Plant of the Week

Poison hemlock
Conium maculatum L.
other common names: snakeweed, St. Bennet’s–herb, poison parsley, wode-whistle, spotted parsley, bunk
Conium: from the Greek coneion, name of the hemlock by which Socrates was put to death in ancient Athens
Maculatum: from Latin, meaning “spotted” or “mottled”
Parsley family: Apiaceae (Umbelliferae)

Photograph by Thomas Rosburg, Wildflowers of the Tallgrass Prairie: The Upper Midwest, Second Edition

Holiday Post from Christmas on the Great Plains

 From "The Christmas of the Phonograph Records" by Mari Sandoz

Holiday week was much like Christmas, the house full of visitors as the news of the fine music and the funny records spread. People appeared from fifty, sixty miles away and farther so long as the new snow held off, for there was no other such collection of records in all of western Nebraska, and none with such an open door. There was something for everybody, Irishmen, Scots, Swedes, Danes, Poles, Czechs as well as the Germans and the rest, something pleasant and nostalgic. The greatest variety in tastes was among the Americans, from Everybody Works but Father, Arkansas Traveler, and Finkelstein at the Seashore to love songs and the sentimental Always in the Way; from home and native region pieces to the patriotic and religious. They had strong dislikes too, even in war songs. One settler, a GAR veteran, burst into tears and fled from the house at the first notes of Tenting Tonight. Perhaps it was the memories it awakened. Many Americans were as interested in classical music as any European, and it wasn’t always a matter of cultivated taste. One illiterate little woman from down the river cried with joy at Rubinstein’s Melody in F.

Christmas on the Great Plains, edited by Dorothy Dodge Robbins and Kenneth Robbins
Art by Claudia McGehee