Michigan Garden Muse

Sleep Well

2010-01-02T14:01:00.003-05:00

The garden is soundly sleeping under about 15 inches (and counting) of snow. There have been holidays, work schedules, some rambling about here and there, and the gardener has been disinclined and uninspired to put pencil to paper and create a blog posting these last couple of months. Having written about the garden for one complete year, four seasons now, the story of it seems, for the time being at any rate, to have come full circle and to a full stop.

Apologies, dear readers, but this winter it just seems repetitive and unenlightened to address, yet again, the weary topics of garden catalogue browsing, bird feeding and watching, "structural" plantings for winter garden visual interest, or the other subjects to which garden writers turn during the dormant season to flesh out their columns. Can there really still be anyone, anywhere in the gardening world, who doesn't know what to put in a bird feeder?

Plus, maybe it is the curmudgeon in me, but my personal opinion is that the best looking objects in the winter garden, other than the dark and handsome evergreens, are all the things that are not plants -- rocks, tree trunks, snow drifts and dunes, bird houses, benches, garden art. Ornamental grasses, thistles, sedums and other plants and seedheads widely recommended to be left intact into winter to add attractiveness to the garden landscape look, to my eyes, simply dead and dessicated. Grey or brown or blackened with frost, they just aren't an appealing feature of the winter garden, and detract from rather than enhance its winter wardrobe. Winter is not the season for showcasing plants in the garden. They are somnabulant, and just ought to be left in peace.

And, for now, Michigan Garden Muse will also be left in peace. Perhaps the gardener will return next month, in two months, next spring. Until such time, a very happy, healthful, good cheer and glad tidings New Year to all, and to all a good night.

Green Theology

2009-11-11T12:48:00.003-05:00

What is a garden? It could be acres of tailored woods and meadows, pathways, ponds, topiary and pergolas. It could be a tapestry of wildflowers in a seam of formerly neglected dirt along a schoolyard fence. It could be herbs and tomatoes, lettuces and broad beans, sunflowers and marigolds in a big city tenement backyard. It could be a haiku of cherry blossom, peony, arched laquer red bridges, swans and raked sand. It could be fat wooden barrels of impatiens, snapdragons, daisies and English ivy standing sentinel at the doors of a firehouse. It could be clay pots of jade, aloe, sempervivums and fountain grass strung shoulder to shoulder along a high rise balcony. It could be teacups of African violets capturing the sunshine on a kitchen windowsill. Or it could be, as in my garden, a small village lot quilted with old-fashioned country garden stalwarts and favorites.

We've now come full circle of one whole year in these writings on the garden. Winter has come to call once again, drawing down the window shades on the sun and icing closed the gateway to the garden. This year, watching the big-bellied snow clouds somersault across the sky, I think of tropical islands and the desert Southwest, Hawaii and the Florida Keys. Places where gardening goes on all year long.

The English landscape gardener, Gertrude Jekyll, posited, “A love of gardening is a seed that, once planted, never dies.” Her sentiment is a perfectly accurate summary of my emotional relationship to the fine art of gardening. Every year, as incremental knowledge and skill in the practice of this art are sought after, obtained and heightened; as thrilled acquaintance is made with previously unknown plant species; and as the garden in my keeping grows ever more populated, multicultural and mature; so also grows apace my love of gardening. It's fair to say the fruits of my gardening labor – physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual – provision me with the greatest happiness and fulfillment of any métier I've turned my hand to since parenthood.

Gardening is as definitively an artistic pursuit as painting, composing music, choreographing dance or writing novels. Earth is the artist gardener's blank tablet, upon which a uniquely individualized creation is constructed, layer after assiduous layer. Like any work of art, the garden can never truly be declared a fait accompli, can always benefit from a smidgen more fine tuning, another wash of color, sowing actions better suited to the setting.

Given the seminal position gardening holds in my heart, mind and way of life, why do I dwell in a northern, wintry clime? Sometimes we choose a place to live, and sometimes a place chooses us. Lake coastal northwestern Michigan chose me. Wooed me, petitioned and cajoled me here, and it does not look fit to let me go anytime soon. We get wed to a particular place because it (or somewhere closely resembling it), was the landscape to our childhood, which we all ache to recapture in some ways; and because the place shelters family, friends, neighbors with whom we want to keep close proximity; and because the physical attributes of the land, the colors and contours, stones and waterways, flora and fauna, quality of light and darkness, act upon us as balm and inspiration, soothe us and stimulate us like nowhere else we've hung our hat.

Hence it is that whenever a gardener finds herself to have, in the fullness of life, put down strong rootstock, be it in city or country, in groves of buildings or of trees, studio apartment or suburban tract or log cabin, in that place of her belonging she will ply her chosen craft and make a garden. The definition of a garden has no fixed size, shape, locale or cultivars. It is not any list of characteristics, however lengthy or broad, but rather is a testament, sworn in seed, soil, moisture and light. Here I am, it states, here shall I abide, find a handful of earth, plant, nurture, believe in tomorrow, and raise up life. A garden is a womb, a faith, and a hope.

The Contumacious Gardener

2009-10-22T14:19:00.004-04:00

The bulbs put into the ground for the fall planting season over the last couple weeks: dark purple Dutch iris; windflower anemones; double-blossom mixed yellow and white narcissus; cherry vanilla double-blossom tulips; Thalia snow-white narcissus; and hyacinths. All these bulbs enlarge upon the existing colonies of their species already in place in the garden, building its repertoire for a broader, bolder and longer yield next spring. The anemone and tulip bulbs, which are to deer, rabbits and squirrels what hot fudge sundaes are to the gardener, once placed in the ground and before covering over, got sprayed to soaking wet with garlic and egg liquid deer repellent, to improve their chances of staying in their beds and not being precipitously dug up for a critter dinner.

The garden has three large round mats of dianthus plantings which have increased their diameter annually and resemble a plush green carpet all spring, summer and fall. They're aged approximately four to five years, and this past spring, for the first time, produced only a scant smattering of flowers during bloom time in late May and June. With these, and the creeping phlox whose spring display also was diminished this year, composted cow manure was dug into their root stock and layered around their crowns. Hopefully the fresh, rich soil will feed them up over the winter sufficient to bring back their profuse bloom habit.

After cutting down the yellowed, floppy leaves of the Siberian iris and daylillies, the long leaf blades were sheared into lengths of three inches or so, and layered back around the plant cores. Thus do the leaves get put to use as green mulch, warmth, and protection to the soil and plant roots from erosion by the rains, or freezing and thawing and heaving from winter temperature fluctuations. The chrysanthemums, some of which are still doing their beautiful work of fall flowering, are not going to be cut down to the ground this year. Several gardening professionals have mentioned in recent writings that mums do better through winter in cold climates with their leafy, woody stems left intact to shelter the plant crowns from the weather. As they finish flowering, I snip off the dead flower heads, and trim the leafy torso of the plant down only half way, leaving it three or four inches above ground until next spring's advent of more gentle fahrenheits.

Other trimming, tidying up is ongoing, but the bulbs no doubt mark the last gardening (as in actually planting something) to be done this year. There is an old saying that one can bury a lot of troubles by digging in the dirt. Certainly that is true for me, heaven knows the soil of my garden is laden deep and wide with truckloads of troubles, worries, melancholia, and fears worked out and into it over the years. Gardening is the most potent, immediate and efficacious treatment for unhappiness I've ever come across. Getting the hands dirty out of doors and sowing possibility and hope, witnessing and tending to the physical fruits of one's labor, beats the pants off any pharmacopoeia or counseling on offer to the sore of heart. And so it is with sadness and feelings of dread that the gardener downs tools and watches the inexorable advance of the season of dormancy and death across the meadows, hills and forests.

The trees are emptying of leaves, autumnal gales and rainstorms rudely tumble the afternoons away. Frost falls down at night, the sun offers only a cold shoulder to the days. Any gardener who claims to like the wintertime is surely, at the least, disingenuous. Yes, the woods boast wonderful hot-coal colors in late October, shiny chestnuts and sweet, beanie-capped acorns can be gathered, but to the gardener, all this brown, gold and flame-orange means death is coming creeping, gnawing relentlessly away at the green, the alive. As autumn marches on toward a frozen, still-life tomorrow, the gardener can do nothing except bundle up self and garden against the walloping cold a northwestern Michigan winter invariably delivers.

Preparing the garden to withstand the slings and arrows of another winter, and laying in bulbs to better clothe it in resplendent color and output next spring, hasn't been enough, this year, to tranquilize my discontent and woe that summer is finished, another year of gardening has ended, winter is nigh. The turning of the seasons is part and parcel of living in a northerly climate, and necessary to the existence of many of my favorite garden dwellers – the lilacs, the peonies, the forsythia and high bush cranberry. And yet, and yet, maybe it's the too short, too cool summer we were allowed this year; maybe it's the bittersweet knowledge that the penny-candy pink and pale apricot mum flowers sitting so prettily in china jugs on my tabletops are the very last flowers I will be able to cut from the garden this year; maybe it's that the top third of the quaking aspen tree has already been burgled of all leaves by the windstorms, even as the leaves hold their shimmering gold final fling with color – but I do not, this year, go gladly into the long garden goodnight of winter. I don't want it, I don't like it. I go to the Lake Michigan shore, take off my moccasins, and wade defiantly up to my knees in its pellucid 50-degree waters. I contemplate going for another swim (insane idea), and exhort the temperature gods to go against all odds and rise, rise.

It will probably take nothing short of the first big blizzard to put a halt to this feckless, childish, contrary behavior. Until those furbelows of snow come swooping into the garden, the gardener will probably persist in impotent resistance to Mother Nature's procession down the ancient, necessary pathways of the seasons, in all their tempests, wisdom and power.

Think and Think Again

2009-10-05T13:50:00.003-04:00

This year the foundation border under the front living room windows flagged around mid-summer, taking on a peaked and slightly famished appearance. Every season one or another spot in a perennial bed or hedgerow grouping or flowering border will do this, suddenly becoming anemic or revealing under-populated areas, plantings that are growing more feeble instead of more fecund, and calling out for re-invigoration. Once the columbine, bleeding hearts, delphiniums and bee balm began winding down in late July, this south-facing border sported more vacancy than arresting occupants.

Much of the blame for the under-employment of this very visible sunny patch falls to the holly bush. Meant to anchor and fill up the back of the border with high gloss, leafy, spreading branches and clusters of red berries, the blue-girl and blue-boy holly couple had not grown above knee high in six years of residency. More distressingly, despite the arranged match-up of a male and female of the species for pollination purposes, the missus had never grown even a single berry.

The location is a hot one, getting sun nearly all day long, although the river birch and Cleveland pear centered in the front yard have matured enough in the last couple years to alleviate the sunbath somewhat with shade. Still, the strong summer light, heat and dryness seemed to be undermining the holly's prospects for vigor and expansiveness, and forcing the conclusion that it was simply uncongenially sited. So more accurately, the gardener who placed the holly there because she wanted green and red bushiness splayed picturesquely against the front house wall, is in fact really the culprit who must bear the blame.

Unwilling to give up on the mistreated holly, and the capacity I am sure still lurks suppressed within its woody loins for putting forth a bird-feast of red berries, a remedial relocation was undertaken forthwith. A new home along the east side of the house, shady and cool in the afternoons, was chosen. A day before the move, a trench was dug with a shovel down two feet or so, in a circle around the shrub and a couple feet out from its trunk, to sever the roots and telegraph to the holly that changes were in the offing, thus giving it a day to get used to the idea and to ameliorate the physical trauma attendant upon being dug up out of the ground. The following day, a large hole was excavated in the new domicile, thoroughly soaked with a couple gallons of water, and lined with bedding bottom and sides of composted cow manure. The holly was then gently unearthed and moved, with as much of its root ball intact as possible. Well watered in and kept watered bi-weekly since then, to all outward appearances it seems to have taken quite blissfully to the transplantation, even after just two months shining green and glowing and, methinks, more flush with health.

The gaping wound in the front border was sutured up, the same day, with a new clethra summersweet ruby spice shrub. This newcomer is an upright, fan-shaped bush, that flowers from mid-July through summer's end with bottle brush candles of flowers in soft pink. The flowers give forth a rich, incredibly sweet fragrance, which one hopes will waft through the front windows and infuse the rooms of the house with one of summer's headiest perfumes. Flowering occurs on new wood with a clethra, so future pruning for shaping can be done at will, spring, summer or fall. Butterflies and hummingbirds find its nectar irresistible, and in a conducive setting, it can grow six to eight feet tall.

A summersweet shrub is an augmentation to the garden I have specifically coveted for quite some time, since being introduced to its munificent flowering talent and almost decadent, intense scent in other gardens and along country lanes and creeksides. The garden can always use more summer into autumn bloomers, as well. This shrub makes an excellent foundation plant, according to the information sheet printed out from the Ohio State University extension service website, after the clethra was installed in its new dwelling and I decided to do a little investigation into the finer points of its personality. For preference, the information sheet went on, clethras incline to moist and shady soils. Uh oh.

And hence begins another campaign by the gardener to encourage and raise up an adoptee in a less than optimal, poorly thought-through situation. Maybe the annually widening, deepening shade of the birch and pear trees will offer adequate, compensatory canopies to offset the gardener's shortcomings in advance planning and research. Maybe – no, certainly – the gardener has dimwittedly consigned herself to hours of auxiliary watering down the next few years of hot summer months to come. Maybe the shade and extra watering, taken together, will be just the ticket to stimulate the clethra to live up to its name, and be a big, bushy helping of summer sweetness in the front border. If not, then yet another re-think and revision to the border will, one future day, need to be done.

The garden is never entirely what the gardener envisions and wishes it to be. Plants don't always like their placement. Pest deterrents are never one-hundred percent fail-proof. Weather isn't always kind, seeds are not always fruitful. With even the best will, intentions and assiduous labor, not all garden components will prove their mettle and grow up well and successful. Reinvention, rejuvenation, relocation and other forms of change, flexibility and adaptation are unavoidable concomitants of the pursuit of a bountiful garden. The gardener's lot in life is to be a constant copy editor of her creations. Especially when, as with yours truly, garden design is directed more by desire and impulsiveness than careful, cross the t's and dot the i's forethought.

Garden Schooled

2009-09-20T14:04:00.003-04:00

Water, water, water. So has read the garden duty roster over the past few rainless weeks, thereby countermanding one of the core tenets of my gardening philosophy. Water is a cherished and finite resource on this green planet, and a guiding belief in building a garden has been that its plant life shall be capable of becoming, upon maturity, largely self-sufficient, self-propagating. A garden should co-exist harmoniously with nature rather than combating it, harming or depleting it. Yes, well – chance would be a fine thing!

The reality, of course, is that aside from maybe a prairie wildflower meadow or a desert cacti bed, there's no such creature as the autonomously thriving, no-maintenance garden. Whether it be taking measures to fend off omnivorous deer, rabbits, aphids and other critters who view the garden as their personal banquet hall; or schlepping and shoveling mulch, compost and other soil-enriching and protective materials; or broadcasting runnels of fresh water up and down the garden when clear skies rule the heavens for days on end; or any of the score of other cossetting, supportive, laborious chores that perforce must be completed – a healthy, lively garden can be sustained only with the continual attention of and intervention by the gardener.

All the 25 shrubs and 11 trees planted over the years in my garden are native to Michigan, supposed to be well-suited to growing robustly in the particular kind of environment on offer here. They also number among the more feisty, hardy contenders of the plant world, rather than hailing from the squads of the fragile and easily perishable. The lilac, forsythia, American high bush cranberry, red maple and oak, aspen and river birch, and the other species are, indeed, often found growing old and going strong in deserted farmyards and untended forest land throughout the state.

While I celebrate whatever happy circumstance of micro-ecosystem maintains such wilderness dwellers, the fact remains that none of the trees or shrubs in my garden came here by choice or natural selection of just the very spot where they could flourish into a ripe old age. All were brought to their garden location by my hand, all are still in the childhood of their possible lifespans. And although it contravenes my desire and intention, goes against the grain of how I believe one should garden in the best of all possible worlds, these youngsters need watering when it doesn't rain.

I feel responsible to and for the trees and shrubs in the garden. To leave them to their own resources come hail or high water, after purposefully adopting them and bringing them home to new lives in the garden, does not seem right nor fair (not to mention being spendthrift foolish). The trees and shrubs would likely survive without supplemental water, but if they get less than a couple certain inches per week, they will toil and gasp their way through winter, their viability will be weakened, and I'm persuaded they will never thereafter be as strong or as capable of longevity and fullness as they could have been with a modicum of gardening care. Evidence of the dangers of benign neglect is currently on view in most of the (unwatered) curbside trees throughout the village, whose leaves are already largely dry, curling at the edges, and burnt reddish brown, while those in gardens and by watercourses hold their vibrant green over 95 percent of their foliage.

For as many years as I can recall (back to around the mid-1900s), a reliable annual component of Michigan's weather calendar has been the onset of a brilliant course of Indian summer weather on or about Labor Day weekend. It generally persists for at least a couple of solid weeks, and some years holds its ground right through the month of September. It features flax blue skies, hot sunny days that bring the crops in the fields and orchards to harvest-ready perfection, and scant to no rainfall. Occasionally the odd early frost or sudden deluge breaks this annual pattern (as well as the corn, pumpkin and apple farmers' hearts), but that is the exceptional year, not the rule. Indian summer in Michigan can be counted upon probably nine years of out each decade to usher in a wonderful hiatus to the onward march of autumn toward winter, a bonus few weeks of summer weather wherein the gardener gladly swaps weekly hours of watering for the opportunity to bask in sunshine, warmth and a few more swims in the untroubled lakes and rivers.

Weather means a lot, means more to you when you garden. This heightened mindfulness and cognizance of weather is but one of the sundry ways that cultivating a plot of earth connects the gardener closer to the natural, living world. To garden conscientiously makes one a student in the lifelong curriculum of nature. It is a course of study that can never be completed, but always has new lessons and a further wisdom up its sleeve. Gardening is a kind of schooling in which the door never closes, the mind keeps getting the gauntlet thrown down to open wider and take in more knowledge, and no final bell of dismissal ever rings. And thank goodness for that!

Best of Autumn

2009-09-08T11:38:00.004-04:00

In ancient China, where the earliest known chrysanthemums (called Chu) were cultivated as a flowering herb as far back in the mists of time as 1,500 years before Christ, the plant was believed to hold the power of life. The flower petals and sprouts were eaten as salad greens, the leaves brewed as a tea, and an infusion of the roots championed as a cure for headache. Brought to the western world many centuries later in the mid-1700s by Swedish botanist Karl Linnaeus, he it was who christened the plant with the name chrysanthemum, from the Greek words for “golden flower.” Golden and one of the most glorious forms of life in the autumn garden it assuredly remains in the present day.

If springtime means the portal to the garden is swinging open upon the magical, tantalizing cornucopia of all the wonders to come, in autumn the doorway is slowly narrowing toward its close. The sophisticated, finely tailored, stately-paced chrysanthemum places a well-shod foot into the garden doorway and holds it firmly ajar for another month or two of color, scent and bloom, when nearly all the other plants are discarding their bib and tucker, and turning with drooping eyelids towards the long winter sleep.

Because chrysanthemums keep us in the company of flowers during September and October, they number high on my fairly brief list of favorite features of the autumn season. Their sedate, regal progress through the cycle of growth and bloom mirrors the slowing, more peaceful pace that is a second gift of the season. The garden ceases the mad dash that characterized it in spring, as well as the busy, dawn-to-dusk endeavors of summertime, and grows more quiet, contemplative and serene. Resting on the laurels of its high season accomplishments, it envelops the plants, the birds, the bees, and the gardener in welcome respite from continual toil. In autumn the garden folds us to its ample bosom, encourages repose and reflection among its languid and leafy bowers, whispers and hums lullaby-style in place of its bravura choruses of spring.

The colors autumn dons are another of its treasures. Jubilant pink, exclamation-point white, buttercup yellow and bold-boy blues give way to warm, firelight, harvest tints, the tawny garments of the garden wardrobe. Autumn is the color of honey, of burnished copper along the fringes of the peony and red oak leaves, and lavender-mint shading in the bird's nest baskets of the closing Queen Anne's lace flowerheads. The colors of spring are youthful exuberance which cannot wait to flaunt itself before our gaze, the colors of autumn are mature, mellow, gentle on the eyes, and reveal themselves in a long, decorous meander across many dappled weeks.

Spring bestows heady rejuvenation in the garden, autumn gives us time. It takes our hand and strolls us unhurried along its dense banks of stippled dune and fountain grasses, rust-red cattails and cabernet sumac, and day by day, layer by measured layer, it delicately paints the deciduous forests through months of sumptuous, molten color. The tree color tour in the northern Midwest is never an event of a single day, weekend or week. It isn't one of nature's all-in-an-instant, cataclysmic occurrences, such as a volcano, earthquake, tornado. The changing of the leaves takes place as a gradually developing acquaintance, beginning with just a brushing of the tree's fingertips at the outermost edges of the crown, then moving downward and inward at a snail's pace across the limbs of the tree. Each day the friendship with color advances by wee increments and deepens, until the ultimate culmination is reached in the tree's full-flung love affair with autumn's brushed reds, golds and chestnut browns.

Weather is the last best facet of autumn for the gardener. Once St. Bartholomew's “cold dew” comes falling nightly round about August 24, even in drought years the garden reclaims a green cast to its foliage and is refreshed. Cool nights averaging in the forties typify September and October, perfect for sleep and windows left open to the freshening air. The days awaken misty, with thin shawls of fog on meadows and hillsides, then warm rapidly into hot, sun-filled afternoons exactly right for dawdling down the shady rows of an apple orchard, plucking the ruby-ripe fruit.

Autumn brings regular, dependable, sometimes quite spectacular rain showers and lightning storms, nature's unequalled fireworks that burn across the long, open horizon of the big lake. Few pleasures can match that of a Great Lakes mighty thunderstorm rolling in, its waterfalls drumming against the rooftop and windowpanes whilst the gardener sits snug and warm at the hearthside, knowing the trees, shrubs, and flora are drinking their fill, soaking up the fresh water that is the garden elixir of life. Autumn weather is the gardener's able assistant, recharging life in the garden and refueling its stores for the months ahead. Thus in its unassuming, slow, lustrous way, autumn returns like a comfortable old friend, bearing its special gifts and making itself very welcome.

Two Tomatoes

2009-09-01T12:58:00.004-04:00

Two tomatoes, four radishes. Therein is the sum total of fresh produce yielded to date by the small vegetable patch put in this summer. The patch was sown in early June with one row each of seeds of sweet green pepper, radishes and cucumbers, and two six-inch high Early Girl tomato plants. Then along came, according to weather records, the coolest, most rainy Michigan summer in about one hundred years.

The tomato plants gained only about six new inches in upward growth all summer, and each managed to generate only one tomato. These fruits are still smaller than a tennis ball and still green, though one began to show tracings of a pink blush this week, so they should ripen enough for consumption by mid-September. Truth be told, the minimal yield and growth probably cannot be blamed solely upon the weather, although that did play its inauspicious part. Three doors down the block, my neighbor's tomato plants stand a much healthier four-feet high, with lots of tomatoes, albeit also small and still stubbornly green. The neighbor fertilized her seedlings, I alas did not, mistakenly trusting in nature and composted manure to feed them sufficiently, and having a reluctance to introduce and use foreign chemicals, even organic ones, in the garden.

The bell peppers sprouted, and tiny sprouts they remain to this day, apparently having decided this was all the maturation they could or would accomplish under the cool, cloudy skies. The cucumbers initially showed great promise, sprouting within a couple days of seeding and developing into a leafy, healthy row of young plants with plenty of yellow flowers. Beyond the surge of those first weeks they simply stopped, and nary even a single cucumber has emerged.

