George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Why We Needed Our Gardens More than Ever This Year

November 3rd, 2020

   A surprising twist happened this year on the way to a pandemically doomed gardening season.

Working in the garden seemed more comfort than work this year.

   It actually turned out to be one of the best years ever for plant sales.

   Everybody from seed companies to garden centers to landscapers are reporting banner years – some of them record years.

   It seems that many of us retreated into our yards and took solace in one of the few spots that seemed safe and familiar – our gardens. And we bought a whole lot of plants in the process.

   “Time and time again, we heard people say they were tired of being cooped up, and they wanted to get out and enjoy the outdoors,” said Veto Barziloski, who owns Bennies Nursery in the Wyoming County countryside near Scranton.

   He says fresh air and exercise were only part of the allure, though.

   “Gardening is therapeutic,” Veto says. “I think it’s been a mental and emotional relief for people, too.”

   How true. Gardening is something people turn to whenever the chips are down.

   “If you go back to other times of uncertainty, you generally see an uptick in gardening sales,” says Chris Wallen, a grower at the wholesale Quality Greenhouses near Dillsburg. “This year, it was all over the board. People bought everything.”

   I was talking to David Wilson about this, and he says he’s seen the same thing.

   David has long been the gardener-educating horticulturist for Overdevest Nurseries, which produces the Garden Splendor line of plants. But he grew up and got his career start in Ireland, which back then was frequently rocked by internal terrorism and violence.

   Every time terrorism flared, he says, gardening peaked.

   “When people feel threatened or insecure, they go into the garden more,” Wilson says. “People feel safe in their garden.”

   In the case of COVID-19, people have been reluctant to venture out – and at times have been urged to stay home. The open air and isolation of our own yards seemed like a very good place to be.

Coming Soon: Penn State’s Ambitious New Pollinator and Bird Garden

October 27th, 2020

   A pollinator garden was one of the first gardens built at the fledgling Penn State Arboretum, located at the northern edge of the university’s main campus.

The walks are in as construction continues on Penn State’s new Pollinator and Bird Garden.

   But the new and greatly expanded Pollinator and Bird Garden that’s now under construction is one that Arboretum Director Kim Steiner says will be unlike anything you’ll see anywhere else.

   “Nobody has ever tried to do what we’re going to try to do here, and that is attract every single species of native pollinator in this region,” says Steiner. “And that’s several hundred species of insects.”

   The garden endeavors to do that by recasting the one-time flat and unremarkable site into a new environment that features grade changes, water sources, wetlands, a woodland, a dry meadow, and 90,000 plants of 390 mostly ultra-native species – basically all of the diversity that any Pennsylvania pollinator might want.

   The Pollinator and Bird Garden will cover three acres of the arboretum’s H.O. Smith Botanic Gardens, increasing the size of that display-garden part of the arboretum tract by 60 percent. The original Pollinator Garden is being rolled into it.

   The site has been a beehive of construction activity this month (sorry, couldn’t resist) as crews have been building structures, laying concrete, and moving mountains of dirt.

   The basic framework is now in place, including a large wooden structure that will become a honeybee observation hive.

   Volunteers even planted the first plugs of the 90,000 new plants during the first weekend in September.

   “Bees and butterflies were at work on flowers just 24 hours later, so we can declare the garden an early success!” says Steiner, who’s also a Penn State professor of forest biology.

   Construction will finish this winter with the bulk of planting to happen in spring. And then visitors will get to see what’s been in the planning for a decade and is costing $9 million in private donations to build.

Are We Finally All Yew’d Out?

October 20th, 2020

   Back when so many homes had exposed concrete-block walls, the first order of landscaping business was to plant evergreens the whole way around the foundation.

Nothing but yews of various chopped shapes in this house front.

   The dark-green, hard-to-kill, soft-needled yew bush usually got the assignment.

   Box- and ball-shaped yews are so common around mid- to late-20^th-century Pennsylvania houses that it seems as if building codes must have once mandated them.

   While lots of aging yews still skirt our foundations, I don’t see as many new ones going in.

   For one thing, we have so many other evergreen options these days.

   For another, newer homes often have siding, brick, or ornamental stone walls that go the whole way to the ground, taking away the need to hide anything.

   Or maybe some people just got tired of everybody having yews and are purposely choosing something else for diversity’s sake.

   I wonder, too, if more people aren’t getting the message that yews are toxic.

   While many so-called toxic plants can bring on nausea and similar unpleasant symptoms if you eat them, yews are one of the most truly toxic landscape plants. The foliage and red fruits can kill you – if you can stomach enough of them.

My New Favorite Butterfly Garden

October 13th, 2020

   Even at big public gardens, butterfly gardens tend to be fairly small, blending into the crowd of different themes.

Looking back over one of the ponds in the Holden Butterfly Garden at the visitor center.

   I’ve never seen one with enough wow power to really stand out… certainly not to the point where I left judging a butterfly garden as the best feature in the whole place.

   Then I saw Holden Arboretum’s butterfly garden for the first time early this month.

   Holden Arboretum spans two counties in northeastern Ohio, about a half-hour drive from Cleveland. It’s a sister to the Cleveland Botanical Garden and covers 3,500 acres, although “only” about 200 acres are in cultivated gardens and collections.

   I had heard that Holden was big into rhododendrons and had an interesting canopy walk that runs about 500 feet long through the treetops about 65 feet off the ground.

   There was a Holden Butterfly Garden listed on the map behind the visitor’s center, but even the arboretum’s website didn’t hint at the scope of what was back there.

   Assuming it to be another smallish wildflower collection that was probably well past peak by now, my wife and I skipped it and headed first to the “main attractions” – i.e. the trees, the trails, the canopy walk, the fall displays, the Stickworks willow-sculpture special exhibit, and some really scenic lake views.

   It was a very nice arboretum – better than I was expecting – and no doubt is particularly stunning when the thousands of rhododendrons bloom in May.

   As we were wrapping up the visit, I poked behind the visitor center to see what was left of the season’s butterfly plants.

   “What was left” turned out to be the arboretum’s best feature and the biggest, most amazing butterfly garden I’ve ever seen.

Transplant Shock

October 6th, 2020

   New plants often look like they’re having a near-death experience almost as soon as we put them in the ground.

This recently transplanted clethra is wilting, curling, and losing color.

   They’ll wilt, yellow, turn brown around the leaf edges, and maybe even drop leaves and needles, scaring us into thinking we’ve killed the poor things right off the bat.

   And that sometimes is the case.

   However, more times than not, these alarming symptoms are temporary and a result of a common gardening phenomenon called “transplant shock.”

   Transplant shock is a plant’s way of letting you know it’s not happy about getting evicted from its cozy pot and coddled nursery care and moving into the real world of lousy clay, erratic weather, and iffy watering.

   It’s not an easy transition. Much can go wrong. In fact, other than moving into deer territory, going into the garden is usually the biggest challenge a plant will face.

   We might not be able to completely erase transplant shock, but there’s a lot we can do to minimize it.

   The effort begins at plant-picking time.

   Since we’re generally starting with small plants and limited root systems, it pays to make sure those few roots are as big and healthy as we can find them.

   Way too many plant-shoppers choose based on what they see above ground, i.e. the bigger the canopy or plant size, the better.

   Personally, I’d rather have a plant with a bigger root ball and less top growth than a big plant with a comparatively little root ball.