At the age of 81, it looked like Claude Monet was all washed up. His eyesight was dimming, failing—the worst possible calamity for a painter. But he was working on a project—and he had to finish it.

Beginning at the age of seventy, cataracts had slowly begun to thicken over his eyes. They blurred his vision and changed his perception of color, making it hard for him to perceive greens and blues. His world of sparkling waterlilies faded to a muddy yellow fog.

Surely it was time to quit. He’d had a good life—unlike most of his contemporaries, he’d achieved fame and modest fortune. He was a respected artist, his paintings beloved by millions during his lifetime.

But he went on painting. He was working on what he called his Grandes Decorations: a series of water lily paintings. He had a specific purpose in mind: to donate this work to the people of France, to help them heal from the trauma of the Great War. He’d painted waterlilies before, of course. But this time the old man thought on a colossal scale. Each painting was to be at least six feet high and more than fourteen feet long, and he envisioned dozens of them, strung together in a wide horizon of water and floating flowers.

He went on painting, year after year, putting his lifetime of experience into the creation of his masterpiece. He courageously underwent cataract surgery, at a time when anesthetics were minimal, and blindness a terrifying possibility. But the operation worked—not perfectly. Nothing is perfect, especially not when we’re in our eighties, God knows. But it was good enough. His color perception improved, the edges sharpened a bit. He went on painting.

When he hit 85, a new pair of glasses gave him even more vision. He wrote that he was “back to work as never before,” painting with “passion and joy.” He often worked from life, painting outdoors all day in spite of occasionally getting soaked by pouring rain.

His family begged him to rest, to relax, to enjoy his retirement, to take care of his health. He went on painting.

Most of the Grandes Decorations are in the Louvre now, but we’re fortunate that a few of the panels are in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. On a recent trip, I spent a long time in front of the waterlilies. They reminded me that age can be more passionate than youth. That physical disabilities can be turned to unexpected advantage. And that the terrible knowledge that this is your very last chance can depress and weaken you—or inspire you.

The post Monet’s Masterpiece first appeared on Anita Sanchez.

One of my favorite ancient names is “Ragged Sailors” for the tall, scraggly blue plant that lines highways and byways all summer. Chicory is the more common name, but if you look closely at the tips of the petals (a worthwhile occupation for a summer’s morning) you’ll see where the name comes from—although they’re not really raggedy, but trimmed in a neat zig zag pattern as though with pinking shears.

You’ll have to do your chicory research on a summer morning, because the flowers only open wide in the sun. By afternoon they’re closing up—the pollinator rush hour is winding down, so it’s wise to protect the delicate flowers till the sun comes out again.

As you stroll along a country road, the chicory almost seems to stand and watch you go by. So you can see the reason for the German name for the flower: wegewarte, often translated as “The Watcher of the Road.” Google Translate renders it as “Path Warden,” which I like even better. Chicory is a plant that grows close to the edge of civilization, springing up from hard-packed, sparse dirt, flourishing in gravel, defying road salt and litter. If you look down a long road, you’ll see the phenomenon called zonation, where plants group themselves by their preferred microhabitat. They all have differing needs of water and sun, different levels of toleration of salt and soil compression. Queen Anne’s Lace is another hardy plant, but royalty blooms a little behind the Ragged Sailors. Only some tough grasses, Ragweed, and Bird’s-Foot Trefoil (aka Devil’s Claw) can grow closer to the blacktop than the Path Wardens.

You’ve probably heard of chicory as a coffee substitute. Wild food guides advise you that to make this tasty beverage you need to dig the roots and grind them, but like much advice, this is easier said than done. It takes a lot of work to unearth even one root, and then you need to wash the roots, then dry them in a low oven, then grate or grind them up. Once you’ve tried to wash every speck of dirt out of the crevices of a few chicory roots, you start thinking about a trip to Dunkin instead. But in times of war, from the Revolution to WWII, it was hard to get imported luxuries like coffee or tea. Chicory root coffee was the patriotic drink of choice.

I was sad when they mowed my roadway last week. I miss the cheerful blue faces that watched me on my morning stroll. I know mowing is necessary, because chicory can’t grow in a thicket of bushes, but I wish they’d wait till winter is closer so the wildflowers can go to seed.  But the Path Wardens are tough. They’ll be back on duty next summer.

