First pick of mulberries today. The street trees we usually pick from have had all their lower branches pruned in a hopeless (I dare not say “fruitless”) effort to reduce the masses of mulberry fruit squished into jam on local sidewalks, but about a kilometre away I found a street tree laden with low-hanging fruit and, with the property owner’s permission, picked about 4 cups.
Mulberries have a sweet and slightly tart taste. They make excellent mulberry-lavender ice cream, very good jam, and are an unbeatable companion to dark chocolate. They also stain strongly, and would likely make excellent purple or burgundy dye or ink. Like most berries, they freeze easily for use throughout the year—a good thing, because mulberries in the Toronto region fruit briefly, a week or two before the raspberries are in full swing, from late June to mid-July. The best mulberries to pick are the fat, long ones that detach readily from the branch. Mulberry trees with eastern exposure seem to produce the sweetest, fattest berries.
Mulberry trees are somewhat controversial in native plant circles, mainly because Asian white mulberry trees (Morus alba), reportedly introduced to North America in the 1600s, have replaced or hybridized with native red mulberry (Morus rubra) and are therefore considered invasive. Native red mulberry is severely endangered in Ontario: reports from 2014 indicated that there were only 217 red mulberry trees remaining in the province, clustered mainly in southwestern Ontario.
Personally, I am on the fence about hybridized mulberries. I am always open to correction, but currently it is my non-expert impression that the proverbial ship may have sailed on the prospect of restoring a sustainable population of non-hybridized red mulberries in Ontario. I am not convinced it is possible or even desirable at this point to eliminate hybrid trees. Having said that, at least two native red mulberry trees are on my wish list for Maher Circle and, if we are able to procure some for our native pollinator garden, I will endeavour to maintain a 50 metre clearance between our natives and any non-native or hybridized mulberries.
In the meantime, however, I am happy mulberry season has begun, and hope over the next week to pick a year’s worth for the freezer, of which a quantity will go into a batch or two of delicious mulberry-lavender ice cream.
Today is the third of July, and my raspberries are producing fruit. The first ripe berries, hot in the sun, always, are reverently consumed: sweetness on the tongue. Afterward, most of the berries go straight into the freezer until I have enough to make milkshakes, ice cream, and jam.
Reverently, too, we observe the bumblebees who pollinate the flowers and are therefore the raspberries’ principal keepers. Here is one, hard at work a few days ago, a producer of miracles in summer sunlight.
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The cicadas are in season, too. I heard the first one of the season late yesterday, as the humid evening eased itself into dusk. I heard it again this morning, and hopefully soon we will have a loud chorus of cicadas, droning in the summer air.
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Also, seen recently in my woodland garden: a male blackburnian warbler! I am terrible at bird identification, and my phone camera managed only pixelated pictures, but blackburnians have such distinctive plumage that it was fairly easy to narrow down the species while flipping frantically through my collection of field guides. I assume this bird was in transit and stopped by my woodland garden to shelter under the cedars and enjoy the bird bath.
Yesterday, while tending to the pollinator garden I coordinate in a nearby public park, I was surprised to see this common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) exhibiting albinism.
Apparently albino milkweeds occur infrequently in nature, likely due to a genetic mutation. Because they lack chlorophyll, they are unable to photosynthesize and, reportedly, do not live as long or grow as large as ordinary milkweeds. However, milkweeds spread by rhizome, meaning that albino milkweeds may gain nutrients from fellow plants to whom they are connected.
Albinism in plants is never common, but reportedly occurs often enough in redwood trees and orchid plants to suggest it may confer some evolutionary advantage (perhaps especially in shade and understory environments), wherein non-chlorophyll-producing plants—known as mycoheterotrophs—forgo photosynthesis in favour of parasitizing mycorrhizal fungi. One wildflower native to Canada, Monotropa uniflora or ghost pipe, is fully mycoheterotrophic.
[Personally, I object to the term “parasite” to describe mycoheterotrophic plants. If the mycoheterotroph gains or borrows energy without harming the source plant or fungal organism, it seems to me it would more properly be described as a commensal.]
I cannot say whether the albino milkweed in my local park has ‘chosen’ a mycoheterotrophic strategy or is simply a mutant plant. It is noticeably smaller than its peers, but seems healthy so far and shows the beginnings of a blousy blossom head. I will monitor it through the season to see how it grows. I’m curious to see whether it will remain healthy and, equally, whether its blossoms will attract insects.
In the meantime, my mutant milkweed is a thing of beauty and a source of wonder, nestled in among her green sisters. I am grateful to her for existing, and for giving me the opportunity to learn something new about plant genetics and physiology.
Unusually this year, although I had made a note in the calendar, I forgot that the clocks ‘fell back’ an hour overnight. It was about 10:30—er, 9:30—before I looked at a digital clock this morning and realized our daughter, whom we’d hounded out of bed already exhausted from the first day of her Bronze Medallion qualification course, still had an extra hour to get ready for swim.
The extra hour is illusory, of course: a reminder that there is always a cost to playing with Chronos. An extra hour on a November morning is lovely, but by mid-afternoon one looks up at the clock, thinking it must be getting on to dinnertime, maybe even bedtime, and is dismayed to see how many more miles hours there are left to go before sleep.
As I write this it is 5:15 pm, and outside it is at the tail end of twilight—as close to dark as it might be at 9:30 pm at midsummer—and this makes me feel as if rather than gaining an hour with the changing of the clocks, we’ve actually lost about four.
