We finally received some decent rainfall this past week; ½ of rain on Tuesday 23 and 1 ½ inch on Thursday 25, finally relieving the bone dry conditions which have been ongoing since early August. Except for a paltry half inch in the last week in August, there has literally been no rain at all. A picture I took of a passing monarch butterfly recently shows the brown grass afflicting everyone’s lawns.
Only the toughest weeds stayed green. A dish of water I put out drew a steady stream of wasps and yellow jackets, so many in fact that birds stayed away from the bowl. Daily waterings of my garden kept that going but even trees seemed to show the pinch.
Even so, many oak trees produced huge numbers of acorns, making it necessary to sweep out the driveway over four times as acorns and their caps fell in a steady rain I could hear pretty much everywhere while out on my morning walks.
Squirrels and other acorn lovers will be feasting and hoarding well this fall.
Lastly, the change in foliage color is now underway, with bright yellows and oranges beginning to flare though it will probably be at least a week before we reach peak foliage here in northern New Hampshire.
Greek mythology bursts with all sorts of amazing beings; gods, sorcerers, gorgons, sirens, sea monsters and so forth. One such being is Talos, often referred to as the bronze giant.
Thanks to Ray Harryhausen, a Hollywood stop-action animator, the usual view of Talos is as an enormous metal statue come to life, often viewed erroneously as a robot.
Talos’s true nature depends on which Greek legends you read. Far from being a nation-state as it is now, Greece was a diverse collection of kingdoms, called poleis, small city-states which shared a common ethnic heritage but were not united, each having its own rulers as well as iteration of gods, spirits and the afterlife.
Talos was often described as a man of bronze set by the gods to guard Crete from invasion or attacks by pirates. Some tales have him as being forged by the smith-god Hephaestus in His divine furnaces as a statue, not a mechanism then brought mystically to life to serve as Crete’s guardian. The living statue would run three times around the island as part of his duties, throwing huge boulders at trouble makers. Popular views show him as a giant, though legends give no clear indication of his actual size.
But other versions of the myth state that Talos was a living being who was a survivor of the Age of Bronze. Ancient Greeks saw history as a cycle of ages, slowing declining with each subsequent age until the cycle bottoms out with the Age of Iron, which is the one we currently live in.
The Age of Gold was the first age, ruled over by Cronus the Titan. It was a time of peace and abundance. The earth provided food without humans having to struggle obtaining it. Hardship of any kind was unknown. Spring was eternal. People lived long healthy lifespans, free of sickness and pain, dying peacefully in their sleep.
Prometheus bringing fire to mortals was alleged to have brought an end to the Age of Gold, leading to the Age of Silver. With the Silver Age, seasons such as summer, winter, and fall came into existence. Humans needed to plant crops and build shelters. Their lifespans, while still long, was shorter than in the Golden Age. Battle among them began appearing. Evidently the god Zeus decided they weren’t honoring Him enough, so He brought an end to them, leading to the Age of Bronze.
In the Age of Bronze, humans were still powerful, but violent and warlike. It was said they were created from ash trees and their appearance was described as brazen, meaning they were metallic or bronze. These beings began building cities, their homes and weapons made of bronze as they themselves were. Talos was said to have a single vein running through his body filled with ichor, a divine form of blood, his only vulnerable point being his ankle which had either a thin membrane of flesh or a bronze nail. The Age of Bronze came to an end when the bronze humans destroyed themselves in a violent cataclysm or, in another version, a vast flood wiped them out. In this latter ending, two humans, Deucalion and his wife Pyrra threw stones over their shoulders, creating a new race of humans.
It’s not clear how Talos himself survived the end of the Age of Bronze into the following Age of Heroes but he was given as a gift either to Europa, a lover of Zeus, or to King Minos the ruler of Crete (again depending on which version of the myth you read). His demise came when Medea, a sorceress, managed to trick him into allowing the nail in his ankle to be removed, causing him to bleed to death.
There’s no account given of what became of his remains. As a living statue, once the life which the god Hephaestus gave him bled out, he would have reverted to mere bronze, presumably getting melted down by locals, a humiliating end for such an awesome creation. On the other hand, if he was a survivor of the Age of Bronze, one wonders if his brazen flesh would have rotted or been palatable for scavengers. A mournful prospect either way.
Now, according to Hesiod, we live in the final age, the Age of Iron, a time of sorrow, cruelty and desolation, where infants are born with gray hair, lies are considered ethical and the gods disrespected, all caused by human venality and corruption. It can certainly seem that way to us, with the endless barrage of evil news from TV newsfeeds, podcasts and YouTube videos hysterically declaring the end is upon us.
But honestly, I find it hard to think that way when I see a beautiful sunset with the setting sun coloring the clouds lavender and gold, a bald eagle flying in the distance, a slender fox galloping through my backyard in search of a meal or those infant spiders that I saw a few months ago congregating on a foxglove plant, preparing to launch themselves into the air, searching for a new life.
