Tag: gardening

Companions, Communities

1 Comment

Michigan sits under both the Atlantic and the Mississippi Flyways, and in spring and fall many migrants pass through. So when, sitting by the window to write, I noticed movement at the birdbath, I thought exotic species might be involved. But no – it was the local community, sparrows and finches, diving, bathing, drinking, and generally disporting themselves at the spa. Whatever the birds were feeling, it looked joyful to me. Chickadees showed up and were admitted; blue jays showed up, and all the other birds left. Were the jays aggressive, or did they just take up too much space?

This year I tried a lot of companion plantings, with mixed results. The basil among the tomato plants did really well while the tomatoes did not, but local gardeners without basil also had poor tomato crops. The radishes among the squash might have helped, except a rabbit got into the garden and ate all the squash leaves. Having some extra Queen Sophia Marigold seeds, I tossed them into the edge of the zinnia and cosmos bed. Tall varieties of zinnias and cosmos tend to flop, then grow in zany angles as their leading edges stand back up. But well, look at this – the marigolds held the zinnias and cosmos up straight. Where there were no marigolds they keeled over. 

My usual approach to companion planting is to shove a lot of flowerpots together and hope they riot well in each other’s company. Many of my flowers have resigned from blooming, as shade from the house advances over them, but this part of the deck still gets some sun. The nasturtiums and marigolds soldier on while the cosmos droops gracefully over them. Maybe next year I’ll boost some marigolds up into the cosmos pot, for support.

As color drains from the flowerpots, the burning bush begins lighting up. It’s said to be invasive, and it probably would be if the critters in my yard would leave it alone. It’s a favorite for topiary among the deer, and its berries are loved by the birds. Its proper name is euonymus, which means well-named. Which is a little weird, since “well named” sounds like they know we’ll really call it “burning bush,” a well-fitted name.

Red and gold are typical autumn colors, but I’m partial to the blues and purples of asters, which also come out in the shortening days. I’ve tried for years to get them to establish in my yard. They bloom so late in the season, I thought maybe I was accidentally weeding them out in their early growth. But here they are this year, popping up all over – everywhere I strewed seeds that never germinated or placed a plant that failed to thrive, at last here they are, suddenly flourishing. The grace of the garden. I’m going through the yard putting in plant markers at each clump, so I’ll recognize them as they come up again next year. I want them to become a regular part of my garden’s community, and it’s so easy to mistake the nature of things that are still developing.

Edging Toward Fall

Leave a comment

The garden’s been a bit off this summer. Some of my tomatoes, on different plants in different beds, did whatever that is in the photo on the left. Tasty enough, but weird; also a smaller crop than usual. Weather? Critters? Meanwhile a resourceful bunny managed to break in through the chicken wire. In the time it took me to find the break and block it up, she nipped all the flowers off the squash plants and munched up many squash leaves. They have recovered, but there will be no bounty in the freezer this year.

It was, however, a good year for crabapples, which are much appreciated by the deer. Also by me, as the deer spend most of their time snarfing up the crabapples and leave my flowers alone. There are three new fawns this summer, and one of last year’s little guys is now sporting two single-spike, prongless antlers, which means Mama Doe really doesn’t want him around. If deer wonder anything, he must wonder why she keeps chasing him away from where the rest of them are feeding (“Mom! It’s me!”). At first he tried just keeping out of her reach as she nosed through the fallen fruit, but lately he’s started coming earlier in the afternoon, before the others get there. Life as a young buck isn’t easy.

The phlox in the backyard are thriving this year. I planted garlic chives around them on the advice that this would keep deer away, but the deer would wade right through it as soon as they saw the flowerbuds, and chowed down on them. This year I have a lot of milkweed coming up among the chives, in front of the phlox. Whether deer won’t cross the milkweed or whether they’re too distracted by the siren call of the crabapples, the phlox is flourishing, unmolested. 

The plumbago in the front yard is flourishing too. Plumbago is such a useful workhorse of a groundcover. Neither the deer nor the rabbits eat it. It holds back in early spring when the daffodils are in glory, leaping out just when it’s time to cover the daffs’ long, drooping, yellowing leaves; in full summer it bursts into blue flowers; and come fall the leaves turn bright red. This is a plant that really leans into the seasons. It spreads, but slowly, and I’d like to expand its share of the yard. Despite its excellence plumbago can be hard to find in nurseries, so I’ve ordered a few more from my catalogs.

