Wheel of fortune

Is that finally summer I see?

June is a welcome month in the northern hemisphere. But in the southern hemisphere it's now the equivalent of December. Winter weather without the Christmas? Seems kind of sad.

The month of June is named after the Roman goddess Juno. She was married to Jupiter and was the guardian of women and happy marriages. June is the most popular month for weddings, at least in the U.S. and Canada. June marriages are considered lucky-- this goes back to ancient mythology and superstition. "Marry in May and you'll rue the day" is an old proverb, but the Roman saying went "Prosperity to the man and happiness to the maid when married in June." For Roman women, June was a busy month at the temples.

Juno

June 1. The ancient Roman festival of Juno Moneta (Latin source of the word money.) On this day the goddess Juno warned women who were about to make bad marriages. Along with love advice, her temple also contained the original mint. Money and marriage...

Roman Juno Moneta coin

Vesta

June 9. The day was set aside for the pubic festival of Vesta and the vestal virgins. Women walked barefoot around Vesta's shrine with offerings of ritual salt and grain. June 9 eventually became a holiday for millers and bakers.

Mater Matuta

June 11. Women celebrated Matralia on this day. They asked the blessings of the goddess for their children and their sister's children. As part of the ritual, the women drove a slave girl who represented night from the temple to symbolize the arrival of dawn.

Fortuna

June 24. Romans celebrated the goddess of good fortune. Fortuna randomly spins her wheel. Some suffer, others gain. The wheel of fortune was a religious allegory into the middle ages, reminding us of the temporal nature of earthly things and the eventual downfall of the mighty.

Oh yes. On this day in Iceland, folklore says if you bathe naked in morning dew you will keep aging at bay for another year.

A grim Wheel of Fortune
Boccaccio manuscript

Wheel of Fortune
ala Victorian painter Edward Burne-Jones

Hang on-- Fate still cranks the handle.

And of course the one wheel everyone recognizes!

Hidden gardens and weekend chores

Knowing the Spring Courtyard
Seattle Chinese Garden

The weather was mostly cool and gloomy this weekend, although Saturday was sunny and so evolved into a garden work day. I cleaned out beds and cut the tops off all the ratty looking tulips and daffodils, probably too soon. If you can stand looking at them, it's better for the bulbs if the foliage turns completely yellow and flops overs before you whack it. After John mowed the lawn our little corner looked gorgeous in the brief sun with the purple alliums blooming and dozens of iris just ready to pop open. But this is the latest the peonies have ever been, although they're covered with more buds than usual from all the rain.

On Saturday I grilled a T-bone steak (which we shared) and on Sunday some pretty good chicken thighs. After a long winter I'm starting to get my "grill" back. Memorial Day weekend is usually the time to lay low and avoid the crowds and highways. Although last year I remember we were in Twisp and went to the Winthrop rodeo. I was looking back at the blog post-- how did that little baby Nova turn into a talkative, running toddler so fast?

So it's been a quiet weekend. We drove over to the South Seattle Community College Arboretum on Sunday morning to check progress on the Chinese garden being designed by Seattle's sister city of Chongqing. The Knowing the Spring Courtyard is the first major structure to be completed this past winter. The overall project is ambitious and will eventually cover 5 acres on a ridge overlooking Seattle, becoming the largest Chinese garden outside of China. The area is protected by greenbelts on each side with excellent and unusual downward views of the city. The Chinese garden designers working there praised the site's good fengshui.

The meditation rocks are installed but could use a bit of weathering...
The large inner courtyard will eventually be used for festivals, celebrations and ceremonies.

A bonus sighting

Nature, in her blind search for life,
has filled every possible cranny of the earth
with some sort of fantastic creature.

Joseph Wood Krutch

I was excited on Thursday to see a pair of Western Tanagers out in the holly tree. The female was dull-colored, but you couldn't miss the brilliant male. I screamed loudly for John to "come upstairs quick" and have a look. When I saw the single male the other day I assumed he was just passing through on his way up to Canada, and would look for a wife when he got there.

Well, that would be a small miracle if this pair migrated from Central America to spend the summer in our corner of Seattle. For those of you living out in the countryside surrounded by all sorts of colorful birds, it might be hard to understand our thrill seeing such an exotic, tropical creature right in the city.

Western Tanager nest

I looked up their mating behavior on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website, and if they are hanging around it may be easy to spot the messy nest. For such splendid looking birds, they don't seem to put much effort into housekeeping:

The Tanager Nest is a flimsy, shallow open cup of twigs, grasses, bark strips, and rootlets, lined with grass, hair, or fine plant fibers. Placed in trees on top of branch well out from trunk.

