The Lowly Lichens

                                                            Clover                         Gottoo

Ah, we just got another Indian summer day. There’s no way I can stay in the house when November’s temperatures get into the 60s, so Clover and Gottoo, who are always begging to take a walk, and I, took a long beautiful walk up to the cow pasture and beyond. The pasture was at its most appealing, close-cropped and smooth except for rocks and a scattering of barberry bushes to add a touch of red here and there. The pussytoes lay perfectly flat against the ground, their leaves silver rosettes. The mosses were greener than the grass, showing off their myriad shapes and textures with no need to compete with taller vegetation.

The most prominent plants at this time of year, however, are the lichens. These unusual plants form a symbiotic partnership between a fungus and an alga. It's a very happy marriage as the fungus shares his house with the alga, who provides the food for the two of them. Neither partner has roots, stems, leaves or flowers, but a fungus doesn't even have chlorophyll, so he's delighted to give shelter to the algae who do.

The gray-green lace doilies growing on our pasture rocks are lichens. Reindeer moss, the wiry clumps of pastel green growing in open spaces in the woods, is another. The algae who live in these houses are often single-celled like the green scum found in stagnant ponds. Old man's beard (not to be confused with Spanish moss which is a flowering plant of the pineapple family) drips down in long flowing streams from the branches of trees in damp forests.Some of the most appealing lichens, British soldiers, also known as red cap moss, and fairy cups, are species of Claydonia.

                                              British Soldiers                           Fairy Cups

Lichens, though low on the totem pole of plants, have a pretty important job. They're the pioneers who build soil. Because they need no soil themselves, they can exist in inhospitable places, in arctic wastes and dry deserts and on bare cliffs. Their powerful acids eventually etch tiny cracks in a rock, loosening particles to let in the frost which disintegrates the rock further. In death the lichens' decayed bodies contribute additional material for higher level plants, mosses and ferns, to grow in.

Because most lichens contain strong acids, they're extremely bitter, but there are a few species that can be eaten. Even though reindeer moss isn't very tasty, moose and reindeer often make a meal of it. The "manna" eaten by the Israelites in ancient times was most likely one of the lichens.

I brought home several  lichen varieties from our walk to see if I could identify them. I got out The Lichen Book by G.G. Nearing, a book I'd never looked at since the day I received it as a birthday gift 39 years ago.  No wonder. The most necessary tool of a lichen lover is a microscope. I had no luck identifying my specimens, but I did have fun studying all the picturesque names - Pink Earth lichen, funnel lichen, mealy goblet, stringy name, rabbit, lemon, bristly, dark blister.

I then spent several hours playing around with my photo software making a picture to go with the following poem, one I wrote back in the days when I talked and sang about plants to school children.






Do you believe in fairies, who dwell within the wood?

They're very real, I promise you, and if you don't you should.

They have their parties with the moon when people are abed

They laugh and sing and drink the dew, the mushrooms are their bread.

But when the round and honest sun peeks o'er the hills at dawn

He find a field of sleepy cows, for all the elves have gone.

But once he caught them unaware - they'd had a rowdy night.

Their tiny gray-green drinking cups were scattered left and right.

And some had left their red wool caps behind among the moss.

When they got back to fairyland I'm sure the queen was cross.

So do believe in fairytales and never doubt yourselves,

Though all you'll find will be the signs, and not the elves themselves.

Tribute to the Sun

         

Oh, dear, the end of Daylight Saving always makes me feel as gloomy as a kid sent to bed without dessert. How bleak and colorless my perennial border looks as we say farewell to summer. I think I'm one of those people who go into a decline when deprived of sunlight. I've never been diagnosed with the syndrome known as Seasonal Affective Disorder (its wonderfully appropriate acronym is SAD) but supposedly it can be cured by sitting in front of fluorescent light tubes which emit the full spectrum of light found in sunshine.

I'm too cheap to buy one of these sun boxes, but by December 26th, the day with the year's least sunlight, I always wish I had. In January the sun's rays offer us nothing but bleak cheerless light as cold as moonlight, and by February that golden globe in the sky isn't much better, too weak to defrost an icicle. Finally things begin to look up in March. Even with temperatures hovering in the teens, the sun takes on the characteristics of a good kindergarten teacher, preparing the ground for spring growth, waking up the pussy willows, luring snowdrops into bloom and convincing masses of scilla to paint the landscape in a sea of blue.



