biodiversity hurray

on saturday i went to a day-long volunteer training for "rapid natural area assessment" sponsored by the huron river watershed council. over the summer, 90 sites will be assessed by volunteers to determine which are the highest quality places that would be top priority to be protected. one of the most important characteristics is abundant biodiversity: many species of trees, shrubs, and plants.

with this in mind, i took a walk through our strip of woods that borders the hayfield. and, without taking notes and trying to be scientific, here are species that i noticed:

trees:
red, white, and black oak
red maple
black cherry
pin cherry
basswood
shagbark hickory
pignut hickory
blue beech
hopbornbeam
sassafrass
cottonwood
hawthorn
sumac
ash (all dead)
elm (mostly dead)
box elder
poplar
willow
autumn olive (invasive, along perimeter)
buckthorn (invasive)

prickly gooseberry
black raspberry
gray dogwood (or silky?)
red osier dogwood
multiflora rose (along perimeter)
grapevine

native wildflowers and plants:
spring beauty
trillium
trout lily
wild geranium
nodding trillium (white and red)
mayapple
jack in the pulpit
virginia waterleaf
cutleaf toothwort
pale blue violet
yellow violet
ramp
poison ivy
queen anne's lace
bergamot
various asters
various goldenrods

pennsylvania sedge and other as yet unifentified sedges

but also: garlic mustard: vigorous alien invasive, taking over the world

and that doesn't include the wetland itself to the north of the field, pictured above.

the total area may be quite small, but it has excellent biodiversity.

and to keep it that way, i'll go pull some more garlic mustard.

notes on russia

Notes on Russia

The massive bronze statue of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, dominated the square on Nevsky Prospekt in the center of St. Petersburg. All I could remember about her was the high school playground rumor that she died making love to a horse. As horse-crazy teenage girls, we knew a thing or two about horses and this was hard to visualize. Surely she was one of the most powerful women in the world, and two centuries after her death, her story was reduced to that crazy myth about her voracious sexuality. Catherine never tried to hide her several significant lovers. On the other end of the spectrum, the Virgin Queen defined Elizabeth I.
I’d found a precious empty space on a park bench in the shade and pulled out my guidebook. I knew so little about Russia and was annoyed with myself for not reading much before I arrived. I was traveling with my friend Susan and had let her make most of the arrangements. She’d come to visit while I was living in Sweden, so I’d planned our adventures in Stockholm, Uppsala, and Helsinki, leaving Saint Petersburg to her. The huge attraction for anyone in our profession of art history is the State Hermitage Museum, known for its enormous collection of over three million works of art. Difficult to visit until the thaw in East-West relations in the 1990s, its well-known but mostly unseen masterpieces in the Winter Palace had the additional appeal of formerly forbidden fruit not exactly on the usual museum circuit.
And yet, I had fled after an hour in the galleries, eager to get out in the June sunshine and look around the city.

The Repin
The old-fashioned compartment on the Russian train Repin was hot and stuffy. The walls were plastic paneling and the seats were upholstered with a worn brown fabric with dark green swirls in the ugliest, most unnatural configuration possible. Outside the sliding door to the compartment, militaristic versions of folk music were playing at an uncomfortably high volume in the corridor. Shortly after the train pulled out of Helsinki, a porter came around, offering a stick of something resembling salami, a packet of crackers, and a watery beer, apparently part of the service. At Vyborg, the border crossing into Russia, three police in elaborate military uniforms took away our passports for about a half hour, making sure our visas were in order. Then two presumably Russian businessmen entered the compartment without a word or a nod to us or each other.
When we rolled into the Finland Station in Saint Petersburg at almost 11 p.m, the “White Nights” sky of early June was still partially light. Guidebooks had warned that taxi drivers lurk to take advantage of arriving tourists. Taxis have no meters and no fixed prices, so you must always bargain hard for a price in advance, and several drivers may be competing for your business. Some may be regular taxi drivers, but many are ordinary car owners making a little extra money. This sounded dicey, especially as darkness was coming on.
As we rolled our bags off the train, a tall man with a baby strapped to his back asked in almost perfect American English, “Do you know what you’re doing?”
We didn’t, in spite of the fact that we were both experienced travelers.
He asked where we were staying and then gestured to his wife and a small child. “Come with us, we’ll share a taxi. We can be dropped off first, then he’ll take you to your hotels. Our apartment is on the way.”
He was Finnish; his wife Russian. He’d worked for a while in L.A. She went outside the station and several cars immediately pulled up, but we were four adults, a small child, a baby, and plenty of luggage, so she waved them away, waiting until a battered Lada station wagon with a roof rack appeared. Somehow, we all squeezed in. The price would be about twelve dollars. We were very grateful and offered to pay it all at the end.
“No tip, remember,” our hero said. “He’ll ask for one, but don’t give him a thing extra. Three hundred roubles is already more than enough.”

