Spring Villa

Yesterday I went to an old plantation home site called Spring Villa, south of Opelika. I had read about the house a few weeks ago, and when I went by my mom's to water plants, I casually asked if she had ever heard of it. "Yeah, want to go?" she asked, and it surprised me how readily she wanted to drop everything and go (I think I had caught her walking down the hall and assumed she was about to do something).

I got my camera, and we got in her car. She drove the long way, down Moore's Mill Road to the outskirts of town.

"We went swimming there sometimes a long time ago. They had a spring-fed swimming pool. It was really cold, and you really didn't want to swim there unless it was blazing hot outside. But even then, the pool was in the shade and it was still too cold."

"When was the last time you went there, like the 80s?"

"Oh no, probably the 70s. Maybe the 60s. I was a kid."

There were big fields of pasture and cows, lots of trailers and brick country houses.

"Do you remember how to get there?" I asked.

"Yes, there's a sign. It says Spring Villa."

"You mean, there was a sign that said Spring Villa in the 60s. Who knows if its there now."

She ignored me and kept driving. Soon enough, there was the Spring Villa sign. When we turned down that road, there were road signs warning of "catastrophic sink holes" (My dad told me at dinner later that night, that a few years ago a part of the road collapsed and fell in 100 feet). I was wondering if at any point the road would cave in and we'd die. But then, I saw houses and cars and tractors that seemed to be used by people unafraid of being swallowed by the earth, and I felt better.

And then, there it was, Spring Villa, as I had seen in the photos:

Spring Villa house, home of the Yonge family, built in 1850.

I was surprised by how small the house was. It's tall but very narrow. And, as seen in most photos, it appears as one building, but it's actually two buildings set perpendicular together, and originally joined by a second-story walkway that's now no longer there. 

I read that this style is called carpenter gothic. There's another carpenter gothic house in downtown Opelika, but when I took a photo of it a few months back, the owner came out and started raving at me and demanding money for photos, even though I took it from the street and never stepped on his property. So, I just deleted those photos and left. Spring Villa is much more friendly to guests. It's a public park now, and you can enter for free and wander as you wish.

On the grounds we also saw the old swimming pool, now closed, which had separate little restrooms for men and women built like little carpenter gothic miniatures. There was also an RV park at the rear of the property, a playground and picnic area, and a house used by the property manager. The Spring Villa house itself looks like it's only used for reserved events.

Mom and I also crossed the road and went a path up a hill through the woods. There we found graves, side by side, of father and son Yonge. According to legend, one of the Yonges was a harsh slave owner and was murdered by one of his slaves. There's a spiral staircase in the house with a niche by the 13th step. The slave hid in the niche and stabbed the owner to death as he passed by. Apparently the 13th step was stained in blood until the 1950s, when it was replaced because it had rotted. The house is supposed to be haunted.

Autumn Daffodil

I got my autumn daffodil (Sternbergia lutea) bulbs today. I'll pot them up and hopefully there'll be blooms next month! I also started some Corsican violet seeds. I'll try them this year instead of or in addition to my usual violas. The spider lilies are blooming all over the place, and withering quickly in this heat. I think the hurricane and the cooler weather made them bloom a few weeks earlier. It seems they normally bloom in the first part of October (I remember, once, when visiting home from Ball State on October 10, 2010, they were in bloom).

Rudbeckia triloba blooming on Auburn's campus

Lycoris radiata: ones I'm growing in pots

Lycoris radiata in the grass near my dad's house

Cosmos sulphureus

Sweet almond verbena (Aloysia virgata), a small shrub or woody perennial with white intensely fragrant flowers. I planted it at my mom's house but I cut a stem to take home and perfume my living room.

Sternbergia lutea bulbs. They're smaller than I remembered, but they're small plants generally. You can tell just by looking at the bulbs that they're closely related to true Narcissi.

The purpose of education

The purpose of education is friendship.

This is what I heard from a CiRCE Institute podcast, from one of its founders. I hadn't thought of it like this before. I might have said that the purpose of education is to know the truth, or to be virtuous, or something along those lines. Yet, if the purpose of virtue is friendship - true friendship, that is - then the purpose of education must be friendship. Our education ought to train us to be capable of true friendship.

How different this purpose is from that the world now thinks is the purpose of education: career; or even more base: money or status. It is interesting also that in our day, career is almost always placed above friendship as a life priority.

I was listening to an episode of On Point on NPR, talking about the decline of male friendship. According to many who research these things, almost all men lose all their friendships by middle age. Men in middle and old age, for the most part, have no intimate friendships with anybody, and the resulting loneliness is causing a host of physical and psychological health problems. How did it happen? It happened because men placed career and family above friendship, and over time all their friendships fell away. It's not entirely men's faults. Our society expects men to treat career and family above friendship. Friendship cannot be forged in isolation; it is a collaborative exercise requiring mutual acknowledgement and commitment of two individuals. Thus, even if one man decided to place friendship above or equal to career and family, chances are he would find no one willing or able to reciprocate. This is the process by which male friendship has eroded into nonexistence over the past few decades.

Behind the Shed

Colorblind

I was reading recently how early photographic technologies were only sensitive to blue (and into ultraviolet) light. The early photographs were not merely colorblind in the sense of being in black and white; they were furthermore blind to reds, oranges, yellows, and greens, rendering them all dark, no matter how bright they would appear to us. What appears to us as a bright yellow ball or a bright red fire hydrant would both appear totally black or very dark in these kinds of photos. Conversely, blue things appear very bright or even white: thus clouds become indistinguishable from the blue sky, and blue eyes appear ghostly white.

