Author: David Gorsline

Ellanor C. Lawrence Park project: 5

Back to the park this past Saturday, on a rather cloudy and breezy afternoon, with Leta riding shotgun this time. Many of the trees’ leaves are down; the unexpected Partridgeberry is still holding on to some fruits. The persimmon tree at the wineberry bench was holding some of its fruits, but I found lots on the ground, too. We gave them a taste, and the consensus is that while the pulp is okay, the pucker of a little bit of persimmon skin goes a long way.

amazinWe found a somewhat ratty example of Daedalea quercina on a dead branch.

Ellanor C. Lawrence Park project: 4

I got out to the park not long after sunup today, so the birding was much better. White-throated Sparrows have definitely moved into the neighborhood for the season.


chicken palerchicken raggedThe Chicken of the Woods fruiting bodies on this log continue to fade and deteriorate. The image at left was taken twelve days ago; that on the right is from today.


galleriesI found an interesting dead branch that was full of boring insect galleries. No guesses as to what sort of beetle is responsible.

This might take a little while

Dan Kois likes to read plays, particularly those by Annie Baker, and especially her stage directions.

This mix of precision and shagginess epitomizes The Flick, in which Baker is always tracking the minute-by-minute emotional evolution of its three screwed-up characters, even while encouraging the happy surprises that make a play something special every night. A good actor or director reading that stage direction will be thrilled at its haziness, thrilled that it gives actors the ability to discover the moment in real time every night. On the page, it feels like an invitation to discover the moment on my own.

ᔥ ArtsJournal

Piedmont forests

big honking treeJoe and Stephanie led the class to several sites of Piedmont forests in Montgomery County, including one patch that I had never visited. Along the Seneca Creek Greenway Trail, there’s contact between the sedimentary rocks that filled in the Culpeper Basin and the crystalline rocks of the Marburg Schist. That’s an opportunity for groundwater to collect, and therefore you can find some tree species that like their feet wet in this otherwise upland locale. Best example: this humongous Box Elder (Acer negundo), found along the remnants of a hedgerow.

peelyspreadingDown along the Potomac at Riley’s Lock, where that same Seneca Creek has its mouth, is a handsome row of salmon-skinned River Birch (Betula nigra) (left), as well as single trees of Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) (right), soaring into the sky.

We talked about mnemonics and keys for separating the white oak and red oak groups. The acorns of the reds, somewhat like red wines, are more acidic and require some aging underground before they germinate (or become palatable to squirrels). The bristle tip on the leaf of a red oak is not a separate structure, but rather an extension of the leaf vein. Even a red oak-group Willow Oak (Quercus phellos) shows a small bristle tip. White or red, a dry oak leaf takes a long time to decompose; thus, “an oak forest is a noisy forest.”

Genre

Emily Nussbaum in a recent issue of The New Yorker:

The Fault in Our Stars has inspired a roiling debate about the popularity of Y.A. fiction, particularly among adult readers…. The messy part about this discussion is, of course, that plenty of the most potent and enduring “literary” works focus on adolescent identity, from Romeo and Juliet to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Often, it’s hard to distinguish the debate about art from the one about marketing, and from the thrumming anxiety about the economic survival of literary fiction—which is, after all, a genre itself. As with crime novels or science fiction, labelling entire genres “popular junk” or “ambitious art” is too simplistic: the teen book you like is Y.A.; the teen book I like “transcends the genre.”

Ellanor C. Lawrence Park project: 3

My third trip to Ellanor C. Lawrence Park, yet earlier in the day this time. It’s quite warm for October, and I heard Common Katydids in the early morning. White-Throated Sparrows are making their presence known. The Japanese Stilt-grass is starting to die back.

almost missed itThe park has provided some unexpected herps. This is the first Rough Green Snake (Opheodrys aestivus) that I’ve ever seen and identified. I nearly stepped on it, as it was lying across the trail and looked like a strappy leaf from a house plant, not like an animal at all. You can’t see the impossibly skinny tail in this image, but trust me, there’s another ten inches of snake out of frame.

Riverbend Park meadows

new placeMargaret Chatham led a grasses walk through the managed meadow at Riverbend Park on Sunday, a new place for me. This patch of twelve acres is upland, rather than down by the river where we go looking for bluebells, and it’s regularly mowed in strips. Access is from Jeffrey Road and the nature center, rather than the vistor center farther downstream, where the boat rentals happen.

Nimblewill (Muhlenbergia schreberi) was a new grass for me. The culms are a nice ruby red at this time of the year.

whorledWe looked at woody plants and forbs, too. I got a pointer on distinguishing a young catalpa tree from an invasive Paulownia. Look for the whorl of three or more leaves at the stem, as you see in this image. The Asian invader has only a pair of opposite leaves. Similarly, the only two Verbesina wingstems that we see here in the mid-Atlantic can be separated by their branching pattern.

Your botany WOTD is endozoochory, that is, seed dispersal that depends on passing through the gut of animals. Habitat managers found out too late, to their dismay, that Rosa multiflora can be invasive when aided by birds’ digestive tracts.

Marie Antoinette

David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette, a star turn for Woolly company member Kimberly Gilbert, has some affinities with the 2006 film of the same name by Sofia Coppola, but it also recalls Adjmi’s Stunning from 2008: a sheltered, privileged young woman, bratty at times and certainly ill-equipped to deal with the wider world, is hobbled by the man in her life, someone who proves to be weaker than she. Adjmi’s Marie says, “I feel like a game that other people play, but not me.” As her marzipan and fondant world dissolves all around her, this Marie’s journey is to a smaller, quieter place where she acquires some measure of fortitude, even in the hour of her doom.

The theatrical exaggeration and the “snapshots” of the famous lines from history in this script and production remind us that what we think we know about Marie’s story is only framing, not knowledge at all.

As events fall out and the pretty venue of the Petit Trianon disassembles into Marie’s prison, the complex set changes (e.g., rolling up a grass carpet to expose an iron-mesh deck) call for visible crew members to make the shifts—a rare, welcome sight at Woolly. Indeed, is this disassembly or dissembling: how many layers of artifice do the technicians need to peel away?

Sarah Marshall’s work as Sheep is expressive, even though her puppet has no articulation, just a head stuck on a pole. Ominous and playful, sometimes a head cock is all that’s needed.

  • Marie Antoinette, by David Adjmi, directed by Yury Urnov, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington