City House Country House

When I lived in NYC, which has been most of my adult life, there was gardening to talk about. This may have been due to how little gardening was truly going on. There was time for talk, for idle thoughts, for chit chat. There was standing on the corner, taking waves and how you doin', little to the garden footprint but such large human imprint. There were complaints that people could relate to (really, diapers on the hydrangea, again?). Glitter faced prostitutes offering assistance, Russian emigres with effortless tongues, kids who saw onions in tulip bulbs, landlords with teeth to gnash, unskilled laborers who knew how to dance in a garden, familiar weeds, oceans and peas, garlic and sand, and the sticky, salted skin when the onshore turned in for the evening. There were myriad plots across countless yards, tree pits, sidewalk strips, and undeveloped dreams. People have a passion for growing things in the city because the passion is on parade, is persistently evident from the walk to the subway, from overtures to our agrarian past on highrise rooftops to the panacea of the hyper-local, from the artist-led food garden to that curious moment when enthusiasm ran wildly into a business growing food in your backyard. The city a counterpose to the garden, an architecture for the gardening posture, a context that convinces us that a garden is the cure when it is merely a salve.

I now garden in a different context, one that is younger to the white man, but has seen its share of rapaciousness. With enough trees around even I can convince myself that my place is not an island in a sea of suburban plant homogeneity and millions of acres of either corn or soy. The optimist will extend the metaphor to an archipelago, but little more. To garden on the scale of fifteen, even thirty acres is an arrogance, and so me at my most arrogant goes about gardening the woods, weeding the woods, fretting over the rising and falling water levels in various swamps and wetlands, watching opportunistic plants move rapidly into space available, making plans and haphazardly executing them. This is to say nothing of the vegetable growing, the cultivated gardens or lawn and shrubbery that make up much of the country house.

Despite all that is going on, all that there is left to do, I have come to accept that there is not much time to talk about it. Exposition is the garden work of the city house.

In defiance of this conceit, I offer a picture of the country house -its autumnal prairie-ish planting east and north of the studio. Now in its second summer, many new plants have begun to mature. The pollinating and predatory insects love it, although the birds enjoy the much simpler savanna-ish planting on the building's south side. The deer all too much love the woodland planting on the west side of the building, now under revision. 

This week I'm in the middle of expanding the prairie-ish as I restore our one thousand foot gravel driveway, a process that includes digging drainage swales alongside the drive, loose soil slopes covered in burlap, winter seeding and fall planting of woodland natives I'd started last spring, moving boulders to shore up one or two hundred square feet of new cultivated garden space, and a whole hell of a lot of 3/4" minus crushed red limestone spread by myself in a track loader that will then be compacted by Betsy with a vibratory plate.

It's Not All Bad

 I mean, look at that Bok Choy, only 3 weeks old from seed.

 More cukes from four plants than we can handle.

 Herbs, herbs, herbs.

And the savanna prairie is coming together -all this from seed scattered in the icy depth of winter.

A Prelude to the Understory

After two full seasons of intensive looking, I still find unfamiliar plants. Sometimes I photograph, sometimes I pluck a specimen (depends on the quantity). A fraction of those make it to the concentrated search for identification. Of course, identifying a plant isn't always remembering it, and that takes something more: a drawing perhaps, a meal, maybe, or some other triangulation of anchoring interactions that commits a new identity to memory.

Mosquitoes in the dark and damp woods can make any phone photographer's shot a blur. When in doubt and plenty, pluck a branch, preferably in flower. If you can get to it quickly, bring the pluckling to your computer. If you can't, photograph it on the hood of a car, and get to it later. Here, a plant that beguiled me through the garlic mustard harvest. I now know it as Canadian Wood Nettle, Laportea canadensis.

Above, a plant that must've been easier to miss across prior years in a dark woods. Now, freed from other obsessions, I saw it everywhere, understory. It's form is suggestive of both invasive species and Eastern Forest native, a counter distinction to the many invasive forbs that to a degree appear "out of place" in our woods. Awareness of such differences is both a product of experience within the Eastern Forest, but also a diminished plant blindness.

This "new" plant was challenging due to its small white or maybe green-yellow flowers, its casual umbell, and my age-induced farsightedness. The umbell, trifoliated habit, and seed tipped identification toward an anxiety-producing, naturalized reversion of Aegopodium podagraria, goutweed or bishop's weed to you and me. We have two large colonies of goutweed on the southern slope, but something wasn't quite right about this ID. I had to dig deeper. I had to zoom closely on the seeds, had to engage with leaf sheaths, and most importantly, I had to learn to see double serrated leaves. Those cues in hand I was able to find this plant's true identity: Canadian Honewort, Cryptotaenia canadensis. Why this subtle plant has a name composed of "hidden" and "tapeworm," I do not want to discover.

