Spring Springing
It's about the People
Confessions of a Certified (and Certifiable) Tree Hugger
The Life Is in the Sap
Ten Ways to Die Gardening
An Autumn Masterpiece
Sassafras
Fall Gardening
A Day In The Life
What's Killing Your Lawn
Sweet Bay
Fringe Tree
Sweet Gum
It Will Stop You In Your Tracks
A Baker's Dozen Favorite Gardening Books
He Planted A Garden
Ode To The Humble Cherry Laurel
How To Find A Gardener
Confessions of a Certified (and Certifiable) Tree Hugger
OK, since I have been accused, I will go ahead and confess. Yes, I hug trees.
Though people are often referred to as tree huggers this moniker is not usually meant literally. It just means that the person cares about the environment or maybe wears sandals and eats granola. I do like granola and I do care about the environment, though I rarely wear sandals.
And I do love trees. Especially big trees, old trees, trees with character and history. Maybe that’s one reason I like Tolkien so much, for he so deeply loved trees too (For a wonderful essay about Tolkien and trees click here).
Now wouldn't you love to curl up in the nook of a "limb" on Treebeard (who wasn't himself a tree but was a tender and guardian of trees) and take a nap, or hear a tale of Fanghorn, or listen closely along with Treebeard to the deepness of the forest? I like to sit against trees, especially in the nooks between roots of really big ones, like Frodo did in Tom Bombadli's forest. Thankfully the trees I sit against are nicer than Tom's. And if I sit very very still against a tree in the forest soon the animals forget about me and go about their business and often come very close. I've seen lots of deer this way.
Though people are often referred to as tree huggers this moniker is not usually meant literally. It just means that the person cares about the environment or maybe wears sandals and eats granola. I do like granola and I do care about the environment, though I rarely wear sandals.
And I do love trees. Especially big trees, old trees, trees with character and history. Maybe that’s one reason I like Tolkien so much, for he so deeply loved trees too (For a wonderful essay about Tolkien and trees click here).
Now wouldn't you love to curl up in the nook of a "limb" on Treebeard (who wasn't himself a tree but was a tender and guardian of trees) and take a nap, or hear a tale of Fanghorn, or listen closely along with Treebeard to the deepness of the forest? I like to sit against trees, especially in the nooks between roots of really big ones, like Frodo did in Tom Bombadli's forest. Thankfully the trees I sit against are nicer than Tom's. And if I sit very very still against a tree in the forest soon the animals forget about me and go about their business and often come very close. I've seen lots of deer this way.
So sometimes when no one is looking I’ll wrap my arms around a tree to get a feel for how big and old it is. As far as I know a tree has no neurons or anything like them, though .recent research has confirmed that some plants do transmit a a kind of electrical impulse. Trees also have hormones, and hormones allow one part of a tree to communicate with another. And plant cells have the ability to "store" information, though we cannot say, sadly that they have memories as we think of memories. But they just seem to have memories don’t they?
Trees, especially old trees, seem to have unique personalities. Even old trees of the same species are quite different from each other, and they each seem to have a unique story to tell if they could but talk. Trees point us back to the mystery of history, to stories we want to understand yet which seem just out of our grasp, to that mystery which is the past. This tree has a story I think.
Trees, especially old trees, seem to have unique personalities. Even old trees of the same species are quite different from each other, and they each seem to have a unique story to tell if they could but talk. Trees point us back to the mystery of history, to stories we want to understand yet which seem just out of our grasp, to that mystery which is the past. This tree has a story I think.
Trees that disappear into the heights seem to want to tell a different story, not of the past. They seem to point us to a deeper mystery with which our hearts desperately want to connect. In a literal way they reach up, pointing to the sky, to the heavens above. They get lost, shrouded in mystery, and we want to follow them into that mystery, for somehow it seems our own stories are made complete there. These trees seem to point us to our future, our destiny, but it is just a hint, just enough to keep us yearning.
So...if a man can “love” the earth, which seems appropriate and not weird, and if a man can love the beasts, which seems appropriate and not weird, and if a man can love a mountain which seems appropriate and not weird, can a man not love a tree as well, and it be appropriate and not weird? And cannot a man love certain groves of trees, and kinds of trees, and specimens of trees, as he would love his particular dog, or creek, or mountain? I think so. And so I confess, I love trees. I love the soil. I love the critters and beasts. I love mountains. I love the beach. And I love trees.
I think C. S. Lewis would call this love the love of “affection.” It is deep and abiding, and many people share this affection for trees, and the land, and the soil, and unspoiled places. When you cut down their favorite grove of trees or open up to development that beautiful field you are not just removing inanimate objects, you are removing something beloved, and you are cutting into a person’s heart.
I suppose I will keep hugging and loving trees. I will try to make the world of my grandchildren and great grand children better by planting more of them than I destroy, directly or indirectly. I will keep trying to preserve for the enjoyment of my children and grandchildren and great grandchildren special beautiful places so their lives can be rich and full of the bounty for which (I believe) God has created and with which he has blessed us.
People of faith often talk about "heaven" in a very nebulous non physical sort of way. For those whose faith is rooted in the Hebrew or Christian scriptures however, this picture just won't do. The story of these scriptures points not to a mere "spiritual" as in non-physical end game, but to something far richer, to a "new heavens and a new earth." Yep, a new earth. The narrative of these scriptures points to the restoration of the original creation, a creation teeming with life, and filled with trees and forests and animals! One might even say that the story of these scriptures is a story of garden restoration ( :-) ), where the primordial earth and the original garden finally find their freedom from bondage and live on and persist in all their intended glory.
And as to the tree hugging, and my confession, here is proof:
I think C. S. Lewis would call this love the love of “affection.” It is deep and abiding, and many people share this affection for trees, and the land, and the soil, and unspoiled places. When you cut down their favorite grove of trees or open up to development that beautiful field you are not just removing inanimate objects, you are removing something beloved, and you are cutting into a person’s heart.
I suppose I will keep hugging and loving trees. I will try to make the world of my grandchildren and great grand children better by planting more of them than I destroy, directly or indirectly. I will keep trying to preserve for the enjoyment of my children and grandchildren and great grandchildren special beautiful places so their lives can be rich and full of the bounty for which (I believe) God has created and with which he has blessed us.
People of faith often talk about "heaven" in a very nebulous non physical sort of way. For those whose faith is rooted in the Hebrew or Christian scriptures however, this picture just won't do. The story of these scriptures points not to a mere "spiritual" as in non-physical end game, but to something far richer, to a "new heavens and a new earth." Yep, a new earth. The narrative of these scriptures points to the restoration of the original creation, a creation teeming with life, and filled with trees and forests and animals! One might even say that the story of these scriptures is a story of garden restoration ( :-) ), where the primordial earth and the original garden finally find their freedom from bondage and live on and persist in all their intended glory.
And as to the tree hugging, and my confession, here is proof:
So book me Dano!
Fringe Tree
Spring before last I planted a tree for some neighbors in the corner of their backyard. An existing tree in the location had died. (Or so we thought - the tree was, as it turned out, only mostly dead). I suggested to the homeowner that we plant a small native tree that I liked called a fringe tree. I sent along some pictures and an article or two. They looked it up and were agreeable. The day I came to plant the fringe tree I noticed that one limb of the "dead" tree was still alive, and that it was blooming. Much to my surprise it too was a fringe tree! The homeowner and I had one of those do-do-do-do moments...I mean, what are the chances? It seemed that that corner was just meant to have a fringe tree.
I wrote the client to ask how it was doing. He sent along the picture below. The young tree is barely six feet tall but look at the blooms!
I wrote the client to ask how it was doing. He sent along the picture below. The young tree is barely six feet tall but look at the blooms!
Obviously these are not ordinary blooms! They hang down in big fluff balls of snow from the stems. The scientific name for our native fringe tree is Chionanthus virginicus. Chionanthus, the genus, translates roughly as "snow flower." It's not too hard to see where the name came from. Another common name is old man's beard or Grancy gray beard.
This past spring I was at the nursery with another customer to buy some perennials. They just happened to have a blooming fringe tree in stock. My customer friend took a big deep smell and exclaimed that it smelled like chocolate. I had never really stuck my nose into the flower tufts so I did the same. To my surprise it did indeed smell like chocolate. We took it home and found a perfect place for it.
Fringe trees become beautiful, somewhat gnarly trunked small trees 15-20 feet high, often as wide as tall. Their bark is a beautiful furrowed gray-brown, and the leaves turn a delightful yellow in the fall.
Our fringe tree is a true native, being found across the Carolinas in various habitats and soil types and sun conditions. I have seen fringe trees in the wild on several occasions, usually as an under story tree or on the edges of wooded areas.
What I find most interesting about fringe trees is that most people have never seen them, yet when they do they find the tree fascinating, even exotic.
And this is what I find most interesting about gardening with native plants. So inundated have we been for so long (almost 300 years!) by so many mostly oriental plants, plants which are now the mainstays of the southern garden, that it is the native species that have become the rare, interesting, and exotic ones - the ones we are inclined to treat as lost treasures!
This past spring I was at the nursery with another customer to buy some perennials. They just happened to have a blooming fringe tree in stock. My customer friend took a big deep smell and exclaimed that it smelled like chocolate. I had never really stuck my nose into the flower tufts so I did the same. To my surprise it did indeed smell like chocolate. We took it home and found a perfect place for it.
Fringe trees become beautiful, somewhat gnarly trunked small trees 15-20 feet high, often as wide as tall. Their bark is a beautiful furrowed gray-brown, and the leaves turn a delightful yellow in the fall.
Our fringe tree is a true native, being found across the Carolinas in various habitats and soil types and sun conditions. I have seen fringe trees in the wild on several occasions, usually as an under story tree or on the edges of wooded areas.
What I find most interesting about fringe trees is that most people have never seen them, yet when they do they find the tree fascinating, even exotic.
