Flowers

Being Like Wildflowers

/ Merilee / 3 Comments

Winter 2021-22 in California started out with a hefty amount of rain in December.  Too much, actually, since we now tend to get atmospheric rivers of water aimed at the west coast which slam it with too much all at once.

Sort of like if you don’t water your yard for months and it’s dry and baked, and you decide to turn on your hose full-blast and hit that hard soil with a ridiculous amount of water all at one time.  It can hold only so much water before soil starts slipping.  Then you have mudslides all up and down Pacific Coast Highway and Malibu ends up a mess.  For a minute…  But no one really likes to complain about it because we want that rain.  We need the atmospheric rivers, whenever they show up.  Our mountains don’t get enough snow and the reservoirs are running dry.

In December we all thought things were going along swimmingly, that La Nina wasn’t going to be mean to us after all and would have a little mercy, giving us the precipitation we need.  But in January the tap shut off, Santa Ana winds blew again (and again, and again) drying everything out and dashing everyone’s hopes for a decent rainy season.

This not only kills the joy for everyone from farmers to gardeners, but also – wildflower lovers.  There is no Super Bloom for 2022.  A few scatterings here and there of poppies and lupines up along I5 between the LA Basin and the San Joaquin Valley, but not a lot.  I looked.

So when I spent a big chunk of time recently out in the desert, I was not surprised to see hardly any flowers.  A few running alongside the I15, but not much.  So one day I went out on an excursion to see what I could find, if anything.

I went up Jubilee Pass Road over Salisbury Pass at the south end of Death Valley.  Usually you can find flowers at the higher elevations, and I wasn’t disappointed.  They were there in occasional drifts alongside the road.

They were dwarfed, though, stunted and sparse.  But still, they are there if you look carefully.  Even growing in the cracks of the pavement on the road.  Or way up in rocks, which I always find fascinating.   There were a surprising number of gravel ghosts, which always thrills me to find my namesake hovering over the ground without a care in the world.

There’s always joy spending time with wildflowers.  They innocently bloom and bounce in the breeze, enjoying the sunshine and welcoming bees and bugs and are oblivious of the troubles in the world,  whether it’s a Super Bloom or a Little Bloom.

I would like to be more like the wildflowers.

 

The Joy of Japanese Anemones

/ Merilee / 9 Comments

Once you plant them, they are with you always.

Every summer their leaves come out and then the stems come up, tall and slender and elastic.  And just like clockwork the first blossom pops open near the end of August.

Anemones. Copyright Merilee Mitchell
Anemones 8. Copyright Merilee Mitchell
Anemones 7. Copyright Merilee Mitchell
Anemones 16. Copyright Merilee Mitchell

Throughout September the stems get longer with more and more buds and luminescent, white flowers.

They bounce silently in the breeze.  They have no scent.  Joy emanates from them instead.

They are Japanese anemones.

I’ve had them in pink and I’ve had them in white.  They can be frustrating with their greedy habit of taking over a garden, but when the blossoms are on 3′ tall stems, you can’t be mad at them for liking to dominate.  In winter they disappear again under the ground.

I’ve tried to pull them out once or twice before, then regretted it afterwards, remembering the autumn blossoms, thinking how much I love them.  The plants become so large that they swallow up everything else in the garden, including azaleas.

They always come back, though, no matter how thoroughly I thought I had pulled each and every piece of plant out of the ground.  It makes me happy to have them back even though they completely take over.

Japanese anemones are just one of the things that I love about autumn.  When the light gets a little softer and the air has a slight crispness in the early morning and the setting sun backlights the garden in late afternoon with the most golden of colors.

And the anemones bounce in the breeze.

Telling you to be happy.

Just Outside The Fence

/ Merilee / 10 Comments

When disaster strikes and it’s all over the news, the media is inescapable, pushing everything at us.  The news tells us about floods, super Arctic freezes and blasting Nor’easters, tornadoes and avalanches.  Naturally it’s assumed that the entire world knew about the horrendous fires that burned California last year, and in particular the Woolsey Fire, because it affected me personally, as well as thousands of other people who live in my area.

The beginning of the Woolsey Fire of November 2018 from the back of my property

I recently returned from an East Coast trip knowing that first thing the next morning I’d have men removing the fence at the far end of our property.  The fence was burned to a crisp back in November.  You wouldn’t think fire would do much to wrought iron, but it does.  So it had to be taken down, sand blasted, repaired, repainted and put back up again, providing a delicate and somewhat humorous boundary that doesn’t really keep wildlife out.  I’ve watched coyotes and bobcats simply jump over that fence.  It’s merely a form of entertainment and exercise for them. The coyotes like to eat my persimmons.

The Woolsey Fire of last November burned our property.  It raged all around the entire neighborhood, taking out one house and torching the area for miles.  It was a fire storm that had us evacuated for five days, living in a motel in Burbank.  It was all that was on the news day and night, night and day.  The Camp Fire in Northern California was going on at the same time along with various other fires all up and down the state.  In essence, California was being burned from one end to the other.

While in New England last week my conversations with other people were interesting.  They either had not heard of the fires at all, or thought they were still burning.  A couple of teenaged girls insisted that the Sierra Nevada Mountains were still burning.

“You can’t go to Yosemite or anywhere in the Sierra Nevada.  It’s all burning.”

“Ugh….no.  No, that was last summer and fall.  It’s now under tons of snow.  There are no more fires in the Sierras.”

“Oh, no, they’re still burning.  The fires are always burning in California.”  This seems to be the impression of California.  It’s either burning or sliding all of the time.

Social media allowed lots of people to vent their antagonism towards the rich and famous during those fires.  It was the Woolsey Fire that took out a huge chunk of houses and businesses in Malibu.  Twitter was filled gleeful people, happy that celebrities and the wealthy were losing their homes.  That was amazing to me.  Why would you be happy that someone lost their home to fire?  Or to any disaster.  A lot of people had their homes burn in 2018.  Rich and not so rich people lost everything in fires all over California.  Why is it funny, desirable or even justified if it’s a celebrity who loses their home?  I never understand this kind of thinking.  It’s clearly sick.  Reading these types of posts really made me dislike Twitter even more than I did before.  In fact, I struggle with social media in its entirety.  I’m not so sure it’s a positive thing, but that’s a whole different topic.

A lot of people associate California, and in particular, Southern California, with mudslides.  Yes, we have mudslides.  Lots of them.   But a lot of the time, mudslides are caused from previous fires that have burned the hills.  Then the rains come and the naked hills slide due to the vegetation being gone and soil structure changes.

When the men removed the fence that’s supposed to keep out coyotes and bobcats, it allowed me to venture out onto the rest of the hill our home sits on.  It was liberating and freeing, not having that fence in place and I realized that the entire hill is absolutely filled with wildflowers.  Lupine, blue dicks, mustard and many others I’ve never seen before.  The abundant rains of this past winter unlocked seeds that probably were dormant for years.

I walked out into the heavy growth of wildflowers to photograph them.  It was a thrill to be standing inside a thicket of flowers, taking their portraits before the men finished welding the fence panels.  I don’t know if I will ever see such a wildflower display again.  Drought has a way of creeping back in when you live in California, and wildflowers don’t like drought.

Actually, in all of the years I’ve lived in California, and that’s been nearly my entire life, I have never once seen so much rain, but also so many wildflowers.  They are just outside my fence, filling the hills that were blackened and charred a few months ago.

It’s like a gift after the disaster.