Wild Strawberries and Wildlife

The Fragaria virginiana, the region's native strawberries, have started to produce their berries. The Rubus occidentalis, native black raspberries won't be far behind, and a very wet spring has plumped all of these berries more than last year.

Three years ago when I set the strawberries on their way to take over all of the shady moist spaces in the garden, I think I was imagining one small jar of jam each spring. I soon realized that the berries ripen over a long period in June, but also that just before each is perfectly ripe, it is eaten up. The one in the picture actually has a bite out of it, already.

The raspberries flip into ripeness almost all at once, and so we (Gracie picks her own from the low branches) actually get quite a few. But like the strawberries, they are a popular food source for the wildlife.

But the news for me was that it is not just the berries that make these good choices for supporting the ecosystem, because both the raspberries and the strawberries flower early, and seem to attract bees especially. The berries, the result of all of this activity, extend the benefit of these plants into food for other insects, birds and small mammals.

Salix discolor and Everyday Miracles

Willows, according to Douglas Tallamy in Bringing Nature Home, are second only to oaks in supporting faunal diversity in New World ecosystems. That is, like oaks, they are highly important sources of food, shelter and nesting sites for a large number of insects. You know, the insects that otherwise pollinate everything that grows and that act as food for birds, bats, small mammals and other insects. Willows are a particularly important node in the web of life that is the ecosystem.

And yet they are also on the list of prohibited trees for the City of London- willows are among the trees that cannot be planted on City owned boulevards. I don’t yet know why they are on that list- it may be because they are considered ‘dirty’ (my neighbor believes this, though has no evidence from ours). Some tend to be weak and flexible and so big ones often drop limbs in storms (but you can just site them carefully). Some can spread rapidly and extensively. Of course, as it seems to be going with our naturalizing, I have planted five willows, each a Salix discolor, each a descendent of the willows native to Southern Ontario. None, however, is on City property, and so they are protected.

But discovering that they are outlaws when planted outside the bounds of our property makes me think again about how we compose the landscapes that we are constantly creating and recreating in urban areas. What shapes these decisions?

I chose Salix discolor for two reasons. First are the qualities of the tree itself. I wanted something that could break up compacted soil, because they are planted where there used to be a laneway. And I wanted something with exactly the profile of a mature Salix d.-much taller than it is wide with long un-branched stems reaching upward- and that could thus be planted in a row to shade the exposed west side of the house. And I wanted something that would not too heavily shade the plants beneath it- large clumps of Asters- Aster novae-angliae, Aster laevis –Joe Pye-Eupatorium eutrochium maculatum- and Echinacia purpurea. While willows provide shade, they are all characteristically open trees that move freely and elegantly in the wind. And I think the light green house complements their grey-green leaves.

The second reason I chose these salix d. is that they are the descendents of the very tree that is my very first memory of a tree, and one of my very first memories at all. It was Easter Sunday when I was four and I remember standing in the breeze beside my grandmother who had taken me to the neighbor’s house to see the pussy willow in bloom. I remember her hand holding mine, and looking up to see the bright white catkins on smooth grey stems, each stem frosted with a bright green blush. I could only look up at it, which meant I had to take it all in against the bright blue sky.

I can still feel the stems the neighbor cut for me clutched in my hand as we walked home. My grandmother was a devotee of plant life- she had a green thumb, as they say- and so she put them in water in a vase on the kitchen windowsill rather than let them dry out to become decor. Later, when the catkins sagged and fell off, my despair again gave way to wonder as fresh shoots of leaves appeared on the branches.

The tree my grandmother grew for me from those stems – in her own flower garden no less- later provided a new tree for our next family home on Hill Street. In 1988 that second generation gave new stems for trees at my mother’s new home, and now my mother’s trees gave up some stems for the five at our home. I guess there is something to the wild abandon with which Salix spreads.

And something to the miracle that is Salix come spring. This year ours had visitors before the blooms had even burst, checking early and often for the right time. One bumble bee also seemed to be preparing a nest beneath one of them. The bees even seemed to be waiting around, clinging to the near-by decorative and non-native Muscari blooms like they were clinging to buoys, sleepily adrift at sea, buffeted by spring winds, waiting. When the Salix began to bloom, early and ahead of even spring ephemerals like Bloodroot, it was as if the entire bee neighborhood heaved a huge sigh of relief, and spent every sunny afternoon along the willow path.

