Can You Dig It?

Not everyone gets excited about a pile of organic matter, but I do.  Let me explain by first telling you I am a lazy composter.  I don’t turn or aerate my pile, I simply dump more garden waste on top.  A well-tended compost pile will produce results in just a couple of months, but by my method of benign neglect, plant matter takes its own sweet time to decompose.  Each spring, the pile will have last fall’s debris sitting on top, still intact, but I dig in from the sides to uncover the dark, crumbly “black gold” hiding below.  Recently, I got curious as to how much finished compost was still hiding under the top veneer of detritus, so I decided to remove anything that still looked like a stem or leaf and reveal what remained.  What I found was a mountain of glorious stuff.  At almost three feet high and fifteen feet long, I discovered the mother lode of well-aged compost, just waiting to be used.  Like almost anything else homemade or homegrown, backyard compost is better than money can buy.  In economic terms, I was suddenly the Michael Bloomberg of the flower-growing set.

Not all gardeners have joined the church of the compost pile, but those who have believe in it with some fervor.  While I banish pet waste, meat scraps, or diseased plants from my pile, I do add eggshells and vegetable scraps from the kitchen.  My town doesn’t offer curbside pick-up of leaves (we don’t have curbs), but even if it did, my leaves would still stay home in my compost pile, or get chopped up for leaf mulch.  Composting on-site reduces the amount of fossil fuel it takes to haul raw organic wastes away and then haul finished bags of compost home to the garden.  It saves money and eliminates plastic packaging, too.  But the righteous feeling you get making your own compost pile pales in comparison to the compost itself.  I know what’s in my compost and what’s not.  There is no pesticide residue or heavy metals.  There is no plastic trash, or other junk either, unless that pair of secateurs I lost three years ago turns up.  There are also no invasive jumping worms, a rising concern not only locally but nationwide.  Using your own compost is a lot like knowing where your food comes from.  It feels nice.

I’m going to spread my compost wealth around the garden in a few different ways.  Primarily, I’m adding a few inches across my raised beds to benefit next year’s dahlias and vegetables.  I won’t use it to start seeds (since I can’t be entirely sure it is pathogen-free), but I will mix it with pine or hardwood bark to make a potting mix for older plants.  If I get ambitious next spring, I’d like to renovate a perennial border, and after the old plants come out, compost will go in.  Money doesn’t grow on trees, but free-for-the-making compost encourages the trees to grow better.

A Sage On Osage

“I gave up trying to find the answer to this one and was hoping you could pass it along to one of your crack specialists.”

So started an email with photo received this chilly November.  It is just such tantalizing inquiries which make me appreciate my job.

“If you can’t ID it, I’m gonna call it a maggot ball.  It has a fragrance to it.  It’s about the size of a softball.  Do you think it would spice up the stuffing on Thanksgiving?”

Luckily, I had grown up around maggot balls in rural New Jersey, but we called them monkey oranges.  The yellow-green fruits fell out of scrubby, thorn-laden trees in old hedgerows and along roads.  To my young mind, their most amazing attribute was the texture of their skins, which mimics most alarmingly the surface of a human brain.  This youthful exposure to the trees allowed my own grey cells to easily provide some answers.

Botanical thinkers know this plant as Osage orange, or Maclura pomifera.  Planted nationwide as living fences before the invention of barbed wire, this species is native to the Red River valley in southern Oklahoma and northern Texas.   In that locale, they commonly grow under a bevy of odd names, including hedgeapples, horse apples, or hedge balls.  Since there are separate male and female trees, only the females will develop the balls.  I’ll leave the rest to your fertile imagination.

The fruits of Osage orange look as unappetizing as they are inedible.  The pulp is white, tough and stringy.  The seeds, the most digestible part of the entire mass, are covered with slimy goop.  Cattle sometimes die when they swallow Osage oranges after too little mastication effort.  So why would a tree go to such great lengths to produce such an unappealing fruit?  Perhaps they were designed to attract some now extinct critter that roamed the Oklahoma plains eons ago.  As for the stuffing, stick to bread crumbs.

Monkey oranges make up for their culinary shortfalls in other ways.  New Jersey legend holds that a green fruit in your underwear drawer (or even elsewhere in the house) can repel cockroaches, while in the Midwest Osage oranges were said to retard the advance of crickets, spiders and other pests.  Today, some find these to be valid claims, while others cry pure bunk.  Turning to research for an answer, Iowa State University uncovered yet another odd fact:  chemical compounds in the fruit did indeed thwart German cockroaches, but entire fruits did not.  Would a rotting fruit in your drawers work better?  It’s yet another sticky question for science.

Even more astonishing are the properties of Osage wood.  One of the most naturally rot-resistant types of lumber available, it is superior for fence posts.  Burning it releases more BTUs than almost any other wood.  Students of archery prefer it for bows.  And it has been used to make fine guitars, harps, mandolins and writing pens.

Maggot balls?  Bosch!  We should be proud to call Osage orange a native American.

Bloom Where You Are Planted

I’m not sure that Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, has won the designation “Coolest Small Town In America,” but it ranks high in my opinion.  A thriving downtown, beautiful location amongst rolling hills and public artworks make it a pleasant place to be.  But what puts it over the top is The Bridge of Flowers, a horticultural showstopper that draws thousands of visitors annually from around the world.

