Sunday, March 29, 2009

Hoary Cress

What’s blooming in the area: Snow that covered everything receded yesterday afternoon. Someone must have had a sale on those propane-powered flame weeders; last weekend, at least four men had them strapped to dollies and were pacing their fields and yards to burn off dead vegetation. Village ditch meetings yesterday and today.

What’s blooming in my yard: Peach, forsythia and hyacinth flowers dead; yesterday icicles were dripping off roses and cholla; Siberian elm seedling unfazed.

Inside: Brazilian bougainvillea, South African aptenia, kalanchoë and rochea weed.

Animal sightings: Rabbit tracks Friday morning; some flies hatched; five head of cattle were brought to graze a fallow field near the village.

Weather: Thursday night rain began before sunset. Then temperatures dropped. Several inches of snow fell on layers of ice that broke branches along the main road and bent pines, Siberian elms and my largest spirea and rose of Sharon. Friday, enough ice melted for the shrubs to spring back, but Saturday morning the thermometer on my front porch read 18 degrees. It’s still March with 12:46 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Every spring since I’ve lived here, some short spikes with white heads have bloomed near the post office in April and May. This year, they bolted sooner.

Since I didn’t recognize them from my Michigan childhood, I simply called them the white head. When I looked them up, I discovered hoary cress is new to most people: its most common name is white top.

It’s not that it’s some exotic from the far Altai. Linnaeus knew it as Lepidium draba in 1753, and various people reported it in this country in the nineteenth century. It’s simply that Cardaria draba, as it’s sometimes known, didn’t become a pest until the twentieth century, long after the vocabulary for common plants was formed.

Hoary cress owes its fluorescence to people’s desire to farm the northern great plains. In 1895, a senator from Wyoming, Joseph Carey, sponsored legislation that allowed private companies to build irrigation systems to make public lands more desirable for homesteading. The act defined desert lands as those that couldn’t produce hay, and was particularly popular in Idaho and Wyoming.

A few years later, Congress allowed the agriculture department to send people to collect foreign seeds and prepare them for use in this country. In 1897, Niels Hansen left South Dakota to prospect for alfalfa in Turkestan. His hay seed was so successful in the frigid winter of 1898-1899, that he returned in 1900 to find even better varieties.

Entrepreneurs immediately began offering Turkestan alfalfa seed, often at premium prices. However, the Russian steppes are vast, spanning modern Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Importers found the cheapest seed, usually grown in irrigated fields near western ports, while Hansen searched for seed from the most hostile areas, near Lake Baikal in the east.

By 1916, the USDA was telling farmers the seed sold as Turkestan was inferior to American strains. However, since it wasn’t given authority to regulate seed until 1939, all the agronomists could do was tell farmers the ways to recognize poor offerings. The imported stock usually was contaminated with Russian knapweed seeds which were larger than alfalfa and ivory colored. Herbert Groh believes hoary cress hid in those shipments.

Despite looking a bit like a sedum, hoary cress denies our egocentric assumption that the parts of plants we see, flowers and tree canopies, are their raison d’ètre. This mustard lives for its roots. The whitish rhizomes spread under the surface, and whenever they need more nutrients, they send up new shoots, creating dense stands that are unified systems of deep probes seeking water and dense fibrous mats a few inches below ground. Any part that’s broken off by a spade or plow can send up a new stalk to regenerate itself.

The roots, leaves and stems contain sulfurous chemicals that inhibit germination of alfalfa seed, and even prevent growth by its own seedlings. The sticky, mucilaginous, brown seeds develop new colonies at a distance from their self-aggrandizing parents.

The most persistent local plants have been those growing along the sidewalk by the post office and across the road near a concrete foundation. Last year, the grey leaves took over the gravel spread between giant yuccas and a wisteria in the next yard to the north.

The sprouts that broke ground last week may have been killed by this week’s snow and cold, but the roots will survive: they’ve adapted to Finland. Other than herbicides that destroy everything, the only way to kill alfalfa weed is discing the roots some 20" down every few weeks for several years until the seed bank is exhausted. Hoary cress blooms each spring because subterranean lifeforms usually outlast our will to eradicate them.

