Be tenacious!  Have courage!

When everything that you recognize is stripped away
know that as a creative being you can still blossom.

Pink. The Lady Slipper Orchid emerging after surviving the timbering, April 2022

It was the holiday season of 2009. We simply took a drive. Heading west four hours from Wren House we enter a different world.

I’m still shocked when I see photos from our first months camping on the 50-acres that we purchased after it had been clear-cut. Throughout our relationship, going all the way back to 1982, BD had frequently  remarked that she had a dream of purchasing land and simply allowing it to grow without interference … she would often say, “I want to have a free-tree-farm.” 

Heavy timbering equipment makes the earth like concrete. All the more reason for our thrill at the appearance of the Pink Lady Slippers (we counted 15 of them) emerging on the edge of the most recent clear cut.

In the forest, plants and insects appear and disappear in their individual notch-of-the-year. It would have been so easy to have missed completely the Pink Lady Slipper’s time.

In April BD took a hike to the east edge of our land to check on our eastern boundary where the pines were timbered early in the year. She returned excited to report Pink Lady Slippers emerging on the edge of the cut land. She found two orchids in bloom about ten feet apart. We couldn’t imagine how they would survive now being exposed to full sun. Our internet research, and phoning Virginia Native Plant Society along with the Buckingham County county extension agency provide the same information…Pink Lady Slippers are notoriously difficult to transplant. We slept on it before disturbing the plants any further.
I wondered what it must be like to rise up from a winter underground and find that there is no there there. Everything gone.

We are twelve years into learning the ways that Mother Earth reclaims herself. 

 

Coyote on the regrowth trail. 

Our land is a wildlife sanctuary and a retreat for us. We are not growing trees for resale. However, for those who are, mature trees, usually after about three decades, are listed for auction. The winning bidder clears the land. Five years ago I listened to the high-powered saws clear 250-acres along our north boundary. This winter the loggers cleared 650-acres along our eastern border. Different than a typical chain saw, the blades sheer the tree off at the base like a hot knife through butter as giant calipers wait to grasp each tree escorting it to the waiting flatbed trucks. One tree at a time the forest is placed onto the back of trucks and driven away. Some trees become toilet paper, some are destined to be shipped to China to be returned as cheap pressed wood panels and the products that they are made from. If the waste wood is cleared away it may be turned into wood pellets for stoves. 

During these ten years of driving back and forth from the ocean to Piedmont, we frequently observe large tracts of the forest now gone. Clear-cut. Hardwood and pine trees as crops. Tree growing is an industry.

I’ll never get used to this. It consistently has me question, ‘Can’t we do better?’ Isn’t there another way?’ and then I observe what happens next as the ‘tree crop land’ revitalizes. I see burgeoning growth. I research and learn that a young forest, even before the trees reemerge, supports grasses that need full sunshine and in turn form meadows that attract songbirds.

Journal page, return of the bluebirds, Drozda, 2010

The tree saplings grow fast and within five years many animals have returned. The growing season in Virginia is such that vegetation often appears to be on steroids. We’re amazed at the changes in one season, not to mention how dense the undergrowth becomes in a few short years. Vines, primarily rugosa rose, blackberry, honeysuckle, and poison ivy, (all invasive species) make for hard physical work as we create hiking paths.

 

I tend to equate experiences in nature with the creative process so it seems easy for me to consider the way in which life cuts us down through situations and circumstances beyond our control. Yet pure creative tenacity makes us unstoppable. We rise. We begin again. This is why I am passionate about syncing in with the circadian rhythms of the seasons. I want to be, and choose to be, as natural as possible in this fast-paced high-tech world. It’s an exciting way to move through time and space.

 

I am excited to share this experiment and adventure. We are two women in our seventies exploring 50-acres off the grid. We are doing what we can to create an example of voluntary simplicity on our free-tree-farm. We did the best we could to transplant the two Pink Lady Slipper Orchids that were closest to our land. We did all that we could to line them up with where they had been, keeping them as close as possible to pines crossing our fingers that the microorganisms and fungus that they are in a symbiotic relationship with also make the move intact. I enclosed each of the remaining 13 emerging Pink Ladies within twig boxes to mark their spots. Now nature must take her course.

Consider what you are currently nurturing. Share what you grow so that it might become strong…’cuz we grow together … and we sometimes need to be transplanted.

See you in June when we celebrate the moon/month of Brilliance.