Feeding the birds

With the trees bare, I have more opportunities to see the birds that are flitting around my leaf-covered backyard. On one memorable afternoon, I saw a flock of dark-eyed juncos foraging in the leaves on the ground while two blue jays flew back and forth from the birdbath to the big oak near the garage. 

I usually see juncos in flocks

A chickadee hopped along the oak trunk, jumping between the protective horizontal shoots of a climbing hydrangea. Meanwhile a cardinal couple appeared and disappeared among the dense evergreen needles of a large nearby yew.

This husky hydrangea vine provides cover for birds even after its leaves drop

     A week later at twilight, my attention was drawn to a loud chirping from the newel post of the front steps railing. I was able to identify the small bird that perched there, vocalizing officiously, as a house wren, Troglodytes aedon. 

House wren - photo JanetandPhil

This is not a rare species, but it’s not one I’ve seen in my yard before. I was proud to read on the Audubon Bird Guide app that this bird feeds on insects and likes to forage on the ground where there’s dense low growth—like here! 

     The house wren reportedly has a distinctive bubbling song. What I heard instead was its “excited chit call.” Listening to a recording on the app confirmed my bird identification. House wrens spend the breeding season all over North America, from southern Canada to the Mexican border. My wren may have been on the way to winter grounds in the southern US or Central America, migrating by night. How a five-inch bird weighing a few ounces can accomplish this long journey remains a wonder to me (For more on birds’ amazing powers, don’t miss The Genius of Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman).

     All these bird sightings seem to vindicate this year’s plan of piling up fall leaves on my garden beds. The reason for doing this instead of sending them out as yard waste or shredding them for mulch was to provide shelter for insects through the winter. When I see birds busily foraging in the yard, I can believe that leaf litter is doing its job.

Insects weather the winter among the fallen leaves--unless predators find them

     It turns out that those chickadees I see on the oak trunk are champions at coping with the cold. They can’t put on a lot of extra fat or a down layer like larger birds, because that would mess with their aerodynamics. Many small birds adapt by fluffing up their feathers, huddling together, and shivering in a special way by activating opposing muscle groups. Chickadees go further, dropping their nighttime body temperature by as much as 22° Fahrenheit in what’s called regulated hypothermia.

Chickadees are ready for the cold - photo USFWSmidwest

     How can we not want to help these birds with some winter calories to keep them warm? I’ve stopped filling my bird feeders during the warmer months, but now they’re back in action, and birds are using them. It’s encouraging to see them also hunting insects in those piles of fall leaves. This is the balance I’m aiming to achieve.

 

Coming soon

I'm off to visit the kids. See you in the New Year!

Insect-friendly in 2019

Judging by last year, seed catalogs will start arriving this month. I’m beginning to think about how to keep neonicotinoid insecticides out of next year’s garden.

Seed catalogs should be arriving soon

    Evidence is piling up that “neonics,” widely used in agriculture, are ubiquitous in the environment and the food supply. This class of chemicals was developed in the 1980s to replace earlier pesticides that were more toxic to humans. In the years since, they’ve played a part in a massive insect die-off. Neonics persist in plant tissues and kill or disable non-target insects, traveling by wind and water to affect untreated wild and cultivated areas.

Neonics kill and disable bees

    The problem goes beyond pollination. Insects also play a crucial role at the base of the food web and do essential work recycling waste through decomposition. Without insects, Earth wouldn’t support much human life (My thanks to reader Patricia McGinnis, who forwarded a revealing New York Times Magazine piece on this subject).

    In the midst of this gloom, I got some good news recently when I phoned a local garden center, Allandale Farm, to ask about their practices. I knew that the farm uses only organic controls on their site. The grower I spoke with reassured me that they also don’t buy any plants that have been treated with neonics. They’ve been able to find smaller nurseries that don't use these pesticides, she said. I was delighted to hear it. 

 

May plant shopping is a fun tradition

My lingering doubts about buying perennials at the farm were dispelled. Because garden centers source some of their stock from other growers, I’d feared that the farm might be selling neonic-treated plants from elsewhere. Now that I know their plants are neonic-free, I can enjoy a shopping spree in May. It’s great to hear that there are small wholesalers out there producing neonic-free plants. I hope they prosper!

