Cycling: The delight of cycling is that you are going fast enough not to be bored, yet slow enough to see and to stop to photograph scenes such as these.
Photographing old barns and sheds is a passion of mine. I see their fleeting beauty because, more often than not, when you look for it next year, they are gone.
Dame's Rockets are often called Flox - a misnomer - Flox has 5 petals on the flowers whereas Dame's Rockets has 4. Although these beauties came over from European gardens, they thrive in the wild areas. They enhance many rugged places, like this one, although they, along with most of the wild flowers and nature today, are being mowed into obscurity, into endangerment, and into extinction.
The caterpillars are also being mowed into extintion. I see fewer and fewer butterflies. The naturalists and the nature photographers mention their decline, too.
Even the sides of the highways out in the boonies are being mowed, the mowers destroying cucoons and/or the caterpillars, leaving nature's critters with no place to hide and abide.
Insects, too, are disappearing, and some are exquisitely beautiful and useful.
Doesn't it tell us something - that we now dig up, poison, and destroy nature to plant crops such as sunflowers to feed birds that under normal conditions would have found food without any help from us.
Here's a remedy that works wonderfully. When you see a different greenery coming up on your lawn, mow around a patch of it and watch to see what it grows into. Serendipity becomes a prominent household word for you.
I did this around Colorado's state flower, the Columbine, and then transplanted it to where it could grow safely next year, and it did so, and every year thereafter.
I did this with a Queen Anne's Lace once, allowed it a 2 foot diameter patch, and it grew tall and lush and cascaded with hundreds of white flowers for months, returning year after year.
I did this with Milkweed, and, although it looked pretty scraggy in late summer, it gave Monarch butterflies/caterpillars some hope. I hope.
I did this in early spring with a patch of Pussytoes, a tiny rare beauty that most people wouldn't even notice and few have seen. It rewarded me with a delightful carpet of white annually. The flower does looks like a kitten's foot.
Likewise with hawkweed. After each species each went to seed, I mowed them, and they always came back next year.
Make your own story. Mow gently. See what wonders you receive as a gift from Mother Nature. She is truly wondrous.
Similarly, I gave all my perennials a spot in the lawn, 2 or 3 feet wide, mowed in a circle around them, and then I never had to weed. I planted some annuals around the base of some of the perennials so I could remember what colour was planted there and so that when the perennial was done flowering, I still had colour around the periphery.
The most successful was with the ever beautiful and hardy sedum live-forever; also with narcissus, flox, and every perennial that I had.
I would sit on my lawn swing in the center of the lawn, and water them from there. On one occasion, a hummingbird hovered above the crest of the water from the hose to take a drink on a hot day.
For the most part, cycling is only a changing scene of houses and mowed lawns.
Sad!!! Too sad. Gigantic stirile green deserts. Take a look! Is there anything alive on those lawns for the most part? Not that I can see.
Face it, folks. We have been brain-washed - brain-washed into believing that vast sterile green deserts are necessary and beautiful, that the world must be mowed or it is ugly.
Not so. Let's change it starting this spring.
Allow some wildflowers a place to grow naturally on your lawn.
Even just one for this year? Queen Anne's Lace? Tiger Lily around your trees? Transplant sumac and lilac to your property.
The benefits are serendipitous. Enjoy.
Ride on secondary roads today and you'll still see some wildflowers areas.
All you can do is voice your disappointment, your suggestions on how to make the world a little better, and then get on your bike and enjoy it anyway as long as it's still there to do so.
Get out your seed catalogues and your wildflower books and dream of warmer days.
It's -5 and a blizzard out there today, here in southern Ontario.
KIS ses and tears
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