Tag: garden

Summer A-Coming In

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It’s been an especially lovely week to be out in the yard and garden. We’ve had a run of gorgeous weather, so that prepping the raised beds for their tomato plants and flower seeds was less like a chore and more like sunbathing. I cleared off the weeds, sheared the clover, spread compost, and glanced down idly, wondering if there would be four-leaf clovers this year. Yes! There they were, laughing up at me – half a dozen good luck omens, casually waiting to be noticed and carried into the house. Why should flowers have all the fun? 

In the front yard all the perennials are showing up in order. The crabapple finishes flowering, the pear tree finishes flowering, and the iris knows it’s next. How do they do that? The bearded iris toward the back, the Siberian iris in front, and the pear tree off to the left make a joint project of shadows together on the newly bright lawn.

And once the iris are underway, the peonies chime in. It’s turning out to be an excellent year for peonies – many blooms and many buds on every bush. This is a close-up of the peonies, so you can’t tell they’re interspersed with more irises. They seem to enjoy each other’s company. That inspired me to look into companion planting – the idea that certain plants do better together than separately. The classic example of this is the Three Sisters of native American farming practice: beans, squash, and corn. Beans fix nitrogen in the soil for the squash and corn, corn provides a support for the beans to climb, and squash shades the ground with its broad leaves, blocking out weeds. Since I don’t have room in my garden for corn and I don’t like beans, I’m looking for other combos instead. 

Meanwhile I found a different companion right at my front door. The shaggy part appeared first and I had my doubts, but once the gap between lantern and wall was filled in, a neat little nest appeared on top. It’s very touching to see that a bird feels safe from predators when close to people. We may be disturbing their flyways and disrupting their climate, but indeed the foxes, owls, and hawks flee when they see us coming. Birds have figured this out. You’d expect a creature that started out as a dinosaur to be adaptable like that. 

Perennial Thoughts

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The weather’s been up, down, and sideways this spring, uncertain enough to keep my seedlings stuck in the house, looking out their sunny window as erratic frost rolls and unrolls over the lawn. But out in the yard, the perennials are not confused. The reliable chives wave their purple goodbyes to the daffodils, while the last of the wild hyacinths refuses to cede ground. Nice try, but nothing can stop the chives. 

Across the lawn from the herb garden, at the edge of the woods, I’ve made a tiny patio of a few rows of bricks. It’s just big enough for a single chair, me, and a cup of tea, maybe a book. The lilies of the valley would like me to know, though they look dainty and possess the scent of sweet innocence, that they are a power to be reckoned with, and should have been consulted. Their outrider will move that brick if I don’t stop him.

The asparagus, another perennial, has been poking its fingers up through leaf mold for weeks now, and the time has come for me to stop cutting and carting them off for dinner, and let them feed themselves instead. They’re at the stage now where they look like, well, sort of skanky Christmas trees – the tightly-closed tips expanded into branches, but the ferny leaves not yet fluffing them out. 

Sturdy, reliable, undemanding, how nice that these trusty plants come back every year with no effort on my part. My lamium, for example – such an excellent groundcover. But what’s that little purple flower sneaking into the picture from the upper right hand corner? Creeping Charlie! A weed! Alas, a perennial too, and just as determined to come back as all the others. The traits so wonderful in a plant you want, so aggravating in a plant you don’t. It’s hard to see their habits as the same, but they are.

Take garlic mustard, for instance. Early colonists brought it with them as a desirable salad green, but few here today consider it palatable. Including me – I’ve tried it. It’s not perennial, but so profligate of seed it might as well be. When I first moved to Michigan and saw stands of garlic mustard blooming in spring, I thought it was lovely. Then I discovered its aspirations to world dominance. Its specialty is swamping the opposition in a bid to turn diversity into monoculture, as though some mega-chemical company were in charge. If only my basil would do that.

 

Resilience

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Our first frost happened a couple of nights ago, drawing a map of hardiness, protection, and resilience across the garden. The hardy perennials, like these asters, didn’t notice, originating as they do in climates that reward ability to cope with winter. Tender annuals, like my basil and tomatoes, withered and keeled over. I had already brought into the house several pots of basil and all the green tomatoes still on the vine, in anticipation of this. These are plants whose ancestors never met with winter weather, and had no need to adapt to it.

