Late Starts

Posted on 2024-11-26 by Hecate

Plans, plans, plans

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, dear reader, you know by now that doing things ahead of time is not my forte.

For you, it should come as no surprise that my veggie garden this year didn’t go in on time.

I had good excuses, of course. Most germane: I hatched a grand plan to achieve vegetable self-sufficiency while foiling rodent marauders (the Thumper tribe and Tamerlane the woodchuck). This meant putting in a fenced garden,

Outline of rectangular area dug into very early spring lawn, with backdrop of small conifers and bushes in near background, and woods in far background

March 26

with hog wire fencing sunk 18” below soil surface,

Same rectangular area now fenced with hog wire and metal stakes, with wood-framed gate

April 8

Enclosed garden area with wooden stakes marking area for beds; a man is kneeling at the back of the fenced area installing raised bed.

April 26

and beds edged with cedar boards separated by wood-chip pathways.

Which meant waiting until my lawn guy had the time to do all that.

It also meant ordering organic soil in bulk (4893 pounds of it, to be exact) and then waiting weeks for its delivery.

Then there was my most longstanding hobby, procrastination. I won’t weigh you down with the excuses for that.

Time management?

In any case, I got an even later start than Kamala Harris. By mid-August, though, I had a new fenced-in garden, 25 by 25 feet, sitting in full sun. I had great plans, zillions of seeds, and 180 square feet of brand new, bare beds. But I rashly donated to Kamala, after which I spent a lot more time deleting election fundraising emails as they cascaded in. (Electoral candidates are like seed catalogs. For each one you donate to/ buy from, you get deluged with appeals from another ten or twenty. My spam folder ranneth over. And there were many more candidates than seed companies.) Then I started writing postcards to voters in Ohio and Nevada.

So of course I did what any sensible person would do under those circumstances: I went to the nearest garden center and stocked up on veggie starts.

Closeup shot of green organic lettuce seedlings growing in black-brown potting medium in small individual plug cups.

Organic lettuce seedlings

Photographed by Marvin Bikolano (2017), Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.

These would come nowhere near filling all those empty beds, but they’d provide at least the feeling that I’d done something about vegetable independence. Twelve lovely little lettuce starts went into the western part of the perimeter bed. A medley of cool-season youngsters went into a couple of other beds: broccoli, chard and arugula in the one long (15-foot!) raised bed, kale and chard into the neighboring lower bed. Gate closed against the marauders, I had nothing to do but water (rainless August, September, October even) and wait.

Volunteers

And deal with the weeds that had sprung up once more in the perennial/shrub beds.

Weeds seem not to require water, or any other form of encouragement. They creep along underground and pop up where you’d least expect. Or they float in on the breezes, or blow in on the blustery winds we got from time to time. Or they land with the poop of undiscerning birds that stoop to eating the berries of invasive vines.

Bright yellow blossom of native sunflower, centered amidst bright green foliage and a few scattered smaller yellow blossoms.

Woodland Sunflower (Helianthus divaricatus)

John Phelan (2024), photographed in the Wopowog Wildlife Management Area, East Hampton CT. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Occasionally, an accidental flower pops up. This season, I got a tall, bushy native sunflower whose bright buttery blooms jostled the elderberry bushes, and a native lupine that apparently reserved its flowers for next year. The cornflower that started as one plant several years back has spread its progeny through a wide swath at the north side of the north bed. Barely visible until those cornflower-blue flowers burst forth. Mostly in spots you can’t get at to roust them out without performing contortions I associate with advanced yoga.

Overload

It felt like the Internet out there: things appeared all over the place, and you couldn’t tell where they came from or whether they were worth anything until they got too big to pull out. While the north bed got weeded, the south and east beds went rampant.

The only reason things didn’t get more overgrown was that the bunnies kept them trimmed back. Unfortunately, however, bunny tastes run to the expensive side. They ignored most of the weeds but gave the little asters in front of the house a late-season Chelsea chop, waited until the plants recovered and formed lots of buds, and then a rabbity un-Chelsea chomp finished off all the flowers before they even got fully opened.

A large dark-green zucchini squash next to a metal 12-inch ruler. The squash is longer than the ruler and about 3.5" in diameter.

The second-largest zucchinum I got.

If the veggies had gotten further along faster, I might not have noticed the damage at all. I had my hands full with the little I’d planted in the old exposed beds. The few pea and cucumber plants that had gone in in April and June, respectively, produced enough to keep me busy for a couple of weeks for each variety.

Pick and cook. Pick and pickle. Or pick and find some poor sucker to accept the surplus. When your peas produce by the grocery bag and your cukes burgeon by the bushel, who needs zucchini hills (July, in haste)? I did, however, harvest several small-to-large zucchini and one mega zucchinum (or whatever the singular is) that looked like the business end of a deep green baseball bat. And then there were, as I mentioned, all those voter postcards.

Harvest, sort of

As those of you in the Northeast know, we’ve had a ridiculously warm fall season. The lettuces and kale took off and are still going, even after several November frosts in the high 20s. I tucked the lettuces under a tiny net-and-hoop tunnel in late October to keep them cozy, but the kale stand naked. The broccoli plants have grown to about a foot high, but nary a broccolino has peeped out. The chards have dithered over whether to stick around; I begin to suspect the nays have it. All in all, mixed results. But it’s amazing how much has survived even past the election.

Two kinds of kale (dark green, narrow-leaved dragon kale and medium green lobed kale) growing in hay-mulch in a wood-enclosed bed, with light brown wood chips surrounding it on three sides.

Mid-fall kale, obscuring the dithering chard

Where’s the lesson in here? Well, clearly, even with a late start you can make some progress. Naturally you need to have the sense not to plant the wrong stuff. No beans, no tomatoes. Even so, the harvest may be less than great. You try to celebrate the things that worked, and not repine over the ones that didn’t. Even if you do invariably repine.

And you get ready for the next round.  Thanks to my sister, who has been staying with me while getting herself settled into life in this area, a lot of those weeds got pulled. The garlic got planted in early November for next midsummer’s harvest. We’ve secreted new corms and bulbs hither, thither and yon. If the squirrels don’t get them, I’m trusting them to do their underground magic to emerge as crocuses and hyacinths and anemones in early spring, just when we need them most.

The gardening gurus beg us not to clear the dead growth in fall but leave it all for overwintering pollinators. So I’m leaving cleanup till March. But a few days ago, I finally pulled out the Harris – Walz yard sign. Clearly it would neither bear fruit nor host a pollinator.

All signs suggest the gardener’s winter this year will be mild. But we’re girding ourselves for what may be a long, hard political winter. That garlic could come in handy by July.

And now…

A Sasanqua camellia bush half in bloom, with dark green foliage and some bright pink flowers, many pinkish buds, and many pink petals on the ground underneath.

The sasanqua camellia is a little late this year, too!

Photo by Hillary Hutchinson (2024)

Faithful reader Hillary has once more contributed a Thanksgiving-time photo of her sasanqua camellia (Camellia sasanqua). As you can see, the bush is beginning to bust out in bright pink. Usually the shrub is slathered with flowers in late November in the South Carolina coastal climate. It, too, is behaving a little strangely this year, though. Already dropping petals but not yet covered in blossoms.

If you’re celebrating Thanksgiving this year, have a good one. Let’s worry later about what comes after.

Meanwhile, your turn!

If you haven’t already done so, you can sign up for the newsletter, which just gets you an e-mail when a new post goes up. Whether you sign up or not, please post your comments below. I try to reply to every comment, but feel free to answer others’ comments yourself, too. Go for any topic this post or gardening in general inspires you to.

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Posted in Fall, Garden, Plants | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Nature Comes Calling

Posted on 2024-10-25 by Hecate

A note to readers

Dear readers,

Just to keep the record current, I’m now posting on the blog the newsletter that I sent round to subscribers last year in early fall, with some edits incorporated. I finally resolved the issues that had me looking for a new web host. So we’re back in business, and another new post will be ready for you within the next month. For the time being, you can re-read this one if you like—I’ve updated it with the dénouement of the adventure detailed herein.

Yours in perpetual gardening,
Hecate, the truly Inconstant

Adventure Strikes

11 Sept. 2023

The indented part of my Subaru dashboard—the place housing the little screen that tells you your MPG and nags you to get service—looked weird when I got into the car. It had yellow stripes and it moved.

Ever seen something way out of place and had your brain fail to register it at first? It must have been at least 2 seconds before my amygdala (always first past the post in such situations) shrieked Snake!!! Well, not a big deal. I studied my brother’s Boy Scout manual as a kid, so I knew this wasn’t rattler, coral snake, or *heaven forbid* water moccasin. Not poisonous. I feel kindly towards snakes, and had been wishing for some in my garden. Especially one big enough to dispatch my rabbits. But nonetheless, a snake in my car??? Where it most certainly did not belong?

I doubted I’d be quick enough to grab him just behind the head (Boy Scout manual tip). So I rummaged thru the bags on my passenger seat for a canvas one, the better to capture Slither-in with. But he meanwhile he must have done some thinking too. When I looked up from the bag, I saw him half disappeared down the vent for the windshield defroster. Dropping the bag, I made a grab for his tail, but not fast enough. Slither-in had slithered out.

What the ???

We pause for a moment to consider this question. How would a snake get into my car? I’ve read about snakes somehow sidling their snaky way into the landing gear of planes, stowing away and riding across thousands of miles of ocean. Like the brown tree snakes of Australia that landed in Guam back in the 1940s. They have since eliminated nearly all of Guam’s native birds and other vertebrates, before hitching more rides and spreading to other Pacific islands.

A garter snake, black with three yellow stripes (one on its back and one on each side), coiled up on mottled gray rocks.

A relative of the dramatis persona.
Photo by Courtney Celley/USFWS, https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwsmidwest/37741563212/

But tree snakes specialize in climbing. This little guy (maybe 18” long) was an earthbound fellow. The best I can figure, he’s probably a garter snake, unless he’s a salt marsh snake who somehow hitched a previous ride up from the Gulf Coast. Near as I can figure, he must have been cozily settled inside the bale of salt marsh hay that I bought week before last and left in the car for a day or so before moving it to the garage. No doubt he decided to grab a nap on the dashboard to recover from the exertion of working his way up that high. Too bad he woke up before I could catch him.

Adventures in Problem-solving

What to do? I do not qualify for dismantling dashboards. So I phoned my local car repair shop and explained the situation. The answer came back, after some discussion in the background: they do not do snakes. Then I called my usual Subaru service shop, the one I’ve shelled out big bucks to every six months or so for the past ten years. They said they Don’t Do Snakes either. They even declined to take the dashboard apart so I could get at the snake myself. I am not feeling the love, O Subaru.

Next, I called the town animal control officer, who promised to get to me as soon as she’d seen a lady about a dog bite. She pulled into my driveway in a huge white truck round about 11 ack emma and proceeded to investigate. Naturally, Slither-in had not obliged by sunning himself again on the dashboard. So she had only my word for it that there was indeed a snake camped inside. She poked around under in the dark nether regions between the dash and the floor but found nothing.

Then she investigated the rest of the car, such as she could see for the junk that I have stored in the back seat and the rear compartment. No Slither-in. She banged on the dashboard, poked around a bit inside the windshield vent with a zigzaggy metal stick. Nada. We even opened the hood of the car to see whether a snake might have exited that way, but it looked pretty tight. She went back to inspecting the interior. Meanwhile I refilled the windshield-washer fluid that, while peering under the hood, I discovered badly needed replenishing. Better than standing by just watching.

Wherein the Author Elicits Insights on Animal Control

While she was hunting for the snake-in-car, she shared with me the story of an adventure in animal control she experienced two days earlier, chasing an escaped heifer up hill and down dale for four hours. “Every time I managed to get near her,” she told me, “somebody would come running up to ‘help’ and scare her, and I’d have to track her and try all over again.” Heiffy got herself across a busy main road twice and traveled several miles in the course of her wanderings. By the time she graduates to full cow she’ll have bored her fellow bovines to moo point with the tales of her travels.

Finally, around noon, the animal officer confessed herself stumped about what to do to find my critter. She opined that, given that location of his hideout, only a Subaru specialist should be removing pieces to find the darned thing. Then, having retrieved her flashlight from my car’s interior and her sunglasses from the roof of my car, she was off to her next adventure.

The Zen of Snake Removal

Okay. Car repair places don’t do snakes. Animal officers don’t do cars. Now what? I called two friends who use a different Subaru repair place, thinking they might persuade the guy running it to cope with this novel situation. One of them knows a lot about cars (has one just like mine, only cleaner) and snakes, and she said there are plenty of small holes all over cars and the serpent would find its own way out. She said it would cost way too much to remove the dashboard for a snake hunt.

Reassured, I decided to leave the car in the driveway for the weekend and let nature take its course.

Today, though, I really had to get to the grocery store.

I was certain that by now the snake would have long departed. I drove myself blithely to Trader Joe’s, spent a good 45 minutes in the store carefully selecting fresh veggies and healthy proteins and then buying a bunch of stuff I shouldn’t have, wheeled the cart to the car, carefully arranged the four bags of groceries in the back seat, slid into the driver’s seat and lo! There was Slither-in, stretched out where the windshield meets the dashboard, enjoying the view on the driver’s side. And dang if he isn’t at least 24” long, maybe longer!

Again, he reacted faster than I could, and before I could decide what to do, he’d turned around, gotten himself to the passenger side, dropped to the floor and disappeared under the front passenger seat. By the time I got over to that side of the car, he had once more vanished.

In Which We Ponder Meaning

You may wonder what philosophical insights I could possibly derive from this situation. I suppose I could reflect upon the over-compartmentalization of expertise, such that neither experts on cars nor experts 0n animal control can figure out how to extract a snake (animal) from a Subaru (car). But no, we’re all already used to that Catch-22, aren’t we? (And frankly, I’m glad the animal control officer didn’t try taking apart my dashboard.)