Notes:
Groh, Herbert. “Turkestan Alfalfa as a Medium of Weed Introduction,” Scientific Agriculture 21: 36-43:1940, cited by Zouhar.

Kiemnec, Gary L and M. L. Mcinnis. “Hoary Cress (Cardaria draba) Root Extract Reduces Germination and Root Growth of Five Plant Species,” Weed Technology 16:231-234:2002.

Oakley, R. A. and H. I. Westover. Commercial Varieties of Alfalfa, USDA Farmer’s Bulletin 757, 1916.

Zouhar, Kris. “Cardaria spp.,” US Forest Service Fire Effects Information System on-line database,2004

Photograph: Hoary cress buds near the post office, 21 March 2009.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Oxalis

What’s blooming in the area: Apricots, a few crabapples, one pink hyacinth, mossy phlox, hoary cress; tansy, tumble and purple mustard; native and common dandelion; Siberian elm in bud, arborvitae, piñon, and snakeweed greening. The truck garden was plowed early in the week, and weeds along the banks burned yesterday; so many people have been burning, the smell of smoke was strong Tuesday morning.
What’s blooming in my yard: Forsythia and oxalis; peach buds pink; first tulips, daffodils, daylilies, sweet peas, garlic chives, Maltese cross, Jupiter’s beard, tansy, and fern-leaf yarrow emerged; globe willow put out first leaves
What’s blooming inside: Bougainvillea, aptenia, kalanchoë; rochea few flowers.
Animal sightings: First ant hills, bird standing guard on the utility pole in morning, cabbage butterfly last Sunday.
Weather: Frost Monday and Tuesday; mornings later in week around 40, and afternoons rose to near 70; last rain 3/13/09; 12:16 hours of daylight.
Weekly update: The first flowers of spring are often weeds: dandelions, tansy mustard, the Oxalis that poked out last Sunday near my back porch. Usually domesticated plants wait until conditions stabilize, but this year’s early warmth fooled the five-petaled yellow perennial.
Wood sorrels are particularly sensitive to heat: I don’t usually see their quarter-inch flowers until the first of May, when they retire by midday. Scientists aren’t sure if the plants respond more to light, heat, or internal circadian rhythms, but anyone who has one knows the alternating sets of three leaves fold into pyramids at night, on cloudy days, when temperatures rise, and when they’re touched.
The little Oxalis began as a native wildflower that moved into greenhouses where its shamrock leaves spread along earthen floors. When its flat brown seeds settle in small pots used for perennials like purple coneflower, it shoulders aside the seedlings in its quest for food, water, and light. However, when it appears in larger containers with shrub cuttings like azaleas, it has little affect on the health of its host.
Today the plant is ubiquitous, but it’s provenance is obscure because botanists have used small differences to define discrete species, then applied the same terms for different variants, and now are grouping them all into a single class. Today only the more aggressive creeping rhizome, Oxalis corniculata, is separated from my stricta which starts out erect, then flops from the point where its branches emerge from the main stem. The reason the distinction survives may arise less from biology than the fact the first is seen as more difficult to eradicate in cool nurseries.
When I see people identify an Oxalis, I’m more sure of their personal experience than I am reality. I know John Josselyn saw a yellow wood sorrel in New England in the 1670’s, but I don’t know if Edward Tuckerman is correct to identify it as the creeping species. I’m sure the Cherokee use wood sorrel for a variety of purposes, but don’t know who is correct, Paul Hamel and Mary Chiltoskey, who suggest they use corniculata, or Myra Jean Perry who thinks they use my plant.
The differences don’t seem to matter much: people have substituted one species for another without serious consequences. Plains tribes use both the purple-flowered violacea and my yellow one as food for their children and horses. In Poland after World War II, children who ate the local white-petaled acetosella would eat the alien stricta when it appeared.
John Gerard used the local acetosella in a sauce to treat stomach problems in sixteenth century England, while Nicholas Culpepper recommended boiling the leaves into a red syrup for blood and ulcer problems in the mid 1650's. In this country, the Santa Clara chewed roots of the purple-flowered species for diarrhea, while San Ildefonso chewed the leaves to treat sores and swellings. Nearby Spanish-speakers boiled the leaves to expel worms.
By the end of the nineteenth century, King's American Dispensatory suggested both stricta and violacea were acceptable substitutes for the European acetosella, and found them useful against scurvy. However, every writer warns against overuse. The ascorbic acid converts into oxalic acid, which can bond with calcium in the body to produce kidney stones.
I think my Oxalis is a stricta that arrived from Iowa with a field-grown raspberry. I spotted the leaves in 2001 and 2003, and have seen the flowers every year since 2007 in the same place. In friendlier climes, it pollinates itself and the narrow green pods expel seed, sometimes spreading into a nuisance. Here I think a single yellow wood sorrel root has managed to survive in the drip line as one of the more benign signs of spring, one that blooms fitfully season after season without producing scratches or rashes.
Notes:Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, 1650's; 1826 edition republished in 1981.Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Felter, Harvey Wickes and John Uri Lloyd. King's American Dispensatory, 1898, Henriette Kress’s copy available online.Gerard, John. Gerard’s Herball, 1597; reprinted as Leaves from Gerard’s Herball, 1969, from a 1929 edition by Marcus Woodward.Josselyn, John. New England’s Rarities Discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents and Plants of That Country, 1672, reprinted by University of Michigan, University Library with 1865 notes by Edward Tuckerman.Luczaj, Lukasz. "Archival Data on Wild Food Plants Used in Poland in 1948," Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 4:4:2008.Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database, includes Melvin R. Gilmore, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, 1919; Paul B. Hamel and Mary U. Chiltoskey, Cherokee Plants and Their Uses -- A 400 Year History, 1975; and Myra Jean Perry, Food Use of "Wild" Plants by Cherokee Indians, 1975.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Photograph: Yellow Oxalis flower, 15 March 2009.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Juniper

