Indian paintbrush isn't always red. Several clumps of this delightfully lemon-yellow one are blooming along our lane. What we call the "flower" is really a cluster of bracts, specialized stiff, hairy leaves that contain a tiny flower. The flowers can only be fertilized by a hovering insect or bird, since there's no place to perch--and the pollinator needs a long "sipper," since the flowers are deep inside the bract. Our paintbrush are keeping the recently arrived hummingbirds busy.
Interesting paintbrush lore. The blossom cluster is said to be sweet, and were eaten by Indians. The Chippewa used a decoction of the plant as a hairwash, and other tribes used it to treat venereal diseases and as a general tonic. However, the plants concentrate selenium and can be toxic, especially when they're growing in heavily alkaline soil. Another interesting note: the plant is hemiparasitic: that is, it has specialized roots called haustoria that invade a host (usually a grass) and suck out water and nutrients. (Mistletoe is another hemiparasitic plant, but it grows in trees, rather than in the ground.) If you want to try to grow paintbrush, check out this advice from the North American Native Plant Society.
Book report. I'll zap the e-file of MOURNING GLORIA off to New York tomorrow. Nice that the editor no longer wants a print copy: saves 350+ sheets of paper and a whopping shipping charge. It goes into the queue with her other books that will be published in April 2011. I'll see it again in November, in the copyedited file, and then again in January, in page form.
Meanwhile, I'll be turning to the next (#2) book in the Darling Dahlias series. My editor's not wild about my proposed title (THE DARLING DAHLIAS AND THE TERRIBLE TULIP TRAGEDY), so I need to do some more thinking about that. I'm the kind of writer who needs a title before anything else can happen, so the thinking has to be done in the next few days. The book is due at the end of June. I read the pages for the first book a couple of weeks ago and loved it, so I'm eager to get started on #2.
Kindle eBook edition of Holly Blues. Still no word on this, as of this morning. If you're puzzled about why Amazon has canceled your order, you can read the explanation in my April 1 and 2 blog posts (below). I'm still getting emails from readers who want me to "do something" about this situation and threatening to stop reading the series if they can't get the book via Kindle. Sorry, gang. Again: there's nothing I--or any author (unless she's self-published)--can do about the pricing and availability of my books. I'm grateful to all my readers for their support and patience in this difficult transition period, as all the major publishing houses (not just mine) move from one pricing model to another. HOLLY BLUES just happened to get caught in this transition.
Dirt. When I'm not writing, I've been doing more dirty work. The spring garden (peas, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, carrots, kale, onions) is mostly in, which gives me time to play in my dirt pile: last year's compost, mixed with soil from the woodlot (rich with leaf litter) and the pasture (sandy loam), and large numbers of cowpies. (You know what those are, don't you?) I collect tubs full of cowpies, load the tubs into the ranch truck, and haul them back to the dirt pile. The freshest cowpies go into the compost, "mature" cowpies go into the dirt pile. I also drop a few into a garbage can where I'm brewing compost "tea."
I love these mysterious alchemical transformations: fresh grass processed through our cows' bellies into rich manure; the trees' leaf-life into soft, decayed leaf litter; sandstone rock weathered into sandy loam. All these materials continually transforming themselves into soils, the soils into my garden plants and my food. And on this Easter Sunday, when many are celebrating a different transformation, this is the one I celebrate.
Reading note. The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.--Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature