It's Guest Rant week at Garden Rant!

Two fun rants have been posted already. Happy reading!

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Goldenrod are in the aster family.

It's hard to think of goldenrod as individual plants, much less individual flowers.




Look closely, though. . .




The individual flowers look like little daisies.

I learned something new!

Don’t Take Wetlands for Granted

That's Gabe's foot on my article in the Franklin Country Gazette.


Don’t Take Wetlands for Granted


This summer, as we drove by a vast and scenic labyrinth of grasses and gleaming water, I remembered something my grandfather once said to me: “those do nothing but breed mosquitoes. They should all be filled in.” He was talking about the costal marshes of Galveston, Texas.

On this recent trip to Galveston, my family watched from the beach as something orange and formless drifted down the coast. Thankfully it wasn’t oil from BP’s spill - it was just seaweed, filled with tiny shrimp for the shore birds to feast on. But our trip was colored by the possibility that this might be the last time that we see the area alive with birds and crabs and native plants.

In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina we as a country are growing more aware that coastal wetlands offer a layer of hurricane protection to low-lying coastal cities. This is of particular importance to the city of Galveston, which was the victim of the nation’s worst natural disaster when, in 1900, a hurricane killed thousands. Exposed as it is, the Galveston area needs all the protection it can get, and BP’s oil spill is making it clear that its protective wetlands, too, are vulnerable.

Here in Massachusetts, our wetlands are similar buffers against natural disaster. When too much rain fell in too short a time this March, pavement and compacted lawns prevented the water from soaking naturally into the earth. Overloaded storm drains couldn’t contain the water, and small backyard streams burst their banks, filling roads and basements, because the water had nowhere else to go.

My own house stands mere feet above wetland, so I assumed that we would soon be underwater, too. But to my relief, the water level of the wetland varied only slightly. That wetland is the fringe of the Charles River watershed, which is, in essence, a very broad and slow-moving stream. The water entering the wetland seeps lazily from one vernal pool to the next as it trickles down the slope of the land, into the Charles, and down into the ground itself, to recharge the water-table below.

This area is so broad and sponge-like that it was able to absorb the torrent of water. It also slowed the water: it took a full twenty-four hours after the rain stopped for the flood to arrive ten miles downstream in Medfield, where it finally forced a closure of route 109. At that location, the road crosses a swath of Charles River wetlands three-quarters of a mile wide. Usually, that region looks like a field full of shrubs, but for that wet week, it looked like a lake. Had those wetlands been filled in because they did nothing but “breed mosquitoes”, there would have been catastrophic flood damage. Instead, there was just the one leisurely road closure.

Being at the head of the Charles river, Franklin, Bellingham, and Milford business are being targeted by the Environmental Protection Agency for new regulations surrounding the runoff from parking lots and roofs. The owners of large areas of impermeable surfaces may soon be required to route their storm water through engineered wetland. This is because wetland acts as a filter, removing phosphorous and other water pollutants before they contaminate the river. Should they pass, these regulations may be onerous for the business owners, but the environmental impact is potentially huge.

To this day pop culture perpetuates the myth of wetlands as being scary, dark, rotting and stinking homes of monsters, but in reality wetlands brim with flowering plants, stately trees, handsome autumn foliage, fascinating wildlife, and scenic views. Wetlands suffer from such bad reputation that in order to be accepted by the gardening public, they have had to be rebranded “water gardens”.

There are different types of wetlands to be seen at parks throughout Massachusetts. Salt marshes, for example, are visible from the Shining Sea Bikeway at Woods Hole. This is a good location for watching ospreys and red-winged blackbirds.

For the adventurous, a half-log trail snakes out into a white cedar bog at Ponkapoag Trail at the Blue Hills Reservation, just south of Boston. White cedar bogs are quite rare in Massachusetts. Three kinds of carnivorous plants live among the bog’s prehistoric-looking mosses. Be sure to bring shoes that can get wet.

Closer to home you can visit an example of our more common swamps and ponds at the Massachusetts Audubon’s Stony Brook Wildlife Sanctuary in Norfolk. There, a solid deck walkway - safe enough for strollers - leads through wetland and across a pond. Massive highbrush blueberry and swamp azalea bushes make a tunnel around the walkway, and armies of turtles laze among water lilies and exotic-looking pickerel weed.

There may be a few mosquitoes at these landscapes, but for such beautiful scenery, they are worth it.

Hummingbird Battle

I promised more photos of hummers, so here they are!




There were two of them on that morning, and they were taking turns chasing each other away from the evening primrose. I could hear their tiny, squeaky chirps. I'm sure in hummingbird language, those cute little sounds were actually bellows of rage. Hummers are territorial little brutes.




I'm tempted to apologize for the quality of the photos, but I've never tried to photograph such quick, unpredictable subjects.

The morning sun was hitting the flowers, but the battle progressed to the fence, which was still in the shade.




It seemed to me like they were expending a silly amount of energy driving each other away from the food.




The following day Chris confirmed that the hummers were using the scarlet runner beans (Phaseolus coccineus) as a food source, too. I'll have to get some photos of that plant. It is definitely one that we'll be growing again. The beans are tasty, the flowers are pretty, and they attract hummingbirds. Win win win!

