Vanquishing a Foe

     Heavenly bamboo.  It has it's good points.  I remember a long time ago walking around an elegant section of town and admiring the tall stems and bright red berries on clumps of Nandina domestica near the front door or steps of many of the houses.  I enjoy the lush clusters of berries, bronze in the fall and lipstick red in winter.  I like that they are evergreen and also often have red leaves in the winter. 

     They require no fertilizer or supplemental water.  It's nice, in a way, that you can cut them down to the ground and they will grow back again as full as ever.  They're great for something like hiding the utility cap on your cable TV access point.  If the cable guy needs it cut back, it'll recover quickly.

     But the biggest strength of Nandina is also one of its biggest drawbacks: it is very hard to kill.  You can have too much of a good thing.  I have basically a solid wall of Nandina six feet tall and 90 feet long that was planted by previous owners of my house.  

     It's partly my fault.  They were more spaced out and not this big when we moved in, but they spread slowly and steadily, and I have been all but helpless in the face of the behemoth until only a year or two ago.  I had tried pruning it, then hacking it, but it kept coming back.  I had tried digging it up, but could only make a dent on small isolated clumps.  "Making a dent" in fact, is what the Nandina did to my square-tipped spade when my husband tried to dig some up a few years ago.  The blade was bent badly enough it had to be replaced.

     Now I have developed a system.  I wish I had figured this out a long time ago, because the Heavenly bamboo hedge is going to take a lot of work to vanquish, but at least now I know how to attack it.

     Here are my weapons:

Step 1:  I cut off all the berries on the clump I'm going to work on.  This is going to be a violent battle and if I knock off a ton of berries, I'm just going to end up with clumps of seedlings.  I usually do find a small number of seedlings a few months after removing a clump anyway, from the years-worth of berries that have already dropped, but it makes me feel better to think I'm not sowing the seeds of my enemy.  I don't put these in the compost bin either; I throw them in the trash.  I don't know if this is overly cautious or not.

Step 2: I cut off the tops with long-handled loppers down to about a foot tall.  This is enough to remove most of the leaves and small branches, so I can see what I'm doing without getting leaves in my face, and enough is sticking out of the accumulated leaf mulch so I can see where the stumps are and not poke myself in the foot with them.  I pile the stems up either behind my compost pile or behind my shed.  The do a pretty good job of suppressing weeds in these spots while they break down.  The leaves fall off and mulch the ground after a while, and I sometimes retrieve a few stems later to use as plant stakes.  

Step 3: Now for the real heavy-duty work.  I rake up the mulch and dig up the Nandina by the roots a little bit at a time.  This is a bit of work, but not nearly as hard as trying to dig up a whole clump.  I have no desire to replant this stuff so I can go after bite-size pieces.  First I cut around a small section on the edge of a clump.  Generally, it's easy on the outside: I just use the spade to loosen the soil around the edge.  On the inside of the section, it takes a good tool to cut.  I don't do it with the spade, because I don't have that kind of back strength.  Instead I use either a mattock (if there's room to swing it) or the drop bar shown on the right edge of the group of tools.  The blade on this tool is relatively small and easy to get into a tight spot, but instead of using your foot and your body weight to cut, you are mainly using the weight of the tool.  It sometimes takes three or four blows to cut through a typical Nandina root, but it's not too hard on my back.  On the first pass, I don't worry about cutting every root, since I can't see what I'm doing anyway.  But I'm trying to loosen the clump enough to lift it with the spade (without damaging the spade or my back).  It turns out that Nandina roots are not very deep at all, just a few inches, so once I have things loosened up, I can slide the spade underneath and start lifting.  This makes it much easier to see where to make the next cuts.  Now it's a straightforward matter to cut the rest of the roots to remove the first segment, and start targeting the next segment.  Working around the edges of the clump, each segment is easier to get out as the roots are all being lifted and loosened.  

     Here are the roots of a patch I was able to remove in about 30 minutes of work.  

