Here where the glaciers ground each other to a halt and ate down into the earth instead, the Apex volcanic complex meets the North Cascades.
After so many millions of years, they’re still talking it out.
The Mysterious Similkameen
Reply
Tag Archives: spring
Apples Make Their Own Heat
Here’s my Spigold opening up last week. Note how the sun drew the leaves out quickly, but the flowers take their time, drawn out more slowly by the heat their fur traps close to their skins and the heat the red spectrum of their first show of petals gathers from the sun. What tiny worlds. What tiny energy effects!
This isn’t global warming. It’s local warming!
In the end, 500 gram apples are the result. It takes time. We have that.
Grapes are So Celtic
There are many ways to grow after visiting the land of the dead. Grapes do it by pushing out shoots from the eyes we call “buds.” Each shoot is a vision. Wood without eyes is said to be blind.
This is the essence of celtic (and Greek, and Byzantine and Catholic) culture: the living rising out of the dead. For that, vines are often best: they rise on the blind limbs of trees and carry sight and vision up with them. This is the time of year when seeing begins. Soon will come the time of year when each eye becomes a bee’s-eye cluster of grapes in our hands; if we give them over to death, they will come back with a god in them. For Christians, this god is God; Christ is only an iteration of this wisdom.
Every Apricot Begins Neither Male Nor Female
Those are for the bees, More important, is the ovary within its frilly, protective leaf, and the stamens attached to it. As you can see, they’re very much alive.
It’s not the petals that make a flower!
The Leaf That Opens the Flower
Plants are leaves that have made networks and community. If flowers formed first, they would open first in the spring, when every dormant plant repeats its ancient story.
You Can Tell Time by Rowans
Beautiful Old Tree
Image
Peaches are scrubby little bushes from the Gobi Desert, that live to be fifteen years old, more or less, before they succumb to their many fragilities. Here’s one I’ve been caring for twenty years, after another man cared for her for nearly twenty before that. A quarter of her sisters have died, but a week ago she was the first one blooming this year. Her name is Glohaven.
Still gorgeous after all these years. Some fifty-five years ago I remember images of blossoms like this, with my father as the photographer, and it was a tree like this (her name was Vee), with just the right branch, who taught me how to climb trees. I worked at it for weeks. I have a whole lifetime to return the gift.
What Wasp Knows
It’s not just about the flowers.
Buds hold their secrets, too.
Love your local apricot today!
Wooden People in the Similkameen
After forty-five years, a change of flavour!
It was the only sunny day forecast for a week, so today was the day. Up at dawn, and a two hour drive, to be greeted by apricots in full bloom.
There’ll be apples here in 3 years.
I cut the scion wood in March, wrapped it in cloth, and buried it in my onion garden. Today, eight hours making the world new, then two hours back home.
That’s a new sunrise in the foreground, and a new fuji in behind.
Fourteen in all! Six last year, and six the year before that (two varieties are going to have their first apples this year). Spring is fun! How did you celebrate it today?
These Drops Will Not Fall
Here in the depressurized zone east of the Coast Mountains, they will soon be absorbed back into the air.
They have only alighted for a moment on these cottonwoods, like birds.
It’s That Day (You Know the One)
You remember arrow leafed balsam root, of course.
First Flower Day! Soon there will be millions.
