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?

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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Classify This!

Posted on 2022-09-13 by Hecate

In case you hadn’t noticed, gentle reader, I’ve been off your screen for a while. Not because I’ve been off with the masses, catching up on the life missed during Covid by lining up in airports or hanging out on beaches. And not even because I’ve been spending endless hours in the garden. At first in my silent spell, I was doing the latter, but not lately, not during the beastly heat waves we were playing host to here in what used to be the semi-frozen north.

Nope. I have been Otherwise Occupied. And for your sake, believe it or not!

Photo of winding road leading into mountains with jagged peaks

You just never know where reasoning will take you…
“Cilaos” by Worlds In Focus is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

You see, I came to think, through routes of ratiocination too tortuous to be examined, that if I am to continue writing about Nature and all that jazz, I’d better know more about it. From a standpoint of Expertise and not just Experience.

So after some cursory exploration (routes also best left unexamined) I decided to pursue a Native Plants certificate through the Native Plant Trust. Two certificates, in fact: basic and advanced. Starting, you may be astonished to learn, with Basic.

The requirements didn’t look too tough: several core courses available online, some focused courses online or in person (Shrubs, for example), and a few electives out in the field (Ferns! Know Your Pests!). Easy peasy, I thought.

I could not have been more wrong.

See, as I saw the whole summer stretching out before me, I figured that doing all three of the core courses would be a cinch. I had from April 25 to September 12. Plant Form and Function? Roots and shoots, good to grow. Plant Ecology? Gotta get along with the neighbors. Plant Families? Mom, dad, the kids and the grandfolks. Piece of cake.

Ha. Ha. Ho.

In future posts, maybe I’ll tell you more about some of the many fascinating things I learned along the route. But this is just about one assignment.

Until nearly the bitter end, I was drowning in Plant Families. I should have guessed. We do all know what happens when we start delving into our own families. Skeletons in closets, wackos in plain view, dysfunctions up the wazoo. Why should plant families be any different?

Photo of a family at a heavily-loaded (Thanksgiving?) table, with character at far right making goggle-eyes at the camera

“Happy Thanksgiving” by BenGeldreich is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

If you didn’t know about the concepts of species and genus, had never heard of Linnaeus, and had 400,000 samples (there are at least that many species of plants in the world!) to sort through and classify, how would you do it? What kinds of cabinets and drawers would you plop the plants into? That was one of those easy-peasy assignments that ended up gobbling hours and days of my time.

Here’s what I wrote:

Photo of gray rabbit in the middle of a clover patch, looking like she's inspecting to find a tasty shoot.

“Rabbit” by James F Clay is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

I propose the organizing principle of Utility. I take my inspiration from my local bunny rabbits, albeit applied differently. For the bunnies, the major classification demarcator would be Can I eat that? My net extends more broadly, with several demarcators added for the things we humans get up to.

But let’s start on the rabbit end. Edibility. The bunnies and I unfortunately agree on the edibility of most of the veggie plants I grow. They’re overboard on the edibility of the flowers, but they make up for that by shunning most of my herbs.

The edibility principle does pose some challenges, though, even if we confine it to edible-for-humans and don’t fuss over whether it’s an appetizer or main course:

Closeup photo of rutabaga root, top 3/4 buff-colored, bottom 1/4 purple, with gnarls and twisted roots showing towards the top

“Rutabaga” by -meredith- is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

  1. Do all or only some parts of the plant have to be edible? Brassicas (your garden-variety broccoli and cabbage) seem to skew towards all parts, although it had to take some elegant breeding moves to come up with a rutabaga. Walnut trees, only part, and you have to work to get at the edibles.
  2. A plant might be edible but poisonous. Here we have a different kind of challenge (strong influence here: Amy Stewart’s Wicked Plants). There’s rhubarb, for example: the ribs are okay, if you cook them, but even the cooked leaves can make you sick or possibly kill you.
  3. So, one added dimension of classification would be raw=poison or toxic, cooked=okay or even yummy.

We pause for a head-scratch

This doesn’t get into the question that has always puzzled me: after Murgh, Ayam and Csirke have keeled over from eating a mystery plant, why would it occur to the rest of the clan to say, “Gee, let’s try cooking it and see whether that kills us.” In this category: cassava (hello, tapioca!), bamboo shoots, fiddleheads. Even, my god, kidney beans! And pangium nuts, which have to be both cooked and fermented to get rid of their hydrogen cyanide. The clan had to do some fancy trial and error on that one!

photo of caveman, dressed in animal skins and with finger tapping a stone tablet; caption says "Maybe NYT Cooking would have a better idea..."

Photo: canva.com; caption by me.

