Chicory is under-appreciated.
From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four:
Chapter 7:
How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!
Walking
Category Archives: nature
It’s been a while.
Recent acquisitions.
In the two weeks since my last post…
The band my husband and I joined earlier this year performed its spring concert. What a lot of fun! The flute section recently decided to form a small performance group, so in addition to the weekly rehearsals for band, I’m now practicing with the flute choir.
Our “pollinator pockets,” which we finished planting over Mother’s Day weekend, suffered a bit in last week’s heat wave, but we were able to protect them with a canopy and extra watering.
The bird feeders remain down until May 31 — or longer, if that’s what advised.
Spring
Seen on our walk yesterday.
All of the plants for the “pollinator pockets” I’m planning for the two raised beds we prepared last month are crowded into three-season room. It’s a beautiful mess — and hell on my allergies. “They” say that the last frost is behind us, and the warming trend begins this weekend, so I hope to plant early Sunday morning. In the meantime, I’ve mulched the other beds, repaired the borders, tidied the patio, readied the containers for perennials, repaired a few bare-ish lawn patches, removed all the feeders, and, yes, already mowed. Twice. (Hey, when you keep the grass a little longer, it’s critical to keep it tidy.)
And now that I’ve typed this, I realize I’ve procrastinated long enough. It’s time to practice my music. Our concert date approaches, as do this semester’s final three private lessons.
Yesterday
On our walk beside the Huron River.
Spring
Image captured near a closed building at the Detroit Zoo.
Art in Bloom
On Thursday, we attended Art in Bloom at the Milwaukee Art Museum. If you read me regularly, you probably know how much I admire Anselm Kiefer’s painting, “Midgard.” The arrangement inspired by that painting easily secured my “people’s choice” vote.
Orchids
We were able to see the Orchid Festival while visiting the Conservatory at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens. (See previous post.)
Back to the conservatory
Images captured over the weekend at the Conservatory at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens.
Catching up
Recent acquisitions.
My commitment to annotating my reading list has waned primarily because enough note-taking, peripheral reading and studying, and discussion occurs in the assorted groups in which I am participating that I feel as if I’ve said what I need to say. Of course, I haven’t said it here, but music practice (1), band rehearsal (2), planning raised beds for pollinators, backyard birding (3), plus studying and reading have all conspired to keep me off the computer (except when I’m in Zoom meetings). We’ll see if I can remedy that.
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(1) My current solo piece is (still) Howard Ferguson’s Three Sketches for Flute and Piano. I’m also working on No. 15 of 18 Studies for Flute by Joachim Anderson, Op. 41, in Robert Cavally’s Melodious and Progressive Studies from Andersen, Gariboldi, Koehler, and Terschak for Flute, Book 1, and Sonata No. V (Handel) in Selected Duets for Flute, Volume II (Advanced), as well as scales, rhythmical articulation, and music for the spring concert.
(2) Yes, we joined a band of adult amateurs, who range from late beginner to early-advanced. During the 1.25-hour commute there and back, we’ve been listening to The Great Courses (TGC) on Dante’s Divine Comedy, which I’m reading for 100 Days of Dante. We’ve also been sampling TGC lectures on the bible. Neither of us has read it, cover to cover, so to address this educational gap, we’re using a reading schedule we found online, (usually) doubling the daily commitment, so that we finish this summer.
(3) For the last week or so, we’ve had a tiny flock of Common Redpolls at our feeders, a first in the eleven years at the forever home. This article shed some light on what may be going on. (Is it too much to ask that some of the sandhill cranes we’ve espied in the neighborhood stopped in our yards?)
Unexpected
It is not immediately apparent in this image, but the condensation looked like fine fur or feathers.
My feet possess divining rod qualities; they suss out every stray nut, garden rock, patch of ice, and unyielding stick on our neighborhood’s sidewalks. Once you’ve taken as many spills as I have, you know to keep one eye on the ground, which is how I found the unexpected arrangement featured in this post.
Since I’m a fan of moments of serendipity / synchronicity / synthesis, I’ll mention that it first struck me as door decor. The house was painted this past spring, and some of my favorite door hangings don’t work as well with the new color scheme as they did with the old. Finding something for the transitional period between the winter holidays and late March had been on my mind when I noticed the storm drain. And I had recently borrowed a number of books on Joseph Cornell’s art, so it’s no surprise that it also looked like a collage.
Nerdishly 