It's Lammas week #phenology

Wednesday is August 1. That's two days from today. In the Celtic culture, August 1 is the festival of "Lughnasad, or Lammas, the celebration of the cutting of the first crop." We've mentioned this in prior postings without mentioning that it seemed early to those of us who are most familiar with the row crops of soy beans and corn that are usually harvested closer to Samhain (Halloween). Then, today, as we were driving past one of the few small grains fields around here, what did we see but a combine, starting to harvest the field. It's nice to feel in touch with a larger, ancient, cycle of life.

according to some, but not all, field guides,
this is spotted horsemint (Monarda punctata)

Photo by J. Harrington

We're experiencing one of those occasional "will the real authority please reveal themselves?" sequences on the identification of spotted horsemint (Monarda punctata). A search on the (not USDA) Wildflowers of the United States yields "No Results for the search specified" whether we search on the scientific or common name. Prairie Plants of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which has become "old reliable," lists it as "dotted horsemint" and spotted bee balm. What's Doin the Blooming'? (wildflowers of the Upper Great Lakes) lists only Monarda fistulosa, wild bergamot. Northland Wildflowers includes mint and wild bergamot, but neither spotted nor dotted horsemint nor Monarda punctata. Stan Tekiela's Wildflowers of Minnesota includes wild bergamot but not mint (it also fails to have an index of scientific names). Wildflowers and Weeds does include dotted mint.
Last, and perhaps most troublesome, The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers only includes M. punctata as an aside under plains bee balm (M. pectinata). If we were relying on the "wrong" one or two (or three) of these guides, there's no way we would have identified a native plant that occupies several swaths of our property. That's frustrating.

History

Linda Hogan

This is the word that is always bleeding.
You didn’t think this
until your country changes and when it thunders
you search your own body
for a missing hand or leg.
In one country, there are no bodies shown,
lies are told
and the keep hidden the weeping children on dusty streets.

But I do remember once
a woman and a child in beautiful blue clothing
walking over a dune, spreading a green cloth,
drinking nectar with mint and laughing
beneath a sky of clouds from the river
near the true garden of Eden.
Now another country is breaking
this holy vessel
where stone has old stories
and the fire creates clarity in the eyes of a child
who will turn it to hate one day.

We are so used to it now,
this country where we do not love enough,
that country where they do not love enough,
and that.

We do not need a god by any name
nor do we need to fall to our knees or cover ourselves,
enter a church or a river,
only do we need to remember what we do
to one another, it is so fierce
what any of our fathers may do to a child
what any of our brothers or sisters do to nonbelievers,
how we try to discover who is guilty
by becoming guilty,
because history has continued
to open the veins of the world
more and more
always in its search
for something gold.

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