Sound & Fury Morris At Folklife

Day 230: First of all, I would like to thank the photographer from Merry Missives of Moscow for providing these images of our Sunday performance at Folklife. The Merry Missives are young dancers who attend a charter school in Moscow ID. They have no musicians of their own, so Sound & Fury's musos played for them. It was a privilege to share the stage with such an enthusiastic group of youngsters. They will carry the tradition of Morris dance into the next generation.

We performed in rotation with the Merry Missives, and opened with our new show piece, "Cobb's Horse." As you all know, I am new to Morris, so it was nice to have other dancers learning steps alongside me. The footwork for Cobb's is fairly simple, i.e., no galleys, no hocklebacks, no great leaps or complicated crossings. I struggled with the terminology at first, but now terms like "process up," "half-gip," "hands around," "foot down" are beginning to make sense. Clashing...well, it's not quite sword-fighting with sticks, but definitely has appeal for this old pirate.

In between dances, I double as a "muso" (musician). I don't have the requisite confidence to play my concertina in front of other members of the side, so I thump the bodhran or shake the tambourine.

Most Morris sides have a "hobby," a term you might equate with "hobby horse." Ours is Finn the Salmon. Finn's job is to accept donations from the audience, as well as occasionally weaving in and out among the performers as they dance. Unfortunately, our Sunday stage was too small for him to interface with us on the dance floor.

Depending on regional tradition, Morris footwork and costumes vary widely. Sound & Fury largely dances in the Adderbury tradition, a high-energy style. Bell pads are worn on the shins, not your standard jingle bell but rather ones made from much heavier brass. The ringing is quite loud! Dances nearly always involve either sticks or hankies, and are appropriately known as "stick dances" or "hanky dances." It might seem odd, but hanky dances are harder to execute since there are more things you can do with hankies and the timing must be perfect.

"Sweet Jenny Jones" is another of the dances I've learned so far with Sound & Fury. It is a stick dance and ends with a hey (dancers weaving between others in their line, returning to their orginal position at the end). In the hey, the top dancer (the one closest to the musicians) always passes right shoulder to right shoulder with the person approaching from below them in the set. Depending on whether you have a three-man line or a four-man line, the dancer at the foot (me) passes right or left respectively, a subtlety which almost always escapes me when my mind is on the footwork. I am happy to say that when I watched a video of our performance of "Jenny," I actually did the hey right for once!

As I mentioned earlier, Adderbury Morris is a particularly high-energy dance. Foreman Dave and Squire Dan catch some REALLY big air when they leap! This move always draws cheers and shouts of "Higher! Higher!" from the crowd.

There is some concern over whether or not Folklife will be able to continue. It started in 1972 as a small "hippie" music fete and has grown to its present state with over 5000 performers and 235,000 attendees in 2017. It's free, and therein lies the rub. It is enormously expensive to engage the entire 1960s World's Fair venue, to say nothing of advertising and other operational costs. This was my first time attending as either a member of the audience or a performer, and I will be back to dance next year if the festival can raise enough donations to continue.

Serviceberry

Day 229: Alternatively pronounced "SARviceberry," Serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia) may also be referred to as "Shadbush," a common name which reflects the fact that it blooms concurrently with the start of the shad run in both east and west coast rivers. Native peoples relied on such indicators as a calendar of food-source availability. Serviceberry also provided edible fruit in early to mid-June, berries similar in size and somewhat in taste to blueberries, if not quite as juicy. In Canada, this shrub wears yet another common name "Saskatoon" and in the midwest, it is known as "June-berry." Bushes can grow to 20' in height and can be found from sea level to approximately 4000' altitude.

Miner's Lettuce

Day 228: Today I bring you a rather mundane little plant which is often seen in lowland forests in the Pacific Northwest: Claytonia perfoliata, formerly known as Montia perfoliata. The second half of the binomial name is especially descriptive of the species. "Perfoliata" means "perforated leaf." The stem of this plant arises from the center of what appears to be a single fleshy leaf, but in fact it is two joined leaves as can be seen by observation of the two pointed tips. As the common name suggests, Miner's Lettuce is edible. It has a rather tangy taste, a little on the sour side. I wouldn't want to make a whole salad from it, but like nasturtium leaves, it would add a little extra zest to lettuce or romaine. Consumption of large amounts of Miner's Lettuce is not recommended because it contains oxalic acid which can lead to development of kidney stones, but snacking on a few vitamin-C rich leaves while you're out hiking might even be beneficial.

