Native flowers for early spring

The flowers that I think of as my spring bulbs are emerging early this year, so much so that it’s worrisome. I’m afraid their blooms will be prematurely cut down by a March snowstorm. 

Crocuses flowering earlier than usual

It’s always heartening to see these first snowdrops and crocuses. They signal that spring is on the way, and they’re important to the first pollinators circulating during these early weeks. I haven’t seen any bees on the crocuses yet, but I’m expecting them soon.

    As lovely as these flowers are, they’re imports. Are there native options?

    Research into what are generally called bulbs always bumps up against botanical correctness. Plants that grow from underground storage organs can correctly be called geophytes, and true bulbs are only one of their adaptations. Others are corms, tubers and rhizomes. Bulbs, as exemplified by onions, are made up of layers of embryonic leaves separated by membranes. 

The layers of an onion are future leaves-photo Amada44

A corm is an upright thickened underground stem, whereas a rhizome is a thickened horizontal underground stem. A tuber such as a potato develops at the tip of a rhizome.

Bearded iris rhizome, Book of Gardening 1900

    Terminology aside, the native range of many of my early bloomers is eastern Europe or western Russia. I’d like to grow more native spring-blooming geophytes, not just imports from the Caucasus.

    While I practice social distancing, I’ve had time to review the early-spring-flowering natives on my plant list. Instead of bulbs, I’ve regarded these geophytes as spring ephemerals. They’re woodland plants adapted to bloom and produce foliage in earliest spring before shade from the tree canopy sets in, then drop their leaves and draw on stored energy to survive the summer.

    Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) and Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica) both grow from rhizomes and flower early and beautifully in my yard.

Bloodroot's early spring flowers

 They’re both happy in their shady locations and forming expanding colonies. 

Virginia bluebells about to open

White trillium (Trillium grandiflorum), another native, also grows from rhizomes. I’ve tried to establish this plant over the years with little success. At present, just one is hanging on along the back fence. We’ll see how it’ll respond to increased sunlight from the switch from a stockade fence to chain-link.

White trillium-photo СССР

    I planted large camas (Camassia leichtlinii), a true bulb, because it tolerates shade. This camas is native to western North America, but there’s another called wild hyacinth (Camassia scilloides) that grows in the East too, looks pretty, and blooms in April and May. Worth a try.

Wild hyacinth-photo Tom Potterfield

    I’m delighted with the yellow trout-lilies (Erythronium americanum), also eastern natives, true bulbs that seem to have established themselves in light shade next to the bird bath and flower in early spring. 

Yellow trout-lily

I could branch out to another native in the genus, white dog-tooth violet (E. albidum).

White dog-tooth violet

    I love white bleeding heart (Lamprocapnos spectabilis ‘Alba’), a tuber former that’s spread around the garden by self-seeding and blooms in May. It’s not a native, but it has native cousins including fringed bleeding heart (Dicentra eximia), Dutchman’s breeches (D. cucullaria), and squirrel corn (D. canadensis) that also flower in early spring in shady woodlands. More shopping opportunities.

Dutchman's breeches-photo Tom Potterfield

Gardening with Lenore

On Sunday we lost my mother-in-law, Lenore. As the family gathers to recall the good times we shared with this ebullient spirit, I’m remembering Lenore as a gardening accomplice.

Lenore and Norm before their grandparenting phase

    When Lenore’s sons started getting married, she and her husband Norm chose a country house that would be grandchild-friendly. It had a washer and dryer, lots of bedrooms, a big open kitchen, and, as a bonus, a large fenced garden with a water line installed by previous owners. Now that I’m hoping for grandchildren, I admire their strategy.

The vast area fenced for a garden

    I was warmly welcomed into the family as their son’s girlfriend, and we spent many summer weekends at the new house. I was excited about the gardening possibilities. Lenore liked the idea of fresh vegetables, but she was less confident about growing them. She had not-so-fond memories of enforced weeding sessions in the hot sun. Her father, who rode the commuter rail from Westchester to his office in New York City, enjoyed cultivating a big vegetable garden during his time off. He conscripted his two daughters for the grunt work.

