The lost is found (and a preview of coming attractions)

Last winter, my supposed-to-last-me-the-rest-of-my-life one-terabyte external hard drive met a Sad Fate when it made sudden contact with the very hard tile floor of a Mexican beach house. Electronics do not do well with such treatment. Most of the files were backed up in other places, but not so, all the more recent photos. Sigh.

However, some of the photo files had indeed managed to sneak themselves into the hard drive of my laptop, where they were discovered when I opened a nondescript file. Photos from the January visit to the Roger Orellana Botanical Garden were hiding in (almost) plain sight. The gardens are not as breathtakingly beautiful as the Toledo Botanical Garden (or at least not in the January dry season), but they are one of the greenest places I have found in Merida.

With my departure for the tropics imminent, I am beyond excited, having been offered the opportunity to learn about the gardens and lead tours for English speakers. Education about tropical plants--for free? What self-respecting plant nerd would not sign up?

Part of the CICY research institute, the collections include a conservatory of desert plants from around the world,

a section including every Yucatecan palm species,

and of course numerous specimens of the agave that made 19th-century Merida one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Language lessons are included, since the informational signage includes not only the plant's scientific name but its common name in both Spanish and Maya.

Particularly interesting to me, however, are the medicinal and bee gardens. In the medicinal garden, plants are grouped and labeled by their uses in traditional medicine.

Part of the institute's work involves consulting with village shamans and attempting to isolate the compounds in particular plants that cure the conditions for which they are used. I am selfishly hoping to be present when some of the shamans visit the city, though I know approximately two words of Maya, the name of a bird and the name of the leaf that makes a favorite beverage. The shaman who blesses the bees makes interesting offerings: in addition to pottery and flowers, he gifts the cavity-nesting mellipona with tobacco and tequila.

This promises to be an interesting winter.

On this the darkest night

I have noticed over the years that late December seems to bring posts about loss, and this one is no exception. Since June, five women in my circle of friends and acquaintances have lost their spouses to death, two suddenly, and several people lost parents. This morning I attended the funeral of a dear former colleague's mother, a woman who, I was shocked to realize, was a year and a half younger than my late first husband, whom I cannot imagine as a man in his eighties. The greatest shock, however, was the unexpected death of a friend made more than forty years ago, when we were university students. Charles was the most gifted of our cohort, his work exhibited in a solo art show the summer after graduation, an event that proved the highlight of his life. The ensuing decades were not generally kind.

The winter solstice of course calls us to consider darkness, both as literal fact and as metaphor. We often leave for and return from work in the dark. There are fewer hours in which to accomplish the outdoor tasks that managed not to get done in the months when we wanted to do them. These short days find many of us less inclined to venture out in the evenings, the dark being so dark. We spend more time at home. Many of us turn inward, away from the outer world, at least for a while.

Similar things are happening in the non-human world. While a lot of life is still pretty lively, given the action at what I foolishly call the bird feeders, many things have gone underground: roots, seeds, larvae, hibernating animals. Humans are not the only beings who retreat from the cold and dark.

Still, even though the coldest months are ahead of us, tomorrow the days will slowly--so slowly--begin to lengthen. And today, on a hydrangea noticed on my way to a solstice observance at a site where the ancient Hopewell observed the same phenomenon, there were green buds.

A curmudgeon's rant

One might think that this would be a peaceful place.

Yesterday morning, however, it was not. The prairie was alive not with the sound of music but with the sound of traffic. In a 500+-acre preserve, several hundred yards from the nearest road, the background roar was such that I found myself unable to concentrate on enjoying one of my favorite places. The same was true when I left the prairie trail for the woods, where the wind in the trees often muffles traffic noise.

But not yesterday. The urban park felt more urban than park.

In recent weeks I have become progressively more annoyed with machine noise. Second Street, where I live in an often-seemingly-idyllic small town that regularly appears on places-you-have-to-visit lists, is not a truck route, but Third Street is, and the bridge on the cross street carries truck traffic to the factories and injection wells on State Route 7. (Some times of the day, walking the street that leads to the bridge is not a good idea because the diesel fumes are so overwhelming that a bronchodilator is necessary, but that is a different rant.) The recent fracking boom has led to increased traffic and of course increased noise. Porch-sitting, one of my favorite outdoor non-activities, is no longer a joy. You can't yell "Get out of my neighborhood!" to a brine truck, and those big engines can only be quieted so much. Even the sounds of ordinary cars leave me irritable these days.

