imagesofgalveston.com

The spider lily provides an incongruous contrast to a long neglected mail box in front of this old house.  The flowers are at their peak; by the next day they were beginning to droop and turn gray from the dust of the road. One wonders if that small patch of ground once held a cluster of lilies and if the vine that is beginning to cover the mail box ever had an arbor to climb.

The house is small but it is well constructed. Deserted for the last few years, it is beginning to show severe signs of neglect, but it is redeemable and could perhaps be a home again. And maybe the spider lily will multiply, its tiny space expanding just a little as the mail box is pulled up and discarded, the vines mowed down, and it will welcome home the house’s new residents with bright white flowers for a few weeks in the early summer.  One wonders, however, if it will look quite so remarkable when the mail box is gone.

Lady Bird Johnson died this week but she left a legacy to be envied. Millions of wildflower seeds have been cast along roadsides and in highway medians, thanks to her efforts. In spring, the impact can be overwhelming in its beauty, with millions of asters, poppies, lupine (including, of course, bluebonnets), and other bright flowers stretching into the distance. But I also love the scattered solitaries of the summer and fall, when more subtle colors dot the grasses that are browning, under first the heat and then by the diminishing impact of the sun.

There is a columnist in The Houston Chronicle known as “The Lazy Gardener.” Every week, she shares her wisdom with readers in the Gulf Coast area about reducing the frustrations of local gardening. She could probably take a lesson from me. My approach to gardening is “if it can’t survive without pesticides, herbicides, or at least two weeks without water even at the height of summer, it doesn’t deserve to grow in my garden.” That explains why “weeds,” wildflowers, and long-established trees and bushes do so well around our house. And one rose.  

I have fallen in love with Perle d’Or. Our lovely bush has survived drought, flood, and being uprooted by Hurricane Rita and still keeps putting out her lovely, delicate, fragrant blossoms. All I do is deadhead the old clusters before they set hips and speak softly and lovingly to her while I do so. And she returns my kind words by posing now and then for a photograph.

Every year, tons of seaweed drift onto the Gulf’s beaches. It’s smelly, sort of an unappetizing khaki green, squishy under bare feet, and full of weird sea creatures that scurry ahead of you as you pick your way through the piles on the way to the water.

It’s much easier to bear with this onslaught, however, once you put the pesky stuff into perspective.  The seaweed is actually floating Sargassum (from the Portuguese, sargaco, or “grape”), a migratory plant that stays afloat thanks to gas-filled bladders that act like buoys. Sargassum along the Gulf may well have originated in what is known as the Sargasso Sea, the only sea in the world that is not defined by a land mass. This area of the Atlantic, is dominated by masses of free-floating seaweed, hence the Sea’s name.  Surrounded by strong currents and lying just south of the Gulf Stream, the seaweed mass usually rotates in place like a very sluggish whirlpool, shifting slightly with changes in weather and temperature, throwing off large sections that drift to the shores of the Atlantic seaboard and into the Gulf. 

Ships have been known to sit for weeks in the Sea, stilled for lack of even a breeze. Such adventures may explain the multitude of stories relating the strange disappearance of ships and drifting remnants of ghostly unoccupied vessels.  The Sea is also the major spawning ground of freshwater eels, which travel there by the millions from North America and Europe to lay their eggs. After hatching, the baby eels reverse their parents’ course and head back towards fresh water. 

Knowing this unique and colorful history may not make the seaweed smell any better but it has taught me to be more tolerant of its presence.