Not Lenore, but this must have been how it felt

    I, on the other hand, was over-confident. I was sure that on weekend visits, we could fill the large space, perhaps 80 by 100 feet, with vegetables of all kinds and reap a bountiful and delicious harvest. I diagrammed 12 beds, each 10 by 10 feet, and started ordering seeds. I even sent away for asparagus starts. Lenore, always game, was willing to go along. When May came, we visited the garden center together and filled a cart with seedlings: lettuce, herbs, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants. I remember Lenore commenting to the cashier that the young lettuces were so beautiful, we could just eat them and skip the planting.

    My dad lent us his rototiller, and we used it to prepare our new beds for planting. 

My sister-in-law Liza contemplates the rototiller

Lenore and I chatted happily as we worked side by side along the furrows. I knew she was smart, beautiful and funny. Working with her in the garden, I learned that she was also loving, playful, and generous. By June, we had our seeds and seedlings in the ground and sat back expecting great things.

How we imagined our seedling rows

    If you’ve ever bitten off more than you can chew in the garden, you know what came next. The first year we did harvest quite a lot of vegetables. We learned that weeding was indeed a hard job, despite the mulch I insisted on spreading, and that raccoons knew better than we did when our corn was ready to eat. My attempts at pickling our excess harvest fell flat, but Lenore didn’t criticize. By the third summer, my energy was flagging. I’d provided Norm and Lenore with their first grandchild. Our attention was focused more on him than on the garden.

Lenore enjoying her grandson

    I still appreciate Lenore’s companionship in that vegetable garden. Yes, the plan was far too ambitious and doomed to fail. One of the things I learned from working with her was that, by marrying Lenore’s son, I’d gain the best mother-in-law ever.

Goodbye, Lenore. You were loved.

Locally sourced and great

There’s a new pile of wood chips in the driveway. After a heavy wind brought down some big pine branches in the yard, arborist Kevin Newman recommended thinning the crown of our tallest pine. His team left me the resulting chips. 

I'm gradually transferring wood chips from the driveway to the garden

    Now is a great time for spreading wood chip mulch. On warmer days, I’d like to be outside doing something in the garden, but nothing’s growing. That’s when I load up the wheelbarrow with wood chips and trundle around the yard to dump them where they’re needed.

    After working with this mulch for eight years, I’m a huge fan. It’s a sustainable choice, because the chips originate in my own yard or nearby where Kevin’s men are pruning or taking down trees. The chips are easy to work with, much less dense than bark mulch. 

A wheelbarrow full of wood chips isn't too heavy to maneuver

Unlike bark, they don’t contain wax, so they don’t block water from soaking into the soil. The first time I dug into the soil under the wood chip mulch, I was amazed. It’s dark, moist and rich—just what a gardener hopes for.

    This year I’m spreading wood chips around trees and shrubs, and I plan to add some to the garden paths, where they break down fastest because of heavy foot traffic. If I do more sheet composting, they’ll be a key ingredient.

Sheet composting March 2019: wood chips on top of composted cow manure

    My source of mulch information is Linda Chalker Scott, a horticulturist and mulch scholar at Washington State University. She corrects conventional wisdom with scientific fact. For example, people worry that wood chips will acidify soil. Research shows they don’t. I’m increasingly aware that soil is not an inert substance. It’s full of biological and chemical activity, including an effective buffering system. You can’t change the pH of soil without adding chemicals such as lime to make it more alkaline or sulfur to make it more acid.

    There’s a gardening legend that high carbon mulch such as wood chips depletes nitrogen in the soil. Linda studied this and found no evidence for it. She hypothesizes that there’s a narrow band of relative nitrogen deficiency at the interface between the soil and the wood chip mulch. This is actually a plus, because it suppresses weeds. You can use this mulch anywhere in the garden except where you’re going to plant seeds or young annuals that don’t have an established root system. Like young weeds, they’d suffer in this nitrogen-poor zone.

Wood chip mulch will suppress weeds around this tree

    Can chips from diseased trees infect your yard? This is a concern I often hear from garden club members. It turns out not, because the disease organisms in mulch can’t reach plant roots. I often see impressive networks of white fungal hyphae among the chips, either in the pile or after they’ve been on the ground for a while. Linda Chalker Scott explains that these fungi are decomposers, not pathogens. With their help, wood chips decompose slowly, gradually releasing nutrients our plants’ roots can use. I’m grateful to have this free material for pampering my plants and soil.

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