Then there are hardy annuals, like petunias. They can resist the kind of winters we had in Southern California, which did sometimes include a light frost in late December. They seem to be familiar with this and will persevere through it, but when the hard, serious frost comes, they succumb. Marigolds and pansies are also in this category. Okay, so far all is neat and clear in the life cycles of my garden plants.

But then we have this scenario from the way back of the garden. Marigolds, check, still abloom as expected. But there’s that cosmos standing tall and happy, while all the other cosmos in the garden is dead. Sort of looks like the marigolds talked them into it. Good story, but the reality is different. There’s a tall black cherry tree just outside the picture, leaning over the garden fence enough to shelter the cosmos from the sky. The same thing that makes this part of the garden too shady for plants like tomatoes, expected to ripen fruit, offers protection from light frost.

So the resilience a plant shows in the face of frost can be inborn, or it can be situational. It’s the job of the gardener to situate the plant where it can have its best outcome. Here’s some milkweed in process of its best outcome, which is not the propagation of Monarch butterflies, but the launching of its frothy seeds into chilly autumn air that carries them into the future.

Slow to Get the Message

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So I looked out my window at this nice bucolic scene, the deer browsing among the fallen crabapples on the front lawn. Very peaceful and lovely. Then I noticed one of the deer kept chasing another one away. They usually shared quite amicably but I’d seen this before, and this was the time of year for it. The chaser was the lead doe, and the chasee was a young fellow with just the first, nubby suggestions of coming antlers on his forehead. A button buck. She’d chase him off a short distance, he’d come back, she’d chase him off again, over and over. She was determined. I pictured thought bubbles over their heads: “Hey Mom it’s me” from the button buck, and “You’ve got those things on your head, get out” from the doe. It makes me very sad for him, but I guess this is how deer prevent inbreeding. 

It’s hard to think of winter coming, with the weather as warm as it’s been through September. It’s been giving me cognitive dissonance – on warm Michigan days I expect the sun to be up till 9:30 or 10:00 at night, but it’s setting by 7:30. No more saving yard work for after dinner: the warm weather keeps the tomatoes ripening, so I keep weeding them.

The zinnias and cosmos continue too, but as they get taller and taller, reaching for the retreating sun, they’ve started toppling over into the mini-pumpkin patch. That’s not a giant zinnia, it’s a wee pumpkin.

Rooting around under the tomatoes, I found another four-leaf clover. There’s one plant in here that turns them out fairly consistently, so I can be generous with what I wish on them. I used this one to wish good luck to young mister button buck.

Late Summer Harvest

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August is summer with a difference. Hours of daylight are still plentiful, but you can feel them drawing down, heading toward the equinox. No more strolling in the garden at ten p.m.; nights are cooler; but the harvest is rolling in. Tomatoes are coming into their own, and the squash – oh, the squash. I plant yellow crooknecks instead of zucchini so I have a chance to find them before they get as big as doorstops. Even so, they seem to have an amazing ability to be four inches long one day and twelve inches the next. I would be tempted to say they’re called squash because they squash anything else trying to grow near them, but being a wordsmith, of course I looked that up. One kind of squash comes from “quash,” a Middle English word now used chiefly for subpoenas, and the other from “asquutasquash,” from the Narragansett. It sounds like the Narragansett people taught the pilgrims how to eat some kind of squash they’d never seen before. 

The Narragansetts would also have had blueberries, a native North American fruit. I came across an argument online about whether the Indians called them “starberries,” but was unable to delve into it because AI kept changing “starberries” to “strawberries.” Thanks, but I’m well aware that no one calls blueberries strawberries.

The flowers that produce seeds instead of fruit are also hard at work generating harvest. The seed pods of my California poppies are so elegant, I have sometimes tried to preserve them. They’d look lovely in a dried flower arrangement but they always burst open, their goal achieved despite my desires.

