Feeling like a Queen of the Prairie

I am celebrating the great, unexpected good fortune of being able to live in the country again, as I did through childhood, at the urging of good friends an hour from Duluth--and celebrating the concept of summer everlasting in our minds, summer with its weird discoveries or epiphanies from the natural world. Maybe half a mile down the road from my new shared home is this stand, just below the road bank, of a native American prairie plant classified within the giant rose family, called queen-of-the-prairie. It will be in a watercolor which I mean to develop at its own pace.

While we in our fifties or coming into our sixties feel or see our own aging process, a wild and lesser-known plant like this one, especially one this uncommon, coming into its prime just off our shoulder speaks to us of rejuvenation, whether it's individual or community. When I first saw this plant while passing in a fast walk, I knew it by name immediately, though I'd never seen it in the flesh, only in pictures in several wildflower manuals. Some plants and animals are like that, so showily distinctive that some photo in some book instills a lasting memory.

Queen-of-the-prairie is like a pink floss or a foam on top of its pale orangey green stalk. Originating, apparently, in the northern and central prairies of the United States where there's wet soil, the plant has found its way eastward into New England by way of plantings. Down in the grasses below the inflorescence are the leaves, colonial, sharply veined and toothed, deeply lobed and golden-green. What a privilege, to share habitat with things like this that nobody contrived or apparently sowed here, it just came into being by natural process through thousands of years and holds out, where nobody may for the longest time have grazed livestock or mown hay.

Watch for the 2013 watercolor, which continues my line of native North American plant note cards. I'd halfway like to have it done right now, right here to advertise the whole set of works. But every time I get down to business at one of these, trusting a folding chair will protect me from the bite of deer ticks, I have to consciously tell myself that the project can't be hurried or the whole thing suffers. Evolution takes eons; artwork meant for its glorification should take as long as the artist's whole life support system demands, as long as the inevitable mistakes take to be found and overcome, as long as the utmost patience will bear.

I am so full of gratitude, when I stop to think, of all that's been possible and may yet be possible in my time.