Betsy Horvath

Category: Nature

  • Hands In The Dirt

    hands in the dirtGentle readers, I promise you that I tried to plod through the drama of the past two weeks.  I did.  I DID!  But then…I got swept up in the whirlwind and found myself trapped under my house and my ruby slippers were stolen by this chick carrying a dog in a picnic basket…

    Okay.  Maybe not.

    Anyway, I lost my footing and slid down the hill into chaos and knew not how to find my way out of the mire.  Then, this Sunday, I thought to myself….”go weed.”  So I did.  When I came back inside, I felt more grounded (heh, grounded.  Get it?) and able to concentrate.

    Today I was sitting at work stewing about some of the things I’ve got going on, and I thought “when I go home, I will weed.”  So I did.  And now I feel centered again.

    I have a love / hate relationship with the grounds of the Palatial Horvath Estate.  Sometimes I look out and I see an overwhelming jungle of despair.  I don’t know how I can possibly do all that needs to be done.   Sometimes I get angry at the land for demanding my time when so many other things need to be done.  Sometimes I feel dread and fear because I know it is too hot  to be outside and there is so much to do and it all seems to need to be done all at once and everything just keeps growing.

    Then I have a period of total ridiculousness in my life and I know I need to go out and weed the garden.  And I do.

    It’s not that I love weeding.  I don’t.  It’s not even that I love gardening all that much.  I really don’t.  I’m not one to spend hours in a garden center or flip through seed catalogs.  But for some strange reason, the act of weeding centers me.  Yeah, I don’t understand it either.

    I distinctly remember how I felt on September 11, 2001 when the World Trade Center was attacked.  I was at work, but we weren’t working.  We were just standing, silent, watching the news footage, clutching each other because it was too awful.  Too unbelievable. I felt like I had lost my moorings to the universe and I didn’t know what to do.

    So I went home and weeded the garden.  I got my hands in the dirt.  And it comforted me.

    I don’t know what it is, but the connection between me and the soil, between my hands and the earth beneath them, centers me and helps me to think.  Fortunately for me, my gardens are wild untamed and unruly places.  There is always an opportunity to weed, if I choose to take it.

    Then I come back inside and face the world again and it’s a little bit better.

    Now if only I’d recognized that young poison ivy plant before I pulled it….

     

    DIRT!

  • Here Comes Spring!

    ForsythiaHere at the Palatial Horvath Estate, the catkins on the pussy willows are full to bursting, the forsythia have started to bloom with golden splendor, and the robins are busy building nests in both the forsythia and the pussy willow.

    Yes, okay, the winter juncos are still here, but the red-winged blackbirds are showing their red shoulder patches and singing to entice the ladies. Ducks from the nearby pond have started pairing up, waddling two-by-two for take-out at my bird feeders. This morning a love sick mallard quacked a NEVER ENDING song to the object of his affection right under my bedroom window.

    That’s right.  It’s spring.

    With all due respect to Punxatawny Phil, it seemed like spring took a while to get here this year. I asked Pennsylvania Paul – he’s the groundhog under my shed – for his opinion, but he just grunted something profane. Well, he’s taking a break from weather forecasting to spruce up his den.  I do believe Pennsylvania Paul might have a little wooing on his mind.

    I like spring. Specifically, I like early spring in Pennsylvania. We’re just on the cusp; you can feel it as soon as you walk outside. The sun is shining for a little longer, the days are a little warmer (or, today, a lot warmer). Everything is gearing up, building towards the mad dash of re-generation that happens so miraculously every year. It’s vibrating there – right under the surface, ready to pop.

    In the next day or two or three, plants will suddenly start growing a mile a minute, trees will bud, weeds will come back to life, bugs will multiply. Nature is on her mark, and in just a short time she’ll be off and racing. Birds! Buds! Leaves! Flowers! The pollen will coat my car and my sinuses. The love sick ducks quacking under my windows won’t be so cute anymore. Then the baby ducks will start coming to my feeders and they’ll be cute again.

    We’re right there. We’ve been balancing, teetering on the edge for a long time. But the forsythia are blooming now. I think they might have just pushed us over.

    Get ready, Pennsylvania – here comes spring! Ready or not! One…two…three… LIFE!

    Fast Forsythia

  • I Like Trees


    I like trees. I like looking at them. When I was younger, I wanted to live inside a tree like the kid in the book “My Side Of The Mountain”. Sometimes I still do.

    One of my first poems, written when I was in third grade, was about a tree I used to climb in the backyard. By “climb”, I mean that I went up maybe one branch. The poem was a longish ode, but I only remember the first two lines.
     

    My tree and me
    Are as happy as can be

    Nowadays, I talk to my baby Colorado Blue Spruce tree when I’m outside in his part of the yard. My baby blue spruce is named Bob.

    Don’t judge me.

    When I walk, I like to look at the trees around me. I wonder how fast they grow, and how old they are. So I looked it up on the internet.

    Trees, like people, grow at varying rates. How fast they grow depends on their environment and the food they have to eat. Again, much like people. On average, a fast growing tree like a American Elm or a Silver Maple, can grow 15 feet in 10 years (or 1.5 feet per year). A moderately fast growing tree like a red maple or a tulip tree grows 8-15 feet in 10 years. A slow growing tree like a Sweetgum or European Ash grows less than 8 feet in 10 years. Depending on the species, trees can live to be hundreds or even thousands of years old.

    When I walk, I pass a group of Eastern White Pine trees that are at least 60 feet tall. They are a fast growing tree, but even so they are probably at least 50 years old. If all goes well, they should live to be over 200. Bob, my baby Colorado Blue Spruce, is about 4 feet tall. He’s a moderately fast growing tree and seems to be averaging more than a foot a year. When he’s an adult, he’ll be 40-80 feet tall and he’ll outlive me by centuries unless the development where I live cuts him down.

    And that’s the problem with liking trees. You have to watch them get cut down. Sometimes an old or a sick tree, or a tree in a dangerous position needs to be cut down. I had to have one cut down because it was a shallow-rooted tree and it was leaning towards my house. But sometimes I see them get cut down and it just breaks my heart. The trees in the picture at the beginning of this post are no longer there. They were oak trees, and at least 90 feet tall – probably more like 100. Oaks grow 8-15 feet in 10 years, so those trees were probably over 100 years old. They were probably much older than that. The development where I live had them cut down because the people buying the house near the trees asked them to.. It took the tree men a day to remove them. I came home from work, and they were gone. Just gone. Hundreds of years wiped out in a fingersnap. Even if somebody plants new baby oak trees in the same spot, I will never see them be 90 feet tall.

    So the next time you go outside, I invite you to do what I do – look around at the trees and think about how old they are, and how they grow. If you are of a reflective nature, think about how those trees you’re looking at have the potential of outliving you by hundreds, if not thousands of years.

    Trees. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

     

     

    Sources:
    http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/hortnews/1995/3-24-1995/fast.html
    http://www.cdr3.com/spruce/sp00002.htm
    http://www.wildernessclassroom.com/www/schoolhouse/boreal_library/plants/white_pine.htm
    http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090104191206AAZzV96