Went to the Oklahoma Centennial Botanical Gardens
for the Master Naturalist training on prairie ecosystems.
We actually learned something about two ecosystems -
the prairie
and the cross timbers.
The cross timbers and the prairie
sit side-by-side there,
seven miles northwest of Tulsa.
The cross timbers ecosystem
then curves around, covering the central part of the state.
It’s an ancient,
scrubby
deciduous woodlands.
Washington Irving,
coming upon the cross timbers
during his travels,
compared it to a sea of iron.
It’s thinned out considerably since then
and trails have been blazed through it
at the new botanical gardens.
At the edge of the cross timbers
looking out onto the prairie
is an elegant persimmon grove.
It’s an all male persimmon grove,
started by one lone persimmon seed
that somehow found its way into fertile soil.
You can see it there,
in the photograph, in the middle of the grove.
It’s shorter and knotty,
having withstood by itself
the weathering of the winds
and storms
until,
from its roots,
other male persimmon trees sprouted,
grew straight and tall alongside each other
and created a lovely grove.
No persimmons, of course.
But there are female persimmon trees
in the nearby cross timbers,
with small persimmons hanging on.
We opened the three seeds in one fruit
and found a spoon in each one.
A spoon in a persimmon seed,
I learned last year,
is a prediction of a snowy winter.
A knife predicts ice
and a fork, a warm winter.
Last year’s persimmons also contained spoons
and we did indeed have snows -
even a blizzard in the Oklahoma Panhandle,
though I don’t know if persimmons grow there.
Interesting that we can rely on a persimmon seed
to make a prediction
in such an unpredictable world.
A world in which
a lone male persimmon seed
took root amidst the tall grasses on a windswept prairie
and now
an elegant grove
of straight and tall trees
reach to the sky.
