Winter Seeding

Our first snowstorm was brewing on top of an inch that had fallen two days prior. Although there was much to do, I paused to get out to the back swale, once wet, now dry, to scatter the seeds I had collected.

The roughly two acre swale, either artificially created by gravel mining just over the property line or an artifact of the terminal moraine on its northern flank, used to dry up each summer, enough so that tree species accustomed to periods of water logged soil could still grow to sixty or seventy feet tall. These trees have now died, the largest within the last three years, because of permanent inundation.

This year, another change had taken place -the swale dried down. The spring tree which drains the area continues to flow and a walk through the swale could still leave you suctioned to its wet bottom, but the hummocky surface is dry, the duckweed a gray mat. With that had come an incredible explosion of canary reed grass, the cool season, hybrid grass created for just this type of environment. In two short months the grass multiplied its square footage by ten and left little room for intervention by this woods gardener.

Canary reed grass or reed canary grass, Phalaris arundinacea, is terribly hard to remove -more so than garlic mustard, buckthorn, and creeping charlie combined -for its wet soil, its nearly impenetrable mat of fibrous roots, its rhizomes and seeds. Although developed for haying wet ground, wild animals do not care for it. Yet here, it is clipped, but I cannot recall whether I clipped it in preparation for some type of management or it has been grazed by deer this late autumn. If it was deer, that would be unusual.

I will not be able to remove the reed grass, nor do I intend to spray glyphosate on it. I've tried plastic tarps, but there are now too many woody obstructions over a region much too large for that. My plan is to seed this open area, ahead of the advancing grass, in hopes of some species gaining a foothold. Only if the pond does return, to its last maximum, will the open water push the mat of grass back to its edges.

If the pond does not return, this wet meadow may have a limited number of species capable of growing alongside canary reed grass. I've seeded blue vervain, Verbena hastata, common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca, swamp milkweed, Asclepias incarnata, various asters and goldenrod, and a bit of big blustem. I had two dozen blue lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica, starts remaining from the late summer planting, roots still alive, that I dropped in the hummocks under the snow. And in late September I planted dozens of Spotted Joe Pye, Eutrochium maculatum, more blue lobelia, and several other species I cannot recall at the moment along the more shaded swale edges where the canary reed grass had yet to overtake.

In Stillness and Warmth There is Mosquito

On an unusual summer day I come to fully appreciate how little I venture into the hot season woods. Like winter, or maybe more so than winter, the summer time woods belongs to others. But on those two days, when temperatures plummeted into the fifties by night, only the sixties by day, with a supplementary breeze from the northwest, the woods invited my eyes and skin as if it were a day in early May or mid October.

Few mosquitoes made a stroll of getting to this laetiporous in the once wet middle slough.

How little I experience the woods in summer dictates my familiarity with its cycles of growth and senescence. On this walk I was thrilled to find plant species I have yet to see here, more vigorous growth than in the past, and less encroachment by aggressive species in some places. This could have been my own doing, attributable to three years of pulling garlic mustard, or was it the longer, cold winter that favors those that have evolved with it?

What I have experienced this year, one too busy with other activities to commit to the two month long pull, is roughly a ninety percent reduction in garlic mustard seedlings and a nearly one hundred percent reduction in second year rosettes. Why is this? Although it is tempting to enjoy the reprieve, it is more helpful to understand the process. Has our pulling had an effect? Or was it the temperature and frozen ground through out April (garlic mustard is some of the earliest of greens)? Is there a natural rhythm to biennial growth that gives way to an unproductive season?

This is not to say that there is no more garlic mustard in the woods, there is. A few lush, large-leafed specimens grow around the water line among large patches of Pilea pumila, clearweed, a native annual that sprouts in the heat of summer. Without the garlic mustard cover, it has been able to rise up from its own large bank of seeds in areas dominated by garlic mustard for years. Even the small patches of first year seedlings on barren slopes seem to be the exception proving the rule.

The swamp in the back has largely drained for the first time in three or more years. It is now a topography of muck covered in still-green duckweed shifting toward brown, nearly perfect growing conditions at the old waterline. The low water means we do not host wood ducks that have been in residence since we've moved here. The changing shoreline, three years wet, another dry, has created challenging conditions for almost anything, trees included, that isn't the nearly ineradicable reed canary grass, Phalaris arundinacea. If you do not know this plant, then it is likely not in your neck to the woods, yet. In the upper Midwest, where it is likely there are more pothole wetlands than anywhere else in the nation, it is still being planted as a wetland "forage" grass to make "useful" what was once too wet to grow anything a farmer might describe as useful.

