Offhand comments from a frustrated history geek

Autumn storms, odds and ends

2011-11-13T20:38:00.001-08:00

Two weekends ago, we had a freak autumn snowstorm that dropped a little more than a foot of snow on trees that still had the majority of their leaves. As a result, some people lost power for a week, and trees and tree limbs went down everywhere. (I was lucky, losing power for a mere three days, but darn was it cold at night in my house!) A maple tree in my yard had a large, horizontal limb partly break off and fall onto a privet hedge. Part of it was sticking out into the street, and I had to grab my pruning saw and go out while it was snowing to cut that part of it off so that it wouldn't block cars. The part that wasn't sticking out into the street is still where it fell, still partly attached to the tree. The tree-pruning companies are so booked up that I couldn't get an appointment for someone to come and remove it until the 22nd of this month, still a little more than a week away. Here's the branch:

Here's another view:

Here's the tree just a little more than a week before the storm - you can see the branch that broke off in the lower right:

In other news, my father will be buying a new house this week. I will be helping him gradually pack and move stuff out of the old house where he has lived for almost 30 years, and where I grew up, and into his smaller new house. We will be able to do this gradually because he plans to sell the old house to neighbors who are interested in it, and they won't be ready to move in until around March.

Flowers, fruit, insects

2011-08-14T19:10:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting many garden photos, mainly because the garden at my current residence is long on plants but relatively short on showy flowers (at least compared to the garden at my dad's house, which is where I took photos in previous years). I've also been a bit negligent about taking photos in general this year. Nevertheless, I 've managed to take some decent photos over the last 2-3 months.

Iris

Spiderwort (Tradescentia)

Roses (past their prime - I wish I had gotten a picture a few days before this).

Daylily (I don't know the different varieties - I just call them all daylilies).

Daylilies and Hosta in bloom together

More daylilies

A different variety of daylily near an ostrich fern

Daylily closeup - can you tell that - 1. I like daylilies, and

2. Daylilies are some of the few large, colorful flowers in my garden?

Wild blackberries - various kinds of berries grow prolifically

(i.e., like weeds) in my current garden

Wild black cherries ripening

Dragonfly

Same dragonfly at a different angle

I've rarely seen an insect stay still for this long, which is
why I have so many photos of this dragonfly.

20 minutes later, what I think is the same dragonfly came back

and landed near me again - talk about a helpful subject!

A typical view of my semi-wild garden, with goldenrod starting

to flower on the left, and wild berries ripening to the right.

Random observations

2011-07-25T07:38:00.000-07:00

One of my projects at work is going through the biographies section and polishing up the catalog rec records there. I've recently run into a lot of biographies of Grover Cleveland. He was a big deal in the late 19th century, when he served two non-consecutive terms as President of the United States. Between those two terms, he barely lost the election of 1888, in which he came in first in the popular vote but second in the electoral college - this would not happen again until the 2000 presidential election. In spite of coming in first in the popular vote for President three times, he lost much of his popularity when the country was hit by a major economic depression during his second term as president, and he was largely forgotten in the 20th century. It makes me wonder if even the most influential political figures of recent times - George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton, etc. - will be forgotten by almost everyone except historians in 100 years or more.
A few weeks ago, I bought the cheapest garden hose I could find. I soon realized why it was the cheapest available. It is basically impossible to roll or coil this hose up neatly. Every few feet, the hose bends in a different direction, and when I try to force it into a proper coil, it springs back to its original position or folds up so that the water is blocked. Every time I try to roll it up, I end up with a series of large knots that I need to untangle next time.
I used to enjoy driving a lot more before I had my OCD-inspired fears of hitting people and animals.
Last week was damn hot, getting into the upper 90s for several days. This is nothing special for people who live in the southern part of the country, but for us northerners it was unusual, and very unpleasant for someone like me who sweats a lot. I was very lucky - the air conditioning in half of the office space where I work broke, but I was in the half that kept working, thank goodness. More importantly, the AC in the stacks where we keep all of our books, newspapers, and other printed material, never stopped working. Our collections are kind of like me - they much prefer cool and dry over warm and humid.

It weighs me down

2011-06-23T09:16:00.000-07:00

WARNING - DEPRESSING POST ABOUT OCD AND DEPRESSION

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and depression are still pressing down hard on me. I see a psychiatrist, but he no longer does active counseling, and only monitors medication at this time. Furthermore, neither of the two best psychologists in my area are currently taking new patients. I've definitely had better times, mentally speaking. Compared to the better points of my life, I feel like I am dealing with the burdens of two lives - my external life of everyday responsibilities, and my internal life of obsessive anxieties and self-hating depression. I feel like I'm barely treading water in my "normal", everyday life because most of my energy goes into dealing with my anxiety and depression. Doing ordinary things like getting ready in the morning or driving or washing dishes seem much more difficult and energy-consuming than they used to be. It definitely weighs me down and narrows the scope of my life. Fortunately, it's not bad all the time. Hopefully things will improve soon, and I will have something more positive and interesting to write about!

Working with a "semi-wild" garden

2011-05-29T21:19:00.000-07:00

I like to think of the garden at my new house as a "semi-wild" or a "woodland" garden. It's unruly and unkempt, but also very lush and full of healthy plants that seem to like their current location. There is an abundant mixture of geraniums, ferns, lily-of-the-valley, hostas, irises, daylilies, barberries, blackberries, violets, strawberries, and a couple of other plants that look nice enough but that I haven't identified. There are also, however, plenty of weeds, including tree seedlings and saplings (some resprouting from stumps), the invasive weeds garlic mustard and oriental bittersweet, and of course, the bane of my existence, poison ivy.

I've ruled out trying to dig a large part of it up and starting over. I don't have the energy for that, and it isn't my style anyways. I like to try to work with the plants I have as much as possible. I see my job as removing the weeds, encouraging the existing plants that I like, and making a few additions of my own wherever there are gaps. So far, I have gotten a good start on the first two. It isn't always the easiest job. I need to carefully separate the weeds from the desired plants when the two are all mixed together in a lush mass of plants. I have to try and avoid stepping on anything, which is almost impossible in many parts of the garden. With some plants, especially the blackberries and barberries, I want to have a few of them in the garden, but not too many, so I need to decide which to pull and which to leave. The blackberries and barberries also have thorns, which catch on clothing and occasionally break through even leather gardening gloves. Then, of course, I always need to be on the lookout for poison ivy. I've brushed it with my gloves a few times already, but I haven't actually gotten any rashes. I get a little paranoid about touching things with my gardening gloves on, however, since poison ivy oil can be transferred from one object to another. I don't think I've touched enough poison ivy with my gloves for this to be a serious problem, but I'm not 100% sure. With Obsessive Compulsive Disorder I can easily get too paranoid and spend more time worrying about poison ivy than actually gardening, if I don't fight my excessive worries. All in all, I think I have done a pretty good job so far - both with the gardening and with the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Here are a couple of pictures at different angles of the main garden bed. I've done some more weeding since these were taken, but it basically looks very similar:

The little pink-white flowers are geraniums.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the yard, two bushes are in full bloom without me having to do anything whatsoever. The first is the rhododendron in front of the house, which turns out to have flowers of a lovely lavender color.

Here's a closeup, with an ant crawling around one of the flowers.

Here is one clump of flowers near the ground ...

... and what I think is the same branch of the plant in March, when there was still snow on the ground and the flowers were enclosed in a tight bud:

The second bush in full bloom now is a Spirea of some kind, with pure white flowers :

Here is a closeup of the little clumps of flowers:

Unfortunately, neither the rhododendron nor the spirea will flower for long - very few flowering bushes have long-lived flowers. Still, there should be plenty of more flowers coming - the irises are just starting to open, and they are beautiful. Unfortunately, I broke my old digital camera yesterday by dropping it. Fortunately, I got a new and (hopefully) better camera today, and I should be ready to take some more pictures (as well as pulling some more weeds) tomorrow.

Garden update

2011-05-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

This morning, early April called early May and asked for its weather back. In other words, it has been unseasonably cool so far this May. I'm not complaining - I actually like cool weather (not cold) better than warm or hot weather - but the coolness means that the plants have been growing and leafing out in slow motion compared to what they would be doing in more normal weather. Again, I shouldn't complain - it means I can do my weeding at a slower pace and I didn't have to mow the grass for the first time until today - but I'm still looking forward to everything becoming fully green for the year.

I haven't posted in a while, largely because my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder has been hitting me really hard and often leaving me feeling exhausted and uninterested in communicating with the outside world during my free time. Still, I figured I should post a few pictures. These were taken about a week ago, so some of the bulbs have lost their flowers, while the other plants have grown some (but not as much as you would expect given the time of year).

My main garden area. I've inherited a sort of woodland/shade garden, with

hostas, blackberries, geraniums, barberries, lily of the valley, ferns, a few bulbs,

violets, and various other wildflowers scattered around underneath a large spruce

and a couple of small cherry trees, plus a lilac and a small fir.

Not much is blooming yet, but fortunately there are a few bulbs.

Here is a tulip and two hyacinths.

Here is a closeup of the tulip.

Here are the two hyacinths, with what I think are geraniums and violets coming up around them.

There are a few daffodils as well. I especially like the white one in the middle photo -

it's different from most daffodils that I've seen. Unfortunately, the daffodil flowers

pretty much shriveled up over the past week.

Most of the plants currently in my garden aren't noted for showy flowers, so it looks like I will have to add new plants of my own if I want more color. On the other hand, maybe there will be some surprises coming up - there are still some plants that I haven't identified.

First flowers of the year in my garden

2011-04-03T20:57:00.000-07:00

A little snow on Friday made it seem like winter again, but almost all of it has melted, and today the first crocuses were flowering - the first flowers in the garden:

This one was fully open

This one was just starting to open.

Very soon, another set of flowers will be opening - but these will be on a tree. The buds on the red maples are growing, giving parts of the forests around here a slight reddish tint. Soon they will open into tiny red flowers:

Buds of Red Maple (Acer rubrum)

Conifers (and a rhododendron)

2011-03-19T06:17:00.000-07:00

Evergreens have a head start when spring is approaching. Here are a couple of pics from last weekend (Captions above the photos this time):

A clump of foliage from a Canadian hemlock (Tsuga canadensis)

Fallen twigs from 3 different species of conifers. From top to bottom:

Norway Spruce (Picea abies)

Canadian Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis)

Yew, probably Japanese Yew (Taxus cuspidata)

An evergreen but definitely not a conifer, this rhododendron is a little

worse for wear but doesn't look like it will take long to recover and

start growing.

Yard and garden update

2011-03-13T14:49:00.000-07:00

With everything that is going on in the world, the condition of my yard is almost infinitely insignificant. Still, it's significant to me, so I figured it would be an appropriate thing to write about.

A week ago, I thought that it might be a month before all of the snow melted. Even a couple of days ago, I thought it might be a couple of weeks. This weekend, though, I realized that at the rate the snow is disappearing, most of it might be gone in a few days. Most of the snow already is gone, in fact - there was just so much that some of it is still left. A combination of temperatures reaching at least 40 Fahrenheit (about 5 Celsius) each day, plus lots of rain, have really pushed the melting along.

A couple of pics of the largest garden area in the side yard

Little stream running down the side of the driveway - it's been running continuously

for a week.

This side of the house still has a decent amount of snow.

The most pleasant surprise to me, though, is that as soon as the snow melted, underneath it there were already plants sprouting! The most common plant that I see apparently ready to grow is this one. I'm not sure what type it is, or whether it is a weed or a "cultivated" plant (sorry for the non-centered photo - Blogger is acting up and won't let me shift my photos to the center for some reason):

I may have my work cut out for me if this is a weed - they're all over the place.

There are, however, other plants sprouting that I am pretty sure I will want in the garden. This looks like an iris of some kind, pushing up past a bunch of twigs from the Norway spruce that were blown down over the last few months:

Here's a fern of some kind emerging green from underneath the snow:

Why are some plants emerging from the snow green and looking almost ready to start growing? Maybe the snow actually acted as an insulator, keeping the ground warmer than usual. In that case, I hope it doesn't get cold enough to damage the plants that are out of the snow now. The ones that are already green are probably pretty tough.

Sobering facts about the earthquake/tsunami in Japan

2011-03-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

There's nothing that I can say about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan that many others haven't said much better. It is a tragedy and a sobering reminder of how we are definitely not in the drivers' seat for so many things that happen on this planet. Unlike climate, geology seems to be something that we have no effect on or control over, one way or another. All we can do is try to prepare for disasters and do rescue and recovery when they do happen.

The really sobering thing to remember is that Japan is probably the best prepared country for earthquakes in the whole world. Everything is built to withstand earthquakes, and there is a large infrastructure in place for warning, searching, and rescuing. Even with all of this, this huge earthquake and tsunami still had devastating results. In any other country, it would have been worse. California is probably the second most well-prepared place on earth when it comes to earthquakes, so an earthquake of similar size there would probably cause similar, or even somewhat worse, damage. Other parts of the world, though, are much less prepared - especially poorer areas. A little more than a year ago, the earthquake in Haiti showed how devastating a natural disaster can have in a country where people are already living in very poor conditions and there is no mechanism for dealing with a disaster. Though much smaller than the earthquake in Japan, the death toll was probably dozens or hundreds of times larger. Similarly, the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia and other parts of the Indian Ocean hit many poorer areas of Asia and east Africa that were less prepared to cope with the damage than a country like Japan or the USA would be.

All of these earthquakes at least happened along active fault zones where the earth's crustal plates meet, places where earthquakes can be expected to happen. Powerful earthquakes occasionally happen in unexpected places, such as the historic New Madrid, Missouri earthquakes of 1811-1812. This was a massive earthquake that caused a section of the Mississippi river to flow backwards. If a similar sized earthquake occurred today, it would almost certainly cause great damage across much of the US "heartland", hitting areas where neither buildings nor emergency services nor the general public are prepared for earthquakes. There are many other such places in the world, where occasional large earthquakes could occur.

Basically, people and nations all around the world need to realize that events like major earthquakes and tsunamis can happen in many different places, and that while they are extremely unlikely in most places (and you're almost 100% safe from a tsunami if you live well inland or at a high elevation), they should be remembered when designing buildings and organizing emergency services. In geology more than almost anything else on earth, we humans still have to take anything that nature dishes out and deal with it as best we can.

Shaky conservative

2011-03-09T20:18:00.000-08:00

I don't write about politics much. Part of this is because my own views are uncertain. Part of it is that my views on a lot of things are more conservative than those of most people I know, and I don't want people to think less of me because of my views. (Let's face it, people often do think less of other people if they find out that the other person has opposing views on political issues, especially if it is a very sensitive or emotional issue.)

Discussing my views in detail is much more than I have the time or energy to do now, but there are probably a few reasons why I often lean in a conservative direction. First, there's family influence. I grew up in a moderately conservative, Reagan-supporting suburban middle-class family. Unlike many people with that background, I didn't grow up to oppose the ideas and values that I was brought up with. I don't agree with all of them, but overall I think that most of them make sense. The conservatism that I grew up with was somewhat moralistic, but not harshly judgmental. It taught that people shouldn't be dependent on the government, but not that people should be completely left to their own devices no matter what. It was patriotic, but not overly nationalistic or xenophobic. I liked it then, and I still like it now.

Another thing that pushed me in the direction of conservatism was that many of the more liberal or left-leaning people I knew, while certainly good people, were a little bit more ... close-minded than the conservatives. This goes against the common stereotype that conservatives are the narrow-minded ones, but I have often found it to be true. If someone starts from the assumption that all conservatives, no matter what their actual ideas, are narrow-minded fools and bigots, then there really isn't any room for debate or discussion of any kind. That attitude always rubbed me the wrong way, to put it mildly.

These days, everything is confused for me when it comes to politics. I still think of myself as a conservative, and take that side of an argument more often than not, but the conservatism of recent years seems to be more harsh and intolerant than the variety that I grew up believing in. I guess being harsh and intolerant doesn't necessarily make something wrong, but those have never been qualities that I liked very much. I guess you could say that my conservatism is very shaky.

Maybe I should start writing about my political views. Actually, I shouldn't. There seem to be millions of bloggers writing about politics, and most of them know a lot more about the issues than I do!

Trees and sky

2011-03-05T16:24:00.000-08:00

My new home has many virtues, but dramatic sunset vistas that make for good photographs are not among them. Instead, my house is surrounded by other houses and trees, which is entirely typical of New England. In this part of the country, being able to look at landscapes that are many miles distant from one's own home is more of a privilege than a standard feature.

Nonetheless, there are a few good views that I've been able to get over the past few weeks:

Move along, nothing to see here

2011-02-12T12:06:00.000-08:00

Nothing really blogworthy to report here. I'm just going day to day, struggling with my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and waiting for warmer weather when there will be a little green outside.

Icicles and trees

2011-01-29T08:53:00.000-08:00

I've spent the past week getting settled into a new house that I actually own. This house has many advantages. Some of the most basic are -

1. It's a nice place - 2 bedrooms, a kitchen/dining area, and a living room. This is more space than I really need, but not necessarily more space than my books other stuff need.

2. It's in a good neighborhood.

3. It's only about 3 miles from work, leading to a very short commute.

There are some disadvantages, though, which are small compared to the advantages but nonetheless present. The biggest disadvantage is that I live on a dirt road. It gets plowed when it snows, but it isn't possible to plow a dirt road as closely as a paved one, so there is still lots of snow. The area is also hilly. This could describe 90% of central Massachusetts, so it's no surprise, but hills plus snow plus a car that lacks four wheel drive and was definitely not designed for either dirt or snowy roads makes driving ... interesting, to put it politely.

(Another disadvantage is that I now owe more money than I ever have before, but that's sort of an automatic hazard of buying a house unless you are wealthy or buying a cheaper house than what you previously owned.)

