The best moment of the year

It's the middle of May in eastern Kentucky and white blossoms are everywhere. Wild roses (rosa multiflora) and blackberries spill from banks and hillsides perfuming the warm air, while field daisies and daisy fleabane (erigeron strigosus) march gaily along the roadsides and adorn the unmown yards and meadows.

Driving this week car windows down to smell the roses and blackberries, I found myself saying "now is my favorite moment of the year." Then I laughed to remember that just four weeks ago, when the purple redbud and lacy dogwood were in bloom, I had said the same thing: "my favorite moment of the year."  Moreover, a few weeks before that in mid-March I was sighing over the splashes of yellow daffodils, and exuberant forsythia everywhere, also thinking "best moment of the year."

Not long from now in June I'll be thinking the same thing when the first local blueberries come to the Letcher County Farmer's Market and the day lilies turn my hillside orange. The thought will come again in July when my first tomatoes get ripe and I eat them warm off the vine. I will also be thinking it when the jewel weed blooms its millions of tiny orange flowers that attract the hummingbirds to sup in September - also the moment when the Virgin's bower vines burst into delicate white blooms.

Then comes October and all the maples go scarlet and rose. Once again, I'm thinking "my favorite moment of the year."  One might think that was the end of it, but in November when all the leaves are gone the stately majesty of white limbed sycamores stand tall as the guardians of the winter forest causing me to once again think "this is it."

So it turns out that every moment in the mountains of eastern Kentucky is the best moment of the year.

more fairy carpet

Finally had the time, the light, and the camera at the same time, before my lawn of violets is sacrificed to the great American suburban god 'Lawn Mower.'

a carpet of violets

This afternoon my husband got the lawnmower out for the first time and tamed the wild jungle inside our fenced yard where the dogs play (and do their business). It looks lovely, all trimmed and neat. But I'm secretly pleased that he did not have time (or energy) to turn the mower on the front yard yet. Two thirds of our huge front yard has been taken over by the velvety purple of tiny violets and their shiny green heart-shaped leaves. It looks like a faerie carpet, ready for spritely dances by gossamer winged creatures.

spring sprung awry

I never really appreciated spring as a season growing up in California. I did like March, when the winter rains were still with us, and the neighbor's willow tree would begin to green. But the San Francisco Bay Area didn't really have four seasons, just two - raining and dry -- a typical Mediterranean type climate. When I decided to go "back east" to college, a big part of my decision was weather; I actually wanted a real winter, with snow and cold. That real winters resulted in real springs was a bonus that had not occurred to me.

My first year of four seasons in Oberlin, Ohio was full of incredible discoveries. I'd fantasized about what it would be like to walk in falling snow; I learned what it was like to live with two feet of snow on the ground for two weeks, and that walking on icy walks was a real art form. The biggest discovery of that first year was the spring sequence of blooms and color, although I didn't realize the first year that it was an annual occurrence. The sequence that began with the brilliant yellow of daffodils and forsythia, and ended three months later with wild roses. In between came tulips, the flowering fruit trees, red bud, dogwood, irises, blackberry blossoms and heavenly scented lilacs.

Over the next forty years I found that where ever I spent spring -- Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, or Maine -- that the sequence of spring was the same, only the timing differed. In Ohio, the daffodils and forsythia appeared at the end of April just in time to liven up the last weeks of the semester, in Kentucky, daffodils and forsythia made their yellow splash during spring break in March, in Pennsylvania the yellow blossoms always appeared just after graduation in late April.

Over the past decade, climate change has shifted the start of spring, and its daffodils and forsythia earlier, by nearly two weeks, but the sequence seemed to remain largely intact. This spring, however, the sequence seems a bit out of whack. For the first time in my memory, the daffodils and forsythia came early as they have for some time, in early March, but strangely they hung on longer than usual. Suddenly the flowering fruit trees blossomed white and pink and are already fading to green leaves while the bright yellow forsythia was still in full bloom - and it is past April 1st.

The most startling discontinuity of this spring has been the redbud, which began blooming one full week ago, in March, while the forsythia and daffodils were still bright yellow, and the flowering fruit trees still clung to their pink and white blossoms. This is an entire month ahead of what was normal blooming time for redbud ten years ago.

I can remember driving to Elizabethtown, Kentucky back in 2002 on April 25th and being blown away by the hundreds of miles of light purple redbud along the roadsides. Over the past decade the time for redbud blooming has slowly crept forward. Last year the redbud was in full bloom on April 16, when I drove to Harlan for a faculty meeting. But a leap ahead another two weeks to April 1st to be in full bloom is astounding, and disturbing.

It's as if what was once nearly three months of sequential blooming has been compressed and overlapped into a few weeks of March and April; with the life span of some flowers extending much longer, while others come and go more quickly. The scientists who study climate and and seasonal changes refer to this disruption of established patterns of plant flowering as "desynchronisation" (see: Dr Malcolm Clark and Prof Roy Thompson, and suggest that it could create problems for animal species that depend upon reliable plant food sources for seasonally timed reproduction.