Back in 1908, building a bridge across the Deerfield River to carry railway freight and passengers, as well as a water line, seemed like a good idea.  The nearby Iron Bridge, constructed in 1890, wasn’t up to the job (yet, somewhat ironically, it is still in use for motor vehicle traffic today).  In a fit of optimism, The Shelburne Falls and Colrain Street Railway paid $20,000 to have a new bridge constructed.  They built well:  the sturdy structure was formed of concrete and featured five arches.  Soon, the Railway was transporting everything from mill products and farm produce to U.S. mail, and carrying 200,000 passengers each year.  But those heydays were short-lived.  As cars and trucks became more numerous, the fortunes of the Railway declined, and it ceased operations in 1927.  With the trolleys gone, the bridge could have been destroyed, but the necessary water line made that impractical, and it was a costly proposition, anyway.  What could be done with a bridge with diminished purpose?     

It might have been a stroke of genius, or perhaps Yankee ingenuity, but the bridge didn’t sit derelict for long.  While doing household chores, local resident Antoinette Burnham suddenly struck upon the idea of turning the bridge into a garden.  Aided by her husband Walter and a growing cadre of supporters, a fundraising concert was held and funds gathered.  Soil was ordered and the first plantings installed in 1929.  Eventually, the Bridge of Flowers Committee, under the aegis of The Shelburne Falls Women’s Club, germinated to further organize the efforts.  Today, two part-time paid gardeners, assisted by many volunteers, keep the bridge looking beautiful from April to October.  The initial budget of $1,000 has also grown, thanks to memorial gifts, bequests and donations given in secure boxes located at either end of the structure.  And when significant deterioration threatened the structure by the 1970’s, the good folks involved rallied once more, raising thousands to reconstruct and repair so both bridge and garden would survive.

While planting in two narrow beds on a bridge dozens of feet above the water might seem daunting, it turns out to be a pretty good place to grow.  The soil depth varies from 2 ½ to 9 feet, allowing trees to be planted in the deeper areas.  When I visited in August, dahlias in a broad array of colors were featured, supported by daylilies, phlox, crocosmia, hibiscus and coneflowers.  Annuals such as sunflowers and bachelors buttons shared space with woody viburnums, hydrangeas, redbuds and even a hemlock.  All were kept in tip-top form with nary a weed in site.  Happy 90^th Birthday, Bridge of Flowers!   

Sneezemaker and the Basswood Bees

Each September finds me, along with some other adventurous souls, ambling in honor of the Hudson River Valley Ramble.  This series of events, all held in proximity to our great waterway, aims to get people out and doing.  I enjoy leading my plant walk on Papscanee Island, where we visit the tree that grew in Brooklyn (Ailanthus altissima) as well as the plant that killed Abraham Lincoln’s mother (white snakeroot).  We pause at old favorites, like the three hostas growing under the touch-me-nots, and always find something new, too.

Our novelty this year turned out to be a lovely plant I once tried, and failed, to grow in my garden.  We discovered just one small patch of Helenium autumnale, sometimes called Helen’s Flower, growing inches from the mighty Hudson. The location wasn’t surprising; it requires a moist soil, making it a denizen of streambanks, ditches, pondsides and the like, in all lower-48 states.  My garden, it turns out, is just too dry.  The bright yellow flowers, composed of a prominent disk surrounded by fringed rays, make it a thing of beauty.  The plant hybridizers, seizing something good, turned Helenium into a garden center commodity by expanding its floral color range into all shades of red and orange.  Don’t focus on its other common name, however, since no one wants to grow sneezeweed.  This moniker derives from the old-time practice of using the dried blossoms and leaves as snuff.  Nowadays, it’s more likely that nursery customers might assume sneezeweed causes allergies, and drop it like a pot of poison ivy, so smart marketers focus on the connection to beautiful Helen of Troy.  Supposedly, Helen’s falling tears caused this plant to spring forth.  That would be quite a feat, since she lived in Greece and Helenium is strictly American, but let’s not question the gods too closely.

A tour highlight is finding the lone basswood tree, known also as American linden and botanically as Tilia Americana.  This takes some doing, as it stands some distance from the path amongst impenetrable thicket; one year we missed it altogether.  Growing naturally from New England to North Dakota and into the upper South, basswood thrives in rich, damp bottomland soils but also makes a living on drier slopes, too.  Pyramidal in youth and aging to oblong or rounded in shape, it can reach 60 feet tall or much higher.  The dark green, heart-shaped leaves hide small pale yellow flowers, which appear in June and lure scads of honeybees and other pollinators.  Crafty beekeepers take advantage of this situation by placing hives in linden groves and taking the honey produced off as soon as the linden flowers fade. It is described as pale-colored, medium sweet, and highly aromatic.  Basswoods are rarely found in home landscapes, although they sometimes appear in parks or on golf courses.  Passed up in favor of the littleleaf linden, darling of European horticulture which has spread here, perhaps someday we’ll prize our native version here as highly as I regard the lone wolf on Papscanee.

