gardening: observing, planning, designing, and editing
There are three natives in this yard that develop good-sized seed collections, which start getting distributed in July: twinleaf, trillium, and false Solomon’s seal. These plants did very well setting fruit this spring, but the nonnative Solomon’s seals, which seem to like similar habitats, did not.
Twinleaf seedpods are very silly—eventually they split open at that manic smile of a seam, ready to dribble seeds nearby.
I wrote about irises, native and not, in the summer of 2020, but this time I would like to look at their succession through the bloom period, which starts in May and usually goes into June.
The month of May starts with native blue-eyed grass and Iris cristata, a US native, but not quite to this area. The blue-eyed grass, which is a failure in this yard as a bedding plant, adds a nice sparkle where it alights for about a month before it unobtrusively fades into the background. It is also extremely easy to remove unwanted seedlings as the root system is small.
I decided that the alien marshmallow was a lot of effort for iffy results. Theoretically I could bury the fig, but there are probably roots from the smoke bushes—so, no room. So I wrap it; on January 2, 2021, I bundled that little tree up like a kindergartener walking to school on an arctic day, as I had done the previous winter. It was a winter of temperature swings, but it seemed OK until late March 2021, about when you would expect temperatures to moderate somewhat. They did not; they oscillated from the low teens some nights to 71°F highs three times in 13 days.
