Seeds of Abundance

for Autumn Equinox 2009

It was one of those brilliant autumn in days North Texas. The strident summer Sun had mellowed to just the right brightness, yet it was still t-shirt weather warm. The August doldrums had moved off and there was a breeze again. My husband Scooter and I were driving down country roads looking at rural land. Clean green air streamed through the open windows of the car.

Pleasant enough, but even so it was just one cattle farm after another, enlivened only by the dark wash of trees along the creeks and gullies. The constant grazing of cows had tamped down the grasses into obedient shortness, a palatable sameness. The fields were forever juvenile, the grasses never allowed to seed, without potential, without hope, thwarted lives kept in constraint.

REBIRTH

Then we came around a bend to see the sharp vertical plumes of a native prairie grass, brushy bluestem, the rust-colored filaments shining gold in the sunset glow. We had to pull over and stare. Decades ago the landowner planted Bermuda, a tropical grass, on top of the native prairie. The aggressive grass dominated the land, making a monoculture that was good for cows and bad for everything else.

Then the owner went away, and the animals, too. Neglect was all nature needed. The native seeds still remembered, even though it had been 50 years, and the bullish brushy bluestem is always one of the first. Seeds are the memory of plants. From the dark silent rest in the dank soil, bluestem seeds still yearned for their original prairie days, struggling to the surface to pierce the Bermuda and find the light.

We fell in love with the land that day and convinced the absentee landowner to sell. We stripped off the Bermuda cover and replaced it with native grasses and wildflowers. Compared to the surrounding lands, it’s a riot of waist high strappy leaves and fall seed flumes that strive even higher, and rowdy with a variety of life -– birds, butterflies and a myriad of unseen rodents and rabbits. Yet even today, it’s adorned with the yellow autumn blooms of goldenrod, a forb we did not plant, whose seeds languished in the soil until they remembered, too.

SUNLIGHT MADE TANGIBLE

On this planet life is dependent on plants. The greenery here creates most of the air, much of the soil, and anchors the entire food chain. Compared to the huge biomass and energy value of plants, we animals are stowaways. We live on a plant-et. Everywhere but the desert and arctic, plants are busily, rampantly, enthusiastically and luxuriantly procreating. Their sole purpose is to transform the Sun’s endless energy through photosynthesis so that they can grow, mature and cast seeds to the winds.

Seeds. If you went outside and dug up a square inch of soil, put it in a sheltered place and gave it light and moisture, it would sprout from seeds contained in the soil. If you cut down those tiny plants, seeds would sprout again, and again, over and over for 60 years. Only after many decades would the bank of seeds held in that small square of soil be exhausted.

Now that’s abundance. Plants make far more seeds, and berries and fruits, than they need to reproduce, more than the birds and bugs and animals could ever eat. Plants make seeds for the life of it, because reckless fertility is what they do. They concentrate the energy of sunlight and make it tangible in seeds, giving totally without thinking of reward, without possession or attachment to outcome. Plants live to give and give to live. The lesson of plants is clear: creative fertility is the overriding principle of this planet.

MATH, BIOLOGY & SUN

Consider the sunflower, its radiant yellow petals framing a center packed tight with the familiar grey seed. The seeds swirl out in a parabolic spiral, Fermat's spiral. The spiral’s dimensions reflect the Fibonacci numbers sequence, the basis of the golden ratio, a formula of height to depth and width that underlies much of classical painting, sculpture and architecture. Math and light, beauty and biology, all simply to make a seed.

Every seed is both a completion and a beginning. The grasses in my meadow pause at the climax of their process, seed plumes flush in the autumn sun, shining in potential, radiant in maturity, proclaiming a life well lived. Then they release their seeds into the wind, water and soil, confident that whatever may come, however many years may pass, they too will rise to remember the Sun once more.

Foolish Faith

March 18, 2009

It’s the very definition of insanity, you know, to do something over and again and expect that somehow next time will be different. Yet I don’t feel insane, I feel blissful. Once again I‘m trying to naturalize plants to the wild, restoring what too many cattle and too much neglect did to the land at Osage Moon.

There’ve been pockets here and there that made it, osage trees that sprang up where we tossed the wrinkled green balls of our barn bois d’arc, tiny patches of grape hyacinth I’d pocked beneath a tree, pecan saplings from nuts we scattered that the critters somehow missed. But there were also pond plants dug up by wild pigs and many a transplanted tree stomped by cows that invade from the neighbors’ land.

Yet here I am, risking the vagaries of weather and wildlife, blotting from my mind the plant toll of last year’s droughts taking obedient plants from my yard in Dallas and digging them into soil here that I’ve rejuvenated with compost and lava sand. Lovingly raised from seed, viney pigeonberry shrubs now flop and cover the ground with heart-shaped leaves and lovely red berries easy for ground birds to eat. Small turks’ caps, grown from seed gathered in my neighbor’s garden bed, promise a summer of audacious cardinal flowers and phallic yellow stamens.

Into the ground they go, in the shade fencerow alongside my rural cabin. Those plants themselves will someday be, like their city cousins, a nursery for seeds and berries. That fertile bounty will be wildscaped in the far reaches of the property, planted with the same foolish faith. Each garden bed, each hopeful plant, serves as a tiny ark, restoring species and diversity to this 75 acres of land.

My husband works in acres at a time, using the old Ford tractor to take out sterile Bermuda grass pasture and put in native grasses. Their unruly profile of strappy leaves and colorful forbs taunts the nearby submissive fields, clipped into hay or stomped by cows. Wave after wave of grasses ripen and shower their seeds, far more food than the wildlife could ever eat, fertility for the sheer joy of it.

What are we keeping it for, this 75-acre ark? To be ready for when all people come to their senses and live in cooperation and balance with each other, the land and its inhabitants? Or is it for that time beyond us? If humanity crashes and burns the planet and civilization fall into rubble, will this land be the seed from which nature reasserts herself?

The Way the Day Unfolds, part 1 of 4: Getting to Know Grass

When there are ten-thousand things that need to be done, it’s hard to know where to start. The weather, the wind, how wet the soil is, these ferret out a few tasks. Sometimes the disaster du jour sets the day. Or you see where your feet lead you.

Getting to Know Grass - Part 1 of 4

We stride out into the north meadow, determined once again to identify the new native grasses. For years we pummeled the 5 acres, yanking out the old Bermuda that didn’t do diddly for wildlife, disking and plowing and disking some more, then rolling in hundreds of dollars of native grass seeds, hoping to bring back the prairie that grew here a hundred years ago.

What came up we haven’t a clue. It all looks like the same grass – until the seed heads emerge in fall. Until we get a name we call them by their look: puffy top (looks like a frightened cat’s tail), red windmill (rusty tops with two to three strands that flop in the breeze), golden windmill (the same in gold), short spangle grass (conical seed head looks like a anorexic Christmas tree after all the needles fall off).

None of these are what we planted. Natives, yes, but all volunteers. They look great for sure, the puffy tops that gleam in the sunlight and sparkle with dew in the morning, the undulating windmills in the breeze, setting up waves of maroon and gold. Lovely, but with little seed value for wildlife.

Bluestems, that’s what we want, big-boned native grasses boasting tall vertical heads of ample seeds, plants that grow into large clumps that birds can nest inside. Here and there, little and big bluestem are giving it a go, spikey tops standing out among the puffies and windmills. Plus our old pal brushy bluestem, whose rust-colored fluffy seed heads poking out of the Bermuda several years ago convinced us the prairie yearned for return.

But where is the side-oats grama? After much digging, we find a solo distinctive spike, the seeds dangling off to one side. But the Indian grass? The Alamo switchgrass? We stand in the 30 mph wind screaming out of Oklahoma, flipping through books with pages flying, trying to match one of hundreds of pictures to the plant. Answers are just not going to happen today.

It may be a lost cause anyway. New native grasses tend to stay small the first year, investing their energy into putting down roots. We just won’t know until next summer. We simply have to have faith, much like the faith of the brushy bluestem, waiting for the right year, right weather, right landowner, to push out of the darkness and into the light.

October 25, 2007

The Way the Day Unfolds, part 2 of 4 – Invasion of the Cedars

Invasion of the Cedars

Our search for grasses takes us by jeep into the Back 40, to the East Flank. On this side of the wet-weather Cross Creek that divides the 43 acres, the cedar trees had not completely overtaken. Fifty years ago during a long drought, the neighboring rancher had cut the fence and allowed his cattle in. His cattle were starving and the Back 40 absentee owner had not been seen in years.

This forage larceny turned out to be an act of grace. With deer, buffalo and other native ungulates unable to access the Back 40, trees had moved in decades ago. At first it was oak, ash and pecan, wonderful hardwoods that make great mast, or large seeds. They lined the outer fences and shaded Cross Creek, growing immensely tall on the upper end where the seeps are. It was what habitat geeks call “mid-succession,” a fertile balance of food and shelter, sunny meadows and shady woods.

Then in moved the junipers, though everyone calls them cedars. They grew up underneath the hardwoods, choking out the food-rich undergrowth and eventually the hardwoods themselves. Over 70% of the rain that falls on a cedar is retained, never hitting the ground to nourish other plants. It was on its way to being a cedar dessert, until the hungry cows cleared out a generation of young cedars, restoring balance.

October 25, 2007

The Way the Day Unfolds, part 3 of 4 – Patience & Prairie

Patience & Prairie

The East Flank remained meadow-like for a while. By the time we got there 50 years later, the cedars had reduced the long meadow into a series of patches and in our first three years we watched the cedars get larger and more numerous. The drought of 2006 made it worse. The seeps stopped flowing. Plants like the surviving oaks and pecans that were on the line, were clearly dying, even the hardy persimmons and sumacs.

So we did the craziest thing: we cut over half of them down. Even though it was in a back-woods area that trucks couldn’t access, making it impossible to bring in shredders or sawmills to transform trees into timber or mulch. But Wade with his small bulldozer-like Bobcat with a table-sized buzz-saw on the front could get back there. He cut and shoved the 30-foot tall cedars into house-sized piles.

