Prairie Evening

Yesterday a few friends and I journeyed in time, to the grasslands that once rolled like ancient seas from the river to the mountains, to a refuge for rare native plants, to a resounding moment of presence at the heart of the prairie. We walked a paved trail, stopping often to identify and photograph plants and insects.

Rattlesnake master,
Eryngium yuccifolium

Blackberries and black raspberries lined the path just before it passed into the shade of a red cedar grove. Climbing out of the shadows, we watched the meadows open before us. Sections of this prairie are maintained by mowing. The fragrance of new mown hay spilled over us. Rattlesnake master raised its white globes, and gayfeather gathered butterflies. Bluestem grass waved at the sky.

The university maintains this land as part of a biological reserve. Some sections are mowed; others are burned or grazed. Some are left untreated. Old fields have been reseeded with warm and cool season grasses. In a garden a few miles down the road, ethnobotanists and chemists study the medicinal properties of native plants. Public trails lead hikers into secret worlds.

Gayfeather,
Liatris pychnostachya

The trail ends at an overlook with a long bench designed to roll like the prairie. We spread out a picnic on its hills and valleys. We ate and talked and gazed across the river valley toward the town. We finished as the sun was setting. The crescent moon emerged from shining clouds.

On our way back, the two fastest walkers went on ahead. As they followed the turning trail, they seemed to wade to their knees in long grass until they vanished. A few minutes later we watched two ethereal figures returning. Our friends appeared transformed, barefoot with flowing skirts and swirling hair, tall nymphs of the wilderness conversing in musical voices on the wind. Two strangers said hello as they passed us on their way to the overlook. 

There are moments like this if you pay attention: For the space of a few heartbeats, strangers on a path embody a glimpse of immanent magic. Spirits of the Meliades tend the pastures, and Nephelai shepherd the wild clouds. Demeter and her daughter wander through swaying grasses. The moon rides in dusk and cloud above the shimmering prairie.

Field Botany

I signed up for a six-session class in field botany this summer. I had taken a botany course in college, but I retained about as much information from it as many people do from seventh-grade Spanish classes. The attractive aspect of the short class was the field trips. I have bad memories of blurry microscopic images. The class included undergraduates and several nontraditional students, like me. One of the nontrads had been the instructor’s second-grade teacher.

Botany Bluff trail

Looking over the first few pages of class material was daunting. The eleven-page primer of botanical terms looked like it might at least help improve my scrabble game. Spelling the words had to be easier than understanding what they were on about. I tried to read the class material before each session. In class I tried to take notes on the printout pages. At home in the evening, I wrote up my interpretations of what I was supposed to have learned. I decided to transfer my notes to the computer, mostly in hopes that I could lay out the information in some way that would cause some of it to stick in my brain. I found myself explaining roots and shoots to my daughter. I actually sounded like I had a clue. This might just get me somewhere, I thought.

Beardtongue.
We shredded a few of these in class.

I managed to get the microscope to show me anthers and carpels on the second day. It also produced images of a ferocious yellow dragon with horns. Tiny insects that occasionally fall out of flowers look quite alarming at 25x magnification. On the field walk that day, the teacher asked me how many anthers I could see in the flower of a wild pink. This had about the same result as the medieval joke about tricking the devil into enumerating the holes in a colander. The poor dimwitted guy keeps counting over and over, “One, two, three. Uh. One, two, three. Uh.” At least I made it as far as nine.

I discovered by taking daily quizzes that I don’t mind drawing a blank as much as I mind thinking that I know the answer when I’m actually wrong.  Working my way through a botanical key was also a humbling experience. The key to local trees threatened to provide me with many delightful hours of wandering around in the timber, checking a printout and mumbling to myself. I collected bur oak leaves from two different trees on one of the walks. They didn’t look all that similar to me.

I know people who could
identify this tree in five
seconds. With the botanical
key, it took us half an hour,
but now I know what makes
it a bur oak.

I had heard rumors that botanists were sufficiently obsessed to jump over private fences to photograph neighborhood flora. Our teacher raided other classrooms on occasion. To illustrate the Liliaceae, he darted out of the room (leaving the undergraduates deep in a discussion of bands I had never heard of) and returned with a florist’s vase of Asiatic lilies, larkspur and coneflowers. “I don’t know who these belong to,” he warned us, “so don’t dissect them.”

