Monday, May 26, 2014

Garden Walkabout

One of the pleasures of a garden is the morning walk-about. It's best done as an hour stolen from the morning before starting work, with a mug of good coffee and a faithful following hound. If the walk-about were an event in itself, you would have to think about the jobs you see that need doing, or the problems you note that need to be solved, but since the hour is being borrowed from the work day, you aren't on duty and can't be expected to think about those things.

Shall we walk?

Let's start beside the house, where the crabapple trees are having their 15 minutes of glory. The red peony under the middle tree is finally beginning to bloom - it has been in the garden for years and only now is it blooming. It started as one stem, about two inches high, so I guess it needed to grow up.

The dwarf bearded irises along the path to the Hillside are gorgeous. How did someone who decided not to have any bearded irises end up with so many? My excuse is that I had decided not to have tall bearded iris, and these are not tall. I keep finding them in pots at the nurseries (and stores) in the spring and fall for the colours, the satiny texture of the petals, the amazing form of the beards. I counted the different ones, and, well, never mind.
The path takes me around the Studio and into the Rockery. A friend gave me a piece of a Bloodroot she discovered which has yellow leaves. The flowers are the usual white, but the leaves are spectacular. The Forget-me-nots put themselves here, with their usual unerring instinct for where they suit. Forget-me-nots, like some lucky people, have Style. Thank you, Lee!

Another plant with good instincts is an ornamental strawberry, called, I think, 'Pink Panda'. A dumb name, but a nice, if stubborn, little plant. The flowers are quite large, and there are a few all summer long. It does however, insist on growing where it wants to grow, not necessarily where you might want it. I planted it at the top of a small wall, and it moved to the bottom. I put a piece in the front of a small bed of pale yellow daffodils, and it moved to the back.... fine, I'll just enjoy it wherever I find it.

Continuing on my way around, I stopped for a minute to give one of the little self-seeded White Spruces a (metaphorical) pat on the head. They are headed to brief (but brilliant) careers as Christmas Trees, and I'm happy to see how bushy they are getting. The new growth is bright green and a bit droopy.

 You'd be droopy too, if you had to grow 6 inches in about 3 days.

Everywhere, the ferns are springing up. They tend to rise later than many of the spring flowers, so sometimes I get a bit nervous and poke around carefully at the bases of last year's stalks to make sure there are tightly coiled green fiddleheads  waiting there. The new growth is unbearably green, so tender, so hopeful. The whole Sampler Garden, like the woods around it, is bursting with new growth.

I can even find something good to say about Ajugas - when they bloom, they do set off the new ferns beautifully .

Well, our hour is up; I'm back at the Studio. My coffee mug is empty, but my heart is full.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014


I think I'm a person who has adventures. At least, they seem like adventures to me. They may not to you, if you think it's only an adventure if it takes place in some hard to reach locale and involves camels.... but on the other hand, have you seen my driveway? And if you squint at my cat just right.....

Yesterday was such a beautiful day I decided to get my vegetable patch ready for planting. I've downplayed veggies the last few years because the chipmunks destroyed everything I did. If I planted peas, they simply ate them. Beans, they waited until they germinated and then ate them. The only thing they didn't eat was broccoli, and there was so much broccoli that by the end of the summer I was halfway wishing they had eaten it. All tomatoes had bite marks, cucumbers were pre-peeled; it was hopeless. But there are fewer chippies since I stopped feeding the birds so I think I'll try again.

My veg patch is pretty small, only 20' by 20', but the soil is good and it is in the sun, so things do really well there. All it needed was some thistle seedlings removed and a bit of fluffing up with the garden fork.

So there I was, bent right over shaking the soil off a thistle root, when I felt something tap me, rather sharply, on the back. Naturally I jumped but when I tried to straighten up I couldn't! It took me a second or two to realize I was stuck in the branches of a dead Balsam Fir. These trees don't live long, and all the ones along the marsh are slowly dying and being replaced by cedars and maples. There are only a few left beside the veg garden, and one of them was quite dead on top. The gusty spring wind had broken the top off and blown it onto my back!

