers

I've written before in my newsletter and my blog about the concept of Birthday Flowers, that is a flower that blooms on your birthday. My mother associated the Amaryllis Belladonna with my birthday because it blooms in Southern California where I was born on September 4, my birthday. It's also called Naked Lady and there's another flower called Naked Lady, the autumn crocus, which blooms in Seattle, where I live now, on my birthday.

This year I was worried as my birthday approached because I didn't see any sign of my birthday flowers where they usually bloom, in the parkway of a residential street near my work. Then on the day before my birthday, my daughter invited me to go on a long ramble with her through the nearby park. On our way home we spotted some of my birthday flowers emerging from a patch of dirt outside a brick apartment building only a block from our house. It's not a block I usually travel, either when walking the dog or on my way to work or the store or the library. In fact, I'm only on that block when the lindens are in bloom. So it was a nice find. It's one of the great things about being a naturalist in the city, that you can discover something brand new right around the corner.

On the day after my birthday I was on my way to work, traveling along my usual path, and there were my birthday flowers in their usual spot. I don't know how I missed them on my previous trips. I'm not sure how I feel about having the autumn crocus as my birthday flower. It's highly poisonous but also poignant, appearing in the midst of a blighted landscape as a pale apparition of vulnerable beauty.

Do you have a birthday flower?

Later Lammas

It's amazing how fast something becomes a holiday tradition., i.e., the Lammas Festival. I attended last year and returned this year, eager to experience some of the magical moments from last year, like swimming in the river, and singing the song "They Shall Remain" in the closing circle, and breakfast at the Acme Cafe on the way home.

But the beauty of repeating an experience is that it isn't quite the same the second time. And although all of those things happened again, I left with a whole new set of magical memories. Like singing around the campfire and sleeping in my car and waking up every few hours to see the shifting tableaux of the campground, like a series of camera frames.

When I first curled up in my front seat, I could look out my window and see the picture above, of the bonfire and sparks dancing upward into the night sky, like fiery snakes, and the people were only rosy glows moving in and out of the light. A few hours later when I awoke, I saw only a blazing fire throwing off great sparks; all the rest was dark though I know there was a fire tender keeping watch. The next time I woke up, fog had settled in the valley, and the fire was just a dull orange glow although the ascending sparks occasionally lit the mist above the fire with bursts of pale peach-colored light. I woke again a few hours later after daybreak and saw a circle of empty camp chairs around the fire pit. It was all so close, almost within a hand's reach, it seemed, though the bonfire had seemed so far away from my car when I retired. I closed my eyes again and when I next woke up, the chairs were populated. People were drinking coffee and talking. I rolled down my window and let their words drift in, along with the smell of dried grass (I love the smell of dried grass.)

Probably the best memory, though, was my recognition that I had become part of a tribe. Even though I hadn't seen most of these people since last year, I felt so comfortable, so accepted, so welcomed, it was easy to be myself (a shy person and a cranky camper). I have a feeling this gathering, in its own small way, recaptures the way people felt when gathering for the Teltown Fair back in the eleventh century.

A chance to reconnect with old friends, to hear the stories of what's happened in their lives, to sit back and watch the new babies being passed around the circle, to see how the kids have grown, to admire the talents each person brings to the group (clothing, song, art work, learning, embroidery, food art, ritual, etc.), to feast and sing and dance. I'm already looking forward to returning next year, knowing the magical memories will be completely different.

Early Lammas

When you're a holiday maven, it's hard to keep up with all the holiday traditions you develop. this year I missed my usual July/Lotus Moon water lily paddle on Lake Washington, but I didn't miss my Lammas blackberry picking, a tradition I developed to simulate in Seattle the Irish custom of climbing high mountains on the Sunday before Lughnasad to pick bilberries.