In any case, I will leave you with a couple of pictures. First, icicles on my house. These have grown so large that I am afraid to disturb them:

Second, a big tree that overhangs my driveway. It's a Norway Spruce (Picea abies), I think.

2011-01-21T08:20:00.000-08:00

Last Wednesday: A foot and a half of snow.

This Tuesday: about six inches of wet snow, followed by freezing rain that put a layer of ice over everything.

Last night and today - six or seven inches of snow

Later this weekend - temperatures predicted to drop to five or ten degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-10 to -23 Celsius), not counting windchill

Conclusion - Not a good time to become a new homeowner and not have a snowblower.

New Homeowner

2011-01-17T05:20:00.000-08:00

Last Tuesday, I signed a stack of documents that made me a homeowner. It was originally supposed to be on Wednesday, but the closing date was moved up to Tuesday because a big snowstorm was coming on Wednesday. It's a good thing we moved the date to Tuesday, because the storm ended up dumping somewhere between 16 inches and 2 feet of snow on the area (varied by exact location).

I don't need to leave my current residence quite yet, so fortunately I can move by bits and pieces. The downside of this is that there will be a lot of shuttling between my old and new residences.

I didn't even try to get to the house on Wednesday. Work was closed, and nobody went out driving if they could avoid it.

On Thursday evening, after work, I performed my first task as a new homeowner - shoveling out paths to the doors. Perhaps I should have started in the morning before work, but I underestimated the size of the task. After almost three hours, I had cleared a path from the street to the front door, and a large part of the driveway and a second path from the driveway to the front door. I learned a few lessons from this:
1.) ALWAYS check my coat pockets to make sure I have my winter gloves and hat. I forgot them, so I did all of this shoveling with bare hands and earmuffs only. Fortunately, it was cold but not windy.
2.) My new house requires a lot of snow removal. It has a relatively long, curved driveway, and a relatively long, curved path from the driveway to the front door. A second, shorter pathway from the front doorway to the street is recommended for access. One person with a shovel needs to do quite a bit of work to clear these paths.
3.) I must invest in a snowblower.

On Friday, I took delivery of my first pieces of furniture, a kitchen table and four chairs. I also learned from the mailman, who showed up shortly after the furniture movers left, that he puts the mail in a mail slit in the side door. This cleared up a bit of a mystery that I had forgotten to ask the previous owners about, but it also meant that I needed to shovel a third path, since the previous paths did not cover the side door.

On Saturday, my father and I got a small UHaul truck and moved a bunch of boxes and a couple of pieces of furniture, the only furniture that I am keeping.

Yesterday, I finally finished clearing the driveway, chipped ice that had formed on the paths to the doors, bought a bunch of cleaning and kitchen supplies, set up my desktop computer, and tried with limited success to figure out where various items in the boxes should go. (Being obsessive-compulsive, I sometimes get hung up over things like that.)

Today, I need to get some more supplies, bring a few more things, and re-assemble a couple of pieces of furniture. I'm pretty confident that there will be no shoveling today. Tomorrow, though, we're supposed to get a few more inches of snow.

Wednesday, I get a bed, table, and easy chair delivered - weather permitting, I assume.

Even with this going on, the most stressful aspect of my life for the past week, as it has been for the last 2 or 3 months, has not been anything going on outside, but rather my almost constant struggling with a very bad attack of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I don't want to go into detail here, but it has been pretty severe and it has come at a very bad time. So far, though, I have been weathering the move, the OCD, and the weather itself.

Death in the family

2011-01-09T06:55:00.000-08:00

My grandmother died yesterday. She was my last surviving grandparent, and the one that I was closest to. She was 94 years old, and had been declining a lot over the last year, so it wasn't completely a surprise, but it was still a painful shock to hear this news, since I hadn't heard that she was doing worse than usual.

She had a strong personality - loving, sociable, opinionated, and stubborn. We always got along very well, even though I am quite different in some ways. I remember one summer when I was 12 or 13, spending most of a month visiting her, going out every day to see sights in Washington, DC and Maryland, having a great time. It was difficult to see her gradually decline physically and mentally, even though this is almost inevitable at her age. My father and I visited her in Texas, where she went to live close to my aunt, on her last two birthdays for the last two Septembers. I am glad that I got to see her when I could still talk to her, although she couldn't handle much talking on our last visit.

She lived a long, full life, working full-time when my father was growing up, at a time when this was the exception for middle-class women rather than the rule. She had a very interesting career - she was a computer programmer, starting shortly after World War II when computers weren't even programmed with punched cards, but by rearranging wires within the computer. She spent most of her career working with punched cards.

About a year ago, I started writing letters to her. At first, she wrote back, but after a while, she could not do this anymore. I kept sending letters periodically. For the last few months, my aunt would have to read them to her when she visited every few days. I think that they did help cheer her up a little at times, and that she liked to hear from me. The last one I wrote was a little less than a month ago. I just wish I had sent one last one right around Christmas, rather than procrastinating, though she might not have heard it anyway.

She lived a long, fairly happy life that affected many other peoples' lives in good ways, and died peacefully. She will be greatly missed.

Holiday plant and photos from a walk

2010-12-30T08:51:00.000-08:00

A few pictures that I took yesterday:

An indoor tropical plant (I don't know the name), decked out in appropriate

holiday season colors.

An old beech tree that I saw along a walk, with a little plaque. This type gets

purple leaves in the summer, and is very nice. Unfortunately, they don't seem to

be planted very much these days, possibly because grass won't grow underneath them.

Random forest scene.

Random roadside scene.

Two pictures at Dad's house, where I spent most of my childhood

(and some of my adulthood). The first is a view from the driveway,

the second is a view of the house itself later in the afternoon, just before sunset.

A unique view of early New England, part 1

2010-12-27T17:39:00.000-08:00

One of the most detailed accounts of the geography, climate, weather, plants, and animals of New England in the 17th century did not come from a person who lived there, but from an English traveller named John Josselyn. A moderately wealthy man with connections to the original non-Puritan rulers of Maine, he travelled to the Massachusetts Bay colony and Maine as a fairly young man in the 1630s, and again as an older man in the 1660s (by which time Maine had become part of Massachusetts Bay). He wrote two books, one called New England's Rarities, discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, and Plants of that Country, and the other one called An Account of Two Voyages to New-England. These works, especially An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, are written in a meandering, sometimes almost stream-of-consciousness style. An Account of Two Voyages mixes all sorts of information on New England with accounts of some of his own personal experiences and his opinions about various subjects ranging from geography meteorology to astronomy to mining to law and government. In spite of his tendency to go off on tangents in his writing, it has a lot of interesting information about the condition of New England in the first generations of English settlement, and an interesting perspective on what New England looked like to an early traveler from "Old" England.

"The shore is rocky, with high cliffs, having a multitude of considerable harbors; many of which are capacious enough for a navy of 500 sail, ... the country within rocky and mountainous, full of tall wood, one stately mountain there is surmounting the rest, about four score mile from the Sea ... between the mountains are many ample rich and pregnant valleys as ever eye beheld, beset on each side with variety of goodly trees, the grass man-high unmowed, uneaten and uselessly withering; within these valleys are spacious lakes or ponds well stored with fish and beavers ... manifesting the goodness of the soil which is black, red-clay, gravel, sand, loam, and very deep in some places, as in the valleys and swamps, which are low grounds and bottoms infinitely thick set with trees and bushes of all sorts ... others having no other shrub or tree growing, but spruce, under the shades whereof you may freely walk two or three mile together; being goodly large trees, and convenient for masts and sail-yards. The whole country produces springs in abundance replenished with excellent waters, having all the properties ascribed to the best in the world." - John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, p. 37-38.

The description of a rocky coast and spruce forests probably reflects the time he spent in what is now Maine more than what is now Massachusetts - Josselyn doesn't always distinguish one part of New England from another when evaluating it. It is clear that he was impressed by the abundance of both large trees and the beaver and fish along and in the lakes and rivers. These resources that later became very depleted from intense use - beaver were almost wiped out in much of New England by the 18th century, which changed the whole landscape, greatly reducing the number of small lakes, ponds, and swamps, many of which had been created by beaver dams.

It is also clear that there was plenty of fresh water springs in many places - always an important factor for early settlers. The description of the richness of the soil is somewhat optimistic. There is indeed good black loam in some parts of New England, but it is often quite thin, and in the more hilly areas there is often barely more than an inch of good topsoil before one hits clay or sand or bedrock underneath it.

"The mountains and rocky hills are richly furnished with mines of lead, silver, copper, tin, and divers sorts of minerals, branching out even to their summits, where in small crannies you may meet with threads of perfect silver; yet have the English no maw to open any of them, whether out of ignorance or fear of bringing a foreign enemy upon them ... The stones in the country are for the most mettle-stone, free-stone, pebble, slate, none that will run to lime, of which they have great want, of the slate you may make tables easy to be split to the thickness of an inch, or thicker if you please, and long enough for a dozen men to sit at. Precious stones there are too ..."- John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, p. 38-39.

Josselyn is apparently falling into the trap that many earlier explorers had fallen into - assuming that every part of the Americas was full of precious metals. Although there were small amounts of metal ore in a few places, there were no large veins of metal ore anywhere in New England. The reason that the English settlers weren't setting up big mines is that there wasn't very much to mine in the first place. There were later a variety of stone quarries and smaller mines, but although New England became well-known for its rockiness, most of that rock did not have anything valuable in it.

One accurate thing that he notes is that there is no limestone or chalk in most parts of New England, in contrast to many parts of England. The lack of rocks that produce lime meant that they usually had to import lime from elsewhere, and it also led to the soil in most parts of New England being quite acidic, with no lime to make it alkaline.

"The climate is reasonably temperate, hotter in summer, and colder in winter than with us, agrees with our constitutions better than hotter climates, ..." - John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, p. 39.

Here Josselyn nails the most fundamental difference between the continental climate of New England and the maritime climate of old England - the wider temperature extremes. When early explorers briefly landed in places like New England or Nova Scotia or Quebec or New York in the summer, they usually assumed that the winters must be mild. This was based on the warm summer temperatures and the fact that what later became the northeastern USA and southeastern Canada are at a lower latitude and closer to the equator than much of Europe (Boston is on almost the same latitude as Rome). The first winters that Europeans spent in these areas were usually an unpleasant surprise.

The comment about the climate "agreeing with our constitutions better" than warmer climates may actually be referring to the relative lack of disease, because disease was widely thought to be caused by the effects of climate on the "constitution" of the body. For the white settlers, New England was one of the healthiest climates in the world. Diseases like smallpox existed, but were less common than in Europe, while warm-weather diseases like malaria were also rare. For the American Indians, on the other hand, the disease environment was a disaster, with even the occasional introduced European disease running wild among a population with very little resistance.

"Mid-March their spring begins, in April they have rain and thunder; so again at Michaelmas [late September], about which season they have either before Michaelmas or after outrageous storms of wind and rain. ... Cold weather begins with the middle of November, the winters perpetually freezing, insomuch that their rivers and salt-bays are frozen over and passable for men, horse, oxen, and carts ... The north-west wind is the sharpest wind in the country. In England most of the cold winds and weathers come from the sea, and those seats that are nearest the seacoasts in England are accounted unwholesome, but not so in New-England, for in the extremity of winter the north-east and south-wind coming from the sea produces warm weather, only the north-west-wind coming over land from the white mountains (which are always, except in August, covered with snow) is the cause of extreme cold weather, always accompanied with deep snows and bitter frosts, the snow for the most part four and six foot deep, which melting on the surfaces with the heat of the sun (for the most part shining out clearly every day) and freezing again in the night makes a crust upon the snow sufficient to bear a man walking with snow-shoes upon it. And at this season the Indians go forth on hunting of deer and moose, twenty, thirty, forty miles up into the country. Their summer is hot and dry proper for their Indian wheat [i.e., corn or maize] ; which thrives best in a hot and dry season, the sky for the most part summer and winter very clear and serene; if they see a little black cloud in the north-west, no bigger than a man may cover with his hat, they expect a following storm, the cloud in short time spreading round about the horizon accompanied with violent gusts of wind, rain, and many times lightning and terrible thunder." - John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, p. 45-47.

If the winters Josselyn describes sound a little harsher than those in Massachusetts or southern Maine today, with saltwater harbors freezing over deeply and 4-6 feet of snow, this may be because many parts of North America and Europe really were colder 350 or so years ago. This was the later part of what is sometimes called the "Little Ice Age", a period of somewhat colder than average weather that lasted from the 1400s through the early 1800s. This was an era when the Thames River in England and the canals of the Netherlands froze over deeply enough most winters to walk and skate on - and that was in the relatively mild winters of western Europe. In New England, average winter temperatures were considerably colder than average winter temperatures today - Massachusetts probably felt more like Maine, and Maine might have been almost as cold as central Quebec.

Other aspects of the weather that Josselyn describes are quite familiar to modern New Englanders - the rainstorms of spring and fall, the icy crust that forms over snow from freezing and thawing, and the sudden changeability of the weather, where a small dark cloud on the horizon often means a total change of weather very soon.

Drifting snow and a sunset

2010-12-27T14:33:00.000-08:00

The snowstorm didn't dump as much on us as predicted, but it was still a lot of snow and wind. It stopped snowing this afternoon, but the wind was strong, with gusts up to 40 miles per hour (65 kilometers per hour). The sun peaked through the clouds, revealing the blowing snow:

Later, as the sun was about to set it shone over the drifting snow in the field behind the house:

Then the sun approached and dropped below the horizon, illuminating the clouds in various shades of yellow, orange, red, and purple as the light got fainter:

Heavy snow coming

2010-12-26T06:34:00.000-08:00

So far, it has been a very low-snow season. While other parts of the USA and Europe have been getting hit hard with lots of snow, we've gotten a total of maybe 2 inches, most of it a few days ago. Today and tomorrow, though, we are going to get pounded by a storm that is supposed to bring at least a foot and a half of snow (about .5 meters for you metric folk in the rest of the world). Hopefully we don't lose power - that's the only thing I worry about. It's supposed to be windy, too, so it will be a true blizzard.

Snow - beautiful to look at, a pain in the posterior if you have to do anything outside.

2010-12-24T17:15:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, everyone! Since I've become used to posting pictures of plants, what better way to express holiday wishes than showing some pictures I took yesterday. What is there to take pictures of this time of year? Buds!

Buds of Siebold Virburnum (Viburnum Sieboldii)

Bud of Great Rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum)

Buds of Saucer Magnolia (Magnolia x soulangeana)

Buds of dwarf Colorado Blue Spruce (Picea pungens, dwarf variety)

Buds of Azalea, not sure of species

Now, only 4-5 more months before the buds start opening into flowers and leaves!

Merry Christmas, everyone.

More sunset pictures

2010-12-21T04:55:00.000-08:00

The clouds were like a gray blanket yesterday, but we suddenly got a flash of bright colors as the sun set.

2010-12-17T22:05:00.000-08:00

I rarely get decent pictures of any kind of animals. Unlike plants, they have a really bad habit of moving before I can get a good shot. I still occasionally get a decent picture of some kind of animal. Here are a few of insects:

Butterfly - I don't know which kind

Dragonfly (highly magnified from the original picture)

Honeybee and fly on the same cluster of "Autumn Joy" Sedum flowers

Fly on Purple Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea)

Unknown insect crawling up the wall of the enclosed porch.

I thought this one was interesting because its abdomen is shaped kind of like

some sort of medieval weapon.

Unfortunately, this one post almost exhausts my supply of decent insect pictures for the past year!

(Semi) evergreen plants

2010-12-13T21:45:00.000-08:00

Even in the winter, some of the perennials remain at least party evergreen, although they are still basically dormant. Here are a few of the (semi) evergreen flowering plants in the garden over this past weekend. The leaves around them provide some insulation, plus I was a little lazy when it came to raking this fall!

Coral bells (Heuchera)

Pachysandra

Lamb's ear (Stachys byzantina)

Yellow Archangel (Lamiastrum galeobdolon)

Deadnettle (Lamium species)

Muted sunset

2010-12-12T15:27:00.000-08:00

The sunset yesterday was a nice one, with gauzy, high clouds dimming the sun while scattering the light.

Today it was pouring rain. We've had some pretty cold weather, but very little snow. Every time precipitation is coming, it warms up enough to make it rain instead of snow. I should not complain given how some other parts of the USA are getting pounded with snow - we've been lucky so far. I'm not sure if the perennial garden plants are as lucky - snow is good for them in the winter because it provides insulation when it gets cold.

Stuff that's going on in my life

2010-12-12T09:18:00.000-08:00

On Friday, I signed a purchase and sales agreement for a house. It is a very nice place, in good shape, about 1000 square feet, and only about 2 miles from where I work. Closing is not until early January, so I won't have to worry about moving stuff right over the holidays (though I will have to be packing, of course, and looking for some new but cheap furniture). Overall, I am happy about my decision. It does of course mean a large debt and less money in the bank, but I have calculated that I can handle it. I'm not a big spender in any case, and I don't have many expenses beyond the basics of housing, food, utilities, etc. (though a good internet connection is almost a basic necessity to me!). I've even gotten into the practice of keeping the heat lower and taking less showers to use less water, though I'm not sure if these will really have much of an effect.

My whole immediate family will be together for Christmas this year - me and my father, both my brothers, and my sister-in-law and niece. Both of my brothers are living in Europe - the one with a family in Dresden, Germany, the other one going to school for a Ph.D. in Oxford, England, UK - so they will be making long trips. I am looking forward to this. The Christmas season has usually been one of my favorite times of year because I am lucky enough to have a family that gets along so well that our gatherings have a lot of the atmosphere of meetings of old, close friends, only even more so. The older I get, the more I have realized how lucky and privileged I have been to have this kind of relationship, and I sometimes feel ashamed of taking it for granted too often.