The Corinthia Nevsky Palace and the Oktiabryskaya
Susan’s colleagues in the museum world had highly recommended a five-star hotel: the Corinthia Nevsky Palace, suitable for a self-described Jewish princess. She had found a decent price on line and booked a nonrefundable reservation for five nights. When the total bill appeared on her credit card, it had escalated wildly with the addition of service fees, taxes, and extra White Nights occupancy charges. I was retired a retired cheapskate, and the pretensions of fancy hotels turn me off. With the help of a bemused Swedish travel agent, who questioned why I wanted to go to Russia, I’d found a more reasonably priced hotel nearby, the three-star Oktiabryskaya. It was a few long blocks away from the Corinthia, near a large busy square where several big streets converged. The driver took us first to my hotel, and Susan insisted that she would walk from there; she wanted to stretch her legs; it wasn’t very far. She set off and walked a long way before she realized she might be on the wrong street. We had both learned the Cyrillic alphabet for this trip, and when she finally came upon a street sign legible in the dim light, she knew she was lost. Someone pointed her back towards Nevsky Prospekt (перевода. Перспектива).
My room at the large Soviet-era Oktiabryskaya was large, clean, old-fashioned in decor, and perfectly acceptable, though swarms of mosquitoes came through the thin curtains when I opened the window. Ladies of the night sat quietly in several small armchairs near the elevators. The buffet breakfast consisted of strange unidentified hot and cold foods. Ahead of me were a group of French ladies who laughed at the offering, repeating to each other “Mais, qu’esque c’est?”
Susan’s sixth-floor room at the Corinthia was smaller, attractively decorated in international upscale hotel style, and with a view over the six lanes of traffic on Nevsky Prospekt including a view of the broken timbers of the roof of a rundown building opposite. Night and day, two inscrutable beefy security guards sat outside one particular door on her floor. The buffet was excellent by any standard, and Susan invited me to be her guest. They never asked for her room number, and she didn’t feel guilty, given what she was paying.

At the State Hermitage Museum: a private tour
Mr XX met us at the staff entrance of the vast museum, which sprawls over six buildings. The curator of modern art was polite, but not overly effusive. Susan had met him when editing a catalogue of paintings loaned to the Art Institute of Chicago. He headed immediately to the modern art galleries. We walked fast up the enormous white marble staircase, under gilded and painted ceilings and enormous crystal chandeliers, past huge malachite and lapis lazuli basins, vast mirrored chambers and others hung with tapestries, until we finally reached the top floor. Here in plain, white-walled galleries were the famous Matisses, Gauguins, and Picassos and a very important large painting by Degas that was looted from Germany during World War II. It was a hot, sunny day and the windows stood open; no fancy climate control for these masterpieces.
The curator and Susan chatted, exchanging museum gossip; I looked at the famous paintings seen in every art history textbook. After teaching art history for seven years, and working as an editor at the Detroit Institute of Arts for twenty years, my enthusiasm for great masterworks had worn down. I knew that these artists had changed the direction of Western art; Matisse’s Red Room was a favorite of students. Certainly I would enjoy any one of the paintings at home if offered the chance, but, as one of my friends says, are they so important? They are just paint on canvas. Mr. XX told a few stories about the visionary Russian collectors who had purchased these great works from the young artists in Paris. He mentioned that he hadn’t been allowed out of Russia until the late 1990s. These were the only original French works that he’d seen first-hand until that time, although that was his specialty.
After a half hour, he was gone, pleading an important meeting. Susan was a little miffed; she and her colleagues had gone out of their way to be hospitable in Chicago, wining and dining their impoverished Russian colleague.
“He knows I’ll retire soon; I’m no longer of use to him,” she said, and headed for the dozens of Rembrandts.
I looked out at the sun warming up the day and decided to take a walk. We’d bought three-day passes to the Hermitage; there would be plenty of time. I wanted to get my bearings in the city.

