Cover
I would dare you to discover a square meter of disturbed, unmanaged land in Florida (or across the south) not covered in a layer of turkey tangle fogfruit, a.k.a. capeweed (Phyla nodiflora). I feel it crunch under my feet whenever I pass a particular stretch of lawn where exotic grasses have given way to this persistent ground herb - neglect, the retreat of herbicides, something different happened here - and I can hear when other people walk through fogfruit patches as well. It is not a succulent, but it is thick-skinned. The USDA claims it to be fire and draught resistent, and I have no reason not to believe them. It is strong and fast, as a plant; I have seen it climb a 50 foot mountain of fill and present a stable ground cover faster than erosion could do its dirty work and wear the pile down. It acts as a pioneer species in places where land has been moved, turned over, dumped, removed, or otherwise (mis)handled. I know purists who call it "worthless." It is not necessarily a native, although it lives from Florida to California across a southern band of North America. It lives there doing this work, being uneventful and unnoticed, unheralded where not altogether spited. Pulled up, its rhyzomy ivy-like structure reveals a matte, showing the whole ground in one interconnected weave of slightly hairy stalks. Each plant produces these delightful little bursts of flower, delicate white petals barely hanging on to a bulbous flower head, thick leaves, purplish-red and dark green. Ubiquitous where we inhabit the south; you may step on one today if you live here. The fogfruit is always ready to put down root, lurking and waiting for our next move. Benignly covering and protecting our sandy soil poured upon intermittently by torrents of desalinized ocean water, water purified by the atmosphere and dumped in buckets. The fogfruit grows, in part, so we do not have to worry; it holds back the true consequences of our actions. And, still, we curse its presence in our lawns and do not even bother to learn its delightfully melodious name as our soles crunch against its persistence and our sprays strangle another tangled patch to death.

In this, we are merely blinded, not bloodthirsty. We have simply neglected something; the fogfruit will forgive us easily and go on with its work. It is more a loss of delight than the destruction of something vital. Which, if only had been the case in other matters, may not have left me so deeply sullen this last day of 2006, this fourth year of this arrogant and thoughtless war, this second day of murder on the front page, this shameful, shameful fall from humanity. I do not care how angry this may make you; the hanging of Saddam Hussein was a bloodthirsty act and we should be ashamed to have been a part. Nothing of value is served by the spectacle, no one is saved, nothing is ended, vengance is perpetrated and the near certainty of savage warfare into the forseeable future is cast. It was wrong. It was foolish. More, it was evil. We did not neglect an experience benignly, or blindly in this bloodthirsty act. We let our instinct exceed our reason, we killed in full view of the television and for two days now we trot out these images as if they serve to symbolize anything but the bloodthirstiness of anger. Where is our sense, where is our reason, where is our humanity? Who have we become that we openly sanction murder, that we celebrate it in headlines and torrid descriptions of the death ceremony? I am ashamed for the United States, for my country of birth, for this great experiment in human self-rule that seems to be proving that power without education, capital without humanity, aristocracy without obligation, has no right to call itself civilized. The Bushes exposed this dirtly little secret about United States power; they cultivated it as an artform and shamed us all. And, so I wish for a fogfruit of humanity in 2007. I pray to the universe for all of us to notice how we too form an interlaced matte holding the fragile sands of power in place. They would have us forget, distract us with howls of vengance, tickle our worst emotions. In the year ahead, may we remember.