I could observe that if I could unwittingly pick up an animal that ain’t where it oughta be and drive all over with him in my car, then maybe it’s not so surprising that plenty of flora and fauna get transported to new environments where they wreak havoc. (What havoc is the snake wreaking, you might ask? Not much, I guess. But I’m extrapolating, which is what philosophy is for anyway, no?)

Or I could just note that whenever you think you’ve seen everything?—You haven’t.

As for Slither-in, he’s had plenty of escape chances. I opened the passenger window for him and he chose to slink off and hide instead. I left three car doors open while I unloaded the groceries but I suspect he never took the opportunity to decamp to my waiting garden.

Poetic Justice?

He’ll regret it. By now, unless he’s discovered a hidden store of snake food in my car, he hasn’t eaten in at least ten days. Had he cut and run, he could at this very moment be feasting out in the garden on invasive jumping worms and slugs and tiny (very tiny; his mouth is small) mice.

And as for the Subaru service shop, well, my dashboard screen reminds me every day that I need to get an oil change, replace filters, and get the tires rotated. They may end up Doing A Snake after all.

Epilogue: A Week Later

By this point I was certain that snake was either dead or gone. So I wasn’t exactly primed for action when I sauntered out to the car on a misty later-in-September morning. Before even opening the door, I spied Slither-in, back in his favorite basking spot soaking up the rays that had just started to hit there.

With lightning reaction speed and great determination (translation: in a panic), I spun myself back to the front stoop and grabbed up my gardening gloves. Then I whipped open the driver-side door, grabbed Slither-in before he had time to sniff* my presence, and flung him sideways into the front garden island.

My hope was that he would make short work of the bunnies that had been devouring all the asters. But he must have had other ideas. The asters kept getting shorter.

But the Subaru service people didn’t have to Do A Snake. Too bad.

*A P.S. on Snake Senses

Now that we’re in 2024: I recently read a fascinating book by Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Worlds around Us. In that, I discovered that Slither-in probably hadn’t reacted to seeing me, since snakes see very poorly. Instead, he smelled me, using that little pink forked tongue of his. And the fork, it turns out, helped him to pinpoint my exact location. The moral of that story, I suppose, is that if you want to sneak up on a snake, it helps to be in a glass bubble….

Meanwhile, your turn!

If you haven’t already done so, you can sign up for the newsletter, which is just a notice when a new post goes up. Whether you sign up or not, please post your comments below. I try to reply to every comment, but feel free to answer others’ comments yourself, too. Go for any topic this post or gardening in general inspires you to.

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Posted in Animals, Books, Fall, Garden, Native plants, Plants, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Winter | 7 Comments

Unnatural Acts

Posted on 2023-07-11 by Hecate

Gardening is an unnatural act.

Yes, dear reader, you heard that right. Here we are, lovers of nature, birds, bees, green stuff, and what do we do? We go outside and dig it up, turn the tiny world of our gardens upside down, and start interfering every which way. Adding fertilizer, pulling weeds, plunking in plants where no god ever intended them, pulling weeds, scaring off bunnies and woodchucks (as though we could), pulling weeds, fencing things in and staking stems up and deadheading flowers, pulling weeds, and then before anything can go properly to seed as Nature intended, we go out and . . . pick it!

If my garden were totally natural, I’d have it knee-high, even chin-high in mostly those things I just called weeds. My yard would resemble the homesteads that proper suburbanites and homeowner associations tsk over if they lie down the block, or fulminate about if they abut the offending properties.

Urban garden allowed to go natural, with milkweed plants (large broad leaves growing at intervals along tall stem, topped with clusters of pinkish flowers) amid uncut grasses and other plants

Are we natural yet?

But here’s what I’ve had to wrap my head around the past year or so: if you want your garden to provided habitat for wildlife, you must let things grow. The “No Mow May” movement (leaving your mower in the shed till June), intended to leave ample eats for pollinators and their babies, represents only a leading edge of a wider movement.

Learning to let go

Maybe I could have ignored that trend had I not signed up for a class offered for Native Plant Trust’s native plants certificate program. The class, Slow Gardening, sounded like a perfect introduction to reducing my gardening tasks. Little did I dream that it would challenge me to eliminate most of the tasks entirely. No-dig is in. Planting right amid last year’s dead stuff has taken the gardening world by storm.

That’s a hard prospect for me to face. Sure, I have wholeheartedly bought into the Leave It Lie approach to fall cleanup. My yard already spends a good part of the year looking disgracefully unkempt compared to neighbors’ pristine properties.

Bookshelf full of used paperback books, with white label on front of shelf reading "Catholic guilt."

Guilt is my forte. I learned from the best.
“Funny shelving category at San Francisco’s Kayo Books: CATHOLIC GUILT”
by gruntzooki, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

But in early summer 2022, after I finished the spring cleanup of all that leave-it-lie detritus, got most of the more aggressive weeds pulled, planted a few native groundcovers and laid down a lot of (undyed, mind you!) bark mulch, what happened? Visitors exclaimed at how neat everything looked, and I felt guilty.

Yes, here I sit caught between two principles. On one hand, the ethics of encouraging nature. On the other, the aesthetics of caring how things look. At this point the ethics, assisted by a healthy dollop of inertia on my part, are winning. Nobody has complimented the neatness this year.

Armageddon in the garden

I have cleaned up a bit since late spring, but it seems the major task has been uprooting non-native perennials that have gotten too pushy for the garden’s good. Looking at you, bearded irises! Do you have any idea how much one weentsy little iris rhizome can multiply itself in the space of a few years? No, take that guess and multiply by at least three.

As I recall, I put at most six of those suckers into my front island bed back in, oh, maybe 2018. One each for six different hues of bloom: white, deep red, deep purple, a light purple, a two-toned lavender and white. And something called “blush” but that looks to me like a white that’s been wiping up spilled café au lots-of-lait.

Bearded irises in bloom, in a medley of colors (white, purple, peachy-beige, lavender) atop green spear-like leaves. Lawn, small tree, and a strip of roadway visible behind the irises.

The imperium of irises

They’d make, I thought, a zesty, tasteful display before the daisies and yarrow and coreopsis and cardinal flowers and baptisia and blazing star liatris burst forth. But by this spring, the irises, waxing plentiful and glorious, had taken over half of the cardinal flowers’ little lair. They’d disappeared one of the liatris entirely, and overhung the daisies and yarrow on one side and the baptisia on the other. And they’d just about eaten one of the balloon flower plants.

Armageddon 2.0

The balloon flowers were already on the To Expunge list, but most of those irises just had to go. They did not go quietly. They clung tightly to each other in vast and tightly entangled rhizomes. It took first a trenching tool, then a spade, then an attack with my sharp new hori hori knife, all accompanied by a fair share of grunting and cussing, before I got even the first clump out.

It took two days of early morning sneak attacks to remove most of those imperialist offenders. One clump remained until its lavender and white flowers finished blooming. Then it went too: the liatris desperately needed help by then. Twenty iris plants have gone to an avid gardener friend who has space for them. (I foiled her attempt to get me to take some of her hybrid lupines in exchange—because, read on.) Several others lay drying/dying on the edge of the driveway until I removed them to a more private open-air mausoleum.

Black and white photo of the top of an apparently very old tombstone, with a carved relief of a devilish winged angel holding a scythe; only the top line of incised text beneath is visible: Here lies buried the Body...

I don’t ask where the bodies are buried.
“here lies buried the body”
by Rosino is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Somehow I can’t bring myself to throw a plant away. Even an imperialist interloper of a plant. I’ve done it, but every time I feel bad about it for years afterward. I would not have made a good guillotine operator.

Sometimes I deputize. My lawn guy removed the two hibiscuses and two butterfly bushes and hauled them away. I didn’t ask where he put the bodies. Maybe they live a happy life in some garden Elysium up the road.

The cast of actors

Why am I purging these plants? Because I want to make room for more native plants.

This is no longer merely theoretical. I have, unfortunately, been visiting garden stores since mid-spring. A local one featured foamflowers in its weekly two-for-one sale some weeks back. I went for two and came home with six, because the more you buy the more money you save. This came after I went to the local all-native-plants nursery when it opened for the season at the end of April, looking for multiple plugs (tiny seedlings) of shade-loving groundcovers. I found none of those but others called my name, and I brought home:

  • Two creeping junipers;

    A woodland poppy in early spring, with a label posted behind it. A few bright yellow flowers show atop green, delicately lobed foliage; in the background is a peg with label for the plant "Stylophorum diphyllum/ wood poppy/ PAPAVERACEAE/ Midwest to Southeast US," with a carpet of light brown dead oak leaves.

    Wood poppy at Native Plant Trust’s Garden in the Woods
    24 April 2023

  • Two native sundial lupines (see above reference), because they feed the rare Karner Blue butterfly;
  • Two trailing arbutus, because it’s the Massachusetts state flower, and rare;
  • Two red columbines, because the ones I already had are so pretty;
  • Three wood poppies, to keep the foamflowers company in the shade;
  • Two blue wood asters, because I’m a glutton for punishment;
  • And four more foamflowers, because, well, in for a penny, in for a dime.

That is not the end of the list of plants sitting for weeks in my garage and on my deck, waiting for me to get them into the ground. Some still wait. I hear loud Ahem!s every time I step outside, and I imagine that those already on deck wailed in despair when I brought home a couple of blue star flowers, several more moss phlox, and two more foxglove beardtongue.

The challenge ahead

Photo tipped on diagonal, showing an outdoor line of people at a garden store, some with plants in their arms and others pulling wagons loaded up with plants.

It’s an illness, and I’m not the only sufferer.

It’s gotten as dangerous for me to go browsing in a plant nursery as it is fatal for me to meander through a bookstore. I can’t say whether plants or books are better. On the one hand, plants will grow, look pretty, and smell sweet. On the other hand, you never have to water or deadhead a book. Much less plant it.

Aye, there’s the rub.

Not that I am past praying for. I have managed to get two bee balm plants into new homes where the butterfly bushes had been evicted, and installed a baby Carolina lupine (not really lupine) to keep a teenage one company. And I very gingerly plunked a new little prickly-pear cactus in the middle of the sunny-dry bed alongside the garage.

Plants in a strip of garden bed next to a white clapboard wall with cement foundation. Some plants are already in the ground; others still in their pots awaiting planting. Tools are lined up along the left side of the bed, and an emptied carboard flat sits towards the front, just past a white drainspout.

Progress in the making

But there is so much more to do. The flesh is willing but the spirit is weak. First it was too doggone cold at 7 in the morning before the sun hit the front beds and glared me indoors. Now even when we aren’t getting a daily inch of rain, it’s too hot and muggy. Moreover, once the sun has vacated the beds out back late in the day, the mosquitoes and gnats come out in force.

Slowly, slowly, I will get it done.

A short explanation

A number of people have asked me recently what’s so great about native plants.

(Or why I’ve gotten so passionate about them, but that’s a different type of question that might take years of psychotherapy to untangle.)

I can understand their perplexity. The native plants don’t usually figure as superstars. Their bloom times run relatively short. They mostly sport understated, modest, ladylike blossoms. A far cry from the flamboyant heads of peonies and oriental poppies and, yes, bearded irises that liven up my spring garden. Think the difference between a crewcut and Big Hair.

Approx. 10 large, strikingly pink peony flowers atop lush deep green foliage; a small gray stone statue rises among them at the right.

Big Hair
“Rebecca with Peonies” by kkmarais,
licensed under CC BY 2.0.

And I have to admit that many of the native plants do look uncomfortably like the weeds you find growing in the fields and the woods. Because guess what? They are those very weeds!

But let’s stick with the general question: what’s so great about these weeds? Here’s the simple version of answer.

A Monarch butterfly caterpillar, vividly striped in yellow, white, and black, on a milkweed leaf that is nearly completely consumed; the bare central rib of an already eaten leaf is in foreground, and a large partly eaten leaf is in the background, slightly out of focus.

“Monarch Caterpillar”
by Bistrosavage, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Native plants are a part of the local ecosystem. They have evolved to work with each other and with native fauna—anything from tiny nematodes in the soil to the deer in the woods and the wascal wabbits under my deck—in a self-sustaining circle of life. Some of the fauna, especially smaller ones like butterflies and bees, have evolved as “specialists,” which, whether as adults or as larvae, can feed on only one or a few species of plants. Without those plants, the pollinators perish.

Case in point: I recently stopped myself just before yanking out the tall weeds bobbing up around a couple of evergreens. Why? I suddenly recognized them. Those “weeds” were milkweed: the only plant the monarch butterfly caterpillar can feed on!

The agony of backyard ecology

When you look at it this way, the point is not merely to root out all the ice plants or ox-eye daisies or burning bushes and replace them with rose verbena or Virginia mountain mint or viburnum. The point is to try, in our own little gardens, to do what we can to restore the local ecosystems that have been devastated by “development.”

Which brings us to the hard part for me. In trying to reconstruct an ecosystem, I’m laying out a lot of money and a good deal of sweat equity to raise plants destined to be eaten—and not by me.

Several different kinds of plants in temporary pots on three shelves of a wire shelf unit outdoors, waiting to be planted

2023 bug banquet #1

I’m talking about the bug banquet, the cornucopia for very hungry caterpillars that will chomp away at the Golden Alexander—caterpillars that will, having consumed enough Golden Alexander, turn into magnificent black swallowtail butterflies. Or the less glorious beetles that will fill a leafscape with tiny holes, or larvae that scrape away everything but a skeleton of green veins. Or the aphids, duly transported to their pastures of greenery—my flowering hyssop!—by industrious farmer ants who milk them once the aphids turn all that yummy plant sap into honeydew.

And I have to countenance all of this because something that eats something that eats something else will benefit in that great round of life and death and life again.

Approx. 10 plants in temporary pots, most of them foamflowers, atop a glass table outdoors, prior to planting

2023 bug banquet #2

Mind you, I make an exception for Thumper under the deck. He’s welcome to the clover in the lawn, or all the dandelions he can find. But if he comes after the asters or the coneflowers, he is going to get a very unpleasant mouthful of cayenne pepper, with which I have powdered the leaves. That’s the stopgap, while I work on my aim with a slingshot.

Against nature?

But back to the unnatural act of gardening, possibly the last unnatural act that Ron De Santis hasn’t gotten around to banning yet.

Even if I replace all the non-native plants with natives—which I’m too attached to the aforementioned peonies and poppies to do—gardening with native plants still counts as gardening, which just ain’t natural. If you don’t believe me, plant a bunch of milkweed and Joe Pye weed and sneezeweed (notice that common syllable in their names?) and walk away from it for a year. Come back and see what has happened.

You might spot some of those six-footer Joe Pye heads jutting above the rest, but good luck finding any of the actual plants amidst everything else that has taken up residence.

And if you walk away for five years, upon your return you may encounter a clutch of young white pines or feisty oak and maple saplings beginning to loom above the weedy mass.

Nope. We gardeners keep interfering, freezing nature in a particular state or at least trying to slow it down.

In my little bailiwick, while I try building this tiny ecosystem, I’m the gatekeeper deciding who gets admitted. I’m the bouncer going after the gatecrashers and ejecting them, when I get to it.

So far, I manage to live with that.

Meanwhile, your turn!

If you haven’t already done so, you can sign up for the newsletter, which is just a notice when a new post goes up. Whether you sign up or not, please post your comments below. I try to reply to every comment, but feel free to answer others’ comments yourself, too. Here are a few questions to get you started, but go for any topic this post or gardening in general inspires you to.

  1. Have you already heard about the native plants movement? If so, where/how did you hear about it? Are you growing (on purpose) any native plants in your garden?
  2. Do you have any questions about native plants that you’d like me to address in future posts?
  3. What are you behind on in your garden, right now?

If you’re commenting for the first time using a particular email address, your comment has to wait for my clearance (spam-thwarting at work there). After your first approved comment using that address, your next should go up automatically. If you’re concerned about privacy, you don’t need to include your surname. I am the only one who sees your email address.

If others post comments before you, the Reply box for your comment appears after their posts, so scroll down till you find it.

Thanks, as always, for reading, double thanks for responding, and triple thanks if you sign up for a subscription—or encourage a friend to do so.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

What’s in a Name?

Posted on 2023-05-01 by Hecate

Well, what is in a name?

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet. But if you’re in New England and the rose’s species name is Rosa multiflora, you have stumbled upon an invasive and better get rid of it. There are roses by other names that you’ll want: Rosa virginiana, Rosa Carolina, and a few others.

I’ll have plenty to say at a later date about invasives, as I get deeper into learning about native plants and their significance. But for this post, I confess, I’ve chosen a slightly deceptive lead-in to telling you about something else. Namely, my pen name. And why I’m changing it.

Those of you dear readers who have been with this blog for a while know its author as Kateri F. Foley. But in recent months, I’ve grown increasingly uneasy about that name. No problem for the Foley; it comes to me via a grandmother’s maiden name. But the choice of Kateri, a name that enchanted me from childhood, has felt increasingly inappropriate.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Kateri Tekakwitha story, I’m providing a brief summary. Tekakwitha (1656-1680) was a Native American converted to Catholicism by French missionaries. (The missionaries had been imposed upon the Mohawks by treaty after military defeat by French colonizers.) “Kateri” roughly approximates the pronunciation of her baptismal name, Catherine, in her native language. After her conversion, hostility against Tekakwitha arose among her Haudenosaunee relatives and neighbors. Encouraged by a French Jesuit, she left her home village to settle in a Native American village connected to a French mission. She lived in the village for three years, before her death at age 23 or 24.

No, what really is in a name?

Statue of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha in small garden spot outside a church, with cast-iron gates and stone gateposts surrounding a cemetery seen in background. Statue has turquoise necklace, earrings, and bracelet, white blanket/shawl over shoulders, and brown and red tunics beneath, and is holding a steaf of feathers, a rosary, and what looks like a stem with seedbeds on it.

Kateri Tekakwitha Statue at Cathedral Basilica of St Francis of Assisi
by jay galvin
licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Her short but saintly life brought popular veneration among Indigenous Catholics after her death. However, the Church’s official processes move slowly. She received the designation of “venerable” only in 1943, became Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha in 1980, and finally was canonized as Saint Kateri Tekakwitha in 2012.

At first, I thought the name Kateri made a good fit for me. I grew up on the shores of Lake Huron, near areas once claimed by the Haudenosaunee peoples (and also by Algonquins, the Native American people her mother was born to). And she is considered a patron saint of ecology and the environment.

However, I started feeling uneasy about whether adopting the name Kateri might smack of cultural appropriation. Then, as I looked more closely at the history, I started feeling concern that Kateri herself might have been appropriated by Western colonial culture, of which religion forms a part.

Consider the missionaries forced upon the Haudenosaunee, and Kateri’s separation from her community following her embrace of Catholicism. And I can’t help but cringe at the blatant racism in the reminiscence by the priest who administered the last rites to her: “This face, so marked [by smallpox] and swarthy, suddenly changed about a quarter of an hour after her death and became in a moment so beautiful and so white that I observed it immediately.”[Emphasis added]  Although Saint Kateri enjoys veneration by many Indigenous people in North America, others deplore both her conversion and the “way Mohawk culture is represented through the lens of her conversion.”

Even if the issue isn’t exactly clearcut, do I really want to wade into such territory?

Therefore

So I decided to change my pen name. Hereafter, I will use the name Hecate Foley.

How did I pick that one? How do you even pronounce it?

Marble statue with two out of three female [presumably Hecate] figures showing, dressed in flowing tunics and skirts and balancing a carved decorative item atop their heads

Triple Goddess Statue (presumably Hecate)
by MumblerJamie
licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Regarding the latter: Hecate comes from the classical Greek Ἑκάτη. My recollection of classical Greek pronunciation (no, I never learned the language, just the alphabet) says you’d pronounce that h

eh-KAH-tay. Merriam-Webster says HEK-uh-tee or HEH-kut. But how often will you want to say it out loud? You can call me Cate.

How did I pick it? Well, if I’m going to be appropriating anything appropriately, Graeco-Roman provenance makes a good source for someone of my cultural extraction. And a goddess makes a good role model. Hecate offers multiple possible roles, “being at once the goddess of witches, the household, crossroads and travel, agriculture, and more,” says Mythopedia. I’m fine with agriculture, crossroads, travel, and household, and as we all know, witches had to know a lot about plants, too. Moreover, for someone who has trouble making up her mind, the classic representation of Hecate as three figures facing in different directions strikes me as all too appropriate.

I buried the lede…

Closeup of four close-growing pink lady slipper orchids in full bloom, individual flowers suspended on stalks rising above green tulip-like foliage. Flowers have deep pink labella shaped somewhat like ladies' slippers, with thin brownish petals spreading out to the sides above the "slippers." The plants are growing out of a carpet of oak leaves and twigs, with lichen-covered branches or tree trunks in the background.

Funny, they don’t look dangerous…
Pink lady’s slipper orchids surprised in a wooded area of coastal Maine, May 2021

So why am I making this declaration now? Because, dear reader, my very first publication in a literary (online) magazine has just hit the ether. Hecate Foley is out in public! You can find my tiny flash-nonfiction piece about orchids, Surprise Bad Guys, in Cosmic Daffodil, right now. This is CD‘s two-part issue on Buds & Blooms.

So you get a reward for plowing through all that pen name angst. Not only me going on about flowers, but about 80 other people doing so as well. Enjoy!

Next time, I promise, you will get a full-fledged blog post about Plants. It’s the season, after all. I’m taking more of those amazing Native Plants certificate courses—New England Herbaceous Early Flowering Plants, for one. With New England Shrubs coming soon. Plus, our local native-plants nursery just opened last Friday and oh my, of course, I had to get two of these, and three of those, and four of those irresistible…. The next adventure will be actually getting the babies into the ground.

Annnnnnd, I’ve just committed to compiling a directory of native plant nurseries and native-plant garden designers in New England and beyond. So, there’s lots coming soon.

Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, your turn!

If you haven’t already done so, you can sign up for the newsletter, which is just a notice when a new post goes up. Whether you sign up or not, please post your comments below. I try to reply to every comment, but feel free to answer others’ comments yourself, too. Here are a few questions to get you started, but go for any topic this post or gardening in general inspires you to.

  1. Can you recommend a native plant nursery or garden designer in your area? (please state the general area)
  2. What’s the first thing you plan to plant this spring–or have you already planted it? Tell us about it!
  3. Post a comment on Surprise Bad Guys here, if you want to.

If you’re commenting for the first time using a particular email address, your comment has to wait for my clearance (spam-thwarting at work there). After your first approved comment using that address, your next should go up automatically. If you’re concerned about privacy, you don’t need to include your surname. I am the only one who sees your email address.

If others post comments before you, the Reply box for your comment appears after their posts, so scroll down till you find it.

Thanks, as always, for reading, double thanks for responding, and triple thanks if you sign up for a subscription—or encourage a friend to do so.

 

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Whose Woods These Are I Surely Know (The Trees, Not So Much)

Posted on 2023-03-07 by Hecate

You know what I like most about winter? It’s the one time of year when I don’t have to feel guilty about neglecting the garden. It’s my duty to neglect it!

But I can never let well enough alone, so this winter I signed up for several more courses offered through the Native Plant Trust. Most recently completed: one course on soils, one on trees of New England. These gave me numerous opportunities for guilt: they had homework assignments.

Brace yourself: I’m going to share with you my experience with the homework assignment for one of those courses. I’ll spare you the soils. I loved that course, but I mustn’t try your tolerance of my geeky tendencies toooooo far. So let’s head for the trees.

The mission …

Here was our challenge: take a walk in a wooded/forested area. Identify as many tree species as possible. Locate different species in canopy and understory, noting changes in species mix at different elevations or in wetter/dryer habitats, and maybe even figuring out the chosen woodland’s history.

I never got to any but the first part. By the time you finish reading this, you’ll understand why.

Several deciduous tree trunks in winter, mostly light brown/gray, with no leaves. One trunk dominates in center foreground; several other thinner trunks are in near background. Some evergreens are visible in farther background; in top half of the photo the background is deep clear blue sky.

Bare as a blank slate…

I’m used to trying to identify trees by examining their leaves. Identifying a tree in February in New England posed a problem. With the exception of pines and hemlocks and cedars and spruces, the trees are naked. Starkers! I’ll admit one exception: the oaks tend to hang onto a lot of their dead leaves. That practice used to seem deplorable, until I was straining to spot at least one deciduous tree I could be sure of.

How do you identify a tree without its leaves on? You can’t trust the leaf litter on the ground if you’ve ventured into a mixed stand; the winter blasts have already done a promiscuous mashup there. In the woods, you can’t go by the tree’s shape—you know, maples looking like a fat bouquet and elms making like a vase. No, trees growing together in the arboreal equivalent of cheek by jowl have had to elbow and shoulder their branches in wherever they can find a patch of light, and hope for the best.

So what can the avid (desperate?) identifier do?

Two things. Possibly the best, or so my botanist friend M maintains, is twigs with buds. If I had a stand of 5-foot trees, I’d choose that for sure. However, when everything but the trunk is 20 feet up or higher, you can kiss the buds goodbye. What you’re left with is bark.

Plain.

Old.

Bark.

Barking up the trees

About a year ago I tuned in on a forestry school’s guest speaker talking about bark. He was earnest. Intense. Totally in love with tree bark. And about as absorbing as watching a tectonic plate move (between earthquakes) in real time.

Heaven forfend that I do that to you! So I won’t go into all the finer points about bark (cambium layers and all that jazz, for example).

Closeup of two adjacent trunks of paper birch tree, primarily white bark, but left trunk has some of the white bark peeling away in curls, with grayish-pink bark beneath; right-hand trunk has patches of dark scar with pale green lichen overgrowing the dark gray scars. In background on left can be seen yellowish cropped fields, a wooded area in the distance, and a patch of clear blue sky.

My favorite tree for identification

You may already know some of the obvious distinctions. Paper birch, for example: that dramatic stark white bark, curling itself away from the trunk in artistic scrolls. Come to think of it, that’s just about the only easy distinction, unless you resort to exotics like shagbark hickory, or the ghastly graveyard look of sycamores.

For the rest, you can find a lot of variation. In textures, from smooth to roughly ridged; in colors, ranging grayish white to greeny gray to reddish brown to nearly black; in patterns running from scales to shingles to slabs to parallel furrows to a crazy crisscross or a crazy quilt of Ns and Ys.

Every species is different. Except that sometimes they aren’t. Or sometimes, the bark on a young maple looks much like the bark of a mature or even ancient beech—and not at all like the bark of a mature or ancient maple.

Then there are the oaks, which hybridize all over plant kingdom come, so you can find “white oak” leaves fluttering from a trunk with “red oak” bark.

Should you accept it…

So how do you (I) figure out the ID? We were urged to use one or more of the dichotomous keys that various books and plant identification sites provide.

Here’s how a dichotomous key works. Imagine you’ve had to rush to the emergency room, and (assuming it’s not a Saturday night riot scene) the doctor tries to diagnose your problem before she can fix it. She whips out her Dichotomous Key Diagnostic Book, and starts to work.

  1. Is the patient visibly bleeding?

    A simple diagram showing diverging choices outlined in hand-sketched polygons: Shiny new project Do you have time? No -- Don't do it Yes -- No you don't

    A dichotomous key we should all use
    This came to me through an e-mail from an e-mail from Twitter, with no author indicated. If you are the author, I’d love to give you credit (and to get your permission to use it), so please alert me if it’s you!

  • If yes, go to 2
  • If no, go to 945
  1. Is there a lot of blood?
  • If yes, go to 3
  • If no, go to 500
  1. Is the blood
  • Spurting intermittently? Go to 4
  • Flowing steadily? Go to 250
  1. Is the spurting coming from
  • The neck? Go to 5
  • Anywhere else? Go to 80

You get the idea. Thank heaven they’re not using dichotomous keys in the ER. By the time the doctor has figured out that you’re bleeding out from your femoral artery, she may be at

499. Patient has bled to death.

Fortunately, none of the trees were visibly bleeding.

Ready for the tree hunt now?

Into the woods—not

For the tree identification exercise, I walked along the edge of a woods owned by a nearby farm. I had planned to walk into the woods to get a good look at interesting trees, but found my way impeded by undergrowth (lots of multiflora rose invaders), random barbed wire, and deep mud in the pathways and trails. There was enough, though, to occupy me just along (mostly) the edges.

Photo showing covers of two paperback books: Bark: A Field Guide to Trees of the Northeast, by Michael Wojtech; and Winter Tree Finder, by May Theilgaard Watts and Tom Watts

The basic books: one for bark, one for buds

I took Michael Wojtech’s Bark guide with me, as well as the Wattses’ Winter Tree Finder, but quickly realized that out among the trees was not the best setting for flipping back and forth through the dichotomous keys.

Instead, I took photos. That meant trying to get shots of the whole tree—not always possible if neighboring trees crowded too close, especially if they were evergreens and blocked the upward view entirely—as well as some closeups. Then I went home and started trying the identifications from the photos using the dichotomous keys.

It went downhill from there, except when I’d managed to nab a leaf and/or twig sample as well. In a couple of cases I also checked against more photos on some websites (see below about those). I still ended up unsure of the identifications of most of the trees I’d photographed. Of the 20+ trees (including some clumps of trees counted as one each), I managed fairly certain identifications of only two; all the rest have question marks attached.

How dry I’m not

I did use one exclusion to narrow down the choices. For example, a couple of trees’ bark seemed to look a lot like hop hornbeam (Ostrya virginiana). But Wojtech (118-119) describes its habitat as “Dry, rich sites, most often on slopes and ridges….”

This area, though, sits in a kind of depression and the water stays there (and beaver activity in a contiguous swamp has helped keep it wet). On my tree walk, which took me to a part of the woods I hadn’t explored before, I found some major drainage ditches: one bordering the woods, and several leading into them, some alongside paths. Even so, and although the rains hadn’t been so very recent, the ground was still very wet and the trails were inches deep in mud.

From this I concluded that the trees I was most likely to find growing there would be the species that don’t mind wet feet. Exit hop hornbeam, although from the pix in the books it looks like a lovely tree. I may look for space to plant one in my yard. I can do dry! Just ask my gasping maple and birch.

From near certainty

So, what trees did I find? (Or more accurately for most of them, do I think I found?)

As the landscape shot at the top of this post makes clear, this area is a mixture of evergreens and deciduous trees. The evergreens seemed to me to consist primarily of Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus). I confirmed the identity of a couple of those, thanks to their being small and having that convenient habit of producing needles in clumps of five, and growing close enough to the edge of the scrum that I could get a good look and/or a sample. These included Tree 05 and Tree 15:

Closeup of some young branches of white pine blowing towards the left, in a breeze. Twigs are reddish brown with small white dots marking them; needles are long and thin, with many sprigs of them on each twig.

Tree 05

A young white pine tree, approx. 5 ft. tall, amid tall dry grasses; just behind it are some branches with dead deciduous tree leaves, and a bit further back, some trunks of young deciduous trees.

Tree 15

Magnified view of white pine twig showing needles growing in clumps of five

White pine’s telltale clumps of five needles

To almost near certainty

A deciduous double-trunked tree in winter; some dead leaves retained on lower branches

Tree 12

The other identification I’m pretty sure of, Tree 12, is a white oak (Quercus alba). This tree had a double trunk, part of which might qualify as a blasted oak, since the base of the trunk looked much the worse for wear. The upper parts of the trunks looked to be in pretty good shape, but were so thick with lichen that I had to resort to studying a bare part of the blasted trunk to match the bark to a mature white oak.

I’m grateful in this instance that oak trees hang onto many of their dead leaves. The leaves on twigs and branches had rounded edges, like those of white oak.

This tree also had several old round oak bullet galls (created by cynipid wasps) that were easy to spot, and one that was close enough at hand to photograph. That confirmed at least the Quercus if not the alba.

Closeup photo of blasted trunk of white oak tree

Tree 12: the blasted trunk

Closeup photo of red-brown, spherical gall attached to oak twig, on which a couple of leaf scars are visible

Tree 12: former home of cynipid wasp (aka oak gall)

Another much younger oak, Tree 14, has me wondering whether I spotted one of those notorious hybridized specimens. The leaves looked to me very much like white oak, but the bark looked like young Northern red oak (Quercus rubra).

Tree 14: Young red oak bark

Tree 14: White oak leaf

To probabilities

But why should I have all the fun? How about you try to figure out what some of the others were? I’ll give a prize book to the person who provides the best (not necessarily the correct) answer/s.

Below, you can find photos for three of the trees I never felt sure of. The photos are fairly low resolution (that’s so this page won’t load like molasses in March), but if you click on them, it will take you to the higher-resolution originals. I provide you with a handful of species possibilities to narrow it down. You probably don’t have the books, but you can check against a couple of online sources:

  • iNaturalist (https://www.inaturalist.org/home ; you may have to register on the site to use it, but it’s free). This is like a crowd-sourced platform pulling in observations by people like us, along with scientists and various experts who help with authoritative identifications. It does not use dichotomous keys.
  • Go Botany (https://gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org). This site gives you a choice of several different kinds of keys, and if desperate, you can register for the PlantShare section to upload plant photos and Ask the Botanist for identifications. The individual species pages have photos and descriptions that can help with identification. Note that Go Botany specializes in plants of New England. If you’re in a different part of the country, this may not help you with your local plants.
  • For more photos and descriptions to check against, you could try the Missouri Botanical Garden Plant Finder (https://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/PlantFinder/PlantFinderSearch.aspx) and the North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox (https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu).

On your mark

One other important clue for you: Remember the ground is pretty soggy, though not actually swampy.

Ready? You can post your answers in Comments. Just be sure to explain why you picked a particular species—the reasoning counts the most towards winning the prize. If you want to do only one or two, feel free. And don’t be ashamed to resort to the Sherlock Holmes principle: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Tree 06: Smooth, unbroken bark with no vertical lines

This should be easy; there aren’t that many species with smooth bark. But the mottling and especially the ample growth of lichens on the trunk complicated the identification.

Tree 06: The upper story (click on photo to see higher resolution)

Tree 06: The trunk (click on photo to see higher resolution)

Do you think this tree is

  1. Downy serviceberry (Amelanchier arborea)
  2. Red maple (young) (Acer rubrum)
  3. American beech (Fagus grandifolia)
  4. Something else (name it!)

Why would you pick the one you pick?

