ON AND OFF THE ROAD

My famous brother-in-law,
Preston Jones

            Sorry about the hiatus. The Fitzes hit the road on July 5 to visit relatives in Maryland and Virginia, having grand times with my Boonsboro cousins, and mom, sister Donna and her husband Preston in Williamsburg. Preston’s the number two craftsman at the silver shop in the restored area, by the way; if you’re planning a visit to the vicinity, stop by and say hey. He’s waiting patiently for the big job as master silversmith. My brother-in-law’s also famous as the cover-guy for National Geographic’s 1776: A New Look at Revolutionary Williamsburg by K.M. Kostyal. He wears colonial garb well, doesn't he?

            Anyway. Surviving the trip back down always-harrowing I-95, Tim and I got home the middle of last week, kissed the cats and the carpet (after a quick pass with the vacuum cleaner), hugged our pillows, and settled onto the world’s most comfortable mattress for an extended lie-in. Since then, we’ve only moved to go to the kitchen for periodic infusions of Tim’s really good coffee. I’ve ventured outside three or four times to perform absolutely mandatory gardening chores. (Hooray for irrigation systems!) I harvested another phase of our bumper crop of ripe tomatoes, trellised the pole beans, and spot-watered any particularly wilted specimens, but that's all. I can’t even imagine having to get up and go to work for the foreseeable future. (Hooray for self-employment!)   

             Yup, it’s official. Needing two weeks to recover from a six-day vacation makes it impossible to deny: Tim and I are Old Farts.

While motoring around in the stultifying July heat, I couldn’t help noticing the number and variety of wildflowers edging our route, especially along the back roads. Thanks to Tim’s infinite good humor and situational awareness, we didn’t get killed any of the times I screeched, “Back up! Back up! Isn’t that purple fleabane?” (It wasn’t.) He also handled traffic control and first aid as I scrambled barefoot up hillsides and down into ditches, or crouched in the breakdown lane or on the verges of medians to capture the perfect shot.

And here’s what we got for all our (actually Tim's, if I'm completely honest) pains. I call your attention to the high-summer denizens of Mother Nature’s hell-strips in the country surrounding Boonsboro, Hagerstown, Funkstown and Sharpsburg, MD and Martinsburg, WV.

Hedge bindweed

Our first photo is of hedge bindweed (Calystegia sepium). It’s a morning-glory-like wildflower of cultivation, only living where people do. We found this particular specimen in the hedge of Carissa hollies bordering a McDonald’s just east of Hagerstown.

Maryland's state flower

The wild black-eyed Susan, plain ol’ species Rudbeckia hirta, is Maryland’s state flower for good reason: it grows everywhere. This particular batch adorned the byway above Burnside’s Bridge on Antietam National Battlefield Park.

Cerulean blue chicory

One of the things I miss about upstate New York is chicory (the flower, not the poor-man’s coffee substitute), probably because of my thing for blue blooms. I tried growing it from seeds I brought to North Carolina with me, but they wouldn't grow. I think Chicorium intybus is more of an upland plant.

Queen Anne's lace

Wherever there’s chicory, there’s Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota), blooming at the same time and nearby. The flowers are frequently confused with those of bishop’s weed (Aegopodium podogrania), but Queen Anne’s foliage looks like ferny carrot tops where the bishop has trifoliate broad leaves.

Blue & white border,
au naturel

Looking for garden design help? Take a page from Mother Nature’s book of companion plantings, like this one of white Queen Anne's lace punctuated by blue, blue chicory.

Adding a touch of yellow to the blue and white composition, common mullein (Verbascum thapsus) blends right in in its shorter incarnations, or towers above the crowd.

...& statuesque mullein

Stubby mullein...

The scent of clover (Trifolium spp.) revives childhood summers for me. I grew up next door to an old dairy farm, and my dad didn’t suffer from the epidemic of perfect-lawn-itis many of his generation of new-to-the-suburbs men did. Killing stands of clover in the yard is a mistake, as it turns out:  clovers are leguminous, fixing nitrogen in the soil to the benefit of everything else growing in it.