Serendipity

Plant a redbud tree, and with a little luck, it will reward you with the beauty of it’s form, foliage and flowers for many years.  You might even find some tiny redbud seedlings sprouting nearby.  Should they be pulled from the ground, mowed down or dosed with herbicide?  That would be the response of some folks, but to my mind, they are a gift from Mother Nature.  

While gardening is sometimes about planting and nurturing, editing is also involved, too.  This is referred to this as weeding, and the joys and challenge of grubbing out the undesirables is a major part of life as a gardener.  But there are good “weeds,” too, in the form of delightful or useful plants which suddenly spring up, unbidden, a form of horticultural treasure.  It just seems to happen a lot less frequently than, say a new stand of poison ivy. 

Twenty or more years ago, I wanted a redbud tree, more formally called Cercis Canadensis.  I acquired seeds from a roadside tree, several of which germinated, and one survived.  This tree has grown into a handsome specimen, producing dark pink pea-like blossoms early each spring, followed by papery seed pods.  Only recently have I noticed baby redbuds appearing, hither and yon, throughout the garden.  Some I might pot up, others I can move to where I want them, while those in a favorable place I will leave, just to see what happens.  It’s fun to play god of the garden when it isn’t just about ripping out thugs like Japanese knotweed and garlic mustard.

Volunteer tree seedlings make great gifts, too.  Many years ago, a wonderful woman named Virginia had an expansive garden, full of interesting trees, in East Greenbush.  Beautiful silverbell trees (Halesia sp.), native to the Appalachians, grew there, and started self-sowing.  Virginia kindly gave me a seedling, which I planted behind my garage.  Thinking it would develop into a smallish example, the silverbell has morphed into a large, multi-trunked pyramid, covered in white bell-shaped flowers in spring.  I’ve been waiting for mini silverbells to appear, but so far none have come forth, despite the tree making seedpods.  Perhaps the seeds are not viable without cross-pollination, or maybe I just don’t have the magic that Virginia did, but I will keep hoping for offspring, nonetheless.  Virginia shared her silverbells with other lucky gardeners, and she left us a wonderful guarantee that her spirit and generosity will be remembered.

In practical terms, there are steps to take if you would like to encourage volunteers.  First, plant the parents.  It won’t do much good to wish for redbud seedlings if you don’t have a mother plant in the garden.  Develop keen eyes, too.  Seedlings are tiny, and easily destroyed.  And be a little messy.  Highly polished gardens, like the sterile yards surrounding some tract houses, are unlikely to yield volunteers, which often pop up amongst last year’s leaves, along the edge of the woods, or under a shrub.  If we desire a little serendipity, we can cultivate it. 

Bittersweet Confusion

Some plants generate confusion.  Ask the man on the street to identify a pine or spruce, and you’ll find he’s confused the pine with the spruce.  When someone mentions a red maple, are they referring to a red-leaved Norway maple (Acer platanoides ‘Crimson King’), a red-leaved Japanese maple (Acer palmatum ‘Bloodgood’) or the true red maple (Acer rubrum)?  Often it is one of the first two, while choice three is best.  Only one thing is certain:  misidentification is a human issue.  No plant ever had an identity crisis.  Since they let it all hang out, it’s up to us to observe their attributes more closely before we attach a label to them.

Consider bittersweet, plants placed today in the genus Celastrus.  Early settlers to these parts thought a vine they came upon looked like Europe’s bittersweet, so they gave the new plant the same name.  Oops.  The olde worlde herbe turned out to be Solanum dulcamara or Eurasian nightshade, a completely unrelated species to our native American Celastrus scandens.  While the fruits of both look similar at one stage, the leaves, flowers and stems are night and day different. 

Jump ahead to the mid-1800’s.  While  American bittersweet was ornamental enough for gardens, chiefly valued for its fiery-orange fall fruit the shape of a pea, Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) was thought to be better.  Some botanical wizard imported it from China or Japan into the northeast, and soon it was found to be better.  A better climber, since this new species not only scrambled up trees, but it could break, smother and strangle them (see photo, bittersweet taking on spruces).  A better propagator, too, since its fruit usually has five or more seeds, while the native’s berry often only contains one.  Since the release of the Oriental species, it has largely taken over the habitat of the American in New England and New York, and has possibly hybridized with it, too.

Straightforward enough.  We should banish the invader while aiding our hometown hero.  Unfortunately, for folks uninitiated in the nuances of bittersweet, the two types are tough to tell apart.  When someone asks which one they have on their land, it is a darn good question, one worth pondering before any further action is taken.

Start with flowers and fruit.  American bittersweet has these in clusters on the end of the shoot, while Oriental bittersweet has flowers and fruit all along the stem.  American bittersweet has an orange capsule that encloses the fruit, while Oriental’s are yellow.  American’s fruits are larger, but contain few seeds, as noted above.

That’s great, but there’s another rub:  both species feature separate male and female plants.  Male plants don’t make berries, so those clues are out.  So get out your magnifier, because male American flowers make yellow pollen while male Oriental flowers make white pollen.  There is also a vegetative indicator.  When American vines leaf out in spring, the leaves are rolled like a scroll, while Oriental’s are folded just once. 

