Tending my 5 Adopted Gardens

Behold my pick-up truck 2013 Honda CRV! Just don’t ask me to give more than one person a ride anywhere on short notice, coz it would take a while to make the back seat presentable again, and then just barely.

The reason my car always looks like this, even in late December, is that since taking over several public sites to garden, my car has become a tool shed and temporary storage for yard waste in one direction, mulch and wood chips in the other.

Fortunately I don’t give a damn what my car looks like, but I do care about my 5 adopted gardens. Turns out, the townhouse I moved into 8 years ago now, which I chose partly for the small garden, isn’t quite enough for my gardening obsession needs.

Honestly, I’m thrilled by the opportunity to do garden make-overs, especially dramatic ones in very visible spots, like these 5. Even mundane tasks like weeding make me excited to get up in the morning, as early as the sunrise in summer, and get started on them.

Here’s a survey of my charges.

Garden 1. The small border above was once a weed-filled spot in a very prominent city plaza, just outside the local bar and music venue where I’m a regular. I didn’t take a real “before” shot, but here’s the space after being cleared of weeds and then planted, with no budget, so mostly donated plants. The existing bank of Nandinas and a new cherry tree were the city’s contributions.

The plants have filled out very nicely and this fall needed some thinning. People pass by here all day long and comment, especially when the groundcover Sedum takesimense is blooming.

Garden 2. The landscape in front of my coop’s office building is my most exciting adopted garden – because of the high visibility, the dramatic nature of the change, and having a budget! Those overgrown junipers near the door had to go, so to replace them I bought and was reimbursed for 16 new shrubs and a few perennials.

Someone donated the Nepeta in the foreground above and they’re so fabulous I’ve added them to my own garden. This year I added the orange-blooming Butterfly Weed at the suggestion of our general manager, and it’s another great performer.

Garden 2A. Targets of my obsessive making-over have inevitably spread from the office building to the entrance a block away. Here I used nothing but Rudbeckia, all donated. It’s our state flower and to my eyes, the most cheerful, long-blooming plant in Maryland.

Garden 3. About a block from my house is this corner I pass frequently and it was bugging me no end. It looked like crap and weedy shrubs were impeding driver visibility.

After two whole seasons I’ve finally gotten rid of enough of the poison ivy to enjoy weeding and planting here. With no budget, I relied again on donated Rudbeckias and more recently, two high-impact Spireas.

These last two adopted gardens are close enough I don’t have to drive to tend them.

Garden 4. In the “before” photo above you see the shrub border between my and my neighbors’ parking lot and the green common area we share. I used orange paint to create a shape that would be easy to mow around.

So now the crew can tell where to stop mowing, and the tough Carex around the edge keeps weeds in the lawn from creeping into the borders. On the right is a nearby island that I started, using donated Spireas and Ninebarks. With more Carex at their feet, this shrub island is as close to no-maintenance as anything I’ve ever planted.

Garden 5. The only non-public space I’ve adopted is this bank at the end of my next-door-neighbor’s back yard, along the main road. You may be bored by now to see MORE Rudbeckias and Carex, but beggars can’t be choosers, and I like the result, especially with the addition of ornamental grasses. All the garden needs is one cutting-back a year. I do no supplemental watering there and less and less weeding each season.

Does this garden need a “No Signs” sign?

Finally, a bonus garden, one that I haven’t adopted, except as a spot to complain about. It’s the welcome median into the heart of the historic town, which city staffers plants and maintain with the help of irrigation. (A few of us have lobbied for a reduction in the city’s use of annuals and irrigation, and we’re told that change is happening.)

My complaint about this garden is obvious to all of YOU – that sign junking it up! So I posted this photo to our local Facebook group, asking if signs could be put somewhere ELSE, please, and it caused a bit of an uproar. Honest to god, I was accused of being anti-fire department!

That brief scuffle on social media made me grateful for my 13 years of taking some occasional shit for speaking out here on the Rant. It’s trained me and, I think, toughened me up for responding (or not) to this kind of nonsense.

Though boy, it IS different when the people angered by something you’ve written are the very people you run into in the grocery store. Like every day.

Tending my 5 Adopted Gardens originally appeared on GardenRant on December 24, 2019.

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Actual Good News, from Prison Gardens

A reader sent me the link to this New York Times story about the garden at Riker’s Island, the notorious New York prison slated to be closed. Rant readers won’t be surprised by this feel-good story about gardening, but at this time of year and especially this scary time in history, can’t we all use one?