     The area I pulled them out of is covered in pine needles in the next photo.  Obviously I still have a lot of work to do, but I'm looking forward to planting something of my own choosing in this nice rich patch of soil.

Macro Monday: Moss

Take a glimpse into this tiny strange world on top of a brickbat.  Also check out what other tiny worlds people are photographing for Macro Monday, hosted by Lisa's Chaos.

In an out-of-the way spot on the north side of my house is a shady, damp place where I put plants I bought or divided while they wait to be planted in the ground.  There's also a handful of brickbats that I used to mark a spot where I occasionally stick cuttings so I don't lose track of them.  (Brickbats are just broken bricks.  If I had enough I might make a crazy-quilt brickbat path like some of the ones in the gardens in Colonial Williamsburg.) I guess it's very damp and shady indeed, because I found a happy healthy colony of mosses.

I know very little about moss and about all I do know I learned about five minutes ago in Brian Capon's Botany for Gardeners.  The little brown stalks are part of the moss's reproductive cycle.  Actually, it's weirder than that, because they are totally separate plants.  When you first notice moss in your garden, it may be just a soft green mat with no little brown stalks.  The green moss is a collection of both male and female plants.  These plants are unusual because they are haploid, meaning they have only one copy of chromosomes in the cells.  You may recall from high school biology that human body cells have pairs of chromosomes and so are diploid, but that human sperm and egg cells have only a single copy of each chromosome.  Those are haploid cells.  Mosses are a bit different.  The green part of the moss consists of plants that are entirely haploid.  These are the gametophytes, whose job is to produce gametes: sperm and eggs.  The sperm sit in "splash cups" on the males and are splashed onto neighboring females by raindrops.  Moss sperm cells actually "swim" to the eggs through water.  It's only when the sperm and egg get together that a diploid cell (the zygote) is formed.  This is the beginning of a new stage of the life cycle of the moss.  The zygote splits by cell division to form another plant, called the sporophyte.  The job of the sporophyte is to form spores.  In fact, it doesn't even photosynthesize so it draws food from the female gametophyte it's attached to, but it is a separate plant.  These sporophytes are the small brown stalks sticking up out of the green moss.  The spores form in the structure at the top and then disperse to start new colonies.   

Hellebores under the covers

I posted a photo of my garden's first Hellebore flower of the season a few weeks ago.  Now the plant is covered in blooms.  I like this plant more and more every year.  Now, I am finding out the flowers are really pretty interesting from an intellectual standpoint, too.

Ken Druse in his book Planthropology writes this about the hellebore:  "The female stigma of a hellebore flower is ready to accept pollen from another flower a week or more before its own male anthers have produced their fertile grains.  Even before the flower opens, bees push their way into the swollen buds in search of pollen, which they do not find, but deposit some from the last ripe anthers they visited."  This is described as a strategy to avoid self-pollination, to keep mixing up the gene pool as much as possible.  

The photo above shows several hellebore flower buds.  The top bud is tightly furled, and I doubt a bee would be able to force its way inside.  The middle bud is a bit looser.  The petals are still closed but not so tightly and there is empty space inside.  I guess this is the stage that Druse is talking about.  The lower flower was also just a bud, not an open flower, at a similar stage to the middle one, when I forced open the petals and peeled one back so I could take a look inside.  You can see the anthers clustered close together, with the five pistils sticking out the center.  If you look back at my earlier post, you'll see the anthers are much more spread out.  It seems to make sense that when they are producing pollen they would be more spread out.  I don't see anything noticeably different about the female parts. 

Avoiding self-fertilization is a good strategy, but hellebores are prolific self-seeders, and although this is  the only plant I have that has produced flowers, I found many seedlings of it this past summer.  Perhaps my neighbors have some hellebores close by, but I think it's much more likely that the plant does self-pollinate when necessary and this strategy is just a way to give pollen from another plant (or another flower on the same plant?) better chances.  The last photo shows the faded first flower of the season, the same as the one pictured on February 15.  Now all its anthers have fallen off, and the ovary at the base of the stigma appears to be beginning to swell.  Maybe I'll get more new plants again this summer!

