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.

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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.

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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.

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The evolution of a front yard garden

I’ve been enjoying the blog Gardening Gone Wild for a while now.   It is a space that actually publishes useful information on a variety of topics, and one of the ways they do this is to host a Design Workshop monthly, where bloggers post about a particular topic and then the editors of GGW bring all that information into a central post.   This month the topic is Front Yards Revisited.

When we first purchased this home back in April of 1996, the first thing we did after signing all the papers and getting the key was to go over to our new place and take pictures of it.   I recently did a blog post where I compared how things have changed around here since we started living here, and it is worth visiting for a quick tour.  Basically, when we moved here we had a house, a barn and a garden shed situated on two acres of lawn with several elm trees surrounding the house site.

The front of the house presented like this:

That little quarter circle of garden was the only flower bed on the whole place.   That and the “Green Moustache” of junipers was the only adornment the house sported.   Sadly, the flower bed was that in name only, since it had been completely ignored for several years.   Along the back edge in front of the stone planter was a row of yellow irises, and the whole rest of the bed was a tangled mass of vinca, dandelions, plantain, with a host of other weeds thrown in for “color.”

My first task was to prune back those overgrown junipers and then weed the “flower” bed and plant a few other things to live there.   While I was accomplishing that feat, I started trying to envision what I wanted my gardens to look like, and it wasn’t long before I started thinking that it would be really nice to have a small tree living in the bed I was starting out with.   As I was working that spring, I came across a volunteer redbud sapling that just happened to be in a good place, and so I weeded around it and rejoiced in the fact that the tree was there and in a good spot.

Shortly after I finished weeding and planting and mulching my first plant babies, one of my massage clients took a picture of me in front of the new bed.  You can just see the baby redbud in this picture, it is the very small dark green plant just to the right of me and in front of the small silver mound artemisia.

The next picture was taken three years later, in 1999.   The redbud has gotten to be head high, and I have more than doubled the size of the garden beds by adding to them outside the walkway.  The new bed curves down to the driveway and incorporates the light stand  (the light no longer functions but I like the vertical element and have clematis climbing it), and extends all the way along the front of the house.

You can also see that in the interim I added more colors to the iris collection, somehow “all yellow” just wasn’t doing it for me.  This photo also displays my love of purchasing “naturalizing mixtures” for increasing my holdings of sundry plants.   By the this time I had invested in an asiatic lily collection and a day lily collection, which is partly why I had to increase my available garden space.

Fast forward seven years.   During the interim, we had the house painted.  This is a shot taken in early spring when the not-so-little young redbud is blooming, along with my daffodils.  While I began with a daffodil naturalizing collection (actually two different ones in two different years), my daffodil addiction (and trust me, it IS an addiction) has led me to start purchasing selected breeds.  I now have over 90 varieties of daffodils at The Havens, and I’m sure I will acquire more as the plant breeders provide me with more opportunities for “substance abuse.”

I was so pleased that year that the showy evening primroses I had planted a few years previously were finally starting to take off.   By the following year, they hadn’t just taken off, they were taking over.

These highly invasive plants earned the right to be eradicated. The process began that fall and continued the following spring.   One of the things that motivated the eradication program was the difference in the dutch irises from one side of the walk to the other.   On the south side, I had lovely clumps of flowers and on the north side there were almost none, the ones that were growing were stunted and struggling.

The next shot was taken last year.

Sadly, I lost the peony closest to the driveway shortly after this picture was taken.  It developed a nasty fungus and had to be removed completely.  Unfortunately, as an organic gardener, my only option was to remove it (and all the dirt around it) and replace it with something not susceptible to the fungus.  I chose a day lily, which seems to be doing just fine, so far.

Now, there are a couple of observations I will make here.   One is that when you have a tree in a garden bed, as it grows it will change the nature of the bed.   First of all, there is the obvious fact that a growing tree will start to produce shade.   This is certainly a process that has been occurring in this front garden, and there are lilies that have “disappeared” because they no longer get enough sun to be happy.  I have moved a couple of irises that do not get enough sun to bloom well any more.

The other thing that happens is that the tree will naturally establish its root system in the bed.  This may seem patently obvious, but it was a process that was not really mentioned in any of the garden planning books I read, and it is a real issue for the plants sharing the bed with the redbud tree.   Over the years, the garden has become wilder and bushier as I find plants that co-exist well with the tree.  Most of the plants that share the original bed with the redbud tree are very good competitors, many of them are native perennials like spiderwort and echinacea.

This is how the garden looks today, as I write this post.

It is rapidly becoming clear to me that I am going to have to do something about the juniper moustache, as it is in the process of dying.   I would love some suggestions about what to replace it with.  I am not looking forward to digging out the ancient roots of those bushes, but it will need to be done soon.  I’ll probably address the situation this fall when I will hopefully do minimal damage to the other plantings in front of the shrubs.   Even though the junipers are dying, they were a home for the robins this spring.  (I did a whole series of posts about that bit of excitement: here, here, here and here.)

I have put the development of the front yard gardens on hold in favor of all the work I have been doing behind the fences.  Anyone who wishes to can check my archives and see what is going on elsewhere on the place.   In addition to the habitat pond, we have a terraced garden on our root cellar, a vineyard, a garden around the sauna and a new Stroll Garden, which we began in October of 2007.  We have been influenced by a sentiment we ran across while reading Michael Pollan’s book, “Second Nature.”

“Gardens and even yards in America are not places for being in but for looking at. We admire our beds from the lawn, and arrange our unfenced front yards for the admiration of the street.   What other possible purpose could “foundation planting” serve? . . . Suburban America has been laid out to look best from the perspective not of its inhabitants, but of the motorist. . . .  I’m convinced that gardening — real gardening, not just putting in beds of flowers or tomatoes — begins with the removal of one’s property from the motorist’s gaze, with one’s secession from the national lawn.  This might mean throwing a hedge or fence around your yard, letting it go to meadow, or ripping out the grass and putting in something else entirely.  But once you’ve done this, made the big break, prepare to feel very much on your own.”

We have our “Motorists View” indeed, and we are quite pleased with it.   But the real gardening is going on behind the fence, and outside the borders of this particular blog post.  Fortunately, the First Garden, our foundation planting, is well established and continues to be beautiful without a lot of effort going towards it as we obsess in the back areas of the lot.

Thanks for spending this time with me.  Hope to see you around The Havens again sometime.

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Happy solstice and happy Father’s Day

Celebrated the summer solstice with a bunch of friends by floating the Gasconade River this weekend.   Stayed out in the country at a place where there are at least five different kinds of frogs enjoying a pond near the house site.   We camped out in tents and listened to the amphibian chorus serenade us all night.   The concert was interrupted by a rowdy group of coyotes singing their way down the hollow we were camped above on their way to the river access.

We ate wonderful food, and a good time was had by all.

After we came home, I spent the afternoon watering various things and getting our camping cooking floating stuff washed and put away.  After all that work, I went out to sit in my swing .  While I was resting there, a goldfinch flew down from the bird feeder and checked on the ripeness of the echinacea in the Petite Prairie.

I went out and walked the labyrinth at sundown, sang in the directions and watched the sun set on the longest day of the year.

Back in the house, I am enjoying the latest iteration of “Bouquets You Can Only Have If You Are A Gardener.”  This one has lady fern, hardy gladiolus, a zinnia, and a dahlia.

May the seeds you planted in the spring grow strong and produce a bountiful harvest.

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