Then it gets really complicated

  1. Another dimension: part of the plant is poisonous; part is safe, at least if properly treated. Rhubarb here; also, cashew, the nut of which has tasty edible flesh inside a toxic casing growing from a tree many parts of which can give you a nasty rash or worse. Actually, some of those in the raw/cooked dimension may belong here too. Already the classification system gets a little fuzzed.
  2. A plant might not be much of a culinary treat but have important medicinal properties. People may ingest it anyway. Plants could even taste downright nauseating but still be good for you. Many of the herbs that figure in Chinese traditional medicine notoriously fit in this category.
    picture in pastels of a girl and a boy, both blond, standing in front of a house with forest behind them, and looking amazedly at an old woman in long dress and wearing a black conical hat as she peers at them over a railing at the front door.

    Margaret Tarrant’s ‘Hansel and Gretel‘” by sofi01 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

    But we don’t have go all the way to China to find numerous medicinal uses of plants. My personal library includes Native American Medicinal Plants: An Ethnobotanical Dictionary, which indexes the uses of 3,000 indigenous North American plants. There I find the most unexpected uses for some of the flowering plants in my garden: among the several medicinal uses for my foamflower, Tiarella cordifolia, for example: an “Infusion of roots and leaves given to fatten little children.” For what, is not stated. I’m thinking: Hansel and Gretel?

  3. Many other plants might not be wise to ingest, but have medicinal properties when used as poultices or other external applications.

Beyond the bunny

That last point explains why I decided to label this classification method as “Utility” rather than “Edibility.” Unlike bunnies, we can come up with a wide range of possible uses for plants that we couldn’t or wouldn’t eat. Clothing (cotton, hemp, linen, even some tree barks, and the fig leaf that plays such a large part in the pop version of the Judaeo-Christian origin story). Material for making useful items (wood, or course, but also reeds, flexible twigs or branches, straw that can be braided for cord or tied together for bedding or other uses, palm leaves).

In fact, if we appreciate the diversity of human cultures throughout history, we might find that almost all plants could fit somewhere within a classification scheme according to utility. Even poison ivy makes good food for goats. For hunting, you could dip your arrow tips into any of a number of plant-derived toxins.

Painting of Socrates in apparent prison cell half-sitting on a pallet on a wooden platform, just before taking a cup being offered to him by a man carrying a tray. Socrates's right arm and hand are lifted up, as though he was declaiming, as his left hand touches the cup. His followers clustered in the room are in various positions of grief, some comforting each other, none of them looking directly at him.

Jean Francois Pierre Peyron (1744-1814), “The Death of Socrates, 1787. kms7066″ by SMK Statens Museum for Kunst (officiel) is marked with CC0 1.0.

And if you need to eliminate a pesky philosopher named Socrates, look no further than that kissing cousin of the homely carrot, hemlock (herb, not tree).

So why not use my system? Although we might enjoy identifying plants for the sheer fun of knowing their names, I suspect that the most crucial plant question throughout most of human history has been “What can I do with this plant?” The answers may change; the people who first used natural rubber to make balls to play with could never have imagined what Firestone would get up to with it.

But the question of utility makes a constant, and, I think, should be more emphasized today, as we lose species at an alarming rate. Each species lost represents a potentially vital gift to humanity thrown away. Too many of the planet’s drawers have already been emptied forever.

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. If I’m going to be getting geeky about plants, especially native plants, is there some question that you’d like to see me research and write about?
  2. What, besides eating, is the most important use of plants for you?
  3. How did the summer go in your garden? Did you also have a heat wave and/or drought, and if so, how did you cope with it?
  4. Would you like some rabbits?

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, and double thanks for responding!

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What bugs me

Posted on 2022-05-31 by Hecate

Don’t worry; this isn’t a rant.

No, I’m just going to talk about bugs. Real bugs. Or, to be more precise about the nomenklatura in the garden: insects.

Let me tell you about the reeducation I’ve been getting as I pivot towards more native plants in the garden.

Going native

There are good reasons for gardeners to turn towards native plants. First, the choice of native v. import may help avoid introducing invasive plants into the local landscape. Second, native plants evolved in the native environment, so chances are they’re better adapted to local climate, both temperatures and precipitation. Third, they evolved as part of a local/regional ecology, which means they mesh with other natives in creating a local ecosystem, right in our own backyards.

closeup of tiger swallowtail butterfly (black stripes on yellow for upper and inner 80% of wings; with black border all around, and panes of deep blue in varying sizes along bottom of wings just inside border). Butterfly seen against backdrop of (apparently) pink flowers and green foliage of butterfly weed.

“Eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly” by Audrey is licensed under CC

Ah, ecosystem! So much grander than plain old backyard. It sounds so harmonious, so balanced, so God’s-in-her-heaven-all’s-right-with-the-world. Especially when you think of all the lovely native trees and shrubs and flowers serving as hosts for gorgeous butterflies like tiger swallowtails,

Baltimore checkerspots,

coral hairstreaks,

painted ladies. And yes, of course, the monarch.

Doesn’t that sound heavenly? Imagine yourself planted ‘midst your serviceberry and summersweet and black chokecherry shrubs, your wild columbine and butterfly weed and lupine and black-eyed Susans and cranesbill and wild bergamot on a spring-thru-summer afternoon.

