The sun is shining bright but there are no Lupines or bees collecting pollen to be found this late into the fall. There are approximately 280 species of Lupinus, commonly known as Lupin or Lupine.
Lupins make good companion plants for crops that need significant amounts of nitrogen in their soil since lupins can fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and this allows lupins to be tolerant of infertile soils and capable of pioneering change in barren and poor quality soils.
The yellow legume seeds of lupins, commonly called lupin beans, were popular with the Romans, who spread the plant’s cultivation throughout the Roman Empire.
The sun was out early this morning and with the continued above average temperatures this week, the image of summer popped in my head. An image of a warm summer evening with cattle grazing in the pasture, the moon rising as the sun was setting and swallows chasing bugs above the barns roof.
With the above average temperature for this November day, it has me thinking of heading to a lake to enjoy the sun and sticking my feet in water on a warm, lazy summer day. ‘Thinking’ is the key word, since it is not summer and the water wouldn’t be that warm today so dreaming of a warm Sunday afternoon at the lake is all I can do today.
To close out this week’s ‘hunting for spring’ theme, I figured I needed a picture of the robin since they say that it’s not officially spring until ‘it has snowed on the Robins’ tail three times.
Another flower that I would ‘hunt for in the spring’, is the Glory-of-the-snow (Chinodoxa), originating in the alpine regions of Turkey, Crete and Cyprus, where each year it transforms the landscape from snowy white to blue. It’s therefore fitting that its botanical name comes from the Greek chion, meaning “snow,” and doxa, meaning “glory.”
I suppose one would be in glory seeing the snow melt and the flowers blooming after a long winter.
Looking out at the flower bed this morning, the purple asters have turned mostly brown after several nights in the low teens. So the purple I’m thinking of as part of this week’s ‘the hunt for spring’ theme, is the tiny crocus which can often appear through the snow in the spring. According to legend the Greek Gods Zeus & Hura loved each other so passionately that the land where they lived burst open with crocuses.
The crocus was not native to North America, but instead came on ships by settlers who planted them around their cabins. But while not native here, the crocus has been cultivated since at least 1550 BC in the Mediterranean area. The lavender-flowered, fall-blooming crocus (C. sativus) has been grown for saffron the flower produces which was used as a spice, a dye, a medicine, and also in perfumes.
Saffron has always been expensive, even during its use in the Minoan culture, where the same weights used to measure gold were used for saffron. The reason for the expense is the labor-intensive nature of the production process of crushing the dried stigmas of the flower for the powder. During the brief blooming, the stigmas of C. sativus are painstakingly separated from the petals and stamens and then dried, a procedure best carried out on the day of the collection. Each crocus has three stigmas, and it takes about 160,000 flowers to produce 11 lbs of wet stigmas, which converts to 2 lbs of dried spice.
I might have to start growing the fall crocus instead of the spring crocuses since that 2 lbs of dried spice is approximately worth $10,000. Course growing 160,000 flowers to get that two pounds might be difficult with my chipmunks digging up my flower bed all the time!
Melting snow normally means the pond will fill up with water again, but that only works in the spring as the dusting of snow yesterday that melted didn’t help fill the extremely low pond level caused by the dry summer and fall. So today’s ‘hunt for spring’ picture is a full pond, ready for the visiting ducks on their spring travels.
With the sun out melting the snow today, the ‘hunt for spring’ fever continues this week and one sign that spring has arrived is the song of the Red-winged Blackbird as they hang out in the cattails.
The male Red-winged Blackbirds will do everything they can to get noticed, sitting on high perches and belting out their conk-la-ree! song all day long. Course they want the girls attention as the male Red-winged Blackbird may have as many as 15 female mates but with that many females, he apparently doesn’t watch them closely enough as a quarter to half of the nestlings are sired by a different male!
Watching the big snowflakes coming down this morning makes me think of finding white that is not so cold and looking for white in the form of a spring flower. The Bloodroot is an eastern North American native plant and was used as a popular red natural dye by Native American artists. A break in stem would reveal the reddish sap or ‘blood’, leading to its name. The Bloodroot is often the second wildflower to appear in the spring after the Hepatica in my woods.
Native Americans, early settlers and herbal practitioners have prescribed Bloodroot for medical conditions from skin cancers to sore throats. Its most common use takes advantage of the flesh destroying properties of the root juice or powered root for treating conditions of the skin such as ringworm, moles and warts. Bloodroot is used in the mole remover Dermatend. An extract has long been used in toothpaste and mouthwash to fight plaque and gingivitis and this use is now sanctioned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Looking out at the brown leaves covering the ground, I’m dreaming of spring and the hunt for the first spring flowers to emerge after a long winter. But that hunt will be months away as the brown I see is the fall brown before the white snow and not after the snow melt.
The Hepatica is found growing in rich woodlands from Minnesota to Maine to Northern Florida west to Alabama and is often the first wildflower to appear in the spring. Hepatica leaves usually come out after the flowers and are very fuzzy. The fuzzy leaves helps the plants to keep warmer in the very early spring. They would need their long johns today since the temperature is dropping to 20 tonight.
