Treasure Trove of Trilliums

Vivid bouquets of flowers bedazzled this sunny Mother's Day weekend, showing up like unexpected flamenco dancers on the back deck. The chilly, rain-soaked weekend before this one offered a herbaceous banquet of a different sort, filled with native plants and greenery that flourished in soggy settings.

We spent that Saturday dodging downpours, slathered with mud as we dug up ferns on the forested property of friends whose home and gardens will soon be bulldozed to make way for a housing development. They also pointed out a few other dig-worthy plants--rhubarb, raspberries, heavenly bamboo--that it seemed a pity to leave behind. We drove home in a minivan packed with our new fronds (it's not easy to make new friends in a new neighborhood; fronds are quite a bit easier to come by).

The Sunday of that soggy weekend I enjoyed an early Mother's Day gift to myself: a "Tea and Trilliums" talk and tour at Cottage Lake Gardens, which is tucked right behind the library barely five minutes from my home.

Cottage Lake Gardens is perched on the shore of, not surprisingly, Cottage Lake, and is home to all of the world's 48 species of trillium, a lovely genus of wildflower native to North America and parts of Asia. Trilliums are named for their habit of sprouting threesomes: They have three leaves, three sepals (those green bits that surround the base of a flower), and three petals.

Tea, coffee, pastries, and fruit served up on antique Limoges china...I could've stopped right there. That was enough of a break from the daily grind.

Then, fortified with food as well as information about trilliums, we headed out into the rain to wend our way through the forested garden. There the trilliums reposed in groups along a meandering path, sharing the landscape with a wide variety of shade-loving plants.

What I found most fascinating about the trillium is just what a late bloomer it is. Not in terms of the season, mind you--it's one of the earliest bloomers when it comes to springtime (one of its nicknames is "wake-robin," because it's such an early riser it even wakes up the robin who's supposed to be the harbinger of spring). No, its peculiar late-blooming property is that about seven years pass before a trillium seed finally grows up enough to produce a flower.

The bulk of the plant takes the form of an underground, swollen stem called a rhizome. (If you've ever brought home a chunk of ginger from the grocery store, you've purchased a rhizome.)

Shoots from the rhizome poke up from the soil, with each shoot producing three leaves and a flower.

The flowers bloom for a few weeks, set seed, and are done for the season by the time other flowers are just thinking of getting out of bed.

This long adolescence and brief bloom, combined with the leaves' inclination to die back in dormancy during a hot, dry summer, puts an interesting spin on the whole notion of what, exactly, a plant is.

To the aboveground-dwelling human, a plant is leaves, flowers, fruit--the things we can see.

But I'd think a trillium would feel otherwise, if it had feelings. Its real self is a mole-like being that puts up a periscope of a flower and goes on a sunshine-buying spree with its leaves before returning to its underground digs and retiring with a brandy and a nice collection of books for the rest of the year.

First-year shoots (left) and older shoots (right)

It put me in mind of a 17-year cicada, which spends 17 years underground as a nymph, sipping from roots. Finally it bursts from the ground, climbs up a trunk, molts into its adult form, then spends about a month carousing, reproducing, dodging predators, and making a row before dying.

A cicada's short above-ground life seems puzzling to humans, but a trillium would understand it. It's the 17 years of subterranean life that's the real thing, not the brief party in the light of day.

Cicadas don't consort with trilliums, but other insects do. Pollinators of trilliums include beetles and ants. (An East Coast species, the red trillium, attracts these animals with a pungent odor that earns it charming nicknames such as “stinking Benjamin.") The most commonly encountered trillium in the Pacific Northwest, Trillium ovatum, puts on quite a show after it's been pollinated: Its lovely white petals turn increasingly deep shades of pink, transforming into a rich, velvety purple before the flower dies.

Beetle on wild trillium in a Redmond park

The plant offers ants not only protein bars in the form of pollen grains as reimbursement for pollination services, but also oily fast food attached to its seeds. These treats are called elaiosomes and are nutritious, calorific growths on the seeds.

Ants eagerly tote the seeds away from the trillium to share with larvae. The kids gobble up the elaiosomes while their indulgent elders toss the seeds on their own nutrient-rich junk piles outside the nest.