While I was searching nurseries for plumbago, I found this pot of black pansies. Pansies can handle a fair bit of frost, so there’s a good chance they will last till Halloween. They will look nice and witchy sitting on the front steps with some pumpkins. That tomato I started out with also looked a bit witchy, but part of its witchcraft was turning into two BLT sandwiches yesterday. It did an excellent job.

Looking and Seeing

Leave a comment

I once had a job as a substitute art teacher. The class was an elective for seventh graders but, truth be told, many were there because their first choice elective was full. They really wanted to be swimming. They said they couldn’t draw. I told them the problem was, they weren’t seeing what they were looking at. I gave each of them paper, pencil, and a zinnia fresh cut from my garden. Pretend, I said, that you are an ant, crawling around the edge of each petal, all the way to the center of the flower. Draw the ant trail you will make. They did, and they were amazed at what beautiful drawings of zinnias they made.

It inspired me to write a poem about an ant on a zinnias – Magellan of ants, traveling around and around, discovering a universe mysteriously changed from what it was when he started out, in the garden. As Georgia O’Keeffe once said, “…nobody sees a flower, really – it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time…” I grow my zinnias from seed and fall in love with them, and when – as often happens – I feel I don’t have time to paint them, I take these photos.

But I see them better when I paint them. The store-bought lilies and rose dominate this painting, but that’s one of my zinnias nestled in the middle. The lilies had a fabulous scent; I can smell it every time I look at this picture. 

But my main garden flowers are zinnias and cosmos. I wrote a poem about cosmos too; it ends: “Vain petals like a pinwheel/drop in a sudden shower/who would name the universe/after such a flower?” The cosmos flower is said to symbolize order and harmony, most of them having a simple structure like the one on the bottom left of the photo. But because we can’t leave well enough alone, the outrageously ruffled beauty in more or less the center is cosmos, too. A more complex universe; it mixes well with zinnias.

I was walking through the yard, hoping to get a photo of actual ants on actual zinnias – it happens – when a gently buzzing sound made me realize what I was more likely to find on flowers. Bees. The mountain mint, in bloom now, was covered with them. Bees don’t mess around circumambulating – they head right into the center of things. Purposeful, confident, no time to stroll around. They know what they’re looking for, and they find it. 

Rabbit Life

Leave a comment

A few days ago I strolled out to the garden, intending a peaceful time staking up tomato plants. Instead: outrage! I opened the gate and a rabbit zoomed out of my gladiolus and streaked across the garden! She wasn’t very big, but she was insidethe garden. This could only mean a new hole in the chicken wire. Outraged, yes, but I watched carefully to see where she went, hoping she would lead me to the hole. She vanished into the clump of daylilies against the fence, put there for some reason by previous garden owners. I could see they would make good cover for a bunny, and behind them I could see a long, low break in the chicken wire.

I picked up the hoe that lives in the garden and poked and stomped around the daylilies, listening for bunny rustles. Satisfied that she wasn’t in there any more, I pushed some bricks against the hole to block it, went inside for a spool of wire and some cutters; wired the gap shut from the outside, and finally staked up my tomato plants. 

I had planted gladiolus in the garden because otherwise the deer ate them, and I wanted them for flower arrangements. The rabbit’s technique seemed to be to pull them over sideways, and nibble away. It was very interesting to note that, while decimating the gladiolus, she had totally ignored the ox-eye daisies. They’re volunteers, and plant them selves both inside and outside the garden. Nothing, not the deer, not the rabbits, not even the woodchuck eats them. And as a bonus they’re wonderfully long-lasting in flower arrangements. Maybe I should give up on the gladiolus and let these little daisies take over.

The next day I strolled out to the garden again and yikes! The rabbit was still in there – and now I had closed up her escape hatch. I called in reinforcements. Doug. With a hoe each we propped the garden gate open and herded the rabbit, like a pair of Mr. Mc Gregors, except we were laughing more than we were angry. What a comical sight we must have made, hoes flailing, me squeezing in between the now tall and ferny asparagus, Doug blocking her way to safety like the angel with the flaming sword at the gates of Eden. The rabbit ate of the wrong fruit, and we expelled her from the garden. This is my point of view. Hers, I suppose, would be that the whole yard is her territory, and we’re the interlopers. 

Weather and Heat

Leave a comment

July weather has arrived, and Doug and I are having our usual disagreement about it. Eighty degrees is hot, he says, a typical Michigander view. Eighty degrees isn’t even warm enough for a sleeveless dress I say, a Southern Californian. Dry California heat is different from humid Michigan heat, he tells me. Yes, I say, but I’m sitting right next to you here in humid Michigan and I say it’s not hot. Then I go sit in a shady spot under a tree among the ferns, and he misses out, though he doesn’t consider that he’s missing anything. And I do worry that if I sit there too long the ferns will engulf me – look at them trying, inching up between the bricks, swamping even the lilies of the valley. 

