The Natural Patriot

The crops are sleeping.

The creek is frozen.

The trees are sleeping.

The creatures are sleeping.

Everything is waiting.

Waiting patiently.

Just now I felt the need, as I sometimes do, to just step outside and stand quietly for a while. Letting my breathing and heart rate ease into a quieter rhythm, allowing the soft breeze to wash away the cloud of small things clamoring for attention, gradually becoming aware of the slower turnings of the world around me.

It’s still dark in the early October morning, on the cusp of daybreak, and my first sensation is the smell of damp earth, always welcome and nourishing after a period of dry weather. Crickets drone all around, seemingly hidden somewhere distant and just within earshot. A few birds beginning to rouse. Overhead, thick clouds churn slowly in the first gray light, my neighbor’s great towering pecan tree silhouetted against them. A crow calls, the melancholy soul of autumn in these parts.

In front of me, only beginning to emerge in the dim light, is the new bed we planted a couple of weeks ago, the latest step in the gradual reclamation of the suburban yard and its transformation back to something resembling American Nature. The little perennials, looking forlorn in a sea of mulch, are fading as they go to sleep for the winter. But they’ve set in well and I’m happy knowing that we can look forward to the tiny first sprouts of a prairie of sorts beginning to come to life in March or April.

I learned a few lessons from the earlier phases of the experiment. This time, I used a flat-edged spade to cut the lawn sod into a grid and then overturned the chunks, pulling out what grass rhizomes I could. Then, to discourage the grass from coming back, covered the tumult with a layer of broken down cardboard boxes, pizza boxes, and old newspapers that have been accumulating in the shed for months before dumping a thick layer of mulch on top. That was a good vigorous day’s work.

Then, over the course of the next week, came the planting. Twenty-nine pots in all: 3 bluestar (Amsonia tabernaemontana), 5 purple milkweed (Asclepia sp.), 3 doll’s daisy (Boltonia asteroides), 5 star tickseed (Coreopsis pubescens), 5 purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), 3 aromatic aster (Aster oblongifolius), 3 Virginia cup plant (Silphium connatum), and 3 false indigo (Baptisia australis). Plus I had to dig up and move the old butterflybush, not a native but spared because it’s so good at attracting butterflies.

It’s an exercise in patience, since this will look much like any other planted garden bed for a year or three and won’t really come into its own as a diverse wildish landscape for probably several years. Nevertheless, we can certainly expect flowers in the spring, and butterflies and birds. Probably also varmints, which hammered some of my earlier native plantings — will have to remain vigilant there. Lots of hard physical work digging, turning sod, wheelbarrowing mulch, and so on, but it’s surprising how good that feels after sitting for weeks behind a computer.

A few days ago, the little garden patch produced its first fruit (photo at right). It doesn’t like like much, I’ll admit, but every baby is beautiful to its parents.

Well, to be truthful, some of the things advertised in the title I already knew, and others I learned from trying to grow things outside in general, rather than from this particular zucchini per se. But the larger point is that growing things teaches one several important lessons that are difficult to get from the everyday, fast-paced, air-conditioned, hyper-caffeinated, homogenized, insular, virtual world that most of us inhabit.

The first and perhaps most pedestrian thing I learned is that I can do this.  Born in the suburbs and having spent most of my life foraging shrink-wrapped pseudo-food from more or less identical supermarkets throughout the 50 states and the world, even I can do this. It’s only one zucchini so far, but there are two or three more on the surprisingly gigantic plants out there, and a pile of green tomatoes ready to spill out of the patch and lots of basil. I’m optimistic about the beans and at least a few leaves of spinach too. And you can do it too (no doubt many of you could give me long lessons about this), with even a few square yards of soil or a few large pots. It doesn’t take much to get started, and then you start seeing all kinds of opportunities.

I learned to be keenly aware of the weather, and in fact to like rain. At least rain of a certain sort and frequency — gentle, sustained for a few hours, coming after we haven’t had any rain for a week. Now, instead of seeing rain as an annoyance as so many of us do in modern life, getting exasperated about getting my shoes wet on the way to the car, my skin feels like it’s gratefully absorbing the moisture as I think of the soil and little root hairs drinking up life-giving water, and the two rain barrels filling up to see us through the next week or so. Well, not always — I still get annoyed when I get soaked on the way to the car.