Local signs of spring: Some apricots blooming in village; prairie, hay fields, and purple asters greening; daffodils, mustard tansy, dandelions, and cheat grass up.

What’s happening in my yard: Roses, vinca, bouncing Bess, and chrysanthemums putting our new leaves; hyacinths growing; iris and grape hyacinths coming up.

What’s blooming inside: Bougainvillea, aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë; snake plant put out new sprout.

Animal sightings: Horses brought in to pasture.

Weather: Storm sat over area for a week, early morning temperatures alternated between 20 and 40, rain finally fall Friday; 11:56 hours of daylight.

Weekly update: The first signs of spring have arrived - stuffy noses, runny eyes, sneezes.

Each year I listen to friends blame it on juniper blossoms. I fully sympathize with their miseries but I have a problem with the idea of an evergreen with flowers. Too many artists’ renderings of dinosaurs in swamps surrounded by giant ferns, mastodons feeding on grass, and graceful mammals cavorting with flowers and insects impressed on my young mind that conifers do not bloom.

They may have seed cones, but they don’t have petals. That was the great dividing line in plant development between the gymnosperms and the angiosperms. Indeed, it was the drying of the earth that led to the great revolution. The sperm of earlier plants moved through water. When water disappeared, natured adapted with pollen that sailed through the air.

The long extinct seed ferns that developed in the coal swamps of West Virginia in the upper Devonian were the first to use pollen. Imprints from characteristic leaves for the cypress family have been found in upper Triassic, and evidence of two existing junipers from the upper Cretaceous. The local sabina subgroup of junipers with serrated leaf edges appeared with the Madro-tertiary geoflora of the Eocene and early Oligocene in México.

Last weekend I walked out to the nearest juniper on the prairie to see what it is, in fact, they are doing this time of year that causes so much suffering.

The male tree had clusters of brown leaves mixed in with the green that looked like piñon nuts from a distance. The strobili had emerged last fall, and over the winter pollen had developed in sacs on their underbellies. When the cones on distant female trees reach puberty, their end scales will part and sticky droplets form. Soon after, these pollen sacs will open and fling their life force to the wind.