Where they remain, housing extended families of raccoons and rabbits no doubt. Too large and too close to the remaining trees to burn, they may be with us for quite a while. Inbetween the piles is some mighty fine prairie to be, a quarter mile long meadow, rimmed with trees that recede and project in lobes and points, creating a deeply curved edge that fosters life.

Decades ago, someone trying to be helpful, probably hunters attempting to attract deer, had seeded the meadow patches with a hybrid bluestem that took over, not much in the way of seed but a fine cover plant for erosion-prone soil. Wandering the nascent prairie on this day, here and there bluestems push through, and partridge pea, a fine forb with a great seed, makes a robust rally, all without any additional seed from us. Hope lives in the memory of the soil.

October 25, 2007

The Way the Day Unfolds, part 4 of 4: Crash, Cut & Tape, or, Being Lost is Half the Fun

Crash, Cut & Tape, or, Being Lost is Half the Fun

Our grass evaluations concluded, the kind of warped logic we are prone to takes over. Now back at the south end of the property, we’re curious about some woods work we continued yesterday on our latest trail. That was on the West Flank. It’s much like the East Flank, but since it didn’t have the mid-century cow invasion is far more overrun with cedars, forming a dense woods, some of them 50 feet tall.

Yet our crashing through the brush over the past year had uncovered an intriguing series of widely spaced large pecan trees, nearly swallowed by cedars, but surviving, along with the occasional possumhaw and roughleaf dogwood thicket, struggling remainders of a vibrant understory life. We marked our careening path by tying long strands of yellow tape with black dots, but didn’t cut the branches away to create a real trail.

That area of the West Flank is just a few hundred yards by foot across Cross Creek via the Funky Trunk Crossing and Hanna’s Trail. Or over a mile by jeep roads, since we have to drive down to the shallow end of the creek and back up again. So we strike out by foot, reasoning that we’ll go over there, cut and re-mark the trail, and come back. Piece of cake, nice hike.

The first tip-off that things would not go quite as planned was losing the trailhead. The trail we knew was still there; we worked on it a few hours yesterday and have the scratches to prove it. The trailhead was another matter. We knew it was off Hanna’s Trail somewhere. But sometimes the tape disappears, sometimes we run out of tape and don’t finish marking the trail.

We follow Hanna’s Trail to its hilltop clearing terminus, and walk back and forth over 50 yards or so, looking for the trailhead. A parting in the trees looks promising and we enter. One slight opening in the cedar forest leads to another and then another and then nothing, just solid thicket. We crash into it, knowing that out there, somewhere, were strands of yellow tape making vague partings in the woods.

Scooter begins fanning back and forth through the cedar brush looking for the trail, while I make a line to where I think the trail should be, cutting and marking a new trail as I go. We find yellow tape, but aren’t sure where on the original trail we are. He heads out again to figure the trail out. I’m too lost to do much of anything besides cut the trail we found, linking one yellow strand to another, to wherever the heck it’s going to go.

Eventually we connect, my new trail becoming more ragged and less well cut as it goes on until I crash into the original trail. We follow it to its trailhead, in a far different spot on Hanna’s Trail than we remembered. By this time it’s nearly dark; we spent almost five hours bushwhacking trails. Exhausted and out of water, we sit on some bare ground and remember, oh yeah, the jeep is quite a distance on the other side of Cross Creek.

We brush off the accumulated cedar needles and head back, another day spent where the feet wanted to go. Yet incredibly productive. Someday we’ll bring in machines to cut cedars on the West Flank as we did on the east. But before we do, we have to know where the good trees are to save them, and where the animals find shelter, so we avoid there, too. We return to the jeep and drive home in the gathering dusk. As we leave the high forest and enter the lowland meadows, a Full Moon surprises us, rising above the eastern treeline.

October 25, 2007

Sugar Freaks on Planet Earth

Sugar Freaks on Planet Earth

A sweet tooth is universal. If aliens ever land, I’m sure they’ll head straight to the sugar cane fields of Brazil. From the grizzly bear that raids the bee hive, to the microbes in my garden soil that get delirious over dried molasses, planet Earth is full of sweet freaks.

Hackberry emperors are the beer drinkers of butterflies, tanking up on rotting fruit and tree sap rather than the fine wine nectar of flowers. It looks like a tiny flying swatch of Persian rug, intricately patterned in brown, black and tan. Macho butterfly. Ants are the top sugar fiends of bugs, so hooked on sugar that some breeds will farm aphids, a soft white bug, and milk them for a sticky sweet secretion called honeydew, a nice word for aphid poo.

Down on our shady bottomlands, the sugar freaks have set up a bar district. The leaves of lean 10-foot water ash trees are all curled up and puckered, each encasing a small aphid colony. Hackberry emperors and their butterfly buddies careen about the trees, staggering from branch to branch, then go quiescent in stupor. An occasional bee tries to crash the party, June bugs dopily wonder what’s up. The bartender ants go briskly about their business, their slops and slip-ups the happy feasting of drunken flying bugs.

late June 2007