The poinsettias, like me, enjoy coming outdoors for the summer. They had grown so thin and weepy indoors, this vacation was just what they needed, pulling a new green summer wardrobe over their heads; summer camp for Christmas plants. But I know I can rely on them. Indoor winter light will turn them red again when the time comes.

In a Michigan summer it doesn’t get dark till after nine at night. There’s plenty of light to grow things like this gigantic swath of burgeoning shrubbery, four feet high and about as wide. One search engine thinks it’s catnip and one thinks it’s lemon balm, but I didn’t plant either of them so, whatever else, it’s definitely a volunteer. I brought some in and Frassy rejected it as catnip, but she’s picky about her treats.

Last year’s milkweed was from deliberate seeds, but this year they have added to their number on their own account. They look ready for entire flocks of monarchs, but as yet I’ve seen only two dancing attendance on them. Is it too hot for butterflies? Milkweed is toxic to most animals, so I was surprised to find some of the mid-height leaves munched off, as if by deer. We have three new fawns, inexperienced enough to eat something like that. I’d be happier if it was the woodchuck but she’s too wily.

There’s also a mix of the deliberate and the accidental on the deck. The purchased petunias, taking the opposite route from the poinsettias, are going for a hot, summery red. Behind them the bougainvillea, after sulking tragically indoors the last few months, is stretching every finger in the sun and heat, just beginning to get the polish on its nails. The other pots are mostly full of greenery from zinnia and cosmos seeds I started a few weeks ago, but there in the middle of them is a glorious flash of California poppies, volunteer repeats from last summer. The seed must have survived the Michigan winter and frosty spring, waiting it out until the soil warmed up and local conditions matched its native needs. The poppies rose to the occasion. They’re split decision between me and Doug – eighty degrees is not too hot for daytime, but way too hot at night. As nights warm up they fade, waving goodbye in a fall of petals and fine seed. They’ll be back.

Summer A-Coming In

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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.

 

April Comes

Leave a comment

Now that we’re past groundhogs and the equinox, it’s really starting to look like spring. April veers from Fools’ Day to Arbor Day, sweeping Passover and Easter along in a current of National Poetry Month, rainshowers, and regrowth. If T.S. Eliot thought April was the cruelest month for pushing out lilacs before he was ready, what did he think of the daffodils? Look at them there, mocking misanthropes. Go daffodils, I say.

Last fall Doug helped me plant a lot of scilla in the lawn, perfect bulbs for the job because they bloom and fade before the grass needs mowing. Also, the deer and rabbits won’t eat the flowers. They will, however, nip off the emerging tips of the leaves. It’s a little hard to tell which perpetrator is responsible for this damage – rabbits have sharp front incisors and make clean cuts; deer bites are more ragged. There are both types of damage here, so the bunnies and the Bambis are sharing. How lovely that would be if they were eating weeds. 

I like my flowers to naturalize into nice thick boisterous clumps, swaths, and patches, but I do think this little one growing all by itself in the leafmulch is very elegant. It was moved off its original spot by unknown forces of nature: hyperactive squirrels; frost heave; or maybe the human element of a snow plow going a little too deep, a little off target. Sometimes it turns out well when your plans go astray.

It’s time to start the seeds for my garden. Doug took the folding tables upstairs to the big sunny window in the guest room, we set them up, and I spread my trays across them. Frassy was extremely interested in this, even more so when I started filling pots with dirt. She stepped from one tray to the next, inspecting, and apparently approved enough to commandeer one of them for a nap.

Outside, meanwhile, the perennials that vanished with winter are reasserting themselves. T.S. Eliot might see these as ghastly hands reaching up from the grave, but in fact they’re new growth rising from the roots of peonies. They have all of April and all of May to build out the torrent of ruffles and perfume that will burst from them in June; they’re in no rush. I’m happy as long as I can see it coming.

 

Not Winter, Not Spring

Leave a comment

When Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow six weeks seemed like a long stretch of time, but like all stretches of time it has passed. Faint signs of spring are accumulating. Stuff that looks like snow still escapes from the clouds, but by the time it’s on the ground it’s rain, and has even melted the big snow berms the plows pushed up. The hellebores whose blooming I doubted, have unfurled themselves in plenty of time to stake their claim as Lenten Roses. 