Sedges fill a minor savanna between the road to the east and the house to the west, the little wetland and great wetland bounding it on the north and south sides. Oaks used to dominate this dry mound, but basswood and maple are encroaching.

Oaks die or fall in storm winds, as this large one had two summers back. The oaks, when dominant, create a canopy pierced by sunlight, an environment the sugar maples do not provide. The understory is complex; already colonized by sedge, ephemerals, and a lower dose of garlic mustard than is typical in more moist, down-slope locations. Maybe the clearing's relative isolation has allowed more native species to proliferate than in other tree-fall clearings nearer the house and adjacent, cultivated properties.

I was overjoyed to spot a strongly growing specimen of poke milkweed, Asclepias exaltata, a foot from the fallen oak. I tray-planted 50 seeds of this less common milkweed last year. Only six sprouted, then five took faint hold along the edge of our septic field; five that have since been moved to the new, mostly shady clearing behind the studio. I've decided that poke is not as easily grown as swamp or common milkweed, but it is the only milkweed common to shadier, woodland locations, and I'd like to have some growing out there. Maybe I will try again, next year.

Although I intended to keep the mound of fallen oak and poke milkweed clear, time and garlic mustard always seem to get away from me. Askance of plans, among mosquitoes excited by a coming storm, a moment was wedged to clear any observable, green seedpod-bearing garlic mustard. As the lightning became daylight visible and thunder claps louder, I decided to discontinue what is always an ever expanding circumference of mustard weeding. Today, nearly all remaining second year garlic mustard is yellow fading into beige. Seeds by the thousands are lined up for distribution on sites already occupied by thousands more. If a rift in time should open, I will get into the woods, shod in mosquito net cap, to clip and bag the drying stems from areas newly colonized.

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I spend a fair amount of time identifying plants: weeds, natives, and cultivated for myself as well as others. Texts roll in with pictures of pokeweed or Fallopia japonica, multiflora rose and daylily. Most pictured plants are easy to identify because most are coming from yards carved out of the Eastern Forest. In them are cultivated plants or common weed species of Eurasian provenance. In making yards -clearings designed to lessen our work (ha!), lower our exposure to pests, and provide a platform for leisure, we offer opportunity to ambitious plants.

In the process of putting up our studio building, I created about two thousand square feet of opportunity. The area is now covered in subgrade clay over topsoil because when we dig, what is beneath ends up on top. Many desirable plants won't flourish in this subgrade soil, but the adventitious do. Given my positive experience growing native milkweed, I ventured to grow several native plants for the sunnier part of our studio clearing before the weeds take hold.

I imagined a medium height grass and forb savanna underneath the tall basswood on the south side of the building and under the red oak on the north east corner. I winter seeded Prairie Moon's short grass inexpensive seed mix and savanna enhancement mix, both of which had some species from their exposed clay mix. Sowing seeds felt like leaving too much to chance, so I also stratified hundreds of individual species seeds through winter, then cell tray planted them in April. But, an unexpected hot greenhouse day in early May boiled many of my seeds laying patiently under their moisture-preserving cellophane wrap. Most were lost, although some did sprout near the cooler edges, and those are now large enough to be potted up.

Growing native plants from seed is not always easy. Cultivated plants have been bred and selected for viability, commercial or otherwise. Natives, however, maintain their original, sometimes fussy seed-sprouting needs. Multiply cold, heat, or cold and heat by time, then add light or darkness, subtract or add moisture, and you may have a formula that produces a native sprout. I have several more young native plants to pot up, and at least 50 clumps of grasses (mostly blue grama, side oats grama, but also a few rattlesnake and prairie brome) in need of the same. Before planting these in their final places in mid to late August, I will till in a portion of the ten cubic yards of compost mix we had delivered last month. This may give the native plants a fighting chance among the highly competitive weeds.

Some of the remaining compost will make it into raised planters I have been building. Below is one of two I have placed around my already growing potatoes -the only vegetables I got in on time this year. As they grow, I have been adding compost mix. When all is done, there will be eight raised beds, a prospect I am quite happy about. Two years of growing vegetables in beds surrounded by the lawn and excessive summer rains have led to lawn that is nearly seventy five percent creeping charlie. The other twenty five is clover that co-existed nicely with the grass. Raised beds will be easier to work, weed, plant and harvest, but most of all I appreciate the architectural structure they add to the vegetable garden on a small front lawn (of creeping charlie). For all my interest in wild-ish native planting, I still like the perception of order in the vegetable patch.

