Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
When I was a young’un in North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley, I often heard whipporwills. But in the 16 years I’ve been living in the Blue Ridge foothills, I had never heard a whipporwill until last night. It was very close — in my front yard, or in the edge of the woods that adjoin the yard. The video is terrible — it was almost dark. But you’ll be able to hear the whipporwill.
My deciduous magnolias are stunning this year. But tonight we’re expecting frost, and they can’t take much of that. All the other early blooms should be fine. But the deciduous magnolias hate frost.
The winter seemed long and cold, and February brought no early spring. And yet, for the first time in my 16 years here in the Appalachian foothills, I didn’t see a snowflake all winter. A few days of warmish rain in early February brought up flocks and flocks of tiny red clover sprouts from the seed I spread last fall. But the return of colder weather caused the clover leaves to shrink and wait for the next warm rain before they start growing again.
For months, I didn’t look at the National Weather Service’s long-range forecasts, knowing that they’d forecast nothing but more winter. But just now I took a peek. All the long-range forecasts — 10-day, 14-day, 30-day, and 90-day — are for warmer and wetter than normal. If those forecasts hold, then we should have a beautiful spring here and a good start for the vegetable gardens.
Foxes aren’t uncommon here. But I’m flattered that a fox is now hanging out in my yard. I got my old game camera working again and got a shot of the fox last night. I’ve also seen it on my security camera, and once I’ve seen it from an upstairs window.
During the past 48 hours, the camera caught lots of deer, two happy rabbits that are frequently seen, one possum, one raccoon, and the fox. Three or four wildlife trails lead out of the woods into the yard. There is plenty of cover in the yard, and, even in winter, lots to eat. Some critter, probably the raccoon, has been making little holes while digging for grubs. The fox, no doubt, catches voles. Ten years ago, a fox raised two pups in the woods just behind the house. I would love to have fox puppies in the yard again.
There are coyotes in the woods, but they never come close to any houses. I understand, and it seems plausible, that foxes sometimes stay close to human houses because they’re safer from the coyotes. As for the deer, they’re so well known here that most of them have names. We have bears, but they stay up on the ridge and down in the branch bottom. A year or so a neighbor saw a bobcat down at the footbridge that crosses a branch on my land.
It’s good to live where the wild things live.
Yep, I live in Carolina, and it was a very nice Sunday morning — the sun just above the treetops, temperature 42F with a few spots of light frost. For the past couple of weeks, the weather has been cool enough to work on re-establishing the habit of morning walks.
But I’m not sure that nothing could be finah than to be in Carolina. I think I might prefer to be sneaking into the McDonald’s at Paddington Station for coffee and an Egg McMuffin before catching a train to Edinburgh. Or, better yet, having a ridiculously huge Scottish breakfast in one of those cafes on Cockburn Street above Waverley Station. October is the very best month for travel. But October also is a very good month to stay at home and be content.
I’m following the Trump trials very closely, but I’ve had nothing to say about the trials here because the trails are going very well — as long as you’re not Donald Trump. And then there’s the circus in the U.S. House of Representatives. It seems to me that Democrats are handling that very well and have all the right contingency plans for whichever way Republicans try to go. As always, the stupidity of Republicans is astonishing — gaining absolutely nothing politically while generating millions of dollars worth of bad publicity for themselves. I think it’s important to keep in mind, though, that so-called moderate Republicans in the House, though they are too afraid of Trump to say anything in public, are working hard behind the scenes to get out of the trap that MAGA bomb-throwers have caught them in. It’s not impossible, if all-Republican tactics fail, that moderate Republicans will have to make some kind of deal with Democrats to elect a speaker. If they do, Republicans will have to pay heavily for it.
I’m about two-thirds through Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley. No Walter Scott novels are well-read these days, and Waverley is hardly ever mentioned. This surprises me, because of the nine or ten Walter Scott novels I’ve read, Waverley seems like one of the best candidates to be made into a movie. The Edward Waverley character reminds me a great deal of the Edmond Dantès character in Le Comte de Monte Cristo. We get Gothic scenes in the Highlands, castles, hovels, full-dress balls at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and a wide range of characters from eccentric earls to outlaws to the charismatic Flora MacDonald, who is famous for helping Bonnie Prince Charlie escape from government troops. (In the novel, the Flora MacDonald character is named Flora MacIvor.)