Usually I go blackberry picking on the Sunday before Lammas with my friend Michael after our usual Sunday breakfast. We go to the blackberry bushes that grow along the Burke Gilman trail, right below the University of Washington and the I-5 bridge. But we didn't go on the Sunday before Lammas because we were both in a hurry to go someplace else and we didn't think the berries would be ripe (it's been overcast in Seattle in recent weeks).

Luckily I got another chance to go berry picking on Friday, August 1st, because my car got a flat tire and I was delayed in heading out of town to a Lammas festival. So I made a solitary pilgrimage to the berry bushes. As you can see from the photo, there were a few ripe ones on these bushes, but I couldn't reach them. But all I had to do was cross the street. On the other side of 40th, I found plenty of warm, sweet, ripe blackberries. I brought home a basket full to share with my daughter.

Flowers to Seeds

I mentioned in my newsletter that I was really noticing the transition from flower to seed at this time of the year and here are a few pictorial examples.

I love the way the seed pod is so visible inside the ruffled petals of the poppy. This photograph was taken almost two weeks ago and most of the petals have dropped by now.



This second photo is of the rhododendrons going to seed. I apologize for the poor quality of the photo. I dropped my digital camera (a Canon) six weeks ago (which is why you've heard nothing from me) and borrowed a friend's camera to take these.But I'm not yet very comfortable with the new camera (a Fuji). I do like how you can see the withered petals of the flowers along with the swelling at the base of the ovaries and the long remaining pistil(?)


And finally the Coreopsis, one of whose common names is Tickweed because the black seeds look like ticks. This photo was taken a little too late at night, though I like the way the background suggests a black velvet painting. You can see the intermediate stage between the orange flower and the tick seeds in the pale green flower head that's closest to the camera. Behind it you see one that is farther along and turning brown. The curved sections are clutching the humped black seeds. I'll try to take a better picture of this and post it later.

Iris Farm

These beautiful photographs were taken by my friend, Michael, who accompanied me on both my first and my most recent visits to Schreiner's Gardens just outside of Salem, Oregon.
We went on Mother's Day weekend this year and because it's been so cloudy and cool, most of the bearded irises were not yet in bloom. So most of the display iris in this area, were the dwarf irises, which I had never seen before. I wandered up and down the aisles smelling irises and found many new favorite fragrances.
There's also an area where you can buy plants. This photo shows me in the background in my "cat hat" (my daughter makes them) and a beautiful columbine in the foreground. I bought one like this for my garden.
Schreiners also has a beautiful iris garden where samples of every kind of iris are planted in rows and clearly labeled, so you can see how they grow. There's also a section (as shown in this photo) which was full of lilacs and rhododenrons in bloom. The last picture shows me in front of a magnificent yellow rhododendron.

The Pink Rain

This is one of my favorite times of the year. I call it the season of the Pink Rain, when the cherry petals drop and carpet the sidewalks.





The picture on the left was taken on April 28, when the sidewalks were peppered with petals like confetti.



The next two photos were taken on May 7 when the dusting of petals had become a carpet, filling the gutters with pink rain.




These last two photos were taken on May 14 and May 16 and show the heaps of petals covering parked cars and covering the surface of a decorative pool in front of an apartment building. The pink rain is almost over, alas!

A Trip to the Iris Farm in my New Car

On Mother's Day, I made a quick trip down to Schreiners Iris Farm just outside of Salem, Oregon. It's a pilgrimage I plan every year but seldom execute. This year the leisurely trip I planned ended up crunched into one grueling day of driving. But it was all so much more pleasant because I was driving my new car, which I bought last Mother's Day. That's a whole story in itself. I just thought I would celebrate the ease it has brought me. It's a 2007 Ford Focus and it really looks good parked next to my neighbor's tulips. I'll post more about the iris farm trip in a few days.

