TODAY'S TO DO LIST
1. 10AM. Arrive at friend B's creekside house with pot, small spade and work gloves. Find friend standing in dirt road, brooding over a dead robin in the classic Irish manner. Chat with friend for a moment. Friend is visibly amused that one of the plants around his house will have a home at the country's oldest botanical garden. Friend has actual life instead of an array of hobbies, so off to work he goes. Bids you a good day and to have fun tromping about his grounds.
2. Descend from dock via precarious aluminum ladder with borrowed inner tube on shoulder.
3. Take a breath, brace self against the shock of cold, dark cedar water hitting The Boys. Boys sit this round out, take vacation somewhere inside neck.
4. Wade up to chest across creek with inner tube carrying tools. Trip over hidden branches on creek bed. Wiggle toes in black, gritty silt. Thank your lucky stars your life consists of hobbies.
5. Reach and clamber up mossy creek bank opposite friend's house, using the same tree trunk which you had climbed last week to help friend trim old tree branches dangling over creek.
6. Wonder how the hell you'll manage to get tools up onto bank from inner tube far below. Manage somehow. Toes play a vital role, inexplicably.
7. Proceed through cat brier, poison ivy and grasses to reach swampy area in clearing that is home to hundreds of arrow arum (Peltandra virginica).
8. Find suitably robust specimen.
9. Carefully and gently remove specimen, place in pot. Return to inner tube. Wonder how you're going to get it into the thing from so high. Manage somehow. Toes play a vital role, inexplicably.
10. Return across creek. Slowly climb precarious aluminum ladder up to dock with pot on head. Wipe mud from eyes.
11. Take five gallon jugs and fill them with acidic, brown cedar water.
12. Wrap up potted plant for trip. Pack into Pine Jalopy.
13. Return home to wash up and to wrangle/pack up bullfrog tadpoles.
14. Pack Pine Jalopy with Massive arrow arum, jugs of water, and tadpoles. Leave cage and cocoon from last night's eclosion in car.
15. Proceed to favorite stand of native woodland orchids. Take soil sample near stand of orchids. Head to Philadelphia.
16. 2:30PM. Arrive at botanical garden. Unload Jalopy.
17. Staff situate arum plant into newly refurbished pond garden. Tadpoles are released individually, so that no duckweed invades pond.
18. Check in on new bog garden. Staff uses your cedar water jugs to supplement water already in bog, as well as to help acidify it.
19. Hand over bag of soil to staff, so that it can be mixed in with the new native orchids, in the hopes that the beneficial symbiotic mycorrhizal fungus in said soil will establish itself and improve their health.
20. Show spent cecropia moth cocoon to staff. They agree that it is indeed neato.
21. Briefly and poorly explain how a bat house is constructed. Staff kindly gives you a small dogwood tree with lovely ribbed leaves.
22. Fight rush hour traffic out of Philly. Buy mangoes on the way home.