As for the radishes, the plants bounded up, green and thick with leaves, put forth a sweet display of soft pink flower heads, and then bolted straight into seed production while the nascent radishes beneath the soil got no bigger than a fingernail and no wider than a pencil. My guess (and that's all it is since my agriculture know-how is obviously sorely lacking), is that the row should have been thinned rather radically at the sprout stage to give those left more elbow room, as it were, and as advised on the seed packet instructions. I'm cowardly and disinclined when it comes to culling eager young sprouts, and did not do so. The four little radishes salvaged, cleaned up and eaten had a great, pungent and pronounced flavor, but taken together added up to not even a whole mouthful. As far as this first foray into vegetable gardening goes, let's just say it's very fortuitous farmer's markets abound in these northern Michigan parts.

Every year without fail or hesitancy, Mother Nature redesigns the garden laid out for the summer, sometimes in ways to the gardener's liking, sometimes decidedly not. In the present season, besides stunting the vegetables in their infancy, her less favored, wholesale, scatter-shot propagation ran to invasive ground pine throughout the plot, from woodchip-covered unplowed ground to flower beds; the apparent assassination of half a dozen of last year's hardy (ha!) chrysanthemums; spotted knapweed, white campion, common mullein and tough-as-nails weed grasses everywhere; and the self-seeding replication of one variegated sage into a half-dozen new plants, volunteering round and about the flower bed that formerly housed most of the chrysanthemum victims.

On the plus side, to give her due credit, Mother Nature took kindly to the bunches of extraneous lavender flowers pruned off last August and spread about the yard as green mulch, giving the garden this summer a dozen or more new, surprise lavender plants now on the go, and viable enough for transplanting to any bed or container which could use filling out. Likewise, nature brought the garden random new outcroppings of pretty little snow-in-summer and violas; ten or twelve big, confident, flower-bedecked stands of the always beguiling, olden-times evocative Queen Anne's lace; a half-dozen or so plants of the late summer showgirl, black-eyed Susan; and a real plethora of decorative hoary alyssum and ox-eye daisies. A watchful eye does need to be kept on these wildflower volunteers, as given their breeding habits they are but the thin edge of the wedge, and allowed half a chance and a free hand, will gladly migrate and reproduce throughout the whole yard, becoming a bit too much of an otherwise mostly good thing.

The British gardener and writer Hugh Johnson has said, “no two days are the same in one garden.” To forestall disappointment, a similar expectation really ought to inform our approach to each new season in the garden, wherein the standouts and fond companions of last year may or may not return for another fine go-round in subsequent summers. The garden is, after all, just a microcosm of the beautiful, ephemeral, temporal Earth we inhabit, nothing here is permanent nor certain except constant change. Every summer surely brings losses to the garden, false starts and failures. Fortunately for the gardener, it just as surely bestows gains, surprise packages and unexpected success stories. And that's what keeps the gardener pulling on the tattered old straw hat, hitching up the dungarees, and heading out to get down, dirty and atwirl with nature, year after year.

Pack Mule Season

2009-08-20T15:22:00.004-04:00

It is only the middle of August and it's already begun. Truthfully, it goes on all year except when the garden is under snow, but August through November marks the apogee. Summer's end days up to first snowfall is the season when the gardener's job most closely resembles that of a pack mule.

Cutting back and away the greying lavender blooms, spent Shasta and Ox-Eye daisies, yellowing stalks of phlox, delphinium and daylilly, seeded heads of coreopsis. Loading up the wheelbarrow with all the wilting detritus, and trundling it through several trips across the uneven ground of the neighborhood green space to a wild woodlot where it can be dumped out of sight among the thickets of brush, and maybe start a wildflower patch in a spot that actually is wild. Re-loading the wheelbarrow with sacks of composted manure to feed and replenish the beds where bulbs, peonies, iris and creeping phlox are gathering strength and nutrition for next year. Trucking fresh mounds of cypress mulch to smarten-up bare patches and give protection to the soil cover of perennials. The larger and more productive a garden is, the greater will be the number of gardener's hours of slog and hack and haul, from summer straight through the autumn.

Clearing away and fall bulb planting just do not confer anywhere near the same measure of enjoyment as do the laying in and sowing of spring and early summer. The latter is a labor of love, the former a drudgery carried out with an achy-breaky heart. The payoff that end-of-season garden work will yield (apart from a more spic and span appearance), is in the far distant future of next year. The gardener is embarked upon a rather melancholy reduction of garden companions, a long-drawn series of goodbyes for another whole year to each species as it finishes its turn before the footlights, and segues from glowing energy to a bedraggled demise. The best days in the garden – the childlike optimism of spring and the cornucopia bounty of summer – have waned, the prospect of the garden's annual disappearance into winter hibernation looms upon the horizon.

Each year since planted six summers ago, pruning the lavender plants alongside the front walks has become a more onerous task. Begun as six seedlings, each about the size of my forearm, they have annually grown so luxuriantly as to now form almost a continuous shrubbery on either side of the walk for nearly 20 feet in length, 3 feet in width, 2 feet in height, generating tons of flowers every season. Completely self-sufficient and drought-indifferent since their one-year birthday, each late summer (well before any slightest possibility of a damaging fall of frost), they are pruned back by the recommended one-third of their greenery. This must needs be done to stimulate next year's fresh leafing-out and flowering.

The last couple years, the pruning has been more like half the bushy growth, just to prevent the lavender from totally obliterating the sidewalk and nearby companion plantings. One is not supposed to cut into the leafless “old wood” of the lavender trunks, on pain of possible death of the plant, but the gnarled and thickened wood now stretches up and out about a foot from the ground on these plus-size specimens. Perhaps the season will come when the proportion of woodiness exceeds the foliage and flowers, and they will have to be excised and replaced. I don't believe there is any means of keeping lavender from eventually going this route, as how could one stop a shrubby plant's trunk from increasing in density and size while it is alive and growing?

The rudbeckia Prairie Sun sown in seed in June have attained only about 6 inches in height this cool, rainy year, they may not reach flowering stage before the killing frosts descend. And another source of heartache, the dratted deer passed through night before last and ate all the at-peak flowers and the buds on the hybrid roses and the daylillies. They caught me unawares, after rainfall had washed the plants clean of sprayed deer repellent.

Thank the stars and planets for the Russian sage, ornamental grasses and the chrysanthemums during summer's diminishment. The sage is a 6-foot spray of long, lilac plumage, and bears a honey-spice fragrance more pleasing and less earthy than other sages. From now until winter, the miscanthus grasses, blue oat grass and switchgrass are in their glory, full, covered in feathery fronds, capturing and refracting the watery rainbow shafts of northern Michigan coastal light and shadow. The mums, in tints of ochre, cotton candy, burgundy, eggshell white and burnished gold, are just now beginning to peek open their flower buds. That's why I love chrysanthemums so, the rare flower that holds its promise close to the chest until ready for August-September delivery.

Chrysanthemums are the last chapter in the big, multi-layered, beloved novel of the garden. The revelations and tying up given in this final chapter are savored, but the end page is still approached with the sadness of knowing that soon it will all be over and the cover closed. But for now, even with the bale hauling, the garden is still a very good read.

Paean to the Daylilly

2009-08-10T14:08:00.004-04:00

This is the summer of the large, completely smitten crush on daylillies. While always appreciated as reliable, hard-working border dwellers, this year they've knocked my socks off and given me new, heightened affection and awe. Perhaps because this year there was no offsite day job keeping me absent during the hours when their blooms spread wide to the sun and look most splendid. Being and working in the garden pretty much daily also meant spent blooms got deadheaded as soon as finished, letting the lillies stay comely and flush with only fresh flowers. And then there is the dizzying number of choice new hybrids.

The tiger lillies initiated my new-found dotage. Halting me in my tracks at the local nursery, three of the striking tall soldiers, with backwards-curving tangerine petals handsomely dotted over in chocolate spots (and why they aren't leopard rather than tiger lillies, I do not know), were promptly scooped up and brought to a new home under my front windows, among a bed of various cousins of the species. At once exotic, warm and impeccably beautiful, their sequentially flowering multiple buds kept up a continuous parade of new flowers from mid-July straight through to last week.

Rewarded daily with the on-going bursts of plush color and perfect posture of the tiger lillies, I was hooked. Subsequent trips to the nursery found me purposefully seeking out the lilly stock, discovering and bringing home several additional new, lovely hybrids – Pandora's Box, Strawberry Candy, Casa Blanca – in mouthwatering tints of cream, buttermilk, plum, peach, raspberry.

The earliest recorded mention of daylillies occurs in the writings of Confucius, some 500 years before Christ. Originally a wild flower of the Orient and Syria, lillies lend themselves so readily to hybridization and replication that there are now tens of thousands of varieties available, with millions of diverse, sumptuous color combinations, from the bold to the gossamer. Some hybrids like Stargazer and Casa Blanca have perfumes so rich and decadent they can waft scent across yards of space. In the first half of the 1900s in the U.S., daylillies were regarded as rather common and called “ditch lillies,” for their sturdy workhorse habit of naturalizing on roadsides, on the banks of creeks and ponds, across fields and untended urban lots.

Daylillies will thrive in a huge spectrum of climates, from south Florida to northern Canada. They are rugged, endlessly versatile, and so adaptable as to fare excellently in sandy soil or clay, inner city or countryside, waterside or in droughty regions. They do best with 4 to 6 hours of sunshine daily, turn their faces toward the direction of the sunlight (something to be mindful of when deciding where to place them in the garden), and welcome a bedding of compost after flowering and in autumn. They don't want fertilizing – which can actually render them more susceptible to disease – are naturally quite pest- and disease-resistant, and don't require supplemental watering once their first growing season is past. Further, they boast the desirable naturalizing habit of spreading at the plant crown, sending up new fans of leaves beside existing ones. The many cultivars offer blooming season that can extend from early summer through fall frosts, as well as everlasting bloom varieties that keep flowering all summer long. Even when not in flower, the hillocks of slender green leaf blades of the mounding-type lilly add attractiveness to the garden.

“The Daylily, a Guide for Gardeners,” is a big, thorough and loving volume by John Peat and Ted Petit, from Timber Press, Portland, Oregon. It can school gardeners in all knowledge needed to grow daylillies, it rapidly recruits the reader into the fan club for this strappy, solid, beauteous performer, and the coffee-table size book astonishes with the scores of photos of many incredible, extant varieties in all their undeniable glamor. Present day incarnations of the daylilly have come a very long way indeed from holding the position of drab scullery maid of the garden. Some of the frilled, narrow-petal hybrids, such as Crocodile Smile, Thin Man, and Wild Child, resemble the most extraordinary, sensational of orchids in their colors and elegant shapes.

Evidently, once could go on expanding a daylilly collection endlessly, certain to run out of space long before exhausting even a fraction of possible superb choices. Now there is a thought to warm the cockles of the heart of a gardener in the midst of a summer of daylilly love.

How to Look at the Garden

2009-07-23T13:45:00.004-04:00

July is the month when a legal guardian or conservator really ought to accompany me on trips to the garden nursery, ostensibly to restock compost and mulch supplies, and deer repellent (which must be restocked with great frequency in northern Michigan gardens). Would that I could make it in and out of the nursery with purchases only of core gardening supplies. I cannot.

In any season, my instinctual response to entering a garden shop is akin to that of a child in an old-fashioned penny candy store, where peppermint sticks and licorice whips, hot-pepper gumballs, slo-poke all-day suckers, sophisticated candy cigarettes, love-bead candy necklaces, ruby red wax lips with soda pop filling, sour lemon drops and other delectables line the shelves in big glass jars. Substitute for the candies arrays of snapdragons, lillies, yarrow, dianthus pinks, convulvulus, and so forth ad infinitum, and essentially I want one of those, and those, and those – oh, what the dickens, just one of everything! Quicker than a skinny minute, I can divest myself of the entire contents of my wallet on plant purchases that, while infatuating, often fall short of being wise.

July is not the best month to buy potted plants. Many will have become root-bound and exhausted from being stuck in pots for a couple of months, many already will have peaked in blooming. It's too early for the penny-wise benefits of end-of-summer price mark-downs. It is the month, though, when the gardener is perhaps most seriously tempted to splurge, because it's when vacancies in the garden plot become most apparent. The fulsomeness of the spring-flowering bulbs is spent, and the high summer season of flowering has reached whatever apex it is likely to attain this year, thus laying bare to the discerning eye whatever gaps, gaffes and failures there may be in the beds and borders.

However large, mature and resilient the garden output may be, it is those disappointing gaps the gardener somewhat obsessively tends to focus upon. The bee balm may have grown to five feet this year, the lillies and iris may have generously multiplied their numbers, the reliable Russian sage has come back for another vigorous outing. But still, last year's alyssum didn't re-seed itself, the columbines returned only thinly and flagging, the limerock coreopsis and several chrysanthemums seem to have disappeared altogether. In the land of Michigan's punishing winters, on a sandy, wind-whipped, lakeshore plot, with nightly visits from forever foraging deer, every summer dishearteningly reveals fatalities and terminal wounds among the garden's rank and file. The garden shop offers so many tantalizing options for potential new plant recruits, so many dreams of more, bigger, fuller, better.

July is the month to keep firmly in mind that nature laughs when the gardener makes plans. And it's the time to look at the garden in its entirety, seeing and appreciating it whole, not just zeroing in on the sore spots. July is the month to revel in how far the garden has come, to touch, smell and really see the successes, decked in their best splendor, to hear the rustle and bustle of dozens of bees in the lavender spires, the back and forth soft tympany of summer breezes at play in the tall quaking aspen.

An excellent means of elevating the sensual enjoyment of the summer garden, and minimizing its flaws, is to sit right down upon the ground in its midst. This angle of repose puts the gardener right at eye level with the garden's best display of bloom and architecture. Seated on the warm earth, the line of sight goes not downward from above, but outward to the surrounding company. To sit right among the plants, shoulder to shoulder, side by side with the flower heads, branches and leafy torsos of the garden is like drawing up a chair at a banqueting table with a large, colorful, engrossing congerie of friends in every direction you look. Remember the feeling of complete, bone-deep contentment you got as a child, when laying in a grassy meadow on a sunny summer day? It's like that. The senses will be filled, the blank spaces barely noticed.

The gardener will still, doubtless, commit the sins of lust and covetousness at the nursery. Plant and garden love is an incurable affliction, once it works its wiles upon the heart. But looking at the garden from a seat at its summer-laden board could help instill a little more restraint and wise choosing into the inevitable purchasing process. One can but hope.

Color Scheme

2009-07-13T14:01:00.004-04:00

One spring day walking home and, as I approached the house, contemplating and critiquing the front garden as I am wont to do whenever it is within view, I was startled to see that the whole front garden was awash in waves of blue and violet flowers. This startled me because I'd not planned nor specifically plotted a blue-toned garden.

Cool shadings of color are not what come to mind in my daydreams of the idyllic cottage garden. The dream garden is painted in delicate, gauzy cream, butter yellow, pastel peach and apricot, Necco wafer colors, nursery colors, with here and there judicious splashes of apple red. If a blue were envisioned in the dream scheme, it would be an ethereal, barely-there powder blue. Any more declarative blue I'd have judged, in theory, not to my taste, not my gardening style.

Yet there the front garden stood, adorned from left to right in frank, summer-sky blue, teal, navy blue, lavender, lilac, plum and deep purple. A blue-toned garden, planted by yours truly.

This came about because the garden plantings were chosen for their shape, structure, flowering time, scent, deer-proofness, popularity with bees, butterflies and hummingbirds, or just plain old nostalgic associations. Nothing was really chosen on the basis of its location on the color wheel, except the Russian sage in the back garden and the roses. The plantings were not all acquired and incorporated at once, either, in a grand and well-thought out design, but rather were accumulated little by little over the years, as money and inclination dictated. Certainly I knew the color of the flowers as each plant was brought home to be enrolled in the garden. Taken individually, the thinking went something like, hmm, a cerulean lupine, not my first choice of color, but how very good-looking!

And so it went. Lupines, violas, Canadian violets, alliums, mountain bluet centauria, lilacs, denim blue penstemon, lavender-colored chives, and velvet-robe purple Siberian iris. Stopping on the front walk, taking in the whole serendipitous blue picture painted across the late May garden, I really, really liked it. Part of the affection was simply gratitude to these perennials for continuing to come back to the garden each summer, surviving the tough, long haul through the northwestern Michigan winters, as some of the fairer-complexioned plants (columbines, gaura bee blossom, bleeding hearts, primroses) couldn't manage to do.

There are other colors I thought I'd forbid from my garden. Hot orange, neon pink, sunlight-sharp yellows once daffodil season had passed. Yet orange glows like a fireball from the daylillies at the foot of the white pines, and beneath the front windows reside mandarin-orange tiger lillies I'm currently madly in love with. The shout-pink of the creeping phlox cheerleads the garden into its first slap-happy springtime outburst, and shortly thereafter, a blood-orange and ripe-lemon petalled pyrethrum painted daisy unfurls razzle-dazzle smiles.

The moral of the story of color in the garden is that all colors work together in lovely harmony, for me. In practice, as opposed to best-laid plans, every color brings added visual value to the garden. Tints of every stripe gayly rub shoulders with one another, extending and expanding the interest, the attractiveness, the eye-candy richness of the garden. It seems there's no such thing as colors that clash in nature's paintbox. On the contrary, when it's a question of color in the garden, the more and various, the merrier and more convivial the garden fellowship becomes.

Splendid Shrubs for Michigan Gardens

2009-07-03T12:51:00.003-04:00

When heavy-muscled storm clouds envelop the blue skies, and rain falls in foggy mists and sweeping showers for several days running, it is a chance to pause in the continual summer chores of the garden and assess how it is getting on. Among the various categories of plants that make up the perennial occupants of the garden, the shrubs flanking its boundaries and softening the front aspect of the house annually bring to the garden more density, height, color and scent. There are seven types of shrub, of the 15 or so I've planted in my garden, that can be wholeheartedly recommended for northwestern Michigan gardens.

Common farmyard lilacs in lavender, pink or white are a low-maintenance, fast-growing choice that never fail to please with their May offerings of wonderfully scented flowers. Lilac hedgerows naturalized into the wild grow all over the fields, country cemeteries, roadsides and former farm homesteads in this region, testifying to their adaptability and suitability for the hefty seasons and weathers. When in bloom, their scent pervades the air for miles through countryside and village. Picking the fragrant flowers for bouquets actually encourages lilacs to develop more flower buds for the following year. In the private garden, the flowers and the healthy forest-green foliage that stays intact late into fall give much benefit with very little care.

Forsythia likewise is exceptionally hardy, shoots rapidly upward once rooted in a sunny spot, and literally covers itself from stem to stern in merry, early springtime, sunshine-yellow flowers. The flower fragrance is clean, light and fresh, smells like springtime itself. The branches can be cut while in bud and forced into bloom indoors, long before anything else in the garden is display-ready. With regularly freshened water, the flowering branches will hold up well for a couple of weeks. If forsythia is pruned for shape and to remove dead or crossing branches after the flowers finish in spring, it redoubles its growth and flowering the next year.

Three types of shrub in the garden share the crown for being absolutely no-fuss, no-muss standout performers. Unlike hollies, bayberry, butterfly bush and elderberry which all have late-arriving, short-lived, summertime-only leafage, these three leaf out in early spring and stay foliage-full and beautiful throughout autumn. Unlike the slowpoke shasta and onondaga viburnums, they grow very rapidly, gaining a couple of feet in height and width each year. They all have lovely flowers and gentle scents. The three queens are the diablo ninebark, with rich burgundy leaves and clusters of seashell-pink flowers; the American high bush cranberry, with beautiful green foliage tipped by dark red that turns to flame-red in the fall, and cherry-red berries much loved by the birds; and the snowmound spirea, with some of the thickest, dark green foliage found anywhere in the shrub world, and cascades of sweet-smelling, late May, snowdrift-white blossoms.

The Chicago lustre viburnum, contrary to its dwarfish, hip-spreading cousins in the viburnum family, is an upright, handsome fellow who branches tall and fan-like. It always appears extremely well-groomed, with or without pruning, due to an unusually orderly, straight up, no-nonsense growth pattern, symmetrically veined and clamshell-shaped, precisely defined leaves, and very tight, neat little bundles of flowers in antique ivory. Not showy or flamboyant, it is straightforward, reliable and sturdy. It finishes off its annual strapping-fellow season with clusters of indigo berries.

Lastly let us sing the praises of the flowering quince. The tapered oval, grass-green leaves grow thick and glossy from first of May – no barren, spindly grey branches here to despoil the verdant spring landscape. The quince grows upward and outward in profligate ardor, very rapidly offering the deep thicket of branches that birds adore for nesting. It's got that unbeatable, hardy shrub resilience which, after the first year, releases the gardener from care and responsibility and does just superbly, thank you, all on its own stock. Best of all, it puts on a perfectly dazzling, citrus-honey scented princess gown of apricot flowers (or cream or cotton-candy pink, depending on variety), in late May, from head to toe. The wealth of bright and frilly flowers are a show-stopper, a fireworks explosion of color joyfully ushering in a new summer.

The landscaper Vanessa Kuemmerle, of Emeryville California, said, “A garden is like having an art museum outdoors, with constantly rotating exhibits and a living palette.” Shrubs raise the backbone and square the shoulders of the garden paintings. They contribute a feast of color to the scene, and strength and longevity in a setting where much else is all too transient and fly-by-night.

Just Sit a Spell

2009-06-19T13:20:00.008-04:00

One of the more challenging things to do in the garden this summer is to repose at complete ease in the Adirondack chair or on one of the rustic benches. The gardener finds this challenging because whenever spending time in the garden or merely passing through, weeding takes place. Whatever purpose brought the gardener outdoors, be it watering new seedlings, having a whack at the grass with the push-reel lawnmower, heading to the garage to wheel out the bicycle for a ride, or intending to take a seat in the sunshine and read a book for a spell, bet the farm on it, weeding will occur.

Whatever it is I meant to be doing on exiting the house, and whether sitting still or walking around the yard, my gaze will keep returning to ground level, scouring the borders and woodchip pathways for errant weeds, mostly blades of invasive grasses and the hairy stalks of chicory. My feet will keep tracking these intruders, my body will keep stooping over, my hands reaching to yank out the ungainly offenders. Even with a lovely new novel on my lap approaching its crescendo, or a cup of Darjeeling tea in hand to toast a new morning, my eyes keep getting drawn into examining the ground and the next thing you know, I'm frenetically zigzagging around the garden without plan or pattern, filling my hands with pulled weeds.

In part this is true because the garden is a bit of a ragamuffin. Try as I might to keep it designed, shipshape and neat as a pin, it really doesn't fit this description in any of its quarters. It's blowsy, boisterous, likes to take frequent walks toward the wild side, and very much has an undisciplined and tatterdemalion mind of its own. However many weeds are disgorged and dispatched, there are always more shooting up, sending out branchlettes and explorers in every direction, pitching tents in yet more sections. The weeds grow like, well, weeds, with a wildfire speed and joie de vivre that far surpasses any such characteristics in the cultivated plants. And if one species of weed or wild grass gets successfully eradicated, before you can say Rumpelstiltskin, two or three newcomers of another variety will quickly arrive to replace the banished one.

So far this summer, the weeds (or wildflowers, if you will) identified in this one little garden, in addition to the ubiquitous common lawngrass and little bluestem, include dog fennel, lesser stichwort, milkweed, various types of snakeroot, chicory, hoary alyssum, common mullein, dandelion, yellow wood sorrel and bladder campion. Something the Sleeping Bear Dunes park botanist identified as ground pine, a creeping evergreen, has fanned out its vine-like growth of green needles across about a third of the woodchip-covered back yard. Queen Anne's lace also claims space here and there, maybe having heard on the wild-plant grapevine about the benefits of residing on this little lot, and there are lots of others I don't recognize nor know the names of.

