Days of the Gristmill

"But noon and night, the panting teams
Stop under the great oaks, that throw
Tangles of light and shade below,
On roofs and doors and window-sills.
Across the road the barns display
Their lines of stalls, their mows of hay,
Through wide open doors the breezes blow,
The wattled cocks strut to and fro,
And, half effaced by rain and shine,
The Red Horse prances on the sign."
  – Longfellow, "Tales of a Wayside Inn"



Days of the Gristmill

1.

The eyes of the historian
always carry a wishful air
to transport backwards and to place
a thumb to hold down a scene...

...A long and old October Day
by the bay channel of Black River,
As I watch an eagle that has sat
down her late fall carrion fish
on the brown beach to peck and gnaw,
I can't help but think back against
the foggy approach of coming
winter a day from years ago,
of Sudbury Mass at Old Post Road,
that which reached by gravel an inn,
a gristmill by day, nightly a tavern.
We might hear from some hundred
feet away around a cobbled wall
the murmurs of the small creek
that crawls through the gnarled oak wood
and lances past the inn to shoot
down in reckless pattern to the wheel
which turns slow tightly ungreased
and lets out a remote toll
as of an owl who has its head from
shadowed limb to call the orange moon.
A party of voices joins-in
but hid as an echo low from within
the stone walls of the tavern
and sent out the window candle lit
"The grog will be good, a break
of farmer's bread made by the grist,"
one of the comers delights
and pauses, and sees good cheer
soon dripping from his cold fist.

Family Nature Journal
Option 10

"If we are going to get back, we need to look first at where we are now. Katie Avery, third grade teacher in the White Mountain-encircled town of Gotham, New Hampshire, got at the crux of the problem during a curriculum planning meeting when she asked, 'Why are we using textbooks that focus on landforms in Arizona when we have such amazing resources right here in our backyard?' Good question." – David Sobel, from "Distance from Beauty," Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities







Teaching a place-based curriculum to students in school, or to our children at home, without imparting a strong sense for local history, is a little bit like trying to study the unique quartzite bluffs at Devil's Lake, WI by merely looking at a small quartzite rock taken from that park. A simple question would come to us, in terms of getting young people interested: what is more fascinating, the history of this one particular rock, or the history of the place, as it stands out as a feature in southwest Wisconsin, as an ancient home to native inhabitants, as remnant of glaciation, as a landscape of erosion, beauty, spirit. In the study of history, the key in modern times is first of all, not to ignore it. Sometimes history is the very first thing to go in education because we have, at times, done a poor job of teaching it and bringing it to life. Very often we stress bringing history to us, but it can also be an exercise in historical imagination to go back to it. To do this, it's important to steep ourselves in the place itself, its features, its cultural patterns, its food routine, the work involved, the leisure, educational tendencies and attitudes towards the land. Far too often we treat our history as though it has virtually nothing to offer us in a highly modernized, tech-driven, and commercial culture which is currently struggling with finding a viable system of belief.  Ironically, what we crave is not necessarily more, better, faster, (we already have this) but counter measures that provide quality experiences like making things, finding out how to grow things, creating small edible gardens, considering who our local farmers are so we can buy from other hands-on producers, natural restoration projects. We notice that as school curriculum become more sources of complaint for students, what is longed for is experiential learning – get outside, learn skills, apply, connect mind to reality. Although it can seem at the outset a dull project, it can be very fascinating to look at certain sources of history that might otherwise be skipped, such as Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of

Virginia, a kind of pioneer work of place-based study, in which the eventual third president makes a years long study of everything from geography, waterways, farming, currency, founding, population, birds, located in his state. It is quite fascinating to compare some our tendencies in determining climate with his own, observed through study in the years 1772-1777...."I will presume it not improper nor unacceptable to furnish some data for estimating the climate of Virginia. Journals of observation on the quantity of rain, and degree of heat, being lengthy, confused, and too minute to produce general and distinct ideas." How did climate affect growth on farms? "Besides these plants, which are native, our Farms produce wheat, rye, barley, oats, buck wheat, broom corn and Indian corn...The gardens yield musk melons, water melons, tomatoes, okra, pomegranates, figs, and the esculent plants of Europe." When we talk about going back to history, or bring history to us, information like that written by Jefferson becomes a kind of fascinating prospective two-way street in education. If we were assigned to read portions of Notes on the State of Virginia, first of all we would be reading an original work of place-based research and education. Questions abound: what would it be like to live at this time in American history, a time that deem this information as useful? What would it be like to enter into this mindset of utter curiosity for our place, our state, our own town or neighborhood? Has our interest waned truly because there is nothing interesting or new to observe, or does it have more to do with simply forgetting about that curiosity or giving it over to other forms of information? To use these queries, as Jefferson called them, as a source for our own 'Notes,' it becomes an exercise in historical relatability – what I am doing now is something that Jefferson (and obviously others at that time, late 18th century) was doing and thinking. The place-based historical mind needs exercise and practice, things that would have come completely naturally then, but that we have to work at today, as the reaching back becomes washed out not just by the reaching forward, but to the reaching of all those things that might prevent us from doing either, mere modern distractions, which serve little function other than keeping us busy and moving through our hours.  To take a brief look at the historical recipes of George and Martha Washington at Mt. Vernon offers a similar function of exercise, imagination, education and opportunities for place-based education. We don't have to necessarily relate to the pomp and circumstance of formal dinner program at Mt. Vernon, but it is a very connective exercise in learning history if we follow the recipe for Green Peas with Cream, and see that this simple staple was highly valued: "Delicate green peas were a favored spring vegetable, eagerly anticipated by Virginians after long winters during which fresh vegetables were at a premium. Washington noted in his diary on May 25, 1785, that the family 'Had Peas for the first time in the season of Dinner.'" As we might take down our own notations on fresh food, culled from