Tenacious
This lovely maroon leaf, sprouting and growing now, in late December, a week before winter's solstice, has a long history here in Florida. Florida holly, Christmas plant, Brazilian pepperweed, (Schinus terebinthifolius), has a history, rather than an ecology. It came late to this state, in the 1800s from South America, from the birthplace of my soulmate, from Argentina. An entrepreneurial chap in Bradenton, Florida, just south of here, decided it would make a nice holiday plant; its bright red berries and dark green leaves fruited just at Christmastime; it had the appearance of the season. And so it spread, hand to hand, beak to soil. Today, if my observations do not fail me, it is replanted daily by ravenous masked rodents. They bite off a mouthful of berries and release them complete with fertilizer some few hours later. Some time in the 1960s it reached what might be called a critical mass down here on this peninsula, this heap of sand, this Florida; it invaded every piece of farm field left to the state and to the nation during the land conservation craze of those years. And since then, it has perplexed land managers and nature lovers alike. It is unique in its qualities. It grows almost constantly throughout the year, except late fall to early winter. It can sprout from its stump, and do so with a wild explosion of branches making a cut stump a worse enemy than an old tree. And it produces, as it was brought here to do, an enormous load of colorful fruit every year at Christmastime, feeding our wintering bird population and hungry racoons and setting about an annual cycle of cultivation. It grows faster than anything around it and has an incredible plasticity of form, allowing it to overtop any reasonably sized canopy and shoot through the top. It has been classified, and rightly so in this instance for mostly the right reason, as an "invasive" plant. It dominates the plant communities where it grows, shading out everything but the dogged cabbage palm (Sabal palmetto) and an occassional intrepid live oak. It is beautiful, a plant with charm and attractiveness to the eye, but a plant with no sense of equity or fairness. It does not understand the need for cooperation, it overproduces fiber and berry and pushes itself out into every available nook and cranny and extends it arms in every possible direction. It holds a good sized bird population during daytime in its shaded understory, and armoured beetles in its roots and leaf layers. But it recreates what can only be called a sickly pale substitute for the possible variety and variation in a plant community like our palm hammock. It does not share and it does not care to. There is more to say on this matter, but for now rest it at this: I have been waging a quiet battle against this tenacious species. Its spirit and tendencies are not good metaphors, they do not teach our children well, and so we work to limit its influence. It is us, no question. It is our hands, our motives, our ceaseless desire to have whatever our impulses make us think we want; and so the work against it is hard work, endless work for a lonely soul. Work that requires patience and care and work that will draw us out of a failed paradigm. I believe that this is what Schinus can ultimately bequeath us, if we give it the right attention.

Fall Colors
Even here near the broad middle bulge of this planet where heat stays longer and cold hardly shows its face, the colors of changing leaves appear. This scarlet explosion is the familiar Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) that grew in the Northeast, that grows in the mid-Atlantic, and that lives down here in Florida, too. Its presence on the land is a familiar comfort, like an old friend or a favorite passage in a book. Here it overtops a Florida privet (Dodonaea viscosa) beside a small vernal sinkhole at the edge of the recovering hammock on campus. It covers several cabbage palmettos on the northern edge of the hammock and elsewhere on campus. In all of those places, it has turned the same shocking scarlet. It carries the memories of colder falls in its leaf structure, deciduous. It protects itself against the possibility of frozen ice crystals, piles of snow, by drawing down the vital sugars into its roots, setting a bud, and closing down for the season. In this warm November air, it seems an unnecessary caution, but life changes slow like that, never releasing qualities that might again be useful simply because they are not presently used. It is not all competition; it is not all blood and claw, there is no fixed efficiency in the mechanical sense of the word out there in the wild (or in here in the wild, either), life persists and carries what it carries for its own sake. Who could deny with certainty, for example, that the Virginia creeper changes it's colors because that is what it likes to do? Who would insist that every quality make sense in a teleological narrative of that sort, that nothing is left to chance or accident or, shudder to think it, simple desire to live what is, in fact, life?

Because greed has gotten the high ground in Washington, DC, we voted in a slate of Democrats who just as quickly backed away from fixing the problems they said that they despised. Do not let a day pass this next year when you do not remind them of this cause. Because, without a return to ethical policies written by honorable people representing our best intentions, we risk expulsion from the human community to which we should increasingly try to belong. It is not all about competition, it is about life. I know that it is. It is about Virginia creepers turning scarlet in the warm heat of the Florida sun, and grasses fading to next year's seeds, cycles of persistence, not fleeting at all.