The post Chicory: The Road-Watcher first appeared on Anita Sanchez.

What’s the difference between a meadow and a lawn? A lawn is an expanse of nothing but grass, probably drenched in herbicide. (I will spare you my usual rant about the dangers of lawn pesticides.) But a meadow is, by definition, a gloriously diverse mix-up of grass, wildflowers, sedges, rushes, a fern or two, all swaying in the summer breeze, with roots wildly entangled under the soil. A meadow is non-native daisies and buttercups, it’s native flowers like sundrops and milkweed, it’s flowering and non-flowering plants with a bit of moss and fungus thrown in. Diversity is the very essence of a meadow.

As I ramble through nature I’m always looking for metaphors: coded symbols, whispered messages from the universe hidden in the leaves somewhere. And in a local meadow where I recently strolled, I found this odd fellow, a native plant called yellow rattle. It’s a creator of diversity.

Grass is dominant in most open, mowed landscapes. Especially the grasses we use for lawns and hayfields, which were imported here centuries ago from Eurasia. (There are native grasses, of course, that grow in graceful clumps, but they don’t make good lawns, and they’re increasingly rare in our landscape.) Grass is the aggressive colonizer, designed to overwhelm and replace the indigenous inhabitants.

Hayfield or lawn, the goal of farmers and homeowners is a smooth, homogenous expanse of green. But in this particular meadow, enter yellow rattle, an outlaw plant that totally messes up the system. (It gets its weird name, by the way, from the fact that the seeds are formed inside those clamshell-shaped pods. In late summer, the sun dries the seeds to hard little pellets. When the first fall winds blow, you can actually hear the plant “talking” by rattling its seeds.)

Yellow rattle is a quiet subversive. It survives by surreptitiously attaching to the roots of other plants and leaching nitrogen and other vital nutrients. But here’s the thing—it doesn’t prey on the weak. It targets the strongest plants: the dominant grasses. By thinning the aggressive grass, yellow rattle opens up space for other plants: the ones that attract pollinators like bees, butterflies, hummingbirds. It turns hayfield to meadow.

Of course, it’s regarded as a parasite and an agricultural pest. If you google yellow rattle, you’ll find all sorts of nastily toxic suggestions for ways to eradicate it. But a site called Wildgardenexpert.com has a more positive take. They point out that yellow rattle creates diversity. They recommend planting it to help the meadow be all it can be:

“Yellow rattle, with its vibrant bursts of golden flowers, plays an important role in wildflower meadows. Indeed, unlocking a wildflower meadow’s fullest potential requires introducing the supporting actor that is yellow rattle.

“Parasitizing meadow grasses proves essential for yellow rattle to complete lifecycles but also profoundly benefits floral diversity. By tapping into grass root nutrient and water channels, yellow rattle weakens dominance of fast-growing grasses like ryegrass, Timothy grass, and tufted hairgrass. This suppression of dominant grasses prevents shading out lower-growing wildflowers in the developing meadow ecosystem. Promoting the establishment of endangered or overlooked wildflowers enhances species richness, attracting more pollinators like solitary bees and hoverflies. Thus, yellow rattle facilitates a self-sustaining, biodiverse ecosystem.”

Metaphors in the grass—there they are, literally under our feet. A little-noticed plant whose role is to “unlock potential”—I love that. Self-sustaining and diverse: that’s the description of a healthy meadow, or city, or nation, or planet.

The post Yellow Rattle: The Meadow-Maker first appeared on Anita Sanchez.

However, I wasn’t on a pilgrimage to a famous author’s sanctum on a short jaunt to New York City. I was ambling around the East Side, around Gramercy Park, and I just happened to bump into a place called Pete’s Taven. It claims to be the oldest restaurant in continual use in New York City, selling “groceries and grog” since 1864. It even kept operating during Prohibition, under cover as a florist’s shop, peddling flowers out of the front room and drinks out the back door.

Photos of the rich and famous crowd the walls: movie stars, politicians, celebrities. But I think the most remarkable person that hung out at Pete’s was a man named William Sydney Porter. He used to sit at his favorite booth, knocking back a few beers, and scribble away. In 1903, when he was hanging out at Pete’s, a mug of beer cost about a nickel. According to the plaque in the tavern, it was here that he wrote the immortal story The Gift of the Magi. It was published under his pen name: O. Henry.

