Equilibrium

Weather: The weather bureau has several classes of precipitation: light rain, hard rain, and thunderstorm. The last is obvious, though a misnomer. It’s not the thunder that’s the issue, but the lightening.

The words hard and light refer to a continuum of noise. Hard rain makes noise on my metal roof, and the hardest rain is the hail that fell for a few seconds Thursday. Light rain makes so little noise you have to go outside to see if it’s actually happening.

However, noise isn’t what the weather bureau means. It means the amount of water that falls in a minute, with a hard rain dropping more than a light one. Thus, we had a hard rain a week ago Tuesday, and a light rain this Thursday. The one lasted for less than hour, while the other went on for several hours. Both times the shoulders held standing water and mud lay on the pavement, but there was more a week ago than this week.

Last useful rain: 7/16. Week’s low: 59 degrees F. Week’s high: 95 degrees F in the shade.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red-tipped and Arizona yuccas, fernbush, Spanish broom, sweet peas, Russian sage, buddleia, bird of paradise, roses of Sharon, hollyhocks, gladiola, purple morning glories, purple garden phlox, datura, squash, melons, coreopsis, blanket flowers, white cone flowers, cultivated sunflowers, corn tasseling

What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Trees of heaven, buffalo gourd, bindweed, green leaf five eyes, silver leaf nightshade, alfalfa, white sweet clover, yellow mullein, velvetweed, prairie white evening primrose, leather leaf globe mallow, lamb’s quarter, Queen Anne’s lace, plains paper flowers, goat’s beard, pigweed, Russian thistle, Hopi tea, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, gumweed, wild lettuce, horseweed, goldenrod, golden hairy asters, quack grass, seven-weeks grama

What’s blooming in my yard: Betty Prior and miniature roses, yellow potentilla, caryopteris, garlic chives, catmints, lady bells, calamintha, Johnson’s blue geranium, winecup mallow, sidalcea, blue flax, coral beard tongues, sea lavender, lead plant, Dutch clover, white spurge, tomatillo, pink evening primroses, Saint John’s wort, large-flowered soapwort, David phlox, Mexican hats, chrysanthemums, white yarrow, chocolate flower, plains coreopsis, black-eyed Susan, anthemis, purple coneflower, Mönch asters; pansies that wintered over

Bedding Plants: Wax begonia, nicotiana, pansies

What’s coming up: Hollyhock and pigweed seedlings.

Tasks: After rains, I’ve been pulling wild lettuce and heath asters.

Continued resetting and replacing Saltillo tiles. When I lifted them I discovered the ground underneath had turned red. I also round some hole about an inch and a half in diameter. Don’t see how either an animal or water could have created them, but one must have.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, chickadees, hummingbird, geckos, sulphur butterfly, bumble bees, crickets, grasshoppers, hornets, small ants

Weekly update: I found a gumweed blooming in my driveway. The last time I saw one was in 2016. It reminded me how much the local biome has been delimited since I first moved here.

The area was originally prairie, that converted to steppe as people grazed animals. In the last thirty or forty years it has become an exurb of Española. To the west, toward the Río Grande, people build modern houses and landscaped their yards. To the north, where the road skirts the badlands, they brought in double wides. Some resided them and maintained a yard. Others left everything alone.

When I moved here in 1991 most of the plants along the shoulders of the road were pigweed and Russian thistle. But, mixed in were whorled milkweed, ivy leaf morning glories, and woolly plantains. More common were the gum weeds and golden hairy asters.

Some of the seeds blew into my yard, but never naturalized. My soil and water weren’t to their liking.

Houses changed hands, and the new residents tried to control the roadside volunteers that their predecessors had let be. Slowly, the Aesclepias verticillata, Ipomoea hederaea, and Plantago patagonica disappeared.

Sometimes, someone get on his rider mower and cut the roadside vegetation, especially on the curve outside by house where tall plants could block visibility.

Finally, the county began to send out a crew with a blade that reached out six feet, but, of course, was raised a little from the ground. This year they were out in mid-May.

When the original vegetation was destroyed, pigweed (Amaranthus albus) and Russian thistles (Salsola pestifer) moved in. Neither minds being cut, and both will produce seeds on plants a few inches high, below the level of the reapers.

The result has been the gradual reduction of the species in the neighborhood seed bank, so that what was once unique, now looks like every other part of the of the countryside.

As they say, it takes a village to raise a child. A village also defines the common vegetation, even for those who would prefer something else.

Notes on photographs: All taken by the road on 29 July 2019.
1. Sulphur butterfly on Caryopteris clandonensis.

2. The roadside where the gumweed (Grindelia aphanactic) once grew.

3. Russian thistle that sprawled when it couldn’t grow tall; it has a single yellow flower to the top left.