This spring I planted a bed of lilies. Nothing else.
A year and a half ago, the spot that they're on was trying to be part of the lawn, but was failing. It was mostly dandelions. I used Round-up on the weeds, and a week later after they withered, I scalped all the grass and weeds, covered with newspaper, and a good 3" of bark mulch.
When I dug the area up for the lilies, the newspaper was about 75% decomposed, but the soil was clay. I added some compost, and tilled it in. I suspect that my interloper seed was in the compost. But what is it?
Damn. I knew it was something unusual, and to be feared.
Are you sure? Shouldn't the bloom face east, not due west? And the spot it is growing in hasn't been dug since early April. Could it have taken root after being deposited on top of an inch or two of bark mulch? Or would it be so late in the season if it was under the mulch?
It just doesn't seem like a sunflower would be coming up so late in the season, and facing the wrong direction. Of course I haven't purposely grown them, and the ones that sprout around the bird feeder that sprout (and few actually do), bloomed two months ago, faced east or south, and were much smaller.
But if that's the verdict, then that's the verdict. And I'm going to have to round-up the neighborhood fowl and fauna to find out who the guilty party is.
It's only too bad Si'alh (Chief Sealth) never gave that speech, which was a romantic invention concocted by screenwriter Ted Perry, who had looked up Chief Sealth's speech & assessed it as "simply not very inspiring or significant" so made one up he liked better, for the 1972 telefilm "Home," which was somewhat hippy oriented, & aimed at ecology-minded christian whites & completely unconcerned with Native Americans.
The fake speech includes such moronic impositions as "I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train" when Chief Sealth's stomping grounds were the east & west side of Puget Sound, & he neither saw prairies of dead buffalos nor pretended he had, nor in 1854 could he have seen a train; nor did Sealth know the "web of life" myth which is Greek, though had that been the only absurdity it could've been chalked up to a translator's imposition, though in fact it is just Ted Perry writing from a white cultural basis. Every line of the fake speech is either historically ridiculously, or portrays Chief Sealth as some kind of Saint Frances idiot savant, if not merely a third-rate poet suited to one more bad song from Paint Your Wagon, "I talk to the trees." This fake speech insults Northwest native peoples, who've tried to no avail to squelch this fake, but most whites want no part of the real deal, because history is painful but Popular Romance is a feel-good Par-Tay.
What is preserved of his actual speech can be read here:
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was imperfectly recorded, & he gave his speech in Salish, so the speech as we have it is a witnesse's after-the-fact reconstruction from notes taken through a translator. Some historians have complained that even this "authentic" speech is poorly attested, but it has enough actual touchstones to the 1850s that it can probably be accepted as being as close as we'll ever have to hearing Sealth's oratorial strength. It is horrifying that white america prefers its own modern version which has been turned into t-shirts, environmentalist posters, greeting cards, persistantly misattributed for the three decades since it was written, while Sealth's actual words of peace & sorrow receed from public knowledge. Why is that awful Ashleigh Brilliant-style fake speech is so well known, loved, & persistantly quoted, but the disturbingly beautiful original is not:
"At night, when the streets of your cities & villages shall be silent & you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled & still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just & deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless."
Even this moving statement is altered by white interpolations, an anonymous christian editor adding to a later, revised version the ridiculous afterthought "Dead did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds," completely reversing Sealth's persistant "comparisons" of conqureror vs native beliefs; one of Sealth's beliefs was that the spirits of the dead linger in THIS world, not some distant paradise, & this difference of belief was signal to his 1854 explanation of why these two cultures had such turmoil between them.
The actual speech speaks to real injustices & inevitabilities & is very moving in its historical context, permitting a glimpse of a good man who lived through a challenging time of sorry changes for his people, & still hoped room might be preserved for his people. The fake speech plays more generically into a broad liberal white guilt & the exact same kind of (ultimately racist) Romanticism of the Noble Savage that caused photographer Edward Curtis to make up his own Indian costumes & require Indians to wear them before he would photograph them, having absolutely no interest in their actual lives. The fake speech is a nice paean for the Sierra Club; the real speech is an unembittered plea for peaceful co-exsistance with conquerors who had been killing off Sealth's relatives for several years, for he knew his people could not survive through rebellion.