I continue to wrestle with the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, sometimes with a lot of success, sometimes with no success. In spite of the generally good condition of my "outside" life lately, my internal mental and emotional state has been veering between a combination of great happiness, confidence, and determination, and a combination of anxiety, self-hatred, depression, and negative thoughts and behaviors toward others and myself. In the course of my internal struggles, I am making the disturbing discovery that I am very ready to ignore the interests and needs of other people in my struggle to defeat or at least contain many of my negative emotions. I have long suspected that my OCD and the internal struggles that go with it have made me very self-centered in some respects, but recently this has become more serious and blatant than ever before. On the other hand, I am not even sure if I am doing any actual harm at all - my anxieties include an obsessive fear that I am causing harm to others without fully realizing it, so I tend to not trust my own perceptions.

Weeds by the roadside

2010-12-09T21:25:00.000-08:00

Some of the plants that I find most interesting are not in the garden:

Wild grapevines leafing out in the spring

Wild grapevine hanging from tree with my hand.

Poison Ivy growing up a tree

Numerous seedlings of Garlic mustard (an invasive weed) intermixed with other,

taller plants

A mixture of vines, including Poison Ivy, Oriental Bittersweet, and Virginia Creeper

A large mullein (Verbascum thapsus)

Random Garden Photos 2

2010-12-07T18:09:00.000-08:00

I think that I should make this a regular feature over the course of the winter. Hopefully other people will enjoy them, and I will get to look at some digital plants (and animals) that will partly make up for the lack of non-dormant plants outside now!

Honeybee on azalea flowers.

Pieris or Japanese Andromeda with new growth in the spring.

This variety has new growth that is red, which only gradually fades

to green by early summer. To the left, a large hydrangea is just

starting to "leaf out".

Columbine hybrid with multiple layers of petals.

A perfect spring day in mid-May. Scenes like this look especially beautiful

after month after month of drab, dormant ground in winter and early spring.

More atmospheric views

2010-12-06T19:19:00.000-08:00

These are from last spring -

Late afternoon with clouds and airplane contrails

Closeup of airplane trail going behind clouds

The sun mostly hidden behind the clouds, but just starting to "peek out"

A hazy sun behind clouds, behind trees (and a bird)

Changes in local plants over time

2010-12-05T22:24:00.000-08:00

Combining my interest in history with botany, I have sometimes wondered what my area looked like when the earliest Europeans arrived - especially the plants. How were the plants different, and how were they similar? Well, based on reports from native and European sources, and scientific analysis of old pollen and plant remains, one can make some guesses.

Apart from the obvious lack of modern cities, highways, roads, housing subdivisions, shopping malls, etc., etc., one of the most striking differences would have been in the characteristics of the forests themselves. Much of the forest would have much larger trees than we are used to seeing in wooded areas today. There were large areas of forest that had never been cleared at all, truly old-growth forests that would be full of widely-spaced trees with trunks that were 3, 4, 5, or even 6 feet in diameter at the base, and 10 to 20 feet in circumference, trees that had reached this size because they were several hundred years old. There is very little forest like this left in New England today - almost every piece of land has been cleared or logged at least once in the last 300+ years. Almost all wooded areas today are much younger overall, ranging from forests of numerous young saplings 10 or 15 years old to those with much larger, older trees, perhaps 100 years old, that look impressive in size but which are actually still skinny youngsters compared to the massive, several-century old trees that were fairly common when the first Europeans came.

Of course, not all of the land was covered with old-growth forest. The American Indians in southern New England had been clearing land for agriculture for centuries, and there was quite a bit of second-growth forest in areas that they had once farmed but later left. They also kept some hunting areas clear of woods for many generations by repeatedly setting small fires that would kill young trees but leave grasses and other non-woody plants to grow back. Because of this controlled use of fire to create terrain more favorable for hunting, Europeans were sometimes surprised to find large open areas of fields, extending many miles, on land where they expected to find dense forest. The use of fire extended to the old-growth forests themselves. Small fires did no permanent damage to the older trees, but they helped to clear out vines and thorny shrubs and other undergrowth, which made tracking and chasing animals in the forests easier. Again, early Europeans sometimes remarked on how open the forest floor was in the old-growth forests. A man could easily ride on horseback along the forest floor, with little dense underbrush to impede him. One early English explorer in Virginia noted that in some areas, the spaces between the big old trees were large enough that one could have driven a full carriage with its team of horses right between the trees with no trouble! Not all of the wooded areas were this clear, however. In areas where there were fewer animals to hunt, such as steeper hills and mountains, or areas with poor soil or areas just not frequented by many animals, the Indians didn't practice their forest management through controlled burning, and the underbrush was much thicker and took some effort to penetrate.

The majority of the types of trees most common in forests were the same as today, but their proportions were different. Old growth forests, not surprisingly, tended to be dominated by the trees that had the longest lifespans, which usually meant various oaks, various pines, sugar maples, and beeches. Trees that are common in the relatively young forests found today, such as red maple, black cherry, and birches, were a lot less common. They would be found mainly in the second-growth patches where there had been Indian farms and towns, or major forest fires or storms had cleared an area of its old trees. They were also often found in areas where the more dominant tree types would not grow, like swamps and steep, rocky hillsides. One consequence of this was that the autumn foliage was probably not nearly as impressive, since the brightest colors - the reds and oranges and the most brilliant yellows - often come from maples, which were less common in the 17th century forests.

There was one tree that was quite common in these forests that is only occasionally seen anywhere today, and that was the American Chestnut. They were once common enough that many New England towns have a "Chestnut Street" along with an "Oak Street", "Maple Street", "Elm Street", "Pine Street", but the Chestnut Blight fungal disease killed virtually all of them in the early 20th century, and the only thing that kept some of them alive was their tendency to re-sprout from the roots after the main part of the aboveground tree has died. Elm trees have suffered a major blow from Dutch Elm disease at the same time, but they were not quite as common as Chestnuts before the diseases came, and Dutch Elm disease isn't quite as universally destructive as Chestnut Blight is.

Many of the other plants one could see at various times of the year would have been familiar to people today - wild grapevines and Virginia creeper climbing up trees, skunk cabbage poking through the ground in swamps before the snow is even gone, short-lived spring wildflowers blooming before the trees above them have grown their leaves in the early spring, milkweeds producing their seedpods full of seeds with feather-like tufts that allow the wind to catch them, goldenrods blooming in late summer, along with the much less welcome ragweed. There would, however, have been some very familiar plants that would be missing. Some of these missing plants wouldn't be missed very much, since they are notoriously invasive, fast spreading, and tough to kill. There would have been no clumps of Japanese Knotweed, no bittersweet vines climbing up trees, no purple loosestrife forming dense swathes in wetlands. Some less invasive, but very common weeds would also have been lacking. The best known of these is probably the common dandelion. Other common weeds seen today that would have been completely lacking at the time of the first Europeans would have been chenopodium, aka lamb's quarters or goosefoot, common plantain, shepherd's purse, and common mullein. Some common wildflowers would have been lacking as well, including Queen Anne's lace, common or ox-eye daisies, Chicory, and Black-eyed Susans. Almost all of these plants, whether considered weeds or wildflowers (or both), are originally from Europe and Asia, and were introduced to the eastern part of North America. The one exception is the Black-eyed Susan, which is native to the prairies of the midwest and was not brought east of the Appalachians until the 19th century.

There is a lot more stuff that I could add, but the short version is that the forests and fields of Massachusetts would have looked considerably different from today in the 16th or early 17th century, even apart from the obvious and blatant changes like clearing of forests, creation of farms and villages and towns, and later cities, factories, highways, malls, etc. Just the changes in how the forest was handled and used by the people living in the area, and the plants that were introduced, made major changes. Of course, there were many other changes to the environment caused by changes in the animal life, but that is a story that I don't have time for right now ....

News, good and bad

2010-12-05T05:35:00.000-08:00

The good news is that I have agreed on a price for a house of my own, one that is nice and only about 2 miles from where I work. The agreed price is $156,000, which is very reasonable in this part of Massachusetts even for a small house in a down market. I haven't talked much about my house-hunting, but it has been an interesting process, and there are still quite a few steps left. I am going to the inspection on Monday.

The bad news is that my grandmother's health is going further downhill. She is my father's mother, my one surviving grandparent, and is 94 years old. She lives down in Texas, about 100 miles southwest of Dallas and some 40 miles west of Waco, near my aunt, who visits her at least once every week. She often described me as her favorite grandchild, and we were pretty close as I was growing up. My father and I have visited her the last two Septembers for her birthday, and I still write to her from time to time. For the last year or so, however, her health has deteriorated. She sleeps a lot, has lost quite a bit of weight, and needs more assistance taking care of her everyday needs like getting dressed, etc. She has usually been unable to hold extended conversations, and sometimes gets very confused. She moved from an assisted living area into a more complete nursing home area of the same facility. Now she often completely forgets where she is, which is considerably worse than she was just this past September when I visited her. My aunt and the people at the nursing home both think that she sleeps so much at least partly to escape the confusion and anxiety that she feels because she can not remember where she is or what is going on. I feel somewhat guilty for not writing to her since earlier in November, although I believe that she mostly relies on my aunt to read my letters to her now, and may not always fully understand them.

Overall, her health and quality of life, which were not good even over a year ago, are tragically declining more and more. It happens to almost everyone eventually, but that does not make it any less painful or sad when it does happen.

Random Garden Photos

2010-11-30T19:22:00.000-08:00

Hmm, it's still three weeks to the start of winter proper, and I'm already suffering from "plant withdrawal" enough to want to post more and more garden pics. Here are three more or less random ones -

Clump of Zagreb Coriopsis - a lovely cushion of yellow color (while it lasts).

Removing fences and flowering cacti: a random post

2010-11-27T11:40:00.000-08:00

Clearing leaves and dead perennial foliate did not complete in the garden this year. There was also the question of the old wooden fence that my parents put up partway around an above-ground pool back when we were kids. The pool was long since taken down and replaced by more gardening space, but the fence remained. Over the last few years, it has been showing its age, so my father wanted to take it down.

This is what we ended up with. The wooden pieces are gone, the
metal poles embedded in concrete bases that we dug out of the ground
are still here for the moment.

This is the garden area and part of the fence in the summer (the rest of the
fence bends back and is hidden behind the front part):

Here's a more closeup view of the same area after we were finished taking
the fence down:

The fence ran through the garden area in the lower part of the picture.

This shouldn't be much of a problem for the plants - only a couple of them were climbers, and we can get trellises for those. Almost all of them were basically sun rather than shade plants - the extra sun from the removed fence should help them or at least not hurt them.

This picture inserted for no good reason other than that I think
that as many posts as possible should have pictures taken just after sunset.

Meanwhile, there are actually plants growing inside the house as well. They rarely get the attention that they deserve in this blog, but I couldn't ignore the Christmas cactus, which started blooming a little earlier than its name would suggest, but at the right general time of year.

Top-down view

In my humble opinion, Christmas cacti have some of the most beautiful flowers around. They look incredible close up:

Moods of the sky ...

2010-11-27T09:49:00.000-08:00

One thing I love about where I live is that there is a field behind the house, which is near the top of a hill. There is a great view to the west, which is a contrast to the situation of most houses in this area. Most houses either look onto a patch of woods, or into another house and yard the next street over. Over time, the sky has many different "moods".

Dramatic and contrasting:

Somber and gray, but with a bit of a lighter side:

Bright and cheerful:

A flash of light through the gloom:

Murky and mysterious:

A calm but colorful finale:

Turkeys and the "Columbian exchange"

2010-11-26T10:17:00.000-08:00

When the group of English colonists commonly known as Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic, they brought domestic turkeys with them. When they reached what is now Massachusetts, they found wild birds of the same species living there. At the festival of the first Thanksgiving, they may well have eaten either, or both, wild and domestic turkeys.

The turkey is a native of North America only. Given this, how could European settlers have brought turkeys from Europe to North America? The answer is that turkeys had already been brought from North America to Europe in the sixteenth century. The Pilgrims were already used to eating a distinctly "American" food long before they left England or the Netherlands to come to Massachusetts.

There are several different subspecies or varieties of wild turkey in North America. The southernmost of these subspecies lives in central Mexico. It was the only variety that was domesticated. When the Spanish overran the great Mexica (Aztec) empire in Mexico, they learned about the local foods. Apparently they liked turkeys enough to bring them back to Spain not long after the conquest of Mexico. From Spain, they spread through many other parts of Europe by the end of the sixteenth century, including England.

When the bird reached England in the late sixteenth century, there was a problem with names. The Spanish referred to the birds by a version of their native Mexican name. Hardly any of the English, on the other hand, knew exactly where these birds came from. At that time, the Ottoman or Turkish Empire controlled much of eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and was seen as strange and exotic by most people in western Europe. People tended to assume that most strange things, including strange animals and plants, came from Turkey. The large, meaty, but odd new bird became known as the "Turkey bird", because so many people assumed that it came from the empire of the Turks.

The spread of the domestic turkey from Mexico to Europe and then back across the Atlantic to more northern regions of North America is just one small example of a massive movement of domesticated and non-domesticated plants and animals known as the "Columbian exchange". It gets its name from the fact that it was the voyages of Christopher Columbus that started the exchange by encouraging further exploration, conquest, and colonization of new lands by Europeans.

Among other things, Europeans brought wheat, grapes, barley, oats, apples, peaches, oranges, pears, peas, rice, coffee, tea, sugarcane, pigs, sheep, cows, horses, honeybees, and a bunch of diseases from the "Old World"continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia, to the lands they considered a "New World". In return, they took, among other things, corn/maize, potatoes, chili peppers, beans, squash, sweet potatoes, cacao/chocolate, tomatoes, and pineapples back to not only Europe but to other parts of the "Old World". (Turkeys seem to have been the only domesticated animal taken in significant numbers from either American continent to the "Old World".

By doing this, they drastically changed the world's economy. Potatoes in northern and western Europe produced larger quantities of food on the same amount of land than traditional crops like wheat. This eventually led to a great increase of population in northern and western Europe, which probably helped make the industrial revolution possible creating a large number of former peasants who could not find work in rural areas and so came to early factories looking for work.

Corn/maize had little impact in northern or western Europe, but it became a major crop in parts of southern and eastern Europe. Its greatest impact, though, was probably in tropical Africa. Corn varieties that came from wet tropical regions of North and South America grew well in wet tropical areas of Africa, and as the potatoes did in Europe, they produced more food on the same amount of land than traditional local crops like yams. As in Europe, the new crops helped support a major increase in population, but instead of the Industrial Revolution, the extra population in Africa had a much worse fate. All of those extra people probably helped encourage various kingdoms and tribes in western and central Africa to go to war more often, and capture people from enemy kingdoms and tribes as slaves. Many of these slaves were sold to European slave traders, who took them to plantations in the American continents and the Caribbean.

So, just two crops going from the Americas to the "Old World" probably helped create both the African Slave Trade and the Industrial Revolution. The effects of the "Columbian Exchange" certainly went well beyond what was eaten at the first Thanksgiving!

Plant and garden pics from this year

2010-11-14T19:40:00.000-08:00

Lilacs blooming in front of the house in May

Pyrethrum or Painted Daisies in bloom, May
(species possibly Chrysanthemum coccineum also called
Tanacetum coccineum)

Unfortunately blurred closeup of a flower whose name escapes me at the moment,
taken in May.

Edge of a swamp area near where I live.

Emerging catkins (long clumps of tiny flowers) and leaves on a
white oak (Quercus alba), taken in May

Clusters of small white flowers on a
black cherry (Prunus serotina), taken in May.

Peonies in bloom, taken in June

Sunset from the back yard, taken in June

2010-11-06T22:57:00.000-07:00

On a different note, I looking at some of my photos taken during the last 2 or 3 months, and found a few that might be worthy of posting:

A big moth of some kind on a screen door to the back porch. It was about 1.5 inches wide,
with a distinctive color pattern.

A small tree growing alongside the sidewalk along the main street in my town.
I believe that it might be an American Chestnut growing back from
the remains of a much older one - the leaves seem to be the right size, shape
and configuration.

An Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) in the front yard. At about 20 years old,
it has gotten a little too tall to easily fit into a picture taken from near the house.

A fall-flowering wildflower - I'm not sure which one, but it was pretty.
Note the 3-leaved menace, poison ivy, sneaking into the picture to the
upper left. By now, they've both probably gone dormant for the winter.

Maple trees showing patches of color a little more than a month ago.
They might be either Sugar maple (Acer saccharum) or Red maple (Acer rubrum)-
I can't tell from this picture. By now, they've almost certainly lost close to 100%
of their leaves.

A single Red maple leaf lying on a juniper bush in the backyard, looking kind of like
the Canadian flag would look of the Canadian flag had a background
of green juniper foliage, and a differently shaped maple leaf with dew on it.

Sometimes individual maple leaves get patches of color while the rest is still green.
This might be a Silver maple based on the shape of the leaves, which look more
deeply lobed than either Sugar or Red maple leaves.

White oak (Quercus alba) fall foliage, from a small branch that broke off a white oak next door.
Oaks usually don't get showy fall foliage, but white oaks sometimes get
this sort of burgundy-like color.

Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia), a native vine related to wild grapes,
often gets bright red foliate in the early autumn. The neighboring invasive
Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) to either side of it remains green later
into the fall, and then turns yellow briefly before dropping off.

