Kansas thoughts

I haven't spent much time on my land in Kansas this past month because it just.......keeps.......raining. I could have driven out this past weekend (despite the constant rain) but since there were flash flood warnings for the area, I stayed put. I'm not a reckless person (although Dick says I have plenty of "reck"). On Tuesday I decided to drive out and see what the creek looked like since for some reason it wasn't raining. Besides, I was curious to see what the creek looked like when it was running high.

When I got out there, the creek looked like it was flowing at its normal level but you can see how high the water did get by looking at the big flattened stalks of butterbur leaves.

Things still looked a little off though.

In this particular spot I found what I think is a mulching bag to a mower. And that orange blob in the water? That turned out to be a Marilyn Manson cd(!!!!!). Who knows...when I start having to mow acres of grass, or "acers" as they spell it on signs in the country, Marilyn Manson might be the best music to listen to if you want to get your lawn mowed really fast. I saw other bright discs in the water and along the creek bank but they were either wedged too tight in the rock or I couldn't safely get to them. Learning the identity of those musicians will have to wait......like maybe until tomorrow since it rained like heck again yesterday.

Overlooking all this landscape rearrangement (I think there was some rock shifting in the creek too) were flitting ebony jewelwing damselflies. They were absolutely everywhere. Sometimes they stopped to take a couple seconds rest on a leaf and then they quickly launched into the air again.

Last week when Meg and I were out on the land, there were butterflies flitting around everywhere...almost to the point where you had to bat them off your face. But today, the airspace was being used by the jewelwings. When you see a white dot on their black wings, it means that that particular ebony jewelwing is a girl. When I was reviewing my photos, I noticed that all the photos of damselflies posing for me were girls who were taking a break from all that activity in the air above them. I totally get that. I take a lot of distraction breaks myself. This one left the creek area and got distracted with my new Blue Q bag. :-)

This is a different sort of damselfly I found later in the woods. Unlike those jewelwing girls, he was very focused and patient with me and my camera. However long it took for me to get a good picture, he stayed put and held his frozen smile for all of my photos. Is he cute or what?

I found him hanging out on a plant in the woods that was starting to flower. Lots of little tiny pink flowers.

I had been seeing a lot of these three-leaved plants throughout the forest and I thought they were very pretty. It was nice to see one in flower...I think.

They were not too hard to identify once I got home. Desmodium glutinosum. It's native to the area and since it's in the pea family, it fixes nitrogen to the soil, both of which are good things. But the seeds....oh, I recognize those things. They have to be individually picked off once a few (Ha! Never a "few!") have attached themselves. And poor Aussie. She wears necklaces of these things in the fall. They're also known as beggar's ticks or beggar's lice. Available here. Seriously. :-)

I left the shade of the woods to walk in an open area full of sunshine. This clear area was made when the owner previous to the previous owner of the land put in a satellite dish and thought he needed an unobstructed view to the stars to pick up his reception. I had the gigantic lawn art satellite dish removed but am thankful for this small spot in the woods that is clear of trees. One of these days I want a greenhouse there and a pond and this is where the chickens will have their coop and I'll have a large vegetable garden.... oh my current imagination has a lot of things happening in the future for this area.

This is also the spot where Meg and I saw most of the butterflies fluttering around last weekend. They seemed to really enjoy the coreopsis although I don't think this particular coreopsis is native to Kansas.

But I think this yarrow is.

This horse nettle flower is pretty and is definitely native...but it has spines and is toxic so I don't want it around me or my future pet chickens. It's got to go and I have some conflicted feelings about that.

The sumac at the edge of the clearing is starting to flower. Last fall these trees were disappointing with their color and fruit and I don't think I'm going to be stunned by any new dramatic show by them this year. Michigan sumacs are gorgeous. I'm not sure how to describe these guys. Confused as why they are where they are? Sitting under some oaks at the top of a hill? I kind of want them out of there. I'm conflicted about that too.

It's been interesting watching my transition from only wanting to grow native plants on my Kansas land to figuring out a compromise. Why the compromise? Because I've learned that hardly anything growing on my land is native to the area. Around 200 or so years ago it was part of a tall grass prairie but when the pioneers settled here, although they arrived with hardly anything, they sure had a lot of seeds in their pockets. Just about everything growing out there should be growing on some other continent. I never realized just how dramatic the landscape was permanently changed until I bought land in the "country" and started researching what it's supposed to look like, or what it was supposed to look like.

See that tree in the background? I thought it was a linden, and it is, but combined within its trunks is a white mulberry tree. Their trunks look nearly identical but the leaves betray what's really going on. One tree should be growing there, the other shouldn't. So what to do? Try and remove the mulberry after all this time? I don't think that native linden would recover. Oh the irony of that poor native linden doing its best to cope with the intrusion of that bully of a mulberry who moved in and literally planted itself inside the middle of it.

Those two stalky plants in front are mullein. I've always liked mullein because of its super soft leaves. Apparently the leaves were used as diapers by Native Americans. But is the plant native to North America? Nope. Another sneaky stowaway hidden in some European's dirty pockets. So what to do when you actually like the weeds (which I suppose you can correctly call European wildflowers) that are now permanently part of the American landscape?

And just to further confuse the native plant issue going on in my head, a month ago I saw this Blue-eyed grass blooming in a grassy area and thought it was just the prettiest delicate little thing.

I have no idea why but after identifying what it was in the "wild" and then seeing it again at a nursery, well, I bought one and brought it right home. Huh? I could have dug up some of the plants to transplant into my future rock garden but they looked so happy where they were. This new plant that would eventually be put in the rock garden is named Sisyrinchium "Lucerne"...as in Lucerne, Switzerland. I think what happened is that the American version went to live in Switzerland and came back to the States all hybridized. I thought that was kind of funny when I researched the nativeness of this native plant that is now a non-native. Oy. This trying to be true to what should be growing out there is a sincere workout for my head.

I struggle with trying to restore or maintain what should be growing out there with knowing that once what was living there can never be like that again. Why do I want to grow native plants anyway? My primary reason is that they attract native bugs and butterflies, little personalities I like to chase with my camera. But those guys are already out there. I guess I'll try to grow native plants where I can but when I can't, I can't, and I'm not going to feel too guilty about it. Well, maybe just a teeny bit.