Knocked Down & Knocked Up

You might already know that I hate the wind.  I can't stand it.  It annoys the piss out of me.  If you do anything outdoors that involves papers, forget about it.  The wind is your enemy.  And the same goes for gardens.  Strong wind is an invisible locust.  It might as well be.  Strong wind can destroy beautiful things.  And so forth.  I have many reasons for detesting the wind.  If you are heir to a wind-breaker factory, good for you.  I'm not.  I am a normal person who will inherit one nice set of German china that I will keep in a place where no wind will ever touch it.  Not even a tornado.  Anyway, this is how I feel about the wind, not what I think about it.  The wind is important.  The next time you hear me bitching, you can go ahead and quote me. 

There is my shoe, and there are some black-eyed Susan, rudbeckia for those of you that are into Latin names.  The wind knocked them down.  It happens every year.  They grow, and for a couple weeks they look nice and pert, real upright, but then gravity and the wind team up and knock them down.  Gravity and Wind: major forces.  It sounds like a movie.  I would probably watch it, complain the whole time, and get a perverse pleasure from the grim conclusion, except that the conclusion here really isn't that grim.  In fact, it's only grim if children growing up and moving out of mom and dad's house is grim, and that is essentially what is happening here.  The Rudbeckia are boxing up their sh** and moving out.  They're headed off to college!  They're still not even born yet, but there they go!    So long Bobbie, so long Denise.  Study hard.  Don't drink too much.  Use a condom. 

  
OK, OK, enough of that.  Let's get serious.  Above is a picture of my hand.  I am holding one part of a dill flower head, one little group of seeds at the end of one spoke.  There are many spokes per head.  And so forth.  The point is that dill is a notorious flopper.  It gets tall and then it flops down and places its seeds on the ground.  If you ever check out a dill seed head, you'll notice that the clusters of seeds are evenly and perfectly spaced, just as there is a spacing chart the back of a dill seed packet.  You fill in the blanks.  Plants need their elbow room, too.  And now we are back to where we started.  The wind.  It knocks plants down and plays its part in consummating the relationship between the flower and the insect.  That is, the insect makes the flower pregnant, and the wind disperses the little babies (seeds) so that they don't compete with the mama for space, for earth, for food and water.  It's very simple: baby cannot grow where mama is busy eating everything up.  In the human world that would be like a nursing mother taking plugs from her own boobs, hogging up all the milk, the bambino sitting on the sidelines, slowly turning into a wafer.  Anyway, I think you get the picture.  If not, here's a picture of my garden.  If you look at it long enough, you will come to these conclusions on your own.