A Walk In The Woods

Word was the woods were filled with Indian Pipe, Monotropa uniflora, in exuberant quantities, unlike never before. I headed out -on and off the trail. From the trail, I observed a little patch here, a little there. It was only when I went off-trail that I saw how extensive the slopes were covered with the myco-heterotrophic, chlorophyll-free flowering plant. I just discovered this plant for myself last year in Forest Park, so I have little sense of how unusual such a large population is.

But Rex, having been a woodsman all his life, assured me that he has never seen so much Indian Pipe in any of his woods. This patch was right beside his trail, the oak leaves piled high from a recent oak death above the spot.

Rex, who keeps his trails open to his neighbors, excitedly put up a sign identifying the mysterious plant for neighborhood walkers. I was excited to see his sign, I love signs -tell me more.



This is Hogpeanut, Amphicarpaea bracteata, swamping an area of the woods where a few large trees came down and let in some sunlight. I thought it was a weed, possibly invasive. Instead, it's native to eastern woods, edible, fixing nitrogen in the freshly sunlit soil, and probably is invasive to any garden given half the chance.

Indian pipe, caring not for photosynthesis, crops up even under the hogpeanut.

Adjacent, in the clearing, new oaks grow on the fallen.

And asters.

This clearing, towards the western boundary, is wet, causing much of the trees to fall over in storms. This maintains the clearing, allowing the sun lovers to grow.

Upslope and westerly, the woods abruptly ends at a fence line. Here, goldenrod.

Standing at the edge of the woods, looking northwest, we stare into the top edge of the gravel pit -so called because it was actually an active gravel excavation pit in the past. On the slope into the woods, piles of glacially rounded stones, and some chunks of concrete remain from those active days. Now the pit is covered with birch trees, some cedar, a very different plant community than just 100 feet to the east. No water stands in the pit, it seeps straight into the greater area aquifer.

Walking along this trail, on the northern boundary, we enter a valley with sloped sides.

The recent heavy rains unleashed a torrent down the northern slope. It's hard to make out, but a cleft in the slope, center top, is where the torrent ripped through purely black soil, washing this light gray clay onto the valley floor. It swamped everything in its path. Rex says it will kill the trees growing here. The cleft has been growing every year and there is no will to try to slow the water down that pours through here during heavy rains. There is no humus, no undergrowth to slow the moving water. This is a glacial landscape in flux, hills filling basins.

The red dot you may have noticed in the previous photo was a cluster of berries, the fruit of Jack-in-the-pulpit, Arisaema triphyllum.

First they are green.

Then mixed, finishing up red. These seem to be the only plants that grow in the deep shade under the maples.

Rex is always clearing the fallen twigs and timber, making piles he promises one day to burn.

There are about 8 piles now, all taller than me.

The southern exposure, which faces the large wetland, is occupied by an army of Buckthorn, Rhamnus cathartica. Can I make the greatest claim for invasive species management? That is a whole understory of buckthorn is really boring to explore. All green, all the time and nothing else.

I don't remember what these berries were attached to.

The occasional woodland sunflower.

The occasional woodland ladybug.

The occasional marble. I always find marbles when I am gardening.

Read more ...

New England Wildflower Society

Two weekends ago I visited the New England Wildflower Society's Garden in the Woods in Framingham, Massachusetts. I got there pretty late, maybe about 4:30pm, but they were open until 7 pm. It was nice to get out of the city, and I went on that rare type of day this summer -the cool kind, before the intense heat of last week. I stepped out of my van and I felt my blood pressure drop.

The Garden in the Woods actually contains a number of gardens, linked by trails that can be somewhat confusing to navigate -but we figured it out along the way (we had a map). There are also woodland trails not part of the garden proper, but connected to it. I saw many plants in flower, all quite beautiful, but it has taken much too long to put this post together, and so will give my best impression of brief.

Many of the plants were tagged, and there were different opportunities to learn what one is looking at. For instance, the "What's Blooming Now" sign board at the trail's beginning, but you can't take that with you, and the garden couldn't possibly tag every plant specimen, so it is that I have not identified many of the plants I found interesting. That said, I will try to find them on the internet. I should also point out that the NEWS website goes pretty deep, with a lot of information should you want to find information about particular native plants.

After parking, you approach the visitor center and nursery. There's plenty to buy, including sandwiches. I saw on their website that goldenrods were to be on sale ($5) the weekend I went, and, since I had killed my seaside goldenrod last year (moving it in fall), I thought this a perfect opportunity to buy a new one, or two. I bought a Bluestem, S. caesi, and a Showy, S. speciosa. These sit sadly, unplanted, in the side garden until I figure out where to put them or the heat breaks -whichever comes first.