So I took advantage of a few days with nothing scheduled to get away. Unfortunately, my favorite northwest Ohio park was no haven, sitting as it does between three busy roads. However, Lucas County is full of parks, so off I went to another several miles outside of town where the roads are much less busy than they are in the city.

There, a park employee was using a gas-powered leaf blower to remove approximately twenty-five leaves from the extensive walkways surrounding the parking lot and nature center. He had hearing-protection equipment. I did not.

But at least I had remembered my inhaler.

Life and Death in the Meadow (not for the squeamish)

It is obvious that meadows (and their prairie relatives) are full of life. Flowers, grasses, butterflies, and birds are everywhere.

This little cutie is a silver-spotted skipper.

And we musn't forget the bees, who love meadows.

This particular spot near Wiregrass Lake was hosting dozens of swallows, swooping and twittering the whole time I was there,

and the grasses near the Meadowhawk Shelter were indeed hosting meadowhawks, this one a male ruby.

But all that life comes at the expense of other life. Dragonflies this year are so numerous that they show up on National Weather Service radar, and, gorgeous as they are, dragonflies are consummate predators. A few yards away in the same meadow, this handsome fellow was having an insect snack.

The unfortunate prey vanished in only a few seconds.

The same meadow plants that attract pollinators also attract pollinator predators. Meandering along, I saw what at first seemed to be a bumblebee spending an unaccountably long time perched on a bare stick but proved to be a bumblebee captured by a praying mantis.

Mantis carnivory is not pretty.

Even those lovely, swooping swallows were hunting as they made their loops over the meadow, and the butterflies nectaring on the blossoms were also looking for places to lay eggs, where their caterpillars could chew holes in the leaves of their chosen hosts-

-if, that is, they manage not to become food for the baby birds dependent on caterpillars for their first diet.

Nature can be beautiful, but she is not particularly kind to individuals.

The magical meadow morning

I love lots of places, but one special favorite is a spot on the meadow loop trail at Toledo's Wildwood Metropark, just beyond its intersection with the floodplain trail and near the paved bike path. This small section of a very busy park is not wilderness, but I have spent as long as half an hour there without encountering another human. 

One of the attractions of my favorite bench is the view of this white oak, which I always think of as the Prairie Sentinel (even though this meadow is technically not prairie). When I first encountered the tree in 2010, a man was seated on one of its spreading branches making notes about something below, but the discovery of nesting bobolinks led to the closure of that trail.

This little patch of restored grassland was a lively place this morning, filled with the hum of cicadas and the hovering of meadowhawks, those lovely-to-us dragonflies that are no doubt the terror of other insects. Hawks of the avian variety occasionally rode the thermals overhead, though their presence did not seem to make the smaller birds particularly nervous.

A pair of hummingbirds rested briefly on a dead limb just a few feet from my bench; as is the way of hummingbirds, they didn't stay long in one place. The stars of today's show, however, were the goldfinches, which were everywhere, swooping above the meadow in their unmistakeable flight pattern. It has always intrigued me that a bird this showy can very nearly disappear when feeding, but the males' breeding plumage is the color of many of our summer flowers, and the females' olive drab blends right into flower stalks, allowing them to forage unseen. (Let's hear it for evolution!) Of course, this trait makes photographing the little lovelies impossible with the limited zoom on my pocket-sized point-and-shoot.

Particularly amusing were what seemed to be Goldfinch Wars over a particular patch of thistle. The meadow has been invaded by quite a bit of Cirsium, but today everyone seemed to want this specific group of plants; none of the others would do, so much diving, chasing, and twittering ensued.

The decision of the human to walk over to see what all the fuss was about led the quarreling finches to explore other parts of the meadow, but the thistle patch was most satisfactory, anyway. Thistle bloom is quite lovely, despite the weediness of so many plants in the genus,

and today, after the goldfinches left, the pollinators took over the patch.

Not a bad way to spend part of one's morning.

A possible cure for the insect apocalypse?

The last few months have brought alarming reports on declining insect populations, a phenomenon that has been dubbed the "insect apocalypse."  Given that insects are an essential part of all terrestrial food webs (and that a lot of human food depends on insect pollination), this news is beyond alarming. Out for a walk through Toledo's Wildwood Metropark yesterday, I was deeply troubled to find almost no insects in Susan's Meadow, an area generally buzzing with life. (Sorry--I couldn't resist.)

