Yesterday, while tending to the pollinator garden I coordinate in a nearby public park, I was surprised to see this common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) exhibiting albinism.
Apparently albino milkweeds occur infrequently in nature, likely due to a genetic mutation. Because they lack chlorophyll, they are unable to photosynthesize and, reportedly, do not live as long or grow as large as ordinary milkweeds. However, milkweeds spread by rhizome, meaning that albino milkweeds may gain nutrients from fellow plants to whom they are connected.
Albinism in plants is never common, but reportedly occurs often enough in redwood trees and orchid plants to suggest it may confer some evolutionary advantage (perhaps especially in shade and understory environments), wherein non-chlorophyll-producing plants—known as mycoheterotrophs—forgo photosynthesis in favour of parasitizing mycorrhizal fungi. One wildflower native to Canada, Monotropa uniflora or ghost pipe, is fully mycoheterotrophic.
[Personally, I object to the term “parasite” to describe mycoheterotrophic plants. If the mycoheterotroph gains or borrows energy without harming the source plant or fungal organism, it seems to me it would more properly be described as a commensal.]
I cannot say whether the albino milkweed in my local park has ‘chosen’ a mycoheterotrophic strategy or is simply a mutant plant. It is noticeably smaller than its peers, but seems healthy so far and shows the beginnings of a blousy blossom head. I will monitor it through the season to see how it grows. I’m curious to see whether it will remain healthy and, equally, whether its blossoms will attract insects.
In the meantime, my mutant milkweed is a thing of beauty and a source of wonder, nestled in among her green sisters. I am grateful to her for existing, and for giving me the opportunity to learn something new about plant genetics and physiology.
Unusually this year, although I had made a note in the calendar, I forgot that the clocks ‘fell back’ an hour overnight. It was about 10:30—er, 9:30—before I looked at a digital clock this morning and realized our daughter, whom we’d hounded out of bed already exhausted from the first day of her Bronze Medallion qualification course, still had an extra hour to get ready for swim.
The extra hour is illusory, of course: a reminder that there is always a cost to playing with Chronos. An extra hour on a November morning is lovely, but by mid-afternoon one looks up at the clock, thinking it must be getting on to dinnertime, maybe even bedtime, and is dismayed to see how many more miles hours there are left to go before sleep.
As I write this it is 5:15 pm, and outside it is at the tail end of twilight—as close to dark as it might be at 9:30 pm at midsummer—and this makes me feel as if rather than gaining an hour with the changing of the clocks, we’ve actually lost about four.
These lost hours are what propel us toward hibernation, or at least carbohydrates and cozy mysteries. We turn inward, measuring the hours by midnight snowfalls and mugs of cocoa, and remain that way until New Years’ resolutions and the blinding January sunlight drive us out of our dens.
With the coming winter in mind, I went out today and, in the bleary November sunlight, put the gardens at the circle park to bed. Yesterday my excellent neighbour and I planted about 100 bulbs as a springtime surprise to our community, and today I mulched the beds with fallen leaves, swept the walks, and communed with the native plants tucking themselves in for winter.
Swamp milkweed podshabitat logs
I am so pleased with what we accomplished this year at the circle park. In April the park was barren, much of its soil compressed into hardpan. In a single growing season we have transformed much of it into a living green space, replete with native flowering plants buzzing with insects. But I think the real measure of the park’s progress has been its late-season appearance–seed-heads bursting with promise, habitat logs settling into the soil, fallen leaves laid down like a blanket. It looks like a healthy woodland, a place possessed of its own sense of time, whose rhythms are closer akin to Kairos rather than to any arbitrary changing of the clocks.
Yesterday afternoon the sky cleared after a week of intense humidity ended by 12 hours of excellent, soaking rain. The sky turned that saturated blue of mid-century memory, and fluffy white clouds sailed across it, borne on the sort of breeze that billows washing on the line. By evening there was a hint of cool in the air. The sunset had a late-summer quality: oranges instead of reds; a skein of cirrus cloud instead of blue fading, ever so slowly, to purple. At dusk the crickets started up their chorus, as they do every year at the end of July, and around me I felt summer begin to grow long in the tooth. It was a good night for sleeping.