Macro Monday: Field Pansy

This photo is my contribution to Macro Monday, hosted each week by Lisa at Lisa's Chaos. 

Earlier than any other violet in my yard, I see this absolutely teeny violet in bloom.  I first noticed it in a neighbor's lawn and was actually disappointed I couldn't find it in my own.  It's not like I don't have plenty of other lawn weeds, but I wanted a closer look and didn't want to be too conspicuous inspecting something on my neighbor's property on hands and knees (or, worse, pulling something out of their lawn.  That seems downright antisocial, even though I'm pretty sure they would consider it a weed and not a wildflower).  What I really wanted was a close look at the leaves so that I could identify the species, but it's not easy to differentiate the leaves of a single tiny plant growing in the middle of a weedy lawn.  But today I found it growing in my herb garden.  Previously, I bragged about how well weeded my herb garden is.... oh well.  I was happy to see it.  It was well-enough separated from the nearby parsley and chamomile that I could get a good enough view to look it up in my trusty Peterson's Wildflower Field Guide.  It looks like Viola kitaibelliana, the Field Pansy.  The next picture shows the shape of the leaves.  Note the long, narrow stipules at the base of the upper leafstalks.

Peterson's lists it as "Alien."  It seems to me that many of our lawn weeds are introduced species, rather than native wildflowers.  Years ago, when I first got this field guide and didn't know much, I would pull it out to try to identify every flower I could find growing in the wild.  If I was close to home (i.e. the suburbs), these were generally lawn weeds.  When you think about it, lawn is not really a native habitat here, in the region once blanketed by the Eastern Deciduous Forest.  Forest openings would have briefly been occupied by meadows, but not mowed lawns.  Maybe it's more surprising that some native plants (like the common blue violet) can adapt to living in a lawn.  Many or most of the other common lawn weeds and many meadow wildflowers are probably plants that have long been adapted to grazing by livestock and came over with the earliest Europeans.    

I snapped the last picture to show just how incredibly tiny the bloom is.  That's my index finger, grotesquely larger than life size.  The pansy is out of focus and overexposed because I'm not very good at using my camera one-handed, and it wasn't worth it to set up the tripod for a picture that was going to have my finger in it!  The tininess of the bloom made photographing it a challenge.  First, to get the camera close enough to get a nearly full-frame macro shot, I was close enough to shade the bloom with the camera!  So I had to take the photo from slightly off-center rather than line up with the pansy in the same plane as the camera sensor (as often recommended for macros because of the narrow depth-of-field).  That's OK, I like the slightly oblique view better.  I needed a tripod (I usually do for macros) but couldn't get it close enough. I was stymied for a moment, but just then my husband came out to see what I was up to.  I said "I need a bean bag!" And he said, "what about a bag of rice?"   Part of why I married him is that he's so smart!  Another big part is that he's really nice -- he actually went back inside to get it for me!).   Now the camera was all set up and ready to go, but sunlight on the foliage was making a distracting background.  The bean bag also gave me a free hand to shade the background.  Initially I meant to only shade the hotspot, but it was hard to aim my shadow.  I liked the look of the nearly black background anyway, so I went ahead and triggered the shot.

Why are there Lilliputians in my garden?

The daffodils are starting to open in my garden!  Mostly right now are Ice Follies and an all-yellow trumpet that is probably Carlton or something similar, both of which typically start blooming about now.  But today I found this little squirt, also...

This daffodil was part of a mix of unnamed fragrant seedlings from Brent and Becky's bulbs.  I had to move them last summer to make way for construction of a patio.  I had marked these bulbs as "Early/Short" but they were neither this early nor this short last year!  Just in case it isn't clear just how vertically-challenged this daffodil is, here's another shot...

I have almost no clue why they are like this, this year.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I disturbed them before the foliage had fully ripened last year?  But I have other daffodils, Ice Follies, that are also blooming short this year, without having been moved.  Somewhat taller than the unnamed Jonquilla type shown above, this one towers over Strawberry Shortcake at a good eight inches or so.