There were a few butterflies flitting here and there, some tiny flies, and an interesting creature I could not identify on a monarda,

but none of the clouds of bees usually found there. Nor were there any goldfinches, whereas last year they were swooping around in what looked like aerial dances. An Ohio summer without insects is Not Normal.

Leaving the meadow and heading toward the manor house (Wildwood having been part of a wealthy family's estate at one time), I decided to check out the rain garden and found where at least some of the bees and other buzzing insects had gone; they were all over a blooming buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis).

This cousin of coffee, gardenia, and sweet woodruff(!), it turns out, was once a major nectar source for a beekeeping industry in the southern US, and is an important larval host for several showy moth species. The Xerces Society (and if you aren't familiar with this organization, you need to remedy that situation immediately) regularly includes buttonbush on its lists of plants for bees and butterflies. In addition to being useful to insects, buttonbush produces fruits eaten by more than fifty species of birds.

These need to ripen for a few months.

This common native plant takes a fair amount of space and water, occurring as it does in wetlands and damp woods, but in the right setting, it seems to garner more insect attention than anything else in the vicinity. Something else to add to your "if you plant it, they will come" list.

"Admire me I am a violet!"

Something no self-respecting violet would ever say, according to poet John Keats in a letter to a friend; in his view, "retired" flowers like violets and primroses would lose their beauty if they called attention to themselves. With all due respect to Keats, when the common blue violet is in bloom in its thousands in an Ohio April, the spectacle is pretty attention-getting. I have never taken a photo that does justice to the show, but the swaths of deep purple resting just above the deepest spring green in every Marietta park are not exactly shy about making their presence known.

And why should they be? Violets are not only an indestructible ground cover, they are the sole larval host for the great spangled fritillary, one of our most beautiful butterflies, and a major early pollen source. They deserve to strut their stuff.

But the flowers we think of when we hear the word "violet" are not the only types. Besides numerous species of purple violets that I am not in good enough shape to identify (since me crawling around on  the ground with a magnifying glass would be a whole other kind of spectacle), Ohio also boasts violets of other colors. For several decades now I have looked forward to the shy blooming of the white violets descended from the patch in a deceased friend's yard. Unlike their common cousins, white violets do not spread aggressively but keep within bounds and play well with others.

And yesterday I saw my first specimens of a violet I had not known existed, the (supposedly) common yellow violet (Viola pubescens), growing in several areas of Wildwood Metropark. This little beauty is pickier about siting than Viola sororia, preferring to grow in relatively undisturbed soil in forested areas.

As far as I know, this particular violet does not grow in England, but it behaves much more like those Keats described. Those of us who want to appreciate it will need to seek it out; it won't shove itself in our faces.

Following my nose to a new discovery

The Toledo Botanical Gardens are not as colorful this spring as they have sometimes been. Yet another Winter That Would Not End has delayed quite a few of the spring bloomers, though the daffodils are being their usual cheerful selves and looking quite lovely amidst the birches.

Walking along the path next to the walled garden, though, I was hit by a sweet scent too powerful to be coming from a few ground-level narcissi, so of course, I had to follow my nose. The scent was coming from a shrub I had never seen before.

This not-particularly-impressive-looking thing was the source of a spicy sweetness noticeable several yards away. My first thought (after "what is that thing?") was that it looked like a white forsythia, and a little snooping revealed that this is more or less what it is. White forsythia is one of the common names of Abeliophyllum distichum, a Korean endemic now listed as "endangered" in the wild, with fewer than 4000 specimens remaining. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists habitat loss from deforestation and "ruthless collection" as contributors to the species' precipitous decline in its natural habitat.

Given that Abeliophyllum is as easily propagated as its yellow cousin, there is no excuse for wild collection of this plant. Any branch that touches dirt can be rooted by simply pegging it to the soil or even placing a brick to keep it in contact, so if you feel the need to acquire white forsythia, please make sure that it was nursery-propagated and not wild-collected.

The scent is wonderful, but allowing this plant to become extinct in the wild would not be sweet.

A fine day

Yesterday was a good day to wander a couple of favorite parks. Not much is blooming yet in northwest Ohio, but the trilliums are beginning to show themselves,

and the chionodoxa at the botanical gardens are at their peak.

Not quite an English bluebell wood, but not bad for a public park in an ordinary neighborhood.

