by Hal Borland
If this should become a national project, every sprayed roadside will be as sterile and uninhabited as a city gutter. Birds will retreat to the remote woodland. Wildflowers will be found only on the inaccessible hilltops and in the trackless swamps. Rabbits and other small game will be robbed of their homes. We will all live in a land where the roads are as barren as the back alleys of Chicago.
But it may fail as a project, not because of the reasons I cite but because with the vegetation gone the roadsides will wash and erode with every rain and the roads themselves will be undermined. Even highway engineers should be able to understand that.
SEPTEMBER
I SPENT TWO HOURS this afternoon counting goldenrod blossoms. Probably someone else has done it, but I have never seen the figures. I took one spray of Sweet Goldenrod, Solidago odora, and counted the individual flowers. There were 3,023 on that one spray. But that is only a base count. Each of those flowers is made up of five to ten florets grouped in a head like the center of a sunflower. I needed a 10-power glass to see them clearly, but there they were, each floret with its own stamens and pollen, its own pistil and ovary. So on that one average goldenrod plume were a minimum of 15,000 to 20,000 florets. When all the seed comes to ripeness, that one plume would seed half an acre with one seed for every square foot.
But seed casualties are high. Probably not more than ten seeds from one goldenrod plume will strike favorable soil and sprout. At least half of those will fail to survive. Nature is generous in her seeding, but also harsh in her conditions. Otherwise, my pastures would have nothing but goldenrod instead of grass and clover. Or thistles, or any one of a hundred non-forage plants.
Another item worth considering is that each of those thousands of goldenrod florets produces pollen. We now know that goldenrod pollen is not a common source of hay fever, but it is a source of honey. Each time I look at the goldenrod along the fence rows I see almost as many bees among the yellow blossoms as there were among the clover blooms two months ago. Goldenrod is the last big crop for the bees, and beekeepers tell me they depend on goldenrod for most of their late Summer and early Autumn honey. So the honey known commercially as “clover honey” probably has a good deal of essence of goldenrod in it.
Those who have lived with a garden all Summer come now to the time when a sense of immediacy begins to close in. Days shorten. Growth slackens. The garden is still full and overflowing with plenty, but we know this may be the last full crop.
At planting time the season stretched ahead almost without limit. The first fruits were precious, garner from the fertile soil. Midsummer brought bounty. Then so much came at once that there was a surfeit. We wearied of green beans, wearied even of sweet corn, could eat only so much of Summer squash. But now, with the end in sight, when frost shall be creeping down our valley, the garden and its produce are precious again.
Late corn is at its peak. We have begun again to have it twice a day. But now we ask if the late lettuce will make its way to the salad bowl. It is just beginning to head. Will we be fortunate, as last year, and have it well into October? Will the scattered blossoms on the limas make more pods, or is this the final crop? And what of the string beans and the Summer squash, which we scorned a month ago? Will the blight now strike the tomato vines, or will we have still another canning of them? Should we pick green tomatoes and make piccalilli, or risk a frost? Will the Winter squash have another month of growth and maturity?
We eat, stuffing ourselves with vitamins against the dark days ahead, and the flavor, under the pressure of uncertainties, once more has the savor of the first garden peas. It was there all the time, but it palled on us until the end was in sight.
We think of the full Autumn, sere leaf and hard frost, as the time for bird migration. But southbound singers who summered north of us have been with us since the first katydids saluted the August dark. They came so quietly that we were scarcely aware of them unless we heard some sweet, familiar fragment of song in the cool of early morning. I heard such fragments this morning and tentatively identified them as songs of a yellowthroat and a mourning warbler, though I am not sure and I never did catch sight of them.
Most of these migrants sing a little, but not much, for the mating season is past and gone. And we see few flashing, colorful wings, for the adults have passed the height of their colorful season and the youngsters haven’t yet achieved it. The birds wear sober traveling clothes on their southward trip.
