garden

garden : nesting birds and a developing ecological balance

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There have always been a lot of birds around our yard, but this year we seem to have hit a sweet spot in terms of cover and food because we’ve seen a greater variety of fledgling birds than ever before. It’s possible that these birds have been here every year and I just haven’t noticed because I haven’t been as active in the yard after April. It’s also possible that I was finally sufficiently threatening with regard to the neighbors’ cats being in the yard every other day for three years, as I haven’t seen them around in months. We’ve also sprayed the cherry trees for Eastern Tent Caterpillars for two years now, which has enabled them to fully foliate and have enough energy to actually produce cherries. Most likely the proliferation is a combination of all of those factors plus the near-constant rain keeping fresh water in the birdbath.

At any rate, I’ve seen rumpled no-tail-feathers wobbly-flying young of 13 species in our yard (or on the street in front of the house): American Crow, Blue Jay, Catbird, Eastern Phoebe, Hairy Woodpecker, House Sparrow, Northern Cardinal, Grackle, European Starling, Brown Thrasher, Mourning Dove, American Robin, and (just this morning) Carolina Wren. Of all of these, I was most pleased by the ones I hadn’t seen before. The phoebe was a wonderful surprise, as I’d read they were shy nesters; in addition to being a pretty little bird (I have a northerner’s affinity for the gray species) they eat mosquitoes almost exclusively. I was excited about the crow, too, mostly because it’s one of those large birds about which you joke of never seeing a juvenile. And, truly, the young one would have been indistinguishable from an adult were it not making such plaintive cries for attention and had I not witnessed its parent actually feeding it. Finally, the woodpecker was a treat just because it was so cute. Without tail feathers, it was the quintessential Weeble ™ fluffball as it tried to peck for bugs up and down the limbs of the red maple.

My father rightly observes that all of these birds are ‘the loud ones,’ which is likely related to being the large ones, which is definitely related to being the voracious insect-eating ones. After years of effort, I seem to be finally developing ecological balance. We have numerous predator bugs in the yard, most noticeably fireflies, and just this week I discovered a beautiful spider—I bet you never expected me to use those two words together—camped out in the daylilies and another of the same in the climbing rose in the backyard.

Now, if only the slugs would attract some toads, I’d be set.

garden : nesting birds and a developing ecological balance

garden : foundation bed, volunteer wildflower, and leaves on the twig

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The front flower bed, newly planted.


The front flower bed, one month later.

A month after planting the foundation bed with flowering perennials, we’re seeing all kinds of growth. It doesn’t look like a mature flower garden yet, but it’s showing signs of how it will be when it fills in. When the plants first arrived, I was disappointed; I had expected all of the plants to be in pots and all of the potted plants to be larger. Now that the bare roots have sprouted, we’ve been able to tell which had crown rot and need to be replaced and which are likely going to survive. I probably should have been prepared for how scraggly it looks with just sprouts, but I have never done this kind of planting before.


Lavender buds just opening.

In terms of flowers, the bellflowers were coming into bloom when they arrived, so they have been a nice splash of purple. The scabiosa took off, and they are also sprouting multiple pale purple blooms. While lovely, neither is the true blue that was advertised, and everything looks washed in purple with the lavender in full bloom next to the bed. The butterfly weed grew like, well, a weed, and several of the shoots have developed flower buds. I look forward to that splash of orange or yellow color. The dwarf aster bloomed as well, and I can’t remember whether it was supposed to bloom this time of year or whether it was just early because of the planting schedule. And, the small rudbeckia on the other side of the steps has bloomed, and looks quite cheery in that dark little patch. Besides those, everything else is still in the sprout stage; I’m not sure I’ll get any daisies at all this year at the rate they’re growing. I remind myself that it’s barely summer, and there’s plenty of time for them to shoot up and get established.


The volunteer aster.


Leaves on the clethra.

Elsewhere around the front yard everything’s loving all the rain and heat. The clethra now has a full set of leaves, and we’re hoping to see more shoots once it starts actually photosynthesizing. The aster that I left unmowed has bloomed all over with lovely yellow-centered white flowers. I kind of like it as an outpost at the property line, but I’m under some household pressure to relocate it into the flowerbed. The monarda has grown significantly, and now has a healthy colony of predator insects eating the healthy colony of aphids that discovered it within the first days of planting. It hasn’t bloomed yet, but I’m hopeful. The daylilies are bursting out all over, of course; they love this climate and have been reveling in the rain. I had been thinking of phasing them out in favor of more natives, as I wasn’t sure anything found sustenance in them; I’ve since seen some insects eating the pollen and at least one butterfly—possibly a Delaware skipper—drinking from a bloom.


The daylily bed, with the clethra in the lower left corner.

garden : foundation bed, volunteer wildflower, and leaves on the twig

garden : mystery flowers, lily refugees, and stumps

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White mystery flowers.

There are these little white flowers that spring up all over our neighborhood in late spring. For a long time I thought they were spring star flower; now that I’ve received some ipheion from a neighbor I can see they’re different. I now believe they are zephyr lilies, however the most commonly described variety appears to be only one flower per bulb without branching stems and are listed as blooming in autumn. They could be a native regional variety in the same family; I haven’t been able to tell from photos whether this variety has a branching stem, although the habitat description certainly fits with our town. At any rate, I moved several clumps of them out of the lawn last year and into the small bed with the daffodils, on the right side of the porch steps. Only two bulbs sent up flowers but the greenery did quite well; as with the crocuses, I’m hoping to get many more flowers next year.