Hair. Sometimes when I clean my brush in the bathroom, I'll throw the hairball out the window. I have no idea why I do this weird thing, except something my German Grandma said once about hair and bird nests. I can't seem to remember if it was good or bad. When I was young I remember her throwing hair in the wood stove and watching it burn up. So pitching it out the window may just be an act of childish defiance. But who knows, some of my gray hair might actually wind up in a Tanager nest?

Ohio iris

Ohio iris before Seattle iris? This spring weather really is topsy-turvy. Thanks Dan and Becky for the picture from your country home. (Maybe this will shame our city iris into blooming.) The weekend weather in Seattle is still a mixed bag of sun and showers with high temperatures about 10 degrees below normal.

Robert Frost wrote about chilly New England, but these lines from Two Tramps in Mud Time sound like our Northwest spring:


The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.

from, Two Tramps in Mud Time
Robert Frost

The Emergence of Spring
(artist unknown)

Snippets of America

I sometimes wonder if you Americans aren't fooled by our accent into detecting a brilliance that may not really be there.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry is an actor, writer and comedian who has appeared in countless movies and television programs-- I'm sure you recognize him, or at least his voice. He's famous in England and lives a colorful life with a checkered past which makes for an interesting bio.

We've been watching a 2008 six-episode television series (available from Netflix) called Stephen Fry in America, where he travels in a little black cab through all of the U.S. states. He has a likable, easy-going wit without any British pretensions as he rambles on about people, nature and American customs.

Of course it's just a snippet from each state -- in Colorado he stops long enough to have hot rum at the top of a ski lift in Aspen, and in Tennessee he has a short and unfortunate encounter with a horse. He doesn't "see the point" of skiing or riding. But his dry humor and kindly nature make the most ordinary events entertaining, like having Thanksgiving dinner (deep fried turkey) on a southern plantation. You can tell he really did like those yams with melted marshmallows. We know the Brits make fun of Americans (often for good reason) but Fry is sincerely enjoying himself-- most of the time. He hated Miami.

The series has an rambling feel to it, but the entire trip was meticulously planned in advance by the BBC because he meets with American heavy-hitters like Morgan Freeman, Ted Turner and Mitt Romney. He also visits some bizarre places most Americans will never see, like a hippie family living in an old underground missile silo in Kansas. Anyway, it's light entertainment good for weeknight TV watching. And best of all, with Netflix DVD there's no commercials or PBS begging.

Green and more green

The purple alliums are just starting to bloom. The bearded iris want to bloom, but are still holding out for 70 degrees. I'm hoping to show off our peonies and iris when John's brother and sister-in-law visit next week, but it's not looking good. The next four days in Seattle will be soggy and cool, right through the holiday weekend. I was just watching the local forecast and the weatherman was all excited about the possibility of a "mostly dry" day on Sunday.

But it's still beautiful in an intensely green sort of way. And when the sun appeared yesterday afternoon I snapped a few pictures of our mini-jungle.

Golden hops vine...

A 10 foot laurel hedge begging for an expensive haircut...

Hostas on steriods...

Water-gorged succulent baskets...

Here's what our local weather expert Cliff Mass has to say about the coming few weeks:

During late May and much of June low clouds tend to dominate the lowlands of western Washington and the nearby offshore waters. Know as "June Gloom" in many circles, such persistent low cloudiness is a very typical feature of our climate. June is simply not a great month here and there are reasons for that. Want to know something REALLY depressing? According to the regional climate simulations being done by my group and others at the UW global warming will bring MORE low clouds during the spring around here.

Clematis good and evil

Clematis Montana

Proposals for Building a Cottage
by John Clare

A little garden not too fine,
Enclose with painted pales;
And woodbines round the cot to twine,
Pin to the wall with nails.

Let hazels grow and spindling sedge,
Bent bowering overhead;
Dig old man's beard from woodland hedge,
To twine a summer shade.

This pretty white Clematis Montana we have blooming now is not the same Clematis as the "old man's beard" or "woodbine" in John Clare's poem. These are both common names for another variety of clematis called vitalba, which grows wild in English hedgerows and is considered an invasive species here. The name "old man's beard" comes from the feathery gray seed fluff that flies everywhere after the flowers have faded. In literature, it is often referred to as "traveler's joy" because it grows along roads and paths.

On weekends in Seattle, you sometimes see hard-working crews of volunteers from environmental organizations pulling it off tree trunks in greenbelts and parks. Along with English ivy-- another unwelcome British tree strangler.

Our little wood gazebo in the corner of the yard is slowly reverting back to nature, so I let the trashy vitalba cover it completely in the summer. It makes a nice effect. The vines are soft and brittle (no thorns) so sometimes I crawl in there with a glass of wine and hide.

