Just because they're pretty

To grow less lawn, I’m thinking of adding a bed of cutting flowers outside the fenced-in vegetable garden. This spot gets sun much of the day. By reducing the area of lawn between the fence and the bed surrounding an expanding dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) to a 10-foot-wide walkway, I can carve out a 3-foot-deep stretch for cutting flowers.

There's room for a bed of cutting flowers in front of this fence

    This will be backsliding, because the flowers I’m thinking of including aren’t Northeast natives. Zinnias, dahlias, and globe amaranth (Gomphrena globosa) are all native to Central America. I’d also include celosias, from tropical areas in Africa and South America.

Zinnias make reliable cut flowers for me

    For cutting, I’m looking for flowers that last for several days after they’re picked. A couple of summers ago I tried subscribing for a flower share through our community supported agriculture. I found that the flowers didn’t last as long as blooms I picked at home, possibly because of stressful conditions during their trip from the field to the pick-up location.

Globe amaranth should work as a cutting flower

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s lots of lore online from florists about how to extend vase life. Boiling it down, it seems that cut flowers need water to keep their tissues turgid, sugar to allow continued metabolism, and a germicide such as bleach to slow decomposition. Acidifying the water reportedly also helps; one source suggests adding citric acid-based soda such as 7-Up or Sprite for this purpose. 

    The farm and garden at University of California at Santa Cruz offers advice on the harvesting process, from cutting your flowers in the early morning when their tissues are full of water, to recognizing the right degree of flower opening, to when to plunge stems in warm versus cold water. They recommend flowers with thick stems and correspondingly thick xylem cells (water conductors) for longest life, fortunately including the dahlias I plan to enjoy.

Dahlias come in several elegant forms-photo Bernard Spragg

    To prepare the soil for this new use, I could start another sheet composting project. Over the summer, decomposition seems to have proceeded in the one I built last March from layers of wood chips and leaves sprinkled with compost. The level of the pile has sunk, and I’m expecting to be able to plant into it in spring 2021. I’d rather not wait two years to plant my cutting flowers, though.

    Maybe I’ll just peel away the lawn grass and layer on some compost and composted cow manure. The resulting soil wouldn’t be as excellent as what I expect from the sheet compost approach, but it’d probably be good enough for the first year. Then next fall I could decide whether more thorough soil improvement is needed. I’ll surround the flower bed with wire fencing to keep my puppy from digging there.

    Meanwhile, I’ve got lots of seeds ready to start. I sowed tiny celosia and globe amaranth seeds in six-packs this week to give them time to grow strong before moving to the new bed around May 15. I’ll start bigger seeds in March and April, shop for dahlia tubers, and hope for beautiful August bouquets.

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds

In 340 B.C., Aristotle noticed that honey bees tend to choose just one flower species during a foraging flight. This behavior, termed flower constancy, continues to puzzle scientists today. Why, when they could select other nearby flowers that are more “rewarding”—offer more nectar—do honey bees, bumble bees, and some butterflies visit only one kind of flower per trip?

Honey bee on camas flower-photo Victor Berthelsdorf

    Flower constancy works out well for flowering plants. Pollen sticks to the bodies of bees and other pollinators as they collect nectar. If the plant is lucky, some of that pollen will be deposited on a flower from the same species. A bee that visits only one flower species per trip is more likely to deposit the right pollen on the next flower, enabling it produce seeds. A fickle insect flitting between different kinds of flowers may just clog the (female) stigma with irrelevant (male) pollen from other species. That explains how flower constancy helps plants. It doesn’t explain what’s in it for the insects.

Does visiting just one flower type help the bee?

    Scientists have come at this from several directions. One theory is that bees don’t have enough short-term memory to retain a schema of more than one flower to visit at a time. Another is that it’s too risky to invest time and cognitive energy into learning to find the nectar in another kind of flower; better to stick with a flower type that the bee knows will provide a good nectar supply. A third hypothesis is that social honey bees avoid conflict with sister bees from their hive by sticking to one kind of flower and leaving the rest for others to visit. 

Honey bees in the hive with their queen-photo Levi Asay

There are problems with each of these theories and a lack of data to support any of them. Bees aren’t as rigid as some of these discussions imply. They’ve been shown to adjust their flower choices when there’s a really juicy high-nectar alternative.

    On Valentine’s Day, I’d like to believe that flower constancy is actually intentional faithfulness. My husband Steve brings me pollen (actually, a whole bouquet of beautiful flowers) every year at this time. He hasn’t gotten sidetracked yet by any high-nectar cuties.

Received for Valentines Day. Bees, eat your hearts out!

    What do we really know about the inner life of bees? Do they have aesthetic tastes in flowers? Do they have other things to think about while they’re sipping nectar and bringing home pollen for their queen’s offspring? In the bee world, females do the work of transporting floral offerings. The males are lounging around the Drones Club between fulfilling their reproductive role.

Drone bee-photo Epgui

    A worker bee only lives for three to six weeks, during which all her labor goes toward the collective good. She’s not going to mate or have children. Maybe she feels alienated at the hive and happiest when she’s out in the sunlight landing on particular flower petals. She could add variety to her trip with a mixture of blooms, but she doesn’t.

Worker bee making her own choices

    Let’s give her some credit for making a strong positive choice. Why just one kind of flower? Because that’s what she wants.

A curtain of vines

Thinking about ways to reduce our energy use for cooling next summer, I hit on the idea of shading some west-facing windows at the back of the house with foliage. I don’t want to block the three full-length windows that provide our main view of the garden. But a pair of windows near the southwest corner could use some summer shade. Vines could be just the thing.

