The Burn

Last Thursday at The Arboretum we had a controlled burn! We burned half of our Wildflower Meadow to get rid of the grass thatch and give more soil space to the wildflowers. We only burned half because we want to see how one area will respond before we burn it all (Would invasives take over?). The fire department did the burn, it seemed to be a learning experience for most of them because most just stood around. Sadly, I had to stand around as well. I wanted to be involved somehow, besides just taking pictures, but there was nothing for us to do because it was such a small area being burned. You can see in the photo above that they used a kind of blowtorch to do the burn. It never became a raging fire, but it was exciting. It's one of those things I've always read about with meadow restoration and natural landscaping, but had never witnessed.

The yuccas were spared by spot burning. P.S. I just finished reading Blindness by Jose Saramago, who one a Nobel prize for it, and am currently reading a selection of essays called The Eleventh Draft written by a number of writers who have participated in the Iowa Writing Workshop. It's given me some encouragement to keep going. Blindness is about a man who goes blind suddenly one day, who sees everything milky white instead of dark, and it turns out that his blindness is extremely contagious...and that's all I'll say about it, except that I recommend reading it.