Green Day (April 2015)

Join us.

http://www.keeprocklandbeautiful.org/

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/40602834114953843/

Trinity

An old tree stump is rife with mushroom life,

as a forsythia bush mixes with the trees, roofs and sky,

and "The Great Tree*" opens up to the world with many arms.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_people_%28Canada%29

( Welcome home, "Mes Gens" )

Spring Flowers (Easter 2015)

A small, star-shaped, five-point Campanula.

I saw my first spring flower this week: a tiny pale purple Campanula revealed by my neighbor's patient, gentle gardening hand. 

It was so exciting to see, particularly when our spring calendar days are full of temperature "ups-and-downs". Sometimes we lose sight of the bigger picture that warmer days are ahead, but they certainly are.

Bright yellow star! A crocus finally blooms.

Then a bright yellow Crocus appeared, so bright that at first I thought it was a fake flower fallen off an Easter wreath from someone's door, blown by the strong winds to land in the yard beneath my apartment. 

It was shockingly yellow, beyond what you remember about nature after winters' color palette. After that first yellow flower, they broke out in small patches throughout the lawn the next day and all around town. It's official. Spring has arrived.

 Happy Easter, 2015.

A bunch of cheerful, wildly purple Crocuses.

Two perfect blooms of the native Crocus flower.

Aha! Spring is afoot!

Crocuses are here, there, everywhere! Enjoy the sights and scents of Spring.

Benign Neglect

Diversification and preservation often accompany a purposeful, deliberate kind of neglect. Witness the relatively intact architecture and perfectly preserved cars of Cuba, a nation that was in extreme isolation from us. What would new wealth have done to its iconic architecture? Probably given us one badly done renovation after another. How many beautiful brownstones would we have lost in New York City, if Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant were rich white neighborhoods? 

And so it follows in nature. The front lawn of a certain old house in the historic Hudson Valley has an intact lawn; not the artificial one made with an abundance of pesticides and aggressive weed-pulling, but an incredibly rich and diverse tapestry that holds hundreds of plants, weeds, and wildflowers one doesn't typically see untouched in the suburbs, simply because the current owner does not tend to it with the same kind of care he would to his own lawn. It is often through this kind of neglect that the most beautiful wildflower flourishes. 

Welcome to September, dear readers.

Wild Mushrooms

Mushrooms grow out of decay....

.....or from underneath a rock; such is the power of life.

Food: Wild Grapes

Wild grapes.

After walking past these vines for weeks, I finally picked some ripe wild grapes last week, which was a bold move on my part. You never know what people do by the side of a road, but these were on a small hill that I had to climb to pick them, so I figured they were about as organic as you're going to get outside of a expensive organic market.

Wild grapes growing by the side of a road.

I tossed them in with some small sour apples I picked up from a nearby park into a warm steak salad, and it turned out to be the right thing to do: the apples became sweeter upon cooking and so did the grapes, plus they gave off a beautiful red wine color when they sweated with some onions. I love it when a dish all comes together on the fly like that, because I've cracked enough eggs to make a very big omelet. What do you find growing in the wild?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape