Wordless Wednesday: The bumble

Goodbye to August

When I walked out to my backyard this morning, I noticed a scattering of yellowed and drying leaves around my sitting area under the sycamore tree. Partly, that is due to the long, dry month that is ending today and, partly, to the changing seasons. Summer is in its last throes, with only three weeks remaining. But this has been a difficult August and it's no surprise that the trees are responding to the stress by dropping some of their leaves early.

It has been the hottest August on record in the area. We've had other Augusts that have had more days on which the temperature reached 100 degrees and above, but the difference this year has been that the nights have been so hot. The effect of the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and water vapor is to hold heat in and to not allow the earth to cool off at night. (That, after all, is why they are called "greenhouse" gases.) As those gases increase in our atmosphere, the earth will inevitably get hotter. That is why climate scientists warn that future Augusts may be hotter still, because we seem disinclined to do anything about the human-caused part of the greenhouse gas equation. Our answer seems to be to just turn the thermostat down and forget it.

Though air conditioning may make our lives bearable, it doesn't do much for the plants and animals outside. They must adapt to the changed conditions or die. One of the ways that plants adapt is to drop their leaves to conserve moisture within the vital roots, trunks and stems. When heat is combined with dry conditions, as has been the case in my yard throughout August, the plants' struggle for survival is made even more difficult.

We did actually have plenty of rain in July and that helped a lot but August has been dry, dry, dry, as well as hot, and most of my gardening activities this month have been restricted to wandering the yard with my hose or my watering can in hand or moving the sprinkler from place to place. It seems to have done the trick. At least my plants don't appear to be collapsing in a heap, even if they are shedding leaves.

I can't say too much for my poor little fall tomatoes, though. They are alive, but they're just standing there. I don't think they have grown at all since I planted them two-and-a-half weeks ago. Well, tomorrow is September and perhaps it will be kinder to them. And to all of us.


Come on, Autumn!

A gardener's week - #4

Every day now the sun rises a minute or so later and sets a minute or so earlier. It's as if it, too, is tired of this summer and anxious to get it over with.

When we went for our walk early this morning the temperature was at 70 degrees and the humidity seemed correspondingly low. It was almost cool! For the first time in...forever, I came home after an hour's walk without my clothes being saturated and dripping salty water. Don't look now, friends, and for goodness' sake don't say it out loud for fear of scaring it away, but autumn is coming.

If we needed any further comfirmation of that, we would only have to look around the garden this week to see the abundance of hummingbirds and butterflies. The fall hummingbird migration is well under way now, with lots of all sexes and ages of the little birds visiting us on their way south. (See my post at Backyard Birder.)

Butterflies, too, especially the Sulphurs, are making their way back into my garden, after a hiatus.


Maybe their return has something to do with this. The flame acanthus is back in (almost) full bloom again after I whacked it back severely - was that only two weeks ago? I tell you nothing keeps this plant down for long and it is a magnet for both hummingbirds and butterflies. This Sulphur looks as though it has lighted among tongues of flame. You can certainly see how the plant gets its common name.


This Clouded Sulphur enjoyed a nice long snack on this blossom, allowing me to record it for posterity.


Another butterfly and hummingbird magnet is the Texas Star hibiscus which continues to send out several of its dramatic blossoms every day.


Each blossom is visited many times during the day by both the hummers and the flutterers. The Sulphurs seem to be particularly fond of these blooms.


Giant Swallowtails have been present in the garden again, too. I seldom see one of these beauties that hasn't been nicked up in some way - usually one of its swallowtails or part of a hindwing is missing. But this one was absolutely perfect in every way. It had not yet had any close encounters with predators which leads me to believe that it may only recently have emerged from its cocoon. It gave me joy just to see such a perfect and perfectly beautiful creature.


After leaving the flame acanthus, he paid a visit to the nearby butterfly weed.


Gulf Fritillaries were highly visible visitors to the garden this week, too. This one is visiting a Mexican sunflower blossom that has poked its way through the cypress vine.


This 'Monkey Business' floribunda, seen here with its blossom turned toward the sun and away from me, has been a good performer for me this summer.


Likewise this yellow cestrum. Does this thing every stop blooming? It has been in bloom literally since I planted it in the spring and as the plant gets bigger it just puts on more and more blooms. I may have to get another one of these next year.


