Chard and Blue Flower Memories

Good morning! It's cherry time!

Baby chard from Bare Knuckle Farm

Northport’s Farm Market is so beautiful, so bountiful, so well attended and even beloved that it’s hard to believe we haven’t always had it. The Children and the Chard  is a book title idea that jumped through my mind as I was recalling our older grandchildren’s infatuation with the leafy dark green. They were 11 and 12 at the time. It was years before we were living out at the farm and before we’d even had a new well put down, let alone insulated the farmhouse walls or installed a furnace, but I had hand-dug a small garden and hauled water from the creek when the rain barrel ran dry, and we spent as much time there as we could. Then the grandchildren came up for a visit with their parents. Raiding my garden, I made a baked casserole of creamed chard topped with Parmesan cheese.

What parent or grandparent would not be astonished to hear kids asking, “Is there any more chard?” Was it the cream sauce or the Parmesan? No matter, they were asking for more chard! It was a long Pyrex cake pan, and when time came to do the dishes, the pan hit the sink almost clean.

Spiderwort on front porch

Part of the art display

My memory of spiderwort comes from an old friend of my husband’s. Charlie, a former teaching colleague of David’s, offered to give me some plants from his home garden for my little backyard in Kalamazoo, “but only,” he added sternly, “if you will call it by its proper name.” The Latin name? (I didn’t know it then, but it’s Tradescantia virginiana.) No, that wasn’t what Charlie meant. The common name he considered “proper” for spiderwort was snotweed!

Don’t be put off by the name. The flowers are a beautiful blue, aren’t they? They come in clusters, too, so that for many days there is always at least one of the cluster in bloom – and the leaves don’t wilt, but remain sharp and, as I like to think of them, architectural in the interesting right angles they form.

Here’s what the National AudubonSociety Field Guide to Wildflowers (Eastern Region) has to say:

Spiderworts are so named because the angular leaf arrangement suggests a squatting spider. [I must confess it never suggested that to me, so this explanation came as a revelation.] The flowers open only in the morning [but every morning!]; the petals then wilt and turn to a jelly-like fluid. Each hair on the stamens of this showy spiderwort consists of a chain of thin-walled cells; the hairs are a favorite subject for microscopic examination in biology classes because the flowing cytoplasm and nucleus can be seen easily.

Again, don’t be put off by that bit about “jelly-like fluid” or wilting petals. Spiderwort is lovely! It has a relative called Asiatic dayflower (not pictured here), with lighter, brighter blue flowers, and my memory of that is having it grow wild under my Traverse City grape arbor back in 1971.

Back years ago, when I bought my first Audubon wildflower guide from bookseller Prudie Meade in Leland, I would sometimes page through it idly, reading descriptions and looking at pictures while waiting for David to come back from talking to someone about a car or a boat or a trailer, and in this way I learned to recognize wildflowers before seeing them in nature. One day, then, along the north side of Omena Road, back on land that held (then) an old derelict orchard, I found growing between the rows of trees prickly-stemmed, deep blue-flowered plants I recognized from my guide book, and I exclaimed in delight, “Viper’s bugloss!” “You’re making that name up!” David accused. But it’s the real name. What’s the story there?

Here’s Audubon again:

The origin of the name Viper’s Bugloss is uncertain: The resemblance of the nutlets to snake heads may account for “viper,” which may also refer to the dried plant’s use as an alleged remedy for snakebite, while “bugloss” is from the ancient Greek for “ox tongue,” which the plant’s leaves were thought to resemble.

The “nutlets” in this passage are the plant’s fruit, and I confess I’ve never seen the fruit. I further confess that I would never in a million years have worked out the origin of the plant’s common name. Its Latin name is Echium vulgare, and it is a member of the borage family, along with the hoary puccoon (David’s favorite plant name), Virginia bluebells, and forget-me-not.

The first year I ordered new books to supplement my used book inventory, nature field guides were the top of the list. They are still and probably always will be among my favorite books.

Reminder: This coming Monday evening, July 15, from 7 to 9 p.m., Dog Ears Books will host Katey Schultz, author of the short story collection Flashes of War. Please join us!