There you are, admiring the tiny works of nature’s art fluttering about, sipping here, feather-landing there, doing loop-the-loops around the sugar maple and the pin oak. (Naturally, your fantasy should substitute other regional native plants and pollinators if you’re not in New England.)

Idyllic, no?

Wellllll, let me tell you. If you’re setting up hosts in your garden, you’re not just laying out a buffet of floral sippy-cups. This is not exactly AirBnb—unless you’d offer a house where the guests, after draining the sippy cups, are free to set their kids loose to eat your curtains, your rugs, the furniture, the books, the paintings, and the paint off the walls.

Your lovely native-plant hosts, I regret to inform you, are there to be eaten.

It ain’t pretty

You begin to see where I’m going on the reeducation? Used to be, I’d look for plants advertised as virtually pest-free. Generally, that means plants so alien to the local environment that no self-respecting local-native bug would touch them.

Now, however, I’m supposed to put plants in because they attract pests. Because something buzzing or floating or crawling about will take a sniff and yell Dinner! and zero in to chow down. Or worse yet, yell Honey, I’m home! and zero in to lay a couple thousand eggs that will hatch into Very Hungry Caterpillars.

Several Baltimore checkerspot caterpillars (bright orange bodies with small black spots and black hairy tufts along body) on a host plant's stem, with half-eaten leaf showing at left and another mostly-eaten leaf in foreground.

Very Hungry Baltimore Checkerspot Caterpillars
“Baltimore checkerspot caterpillars II” by dogtooth77 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Granted, there’s payoff here for the local biome, not just for the individual species of guest I’m hosting. The caterpillars attract birds, who gather not for the aesthetic enjoyment but for the eating. And birds will help keep other insect populations (and annelids, aka worms) under control. So it’s all one great circle of life, kumbaya, amen. Right?

Still, when the leaves on my newly planted winterberry bushes started disappearing at an alarming rate last summer, Kumbaya ain’t what I was humming. It’s one thing to put up with the kids eating the drapes, but when they started in on the furniture, all I could think of was that those bushes came at 70 bucks a pop. A pretty steep price for a bug buffet!

Game plans gang a-gley

For this year, I planned to head off the sticker shock by buying seeds. Then I could start from scratch and keep refilling the smorgasbord in hopes of some leftovers.

I’m great on planning. On execution, not so much.

I got all the pots and potting medium and even put together a nice little nursery frame out under the Canadian hemlocks. The seeds should have gone into the nursery around January. Now it’s nearly June and I still have all the pots and potting medium. The seeds are still in the fridge.

Maybe next January.

Hope springs infernal

Meanwhile, incredible though it may seem, there are empty spots in the sunny-garden beds. And plenty of space in the shade border, where mulch continues to fight a losing battle against weeds, and needs some help from ground cover. So the weekend before last, after perusing several different sources and compiling a carefully curated list, I betook myself to the local native plants nursery.

Naturally (no pun intended) they were out of most of what I was looking for. “Crazy-busy” might best describe the scene; the manager and sole ringer-up on duty said it’s been hard to keep up with the demand. Apparently others share my preoccupation with native plants.

If I were cynical, I’d say a native plant nursery is the perfect business. You’re selling people stuff that begs to be eaten.  (Thumper and Bambi are another issue. Having more cosmopolitan tastes, they’ll eat just about anything.)

Several different varieties of plants in black plastic pots on an outdoor glass-topped table

The 2022 bug banquet

Anyhow, I improvised enough to assemble a bug banquet, the members of which are still waiting for distribution to their homes-till-consumed. And I’m hoping that enough will survive, even after the painted lady and monarch caterpillars have eaten their fill, that the banquet will have staying power.

Stay tuned.

About the larger environment

What can I say? Huge swaths of the western US are burning (again), the gun lobby and its hired hands in Congress remain adamantly opposed to legislation on gun safety despite yet another horrific slaughter of schoolchildren, and the Supreme Court… well, I said I wasn’t going to rant.

I’ll just say that if you can figure out how to light a candle rather than cussing the darkness, go ahead and more power to you. If you want any recommendations: we gardeners know how important it is to get root systems well established—that goes for movements as well as plants! Two organizations doing essential work that begins at the grassroots are 350.org (action on climate change) and Movement Voter Project (assisting community-level organizing for progressive causes). I especially like the way MVP sends occasional bulletins describing in detail what it has been supporting, and why.

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 native plants for your region do you particularly love? (If you’re not sure what’s native and what’s not, you can use the National Wildlife Federation’s Native Plant Finder.)
  2. Have you been trying in recent years to put more native plants into your garden? If so, what impelled you to do so?
  3. Do you know of any good sources for native plants in your region? Share a recommendation, please!
  4. Are there any good grassroots-oriented organizations you would recommend that other readers check out?

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, and double thanks for responding!