The obvious benefit of these five trees raises some questions for me about the systems we use to order and determine the adequacy and appropriateness of all of the growth we do encourage and allow in our shared landscape. And I can't help but conclude that these decisions have been and maybe continue to be limited, severely constrained by the logic that landscapes are showcases of our consumerism. The long chain of events that brought our Salix to our home never once included a commercial nursery, a marketing firm or a catalogue. These trees were passed hand to hand, and very likely were started from cuttings taken from a natural swamp that was painstakingly destroyed for a housing development in the early 1980s, about 10 km away from here. These trees are part of the circulation of ideas, values, information and attachments that are put at risk when our decisions begin and end as individual consumer choices. It seems harsh to make this conclusion, and it is indeed overly pedantic, and a little self-congratulatory. But it isn't meant to be- I am just struck by the sharp contrast between the gardener my Grandmother was trying to teach me to be and the gardener that it is 'easier' to be.

Wealth

Last Sunday coming home from the park, we ran into our electricians, cleaning up leaves from an income property one of them owns around the corner. They had just finished loading an entire trailer with leaves from the sugar maples and soft maples around the property, and were preparing to take it some 15 kms away to the city compost yard.

Of course when I asked where they were going to go, the owner of the property (and the leaves) asked if he could instead deliver them here. And so unlike the last two Falls, I have been spared the effort of dragging home bags of fallen leaves from the curb... One entire wagon load of leaves, here, delivered to the base of the giant hackberry. And plenty of laughter at my delight and glee as they added them to the pile we had started on Halloween.

And while you can't see it in the photo, the pile is furrowed and compressed, because Gracie too can not contain her glee, and has spent the week playing in them. As soon as I can get to it, they will be ground up to become a thick winter blanket for the gardens. We're rich here.

Growth, Wealth, Accumulation

The Ontario Bee House allowed me to guiltlessly indulge my love of looking at and evaluating every bit of stray lumber, fallen stick and broken piece of furniture we stumble upon on our walks. There was an immediate use, a project, and so all the little bits I carried home went directly to the workbench.

And so the oak chair seen here was sought out to be part of the next Bee House I am making as a gift. This chair spent at least three nights in the rain (and a rainy three nights they were) until I could get back to the train tracks where I first found it. Dumped in the weeds and grass, only a leg and part of the arm visible, I imagined it was, at best, smashed up, at worst, had been part of bonfire. (I thought I might salvage the wheels, too). But it was intact. Completely and perfectly intact. The varnish had a wet bloom, but one swipe of a towel and an afternoon in the sunshiny sewing room and it was gone.

I can hardly imagine that something as precious as oak could be waste- thinking back to a talk by a speaker from the Nature Conservancy during a walk in the Clear Creek Forest, I thought to calculate the age of this chair in real time. It could have been manufactured any time between the 1920s and the 1950s; the H. Krug company has been creating these gorgeous chairs since even earlier than that, but the lable on this one dates it to after WWI. But- how old was the tree that was cut down to make the chair? Was it a century old? Maybe two? There is a century maple about twenty feet away from me, just outside the front windows here, and it seems just big enough now to produce lumber. Oaks, however, grow slowly, much more slowly than my beloved sugar maple.

How could something as precious as oak be waste? Having the garden has sharpened my concerns about 'waste', or rather about what constitutes wealth. Is it the accumulation of strengths, durability and permanence? You know, deeper roots, richer soil, more diverse biota? These are the things that are accumulating in our gardens here; like the oak in the chair, this is a process that occurs over time in excess of what humans have.

Next time to leaves. Or 'there is now a gold mine in my back yard'.

Ontario Bee Roost

Creating protected habitat for a diversity of species of living creatures has become our key goal as gardeners. This goal was created for us, actually, because as we began to diversify the plantings in the gardens (and omitted all artificial inputs), the gardens began to attract new wildlife. A cascade of new wildlife in fact.

Among the buzzing, humming, spinning, creeping and eating creatures in the garden, the most obvious at any moment are the bees and wasps. They are most evident, I guess, because they are so busily pollinating what must be every single flower here.

Infrequently we see an official European honey bee or two, representatives of the pollinators at risk from Colony Collapse Disorder, CCD. These are the bees that, because they are community dwellers, can be used to pollinate food crops: their hives can simply be moved to where they can be put to work.

The majority of our bees are their 'wild' and solitary cousins, which are not necessarily so reliable, though they are similarly important to the process of plant reproduction. These native pollinators do not depend on the presence of a single hive in which they can sleep, eat and reproduce. Instead they find suitable habitat- old stumps with worm and woodpecker holes, hollow stems, rotting logs- on the fly.

And so the collapse of honey bee populations means that protecting and encouraging these native pollinators is all the more urgent (see for example Pollination Canada's website http://www.pollinationcanada.ca/index.php?n=pc_home). The Ontario Meadow flower garden (and the new meadow we are working on) have plenty of suitable food for pollinators, flowering from early Spring right through to the late Fall. But not much in the way of roosting, resting and reproducing spaces.

