Wild Plum

They are unholy who are born
To love wild plum at night,
Who once have passed it on a road
Glimmering and white.

It is as though the darkness had
Speech of silver words,
Or as though a cloud of stars
Perched like ghostly birds.

They are unpitied from their birth
And homeless in men's sight,
Who love, better than the earth,
Wild plum at night.

Orrick Johns, in The New Poetry: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Verse in English. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1923


(OK, truthful admission here, the photo was taken last Saturday in the daytime; the night-time effect is compliments of Adobe. But my admiration for the poem, and for the effect of wild plum in the moonlight, is unchanged. And the scent! the poet didn't mention the scent!
If any flowers remain tomorrow after the winds of tonight's cold front blow through, and if it isn't cloudy and rainy, I may try for a night-time photograph. Too bad I didn't think of it sooner, during the last few balmy clear full-moon nights.)

rain coming???

Sunday morning — another clear, breezy day, heading for almost 80°. But the weather-guy now says we might get showers tomorrow or the next day, and Wednesday when the cold front comes in, he has upped the chances to 50%. Also lowered the forecast temperature to 50° or even the forties for daytime, with a couple of nights in the mid-thirties. Maybe I won't take the plants back out yet after all. Crossing fingers for rain! So far we have had a grand total of an inch and a half for the whole year.

more chiefs than indians

Wearing my hat as one of the publicity committee photographers, I accompanied a city Parks/Rec-sponsored walk at Cross Timbers park. For the city, the staffer for such activities (I forget her name). For the public, four Brownies and their troop leader. For the naturalists, Dorothy Thetford, Dave Rowley, Marilyn Blanton, Joe Bain, Joanna Fellows and her husband, me, and I think a couple more I have forgotten. [edit - Sharon Barr, Tracy Durmick from city, and the woman who joined us midway.]

We saw several redbuds, just starting to bloom. The mexican plums are glorious! And the scent — aaaaahh! Also a real infestation of privet, which we pointed out and explained too. For herbaceous wildflowers, there were Antennaria (pussytoes) up near the lake.

Since I was last at the park, they have added a wonderful steep, dirt section up to the Lake Forest lake. You can hike one-way now from Hickory Creek Road to Lake Forest Park and the dog park, off of Ryan Road. I especially am glad they have a section of one-person-wide dirt trail, as opposed to the gravel "road" of the main trail.

We all got pretty good exercise; the total distance was something between 1.5 and 1.7 miles. Just about the longest the little girls were up to. Me, too. Really got to get in better shape!

So, a nice morning. Cloudy, temperature in the 70s, pretty breezy. Good company, and! two more hours for my service record. (Plus another hour, conservatively figured, for labelling, exporting, getting disc to Dorothy, etc. Dorothy called to say how much she liked the one I managed to send her online.)

in like a lion ...

Well, the first couple of nights of March were fairly lion-ish, and since then we have also had some fairly ferocious winds, but the temperature has become positively lamb-ly. Although it is rapidly growing up to a full-sized sheep, all hot and smelly. 87° yesterday was more spring than most people wanted. We are promised a cold front next week, and I sincerely hope it is a 40° front, and not a 20° arctic special.

The daffodils have mostly done their thing. The early ones got frost-nipped, and the later ones were fairly rapidly shriveled up by the hot dry wind. No rain to speak of for weeks, sigh. The redbuds are beginning, and the Chickasaw plum thicket at the Ridge is a billow of off-white specks.

olives olives olives (Texas var.)

Went down to the Fort Worth Nature Center yesterday for a winter woody plants ID walk yesterday, led by Suzanne Tuttle. I almost didn't; I've been in bed for a week or more, miserable and sick or depressed or both, but it had been scheduled for months, and I kicked myself into going. Glad I did. Only problem was I was pretty unfit, but it was a slow amble with stops to look at stuff, so no real problem. Betty Zajac, of the Denton naturalists, was there, and she did fall from an unexpected root under her foot. I was afraid I might, but made out OK. And her tumble did her no harm.

I saw one plant I had totally never heard of, Elbow Bush, Forestiera pubescens. Sprawly little deciduous gray thing that was already blooming, little puffs of quarter-inch yellow-green anthers here and there. It's in the olive family, which was actually fairly well represented -— Texas ash, green ash, privet, Japanese ligustrum (both being eliminated, maybe). Also turns out that lilac and forsythia are Oleaceae.