Growing on the edge of the swamp: Pilea pumila, Leersia virginica, a few Bidens spp and Impatiens capensis

I was delighted to see these patches of healthy growth along the eastern swamp edge where the water line has receded. Now that the trees have died from inundation, more light enters here, giving a greater diversity of plants a shot at growing.

One of those plants is mad-dog skullcap, Scutellaria lateriflora.

Only a few stems and rhizomes at the edge of high water late last season, this mint is now such a prolific grower that, if I knew less, would think it could compete with reed canary grass. It is known to take advantage of disturbed sites, whether made or naturally occurring (this site is arguably human-altered). Although some have nosed out above the mad-dog, it has handily out-competed last autumn's planting of joe pye, iris versicolor, big bluestem, cardinal flower and verbena. Yet I accept this because, pause...it is a native.

 

Why is that? After all, ignorant of its origins, I might think this grass is doing a great job of greening up a mucky swamp of dead trees. It's the analysis that triggers concern, the conceptualization of homogeneous communities that also send up red flags, and maybe an aesthetics of bio-diversity that has me lurch into action.

That action can take the absurd form of a twenty by ten foot plastic sheet. Placed last summer to smother the reed canary grass, yet appears to have only made it stronger. Once the grass takes on these proportions it is impossible to eradicate by hand pulling. The dense mat of roots and rhizomes have such a tenacious grip that standing in the muck pulling on it produces a feeling of futility and a frustrating clump of leaves in hand. In placing my efforts elsewhere I may have to accept that what was once a forested vernal swamp is now, in wetter times, a clearing, an occasional pond, and quite soon a reed canary wet meadow.



Just up slope from the reed canary grass and mad-dog skullcap is a mighty patch of the weedy Canada thistle, Cirsium arvense. Whereas reed canary grass provides little support for other creatures, Canada thistle at least offers food for pollinators and birds. 

Despite the near drought conditions (you can still have one even when there are occasional heavy thunderstorm rains) that led to drying of the back swamp, water is flowing more heavily than is typical from the spring tree. Why is that? I have seen high water in the swamp with much less flow from this seep, only fifty feet from the swamp and about the same elevation, if not a few inches lower.

The spring tree seep is the only year-round flowing water in our woods, typically runs orange with oxidized iron fixed by iron consuming bacteria. Perfectly natural.


For us "coasters," where certain introduced insects, aquatic organisms, and plants have been around for generations, our relationship to them is different. Can you imagine the idea that Queen Anne's lace is an upcoming threat? How about the notion that your garden is suffering a never seen before invasion of Japanese beetles? Although some species are new to the area, plants like buckthorn have been spreading from yards and nurseries for long enough that a generation or two do not know what the woods looked like without it. In this slippage change becomes fixed and the concept of paradise is born as a way to process that faint, nearly imperceptible loss of the unknown.

Some images from around the new plantings...

American Bellflower, Campanulastrum americanum, tall, short, welcome.

Bottle Brush Grass, Elymus hystrix, great medium height grass in the shade.

Royal Catchfly, Silene regia, a red like the Scarlet Tanager, loved by humming birds, although not native to Minnesota, it does okay, if a little sickly in the leaf by flowering time.

We've had countless monarchs this year. They love the new plantings, as do swallowtails and more.

For about a month she rebuilt the web daily outside our kitchen window. Spider watching and dish washing -it's all the rage.

Side Oats Grama, Bouteloua curtipendula, or as I like to call it: Grandma.

The warm season grasses, unlike those of the lawn, have colorful flowers.

The Month Spring

The Weather

 

The last spring snow melted in the gardener's lot the night of May 10th. It will now be in the nineties.

The Farm(s)

On the ninth, I had a moment to look on the garlic, strike the weeds with a hoe. Never before have I seen the garlic so small so late.

The effervescence of lambsquarter and thistle is contained with mats of semi-wet straw remaining from last fall.

The Greenhouse

Three rows by five of ear leaved brome, Bromus latiglumis, out front of 4 rows of bottle brush grass, Elymus hystrix, and three rows of silky wild rye, Elymus villosus. An ability or want to grow in the shade is a commonality among these monocotyledonous Poaceae. These will likely be established on the culvert embankment, partially collapsed last fall, once restored.

It takes an especially observant person, and some years of experience, to decipher one seedling's visual cues from another. Identification -what is that? Dicotyledonous plants, with pubescent stems and leaf edges, slightly wavy heart-spade shaped leaves, pale green, growing thickly (indicating small seeds to the planter of seeds). This blindness to leaves and stems, the miniature, and impatience allows many undesirable plants to survive the hoe.  Refining possibility by my seed order leaves only Campanula americana, or Tall Bellflower. When I return from Cedar Creek, the tag will tell how experienced I am.

