Smothering some lawn

On Friday Kevin Newman’s team did some long-overdue pruning in my yard. They cut out dead branches, pruned back our trees where they were hanging over the fence, and removed branches that had grown over our property from next door. They fed all the branches into the big chipping machine parked in the driveway. Before they left, they carefully dumped a portion of the chips in front of the garage.

A new trove of wood chips

    This puts me right where I want to be. I’ve got big plans. I’m going to add a big swath to one of the shrub and perennial beds by trying out sheet composting.

    The spot I have in mind is some lawn in front of the dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides). When we planted the tree in 1997, it was slender and just 10 feet tall. Now it’s rooftop height and wider every year, with feathery branches overshadowing the perennials I planted around its base. By commandeering some of the lawn in front of this bed, I can grow plants that need more sun than they can get under the tree’s branches. And I can forward my mission to subtract lawn.

Now covered with snow, this patch of lawn doesn't know what's about to hit

    My planting plan for the new part of the bed is still vague. I’m picturing low native plants. I’ve got time to study my ecoregion’s plant community to decide what these should be. The flower color scheme so far has been blue and deep pink. I’ll try to harmonize with the dusky pink blooms of a growing patch of purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) at the front of the existing bed.

What goes with purple coneflower?

    Sheet composting is the same process that happens in compost bins, but spread out over a wider area. 

Master Gardener Eve Werner, Butte County, CA, demonstrates sheet composting over lawn

The technique I’ll use is adapted from Toby Hemenway’s permaculture book Gaia’s Garden. Usually I skip recipes for “lasagna composting,” because I can make compost more easily by dumping plant waste on the compost piles as it comes. This time, though, I’m going to try the recipe to speed things up. If I just put down a layer of wood chips and fall leaves, they’d take years to decompose.

Wood chips on paths decompose very slowly

Here’s the recipe from the ground up:

1) A thin layer of blood meal for nitrogen (Blood meal powder is a byproduct of slaughterhouses. It appeals more to me than a high-nitrogen chemical fertilizer, which could leach nitrogen into the groundwater).
2) A layer of newspaper, minus glossy supplements, an eighth to half an inch thick, to smother grass
3) Composted manure for more nitrogen 
4) Twelve inches of wood chips mixed with fall leaves
5) A couple of inches of compost to inoculate the pile with soil organisms
6) Two inches of clean straw that’s free of weed seeds

    It’ll take a couple of years for soil organisms to weave through these layers and convert them into rich soil. I can plant seeds and seedlings this year in pockets of compost. 

Tomatoes planted into sheet compost-photo Natureln

Bigger plants will wait until next year. Meanwhile I can gloat over the lawn decomposing underneath.

Gardening or editing?

Starting Garden Revolution, by Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher, has me reflecting on what counts as a garden. Weaner is an influential designer of ecologically driven landscapes who enlisted Christopher, a garden writer and editor, to help tell his story. The book's subtitle is, “How our landscapes can be a source of environmental change."

    It’s unfair to react before finishing the book, but as I read the first few chapters, I found myself resisting not so much the text as the pictures of Weaner’s projects. He has attained so much success that he’s now working on a large scale, designing for properties of multiple acres, not small yards like mine. The photos show drifts of wildflower in what look like naturally occurring meadows and woodland edges.

Here's a link to photos of Weaner's projects. This is generally similar-photo Marathon

    Weaner often describes his role as editing. He was trained to design gardens the traditional way, installing plants for pleasing visual effects. He came to reject this approach in favor of studying what’s growing on a site and nudging it through judicious weeding and planting. For example, by removing invasives, he gives native wildflowers a chance to flourish and show sometimes unrecognized beauty. He insists on creating landscapes that can fend for themselves without fertilizer or irrigation, and he expects them to evolve over time into different but still beautiful vistas through plant succession.

By editing out invasive weeds or tree saplings, Weaner directs landscape succession-photo  Lasse Enevoldsen

    I can definitely get behind this statement: “When you begin to think of your garden as an ecosystem, you have moved beyond the traditional concept of a garden as a collection of plants selected solely on the basis of flower color and foliage texture. You have recognized that your garden’s vitality is based on the interactions of the plants with each other as well as the soil, topography, and local wildlife.” 

    My question is whether a meadow of wildflowers that sprout from the soil’s seed bank is a garden. In the book’s photos, these landscapes are definitely pretty, like pleasing natural landscapes. But they don’t have the design features I expect in a garden: placement of forms for aesthetic effect, contrasting textures, intentionally limited color schemes, or focal points.

To me, a beautiful natural landscape is different from a garden, although it may show human influence

    Weaner’s deep knowledge of the growing conditions and native plants of his sites’ ecoregions inspires him to enhance plant communities and emphasize their most pleasing qualities. But he’s confining his role to tweaking what’s likely to grow without human intervention. Maybe we should have a different name for this activity. Interestingly, he points out that Native Americans did something similar to manage North American lands to produce more of what they needed before European settlement.

Native Americans managed landscapes such as Yosemite's before Europeans arrived-photo NPS/Joyce

    I still want to create something stamped with my design taste. But I have to admit that I seem to be evolving toward less focus on individual beautiful plants and more interest in creating a healthy ecosystem in my yard, as those piles of last fall’s leaves on all the beds can testify. Perhaps I’m heading toward the kind of landscape management Weaner describes. Time will tell.

If leaves on the ground equal ecological savvy, I've got plenty

Welcoming pollinators

With the first snowdrops blooming in the front yard, it’s time to get serious about this year’s growing season. What features should I be looking for when choosing flowers and plants to provide food for pollinators from spring through fall?