I have read that tulips can bloom on very short stems if they get insufficient cooling... and in fact it has been unusually warm this year.  But it's hard for me to believe that explanation for several reasons.  I've never heard of it happening with daffodils?  (Have you?)  Ice Follies are naturally very early blooming and are particularly prolific and prevalent around here in Southeastern Virginia where it is common to not have particularly cold winters and I've never seen them bloom short like this.  If it were going to happen, it should have happened last year to a clump of bulbs I planted in February.  I planted them  at the same time that most of the Ice Follies in my garden were blooming!  They bloomed with the late daffodils at the normal height; they are in bloom again right now at the typical Ice Follies time and height.

Book Review: Armitage's Native Plants

Today I am joining HolleyGarden at Roses and Other Gardening Joys for Garden Book Reviews.

Armitage's Native Plants for North American Gardens is a book of encyclopedia-style listings of perennials native to North America.  In general this style of book strikes me as rather dry but I find it useful to have a few reference books in the garden "library".  I tend to start wanting a plant when I see a great photo or read someone's personal  account of it.  Usually, it's when I read "I love this plant for its fragrance" or "it's covered with butterflies" or "brings back memories of grandmother's garden," rather than "this plant lived through deer browsing and survived poor drainage over the winter."  So most of the plants I fall in love with in theory are not necessarily well-suited to whatever conditions I have to give them.  It's useful to have a comprehensive listing where I can specifics.  Armitage's Native Plants is particularly useful to me in this way because Allan Armitage also talks about his experiences gardening in different climates and frequently describes why a certain plant did better in one location than another.

This book also particularly appeals to me because I am already committed to a love of native plants.  I have both natives and non-natives in my garden, but I am always eager to add more native plants.  In fact, I think I am more into native plants that the author of the book, who includes 6 pages of thought provoking musings on native plants in the preface.  Here he explains that the book is "not written for native plant enthusiasts" but for "my daughters ... who would love to try some native plants but don't know where to start."  I believe this distinction is aimed mainly at explaining Armitage's choice of which plants to cover.  He mostly limits his selections to plants that are relatively easy to obtain (although a few rarer ones are thrown in that he particularly likes), and also covers popular cultivars and hybrids between native species in the species accounts.  I definitely understand why some native plant enthusiasts may be put off by the inclusion of cultivars and hybrids, but from the standpoint of availability I agree that it's practical to include them, and I have found this information very useful when trying to determine the species of incompletely-labeled plants I see in catalogs or the nursery.

The entries in this book have all the standard information you would expect to have in such a book, including the basics like sun and soil requirements and USDA hardiness zones.  Additionally, every entry also includes information about the native habitat, which I find even more useful for making an educated guess whether a particular plant will do well in my garden.  The organization of the book is alphabetical by genus, with detailed entries about the most available species in the genus and then a briefer listing of additional less-available species and hybrids.  Each species account is chock full of information excluding extensive lists of cultivars or selections (as well as the straight species) with notes on their garden performance.  Entries also include usage or design tips.  For example Vernonia noveboracensis (New York Ironweed) is described as "a knockout" in bloom but its seven-foot height makes it "more at home in an informal setting" or as "an architechtural feature."  An eye-opening description (for me) accompanies his description of Aster divaricarus.  I had tried to grow this plant already and had already noted that its small blooms would work better in combination with another plant than as a stand-alone garden feature.  However, the extreme floppiness of the stems had put me off and left me beginning to understand why not everyone likes native plants as well as I do.  However, I experienced a minor epiphany when I read Armitage's account and found that he values it specifically for its prostrate habit.  He explains, "since they are prostrate, plants may be placed in the shade of larger plants, and they will grow up and out from the plant."  Now I envision planting it beneath a shrub where it will serve as a "shoes and socks" plant in the fall the way small bulbs do in the spring.