Purists
In one of his most revealing passages, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “nature is the vehicle of thought.” In another he wrote that “Nature always wears the colors of the soul.” In the first passage he suggests that the life, collectively, mirrors our inner lives because it is the raw material for ideas and meaning; we cannot have a stormy thought without the actual storm. In the second he suggests that we bring a lot of our own moods and pre-conceived ideas to our interactions with the life, collectively. His challenge to us in Nature is to have the Discipline to distinguish these poles of meaning.

Aldo Leopold, like Charles Darwin, severed the human imagination from questions of nature. There is no vital interaction on this level; this is the veil of the modernist sciences, I think. For Aldo, the natural world was simply material that could be and had been “forged” into civilization; or a location where we must go, by foot or pack train, in order to renew our humanity and democratic spirit. The “land mechanism” was finished before we got there. Wilderness (the perfect, the finished “land mechanism”) could only shrink. We had trammeled the Garden, and once trammeled, no possibility for redemption. Leopold followed his metaphor too far, I think; we should be cautious not to do the same. When you take a cog and a wheel out of a machine, it is no longer a machine; it is only a hunk of metal (in a way, it becomes nature again). But when you take a cog or a wheel out of an ecosystem (by which we can understand Leopold to mean the removal of an entire species; his life example was wolves) it is changed, but it does not cease to be an ecosystem. This is a fundamental confusion that seems always to follow Leopold¹s wilderness logic. These ideas have spawned a kind of environmentalist Taliban, the evangelical fundamentalist naturist, extremists who, in their zeal to prove their faith, work to deny us our full birthright, “the great apparition that shines so peacefully around us.”

Historically speaking, concern about invasive species was first articulated and first noticed by George Perkins Marsh in Man and Nature (1863). It grew out of Marsh’s reading of Darwinism, which cast Nature as the only perfect force and exiled humans from membership. But the idea did not emerge as a broadly noticed issue until the past decade. Hmmmm....? Now it has come to function as one of our most common shorthand condemnations of a species or ecosystems. “It’s pretty, BUT it’s an invasive.” Indeed, most of my environmental studies students can actually identify more invasive species here in Florida than native ones; in other words, the natural world they know is an illegitimate one as far as they have been told. They crave the pure, they long for some other place where the Garden has not been soiled; they have been taught to have nostalgia for someplace else. Without diminishing the need to actively manage a wide variety of plant and animal species in order to maintain particular kinds of ecosystems and the natural aesthetics and trophic complexity they provide, I would like to suggest that the separation of human imagination and nature embedded in the wilderness ideal and in the fear of invasives is exactly the opposite kind of ideology than we need to solve our habitat crisis.

Addendum
Brazilian pusley (Richardia brasiliensis) and coast sandspur grow in the four-acre wilderness on the succeeding dredge heap next to my campus here in Florida. Both of them are beautiful plants, elegant in their structure. They are ubiquitous, and so unnoticed ­ unless one of those spurs catches your ankle. They have, along with two strains of carpet grass, dog fennel, castor beans, ragweed, capeweed and Brazilian pepper, reclaimed a large pile of fill left in a barren heap behind the Chapel Pond two years ago. A slow amble through these places reveals a stunning display of diversity and resilience and tenacity. Each individual plant, a remarkable structure on its own, together, something else even more inspiring. Not Darwinian at all, no brutal competition, inter-dependence, and a gentle form of it at that. There are otherwise well-meaning nature lovers who turn up their noses at these tremendous plants. Weeds, non-natives, invasives, they spit. Yet they are all plants, valid in their living, and all of them advancing an ecosystem where human disturbance had taken one away. Thoreau was right about this, our home soil is always rich in Emersonian metaphor.