                                   


Mother Nature and her sun perform all these miracles. Even those drab little gray birds that argue with each other at the thistle feeder all winter are magically turning back into goldfinches. I don't see how they manage that, do you? Are their feathers getting a sort of sunburn as spring returns, the way we humans get a tan as we work outside?

By summer the sun is not so benign. It can blister and shrivel anything it sets its eye on. Unprotected plants wither as it sucks moisture from their leaves and dries out the soil around their roots. In autumn the sun loses its power quickly, but because the earth has absorbed its heat for many months, it takes a suprising amount of time to lose it.

The sun is as vital an ingredient in making a garden as thread is in sewing a slipcover. Whether you're growing perennials, annuals, vegetables, shade-loving wildflowers or heat-loving cacti, you need sunlight. When you start planning next year's gardens, think about how and where and when the sun's rays will fall. Trees and shrubs that are too close on either the east or west side of a garden will create much longer shadows than those on the north or south.

The closer land is to the equator, the more vertical will be the light falling on the land. In the tropics where the sun shines down from directly overhead and vanishes in seconds at the end of the day, its light offers a dazzling brightness. It is often so brilliant that it destroys colors, turning the sky white and plants into mere black silhouettes. Such vertical sunlight creates small dark pools of shade beneath trees and shrubs, and highlights all perpendicular surfaces, sparkles the waves on water and accents the shadowed crevices in stone walls.

Our summer sunlight in New England comes from closer to the horizon, offering a more angled light. Even on June 21st, when the sun reaches its highest point in crossing the sky, its angle over New England is nowhere near 90 degrees. It's only about 45. As the sun reaches the equinox, its angle is even more acute, and by the winter solstice, a mere sliver. The shadows of our locust trees stretch all the way across the sheep pasture as we head into winter.

Before planting a landscape, it makes sense to think about the affects of sunlight and shadow on the area. When the air is moist, the sun gives a soft, filtering light which picks out the details and colors of plants. It creates patterns of foliage and slowly lengthening shadows as evening falls, and offers backlighting as it moves across the sky.

Sunlight can make an area warm and cheerful or dry and withering. It will turn the water in a birdbath silver or black, put diamond sparkles into the ripples of moving water. Lack of sunshine can mean a cool retreat or a dark cold corner. Having a sheltered spot which stays shady through the hot summer is as important as having one that is protected from wind and receives sunlight all winter. I wish I had a warm protected spot like that to cheer up the months ahead. Alas, the winter wind usually blows wickedly on Locust Hill.



                                  


Dear me! I didn't mean to write such a cheerless column. I wouldn't dream of moving to a warmer climate. I love the changing seasons and the infinite variety of New England's weather. The January thaw is such a treat, and seeing the soft pink of quince, one of the first harbingers of April. I don’t mind the August heat when the sweat runs into my eyes as I work in the garden, and of course who couldn’t love the fantastic display of colors as Autumn turns the leaves and gives us that little reprieve of Indian Summer. I even like the purity of a blanket of snow covering the earth when I curl up with the latest seed catalogs.

Lots of good things happen in New England, don’t they?

Quack Grass - Not for Ducks

                                       

