redbud blossoms

redbud blossoms' small

pink ballet slippers with wings

dance on a bare branch

another way trees make leaves

another way trees make leaves --

pulp into paper printed on pages --

pages into compost --

roots into leaves

Ten pumpkins on the sun porch froze solid during the last spell of -17 F (-27 C). Then came the usual January thaw and they started to soften. I've been slicing, dicing and steaming, packing the pulp into plastic containers for the freezer. Five down, five to go. Now we've had another below zero dip, so I will hold off on the pumpkins for a spell. 

Yesterday, after the freezing rain that looked like ice BBs followed by a frosting of snow, I walked gingerly out to the compost bin with the bucket of pumpkin skins. When I lifted the ice covered lid, a mouse disappeared down into the bowels. Better here than in the house! On the way back I took the bowl full of slick pumpkin seeds and dumped them in the tray under the bird feeder. The blue jays like them, and the squirrels. 

That's another part of nature's magnificent recycling center, from seeds to plants to food for animals, to excrement to compost to nourish roots. Throughout the cycle runs the sap, unless it's momentarily frozen!

sunset golden light

sunset golden light

a man with a pole wading

in the low river

Record-breaking heat in late September. During a break between choir rehearsal and the John Williams concert at the Ottumwa Bridge View Center, I step out of the cool hall in my long black concert attire. After this summer's drought, the Des Moines River runs quite low, revealing shoals of gravel. A man is wading in the shallows. He pokes around on the bottom with a pole that has a small round attachment on one end. I don't think he's fishing. He seems to be searching for something. Could it be a metal detector? Or a little seine for scooping up gold-laden gravel? The only gold I see is cast by the setting sun on the bridge piers. They look like angels with outspread wings holding up humans on their incessant journeys back and forth across the waters.

corky scabs embossed

corky scabs embossed

on a green Asian pear --

abstract fungal art

One fortunate result of this summer's drought is that fungus has not had much chance to attack our fruit trees, since it needs wet weather to infect. I have found only one Asian and one Kieffer pear with signs of scab. When it just affects the surface and doesn't crack the skin, the fruit is still edible. I know it's considered unsightly, but my artist's eye finds beauty in the crusty patterns, like rocky continents interspersed on a planet with green seas.

buckeyes in a blue bowl

buckeyes in a blue bowl

glossy cordovan seeds splitting

their spiky shells

After a summer of drought, the palmate leaves of buckeyes are already turning orange in August and the nuts are falling to the dry, cracked ground. I bring a few home and watch as they split open. Smooth, shiny seeds peak out from their armored shells like chocolate bon bons. But raw horse chestnuts have another defense, tannic acid, toxic to humans. However, squirrels will chew off the thick husks and "sample" a few bites of the nuts. They can be eaten if roasted like chestnuts, but I have not tried this.

no one planted them

no one planted them

or watered them through the ongoing drought

a bouquet of pale purple petunias 

growing from a crack in the concrete curb

Coming out of the bank, I almost step on them, but I'm arrested by a dozen purple eyes looking up at me. How did they get there, a clutch of petunias growing out of a crack in the curb? Certainly no one planted them there. True, there a window boxes on the bank's windows, spilling over with a riot of petunias. But none of them are this lovely shade of lavender. For sure, no one watered them through this long summer's drought. Yet they are flourishing, delicate but indomitable, Nature's everlasting bounty.

ripped apart and stained

ripped apart and stained

blue by fungus, a tree trunk

opens to the sun

On a walk around the Big Island, a flash of blue catches my eye. A fallen tree, its trunk twisted open, reveals fibrous strands of the inner bark, like hair or dead grass. Part of the sapwood has turned pale blue, evidently the work of blue stain fungus, slowly consuming the heartwood. The complimentary colors of blue and green against orange and yellow make a pleasing composition out of the wreckage of a fallen tree.

first snow, a cardinal poses

first snow, a cardinal poses

on white pillows in the goumi bush --

red on white on green

First Sunday in December, waking to a white world. Soft cotton balls falling straight down. A male cardinal perches among the still-green leaves of the goumi bush, white pillows on black limbs.