Fragrant Rhododendrons

Ever since I read the book Tales of the Rose Tree by Jane Brown and learned that the earliest rhododendrons, brought to England from Nepal and China by plant explorers, were fragrant, I’ve been searching for a fragrant rhododendron. Seattle is rhododendron city; there’s a rhodie on every block, practically every yard. It’s our state flower after all. But, despite sniffing every rhodendron I passed, I couldn’t find one with any scent. That’s partly because, as with other highly hybridized flowers, the scent has been bred out of them in favor of big blossoms and vivid colors.

Then on May 1, when I was leaving the Museum of History and Industry after a great reunion of Nearby History participants, I smelled the most intoxicating fragrance. I looked around and the only blossoms in sight were on a huge rhododendron with large white flowers. So I thought I would try sniffing the blossoms. Ah! A heavenly aroma. A truly fragrant rhododendron.

A few days later, I was celebrating an impromptu May ceremony with some friends, tossing wreaths into the lagoons at the end of the Arboretum, when I saw another white rhododendron, right next to the gatehouse that leads into Broadmoor. I pointed it out and we went over to smell it. Again, that intoxicating fragrance, a lot like honeysuckle. We stuck our noses deep into the blossoms to inhale the scent and when we raised our heads, there were smudges of pollen on our noses and sticky pistils. The flower had lured us, hapless pollinators, to spread its seed around. A perfect ending for May Day.

The photograph above is not either of the bushes described but it may be the same cultivar. This is Polar Bear and it’s a fragrant rhododendron offered for sale by Banwy Valley Nursery in the UK.

The Berkeley Horticultural Nursery has a wonderful list of fragrant rhododendron cultivars.

I was especially fascinated by the distinctions made in describing their scents. Bill Massey is very fragrant with cinnamon/chocolate overtones. Fragrantissimum smells of honeysuckle and nutmeg. And Fragrantissimum Improved has “an almost tropical fragrance with nuances of jasmine and cloves.” McNabbi smells like nutmeg and Mi Amor has hints of musk and tarragon. Paul Molinari has the scent of wild honeysuckle (I have a feeling this is the cultivar I enjoyed) while Scott’s Valentine smells like jasmine. It’s enough to make me run out and buy some rhododendrons for my garden.

One thing this flower project is doing for me is making me fall in love with flowers I always disdained (like the bergenia and the big showy, scentless rhodies).

May Flowers

As we do every May Eve, my daughter and I went out last night at midnight and wandered around our neighborhood in the dark, armed with bags and clippers, looking for fragrant flowers in the parkways and the alleyways (where we consider them fair game). This year, to our astonishment, there were no lilacs in bloom (except at the very top of the bushes where we couldn't reach them). We brought home a few buds hoping to force them in the warmth of our house but with no success. This tells me that spring is truly late this year (I've been refusing to believe it, since other flowers, like the daffodils, bloomed on time.) The only May flower which is blooming on time is the sweet woodruff, the plant traditionally used to flavor May wine.

The picture of the little basket is from last year when we had a better haul, and shows one of the offerings we left on all the doorknobs in our apartment building. This year we simply filled all the vases in our apartment.

Are your May Day flowers blooming on time or are they late, like ours?

The Mystery Plant

At the start of March, I embarked on a new topic in my year-long quest to learn about flowers. I began to focus on plant identification. I read Botany in a Day by Thomas J Elpel, a wonderful book that teaches you to identify plants by learning about plant families, then went out walking, eager to apply my newfound knowledge.

Unfortunately, I ran into a snag right away. I decided to identify the plant on the left. I call it the snail plant because snails love to eat the leaves and it usually looks pretty ratty by this time of year (the one on the left is looking pretty good). I used the process of keying out described by Elpel and quickly established that this was a Pyrola or wintergreen. I was thrilled! I had identified my first plant. Wanting to confirm my conclusion, I Googled Pyrola only to find out: this is not a Pyrola.

I was relating this story over lunch to some friends and one of them after hearing my description (round leaves with scalloped edges, pink flowers on red stalks) suggested my mystery plant was bear's britches. Again more excitement.