     Believe it or not, the photo above is what my asparagus bed looked like this spring - a nightmare of very healthy quack grass. It was so thick that I couldn't find any asparagus until the stalks became inedible ferny little trees. The two raspberry beds looked equally horrible, another sea of quack grass.
     We planted both the asparagus and the raspberries in 1982 and for almost 30 years we mulched them with hay bales each fall. In early spring when I harvested the asparagus, I would pull the few bits of quack grass which appeared. This year the sight of all that wretched grass filling the beds was as upsetting as discovering a dozen snakes in the compost pile. How was I going to get rid of that grass without killing my lovely asparagus and raspberry bushes?
     I like to think of myself as an organic gardener, and do not like using chemicals, but I"m no purist and am willing to make exceptions when there's no alternative. Nowadays there are dozens of chemical products on the market to help gardeners solve vegetation problems, many of them selective, which means they only kill specific types of vegetation.
     Since we have a major problem with multiflora roses in our pastures, we use Crossbow, which kills these thorny monsters without harming the grass beneath them. Grass-be-Gone is another selective chemical, which obviously kills grass, but does not harm broad-leaved vegetation. GroundClear is a chemical used on driveways or similar areas that kills everything in sight and out of sight, as it poisons the soil and all vegetation for up to a year. Round-up is a systemic that is applied to undersirable vegetation. It travels down from the sprayed plant and kills the root but does not poison the soil.
     Quack grass, like a dozen other types of vegetation, clearly adored the combination of warmth and rain that spurred their growth these last two years. Being totally ignorant of how to solve the problem, I took the photo of my aspargus bed and went to see Crop Production Services in Amenia, NY. , the outfit that sells us Crossbow. They were extremely helpful, giving me explicit directions on how to treat the asparagus bed.
     "In the fall when the aspargus has finished growing, mow down the bed. When the new quack grass appears, spray the entire bed with Round-up, the systemic poison that kills whatever vegetation it covers by traveling down to the roots, but does not harm the soil. Just make sure all the asparagus is gone."
     And the raspberry beds? I actually was so concerned about the asparagus, I forgot to ask, but as the summer progressed the quack grass in the raspberries began to look very thick and healthy, and the raspberries started looking sick.
     Raspberries are biennials. Their first year they just come up. The second year they bloom, have berries and die. These dead stalks should be removed and only two or three new young stalks should be left on each plant. Since I couldn't do anything about the asparagus until late Stepember at the earliest, I decided to tackle the first raspberry bed at the end of August. I uprooted huge hunks of quack grass and old hay and cut down the summer's dead raspberry canes, filling the pick-up truck to overflowering 3 times.
     It was an exhausting job and I wasn't done. Within a week green blades of quack grass began to appear. I sprayed them with Round-up, carefully protecting the raspberries. I did this once a week. Then my wonderful yard man, Steve, brought a truckload of wood chips from the town dump and spread them on the bed.

                                      

     By the time we were done I just couldn't face the second bed. Why did I need two beds anyway? Steve took the cycle bar mower and cut down all the raspberries in the second bed. Then I took a trowel and dug up all their roots. Then I weeded, raked, seeded the bed with nice grass seed, watered and took a picture! There's no sign of new grass yet, but I plan to save the rest of this story for sometime next spring, including the success or failure of the asparagus bed.

Let's Elect Some Annuals

        Who can think about anything besides the coming election? I can't wait to see how many greedy congressmen lose their jobs.  I suppose the current crop of congressmen is no worse than previous incumbents but because I have a subscription to  the Wall Street Journal, I read about the latest political horrors every day.
         I wrote a column back in 1990 at election time reporting that Congress had just raised the legislative budget 16%, which included $33 million to pay for the previous year's franked mail.  I looked up the word "frank" and found "a pigsty, also the fattening of animals."  Perfect!  Franked mail could certainly be classified as pork!
        Politics hasn't much to do with gardening, but I'll see if I can weave a few flowers  into this column.  What comes to mind are all the new faces that I'm  hoping will appear in  the House and Senate come January.  I guess these freshmen could be compared to annuals, plunked down in a well-established bed of perennials.
        A flower bed full of perennials usually doesn't guarantee a riot of color all summer.  To have constant bloom, it needs annuals, the same way Congress needs new representatives.  Adding little mounds of white allysum, clusters of snapdragons or a sprawl of petunias to the front of a border promises blossoms from June through September, and with global warming, right through October. 
        These tender seedlings need help before being installed among the established perennials.   They must struggle in their race for space. Like freshmen congressment, newly planted annuals can be totally intimidated by the plants that have been soaking up the garden's perks for years.  If their roots have been cramped in a nursery container all spring, those roots need to be loosened and spread before planting.
        Most garden books refer to annuals as bedding plants.  I wasn't sure why so I looked up "bedding" in Webster's.  Obviously annuals are not bed clothes or material for animals to sleep on.  How about "something that forms a foundation or bottom layer"  since they're usually planted at the front of a flower bed.
       There is a huge selection of annuals to choose from as far as color and size, but I'm ashamed to say the ones I listed above are the ones this unimaginative gardener usually chooses.  White petunias planted at the front of a border show up through rain and fog and even as night falls in the garden.  They bloom all summer long if they're dead-headed frequently.
        Pansies don't last that long, even when dead-headed, but their little faces are so appealing I always grow a few in the Abitta garden.  Dusty Miller, that small gray plant with lacy leaves that makes a nice contrast to other annuals, doesn't require dead-heading as it doesn't set seeds.
        Oh, dear, my comparison of annuals and newly installed congressmen doesn't work very well with dead-heading.  I'd hate to see those freshmen ostracized if they were producing sparkling new legislation.  What an unattractive term "dead-heading" is!  But  it really is an important garden chore.  All plants have one big aim in life - to produce seeds.  If we bother to remove the spent flowers on our annuals before they manage this feat, the plants will continue to  flower, determined to succeed in producing the next generation.
        "Do as I say, not as I do," a motto my husband said often.  The petunias in my photo were never dead-headed, but despite that fact they are still blooming.  Their stems, lined with seeds,  extend for close to a foot in all directions.  Of course this has been a crazy summer when every sort of vegetation has had enormous growth, not just petunias.  Did you grow cleomes this year?  Also known as spider plant, these are one of the few tall annuals.  Mine reached six feet by August, but then fell over, probably for lack of water. 
        I just pulled a book off my library shelf I didn't know I owned, "All about Annuals."  It must include well over 200 plants. You would certainly have learned more about new and unusual annuals if I'd found it sooner.    I usually try to include a few helpful garden hints or fresh ideas in my columns, but I had too much fun playing with my election metaphores.
                                                      DONT FORGET TO VOTE!