The trillium seeds, in a nice "Br'er Rabbit and the Briar Patch" twist, then happily take root in these middens. Pretty clever for a rhizome!

A Horse's Lazy Sunday

The novel Black Beauty by Anna Sewell has probably never gone out of print since it was first published in 1877. It popped into my mind on Sunday as the Resident Teen and I watched her horse frolic on a pretty spring afternoon, reminding me of the scene in which kind cabdriver Jerry lets Beauty enjoy an afternoon in a pasture far from the busy streets of London after a short Sunday drive:

When my harness was taken off, I did not know what I should do first--whether to eat grass, or roll over on my back, or lie down and rest, or have a gallop across the  meadow out of sheer spirits at being free; and I did all by turns.

Avi is hardly the much-put-upon carriage horse that Beauty is--he's got nothing, nada, zip to complain about--but like Beauty he kicked up his heels and enjoyed all these horsy activities by turns:

"I know. I make it all look easy, don't I."

Riding Horses vs Writing Horses

I covered reams of paper with scenes like this...

When I was a girl, all I could think about was horses.

Like many horse-crazy girls, I plastered my room with horse posters, lined the shelves with horse statues, read and reread every horse book in the library, and galloped around the back yard tossing my hair ("flowing mane") and neighing (much to the irritation of the people next door).

I took riding lessons for two years, fell off once (my fault, Snowball), but managed to stick on going over jumps up to three feet high.

I also spent countless hours drawing pictures of my dream horse, a palomino Arabian stallion called Golden Stardust, who was going to found a dynasty of palomino Arabians, and writing stories about such noble steeds. Plus I was going to be a jockey.

Never mind that palominos don't necessarily breed true, meaning you won't always get golden foals with white manes and tails. Never mind that Arabians technically do not possess the "cream dilution gene" that produces a palomino and that palomino Arabians are actually genetically chestnut horses with blond manes and tails.

And never mind that I now weigh about two jockeys.

I think this blur is a horse called Udam, who finished in third place.

I thought about all this as we attended a glorious equine event the other night: the 2014 Spring National Jumper competition at the Evergreen Equestrian Park in Monroe. It was the last night of the show and featured the Grand Prix.

In Grand Prix events, horse and rider bound over (hopefully) from 10 to 16 jumps, some of which may be more than 5 feet high or more than 6 feet wide.

Most of the horses flew over the jumps. Some gave a jaunty kick in midair as they sailed over the top. One particularly flashy gray flagged his dramatic white tail as he galloped and leaped; another bore down on each jump like a terrier going after a rat.

A few riders lost stirrups and looked as if they'd fall off any second while others seemed like a natural extension of the horse. A few horses threw their heads around as if they had bees up their nostrils while others were dead serious about their jobs.

The Resident Teen's trainer, Katherine Wade-Easley, aboard
Smooth Criminal (a.k.a. Toby), who finished 6th in the event.

It was terrifying to watch the ones who seemed out of control, inspiring to watch the ones who literally took it all in stride, even if they rapped a pole here or knocked down a pole there.

I thought a lot about who and what I thought I'd be when I grew up, and how my love of horses never translated into being dead-set on acquiring one and mastering the fundamentals of horsemanship.

No doubt fear and lack of confidence had a role to play; the last time I was on a horse and it bucked, it scared the bejesus out of me and I had no "emergency drill" in place to respond. (The bucking felt like crowhopping to the sky, to me; the Resident Teen, who was watching, noted that the mare's hind feet were actually barely two inches off the ground.) Certainly lack of opportunity was a factor, too.

But as I watch the Resident Teen follow her passion for horses, I am happy to realize that I'm content with the way my own fondness for them has developed.

She has long since jettisoned the toy horses and little glass statues for the down-to-earth and practical as she pursues her sport, and shown that despite our shared love of horses, she is certainly no Mini-Me; she has grit and self-preservation skills when it comes to horses that I don't and never did.

YIKES!!!

I think it's amazing that she's not intimidated by going over huge jumps; she thinks it's amazing that I can manage a budget, a schedule, and a freelance job.