Highlights for me:

Riker’s garden has a “remarkable track record for keeping inmates who have worked the soil there out of prison,” with one study  showing that “participants in the GreenHouse program had a 40 percent lower rate of reconviction than inmates in the general prison population.”

And one prison gardener’s experience:

“I didn’t like dirt, I didn’t like bugs,” he said as he prepared some flowering echinacea for a circular bed. “But I gave the garden a chance, and it’s like crazy, I fell in love with it.” He says that he especially enjoys pruning the roses. “It’s a thinking job, it’s like a puzzle,” he said. “You need to figure out what bad stuff to cut out to get the good stuff to grow.” Mr. Cruz now spends 20 hours a week there.

Interestingly, “the focus of the garden shifted from vocational training to life skills: self-care, nutrition, teamwork, personal responsibility.”

Along those lines, we learn about the Insight Garden Program, “which combines gardening with mindfulness training. It operates in California’s San Quentin prison and 13 other facilities nationwide.” Wow.

Above, a moment from this video about the Insight Garden Program at San Quentin.

Actual Good News, from Prison Gardens originally appeared on GardenRant on December 20, 2019.

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Hard Pruning with Attitude Amid Lingering Dwarf Conifer Issues

If I were being completely honest, and I’m usually not, I would admit that I have an almost maniacally caricatured impulse to over-plant. Collector’s mentality run amok. Garden design joyfully not grounded in reality. Which basically defines most gardens I’ve seen and 99% of the dwarf conifer collections I’ve been to. Yeah, sure, they grow an inch a year, but give them too little space and too many years, and, boom, a red hot mess of green and yellow geometrically shaped plants poking and prodding into each other like deviants. This is a look no one likes except a tiny subculture of old men, usually found in dwarf conifer societies, who never seem to tire of murmuring terms like “juvenile foliage” as they struggle to identify cultivars only micro sliver’s different from ten others in the very same garden.

The most unnatural thing in the world is when dwarf conifers intermingle. Like tuxedoed bankers who wandered away from the awards dinner and huddled together when they found themselves surrounded by curious hippies.

Too many dwarf conifers together just seems like the horticultural equivalent to being on a slow, crowded elevator to the clinic.

Lord knows I have a ton of flaws, but cowering in the face of an over-planted garden about to riot isn’t one of them. I’ve got a garage full of tools with very sharp blades and it takes but the drop of a hat to start me slashing my way through vegetation like a crazy-from-the-heat conquistador seeking El Dorado. This happens at least ten times a year. And I don’t have an ounce of sentimentality anymore for a plant when it can no longer be sheared, mounded, hacked, beaten, kicked, limbed up, or rejuvenated (ha!) into submission. When a plant no longer pleases me, or, lo, if it should ever battle, bother, or bore me, it quickly transitions to a stump.

It’s been a busy gardening year. I did a bunch of stuff and most of it in a hurry. On multiple occasions, while bustling through the garden and paying less than full attention to where I was going, a certain perfectly healthy but girthy dwarf conifer (Picea pungens ‘Globosa’) nearly knocked my fat ass off the path. A big stiff, scratchy shove to the side. The first time, kinda funny. The second, not so much. The third, and its days were truly numbered.

The offending Picea. Looks innocent enough, but very pushy.

Last week, the knives finally came out. Now I could have mercifully gone out and cut it off at the ground and been done with it, but I fancy myself something of an artist. First, a little creative pruning to see if I could sculpt it into something wild and cool. So instead of doing other things, I tried doing that. An hour or so of nipping, tucking, gazing, and cursing, and I almost had myself convinced that I had succeeded. A second look a day later, and it was obvious my spruce had zero likeness to the wind swept Monterey cypress look I was imagining. Nope. At best, it resembled a demon cancan dancer, skirt lifted, cruelly revealing the world’s ugliest legs for all to see. Not good. Not good at all.

Like a cancan dancer from hell.

Actually, no Sir, I am not. I am not proud of this.

So the next time I’ve got a spare minute, or, more likely, some afternoon when I’m supposed to be doing something else but would rather saw something down, the job will be finished. It’s not like there aren’t 400 other plants I wouldn’t mind trying in that spot. So sometime this spring I’ll go out and buy something and it will have its chance to thrive in my garden. At least until it gets too big and poky.

