I noticed today leaves falling from the alder trees.
Thoreau writes, “we begin to see dandelion gone to seed here and there...perhaps before we had detected its rich, yellow disk.” He is right I personally see more the ‘downy’ dandelion than the sunny yellow flowers, (which we've all plucked and held under our chins to see if we like butter.) Perhaps the fuzzy heads are more noticeable because as the dandelion flower matures, it towers high above the earth hugging greenery of the mother plant. Plant ‘down’ tends to be a year round cycle, which I hadn't thought much about until reading ‘Faith in a Seed’. Here in Oregon dandelion tends to be the first to seed, and left unattended they tend to ‘puff’ spring through fall.
As well as dandelion, fireweed and wild purple aster, depending on the kind of summer we have seed anytime from late August through October. However, my personal favorite is the seedpod from the milkweed, which matures in September. I believe Thoreau had a fondness for it, too.
Thoreau’s command for the language was wonderful, his use of words in Faith in a Seed are fascinating, colorful, and for 1995 most imaginative as in…”Late in the fall I often meet with useless and barren thistledown's driving over the fields who's capital was long ago snapped up, perhaps by hungry goldfinch.” He also pondered many things, that I’m sure to some made him appear to be a lunatic. He was intrigued by the minute, and trained himself to observe the smallest of things and how they behaved in nature. As an example, he would go back to check some nuts deposited in the ground by a squirrel, to see whether the squirrel would remember where they were. In time the nuts were gone. Thoreau asked, “...do squirrels ‘remember’ where the nuts are buried or hidden, or simply ‘re-discover’ them by scent?”
He believed that when seeds came up from a plant that had not grown in a particular place it was because a bird or animal dropped it there. The same is especially true of the wild blackberry, however in other cases I believe they can also come back by root, which have not been totally destroyed or removed from the ground when plant has been removed for whatever reason. Hence, some plants grow where they’d never been, while others ‘re-appear', as those along our creek bank.
For instance, the nearest oaks I know are at the end of our street, so that the tiny oak I found growing in the ‘west 40’ (when we cleared the lots), and the seedling I found this summer in the back lot may both have started from the two parent trees mentioned above. The acorns carried to my place either by Steller’s jays, scrub jays or squirrels. (October 25th, 1995 it occurred to me this morning there is another oak closer. It sits along the fence on the Middle School property line.)
As a lark, one year I brought home a handful of acorns and planted them in the garden just outside our bedroom window...in this case, not one germinated. Was this simply a case of bad luck or timing...or does nature like to take care of itself? Case in point, I think dispersal of seeds also has something to do with weather. Several years ago there were hundreds of maple seedlings growing under and around the vine maple just to the east of our back lot. It was obvious the growing conditions were perfect for germination that year. However, none of them grew into trees. By the next summer they had all died. Only the original vine maple remained. (We almost lost this vine maple altogether, when some fellow who lives on the street above didn't set the brake on his sports utility vehicle and it careened down the hill and broke off all but one of the beautifully spread trunks.) (September 17, 2000 we managed to save this tree, caring for the healthy new growth that slowly sprung from the original broken trunks.)
This ends the second segment of my Nature Journal, in time, hopefully, others will appear.
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