 

Monarch on New England aster

     Some useful plant families to start with are the asters (Asteraceae) and mints (Lamiaceae). I’m already growing several plants in the aster family, including purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), goldenrods (Solidago spp.), black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta), and New England asters (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae). These all have daisy-shaped flowers that are actually composites. 

Black-eyed Susans are composites of multiple tiny flowers

The “petals” are really ray flowers. The dark centers are made up of many tiny disc flowers.  This design makes visiting particularly profitable for insects. You’ll notice bees poking their proboscises repeatedly into the tiny openings. They’re harvesting nectar from each little flower.

    Sunflowers are in the same family, but I’ve mostly struck out with them. That’s because I can’t get them past the seedling stage. My squirrels seem to have a yen for sunflower sprouts. I’ve tried surrounding the seedlings in cylinders of wire screening, but the squirrels find a way to get at them before they can grow woody stems. 

Trying to protect seedlings from squirrels

I’m going to give it another try this year. I have a pop-up fabric shelter for protecting seedlings that’s 3 feet tall. I’ll try burying the edges in soil and see if sunflowers grown inside can make it past squirrel food size.

    I’d also like to grow Mexican sunflowers (Tithonia rotundifolia). This is a big annual with zinnia-like orange flowers and a wide round shape like a shrub. Sunflowers, Mexican and otherwise, have another benefit beside composite flowers. They also offer a stable landing pad for butterflies. A monarch with a 3-inch wingspan needs something sturdy to land on.

A sunflower makes a sturdy landing spot-photo Don Graham

    This is not to say that daisies are the only pollinator-friendly flowers. In the mint family, I’d like to try blunt mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum) again. One succumbed in a spot with too much competition. Mountain mints are reputed not to become invasive, unlike many other mints. The problem with bee balm (Monarda spp.) and giant hyssop (Agastache spp.) in the same family is their tendency to spread aggressively. I moved Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’ from lean sandy soil near the fish pond to a richer bed, and now I have to pull out wheelbarrows full every year.

Hoverfly on Agastache 'Blue Fortune'-photo Benh LIEU SONG

    I’ll also draw pollinators with compound flowers such as those of alyssum (Lobularia maritima), sedum (Sedum spp.), and swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata). These all feature clusters of small flowers that attract lots of insects.

Alyssum has a sweet scent and draws lots of pollinators

    I’d like to grow foxgloves (Digitalis spp.) again. Their attractive spires have nectar guides, in the form of freckles, that attract bees and butterflies. These are flower markings that lead pollinators to the nectar, like airport runway lights, simplifying their search for food. I’m fond of the variety ‘Foxy’, which blooms the first year from seed. I might grow it again to save energy for bees. This is a hopeful time in the gardening year.

Foxglove freckles guide bees to nectar

Brainy insects

Scrolling through a web page about pollination syndromes—ways flowers are designed to get themselves pollinated--published by Vanderbilt University, I was intrigued to see some insects referred to as unintelligent. Magnolia flowers are so primitive and simple, the authors said, that they can be pollinated by “relatively unintelligent insects like beetles” crawling around, bumping into anthers and getting dusted with pollen. Does this mean that some insects are considered intelligent?

Beetles pollinating magnolia flower, dumb but effective-photo Beatriz Moisset

    Yes, it turns out that they are. It seems that the investigation of insect intelligence has been hindered by our tendency to look for human-like cognitive abilities, which insects may not need. As scientists shrug off this bias, they’ve found that social insects tend to be the smartest. It seems that finding food and shelter are less cognitively challenging than dealing with members of one’s social group. I can relate. That’s why beetles aren’t so smart. They’re solitary.

    Fleas and ticks are at the bottom of the intelligence scale. All they need to do is find their host for a blood meal. 

Deer tick: all brawn, no brains

They don’t need other information from their environment, and they don’t depend on social interactions. Somehow, the idea that ticks are dumb isn’t surprising.

    The smartest insects include bees, wasps, ants, termites, and cockroaches. Termites are prime exemplars of swarm intelligence, acting in concert to build and engineer large, complex, constantly evolving structures. As such, they’re attracting attention from designers of robots. 

Termite hill-photo Adityamadhav83

Paper wasps have been shown to recognize each other’s faces, and researchers hypothesize this is necessary for surviving in the wasps’ complex social hierarchy! Ants don’t wander around randomly, as was once thought. They have advanced navigational abilities and can leave a chemical trail for their fellows. 

Ants tending citrus mealybugs-photo Katja Schulz

Cockroaches can learn how to respond to a novel situation and then judge whether the same response is likely to work when a new situation arises. 

    Bees seem to be the smartest of all. They start life ignorant of how to find food. A young bee figures out how to “operate” each type of flower to get the nectar she’s looking for. She uses observation, learned knowledge, and memory to solve problems. Bees can count up to four. They can even recognize and distinguish between human faces.

Honey bee on Camassia flower-photo victorberthelsdorf

    Then there’s the waggle dance, evidence of bees’ advanced communication ability. A bee recalls where she found food and tells her mates the location with a dance on a vertical surface inside the hive. Moving straight up means traveling in the direction of the sun, straight down means away from the sun, and angles away from the vertical line show the direction to fly to find the nectar source. If it’s a really great source, she’ll dance many times—the equivalent of shouting. The waggle dance means bees can share information without leading their sisters to the food source or otherwise attracting attention from competitors.

Bee waggle dance-figure designed by J. Tautz and M. Kleinhenz, Beegroup Würzburg

    Knowing that insects can think motivates me to give them their space in the garden. Maybe they’re observing me to assess my intelligence.