The British garden writer Lewis Gannit aptly summed up a gardener's malady of compulsive weeding. “Gardening is a kind of disease,” he wrote. “When visiting friends for a garden party, you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed.” Exactly what happens to me in my garden (except, more's the pity, for the serious cocktail drinking), and frankly, I'm a little fed up with myself about it. The realization came upon me, while lunging after yet one more cantankerous rhizome the other day, that not nearly enough time was being spent simply enjoying the garden, or truly relaxing in its presence, or appreciating all its fine and gorgeous cultivated specimens, which do vastly outnumber the scraggly uninvited guests.

Unless one is the happy possessor of a crew of assiduous groundskeepers and a formal, exactingly managed landscape, the fact is that a garden is never going to be perfectly groomed. If it is a healthy garden, it's always going to be kicking over the traces and dashing about in unbridled abandon. It's going to encompass surprise visitors who may be a bit riotous, even slovenly in style, and lacking in self-effacement or deference. A garden with any vitality doesn't know how to demur, and is messy, independent and irrepressible.

And part of the gardener's duty, I've decided, is to stop fretting over the garden's untamed heart, and take pleasure in it. Resolutely raise the eyes from weed level to the blooming flowers and lush, many-colored foliage, to all the keen and gleeful effervescence that is the benefaction of the garden in June. A contented gardener must accept imperfection, and let the correction and addressing of it be kept in the proper time and place, chore time, where it can't encroach upon the hours for simply savoring the bountiful and too fleeting garden goods. Is not that the desideratum of all garden toil?

As Summer Begins

2009-06-12T13:50:00.010-04:00

It's now the middle of June (even if the weather for the last few weeks has perversely behaved like mid-to-late October), the garden is in rampant, early summer flush of growth, so let's take a step back and review. After six years, which of the many flowering plants and herbs sown upon this sandy northwestern Michigan garden lot can be deemed successes? Nurseryman Dan Heims of Portland, Oregon writes, "Anywhere there is light, moisture and a bit of soil, there is life." Indubitably, those conditions pertain in these country parts with moist Lake Michigan air currents and silky, sunny summers, but which of the plants chosen and fostered don't merely live, but rock and roll?

The rollcall of standouts begins with the lavenders and thymes, who take to the sand-based soil like ducklings to water, and have needed only hard trim-back each late autumn to grow denser and spread further each summer, with an extravagant harvest of flowers every year. Even in the most parched summers, these herbs never received watering to supplement the rainfall, a hands-off approach that has suited them to a tee, as well as making the gardener's chores much easier.

Hollyhocks and peonies likewise needed only to be given houseroom in a hole, tucked roundabout with chocolate-cake texture composted cow manure, and watered weekly their first summer to infuse their roots with get-up-and-go. Now they bound up and shake out very full tail feathers each spring, each one adding their particular green hedging to the borders. The only quibble here is with the dark red peonies, as unlike their pastel sisters, they don't develop very many flower buds, some years only one flower or even none per plant. This is the second summer the dark reds have grown thick, healthy leafage, but minimal flowers, I've no idea why. Perhaps the "eyes," those reddish shoots at the bottom of the plant, didn't get enough light under their winter mulch, this fall we'll try leaving them less covered-up.

The dark plum and the butter-and-cream Siberian iris are doing excellent, filled with tightly furled flower heads. If the sun actually consents to shine for a few days in a row, the iris will be blooming by month's end. Likewise for the vigorous beds of mixed poppies, lots of round, full buds on those, as well. The poppies took a couple years of leading by the hand to get themselves in growing and blooming gear. All were started from seed, some package and some from friends' gardens. The first year planted (whether sown in spring or fall), they barely put up stalks and leaves, with a sparse or no show of flowers. They've come on nicely and multiplied their numbers each year, however, this summer bearing more flower buds than any prior year.

Another entry that took a couple years to hit their stride are the lupines. Also brought along from seed, the two lupine patches are now in their third year and absolutely brimming with the tall, columnar, purple and peach flowers, with their ferny leaf bracts as wide around them as a debutante's tulle ruffles. The lupine flower is handsome, distinctive and somehow mysterious in its shapely form, and compensates very well for the absence of its somewhat similarly shaped cousin, the foxglove, which has repeatedly, politely declined to flower or perennially or biennially return to the garden, despite having been given numerous handmade invitations to do so.

The echinops globe thistle have filled and spill over a section of a flower bed where globe amaranth gomphrena were tried, struggled, fared poorly, and were ultimately abandoned as a bad cause. Another plant that takes virtually no watering to raise their proud and dapper lakewater-blue heads, the globe thistles will bring welcome color to the garden in July and August, when many of the other flowers are flagging or spent. They are kept company in their bed by penstemons, enthusiastically fanning out in only their second year in residence, and a mountain bluet centauria, which has flowered like there's no tomorrow all through this month and is still going gangbusters, setting up new flower buds.

Chives, snow-in-summer, snow-on-the-mountain, delphinium, the half-dozen rose bushes, lilly-of-the-valley and day lillies, phlox, muscari, crocosmia lucifer, daisies, rock cress, violets, stonecrop sedum, baby's breath, verbascum, and pretty, frilly little veronica waterperry, one and all have found their way back to the garden again this year, in greater size and strength. The dianthus pinks can also be said to be here to stay. They annually push the edges of their carpeting green foliage farther in diameter, but this year, for the first time, they haven't flowered very profusely, offering only a smattering of blooms. Lashings of composted cow manure, the richest natural fertilizer available, are definitely in store for them, come the autumn. Some of the creeping phlox swatches, especially the paler pink-shaded and variegated, also managed only a weak flower display this May, perhaps due to the colder-than-normal temperatures and rather niggling number of sunny days, or maybe because fallen birch and pear leaves weren't sufficiently cleaned off of them last fall. This autumn, fingers crossed and hand on heart, they will get a thorough raking over and fertilizing. Please may this return them next spring to their normal mad fandango of brilliant flower display.

When all's said and done, and with the tiny sprouts emerging of seeded rudbeckia, sunflowers, cosmos, bachelor buttons, chamomile and asters, the garden is full of vim and vigor, and looks pretty darn marvelous to me. In every direction there is color and enterprise, zeal and coquetry, energy and finery for the eyes to feast upon. The garden in June, after the long pewter and slate of a relentless Michigan winter, opens a crayola box of hue and possibility, life indeed, life aplenty.

Throwback Mowing

2009-06-02T12:13:00.004-04:00

Propelling an old-fashioned rotary hand mower through the lengths of volunteer little bluestem and rye grass, chicory and milkweed, stinking chamomile and sundry other unidentified weeds that have set up housekeeping in the garden is pretty tough work. It takes a deal more elbow grease and leg power than steering and trotting behind an infernal combustion-powered mower. It necessitates more hand-clipping of the opportunistic weeds that cluster self-protectively close to the trunks of shrubs and trees. And the end result is a longer, looser, less tidy mop than the symmetrically close-sheared result one gets from the much faster rotating, gasoline-muscled blades of a power mower.

With such a shaggy outcome, and the extra sweat equity invested, is it really worth it, or acceptable to the gardener's neatness fetish, to switch permanently from a carbon-fueled powerhouse scything machine to a pre-industrial hand tool? Granted, it was lovely and satisfying at the hardware store to march righteously past all the big, shiny, lawn-mowing machines with their price tags starting in the hundreds of dollars, and ferret out one of the two push reel mowers, from the American Lawn Mower Company of Shelbyville, Indiana, way at the back of the store, out of the marketer's premier sight-line positioning. You couldn't beat with a stick the reasonable and affordable bargain price of $85. The assembled push mower, deftly put together by a teenage clerk who had the good manners not to sneer even a little bit at the archaic purchase, fit as easily as a pea in a pod on the passenger-side footwell in the front of a Honda Civic, whereas a pickup truck or transport van would have been needed to ferry homeward any of the motorized machines.

Likewise, the push mower slots unobtrusively into a very small corner of the garage, taking up no more storage space than would a large person. When the time comes to put it to use, it is simply rolled out of the garage, onto the grassy patches, and you're in business. No fiddling with spark plugs, checking and replenishing messy, smelly oil and gas, no priming, no yanking over and over again on the starter cord, and struggling to untangle the wretched thing when it twists itself into knots. No tearing of the hair over the inexplicable recalcitrance and frequent outright refusal of power mowers to actually fire into life and work. The deafening roar of the motor is blessedly gone, replaced by a gentle swish, swish, swish of the reel that compliments, rather than obliterates, the pleasant summer sounds of birdsong and wind in the treetops.

Rather than inhaling the choking, dehydrating, carcinogenic fumes of gasoline for a couple of hours, the gardener wielding the push mower smells fresh cut grass and the soothing, ambrosial scents of flower blossoms and herbs brushed in passing. Running a gas mower for one hour puts out the same smog-forming particulates as running 40 new cars for one hour. A person on a riding power mower cutting grass for four hours puts the same toxic cloud of carbon dioxide into the air as produced by an automobile driving across the North American continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Using just one push mower versus a gas mower reduces the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 80 pounds per annum. Turning the job of mowing over to a manual endeavor is demonstrably a good afternoon's work for the air that we, the plants and the animals are trying to breathe.

Unquestionably the grassy segments of the yard do not have that clean, lean, high-and-tight Marine brushcut when the job is finished. The grass and weeds, not as closely shorn as with the mighty gas mower, pop back up to thumb their rude noses at the gardener a little more quickly, which probably means they will need to be cut more often this summer than the once-a-month they got when clearcut by a power mower. That means a few additional afternoons for the gardener of a real physical workout, putting leg and arm propulsion into the little push mower, up and down the yard, hearing and smelling the good, warm essence of a summer's day, building muscle strength and filling the lungs with regenerating fresh air. Being wafted in memory back to childhood days of dawdling and daydreaming beneath a cornflower blue sky and breathing in the earthy green fragrance as my father, in khaki workpants and Detroit Tiger ballcap, trimmed the lawn to the blithe susurration of the simple, brilliantly designed push reel lawnmower.

Maybe a smidgin or two of untidiness isn't a bad thing, in the big picture. Maybe it is good to relax, lighten up on the control and precision and everything-in-its-place style. Follow in Nature's footsteps as she drops her greenery-yallery garments here, there and everywhere in a slapdash, overflowing, peaceable and ebullient profusion of sweet summertime.

Out, Out Damn Caterpillar!

2009-05-25T13:15:00.008-04:00

Yuck and horrors, they are everywhere! Drive the country roads, highways, village streets of northwestern Michigan this spring, and nary a stretch can be found without trees, in the hundreds of thousands, hosting the triangular, silky white pouch nests of the eastern tent caterpillar. Hosting by brute force that is, not by choice, as tent caterpillars are an invading, parasitic horde who feed off and destroy the trees in which they set up camp. Across farm fields, meadows and hillsides, swathes of denuded, dying trees blot the landscape, the swollen caterpillar pouches the only remaining signs of life on their limbs.

Tent caterpillars hatch from egg sacs laid by adult moths the previous year, usually wriggling to life around early March. A greyish-black, hairy creature with a single yellow stripe along its back from head to tail, after sloughing off the egg, the tent caterpillar weaves its homesite pouch in the forks of tree branches or trunks. They leave the pouch to feed, usually in the early morning or early evening hours, and what they feed upon are the leaves of the host tree. As the caterpillars consume leaves, they enlarge their pouch and build subsidiary ones, with the pouches sometimes reaching a length of over a foot. Voracious little eaters, they can completely defoliate a moderate-size ornamental fruit tree in a couple of weeks.

Approach a tent caterpillar nest and through the nest membrane you can clearly see hundreds of the critters slithering about, probably doing a little worm-dance celebration of their good culinary fortune. Their favorite food is the leaves of wild cherry trees, with crab apples and eating apples coming a close second, very bad news for counties like this one, where cherry and apple trees abound. Failing the choice of these species, they will also colonize and chew the life from peach trees, sweet cherry, plum, pear, hawthorn, maple and birch.

In four-to-six weeks after spinning their nest, the caterpillars reach full-grown size of three or four inches, and wander off from the pouches to spin the one-inch long, white or yellowish cocoon they will inhabit while transforming themselves into an adult moth. The pale cinnamon brown moth, with two cream-colored horizontal stripes across each wing, emerges from the cocoon after about three weeks. The adult moths then mate, lay new eggs that will generate more tent caterpillars the following springtime, and expire. The egg sacs are shiny, dark greyish white, about one inch long, and have a hard casing like fossilized foam. They will be laid on the the twigs or trunks of trees, the walls of buildings, porch railings, and adhere to the laying site throughout the winter. One egg sac can yield up to 400 caterpillars.

Tent caterpillars pose no threat to humans, nor to any plants other than the trees in which they nest. They do not bite, sting, nor carry disease, they're not poisonous, they don't attack or eat any other plant besides trees. Other than imperiling the health and well-being of trees, they are largely just a blight upon the landscape and a nuisance pest. When the full-grown caterpillars set off from the home pouch to establish their own cocoons, they litter plants, walkways, driveways, even nearby vehicles, leaving slimy trails behind them and exploding, if stepped upon, into a gooey, slippery mess. They seem to bestow not one whit of good upon the environment to compensate for the havoc and ugliness they wreak, as birds or other possible food-chain predators don't fancy them much nor make enough of a meal of them to control their spread.

The natural resources office at the Sleeping Bear Dunes Park doesn't regard tent caterpillars as an actionable menace, despite the fact that many thousands of trees in the park are being assaulted by them this spring. A park spokesman noted that the caterpillar populations fluctuate from year to year in size of outbreaks, one year being widespread and then declining in the next year. Healthy trees, he posited, even when scalped of all their spring leaf growth, will often recover and grow new leaves by mid-summer. Holding this view, the national park will stand back and let nature take its course with the tent caterpillars, not making any effort to halt their rabid ways or come to the aid of the woeful trees.

To be fair, the park service, and county forestry departments, don't really have any good options for fighting tent caterpillar infestation across acres of woodlands. Even if they had the money to spray miles upon miles of infected land with pesticide, which they do not, even if they were willing to contaminate many beneficial insects, butterfly caterpillars, and plant life in shotgun-style poison spraying, which they absolutely should not, pesticides aren't very efficacious at destroying tent caterpillars. There are some wasp species and bacteria which can eliminate tent caterpillars, but these require individual, painstaking, tree-by-tree application, a process which is unfeasible for a pest that colonizes hundreds of miles of trees.

The private gardener, fortunately, does have an effective, easy recourse for eradicating these little tree-killers. Personally, I don't buy the year-by-year fluctuation, nature-can-deal-with-it, hands-off approach. A tent caterpillar pouch debuted last spring in my crab apple tree, and despite being promptly and thoroughly (I think) dispatched by my hand to oblivion, another pouch popped up in the fork of the same tree this spring. What's more, pouches were also woven this year in the young crabapple and cherry trees in several of my neighbors' yards.

Maybe a strong, adult, healthy tree that enjoys lots of water each year and mild wintertimes can, indeed, pull off a comeback after its first crop of young leaves are completely devoured. Or maybe not. There are stands of trees all over the county that have seen several continuous years of cannibalistic beseigement by tent caterpillars, and which are now clearly expiring. The winters are frost-heavy and tough around here, the summers can bring sustained periods of drought, and setting out new leaves in summer to replace stripped branches takes an enormous amount of energy, further depleting a tree's strength and resources for onward, healthy progress.

My crabapple and those of my neighbors were given a helping human hand. Purging a tree or two or three of tent caterpillars in private gardens is a quick and simple task. All one needs do is get rid of the nests and the dratted caterpillars in one fell, fatal swoop. Striking around noontime, in the heat of the day, will find them least active and lollygagging inside the pouch. Put on a pair of gloves to protect the hands from the necessity of touching the critters, or getting unappealingly slimed. Take a bucket and put an inch or so of rubbing alcohol in the bottom. Using the hands, the pouches can easily be pulled off the tree bark, into the bucket. Scrape any loose or escaping caterpillars into the bucket, and rub all remnants of the pouch silk off the tree bark. Check the ground beneath the tree and the branches around the pouch for other escapees, and deposit them in the bucket. As soon as the caterpillars hit the alcohol, they perish.
If there are more caterpillars than the alcohol can submerge, or it any wrigglers persist after dousing, take a kettle of boiling water, pour it atop the survivors, and it will polish them off for good and all. If your homicidal impulse remains unsatisfied, crush the sodden mass in the bucket with the back of a trowel until nothing remains but pureed caterpillar soup. This can be dumped down a garbage disposal if you really want to see the back end of it forever, or, once the caterpillars are well and truly dead, simply thrown into a ditch.

Watch for the hard-foam egg sacs on branches and elsewhere in your garden through summer, and they are easy to break off, crush and burn to prevent a return engagement next year. In such manner, the gardener can assist nature to deal with one of her more deviant, destructive creatures, and preserve and protect the precious fruit trees that bring a froth of lacy blossoms each spring, and food for birds, people and animals all summer and fall. Some actors on nature's stage just cannot be tolerated for repeats of their dismal performances, nor must the good gardener sit passively by, repelled and appalled, while their greedy premiere broadside plays out.

Seed Time

2009-05-19T13:26:00.004-04:00

With the skeleton of the garden in trees, shrubs and perennials now, in its sixth year, well established and growing great guns, attention this spring is being paid to filling in some empty spots, introducing some new inhabitants, lengthening and broadening the flowering that occurs, and venturing into a little vegetable gardening. Most of the new planting took place this week, now that night frost has (one hopes and trusts) moved off the horizon, with a couple largely innocuous parting shots just as the cherry orchards budded out. That Jack Frost is quite the mischief-maker, isn't he, the spoiler at the party, the incorrigible delinquent of Mother Nature's household.

Other than a double white peony and a pinky-winky ever-blooming hydrangea, which will be planted as soon as they arrive at the cautious, previously frostbitten local nursery, all the planting done thus far and planned for this spring is in seed. Seeds are so inexpensive, compared to starter plants, and they seem to produce stronger, more viable plants, more able to hang on through the trials of their first summer, thrive and settle in for multi-year lifespans than is the case with scrawny or over-fertilized (i.e. hyperactive), often root-bound, sometimes sickly hothouse seedling plants. Some seed-grown perennials may not flower the first year, but that's fine if it means they are building strong root stock to keep them active in the garden for many repeat appearances.

Seed packet and live-plant displays always catch my eye and beckon me to them, whether in the village grocery, hardware store, nursery, or wherever, I'm an addict for them with little-to-no resistance. No doubt, once the nurseries are filled to overflowing with live plants, I'll succumb to some of their siren calls and splash out with more yarrows and bee balms, maybe a few additional bleeding hearts, columbines or irresistible delphiniums. For now, my gardening jones has been fed by the twenty or so seed packets emptied into the soil.

An unpleasant reminder of the national economic pallor and downsizing was revealed in discovering that commercial, standard brand seed packets this year held about half the amount of seed offered in past years. This proved to be the sad case for some half-dozen different big-name seed brands selected. Evidently penny-pinching and cost-cutting is reaching its hatchet even into the gardening industry. The one exception to this cutback phenomenon was from Botanical Interests (www.botanicalinterests.com), whose packets yielded not the mere dozen or so seeds of the big companies, but palms full of probably three-to-four dozen seeds per pack. Botanical Interest packets also promise that all seeds are untreated with synthetic chemicals and contain no genetically modified seed, so they take first place in the competition for my garden dollars.

What went into the ground recently were rudbeckia Irish Eyes, a member of the black-eyed Susan family with a soft celery green, rather than chocolate center, stocks, mixed asters, ganzia daybreak (a compact flower similar to a strawflower), lupines, delphinium Pacific giants, bachelor buttons and double poppies. All except the poppies, chosen because there's no such thing as too many of these pretty comers, swear they will flower mid-summer into the fall. With lots of spring-flowering bulbs and plants already in place, summer and fall bloomers are what the garden wants more of.

Chives and radish also got sown, the chives, in all honesty, for their handsome purple flowerheads, the radishes as the start of the vegetable plot. To be added to this sunny spot in the backyard once the nights stay around and above the 60-degree mark will be bell peppers, cucumbers and sweet basil. The only vegetable (actually a fruit) attempted before was tomato plants, which shriveled in the withering summer sun and could not get their thirst quenched sufficiently, despite daily watering. This year's effort is to see if a few of the vegetables that are routinely purchased on every week's trip to the grocer can be grown at home. Vegetables are still (fingers crossed) relatively inexpensive to buy and readily available at farmer's markets, so there hasn't been much reason to self-grow them, but this year the idea of being able to pick fresh, wax and pesticide-free peppers, radishes and cucumbers from the backyard just really appealed.

All the seeds were planted in toppings of composted cow manure, the absolute best growing medium for any plant life on this green earth. Now come the tinkering, waiting weeks, with daily sprinklings for all from the watering can, except when given a day off by rainfall. Oh happy day, some of the rudbeckias actually have sprouted already, after only about seven days in the ground. It seems from past experience that maybe about one-third or at very best one-half of seeds sown will deign to put up green sprouts. If a third of the seeds put in this spring lift their fingers into the light of day, all will be well and smiles shall break forth and the gardener will raise a glass of Cabernet in toast from her repose on the Adirondack chair, grateful for the sprouting proof that perhaps she really does know a thing or two about raising a hale and bonny garden.

May, the Favored One

2009-05-11T12:19:00.004-04:00

As a gardener, it is probably the better part of wisdom not to play favorites among the plants, lest it occasion hurt feelings, jealousy, sulking, and a case of the vapours in the less favored. Plants certainly sense and respond to vibrations in the air, energy and electrical impulses, and emotional currents around them. As with children, harboring or exhibiting anger and frustration with lackadaisical performance is not the best technique for inspiring them to step up their game and realize their full potential.

If the prolific lilac bushes are being treated to a nice helping of compost fertilization, therefore, the wise gardener will bestow a like beneficent treatment upon the layabout forsythia, or the hydrangea that's dragging its heels at flowering, or the untidy, perpetually disorganized rosebushes. Treated equitably, encouraged and praised rather than frowned upon, scolded or ignored, even the recalcitrant garden minions are more likely to achieve or exceed the expectations and fond hopes of their keepers.

The gardener's private preferences could never enjoy sufficient potency, however, to determine or alter the course of the seasons. Superstitions notwithstanding, the gardener's feelings do not change by one iota the earth's rotation through the weather courses of a year, so no harm befalls declaring and reveling in the fact that spring is the gardener's number one season of choice, or even going so far as to name May as the personal best month of the 12 contestants. The mornings dawn to the return of the purl and trilling whistles of birdsong, rather than rain and hail assaulting the windowpanes. The air currents are cool and invigorating, warming to comfortable shirt-sleeves' ranges in the afternoons, the furiously aggressive March and April winds subside into breezes that caress rather than pummel the skin. Glorious, delicate, newly-minted green comes back to town and country from its prolonged winter absence, sidling tantalizingly across fields and hillsides, up the branches of willow and maple, blushing its shy way to the tips of reeds, shrubs and sedges.

In the last ten days, all the spring flowers in the garden have progressed from the idea of climbing out of bed to eyes-wide-open bloom. Now there is a nature's jewel box of color spilled across the garden, from front to back. In bloom are sugar-almond colored hyacinths, daffodils and jonquils in shades of lemon, apricot, peach, ivory and orange, denim-blue grape hyacinths, primroses, forsythia, windflowers, snowdrops and tulips. The river birch is covered in dangling catkins and tiny lime leaf buds. The Cleveland pear is bedecked in buds as well, as are the Fuji apple tree, the sweet cherry sapling, the lilacs and rosebushes.