    I feel good about shopping at local garden centers like Allandale Farm. At the other end of the scale of plant retailing, Home Depot promised in 2015 that they would phase out neonic-treated plants by the end of 2018. In the interim, they required their suppliers to attach a warning label to plants exposed to the chemicals. This is all progress, but I don’t see any statement on Home Depot’s web site announcing that the neonic phase-out is complete. Let’s hope that will be forthcoming next spring.

    Meanwhile, I’ve developed a short list of seed catalogs that offer organic seed. Conventional growers use treated seed to introduce neonics into a plant’s life cycle; organic growers don’t. Unfortunately it’s much easier to find pesticide-free seed for starting vegetables than for flowers.

Organic basil seeds weren't hard to find last year

     There’s still not enough consumer demand for organically grown ornamental plants. As one grower said to me, “You’re not going to eat them, so what’s the point?” The point is that we want to protect the soil and the creatures that live around us!

Here’s my list so far of catalogs that offer some organic alternatives: 

*Natural Gardening Company 
Johnny’s Selected Seeds
Renee’s Garden
*Adaptive Seeds
Botanical Interests
*Seeds of Change
Burpee
                        *organics only

Better red than dead

The ground is frozen, the leaves are down, and the landscape is a drab gray-brown, relieved occasionally by evergreens. 

Yellow coreopsis flowers turned to brown seedheads--just not the same

There’s one splash of color in the picture: red berries. The wildlife and I appreciate the trees and shrubs whose red fruits stand out at this time of year.

    Right outside the back door, a crab apple, Malus ‘Donald Wyman,’ still holds some small red fruits.

Crab apples at Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn producing lots of fruit in full sun

 After we moved our tree from a spot against the back of the house to its current sunnier location, it started to make fruit every other year. Now we see red crab apples among the green leaves in August. The sour fruits aren’t squirrels’ first choice, but as the cold weather sets in, the easy ones to reach disappear, leaving a few bright holdouts on the outer branches. Eventually we see squirrels shimmying along wildly swinging twigs to grab the last few crab apples.

    I’ve been waiting for years to see red berries on a low-growing winterberry, Ilex verticillata ‘Nana’ Red Sprite, not far from the crab apple. A few dozen of them finally appeared this year. This shrub is a deciduous holly that’s native to eastern North America. Because it’s dioecious, I planted a male shrub nearby, a cultivar named ‘Jim Dandy’. Pollen from male holly flowers is needed to fertilize flowers of the female plants to produce the red berries, technically called drupes. A bigger version of this species that’s grown into a small multi-stemmed tree farther back in the yard makes lots of fruit, but birds pick and eat it enthusiastically. By winter, the fruit is mostly gone.

Mockingbird eating winterberry fruit-photo qmnonic

    Birds have visual powers that we lack. Many can see in the violet range, beyond the blues we see, and others can actually perceive ultraviolet light. To see these short wavelengths, birds’ retinas have four types of cones, compared to our three. They also have cell organelles called cone oil droplets, derived from carotenoids in food, which allow retinal cones to shift the range of wavelengths they perceive, like using filters to shift the color values of a digital photo. 

Birds can see ultraviolet light reflecting off waxy berries-photo kdee64

For both birds and humans, red anthocyanin pigment in fruits jumps out in the visual landscape, tempting us to take a bite.

Red is eye-catching

The first freezing weather causes starches in berries to turn to sugar and ferment, so if you see blackbirds that can’t fly straight, they may be drunk on fruit alcohol.

    At this time of year, you’re probably also spotting the small elongated vertical fruits of Japanese barberry (Berberis thunbergii). 

Japanese barberry-photo Leslie Holzmann

This thorny bush was a landscape darling for a while, but now it’s considered invasive in Massachusetts, and its sale is banned. When I see barberry in parks and conservation areas I worry, because it’s a strong competitor that can edge out native plants. Those pretty red berries are snapped up by birds who spread the seeds around, planting more barberry shrubs. But I have to admit that the bright red berries lift my spirits when everything else is gray and brown.

Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana), another bearer of bright berries

A journey of a thousand miles

Sunday at Celebrate Newton, a local craft fair, several shoppers asked me why I use the phrase “sustainable-enough.” I found myself replying, “My idea is that you don’t have to go from conventional to perfect in one step.” Back when it came time to choose a title for my book, I was stumped. My editor, Lorraine Anderson, suggested The Sustainable-Enough Garden, and that was just right.

Sustainable-enough gift basket

    There’s a nod in the title to pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough mother,” a mother who recognizes and meets her baby’s needs but sometimes fails at perfect attunement, allowing the growing child to experience some manageable frustration. Similarly, I aim to be a good enough environmentally conscious gardener: trying my best, developing new insights over time, but not perfect.

On the path to 100 percent sustainability, but not there yet

    I think every step we take toward making a sustainable garden is a plus. If you can’t do everything, so be it. Do what you can now and add more as you go along. It’s foolish to think we know everything about natural processes. We’re bound to learn more as time goes on, and we’ll adjust our approach accordingly. For example, we now know that nonnative flowering plants do have a role to play in insect-friendly gardens. 

Nonnative butterfly bush draws lots of native insects

Thanks to active research, we’re getting more information in this area every year. Meanwhile, we can hold off on tearing out our beloved peonies and hydrangeas!

    It’s easy to get impatient with incremental changes. Compare the approaches of two effective environmental organizations. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), known for fiery defense of natural areas under attack, has been in high gear during the Trump administration, filing and winning lawsuits to block environmental deregulation. Their strategy seems to be to shoot for the stars.

NRDC fights to preserve wilderness

    In contrast, back in the 1980s, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) chose a more gradual, collaborative approach, showing industries how they can save money (and generate good PR) by eliminating waste and conserving energy. The idea of working with McDonald’s and Walmart must have been hard to stomach at first, but the results are undeniable. Over a decade, McDonald’s eliminated 300 million pounds of packaging and reduced restaurant waste by 30 percent with EDF’s help.

EDF persuaded McDonald's to skip the polystyrene clamshell packaging

Walmart has cut their greenhouse gas emissions and leveraged their clout to create a market for sustainably produced food and other products. I don’t want to support either corporation with my dollars, but I have to admit they’re positioned to be influencers in combating climate change.

Solar panels at Walmart in Caguas, Puerto Rico

    Recently EDF is working with Corn Belt farmers to reduce fertilizer runoff into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Using less fertilizer saves money for farmers, and it promotes healthy soil and clean water. A goal of the program is to shrink the dead zone caused by man-made chemicals in the Mississippi Delta to “a safe level.” Is that enough? Even if it’s not, it’s still worth taking steps now, until we can do better in the future.

Working together

Come visit my table at Celebrate Newton, a holiday craft fair, this Sunday December 2 from 10 to 4.

I realize that I’m prone to thinking of the plant world in terms of competition. I suppose this is an over-simplification of Darwinian thought: we picture the garden as a battle for resources where the fittest survive. Experience bears this out when we see aggressive plants-- nonnative invasives but also native plants and imports that happen to be in their best growing environment--crowding out plants that are less well-suited for a particular niche in time and space.

Sweet woodruff ruling the shade garden

    As I learn more about the science of soil and plant communities, though, I find that there’s a lot of cooperation in addition to the competition I tend to notice. The first hint came in junior high, when we were taught the concept of symbiosis through the example of lichens, which, we were told, are a cooperation between fungi and algae. As lichenologist Trevor Goward says, “Lichens are fungi that have discovered agriculture.” The algae provide the fungi with energy through their photosynthesis, and the fungi provide protective structure. It turns out there’s a third partner in this cooperative effort, recently discovered. It’s a kind of yeast.

Lichens are a cooperative effort-photo Alex Proimos

    But there’s more. In The Hidden Life of Trees, forester Peter Wohlleben describes trees as social beings that share nutrients and warn each other of impending danger through their roots. Teaming with Microbes, a fascinating and useful book by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis, describes the soil food web, the network of soil organisms that work together to provide plants’ roots with needed nutrients. Each soil organism has something to gain in the complicated transactions going on in the top few inches of soil.

