Tales from the Microbial Laboratory

~more views of the Earlysville White Oak~

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I went to visit my Father on Saturday - just a quick visit to say hello and take him to lunch at his favorite italian spot.  He was doing okay, but since his brief illness in December, he hasn't quite regained his mobility, and from what I've observed (and others have shared with me) the same cognitive level - there is just this generalized sense of decline.  He enjoyed lunch - he ordered a huge calzone that he thought was yummy, and he took leftovers home with him.  He asked me if I was staying the night, and I told him that I had to return to my place outside of DC.

For me it was a strange visit, but for an unexpected reason:  I realized as I was driving to Earlysville that it was the first time that I went to visit a parent for something as simple as lunch - I returned back to my place in the DC area soon after I dropped him off at his home with  his care provider.  I've have always lived out of state, since I graduated from college - and visiting generally meant loading up or boarding the dogs, and staying overnight for a few days.  This has especially been the case since my Mother's illness and passing, and my Father's emerging dementia.

It was a luxury, this short visit.

 I also stopped, parked my car, and took more images of the Earlysville White Oak.  It's a comforting habit, these visits to a wonderful old tree.

Links to a video and more images of this wonderful tree can be found here.

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~a curled up pointer~

Annabelle Lee, aka one of the infamous Pointer Sisters.  A ball of pure sweetness.

~the Earlysville White Oak (in a video...)~

Since late December of 2007, I've stopped and photographed an old white oak just outside of Earlysville, Virginia whenever I could.  It was often when I was leaving town after visiting my Mother who was battling lung cancer - and now it is during visits to see my Father, who has since been diagnosed with vascular dementia.  It has become nothing less than a ritual - one of those comforting things that you do amidst less than comforting times.  But tonight as I write this, I realize that I've also been steadily documenting this tree that has lived more years than either you or I might imagine to live.  I've come across the term witness trees before, and while I have no idea whether civil war-era bullets will ever be found in this white oak, I can imagine that it was a worthy place to stop - for a lengthy conversation, a meal, or a night's rest for Civil War troops who found themselves traveling through this part of Virginia.  If only trees could talk...

 So between Christmas and New Years, I received an email by someone (1mandomaker) who had crafted a video for the song "Sticks That Made Thunder" by the Nashville-based group The Steeldrivers.  The song is written by Mike Henderson and Chris Stapleton - and is about American Civil War events as told from a tree's perspective.  The image chosen for the video - for the tree - is one that I first posted on 27 December 2007.  The video now has just under 83,000 hits - and it makes me smile that this beautiful white oak, considered the second oldest in Virginia, sitting alongside a Charlottesville-Albemarle airport runway (the airport is now caring for it), has been viewed so many times.  It's one of the trees included in the book Remarkable Trees of Virginia.  It's a deserving tree.

 

~back to my "other" home~

~Pennsyvania Avenue, Washington, DC~

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Before Christmas, I took the Metro downtown with friends to see The National Tree - I still am sometimes caught offguard that I can get to the White House in a 15 minute Metro ride (and I think "do I really live up here?  Well, I suppose I do!).  Anyway, it was a beautiful December evening - and it had been raining (sometimes heavily) earlier in the day, but when we got downtown, the sky was filled with fast-moving white clouds, which helped to provide some reflective light in the night sky.  It was a beautiful evening.

Today I drive back to the DC area - after time spent with my Dad in Virginia and time spent here in South Carolina.  The past two nights have been chilly ones in the Airstream, but I was glad to be here to protect my citrus as the temperatures dipped into the low-20s last night (it is still only 23 degrees outside of the Airstream).  I'll keep the small trees covered, and have a friend 'free' them when the warmer weather approaches at the end of the week.  Also, it was rather perfect that I was here for the first heavy frost/hard freeze for the winter.  I arrived with roses and fall-blooming salvias in bloom, perennial morning glorry still clinging to the front fence and elephant ears still hanging in there - this morning the garden looks much different.  It just felt right that I was present for this necessary transition.

~a blue camellia and the New Deal~

~my favorite camellia-grower~

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I spent New Year's Eve afternoon once again wandering a camellia garden with my friend Skip.  He was doing well (let's face it - beyond well - he never ceases to amaze me), and as always, I saw camellias in bloom that I hadn't seen before.

While his son was preparing a lunch for us, we headed toward Skip's main camellia garden.  We had a warm New Year's weekend in South Carolina - upper 60s to low 70s - can't complain about that!  The camellias looked good, although because of the unusually warm fall (coastal South Carolina hasn't had a hard frost yet, much less a hard freeze, as of New Year's weekend) I think that some different-than-normal camellias were in bloom.  But then, each time I visit I see a camellia that I haven't seen, and I learn something new.

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Roosevelt Blues... aka 'Frankie Bray'.  Skip told me that this cultivar was named by a person who thought the camellia was unattractive, and so he named it after President Roosevelt because he was unhappy about the New Deal.  So in essence, he named a camellia he didn't like after a President he didn't like.  I believe that Skip said it was Robert Rubel who named it - a name known by most camellia folks.  Interestingly, according to Architecture Research, many of Rubel's camellias ended up somewhere in South Carolina (and I'm guessing Middleton Place or Magnolia Gardens - I'll have to look into this):

Between 1931 and 1932, Rubel sold thirteen carloads of collected specimens to one South Carolina customer, a transaction that he believed to be the largest sale of camellias since their introduction to Europe in the early eighteenth century. The meticulous plantsman sold his camellias with embossed copper labels attached to each plant, so that the tag could serve as a permanent means of correct identification.

[The image that I took of it (above) doesn't look quite as blue as it does 'in person', but you can still see hints of blue - it was quite beautiful, and not unattractive at all - but then I would have probably voted for Roosevelt.]