The Marvel of Peru

One of the summer flowers that blooms well up until the Shire's frost date

is the four o'clock, mirabilis jalap; also called the Marvel of Peru, 

or in French, la belle de nuit, "the beauty of the night."

I have always loved four o'clocks for their sweet fragrance

and peculiar habit of opening only in the late afternoon.

But another idiosyncrasy of the plant 

is its ability to bloom in several different colors from the same root.

For an image of yellow four o'clocks, click here:

http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/consumer/factsheets/annuals/mirabili_%20jalapa.html

There are also hundreds of images of four o'clocks on Google Images.

A pleasant four o'clock once grew along my neighbor's fence, 

and I always liked seeing the flower's pink and yellow trumpets 

peeking through the pickets.

But eventually they sold the house, 

and the new owners pulled the plant out one spring,

unaware that it was an old-fashioned flower with a long history,

and not a noxious weed. 

I always look up flower names 

in the Alice M. Coats book, Flowers and their Histories,

 because I learn more from her than I do from an internet search, 

which often tends toward redundancy.

Coats says that the seeds of the mirabilis 

were brought to Spain from Peru in the last half of the 16th century,

which would have been in the decades immediately after Pizarro 

and the Spanish Conquistadors defeated the Incas. 

By the time the old English herbals were being written,

four o'clocks were already a staple of English gardens.

Herbalist John Gerard was so impressed with the mirabilis 

that he considered the nickname Marvel of Peru to be inadequate, 

preferring instead "Marvell of the World." 

Coats also tells us that the four o'clock flowers' late afternoon opening is so reliable,

that in the Malay Archipelago, once called the East Indies, 

gardeners always planted at least a few four o'clocks in conspicuous spots

and used them as sundials or clocks.

Gerard would dig the roots each autumn

and store them in "a butter firkin filled with sand."

Firkin is definitely a word one doesn't hear anymore, 

and Coats offers no explanation. 

I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary: 

a firkin is an archaic term for a cask equivalent in capacity to a quarter of a barrel.

Firkins were used for keeping butter, fish, liquids, 

and in Gerard's case, four o'clock roots.

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Four and Twenty Blackbirds

Four and twenty blackbirds
"is based on a 16th-century amusement ... 
to place live birds in a pie, as a form of entremet,"
an elaborate entertainment between dinner courses.
Live birds were placed inside a pie shell so that once the pastry was cut,
their sudden flight into the air would astonish and entertain the guests.
Source: Wikipedia.org*

The early evening of this August's blue moon,

I found myself astonished and entertained
by what is called a murmuration of starlings,
murmuration being the little-known collective term for a flock,
as in a "murder" of crows or a "passel" of pigeons.

Many people consider starlings a bird of a lesser order,
even though they are not bad looking,
with an iridescent sheen on their wings
and speckles on their dark heads and bellies.

Starling photo compliments of
 <p>Image: <a href="http://www.freedigitalphotos.net" target="_blank">FreeDigitalPhotos.net</a></p>

But their good looks aside,
starlings are often criticized for bullying other birds at feeders,
for usurping the nests of more appreciated songbirds,
and for their unfortunate habit of creating frequent messes.
The last I can personally attest to,
having once naively placed a block of suet
on a deck table one winter morning,
only to witness a rowdy crowd of hooligan starlings descend on it en masse
with an attitude that can only be described as
an unpleasant mixture of greed, lust, and gluttony.
They gobbled it in milliseconds, leaving a dreadful layer of feathers
and the unmentionable splattered all over the table and deck.
I hadn't even been given the chance to hang the suet block up in a tree.

But this recent evening, there was no suet to incite the mob's food lust.
When I first walked out of the house,
I could hear hundreds of them tweeting, chattering, and chirping,
as they flew into a wooded area across the street from our house

and settled into the tall pines.
I wondered if they were getting ready to roost for the night.

Some pecked at insects, others flapped their wings 

or flitted from branch to branch and bough to bough. 

Every moment or so, some would take off north by northwest,
then return south by southeast.

And several would go flying off in an arc, meeting others on their return.

Their routine appeared orchestrated.

First they went flying across the street to the shelter of other tall trees,
then, they came winging their way back
before  again setting forth above the rooftops.

But suddenly their aerodynamic ballet came to an end.
All at once, a threat, real or imagined, prompted most of them 

to flap their wings  and depart over the lake to the south.
There is no way to adequately describe
the soft thud from hundreds of feathered wings beating in unison,
while simultaneously the cacophony of tweets and chirps is silenced.

I decided to research why so many starlings would have congregated together.
And I came across this video, which enjoyed "viral" status on the Internet last year.
A friend had shared it on Facebook back then, so I had seen it,
but this is a slightly longer version showing the murmuration of starlings
flying over the River Shannon in Ireland. It's only a few minutes long,
but I guarantee anyone who watches it will catch their breath
and marvel at the sheer elegance of the sight.
Watch it all the way to the end to see the expression on the girl's face. It is priceless:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/starling-flock/

I love this video because it demonstrates how unity of spirit can transform
 messy, covetous starlings into creatures of magnificence.
And that means there's hope for the rest of us.
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*Cited in Wikipedia: [2] Giovanni de Roselli's Epulario, quale tratta del modo de cucinare ogni carne, ucelli, pesci... (1549), of which an English translation, Epulario, or the Italian Banquet, was published in 1598 (Mary Augusta Scott, Elizabethan Translations from the Italian no. 256, p. 333f.). Accessed: 2Sep2012

A Late Summer Garden

A late summer garden has a tranquility found at no other time of year.

                                                                  --William F. Longgood

                                                     

Each September heralds the change 

from the withering days and sultry nights of summer 

to the cooler hours wrought by Fall.

The shadows grow softer 

and the darkness creeps in earlier each successive night.

Yet, summer does not yield her place so easily.

And I am glad.

Although autumn is officially just three weeks away,

it is still summer here in the Shire.

The sun still shines, the bees still buzz, and the flowers still bloom.

I didn't want summer to pass without writing about a few more of my favorite plants.

In late June, just as the planting season's clock was about to chime

the Mid-Atlantic gardener's eleventh hour, I bought some vinca,

also called periwinkle and the more colorful name, dogbane.

Nothing is better in a hot and dry landscape than these flowers.

They aren't at all fussy and withstand lots of horticultural neglect

--my specialty when the hot and humid days 

kindle my indifference as to whether my flowers live or die.

Thankfully, they seem not to notice that I am a fair-weather gardener.

Here are a few that have survived so far:

The white centers of flowering vinca

are why there is a variety called "little bright eyes."

I love the bright little eyes twinkling in these fuschia blossoms:

These petals are dressed in a hot watermelon red:

I love the way the center looks like a tiny five-pointed star

on this soft white one:

These white ones have the tiniest yellow centers:

And of course, there is a periwinkle color:

Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote 

"the best things in life are nearest:

breath ... light in your eyes, flowers at your feet ... ."

He must have been charmed by some late summer periwinkle.

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