The Nature of Things

Can it really be the end of November? Where did the month go? For that matter, where has the year gone? Tomorrow we head into December. Our average first frost date is December 10, so it is likely that many of the blooms in the garden today are on borrowed time. Already, we have had a few chilly nights, once dropping down to 35 degrees F., but the garden positively loves this weather. The fact that we've had a very wet couple of weeks has made the plants even happier. As we get ready to welcome December, here are some of the blooms - and other things - that are still bringing color to the late fall garden. I love violas and I tend to tuck them into every bare spot around the garden in late fall. I like them in all colors. Purple trailing lantana is at its best in the late fall and the butterflies are grateful. The Cape honeysuckle is in full bloom, but I haven't seen any hummingbirds sipping from it lately. Yellow cestrum blooms persist right u...

For this week's featured poem, here is a classic - John Keats' ode to the season. The beautiful pastoral imagery of the poem evokes a time long past, but even so they are images that seem somehow familiar and recognizable. Perhaps they are in our blood.                                   TO AUTUMN                       by John Keats (1795-1821)                                               1.     SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,         Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;     Conspiring with him how to load and bless         With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;     To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,    ...

The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende My rating: 5 of 5 stars I've long been a fan of Isabel Allende's inspiring fiction. Her soul-baring stories most often feature female protagonists and are told through multigenerational family sagas. She continues that tradition with The Japanese Lover . Allende's method is to tell her story through the voice of the all-knowing third person narrator, but, although the narrator may know all, it is revealed to us very slowly, as one after another of the narrative's layers is peeled away. Her style of writing is deceptively simple and unadorned. At least, that is the feeling that I get reading the books in translation. One has to acknowledge that this may be at least in part attributable to the art of the translator, in this case two translators, Mike Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson. In The Japanese Lover , all the major characters are guarding secrets that are considered shameful at the time. In the course of the novel, all of those s...

"This Week in Birds" is taking a Thanksgiving vacation and will return next week. Instead, this week on the eve of the big conference on climate change in Paris, I am rerunning a post that I did in April 2012. It concerned a New York Times poll that found that a majority of Americans believed that global climate change was affecting the weather. However, the comments from Times readers about the story told a very different tale of climate change denialism. Three-and-a-half years later, has anything changed? Is there any more acceptance of the truth of human-caused climate change and the urgency of taking action to stop it? Well, certainly not in Washington where denialism still prevails in Congress.  *~*~*~* April 18, 2012 Climate change affecting the weather? Ya think? Headline in The New York Times today:  In Poll, Many Link Weather Extremes to Climate Change . The story under the headline relates how  a large majority of Americans believe that this ye...

For my Thanksgiving post in 2011, I featured this "Addams Family Values" video. Let's repeat it for this Thanksgiving, and, as we sit down with our families for this holiday meal, perhaps it will give us something else to be thankful for! *~*~*~* Addams Family Values - Wednesday Addams explains Thanksgiving ~~~~~

The Blue Last by Martha Grimes My rating: 4 of 5 stars All the usual Martha Grimes ingredients are here: precocious and charming children; clever cats and dogs; quirky villages and villagers; memories of World War II; quaintly named pubs, of course; in London, Richard Jury, Wiggins, Cyril the Cat, Carole-Ann, and Mrs. Wasserman, and in Long Piddleton, Melrose Plant, Marshall Trueblood, Aunt Agatha, and all the other villagers we've come to know and expect. And, naturally, there is the typical convoluted Grimes plot that bobs and weaves and circles back on itself. In Grimes books, it is always the journey itself that is most satisfying; often, the conclusion is less so. That is the case with this book. A friend of Jury's in the City of London police asks his assistance in solving a mystery. Some bones have recently been uncovered on the site of a pub, "The Blue Last," that was destroyed in the blitz during World War II. They are the bones of a woman and child. Osten...