our own local source, it might strike us also what this kind of anticipation for the fresh and flavorful might be like. In the meantime, our connection to history might become a little more down to earth, a little more approachable and outside of the more standard lens of contentious politics.  In the end, place-based education has to start with a dual approach of observation and some research. It needs some guides who are willing to initiate the sometimes hard but always rewarding process of reconnecting our lives to what we are surrounded by. Our cities can obviously become nothing more to us than a wash of passing concrete dotted by green spaces, or our cities can become touching points of stories connected to stories, connected to stories, all of which tends to have some original touchpoint to the land itself.  Where topography meets garden, meets the kitchen, and finally meets at the nightly meal is history in the making if we can see it step by step.

Nature Journal 10: Follow the trail of place from farm to table.  Pick a trusted local organic farm and do some web sight research on the farm history, its topography, its crops and its practices. Write a brief report, call it a note. Choose one of the products that the farmer grows, find a recipe with that product, write it out, and make the dish. Write a brief description of how it was.

Dining with the Washingtons
A Culinary History

"Thus, along with the distinction of being 'First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,' it seems fitting to add another, rather surprising item to George Washington's long list of accomplishments– (almost) first in whiskey." – Dennis Pogue, "Drink and Be Merry: Liquor and Wine at Mount Vernon"




Facets of sustainability take on many guises. Today, a rain barrel at the corner of our house for the sake of a water flow into the garden fits the bill. Buy from the organic bulk section of the co-op and make  your own granola serves as a great way to buy local and to know what is actually in the food you are assembling. Keep your heating and air conditioning down to a minimum. Drive less, obviously – if you can get there by bike or foot, why not? Exercise itself is a component of sustainability as it increases your heart rate, gets you off of of the electronics, and thereby offering another alternative reality to consumption.  As the list of sustainable options increases, it is very interesting to consider them in context to the living styles of Colonial and Revolutionary America when, whether they wanted to or not (and many farmers did so) all of life was sustainability. We moderns, with a kind of blind distrust of history, actually find ourselves in a very precarious position in history – we claim the right to disregard any history pre-dating the year 2000, all the while secretly chasing and longing for many (not all, obviously) of the components of slow food, slow money, care for the land, craftsmanship, investment in home, work the self, re-connect to the political system, keep things local, stay fit, talk to people, take time for lunch in a courtyard, raise some chickens, etc., etc. As the Washingtons of the world might very well have been on a fast track, somewhat unwittingly, toward mechanization (think of the Mt. Vernon gristmill turning fully automated, then the steam engine not far behind), now we are on a seeming fast-track to reel back in some home-spun tendencies to call our own. Where the past meets the future is where we find organics, co-ops, biking over carring, small gardens and outdoor education. It seems the sooner that we are to re-consider our own history for all of its triumphs and warts (plenty of these), the sooner we can usher in a more meaningful contemporary culture, where we can move forward by sometimes allow ourselves to move backwards, no self-judging.  I picture the thought process of the Washingtons at Mt. Vernon where it became mightily clear that to continue to import all of that liquor, wine and beer from places like Portugal (Madeira) port from Boston, or Rum, the most essential spirit in America at that time: "The record of the Rum account entered in the Mount Vernon plantation records for 1787 ... Washington acquired 491 gallons of rum that year, purchased in eight shipments from five merchants; these ranged in volume from a single barrel (thirty-one gallons) to a hogshead containing 125 gallons." Besides the great thirst for rum and ale, Madeira was the General's favorite post-supper drink, to such a degree that Madeira vines were attempted on Mt. Vernon, just as a whiskey distillery was opened on the estate.  The prolific rate of micro home brewing comes to mind, or the popping up of various winery in areas of the country usually deemed as ungrowable. As the lens zooms upward and outward onto farm at Mt. Vernon, we can see a tendency to keep all sustainable needs growing on premise: kitchen garden for all produce, a smoker for hams, bacon, a grist mill for flour, a distillery for spirits, cash crops for trade and use, no doubt animals for slaughter and use... a sort of working apparatus of accounting for need within the farm, then the tweaking of the system accordingly, all use, no waste, and a circular motion of trade in and trade out. The dependence on slavery for this system was wrong both at the cultural and individual level, but it doesn't mean the modern cannot find answers for sustainability in the construction and accounting of farms of the past.