So here are the photos. Judge me all you want. I don’t care. I am a very experienced gardener. I am also a highly trained professional who happens to have International Society of Arboriculture arborist certification (OH-6174A). I’m certain the ISA will be less than thrilled when they see this and will review their membership criteria in a panic, but until I’m disbarred I’ll just remind everyone that I at least passed the test while the vast majority of you didn’t. And I’m paid up on dues. So go ahead and say nasty things if you want. It won’t hurt my feelings. But, if by some fluke that happens, I want you to know I have an old, insecure, partially blind dog I can take it out on. Just kidding. I’m flawed, but not that flawed. I’ll take it out on the cat.

Hard Pruning with Attitude Amid Lingering Dwarf Conifer Issues originally appeared on GardenRant on December 18, 2019.

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Companion Planting: Fraud vs. Facts

Sometimes common knowledge, what everybody knows to be true, just isn’t.  That’s the case, I’ve found, with much of the broadly accepted information about companion planting.

Do tomatoes really like basil? (By Gausanchennai – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://ift.tt/35tZmS6)

Tomatoes, for instance, are supposed to “like” basil; similarly, chives and carrots supposedly “like” each other.

Where does such information come from?  That’s what I began to wonder a number of years ago.  Why should tomatoes like basil?  Typically, the sharer of this information couldn’t say.  I went to organic gardening literature, which usually just presented the companion planting combinations as fact.  By comparing many different accounts of companion planting, however, I eventually identified a source.  A number of the books credited Ehrenfried Pfeiffer as an originator of companion planting know-how.

And if so, is the feeling reciprocated?  (By Castielli – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7133704)

A trip to the New York Botanical Garden Library revealed who this mysterious authority was.  Ehrenfried Pfeiffer was a German immigrant who was a disciple of Rudolf Steiner, a late 19^th century, early 20^th century Austrian philosopher and mystic.  Among other activities, Steiner founded biodynamic gardening.  Pfeiffer was one of only a handful of people that Steiner entrusted with making his biodynamic “preparations,” such as preparation #502 which called for yarrow blossoms to be stuffed inside the urinary bladder of a red deer and exposed to the sun over the summer, then buried over the winter before being exhumed and used to inoculate the compost heap.

At Steiner’s behest Pfeiffer also developed a procedure he called “sensitive crystallization.”  In this process Pfeiffer would mix some biological extract with a solution of copper chloride and pour the result into a petri dish to observe the pattern of crystals that formed as the liquid evaporated.  He applied this process largely to the study of plants.  If the plant extract contributed to a clear and orderly pattern of crystals, Pfeiffer judged this to be a sign the plant was healthy.  If the pattern was unclear or disorganized, Pfeiffer took this as proof that the plant was unhealthy.  When two plant extracts were combined with the copper chloride solution, an attractive pattern was proof that the plants were compatible and should be grown together.

Pfeiffer published his observations as a companion planting list.  Picked up and endorsed by J. I. Rodale, an early leader of the American organic gardening movement, this list of supposedly compatible plants became a popular tool of organic gardeners, who usually did not know of the nature of its origin.  Passed down from book to book, Pfeiffer’s dubious findings are still promulgated as gospel today.

Does this mean that all companion planting information is bogus?  Not at all.  There are people who have pursued a more science-based take on this subject.  I’ve interviewed one of them, Robert Kourik, on a podcast at thomaschristophergardens.com.

Companion Planting: Fraud vs. Facts originally appeared on GardenRant on December 16, 2019.

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Fall Foliage in a Townhouse Garden

I would have shown you these fall photos of my garden in the actual fall if a technical glitch hadn’t kept me from posting here at all for a couple of weeks.

So imagine it’s mid-November in my back garden, where my recent shrub- and tree-buying is really paying off, small space be damned.

The Amsonia hubrichtii in the foreground looks great for a long time, as does the Oakleaf Hydrangea behind it. Further right and rising above the screen are the orange-tipped yellow leaves of Redbud ‘Rising Sun.’ Gorgeous.

On the sidewalk side of the screen you see the Redbud on the left, along with the red leaves of ‘Mt. Airy’ Fothergilla and purple leaves of a Purple Smokebush. Below them is a variegated evergreen Acuba ‘Picturata.’

Closeup of the Fothergilla.

Above is the view from my living room with three Japanese maples doing their fall thing. The new maples are ‘Osakazuki’ and ‘Orido Nishiki.’

On the patio you see the three pots that used to hold annuals, which were promptly decimated by deer. I replaced them with ‘Standing Ovation’ Little Bluestem grasses, as I reported in this post.

For winter I added a few artificial pieces for a bit of color to the pots. That’s it for “holiday” decorations in my back yard.