And this is what I find most interesting about gardening with native plants. So inundated have we been for so long (almost 300 years!) by so many mostly oriental plants, plants which are now the mainstays of the southern garden, that it is the native species that have become the rare, interesting, and exotic ones - the ones we are inclined to treat as lost treasures!
Sassafras
Sassafras Leaf on Ivy
I was working early last fall clearing a wonderful rocky hillside on a property on Lakeshore Drive. As always when I do this sort of work I had to make decisions about various saplings and small trees, whether to leave them or take them out ("What to leave in, what to leave out" - Bob Segar, Against the Wind).
This particular hillside has many small trees popping up that are clearly invasive non-natives like princess tree, tallow tree, and mimosa. I am not fond of any of them. Natives like cherry laurel and hackberry and sweet gum sprout up everywhere too.
When I see a young tree it helps to know its habit - is it an under story tree (one that grows underneath the taller trees) or will it want to grow to 60-80 feet, and if so, is there room above for this to happen? I look up and think, "Does this tree have a future in this space?" If it does not seem to then out it comes.
I had come across a little grove of young sassafras trees on this rocky hillside the year before. Now I am clearly a fan of sassafras; I leave them along almost all the time. Sassafras takes me right back to my childhood and I love the shape of the leaves and the smell of the roots. Sassafras has a wonderful brown bark and a twisty gnarly pattern and is an under story tree and it gets lots of love from me. I smile to think how many homeowners overrule me on sassafras. Not everyone is a fan.
You can read about sassafras here and here.
So I was making my way along the hill, pulling up ivy and other vines, deciding on this or that shrub or bush, and this wonderful red sassafras leaf set off against the glossy green ivy caught my attention, so I grabbed my iPhone and snapped a few pictures. I think it's mighty pretty.
Not to get overly philosophical here but I have always been moved by these little isolated "moments" of beauty. See, this particular view of this leaf on this ivy on these rocks, well, in the history of the universe this is a unique moment, never to be exactly repeated. And I, normal as I am, still a unique person (as all persons are), also never to be exactly repeated, able to see and rejoice in it. A moment in time, noticed, appreciated.
And captured here for you.
Sassafras
This particular hillside has many small trees popping up that are clearly invasive non-natives like princess tree, tallow tree, and mimosa. I am not fond of any of them. Natives like cherry laurel and hackberry and sweet gum sprout up everywhere too.
When I see a young tree it helps to know its habit - is it an under story tree (one that grows underneath the taller trees) or will it want to grow to 60-80 feet, and if so, is there room above for this to happen? I look up and think, "Does this tree have a future in this space?" If it does not seem to then out it comes.
I had come across a little grove of young sassafras trees on this rocky hillside the year before. Now I am clearly a fan of sassafras; I leave them along almost all the time. Sassafras takes me right back to my childhood and I love the shape of the leaves and the smell of the roots. Sassafras has a wonderful brown bark and a twisty gnarly pattern and is an under story tree and it gets lots of love from me. I smile to think how many homeowners overrule me on sassafras. Not everyone is a fan.
You can read about sassafras here and here.
So I was making my way along the hill, pulling up ivy and other vines, deciding on this or that shrub or bush, and this wonderful red sassafras leaf set off against the glossy green ivy caught my attention, so I grabbed my iPhone and snapped a few pictures. I think it's mighty pretty.
Not to get overly philosophical here but I have always been moved by these little isolated "moments" of beauty. See, this particular view of this leaf on this ivy on these rocks, well, in the history of the universe this is a unique moment, never to be exactly repeated. And I, normal as I am, still a unique person (as all persons are), also never to be exactly repeated, able to see and rejoice in it. A moment in time, noticed, appreciated.
And captured here for you.
Sassafras
Field Notes 11/3/2014: Just Another Brick in the Path
Loquat in Full Flower
Today I worked at the home of a special client. I say "special" because she was one of the first 2-3 folks who hired me when I got started gardening again back in May 2010, admittedly a low point in my life. I will always be especially grateful for those folks who decided to give me a try, and who then referred me to others.
The work in this yard is hardly restoration, though in the beginning I did have to do a fair bit of vine removal. This person is a master gardener and always has projects for me to work on, and yes, the seasonal pruning.
Let me see, today I pruned a crowded crape myrtle, very carefully removed some lower limbs from a beautiful berry-filled old burfordi holly, took some dead wood out of an old dogwood, cut down and dug out a very old huge but sick sasanqua, transplanted a forsythia and four azaleas, removed wisteria here and there, went around the entire lot to do touch up pruning, pruned her 150+ foot long loropetalum hedge along the sidewalk along Beltline, petted her kitty, sunk bricks an inch into the ground for a mower-safe brick border in the "secret garden," and pulled down some smilax from her large camellias.
In case you're interested I listened to Lucinda William's "Down where the Spirit Meets the Bone" loudly on my iPod when pruning along Beltline.
It was a good general gardening day.
This client likes to work in the garden when i am working there. I love it when clients do this, and the moments we work-along-side and get to talk about life. The personal relationship with my client-friends is such a key component to my business, well, more accurately, to my life. I work a lot, and were it not for these relationships my life would be much more barren. And I just like it when folks who hire me are also. in some sense, my friends.
I took a few moments to take photos with my iPhone of her loquats in full bloom. I have pruned these big boys many times but not today. I am quite fond of loquats. They almost always have a late fall bloom which attracts and feeds lots of bees. And there is always the hope that these flowers may turn into fruits. As to why loquats fruit one year and not another is a total mystery to me, but when they do..ahh...they are so delicious! I do love me some loquat fruit!
The work in this yard is hardly restoration, though in the beginning I did have to do a fair bit of vine removal. This person is a master gardener and always has projects for me to work on, and yes, the seasonal pruning.
Let me see, today I pruned a crowded crape myrtle, very carefully removed some lower limbs from a beautiful berry-filled old burfordi holly, took some dead wood out of an old dogwood, cut down and dug out a very old huge but sick sasanqua, transplanted a forsythia and four azaleas, removed wisteria here and there, went around the entire lot to do touch up pruning, pruned her 150+ foot long loropetalum hedge along the sidewalk along Beltline, petted her kitty, sunk bricks an inch into the ground for a mower-safe brick border in the "secret garden," and pulled down some smilax from her large camellias.
In case you're interested I listened to Lucinda William's "Down where the Spirit Meets the Bone" loudly on my iPod when pruning along Beltline.
It was a good general gardening day.
This client likes to work in the garden when i am working there. I love it when clients do this, and the moments we work-along-side and get to talk about life. The personal relationship with my client-friends is such a key component to my business, well, more accurately, to my life. I work a lot, and were it not for these relationships my life would be much more barren. And I just like it when folks who hire me are also. in some sense, my friends.
I took a few moments to take photos with my iPhone of her loquats in full bloom. I have pruned these big boys many times but not today. I am quite fond of loquats. They almost always have a late fall bloom which attracts and feeds lots of bees. And there is always the hope that these flowers may turn into fruits. As to why loquats fruit one year and not another is a total mystery to me, but when they do..ahh...they are so delicious! I do love me some loquat fruit!
Ode to the Humble Cherry Laurel
This is the time of year when it would pay for a guy like me to lay before you a list of many of the wonderful new cultivars of this or that variety of plant, and encourage you to buy them – and of course also hire me to plant them for you.
But I have been feeling sorry for one particular native tree lately, and thought I would extol its virtues before going on to speak about plants you might actually want to grow…
If I had to give the Rodney Dangerfield award to the native tree that gets the least respect it would certainly go to the common warty-trunked hackberry tree, suffering even more in reputation of late due to a troublesome aphid problem leaving everything below covered by a black mold growing happily in the aphid poop.
But coming in a close second in Dangerfield honors would be our very own native cherry laurel, Prunus caroliniana. Both the hackberry and the cherry laurel are often referred to as trash trees or weed trees. They are definitely not trash, though, given their tremendous success in getting birds to spread their seeds anywhere and everywhere, they can in fact act like weeds. As to what a weed is – and is not – well, that’s for another article.
I cannot dislike any plant whose species name is caroliniana. And I go way back with this prunus…
Growing up on Bridgewood Road we had a volunteer cherry laurel tree right at the back corner of the house, and for years and years it provided very easy access to the roof, much easier than a ladder. The cats even used it for that purpose as well, and I often enjoyed chilling out on the roof with one or more of our cats, thanks to said cherry laurel.
That particular cherry laurel, like most I would guess, grew up amidst stiff competition for light, bending this way and that way. In the end it worked out OK for climbing but it wasn’t particularly photogenic.
We had another cherry laurel that grew up straight as an arrow all by itself, and for some reason we just let it grow. It was in the forward corner of a back quadrant of the back yard that we had long neglected, and served in time to demarcate the civilized from the uncivilized parts of our property. It grew up to be a beautiful, full, and perfectly symmetrical specimen, probably twenty five feet tall by the time I cut it down in 1980 to make room for a lawn I was planting for my parents, imposing civilization upon the woods of the back quadrant. They loved the lawn.
The other things I remember about these two trees were the upright cylindrical blossom arrays (racemes they are called) every spring, the bees swarming around all the white blossoms, and as a result of blooms plus bees, the beautiful black berries every fall.
In my work now I pull out, trim back, cut down, and dig out cherry laurels on quite a regular basis. I suppose that this humble tree contributes quite a bit to my living, so I am grateful to it also in that respect. And thankfully it is very easy to pull out of the ground by hand, compared say to an oak sapling. Even a cherry laurel sapling three to four feet high can be yanked out roots and all, no problem. Try pulling up an oak sapling even half that size. You may pop the sapling, or pop your back, but you won’t pop it out roots and all.
Cherry laurel wood is very heavy due I think to water retention, and has a really attractive red brown color. It stains wonderfully and unpredictably, though I do not know much about its historic use as a wood. For burning I would think it takes a long time to cure. I would be interested to know how it burns once dry since I often produce a prodigious supply!