The lavender fields were entrancing.
Just over a week ago I spent a few precious days visiting my closest friend and her husband in Northumberland County. We’ve known each other for more than 25 years, after meeting at graduate school, and share many things in common, from cultural background to family history to intellectual outlook to a shared love of barbecue-flavoured potato chips from Giant Tiger. After two days spent visiting our usual haunts up-country, including Laveanne’s gorgeous lavender fields just north of Port Hope, Rice Lake and the inimitable Rhino’s at Bewdley, Millbrook (where we always stop in at the delightful consignment store The Joneses), we retired to her sunporch, where my friend (who has lived and worked in very hot as well as sub-Arctic places) mused that one of the reasons we appreciate summer so much in Canada is because winter is so long.
We sat there and sighed, and looked out at her beautiful garden, and considered whether the potatoes were ready to dig, because nothing epitomizes those low-angled days of late summer more than a feed of new potatoes, boiled and smashed and served with butter and salt.
Back home in Toronto, I pulled fat tomatoes from the vine and snipped hot peppers and picked the last (well: almost the last) of the raspberries. I pulled the first of the garlic (good bulbs, not huge but the biggest I’ve grown yet) and hung them to dry and thought: it is the beginning of the harvest season. My herbs are due for a second cutting. I ran my fingers across the lemon verbena and realized: it is almost time to make jelly.
This morning the air is cool; the light pale. A merlin—a lady hawk, my neighbour calls it—swoops aggressively over the cedars with a staccato screech, hoping to flush small birds from the branches. I feel protective of the robins, who sound the alarm before regrouping and checking in with one another. Too soon the robins will begin to travel south, until one day in late September I will realize it has been a while since I last heard—or saw—one.
And I am just sitting here, typing, for the pleasure of feeling my fingers on the keyboard. No big thoughts here (I have several draft posts of those), apart from a growing conviction that every hour spent writing a blog post is a better use of time than scrolling social media. Yesterday afternoon, while doing research on a salad set of apple-shaped glass dishes I had picked up at Value Village, I happened across several blog posts (all dated five or six years ago; none of the blogs had updated since about 2018) and felt a deep sense of loss. Less than a decade ago, the internet ‘out here’ was a vastly richer and more open space, before social media platforms sucked the life out of it, absorbing nearly all public conversations into their maw and distorting discourse until it became almost unrecognisable. Online research itself has been flattened, as material that was once searchable has been sucked into proprietary platforms and search results themselves narrowed increasingly by algorithms spitting out results according to their whims. And then there is the disturbing problem of social media sites and search giants alike explicitly quashing news content.
Oops: no longer just typing. Deep breath.
Back to typing.
Ravenhead ‘Siesta’ salad set in bright yellow
Those apple-shaped dishes I bought the other day are, it turns out, from Ravenhead’s ‘Siesta’ line and date to the 1970s. The Siesta line was reportedly created by noted glass designer Alexander Hardie (under John Clappison) in 1973; Ravenhead was a well-known UK-based glass company. Weirdly, the images I am able to find online all show these dishes in clear or amber glass, while mine are a sunny yellow.
As summer grows long in the tooth, I am looking forward to using these dishes to serve out a harvest-themed salad (something with apples, nuts, cranberries, arugula and goat cheese, perhaps) in our shortly-to-be-renovated dining room, about which more anon.
And now, as the day warms (it is past eight o’clock, and the sun is cresting the cedars), I must shower and dress, and walk the cats, and find time to row, and tend to the day’s doings.
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Afternoon update: I pulled the rest of the garlic, and made what may be this season’s final pick of raspberries. In a little while I’ll do a second cutting of herbs.
The sun is bright, the breeze is fresh, and I am soaking up every moment of peace.
