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.

Flores de Yucatan, part 1

This winter finds me back in the Yucatan, which has far better winter weather than Ohio generally does (unless one is a fan of rain, mud, snow, ice, and gray skies with occasional bursts of sun). This morning my perambulation took me to Parque de las Americas, a large park in the Garcia Gineres neighborhood of Merida, home to bigger-than-average trees for this city. The park is worth its own post, but my color-hungry Northern eyes are focusing on flowers this week.

This lovely thing is growing in a neighbor's yard,

up a wall, and out over the sidewalk.

It was also full of bees, though none were willing to hold still long enough to permit much of a photo.

Thanks to the sharp eyes of a participant in a plant identification group on Facebook, this beautiful mystery-to-me plant was quickly identified as Petrea volubilis, or purple wreath vine, native to much of Central America, including the Yucatan peninsula. Not only are its flowers gorgeous in multiple stages of their existence,

they are attractive to butterflies and hummingbirds, as well as the bees I saw darting among the bloom clusters. The plant is also a traditional medicinal, with its leaves used as a wound salve and in the treatment of diabetes. In earlier times, its blooms were combined with those of another native shrub in a tea used as a morning-after drug by women seeking to avoid pregnancy.

The plant is useful even in death. Its wood is reportedly dry, fast-burning, and useful as fuel. Queen's vine (another common name for the plant) is definitely more than another pretty face.

Finding the right balance

Total strangers tend to strike up conversations in the parks around here. A few weeks ago, an athletic sixty-something guy preparing to do a little fishing at one of the Blue Creek quarries did just that. When I mentioned my fondness for Lucas County's Metroparks, however, a rant ensued. My conversational partner had recently moved back to the area after a thirty-plus-year career as a biologist and assured me that he had never lived anyplace where people despised nature as much as they do in Perrysburg, Ohio. Never having spent time in Perrysburg, I could not evaluate my new acquaintance's opinion but was troubled by his assertion that the area's parks all needed to have the word "preserve" removed from their names. After all, the county Metropark system contains over 12,000 acres; the parks found in individual cities, towns, and villages add several hundred additional acres of green space and the state and other nature preserves found in the county an additional thousand or so--between 13,500 and 14,000 acres of preserved greenspace in a county covering 596 square miles. In contrast, my home county, at 640 square miles, boasts only 1000 acres of city, county, or state-preserved land, in addition to portions of a national forest.

As my new acquaintance's complaints continued, it became clear that his objection was to what he saw as the commercial development of the county's parks . The park system is now selling t-shirts, allowing visitors to advertise their favorite parks. The riverside and lakefront parks feature boat launches, and some now have kayak concessions. In addition to the camping that has been done for decades at Oak Openings, some recently-acquired land is about to be home to a tree house village for an Ohio version of "glamping," and a 12-mile mountain bike trail has been added. The park system even has its own page of YouTube videos.

So, I get it. These 13,000+ acres are not pristine wilderness, and the park system managers would like to encourage people from other parts of the world to travel here and spend their money and encourage area residents to recreate here instead of traveling to other places for all their outdoor adventure. They would like people to bring their children to the playgrounds and pack a picnic lunch while they're at it. The goal is to have a Metropark within a five-minute drive of all 440,000 residents of this nearly-600-square-mile county, and for the parks to get even more visits than the four million or so they got last year. There is a danger of parks being "loved to death."

And yet: these relatively few sites in a single US county contain nearly 400 species of birds at various times of the year. People from all over the world flock (pun intended) to the area every May for the spring warbler migration. The Oak Openings and the remnants of the Great Black Swamp are home to rare plant species as well as healthy populations of common ones like the hoary puccoon used in earlier centuries as a dye plant

and wild spirea, or meadowsweet, here hosting an ailanthus webworm moth.

The plant diversity of the park system's forests, prairies, and meadows hosts an enormous variety of insect life, including butterflies like this Polygonia.

Because several of the Metroparks are in fact inside Lucas County's cities and towns, someone visiting the library in Whitehouse can walk a few hundred feet and watch the sun set over the Nona France Quarry.

Wildwood Metropark is bordered by busy roads (which can often be heard despite the park's over 450 acres) on three sides, but its trails can give the wanderer a real sense of isolation, as can much of the Swan Creek Preserve, surrounded by some of the busiest roads in South Toledo.

If there is a more peaceful autumn scene on earth, I do not know where.

