Valerie Strong - All My Phlox

O HIO IS NOT A DRAMATIC STATEno mountains or ocean, just rolling hills, corn fields, woodlands, and Lake Erie, which is usually a dull pewter color. It is a state people say they have passed throughon the way to Chicago or New York, perhapsbut never itself a destination. But we do have the drama that comes with the seasons, spring and fall. Our autumn drama is obvious; brilliant leaf colors, berries, and golden fields bring the foliage pilgrims onto back roads to fill country inns and small-town squares. With spring all those intense colors of autumnfiery red, burnished gold, and polished mahoganyare reborn as pastel lavender, pink, rose, and yellow, a landscape too subtle to draw the tourists.

What is not subtle is the intensity of Ohio spring. There is an inescapable vibrancy, a throb and excitement in every living thing, a hurry to nest, mate, sprout, or flower. The predawn rallying call of the cardinal outside my bedroom window seems to set off every bird in the neighborhood, newcomers and winter residents alike. How can I stay in bed with all that pulsing life outsidebirdsong and the silent stirring of underground creatures and plants changing even by the day?

Within a block of my house I have about forty acres of unimproved land to walk in all weathers and seasons. I say unimproved because I can remember seeing these signs on vacant lots. Now the word of preference is available, but in both cases it means that if you have the money you can cut, slash, bury, dump, or buildtranslated as lay wastea developers dream.

This rough landscape I have come to appreciate as much as any garden, especially as it is in such contrast to the surrounding perfect green playing fields of Western Reserve Academy, the private preparatory school here in Hudson, Ohio. This unimproved land, the playing fields, and the hockey pond at the bottom were once part of the Academy farm. The big dairy barn still stands at the edge of the fields, a historic reminder of a time when manual work was considered part of the educational curriculum and students helped with farm labor. Until about twenty years ago hay was cut here, so although the fields lay fallow, the second-growth woody plants are still tentative. We see a lot of these abandoned farm fields here in Ohio. Former farmland overgrown with shrubs, small trees, and weeds is great for developers, since the cost of cleaning out the junk, as a client of mine persisted in calling any uncultivated land, is minimal.

The student cross-country trackand my walksstarts at the hockey pond, follows a rise to a hilltop planted in pines during a student tree-planting project, runs down through open meadow and on into another pine plantation, and then crisscrosses back up the hill to the hockey ponda round of about a mile and a half. There is enough in these few acres to hold the interest of a student of nature for a lifetime, and this is where I meet Ohios spring head on.

The buds of the red maples are in flower. The pussy willow catkins so soft a few days ago are already leaves, and here and there dandelions are blooming. A green fuzz has transformed the meadows, and the walk in the woods is like stepping into a pointillist painting, all soft dots of delicate color. The field paths are resilient underfoot, and my nose is tickled almost as much as my dog Amoss, but not for the same reasons. While he sticks to scenting out the passing rabbit or remains of an owls dinner, the rank, damp smell of the earth awaking from its winter slumber fills and excites my senses.

From the first raucous call of redwings staking out nesting sites and robins gathering in the pines on their way north, the entire meadow takes on unstoppable momentum of growth and color and bloomthe woodies sprout new leaves, the grasses shoot up, clover stretches beside the path. Within weeks, it seems, there is the fragrance of thorn apples, the symbol of spring in abandoned Ohio farmlands, followed by the sweet flowers of the wild locusts that edge the fields on one side, no doubt planted originally to serve as fence posts. The measured plumping of my tame buds at home is nothing compared to the exuberance of these fields in welcoming spring. And if a late snow or frost hits, the wild foliage doesnt need coddling with artificial covers; it simply closes, hiding like the rabbits until fair weather coaxes it out, unharmed, with every branch showing a new green. The multiflora rose, in dense tangles so beneficial to wildlife, will perfume the air in early summer as no fancy tea rose ever could. Blooming clusters of wild crabs are gathered like ballerinas in the wings, spring blossoms taking the summer to become the little red or yellow apples I pick for jelly in the autumn. The blackberries, too, are white with blossoms that become juicy fruit free for the picking. After the exuberance of spring, a quiet settling-in takes over the fields as the seasons unfold and ripen.

In even the few years Ive been walking the fields, Ive seen how quickly, once mowing stops, cultivated land reverts here in my part of Ohio to original hardwood forest. The meadow grasses give way to a tough mix of goldenrod, dock, milkweed, teasel, ironweed, daisies, black-eyed Susans, which are already being shaded out in places by sumac, gray dogwood, thorn apples, wild crabs, multiflora roses. If I live long enough, Ill be able to admire the next successionoak, ash, maple, beech, hickory, tulip poplarshade out the original woody plants. Without mowing there is no holding back this progression, where plants find their own habitat and bring with them their own wildlife. Without paying a cent, or levying new taxes, we have in our town a living laboratory.