Until then, have a fabulous weekend, Up North or wherever you are! It's shaping up to be a great one already here.

Northport Youth Sailing School in action

I Catch Sight of a Small Seasonal Resident

Near-sighted eyes are not ideal bird-watching equipment, and even with the best of field guides identification can be difficult, owing to the plain fact that birds generally do not hold still for long.  (Trees and wildflowers are so much more cooperative!) Here is where a digital camera doubles as binoculars and recording device: Having spotted a bird too faraway or high up to see clearly, I zoom in as close as possible and click the shutter, after which I can zoom again onscreen to note markings at my leisure, there in the field and later, at home with my field guides.

That invisible bird near the barn in the morning? Having caught him on camera in the afternoon, over by the edge of the woods, I am at last able to identify the Eastern Tree Sparrow, Spizella arborea arborea (nice name!), otherwise known as the “winter chippy” (cute nickname!). Roger Tory Peterson leaves no doubt in my mind: “The single round black spot or ‘stickpin’ in the center of the breast, and the bright red-brown cap are the only marks necessary to identify the ‘Winter Chippy.’” Peterson makes it sound so easy, and so it is with a good, long look at the little bird. He gives its note as “a distinct tseet,” which is how I link the invisible bird by the barn to the visible bird my camera found in the brush between orchard and woods.

I tell a birding friend about my success, prefacing my story by saying that it won’t be a very exciting bird to him who has seen so many, on various continents, in his lifetime. He laughed. “They’re all exciting to me,” he admitted.

It got better. He hadn’t seen any tree sparrows yet this winter and had been concerned over their late arrival, so what I told him about seeing the tree sparrow he took as "good news." These birds breed and summer up in Canada and come down to our area in winter, staying until spring returns.

Can you see my new little friend?

I'm happy to think that my little friend will be around all winter. I look forward to seeing more of him.

A Berry Obsession, Part II, or, Hawthorns, Continued

(If you missed Part I, you can find it here.)

More like it! In the line drawing of hawthorn above, from Illustrated Guide to Trees and Shrubs, by Arthur Marmount Graves, published by the author in 1952, look at those leaf edges with their nicely rounded lobes! The fruits look flatter than mine, more like blueberries in form, but this is a generic drawing, not meant to represent exactly a particular species. Next, in Avril Rodway’s Wild Foods (1988), with illustrations by Zane Carey, I found another promising line drawing:


Wild Foods also has full-page color illustrations, and here are a couple details from the hawthorn page, looking very like my specimens.



Finally—wow!—Field Book of American Trees and Shrubs, by F. Schuyler Mathews, published by Putnam’s with an author’s copyright date of 1915, gives a dizzying array of hawthorns, beginning on page 211 and going through page 253, although this is only a sampling, according to Mathews, who begins his introduction to hawthorns as follows:

An extremely difficult and complex genus separated by botanists into many divisions comprehending about 200 species. The subtle distinctions of leaf-form, anther-color, number of stamens, and character of fruit, etc., are more or less precarious....

A visit from my botany guru, Chris Garthe of the Leelanau Conservation District, however, confirmed that my leaf and berry samples--and we can now refer to the berries as haws--are definitely hawthorn. I showed him my photo of the little tree, too, which nicely conforms to the description given by Mathews:

The Hawthorns are mostly flat-topped trees, irregular in limb and branch, the shrubby form generally showing ascending and the tree form spreading branches, but no rule is possible in this direction.

“No general rule” seems to be the general rule for hawthorns. Is this why I love them, other than their having been featured in the first volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past? That’s where my initial obsession with hawthorn trees began.

[Pause while bookseller combs house from stem to stern, searching for first volume of Proust. Does not find. Only final volume surfaces. Must go to press without relevant literary quote here. Rats!]