The garden will remain awash in the spring-flowering bulbs for the first half of the month, but May has even more plenty in store, currently powdering its nose in the wings for an entrance from mid-month on. The creeping phlox in magenta, dusty pink and periwinkle, the wizened little faces of violas, the lilacs with their delectable rich nectar scent, and the penultimate flower that will grace the final days of May, the luxuriant peonies. No flower that grows anywhere in the world smells more heavenly to me, none possesses looks of more perfect beauty.

Springtime, the merry, burgeoning month of May, and the fresh, delicious flowers it comes bearing win the affections easily after the long scent and color drought of winter. Because they are first on the scene after the months of drear and grey, May flowers have an inside track for the position of favorite. Then too, the spring bulbs require nothing of the gardener once they've been snuggled into the earth, holding everything within their dark core that is necessary to bursting into bloom, given a couple daily hours of incremental sunlight and some April showers. No pinching back, fertilizing, pruning, weeding, de-bugging, not one chore must be undertaken for the flowers of May to launch their splendor. For this month only, in the seasons of the garden, the gardener can mostly relax, gaze in awe at Nature's opening show of many-colored handiwork, and savor the pleasure, the gifts of the garden.

“Earth is so kind,” the English writer Douglas Jerrold says, “just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest.” While that may not be a totally accurate description of earth's horticultural behavior in the perishing hot, dry spells of summer, or the alternating frosts and Indian-summer heat of autumn, it portrays the insouciance and largesse of the May garden to a nicety.

War of the Weeds

2009-05-05T12:19:00.003-04:00

“The misunderstanding I have with Nature over my perennial border,” writes gardener Sara Stein, “I think it is a flower garden. She thinks it is a meadow lacking grass, and tries to correct the error.” A similar misunderstanding and attempted “correction” plays out in my garden every year. Since the garden is meant to cover the whole of the lot, however, the annual war of the grass weeds is fought across the entire yard, not just in borders.

The primary foe in the ongoing skirmishes is a wild prairie grass, called little bluestem or wiregrass (pictured here), seconded in the field of contention by common lawn grass. The surface of the lot is covered in cypress wood chips, and at this writing, about one-third of the lot also hosts garden shrubs, trees and plants. The wood-chip covered areas do not have garden plantings because time and money did not allow the whole lot to be landscaped at one fell swoop. While the gardened areas are added to and expanded each year, the wild grasses have been able to establish in swathes along the sides, front and back perimeters of the lot. Every fall, opportunistic tumbleweeds of grass seed blow into the yard from neighboring yards and meadows, and every spring the patches of prairie and lawn grasses merrily resprout in unsightly, random clumps and ragtag bands.

The grasses are incredibly resilient and disgustingly healthy. The gardener tromps around on them in all seasons, digs them out, never waters them, and regularly directs curses and spells towards them, all to no avail. They grow, as grasses are wont to do, like the dickens, and every summer must be mowed down every three weeks or so. Since mowing a lawn was never part of the garden plan, the gardener must needs borrow a lawnmower for this obnoxious task from a neighbor, then has to inflict a couple hours' worth of extremely unpleasant and harmful lawnmower gasoline engine fumes on the environs, and finally has to re-mulch all the mowed areas with new cypress chips, since the lawnmower chops and blows the ground cover to smithereens, leaving behind sad, bare stretches of earth.

Last year, the gardener attempted a more resounding assault upon the invaders. Using the weed-killer Round-Up, the blades of the grasses were sprayed as they emerged, primarily in the places where they were extending their reach toward the flower beds, and on the random scatterings of outcroppings in new, previously uncolonized locations. If the spraying occurred on a sunny day that was followed by at least a week or two of more sunny days and no rainfall (chance would be a fine thing!), most (not all) the sprayed grasses would, in fact, turn yellow, then brown, and die. The roots, apparently, seldom if ever met a like fate, as within another couple weeks, new grass infants would be born in adjacent locations.

The herbicide spraying tactic will not be employed this year. Not because in the big picture it didn't really work, not because Round-Up is very expensive, relative to the garden budget, and the profits go to Monsanto, a multi-national chemical company that has been manufacturing horticultural, agricultural and military poisons for decades. The spraying won't be repeated because the gardener does not want to commit murder, not even a little bit of murder of the earth, and that is precisely what synthetic chemical herbicides, insecticides and fertilizers do. The war of the weeds got the better of the gardener's knowledge, common sense and principles last year. I lost my patience (and a little of my mind) in the heat of battle, and employed a strategy I abhor. Never again.

The death of the particular sprayed grasses is not the issue. Common lawn grass and little bluestem flourish ubiquitously throughout the Great Lakes and Midwest regions, and across prairies and yards on the whole North American continent. They are invasive, not by any stretch of the imagination endangered. But spray-bombing a single species of plant or insect is not a finite act. Toxic chemicals do not simply kill the species upon which they are applied. They debilitate everything they come into contact with, and once a poison chemical enters the ecosystem, it cannot be confined nor contained. An ecosystem is a contiguous whole, its parts cannot be isolated one from the others, and what befalls any of its individual parts will migrate, stealthy, silent and deadly, to all.

Chemicals sprayed on plants or insects enter and lodge in the seeds, pollen, eggs, roots, underwater streams, wells and water tables, dew and rainfall. Animals that feed on the plants or insects ingest the poison, and in turn also become poisoned and poisonous. Toxic substances thus spread from the single plant or insect to the soil, earthworms, creeks, rivers, lakes and oceans, fish and birds, wild and domestic animals, and human consumers of the plants and animals. Poisonous chemicals from herbicides and insecticides have been found in the seeds and subsequent generations of plants of sprayed species, they have been found in the honey produced by bees from the nectar of sprayed plants, and in the eggs and fledglings of birds that feed on poisoned insects. What's more, chemically poisoned plants and insects can develop a survival resistance to their assailants and undergo a flareback phenomenon wherein they resurge in greater, stronger numbers. To unleash a fusillade of poisons on any segment of the earth's ecosystem can render it unfit for all life forms, contaminating the entire environment.

So, the gardener made an egregious mistake last year, but has mended her errant ways, and approaches the garden and contemplates the flings of swaggering new grass sprouts with a revised, chastened attitude. Bands of rangy grasses here and there throughout the garden will be accepted as flagbearers of Nature's exuberance, will to live, and vibrant health on this little plot of land. A benign trowel or spade will root out any brigades of grasses that forge into no-go areas of flower beds. A non-polluting, manually operated rotary lawnmower will be acquired to keep the larger stretches of grass in trim. The gardener will henceforth bear in mind that the goal here is to make this village lot a better, more fecund and robust corner of the earth, rife with life and propitious to all comers. Pinching fingers or hungry praying mantis are still the best deterrent for tentworm caterpillars, after all, and ladybugs like no dinner menu better than aphids off the rosebush.

Succulent Love

2009-04-27T14:17:00.002-04:00

In a garden or greenhouse, on a windowsill or between patio pavers, succulents hold an irresistible attraction. They draw us to them, stop us in our tracks, detain us in spellbound, contemplative fascination of their strange beauty. The secret of succulent seduction lies in their droll physical forms. More than any other plant type, their wildly diverse and numerous varieties assume singular forms that embody drama and sculptural silhouettes, humor and mysterious textures, delicate color and bizarre, other-worldly skins. Succulents radiate an ambience of sand dune warmth, they conjure shimmery images of armadillos, burros, salt flats, palm trees. Even their name is alluring, sexy – the soft sibilant beginning, the sultry depths of the long vowel center, the certainty of the consonant closing.

Although associated instantly in the imagination with the hot and arid environs of the desert, many succulents are cold-hardy and will prosper in Michigan gardens. Hardy succulents are extremely tough characters, well-suited to the strong weather and seasons of the northern Great Lakes region. They revel in annual hard frosts and dormant months as part of their natural cycle. They can shrug off prolonged drought and high heat, doing dandy in temperatures that range into the high 90s. Cold-hardy varieties can ignore downward spirals of the thermometer to depths of -30 fahrenheit, growing as far north as into the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia.

Succulents have no need of water beyond that brought by rain, dew and snow. If anything, they dislike sitting in puddly soil that does not dry out. This makes them ideal plants for the sandy, rocky, quick-draining soil of northwestern Michigan, as well as sturdy, happy occupants of gravel beds, rock gardens and living wreaths. They will cheerfully burgeon in containers with half or less the watering desired by any other plants, and respond to days and weeks of unmitigated sunshine by stretching out in sunbather pleasure. Most are also completely impervious to grazing wildlife, predatory pests, insects and diseases.

The longevity and self-propagating ability of succulents is impressive. Their season lasts from early summer through first nipping of frost. Sempervivums (commonly known as hens and chicks) very name means live forever, and the lovely, symmetrical rosettes of leaves generously pop out offsets (the chicks) to expand and carry on the family ad infinitum into the future. To divide and reproduce any succulent, from a prickly pear to a jade plant to sedums, the entire process involves simply cutting or pinching off a leaf or branch, sticking it in soil, watering it in, stepping back and watching it grow. So tenacious are these plants, if a leaf falls or gets accidentally knocked to the earth, it often will put down root and start growing without any external help whatsoever.

Sempervivums come in over 100 different varietal types, with a spectrum of luscious colors from coolest twilight grey-green to mahogany red. The cobweb species hens and chicks spins a silky web of threads across the rosette heads, giving it a gossamer and tempting veil that beckons touch. The unique texture of succulent skin, whether it be the waxy smoothness of a jade leaf, the sharp thorns of cactus, or the hairy tendrils of a Missouri pincushion, make it a wonderful tactile as well as visual sensation.

Sedum hardy succulents, in addition to the purple emperor and other familiar upright, 2-to-3 foot tall versions, can be found in dwarf, spreading, ground-cover styles. Red carpet sedum is a spreader with dark rose to burgundy leaves that keep their color all year long; John Creech has tight, overlapping mint green leaves that form ground-hugging mats with an abundance of pink flowers. Or check out the dragon blood and fuldaglut spurium sedums, or the lavender Vera Jameson sedum, all great ground-covers.

Believe it or not, prickly pear cactus can grow in Michigan gardens, provided one chooses a hardy species such as the purple-fruited, porcupine, or cliff pricky pear, all of which have naturalized into southern Canada. The spineless hedgehog, claret cut and mountain ball are other cacti suitable for cold climate gardens. Opuntias, variegated yuccas with their sedge-like leaf blades, and hardy agaves are succulent genus members who can handle all four seasons without breaking a sweat or catching chillblanes. To learn more about north country succulents, a fine and thorough book is “Hardy Succulents: Tough Plants for Every Climate,” by Gwen Kelaidis, from Storey Publishing. Or visit a nice website at www.cactiguide.com, or tour a mail-order succulent nursery at www.simplysucculents.com

There is an old country tradition of grandparents giving sempervivum chicks to their grandchildren, to carry on new plant generations with the new family generations. The tradition may have arisen because hens and chicks were fairly common to many country households, or because growing-on the chicks is so easy it really can be done by a young child. However it began, hardy succulents make relaxed, low-maintenance, witty and hilarious, theatrical and entertaining extended family members both indoors and out, in a clay pot or broadcast across the yard.

Garden Groundswell

2009-04-20T14:09:00.004-04:00

Now you're cooking with grease!, as my grandma used to say when something or someone got on the right track. On several recent days, the thermometer crested the 60-degree mark that is the demarcation line between winter's coattails and spring's hello handshake. The daffodills, jonquills, primroses, tulips, hyacinths, snowdrops and a few of the windflowers are halfway up out of the ground, a handful already opening blooms in the warm afternoon sunshine. True, a temperature backslide and snow flurries are forecast for April's second half, but the setback will be fleeting, the seesaw ride of springtime in northern Michigan has begun in earnest.

Thus far the only sowing has been a ring of sweet pea seeds, around the base of a metal tripod sculpture well-suited to their climbing propensities. They are the only plant on this year's roster that can be, and actually does best if planted a month or so before the night (and occasional day) frosts cease. Each pea seed was nicked with a nail clipper to open a breach in the hard shell, then they were left on a water-soaked paper towel for 24 hours for pre-planting moisturizing, then sown in fresh-laid composted cow manure, the par excellence substance in which to plant everything and anything. Next planting date will be the rudbeckia and verbena bonariensis seeds on April 30, flowers that want no more, no less than planting just a couple weeks before likely last frost. April 30 because that's the next day when the moon, stars and planets are in favorable conjunction for sowing flower seeds (see below "Moonlight Becomes Your Garden," a February 13, 2009 post, for more on astronomy and planting).

Gardening time functions mysteriously, much like Internet time or home carpentry time – whatever length of time one estimates will be spent on any given foray into the garden generally, reliably will end up taking two or three times longer. Look closely and there are always more tasks to be taken in hand in a garden, one more patch of weeds to clear, dry spots to water, birdbaths to fill, branches to prune. Thus, when setting out with the single, crisply defined goal of sweet pea seeding, a couple hours later found, also, the edging along the backyard ornamental grasses bed refreshed with new, fallen, woodlot-scavenged birch logs; a dozen or so wild, volunteer sprouts of cornflower (chicory) plants pulled (weed, wildflower, call it what you will, it will colonize the whole yard in short order if left unchecked); several handfuls of composted cow manure laid at the base of each rosebush and peony to start their seasons with a big dollop of high-nutrient dirt; and a couple garlic cloves plugged into the soil beneath each rosebush to fend off opportunistic deer and also boost flowering, both of which garlic does masterfully.

And in honesty, probably a good spell of the time on this garden venture, as on every one taken, was spent in simple, idle stillness and close observation. Just walking around my small village lot and pausing to examine and admire the minutiae of its colors, scents and textures gives me an inordinate amount of happiness. Pinching a lavender stalk or sage leaf to release their inimitable, earthy and heartwarming perfumes brings gladness and calmness. Feeling the loamy softness of compost sift through my hands induces purposefulness, reassurance, connectedness to the natural world. Staring at the whorls and wrinkles of birch or red oak bark, or the indigo of an opening primrose, or the innumerable variations of the color green in the score of plants putting out leaves – just being and seeing in the garden could occupy me completely contentedly for hours, and never fails to imbue me with feelings of great well-being. In the garden, active or lollygagging, all becomes right with the world, every time.

Also generating feelings of well-being and rightness is the unprecedented groundswell of gardening and environmental activism rolling across America this spring. The presidential family in the White House aren't the only ones digging up a lawn to plant a vegetable garden, there are more home gardens, community gardens, small holdings, and pots filled with tomato plants and herbs on patios and balconies than for decades past. Burpee and other seed companies report an increase of fruit and vegetable seed sales of a whopping 30% this spring over previous years. Natural, sustainable, organic gardening and farming methods and products are to be found in every garden store and even big box nursery, for the first time given shelf space equal to that of noxious, big chemical company, artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. There is a national and governmental commitment to pursuit of environmentally sound land and forest preservation and alternative energy development on a scale that has not been evident since the founding of the conservation movements and the national parkland set-asides during the early 1900s.

The raised national environmental consciousness has been brought about by the perfect storm of a crashing economy, a revulsion for dependence upon dirty petroleum products from foreign countries that largely wish America ill, and fear for the future of a planet weakened and struggling under the violent storms and rising temperatures of global pollution. Out of this miasma of bad acting and vile values of recent decades is emerging a determination to right our ways, restore health to our food and to the way we conduct our lives, and to take better care of the irreplaceable earth. Following the knowledge laid down by Alice Waters, J. I. Rodale, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Frederick Law Olmstead, Theodore Roosevelt and other pioneers of conservation, organic agriculture and natural foods, America is turning into a nation of green gardeners, tree planters, ecological preservationists. This springtime rebirth and regeneration stretching from coast to coast feels marvelous, and you can bet your garden galoshes that's exactly how it feels to the earth, as rakes and hoes get busy scratching her continental back.

Garden Healing

2009-04-13T15:32:00.003-04:00

Having written of the perils of toxins in common garden plants a couple weeks ago, it's only fair and balanced to take another meander down the garden path, this time to highlight garden healers and promoters of good health. Gardening in and of itself confers benefits in vim, vigor and fitness of mind and body to the practitioner, but beyond those gains it also contains plant genuses which actively heal, soothe and remedy specific afflictions. Let's consider just a few of the most efficacious.

Garlic literally leaps to mind ahead of all comers in the plant world pharmacopoeia. Research has demonstrated that it helps prevent the occurrence of cancers in the body. Eaten raw and daily, it purges and cleanses the lungs (this one's for you, dear smokers). It will also ameliorate and forestall the recurrence of chronic cold sores, fever blisters, impetigo, hemorrhoids and chronic rashes, as well as battle acne into submission and enhance skin tone. It's able to settle upset stomachs and fend off Monteczuma's revenge (or diarrhea if you're outside Mexico), through it's very able anti-bacterial properties. A couple cloves a day of fresh garlic chopped fine, swallowed like a pill before eating, and washed down with a slug of milk to help mask any odor kickback, will accomplish all these curative feats. This homeopathic remedy is also probably the easiest in creation to be homegrown, as just pushing whole garlic cloves a couple inches down into good soil or compost in a sunny spot will yield new green shoots in about two weeks. When the leaves begin to brown and fall over, the garlic cloves are ripe for harvest.

Peppermint or spearmint, another plant genus that is only too eager to flourish in the garden, also puts a fast halt to stomach upsets, and the stomach-muscle spasms and other symptoms of norovirus infection. A tisane or tea of any type of mint leaves works better, in this regard, than drugstore pharmaceuticals. Mint is such an exuberant grower that it will spread throughout and take over a garden, given half a chance, so it is best planted in an enclosed or isolated location, or in containers where it can sprawl generously about to its heart's content.

The scarlet berries of hawthorn trees, adored by birds and adorning northerly landscapes throughout wintertime, were used in olden days to treat heart palpitations. Recent studies in England have shown this herbal treatment to be based upon provable results, as hawthorne berries yield significant benefits for people with chronic heart failure. They work in a manner similar to digitalis in cases of congestive heart failure, and hawthorne berries can redress high blood pressure, as well. High in antioxidants like their better-known cousin, the blueberry, hawthorne berries can boost resistance to development of dementia and aging of skin.

Lavender not only smells terrific and makes a very long-lasting dried flower, it's got remarkable soothing and calming powers. For centuries, sachets of dried lavender have been tucked under pillow shams to aid people with falling asleep. Lavender oil massaged into sore muscles will relieve pain, and rubbed on the skin over a headache it will reduce spasms and bring headache moderation or cessation. Clinical trials have found lavender oil effective in curing earache, and lavender scent successful in reducing feelings of agitation in patients with dementia or Alzheimer's. The English herbalist William Culpepper summed up lavender's talents accurately as “beneficent for all the grief and pains of the head.”

Primrose flowers are not only welcome pastel harbingers of the return of blooming season, but also are useful in alleviating common headaches and, like lavender, exert a quieting influence. For a healthful tonic or nervous system stimulant for lagging spirits, on the other hand, steep a teaspoonful of the dried bark of dogwood in a cup of boiling water for half an hour, and drink half a cupful daily. Comfrey root, prepared and drunk daily in the same manner, hot or cold, takes away nasal congestion and catarrh.

The elder tree was held in such high healing regard in times past as to be known colloquially as “the village pharmacy.” The flowers, berries, bark, roots and leaves all found medicinal uses, and hedgecutters would refuse to cut it down because of its renowned powers of medicinal good. Elderflower tea has been shown to deactivate viruses, and shorten the duration and strength of influenza.

Figwort leaves, another garden friend much esteemed in herbal folklore, stimulates skin cells that speed and promote the healing of wounds when used as a poultice or dressing. Rosehips made into a poultice will diminish the pain of arthritis and aching joints. This would come as no surprise to ancestral herbal healers, who traditionally rubbed rosehips onto painful joints of the hips, hands and knees. Rosehips offer an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effect which assuages inflammatory conditions and thus results in elimination of pain.

The great advantage of most herbal and plant medicaments is that they have no nasty, undesirable side effects, as do so many chemically manufactured drugs. They are also free and readily at hand in many gardens, so obtaining and putting them to use will not impoverish the sufferer nor line the deep, already well-stocked pockets of pharmaceutical companies. The foregoing is but a tiny sampling of the many, many plant-world natural remedies for maladies of mind and body. A great starting point to pursue knowledge of nature's medicine chest can be accessed at the British National Institute of Medical Herbalists website, www.nimh.org.uk. As herbalist Joseph Meyer posits, “why use chemical drugs when nature in her wisdom has provided, in her great vegetable laboratories of the fields and forest, attenuation for the ills of mankind?” There now, don't you feel better already?

Spring Patience

2009-03-30T14:35:00.005-04:00

Spring arrives later and proceeds down the garden, forest and farm-field aisles with more gradual, cautious steps in northern Michigan than it does even in parts of the state just a few hours to the south. When the lilac bushes hereabouts at last drop their shoulders under the weight of fully opened flowers, lilacs in the Detroit, Lansing and Grand Rapids areas will have passed their peak by a couple of weeks. Peonies generally aren't ready to shake out their pom-pom heads until after Memorial Day. Nighttime frosts continue with regularity right through April, can and do keep showing up in May to lay killing fingers on emerging growth. Memorial Day is traditionally held to be the earliest safe date for setting out tender starter plants, although last year that holiday weekend which is supposed to usher in summer brought, instead, a hard frost.

Along the coastal fringes of Lake Michigan, the water of the big lake moderates the temperature somewhat, and in consequence the last frost date here will be earlier than just a mile or so inland from the shoreline. Nonetheless, the nights still nosedive into the twenties and thirties throughout April and May. It is really hard to curtail the urge brought on by seductive spring daytime temperatures to get out in the garden and start sowing. The pile of seed packets stands at the ready on the kitchen counter, listing ever so longingly towards the back door. There are exciting new characters in the pile, with glamorous headshots profiling the good looks they are ready to bring to the garden stage. The planting instructions are perused again and again, maybe it didn't really say wait until after all chance of frost?

Patience isn't just a virtue, it is a non-negotiable job requirement for a gardener. Almost everything done in the garden is done for the delayed gratification, sometimes very long delayed, of a future reward. Being too hasty and attempting to accelerate any part of the stately, methodical process of raising a garden usually leads to heartbreak, as surely as does stampeding gung-ho into a fledgling romance. Gardens want to be courted the old-fashioned way, gently and steadily wooed into fruition. Their response to stalking, imploring and badgering will be to shrivel away from the suitor. Seeds and young plants put out when the nights still fall into frozen postures may not die, but neither will they thrive, and the poor, shocking start can arrest and stunt their growth throughout the summer.

Right now the signs of incipient spring are still almost nonexistent. The trees remain flat brown and grey, no blushes of returning growth yet color their bark in Easter pastel greens, yellows and rose. The grass on the meadows and fields is the tawny, lifeless color of dried cornstalks, the American dune grass on the beaches is the pale, quiescent blond of Marilyn Monroe's hair. In the garden, only the merest tip of the primroses, a handful of the daffodils, and a few skinny fronds of the poppies have made their way through the cold ground and taken on the green hue of rebirth.

In the last week or so, spring has deigned to advance far enough to re-open most of the hiking areas that become inaccessible under winter's snow and ice payload. As winter marches onward in the Leelanau Peninsula, the number of places where a hike can be taken diminish week by week. Trailheads become unreachable down unplowed, knee-high, snowed-buried country roads. With the trails out of reach, only the beaches remain passable for walkers. Then the treacherous, chunky, slick freezing of the sands sets in, arctic icebergs get thrown up on the shorelines by the tumultuous November and December gales, and the beaches, too, become unwalkable. By February and into March, only the town and village roads are left as possibilities for stretching the legs without first donning snowshoes or cross-country skis.

Spring has at least now bequeathed back the country trails, the dunes and beaches. The snow and ice have mostly melted, back-country gravel roads can be navigated, trailheads achieved. The dunes shed their winter duvets of snow, and startle again with how much, each year, they shift and change their shape. This spring the annual shape-shifting wrought by the winter winds is most visible at the Sleeping Bear Dunes dune climb along Highway 109. The dune climb plateau has migrated downward what looks to be about six feet, it's horizontal headland now scooped out to resemble a swayback sculpted crescent. The waterline of the lake is higher this year, as well, the winter's heavy precipitation having forwarded it right to the foot of the bluffs at Sleeping Bear Point, and swallowed up five to ten feet of sandy beach. New hills, ridgelines and sweeping sand bowls redefine the dune silhouettes all up and down the coast, a facelift that changes the vistas encountered on each familiar trail. The altered limbs and muscles of the dunes are a reminder that they live, breath, heave, cascade, and evolve. The bears do not stay still, but roll over in their sleep.

For now, the gardener needs to unhand those seed packets, take a deep breath, explore anew another trail friend back from winter hibernation, and accept the fact that calendar dates signifying the commencement of spring for other climes mean, in northern Michigan, that the garden is just turning over and snuggling back down into another month or two of its beauty sleep, not even close to prepared to rise and shine. As garden writer Eleanor Perenyi advises, “patience is the only way. The seasons can't be rushed, or halted.” Nature knows when the moment is right to bedeck herself in bonnets of narcissus and white gloves of snowdrops, to slip into her patten leather pumps of kelly green creeping phlox, and step forth to give us her hand for the opening dance of springtime. The gardener, hat in hand, can only wait.

Death in the Garden

2009-03-20T12:13:00.003-04:00

Appearances can be dangerously deceptive in the garden. Some of the most delicate, pretty little things harbor substances that can easily fell a hale and hearty grown-up. Some flowers found in almost every full-fledged Michigan garden can raise welts and rashes on the skin, burn the ability to see from the eyes. Reading in a 1934 tome called “The Herbalist,” by Joseph E. Meyer, “author and compiler,” it's astounding how very many well-known garden friends and companions secretly possess the power to commit murder most foul.

Nibbling the young, spring leaves of delphinium or larkspur before the plant flowers, for instance, will rapidly poison the eater. The leaves and seeds of these plants may cause dermatitis. The fair-haired spring bulbs of narcissus, daffodil, jonquil and paper-whites all result in poisoning if ingested. At the other end of the flower season, autumn crocus are highly venomous, potentially not just sick-making but fatal if eaten.

The milky juice in young seed capsules of the poppy carries the extremely potent opium narcotic. Severe poisoning will also follow upon eating fresh or dried leaves of foxgloves, and children can be poisoned from chewing on foxglove flowers or seeds. Turkey mullein, or doveweed, holds in its veins a narcotic that was employed by Native Americans to make poisoned arrows, and which causes stupefaction when it enters the bloodstream.

Hellebore, or the Lenten rose, is filled with alkaloid toxins from its late-winter blooming flowers, to the leaves, to the extremely poisonous root, and consumption of any part of the plant can bring on violent vomiting. Bruising or brushing the leaves can also cause rashes. Sweet, petite lily-of-the-valley contains deadly amounts of cardiac clycosides in the leaves, flowers, rootstalk and berries. A child can perish just from drinking the water in a vase of these flowers! Considering how the lily-of-the-valley's enchanting scent, bell-shaped flower and diminutive size make it a magnet for children, its toxicity is especially worrisome. These little charmers bear close monitoring when children are about.

Some of the most attractive wildflowers are also very efficient poison-delivery systems. Dutchman's breeches, a very common and attractive sight every springtime throughout Michigan woodlands, have leaves and roots that will induce trembling, loss of balance, difficulty breathing and convulsions, should one be foolish enough to take a bite out of them. The fluid in the stalks of lady's slipper raises a poison ivy-like rash. Deadly nightshade (pictured above), also traveling under the alias of jimsonweed, is so lethal that consuming it leads to an intoxicated state, intense agony, delirium and death.

The latex sap in butterfly weed (or spurges) is potentially carcinogenic, burns the eyes and inflicts dermatitis. The feathery Chinese brake fern has an unusual talent for absorbing large amounts of arsenic from the soil, which it effortlessly passes along as a venom to those who eat its leaves. The bracken fern brings on acute poisoning in ruminants (including humans who may happen to graze upon it). The roots of squill are used to make a poison rodent powder. And the juice of milkweed stalks is another virulent poison, to animals and humans alike.

Jeepers creepers! Mother Nature sure knows how to arm her progeny with weapons against would-be predators. Of course, she also endows many of them with curative, calming and beneficial substances, as any herbal practitioner can attest. Even the baneful milkweed sap is said to eradicate warts if rubbed upon them (assuming one doesn't accidentally then transfer the affected area to one's mouth and die before the wart disappears).

The juice of the kindly Joe Pye weed, applied as a poultice, will heal sores, wounds and bruises, and hunters have noted that a wounded deer will seek out this weed to consume. The bark of willow trees and the ground leaf of Meadowsweet offer an aspirin-like chemical without aspirin's side effects, efficacious remedy for headaches, rheumatism and arthritis. Violets are known as nature's Vitamin C, being richer in this vitamin even than oranges, pound for pound. Verbena plants proffer a natural antidote to their more injurious cohorts by arresting and neutralizing the diffusion of ingested poison.

All told, it's clearly best to be well-armed with a thorough botanical guidebook before going noshing in the dodgy, chimerical environs of the plant world, even unto the gentle, frothy, fragile-seeming flower beds. Knowledge is needed to distinguish the benign edibles from the potential plant assassins and to identify horticultural helpers like the periwinkle. An old English herbalist, one Dr. Culpepper, promises that “the leaves of periwinkle, if eaten by man and wife together, will cause love between them.” And if that doesn't work out as anticipated, there's abundant recourse to be sought from Mother Nature's more pernicious gifts. Dram of nightshade tea, old thing?

Last Days of Winter and Nation's Dark Season

2009-03-14T12:03:00.007-04:00

Pretty much everyone stopping in the corner EZ Mart for coffee, the village post office for mail, the IGA grocery, agrees it's high time for winter to get out of town. Winter unleashed salvos so early this year, barely letting Halloween close-up shop before it started landing left-right combinations of below-freezing temperatures and truckloads of snow. Big snow – more so far than in the last 13 years and it isn't over yet – and frostbite cold have stuck around almost without interruption for close on five months now. Everyone but the diehard skiers has joined the chorus shouting or muttering darkly, “Enough! Get away with you!”

The dire local, state and national socio-economic situation this winter further assaulted our spirits and fingersmithed our wallets. Investment bank and stock firm CEOs stole American homes, pensions and savings to buy themselves lavish lifestyles, and then walked away rich from the financial conflagration they ignited. When you're unemployed, or working reduced hours for a diminished paycheck, or agonizing over family members who can't scare up a decent job no matter how hard they search, or making choices between buying schoolbooks and supplies or buying food, getting smacked in the face with a sleety open palm of -5 wind and chill when you step outside starts to wear resilience to a pretty thin edge.

But the responsible grown-ups who make up 99% of the apples in our national bushel basket are a scrappy, determined, decent, can-do, inventive, street- and farmyard-smart bunch. Whether because spring hovers just down the road a stretch, or from the wise guidance of the elders among us who've weathered such national storm seasons before, or because American grit is founded in a credo of never give up, change for the better of all is en route. Led by the smartest, hardest-working and honorable president the country has enjoyed in decades, we are calling the corporate criminals to account, taking away their luxury penthouses and seizing back the stolen assets (and really, may Bernard Madoff, Arthur Nadel, John Thain and their ilk rot in hell).

We're figuring out creative methods to clean and green our industry and energy production, planting rooftop gardens on big box stores and assembly plants, and swapping out incandescent lightbulbs for long-lasting, low-energy fluorescents. We're rejuvenating our frugal, mend and make-do and grow your own and shop local, native know-how, reducing waste, recycling, lending a hand to neighbors and the needy, putting up windmills and taking down financial and environmental predators.

Progress is being made again. The country is emerging from its long, sharp, bone-shaking winter more savvy, leaner, more self-sufficient and healthier, more cognizant of and set on shoring up the common good than ever in recent memory. Baseball spring training is in full, oaken swing. Yesterday an honest-to-goodness, fat and fluffy robin redbreast – first one sighted this year -- alighted atop the crab apple tree in the back yard. The sap is running in the sugar maples, ready for tapping.

Counting down these final few frigid weeks until the song of the turtle is heard in the land, the simple, thrifty, cheering and succoring pleasures are what see north country denizens through. When the wind howls and tugs at the windowpanes, the snow cracks whips across the dune hills, the walkways and trails are too icy to maneuver, the gardener has recourse to the following list of true comforts with which to wait out winter's last gasps. If you have others, dear reader, please fire up the computer and send them along to share:

More time to spend reading newspapers, magazines, and in the entertaining, instructive companionship of treasured writers and fictional characters. Best books read since 2009 opened its eyes – “When Will There Be Good News?” by Kate Atkinson, “City of Thieves” by David Benioff, “The Brass Verdict” by Michael Connelly, “The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death” by Charlie Huston, "Green Thoughts," by Eleanor Perenyi, “Child 44” by Tom Rob Smith, and “Flower Confidential” by Amy Stewart.

Herds (yes, herds) of hungry, beautiful deer, their coats the color of driftwood, strolling down the main streets of the village, leaping snowbanks, pausing in long, still moments just yards away.

Oil paintings of landscapes and interiors, see especially the American wing at the Detroit Institute of Arts and anything by Frederick Edwin Church or Albert Bierstadt. Or Ruth Conklin and Kristin Hurlin in Glen Arbor, Mimi Nieman in Leland, paintings you can enter and inhabit.

Rediscovering the satisfaction of home-cooking and rich, hearty meals of homemade soup, stew, chili, pot roast and noodles, chicken and dumplings. This week it will be corned beef, redskin potatoes and cabbage, naturally.

Hot cocoa. Scarlet geraniums blooming on the windowsills.

Two for the price of one burgers, Monday nights, Art's Tavern, as in the sublime mushroom/swiss burger. Eagles and Lions pancake breakfasts and fish fry suppers at the village town halls, up and down the Leelanau Peninsula.

The musical stylings of Leonard Cohen, Sarah McLachlan, Joni Mitchell and Bruce Springsteen. While this selection might lead others to want to jump in the shower and open a vein, it makes me sing.

Glimmering snow paint strokes across the burnished gold muscles of the sand dunes.

Sheltering in bookstores and coffee shops, boning up on the new crops in literature, indulging in the occasional thick, black and homicidal espresso concoction. Walking the aisles at the Ben Franklin five-and-dime and marveling at the cornucopia of inexpensive, useful household goods and chattels on offer.

Paint-up, fix-up, sort, clean-up, recycle time with the homefront, its closets, dressers and cedar chests. Getting down to business with needlework projects that tend to languish when the weather's fine, knitting, quilting, sewing nice, cozy flannel curtains for the north-facing windows.

Weeknight evenings, watching Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert on Comedy Central, and the brilliant Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, and thus getting schooled on the truth versus palaver in politics, government, current events, and getting to laugh out loud at the deft exposure of blowhards, scapegraces, blackguards and knuckleheads.

Down comforters and 9 p.m. bedtime, totally guilt-free. Goodnight, dear reader.

Spring Pruning

2009-03-06T14:18:00.002-05:00

How cheering it is, after the big meltdown of a 50-degree day mid-week, to see the garden re-emerge and poke its head out of the disappearing snowpack. For the first time in several months, the small shrubs, cement statuary of rabbits and hedgehog, the spindly rosebushes and silver-sage lavender branchlettes, the amber pine needle mulch on the flower beds, all have doffed their thick snow blankets and begun to return the garden to view.

Sunday inaugurated the 2009 gardening year by being the first day of work in the garden. Or first hours would be more accurate, given that after two hours in the 29-degree temperature, the feet were so thoroughly chilled they made the hands down-tools, and strode up the path and back into the warmth indoors. Cold weather or not, the sky calendar of moon and stars dictated it was the best time to prune trees and shrubs, and really, this celestial command was happily obeyed. Though it was a shivery, nose-running two hours, it felt excellent to be abroad and at work in the garden again, with the soft, tempered warmth of the winter sunshine like a poultice on the face.

The goals of the pruning were to stimulate this year's growth, fruiting and flowering, to remove crossed, dead and unhealthy branches, and to shape and cut back branches going in unwanted directions. The young Fuji apple tree was the first customer for the clippers, as apple trees need sharp shearing during their youth if they are to mature into strong, fruit-bearing grown-ups. During this initial sally upon the garden's shaggy quarters, however, it quickly became apparent that not quite as much cutting back as recommended was going to be done. While I have no qualms about hacking out dead matter from the garden, it is extraordinarily difficult for this gardener to slice into living, apparently healthy growth and terminate it. In part, perhaps this cowardice is because all the inhabitants of the garden are still in their youth and on the small side. The vision is for the garden to be big, busting out all over, arms spread in luxurious, strapping growth, so even when one knows it will yield long-term horticultural dividends, it just seems wrong to assault and reduce the height and breadth the trees and shrubs have attained thus far in their short lives. So faint-heartedness and fond attachment to the progress of the garden denizens somewhat stayed the hand wielding the shears. The final result hopefully found a reasonable, efficacious balance between the cutting which could have been done, and that which the gardener deemed acceptably non-violent.

After the apple tree got its moderate trim job, it was on to the Chicago lustre viburnum, the American high bush cranberry, the diablo ninebark, and the red-twig dogwood shrubs, to remove just those branches rubbing against others, and a few offshoots encroaching into bordering areas. With all the leaves gone for winter, it's very easy to inspect and evaluate a tree or shrub, to spot problematic growth, and to see its silhouette and shape in full. The only troubling discovery was a barnacle-like, rock-hard growth about midway up a single branch on the apple tree, and a matching growth on a single branch of the red oak that is the next-door neighbor to the apple. This growth looks suspiciously like some type of fungal parasite, and will be taken to the nearby Sleeping Bear Dunes park headquarters for identification by the arbor and botany experts. All national parks and university extension services have these resident founts of knowledge on staff, and are a tremendous free source of information for the amateur gardener.

Next in line for barbering were the rosebushes, which also got a scaled down pruning this year, considerably less than the one-third cutback of prior winters. Jim, the head gardener at the local Wildflowers garden shop, also describes himself as “not a big fan of pruning,” and provided the knowledge that only hybrid tea roses really require a good cut-back each spring. Shrub and old-fashioned roses should be pruned only to remove dead stems. Even though spring is still a couple of moons away and the rosebushes remain in dormancy, it is obvious to the eye which boughs are alive by their ruddy, reddish-greenish hue, as opposed to the dull dark brown and gray tints of dead boughs. Where color of the bark is not so conspicuous, an easy method of determining life within a branch is to scrape a small portion of bark away with the fingernail. Living branches will have a pale green color just below the surface bark, while dead ones will be dry, gray and white.

The last tasks completed entailed snipping off the dead, collapsed leaves of the globe thistle, daylilies and iris, the dried and largely denuded seedheads of red carpet sedum, and the long, sprawling fronds of switchgrass and fountain grass which had been brought to their knees by the weight of the snow. The remaining pruning and clear-up – the Russian sage, blue oat grass and miscanthus silver grass – await another sunny day, when the temperatures are more amenable to bare-handed toil. Darling, unpredictable spring can't be too many weeks away now, and an afternoon spent tidying the garden proves a very satisfactory snippet of the good green season of outdoor occupation soon to come.

Garden Ease

2009-02-24T12:59:00.003-05:00

Maybe to an observer it looks like a lovely dalliance to collect baskets of fat, ripe tomatoes or snip bouquets of pastel blushing roses, but in reality gardening is hard work. It can be expensive enough to carve craters in the bank account if the common garden affliction of “plant lust” infects the gardener. And it requires a long-term commitment of resources, toil and time similar to, but much more labor-intensive than adopting a pet. A garden is never a finite task with a start, middle and completion, but rather a work-in-progress the gardener must continue to tend, tutor, define, discipline and support for all of the garden's lifespan.

Nonetheless, for those who'd like to like to harvest some of the rewards a garden brings without having to devote every fair-weather free hour to its care, or who are daunted by the seeming complexity and cost of cultivation, or discouraged by a big, empty, wildly needy arena of yard, there are approaches that will let the novice or the skint wade in the refreshing shallows of gardening, and avoid plunging headfirst into its subsuming depths. Let simplicity and thrift be the guiding principles behind nascent forays into gardening, and its pleasures can be realized by one and all.

Start small. If you have a whole yard without so much as a single crocus growing, or with unattractive landscaping like the drab, ubiquitous, evergreen shrubs that so often flank a house foundation, pick just one area to begin to remedy the emptiness and neglect. Make it a spot where you like to spend time outdoors (around a patio, in front of a porch), or that will enliven the view from windows (the borders of the front walk, the center of the back yard), or where something hideous needs to be removed (patches of weeds, dead or old, woody shrubs). Define a modest, limited area, such as a circular bed in the lawn, a half-moon bed by the front door, a foot of border along a walkway, and dig in. Don't be intimidated by thoughts of having to dig out the ancient roots of trees or shrubs that need to go, these can simply be sawn off at the ground and carted away. The roots will die out over time as long as any new shoots that appear are cut down.

Flower bulbs. For the sweetest, longest-lasting payback to the most minimal cost and effort, bulbs are the ticket. Just put them in the ground at the depth and season recommended and for years to come they will give the garden flowers. Replace the dirt from the hole dug for the bulbs with composted cow manure, cheap garden gold at about $3 for a 40-pound sack, and they will have all the natural fertilizer they need. Watering isn't needed except during lengthy drought. The only caution here is that most tulip bulbs, which are some of the pricer species, generally only flower well the first year, after which all they put forth are leaves. In addition, woodchucks, deer and rabbits love to feast on tulips. If you want tulips, look for the reputed naturalizing, multi-year types (though I haven't found these to live up very reliably to the claims of repeated bloom), and be prepared to spray the emerging plants with wild-forager repellents. Choose daylilies, windflowers, alliums, snowdrops, crocus, or any of the thousands of exuberant daffodils and narcissus on the market, and the wildlife will be less intrusive and your plantings will flower and spread farther every year. Add a few or a lot of bulbs -- depending upon time and budget -- each fall, and eventually the flower bulb gardens will expand into a Wordsworthian field of flowers.

Tight quarters. When fashioning a garden bed, stock it up with bulbs and plants to completely fill it out. If it gets too crowded for the plants to breath and stretch, it can always be cropped back, but a full bed will reduce the vacuum which nature abhors and always rushes to fill with weeds. A full bed will also shade the soil surface and thus preserve moisture in the soil. Thus will the maintenance time and chores of weeding and watering be reduced.

Container gardens. To truly limit garden labor demands, or if available space is very sparse (an apartment balcony, a condo sidewalk verge), put the garden into pots, barrels, window boxes, old watering cans, enamelware or biscuit tins, whatever takes your fancy. Just make sure the container has a hole or two in the bottom to drain off excess water, toss some pebbles or crystal rock into the pot to help retain moisture, and water regularly to offset the faster drying-out that occurs in an enclosed pot. You can plant pretty much anything from petunias to pepper plants in containers, and succulents, with their low-water requirements, do especially well. Scatter some mulch wood chips or pine needles on the top of the soil and the drying out will be slowed.

Seeds. Seeds are yep, dirt cheap, and aside from needing daily watering until they sprout (usually one to two weeks), can be easygoing, non-demanding garden dwellers. Go for the hardy, old-fashioned, readily-sprouting types rather than the fancy, hybrid, new-fangled princesses. Good choices include sunflowers, cosmos, bachelor buttons, bee balm, black-eyed susan, poppy, hollyhock, larkspur, lupine, morning glories, snapdragons, veronicas and yarrow to name just a few of the most strapping. Many of these will return and multiply year upon year.

Ground covers. Say goodbye to the infernal machine of the lawnmower, and don't trouble with watering cans after the first year. Many ground covers are soft and sturdy enough to walk upon, do just fine with miniscule amounts of rainfall once established, and bring flowers and fragrance in their bag of tricks. Some favorites which will stretch out farther and fuller by the year include creeping thymes, creeping phlox, creeping jenny, periwinkle, ivies, stonecrop sedums and chamomile.

Garden art. Another way to create still lifes and vignettes in your grounds while eschewing all forms of travail is to turn to garden art. Statues, antique furniture or housewares or farming tools, gazing globes, birdbaths and houses, pinecones and acorns, culled willow and grapevine-branch pergolas, boulders and beach stones and shells, water fountains, fairy houses, rustic furniture from tree stumps, and so the list continues of objects which can be scattered decoratively upon your landscape. Thrift store houseware sections, yard sales, junkyards, recycling centers, forests, riverbeds and your imagination will provide you with free or low cost objects to re-purpose as garden art.

Free plants. Lots that are slated for development bulldozers, neighbors who are dividing overgrown beds of iris, lilies, tradescantia, mums, and wild unoccupied public lands can all be sources of free shrubs, sapling trees, flowers and wildflowers. Carefully dig up with as many roots intact as possible and with dirt from the growing spot, ladle into a bucket of soil and transplant to your yard. Keep them moist for a few weeks (or twice weekly waterings for two summers for shrubs and trees), and a mostly free garden will ensue.

Gardens can become bossy, pricey, exhausting mistresses if allowed free rein. With wily forethought, keeping a ready eye out, and setting and sticking firmly to practicable ground rules, the gardener can remain in charge (for the most part and excepting the occasional weather temper tantrum) of purse strings and garden pursuits.

Moonlight Becomes Your Garden

2009-02-13T12:50:00.004-05:00

In the early 1950s, a young German biodynamic farmer/researcher named Maria Thun decided to investigate the legendary belief present in many agro-cultures all the way back to Babylonian times, that the phases of the moon affect gardens and crops. She began by sowing underground crops (potatoes, carrots) according to lunar cycles. Based upon initial results which demonstrated the powers of the moon, over the next several decades Ms. Thun extended her experimentation to many other kinds of plants.

Her body of research and that of other agricultural scientists who followed her lead documents that the moon and other heavenly bodies and events do indeed impact earthly plant growth. Understanding how and why this is so allows gardeners to enlist the divine intervention of the heavens for the good of their enterprises, and to avoid incurring the heavens' wrath (as it were) upon their gardens.

The orbit of the moon acts upon and moves the rise and fall of tides, the air currents that flow constantly over the earth's surface, rainfall and drought and thunderstorm occurrences. Tides in seas, lakes, rivers, and the waters contained in and beneath the soil, follow the same daily cycle as the rising or subsiding moon. Most of earth's rainfall comes just after a full moon. For the garden, this means that phases of a full moon are most auspicious for speeding germination of seeds in the soil, as well as survival and success of tender young plants, particularly during periods of drought. The waxing (increasing) moon greatly assists the ascendance and absorption of moisture.

Likewise, periods of a new or waning moon are generally the worst times to start seeds or seedlings, and can blight their prospects. If, like me, you have ever bedded in seeds and young plants assiduously, watered them religiously, and seen nary a sprout nor healthy, dancing plant yielded by your labors, perhaps the explanation may be that it was just the wrong time of the month for Mother Earth. A time when she had, so to speak, a celestial headache.

In addition to the phase of the moon, the moon's placement in the sky and in constellations also determines whether the heavens will be smiling upon and lending a helping hand to the gardener, or tossing down scowls of bad weather and curses of ill-starred energy. Plants carry electrical charges, as do all life forms, which can promote or depress growth. Because of this, plants are extremely sensitive to fluctuations in energy fields, to changes in earth's air currents, and to alterations in the air's ionization caused by thunderstorms. Plants actually favor and respond best to the moon's placement within constellations depending upon the type of plant and the physical/astronomical environment its type requires in order to go forth happily and flourish.

