I don’t need an alarm clock. I have a cardinal.

I don’t know exactly which cardinal it is, and if I did I might be tempted to shoot him. Cardinals are early risers. They sing with the dawn. Mine’s a night owl. He starts his territorial song marking around 3:30 a.m., or about three hours before sunrise. I wouldn’t mind if he were far away, but he’s right outside my bedroom window, and I know why. My mulberry tree.

It’s a red mulberry I planted just about a decade ago. This time of year it’s heavy with fruit, and my cardinal is staking his claim early. Like bluejays who argue in a forest, all yelling “My tree, my tree, my tree”  this early-to-bed early-to-rise cardinal is announcing first dibs on “his” mulberry tree.

Morus rubra. Think of it as large blackberries on a tree, sweeter, and no thorns. To the cardinal, and I’m sure his nearby bride, this is feast time. It’s fast food, gourmet cuisine and good dining all in one. What the cardinal clan doesn’t eat I will be turning to pies. In fact, even the young leaves are edible, cooked, though the berries are so good one rarely ever gets to the leaves.

As you might suspect I started this essay at 03:40 a.m. I’m sure as the season moves on so will he and I’ll be able to get some sleep. Until then there’s only one thing to do: Grab a flash light and go get some breakfast off his tree.

Put five monkeys in a large cage. Then put a step ladder in the cage with a banana on top. Soon the monkeys learn to go up the step ladder and get the banana. Life is good, the monkeys are happy.  Now you introduce change.

You put a banana on the step ladder as usual. When one of the monkeys starts to go up the steps to get the banana you spray the rest of the monkeys with very cold water. That irritates them mightily. Every time a monkey starts to go up the step ladder to get the banana the other monkeys get sprayed with cold water. Soon they will not let any monkey go up the step ladder to get the banana.

Now you take one monkey out of the cage and put in a new monkey. When the new monkey, who has never been sprayed with cold water, starts up the step ladder to get the banana the other four monkeys beat him up. He soon learns not to go up the step ladder to get the banana.  Take out another monkey and replace it with a new one who has never been sprayed with cold water or beaten up for getting the banana. As soon as he starts  up the step ladder to get the banana he is beaten up by the three who have been sprayed and by the one who has never been sprayed but has been beaten up. Soon all five monkeys, old and new, ignore the banana.

In time you can replace all of the original monkeys in the cage, one by one. You now have five monkeys who have never been sprayed with cold water but they will beat up any monkey who tries to get the banana. That is the basis for “that’s how we do things around here.”

Enforcing a weed ordinance is like beating up the new monkey for doing something quite understandable and not wrong. But, since the creation of and reasons for such ordinances are forgotten, and how they were enforced have changed, now the extreme rules. The learned behavior is now how it is done.  So when you let dandelions grown on your lawn you have to contend with ordinance monkeys who want to (legally) beat you up but they really don’t know why they are doing it other than that’s how it is done around here.

In the journey to a better planet environmentally, not all of the battle is deciding to lead a green, plant-friendly, environmentally sound life. It also has to include confronting ordinance monkeys and retraining them. A dandelion in your lawn is not a bad thing, no matter what the home owners’ association president says or the local county code enforcement officer. They get paid, or are given the power, to (legally) beat you up for doing something quite natural and understandable. If they don’t stop you they don’t get paid, and or lose power.  Think cold water.

Consider my little front “lawn.” In 10 years no pesticides have been put on it. No toxic plants have been planted. Little water has been pumped out of the aquifer to water it. Little fuel or machinery has been used to upkeep it. It produces food for me and wild life, which it has a lot of.  It has also violated county ordinances by climbing the step ladder.

Consider my neighbor’s lawn for the past 10 years. Pesticides are dumped on it nearly weekly. Toxic plants are the mainstay where there isn’t decapitated grass, grass that requires much fuel and machinery to keep artificially coiffured. Much water is pumped out of the aquifer to keep it green. No wild life lives there. It produces no food for the family or local creatures. It is ordinance perfect. The banana that is left alone.  And yet, that is exactly backwards from what it should and needs to be.

The minor battle is changing your life to being plant and environment friendly. The major battle is retraining the monkeys.

I used to have a friend named Randy Armentrout. He died about 20 years ago of a brain tumor. We knew each other well and attended many a social function together.

But what you should know is that Randy was an extrovert, a big man, a bit overweight as well, a rugby player, and loud. He rode a big Harely motorcycle, wore leather, and chains and keys and generally looked like he could easily be the last man standing in big biker bar fight. He was actually quite gentle, brilliant, and had beguiling sense of humor. Here is something I saw him do many times.

We would be at some social event, and someone, male or female, would make a disparaging remark about someone famous, such as “Oh, I can’t stand Billy Joel”  or “I think Jennifer Aniston is ugly,” or the like. Randy would glare, and as usually was the case, would look way down at the person.

“What did you say?” Randy would ask, clearly looking very angry, very big, and very intense as if it was only with great restraint he had not already pounded the offender through the floor. In the inevitable silence that always followed Randy would add in a very soft voice, nearly trembling with rage: “She’s my cousin.”

I watched many a person melt at that moment, a moment that Randy would let stretch on for four or five seconds and then laugh this great big belly laugh and we’d all get a chuckle from the look of relief on the face of the would-be-victim.

But one area in which Randy was not kidding was motorcycles. I own two motorcycles and 90% of my traveling is on two wheels. But my attitude is laissez-faire. However, anything other than 101 percent approval of them and the riders and the industry uncorked a tidal wave attitude out of Randy. Oddly, it has been my experience that mushroom hunters tend to be the same way.

