Susan's Meadow Knoll Journal

April 4.

Back home after a quiet week of reading and writing. I’m working on a project I’m calling Landscapes of Solitude. I was able to rough out some of the material and decide how the whole might be shaped. But this is a book that will take a while to develop, and I’m content to let it rest now, while I turn to other things, back here at Meadow Knoll. While I’ve been gone, the bluebonnets have begun to bloom. From the back deck, the upper meadow looks like a vast lake of blue; in the south meadow, there are mounds and masses of blue blooms, lovely against the Mustang grape vine that is beginning to cover the fence.

April 6.

The creek is beginning to come to life again. It dried up completely during the drought, and the raccoons and herons snatched up the stranded fish and crayfish—some creatures dying, others living by their deaths in nature’s great cycle. Now, the lake is overflowing into the creek, and the flowing water brings with it small fish and spawn. This morning, I even saw a large carp lurking in the mud of Long Pool, and a snapping turtle sliding into the water. Down the creek, near Ripple Run, I planted some native Texas columbines two years ago. They managed to survive in spite of the drought, and they’re blooming now, a sunny yellow against the darker shadows of the water.

 

 

April 7.

Another Texas native, the Texas mountain laurel, is blooming now. We have about a dozen of these lovely small trees, all grown from seed that I gathered myself (from container-grown trees in an Austin shopping center, razed now) about ten years ago. This plant, Sophora secundiflora, isn’t a laurel at all, but belongs to the pea family—readily apparent when you see its purple blooms, which look a little like clusters of sweet peas and smell exactly like grape Kool-Aid. (The truth, honestly!) The plant is native to the arid trans-Pecos region of central and south Texas and grows best in the loose limestone soils of hillsides. It’s perfect for dry-region gardening, and has yet another plus: the deer won’t eat it! I enjoy these trees even more because I remember them as little seedlings—something like watching your children grow up. They do grow slowly, though—no instant gratification here!

April 8.

Bill and I gave a talk to the Austin chapter of Sisters in Crime this afternoon. We enjoy talking about the books and our writing work, especially when there are other writers in the audience. It’s fun to talk about the process and the often frustrating business of writing with people who have been there, done that. When we got home, we saw a female wild turkey feeding down by the creek. I ran for the camera but couldn’t get her picture. Bill snapped one while I was gone, though—here it is. We’ve been hearing the loud "gobble gobble" of the tom turkey very early in the morning, his spring-time mating call. With all this sexy stuff going on, it won’t be long before the female will build her nest and lay her eggs. We’ve seen mama turkeys with as many as five or six young birds during the summer—so sweet and funny, with their awkward, zig-zagging run and their sudden bursts of flight. I love to see these birds; they remind me that we really do live in a wild place: not pure wilderness, perhaps, but nearly so.

April 10. We’ve been living with a sad mystery for the past few days. Since January, we’ve found a half-dozen wild birds dead or dying—adult male cardinals, a juvenile redwing blackbird, a red finch, a warbler. After some sleuthing on the Internet, I emailed the Texas Parks and Wildlife and was referred to a division called "Kills and Spills" (an appropriate name!). Joan Glass, the wildlife biologist there, replied that we’re most likely seeing an outbreak of salmonella poisoning. Here’s what she says: "This year, the only organism verified has been salmonella [I had speculated that we might be seeing avian botulism] and it has been widespread. During migration season the birds are in large flocks and easily spread it from bird to bird on feathers or on perches. Of course it is also spread at feeder perches and through bird droppings on feed. Salmonella is one of the animal disease organisms that will cause disease in humans also. Be sure to wash your hands whenever you are in the areas with the birds." When I was sleuthing on the web, I discovered a note from a woman in New Zealand who reported that the neighborhood cats were dying and was afraid that someone was poisoning them. The biologist who responded to her suggested that avian botulism was the culprit. This is something I’d never known about--an interesting and sad part of the natural process.

April 13.

The roses are stunning just now. The one in the picture, climbing up the arch, is called Pinkie. Behind it is another stunner, purple verbena. This is not the wild variety, but a domesticated hybrid—still, it is wild as they come, spreading enthusiastically wherever it wants to go. The antique roses do far better here than the newer hybrids—less black spot, less watering (important during our droughts!), more blooms.

 

 

 

April 15.

When Bill was hauling junk from the new property, he found several lengths of rusted iron pipe 16" in diameter and 24"-30" long—maybe from the gas pipeline which was laid on the neighboring ranch fifteen years ago. I appropriated them for the garden, and one became the base for an armilary sphere. Here’s a picture of it, with a feathery fennel just coming up at the base, interwoven with some exuberant purple verbena, and garden sage in bloom (it’s a perennial for us here) on the right. The grass to the right, behind the armilary, is miscanthus—too large for its spot, but beautiful just the same—and behind it all, a splendid Doucher rose in glorious bloom. Just now, the garden is truly enchanted.