When he graciously accepts the offer of reservation life because his people "are no longer in need of a great country" there is a bit of a backhanded compliment imbedded in there; when he accepts the alleged "friendship" of the Great White Father back east (who he thought was still Geroge Washington), he says how generous this offer is friendship must be since the Great White Father has so "little need of our friendship." These are such obviously veiled criticisms of further injustice he is about to cave in to in order that some of his people might survive, even if only as "broken bands" grieving over their peoples' burial places. Understanding Sealth's position gives beauty & weight to his words, but the fake speech is suited primarily to quotation in Hallmark Cards or as captions in National Park picture books & tourist pamphlets.
As a great man of peace, Sealth deserves far better than forever to be quoted for things he never said, that had nothing to do with his life & the storm he had to bring his people through. His words were prophetic, & concern the ecology insofar as he saw that not only his people, but also the very land, were decaying beneath the tread of white conquest, a madness he blamed on whites' belief that the dead go away to a far paradise, whereas his own ancestors dwelt in the wild places that were already in Sealth's day being decimated, the whites permitting nowhere on earth "dedicated to solitude."
Sealth was liked by whites because he was always placating whites & joined no rebellions. He was nevertheless brave to give the actual speech he gave, considering how Quiemuth was stabbed to death in Governor Stevens' office for attempting peacefully to turn himself over to conquerors, & when Chief Leschi sued for peaceful negotiations, he was summarily hung for an invented crime, in a public display of white barbarity the purpose of which would today be called pure terrorism in both its intent & its effect. The only good that can be said of white response at that time is that the white soldiers at Ft Steilacom so respected Leschi as a just warrior, & knowing that he was not guilty of the crime alleged, would not permit the territorial governor to have Leschi hanged in the fort, blocking the gallows to being placed there. It was otherwise an unitertupted legacy of conquerors' merciless cruelty that Sealth stood before, accepting humiliation while begging for co-existence, NOT for an Arbor Day celebration or donations to the Audobon Society.
Mad, I have no idea where some people get their spelling, but here's a good link explaining the Chief Seattle stuff. I'll refrain from my own editorializing.
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love the sentiment, I don't care who wrote it. It is the way we should all live our lives.
I plant sunflowers for sale as cut flowers. about 95% of them face east-southeast. They do not follow the sun. The ones I plant are the fancy hybrid pollenless varieties, but the volunteers that spring up from the neighbors' birdseed do the same thing (There are fewer of them, so the statistics are less reliable).
"Rats with wings" would definitely be a good definition for starlings. They are vulgar bullies with no redeeming value. There should be a bounty on killing the pests.
Pigeons are more like clowns. When you see the way they walk, you almost feel sorry for them. Its almost like they need corrective shoes and rehabilitation.
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Bats most definitely are not "rats with wings" despite their German name, they aren't even rodents.
I agree...young starlings cause a lot of damage in my vegetable garden in the spring. Often it nothing more than vandalism as they don't seem to know what's edible and what isn't.
When you see what a mess they make roosting in large numbers, 'clown' isn't what comes to mind -- more like 'guano machines'.
My daughter was mightily amused the other day by a sticker which suggested that 'Pigeons shouldn't eat chili.' And speaking of chili, this Sunday is the Annual Great Lakes Regional Chili Cook-off downtown in Plymouth:
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back to insulting birds.
While we're at it we should pick a derogatory name for the widely introduced Canada geese that are pooping all over the parks these days. (In SE MI they've increased more than 50 times in numbers since the late 70s. It's a man-made problem as they were enthusiastically released all over the place for years.)
One redeeming trait--I've observed them eating Japanese beetles off of my canna plants. Not to excuse their other bad habits, but I am grateful for small favors.
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