Leaving June

“I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.” — Lucy Maud Montgomery

Summer mornings in late June are not as exuberant as mornings in the spring. When I go out on my morning walks these days, the dawn chorus of the birds is more subdued. Their courting days are over and they have settled in to nesting. There is no need for the males to impress the females or proclaim their territories with song. Now the only morning songs I hear are the soulful cooing of the mourning doves and the rambling melodies of the catbirds. Oh, and then there’s the loud, persistent, and tropical trumpeting of Posey, our peacock, as he greets the sun. But these summer mornings are mostly calm, quiet, and wet. The dew is usually very heavy. By the time I’ve strolled across the lawn and through the meadow and orchard, my shoes and pant legs are soaked with dew.

Calm June morning.

Full moon setting at dawn.

Posey greeting the sun.

Summer officially arrived last Sunday, but the first days of summer were not very summery. It was warm for a few hours at first, but a pretty violent thunderstorm roared through on Monday in the late afternoon with high winds and pelting rain. After it passed, the temperature was much cooler. It was chilly during the day and downright cold at night for a few days afterward. The storm brought down a few branches in our yard and knocked down a maple tree in the neighbor’s yard across the road. I’m always glad when these storms pass through and leave my big maples relatively unscathed.

Thunderstorm downpour.

The neighbor's fallen maple tree.

If you were to ask me what the most dominant feature of my property is, aside from the house, I would tell you it is the maple trees. We have nine maples trees – two of them big and seven of them huge. The seven huge ones are well over a hundred years old. The two that are merely big are ones that Stacey and I dug out of the bank behind the barn and transplanted at the edge of the yard along the road the first year we lived here. They were spindly saplings then. Now, twenty-two years later, they are over thirty feet tall. There are two huge maples right by the house that tower over it. The largest of all the trees are the four out in the front yard. There is also one huge tree out in the woodland garden, that, since we cut all the pine trees down, is the main feature making it a woodland garden. I love these old maples. They are beautiful in every season of the year. I love it when they bloom with their chartreuse tassel flowers and their tender new spring leaves unfold. And in summer they cast fine shade on sunny days and tint the sunlight filtering through their leaves a calming shade of green. In the fall they transform themselves into mountains of color – orange and yellow leaves that blaze with glory for a few short weeks and then fall to earth to become part of the compost that nourishes my garden. For much of the year, from mid-October to the end of April, the maples are bare, but even then the fractal fineness of their limbs, branches, and twigs makes them beautiful, especially when they are decorated with snow.

The front maples in early spring.

In high summer.

In the fall.

In winter.

This year our maples had us worried. We noticed a few weeks ago that many of their leaves were discolored and deformed and were dropping off. I didn’t know what was causing it. I feared they had some disease that would kill them and we would have to take them down. What would our yard be without its maples? I couldn’t stand the thought of it. I did some desperate research and determined that they have maple anthracnose, a fungal disease caused by one of three fungi, Aureobasidium apocryptum, Discula campestris or Colletotrichum gleosporoides – fancy sounding names for an ugly problem. The sites I checked all assured me that, with well established trees, anthracnose is usually a minor disease that only reduces their aesthetic value. The fungi thrive in certain weather conditions, particularly cool, wet springs, which we have had this year. The trees have been shedding their infected leaves, but they will grow more over the summer. As dryer, warmer weather sets in, the fungi should go away. If the weather is better next spring, the disease may not appear again. I hope.

Maple anthracnose.

Tuesday, the day after the storm, was cloudy and cool. I couldn’t bring myself to do any but the absolutely necessary chores outside. It just doesn’t seem right to bundle up to work in the garden at the end of June. Besides, I had signs to paint indoors. That night as I got ready for bed, I checked the temperature. It was 39°. I had another fretful night, getting up to check the thermometer every couple of hours. At dawn it was 34°. We escaped a devastating frost again, barely. On Wednesday things started to slowly warm up again. But that night the temperature dropped to 35°. Finally the warm weather settled in. We hit the 70's on Thursday, the 80's on Friday, and finally yesterday, we almost hit 90°. I’m glad the warmth has returned. We have so many cool and cold months here that I start feeling cheated when summer doesn’t oblige me with a few hot days.

Evening light.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been reading a trilogy by Evelyn Waugh set during World War II, Men At Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and The End of the Battle. I was almost half way through the third book and I was enjoying it, but I’d grown a bit weary of war and felt I needed to take a break. I decided to open the first days of summer with Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine yet again. I think I write about this every year around this time, but I love Dandelion Wine. It has always been my favorite of Bradbury’s works from the first time I read it as a teenager in the first days of summer back in the early 70's. Unlike most of his other books, it isn’t science fiction. It is set in the year 1928 in the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois, and its main character, Douglas Spaulding, is partly based on Bradbury’s childhood. The book starts on the first day of summer and moves through a set of connected short stories. As Ray Bradbury described it: “Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood.” I can’t say it any better than that. This time, because I was busy painting, I decided to listen to an audio book version. I don’t usually listen to audio books. For me, holding a book in my hands is as much a part of reading as using my eyes. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed listening to it. Hearing the reader speak Bradbury’s words gave me a new appreciation for the power and beauty of the language. Here is how the story begins:

“It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer. Douglas Spaulding, twelve, freshly wakened, let summer idle on its early-morning stream.”

