Sea Glass Hunting

The summer is over but Anouk and I have still made a point to hit the beach at least once a week in September and October. I love the beach in autumn; beaches change with the seasons, too, and fall is especially pretty with the pines dropping needles and the goldenrod in the dunegrass coming into bloom. When we come home we're chilly and cozy and reinvigorated -- and we usually have a handful of sea glass to show off for our efforts.

Autumn is a great time of year for sea-glass hunting -- the weather is cooling down, the beaches are beginning to empty, and storms are churning up the coast, stirring everything up. Prime sea glass hunting weather. Some people chart the tides and the phases of the moon to find the best times for collecting sea glass, others bring special equipment to pan for glass in the shallows. Anne and I just walk and see what we see, which is usually a good enough tactic.

There is an art to looking for sea glass and A. has it. She can spot even the tiniest shards of color in the tide line. Of course, because sea glass is really just glass, it can be sharp, so she knows not to touch it until I've examined it and pronounced it OK. She just calls out the color and I come over to check out what she's found. If it's smooth enough and frosted enough, the glass goes into our bucket. If it's still sharp and only a little cloudy, we toss it back into the water. The waves will smooth it a little more and it will wash up for somebody else, sometime later. That's the Tao of sea glass hunting -- if it's not for you, it's not for you. Move on.



The beaches around Hampton Roads are great for sea glass, because of their proximity to shipping lanes, factories, and colonial-era settlements. So there is always another lovely frosted glass shard or smooth piece of pottery to find and bring home and display. There's a hierarchy of sea glass -- oranges, reds, yellows, and purples are rare. Black is almost impossible to find. The common blues and greens and browns are a dime a dozen -- a lot of "professional" sea glass collectors wouldn't even bother picking it up, but we like it.



I don't know exactly why I love sea glass so much but I think it has something to do with the idea of something ugly -- something that's basically just trash, junk -- that's transformed and smoothed into something beautiful. I read once that diamonds are made by nature and refined by man; sea glass is made by man and refined by nature. I think that's a really humbling thought.

Do you collect for sea glass? For those of you readers who live in landlocked places, don't forget about beach glass (found along rivers and lakes). For an interesting NYT article about the current state of sea glass collecting in the US, click here.

Have a great weekend!

Trail Center and Bald Cypress Trail at First Landing State Park

Fall is one of my favorite times to get outdoors, so it's been a bummer that so many of the HRVA area national parks and sites are closed due to the government shutdown. Luckily, First Landing is a state park and is still open! And it's at its absolute prettiest right now.

Our playgroup met up there last week for the express purpose of visiting the new Discovery Room at the Trail Center. Unfortunately, the room was off-limits while staff cleaned and fed the animals, but luckily again, the trail center features some other great stuff to hold the little ones' attention, including a cool little exhibit on local flora and fauna, complete with a "please touch" area where we could stroke fur pelts and listen to seashells.



After we'd done a few turns around the exhibit, we went back outside to set off down the Bald Cypress trail, a mile-and-a-half-long boardwalk trail through a marshy wooded area. We didn't make it through the whole loop -- the kids stopped several times, to peer at a frog, climb a hill, and eat some trail mix. And pose for lots of pictures.

First Landing is beautiful in every season, but it really shines in late summer/fall, so much so that I'm adding it to our Fall Fun List as a must-see autumnal destination. What are your favorite spots/trails in the park? Have you made it to the Discovery Room? I'm determined to check it out, so I know we'll be back soon.

Pollinator Protection Project: Plants for Pollinators

Since signing the Pollinator Protection Pledge at the end end of June, Anouk, James and I have been hard at work on fulfilling our promise to make our backyard into a more friendly place for the birds, bats, and bees. The first step was to make sure our garden was chock-full of pollinator-friendly flowers. While our yard currently sports a vegetable garden and several blooming fruit trees, we still wanted to bring in outside plants to supplement our current ones. Because more is always better, right?

After a little research -- and some advice from helpful garden center staff -- we came home with half a dozen new plants and some hints to share about how to choose flowers that will be the most attractive to your neighborhood pollinators. Here they are, below.

• Think pink (and red, and blue...) Each pollinator is most attracted to a certain color range of flowers. For instance, bees prefer yellow and blue flowers, while hummingbirds prefer reds and pinks and butterflies will be attracted to blossoms in the violet range. We made sure to choose plants in several color ranges, but to concentrate our choices in ones that would be most appealing. 

• Go for three of a kind. The more plants you have, the more likely you are to attract pollinators to your space. Ideally, to attract the greatest number of pollinators, you would plant in masses of five or more plants in the same color spectrum. However, for a lot of gardeners with limited yard or patio space, this isn't an option. A good rule of thumb is to place at least three flowering plants of the same color range on each doorstep (front, back, side if you have a side door).

