LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM
TIME IN THE MEADOW
By Barbara Tatham Johnson
“This fevers me, this sun on green,
On green glowing, the young spring.”
—Richard Eberhart, A Bravery of Earth
The burgeoning green of the meadow in May was gloriously lush, radiant
really. I searched for enough descriptive words to distinguish the greens I
saw—emerald and viridian; olive, pea, and lime; verdigris and malachite. I
became giddy surrounded by robust greenery. Here, indeed, was Keats’s “green felicity,” and the trials and doldrums of winter disappeared with the
exhilaration I felt watching emerging blades, vines, and shoots.
As the meadow’s growth flourished, I kept track of the succession of plants.
Golden coins of flowering dandelions carpeted the new grass for a week
before fluffing into white globes of seed-carrying filaments. The grasses
grew taller. Buttercups and blue flag irises colored the meadow with gold and
purple, and daisies added their white blooms.
Grasses began to bud. Grass holds its highest energy content, that is, the
most digestible dry matter, at this stage in its growth. Once bloom comes,
nutritional values drop. However, the variety of grasses growing in the
meadow do not bloom at the same time, and the mix of other hay plants,
including clovers, vetch, and alfalfa, are best left to harvest while in
partial bloom. This makes the optimal cutting time difficult to schedule.
The weather conditions also influence the time to cut. We ask our neighbor
to delay the mowing of our meadow until the bobolink youngsters have safely
fledged. In a cool wet summer such as the one we have this year, parts of
the meadow may be left uncut until August, providing mulch hay rather than
animal feed.
This year I tried to identify as many kinds of grasses as I could. I
examined the flower clusters with their delicate spikelets as they opened.
Grass flowers are small and inconspicuous but wonderfully intricate when
examined closely and required all the patience I could muster. My poor old
brain managed to sort out four or five, but, in the end, I settled for the
lovely sight of clouds of pollen cast abroad in a stiff breeze across the
meadow and the subtle colors of each variety interwoven in the meadow.
I have a special fondness for Winslow Homer’s painting In the Mowing.
In the foreground, three boys, two apparently nine or ten years old, and one
just past the toddler stage, stand in the knee-deep grass and daisies of a
large hay meadow. Halting in their wanderings, they look toward the distant
tree-edged expanse in the background where a figure in red—mother, father,
or sibling—waves to them. The light, at a low angle, burnishes the grass to
brassy gold. It seems to me the boys are abroad early, before sunrise and
the start of chores, perhaps looking for nests, checking on the wild
strawberry patches, or discovering the business of the inhabitants of the
fields. The waving figure may be calling them to breakfast. Homer portrays a
simple moment of childhood freedom and exploration. The painting touches my
spirit, for a hay meadow is one of the richest and best places to meet the
natural world.
On summer afternoons when the sun beats full on the meadow, I like to poke
about the edges between the grass and the woods. Here, in a damp corner, I
find tiny tight pink flower clusters atop plants with arrow-shaped leaves. I
run my finger along the stems to feel stiff little prickles and confirm my
guess that I have found the plant, called with overstatement, “tear thumb.”
Earlier, in a drier part of the meadow, I found another scratchy stemmed
plant called “cleavers.” The bristly spindly stems feel similar to the
roughness of a cat’s tongue, more tingle than scratch, surprisingly
pleasant.
The incredible blue-violet color of common vetch, still blooming, catches my
eye where a vine twines among the stiffening grass stems. Everywhere, Queen
Anne’s lace plants spread their dishlike flowers. Some of the flower dishes
have tiny black centers that resemble little beetles; others host real
insect visitors. In autumn, the radiating flower stalks will turn upward
and, drying out, resemble birds’ nests. Amid the angularity of dry milkweed
stems and pods, their shapes above winter snows will add subtle texture to
the beauty of the winter scene.
I come upon a runway worn by the passage of voles and white-footed mice that
cuts a velvety band across the damp mown grass of the path, as the little
animals track to and fro gathering seeds and berries. If I remain quiet long
enough, I may see a little animal dash across.
The sweet scent of maturing grasses heated in the sun mixes with the subtle
perfumes of field flowers and the moist earth smells drifting from the
cooler shaded edge of the woods. For an instant, I return to childhood
summers spent in the country. The sensation of early revelations and
adventure is momentary, but the magic connection of scent and memory
enriches the afternoon. The vigor of the meadow settles around me. Insect
buzz, a light breeze brushing ripe grass heads, and the bleating caw of a
crow brings a stirring undercurrent of sound, and I sense sunlight and leaf
chemistry brewing life. Yet, the organism that is this meadow is a vital and
changing one. The cricket chorus, the dun grass tops, the bobolink flocks
are all signals that the summer season matures.
A corner that the hay mower cannot reach slowly fills with shrubby growth of
chokecherry, elderberry, and willow. In time, it will begin a succession to
forest as birch and aspen seedlings grow into trees. This meadow exists only
as long as we mow it to keep back the natural process of reforestation. I
like to think that my paternal forebears, yeomen who scythed their own and
their neighbors’ fields one hundred years ago, shared “the earnest love that
laid the swale in rows, ” of the mower in Robert Frost’s poem—and that they,
too, may have left a tuft of flowers for a “wildered butterfly” as
acknowledgement to the interconnectedness of life.
Our neighbor cuts our hay, the meadow remains in flowers, and, this year,
the grass grows as green as any in Ireland. Weather permitting, another hay
cutting will be made in September. Then the meadow and its inhabitants will
be left to prepare for winter.
On a small willow at the pond shore, a leaf rolled into a narrow tube
shelters the tiny caterpillar of a viceroy butterfly who will continue its
life cycle when the willow sends out new leaves in the spring. If the winter
snows are deep, the mice and voles, with snug nests of grass and networks of
tunnels beneath the white blanket, will prosper on meals of grass roots and
seeds fallen from our bird feeders. My circuits of the meadow on snowshoes
or skis will reveal that life is lived in earnest. Along the woods’ edge,
the tracks of a snowshoe hare, separated by distances over a meter long and
overlain by footprints of a sprinting fox, display the drama of survival.
The seeds of yellow birch, shaped like little birds with wings outspread,
lie scattered over the crust of snow in February waiting a thaw and the slow
descent to the soil where spring sun and warmth will start germination.
Persistent and valiant, this place invigorates me.