This photo was shot looking up from one of the Adirondack chairs on the patio. On the left is the only plant left that predates my moving here eight years ago, so I don’t know which Japanese maple it is. The ‘Osakazuki’ maple on the right is a recent addition.

Finally, here’s a real do-er in any garden, including this bit of city property I’ve adopted, not far from my house. It’s an ‘Ogon’ Spirea, which I can’t seem to get enough of, since I’ve planted them in all the gardens I tend. It’s the first to leaf out in spring and the last to lose leaves in the fall. Eye-catching in three seasons.

Fall Foliage in a Townhouse Garden originally appeared on GardenRant on December 13, 2019.

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Chestnuts and Earth in a Burning Ring of Fire

What does “gardening like there’s no tomorrow” really mean?

Do you think your garden, and earth, can avoid the ongoing sixth mass extinction? The U.N.’s recent “bleak” climate report may put a damper on holiday joy.  Believe science or not? Truth or dare? I think about my garden every day but worry only occasionally about actually going over the cliff.

Let me put the limits of personal control and “eco-anxiety” into perspective.

The Russians were going to bomb America into smithereens in the early 1960s. When I was in grade school, the rush was on to stock Do-It Yourself Shelters with water and canned soup beans. Mrs. McCann polled my 3^rd grade class every Monday, for weeks, and asked how many families had made progress on their bomb shelters. (Watch this excerpt from the 1982 documentary film, Atomic Café.)

I was scared out of my wits, worried that everyone else in my class might survive the nuclear apocalypse without me. I begged my father to build a bomb shelter. Dad argued that we would be okay without one. I asked, “How?” My father was remarkably sensible, never one prone to hysteria. “We’re going to go down to the basement with a couple of bottles of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes and take our chances.”

We survived Nikita Khrushchev.

Can we similarly stall global warming, put off the sixth mass extinction, and continue gardening for awhile?

Without political leadership, sufficient clean water, shifts in lifestyle and agriculture, a substantial adoption of sustainable energy sources or some miraculous technological breakthrough, I am not sure.

I’ve got an all-electric car, 60 solar panels, and I have planted thousands of trees over a lifetime. I’ve piled up a lot of Boy Scout badges, trying to be a good earth steward, but it’s not enough.

I can’t slow rising temperatures, loss of species, melting glaciers, drought or rising seas by myself, any more than I can stop a colossal asteroid from slamming into my back yard.

I’m sweating it out.

I’m trying to channel my late father, hoping I can divine some way to survive living on earth.  What would Dad think? He was generous, worked hard, lived modestly, and didn’t get bogged down in existential thinking. Yet there was always a lot on his mind.

How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan’s book on psychedelics, explains how the author gave up control for a few hours, and expanded his outlook, during several guided hallucinogenic trips. To turn on and escape with psilocybin, LSD or crystallized Sonoran toad venom would not have crossed Dad’s mind. My father was a man of reflection, but the concept of enlightenment was too fuzzy for him. Paying bills was fulfillment enough. Dad took a load off with an extra drink or two on Saturday nights. He listened to Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson on the turntable, and sometimes got a little loopy, but seldom missed Sunday 8 a.m. communion.

I have been keeping up with Dad, lately, via paranormal smoke signals.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

Whiskey and psychedelics won’t bolster confidence if you’re stuffed in a musty shelter, even for the sixth ongoing extinction. (I enjoy bourbon, but I went to a cockfight on acid one time, and it was not a good trip. A claustrophobic corner of the basement, probably won’t be tempting, either, even if you add grow lights and cackling, laying hens.)

So, Hell’s bells, put your feet up this Christmas season.

Warm your toes next to the not-so-earth-friendly open fire, built from the remains of ash trees killed by emerald ash borers.

Start dreaming about a white Christmas and next year’s garden; make a bourbon Old Fashioned; please order Funky Little Flower Farm, and listen to Nat King Cole sing “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” while plumes of carcinogenic wood smoke and CO2 drift up the chimney into the cold and starry night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chestnuts and Earth in a Burning Ring of Fire originally appeared on GardenRant on December 11, 2019.

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Is this about plants?

I love my new monstera but not enough to take a selfie with it.

The question was staring at me from my Facebook feed, in the form of a hunky guy sitting with a medium-sized parlor palm (I think) between his naked legs. For the past two years or so, the House Plant Hobbyist Facebook group has hosted an intermittent series of group members posing for selfies with their plants, sometimes showing some skin, sometimes not (maybe a pirate costume).  It all started last year, when someone posted a selfie with an orchid, shirtless. It may have been inadvertent—the post was in early September, after all—but some other members got mad and it all got very silly, with group moderators needed to step in and delete mean comments. You still see the selfies every so often, in between dozens of the usual “is this plant dead,” “what is this,” and “look what I bought!” posts.

