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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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garlic

July 21, 2024 by Dave Bonta

Cool and partly cloudy. A fledgling wren at the woods’ edge begs to be fed—an interrogatory whine. The mob of feral garlic heads are splitting their hoods.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags Carolina wren, garlic
July 10, 2024 by Dave Bonta

Here and there, the bracken in my yard is beginning to turn yellow. A hummingbird buzzes past, pausing to inspect several garlic heads.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags bracken, garlic, ruby-throated hummingbird
July 2, 2024 by Dave Bonta

The garlic heads in my yard give pause: a crowd of inverted commas, punctuating wildly. A goldfinch drops by to strip the seeds from an old weed stalk.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags American goldfinch, garlic 2 Comments
June 21, 2024 by Dave Bonta

A hazy sunrise for the first full day of astronomical summer. The feral garlics are raising crane’s-bill heads.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags garlic, sunrise
June 24, 2023 by Dave Bonta

Foggy at dawn for the wood thrush’s solo. The wild garlics are beginning to raise their egret heads.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags dawn, fog, garlic, wood thrush
July 12, 2022 by Dave Bonta

An hour after sunrise, wild garlic heads still nod. A flower fly hovers in front of my glasses’ right lens. The smell of smoke.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags garlic, syrphid flies
July 15, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Sunrise. A snort from the deer who sleeps under the crabapple tree. A hummingbird zips past the wild garlic.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags deer, garlic, ruby-throated hummingbird, sunrise

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On This Day

  • June 11, 2025
    Cool and mostly clear at sunrise. A goldfinch chirping in pentameter. The cerulean warbler changes trees—a blue-striped blur.
  • June 11, 2024
    Cold and gray. A catbird crosses the yard with a fecal sac from one of its nestlings in its beak. A male ruby-throated hummingbird buzzes the boot soles on my propped-up feet.
  • June 11, 2023
    Rising late, I’m in time to see the last cottontail going back under the house for a mid-morning nap. Cuckoos call in the distance. Common yellowthroat. Wood pewee.
  • June 11, 2022
    Writing on the porch for a while, I am confronted, every time I look up, by three bracken fronds in my yard that have already turned yellow, like needlessly complex skeletons of fish.
  • June 11, 2021
    Overcast and cool. A titmouse appears to have developed a taste for caterpillars, circling the trunk of a walnut like a nuthatch.

See all...

Related book

Cover of Ice Mountain with a linocut of a big ridgetop tree.

What I do after I sit on the porch. One winter and spring's daily walks distilled into short poems with linocut illustrations by Beth Adams.

Header image: detail from Paper Garden by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (used by permission)

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