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Spring Fevers

Posted on 2022-03-08 by Hecate

When last heard from, Inconstant Gardener was rolling up the garden and putting it away for the winter. And anticipating more time for blogging, hence more frequent posts all winter.

Guess what? Well, look at today’s date, and you’ll know. I last posted shortly after we went off daylight saving time. We’re due to go back onto it this coming weekend.

Where did the past three-four months go?

Does this ever happen to you during winter? You start out with all these ideas about how you’ll make the winter cozy and/or productive and/or b-e-a-r-a-b-l-e, and before you know it, none of that has happened and the seed catalogs have piled up and there has been no knitting, barely any pickles or chutneys made, and no chestnuts roasting by an open fire. Nor has the stack of must-read books receded by one millimeter.

For the last of those, may I say in my defense: I have been reading, but somebody who will remain nameless but sports the initials I.C.G. keeps ordering two books (or three, or four) for every one read.

But seriously, where does the winter go? Or to be more specific, where the hell did this winter go?

Spring is on the Way. Yikes!

Not to get too far ahead of myself. It is still winter out there, and I have the photo to prove it. (Okay, it’s a week old, and it was 66° a day or so ago, so most of it’s gone now, but still….)

Snow-covered garden section showing outlines of 2 raised beds, with a small cast-iron decorative fence and some stakes to the left of the beds; beyond and on a lower level the trunks of some small trees can be seen rising out of the snow.

Not ready yet.

What a weird winter it has been. I had looked forward to a chance to use my snowshoes, newly bought in 2020 and never used. But snowfall has not cooperated. On average, we get 28 inches of snow from November through February. This year, we got barely more than half of that. The snows that did fall subsided faster than usual, too.

Climate change? November was 2° above the historical average; December, 4° higher; January, about average; February, 2° higher. Those averages don’t convey the seesaw we saw, though. Daily highs in February of 52, 58, 62 and even 66°, hopscotching with highs of 32, 28, 22 and 20°—and many of the lows in single digits. Climate whiplash!

And yet, and yet. There’s that switch to daylight saving time coming, followed shortly thereafter by the Ides of March, and about a week after that, spring equinox. It will be May before I know it.

Are we there yet?

We New Englanders know all too well that winter ain’t over till it’s over, but there are harbingers outside the calendar too. My daffodils out in the north forty (feet) started poking green feelers above ground back in mid-February. Something next to the front stoop is trying hard to assert itself, and once the pile of cleared-from-driveway snow melted away, that something revealed itself as undaunted.

We can’t rest easy (ha! we can’t get too active outside, is more the point) until mid- to late April, and I dare not plant much out there until a good deal later. But I know from sad experience that if I don’t get ready well beforehand, I’ll miss the spring boat.

Photo of ground with snow at top of photo, and some mulch-covered soil in foreground with several shoots of spring bulb plants coming up green through the mulch

Harbingers or foolhardies?

Do you know the last frost date for your area? (If you never get frost, don’t gloat. Remember you will never savor the joys of chilblains and frostbite.) And do you know when to get bizzzy with the spring garden tasks? Some call them chores, but that sounds, I dunno, kind of onerous, like it’s work or something.

If you’re planning on planting from seed, or putting in any tender plants, you need to anticipate what Ma Nature could toss your way unexpectedly. For that matter, even if you aren’t gardening, it’s a good thing to know that last likely frost date. Some years ago, a friend of mine in Boston, psyched for spring by a spate of March weather in the high 60s, put away all her winter clothes at the beginning of April. Whereupon of course the wind turned and she froze her tushie off all of April and into early May.

Your garden odometer

So, gardener or not, you may want to study carefully this tool from Dave’s Garden:

Look up your first and last freeze dates by zipcode

For reading the table you’ll get from your search, remember that degrees of probability matter. For my area, for example, there’s a 50% chance of light frost even after May 10; to get down to only a 10% chance, I have to wait until May 24. I might luck out with tender babies planted on May 11, but half the time I probably wouldn’t. So I will wait on those until late May.

Of course, if I’m planting the tough guys, like peas, I (and they) can afford to scoff at frost a bit. Those could go in as early as April 12. Peppers and squash, on the other hand, should only go into the ground after June 1. If you know what you’ll be planting in the veggie, herb, and annual flower department, Margaret Roach has put together a spring garden calculator that helps you figure out when to sow them outside or plant indoors. Or, if you prefer a more graphic guide, you can order the gorgeous spring planting poster from Hudson Valley Seed.

Down and Dirty

Cover of Fedco's 2022 Seeds and Supplies catalogThen, naturally, we need the seeds. Temptations in the form of seed catalogs started plopping into my mailbox in December. I resisted temptation the only way I know works: I didn’t open them. But they still whispered to me. I stashed them all with the gardening books and files, nearly a dozen of them. Johnny’s Selected. Fedco. Baker Creek Heirloom. Seed Savers Exchange, High Mowing, neseed, and a bunch of others.