On the last day we visited a local prairie held in trust by the state and the family of the woman who had treasured it. We went out in groups to find examples of plants from the families we had studied. For some reason, each group scored 16 of a possible 10 points. Botanists are evidently as generous as they are obsessed. The conserved prairie held a small memorial to the woman who had loved the wildflowers there — a pink quartzite boulder, a bench, some peony bushes and a plaque dedicating the wild grasslands to her memory. I can imagine no finer tribute.

Lavender Moon

One of the many names for the full moon of April is the Pink Moon, supposedly derived from early colonists’ perceptions of spring blooms in New England. In this part of the timber, I’m seeing more lavender, especially in late April and May.

The native redbuds, Cercis canadensis, are the most spectacular. They usually bloom in mid-April before the trees have leafed out. For a couple of weeks, the light is filtered through a cloud of blossoms. The roadsides look like an invitation to enter Faërie. My daughter gathers the blossoms to sprinkle on cinnamon toast and drop into salads. When we first bought this land, my husband and I (both lifelong locals but townies) walked through the woods in March. There were more unfamiliar trees than either of us had seen before. We asked each other, “What are all these trees with the dark red buds on them?” In April the answer became obvious, a delightful “Duh” moment.

The lilacs are next. We planted purple and white Syringa bushes early on. We now have a variegated lavender selection spreading beside the driveway. As far as I’m concerned, the lilacs can be any color they want as long as they smell like ecstasy. The species name comes from syrinx, a hollow tube or pipe. Syrinx was a nymph who escaped the pursuit of the wild God Pan by transforming herself into reeds. Pan gathered the hollow stems and invented his signature instrument, the panpipes or syrinx. My daughter likes to compose flute music in the garden and the woods, where the singing of crickets and spring peepers inspires her. The neighbors sometimes hear distant piping, elusive as the scent of lilacs.

In May the sweet rocket goes off. It’s also called dame’s rocket and lady’s rocket, Hesperis matronalis: Mother of the evening. It was here before we were, favoring the edges of the timber. It moved into the yard with great abandon. One year I bought a couple of plants of the alba variant at a local nursery. They mixed it up with the natives immediately. Now the rocket explosion features not only the native deep purple, but also a random selection of white, pink and lavender blossoms.

So I use a personal name for the moon of May. The light changes as it pours through blossoms, spilling purple shadows on the ground, showering the timber with the Mother’s blessing.

 (Listen to "Syrinx" by Claude Debussy: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbRC3scRYeE 

performed by Paula Robison.)

Wild Violets

I grew up in a small town in this county, but I'm still something of an outsider, resettled in a different township. My nearest neighbors are a farming family. They’ve lived and worked here for four generations. They had their doubts about me when I first moved to the timber, but their matriarch had worked at a café across the street from my father’s print shop when I was little. She remembered him stopping by every morning for coffee and me coming in with my parents for lunch, piping up with a request for a “girl cheese” sandwich. She vouched for me, and her husband told other neighbors that I was okay; they had “knowed me since I was knee-high.”

Jack-in-the-pulpit

My dad loved the timber. In his teens, he transplanted wild jack-in-the-pulpit, deertongue, dutchman's breeches and lady's slippers to his mother's garden. Jacks, wild violets and deertongue grew on the north side of our house when I was growing up. Each spring, he would take us hunting for wildflowers in the timber. I was allowed to pick only a small handful of dutchman's breeches to take home. We left the mayapples and jacks alone where they grew.

Mayapples

I must have been about five years old when he told me it was my job to pick all the violets in our yard as they bloomed. Every day after the first flower appeared, I would hop about in the deep grass, plucking blossoms and clutching them in my fist until I could carry no more. We put them in small vases, then in juice glasses, then in empty jelly jars until we had filled the kitchen counters and the dining room table with violets in various stages of bloom and decline.

Toothwort

I’ve never felt like a stranger in the timber here, even though I’m still learning the names of the trees and finding new wildflowers hiding under the coral berries every spring. The spirit of this land has known me since I was knee-high. The violets speak for me.