ONE DOLLAR AND eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

You can sit at the very table, in the very spot where O. Henry invented his delightfully frustrating ending. Spoiler alert: the two lovers each sell their most beloved possessions to buy each other the perfect gift. It’s a sweet story, truly sweet. It goes well if read with a beer and a sausage at Pete’s.

The Magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the Magi.

The post O. Henry At Pete’s Tavern: The Gift of the Magi first appeared on Anita Sanchez.

The wasp wasn’t buzzing around or zooming in circles as wasps usually do, but just standing there on the steps. It was facing me, and since the little insect was on the top step, we were pretty much at eye level with each other. We both paused.

The bug was less than an inch long. I had a rolled-up newspaper in hand. It’s a wasp, I thought, those suckers sting. All it would take was one good smack. But we stood there, the wasp and I, staring at each other.

I really had a sense that it was looking at me, considering me, evaluating my threat potential. I could almost see the wheels going around in that tiny head. Apparently I rated fairly high on the alarm meter, because the wasp drew itself erect, tilting its body upwards, still staring me down. It could have attacked, or fled, but the wasp stood its ground, confronting an enemy a hundred thousand times larger than itself.

Hmm. I decided that my errand to the porch was not essential. I retreated indoors to my laptop and googled wasp behavior.

I was surprised to find that many entomologists consider wasps to be among the most intelligent insects on the planet. Like honeybees, some species of wasps (but not all) live in colonies, which requires complex and flexible communication skills. Wasps aren’t running on pure instinct. There’s some thought that goes into their decision-making process.

And I was right to think that the wasp was looking at me purposefully. Wasps have very acute vision. It was considering my face.

A study done by biologists at the University of Michigan has shown that wasps have amazing facial recognition abilities. The thing is that not all wasps look alike. If you observed a family of wasps close-up (don’t, though) you’d discover that they all have slightly different faces, just like your own family does. The brains of wasps can recognize facial patterns very much as humans do. Turns out wasps can tell their own family members apart. They can also spot wasps who aren’t part of the family, but are invading to steal food.

Now entomologists think that wasps may even be able to recognize and remember individual humans. So perhaps my acquaintance on the porch was studying me, memorizing my face, figuring out if I was friend or foe.

She was a type of wasp called a paper wasp because they build papery nests. I say “she” because, as with honey bees, all the worker wasps are female. The ladies do the work of nest-building and tending to the young. Paper wasps build a saucer-shaped nest from dead wood, which they gather in their mouths, one tiny wasp-bite at a time, chew up and turn into wood pulp that dries into paper.

Unlike the wasp, I do not have amazing facial recognition abilities, not even for humans, but certainly not for insects. I wouldn’t know her for sure if I saw her again. But that summer a paper wasp nest appeared high in the corner of the porch roof.

It was a small affair, about the size of a doughnut, with a few wasps usually hanging about or buzzing off casually on errands. They never came close to any humans, and I saw no need to reach for the spray can that would jet a stream of poison into the air. Wasp-killer pesticides, designed to kill from a distance, are really really toxic stuff. With a toddler and a dog hanging out on the porch, not to mention the butterflies and hummingbirds that come visiting my fuchsia, I didn’t want to be blasting clouds of wasp-killer spray into the air. A small paper wasp nest seemed like much the lesser of two evils.

Further googling revealed that paper wasps are not highly aggressive. Like me, they become irritable and even seriously annoyed if their homes or their young are threatened. But left alone, they’re happy to return the favor.

So we decided to tolerate each other. I minded my own business, sitting on the porch with my paper and my tea, and they minded theirs. We passed a summer of peaceful coexistence. Occasionally I saw a wasp perched on the porch rail or exploring one of the petunias, and wondered if it was the one I didn’t smack on the porch step, and if she remembered me at all. I’d nod, but she’d ignore me, give her antennae a good cleaning, and whiz off about her business.

We’re never going to be best friends, she and I, but we don’t have to be enemies, either. We’re just neighbors.

The post A Close Encounter of the Wasp Kind first appeared on Anita Sanchez.

photo by lloyd holmes

We can win by saving what we love instead of fighting what we hate.

So many of us are deeply moved by nature, and find peace and solace there. Yet few people make the connection between the relaxing beauties of nature and the hard work of voting.