Dining with the Washingtons
A Culinary History

"So far none of the forty-odd farmstead owners has put in a field of durum wheat, nor does any of them raise pigs, or milk a cow. None, in fact, has done more than keep a couple of horses and mow a few swaths of hay. But they will, they will. Miniature farming is the coming sport of the leisure class." – Noel Perrin, from Second Person Rural










With the great benefit of retrospect coupled by the sometimes more than a little frustrating view of things as they are today, we can reach certain points in history and say "that would have been a good place to stop, keep it as it was, then maybe some of the various consequences that came after would not have happened.  One of the dominant complaints circling in contemporary culture has been the condition of the food system in the U.S. Eleven years ago the Omnivore's Dilemma pointed out some very congenital problems with monoculture agribusiness, feedlots, and corn fed cows just as a few examples. Not everyone knew at that point at publication about the diet of petroleum, antibiotics and corn for cows. Not everybody would have visualized and understood that as farms have gotten bigger, so too has the need to wash crops with chemicals. Machines take over where the farmer and family once laid hands and paired age old training with good practices, rotating crops, keeping portions of forests in the fields, laying cover crops, letting pastures rest, and so on down the line.  Tobacco, at the time of the American Revolution, was becoming seen as high intensive and a mere export, no

sustaining the local community. Wheat production had become a more viable option and one that was very much recognized by Washington throughout the War campaign because of its great value to the Continental Army. Washington had already begun to transfer over resources to wheat and gristmill production but became, by 1791, interested enough in the new design of the fully automated mill design by Oliver Evans to rebuild his own mill by the new patent. Evans' new designs made the mill fully automated, from a bucket elevator system to take wheat to the top of the mill, "an automatic floor cooler, called a 'hopper boy,' prepared the flour for sifting. Cooling was essential because wheat

from Brandywine Village Delaware

meal became quite warm during the grinding process...These innovations greatly increased the efficiency of the operation while reducing the number of laborers needed." At this moment, as the milling trade was in full swing and ripe for innovation, it was an industry that served as an integral hub for local community life and created what we now enviously would call a closed loop system – the miller and the local farmer worked for one another, for both profit (the miller received his fee for processing...'miller's fee), and of course the farmers were able to turn their raw wheat to a viable product not only local trade (possibly international) but obviously for personal consumption, bread being a chief staple.  We can picture the millwright craft still in full swing. Someone has to observe the sight for a mill, determine location on water, then design an intricate but non-synthetic system of gears, pulleys, chutes and wheels so to take advantage of either running or impounded water. Farmers

still would have had to keep their eyes and hands on the ground, so to speak and because wheat is such a staple, it would not have ever become a 'flash crop,' here today, gone tomorrow. Put simply, preserving the small and local wheat business could have been viable for ever. The steam engine came soon after. Production swelled, and with that, eyes bulging at the prospect of profits and prestige. Here is a moment in history that the great agriculture writer Wendell Berry would signify as a time when the generalist in farmer becomes the specialist, and the food system has degraded ever since.  The generalist farmer, like Washington, Jefferson, and the rest of our founding generation, keeps his and her eye on everything still, the home garden, the landscape that is intricately associated with crops, native seeds, watering...and milling. The specialist is in charge of a farm that is a massive acreage farm that grows one primary crop. What to pay attention to? Making sure the crop grows and nothing else. To enormous for the farmer's hands to pick, machines take over from skilled and

invested labor. Crops might not get rotated, so no rest or reaccumulation of nutrients in the soil. The topsoil is either a producer or it becomes that synthetically. The corn that is grown is not used by the local community but is sent on a train somewhere down the line, thousands of miles away, to be used primarily as feed for cows that don't like it. The farmer must invest in very heavy and expensive machinery to keep this going concern alive, but gets low price. The farmer is indebted and growing something that has no connection to his neighbor. Washington and Jefferson might have been able to conceive of virtually anything that would become the future because of their foresight; but without very little doubt neither would have condoned the modern state of agriculture. Jefferson's political philosophy was based on an agrarian economy: keep it local, keep it educated, keep it engaged. Washington's single most candid passion was farming. It was the very thing, besides his family, that he harkened back to in his mind when going through the hundreds of difficulties throughout the Revolutionary War.  A new gristmill economy sounds quite quaint, but there is now a strong trend of growing of interest in not only folk crafts and trades but small subsistence farming. The first thing I'd do is build a grist mill.

Dining with the Washingtons
A Culinary History

"But the western country on the Mississippi, and the midlands of Georgia, having fresh and fertile lands in abundance, and a hotter sun, will be able to undersell these two states, and will oblige them to abandon the raising tobacco altogether. And a happy obligation for them it will be. It is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness." – Thomas Jefferson, from Notes on the State of Verginia








Of the many jobs on an estate farm in the latter half of the 18th century, I can't help but to dream of having William Roberts' job. As other farmers of his ilk and range, George Washington could see upon his reception of his family farm at Mt. Vernon into the future of farm commodities. As Jefferson points in his Querry XX of Notes on the State of Virginia, tobacco was on its way out already by midcentury – surrounding states had an easier time producing and cultivating the once indespensible crop and wheat was up and coming, a crop that, if milled well, could end up in the hands of the

French or the Portuguese, or in the hands of ship sailors in the form of hardtack. Washington was, if anything, a careful analyst and well informed farmer. Tobacco was a cash crop but nothing else. It didn't provide the same inherent benefits as wheat or corn, which obviously served to feed the growers themselves and a worthwhile crop to buyers. And unlike the highly intensive picking of tobacco, there was now technology that could be used to process wheat, the fabulous gristmill. William Roberts was, as Dining relates, one of the few talented men who were not just a millwright (builders of mills and its components) but also a miller (mill skill worker). Other than the fact that Roberts would later concede to taking too kindly to drink at the miller's position on the farm, he was of exceptional talent. Washington kept note that "for skill in grinding, and keeping a Mill in order,