Ginkgo biloba is a unique species of tree that is the last survivor of what was once a widespread group of plants. It is also a popular ornamental tree in this area, since it can grow
in heavily built-up areas, has a nice, symmetrical form, and a unique shape of leaf.
Ginkgo has separate male and female trees. The male trees are more popular to plant because
they do not produce any fruit - ginkgo fruit is edible but gives of an unpleasant smell.
I had assumed that this was a male tree until the fall when I saw what were quite clearly fruits hanging in the branches. I didn't notice any unpleasant smell, either. Either I was just
lucky or I'm unusually insensitive to the smell.
Ginkgo leaves turn a nice bright golden yellow later in the fall, and then drop off quickly.
One day last week I noticed that this particular tree was almost bare, and all the fallen leaves
formed a nice bright yellow carpet on the ground. I'm not sure what happened to the fruit.

Ups and downs

2010-11-03T21:15:00.000-07:00

WARNING: Introspective, depressing, somewhat whiny post ahead. Please ignore if you don't want to read that kind of thing.

So again I took a long "vacation" away from blogging. The problem I have is that with my tendency to obsessiveness, once I get in the habit of checking this thing daily, I spend more and more of my time going around reading various peoples' blogs and occasionally get into an argument just for the heck of it. Clearly, this is unhealthy, so I step away. Unfortunately, I have a couple of other sites that I go to and do basically the same thing at when I'm not here. Why would any person with any intelligence or self-respect waste their time this way? In my case, at least, it's because bouncing around the internet getting involved in the occasional pointless argument is vastly more enjoyable than my other OCD-related activities. My other most common OCD related activities are:

1. Frequently worrying that I've run over animals, and sometimes people, in my car. This obsession has progressed to the point where I no longer totally trust my own senses, and worry that I've hit things even when I have no evidence for it at all, not even a bump.

2. Experiencing wild mood swings in which I alternately repeat certain abstract thoughts that make me happy, and think of reasons why those thoughts are nonsense and why I really should not be happy.

3. Generally coming up with reasons why I am a poor excuse for a human being who has utterly wasted his entire life.

I realize that these descriptions are incredibly vague, but describing the details of my thought process would take a lot more room and, more importantly, would be largely nonsense to anybody else. Still, these brief summaries should probably give a clue as to why wasting time on the internet is actually the most enjoyable aspect of my OCD. Of course, excessive internet usage is not the only unhealthy activity that I engage in as a way of trying to get relief from my OCD. I've also been eating lots of junk food and gaining some weight back. It sucks, but if you're a stress eater like I am, a jumbo box with a pound of Cheez-Its or Doritos or popcorn is surprisingly effective at calming the brain down after a bad day of recurring negative obsessions.

Anyway, on the brighter side of things, I have finally got my butt moving enough to start looking at houses. I went looking at a half dozen with my realtor last Saturday, and will go looking at some more this Saturday if I can figure out which ones on the list I want to look at by tomorrow (well, later today, actually). It's unfortunate that what should be my highest priority, along with other priorities like work, finances, life, etc., are fighting an uphill battle with my various facets of my OCD for attention in my brain - but that's the story of much of my life. After a meeting with my psychiatrist today, we agreed that it would be a good idea to look for both a support group and new prescription. Hopefully this will work well.

Late summer flowers

2010-09-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

After the previous post, here's something lighter ....

My gardens are rich in plants that flower in spring and early summer, while there are a lot fewer flowers in the middle and later part of the growing season. I should have changed this, but I'm ultra-conservative in my gardening - if an existing plant is healthy and produces lots of flowers, I hate the idea of removing it just to put in something different.

Still, the later summer is not completely devoid of flowers and other interesting features. Here are a few:

In spite of its name, the Blackberry lily (Belamcanda chinensis) is closely related to irises rather than lilies. Its foliage consists of a fan-shaped pattern of long, straplike, pointed leaves, just like an iris, but the flowers look more like small orange lilies (hence the name). It's not a very showy plant, but I think it looks nice in a modest sort of way.

These flowered unusually early.

The small but colorful flowers only last for a single day, much like those of a Hemerocallis or daylily. Again like a daylily, a single plant will usually produce at least several days' worth of flowers.

Why is it called a blackberry lily? To understand this, you have to wait a little while until the seed pods start to burst open and reveal the clumps of seeds:

Each clump of small, round, black, shiny seeds looks remarkably similar to a blackberry. The resemblance is an illusion - each seed is separate, and they are hard and inedible. They do look pretty, though.

The blackberry lily is native to parts of China, and was brought to the US as an ornamental garden plant. One of the first people to grow them in the USA was supposedly Thomas Jefferson. This is especially significant because all of the blackberry lilies in my gardens are descended from a few seeds that my mother got at Monticello (where they are still grown in the gardens) about 12 years ago. The plant is a prolific self-seeder, and now grows in a number of different parts of the garden.

"Autumn joy" sedum is an extremely common, extremely hardy plant that flowers from late summer through late autumn. It is also a magnet for a variety of different insects. It started to attract bumblebees before the flowers were property opened:

Once the flowers open completely, they are a reddish-pink color.
As time goes on, they gradually turn more of a brick-red color, and then turn to a reddish brown as they go to seed later in the autumn. They last that way throughout the whole winter.

The Chinese lantern plant (Physalis alkekengi) has small greenish flowers that are difficult to see, but in late summer it develops bright orange coverings over its fruits - sort of a like a loose, natural "wrapping paper". These really stand out and make the plant worthwhile for adding color to the garden.

The plant's other outstanding feature is its ability to spread through underground runners and pop up in completely different places each year. It's actually pretty "weedy", and it would get pulled out quickly if it weren't for the nice orange "lanterns".

Some of the color in the gardens this time of year does not come from deliberately planted garden plants. This is the time of year when the goldenrods (members of the genus Solidago)
are in bloom. These are either weeds or wildflowers depending on one's perspective. Some people associate them with hay fever and allergies, but in fact they don't cause allergies. They just happen to bloom at the same time as ragweed, which does cause allergies, but has very inconspicuous flowers. For hundreds of years, people have been hit with allergies at the same time of the year that goldenrod has been the most obvious, colorful wildflower in bloom, so people naturally associated goldenrod with the allergies.

Falsely accused

There are lots of species of goldenrod, and I'm not enough of an expert to tell the difference between most of them.

One of the "golden rods" close up

Finally, in the category of "not especially pretty, but interesting", I put some of the grasses that pop up in the gardens. A lot of the weeds in my garden are grasses, and these fall into 2 categories. First, there are the usual grasses - the lawn grass encroaching into the flower beds, and the usual crabgrass. Second, there are the types of grasses that you don't see as often in a suburban yard. I suspect that most of these come from the field right behind out house, where they used to graze sheep and cattle but now let the grass grow and cut and bale it it twice each summer for hay.

Emotional exhaustion

2010-09-17T06:59:00.000-07:00

I don't write about my emotional struggles very often. When I do write about them, I don't do it very well. It's not something that I'm used to doing. It often seems pointless because the specific things that get me upset are often so odd and divorced from the everyday world that putting them in writing just makes me look like a complete moron. Lately, though, I've been going through a pretty difficult period. It's one of the reasons why I haven't been reading or posting much lately. Frequent mood swings and going back and forth in my mind about questions like whether I have good reasons to be happy and whether my emotions are justified or not is just something that gets exhausting after a while. It takes a lot of time and effort, and my productivity in all of the normal, external parts of my life suffers for it. It also leads to a lot of erratic behavior, and makes me pull even further into myself than normal.

I read the blogs of a couple of people who are very eloquent about describing their emotional struggles and the reasons behind them. I don't have any such ability. All I can say is that when I'm in a certain mood, I can find an almost limitless number of reasons to hate myself.

Random comments

2010-08-12T06:46:00.000-07:00

The good news: The temperature outside around 70 Fahrenheit and relatively dry.
The bad news: The air conditioning in my office with non-opening windows is busted, leaving current office temperature at about 82 degrees and humid, probably to rise over the course of the day.

The good news: I'm getting in about 3 miles of walking every day to and from the train station to work.
The bad news: I've fallen back into the habit of pigging out on junk food in the evenings, which more than nullifies any benefits from the extra walking as far as weight loss goes. I'm sure that the walking is still good for my health, though.)

On an unrelated note, I am tired of wiping up after folks who can't hit the toilet accurately in the men's room. People would be well-advised to remember the following little jingle from my childhood:

If you sprinkle when you tinkle
Please be neat, and wipe the seat

(I apologize if this was a case of TMI.)

Going to seed

2010-08-10T19:24:00.000-07:00

The garden that I take care isn't looking so hot these days. It has an abundance of plants that flower in spring and early summer. It doesn't have nearly as much that thrives in mid to late summer. When you add in the fact that it's been relatively hot and dry for the past two months (at least by Massachusetts standards), and that I prefer to avoid heavy watering unless the plants look like they are in danger of actually dieing - it all adds up to a garden that looks somewhat wilting and ratty, in addition to lacking many flowers.
In the picture directly above, half of the green comes from weeds (mostly goldenrod, the tall ones with numerous small leaves). I don't have the heart to rip them out when they provide greenery and little yellow flower spikes as well.

A big patch of tradescentia plus heat and lack of water plus neglect equals a matted mess of dried up old tradescentia plants.

Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum), with its lush leaves scorched brown by too much sun and not enough water. The yellow fruit has matured, though - the entire plant, including immature fruit, is poisonous, but the mature fruit is supposedly fine to eat (I haven't tried it myself). This is really a shade plant, which I unwisely planted in almost full sun. It does great in the spring and very early summer, then gets scorched as the weather gets hotter and drier. This has happened every year for at least 5 or 6 years - this year is just a little worse than usual.

Purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea), mostly past their prime and starting to go to seed. These may be the best self-seeding garden flowers that I have ever seen. Each individual plant seems to live about 2-4 years, but no new plants have been added to the garden for probably 15 years or so. All of the plants growing there now are self-seeded.

It may be a "lazy gardener's technique", but I have no problem with letting weeds that I consider attractive grow in parts of the garden that are thin on proper domesticated plants. This is a clump of milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), with not yet opened seedpods near the top of some of the plants. It will come as no surprise to most gardeners that the weeds, whether desired or not desired, have tended to cope with the heat and low rainfall better than most of the cultivated plants!

2010-08-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm still alive. I just left blogging for a while because 1) I felt like I had nothing meaningful to write, and I couldn't even think of decent comments to make, and 2) I was growing obsessive about reading other peoples' stuff and was spending way too much time on it. I may not have much of a life, but even I have other things that I need to spend time on.

A lot of my mental energy over the past few weeks has been spent wrestling with my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, my old "friend" that has dominated my mental outlook for most of my life. If anyone reading this has an anxiety-type psychological disorder, or even another kind of psychological disorder, there's a good chance you'll know what I'm talking about when I mention how exhausting it can be to wrestle with my OCD. Obsessive hopes and fears swirling around in my brain, the same things over and over again but not losing their emotional force and power, me sometimes trying to fight it but often just giving in because I don't have the mental energy to constantly fight. They are a constant distraction through all my waking hours from thoughts and activities that might actually be useful to me. I would go into more detail, but I don't have the time or energy.

One upshot of my OCD is that driving has become a very anxiety-inducing activity for me (long story), so I have been looking for ways to reduce the amount of time I spend behind the wheel. One such way is taking the train into the town where I work, even though it isn't that far away. Taking the train actually takes twice as long as driving, but it does cut down on the anxiety. It also gives me exercise walking about 1.5 miles to and from my workplace from the train station.

The garden's looking a little ratty - I haven't been doing enough weeding. Of course, the lower than average rainfall and higher than average temperatures for the last month and a half or so haven't been helping its appearance either.

Yet more garden photos

2010-06-14T20:01:00.000-07:00

One of these days, I'll make a post that requires more thought, but for now, more garden photos will have to so ...

Here you can make out yellow Coreopsis in bloom in the center, and several foxgloves
with their long spikes of purple flowers above then and further from the camera

A self-seeded Rose Campion (Lychnis coronaria) with small magenta-colored flowers
is growing on what should be the walkway to the left of center near the bottom of the picture. I decided not to pull it up because I have a general policy of not removing nice flowers that are kind enough to grow without even being deliberately planted.

Self-seeded foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea, I think)

Hostas with a Japanese painted fern kind of squashed between them

Common Milkweed (Asclepius syriaca) - another self-seeded plant, and a native. As the name implies, it is generally considered a weed, but IMHO it's a pretty and not-terribly-aggressive one that is conveniently filling in a spot that was bare before, so I decided that it's welcome. Behind it is a large clump of Oregano - first planted a decade ago by mom as a source of fresh spices, it quickly spread far beyond our puny needs for cooking, and now there are probably 15 clumps of it growing in various parts of the flower beds, which need to be partly torn out every year of two to prevent them from pushing out neighboring plants. It stays from a combination of my inertia and the fact that the flowers, while tiny, attract lots of insects, including butterflies and occasionally some odd orange and iridescent blue-colored hornets that I have never seen near any other flower in the garden.

Civilization and science

2010-06-06T09:57:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading a fairly short book about the possibilities of extraterrestrial life (The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, by Paul Davies. Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). I just reached a section that especially got my attention, even though it's only tangentially connected to the question of extraterrestrial intelligence. As Davies discusses the various things that would have to happen in order for intelligent extraterrestrial life capable of communicating with humans to exist, he also discusses what we know about how modern human civilization emerged on earth. When he reaches the question of the development of modern science and technology (which would be necessary for any intelligent civilization to communicate over very long distances), he discusses the prerequisites for the development of the scientific method in human civilization over the past few centuries, and it is here that he gives what I'm sure is a fairly controversial opinion.

It is certainly fashionable, partly for reasons of political correctness, to assert that, here on earth, any human society would be bound to discover science and technology in the fullness of time. To say otherwise seems to be implying the superiority of European civilization, where science as we know it began, and this is regarded by some people as racist and chauvinistic. Personally, I have always been sceptical of the claim that 'science is inevitable'. The problem is that science works so well, and is so much a part of everyday life, that people tend to take it for granted. ... The 'obvious' view of science is seen to rest on flimsy foundations when placed in a historical context, however. Science proper emerged in Renaissance Europe under the twin influences of Greek philosophy and monotheistic religion. The Greek philosophers taught that humans could come to understand the world by the exercise of reason, which achieved its most disciplined form in the rules of logic and the mathematical theorems that followed therefrom. They asserted that the world wasn't arbitrary or absurd, but rational and intelligible, even if confusing and complicated. However, Greek philosophy never spawned what today we would understand by the scientific method, in which nature is 'interrogated' via experiment and observation, because of the Greek philosophers' touching belief that the answers could all be deduced by pure reason alone. The Greeks' remarkable advances in reason and mathematics were nurtured for centuries during the European Dark Ages by Islamic scholars, without whom it is very doubtful that science and mathematics would have taken root in European culture in medieval times. An echo of the Islamic phase survives in modern terms like algebra and algorithm, and in the names of familiar stars such as Sirius and Betelgeuse. In spite of the importance of the Islamic phase in the lead-up to science, for some reason (possibly political or social) Arab scholars did not go on to formulate mathematical laws of motion or carry out laboratory experiments in the modern sense of the term. (Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence, p. 72-73)

There is another influence besides the rationalism of ancient Greek philosophers that Davies believes was essential to the development of modern science, however. This is monotheistic religion - a surprise given the modern disputes between monotheistic religion and science.

Meanwhile, monotheism increasingly shaped the Western world view during the formative stages of science. Judaism represented a decisive break with almost all contemporary cultures by positing an unfolding cosmic narrative based on linear time. According to the Judaic account, the universe was created by God at a definite moment in the past, and developed in a unidirectional series (creation, fall, trials and tribulations, Armageddon, salvation, judgement, redemption ...). In other words, Judaism has a cosmic story to tell, of a divine plan revealed through historical sequence. This was in sharp contrast to the prevailing view that the world is cyclic: the rotation of good times and bad times, the rise and fall of civilizations, the revolving wheel of fortune. Even today, the unidirectional linear-time world view of Western civilization rests uneasily with other cultural motifs, such as the dreaming of the Australian Aborigines or the cyclicity of Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies.

The concept of linear time, and a universe created by a rational being and ordered according to a set of immutable laws, was adopted by both Christianity and Islam, and was the dominant influence in Europe at the time of Galileo. The early scientists, who were deeply religious, regarded their work as uncovering God's plan for the universe, as revealed through hidden mathematical relationships. What we now call the laws of physics they saw as thoughts in the mind of God. Without belief in a single omnipotent rational lawgiver, it is unlikely that anyone would have assumed that nature is intelligible in a systematic quantitative way, mirrored by eternal mathematical forms. The scientific method itself verged on being an occult practice at the time of Newton, and was conducted after the fashion of a secret society. Writing coded symbols on pieces of paper and subjecting matter to 'unnatural' experimentation in the sanctum of special laboratories is an arcane procedure by any standards. So science, though considered natural enough today, was little different from magic when it was first established. (Davies, p. 73-74)

Davies is pretty sure, in fact, that no other civilization besides early modern Europe had the intellectual tools to come up with the scientific method - even civilizations that were just as technologically advanced.