That tally does not include the bulb and tuber and corm vendors. Those catalogs poured in with covers adorned with legions of irises and lilies and their sisters decked out in colors that would turn a rainbow green with envy. Some of those catalogs got saved too.

Why, I do not know. Because here’s the truth of the matter: there is no room at the inn. Well, maybe a tiny bit more. But only if I assemble the new cedar planks-and-connectors into the 3’X18’ bed I have in mind for the bottom of the stone wall. I find, however, that planting spaces are like unexpected money that rolls in. I can always think of three uses for every extra dollar. And by gum, I can always think of ten uses for every square foot of garden space.

Garden space has tricks my dollars haven’t learned, though. When it comes to veggie or annual flower plantings, I can often get two uses out of the same spot, with early and late crops. Like the late crop of beans and peas and carrots and radishes and lettuce and chard that kept me harvesting into late October last year.

Still, there are limits, unless I yield to the temptation to dig up yet another part of the lawn—a big part—and get Serious. But—no. Not this year.

Plan. Plan again.

I think I told you last year it’s best to have a plan, but you saw how that worked out. Even with a plan, I ended up way over-buying on seeds. Some of my neighbors benefited thereby.

But I may not have mentioned that I also bought all sorts of seed-starting paraphernalia. Grow lights and the chains to hang them. Heating mat. Trays and pots and a plastic-domed setup for starting the pickier seeds. None of that got used, but it beckons now, with many of last year’s leftovers labeled (last fall) START INDOORS IN MARCH or APRIL.

Meanwhile, I planned on something simple for the edible garden this year: herbs and salad, with a few bug-repelling flowers for company. How’s that for a resolution? The resolution stuck until I arrived at my local co-op market a few days ago to find confronting me, right upon entry and even before the bananas, several racks with choirs of seed packets crooning just to me. I resisted the melons and the broccoli and the cauliflower, but oh how the peas and squashes stirred my soul.

To the tune of the assemblage below.

photo showing fronts of a couple dozen seed packets of vegetables, herbs and flowers

Too much of a good thing

Another happy event for the neighbors.

Well, down at least

If you haven’t nabbed your seeds yet, you can still order online or even via mail-order (yes, some companies still do that!). For readers’ convenience, I have started a Resources section on this website, where you’ll find Seeds as the first crop, emphasizing organics.

But if you have the self-control necessary to run the risk of over-buying, check the seed racks at your local garden center, not the big-box one but the co-op or mom-and-pop operation. You’ll be supporting your local economy. Many of the companies listed on the Seeds page sell through stores as well as online.

A jumble of supplies for indoor seed-starting: peat pots, planters, mounts for grow-lights, timed extension cords, etc.

Batterie de jardin indoor

My next act with the seeds: to pull out the seed-starter equipment and get to work. Fortunately, the pandemic continues to curtail my wanderlust. Once the seeds get planted in the starter battery, I can’t leave them for more than one overnight without risking their drying out and expiring.

Up first: nicotiana, whose flowers, believe it or not for a name like that, are said to have an intoxicatingly sweet aroma.

Stay tuned. You may get to see candid shots of tiny shoots.

What got away

Here’s my admission of winter failure, though. I’d planned to plant a bevy of native wildflower seeds, the kind that require “cold stratification.” In English, that means they need to freeze their tiny buns off in cold wet outdoors for a couple of months before they’ll sprout.

Last fall I ordered Joe Pye weed, red columbine, and New England aster seeds from Maine’s Wild Seed Project. For those, you could just spread them out on the ground in fall and let them take their chances, but good luck telling them apart from the weeds when they come up. The more surefire approach requires sprinkling the seeds in a pot, watering well, and placing them outdoors in an enclosure to protect them from critters.

Surefire? You’re supposed to do that in November or December. Maybe January, if you’re pushing it. I intended November, really I did, and even got a 3’X3’ cedar frame set up ready. Then I intended December. Then I figured Oh well, January. And lo! it became Feb. 15, so I said Next year.

Yeah, I do that a lot.

The perennial problem

Cartoon in 3 panels, with 1 leader and 3 responders: <br>panel one: Who are we? (responders); Gardeners!<br>Panel two: What do we want? (Responders): All the plants! <br>Panel three: Where will we put them? (Responders): We don't know!The irony here of course is that if I had started all those nifty natives, by summer I’d have faced the dilemma of where to put them (see above disquisition on space limitations). Which brings up my favorite gardening cartoon. I wish I knew what brilliant soul came up with this, because I’d like to give credit and get permission. So if you know the source, please let me know!

The moral of this story: I’m beginning to understand why Japanese gardeners came up with bonsai. But that gets us to the topic of pruning, which I’ll have to reserve for the next post.

Meanwhile: make sure your garden really is warmed up for spring before you start “cleanup,” or you may destroy some of the beneficial insects that overwinter in leaf litter and dead twigs. I’ll say more on that next post, too—before spring advances too far.

While you’re waiting for that last frost

Dandelions growing alongside a gray curb; the street and most of the dandelion plant have been sprayed the blue in the Urkainian flag; a single dandelion remains bright yellow.

“Ukrainian Flag,” by Olga/ _Nezemnaye_
CC BY-ND 2.0

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has created hundreds of thousands of refugees, and may mount to millions; it has also destroyed the homes and livelihoods of countless Ukrainians. If you’re looking for somewhere to donate or something to do, and aren’t sure about reliable organizations, here are a few possibilities.

Remember that in situations like this, there are rarely ironclad guarantees that your money will be used responsibly. Perfectly reliable and honest organizations may be so busy responding to urgent needs that they don’t get around to timely tracking or accounting for funds. So if you don’t feel comfortable with the assurances by particular collectors, investigate further or find organizations vetted for by a source you trust.

(NB: I’m not vetting, but I am passing on links provided by people or organizations I consider reliable. If you find the same organization/s recommended by several sites, they’re possibly that much more reliable, but they could just be more mainstream.)

  1. GoFundMe fundraising for Ukrainian Humanitarian Fund. According to the site: “All donations raised will be distributed to verified nonprofit organizations supporting vulnerable communities to obtain access to shelter, food, medical services, education, and psychosocial support….” Read the fine print! You can find here a listing of the organizations that have received funding so far, and those likely for future funding.
  2. How you can help the people of Ukraine, from the Obama Foundation.
  3. Want to support the people in Ukraine? Here’s how you can help, from PBS.
  4. How to help people in Ukraine and refugees fleeing the conflict with Russia, from NPR.
  5. How to Help LGBTQ+ and Black Ukrainian Refugees.
  6. Stand with Ukraine. Provides links to places to donate, but also to some non-financial actions you can take.
  7. Help Ukraine Win. The section up top is for supporting the “the Ukrainian tech community,” but if you scroll down there are links to other organizations and actions. Also includes link to widgets you can place on your website to link to the Help Ukraine Win site.

Your turn:

If you haven’t already done so, you can sign up for the “newsletter” if you want notices of future posts. And whether you sign up or not, please post your comments below. (If others post comments before you, the Reply box for your comment appears after their posts, so scroll down till you find it.) 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’s the first thing you do in your garden in the spring?
  2. How do you get your new plants started? Sowing seed indoors or out, or buying the seedlings started for you?
  3. What’s your favorite seed company or garden supply outlet, whether bricks-and-mortar or online? (You can provide one link per comment.)
  4. If you know of a good organization or action for helping Ukrainians affected by the invasion, could you post about it here? (One link per comment, please. You can post any number of comments.)

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.

Wishing everyone a spring that brings peace.

Thanks, as always, for reading, and double thanks for responding!

 

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Eleventh Hour

Posted on 2021-11-08 by Hecate

Happy Unhalloween!

‘Tis the season, at last, for dealing with the last dead or dying scraps before wrapping up the garden for the winter. (Don’t worry: the blog will continue. And I’ll have more time for it!)

A few days past Halloween, I happened upon a scene that seemed tailor-made as a motif for this season—and I even managed to park and get the phone camera out fast enough to get several shots, and a video to boot. Herewith, a sample:

Three black vultures near yellow center line of a road, two of them picking at some roadkill while the third appears to be supervising from about two feet away; tombstones of a cemetery in background, with green grass going brown and trees behind, most of them with leaves already dropped. In far background, a hill can be seen, topped with blue sky.

Picks just keep getting harder to find.

As I drove down the road towards this scene, I thought at first that it was crows picking at roadkill in the middle of the asphalt.

Wrong! Carrion eaters, but not corvids: VULTURES. Vultures picking daintily at a dead carcass. Not turkey vultures, apparently, unless they’ve been at the Clairol. Black vultures, which supposedly don’t range up this far north, but hey, climate change.

It’s not a jungle out there just yet

Now, if you’re expecting me to jump right to political topics, sorry! Sure, we’ll be getting to that as usual, but in the meantime, given several successive nights of real frost (and some humdingers; I woke up to 24°F one morning, and precious little warmer on others), winter is truly setting in, and deserves a mention.

Weeds are at last gasp; I can hear them choking when I step out onto the deck. They’re sitting ducks now for the pulling, which I have resolved to do this week, after I get this posted and the temperatures go up enough to make gardening less excruciating.

A bluish-white iris bud just about to blossom, but killed by frost. frost can be seen on the bud tip, on the beigy-brown casing, and on a flurry of iris leaves behind the doomed blossom.

What a frosted reblooming iris looks like.

Flowers? Curtains.

Yes, I actually did still have flowers. Quite a few: Montauk daisies. Black-eyed Susans. Coreopsis. Butterfly bushes. One or two gallant coneflowers. Some stalwart reblooming irises. Even a couple of gorgeous peachy-pink foxgloves that kept chugging right up until the mercury hit 28º. Requiescant in pace, every last sweet one of them. See ya in the spring.