I rushed home and Googled Bear's Britches, the common name for acanthus mollis, the ancient plant whose leaves often decorate the capitals of Roman columns. Unfortunately, my plant is not Acanthus mollis (although I did have the good fortune, now that I know about it, to find an Acanthus on my walk to work this morning)

So I was sulking and feeling like I couldn't post anything because I was such a failure as an amateur botanist. Then I realized, this is what the Internet is for. One of you will surely recognize this plant. Can you tell me what it is? I look forward to your wisdom.

One thing that has happened as a result of my quest is that I now love this plant that I used to hate. I'm much more intimate with it now, having pried apart the five pink petals to count the ten tiny white stamens. I admire the combination of colors the bloom displays as it fades: the vivid magenta of the petals, the greenish-purple sepals and the deep maroon of the stem.

Spring Equinox in the City: An Iris Blooms!

It's not a glamorous photo but it records a sighting that made my heart leap with joy! The first iris bud of the year. Spotted at the corner of Broadway and John in Seattle on the first day of spring.

When I went to write this into my phenological journal, I noted that the first iris bud appeared in the front yard of the apartment building across the street a week earlier (Mar 13) in 2005. I wonder if there is one over there right now? I will have to go check.

Besotted by Violets

I spent the last week in a happy haze of violets.

It all began when I bought a chunk of violet-scented soap from Lush, my favorite source for hand-made soap and bath bombs.

It was named Gratuitous Violet in an internal rhyme that made me smile. Immediately, it became my favorite soap, a pleasure to slide over my skin, the sumptuous scent lingering on my skin in a shimmer of fragrance for hours. It reminded me of the scent of irises (and I have since learned they share a common chemical compound: ionone) which I love. It is floral without being pretty, sweet without being saccharine, with a hint of dark spiciness. It did not seem familiar to me, and this is probably good, since many people seem to associate the scent with old ladies doused with violets and powder.

The soap soon became an addiction. Alas, on my last trip to Lush on Winter Solstice, I discovered they were discontinuing this soap. I bought the largest piece I could afford and am still doling it out, one little slippery shard at a time, but meanwhile it was time to look for a new supply of violet scent.

I’ve been haunting perfume review sites for some months, eavesdropping on the fabulous discussions of perfumes far too expensive for me to dream of buying a bottle, where I learned about the Perfumed Court, a small company run by three women perfume addicts who got the bright idea of selling samples of decanted perfumes from those big expensive bottles so people like me could try these extravagant pleasures for a minimal price. I searched for “violets” on their web site and found that they offered a violet sampler which I immediately ordered.

While I was waiting for my violet sampler to arrive, I received an email from a Living in Season reader who had read my wistful comment that I had never smelled a real violet as I didn’t believe they grew in Seattle. Not so! She replied. Martha had violets growing in her yard and she volunteered to give me some for my garden. So last Sunday I drove to Martha’s house and we got on our hands and knees and pried them out from among the day lily bulbs.

Martha had several varieties: parma violets with their almost psychedelic red-violet color, and delicate pale apricot colored violets, but the real prize for me were the sweet violets (viola odorata). The tiniest of the lot, you couldn’t smell them unless you got down on your hands and knees and stuck your nose inches from the soil. No wonder violets are so often associated with humility (in the language of the flowers) as they bring us so low to appreciate their fragrance. But the scent! It was intoxicating! Martha told me she picks a few stems and floats them in water. The scent, she said, is so strong it imbues the water with fragrance.

I rushed my transplants home and planted them in my plot in the community garden. The apricot-colored violets have been the happiest with the transfer, but the others are surviving, though they still look a bit crushed. I did pluck three stems of the sweet violets and placed them in a glass of water on my desk where I could periodically reach out and bring it to my nose. The scent is heavenly.

And then my perfume sampler arrived. Thus began a week of prying open tiny glass bottles, one at a time (remembering one of my prized possessions as an adolescent, a box of perfume samples packing in skinny glass ampules, as thin as toothpicks, which you snapped open to release the few drops of liquid inside). Every night I daubed my wrists with violet-themed perfumes, then spent a happy hour trolling the Internet reading perfume reviews.