White clover (Trifolium repens)

Red clover (Trifolium pratense)

Wild spearmint

Another blast-from-the-past field flower is spicy-smelling and –tasting wild spearmint (Mentha spicata), or horsemint, as we called it back in the day. Chewing a leaf refreshed the palate after a lengthy foray into the blackberry bramble patch. Dontcha feel sorry for kids today, whose memories will feature cold, textureless, scentless electronica and summer days spent inside pecking at tiny keyboards below LCD displays?

 

Never did find the purple variety, but white Eastern daisy fleabane (Erigeron annuus) abounded on roadsides and in wildflower meadows, there as here.

I've always loved thistle flowers—if not their prickly stems and leaves—probably another legacy of being a kid playing in cow pastures. There are at least three genera and about a gazillion species of them (thistles, not kids in cow pastures) out there. This particular one is a bull thistle (Cirsium vulgare), photographed behind a couple of the monuments scattered over the killing fields of Antietam.

...but, ooh, those prickers

Lovely thistle flowers...

Cool-looking teasel

A resident of low places, teasel (Dipsacus sylvestris) resembles thistles on steroids; but teasel leaves are kinder and gentler, even if their stems and calyxes are not.

Common milkweed

Got milkweed? Host plant to monarch butterfly larvae, it’s another wildflower that grows, well, wild in uplands but gives coastal North Carolina a pass. We can grow lots of the other butterfly weeds—Asclepias (pronounced as-CLEE-pee-us) incarnata, A. tuberosa, A. curassavica—but not Asclepias syriaca.

You wouldn’t guess it from the war I used wage on the common vetch that invaded our lawn (back when we had a lawn), but I adore the sight of the banks of Interstate drainage ditches covered with blooming crown vetch (Coronilla varia), sown to prevent erosion of said banks. Great stretches of large (for vetches) globose flowers atop dainty compound foliage make for a welcome distraction from the blinkered idiot vehicle operators who seem to set the tone on our nation’s highways.

A swath of crown vetch

Crown vetch, close up

It’s good to be home. Thanks for dropping by.

                                                                        Kathy    

GARDENING OBSESSIONS

The Big Green Weather
Observations Book

            I admit to having obsessive/compulsive tendencies in some areas of my life. At least three weather observations a day (four is better) must be duly noted in the Big Green Weather Book, for example. Towels must be folded in thirds, for another. We flip or rotate the mattress the first weekend of every other month. The sink must be empty by bedtime, the dish drainer before morning coffee. Tim regales audiences at informal gatherings with stories about my list-making, which extends to making lists of the various lists I have running at any given time.

            Okay. Maybe I suffer from more than mild OCD. Whatever gets you through the day, right?

While grooming the nasturtium baskets this morning—which will soon be only nasturtium, since pickleworms have discovered the cucumbers I’d interplanted with them—I realized I’d snipped off some seed heads before they’d ripened. Oh, bugger, I thought. Blew that seed-saving opportunity. (My OCD manifests when it comes to saving seeds. Our refrigerator’s vegetable crisper teems with them.  The disorder does not extend to planting the saved seeds, however.) The oversight inspired me to take a really close look at the flowers, though.

Monoecious nasturtium flowers

Seems nasturtium (Tropaeolum spp.) are monoecious, a botanical term deriving from the Greek for “one house”; it refers to both male and female flowers being borne on the same plant. The female blooms evolve into seedcases while the males just die. (Other species, like hollies, are dioecious—Greek for “two houses”—with male flowers on one plant and female on another. Male hollies never produce babies/berries. Neither do females if there is no male within cross-pollination distance. While we’re on the subject, the quality of dioeciousness applies to pampas grass as well. If yours never erupts into spectacular bloom, you’ve got yourself a boy plant.)   

Gregor Mendel

I find the secret lives of flora endlessly fascinating, and as I pulled off dead leaves and (male) flowers, I found myself thinking about Gregor Mendel, the Austrian Augustinian monk whose obsession with peas in his monastery’s garden resulted in the science of genetics.