In the terrified aftermath of November 2016, as we faced the reality that yes, Donald Trump had really been elected President of the United States, a certain poem often cropped up in my Facebook feed. It’s called The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry, and in those unsettling times many people turned to it for support, and still do.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

And that’s lovely, isn’t it? So soothing, so calming.

Twelve days after Trump’s inauguration, the Republican-dominated Congress passed a joint resolution to block the coal mining regulation known as the Stream Protection Rule, aimed at limiting the dumping of coal mining waste into streams. And so the wood drake and the great blue heron were out of luck. They’re not going to find much to feed on in any of those streams polluted by mining sludge.

Sigh.

If we cherish the peace of wild things, we have to take some forethought of grief. We have to get out the vote for legislators who will make laws to protect wild things. It’s as simple as that.

Okay, so how to help with this worthy goal? I think that an organization called the Environmental Voter Project is on to something. Here’s how they describe their work: “With behavioral science-informed messaging, we call, canvass, mail, and send digital ads to millions of low-propensity environmental voters each year with just one goal: turning them into better voters.” In other words, they reach out to folks who love nature but haven’t yet made the connection between loving nature and voting to protect it.

You can donate to EVP, of course, or you can get more directly involved. They have an excellent phone-banking program that runs all year, not just in fall for the big election. You sign up for a certain date and time, and after a brief Zoom training you’re given a script and some phone numbers to call.

As someone who’s a bit telephone-phobic, this is a stretch for me, but it’s effective. You don’t have to get in a big long conversation, just say your piece, thank you, and hang up. You might be calling voters in Pennsylvania to remind them about the upcoming primaries, or giving voters in Nebraska information about a special election. And EVP also has useful postcarding programs, sending notes to carefully targeted audiences who, if they vote at all, will vote to support environmental causes.

And if you’re not up for phone banking or donating right now, I think their general idea has a lot of merit: seeking out voters who are on the fence about voting and giving them a gentle reminder of the stakes coming up in November.

Check out my substack, The Optimistic Activist, for more ideas: The Optimistic Activist | Anita Sanchez | Substack

Do you know anyone who loves nature? Loves the red gleam of a cardinal at the feeder? Someone who spends hours in the garden nurturing tulips or fussing over irises? Can you nudge them in the direction of their polling place? Ask them if they’ve seen a creek with a wood drake or a wading heron recently…

photo by P. Weaver

The post Love Nature? Take a Hike to the Ballot Box. first appeared on Anita Sanchez.

It’s not surprising that a college freshman hasn’t spent much time pondering the state of the American political landscape. She’s had a few other things to figure out, like who she is and how she’s going to tell her family about it and what she’s going to do with her life. But when she blithely informed me that she wasn’t going to bother voting in November, I was about to really let her have it, tell her a thing or two—doesn’t she know about the suffragettes, for heaven’s sake? I wanted to give her a stern lecture on the dire necessity of fulfilling her civic duty.

Fortunately, the other person at the registration table with me had more sense. She just asked the student one simple question: “Do you, or does anyone you know, identify as LGBTQ?”

And that opened the door to a conversation. About Florida and the Supreme Court and who appoints judges, and so forth. After considering a few of the rights that LGBTQ people are in danger of losing (the right to marry, the right to adopt children, the right to have the word “gay” said aloud in public schools), I could see that the student was starting to ponder. Eventually she filled out the voter registration form (and that’s not easy, it’s an intimidating, dense form with a ton of fine print, not user-friendly.) Then she wandered off to class.

But half an hour later she was back.

And she wasn’t alone. She returned to our voter registration table, driving half a dozen friends before her like an unwilling gaggle of geese. Relentlessly she lined them up and handed them voter registration forms. She explained the importance of Supreme Court judges as they filled out their forms.

This is how we get out the vote, one conversation at a time. We gather around a table.

Odd to think of “table” as a verb, as in “I tabled at the local community college the other day.” Tabling is an art. It’s a science. It’s an action.

What is tabling, exactly? It’s sitting behind a folding table on an uncomfortable folding chair—or, better, standing in front of the table—and engaging with passersby. I’ve found by far the most effective way to do this is to put it in the form of a question. “Would you like to do something about climate change?” “How do you feel about a woman’s right to choose?” or the sixty-four-thousand-dollar, all-important question: “Are you registered to vote?”

