"Crocuses have come; wind flowers
Tremble against quick April. Violets put on the night's blue, Primroses wear the pale dawn, The gold daffodils have stolen From the sun." "This Fevers Me" Richard Eberhart "Beneath the light, against your white door, The smallest moths, like Chinese fans, Flatten themselves, silver and silver-gilt Over pale yellow, orange, or gray." "A Cold Spring" Elizabeth Bishop "Always it happens when we are not there-- The tree leaps up alive into the air, Small open parasols of Chinese green Wave on each twig." "Metamorphosis" May Sarton The Language of Spring: Poems for the Season of Renewal with poems selected by Robert Atwan was published by Beacon Press in 2003.
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Trees are an integral part of the biodiversity that sustains life on Earth. Trees provide oxygen, food, wood, cooling, medicinal remedies, solace and inspiration. They are incredibly efficient carbon sinks, sequestering millions of tons of carbon dioxide yearly. Trees define our lives.
There are approximately three trillion trees made up of seventy-five thousand species, but that is only half as many as there were when humans turned to agriculture twelve thousand years ago. In the Amazon, forests are burning at the rate of twenty-two square feet a minute while central Africa loses ten million acres a year. Human-caused climate change has brought more insect and fungal infections, increasing numbers of fires and drought, and rising tides as freshwater tables drop. Forests are being poisoned through mining practices as well. Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future was written by Daniel Lewis and published by Avid Reader Press in 2024. Beginning in the 1840's, large stretches of California's redwoods were logged for uses as varied as buildings, piers, furniture, caskets, roadways, cesspools and pipes. More than 96 percent of the original forests were harvested, leaving only ninety thousand old growth trees. The largest redwood trees are now protected by either the state or federal government.
Earthquakes are a continuing hazard. The Cascadia subduction zone runs down the western coast of the United States beneath the biggest concentration of old-growth redwoods in the world. In the 19th century, Humboldt County's Bay indigenous tribe recounted trees falling into fissures during an earthquake. As in the past, tsunamis could also level swathes of forest. Individual trees can face challenges. Sometimes trees tip over when subsurface water saturates the area below the roots or a tree's taproot may die. When one tree topples over, others can be brought down at the same time. Wounds and fire scars provide an opening to organisms injurious to the tree. Millions of years ago, trees suffered from a lack of carbon dioxide. While we have an abundance now, the accompanying side effects of drought and fires, higher temperatures and increased insect infestations pose their own risks. Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future was written by Daniel Lewis and published by Avid Reader Press in 2024. BBC's series Earth: One Planet, Many Lives hosted by Chris Peckham relates the amazing history of our planet. One episode recounts how the entire planet froze, including the equator, after a period of warm temperatures and another episode reveals how the planet became barren rock after having been covered with trees and other vegetation. The first episode explains how scientists think almost all marine life and seventy per cent of land vertebrates died 252 million years ago.
Enormous volcanic eruptions spanning two million years precipitated this mass extinction event, creating a 'line of death' in rock formations around the world. Following this fiery spectacle, intermittent intensive rains for almost two million years enabled life to recover and provided the conditions for the arrival of the dinosaurs. The total number of living creatures today accounts for less than one per cent of all those that have ever existed on Earth. The exotic woodblock prints from Japan had a striking effect on European art in the latter half of the 19th century. The discovery of a Japanese picture book in a crate of porcelain tea service shipped to France in 1836 marked the beginning of the immense popularity of this art form in Europe. Afterwards, inexpensive Japanese prints were collected and discussed by Impressionist painters and literary figures. Even Debussy's music was influenced by Hokusai's print "The Great Wave."
The bright colors, the unusual compositions and perspectives, the depictions of everyday life and the use of the familiar vanishing point perspective that the Japanese had adopted from European paintings appealed to Europeans disillusioned with academic art. Besides using the vanishing point perspective, Hokusai employed Prussian blue pigment from Europe in his famous "The Great Wave" print, originally known as "Under the Wave off Kanagawa." Today, it is one of the most recognizable works of art in the world. The Japonisme craze has influenced European and American art into our time. Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence by Sarah E. Thompson was published by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2023. "Hokusai's The Great Wave" is a chapter in Neil MacGregor's A History of the world in 100 Objects which was published by Penguin Books in 2010 and 2011 by Viking Penguin in the United States. Intrigued by the wide variety of marvelous decorative elements on Jomon pots, I made several pots based on their designs when I was working in clay. In his A History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor chooses a Japanese Jomon clay vessel from approximately 5000 B.C.E. for one of his chapters.
