What's A Four Letter Word for Procrastination?

It's spelled BULB.

So full of promise, but did they ever get in the ground? Depends on whether they were yours, or mine...

photo credit: Bethany King

 

Of course the good news is that I never ordered any, so I'm free and clear. But you folks with vital bulbaceous life in the garage (or the basement, or the trunks of your cars) -- how long is too long?

The question reminds me of the afternoon I spent with a very charming man and rose-crazed gardener, the now-deceased actor, John Spencer (he played Leo on West Wing). Mr. Spencer was featured in a Morning Edition series on Celebrity Gardeners back in 2000.

I've often bought more than I've had time have time to plant. And I'm jonesing to buy some dahlia bulbs. So the question is, will these dahlia bulbs get planted? Or, like some of the bulbs I bought, they bloomed in the bag. And I looked at them guiltily when I pulled the car in coming back from Warner Brothers every night. And they never saw the ground!!

You can hear the entire series at the bottom of this page.

So...no prizes for the best procrastinators among you, but plenty of good company. Check out some of the competition at Garden Rant.

10:18 AM ET | 11-29-2007 | permalink | comments (5) | e-mail post

Let Them Eat Leaves

The local "organigrocery" was stuffed this day before Tgiving, people cramming their baskets as if preparing for a famine. And every one of us was blissfully distracted from the true famine in our own backyards.

What's starving? Wildlife. Are you growing native oaks and cherries for your saddleback capterpillars? Black-eyed Susans for your pearl crescent butterflies? What about white, yellow, or lodgepole pine for your imperial moths?

"Plants," writes Douglas W. Tallamy in his spanking new book, Bringing Nature Home, "are the fundamental source of energy for all terrestrial creatures" (my emphasis). And note this: "Insects transfer the most energy from plants to animals".

The punchline? If you want to sustain native wildlife -- whether butterflies, birds or mammals -- you best be making room for more native plants.

OK, so it's not exactly breaking news. But if you've always thought planting natives was simply p.c., "a peripheral option favored by vegetarians and erstwhile hippies," (hey, I resemble that remark), the honeymoon's over. The stakes are the biodiversity of the world.

As a gardener, I'm the first to admit it's not always easy to work with the color of Rudbeckia, black-eyed Susan. But it may become an increasingly compelling option, since its flowers provide nectar and its leaves sustenance for this pearl crescent, Phyciodes tharos, as well as dozens of other butterfly species.

photo credit: Douglas W. Tallamy

 

Many of us tend to think that the problem with non-native plants is that they may become invasive. And of course some do. But Tallamy gentles us into a different awareness.

It seems that many American herbivores -- e.g., caterpillars, katydids and beetles -- simply cannot eat the exotic plants we adore. Hence, the famine: starve the bugs, starve the birds, starve the predators (and I ain't talking about cats).

If you see this moth, you're doing something right, according to the author of Bringing Home Nature. It's the polyphemus moth, a.k.a. Antheraea polyphemus, "wonderful evidence of backyard diversity".

photo credit: Douglas W. Tallamy

 

Here's a brief excerpt from this very readable and morally even-handed book:

The predictions of mass extinction (note: he's speaking of all our wildlife) are based on the assumption that the vast majority of plants and animals cannot coexist with humans in the same place at the same time. Nonsense! Evidence suggests that the opposite is true: most species could live quite nicely with humans if their most basic ecological needs were met.

I found this passage particularly compelling as an argument against my own kind of shape and leaf-centric garden:

For the past century we have created our gardens with one thing in mind: aesthetics. We have selected plants for landscaping based only on their beauty and their fit within our artistic designs. Yet if we designed our buildings the way we design our gardens, with only aesthetics in mind, they would fall down. Just as buildings need support structures...to hold the graceful arches and beautiful lines of fine architecture in place, our gardens need native plants to support a diverse and balanced food web essential to all sustainable ecosystems.

Enjoying a meal of black cherry, Acharia stimulea, the saddleback caterpillar, has stiff spines with potent poison glands. According to author Tallamy, "one only knowingly touches a saddleback caterpillar once". Still, it'd be worth seeing one, if all it really took was the right tree.

photo credit: Douglas W. Tallamy

 

I've no doubt many of you have been gardening with natives for decades, but I would love to hear from folks who are creating change/seeing change in unexpected places. Louisville, anyone?

2:40 PM ET | 11-21-2007 | permalink | comments (12) | e-mail post

Plants Give Cues To Offspring

As many of you Tgiving types get ready to visit your own roots...

Most gardeners are hip to the fact that plants do best in their "native" environment -- that is, if a plant naturally grows in a bog, we keep its feet wet; if it likes windy cliffs and fast-draining soil, we put it in a rock garden.

A just-released report in Science Daily takes a gardener's common sense a step further. It seems parent plants teach their children well, according to evolutionary biologist Laura Galloway, who found that "maternal plants give cues to their offspring that help them adapt to their environmental conditions".