George Washington Carver
(photo taken by Frances
Benjamin Johnston in 1906)

Gardening obsessions are quite common. Take George Washington Carver. He saw small farmers struggling to make their livings growing cotton, which not only depletes the soil but doesn't fill the family's stomachs either. He promoted diversification into marketable crops that also offer nutritional value, such as soybeans, sweet potatoes, and peanuts. Over a long career at Tuskegee Institute, he wrote dozens of farm bulletins containing some 105 recipes using peanuts. He also developed more than 300 products for farm and home use from the lowly goober, including cosmetics, dyes, gasoline (biofuel!), nitroglycerin, paints and plastics. When it comes to obsessive/compulsiveness, Carver makes me look like a rank amateur.

Other siren-like plants send people into the clutches of a persistent notion that defies rationality. The rosarians are one such group. Even the word “rosarian” conjures up religion. In Otherwise Normal People: Inside the Thorny World of Competitive Rose Gardening, Aurelia C. Scott captures the insanity overtaking seekers of the title “Queen of Show” at the biannual National Rose Show.  

 Orchid-fanciers suffer from similar obsessive/compulsions, a condition the Victorians called “orchedelirium.” So compelling is this particular form of plantmania, Spike Jonze adapted Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession –the story of the discovery and break-up of a Florida orchid-smuggling ring—into the 2002 movie “Adaptation,” starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. Not bad for an epiphyte. 

            More mundane but just as all-consuming to aficionados, pumpkins claim their own coterie of the unbalanced. The subtitle of Susan Warren’s 2007 book, Backyard Giants: The Passionate, Heartbreaking, and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever, pretty much says it all.

Growing edibles inspires others to craziness, a sickness I can empathize with. If you struggle with your vegetable plot; if your significant other occasionally remarks that you could have purchased bushels of whatever with the money, resources and time you lavish on your garden; if you wonder if you’re all alone in this unequal struggle against nature, you must read The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden by William Alexander. You’ll feel better about yourself when you finish it.

Of course, Mr. Alexander’s $64 tomato pales in comparison to my own $200 potato patch. After three seasons of dismal yields, this year’s test harvest looked promising. The 12 pounds of four species of seed tubers I planted may actually produce at least that weight in edible spuds, for a happy change. Tomorrow’s the day I’m hauling them in, so fingers crossed, y’all. As a sort of voodoo insurance, I haven’t yet cleared out the closet where I propose to store the bounty until the weather cools down. Just in case.

Test harvest of 'Purple Majesty'
weighed three whole pounds!!

Test harvest of 'Red Caribe'
weighed two-and-a-half pounds!!

Whether for beauty, rareness, usefulness, and/or nutritional value, the quest for that perfect plant is an obsession that lurks in all dedicated gardeners, whether we express it to the point of madness or not.  A little bit of OCD might be all that’s needed to push a weekend putterer into nutcase territory. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Thanks for dropping by.

                                                                        Kathy

LOVE BUGS

            In her fascinating book, Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love and Language from the Insect World, entomologist Marlene Zuk posits that humans have trouble relating to insects because they’re so difficult for us to anthropomorphize. Mammals are easy to love, even de facto nasty ones like pandas and koala bears. We can even stretch our affections to reptiles and amphibians, demonstrated by that adorable GEICO gekko, the teenage mutant ninja turtles, Majolica Palissy ware, and the explosion of frog-themed garden ornaments. That third pair of legs, however, apparently cancels out any hope of potential cuddliness. (Snakes elicit the same emotional disconnect because they lack “hands” or “feet” all together.) Zuk cites a 1973 survey that puts bugs at number three—tied with “financial problems” and “deep water”—on a list of things people fear most. “Public speaking” and “heights” beat out the six-legged ("death" came in sixth, in case you were wondering), but she says if spiders had been lumped in with insects, they may have soared to the number one spot.  

            The more contemplative yogic disciplines emphasize opening ourselves to the beauty and harmony in all things, a practice I have a lot of trouble with when it comes to people-in-general and politicians-and-bureaucrats-in-particular. Bugs, not so much. Entomologists have found evidence that insects can communicate, learn, teach, and manipulate their environments. Some species make very good parents, a finding that more daring scientists think may indicate personality and emotions. On the other hand, people who love sci-fi films that depict evil, alien creatures as insectile would appreciate the more grisly aspects of reality in Bug-World: sexual deviancy and cannibalism, despotism, chemical mind-control, slavery, live sacrifice. Hey, bugs are sounding more human all the time!

