Thoughts and Progress

http://100speciesdodd.blogspot.com/
I got tired of that one. I have enough photos to do maybe 20 more, and then I plan to write a mini-manifesto about how 19th century it is to want people to identify plants, and I bet the guy who generated the statement wouldn't be able to name 100 magazines or newspapers or 100 professional musicians or 100 musical instruments, or makes of automobiles. NO WAY could he name 100 movies or actors or TV shows!

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I wrote the above notes months ago. My yard is full of budding, sprouting, greening this'n'that.

Recently I've added to a couple of posts. There's a real-time video of a moonflower opening (I didn't make it; I lifted it, but you can follow the link back). There's a photo of some tulips that came back up this year (more now than before, as evidenced by last year's photo).

http://100speciesdodd.blogspot.com/2008/10/28-moonflowers.html
http://100speciesdodd.blogspot.com/2008/08/14-tulips.html

I do still intend to add to this blog, but the initial steam has cooled. That's okay. I don't mind projects taking years. Maybe someday I will get to 100 and maybe I won't, but my yard continues to improve little by little every year either way. And when I can't take care of it anymore or if someone lives here after us who has different priorities, some of the plants might go dormant, or die. Much of what is here was here for years, unwatered and unloved, but when we moved in and watered and dug around, things came up! So some of the things I've brought here or that were here that we nurtured might similarly surprise someone else in a few decades. Cool!

But back to my original thoughts about naming 100 of ANYthing, I re-read this, about my visit to Kirk Ella with Holly eight years ago.
SandraDodd.com/eastyorkshire

I read it because I'm corresponding with some unschoolers in the U.K. about a visit I'm making there in July. And I realized that knowing a lot about one town in England ("a lot" meaning some history, some people, some geography, when the store opens and whether they have Dr Pepper, where the snickleways are, how far to Beverley) is different from seeing and naming 100 castles, or 100 towns, or 100 parish churches. But reading all the names on the gravestones in ONE church, hearing the bellringers practice the changes, finding a big toad in the churchyard... that's better than remembering the name of the church.

If I take photos of my grocery-store tulips every year and document their divisions and growth, that might be better than naming 100 strains of tulips. Planting tulips and not EVER taking their picture is better than feeling agitation about what a dead guy thinks about whether I can name 100 species.

I'm treating this like a game, and not like a test, and if I get distracted and start doing something else, I'm still playing. And in the end it's not whether I win or lose, its whether I knew it was a game.



I don't know what those flowers are. I don't remember what little town we were in that day.
I remember Holly touching flowers growing on an ancient wall in an alley across from a pub that wasn't open yet.

#32 Burro's tail

Burro's tail. It's a succulent—a desert plant like a cactus, but not with any pokey-parts.
The dice and game card aren't usually there.

I got this from my friend Steve. He has his in a pot and takes it in in winter. I dug mine up and took it in the first year, but the next year I left some out, and this year I left it all out. Seems to have survived fine, though it doesn't stay in the very same place. Some babies live, and some older plants get walked on (because it's right by the back door), but it's doing well!

I read up on it and it's from Mexico. In an image search, it showed people using it as a hanging-basket plant.

The photo above is a couple of years old, and was taken for the lyrics game, when the word was "dark." http://lyricsgame.blogspot.com/2007/09/dark.html

Lately I find images for each new word, but early on I was setting the cards in various places, rolling dice and photographing the two of them. Some of those photos are fun. I did it on a trip to the zoo, and on a trip to Colorado.

#31 Sage Brush

I could probably name two dozen "cokes" but not that many kinds of "kleenex," and the general name for this type of growth is "sage brush." Of what is technically sage brush, there's more than one kind. Probably some of what's in the picture is and some isn't. Because I'm neither a botanist nor a landscaper, "sage brush" is close enough for me.

This photo is across the valley from my house, but there are things like these within a mile of my house.