Blue lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica, whose seeds are only a fraction of a millimeter, have a stellar germination rate. Competition must be the thinning mechanism.  These seedlings are for the northern edge of the great swamp, that two acre depression of drowned trees, duckweed, and fluctuating water levels toward the back of our woods. On that partly shady slope -weedy garlic mustard, thistle, canary reed grass and me. I've got black plastic on part of the water's edge covering canary reed grass, and been hoeing then planting Iris versicolor, spotted joe pye weed, blue vervain, big blue stem grass, and others. The seed bank of garlic mustard and root network of thistle is deep, while canary reed grass forms dense, fibrous mats that are bears to pull, but there is also a surprising amount of diversity in this highly disturbed site at the edge of a former commercial gravel pit.

Ephemerals

Hepatica, Anemone americana, trailside, Cedar Bog Lake trail, May seventh Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve.

Large flowered bellwort, Uvularia grandiflora, like many ephemerals growing in our woods, had a prolific season. Is this is due to winter weather resembling winters these plants have evolved by? Last year, after yet another overly warm winter, I stumbled upon one, maybe two bellwort. This spring there are possibly dozens of clumps scattered in previously barren understory sites. Our only known patch of trillium, nibbled by the hungry deer this spring, now has peers. A display of randomness that throws off any rational sense of seed distribution and opens us to the potential of seeds storing in ground until conditions are right, to a migration of seeds via ants and mice, and, as is the case with trillium, to the slow process from fruit to flowering plant. A warming climate, should it create a warming winter here, won't be hospitable to these spring ephemerals, more likely favoring the weedy plants that take advantage of disruption and do not have such particular requirements for germination.

Nodding trillium, Trillium cernuum.

 

A Pickling Pond*

For the first time in probably two months I headed to the western side of our woods. The light has been hazy, the mosquitoes just this side of intolerable. Now that the water has killed off all of the trees, it's time to hack back the weeds and garden this part of the woods.

I spend my time looking at plant parts with purpose to divine the weed from the wanted. A seed is one clue and my digital camera a prosthesis of magnification and memory.

Could the seed, above, and node, hairs aimed down, point to Leersia virginica. White Grass? It's hard to be absolute without an expert on hand. I composed a little poem about grass anatomy.

Lemma, awn, sheath 

and palea. 

Ligule, node, culm 

and glume.

The bridge I tore apart in late winter still in shambles. I did create a working drawing for its replacement and designed a steel post and wooden beam structure, prototype section yet to be built. These places belong to mosquitoes in summer, and with so much else to do, the bridge project has languished. 

From the head of the bridge, looking east, southeast. Reed canary grasses, willow, cottonwood, cattail, some sedge. Behind me a forest of invasive buckthorn that has accelerated since the 2012, thunderstorm downing of a giant old bur oak. 

The prototype for this bridge will be built as a pier into the wetland in the photo at the beginning of this post. Why there? The heavy rains of the last few years has created constant water that has killed off every tree near and within the bounds of the forest slough. Without the basswood, ash and maple that tolerated seasonal wetness only, there is quite a bit of sun hitting the water and land. Invasive species are gaining ground and water, or have already taken it. Garlic mustard, reed canary grass, Canadian thistle (not from Canada, originally) are the powerhouses, here. Late growing natives, like clearweed, Pilea pumila, fill in after the garlic mustard dies back. An aster, here and there, and some hogpeanut too. The soil washes down a severe slope just to the north of the water. By September there are few leaves left by earthworms and decomposition to help slow the heavy rains. The soil pathway created by this down rush of water grows little. This bare patch will be the entrance to the water edge.

I know this spot well. It is a mass of garlic mustard in spring and early summer, yet a few plants, like clearweed, hold on or can work with the seasonality of the invasive species. I've recently seen what is likely to be white grass, Leersia virginica, and what I believe is marsh skullcap, Scutellaria galericulata. In spring I tray-seeded sweet joe pye weed which tolerates some shade and wet for part of this area. I have some fringed brome, iris versicolor, cardinal flower, blue vervain (tolerates wet soils), ironweed, and a couple of others I cannot recall from my desk. We also have enough blue lobelia, physostegia (obedient plant),  and even some chelone glabra (turtlehead) volunteering around the gardens to shift to the back. Near the small pier I will clear for these transplants and, come mid fall, will be on the look out for pull out of garlic mustard first year rosettes.

*An artist friend told me that duckweed covered waters like ours were called pickling ponds by locals and young kids were warned to stay away from them, lest they be pickled.