Tugging Seeds
There is a wilderness of grasses and trees and anoles and large birds all living in the palm hammock at the edge of my campus, a dredge heap of invertebrate detritus less than four feet above sea level. This coast sandspur (Cenchrus incertus which means uncertain millet) is a member of this wilderness. This is a remarkable grass whose bite is as stinging as it looks. Its seeds are ensconced in hard fibrous barbed shells that hook clothing and pierce bare skin. You learn to keep an eye as you walk, you learn that this grass hides beside its less agressively built cousin, the crabgrass. You learn to watch where you step. And you still forget. Each barbed shell gets pulled from your clothing, by finger tips with skin pores just large enough for the barbs to sink themselves again, sticking to your fingers. It takes a delicate brushing of hands in the air to slight the barped pod off of you and to the ground, where you let it lie. The genius is the patience. It will wait for rain, a season of growth, the proper fertilization, and another hapless saunterer in search of vegetable game and all its progenitors will take flight again. The sandspur is a common plant along coastal areas impacted with frequent foot traffic. They follow the walker, depend upon him, rely on his careless habits and broad dispersal. Next year, a survey of the new generation of sandspur would track my studies this past Fall, retracing my footsteps of exploration as I sought new species of plant and came to know new groups of communities. The wild has multiple expressions and what amounts to a changed complexion under the steady warmth of the Florida sun.

Journal: 10-23-06 -- A flock of turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) descended on the Palm Hammock today. More than a dozen. Resting, then flapping their awkward unbalanced bodies into the sky. Gliding with an uncertain wobble. Then resting some more. They have a keen sense of smell and find hidden carrion with their noses. Something must have died. They silhouette against the slightly overcast sky, silently carving figure eights through the atmosphere. They perch like hulks of feather and flesh atop the chapel and on the Eucalyptus snags. What are they scouting? What do they expect to find? They were here two weeks ago as well, although not as many, gliding through in a pack, silently seeking the dead. Craving flesh, but wishing no harm, doing no killing. The turkey vulture is a kind soul.

Ubiquity and Infamy
My old familiar friend, crab grass (Digitaria ischaemum ), lurching out its rhyzomed stalk. I love this plant, the very symbol of natural tenacity. It is loathed by lawn fanatics world wide for its fleshy invasive habits. It crowds out the gentle stands of soft bluegrass, undermining their delicate roots at the same time. One company has estimated that 80% of all invasive grasses invading manicured lawns across the country is this very species, the smooth crab grass. You've seen it erupt from an unlikely sidewalk in mid-town Manhattan or creep out over the edge of the asphalt where standing water had soaked the day before. It sends out shoots from piles of crushed stone and will grow right in the middle of your son's summer sandbox. It only needs the slightest toehold to get started. That, and a splash of water, and a rapid unfolding, a building of cells. Acids and bases performing that magical dance that builds cells that look like cells that were built before and makes structures that look like structures of other places and other times. Crab grass (Digitaria ischaemum) is named in the first place because its pattern persists. Fantastically successful by all accounts. This one made an amazing leap from the back alley where its parent cluster spawned it before dying last year or the year before, and then it rode one of these bricks that was put in place in front of my eyes just over six weeks ago, with fresh sterile sand. I was filled with a strange sort of joy and surprise when I found it growing here this morning. The shape of the stalk, the curve of the leaf, the clumsy sprawling disposition, it reminded me of thoughts I'd had before, of things that had passed before my eyes; it's form familiar, comfortably so. You have to reach down below a crab grass plant and grasp it at the root stalk to remove it, which is near impossible to do with human fingers in a pinched space like this one between the bricks. If the root remains, more grass will grow. When the owner of this xeriscaped plot, who himself laid these bricks so many weeks ago unaware of the planting he'd done of this species, told me about how to care for the yard his rule of thumb was to "remove everything that looks like grass." I have done so with care thus far, but this one I'm leaving for now. It means too much to me.

On the anniversary of that horrible day a half decade ago the images of the lost architecture are everywhere. I consider myself blessed that I no longer watch television. But even in just reading the newspaper, there it is, again and again. And on its anniversary those uncivil bulldogs, Cheney and Rice, stand in front of cameras and recite the same lies that have been recited from the very beginning. They have figured out the psyche of the American electorate: Less than a majority is paying attention and the rest of everyone likes a good effort. That is what they keep presenting. Not the truth, not the facts, not the real world in which informed citizens live, but that they are convinced of themselves and the good effort they are making. And people seem to keep soaking it up. You can't blame a guy for trying, they say as they re-elect their doom. A good effort is being successfully presented. A false sense of order and purpose. They lie and more of our children die. The Enlightenment succeeded in producing a democractic aristocracy rooted in a free market, but it had aimed to over come aristocracy itself. This goal waits, like crab grass seed, for the right combination of water and sunlight.