Soil microbes-photo courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Lab

    Fungi called mycorrhizae grow in symbiosis with roots, providing water and nutrients in exchange for carbohydrates made by leaves. Free-living fungi, bacteria, nematodes, protozoa, small insects, and earthworms all seek food for themselves and, as a byproduct of their labor, provide food for others in the network. Each organism has evolved to play its part. It’s interesting that evolution has favored cooperation in this system, not just competitive success.

Fungi play an important role in decomposition

    Above ground there are similar processes at work. When we plant perennials, we tend to think they need plenty of space so they won’t have to compete for water, sunshine, and nutrients as they get established. 

Perennials spaced out for traditional planting

A newer, more natural way of planting recommends closer spacing of different kinds of perennials to form plant communities.

    Some perennials grow upright and tall, others make wide rosettes of leaves or hug the ground and weave their stems between taller growers. Some have taproots that grow straight down, many others create a mat of slender root fibers. Some take off fast in newly open ground, others grow more slowly but persist longer. 

Perennials with different growth habits can grow close together

By working around each other in space and time, the plants get what they need and also help each other by providing shade, edging out intruders, and holding moisture in the soil. In community there is strength.

Before the freeze

Come visit my table at Celebrate Newton, a holiday craft fair, on Sunday December 2 from 10 to 4.


Despite interruption by early snow, I’ve spent the past week hurrying to prepare the garden for winter. A list of chores always looms as the light for working outdoors shortens and the ground gets ready to freeze.

Snow already! Time to rush through the last garden tasks

    Number one on the list is gathering in as many fallen leaves as possible and spreading them around the garden. This fall I’ve reverted to shredding leaves to mulch the new perennial beds at the back of the house. I’ve been shredding less since learning that whole leaves shelter insects and other animals through the winter. 

Letting whole leaves lie for shelter

Last spring I found I had to peel back layers of whole leaves I’d piled on these new beds to uncover the emerging young perennials below. That would have been OK, but once those leaves were gone, there was no mulch left on the bare soil between plants. The thin layer of bark mulch I'd applied when I planted the new perennials had long since decomposed. Until the plants grow to full size, I think they'll need some shredded leaf mulch.

     Everywhere else in the yard, I’m piling up whole leaves. My neighbor Pat kindly donated her bags of raked leaves. I go out periodically and collect leaves from nearby sidewalks and gutters, piling them on a tarp to drag into the backyard. 

Precious cargo

At this point, the drifts of fluffy leaves look way too deep, but I know they’ll settle to a reasonable layer of a few inches as the winter comes on.

    I’d hoped to use potting mix from the large pots that hold my container plantings to layer on top of the grass where I’m planning to enlarge a bed. Cold weather came too soon, though. Starting that new planting area with layers of cardboard, wood chips and compost will have to wait until late winter, when some tree pruning should provide me with a big pile of wood chips. 
  
    Frost reminded me to move hoses and watering cans into the garage or basement. 

Time to put away the hoses

The last job of all will be to wash the large ceramic and plastic pots and move them indoors. Freezing and thawing outdoors through the winter shortens the lives of pots and hoses. I eventually store all the pots in the basement but never get around to washing them until the garden is completely dormant.

I'll wash ceramic pots and store them in the basement--eventually

    A few end-of-fall tasks prepare for indoor gardening. I sifted finished compost from one of my piles, transferred it to a bucket, and ferried it into a large plastic garbage bin in the basement. There it’s available to mix with coir—coconut fiber--for making homemade potting mix. I’ll use that to proselytize for moving beyond peat-based potting mix, giving out little sample bags when I visit garden clubs.

    Saturday I picked out amaryllis bulbs at the garden center. With compost and coir in the basement, I’m ready to pot those bulbs in peat-free potting mix. We’ll enjoy their giant flowers in the warm kitchen while winter rages outside.