End of Summer Thoughts

I’ve just been going through my Website’s Archives to see what columns I’ve already written about Autumn -  fall chores, Jack Frost, turning leaves, October’s flowers,  and a half dozen other appropriate subjects. I seem to have covered every aspect of what gardeners go through at this time of year.  Since I’ve been writing garden columns since 1982, I suppose that isn’t too surprising, but it does present a problem – what new and different feature of October can I write about that won’t be a repeat of an old column?

            As I reread some of those earlier columns, however, I found that I hardly remembered most of them, so why should you?  And since a gardener’s summer varies from year to year depending on the weather, I’m going to stop worrying and give you a review of Locust Hill’s  2010 vegetable garden.

            Talk about weather!  Global warming certainly turned New England into one hot summer, and every sort of vegetation grew fast and furiously, didn’t it?  Having ripe tomatoes in mid-July was a delicious treat. And no tomato blight to ruin the harvest. That warm weather turned everything in my vegetable garden to speed demons, which was both good and bad.  The peas climbed up the fence and toppled over to start down the other side. I’d much rather have had them put their energy into the peas. They had hardly any flavor at all.

The same sort of problem was caused by my string beans.  I planted a row of bush beans right between a row of onions and a row of radishes as I usually do.  A few weeks after they appeared they stopped sitting up and began looking around for their poles, at least that’s what it looked like. Did I buy pole beans instead of bush beans?? No, the packet of seeds had “BUSH BEANS” in large letters.  Stupid seed company!

I did not want pole beans shading my radishes and onions.  But what’s a gardener to do?  I gave each plant a pole to climb. I also gave each plant a demonstration of how to wind itself around the pole and climb. Not one plant took my advice. In a week they were sprawled over the ground and smothering my radishes. Obviously they were bush beans gone wild with the heat. They produced an adequate crop of beans, just a bit muddy from lying in the dirt.  Fortunately they left my onion row alone. As for the radishes, I planted another row in a safer spot.

The rest of my vegetables behaved normally.  As usual the zucchinis got as big as Goldie, the goldfish I wrote about in my last dozen cantaloupes column, before I could harvest them. I had two-foot long cucumbers, a crop of about a dozen canteloupe that were quite tasteless, three planting of delicious lettuce, and a row of zinnias that were really spectacular

Here it is almost the 10^th of October and still no frost.  I guess that’s another affect of global warming. I suspect it will be well worth covering tender crops for that first frost because it will probably be followed by many weeks of warm weather.  Predicting when or whether a frost will hit is tricky even for the weather man.  He probably uses the dew point to help him. The whys and wherefores of the evening dews and damps and that thing called a dew point can be pretty confusing, but very helpful in predicting frost. Dew is the result of water condensation.  As air cools it is able to hold less and less water vapor.  When it can hold no more, the water vapor condenses forming dew, and the temperature at that exact moment is the dew point.