Finally, another great feature of each entry is propagation tips, often by more than one method.  After reading this book, I'm going to try propagating my amsonia by cuttings this year.  It sounds very easy and and I think I'm more likely to actually do this than propagate it by seed, but instructions for both are included.  Instructions for propagation by division are also included, and probably would be easiest of all, except that I don't think my plant is mature enough, which is why I think it's useful to have all the options listed.

One of the best things about this book is Armitage's sense of humor.  I once was lucky enough to see Allan Armitage in person, presenting a talk and slideshow at a local garden event.  His humor and love of plants made this a memorable talk.  In Armitage's Native Plants, his sense of humor pokes out over and over again, even in such a nuts-and-bolts kind of book.  Here is the listing for propagation of Gentiana andrewsii (Bottle gentian) by division:"If a fine colony is established, leave it alone."  And a usage tip (sort of) about yuccas,  "Without a doubt, if they make a Mexican food joint look better, think what they will do for your garden."  In fact, Armitage is unabashedly opinionated and I like that even though I don't always agree with him.  For example, Armitage makes it clear that he doesn't really like milkweeds (Asclepias) but does a good job covering them anyway.  

The only real disagreement I have with this book is with some of the points in the prologue.  Armitage rants "The way some people equate natives with godliness is scary....  If you are going to lecture me about natives behaving themselves, do so while you help me get rid of milkweed and northern sea oats.  They must have missed that lesson."  While I agree with Armitage that natives can be annoyingly aggressive or even destructive to a garden bed (I would add "obedient plant" to the examples he gives), I think it's hugely important to make a distinction between plants being aggressive in a garden setting and plants that are invasive.  Invasive plants can spread into wild areas and crowd out native vegetation, doing irreparable harm to local ecosystems.  If you plant a locally native plant and it spreads out of control in your garden like a weed, it still is not harming local ecosystems, because it is already there along with its natural checks and balances.  However, this is a complex topic probably for another post, and a disagreement with a comment in the prologue is really is neither here nor there in terms of the enjoyment and usefulness I get out of this book.  Like I said, though, the musings he shares in the prologue are all thought provoking.  Anyone who has an opinion on native plants, one way or the other, would find it interesting to read these pages.  The frustrating thing is that it's like half a conversation, and it's hard to talk back!

Still, it's Armitage's personality that makes this a great book.  Unlike most encyclopedia of garden plants, this book is fun to actually read (maybe not cover-to-cover, but in chunks at least).  Like I said at the beginning, personal descriptions of plants tend to draw me in, and this book has those too.  Here's how Armitage describes Pycnanthemum incanum (hoary mountain mint).  "This was the first species [of Pynanthemum] I encountered, and immediately I had to have it for my garden... I never walked by it without giving a leaf or two a gentle rub between thumb and forefinger.  Nor did any visitors to the garden escape un-minted."  After reading this enthusiastic description, I had to have it too, especially when, armed with the information I had read in this book, I was able to recognize it at a local plant sale shortly thereafter.  This is one of those plants (probably like many in this book) that don't look like much in a pot at a plant sale, but it was even better than I hoped in my garden.  Here are three views of it.  The closeup shows that the flowers are not really showy, but it's actually a powdery white texture on the leaves surrounding the blossom that really make this plant awesome.  You can see in the long view how it glows against the dark background of the shady part of my yard.  In the mid-range view, you can see how it combines with the bright magenta of bee balm.

On the other hand, Armitage's exhortation "As soon as you read this, put down the book and purchase this plant [Vernonia lettermannii]" didn't do it for me, although it made me laugh.  Maybe another year....

