Fourth of July

It is Independence Day.   I put the flag out this morning.

I never get through this day without thinking about the firebrands meeting in the Boston taverns, drinking their ale and bitching about the heavy hand of the British overlords.   I can imagine Sam Adams and Paul Revere clutching their mugs and declaiming in inebriated fervor.   Somehow that all got organized to the point that the traitorous dogs managed to get a whole bunch of other disaffected colonists together to actually fight and die for the cause.

Ultimately there were fighting words spoken, written, signed, sealed and delivered to the Crown, and the rest, as they say, is history.  It is why we celebrate this day, and an episode in history that politicians have been referring to ever since.

By the accident of birth and the diligence of my late Aunt Maurine, I know that I share blood with that history.   I have at least one Revolutionary Ancestor.   I’m sure that there are probably others, but the young man we can trace our roots back to and prove our lineage from was one Joel Gibson, a private in the 1st North Carolina Regiment.   We know he survived the war because he received a pension for his service.  But the fact remains that he was willing to put his life on the line and allow his farm to be neglected in his absence in order for the brand new United States of America to be birthed.

I’m rather proud of my lineage, actually.

We also know that one of our maternal ancestors was a full blooded Mohawk  Indian.  She was one of numerous Indian children separated from their tribes, “adopted” and raised by a white family.   In addition to our Revolutionary ancestors, we also have traced our lineage back to the Mayflower; we are some of the numerous Doty descendants.  We had ancestors on both sides of the Civil War, and one roamer with a dedicated wanderlust who happened to serve during the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Perhaps that explains my occasional need to go off on solo road trips on occasion.   It satisfies some deep need within me to get away from all the normal routines of my life and “explore” new territory.

I love my familiar territory, though.   Yesterday I was moved to take some photographs (yeah, I know — big surprise) of the Petite Prairie.  I got the plants I purchased at Cottage Garden planted, and as I was preparing to do the job I started thinking about the bed, its contents, and the nature of the planting.   I decided that since I am referring to the bed as the “Smallest Prairie in the Universe” perhaps I should re-evaluate the things I have chosen to plant there.   I decided that cultivars of actual native plants were acceptable, but aliens should perhaps be located elsewhere.  So I removed the Miscanthus sinensis and the Japanese blood grass.  This not only “purifies” the prairie, but it provides room for the newer flowering plants I just purchased.   It also means that in a few years I will not be tearing my hair out as I tear out the extremely invasive blood grass and fountain grass from the planting.

It looks like this right now.

The Knockout Rose is engaging in a new wave of bloom.   It is such a hot color, it glows in the evening light.   I called this shot “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” since it has the dead bloom of the day before, the burgeoning glowing daily flower and the bud that will bloom tomorrow.

Moving around to the Hosta Dell, I found that the microphylla thyme on the Thyme Walk has started blooming.   It is so cute, but you almost need a magnifying glass to see it.   For scale, bear in mind that the pebbles in the following picture are about the size of my little fingernail.

Then I noticed that the gravel in the Japanese Rock Garden was sporting a halo of weeds, so I put on my Zen face and proceeded to traverse the area and remove all the “volunteers.”   It was while I was doing this chore that I found evidence that the ecosystem at The Havens is  healthy enough to support a variety of wildlife, including the predators at the top of the food chain.   Apparently, life is so good that my resident Western Ribbon snake grew out of her skin and had to shed it.   She availed herself of the rough rocks making the ridgeline of the Rock Garden to slip out of the old, too-small skin.   I got a shot of it in situ, and it wasn’t until I was cropping the image that I noticed the feather nestled in there as well.   The birds sit up on the den tree above the Rock Garden and preen, so I imagine this is the result of that activity.   There have been a lot of fledglings around lately, getting their feathers in and arranged properly.

