JULY WRAP-UP

            As the final straw breaking the back of that undignified camel called July, poison ivy blisters dot my arms, neck and face, itching and oozing. Aah, it’s a lovely feeling; ooh, it’s a lovely sight. Feeling perversely relieved—the poison ivy rash marks the third bad thing, after heat exhaustion and food poisoning—I am drawing a line under the seventh month of 2011, bidding it good riddance with a series of random thoughts (and accompanying links), starting with the hectic and unpleasant and gradually mellowing out.

            My ‘Lemon Queen’ sunflowers did bloom on time for the Great Sunflower Project’s Great Bee Count of July 16. I participated, perspiring profusely as I stood beside the patch for a quarter-hour, and counted bees: to be exact, nine sweat bees, one each bumble and carpenter bee, and a reddish wasp I don’t know the name of. No honey bees. Tim forwarded me a snippet from Inhabitat with a possible suggestion as to why. Seems the ubiquitous cell phone plays a part in the demise of the species. How? Signals emitted by phones in use—and this includes text transmissions—confuse, dismay and disorient honey bees, prompting them to leave their hives and follow erratic paths to who-knows-where. Think about that the next time you can’t possibly wait one more second to share the excruciating minutiae of your life with someone as obliviously glued to their instant-communication device as you are.

            Sorry. Did I say that out loud?



The narrowing food tree graphic,
top half

            Okay, that’s it for cell-phone bashing (for the moment). On to my next favorite love-to-hate hobby-horse, Monsanto. Appears diversity in the seed world is getting quite a bit less, um, diverse, thanks to the proliferation of patented organisms and agricultural monocultures. Check out this graphic portrayal of a global tragedy in the making. Think it doesn’t matter that we’ve lost 516 varieties of cabbage? Better think again. Diversity is our only hedge against catastrophic crop failures.

            I did mention I was starting out hectic and unpleasant, didn’t I?

A jellyfish crafted
from beach garbage

            Do you recycle? The Fitzes do. Our two-person household produces only one 13-gallon Bio-Bag of garbage-garbage a week. Everything else we compost and recycle. I insist on using cloth or paper bags for groceries and sundries, reducing by a skillionth of a percent waste plastic slowly choking land and seas. Tim started out rolling his eyes a lot, but humored me. Now he participates of his own volition, even forwarding me an article entitled “Washed Ashore,” about artworks created entirely out of trash picked up on Oregon beaches. Now on exhibit at the Marine Mammal Center, Fort Cronkhite, Sausalito, California (through October 15, if you’re headed that way), the art makes any inconvenience involved in our “Reduce, reuse, recycle” lifestyle seem niggling indeed.

            For locals only: the Verizon Wireless Call Center at the corner of Shipyard and Independence Boulevards in Wilmington is collecting unwanted electronics and small appliances (coffee-makers, can openers, toasters, etc.) for recycling on Thursday, July 28. Don’t let all those devices sit around taking up space—dispose of them responsibly.

            Moving right along… Here are some thought-provoking statistics for you. In the June 2010 issue of American Nurseryman, Maria Zampini cites National Wildlife Federation’s Kevin Coyle’s presentation of “…some unbelievable—more like disturbing—figures about how kids spend their time nowadays:

·         unstructured outdoor play=30 to 50 minutes per week;

·         organized sports=four hours per week; and

·         indoor ‘screen’ time=53 hours per week.”

Do you read books?
You're in the minority.

Maria goes on to say that Kevin claims this lack of “face time” with other people creates children with stunted social and interpersonal skills. It also figures in the disconnect from nature afflicting youngsters that some schools are starting to address.

            Do a kid a favor: unplug whatever machine he’s currently staring at, and take him out in the garden with you.

            And, after perusing the “Who Reads Books?” factoids linked here, do the same kid another solid and take him to a library to check out a volume, even if it’s about electronics.