Roberts is inferior to No Man...He is an excellent Cooper & Millwright, he has lived with me near fifteen years, during which period I have not paid a shilling for repairs."  Made up of massive gears made of white oak, and massive millstones, once remarked by Washington as "an Article of more consequence that all the rest to me," the mill became a nearly fully automated conveyor system of wheat separation, transportation, grinding and gathering, all set in motion by the power of water below and yielded profits, away from tobacco, for nearly thirty years.  One has a hard time imagining such an elaborately organic craft and trade, but one that seems particularly enticing as some small organic farms try to strike it out on their own against the entrenched power of large scale agribusiness. It is interesting to make a certain daydream out of picturing the craftsmanship of creating wooden gears and buckets, sanding down stones, contriving water scoops and latching levers...as a trade. To see such work by one's own hands seamlessly grinding down the fine crop of wheat to usable powder, all powered by nothing more than a small dam, is a course on sustainability all on its own. Now to consider that that very same farmer would pull aside a certain allotment of the wheat germ for private use in baking and cooking, we have the beginnings of a closed loop system of use and no waste, plus a cash crop which might eventually pay for the materials of the mill itself. You do wonder, as more William Roberts of the world re-learn the craft of millwrighting, if more local folks might not be willing to invest in the trade, buy the product in local sack, and you have that same old transactional connection that kept small farms alive for centuries. The most serious question that might arise from the success of the new mill might be whether some day to sell to roving food company watching the trend so to turn it into something unrecognizable again.

Dining with the Washingtons
A Culinary History

"Sargent found breakfast with the Washingtons to be a 'very substantial Repast,' noting, 'Indian hoe cake with Butter & Honey seemed the principal Component Parts.'" – from "Served up in excellent order: Everyday Dining at Mount Vernon."











To read about the protracted Revolutionary War, we come to see Washington as the center point of virtually all activities, from its inception at Bunker Hill until its finale in South Carolina – all action, trudging and strain. There were, of course, no assurances that it would end well for the hodgepodge Continental Army. Against this backdrop of action and struggle, we begin to see another side, that which was being protected, when we see life at Mt. Vernon, an idyllic estate functioning by slow time, slow food, and a daily routine that would have served as a stay against the surrounding chaos (speaking strictly of the Washington family, not servants or slaves. It is hinted at that both were treated very well here, but a relative assessment). When thinking about modern notions of the slow food movement, we might ask how would we live and how would we eat if we created our own daily rhythms in which the body and mind followed its own cues and hungers instead of the sometimes seemingly unusual modern habits of a rushed cereal breakfast, a processed lunch on the go, and an over portioned supper sometimes to be eaten at 7 in the evening? At Mt. Vernon there was a balance between the need for work – staying busy and productive through the daylight hours – and eating portions and at times that worked well within this daily farm cycle.  Both Mr. and Mrs. Washington rose early; for George, this might have meant reading the dailies and taking notes by candlelight as early as 4 or 5 in the morning, then maybe a light breakfast by 7 a.m. standard, in order to prepare for an 8-14 mile ride around the property of the sake of management. For Martha, this might have meant either an early assistance with the preparation a light breakfast or a long walk along the piazza for exercise.  The breakfast could have been as light as hoe cake, butter, honey and three cups of tea for George, or as heavy as "ham, cold corned beef, cold fowl, red herring, and cold mutton, all garnished with parsley and garden vegetables," for a visitor such as Massachusetts Congressman Manasseh

Cutler. Breakfast wasn't typically a lingering affair as dinner would be later that day at 3 p.m., a standard plantation hour for dining. Breakfast was the farmer house preparation time, waking with tea, coffee or Chocolate ... "at Mount Vernon, as my Wife thinks it agreed with her better than any other Breakfast." The hours after were spent in preparation for the larger daily meal. "For those who were hungry in the meantime, snacks, both sweet and savory, were available." And finally, in a sort amusing image, if the small snacks were not enough to counter the early to mid day hunger, George might have very well carried along with him on his jaunts around the property a 'Farmer's Lunchbox,' with sandwich. At fifteen minutes to 3:00, the grounds bell would ring and all comers were notified that it was time to freshen and descend at the dining table for the more substantial feast, always shared with visitors, then followed by the round of desserts, madeira and conversation sometimes lasting into the evening. This particular day would have rallied around prideful work, reading and writing, slow food, family and visitors, and a relatively early bed time, in essence components that modern culture has lost touch with but are trying restore through a variety of subtle practices such as home permaculture, homemade pantry stock, work schedules with flexibility, some homeschooling, and a rising interest in re-learning folk crafts. It seems that culture is necessarily taking stock in the idea once again that Time is of the essence: either we create it, or somebody else does for us.

Some Notes on Dining
With the Washingtons
A Culinary History

"I do not pretend to teach professed Cooks, my design being to instruct the ignorant and unlearned, (which will likewise be of use in all private families.) and that in so full and plain a manner, that the most ignorant Person, who can but read, will know how to do Cookery well." Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1763, 6th ed.)