            Like most gardeners, I have only a nodding acquaintance with most of the bugs passing through my yard. We wave, but don’t know each other’s names. A comprehensive reference work with photographs—either print or online, Bug Guide notwithstanding—doesn’t exist yet. The undertaking is too massive. Insects account for more than 80% of known species on Earth. They were here long before us and will be here long after.  Naturalist E.O. Wilson said, “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

            Kind of rips a huge hole Homo sapiens’ carefully cultivated superiority balloon, doesn’t it?     

            Read Zuk’s book. She’s a decent writer with a flip sense of humor, and her subject will broaden your mind.

            Meanwhile, crawling around in my own yard, I make an effort to notice bugs. I take pictures of the ones I don’t recognize, and send them off through the ether to the entomologists manning the Plant Disease and Insect Clinic (PDIC) at North Carolina State University in Raleigh for identification. The Extension specialists there also offer control solutions, if any are necessary. Me, I just want names. (See my posts Bugged and Bugs, the Good for more information on PDIC.) I encourage all enquiring gardeners to do the same, because once you know who they are and their place in the scheme of things, six- and eight-legged creatures become less threatening, less, well, other. No, really, they do.

            Here are some of the beautiful animals to whom PDIC has formally introduced me this season.

            Two caterpillars, and the moths they metamorphose into:

Eight-spotted forester caterpillar
(Alypia octomaculata)

Eight-spotted forester moth

      

Saltmarsh caterpillar
(Estigmene acrea)

Saltmarsh caterpillar moth

         


         









       

            Two larvae, and the adults they become:

Wheel bug (an assassin bug larva)
(Arilus cristatus)

 Wheel bug (assassin bug) adult

           

      

Euphorbia bug larva
(Chariesterus antennator)

Euphorbia bug adult

Green stinkbug, ovipositing
(Banasa dimidata)

            
            
            An egg-laying (ovipositing is the technical term) stinkbug (an alert anole ate all the hatchlings, though):

         

Leaf-cutter bee
(Megachilidae family)

            A leaf-cutter bee:

      

Narwhal-nosed bee fly
(Dave didn't know what species)

            A narwhal-nosed bee fly:

Basilica orb weaver
                (Mecynogea lemniscata) 

            Two spiders, the first very common in my back yard, the other seldom seen:

Spiny-backed orb weaver
                (Gasteracanthus cancriformis)

What's your name?

            And the latest, not-yet-identified submission, a black-and-white wasp-like creature:

None of these guys require controlling: only the stinkbug and euphorbia bug have even the potential to hurt my plants, and neither is likely to be present in sufficient numbers for any damage to be significant. And isn't that nice to know?

Tiger bee fly
               (Xenox tigrinus)

            A note about bee flies, a category of insects I’d never heard of before NCSU’s entomologist extraordinaire Dave Stephan clued me in to the identity of this impressive screen-sitter last summer. Members of the family Bombyliidae (pronounced bom-bi-LIE-ih-dee), stingless bee flies eat nectar and pollen, making them important pollinators. Their larvae are parasitoids of other insects (what’s “parasitoid"? See Chatter from OG). That uncanny resemblance to bees may be a defense mechanism, to throw predators off track. Not a whole lot is known about this group, because they are not seen in great numbers. Keep your eyes peeled, you citizen-scientists, and you can help increase mankind’s knowledge of the world around us before we do ourselves in.

Not to worry: the insects will clean up the mess we leave.

Thanks for dropping by.

                                                                        Kathy

SNAPSHOT OF MONDAY

            It’s a beautiful day here in southeastern North Carolina—sunny, warm but not too hot, not too humid, a steady southwesterly breeze. It’s too nice a day to sit at the computer, even if one does have a blog entry to post. So I wandered outside with my camera and took a picture (or 12: what did we do before digital photography?) of every plant that has flowers on it in my yard. Now, with a minimum of commentary, I’ll share them with you.

