Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana),  with its polished red fruit looks delectable, but like the name forewarns, has a decidedly astringent taste. I admire and love the dark crimson color against the green leaves. As a child, I was always attracted to their inviting color, but warned strongly against sampling any. Once mischievously, I ate one anyway and quickly spat it out – lesson learned!

Chokecherries, both flowers and leaves, are an important food source for moths and butterflies, including Cecropia, Io and Sphinx Hawk moths, Eastern Tiger Swallowtail and American White Admiral butterflies, as well as the dreaded Tent Caterpillar, which can spread to domesticated fruit crops. (You can see munched leaves in the above photo).

Birds enjoy the fruit and likely rodents do as well, once it falls to the ground. Along with its cousin, Black Cherry (Prunus serotina), rodents will cache the stone pits to eat through the winter.

Jams and jellies can…

As you might recall if you read the exchange of comments after my review of On Rape by Germaine Greer, Fourtriplezed and I agreed to read each other’s suggestions: he had never read anything by Greer, and I hadn’t read The Better Angels of Our Nature, the decline of violence in history and its causes (2011) by Steven Pinker.  Mercifully, since the Pinker book is 802 pages long, I wasn’t asked to read the whole book— just the sub chapter in Chapter 7 ‘The Rights Revolution’ which is called ‘Women’s Rights and the Decline of Rape and Battering’.  So this is not a ‘book review’, it’s just a response to the part of the book which I was asked to read…

Now, one way to suspect that there might just possibly be too many books in the house, is to find a book on the shelf that has also…

Just a quickie because I am on the fly, but just had to share the news that Jock Serong has won the inaugural (UK) Staunch prize for a thriller that doesn’t feature violence against women.

A thriller in which a group of Australian surfers and a boat carrying refugees are caught in a storm off Indonesia has won the inaugural Staunch prize, which goes to a thriller “in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered”.

A reaction to the prevalence of violence against women in fiction, the £2,000 award went to Australian author Jock Serong for his third novel, On the Java Ridge. Taking on Australia’s refugee policy, the thriller sees a group Australians on holiday in Indonesia rescue shipwrecked refugees from stormy waters.

 You can read my review here.

Read more about it here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/26/award-for-thriller-without-violence-against-women-goes-to-jock-serong-staunch-prize-on-the-java-ridge

Carve impossible vistas.

Jumbled and stacked.

Boulders perch, tossed like balls.

Cracked spines.

Desert ice cream cones.

Joshua Trees twist in tortured poses.

Mother Nature’s iconic artistry.

A gift to treasure and protect.

Joshua Tree National Park encompasses almost 800,000 acres and straddles both The Mojave and Colorado Deserts in Southern California. Joshua Trees are not trees at all, but a variety of Yucca, sculpted into bizarre shapes by desert winds. The eerie rock formations were formed eons ago by cooling lava, that cracked and split from fault uplifting, and eroded over time by wind, water and sand.

100’s of species survive in this harsh desert landscape, despite summer temperature that reach well above 100 degrees fahrenheit. Native Americans inhabited this region for thousands of years and their artifacts remain scattered throughout the park. Be careful or you will walk right by them! We encountered this metate, or grinding stone…

I always find this time of year with its total obsession on Black Friday sales and rampant consumerism rather disheartening and troublesome. At a time when climate change is causing natural disasters everywhere it is obscene the number of trucks, trains, planes, freighters, and various modes of transport that puff smoke into the air as goods are shipped around the world. The production and transportation, and consumption of said goods adding to the carbon imprint on our planet, and therefore adding to global warming. What will it take, I wonder, for humanity to become aware and take charge to change the damage we are doing to earth.

And then came the concept of Giving Tuesday. A day set aside to give back through a united effort to harness the resources, time, and talents of organizations and individuals to make a positive difference in our world. By doing so…

(i.m. Ron McKechnie)

It was that morning, New Year’s Day,
just before our last conversation,
I saw them, at first mistaking
their playful roiling for a knuckle
of current or a floating branch.
You asked if there was a poem there –
I thought, maybe, thinking of images
of concealment, wildness, natural fit.
But what stayed with me were the questions
of uncertainty of seeing, the dissolution
of shape and movement, and how the mind
settles on what is there, and what is not.

Angus Macmillan