Green
WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS NOTHING POLITICAL WHATSOEVER
One thing you can say about mid-July in Alaska is that it’s never going to get greener than this. The last of the early blooming wildflowers are still just hanging on, and the late bloomers of summer are coming into their own. Leaves and grass are everywhere. You can practically smell the chlorophyll.
The picture below was taken in my backyard, which you all tend to see in one form or another fairly regularly. There are a couple dead spruce in the shot… victims of the infamous and deadly spruce bark beetle. They will stand for a long time, even though dead, and then when the inevitable 80, 90, 100 mph winds come charging down the valley this fall, the ones that have weakened enough will snap like pencils. The rest will stand to fight another season.
But apart from the dead wood, the world has changed from the apple candy green of spring, and has matured into a deep velvety emerald. We’ve had rain showers lately, so everything is extra squeaky clean, including the wild geraniums and Sitka roses.
The bedding plants in this wonderful garden are ferns, and tall grasses, and young alders and willows. There are raspberry canes mixed in with the roses, and all the incredible lichen and fungi that I enjoy photographing in early spring and late fall are hiding under the massive Jurassic-style leaves of cow parsnip, and devil’s club.
The berries of the future are all around in the form of flowers like little bell shaped salmon-colored ones, and backward-petaled ones that look like shooting stars, and white spidery ones that hide under the tall slender leaves of the plant that will turn them into a row of watermelon berries in the fall that dangle like shiny red earrings.
There are a couple paths around that are shared by humans, moose, bear, lynx, and an occasional wolf or coyote. But if you want, you can just charge off to the side into the grass and cow parsnip. It’s like walking in a bay, with water up to your waist, and you hit a sudden drop-off that puts you in up to your chin.
It’s hard to believe that in a few weeks, a couple of the leaves will start to turn orange around the edges. And one morning you’ll catch a pungent whiff of tundra that’s just popped with berries. And then you’ll see your breath as you get into the car. And then… termination dust, the dreaded dusting of snow on the high peaks over Anchorage that sits there smugly as if to tell the city below, “That’s right… I’m back.”
But for now, the world is chock full of birds, and bear cubs, and flowers, and moose, and rabbits, and mosquitoes. The creek makes the whooshing noise that is such a shock when it comes in the spring after the ice breaks up.
Forget-me-nots, the Alaska state flower.
We hear about the rest of our poor neighbors to the south suffering through unbearable heat in the triple digits, power outages, no air conditioning, wild fires… We look at the thermometer that says 57 degrees, and we feel the damp air on our faces, and suddenly it doesn’t seem so bad.
The pretty little salmon-colored, bell-shaped flowers appear to be Fool’s Huckleberry, False Azalea (Menziesia ferruginea), which looks like it will turn into berries but instead fruits as an inedible, dry capsule.
Wow. What a disappointing finish! Thanks for the info, though. I’ll keep my eye on it. Maybe I’ll try my hand at an inedible dry capsule pie. I know a few elected officials that I’d love to gift.
Right now in central PA it is very BROWN. We have had record breaking high temperatures and little rain, which followed the warmest, driest winter in history. We are becoming ARIZONA …YIPES!!!
Heading to Ireland and Scotland tomorrow – for some GREEN. Going to do a Mini-Mudstock w/ IrishGirl.
Life is Good!
Those wild geraniums and sitka roses are beautiful! I love the colors.
Thanks for the gorgeous photos. So, now I know of yet another Alaskan berry: watermelon berry, which I’d never before heard of. I’ll add that to nangoon berry and salmon berry as Alaskan treats to try, when I finally spend more than 20 minutes in your beautiful state. Maybe next year …
http://www.uaf.edu/files/ces/publications-db/catalog/hec/FNH-00123.pdf
Twisted stalk/watermelon berry IS a treat !:-)
Got a recipe for watermelon berry daiquiris?
The photos match the writing: exquisite. Thanks!
