back in action

That's right. After a year in the basement collecting dust and growing mold on its plywood deck, the bike trailer is back. Made by Bikes At Work in Ames, Iowa, I bought this beauty back when we lived in Berkeley to haul my gardening tools around the neighborhoods of the east bay area. Since we moved to less-bike-friendly-but-getting-there-Chattanooga, I haven't felt all that motivated to take it to the streets, but today was the day. I took off one section of the trailer so that it is lighter to haul on the hills and ridges around town, and then headed over to Crabtree Farms to pick up our produce.

Was I partly doing this for attention? Absolutely.

And also, as it is Independence Day, to commemorate the Boston Tea Party, who chucked a bunch of boxes of British Tea overboard into the sea in order to tell the British, "We don't need your stinking caffeinated beverages." And lo and behold, to this day, 9 out of 10 Americans, when asked if they would like coffee or tea, they'll choose coffee. So my one-man-bike-trailer-parade-with-no-official-audience today was my only mildly serious way of saying, "We don't need your stinking foreign oil."

from Wendell Berry...

"Judging from our epidemic of obesity and other diseases of sedentary life and from the popularity of the various strenuous employments of the 'physical fitness movement,' the greatest untapped source of usable energy may now be in human bodies. It may become the task of a future economy to give worthy employment to this energy and to reward its use."

Nora

One of the great things about living here in Chattanooga is that I live within a block of a dear old family friend, Linda. Linda and my older sister were best friends since elementary school so I have memories of Linda from as far back as I can remember. While its hard living so far away from my sisters living close to Linda is next best thing, as she really does feel much like a sister to me. She took these pictures of Nora and me. As you can tell from the pictures, she is an exceptional photographer. It it kind of funny, we must have been thinking about each other this weekend....she recently posted some more pictures on her blog (http://beinggreen5.blogspot.com/) of Nora and me,  if you want to check them out...her blog is well worth a read too!

first climb / first deadwood pruning

A month or so ago I climbed my first tree. (That is if you don't count childhood tree climbing of course...) A water oak, Quercus nigra, in an undisclosed location...The identities of the ground crew and photographer (all one person) will also remain undisclosed. I was both learning how to climb for the first time as well as removing deadwood and hangers, i.e. dead branches that had already fallen but gotten hung up in the canopy. I used an arborist hand saw - no chainsaws yet. Walk before you run and all that. I was also using a rope system to ascend and move around in the canopy as opposed to using spurs on my boots, the method that is generally associated with tree climbing. Climbing with ropes is actually more common, more accepted, safer, easier, and does a lot less damage to the tree. It was a blast. I hope to do it again soon. I've caught some kind of primate fever.

Lenten Rose

Along with the early daffodils and forsythia, Lenten Rose (Helleborus x hybridus) has been showing its face in the garden for the last several weeks - an early announcement of Lent, of which today is the first Sunday. It blooms every year around this time in the understory shade of larger trees when the days are still a bit too short. I suppose it was given its name in an effort to say that Lent is not all about deprivation and solemnity since flowers are rarely symbols of such ideas.

Botanically, it's not a true rose - you would never mistake it for one if you walked by it growing in the ground. Since the rose is so significant in literary and religious metaphor, it might be interesting to discover why this plant was given such a weighty and familiar name coupled with one of the longest and most puzzling seasons of the church's calendar.

If you have one of these perennials in your garden, make sure it's in a shady spot, wherever you might plant your hostas and ferns. Ours, an inadvertent gift from the previous owner of our home, and probably the previous owner before him, is set in the ground on the south side of our house where I'm guessing it gets scorched every summer like a shirtless Irishman on an LA beach. We'll have to move it to a darker spot when the time is right, but for now, we'll just let it keep blooming until the weather warms up.

prayer

Yellow

is a dream-hidden daffodil,

brown shyness beneath the loam,

waiting

behind a hatch in the bulb.

Careful hands,

bring a rain-water bucket,

brimming with peace.

Douse life from its winter sleep.

Careful hands,

tempt joy from the ice-ground

and barge

shine sounding 

into the day -

a clarion of Easter-coming.

an oak in st. elmo

Our neighborhood, historic St. Elmo on the south side of Chattanooga and at the foot of Lookout Mountain, is one of the oldest neighborhoods in town. I vaguely remember someone referring to it as the original suburb of Chattanooga. 

The old houses stand along three avenues that run for twenty blocks or so, and range from bungalows, to Victorian monsters, to architectural mishmashes that have sprung up or evolved over the hundred plus year life of our little community.