The garlic chives are blooming. I find these little flowers very pretty. (That orange thing on the one on the right is an assassin bug, one of the good guys.)


'Lucifer' is again bringing light to my garden. This is his third (I think) flush of blooms. Or maybe fourth.

I have to come clean and tell you that I really haven't spent too much time in the garden this week except to do obligatory watering. Yes, I'm still waiting for rain.

But whenever I've been out there I have been greatly cheered by the multitude of colorful fliers and a few colorful blooms. All in all, my garden has held up well in the heat of summer and that makes me happy.

The devil's trumpet

As a child, I spent a lot of time in solitary wandering around the meadows and pastures of our farm. It was there that I first met many plants that I was to encounter again much later in life and in much changed surroundings. Plants like elderberry, sumac, pokeweed, beautyberry, as well as such wildflowers as butterfly weed, black-eyed Susans, goldenrod, wild roses and asters.

There was one weed in particular that fascinated me. We called it jimsonweed. It was a tall shrubby plant, much taller in its full growth than I was at the time. It had large, dramatically-toothed leaves and beautiful trumpet-shaped blossoms that, as I remember, were rather lavender at their base but became bright white through the body of the blossom. The seed pods that formed later were spiky balls. The plant also had a distinctive odor which I can recall but find it hard to describe. It was not unpleasant, necessarily, but on the other hand, it wasn't especially attractive either.

I don't remember anyone ever warning me about this plant, but perhaps they did. At any rate, I knew it wasn't something to be trifled with. Its gothic appearance alone might have warned me of that.

It was one of many potentially harmful plants in my world. There were plants all around me that could have made me sick or given me some very strange dreams if I had ingested them, but I don't recall ever having any unpleasant experiences with them. I just took them for granted, looked at them, sometimes played with them and watched animals visiting and using their flowers and fruit.

It was much later, probably when I was reading Carlos Castaneda in college, that I learned that this plant whose scientific name is Datura stramonium, had psychotropic, narcotic, and hallucinogenic properties. It has been used in shamanism as a bridge to another level of consciousness and it played a role in Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan, which was very popular at the time.

The plant is known locally by many different names. The name by which I knew it, jimsonweed, is actually apparently a corruption of "Jamestown weed." It is also called locoweed, stinkwort, thorn apple (because of its seed pods), mad apple, and devil's trumpet.

The devil's trumpet is, in fact, related to the plant that is commonly grown in our gardens and called angel's trumpet. They are both members of the solanaceae family, many of which can be poisonous, but to which some of our favorite veggies like tomatoes and peppers also belong. The angel's trumpet also used to carry the name of Datura, but some years ago was rechristened Brugmansia. The two are easily distinguished because angel's trumpet blossoms point down toward the earth while the devil's trumpet is pointed up towards heaven.

I was reminded of all this lore about the devil's trumpet when I happened to see a blog post in The New York Times a few days ago. This plant, it seems, grows not just in Southern pastures and meadows but throughout much of the country, including New York City! (Who knew?) Like many weeds and wildflowers, it is an opportunistic colonizer and will go where the wind or a wild animal takes it and often will make itself at home there.

There are several kinds of Datura and some of them are cultivated garden plants. These mostly belong to Datura wrightii, I believe. They are all interesting plants and well worth having in the garden. I've never tried growing one, but I might just look one out for my garden, just for nostalgia's sake. So what if they have an aura of danger? Many of the plants that we grow do. It just brings a little extra fillip of excitement to the staid, bland world of the gardener.

Son of Sam???

Sam Box the backyard box turtle still hasn't revealed herself to me this summer, nor have I again seen the anonymous box turtle visitor that I showed you earlier this month. But look what was waiting for me on my back porch early this morning.


Who's that hiding behind the cat food dispenser?


Why, it is a baby turtle - clean, shiny, new and not much bigger than a silver dollar.


I figured he was there for the cat food so, to make things easier for him, I spread some on the floor. I was hoping he would emerge from his shell and nibble so that I could get a picture of him in action. But as long as I was in the area, even when I hid myself and stood perfectly still, he remained tight in his shell - his mother obviously taught him not to trust strangers.

I would call him Son of Sam but that name has already been taken and besmirched so I'll just call him Sammy. What a lovely surprise and a nice way to begin my day.

I have remarked before about the abundance of young amphibians and reptiles in the yard this summer. It seems to have been a very good breeding year for them. I'm very glad to see that that success extends to box turtles.