Amaryllis flowers light up the dark months-photo pizzodisevo

New perennials the easy way

To share purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) with students in last month’s sustainable gardening course, I asked them to snip off the spiky brown heads of the coneflowers in the flower bed. Just drop those dried-up brown items on the ground, I confidently told them, and they’ll plant themselves.

    The reason I believed this would work was that the same method had succeeded for me. I’d purchased and planted a single potted coneflower. When I wanted to make more, I initially thought I’d have to divide the plant, cutting out a section of its stems and roots. Or I’d have to collect seeds, plant them indoors, and grow them to transplanting size under lights. 

Goldfinch feeding on coneflower seeds

    But there were so many of the “cones,” that I decided to try dropping some where I wanted new plants and see if something would grow. This worked surprisingly well, and now I have a line of coneflowers where I scattered those seeds. 

A patch of coneflowers has grown where I dropped seedheads in fall

The round seedheads are what’s left after the flowers are pollinated, seeds develop from each of the mini-flowers in the central globe, and the petals drop off. If pollinators are around to do their work, each cone can carry hundreds of seeds.

Each spike is a coneflower seed

    Some native flowers grow easily from scattered seeds. Black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta) do this every year in my insectary bed. This plant is a biennial with a lifespan of two years. It performs like a perennial, though, because the seeds that drop from the flowers grow into next year’s flowering plants. If you didn’t know, you’d think the parent plants lived on indefinitely. I write about these plants a lot because they’re among my most successful and lowest maintenance natives.

    Last year I attended a lecture on how to grow native perennials from seed. This is a way to create a genetically diverse plant collection, because seeds combine the genes of both parents. I learned that the process is much more complicated than what I’m used to with annuals and vegetables. Some perennial seeds need a period of sustained cold, which in nature would be provided by winter. Some need alternating warm and cold treatment. Some need help breaking through hard seed coats.

Trillium seeds require several cold and warm seasons before they'll germinate-photo Finetooth

    These perennials have evolved strategies to delay germination until the conditions are right. That’s how they maximize viable offspring and avoid being destroyed by animals or shouldered aside by other plants vying for the same sites and resources. But imitating the sequence of events that triggers germination in many native perennials would be tough, exacting work.

    The alternative is to let the process happen outdoors without intervening. Since I don’t need to produce large numbers of plants, I can let nature do the work. I’ve stopped reflexively dead-heading, removing flowers before they can set seed. I’m hoping that seeds of some of the new native perennials that flowered in my garden this year, including sweet goldenrod (Solidago odora), Stokes’ aster (Stokesia laevis), and blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium) will surround their parents with the beginnings of small colonies next spring.

Blue-eyed grass flowering in June

Making room for native plants

As we planted daffodil bulbs together, I overheard two fellow garden club members talking about how to refresh the flower choices at a public place we all care about. “Daylilies and hostas,” they agreed. This overheard conversation made me realize that my plant choices have changed significantly in recent years. I’ve become a native plant nut.

Native plants offer fall and winter habitat for wild creatures

    Yes, daylilies and hostas can be counted on to provide attractive flowers and foliage through the summer. They’re tough, and they don’t mind gardeners’ neglect. When I started my garden, I purposely avoided hostas because I thought they looked like cabbages.

Huge leaves are hostas' leading feature

What was the point of a perennial without showy flowers? In the following years, I came to appreciate the large corrugated leaves of clumps of mature hostas, and I planted a number of hostas in my garden. Some have grown into massive shrub-like eminences with leaves as big as those of the elephant ears (Colcasia spp.) featured in my container plantings. Shade gardening calls for desperate measures (and it’s not true that all hostas lack pretty flowers).

    To some gardeners, day lilies are a suburban cliché, but they’ve rescued a narrow sunny bed along our driveway from failure and confusion. I bought a grab bag of mixed colors sometime in the ‘90s, and now they’re pumping out dozens of flowers from July to September in pleasing shades from yellow to dusty pink. They’re not fazed by heaps of shoveled snow in winter nor proximity to baking asphalt in summer.

Daylilies bloom reliably if they get sun, and they come in lots of colors

    So why not daffodils, daylilies and hostas at the front entrance of a treasured building that’s on prominent view to the community? Because now I’d like us to take every opportunity to show what native plants can do. I wouldn’t throw all those beautiful nonnatives on the compost. Heaven forbid! But showcasing some natives can help convince every gardener to include a native or two.
 