Today we live within one of the great food revolutions in known history. The advent of hunting, gathering, tools, and the advancement of far flung eras past of cooking techniques could be seen as revolution number one, but our revolution is unprecedented in its scale, degree, choice, and broad professionalism. The popularity and number of cookbook available for the modern consumer is nearly as good a symbol of this revolution as the number of homespun restaurants erected in the past 20 years. At the time of the Washington's rise to prominence in America, from 1774 especially, until Washington's death in 1797, one could make a case that Mt. Vernon and similar estates would have been the symbol of food culture for that time. In the year 1774 – the year Washington was elected to command the Continental Army – for example, it was reported that the Washington household entertained dining guests 136 of 207 days that he was home. "In 1785, two years after the war's official end, the Washingtons welcomed dinner guests 225 times and overnight guests 235 times." Visitors might have been old friends, dignitaries, military officials, politicians, foreign visitors, or just the curious passer-by. All were welcome and all were served, to varying degrees, warmth, a meal, conversation, and the option for an overnight stay. As Washington himself once remarked that there seemed very few differences between the open door policy of home and a town tavern.  If

Washington was in charge of overseeing the running of the farm property, Martha was in charge of supervising all of the domestic affairs, not always cooking herself, but making sure that all cooking operations were taken care of. "Her grandson likewise remembered how she excelled in this role: 'Mrs. Washington...gave her constant attention to all matters of her domestic household, and by her skill and superior greatly contributed to the comfortable reception and entertainment of the crowds of guests always to be found in the hospitable Mansion of Mount Vernon.'" Part of this contribution would have been menu construction as well, often conceived directly after breakfast, served at 7 a.m. regularly. Unlike modern times, interestingly, only two cookbooks would have made up Martha's collection at this time, one a hand written family chronicle of recipes and the other Hannah Glasse's famous The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, a book that was quite common among households of means at that time and one that was directed toward the clear training of servant cooks.  Sometimes this relationship between the head of domestic household and cook too the form of Martha reading the recipes aloud to the cook. She would have shared recipes with friends and neighbors and created her own, hand-written them, and included them in her own hardbound copy. When considering Mt. Vernon in its entirety, then, from farm to table, from inn keeper to cook, to dinner guests to family members, and cookbooks to recipes, it is a safe surmise to see this as one of the more unified beginnings of the American food culture, which makes sense in light of the fact that this was the same time, place, and coterie of the beginning of the American democracy. Today we see

at the very edge of food culture phenomenons such as small organic farms that offer both dining and overnight services, such as the famous Blackberry Farm in Tennessee, with tenets of sustainability in visible use, just as they were at Mt. Vernon where – as memoirs record – the Washingtons served fresh fine meals hospitably but rarely if ever over indulging in either food or drink. Cooks were often encouraged to try to sell in other markets waste from food production. In a famous example of Washington's keen sense for farm practices, he eradicated his tobacco crop for wheat and a grist mill, a similar practice, many today would be inclined to support, to transform the dominant corn crop to a full rotation, and to feed cattle grass again.

"To sit
Among them,
They're always dripping
Azure shade, and when we talk,
Give sudden birth to breezes."

– Yu Chao, "The Pine Whisk"






Along West Knoll
Big Bluestem says hello at entrance.
It is autumn now.
The wild field a puzzle of colors
has departed –
Oak savanna beige by grass stems –
except for the primrose,
petals delicate sundrops.

I thank the Oak off in the distance,
black beautiful limbs,
a piano to the sky,
no sound, just music.

We must move slow.
Trail narrow.
Oak grubs huddled in among
the bunchgrass,
old friends listening
too to nothing.

Into Restoration

"My guidebook on trees says that the fruit of the wild plum, although succulent, is too sour to be eaten raw. That shows what the people who write guidebooks know. I happened to have the taste of a raw wild plum, the rich, unsullied, apricots flavor of it, fresh in my mouth." Gruchow, from Journal of a Prairie Year







When walking along the narrow side trail of the West Knoll of the Grady Tract leading down to Green Prairie, maybe hunching over to determine whether the cutest little yellow flower (weed) you have ever seen is a sundrop primrose, you are confronted with the dream of the oak savanna. It is a dream because, as you look uphill or downfield, you know you are standing in the middle of a long attempt at oak savanna restoration, a field of grass, lined by big bluestem at its edges, the memory of spidorwort and butterfly weed along the way earlier in the season, and most importantly not only the mature oaks residing over the grasses but the grubs, gathered in their bunches, indicating the old native growth of this particular landscape. It feels like a dream because, as we can so easily visualize the opening, we know the previous use of this land was for farming and that what we are seeing had not been preserved but worked, grazed, tilled, flattened, and for many years forgotten to receive its necessary burning. It is a dream because the walker of the savanna desires more opening, fewer grubs, no more creeping bittersweet choking off the trees to either side of the knoll. A dream because we know that if we were dropped onto this same very plot in previous geological eras, post glacial, that is precisely what we would have seen, and wouldn't it have been marvelous to watch play out in its geologic time that harmony of features that made up the lower quadrant of southwest Wisconsin – the deep grassroots layer rising to catch its full dose of sunshine, shaded by the happily infrequent oak canopy cover, and to hear the peace of the prairie birds in spring rise from limb to limb. Today it seems more like a biotic puzzle, in which many of the fragmented pieces are still out there but must by definition now thrive only by assistance of the very human hand that created the disturbance in the first place.  Without lightening, for instance, the prescribed burn must preserve the integrity of the friendship between prairie and oak; without the gloved hand holding the loppers how could the understory survive the voracious appetite of the bittersweet vine which climbs to sunlight choking off at tightened spirals the native tree column. Putting the puzzle back together again seems a reassembling of a dream that is educational and probably more necessary than many could come to understand. Just as the dominant mission of humanity had been the expansion and subjugating of the land for 150 years, it might very well take another 150 for what might end up being called the era of counter restoration. As we bend down to touch the tiny petals of the sundrop, the bright yellow is a micro sign of a perfect little inch of the soil as it leads out to a clear draw where the oak stands as a thousand exclamation points.

