Seeds of hope

New life, in the palm of my hand

Today was a good day.

It started with a walk along our nature trail, which is slowly healing from the hurricane’s assault.

Fallen trees still block some sections. It hurts my heart to see where huge pines crashed, taking their neighbors down with them—young beeches and maples and poplars snapped in half or bent to the ground under the weight of an elder. Huge round tangles of roots and red clay that were once the feet of those slain trees.

I have yet to conduct a memorial service for them all. That’s coming.

I also will need to honor the lives lost during bear hunting season. Every year, this last week of October is a hard week for me, knowing that hunters are all over our area, stalking the most magnificent mammals that live in these wild mountains. I hear the baying dogs as they chase their prey through the woods. I hear the shot that brings down the bear. I hate it, and there’s not a blessed thing I can do about it.

But on this day, for awhile, I could enjoy autumn. The forest thrummed with crisp sunlight and crunchy leaves.

A native meadow

Late in the afternoon, my friend Cory and I tackled an important task of this season: collecting seed. This is the first fall we’ve done it.

Cory and his buddy Jon are native plant geniuses, both of them. Last winter, they brought hundreds of plantlets to our place, plants they’d grown from seed they collected all over these mountains. We placed the baby plants, one by one, in a sweep of cold ground that curved around the front yard.

The plan was/is to create a masterpiece of a meadow. We’re growing what Cory and Jon call “hyperlocal” wildflowers and grasses. Every species in our meadow is native to a 20-mile radius of here. What we have is a living laboratory of wild flora that’s endemic to this area—everything from coreopsis to liatris to little bluestem.

I mentioned our project in a previous post, and promised to tell you more about it. Here are a couple of photos of the meadow back in August. Look how colorful! I hadn’t expected this in its very first summer.

Intimate touching

Now, in high autumn, the meadow is a symphony of brown. Those colorful blooms are gone, replaced by seed cases in an amazing array of shapes and forms. All of them look like they’re about to burst, eager to scatter their bounty. Nestled inside are millions of tiny capsules, each one smaller than a grain of rice. Dormant life, holding the DNA to become another Helenium or an Echinacea, maybe an Eryngium.

Cory brought paper bags for us to collect the seeds in, and he labeled each one with the plant’s name.

Sometimes stooping, sometimes squatting, sometimes sitting on the ground, we moved through the garden, gently pulling off tufts and burrs and pods. It felt sweet to touch the plants in such an intimate way, running my hands along their dried stalks, coaxing them to release their treasure.

“I love doing this,” I said.

“Yes,” Cory said.

Some of the plants, especially the grasses, offered mere wisps of seed.

Others were snowdrifts of seed capsules, billions of lighter-than-air helicopters. All I had to do was brush against the plant and its snow billowed everywhere. Half went into my paper bag, half showered to the ground beneath the mother plant—her babies all around her.

Where will this seed bonanza go?

First it will overwinter in my garage. Come spring, we’ll sprinkle seeds elsewhere in our landscape. Jon and Cory will take some, too, to grow them up as they’ve done before—spreading the gospel of native plants. I’m so happy to contribute to that effort.

New life

First there was the hurricane, then the heartbreak of bear hunting. Destruction and death have surrounded me for awhile now. It’s heavy.

Today felt different. Lighter. Almost joyful.

For a time, in the late afternoon light, I held new life in my hand.