Here's my favorite part:

Historically maternal effects have been viewed as a complicating factor, an inconvenience, explains Galloway. But we have found that they can dramatically influence the performance of an individual.

My own Ever-Ready Bunny of a mother is going to be 92 this spring. A dramatic influence? Ever more, every day...

12:00 PM ET | 11-20-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Fernier Than Thou

It all started with an e-mail from the celebrated California horticulturist and landscape designer, Roger Raiche, titled "With Fronds Like These, Who Needs Anemones":

In one of those small triumphs that will never change the world, but which are personally very satisfying, I finally came across a rare variant of a common fern that I had been hoping to find for nearly 25 years now.

I got the e-mail yesterday and once I found a few hours to read it (I jest, but it is the size of a magazine article), I thought of you guys, or shall I say I thought of the bonafide plant freaks among you.

His story is a very simple one. It's about his decades-long search for the native Californian Lyman fern, not because it was rare or endangered -- in fact, it's in the trade -- but because he simply wanted to see it in its native haunts.

Here's the fern plantsman Roger Raiche has been searching for lo! these many years. The caption in his e-mail read, "Depending on robustitude, the pinnae or side leaflets can be toothed or lobed or both. This is the Garnett Creek site."

photo credit: Roger Raiche

 

It's a story for fern lovers, plant hunters, grail-seekers and hortiholics. If you've got a little down time and words like polypody and pinnae don't scare you, read on...

Continue reading "Fernier Than Thou" »

10:31 AM ET | 11-16-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Author of 'Exodus' Honored by Plant?

Leon Uris (1924-2003) wrote the epic Exodus about the founding of the State of Israel. You probably never read it but you might have seen the movie with Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint and the ill-fated Sal Mineo (poor guy, a roller coaster ride through Hollywood, then murdered during a botched burglary in his late 30's).

Until the end of the 20th century, I thought author Uris had a plant that was named in his honor: Leonotis leonurus. I figured the change of spelling at the end - from "is" to "us" - was some Latin mannerism.

WRONG.

As featured in last week's blog, here's a close-up of a leonotis flower head. Despite my tendancy towards hyperbole, come late fall, this plant lives up to the hype.

photo credit: Andy Carvin, NPR

 

Leonotis leonurus is a South African mint family member otherwise known as Lion's Tail or Wild Dagga, though I've never heard it called anything but leonotus (leeya NOtice). A valuable medicinal (I think it's particularly popular in South America), the trade calls it a "tender perennial" so you'll still buy it in the hopes that it won't die come winter, but for most of you it's going to be an annual.

Give your leonotis space and sun and behold summer in October.

photo credit: Andy Carvin, NPR

 

I garden in Z8 where my leonotis has been surprisingly reliable year after year. Or it was before Zoe Mae moved in. Alas, she has chosen that exact spot where dear Leon is growing to plant her four padded feet and stare down anything that walks down the street.

How 'bout those buds? Like I said, whorls in tiers and a square stalk.

photo credit: Velveteen Swirl

 

This, of course, is unacceptable. Such a plant deserves much, much better, simply incomparable for the late fall garden when everyone but salvia's petered out.

And it's color! Pure, thirst-quenching orange. If you didn't know better, you'd think the plant in full flower was a fake: densely clustered spider-legged whorls of flowers growing in tiers along a square-stemmed stalk.

Check and see what others' experience with this plant has been in your area if you're skeptical, but I can't imagine you'll regret giving it a try. Once upon a time I tried a cultivar named 'Staircase' or 'Ladder' or Giraffe Legs', who the hell remembers, it was a towering 8' but way too lanky.

Stick with Leon's namesake.

12:29 PM ET | 11-13-2007 | permalink | comments (8) | e-mail post

Historic Pruners, Only $129.95

This just in...

Now YOU can own a pair of pruners with handles made from an ancient Versaille oak!

Ever hear of the outlandish architect Andre Le Notre (insert accent grave, aigu, etc)? How about the gardens of Versaille? OK, so now we're on the same page.

It seems that one fine day in 1679, Le Notre planted an English (gasp!) oak for his boss, the Sun King. Or maybe he just pointed, and his gardeners planted it. So fine a tree it was, no less an idler than Marie Antoinette used to chill out beneath its arms.

Anyway, this Quercus rober had nine lives, escaping makeover-crazed kings and who knows how many storms and hurricanes, until it finally succumbed at age 324 in the ghastly French summer of 2003, a summer which tragically took human lives.

So here's the punchline: the folks who've been cashing in on the dead tree with various other collectables (oh, to have a Versaille oak corkscrew!) have just released a pair of wood-handled pruners made from this venerable oak.

The even better news is that a seedling of this mighty giant is making new history at Versaille.