Solidago Dirge
This branching towering stalk belongs to a seaside goldenrod (Solidago semperviren) planted next to the garage by the owner of this plot. There are several who have overgrown themselves, falling backwards into the garage wall or forwards onto the brick patio like drunken miners. They have evolved, as their name suggests, in seaside locations, these are dune flowers, ready to survive salty conditions and the intermittant drought. Enough water tells them to feed their roots, dig in for the long haul. More nutrients gives them a leafy stalky disposition. There is a certain intelligence in things, a place-based knowledge that serves well and adapts its knowledge to the very long term. The eruption of Asters, for example, the most recent family of plants, may be just that sort of thing. Short-term long term, variety and adaptability, patience and impatience in their proper time; seaside goldenrod, like most short lived perennials, has its species' survival in mind, if I may mix that metaphor. This one has grown leaves to feed its young roots and store up the needed energy for the certain drought that may never come in this xeriscaped yard on this pile of sand atop the piece of limestone stuck ungraciously to the underbelly of the North American continent. The water cycles daily, floating the sand enough for everything else to hold on. Keeping life in motion.

Which, as a trend, would be a good one in these days of George W. Bush. The scare tactics and violence they employ to keep the rest in order should cause everyone to shudder just a little bit. Ask oneself, of what else is he capable if these are his standards of truth? And, should we survive this travesty with parts of our democracy intact, we should be certain to think the next time. We should remember to throw a lot of money at education and food and teach civics and ethics in the classroom and make it matter as it should that someone has been born in this great nation and has the opportunities to truly make a difference. A perfect society can never be made, but if one does not work to that end one is working toward imperfection. Politics are too uncertain to be handed over to ultimatums and ideological snares, they are today's negotiations, tomorrow's hopes. The Bush's, who I am sure are a good people at heart, should be ashamed for their wayward son. This has cost too many too much. We can only hope that the ascendancy of these ideas has caused them the same sort of gravity problems that beset this goldenrod. May they tumble forward onto the brick patio of last year's mistake and leave us to grow our gardens as we will.

Iron Herbs
This Common Pursulane (Portulaca oleracea) has sprouted with vigor at the edge of the yard near the paved alley road. Its relatives are everywhere. It is perhaps the most common plant the world over. Researchers have indentified twenty-six different local names for this species, including Ngaglug in the Philipines, Farfena in Oman, and Verdolaga in the Dominican Republic. It is also used in many places as a traditional medicine, having an unusually high iron content and a complex of biologically active compounds that have proven traditionally effective at treating everything from boils to nauseau. It has been a regular component of salads for peoples everywhere, although, because of its potential toxicity, such uses are no longer encouraged. It grows in stages, dropping down roots alongside its succulent leaf stalks, not always to set, but always just in case. Its red branches and rounded leaves remind one of the Jade tree, long treasured in the East, but the delicate five-petalled flower it produces betrays its true character. The common pursulane's yellow flower opens only to sunlight, it remains folded otherwise. Pliny the Elder gave the sun his highest esteem in his Natural History for its contribution to the essential vitality of life; these ubiquitous plants seem to quietly concur, as well as to provide their own helpful additions. Unless you live in the far north, you have encountered the iron-rich pursulane, you have snapped its stalk and leaves underfoot or pulled its sprouts from your garden or allowed it to flourish at the edge of your driveway. You have unquestionably seen it; I know you have.