Though cherry laurels are known for sending up suckers from stumps (almost overnight it seems), the stumps can be killed by brushing with concentrated RoundUp. They can also be dug out if need be.
The reason there are cherry laurels everywhere is of course that their berries are a big hit with the birds. I don’t actually know how many bird species like them, nor, if I were to ask a bird, if cherry laurel would be in its top ten berry list. I do know that the trees are always stripped bare of their berries and that little baby cherry laurels grow far from any mama trees. Somebody likes it. The seed apparently is poisonous but not the flesh of the fruit (technically a drupe). The leaves also are poisonous, which is why deer don’t like them. If you have a deer problem, cherry laurel is a great plant to have around.
Cherry laurels were very common in antebellum southern gardens. They were used for hedges, visual screens and barriers, shade, and often as specimen plants. They were celebrated by none other than the famous Michaux father and son – Andre and Francois – and got a page in Francois’s monumental The North American Sylva, or, A Description of the forest trees of the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia. Michaux called the plant Wild Orange, and it was also known back then as wild olive. Here is a copy of his engraving of this native tree.
But I have been feeling sorry for one particular native tree lately, and thought I would extol its virtues before going on to speak about plants you might actually want to grow…
If I had to give the Rodney Dangerfield award to the native tree that gets the least respect it would certainly go to the common warty-trunked hackberry tree, suffering even more in reputation of late due to a troublesome aphid problem leaving everything below covered by a black mold growing happily in the aphid poop.
But coming in a close second in Dangerfield honors would be our very own native cherry laurel, Prunus caroliniana. Both the hackberry and the cherry laurel are often referred to as trash trees or weed trees. They are definitely not trash, though, given their tremendous success in getting birds to spread their seeds anywhere and everywhere, they can in fact act like weeds. As to what a weed is – and is not – well, that’s for another article.
I cannot dislike any plant whose species name is caroliniana. And I go way back with this prunus…
Growing up on Bridgewood Road we had a volunteer cherry laurel tree right at the back corner of the house, and for years and years it provided very easy access to the roof, much easier than a ladder. The cats even used it for that purpose as well, and I often enjoyed chilling out on the roof with one or more of our cats, thanks to said cherry laurel.
That particular cherry laurel, like most I would guess, grew up amidst stiff competition for light, bending this way and that way. In the end it worked out OK for climbing but it wasn’t particularly photogenic.
We had another cherry laurel that grew up straight as an arrow all by itself, and for some reason we just let it grow. It was in the forward corner of a back quadrant of the back yard that we had long neglected, and served in time to demarcate the civilized from the uncivilized parts of our property. It grew up to be a beautiful, full, and perfectly symmetrical specimen, probably twenty five feet tall by the time I cut it down in 1980 to make room for a lawn I was planting for my parents, imposing civilization upon the woods of the back quadrant. They loved the lawn.
The other things I remember about these two trees were the upright cylindrical blossom arrays (racemes they are called) every spring, the bees swarming around all the white blossoms, and as a result of blooms plus bees, the beautiful black berries every fall.
In my work now I pull out, trim back, cut down, and dig out cherry laurels on quite a regular basis. I suppose that this humble tree contributes quite a bit to my living, so I am grateful to it also in that respect. And thankfully it is very easy to pull out of the ground by hand, compared say to an oak sapling. Even a cherry laurel sapling three to four feet high can be yanked out roots and all, no problem. Try pulling up an oak sapling even half that size. You may pop the sapling, or pop your back, but you won’t pop it out roots and all.
Cherry laurel wood is very heavy due I think to water retention, and has a really attractive red brown color. It stains wonderfully and unpredictably, though I do not know much about its historic use as a wood. For burning I would think it takes a long time to cure. I would be interested to know how it burns once dry since I often produce a prodigious supply!
Though cherry laurels are known for sending up suckers from stumps (almost overnight it seems), the stumps can be killed by brushing with concentrated RoundUp. They can also be dug out if need be.
The reason there are cherry laurels everywhere is of course that their berries are a big hit with the birds. I don’t actually know how many bird species like them, nor, if I were to ask a bird, if cherry laurel would be in its top ten berry list. I do know that the trees are always stripped bare of their berries and that little baby cherry laurels grow far from any mama trees. Somebody likes it. The seed apparently is poisonous but not the flesh of the fruit (technically a drupe). The leaves also are poisonous, which is why deer don’t like them. If you have a deer problem, cherry laurel is a great plant to have around.
Cherry laurels were very common in antebellum southern gardens. They were used for hedges, visual screens and barriers, shade, and often as specimen plants. They were celebrated by none other than the famous Michaux father and son – Andre and Francois – and got a page in Francois’s monumental The North American Sylva, or, A Description of the forest trees of the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia. Michaux called the plant Wild Orange, and it was also known back then as wild olive. Here is a copy of his engraving of this native tree.
One of the virtues of cherry laurel for the garden is that it can be shaped easily. If pruning starts on younger plants they can be grown and maintained as a moderately sized impenetrable hedge. There is a a wonderful cherry laurel hedge, about four feet in height, on Adger Road on the right side heading down the hill toward Trenholm, right after the stop sign at Meredith Lane. It has been kept up beautifully for years.
But upkeep is the key. Like many fast growing plants, if forgotten, cherry laurel will soon seek whatever shape its immediate locale allows, will outgrow its hedgerow size, and start to lose its lower branches. Then it won’t work well for a hedge anymore. As a nice evergreen screen for heights 6 to 20 feet it is pretty much unparalleled. Given its evergreen quality and its dense leave pattern it is also a great sound screen for traffic.
I personally like cherry laurel best when given space and allowed to grow fully in its dark green glory and wonderful oblong tapering shape. I see specimens like this here and there as I drive around. But specimens of this kind are not nearly as common as the crowded bent specimens (which may develop their own twisted gnarly glory as they get older) resulting from early growth among stiff competition. If you have a spot for a cherry laurel, with the space for it develop according to its natural form, it is best to obtain a tree from a local nursery. There are several cultivars, including dwarf varieties, available, such as Monrovia’s Bright ‘N Tight (such a weird name for a plant).
And if you need someone to plant it….
I personally like cherry laurel best when given space and allowed to grow fully in its dark green glory and wonderful oblong tapering shape. I see specimens like this here and there as I drive around. But specimens of this kind are not nearly as common as the crowded bent specimens (which may develop their own twisted gnarly glory as they get older) resulting from early growth among stiff competition. If you have a spot for a cherry laurel, with the space for it develop according to its natural form, it is best to obtain a tree from a local nursery. There are several cultivars, including dwarf varieties, available, such as Monrovia’s Bright ‘N Tight (such a weird name for a plant).
And if you need someone to plant it….
It’s About the People
Years ago at our house in Greensboro, N.C., when my kids were starting to ride their bikes, I decided that I needed to remove the two large shrubs on each side of the drive near the entry into the cul-de-sac. One of them was a large old nandina, the other a very overgrown honeysuckle bush. It took some doing but I managed to get them out and was satisfied that the kids would now be safer going in and out of the driveway. My oldest daughter, however, was quite upset. Though we had only been there a couple of years at that point, those large bushes were a part of her mental map of our place. They were a part of "home." She grieved their loss.
The connection we as human beings have with "place" is deeply ingrained in us, even with nomadic peoples who tend to revisit special places in their wanderings over and over again. To be removed from a special place can be highly traumatic and emotionally disorienting.To have a special place forever changed or destroyed can be heartbreaking.
It is not just that we make a connection with "place" as in a particular geographical space filled with its various accoutrements.These spaces are also like containers holding the richest memories of our own lives, and of our dearest loved ones.
I miss our house in Greensboro. Divorce rips one or another person from a special place, and changes that space for the ones who remain. Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine walking around the yard there, touching the bark of the two large river birch trees I planted with my kid's enthusiastic help, or looking into the crab apple in which we all loved to climb and hang out. It was often home base in tag. And then there were those intense crab apple wars once a year. In my day dream I walk fifty feet over and touch the silver maple whose limbs and roots I constantly pruned to give light to the vegetable garden, and from whose lowest limb we all jumped into the huge pile of leaves each fall. I think of the dead area of grass that we tended to kill each year playing hot box, and the route around the perimeter of the trees and inside the fence that was our own home-grown race track for running or biking. I miss that place.
Many people carry such memories of their childhood homes which have been sold and are now owned by other people and other families. But some people, and a goodly number of folks I work for, have moved into family homes after parents or grandparents have passed away.
There is one place I work in which the family lives in the former home of the mom's parents. It is hard to be there without thinking of this mom, now herself a parent of grown kids, as a little girl running around the American holly trees or climbing up the very big magnolia, or just following her mom around their wonderful garden.
Many yards and gardens have special areas set aside where beloved pets have been buried. And in some cases there is a tree planted in remembrance of a parent or a grandparent who has passed away, or (and it is hard even to think about) in remembrance of a lost child. Needless to say those spaces are like holy ground.
At one place I work the young couple has moved into the husband's grandparent's house. In this case the grandfather was the gardener, and a good one at that. His plants still line the house. It is such a blessing to me to see how his memory is revered in the way the plants are treated. They aren't just plants. They are pieces of family history. They are connections to a loved one. In some ways hard to understand, they are like the very presence of the loved one in the here and now.
Sometimes, and all too quickly here in humid subtropical Columbia, a special place becomes overrun by volunteer trees and vines. Order has been taken over by the forces of chaos. Whereas the owners once had the time or energy to keep the chaos at bay, they do not any longer. And what used to be a special place of comfort and beauty is now just overwhelming. Too much is wrong to enjoy it - the azaleas are swamped by grape vines; cherry laurel and hackberry and oak trees are pushing through all the shrubs; ivy is taking over everything. The space which was once a refuge is now a source of great anxiety and disorientation. Rather than face the angst of it all, one just retreats into the house. In such a retreat a special place for all practical purposes is lost.
