The Blueys are Blooming…again.

When the North American Native Plant Society asked me to write about a plant for the cover of their newsletter, I picked “the Blueys,” one of my favorite urban wildflowers, and one of the toughest. It blooms all summer in trash alleys, ditches, cracks in the asphalt, and this morning, at a telephone pole.

Thanks to recent rains, the Blueys are having their fall revival, so it’s time to share the article here at SidewalkNature. Irene Fedun, editor of the Blazing Star kindly gave permission to reprint a version below.

First, here’s a screenshot to show the artwork by Beatrice Paterson:

And here’s an audio clip in case you’d rather listen to the whole thing:

Who can resist a true blue flower? As blue as a bluebird wing, as blue as a summer sky, bluer than any local butterfly?

In Nashville, we’ve got several species of native, blue flowers, but most lean toward violet or lavender. Even a smidge of pink can nudge blue to not-truly-blue. True blue is rare.

Whitemouth dayflower is true blue. In books, it’s also known as Slender dayflower and Widow’s tears, but none of these names reference what’s so striking about the plant – the clear, bright, beautiful blue – so at our house, it is known as the Blueys: as in “Hey, the Blueys are blooming, come and see.”

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Fall Author Events and a butterfly update

Below, I’m listing local events where I plant to speak or share or both. The first one is this Saturday (Sept 27) at the Hendersonville Public Library.
But first, an update from this month’s Native Nature Share:

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Meet the Mustard: Nashville’s Superbloom

^{[buffalo and bison = same animal. Scientific name is Bison bison, a tautonym!]}

Nashville Mustard is blooming!

Want to Meet the Mustard?
Psyched for the superboom?
Wondering why this small flower is a big deal,
and what I mean by “Trace of the Trace?”

Drop by Fort Negley between 11am and 1pm on Saturday, March 8 and 29th to find out. And keep reading…

Here’s an update from our Meet the Mustard event from March 1:

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Nature Show ‘n’ Tell for Grown-ups

Here are some highlights from the past few Native Nature Shares. What is Native Nature Share? It’s a monthly get-together at Warner Park Nature Center: “an opportunity to learn from each other about our local habitats, and to build community in an informal, supportive gathering.”

Basically, It’s show ‘n’ tell for grownups. Everyone is welcome. All you have to do is bring one seasonal, right-now wonder that you think is urgently interesting and probably native: a plant, leaf, fossil, rock, stick, feather, fungus, bug, whatever.

You can ask the group to identify your treasure or you can tell us what it is, but either way, we’ll talk about it, and we’ll learn from each other.
The collective enthusiasm and experience and curiosity around that table is itself a wonder.

It’s like a Book Group, but without the guilt of not reading the book.

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Book: This is How a Robin Drinks (an invitation, and recap of Launch)

I wrote my first book in Kindergarten. It was about an ant:

This is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature is my second book, and it is finally real.

The advance praise is gobsmackingly wonderful, so I’ve made a page for what Margaret Renkl, Doug Tallamy, David George Haskell, Georgeann Eubanks, Erika Howsare, Michael Sims, and The Humane Gardener, Nancy Lawson took the trouble to say, along with some reviews so far. Here’s that page: link.
One review made me glad I read it alone in the kitchen, so I could clutch the countertop and have a proper, joyful, and very ugly cry.

Photos of the *Book Launch* at Parnassus Books with Margaret Renkl are below, but first, a request:

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Purple Martins

Purple Martin “migratory roosting” is a right-now, must-see wonder in downtown Nashville.

Go see them while you can. Their nightly, massive, communal roost won’t last long, and no one — not even a Purple Martin — knows if they’ll be back next year.

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Cicada update: babies

Look who hatched today! The first baby of Brood XIX periodical cicadas! With lots of luck, this new nymph will survive the next 13 years underground, then emerge and molt into adulthood in May 2037. Right now, it is barely bigger than the egg it came from, but you can see six legs, two antennae, and cute little eyes.

Part of that luck starts with the egg itself. If eggs are deposited in a twig that snaps, browns, and hangs (“flagging”) or in a twig that breaks onto sunny lawn, the eggs are not likely to survive. They dry out if not protected by living plant tissue. And then, at hatch time, if a nymph drops to any other surface but soil, it is doomed. And if the merest breeze wafts it to the roof, driveway, bird bath, street: doomed. And if it gets mown, trimmed, blown, sprayed w/ any pesticide: doomed. And if it gets spotted by even one of a zillion predators above-ground or below: doomed.
Good luck, little cicada!

New nymphs will be hatching for several weeks now, so watch for falling, tiny, white creatures. I’m pinning black t-shirts to the clothesline, the better to spot the contrast. I’m also watching our dog’s black-furred back as we walk her, in case neighborhood nymphs drop on for a ride.

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By the way, I wrote a book

After a festival or a hike, my husband will ask, “Did you tell anyone about your book?” or “Did you mention you have a blog?” and I will answer “No.”
Honestly, I forget. And I’d rather talk about Mosquito Buckets of Doom or Caterpillar Host Plants or Native Habitats than talk about myself, even when “myself” is 100% relevant to the topic at hand.

So, I am extra grateful that Margaret Renkl let slip that my forthcoming book is finally coming forth.
She put two surprise shout-outs in her essay in The New York Times, “The Cicadas are Here, Singing a Song for the Future” (link). While quoting from one of my cicada Instagram posts, she mentioned my book, “This is How a Robin Drink: Essays on Urban Nature.”

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Meet a Periodical Cicada (life cycle)

Greetings, Cicada fans!
My goal is to capture every stage of the life cycle during this Brood XIX emergence.
Hatchings are the next step, but till then, here goes…
Let’s meet a periodical cicada.

This cicada is 13 years old:

His story:
13 years ago, his mom laid an egg in twig in a tree. Six weeks after that, the eggs hatched, the new nymphs fell to the soil, found a crack, and burrowed inside to suck on tree rootlets.
For 13 years he and his siblings ate, peed, grew. They wriggled out of their skins four times before their final outfit, which included brand new accessories: wings.

**If the tree is cut down during the 13-years, the cicadas will not survive.**

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Periodical Panic, Part 2

Part 1 tried to calm panic about tree damage, noise, stink, inconvenience.
Part 2 will try to stir panic, but on behalf of the cicadas.

Here’s a new yard sign I wish I could sneak all over town. Even though many of us had a “No Mow April” sign, some of us need this new one, just for a few days: “No Mow Cicada.”

**Can we please delay our obsessively tidy, short-bladed, weekly mow and blows? For another week or maybe two?**

^{(^not a real sign, just a real digital image)}

Cicada emergence is well underway, and in some areas almost over, but our lawncare is killing them before they get a chance to mate.

It’s all about timing. These cicadas have spent 13 years underground prepping for the moment they emerge from the soil, climb a vertical thing, hang on tight, and break out of their nymphal exoskeleton. This final transition can take hours. They start to appear at dusk, but by morning many are still searching for a safe spot, or are mid-way through their final molt, or are still hanging to let their white, dough-soft bodies sclerotize into stiff, black, flight-ready condition. New adults don’t even try to fly until the sun warms them, and sometimes not until afternoon. When startled, females drop to the ground. And all cicadas are notoriously clumsy fliers.

So when a lawn crew arrives with lawnmowers, trimmers, leafblowers, pesticide sprayers, nearly all the newly emerged cicadas are doomed. Lawncare may be their most successful predator yet, and unlike the predators with whom cicadas evolved, a lawnmower does not reach “predator satiation.” A lawnmower never tires of eating cicadas. There is no end of cicadas that lawncare can kill.
Until there is an end of cicadas.

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