More good news is that forests in the park system are regenerating. While young oaks are being shaded out by maples and hickories in much of their range, some of the Metroparks are home to young oak trees like this baby along the grassland trail at Wildwood.

    
Metroparks are maintained and therefore not truly wild, though it is the presence of sun along a trail edge or in a maintained clearing that allows young oaks to grow. Portions of most parks have also been made accessible to people with mobility challenges, with paved trails available. Some parks are on bus lines, rendering them accessible to people who do not drive or do not own a car.

We need wilderness, but most people cannot (and arguably, should not) go there. Still, all people should have access to wildness, whether it is a field full of butterflies and finches, a mayapple wood, an urban river harboring ducks and herons, or a second-growth forest sporting the brilliant red of baby oak leaves. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the construction of buildings with meeting rooms and modern plumbing in addition to their Windows on Wildlife and the building of trails that allow wheelchair users to get close to natural areas are a reasonable compromise between the needs of people and the needs of other species. People who never see wild things are unlikely to love them, and as Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum said fifty years ago, "In the end, we will conserve only what we love."

Perhaps helping people learn to love their  local (even semi-) preserves is the best way to foster a society that wants to preserve more of life on earth.

Waiting for fall color

This year's hot summer has meant that Southeast Ohio has not yet seen a lot of fall color, a phenomenon that seems to be widespread in the eastern US. Visiting the northwestern corner of the state, conditions at first glance seemed the same: most of the flowers gone, and most of the trees either a fading green, or simply faded, like the tulip poplar near our house that has lost most of its leaves without ever putting on its fall show. A favorite trail at a favorite Metropark was perfectly lovely, but the colors are still mostly subdued.

The picture, of course, does not tell the whole story. Even though this part of the state has had some frost and most of the spring and summertime creatures seem to be gone for the year, lots of insect sounds were coming from the vegetation, and a few clouded sulphurs were fluttering along the path, visiting the late asters that still dot the meadow. And a seed-and-insect-filled area like this one hosts a LOT of birds, though again, they were hard to see, most being in fall plumage and blending in with the drying vegetation. (Interesting how that works, isn't it?)

Goldfinches were obvious due to their unmistakable call and flight patterns, and one finally got close enough to be photographed, with enough of its breeding plumage left to be recognizable.

 

Even though there was plenty of thistle to be had, this finch and his companion were hanging out in a large patch of goldenrod, demonstrating yet again that expensive niger seed and specialized feeders are probably a waste of money. (At our place, the goldfinches generally go straight for the black-oil sunflower that comes in forty-pound bags, or, better yet, for plants going to seed in the yard.)

At least some trees seem to have looked at the calendar. A little further on, next to the parking lot, human-planted red maples were doing their fabulous fall thing. They never disappoint.

Along the elevated bike trail that passes through a sugar maple wood, that threatened species was also in full color. If our changing climate does wipe out Ohio's sugar maples, I am not sure which I will miss more: dark brown Grade B maple syrup (as good on ice cream as it is on pancakes) or views like this one, perhaps the essence of an autumn afternoon.

Maybe it's a good thing if fall teases us for a while.

Sanguisorba canadensis

Many perennials have stopped blooming by now, but in the Toledo Botanical Gardens this morning, a clump of something I did not know was working with so many bees that the stems were vibrating. 

Fortunately, the plant was labeled. It was Canadian burnet (Sanguisorba canadensis), which, contrary to its name, is found in many parts of North America, though it is rare in much of that range. As much of a wildflower enthusiast as I am, the botanical gardens are the only place I remember seeing this plant, and today I was lucky enough to see it at peak bloom.

A single glorious stem

The plant in its context in the perennial border

Burnet is in the rose family, though it looks nothing like any rose I know. While the specimen I saw is flourishing in a garden setting, in the wild it is a plant of wet prairies, meadows, swamps, and fens; it is not a plant for dry areas. The root system is woody and spreading, making it a useful plant along stream banks, where it will help hold the soil.

Moreover, our native burnet is a magnet for bees, both native species and honeybees, and its late bloom season makes it a valuable addition to the fall garden. Anyone with a damp, sunny spot should probably give it a try.

After all, what's not to like about a gorgeous plant for difficult conditions that feeds the pollinators?

Darling Dahlias

The title of this post comes from a charming mystery series by Susan Wittig Albert, featuring members of a ladies' garden club in Darling, Alabama, during the Great Depression. Dahlias are not a major feature of the books, just the name of the club, but today the dahlia bed at the Toledo Botanical Garden became the center of my attention for a while.