Though I am a gardener by trade it seems sometimes that my job is really to reduce stress and anxiety and restore just a little bit to a person's heart and mind of a sense of order and beauty instead of the chaos and growing ugliness of jungle. I call what I do garden restoration, but it is more psychic restoration. It's not so much about plants really, but about people.
I have seen older folks, people I now consider to be special friends, find at least for a time in their later years new purpose and enjoyment of life in being able to be back in their special places. Sometimes these friend enjoy doing actual gardening again. I have had the joy of watching strength return, color, and vigor. Gardening is great exercise Other times I get to see a friend just sitting and enjoying their space and all its inhabitants again, not just the plants and flowers but the birds and butterflies and Carolina anole lizards which are oh so easy to love. It is such an honor to have been part of that experience.
Yards or gardens have a special power of orientation for people in the early stages of dementia. There is the familiarity of course, but the touch and feel and smell of a garden evokes special memories and keeps the person's mental map more grounded in the important things of their lives. Aromas have a special power for evoking memory. I have written about tea olives and how, no matter how often I smell them, or where I am when I smell them, my grandmother Nanny is right there in my mind. One day when I am old, and my mind is fading, I hope there will be a tea olive nearby to bring Nanny to my memory.
Some people cannot, of course, move into their parent's houses. One good reason may be that their parents are still living! But many people take with them garden mementos - a young crape myrtle, seeds from the four o'clocks, a rose of Sharon, or day lilies and irises. These plants then provide a tangible connection between generations. One person I work for has had a transplanted crape myrtle and althea both be so successful that they are intertwined and in competition. Normally one would need to go . . . but it is hard to do. I think those plants will likely intertwine for years to come.
I have worked for a dear person fighting advanced cancer who, rather than completely retreat into her suffering, decided to turn her yard, long neglected due to sickness and surgeries, into the beautiful place it once was, so that she could enjoy it again in the time she has remaining. It was a big project, a physically demanding one, but oh what reverence, what purpose, what holiness attended it.
I want to close with a word to young people establishing themselves in new homes. Life is busy and stressful, and it is easy to treat the yard as window dressing. Plant some trees, set aside a place for growing flowers or vegetables you love; if you have children give them opportunity to help you. The time, the sweat, the camaraderie, all are building memories for you and for your children. They are ingraining affection. One day that tree will be a treasure, and the affection you have for a special flower or plant will follow you all of your days.
And as for me, in light of changes in my own circumstances, I am grateful that I can somehow spontaneously embrace the words of the Apostle Paul who said, "All things are ours." I may not have "place" in the way I have had it before, but somehow, some way, my own need for attachment to place is met substantially through the special places of my city and my state, and yes, also even all those wonderful gardens in which I work. I do not own them for sure. But I am given affection and enjoyment of them, as if they are mine. For, in that mystery of which the Apostle speaks, well, they are.
The connection we as human beings have with "place" is deeply ingrained in us, even with nomadic peoples who tend to revisit special places in their wanderings over and over again. To be removed from a special place can be highly traumatic and emotionally disorienting.To have a special place forever changed or destroyed can be heartbreaking.
It is not just that we make a connection with "place" as in a particular geographical space filled with its various accoutrements.These spaces are also like containers holding the richest memories of our own lives, and of our dearest loved ones.
I miss our house in Greensboro. Divorce rips one or another person from a special place, and changes that space for the ones who remain. Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine walking around the yard there, touching the bark of the two large river birch trees I planted with my kid's enthusiastic help, or looking into the crab apple in which we all loved to climb and hang out. It was often home base in tag. And then there were those intense crab apple wars once a year. In my day dream I walk fifty feet over and touch the silver maple whose limbs and roots I constantly pruned to give light to the vegetable garden, and from whose lowest limb we all jumped into the huge pile of leaves each fall. I think of the dead area of grass that we tended to kill each year playing hot box, and the route around the perimeter of the trees and inside the fence that was our own home-grown race track for running or biking. I miss that place.
Many people carry such memories of their childhood homes which have been sold and are now owned by other people and other families. But some people, and a goodly number of folks I work for, have moved into family homes after parents or grandparents have passed away.
There is one place I work in which the family lives in the former home of the mom's parents. It is hard to be there without thinking of this mom, now herself a parent of grown kids, as a little girl running around the American holly trees or climbing up the very big magnolia, or just following her mom around their wonderful garden.
Many yards and gardens have special areas set aside where beloved pets have been buried. And in some cases there is a tree planted in remembrance of a parent or a grandparent who has passed away, or (and it is hard even to think about) in remembrance of a lost child. Needless to say those spaces are like holy ground.
At one place I work the young couple has moved into the husband's grandparent's house. In this case the grandfather was the gardener, and a good one at that. His plants still line the house. It is such a blessing to me to see how his memory is revered in the way the plants are treated. They aren't just plants. They are pieces of family history. They are connections to a loved one. In some ways hard to understand, they are like the very presence of the loved one in the here and now.
Sometimes, and all too quickly here in humid subtropical Columbia, a special place becomes overrun by volunteer trees and vines. Order has been taken over by the forces of chaos. Whereas the owners once had the time or energy to keep the chaos at bay, they do not any longer. And what used to be a special place of comfort and beauty is now just overwhelming. Too much is wrong to enjoy it - the azaleas are swamped by grape vines; cherry laurel and hackberry and oak trees are pushing through all the shrubs; ivy is taking over everything. The space which was once a refuge is now a source of great anxiety and disorientation. Rather than face the angst of it all, one just retreats into the house. In such a retreat a special place for all practical purposes is lost.
Though I am a gardener by trade it seems sometimes that my job is really to reduce stress and anxiety and restore just a little bit to a person's heart and mind of a sense of order and beauty instead of the chaos and growing ugliness of jungle. I call what I do garden restoration, but it is more psychic restoration. It's not so much about plants really, but about people.
I have seen older folks, people I now consider to be special friends, find at least for a time in their later years new purpose and enjoyment of life in being able to be back in their special places. Sometimes these friend enjoy doing actual gardening again. I have had the joy of watching strength return, color, and vigor. Gardening is great exercise Other times I get to see a friend just sitting and enjoying their space and all its inhabitants again, not just the plants and flowers but the birds and butterflies and Carolina anole lizards which are oh so easy to love. It is such an honor to have been part of that experience.
Yards or gardens have a special power of orientation for people in the early stages of dementia. There is the familiarity of course, but the touch and feel and smell of a garden evokes special memories and keeps the person's mental map more grounded in the important things of their lives. Aromas have a special power for evoking memory. I have written about tea olives and how, no matter how often I smell them, or where I am when I smell them, my grandmother Nanny is right there in my mind. One day when I am old, and my mind is fading, I hope there will be a tea olive nearby to bring Nanny to my memory.
Some people cannot, of course, move into their parent's houses. One good reason may be that their parents are still living! But many people take with them garden mementos - a young crape myrtle, seeds from the four o'clocks, a rose of Sharon, or day lilies and irises. These plants then provide a tangible connection between generations. One person I work for has had a transplanted crape myrtle and althea both be so successful that they are intertwined and in competition. Normally one would need to go . . . but it is hard to do. I think those plants will likely intertwine for years to come.
I have worked for a dear person fighting advanced cancer who, rather than completely retreat into her suffering, decided to turn her yard, long neglected due to sickness and surgeries, into the beautiful place it once was, so that she could enjoy it again in the time she has remaining. It was a big project, a physically demanding one, but oh what reverence, what purpose, what holiness attended it.
I want to close with a word to young people establishing themselves in new homes. Life is busy and stressful, and it is easy to treat the yard as window dressing. Plant some trees, set aside a place for growing flowers or vegetables you love; if you have children give them opportunity to help you. The time, the sweat, the camaraderie, all are building memories for you and for your children. They are ingraining affection. One day that tree will be a treasure, and the affection you have for a special flower or plant will follow you all of your days.
And as for me, in light of changes in my own circumstances, I am grateful that I can somehow spontaneously embrace the words of the Apostle Paul who said, "All things are ours." I may not have "place" in the way I have had it before, but somehow, some way, my own need for attachment to place is met substantially through the special places of my city and my state, and yes, also even all those wonderful gardens in which I work. I do not own them for sure. But I am given affection and enjoyment of them, as if they are mine. For, in that mystery of which the Apostle speaks, well, they are.
The Life is In the Sap
A customer of mine who lives on a beautiful hilly and rocky property on Forest Lake has a problem – a beaver problem. Early last year the furry critters girdled two 16 inch diameter sweet gums on the back hill. They took off about two feet of bark and underlying green tissue all the way around each trunk.
Now, as you know, plants manufacture food in the leaves where photosynthesis takes place. This food is primarily in the form of sugars and is distributed to the rest of the plant where it is used as a source of energy in the production of the many complex components of the plant such as fats and proteins and DNA.
This movement of this energy producing food takes place in specialized tissues called phloem. In woody plants like trees the phloem is just under the bark extending in an unbroken network from leaves to the tips of stems to branches truck and root. In this tissue flows the lifeblood of the plant.
And that is bad news for our two sweet gum trees. Because of the break in the flow of this food source to the roots of the tree, in time these roots will die. When the roots die the tree will no longer be able to get any water, which means the tree will die.
But oddly, 18 months later the tree is not dead – indeed, it has a full canopy of leaves! How can this be?
Plants, thankfully, are adept at storing food for future use. Seeds are so nutritious for animals because the plants have stored so much concentrated food there for the growing seedling. Many plants store food in underground stems or tubers or bulbs. Most plants store food in the tissues of roots and/or underground stems.
The girdled sweet gums had obviously stored a large amount of food in their roots because those roots are still alive producing active root hairs and transporting water and nutrients through the xylem tissue deeper in the trunk to all the limbs and shoots and leaves above. But this food is going to run out at some point.