Suppose an asteroid had hit Paris in 1300 and destroyed European culture. Would science ever have emerged on Earth? I have never heard a convincing argument that it would. It is often remarked that in medieval times the Chinese were technologically far more advanced than the Europeans, which is true. So why did the Chinese not go on to become true scientists? Part of the reason is that traditional Chinese culture was not steeped in the monotheistic notion of a transcendent lawmaker. Outside the monotheistic world, nature was perceived as ruled by the complex interplay of competing influences in the form of gods, agents and concealed mystical tendencies. In medieval China, no clear distinction was drawn between moral laws and laws of nature. Human affairs were inextricably bound up with the cosmos, forming an indivisible unity. For the pagans of Europe and the Near East, who were in competition with Christianity and Islam at their formative stages, knowledge of the cosmos was to be gained through 'gnosis', a mystical communion with the creator, rather than through rational enquiry. Could gnosis eventually lead to science? I don't think so. Unless you expect there to be an intelligible order hidden in the processes of nature - fixed and analysable by mathematics - there would be no motivation to embark on the scientific enterprise in the first place. (Davies, p. 74)

I suspect that Davies' claims would strike many people as being culturally chauvinist, as he noted himself. Is there any historical evidence that could be used to show that they are true or false? History is notoriously inexact and unclear compared to the physical sciences, and there is no way of applying the strict experimental method to history ("... in group B, we will eliminate European civilization in 1300 CE and compare the rate of development of a scientific worldview with the control group that includes European civilization ..."). Still, there might be some way of evaluating these claims in a very limited way ....

(In the near future, I'll give my off-the-cuff evaluation ...)

Plants and history

2010-06-03T21:40:00.000-07:00

I love history, and I love botany, so I especially like reading about plants in human history. Here's a few odd facts and stories that I've learned about a few local plants over the years, illustrated with a few of my own photos.

White Pine (Pinus strobus)

This conifer can grow to be the tallest tree in eastern North America, with some specimens in the old-growth forests of colonial times supposedly topping 200 feet (about 60 meters) in height. The large size, plus the wood's combination of strength, softness, flexibility, and low amount of resin (for a pine) made it ideal timber for some uses. The trunks of larger specimens were used for ship masts because they were strong but could flex when under great strain. The largest trees of all were officially reserved for use by the British navy in colonial times, and were sometimes branded with a symbol that marked them as so-called "King's pines" (reserved for use of the King's navy). The fact that they weren't allowed to cut them for their own ships or other use was another in the accumulating list of grievances that the colonists of New England developed against the British government.

By the later 19th century, most of the old-growth white pines had been logged, but the white pine certainly didn't become a rare species. The trees adaptability to a variety of conditions and fast growth rate meant that it was often the most common tree to grow on farm fields that had been abandoned. By the late 19th century, a lot of farms in New England were being abandoned as many farmers moved to land in the midwestern and great plains states that had richer soil with fewer rocks, or else moved into the towns and cities to find more profitable work. By the early 20th century, a second wave of logging swept over New England, cutting down the second growth of white pines for a new use - shipping crates. It turned out that white pine wood was ideal for making crates for shipping a wide variety of items by rail, ship, and truck - and the trees didn't have to be especially big to furnish timber for crates.

By the mid 20th century, the development of cardboard among other things undercut the market for white pine crates, and the pines regrew a third time. Some of the pines and other trees of this third generation of New England forests since European colonization have been cut down in their turn for housing developments and malls and other features of suburban sprawl, but many remain because suburban sprawl actually involves less clearing of land than the farming and lumber industry of earlier time. Today, Massachusetts has far more forested land than it did at the time of the American Revolution - though hardly any of it is fully mature old growth forest. Perhaps at least some of it will be able to grow uncut for centuries and allow some of the relatively young 50 or 60 foot tall white pines common today to grow to the 150, 175 or even 200 foot giants that were once far from rare.

The white pine has also been a symbol for both Native American nations and the European-descended whites who displaced them. The Haudenosaunee or Iroquois people who lived in what later became New York State used a white pine as a symbol on their modern flag, which is based on much older designs. For the Haudenosaunee, the white pine represented peace and the unity of the several nations who united to form a confederacy. One possible reason for this symbolism is that the white pine grows its needles in bunches of five, and the original Haudenosaunee or Iroquois confederation was made up of five nations (a sixth joined later).

When the English settled in New England, the white pine became a symbol for them as well, as the pine tree flag used during the American Revolution indicates.

Sassafras (Sassafras albidum)

Europeans introduced many terrible diseases to the natives of North and South America, but America only gave the "old world" a single significant disease in return - syphilis. Still, it became common enough in Europe during the 16th century that Europeans were desperate to find a cure. One theory was that since the disease came from the Americas, only a plant from the Americas could provide an appropriate remedy. A number of different plants from different parts of the American continents were tried, none with much success. One of the most popular plants that was tried was the sassafras tree, a native of much of what is now the eastern USA. Some of the very first Europeans to land on the coast of what later became New England at the beginning of the 17th century - more than a decade before the Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth- came primarily to cut down Sassafras trees and dig up their roots to extract the oil. Both the fruit and the roots could be used to produce an oil that had painkilling properties (this was probably where it got the reputation of being a good "cure" - for most infectious diseases at the time, the best treatments alleviated the symptoms rather than helping much with the disease itself). The oil also had a distinctive smell that many found attractive and that repelled insects to boot. Settlers later found that parts of the plant could also be used to make flavorful teas and a distinctively flavored beer known as "root beer" because the extract that gave it a distinctive taste came from Sassafras tree roots (yes, the original root beer was an actual beer).

Unfortunately, parts of the sassafras plant also contain the chemical safrole, which is potentially carcinogenic. Not surprisingly, sassafras isn't used for medical treatment anymore, but dried and ground leaves (which don't contain significant amounts of safrole) are used as a seasoning in some regional American cuisines, especially cajun and creole in Louisiana.

Grapevine (Vitis genus, unknown species)

European explorers overseas often looked for evidence of something familiar as they surveyed an unfamiliar environment, and in North America one familiar thing that they often saw was grapevines. One Viking saga tells of how Norse explorers who reached North America around 1000 AD found grapevines there, but did not recognize them because they did not grow in their own homelands of Scandinavia, Iceland, or Greenland. Instead, it was a servant who originally came from the Rhineland of Germany and who was familiar with grapes who recognized the American grapevines and pointed them out to Norse fellow explorers. There is some controversy about this legend, because the only place in North America where the Vikings are known to have landed is northern Newfoundland, which was too far north for grapevines to grow even during the unusually warm early medieval period when the Norse crossed the north Atlantic. One possible explanation is that the medieval Norse word for "grapes" might also refer to other kinds of berries that did grow in Newfoundland. Another possibility is that the Vikings set up a base in Newfoundland, but explored much further south, reaching Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and possibly parts of New England. In these places, they would have found plenty of native grapevines. What is certain is that when Europeans returned in larger numbers to temperate North America in the 16th and 17th centuries, many of them remarked on the grapevines. Giovanni da Verrazzano, leading one of the first European expeditions to explore what is now the eastern coast of the USA in 1524, noted:
We noticed many wild grapevines climbing up the trees, as they do in the north of Italy

. If these vines were to be cultivated, they would surely produce some excellent wines. I tasted the grapes on several occasions and found them flavourful and sweet. That the natives consider the grapes important can be seen from the fact that they clear the weeds from growing around them, so as to facilitate their germination. (From this website.)

In fact, North America has a larger number of grape species than any other part of the world. In spite of this biological diversity, and in spite of Verrazzano's optimistic prediction, none of these species have ever been able to rival Vitis vinifera, the old world grape native to the Mediterranean, as a source of either wine or table grapes. Still, the native grape species Vitis labrusca, Vitis riparia, and Vitis rotundifolia have all been developed into several varieties of wine and table grapes, even if they will never match the traditional V. vinifera in popularity.

Virginia spiderwort (Tradescentia virginiana)

This plant was one of the first native plants of North America to be brought back to Europe for mainly aesthetic reasons - as a garden plant. It was introduced to England by John Tradescant the Younger, a 17th century English scholar and botanist who served as chief gardener to King Charles I of England and who personally traveled to Virginia in the 1630s to find interesting plants for the gardens of the King and wealthy English nobles.

Common Plantain (Plantago major)

This plant is a common weed in fields, lawns, and roadsides in the northeastern United States. It also was (and is) a common weed in Europe, and this weediness lies at the root (no pun intended) of its spread to North America. Because it was a common weed in fields of wheat and other grains, its seeds inevitably got mixed in with seeds of wheat and barley and forage grasses that the early settlers took with them from Europe to sow in their new fields in what became the eastern USA and Canada. Wheat, barley, and other plants were sown, the seeds of the common plantain were unwittingly sown with them. A number of other weeds came over from Europe with European settlers in the same manner - the best known of these is probably the common dandelion. The common plantain, though, became so common around English settlements that the Native Americans in New England took a special notice of it. They referred to it by a phrase which translates as "the white man's foot", because they said that wherever white settlers went, this plant, unknown before they came, seemed to appear almost as if by magic.

Re: my posts

2010-06-01T21:17:00.001-07:00

Sorry that I haven't been posting much besides garden and plant stuff lately. I haven't been feeling at my best mentally, I've felt tired a lot, and gardening and plants are the only things that have both made me both want to write and that I feel like I can write (semi-) coherently about. Every time I want to write something about history, my life, or some other issue, I start worrying if my post really is worthwhile or makes any sense or is pointless or will unnecessarily offend someone, or whether it accurately represents what I am really thinking, etc., etc. Frankly, I didn't start blogging to add another pointless obsessive self-imposed emotional burden to my life, so I avoid posting except for the few subjects that are free of this emotional baggage. (Given my talent for creating pointless self-imposed emotional burdens, I shouldn't be so surprised that this has happened.)

The same issue applies to a certain degree commenting on other peoples' blogs.

Hopefully this will pass.

Tulip tree

2010-05-29T21:18:00.001-07:00

The first time I remember seeing a tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) was during a family trip to Virginia. I didn't think that it grew as far north as Massachusetts. I was quite wrong. It's far from common, but it is occasionally planted as a landscape tree, and can survive. When I started at my current job a couple of years ago, I realized when spring came that there was a big specimen growing right next to the parking lot.

It's impossible to fit the whole tree into one picture from the parking lot.

The tulip tree, aka yellow poplar, is a native of much of the United States east of the Mississippi, more common in the southeast but obviously capable of growing as far north as Massachusetts - though we are on the extreme northern edge of its range. It's a very distinctive and remarkable tree. In sheer size, it can be one of the largest trees in eastern North America, growing to more than 160 feet/50 meters tall in the more southern parts of its range. The leaves, flowers, and seeds are very distinctive and not easy to mistake for anything else once you get a close look at them.

The most distinctive feature of all, and the one that gives the tree its name, are the flowers. They are large and showy, a mixture of yellow, orange, and green, and shaped somewhat like tulips - hence the name for the tree. Unfortunately, the flowers tend to be mostly on the middle and upper branches of the tree, so it can be difficult to get a good closeup, especially on a fairly large tree.

Tulip tree flowers - pale yellow and orange in color

The name for the tree may come not only from the shape of the flowers themselves, but also from the shape of the leaves. They have a similar shape to the outline of some types of tulip flowers when seen from the side. They also look a little like maple leaves, but they have 4 lobes rather than the 5 or 3 lobes that maple leaves have. Tulip tree leaves lack a middle lobe of the type that gives maple leaves a "tip" in the center.

Closer view of Tulip tree leaves - 4 lobes total, no central lobe

Tulip trees are related to magnolias, but they have no really close relatives (in the same genus) in North America. Their closest relative is in fact a native of China - Liriodendron chinense. It may seem bizarre that the closest relative of a plant native to the eastern USA is found in China, on the opposite side of the northern hemisphere, but in fact many plants from both eastern and western North America have close relatives in China and other parts of eastern Asia. For tens of millions of years, the two continents have apparently been exchanging plant and animal species through several different means - dry land bridges or bridges of closely-spaced islands caused by either lower sea levels or geological activity, or by migrating birds and wind-blown seeds. In the distant past, tens of millions of years ago, it was also apparently easier for Asia and North America to exchange plant species because the world's climate was both warmer and wetter, so even the high arctic latitudes where the two continents came closest too each other were covered with temperate or even subtropical forests, rich in plant species that could migrate in both directions. In more recent times, the two continents have been temporarily joined by a land bridge during ice ages, but that land bridge was frigid tundra, which allowed animals - including humans - to move between the continents, but was only useful to plants that were adapted to the coldest tundra conditions - which eliminates most trees!

Garden geography

2010-05-22T19:00:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I find interesting about gardening is something that many gardeners probably don't think very much about - where the plants in the garden originally came from. Most garden plants, whether flowers, herbs, or vegetables, have been selectively bred to some degree to produce larger flowers or leaves or roots, but most of them still have a lot in common with their wild ancestors. So, in a sense, even an average suburban garden is a sort of herbarium or botanical garden with specimens that originate in various parts of the world. Here are just a few samples from my particular garden:

Dicentra eximia - Wild bleeding heart; native to
eastern United States, mainly Appalachian mountains

Syringa vulgaris - Common lilac; native to the
Balkan peninsula of southeastern Europe

Podophyllum peltatum - Mayapple; native to
eastern United States

Cercis canadensis - Eastern redbud; native to
eastern United States (but not Canada, in spite of the name)

Centaurea cyanus - Cornflower or Bachelor's button; native to
most parts of Europe

Rosa carolina - Pasture rose or Carolina rose; native
to eastern United States and southeastern Canada

Rudbeckia hirta - Black-eyed susan; native to
central and eastern United States and Canada

Athyrium niponicum - Japanese painted fern; native to
Japan (duh!), northern China, Korea, Taiwan

Leucanthemum x superbum - Shasta daisy; hybrid of two species
native to Europe -- with Apis mellifera - Honey bee; native to parts of Asia,
Africa, and Europe

Dicentra spectabilis - Bleeding heart or Lyre-flower; native to
southeastern Siberia, northern China, Korea, and Japan

Rhododendron maximum - Great rhododendron; native to
eastern United States and southeastern Canada

You may notice that all of these plants are natives of either eastern North America, Europe, or the northern China-Korea-Japan area. This isn't an accident - the northeastern part of the United States has a type of climate sometimes known as humid continental. There are three large areas of land on earth that have this climate:

Image from here on Wikipedia - see this article.

The native ranges of most of the common (and quite a few of the less common) garden plants that grow in the northeastern United States fall mostly within one of these three zones.

Tired

2010-05-19T09:10:00.000-07:00

Tired at all hours of the day. Tired enough to barely keep my eyes open sometimes. Tired enough to go in and out of a near-sleep state in front of my computer at work, in which my eyes are open but I am not conscious of my surroundings. Tired for no apparent reason. Tired in spite of getting enough sleep. Tired in spite of not being particularly stressed. Tired in spite of not feeling sick in any other way. Mystery tired. Not too worried - it happens occasionally. Hope it goes away.

Wild turkey

2010-05-10T18:05:00.000-07:00

As I was eating breakfast this morning, I saw a wild turkey in the backyard right outside the window, less than 10 feet away. By the time I got my camera, it was further away but I managed to get a couple of good photos:

I'm pretty sure this was a female - the males are considerably larger and have more reddish skin on their head and neck. They can fly, but only do so when they really have to, preferring to walk around. They often travel in groups, but this one was solitary.

Twenty years ago, wild turkeys were very rare in this part of Massachusetts, having been hunted or driven out by the 19th century. The first one in my town in more than 100 years was spotted 18 or 20 years ago. Now they are common enough that it's no surprise to see them, but this was still an unusually good opportunity to get a picture from pretty close up in good light - and from indoors, where my movement and noise wouldn't drive the bird away quickly.

Tulips and other flowers of mid-spring

2010-05-08T19:28:00.000-07:00

I was so happy to see the tulips actually get a chance to bloom this year instead of being eaten by deer that I took lots of photographs. There are plenty of other flowers that have been blooming over the past 10 days or so, and I didn't completely neglect them with the camera.

First, the tulips. Most of these photos were actually taken last weekend. Unfortunately, tulips are not very long-lasting flowers once they open, and virtually all of the flowers pictured here have dropped all of their petals. Today I clipped off a lot of the flower heads, because bare flower heads after the petals fall off look rather unattractive (in my opinion), plus if they actually produce seeds, this will use some of the sugar and other nutrients that the plants live on. If they don't produce seeds, more of the nutrients will go down into the bulb, resulting in a larger plant next year. Or so I've heard - I probably should check more closely to see if I'm wasting my time!

These first two pictures are two views of the same tulip. It is the only one with this color combination in the garden - I especially like the combination of colors when the flower is backlit.

Red and white striped tulip with colors that remind me of a candy cane. (It doesn't take much to remind me of one kind of junk food or another.) These I like how the outer "petals" flare out like little tongues. (The "outer petals" are actually sepals in tulips. For many kinds of flowers, the sepals are the green lobes that make up the outer covering of the flower before it opens, and which usually shrivel up or become inconspicuous after the flower opens and the petals come out. In tulips, however, the sepals change color to match the petals as the flower starts to open, and remain an important part of the flower until they drop off around the same time as the petals.)

Pinkish tulip with a lighter central area and sepals that flare out somewhat less than the previous flower.

Large yellow tulip with dark center - and a small spider crawling on the right side.

A tulip of the same type as the previous, except with a single red stripe.

Some type of pale blue iris - as you may have noticed, I'm not good at remembering the names of different varieties or cultivars! All I know is that I got this at a local garden club sale, and that it is a short variety, with the the flowers no more than 6-8 inches above the ground and the leaves not much taller.

A closeup of the flowers of an azalea or dwarf rhododendron (I can't remember which) in front of the house. Notice the bee at work gathering nectar from the flower in the center - I believe this is a honey bee.

A broader view of the same azalea along the walkway to the front door of Dad's house (the house where I spent most of my childhood and have lived for some of my adult years as well.)

A cluster of pink tulips, with some white and red tulips in front of them (kind of washed out from the late afternoon sunlight glaring off the white flowers). The pale blue irises are at upper left, further from the camera than the tulips - you can see how they are pretty short.