When dew forms it releases energy and that energy keeps the temperature near the ground at the same level as the dew point.  Therefore if the dew point is hovering in the low 30s, prepare for frost.  If the humidity is high, so is the dew point. A night of dry air, no wind and clear skies indicates a low dew point and you'd be wise to cover all the tender vegetables with blankets or buckets. 

A Double Day Lily Bed

      There are lots of flowers I like better than daylilies, but I have to admit they have some sterling qualities. The plants last for many years and produce new flowers every day for many weeks; they adapt easily to that magical formula - divide to multiply. And best of all, they rarely need to be weeded. With all these attributes, daylilies were what I chose last year when I decided I needed a flowerbed I could see from the terrace at the front of the house.
      I have a perennial border that stretches 100 feet in front of the sheep pasture's split-rail fence, but it can't be seen from the terrace where we spend much of our time. I wanted another flowerbed to weed about as much as I craved an aching back, but the idea of looking across the pond at a colorful display of blooms overcame my common sense. Fortunately preparing the bed was surprisingly easy since the bank on that side of the pond, unlike most areas of Locust Hill, contained no stones or nasty clay soil. It was made up of the excess sand we'd used as a base when we built the pond.
      The field grasses that grew on the bank had very little to hang onto and I was able uproot them with ease. The half-dozen clumps of daffodils I'd planted there in previous years (rarely noticed as they bloomed when it was usually too cold to eat on the terrace) I left in place. In fact by the time I started planting the daylilies, I'd forgotten the daffodils were there, and periodically found myself running into them as I dug my holes.
      I had several common lemon lilies in the perennial border that I divided to make a start on the new flowerbed, and my friend Angie gave me some she'd divided, but I wanted a few really exotic daylilies as well. I waited patiently - no, impatiently - for July when Gerald Hardy has his yearly daylily sale in Falls Village.
      The Hardy daylily gardens on Sugar Hill Road are something to see - two solid acres of daylilies showing off their colors is quite a sight. Mr. Hardy and his wife Marilyn have been raising daylilies for 25 years. They hybridize over 1000 plants from seed each year, producing many unusual and beautiful new varieties. This year's sale has started and will go on until August 17th - Thursday through Sunday, 9-5.
      When I went to buy my daylilies, I kept going round and round trying to make up my mind which ones to choose. Most are sold by the "fan", so a large plant with three or four fans is far more expensive than one with a single fan. There are also very reasonably priced lilies for landscaping. I bought three fancy hybrids, each with only a single fan, and three that were large enough so that in only a few years I'd be able to divide and multiply them.
      The bed still looked pretty sparse after I'd planted all these treasures, but I knew that eventually even the beginners would begin to fill in the spaces. In the meantime, however, I knew just what would fill those spaces - weeds. So, having learned that North Canaan's transfer station offers free mulch to anyone in town, Hank and I drove over and watched as an enormous bulldozer scooped up a bucket load of beautiful looking mulch and slowly dumped it into our pickup. Between us, grandson Eli and I spread it on the daylily bed.
      That fall my friend Noreen brought me a dozen Asian lily bulbs. Not having a better place to put them, I planted them in the empty spaces in the new bed. I didn't have a clue as to their colors, so I just hoped they wouldn't clash with the daylilies.
      Nothing is more fun than watching a new garden project come into its own. I could hardly wait to see what sort of display the new bed would make this summer. The Asian lilies were the first to appear. The pinky red ones were so short they could barely be seen. The yellow ones just grew and grew and grew until some were four feet tall before they put forth their huge blossoms.
      A gardener can't expect to get everything just right the first time around. One has to learn about sizes and colors and bloom time in order to arrange the plants artistically. By the time the daylilies began to bloom I knew I had my work cut out for me. Tall plants were hiding short ones; all the yellow blooms seemed to be planted next to each other; the creamy white lily was buried behind a deep maroon one.
      So yesterday I went out to tie up the stems with different colored yarn in preparation for the big rearrangement come fall. Where to start? An hour later I hadn't tied my yarn around a single plant - too busy weeding all the Queen Ann's lace, vetch and bindweed that had happily moved into the bed from the big meadow just beyond the bed. Tonight I'll make a plan and tie up just the ones I need to move.
      By next summer when the youngest plants have grown up and filled out, and the color scheme has improved, the bed should look much better, but in the meantime, I wanted to show you the unexpected pleasure I'm getting this summer. Whenever the wind drops out and the pond becomes as smooth as glass, I have a double flowerbed as all those colorful blossoms are reflected in the mirror of the pond. At dawn one day last week when not a single ripple broke the surface of the water, I caught a photo of the reflected flower bed showing off its colors in the pond.