Dahlias are not plants that I have grown much (anything that requires staking, regular feeding, and digging up in the fall not being something that is likely to live long in my yard), and these beds are not the sort of garden that generally appeals to me, but some days, you have to love sheer exuberance, and that is something that dahlias have.

Where does one even begin to describe such a ridiculous explosion of a blossom? Dahlias have come a long way from the daisy-like wildflowers "discovered" in the mountains of central Mexico in the seventeenth century (though flowers similar to wild species are available to gardeners in the US). Today's dahlias come in a range of heights, shapes, and bloom sizes, from miniatures that hug the ground to plants taller than my 5'6".

This gorgeous thing is called "Spartacus."

The dahlias to which I am drawn tend to be the gaudy ones, dahlia genes allowing for a greater variety of petal shapes and flower forms than most plants. The old-fashioned daisy shapes and the two varieties above are just a few of the existing dahlia types. Some form nearly round pompoms

while others grow quilled petals

and some put their energy into making their fertile flowers the eye-catching part of the blossom. (No, those large petals that draw the human eye are not the business end of a flower, which is, after all, a sex organ. The important parts are often the tiny, inconspicuous ones.)

Looking at some of the blooms on display had me wondering how these things get pollinated. More importantly, do they do anything for pollinating insects? On many of the blossoms, nothing that resembled a stamen or a pistil is immediately observable, though the plants are obviously managing to reproduce. 

Looking closely, I did finally manage to see a few insects drawn to the plants, some tiny black things in this pale yellow giant,

something on the petals of this red collarette type,

and finally, a bee finding something to her liking.

Our cultivated dahlias are unlikely ever to be major players in a wildlife garden, but once in a while, there is something to be said for pure fun.

Underestimating meadows

When most people think of dramatic landscapes, mountains or deep forests probably come to mind. A few may envision the wide-open spaces of the midwestern prairie, but I doubt that many people automatically get excited about the smaller patches of grassland we call meadows. (A young relative once referred to our meadow planting as "a weed bed.") A healthy meadow, however, is a thing of subtle beauty and, more importantly, a small-scale biodiversity hotspot.

This meadow, part of Wildwood Preserve in Toledo, was livelier this morning than either the trail through the floodplain forest or the Window on Wildlife this park uses to lure birds and other creatures close enough for easy observation. Because the bur oak on the edge of the meadow is one of my favorite trees, I generally take advantage of a well-placed bench to sit and commune with this old tree that I sometimes call the Prairie Sentinel (even though this area is not technically prairie as it is not dominated by tall warm-season grasses).

The most noticeable creatures were the goldfinches that seemed to be alighting in droves on every patch of thistle. This particular plant,

which looked perfectly ordinary to my human eyes, at one point had four male goldfinches (and probably a female or two that I did not see, seated as I was some distance away) darting in and out, as well as two hummingbirds (at the same time--not typical behavior for these aggressively territorial little birds), bees of various species, and several hummingbird moths.

The sea of goldenrod (which actually contained at least three species of Solidago) was providing hospitality to hordes of monarch butterflies, tanking up before their long migration to a Mexican forest they have never seen. Sulfurs, whites, and skippers were abundant, and one lovely ailanthus webworm moth was hanging out right next to the trail.

Yes, that little creature is a moth, and its caterpillars eat the ironically-named tree of heaven, so even though the extension of its range (formerly the American tropics from South Florida to Costa Rica) may be a troubling sign, any insect that will eat a noxious weed of a tree is in my estimation a good bug.

Goldenrod was not the only flower blooming today. Ironweed was going strong, accompanied by asters just starting to bud, a few liatris hanging on, and numbers of smaller, more subtle blooms interspersed among the dominant yellow. And while they were not noticeable, the grasses were there, sending their roots down several feet into the soil and helping to create the soil matrix that is the basis for all other terrestrial life. Some bird species require landscapes like this one, nesting on the ground and depending on the thick vegetation to protect their young and provide the insects that will feed them. Even birds we normally associate with trees make use of grasslands. Today, this scruffy cardinal (either molting or a particularly unfortunate adolescent male just getting his adult coloration) spent a good bit of time calling from the shrub dogwoods that form part of the edge between Wildwood's meadow and forest areas, then more time investigating the seed selection in the meadow plants.

Meadows may not get much press as exciting places to visit, but they should not be underestimated. Spending a little time in a meadow reveals much more than is visible at first glance.