Les Line's Posts
I've read somewhere that the West Virginia town of Bluefield, which sits smack dab on the Virginia state line, was named for the fields of chicory flowers that reflected summer's azure skies way back when the place was a mountain community of a few hundred folks. Well, several acres of one of the most scraggly plants ever brought to these shores by European colonists would certainly be a pretty sight, but they wouldn't rival a sea of native bluebonnets down in Texas.
There's an historic inn called the White Hart in a close-by village with a crackled oil painting of an magnificent albino antlered animal in the lobby. Still, I wonder how many guests, diners or imbibers in its cozy tap room with pine-plank tables grasp the meaning of the venerable establishment's name. The word "hart" is a centuries-old and largely disused British term for a male red deer, in particular one that is mature enough to carry an impressive rack of horns.
It's early August and the starring role among field and roadside wildflowers in the Northeast belongs to Queen Anne's lace, yet another colonist from the Old World. The wild ancestor of our garden carrot, Daucus carota (as botanists know the plant) also has a more or less edible root, but unless you're a wild foods enthusiast or hopelessly lost and starving in some old pasture and have a shovel handy, I would recommend a trip to the supermarket for a bag of the domesticated and much sweeter orange variety.
A picture-perfect monarch butterfly, fresh out of its chrysalis, was sipping nectar from a pot of dwarf Black-eyed Susans on our deck this morning. Summer wouldn't be summer without both of them, monarchs and Susans. And the latter are in full bloom in meadows and along roadsides throughout the Hudson Valley as July winds down, with butterflies of all colors fluttering in for nourishment while nectar-drinking bees buzz busily about.
"Summer wouldn't be summer without daisies," the New England naturalist Hal Borland wrote in our book A Countryman's Flowers, and of course the wildflower he had in mind was the ox-eye daisy. which is making its annual appearance in the Hudson Valley where I live. "The daisy's name," he explained, "comes from 'day's eye' and refers to the yellow center, which folklore represented as the sun." But ox-eye? That's a puzzle, since as Hal pointed out an oxen's eyes are usually brown.
It is mid-June and warm breezes circulating in the Hudson Valley carry an inescapable but pleasing fragrance from the tangled multiflora rose bushes that abound along country roads and in old fields. I sometimes think that the society world would be ecstatic if Paris could capture the bouquet from these attractive clusters of white-to-pink blossoms in a parfum bottle.
When I tottered downstairs for an eye-opening cup of coffee this morning I was both startled and delighted to find a luna moth clinging to the screen door. The lime-green luna with its four-inch wingspan and long twisted tail is, in my opinion, the most beautiful of the giant silkworm moths in North America. That's a bold statement, for the Saturnidae family includes some magnificent specimens, among them the cecropia, polyphemus and promethia moths.
A research vessel recently rechristened for noted environmentalist Russell W. Peterson, the 91-year-old former National Audubon Society president, chairman of the President's Council on Environmental Quality and governor of Delaware, broke up 14 miles off Rehoboth Beach in a severe storm that smashed the Mid-Atlantic states on Monday, May 12th. The liftboat, formerly used to service oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, was being used to study migratory bird routes for a company planning an offshore wind farm. One of the two crewmen rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter died.