Another new one, that I had heard of before but not seen to know it, was Eve's Necklace, a tree in the Leguminosae, excuse me, Fabaceae. Also in the family, mesquite and honey locust, Gleditsia triacanthos – three-branched spines. Boy, it's a well-armed tree! I don't know if I will recognize Eve's Necklace if I see it again or not; it didn't make a huge distinct impression.

There was a very early Mexican plum blooming; also a pear (non-native) down by the waterside. Today I'll have to get out to feed poor Buddy (made it back to D&L in the nick of time to get him some food, but I was tired and came on home with it). Maybe the big pear's blooming there. I hope Bud's OK after last night's hard freeze; the weather underground site says it was 21! That's way, way colder than I thought it would be. I should have really taken him his food yesterday evening.

So, nice sunny afternoon, sort of sore muscles (muscles? what muscles?) and three hours AT for my master naturalist log.

Red-bird Ridge clearing

I'll take an entry or two to summarize what we have done recently here at the Ridge. We're making it look a little more civilized, but I don't believe we have done anything much to degrade the habitat, more the contrary. Of course, the ultimate aim, of building a few houses and selling their lots, will do so to some extent. But three one- or two-acre lots, with the structures we envision, and rules protecting natives and prohibiting transformation of prairie into lawn, should be able to fit in OK. Certainly the wildlife, at least the birds and occasionally the foxes, come right up to this house.

Friday 16 Jan was the first time we used the new little 14" Husqvarna saw. Eddie cut half a dozen little trees, some dead, to open out the clearing at site SC. Then he tackled the largest of his targets, a 7-8" oak, and it fell wrong. He tried to cut the little twisted strip of remaining wood, and the trunk shifted and trapped the chain. Though he turned it off immediately, the drive sprocket damaged some of the drive teeth. I filed them so they would fit in the groove again, but it didn't serve.


So I found a place with knowledgeable Husky servicepeople at Ed's Lawn Equipment in Addison, and trekked down there next day. They sold me a new chain and got the chain brake loose where we did it wrong. Sunday I put the chain on, but I couldn't get it to start.

Last Friday I had Eddie and Virgil and Scott. Scott and I went to the dump with the trash from the shop last summer, and E and V tried "about a hundred times" to start the saw, then gave up and used the handsaw and the axe. Eventually though the SC clearing was pretty open, and the NC also, though I have less sense what needs to be done there. The house is getting a good wood supply (I used a LOT yesterday and today!), and we made a nice shelter-pile with the trimmings. Virgil mowed most of the half of the south field I had started,and the dry gray dead broomweed between the house and NC.

I think mowing fields of weeds and briers is good practice, as a support for the grasses that get more sun. There are still several "hammocks" of trees overgrown with briers in that south field. They are probably more sheltering than the field-ful of thin brier growth. I want to clear out some of them, but I guess not all.

Saturday I went back to Ed's. They diagnosed a flooded engine, removed the spark plug, pulled the starter several times, replaced the plug, and it started right up. Smokily. I brought it home again (via Books-a-Million, where I GOBBLED up Bujold's new Horizon.) Even I could start it Sunday afternoon.

Monday the three guys, with my participation, much more energetically than last Friday, when I was barely over my bad cold, cleared privet at the gate and made a pedestrian gate into the panhandle woods. I surveyed into the woods and located a possible site where clearing a 20' mound of privet, several small dead trees, and one live one would make a nice site, without impacting the ravine/sometime creek. V finished mowing the S field, E and S made another gate/stile from the center woods into the west half, and then we came up to the north field.

Turns out there is more land west of the bulldozed seismic track than I had realized, at the s end of it. The guys made an effort at clearing a path along the west fence, but did no more than half of it. Then E asd I inspected from the back side of the tank dam where Jorge mowed last year. We found that two of the dead pines have smashed the fence. Buddy could have been long out and gone if he wanted to slither down the dam. The seismic-study bulldozer seems to have taken out part of the cross-fence. And as far as the first surveyor's claim of an "iron rod set" in that corner, well! We really need to get our money back from him!

sleet and cardinals

It sounds like perhaps the sleet is about over. It was quite noisy earlier, but there is only a faint high-pitched clatter now. This is a widespread storm covering almost all of north Texas, with possible accumulations of a half inch forecast; this on top of a glaze of ice. I am out at the Ridge writing this; I called Joy and told her where to find the ash can if they needed to get more traction.