Confused?  Check the internet for the Great Lakes Science Center Fact Sheet 2007-2: https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsbdev3_017307.pdf

Fit For The King

Poking along Ridge Road by bicycle, I stumbled upon a handsome example of a powerful plant.  Proudly in flower, and growing boldly out of a living maple tree trunk, it’s an herb of presidential politics and festive celebrations.  Used with skill it might cure, but cooked wrong it can easily kill.  ‘Twas once renowned enough to make the sensational swiveling singer from Memphis croon.  It’s a plant with a resume so slick it could turn a Harvard grad green.  I give you pokeweed.

Growing from Maine to Minnesota and southward, Phytolacca americana is an herbaceous perennial that pops up in pastures, cleared areas, fencerows and open spots in the woods.  Covered in simple green leaves, its purplish, branched stems can reach an impressive eight feet tall and bear elongated racemes of white flowers which become attractive purple berries.  This botanical exuberance is fueled by a deep and extensive root system.  While visually impressive, consider this:  the entire plant is poisonous, and swallowing enough may cause vomiting, spasms, convulsions, then death from respiratory failure. 

Despite this gruesome little fact, pokeweed has long been considered a culinary delight, especially below the Mason-Dixon.  The trick is to harvest only young leaves, before they exhibit any reddish pigment, and boil them thrice, discarding the water each time.  This regimen gives us the basic ingredient in poke sallet, which reportedly has a flavor between asparagus and spinach.  While it sounds simple, my advice is, “don’t try this at home.” 

A much safer option would be to bring your appetite to one of the four annual pokeweed festivals.  The doings in Harlan, Kentucky feature a poke sallet feast with side dishes of boiled eggs, green onions, cornbread and buttermilk.  A cooking contest gives $25 prizes for the best poke recipe, appetizer, and dessert.  Whether one has to be an expert in poke preparation to enter is unclear, but I imagine the judges pay up on their life insurance before the tasting.  And the one tune sure to be blaring from the loudspeakers is “Poke Salad Annie,” popularized in the ‘70’s by none other than Elvis Presley.

What might drive people to eat the horticultural equivalent of a hand grenade?  One historic reason would be plain hunger, especially problematic in spring, the “safe” period for poke.  Eventually, poke sallet became a supermarket staple, sold by the Allen Canning Company of Siloam Springs, Arkansas.  Medicinally, topical applications of pokeweed were used to treat itching, inflammation and acne, while careful ingestion might aid arthritis, mumps, or constipation.  Recently, investigations have probed the use of poke extracts in curing cancer and HIV-AIDS.

But wait!  There’s more.  As a child, a friend and I collected a large jar of poke berries and spending an afternoon squeezing a wonderful juice that permanently stained our shirts.  We didn’t know this same stuff was dye to Native Americans and ink for Civil War soldiers.  Supporters of Polk’s candidacy wore a sprig of poke, a potent plant for the least known consequential president.       

Full of Surprises

If I wrote that every garden needed some Lycoris squamigera, I probably wouldn’t tickle the fancy of too many people.  If I said you would die for some Resurrection Lilies, some interest would arise, especially among the church folk.  A pop-up advert for Surprise Lilies would stir up the optimists, who think everything is coming up roses, but might turn off the pessimists, who can just picture a new invasive.  But if I showed you some Naked Ladies, everyone would clamor, and guys might even get interested in horticulture.

All these wonderful names belong to just one plant which has a rather odd life pattern.  In spring, along with the awakening of most other plants, a cluster of thick, dark green, strap-shaped leaves is produced.  Shortly thereafter, however, these die, and the space is taken over by daylilies, lady’s mantle, and other garden plants, or even weeds.  Weeks go by, then in early to mid-August comes the magic.  Two-foot tall flower stalks emerge from the ground, crowned by clusters of magenta buds.  These open into pink, trumpet-shaped, lily-like flowers enclosing a cluster of yellow stamens.  For those who have forgotten the early set of leaves, it seems terribly odd and more than a little surprising that these leafless flowers have sprung from seemingly nowhere.  If you remember the leaves, but thought the plant died and vanished, then it’s resurrection is a joyful occasion.  And the curvy, fun, pink flowers certainly do hold more than a little of the feminine mystique.

Just where Naked Ladies comes from is a bit of a mystery, too.  Signs point to Japan or China, and it might be a hybrid of two different Lycoris species. Dr. George Rogers Hall of Rhode Island is credited with introducing it to New England from Japan in 1862.  Hall was a medical man seeking his fortune by opening a small hospital in Shanghai, but he entered history by being the first to import plants from Japan to the USA.  Having proven hardy in the chilly climate, Naked Ladies spread through various distribution channels across the country.  Given its disappearing act, it is difficult to offer in garden centers, where the task to sell a pot of non-descript leaves or fragile, fast-fading flowers is mighty.  Designated more of a “garden novelty item,” Naked Ladies has found a home within mail-order catalogs and web sources, where it can be easily acquired.  It is also undoubtedly a pass-along plant, since it can easily be dug up after the leaves fade, divided, and then shared with friends and neighbors. 