Into Restoration

"The road to the quarry showed the tracks of the rabbits that had run there, but there was no sign of the humans who flocked to the place at any other time of year. Even in its prettiest dress, winter attracts scant notice." – Gruchow, Journal of a Prairie Year


Leopold often mentioned that when talking about natural resources the 'pretty' would always be an initial factor when considering how to get people to think of the land as community not commodity.  And so in restoration, likewise, the visual has its essential appeal. As you walk the old farm road through the Grady Tract, restored oak savannah to the right, and the kettle hole, embroiled in shaggy invasives, at least one part of the restorative mission is revealed: the oak savannah, gathering sunshine by big blue stem, Indian grass, even wild sage up the knoll, reveals a sort of paradise of the native, in which the occasional oak is queen, no doubt spreads her roots wide and deep below, and receives the proper balance of space, nutrients and sunshine – a landscape in harmony with itself. Onto the other side of the road, even the simple visual test for harmony is not met. Random species visually quest for their small plot of soil; the enormous stem of the poke weed is tangled up in the tendrils of the honeysuckle; vast stretches of buckthorn climb the kettle hole up and down, and lead down into a nondescript disturbance that may or may not have once been used as a dumping zone for the farmers who made a go of it on this undulating land years ago. And yet, despite the tangle, or maybe because of as it can be seen in the same immediate visual with the savannah, a goal for learning is visualized: what would happen if this patch was relieved of its bittersweet and garlic mustard, burned flat multiple times, and then replanted with shade tolerant natives? As we are reading, the thing that stands out to understand about invasive, is that their strategies for dominance are multifold, aggressive, and worst of all for natives, successful. As the leaves of the buckthorn green before the natives, they are able to shoot up and shade out sprouting of the more coveted stuff. We can only guess at the invisible battles that happen below the surface, but it seems logical to think that the invasive must be winning that battle as well, gobbling up nutrients and real estate. At this point, the restorationist has one more motive in to add to the tool belt – not only to seek the visual clearing of the patch but to recreate a level playing field, so to speak....to create an evolved harmony among tree and shrub, plant and flower, water resources and sun sources. The process of going back to help a disturbance in the landscape seems to be the one we are left with everywhere, our yards, our parks, our city woods, our country farms, and the rainforests worldwide. There had been eras dedicated to expansion, clearing, and planting; now we are in the era of restoration on all fronts. To see those restorations become more 'pretty' will take some down the path of assistance; for others, it might be the understanding of how things should be that usually attracts scant notice.

Notes on Dining with the Washingtons
and Culinary History

"So when we begin to understand how the president designed his gardens, arranged his dining rooms, and made a business of selling much of what his farm produced–all the while eschewing overindulgence and extravagance at the table–we not only learn more about him, but we also see how he interpreted and even influenced American food and dining." – Walter Shieb, forward to Dining with the Washingtons




On a second reading of Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, it becomes obvious just how revolutionary that book is as it reveals in a rational and measured way the very food system in which most of live, whether we then knew it or not. The revolutionary part really has come afterward, where now, unlike then, most of us do now have a much better sense that corn is king, for example, that the carbon footprint of large concern agriculture is enormous and often seeming irrational (the great example of the corn commodity transaction and distribution; the data of just how much 'petroleum' ruminants ultimately consume, etc., etc.), and that all of this just sort of happened, while we were not watching. Just to consider options for backtracking to turn an irrational food system to something that even resembles a rational one, has taken...ten years since the Omnivore's publication, and we're really not even close to solving concepts of big organic, carbon sequestration, the bankruptcy rate of rural farmers and right on down the line. In a word, the more you know, the more it all seems a mess. Finding a sort of snapshot of the food system from a previous generation, then, also seems like at least an interesting entry point to track either some of the difficulties always associated with the creation of food, or some of the ideals on which some of the practices aspired to achieve.  The book Dining with the Washingtons is one of the more overall thorough yet non-academic attempts at showing us a snapshot in time, of Mt. Vernon as both farm and hospitality center. As the chef Walter Shieb describes in the first paragraph of his forward to the culinary history book, he too did not quite know how to approach our first president in his own studies; there is the image, there is the historical epoch; there is the nation; there is the farm; and there is the real man. How to sort all of this out and disentangle it all with the hundreds of viewpoints available to interpret? My own interest might have less to do Washington himself – although that has been a very interesting route as well – but more as

a comparison, in my mind anyway, of food systems. To think, for example, that Mt. Vernon was an exceedingly diverse planting of crops (Washington actually eliminated tobacco at one point and relied upon wheat, with his own mill for processing), created all of the food that the plantation consumed, and offered surpluses to local community, quickly becomes a study in the 'local.' In fact, as one continues on in the reading, virtually every local ideal that we know hold up as values that we would like to aspire to engaging (slavery absolutely not included in this ideal), were common practice on this particular farm. In this, two strands of diverging attitudes and approaches to food, culture, family, become essential in understanding Dining with the Washingtons – that Washington himself was a dedicated and hands-on farmer who regularly be seen supervising or taking notes in the farm in drab clothes and plain speech, never over indulging meat, drink or sweets; and on the other side, living with certain luxuries that would only be available to the highest level of society. In other words, and quite telling, Washington lived a life that was surrounded by elegance but purposefully understatedly and with grace, humility, and generosity, the very characteristics that many might hold out values we would wish to see demonstrated by those who have. On that second reading of Omnivores, it is most disturbingly telling of the unfortunate circumstances of the large farm operators who do not find it possible to carry with them the most important luxury of them all – the luxury of being able to create your own food system which reflects personal values and autonomy.  To be stuck with corn as a mono crop and stuck inside the system of the feedlot is a lot less about caring farming practices and a lot more about commodity management. We know for certain that Washington would have rebuked this system and mounted a campaign against it. We get the sense he would have been victorious.

Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen

"And my pantry contains not just the staples you would expect, but the extra seasonings, condiments, and embellishments – for lack of a better term, the grace notes – that truly define my cooking and my home."
– Alice Waters, from My Pantry

It would be hard to imagine the history of the farm to table movement in America without the presence and guidance of Alice Waters. In two bits of culinary history trivia, among so many others to choose from, we can see how Waters and the movement co-evolved, so to speak. At 19, living in France as a student, she said she “lived at the bottom of a market street, and I took everything in by Osmosis.” Years later, in the beginning stages of creating the local food market at her Chez Panisse, it was Waters’ self-invented in-house ‘forager,’ Patricia Unterman, who received a call from another local food activist Sibella Kraus to see if she was interested in helping to revitalize the Ferry Market Building in San Francisco as a hub for bringing together farmers and restaurants and sell to the public as well. The rest is farm to table history. It seems very fitting then that Waters’ 2015 cookbook My Pantry: Homemade Ingredients That Make Simple Meals Your Own (Pam Kraus Books) anticipates yet the next progression in a growing niche by advancing the idea that “Simplicity and economy and ease in the kitchen all come from having a pantry you’ve made your own from ingredients you’ve mixed and made yourself.” The recipe book, made up of chapters like “Spice Mixtures and Condiments,” “Nuts,” Beans and Other Legumes,” “Cheese,” and “Sweet Preserves,” provides busy but conscientious home cooks with some simple recipes that allows us to rely less on processed food and more on prepared recipe staples. What better way to celebrate the treasure of the pantry than with her daughter, Fanny Singer, an art historian who happens to illustrate this artful and timely book.    

Into Restoration

"I was driving through Minneapolis one winter night with my five-year-old daughter. She looked out of her window and spied the moon. 'Oh!' she exclaimed. 'That's why we haven't been having a moon at home. It's been up her in Minneapolis!'" – Gruchow, from Journal of a Prairie Year









When working with real naturalists, you find out there are still many mysteries left in the natural world to provide questions that lead not only to pleasant debate but, most importantly, set them off in the direction of clue hunting out in the field. In fact, I can now plainly see, as we worked through winter twig identification, and then soon after took our tour through the Longenecker Garden and into the Gallistel Woods, that this was the very motion of spirit for restoration naturalist: raise a question or point of interest in the classroom, then go find out the answer in the woods. What a good life this is. The question was whether the particular twig we had in front of us, a slender, nearly yellowing, somewhat bent at its center point and definitely bent at the terminal bud, was a hackberry or not. Briefly looking through the hand drawn twigs list, only one showed a "strongly angled" terminal, but other features were not certain. The Hackberry is an interesting tree, no least of which for its name, derived from 'hagberry,' meaning swamp berry, a name used in Scotland for cherry. Maybe most interestingly, it is written that a fully mature Hack can become similar in size and shape to oaks in open savannah, and oh how the birds love the free sweets of the edible berry.

Walking through Longenecker as a novice would be a sheer exercise in mystery if it weren't for the convenient rusted metal tags found dangling by branches at the southside of each tree or shrub planted. A naturalist had off handedly admitted to self that this street scape line of experimental plantings was a veritable hodgepodge, but in that also the seeds, literally, of one of the great sweetshops for naturalists known anywhere. The Pawpaw tree was blooming fruit. Who had ever seen such a thing? This particular single tree (usually paired) had been hand fertilized, was blooming its fruit in October, and could be picked and eaten for it's small banana shape comes out the flavor of custard! Small mystery one. What about bizarrely scraggly and spiny open husk creatures at the floor of the tree ahead?  The horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum on tag), is an ornamental tree that relieves itself of heavy duty fruit "2-2 1/2 " in diameter; a brown spiny or warty capsule, splitting into 2-3 parts; 1-2 large rounded shiny brown poisonous seeds; maturing in lat summer," and coveted by the turkey crew that roves Longenecker cooks hawking an early morning city market. Looking left and right for the next naturalist moment, we had walked directly under the hackberry without noticing much the fairly non descript bark color of the tree. It still carried green leaves though, and in among the cluster, the small purple berries which we tried and spit out the tiny seeds within the fruit. Pulling down one of the leafed twigs, I pondered whether this terminal bud was angled as the one inside the building. Yes indeed. The color of the skin of the twig, however, was not quite the same. Could age transform color to some degree? I couldn't say. Nor was the tree as large, yet anyway, of an oak in the immediate area. We slowly moved on to the conifers upfield. I never received my definitive answer. I tried a hackberry for the first time. We will have to return sometime further examine.










 

Frautschi Point
A Nature Story

"Keeper had jammed the figurine into her pocket on her way out of her bedroom, right before she sneaked out of the house. Yemaya, queen of the sea, head mermaid. She was one of seven, carved for Keeper by Mr. Beauchamp. She called them the 'merlings'" – Appelt, from Keeper



4.