(At least I can still manage to impress in one sphere of life!)

It's been nice to discover that there are as many ways to appreciate horses as there are kinds of horses, just as you can be a train fan without being an engineer, a birder without being an ornithologist, or a patron of the arts without being in an orchestra.

I don't know why it took me half a century to realize this. After all, my dad designed F-14 Tomcats and other fighter aircraft but wasn't a pilot.

So I'm quite enjoying my role as a spectator and handmaiden to a horse and rider. The Resident Teen, when she was the Resident Preschooler, told me that when she had a stable as an adult, I could muck out the stalls. Now she even says that yes, I may even be able to keep some old bombproof horse or pensioner pony of my own.

We've come a long way. As long as my non-palomino, non-Arabian, definitely-not-stallion steed can carry two jockeys, we're good.

Hooray!

New Garden, Full of Surprises

Though our family near and far currently endures a measure of misfortune and illness, and a fog of shell-shocked weariness engulfs us, the beauty of spring still has the power to startle and delight--especially as it's our first spring in our new home and so we get to enjoy weekly surprise parties courtesy of the perennials, shrubs, and trees as they bloom.

Somebody planted this place with azaleas and rhododendrons in dazzling shades of purple...

...and red. The delicate interiors of the flowers are just as lovely as the vivid petals.

Sprightly little plants also spring up uninvited, but welcome; here's a pansy that's
quite at home in the paving stones of a path to the back deck.
It's completely unfazed by the dog galloping over it daily.

I had no idea a graceful bleeding-heart adorned the slope out front
by the culvert that catches runoff water until suddenly there it was, in full bloom, dangling its pink earrings in the breeze.

A magnolia topping out at about 15 feet grows outside my office window.
It looks as if it's holding hundreds of white bone-china teacups up to the sky.

The central parts of a magnolia blossom look like something out of a Chihuly glass exhibit. The green-gold tentacles are the pistils, or seed-producing parts; the pink fingerlike structures are the pollen-producing stamens. Beetles and bees are the pollinators.

This small plant grows in ground-covering clusters in the shade.
It grows so well that I was sure it was either a nice native plant
or a horrible invasive non-native that Washington State law
would mandate must be dug up and destroyed.
After some research, I learned that it's a variety of
Spotted Dead Nettle (nice name, yeah) and that,
though there's a black sheep in the family called "white nancy,"
this purple variety hasn't been singled out as an invader.

Last autumn's leaves form a still life in the bird bath along with catkins from this spring's growth.

Kitty came with us from our last home. She now dozes on soft moss,
sprinkled by fir needles and cherry blossoms.

We lugged our rhubarb plants with us, too.
They'll have a year to settle in before we harvest them again.

Hooray for Spring!

The Writing Process Tour

My friend Rachael Conlin Levy asked me if I would participate in an online blog meme called My Writing Process, and I couldn't say no because I admire her and appreciate her so very much. Rachael is a journalist, a beautiful writer, a wonderful cook, a creative homemaker, a talented knitter, and a sensitive photographer. You can enjoy her words and images on her blog, The Slow-Cooked Sentence. 

What am I working on?

As a writer for hire: assorted nonfiction books. In my (precious few) spare hours: a middle-grade novel and a few picture books.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I must retreat beneath a bushel basket from this question. Although I can put forth my credentials for writing a particular project and believe in my ability to do the job well, it makes me extremely uncomfortable to answer this! 

Why do I write what I do?

Because I love to research and to write. I love animals, science, and natural history and feel very fortunate to be writing about the topics that have interested me since I was a little kid.

How does my writing process work?

Most of my work is nonfiction, so my writing process usually begins with mountains of reading. I take out dozens of books from libraries and visit oodles of websites. If necessary I contact experts. I am delighted to have an excuse to buy a few new or used books, too. Then I create a rough outline for the book and go from there. 

If I'm working on a picture book of my own, then I write with a black Uni-ball Signo pen on looseleaf in a binder or a spiral notebook. I doodle a lot in the margins. Usually horses or googly-eyed dogs. Or stupid-looking birds and dragons. I write my blog on my blog site instead of cutting and pasting it, because cutting and pasting it from a document usually means Messed-Up Formatting.

