New Beds and Natives

Three years ago a friend invited me to a group on FB about environmentally friendly gardening in Maryland. I began learning about the importance of natives and how they are the best to feed native species. The plants, soil, animals and insects lived largely unaltered adapting well to each other for thousands of years until humans started "playing God".

I've read the book 'Founding Gardeners'. I love it. It's a really fascinating and fantastic read. These guys' commitment to nature was beautiful, but trying to replicate European gardens when you're not in Europe isn't the greatest plan. We're still reaping the ever-increasing consequences of non-natives decimating natives. (Here's looking at you, English Ivy 😑)

Someone recently shared that they get so frustrated when people say "Oh look at all the pollinators on these flowers, they must be good!"
That's like saying, "Oh look at all the cars around Mc-a-Dee's - it must be good for you!"

There just isn't as much nutrients in most of the plants at nurseries which have been played with to make longer blooms, more desirable attractiveness, etc.

So I began oh-so-slowly to buy a few natives.
And got some from my friend who started me on this journey.

But I think one of the biggest changes has been re-thinking beauty.

This is beautiful:

It really is. I absolutely LOVE color! I went overboard on annuals last year because I was hosting a luau and wanted fun, brightness!

But those are largely all cotton candy for pollinators.

What else is beautiful?
I've come to see that this is:

Sure, you might think it looks messy and it kind of is - I'm working on it! So let me share some of the gardens from folks in the group I mentioned above:

Snapdragons are decidedly not native, but
I didn't know they're perennial when I
planted them years ago 🙊

Absolutely beautiful! 

I've found that learning more about what's actually helpful instead of just what I've been conditioned to see as beautiful in "what a yard should look like" has truly changed how I see beauty in plants.

Just letting things go a bit more "wild" has already made our yard explode with butterflies and birds. Last year we saw our first ever Carolina mantis egg sac (though they never hatched...alas. Still - all I'd seen before were the invasive ones!) And this year we're seeing a ton of 9-spotted ladybugs, which were introduced from Europe, but at least have been around decades longer than Asian ones that have taken over of late.

I don't want to be a psycho about this. I personally have a hard time thinking that over the hundreds of years since Europeans introduced new plants, pollinators haven't adapted to them...?
But I do want to be a good caretaker of this tiny piece of land I've been entrusted with, so I'm tryin'!

Where we took the trees down, I wanted to take advantage of this now-open space and create new beds, especially since I had a ridiculous amount of mulch to keep too much stuff taking over while I planned and obtained plants to fill what has become a significant square footage!

Huge empty areas after the trees were removed

Brand new enormous bed! Gosh I hate removing sod 😩

In the fall I bought a few natives to fill in (which I didn't take good close pictures of 🙄)...

Giant coneflower / brown-eyed susans, Tickseed, Creeping Phlox, Yarrow (which I ended up planting in a giant pot in the front), and a new favorite: Blue False Indigo - sooo pretty!

This spring I'm very excited that I got some new natives from a fellow gardener in the group! I put them right to work, starting in my "new" wildflower bed (refer to  last year's jungle  to remember this history of this little bed)...

Sure, sure, I know it looks sparse now, but you plant for the size plants will become, NOT like developers do and smoosh it in for current curb appeal leaving homeowners cursing and ripping out trees and shrubs planted 3' from their foundation 5 years later 😑 (I clearly don't have strong feelings on this 😑😑)

Some of these plants are decently eager spreaders (hence putting them here and NOT along our neighbor's fences!), so I'm sure by next year and especially the year after it'll be spectacular!

I got Golden Alexander, Lyreleaf sage, Cutleaf coneflower, Aromatic aster, Pussytoes, and I'm quite excited about a few St. Johns Wort shrubs she shared as they seem to be great in multiple conditions, are pretty, and remain a decent size.

But the crowning glory is finally having my first packera aurea! Golden ragwort!

For some reason, it's a featured plant in my gardening group and so I feel so "in" having some now 😄 Mostly I'm excited because this and a few others are May bloomers, which has historically been my bloom-less time (and also when half my friends have birthdays, so no fresh garden bouquets for you 😞)

Several of those plants are the preferred host for pollinators to lay their eggs on. Within 2 days of planting, an American Lady butterfly was checking out the pussytoes!

So yay! We're well on the journey now!

Next up, take a peek at my psychotic, slightly spontaneous huge rain garden addition!

Another Random Death

Welp, around the time last year that we knew that our trees were dying and  needed to come down, we gave up hope for the photinia x fraseri. 

The previous year this evergreen had randomly dropped its leaves overnight - or at least within a week. I walked out one day and gone. Skeletonized 😳

It was a complete mystery to me.
Husband, however, wasn't so puzzled. 

We'd planted it too close to the house to begin with and he always hated that thing since it required high trimming. So in a fit of rage he pruned it more than I'd (and maybe he'd! 😆) realized. (Disclaimer: if he's ever had a fit of rage in his life it hasn't been in the 20 years that I've known him. An overly enthusiastic, possibly in a fit of frustration trimming is probably more accurate.)

