SOLOMON'S SEAL BERRIES FINALLY RIPE
GREEN ASH WINGED SEEDS
SHOWY MOUNTAIN ASH BERRIES
EUROPEAN MOUNTAIN ASH BERRIES
RED-TWIGGED DOGWOOD BERRIESWednesday, 7:30 AM. 48 degrees, wind SW, calm. The sky is partly cloudy and the barometer predicts sunshine.
Fall is fruiting time for most flowering plants. The white berries of the native red-twigged dogwood provide a beautiful contrast.
There is a great variation in the fruit of the different mountain ashes, from orange to deep red.
Green ash seeds are ripening and the single-winged seeds (samaras) will soon be carried off on the winter winds.
I am always pleasantly surprised to find on my library shelves books that I have never read or that I could well read again. I just finished reading “Thomas Jefferson’s Farm and Garden Books,” which sat unopened for over twenty years. It is a good sequel to “Thomas Jefferson and Monticello,” and reinforces my opinion of Jefferson as a brilliant politician and writer, but a person who did not have the courage of his own convictions. He always perceived that slavery was something that would end in the future but that he could do little about on a personal basis. It is very disturbing to see in his farm book human chattel listed as possessions along with cows and pigs. But he was a great gardener and farmer.
Another book around for more than a decade is the autobiography of David Fairchild, a preeminent plant explorer of over a century ago. He followed the dictate of Jefferson that the finest thing a man could do for his country was to introduce a useful new plant to its culture.
It has taken all summer for the berries of the Solomon’s seal to turn red.
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