invasive?

this velvetleaf is supposedly an damaging weed from southern asia, and is now considered a significant threat to corn and soybean productivity. i’m sorry, i’m sure this should bother me, but i just had some really good pho for dinner, and my attitude at the moment is that the more visitors from asia who decide to come to my part of the world and stay, the better. welcome all.

velvetleaf seedpods

rice creek trail, saint paul, minnesota

clear the decks

this is the result of sweeping my deck on an october day in minnesota. we think of fall colors as all brilliant reds, oranges and yellows. but these are the real colors of fall. muted, incremental, with a little summer and a little winter mixed in.

fall leaves swept up from my deck

turtle lake, shoreview, minnesota

bees and clover, bees and clover
this i tell you brother
you can’t have one without the other

clover blossoms

along hwy 96, saint paul, minnesota

random

during a recent visit to philadelphia, i spent an awestruck hour or so in a cy twombly exhibit, but then i wandered into the gallery next door, where there were a roomful of ellsworth kelly collages and paintings, several of which made use of radomizing elements, and i was equally smitten. one piece, for instance, was a scattering of black and white squares that, i swear, looked just like the shimmering light reflecting off of a river. it was titled seine, and he had pulled numbers from a box to determine which squares should be black and which white. today’s still blog photo is not an ellsworth kelly, but i do like the effect of an occasional randomizing gesture, like bumping a carefully arranged pattern, or, in this case, letting crumbled grape leaves fall as they wished. apparently they wished to be beautiful and slightly melancholy.

red grape vine leaves (vitis riparia)

craftsmanship

after two weeks of having craftsmen in my house, i’m starting to see everything differently. my switchplates are a mess, for example. my floor is uneven, and the base molding doesn’t quite sit tight against it, i’ve learned. my cabinet inset is not plumb or square. the corner bead on my fireplace is popped. and on and on. so now i’m looking at this woodpecker’s  asymmetrical and haphazard work on this birch bark and thinking, “pretty shoddy, my friend. you need to tighten things up a bit. are you trying to make a round hole or a square hole? make up your mind and do it right.”

birch bark

sucker lake trail, saint paul, minnesota