After I acquired a few images of the skin in place, I carefully removed it from where she had discarded it.   I felt quite elated as I inspected the snake skin, it isn’t often that you find one that is completely intact.  She slithered out of it, starting from her head, and the whole thing just slipped off so neatly.   Of course, it is inside out.   You can see the spot where her eyes were, and the thin part of her lower jaw is even there.

I shall leave you with a couple of  images of the center of an infant sunflower the blue jays kindly planted for me.   It won’t be long before the finches discover it and open up the Sunflower Cafe.

Day lilies and Dale Chihuly

I’ve been away from the blogosphere for a while.  The main reason is that Jesse is here on leave, and somehow spending time with him seemed a lot more important than blogging.   Also, my 81 year old mother needed transportation to a convention up in St. Louis, and since it wasn’t going to cost anything extra for her to have a companion in her hotel room, I decided to take the opportunity to go up there.

I was motivated partly by her need for transport, but I recently read a review of a nursery called The Cottage Garden up in Godfrey, Illinois on Gardening Gone Wild, and I REALLY wanted to go there.    So I did, and it was definitely worth the trip.   It was all the reviewer said, and more.  The proprietor was very friendly and we had a wonderful conversation.   I wished I had taken a lot more money along, but I was able to limit myself to what my budget would allow and came away with some lovely additions for the Mini Prairie.

The next day I went over to the Missouri Botanical Garden, mostly because I knew the day lilies would be blooming and I wanted to have a look at some of the cultivars available.   I have some holes in my garden that need filling, and I can’t think of a better way to fill them than some new day lilies.   While I was wandering around taking pictures, I couldn’t help but remember a conversation I had with someone about a year ago.   She was talking about how she really wanted to have some flowers in her border around her deck, but that she wasn’t very committed to taking care of them.   “They’d need to be really hardy and able to thrive on neglect.”   I mentioned that perhaps she would enjoy having some day lilies, as they are pretty durable.   “Oh,” she replied airily.   “I don’t like day lilies much.   I mean, they’re all just orange.”

I had no response to this comment, as my breath was about knocked out of me by it.   So, in honor of that conversation, here, in no particular order, are a selection of the beauties I saw on my walk through the MBG day lily collection.

Raven Woodsong

Thin Man

Cat Claws

Lavender Blue Baby

Gothic Butterfly

ChristinaCook

Paper Butterfly

I could go on and on, but you get the idea.   Just orange my foot.

The other thing that was a pleasant surprise was that the Dale Chihuly installation of glass art turned out to be a permanent installation at some areas.   I read an article about the display of Chihuly’s art, and I really wanted to see it.  But I also knew that the exhibition was over and so I was pleasantly surprised when I entered the gardens and found the gates in the rose garden adorned thus:

Of course, I had to try to get a close-up of the individual components of the gates.

Then, over at the Victorian Water Lily Reflecting Pond, there was another installation.

I love the way the glass seems to glow in the sun.  Finally, over in the Climatron (which you can see in the background of the first picture in this group of three), there was a wonderful installation in one of the ponds there.   It looked like some kind of wild tropical plants.

And so I’m off, licking my wounds just a trifle.   I entered the Gardening Gone Wild photo contest for June and just went and discovered the results.   I have no problem with the decision of the judge, Debra Lee Baldwin.   The winning entry was spectacular and beautiful.   What hurt my feelings was that Ms. Baldwin did not content herself with lauding the winner.   She went on to talk about several other entries as well; also not a problem.   Their photos were beautiful and their roses fabulous.  But by the time she was done with her commentary, she had mentioned 24 of the 31 entries and provided links to them in her judging entry.    So I am left with the rather bitter and sad questions:   “What was so unremarkable about my photo and my blog that it didn’t even get a link?   Is my blog so boring and my gardens so ugly that I don’t even get mentioned in the catch-all paragraph?   Is my photography that crappy?”    I’m sure there are six other people who are asking themselves the same sort of questions.    It would not have been so hurtful if she hadn’t mentioned and linked to 75% of the entries.   The ones left out in the cold — how are we supposed to feel?

