Long Unidentifiable Weed Turns Out To Be Dogbane

July 6, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:  I’m still on an early morning schedule, even though Moi has come home, and wake up about 7:30.  Yesterday the temperature had soared to 101 degrees by late afternoon, and I suggested to Moi, after Ezra left her off, that we cook supper outside on the charcoal grill.  We thawed out some kielbasa and salmon, and I went to the store to pick up some vegetables, ready to try out my vegetable griddle that Jazz had gotten me for Father’s Day.  Between 6:30 and 7, we figured it would be bearable to go outside.  All the McNeighbors were in their air-conditioned lairs.  It was absolutely peaceful and quiet out, no noise pollution from machines and loud voices.  (Moi had turned off the filter of our pool.)  After we ate, we took a dip in the pool – it was Moi’s first time in it this year (she doesn’t go into the pool until the temperature reaches 99), and she spent most of her time in the water scraping down the algae that had accumulated on the pool sides.  When I come down to the kitchen this morning, Moi is at her laptop, the coffee is made.  But I’m surprised to find out she hasn’t yet taken Mway for a walk.  I offer to do so (Moi hadn’t turned on my computer, so I have to wait for it to finish its grinding anyway), and Mway and I head out at 7:40.

State of the Path:  Despite the hot weather, I still wear my regular outfit of long pants, long-sleeve workshirt, boots, gardening gloves, and safari helmet.  Even though the plants are all distressed by the lack of water and high temperature, they’re still growing enough that I need protection from briars, burs, nettles, spikes, overhanging branches, and poison ivy.  Before we hit the path, I notice that there’s poison ivy growing up the side of the chicken coop, and make a note to myself to pull that down sometime.  Out at the walled garden, I glance at the plant I’ve been trying to identify.  Last evening I told Moi about my failed attempts at trying to identify this plant; we took a walk to look at it, and Moi recognized it right away: “Oh, that’s dogbane,” she said, “Look it up in the book.  This stuff has really tough stems, and if I had done my wigwam completely to traditional specs, I would have used this for lashing.”  I remember now that several weeks ago Moi had pointed out some dogbane in the field amidst the goldenrod, and I should’ve remembered that before.  For, having looked it up in the book, I’m satisfied that this is what this is: a type of dogbane.  It might not be the spreading dogbane that’s pictured in the pink flower section, although “milky juice exudes from broken stems and leaves,” its leaves are “ovate, blue-green,” and its fruit is “2 long, slender seed pods…opening along one side”; because I’ve yet to see any pink flowers, it might be the kind of dogbane, mentioned in the same entry but not pictured, called Indian Hemp, “a slightly smaller species with erect clusters of greenish-white flowers [that] is also found in fields and is poisonous.”  Time, however, may reveal that some of these plants have pink flowers (as Moi now tells me she has seen in past years).

State of the Creek:  The three pools, or rather puddles, have not yet given up all their water, although I smell freshly exposed mud as I walk past them.  Along part of the creek bank, now flanking nothing but a corridor of dry rocks, there’s a row of jewelweed that hasn’t disintegrated into dust, clutching vainly to a source of moisture.  I touch one of the few touch-me-nots; it doesn’t recoil, but it seems to me it does spray some seeds – I can’t tell for sure.

The Fetch:  Up at the clearing, Mway runs over some dogbane as she dashes after the stick.  I find again, as Mway fetches the stick over and over, that I’m composing sentences in my head.

Addendum:  I take Mway out again around 5 pm.  Again I have no work today, but because I’ve already had two full days of no work this week, I don’t luxuriate in the fact as much.  Nevertheless, it was too hot today to do much except lie in front of the air conditioner in my bedroom and read.  At midafternoon, Moi checked the official temperature online: 103 degrees.  She had gone out some time today to check on the black raspberries around the perimeter of the yard, something I’d neglected to do in the past weeks.  She found, much as I found in the side acre, that the promising crop of berries were all dried up in the heat.  When I go out in the yard with Mway, both Moi and Barb Dennehy are in the pool.  They warn me that they heard some sort of agonized animal growl in the fields, so I’m prepared to encounter some sort of animal, perhaps, a dying one.  By the walled garden, only about two day lilies are open; the rest are closed – either they’re drying up in the heat or they’ve already passed their peak (out my office window, I don’t see any day lilies in bloom by the summer house; indeed, some of the plants are dried up and flattened to the ground). I look again at the jack-in-the-pulpit fruit; some of the kernels have turned white.  On my way to the creek, I check two of the grasses I’ve been trying to identify.  While online today I found a couple sites that explained the differences between grasses, sedges, and rushes; both of them quoted a little verse: “Sedges have edges, Rushes are round, Grasses are hollow, what have you found?” or alternately for the last line, “Grasses have nodes all the way to the ground.”  The verse is of no help to me.  The stem of the plant I’ve been calling red grass, or more recently great spike rush, is both round and hollow.  The other plant, which has a leaf formation similar to the other, is also both round and hollow.  Along the path, I find a lot of little holes, places I suspect animals like snakes or frogs might be hiding themselves.  In the muddy creek bed, I see what look to me like paw prints, but for all I know they might be Mway’s.  Then past the big trees, I hear a rustling in the weeds along the creek bed.  I turn around and see a gray house cat, running away from me but not frightened enough to run out of sight.  I suspect that it might be one of the feral cats that has been living in our outbuilding, but which we haven’t seen for a while.