January has had a roller-coaster of temperature. Three times this month the mercury has reached around 80°; each time it then abruptly dives for the thirties or even twenties.


The bird-feeder-watching was really excellent today as the freezing drizzle came down. Alabaster particularly seemed to think so!




My camera is not really built for wildlife photography, especially on a dim day through glass with reflections of the sky through the windows behind me. A long lens, some very fast film or CCD, and a polarized filter might be of help. Still I captured something of the feeling of the excitement of having so many birds coming, including so many of our eponymous red-birds. Several times I counted eight males at once. They are much in evidence in these snapshots, along with the chickadee I caught coming in for a landing, the wren, several goldfinches, and more.
Bluejays, mockingbirds nibbling the yaupon berries, Harris', white-crowned, and white-throated sparrows, a brown thrasher, and a towhee are also around.

Nope, the sleet's not over. The faint background noise just crescendoed back into a dominant motif. In spite of using a good deal of my new firewood (courtesy of Eddie's efforts with the new baby Husqvarna), I am also using up propane. I called today to get the tank refilled tomorrow. Hope that will last till late spring, though I guess it depends on how many cold days I spend out here. But I believe heating this house is more efficient than at 711.

great birdfeeder

Here are actual photos of my birds on the new feeder, somewhat fuzzy, and taken through glass with some reflections from within the room. On the upper left and on the bottom tray are goldfinches, upper right is a titmouse, and at the lower right is a confusing superposition of a Harris' sparrow and a cardinal. They eat up the supply pretty rapidly; it looks like I may need to refill weekly or even more often. A 25-lb. sack of sunflower seeds every month won't break me. But it sure will leave a pile of seed-coats on the ground underneath!

The cardinals often pose in the late afternoon sunlight. I may do some thinning of the yaupon, privet, hackberry, plum thicket, but I will certainly leave plenty of perches.



I have heard the s-s-see, s-s-see of waxwings, though I haven't looked the right direction to see them yet. These are the yaupon berries that draw them. (These are last year's, but there is a good crop this year also, somewhat unusually; often a poor crop alternates with a good crop.) A flock of waxwings will descend in a flurry onto the yaupons and stuff themselves madly with berries, then on some signal they will swirl up into the bare oak, where they will sit motionless, all facing the same direction, for 20 minutes, digesting. Any lawn furniture below will be liberally purple-spotted.

just about perfect

Sitting in the Ridge living room, nice fire in the fireplace, Agate purring in my lap (Tut curled asleep with her nose under her paw in another chair, Alabaster on the futon-sofa), watching the birds at the splendid new feeder. Chickadees, titmice, goldfinches, Carolina wren, white-crowned sparrow, Harris' sparrows, brown thrasher, cardinals, blue jay, mockingbird. Down by the tank I saw a great blue heron.

It is a real major pain that, when a flicker of motion draws my attention from the computer to the window, I have to push my reading glasses out of the way to be able to see. And it's hard to type with a lapful of cat noodging the laptop off the lap. And I'm SUPPOSED to be making jewelry. Well, I'm about to, I guess.

yuletide weather

Here's a kind of cute entry in a blog on weather underground, a worldwide summary of tomorrow's weather with particular emphasis on whether snow-covered rooftops will make things easy for the reindeer. flying reindeer forecast

A week or so ago things were topsy-turvy; it was 28° here and 58° in Lincoln. This early morning however it is 31° here and 7° there.

I am sitting in front of the remains of my evening's fire, which is pretty much gone, so I will soon head for bed.

Eddie and I worked at the Ridge today, and cleaned almost all the windows, which made a HUGE difference. I have been putting out sunflower seed for about three days now, and there are many birds in evidence. Eddie was pretty impressed by four male cardinals at once in the back yard. I told him that's why it's called Red-bird Ridge, a name he had never really paid attention to before. People have become so used to meaningless street-names and subdivision names, that it doesn't even occur to them to look for real meaning in a placename any more.