I can certainly attest to the hardiness of Naked Ladies, having several clumps in my old garden planted many decades ago by the previous gardener.  One patch pops up next to an ancient forsythia, a large group lives in my perennial garden, and one poor soul struggles to survive under an expanding magnolia.  Naked Ladies need their sun and don’t like competition, and who can blame them?

Those Darn Yellow Daisies

Talk to botanists and they’ll tell you that the world is full of DYCs.  Botanists don’t care about DC (a thorny place full of prickly issues), the DMZ (a borderline patch between North and South Korea that is no place to garden) or AC/DC (loud rock music is not good for plants).  But DYCs are both a source of amusement and puzzlement, because in botany, they are the damn yellow composites.

Composites are plants with two part, daisy-like flowers.  Each bloom consists of a center disk flower, which may be green, brown, yellow, black, or any other shade, and the “petals,” or ray flowers around the disk.  So far, so good, so why the swearing?  Because there are so many species of yellow composites and they all look so much alike.  A botanist’s street cred (even if she works in the woods) hangs on being able to properly ID a plant, and DYCs create mayhem and foolishness.      

Of the dozens of wild DYCs, a relative handful have found their way into cultivated landscapes.  Three of them are in bloom at our Demonstration Garden right now.  Oxeye sunflower (Heliopsis heilanthoides) reaches a height of three to four feet, has dark green, opposite, toothed leaves, and covers itself in yellow daisies with a yellow center.  Its minor faults – that red aphids find hanging out on the stems beneath the flowers an irresistible place to be, and that it self-seeds a little bit – should be overlooked in favor of its jaunty demeanor.  Ashy sunflower (Helianthus mollis) is less well known but deserves consideration.  It has blue-green, opposite leaves without teeth and similar yellow flowers.  Cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum) has higher aspirations, producing its DYC flowers six feet or more above the earth.  Its paired leaves encircle the stem, hence the common name.  Michigan lists it as an endangered native plant, while Connecticut calls it invasive, so go figure.  All three of these species, like most DYCs, will live happily for years in full sun to slight shade in a wide range of adequately drained soils.

If cup plant excites you for its stature, you’ll also love the towering cutleaf coneflower (Rudbeckia nitida ‘Herbstonne’), which reaches over seven feet.  Its ray flowers of an even more luminescent shade than most DYCs droop a bit and the disk is mounded and slightly green.  Double-flowered variants of this also exist, but the blossoms look like used Kleenex to me.    Most bizarre is Cabbage  leaf coneflower (Rudbeckia maxima), which shoots up seven foot leggy stalks, each topped with a single bloom of very limp rays encircling a big brown disk.  The base is a set of strappy, blue-green leaves which reminded someone of the main ingredient in cole slaw. 

Lest we forget the plant that swept the ‘1980’s, consider Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm.’  With black-eyed Susan cheerfulness and Terminator toughness, it became the poster child for the “new American garden” school of landscape design, made millions for the nursery industry and thrives coast to coast.  Damn good for a yellow composite.    

Fuzzy, But Not Cute

Appearances can indeed be deceiving.  When I saw the white fuzzy stuff on the flower stalks of the hostas, I thought “must be a woolly aphid” and kept going.  Then it appeared on the Joe-Pye, the wild senna, and the dwarf lilac.  After receiving a phone call about this mystery critter, I took a better look.  These woolly aphids could jump!  Some searching revealed the proper identification:  citrus plant hoppers, a.k.a. mealy lantern flies or frosted lightning hoppers.  Gadzooks, what next?

Since I like the name “frosted lightning hopper” best, I’ll call these creatures FLH’s for short.  Scientifically, they are Metcalfa pruinosa.  The genus name honors entomologist Zeno “Zippy” Metcalf, a North Carolina State University researcher who was dedicated to the study of leafhoppers and their kin, while “pruinosa” means frosty, referring to the insect’s aforementioned fuzz.  They feed by sucking the sap from plants, and while a few FLH’s may not cause much damage, a higher population may induce stem twisting, stunting or dieback.  The fluff may also be off-putting to folks who like their plants neat, and might be troublesome to nurseries selling plants.  Perhaps most problematic is the waste stream of sugary liquid called honeydew which FLH’s emit.  This backdoor by-product lands on plant foliage and then grows a crop of an ugly black fungus called sooty mold.  If the FLH’s are high in a tree, the honeydew and resulting mold can land on patio furniture, parked cars or slow-moving pets, creating more clean-up work for the gardener and adding to the “honey do” list.

Just like I found in my own garden, the FLH feeds upon a wide variety of plants, including azaleas, magnolias, viburnums, and citrus trees.  A native to North America, it ranges over a large area, from Quebec to Florida, and west to California.  While we often complain of foreign insects invading our shores, we don’t often consider that our bad bugs go wandering, too.  This is in fact the case with the FLH, which is now found in parts of Europe, and has been causing problems in agriculture in South Korea.  May they’ll try a tariff.    

