Spring Evening, Evanston Illinois, 27 April 2013

Vinca major (Periwinkle) - in several front yards

Scilla sp. (Squill) in several yards, also on openspace near CTA station on Main etc 

Close up of Squill

Pachysandra - gardens around Evanston (thanks Kim Frye for reminding me of the name)

TREE ARCHITECTURE

This is a great time of year to start looking at tree architecture.  Even if you have not perfected your winter tree ID skills, take note of the branching pattern of trees and as they leaf out in the coming weeks put a name on them!  Want to learn more about tree architecture (see here)

Ulmus americana (American Elm) (not the typical architectural expression for this tree).

 Gymnocladus dioicus (Kentucky Coffee Tree).  Note the seed pods from last year. 

Catalpa speciosa, Northern Catalpa.  Very distinctive architecture.

BUD BURST

Good time also to watch bud burst.  The maples are very busy this weekend.

Acer platanoides Norway Maple.  Notice opposite buds.  As the trees grow this arrangement of the buds continues to be expressed in the shoots, branches, limbs etc.

WORMWATCH!

Oh yep, worms... all non-native worms in Chicago.

Three Tree Pictures - Evanston: Custer - Dempster/Chicago - Ridge

A Pedestrian Fragment on Interstitial Ecology

It’s just the way we roll: on our walk today Vassia and I detoured from our habitual walking route and instead of going east towards the lake and then north along the lakeside trail, we went east and south towards Chicago.  No particular reason; sometimes strollers, flâneurs, a pair of peripatetics such as we are, are just called upon to delicately subvert the normal course of things.  Who does the calling?  To whose invitation do we respond? 

We do most of our living in the margins.  Between our workaday world and the wilderness of sleep, a few hours of respite, between the orderly abodes of our little city and the wilderness of the lake, a margin of grass and sand; between the end of one week and resumption of our same old travail, a couple of days to be very mildly wild, and by wild I include the exercise of our animal limbs: we walk. 

We walked along the beach where we could, or marched along the path by the beach and looked out over the grey-green water.  The waves were high and surgent and crashed against the wooden posts driven into the sand.  Groins, I think they call these; wooden groins driven in the sand to calm the lake.  In the crack in our town between the houses and apartments and the lake, are trees and grass and weeds.  In the cracks in the pavements, small weeds grow, no less lovely for being common as the rind of muck they grow in.

On our return we walked across the graveyard.  The dead have no plans.  Between those monuments to the plan-less, geese shat and walked, and honked.

Compassion

Compassion: Look out for this on a Evanston pavement: a black ground-beetle inverted, its tiny rowing motions arrest attention.  It is struggling to right itself.  Examine it!  Kneel down if you have to.  You’ll see the predicament the beetle is in – it has no legs, all six have been nipped at their bases.  The stumps flail. The fraying carapace rocks gently back and forth upon the ground.  It can never be restored.  Look closer, a crew of ants is busy with it, eating their meat rare.  On Washington Street in June, I bent over and inspected a noiseless dying such as this, and compassion obligated me to destroy the creature.  The black body was surprisingly yielding – like little fruit underfoot.  When the work was done it looked as if a single mulberry had rotted there upon the sidewalk.  Dotted through the mess, like seeds, were the carcasses of ants.