Most importantly, I learned that eating fresh produce has a satisfaction that is far deeper than just filling one’s stomach with the fuel necessary to keep tapping at the computer. Knowing the source of food, knowing its history, having seen it grow from a flower bud, through hot sun and rain, having tended it and checked on it every morning, heard the birds singing around it, maybe picked off a pest or encouraged a friendly insect, all of this gives eating a satisfaction not only to the body but to the soul that is impossible to appreciate without having done it.

And I didn’t even mention that it was the best zucchini I ever had — firm but tender, mildly flavored with no hint of bitterness, no seeds. Raw or sauteed in a bit of olive oil (I tried it both ways). I could almost feel the vitamins and healthful essence spreading through my body. Nourishment in a much broader sense that we usually think about.

OK, I’m off now to check the garden.

Dear me.  First lightning bugs of the season out in the last few days and I haven’t even reported on this spring’s new incarnation of the Timberneck Biodiversity Restoration Project (translation for uninitiated: yardwork. Only more fun.). Well, it hasn’t been for lack of interest. Since I am off tomorrow for a overnight trip with the boy’s class, a brief tour of the highlights will have to suffice for the time being.  More to come soon, well, eventually anyway. There’s a lot happening out there.

The alert reader will recall that I made a resolution of sorts a year or three ago, inspired in part by Doug Tallamy’s wonderful book, to get serious about re-engineering the yard toward a landscape more in harmony with the evolutionary history of the local area, more hospitable to desirable wildlife of all sizes, less thirsty for imported water and industrial fertilizer, more pleasing to the eye and spirit, less work (?), etc. This has involved both a surprisingly satisfying campaign of piched battle against various aggressive and invasive alien plants, as well as a systematic plan to plant a wide range of native shrubs and perennials over the course of the next few years.  Oh, and a vegetable garden too. A major re-imagining of the property.

After starting tentatively last spring with a little butterfly patch and a few pots scavenged from a native plant sale, we decided to launch into this righteously and contacted our local native plant nurserywoman and guru, Denise Green, who produced a coherent plan to convert a large swath of monotonous green “grass” (mostly alien weeds, albeit many with little flowers that are charming in their way) into a structurally diverse sward of native flowers, grasses, and shrubs favored by butterflies and birds. The idea was to have this native landscape meld into an edible landscape that included an existing pecan tree at one end, and our little vegetable plot on the other. The plan is shown below.

Well, it all looks good on paper. But of course turning this into reality requires busting one’s  hump to pull out all the privet, honeysuckle, English ivy, and so on, mulching the area, planting the plants, and then watering them through the sometimes brutal Virginia summer. But of course, this is a labor of love.

So, long story short, I started with the area between the house and the shed, along the sinuous brick path. First the destruction: I cut down a gnarly old black cherry that was hugging the shed and constantly dropping dry sticks around, as well as a “grandmother tree” (Chinaberry) that had been split and broken up and resprouted many times and was basically an eyesore. Then covered the intervening grass area with old newspapers and pizza boxes and then heaped mulch over that. Into this I planted the shrubs — four highbush blueberry plants (of two varieties to ensure vigorous cross-fertilization), a small fig sapling (the only non-native), and an oak-leaf Hydrangea. Put them in in March and they are doing great!  Lots of big fat blueberries on the bushes (now covered with bird netting), the fig leafed out and growing well, the Hydrangea with two nice flower clusters.

Around the same time I installed a second rain barrel along the front of the house so we now have a capacity of 100 gallons (I hope to add a third eventually on the other side but that will require installing a gutter too, which is a bit more advanced than I want to tackle at this point). I haven’t tapped into the well yet this year.

Now the vegetable patch, at the other end of the edible crescent. Last year was my first hack at this and the results were what one would expect. I planted tomatoes, basil, rosemary, lettuce and probably something else I don’t remember. Basil is pretty tough to kill and it did accordingly well –  we had homemade pesto many times during the summer, always a hit. I got a few tomatoes but most fell victim to a fiendishly clever animal, which I have deduced must have been a raccoon because the villain actually pried apart the wire fence stapled to the timbers surrounding the plot (and, to add insult to injury, mostly took one or two bites out of each, then dumped it on the ground). The lettuce was an abject failure, started too late for one thing.