           

           



Joshua Bell and his Strad

              You’re a gardener, right? You appreciate beauty, and try to make some in your own space. But would you recognize beauty should you happen on it out of context? How about if, on your way to work one morning, you stumbled upon Joshua Bell playing Bach on his priceless violin in a subway station? Check out “Do You Have a Moment for Pure Genius?” to learn how 2000 Washington, D.C., commuters reacted. (Teaser: what little kids did is instructive.)



The mystical kneeling trees of Poland

           Okay, we’re rising out of the murk of July and heading for the unsullied possibility that is August. See these crooked trees? Aren’t they cool? No one knows why this particular patch of Polish pines does that kneeling thing. I’m not at all religious, but the trees make me think of the best part of church.

            Back in May, I started a post called “Penny Wisdom” (May 4, to be precise), about the folly of stinting on things that are good for your soul, with the story of Tim’s reluctance to buy himself the David Sorg easel he really wanted. Not too long ago, I found him (Tim, not David Sorg) on the floor in his studio, measuring a piece of tempered glass salvaged from our old refrigerator. “Whatcha doin’?” I asked. “My palette’s too small,” he says. “I’m going to find a Wal-Mart table to fit this glass on so I can mix colors on it. I’ll get one with drawers so I can lose that plastic kids-stuff bin I’ve been using.” “Uh-huh,” I reply. “Didn’t you mention a really nice taboret [see picture of smiling Tim] you found on the Internet a while back?” “Oh, I can’t get that. It’s too expensive.” “Look,” I urge him. “Order the damn taboret. You’ll jury-rig something that won’t do at all, and you’ll hate it. Just leave out the whole unsatisfying middle part, and order your taboret. Please. For me. Besides,” I said, “I like to sing it,” breaking into a chorus of “Life is a taboret, old chum, just buy the taboret!” (“Taboret” rhymes with “cabaret,” in case you didn’t know.)



Smiling Tim
in his elegantly equipped studio
(taboret at left)

             So, probably to stop me massacring the entire score of “Cabaret!” (“Money makes the taboret! The taboret! The taboret!”), he ordered it. His hand shook as he hit the “submit order” tab, but he did it. It’s a beautiful piece of honest-to-gosh hand-made furniture, and Tim hasn’t stopped smiling since it arrived. (For all the gardener/painters in the market for a primo piece of studio equipment out there, do go to Casey Childs’ website.)

            Why do I include this story? Because what lifts Tim’s spirits lifts mine, and, as I said, we’re rising into August.



The totally uplifting
gravity marimba

         Lastly, please take time to view this lovely video of a painstakingly constructed gravity marimba playing Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” as it wends its way through an ancient Japanese forest. Yeah, it’s a commercial, but remember about stopping to appreciate beauty in unexpected places.

           

            Thanks for helping me lift myself out of the gloom and drought of July to Zen serenity reborn. And thanks for dropping by.

                                                                                    Kathy

SUMMER WEEDS, PART 2

            If you read the post before this one, you already know what the delay was all about. But here it is at last, a terse weedy post providing mug shots, names, (common and botanical), hangouts, how each makes more of itself, and any other pertinent information for a dozen more usual suspects flourishing at this time of year. Remember, you can click on the pictures to make them bigger.

            Some terminology notes: basal means “at base, at the bottom”;  leguminous means “a plant with nitrogen-fixing root nodes, a member of the pea family”; stolons are runners that travel aboveground; rhizomes are runners that travel below ground.

             We begin with six perennial offenders.

Dog fennel, Eupatorium capillifolium

Sunny natural areas and lawns

Seeds, suckers and regrows from a woody base (sheesh!)

Roots hard to pull out on established plants

Rather pretty, with aromatic ferny foliage, reminiscent of asparagus

Dog fennel,
just getting started in your lawn



Dog fennel, all grown up













Fleabane, Erigeron quercifolius

           Lawns, areas of dappled to part shade

           Seeds

           Leaves pull off easily; roots are another matter

           Little white to pinkish daisy flowers



Fleabane,
growing where it's not wanted



Pretty, pernicious fleabane







Buckhorn plantain
(not the banana)

