When Sue and I were out walking last Friday, we spied Loris working outside in her yard. We asked her whether she were setting a good example for the rest of us by raising the bar so virtuously high.
“I don’t know about that,” she answered, “but it is a bit of an adventure today. I’m late getting the last twenty or so bushes in the ground.” Yup, that’s Loris, all right, putting in another twenty bushes after some untold other number of plantings.
“It’s long enough now, since I bought these, that the tags and leaves have all fallen off. I don’t know what I’m planting. The plan at this point is just to put them in the ground, and see what comes up in the spring.”
One thing we do know about whatever Loris is adding to her yard is that it’s a native plant. She not only uses native plants around her own house but advocates for their use in general and helps other people figure out how to use them, both ecologically and to create sanctuaries for themselves. It’s good to have Lorises in the world.
We’ve reached the point in the season where most of the leaves are on the ground. This makes it easy for me to apply my shoe test to them and assess their largeness. A large leaf, according to this test, is one that’s larger than my shoe. Why a shoe? Well, it’s, um, always handy. My shoes go with me everywhere when I tromp around the neighborhood.
There are some obvious winners in the largeness sweepstakes, year after year. Catalpa leaves, for instance, always do well. And sycamore leaves are truly large, with the added benefit of being the very best leaves for kicking. This is the first year I can recall, however, that white oak leaves passed the shoe test. Given their taper, you wouldn’t think they could manage a whole shoe, but lots of them did, this time around.
Furthermore, there was a new contender that outpaced them entirely. Sue and I came across a tulip tree with leaves big enough for two shoes at once! I never even imagined a leaf that could do that, and certainly not one from a tulip tree. No previous tulip tree leaf even prompted a shoe test.
This must have been a tough growing season for trees to have put so much effort into big leaves. Their ability to do so is called, according to an online search, phenotypic plasticity. When times are tough, trees try to make every leaf count. Loris probably knows all about this.
The Thrift Shop where Loris and I volunteer had its annual party and silent auction, recently. As Loris was away at party time, I had to fill her in. The acquisition with which I’m most pleased is a quilt, for which I was the only bidder.
The quilt is a vintage one. And that’s pretty much the sum total of knowledge of its provenance. Whoever made it pieced it by hand and quilted it by hand, as well. The pattern is a cross between double wedding ring and interlocking squares, worked in cornflower blue and a cheery yellow on a white field.
The back of the quilt is yellow also, but a different yellow, one with more gold in it. There’s no way to know if the maker just happened to have a large enough piece of this coordinating color to serve as a back for the quilt, or if this second yellow was part of her plan from the beginning.
Another mystery is whether the maker did or did not use any batting at all. If she did, it’s the thinnest, lightest batting I’ve come across. The maker would have expected to produce a very light-weight quilt. That we know.
But did she also expect it to be translucent? It is. Pull this quilt over your head while reading on a bright autumn afternoon with a nip in the air, and there’s still plenty of light to read under there. Even better, thanks to the glowing-yellow backing, the light is golden.
Many people congratulated me on the purchase when the auction ended, saying that even though they hadn’t bid on the quilt, they had admired it. Quite a number of them reached out to pat it as it lay over my arm. Surprisingly, it looks brand new. The woman who made it created functional art with her vision and her hands. I hope she’d be happy to know it’s gone to a new home and helped support good work in the community.
15 November 2024