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| robust, healthy milkweed
Photo by J. Harrington
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A couple of days ago I finished reading Fred Pearce's The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation. Many, perhaps most, of his propositions make sense to me, but I want to think some more and probably buy a paperback version that I can annotate before I declare myself. This morning I returned a borrowed hardcover copy to my local library. The blessing of having a library copy available was a response to having skimmed some reviews, and being uncertain if I'd end up hurling across the room a poorly developed and badly written apologia for benign neglect as a conservation strategy. Nope. Pearce makes at lease a half-way decent case. I'm still not sure he makes enough of a case. His book, and its premise, are temporarily lodged in my category of necessary, but not sufficient. We'll get to more about that in a later post. Pearce seems too accepting of non-natives while many conservationists want to eradicate those that weren't here before Columbus. I want to see, as a basis for a management strategy, more assessments of the role and ecological niche an invasive fits and whether it is extirpating native species. Anyhow, for now I want to get back to the point I wandered from at the beginning of the paragraph, that returning the library book gave me the opportunity to take a close look at the rain garden that lines the north and west sides of the library building.
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| purple cone flowers in rain garden
Photo by J. Harrington
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This morning the garden was full of purple cone flowers and florescent pink phlox and blazing star and some yellow flowers I didn't recognize. The milkweed at the rain garden's edges is much taller and more robust looking than the scruffy, dust-covered stems and leaves in our sand-plain field. Its seed pods are among the biggest I've ever seen. I noticed though, that not all the plants had developed pods. Later, when walking one of the dogs, I did notice some puny, developing seed pods on our local milkweed plants, but not even on most of them. From what I read, seed pods don't develop until the third year of a milkweed's growth. That would explain a lot, or at least why some plants have pods and others don't. Good to remember, but I had foolishly thought I was home free remembering the difference between annuals and perennials. Sigh!
Milkweed
James Wright
While I stood here, in the open, lost in myself,
I must have looked a long time
Down the corn rows, beyond grass,
The small house,
White walls, animals lumbering toward the barn.
I look down now. It is all changed.
Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.
It is here. At a touch of my hand,
The air fills with delicate creatures
From the other world.
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