It did get some new growth, so we left it alone, but it remained real sad and looked like this all last summer...

Slightly different from the vibrant behemoth it had been for close to 10 years (well ok, it took several years to become a behemoth of course).

With  new trees  in sight, it had to go.

But holy giant shrub, Batman! This thing SUCKED to remove!

It really was like removing a tree. A very, very fluffy, possibly fighting-back tree.

Digging with all my might while husband sawzalls the giant branches in the background. I finally had to call him over to do his worst on the largest roots because my clippers weren't cutting it and that stump was not budging!

Finally, freeeeeee!!!

It made quite the stick bundles for our saintly yard waste collectors! 😬

But that stump, sheesh! It only took 7 months before we finally got it to the dump.

We have a lovely new blank canvas into which I can plan our front beds properly! Buuuut first there's one little humongous problem...

Over the years thistles have grown up around it. It started with a few I tried to pull out and then got more and more and the last couple of years they have been completely out of control. Come to find out they have a vast underground root system; the tap roots can go FEET deep. The connecting roots are incredibly brittle, though, so the second you tug, it breaks and you've just created fuel for its happy, wicked spread. These are demons in plant form, no doubt about that!

Multiple people in my "environmentally-friendly gardening" group have said that this is the ONLY thing for which they use weed killer. This is a very very VERY anti-chemical group, so that tells you something! 

Unfortunately I didn't know all of that when I decided we now had a wide open bed so that I could aggressively rip out all the roots! That of course made them spread worse. 😩

So I am now clipping them off as they pop up, very carefully spraying the base and then I covered the whole area with about 8" of leftover mulch of which I have an abundance. I'll leave it be for this year to keep tabs on what comes up and let the soil recover from the chemicals and then next year I hope to plant plant plant!

Spring Sprung and I Wasn't Ready

I had a most delightful winter. A very, very all-too-short winter. I had so many projects I was going to get done before gardening season kicked off and before I knew it it was March and I was secretly praying it would stay cold so I didn't have to feel guilty for not gardening!

But ready or not, here it came!

Lovely tulips and other spring fare:

We had a ton of Cedar Waxwings show up in our cherry tree...like, DOZENS! Apparently they like the cherry blossoms, who knew?! Google, that's who.

We did get some peas and lettuce planted; the peas are looking dandy in their new spot, but the lettuce has yet to produce more than 4 leaves out of the numerous seeds we planted.

One delightful last year project was finally digging out the last of the daylilies. Sheesh these things are insane! This was the largest root/tuber ball cluster! 

My switch in trying to focus primarily on natives has led me to start tackling especially the aggressive non-natives, so this felt like a big win!

And as usual, a few nice days and getting my fingers in the soil has made me abandon all other projects and it's aaaall about the gardening now!

Next up - 

New Trees!!!!!!

Huh, well  that  was a massive bummer to end the year on and no follow-up with the new life part!

As I mentioned at the end of that post, we participated in this wonderful Maryland program and got FOUR native trees for $25 each! 

The Service Berry (Amelanchier canadensis): 

We put this in our front yard; it will get about 25-30 feet tall and spread out 15-20, so should fill that half of the yard nicely!
It has beautiful orange and red coloring in the fall, lovely blossoms in the spring AND we can eat the berries!

The Willow Oak (Quercus phellos):

This big guy came to us at around 7', so that was a fun surprise (they were supposed to be "about 4-6 feet")! 

I have never heard of it nor knew there were oak trees with these types of leaves. It's a decently fast-growing oak and loves water (like a willow!), so it's great for the spot in the corner of our yard where all of our yard drains to.
I went back and forth on how irresponsible it was to put an oak that close to neighbors' yards...it's one thing if it's existing, but to deliberately dump acorns on them?! Then I found out (from my kid's book 😄) that they don't start producing acorns until they're like 30 years old, so we'll probably all be long gone before then! Hashtag future owners' problem 😆🙊  

The always-wanted Flowering Dogwood (Cornus florida):

This will, of course, be glorious in the springtime. My neighbor's just glows and makes me gasp multiple times a spring! That is, if it survives. I'm aware that these are very prone to disease and issues and when I mentioned that, my tree guru suggested I get "another one just in case"....soooo that's how we ended up with four trees. "Soooooo, honey..." 😆🙊

The American Witch-hazel (Hamamelis virginiana):

This came to us the smallest of the bunch and boy has it had a go! In the winter it looked like something had snipped it off - it was literally a 12 inch STICK in the ground! 😱
I thought for sure it was a goner, but a few weeks ago husband said he saw the teeeeniest buds starting! Woo hoo!!!!

Like the Dogwood, it'll get about 15-20' tall, so nice sizes to fill in under our oak and black gum and the neighbor's maple canopy.

The vastness of green...

