I can’t say that I know what all of these flowers are, and I’m posting this without labeling even those that I do, but it’s fun for me to see how many of them I do know. (Sorry that a few aren’t photographed in a way to facilitate identification, if you are taking a stab at it yourself.)

Although they aren’t all great pictures, I am amazed, even if I’m saying it myself, at how beautiful so many of these pictures are. Yes, I have a nice lens and I did think a bit about how to compose the pictures, but the credit is really due to the flowers themselves. Yet another thing that is becoming clear to me is how easy beauty is to find in the natural world. It is, in a word, cheap. But, once again, the distinction between price and value couldn’t be more clear. It’s easy to get ones sense of beauty set to such a level that the dark colors of a Starbuck’s seem to delineate a space to linger for a day and a walk though the luxurious lobby of a hotel seems the epitome of refinement and beauty. But a few minutes looking down a patch of beautiful pink flowers flecked with delicate freckles or walking through the coolness of tall alders makes me long to just lie on the grass surrounded by life and its incredible diversity, never mind the comforts of civilization, or the bug bites and showers — why do I spend so much time indoors?

Anyway, here are all 31 — I only chose one of each and even so it’s kind of overload. But it was quite fun to spot each and every one.

A few days ago we had one of our summertime traditions: the watermelon flower shop, where the kids run around bringing flowers to me and are paid pieces of watermelon in return, a holdover from the days when they used to set up every kind of shop at a moments notice; this was my way of joining in. James really looks forward to it – it was the thing he mentioned that he really wanted to make sure he did this summer. In past years, it’s been about dandelions – quantity and quality. This year, as I’m trying to learn about the life on my property, I requested novelty, and, sure enough, there were lots of flowers that I didn’t know the names of.

Today, I tried to identify one, a lovely yellow flower with five petals and lots of stamens. Although it is a weedy looking plant, the flowers are really pretty – bright five-pointed stars that seem to have a bit of an explosion of stamens in the center – or are they alluring eyelashes? Metaphors are misleading, perhaps, but the flower does somehow remind me of batting eyelashes, and the cheerful yellow seems designed to banish any blues in a wash of simple happiness. So I decided to take a stab at identifying it.

It’s always a bit intimidating to start poking through the books and trying to make an identification, and it can be hard to be sure I’ve found what I was looking for! This time, I am completely confident.

The process of studying and identifying a flower is a lesson in observation. It seems an old magic that still satisfies me to find Klamath Weed in the book, to be told that there are small black dots near the tips of the petals and then to look at the petals and…I didn’t notice them before, but there they are!

..or the dark dots on the leaves that are translucent when the leaves are held to the light?

And then, there’s the beetle, which the guidebook also mentioned, but didn’t name – I only noticed it well after I started studying my various guide books — and its mention in the flower field guide led to a very satisfactory identification in my fairly inscrutable beetle book! (there are so many different kinds of beetles that it sometimes seems kind of ridiculous!) Anyway, the plant is called Klamath Weed, so naturally the beetle clinging to it is the Klamathweed beetle! (or Chrysolina quadrigemina, one of the 212 members of the skeletonizing leaf beetles)

With all of those dots and the beetle, as well as the color and petals and “many stamens in 3-5 bunches”, I was sure I’d the right plant. The guide book also mentioned an intriguing story of the invasion of the Klamath area by this plant, which I later found online:

Klamath weed, also known as St. John’s wort or goatweed, is a native of Europe and Asia that was accidently brought into northern California around 1900. The plant, which is poisonous to livestock, spread rapidly throughout the pasturelands of California and adjacent states. By 1945, it had rendered over 4 million acres of rangeland unfit for grazing livestock. In the late 1940′s, several leaf beetles collected in the weed’s native Europe were imported to California and released on infested rangelands. The most successful of these species, Chrysolina quadrigemina, soon became established and by 1956, it had largely eliminated klamath weed as a threat to livestock in the western United States. Today, small pockets of the weed still exist in shady sites where the beetles do not survive well. These isolated weed populations are sufficient to maintain the beetle population at a level that effectively suppresses further outbreaks of the weed. (from http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/course/ent425/text19/weedeaters.html )

I really struggle to get good photos of these tiny creatures – and not just because they are eye-strainingly small. Like any wild creatures, they tend to move around and go where they want to. But the rewards of close examination are such that, even if I didn’t capture the beetle completly on film, its beauty and the beauty of the noxious weed it eats are cemented in my brain; I learned so much from the short hour I spent with this pair. Look at the knobby antennae of this beetle – that’s something I’d only seen in guide books, not really looked at in life. And do you see those tiny dots on the carapace? When you look at this beetle with only your eye, it appears to be almost a perfect thing, but the colors and dots, on closer inspection, seem like aging metal or a tropical creature.