Tree 09: Furrowed bark in long vertical strips, deeper and more broken up towards base

This wasn’t an especially healthy-looking specimen and it had too much company, so I don’t know whether its shape means anything. The trunk could have been any of several different possibilities. It was so thick in moss—not lichen, actual moss—that it was hard to be sure exactly what the bark looked like. I found plenty of maple and oak leaves along with a few elmy-looking leaves in the immediate vicinity.

Tree 09: Upper reaches in the neighborhood (click on photo for higher resolution)

Tree 09: Closeup of bark (click on photo for higher resolution)

Do you think this tree is

  1. Sugar maple (Acer saccharum)
  2. American elm (Ulmus americana)
  3. White oak (Quercus alba)
  4. Something else (name it!)

And why would you pick the one you pick?

Tree 11: Smooth, unbroken bark above; rough bark with vertical cracks at base

“Tree” 11 was actually a tight clump of several young trees. Almost all the bark, all the way up, was a smooth light gray (making allowances for splotches caused by lichen). But towards the base of a couple of the trunks the bark was rough, with long vertical cracks that looked like they might develop into furrows. Several of these small trunks had tiny twigs with a distinct reddish cast.

Photo looks upward into the upper reaches of the trunks and canopy of a clump of six young trees (one with top snapped off) growing very close together. Their bark is smooth greenish-gray-brown mottled with lichen. Deep blue sky forms a background, along with the canopy branches and twigs of other trees behind this clump.

“Tree” 11: Sticking together (click on photo for higher resolution)

The lower trunks in a stand of five young trees (not all visible in photo), with grayish-green smooth bark above and rough, greenish-brown bark at the lower part of the trunks. A fallen branch is lodged vertically between two of the trunks; light brown dry undergrowth and several small tree trunks are in background, with a slice of blue sky visible behind them.

Tree 11: from smooth to wrinkles (click on photo for higher resolution)

Closeup of smooth green-gray-brown tree bark on trunk, with mottling of small patches of olive-green lichen and shadows of small branches or twigs on bark. One dark brown twig protrudes from bark at upper left; a thinner and shorter twig with several inches of red towards tip protrudes from lower right.

Tree 11: closeup with twigs (click on photo for higher resolution)

Do you think this tree is:

  1. Red maple (Acer rubrum)
  2. American beech (Fagus grandifolia)
  3. Silver maple (Acer saccharinum)
  4. Something else (name it!)

Your reasons?

The surprise find: Tree 18

None of my tree books helped in identifying Tree 18. For that, I had to resort to running the photo past iNaturalist, which almost instantly furnished several possible matches, the first of which I discounted. Amur corktree? Native to Manchuria? Who could believe that!

Photo of young tree with several small branches; bark is rough and light orange-brown. Trunk of a different species and more mature tree is to the right; other young trees' trunks and some evergreen (probably white pine) trees are in background, with backdrop of deep blue sky.

Tree 18: The anomaly

Closeup of the bark on the trunk, with thumb and forefinger on trunk to provide scale. Bark is greenish-brown with orangish-brown tinge on top surface; texture is very rough and bark looks like an assemblage of small chunks

Tree 18: The bark

But after I’d scratched my head and eliminated all other possibilities (ashes of various sorts among them), I uploaded the photos on iNaturalist for community identification. I also consulted my botanist friend M. Fortunately I had gotten a shot of the one twig I’d been able to reach.

Photo shows crotch of tree with orange-brown rough bark of trunk on left; on right, a substantial branch with differently patterned green-orange-brown bark, mostly smooth but with numerous prominent ridges beginning; one dark brown twig between them, protruding from the trunk.

Tree 18: Trunk, branch, twig

Dark brown twig placed against the mottled green-orange-brown bark. Small, tight brown buds are nearly encircled by leaf scars; small white dots appear intermittently along the bark of the twig.

Tree 18: The twig and the bark

One of the experts on iNaturalist confirmed the tree as an Amur corktree (Phellodendron amurense), and M clinched the identification by locating a photo of the twig, which looked like a perfect twin of the one I’d clipped. Sherlock Holmes was right!

Turns out the Amur corktree, which came in originally as an ornamental tree for lawns, has naturalized to forests in New England and beyond. Several states have designated it as invasive or as a “noxious weed,” because it crowds out native hardwoods. The female trees produce clusters of tiny fruits that must appeal to birds, which is all it takes to spread the seeds far afield.

Which gets us to the point:

This identification exercise, aside from imbuing me with new respect for the people who traipse blithely through the woods calling everything by its (generally European-descended human-bestowed) name, also increased my awareness of the fragile balance that keeps our trees with us.

The Amur corktree made for a dramatic example of the plant invaders that threaten the vitality of the woods we tend to take for granted. But there are plenty of other examples: multiflora roses abounded in my chosen area, and if I’d looked more closely I’m sure I’d have found plenty of others. Japanese barberry, for example. If you’re a New Englander, you may already be aware of the pervasiveness of purple loosestrife along roadsides and in wetlands. If you’re anywhere along the East Coast of the US, you might have heard of the growing (no pun intended–but: a foot a day!) problem of kudzu. And if you’re a gardener, you may already worry a lot about garlic mustard or Japanese knotweed taking over your beds.

These, and more (way too many more!), species of plants, were planted originally by well-meaning gardeners, farmers, highway departments, erosion control programs, and others. But unlike our politer visitors like peonies and lilacs and corn, the invasive species escape from their original plantings and begin crowding out native species. They rob the soil of nutrients, suck up the water, and shade out the light that other plants need to survive and thrive.

That’s bad news not just for our native plants, but for the wildlife species that depend upon them. I could say a lot more on that topic, but that’s another whole post (or two or three).

Action plan?

Screenshot of results of a search on duckduckgo.com for "New England invasive plant species"

Looking it up is easy!

Our forests already face big threats from climate change and from the spread of (also often invasive) new bugs and blights. The least we could do is to think carefully before digging a spot for that gorgeous new plant we saw at the garden center, or accepting a free plant from a fellow gardener.

You can easily look up the plants to avoid by using a search engine. Just put in a search string with “[my region or state] invasive plant species” and you get good info from Audubon, National Park Service, and more.

And if you’re considering a specific plant, all you have to do is to search for “[name of plant] invasive?” You could also check to make sure that none of what you’re now growing is on the list of problematic species.

If we’re inclined to work within a larger arena, it wouldn’t hurt to check on what policies govern our town or city agencies’ decisions on what they plant in our public spaces. Or maybe even to get involved in the discussions leading to such decisions.

Okay, off my soapbox.

Your turn:

If you haven’t already done so, you can sign up for the newsletter, which is just a notice when a new post goes up. Whether you sign up or not, please post your comments below. I try to reply to every comment, but feel free to answer others’ comments yourself, too. Here are a few questions to get you started, but go for any topic this post or gardening in general inspires you to.

  1. What is your best guess for any or all of the tree identifications (tree 06, tree 09, tree 11), and could you give your reasons? You could be the proud winner of a book on trees!
  2. What’s your favorite tree, and why? (species or individual, doesn’t matter)
  3. Are any invasive plants particular problems in your area?

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