A field of flowers I planted last year on Father’s Day has been blooming since May. I didn’t plant it on Father’s Day to honor my father, so much as to be able to easily remember when I planted it — late spring.
Wildflowers are fickle. This is a blend of about 40 kinds, and your brain must translate almost every color known to man to see it. Interestingly, this riot of color cannot be caught with smartphone cameras. Behold it instead.
What we are trying to do with the flowers illustrates a philosophy that has become our catchphrase and a commitment between my brother and me: “Don’t mess with it too much.”
Sure, I went down there and I tilled, and I manipulated by spreading all those seeds at once, but there are no fertilizers or pesticides applied. There are no leaf blowers. Other than the weather, this place, close to the bordering wetlands, is left be. That’s increasing rare here, where houses and their surrounding grounds are almost always under some form of aggressive transformation.
June is a month of late sunsets and golden light. You can feel embraced by this summer month, because you and all you see is wrapped in a soft, promissory glow.
I note the haze created by the heading barley and then watch the wind that is mimed by the grains’ graceful movement. Waving grain is in one of our anthems, because it speaks of abundance and thus opportunity. And it’s one of the reasons the federal government chose green for dollars. They knew that most people associated the green acreage rolling out in front of the developing, if imperiled, nation meant stability.
June, if you are lucky, is spent almost entirely outdoors and, in the case of a farmer, watching the fretful spring turn generous. The field is viewed primarily from the tractor prepping ground, patrolling for weeds, scouting for undesirable pests. Your eyes make a constant sweep for comparisons among the green themselves.
From the glittering heights of asparagus fern to the ruby vein that rims the just-germinated buckwheat, green is often a glorified cover crop that will enhance the soil and provide stability by adding biomass. Here is the truth: In order for the land to provide stability, you must introduce a form of stability.
The green of those first paper dollars, lush but printed and not grown, cannot capture the spectrum here.
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