These lost hours are what propel us toward hibernation, or at least carbohydrates and cozy mysteries. We turn inward, measuring the hours by midnight snowfalls and mugs of cocoa, and remain that way until New Years’ resolutions and the blinding January sunlight drive us out of our dens.
With the coming winter in mind, I went out today and, in the bleary November sunlight, put the gardens at the circle park to bed. Yesterday my excellent neighbour and I planted about 100 bulbs as a springtime surprise to our community, and today I mulched the beds with fallen leaves, swept the walks, and communed with the native plants tucking themselves in for winter.
Swamp milkweed podshabitat logs
I am so pleased with what we accomplished this year at the circle park. In April the park was barren, much of its soil compressed into hardpan. In a single growing season we have transformed much of it into a living green space, replete with native flowering plants buzzing with insects. But I think the real measure of the park’s progress has been its late-season appearance–seed-heads bursting with promise, habitat logs settling into the soil, fallen leaves laid down like a blanket. It looks like a healthy woodland, a place possessed of its own sense of time, whose rhythms are closer akin to Kairos rather than to any arbitrary changing of the clocks.
Yesterday afternoon the sky cleared after a week of intense humidity ended by 12 hours of excellent, soaking rain. The sky turned that saturated blue of mid-century memory, and fluffy white clouds sailed across it, borne on the sort of breeze that billows washing on the line. By evening there was a hint of cool in the air. The sunset had a late-summer quality: oranges instead of reds; a skein of cirrus cloud instead of blue fading, ever so slowly, to purple. At dusk the crickets started up their chorus, as they do every year at the end of July, and around me I felt summer begin to grow long in the tooth. It was a good night for sleeping.
The lavender fields were entrancing.
Just over a week ago I spent a few precious days visiting my closest friend and her husband in Northumberland County. We’ve known each other for more than 25 years, after meeting at graduate school, and share many things in common, from cultural background to family history to intellectual outlook to a shared love of barbecue-flavoured potato chips from Giant Tiger. After two days spent visiting our usual haunts up-country, including Laveanne’s gorgeous lavender fields just north of Port Hope, Rice Lake and the inimitable Rhino’s at Bewdley, Millbrook (where we always stop in at the delightful consignment store The Joneses), we retired to her sunporch, where my friend (who has lived and worked in very hot as well as sub-Arctic places) mused that one of the reasons we appreciate summer so much in Canada is because winter is so long.
We sat there and sighed, and looked out at her beautiful garden, and considered whether the potatoes were ready to dig, because nothing epitomizes those low-angled days of late summer more than a feed of new potatoes, boiled and smashed and served with butter and salt.
Back home in Toronto, I pulled fat tomatoes from the vine and snipped hot peppers and picked the last (well: almost the last) of the raspberries. I pulled the first of the garlic (good bulbs, not huge but the biggest I’ve grown yet) and hung them to dry and thought: it is the beginning of the harvest season. My herbs are due for a second cutting. I ran my fingers across the lemon verbena and realized: it is almost time to make jelly.
This morning the air is cool; the light pale. A merlin—a lady hawk, my neighbour calls it—swoops aggressively over the cedars with a staccato screech, hoping to flush small birds from the branches. I feel protective of the robins, who sound the alarm before regrouping and checking in with one another. Too soon the robins will begin to travel south, until one day in late September I will realize it has been a while since I last heard—or saw—one.
And I am just sitting here, typing, for the pleasure of feeling my fingers on the keyboard. No big thoughts here (I have several draft posts of those), apart from a growing conviction that every hour spent writing a blog post is a better use of time than scrolling social media. Yesterday afternoon, while doing research on a salad set of apple-shaped glass dishes I had picked up at Value Village, I happened across several blog posts (all dated five or six years ago; none of the blogs had updated since about 2018) and felt a deep sense of loss. Less than a decade ago, the internet ‘out here’ was a vastly richer and more open space, before social media platforms sucked the life out of it, absorbing nearly all public conversations into their maw and distorting discourse until it became almost unrecognisable. Online research itself has been flattened, as material that was once searchable has been sucked into proprietary platforms and search results themselves narrowed increasingly by algorithms spitting out results according to their whims. And then there is the disturbing problem of social media sites and search giants alike explicitly quashing news content.
Oops: no longer just typing. Deep breath.
Back to typing.
Ravenhead ‘Siesta’ salad set in bright yellow
Those apple-shaped dishes I bought the other day are, it turns out, from Ravenhead’s ‘Siesta’ line and date to the 1970s. The Siesta line was reportedly created by noted glass designer Alexander Hardie (under John Clappison) in 1973; Ravenhead was a well-known UK-based glass company. Weirdly, the images I am able to find online all show these dishes in clear or amber glass, while mine are a sunny yellow.
As summer grows long in the tooth, I am looking forward to using these dishes to serve out a harvest-themed salad (something with apples, nuts, cranberries, arugula and goat cheese, perhaps) in our shortly-to-be-renovated dining room, about which more anon.
And now, as the day warms (it is past eight o’clock, and the sun is cresting the cedars), I must shower and dress, and walk the cats, and find time to row, and tend to the day’s doings.
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Afternoon update: I pulled the rest of the garlic, and made what may be this season’s final pick of raspberries. In a little while I’ll do a second cutting of herbs.
The sun is bright, the breeze is fresh, and I am soaking up every moment of peace.
First pick of mulberries today. The street trees we usually pick from have had all their lower branches pruned in a hopeless (I dare not say “fruitless”) effort to reduce the masses of mulberry fruit squished into jam on local sidewalks, but about a kilometre away I found a street tree laden with low-hanging fruit and, with the property owner’s permission, picked about 4 cups.