Underground root crops, for example (carrots, garlic, potatoes, onions), like to be planted when the moon is dallying within one of the earth signs of the astrological calendar, those being Taurus, Capricorn and Virgo. Above-ground leafy plants (lettuce, celery, alfalfa, chard) enjoy the best chance of settling in for a productive residence if planted when the moon visits a water sign, Pisces, Scorpio or Cancer. Flowers (flighty creatures) want to get started when the moon is ruled by an air sign, Gemini, Libra or Aquarius. And seed plants (apple, tomato, nuts, pomegranates, raspberries) prefer to get their game on with the moon headquartered in a fire sign, Aries, Leo or Sagittarius.

The constellations also can aid or hinder other garden undertakings. If you're thinking of attacking, chopping out and attempting to defeat weeds or other unwanted growth in the garden, your efforts will be most effective when the most barren signs of Gemini, Leo and Virgo rule the heavens. Harvesting ought to take place during the dark of the moon (from last quarter to new moon) in the signs of Aries, Aquarius or Sagittarius. To gather fruit, grain or vegetables during water signs may invite unwelcome decay or sprouting. If there's a shrub or tree that's getting a little too big for its britches, pruning done in the signs of Aries or Sagittarius will discourage new growth. If pruning is employed with a view to stimulating and bringing on new growth, put the secateurs to work in the signs of Cancer or Scorpio between the full and new moons, as this is when wounds heal best (also good to know if you're planning a spot of elective surgery). Maria Thun publishes an annual biodynamic planting and sowing calendar with very detailed cosmological planting guidelines, and these can be located by searching her name at www.alibris.co.uk.

The writers Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson took the garden/moon dialogue to another level by creating a moonlight garden at Sissinghurst Castle, meant to be visited and enjoyed by the light of the moon rather than in daytime and sunlight. Moonlight gardens feature white, cream or yellow flowers, and those which look and smell their best under the dewy touch of nighttime and the gentle beams of the moon – calla lilies, pale roses, jasmine tobacco, clematis, four o'clocks, stocks, snow-on-the-mountain – pretty much any plant with vanilla shades of flowers. Silvery, mint and sage foliage, such as found on lavendar, lamb's ears and dusty miller, also look magical by moonlight, as does white-toned tree bark.

What underpins the overall horticultural science of being guided by the moon and stars really comes back to a fundamental principle of good gardening, namely, don't fight nature. Flowers wish to unfurl, corn strives to bound upward, grasses are bent upon growing long tresses to toss in the winds if the gardener but abides by the ancient wisdom of heeding the earth's tethers to her heavenly consorts. Thus can the moon become your garden, and the gardener become, in the words of Reginald Farrer, “the reverent servant of nature, not her truculent, wife-beating master.”

Childhood Gardens

2009-02-04T12:46:00.003-05:00

The best, most distinct, most numerous memories of childhood often involve gardens, trees, waterscapes and other natural world phenomena. From infancy, children seem to possess a very close connection with nature and inexhaustible enchantment with her offspring in all their permutations. A surefire method of quieting a crying baby is to hold it before a window, where it will quickly become enthralled and speechless watching the light, the branches of any visible trees, even the nighttime sky, stars and shadows. Take a child to a lakeside, riverside, ocean beach or creek, and only with difficulty will she or he be persuaded to stop exploring, splashing, collecting stones and shells, minnows and crabs, and come away again. Rare is the child who isn't regularly trying to escape from buildings to the much preferred environs of the outdoors.

Two gardens make up the setting for nearly all the childhood memories remaining to me. Both happened to be located in the tiny village of Lexington, on the western shore of Lake Huron, where my family spent every summer, from school out to fall roundup. One measured probably half an acre in size and surrounded the large Victorian house of a great aunt, where the family resided each summer. The other was a village lot some 50 feet wide by 150 feet deep, around the cottage of a grandmother, and on a bluff above the lake shore.

The aunt's gardens, for there were many in that half-acre, had been professionally planted and were maintained by a gardener, Mr. Hupp, who resided in a tiny loft apartment in the old barn at the back of the property. Mr. Hupp mysteriously disappeared, without so much as a note or a fare thee well, at some point in the growing up years, and thereafter the gardens were tended by the aunts, grandmothers, cousins and other females of the clan. The grandmother's yard was sporadically mowed and its shrubs trimmed up whenever a village lad happened along looking for some simoleons, or occasionally by my father on his weekend visits from Detroit City. Both completely captivated me, all waking hours not consigned to mealtimes, chores or sheltering from summer thunderstorms were spent in their presence.

Here's what held me spellbound, and never satiated in my pleasures and fantasy life in those gardens. The aunt had six mature cherry trees, two sweet black cherries, two tart red for pie-making, two Queen Anne whites. Countless sunny hours, every July, were dawdled away in these trees, climbing to perch on branches where the best cherry eating was within reach. There were many fruitful apple and pear trees as well, an avenue of horse chestnuts that yielded carpets of wondrous shiny brown nuts, a sweeping stands of towering pines, and a magnificent copper beech whose silky grey bark invited caresses. Rows upon rows of a cutting garden introduced me to the gladness of color and scent with phlox, lillies, iris, stock, delphinium. A large ringed bed offered the ecstasy of some dozen pastel and wine-red peonies, a decorative circular fence surrounded a functioning firehouse-red, hand-crank water pump and was smothered in climbing roses. All across the screened front porch, a purple wisteria drooped heavy blooms. In the center of one of the side yards a 20-foot circumference field-stone planter shaped like an Easter basket was filled annually with a plethora of petunias and marigolds. And along the western boundary, a large field left to go wild sported tall native grasses and wildflowers wherein a child could lie on the downy breast of the earth and wile away whole afternoons in sun-warmed daydreams.

The grandmother's garden, though miniscule and manicured in comparison, also captured deep affection. An old, small, much gnarled apple tree with a wide-spread divided trunk provided the easiest tree climbing and most comfortable, gently angled branches for repose. This garden acquainted me with the inimitable glories of the lilac's perfume and delicate beauty in a tall hedge along the side porch, where chickadees nested and hummingbirds came to drink. The bluff down to the beach, all wild and rarely cut back, was a mythical, romantic tangle of self-sown hollyhocks, sumac and dune grass. At its foot, aged, weathered and stretching its lemony boughs to dapple the sand with shade, a matronly willow tree stood sentinel. And of course, the grandmother's property included the unbeatable, infinite fascination of the big lake, peerless location for picnics, swims, beachcombing, sand-castle building.

The time spent in these two very different Michigan gardens left an indelible imprint of true, bone-deep happiness. The companionship of the trees and flowers, the rabbits, squirrels, field mice, cardinals, jays, junkos, sparrows, outdistanced by far that of human beings in quality and quantity, in the spreading of imagination's wings, in the solace of solitary rambling, in the balm given to a child's senses.

Perhaps childhood memories hold such prominent, polished sway partly because the person to whom they happen has a mind like an unplowed acre, open, impressionable and without timeworn pathways and interpretations. When such memories are of outdoor settings and explorations, perhaps what sears them into the mind is the fact that they return the child to the embrace of it's fundamental origin, to the nature from whence all life so exuberantly springs. Perhaps in a garden, children feel the gentle tug of the earth, the sunbeams, the tides that pull toward yes and yes and yes, yes grow, yes live, yes flourish.

To Prune an Apple Tree

2009-01-26T13:30:00.003-05:00

As sub-freezing temperatures lay their cold paws across the landscape and veils of windborne snow course endlessly up hill and down dale, the gardener grumpily endures nature's enforced season of dormancy upon those who would till. Just as all growing things must pause and wait out winter's months of quietude and inactivity, so must gardeners. Hankering after some means of keeping one's hand in and being productive during the mid-winter exile from the garden, plans are drawn up for the pruning of the two-year old Fuji apple tree.

Very little pruning has been practiced in my garden, to date. The roses do get lopped back by about a third early each spring, as this is universally recommended as essential for their health and bloom. A white lilac that hasn't yet deigned to flower in five years had about a third of its young branches cut to the ground last summer, again because such pruning is supposed to bring bloom. In general, however, the shrubs and trees grow on uninterrupted, and may ascend to whatever width and height they are comfortable with, as the bigger they get, the happier the garden and its wildlife appear to be. And shrubs and trees alike are all still in their youth and smallish in size, pruning more than broken or crossed branches isn't needed at this juncture.

Except, apparently, for the apple tree. A radio garden show happened to mention that apple trees must always be pruned in their first years or they will go into a long pout of poor growth and delayed fruiting. This was news to me, but a little research indicated that indeed, the consensus among farm and garden arborists held pruning to be essential for apple trees (though not for other fruit-bearers, like cherry). The extension service at Tennessee's Clemson University, at www.hgic.clemson.edu, puts up a very broad and deep body of information on home garden topics, with detailed factsheets on many matters and species from peonies to pruning.

To begin, its necessary to remove all but one “leader” or central branch on the apple tree, cutting competing leaders back close to a bud and to their starting point. Looking at the little Fuji, it does in fact have three or four about equally tall central branches vying for the role of leader, so all but the biggest and best shaped will have to come off.

The leader central trunk then needs to be “headed back” by pruning about one-third off the top, again making a cut close to a bud. All downward pointing branches and suckers (branches that point straight up) must be removed, cutting just above the “collar” of raised bark that circles the branch where it emerges from the tree trunk. Branches with narrow crotches and those at less than a 45-degree angle from the trunk also get sliced off above their collars.

The Fuji in the garden, now that one knows what to look for, actually has every single one of these reportedly inferior, inhibiting branch growths. Perhaps that partially explains its production of just one lone apple its first year in the garden, and one lone apple again last summer, its second year.

Finally, the tree should be relieved of all but three-to-six scaffolds or side branches, evenly spaced around the central trunk. The cut limbs must be removed from the area, and burned or recycled in a distant brush pile, as left as layabouts on the ground they make very desirable residences for insects and diseases which feed upon and harm fruit trees.

Not until February 14 to 18 can this pruning plan be carried out. That, according to the Blum Farmer's Almanac (available at most grocery stores or www.blumsalmanac.com), is late enough in the winter dormant period to not be facing too many more weeks of freeze, yet before new spring growth will have begun. Those particular days in February mark a phase when the moon is waxing (or increasing in size), and the planets are best aligned to allow pruning to promote, rather than discourage growth. The Farmer's Almanac maintains that pruning during a waning period of the moon will certainly decrease growth, why they do not say. The waxing moon building toward full exerts a stronger gravitational pull upon the earth, its tides, tree sap and other energy fields, and thus probably also beckons forth growth spurts. The full moon, after all, which exercises the maximum gravitational pull each month, always brings the most births of human babies, as well.

Plotting and planning, researching and ruminating, gazing out the windows or braving the elements to hike through the snow drifts for closer inspections of the drowsing garden, so do the frustrations of not gardening get somewhat mollified. So do the days and weeks of January, the most unforgiving month, tick more usefully by. Or as Edward A. Bowles, English gardener and author, so eloquently states, “if only the gardener will plant enough plants of the most different types and habits procurable, there ought to be never a day in which he cannot find some pleasure...no minute of the daylight hours in which there is no interesting and health-giving work to be done.”

Green Warfare

2009-01-16T14:55:00.004-05:00

City and town environments can be harsh, monochromatic, fairly lifeless places. When I lived in the city, my favorite aspects of the surroundings, contrarily, were the parks, waterways, bordering woodlands, botanic and private gardens, the places where water flowed and plants grew. In economically depressed neighborhoods and in heavily-built municipal centers, the eyes and heart can languish for the uplifting presence of greenery, flowers, trees.

For the past several years, guerrilla gardeners have embarked upon a mission to redress the paucity of plant life in urban landscapes. From New Zealand to Canada, Great Britain to South Africa, Chicago to Berlin, a loose coalition of rebel gardeners have made it their business to introduce growing, blooming specimens into city hardscapes. Sometimes it is a single rosebush at the corner of a blacktopped schoolyard, or a ladder of ivy vines against a chainlink fence, or a bed of perennials in a barren traffic island. A flow of daffodils scattered on a streetside verge. A wildflower patch sown into the neglected yard of an abandoned house. Rows of beans, squash and salad greens tucked into an empty city lot.

Richard Reynolds, an enterprising and community-spirited young English fellow, launched the present-day guerrilla gardening movement by laying claim to a lifeless, ugly traffic island in London and setting about to put it to productive, pretty use by filling it with flowers, shrubs and trees. At www.guerrillagardening.org, Mr. Reynolds lays out the premise of the movement as a “war against neglect and scarcity of public space to grow things, beautiful, tasty or both.” In photographs and words, he and the legions of guerrilla gardeners who have followed his lead document their efforts to make their locales more beautiful and useful through the reclaiming of unutilized public spaces for cultivation.

Guerrilla gardening, under various monikers, has a long and storied history. In 1649, Englishmen Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard founded the Diggers agrarian revolutionary society of unemployed laborers and peasants on the principle that common land and wasteland should be available to the poor for the raising and sharing of communal crops. Johnny Appleseed practiced a similar, if more solitary, agrarian socialism by starting orchards wherever he rambled on U.S. public land. Community gardens established in schoolyards and vacant lots, with or without official “permission,” have been a regular phenomenon in countries near and far during eras of economic hardship and food shortage. In the 1960s, the Diggers of San Francisco pursued their agenda of free food and public services, in part, by creating gardens and distributing free food in public parks. Following the horrendous tragedy of September 11, 2001, a number of New York City firehouses found themselves the recipients of volunteer garden groups who brought vitality and cheer to their doorsteps with planters, windowboxes, sidewalk flower beds.

The genius of guerrilla gardening is that anyone, child to elder, poor or rich, can practice it. It comprises an egalitarian opportunity to transform a dour, oppressive, arid spot into a place of cheer and fecundity. For little outlay beyond a bit of cogitation, physical endeavor and a few dollars, a packet of seeds can be coaxed into seedlings to be transplanted into a sidewalk or street verge. Small shrubs and seedling trees can be dug up from land that is slated for the bulldozers of approaching building development and given a new home in a traffic roundabout or other wasted city plot. Grafts and divisions of plants from one's own garden can be the basis of a new flower bed at a health clinic, jailhouse, retirement home, public housing estate.

Many city gas stations, corner shops and convenience stores have easements, foundations and sometimes even planters available and containing nothing more than dirt and weeds, when who knows? Perhaps the store owners might chip in the odd ten-spot or two to a willing worker offering to sow the brilliance and hopefulness of sedums, virburnums, cranesbill geranium, lily-of-the-valley, phlox. Sunflowers, sage and thymes, coneflowers, daisies, ivies, grapevines, honeysuckle, cottoneaster, there's a well-nigh infinite list of the perennially-flowering plants and shrubs that are tough and scrappy enough, once on their legs, to survive and flourish for years with minimal or no maintenance beyond what nature provides.

The wizardry of guerrilla gardening is that it inspires and rewards all. The gardener, and every passerby who happens upon a guerrilla garden, every community member who receives a basket of runner beans or a zuccinni, reap alike moments of grace, pleasure and bounty where previously they encountered only the empty drear. That's an insurgent warfare everyone can get behind, swapping the cruelty of swords for the goodness of ploughshares.

A Catalogue Against the Cold

2009-01-10T11:41:00.002-05:00

The first 2009 plant catalogue,* from Bluestone Perennials, arrived in the mail, a most welcome sight in these deep winter days with its jaunty cover photo of a fling of apricot helenium flowers. It seemed worth spending maybe a quick half-hour browse, just to see what plants might jump up from the page as potentials for next spring (because spring will return in just a few months, even though it feels so very far away and unlikely with the garden hibernating beneath several feet of snow).

Two or three hours later, having read the tantalizing catalogue from cover to cover, a selection of a very restrained half-dozen specimens were flagged as definite must-haves for the garden. Already fairly flush with spring and early summer flowering plants, the garden still yearns for more summer into autumn bloomers. This consideration, along with seeking newcomers to introduce fresh personalities to the garden, and also to offer bloom time that lasts for more than just a week, guided the specimen choices.

Rudbeckias produce daisy and sparkler-style flowers from summer until frost knocks them down. Black-Eyed Susans are a common rudbeckia. Their color scheme ranges from butter yellow to sherry red, and some types – Henry Eiler, and maxima, and prairie sun – reach from three to even five feet in height. These gangly rudbeckias could really fill out and punctuate the back of a border during autumn's low-flowering stint. Prairie sun, labeled a “gold medal winner,” won a place on the order list for its limey green center surrounded by petals shading from soft tangerine to pale yellow at their tips. The catalogue promises rudbeckias are robust, self-seeding and can last for many years. What more could be asked?

Next on the list of desirables comes a Max Vogel anemone, with a flower that resembles a double-petalled cosmo, and colors a cotton-candy pink around a hot-orange center. This one also flowers continuously late summer through the fall, and grows two-to-three feet tall. When a plant is tall, bushy and full-flowered enough to be seen and enjoyed from across the yard or through the windows from indoors, it really broadens the garden vista and charms.

Another perennial that will stand up tall for itself with a two-foot, columnar flower stalk is the cherry blossom delphinium. The creamy pink flower got this one on the list, it's just what the blue and white delphiniums in the border under the front window need to nicely enlarge their color scheme. I'm a sucker for the pretty, frilly delphinium, even though it takes a little extra watering to keep it going in dry summers. Delphiniums love the sun but really don't like to get parched. If the flower stalk is cut back close to the ground when the bloom is finished, it will re-flower very reliably, though usually with a smaller flower head.

In the smaller, edging category, a catananche (love plant) caerulea teal blue and a feathery white look like winners. Late June through August flowering, these grow to about a foot and a half, are reported to have “many flowers above interesting silver-green foliage,” and have a flower similar in appearance to a bachelor button, pointy dense petals with a contrasting-color center. These girls like sun and well-drained soil, so they could really take to the front edge of the sunny, sandy garden, raising smiles to passersby on the sidewalk.

A surprising, fairly unusual find in the catalogue were special-species chrysanthemums, such as spoon, quilled, and football mums, which previously have been come across only in specialty mum catalogues. Mums are the queens of autumn tints and show in the garden, long-lasting and pretty hardy if they are mulched in cold-climate winters. If the foliage is pinched back up until the first of July, and no later, mums create lots of flower buds. The football mum flowerhead spreads round and wide, with inward-curving petals, in a big sphere more like a giant softball than a pigskin oval. Here are the colors offered in the football mums – amber, coral, French vanilla, russet, buff pink and light bronze. I mean, how could anyone resist trying some of these Reubenesque beauties?

Last but not least, the pinky-winky, perpetual-flowering hydrangea is darn near irresistible. The shrub can reach six feet in height, the twelve-inch, cone-shaped flowers stand upright and segue from white to pink to dusky rose, and can be cut and hung to dry for arrangements that will last until the next year's blooms appear. Hydrangeas also like regular watering in droughty spells, but doesn't summer-long flowering make it worth a little extra hose time?

All the above entries except the delphiniums will be brand new characters on the scene. At present, the standard, well-known cottage-garden plants such as hollyhock, poppy, daisy, lupine, peony, rose and so forth, are already well-represented in the garden. Now I'm looking to incorporate adventure and new names, species that may give innovation and diversity, that can be tried out to see if they will like and thrive in this northwest Michigan location, and perhaps enlarge the collection of favorites and strong performers.

Catalogues are excellent for searching out such new, untried plants. They also make useful reference tomes, to be consulted for photos and behavioral traits when one comes upon the name of an intriguing, heretofore unknown plant. With information from a catalogue, the gardener can seek out wanted specimens at local nurseries, or request that they be ordered by the neighborhood garden center. The catalogue arms us with our preferred marching orders for the surely coming next spring, even if we choose to employ the information only to shop locally for plants we can see, touch and thereby verify their strength, appearance and good health. In a snowbound Michigan January, plant and seed catalogues make for a full afternoon's enlightening, exciting reading.

*( Yep, thank you, Mr. Busybody Spellcheck, I do realize that “catalogue” isn't spelled this way any longer. However, it's still spelled this way by the gardener, as it looks better with all its letters intact, and I do not cotton to the new, efficiency-inspired practice of lopping off perfectly good letters from the words in which they've always resided. Nope, that's not my favourite thing.)

Why Garden?

2009-01-02T14:57:00.002-05:00

When will there be good news? In Michigan especially and in the whole of our beleaguered country, such hard times and daily bad, sad tidings beset us, it is difficult to find any arena of our socio-political-ecological world where good news and promise hold sway. Periods of hard times and turbulent change have often, in the past, spurred a focus on embracing the outdoors and nature. The Arts and Crafts Movement plant- and animal-based designs followed the Industrial Revolution, the national park system began in response to the Great Depression, big and bold preserved, cultivated city landscapes like Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and Central Park in Manhattan were born to counterpose the early 20th Century boom in urban building.

The private gardener is similarly motivated. Planting a garden lets us get personally, intimately, actively engaged in opposing the degradation and destruction of nature. Instead of plundering, paving and killing the earth, gardening tills the earth, opens and feeds the soil, reinvigorates growth and productivity. It nurtures and provisions the natural world, rather than endangering it. In the garden we can give back to the earth instead of taking away from it. We sow toward a tomorrow that will be more plentiful rather than more impoverished.

To work and care for a garden brings the gardener into direct touch with and awareness of nature, the weather, the seasons. It transports us out of the busy, distressing, artificial milieus of work, commerce and politics, and into a clean, tranquil, straightforward engagement with the sun and the rain, seeds and soil beneath our hands. A garden can carry us back to long, innocent hours of childhood spent contemplating the spread of tree branches against the sky, the shape and portent of clouds, the marvel of scent and color in a flower bed, the play of squirrels on a green, the earnest industry of birds creating a nest, one strand at a time.

A storybook world that perhaps never existed in actual childhood can be fashioned in a garden. Rose-covered arbors, hollyhocks and hummingbirds flocking a wall, swings and benches to daydream upon, herbs to perfume the air, posies to sniff and gather, all the seductive features of fairy tales and imagined wild kingdoms can be made to come true.

In the garden the individual can exercise control over what will be. There are no bosses giving orders, there's no government deciding how money and resources will be spent, no corporations strip-mining and clearcutting, no tankers spilling oil, no gunfire and bombs wreaking havoc. Only the gardener and nature, in consort, are in charge of including or disposing, pursuing a course or changing it, what is allowed and what prohibited, the means and ends that guide action. Here is a venue where the single person can pursue whatever beliefs and dreams are chosen, and never have to bend or cower to others.

A garden grants every person, equally, the ability to engender beauty. No innate talent is necessary to forge a work of art from a plot of ground, anyone willing to employ elbow grease can be an artist in the garden. An empty canvas of topsoil can be made radiant with poems of flowers and arias of leafy branches. With a garden, anyone can increase the extant loveliness upon the earth.

Gardening strengthens the body, repaying in physical health every iota of effort put into it. It challenges the mind, stimulates learning, and imparts new founts knowledge. It teases out worry and sadness, hopelessness and defeat from the spirit, letting satisfaction and happiness mount as holes are dug, weeds pulled, leaves raked. The garden turns attention from the self to the care and tending of the great outdoors.

Gardens bring good news. This is why we garden, because even when hailstorms shower damage on the apple tree or unkind insects make a meal of the roses, the garden beckons with its bewitching glamor and serene crannies, it galvanizes the gardener with its ongoing need for attention and application. The garden brings good news by unfailingly rewarding honest, simple endeavor with a better world outside our doors.