The nursery had a lot of other plants -most are well-known garden perennials. They do sell some native perennials and shrubs that are hard to find at our common nurseries, like Threadleaf Ironweed,Vernonia lettermanii or New England Blazing Star, Liatris scariosa var. novae-angliae both of which I picked up because that's what plant people do in the face of plants new to them. If you are looking for rare native plants or those in quantity, look to their Nasami Farm -that's their major nursery operation.

The plant that was everywhere and eminently garden worthy is Black Cohosh, or Cimicfuga racemosa. Brilliant spires shooting above dark foliage.

One of the first gardens we stopped for was the 'idea garden.' Most of what we found here was this charming little garden shed with a planted roof. Notice the plant baskets on the fence line.

Pitcher plants in a basket.

On the other side, flowers.

As we walked downhill, we spotted this young deer prancing back and forth. I wondered how much deer damage there is in the Garden in the Woods.

The lily pond. Islands show different plant communities. Educational, but I didn't like the effect.

Along the pond trail, Slender Blue Flag, Iris prismatica.

I believe this is Cardinal Flower, or Lobelia cardinalis. This is one where I couldn't find a tag, but was well reminded of the plants from my Nissequogue canoe trip last summer.

The stems of the above are flattened, with ridges -not unlike celery.

Friend Steve in the meadow. Our timing landed us in between the two floriferous periods, and so it appears mostly green.

Although this plant is intriguing, I do not know what it is. Any ideas? *Desmodium paniculatum -thanks Steven Ziglar!

Nope, its not Purple Loosestrife, Lythrum salicaria. This specimen, however, was just a few feet from the former. Purple Loosestrife is listed as invasive by the Massachusetts Invasive Plant Advisory Group which is a comprehensive body of interested parties. Like the cheshire cat, it appears when you least expect it, smiling as if to say that even here, amongst the native plants of the New England Wildflower Society native plant gardens, I will appear -deal with me. "The proper order of things is often a mystery to me. You, too?"

And as if to reinforce the cat's position, a jail pops up. Beyond the absurdity of plants being held in jail, it's the unfortunate, misplaced metaphors like this that allow certain nay-sayers to harp on what they suggest are Nazi sympathizing, anti-immigration purists amongst a community of invasive plant policy supporters. As far as I can tell, nothing could be further from the truth. This kind of comparison only works in the mind, on the internet, in print, on paper. In the field, amongst scientists, the comparison loses traction. So the 'Plant Jail' has to go because it is a stupid visual pun that underestimates our intelligence and gives ammunition to those who'd rather look the other way than pull a few plants from a palette of thousands.

Okay, back to the fun stuff. Field of Asclepias tuberosa, or butterfly weed.

The large leaves and berried umbels of Umbrella Leaf, Diphylleia cymosa.

Have no idea, but was near the education center and rain garden. *Spigelia marilandica -thanks Ellen and Steven!

I believe this is a cultivated aster, Stokes Aster, Stokesia laevis.*Nope, sorry Frank, that's Barbara's Buttons or Marshallia grandiflora -thanks again Steven!

If you're ever in eastern Mass or anywhere near Boston, it's worth a trip. I wouldn't look to the Garden in the Woods as an example of great garden design, but more as a palette of plant choices that can inspire design. It's worth mentioning that the staff were very helpful and friendly even though I was purchasing plants at the last minute, never letting me sense that they were itching to go home. They even watered my plants with compost tea before I loaded them into the van. Now to get those in the ground.

Read more ...

Thunder

Courtesy of Wunderground.com

I saw the lightning from the studio window and I didn't want to get caught in the rain without my half-beaten umbrella, destroyed by one or another of the thunderstorms of this summer. I wasn't sure of the direction the storm was moving, all the while the chinny moon was in and out of our smokey warm front sky.

The yellow square indicates hail, the arrows direction, the notches in the arrows time till your neighborhood.

I made it home by 7:45 pm and only some low cracks and a few flashes, a drop on the sill, maybe two. The radar above tells a different story. Or not, this could be petering out. The storm V0 briefly had a tornadic signature over NJ, which I could see on the radial velocity radar image. Whenever I see a particularly intense thunderstorm, one with purple coloration and strong "shape" I check that radial velocity for the signature -something I did quite a few times this year.

The yellow diamond indicates a mesocyclone, which is simply a rotating storm which could lead to tornadic activity.

When I was a child I was horribly afraid of thunderstorms. So was my mother, and I think this is where I learned to fear. During really bad storms, which there always seemed to be, we would hunker down in the basement -a space somewhat capable of diminishing the experience of the storm. But, there were too many times that we kids were on our own, during storms, largely in summertime, in the afternoon, long before my parents would return from work. Those storms seemed so dangerous -as if the sky was after us, like a monster or hungry tiger ready to strike children.

