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Walnut trees are the first to lose their leaves. They are also the first to go into leaf in the spring. A wise person knows about such things. Dormancy and awakening, and how some living things have different cycles than others.
An unknowing person could come in and suspecting that the walnut tree was dead, chop it down. Poof! “That tree didn’t fit into my schedule. It didn’t fit into the way I see the world.”
I have spent the last two days of my life outdoors considering such things.
Today I burned the raked-up walnut leaves. Oh, they smell so good when brushed by the nose, almost as comforting as the awakened scent of a brushed by tomato plant.
It is the end of another growing season. The winter snows are coming in on the tails of the robins flying south.
I chopped back the lilacs that have become leggy like undressed ballerinas. Next year they will become fully dressed in a canopy of heart-shaped leaves. But to cut them back I have to give away the budding sprouts, so no sweet-smelling purple clusters next spring.
Perhaps I won’t be here to miss them anyway.
I lifted some of the hostas, genus Hostae, the miniature yellow-leaved ones that people mistaken for sickly plants. I like their disguise…robust, healthy, and YELLOW!
It seems I may be moving so I am taking some of this house with me including parts of the garden paradise I created here. I will just take gathered up seeds of the echineaca, the black-eyed Susans, columbines, Oriental poppies, butterfly plant, agastaches, and other ephemerals, leaving the well-grown plants to remain.
I love the soil so black and slightly moist. One neighbor, an elderly woman, was speaking to me when I first started this garden. She said, “You pat the earth like it is a baby’s bottom.“ Like that is an unusual thing.
How I love the upper Midwest, so fertile, rich in black dirt, the vivid greens of lawns and leaves in the summer, that seems to floures, glow, radiate. This land spotted and dashed with lakes yet it isn’t like the swampiness of the South. Nor does it reflect the dry, water-starved windswept lands of the West. Here the promise of life is big and in-your-face hopeful. The smallest seed can fly in from around the world and take root here.
In fact that’s how I got my Mock Orange tree. It planted itself right outside of the front door in a grouping of the purple-flowered periwinkle and white vanilla-scented starflowers of sweet woodruff. Up it shot straight to the sun. I didn’t pull it out just because it didn’t belong there. And then one summer when I opened the door my nose sucked in the scent of heaven. The flowers huge white single-petaled saucers, so delicious.
The plants, the free-from-the-earth ones, I call them my birdshit plants. I imagine that a bird ate the fruit, then deposited them in my yard. Fertilized and potent, the seed beat down into the ground by the rain, sprouted. Luckily I am not a very tidy gardener or PLUCK! they would be gone. No I am more interested in what things, sprouts, can become. My three and a half years here have been full of many gifts and surprises.
Living here has been the best.
The local newspaper stated that the Extension Specialists forecasted an especially good years for nuts. My naked walnut tree out on the point of my property certainly has gone along with that idea. Nuts everywhere!
Earlier in the season I saw a huge black crow pluck up a walnut and fly with it perched in its mouth to one of the limbs of the mulberry tree right outside my large bay window. He held the nut firmly between his talons and peeled off the huge green rind. If you have ever touched a ripe black walnut you know five things:
1.They have a distinct scent, both familiar and strange, exotic and loving.
2.The rind is toxic to humans. One bite and dead.
3.Walnuts make a good dye. Which really means that they will stain your fingers and the orangey-black dye won’t go away for days no matter how much you scrub. Hmmm…maybe I should try Lava.
4.Walnuts are harder than hell to open. People place them in their driveways and run over them!
5.Walnuts are bitter. They are best eaten as a crumbed topping otherwise you will think you are eating something as toxic as Cleopatra’s asp.
.So now I have a huge pile of walnuts just waiting the crows and squirrels and whatever other nut-eating creatures live in my yard.
Squirrels, now there’s another subject I could go on and on about, but I won’t. Basically squirrels hide nuts EVERYWHERE. But what I find so curious today as I watch a squirrel chomping away is this: How come wild animals don’t get fat? It seems like they are always eating but did you ever see a fat goldfinch or a fat squirrel? Nope.
You know I do have a huge pile of nuts here. What if that fluffy-tailed creature just keeps eating and eating and eating?
Exploding squirrels. Now that would be something to write about.