Life for FLHs starts out as eggs hidden in woody plant tissue or under tree bark.  Young nymphs hatch in mid-May.  These are covered in white waxy filaments, probably as a protective aid.  If you’re fortunate enough to be familiar with mealybugs or cottony cushion scales, these will seem superficially similar.  The adults, sporting a completely different look, are smooth, gray to brown, and wedge-shaped, with prominent yellow eyes.  I can reliably report that their vision is very good.  Each time I approached the infested hosta stalks with my secateurs to snip a sample, they moved slyly around the stem to hide.  But even more remarkable is their jumping ability.  Once I got my sample into the office, opening the bag allowed the FLH’s to jump several feet, onto the shoulders of the Master Gardeners, which caused a mixture of consternation bordering on fright.  They ain’t called “hoppers” for nothing. 

Beauty And The Zits

Shooting skyward, over six feet tall, the handsome stranger peeked over the stockade fence.  This mystery was accompanied by some commoners, including daisy fleabane, Queen Anne’s lace, and pink cosmos, all living in the giant’s shadows in a narrow strip along the gravel.  Featuring short, dense, bottlebrush leaves on a few lanky stems, it was topped by brilliant scarlet, trumpet-shaped flowers.  Not a well-known wildflower, and not a nasty invasive, a little Wednesday morning detective work pinned this suspect as Ipomopsis rubra, a.k.a. Texas plume, standing cypress, or scarlet gilia.  A truly beautiful thing, it can tolerate hot, dry soil, and exists as a biennial or short-term perennial.  Hummingbirds, legendary for their attraction to flowers in shades of red, not surprisingly serve as pollinators of this species.  Probably not a garden stalwart to count on for a floral display, but lovely when it appears, a gift from the gardening gods who all too often send us crazy snake worms, tomato blights, and, as I’ll later describe, plant zits.

But where is it native?  This is a question recently asked and answered by a team of botanical researchers from the Universities of North and South Carolina.  They note that I. rubra was a well-known garden plant at the time of the Civil War.  Bartram, traveling through Georgia and Florida, described it growing wild in 1791, and even earlier, Johann Dillenius was studying the seeds and growing it at Oxford University in England in 1732.  Yet it remained unclear where exactly the species originated and where it later traveled, aided by humans.  By studying every available herbarium record, the scientists have concluded that standing cypress is native in small pockets, from low country North Carolina to Texas and Oklahoma, and lives in a wide variety of habitats, from prairie to seashore, from granitic soils to limestone.  Occurrences north of Arkansas and ranging all the way into Ontario are likely introduced, including the plant growing right here in Troy.

Much less desirable and even more obscure, the Rudbeckia psyllid is making its presence known in a local garden.  We first learned of this strange insect in 2016, when a Master Gardener found it in her brother’s garden in Massachusetts, feeding on the ever-popular botanical megastar Goldsturm Rudbeckia.  Apparently not an entomologist, the brother described the damage as “zits,” but a more prosaic description could be purplish-black spots with greenish raised bumps. 

Although the details of their biology remain obscure, these creatures have several names, including psyllids, triozids, and “jumping plant lice.”  When in the mature nymphal state, they are about one-eighth inch long, flattened and very colorful with a light green abdomen, red-orange head and thorax, and white wing pads. They feed by inserting their needle-like mouthparts into lower surfaces of the leaf and sucking out plant juices. This feeding causes a distinct, shallow depression and purplish spots.  We aren’t sure how much trouble these triozids might cause in the future, but acne is no acme of anyone’s summer.

Stout and The Tawny

The ditch lilies are out in force.  Excuse me for using what seems to be a tawdry name, perhaps you know them by the more accepted monikers tawny orange daylilies or Hemerocallis fulva.  Natives of Asia, legend has it they were brought here by sea captains bearing gifts for their wives (who might have longed for something shinier).  No doubt their bright orange flowers, with pale stripes and yellow throats, delighted nineteenth century gardeners, who were daylily-deprived.  Although each blossom lasts for only a day, they flower abundantly and possess a tenacious spirit, growing in a wide range of conditions and re-appearing after being mowed, grazed, or even sprayed with herbicide.  Given their ability to spread, H. fulva is considered an exotic invasive through much of the eastern U.S. and in pockets farther west.  But as intruders go, it is difficult to thoroughly dislike the eye-dazzling trumpets, which seem to scream, “its summer, its hot, and so am I!”

With both rhizomes (spreading roots) as well as tubers (swollen underground storage organs), tawny daylilies are tough customers which can move.  Oddly enough, for all the show of the flowers, most of the plants we see “in the wild” are somewhat useless from a biological perspective, since they rarely reproduce from seed.  This is because they are a triploid form, and while producing viable pollen, they are otherwise sterile.  This triploid form is scientifically known as Hemerocallis fulva variety fulva.  Other forms of H. fulva, many long-cultivated in Asia for food, medicine, and beauty, also made their way to European and American gardens, along with other species of daylilies, which total about twenty in number.

Providence smiled upon the daylily when a Midwestern farm lad met H. fulva in the 1890’s.  Young Arlow Burdett Stout was intrigued by his mother’s tawny daylilies, growing by the porch, which produced no seeds.  He went on to study botany at the University of Wisconsin, and soon earned a Ph. D. from Columbia.  By 1911 he was working at the New York Botanical Garden, where in the 1920’s he obtained daylily plants and seeds from Asia.  Keeping meticulous records, he started hybridizing, eventually making over 50,000 crosses and raising thousands of seedlings, which were evaluated and culled, leaving only about 100 plants good enough to become named varieties. 

