George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

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.

I’ll Take the Smaller One, Please

September 29th, 2020

   I’ve planted 11 trees at my new place in the last year and a half, and in every case, I bought small ones.

This weeping beech is little now, but it’ll transform into a beauty year by year.

   Small as in ones in the four- to six-foot-tall range as opposed to the bigger ones that many nurseries also offer.

   I mention this because it’s a question I often get – “Which size tree should I buy?”

   Nurseries and garden centers will tell you that tree shoppers often ask for the biggest and fastest-growing trees, saying something like, “I’ll be dead before I see a little one amount to anything.”

   Fast-growers might throw out more shade than average- and slow-growers, but they also too often keep going to the point where they outgrow the space. And they do so at the expense of more brittle and less dense wood in exchange for the speedy growth.

   Unfortunately,  you can’t hit a pause or stop button on those fast-growers once the size is just right.

   As for the size at buying time, numerous studies have found that smaller trees establish faster and usually match or surpass the size of the larger one, sometimes in as little as three years, according to a 2016 study at Texas A&M University.

   That’s because large trees are generally field-grown ones that lose one-third to nearly one-half of their root systems when being dug and wrapped in burlap for transport.

   Those trees tend to lag in growth until their root systems recover enough for the tree to invest energy in producing more and longer branches and more water-hungry foliage. They need to fortify their roots first.

Gardening in the New Climate

September 22nd, 2020

   For better or worse (mostly for worse), it’s time to rethink how we garden in our new and changing climate conditions.

Get used to summer landscapes that look like this.

   This summer served up a model for what climate researchers and horticulturists say we should get used to in the coming years – warmer winters, earlier springs, hotter/drier summers, increasingly erratic changes in temperature, and more weather extremes that alternate between ever-heavier rain dumpings and “flash droughts.”

   All of these affect our plants and how we garden. And they’re getting hard to write off as occasional abnormalities.

   I’m convinced we’re moving into a “new normal” that involves more than just getting used to warmer temperatures or planting more crape myrtles, nandinas, and other “southern” heat-lovers.

   Nature is complicated. It’s so interconnected that even small changes in one facet can cause a ripple effect of changes throughout others.

   I first noticed something was up about 20 years ago when a sugar maple in my front yard started growing smaller leaves than normal and lost its former fullness and vibrant fall color. The following fall it started leaning, and the next spring, it never leafed out at all. It just died.

   There were no bugs, no disease, and no obvious explanation… until I read that Longwood Gardens was seeing the same problem and attributing it to increased heat.

   Sugar maple is just one species that’s on the southern edge of its climate range here. As our climate becomes more like what Baltimore’s used to be, cool-preferring species are running into increasing trouble.

   It’s behind why we’re losing so many Colorado blue spruces and why so many Japanese maples are struggling lately.

   We’ll save a lot of money avoiding future plant deaths if we’re aware of the changes and base our plant-picking decisions on the coming climate.

Good Tree Goes Rogue

September 16th, 2020

   This is a classic tale of a good guy turned bad… except the star is a tree instead of a movie villain.

These callery pears have seeded into an untended roadside bank in Hampden Twp.

   It’s about the ornamental or “callery” pear, that hard-to-kill spring beauty that blooms white in yards, parking lots, and along streets all over Pennsylvania and beyond.

   When it came to market in the 1950s as a cultivar named ‘Bradford,’ the tree sounded like a wunderplant.

   It bloomed profusely in spring, then turned an equally stunning glossy blood-red in fall.

   It grew in lousy soil, grew fast, hardly ever ran into bugs or disease, and didn’t produce fruits that would make patios, streets, and sidewalks “messy.”

   No wonder people planted them everywhere.

   Then by the 1970s, the first chink in this tree’s armor started appearing.

   It turned out that as ‘Bradfords’ aged, their wood became brittle. Trees were soon notorious for cracking apart in storms.

Read George’s article on “Muscle Trees” that are strongest in storms

   No problem. Breeders got to work developing new cultivars that were stronger-limbed alternatives with the same prolific spring blooms, brilliant fall foliage, and can’t-kill-me attitude.

   Cultivars such as ‘Aristocrat,’ ‘Cleveland Select’ (a.k.a. Chanticleer), and ‘Redspire’ became the new choices in the growing callery pear family. (The species, Pyrus calleryana, was named after the French missionary Joseph Callery, who discovered it in Asia in 1858.)

   Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of this roguish story.