A Tiny Walled Garden

        I don't like to tell stories I've included in my book, but because today's column is about the Abitta Garden, I really must explain its beginnings.  It was originally a small stone hut built into the side of the cow pasture's hill by a hired man around the turn of the century, who preferred to sleep in this dank, windowless hovel than in the house. Later someone added a cement floor, making the ceiling so low you couldn't stand up inside. We used the building to store garden tools, broken furniture, old tricycles and trash, and it soon became known as the Alotta as it housed such alotta junk.

        One evening as we were eating dinner we heard a loud crash, followed by the frantic bellowing of a cow.  When we rushed out the back door we discovered one of our neighbor's heifers inside the stone hut, thrashing around in the midst of rotted roof beams and alotta junk. Since the building's roof was on a level with the pasture at its back edge, this silly young cow had lumbered onto it and fallen through.  She was too big to get out the door so we spent the next hour pulling down the front wall in order to free her.

        As we started hauling away the debris next morning it suddenly occurred to me that the remains of the Alotta would make a sweet little garden, a space 8 feet by 10 surrounded on three sides by the remaining walls of the hut.  The fact that there was still a cement floor was a minor detail. At least that was my thought, but as it turned out it was major. We not only had to break up the cement with a pick axe, we had to haul away a deep layer of stones from underneath it.

        We filled the resulting hole with dirt and well-rotted manure and rebuilt the front wall into a foot high edging for the garden. By then it was too late to do much else but dream about what I would plant the next spring to turn the Alotta into the Abitta, a tiny walled semi-secret garden.

        Having had little experience in designing a flower garden, my sweet dreams turned into bad ones as I struggled to create the perfect tiny garden. It took four or five years just to figure out that my flagstone path was all wrong. Entering the garden from the front, the flags were laid out in the shape of a cross, an esthetically unpleasing design.  Eventually I came up with a better arrangement, entering the garden from the side and making a curved path that led to the far corner where I placed a small pool I'd made with cement.

        Over the years  I tried many different plants, both annuals and perennials, but I had more failures than successes. I planted phlox in back of the pool, but in that airless corner the leaves were always covered in mildew by July.  I planted pansies, which looked fine in May but were scraggly by June. I put in sweet alyssum, but  these delicate little plants were always smothered by the annual pink poppies that self-seeded by the dozen.

      As you can see, I'm not exagerating.

The garden became a poppy party because

I never even thinned these annuals.  It's

hard to pull up flowers just because they're

growing in the wrong place, so besides the pink poppies other proflagate flowers sent their seeds to join them -  feverfew, Chinese forget-me-nots, columbine, dianthus.

       Despite all these greedy interlopers there were a few successes.  The nice old-fashioned hollyhocks on the back wall in that photograph, managed to keep coming every year, even though they're biennials - new ones replacing the old.   By pure luck I planted two peonies in spots where they looked well.  Daughter Bridget gave me a little machine to make a small fountain in the pool.

        Daughter Trum brought me five different varieties of thyme from Oregon ( plant prices in Oregon are a quarter as much as they are in Connecticut) and helped plant them between the flagstones where they thrived and spread their tight mats of tiny leaves.  And last year I picked just the right places to plant a white lupine and a stately delphinium.

          Take heart all you inexperienced gardeners.  I struggled for more than thirty years  to get the Abitta garden even close to what I'd envisioned as I broke up the cement floor of that hired

man's hut. The Abitta garden is still far from perfect, but each year it gets closer to my dream of what a tiny walled garden should be.