My zinnias produce new flowers and ripe seedheads in equal numbers right up till frost. They’re a mainstay of my bouquets, so I was disturbed one morning to find the petals munched off of a few of them. I spent some time searching carefully for miscreant bugs in need of control, but none appeared. A bit later, looking out the kitchen window, I laughed to see the riddle resolved: it was a goldfinch, ripping seeds out of the still-petalled seedheads. The petals fell to the deck, where they soon turned an inconspicuous brown. The stems bent over when he landed on them, but not so as to interfere with his snack. The really funny thing was that I was looking right at him thinking he was a bright yellow Cut and Come Again zinnia blowing slightly in the breeze, until he moved enough to show the black stripe on his wing. He was gone before I could get a photo of him at it.

The Little Girls

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All day I tried to write a blog post about my beautiful summer flowers, but all I can think about is the little girls swept away in the Texas floods. Summer was beautiful for them, too, swimming and canoeing, supported by the river and trusting in the goodness of life as children do. They slept, and the world changed. They woke to thunder, and the lurch of a power they never knew the river had. 

Those sweet, small lives. Not only the devastated families whose daughters were lost, but also those girls who survived, now have this experience engraved on their hearts. All the rest of us, no matter our politics or attitudes toward climate disasters, have hearts rent by their pain right now.

Meanwhile in Texas, they will face the question of blame. Blame is useful if, instead of poisoning regret and generating revenge, it is targeted toward solutions to the problems that fed the disaster in the first place. To have a child, the saying goes, is to have your heart walking around outside your body. All those girls, beautiful as summer flowers, leave many empty spaces behind them, and only memories to fill them in. I hope the families of Camp Mystic can find comfort and solace in remembrance.

More on the Milkweed

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A few years ago I was given a seed packet of milkweed – the only host plant for monarch butterflies – to sow in the yard. A random milkweed plant would show up in my yard from time to time but they never established themselves, so I assumed I had poor milkweed habitat and forgot about the packet. Then, cleaning out a drawer in February, voila, the milkweed seeds reappeared. I doubted they were viable at that point, but I read on the envelope that they could be tossed out onto the snow in winter. So I did that.

Turns out the seed was plenty viable and the plants, now flourishing in full flower, are barging in on the hydrangeas, the chamomile, the sage, and even the pineapple mint and garlic chives. 

So, another lesson from the garden. Never underestimate the ability of life to overcome adversity, no matter how unfavorable the outlook or how dim the expectations. Here’s my milkweed standing up for the success of the beleaguered monarch butterflies. The odds don’t look great for butterflies right now, but the milkweed is voting for them. You go, milkweed.

Keep Trying

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People are complicated, come from different backgrounds, and have different experiences, so there are many things to disagree about. Argument is a perfectly legitimate form of human communication. Violence is not, yet we seem to go there all the time. There are more sad news stories today than I can, or want to, recount. I went to the garden for solace and there I found the bleeding hearts still blooming. Bleeding hearts came to North America from China, where they’re called purse peonies. Different ways of looking at things.

I still have a few regular peonies, too. Earlier this month the large and beautiful peony garden in Ann Arbor was assaulted, hundreds of its innocent flowers cut off and thrown to the ground. Flyers left behind announced this as a political act but it looked like spite. Did someone really expect the fallen flowers would bring allies to their cause?

The garden is much better at forming alliances. Here’s a bumblebee visiting my baptisia, where she will use her weight to open the flower, something smaller bees can’t do. Baptisia and bumblebees have worked out a deal. No manifestos were created, no weapons fired, the bee presumably her own ambassador.

The milkweed, still in bud, has a deal with monarch butterflies. When it blooms they’ll pollinate it, and in return its leaves will supply munching monarch caterpillars with a poison that keeps predators away, an alliance of mutual benefit. Poison can be considered a weapon, but for the monarch the point is deterrence. There is no wisdom in the mutually assured destruction of having your predator die after it eats you. 

There’s certainly struggle in the garden. The ferns have moved in so far onto the path through the woods, I’m going to have to pull some out. But when I do I’ll transplant them to the front yard, under the pine trees. I expect they will thrive in the mulchy shade there, where the grass is unhappy. Plants, like people, have different needs, sometimes hard to figure out. The least we can do is try.

Things That Stay, Things That Change

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Faithful to the season, the hellebores lifted themselves out of the dirt in time to wave hello to lent. I should have been paying closer attention, because I missed getting my paczki this year – a special Polish pastry available only at Mardi Gras. Not, of course, called Mardi Gras in Polish, but I have enough trouble spelling paczki (it’s pronounced “punchkey”) to venture another Polish word. Every year the hellebore tribe increases in my yard; they seem especially ruffly this year.

The tribe of the deer increased this year, too. Over the winter we had a group of eight, then a group of twelve, but now they’ve merged into a group of twenty, more than I’ve ever seen at once on my lawn. It’s odd, because normally the herds break into smaller units come spring. Maybe the deer equivalent of paczki is coming up in through the grass.

Another spring surprise for me was this orchid, a gift from a friend last year, reblooming. I’ve been given orchids before, enjoyed them while they bloomed, and then watched them wither and die. My previous experience with orchids was as corsages, or seeing them in California where they grew outdoors. So I assumed a windowsill was not great orchid habitat, yet here she is, all aglow. 

Behind her, in brighter light, is another outdoor California plant, a bougainvillea, which has come back from a near-death experience. It had dwindled to a total of four leaves before I realized the gnats in the room were a sign of fungus in its soil. I had a three-pronged attack for this, so I’m not sure which part worked. First I mixed hydrogen peroxide into a pitcher of water and soaked the soil with it, as a fungus killer. Then I poked holes in the soil nearest the sad bare branches and shook in some rooting powder, to try to regenerate healthy roots. Then I painted the four stalwart leaves with Miracle-gro, a foliar feeder, to help it out until its roots recovered. It worked! Yay!

Meanwhile, it’s been fun getting to know our new cat. Frassy has found all Zerlina’s old favorite spots, and invented a few of her own. Zerlina was afraid of sticks, or anything sticklike, from which we guessed she had once been abused with them. Frassy seems to be trauma-free. She’s especially fond of Doug. Here he is playing with her with a feather toy on a stick. She’s already bitten through the string once – see the knot where I tied it back together? She’s also ferocious with her two toy mice. If we do really have a mouse in the house, I hope we won’t for long.

Winding Down

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b stagAfter weeks of summer and fall bumping into each other in a jumble, fall seems to be emerging triumphant at last. The stags are about done destroying small trees by using them to rub the velvet off their antlers. I’m still waiting for one of them to graciously leave his shed antlers in exchange – seems like the least he could do. Maybe this will be the year.

b gloriosasBetween the light frosts and the subsiding hours of sunlight most of my flowers and tomatoes are gone, but out in front, facing south, one rudbeckia plant persists. It’s not the only rudbeckia out there, but it’s the only one still blooming. A mystery of nature.

b foxgloveOver in the shady section, a single foxglove has re-bloomed. It was pink the first time, but has paled in the shortened hours of daylight. The foxgloves are spaced widely, so in their case it’s understandable that individuals may have different amounts of light, or shelter, or competition from other plants. Less mysterious.

b lettuceOut in the fenced garden, once the tomatoes were gone, I planted lettuces in the cold frame. They’re flourishing. This is very satisfying to me as a gardener, but the flaw in the plan is that I really don’t eat much salad in cold weather.

b radishThat was the trouble with radishes too, until I learned that they can be cooked. How did I get to be as old as I am, and never knew this? They’re so cute out in the garden, with their little round, red shoulders peeking out of the dirt, and they demand so little in the way of warmth and sunlight, I can’t resist planting them when random space becomes available. I’m still working out the best recipes for them.

b pathMeanwhile, the main path into my woods needed help. I spread several layers of the Sunday New York Times over the old path, poured a bucket of water over that so it wouldn’t blow around as I worked, and topped it with mulch. That will be one less thing to do come spring, when things to do are plentiful. As much as I love gardening, there comes a time when I really need a break. If spring is the reward for winter and harvest is the reward for spring, winter is the reward for three seasons of hard work. Just curl up with a good book and eat all those quarts of tomato sauce.