Today I was at another customer’s house. A couple of months ago we decided to cut back two old and very large chindo viburnums to about a foot in height, and let them start over. It took a while for the stumps to put out new growth but today I noticed that there was an abundance of rich green shoots about two feet high.
In the case of the viburnum we had cut off all means of the plant manufacturing its food via photosynthesis. There would be no sugars transported from leaves to the roots. But thankfully, again, the roots had stored an ample amount of food to supply new buds and tiny new leaves with all the food they needed until they are able to produce enough to begin feeding those same roots again.
How new growth is activated in a cut stem or trunk is fascinating – but for another article.
So imagine that every time new growth appears we cut it back. This could go on for some time but eventually it will stop. The plant will have used up all its food reserves in the roots, and it will die.
This sounds kind of sad for a once grand chindo viburnum, but what about for wisteria? In that case it sounds like a plan.
It is commonly thought that wisteria is nearly impossible to eradicate. Cut it back and new shoots pop up not just at the main stump from underground runners that seem to be everywhere.
Well, grab a sharp set of hand pruners and once a week take a few minutes and just cut back all the green shoots and leaves you can see. After a while there are fewer and fewer of them. Eventually they stop altogether. You have starved the wisteria to death.
The fact is that the complex transport and storage of nutrients in plants is utterly necessary to plant life. It happens in different ways in different seasons. In summer, where we in Columbia find ourselves now in that drama of an earth spinning along a tilted axis in its annual trip around the sun, food is being produced at a maximum rate by mature leaves and sent to all parts of the plant.
The very newest leaves at the tips of the stems are not self supporting yet and so food is sent to them to help them grow and get started photosynthesizing on their own.
Flower buds require a huge amount of food. In fact perhaps the most important movement of food resources is to the reproductive tissues of the buds, flowers, and fruits all of which exist to produce and protect and enhance the spread of the seeds! For in the seed is new life, and new combinations of DNA to keep the species flexible and healthy over the course of time.
Today I was noticing the seed pod of a camellia at the same place as the chindo viburnum. This seed pod was maybe an inch and a quarter across. It has not yet fully matured. I tried cutting it open with my hand pruners but they didn’t really open wide enough to get a good cut. When I was a kid following my grandmother around her garden in the fall she would grab mature camellia seed pods that were ready to open and hand me the seeds. I planted many of them back at my house. But Nanny was not fond of those fruits and seeds. She explained to me that all the energy that went into growing those fruit pods and seeds was energy not going into flower buds. She grew camellias for the flowers not the seeds, and if she wanted new ones that she liked she rooted cuttings. One never knows what kind or color camellia will emerge from a seed.
But the lesson was that we can impact the growth of different parts of the plant by impacting how food energy is dispersed. If you grow knock out roses for example you will see that after the flower blooms it grows a fruiting body called a “hip.” Well it is likely that you are not growing knock out roses for the rose hips but for the flowers, and if you want more flowers you need to keep those hips from forming. Thus you pinch off the spent flowers, called deadheading. With many plants this encourages a new round of flowering. Chaste trees are a good example – if you snip off those spent clusters of flowers you may be rewarded with a second flush of blossoms in late summer.
The production of over wintering flowering buds also requires a large amount of plant energy. For a plant like camellia too many flower buds mean flowers that are too small! So if you are growing camellias for flower cuttings, fewer stems and fewer buds mean bigger flowers.
As summer ends those highly productive leaves (at least on deciduous plants) begin a process of planned death and use much of their late season energy production to break down larger more complex starches and proteins into simple sugars and amino acids, which are then transported along with important nutrients to areas of storage – the roots, the stems, and the outer bark just outside the phloem of the stems and trunks. There, as the plant enters into winter dormancy, these food reserves are ready when winter turns into spring and a new season of growth begins.
Which gets us back to the beavers. The beavers that girdled those two sweet gum trees were not hoodlums. Nor were they planning to use the 60 foot high trees - whenever they would die and fall - in their dams. Just just inside the bark of the tree is a layer of cells called the vascular cambium that produces the phloem tissue that carries nutrients around the plant. Not only are the cambium tissue and phloem rich in nutrients, but there are other cells in the inner bark which store food for use in the spring. This rich tissue underneath the bark is a rich food source for beavers which also have the capacity to digest the hard bark and wood tissue around the phloem. So the beavers girdled the trees because, well, they were hungry!
Now, as you know, plants manufacture food in the leaves where photosynthesis takes place. This food is primarily in the form of sugars and is distributed to the rest of the plant where it is used as a source of energy in the production of the many complex components of the plant such as fats and proteins and DNA.
This movement of this energy producing food takes place in specialized tissues called phloem. In woody plants like trees the phloem is just under the bark extending in an unbroken network from leaves to the tips of stems to branches truck and root. In this tissue flows the lifeblood of the plant.
And that is bad news for our two sweet gum trees. Because of the break in the flow of this food source to the roots of the tree, in time these roots will die. When the roots die the tree will no longer be able to get any water, which means the tree will die.
But oddly, 18 months later the tree is not dead – indeed, it has a full canopy of leaves! How can this be?
Plants, thankfully, are adept at storing food for future use. Seeds are so nutritious for animals because the plants have stored so much concentrated food there for the growing seedling. Many plants store food in underground stems or tubers or bulbs. Most plants store food in the tissues of roots and/or underground stems.
The girdled sweet gums had obviously stored a large amount of food in their roots because those roots are still alive producing active root hairs and transporting water and nutrients through the xylem tissue deeper in the trunk to all the limbs and shoots and leaves above. But this food is going to run out at some point.
Today I was at another customer’s house. A couple of months ago we decided to cut back two old and very large chindo viburnums to about a foot in height, and let them start over. It took a while for the stumps to put out new growth but today I noticed that there was an abundance of rich green shoots about two feet high.
In the case of the viburnum we had cut off all means of the plant manufacturing its food via photosynthesis. There would be no sugars transported from leaves to the roots. But thankfully, again, the roots had stored an ample amount of food to supply new buds and tiny new leaves with all the food they needed until they are able to produce enough to begin feeding those same roots again.
How new growth is activated in a cut stem or trunk is fascinating – but for another article.
So imagine that every time new growth appears we cut it back. This could go on for some time but eventually it will stop. The plant will have used up all its food reserves in the roots, and it will die.
This sounds kind of sad for a once grand chindo viburnum, but what about for wisteria? In that case it sounds like a plan.
It is commonly thought that wisteria is nearly impossible to eradicate. Cut it back and new shoots pop up not just at the main stump from underground runners that seem to be everywhere.
Well, grab a sharp set of hand pruners and once a week take a few minutes and just cut back all the green shoots and leaves you can see. After a while there are fewer and fewer of them. Eventually they stop altogether. You have starved the wisteria to death.
The fact is that the complex transport and storage of nutrients in plants is utterly necessary to plant life. It happens in different ways in different seasons. In summer, where we in Columbia find ourselves now in that drama of an earth spinning along a tilted axis in its annual trip around the sun, food is being produced at a maximum rate by mature leaves and sent to all parts of the plant.
The very newest leaves at the tips of the stems are not self supporting yet and so food is sent to them to help them grow and get started photosynthesizing on their own.
Flower buds require a huge amount of food. In fact perhaps the most important movement of food resources is to the reproductive tissues of the buds, flowers, and fruits all of which exist to produce and protect and enhance the spread of the seeds! For in the seed is new life, and new combinations of DNA to keep the species flexible and healthy over the course of time.
Today I was noticing the seed pod of a camellia at the same place as the chindo viburnum. This seed pod was maybe an inch and a quarter across. It has not yet fully matured. I tried cutting it open with my hand pruners but they didn’t really open wide enough to get a good cut. When I was a kid following my grandmother around her garden in the fall she would grab mature camellia seed pods that were ready to open and hand me the seeds. I planted many of them back at my house. But Nanny was not fond of those fruits and seeds. She explained to me that all the energy that went into growing those fruit pods and seeds was energy not going into flower buds. She grew camellias for the flowers not the seeds, and if she wanted new ones that she liked she rooted cuttings. One never knows what kind or color camellia will emerge from a seed.
But the lesson was that we can impact the growth of different parts of the plant by impacting how food energy is dispersed. If you grow knock out roses for example you will see that after the flower blooms it grows a fruiting body called a “hip.” Well it is likely that you are not growing knock out roses for the rose hips but for the flowers, and if you want more flowers you need to keep those hips from forming. Thus you pinch off the spent flowers, called deadheading. With many plants this encourages a new round of flowering. Chaste trees are a good example – if you snip off those spent clusters of flowers you may be rewarded with a second flush of blossoms in late summer.
The production of over wintering flowering buds also requires a large amount of plant energy. For a plant like camellia too many flower buds mean flowers that are too small! So if you are growing camellias for flower cuttings, fewer stems and fewer buds mean bigger flowers.
As summer ends those highly productive leaves (at least on deciduous plants) begin a process of planned death and use much of their late season energy production to break down larger more complex starches and proteins into simple sugars and amino acids, which are then transported along with important nutrients to areas of storage – the roots, the stems, and the outer bark just outside the phloem of the stems and trunks. There, as the plant enters into winter dormancy, these food reserves are ready when winter turns into spring and a new season of growth begins.
Which gets us back to the beavers. The beavers that girdled those two sweet gum trees were not hoodlums. Nor were they planning to use the 60 foot high trees - whenever they would die and fall - in their dams. Just just inside the bark of the tree is a layer of cells called the vascular cambium that produces the phloem tissue that carries nutrients around the plant. Not only are the cambium tissue and phloem rich in nutrients, but there are other cells in the inner bark which store food for use in the spring. This rich tissue underneath the bark is a rich food source for beavers which also have the capacity to digest the hard bark and wood tissue around the phloem. So the beavers girdled the trees because, well, they were hungry!