Lately I've been using a filter that admits mostly blue, violet, and ultraviolet light. I especially like how it renders plants. It is colorblind. I think that flowers have such spectacular colors that it's easy to overlook the structure or texture of flowers. Blue-light-only cuts out nearly all the color, and allows the form to take prominence. One challenge with these photos is that the camera receives much less light, requiring longer exposures. Thus, I have to keep the plants very still while photographing them. I've found it easier to bring them inside for this purpose, where there's no wind.

Heliotrope and other pasture weeds. Heliotrope flowers are violet with yellow-green centers, thus white with black centers here.

White rain lily (Zephyranthes candida). White flowers with yellow stamens.

Rudbeckia triloba. Bright yellow-orange ray flowers and dark brown disk flowers.

Sneezeweed (Helenium amarum). Yellow ray flowers and yellow-green disk flowers.

Verbena rigida. Bright violet flowers.

Lantana camara 'Dallas Red'. Bright red and orange flowers.

Cosmos sulphureus. Bright orange ray flowers and yellow disk flowers.

Brown-Eyed Susans

It feels cool out today. I heard that tomorrow morning it will be 55 degrees. I'm looking forward to that! This afternoon I took a walk down the road to the bridge that crosses the little creek. I didn't even break a sweat. I found some brown-eyed Susans blooming in a ditch near the edge of the woods. I picked one and took it back for photos.

Rudbeckia triloba, hand-held shot. I never noticed the orange gradient in the ray flowers before today.

Monochrome with blue light

Color composite

Smith Mountain

I went up to Dadeville, Alabama this afternoon to drop off some documents at the county engineer office. Nearby Dadeville is Smith Mountain, which hosts a fire tower with magnificent views of Lake Martin. The breeze up there was great to cool off after the hike to the top. It was a pretty hazy day, with humidity and smoke from a controlled burn in the distance.

Longleaf pines galore at Smith Mountain. With so little underbrush, it makes me think they must do controlled burns here. Longleaf forest with fire-controlled underbrush is among the pretties habitats in the world, in my opinion.

Lake Martin, an area called Sandy Creek. The cleared land in the distance is an Air Force recreational area that was cleared by a tornado a few years back. One of my aunts lives to the left of there on the waterfront.

Fall foliage is slowly beginning in Alabama. I believe these are sourwoods, which always turn early. 

Lovely lichens

Lake in Infrared

My camera has a hot mirror, but if I take long enough exposures I can get infrared images. I took some yesterday at the lake,

This Canon 50mm lens has a pretty bad infrared hotspot, but it makes an interesting vignette effect.

This is our neighbor's house across the way. This image is infrared + red + blue light.

Daffodil Journal 2017 & 2018

It has been since April since I've written about daffodils. I spent some time this week putting together plans for this year and next year's daffodil adventures.

It would seem that daffodils are done for the year, but there are actually many autumn-blooming daffodils. Unfortunately, many of these are rare or hard to find. I've seen some sold for $50 a bulb! I couldn't justify spending so much money on something that may not even thrive here.

On the other hand, there is the so-called Autumn Daffodil, which is not a member of the genus Narcissus but a close relative: Sternbergia lutea. They look like little yellow crocuses and they bloom in fall. I had them growing at my mom's ten years ago, but sometime in college or while in Indiana they died away among the weeds. This year I've bought ten more bulbs and hope to plant them in pots.

Speaking of pots, I've decided that from now on I mostly want to grow daffodils in pots. Pots have many advantages, especially for a gardener without land of his own to garden on. For one, with so many daffodil varieties, it is getting hard to keep them separate and remember what is where. In pots, this will be so easy. Secondly, having them in pots allows them to be utilized as specimens. I like to have them up close where I can look at them or smell them. I like to move them where there's good lighting if I take photos. I like to bring them inside for short periods to perfume my rooms. Thirdly, it is easier to chill bulbs in pots than in the ground here. Most daffodils need cold to grow and bloom properly, but our soil here stays too warm in winter.

So, as for 2018 plans, these are the new cultivars I'm planning to try. Last year I spent a lot of attention on Jonquilla daffodils. I've started to catch on to the fact that late-blooming daffodils don't fare well here, even if they have mighty Jonquilla ancestry. This year I plan on trying more Tazetta daffodils. They tend to need less cold and bloom earlier.

'Goose Green' - a Poeticus daffodil, the first one I've tried. It blooms earlier, so maybe it will work.

'Abba' - a double sport of 'Cragford' (see below); seems similar to 'Sir Winston Churchill' but blooms earlier

'Orange Comet' - a Cyclamineus daffodil. Not sure how it will do but I couldn't resist trying.

'Martinette' - a Tazetta that should do well.

'Falconet' - another Tazetta with similar ancestry to 'Martinette'

'Aspasia' - a late blooming Tazetta/Poeticus hybrid. Has similar ancestry to 'Twin Sisters' which does well here, so I'm taking the gamble.

'Cragford' - an early Tazetta

'Odoratus' - a smaller Tazetta that is supposed to bloom better than 'Canaliculatus', which only sends up foliage for me; supposedly has a great apricot scent, too.

'Bittern' - one of the complex hybrid daffodils that looked interesting to me.

'Diamond Ring' - one of the Bulbocodium daffodils (hoop-petticoat type)

Also, a few heirloom and historic varieties:

'Princeps' - a very early trumpet daffodil that may be a selection of N. grayi

'White Lady' - a small cup daffodil from before 1897

'Grand Primo' - it grows in the woods all by my dad's house and I posted photos earlier this year, but I wanted some of my own.

'Stella' - a large cup daffodil from before 1869.

'Minor Monarque' - a starlike, fragrant Tazetta daffodil that blooms very early, perhaps around New Years.

Well, that wraps up things for now. I'm looking forward to getting things going. Hopefully I'll receive my Autumn Daffodils this week.

Autumn Daffodil, Sternbergia lutea, taken in October 2007. My, time has flown by!