Weather: Afternoons were progressively warmer, until we got some rain on Saturday afternoon. The hot days shortened blooming periods for area peonies, if they bloomed at all. The only ones I have still in bloom are in shadows that protect them from the sun and keep them cool.
Last rain: 5/130. Week’s low: 37 degrees F. Week’s high: 94 degrees F in the shade.
What’s blooming in the area: Persian yellow, Doctor Huey, wild pink and hybrid roses, yellow-flowered potentilla, Arizona and red-tipped yuccas, Spanish broom, silver lace vine, red hot poker, blue flax, snow-in-summer, Jupiter’s beard, golden spur columbine, purple salvia, yellow yarrow
What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, alfilerillo, tumble mustard, fern leaf globe mallow, green leaf five-eyes, bindweed, alfalfa, yellow sweet clover, wild licorice, velvet weed, showy milkweed, flea bane, plains paper flower, goat’s beard, common and native dandelions, strap leaf aster, cheat, brome, and three-awn grasses
What’s blooming in my yard: Miniature and floribunda roses, cliff rose, spirea, catalpa, chives, coral bells, Bath pinks, Maltese cross, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, pink and white sweet peas, Dutch clover, Rumanian sage, catmints, Johnson Blue geranium, perennial four o’clock, California poppies, wintered-over pansy and snapdragon, coral, purple and smooth beard tongues, Shasta daisy, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, white yarrow, Ozark coneflower
What’s emerging: Some melon, cardinal climber, and Sensation cosmos seedlings. Sour cherries forming, although I never saw any flowers.
Bedding and house plants: Snapdragons, zonal geraniums, pansies
Tasks: Farmers finished the first hay cut of the season. The man who places plastic cans around his plants put them out; I think it’s to protect the plants from rabbits as much as from the weather.
I’ve started the routine weeding. I keep seeing elm seeds, and have to be careful not to plant them.
Animal sightings: Rabbit, chickadees, house wrens, quail, gecko, cabbage butterflies, bumble and small bees, hornets, grasshoppers, sound of crickets, sidewalk ants
Weekly update: Often when I’m sitting on the ground doing work I could hire no one to do, I think about plantation slavery. This week it was cheat grass that brought it to mind. A weed eater will slice it down, but the heads continue to ripen. The only way to remove it is to pull it by hand.
If one is serious about the task, one could spend every day doing, because it comes back in the night. Nothing else would ever be attempted. It was the kind of repetitious work slave owners might have given children: it requires no strength and little skill.
Frederick Law Olmsted observed rice plantations in South Carolina before the Civil War, and noted the many ways slaves avoided doing tasks or did them as badly as possible. [1] One suspects children would have been sure to pull out the desirable plants at the same time. Passive resistance took many forms and was learned early.
Olmsted noted almost no plantation used a plow. [2] As a northerner he was used to thinking in terms of productivity. He implied it was because the slaves would resist using them, or damage them.
He didn’t mention the other possibility, that one only spends money on tools when labor is not available. If I could control cheat grass by hand, I wouldn’t bother with a weed eater.
Slave owners were chronically in debt. Very often their creditors were the very men who were suppling their slaves. Those middlemen would have had no incentive to lend money that would had gone into other people’s pockets. The salve trade itself perpetuated some of its worst practices.
At one point, Olmsted wrote:
"It is a common thing, I am told, to see a large gang of negroes, each carrying about four shovelsful of earth upon a board balanced on his head, walking slowly along on the embankment, so as to travel around two sides of a large field, perhaps for a mile, to fill a breach—a job which an equal number of Irishmen would accomplish, by laying planks across the field and running wheelbarrows upon them, in a tenth of the time." [3]
The difference is compensation. The Irishmen were paid by the task, and had an incentive to finish. Slaves knew that if they finished something early, the owner, overseer, or driver would simply find more work for them to do. There were no rewards for doing something well.
Slaves had been forcibly removed from their homelands. Many resisted being robbed of every piece of their culture. One suspects that carrying a load on his head was one way a man could maintain some tie with his past. The retention of culture was the greatest form of protest.
Notes on photographs: All taken today, 31 May 2020.
1. I bought two golden spur columbines (Aquilegia chrysantha) in 1997. They went to seed and continually threaten to take over whatever bed they land in.
2. Pink evening primroses (Oenothera speciosa) constantly are colonizing my walking path; I let them move spread elsewhere as they like.
3. I didn’t plant either of these in this place. Some rose reverted to the Dr. Huey rootstock. The sweet peas (Lathyrus latifolia) just moved in. I’ve left them with the roses, but am constantly cutting the vines that invade the primroses.
End notes:
1. Frederick Law Olmsted. A Journey in the Southern Slave States. New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856. 480–481. Melville J. Herskovits brought this to my attention in The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1941, 1958 edition. 99–101.
2. Olmsted. 481–482.
3. Olmsted. 481.
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