The foxgloves in the front yard are also waking up. They looked so dead for so long, but the bright green whorls stashed in their hearts have escaped into sunlight. The deer are attracted by the fresh color and step up with hopeful hearts, but when they get close enough they realize this is digitalis, and poisonous to eat. Which has a positive impact on the flowerbed, because while they’re standing there in their disappointment they deposit a lot of manure. 

The milkweed in the back yard launched many seeds last fall, but held some back for spring. Winter laid the tall stalks on the ground, where the last winged white seeds fell out into snow and flew nowhere. Seeing them once the snow melted off, I thought – what’s that, dryer lint? Feathers? But it was milkweed seed, staking a claim to its parental territory, while the early crowd prospected further afield. 

Through the last few weeks of up-and-down weather I’ve been checking for progress in the fenced garden. Several of the raised beds that grow tomatoes in summer spend the winter months nurturing tulip bulbs, and they need to send shoots nosing up a few weeks before they intend to bloom. So they had to be getting ready. I looked – nothing – looked – nothing – and then pop, a whole gang of them, fat tulip leaves like donkeys’ ears standing up out of the dirt of tomatoes past. It seemed to have happened faster than it could possibly have happened.

But however fast or slow, it was certainly expected. What I didn’t expect was two tatsoi plants in the next bed over, acting like perennials. Cold hardy is one thing, but surviving a Michigan winter is something else. Not all the tatsoi did. What made the difference? Mini-micro climate?  Different snow cover? Good genes? Random luck? Will this survivor tatsoi differ in taste, toughness, or texture from tatsoi eaten in season? I would find out, but I don’t want to reward its efforts at resilience by ripping it out of the ground. For now I’m content to marvel at it. Resilience is a wonderful thing.

Resolution

Leave a comment

I like to start every new year with a resolution or two, chosen from my list – unwritten, but still a list – of things I really want to do, but keep not getting around to. Not things I should do but avoid, like exercise, or giving up snacks. There are so many happy, satisfying things that need doing and can be turned to instead. For instance, I’ve gotten behind on my favorite, persistently arriving magazine, because I haven’t been traveling. Magazines are perfect for places where your attention is frequently interrupted – airports and airplanes, for example – because they consist of discrete parts. You can finish a whole article while waiting for your flight to be called, and not lose the thread as will happen with a book. You can dip in and out of the letters, poems, and cartoons in between the good views out your window seat. I’m quite content not to be traveling these days, but I miss reading my New Yorkers. So that’s one possibility.

Then there’s my indoor gardening. I brought my curry leaf plant in for the winter so it wouldn’t die, and it didn’t die. It has such an abundance of wonderful, fragrant curry leaves that I really want to cut some and dry them, for future use. Would they make a nice tea? I don’t especially like to cook, but I do like to play with my plants.

My spider plants could also use some attention. Their adorable enthusiasm for life leads them to throw out new, spindly limbs in all directions, each one flourishing a baby spider plant at the end. I’ve gathered these into plant supports over Mamaplant’s head so they don’t sprawl all over their neighbors, but every so often I cut them off, pot them up, and resettle them on other windowsills, sometimes in other people’s houses. It satisfies my urge to grow and propagate things, despite the snow you see on the other side of that window. So, more possibilities.

Then there’s all this yarn I’ve collected in what Kaffe Fassett calls a colorway. Whatever else I’m doing I like my hands to be busy, so knitting or crocheting is another pleasure. Frassy has a new habit – pawing a hank or ball of yarn out of its nest and carrying it around the house in her mouth, kitten-like. She doesn’t unwind or chase them, and I really don’t know if they are substituting for kittens or dead mice. But it gives me the added motivation of using the yarn while I can still find it. Also good to finish any scarves or sweaters before I run out of winter. 

While I was saving yarn from Frassy, I came across not one but two little notebooks full of notes, bits, and pieces for poems. Between these and the many poems always in my head, it would be quite satisfying to convert some of these scraps into poems. Another possibility. I will choose one or two of these possibilities for my resolution this year, but can’t tell you which. New Year’s resolutions are like wishes on a star: I was taught that if you told anyone about them, they wouldn’t come true. It’s like why you say “break a leg” to a ballerina before she goes onstage, as though some malevolent force is listening in, ready to thwart your hopes. Wish her well and she’s doomed; wish her ill, and it’s certain not to happen. So, break a leg, one and all. Let’s see if we can nudge malevolent forces in the desired direction for 2026.