So often I find that more I dig into the natural history of any creature or plant, the more trails I uncover.

One such trail is visual – evidently this beetle has striking wings hidden under that shell. (and what are those holes for?)

Another is more complex. As you may have noticed above, Klamath weed is perhaps better-known as St. John’s Wort, the once-popular herbal remedy for depression. This forks off to many trails; for example, a vocabulary trail, which I quickly settled – wort is a Middle English word for plant, one often used for medicinal plants, as in liverwort, which was thought to benefit the liver. But there is also medicine, evolutionary biology and so on…

As I understand it, one of the side effects of eating the leaves of this plant is a sensitivity to light and this sensitivity is what makes it impossible to use as forage for livestock. A continuing theme this summer has been the ongoing dynamic – one might call it a war – between creatures, even between humble ones like weeds and grazers. I’d like to understand more about this – how does it work? How are – or would be – my cells made more sensitive to light? And how could this subtle effect have developed in the plant? These questions, like my quick one about wort, probably all have available answers, but I can’t just ramble on, researching and regurgitating.

Instead, I’ll exit with one more picture of the beetle, the way it was usually sitting, rear-end facing the world, with bits of frass laying around. I have to say that I feel quite satisfied with this whole process – I managed to identify the plant, notice things about it that I would never have otherwise – including the beetle eating it – and I feel the richer for the whole process.

Their chief appeal to me is their appearance. There seems to be two distinct varieties of these berries — one ripens to a rich yellow or orange, the other to the spectacularly shaded reds and oranges that shade from bright to dark and attract my eye. They are so beautiful — one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Although they are starting to develop sweetness now at the end of their season, they usually don’t have much besides freshness to offer in the way of taste; the seeds are, quite deliberately I’m sure, bitter. They seem adapted to suit our eye and sense of beauty just as blueberries, plums, and other fruits are adapted to please our tongue and sense of taste. Fruits are designed for consumption by us and other frugivores and frugiphiles (I made that second word up) who also love sugars and vitamin C and prefer soft ripeness to the fibrous cellulose of grass and leaves. Part of ripening is, quite properly, referred to as self-digestion as the plant prepares the fruit to be eaten. (Likewise, the seeds are laced with unpalatable or even toxic chemicals — cherries, apples, plums, almonds, apricots, peaches and many other fruits all generate cyanide when their seeds are digested.

But what to make of the beauty of the salmonberry? Although it always remains a wonder to me, it’s become a commonplace observation that our sense of beauty is somehow shared with the animals, as witnessed by the beauty of a peacock or a bird of paradise, along with so many other examples. Could it be that a robin is also entranced by the beauty of its food, and ends up eating a salmonberry, as I have, simply because it couldn’t resist examining it rather than because it thought it would be delicious? It’s just possible that salmonberries are adapted to please my eye specifically: humans, have been eating salmonberries for as long as they have lived in this area — they were an important part of native diets.

Gathering them today with James, keeping this in mind, I noticed that the most beautiful ones were also the ones that tasted the best — the best of the berries was also the shiniest and seemed to glow from within in the morning sunlight.

I looked this up because of its mention in Barbara Kingsolver’s marvelous essay in High Tide in Tuscon

This summer we bought a coconut – it was Robin’s choice, actually (“any fruit you want”, I said). We shared the liquid amongst ourselves. Like so many things in life, it came as happiness and sadness. It was fun to see how much was in there, and the taste was sweet and unusual. It was a nice memory for me, remembering the few times we had them as a kid, my father showing me how to strike a Phillips screwdriver into one of the three depressions in the skin, telling me of collecting coconuts along the street in San Diego. Everyone was savoring their individual servings when tragedy struck, a small puddle on the driveway had just been in James’ glass. Small things loom big in a child’s life, and he could barely keep from sobbing. Even after we all shared some of ours with him, he was still sad; it made it all seem more real. The white meat inside, so surprising, was less of a hit.

