Ideal Cosmos

At my latitude, nine rotations in mid December exclude daylight for fifteen hours and fourteen minutes. This slow motion reversal at the planetary elliptical vertex is experienced as stasis. Nine days of nearly equal day light. Then, day by day, our planet rushes toward another season at 67,000 miles per hour, delivers us a minute, then two, and finally three minutes additional daylight per rotation. This is time, flying.

That it is completely dark at seven thirty five in the morning, nearly 26,000 minutes after that reversal, is still surprising. The moon, approaching its 297° northwest by west horizon, nearly full, cast its reflected light through our window, waking me as would the morning sun, set to meet the horizon only fourteen minutes later.

The rising sun's countenance a dim facade.

Winter, with it's frozen palette,

 pushes me to reconsider a lifelong disinterest in Florida.

 All places can challenge our preconceptions.

Although Florida's humanity has created endless reaches of entertainment and consumerism, gated communities and social poverties, it is a place of subtle beauty, and warm, ever so warm. I've still not grown accustomed to winter travel, its luxury and privilege. Yet, it does aid the spirit and what does one have if one is low in spirit?

I've become taken with this greenhouse situated within Florida's Mead Botanical Garden. It's not my first greenhouse, and won't be my last.

At home we invite the aura of a Floridian winter when we bring outdoor plants indoors to overwinter.  With them we bring various creatures, including this year's populations of aphids and fungus gnats.

In this choice we face the decision, should we be so thoughtful, of life or death for these insects. The suffering of plants, should they experience suffering at all, is weighted against the immediate squish or the slow, sudsy demise of soft-bodied beings. We recoil at the sticky residue and skins shed onto the windowsill, but not the lack of empathy for life. Expanded, these thoughts engage all the world, all the choices within our power to make.

Despite myself, I still moved to extinguish the aphids, to eliminate the gnats. A garden is celebrated, but a gardener kills. We do not move against the gardener, decry their deeds and demote their effort -apart from the more fashionable descriminations. We do not yet belong to an ideal cosmos, of which only mathematics and our imaginations approach.

Lunar Eclipse

January twentieth's total lunar eclipse, on a cold, clear night, the so called Super Blood Wolf Moon. Below zero temperature, the moon at high altitude, a clumsy tripod incapable of the angle, and an adapted, low quality Minolta 210mm zoom from the 1980s on my great Olympus EM10, all overcome to capture a couple of nearly steady images at several second exposures. If you look closely, or click on the image, you can even see a few shaky stars. Lunar eclipses reveal the moon's spherical form more than our usual moon, offering us the subtlest grasp on the depths above.

Peach Blossom Spring

Things move slowly, we know, but still we expect change to come quickly. Yet quickly comes change, not often the kind we anticipate.

I am now, roughly a year, working in education at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. Here stands the red barn, a relic of an old farm since annexed. The tracks lead you to the Tashjian Bee and Pollinator Center, where we hold classes for adults in a variety of subjects connected to the institutional mission and serve thousands of school children every year. My focus is the advancement and deepening of photography education. I develop classes, hire teachers, and offer insight wherever I have more than two cents to offer. This satellite of the main campus is in development around agriculture, home grown produce, cooking and methods for preservation. It soon will not be the quiet place it appears to be, but occupied by new buildings, agriculture extension staff, visitors, chefs, meals, and fields of produce. Change here will come quickly.

At home, winter is still thick as the lake ice under trucks and shacks. Two years ago this area was cleared to put up the new shop and studio. In 2016 I fall-planted milkweed and transplanted goldenrod, then winter-seeded a mix of savanna seeds in early 2017. By summer we had five foot tall goldenrod, the quickly germinating black-eyed susan, and the beginnings of a more complex blend of plants. I weeded to keep out the Canada thistle, canary reed grass and other more mysterious upstarts.

The winter snow has been permanent, cold as it has been, sheltering the seeds of milkweed, golderod, rudbeckia, and monarda fistulosa. It is one way to plant, if you can give it over to the plants and their fecundity or lack of it. If you want to get plants going with an efficient use of a dollar, avoid buying plants, bare roots, or the daunting germination codes M, E, F, G, or ?, stay off wet soils, weed when needed, and let the plants do the work.

The tiny seeds of eastern forest native Lobelia siphilitica, great blue lobelia, collected from the garden last fall. Despite having enough of these self-seeding, locally native plants to start new colonies, I am seeding it in trays this April because it will do well in sunny, wet soils and shady, mesic zones, is untouched by deer, is competitive with weeds and, with luck, garlic mustard and thistle. These seeds have the germination code C(60) and D, meaning that they will require cold stratification (as in nature) of at least 60 days, they are quite small and may require light to germinate. I will regret mixing these with damp silica sand, as they are... quite small. Next time, all code D seeds will be put on damp, white coffee filters for stratification.

In addition to the fifteen or so species collected, bagged and stratifying as I write, another twenty species has arrived from the local native seed supplier, Prairie Moon, yesterday. My first season I concentrated on milkweeds, last year on forbs and grasses, and this upcoming season on forbs and sedges. All are intended for woods, savanna, or wetland edge gardening as I make small dents in the garlic mustard and buckthorn. Come April, these seeds will be greenhouse trayed for sprouting, then moved outside. Most won't be planted until late summer or early fall in locations previously cleared of weeds.

I will end this rambling with a bit of a poem by Tao Yuanming -the 4th century writer of The Peach Blossom Spring, a tale of utopia in a time of political disunity.

The myriad transformations

unravel one another

And human life

how should it not be hard?

From ancient times

there was none but had to die,

Remembering this

scorches my very heart.

What is there I can do

to assuage this mood?

Only enjoy myself

drinking my unstrained wine.

I do not know

about a thousand years,

Rather let me make

this morning last forever.

A Peculiar Petunia

A blooming petunia sits on the chest of overwintering. Rosemary, lantana, prickly pear, agave, lavender are companions, all known for their ease of transition from garden to window, and back. The petunia, however, has had a more interesting life, a touch of mystery and adventure, and an uneasy, surprising transition.

I've been busy spinning plates. Photographs, details on the studio shop, painting the attic post bat remediation, many websites. Tomorrow I am off to southern New Mexico to work on some art, see some old friends, make some connections up in Santa Fe, and eat at two or three favorite local establishments. Upon my return, finish the attic, make sample work for my business (three bridges and two planters), begin the gardening season, pour two concrete pads, seed the plethora of native seeds I have stratifying in the fridge, move on to buckthorn, Rhamnus cathartica chopping in lieu of garlic mustard removal. It's been so mild this year that I cannot walk the woods to remove garlic mustard without seriously compressing the wet soil. And despite last year's two dozen fifty-gallon bags and countless rotting piles of pulled garlic mustard, there appears to be more growing this year than last. Maybe this spring I can post about last year's experience.

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The Mink

Are you living, fully, if you always get the shot? Don't get me wrong, the shot is important, but that's its own thing. You cannot always have the camera with you, or the best one. Sometimes interesting things just happen. It's better to just be present for those moments, and for me, here, those moments often involve animals (after all, we don't have children).

I watched a large owl fly up the driveway, or should I say -flyway. I've seen a red fox happily pouncing on an invisible object. After years of trying to spot the bird responsible for that jungle call, I finally spied the pileated woodpecker straight up, atop a dead tree. There were the flying squirrels on a blustery, snowy night near the woodpile. A coyote at five ayem, a buck at four. A snowy owl in the woods. And now, finally, a confirmational sighting of what was only a black blur plunging through the deep snow last winter -a mink, Neovison vison.

When phone cameras fail. That center-image shape is it, one of a veritable Muybridge series of shots that succumbed to the common bug screen.

The best I have, cropped from actual pixel resolution, makes for a mysterious looking creature. As it first passed into my view I thought, huh strange looking squirrel, but only for a split second. It bounded from a tree to the recycling pile, then over to the rear steps, underneath them, then to the ac unit, then back to the tractor implements, then toward the cold room, then up this tree about 20 feet, then down it, and on and on over about three or four minutes.