And so on the Civic Holiday weekend (which should now be called Bee Holiday Weekend) we salvaged some lumber from an empty lot, and created our first Ontario Bee Roost. It is constructed of untreated and well-weathered sections of 2x4s, parts of a log from a maple tree around the corner that was cut down two weeks ago, and some nails. The roosts themselves are 8" sections of this lumber and log which have 5/16th holes drilled 4"-6" deep into them. The entire structure is capped off with a piece of found plywood, quite luckily exactly the right size for a roof. It is at the back of the meadow, facing southeast, and about 6' from a drinking spot set up for insects-it is a low footed birdbath filled with pebbles and rocks.

This is an experiment, and it will be some time before we know whether or not any creature will take shelter here. In the spring we will provide some clay in case mason bees show up, who will use it to build cells for pollen and larvae. In the mean time, we'll wait.

"Inspiring": An E-mail from Jonquiere, PQ

This week a student sent photos from her summer travels. This one, of the closed Walmart in Jonquiere, Quebec, inspires her to remember what people working together can do. In this case, the reports go that the workers unionized, and Walmart promptly shuttered the store, a story well worth remembering. The photo shows that apparently even Walmart couldn't resist memorializing these events.

The photo she took reveals much about the bigger social and economic context that makes a Walmart possible- this mode of resource use (thinking of the environment, the earth, the water, the people) takes root and thrives in societies driven by consumption, when few other choices are available for the majority, and when lowering the price of consumption takes priority. This is of course a kind of false economy- meaning that the bills come due eventually, excepting that the 'bills' in this case are the long-term outcomes of letting a single retailer shape the global economy by driving down the price of production.

Her photo also reveals exactly the kind of consciousness we need to subvert the process that Walmart is the emblem for, because her photo and its story are ironic. This ghastly barren landscape is a monument for this photographer, a monument to how clearly we can see another road ahead and how close that change is. It is, in fact, all around already, when parking lots at shopping malls are transformed into Farmer's Markets (http://www.lfpress.ca/newsstand/Business/2009/05/16/9476671-sun.html), when Guerilla Gardening is a craft for children (http://londoncommons.ca/node/7251), to use just two small examples from my hometown.

So her picture makes me take heart- and makes me want to take pictures, and make monuments out of the spaces around us all that we can transform.

Get Rid of The Laneway, There's a Garden Under There!

At Gracie Gardens we were once blessed with a cement laneway running the entire length of our house, through the yard, all the way to the building we commonly call 'the shop' (though it bears similarities to a 'car hole'). It was a serious laneway, too: over 60 feet from the street and thus more than half the length of the property! It also runs on the west side of our property, which left the side of the house exposed to baking afternoon sun. That is, the laneway did nothing but signal to all who walked or drove by that this property had the ever respectable and property-value-raising 'garage'.

We had a third of the offending laneway removed (with a back hoe- the cement went to be recycled), leaving a part as a cement walk to the back, put a picket fence around the newly liberated earth, added two yards of compost, and planted sun-loving trees and wildflowers in masses. The plan was to plant something that appears 'gardeny' from the street, shades the house and is wildlife friendly. And gives Gracie herself somewhere nice to stand to bark when a dog walks by.

The reason this project merits a report is how little work this was once the cement was gone. I estimate that it all took about 25 hours to plant (which includes un-compacting the soil by hand, adding the compost, planting the seeds and setting the plants, etc). The trees (four Native Salix discolor rooted from my Mom's cutting from a tree I planted at my Gramma's when I was four years old) were planted in August 2007 at about 1' tall, and are now 12' tall. The Eupatorium maculatum and Monarda fistulosa I grew from seeds I collected at the river nearby. The Echinacea purpura, while not Native to Ontario, is an American Native, good to the bugs and is drought tolerant. And it looks pretty 'cultivated' from the street. (Most of it came from my guerilla garden where it has self-seeded freely). There are also a variety of asters (from the CN tracks and from a Native plant nursery), a Campsis radicans from the back yard, and of course Solidago, from the empty lot next door.

So: the point? Well, there are lots of practical things to value here. The house is cooler in the late afternoon; this bed eats up lots of the grey water from our house (siphoned from an upstairs tub); it absorbs rain water that would otherwise end up in the storm sewer. And this bed is gorgeous: it gives anyone who walks by and cares to look the sense that people who wish them a good day live here! We managed to find about 100 square feet of garden space with which to share these good wishes under only one third of this horrible, hated and useless laneway. So the point is that even small spaces, with a little planning, can be exceptional additions to our homes and communities. This summer it is full of butterflies, and last Fall- it's first real Fall- it was always busy with Goldfinches eating flower seeds.

It has value.