Another winter storm in NW Arkansas

Here we go again. Winter storms like this used to be rare in Arkansas, but not so over the last couple of years. At least this one was more snow than ice and the power stayed on. At first it was freezing rain which turned to sleet and then to snow. All and all, we received about one-third inch of ice and then five inches of snow. Here are a few pics I took. At the end of the first day we had a pretty blanket of snow that made our patio somehow festive even in January.





For those of you who know her, here is Talulah in the water garden.

Statues look somehow comical in the snow. We have another one near the upper part of the water garden who is supposed to be blowing something in her hand. I've photographed her before. She had icecycles dripping off her toes..                                                                                                                      How about a nature shot . . . below is a witch hazel tree between our driveway and house. Witch hazel is an interesting small-statured tree. Interesting because it blooms in the winter. There are two species in Arkansas; I think this one is Hamamelis virginiana, or common witch hazel, as opposed to Ozark witchhazel. Here are two pics: one with the flower buds encased in ice and sort of magnified by it. The other is a flower that, I think, bloomed today, because there was no snow or ice on it. The petals are only about a centimeter long (2.5 cm to an inch) and look up close like gaudy Mardi Gras decorations. The woody fruit dries over the summer, winding it's fibers down like a coiled spring. When conditions are right in early fall, the fruit splits explodes open under pressure, flinging the two seeds up to 30 feet away.  Extracts from the stems and bark were used by Indians and later by Europeans as an astringent to stop bleeding or swelling among other things. It is still used commonly in shaving lotions, acne medicine, and hemorroidal creams. We have a bottle of it right now in our medicine cabinet. I have no idea why and have never used any.

 

As I walked around my place, I noticed these speckles on the fresh snow (see below). As I looked more closely, I realized the speckles were freshly dispersed seeds from the sycamore tree in my front yard. Sycamore trees produce round, dangling fruit in the fall that look like brown Christmas ornaments hanging all over the tree. The seeds are crammed into this hard little ball and are not released for a while. In fact, it is oftentimes not until early spring when the seeds are released. I've never really seen them being released and would not have noticed these had it not been for the white background provided by the snow. These seed will seep into the soil surface as the snow melts to be ready to germinate this spring. In fact, the tree that produced these seed itself came from a sycamore ball that I pulled off a tree along the creek at the back of my land. I broke the ball apart and sowed the seed in a flat in the greenhouse. It produced a small lawn of sycamore seedlings. I planted three of these in my yard about 25 years ago. Two were cut down over the years and this is the sole survivor, now producing its own crop of seed.

Here's the seedling grown up about 40 feet tall: 















Seeds are important, not only for making next years seedlings, but also as food for birds and small mammals. These left over seed heads are from Sawtooth Sunflower, a native

perennial that loves the wet, boggy area behind our back yard. Encased in ice, these seeds are unavailable for birds during this rather desperate weather event for wildlife. Fortunately for the birds, there is an ample supply of berries up and down the fence rows of our street--from a rampant weedy shrub called privet (below). This is a European ornamental that has escaped into the American countryside and displaced a lot of our native vegetation. Join me in learning to love to hate this escaped alien plant. But that's a whole other blog . . .
                          

 

 Then there is the native Buckbrush or Indian Currant. This grows along the edges of woods throughout Arkansas and Oklahoma, and planted itself along the back of our house. It is great food for deer, quail, turkey and lots of song birds. The berries are somewhat magnified by the ice.

And check out the frost on these buttonbush fruit (Cephalanthus occidentalis). Buttonbush is native to moist areas along creeks, rivers, ponds, and lakes. But it likes our yard just fine, and is--hands down--our best shrub for butterflies. They flock to the round white blossoms in the summer. So do other insects. I have a photo of a bright green tree frog lying in wait in the green foliage quietly eying its next meal of some unaware pollinator (see post on Tree Frogs in this blog for June 24, 2009) . All of those characters are somewhere laying out the winter right now; summer flowers and insect meals seem far away when you look at this photo.

I also saw Julie's lavender plant that's been growing in that spot for several years now. A really fragrant herb that is incredibly tough--the snow graces the lovely lavendar leaves but does them no harm.



 Here's an old bell attached to our shade house, sharing a post with twining trunks of trumpet vine. This is the very bell that my mother would ring when I was a kid to call me in for meals as I played with my friends in the woods behind my house. The bell is now cracked and doesn't really work. You'll have to ask her if it ever did work in rousting me out of those woods.

We have lots of gray squirrels around our place. They grow fat off the leftover dog food in the dishes and rob the bird feeder. Our dogs seemed to have lost their fascination with chasing them. Every now and then I see a fox squirrel pass through. These are the kind we had where I grew up in southeastern Oklahoma. I think they are more handsome than the grays, what with that big bushy, reddish tail. It seems this one had a close shave with some trouble. Check out the reverse mohawk down his back.

 

 Well, that's about it for now. I'll leave with a moon rise over the snowy Boston Mountains that we saw at the end of the day.

 Check out the beauty in your own backyard soon. Peace . . .








                          

Snow

It’s January again and we are experiencing, in NW Arkansas, our third or fourth snow of the winter. I’m already losing track. Not a big deal for Northerners, but significant for us. Even more significant is the temperature and windchill: At 7:08 AM right now on a Thursday, it is 9^o F, with a wind chill of -7^o. It is projected to be -1^o when I awake tomorrow, with a high of 9^o. Pretty chilly for the mid-South. I’m glad of two things right now. First, that I am not experiencing temperatures like those in Minnesota and the Dakotas. Secondly, that we are not under a layer of ice, as we were this time last year—see last January’s blog.

We had a pretty, 3-inch snow on Christmas a couple of weeks ago—the first white one here since 1983, the year I moved into this house. Here is a poem from a contemporary poet, named George Bilgere. He writes poetry I can digest. Google him and check it out. Some of you may be put off by this poem, especially wives, and perhaps grown children, but it is sweetly philosophical for me.

Snow

A heavy snow, and men my age
all over the city
are having heart attacks in their driveways,

dropping their nice new shovels
with the ergonomic handles
that finally did them no good.

Gray-headed men who meant no harm,
who abided by the rules and worked hard
for modest rewards, are slipping

softly from their mortgages,
falling out of their marriages.
How gracefully they swoon—

that lovely, old-fashioned word—
from grandkids, pension plans,
winters in Florida.

They should have known better
than to shovel snow at their age.
If only they’d heeded

the sensible advice of their wives
and hired a snow removal service.
But there’s more to life

than merely being sensible. Sometimes
a man must take up his shovel
and head out alone into the snow.

George Bilgere's latest book, Haywire, won the May Swenson Poetry Award in 2006, and he received the Ohioana Poetry Award in 2007. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at John Carroll University.