I couldn't handle the loud, instant cracks of thunder -the sharp ones, the ones that feel like someone is shattering steel sheets over your head. I would plug my ears with my fingers to the point of ache. One time I was caught out on the open water in a skiff with my father. While we could see that a storm was brewing, he waited until the last minute to bring us in. I put my head between my legs so that I wasn't the highest point as lightning crashed around us, wind whipped waves driving the boat into the air. Another time, on the beach, a green sky storm seemed to stir up out of nowhere. Rushed from the water to the parking lot, lightning bolts crashing down yards away, but locked out of the car and waiting for my mother and aunt to make it with the keys.



It probably wasn't until my time in New Mexico that I truly began to get comfortable with thunderstorms. In my first few months there I lived out of my Ford pickup. It being monsoon season, afternoon, evening and night time thunderstorms were the norm. That first month was hellish as I tried to sleep in the pickup during night time storms, rain so heavy I thought I would get washed away in a flash flood.



Because of the nature of the landscape in the high desert, we can see distances, can watch thunderstorms form and dissipate from 30 or 40 miles away. I began to appreciate them for aesthetic qualities, something distance allows. I also began to appreciate the rains, and to watch people, however foolishly, not be scared off by storms moving in, ever so slowly, in the heat of a desert afternoon -soccer must go on.



It may have been my fear of thunderstorms that led me to my interest in meteorology, although I am as much inclined to believe it was Hurricane Belle, hitting Long Island one August, when I was six. My parents were in NYC that day, and we were cared for by my young uncle. It was humid and very cloudy, gray -I remember everything about that day from the moment my uncle told us we would have to bring in anything that could blow away. Up until that moment, we knew nothing of what was coming. The idea that things could blow away was highly intriguing. This was my first wind storm.



The storm passed overnight, lightning flashes revealing swishing, tormented trees, the black and white on all night, as my parents watched the progress of the storm via news reports. The next morning I recall the litter of twigs and branches, the fallen fences, the smell of fresh oak wood, but most of what I recall is the view out our bedroom window the night before, made visible by flashes of lightning.



So now it is that I am mostly comfortable with thunderstorms. But every so often, I am caught completely off guard, and this usually happens when I am removed from that ever so useful radar.



A few summers ago I was at the Mac Dowell Colony. It was the kind of summer where an unstable frontal boundary had parked right over northern NY, southern Vermont and New Hampshire. We had rough storms daily for about two weeks. I was in the common building, when it was struck by lightning. That was a loud. We had internet access in the building, so I checked the radar before leaving for my studio -a 15 minute walk. Nothing else appeared to be out there, so I left for my studio. When I got there, I had about an hour before dinner, which was in a yellow house atop a hill in a field another 15 minutes away. I decided to call Betsy on my cell. While we were talking I heard thunder that had the momentum of a march, canon fire, mortar blasts, a rather steady beating. After a few minutes, and seeing that dinner time was near, I told her that I should leave for dinner lest I get caught in the rain -oh the horror, wet at dinner.



I headed out the door, down the road, and into the woods. I can't see anything -only my ears to tell me what is going on. By this time Betsy can hear the thunder on her phone. I tell her that it is coming on awfully fast, mere minutes since I had left the studio. She tells me to hurry up and I tell her I think I should move faster. I hang up and walk faster, never inclined to run if I don't have to. By the time I exit the woods, maybe 7 minutes after leaving the studio, to cross the paved road, I see that the storm is just over the hill. It is not raining, however, and judge that I have enough time to get to the house up the hill before the deluge.



What came next was entirely unexpected. As I made my way up the paved road and turned onto the dirt drive, still the hill to climb, I am completely overtaken by the storm, surrounded by lightning bolts -there are ground strikes everywhere. I am mobilized by fear. You'll find this hard to believe, but the Mac Dowell creedo to not bother anyone in their studios prevented me from taking cover in any of the two studios on the way up the hill! I saw lightning above me, I instinctively dropped on all fours, or did I fall? The thunder was constant, never ceasing. I ran up that hill -who knew it was made of molasses? When I arrived at the top, I saw some of the kitchen staff running up the hill from the kitchen garden -they too were caught off guard. At that moment, lightning, which was landing all around us, had struck the large pine tree in front of the yellow house. A spiral burn and missing bark marked the spot, and where it leaped to the wishing well, it lost its shingles. All four of us ran into the nearest building to endure the storm. Never before had I felt so unprepared, so overtaken by a storm, so exposed.



Part of that is being in the mountains, where the woods obfuscates the sky, and the echoes off the hillsides distort what we hear -distorting our judgement. We were later told that this storm produced 20,000 lightning strikes per hour, which accounts for the thunderous march.



