It’s now June—my birth month and here in the Northern Hemisphere, the month of the Summer Solstice. I’d intended to spend more time outside but life has other plans for me…
As I write, the flowers of beardtongue (Penstemon) sway in the breeze beneath our staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) which is heavy with greenish-yellow panicles. Two beardtongue grow in our garden; sometimes, three: Hairy (P. hirsutus), Tall White (P. digitalis) and Electric Blue (P. barbatus). I say, sometimes, because our garden is more wild than cultivated, and at this moment I can’t quite picture our blue beardtongue.
I’ll have to take a walk outside and see if I can find her…
The sumac is the wildest of all—bird-planted a few years ago, it now stands nearly twenty feet tall in the center of our backyard. Each spring a metallic-red beetle—a female sumac leaf-rolling weevil (Synolabus nigripes)—chews and meticulously forms fresh leaf material around her eggs. The tightly rolled packages (nidi) dry up, fall to the earth below and become lost in the soil. There, her eggs hatch and her larvae develop…and the pretty little red beetles no one else notices carry on living in our backyard.
As I work at my Nature of Wuthering Heights project I’ve been listening to Libby. My current audiobook obsession is: Possession by A.S. Byatt. I highly recommend it. Such wonderful imagery and language! In May, I listened to The Old Man & the Sea. Ernest Hemingway, read by actor Donald Sutherland—I cried. Hemingway breaks my heart.
Last month I received a text message from a dear friend. Bless her, she’s recently read and listened to Wuthering Heights, only because I’ve told her how absolutely brilliant it is—Bookish friends are the best friends. “So,” the genial text began, “I cannot figure out why Heathcliff is your favorite character in the book! What did I miss?”
Her question has encouraged me to think a lot about why Heathcliff appeals to me; why is he my “favorite” character in Wuthering Heights? I think it’s because, like the sumac, he is the wildest of all. ♡
What are you seeing in your garden? What are you reading…listening to?
I hear so many different bird calls as I sit outside today. I am in the middle of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Some of the volumes have the most wonderful nature descriptions. I miss when they aren't there. I am also reading Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch a chapter a day. Thank you for this lovely post!