Why restore prairie?

Before I begin today’s topic, I just want to post another Bouquet You Can Only Have if You Are a Gardener:

I picked this in about five minutes wandering around the place today.   I did not pick any of the lilies or day lilies that are blooming right now, so this is an excerpt of the news of the day.   This particular bouquet consists of zinnias, three kinds of echinacea, crocosmia (the red branch), liatris, coral bells, three colors of yarrow, Queen Anne’s lace, and a frond of lady fern.  There’s plenty else going on out there, I just stopped when I had a nice vaseful.

So, the question on the floor is, “Why would you restore a prairie?”   What is so great about it, and why would one go to all the trouble and expense to do it, anyway?   When we went to visit our friend who lives in Wisconsin and is going about restoring 4.5 acres of medium/tall grass prairie savannah, I posted about the process a bit.

I am a member of the Missouri Prairie Foundation.   I have become disenchanted with the large “conservation” organizations, who seem to take the money you send them and use it to pay lobbyists (who apparently aren’t very effective, considering we still have aerial wolf hunting, etc.) and buy more mailings to ask for more money.  So a few years ago I was looking for an organization where the money I sent would actually be used to accomplish something.   I came across this group at a plant sale, and once I checked them out I knew I had found a charity I could donate to wholeheartedly.

So, the big question is, why would you care about prairie anyway?  What is so great about it?   And why isn’t an overgrown field or a suburban garden just as good?

The answer to those questions lies in one word:  biodiversity.

A suburban garden is quite often a very beautiful place, with gorgeous flowers, beautiful trees, and healthy shrubs.  An overgrown hayfield has lots of grass and some flowers, it looks verdant and like a great place for wildlife to live.   Up to a point, this is true.

But an overgrown hayfield is usually one, maybe two kinds of grass interspersed with a few tall weeds like fleabane, daisies, and horsenettle.  And an ordinary suburban garden looks for all the world like a colorful desert to the native herbivores that make up the main meal dish for many birds.   The herbivores are the bottom of the food chain, and if they aren’t there, the food chain isn’t either.

We gardeners are not always kind to the herbivores in our gardens.   After all, WE want the plants to look beautiful, and one thing a garden herbivore does is eat holes in the plants.   Sometimes they eat the whole plant.

When I got my latest Prairie Journal, they had some wonderful articles about how to establish a native plant garden.   There was a side bar in the article that I found to be so interesting, I am going to quote it extensively.  It explains much better than I can why we should care.

“The table below provides hard data that show how important native species are as host plants for butterfly and moth larvae, which are in turn important pollinators and food for birds and other animals.

Native landscaping advocate Dave Tylka prepared the table by selection data from extensive lists prepared by Dr. Doug Tallamy and K. HJ. Shropshire.   Tallamy, who is professor and chair of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware, is also author of Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens.  . . .Tallamy and Shropshire chose Lepidoptera as surrogates for all insect herbivores for two reasons.   Published host plant records for this group of herbivores, though far from definitive, are more complete than are host records for other insect herbivores.  Moreover, lepidopteran larvae (caterpillars) are disproportionately valuable sources of food for many terrestrial birds, particularly warblers and neotropical migrants of conservation concern.   Tallamy and Shropshire restricted their focus to moths and butterflies that develop on plant genera occurring naturally or planted ornamentally in the mid-Atlantic region of North America.”

All of a sudden I like goldenrod a lot better.  I still love hostas even though they aren’t much use to the native butterflies and moths.

Another question is,”Why is a prairie so much better than an overgrown field?”   There are some wonderful photos on the National Geographic site of prairie grass with 10 foot long roots. Typically, hay field grasses are not nearly so deeply rooted, so they are not as drought tolerant as the native species and they also do not hold the soil as well.  Soil erosion is a major problem world wide, and it is in our own best interests to keep it to a minimum.