The jargon amazed and baffled me. Reviewers raved about silage and top notes, threw around terms like dry-off and dark base. It was like being at a wine tasting with a bunch of snobby connoisseurs. One reviewer found notes of blond hay, tobacco, mint, aniseed and violet in a perfume where I smelled merely intense, obnoxious sweetness. To my delight, the perfumes I liked the most were the simplest and the most true to the violet scent: Violetta di Bosco and Violettes de Toulouse, named after the French city which celebrates the violet with a festival every year. I think I will have to visit next year.

Song of the Plants

This is a picture of the first quince blossom I saw this year, taken February 25. But I didn't choose this picture to illustrate that important phenological event but simply because it's the best photograph I've taken to illustrate the rather mysterious topic of this blog.

When I first launched my project of getting to know the plants in my urban neighborhood, it wasn't really because I wanted to learn their Latin names or know what date they bloomed in a particular year but because I wanted a deeper connection with the natural world.

All through February I've been tracking and annotating the buds and blossoms, the proliferating of twigs on branches and the reddish haze at the top of the linden trees, even the elusive scents that are drifting through the spring air. But my phenological observations while helping me engage more with the natural world, still keep me at a distance. The plants are the objects of my scrutiny but they are still objects, data pinned in the pages of my notebook.

Then about a week ago I was walking home from work in the dark. And I became aware that my mind was churning over my list of to-dos, as it used to do during my walks before I became distracted by the plants. One of the lovely things about walking as a phenologist is that I'm freed from this sort of incessant mind chatter. But in the dark, it seemed I had no plants to observe.

My friend Janis had just remarked on how much she was enjoying reading one of Stephen Buhner's books about plants. He writes about how native healers in different cultures learn about the herbs they use medicinally. They say the plants speak to them, some say the plants even have specific songs that tell something about their character.

I wondered if I could tune in to the plants in the dark, so I walked a little more slowly, with curiosity, my head tilted a bit to see what I could hear. I was blown away by what I experienced. Every plant I passed was singing its own song. Mind you, I heard no distinct words, no instructions for their uses. But their personalities were distinct. Some were lively, some greedy, some dispirited (that was the English ivy).

I've felt the energy of trees before (I wrote an essay for my newsletter on tree hugging) but
this was more like walking through halos of energy, or clouds of lyrics sung in a foreign language. Walking in the dark past the plants and being aware of their presence was a miracle. I think maybe life is really like this all the time but we don't notice it.

Daffodils for St David

Last year I wrote a long post all about daffodils on this day. This year I thought I'd share photographs I took of the daffodils blooming in my neighborhood.

The daffodils on the left are growing in the garden of a nearby apartment building. The daffodils below, usually the earliest to bloom in our neighborhood, are in front of Horizon, the used bookstore on 15th.

I also went in and bought some cool gardening books during their 50% off sale. I got a copy of a hardcover book called called A Paradise out of a Common Field: The Pleasures and Plenty of the Victorian Garden by Joan Morgan and Allison Richards. Looks like it will be good for my Victorian historical novels as well as my garden research. Also a book with beautiful flower arrangements called Country Flower Style by Jane Newdick. Jane recommends displaying daffodils in bunches or with twigs. She says that they cause other flowers to die more quickly (I wonder why?).

I also got an amazing book called Lilies of the Hearth: The Historical Relationship Between Women and Plants by Jennifer Bennet. It covers, among other things, the way medieval women used plants in their stillrooms, plants and convents, the way botany became a pleasing area of study for 19th century women, and ends with biographies of some my plant heroines like Maud Grieve and Rachel Carson.

My rule about buying new books is that I have to take some off the shelf and give them away when I put more on. But I can't resist buying more books about plants and I'm not willing to give up any of my old ones.