• Do double duty. The space in our backyard is limited, so we made an effort to choose plants that would appeal to more than one pollinator. Our big, bountiful buddeleja (butterfly bush) is also a favorite of bees. Our salvia bush is one of the top plants for hummingbirds, but also attracts the insects that bats eat. And the deep flared flowers of the hummingbird plant (AKA Dicliptera suberecta) will appeal to butterflies as well as its namesake.

• Party hardy. Because our pollinators will need food throughout the summer months, we chose plants that are cool-weather hardy, and will bloom late into the season. Asters, shasta daisies, bee balm, trumpet vine, and blanketflower (gallardia) will all bloom throughout the summer and well into the fall.  

• Stay up all night. Don't forget the late-night pollinators like moths (which are often overlooked). Many daytime flowers close their buds at night, but there are plants that will blossom in the evening. Evening primrose, moonflowers, and flowering tobacco are all examples (we planted a patch of cheerful four-o'-clocks for just this reason). 

A few of our transplanted flowers are looking a little ragged in the heat, but we've still seen an increased number of butterflies (a few gorgeous swallowtails!), bees, and flying ants (?) buzzing around them. Anouk no longer screams when she sees a bee, but says, "Hi! Hi!" I guess those bee-friendly books are really changing her attitude?

Have you signed the Pollinator Protection Pledge? Do you have any pollinator-friendly plants in your garden?

Hammered leaf and flower prints

I photographed this project while we were doing it, but looking at the photos after, was kind of like, "Eh, maybe not" about posting it. However, when Anouk was still talking about our leaf prints the next day, and demanded we do it again the day after that, I reconsidered. I've never seen an art project hold her attention for this long.

It's a very simple concept: you line up a bunch of leaves and flowers on white paper, cover them with a paper towel, give your kid a hammer, or a mallet, or a wood block, and let them whack to their heart's content. After a good hammering, the pigments in the leaves transfer to the paper, and you've got yourself a nice, nature-inspired print.

A few tips: dark-colored flowers and needle-y plants (pine needles, rosemary) make the most striking designs. We had the best results when we placed the underside of the leaf against the paper, facing up. We also noticed that after a few hours, some of the colors faded or turned brown -- any suggestions for things that might keep them bright and fresh are appreciated! (Lemon juice? Fixiative spray?)

Our designs turned out a little muddier and less crisp than the examples that we found online, but some of them were really pretty in spite of (because of?) the softer effect. And we had a really fun (and noisy -- sorry neighbors) time making them.

We're going to try this again in the fall, with some bright autumn leaves. Happy Monday!

Norview Community Center Splash Pad

I'm blogging about our afternoon at the Norview Community Center Splash Pad over at My Active Child today! So fun. We brought a bunch of kids ranging from 1 to 13, and everybody had a great time.

What are your favorite spraygrounds in the area? Let us know, we're building a list.

Halfway through the week! Be sure to do something nice for yourself today, to celebrate.

The Reptile House at the Virginia Zoo

The reptile house is easy to miss at the Virginia Zoo. It's tucked away in the barnyard, which is currently closed for renovations, so it's not very a high-traffic area. However, Zoo Tales is often held during the winter in the barnyard classroom, and Anouk and I rediscovered the reptile house after storytime a few weeks ago. It has quickly become one of our favorite places to spend a rainy/chilly morning at the zoo.

The exhibit is pretty low-key, definitely not as flashy as the new tiger or orangutan habitat. It hasn't been renovated in a long time -- not since I was a kid, because I remember visiting it and things looked exactly the same, then. But it would be a shame to judge the reptile house on its outward appearance -- because the array of reptiles (and amphibians!) at the Virginia Zoo is pretty amazing. They have a wide collection of snakes and frogs, turtles and lizards (including a couple of fearsome iguanas), a few of which we've been lucky enough to be able to see up close (and pet!) at recent Zoo Tales. A. has been all about frogs ("woggies") lately, thanks to a little rubber frog she got at the pediatrician's office, and enjoys being held up for some face time with the frogs more than almost anything else the zoo has to offer.

The reptile house is attached to the nocturnal animal exhibit, and so when we tire of the creepy crawlies, we mosey on over to visit the the shrews, porcupines, and owls, and the animals in the small mammal house, including a teeny tiny red deer and the spider monkeys. The monkeys might just be our favorite animals at the zoo -- they are constantly in motion, tumbling and rolling, swinging from branches, and tossing each other food. It's worth a zoo trip just to see them -- Anne and I could watch the spider monkeys for hours. They're better than any movie, and far less predictable.

Don't forget about the reptiles and the small mammals on your next zoo visit! They just might surprise you, and turn out to be your favorites, too.