There is another issue as well.   Imagine your lawn grown tall.   That is the way an overgrown field typically will look.  This is an overgrown field:

Now observe this photo of the prairie as it grows.

Notice that there are spaces between the forbs (flowering plants) and the bunch grasses.  When the prairie grasses get bigger, the bunch enlarges but the grasses sort of cascade around the bunch and there are spaces down under there.

Now imagine that you are a baby quail or prairie chicken.   When you are newborn, you are a precocial bird, which means you must run around and forage for your own food (like a chick or a duckling) rather than waiting in the nest for your parents to bring it (like a robin).   Granted, you are still under the supervision of your parents, but you have to get out there and find your dinner yourself.   You are approximately the size of the end of an adult human’s thumb, with legs the size of toothpicks.  The closely packed grasses of a hayfield are almost impossible for you to fight your way through in your quest for food.  Additionally, when dew falls, if the grasses are packed together you will become wet and die of hypothermia and/or drowning. In a prairie, there are spaces for you to get between the grasses as you hunt and you can shelter under the overhanging grasses to stay dry when the dew falls.

Again, the story is all about biodiversity and how to promote it, with a strong dose of understanding how to keep soils healthy and protect them from erosion.  That is why in my opinion it is worth maintaining the prairies we do have and, wherever possible, increasing the extent of the prairie ecosystem.

Another rose bites the dust

Oh, I’m just so bummed out right now.   Aside from the fact that we are enjoying a wave of dangerous heat — temperatures in the high 90s and humidity to match — while I was out watering my rose/daylily bed along the privacy fence I discovered that another one of my roses has become infected with Rose Rosette Disease.

The latest victim is Rosa eglanteria, a very old cultivar that I chose because it is so resistant to pests and diseases, is sporting the characteristic witches brooms and distorted canes.    So, in addition to bidding farewell to another one of my roses, I now have the wonderful task of cutting it all back to the ground and burning the canes in the sultry heat.

As my mother used to say,  ”Goody goody god damn.”

Guess I’d better get busy, before more of the mites that carry it catch the breeze and spread some more.

Shit.

Picking blueberries — or, “The bear went over the mountain”

It is blueberry season in the Ozarks, and so I have been out gathering my yearly supply of blueberries.   The babies that we planted are way too young to make a crop, so we avail ourselves of the U-Pick patches in the neighborhood until they mature.

The U-Pick patches are characterized by long rows of carefully tended and meticulously mulched high-bush blueberries separated by exquisitely mowed grass.   It is hotter than the hinges of Hades around here right now, so we try to get up nice and early and be at the patch to pick when they open at 7 a.m.  So you stroll through the dewy grass, pick perfectly ripe berries the size of the end of your little finger, eating as many as you wish, and listen to the birds and swat an occasional mosquito or fly.  In an hour and a half, I can pick a couple of gallons.

It is always at this time of year that I start thinking about what it was like to pick blueberries in Alaska, a completely different sort of experience.   First of all, there are the blueberry “bushes”.   The first time in my life that I went to a commercial blueberry patch, which was located in the state of Washington, I felt I had entered some sort of Alice in Wonderland fantasy where the giant shrubs covered with blueberries had drunk the bottle labled “Drink Me.”   I could not believe that these giant masses of arching canes making an almost impenetrable jungle were actually blueberries.   They were, I realize now, inhabiting a farm that had not been pruned in any way for over a decade.  But still, it was a far cry from the plants that I was used to finding blueberries on.   The blueberry “bushes” in Alaska are rarely more than three or four inches tall.  The berries, while delicious, are much smaller too.  If I found one that was as much as 1/4 inch in diameter when I was picking in Alaska, I felt I had found a monstrously large berry.  Around here, a berry that small is hardly worth the effort to pick it and put it in your pail.