Which seems to me to be one of those incidentals that begs the question of truth. We are being exposed to a minute fraction of what might honestly be called 'world events' and being made to fix our attention and our earned value and our integrity on getting those few things right. And we haven't even gotten them right; we have gotten them terribly wrong. Our funds have paid for the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Some guilty, too, no doubt, but the vast numbers, innocent. And our polis has made this so; we have caused more than a proverbial mayem. Worse still, for all of the rest of the overlooked, this has been a shameful time, a time of neglect, a time or carelessness in the sense of who could care less? With the answer being a resounding, no one. These are the least caring of times. So, the common pursulane is the sort of natural fact that stands in sharp contrast to the awful manners we have decided to wear at home and carry abroad. Its passing from our common lives is perhaps one of those boundaries from which it is always difficult to return. May it entertain our salads once again.

Powder Puff
I thought this was a Wild Tantan (Desmanthus virgatus), but it turns out to be Sunshine Mimosa (Mimosa strigillosa). Also known as powder puff mimosa. It has been quietly extending its fleshy stem from edge places toward open space within this xeriscape here on the sandy ground of Gulf coast Florida. It grows here like elsewhere in Florida from an abundance of seed stock left by its own past generations. Slowly, unadorned, without fanfare, it creeps, pressing out a compound pinnate leaf of the most intricate and delicate character, and then pressing out another. So unassuming, in fact, that I had barely noticed it except to notice that it grew in every spare corner and had a familiar appearance. It looks very much like the Prairie Mimosa (Desmanthus illinoensis), which is found in the central prairie of the United States and welcome as a highly nutritious grazing plant. But this plant has similar leaves only; it grows in a very different manner creeping along the ground and it explodes a purplish, instead of a white, rounded powderpuff flower. It will leave behind traces of the summer's energy for future residents and future years. This flower shocked me this morning in my daily rounds. It had appeared overnight, a firework explosion of thin petals, a strange purplish presence jumping out at me from the otherwise drab yard. I thought it was a plastic object, at first, and then I thought it had fallen off a plant from the next yard. When I reached to pick it up, I found it connected to the plant where it lay. I noticed then that the mimosa had sprouted multiple pods that would become flowers in the next few days and I realized that the rains that had picked up this week, as against two weeks without rain, had set these patient plants in motion. There is ample sun energy in these parts, whose expression is only hampered by the availability of water.

When does the question of present horror get honestly asked? Murder and death and brutality beyond the scope of our predecessor's best hopes. We are too old for this, as someone should say. We are no longer children. Looking into the face of death produced by 20th century society did not have to be and does not have to become more cycles of the same tired hatreds. We must live more now. More today. More at the ends of our fingers and hands, more within the scope of our visions and range of our ears. We must live life for life and side step the fake ideology of modernist preening and machified communications. These are not idle days of ours, they will be gone one day and our children and our children's children will look back and have the question of where we were. I do not want to be ashamed of the answers they find. May our lives be more and more like the delicate structure produced by this tenacious and delicate ground cover, appealing to the eye (and too the inner eye as well) and exploding, on occassion, with the surprising delight of this flower.

Heart of Heartiness
This cabbage palmetto or cabbage-palm (Sabal palmetto) is the only palm species native to the eastern United States. It's range is from the southern coast of North Carolina south along the coast to Florida, a state it occupies the southern three quarters of. South Carolina and Florida both claim it as their official state tree, although the geography favors Florida. Limited by climate and well suited to soils that would not appeal to more discriminating trees, the cabbage-palm is planted in urban places and has been planted in large numbers along Florida's Interstate Highway system. They are something like the sycamore of the south, streetside and poorly nutrified. The cabbage-palm can tolerate soils from base to acidic, and prefers the sandy neutrality of the Southeastern coast and Florida Peninsula. Drought has no immediate effect on the tree, and it will flourish and grow with vigour under regular water. The leaves or fronds, six or seven feet in length and nearly as wide, erupt directly out of the top of the trunk of the tree - a trunk that never branches. Some of these native palms retain their leaves, the stalk of which is sawed off forming alternating pockets along the length of the trunk, pockets that provide home to several kinds of lichen and fungus as well as other native air-breathing plants. You can see a new frond taking shape directly out of the top of the tree in this picture, it's thick spine developed first, sticking almost five feet straight into the air. If I were to climb this tree and root out that frond, the tender living tissue could be made into a delicious salad. Perhaps you've had one: heart of palm? If you root out the living tissue, however, you take the life of the tree. The practice is discourage and outlawed, although gleeners descend with speed upon every palm fallen by natural causes. Hurricane salads, they might be called. The trunks themsleves are usefully solid and used as wharf pilings and for docks. The fronds can be turned into brushes when they are young and woven into baskets as they mature into leaves. This one builds its leaves in a steady native pace. Happy here amongst the citrus trees and pineapple, beach sunflower and green anoles.