Midsummer can slip past you before you know it. So it helps to have a camera to capture some of the garden flowers before they go by. I’ll confess that my gardening skills are modest, with some things succeeding admirably but others sinking out of sight like the Titanic. The garden phlox is coming but is still in bud. Ground phlox has come and gone but put on a nice show. For some reason I forgot to take pictures so will have to wait until next year.
Echinacea does well. I have two types, a medium pink shade and a second which is much paler. The medium pink is in full bloom while the light pink (which is in a more shady spot) is still in the bud stage.
The patch of daylilies beside the foundation put on a decent performance but the plants really need to be thinned out. The trick will be to find a spot to plant them, most likely along the bank in front of my home.
I have several different beebalms.
The red variety seems eager to escape the garden for some reason. This one is sited in a weedy spot; several others insist the front lawn is the place to be. I mow around them, as I want to dig them up later on and place them back in the garden.
There’s also a lemon-scented beebalm, which is a delicate lavender color, though to be honest, I cannot detect any lemon scent from the leaves. The bees find the blossoms very attractive so that compensates for any lack of scent.
Potted plants are doing well. A mix of petunias as well as a colorful geranium bring a nice splash of flowers.
Here’s another pot of petunias. The black-eyed Susans are in the foreground rather than the pots.
Here are some purple bee-balms (similar to the red) which are behaving themselves by staying in the garden where they belong. If you look carefully, there is a bumblebee on the second blossom from the left.
There’s still all of August to go, so stayed tuned. Be well, all.
I saw something interesting this past month which I haven’t seen before. I have some chamomile growing in a large pot out front. During the spring, surrounding maple trees (and probably others) began shedding huge numbers of catkins, which covered the lawn, driveway and any plants I had growing. One morning I noticed what looked at first like a clump of catkins draped over the chamomile blossoms which were just opening up, but found when I came to brush them off, that it was really a cluster of baby spiders just hatching out.
Since spiders devour nuisance insects and serve as baby food for hatchling birds, I let them be. Since the chamomile had just grown this spring, the egg mass must have been laid in the leaves and I hadn’t noticed. There was no sign of the mother spider, so I have no idea what species they were.
Now I’ve seen plenty of baby spiders just hatching out from their egg mass plenty of times before, so spiderlings are nothing new. But the next day I saw something I hadn’t seen before. The mother spider must have been still around, because a long thread, too large to be the doing of the tiny babies, had been spun all the way from the chamomile to a foxglove plant growing nearby in the garden.
My camera is an old digital Panasonic but I managed to capture the thread which in the picture stretches just barely visible from the flower head across to the center and down to the left where the chamomile flower is.
The distance between the flowers was over four feet so it was an impressive achievement. What was even more surprising was that the baby spiders were migrating over to the foxglove along the thread. They looked like tiny tight-rope walkers. Unfortunately, my camera couldn’t really resolve the sight as they were so little. You can see them beginning to congregate on the foxglove below.
By the end of the day, they had all moved over to the foxglove and when I looked the next morning, they were all gone, with only a little webbing to show they had been there.
Once baby spiders hatch out, they spin a long fine thread which acts like a parachute. When a breeze blows, they will float away, attached to the thread, and take up residence wherever they land. This is called ballooning or kiting. While they usually will travel only a few meters, a strong wind can carry them quite a distance, often miles if the conditions are right.
This behavior has been noted for quite some time, all the way back to the ancient Greeks. More recently the 19th Century poet Walt Whitman wrote a poem with a kiting spider as its theme.
A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory; it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them – ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you, O my soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, – seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d – till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my soul.
Nearing the end of May, looking back on the month, it’s hard to decide what to focus on. The weather started out the month on the decidedly cool side with the rain being on the generous side without being a gully washer. This encouraged plants to grow, though slowly because of the cool weather. The raised beds have been cleared of dead leaves and various weeds trying to get a head start ahead of my planting. A garden trowel is very useful for discouraging this. I now have garden peas, carrots, spinach and potatoes poking up, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
The old flower gardens I’ve inherited from my mother are badly in need of renovating. Lily of the Valley has been making a power play to take over the front garden, crowding out everything else. The side garden, which is dedicated to daylilies, also needs a make-over. Last year, they looked like the picture below.
This year, it’s wall-to-wall daylilies and I can’t see any sign of the daffodils I planted there a few years before. Visits to gardening websites recommend thinning every three to five years to keep them under control, something I’ve been very negligent about and will have to correct.
Monday was Memorial Day, and my small town (population just over 6000) had a parade. A few years ago, the parade had been canceled due to lack of volunteers and an aging honor guard. This produced a loud enough howl of protest that efforts were undertaking to quickly bring back the parade. Yes, the honor guards are getting a bit long in the tooth, but they marched anyway.
The American Legion did their bit, carrying their banner.
And including a small float.
The local Knights of Columbus also marched.
An outfit called the sons of the Revolution put in their own float, along with cosplayers.
The parade wound up with the local Fire Rescue Squad, complete with a dalmatian dog.
A modest affair compared with larger towns, but it drew a good crowd, nonetheless. The weather was clear and mild, making for a perfect Memorial Day.