Cedar Blush

The foggy morning was a prelude to the storm that just ended. Blue sky, something we've had little of this winter, is now in its stead. It is these weather events that make a cold climate tolerable, just rewards for what can be hard.

Moisture riding the push of warm advection crystallizes on cold twigs and grasses.

And sumac not yet pecked by the birds.

I love the cedars that grow here; reminding me of those that break the monotony of old fields on Long Island. They, of course, are the same species, and aren't truly cedars -Eastern Red Cedar, Juniperus virginiana. These are tough trees, can be over nine hundred years old, tolerate drought and wet, cold, and the poorest soils. While deer browse your expensive arborvitae hedges, by the looks of the Eastern Reds around here, they hardly touch them. There is gin, of course, and the aesthetics which, to my eye, are some of the best an evergreen can provide.

There is a moment every autumn, usually middle to late, when the cedars turn bronze, red, mauve, blushed or however you may see it. This change requires a loss of some of chlorophyll's green and the development of red anthocyanins and the two, together, create this bronzing effect. This is painter's stuff, mixing reds and greens to create blacks more green or more red. The dark bronze contrasts with the white of aspens and snow and plays well with ochre field plants.

Like so many plants you love, someone, somewhere lists them as invasive. How can this be, you ask, after all it is a native in its range! Well, I rationalize it this way -Eastern Reds grow readily in farm fields and get a bad rap for its ability to grow readily from bird-dropped seeds in these fields. The other reason is the loss of fire as a control agent, but this is our fault, and we shouldn't be blaming the cedar. Finally, because we plowed under so much prairie that there is less than one percent of it left, managers curse the Eastern Red for colonizing what's left that isn't being managed by fire. Given these rationalizations, I still wouldn't blink if I had the opportunity to plant one on our land.  I may well have that chance in one of the many clearings created by downed large oaks or bass that have given rise to another accomplished colonizer -common buckthorn.

Glacial Lakes State Park

Last night I had a tornado dream -usually the kind I have when I am deeply bothered by something. The tornado bears down on me, I hold on. This one shook and rattled the concrete building I dreamt myself to be in. I woke up.

Magically, this made me think of last summer's trip to Glacial Lakes State Park in Minnesota's prairie country. I chose this park as my destination because the name of a nearby lake, Minneswaska, was the same name as a lake and state park in the Shawangunks of the New York's Hudson Valley. And the closest town was named Starbuck.

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Minnesota is divided between three distinct regions: northern coniferous forest, prairie, and the western most extent of the eastern deciduous forest (called Big Woods in Minnesota). My trip took me on one of several roads that follow an arc of glacial lakes, or kettles, that remain as reminder of the Wisconsin glacial period (so-so Wiki article). I left the Big Woods and entered the prairie. According to the Minnesota DNR, 98% of Big Woods has been converted to farm land, housing and commercial development and 99.9% of Minnesota prairie has been turned for farm land.

When I neared the park, the land turned from farm to grassland. The road turned from asphalt to gravel.

This landscape was rolling, elevated, scattered stones and boulders about, and grass -lots of grass.

After entering the park, the roadway descends toward a kettle lake. The parking area is surrounded by a glade of trees.

I began walking on the trail that circumnavigates the main kettle lake, called Signalness Lake.

I'm impressed with the oak forest and the feeling like this forest is a hidden pocket in the prairie come farmland. It also strikes me how similar this landscape is to my own Long Island experience with its kettles and oaks.

As you walk down the slope toward the lake, you cross this simple footbridge. It crosses a wetland adjacent to the lake. Among the many plants, milkweed -Asclepias syriaca and what looks like yarrow, Achillea millefolium (native or not???).

I couldn't ID so many of the plants I discovered on this trip, like this one below. It was just above the wetland.

Lakeside, half-way around and looking at my starting location.

Leaving the lakeside I move back uphill toward the drier forest. To the east rolling hills and prairie grassland. Notice how the woodlands are in the depressions in the land, where there is more moisture and protection.

The drier uplands are primarily prairie land. But native sumacs can aggressively fill the slopes without fire as a control agent. Prairie loves fire because it keeps woody plants from taking hold.

Scanning the prairie you see a fabric of grass and other plants.

Closer looking finds brilliant flowers. What is it?

Likely the native coneflower, Echinacea angustifolia.

Hoary Vervain, Verbena stricta

Name this grass.

I know this one because of my time in New Mexico -its Leadplant, Amorpha canescens.

I always enjoy the interpretive signs, especially old disintegrating ones like this explaining how this landscape was formed.