And oh what varieties they were!  The first one to hit the market, in 1929, was ‘Mikado,’ a strong yellow with dark red bands.  One of ‘Mikado’s’ parents was, unsurprisingly, H. fulva.  Daylily popularity boomed with the introduction of more of Stout’s hybrids, encouraging other plant breeders to get involved as well.  Today we have almost 50,000 named hybrid daylilies in vast array of colors, forms, and sizes.  Each year, one new daylily cultivar wins the Stout Silver Medal, the highest honor given by the American Daylily Society.  2018’s winner, ‘Entwined In The Vine,’ is a lavender pink, with a darker lavender multi-colored eye, yellow-green throat, and rippled ivory edge.  You’ve come a long way, tawny.      

Surviving Shock

In spring, along with rising sap, a gardener’s passions run high.  Most of us need to get in the car, travel to several nurseries and garden centers, and exchange some green (cash) for some green (plants).  We tote our purchases home, plant them, then expect them to perform.  What do the plants do?  After realizing they aren’t in Kansas anymore, some adjust to their new digs just fine, while others sulk, entering a phase some call “transplant shock.”  That’s just what we want to avoid.

Plants live on a slower schedule than we do.  It is not at all uncommon for a newly-planted tree to take three to five years to re-establish itself in a new location.  During this long re-adjustment period, the tree may show a host of distress symptoms.  These range from delayed leaf emergence in the spring, smaller leaves, off-color leaves, and early fall color to stunted growth, stem dieback, secondary insect and disease issues, and limited flowering.  Of course, the ultimate expression of dissatisfaction is when the tree checks out and dies.  Good gardeners can read these symptoms and possibly provide some corrective action, while the non-horticultural remain blissfully ignorant, become helpless or get angry.  Unfortunately, there is no mandatory coursework required to enter plant parenthood, but maybe there should be.

The list of reasons why transplanted plants fail to thrive could fill a textbook, and since plants can’t talk, we probably don’t know the half of it.  Consider that some nursery plants are of poor quality – with undersized root systems, or excessively pot-bound roots, or stresses from pest issues or poor handling techniques.  Any sort of root damage along the way from the production farm to the sales lot to your home is likely to show up as dieback on top.  Mishandling plants can have lasting results.  I get a chuckle when I see trucks flying down the road, nursery stock hanging on in back, leaves blowing in a fifty mile-per-hour breeze.  What foliage does hang on after that joyride is likely to become a desiccated mess. 

Matching the plant to the site is critical.  Some plants like shade, some like sun, some tolerate both.  For example, a rhododendron is not a good plant for a hot, dry parking lot, but I’ve seen it attempted.  Heavy clay soils are likely to retain a lot of water and have low oxygen content, so choose plants which can tolerate “wet feet” here.  Sandy soils are likely well aerated but may lack moisture, so drought tolerant species are a must.  It pays to stick a shovel in the ground and take a look at the soil before choosing what to put in it.  Windy areas are typically difficult locales for broadleaved evergreen plants, and even needled evergreens may have trouble establishing there.  Places which are exposed to road salt require salt-tolerant plants.  Even simply low spots and high spots have their challenges.  While plant tags are helpful, there really isn’t any substitute for knowing the likes and dislikes of the plants you bring home. 

Tough and Easy

Can something be “tough and easy” at the same time?  I say “yes!” when it comes to gardening with perennials.  Plants are said to be tough when they tolerate poor soil, drought, insect pests, and the other perils Mother Nature periodically reigns down.  They’re easy if you don’t have to spend a lot of time staking, dividing, restraining, or otherwise futzing over them.  At North Greenbush’s Robert C. Parker School, where we have our Master Gardener Demonstration Garden, the wide-open, full sun site and compacted, clay-and-rock growing stratum have provided excellent proving grounds for what grows in a tough place.  We don’t have delphiniums, for example, because, while stunningly beautiful, delphiniums need the same constant nurturing as a preemie.  But we do have some attractive plants which can allow you to have (is it possible?) a life in addition to the garden.

Nothing is easier, for example, than ornamental grasses.  Some have incredible foliage, such as Blue Dune Lyme grass (Elymus arenarius ‘Blue Dune’), with its pale blue leaves and rather unkempt habit.  Also colorful is spiky blue fescue (Festuca ovina), which actually demands well-drained, poor soil and will languish if given too much love (see photo on right).  The main point of interest for feather reed grass, (Calamagrostis acutiflora), is the soft plumes of flowers and seeds which reach five feet or so above a clump of green foliage.  Many grasses, such as the switchgrasses (Panicum sp.), provide increased interest as the season progresses, as they flower and produce ornamental seedheads in late summer, and look snazzy well into fall.  Sedges are also easy to grow but often overlooked.  One of the most handsome (in my mind at least) is Carex siderosticha ‘Variegata,’ a low-grower and slow-spreader with green leaves edged in white.  Flashier ‘Banana Boat’ has yellow leaves edged in green.