Sound & Fury Morris

Day 227 (bonus post): Despite temps in the mid-80s, Sound & Fury Morris filled Seattle Center's McCaw Promenade with dancers yesterday at Folklife Festival. We danced in rotation with three other sides, sometimes coming together for "massed dances" of performers from the various groups. I doubled as a musician, playing bodhran during the dances I haven't learned. It's rare to see so many of us together. Our Squire puts the side's total membership at 21 (not counting fishy Finn, our hobby). Here you see 17 of us with one future member of the Morris Offspring peeking out from behind my left elbow. We'll be back at Folklife today!

Virtual Tour

Day 227: My readers have often heard me speak of my lackadaisical approach to gardening, but over the last several years, I've put more effort into it than previously, putting in new flowerbeds, planting trees and shrubs, working in soil amendments and so on. Well, I am reaping much greater rewards than anticipated for the little effort those labours have actually been, and this year, I am pleased to say that my yard actually looks like a gardener lives here. Please join me for a virtual tour of a few of the plants currently in bloom.

We'll start in the upper left corner with Bachelor's Buttons. They are regarded as something of a pest by many people, but they remind me of my mother's garden when I was very young. I nicked my plant from a roadside ditch where it had strayed from someone's garden. It grows like a weed, so I maintain it to keep it from spreading.

The second image is of the Bridal Wreath Spiraea I added to the front yard last year, again a plant which recalls the gardens of my youth. My grandmother had a huge one. Mine is only about two feet tall, having grown about a foot since I planted it.

Next in line is a commercial cultivar of the blue Columbine familiar to most Montanans. I purchased it as a tiny start a year ago as part of my colour replacement plan to substitute blues for pinks. It is my favourite Columbine.

The daisies in the fourth photo are Delospermum, an annual. They fill the top of a small strawberry jar. They are succulents, and therefore can survive near-drought conditions. I couldn't decide which of three colours I liked best: orange, yellow or red, so I got all three.

The bottom row starts with Siberian Iris, and yes, these can also become quite a pest. Mine came with the house, and I thin them out every few years to keep them from taking over the yard.

Next is the lilac, and thereby hangs a tale. It was not in good shape, so I took the recommendation of a gardening handbook and hacked it off a foot above ground level. The manual assured me that it would come back to full glory in four years. Only this year, approximately fifteen years from its major surgery, is it in full and lavish bloom. Lesson learned. I'll never do that again.

Oriental poppies are a flower I can't hate but can't exactly love, either. They also grow like weeds and spread wildly. It took me ten years to remove the last traces of this one's forebears from the east-side flowerbed, but I couldn't bear to kill it off entirely. It now lives in the "Barren Wasteland" between my house and garage, happy as Larry and providing a blast of colour where it's really needed.

Lily-of-the-valley brings back memories of sitting on my grandmother's back steps when I was three or four years old, surrounded by sweet fragrance. The scent was one Grandma also wore as perfume: Muguet de Bois.

Last is Lithodora, its vibrant stars so shockingly blue that visitors can hardly believe they're real. As far as I'm concerned, it can take over the entire bed beside the driveway, a spot in which it seems to be quite happy.

There are other things in bloom in my yard as well: Bleeding-heart, Kerria, fat blood-red peonies, heather, snapdragons, the Akebia vines...and there are even more things to come, to say nothing of shrubs and ferns and other foliage plants. When I look out over the garden now, somehow I forget all about those days of weeding until my back ached and my fingernails were broken and filthy. It's been worth it all.

Oregon Boxwood, Paxistima Myrsinites

Day 226: This shrub has been a puzzlement to me for many (many!) years. I first observed it growing along Skate Creek Road and thought that it was an admirable foliage plant with its toothed leaves. I had never observed it flowering until a few days ago when I was wandering through Longmire Campground. It is quite small, and I took the flowers to be buds in tight clusters, and it was only when I took a sample in to ask our Plant Ecologist for an identification that I got a better look. He identified it immediately as Paxistima myrsinites (Oregon Boxwood), although he was somewhat surprised by its location. I had not gotten a good picture of the flower (not realizing it was in full bloom), so made a second sally over the bridge for a better shot, grateful that I had finally been able to lay to rest a botanical mystery which had been troubling me for ages.

The Martians Have Landed

Day 225: What strange lifeform is this? It is a bryophyte, but it is not a moss. It is a liverwort, specifically Asterella gracilis. Liverworts are not as abundant as mosses in the Pacific Northwest, and many of them go unnoticed because the leafy forms resemble some of our mosses very closely. This photo shows the female receptacles of this species. These reproductive structures have four or more lobes, each containing a single sporangium (the black "eyes"). As these ripen and prepare to release spores, the involucres (the white X surrounding the sporangia) will separate and will give the receptacle the appearance of having a lacy white skirt around its edge. The thallus (body), hidden beneath the moss, is a small lichen-like rosette, green on top, dark red underneath. Close examination of the thallus with a hand lens will show oil bodies as tiny dots in the tissue, a feature lacking in lichens and mosses.