It's one thing to read about the science. It's another thing to have it so clearly visible in one's own front yard.

Photo of redbud from April 16, 2010 by sgreerpitt

first comes yellow

Spring break was wonderful -- just that short period of time away from the whirl of classroom sessions was a respite. Not that I wasn't working the whole week on grading exams, keeping up with my on-line classes, and writing a book chapter. But any change in pace is appreciated. The only truly negative side of spring break is that all the campus flowers bloomed while we were gone. At least the daffodils were still bright to welcome us back.

The thing I like most about spring has been the regular progression of color. The first thing is always the forsythia and the daffodils - brilliant yellow to ward off the doldrums of winter.

virgin's bower

Yesterday I did my big "shop" over the hill into Virginia. For ten miles, from the Kentucky border to Wise, VA, the steep banks on either side of the road were laden in creamy vanilla virgin's bower (Clematis virginiana) my favorite late summer wildflower. The photos above and below are from our own yard, where virgin's bower has taken over portions of both the front and back banks. It's a very opportunistic vine, and will twine itself over bushes, trees, and other vines (like blackberry).

white clouds of fragrance

Four weeks ago when I drove to Harlan for a faculty meeting, eastern Kentucky's roadsides were highlighted in the pale violets of redbud, lilac and wisteria. Yesterday, I made the same drive, this time to graduation, and was treated to forty miles of roadsides banked in garlands of fragrant white: blackberries and wild roses. These two climbing vines are found together everywhere, including my yard. (Blackberry vine above and wild roses below).

the lessons of the wisteria

The beautiful pale violet flowering vine above is wisteria (this one is along a neighbor's fence just before the turn off to our lane).

Wisteria is a plant that does not bloom until it reaches maturity (which can be a few years for the Kentucky Wisteria that I see all around me, or more than a decade for the Chinese variant). Even then wisteria does not always blossom until it has experienced some type of distress -- like blows, explosions, and fire damage to the main trunk, shock to the roots (like extended freeze/thaw cycles), or drought. Clearly something about the last year, especially this past winter, created exactly the right conditions for wisteria, because it is more abundant in eastern Kentucky than I have seen in 14 years I've lived here.

For the first time it is impossible to miss the wisteria on my drive to work. In addition to lanes of redbud and dogwood this spring, I pass a half dozen places where wisteria has taken over an entire hillside. In each case, in the center of the massive cascades of wisteria, are the collapsed, shattered, rotting remains of a house, often barely visible in the vegetation.

Wisteria is a very long lived plant, an invasive plant that climbs walls, covers buildings, chokes giant trees -- luckily its a relatively slow growing plant (unlike kudzu). Home owners fifty, sixty years ago or even longer, planted wisteria near their homes. The home owners are long since gone, the houses decayed into near oblivion, but the wisteria has thrived and taken over the entire former homestead, climbing 80 foot trees, cascading down hillsides creating magical, fairy bowers.

There is something inspiring about a plant that blooms its best when damaged and distressed, and which creates its most beautiful landscapes on the bones of abandoned homes.

Monet's 1925 painting Wisteria at Monetalia.



My photo
Wisteria Wall by sgreerpitt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://sunflowerroots.blogspot.com.

under the lilacs

There is nothing so wonderful as the smell of lilacs. I'd only read about lilacs until I was 19 years old and a freshman in college. Lilacs require cold, snowy winters to flourish and bloom, so they just won't grow in coastal California -- my mother tried repeatedly, but was never successful in her attempts to produce lilacs.

At Oberlin College, behind the Conservatory of Music, hedge of lilacs that was more than 8 feet tall and 50 feet long; bountiful enough to allow a fragrance hungry freshman to purloin a few sprigs to perfume her dorm room.

In television series '30-something' (from the 1980's), there was an episode in which 'Elliot' was trying to win back his estranged wife 'Nancy' and filled the whole house with dozens of lilacs boughs. That certainly would have won me over.

Our long, snowy winter produced more than the usual supply of spring lilacs through out eastern Kentucky. The bushes are heavy with fragrant blooms. The ones in this photo are on the Southeast Whitesburg campus planted within the last two years, and this is the first year that they have had blooms.

(Under the Lilacs is one of Louisa May Alcott's lesser known children's novels).

redbud by-ways of Kentucky

After my post on Saturday, I was determined to figure out a way to get some of my own photos of the spectacular redbud lining the roads, even if it meant stopping dead in the middle of the road to take pictures.


It was a quiet morning on the way to work, with little traffic on the backroads and I found a couple of small dirt turn outs. In one location (the top photo), several hounds let me know with loud barks that I was tresspassing on their territory -- so I shot the photo out the car window!