The next day, my friend, Tayari, a wonderful writer (and who introduced me to blogging!), wanted to go to town for lunch. I agreed, but a new thunderstorm was building just then. "Just a little thunder," she offered with her sweet Georgia sound before she walked and I jogged to her car. By the time we were on our way to Peterborough, it was clear things were going to get worse. After turning onto main street, the rain was so hard and wind so strong that we could not see in front of us. Then came the hail. I implored Tayari to turn right, into the bank parking lot, where there is a covering. But, honestly, and I think she would concur, she was just shrieking, freaking out, sitting in the middle of the road! She got the gumption to move on, but instead of the bank, pulled into another lot and parked under a tree. We endure 15 minutes of hail, falling branches, me wondering aloud whether or not hail could break the windshield, and crazy, car-rocking wind. I wondered about tornados in New Hampshire. And then we had lunch.



And that's how it is for most of us -tempest, then lunch. Although every now and then, we're awoken to what's possible.

Read more ...

City Water

I arrived at the farm on the beach Friday evening with all my cheap and easy supplies. Dictating my irrigation choices was the 1-inch PVC pipe and fittings my wife had in her studio. At the corner hardware store, there were barely any parts that reduced from 1-inch to 3/4 inch -which is the size of the 'female' fitting on the irrigation timer. After an exhaustive, dust-inhaling search amongst all his inventory, we found three different components that could make it work.

Some may question using PVC (polyvinyl chloride) as an element in water systems, although I have little concern for this application. My alternatives were expensive brass or copper pipes or other plastic compounds with a similar set of issues. In NYC, conventional PVC use is in lawn irrigation and may be slowly replacing cast iron 'black pipe' or 'charlotte pipe' for waste water. That said, around the U.S. and Canada, PVC is becoming the most common choice for potable public water mains and domestic supply. So, I guess what I'm saying is that we're drinking it anyway.

The garden is set up with ancient 1-inch galvanized iron pipes, rusting on the interior like you can't believe. My piping begins with brass fittings and valves, but then attaches to a plastic automated valve, water then flowing through a flexible plastic tubing to the PVC system. I do not have a backflow preventer, but then neither does anyone watering with a hose in a community garden. If you were to install a hard-plumbed irrigation system at home, this would be something you would need.

I cut the pipe to fit and placed all the fittings where I wanted them. At first, I didn't glue anything so that I could change things if needed.

Then I dug the trench with my handy trench digger -it's a shovel only 4-inches wide.

I had an old timer, but it didn't work any longer -forcing me to buy a new one. Lowe's had this timer by a company called 'Orbit,' costing about 30 bucks. It looked cheap and crappy, but was very easy to program -in fact, it didn't come with instructions of any kind. Mechanically, it may be cheap and crappy, but so far so good. I was pleased that it came with a metal screen at the inlet to filter out those chunks of rust that are sure to make their way through to my system.

The whole setup is rather Frankensteinian. Scavenged flexible clear pipe is only 1/2-inch interior diameter with scavenged hose connectors having 3/4-inch connections. I needed to reduce my 1-inch PVC to said 3/4-inch connection. At my corner store I was able to find a 1-inch PVC sleeve-to 1-inch 'male' threaded, a 1-inch 'female' threaded iron pipe reducing to a 3/4-inch female threaded, and to connect it all a double-ended 3/4-inch male threaded galvanized iron! Oy.

I buried the pipes, never gluing the top fittings because I wasn't sure if I would want to replace or reuse those pieces in the future. The water flows gently, which I wanted, so as not to disturb the soil or spray water all over the place. In other words -it works.

This is how most folks at the garden (or any garden) like to water their plants. They probably have a trigger spray nozzle or some such device. I cannot explain the feeling given by watering plants this way, but it is definite and possibly trance inducing. Is it the sense of control over one of the most important elements in all of life? Is it the power of 'making it rain?' Or is it something more sensual -the wetness, the mist, its cooling effect? Could be its sound, the splish and splash, but what of the pfffffft? I cannot say. No matter, I make it rain with electronic valves and gravity, near the ground and at regular intervals.

This is smarter because no matter what anyone says about farms in the city, I will not be slave to watering or rain. I am a city dweller and I long to escape for two weeks at a time, to see the land and its produce, to marvel at the broad expanse of forest and field, to bathe in the cool moist understory of air seeping from woods on hillsides without ever worrying of his tomatoes or green beans -that is in the contract! You -in the countryside will have great expanse and distance between you and others, neighborliness and drive by wavings, a slow pace, cleaner air and honesty. We -in the city will be free from rising at dawn to milk the cows, will have variety in all things, hustle, bustle and irony, and never, ever, will we have to worry about the state of the food growing on our little 'farms.' Because I am a city dweller, I must tend to other pursuits.

Read more ...