Buckhorn plantain, Plantago lanceolata

Lawns, road verges

Seeds

Basal rosette of foliage, flowers on bare stalks

Crushed leaves relieve bug-bite itch when rubbed

     on the spot



Threeflower beggarweed
foliage

Threeflower beggarweed, Desmodium triflorum
            Lawns, open natural areas

Seeds and stolons

Mat-forming, taprooted, dark green leaves with three heart-shaped leaflets

Tiny pinky-purple pea-like flowers

Leguminous








Narrowleaf vetch

Narrowleaf vetch, Vicia sativus subsp. nigra, V. angustifolius
            Lawns, natural areas, fields
            Seeds
            Compound leaves with three to nine pairs of leaflets, lax to ascending habit
            Little pinky-purple pea-like flowers
            Leguminous



The mystery weed

Mystery Weed, possibly a Euphorbia of some kind: a sample has been sent to the Weed Clinic at Virginia Tech for identification

            Lawns, road verges, dry natural areas

            Seeds

            Linear leaves whorled around an upright stem, flowering structure
branching from the top like a candelabra, producing numerous tiny white blooms

            Easy to pull

          



          Now let’s look at a few grass-like weeds.

 

Bahiagrass
(Note characteristic "V" seedheads)


Bahiagrass, Paspalum notatum
           Lawns, playing fields, disturbed places
           Seeds and rhizomes
          Mat-forming warm-season grass, may be mistaken for centipede or carpetgrass
           Seedheads form a distinctive “V”




Carpetgrass in Bermudagrass



Carpetgrass, Axonopus affinis 

            Lawns, dunes

            Seeds and stolons 

            Looks very much like centipede grass: the giveaway is its runners are above ground instead of underneath

            Long runners pull up like a zipper, which is kind of fun; grubbing out the roots is another matter




    

Your basic crabgrass

  Large and Southern crabgrass, Digitaria sanguinalis, D. ciliaris

            Sunny lawns, natural areas, road verges, disturbed places

            Seeds and stolons

            Aggressive annual, tufted or prostrate in habit

            Seed spikelets have two to nine branches

Sand spur, Cenchrus echinatus

            Lawns, dunes, road verges, disturbed places

            Seed

            Wicked annual, with branching blades emanating from a central, reddish-purplish hub

            Seed a spiny bur, with barbed spines that hang on like grim death

            If you (or your dog) ever stepped on one, you’d know it

           



The purplish basal hub of sandspur 



The business end of a sandspur





 





  

 





The seedhead of globe sedge



           Globe sedge, Cyparus globosus

              Lawns, natural areas, disturbed places

              Seed

              Perennial with smooth, shiny, bright green blades

              Seedhead resembles an exploding green firework

              Hard to eradicate

 



Horrid purple nutsedge,
purplish stems, little brown tubers,
rhizomes and all



Purple nutsedge, Cyparus rotundus 

    Lawns, planting beds, disturbed areas, everywhere

    Tubers and rhizomes

    Aggressive upright perennial grass with distinctive channel the

length of the blade; bases purplish

    Little brown hard tubers linked by rhizomes

    Really hard to eradicate, as pulling it just seems to piss it off

Well, whew. Not perfect, having an indention problem, but not too bad. Google's feeling better now, and so am I. Weedy vines and wildflowers next time.



Thanks for dropping by, and for your forbearance.

                                                                        Kathy

WHERE'S THE POST?

            Where’s the post? Where, indeed. I’ve been working on the damn thing seems like forever, but it won’t allow itself to be finished. Thought I had it knocked yesterday—pared-down text (under 600 words, a major miracle for a lexophiliac like me); pictures were taken or downloaded, then uploaded into Picasa, and we’re ready to roll, right?

            Wrong.

            As you probably know, Google is updating its image to faster, stronger, free-er or something like that. I don’t really get it. Anyway, a side effect of this cyber-makeover is occasional mysterious disappearances of information, screen freezes, cryptic fugue states, and having my account closed out every ten minutes. The pictures wouldn’t load. After several attempts to get them where I needed them to be, I decided to sign back in for the 34^th time, check email (nothing critical there), and turn the machine off.