By the Sea: Primorskaya
The warm hospitality we were shown one evening more than compensated. Again through her museum connections, Susan had met a Russian couple who had invited us to dinner at their apartment. Mikhail Karrasik was an artist, a printmaker, and also a dealer in fine antiquarian illustrated books. We took a packed subway to the end of its line, where his partner met us. Marina was slim, pleasant looking, slightly intellectual, wearing fashionable glasses. She hailed one of the little battered yellow minibuses that run fixed routes all over the city, and we rode about five minutes to an enormous complex of tall Soviet-era apartment blocks.
Next to the pot-holed street, dirt paths were worn through a field with scrub trees here and there; between the buildings weeds grew up in a sandbox and vines covered a metal climbing structure. Litter was everywhere: all sorts of trash and rubble, the skeletons of discarded strollers and umbrellas, plastic bags and bottles. This was a warm summer evening and quite a few people were walking here and there, but there was no sense of pleasure in the scene. If all this looked grim in June, how would it look in January?
And then I was surprised to see the sun gleaming on an expanse of open sea. This was prime real estate. But apparently there was no access to the water, not even a sidewalk or path that ran along the sea wall made of chunks of concrete.
“I am sorry for you to see the condition of our building,” Marina said.
The door was a windowless, rusted slab of steel with graffiti all over it, requiring two keys to open. We stepped into a dark, dank concrete entrance hall. On one wall was an array of narrow metal mailboxes, some filled with dirt and trash, others bashed in and all hanging at crazy angles.
Marina called her husband to say that we were getting on the elevator. Often, she explained, it breaks down, so if she doesn’t arrive soon, he will know to try to fix it. The elevator’s interior walls were of plywood, showing extensive burn marks, gouges, graffiti. The numbers on buttons indicating the floors were punched in or defaced beyond recognition. All that was missing were bullet holes.
“I apologize,” Marina said. “This is very embarrassing. But there is no point to clean things up; they just get destroyed again. People do not yet understand private property.”
Out of the elevator on the twelfth floor, down a grim corridor lit only by a tiny bulb, and Marina again used two keys to unlock another formidable steel door.
And we walked into a bright, sunny, clean, high ceilinged artist’s studio, with framed prints on the walls, large work tables, and a lithography press. A loft held shelves crammed with books, and there was modern furniture; all was as sophisticated as any loft in New York or Paris. A gaunt, dark man in his sixties rose to greet us warmly, kissing Susan on both cheeks, and shaking my hand.
Mikael explained that this ‘70s apartment building was designed by the government with studios for artists on the corners of some of the floors. A member of the artist’s union, he had waited on a list for years to be granted this. The tall windows let in plenty of light and there was a small balcony that looked west out to the sea. From there you could see what a wreck the entire waterfront was, with rotting wooden jetties and the shells of abandoned warehouses and the rusting hulls of ships, with waves full of flotsam and jetsam breaking over every kind of junk.
Marina opened a bottle of Prosecco and put out some peanuts and we settled down on a comfortable leather sofa. Most of the conversation went on between Mikael and Susan. I sat in stunned silence, trying to make sense of it all. We’d moved so quickly from one world to another.
Marina spread a stylish tablecloth on the worktable next to the lithography press. The modern porcelain was plain white; the cutlery from famous German manufacturer. A puree of asparagus soup, garnished with small shrimp; then a slab of salmon and a salad; a pretty little fruit tart for dessert. We’d brought two bottles of wine, a California red and an Austrian white, bought duty-free on the ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki. Susan doesn’t drink much, so the three of us had plenty of wine.
After dinner Mikael brought out some of his most precious Russian illustrated books to show Susan, who collects such things, though principally Western European and American ones.
Marina hovered about, occasionally mentioning a price, and Susan was very polite but not interested.
When it was time to leave, Marina accompanied us. Again, she called Mikael on her cell phone to let him know we’d made it down. I asked to buy a bottle of water if there was a shop open anywhere nearby. She’d warned us not to even brush our teeth with tap water.
There was a small structure on the sidewalk that looked like a construction children had made out of a large cardboard box covered with advertising signs. It had only a small opening at eye level. Marina said something to the person invisible within, offered a few rubles, and a bottle of water was handed out. She said a few words to the minibus driver and gave us a handful of subway tokens, and we were off to the Metro.

hurry spring

on Easter Monday it is still very chilly at frog bog farm, not that the cold water keeps ellie out of the pond.