Hawthorns go back centuries in the Old Country, whether in France, England or Ireland. Sometimes fairies figure into the lore, but legends of all kinds abound. Here is a paragraph from Rodway:

The Holy Thorn . . . at Glastonbury in the west of England, which legend has it, sprang from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, blooms in winter – on Christmas Day, or near it – and cuttings from it flourish in both Britain and America. In fact, reverence for the hawthorn has crossed the Atlantic and many of the same feelings for the tree exist in both Britain and the United States.

(The reason for my ellipsis in the paragraph quoted above is that Carey writes of the "Crataegus family," and there is no such family. Crataegus is a genus within the family Rosaceae).

Now for the disappointing news. Chris and I tasted a couple of haws.


The texture is mealy, taste bland, and each little haw contains a big, hard pit. Turning to new books, I find in Tree & Shrub Gardening for Michigan, by Tim Wood & Alison Beck (Lone Pine, 2003), I find this notation:

Hawthorn fruits are edible but dry and seedy. Some people make jelly from them, or ferment them and mix them with brandy.

Before I tasted the haws, I had imagined making jelly, but now I think I’ll leave them for the wildlife. Anyway, I enjoyed the collecting, the mystery, the literature search and finding a solution. That was plenty of satisfaction for a November day.

Hello, Wildflowers--and Snakes!

On the matter of the green-striped trillium from the other day, here it is on the cover of Ed and Connie Arnfield’s Roadside Guide to Michigan Plants,Trees, and Flowers: An Ecological Approach. I highly recommend the Arnfield ecological guide, unique in its presentation. One thing I noticed in the woods this morning is that while troutlily, wild leek and spring beauty seem to enjoy each other’s company, trillium is often found associating with bellwort and Dutchman’s breeches. Ed could explain the reasons for these groupings, I’m sure, but I’m guessing it has to do either with soil or with available light. Perhaps both are factors. You can see more photos of trillium and bellwort on my photo blog.


Of Trillium Grandiflora, Ed has this to say:

Probably the largest flower of its group, it is pure white and turns a pale pink as it ages. Some that are infected by an organism or a virus produce a central green stripe in the flower. The leaves are in threes, and the petals are in threes as well.

Another classic wildflower guide for our area is Michigan Wildflowers in Color, by Harry C. Lund. Yes, the blooms are arranged by color for easy reference, and the revised edition also includes public areas for wildflower walks from southern Michigan to the U.P.

As for snakes, I could have saved a lot of time the other evening if I’d had Michigan Snakes: A Field Guide and Pocket Reference (revised edition), by J. Alan Holman and James H. Harding, in hand instead of having to wait for image after image to download so I could find the snake that matched mine. That’s “mine,” as in the one that surprised me in the woodshed. For those of you who don’t yet have a field guide to snakes, you can visit the DNR site to see my pretty snake, harmless to humans, and Michigan’s only poisonous snake, too.

“All snakes are predators,” informs the DNR website calmly. Remain calm. Michigan snakes prey but not on us. The little sweetheart that found its way into our woodshed was a beautiful Eastern Milksnake, and here’s what Holman and Harding have to tell me about it:

The Eastern Milksnake is a slender, medium-sized (24 to 52 inches long) snake with brown or reddish brown, black-bordered blotches running down the light grey or tan back. There is often a Y- or V-shaped light marking on the top of the neck....

These secretive snakes are found in woodlands, fields, marshes and farmlands. They often hide under boards and trasn near barns and other buildings. Most often seen in spring and fall, Milksnakes appear to be primarily nocturnal in summer. The name “Milksnake” comes from the false belief that this species sucks milk from cows. They may indeed enter barns, or even houses, but in search of rodents. Because of this, they are also called barn snakes or house snakes. Another local name given to this snake in error is “spotted adder.” [my emphases added]

As a sworn enemy of mice in the house, I probably should have left the snake in our attached woodshed rather than relocating it to the garden. Maybe it will find its way back. Maybe I should invite it into the house! It certainly was beautiful--and fierce as a tiny kitten, too, raising its head and acting like a rattlesnake despite its small size, though it is not venomous but kills by constricting its prey. Could a small, young snake like “mine” swallow a mouse, let alone a rat? Maybe a baby mouse. That must be it. Get ‘em while they’re young. Good plan!