            Where’s the post? Stuck in Word and Picasa. To my credit, I only swore a little bit, and didn’t slam or throw anything.

            Plus Tim and I are back to work and the heat makes me headachy and cross. I’m watering all the plants in my yard by hand, er, hose, which takes 75 minutes a time and needs doing every freakin’ day. Then there was the food poisoning incident (not life-threatening, entirely my own fault—I knew that broccoli slaw was past its sell-by date).

            Okay, I’m done whining. Just wanted you to know I’m still out here, plugging crankily along. I will try the pictures again, as soon as the Tylenol kicks in and my eyes open all the way. Keep a good thought for me, and thanks for dropping by.

                                                                                    Kathy

SUMMER WEEDS, PART 1

-            Anal compulsive that I am, I check statistics on this blog twice a day. Readers endlessly surprise me with which posts top the hits list. Through February, “Stuffing Stockings” (Dec. 10, 2010) far surpassed all the others. Lately, however, stockings have been left in the dust of “Winter Weeds” (Jan. 4, 2011) and the “Am I Blue Bonus” pictorial (Apr. 15, 2011), reinforcing my gut intuition that, when it comes to gardening matters, people want pictures—especially photographs—more than anything else.

            (I tried to explain this to Tom Fischer, editor-in-chief at Timber Press, when pitching my excellent but spurned Best Gardening Book Ever to him. His reaction to the revelation that I had in excess of 600 photos to illustrate the text was that pictures are expensive to reproduce. My reply that a gardening book without them is pretty well useless met with stony silence. Line drawings are lovely, of course—and cheaper to mass-produce—but don’t do the job as well as photographs. The rejection form-letter arrived several weeks later.)

            Publishing woes aside, the popularity of “Winter Weeds” speaks to a dire need that remains unmet for the gardening public: good pictorial references to common weeds. Which brings us, at last, to today’s subject.

            Summer weeds are more numerous than winter ones, which should come as no big surprise. There is also the whole when-is-a-weed-a-wildflower grey area to consider. So we’ll take up the subject in two, maybe three, maybe four, parts, starting with broadleaf annuals that are definitely weeds.

             

Spotted spurge

This ubiquitous fellow I call “the spurge of my existence.” His proper name is Euphorbia maculata, or spotted spurge. He can flower and produce seed in about five weeks, meaning he and every other member of his clan account for multiple generations each season. Prostrate and mat-forming in habit, spotted spurge has a taproot, explaining its infuriating ability to survive droughty conditions. He has many, equally prolific cousins, including garden spurge, hyssop spurge and sand-dune spurge. Find the center of the beast and pull straight up: it’s the only hope of removing this muggy-weather breeder taproot and all.



Chamberbitter

           

            Here is Phyllanthus urinaria, a.k.a. chamberbitter. One of two mimosa imitators, it is immediately identifiable later in the season when it sets seed. They’re the little greenish-yellow balls hanging beneath each pair of leaflets. Don’t bother looking for the flowers from whence the seeds emerge: they’re so inconspicuous as to be invisible.

           

Florida pusley

              Another common lawn invader is Florida pusley (Richardia scabra). An attractive weed with thickish bright green ovate leaves, it produces tiny, six-petalled, darlin’ white flowers later in the summer. Its habit is prostrate and spreading. But beware the ugliness behind the beauty: it reproduces rampantly by seed.



Poorjoe

            This one, Diodia teres, is called poorjoe, and no, I don’t know why. I tend to confuse it with the similar-looking carpetweed, Mollugo verticillata, because both have prostate, spreading habits, reddish stems, whorled-looking leaves, and cute little white flowers. Poorjoe blooms have four petals, carpetweed’s have five. When you see flowers, regardless of number of petals, it’s time to yank it out of the ground, no matter what its name is.



Hemp sesbania

  The second of the two mimosa imitators, hemp sesbania (Sesbania exaltata) also shares the touch-me-not characteristic of sensitive plant. Although spuriously similar to chamberbitter, upon closer inspection you will discover that sesbania leaflets are finer-textured and a darker green. Sesbania blooms are a sunny yellow and reminiscent of pea flowers. They form in the leaf axils (where the leaf joins the stalk).