On Wednesday I cleaned the woodshed and the back porch. I consider those two places to be part of “my domain,” along with the yard, gardens, orchard, and barn. I can’t claim most of the house. But even so, the woodshed and back porch tend to be the dumping grounds for the things no one wants to deal with. They get cluttered and I have to unclutter them regularly. It’s a dirty, dusty job involving encounters with lots of spiders, their webs, and other occasional surprises like a mouse or two. So now they are clean and tidy, at least for a little while.

The back porch after cleaning.

The tidied woodshed.

Several weeks ago we discovered that a fox has taken up residence just up the road, a vixen with several pups. The pups are pretty big now. They don’t seem to be afraid of us much, which is a problem. We see them roaming along the road and through our yards. I like foxes. They are pretty animals and they are great destroyers of four of my garden’s worst enemies – rabbits, mice, voles, and woodchucks. But foxes also like chickens and probably peacocks too. We’ve found chicken remains from some of their kills, but they were not from my flock. I think they were from the neighbor up the road. We had one of the pups get into our chicken yard. In broad daylight it mozied in and began stalking the chickens. We had to take care of it, unfortunately. I wish they would move further away up into the woods. I hate making war against them, but foxes and chickens are not a good combination.

On a sunrise walk.

I’ve also had deer in the orchard. We often see a doe and fawn in the tall grass across the road by the beaver pond, but they do not stay across the road. I find deer scat in the orchard all the time. There are places in the tall grass in the orchard where I can see they have rested. And I can see where they’ve been eating the lowest branches of my apple trees. One morning last week as I walked through the orchard, I startled a fawn hiding in the grass. I should say it startled me. It leaped up and ran away and I jumped and my heart jumped. There was no doe, just a fawn. It ran across the Shillig’s yard and into the thorn wood across the road. My apples are getting big now and I will have to begin measures to discourage the deer.

Where the deer rested in the orchard grass.

Apples the size of ping pong balls.

My apple trees are also under attack from gypsy moth caterpillars. The gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar) is a non-native insect from France. They were introduced in 1869 when they were brought to Medford, Massachusetts, to see if they could be bred with silkworms to create a hardier variety of silkworm. That was not a success and some of the gypsy moths escaped. From there, they have spread across 19 states. Every 10 years or so, they have a major outbreak and cause a lot of damage to trees. I don’t think this is a major outbreak, but there are far more of them than usual in my apple trees this year. I’ve been hunting them and squishing them by hand, but I have more than 30 apple trees and most of them are rather large, so that isn’t very effective. I think it’s time to take broader measures. I have a batch of my special orchard spray almost ready. I make it by rotting comfrey, stinging nettle, and horsetail in buckets of water for two weeks. When that is ready, I filter the solids out of the disgustingly stinky liquid, add neem oil, and Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint soap, and spray the trees. It feeds them and fortifies them and the neem oil disrupts the caterpillar and other chewing insects’ growth and development.

Gypsy moth caterpillar in my apples.

Despite the cool weather, the flower garden is thriving. The common poppies, corn flowers, and June roses are still going strong. The opium poppies are ready to start. The very last of the irises bloomed. I’m sad that they are done now. Their blooming time is too short. In the wild edges of the yard, there are daisies and the milkweeds have buds. I have some huge mullein plants that came up in a part of the garden I let go fallow this year. They are beautiful, dramatic plants with velvet-soft silvery green leaves and bright yellow flowers on a tall spike. They’ll be almost eight feet tall by the time they’re done blooming. Now that the weather has warmed again, other flowers like the lilies, sundrops, and daylilies will start to shine.

Poppies still going strong.

The very last iris to bloom.

Giant mulleins in my garden.

Yesterday my nephew Aaron Shillig, his wife Mandi, and three of their children, Madison, Gwen, and Chloe, and their Shih-tzu, Solo, arrived for a visit. Gwen, Chloe, and Solo are staying at our house right now. The others are staying over at Kurt and Julie’s, but we will all be together most of the time. This Wednesday the Utah Howes, Geoffrey, Joni, Ellie, Gwen, and Henry will arrive in Pittsburgh to spend a day with the Thayns and then all of them are coming here on Friday. Kurt and Julie’s daughter Kale and her husband Roman and their two children arrive on the 3rd as will the Fosters. We will all be together to celebrate Independence Day. Miriam has been baking all week to prepare for it. There have been meal planning meetings between Stacey and Julie. There are all sorts of games and activities planned.

Relaxing on the back porch with the Shilligs.

We are home from church now. We just got back from lunch at the Shillig’s house – Hawaiian Haystacks and it was delicious. Later this evening we’re going back for dessert. Miriam is providing that – homemade ice cream and cookies. Then we’ll all sit and talk and probably play a game together. There is going to be a lot of that sort of thing over the next few weeks. It’s going to be great!

A bouquet of the last of the peonies.

Dan