The Red of Spring

Red has always been the color of spring to me, particularly March.

In Bulgaria, on March 1st, people tie red and white tassels called Martenitzas around the wrists of loved ones, also cars, house doors, trees, and young animals. These tassels are protection amulets that are worn until the first stork returns, signaling the beginning of spring.

In Eastern European countries, scarlet eggs were symbols of resurrection and were placed on or buried in the graves of the family dead. A Romanian tale says that eggs are dyed red to represent the blood of Christ. But the Chinese used to exchange scarlet eggs at their Spring Festival in 900 BCE, so it is more likely the red color is the symbol of life.

The month of March is named after the Roman god, Mars, also the name of the Red Planet. Before he was the god of war, Mars was the god of fertility and vegetation. And the new growth of spring is often red.

In the days when I drove up to Clear Lake once a week to visit my mentor and friend, Helen Faris, I always loved that time during the year when the woods on either side of the highway took on a rosy flush, an almost imperceptible halo of color, slowly replaced in the weeks that followed with green.

In my neighborhood the change is a little less obvious since the trees aren't assembled en masse. I often stop to gawk at individual trees and shrubs on my walk to work, convinced they've changed but unable to say exactly how. The first inklings of spring are invisible yet apparent.

As spring rolls on and the leaves unfurl, the shift to spring becomes visible. The twigs of trees flush red at the tips. Right now, the leaves unfurling on the rose bushes are as red as the roses will be later. The new leaves of the hebe (to the left) are dark red, almost violet.

And, of course, who can miss the magic of the ubiquitous photinia, a popular shrub all over Seattle because of this--it's one trick--the bright red of the new leaves which slowly deepen to a darker, rubbery green.

Thanks to a letter posted at my favorite phenology site, Journey North, I now understand why. Anthocyanins. Those pigments that are so good for you, which are found in the skins of grapes and blueberries, are present in the cells of plants, creating the red color which acts as a sort of sunscreen protecting the plant from too much sunlight. As the plant develops, it is able to absorb the sunlight and convert it to chlorophyll, the green pigment, which overshadows the red., which won't be seen again until fall when the leaves of trees die and stop producing chlorophyll and the anthocyanins flame out in their fall colors.

The Journey North web site suggested an experiment which I carried out. I poured some purple grape juice into three cups, filled with bleach, water and white vinegar respectively. The purple color of the grape juice completely disappeared in the bleach, while it intensified in color in the vinegar and became diluted in the water. Don't know what that's supposed to prove but it was fun.

How to Identify a Black Locust Tree in Winter

I spent the day getting signed up with the Budburst Project. I'm going to be reporting on nine plants that grow on my block. My instructions are to report the following markers: budburst (also known as first leaf, when at least three leaf buds have unfolded), full leaf (95% of leaf buds are unfolded), first flower (when you can see the stamens of the flower), full flower (when at least 50% of the flowers are open), end flower (when at least 95% of the flowers have dried up) and seed or fruit dispersal (when seeds or fruits start dropping naturally).

I chose the following plants from a long of possibilities.
American linden, common dandelion, common yarrow, forsythia, lilac, California poppy, purple passion flower, field mustard and white clover.
All can be found on my block except for the linden which is kitty corner from the northwest corner of my block.

I wanted to add a black locust tree to my list, since black locusts have always been magical trees for me. My mascot tree on the UW campus, the one I always hug (furtively) before and after my classes, is a black locust. But I wasn't sure if the locust tree on my block was a honey locust or a black locust.

Luckily I have Jacobson's Trees of Seattle, a wonderful reference guide which not only describes each tree but also provides addresses and directions so one can find specimens of each tree in residential neighborhoods and parks. (If your town doesn't have such a reference guide, you should create one. It's marvelous.)