Apparently, it’s not enough to just be excited by plants, as we all are. The excitement has to be selfified, as often as possible. Which, after all, is harmless. But what isn’t harmless is the possibility of being ripped off that comes with the new houseplant market. It’s one thing to pay $2,700 for a variegated monstera at a legitimate auction, where, at least, you’ll be going home with your ridiculously expensive plant.

It’s quite another to send money to a seller on Etsy and never receive a plant or get a damaged plant with no recourse. That’s why there now a BST (Buy/Sell/Trade) Facebook group that rates sellers. Kind of like Garden Watchdog, but more confusing because it’s all posts and the data is not averaged out. There was recently a big fuss there regarding a seller who may or may not have scammed money from plant lovers who invested in a potential growing operation.

One of the things I like about Buffalo’s houseplant fan group, Buffalo Houseplant Swap, is that it is swap or giveaway only.

There’s definitely more to this than plants. There has to be! I won’t be the one to say—the NYTimes article linked to above speculates on respite from city living or replacements for traditional families. Or just that plants, as we know, lend themselves so well to social media. One thing we can all forget about: the health benefits (air cleaning, adding oxygen, etc.) from having plants in the home have been thoroughly debunked. I fell for that one.

I can’t answer the big questions about the houseplant craze, but here are my small takeaways.
-Sadly, Epsom salts are recommended for just about problem in the houseplant world, just as they are in the outdoor gardening world.
-There is a crazed strain of toxicity obsession running through this group. Having had cats and every kind of plant for more than thirty years, with no incidents whatever, I question the paranoia about this.
-More and better labeling of big box/garden center tropical and other types of houseplants is needed. If this was universal, with both botanical and most-used common name given, along with other information, we wouldn’t have people posting images of Crassula ovata (jade plant) and tradescantia zebrina (Wandering Jew), asking for IDs. And getting 30 wrong answers.

Is this about plants? originally appeared on GardenRant on December 10, 2019.

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Assisted Migration of Native Plants

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a very interesting symposium, “Rooted in Place,” sponsored by the Berkshire Botanical Garden.  The focus of the symposium was new trends in environmentally-based gardening, and it led off with a talk by the marvelous Dr. Douglas Tallamy about fostering moths, butterflies, and caterpillars to feed bird populations.  I had heard him speak before, but this talk contained fresh information from his new book (to be published in February, 2020), Nature’s Best Hope.  The talk I found most interesting on this occasion, however, was delivered by Dr. Bethany Bradley, an ecologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Dr. Bradley spoke to the subject of assisted migration.  She began with a stunning fact, that if we continue on the path we are on now, the climate of Massachusetts will be by mid-century (in just 30 years) similar to that of present-day Maryland.  Then she shared a possible response, that of assisting the migration of warm-climate species to central New England.

She noted some possible complications.  There is, for example, the danger of introducing invasive species, even when the introductions are limited to North American natives.  She cited the black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), a native of the central to southern Appalachians that has been introduced to central New England and become invasive there.  Then she discussed how ecologists might predict the behavior of natives released onto new, more northern territory, while admitting that such science is not foolproof.

Black locust, Robinia pseudoacacia, by By AnRo0002 – Own work, CC0, https://ift.tt/2rQ515H

This is one reason, she stated, why some ecologists resist assisted migration altogether, asserting that it is safer not to do anything than to risk doing something harmful.  But given the holes that climate change is going to tear in our local ecosystems, Dr. Bradley said that she thought that doing nothing would in fact be harmful in itself.  If we leave such holes unfilled, she pointed out, something is going to move in to fill them, and it will likely be garden escapes, invasive exotics.

As Dr. Bradley pointed out, gardeners are already involved in assisted migrations on a grand scale, by their purchasing and planting of non-local plants.  She wants to harness that for good, by persuading gardeners to experiment with warmer-climate natives, rather than the exotic species we so often favor.  Gardeners can have a powerful impact if they insist that local nurseries and garden centers stock such natives.

There is a lot to think about, pro and con, with respect to this subject.  If you would like to hear it discussed at greater length, you may wish to listen to my interview with Dr. Bradley on my podcast, “Growing Greener.”

Assisted Migration of Native Plants originally appeared on GardenRant on December 2, 2019.

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