These windows get a lot of afternoon sun in summer

    The Department of Energy explains that vines can lower the temperature of a house in three ways. In the process of evapotranspiration, plants actively transport water, and when it evaporates, it cools the surrounding air. Shade reduces solar gain, of course, and vines can blanket the side of the house, creating an insulating air space. Put together, these contributions can reduce temperature shifts by 50 percent.

Vines can keep a house cool-photo Michael Palmer

    I’m not proposing to cover the whole west side of the house in vines yet. My idea is to start with a large container of fast-growing vines to keep the sun off that pair of windows.

    When I put up supports, I’d like to leave space between the vines and the house to permit air flow. I’m picturing a wooden frame attached to the siding that would hold some lattice or wire fencing to support the vines. Maybe I can attach hinges at the bottom of the frame so I can swing it down when it comes time to paint the house again.

Lattice attached closely to the garage wall leaves little air space behind it

    I’ve learned a lesson from a large wooden planter I placed directly on the ground in a shady corner. Tree roots grew up into the potting mix, making it hard to remove and replace old growing medium in the spring. This time I’ll prevent that by standing the planter’s corners on bricks to leave an air space that the roots can’t jump.

    Next will come the fun part: choosing which vines to grow. I could go with classic fast-growing flowering climbers such morning glory (Ipomoea purpurea), moonflower (Ipomoea alba), or mandevilla (Mandevilla spp.). These all originate in Central America. I could choose edible options: scarlet runner beans, cucumbers or squash. 

Morning glories are lovely and grow fast

    But I'd prefer to use native vines. I’ve already got two trumpet honeysuckles (Lonicera sempervirens), a cross-vine (Bignonia capreolata), and a trumpet vine (Campsis radicans) close enough to the proposed site that I’d like to try something different.

Trumpet honeysuckle is going strong in a dry spot against the house

    Last summer I grew a blue passionflower (Passiflora caerulea) vine in a container on the deck, wrapping its long stems around a black metal obelisk stuck in the pot. That one’s from South America. There’s a native cousin called maypop (Passiflora incarnata) that looks pretty. It’s reportedly a woody vine in the Southeast that dies to the ground in colder areas, which would serve my purpose. Growing it in a planter would curb its tendency to aggressive root spread.

Maypop, a native passionflower-photo H. Zell

    Another native possibility is woodbine (Clematis virginiana), a vigorous grower with white flowers August to October that could accept cutting back in winter. A quick search uncovers warnings about its spreading by seed, though, so maybe not.
   

Snowdrop clones

Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) are blooming in my front yard, a hopeful harbinger of spring. From the flower’s point of view, what’s the point of blooming so early? I read that bumblebee queens, who survive for several years, may emerge early enough to pollinate these very early flowers, allowing them to set seed, as they would in their home range in Europe and Asia. 

Snowdrops have slowly formed clumps in the front yard

    But the expanding clumps of snowdrops in my garden are most likely clone colonies, groups of connected individuals whose genetic material is identical. Since they’re rarely able to produce seeds, they spread vegetatively as their bulbs reproduce underground and send up new plants.

Snowdrop bulbs can divide and make offsets-www.BioLib.de

    Snowdrops aren’t the only plants that increase this way, of course. The biggest clone colony in the world is a grove of quaking aspens (Populus tremuloides) in Utah called Pando, reputed to be the world’s largest living thing and one of the oldest. 

Pando in fall-the whole grove is one giant organism

Pando covers 106 acres, with about 40,000 genetically identical trunks growing from the shared root system, which is about 80,000 years old. When wildfires kill the trees above ground, the roots survive. Another venerable giant clone colony is the King Clone creosote bush (Larrea tridentata) in the Mojave Desert. 

     In my own yard I’ve got more modest colony formers such as pawpaw (Asimina triloba), sweetshrub (Calycanthus floridus), and highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum). 

Pawpaw sends out roots to form a clonal clump

    As we recall from high school biology, when two individuals get together to reproduce, their genes are mixed together in the process of meiosis. That gives each of their offspring a unique combination of genes, half from each parent. Colony formers spread asexually by mitosis--plain cell division--passing on the same genes to new individuals, which are clones of their parents. That doesn’t mean their genes never change, because mutations occur spontaneously over time. But the colony has mostly the same genes repeated over and over.

These snowdrops are genetically identical

    As much as I love seeing the clumps of snowdrops emerge from the leaf litter or the snow, I’d rather that most of my garden plants be more sexually active. When individual plants within a species differ genetically, a diversity of traits will give the species a better chance of coping with predators, disease, and climate change.

Potatoes blighted in the Irish Famine were clones without diverse defenses-USDA

    This is another reason to buy straight native plants rather than cultivars for my planned pollinator bed. Once a nursery spots a desirable flowering plant as the basis for a cultivar, they reproduce it asexually by cuttings, divisions, or tissue culture. They want new plants that are genetically identical to the desirable ancestor. Straight native species grown from seed, on the other hand, come from open (uncontrolled) pollination by insects, birds or wind. They’ll add biodiversity to the garden.

Open pollination supports genetic diversity

    Currently cultivars dominate the market. Sometimes even native plant nurseries have to offer plant selections or varieties that are truest to their species, because no straight natives are available. Let’s hope that will change as demand for native species increases.

I could only find a cultivar of this scarlet beebalm for sale, so I chose another species in the genus