yesterday the chorus frogs and the wood frogs have been calling and the goldfish have started to be interested in their expensive new "spring and autumn" pellets, imported from germany. they can't digest regular food when the water is below 50F but this fancy stuff offers fine dining when the water is above 39F. i assume it is, but have not yet invested in the appropriate thermometer. the trout lily leaves are up and i've found one spring beauty that is blooming.

on the other hand, the evil alien invasive garlic mustard is very present in several places at the edge of our woods and can be seen all along six mile road, preparing to take over the universe of native wildflowers. if you don't know about garlic mustard, google it. and be very afraid.

i, like many others living in the detroit area, have been feeling quite gloomy of late; a partial reason for not writing on my blog. the straws have been in the wind for some weeks now that GM may go into bankrupcy and Chrysler has two weeks to finalize a deal with Fiat or die. (i'm hoping for Fiat of course--wouldn't it be fun to have one of the new cinquecentos? but will they come back into the American market?) it's all happened so fast that the whole situation seems unbelievable. much of it can be traced back to just plain old greed: make the big suvs and trucks, that's where the big profits were. i keep a little trace of pride in ford, as of course they were such major supporters of the dia in the old days, and they haven't needed bailout money. they seem to me like the real hometown team. i even once brought a vodka and tonic to dodie ford at a ccs party in grosse pointe.

the university of michigan museum of art has opened a new wing and it is very handsome and simple with lots of windows on the ground level, making it literally transparent. i was happy to see that the silver tea and coffee service that we gave in 2002 is on display, albeit in the 'study collection.' this belonged to my great-grandmother mimie chouteau of st. louis and was made by tiffany & co., but as usual with what my father called 'henshaw luck' it dates from about 1885, before the much more interesting and attractive art nouveau style came into fashion. i was very happy to see it there, but it did seem to need a little polishing. mimie's gandfather was charles gratiot, for whom the avenue was named, so you might say there is a michigan connection.

i have picked up auditing corinne painter's philosophy 101 course again, for the next two weeks the topic is the meaning of life. chances are good that there will be no answers but it's hard to say that the topic isn't of interest and the students are very engaged. that's gratifying to see.

jeremy has promised new photos of bennie and tamara, but they haven't arrived yet, so i'll let ellie have the photo honors on this post. apparantly all is well in california and the easter bunny left plenty of eggs for both tamara and bennie, but she scored them all.

just another march day in san francisco

the typical drunken saint patrick's day parade in the morning and the less expected stoned 'brides of march' in the afternoon.

 a visit to the san francisco museum of modern art in between.

a sfmoma you can see an installation of 224 black soft poodles surround a white ceramic newborn baby on a golden star by elizabeth fritsch, a german artist.

 bennie was born on square root day (3/3/09). what does it all mean?

blame it on facebook or bennie

what with everything going on in my world, i haven't written in this blog for quite a while. i'm in san jose, after a few days is LA last week, and am trying to be helpful with tamara and the household, as jeremy is back to work and aekyong still a bit sore. did i mention that bennett edward wise was born on march 3? he was, 8 lbs 2 oz., and is an exemplary baby, calm and easily contented. but the real problem that keeps me from writing is facebook. it takes me just enough away from blogging; reading everyone's updates and trying to think of what i might want to say, what photos to download, and pondering whether or not to give it up and just use it to post photos.

here are some odds and ends that i've been thinking about: bennie looks so much like jeremy that it's uncanny. fortunately aekyong is quite sure that she is his mom. tamara is doing well on the whole, and tomorrow she goes to her 'sibling welcome workshop.' i am amazed at how much bennie has changed in just a week. at first he was eating and sleeping, eating and sleeping, and now he is eating, looking around at the world for a while, and sleeping. a very good baby. a keeper, as my father used to say.

aekyong says that when she was a child in korea, she went with her aunties and cousins into the forest to gather pine needles for kindling and mushrooms to sell in the market. now everyone cooks and heats with gas or oil, so the pine needles are very thick on the ground and the mushrooms have been choked out.

last week, aekyong's sister was here and did a lot of cooking and freezing of korean food. one of aekyong's favorites is a combination of yam stems and fern stems. each takes so long to soak and to prepare that she won't share more than a taste with me. now i know what some of the things in korean cuisine that resemble sticks are. fortunately, aekyong is willing to share her sister's excellent chap chae.