We speak of them as migrants and we think of them going south for the Winter, which is only partially true. We think of them from our own viewpoint, that of relatively static creatures. But the birds actually are only going from one part of their range to another, and their range or homeland is tremendous in extent. To use an exaggerated comparison, they are like farmers who go from the upland corn field at one end of their farms to the river bottom meadow at the other end. The farmer doesn’t “migrate” from one field to another. The birds happen to use “fields” that are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles apart.
We are harvesting a small crop of potatoes such as not half a dozen other people ever grew. They are a brand-new variety, developed by a friend of ours in the village, a gentleman of years who retired from business not long ago to work in his garden. He has been a gardener for perhaps seventy years though we knew him first as a merchant, a quiet little man full of courtesy and reticence. Last Spring we heard that he grew the best tomato plants in the whole area, so we went to see him.
He had a big garden and an ample cold frame and a homemade greenhouse. His plants were unusually good. He and Barbara talked garden with that instinctive understanding of those who know garden soil intimately, and she provoked his admiration by saying she had bigger green beans than he had, and bigger corn, a fact he verified a few days later by a visit to us. Barbara chose her tomato plants and he gave her several more, his own favorites, and he recommended the earliest cabbage we ever grew. And finally he took us to his sanctum, his greenhouse. There he proudly showed us a flat of potato seedlings small as sprouting carrots. Potatoes growing from seed.
Potato seed is almost pepper-fine. It grows in those little ball-pods which appear where the potato plant has bloomed. Few people have the patience to gather it or to plant and tend it, but this man is patience personified. And before we left he gave us a double handful of seed potatoes he grew from such seedlings, on condition that we would plant them. We did, and they grew like mad, and now we are digging them. They are big, long and smooth and fine of flavor and texture. We shall save enough to plant a long row of them next year, that we may perpetuate the Beebe potato and give it a name, at least privately, which its originator is too modest to do. Like most of the deeply devoted gardeners I ever knew, he wants no credit. All he wants is time and soil in which to plant seeds, watch them sprout, see them grow, nurture them to fruition. But anyone with the skill and patience to see that a potato blossom is fertilized with the right pollen, to bring that blossom to seed, to gather the seed, to grow it and bring potato seedlings to maturity with a brand-new variety, has a touch of genius in my lexicon.
The cardinal flowers are in bloom on the mountain just above the middle pasture. They offer one of the most satisfying reds in the whole wildflower spectrum; the only one that can rival it, in this area at least, is the Oswego tea, the deep red variety of wild bergamot, now almost through blossoming.
The cardinal flower is one of the wild lobelias, a late-blooming member of the family. Its flowers grow in loose spikes and each flower is a kind of slender tube with long triple-lobed lips loose as tatters. The length of the tube makes the flower something of a rarity; it is too long for insect tongues, and even the long-tongued bumblebee can make little headway here. The hummingbird and the sphinx moth are the only creatures really equipped to get the cardinal flower’s nectar and cross-fertilize it. In consequence, since hummingbirds are far less numerous than bees, the cardinal flower matures few seeds. The plant does most of its multiplying by perennial shoots and ra
nging roots.
The lobelias were named for Mattias de l’Obel, a Flemish physician and botanist who lived in Shakespeare’s day. He wrote several works on plants, undoubtedly used herbs in his own medicines, and dedicated his most important botanical study to Queen Elizabeth I. One American lobelia, Lobelia in-fiata, or Indian tobacco, is still used somewhat in medicine. But the cardinal flower is the spectacular member of the family. It has an acrid, milky juice, possibly medicinal; but even its botanical name, Lobelia cardinalis, refers to its enduring glory, its color.
Last night was cool, the chilliest of the season, and when I went out this morning to look at the flowers I found the bumblebees in the zinnias. That is a good index to the season.
To a bumblebee, a zinnia is more than a flower. It is a bed with a coverlet, protection from the dew and the chill. As I went from one big zinnia flower to another I ruffled back the petals and found six bumblebees in the first ten flowers, all of them too sluggish and sleepy to resent my intrusion. They had crawled in last evening and let the petals curl back over them, snug as could be.
