George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Ultra-Local Native Plants

May 5th, 2015

Gardeners trying to be gentler on the environment and kinder to wildlife have jumped on the native-plant bandwagon big-time the last few years.

Native plants are a hot trend lately. But how local do natives need to be?

The message heard is that natives don’t need to be sprayed, they’re low maintenance, hard to kill, best for pollinators and beneficial insects, and just way more all-around “moral” than growing “foreign” or “exotic” plants.

Let me say first thing that I like most native plants in the garden and think it’s a good trend that people are planting more of them.

For feeding pollinators and beneficials, natives particularly shine (some more so than others, as Penn State’s research is showing).

But natives aren’t wonder plants.

They can – and often do – get bugs and disease. Don’t expect perfection.

They still take some care, even if it’s little more than cutting down spent foliage once a year and managing spread (or lack of it).

And yes, native plants can even die or become invasive. As with any plant, you can’t just plant any native anywhere you want and expect it to thrive, survive and perform perfectly.

Part of why it’s not so simple to just switch to natives and thereby solve ecology’s ailments is the matter of what’s a native in the first place.

A lot of lists for native plants label a species “native” if it’s known to grow naturally anywhere in the United States.

Right off the bat, that’s a problem because this country is so big and has so many differing growing conditions that the term “U.S. native” is almost meaningless.

Good luck growing an Alaska-native heartleaf arnica or a Florida-native palmetto palm in your back yard.

If your goal is a plant that’ll thrive under minimal care, you’d have better luck with plants native to, say, Germany, parts of Korea or China, and other regions with similar climates.

Part of the problem with assigning native status is that maps are artificial boundaries… changing with time and decided by people.

That always makes me wonder what we’d do if, for example, the French had never sold Jefferson the Louisiana Territory. Instead of purple coneflowers being considered a native perennial, would we consider this Midwest prairie species to be a French exotic?

Or what if the South had won the Civil War? Would our much-touted “native” oakleaf hydrangea be considered a foreign exotic?

That leads to the question of how local a plant has to be before it’s a meaningful native, one that’s truly adapted to our climate and soil and one useful to our local pollinators, birds, butterflies and such.

The Author’s and the Artist’s Gardens

April 28th, 2015

Stephanie Cohen is the feisty planter and prolific author of all species perennial.

Stephanie Cohen, right, talking to a fellow plant-lover.

Seward Johnson is an 84-year-old artist who’s sort of the Norman Rockwell of sculpture.

The common denominator is that both have interesting gardens that you’ll be able to see on my next Lowee’s Group Tours day trip scheduled for Fri., June 26.

We’ll begin the day with a visit to Stephanie’s 2-acre suburban Montgomery County yard.

Starting with little more than a Norway maple and a collection of typical green-meatball shrubs 17 years ago, the “Perennial Diva,” as she’s fondly called, turned her landscape into a plant geek’s nirvana.

The place features perennial borders along the entire front, a four-square herb garden, a native-plant meadow, and multiple outdoor garden rooms crisscrossed by pea-gravel paths and picket fencing.

Perennial-lovers will especially enjoy this place. You’ll find some of the latest, greatest varieties as well as species few people grow, such as the yellow-flowering phlomis – a tiered bloomer that looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.

But Stephanie also likes woody plants, and she’s planted a fine collection of the latest, greatest tree and shrub varieties.

You’ll come away with lots of plants-to-try ideas as well as the inspiration of Stephanie’s contagious spirited personality.

The “vertically challenged” diva calls her garden “Shortwood.” She says she went with that name because “Longwood” already was taken.

Good Enough Grass

April 21st, 2015

Roger Swain wielding a lawn sprinkler at the 2011 Pa. Garden Expo.

As the grass greens on another growing season, many a homeowner (especially of the male persuasian) will spring into action with crabgrass preventer, Step 1 fertilizer, mowers galore and the rest of the “good-homeowner” lawn regimen.

People sink a lot of time, energy and cash into that perfect outdoor green carpet.  But a brewing trend is a noticeable bump in the number of people questioning whether all of this is a sensible goal.

One of them is Roger Swain, the red-suspendered former long-time host of TV’s The Victory Garden, who gave an interesting talk on this topic at the 2011 Pennsylvania Garden Expo.

Swain isn’t an anti-grass guy. He just thinks we can do with less of it and with grass that’s “good enough” instead of perfect.

So he came up with what he dubbed “Roger Swain’s 12-Step Plan for the Lazy Lawn-Care Gardener.”

“You won’t win any points from the golf-course manager,” he says. But neither will you get voted out of the subdivision.

Here’s the plan:

1.) Be kind to your mower. “Get your mower out of the garage now,” Swain says. “Try starting it. If it doesn’t fire up now, it’s not going to run in May. But by then the lines at the repair shop will be much longer.”

