Dwarf Makes Big Impact

Nature encourages us to slow down:  she doesn’t reveal her secrets to the high-speed crowd.  This was true even back in 1904, when two men were waiting on a train platform at Lake Laggan, in Banff, Alberta, Canada.  The train was late, and with time on their hands, the pair started roaming the surrounding landscape.  There is a good chance that what they found then grows in your garden today.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that the gents were from the Arnold Arboretum, the branch of Harvard dedicated to the collection and study of plants.  John George Jack’s career started in 1886 as the keeper of plant records, but his knowledge of both the theoretical and practical aspects of horticulture soon had him identifying specimens, caring for the live collections, and teaching students.  His walks around the arboretum to examine and discuss notable trees and shrubs became popular with the public.  His accomplice, Alfred Rehder, was a horticultural aristocrat, given that his father and grandfathers directed estates for European counts and princes.  He started out weeding at the Arnold for a dollar a day, but quickly became a taxonomist who eventually wrote the eminently useful “Manual of Cultivated Trees and Shrubs Hardy in North America,” a book that can still be found on gardener’s bookshelves. 

The plant the professors found was a conifer, but it stood only a few inches high.  The light green needles, ¼ to ½ inch long, radiated around the stem, making it radically different from the white spruces (Picea glauca) which stood nearby.  The specimens they brought back to Boston grew very slowly, only a couple of inches per year, and developed into extremely dense, conical shaped plants.  This habit provided the plant’s scientific name, Picea glauca ‘Conica,’ better known as the Dwarf Alberta Spruce.  Eighteen years later, the arboretum’s journal, the “Bulletin of Popular Information,” described the trees as almost three feet tall and “one of the most interesting and distinct of all the dwarf conifers.”

Things might have ended there, with the mini spruce living as a botanical curiosity behind the Arnold’s gates, but the “Bulletin” foretold the future when it stated that the plant was “getting attention in England” and was being grown in a few U.S. nurseries.  Soon, more gardeners became interested in rock gardens, which require small plants, and the Dwarf Alberta Spruce fit the bill.  In ensuing years, with the suburbanization of America, the shrinking of yards and the demand for plants with winter interest, sales of this spruce skyrocketed.  Today, these little fat Alberts grow in foundation plantings, backyards, at the strip mall and even in front of the U.S. Post Office in Castleton-on-Hudson, New York. 

While requiring not much fuss, owners of Dwarf Alberta Spruces much watch for two issues.  First, spider mites can cause needle death and drop, leaving the cone with an unsightly bald patch.  Second, specimens sometimes start to revert to the true spruce form, sprouting larger branches up top.  If not removed, the dwarf slowly becomes a strange hybrid monster, yet another natural mystery.  Examine the Castleton Albert and you can see both.    

How Dry I Am

I feel about my garden like I feel about a lot of things these days:  cautiously optimistic.  After weeks of fine blue skies and dry, hot days, we’ve had 0.8 inch of rain.  I’m grateful, but I’m not hanging up the hose just yet, as its not nearly enough to make up the deficit.  Yet rain sometimes begets rain, so I’ll cross my normally green thumbs, (now a bit wilted), and envision that the toasty trend will be reversed.   

After the recent sprinkles, I wonder if the plants have a sense of hope, too.  The daylily leaves have turned a pallid shade of green, while the hostas are seeing their leaves shrivel, one by one.  Kentucky bluegrass lawns are gray-green to brown, while weedy crabgrass remains a vibrant shade of lime.  My potted maroon elephant ear sulks when its bottom saucer dries daily.  The growth of wood sorrel, chamomile and spurge in the gravel driveway has slowed to a crawl, and few new weeds have germinated.  And our big black walnut tree has started dropping yellow leaflets.  I’m sure the roots go down to China, so soil moisture must be part of the trade war.

A gardener’s response to weeks of drought plus a heat wave is to water.  But are we watering wisely?  One deep watering, rather than several shallow sprinkles, will encourage deeper rooting.  Watering in the morning is best, since it allows plant foliage to dry as the sun intensifies, which reduces the potential for foliar diseases.  And putting water low to the ground, rather than spraying the entire plant as if it were a dog in need of a bath, is more efficient from a water conservation standpoint.  At a friend’s peony garden, the automatic sprinklers come on every day for a few minutes at 5:30 PM, violating all three rules.  The result is a white bloom of ugly powdery mildew spreading through the peony patch.     

Science, of course, can quantify the situation.  According the U.S. Drought monitor, eastern-most New York and is in “moderate drought,” the second of five progressively drier and scarier categories.  TV meteorologists are telling us we are about 5 inches short of precipitation for the year, and local communities with public water systems are starting to implement conservation measures.  

Cornell meteorologist Art DeGaetano of the Northeast Regional Climate Center reported on June 25 that during the previous week, evapotranspiration (ET) was very high at 1.25 to 1.5 inches.  While some may remember ET as the bike-riding extra-terrestrial, Art’s ET is the amount of water lost by a plant as it transpires, plus the amount of water lost from the soil as it dries.  For the plant’s sake, an amount of water equal to the weekly ET should fall, either from rain or irrigation, to keep things growing.  But when we have high heat, intense sun and no rain, ET soars and plants suffer.