Anyway, I learned my lesson. Installed a heavier-duty fence with lots of staples and no door (I just hop over the short fence) — so far so good. Worked the whole winter’s accumulation of compost into the vegetable patch. Planted three varieties of tomatoes, giving them a bit more space than last year’s jungle, a bunch of sweet basil, two summer squash plants, two rows of green bean seeds, some spinach from seed, and a single pepper plant. Mulched them after they got established. And have watered them regularly with my collected rain. It helps that this has been a great spring for long soaking, gentle rains. Bottom line: all the vegetables are going crazy. Fingers crossed. Meanwhile, the stunted pecan tree is coming into its own now that it has been released from the shadow of the old black cherry. In a few years, we should have good crops of pecans, figs, blueberries, and vegetables too.  Oh, and I am also weeding away and nurturing some volunteer blackberry brambles that came up in the general chaos of the yard edge.

Right. About the natives. Along the wasteland between the driveway and the vegetable patch, I have been waging war against the impenetrable privet thickets for a few years now.  The stuff is almost gone. And, to my delight, it is being replaced, right out of the woodwork, by a volunteer stand of Aralia spinosa, the “devil’s walking stick” — so named for its long naked single trunk covered with frightful thorns.  The spray of flowers turning to berries expected late in summer is supposed to be a favorite of birds. In the same area, vacated by the chopped down chinaberry, two native spicebush are taking off. And, also to my delight, the little patch of sensitive ferns I put in last March has come back and is spreading vigorously. As is the Joe-Pye weed planted in the butterfly patch, which is frighteningly buff — looks like it’s been watered with pharmaceutical effluent from a Major League Baseball clubhouse. The bleeding hearts also returned (see photo at top).

Stand by for photos of the insects attracted to this wonderland as it starts to bloom. Don’t look now but I’m thinking about a chicken coop next year . . .

How time flies. The fresh new breezes of spring were beginning to blow — three whole months ago — when I painted the shed door green and started the herbaceous phase (as opposed to the woody phase, which has proceeded via occasional tree plantings over the last decade) of the TBRP. It has been a delight, usually, and an education always, following its evolution. I have been meaning to file a progress report for some time. For now I will focus on one component, the “butterfly patch”:

The experiment has proven to be a microcosm of the workings of ecosystems generally, revealing clear evidence of both bottom-up and top-down control. For the uninitiated, this is the geekish ecological jargon for control of the biological community’s health and composition by resources (such as water and light — nourishing plants at the bottom of the food chain) versus feeding by animals (influence cascading from the top of the food chain), respectively.

Everybody knows about bottom-up control, particularly if you live in a place where you get the sort of beastly hot summers, with associated dry spells, that we do here. The may apples couldn’t hack it (despite growing wild in the woods not far away from here — go figure), nor the little native orchid I planted. Alas.

Then, a few weeks after getting the plants in the ground, after carefully nurturing my little charges and watching them grow, pulling the grasses and red maple seedlings threatening to choke them, coming out every day like a proud papa to encourage them and check their progress, one day I walked out into the fresh morning air to find a scene of devastation — thriving plants reduced to shorn stems, leaves gone, broken stems hanging forlornly. Top-down control, slinking in stealthily in the dead of night. I’m guessing groundhogs (or whistle pigs as we like to call them), which are quite common around here, and we see them regularly snuffling around in the yard. I used to think they were cute.

It was a rude awakening. But what’s to be done? It’s supposed to be natural. And, happily, closer inspection revealed that several of the plants were untouched, where others had been more or less devoured. So I decided to let the critters participate in the project, eat what they want, and to allow the natural succession to take its course, with those plants that are defended in some way allowed to prosper. The blue aster I’d bought at the native plant sale got hammered repeatedly, and never bloomed (although now, in early August, it’s looking like the forlorn stems have rallied yet again and may just flower for the first time if they can escape the villains’ attention for another week). On the other hand, the black-eyed Susans, of at least three varieties, have fared very well, as have several attractive little wildflowers that came up from the packs of (mostly, as I discovered to my annoyance after planting them, non-native) wildflower seeds the NASA people were giving away at Earthfest.

The Joe-Pye weed I got from the native plant sale also got stripped and its prospects looked grim. But it came back with a vengeance and is now thriving, with big clusters of dusty rose-colored flowers. The wild quinine (that’s the one with white flowers on right side of the photo above left) has also pulled through and proved its mettle, flowering abundantly.

