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Category: meadow

Dry Zone

Dry Zone

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In the woods, the little bridges are still there, but the streams they cross are running dry.

In the meadows, the earth is bare, cracked, hard-packed. My shoes scuff up dust. Even the grass has stopped growing as quickly as it usually does in June.

From the looks of the sky today, though, I think we’re in for some relief. I’m imagining great sheets of rain, the ground soaking it up, the small runs flowing again. And later, how easily the weeds will give way. I’ll pull them up by the fistful.
Meadow Trail

Meadow Trail

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Walking from a parking lot to the library this weekend I cut through an empty lot bursting with bloom. There were buttercups and daisies and plentiful purple self-heal. There was a shaggy, shrubby intensity to the overgrowth, a bursting-at-the-seams quality that is the soul of June and the soul of any meadow worth its salt.

A narrow path crossed the flowery expanse, just wide enough for foot fall, with tenacious roots that clawed their way across the dusty dirt. It was mid-afternoon of the hottest day yet this season, and the meadow lacked even a stick of shade.

I was in the epicenter of summer, a buzzing, blazing bounty of growth and color and aroma. I had places to go and errands to run — was expecting nothing more than a shortcut, a quick trot from A to B. I found instead a destination, a place of beauty and peace.

Milkweed on the Fly

Milkweed on the Fly

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A bushwhacking expedition wasn’t on Sunday’s list of activities, but on the way back from breakfast I noticed a brown Fairfax County Park sign in a place I’d never seen one before, at the intersection of Fox Mill and Waples Mill Roads. We doubled around and pulled into a small lot that used to be in front of a great wall of bamboo.

A man was there weed whacking. He stopped and talked, said he lived nearby and was trying to make the area presentable. He pointed out a barely discernible path through the meadow. Bamboo never totally leaves a place, of course; it just bides its time. For now, though, the little park is walkable.

A quarter mile into the tangle of grasses and weeds, there was a small, clogged pond and a stand of cat tails. Milkweed pods filled the air with their fairy fluff; I tried to photograph each cottony morsel as it flew by.

It was next to impossible, but I had fun trying.

How We Learn About Meadows

How We Learn About Meadows

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On Sunday’s walk I passed an informational display telling me what a meadow is, why a meadow is
important. How sad that we have to learn about meadows from a sign! How much
better to learn about them from the burrs in your socks, the poison ivy on
your ankles and the sunburn on your shoulders.
I grew up in savannah land — bald, barely treed land where
meadows ruled. I learned to treasure the shady tree line around the edges of fields and the majesty of the lone burr oak. I
learned first-hand  the loud racket of meadows — cicadas chanting,
grasshoppers buzzing — but also the quiet heart at their center and how their beauty is best set off by the
presence of a grazing cow or thoroughbred.
 But mostly, I learned my way around meadows by tramping through them, by looking out at them from fence rows, or by harvesting them, collecting goldenrod, Queen Anne’s Lace and Joe Pye Weed. So when I came across this meadow sign on Sunday, I snapped a shot — but I made sure that there was a lot of meadow in the picture too.
The Encounter

The Encounter

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I saw him on the path to the Franklin Farm Meadow, a placid paved trail adjoining a napkin-sized playground. Fat and sleek, he sat munching grass, completely oblivious of the human two feet away.

His jaws worked each mouthful as he hungrily tore into each new tuft. This was one hungry guy — though from the looks of him he hadn’t missed too many meals.

Groundhogs are always bigger than I think they’re going to be. Good-sized and galumphing. But this one wasn’t budging. He had found a tasty patch of fescue and was going to eat it all or else.

After a few minutes I delicately eased by the guy — and that’s when he sprang into action. He snapped around and assumed an attack position, crouched, teeth bared. I spoke to him quietly, told him I wasn’t after his grass, just on a run.

When I turned back to look at him, he had gone back to his dinner.

A wild thing, observed.


(I’m fresh out of groundhog photos, but this is near where I saw him.)