...filled in with treeeeees!!! (We are clearly so not a sports family when I feel no need for open areas...so long as there's room to run in the sprinkler and set up a slide, 'they good'! 😆)

Current spring loveliness

Compare that short, but happy, leaf-producing little guy in the foreground with his winter self...

Saddest little stick..... Then leeeeeeaves!!!! 

All four seem to be thriving! Soooo happy!

Gorgeous blossoms on the Serviceberry in the spring

The yard in the shed corner is still very naked and my poor shade garden is baking, but there's hope for the future!

Fall planting

Spring Luxe!

Sad Deaths, but Hope for New Life

In the spring our neighbor pointed out a giant dead spot at the top of the trunk of our maple in the back of our yard. We couldn't really see it from where we usually are, but it was obvious from his yard. Well shoot!
We also had a sweetgum tree with a lot of dead branches. Bummer #2.

In beautiful fortuitousness, I did a plant swap with a woman who ended up being an aborist. I asked her for recommendations on tree companies who would tell me honestly how the trees were doing (versus the dime-a-dozen companies whose entire job is basically to remove trees and it's in their financial interest to do so).

I had 2 companies come out and both agreed: the sweetgum, which had more dead branches by the day, needed to come down. The maple could probably be saved and helped, but it was a double trunk tree, one of which was leaning to the right (you know, over 2 of our neighbors' sheds 😳). So they could chop off the dead part at the top of the straight trunk, but were worried that it would mess with the balance of the tree because of the double trunks. The solution would involve hundreds of dollars in trimming, shoring up the diagonal trunk, and fertilizing. And there's of course no guarantee that would actually save the tree.
We're just not in the position to be able to pay for that now and end up having to pay to remove it anyway in one or a few years. 

Both would have to come down.

I was crushed.

I loooooooooooove trees. 

I get angry and sad when I see trees coming down, especially since most of the time people are removing trees because they're inconvenient and pay no attention to the horrendous damage they do to our way of life in taking away something so essential to clean air and the way the ecosystem functions!

But dying trees are a different story, especially ones that have in their path 3 sheds, 2 houses, 4-5 fences, not to mention chickens! Definitely a situation of needing to be responsible neighbors.

I wanted to wait until after a summer party where I strung lovely ribbon banners between them and enjoyed our beautiful, abundantly green yard! And let husband get his last few months with the perfect hammock trees.
Then there was a delay in a company getting back to me and we were traveling and suddenly it was October! And they needed to come down immediately if we were going to be able to plant new. Thankfully I contacted the other (of course more expensive) company and they had me scheduled in 2 days and were incredible to work with.   

The day arrived.

7:15 in the morning I went out to mark the sections we wanted to save for woodworking projects, and as I was so close to the tree, was surprised at how big it is. You don't appreciate the diameter of these trunks until you're up close. Stab in my heart as I looked up at this giant. And tears came. Yes, I cried over a tree. It truly hurt to think of losing these gorgeous, probably 30+ year old trees and to imagine the bareness of that half of my yard when they were gone.

7:30 they arrived and the tragedy commenced.
Thankfully it was SO fascinating to watch. They are truly gifted in their work. My toddlers - even the constantly wriggling 1-year-old - were mesmerized. The 3-year-old and I spent 3 hours throughout the morning going from window to window and the deck watching the process. That really did help a lot what would otherwise have been unbearable to watch.

Yikes it would be truly awful without the remaining trees to slightly fill in the gaping hole. The cherry tree in the foreground looks dead, but that's just because it's the first to lose its leaves every year. Thankfully it's alive and well since husband started pruning dead sections off.

Very different view from our neighbor's 😔

The yard is definitely naked. So bright and so bare in that corner. I'm worried that my shade garden will get too much sun now too!  

Sooooo much sun now! Aaaahhh!!!

I cannot stop being thankful for the remaining oak and my glorious black gum that I DO still have. And for the lovely trees in my neighbor's yard that still give some visual interest to that corner.

The trees ended up being way more rotted than we'd guessed too. That was very helpful confirmation that we absolutely did the right thing. And I got a yikes-ton of mulch out of it too!

Meanwhile - this wonderful arborist had mentioned a Maryland program where for just $25 you can get a native tree and plant it yourself. I was in!
Unfortunately I dropped the ball big time all summer on deciding what trees we wanted and travel in September took my mind away, so that I finally contacted her in early October sure it was too late. But because the trees were able to be removed so quickly and the folks in charge of the program said they think they could squeeze our order in AND most importantly because she had already been out to our yard and we did a "virtual visit" video call before she had to head out of town, she was able to put together the needed plat and talk through placement for the species I was interested in and WE'RE GETTING OUR TREES!!

They'll be 4-6' tall. A far, far cry and nowhere near a replacement for the 30-40' trees that had to come down, but it's at least the right move to help the need for more natives. It also helped ease some of the grief of losing the trees - getting excited about something new to watch grow over the years!