In addition to puzzling over these little white flowers, I spent some time this weekend transplanting perennial lilies from my neighbor’s front foundation beds. The folks who owned the house before her planted hundreds of spring bulbs through their flower beds a couple of years ago, and the lilies in particular are now coming up everywhere. True lilies are not my favorite flower—I find the scent overpowering—however, in the spirit of providing a refuge for the neighbors’ flowers, I took some and planted them along the back fence behind the peonies. Of course, as soon as I had them in the ground I became paranoid that they would bring black mold with them that would destroy the carefully nurtured peonies just as they’re ready to flower for the first time. This is the life of a novice gardener; never being quite sure that what you’re doing is really the best thing for the plants, always fearing that you’ve missed some crucial piece of information in the one gardening book you chose not to consult. In this case, nurturing the peonies has meant weeding around them, clearing the mulch off the crowns in early spring, and otherwise leaving them completely to their own devices. I’m sure it will be fine, and I can always resort to spraying toxins if things get completely out of hand. Not that I’m likely to go that route, but it sometimes helps to remind myself that the nuclear option is there, anchoring the other end of the continuum.

While I was busy moving lilies, my partner was hard at work removing stumps. You may remember that we are still in pioneer mode when it comes to the beds in the backyard, dedicating enormous amounts of time, energy, and sweat to clearing the various sapling stumps, pricker bushes, grapevines, English ivy, liriope, violets, Virginia creeper, and last but certainly not least, poison ivy. The way that works is that we work together with the spade to clear several yards of ground of anything that can be easily dug out, and then my partner spends hours toiling alone with the landscape bar and the tree saw to uproot the pricker bushes and tree stumps. Sometimes we invite friends over for this process, have a beer afterwards, and call it a party. Last weekend it was just us, and it was only the two stumps; nothing like two years ago when we did battle with the pokeweeds for what seemed like months and was really just days. As it has been every year, my goal is to have the side beds cleared of weeds and under mulch by the first frost. Why give it up? It’s a good goal!

We all have to have something to strive for, and my something is a yard bordered by flat brown stretches of bark chips. When that day finally arrives, I’ll be glad to move on to a goal involving actual plants. For now, the front yard is where I am able to fulfill my desire to have living, growing, flowering plants, and I let the backyard be where the killing happens.

garden : mystery flowers, lily refugees, and stumps

garden : I fought the lawn and the lawn won

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Our timing could not have been better in terms of maximizing the growth of the lawn during a one week vacation. The entire week prior to our vacation, it poured rain, ensuring that I could not top up the lawn mowing (so to speak) before leaving. The first weekend we were away, it was dry and there was a heat wave. Nothing grass loves more than nice hot sun after being soaked for days; I say ‘grass’ here when I really mean clover, violets, catmint, et cetera. When we returned not only was the crabgrass tall enough for Jack to scurry up it, all the regular grass had also gone to seed. Great for reseeding the lawn and attracting pollinators, not so great for mowing. And, of course, it was still raining.

Normally I’m not that fussy about the lawn and relatively impervious to the fear that the neighbors will judge us on the basis of the state of the grass. Still, this was a little much, and it drove me to use the hour by hour weather prediction feature on my preferred weather website to find the earliest time this week that would have the maximum drying time prior to mowing and enough time prior to more rain to get the whole lawn cut; that time was 12pm yesterday. Thankfully, it was still cool, as 12pm is not typically my first choice for lawn mowing. I hauled the electric mower out of the garage and went to it. The mower performed valiantly—I only had to stop twice to clear the blocked chute thingy through which the cut grass gets thrown out onto the lawn—but it really was no match for the situation, what with having to avoid running over the cord and the one wheel that likes to reset its height as you go and the screws on the handle that like to rattle themselves loose. The mower itself is a tank, a Black and Decker that was given to us by my friend’s mother when we moved in, so in terms of plowing through a meadow it’s a good choice. For regular everyday use, I’m looking forward to the time I can get a zippy new generation Neuton. I’ve been informed in no uncertain terms that time will be when the current mower is dead, a category for which one gimpy wheel, some loose screws, and a missing rubber flap does not yet qualify it.

The nature of the lawn, as I’m sure you know, is that it grows. The nature of my mowing of the lawn is that I invariably omit to mow one of the tucked away parts of the lawn. This time I remembered the bit up by the stairs to the basement around the side of the house—which was, as the kids say, out of control as I’d forgotten it the last two times—and forgot the section outside the back gate along the alley and the bit by the garage on the other side of the walk. I’ll get back to them when it stops raining.

garden : I fought the lawn and the lawn won

garden : ground is prepped and azaleas are coming in

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We seem to have the latest-blooming azalea varieties on our block, which leads us to wonder each year whether we’ve done something wrong and the bushes just aren’t going to bloom at all. However, except for immediately following the drought, they’ve always come through; this week the color of the buds is finally visible, casting a faint sheen on the entire shrub.

After a long day of digging out roots and mixing in hummus last weekend, the foundation bed is reasonably prepared for the plants that are due to arrive in the first week of May. I made a date with a friend with a child to plant the bed on the morning of Mother’s Day, and I’m hoping to have the plants well in hand by then. In the meantime the rain is doing a wonderful job of integrating the soil, and the robins are busily attempting to eat all my worms as they come up for air in the exposed earth.

Once that bed is planted, I’ll integrate into it some of the bearded irises I inherited last year. I’ve been marking the stems as they bloom to identify the colors, but haven’t yet decided if I’ll move the white or purple ones. I’ll likely wait another month or so to see how the bed looks when the flowers start coming in; there’s a limit to how well even I can visualize a future space filled with flowers I’ve never grown before!

garden : ground is prepped and azaleas are coming in