Who’s next on My Writing Process blog tour?

Nancy Schatz Alton, who is a freelance writer, editor, and writing coach. She is the co-author of two holistic healthcare guides: The Healthy Back Book and The Healthy Knees Book. She is a regular contributor to ParentMap, where she writes articles and essays about parenting here. Nancy also writes about parenting, learning disabilities, family life, books, writing, cooking, and more on her blog, Within the Words. She is currently working on a memoir. Nancy lives in Seattle with her husband and two daughters. She's a Ballard denizen and thus is a member of the Ballard Writers Collective, where you can read an interview with her. Nancy's entry for the My Writing Process meme will appear on April 21.

Of Scratches and Bad Patches

After the upheaval of the past few weeks, the calendar posted on the side of our refrigerator, all neatly demarcated boxes and penned-in times and places, looks like a quaint artifact, something out of Martha Stewart magazine ("March 17: Trace Irish roots to 10th century...March 20: Check the asparagus beds and rotate silk sock collection...").

What conceit, to write down all these plans and expect everything to fall neatly into place!

I'm not referring to the dreadful mudslide in Oso, Washington, which wiped out families and homes, dramatizing in terrible scale how the best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray. Our avalanche was one involving family members, hospitals, and future decisions, the sort of landslide that sweeps through every family from time to time.

Because these events kept us busy darting here and there in the car and making and keeping new appointments, there was little time for us all to attend to the ordinary, everyday chores and pleasures on the home front. This meant the dog wasn't walked, the cats weren't stroked, the house wasn't cleaned, and the horse wasn't visited.

Fortunately, the dog is patient, the cats forgiving, and the house can wait. The horse, however, needs care, and of course he was tended to, first in his current home and then the one he was moved to halfway through the crisis period.

But according to everybody tending to him, he certainly missed the Resident Teen, behaving in a generally  mopey way and not even biting people with his usual enthusiasm.

Before the schedule went haywire, the Resident Teen was dutifully attending to Avi's feet, which were suffering some of the maladies that Washington State horses are particularly prone to suffering during our long, wet, muddy winters: thrush and scratches.

"Thrush and Scratches" sounds like it would make a great name for a band, or perhaps a pair of guinea pigs. They are actually really annoying infections. Thrush is a bacterial or fungal infection of the frog of a horse's hoof that causes a foul-smelling discharge and rotting of tissue. Scratches (also called grease heel, cracked heel, dew poisoning, and mud fever) is a fungal infection of the horse's lower leg, with the fungus often being assisted in its evil encrustation of the skin by bacteria and mites.

Treatment for these maladies involves a lot of diligence, antiseptics, gauze, scab-picking, hoof-cleaning, and maintenance of dry conditions.

It's the Resident Teen (and, in our absence, her friends) who crouches on the floor to medicate Avi's soles, scrape off scabs, and pack his thrush-afflicted hoof with gauze pledgets, then wrap it in duct tape.

After years of taking care of the Resident Teen's head--cradling it when she was a newborn with a floppy neck, putting bonnets on it on sunny days, providing it with bicycle helmets and riding helmets--I don't think I will ever completely feel at ease seeing it lowered in the vicinity of a horse's hooves.

But she's got the practical experience I never had the chance to obtain, because she's been working with horses since she was about six years old, and with that experience comes confidence. I stick to observation and fascination.

And research...while the Resident Teen gets on with the useful task of clearing up the thrush and scratches, I putter about in old horse books so I can pester her with trivia.

An 1887 guide to horse care, for example, has a great deal to say about scratches. The author suggests poultices of linseed meal applied to the afflicted areas for several days, combined with purgative and diuretic medicines. Dressings sound like alchemists' dreams: they include ingredients such as acetate of lead, sulphate of zinc, and sulphate of iron. Pulverized gentian root, beeswax, scrapings of sweet elder, skunk oil, and lard figure into the recipes, too. One of the remedies is credited to "a drunken horse doctor" who cured the author's favorite horse, "old Turco."