Japan produced the world's first pots. A few thousand years later, the first known pots in the Middle East and North Africa were made, and pots in the Americas followed a few thousand years after that. The Jomon pots were created with coils of clay and decorated at first with fibers or cords and later with more elaborate designs. Food was first stored in baskets or in the ground, but the invention of clay pots created new possibilities. Not only did they protect food from insects and other animals, but pots also changed peoples' diets. The Jomon people could now cook seafood, meat and possibly nuts such as acorns as well. Japan may have been "the birthplace of the soup and the home of the stew." Mr. MacGregor's book was published by Penguin Books in 2010 and in 2011 by Viking Penguin in the United States. In his poem "Spring and All", William Carlos Williams wrote that "sluggish dazed spring" was approaching, and that today there is grass but tomorrow "the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf" will appear. Chilled by the "familiar" wind, plants "enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain" but that "Rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken."
Signs of spring are slowly beginning to emerge in the Pacific Northwest. Bulbs are pushing up through the soil and cautious leaves are appearing on some of the shrubs in my yard. Blossoming trees and birdsong are starting to define the days. Throughout the winter, the tree outside my door has sported a growing array of lichens, persisting year-round while the tree's leaves are still just a memory. In the January 17th article in his "Plantwatch" series for the Guardian newspaper, Paul Simons reported on lichens' unworldly survival abilities. Lichens attached outside the International Space Station for 18 months were able to photosynthesize despite being exposed to radiation, extreme temperatures, the vacuum of space and being without water. They can cope with radiation 12,000 times the lethal dose for humans. "Spring and All" is included in The Discovery of Poetry by Frances Mayes published by Harvest in 2001. Paul Simons writes a series of illuminating articles on plants in his "Plantwatch" columns for the Guardian newspaper. In his February 21st article, he wrote about the recovery of the redwoods at California's Big Basin state park after a wildfire blackened the trees and destroyed their foliage, raising fears that the redwoods might not survive. After two years, the forest is green again as new needles emerged, most of the growth coming from buds under the bark or from deep within the trees, with some having been dormant for more than a thousand years. The buds utilized sugars stored for up to 21 years to power this growth.
In an earlier article, Simons reveals the positive impact of mosses in combating air pollution and changes in our climate. Mosses can be found in such varied environments as deserts and polar areas. They act as pioneers in bare ground for successive waves of plants and store tons of carbon. Mosses absorb pollutants and dust along with moisture through their leaves. Soils covered with moss have more nutrients, better levels of decomposing materials, lower numbers of soil-borne plant diseases and are less prone to erosion than soil without mosses. Chile's renowned botanical garden was almost entirely destroyed by one of the devastating wildfires that recently swept across central Chile. A group of visitors managed to escape the fire by huddling on the park's front lawn, but a greenhouse keeper and three family members died in another part of the garden.
The botanical garden at Vina del Mar is one of the world's largest, and has preserved many endemic plant species as well as rare cactuses. A center for research, the one-and-a-half square mile garden contained more than a thousand species of trees, including some from Easter Island. The garden also contained a large collection of plants from the Juan Fernandez Islands. Chilean officials suspect that the fire destroying the garden was intentionally set. Almost forty square miles were burned on Friday by wildfires in Valparaiso province as well. High temperatures and drought exacerbated by the El Nino weather pattern along with unexpected high winds created the conditions for these catastrophic fires. The park's director is confident that the garden's native plants will recover once the rains return in May. Some exotic plants survived the fire, including the Ginkgo biloba trees from Japan in the "Garden of Peace" section that had also survived the atomic blast in Hiroshima. The information came from Jack Nicas' article "Tragedy, Resilience and a Miracle at Chile's Burned Botanical Garden" in the New York Times from February 5, 2024. Steppe regions are areas of grasses, shrubs and herbaceous plants. Steppes' difficult climatic conditions of low moisture, high winds and temperature extremes discourage the growth of trees.
The Great Plains of the United States are one of the four major steppe regions of the world. This prairie extends from Alberta and Saskatchewan down to Texas. Human activities such as converting vast stretches of grassland into farmland have caused an enormous loss of topsoil and biodiversity. Another change created by humans was the introduction of foreign weeds such as tumbleweed. When Volga Germans fled from Russia to escape conscription under Alexander the Third, they inadvertently brought these invasive plants along with their durum wheat seeds. The intermountain North American steppe includes the Columbia Plateau, the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau. The mountain ranges along the western United States block most of the maritime rain from reaching the interior. Shrubs such as sagebrush predominate in the western portion because winter precipitation is the main source of moisture but on the eastern edge, grasslands increase because of occasional rainfall provided by the thunderstorms of the North American monsoons. Fire is also an important element because grass quickly grows back after a fire while sagebrush recovers slowly. Steppes By Michael Bone, Dan Johnson, Panayoti Kelaidis, Mike Kintgen and Larry G, Vickerman was published by Timber Press in 2015. Humans are changing ocean environments and the species of seaweed that grow there. Oceans are warming and acidifying. One alarming result is that Pacific kelp forests are dying back.