Once you’ve gotten your prey to slow their stride past your table, you’ve got them. For about eight precious seconds. Use them to make a few succinct points (“This election is vitally important for our rights, and it’s going to be so close…”) And before they make their escape, be sure to stick a piece of paper in their hand. A voter registration form, or info on early voting dates and times, or ways to contact their legislator, or whatever. If you can lure them to jot down their e-mail address on a sign-up sheet (this is a bit tougher, though) then you can follow up with more information.

I joined the League of Women Voters especially because they can table at all sorts of places, like schools, that would not allow a partisan organization. But I also table at other events, especially urban events—farmer’s markets, kid’s art festivals, Juneteenth celebrations—anywhere I’m likely to register blue voters. And Pride month is a prime opportunity to register Democrats, especially young people who may not have realized what’s at stake in this election. Everything.

***************

Dear Friends,

Are you more than a little worried about the election of 2024 and wondering what to do about it? I’ve started a substack I hope you’ll check out: The Optimistic Activist.

Every Tuesday I post some ideas for doing something. How to get out the vote, spread the word, and support progressive candidates. Ideas for simple but effective activism. As easy, as practical, as do-able as I can make them.

Together, I think, we could really make a difference.

                               “Optimism is a strategy for making a better future.”

The post Come to the Table–and Get Out the Vote first appeared on Anita Sanchez.

All this water must go somewhere. Some of the raindrops and snowmelt seep and trickle into shallow dips and hollows in the forest floor. Soon the leafy ground is dotted with clear, shallow pools, called vernal pools.

Vernal pools are a crucial part of the forest ecosystem. They might be the size (but not depth) of a swimming pool, but more often they’re smaller than a dining room table, or even a dinner plate. But even the tiniest vernal pool is a perfect nursery for amphibian babies. The pools provide the essential moisture that amphibian eggs need to develop. Twigs and leaves lining the bottoms of the pools provide lots of hiding spots for newly-hatched youngsters.

And vernal pools are ideal for forest amphibians for one big reason: no fish. Fish, even little sunfish, are the top dogs in aquatic environments like ponds, scooping up most of the eggs and young of frogs and salamanders. Fish-free ponds and pools are rich habitats for dozens of tiny species: snails, dragonflies, spotted turtles, fairy shrimp, American toads, and many species of salamanders.

photo by P. Weaver

The miniature frogs called spring peepers travel to these habitats to sing their jingling sleigh-bell song, seeking mates and laying eggs. Red-spotted newts journey overland to the pools, crawling on a slow-moving annual migration on legs that are half-an-inch long. Wood frogs, with a black mask like a raccoon over their face, make the trip, too. And spotted salamanders, each looking like a piece of enameled jewelry—shiny jet black with golden spots. All these creatures, and many more, depend on these small wetlands for breeding.

Vernal pools are ephemeral, as fleeting as trout lilies and anemones, hepaticas and trilliums–here for a few weeks in spring, vanished by summer. Sometimes the pools fill up again in a wet fall, or in a dry season they might just be a soft muddy spot. Because they’re generally wetter than the rest of the forest, they’re also mini-gardens for water-loving ferns and mosses.

Vernal pools are at risk, however. Their very existence is endangered because people don’t realize that they exist. It’s hard to protect something that isn’t there most of the time. When a road or a building site is proposed, no one bothers about a few muddy spots here or there. They’re scraped away by the bulldozer and no one knows they’re gone. No humans, that is. Frogs and salamanders often use the same pools for generation after generation, perhaps for decades or even centuries.

So when you ramble the spring woods, keep an eye out for those life-giving little pools. If we value the call of spring peepers, the night chorus of the toads and tree frogs, or the scarlet-orange flash of a young newt crossing the trail, we need to protect their habitat.

The post A Shallow Dive into Vernal Pools first appeared on Anita Sanchez.

It’s shorter than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but it’s certainly not dull reading. All sorts of words found in thrillers and horror stories leap out at you: “beware…killer… toxic…poison…danger…” Anyone can buy lawn and garden pesticides off the shelf and use them at home without a license, and therefore we tend to assume that these handy squirt bottles are trivial, everyday stuff. As harmless as, say, dish detergent. Just to clean up those dandelions a trifle.

On every package there is the number of a poison control center, or instructions to physicians, in case of accidental overexposure. Obviously this is stuff you want to keep far away from a curious toddler. But what if you follow the directions and apply the pesticide precisely as instructed by the manufacturer? Pesticides are poisons. Pesticides kill things.