Geranium, Star of Houseplants

2008-12-19T13:48:00.001-05:00

A key appurtenance for sanely navigating the long, frozen winter here in the north country is the simple houseplant. The houseplant allows us to be indoor gardeners when the outdoors becomes churlish. For an all-points outstanding indoor plant, the common regal or Martha Washington geranium stands right at the top of the crop of candidates.

Geraniums come in every flower color except blue and yellow, which in itself is a pretty remarkable attribute. The range of pinks, apricots, reds, purples, variegated, and whites give the gardener a delectable assembly of choices, and the opportunity to enjoy a diversity of flower color indoors. The flower heads open into bonny symmetrical sprays or spheres like small handfuls of summertime. Geraniums will flower continuously all year, a rare talent in the flowering plant kingdom.

The shape of the plants is also uniformly pleasing. The leaves favor dark green tints, or can be variegated green and white with pink or dark red edging. The tidy, full, rounded form of the geranium is worlds neater and more shapely than the many vining, trailing and spiky types of houseplants such as leggy spider plants, ivies and pendulous ferns. They don't require more space than a decent windowsill and do not grow to massive proportions which hog and block the scant winter light.

No houseplant is easier to propagate or maintain. They need only about four hours of direct light a day, and are perfect, well-behaved, decorative occupants for windowsills or tables, erecting their comely, colored flowers on short, straight stalks as a cheery foil against the bleak grey and white landscape beyond the windowpanes. From fall through spring, they like to drink slowly and allow their soil to get dry between waterings, which need be done only about once a week. They respond happily to potting up in plain old composted cow manure, eschewing any demand for expensive or fancy potting soil compounds. They are not persnickety, easily offended, high-maintenance divas, like orchids and African violets can be.

A brand new geranium plant can be generated through the dead-simple technique of cutting a well-leafed branch close to its base from an established plant, sticking the cutting into a pot of soil, tamping the soil down firmly around it to hold it upright, and keeping it moist for a couple of weeks. New leaf growth and soon, flowers, will follow. There are a couple of red geraniums on my windowsills whose ancestor plants harken back to many years' past. If you acquire a geranium you're particularly fond of, it really is a cakewalk to keep its offspring and new generations with you across the decades.

Once every couple months seems sufficient to apply a liquid fertilizer to potted geraniums to keep them blooming. The flowers open slowly over a lingering two-week period, hold in full flower for at least a week, and repeat bloom about once every month or so throughout the year and the seasons. Cut and placed in a vase, the flowers will last two weeks or more. Deadheading spent flowers promotes growth of new flower buds. Leaves that begin to yellow around the edges also should be pinched off at their base, and this action will encourage new, fuller leaf growth. If the plant appears stunted or yellowing occurs on lots of the leaves, it calls for a boost in nitrogen fertilization, and/or a reduction in the watering schedule.

A freshly potted geranium cutting takes about six months to become a vigorous, full-leafed adolescent, and will gain about six to eight inches in height during this time period. That growth chart makes geranium cuttings a great choice for harvesting from outdoor and container plants in autumn, slotting into a window, and enjoying the leisurely, blooming, compact development throughout the late fall and winter. By late spring, fall-harvested cuttings will be full grown, flowering plants that can then be transferred back to the outdoors as the centerpiece for containers or directly into borders, thus eliminating the need to purchase new stock. Start more new cuttings from the late spring houseplants before moving them outdoors and Bob's your uncle, you've got another crop of potted sprigs to grace your windows through the summer (when they will like drinks of water twice weekly with the increase in sunlight).

Most common geraniums have little scent except a faint peppery, spicy aroma if the leaves are rubbed. Scented-leaf geraniums can be obtained if that's to your liking, in flavors of lemon, rose, mint, nutmeg, apricot and more. Extract of geranium root has been renowned among the Zulu people of South Africa for centuries for its uncanny ability to rapidly cure nasal and chest congestion of flu, colds, sinusitis, strep throat and bronchitis. A British gentleman named Charles Stevens claimed in 1897 that South African geranium root reversed and knocked down his tuberculosis, and he went on to market “Stevens' Common Cure” tonic from it. Be that as it may, the geranium does possess anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties, and boosts the immune system, so geranium-leaf tea or a root tisane could come in handy for under-the-weather spells. As well, geranium leaves, in common with all green houseplants, will purge the indoor air of toxins produced by wood fires, tobacco smoke, candles and cooking.

The author Victoria Glendinning maintains that conversing with your geraniums will make them even more blithesome comrades, but cautions against overdoing it or pouring your heart out to them in a fit of cabin-fever solitariness. “A kind word every now and then is really quite enough,” she opines. “Too much attention, like too much feeding and weeding, inhibits and embarrasses them.” Heaven knows, given all the pleasure and companionship they afford the gardener, the last thing on earth one wishes to do is to embarrass one's geraniums. Maybe just the occasional, “How are you today? Get you anything?,” is about right to encourage and thank geraniums for their houseplant finesse.

The Garden and the Night Visitors

2008-12-12T13:42:00.004-05:00

Baby, it's cold outside. Temperatures dug in at the teens and twenties day upon day, the daytime high temperature as this is written predicted to ascend only to 17 degrees. And the snow just keeps coming, heavy-laden fronts of pewter-grey cloud banks following one upon another with payloads of snow, snow, snow. The newspaper weather map shows Michigan's mitten tinted purple for days when snow is forecast, and the mitten map is purple for every day this week, next week also. In the garden, the snow banks are now up to my hips, everything buried in white drifts.

One advantage for the garden of the daily-restocked, pristine snow is that it reveals what the deer are up to, which constituents of the garden they take a particular interest in and thus which ones likely are most at risk from deer foraging. In this village bordered on all sides by national park wetlands, dunes and forests, small herds of six to twelve deer reliably walk through every morning and night, going east at sunrise, west at twilight, and spending the wee hours between midnight and dawn fanning out to graze for leaves, bark and berries. It is said a deer spends its lifetime following ancestral trails, never moving more than a mile from where it was born. Put up houses, barns, plant crops or gardens, pave roads, move in human inhabitants, it doesn't faze the deer or change their instinctual, ritual trailways, even if those now carry the herd through village backyards or right down Front Street, past the post office and grocer.

First thing in the morning a few days ago, what greeted the eye in the backyard was an area completely and precisely dug out of the three feet of snow around a bird feeder normally filled with sunflower seeds. Since late fall, when most of the birds except crows pretty much disappeared from my windy neighborhood, I stopped stocking the bird feeder after realizing it was drawing the deer into the yard, where they would not only scarf up it's scant two cups of sunflower seeds, but then proceed to nibble on every plant in the immediate vicinity. Deer must rival elephants in their memory, however, as the fresh hollow around the bird feeder showed, returning to scavenge where they previously struck lucky, even for so small a payoff as a few handfuls of sunflower seed.

On this morning, the still-empty bird feeder was left snuggled under yesterday's new snowfall, and the deer tracks instead carved furrows across the backyard to the lilac bushes, then along the side of the house to the pear tree in the front yard, on to the tips of rosebushes sticking up above the snow, then finishing their tour at the young cherry tree on the front easement. Donning boots (pointless when the snow comes up to your hips, but oh well), gloves, hat, scarf, etc., my legs plowing the deer track a little deeper and wider as I climbed and clambered through the snow, an inspection of the trees and shrubs thankfully did not find damage or evidence of deer-inflicted pruning and bark-stripping.

A few weeks back, before the endless snowfall of winter 2008-9 really got up a head of steam, deer-proofing measures were undertaken. Small muslin bags of meat meal and red pepper, a deer odor-repellent, were tied to hang on the rosebushes, young trees, and the shrubs deer like to eat, namely the lilacs, witchhazel and hydrangea. Then for good measure, these plants were sprayed until dripping with a liquid repellent made up of garlic and eggs (available at garden stores as Deer Off, Liquid Fence, etc.), which deer quite sensibly hate the smell and taste of. We had a hard freeze the night after this treatment, so with luck, the spray repellent froze onto the branches where it will continue to make them taste disgusting to the deer until the next thaw.

Oddly enough, the muslin deer bags were gone altogether from the lilac bushes, though still in place on the other shrubs and trees. Perhaps they're on the ground, buried under the snow, but they were tied on close to the center of the lilacs, behind branching limbs, and could not have blown or been slipped off. The deer bags on the roses hung strangely shredded, just their top half and the tie remaining, the contents of the bags and the bottoms ripped away. How did the bags get off the lilacs? How did the bags on the roses get torn apart? Surely not by the deer, who have never disturbed or so much as touched the bags before. One of the mysteries of the winter night in the garden. Maybe it was the coyotes, who often can be heard crying to the moon between midnight and dawn, out on coyote patrol. Maybe they took offense at the blood-meal scent of another species, and promptly showed it whose territory this really was by biting the intruder bags to pieces.

The deer and coyotes are not begrudged their traditional, ancient travel ways and hunting grounds. Beguiling, enthralling to watch, they complement and complete the landscape much more than do the buildings that have been erected on their turf. This time of year, this kind of deep winter unfurling with a fury from the first of December, is simultaneously so beautiful and so dangerous. The deer are welcome to walk through the garden on their familiar route every nighttime, but hopefully discouraged from stopping while there to consume late night snacks.

Planting a More Perfect Union

2008-12-09T11:44:00.003-05:00

At last, at last, a new administration has been elected to take the reins of government in Washington, and hope rises that Barack Obama will begin to lead our country out of its long, ugly morass of launching wars, stealing the world's wealth and despoiling the environment. Many of us are ready and willing to participate in propagating a new era of peace, growth, health and being good stewards of this green and golden earth. For gardeners and smallholders at this turning of the year and our country's path, what can we do to help? Thinking about this and wanting to pitch in for the communal good, here follows my impromptu list of actions gardeners could undertake to contribute to rebuilding wellbeing on the planet.

Plant trees. Give a home to birds, clean the air and generate fresh oxygen, shade and protect dwellings from sun and storms to reduce energy demands. Keep your neighborhood from becoming a tundra or desert.

Reduce energy demands and pollution. Use ceiling and window fans instead of heavily polluting air conditioners, open the windows in cars and let the breeze cool you. If we're hotter in summer, cooler in winter, that's okay -- don't fall into the earth-hurting trap of trying to maintain a perfect, unnatural 70-degree temperature wherever you are, all year round. If there is a lawn that really must be cut, use hand, solar or electric-powered mowers rather than carbon-dioxide spewing gas mowers. Build a windmill. Power water fountains and features with solar energy. Use a rake or a shovel, not noisy, dirty leaf and snow-blowers.

Conserve water. Shut down automatic sprinkler systems that spray automatically at set intervals, rain or shine. Put a rain barrel under eaves where water runs off, use the captured rainwater on the garden and save your foundation from floods. Don't waste fresh water resources on grass, let it go brown in dry spells, brown is a color too. Use water from boiled vegetables for watering house and container plants, vegetable water is full of nutrients and oxygen. Ban toxic pesticides and fertilizers from your garden (remember any chemical that kills bugs and slugs will also hurt pets, children and gardeners), keep these chemicals from running off into the water table, where they cause algae growth and fish kill.

Plant a victory garden. Cut down on purchase of foods transported in trucks, trains and other internal-combustion engine machines. Save money on groceries. Produce fruit and vegetables to share with neighbors and food banks. Get cutting flowers from your yard instead of shipped thousands of air miles from far and distant lands.

Buy local and support community businesses. Shopping at nearby garden centers, farms and orchards, seed and feed suppliers, bookstores, and other small businesses preserves jobs and the local economy. It eliminates truck, airplane and other carbon-heavy miles for mail-ordered or shipped-in goods. Local food sources will give you fresher, safer, known-source comestibles for the table, plantings and art for the garden.

Turn off engines. Don't let trucks, cars or SUVs idle for more than five minutes, the carbon dioxide and particulates from them harm plants, animals, fresh water and people. Use cross-country skis or ice skates instead of snowmobiles that tear up the earth. Use canoes, sailboats, kayaks instead of water and fish-killing motor-driven watercraft. Walk, ride a bike, ride a horse or public transport as often as possible as an alternative to driving.

Clean up as you go. It's inconceivable how anyone can just toss trash down on their Mother, but some do. Be a counter-trasher when out and about in your neighborhood, on trails, beaches, parks, in the city. Pick up the plastic and non-decomposing trash you come across, bring it to a trash receptacle. Carry a bag with you for litter and discarded bottles, cans, cigarette butts, styrofoam, your next stroll and that of others will be nicer. Your Mother and her denizens will look and be healthier.

Vote only for candidates who will fight for and take care of the earth. Support efforts to green up your community with hybrid public transportation, low-energy and non-petroleum-fueled building and utility practices, rehabilitation and reuse of existing building stock rather than new development, recycling programs for waste, creation and preservation of parks, wildlife habitats, community gardens, green spaces. As we undertake together the nation's fresh start, my goals are to go forward in peace and engage in actions to make my corner of the earth better because of my tenancy upon it.

Shrubs to Raise a Hedge

2008-12-01T13:33:00.003-05:00

Upon moving into a rental home some years ago, my young sons found themselves the gleeful lords of a 6-foot wide, dense thicket of shrubs and evergreens all around the boundary of the backyard. Not only did the thicket screen the neighbors' view of the backyard, it also offered a small, secret woodlot, perfect for building forts, and playacting Indian and superhero fantasies. As season followed season, the gardener learned to love this thicket too, for the juncos, cardinals, finches, jays, squirrels, rabbits and groundhogs it attracted, fed and sheltered, and for its green, blooming beauty.

Most of the thicket was made up of Japanese honeysuckle shrubs, maybe 20 to 30 years of age and 10 feet in height, with nectar-sweet flowers in spring, scarlet berries through late summer, fall and winter. The benefits of encouraging wildlife (human boy and animal), and proffering structure, privacy and lush color to the yard taught the gardener to highly value hedges.

In the present garden, therefore, I was determined to create hedges which would bring these same rewards. As development proceeds apace across our land and formerly wild spaces, it is especially important to generate new hedges to replicate disappearing wildlife habitat. Of the vast array of shrubs available to gardeners, how to choose which ones to foster? My choices were founded on just a few basic principles: the shrubs would feature alluring appearance, in leaves and fruits; they would be quick growers, since a tall, screening effect was needed on my very bare and exposed lot; they should be native and suited to northwest Michigan so as not to face an untimely demise; and they should produce food and cover that would warm the hearts of birds and convince them to take up residence. And okay, there was also a nostalgia factor in opting for the lilacs and forsythias that had featured in gardens of grandmothers and great aunts during childhood.

Although I'm really taken with the characteristics and hardiness of Japanese honeysuckles, master gardeners advise that this is an invasive shrub in Michigan, overwhelming the native shrubs as it proliferates, so that option was sadly passed over. A black beauty elderberry shrub, planted at the front of the yard, went into a decline over its second and third years, and in the fourth year generated only a sparse handful of leaves. Despite its handsome burgundy leaves and the berries it is supposed to (but never did) bear, elderberry doesn't like the quick-draining, sandy soil and all day sunshine in this garden.

Viburnum shasta and onondagas, with assiduous (more than anticipated) watering, have leafed out very fully, but don't gain much height at all, and remain disappointingly low-reaching, two-foot high shrubs. All the shrubs chosen were advertised as capable of reaching heights of at least six feet, so even though the virburnums do sport captivating dark green leaves that shade into reddish gold in autumn, their lack of volume puts them into the category that would not be chosen again. This is also the case of the wine and roses weigela, also only about two feet tall after five years of cossetting, and the blue girl and boy holly bush, another slow grower which has yet to generate a single berry.

The successes on the road to a perimeter hedge start with the American high bush cranberry. This shrub is a rapid grower, and the two in my garden have shot up from one foot in height to five feet, with equally healthy, spreading circumference. They turn the most brilliant red in autumn, brighter even than the well-known burning bush, and also offer the boon of clusters of red berries (photo from flickr.com at start of this entry). Lilacs also do well here, speeding upward and outward. There are four purple-flowering bushes, two white. If the lilac blooms are picked when spent, the bushes reward the gardener with many more blooms the following spring. One of the white lilacs has not yet flowered in five years, the suspicion is that this is due to having been planted between my house and my neighbor's along the plotline where the sun only reaches for a few hours a day. Last spring I moved this lilac to the backyard, full-sun plotline, and trimmed about a third of the branches back close to the ground, which is said to encourage rejuvenation, so we will see if next spring it breaks free of the flower drought.

Normally the only fertilizing agent applied to the shrubs is a heap of composted cow manure each fall. The two forsythias, however, while covering themselves in felicitous egg-yellow flowers each spring, had not shown the enthusiastic growth forsythias usually revel in. This spring the gardener followed the advice of a village lady with a gangbuster of a garden, and fed them a helping of slow-release Osmocote pellet fertilizer. They responded by adding a foot of height by the fall. The plan is to similarly feed all the garden shrubs next spring, having come round to the village lady's viewpoint that nature, for all her wisdom and nurturance, does not in fact provide all the food that growing plants need without a little help from her friends.

A snowmound spirea under the front windows has grown about four feet upward as well as in width in five years, and is a perfect sphere of frothy white flowers in spring. A younger blue mist spirea also comes on zestfully, and brings a unique turquoise blue flower to the yard in mid-to-late summer, when most shrubs are past their bloom. The final entries begun five years ago, two viburnum Chicago lustres, a dark red Diablo ninebark, a gold flame honeysuckle, and a northern bayberry, have displayed slightly more sedate but still strong growth. The Chicago lustres bear a purple-black berry, but the bayberry has yet to fruit, despite promises at the garden center that it had cross-pollinating male and female roots.

There was a purple-flower butterfly bush for several years, but last summer this was removed and replaced with a fledgling upright cottoneaster. Butterfly bush flowers are undeniably pretty, do have an engaging sweet-grape scent, and do indeed attract butterflies. Their somewhat surly and unsightly characteristics outweigh these pluses, to my thinking. The flowers turn from their dark purple tones to faded brown within just a couple days of opening. The limbs of the shrub have to be cut back by two-thirds each spring, and these limbs grow thick, very tough, and several feet in length in just one summer, making it a real job of work to prune them every year. The trunks and branches are a dull grey color, depressing rather than enhancing the winter landscape. And the shrub begins to green up very late, toward the end of June, so all through the color unfolding of springtime it just sits like a big dead lump in the garden. With hollyhocks, columbine, yarrow, lavender and lots of other butterfly and hummingbird seducers, the butterfly bush just wasn't worth its drawbacks.

The last shrub planted, this past spring, is a fall-flowering witchhazel. Right now it's about two feet high and numbers maybe half a dozen branches. The pictures of its cascading, spiky gold flowers and the fact that it will bring one more autumn bloom to the garden were the determinants in its selection. This shrub is said to be capable of a 20-foot height, if it attains even half that dimension, the gardener will be more than pleased. With the assistance of the shrubs, most of which now reach to my shoulders, one day the garden will boast a true and robust, tall and fruitful wildlife hedge.

Winter's Cure

2008-11-21T13:58:00.003-05:00

Fall and winter are not the gardener's favorite seasons. Nothing in the plant world grows in fall and winter except underground, out of sight. While the autumn rainy season and winter's deep snowfalls are welcome for the replenishing water supply they bring to the lakes, rivers, streams and plants, their cloud cover and ever-diminishing daily hours of sunshine do put a crimp in the spirit. A surfeit of backache-inducing snow shoveling looms in the immediate future. Hunters with lethal firearms are abroad around the hiking trails. Death and dormancy are the dominant themes.

When the choleric of the overcast skies and cabin-fever inactivity start to shrivel hope and laughter, it's time to lace up the hiking boots and head out in search of nature's cure for the winter blues. In northwest Michigan, each of the four seasons plays out in full fettle. Even in an era of global warming, winter here will be long, lasting at a minimum from November through March, it will be cold. Watching all the leaves disappear from the woods and denuded branches replace swaths of greens and golds, it always seems at first as if winter means months to be lived in gloomy, monochromatic blacks and greys. Taking afoot to the woodland and shoreline trails, however, reveals again, every year, winter's sweetly muted, dappled and multifarious palette of colors.

Along the beaches and dunes, multitudes of marram grass drape clouds of burnt-gold blades and seed heads across the tawny sands. The speckled white bodies of beech trees stand out in bright relief against the tumbled, bruised pewter of the sky. Whimsical milkweed pods fold open to release Santa Claus whiskers in delicate fans. Cherry tree and dogwood branches blush barn red.

On trails across dune meadows and moraines, color abounds in the wild, tomato-red rosehips (as pictured above), sumac, chokecherries, honeysuckle and cottoneaster and bittersweet berries. The characterful, wizened bark of the wolf maple, the shagbark hickory and the willow are on display, the velvet grey elephant-hide trunks of the beeches emerge.

Wherever conifers grow, dozens of variations of green march tall and vibrant across the landscape. The first snowfalls of the season came in off Lake Michigan this week, bringing not much more than a few inches of accumulation but laying a downy white blanket on the fields and hills. The snow backdrop makes the greens, golds, ochre, reds, purples and other tints of winter stand up and shout. Pine green, forest green, kelly green, mint, olive, the seaglass green of the hemlocks, these all intensify and grow prouder against the subdued light of winter. And the cornhusk gold of the beach sand and dunes, faceted here and there with hoarfrost, draws and holds the eye softly, warmly.

It gets very quiet in the forest and on the sands. Maybe it is the muffling effect of the snow, partly it is the reduction in traffic and people, dogs and birds larking about. A sacred kind of stillness hovers in the air. The soughing of the wind in the treetops, the rare call of a hawk or crow, the purl of the waves beseeching the shore, the ancient creaking of a fallen tree against the trunks of its brothers and sisters, every sound speaks with more clarity and meaning.

As long as the temperature stays above 20 degrees, as it usually does in this moderate strip of climate bordering the lake shore, one doesn't get chilled when out and about and moving. Whether skating, skiing, hiking, sledding, shoveling or otherwise keeping the limbs pumping and the blood coursing, on a still or gently snowing winter's day even mild exercise keeps the body plenty warm. As an added bonus, it sends happy chemicals swimming into the mind and spirit, washing away the cobwebs of melancholia. Hush a minute, look around you, discover everywhere plentiful and beautiful reminders of the palpable gifts nature presents to us, even in her season of hibernation and sleep.

Talking Flowers

2008-11-15T12:27:00.004-05:00

One day last week, three feet of snow fell in the northern Great Plains. In Michigan, it was 68 degrees, blue sky, and tempting to go swimming, but that the big lake temperature now hovers in the mid-fifties after successive frosty nights. What happens weather-wise in the Great Plains today will course into Chicago tomorrow, skate across the slippery surface of Lake Michigan and shower upon Michigan's western coast the day after tomorrow. As the first snowfall of the season heads this way, let's put winter on hold for just a little longer and talk flowers.

After getting the garden framework of trees and shrubs planted, the next phase entailed laying in the seeds, seedling plants and bulbs for the flowering beds. These would go across the front wall of the house and much of the front yard, across the back wall of the garage facing the rear of the house, and into a big circular bed middle-left in the back yard. Except for the bulbs that needed to wait for late fall planting, all the starters of the flower patches went into the ground in July. Most have come along famously in size and bloom over the five years since the garden began, others could not seem to get a rooted, lasting grip on the sunny, sandy plot.

For the most part and increasingly over the years, plants chosen must be of a perennial nature. Gardens fitted out with perennials do not require complete planting afresh every year, saving lots of repetitive labor to plant the same space. Cost outlay for plants occurs mainly at the start of a garden and hard-earned dollars don't get invested in flowers that disappear after a single season. Unless a gardener has more money than sense, it seems foolhardy to buy lots of expensive, doomed annuals year after year when there are thousands of perennial options that repay the outlay of sweat equity and greenbacks for years to come.