April 17. Back at work again, on China #11. This book, which will be published in 2002, is called Indigo Dying and will feature dye plants. I’ve been working on the character set, and Bill has given me a couple of really good plot ideas. For the last few books, I did a great deal of the research on the Internet. With this one, it looks like I’ll be doing even more. I’ve subscribed to a Yahoo list-serve that focuses on natural dyes and I’m enjoying the messages that people send to one another. These women are really involved with their craft and are experts at what they do, and I learn a great deal by eavesdropping on their conversations with each other. There’s also an archive, in case I want to do more extensive background work, and they’ve mentioned quite a few books I didn’t know about. I probably won’t contribute to the conversation, but I love lurking. I’m also lurking on a couple of spinning & weaving lists, and today I ordered a spindle and some wool. This is the kind of thing I love about writing the China books—I get to learn so many new things. I can’t imagine another kind of work that would suit me better or make me happier.

April 19.

Last year, I bought a package of Texas A&M hybrid bluebonnet seeds—but they’re not blue, they’re maroon. (Of course. Maroon is the Aggie color.) Funny thing, though. They didn’t germinate very well last year because of our drought, so many of these that have come up this year must have germinated from the original sowing. They’ve also appeared, splendidly maroon, in places where I didn’t plant them, which suggests that they self-sow like ordinary blue bluebonnets. But hybrids aren’t supposed to come true (that is, maroon) from seed! It’s a great mystery.

April 23. We’ve had company this weekend—Bill’s mother from Houston and Aunt Rosa Dene and Uncle Bob from Indianapolis. On Friday, we visited the Wildflower Research Institute in Austin. I’d never been there before and found it interesting and fun to share with Aunt Rosa Dene (another wild flower lover), and also wonderfully reassuring. It turns out that, here at Meadow Knoll, we have all the wildflowers they are exhibiting at the Institute, although they have some some lovely arbors that I covet! While we were there, I took a picture of a pretty wildflower that has turned our pastures pink. It’s a gaura, the grandmomma of the hybrid gauras I’ve been seeing in so many of the perennial catalogs. It’s small but hugely fragrant; here, the butterflies love it (although I didn’t see a great many butterflies at the Institute). We also had a great deal of wind over the weekend, and the roses were stripped. The ground is littered with pink and white and red petals.

April 24. I had a wonderful adventure today—drove over to Lexington to meet Lisa Shell, who raises colored angora goats and is a fiber artist. I loved seeing her beautiful handwoven pieces, seeing her looms and her collection of wonderful spinning wheels, meeting her goats, and learning about her life as a shepherd and artist. I love to think of her raising her goats, shearing them, carding and spinning their fleece, weaving it, and marketing her lovely work--a remarkable process, and she stays with it from start to finish. Here’s a picture of Lisa and me and one of her bottle-fed babies, with a worried mama looking on. Isn’t she a cutie? Lisa has given me a bushel of new ideas for one of the characters in Indigo Dying, the book I’m working on just now. I also learned about the challenges she and her neighbors face, confronted by an encroaching strip mine that threatens to engulf that beautiful area. For more about Lisa, you can visit her website, at http://www.kairanch.com. For more about the strip mine and the problems it poses, see http://www.neighborsforneighbors.com. Meeting creative, committed people like Lisa and her husband Randy (and their wonderful neighbors, all of whom are artists) is one of the great joys of writing, as far as I’m concerned.

April 26. We’re experiencing our annual bug invasion—more specifically, the darn worms that visit the Texas mountain laurels every year. This year, the little trees (there’s more about them in my April 7 entry, and a picture) are absolutely infested with the darn worms. We don’t spray with chemicals and in earlier years have had pretty good luck with hand-picking and squishing—a time-consuming, but effective and somehow psychologically-rewarding process. The tree in the garden has the most bugs on it. On Monday, I picked off sixty-some. Yesterday, Bill squished another fifty. I just picked seventy-five. They’ve eaten almost all the new leaves! The invasion is usually short-lived and they won’t kill the tree, but it’s going to look pretty ragged for the rest of the year, and the laurels along the creek don’t look much better. Miles, my garden helper, used to work in a plant nursery where they sprayed the laurels with Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a biological insecticide. Next year, I guess that’s what we’ll have to use.

April 29. Yesterday, in Houston, I talked at the Herb Education Day of the South Texas Unit of the Herb Society of America. We had a full house (150 people!) and they had decorated the tables and the room, using China’s Thyme and Seasons and Ruby’s Crystal Cave. They made me feel like Queen for a Day and I enjoyed every minute of it. Today, though, it’s back to work in the garden, setting out the baby basils I’ve been growing under lights. They look strong and healthy and I’m already thinking happily ahead to the pails of pesto they’ll provide. At the herb gathering, I also bought four beautiful bronze fennel plants. Yes, I know that’s a lot of fennel, but it’s not for me, it’s for the black swallowtail caterpillars, which feed on fennel. Last year, I had only one plant and it was completely eaten up—but that’s okay, it came back in the fall, as lovely and lush as ever. Funny thing. I don’t mind letting the swallowtails have the fennel, but I hate the thought of those ugly little worms eating the mountain laurel!