But my main concern was the vegetable patch, of which, believe it or not, a good deal remained. In the last week of October, I ripped out the faltering pea and bean vines and harvested all the remaining cilantro, which still sits in a vase of water on kitchen counter awaiting judgment.

A large bunch of leafy cilantro, deep green, stems showing in the bottom of a large glass vase on a white kitchen counter. Miscellaneous small packages and bottles partially visible in background. Backdrop includes the lower right sections of a natural-wood window frame, a white cellular blind on the left side of the photo (closed), and off-white wall to the right.

Highly recommended if you need greenery for a flower arrangement!

Corn and bean salad? Chicken larb? Freeze the suckers? I’ll get back to you on that, because….

Pressing matters

The real drama remains in the veggie beds. Seeing the frosty forecasts, I hastily consulted my go-to source: The Internet! Can carrots survive frost, I asked Google. Are parsley and chard frost-hardy, I inquired of DuckDuckGo. (BTW, I highly recommend the latter as your go-to search engine. It does not track your every move the way supposedly first-don’t-be-evil Google does.) Mostly, the more reliable sources said no problema, although some drew the line at 24°F, others at 28°.

I ran to the garden store and found a GardenQuilt, 12ftX20ft, so I could cover the poor babies in the cold cold ground with a nice warm blankie. (It isn’t really quilted; it’s just a thickish layer of “spun-bonded polypropylene fibers,” which doesn’t sound very organic to me.) Before opening the quilt, I moseyed outside to assess the situation, and made an executive decision: a quilt was nuts. As in, what am I going to drape it over, and how many spots do I have to cover, and what will I hold it down with, and do I really want to cut this thing up and what about next year???

But I’m not reckless. To be on the safe side, I went to…

Plan B!

Part of a raised bed, viewed horizontally, with lots of bright green carrot tops showing at the left edge of photo and in the middle, with light tan saltmarsh hay tucked several inches high alongside the carrot rows. To the right of the carrots, some clumps of leaves of red-ribbed chard and bluish-green kale can be seen, with bare soil around them.

Settling in for a short winter’s nap

I piled a lot of salt-marsh hay alongside the carrot rows, muttered best-of-luck to the chard and parsley, and yanked out the last couple of lettuces. Then I went inside and turned on my central heating. (I held off till Nov.1 this year, in honor of our beleaguered planet, but also because we had such a warm fall.)

And what to my wondering eye did appear, that first morning after the first serious frost?

The raised bed, now seen vertically, with all vegetable leaves frost-covered: the hay-mulched carrot foliage fallen sideways, the red-ribbed chard leaves lying low. Only the kale, although also frosted, looks undaunted.

Frosted veggies! (Those floppy things in the middle and in back are/were carrot tops.)

I thought they were all goners for sure. But later in the day, I took a break from composing their epitaphs to survey the damage, and lo!

The same vegetable bed, from the same angle as in the preceding photo, with frosting gone, and most of the leaves perked back up.

Back up they perked!

Almost as good as new.

This hasn’t been a matter of one frost, though. I think we’ve had a string of five consecutive mornings that started off around 26° or even lower. When I checked yesterday afternoon, the parsley and the chard looked like they were having second thoughts about hanging on much longer.

My plan is to put them (and the carrots) out of their misery today or tomorrow—and to plant the garlic and shallots in their stead. The kale can stay; it has a bring-it-on insouciant air that almost makes up for its being… kale.

Planet A

Circle of life, right? I harvest the carrots, and put in a couple of allium cousins.

Some vehicle leaves roadkill, and the vultures get it.

Meanwhile, as I was beginning on this post, COP26 was just getting going in Scotland. It started on Halloween, apparently no irony intended by the organizers. (This gives you some idea of how long I labor on these posts. You’re welcome!)

Photograph of earth as seen from outer space, with part of the globe in total darkness; about 2/3 of the circle is visible, showing mostly blue with some continental masses buff-colored; swirls of white clouds overlay the whole. The background is pitch black.

The only one we’ve got.
NASA photo from collection “Looking back from Apollo 11,” July 16, 1969

If you were blissfully unaware of what COP26 is all about, well, not to bum you out or anything, but it’s a big UN conference, an international talk-a-rama about what to do about the increasingly dire situation of climate change. My apologies for giving you only Greenpeace links here, but you would not thank me for linking you to the Minotaur’s labyrinths of circumlocution on the UN and official UK (host for this session) sites for the conference. (I looked; I barely made it out alive and/or sane.)

That might be taken as a portent for what comes out of the conference, which continues till November 12. There may be slight progress, but nowhere near what’s needed given the challenges we face now. As far as I can tell, the main outcome seems to be that we’re all still lined up as not-too-distant-future roadkill. Maybe slightly more distant than before. Maybe not.