The same day as the radio spot, I looked for anything on the web about my friend Melanie Faith’s poetry chapbook. I found a review, which reviewed several works, including Paul Hostovsky’s Bending the Notes, which has this poem as its first

Coconut
Bear with me I
want to tell you
something about
happiness
it’s hard to get at
but the thing is
I wasn’t looking
I was looking
somewhere else
when my son found it
in the fruit section
and came running
holding it out
in his small hands
asking me what
it was and could we
keep it it only
cost 99 cents
hairy and brown
hard as a rock
and something swishing
around inside
and what on earth
and where on earth
and this was happiness
this little ball
of interest beating
inside his chest
this interestedness
beaming out
from his face pleading
happiness
and because I wasn’t
happy I said
to put it back
because I didn’t want it
because we didn’t need it
and because he was happy
he started to cry
right there in aisle
five so when we
got home we
put it in the middle
of the kitchen table
and sat on either
side of it and began
to consider how
to get inside of it

Poem: “Coconut” by Paul Hostovsky from Bird in the Hand. © Grayson Books. Copied
from http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2006/09/25 (buy now)

But not for all animals, says this review from Amazon.com:

does not work, June 29, 2009We installed it about a month ago. Now the geese walk real slow so that the motion beams are not tripped and they walk right up to the back patio to eat my grass and leave me little “presents” all in my yard. This morning, one goose was actually drinking the water sprayed from the Havahart 5265 Spray Away Motion Activated Water Repellent. They have gotten used to the spray and some even wait out the 8 second delay or get behind the chairs on my porch to wait out the 2 second spray then continue to eat and **** in my yard. They even circumvent the whole system. (We installed 2) We have even moved the system around to fool them which has not worked either. Thanks but no thanks. I would not recommend this as now I have more than 40 geese take up residence since it was installed.

Well, that’s OK – I plan to get the other brand anyway!

It’s very easy to separate this contemplative, glittering music from the controversial historical figure. I found an interesting article that talks about his importance on the musical scene and his fall from grace, both during his lifetime and beyond, summed up in the Wikipedia entry:

Having been one of the most often performed of French composers in the period between the two world wars, Schmitt afterwards fell into comparative obscurity, although he continued writing music till the end (and in 1952 he became a member of the Légion d’honneur). He became the subject of attacks — both in his old age and posthumously — over his pro-German sympathies during the 1930s, and over his willingness to work for the Vichy regime later on (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florent_Schmitt )

Here is a bit from the music article (the Wikipedia entry appears to be based on this article:

He enjoyed his powerful position as grand-high-arbiter-of-taste during the years when he wrote regular reviews for Le Temps (1929-39), as much as he enjoyed creating scandal at live concerts by shouting controversial jibes from the loges. These bursts of élan were always sparked by his sense, usually at premieres of new works, that the audience was “missing the point”, and he would as readily champion aurally daunting avant-garde works as he would decry the popular. The most noteworthy incident occurred in 1933, when songs of Kurt Weill were being performed at the Salle Pleyel. Schmitt’s scandalous shouts from the audience exposed an anti-Semitic arrogance that resulted in a newspaper scandal, with words of support from Weingartner, and condemnation from just about everyone else, including the publisher Heugel, who called him an “irresponsible lunatic”.

You can read the full article at http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2002/Jun02/Schmitt.htm

Or Click here to listen to “Florent Schmitt: Piano works for 4 hands” by Christian Ivaldi & Jean-Claude Pennetier.

I compose a dialog with a few bits of nearly every book I read, crimping down a page to come back and write about. But I rarely do, and what seemed urgent when I was reading it loses the context when I return. So I’m resolving to start noting a bit of my reading journey mid-stride (if you will).

Today, we finished reading Seven-Day Magic, an Edward Eager book that yields little to comment on. I’m still enjoying Mary Oliver’s poems in New and Selected Poems – I want to start writing down my favorite poems again. I started this journal to do so, but I get stymied by worrying about stealing the poems by posting htem here, so I think I’ll just make a private journal of them – I’m my best audience here, anyway…

I brought a stack of books to the hammock to decide amongst – which should I take to the picnic? Past picnics have been memorable, relaxing reads, usually biography. Also, the books I wanted to write about – Sway (the irresistible pull of irrational behavior) and the gargantuan collection of Joan Didion’s non-fiction We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live, which serves as a journalistic history of the late 60’s. One thing that strikes me is the parallel between the get-rich-quick hit-or-miss gold-strike claim-jumping California of the gold rush days and modern Hollywood.

Oh well, time to go play!