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Saturday, January 14, 2012
Ash Assassin
Taking out one endangered tree seems to cause more alarm than the threat to a whole species. Allen Bush takes out an ash and takes on the neighborhood.
The Emerald Ash Borer (Agrilus planipennis B)
Photo: Zin
By Allen Bush
Arborists cut down our big white ash tree a few weeks before Christmas. It had stood in the front yard since 1974. My neighbors weren’t happy with me. My pleas for any understanding fell on deaf ears throughout the holidays in coffee shops, at parties, on the street. I promised everyone that there would be a better tree that goes in its place.
“Good luck,” I was told.
“We’re tree huggers!” one critic added. No one seemed to know what kind of tree it was, or even care why I’d taken it out. None of that mattered. Our tree was their tree. “What a bummer,” one passerby lamented.
At least the neighbors weren’t marching down Top Hill Road in solidarity, carrying Louisville Slugger baseball bats made from white ash wood, at least not yet. “I see you took the down the tree,” is not a neutral declaration. It means I have looted the neighborhood. I am the ash assassin.
Nobody cared that the tree removal was a preemptive strike, ahead of the emerald ash borer (EAB). This insect has already launched an assault on tens of thousands of ash trees in Louisville alone.
Our white ash (Fraxinus americana) should never have been planted in the first place, at least not in our front yard. (White ash grows naturally from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, south to northern Florida. It extends west to eastern Texas and eastern Minnesota.)
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Domestication, Under This Tree
The old trees of Cambridge and Oxford are riddled with association. How do you elude history and fall into the nature of nature?
Jesus Green
Essay and photos by John Levett
I spent my career in primary education. I don’t miss what it became. I left teaching in 2003 and haven’t set foot into a school since.
If I were asked what I think of the changes that have taken place over the last decade I couldn’t give a coherent answer, no longer following beyond the headlines.
My dissociation with primary education came to me a few months back when I was passing by Park Street School in Cambridge. It’s a long-established church-aided school close by Jesus Green. In good weather the children use the Green as their playground. What took my ear as I walked past was the singing from the school hall.
Under the spreading chestnut tree,
Where I knelt upon my knee,
We were as happy as could be,
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
For those of my generation and before, the song will be familiar, not for its words but for the actions that go with it—the replacement of the word by the action (spread, chest, nut, tree). There’s a film of King George VI (he of the voice) doing the business at a scout camp. I recall it always dissolving into a confusion of arms, hands and elbows.
What made me pause that day was the surprise that ‘singing’ as nothing beyond its appreciation and fun still had a place within a primary school. I’d assumed that anything that didn’t make an instrumental contribution to capitalist accumulation had been stricken from the curriculum.
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Saturday, January 07, 2012
Luffa: Wring in the New Year
Plant a garden of amazement this year and harvest a kitchen tool.
The flower of Luffa aegyptiaca
Photo: Garden Life
By James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary
EarthScholars™ Research Group
How about a New Year’s resolution that’s actually an absorbing pleasure? This year, grow some garden plants that fascinate children. We suggest that you begin by rekindling your own sense of wonder: raising a plant that imitates a sea animal.
We all know that sponges are animals that live and grow beneath the sea. Sponge divers retrieve natural sponges for human applications. There are over 5,000 species of sponge animals, freshwater and marine, but only 15 species have fibrous “skeletons” that are absorbent and soft enough for people to use. The divers cut these loose from the sea floor (provided they meet legal size limits), then clean and sun-dry them.
If you want to interact with real sponge-fishers and purchase animal sponges newly harvested from the Gulf of Mexico, we suggest you visit the sponge docks at Tarpon Springs, Florida. This city boasts the US’s highest percentage of Greek-Americans and is, historically, a sponge-fishing community. There you can even go sponge-fishing on a working boat with a professional diver.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
The Unforeseen: Yahoo Falls
Plantsmen Allen Bush and Paul Cappiello, hunting for pink muhly grass, fall down a rabbit hole of botanical wonders in McCreary County, Kentucky.
Silene rotundifolia blooming near Yahoo Falls
McCreary County, Kentucky, November 2011
Photo: Allen Bush
By Allen Bush
I had no idea what was in store last spring, when Paul Cappiello began talking about an autumn day-trip to Eastern Kentucky. Paul is the Executive Director of Yew Dell Gardens in Crestwood, Kentucky. The premise – or the excuse for a fun walk in the woods - seemed simple enough: try to find cold-hardy native stands of the pink muhly grass, Muhlenbergia capillaris. They were there, somewhere in the Cumberland Mountains; we knew that. Julian Campbell had said so. And Julian knows where just about every native plant is, in every nook and cranny across the state. He had found pink muhly seedlings in Rowan County earlier in the year.