I could easily develop a fetish for leather-bound books. However, the uncommon ones would be very expensive. As for the common ones, the titles available are very limited. There is a good eBay market for the more common editions of leather-bound books from publishers such as the Franklin Library and Easton Press. The titles available for these so-called collectible editions are usually classics in the public domain. Easton Press is still in business. A five-book set of Tolkien’s books including the trilogy plus The Hobbit and The Silmarillion will cost you $395. Maybe someday. But it is a pleasure to actually read these nice editions. Many people buy them for display and never actually read them, which improves the secondhand market on eBay.
I’ve been interested in photography drones for a long time. But only recently did drones become halfway affordable. Smaller and smaller computer chips, improvements in battery technology, and smaller and better cameras have made it possible to build drones that weigh less than half a pound but which can shoot excellent 4K video. The drone I bought is a DJI Mini 3.
I took the photo above by putting the drone on its landing mat in the driveway in front of my house. There are trees all around me, so the driveway is the safest area for avoiding trees. I flew the drone straight up to an altitude of about 235 feet, then pointed it southwest to shoot this picture. The low mountains are the Sauratown Mountain chain, a small chain of mountains in Stokes and Surry counties (of North Carolina) about forty miles south of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. The three bumps to the right include Hanging Rock State Park, and the bump to the left is Sauratown Mountain.
It will certainly be a while before I have the skill to shoot any dramatic video with the drone. Learning to fly drones takes a lot of practice. Some of the YouTube videos shot with drones are amazing. There are lots of people who have been flying drones for years and who are very good pilots as well as good photographers and video editors. And it seems that a great many of them live in picturesque places such as the coasts of the U.K. (including Scotland) and Ireland. I have a lot to learn. But I’ll certainly have drone videos, and more drone photos in the future.
Fifteen years ago, after I cleared an acre of elderly pine trees for the house, the landscape looked like a huge red gash in the earth. I moved as fast as I could to restore ground cover and to start planting. Growth takes time, but nature moves fast. Though there is a band of grass on all sides of the house, this is woodland, and if I didn’t like woodland then I wouldn’t be here.
I planted a great many arbor vitae trees, as well as ornamentals such as deciduous magnolias, camellia, rose of Sharon, abelia, and rhododendron. But mostly I’ve let nature take its course, as all sorts of native trees volunteered and I left them alone to grow — poplars, persimmon, beech, maple, and oak. There was even a magnolia grandiflora already here. It was a spindly, shapeless thing that never got any light. But, once the pines were gone, the magnolia has grown into a very grand tree, as tall as the house and with a perfect magnolia shape.
You would think that the people in these parts would welcome a natural woodland landscape, but they fight it. They prefer huge, square, easy-to-mow lawns, with nothing to stop the eye. I have done everything possible to stop the eye, with a yard that is more like little ponds of grass that meander around the trees. Such a yard is a pain in the neck to mow. But now that I have a zero-turn mower, I can get the mowing done in less than two hours. That’s still a lot of grass, none of which is visible in this photo because so many things stop the eye.
There is another very welcome advantage to welcoming the woods into your yard. The cool air from the woods flows into the yard as the new trees gradually link up with the woodland canopy. Even a slight breeze is surprisingly cooling. The day will come when there will be shade on much of the roof even at midday, but we’re not there yet. And because the trees are deciduous, there’s plenty of sun in winter.
Few people see my house, because I’m near the end of a unpaved private road. But, of the people who have seen it, the abbey landscape is starting to inspire some envy, and a few country folk — country folk, who ought to know! — have asked me how I did it. That’s actually pretty easy. The first thing is make sure that there’s something growing everywhere, that no sun and no water are wasted. Even the ditch along the road in front of the house is a beautiful thing — tall grasses, some wildflowers, blackberries (which get out of hand and must be restrained) and persimmon trees. Not only do ditches channel and preserve runoff, the water makes them lush. They’re a path for wildlife, especially the rabbits, of which there are a great many. Except for the difficulty of mowing a yard in which nothing is flat and in which you can’t walk more than ten yards in any direction without bumping into something, a natural landscape is an easy landscape, suitable for lazy people. A minimum amount of time is spent fighting nature. Another thing I emphasize to the country folk — and the birds agree — is that you can’t have too many arbor vitae trees. Arbor vitae trees are hotels for birds, as are the dense thickets of honeysuckle and jasmine that grow along the top of the orchard fence.