Anyway, there are over 200 species of Clematis-- just Google "clematis images" to see the dizzy variety of color, shape and form.

The most beautiful bird in Seattle

Western Tanager (Breeding Male)

No Photoshop is needed to touch up this lovely creature. One morning last week I caught a glimpse of yellow and red as I was working at my desk, and a Western Tanager landed right outside on the holly tree. They arrive in the Northwest for just a few months in the summer, so it's a special treat to actually see one in the city.

The Western Tanager breeds farther north than any member of its tropical family, right up into the Northwest Territories of Canada.

Here's an interesting fact: the red color in the face of the Western Tanager is rhodoxanthin, a pigment rarely seen in birds. It's acquired from insects in the diet that presumably get the pigment themselves from plants.

On June 6, 1806, Capt. Lewis of the Lewis and Clark Expedition "discovered" the Western Tanager in Idaho.

The Photoshop black hole

A little Photoshop knowledge is a dangerous thing. I spent all day yesterday taking a Photoshop Elements class at the community college. And Sunday morning breakfast is now late, because I've been sitting here dinking around with photos since early this morning.

Take a bug-chewed leaf and in a few moments-- perfection! This works just as well erasing wrinkles and turning 60 year olds into 25 year olds :-)

Don't like the color of Adelina's green t-shirt?

Change it to red!

A perfect pink rose becomes...

Blue!

(OK, I'm just showing off.)

How about sending Vino on a psychedelic trip?

Feathers and Flowers may never be the same.

Copper River cook-off

We've had three days in a row of crystal blue mornings and sunny skies. Today it might finally reach 70 degrees at SeaTac airport. Be still, my heart.

Here's another sign of spring in the Northwest-- the first shipment of Copper River salmon arrived from Alaska on Tuesday. From Seattle it hops across the country making restaurant chefs and gourmet cooks happy for a few weeks. Just out of curiosity, I goggled copper river salmon restaurant specials new york city and found an "opening price" of $43.95 at an oyster bar for lunch or dinner entrees. A generous restaurant serving is usually a 6 oz. fillet. Special, indeed.
The first plane arrives with media fanfare, and the lucky pilot always shows off a big one.
The grills are already fired up when the plane lands, and Seattle chefs compete right on the tarmac for best recipe. They have 30 minutes to prepare the fish for a panel of judges.

Yesterday at Fred Meyer (Krogers) I saw you could buy a whole Copper River salmon for $15.00 a pound. But I won't be grilling salmon tomorrow or sitting around blogging. I'm signed up to fry my brain in a 7 hour class at the Community College on Photoshop Elements. Can you teach old dogs new tricks?

What, the?

Yes, this looks like something the recycle truck forgot-- but it's my new bottle tree. The origin of bottle trees goes way back to when hollow bottles were first made, about 3500 BC in northern Africa. People believed that spirits could live in bottles, probably because of the sound wind makes blowing over the opening. This led to the idea of bottle "imps." Remember Aladdin and his lamp?

At some point folks started using glass bottles to capture and repel evil spirits. The plan was that spirits would be lured into the opening at night and then destroyed when morning light hit them. Like bad dreams. African slaves eventually brought the idea to America, and I guess bottle trees have been placed in entryways in the deep South for a long time. Whew! That's heavy stuff for what's considered just an interesting garden ornament now.

Blue bottles have always been considered the "best" choice for bottle trees. Who knows why, except that blue is a universally relaxing, calming color. Here's a picture of a bottle tree that makes mine look downright puny:

Northern European immigrants like the Germans and Irish brought their own garden superstitions to America. Those innocent looking balls you see everywhere were once called "witch balls." The shiny surface supposedly repelled witches and the opening at the bottom was used to capture them.

I haven't emptied the witches out of this one lately-- yikes. One more garden chore on the list.

And speaking of early American superstitions, we can't forget the Pennsylvania Dutch who painted their hex signs on houses and barns. I remember seeing old faded ones around farms when I was a kid in Bucks County. Now hex signs have become commercialized for the tourist market and are considered just for decoration. Like bottle trees and gazing balls. Here's an postcard from the 1960's of an old fellow selling hex signs:

Family camping

Amanda and Tom went camping last weekend with a group of friends at Banks Lake in eastern Washington. She sent me these wonderful pictures from Michael and Gina's Smugmug photostream.

Nova, Amanda and Roger setting up camp.
That's Gina and Michael's cool VW in the background.

Settled in and just hanging out...

Best friends Nova and Adelina.

A rare moment of sitting still...

Playing on the beach...

Ring-around-the-rosy with dad.

Lovely pictures! If you can't get enough, here's the link to Michael's Methow Valley Moms slide show of the camping trip.