Abbondanza

Just past midsummer, the garden is amazing. Everywhere I look, there are blooms, fruits, veggies growing like it was a science fiction film. Everywhere I look, there are bees bumbling and nuzzling the flowers and butterflies sipping like ladies (and swooping over the deck planters, providing endless amusement to my long-haired orange cat, Mickey. Mickey has been on a diet – the vet said he had to lose 2 pounds, which is like 15% of his body weight, so I’ve only been able to feed him 200 calories a day. That doesn’t sound like much, but proportionally it’s about what a person might eat on a maintenance diet. Anyway, the result is that he’s hungry but not as agile as he is when he’s fully fed. I haven’t seen any butterfly casualties yet, but of course I’m not all that vigilant. And usually when he has caught a bird he brings it to me alive and I release it. But that was B.D – before diet – so I don’t know if he’d eat one now. Mostly, though, he’s content to sit on the deck and watch it all. ).

Everywhere I look there are weeds. This is the flip side to the garden’s midsummer abundance. Some days I just call them ‘ground cover’ and look the other way, but last week I had a type-a attack and went after them. Actually, it was several days of type-a, and I live in a city with a tiny lot, so I can only imagine what it’s like for you all who live in the country on large spreads. I think in your place, I’d call it ground cover everywhere except the vegetable garden.

My most hated weed is creeping Charlie. What’s yours? Honestly, I don’t care much about dandelions. I guess in some neighborhoods people really freak about them, but I just pinch off the flowerheads before they set seed and don’t look. OK, if I’m really feeling aggressive, I’ll go try to pull them out, because it just feels so good when you get a long, tenacious root. Easiest after a rain, I think. But Creeping Charlie – it grows audibly. I try to read the paper, and I can hear the creep: shhhhh-plop! Shhhhh-plop! (the plop is the root going down). Worst of all, it’s the very model of a social networking site. If the shoots only went in one direction, I could deal, but they get all ganglioned-up on you and make friends in every part of the yard. They are bullies, too, elbowing out the grass or whatever else might be planted in their path, which isn’t a path but more like a swath. Do you think weeds have elbows? Anyway…

My number two most hated weed is bindweed. It’s the one that climbs up the plants you like the best, a kind of co-dependent cousin who can’t keep his hands off your wallet. The stalk is so slender you often can’t find its roots, so you pull in frustration at the top of the plant, only to dislodge maybe two inches of the growing end. Then you try to follow it down to soil level, and the roots are tenacious little buggers, but if you get them out, you have to unwind it from your lily or melon or tomato.
I could rant on, but I want to leave space for you to rant on your love-to-hate-‘em weeds too.
And I want to talk about the bugs. I don’t mean mosquitoes, though we have some of those. I am talking about bees, ladybugs, lightning bugs, lacewings, dragonflies and damselflies, moths, butterflies, (OK, I know those aren’t bugs, but I used the word ‘bug’ so I could be unscientific and include what I wanted), and all the other ‘beneficial insects’ that prey on aphids, defoliating caterpillars, and other pests and pollinate our plants.
When I was growing up I was mostly a tomboy. I loved to be out in the woods, to climb trees, to roll down grassy hills, to dabble my feet in the stream – and this was New Jersey! (OK, I’m old.) I never developed the fear of insects that seems to afflict so many people. I think I mentioned some blogs back about my mother and the Japanese beetles on her roses. I was afraid of those. But not the ones I found under rocks or in the soil. And luckily I’m not allergic to bee or wasp stings. So my relationship with the insect world is relatively uncomplicated.

And all those lovely bees bumbling my native plants give me such delight. Sometimes I’ll be in the garden or on the deck and I’ll catch myself just zzzoning off into beeland. (I just finished The Secret Life of Bees, which was a really good read, so maybe I’m more than usually conscious of them. Remember the stories last year about the failures of the pollinators? That stuff is scary, so again, the sight and sound of bees are a comfort.) No one’s ever been stung in my garden, mainly I think because the bees have so many better things to do. I do have clients from time to time who tell me they want lots of colorful flowers (low maintenance of course) but no insects.

And I love the butterflies. I have both Asclepias tuberosa – Butterfly milkweed - and Asclepias incarnata – swamp milkweed - in my garden, so I also get lots of Monarchs. The larvae feed on the Butterfly milkweed, which blooms in May-June, and the adults feed on the Swamp Milkweed, which is just coming into bloom now. I also have Silphium perfoliatum – Cup Plant – a prairie native whose leaves form a cup where they attach to the stem. The cup holds rainwater, so insects and even birds find it a source of fluids. The flowers are yellow sunflowery blooms on these 8-10 foot stalks. It’s a bird –and – butterfly magnet. The kids next door love it too. Finally, I have Eupatorium maculatum – Joe Pye Weed – which also seems to be irresistible to butterflies. It’s also very tall and blooms in August. I prune the outside stalks so they stay shorter and hold the other stalks upright, because the flowers are large and fluffy and like hydrangeas, they can bow down in rain. So my garden is full of plants that bring the butterflies; the seeds of these also feed the birds on into the fall.

Great! But I go back to abbondanza. The problem with all of these except the Butterfly Milkweed is that they reproduce enthusiastically, and all those pollinators make sure there will be plenty of viable seed. I spend several afternoons each spring impatiently weeding out seedlings, particularly of cup plant, which wants to take over. My daughter bought me one tiny plant for Mother’s Day about 8 years ago, and now it’s staked out its turf all over the yard. It has tough roots, too, so I don’t always get it all the way out, but I figure if I can prevent it from photosynthesizing, that’s enough. I have allowed one dense stand of it in front of the south side composter (I have three compost bins. Remember, I do other people’s gardening too) because it screens the bin from view. Another dense stand surrounds the north side composter. One stand has tried for several years to establish itself under the Crabapple (going to show that it doesn’t need full sun), and then the rogues just go wherever they want. It’s not hard to get one or two out. It takes a lot of work to uproot an established stand of them.
So: are they weeds? Where I don’t want them, I suppose they are, but they’re not among the Most Hated because they’re also among the Most Loved. What are we to do? I guess we just have to tolerate ambiguity in plants as in life – sorta like the way we include our codependent cousin in family gatherings even when we know she’ll hit us all up for a loan. After all, we’re still in charge of our own wallets, right?

Sorry my blog has been quiet for awhile. The end of the planting season got really hectic, and then I went to a conference in Zurich to talk about my book, after which I had no choice but go hiking in the Alps for a few days. Next time I’m going to write about the fabulous Alpine meadows there, and this is it for today. Hope you’re all enjoying summer’s bounty.