What’s Killing Your Lawn
In my garden restoration work I am often asked about lawns. I know that I am not a lawn care specialist. I kind of prefer folks thinking I don’t know much about lawns lest they ask me to mow theirs. I don’t mind mowing some lawns as part of a garden restoration project or as part of a total garden care approach, but I mowed enough lawns as a kid to last me a very long time.
However, in my work I have noticed some common practices that are hurting and not hindering lawns.
The key to a good lawn is a healthy root system. And the key to a healthy root system is healthy soil with plenty of organic material and worms and good stuff like that. Sadly many of our common lawn practices work precisely against healthy soil. It is no easy task to develop a good healthy soil in a sandy region like this.
What I see all the time are lawns of overly short grass with low runners clinging tenaciously to hard ground, There may be as much exposed hard ground as actual lawn. And this state of affairs often exists despite lawn services and chemical treatments.
In fact, these services may be doing as much or more harm than good to your lawn. I know personally through my work of several lawn services that do an absolutely super job with lawns, and generally it is because the owner really knows a lot about turf. But sadly, too many lawn services do not know so much about turf.. The same can be said for well meaning homeowners.
Here are the lawn care sins killing your lawn – watering too often and too shallowly, using a blower on the lawn, bagging the clippings, mowing the grass too short, and using too much fertilizer.
Yep, all that is killing your lawn.
Take blowers for example. I realize that in the fall when deciduous trees drop tons of leaves raking can be a pain. A powerful gas blower can come in handy – even more so if the leaves are at all wet. But unless you already have a deep rich sod those same blowers also blow every little tidbit of organic matter right off your lawn in the summer. It’s a wonder the grass isn’t blown away with it. Blowers are NOT good for lawns.
Perhaps the biggest hindrance to a healthy lawn is simply cutting the grass to short. Longer grass is better for several reasons. First, longer grass gives weeds less opportunity to find the sun and grow to maturity. If there is anything you do not want a weed to to do it is that – grow to maturity. Second, longer grass actually shades and keeps the soil cooler which retains moisture better – it is its own mulch if you will. Third, longer grass needs cutting less often. I know this seems counter intuitive but cutting the grass blade short stimulates a response of rapid shoot growth, growth which requires the use of food resources stored in the roots and stems, the constant use of which weakens the plant. Fourth, and perhaps most important, longer grass stimulates the growth of deeper roots, crucial to a healthy plant. Fifth and finally, longer grass better hinders the run off of water, as well as chemicals like fertilizer and herbicide that have possibly been applied to the lawn.
Shallow overly-frequent watering is very bad for lawns also, for two main reasons. First, shallow surface watering trains the root system to stay on the surface where it can grab the moisture before it evaporates. Deeper watering less often encourages the roots to grow deeper into the soil to find moisture, and that makes for a lawn more able to withstand future drought. In addition, overly frequent watering encourages fungal disease, probably the primary killer of turf plants. Surface soil actually needs to dry out, not only to encourage deeper root growth but also to hinder the growth of fungi. Sometimes we think that when a lawn starts to look a little droopy that it is in need of immediate watering. But most grassy plants are adapted to frequent cycles of wet and dry weather. When conditions get really dry they enter a state of semi dormancy, which will be quickly broken by rain or watering. The point is, it does not hurt the lawn to let it dry out some. So I suggest that you not water every day. More water less often is the way to go.
Most modern mowers do a very good job with “mulching,” that is, breaking up the grass and other material into tiny pieces and depositing this natural compost back onto the soil where it can decompose or be worked into the ground by worms. The mix of fresh grass clippings and chopped up organic matter is perfect for developing a healthier sod and minimizing the need for fertilizer.
Speaking of fertilizer, the truth is most people use way too much fertilizer and weed killer. Yes, our turf grasses need a boost of fertilizer a couple of times a year. A slow release fertilizer is ideal because plants can only absorb and use so much N-P-K at a time. Over-fertilization creates a problem not unlike over watering – it encourages a shallow growth pattern and discourages the plant roots from seeking out nutrients deeper in the soil. And – you are probably aware of the fact that fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides on private lawns contribute greatly to pollution in our streams, rivers and lakes.
Even with correct practices, lawn issues will arise. For example, there was a good bit of winter-kill this year, especially in weaker lawns. Nematodes and fungi can be a problem despite excellent lawn care. Before embarking on an expensive re-sodding or lawn do-over it is good to have soil tested including tests for nematodes and fungi. Many times I have seen homeowners re-sod lawns only to have the new sod die because the underlying problems such as nematodes or fungal disease were not addressed.
Barren lawns can be rehabilitated with patience and good turf management practice. In addition to applying the techniques outlined above, filling in bare spots with a good compost (not sand) will encourage runners to spread into the bare areas. Sprigging here and there can quickly fill up barren spots as well. Aerating can be very helpful.
Some areas of your yard simply will not allow for grass primarily due to deep shade. Such areas can be mulched. One practice I am growing more and more fond of myself is planting or simply giving over such areas to moss, which is quite beautiful in its own way.
A great lawn doesn’t happen over night, so take the long view, and enjoy your space while that lawn underneath grows healthier and healthier.
However, in my work I have noticed some common practices that are hurting and not hindering lawns.
The key to a good lawn is a healthy root system. And the key to a healthy root system is healthy soil with plenty of organic material and worms and good stuff like that. Sadly many of our common lawn practices work precisely against healthy soil. It is no easy task to develop a good healthy soil in a sandy region like this.
What I see all the time are lawns of overly short grass with low runners clinging tenaciously to hard ground, There may be as much exposed hard ground as actual lawn. And this state of affairs often exists despite lawn services and chemical treatments.
In fact, these services may be doing as much or more harm than good to your lawn. I know personally through my work of several lawn services that do an absolutely super job with lawns, and generally it is because the owner really knows a lot about turf. But sadly, too many lawn services do not know so much about turf.. The same can be said for well meaning homeowners.
Here are the lawn care sins killing your lawn – watering too often and too shallowly, using a blower on the lawn, bagging the clippings, mowing the grass too short, and using too much fertilizer.
Yep, all that is killing your lawn.
Take blowers for example. I realize that in the fall when deciduous trees drop tons of leaves raking can be a pain. A powerful gas blower can come in handy – even more so if the leaves are at all wet. But unless you already have a deep rich sod those same blowers also blow every little tidbit of organic matter right off your lawn in the summer. It’s a wonder the grass isn’t blown away with it. Blowers are NOT good for lawns.
Perhaps the biggest hindrance to a healthy lawn is simply cutting the grass to short. Longer grass is better for several reasons. First, longer grass gives weeds less opportunity to find the sun and grow to maturity. If there is anything you do not want a weed to to do it is that – grow to maturity. Second, longer grass actually shades and keeps the soil cooler which retains moisture better – it is its own mulch if you will. Third, longer grass needs cutting less often. I know this seems counter intuitive but cutting the grass blade short stimulates a response of rapid shoot growth, growth which requires the use of food resources stored in the roots and stems, the constant use of which weakens the plant. Fourth, and perhaps most important, longer grass stimulates the growth of deeper roots, crucial to a healthy plant. Fifth and finally, longer grass better hinders the run off of water, as well as chemicals like fertilizer and herbicide that have possibly been applied to the lawn.
Shallow overly-frequent watering is very bad for lawns also, for two main reasons. First, shallow surface watering trains the root system to stay on the surface where it can grab the moisture before it evaporates. Deeper watering less often encourages the roots to grow deeper into the soil to find moisture, and that makes for a lawn more able to withstand future drought. In addition, overly frequent watering encourages fungal disease, probably the primary killer of turf plants. Surface soil actually needs to dry out, not only to encourage deeper root growth but also to hinder the growth of fungi. Sometimes we think that when a lawn starts to look a little droopy that it is in need of immediate watering. But most grassy plants are adapted to frequent cycles of wet and dry weather. When conditions get really dry they enter a state of semi dormancy, which will be quickly broken by rain or watering. The point is, it does not hurt the lawn to let it dry out some. So I suggest that you not water every day. More water less often is the way to go.
Most modern mowers do a very good job with “mulching,” that is, breaking up the grass and other material into tiny pieces and depositing this natural compost back onto the soil where it can decompose or be worked into the ground by worms. The mix of fresh grass clippings and chopped up organic matter is perfect for developing a healthier sod and minimizing the need for fertilizer.
Speaking of fertilizer, the truth is most people use way too much fertilizer and weed killer. Yes, our turf grasses need a boost of fertilizer a couple of times a year. A slow release fertilizer is ideal because plants can only absorb and use so much N-P-K at a time. Over-fertilization creates a problem not unlike over watering – it encourages a shallow growth pattern and discourages the plant roots from seeking out nutrients deeper in the soil. And – you are probably aware of the fact that fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides on private lawns contribute greatly to pollution in our streams, rivers and lakes.
Even with correct practices, lawn issues will arise. For example, there was a good bit of winter-kill this year, especially in weaker lawns. Nematodes and fungi can be a problem despite excellent lawn care. Before embarking on an expensive re-sodding or lawn do-over it is good to have soil tested including tests for nematodes and fungi. Many times I have seen homeowners re-sod lawns only to have the new sod die because the underlying problems such as nematodes or fungal disease were not addressed.
Barren lawns can be rehabilitated with patience and good turf management practice. In addition to applying the techniques outlined above, filling in bare spots with a good compost (not sand) will encourage runners to spread into the bare areas. Sprigging here and there can quickly fill up barren spots as well. Aerating can be very helpful.
Some areas of your yard simply will not allow for grass primarily due to deep shade. Such areas can be mulched. One practice I am growing more and more fond of myself is planting or simply giving over such areas to moss, which is quite beautiful in its own way.
A great lawn doesn’t happen over night, so take the long view, and enjoy your space while that lawn underneath grows healthier and healthier.