And when the warblers are warbling, the peepers are peeping, and the spring colors are this fresh, we can wait a while for the flowers to take over the show.

Back to the real world

or at least, to the world where I have spent most of the last four decades. On a short walk last Friday, the sun that inspired me to do my errands was followed by ice pellets bouncing off the sidewalk with a little of what looked like snow amid raindrops, a definite contrast to the 90 degrees and sunshine that were the typical weather of the place where I spent most of the winter.

Of course, the tropics are very real. Beautiful, yes, but with their own sets of problems. Beach erosion, for one. The beach below the sea wall of our too-close-to-the-water rental house was lovely and walkable in January

but during my 2018 visit had lost several inches of sand before I headed home.

This sand cliff grew taller as the weeks passed.

Snowbird mode is a different life as well. Not having projects in Yucatan (though that situation is likely to change next year) leaves lots of time (perhaps too much) for doing basically nothing, not that people- or pelican-watching is a bad thing. In the Valley, fitting everything into the available days (not to mention the available energy) is a major challenge. Busy is better than bored (not that I get bored very often), but there are limits.

And there are definite good things about the eastern US: April is daffodil season.

And six months later, we get fall.

For the birds

The first robins showed up a few days ago, and judging by all the singing, twittering, and general avian sounds emanating from every tree, shrub, fence, wire, and gutter in the neighborhood, we should start seeing baby birds in the not-too-distant future. But before that can happen, the parents-to-be of most species need to build some nests, a process that requires building materials.

Most of our common songbirds (and quite a few others) use small twigs and dried grass as the basis for their nests, but such things are in short supply in overly-manicured neighborhoods. Some humans try to compensate by leaving materials such as pet hair, dryer lint, and short pieces of yarn or twine where birds can find them, but the Cornell Lab of Ornithology advises against these items. What our birds need is more of this.

If you have managed to avoid completing your fall (ha!) yard cleanup, now is a good time to cut those clumps of dead grass and leftover plant stems and use them to create an avian Home Depot.  These in-demand items can be placed in suet cages and hung in likely spots, or just left in piles on the ground if no neighbors object. They will be put to good use.

Once the babies arrive, they will need food, which generally means caterpillars or small insects, with baby hummingbirds being particularly fond of nearly-microscopic flies and gnats. The average brood of baby chickadees will need anywhere from 6000-9000 caterpillars or other insect larvae before they can leave the nest, with other species being similarly voracious. Multiply that number by the number of bird pairs in your area, and the need for insect-friendly habitat becomes obvious.

This planting is only one example of an insect- (and therefore bird-) friendly flowerbed: native plants with landing pads, nectar, pollen, and eventually lots of seeds.

Put something like this near trees and shrubs, and your yard is going to make the birds and the bees very happy.

A new favorite place

A tropical garden in an urban setting is a jewel not to be missed, and last week I and the fellow inhabitants of our guesthouse got to tour the Roger Orellana Botanical Garden. This tucked-away treasure, part of a research institute known as CICY, is an oasis for birds and other wildlife in the middle of a very busy city. Alas, a technical problem (a dropped external hard drive that will no longer open on my computer) has trapped most of that day's photos within a currently-useless piece of technology, so this single image of the entry to the gardens will have to do to provide a sense of the place.

Founded in 1983 on the grounds of an old hennequin hacienda, the garden's 2.5 hectares (roughly six acres) include a medicinal plant garden, a native plant nursery, a bird garden, a pollinator habitat, a showcase for Yucatan's twenty species of native palms, and glass houses for desert plants and tropicals from several continents. We were the only human visitors on the day we were there, but the garden was a very busy place.

Besides all the plants busily doing their plant things, the space was full of birds, several dozen species inhabiting this small site. Dragonflies were everywhere in the damp areas and water gardens, and the place was buzzing with bees. The adjoining medicinal and pollinator gardens include a bee house constructed partly of tree trunks, as many of the native bees are cavity nesters. Unlike their cousins to the north, the melipona of Yucatan produce quantities of honey and have been cultivated by the Maya for several thousand years. The bee house contained such incongruous objects as a cigarette and a shot glass, but our guide explained that a local shaman comes each year to bless the bees and make an offering.