            Moving right along, check out these three perennial rhizomatous nightmares.



Pennywort, or dollarweed

            First is pennywort, or dollarweed, as the upscale call it (not really), the evil genus (pardon the pun) Hydrocotyle (that’s pronounced hi-dro-COT-ih-lee). I’m sure you’ll be thrilled to hear there are several species of this attractive but insidiously thuggish spreader. The one slowly taking over your planting beds and lawn is H. bonariensis; but as you may have surmised from the “hydro” part of the botanical name, there’s a water pennywort as well. When asked about controlling large infestations of this one, Tim and I generally advise clients to learn to love it. The alternative is to get your hands dirty and pull out some of those miles of white runners crisscrossing your property, because pennywort is notoriously chemical-proof.

  

 

Florida betony

          Next up in our gallery of difficult-if-not-impossible-to-eradicate thugs is Florida betony. Believe it or not, this dainty-looking little monster shares a genus name with silvery lamb’s-ears: betony is Stachys floridana, soft and fuzzy lamb’s-ear S. byzantina. Betony also goes by several other common names, including rattlesnake weed and false artichoke. The rattlesnake bit comes from the appearance of the tubers that ensure the immortality of this weed: the artichoke reference obscurely refers to the tubers, too. They are edible—meaning it won’t hurt you to eat them—but I can testify that they don’t taste like anything at all. Certainly not like any artichoke I’ve ever enjoyed. The tubers are connected by white rhizomes depressingly like pennyworts’, in behavior and quantity.

           

            Third is the Harry Potter-ish-sounding mugwort, Artemisia vulgaris. An interesting case of adaptation in the botanical world, mugwort doesn’t flower or set seed. It reproduces itself entirely by rhizomes. It looks sort of like chrysanthemum foliage, and is not unattractive. But my weed-ID guy at Virginia Tech, Scott Hagood, says mugwort has definite aggression issues, aggravated by being difficult to eradicate.

            Two other see-everywhere perennial weeds will wrap up today’s post, because it’s almost time for “Jeopardy!” 

Yellow woodsorrel



Creeping woodsorrel

           

            Many people consider members of the genus Oxalis to be ornamental… and I can’t say I entirely disagree. The neat foliage, reminiscent of clover, and the pink flowers of the species everyone’s mom and grandma grew when I was a kid evoke summer memories, hot pavement under bare feet and the mingled smells of road tar and cut grass. But when Oxalis edges over into its woodsorrel incarnation, the charm rapidly dissipates. Here on the eastern coast, we see two species: Oxalis stricta, or yellow woodsorrel; and O. corniculata, creeping woodsorrel. The yellow variety is upright, with light green foliage. The creeping type is prostrate: its leaves can be green or red, and it spreads (and spreads and spreads) by rooting from nodes on its lax stems. Both are prolific seeders, so try to catch them while they’re blooming. Because once the seed capsules form, it’s too late.



Bindweed

             I’m of two minds about bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis). On the one hand, it’s pretty in foliage and flower, as one would expect from a morning-glory relative. On the other hand, its wiry stems expand at about a mile a minute, and its capacity to smother and strangle other plants is impressive. So how do I handle bindweed outbreaks chez Fitzgerald? If I spot its distinctive cotyledons, or seed leaves, anywhere in the yard, I root them out right away. But if it shows up in other places, draping a scrub tree in the vacant lot next door, say, I’m completely okay with that.

            As I mentioned back at the beginning, there are lots more summer weeds than winter ones. Next time, we’ll continue our tour through the perennials and move into the grass-like species. See you then.

*****

            A quick astronomical note: tomorrow, July 12^th, the planet Neptune completes its first orbit around the sun since it was discovered by German sky-watchers Galle and d’Arrest back in 1846. They were clued in about where to look by calculations made by French mathematician Le Verrier, who couldn’t interest anyone in his own country to take him seriously. Those wacky French!

            Thanks for dropping by.

    

                                                                                    Kathy