The Sand Hills
Well I was born in the sand hills
And I live…in the sand hills
Prob’ly die in the sand hills…
I grew up on Bridgewood Road, a hilly road in a hilly part of town, off North Trenholm Road. Friends who visit Columbia are surprised at how hilly it is here. And I say, “it is called the sand HILLS.”
One end of Bridgewood runs in to Rockbridge Road right across from the top entrance to Rockbridge Club, about a third the way down that great big hill we loved as kids. The elevation drop from the light at Trenholm to the bottom of the hill is over 100 feet. As kids we not only took advantage of this drop by flying down Rockbridge hill full throttle on our bikes, but also by sledding down Rockbridge golf course from the very top near Trenholm all the way to the green at hole #2 along Spring Lake. Not too shabby.
All the sand had its advantages for us kids. In “The Woods” below St. Michael’s church we dug huge foxholes which we used for protection in local pine cone and dirt clod wars, and for hanging out. Sometimes we dug underground tunnels connecting these fox holes. Yes I know that was very stupid. Thank goodness for the tree roots holding the sand in place.
It was always fun to turn on the hose as high as it could go and just push it into the sand. Down down down it would go as sandy water bubbled up. It seemed sometimes like the entire hose would disappear into the ground. That was some serious sand.
The top of Bridgewood is part of a sand hill plateau that extends across Trenholm and along Meadowood and the cross streets to Sylvan. Columbia has a lot of these sand hill plateaus. I am sitting on one as I type over here on South Edisto Drive in Rose Hill. I would type the official name of the neighborhood, which is “Hollywood/Rose Hill,” but Hollywood is not on the plateau (sorry, Hollywood).
There is another very large such sand hill plateau off Forest Drive across from AC Flora, along Dalloz and the various side streets. There is that huge long plateau which Two Notch Road follows past Sesqui State Park. Downtown Columbia is on such a plateau as well.
I mention these plateaus because they tend to exhibit some of the older original attributes of the Sand Hill regions. Longleaf pines, ideally adapted to dry sandy conditions, dominate (that is where pines have not been cut down as they were in my neighborhood). Longleafs on these plateaus are somewhat squat in form with long side branches. Scrub oaks abound. Lawns tend to be hard to grow. It is a bit of a desert on these high sand hill regions as the rain just soaks through so fast.
Long ago the native Americans avoided these regions because they were so barren. De Soto’s men about starved making their way from near what is now Augusta to near what is now Columbia. Interestingly those marauders crossed the Broad River north of Columbia and took the high sandy ground, quite possibly right through what is now downtown Columbia, on their way to the Santee area looking for the chiefdom of Cofitachequi. The sand hills were not amenable to supplying invading armies.
We had scrub oaks in our yard on Bridgewood, out by the street. Those scrub oaks were there when we moved in in 1960 and they are still there today. We also had a beautiful long leaf pine tree.
As most of you are reading this who live in Columbia know, there is clay in our sand hills. In my neighborhood it was a white clay, slippery and slimy when wet and rock hard when dry — perfect for “dirt clod” wars. I had never seen so much of the stuff as when they brought the sewer lines to Bridgewood Road. They had to lay the pipes very deep to accommodate all the houses on the down hill side of the road. And they made huge piles of dirt that seems to stay there for months. In those piles of sand was a lot of clay. This was kid heaven, a good time in the sand hills.
This clay is very very important to the natural history of the sand hills.But here I must digress. I have said nothing about where all this sand came from or why it is still here.
The traditional and likely explanation is that a very long time ago (about 85 million years ago – yep, when there were still dinosaurs afoot), the sea level was much higher, extending even further inland than Columbia is today. And over time then, just as today, rivers were eroding the rocks of the mountains and Piedmont and depositing sediments into broad delta like areas in the sea. There over the eons wave and tide would pound and pulverize. In time the sea levels fell, exposing this sediment to the further action of dune-producing winds, much like what is continually happening at the coast today. And as the sea level further and more quickly receded, it left these large dunes stranded, to be invaded by plant life, locking them in place as it were for millions of years to come.
I have often wondered how this sand – and these sandy hills – could actually have remained in place for such an incredibly long period of time. The mountains and the Piedmont erode away, but the sand hills remain? I never knew the answer to this question until recently, and I do not even remember where I read it. But the secret of longevity is in the sand hills’ porosity. The rain just pours right through the sand rather than running rapidly off it. This constant flow of water through the sand does erode, all the stuff in the sand that is, leaving amazingly pure silica dioxide, otherwise known as, well, sand
Mixed into the sand of course was clay, clay that was also eroded from the mountains and Piedmont, different kinds of clay in different parts of the sand hills region. And this clay has had an incredibly important role in shaping the ecology of the sand hills.
It is a curiosity how there are so many streams in sand hill country given the tendency of water to drain straight down to the water table. But within the hills of sand are lateral sheets of clay redirecting the flow of water underground. Just below the Saint Michael’s woods, in the backyard of a house on Shorebrook Drive, were two bubbly little springs.I was fascinated by those springs. The homeowner had taken advantage of them and dug a couple of little ponds. The water from the spring and the ponds changed the flora and fauna abruptly from what it was just fifty feet up the hill. And these two little springs meant a lot to my dog Clancey. As the water from the springs was piped under Shorebrook Road it formed first a deep pool and then a creek which ran into the lake. On hot summer days Clancey would suddenly get up, want out, run to the back of the yard, jump the fence and disappear. We knew where he was going. He was going for a swim in that pool of cool spring water. I thank the clay for that.
There are little springs like that all over the region, forming or feeding into the larger creeks, which in our case were Jackson Creek and Gills Creek. Yes, these creeks do cut into the sand hills, maiking them well, even more hilly. The water from these springs and creeks then allow for different types of plant communities, and denser growth of plants, which then itself adds organic matter and nutrients to the soils in the low lying areas. Add to this the natural diversity of plant and tree life depending on the northward or southward slope of a hill, and suddenly, in a region known mainly for sand, is an amazing diversity of small local ecologies, with diverse plant and animal populations. We lived this diversity from one end of Bridgewood to another, as there is another spring in a yard in the lowest part of Bridgewood feeding a small creek and wet land that extended at one time to Jackson Creek, but which now empties into Spring Lake. From bone dry sand plateaus at the top of Bridgewood to a wetland, in a few hundred yards – that’s the sand hills!
My backyard was in the bone dry zone, and when I started gardening when I was a kid I realized very quickly the wisdom of the advice to add organic material to aid water retention in the soil. I could water tomatoes planted in that sand and the sand would be dry as a bone again in no time. But peatmoss was expensive. Over in the woods down in the damper section were a lot of old pine stumps which had been decomposing for years. I had already discovered that I could split kindling off those old stumps, and knew that there was a lot of fluffy loose decomposed wood material. So for years I took my wheelbarrow over, filled it up with this natural organic matter, and added the stuff to my garden. I had a compost pile of straw and leaves and weeds, and in time had some pretty darn good dirt, if I may say so myself!
And this brings me to a central fact of gardening in the sand hills. Amending soil is so important! And since our sandy soil over millions of years has leached out almost all calcium based materials such as calcium carbonate, the sandy soil tends to be naturally acidic. Porous, dry and acidic soil brings unique gardening challenges, which we will explore in a future article.
And I live…in the sand hills
Prob’ly die in the sand hills…
I grew up on Bridgewood Road, a hilly road in a hilly part of town, off North Trenholm Road. Friends who visit Columbia are surprised at how hilly it is here. And I say, “it is called the sand HILLS.”
One end of Bridgewood runs in to Rockbridge Road right across from the top entrance to Rockbridge Club, about a third the way down that great big hill we loved as kids. The elevation drop from the light at Trenholm to the bottom of the hill is over 100 feet. As kids we not only took advantage of this drop by flying down Rockbridge hill full throttle on our bikes, but also by sledding down Rockbridge golf course from the very top near Trenholm all the way to the green at hole #2 along Spring Lake. Not too shabby.
All the sand had its advantages for us kids. In “The Woods” below St. Michael’s church we dug huge foxholes which we used for protection in local pine cone and dirt clod wars, and for hanging out. Sometimes we dug underground tunnels connecting these fox holes. Yes I know that was very stupid. Thank goodness for the tree roots holding the sand in place.
It was always fun to turn on the hose as high as it could go and just push it into the sand. Down down down it would go as sandy water bubbled up. It seemed sometimes like the entire hose would disappear into the ground. That was some serious sand.
The top of Bridgewood is part of a sand hill plateau that extends across Trenholm and along Meadowood and the cross streets to Sylvan. Columbia has a lot of these sand hill plateaus. I am sitting on one as I type over here on South Edisto Drive in Rose Hill. I would type the official name of the neighborhood, which is “Hollywood/Rose Hill,” but Hollywood is not on the plateau (sorry, Hollywood).
There is another very large such sand hill plateau off Forest Drive across from AC Flora, along Dalloz and the various side streets. There is that huge long plateau which Two Notch Road follows past Sesqui State Park. Downtown Columbia is on such a plateau as well.
I mention these plateaus because they tend to exhibit some of the older original attributes of the Sand Hill regions. Longleaf pines, ideally adapted to dry sandy conditions, dominate (that is where pines have not been cut down as they were in my neighborhood). Longleafs on these plateaus are somewhat squat in form with long side branches. Scrub oaks abound. Lawns tend to be hard to grow. It is a bit of a desert on these high sand hill regions as the rain just soaks through so fast.
Long ago the native Americans avoided these regions because they were so barren. De Soto’s men about starved making their way from near what is now Augusta to near what is now Columbia. Interestingly those marauders crossed the Broad River north of Columbia and took the high sandy ground, quite possibly right through what is now downtown Columbia, on their way to the Santee area looking for the chiefdom of Cofitachequi. The sand hills were not amenable to supplying invading armies.
We had scrub oaks in our yard on Bridgewood, out by the street. Those scrub oaks were there when we moved in in 1960 and they are still there today. We also had a beautiful long leaf pine tree.
