Is it a simple release, the culmination of another year in the garden, that makes these days so satisfying and certain? I think not. Long before I became tyrannized by a garden and its chores, I had acquired a certain indulgence in the waning season. It is a satiating and sublime melancholy to witness the downward slide of the landscape, natural or otherwise. I thought this to myself this morning, as I wove on my road bike through shards of teen-beer glass on the back lanes of North Kitsap on the western shores of Puget Sound.

I am grateful to leave our home on Sundays to ride. I rise early and drink coffee with heavy cream and peruse the pages of the New York Times. I leave highly caffeinated and assuredly annoyed by the latest buffoonery deep inside the Beltline. But it is coffee crack and headlines that become the fuel for my ride, providing gas as I angrily confront another hill. [Read more…]

Hello good friends and fine gardeners, or those who I do not personally know at this moment with whom I might someday ultimately become good friends. I am easy.

Let me tell you what I am seeing. This is a good exercise for me, as I am currently attempting to finish a book (Making Heronswood, yes, indeed). It is nearly finished. My cerebrum needs refreshment for I am as bound by words and memories as an aged inactive hen. Thus, I welcome you here to see what it is that I see for a moment or two.

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This morning I was mesmerized by a scene on the Sound-side bluff in front of our home in Indianola on the Kitsap Peninsula. In Hitchcockian proportions, the sky and garden to our fore was cyclonic in flocks of Pacific Crows, European Starlings, Band-tailed Pigeons and Western Gulls. The fruit of the Pacific Madrona had obviously reached a palatable ripeness and a bacchalian feast had begun.

I was particularly pleased to see so many Band-tailed Pigeons. These giant, gentle and elegant doves are normally seen in pairs or more disturbingly, during hunting season, single. The fruit of the Cascara, Rhamnus purshiana, is also favored by this species as is the red drupes of our Pacific Dogwood, Cornus nuttallii. Both of these trees however are on the decline in our region; the Cascara removed from landscapes as undesirable and the Dogwood due to anthracnose. As a rather fascinating aside, the Band-tailed pigeon has recently been found to carry a louse species, Columbicola extinctus, that had long been thought to have been extirpated along with its only other known host, the Passenger Pigeon. [Read more…]