One final note: I used the word encyclopedia in my initial description, but I was referring to the individual entries for each plant that are systematically packed with information.  However, the book is not comprehensive in scope and that may bother some readers.   It is, obviously, limited to North American natives and, as mentioned above, leaves out most species that are difficult to obtain.  It seems to me that the book may also have an Eastern bias, but I'm not sure about this.  I myself have an eastern bias and am really only interested in plants that I have a chance of growing well in Southeastern Virginia.  I have very little familiarity with native plants from the southwest, the Rockies, or very cold regions of the north.  As mentioned above, Armitage's speaks of his experiences in Montreal and Georgia, and I have a suspicion that readers in the West may not be as happy with the book as I am.  On the other hand, there are certainly entries for western and southwestern natives here, like Agastaches, Camassias and Aquilegias, so I may be wrong.  Western readers should probably try to get a look at the book before buying it.  Personally, I wish Armitage would write a comparable guide to North American native shrubs.  Does anyone know a really good book about native shrubs?

Bloom Day February 2012

Happy Bloom Day!

     I'm joining Carol at May Dreams Garden for Garden Blogger's Bloom Day, when garden bloggers share what's blooming in their gardens on the 15th of each month.  I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's flowers.  I took these photos a few days ahead of time since the 15th falls on a weekday and there's not enough daylight in February for me to have time to take photos on a weekday.  Good thing too, because the next day was a dusting of icy snow that weighed down these blossoms and made them a bit less photogenic.  

     The best new bloom for February is a Hellebore:

Helleborus niger

     This is the only open bloom but there are also lots of buds getting close to opening.  The buds are well hidden inside a lush mass of evergreen leaves.  This bloom was easier to photograph than I thought it would be though.  I think the flower stem continues to lengthen between the bud and bloom stage, probably to protect the buds from those icy dustings of snow.

     The first daffodil opened on February 1st.  It's companions thought it was a bit too forward, and haven't quite ventured out yet, but soon will.

Narcissus, probably "Carlton"

     Around the same time, the first grape hyacinth bloomed and is still open.  This seems very early to me and I don't expect to see any others for quite a while. 

Muscari armeniacum

     Once again, I found a surprise when I went out to look for blooms for Bloom Day.  I was not expecting a summer snowflake (Leucojum aestivum).  The common name of this bulb is not particularly apt, to be sure, but this is the earliest bloom I've seen on it, and it's not in a very warm spot.  I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.  I like them anytime, and am looking forward to the big groups of them I hope to have later in spring.

Leucojum aestivum

     All of what was blooming in January is still blooming now at about the same pace except that the paperwhites are over.  There are still flowers on the mahonia and rosemary and a few early blooms on the Carolina Jasmine.  There are probably more periwinkle (Vinca major) blooms than last month.  Among them I found another surprise.  This bloom has four petals instead of the usual five.  Once I noticed four-petaled periwinkle blooming all over the grounds of Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello.  Yet, I've never seen a four-petaled one in my garden before now.  It was the combination of the purple periwinkle and the burgundy leaves of the nandina that caught my eye, although I don't usually go for burgundy and purple together.  Both Vinca major and Nandina domestica drive me nuts in my garden, all-too-prolific remnants of a previous owner's penchant for planting invasive thugs, still causing never ending heartache and backache at least 10 years after they were planted ... but I still enjoy the color they have to offer.

Vinca major (bloom) and Nandina domestica (foliage)

     In another spot, I have a problematic color combination.  Last year I noticed that the hot pink flowers of the flowering quince clashed horribly with the bright red berries of the nandina.  I should have moved the quince (or cut down the nandina -- I have plenty!) but didn't.  But how confusing... when the quince first started putting out a few flowers this December, there was no problem: they were a perfect match to the nandina! What's causing the flowers to change colors?

Chaenomeles japonica (bloom) and Nandina domestica (berries), Dec. 2011

    I previously had noticed that when I cut stems and forced the blooms indoors, they were a much paler pink, but I was still surprised to see the color change from year to year on the shrub itself.  It must be due to the amount of light it gets, right?  Maybe, but now I have noticed that the current February blooms (fresh blooms, not faded December blooms) are hot pink again. 

Chaenomeles japonica, February 2012

And here is a shot from 2007 when they were an even lighter pink.

Chaenomeles japonica, January 2007

Has anyone else noticed this?  Any other theories about what affects the flower color?