Half a Meadow

Half a Meadow

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To reach Franklin Farm I clamber over a fence and into a greensward bisected by a paved path. Most summers the flanking land is left to its own devices. Queen Anne’s Lace, oatgrass, milk weed and timothy spring out of the clay-packed soil, and by midsummer these grasses sway waist-high in the breeze. I look forward to the meadow as I would an old friend.

But this year the mower is much in evidence. Though patches of land are still wild and free, most of it is tidy stubble. At first I thought it was just the first strafing of the season or that it was growing more slowly than before. But now, well into June, the truth is evident. What we have in Franklin Farm is half a meadow — and that’s generous.

Is the neighborhood safer without swaths of tall grass through its heart. Maybe, though I doubt it. It is quieter without the buzz of insects and chirp of the red-winged blackbird. It is less arresting to the eye. And it is, sadly, less a place.

Still, half a meadow is better than none at all.

Utilitarian Pasture

Utilitarian Pasture

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My walk yesterday was far hillier than I expected. There was
one moment when I stood still to appreciate where I was. The insects were buzzing and the heat was radiating from the dry grasses and the land rose and fell in such a way that I
could barely see the swell of the earth around me. 
It was a rough looking pasture, with scruffy
weeds, prickle vines and thistles. It could have been a Scottish
moor, so remote and wild did it seem. But it was, in fact, a pipeline meadow or an electric transmission
meadow, some sort of utilitarian pasture. Our open space is not for grazing but
for the humming wires and busy pipes that bring us what we need to survive.  
Beauty, in this case, is a byproduct. 
 

Meadow Music

Meadow Music

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A walk through the meadow. I pull out my earphones to hear the rustle of grasses in the wind, the sound of children playing, a ball bouncing. Past the pond, where a family fishes. The mother is veiled, the little boy intent upon his lure.

Along the ribbon of pavement that bisects a field, I breathe in the scent of pine and cut grass. The Queen Anne’s lace is nodding, the tall weeds waving. Insects buzz, the backdrop noise of summer.

But soon enough, I dart into the woods. There was a place there where I had to duck under a tree that had collapsed upon itself in the storm. But only a bare patch remains. Already I smell autumn in the air, the acrid aroma of dry leaves. I shiver as I stride.

My Heart With Pleasure Fills

My Heart With Pleasure Fills

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I’m thinking of that poem, the one we learned in elementary school, the one that seems jaded and obvious — until you stumble upon it in real time.

The other day I rounded the corner of a paved path and there was my own “host of golden daffodils.”

Or not my own, actually. That was the beauty of it. They were for everyone, were wild and free, glorifying not just a single backyard but a widespread and well traveled community woods. Tucked among the oaks and maples and just a few feet away from the skunk cabbage.

I slowed my pace as I strode beside them, wanting to savor their beauty as long as possible. Other amblers did the same that sweet spring morning. There was a hush in the air, a reverence for the blossoms.

I did not wait for “the inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude.” I took no chances. I used a camera. And now, as I look at the photograph, I remember the flowers’ surprising presence in that parceled suburban landscape. The words flow into my mind before I can stop them: “And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.”

In Their Glory

In Their Glory

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On Saturday morning I took one of my favorite walks — through the Franklin Farm meadow, around a lake, through a woods and back home. It is a varied terrain of shade and sunlight, and the day was so warm I could feel the old earth turning and sending its shoots skyward. Geese were grazing on deadnettle and other early spring flowers.

I’ve walked this way for years now and no longer see just the path ahead of me, the rough fields on either side. I see what has been and what will be again, the tall grasses of midsummer, the chicory and Queen Anne’s lace. I hear the crescendo of cicadas. The meadow soil has a memory, and so do I.

The walk was so lovely that I went back later with my camera. The setting sun slanted across the pond and lit up the cattails. I found a spot under a Bradford pear where I could snap meadow, pond and woods. All these humble sights that I look on in my wanderings, that have made me feel connected to this place, they were transformed in the mellow light of early evening. I saw them in their glory — and captured them that way.