I left them alone and came in and made the breakfast coffee, watching from the kitchen window. Sure enough, before the sun was an hour high here came the birds. Three thrashers came and began to search the zinnias. They, too, know that the bumblebees sleep there. They worked down the row of zinnias, breakfasting on the bees. And I turned back to the stove and set the bacon to cook. I breakfasted on hogs that don’t know a zinnia from a calla lily.
Looking up the mountain this morning I saw Autumn sitting on the first ledge, in a red and yellow shirt, with a jug of sweet cider in one hand, a bunch of purple asters in the other, a grin on his face and an unspoken hello in his eyes. He sat there for an hour or two, then went on up the mountainside and disappeared among the pines. The day became too warm for him. But he will be back.
After lunch I went fishing, or at least made that excuse for getting out on the river. I took the motor and went leisurely upstream a couple of miles, then drifted slowly back. The water is so slack and the current so slow that it took more than an hour to drift down. The sky was a magnificent blue, a few big cumulus clouds drifted far away to the west, and the sun was hot. In the sluggish backwaters beyond the island the blackbirds were noisy and when I passed close by they rose in a cloud and circled and came back and settled in the reeds again, chattering. A woodpecker hammered at a dead limb on a big popple and the rattling of his busy beak made a splendid echo; I suspect that he was less interested in the grubs he might find than in the sound he made.
Just above the house I drifted into a slow eddy on the far side of the river; I sat there, quiet, for ten minutes, and my eye caught a lithe movement on the bank. A half-grown fox came up the game path along the bank, not ten feet from me. He paused and watched me with beady eyes for perhaps half a minute, ears eager, nose wrinkling for my scent, then turned and went on, alert, unhurried.
We speak of the wind and its voices, but most of the voices are in the trees. And even those voices vary from season to season, almost from month to month. They are speaking today, as the Fall winds rise—the winds, not the gales which have, beyond denial, voices all their own.
The oaks speak today with a heavy voice, crisp with the crispness of their leaves. The big maples have a strong voice, with their big leaves rustling and thousands of them. At first listening one might think there was little difference between the voice of the oaks and that of the maples, but stand in an oak grove and listen, then move to a clump of maples. The difference is clear, a softer voice in the maples with their softer leaves and looser stems.
The whisperers, of course, are the members of the willow family, the poplars in particular. Aspens and cottonwoods whisper in anything but an absolute calm; give them a breeze and you can hear them afar, fairly chattering, their heart-shaped leaves on long, limber stems, each leaf dancing against a dozen others. The birches come a close second in their whispering, the small gray birches in particular; as their leaves crisp with September they, too, almost chatter.
The evergreens, the pines and spruces and hemlocks, hum rather than speak, and theirs is closest of all to music. The music of the pines is heard best at night, and best of all on a Winter night when their deciduous brothers of the woodland stand stark in the starlight. But the big Norway spruce outside my study is singing a September song today.
A rainy day and a dark day, and although it is yet early September it had the feel of Fall. The house was warm enough, according to the thermometer, but it felt chill, and I put on a heavier shirt to work at my desk this morning. This afternoon we built a fire on the hearth and the heavy air made it smoke into the room until the flue had warmed up. We had the wood-smoke smell of Autumn, a tang that persisted long after the smoke went up the flue as it should.
The slow, chill wash of the rain and the metallic patter in the downspouts, together with the hearth fire, gave the feel of October, of full Autumn. How different are the rains of the four seasons! This was a cool rain, an end-of-Summer rain, quiet, persistent. It brought down the first leaves, the few that have rushed the season. Two months from now we shall have the early Winter rains of November, which can be as cold as sleet and carry the threat of ice and snow. Rainy November days eat into my spirit. I think of them as black rains.