Early this afternoon a friend posted online that fat snowflakes were falling on her southwestern Ontario city. This was my cue to go out and cut the bright red sprays of pineapple sage blossoms that are the last thing to bloom in my garden, and bring them in to set in a vase. In previous years I have also marked this occasion by making pineapple sage bread or pineapple sage jelly, but this year (unless I feel spectacularly ambitious tomorrow—and already I do feel tempted) the cut flowers are going to provide their own lovely coda to fall.
Watching the sky, I also went down the street to tend to our bur oak, guerrilla planted in the circle park about three years ago. The oak has withstood the ravages of kids, dogs and City parks crews, but I was a little concerned about someone or something knocking it over during the coming winter. I hammered in three additional stakes and wrapped fencing around them to provide a bit more protection. I was pleased to see next year’s buds already well-formed.
While I was doing this work, a woman stopped to chat about the oak. She told me she also has a bur oak in her front garden, and tends it with care. We talked about trees, raccoons, and the ecological responsibilities of urban citizens. She told me she feels very close to her tree; adding that it’s hard not to love something you care for.
I feel the same about our little oak. It’s hard not to hope too much for its future: the folly (and unfortunate necessity) of urban forestry is that trees are planted as singletons, whereas in a woodland environment dozens of seedings might grow in a square metre, insurance against drought, cold, or the grazing mouths of hungry animals.
Still, next year I might see if it’s possible to obtain another bur oak, or two, and get a small oak plantation going in the circle park. We are already nurturing a (non-native) horse chestnut, a white or red oak, and an American elm sapling that is reportedly resistant to Dutch Elm Disease in pots in our garden, for future guerrilla planting, and it wouldn’t hurt to add at least one more bur oak. German forester Peter Wohlleben‘s work suggests trees grow best in communities, so the least we can do is try to get one going.
After tending to our oak, I came home, packed away the last of the pots on the front verandah (and dug in and heavily mulched some sweet cicely and Angelica in hopes it might overwinter in its containers), put the pineapple sage blossoms in water, and turned my internal clock from fall to winter mode.
At six o’clock the setting moon casts its waning glow in the west, while a thin wedge of dawn opens up on the eastern horizon. A pale, thin dawn that silhouettes the trees, stark and bare on this November morning. At seven the little birds congregate at the feeder, wings buffeting the air, their tiny heated hearts beating impossibly fast. Beneath them fat squirrels gather seeds the birds kick down and plan their own incursions at the feeder.
Yesterday, on the last improbably warm day of this beautiful fall, I finished putting the gardens to bed. On Thursday I planted the garlic, pushing fat cloves down into yielding soil, and set the containers against a stone wall in our front garden where they will receive reflected heat and light, and yesterday I mulched them and tucked leaves deep around the containers.
Yesterday I pulled the last of the tomatoes, harvesting the green fruit, and picked red and green peppers. One final, fibrous eggplant revealed itself, too woody to be eaten, and so with regret it went into the compost. All the containers are now tucked away; the walks swept; leaves mounded on the gardens; a couple of nursery trees dug down into the soil to overwinter; patio furniture put away; the air conditioning compressor covered; verandahs swept.
The final task—the one I always put off until last—was to clean out the eavestroughs on the garage. A few years ago we had the eavestroughs on the house replaced and covered with gutter shields, and this has saved us from needing to wedge an extension ladder between the houses, climb up two stories and stick our heads above the roofline in the narrow space, hoping not to swallow too much leaf litter while hauling it out. But the garage eavestroughs are old and uncovered, and fill up over the season with decaying leaf material and bits of grit from the old shingles. Usually I complete this messy task on the last possible day, while rain and flurries swirl about my frozen head. Yesterday it merely rained, a warm rain, as I sang ‘Swamp Thing’ to myself and hauled buckets of sludge down a step ladder and dumped them into the compost (where they will make incredibly rich soil).
Then I put the ladder away, swept the walks one last time, and cast my eyes over the gardens, looking for anything that might be vulnerable to winter. The only container plant left uncovered is the pineapple sage, now blooming in bright red fireworks, which I will cut and bring in today before tucking the very last of the pots away.
There are flurries in the forecast for tomorrow, and then it will be time to turn inward, to warm interior spaces, and hearty meals, and cozy evenings spent with books.
