Laughing Ravens

  Thursday afternoon, just before shutting down my work computer, I got an email from my arborist. His crew was going to have time to take out a few trees that he had been unable to finish cutting down earlier this year. I thought: fantastic! He let me know the crew would be here at 9am. Okay, I was a little surprised, but still excited.  Six am and the backup beeping of a tractor-trailer outside my bedroom window shocked me awake. Even my neighbor, the former excavator, wouldn't start moving heavy equipment at 6am. Bleary-eyed, I went outside to confirm that this crew was in fact going to repair our little rural road. Today.  Well, that was fine. I needed to head into town to go to the doctor's office and have some blood drawn. Blasted off a little after 7am and arrived a half hour later, none the worse for wear. No one was waiting, so I was quickly called to the front desk. The usual pleasantries were exchanged: name, DOB, referring doctor, was I fasting, etc. The nurse...

'Furui Shiro' ( Carol S. Warner , R. 2016) SPEC-X  I expected that after the last of the Louisiana irises finished blooming, that the iris season was over. I had not expected the iris pseudata and the iris ensatas to pick up the pace. June ended with a few of the pseudatas sending up their first-season blooms. This included 'Ause' and 'Furui Shiro'. I was thrilled to see anything bloom on 'Ause' since it was planted late last summer, and sometimes it can take a while for a plant to establish in a new location.  'Furui Shiro' has been something altogether different. It is in its second year (having not bloomed at all last summer)... and the growth spurt this spring was intimidating. When you read the advertising copy on websites, you have to take everything with a grain of salt, right? Well, Carol Warner described it this way: "There are three branches on the stalk giving about 10 blooms. The terminal on a well grown plant will push a four...