Alison Gillespie is a science writer and gardening coach. Her favorite gardens include habitat features for wildlife and spaces where children can get a close encounter with nature. Email her at ag@whereyouareplanted.com.
September 2009
When I was about seven years old my best friend and next door neighbor, Bruce, was stung fifteen times by wasps. He was playing hide and seek and somehow bumped up against their nest in a bush. The wasps swarmed to protect their home, and he was completely engulfed in their rage.
I’ve been thinking about Bruce’s bad day a lot lately, realizing that there are not a lot of people out there who would be willing to host these creatures purposefully. I think that convincing anyone to plant a garden to attract wasps would be a hard sell.
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June 2009
Just beside Holy Cross Hospital on Forest Glen Road, the Capitol beltway crosses over the Sligo Creek trail. This forms a funny place to enjoy nature. You go under the bridge into a huge echo chamber. If I’m riding bikes with my kids we bellow in low long notes and cause funny sound waves to cascade over us as we speed through. The clicks of our gears become huge and rhythmic, and we can’t help but laugh as we come out again into the sunshine.
But if I’m walking, I slow down and listen to the thumpa thumpa thumpa of cars hitting the bridge joints on the road over head. Its like hearing the heart beat of the beltway. It is not beautiful, but at the same time it makes you kind of relax your pace and slow down. I believe that this is some kind of primordial response, like hearing your mother’s heartbeat before you are born.
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April 2009
New tree champions are announced
Its that Lorax-like month again: April. Time for Earth Day and wildflower walks and garlic mustard pulls. Time for box turtles to spring out and try to cross the most improbable streets up and down the watershed. Time for beavers to annoy the park managers, and wood peckers to make loud noises on my neighbor’s metal-plated TV antennae.
Its also time for Arbor Day, that old-fashioned holiday which doesn’t fall on any one day but is celebrated on whatever day your town picks, according to their municipal needs and the planting calendar.
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March 2009
People are often surprised to find out that Friends of Sligo Creek volunteer Mike Smith is not a biologist or a chemist. In fact, he’s a librarian at one of the Smithsonian’s Freer & Sackler museums, downtown. But he takes the water samples as a volunteer.
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July 2008
My friend Jennifer told me recently that she has been gardening in the same spot for 17 years.
“And I think,” she said dreamily, “that a garden isn’t really mature until about 17 years. Really.”
She laughed, and I laughed. This is a gardener’s idea of a good joke.
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June 2008
The last two years I have sounded a lot like Yosemite Sam when I’m in the garden.
Rahbbits. I hate rahbbits. They are eating everything in site and reproducing like, well, rabbits. They are driving me crazy and feasting lots of things I try to plant, including the vegetables I started growing last year.
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May 2008
I was in the grocery store looking for cereal when a little boy in a neighboring shopping cart waved to me. “See my bug?” he said, beaming. Inside his glass jar was one tiny occupant: a black caterpillar with blondish hairs along its sides and a long, blue stripe down its back. I admired his new little pet, then exchanged smiles with his mom before moving on to find my groceries.
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April 2008
When I look at Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica), I don’t see the bells. They look more like flashlights to me, or showerheads. Or, at their peak, like dancing ladies in antebellum ball gowns. But bells? Only vaguely.
I’m not sure what this reveals about my mental state. If wildflowers can be used as a kind of Rorschach test then I’m sure it means something. In the meantime, I find I’m just happy to see these flowers whenever and wherever I find them.
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March 2008
We went for a walk in the rain, just the two of us, dressed in plastic slickers and boots. There was no thunder, just the steady downpour of warm droplets all around and a sky that was flat and gray like the skin of an elephant’s underbelly over our heads. Good duck-walking weather.
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February 2008
Darkness is a thing we humans often find a bit daunting. We aren’t well equipped for it. Our eyes take time to adjust, and we can’t see as well in the nighttime. To venture into the night always takes a bit of courage.
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January 2008
It was late when I came out of the meeting that night. I was tired and ready for sleep and I quickly made my way from the cold into the front seat of my car but, as I took off slowly down East-West Highway, I came upon a sight that made me suddenly sit bolt upright and hit the brakes. There, crawling and wiggling its way up out of the storm drain was a huge raccoon. Its yellow eyes became glowing orbs as they flatly reflected my headlights.
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