Seaweed habitats are being damaged or created by human intervention. Dredge fishing can strip away seaweed along with other ocean life. The construction of concrete wharves and breakwaters remove sand and rock suitable for seaweed growth. Conversely, fertilizer runoff can enable the growth of nuisance seaweeds along the coast. The oceans' gyres once kept different kinds of seaweed separate but now human activity is causing changes to ocean currents which then intermix different species. The Panama Canal and the Suez Canal have both provided channels for new varieties. Ships' ballast water has been the conduit for seaweed spores to move around the world on its shipping lanes. John H. Bothwell's Seaweeds of the World was published by Princeton University Press in 2023. Remarkable numbers of fish once inhabited coral reefs, but those numbers have been dramatically reduced because of overfishing. Many species that were once abundant are now rare or extinct so that, in turn, other species are then targeted. When too many fish are taken, there are no longer enough fish available to replenish the population.
Because of global warming, overfishing and pollution, the reefs themselves are at risk. Due to the loss of the reef inhabitants and the resultant growth of seaweed no longer kept in check by grazing fish, bacteria can take over. The reefs that should "snap and crackle continuously with the bustle of fish, snapping shrimps" are growing quiet. According to an article about the state of the oceans in the Guardian newspaper, mass bleaching of coral reefs could occur over the next two years because of the arrival of El Nino in the Indo-Pacific. Because every pair of El Nino events since 1997 have led to global mass bleaching of reefs, experts are afraid that we may now be reaching a tipping point. Reef species will die and as much as twenty-five per cent of the ocean biodiversity would be at risk. Coral Reefs: A Natural History by Charles Sheppard was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. The Guardian newspaper article by Karen McVeigh was published on December 7, 2023. Recently a Navy Poseidon plane overshot a runway, plunging into Hawaii's Kaneohe Bay and plowing into a coral reef. The Navy placed a floating barrier around it to protect the reef from hazardous materials as well as draining the remaining fuel from the plane. The area, known for snorkeling, fishing, and swimming, had "only recently recovered from sewage spills in the 1960s and '70s" and was also "suffering the effects of climate change and overfishing."
Less dramatic damage happens every day when boat anchors drag across coral reefs. In places where fishing fleets or vacationers in boats congregate, significant damage to seagrass beds and reefs can occur. Every tidal cycle scraps the area within the circumference surrounding the anchor and this can happen multiple times as the boats are moved and anchored again. Large ships can destroy a much greater area, often requiring many decades for the reefs to recover. The information in the first paragraph is from Livia Albeck-Ripka's article "U.S. Navy Works to Salvage Plane From Fragile Hawaiian Bay" in the December 1, 2023 edition of the New York Times. The source for the section on anchoring is Coral Reefs: A Natural History by Charles Sheppard and published by Princeton University Press in 2021. During a walk on Thanksgiving around an Everett estuary in Washington state, I spotted a Black Phoebe making its characteristic forays after insects. The bird was far north of its usual range in the Southwest. The last time I had seen one was by a creek in the mountains south of Tucson when I lived in the area.
The sighting recalled an unexpected encounter years earlier with a different bird. My husband and I were driving along a highway near Tucson when I noticed a movement on a nearby abandoned road. We drove over to investigate and were astonished to discover a Common Loon stranded on the broken macadam. Perhaps it had mistaken the gleam of the road for a stretch of water, but it was now marooned. Draping a towel over the bird's head to shield us from its beak until we could get inside our VW bus, we put it in the back and removed its hood. As we drove, the loon protested intermittently until I closed the curtains against the desert sun and then it was quiet. A nearby state park gave us the address of a wildlife rehabilitator. The loon gave a heartrending cry when the rehabilitator put it in a cage, but she said it was not seriously injured and that she would feed it and then release it in a couple of days. Afterwards I spotted a report in the local Audubon newsletter of a sighting of a Common Loon on a lake that was near her house. Later research revealed that loons from Mexico sometimes migrate over the desert. For flowering plants, fibrous roots and taproots are the two main types of roots. Branching fibrous roots spread throughout the soil extracting moisture and nutrients. Taproots usually have one main root with much smaller auxiliary roots, enabling plants to obtain water and nutrients from much deeper in the soil.
Roots anchor plants in the ground, but bulbs can pull themselves deeper into the earth with contractile roots, allowing the bulb to escape the colder surface temperatures of winter or the drying effects of the sun in summer. The bulb is also less likely to be eaten by an animal. Epiphytic plants in the canopy employ aerial roots to secure themselves to their host trees. Rain, mist, and fog supply the necessary moisture to the plant. The American edition of Smithsonian Flora: Inside the Secret World of Plants was published by DK Publishing in 2018. Seeds can successfully disperse in many ways. Forgotten seeds hidden by birds and squirrels can germinate, but a seed covered by fruit is a more reliable strategy for plants. Elephants are particularly suited for spreading a large variety of seeds over great distances.