At the time it leaves the tree, the tiny, spherical pollen grain is shrouded in two layers. When it lands, the thick inner, intine layer absorbs moisture from the droplet and ruptures. That, in turn, expels proteins from cavities in the outer, exine layer. If the female recognizes the chemicals as gifts from an appropriate suitor, the drop will desicate and the pollen grain will be pulled into the female cone for fertilization.

When a misguided pollen grain lands in a moist human space, it still sends out protein scouts to determine if a pollen tube can follow. The first time, the body generates an allergen specific antibody that lodges on the surface of a mast cell. The next time a grain of pollen intrudes, a waiting immunoglobulin E antibody snatches it. When enough are captured, the underlying mast cells release histamines and other inflammatory substances that trigger allergic symptoms.

In Santa Fe, where temperatures are more moderate and water more plentiful than here in the valley, one-seeded junipers grow close enough along the road to form pygmy forests. Nature could perpetuate itself there with mild breezes. Here in the grasslands, hundreds of feet separate Juniperus monosperma trees. Everywhere pollens are released for weeks, and travel miles.

Outsiders arrive in northern New Mexico awed by what they see as an ancient land. In fact, the Oligocene mountains are so young they haven’t yet eroded enough to produce foothills. Instead, dumps of Santa Fe composites parallel the volcanic Jemez and uplifted Sangre de Cristo. The barren ridges and lower mountain sides have been colonized by a far older life form, the junipers. Each year unsuspecting latecomers find themselves trapped in nature’s primeval rite of spring when the very air they breathe is turned into a great fertility bath of floating pollen.

Notes:
Upper Devonian - 360-374 million years ago, Appalachians, seed ferns
Upper Triassic - 213-231 million years ago, desert, cypress family
Upper Cretaceous - 65-97.5 million years ago, swamps, junipers
Eocene - 38.0-54.9 million years ago - arid southwest, sabina clade of junipers
Oligocene - 24.6-38 million years ago - Sangre de Cristo uplift, first Jemez fault

Adams, Robert P. "The Serrate Leaf Margined Juniperus (Section Sabina) of the Western Hemisphere: Systematics and Evolution Based on Leaf Essential Oils and Random Amplified Polymorphic DNAs (RAPDs)," Biochemical Systematics and Ecology 28:975-989:2000.

Emberlin, Jean C. "Aerobiology" in William W. Busse and Stephen T. Holgate, Asthma and Rhinitis, volume 2, 2000 edition.

Mugnaini, Serena , Massimo Nepi, Massimo Guarnieri, Beti Piotto, and Ettore Pacini. "Pollination Drop in Juniperus communis: Response to Deposited Material," Annals of Botany 100:1475-81:2007, describes female behavior.

Stewart, Wilson N. and Gar W. Rothwell. Paleobotany and the Evolution of Plants, 1993 second edition.

Wodehouse, Roger P. Hayfever Plants, 1945, describes male behavior.

Photograph: Male one-seeded juniper with brown pollen cones between serrated green leaves, 7 March 2009.