A gardener's week - #3

It's been an interesting but frustrating, hopeful but finally depressing week in the garden.

On Monday, we did finally get some of the rain that had been making the rounds in the area. A total of 1.1" fell and was greatly appreciated. Showers continued to flirt with us for much of the week, but ultimately they all passed us by to dump their bounty on some other fortunate plot.

Before the rains on Monday, we reached the 100 degree mark for the second time this summer - the first time had been the day before. In fact, we passed it by a smidge, topping out at 101 degrees. Forecasters are saying we might reach the century mark again over the weekend. Sigh.

The trees in my yard are beginning to drop some leaves now, most notably the apple tree. It's one way of reducing loss of water in the heat and is just another sign that autumn really is on its way.

So what about that fall veggie garden? Well, we did get some replacement tomato plants for the ones we killed a couple of weeks ago. These, too, are 'Champion II' plants and I got the three of them into the ground this week. I dug a big hole for each plant, filled the hole with water, and then stripped off the lower leaves of the plants and buried them with just a few inches showing aboveground. Lastly, I spread a couple of inches of mulch around each plant and watered the mulch and the plant again. Today, I plan to finish mulching the entire bed and put the shade cloth up to give the plants some protection.


Here's one of the little plants after I got it into the ground, and...


...here's all three lined up in the bed. Not much to look at now but I have high hopes for them!

Looking around the yard this week, the falling leaves are not the only indication that autumn will soon be here. The fall berries are ripening.


As soon as the pokeweed berries turn shiny purple black, they get gobbled up by the birds. Among all the green berries here, you can see a few twigs where the fruit has ripened but most of those have very few berries left on them.


The munching of the elderberries is even more pronounced and, in some places, there are few berries left.


I didn't plant the elderberries and pokeweed, the birds did, but I did plant this white beautyberry which is now heavy with berries. Beautyberries typically do not get eaten by the birds until the softer berries like the two above are exhausted. They may last well into the winter. Last year, I was interested to note that the birds seemed to prefer the white beautyberries to the purple ones. The white ones disappeared long before the purple, but I have no explanation for why that should be.


Nearby, a purple beautyberry's berries are not quite ripe yet.

Long-time readers of the blog may remember my documenting my big front yard project last year. On the first of each month, I showed you pictures of the beds there. As a refresher, here's the way they looked on the first of August last year.


Here's a view from the driveway, looking toward the entry. Those are Blackfoot daisies that are spilling over.


Here's the mid-point of that front bed that was dominated by the rampant potato vine.


And here's the view from the south side, looking back across the front.

Well, in evaluating the beds during last winter, I decided that I had made just about every mistake in the book, which, truthfully, is just about par for the course of my gardening efforts. Several plants were too big for their space and nearly all the plants went down during the winter (though they came back in spring) leaving the front of the house looking rather drab and forlorn during that season.

I subsequently moved some of the plants including the 'Big Momma' Turk's caps that obviously wanted more room and the purple fountain grass that was poorly placed. I also moved the 'Tropicannas' to another bed where I thought they might be happier. I lost the Australian rosemary and some bat-face cupheas to the winter cold, which was a disappointment. In the spring, I added some viburnums, one of which has done very well, the other two not so well. I also shifted some of the other plants around and added some daylilies - just because I needed some place to plant them.

And that brings us up to this week. The beds were an overgrown mess. (Sorry, I neglected to take "before" pictures so you'll just have to take my word for that.) Drastic action was called for, so out came the Felcos and I went to work. Here's how the beds looked when I finished.


There's not much left at the entry. As for that 'Texas Star' hibiscus, it is now abundantly clear that it, too, needs more room. I'll probably try lifting it and moving it to another location this winter.


In the mid-front section, there are some salvias, the viburnums, some phlox and buddleias, but it all looks pretty sad.


Looking from the south back across the front is pretty depressing.

So, here I go again. I've got my work cut out for me. More research and perhaps professional advice is obviously required. I need some plants that will provide winter interest as well as habitat plants for the birds and butterflies through other seasons of the year. Overall, I still need to achieve that cottage garden look which I like and which goes with the style of my house. At least this time the beds are already in place so I don’t have to start from scratch.

Oh, well, another opportunity to learn from my mistakes.

Wordless Wednesday: Fluttering by