Over eighty families of plants depend on ants for seed dispersal. Although they do not travel very far, the ants move the seeds underground where they are safe from fire and rodents. Barbed plants use mechanical means that enable the seed to travel further away from the parent plant. Fresh water or seawater can also move seeds great distances. Besides heavy rains and proximity to rivers, seeds can be carried by watercraft, beavers, fish, and turtles. Coconuts are often ferried by ocean currents, but few seeds can tolerate saltwater. (In one of the enjoyable sidebars in her book Seeds, Carolyn Fry recounts how bath toys dumped by a ship travelling between Hong Kong and Tacoma during a storm vividly illustrate the power of ocean currents. The toys washed ashore in Japan, North America, Hawaii, Australia, Indonesia, and South America, while some were found frozen in Arctic ice.) Some seeds depend on self-propulsion or gravity. It is a method better suited to small plants. Wind-blown seeds are often able to colonize open areas with inadequate soils and harsh conditions such as deserts, sand dunes, and the boundaries of riverbanks and forests. The first species of plants to colonize the altered terrain of Mount St. Helens after its eruption were most likely from seeds carried by the wind. Winged seeds and gyrating seeds provide two methods of flight. Tumbleweeds are another example of wind dispersal. Seeds by Carolyn Fry was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016. One hundred million years ago the development of flowers changed our world. Like the spores and pinecone seeds, the first simple flowers were wind pollinated. The Cretaceous era's innovation was a seed within a flower fertilized by pollen—a seed that was already an "embryonic plant packed in a little enclosed box stuffed full of nutritious food." Not only could it be carried by the wind, it could attach itself to animals with hooks, or attract animals with its fruit.
Animals responded to this change. Insects fed on and pollinated the plants and the flowers grew larger and more complicated in turn. Grasslands expanded and herbivores replaced the dinosaurs while birds developed beaks instead of teeth. The quote was from The Immense Journey written by Loren Eiseley and first published by Random House and then by Time Incorporated in 1962. "...so the youth of this spring all at once is over
it has come upon us again taking us once more by surprise just as we began to believe that those fields would always be green" The concluding lines of "Youth of Grass" by W. S. Merwin in The Shadows of Sirius published by Copper Canyon Press in 2009. "Late at night, the end of Summer, The Autumn constellations Glow in the arid heaven." Kenneth Rexroth from The Dragon and the Unicorn published by New Directions in 1952. Today we are likely to think of paradise as a tropical island, but medieval Europeans had a different concept of a Garden of Eden as a paradise still existing on earth but apart from it at the same time. Paradise was thought to be the perfect place for humans on earth as well as being a future heaven.
Medieval mapmakers were faced with the problem of where to place paradise on their maps. Often positioning it on the edge of their world maps, different mapmakers chose varied locations. One problem was finding an area at an altitude sufficient to have escaped the Flood during Noah's time. Over the centuries, scholars thought paradise might be located in the Middle East, Africa, the tropics, and even Armenia. At the end of the fifteenth century, paradise disappeared from the maps. Along with the scholars' inability to find a suitable location for paradise, reports from merchants and travelers of their discoveries contributed to its demise. Mapping Paradise was written by Alessandro Scafi and published by the University of Chicago in 2006. Greeks and Romans visited Delphi and other sacred places before the Christian tradition of going to the Holy Lands or to churches containing holy relics began. Christian pilgrims hoped to secure merit towards salvation, be cured of physical ailments or to atone for their sins. Jews traveled to the temple at Jerusalem, and in the New World, Our Lady of Guadalupe was a focus of devotion for its indigenous inhabitants.
Muslims try to travel to Mecca at least once in their lives. Many Hindus want to travel to Varanasi but there are many other sacred sites that they can visit, while Jains favor the place where a prophet was born or died. Initially Buddhist pilgrims went to India, but they eventually travelled to many areas throughout Asia. Shinto pilgrimages are popular activities in Japan. Pilgrimage can be a secular activity as well as a religious one. Many pilgrims travel the Camino de Santiago route or to Canterbury Cathedral because of their cultural significance or to escape the confines of modern life. Others, inspired by music, travel to Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris to visit Jim Morrison's grave or to the haunts of classical composers such as Bach or Mozart. Information about pilgrimages can be found at britannica.com. |
AuthorI am a Northwest artist making collages from mulberry papers stamped by hand from original images that I have carved. Archives
April 2024
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