When a lawn care company puts herbicide on a lawn, they are required by law to put up markers that warn of pesticide application, telling you to keep off the grass for twenty-four hours. But there are quite a few lawn users who can’t read those little signs.

We enjoy seeing chickadees hopping around on the grass, cardinals enjoying seeds at the feeder, robins pulling worms out of the earth. But we don’t see what happens after the birds fly away. Never noticed any dead birds on your lawn? Our knowledge of pesticides’ effects on birds is like a pyramid-shaped iceberg, in which the widest portion by far remains unseen. Only a few dead birds are noticed and collected; it’s probable that the vast majority of bird deaths caused by pesticides go undetected.

photo by Steve Bonn

The sad irony is that dandelions—the main target of most herbicides—are absolutely great for birds. Dandelion flowers are of course an excellent source of nectar for honeybees, butterflies, and other pollinators, but birds? Dandelion seeds are full of nutrition, and small songbirds love them. It may sound weird, but those round gray seed-heads bobbing on the lawn are a lot of mini-birdfeeders. Goldfinches love dandelion seeds. I once watched a flock of goldfinches flitting from dandelion to dandelion, pecking out the seeds that thickly clustered on the end of the stem, leaving a trail of floating bits of fluff. Especially as summer is ending and the cold of autumn is drawing on, birds need the fats and protein found in seeds.

Dandelions are a non-native species, it’s true. But they’re not a major threat to woodland habitats, because they’re not invasive. You may shake your head in disbelief at this statement, seeing how those determined yellow flowers invade lawns with the ruthless efficiency of tank battalions. But they don’t invade wilderness.

Dandelions flourish in sunny areas of disturbed soil, and so stick to the areas dominated by humans: construction sites, parking lot edges, and their favorite habitat, lawns. They don’t head into the forest, or venture onto the back-country trails. Dandelion seeds aren’t adapted to hitchhike on the fur of a passing squirrel or raccoon–they need wind. On the forest floor, there’s little wind to disperse the seeds. And the sun-loving dandelion always perishes in the shade. So they’re no threat to woodlands and forest wildflowers.

Reframing dandelions as bird feeders gives us one more reason to endure them–even welcome them!– instead of exterminating them. One more reason to avoid poisoning the lawn.

The post Poisoning the Bird Feeders: Dandelions and Pesticides first appeared on Anita Sanchez.

And then bam! A sudden blood-red slash across the earth. You’ve come to the justly world-famous tulip fields.

For about three weeks every spring, the quiet Dutch landscape goes crazy, flat-out van Gogh insane with color. Stripes of gold, magenta, lemon, orange lined up next to each other. Swathes of every shade of red you can think of: scarlet, crimson, garnet, and then a strip of baby pink, edged with a stripe of midnight purple.

The furrowed rows of tulips extend to the horizon, straight as if drawn with a ruler. It’s impossible to describe them without jumbling a hopeless mix of metaphors: they’re a child’s crayon box, a market stall of bright tropical fruits, a stained glass window of intense color shattered over the land.

Dutch weather is famously changeable: sun, rain, sun, wind, sleet, rain, sun…the cliché about waiting five minutes if you don’t like the weather is almost literally true here. Under clouds, the flower colors are somber and muted. Then the sun looks out and the tulips switch on like rows of Christmas lights.

It’s odd to think of such beauty as a crop like wheat or potatoes. But these are not gardens, they’re farm fields. The product the growers are aiming for is bulbs, not blooms. Already the farmers are driving through the fields, the slow tractors following the lines of color, methodically decapitating every tulip.

It seems like vandalism, but of course it makes sense: there’s very little market for the short-lived cut flowers, all the money is in the bulbs. Without the energy-sucking blossom, the leaves will photosynthesize with all their nutrition feeding the bulbs that will be harvested for sale in the summer. The petals fall in heaps of fading colors as the tractor chugs on.

In a few months, there will be dusty piles of dry, oniony-looking bulbs in the flower markets of the world. This section of the Netherlands grows a billion tulip bulbs each year. It’s a crop you can’t eat, feed to livestock, turn into cloth, or put to any useful purpose. A harvest of sheer beauty.

The post Harvesting Beauty: Tulip-Watching first appeared on Anita Sanchez.