Sunday, March 08, 2009

Irrigation Ditch

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers; rose, lilac and chamisa stems; Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, hyacinth, rock rose, dandelions; three men working on new ditches, two have piles of block near their fences.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Branches of apple and peach; stems on cholla and some shrub along the river; leaves on pinks, coral bells, beardtongues, small-leaf soapwort, pink and yellow evening primroses, some golden spur columbine, purple aster and anthemis.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae and other conifers.
What’s blooming inside: Bougainvillea, aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Heavy clouds kept birds in early mornings.
Weather: Too warm, too dry, too windy, too soon; couple trees started to bloom near the river; piles of Russian thistle collecting; all signs of rain that hit my roof early Saturday were gone by daybreak; 11:35 hours of daylight.
Weekly update: Ditch meetings are remembered as times when the community came together to elect its leaders and plan its communal work. The one a week ago was more like a corporate shareholders meeting, with an irrigation district manager who reported the previous year’s activities, provided status on construction projects, and announced when water would begin running.
People also like to remember that work as some festive spring weekend. Alvar Carlson said the original ditches often began when an ox gouged a furrow with a wooden blade that men deepened with spades. They piled the dirt they dredged along the banks to increase the carrying capacity of the ditches. In the 1930's, men spent at least thirty days each summer repairing the village ditch and twenty days on the one along the main road.
When settlers were expanding into lands between the Santa Clara and San Ildefonso in the 1730's, the Santa Cruz alcalde, Domingo Vigil, expected the San Ildefonso to extend the ditch in exchange for an agreement that a disputed grant stay within the control of specified local people. When San Ildefonso complained to the colonial governor, Juan Domingo de Bustamante ruled the natives couldn’t be forced to clean the ditch.
Constructing and maintaining secondary ditches is still unpleasant, hard labor. Last spring I ran into a drunk near the post office who told me he’d just returned from helping clean one of the ditches. He wanted me to cash a casino chip he claimed had been used to pay him.
Some ditches in my area are underground, but there are still many open sections where Russian thistles and trash collect. The association hires a man with a backhoe to do the major cleaning, including killing stumps. When a hay farmer at the ditch meeting asked why he couldn’t get water as early as the ditches nearer town, he was told scheduling that clean-up depended on how late the spring winds were blowing in new tumbleweeds.
Last summer our mayordomo offered to sell me some of the water rights the irrigation district had been buying to prevent Española and Santa Fé from obtaining them as a ruse to claim the water. One man down hill from me apparently took him up and is now busily repeating the work of the pioneers.
First, he or the ditch managers, hired a backhoe to bury a pipe from his property to the main ditch. Next, someone had to patch the crack that left in the county pavement. Then the man installed a pump to pull the water uphill to his property. Recently, he used a backhoe blade to level his land enough so water can be effective. This past week he dug another ditch going uphill the length of his property to distribute water and had dirt delivered to compensate for his scraped away topsoil. In five weeks, he will be able to connect some gated irrigation pipe to his pump and call the mayordomo to open the valve to water his small holding.
It’s hard to see how my neighbor can ever recover the costs of his investment. But when the water runs, perhaps it will be enough to show his kids. A friend of mine in town, where water is available on a schedule rather than on demand, tells me:
"We get water on Wednesday thru Saturday. From that point on, we simply share the water by taking our individual turn when our neighbor is done watering. For instance, when my neighbor next to me is watering, I simply ask him to let me know when he is done watering. When he is done, he releases the flow to me and I water my yard. When I'm done, if any other neighbor needs the water, I let them know when I'm done and release the water to them. If nobody needs the water after I'm done, I go to the main ditch and close the water flow down to our street. Over the years, it’s been kind of fun to water because it seems to keep our neighborhood close in that we get to chat and visit when we're exchanging water. I love it when the water is released to us. I've been working with water and crops almost all of my life and is something that I truly love. I should have been a farmer."
Even when the latest technology replaces the forgotten drudgery of the past, new ditch memories are made every summer.
Notes:Carlson, Alvar W. The Spanish-American Homeland, 1990.
Twichell, Ralph Emerson. The Spanish Archives of New Mexico, volume 1, 1914, on 1730's.
US Department of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975, on 1930's.
Photograph: Our local ditch filled with Russian thistles and pigweed; the concrete feeds through a metal culvert that goes under the road and is faced with plywood to stabilize the bank; 28 February 2009.