I’m not sure who will get to pick our carcasses, but to the extent that the homicidal vehicles have any drivers, they appear to be a mix of those aiming straight at us (big oil and big coal, can you hear me?) and those busy doing the après-vous-Alphonse shuffle over who will take the wheel if it means shouldering the responsibility of finding a better route.

In the nick of time

A group of short cylindrically shaped carrots, bright orange with lush green foliage tops still on them, set in a metal bowl on top of a pebble-glass table. A small white plastic plant label "French Baby Carrots" sits alongside the carrots in the bowl.

What the world needs now?

In the face of what’s coming at us, poking around in the garden sometimes seems nothing but a slightly more elegant variant of the ostrich-head-in-sand gambit. I mean, seriously, is what the world needs really more organic French Baby Nantes carrots or Festiva Maxima peonies?

Before I managed to work myself into a hopeless pretzel over this (which I confess could just be an excuse for giving up on the garlic planting), Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, Orwell’s Roses, landed in my mailbox.

Saved!

I’m about halfway through it, and it’s so good I plan on devoting a whole future post to it.

But I can tell you this much now. Solnit discovered, almost by accident, that George Orwell, that famously acerbic essayist, novelist, and memoirist, was an avid gardener. And that he relished the beauty flowers bring to our world, as well as enjoying the tasty things he brought to the table from his veggie patch. In the midst of the Great Depression. Before and after taking part in the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, which pummeled the UK for six years beginning in 1939. And postwar, while slowly dying of tuberculosis.

Solnit makes a strong case for the necessity of beauty in its many forms (from flowers to philharmonic orchestras) to sustain us as we work for a better world. So, en avant, carrots and peonies! And now I’ve got to get to the garlic.

But before I do, in case you aren’t already involved in action on climate change, let me suggest that you take a look at grassroots-oriented groups in your area. Or check out 350.org, which works at the grassroots internationally, describing itself as a “planet-wide collaboration of organizers, community groups and regular people fighting for a fossil free future.”

As for that contest:

Remember these?

Mystery fruit A

… and Mystery fruit B

… along with Mystery fruit C

Several eager readers made stabs at identifying these fruits. We had two guesses for A (mangosteen and loquat), and two for B (pawpaw and mango). C seemed the most popular item: two people went for lychee, and two for kousa dogwood.

And the correct answers are….

A: medlar

B: pawpaw

C: kousa dogwood

Nobody got all three, but one person did get both the pawpaw and the kousa dogwood right. Helen, I hereby declare you the winner. I think a suitable prize, unless you already have it, would be a copy of Orwell’s Roses. Will be in touch!

Thanks go to Corky for the photo of the kousa dogwood fruits. I took the pictures of the other two fruits during an Edible Landscaping Walk (and talk) at Cricket Hill Garden on October 9. Dan Furman of CHG gave a fascinating introduction to some fruits that gardeners often don’t even know about.

Photo of a pawpaw fruit, opened and partly scooped out with a spoon. The fruit is in a round white bowl, with a black-handled spoon inserted into it. Part of the creamy yellow flesh has already been scooped out, and a couple of the large dark brown seeds are partially visible, as is a small line of the greenish skin around the fruit.

A pawpaw, open for business.

Such as the pawpaw. As part of the walk, we all got some sample fruits. I took my pawpaw home with me, set it sideways to slice off a small lengthwise section, and used a spoon to scoop out the fruit. It was delectable, like a cross between a sweet custard and an apple—much like its aptly named tropical cousin, the Custard Apple. I nearly jumped back into the car to drive the 2 1/2 hours back to Thomaston CT to collect a couple of pawpaw trees for myself.

Only one thing stopped me. As long as I had (and have) no idea where to plant the aronia bushlet I’d brought home with me, buying a couple of trees was maybe not a great idea.

But I have plans for spring.

And one little heads-up, for the ecologically minded

The Berkshire Botanical Garden has announced its Sixth Annual Rooted In Place Ecological Gardening Symposium on November 14. This year they are offering two different types of registration: one for physical attendees on the day of; the other, for online-only, which provides recorded sessions you can dip into any time from November 21 until New Year’s Day 2022. I’ve signed up for the online version. Some of you may want to do so as well. ($ involved, but not an outrageous amount.)

Your turn:

If you haven’t already done so, you can sign up for the “newsletter” if you want notices of future posts. And whether you sign up or not, please post your comments below. (If others post comments before you, the Reply box for your comment appears after their posts.) 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. Is there anything you’ve given up on in your garden and consigned to winter’s blast? Anything you’re still hanging onto, or moving indoors?
  2. What steps do you think it’s helpful or useful for us to take in our gardens or in our daily lives that might, albeit infinitesimally, slow down our hurtling into climate change, or mitigate its consequences? And if you know of any good organizations working on climate change, please share that info. You can include one link per comment. Multiple comments are fine!
  3. Asking again, in case you’ve had a brainwave, or recently joined us: What topics would you like to see me tackle while we’re hunkered down for winter in the coming months?

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.

Thanks, and stay healthy and green in the best of ways!

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