 

         
             I like blue (and blue-ish) flowers best of all, so I have lots. This is false hyssop, Agastache foeniculum ‘Blue Fortune.’ Bees and butterflies love it, deer disdain it because of its anise-scented foliage. It’s not reliably perennial for me, but I don’t care because Christine grows some every year.

            Our cat Fred thinks catmint—Nepeta x faassenii ‘Walkers Low’—might actually be catnip. He’s wrong, of course, although it’s aromatic enough that deer don’t bother it. While “Walkers Low” refers not to the height of the plant but to an English garden, Fred keeps ours well below the 30 inches gardeners without 18-pound pets can expect.

            The passionflowers I observe for the National PhenologyNetwork’s Nature’s Notebook bloomed early this year due to the mild winter. Which is nice.

            This blue-themed pot contains annual Phlox intensia ‘Blueberry’ and a selection of summer snapdragons, Angelonia angustifolia-Serena series.

            My poor aster. Not only is it stuck with a nasty botanical name—Symphyotrichum laevis—but deer uncharacteristically grazed it nearly down to the ground earlier in the season in a fit of pique over our fencing of the tomatoes. So now it’s blooming. Be interesting to see what happens this fall.

            My next favorite flower colors are the pinks, purples and magentas, so I have lots of those, too. Here is a clump of perennial petunias, Petunia integrifolia integrifolia. I have no idea why the specific epithet is repeated. One year I planted these free-flowering magenta beauties in a raised bed with chartreuse sweet-potato vine (Ipomoea batatas ‘Margarita’): the effect was stunning. Also not reliably perennial, it survived this year’s mild winter handily, never even dying back all the way.

          
            One of the mildew-resistant garden phloxes, Phlox paniculata ‘Bright Eyes,’ keeps large pink panicles coming for most of the season. ‘Laura’ is another cultivar I like, with blooms more on the purple side of pink, but she’s not blooming yet.

            This Liatris spicata, saddled with the dopey common name “blazing star,” is a specimen of the straight species, lankier and earlier than the stocky cultivar ‘Kobold’ that grows on the other side of the garden.

           
         
             My specimen of evergreen Serissa foetida started life as a tiny bonsai I rescued from the Philadelphia Flower Show in 2005. It certainly wouldn’t fit back into the two-inch-wide pot it came in anymore.

          
          This is rock rose, Pavonia lasiopetala. A shrubby little thing, it produces its cheerful cerise cup-shaped flowers steadily—if not prolifically—all summer.

            Another trouble-free sub-shrub that enjoyed the warm winter was my swamp mallow (Kosteletzkya virginica—see “Field Notes for the Weary” post of September 28, 2011). Its first bloom appeared ten days ago, weeks ahead of schedule.

            Christine spoiled plain ol’ squatty Gomphrena globosa by introducing me to G. haageana ‘Fireworks.’ The cerise flowers with yellow “sparks” certainly live up to their name, and keep coming from mid-spring into October.

          


         

            And how can any one have a garden without classic Zinnia elegans? This cultivar is called ‘Cut and Come Again’ for good reason.

            I depend on the black-eyed Susans for yellows in my gardens. Perennial Rudbeckia fulgida subspecies and cultivars provide the color in fall, but wonderful annual (but freely seeding) R. hirta ‘Indian Summer’ carries the torch until then.

          

             The sunflowers are blooming! The sunflowers are blooming! These are Helianthus annuus ‘Van Gogh.’

            When I lived up North, I loved nasturtiums. Over a season they’d grow into huge frothy mounds of neatly round foliage dotted with orange, yellow or red flowers. Not so in North Carolina, where the heat takes a toll. Regardless, I plant some every spring and enjoy them until they inevitably crash.

         
             I don’t have a lot of summertime whites in my garden, so for now, I’m grateful for the dainty blooms of my potato crop, Solanum tuberosum.

            So that’s what’s providing color out in my yard today. And that’s all I have to say, until next time.

            Thanks for dropping by.

                                                                                    Kathy