The very bottom photo was actually taken while the car was moving as I was on a main road, with lots of truck traffic (really, I know there doesn't look like any in the shot, but there were several trucks behind me). Only on the middle photo did I actually get out of the car to shoot the picture.




redbud by-ways by sgreerpitt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://sunflowerroots.blogspot.com.

redbud time in the mountains

There is a brief window of about one week in mid-April each spring where all the roads of eastern Kentucky are outlined in redbud. This year, as several times in the past, I was lucky to have the chance to drive the by-ways of eastern Kentucky during that magic moment. Thursday afternoon I left my home at the far southeast of the state, and headed north and west through the mountains toward Lexington and the bluegrass.

The nature of the redbud phenomenon makes it hard to photograph. The mountain roads are narrow, with few places to pull safely off the road, and the redbud--which by the way is not red but rather light purple--presses in tightly on the narrow margins on the steep hillsides. Redbud is a forest margin tree, an understory tree, much like dogwood which blooms about a week or two later.

So one goes barrelling along the highway, rounding curves to have the breath snatched away by intense borders of purple, that pass before one can even consider stopping.
Thursday was also a day of clouds and rain, which made the colors richer and more vibrant, but added even more obstacles to photography. So I will have to settle for a National Park Service photo. Imagine twenty or thirty of these trees crowded together in a long line framing a double lane winding mountain road, deep within the V of the mountains. And then imagine that being repeated over and over again, for 80 miles. It's just part of the miracle of early spring in Appalachia.

The day long workshop (on Friday) that I attended on this trip, dealt with the Open Textbook movement. One of the things we learned about in the workshop is the Creative Commons licensing alternative to copyright. You will see me beginning to explore and use the creative commons license rather than copyright in my blog -- seems a lot friendlier in the blogging. The key is allowing use for non-commercial purposes as long as the user gives attribution with every use.

The redbud photo is a public domain photo by the National Park Service, and can be found on Wikipedia.
The photo of
dogwood by sgreerpitt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://sunflowerroots.blogspot.com.

spring has sprung

While I was laid up with the flu for five days--and deprived of access to the Internet at home--the outside temperatures have been rather more summer than spring (86 degrees F at the present moment) resulting in blossoms busting out all over.

On my first day back to work yesterday I stopped on the way in to Whitesburg to snap my favorite spring views.

It is always miraculous to me, that I can rely on these beautiful things happening every spring. That the yellow of the forsythia along the old high schools retaining wall will always be the exact same, in-your-face electric yellow, and the ornamental pear trees will always be heavenly clouds of pristine, creamy white. It is the glorious precision of nature, that the colors are always perfect, always the exact same, always vibrant, clear and true.

The photographs are always just a pale representation of the original. Over the winter, the colors fade in my mind to the dull approximations of the photographs. So each spring, when the flowers return its amazes me all over again in its brilliance. It is an annual miracle, that restores my faith, my soul and heart once again.

Southeast Whitesburg Mural--38 Ducks and flowers

This was such a different kind of painting day. All the people are done, every single one of them. So today I painted ducks and flowers.

The woman (Penny Ritter) whose vision inspired our college campus used to sit across the road from the old Coca-Cola bottling plant, watching the ducks and dreaming of a day when there would be college students feeding the ducks. So below the plaque (carefully protected behind painters tape and cardboard) I have placed a mother duck and two ducklings.


Then I needed to deal with all the rest of the empty space created by having to place the plaque in from the edge of the wall by some ten inches. I decided to use several types of blue/purple flowers, since the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) colors are a deep blue and gold. Violets do grow in places on the lawn that surrounds the college, although the photos I used for inspiration come from my own yard.

The irises are one of the first things you see in the spring when you approach the administration building and the Belinda Mason Building -- although they actually belong to Dr. Kathleen Caizzi who lives next door to the college. There are more irises to be painted. Some that are a white edged in very deep purple-blue. Also, the only flowers that I have any experience painting are irises; although all my iris painting experience is with water colors which work very differently from acrylics.

Later this week I will be adding morning glory vines and deep blue flowers climbing up the side of the plaque and across the top. Unfortunately, all the construction and renovations over the past eight years have obliterated the morning glories that used to exist on campus. So I have borrowed several photos off the web to provide a guide for how to portray these lovely flowers.

Below you can see first the area around the plaque -- safely hidden and protected from paint splatters by the cardboard. [After the official unveiling September 23, I will take photos for my blog that show the plaque in place]. This is what I worked on today, filling in all the blank white spaces, which included the drive in front of the administration building, the blouse, arms and computer of Pricie Young at bottom right, and the ducks and flowers. Below that is an overview of the whole thing -- almost finished!

splash of yellow

In an otherwise gray and rainy day (though no where near as bad in eastern Kentucky as it was in Louisville today), this bed of black-eyed susans practically shouted with joy! The flowers are in beds behind the administration building on the Cumberland campus of Southeast Ky Community and Technical College.