CICY's research into the region's medicinal plants is in fact carried out in cooperation with a number of the traditional healers known as shamanes, or shamans. The village healers come to CICY with questions and plants, and the academic researchers use the information provided by local people to attempt to isolate the disease-fighting compounds in the plants used traditionally in the villages. The medicinal garden's plants were labeled with signs indicating the conditions they have been used to treat. Fascinating stuff.

As seems to be typical of worthwhile projects everywhere, the garden is understaffed and not particularly well-funded, so it is looking for volunteers for a variety of projects. My little ears perked up to learn that English-speaking tour guides are a need. Free training on the plants of the Yucatan coupled with a chance to tell stories and educate people on the biological wealth of this region sounds like a deal too good to pass up, so I think I know what I will be doing next winter.

Maddening, Magical Merida

Yesterday, a friend made on my first trip to Merida in 2017 was thinking out loud about why she might not come back to this part of the world, though it ticks so many of the boxes of what she wants in a winter home: safe, affordable, warm, and full of accessible cultural activities. This year, the things that bother her (some of which I wrote about last year) have really bothered her: the barking dogs in most neighborhoods; the trash in the streets and on the sidewalks in so many areas;  the occasional burning of said trash, even in the city; the lack of promptness in many aspects of life; the crowds; the noise--from traffic, from the music that nearly every store plays at great volume, from celebrations that go on late into the night; from fireworks being set off for no apparent reason other than--hey, fireworks! 

I get it. Not being generally a city mouse, I find myself ready for quiet and green, open spaces when I head back north in the spring. The older parts of this old city are densely populated, and renovated homes sit cheek-by-jowl with piles of rubble as older construction is either rebuilt or replaced by concrete block--eventually.

Of course, old has its charms. Merida is full of historic churches

and the Beaux Arts confections that find their way into every tourist guidebook. (This one now houses an anthropology museum.)

And I must confess to being amused by this fierce watchdog wearing a pink pinafore.

Merida is a city of contradictions, as I suspect most are: wealth and poverty rubbing elbows as elderly beggars sit holding styrofoam cups in the city's restaurant and entertainment districts; beautiful colonial buildings reflecting centuries of exploitation and attempted genocide; civic pride in diversity at the same time that the descendants of the region's indigenous people are disproportionately impoverished; pampered designer dogs paraded on the Paseo while not-so-lucky canines and felines scrounge for garbage in less tony neighborhoods. 

And yet--this is a place that grabs the heart and the imagination. Every January brings a festival commemorating the city's less-than-admirable founding when the Spanish marauders of the Montejo family seized control of the Maya city known as T'ho and used the stones of its pyramids to build its cathedral, streets, and homes. For three weeks, the city's parks, streets, theaters, museums, and even shopping centers play host to arts events of most imaginable types, all of them free to anyone willing to brave the crowds (and the Plaza Grande does get crowded when Cirque du Soleil or Willie Colón performs).  Even during non-festival times, free live music is available in various parks every night of the week and on Sunday afternoons. Anyone who can afford a bus ticket (eight pesos unless one has a discount, in which case the fare is three pesos--or about sixteen cents) can find a bench, chair, or standing spot and get lost in music and spectacle--or join the dance, which lots of Meridanos seem to do.

A real lure of Merida, though, is the day-to-day life here. A walk in any ordinary area can reveal treasures, like a mural turning an ordinary small house into a tropical fantasy,

 or one of children playing that carries an important message, 

or a bronze sculpture of the spirit of ceiba, sacred tree of the Maya, out for everyone to enjoy in front of a government office tucked away on a mostly residential street.

The people are part of the magic as well. People here greet strangers on the street (rather like the Mid-Ohio Valley in Mexico, to be honest), and have no problem with elderly gringas admiring their children or their dogs. Strangers met on park benches share their stories and have thus far been totally kind despite the language barrier.  Taxi drivers share their insights and include language lessons as part of the fare. Downtown often features buskers, ranging from a truly amazing drum group to young breakdancers to living statues to a guitarist who lost his legs in a work accident in the US and shares songs and smiles in front of various theaters. A favorite example of the spirit of this place: heading back to the guesthouse, I admired the sunflowers of a neighbor who was sweeping her patio. In our mixed languages, I shared the sad information that sunflowers have a short season in Ohio and was informed that in Merida they grow todo el año porque hay mucho sol. Before I left, my new gardening buddy pressed two ripe seedheads into my hands, which I passed on to the owner of our guesthouse, who will now have sunflowers in her impressive tropical garden.

I can't not love this place.