2009 Xmas Home Tour

Christmas Home Tour This Saturday

Holiday Quilt Exhibit included at Historic Uffington House

Join Historic Rugby and the Holiday Home Tour this Saturday, December 10, from 1 p.m. until 6 p.m. Eastern time (noon to 5 p.m. Central). Tour privately owned homes  and historic buildings in the comfort of a van provided for the occasion. Light refreshments and wassail will be served at the Historic Uffington House, home of Mrs. Hughes, the founder's mother. See a Christmas quilt exhibit while enjoying the refreshments. Shopping is available at the Shops of Rugby, including the Commissary.

Dinner will be served at the Harrow Road Café from 5 to 9 p.m. Eastern time with hours of operation from 8:30 a.m. until 9:00 p.m.

Call Historic Rugby toll-free at 888-214-3400 or 423-628-2441 for more information. Reservations are not required.

Book Club’s Next Good Read

By Benita Howell

The Rugby Book Club will meet at Tom and Benita Howell's home at 7 p.m. on Saturday, January 14. We'll be discussing two of Kentucky author Wendell Berry's works, The Long-Legged House, a collection of essays, and Nathan Coulter, the first novel in his Port William series. Our snow date will be January 21.

There are also plans to have a book event with writer Nancy Jensen. Her event will be April 14. We're planning a Saturday afternoon reading that day and book signing in the theatre, followed by dinner or some other opportunity for book club folks who have already read the book to discuss it further with Nancy.  For those of you who would like to go ahead and order her book, it is The Sisters.  http://www.amazon.com/Sisters-Novel-Nancy-Jensen/dp/0312542704

BIRTHDAY

Dec. 8 – George Zepp

Dec. 9 - Cheryl Cribbet

CALENDAR

Rugby is in the Eastern Time zone, just barely.

Saturday, Dec. 10 – Christmas Home Tour – 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern

Friday, Dec. 16 -  Music at the Café - Lesia Terry and Great Day in the Morning

Friday, Dec. 23 – Music at the Café – Robin Branstetter and the Girls

Friday, Dec. 30 – Music at the Café – Leonard Anderson

Saturday, Dec. 31 – New Years Eve at Harrow Road Café - Call now and book your table for a festive evening.

Saturday, Jan. 14 – Book Club – 7 p.m. at Benita and Tom Howell’s house. Two of Kentucky author Wendell Berry's works will be discussed, The Long-Legged House, a collection of essays, and Nathan Coulter, the first novel in his Port William series. The snow date will be January 21.

Quilters’ Group - Wednesdays and Saturdays, 2–4 p.m. Eastern, at the Friendly House behind Christ Church

Rugby Yoga – Wednesdays, 8:30 a.m. Eastern, at the Friendly House.


NATURE NOTES

Witches' Hats

 By Linda Konig

You may think I'm about a month late in writing about witches' hats, but actually I'm writing about a certain kind of gall that's formed on witch-hazel tree leaves. These cone shapes are one of the easiest ways to identify our local witch hazels (Hamamelidaceae virginiana). I've often seen these galls, but only this past week I learned that these cones are formed by an aphid with a very complicated life-cycle. Usually in April, a female wingless Witch-Hazel Cone Gall aphid hatches from an egg that was laid the autumn before on a witch hazel limb. 

 She crawls to the top of a new leaf and looks for an intersection of leaf veins. She jabs her needle mouth (about the size of a printed hyphen) into the intersection to suck up the juices.  She keeps doing this in a circle around herself, alternately injecting the growing leaf with a substance that causes a wall to form up around her, a wall that encases her inside.  When the circular wall is finished, it's a hard cone shape, a sort of witch hat pointing upward. This cone is about the size of the writing end of a pen and offers protection from enemies and the elements. Sometimes you can find several of these on one leaf. Interestingly, this doesn't seem to hurt the leaves.  She will spend the rest of her life there and expel 50 to 70 smaller cloned versions of herself inside the cone. This method of reproduction is called parthenogenesis and probably would take an entire book to explain.

 Aphids of all kinds live by sucking juices from plants. Plant sap mostly contains sugars, yet the aphids can't use most of the sugar. The juice and sugars they don't need are then expelled in copious amounts as honeydew, much loved by ants. So how do ants get access to honeydew waste from these aphids which are enclosed? The aphids' bodies produce a waxy substance that coats the honeydew, forming balls. As far as I know they're the only kind of aphids that do this. In the floor of the cone is a miniscule hole from which the honeydew balls are dropped.  How convenient for the aphids and the ants as well, who only have to pick up the minute honeydew balls from the ground beneath the tree. 

 Finally it's time for the third generation of aphids, the sexual generation with wings, to leave the enclosure in early fall to fly about, mate and lay eggs. They leave through the hole in the floor.  For some good photos of witch-hazel leaves, flowers, green seed pods, and witch hats, try http://www.nyctophilia.net/plants/witchhazel.htm .  Just click on the photos to enlarge them. Also, there's a short poem by Robert Frost about late fall that mentions witch-hazel.

This Week’s Editors: Rick Murphy and George Zepp