The 1980’s wasn’t just the decade of big hair, glasnost and The Yugo, but also marked the widespread appearance of three perennial biggies:  Stella D’Oro daylily, Goldsturm rudbeckia and Autumn Joy sedum.  This trio is still extremely popular, almost to the point of redundancy, because they are so long blooming, tough and easy.  Stella was one of the first compact daylilies to re-bloom, and it is a rather vivid shade of yellow-orange (think processed American cheese).  For some reason, it is often planted with pink flowers, with mind-bending results.  Fortunately, newer, similar daylilies, such as ‘Happy Returns,’ ‘Purple de Oro’ and ‘Little Business’ have widened the possible color spectrum.  Goldsturm (in English “gold storm”) has golden daisy-like flowers with dark centers and a sunny black-eyed Susan look.  And while there is an entire wonderful world of sedums to explore, nothing compares to the joy of Autumn Joy’s pink flowers in, you guessed it, the fall (see photo on left).

 

Would you like something more exotic?  How about Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum) with its white flower spikes, pointy leaves and architectural stance.  Or wine cups (Callirhoe involucrata), magenta flowers on a sprawly, geranium-like plant which combines well with lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis) (photo on right) and lambs’s ear (Stachys byzantine).  All are tough, yet easy.

Mowing Matters

Living in a landscape of lawns as we do, it would seem knowing how to use a power mower would be second nature.  But as I watched someone blow clippings all over a sidewalk and hit a crabapple tree with a push mower from my office window, I discovered yet another teachable moment.

Let’s start with height.  Mowing grass that is 4 inches high down to 3 inches is just right.  This observes the “1/3 rule,” which states that removing just that much from the grass plant is best for it’s health.  It also leaves the grass tall enough to shade out weeds and maintain a generous root system, yet short enough that it looks good.  Using a mowing height shorter than 2.5 inches is asking for a weed invasion, since grasses are weakened and more light reaches the soil surface.  On some riding mowers, you just turn a dial or move a lever to set the height.  My walk-behind is more complex, but fiddling with the lever on each wheel and using a ruler makes it possible.

Clippings can cause controversy.  As a teenager I liked hitching the Parker Sweeper to my dad’s mower, since this meant that I didn’t have to spend hours raking and carting the mess to the compost pile.  But things have changed since the 70’s, even mowing.  About 30 years ago, researchers from Texas A & M University studied lawn clippings and came to a number of conclusions.  Unless they are clumpy, clippings don’t hurt the lawn, but in fact add back a tremendous amount of nutrients, and they don’t contribute to thatch.  Leaving clippings on the lawn makes less work, and also keeps them out of the landfills.  This was all big news at the time.  In fact, one of my first tasks as a new Cooperative Extension agent in 1989 was to educate folks about “grasscycling,” as we called it then.  Some folks warmed to the idea, while others kept on collecting.

The big breakthrough came when manufacturers perfected the mulching mower.  Using modified or multiple blades and new deck designs, these modern marvels chop up the clippings much finer than the mowers of yesteryear.  My dad’s old Simplicity made piles of debris, whereas my new John Deere produces very little.  I haven’t picked up clippings in years, and my lawn is all the better for it.  My neighbor still collects, bags, and hauls it all to the town dump, but only because his wife makes him do it.

Of course, challenges remain.  Mowing wet or tall grass can be problematic, and fast driving, dull blades or a clogged deck add to the misery.  But blowing grass clippings onto sidewalks and roadways or into waterways or storm drains is my biggest pet peeve.  Clippings are rich in nutrients, and end up polluting lakes and rivers.  In fact, a recent University of Minnesota study found that up to 36% of water pollution from households came from two sources:  grass clippings and pet waste.  So watch where waste goes.       

Veggie History:  Strawberries

Source: Cornell U.

It's shortcake season! Volunteer fire companies, church auxiliaries, and garden clubs now are busy posting signs daily along roadsides announcing "Strawberry & Short Cake Festivals," and the red berries  displayed in pint and quarter baskets   fill the stalls at local farmer markets. 

But did you know that these familiar strawberries (Fragaria x ananassa)  are actually an European  cultivar of two crossed wild varieties from the New World?

Native Americans  introduced European settlers to the eastern  variety, Fragaria virginiana. Although the settlers sometimes included it in their gardens, they generally picked the berries in the surrounding woods; and  Europeans returning to the  Old World took plants back to their  gardens.  In the early 18th century, F. virginiana  probably accidentally hybridized with another New World species, Fragaria chiloensis that grew along the West Coast and in South America to produce  our familiar F. x ananassa.   This hybrid quickly displaced Fragaria fresca (the "alpine strawberry" common throughout the Northern Hemisphere), in European gardens, it and soon traveled back across the Atlantic.  By the end of 18th century the new strawberry was being sold to gardeners like Jefferson by "plant men" in America. The rest is history, of course; but for a lot more information about strawberries, see Strawberryplants.org. 

And remember:

"I eat a lot of fruit because if I fill up on strawberries or an apple, then I'll have one small 

piece of cheesecake rather than two big pieces." - Tom Fridan

Adopted from a June, 2019 post from the Rensselaer County Vegetable Blog

by Irv Stephens, Master Gardener