By: Melissa Wiley,
on 5/15/2012
The Lilies-of-the-Nile are being impish again. I was going to remark that as much as I adore their purple spheres of bloom, this bud stage is when I love them best—but I see I already said that, a year ago. I really am repeating myself; I see too that I posted an agapanthus bud exactly one year ago today. Impish they may be, but they are punctual little fellows!
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 3/22/2012
The week shimmers past quickly, and my head can’t quite keep up. I’m still chronicling Wondercon (although I will probably never get around to writing about the best part, the dinners with friends), and working, and repeatedly remembering that I keep forgetting to do the taxes.
(File under: Things that Make Me Wince.)
The best part of the morning was the nature walk. We’d just been reading about native San Diego flora and fauna in a “shrublands guide” published (and available for free download) by the California Chaparral Institute, and it was exciting to walk our familiar scrubby trails and greet the bushes by name. Some of the trees we knew already, like the downright Seussian bottle-brush tree, which grows in yards all over the city, but I’ve never before seen it bleed. Ruby sap, glinting in the sun, seeping through scarred bark. One could almost hear the Ents weeping.
I love knowing the names of things. In a way, names are my favorite things of all: the way a name lets you know a thing (bush, tree, flower, bird, person). What used to be a haze of indeterminate bushes becomes manzanita, scrub oak, chamise, sagebrush, buckwheat, each with a voice of its own.
The kids are more interested in birds than bushes. We create a ruckus as we go, and most of the wild things scatter. Only the hummingbirds ignore us. They are the Hermias of the bird world: though they be but little, they are fierce.
Under one of the bushes in the top photo, Beanie found a sort of burrow: flattened grass, a litter of empty snail shells. What lunches there, we’d like to know?
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 3/21/2012
While we were away, cold rains pounded San Diego, stranding my parents inside with the kids and washing away most of our carrot seedlings. The radishes and lettuces survived the floods and are looking sprightlier than ever. The blueberries dropped a lot of blossoms but I think we’ll get a few berries, at least. The flowers are lusher than ever, fresh-faced now that I’ve picked off the spent, rain-battered blossoms.
We miss our bird feeder. Last summer, it attracted rats, so we emptied it. I’m aching to try again. When we moved from New York to Virginia in the winter of 2002, the very first box I unpacked was the one marked BIRD FEEDERS. True story. In our Long Island backyard, we had downy woodpeckers, nuthatches, and titmice at the feeders every day. I can still feel the cold glass of the sliding door that tiny Jane and I use to lean against as we watched our birds. In Virginia, we had cardinals, juncoes, and my favorite, the wee chickadees. A pair of bluebirds nested in a box under our deck, right outside my office window. I wrote Across the Puddingstone Dam between bouts of peeking at those bluebirds from between the blinds.
In this yard, we mostly only see sparrows and finches, and the imperious crows. There’s a lone phoebe, junco-gray and tufted like a cardinal, who perches on the fence, watching warily as I putter in the garden. There are the hummingbirds, of course, flashing low overhead like little green comets, perching on the slender branches of the cape honeysuckle. They adore those trumpety orange flowers, as do the bees. I haven’t seen the scrub jay in a while. All last summer he called outside our bedroom window at a minute past sunrise every morning. The kids named him Peanut, after his favorite food.
I just googled my own blog to see when I’ve posted about the flock of parrots in years past. January and February is when they swirl through our neighborhood, it seems. But I don’t think I’ve heard them this year! Any other San Diegans know the whereabouts of those rowdy green squawkers right now?
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 3/12/2012
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 2/25/2012
I spent most of the day in the garden, most of yesterday morning too. I found some old bricks and used them to lay out one end of a small raised bed for our veggie patch this year. We’ve planted banana peppers, onions, and cilantro from starts, and there are seeds to go in tomorrow: carrot, butterhead lettuce, and radish. I’m not sure anyone in the family cares much for radishes, but they grow so quickly and are fun to harvest. Oh, and we’ll plant a few beans. We buried a couple of seed potatoes this afternoon. Will I ever cease to marvel at this climate? February was always the longest, hardest month back east. My children love snow (those who remember it), but not I.
Saw our first monarch of the season today! Alas, it made two passes around our yard and fluttered on by. My milkweed has buds but isn’t open yet, and may not bloom at all—it’s horribly infested with little yellow bugs I thought were a particularly squicky kind of aphid, but now I’m doubting think not. We recruited an army of ladybugs, who munched dutifully for a while but have now flown home to check for fires or something.
Bees: a respectable number, but not the legions we hope to see when the salvia blooms.
I took a million pictures today but hardly any of them came out. Ever since I dropped it on the street during Comic-Con, my camera is reluctant to focus.
Bloom notes, mostly for my own reference. I like to poke through my archives and compare…
geranium (three kinds)
tree mallow
Cape honeysuckle
lavender (two kinds)
jasmine (the one with the pink buds, not the white)
the yellow marguerites
African daisies
snapdragon
nasturtiums
sweet broom
viola
alstromeria
sweet alyssum (white and purple)
ice plant, in magenta profusion
bougainvillea (trying—I think I need to move it to a better spot)
red salvia (barely)
petunia
stock
Probably more things I can’t remember right now.