How many people do you know who need to wear hardhats and other protective gear just to work in their garden? And that's without even any camels around.

Then today, this morning, there was a snake in the Studio. Just a small snake, a Northern Water Snake, about 2 feet long and less than an inch at its widest. It was more or less curled up, with the end of its tail sticking straight up in the warning position. These snakes don't have rattles, but they do shake their tails as warning behavior. My cat, Pepper, was swiping a paw at it, just far enough away not to actually connect, and the snake was darting its head at her, also just far enough away not to connect.

How do you get a snake out? I put a pail over it and then pushed a cardboard underneath, scooping snakie into the pail. Then I walked it over to the edge of the marsh and said 'Bon Voyage' and tossed. It seemed to appreciate the sentiment.

Another adventure is coming up, too. Next Sunday is my Wildflowers Day here. This spring has been so late that things are still just starting, but the last few days have been lovely and warm and the spring flowers are just leaping ahead. The Trilliums ought to be at their best on Sunday. I'll have some native plants in pots for sale (very cheap!!) although I can't tell for sure yet what has and what has not survived the winter.

Do come out, if only for a visit! And maybe you'll have the adventure of finding a plant you have been looking for, and I'll have the adventure of meeting another gardener..... see, life is full of adventures!

Friday, May 2, 2014

Trailing Arbutus, a Shy Shrub

Years ago when I was first getting interested in our native plants, I was lucky enough to find some antique books about them, one of which was Mrs. William Starr Dana's 'To Know the Wildflowers'. Her sometimes exaggerated prose made me smile a bit, but on the whole I found she had much to teach me.

One of the plants she discusses is the Trailing Arbutus, or Epigea repens, whose "waxy blossoms and delicious breath are among the earliest prophecies of perfume-laden summer".

I'll spare you the two pages of poetry excerpts that follow.

The point I want to make, though, is that these older books, and the newer field guides as well, led me astray about this plant. From the enthusiastic descriptions and the pretty line drawings, I got the impression of a substantial plant. Since the later books also called it a 'shrub', I thought it was probably like a large blueberry bush..... and I looked for something that size. Needless to say, I never found it.

Only when we moved to Constance Bay did I finally meet Trailing Arbutus. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered it was a prostrate or trailing shrub, with its branches running along the ground and the leaves held horizontally just above the duff layer. Of course, as soon as I saw it, the images in the books clicked into place - all that was needed was a size adjustment!

And, in fact, Trailing Arbutus is everything Mrs. Dana said. Fragrant, fresh, sturdy but delicate, ephemeral, a bit mysterious, totally beguiling. She makes much of it being known as the Mayflower, and being a symbol of the hope felt by the early settlers after the hardships of their first winters n the New World.

I have it now, here at Pine Ridge, from cuttings taken from plants from Constance Bay. In fact, the only other place I have seen it is in Algonquin Part, growing in a very unexpected habitat on top of some dry and exposed rocks. As I mention in the 'Know and Grow' page, Trailing Arbutus is not that easy to propagate. Seeds are very hard to get, and cuttings may or may not root. In three years of trying, I had good rooting only once. That time, I left the cuttings outside over winter as instructed (in another classic, Lincoln and Timmie Foster's 'Pleasures and Perils of the Rock Garden'), covering the flat with a clear plastic lid to protect it. What I didn't think of was that the snow would weigh it down..... the lid collapsed, the plants were squashed flat.... luckily they must have been an obstinate crew because most of them survived, and most of them are now growing in my woods. I put them under tall White Pines, on the north or eastern sides of the kinds of small mounds these woods seem to have, and they are doing well. One funny thing, they have all grown downwards. For some reason, I seem to plant things part way up slopes, expecting them to grow both upwards and downwards, and they never do.

Look for Trailing Arbutus to be in bloom now. The cool slow spring has set them back slightly, but the plants here at Pine Ridge are ready to open their buds.

We'll let Mrs. Dana have the last words: "... these brave little blossoms, struggling through the withered leaves, brought a message of hope and courage to the heroic heart of the Quaker poet...(Whittier) who called them 'The first sweet smiles of May'. Quite.