A 1947 tome, The Book of the Horse, offers stern advice on stable management from the point of view of a long-ago Master of Fox Hounds, D. W. E. Brock. Brock does not mince words (for example, "One water-brush should last you three lifetimes," he admonishes, noting soon after that "The average groom is incapable of drying the heels thoroughly").

He doesn't offer specific advice on treating thrush or scratches, but he doesn't advocate mucking about trying to cure things that are better left to the veterinarian. Not just any vet, however: "Every vet may have the technical knowledge necessary to deal with a horse, but quite a number of them are more at home with poms in drawing rooms than with cantankerous thoroughbred horses in stables."

No need for a vet, in Avi's case--his feet are in good hands. So is the rest of his body--he moved to a new stable in the midst of all the turmoil, or actually back to the first one, where we met him, a calm, clean, and light-filled stable where he feels very much at home.

I'll never forget the look on his face when we and the Resident Teen walked up to the stable for the first time together after his move. He had his head and neck out the window of his stall and was chomping on hay. When he spied us--and his very own girl, in particular--he froze, ears pricked, like a horse in a storybook. He even stopped chewing and let the hay hang down like a Santa Claus beard.

Though the pesky fungi, bacteria, and mites took full advantage of the briefly opened window of opportunity that chaos provided, they are being routed thanks to the administrations of the Resident Teen and her friends. Other challenges will take more than scrapings of elder and sulphate of zinc to conquer, but will likewise be confronted and overcome with the help of others.

Eating Like a Horse

Our horse, Avi, gets advice from his vet that I never, ever am given by my own doctor: Eat! Eat more! You need to gain some weight!

*Sigh*

Avi eats like a horse, to be sure (nearly all the time, the consequence of being a creature constructed to consume many small meals over the course of a day; a cow has a big ol' multi-chambered stomach for fermenting a massive meal, which allows it to loll around chewing the cud for hours--a horse doesn't have that option).

But he's not what you call an "easy keeper" (a "good doer," in the UK)--a horse who maintains his weight effortlessly even on relatively little food. If he were to get it into his head that he should be a Proud Wild Horse and take off to run with a band of mustangs, he'd be a walking skeleton in no time.

And that is why he can easily polish off 12 flakes of hay a day (that's about 60 pounds). Hay varies in its digestibility based on what kind of hay it is and how old it is, but being plant matter there's always some amount that is basically roughage and helps keep horse girls busy mucking stalls.

All the barn's horses are alert when feed time rolls around.

Like most working horses, he also gets grain. Don't ask me just how much--it's the Resident Teen who fills zip-lock bags with pellets of compressed grain with a dash of supplements and ulcer-prevention formula tossed in, along with some grocery-store gelatin (for strong joints and hooves).

For a while, His Majesty was also presented with pans of beet pulp to help bulk him up, but he would have none of it. Not even when the Resident Teen spent half an hour smashing peppermint drops to slivers with a meat mallet to sprinkle on top. He tried to snuffle up the peppermint bits without consuming any of the pulp but finally gave up, emitting a weary sigh at all the troubles in his life.

Now, to add that extra 4,000 or so calories to his diet, the Resident Teen's grain of choice is Ultium (for "world-class equine athletes," so if Avi can read he may feel inspired--though I hope he doesn't learn to read or else he'll find out that one of the secret ingredients in Ultium is beet pulp). It's mixed with a substance that Avi would gladly chug by the bottleful, an elixir that is, in his book, a fine Riesling: corn oil.

Yes, while many people are seeking ways to exclude corn oil and other corn by-products from their diet, Avi is guzzling the stuff.

Sometimes I find bottles of store-brand corn oil on the 50%-off rack at the back of the store. At that price, I end up loading 10 bottles of corn oil on the conveyor belt, drawing sidelong glances from customers and cashiers alike. I need a button to pin to my coat that says, "Our horse drinks half a bottle of this stuff every day!"

Carrots and apples are also cheerfully accepted, but the fastest way to Avi's heart is a snack not typically associated with horses: He adores Lay's barbecue-flavored potato chips.

Despite his gargantuan appetite, however, and unlike many human consumers of chips, Avi knows when to stop. After a few chips, he says, "No, thanks"--leaving plenty for the hardworking horse girls to consume.