The plants in Alaska are not found in carefully tended fields either.   Their preferred habitat is muskeg. They can also be found on the slopes of foothills near mountains.  Both places are equally well supplied with squadrons of starving mosquitoes and flocks of tiny biting flies the natives call “white socks” because of the white stripes on their legs.   You can see those stripes clearly when you notice the little flying bastard taking a chunk out of your body — right before you smash it dead.

So the differences in the blueberry picking experience are vast.   But one of the vastest of the vastnesses is the fact that in the Missouri Ozarks you don’t ordinarily have to worry about competing with grizzly bears for your harvest.

Now I recall a lovely late-August afternoon when I decided I wished to pick blueberries.   I drove out into the permafrost muskeg area north west of town where I generally was able to find a good patch, and there was not a single blueberry to be found.   We had experienced some squirrelly weather in the spring, so I guessed that we hadn’t had a decent berry set that year, sort of wrote off getting any blueberries at all.   The next day I was talking with one of my friends, and she mentioned that down McKinley Park way (this was before we restored the Athabascan name for the mountain — Denali) the bushes were just loaded.   It was a substantial drive to get there from Fairbanks, probably right around 120 miles.   However, in Alaska, distances are so great that a trip like that was truly only a little day trip, not some sort of pilgrimage.   I didn’t have a lot to do the next day, so I hopped in my little Saab and scooted on down there with my berry picking pail.

I found a spot that looked likely, doused myself with Cutters (mosquito repellent), walked around a bit, and ascertained that there were certainly lots and lots of blueberries.  So I set off picking.   As these things go, you tend to hunker down in a good spot, pick all the berries that you see there and then stand up to stretch and move along to another patch.    Since I was all by my little loneliness, and enjoying that very much, I was pretty quiet.   Once you have the bottom of your bucket layered with berries, you make hardly a sound as you pick berries and drop them into the container.

So, I picked and picked, and after several hours I had achieved a remarkable harvest of around three quarts of berries, which looked to me like quite a number of pancake and muffin treats later on during the winter.   (I never bothered to imagine that I would ever be able to acquire enough blueberries to do something so arcane as make jam.)  Of course, it being August, there was no danger of the sun going down on me any time soon, so I thought I’d sort of stand up, get a good stretch in, and survey where I had gotten to over the course of my meanderings and which way I ought to head to get back to my car.

As I worked the patch I had slowly ascended the rolling ridge where they were growing, and I had nearly reached the top of it.  There was a stiff glacier-cooled breeze coming over the crest of the ridge I was on, and so as I picked I had worked my way along the ridge rather than going over the top.  I was sheltered and warm, and yet the breeze was helping keep the bugs at bay.  When I stood up, however, my head and shoulders were up in the wind and I could see over the ridge and down the slope behind.   I looked around, enjoying the view.  The mountain had shed its veil of clouds and was laid out in all its stark icy and rock splendor before me.

“Man, oh man!”  I felt motivated to yell.   “What a beautiful day!”   I prepared to burst into a quick rendition of “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” even though it wasn’t strictly morning.  My shout of joy had disturbed the other blueberry picker who was sharing the ridge with me.  He had been working the breezy side, and the brisk gale that was blowing had blurred the sounds of his activity from me.  He threw his head up, startled by my outburst, and gazed deep into my eyes.  He was big, blonde, handsome and muscular.

He was also a grizzly bear  It would be fair to say that it was a toss-up as to which of us was more surprised by the presence of the other.  I suddenly lost the capacity to breathe or move.  He fixed me with a stern gaze, then gave me a “There goes the neighborhood” look, and lumbered off down the ridge towards a drainage filled with a willow jungle.   He disappeared into the shrubbery, and I managed to pick my eyeballs up off the ground and get the hell out of there in the opposite direction shortly thereafter.  I did not spill my berries, nor did I forget them in my haste.

But it is an experience and a vision that I will never forget as long as I live.  Every time I pick blueberries,  I think about that beautiful, fat bear, and how disgusted he was by his noisy neighbor.