As full of character as the houses may be, they wouldn't be the same without the massive trees that stand in our yards and line our streets. I have yet to find out if some of these giants were planted early in the 20th century after a clear cut, or if some were left standing from the forest that was here before the land was developed.

Anyways, it's inevitable that a city tree's life span will be capped by it's tough environment - air pollution, root disruption from construction of homes, tree houses, the occasional homeowner with a chainsaw. Considering these and other factors, trees are remarkably resilient and have numerous ways of adapting to their environment and healing themselves, which is why there are oaks and maples and sycamores throughout St. Elmo that have grown quite huge, some with trunk diameter's pushing four feet. That's why, treehugger or not, we'd all agree that it's sad to see one of the giants go.

Our neighbors a block away are having this giant oak removed by a local tree company - Robert's Tree Service. What a small world. I have a theory that once the wild, wild west was settled and became corn farms, suburbs, and ski resorts, all of the cowboys and outlaws had nothing dangerous to do, no ruckuses to raise, no taverns to tear apart in senseless brawls. So, what did they do with themselves? They bought a bunch of chainsaws and woodchippers and started tree companies.

Why is this oak being removed? Apparently, the small house at the bottom of the tree is being lifted off of it's foundation by the oak's sprawling roots. It also has serious rot throughout the main trunk's cambium and heartwood. It's only a matter of time before it falls on its own and causes serious damage to two houses beneath it, obviously, considering it's canopy covers somewhere around 2,000 square feet of ground space.

I've taken up the hobby of naming the trees around town. (You can roll your eyes now.) I like to think this tree was here before St. Elmo was developed, before roads were cut and the frames of houses were raised. In light of this oak's efforts to pick up the house built on top of it's roots and (if life were a comic strip) slide it off the hill so that it rolled down Hawkins Ridge and smashed into a mess of shingle and vinyl siding on Tennessee Ave., I've named this one "You're Not Welcome Here."

ghosts in the woods

Have you ever had chestnuts roasted on an open fire?

Me neither.

Have you ever wondered why not?

Me neither, until I started to become a tree geek a few years ago. If you ever find yourself putting one foot in the door of arboriculture, it won't be long till you here about the American Chestnut, and how it is no longer.

Last December, I proudly shared this fact with my mother, an avid and skilled gardener:

"Mom, did you know the American Chestnut is virtually extinct?" I said, proud to show off my arboricultural acumen.

"Well," her tone was famously polite, "yes, except that there are half a dozen of them growing down the street."

I accused her of lying, or even worse, a mistaken botanical identification. Polite, yet not easily swayed, my mother suggested we go for a walk, and so we did. Sure enough, we found half a dozen chestnuts with one and two foot diameter trunks growing along Riverside Drive, right there on the edge of Atlanta.

I wasn't wholly wrong, however, because it is true the American Chestnut, Castanea Dentata, has virtually disappeared from our forests. A century ago, a blight on the chestnuts began its steady progress through the northeast, then spread south down throughout the east until almost every chestnut, sapling to towering giant, was nothing but a skeleton of trunks and limbs. 

My grandfather, who grew up in Sweetwater in eastern Tennessee, remembers the year that the blight swept through our part of the world. He said one year the forests and hillsides were covered with massive chestnuts. The next year, only dead trunks and stumps.

If you're in the same generation as me, you've never thought of chestnuts when you think of the woods. Pines, oaks, maples - all of these are familiar to us, and we would notice if they were gone, tree geek or not. But we don't realize that our forests look very different from the way they did just over a half a century ago. They're still changing, and the forests of the southeastern mountains are going to look completely different to us within a decade if and probably when the eastern hemlock goes extinct in the wild, but that's a different story.

Some good folks in the worlds of botany, horticulture, and arboriculture, have devoted their life work to hybridizing American Chestnuts that will resist the blight that wiped, and would continue to wipe them out. The American Chestnut Foundation is at work in forests all over the place reintroducing and protecting fragile populations of chestnut trees.

Right here in Chattanooga, ringed by mountains, we live amongst forests that used to be dominated by Chestnuts. That is one reason why the ACF has chosen a swath of land on the Georgia side of Lookout Mountain to plant hundreds of chestnuts in an effort to reintroduce them in the wild. The Lula Lake Land Trust, a well kept secret in eastern Tennessee that is only open to the public once a month, is the site of this work. We spent half the day last Saturday hiking around the land trust and got to trek over to the pocket where these tiny saplings are growing underneath massive old oaks and on the edges of hemlock groves.

And what did Nora think of all this talk of arboriculture, extinction, and hybridization?