This quiet place is an anomaly, though. Today brings scenes from new corners erupting into bloodshed, a war on nothing against nothing and everything perpetrating itself perfectly along these lines. We started it. Not the underlying tensions, but the unfettered expression of violence. We started that. We sanctioned the state expression of that, modeled it for all the world to see. The rudderless cause-mongering of GWB, at it again today and clearly aiming for the lowest denominator. That our outrage hasn't swelled into something more tangible and politically effective may be the great historical question of our age. Surely the cost has become too much for all of us. Surely it was predictably so from the very outset. Surely we cannot wish this for ourselves. The evils unleashed are furious, it seems, but why do we only work to unleash more? What fevered battle plan gives this route any credence or justifications? Do we retreat from our best efforts forever? Have we fallen that far. This Sunday as I float in the warm salty seas of our southern Gulf I think of cabbage palmettos, hedging their bets by keeping their structure simple and their needs flexible. The seed of their future generations falls confident each year, would that the same for ours.

Southern Aster
This beach sunflower, or cucumberleaf sunflower, (Helianthus debilis) is a native to Florida, and many of its close relatives are natives to sandy and beach zones along the eastern seaboard. This one erupted here of its own accord and from a few small seeds has created almost a bush of delightful yellow flowers. New generations of stalk and leaf growing up atop older generations. There are three clusters around the yard, but the flower is ubiquitous in this xeriscopic landscape. Yards are being nudged back to native conditions, lawns drying up. Not everywhere, mind you, but you can see it. And the beach sunflower is one of its biggest proponents. In a land not known for its colorful native flowers, this plant bucks the trend and flowers throughout the year. Its flowers, when pollenated, produce an oily seed that is a delicious treat for birds and small animals. Yesterday nearby this cluster of sunflower I saw a green anole (the native one), a large one with vertical dominance over the territory of this flower. Native plants, native species. As an Aster, this beach loving-flower is part of the newest family of plants. Sunflowers, leaf lettuce, and that purple aster you remember from the fall roads in New England, are all a part of this flower's broad new family. Mostly leaf and stalk. Colorful radial flowers. They seem to enjoy their fact of living, wherever they are found. They nourish our stomachs and our imaginations. Here in this xeriscopic landscape, this individual plant cluster will find the space to flourish before its time runs out. It will live a life of life, as its smiling face attests.

And yet, death has become a second nature for us. Each day the tallies in the press are too much to bear, a dozen, another, this time hundreds, that time thousands. We cannot escape the burden of this war any longer. We cannot let this madness go on in our names and get woven into the media-fabric that comprises our notion of humanity. We must stop allowing ourselves to be lied to; we must stop lying to ourselves. Revenge only justifies revenge, it never works backwards. It takes a strong arm to be silent, it takes a big man to be gentle, it take real power to be peaceful. We need real power. A simple shift of priorities can lay new foundations quickly. Native thoughts can flow through native undergrowth. Humanity as life, not death, can flourish once again. The green anole claims its sunflower patch with a flaring of its neck. I have no conflict with him. No. I admire his technique.

