Mother's hardly working naturalist

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Muir, Bartram, Burroughs, Thoreau, Audubon—they were all good naturalists, true, and you have to admire their industry. On hot summer days, though, I prefer not to follow in their trailtrudging footsteps. instead I choose the more supine observational methods of those two other great American naturalists, Pa Kettle and Snuffy Smith.

Although I have not fully achieved their mastery of passive nature study, I practice hard in the hammock slung between two trees in our back yard. Occasionally I must close my eyes and rest, of course, because sustained scrutiny of one's surroundings can be taxing and is made none the easier by the hammock's incessant, gentle sway.

Nonetheless, by sheer dogged determination I have managed to observe and cogitate on a number of summer's wonders.

TAME-FOODS FORAGING

If I lift my head slightly I can make out a couple of pepper plants peeking among the dandelions, sow's thistle and quack grass in our garden. Some would call the latter three weeds, of course, but having read books about organic gardening I know they are actually companion plants and living mulch. No sense in pulling those up.

But even misguided souls who labor in their gardens are to be admired, for they're making far easier work of what was once a life-or-death pursuit. Looking at a garden, it's easy to forget those carrots, peas, corn and other vegetables in neat rows or beds are all descended from wild, free-ranging plants. Whenever you pick a tomato or pull a carrot, you're actually for aging - albeit the easy way - for the same foods nomadic tribes roamed vast distances to gather centuries ago.

You probably know, for instance, corn, tomatoes and potatoes originated as wild plants in Mexico and South America, and became widely used as food in Europe after explorers took the domesticated plants home. Ears of wild corn were barely an inch long and bore only about a dozen kernels before Mesoamericans started working on them thousands of years ago. Tomatoes originally were about the size of a marble.

The wild cousins of many garden vegetables still can be found in their homelands. Celery grows wild in marshes in Asia and northern Africa. Cucumbers thrive in the foothills of the Himalayas. Wild asparagus is so common in parts of western Asia that cattle graze on it like grass. And in India, wild eggplants are considered weeds.

In the chart at right are some other familiar vegetables and the places they came from. As you can see, you'd have to travel a long, long way to gather the ingredients for a good dinner salad.

NATURE'S PAPERMAKERS

On the north side of our house, where the paint is peeling, I see a bald-faced hornet has returned to a favored patch of exposed wood. It's been shuttling back and forth for a couple of hours now from there to an evergrowing nest beneath the eaves above our kitchen door. I suppose I'll have to knock the nest down someday, since hornets are territorial and they buzz about awfully every time someone goes in or out the door. For now, though, I'm content to consider the nest as an example of our species' tendency to take credit where it isn't due.

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