She was thrilled.

letter to nora part 4

   I pedaled my humble green bike furiously through the rainy back streets of Berkeley and Oakland, grateful that the route home had by now grown familiar with my daily ride to and from work. Had I not ridden that way every day for the last several months, I very well might have gotten lost, as I am prone to do, which is why I hope you inherited your mother's sense of direction and not my tendency to walk or drive off towards nowhere in particular.

   But I wouldn't get lost this day and finally wheeled in behind our apartment building to the backdoor where our neighbor Tony keeps all his plants congregated and over-watered. 

After riding through the downpour, I felt like his jade plant must feel when he stands five feet away with garden hose and spray nozzle and firehoses the foliage.

   I expected to find your mother inside, cast onto the couch in utter misery with the onset of labor, with your Oma and Aunt Charlotte fanning her and feeding her chipped ice. I don't know why chipped ice came to mind. This was my first run at childbirth. Putting my key in the lock, I braced myself for a war zone inside, for blood sweat and tears like I had never known.

   Instead, I nearly clobbered your mom (and you, come to think of it) with the door on my way in as she was passing through the narrow hallway between the kitchen and the bedroom. My memory is foggy regarding whether it was a laundry basket, a broom, a mop, or some other implement of domestic destruction that she had in her hands. Whatever it was, I startled her slightly, but then she quickly recovered and said, smiling,

   "Oh! Hey, you're home," which startled me in return. I was expecting banshee-like screaming or lioness-like roaring. I wondered briefly if I'd received a prank call, if this was the wrong house, or had I missed the big event? No, it was just that confounding peace in her that and you and me both will spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out.  

gifts from the winter forest

Our walk in the woods last weekend proved there was much more to the winter landscape than barren trees.

The thimble sized cones of the tsuga canadensis, our treasured but quickly disappearing eastern hemlock.

Wild Hydrangea, hydrangea arborescens, hanging onto its dried summer blooms against all odds, is the lowly native relative of the pom poms we all grow in our gardens.

Some temperatures on Lookout Mountain registered 0 degrees Fahrenheit!

These flakes of fungal growth are transforming this dead oak back into the forest floor.

Winter Jasmine

I first met this plant in June, six years ago. It was a heaping mound of green growing along the top of a wall, and I was a skinny college kid who'd found a summer job gardening for an OBGYN who had built himself a complex of restaurants, B&B's, and coffeeshops in downtown Chattanooga. The eccentric Dr. who hired me, along with the rest of the grounds crew, weren't too positive that I'd last a week pulling weeds and mowing grass in the East Tennessee heat. They put me through my paces early, like the day when the good Dr. walked me over to the cascade of Winter Jasmine running 50 feet along a wall, handed me a 25 lb. power tool - Echo gas hedge trimmers - that resembled a chainsaw with meaner teeth, and said, "let's see what you can do with that..." A thousand drops of sweat and two burning shoulders later, I switched off the machine. The giant Dr. walked up and said, "Looks good." I was proud, but relieved that I would eventually return to the college classroom in preparation for a life of teaching, not pruning. Oops.

I never knew the same plant would show up in front of our first house in the midst of one of the coldest winters I've ever known in the southeast. And true to its common name, Winter Jasmine, Jasminum Nudiflorum announced itself at the bottom of our front steps a few weeks ago. From a distance, you might mistake it for forsythia, but the time of year that this multitude of yellow flowers arrives is your main clue that this is something else, something not-so-native, something brought to our neck of the woods from China. If you do have it in your garden, try to remember not to prune its tangled mass of viny growth in the fall or early winter because you'll chop off all the quiet buds that will eventually become these lovely blooms. If you plant it in the right place, you might not ever need to prune it except every half decade or so to nuke all the old growth...Just be sure you do it after the blooms have passed late in the winter when the forsythia is starting to show.

Nora's Birthday

A few photos from her birthday party....

...a few more from the actual day.

Nora loves to play in the garden.....

December....

Just a few photos from around our home

We had a lovely Christmas in Atlanta with the Heiskell's.

November

Nora and I got to spend some extra time in New Jersey before Thanksgiving. We were there for almost a month in all. We went because my dad was having some surgery on his arm and I was hoping to be able to help out. However, while we were there my nana's health took a significant decline and she passed away on November 26th. I am grateful that I got to be there and be a part of her last days. Here is a sweet picture of Nora and Nana taken when Nora was just 6 weeks. Nora is named after 3 very important women....Robert's great grandmother (Nora Heiskell), my mom (Norma), and my nana (Norma)....so this picture is really special to me.

We also got to spend some extra time with Eva and Mara since they stayed at my mom's for a few nights. Nora loved it!

And Nora had her first picture with Santa....however she was happier if she was just looking at him from a distance. 

These are just a few extra pictures from the spectacular fall leaves that we had this year.