Jacobson gives a nice breakdown of the differences between the two trees. Black locusts are likely to be older, grow wild and have extensive root suckers, while honey locusts have usually been planted, are younger and don't put forth suckers. You can see in this photograph of mine, how prolifically black locusts put forth suckers. This was was one of two trees in my neighborhood that were cut down to put up some condominiums. The two trees were damaged in a fierce windstorm and all the branches removed from the top of this one. In the few months it had vigorously re-asserted itself. Unfortunately, both trees are gone now so I couldn't compare them to the tree on my block

According to Jacobson, a black locust has showy white flowers while a honey locust has small greenish flowers; a black locust has 8 to 14 inch leaves with 9-25 leaflets while a honey locust has smaller leaves and up to 36 leaflets. Since there are neither flowers or leaves right now, I wouldn't be able to use these indicators until spring. Right now the tree is covered with lot of golden, bean-like seed pods. In a honey locust these should be 20" long and scarce, in a black locust, 2 to 5 ' long and abundant. My tree has abundant seed pods which made me think it's a black locust.

Then I found the lovely photograph above on Flickr and looked at the photograph of a honey locust on Wikipedia (did I say how much I love the Internet?). Now I'm sure my tree is a black locust. So I'm going to go add it to my observation list.

I also learned from Wikipedia (this time the article on black locusts) that the black locust is a major honey plant (bees love the fragrant flowers), it produces a wonderful hard wood used for fencing, railroad ties and firewood), it helps fix nitrogen in the soil (it's a member of the bean family and the seed pods do resemble bean pods) and it was named after the tree that supposedly fed St. John the Baptist in the desert, though, being native to America, it was not that tree. Jacobson says that black locusts have a beneficial influence on plants around them (unlike Black Walnuts which have a baneful influence). He writes: "Grass under locust trees is remarkably dark, green and lush." No wonder hugging my mascot tree has always inspired feelings of good will in me.

Reference:
Jacobson, Arthur Lee, Trees of Seattle, Sasquatch 1989

first Robin of the season

On Monday, February 18, when I was heading to the flower store to order some flowers for my Mom's birthday (which is February 19--Happy Birthday, Mom!), I noticed a bird sitting on a telephone wire above the street in front of my apartment building. He (sex uncertain?) was making a lot of noise--I'm not sure I could call all of it singing, though most of it was quite lyrical. I went running back into the apartment and asked my daughter to come out and look at the bird since she's the one with some birding experience but neither of us could tell for sure what it was. I was hoping it was a robin (I've been looking for one for weeks) but when I listened to the robin calls posted at Journey North, one of my favorite phenology sites, they didn't match.

On Friday, February 22, when I dropped off my (way overdue) books at the library, I noticed big bird with a rather fluffy orange-red chest in a tree alongside the library. I prowled around the tree for quite a while, looking up, trying to decide if it was a robin. It looked a bit odd, as if it's orange-red breast was split in two and I always think of robins as having smooth red breasts. But, thanks to Journey North's video, I realized I was seeing a robin preening. He must have felt quite safe up there in that tree as this is not an activity a robin would engage in if he (again I'm not sure of gender but apparently male robins show up first) was feeling unsafe.

I went to Journey North to see if I could figure out if my robin was a male or a female. Probably a male, as the males arrive first. They listed the following markers for Robin phenology: first male seen, first wave (a group of robins seen together), first earthworms, first robin singing (male robins mark their territory with song), first female (they come later after the male has established his turf), first male battle, nest building, incubation of eggs, young hatch, young fledge, young take wing, new nest (or next batch).

I doubt that my singer on the telephone wire was a robin since no one else in my area has reported hearing any robins sing. But it was great to look at the robin map and see the first two robin sightings in Seattle were reported by Beth, who's a School of the Seasons subscriber.

I also found a great article on the etymology of the scientific name for the American robin: Turdus migratorius. No it's not what you think. Turdus is Latin for thrush and the author explains its relationship to the word Sturdy, which originally meant "trashed" or "hammered" because of the way thrushes act after they feast on fermented berries in fall. The French have an expression which means "drunk as a thrush."