The Lowly Ditch Flower; An Unlikely Hero

With June filled dreams of  Moccasin Flowers and Indian Turnips, I'd like to take pause and celebrate roadside bouquets.  The residents of Vernon know of what I am writing, as being a rural agricultural  community we routinely work, play and live near; disturbed areas, swales, culverts, ravines, watercourse or ditches. Whatever you call them, for the purposes of this entry I will use the term ditch flowers. While not an especially romantic term, in the country it is in fact what they are.

Former First Lady Ladybird Johnson wrote, "The environment is where we all meet, where we all have mutual interest." I wonder about this sentiment every bit as much as I wonder why it is that people who are eager to leave the city, move to the country only to rebuild their suburban style homes and grounds in VT. It's like they want none of the city but in the same instance, all of the provenance of the city. Could it really be that we somehow share a common "interest" in the environment? My mom always points out that I never saw anything old and broken that I didn't love - I guess it's a start.

"Sometimes we spend all of our effort trying to create something that already exists in nature." -Kayden Manning.  Our Queen City is engaged in a runoff battle.  Positioned on the shore of the sixth largest freshwater lake in the U.S; Burlington outgrew its humble beginnings and has loved its lake to the point of becoming a ward of the EPA. In the early cleanup years planners decided that the solution to save the lake was to develop a science museum, luxury condominiums, upgrade the marina to include a restaurant and install a riverfront park all to engage the populace.  In all honesty it is fabulous; but the lake seemed none the better for it.  With nearly twenty years of funding and finger pointing at farms, shore front property owners, sewage treatment plants, parking lots, green lawns and the further digging in of already entrenched heals, it seemed that they had run out of new ideas. But perhaps a new idea wasn't exactly the next step that needed to be taken.

"Every human is like all other humans, some other humans, and no other human"- Clyde Kluckhon. I was on a field trip with the third grade at Lily pond when a student captured a small water creature and so discovered that the vernal side of the pond was clean. It seems that they had learned from their BEEK leader, that the creature they had caught was intolerant of pollution. They had come to the pond in anticipation of finding an indicator species to determine the health of the pond. Those kids impressed the hell out of me that day. Lily pond has a mandated fifty foot wetlands buffer to protect it and is surrounded by agricultural and forested lands, could this be the reason that it is clean?

Don't tell my coworkers, but when I find myself unexpectedly home for the day my guilty pleasure is watching Across the Fence. You never know what you need to know until you discover something you don't know. It was on this program that I learned about how strategically planned rain gardens, planting trees and installing small holding containers in Burlington, was going to slow water runoff and help prevent wastewater from being released into the lake; and get this, these plants would actually help to clean the water as it ran off of parking lots, streets and lawns. Like a city girl, I spent at least a year dreaming of buying a rain barrel and installing a rain garden. Then something magical happened, the Brattleboro Food Cooperative installed a rain garden smack in the middle of it's new parking lot. They dug a ditch and filled it with grasses, flowers, shrubs... in the middle of their parking lot next to the Whetstone River. That's the day I decided to follow my dreams and stopped mowing the ditch in front of my house. These days, I wait for the Town of Vernon to mow my most beautiful ditch flowers the one time a year in the fall. So as you wander up and down our country roads here in Vernon admiring our beautiful ditch flowers, be reminded that country ways and city solutions can in fact find a meeting place in the environment -Norma Manning

"We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from out children" -Chief Seattle

A lowly ditch flower 

Class two wetland- Lily pond in Vernon, VT