2:40 PM ET | 11- 9-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

Getta Load of Your Plant Pics

Wanted to catch you up on what's happening over at our TP photo club, membership cruising towards 300. If you have no idea what I'm on about, here's how to play.

And now for a glimpse of some of the most evocative and enticing from the last few weeks:

As it was originally described by photographer and admired TP regular aleth11, "Sadly, the last zinnia photo of the year. As the frost melted, so did their color, and then they were gone ... "

photo credit: aleth11

 

Simple, unpretentious, and universal. I also like to say the photographer's e-name, Grundlepuck. Grundlepuck. Grundlepuck.

photo credit: Grundlepuck

 

With any luck, photographer bear.bonnell will swing by the blog and tell us where he/she took this. I do recommend checking out the bear's other pix.

photo credit: bear.bonnell

 

If you're a TP regular, you'll know the gent who took this pix, Andy Carvin. He's a gift to both NPR and TP, plus one hot flower photographer (what, me, prejudice?). The featured plant is my longtime late fall favorite, Leonotis leonurus. Let me know if you want me to blog about it sometime.

photo credit: Andy Carvin, NPR

 

I've saved my favorite for last. I am crazy, crazy, crazy for this photograph. It speaks to me; hell, it screams to me. Childhood, the Berkshires, Russian writers, the associations are endless. This is a photographer you must meet (and a pix you've got to see larger), so follow the links. Thank you, Jen!

photo credit: Jennifer Yu

 

So of course you're thinking, what's the big deal? I can shoot as well as this. Well, what are you waiting for?

11:46 AM ET | 11- 8-2007 | permalink | comments (5) | e-mail post

Tales from the Woods. Yours.

Man what a week we're wrapping up here at TP. So many new folks, so many smart folks and damn if you aren't an opinionated lot. Loggers, mill owners, non-profiteers, academics. Hortheads, spider freaks, xeriscapists.

My kinda folk.

First, a little housekeeping. If you've nothing more to say on the matter than Yes or No, I'd love to get your feedback on whether you've been posting because you heard the Sugar Maple story.

OK, now YOU...

Bill on the VA. woods:

a nearby crossroads...totally rural farmland of split rail fences and fields of straw and its thick summer air filled with setting sun softly illuminating barn swallows after darting dragonflies, mayflies, Lady Bugs, buzzing bumblebees and all their companions

Nice, huh? That crossroads is now called Tysons Corner.

Laura on a wooded refuge in Iowa:

Eden Valley. In the middle of the beautiful Iowa fields and prairie is this place that if filled with limestone bluffs and forests. I love to go at least once a week and escape.

Bruce on growing up around chestnut trees:

I can't tell you how many times over the years we had to have burrs dug out of our feet. Those things *HURT* a great deal. We'd go out and collect the chestnuts, pierce them and roast them. Good eats.

Mike on other painful chestnut memories:

About 30+ years ago a neighborhood friend and I were sitting on the edge of our driveway eating raw chestnuts that we had gathered from breaking limbs out of my fathers tree. Everything was going fine till my father walked up...

Rob on clearcutting:

A "clear cut" type harvest is a closer mimick of natural disturbance, and actually are rarely found anymore-modern sustainable forestry usually uses shelterwood cuts with seed trees left for regeneration (a "heavy thin").

Jason on clearcutting:

The notion that a clear cut is mimicking nature doesn't make sense. In nature...the trees are never removed from the site, but stay there as part of the ecosystem, supporting ecosystem recovery to a more natural state.

Matt on clearcutting:

...just as widely used now as they ever have been. The difference is that now foresters generally utilize an "AMZ" or aesthetic management zone to shield public eyes from viewing the harvest.

And Jim, who lives by the saw:

I work as a logger in the mid-coast area of Maine. I sold the skidder and use horses now. Each cut is different...I particularly like the fact that here folks can speak to their issues and perceptions. We can all learn from each other.

12:02 PM ET | 11- 5-2007 | permalink | comments (8) | e-mail post

A Good Lumberman Is Not an Oxymoron

I got thinking about good lumbermen after a comment posted yesterday by TP community member, Rob Spence. It was in response to my post about the felling of big trees.

Fourth generation New Hampshire lumberman Jamey French, leaning on a 200-plus year old sugar maple. He was my introduction to the oxymoronic world of do-gooder lumbermen. Care to nominated a lumberman/woman pin-up of your own?

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

Who is to say that (even) sustainable forestry does not include the taking of some large diameter timber? Big trees grow back too, they just take longer, maybe longer than we personally will be alive.

I know someone who undoubtedly signs execution orders for big trees. And much to my (naieve) amazement, he is a fierce environmentalist and a devoted steward of the forest.

And a lovely guy.

You might have met him briefly if you heard this week's Sugar Maple story on Morning Edition. His name is Jamey French. And we could probably get him to swing by the TP blog if anyone has any thoughtful questions for him.

6:24 PM ET | 11- 1-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post