Do not misunderstand me, I like mushrooms, all kinds, from around the world. But I don’t teach people how to forage for them. When asked why I say the threat to benefit ratio is too high. Personally, I have enough liability right now with green plants without adding the legal burden of including mushrooms. When I mention the threat factor of mushrooms that is often when I get threatened by mushroom foragers, and they’re not joking.

Most mushroom are not toxic, I am told in very angry tones. They are packed with nutrition is the next defensive statement. Mushrooms are woefully misunderstood usually follows.

Sending the defenders to authorities who say otherwise does no good. Like suggesting to Randy that loud pipes really don’t save lives, suggesting that mushrooms are less than perfect foraging food gets you lambasted… always. Intensely. In fact, I generally don’t even broach the topic any more.  Indeed, I try to steer the discussion to lichen which I think has more edibility.

What I can’t understand is why that mushroom-related behavior is so consistent, decade after decade.  Maybe sorting out dangerous mushrooms makes one feel as if they aren’t that bad. Maybe mushrooms really aren’t that difficult or bad. Maybe riding a motorcycle on the Turnpike in a thunderstorm is quite pleasant. (Actually I have done that for nearly 50 miles and it is decidedly not pleasant.)

I am also bothered by the fact that every year or two a very experienced, if not a multi-degreed mycologist dies from eating mushrooms. While it is nice that mushroom hunting is a self-correcting endeavor — like wearing no motorcycle helmet — that they die so often is not encouraging. The only mushroom expert I knew very well actually died in his sleep but was so irresponsible in his own life that I could never trust my life to his mushroom advice.

I think my students are safer for me not teaching about mushrooms. If they want to know I’m sure there’s a mushroom expert (with a better lawyer than mine) who will oblige.

If flowers could think they would view man as an errand boy. That floral perspective would also explain one of man’s more annoying habits.

Triassic dinosaurs

Scientist who study such things tell us that up until about 200 million years ago there were no flowers, or humans. The world was green, leafy and filled with big reptiles. Everything moved slowly, including evolution. The plants pollinated by using wind or water. Plant sex was in a word, boring. It was also by chance. Since wind and water were the only modes of pollen transportation plants also did not spread very far or fast. Life was local. That isolated tranquility exploded when the blossom bust onto the scene, and the world was change, so much we are told that without flowers there would be no humans.

Achaefructus liaoningensis, the first flower?

Imagine if you will a rather drab leafy landscape and then a glimmer of color, a flower. That would certainly attract attention, like a light in the dark. That flower would lure visitors of various sizes and numbers of legs. And then instead of just wind and water would be visitors to spread that plant’s pollen. Thus living things that moved came to serve living things that did not move. Insects, pseudo-mammals, proto-birds, yes, even lizards found function, being the sex salves of flowers. And the flowers responded.

Dandelion as a bug sees it and how we see it

Flowers developed special parts to attract various visitors: Color, shape, fruits, seeds, sugars and proteins. They even tapped into different wave lengths of light to create landing patterns only insects could see. Dandelions lose their familiar color if you can see other wavelenghts of light. Flowers exxentially made the world move, and change. Flowering plants spread faster than those that did not, and more creatures started spreading all the things flowers were

Female Fig Wasp

offering. In response the spreaders even specialized, the fig wasp that only pollenates figs, the Dufourea novae-angliae bee that only services the pickerel weed, and the Melipona bee that seems to be the only insect who knows how to sneak inside a vanilla blossom. Also among those spreading creatures was man.

As a mammal man’s role in all this was quite clear, take parts of a plant from here, deposit there, deposition usually in the form of an on-the-spot rest room, occasionally

Dog with burdocks

perhaps seeds or pollen on hair. Flowers started it all and the relationship between them and man continued up to modern times. We know, for example, what folksback in ancient times ate by studying their trash heaps and bathrooms: Nuts, fruits, and vegetables. We don’t find grains or legumes until later times. Those required cooking and that required something to cook in and or a fire. But it’s hard to find roasted wheat groats in the ashes of a fire.

Most people stopped foraging about a century ago. Man also stopped depositing seeds willy-nilly longer ago than that. But until suburbia man did his share of spreading seeds around. Now indoor plumbing is common and any seed eaten by man most likely does not make it through the treatment plant. So not only has man stopped spreading wild seeds around but he is is trapping what seeds he does eat. That certain alters the environment some. But ,the past dies hard because he is still selectively spreading seeds around.

Instead of spreading around seeds of foraged fauna man is distributing those of ornamental flowers and agricultural crops. Pretty flowers and vegetable crops still have man engaged in spreading their seed, even if only from garden to garden. One could say these plants are still manipulating man by making him preserve their seeds (note the seed bank recently created in the arctic circle. Most weeds did not make the cut. )  So whether plants are still manipulating man, or man plants, is a bit of a debate. But there is one other aspect.

As a boy growing up in rural Maine, I wondered why apples trees always grew next to the road, not out in the field. Some of my favorite “wild” apples grew next to woods roads, never just in the woods like other trees. The apple trees grew next to roads because people tossed apple cores away. It’s interesting to realize that someone’s littering decades ago is now a tree you’re enjoying. It also implies more.

Perhaps littering is a natural instinct, a bit of the flower’s directive still operating within us. Throwing away the seeds of a fruit 40 thousand years ago was doing a plant a favor, maybe its bidding. Tossing the apple core beside the road is no different. We may just have a litter gene developed by flowers. Think of it! Most littering comes after eating food products. We consume and toss. That litter along the road side might be an evolutionary echo from long ago, a bit of our distant foraging past still with us. I think the flowers would agree.