Adaptation

The Wekiva (Weh-kee-vah or wah) Spring Run flows onto the Wekiva River which descends from the Florida central highlands into the middle sub-basin of Florida's longest river -the St. Johns. To the canoe or kayak paddler the riverside can appear strange with its palms, bromeliads, and trees bearded by epiphytic Spanish Moss as much as boats captained by duck dynasty types.

Among these, however, are familiar plants and animals of the north -water birds, trees and forbs like red maple Acer rubrum, pickerelweed Pontederia cordata, heron, egret, and white ibis (above).

The red maple, its trunk visible on the far left of this photo, is likely one of the most adaptable tree species in North American native silviculture. I am familiar with it from road travel throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic where it can often be seen in lakeside swamps turning red before autumn gains a foothold. Cultivated forms are also common to streets and yards. Although I have not seen it among our wetland edges or woodland swamps, it certainly grows here and farther north in Minnesota. It is both water tolerant and drought tolerant, shade tolerant and sun tolerant and quite obviously, heat and cold tolerant. A red maple grown in the south may not do well in the north as well as the reverse, but the tree exhibits great genetic variability and adaptability.

Given that our once vernal swamp has become, for the last three years at least, a year-round swamp due to frequent heavy rainfall events, geomorphic characteristics and a rising water table, nearly all of the vegetation has died. The last of the very large trees, namely green ash Fraxinus pennsylvanica and basswood Tilia americana, that tolerate a few months of standing water every year, have finally succumbed to three years of permanent inundation.

The adaptability of a tree like red maple struck me as a good fit for such a situation -able to tolerate the standing water or, should things change, do fine in simply wet soil or even withstand a drought. Research shows that the native tree has increased its population since the time Europeans arrived to the continent, and in some cases may be viewed as an opportunistic, invasive species. This is something I will need to weigh against the other invasive, exotic species that have taken advantage of the sunlight provided by the sudden death of the slough's canopy.

A struggle I've had over the last two years since I have moved to our place in the Minnesota woods is how to preserve and restore the woodlands and wetlands around us. It is disheartening to see government maps describe parts of our woods and wetlands as of "moderate" quality or "altered non-native plant community: no native species present" which are both misleading descriptors. However, after two years' time I believe I understand the extent to which this place has been altered by human interaction and all the species that have followed it.

In acceptance of these changes, why not be proactive? Why not plant species that can take advantage of the new conditions? Why not plant pickerelweed and red maple in the flooded slew even if they are not currently growing on site? The wish to return such a drastically altered site to a pre-human condition is not only foolish, but nearly impossible. What I am likely to consider, now, is gardening the woods and swamp with native plants, without the restrictive edicts of restoration.

Lizard's tail Saururus cernuus was identified on one Florida boardwalk trail. Is it beyond its cold tolerance in our slough? We are likely on the edge of its range, but I'm game for a try.

Any time spent in Florida with plants leads you to think about "houseplants," those typically subtropical and tropical plants we attempt to grow indoors. Seemannia sylvatica, above, may be hard to find locally, but it promises to be a great winter friend in a west facing window.

In a surprise turn, our limited collection of easy care houseplants has increased dramatically despite the winter's desiccating indoor humidity level. Beyond the easy pothos, sprengeri fern, and oxalis we are now overwintering a substantially larger rosemary shrub (2nd year), lavender, two opuntia spp (2nd year), two agave spp (2nd year), a rather large pineapple sage Salvia elegans (which blooms so late here that this may be only way to get it to flower before frost), dusty miller Senecio cineraria (last year it overwintered outside), and the odd petunia.

Now, for the peculiar case of the petunia. At some time, maybe it was August, I noticed a petunia flower underneath our terribly diseased tomato plants (a terrible year for them). We had no petunias at the house this year or last and certainly had none in the vegetable garden. I gave a pass to the notion that it self-seeded from petunias that may have been located in the long window box along the garage in years before our arrival. After all, I find tomato plants sprouting all over the gardens despite occasional -15 or -20 F nights over winter. After a few weeks I decided to dig it up and move it to a more visible location in the raised herb bed, near the parsley, where it continued to flower until the first frost sometime in November. There it lay for another couple of weeks, its pink blooms preserved by the cold. When the first deep freeze was about to set upon us we cut back the herbs for use in the kitchen but left some of the parsley under cover to keep fresh for another few days. On that last day of natural viability, when all over-wintering plants were required to come in, I realized that the petunia was still green, pliable, quite alive. I dug it up, potted it, and it is now doing well on our window sill with a mass of new leaves.