Finally, rain!

I didn't want to jinx it yesterday, but the drizzle has continued for a day and a half now. Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster! We sure needed some rain.

The local farms are relieved. I was curious, and happy, to read that the drought wasn't as detrimental to the crops as last summer's wetness was:

"In Millis, while saying the rains were certainly a welcome sight, Laura Tangerini, owner of Tangerini's Spring Street Farm, said dry spells are part of running a farm. She said she prefers this year's dry weather over last year's soaking rains because it has kept diseases and many types of insects in check."

I grew these by accident.

I didn't plant any evening primrose here. I just failed to do any weeding for two years.




Oenothera biennis at its best. These must be seven feet tall. Perhaps with some selective weeding I could turn this into a perpetual primrose bed, with a few shorter plants in front to hide those scrawny legs.




I really didn't know how amazing these flowers are until a morning last week when I woke up at the crack of dawn, and couldn't get back to sleep. I was too cranky to do yard work, so I stumbled outside with my cup of placebo decaf to water my potted plants with liquid sulk.

First I noticed the smell. Evening primrose on a cool morning smell spectacular! I don't normally notice smells. There were all sorts of pollinators rolling around in the primrose blossoms, and now that I have experienced that beautiful smell, I think I can safely say that those bugs are downright drunk with the aroma.

A pair of goldfinches paid a visit, too. I thought they only ate the seeds, so I'm not sure what they were doing on an evening primrose this early in the season. Scouting, perhaps?



And then I saw something zip by.




Hot damn! Hummers!

I grabbed the camera and got cozy on the bench. Sure enough, they went about their business as I snapped away.




Stay tuned for Battle Hummingbird. . .

"Butterfly weed"

The short milkweed Asclepias tuberosa has become one of my new favorite native flowers for the flower garden. The groundhog munched it to the ground a couple of times, but once I planted a few other things around it, he seems to have lost the plant's location. They have been blooming and blooming through this nasty drought.

These were grown from some scrawny mail-order tubers which arrived this spring. The plants are about eight inches tall and I don't think they have the running growth habit of common milkweed. The only downside, oddly: the flowers don't seem to attract many insects. But perhaps I just haven't been around when the insects visit.

Finally! Sorta. . .

Well, I've been saying since we moved in that I would take this eyesore down.



Now that it's down, it looks overwhelmingly large. I'm not sure how to dispose of it.

Maybe I should have just used it as a trellis.

Good morning.

I've been waking up early lately. Mornings are peaceful. Here's the meadow around back.




This is the only one of my transplanted goldenrod that bloomed this year. I'm surprised that anything survived transplant this summer. I haven't been very good about watering out here during the drought.




The poison sumac has started to unfurl its autumnal glory there on the right, just a little.




Some sort of thistle has volunteered here. I don't know if it's native.




This is one of several groundcherries I transplanted into the meadow. Groundcherry tends to melt into a puddle when transplanted, but with a little water the root survives and starts growing again within weeks.




The first sunlight of morning glows on the grass. The small pokeweed grew from a giant root that I ripped out of the ground elsewhere the previous year.

Vinca battle

I neglected to get a "before" photo of this corner. It contained a clump of some verigated, trouble-making grass, which I suspect to be invasive, volunteered Japanese barberry, Asiatic bittersweet, and gobs of periwinkle. I had a large round cone of black plastic left over from the top of a failed compost bin. I stuck that on the grass to kill it, and for a few weeks in the Spring we could lift it up to see a dozen surprised-looking snakes inside.

The plants under the cover cooked nicely. Then, this weekend, as I walked by, I couldn't resist tugging one strand of periwinkle out of the yew. The nasty stuff was entwined all through the shrub. Then I tugged another. And another.




This is what the bed looks like a little farther on: a nice, dense mat of periwinkle. It would be nice if it weren't sending out runners into the grass. Left unchecked, it would do this to my meadow. And to the woods beyond. Periwinkle, Vinca minor, does not play nice with Massachusetts woods. It carpets the forest floor and prevents native plants from growing. I don't know why it didn't rank the Massachusetts Prohibited Plant list.




I kept yanking and yanking. The plants went into a plastic bag, to make sure they are well and truly dead before I compost them. I'm not taking any chances. Here is the bed after I've cleared out some space.




A lot of work remains to be done in this space. But I suppose the dawning question is: what should I plant here?

Natives at Franklin Matters

This week's post at Franklin Matters is on goldenrod.

Edamame Fresh from the Garden

I picked some of the soy beans just before lunch and decided to try making edamame for lunch. I figured Michelle and I would split some. Much to my surprise Gabe got into his chair and dove in.

It took him a couple attempts before he figured out how to get them open, but he learned quickly.

Nom Nom Nom goes Gabe.

Earlier this morning Gabe shelled a bunch of dried peas for me, so I'm wondering if that helped him out with the edamame. Though eventually he copied mom and dad and started popping the pods in his mouth to break them open.