New York City's High Line linear park shows how native plants can enhance a designed landscape

That’s the way we’ll restore habitat for native insects and birds. We don’t need everyone to become a native plant purist. I certainly haven’t. But together we can do a lot for native creatures in our ecosystem.

    Many of the classic plants that make up the backbone of American gardens turn out to be natives. I was pleased to learn that among the broad-leaved evergreens we inherited when we moved in, the beautiful mountain laurels (Kalmia latifolia) and the towering Catawba rhododendrons (Rhododendron catawbiense) turn out to be natives. Right now we’re enjoying the bright fall flowers of New England asters (Sympyhotrichum novae-angliae), also natives.

What would fall be without New England asters?

    By choosing the native species in popular plant families, you can have a landscape that serves native creatures and also looks “legible” to traditional gardeners. Instead of those daylilies, we could plant black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia spp.). Coral bells (Heuchera spp.) can provide striking leaves to fill the hosta niche. Going native doesn’t mean giving up bright blooms or handsome foliage.

Helping more by doing less

The Xerces Society, which works to protect invertebrates and their habitats, has created nine handsome posters to advocate letting fall leaves lie. They’re offering them in printable form on their website to spread the word that leaves on the ground are necessary for moths, butterflies, bumblebees, and many other garden contributors.

    The reason to let leaves lie on the ground through the winter is that so many species use that leaf layer for shelter. Most butterfly and moth species don’t migrate. They need to make it through the cold months in some stage of their life cycle, whether it be as an egg, a chrysalis, or an adult. Bumblebees don’t gather in hives, and they too welcome an insulating cover of leaves over the shallow holes in the soil where their queens spend the winter.

Fertilized bumblebee queens survive the winter in holes in the ground

    I’m working to welcome these insects and many others to my garden: leaf-eaters, pollinators, and the beneficial insects that, as predators, keep bug populations in balance. 

Dragonflies are top predators, useful for keeping leaf-eating insects in check

I’m counting on these native insects at the base of the food web to keep my plants healthy and my garden a welcoming place for birds and other animals. The three pillars of this approach are avoiding pesticides, choosing the right plants, and letting those fall leaves lie on the ground.

It might look messy, but letting leaves lie is more sustainable

    To help out native insects, I’ve completely discontinued pesticide spraying, even for nonnative pests without local predators. That’s to avoid killing off native insects with friendly fire. No insecticide is so targeted that it doesn’t cause unintended casualties.

In the woods, leaf litter is free of pesticides and stays undisturbed on the ground.

    I’m also choosing plants with the insects in mind. Last week students at a hands-on Newton Community Education course in the yard helped plant my latest insect-attracting shrub, a New Jersey tea (Ceanothus americanus), adding more native flowers to offer pollen and nectar in spring. 

New Jersey tea flowers offer premium pollen and nectar

This little shrub will grow into a 3-foot mound and attract butterflies and hummingbirds to its white or pale lavender flowers. 

     I’m looking forward to experiencing New Jersey tea’s spring fragrance. It’s drought tolerant once established, which fits with my efforts to water less. Right now it’s leafless, showing a few of the yellow twigs that will stand out in the winter landscape when it settles in. When next year’s leaves fall to the ground, they'll help insects through the winter.

    I could undo some of the benefits of planting insect-friendly perennials and shrubs by bagging up my tree leaves and setting them out at the curb for yard waste pick-up. 

Insects lose winter habitat when organic material goes out as yard waste-photo Bill Barber

The Xerces Society warns that sending away those fall leaves--or chopping them up with a lawnmower or leaf shredder for mulch—would be discarding or destroying insects and their eggs and larvae already sheltering among the leaves.

    Not shredding leaves for mulch will save a lot of time and energy. I can spend some of that time piling leaves around trees and shrubs that could use some extra insulation. And there’ll be time to cook up lots of schemes for moving plants around next spring. That’s the beauty of a garden. It’s never finished.