What exactly was Trace and her treehouse teachers supposed to do? The very single day of the school week that they cherished most, the 'out of the building day' was going away? Gone, adios. The three of them had what they came to call a pow WOW, the wow standing for 'We're Outside Wednesday'! and resolved that they would from this moment forward get every seventh grader at Leopold Middle to let moms, dads, caregivers, all, that they wanted WOW back! NOW WOW? They knew that had to have a catchy phrase that everyone would remember. Questions would come up. Teachers would wonder how to reconnect learning goals with time outside. NOW WOW created lesson plans up in that tree house, they began to call for 'green time' after school...! Parents began to have to land questions about rock formations, asked to identify big trees across the street, where did the water come from...oh my, it took awhile! All of this was a good start, but they needed an event. They decided it would be the Devil's Lake field trip. That was where all of the grown ups would come to understand just how badly these seventh graders needed their outdoor education! "We have to work on getting all the right chaperones" The three of them were walking home from school when the plan was hatched and it was Claire who was notoriously the team builder. "Principal Merling has to be there. Mr. Sorenson...my mom!" When she said this she realized that it was her very own mom, my oh my, who had wondered about WOW. "What exactly does your class do on those days anyway?" she had asked. Her mom was very busy. She was in finance and an up can coming partner in a firm of accountants. "The world doesn't solve itself," she would say. "Study, learn... a good trade." On weekends Claire schemed of getting her family out to the Arboretum by talking up the lilac bloom near mother's day. "There is a boardwalk that goes right into the marsh at Wingra Woods. You can stand there at the edge and watch the tiny fish swimming. It is where the native Americans used to live..." Her mother's eyes would wash over and she would raise her eyebrows. "The mosquitos are horrendous in those swampy areas."

Into Restoration

"It has been often said, and I shall argue the case myself, that the only remark of nature is its silence, but that is not because the world around us has nothing to say. It is because we come unequipped with ears to hear." – Paul Gruchow, Journal of a Prairie Year






10 -16


By October at the Arboretum, as our naturalists had commented, 'it's all done now.' This was nothing more than a common observation we likely all made to ourselves, as we took a brief walk outside into the native flower garden, looked out among the remaining native burr oaks, the red cedar, still a beautiful forest green, up onto the glowing red and orange ash, and beyond. The comment simply meant that there were no wildflower species yet flowering, virtually all, except the small white aster, had gone to seed, became crusty as burnt sticks still upright, and the color, the almighty characteristic of all wonderful plants, had faded for the season where it will its turn next spring or summer, depending. For the trained naturalist, this isn't such a tragic thing. Identifying features, as we would learn, were still as abundant as the eye might choose. For the untrained, however, reading the winter twig or the crisp ovular head of an old coneflower, is more of a challenge, and that was the point of the exercise.  Leopold himself often talked about the 'pretty' being the first and most obvious tantalizer for the common person to become enamored with the natural.  The theory of the land ethic might go that in order to become an initiate in the world of land ethics, we all have to find some point of entry into interest, and how things look is a natural start. It's likely not much a stretch in further logic to realize that the number of enthusiastic observers drop off significantly as the season changes from the radiant variety in the early August prairie to this moment now, deep October, soon to turn to the matting down by monotonous snow whereby those same plants become mere brown lumber in among the shoots and valleys of white clumps.

To be capable of combating this lack of interest as the seasons change is a great prize. As an author of  'twig' reading mentions in the first paragraph of his article, "What an interesting world awaits those who can enjoy the out-of-doors in the frost and winter weather. The trees, so bleak and bare, really become old friends to be recognized by their shapes and by the scars and buds upon their branches. Become an initiate in the art of recognizing trees without their leaves and you add a new interest and a new past time to your winter activities." What a pitch-perfect thing for the trained naturalist to say to the novice. As a lover of the pretty, it is far too easy -- and one might even make the point necessary -- to merely pass by the crush of a million features offered by every species along the way.

That ash that so majestically represents the corner of the native garden plot in a full bloom of October colors will soon be a massive rising cascade of pitchforks. We pass and briefly comment on its gray dreariness, its grayish brown bark, the prospect of the ash borer, and so on. And yet, as we walk up to the leaf bunches head high and bring down the branch we can begin to look more closely at what is happening under the color, for the color here, as with the plants, will soon be gone. Reading the buds, as the naturalist language might go, becomes not only an interesting past time for the sake of seeing old friends, but a critical mode for identification. Looking more broadly over the landscape of the entirety of the Arboretum, where raw, sometimes native, woods merges with restorative plantings, identification becomes quite critical. We are moving beyond the realm of friendly encounter of the pretty and into the realm of science.

The winter twig offers some similar features to look at and once distinguished the twig itself becomes its own thing pretty. The terminal bud at the end is a small treasure of identification, changing in shape, size and pattern of scaling. The terms from here, moving in towards the trees, are lenticel, leaf scar, bundle scar, lateral buds and terminal bud scale, the last of which is a ring that measures the growth from one season to the next, measured to the end of the terminal bud. Every tree will have its distinct features; to memorize these features, maybe go so far as to hold up to the hand held magnifying glass, is the new off season walker's prize of the visual.  Thinking of the zoom lens of interest in the natural world, it seems important to still consider the advice that was implicitly written all through the works of Leopold: always consider aesthetics of the natural world. Don't ignore the complexity of soil and landscape, but also don't become automatons of fact. Maybe where science meets philosophy is where art stems from, a goal that everybody could out, or maybe already does without knowing it?