Happy boy full of fresh organic edamame. If I ever doubted if all the time in the garden was worth it, watching Gabe happily eat GREEN things from the garden has dispelled that doubt.

A couple more. . .

It seems that my strategy of taking photos on the weekend and then posting them through the week has worked too well: I still have quite a backlog! So I shall cover two plants tonight.




This St. John's wort volunteered in the meadow, and bloomed like mad throughout this mad drought.




If I remember correctly, there are native St. John's worts, and there are non-natives. And there are lots of each, and they all lot alike. I'm not qualified to deduce which this one is.




This, on the other hand, is absolutely a native phlox. I bought it at Garden in the Woods two years ago, and stuck it in the worst possible location: in a dry spot where I am unlikely to ever drag the hose. And worse, it's on top of the cement block that holds up the broken lamp. So why is it flourishing like this? It has been in blazing bloom for a month, and we have had almost no rain in two months.




I can't believe anything is doing this well under these conditions. It's the only thing up in that front bed that doesn't look awful. Note to self: buy more phlox at Garden in the Woods.

Tomatoes Make Me Happy

Native enough

Kapow!

I'm not a purist when it comes to natives. As long as it comes from North America and doesn't have a history of being invasive, than it's okay in my yard.




This is Allium stellatum, or prairie onion, and it's native a few hundred miles west of here. This was one of the flowers I started from seed the winter before last for Gabe's Garden.



I wanted hundreds of little onion flowers, but only a few germinated. And then I lost most of the seedlings among the grass weeds, finding them only when the "grass" I pulled up had a little bulb on the bottom. Only a few made it, and the three that bloomed are visually lost beneath the serviceberry saplings. As a bit of color in the garden, they are ineffective.




But up close - amazing! And they have withstood almost two months of drought.

More things happening in the woods.

Deer are native, but as a species they are out of balance - they are doing too well. This is fine for the deer, but deer happen to eat the same native plants that are already under so much stress from habitat loss. Forest-floor plants are particularly vulnerable to deer.



Deer must find the Solomon's seal genus, Polygonatum, to be particularly yummy, because they all get eaten so quickly from my yard. Surprisingly, a couple of the munched plants succeeded in making berries this time. I wonder if the additional plants I put around them helped hide them just enough.

Next summer I think I will begin more serious gardening work on my woods, with the aim of establishing more natives which aren't present, or which, like the Solomon's seal, are present only in small, vulnerable populations.

Ecosystem gardening isn't about feeding all of the animals all of the time. It's about establishing balance between the animal and plants.

Grocery store success?

A couple of years ago I planted ramp seeds in my woods. They should have germinated by this Spring, but I saw no sign of them. But I saw ramps on sale at Whole Foods. . . and they were in remarkably good condition, roots and all!

When I told the check-out lady that I intended to plant them, she told me I wasn't the only one doing that. Delightful! Ramps, Allium tricoccum, are quite rare around here, having been destroyed by habitat loss and over-harvesting from the wild. They take at least five years to mature, which is not enough time for their numbers to bounce back after hard harvests.

Not long after planting, the leaves of my ramps withered away: was it an expected part of the ramp life-cycle, or were they dying? But - surprise! Half of the dozen ramps had been preparing to flower. Two of them succeeded, and now have ripening seeds.

These are the first ramps I have ever seen growing. Aside from the one leaf I ate when planting them (mmm, garlic!), I have never tasted ramp. I do hope this means I'll be seeing them again next year.

Last month we took a trip up to Wisconsin to visit family, and one of our stops was at a cabin on a wooded hillside overlooking a lake. There, I noticed some familiar-looking little seed-heads. Quite a few, in fact. Yup, that same garlicy smell. A whole hillside of ramps! And better still, the family member who owns the property is on her way to becoming a Master Gardener in, get this: native flowers! Those ramps are in good hands.

Rain Gardens in Franklin

A local school is installing four rain gardens, and I don't mean four muddy holes made by kindergardeners armed with shovels. There is a backhoe involved! I will have to visit and get some pictures.

I grew these by accident.

I didn't plant any evening primrose here. I just failed to do any weeding for two years.




Oenothera biennis at its best. These must be seven feet tall. Perhaps with some selective weeding I could turn this into a perpetual primrose bed, with a few shorter plants in front to hide those scrawny legs.




I really didn't know how amazing these flowers are until a morning last week when I woke up at the crack of dawn, and couldn't get back to sleep. I was too cranky to do yard work, so I stumbled outside with my cup of placebo decaf to water my potted plants with liquid sulk.

First I noticed the smell. Evening primrose on a cool morning smell spectacular! I don't normally notice smells. There were all sorts of pollinators rolling around in the primrose blossoms, and now that I have experienced that beautiful smell, I think I can safely say that those bugs are downright drunk with the aroma.

A pair of goldfinches paid a visit, too. I thought they only ate the seeds, so I'm not sure what they were doing on an evening primrose this early in the season. Scouting, perhaps?



And then I saw something zip by.




Hot damn! Hummers!

I grabbed the camera and got cozy on the bench. Sure enough, they went about their business as I snapped away.




Stay tuned for Battle Hummingbird. . .