climbing slowly up

climbing slowly up 

an orange pumpkin, preying mantis

at season's end

Right outside the door to the Fairfield Civic Center, a preying mantis is slowly climbing the side of a pumpkin, part of harvest decorations in a pot of chrysanthemums. The brown coloration seems to peg the insect as male. Autumn is mating season and so far he has survived that, as well as near-freezing nighttime temperatures, but he will not survive the winter. He looks a bit bedraggled. His leathery outer wings are partially open, revealing the delicate hind wings, folded like a pleated underskirt. When I come back out, he's gone, maybe hiding among the fading flowers.

the haunted bookshop

the haunted bookshop

cat curled behind bars of shadow
in a patch of sunlight

It's almost Halloween. Costco has sold out of pumpkins, but New Pioneer Coop still has a nice selection, including white, green with yellow striped and warty pink ones. In the Haunted Bookshop, people are browsing for used books, new puzzles, games, toys. A short-hair gray cat is curled up on a padded rocking chair in a warm patch of sunlight striped by shadows. The Second Act consignment clothing store is packed with people shopping for costumes. A dyed blonde is looking at long blonde wigs, a boy swipes the air with a plastic sword, a girl holds up an Elsa dress. Everyone is wearing Hawkeye shirts for the game this Saturday afternoon. As we leave town we pass lines of cars and people walking toward the stadium, carrying coolers and blankets. The temperature gauge in the car registers 74 F. You'd never know it's late October. We drive back to Fairfield, sipping cold kombucha.

waiting for the wind

waiting for the wind

silk parachutes packed in a pod 

bearing brown seeds

On a walk around Bonnefield Lake, I come across a little patch of milkweed, two different varieties. One has long, slender dark brown pods shaped like green beans or small catalpa pods. Some of the pods have split in half, revealing tiny golden seeds attached to the silky floss. Empty, the pod pairs curve around each other like a dancing couple.

The other variety looks more like common milkweed, only the pods are much smaller. The large, flat brown seeds are still packed inside like fish scales attached to a white silk cone.

As I walk under a grove of tall white pines, copper needles rain down on my head and my shoes slip on the mat of slick fallen needles.

Here and there, little groups of mushrooms that look like biscuits are pushing up through the pine needles. The underside of these mushrooms looks like a mustard-colored sponge. Edible? Well, squirrels have been biting off hunks, but then squirrels will eat half of a highly toxic buckeye, so I leave the mushrooms to the squirrels.

black silk hanging down

black silk hanging down

an ear of dry field corn

ready for harvest

Harvest time in the monolithic fields of corn and soybeans in Iowa. The dry ears of field corn hang down, their silk tassels turned black, stalks red, husks bleached and brittle, leaves glowing like beaten gold in the late afternoon sun. There is a beauty here, though at the expense of the soil and water. So much better to grow organic, but farmers get locked into a way of doing things and it's hard to change.

canoe glides softly

canoe glides softly,

rippling the mare's tails reflected

in the placid lake

Good thing we took the canoe to our local lake instead of driving 4 hours to the Upper Iowa River or even 15 minutes to Cedar Creek. As soon as we stepped into the canoe, the long patch on the side started spurting water. The only way to get in some paddling was to take turns soloing, leaning to the left to keep the gray gorilla tape above water. John looks like he's paddling through mare's tails reflected in the water. Kevlar canoe needs some serious fiberglass repair!

The little gazebo by the lake sits amid a patch of buffalo grass turned orange in autumn.

Above, cirrus clouds morph into fantastic shapes -- fans, feathers, mare's tails. I love these clouds.

surviving the fall

surviving the fall,

armored capsule splits open --

inside, eye of the buck

Almost all the buckeye pods have fallen now, some containing three seeds. Both the smooth interior and the rough exterior of the pods are beautiful. Most pods split when they fall and the shiny mahogany seed pops out, quickly eaten by squirrels with their tough teeth. Other pods survive the fall, slowly opening like an eyelid, revealing the eye of the buck.

One day I saw a real buck not far from this tree. Wonder what it thinks, seeing a buck's eye looking up at it from the ground.

This is the view from the other side, showing that each husk has three divisions.

The seed nestles inside a thick shell, soft on the inside, like foam insulation.

This partial husk contained two seeds. A darker circle near the dividing wall is where the eye of the seed was attached.

The tough exterior of the shell functions like studded armor. It starts out ochre, slowly turns burnt umber, then dries to cinnamon.

I collected as many shells as I could find. Only a few still held glossy buckeyes. But with the shells they make a lovely display of autumnal shades of  brown.

blooming in autumn

blooming in autumn --

bottle gentian, pried open

only by bumblebees

Late September, I am looking for the last blue blossoms of great blue lobelia to see if the seeds swelling along the stem are ready to harvest. Not quite. Nearby, the flowers of cup plants, once hoisted aloft on 3 meter high stems, have gone to seed, shattering at my touch. Almost hidden beneath the giant cup plant leaves on the ground, I discover a late-blooming wildflower, bottle gentian. Clusters of striped lavender blossoms, nearly closed at the top, look more like buds than full-blown flowers. Only the burly bumblebee is strong enough to push open the corollas to sip on the nectar inside the "bottle."

blooming between bricks

blooming between bricks

beside the iron streetlamp

bright pink petunias

A day past the autumn equinox, but it feels like the height of summer, hot and humid. No hand planted petunias here, but these enterprising flowers seem happy to keep on growing in a tiny bit of dirt between the brick sidewalk and the concrete base of the iron streetlamp. It makes me reflect that soft yet hardy plants will be here long after the iron streetlamp has rusted away and the concrete and bricks have broken into pieces.

in the ditch between

in the ditch between

mono-crop fields and highway,

prairie grass and wildflowers

I love the deep ditches between the blacktop and the fields of corn and soybeans. Too steep to mow, they harbor prairie grasses and a parade of wildflowers. Right now, at the autumn equinox, the narrow strips are mostly bright yellow sunflowers and goldenrod, with complementary splashes of purple asters.

Harvesting has begun. Green and yellow machines like enormous grasshoppers are cutting down and scooping up the dry soybeans, raising clouds of brown dust, then disgorging the beans into hopper trucks. The field corn is still a little green, but it will soon fall to the sharp teeth of the combines. Both mono-crops are grown with heavy doses of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, so perhaps it's no wonder that wild plants thrive where they do. But insects, especially honeybees and Monarch butterflies, take a heavy hit.

after the tornado watch

after the tornado watch, 

red-orange-purple sunset,

all quiet in the west

Tornado watch last evening, but we drove 20 miles anyway to Mt. Pleasant for chorale rehearsal. The sky was covered with an enormous blue-gray cloud like a lid hovering just above the horizon. Blue all the way around, except In the southwest, where there was a giant gray funnel. Not twisting, just a mile wide V of rain. While we sang Mendelssohn's Verleih uns Frieden, I watched the sunset turn pink, magenta, yellow, then red, orange, inky purple.

fallen hickory leaf

fallen hickory leaf

scarred by insects and fungus,

yellow turning brown

Nearing the autumn equinox, warm days, cool nights. Leaves already starting to fall. Old warriors, they have endured the challenges of frost and wind, bearing the scars of battle against insects and fungus. Now they return home to the earth that nourished their birth and growth, adding to the food supply for next year's leaves.

climbing the hickory

climbing the hickory,

autumn blooming clematis --

bees rising skyward

Mounds of white blossoms are piled on my neighbor's fences, arbors, doorways, sprawled over brush like low-flying cumulus clouds. But our autumn-blooming clematis, fulfilling its everlasting desire to climb up, has wrapped its vines around the trunk of one of our shagbark hickories, halfway to the top of the 80 foot tree.

The shaggy trunk looks like it is studded with stars. Honeybees, drawn by the sweet fragrance, rise higher and higher. Maybe they believe they are going to fly among the constellations.