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."                                                                    - Sinclair Lewis I thought of that famous Sinclair Lewis quote this week as we watched and listened in disbelief as people who think they are qualified to be the next president vied with each other to see which one could out-fascist the rest in their response to last week's bombing in Paris and the plight of Syrian refugees trying to escape the horror of ISIL/ISIS/Daesh - whatever you want to call that terrorist organization. It has been a thoroughly disgusting display of fearmongering and politicizing a tragedy and I suspect we'll be in for more of the same and probably worse in the months to come. As we consider the plight of the unfortunate refugees, perhaps we ...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : Image courtesy of nwbackyardbirder.blogspot.com. I saw my first Orange-crowned Warbler of the season in my backyard on Wednesday. That makes two of our three winter warblers accounted for - the Orange-crowned and the Yellow-rumped . Still waiting for the Pine Warbler to show up. *~*~*~* Congress is set to vote on a bill that has bipartisan support. That deserves a headline! Furthermore, the bill is an important one for the environment. It would phase out the use of microbeads in cleaning and hygiene products. Those minuscule pieces of plastic wind up in our waterways and do untold damage to the environment. Their banning would be very good news. *~*~*~* Animals - and plants - survive by being adaptable. The biggest thing they have had to adapt to since the beginning of the Industrial Age has been human beings and their building of cities on formerly pristine lands. Perhaps it is not so surprising that many a...

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert My rating: 5 of 5 stars Earlier this year, I read Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot and enjoyed it tremendously. Reading that book about the protagonist's obsession with the great 19th century French writer made me want to re-read his masterpiece, Madame Bovary . I first read the book long ago in my youth, in what I now think of as my "romantic period." Quite honestly, although I remembered the broad outlines of the plot, I had long since forgotten many of the details. Thus, reading it this week has been much like reading it for the first time. The book was published in 1856 and was subjected to attacks for obscenity by the public prosecutors. The resulting trial, which cleared Flaubert of the charge, was held in early 1857 and had the predictable result of making the book a sensation and a best-seller. Reading the book today, one is amazed that it could ever have been thought to be obscene. It seems so mild by present-day stan...

I am a Francophile. I admire the French culture and the way of living that is pursued by the people of France. It's a sentiment that is shared by many - I think most - Americans, and it has strong historical roots. After all, France was our first foreign ally. Without their aid, that 1770s war to secure independence from Britain might have turned out quite differently. One of the qualities of a true friendship is that that friend will tell you when you are doing something stupid. So it was when our former president, George W. Bush, determined to invade Iraq after the attacks of 09/11/01. France did not support that invasion and argued against it.  For standing up against a bully, France's reward was jingoistic members of Congress engaging in the silliness of trying to rename French fries as "freedom fries" and calling the French all sorts of insulting and bellicose names.  These are some of the same politicians who are today inveighing against Syrian ref...

For the last few years, the news about the Monarch butterfly has been unrelentingly bad. A disastrous series of bad winters in the mountains where the migrants spend that season in Mexico, coupled with habitat loss across North America and the profligate use of pesticides in farming operations in the heartland of America, had reduced the butterfly's numbers to dangerously low levels. Some wondered if the charismatic insect would ever be able to recover, or would it follow the path of the Passenger Pigeon to extinction?  A massive effort was undertaken to educate the public and especially farmers and gardeners about the needs of the fragile fliers. All across the continent, people who had never heard of milkweed started planting it in their gardens. The aim was to create a "butterfly highway" right across the continent, to provide the insect with the plants that are absolutely essential to its survival. Finally this year, we are seeing the positive effects of all tho...

This past weekend marked the beginning of the season for one of my favorite citizen science projects. Project FeederWatch runs from early November until early April, the period in which birds are most likely to visit backyard feeders. Its participants survey the birds in a specific area throughout that season. The birds that are counted can be those that come to feeders or that feed on the vegetation or the wildlife in the area that is being surveyed. In my case, I survey my one-half acre yard plus my northside neighbor's backyard that contains ten large pine trees that are a magnet for bird life. I did not have high hopes for my first weekend of FeederWatching. The yard has been very quiet recently, very little bird activity going on. Except, that is, for the ubiquitous House Sparrows , bane of my existence as a backyard birder. I can count 20 or 30 of these guys in my yard at almost any hour of the day. My low expectations were quickly exceeded. Even though things still...