Grape Feet
These grapefruit (Citrus X paradisi) begin their slow maturing process on the branches of a ten foot tall grapefruit tree planted on this piece of ground some untold years ago. The fruit of this tree are filled with seeds, no one would want to buy such a fruit. But to taste them, so says their current owner, is to know the glandular paradise from which they got their latin name. They are a newcomer to the fruit tree world, a hybrid between the orange tree (Citrus sinesis) and pummelo (Citrus maxima), cultivated in the 19th century and brought to Florida just before the turn of the twentieth. This tree species is a hybrid that counted on human intervention for its range, some might say even its existence. They are one hundred percent sensitive to frost, which significantly limits their northward range (although, one can imagine them giggling with delight at the current warming projections). Grapefruit branches, like all citrus branches, are thorny shoots that slowly fill into the familiar woody tree like branches. They are an evergreen, with hearty crisp dry leaves that seem to survive into the growth of new shoots, and then yellow and fall. Their roots are near the surface and cannot be covered too deeply or the tree will suffocate. They breathe oxygen through their roots and absorb water from the air. This very tree hosts at least two anole territories, it is a constant perch for the mourning doves that gather food from this piece of land, and it already holds several dozen green grapefruit. It marks a place of human habitation and reveals the gentle hand of cultivation and care. It seems untroubled by the passage of time or the heat of the midday sun.

The message is said to be clear in Connecticut. No war. No complicity with war. Can the elections hang on such an idea? These violent scrambles, the justified and unjustified bloodshed and revenge, Pyhrric victory or nothing, goes the logic. Generations of more hatred cast in stone, shattered into memory with each exploding shell and tearing bullet. What point language if intelligence is unwilling to head its logic. Why bother talking if pre-emption now rules the day. Here's the real question: why launch your killing attacks - well-timed, extensively destructive, that is, pre-planned - from a narrative of defensiveness? What holds back your courage to admit your own honest goals? There is something in that; I know that there is. There is a nugget of fear, which is our only leverage; the fact of demos lurks menacingly just beyond the corner of control. The gentle hand of cultivation makes delicious treats such as this Hudson red grapefruit tree; may it also work its magic on stubborn minds and greedy interlopers. A plea for reason and rationality in the months ahead. A plea for the peace that most of us deserve.

Anolis sagrei sagrei
This Cuban anole, a subspecies of the brown anole (Anolis sagrei), is an invasive lizard that has followed development from the Caribbean northward. It favors open and disturbed lands and can inhabit with a density of about one anole per square meter. This means that these skittering miniature dinosaurs are unbiquitous underfoot on the sandy ground of west-central Florida. A step from the raised deck in back onto the Laurel oak (Quercus hemisphaeric) leaf littered ground causes skittering and scurrying in every direction as the sun-bathing invaders jump from my path. They are never stepped upon, they are too quick for that, and they move with a decided determination that does not leave one nervous about their return. The brown anole is a successful invasive. It has nearly replaced the native green anole (Anolis carolinensus), the only anole endemic to the United States, in Florida and southern Georgia. Whether brown or green, these tiny lizards eat insects and other creepy crawly ground dwelling life forms. They side with the colonizers, perhaps not eliminating undesireable creepers, but certainly doing more than their share. They will flare a throat fin to scare you off if you enter their territory, delimited three dimensionally: they have a specific height that is theirs as well as plots of ground. Spring eggs hatch into summer hatchling and winter adults. I walk throught their colony, a stranger, lead-footed. They skitter up the side of the garage and watch me go.

Florida is nothing more than a giant slab of limestone that broke free from the African plate some 350 million years ago and drifted toward the North American plate striking land 25 million years ago. It is the baby lands of this nation, the youngest place to live. Only sand has gathered on top of the limestone basement, silcate and ground up sea life, more limestone in the making. Rains pour through the surface, no soil. Plants must take what they can from the over humid air and the afternoon showers that scattershot puddles across this flat land. Puddles that drain before the count of ten. Another day, the same process all over again. This is a land filled with excess energy, too much sun. But balances are struck within hours of extremes, there is no other option under these conditions. The world, perhaps, has something to learn from the Florida rains, the determined balance of energies, the skittering brown anole, never underfoot.