theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
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Sunday we walked the property of VNPS Pocahontas Chapter President Catharine Tucker in Hanover County. Her 70 acres have seen little farming disturbance over the last 150 years, and hence are one of our better representatives of mesic hardwood forest in the upper Coastal Plain. The fall zone runs through Richmond, and this part of Hanover County is northeast of Richmond.
On the state road leading to her land, Catharine pointed out Red Morning-Glory, or Redstar (Ipomoea coccinea) growing in a hedge managed for butterflies. There seems to be some question as to whether Ipomoea is native to this part of the country.
Catharine effectively used the subsiding road cut to illustrate the soil profile: a sandy horizon lying atop red clays.
The bulk of the property is a Beech-Tuliptree forest, with some magnificent examples of Fagus grandifolia. Our group measured around one tree, computing a DBH of 110 cm. And with beeches come the parasitic Beechdrops (Epifagus virginiana)—plentiful here, but difficult to photograph with a point-and-shoot.
Our destination plant was Shining Clubmoss (Huperzia lucidula), found in one small clump at the base of a tree. This fern ally is kin to the more often-seen Lycopodium ground pines.
Bonus local common name: Catharine calls Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) May Pops—although Google thinks that this name goes better with Passiflora incarnata.
For my first field trip as part of the Virginia Native Plant Society’s annual meeting, we visited the Virginia Commonwealth University Inger and Walter Rice Center for Environmental Life Sciences in Charles City County. The botanizing was what it was, but the education and lab facility was a stunner.
VCU acquired the property, on a bluff with a majestic view of the James River, via a gift from Walter Rice’s widow, Inger. She then went on to specify (and fund!) a state-of-the-art sustainably-built edifice. Panelled in American White-cedar, the building has achieved LEED platinum certification. Early plans called for solar panels on the roof, but they would have been shadowed by the huge oak that provides the shade in this image. So the panels were relocated to the research pier at the bottom of the bluff.
Vertical geothermal tubes provide some of the heating and cooling. I was surprised to learn that the permeable paving system for the entrance drive and parking area (a plastic grid over layers of sand and gravel) was one of the more expensive elements, blowing out the original $2M budget for the entire package.
The south-facing conference hall is naturally lit and ventilated. Knee-height casement windows are supplemented with industrial-strength ceiling fans, keeping temps in the room very comfortable (albeit on a breezy early fall day).
As we talked outside, our presenters were upstaged by a pair of chippering Bald Eagles, their arrival announced by an unhappy Blue Jay.
Along with research into Eastern Box Turtles and Prothonotary Warblers, the Center is in the midst of a wetland restoration project—one that was prompted by Nature herself. Kimages Creek, just to the east of the educattion building, was dammed in the 1920s by a real estate developer who sought to establish a hunting club. Although he busted almost immediately, the dam remained for the time being, impounding a body of water called Charles Lake (it’s still labelled as such on Yahoo!’s maps). The earthen dam, never well-maintained, was eventually breached by storms in the 2000s. Efforts are now underway to re-establish the tidal freshwater creek.
Land use in the area is exceptionally well-documented and mapped, owing to the place’s strategic importance during the American Civil War. Gen. George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac was encamped on the eastern side of Kimages Creek for a short period of time in 1862.
I’ve been scrubbing the spam comments from a blog that was left unattended for a short time. Sort of like scrubbing a toilet, but smellier. Amid all the filter-evading nonsense text and copy-paste from real articles written by honest people, this bit of non sequitur caught my eye:
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V-DOT has released a set of aerial photos of the line’s silver band of concrete and steel looping through Tysons Corner.
“Three Lauds,” by Kimberly Johnson, at Poetry Daily.
I finally got my recordkeeping caught up for the Wood Duck/Hooded Merganser nesting season. Heck, most of these birds are probably on their way to Florida and points south by now.
The birds made good use of the boxes this year, especially the two new ones that we installed in February. In 16 boxes, we had 12 nesting attempts, all of them successful. No dump nests: our largest clutch was a combined Wood Duck/Hooded Merganser nest with 18 eggs, of which 16 hatched.
The mergs continue to produce more than the woodies for the third year running. 70 HM eggs laid, 63 hatched; 57 WD eggs laid, 46 hatched. The count for the woodies is probably a little low, as we had one box where we never did get a complete egg count. The Wood Ducks made as many nests as the Hooded Mergansers (5 each, with 2 mixed), but their clutches were, on the average, smaller.
Happy 100th to John Cage. His “Lecture on Nothing,” performed by Kaegan Sparks, is trending at UbuWeb.
The Supreme Court’s building on 1st Street, N.E., gets a temporary wrapper.
Kathleen Akerley premieres another of her enjoyable head-scratchers. This time it’s a Law & Order procedural hopelessly warped by a shot of Viennese-school psychoanalysis, as well as automatic writing in the form of Mad Libs—all of it marked by Akerley’s signature physicality.
Heather Haney plays a young law student whose dreams (peopled by Caryl Churchillesque shapeshifters like a comic Chairman Mao [Jesse Terrill] with an inscrutable accent) threaten to overtake her waking life. She is prone to what you might call reverse auditory hallucinations, as she will make a cutting remark about someone and not remember having said it a moment later. Compelled to serve as her own Hercule Poirot—did she do something, say something, think something, awake or asleep, that caused a man to die?—she argues with a fellow student (the affable, goofy Michael Glenn) about which of her thoughts she can call her own, and which are archetypal bubblings from the collective unconscious.
Akerley explores the interesting theme of re-presentation through the metaphor of courtroom protocol that requires a defendant to remain silent and to express her thoughts only through her advocate, her mouthpiece, her representative. Abstruse as much of this is, nevertheless Akerley’s writing remains grounded and personal, as when she writes of a traffic altercation that ends uncertainly.
The necessities of the script’s many scene changes, as Haney’s law student slips from dreams to day and back again, at times tax Longacre Lea’s limited technical resources. And the significance of a point of law, the distinction between contractual acceptance (which occurs when given) and rejection (which occurs when received) still has me mystified.
Hooray! It’s slime mold day at BPOTD!
Happy birthday, Charles “Yardbird” Parker, Jr. Tom Vitale has a encore story on the making of “Ko Ko.”
Listen to Ned Donovan: use a fight director. A good one.
“The contact slap is inherently unsafe. The slap to the face sends more actors to hospital emergency rooms every year than all of the other techniques of stage combat combined.”
A few ironweed (Vernonia sp.) plants are blooming in the Ridge Heights meadow.