DryStoneGarden

Last week was peak wildflower time in our neighborhood. Most of the April bloomers are still going and the May ones have started up. I counted over a dozen species while I went for a run last weekend: Baby Blue Eyes in a few rather sparse patches (Nemophila menziesii), something I think is a white Nemophila (No Spot) Globe Lily (Calochortus albus), Mules Ears (Wyethia), two kinds of Lupine, scattered Brodiaea, two kinds of Dichelostemma, Ranunculus, some lovely thick patches of Mountain Phlox (Linanthus grandiflorus), a few Penstemon heterophyllus, Phacelia, Mimulus guttatus in the and a couple of little white flowers that I haven’t identified. It’s probably the most abundant that the flowers will be, but, more importantly, the annual grasses around them have started to dry out and the neighbors have begun to weed-wack everything.

Though, here I think the weed-wacking has an interesting effect, making it feel like the Lupine has been put into the penalty box or is in a cage match with the grasses. This used to be a vegetable garden, I remember seeing tomatoes when we first moved to the area. Now it’s a refuge for Lupine to shelter from the weed-wacking carnage of the outside world. Beautiful flower, unbeautiful fence. Built elements in our neighborhood tend to combine the forlorn with a certain rural charm.

It’s been a good year for Globe Lilies.

The most interesting wildflower in the area is Twining Snakelily, Dichelostemma volubile, a bulb that twines up other plants. I’m not sure why it surprises me so much to see a bulb that twines, but I find it fascinating. A very cool wildflower.

Update — On Memorial day I saw white Yarrow in full bloom, two kinds of Clarkia, a fair bit of Penstemon heterophyllus, Mimulus guttatus in full bloom in the ditches, some Mimulus aurantiacus, and the Buckeyes are about at peak. The April bloomers are done.
Update — June 20 everything is basically done. The Toyons are blooming, the occasional Penstemon or Clarkia has a flower, but everything else is done.

A Continuous Shape from Eyes & Ears on Vimeo.

A great portrait of stonecarver Anna Rubincam as she herself creates a three dimensional portrait in stone. I particularly like seeing the mix of hand and power tools used in the process. The directors talk about the making of the film here.

Anyone want to buy some beef? The two cows that wander our property have outgrown the space and are heading to the butcher as soon as we have enough orders for the meat. It’s time. They’re full size, they’ve eaten pretty much everything there is to eat on the property, and recently they learned how to break through the fence to get to our neighbor’s literally greener pastures. I’ve had to track them down and drive them back onto our property half a dozen times in the past month. So as soon as the meat is spoken for, they’re going off to the abattoir.

Our landlord has found takers for quite a bit of it but not all. Two full-sized cows is a lot of meat. Anita and I will take some, though it will be strange to eat animals we’ve known by name. I don’t really want to, but I feel like I have to eat them on principal, either embrace the reality of meat or become vegetarian. We’ve bought shares of free-range, grassfed cows like this in the past. The flavor was good, but it was leaner than supermarket beef and we found we needed to cook all of the cuts like game, almost always braising even when that was not the traditional way to cook the cut. The ground beef made great burgers. Our landlord wants five dollars per pound. I’m not sure how the logistics would work but anyone interested should comment or email me at ryan at buenoluna dot com and we can figure it out. Read the rest of this entry »

Watercolors from a trip to Puerto Rico. I used a variety of paper and tried to play around with different styles and subjects. A lot of fun, I managed one for every day of the trip. A great trip, a great place. Coquí!

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‘That packaging of time is a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize and dismiss important events and important ideas.’ Utah Phillips

Hello, 2018, goodbye, 2017. I don’t always embrace the packaging of time into tidy calendar years — as Utah Phillips said, time is a river and we are in it — but I would like to wrap up and put away 2017. It was not an easy year; that seems to be the general consensus and it was my experience as well. But it wasn’t all bad, there were some good times to look back on. I’ve done these sorts of retrospective posts before, and it seems to be a healthy exercise; I’ve been feeling better as I look back at some of my photos and watercolors from the past year. I especially liked looking at Anita’s watercolors. We painted together pretty consistently throughout the year, and it was one of the main things I’ll remember. It’s been a long time since I posted any of her watercolors on this blog, but I like seeing them mixed in with mine. She’s been working with pattern this year, really nice in my opinion. A very incomplete collection of photos and drawings from the past year is below. Read the rest of this entry »

The third cliff dwelling site we visited was Palatki in the red rock country outside of Sedona. Someone told me it’s the best archeological site in Arizona, which may or may not be true, I don’t know Arizona well enough to really say, but it’s a wonderful place, amazingly scenic, with cliff dwellings and a collection of pictographs and a nice little museum. Docents lead tours right up to the dwellings and pictographs, and though I’m not always a fan of tours, the docents gave a lot of good information.

There are two sets of dwellings, tucked under the arch you can see at the base of the cliff. The dwellings were occupied from around AD 1150 to 1350 while there was a year-round water source. Nomadic people, understandably, decided the area was too beautiful to leave and built the dwellings.

It’s charming how they incorporated the boulders that were too large to move. Personally, I’d be leery of building a house anywhere that such giant boulders were accustomed to falling, but maybe if you sleep tucked against the talus it’s like sheltering beside your bed during an earthquake. The structure is still standing, so maybe that’s proof of concept.

There’s a lovely pictograph up on the cliff above the structure, an image outlined by a white circle. The docent said it may be a clan symbol, possibly based on a bear’s paw. The main collection of pictographs is in a shallow cave in another part of the site, and the docent did a great job explicating the different styles and ages, but it was too much for me to really process. This one, a negative-space image of a bear’s paw sited high on the rock face, was my favorite.

It’s a beautiful site. I’d never been to the Sedona area, but it lived up to all of the hype.