violets

The lawn is full of tiny violets, some broken now from yesterday's essential mowing, some merely bruised. If you were to look closely you'd notice the definite but vague purple theme throughout. And when I say lawn I'm taking liberties here - what takes the place of lawn is actually a mix of weeds and moss and the occasional fescue or rye grass. I've never much cared for turf grass. It feeds no one but the beetle grubs that we then poison, leaving no quarter for earthworms or nematodes or any of the other myriad beneficial insects. Well, we at druid labs don't actually poison anything. We'd let the grubs have the grass roots. I'm just saying: we as a Chem Lawn society.

But I like the voilets. I love the mosses, and the various types of evergreen ground covers out there, especially the low green plants that grow in the sandy area where the swingset used to be. I don't know what they are. They seem to take a whole lot of foot traffic and still manage to look vigorous. And they grow in the poorest soil on our property. I used to think there were some sort of moss, but they actually appear to be tiny evergreen trees. They have roots, or rootlets and stems, or something very like stems. They grow in colonies, and I just love their soft feel and deep, vibrant green color.

I have come to love the mole tunnels, the way the ground gives way softly when I walk over it. Since I've never done much gardening around here, the local fauna are welcome to whatever they can find. The hostas are coming up now with a vengeance. In a month or so the deer will find them and that will be the end of their leaves for yet another season. Maybe the wisteria suckers will be popping up again. The Virginia creeper should start climbing soon. Everywhere there are tiny pines and hollies and oaks popping through the ground.

Other than the greenbriar the native vegetation around here has been rather benign. There are some very old poison ivy stems twining up a couple of the trees here and there, but they are long dead and I don't need to remove them. The wisteria vines are loosening their grip on the oaks out front, thank heavens. We killed that vine our first summer here. It was strangling the trees and would have killed them, and I knew that if I ever saw it bloom it would be that much harder to remove it. Then after the job was done I worried that the knotted dead vines would girdle the oaks, but I can see now that the oaks are winning, and the vines, brittle and weather-beaten, are falling off in long chunks.

I can still walk through our yard in Illinois in my mind and see every tree, every plant, every odd little place that I planted a surprise. The Virginia bluebells must look wonderful this year. They've had six years in that wooded area and by now have probably spread to three times their original area. The blue false indigo would be popping up and beginning to make its leaves. The buckthorn, of course, would have already opened its leaves and I'd be on a blood crusade to kill it again.

There are only two more weeks for me to drink up the beauty of this place with my eyes and heart. I wonder if three years from now I'll be able to walk the yard in my mind and see the violets, and the bumblebees already in the weeping cherry blossoms, and the Carolina chickadees rearing their young, the buds on the Japanese maple, the fragrant shoots of the bee balm, or the dark figures of deer walking slowly through the woods, or the scouting turkey vultures soaring overhead. I wonder if I'll be able to see the bat feeding in the evening, or catch the flight of the Great Blue Heron when she leaves Maple Lake to return to her nest each afternoon. I wonder how much I'll have considered this place home, as short a time as we will have been here.

Well, I can't worry about that now. For the moment I'm going to get back out there and take in the purple mosaic of the violets. They'll be gone soon enough, and they won't be waiting for me.