Here’s my hidden agenda.  I’m hoping the best way to make it rain is to write about no rain.  Let’s see if it works.

De-weeding Sparks De-bate

As the world changes and events sometimes seem unbelievable, it is somehow reassuring to realize there will always be weeds.  I’m all for sitting back and letting weeds have their way in some places (my lawn is a botanical garden) but once control is relinquished in the vegetable garden or perennial border, you might as well throw in the trowel.

While nothing is better for mind or spirit than pulling and yanking, yet sometimes a tool is in order.  While I strive to remain impartial, I’ll mention two items some Master Gardeners favor:  the Cape Cod Weeder and the Cobra Head Weeder.  The former measures a little more than a foot long, has a contoured wooden handle with a right-angled slicing hook, and undercuts the weed.  The latter is shaped in a graceful curve terminating in a sharp, snake-shaped blade.  My personal favorite is a soil knife crafted from heavy stainless steel which can dig, uproot, scrape, slice and scratch with ease.  If available in Miss Marple’s day any of these would have been employed for mischief well beyond gardening.

Larger gizmos are also popping up like dandelions, many designed to remove these and similar tap-rooted species.  Many feature a long, straight handle with terminal claws and a foot brace to jam it into the soil.  The claws grab the weed, you pull back, and out it pops, if all goes well.  Using it on moist but not soggy soil and finding one that is well made with a handle proportional to your height seem to be the considerations here.  Other gadgets attach to a power drill and spin weeds out of the ground.  While this seems faster, perhaps the more violent force breaks roots rather than finessing them out, as you could do with human power.  Either tool might have enough novelty appeal to trick a non-gardening spouse or child into using it, for a half-hour at least.  Fixing the mulch or throwing some grass seed down after the weed is gone is critical, or else moves in – another weed!

Probes that give the weed a jolt of heat via electricity are also available.  The reviews run from wild success to dismal failure, and without a university trial (impartiality, again), it is difficult to judge their true efficacy.  All I can definitely say is you’ll need a long extension cord.

All this brings us to a hot topic, torches.  Fire can kill weeds, as well as most other forms of life, and devices that produce flames are used by some organic vegetable growers as well as landscapers to clear fence-lines and pavement cracks.  While mature, grassy or deep-rooted weeds may bounce back after one treatment, the growth of smaller annuals is usually effectively stopped.  Although thermal weeding is gaining popularity, extreme caution is needed.  Mulches, dried weeds or oily pavement can catch fire.  Desirable plants are easily fried (don’t use this on the lawn).  Only experienced, responsible adults should be involved.  Achieving a weed-free zone isn’t worth burning down the neighborhood.         

Thanks For Your Support

Like many gardeners, I find growing tomatoes an essential rite of summer.  I was asked (forced, really) from an early age into helping my dad with his plants.  Summer trips to see my grandparents meant admiring grandpa’s towering tomatoes – somehow his plants always topped eight feet, despite being in a small city backyard.  And then there’s the legend of an ancestral great- great- grandmother who was the first to grow tomatoes in Norway, on a small island called Stangholmen where her father was a lighthouse keeper. 

With this much tomato sauce in my veins, you’d think I’d be an expert, but I’m still tinkering with my techniques, searching for that holy grail full of tomato juice.

A lesson I learned early is that laziness doesn’t pay.  One year, dad decided to rototill the garden, plant the tomatoes, and let nature take its course.  Between the tomatoes, which were allowed to clamber and crawl everywhere, and 10-year old me, in charge of weeding and maintenance, this vegetable cart was hurling toward disaster.  While we picked a few off the tops of the plants, the voles and mice fattened on the fruits of my lackluster labor underneath, and the weeds grew taller than my little blonde head, producing a trauma of rank growth, rot and rodents which haunts me to this day.  I probably should seek counseling.

Most seasons dad pounded an eight-foot wooden stake next to each plant and periodically tied up the growth with ripped up bedsheets.  It gave the garden a “Grapes Of Wrath” sort of look, but was inexpensive and effective in growing great tomatoes.  Then we moved to tomato “cages,” cone-shaped contraptions of wire with thin legs which are installed on each plant like an upside-down dunce cap.  These work, although a large variety plant may topple its coop by late summer, so I recommend adding a supporting stake.  Cages boost yields, too – a Texas A & M University study found caged ‘Celebrity’ tomatoes produced 49% more fruit than those left to sprawl, one reason you’ll never hear tomatoes singing Roy Rogers’ tune, “Don’t Fence Me In.”

Once you decide to give your tomatoes a lift, the options for doing so are boundless.  Square tomato cages are now available, which fold down for easy storage.  Concrete reinforcing wire, five feet tall and heavy duty, can be fashioned into indestructible cages that are durable enough to pass down to tomato-growing grandchildren.  Or, forgo cages for the “Florida Weave.”  This system entails driving a stake between plants and at the end of each row, and weaving heavy twine in rows parallel to the ground eight inches apart among and up the stakes and plants.  While it sounds like a TV solution for hairless Southerners, it might work well for your New York ‘Big Boys.’     

My tomato garden is a complete high-tech system this year – raised beds, tomato cages with stakes, black plastic mulch, drip hose irrigation.  Here’s to great fruit and a healed psyche.