An azalea bush with reddish flowers to the left, pink and mixed pink and white tulips to the right. There are a mix of lower-growing plants, including a few blue anemones to the left, a few purplish grape hyacinths to the right, the plant with the gray-colored foliage whose name I can never remember, and a bunch of lily-of-the valley sprouting just about everywhere it can. (Lily of the Valley spreads itself all too well by underground runners. Mom planted it years ago against her better judgment in a location a few feet to the left of the left edge of this photo, and surrounded it with a plastic barrier 6 inches deep to prevent it from spreading as recommended in the garden books. This worked for 2 or 3 years, but then its underground runners found some little breach and it has been spreading to a wider part of the garden each year.)

A patriotic grouping of flowers - red azalea bush, white candytuft (Iberis sempervirens), and blue anemones.

A nice ensemble photo, with 5 colors of tulip (multiple pinks and purples, 2 white with a little red, and a single solid red and single pale-pink/yellow) growing along with bleeding hearts (background), candytuft (lower left), and yellow alyssum (right). An azalea bush is just above the alyssum, but this one has not started to flower yet.

Pink, purple, and red tulips again, along with bleeding hearts and alyssum, and the pale blue irises (which were hidden behind another some of the tulips in the previous picture.)

Garden: Least Wanted #1, Poison Ivy

2010-05-02T19:33:00.000-07:00

Weeds are something that every gardener has to deal with. My own attitude toward weeds is not as always as hostile as that of the typical gardener. My mom, from whom I learned a lot of what I know about gardening, preferred a garden style that was somewhere between strictly formal, with no plants tolerated out of place, and natural or wildflower, where everything except the most noxious weeds are allowed to grow naturally. Her view tended to be that wildflowers and natural offspring of deliberately cultivated plants were welcome as long as 1) they didn't grow too big or crowd or choke out nearby plants, 2) they didn't look too unattractive or out of place - obviously a subjective judgment, but most garden choices have to be subjective. Taking care of the same garden for my father later, I followed a somewhat similar pattern, except that I err more on the side of giving things a chance to grow. Sometimes this "erring" is costly. Dad mildly but firmly informs me that I need to get more ruthless rather than waiting until halfway through summer to see if those unidentified seedlings of April will turn out to be nice wildflowers, only to discover that they are fast-growing weeds with microscopic flowers that are threatening to devour whole flower beds by the end of June - by which point they have developed clumps of thick roots the size of carrots and need a considerable amount of effort to be removed without tearing out 3 or 4 surrounding plants with them.

In spite of my far too indulgent attitude toward many plants that turn out to be weeds, there are a very few weeds that even I loathe enough to want to eliminate on sight. At the very top of the list is Toxicodendron radicans, better known as poison ivy, the little three-leaved plant growing out of the cracks of the stone wall just beneath a branch from an evergreen shrub here:

It's also known as Rhus radicans, or "The three-leaved spawn of Satan",
though the latter term might just be mine.

This plant is unfortunately familiar to many, perhaps most, people living in the eastern half of the United States and Canada. It's actually not a bad plant in many respects - it is a native plant, its foliage looks reasonably attractive, its berries are eaten by several different species of birds, and it even gets nice red foliage before dropping its leaves in autumn. It has just one slight flaw from a human perspective - all parts of the plant are covered by an oily chemical called urushiol that causes a severe itching and burning rash in the majority of people. Any physical contact between human skin and any part of the plant causes, for most people, anything from a slightly itchy rash to severe swelling and blistering that resembles a fairly serious burn. Some people have no reaction as children, but develop the allergy as adults. Unlike some toxins, the body actually tends to become more sensitive to the oil the more times it is exposed to it. The oil is potent enough that touching objects that have touched the plant, such as clothing and tools, is usually enough to cause a reaction. The WORST thing to do is burn the plant, because this simply vaporizes the oil and can cause severe irritation inside the nasal passages and lungs if one inhales the vapors.

Granted, poison ivy is far from the only plant that can cause a severe and painful reaction for people who simply touch it. Quite a few plants have urushiol - in the United States alone, there are two species of Poison oak and one of Poison sumac that cause similar, or sometimes even more severe effects. Some tropical regions have a number of plants that cause much more severe reactions than poison ivy or its relatives. Different people have different levels of both sensitivity and severity of reaction.

Still, in the northeastern United States, these other plants are non-existent or rare, while poison ivy grows abundantly and lushly in exactly the kind of places where people are likely to encounter it - in gardens, along the edges of yards, along sidewalks and streets, up the sides of trees and shrubs. It's a plant that thrives along the edges of land disturbed by human activity, and therefore many more people will literally come into contact with it than would be the case for a plant that grows mainly in deep woods or swamps. Many of these people will have a reaction that will range from merely irritating to quite painful and even debilitating (though temporary).

Poison ivy usually grows as a vine, either growing up trees, shrubs, rocks, fences, and buildings, or spreading along the ground. Sometimes it will grow more like a shrub. Its most characteristic feature is the leaves in clusters of three, with the middle leaf extended on a petiole (leaf-stalk) while the leaves on either side have little or no leaf-stalk. The leaves typically have a "shiny" and oily appearance, and they are often have a dark reddish hue when they are first emerging:

Growing along the ground with newest growth at upper right.

The stems or vines of poison ivy have just as much oil as the leaves. They are characterized by a distinctly "hairy" appearance when they climb up objects, especially as they get older and thicker:

"Hairy" poison ivy vine growing up chain link fence among other types of vine.
Note the reddish leaves emerging from the upper portions - this was a couple of weeks ago.

Unfortunately the "hairiness" is not nearly as obvious on young vines, and poison ivy also grows along the ground and as a shrub - in which case the stems often have no root hairs at all, since the hairs are used to cling on the objects to support the plant's growth upward.

1 year old stem with some root hairs, but mostly smooth.

There are several other plants that can be confused with poison ivy, especially if you are as paranoid about it as I am.

For example, there's Virginia creeper:

It has five rather than three leaves, but when the plant is growing three leaves sometimes emerge before the other two, making it look very similar to poison ivy. It's not related to poison ivy at all - it's actually a pretty close relative of grapes. In spite of a certain vague resemblance of leaf shape, it is not related to another well-known plant. It's not safe for everyone - it actually produces a different chemical that can cause bad allergic reactions in some people, but for a smaller percentage of the population than poison ivy. I've never had a bad reaction after years of weeding it with bare hands, and I'm really hoping that it stays that way.

Virginia creeper leaves have a similar oily shine to those of poison ivy, and the two plants are both vines that often grow right alongside each other. Below is part of the stone wall between the proper garden and the weed-rich waste area behind it. Poison ivy is growing over the stones toward the left, Virginia creeper toward the right. One branch of the poison ivy extends toward the right and is intermixed with the Virginia creeper. This gives some idea of how one could mix the two up if one is not constantly paying close attention.

Even the bare stems look similar. Compare the Virginia bare creeper vine below with the bare Poison ivy vine earlier in this post.

Another one that can be confused with poison ivy is a very young hickory sapling, which has leaves which are reddish and a little oily looking when they are newly grown. The hickory leaves grow in groups of five, like Virginia creeper, but it's easy to miss the extra two leaves if you aren't looking closely. Unlike poison ivy, hickory tree leaves have fine "teeth" all around the edges, and have a different overall shape:

There are also several types of wild berries, such as blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries, that grow their leaves in groups of three and can look similar to poison ivy. Their leaves tend to have more "teeth" around the edge, though.

So, Poison ivy is my personal most hated weed. When it comes the natural ecosystem as a whole, though, there are plenty that are worse ....

Garden views and greenery

2010-04-27T21:05:00.000-07:00

Should this thing be called "Offhand comments from a frustrated gardener"? Sorry if I'm posting too much about the garden, but springtime sometimes gets me thinking about gardening and plants and botany in both practical and abstract ways.

Now, more garden pictures. These are two views from similar angles taken about 2 weeks apart, showing the relatively rapid growth and "greening" at this time of year:

Here you can see, among other plants, some of the hostas unfolding their leaves, and the Ostrich fern uncoiling its fronds. (The Ostrich fern was planted in a single spot 5 years ago. It's a "colony plant" that spreads through underground runners, and each year appears in one or two places where it didn't the year before.)

Another flower bed - this one has, among other plants, irisis, astilbe, peonies, spirea, echinacea (purple coneflowers), onions, daisies, rose campion, poppies, and sedum. Hardly any of these plants flower really early in the growing season, so it will be another 3 weeks to a month before this part of the garden starts to break out in lots of color. (The only things flowering here are a single pink hyacinth on the left, and a few pale blue phlox above and a little to the right of the hyacinth.)

Back to a part of the garden that has more early spring flowering action going on - Dicentra spectabilis bleeding hearts in full bloom, along with two different varieties of tulip:

In this next picture, the low lying blue flowers are anemones, which have already been flowering for almost 3 weeks. Above them, an azalea bush is about to start bursting out lots of bright magenta-pink flowers, while at the bottom the white candytuft (Iberis sempervirens) is also starting to flower. Little green sprouts of lily-of-the-valley are coming up around everything, and to the right that the ground is carpeted by the aptly named "grey-leafed, self-spreading plant whose name I can never remember"

There's always a major hazard when you don't put any kind of edging material between a garden bed and the lawn. Most lawn grasses will happily spread into the garden, especially because the mulched, composted, fertilized soil in the garden is probably more fertile than the soil under the lawn itself. If you have a low-growing groundcover plant at the edge of the flower bed, it's almost impossible to pull the spreading grass out without ripping out the plant you want to keep. What you can end up with is this:
in which the grass has pretty much taken over a chunk of what used to be part of the flower garden, and the actual garden plant (whose name, again, I can't remember - you can see bits of its greyish foliage peeking through the grass) is gradually being crowded out and choked by the faster-growing grass. I can only see two options - dig up everything and replant, or concede that this area is now part of the lawn again and start mowing it as part of the lawn, which will quickly finish off the last bits of the other plant.

Grass tends to spread more aggressively than most of my garden plants, but occasionally there is a problem going the other way. For example, here the Ostrich fern and a lamium with nice pink flowers both demonstrate a total lack of concern for my arbitrary boundary between flower garden and lawn:

The back of the yard, with the "waste area" between the stone wall and a fence. This has always been a very convenient place to dump clippings, weeds, small fallen branches, etc, and has saved countless trips to a landfill with yard waste over the years. After almost 3 decades of being dumped on like this, the soil is incredibly fertile in this strip - both weeds and "overflow" plants transplanted from the flower beds grow at least as well in the "waste area" as in the formal parts of the garden. Unfortunately, invasive Oriental Bittersweet and native but most unwelcome poison ivy are always creeping in from the other side of the chain-link fence, where I can never get rid of them. Cutting them and other weeds back is a necessary chore at least once or twice per growing season, and preferably more. Without cutting much of the this area would become a tangled mass of weeds in 1 year, and all of it in less than two.

Finally, bushes and a couple of tulips along the front walkway. Oddly, the front yard has far fewer flowering perennials than the back and side yards, partly because it's smaller, partly because much of the available space is taken up by shrubs and small trees instead.

Garden flowers

2010-04-25T20:23:00.000-07:00

The garden that I act as "caretaker" has mainly perennials. This makes it lower maintenance than a garden that has to be largely replanted each year, but it risks becoming monotonous. Fortunately, there are enough different types of flowers to keep it colorful and varied throughout the majority of the growing season.

The first flowers in the garden every spring are the crocuses.

Crocuses usually come up in late March or early April here. They will push up through snow if there is still some on the ground. Since this spring got mild earlier than usual, they came up in the middle of March with no trace of snow to impede them. The flowers are unfortunately short-lived - after about a week they start looking kind of worn out and soon start dropping petals, and are pretty much gone less than three weeks after opening.

The second flowers to start opening are usually the anemones.
This plant usually continues producing new flowers until June or later.

Soon, the hyacinths make a dramatic appearance, with a whole clump of flowers opening simultaneously on a stalk rising from each plant.

The lawn grass is has been pushing into this flower bed for the last couple of years,
but the hyacinths don't seem to be bothered.

Hyacinths usually flower mid-April, but this spring they came up in early April, and the flowers are already fading in color and on their way out for the year.

The daffodils often are the very first plants to poke leaves out of the ground, before even the crocus. Unlike the crocus, though, they usually take a little while (maybe 3-4 weeks) after first rising from the ground to open their flowers.

A pleasant surprise - this group had only pure lemon-yellow flowers last year,
but this year one of the flowers has two distinct colors.

Some of the daffodils are shriveling already, while others probably have another month left. They seem to vary widely in terms of how long their flowers last.

Then, there are the tulips. I am seeing most of them for the first time in 3 years, because in the previous 2 springs they almost all got eaten by deer. The lot does not border directly on a wooded area - it's several hundred feet from the edge of the nearest woods - so the deer liked the tulips enough to walk through several peoples' yards at night to get a special treat. In some cases they ate the plant down to near ground level, but in other cases they waited until the flower was just about to open, and then ate just the flower and stem, which must be like the finest piece of chocolate to them. Finding these "decapitated" tulips was especially annoying.

This year, though, the deer haven't touched anything. Maybe the early spring meant more plants sprouting earlier in the forests so less need to forage in peoples' gardens. In any case, the tulips got a chance to flower again:

The pink and white striped ones in the middle photo were another pleasant surprise - I'm pretty sure that they were solid pink the last time they got a chance to flower. The stripes of various colors and patterns have an interesting history. These markings were especially prized by European tulip growers back in the 17th century. For a few years in the 1630s, breeding tulips became so lucrative in the Netherlands that tulip bulbs became a major investment vehicle, with single bulbs that produced flowers with unusual color combinations and patterns selling for the equivalent of several million dollars. This "tulipmania" collapsed, but tulips remained among the more prized flowers for the wealthy into the 19th century, when they finally became affordable to a larger public. Many attempts were made to crossbreed plants for seeds with more elaborate colors and patterns, but these almost always failed. Unbeknownst to early tulip-breeders, the stripes and multiple colors are not hereditary. They are caused by a viral infection that usually does not have any serious negative effect on the plant's health except to discolor the flowers. That's why a plant can go from solid-color flowers one year to striped and multicolored flowers the next year - it has been infected at some point. The fact that these diseased flowers happened to look more attractive to some people was just a lucky coincidence. Tulip growers discovered that the only way to reproduce a tulip with a desirable color and pattern was to wait for the main bulb to reproduce asexually by budding off smaller bulbs, and then separating these extra bulbs and replanting them. A tulip bulb in good soil will usually produce a number of clones in this fashion, so that rather than seeds became the main technique of tulip propagation.

Anyway, moving on from that hopefully not too dull mini-lecture, here is one of the next flowers to bloom, Dicentra spectabilis, the Bleeding heart:

Flowers slightly less than 1 inch (~2 cm.) from top to bottom.

Dicentra spectabilis is native to eastern Asia. It grows 2-3 feet tall and produces rows of fairly large, colorful, unusually shaped flowers by mid to late April. Unfortunately, as is the case with so many colorful perennials, the flowers have a limited life span. In less than a month, the flowers have mostly dropped. By late June, the plant's leaves and stems start to wilt and yellow in the summer heat, and by July I cut them back to the ground because the entire plant has turned a dead-looking yellow-brown. Ideally, a gardener should plant something that flowers later in the season alongside the bleeding heart so that something can take the plant's space in the garden when it dies back. I've tried a couple of things, but they haven't lasted more than a season.

In another part of the garden, there is a close relative of the bleeding-heart. This is Dicentra eximia. The garden has plants with both white and pink flowers. Dicentra eximia is a native of eastern North America (unlike most of the other plants in this post, which originate in various parts of Asia or Europe). It is only about 1 foot tall, and the flowers are proportionally smaller than those of Dicentra spectabilis, so it is much less showy. However, it has one major advantage - it stays green and keeps blooming throughout the entire growing season. It produces flowers from April through October, although there tend to be fewer later in the season.

Finally, some yellow Alyssum next to the front walkway. This plant is quite good at reseeding itself - it was originally planted in the garden some 20 years ago, and has grown in various parts of most of the different flower beds over time. It's a perennial, but the individual plants often die after a few years, to be replaced by their "children" growing nearby. The alyssum looks all but surrounded by various shrubs and trees, including the weeping cherry in the background.

Next - greenery and general views of the garden ....

Springtime pics

2010-04-23T21:29:00.000-07:00

On a brighter note, the last two weeks have been extraordinarily colorful. Here are some pics from my Dad's yard/garden, which I basically act as a caretaker for. First, the trees. The weeping cherry peaked almost two weeks ago, when I took these photos:

Weeping cherry from two angles.

From underneath

Closeup of flowers

The other "tree" flowering now is a magnolia, but it is really more like a shrub.

Earlier this week, taken at the bottom of a slope -
it's actually barely taller than I am. Note the fading weeping cherry in the background.

Closeup of magnolia flowers.

These two trees are artificially bred varieties. There is at least one type of "wild" tree in the yard that puts on a nice display of flowering color - the red maple (Acer rubrum). Unlike most maples which rely entirely on wind to spread their pollen, the red maple uses the services of insects as well as the wind. Therefore, it produces colorful (though small) red flowers.

Red maple flowers almost 4 weeks ago.

Thousands of these small red flowers give the whole tree a distinct reddish tint that sets it apart from all other tree species in the area in the spring.

This sort of shows the reddish tint.

Red maples don't wait long after flowering to make their seeds. While other maples take until summer or fall to mature their seeds, the red maples have developed their seeds over the last 3 weeks or so, and will be ready to start dropping them all over the place come May.

The leaves are just coming out, but the seeds are almost mature.

As the red maples go through their accelerated flowering, seed development, and leafing out, the sugar maple (Acer saccharum) right next to them has barely started to poke either its leaves or flowers out. It won't drop its seeds until late summer or early fall. Still, time is ultimately on the side of the sugar maple, which on average grows taller and lives more than twice as long as the red maple.

Right: red maple; Left: sugar maple (ignore the pine behind it)

The sugar maple is the leading source of maple sugar (Duh!),
but you can get it from red maples as well - you just need a lot more sap
to get the same amount of sugar.

Next - Crocus, daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths; or, early spring flowers that aren't attached to trees and shrubs.

Down time (explanation and apology)

2010-04-21T04:09:00.000-07:00

I've been having a lot of down time lately. I'm not referring to the kind of down time where I kick back and relax. I'm referring to the kind of down time where the psychological illness that I've been struggling with all my life rears up especially strong and makes me doubt my fitness to exist in human society.

One sign that I'm going through a relatively rough time is that my ability to communicate effectively with other human beings (both in person and electronically) drops further - and I'm not exactly a master communicator even at the best of times. When I do "communicate" with people online at times like these, it's often to argue and contradict. So, I end up doing what I did here - that is, getting into an argument for the sake of getting into an argument. I must apologize for that. I still don't entirely agree with the people that I was arguing with, but I overstated my case just to irritate people, which is the kind of thing that I should have stopped doing quite a few years ago when I became an adult.

I should have posted this days ago, but writing about this even briefly is not an easy thing for me to do, and I unfortunately treated it like I treat a lot of emotionally unpleasant things - I avoid and procrastinate as long as possible.

First garden weekend

2010-04-05T17:39:00.000-07:00

Easter is associated with resurrection and rebirth, and the weather here this past weekend could not have been more appropriate. After a period of record heavy rains that caused serious flooding in some areas earlier last week, everything changed in time for the weekend. The temperature was 70-75 Fahrenheit (21-24 Celsius) during the afternoon, abnormally warm this early in spring in these parts. There was barely a cloud in the sky either day, and the air was relatively dry with just enough breeze to cool the skin a little bit. So, it was obvious that I would have to spend much of both days doing garden maintenance in my father's garden (lacking any garden, or land, of my own at the moment).

I'm normally not much of a fan of hard physical work or chores, but working outside on a really nice day is much less burdensome, in my opinion, than vacuuming or cleaning bathrooms. There were three basic tasks to be accomplished this weekend - trimming and cutting back, raking out the various flower beds, and trying to rake over as much of the lawn as possible in order to pull out the matted dead grass blades from the winter (a.k.a. dethatching). I managed to accomplish all of them, not perfectly, but adequately, I think, and left a considerably cleaner garden ready for future steps, as well as a lawn that is at least a little less suffocated by a blanket of grass from last year.

Part of one of the flower beds early in the process of being cleaned out. The grass has been
reclaiming one corner for the last 2 or 3 years.

Part of the back yard. If you're used to a milder climate, you'll have to trust me when I say
that the grass here is incredibly lush and green for early April.

Most of the perennials and shrubs are off to an early start, and so are the trees. The red maples are usually just getting started, but this year their red flowers are just about at their peak.

Closeup of red maple (Acer rubrum) flowers.

I even managed to find a bird that would stay still long enough in one of the maples for me to get a decent picture - I think it's a red-winged blackbird, but you can't see the red patches on the wings because most of the light is coming from behind. Too bad I didn't notice that the bird's head was hidden - I'm not exactly what you would call a great photographer!

Agelaius phoenicius perched in Acer rubrum. Background provided by
a commercial jet of unknown model.

It's not easy to find a bird around here that isn't camera-shy. The only birds that I could get a really decent picture of were some american robins, and even they would only cooperate when I was inside and took the photos through a window.

The American Robin, or Turdus migratorius. Yes, that is the real
scientific name for the species. I can only guess that they showed up
really late when they were assigning names.

Although most things are really just getting started, much of the local ecology seems to be about 1-2 weeks ahead of schedule this spring. Apart from some crocus, daffodils, and the red maples, very little is blooming yet, but the weeping cherry out front is looking like it won't be long before it erupts in light pink blossoms.

Buds on weeping cherry.

All in all, a very good weekend for someone who likes spring and gardening!

Health Care

2010-03-23T01:44:00.000-07:00

I have very mixed feelings about the whole health care issue, which is one reason why I've avoided the whole angry debate. On the one hand, I used to be a conservative with a libertarian streak, and still am sometimes, so massively expensive government social programs aren't normally something I instinctively welcome with open arms, to put it mildly. On the other hand, when peoples' lives are actually at stake, it seems cruel NOT to assist in any way possible. To me at least, human life and health are more important than almost any other consideration.

Still, I can't help but wonder how we (the USA) are going to pay for all of this when the government is already trillions of dollars in debt. This issue doesn't seem to have gotten nearly as much attention in the whole debate as it deserves. Health care for every citizen is an absolutely massive expense that the government is committing itself to supporting permanently.

I don't think that the examples of other countries are necessarily very helpful here. Don't get me wrong - I think that it's generally a good thing that people in pretty much every other developed country have government-provided healthcare. My brother, sister-in-law, and niece live in Germany (my sister in law is a German citizen, my niece has dual nationality), and one of the more important reasons that they chose to live there over the United States is because of the national healthcare coverage. The problem is that when it comes to funding, comparing the USA to any other developed country is an apples and oranges comparison, for a couple of reasons.

1. The USA has to support huge military expenses that other developed countries do not. Some people think that this is because the USA is an evil imperialist nation(TM). I tend to think that it's simply because other developed nations have pretty much thrown all of the military responsibility onto the USA.

2. The USA has a population that simply is less healthy to begin with, due to the lifestyles that many people lead. This isn't completely the fault of individual Americans - business and government in the USA made a long series of decisions over decades that favored turning the USA into a largely car-dependent, highly-processed-low-nutrition-food-eating nation. Now we have a couple of generations who have grown up knowing no other way of life, and we lack the infrastructure for good public transportation in many regions, and it will be extremely difficult to change. Unfortunately, this means that the population of the USA is likely to remain less healthy, with higher medical expenses, than those of most other developed nations well into the future. This means higher per capita medical costs compared to virtually every other country in the world.

Am I the only one who is nervous about taking on such a massive new expense when we already have a national debt that is larger than most people can even comprehend?

Early taste of late spring

2010-03-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

When I went outside Friday and yesterday, I had to remind myself repeatedly that this is the second half of March, not the second half of April or even the first half of May. The temperature was around 70 Fahrenheit (21 Celsius), which is quite a bit warmer than we would normally expect for March, which is a month where we can normally expect temperatures a good 15 or 20 degrees Fahrenheit (about 10 degrees Celsius) cooler. The preceding several days were not as warm, but still warmer than average.

Plants are clearly responding to this unusually early coming of warm springtime weather. Normally, I can expect to see crocus coming up at the very end of March or beginning of April, and the daffodils and tulips following shortly in early to mid April - though only the crocus blooms almost immediately after appearing. Yesterday, though:

Crocus - already blooming!

Tulips

Daffodils

And it isn't just the bulbs that seem are responding to the early warmth:

Some shrub - maybe some kind of honeysuckle?

The only snow I saw on a 3-mile walk was one pile of very dirty snow next to a school parking lot that had managed to hold out against over two weeks of rain and mainly above freezing temperatures:

Holdout snow pile, which is probably noticeably smaller today

Still, if you look really close at some of the trees in the background, you can see a slight tinge of red on some of them. That's a sign that they are red maples and that their first red flower buds are getting close to opening - probably some 2-3 weeks earlier than in an average year.

Now, what I'm really hoping for is that we don't get any long cold spells for the rest of the spring. Some plants can endure some real cold after they start growing leaves and flowers for the spring, others can't, and the latter will depend on the rest of the spring being free from serious cold spells.

I walked down a road that I haven't walked since last summer, and so from my point of view the plants weren't the only things that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. A new building had risen from ground that supported only trees last year:

I could be wrong, but this building doesn't look like it will be particularly attractive
when finished. I'm not sure what it's going to be - the area around it is entirely residential, but it looks
more like a small office building to me.

Well, it's cooler today, but still pretty warm. By late in the week, it's supposed to be getting down to near freezing at night. Hopefully it won't stay much colder than that for an extended period of time. Also, even if the spring temperatures decide to act like this is Georgia or something - the summer temperatures had better not act like this is Georgia! Part of the bargain of living in a northern state, IMHO, is that you accept a colder and longer winter in return for not having to endure as long or as hot a summer.

My brain has been blunted

2010-03-18T20:15:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I aspired to enter the wonderful world of academia, specifically in the field of history. To make a long story short, I gradually realized two things during my 2 years of graduate school:

1. Actually being a good academic requires a large amount of diligence, persistence, good organization, and mental discipline, in addition to intelligence, intellectual curiosity, and good communications skills.

2. With the possible exception of intellectual curiosity and intelligence, I had a serious deficit in all of the above-mentioned qualities, at least compared to my fellow students who were at the same level of study. (I may have been lacking in intelligence and intellectual curiosity as well, but I'll hang on to those as exceptions to salve my ego for the time being.)

So after two years I took a Master's degree and left, not to return. From that point onward, history would be a hobby, perhaps an obsessive one, but not a profession. Still, I like to flatter myself that I have a pretty well-informed and critical mind when it came to history, even if it was far below professional standards.

Now that I work for a historical society and archive, though, I have my doubts.

The society that I work for is always host to at least a few professional academics doing research there on any of a variety of different fellowships. My particular job does not bring me into much contact with the people (academic or non-academic) who actually use our collections. We do, however, periodically have presentations where people who are doing research at the society present a summary of some of the information that they have found, and how it has affected their research. I sometimes attend these presentations, since I figure it's nice to get a glimpse of how people might actually use some of the material that I work on cataloging.

There is a downside to these presentations, though. They make me realize how blunt my brain has become. You see, way way back in my graduate school days, I might not have been one of the better people around when it came to doing research myself, but I could at least understand a lot of what other people were talking about. I could ask reasonably intelligent questions, even if I was on the lower side of the bell curve when it came to coming up with intelligent answers. Now, I can't even come up with good questions anymore! When I go to one of these presentations, I feel like I'm surrounded by people with minds as sharp as razors while my mind is about as sharp as that rusty old pair of garden pruners that hasn't been sharpened in years so that it can barely cut anything anymore.

Why this came as an unpleasant surprise, I'm not sure. After all, it's not just muscles that shrink and atrophy when they aren't used very often.

Up early this year

2010-03-17T02:07:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, I noticed something unexpected outside. The perennial bulbs are coming up out of the ground already - crocus, tulips, and daffodils. I don't think that I've never seen them poke above ground this early in the year before. Typically, the end of March or the beginning of April are more typical, especially for the daffodils and tulips, which tend to be a little bit behind the crocus.

Winter started out cold and snowy in December here, but for most of 2010 it has not been very severe at all. While places further south or further west and north got clobbered with very heavy snowfall, we've had little. There is almost no snow left now.

Hopefully there will NOT be a really cold spell now that the plants seem to be starting up early.

Other news

2010-03-01T13:17:00.000-08:00

My sister in law in Germany is doing fine after the surgery she had 10 days ago. It wasn’t that serious, and while she stayed home from work last week, she is returning this week.

There has been a mix of about 20% wet snow and 80% rain here since last Wednesday, with the net result that much of the older snow has been washed away along with the new snow. We are now in what I consider the ugliest time of year – everything still dormant from winter but not much snow to cover the brown muddy ground. I shouldn’t complain, though – further north and west and at higher elevations some places got all snow, which came out to about 3.5 feet over the last several days.

I have started waking up really early and not being able to get back to sleep, which is something that as far as I can remember has NEVER been a problem for me before in my life. Part of it is that I have been making a conscious effort to go to bed earlier, but the early waking up is often taking twice as much time from my sleep at one end as I am gaining at the other, leaving me frequently very tired.

As long as I can find the time, this spring and summer will be “garden simplification time”. For three years I have taken care of the sprawling and productive flower beds that Mom set up over the years, but now I will be moving at least a little further away, and Dad is not a gardener. In practice, this means that I need to transform beds packed with various perennials into beds with a few perennials or shrubs and everything else covered with thick mulch to keep out the weeds. It also means that I will have a whole bunch of perennials to try and give away to anyone who will take them.

what I know about real estate could be written on my hand

2010-03-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

I am going to be looking to buy a (small) house of my own soon, and I have been browsing around online at houses listed in my area. Looking for a place to actually buy is something that I have no previous experience of, which for me means lots and lots of anxiety and awkwardness and possibly making a fool out of myself. All I know about buying houses now are a few very simple ground rules like "avoid adjustable-rate mortgages", "if a place is ridiculously cheap, there's probably a good [i.e., bad] reason for it", "don't have the inspection done by someone recommended by the seller", and of course the important "be wary of any place that is described in the listing as having 'charm', or having 'potential' - unless you want to spend most of your time and money for the next couple of years basically rebuilding the place".

A slight change in the forecast

2010-02-24T07:41:00.000-08:00

We were supposed to get 3-5 inches of snow today, and there were already a few inches on the ground was snowing when I woke up. I finished off my previous blog post, then ate breakfast and prepared to shower. I checked to see if there would be a delayed opening for my place of employment, and was surprised to find out that they would be closed for the day.

Then the snow changed to pure rain. Now we're forecast to get nothing but rain until late tonight. So, from my point of view, that whole calling work off for the day was probably not necessary. On the other hand, the majority of people who I work with come from points further west or north, and some of those areas are still getting snow, so it's very good for those people that they don't have to make their way into work.

That's one of the fun things about the weather where I live - when we have late winter storms like this one, we're often really close to the border between snow and rain, with rain to the south and east and snow to the north and west. The problem is that even with the best experts using the best technology, it seems to be basically impossible to predict where the rain/snow border will be to anything closer than 20 or 30 miles. You just have to wait for whatever happens - and pray that you get either rain or snow, and not the dreaded "wintry mix" of snow, sleet, and freezing rain together, otherwise known affectionately as "winter crap".

In any case, I'm not complainin'. This unexpected day off will give me the chance to procrastinate some mo ... I mean, finish all sorts of important tasks that I've been putting off!

Because I need to post something, dammit

2010-02-24T04:15:00.000-08:00

I live a pretty dull life. I actually like it that way a lot of the time, but it does give me precious little worth writing about. Still, since not having anything momentously important to say hasn’t stopped millions of other bloggers, so why should it stop me? So, in no particular order ....

My youngest brother has been accepted into the physics doctoral program at Oxford. That's the Oxford in England, one of the world's more prestigious educational institutions. Yes, he's pretty smart. Not only can I not understand the sub-field that he specializes in - I can't even remember what it's called. (I'll have to ask him if he plans on trying to pick up an "Oxford accent" while he's there - that would be ... disturbing.)

Far less welcome was the news last Friday that my sister in law in Germany had to have surgery. She is apparently doing OK - nobody in the USA has heard from my brother since this past weekend, but since he would always contact us if there was a serious problem, we are going by the principle that no news is good news.

I have several important things that I need to start working on, the most important of which is looking for a new place to live. I have responded to these challenges so far in my usual fashion -- by procrastinating energetically.

I met an old friend who I hadn't seen in a couple of years for lunch this past weekend - he and his family seem to be doing pretty well, which is good news. We caught up on stuff that has been going on in our lives and reminisced about the "good ol' days" when we were growing up (in our case, mostly 80s and early 90s).

It's snowing here now - we're supposed to get mixed snow and rain for about the next 3 days. There isn't supposed to be too much accumulation, though, partly because the rain in the day will help melt the snow that fell at night. Unfortunately, all this freezing and thawing will probably make for a lot of ice on the roads.

There's more stuff that I don't have time to cover (or can't think of) at the moment, but it will have to wait ....

Presidents - the best of the worst (2)

2010-02-15T14:00:00.000-08:00

John Quincy Adams (Elected 1824, defeated for reelection 1828, served 1825-1829)

Why so bad? The second man on the list of "bad presidents with a good side" was the oldest son of the first. Like his father, he served a single term as president, managed to be hated by his opponents while getting only half-hearted support from his own political allies, and was probably secretly relieved when he was defeated in the next election and thus got an excuse to walk away from an office that had pretty much become a living nightmare for him. Unlike his father, he became the first man to win a presidential election even though he came in 2nd to Andrew Jackson in both the popular vote and the electoral college. He managed this because the election of 1824 was a complicated 4-way race in which no candidate got more than 50% of either the popular or electoral vote. As per the United States Constitution, the election then decided by a vote in the House of Representatives. In the House of Representatives, the 4th-place candidate, Henry Clay, encouraged his supporters to vote for Adams rather than Jackson, which guaranteed a victory for Adams. Soon after, Adams appointed Clay as his Secretary of State. This looked like a painfully obvious case of Clay selling the votes of his supporters in return for becoming the senior member of the new president's cabinet. Jackson's supporters immediately accused Adams and Clay of reaching a "corrupt bargain" to thwart the will of the voters, and this accusation tainted John Quincy Adams badly even before he was sworn in as president. Jackson and his supporters used it again and again for the next 4 years, and amazingly Adams never even publicly disputed or denied it. Unlike his father, John Quincy Adams didn't end up having any significant accomplishments of his own as president, positive or negative. He did, however, mimic his father's inability to work well with others, including even Henry Clay, who might have been expected to be a close ally since they were both under attack for the same reason.

In his defence (sort of) ... John Quincy Adams really was a bad president, in the sense of being ineffective and accomplishing little, but this was not because he was corrupt. On the contrary, he was too rigid in his principles to be effective. Remember the old saying that "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree"? John Quincy Adams was very different from his father in some ways, but he matched and even exceeded Dad in his determination to do what he thought was right, regardless of political realities or consequences. There is no evidence that there was any "corrupt bargain" between Adams and Clay in 1824. Clay and Adams agreed with each other on more issues than either of them agreed with Jackson, so it was no surprise that Clay ended up supporting Adams when the election came to the House of Representatives. Adams had worked with Clay in a diplomatic role before when both of them were on the team of American diplomats who negotiated the treaty with Great Britain that ended the War of 1812, and he considered him a capable negotiator who could make a good Secretary of State.

Why didn't Adams even defend himself against the charges that made much of the country question the legitimacy of his presidency? He apparently considered it beneath his dignity to answer the charges. This might sound bizarre and unbelievable to many people today, but it actually fit well with Adams' personality. John Adams Sr. had been stubborn, but also had a down-to-earth streak and did not hesitate to let people know exactly what he thought. John Quincy Adams, on the other hand, had the hypersensitive sense of "personal dignity" of both an elite gentleman and an opinionated intellectual, and often responded to criticism by silence that was meant to show that the accusations of his opponents were not even worth responding to. Unfortunately, that approach is almost never successful in politics. American politics had become more populist, more aimed at the "common man", since his father's time, but John Quincy Adams had moved in the opposite direction. He was successful in almost every other office that he held - as an assistant to US ambassadors in Europe and then an ambassador himself, as Secretary of State (the "Monroe Doctrine" was actually mainly his creation"), and after his presidency as a long-serving Congressman from Massachusetts, where for several years he was virtually the only elected official in the national government to openly criticize slavery while also advocating government funding of scientific research, which most politicians of the time considered to be outside the government's responsibility.

When it came to presidency, however, he was almost comically mismatched. He was probably painfully aware of this for most of his presidency, but he followed his own rigid sense of personal behavior and never said anything about this.

Presidents - the best of the worst

2010-02-15T08:22:00.000-08:00

Today is Presidents' Day, one of the more obscure national holidays in this country, but one which got me thinking, in true history geek fashion, about various Presidents of the United States.

Some Presidents are generally considered good, or if people can't agree on whether they were good or bad, at least historically important for good or ill. In this category one can find Washington, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, possibly Ronald Reagan - as we get closer to the present day, people can't even agree on whether a President was historically significant or not, let alone whether they were a positive or negative influence.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Presidents who are usually considered bad. In this category one can find John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding, Herbert Hoover. When it comes to Presidents within living memory (basically everybody after World War II), opinion about the really bad ones is even more divided than about the good ones based on a person's political views, so I don't even want to make tentative suggestions!

Finally, there are the Presidents that are considered not spectacularly bad, but are generally considered mediocre or just plain dull. In this category one could place Presidents such as James Monroe, James K. Polk, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, Grover Cleveland, William Taft, Calvin Coolidge, Gerald Ford, and possibly George Bush Sr.

Needless to say, the presidents who are generally considered good, or at least significant and controversial, tend to get most of the attention. What about the bad ones, though? Do they deserve their lousy reputations? Even bad Presidents sometimes have good moments. Consider the first man usually considered a bad President ...

John Adams (Elected 1796, defeated for reelection in 1800, served 1797-1801)

Why so bad? As the 2nd President of the United States, following George Washington, it was almost inevitable that John Adams would be seen as lacking compared with his predecessor. Even with this huge handicap, though, he managed to do worse than almost anybody expected. During his one term as President, the United States almost got into a war with France and political hostilities reached one of the highest peaks in the history of this country, with some fearing that civil war would break out. The worst single action for which President John Adams is remembered, though, was his approval of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which targeted the political opponents of Adams' Federalist Party and in the case of the Sedition Act, was almost certainly unconstitutional. On a more personal level, Adams managed to get along poorly with virtually every single other government official with whom he worked, including his entire cabinet.

In his defense ... John Adams certainly made many mistakes as President, and was indeed a very difficult man to work with, but his greatest accomplishment is little remembered because it is something that did not happen. Adams successfully maneuvered to avoid a war with France, a war which was strongly supported by his own Federalist party, and apparently did it for the simple reason that it was unnecessary, and in his own words, "great is the guilt of an unnecessary war".

Adams never fit in well with his own party. Most of the senior Federalists owed their loyalty to Alexander Hamilton, who was considered the effective leader of the Federalist Party even though he held no public office at the time Adams became President. Adams kept all of the members of Washington's old cabinet, which turned out to be a serious mistake because they were all much more loyal to Hamilton than to him. Meanwhile, the leaders of the opposition Republican party (who are actually the ancestors of today's Democratic party, just to add a little confusion) did not realize how serious a split was developing between Adams and the rest of his party, and focused their attacks on Adams. For much of his presidency, Adams was essentially a man without a party, and he actually liked it that way, because he was the last president who tried to continue Washington's tradition of standing completely above party politics. His negotiation of a diplomatic agreement with the French infuriated his fellow Federalists, especially Hamilton, who had become second-in-command under Washington of a new army that the US was raising in case of war with France. It also baffled Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other Republican leaders, who had been assuming that Adams was working closely with Hamilton to push the USA into war with France. To make a very rough modern analogy, it would be kind if like if, 1 day before George W. Bush's ultimatum to Saddam Hussein in 2003 had expired and the Operation Iraqi freedom started, Bush had suddenly announced that, in cooperation with the United Nations, he had reached a diplomatic solution to the crisis after weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiating, and that now, thank God, war would be unnecessary. Try to picture the reaction from both pro-war and anti-war sides. Then multiply it at least a dozen times, and you probably have some idea of how the political world reacted to Adams' announcement that he had gotten an agreement with the French.

In 1800, Hamilton urged Federalists to oppose Adams and line up behind another candidate, and many did. This helped Jefferson win the election, although the odds would probably have been against Adams even if the Federalists had been united. How often do Presidents knowingly go directly against the policy of their own party and knowingly shoot their chances for reelection in the foot simply because they have concluded that a war is unnecessary and they must try to avoid it? Adams did, and IMHO that has to county for something.

Next ... the good side of another bad president, the son of the first one!

Strange winter, cool summer, and climate change

2010-02-14T14:00:00.000-08:00

It's been a weird winter in the eastern USA - after getting some heavy snow back in December, the heavy snows seem to have largely ignored the far northeastern states for the past month and a half, and have totally clobbered places further south, like Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C, while cold weather has made much of the southeast little warmer than the northeast. Here we have had a pretty cold but dry winter with less than average snowfall after the beginning of January. The real weirdness for us was actually last summer, which was one of the coolest and wettest on record. This brings up a problem for many people - if the world is supposed to be getting warmer, why are we getting abnormally cool summers and winters with heavy snows falling much further south than usual? Before anyone panics, yes, I do know that short-term weather doesn't always correspond with long-term climate change, and that even if the whole planet gets much warmer, some spots will actually get colder at certain times of year. I don't think that most people think about weather and climate in that way, though. Farmers and other people whose work and livelihood is heavily impacted by seasons and long-term climate as well as short-term weather might take a longer view, but I think that your average city or suburb dweller doesn't remember or think as much about long-term changes in weather patterns. This is an entirely subjective judgment on my part, and I might be totally wrong (that certainly has been known to happen!), but it seems to me that quite a few people will see a cool summer and heavy snowstorms further south than usual, and think "Global warming, my ass! More like a new ice age coming - those so-called experts don't have any idea what they are talking about."

To be honest, that's my gut reaction, a reaction that gets neutralized by what I've read about global warming and climate change, but still lurks in the back of my mind, waiting for another chance.

It's not surprising that a lot of people in the USA disbelieve in global warming/climate change. One thing that I think distinguishes popular attitudes in the USA from those in many other countries is that historically Americans have a strong streak of distrusting "the experts". This is sometimes called anti-intellectualism, but I think that it would actually be more accurate to call it "anti-expertism". The idea is that experts in various fields are really a self-appointed elite who don't know much more than ordinary people do, but who pretend that they do in order to justify a privileged position for themselves and control over the lives of others. This concept is often closely connected to fear of strong government, a classic theme of US history that always comes back to center stage even after it sometimes fades into the background for a while. Not surprisingly, anti-expert feelings are usually especially strong when the experts are telling people unpleasant news, like that people will have to make major changes in their lifestyles or face climate changes big enough to negatively impact all of human civilization - or that they will face these climate changes even after they make major changes to their lifestyles. Anti-expert beliefs are strong enough for many Americans that they will see anything that seems to contradict the "experts", even if it is not scientifically valid, as proof positive that the experts are "full of it".

Unfortunately, recent weather patterns in the eastern US don't exactly make global warming look plausible to large numbers of people who are inclined to be highly critical of the whole idea in the first place.

What I miss this time of year

2010-02-04T04:48:00.001-08:00

Greenery! Plants! A landscape that looks alive!

Oh well, "only" 3 more months until greenness returns to the landscape.

Overprotective or underprotective?

2010-02-02T19:18:00.000-08:00

I talk to my father often, and among other things we exchange opinions about almost any random topic that happens to occur to either of us. One of the things that Dad persistently comments about is his worry that today's parents, and society in general, are overprotective of children. As one example, he points out that when me and my brothers were kids, we would walk a considerable distance from the house to wait at a bus stop, and we walked alone or with other kids from first grade onward. Now, in the same town, the buses seem to make about 4 times as many stops, so that many kids don't have to walk beyond sight of their house. When they do, there is always one, often more than one, parent who watches over a group of kids until they are picked up (usually a mother, occasionally a father). Are children today (Dad asks) actually in any more danger while walking or waiting at a bus stop than they were when me and my brothers went to catch buses to school 15 or 20 years ago? For that matter, are they in any more danger than they were when my father took a bus to school as a boy some 50 years ago? Or is there just a perception of greater danger because when something bad does happen to a child, it often becomes a big media event and puts the fear of God into parents that something as horrible will happen to their children if they aren't always there to watch over them? I wonder the same things. I also wonder, though, if perhaps the opposite is true - parents in earlier generations were less protective than they should have been because when something bad happened to a child either by deliberate criminal action or tragic accident, people tended to "hush it up" and not talk about it. I was talking with a co-worker yesterday who has two kids, and I mentioned this question. She agreed that parents, including her and her husband, definitely seemed to worry about their kids in more situations and act more protective than in earlier generations. She wasn't sure whether this is due to parents today being overprotective or parents of earlier generations being underprotective, but she did tell me a couple of examples from her own experience of how earlier generations of parents were probably too inclined to cover up or ignore potential dangers rather than address them.

It's a real conundrum to me. Like a lot of these issues, it raises more questions the more I think about it. Is there a price to being extremely protective of children, and if yes, what is it and is it the increased safety worth the cost? Does being overprotective actually make children much safer, or is it more perception than reality? Is Dad looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses and forgetting about real and serious risks that kids ran in a time when parents felt less need to be watchful, and safety standards for toys and other products were minimal or non-existent? Am I idealizing my childhood in the same way? Is greater protectiveness a general trend throughout most sections of US society, or is it restricted to middle and upper-middle class families in suburban areas, or even just some particular parts of the country? Is this trend effecting other nations and cultures outside the US?

All of these questions and I don't even have any children of my own. This is a classic example of how my brain, perversely, tends to think most about the things do not have any direct practical effect on me. I can worry about how childhood and parenting have changed when I'm neither a parent or a child, but I completely skip worrying about something more relevant, like whether I should start putting money into the 403b plan that my employer offers, or whether the rollover IRA from my previous employer's retirement account still has enough money in it to buy more than a decent meal.

Home and memories

2010-01-31T21:49:00.000-08:00

It's kind of strange in some ways to still live in the same town in which I grew up, and to have lived in this town since the age of 7, with a few years break for college and 2 years of graduate school. It's strange to me because having lived here so long means that a lot of the places around me are associated with many, many memories, from quite a few different times in my life. What makes it even stranger is that I have lost touch with most of the people who I knew here growing up, even those who still live in the area, and I have formed few new connections. I am not a person who makes new friends easily for a variety of reasons, and most of my connections now are with old college friends and some co-workers. So, I live in my old hometown as a stranger now. Sometimes I feel like I'm almost as disconnected as a person from the same town 100 years ago would be if they stepped out of a time machine today. A lot of the places are familiar and loaded with memories, but the people are strangers.

Public transportation - 19th century - 1; 21st century - 0

2010-01-28T22:02:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago it was raining and over 40 degrees (Fahrenheit), and tonight it's about 8 degrees, with windchills of about -8. Such is winter in New England.

I met with an old friend and co-worker a couple of days ago - he's come back to the historical archive where I work (and he used to work) to do some research on 19th century railroads in Massachusetts, specifically the railroad that runs east-west across the state between Boston and Albany, N.Y. One interesting bit of information he provided was that according to the oldest schedules that he found, the trains in the 1850s could travel between Boston and Worcester in slightly less time than the commuter rail trains that follow the same route today. This is especially interesting (and depressing) to me because I used to travel on those commuter trains when I worked in the Boston area. It's interesting (and slightly depressing) to learn that a traveller in the pre-Civil War period could get a faster trip than present-day commuters! Granted, the seating on those early trains probably made even the most cramped old commuter rail cars today seem like luxury hotels on wheels - I think that the early seats were usually plain and rickety wood, on cars that had very limited shock absorbing capabilities.

This kind of ties in with the fact that the USA once had one of the world's best passenger rail networks, and then we basically dismantled most of it in the mid-to-late 20th century because interstate highways and automobiles seemed like a superior method of travel at the time. You could once travel to almost any small city and many decent-sized towns in the USA by rail. Even the electric streetcar networks were pretty comprehensive - I heard somewhere that in the early 20th century one could travel all the way from Boston to Chicago using only electric streetcars, although nobody would actually travel that way because you would probably have to change streetcar lines 30 times or something. I'm not sure if that is actually true or not!

Why do I have such trouble ...

2010-01-26T10:51:00.000-08:00

with writing anything. I have a job that, fortunately or unfortunately, does not require much in the way of real writing (as in well-constructed sentences that are arranged in such a way as to effectively convey information and ideas). When I need to write anything else, though, on paper or on a computer, I often hesitate again and again, agonize about whether what I have to write is worth writing, and ultimately conclude that no, RPS, nothing you might write is really worth the time and effort. The only time I can avoid the agonizing is if I basically just spew out what's going through my brain at this very second - kind of like in this post. This doesn't make for high quality writing. So, if anyone wonders "why doesn't RPS post more often, and when he does, why does it just seem like random verbal spew?", there's your answer in a nutshell.

Republican Senator from Massachusetts

2010-01-19T20:03:00.001-08:00

In an interesting political development, my home state of Massachusetts, normally known for being one of the most (possibly the most) Democratic state in the country has just elected a Republican to the United States Senate to fill the seat held for over 40 years by leading Democrat Ted Kennedy. The Republican victory is being variously attributed to the Democratic candidate running a very poor campaign, and general dissatisfaction with the Democratic party as the US economy continues to do poorly and the national debt rises to more and more astronomically high levels.e

There was once a time when I would have been thrilled by this - I used to be a strong Republican who registered to vote in my first election so that I could vote for the doomed Republican candidate who was running against Ted Kennedy in an earlier election. The George W. Bush years gradually ended most of my faith in the Republican party, although I've never learned to particularly like the Democrats either. Ironically, I voted for the Democrat this time, who turned out to be just as doomed as the Republican candidate I voted for some 16 years ago.

This does not seem to bode well for the Democrats. I know that the Republicans are fondly hoping that Obama will turn out to be another Jimmy Carter - a president elected on an idealistic platform of "change" who proved to be ineffective and unpopular and who was replaced by a conservative Republican in a political backlash. I wonder if they will get their wish.

2009-12-31T14:57:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, everyone. Happy New Decade as well, even though technically it's another year until the end of the decade.

I hope that the coming year and decade are better than the preceding one, rather than worse, both in my country and everywhere in the world.

Rambling about personal stuff, science, and politics

2009-12-28T20:33:00.000-08:00

********* WARNING - this post contains stream-of-consciousness rambling and depressed feeling-sorry-for-myself stuff, so if you hate this kind of thing you might want to skip it.***********

I had a good, quiet Christmas with my brother and father, just as I hoped. I baked more and ate a little less than I have during past Christmas seasons, which is a positive development, apart from the fact that I have to push more of my cookies and fudge and marble squares on family and friends.

On a completely different note, I've noticed that my free-time reading lately has been shifting somewhat from history toward science-related subjects. This isn't actually surprising - even before I loved reading about history, I loved reading about various types of science, especially anything having to do with astronomy and biology. In the end, I never became a scientist or a historian of any type for a variety of reasons - lack of focus and self-discipline, a fear of failing that is so strong that I generally don't try at all when I believe that I might fail, the distracting effects of obsessive compulsive disorder which ensures that I am often spending at least half of my time and mental energy worrying about things that are mainly irrelevant to the "real world". Or, if I am in a more harshly self-critical mode, I suspect that it's just because I'm lazy and not very bright. In any case, when it comes to some fields of history and science, I'm one of those people who, as my father used to say (not about me in particular), "knows just enough to be dangerous". Actually, I don't think I'm very dangerous, because I know that I actually don't know very much - it's the people who know a little but think that they know a lot that cause the most trouble. Occasionally, being relentlessly self-deprecating is a good thing, if it keeps a person from getting a swollen ego. If only it didn't go too far in the other direction, and leave me sometimes thinking that I am the most useless person around (or at least in the most useless 3-5%).*

Speaking of self-confidence and ego versus self-doubt, my political beliefs used to be somewhat of an exception. That, though, will require another post at another time, because it's after 1:00 AM here and I need to get some sleep.

*To give you an idea of how pathetic this can get with me, I often focus on blog entries where people express frustration with the cluelessness, viciousness, or incompetence of others, while I avoid reading entries in which people talk about major accomplishments by themselves or others. This is because I vastly prefer reading about people acting even more stupid or insensitive than I think that I do, while reading about people doing things that I can not or will not do just gives me a treasure trove of new reasons to hate myself. The good news is that I don't always think this way - the bad news is that I do pretty often.