We finally had a couple of whopping storms over the weekend. 2″ of rain on Saturday, and 4″ on Sunday! What a gift. It even knocked the temps back to the normal nineties, instead of that awful 114* business, which was just a stinking bore.
Your pictures are beautiful. I do love the wild geranium. Have lots of it interplanted with baby’s breath. Ours decided to just bail out in the heat, and we are hoping it comes back next year.
Rain sounds wonderful! So glad you got relief from those awful temps. We have cooler days here as well. Still need rain but that’s starting to look up as well.
I wouldn’t have minded sharing some of the rain other parts of the country are getting. It’s been really dry here in western NY and everything is turning brown and crunchy. I try not to use too much water for the yard so I only hand water the vegetables in my garden and the new plants I put in this spring. My lawn is so dry that even the weeds are looking droopy! Of course, the weeds in my beds are still going gangbusters even though the stuff I WANT to grow is struggling. SO not fair!!!
Last night my neighbor decided to burn some of the branches of the dead tree her father had cut down. She’s got a metal firepit on her patio and the flames had to be hitting 8 or 10 feet with sparks flying all over. I was a nervous wreck, checking out the window every few minutes to make sure the grass hadn’t caught on fire. Clearly, she has not been watching the news over the last few weeks, with wildfires burning greats swaths of the country. What an idiot!
We finally got a few days of our summer monsoon season, desperately needed to cut the fire danger. I measured 3″ in 3 days in my yard- perhaps a tad too much at once, but greatly appreciated.
Wonderful photos- thanks!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hx7W3W1WO1E&feature=related
love the music! thanks, what a great feature on this blog.
AKM i have been waiting for this refreshing look at the back yard and the wonderful plants you introduce us to make me very happy,
Thinking of you, Bubbles. Will toast you this weekend in Ireland w/IrishGirl! Love this blog that has connected all of us! Thanx AKM!
Record low temps in Juneau – 54 degrees – and buckets of rain have broken rainfall records, too. Last night was unbelievable – I thought we were having a good ol’ drenching Midwestern downpour, the kind where it rains so hard the windshield wipers can’t keep up. We can’t have had more than a couple partly-cloudy {Juneau’s equivalent of “sunny”) days in the past ten weeks.
The rainforest jungle drips constantly – alder leaves shed rain pretty well, but the willow leaves hold water just like mops, ready to douse anyone unwary enough to walk beneath them. Wooohooo! Icy water, right down the neck!
The latest NOAA report is interesting:
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2012/20120710_stateoftheclimatereport.html
The gray in my hair has taken on an algae green tint… goes pretty well with the remnants of paper bag brown of original color. We’ve actually had 4 days in the last 10 weeks- 2 real sun, 2 Juneau sun. I marked em on the calendar 🙂
Back to back La Nina’s have certainly affected us- interesting to see the idea of how they are assumed to have fueled extreme weather in other places.
Thanks for the reference to the NOAA article. Of course the GOP will go into full denial and want to fire any US scientists involved in the report. Mind you, facts and reality never bother a Republican. What I don’t understand is how they can remain so adamant when they have children and grandchildren too. I worry about the world we are leaving behind.
AKM’s photos are just beautiful. Those flowers wait all year to have their moment in the sun.
Yesterday we drove over to the Sleeping Bear Dunes on Lake Michigan. So beautiful and lots of visitors from all over the country. We are in a dry spell here and our annual precipitation to date is now below normal; we were above normal for about the last two months – a first since we moved here almost ten years ago. Our weather has been strange this year: not much snow last winter and then a blizzard in early March followed by the warmest temperatures in March ever since they started recording them in the late 1800’s. This week, though, is absolutely beautiful – blue skies, low humidity, warm enough temperatures for many to take to the water – and perfect for the National Cherry Festival which is taking place despite the large degree of crop failure due to the weather in March. Some sweet cherries have been harvested, no tart cherries and the apple crop in the whole state is in big trouble.
All of these things relate back to the ultimate problem of climate change and politicians, including the GOP, have to get involved. Ours is a very small planet and we owe it our best efforts.