Following the Fragrant Path

A man I deeply admire is Ed Rasmussen. His new catalog just came out last month. His address is P.O. Box 328, Fort Calhoun, Nebraska 68023. Reading the descriptions of seeds in his catalog is a literary pleasure, and a dreamy thing to do when there's thunder outside. His outfit is named The Fragrant Path.

Those poppies that I watched last summer and fall, the ones with the lovely blue-green foliage, so handsome they don't need a flower? they're on Page 64, in the Perennial, Other Flowers of Merit section. Glaucium flavum Horned Poppy. "Bold handsome plants that perform as annuals, biennials or short-lived perennials, depending perhaps on how conditions suit them....Poor soil and full sun suit them and if they don't live over winter, they will reseed themselves. The seed pods can be a foot long."

He seems to hand-select all the amazing number of seeds that are on offer, and the rate of bloom from the packets is amazing. The Fragrant Annuals section has that pretty Sweet Wormwood on page 14 -- Artemisia annua -- which used to be a medicine for malaria. Lovely plant. I'm hoping it seeded itself for this year!

Bluebird of Happiness

We've toured further southwest and east in Washington than I've been before, visiting the bird refuges. That Columbia basin was beautiful.

But there are paths right here in the middle, well the north of middle, of the city. Behind the History Museum and between parking lots on the University campus, which I don't think is really as big as, for instance, Northwestern or DePaul.

And on the first one, we saw cormorants. Cormorants at ease, sailing round in the water and feeding at leisure. They crook their necks beautifully as they duck forward into the water, and come up quite a distance from where they go down.

And on the second one, a resident great blue heron was at home. Sitting on a comfy log where I understand he's been sitting all winter. Timelessly cleaning and grooming his blue grey feathers. I've been wishing I could reallly see a blue heron in flight. They stay so still so long. We moved on around, still watching him from the well-traveled path across the little stream of water between us; there was a grassy spot just on our bank where I could stand and only be about seven feet from him, looking happily at those well-groomed restful feathers. And from the west, flying in over water and waving his huge blue wings to a showy landing, there was a second Great Blue Heron! The resident Professor watched the bustle of the arrival, and with great dignity, arose and began pacing steadily from that log, along the log and then behind it walking on the water's edge without a halt and without a hurry, until he got right next to Arrival, and up went everybody's wings, like socking each other's airspace. Arrival went fast back west and there he was, flying very very fast straight back where he came from (towards that first path, across the water). Will the Professor be in residence tomorrow?

Sandhill Cranes

A sandhill crane migrates with its friends to Othello in eastern Washington because it's hungry. There's a marsh south and east of town that they roost in -- they roost in water; I didn't see that. There are cornfields south and west of town that they drift over to, twice a day, and they plummet into the fields in numbers so great that the tawny golden field turns gray.
Yea, drift over. Well, they fly to the fields in platoons, huge ones, hundreds and hundreds of sandhill cranes, with their necks stretched straight out and their legs and feet stretched straight back and they gurgle a rusty gurgle, and hundreds of Canadian geese fly over the hills, too, and the skies fill with thousands of birds. They fly right over the car and you can lie with your head out the window and they're streaming over head. No veering! Big sweeping tours over the hills, platoons from all directions. Amazing.

Herons and Egrets

I've been sketching pictures here, trying to help myself remember the wonderful things we saw in the Wildlife Refuge trails. Ridgefield is almost in Vancouver, Washington -- I always wanted to see the Vancouver that's down here. Sketching a blue heron is becoming easy, we've had such opportunities to sit in the car and study one that's only five or ten or fifteen feet away. The color of the plumes, the dark blue feathering of their bellies... the one that stood its ground even when we had to pull up right to him, and then he arched his wing and snapped his head, and lofted off with Bill calling "He's got a snake, look!"

A lot of the things I try to sketch have an audio of Bill saying something; saying about the white egrets, "I think you'll find there's more than two of them" and then all of them reared up, showing off their blazing white wingspans, and me frantically trying to count. The most amazing sight. And the blue heron right there while we watched the egrets, only yards from my window, motionless, actually motionless for so long that we finally pulled the car on down the road without ever having seen him move.

Wonderful days.