April rains can be as cold as those of November, but they have a different feel. Still touched with March, they also have the hope of May in them. The earth seems to welcome them, and though they may drench me when I go outside I do not feel as wet as when I am drenched by November rain. Then comes July rain, full of passion and often full of violence. July rain has temper but no sullenness. July days seldom sulk, and sulkiness is twice as hard to live with as sharp outbursts of temper followed by clearing skies or emotions.
Today was a scowling day, but this evening the air begins to clear. September can’t maintain a surly mood very long.
We have been totaling up accounts of various kinds, and it occurs to me again that few people keep really honest records in the country. And from what I hear, the folk who come out from the city are the worst of all sinners in this respect. The city man who moves to the country spends his first few years underestimating the cost, then gradually achieves a complete about-face and shamelessly overestimates. At first there is a pride in economy, but the time comes when he takes pride in extravagance.
Not long ago we visited folk who had moved from the city only a year or so ago, and the man showed me with great pride a fine stone wall in front of his house. “It didn’t cost me a penny!” he said. “We just moved it from over behind the barn.” Four workmen got fifteen dollars a day for three weeks to move that wall, but the proud new squire ignored that. The stones didn’t cost him a penny. Five years from now, if I know that man, he will be telling everyone who asks that the wall cost him two thousand dollars.
Another relative newcomer calculated the cost of his garden. “Seed,” he said, “came to six dollars and forty cents. Add a couple dollars for insecticides and that covers it. Eight dollars and a half. And look at the vegetables!” Another friend, who has reached the next stage, calculated differently. Interest on land investment, labor for plowing, seed, fertilizer, insecticide, wages of a man who works in that garden four days a week. On that basis he says his tomatoes cost twenty cents apiece, cabbage thirty cents a head, onions seven cents each, and so on. I think he overcharged himself about twenty per cent, but no more than that.
It is difficult to keep completely accurate accounts. For instance, Charley plows our garden and manures it. He does this in return for the use of the corn crib and storage space in the barn. How can I calculate that cost? Albert brought up a load of manure for the new asparagus bed last Spring. This was, I suppose, in return for the use of my chain saw a day or two. While he was rebuilding pasture fences last year, Albert said the garden fence needed replacing. I helped with labor, and the posts came from my timber land. Some of the posts for the pasture fence did too. How do you calcu
late the cost of the new garden fence?
We hire no outside help for the garden, so that item has no place on the bill. But if I take account of the time we spend gardening and charge for it at the going rate for such help—well, the lettuce and the beans and the squash and the corn and all the rest of that fine produce would cost aplenty. And the jars of tomatoes we can each year can’t be written off for the cost of the gas under the pressure canner, either.
The fact is that we can’t tally up an exact accounting for these things. It’s useless to try. All I know is that whatever they cost, they are worth it.
The dipper is swung low in the north, this evening, and Cassiopeia was off to the east of the Pole Star. To the east of Cassiopeia stood a moon that will soon be full and was already colored like the pumpkins in the garden. We couldn’t stay indoors. We went out and climbed to the shoulder of the mountain and sat on the big rock. An owl was hooting up on the hillside, but there was no other bird sound. Then Pat, who had gone along, delighted, sniffed off into the darkness and picked up a rabbit trail. He gave his trail yelp and vanished among the shadows.
We sat and listened to Pat trail that rabbit all over the mountainside, the echoes coming back from the birch hollow, then from the upper benchland, then from the big pines, so we could follow his course without moving an inch. And at last we came back to the house, Pat’s voice still eager high up on the mountain.
We came back past the white birch clump twined with wild grape, and there was the winy smell, wild tanged. Closer to home we met the cidery smell of early apples on the ground. We get a hint of it by daylight, but it was strong on the cool night air. Then we came to the rank hay smell at the bar-way to the road. Not the sweet hay fragrance of June, but the mint-and-goldenrod smell of tall weeds recently mowed, with the tantalizing sweetness of sweet clover mingled in. Then, as we came up the road, the wet, cool, faintly muddy smell of the river.