Of course, sometimes a particular plant that just happens to be an annual holds a special spot in the gardener's favor. Even in my largely perennial garden, some irresistible annuals get re-installed spring after spring. Gomphrena globe amaranth, cosmos, alyssum and bachelor buttons are the ones that invariably get reseeded every year, just because of their exceptional good looks and because my summer garden would seem incomplete without their lovely colors. All of these except the gomphrena (a temperamental Miss) are very easy to grow and want only regular drinks of water to flourish. Cosmos and bachelor buttons will self-seed to a limited extend, not necessarily where originally planted but as surprise shoots scattered hither and yon. Alyssum are supposed to self-seed, and often do for a year or so, but not reliably and pretty much not at all after a very hot, dry August and September.

Sowing seeds directly into the garden is another economizing measure that costs lots less than purchasing already-sprouted seedlings, but the results are often mixed, with maybe a third of seeds never yielding plants. The seed-sowing gardener must water the seeded plots vigilantly and daily for several weeks after planting to have any hope of success, and even then some seeds just lie lifeless in the soil, suggesting that a portion of every batch of seed just doesn't carry the power of germination, for whatever reason.

The perennial flowers and herbs that form the meat on the bones of my garden, and get bigger and more flush with blossoms by the year, include peonies, hollyhocks, columbine, lily of the valley, Russian sage, lavender, roses, lilies, mums, yarrow, dianthus, baby's breath, thyme, phlox, chives, daisies, bleeding hearts, snow-on-the-mountain and snow-in-summer, veronica, primroses, Siberian iris, lupines, and poppies. Narcissus and daffodil, windflower (anemone), and alliums are the most successful bulbs.

Foxgloves have not worked very well, whether in a sunny spot where they seem to wilt away if not watered constantly, or in a dappled shade where they seem to languish for lack of sunshine, so I've pretty much given up on them and trying to satisfy their unfathomable needs. Old-fashioned flowering stocks beget one of the most beautiful and possibly the most heavenly scented of flowers (Flickr.com photo at top of this entry), but two summers of seeding stocks gave me not one bloom. Stocks have a multi-budded flower on a tall stalk, similar to a delphinium but with the flower buds more closely nestled together. It took a hunt to find stock seeds, even though this flower is a staple in every florist shop, seed packets for it are rarely found at garden centers and it seems to be slipping into the category of a heritage plant rather than a popular contemporary. First seeded two summers ago, the stocks put up really strong, emerald-green stalks and felty leaves, and kept growing all summer without flowering. This past summer, seeding and watering religiously didn’t even result in any sprouting. Next summer they will get one last try (we live in hope).

Delphiniums also have proven somewhat tough to establish for a multi-year reappearance, but because of their gorgeous flowers, they do get replenished with new seedlings each spring. Smaller butterfly delphiniums, on the contrary, grow and increase their bright cornflower-blue flowers dependably, summer after summer.

The garden also enjoys a couple stands of grasses, one in the front yard and one in the back. Alongside the Russian sage, nice, dense clumps of blue oat grass, miscanthus silver grass, miscanthus fountain grass, pennisetum orientale karly rose, and panicum vergatum switchgrass rise and extend their circumference and height each year. With grasses, experience has shown they like to be watered well at least weekly for the first year or two, thereafter becoming fairly tolerant of periods of drought. The grasses are slow starters each season, not really getting up to speed with new greenery until into late June or July, but then they take off in happy spurts of growth, and wave their feathery arms and seed heads all through late summer and autumn. If left untrimmed, these charmers provide stalks of interesting structure in the garden throughout winter. All get cut back to four-to-six inches height come late March, making way for the next summer's burgeoning. Variegated porcupine and zebra grasses, handsome though they be, failed to become permanent residents in my garden. Variegated grasses do prefer a damp and loamy soil and perhaps are best suited to pond banks, marshy areas and riversides.

All in all, what has been coaxed forth on the sandy lot is a sprawling, spreading, old-fashioned cottage garden. Each type of flower is planted in groupings together with others of its kind to maximize impact. Plants for spring, summer and fall blooming have been purposely incorporated into the staples of the garden so as to have flowers unfolding from April through October. Every garden is forever an incomplete work in progress, and every year around this time, notes get jotted and catalogs scoured for the additions to existing species and the desirable newcomers to be acquired for next spring's sowing season. There is no such thing in the cottage garden as too many plants or no room for more.

Looking Forward in Autumn

2008-11-14T13:07:00.004-05:00

Come the autumn, garden writers often put forth columns of advice on “putting the garden to bed” for the approaching dormant winter season, sometimes giving the impression this is a task that can be done in one fell swoop. In fact, the bedding down of existing plantings, sowing of bulbs for the next spring, clearing and cleaning up which comprise autumn's garden tasks happen progressively, over a period of months, as the diverse trees, shrubs and plants each reach their own varied apexes, and become ready for the long winter sleep.

At mid-October, when garden magazines might be promoting the cutting down and discarding of perennials, a big, healthy sweep of cosmos were finally just bursting into bloom in my garden. The coreopsis sweet dreams and limerick dreams were both displaying a second, happy round of sienna and apricot-colored flowers, the chrysanthemums had at last attained the flowering stage. Even some of the lavender plants were offering up a second, smaller spray of blooms to be collected and dried into fragrant bundles to decorate a pitcher or vase all winter long.

Raking leaves is never necessary in my garden, thanks to the winds off Lake Michigan which careen through the big, open-field layout of this neighborhood in a notch between high dune bluffs. All debris and leaves which hit the ground promptly get blown away, tumbling down the streets and across yards until they hit the wild fields of the rising hills to the east. If raking were needed, however, it would have to be done repeatedly over many weeks, as the trees also shed their summer growth at disparate, individual rates. The apple trees drop their leaves first in this garden, then the maple, then the cherry, then the aspen, none of them all at once but rather bit by bit. The birch, red oak and pear hold on longest, and lovely it is to have their yallery-russet foliage to gaze upon in November and even December, when otherwise there are but brown and grey empty branches across the hillsides and woods.

At the end of my street, two blocks away, a three-block long stand of northern white pine traces the western terminus of the neighborhood. Beneath these mighty, 40- to 50-foot seniors, a broad and deep carpet of freshly fallen pine needles can be found each autumn. This is the source for an endless supply of free, local, native, excellent mulch for the trees, shrubs and perennials in the garden, as they become ready for blanketing against the freezes and thaws of the coming months. Many a trip is made to the end of the block with the empty wheelbarrow, returning heaped with sweet-scented pine needles, interspersed with a sprinkling of attractive pine cones which will be scattered randomly around the yard to add visual interest. How satisfying it is to tuck handfuls of the pine needles all round and about the chrysanthemums and other flowers, the hydrangeas, forsythia and virburnums, as well as the tree trunks. Like tucking in a child with a thick, warm comforter on a chilly night, the fall mulching with pine needle blankets makes one feel like a good, caring and wise plant nanny, securing the garden family against the cold.

This fall, the intention was to order lots more drumstick and stars of Persia alliums, daffodils, tulips, narcissus, hyacinths, wind flowers and so on, a big, fresh bounty of bulbs to supplement those already in the ground and prepare for a profuse spring. Fate and the dire Michigan economy intervened, however, and the gardener received, in early October, an unanticipated, no-notice-given layoff from gainful employment. Because this meant the only income in the foreseeable future would be bare-bones unemployment benefit, until new employment could be secured in a very bleak market, orders for bulbs had to be forfeited along with all other unnecessary expenditure.

In such circumstances, one tries to remain hopeful and optimistic, to face forward and expect and pursue better opportunity, the old “when one door closes, another opens” attitude. The walking papers came, though, from a job that had been held and glowingly reviewed for some two years, with no raises during the job tenure but promises of a big, year-end bonus due to come just a couple months from now. Further, the professional office that cut the job was actually doing quite well, having quadrupled income over the course of recent months. The owners apparently decided that more of this income could safely be deposited in their own pockets if the position of a decently remunerated staff member was replaced with a novice who could be paid substantially less, and the payment of one year-end bonus rendered moot.

It's challenging not to succumb to bitterness, anger, continual backward gazing, and cursing of the owner-class in such circumstances. It's difficult to comprehend why an employer would not give a productive, successful employee the benefit of advance notice of termination, and every possible opportunity to replace the disappearing paycheck with new employment, before they are shown the door and an indeterminate period of angst and penury. It's not hard to understand why the owner-manager class wishes to keep all the money and all the say-so, to quote W.E.B. DuBois, but the managerial class behaves stupidly and contrary to its own best interest when it treats those who produce for them in such a shabby, dishonest, ill-will generating fashion.

Walking on a balmy autumn afternoon along the lake shore, trying to just hear the whisper of the waves and contemplate the pearly blue horizon, trying not to panic or fall prey to debilitating emotions of self pity and fear, the gardener happened upon another hiker, a lady of a certain age and fellow village resident. She is an exceptionally kind and gentle lady, who started her own craft enterprise of making Peace Bears. This entails claiming discarded and unwanted stuffed animals from yard sales, friends and thrift shops, cleaning and repairing them, embroidering a peace symbol on their chests, and then selling them for a small fee at the farmer's market. After saying hello, the lady explained that she wasn't at her usual weekday post of reception in a local dental clinic because she, too, had been permanently laid off, after the solo-practice dentist suddenly decided to retire. Her job tenure numbered 18 years of service. Her advance notice of termination was 11 days. She was self-effacing and mild-mannered about her stark situation, and the painful conundrum of trying to make mortgage, utility, car note, grocery and other bill payments on a subsistence unemployment benefit.

Maybe these days you have to make your own employment, she hazarded, find ways to generate income working entreprenurially, independent of others, keeping your destiny in your own hands. She went on to tell me about a line of health and beauty products she's trying to sell as a franchisee, and discussed how she wants to take this period of unemployment to work on and develop her artisanal crafts.

Strolling on down the beach, the gardener stopped casting glances backward over her shoulder, stopped revisiting and worrying at and rewriting the endgame and termination meeting at the old job. The late-autumn Indian summer weather means the soil is pliable and ripe for receiving bulbs. The local garden center, because November is upon us, has cut bulb prices in half. With a bit of make-do and thrift, it was doable that at least a swath of snowdrops, perhaps two new congeries of daffodils, and mayhaps another half-dozen alliums could, in fact, be purchased. Gardeners by nature must be hopeful creatures, able to envision the yield in the future for the labor and investment of the present. A garden is nothing if not a work of optimism and sunny expectation. When autumn, or the slings and arrows of bad fortune, bring foreshadowing of diminution and decline, the wise gardener rolls up her sleeves, sticks her hands into breathing earth, encourages the plenty the future will bring, given a bit of elbow grease, and looks steadily forward.

Trees

2008-11-12T14:46:00.007-05:00

First the gardener must decide, which species of the thousands of trees to plant? Three factors held the most sway in my choices – appearance, including color, shape, and what fruits, nuts or flowers might be borne; durability, including expected lifespan, how rapidly growth and thus shade occur; and finally, suitability for the temperatures, moisture and other elements of the northern Michigan coastal four seasons. Whether to plant trees was never a question, given the tremendous beauty and shelter from Mother Nature's occasional fits and furies which trees provide, and the inimitable good they confer upon the environment by cleaning the air of toxins and creating oxygen. One mature oak tree, for instance, creates all the oxygen needed by 10 humans.

The only tree in this garden that didn't measure up to all the selection criteria was a cedar, which needed a lot more water and less wind than the site or the gardener could offer, and which segued into the great forest in the sky after a painful struggle of just two years. The best performers to date, on the other hand, are the Cleveland ornamental pear and the white spire river birch.

Everyone knows how pretty birch trees are (see Flickr.com photo at top of this entry), which their shaggy white bark, sharp green leaves that slowly transform to butter yellow in autumn, and graceful, pendulous branches. It's a source of amazement that the river birch in the front yard went from a five-foot sapling with the trunk span of a stout walking stick to a 30-foot high lush shade-maker with a strapping, foot-and-a-half trunk span, in just five years. The Cleveland pear, maybe a little less familiar, gets covered in lovely, fragrant white blossoms every May, has a fetching natural triangular shape and very dense, full leaf development. It bears tiny little ornamental pears about the size of a dime, which the birds love but require not one whit of harvesting or cleaning up. Its other great feature is its ability to hold onto leaves and kelly green color right into November, even in a climate where Jack Frost usually pays his first visits early in October. When the color shift comes, the leaves gradually progress in a gorgeous pageant from shiny bright green to lime, to lemon yellow, to russet, and finally into a dark, burgundy red. Baring gale-force windstorms, most of the leaves stay on the branches into early- to mid-December, well after every other tree is winter naked.

Just this year, an article unveiled the unhappy information that ornamental pears, because all the branches grow from a single (non-branching) trunk, are vulnerable to the trunk splitting from the top downwards, if strong winds pull at the dense leafage. Which strong winds certainly do in this garden, and alas and alack, this spring when admiring the tree's growth and giving it's trunk an affectionate pat or two, indeed a newly developed split in the trunk was discovered. The split starts at the top of the trunk (about six feet from the ground), and extends downward about a foot and a half, so not yet into the lower core of the trunk. The pear is such a favorite, and with its branches now stands about 20 feet high, so it was a heart breaker to descry the breach that could mean the beginning of the end for this five-year old.

Unwilling to accept such a sad fate for one of the garden's inaugural trees, a stint with the thinking cap in place determined two courses of remedial action. First, a tough rubber brace was secured slightly loosely, with room for a little play, breath, and growth, around the trunk just at the mid-point of the split. The hope is that the brace will support the trunk against the tugging of the wind and keep the split from proceeding further down the trunk. The brace is about the length and a little thicker than a bungee cord, made of very hard black rubber, and was among the garden stuff in the garage, though what it is really for or what it is called are pieces of information lost to the mists of time.

Second, about a dozen whole garlic cloves were planted around the base of the tree. Garlic is an almost miraculous herb, with very robust viral and fungal healing powers (not to mention that it wards off grazing deer even better than it spooks vampires, and it makes roses flourish). Once in another garden, a young plum tree fell sick with a fungus called “Witch's Finger,” which basically strangles new branches with a sticky, black, gnarled-finger-looking growth. Reasoning, or hoping, that the garlic cure which can halt Montezuma's revenge, cure cold sores, fight cancers and knock down colds in humans might also be beneficial to a tree, the affected branches were loped off the plum and garlic planted all around its base. It healed, survived and took to growing again. Thus it seemed that a dose of garlic for the pear might help the raw, vulnerable edges of the split in the trunk to heal over, as well. These two treatments (or maybe more accurately, experiments), were effected in May of this year, and as of this writing in November, the split has not progressed further down the trunk, and the split's edges do seem to be hardening off. Time will tell, as with all things in the garden, if it's sufficient to preserve the Cleveland pear.

The rest of the trees planted the first year all grace the backyard, spaced around its perimeter, with the conifers in the back westerly corner. The October glory maple lives up to its name by turning a brilliant, flame red each fall, and has grown pretty well, now standing some 15 feet high after five years.

Nut-bearing trees seem to grow more slowly than other deciduous types. This has definitely been true for the red oak, which has branched out fairly nicely, but gained only maybe a foot of height and half-a-foot of trunk span across five years. The white pines and Colorado spruce followed the old cliché of plant growth, to wit, “first year sleep, second year creep, third year leap,” and didn't increase very measurably in height or width till their third or even fourth year, but as of this summer took to leaping up and out very nicely. Probably took them awhile to decide they could put up with the rackety, ever-recurring winds that swoop through the yard in all seasons, especially from their northwest back corner. Maybe one day they will actually achieve enough mass to block some of the fierce winter winds that charge up from that corner on a regular basis to dump snow loads on my back sidewalk.

The crab apple tree grows well and is a pink picture of blossoms every May, as well as a fall treat for the birds with its claret red fruits. Some of the latter even survive to throw a handful of bright color into the winter-white landscape of snow and ice. Because spring blossoms just finish in delight the view of any landscape, two additional trees put into the garden are a Fuji apple tree in the back, frilly in white each spring, and a self-pollinating (hooray!) Tartarian black cherry tree in the easement out front. The apple is two years old now, and has produced one apple each year -- watching this space for more productivity as maturity ripens! The cherry was planted this summer, one has sky-high hopes of someday plucking that most favored fruit from it.

Lastly, two years ago a quaking aspen was placed, stripling of twig size, in the front yard, and true to its eager nature, now reaches 15 feet in height with a hand-span, palest mint green, sturdy trunk. It, like the birch, transforms its grass-green, heart-shaped leaves over a long month or more, October into November, to a golden yellow. This tree takes its name from the way the leaves flip back and forth in the wind, giving the appearance of “quaking” and raising a soft, shuffling kind of sound, so it talks as good as it looks.

Trees frame-up the garden, draw the eye toward vistas, cosset the spirit with their robust handsomeness and several bounties of fruit, nuts, canopy, solid wooden bones. They seem calm, they reassure, they seem wise. Unlike many other garden dwellers, with a modicum of nurturing they live and reward their stewards for a long, long time. They'll harbor a tree fort and allow swings to sway from their arms. To climb one and sit hidden, daydreaming upon a branch, is to thumb one's nose at gravity and to soar just a little. Trees are nature's crowning glory.

Starting from Scratch in a Sandlot

2008-11-11T12:31:00.008-05:00

The move-in date for the new-built house was mid-July 2003. The house is a simple two-story, wood frame, unembellished square with a steeply pitched roof, kind of resembling the line drawing of a house which children sometimes do. It enjoys small, square front and back decks, and sits upon a south-facing lot that is 50 feet wide and 150 feet deep, located about 6 blocks from the northwest shore of Lake Michigan, in a small rural village with a year-round population of some 450 people.

After subtracting the footprint of the house and that of the one-car garage built on the alley behind the house, the area to be landscaped in the yard added up to about 6,400 square feet. Every single square foot of it covered in soil that was at best 10 percent topsoil, 90 percent sand blown in from the lakeshore and surrounding Sleeping Bear Dunes. Here's what grew in the yard when the builders departed and the movers unloaded the last box of worldly goods: nothing.

Prior to the commencement of construction on this new neighborhood in the village, the land had known two primary former incarnations in modern times. First, it was part of the cultivated land belonging to a farm. The original farmhouse and barn still stand about 3 blocks or so away, now enjoying new use as a bed-and-breakfast lodging. Rumor has it the farmers raised some cattle and some pigs, grew some crops, but that all ceased back around 1990, and if the soil at that time boasted the richness of livestock manure, it no longer does so.

Once the farming phase ended (with the kind of mysterious, kind of creepy disappearance and/or demise of the three reclusive bachelor-brother farmers) the land reverted to a natural dune meadow, replete with wild daisies, spotted knapweed, native grasses and shrubs such as honeysuckle, stands of wild cherry, red and white pine, walnut, maples and other volunteers. My lot had nary a tree upon it, and the grasses and weeds it supported were entirely demolished by the building of the house. Thus, on move-in day, the whole yard, front to back, offered only a long, barren lot of sand, topped up by the builder with a few inches of trucked-in topsoil.

From the get-go, my plan for the yard was to create a landscape of trees, shrubs, ornamental grasses and flowers, with wood mulch covering the empty spaces. No lawn. Having previously lived with a yard that was mostly manicured grass, the concept was to have a yard which would never require mowing, would not need regular watering over every square inch, and would instead boast a pretty, shady, low-maintenance, bird- and earth-friendly environment.

The day before the house furnishings arrived, a willing worker from a local nursery pulled up to the sandlot with a pick-up truck loaded to the gills with the nine trees and fifteen shrubs I'd chosen as the starting core of the lot's landscaping. The trees we planted that day in the front yard were a Cleveland ornamental pear and a white spire river birch, one centered on either side of the sidewalk to the front door. In the back yard, the trees were a Robinson crab apple, an October Glory maple, a Colorado spruce, a cedar, two northern white pines and a red oak. Not one of the trees stood above five feet in height, once planted, and all were in the sapling or toddler phase of their existence, this size tree being all the budget could achieve.

The shrubs planted that day in 2003 included white and dark purple lilacs, close to the front windows of the house where someday, when grown up, their wonderful scent would float indoors on the spring breezes; shasta and onondaga viburnums; American high bush cranberry; Chicago lustre viburnums; snowmound and blue mist spirea; forsythia; honeysuckle gold flame; hydrangeas; wine and roses wiegela; dark purple butterfly bush; diablo ninebark; blue girl and blue boy hollies planted side by side so as to achieve pollination and berries; and one red-bark dogwood.

Garden afficionados warn against planting trees or shrubs in high summer, sensibly, because the heat and scant rainfall do impose struggles on tender youngsters. However, when an absolutely empty yard confronts a gardener, and the sun is falling completely unshielded upon roof, walls and windows, and there arises a longing to get this party started! before another month or season of potential growth goes by, then with pluck and dedication, successful installation of trees and shrubs can be achieved in mid-summer.

Every tree got planted in about half a 40-pound sack of composted cow manure, every shrub got about a quarter-sack of same. Let the writer just say right here and now and for all time, composted cow manure is the black gold of the garden. While horse, chicken or possibly other farmyard manures can burn young plants or, reputedly, give them too much of certain elements, composted cow manure seems to be the perfect soil base and fertilizer for every plant I've ever put in the ground. The holes were filled with water before planting, and the water allowed to seep into the soil before tree or shrub was inserted. After planting, each newby got a further two or three gallons of water to drink. Shredded cypress mulch was layered about two inches thick and about a foot to two feet in diameter around each planting, keeping the mulch a couple inches away from the trunks of the trees and shrubs as the garden masters keep nagging to do. The mulch helps shade the soil and retain moisture, but apparently, tree-bark eating and infecting rodents and insects will set up shop in it if it's too close to the trunks.

Then followed weeks and months in which every tree and shrub got a visit from a very slowly running hose for about half an hour or more, twice weekly (except when Mother Nature gave the hose a day off by providing rain). This period of watering would soak the area around tree or shrub out past the circumference of the roots, and was undertaken just to ensure that this expensive and already beloved congregation of plantings did not die of thirst. The only fertilizing done in supplement to the compost entailed a couple tablespoons of Dr. Schultz's liquid fertilizer (highly recommended) in a couple gallons of water, once after the plantings had been in the ground a month or so, and again in early fall.

The aggressive watering schedule was kept up for at least the first two years, starting each spring in May and continuing up to the first hard frost of fall. Unless you live in a very rainy climate, my experience suggests that watering trees and shrubs well, twice weekly, is the best bet to foster their survival and growth. All my trees and shrubs survived with one exception, most are doing very well (more individual details in a later entry), and the birch and Cleveland pear, in five years' time, have grown to heights of about 30 feet and 20 feet, respectively, with thick, solid trunks and dense foliage. The one tree that did not make it was the cedar, browned to its needles tips and killed after two years by, I suspect, a combination of the high wind factor on my lot, straight off Lake Michigan and not infrequently in the 15 to 30 miles per hour range (like once a week or so), and its exorbitant thirstiness, a characteristic known only after it had been purchased.

On a day shortly after the big tree planting, the writer happened to be on hands and knees in the front yard, introducing a lavender plant into the ground next to the front walk. A gawker (of which far too many cruised the streets of the neighborhood in those early days, checking out the newcomers and building sites), pulled to the curb and yelled a couple questions to me about the houses going up. Mine happened to be the first built and occupied, the second neighbor wouldn't move in for four months. Questions answered, this gentleman went on to observe something to the effect of how pointless it seemed to him to be putting a plant in a big, sun-baked, mostly empty yard. My only response was, well, one has to start somewhere, which was really obvious to me and is as well, I'm certain, to every gardener who ever daydreamed even a pot of pansies or a bed of rangy bee balm, rising to soften and accessorize an otherwise blank space.