2.) Be good to your gas. One of the main reasons mowers don’t start in spring is because you left gas in the tank, and it gunked up over winter.

“Run it dry at the end of the year,” Swain says. “Then every time you buy gasoline, add gasoline stabilizer. Put it right into the can. Use 1 ounce for every 2 ½ gallons of gas. It keeps gas from going bad.”

3.) Mind your ears. Swain recommends ear guards for anyone using a power mower.

“Mowing equipment is loud enough to damage your hearing,” he says. “You’ll look stupid, but at least people will see that you can’t hear them.”

Put Some Buzz in Your Landscape by Helping Pollinators

April 14th, 2015

Somewhere along the road of growing up, many – if not most – children learn that bees are evil buzzing creatures that will sting you if given half a chance.

A bee is hard at work pollinating this butterfly milkweed.

They’re pests to be swatted, certainly not to be welcomed or even tolerated in any civilized back yard.

So over the past two or three generations, humans have done an effective job at knocking back bee populations, not to mention many other bugs that dare to fly or crawl around our roses and azaleas.

It turns out our yard-sanitizing efficiency may be coming back to bite us instead of sting us.

Bee, butterfly and other pollinator populations have dwindled to the point where it’s starting to threaten food production and the prices tied to that.

Even at home, gardeners are starting to notice fewer berries on their ornamental plants and slimmer yields of tomatoes, cucumbers, blueberries and squash.

“I don’t believe the average person knows that moths, flies and native bees play a major role in pollination or the welfare of our ecosystem,” says Connie Schmotzer, a York County Extension educator who also works with Penn State University’s Center for Pollinator Research. “Getting folks to understand that very few insects do economic damage is difficult, especially in the face of the pesticide advertising out there.”

On the flip side, she cites research showing that one out of every three bites of food we eat can be traced to the work of pollinators.

Some of the pollinators’ plight is the result of the rampant roadside and backyard spraying we’ve been doing since World War II.

But loss of habitat is at least as big of a factor.

According to Monarch Watch, a non-profit organization set up to protect the monarch butterfly, up to 6,000 acres of U.S. land per day is converted to development.

That means acreage the size of Yellowstone National Park each year is changing from forests and meadows to office buildings, roads, parking lots and housing developments.

Even most home landscapes are of little value to pollinators because they’re heavily planted in lawn (with bee-attracting clover killed off) and in a relative few non-native plants (which pollinators can’t or won’t eat).

Watch George Squirm on TV

April 7th, 2015

I was zipping along fairly well talking about Pennsylvania plants and my new book for the April 12 edition of the hour-long “PA Books” program on the PCN cable network.

PCN’s “Pa. Books” program airs every Sunday evening. I’m on the hot seat April 12, 2015.

Then host Brian Lockman hit a question that blanked me.

What do you do in that situation?

Say, “I have no clue,” and look stupid?

Or make something up, figuring most people aren’t going to know anyway?

Or take the politician route and try to dance around the whole thing?

I went with Door No. 3 – kind of.

If you’d like to see what baffled me and how I fumbled around this stump-the-chump moment, tune in to the videotaped version that PCN posts on its website for about a month after the airing.  You can also download an audio podcast of the show for free through the Itunes store.

I’m not on TV all that much and never have been interviewed for that long. I’m usually on the other end of the questions.

PCN’s Director of Programming Francine Schertzer invited me to be on the show, which involves in-depth interviews each Sunday evening with authors of Pennsylvania-related books.

The cover of my first gardening book, the “Pennsylvania Getting Started Garden Guide” on the 170 best plants for Pennsylvania yards.

My new “Pennsylvania Getting Started Garden Guide,” which is primarily a best-plants-for-Pennsylvania book, qualified.

Although the show is taped ahead of time in PCN’s Trindle Road studio near the Camp Hill/Hampden Twp. line, it’s a live format. When the camera comes on, you go an hour straight with no breaks, no cuts, and no re-do’s.

You go into this studio with a stage and two chairs and a remote-control camera pointing at you with a bookcase in the background behind.

Brian didn’t give me any clue ahead of time what he was going to ask, although I did see a rather lengthy note sheet on the table beside him.

After a couple of minutes of getting acquainted, the camera turned on and we were rolling.

I fielded some easy questions about how I got started in gardening and a few of the peculiar “challenges” we Pennsylvania gardeners face.

Brian kept peppering away about invasives and favorite plants and such, and I even did pretty well when he said, “So I could just pick a random plant out of your book and you could tell me all about it?” (I passed the test three different times.)

But after I happened to mention that overly aggressive and commonly used non-native plants can elbow some of our natives out the way, Brian asked for a few examples of natives that are endangered.

That’s when my eyes pointed upward, as if I was hoping the answer would somehow be written on the PCN ceiling.