a mourning dove is nesting in the pollarded mulberry in the back yard. we saw the pair making the nest two days ago, and now they are alternating sitting on the eggs (usually two) which will hatch in about two weeks. i hope tamara will be able to see the baby birds. the lemon tree in the back yard is producing bushels of lemons for jeremy to take to work. i am teaching aekyong the arcane art of making lemonade. along the los gatos creek walking trail, california poppies, and lupines are blooming and almost all the trees starting to leaf out and apple blossoms and cherry blossoms coming along. 

i like california and i'm happy to be here for a while. here's tamara with newborn bennie:

my most successful art history paper

by the end of my senior year at wellesley college, my poor grades had improved, not that they were anything spectacular. i'd changed my major to art history, having found that my good visual memory served me well in identifying slides on exams. for research papers, we were required to write only about works of art that we could see firsthand: no pictures in books. this was good training and there were plenty of resources at hand: the museums in nearby boston and cambridge, as well as the collection of the wellesley college museum itself.

in my final semester, i took the advanced course in medieval sculpture. this was taught by the distinguished miss teresa frisch, viennese by birth, with a strong teutonic accent and very good tweed suits and italian shoes (not that i recognized gucci at the time, but i did admire the little snaffle-bit pseudo buckles). miss frisch also served as our class dean for several years. my unexceptional behavior (i was never caught sneaking out of the dorm at night to meet boys, like a certain friend of mine), and the fact that i sat in the back of the classroom and never asked nor answered a question, meant that miss frisch and i had very little contact.

like many another impressionable student, i was attracted to medieval art. it exuded a spirituality missing from the dry protestantism that i'd been brought up on. i decided to write my final paper on a gothic sculpture in the college museum, a typical madonna and child. this was a limestone piece, about three feet high, with the elegantly crowned and dressed madonna holding the child on her left hip. baby jesus was strangely mature and held a small fat songbird, a symbol of the holy spirit. there was a little damage to the madonna's crown and some pieces missing from the folds of her garment--those crude protestants loved to take their mallets and try to destroy such things--but the overall condition was good. 

its label said 'french' but its exact provenance was unknown. the game was to compare it to other, similar figures, and try to determine where and when the sculpture was made. i looked at every detail in every book on medieval sculpture in the library, and every similar statue in collections in the greater boston area. i found enough similarities in style to conclude that this figure must have been carved for a small church in the central loire valley and date to about 1360.

the written paper replete with footnotes and bibliography had to be turned in, but miss frisch asked that students working on objects in the college museum present their findings to her in person. this was scary for me, but i wouldn't be around much longer to be embarassed by my mediocre academic performance. 

the professor and i stood in front of the madonna. i had brought along a stack of library books flagged with illustrations that supported my findings. it didn't take long for me to finish my presentation.

miss frisch smiled  and reached down. out of the jaws of her well-traveled briefcase came my paper, with an 'A' clearly written on the front.

"congratulations, my dear," she said. "this is a fine piece of work."

i was surprised and pleased.

but then she looked closely at me, blue eyes through tortoise shell glasses, and asked, "but who ARE you? why don't we KNOW you?"

this made my absolute lack of academic distinction clear.

she would like a copy of my paper. they were planning a new guidebook to the collection, and my research would be useful to her in writing about such an important piece. i gave her the original. it wasn't easy to make copies in the '60s.

the next week, i graduated.

years later, i was attending the college art association meeting in boston, and a special trip was offered for an evening reception at the new wellesley college museum. a large building had been designed by the distinguished spanish architect rafael moneo. i hadn't been back to the college for thirty years, so i was happy to have this opportunity. along with a flock of other art historians, i had a glass of wine and some brie and wandered around admiring familiar and new works of art and puzzling over why the architect had designed a strange double staircase to allow access from one level to another.

i wanted to have a look at the madonna and child but i couldn't find her anywhere among the triptychs and other examples of medieval art. i asked around and someone finally introduced me to the museum's curator, a slender, pleasant young woman all in black. i said congratulations and made polite comments about how well the collection looked. then i inquired about the sculpture. where was it?

she thought for a moment. "oh yes," she said, pausing. "yes, i know the one you mean. it's somewhere down in basement storage now. i'm afraid it's a fake."

"avarice" from the cathedral of autun in burgundy

happy february birthdays everyone

the pond is high on february 14, 2009

for such a short month, february has so many significant birthdays: darwin, lincoln (born the very same day, i wonder what the astrologers say about that), jm, peter j, ingrid a, and--ahem-- frogbogblog. a very happy birthday to all, and many more for all who can enjoy them.