In thinking about the universe and mankind’s place in it, Albert Einstein spoke about the “optical delusion” of our consciousness. “This delusion,” he said, “is a kind of prison for us restricting us to our personal desires and the affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Few of us grasp “the whole of nature” the way Einstein did. His mind ranged freely, well beyond the time and space that confines the rest of us, to describe the esoteric escapements, verges, and balance wheels in the clockwork of the cosmos. With great turtle-like galaxies, 10 billion years old, crawling outward beyond the rim of our dull and distant imaginings, our ordinary consciousness seems stuck in the mud like… well, like real turtles.
I’ve been watching the painted turtles at a nearby pond when they drag themselves up on a sunny rock these late-summer mornings. The turtles are poikilotherms, which like other cold-blooded creatures, vary their body temperature to match their environment.
The end of July is the time of year when I begin to question the gardener’s conceit that plant life can be arranged and ordered to serve a personal aesthetic. I have seen gardens where this appears to be the case, but they are the illusions of master gardeners working in the privileged realms of botanical sorcery. As this fevered July expires in the sere arms of August, our mortal gardens have taken on a feral look of desperation as purslane serpents coil at their feet, and beetles batter their blossomed brows.
We go through the motions of weeding, watering, trimming up the tattered trailers of plants bent on mischief, but Kate and I are already telling each other that we’ll do better next year. There is an air of surrender in our work. But in surrendering ourselves to a hot summer’s cruel indifference to our efforts to bring some refinement to our largely untamed yard, we have found some consolation on the wild side.
Without the benefit of gardeners – master, or otherwise – the summer scene has arranged and ordered itself into beautiful displays of wildflowers: red and white clovers, roadside chicory and, outdoing everything else, … Queen Anne’s Lace.
The shy catbird gave up the comforts of his birch-leaf lair for some uncharacteristic exposure atop a sun-baked stone wall – a perch that afforded him a better view of the low-bush blueberries Kate and I planted in a new dooryard garden this year. (Bird thought: So many berries, and so few opportunities for pillage unhindered by the proprietary dog, or the man waving arms.) The catbird gave its mewling squawk of approval and launched his raid. I ran out from the kitchen, waving my arms.
It’s berry season, and there is plenty of contention over the spoils of fruiting plants. It’s war, and as always, the victors in this particular war are the plants.
The fruit lovers in the animal kingdom, ranging the least wisp of a wren to the earth-thudding elephant have been led by the palate down the evolutionary path by plants with a critical interest in seed dispersal. Every fruit is a conveyance system wherein a seed rides in its own lunch bucket of nutrients and sweet calories. It is more than happy to share the bounty with those birds and beasts willing to give it a ride to some far-flung ground where it won’t compete for sun and sustenance with its immediate ancestors. Often the seed is planted at its destination with a generous dose of contributed fertilizer.
They are the children of August nights, obeying an inverse convention of being heard but not seen. I wait through half a summer to hear the first of the katydids’ thrumming love songs, which seem such a vital part of the knot of sensations associated with sweating through a summer night. Lying awake in the chance heat and humidity of a near silent mid-July night is unnerving and almost unbearable without the zhuh-zhuh-zhuh, zhuh-zhuh-zhuh that in August shuffles even the most heat-sensitive souls into the stupor that passes for sleep on a too-hot night. The sound can be a great comfort to the discomforted.
I am not alone in my katydid vigil. Out there in the night is a black and orange creature, a winged minion of the jack-o-lantern, with more sinister intentions toward the katydids. It is the Great Golden Digger Wasp. At more than an inch long, it is one of the larger wasps you will find foraging in the gardens and borders. Sphex ichneumoneus is quite harmless despite its fearsome appearance, though it shows some nonaggressive curiosity about humans and their pets. I should say they are harmless unless you are a long-horned grasshopper of the tettigoniidae family, which includes katydids.
Flanking the railroad bridge on Church Hill Road to the east and west, in the gravelly ground forsaken by all but the most opportunistic weeds, is a bumper crop of common mullein. The luminous yellow, flowering spikes of this weed rise taller than basketball players across the open lot and up the embankment to the tracks of the Housatonic Line, making the scene look sun drenched even on rainy days. The feet of these leggy interlopers are swathed in gray-green flannel socks, which on closer inspection are thick, soft, fuzzy leaves.
Because common mullein (Verbascum thapsus) is such an attractive weed, it isn’t surprising that it has been cultivated, hybridized, and distributed around the world for centuries from its native ground in Turkey and the western steppes of Asia. It has been a favorite in the borders of gardeners since the Middle Ages, and today there are 360 species of verbascum available in a full spectrum of colors. Yet to me they are most beautiful as humble weeds when they arrange themselves in airy yellow curtains across an otherwise dreary landscape.