Chamisa (#30) would be lumped in the "sage brush" category by me if I didn't know it's name.

#30 Chamisa

In Española, where I grew up, this stuff was all around. Not in people's fields or yards, but in the wilder parts and the no-longer-farmed parts.



This one is growing behind the tire store behind us, on a part of their lot they've had landscaped. There's a little watering tube coming up from the ground there, so the plant is unnaturally big. It's nearly 5' tall and bigger than that around.

#29 African Violet

When I was 13 and 14, I was in a 4-H club based on botany. We did crops judging, flower arranging, and the care of houseplants. I loved the flower arranging and remembered years later how to use the wires and tape to make coursages and head wreaths and boutonnieres. We each had an African Violet to take care of, and that I didn't much like. I remember a great fear of the presence of mealy bugs, or of watering incorrectly.

Last winter, there were two African Violets in a batch of plants given to me. I didn't figure they would live, and I didn't take very special African-violet care of them. In Spring I put them out in the yard with other plants, in a shady place where they could be watered easily.

I was sometimes careful to put the water on the dirt and not the leaves, but they were outside and sometimes getting some sprinkler water and rain (not much rain this summer).

Then one day in late September there was a bloom!



It lasted several weeks.



I know the leaves look terrible. They had too much sun and too much water. (They greened up after a few weeks in the kitchen.)



So African violets aren't local, but this one came to my house and bloomed.

#28 Moonflowers

A couple of years ago I had moonflowers all up the high side of the end of our house. I think that wall is about 17' tall.

I skipped a year, from social obligations and schedules. They really are difficult to get started here.

This year there were a few, and those in a pot did better than others.




And here's a moonflower that didn't every fully open because the days are still warm but the nights are cold.



More on my moonflowers here, with photos of the HUGE seedlings (and I'll add seed pod photos there in a couple of months):
SandraDodd.com/moonflowers

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I forgot to make photos of the seed pods. I'm writing in April 2009. The few seeds I got last year didn't germinate, but I still had bought seeds, and I have seedlings started in peat pots.

Susan, in Indiana, sent me some seeds for a bush morning glory. In looking on the internet to see what exactly I had, I found a video of a moonflower opening in real time. If you go to the site where it lives (a site dedicated to moon-related things), there's background music by Santana, a song named moonflower (Flor d'Luna). http://www.moonlightsys.com/themoon/flower.html

#27 Fruitless Mulberry

In our back yard there are two fruitless mulberries. When we first moved here eleven years ago, it seemed they might both die. The west tree is very near the house, and it seemed some roots were destroyed by an addition to the house, and then the others were driven and parked on when our house was used for several years as a halfway house for University of New Mexico hospital treatment facilities. Employees would park in the back up near the door, it seems.
Those rings show the early years of the tree, then the nine years it was totally unwatered, and this part of the central trunk was cut when we first moved here.

The place from which it was cut is shown (but in a current photo). That central trunk had dried up entirely.

Other branches came back, though, and it's a big tree now again. The photo below is three years old. It's doing even better now.



The leaf that appears on the main page of the Always Learning list is from that tree. It grew swirly for some reason. I thought it was pretty, and stuck it into the scanner with blue paper behind it:



Here's a 2008 Robin's nest Holly could see from her bathroom window, in the western tree:



The other tree is on the east side of the back yard, not so near the house, but the upper branches come onto the deck which is outside the library (the room above the garage). Keith put beams to catch water, and we have drained the hot tub here many times, so it continues to recover. Holly has always liked to climb it, and swing on the large, soft rope Keith put up in there years ago.



The top of that tree still has dead twigs up top, but the birds don't mind. Here are some doves Holly photographed in the eastern tree this summer:



One year all the leaves fell off that tree in a single day, from some odd cold snap, without wind. They were just on the ground in a circle. Our yard has benefitted greatly from compost made of the leaves of these trees.

And it can hold a piñata!