Category: Nashville

First Week of April: Trees

A roundup of quick Sidewalk Nature updates: one warning and three wonders.

Trouble with Double

Kwanzan cherry trees don’t feed pollinators or birds. They look great two weeks of the year but they don’t support our foodweb. Prunus serrulata ‘Kwanzan’ / ‘Kanzan.’

My concern is that when people have room to plant one tree, this is the one they’ll want. It is cultivated for pretty, and pretty it is, but it doesn’t have nectar, doesn’t make fruit, and as a nonnative congener, its leaves support only a fraction of the Lepidoptera species a native Prunus / cherry can.

But at the Cherry Blossom Festival this month, festival-goers can walk away with a free Kwanzan cherry tree from the Nashville Tree Foundation.

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Nashville Mustard Tour: a Trace of the Trace

Keen to see Nashville Mustard while it lasts? It only blooms a few weeks each spring, and now’s the time. Why go see it? It’s yellow and gorgeous, it’s a mini superbloom, it’s a good photo op, and a true native. Think of it as a remnant of our historic grasslands, or as I like to imagine: a trace of the Trace. Trace, as in buffalo roads, when bison travelled to the salt lick that “made” Nashville (near what is now Bicentennial Mall.)

This post is to show where the Mustard is, so you can visit your nearest site, or go see them all.
And, it’s a happy update to last year’s post about Cutting the Mustard…

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Secret Sidewalk: eight late-November wonders

As fall drifts toward winter, nature doesn’t slow down, not really. Amazing things happen all around us, all the time. This site’s tagline: “Everyday wonders in everyday habitat loss” includes not just “natural” areas, but our own yards, trash alleys, parking lots, roadsides. For example, our Secret Sidewalk …

The Secret Sidewalk is a shortcut through 3 neighborhood blocks, but rather than running along a street, it runs between homes. It’s a 5-foot-wide Metro right-of-way flanked by property lines, and it feels intimate, despite crossing four roads, and despite tall privacy fences. It takes walkers past a mix of cultivated and wild. Exotics, natives, volunteers, invasives: all here. Signs of the season change daily.

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Toothbrush Bug

Superman and I were the only witnesses to this nighttime scene. After which, I released the bug and retired the toothbrush.

I have not told the owner of the toothbrush.

“MOM,” he yelled to me next morning, “Is the new green toothbrush mine?”

“YES,” I yelled back, “The white one was worn out.” 

But what I didn’t add was, “and it’s in the trash because a giant Western Conifer Seed Bug was sucking on it.”

The Western Conifer Seed Bug’s genus name is Leptoglossus.
Lepto is “fine, thin, delicate,” and glossus is tongue.
You’d need a “fine, thin, delicate” tongue in order to suck sap from immature pine cones.

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Spring Beauties: Bee + Bloom

[Spring Beauty bee]

I usually use the ol’ Monarch butterfly example to talk to beginners about “host” plants and “specialization,” which can illustrate “Why Native Matters.”

But right now, in lucky lawns all over town, there buzzes another great example: the Spring Beauty bee.

Monarchs can’t raise babies on anything but Milkweed, right?
Well, Spring Beauty bees can’t raise babies without Spring Beauty pollen.

Spring Beauty is Claytonia virginica, a not-common-enough “common” wildflower in Nashville.
And Spring Beauty bees are Andrena erigeniae, a native mining bee.

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“It’s Full of Stars” of Bethlehem

[caption: upon looking at my yard]

While recovering from migraine during freakishly warm February days, I pull weeds. Slowly, gently, quietly, and in the shade. So far, I have filled an entire 30 gallon Leaf Bag with nothing but one kind of weed. My worst weed. The weed I wish would die in a supernova: the Star of Bethlehem.

I’ve ranted about this plant before (here), but I rant again because on every public occasion when I point to the foliage or the flowers and proclaim the thuggery of this twinkling plant, I am met with disbelief.
“Oh, but it’s so sweet!” gush the disbelievers. Sweet, pretty, adorable, etc.

All true. I used to make sweet, pretty, adorable bouquets of the flowers—all the flowers—in hopes that plucking them would prevent seed-formation, and perhaps reduce the number of new Stars next Spring.

But plucking did not work. Digging did not work. Smothering with cardboard did not work. Repeated removal of leaves did not work. Nothing works. New constellations continue to spread across the yard.

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Dashboard Nature: Car Spider

Today’s Dashboard Nature: the spider who lives in my car.

Funnel spider or Wolf spider?  Either way, it dashes in and out of the windshield gasket as I drive. 

“HELLO!” “GOODBYE!” “HELLO!” “GOODBYE!” etc, super-fast.
All the way to school, every day this week.

Today, it stood perfectly still through a red light at Music Row, which led me to imagine I had a chance to catch it. I pulled the car over, but my Spider Tupperware lives in the kitchen, not my car, and all I had on hand was yesterday’s teabag. Luckily, the bag was a nice, roomy pyramid which, I’ve just learned, can be pressed into a dome the perfect size to trap but not squish a car spider. 

But, if it’s a Wolf spider, all 8 eyes saw me coming, and if it’s a Funnel spider, all 8 eyes (in a different arrangement) saw me coming;
so the spider said “GOODBYE!” before my teabag got halfway there.

There were no more HELLOS! all the way home.

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Swarm Weather

“Are you home now??” texted my neighbor. ”I think there’s hundreds or thousands of bees making a nest in our pine tree as we speak. It’s crazy!!”

To me, it wasn’t crazy: it was perfect. Two friends had already witnessed this very thing in their yards recently, and I was jealous.
So I texted back: “It’s swarm time!”

By the time I got to my neighbor’s yard, all the bees had gathered in one spot, AS one spot: one big blob of buzzing, crawling, and flying creatures, at about 30 feet up the tree. They looked like a giant dollop of bubbling goo about to drip from a branch. 

A honeybee swarm!

I am grateful my neighbor knew what to do: call me,
and I am grateful I knew what to tell her: call a swarm-catcher.

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The Sycamore Squeeze

To squeeze a Sycamore ball is a seasonal pleasure, and the season is now.
Now is when last year’s clusters of Sycamore seeds start to fall and to fall apart.
For the next few weeks, they’ll disintegrate into drifting piles of loose, fluffy achenes: Sycamore “snow.”

To squeeze a Sycamore seed-ball is oddly satisfying.
Call it a Contemplative Practice.
Call it fun or sick or weird, but try it.

The Sycamore Squeeze is one way to get to know Where—and When—you are.

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