queen anne has hairy legs

a good skill to have if you are a plant picker like me is to know the difference between queen anne’s lace and poison hemlock. they are cousins in the parsley family, but, as in many families, one cousin is an angel and the other is a devil. in this case, one is edible, and the other will kill you in about an hour. fortunately if you remember that “queen anne has hairy legs” (in other words, the stems of the benign queen anne’s lace are hairy and the stems of the poison hemlock are smooth with purple blotches), you should mostly be safe. regardless, i don’t know if i will ever be able to bring myself to eat any part of a queen anne’s lace. i just can’t imagine that the pleasure could equal the worst case scenario risk.

wild carrot, queen anne’s lace

red stem bluestem

in the hierarchy of things, there are artists and there is michelangelo. there are dancers and there is nureyev. there are lakes and there is lake superior. there is grass and there is big bluestem.

big bluestem prairie grass in fall

wisconsin

style

i love how plants of a single species grow in an almost infinite variety, and yet always look like themselves. you simply can’t mistake a basil plant, or a curly dock, or a thistle, or a maple tree, and yet every individual is unlike every other. it’s like style, whether a sense of fashion style, or a style of making art, or a style of writing. every combination of words is different, but you always know it’s iris apfel, or it’s mondrian, or it’s updike. who knows. someday there may be a thing that’s known in certain circles as “a mary jo.” wouldn’t that be wonderful?

unidentified wetland weed

sucker lake regional trial, saint paul, minnesota

dailiness

i’ve said for years that one of the biggest rewards of a daily practice is dailiness itself. there are things you see by being present every day that simply don’t show themselves any other way. these buds are just the latest of many examples. in a day or two they will be showy flower spikes, visible for hundreds of yards. yesterday they may have been dull buds nearly indistinguishable from the green leaves and stems that supported them. but today, my daily devotions were answered by this perfect, restrained ladder of magenta buds.

blazing star stem with buds (liatris)

grass lake, shoreview, minnesota

shrugging

this blue jay’s shoulders look as if they’re shrugging. in life, blue jays don’t appear to fear anything. maybe this guy didn’t even fear death, when it arrived: “oh. it’s you, is it? i figured you’d be coming around. well, ok. whatever. let’s do this thing.”

blue jay wings

saint paul, minnesota