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Irrigation District

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers; rose and lilac stems; Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, hyacinth, rock rose, some grasses and weeds beginning to green in places along road.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Branches of apple and peach; stems on cholla and some shrub along the river; leaves on pinks, coral bells, beardtongues, small-leaf soapwort, pink and yellow evening primroses, some golden spur columbine, purple aster and anthemis.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae and other conifers.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds flit through lower branches of peach and cherries mid-mornings; rabbit out last night at twilight.Weather: Early morning temperatures varied from low 20's to high 30's; afternoons near 60; last rain 1/24/09; 11:25 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Our annual ditch meeting was held this past Tuesday at the local firehouse. We’re now part of the Santa Cruz Irrigation District which has absorbed some twenty ditches, including three in my immediate area, since the federal government took over a botched private project begun in 1925 by John Block to dam the Santa Cruz river near Chimayó for the benefit of lowland farmers.
Arroyos, deep and wide, once defined the limits of irrigation supported settlement for people who no longer remembered how Romans built those aqueducts at Mérida in the conquistadores’ Estremaduran homeland. Hollowed logs were used to span canyons and gullies.
The village ditch existed between a wide arroyo and the river. Another somehow passed that barrier and stopped at the next deep arroyo. My ditch is more recent and uses metal pipes to carry water over one deep arroyo before dumping on ranch land before the next major break.
Open trenches were being used by the pueblos when Juan de Oñate arrived in 1598, and still exist in areas where canals cross Santa Clara land. The path of the main ditch uphill from the main road can be traced by the presence of trees in otherwise open grass and scrub land. In places where active laterals come down to cross the road, trees follow the open ditches. In other places, lines of trees survive where the ditches have either been filled or replaced with concealed metal pipes.
Many distribution ditches in the village are still open troughs, edged with grass or weeds; only a few have sluice gates Metal culverts now carry the water under drives, although a few have installed cattle guards. Portland concrete was perfected by Thomas Edison in 1902, and some ditches have been lined. Such reinforcement was an individual choice, so cement sections alternate with earthen ones.
The irrigation network on the other side of the arroyo required hours of maintenance in the 1930's, and had the highest concentration of people unable to pay fees for irrigation. Although the interior department didn’t provide reasons, it suggested the other area where people couldn’t afford the dam construction levies, La Puebla, had a channel that ran through sandy land with banks that constantly collapsed. Each breach meant their land could be silted and crops destroyed.
The ditch along the main road may have been sighted through equally bad land when its builders needed to find a way around the arroyo. It could be the more ambitious thought the high location would allow them to irrigate more land. It may also be they had forgotten what the early Spanish colonists knew who spent time looking for non-porous land for the acequia madre before they established a settlement.
When the Reconstruction Finance Corporation intervened in 1935, the agent for the receivers, Cook, had already taken over 75 pieces of land in the district, and resold some to migrants from Texas and Oklahoma. At some time in the recent past, hay farmers who settled along the main road buried their sections of ditch and installed surface valves to feed ten-foot sections of portable, perforated aluminum pipe that flood their fields. Recently, some homeowners who bought lots from those farmers have been using gated PVC pipe to water lawns.
Lost knowledge, new knowledge are separated by a wide arroyo from traditional village ways in an irrigation district that stretches from Fairview, settled briefly by Mormons in 1895, through Sombrillo now farmed by Sikhs and on down to La Puebla where Los Penitentes were active. Tourists use the lake formed by the dam, while everyone with water rights, from traditional settlements along the Santa Cruz to our Anglo hay farmers, depends on collected snow melt for vegetable plots and commercial fields, flower gardens and suburban lawns.
The social structures that govern water may have changed, technologies have certainly been modernized, but the challenges of growing anything but Russian thistles on dry land remain constant. If you see something green here, there will be a ditch nearby.
Notes:
Calkins, Hugh G. "The Santa Cruz Irrigation District - New Mexico," 1937, on-line through New Mexico’s Digital Collections project.
Carlson, Alvar W. The Spanish-American Homeland, 1990, describes log cañolas.Dobkins, Betty Eakle. The Spanish Element in Texas Water Law, 1959, cited by José A. Rivera and Thomas F. Glick, "The Iberian Origins of New Mexico’s Community Acequias," Economic History Congress, 2002, for how settlers selected land for ditches.US Department of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.
Photograph: Head ditch paralleling road with wooden gates; irrigated field on other side of embankment/dyke was burned this week; road near village, 28 February 2009.