These latter two plants especially have proven to be an amazing draw for a wide variety of insects. And that is the really cool thing about this little project — what an unexpectedly rich font of biophilia it’s blossomed into, if you’ll pardon the pun. This tiny patch of wildflowers, maybe a square yard, is astonishingly rich in life. Almost every day we see insects we’ve never before noticed on the property (partly, no doubt, because I am paying a lot more attention to them). The plot is swarming with small, native bees of at least four species, one with a metallic green body (see photo at right, from here). Beautiful little ermine moths sucking at the tiny flowers. Big zebra swallowtails, tiger swallowtails, one of the dark swallowtails, and several other butterlies and skippers fluttering about the flowers. In the last few days we’ve had several buckeyes (a species I’ve just now identified — see photo below by Bill D) fluttering around the Joe-Pye weed all day, right outside the window. A juvenile preying mantis guarding the same station faithfully day by day. Even our resident hummingbirds have sampled the butterfly bush a few times. This is way better than going to the zoo. It sure beats the same old crap on television, it’s probably as good for your karma as meditation, it’s free, and it’s interactive!

The cool thing is: almost anyone could do this. The plot literally takes up a square yard — though now that the experiment has proven successful I am keen on extending it, making this the first step in the gradual conversion of our relatively sterile suburban lawn to low-maintenance, environmentally friendly, biodiverse, wild and woolly pseudo-prairie. Anyway, all you need is a bit of dirt, some native plants, and literally a few minutes a day. I installed a 50-gallon rainbarrel under our downspout and have not used the hose for gardening ecological engineering since.

Finally, based on the admittedly minimal sample size of one, I can also report that the patch has caught the attention of local kids (OK, kid singular). He has developed a tolerance for my stopping to crouch down and see what’s going on in the patch every time we walk by. He even joins in occasionally (”Look Dad - one of those green bees!”). Then, of course, it’s back to the baseball statistics . . .

I’m excited to announce the inauguration of the Timberneck Creek Biodiversity and Habitat Restoration Project, Phase I. Although it has also been called, more prosaically, “cleaning up my yard”, I prefer to think about it in a larger context as one small step in the goal of world domination of suburban backyards in the service of facilitating native wildlife (of all sizes), battling the spread of invasive species, and promoting truth, justice and the American way generally.

So far, the project has one unpaid employee (me), though I have received additional in-kind matching support from Liz, who has agreed to free a portion of my time that would otherwise be devoted to folding laundry so that I can hack weeds and grub around in the dirt instead.

History

A bit of background may be in order here.  In 1995 we bought this house, a modest Virginia farmhouse built in 1920, on 1.6 acres of land along Timberneck Creek, a tidal creek bordered by salt marsh cordgrass and marsh elder bushes.  It is by general agreement a beautiful spot, which explains why we bought the place despite the absence of a driveway, a stove, or central heat and air conditioning, a palpable breeze around the edges of the closed windows in winter, and an appalling abundance of shed snake skins in the attic.

But I digress. The place had been bush-hogged shortly before we saw it, doubtless to show off the panoramic view of the adjacent creek to best effect, but over the ensuing years, the exuberant vegetation of the area had sprouted up again with remarkable vigor.  A few years ago the scales fell from my eyes and I realized that we could not even see the water any more — in its place, our panorama had become deepest darkest jungle.  This was partly due to strong recruitment of sassafras trees, which can easily grow 2-3 feet in a year in this neck o’ the woods, but was primarily the fault of the diabolical duo of privet, an infernal invasive alien shrub, and greenbrier.  Greenbrier is a native vine that resembles barbed wire except that it’s alive. It seems to prefer the company of privet, and grows with it in impenetrable thickets.

This would not do.

The first campaign

I have always aimed to maximize native diversity on the property.  Over the years I had planted various trees and shrubs, and ripped out bits of greenbrier and privet here and there, mostly haphazardly.  Sought out, for example, the only sweetgum on the property and cleared the vines and surrounding saplings to give it a little breathing room.

