We took a beautiful drive yesterday up to Westcliffe and then east towards Colorado City to see the autumn leaves before they get knocked off with the first snow storm in the mountains…
As it turns out the high peaks of Sangre de Cristos on the way up to Westcliffe are already covered in snow, with the aspen turning right below that.
Then we headed east and witnessed lively colors every time we went around a new curve!
Looks like it’s time for Octoberfest again in La Veta!
Although just north of here has received more than abundant rainfall this summer, we are very low on our Water Year measurement at only 11 inches so far, with less than two months to go. That has been pretty tough on my xeriscape garden & landscape.
But my Blue Mist Spirea bushes are bigger and brighter than ever!
And curiously, all the big sunflowers have sprouted on a hill below our home on the east side.
Our fountain & bird bathes continue to attract all kinds of birds, bunnies, chipmunks, bobcats, badgers…
…and, of course, deer. It’s so fun to look outside at various times during the day and enjoy their antics.
This year is in stark contrast to the much wetter August of 2021, when we had had twice as much precipitation by this time in the water year! GO SEE PHOTOS HERE:
I got a few interesting responses to my last post about re-wilding areas destroyed by farming or other forms of human landscape “improvements.” The 4th episode of PBS “Human Footprint” this week caused me to think further about our American addiction to lawns and lawn care.
Did you know one 400 acre golf course uses 358,000 gallons of water every day? We have more than 40 million acres of turf in the United States that use over 80 millions pounds of fertilizer per year.
Grass is the most resource intensive plant in our country today.
In a country where we so highly value productivity, lawns are the ultimate in unproductive.
The story goes that we can apparently blame the Brits originally. The old idea of owning your own manor and “estate” added to our own brand of individualism in the USA caused many of us to want to own a home on maybe a quarter acre in suburbia. Our home was our castle, and the surrounding space was our territory to improve and maintain. Although some grasses have American-sounding names like Kentucky bluegrass, most of the turf-grass species we plant in the United States are native to Europe.
We also have a strong tradition from our earliest days of feeling like we had “too much land” (after we stole it from the native Americans). If we farmed it, or ranched it, or timbered it for five years than that land was ours. This set the precedent that we should not just sit on land, we should “improve it.” Every place humans inhabit is made artificial in some way, and in our country that usually involves lawns.
The Lawn is the Ultimate Male Status Symbol, showing how deeply grass is rooted in the American psyche.
Thinking about these American traditions reminded me of how proud my Grandpa Carter was of his small home and yard outside of Kansas City, Kansas. He took so much pride in keeping it perfect with his walking mower and lots of watering. And my own Dad the botanist, a lifelong advocate of leaving things natural, still worked hard to keep a nice lawn around his home.
The younger generations may not be so convinced that lawns are a good thing.
To quote that PBS special: “Grass is a signal. Just having it says that we are part of a community.”
And yet, as Nancy Hill pointed out after reading my last piece, those who don’t choose to maintain traditional yards in suburbia may be ostrasized by HOAs and other nasty neighbors. Covenants can be legally enforced. I had never before heard of the term “Lawn Nazis.” In a country that prides itself in offering “freedom of choice,” when it comes to the land around our own homes, we can be forbidden to plant native plants or go natural.
If you tire of hearing ever more negative news about how we humans continue to pollute and destroy the earth we depend on for life itself, try watching this five minute story from this week’s CBS Sunday Morning. Trust me, you will be glad you did!
Rewilding: Letting nature take over
Rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation. It’s about letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes. Through rewilding, wildlife’s natural rhythms create wilder, more biodiverse habitats.
By growing native, drought-tolerate plants here, we have encouraged the return of wildlife, birds, bees, etc.
This idea/story offered me a sign of relief, showing me that sometimes nature wins in a great win-win way for people too. This is what my late father was always talking about, letting nature take over, because she did a great job up until now! This is also what we have tried to do on our own three acres in southern Colorado. I just do not comprehend those who buy land in the country and begin mowing the crap out of it immediately. We hated “yard work” when we lived in suburbia, and guess what, all the birds and bees and other wildlife there also could not tolerate it. They need biodiversity to thrive. Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration aimed at increasing biodiversity and restoring natural processes to the land.
Why is it so hard for man to simply leave nature alone to take care of itself? Why are we so convinced that we need to “improve” it? We as a species must learn the answer to this question before we “improve” ourselves into complete extinction.
Although we haven’t had the kind of moisture that Denver and Colorado Springs have had this past May (with over five inches!), we have had over two inches here with cloudy rainy days for quite a while now. Today is a good example. Here are some pictures of my plants and bloomers in my foothills garden in southern Colorado today.
Starting on the west end, we have some very happy yucca, cacti and evening primrose plants, although the flowers and fruit of the yucca were rudely eaten off by some kind of varmint. Note the cute little honeysuckle bush in the upper left. It always blooms too early in the year!
Next we have the plants that bloom around my Buddha. On the left is a native Penstemon volunteer still blooming, some catmint coming in on the right and a native Four O-Clock fighting its way through in the middle. That will have magenta flowers eventually… Love it!
What I’m most proud of is my yellow Columbine, because I’ve never had one bloom in my garden thus far. Although it is the Colorado state flower, it usually gets bitten off before blooming.
On the east end I have some lovely irises blooming with the West Spanish Peak behind them!
Overall I’m so pleased with what I have so far, because I know that those May and June showers will bring some great blossoms later on! I’ll keep you posted…
Nine years ago this month, Mike and I drove down from Fort Collins to choose a few acres in Navajo to buy. We didn’t know much about this area, only that we loved how it felt to our suburban souls. It took us another year to build our passive solar home facing the Spanish Peaks and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with Mount Mestas to our west.
I was reminded again early this morning why I love living here. I woke up around 6:30 AM to see an unobstructed view of a bright red sunrise to our southeast. This is BIG SKY country to me, where the landscape and the silence are the main characters! Every time I go outside in the morning I stop and feel astounded by the silence. This is what the earth used to be like. Maybe a few bird sounds, but otherwise perfect silence…
Sure there are also unattractive features to this area, but the land is encouraging and haunting all at once, and the summers are glorious!
Our first summer here we had so much fun exploring the back roads and back stories, like this dilapidated adobe schoolhouse slowly sinking back into the earth west of here…
or taking the train up to Fir to hear the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band play in a big mountain meadow.
When I first met Mike he said he wasn’t moving again until he could look at something besides the house across the street.
We found this cartoon in a magazine and laughed together about it. Then we went in search of someplace with truly ‘spectacular views.’
We found those here and so much more…
Adventures of the NEW??? Old Farts 