My biggest disappointment is that the deer will eat almost anything. For example, azaleas can’t live through the night. I’d like to have more blooming things, but the deer won’t allow it. Defending my beloved daily lilies has been almost impossible, though I haven’t yet given up. Fortunately there are a great many green things that don’t taste good to the deer.
Every year, the house will be a little more hidden in the woods. I’m like a deer, or a rabbit, or even a cat. There have to be places to hide.
One of the best ideas I know for making the best of summer is: Eat more pesto. Already this season I’ve had pestos made of basil, kale, dandelions, and mixtures including parsley, dill, cilantro, and thyme. I was afraid that the dandelion pesto would be bitter, but it wasn’t. I did my best to counteract the strong taste of dandelions with other strong tastes — a little malt vinegar, and Gorgonzola cheese. I’ve realized that parmesan doesn’t have to be the default cheese for pesto.
I always like to have some good fiction and some good nonfiction going at the same time. I had high hopes this summer for Tad Williams’ The Dragonbone Chair, which was published in 1988. I stuck with it for 125 excruciating pages and finally flung it. Why did this book get so many fans and so many good reviews? It’s embarrassingly overwritten, lame in its attempts to be ever-so-clever in every last sentence. Nothing ever happens. There is scene after scene in which new characters are introduced, and dozens of other characters are named but never seen. There is scene after scene in new settings in an old castle, and dozens of other places are named but never seen. A database would be required to track it all. But there’s no motive to track it because it’s so boring. Who could possibly compare something this bad with the work of J.R.R. Tolkien? I’m not even going to waste shelf space on this book. On my next trip to the used book store, I’ll sell it. Until I can scare up some new fiction, I’ll stick with Peter Turchin’s new book, which I mentioned in a recent post.
For years, Ken and I have grieved over the abbey’s orchard. The peach crop always fails, early on. The squirrels steal all the apples exactly one day before they’re ripe. We do get some figs. But the trees that never let us down are the persimmon trees. They’re natives, so they’re not finicky and never sickly. For some reason, none of the wildlife raid the trees while the persimmons are still on the tree. They wait for it to drop. There are more persimmons in the yard each year than a single household can use. I do believe that Ken does his best to time his American college tours to persimmon season, which is late October. Last year, when he returned to Scotland, he took some persimmon seeds, which we had saved while making persimmon pudding. He planted the seeds in his Scottish greenhouse. He got lots of promising seedlings, some of which he took to Germany as a gift to his wife’s sister. In a few years, we’ll know how the trees are coming along. Our guess is that the German trees will like their climate better than the Scottish trees.
Because I don’t really watch broadcast (or cable) television, I had missed the long-running PBS series “Masterpiece Endeavour.” Just last month, the series had its ninth, and last, season on PBS. Having missed the earlier seasons, I decided to keep watching all of it, in order. I’m now on season 6. It is some of the best television I’ve ever seen. It’s intelligent, and made for adults. It’s not here-and-now. It’s set in Oxford in the late 1960s. The characters really grow on you. Each episode is complete in itself, but there are longer-running plot elements. I made a brief visit to Oxford in 2019. At the time, I didn’t know that the pub that I wanted to visit is the Lamb & Flag, which according to Wikipedia has been operating since 1566. Now I know. I’ll need another visit to Oxford to correct my mistake.
When one lives in the sticks, it is not uncommon to come upon wild things in flagrante delicto. These are eastern box turtles (Terrapene carolina). These turtles are very common here and are often seen crossing the road. Roads are very dangerous for them, because their instinct is to close up and stop. More and more people stop their cars and move them safely out of the road.
These turtles were safely on the side of the unpaved road I live on.
It irks me that I have to uglify my day lily bank to try to keep the deer from eating the day lilies. This year, they started eating them very early, without waiting for the flower stalks and blooms. With luck and good rain, this bank will be a green jungle of day lilies by early June.
The lilac bush has struggled, but each year it looks a little better. It probably needs a good feeding and a little pruning. Speaking of pruning, I pruned the apple trees fairly aggressively this winter, but the pruning has really improved the shape of the trees, not to mention my ability to mow under the trees without getting scraped off the mower. The fig trees, which are doing well, have just started putting out their leaves, but there’s already a baby fig. I have never seen a baby fig this early.