But a couple years ago I decided to get serious.  I declared war on the jungle and went at it with hedge clippers and a bowsaw, which required no fossil fuel, exposed me to fresh air (as well as thorns and the occasional attack by angry yellowjackets trampled underfoot), and most importantly, allowed me to be selective, axing the bad guys and nurturing the good, such as little volunteer dogwoods.  I have now almost eliminated privet from most of the property and cleared out a substantial part of the greenbrier.  We can now see the sunshine glinting off the little waves on the creek, and the leaves of trees (as opposed to solid jungle) fluttering in the breeze.  The azaleas are beautiful in spring.  The dogwoods and redbuds have reached the age where they are beginning to produce big masses of flowers.  Ma and Pa can sit on the porch and survey our domain with a lemonade.  Or, more often, a martini.

Back to the future

The next phase began after I chanced on a piece about Doug Tallamy’s book Bringing Nature Home in the NY Times (see my previous post).  I bought the book and read it.  I cannot say enough about this book — it fundamentally changed the way I think about my yard specifically, and American suburbia generally.  Here at last is something of substance — something practical — that we as individuals can do to stem the receding tide of biodiversity where we live.  And by becoming intimate with the plants and creatures and ecosystems to which we are connected, we gain a lot more besides.  I enthusiastically recommend the book to any homeowner, gardener, educator, or for that matter anyone simply interested in the natural history of their surroundings (albeit the details are focused on the mid-Atlantic region of the USA).

The basic premise of the book is that we should actively promote vegetation native to our particular areas because it supports native (beneficial) insects, which in turn support a variety of native wildilfe.  In contrast, the introduced plants that have escaped and gone feral all over the place are mostly (with exceptions, of course) less hospitable to native wildlife because they lack a shared evolutionary history.

Shortly after I began reading the book, I took my weathered old green clothbound copy of A Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-Central North America and went out into the yard.  I have always been perversely proud of the fact that there are no more than perhaps a dozen shoots of grass in my yard.  The rest is a motley meadow of various wildflowers (the polite term for weeds).  But I was disturbed to find, as I looked up one plant after another, that virtually every plant in my lawn was an alien.  The problem, according to Tallamy, is that many such weeds do not support insect herbivores, and thus their production is not transferred up the food chain to bluebirds and warblers and frogs and box turtles and what not.  And that’s the lawn.  Then there is the ground cover under those trees where I had pulled out all the privet and greenbrier.  It’s mostly covered now by a tangle of alien honeysuckle.

I resolved then and there to transform our property into a model of structurally complex, diverse native vegetation explicitly designed to support native wildlife.

So: first, the jungly understory.  The challenge here is what to use for a native groundcover.  Two falls ago, I planted a bunch of azaleas on the site of the former privet thicket by the driveway (turning up two burrowing worm snakes in the process, much to 9-year-old Conor’s delight).  The interstices have since filled in with honeysuckle and various fast-growing (alien) annuals.  This is the spot shown in the photo at top right.  I started ripping this stuff out, which was relatively easy.  By a happy coincidence, just as I was cogitating on all this, I heard that the local chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society was having a sale nearby. So I bought a bunch of stuff.  For ground cover in this shady spot, I planted several “sensitive ferns” (Onoclea sensibilis, above left), which are supposed to spread and form colonies.

In another part of this shady area I planted several mayapples (Podophyllum peltatum, at right in pots), which are also supposed to form colonies, and of which I have very fond evocative memories from high school days backpacking in the Appalachians, where one periodically sees big swaths of them among the trees.

Interspersed among the azaleas in here I planted fern-leaf bleeding hearts (which flowered a few days later!) and various other species. You get the picture.

Bring in the bugs

By this time I was on a roll.  The following weekend (last), on my way back from EarthFest, I returned to the VNPS sale and bought another bunch of native plants.  These are, primarily, for a butterfly garden, which is something I have always wanted to have. I came home and dug out a square yard or so of turfy “grass” (and alien weeds) at the corner of our frontwalk and planted ‘em all. Last summer we bought a butterfly bush which indeed attracted a lot of butterflies, then senesced, after which we left it to fend for itself through the winter in a pot on the patio.  It’s still hanging in there, so I planted that in the middle of the butterfly patch.  Ditto for some little sprouts of black-eyed Susan in another feral pot.

It rained long and generously after both planting episodes, which I take to be a favorable omen.  Everyone appears to be thriving. Last night, as we came home in the dark after Conor’s baseball game, there was another favorable omen: I heard the call of the great horned owl that I had not heard around here for perhaps a year.

Stay tuned for Phase II.