This list staggers me. I say that every year but staggered I am again.
FEBRUARY.
We do penance for this in October, when the very air crisps your skin and the only color in the garden is brown.
I'd seen a number of watercolor studies of feathers online recently and had a bit of an itch to do one myself. Fortuitously, I stumbled across this bluejay feather and thought it would be the perfect specimen:
These little nature studies are really fun to do and much quicker to finish than my usual work. I hope to do more of these in the future. This one's available here in my Etsy Shop.
I didn't find any feathers... but hopefully our most recent excursion outdoors will give some inspiration for further studies. We just came back from our annual trip to St. Louis to visit my family, where we all set out on a short side-trip together. We clambered about on huge rocks at Elephant Rocks State Park:
Visited an abandoned lead mine at the Missouri Mines State Historic Site which was excellent reference for my husband in his video game work:
Took a boat tour through an old flooded mine at Bonne Terre Mine:
And circled back to St. Louis where we got to be kids again at the incredible playgrounds of City Museum:
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 7/17/2011
(Click on this one; it wants to be big.)
Here’s a bit of synchronicity…I caught this picture of a pollen-dusted bee this morning while Rose and I were doing the watering, and then a friend shared the following breathtaking video on Google+.
(You might want to click through and watch that at YouTube where the picture is bigger. So very cool.)
And here’s another video that gave me goosebumps this afternoon: a whale caught in fishing line celebrates her freedom after a boat crew cuts her loose. The last minute brought tears to my eyes.
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 7/17/2011
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 6/23/2011
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 5/31/2011
More of my love letters to bees:
All my photos look the same
Petal nests
Fruitless Fall
Oh, for a bee’s experience
Fairy dust
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 5/23/2011
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 5/16/2011
And yet.
Via Light reading: Osmia avosetta bees make petal-nests for their larvae.
O. avosetta bees at National Geographic: “Flower sandwich”
At Daily Croissant:
What appears to be part of a spring wedding bouquet is actually a nest for a rare species of solitary bee, a new study says.
Called a “flower sandwich,” the three-tiered arrangement consists of a thin layer of petals on the outside, then a layer of mud, and finally another layer of petals lining the inside of the chamber…
At Discovery News:
Although O. avosetta was known to science, no one had ever had a chance to study its behaviors. Bees don’t advertise their nests, Rozen said, and this species is only active for about two months out of the year.
But in a lucky coincidence, two teams in two different countries discovered the nest-building habits on the same day. Rozen was working with a team of entomologists in Turkey last May, while another team was studying the bees in Iran. The groups collaborated on a recent paper published in American Museum Novitates.
At Beekeeping Times:
“It was absolute synchronicity that we all discovered this uncommon behavior on the same day,” says Jerome Rozen, curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History. Rozen and colleagues were working near Antalya, Turkey while another group of researchers were in the field in Fars Province, Iran.
This site has a photo of a bee carrying a petal to the nest, but it’s too small to make out much. I would love to see video of how the bees manage this feat.
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 5/15/2011
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 5/13/2011
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 5/12/2011
A Lily of the Nile blossom about to unfurl. I think I might like this whimsical bud stage better than the flower in all its glory.
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 5/11/2011
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 5/6/2011
Sunflower seed planted April 27. I noticed yesterday the seeds we planted in the backyard on the 26th had sprouted, and today the front-yard seeds are up. We planted more yesterday along the side-yard wall. No such thing as too many sunflowers, especially if you’re a Melissa.
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 4/27/2011
Science Experiment of the Day – The Daily What.
I know I posted this at Facebook yesterday, but I’m testing the Press This plugin (dunno why I’ve never bothered with it before) and this seemed like a good test subject. Have you seen it? Video of a clump of fire ants in water? Fascinating!
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 3/13/2011
…………….“…I am scorched
…………….to realize once again
…………….how many small, available things
…………….are in this world
…………….that aren’t
…………….pieces of gold
…………….or power—
…………….that nobody owns
…………….or could but even
…………….for a hillside of money—
…………….that just float
…………….in the world…”
………—from the poem “Summer Story” by Mary Oliver,
………which is about a hummingbird and the human heart
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 6/9/2010
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 6/5/2010
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 5/28/2010
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 4/27/2010
But what the heck IS it??
It flew over the fence, stopped for a brief sip, and zoomed off again. In this picture it has a kind of preying mantis shape, doesn’t it? Except for those copper-colored wings. Could those curly antennae be any cuter?
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 4/27/2010
…all my photos look the same.
Same salvia, same bees, same blur.
Can’t be helped. I am powerless to resist those blues, those greens, those coppery wings, this pointed face buried in blossom.
You understand, don’t you?
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 4/11/2010
The San Diego alligator lizard, who has been known to scare the pants off certain members of my family.