As most of you are reading this who live in Columbia know, there is clay in our sand hills. In my neighborhood it was a white clay, slippery and slimy when wet and rock hard when dry — perfect for “dirt clod” wars. I had never seen so much of the stuff as when they brought the sewer lines to Bridgewood Road. They had to lay the pipes very deep to accommodate all the houses on the down hill side of the road. And they made huge piles of dirt that seems to stay there for months. In those piles of sand was a lot of clay. This was kid heaven, a good time in the sand hills.
This clay is very very important to the natural history of the sand hills.But here I must digress. I have said nothing about where all this sand came from or why it is still here.
The traditional and likely explanation is that a very long time ago (about 85 million years ago – yep, when there were still dinosaurs afoot), the sea level was much higher, extending even further inland than Columbia is today. And over time then, just as today, rivers were eroding the rocks of the mountains and Piedmont and depositing sediments into broad delta like areas in the sea. There over the eons wave and tide would pound and pulverize. In time the sea levels fell, exposing this sediment to the further action of dune-producing winds, much like what is continually happening at the coast today. And as the sea level further and more quickly receded, it left these large dunes stranded, to be invaded by plant life, locking them in place as it were for millions of years to come.
I have often wondered how this sand – and these sandy hills – could actually have remained in place for such an incredibly long period of time. The mountains and the Piedmont erode away, but the sand hills remain? I never knew the answer to this question until recently, and I do not even remember where I read it. But the secret of longevity is in the sand hills’ porosity. The rain just pours right through the sand rather than running rapidly off it. This constant flow of water through the sand does erode, all the stuff in the sand that is, leaving amazingly pure silica dioxide, otherwise known as, well, sand
Mixed into the sand of course was clay, clay that was also eroded from the mountains and Piedmont, different kinds of clay in different parts of the sand hills region. And this clay has had an incredibly important role in shaping the ecology of the sand hills.
It is a curiosity how there are so many streams in sand hill country given the tendency of water to drain straight down to the water table. But within the hills of sand are lateral sheets of clay redirecting the flow of water underground. Just below the Saint Michael’s woods, in the backyard of a house on Shorebrook Drive, were two bubbly little springs.I was fascinated by those springs. The homeowner had taken advantage of them and dug a couple of little ponds. The water from the spring and the ponds changed the flora and fauna abruptly from what it was just fifty feet up the hill. And these two little springs meant a lot to my dog Clancey. As the water from the springs was piped under Shorebrook Road it formed first a deep pool and then a creek which ran into the lake. On hot summer days Clancey would suddenly get up, want out, run to the back of the yard, jump the fence and disappear. We knew where he was going. He was going for a swim in that pool of cool spring water. I thank the clay for that.
There are little springs like that all over the region, forming or feeding into the larger creeks, which in our case were Jackson Creek and Gills Creek. Yes, these creeks do cut into the sand hills, maiking them well, even more hilly. The water from these springs and creeks then allow for different types of plant communities, and denser growth of plants, which then itself adds organic matter and nutrients to the soils in the low lying areas. Add to this the natural diversity of plant and tree life depending on the northward or southward slope of a hill, and suddenly, in a region known mainly for sand, is an amazing diversity of small local ecologies, with diverse plant and animal populations. We lived this diversity from one end of Bridgewood to another, as there is another spring in a yard in the lowest part of Bridgewood feeding a small creek and wet land that extended at one time to Jackson Creek, but which now empties into Spring Lake. From bone dry sand plateaus at the top of Bridgewood to a wetland, in a few hundred yards – that’s the sand hills!
My backyard was in the bone dry zone, and when I started gardening when I was a kid I realized very quickly the wisdom of the advice to add organic material to aid water retention in the soil. I could water tomatoes planted in that sand and the sand would be dry as a bone again in no time. But peatmoss was expensive. Over in the woods down in the damper section were a lot of old pine stumps which had been decomposing for years. I had already discovered that I could split kindling off those old stumps, and knew that there was a lot of fluffy loose decomposed wood material. So for years I took my wheelbarrow over, filled it up with this natural organic matter, and added the stuff to my garden. I had a compost pile of straw and leaves and weeds, and in time had some pretty darn good dirt, if I may say so myself!
And this brings me to a central fact of gardening in the sand hills. Amending soil is so important! And since our sandy soil over millions of years has leached out almost all calcium based materials such as calcium carbonate, the sandy soil tends to be naturally acidic. Porous, dry and acidic soil brings unique gardening challenges, which we will explore in a future article.
It Will Stop You in Your Tracks
There is no reason really to go looking for Tea Olive. It will find you. You’re walking along minding your own business and there it is – that rich creamy sweet sensation. And so you pause, close your eyes, breathe in, and smile. OK, where is it? Tea Olive aroma wafts and bends this way and that, and has a way of settling in at certain spots, not always next to the plant itself. So you look around.
Tea Olive is a large nondescript bush. The flowers are tiny, and you could walk ten times by one that is in bloom and not even notice it. It’s the smell that gets your attention. So there you are in that certain spot, holding onto that last breath while you look this way and that. There it is! You walk up to it, see the small white flowers, put your nose in and breathe, expecting….But, hmmm. It’s less rich than the aroma fifteen feet over that way. Tea Olive is funny that way.
Tea Olive is a large nondescript bush. The flowers are tiny, and you could walk ten times by one that is in bloom and not even notice it. It’s the smell that gets your attention. So there you are in that certain spot, holding onto that last breath while you look this way and that. There it is! You walk up to it, see the small white flowers, put your nose in and breathe, expecting….But, hmmm. It’s less rich than the aroma fifteen feet over that way. Tea Olive is funny that way.
Tea Olive Blossoms
As for myself I like to shake the hands of my friends; with a Tea Olive this means shaking a branch. Tea Olive leaves rattle when the branch is shaken. They really do – and it’s a dead give away. So go ahead and rattle a Tea Olive today.
There is another thing I like about Tea Olives; they bloom several times a year, at least here in Columbia. I have never really figured out why they bloom when they bloom. It’s unpredictable. So after a week or two of enjoying the aroma the blooms drop off and back to normal everything goes. You forget all about that big green bush over there. Until next time that is. You are once again minding your own business, caught up in some really important thing, and there it is again, that smell. It always seems to sneak up on you. It is always – in that first moment- unexpected. It is always a gift.
If you won’t tell anyone I will confess to something else about smelling Tea Olive. Usually when I walk into a cloud of Tea Olive aroma hovering in the air, I smile, and I always – always – think of my dear grandmother Nanny. And some of those times I shed a tear. I do miss Nanny. But my tears always turn back to smiles because I think of Nanny loving her Tea Olive, especially that big one near to the side door to her kitchen. I can see her, getting out of her car in the garage near the kitchen door, being hit by the Tea Olive aroma, smiling, and knowing the same feelings I know. And then I feel close to her.
There is another thing I like about Tea Olives; they bloom several times a year, at least here in Columbia. I have never really figured out why they bloom when they bloom. It’s unpredictable. So after a week or two of enjoying the aroma the blooms drop off and back to normal everything goes. You forget all about that big green bush over there. Until next time that is. You are once again minding your own business, caught up in some really important thing, and there it is again, that smell. It always seems to sneak up on you. It is always – in that first moment- unexpected. It is always a gift.
If you won’t tell anyone I will confess to something else about smelling Tea Olive. Usually when I walk into a cloud of Tea Olive aroma hovering in the air, I smile, and I always – always – think of my dear grandmother Nanny. And some of those times I shed a tear. I do miss Nanny. But my tears always turn back to smiles because I think of Nanny loving her Tea Olive, especially that big one near to the side door to her kitchen. I can see her, getting out of her car in the garage near the kitchen door, being hit by the Tea Olive aroma, smiling, and knowing the same feelings I know. And then I feel close to her.
Nanny's Tea Olive Today
These days I don’t have much, not even a yard, of my own. But today I had a Tea Olive. It doesn’t matter that it was someone else’s Tea Olive. As the Apostle Paul said, All things are ours. Which means for me I get to be thankful that God has blessed my neighbor with such a wonderful plant, feel glad for him, and just enjoy that Tea Olive as if it were mine.
Hope you get to breathe in some Tea Olive today.
Hope you get to breathe in some Tea Olive today.
Biggest Tea Olive I've Ever Seen
A Baker’s Dozen Favorite Gardening Books
I have before me The Rockwells’ Complete Guide to Successful Gardening, 1969 paperback edition. This was my first gardening book. My parents gave it to me at my 6th grade graduation from Satchel Ford Elementary School, along with a big book about animals and another one about American invention. I would have thought they would give me a baseball or football book, since sports were sort of my life at that stage, but I give them props – they knew me better than I gave them credit. And over time I read and marked up Rockwells’ from cover to cover. There are thousands and thousands of gardening books on the market today. I want to recommend thirteen for your consideration. I have read or done much reading in all of these. They range from simple and accessible to more complex. I have provided links to each of these books on Amazon.com. You can get a lot more information about each book there. There is no particular order as to my suggestions.
Perhaps you can email me back suggestions for other books that I might read and recommend in a subsequent article.
John King – Reaching for the Sun: How Plants Work
This is not a book about gardening per se, but it is an excellent and accessible introduction into the workings of plants. I have found myself reading it through several times because it is a good read. In my experience just a better understanding of how plants work would be greatly beneficial for most gardeners. There are other basic botany books such as Brian Capon’s Botany for gardeners.
Michael Dirr – Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, and Propagation and Uses
It’s hard to imagine that such a long tome on the woody plants would be fun to read, but Dirr is not only THE expert, but an entertaining writer as well. With a common name or scientific name you can learn more than you thought there was to know.
Rodale Press – Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Gardening and Landscaping Techniques
Rodale books are fun, quirky and very accessible, and this one is stocked full with information and wonderful illustrations. It covers the gamut, well, except in true Rodale fashion there is nothing in this book about chemicals.
Lois Trig Chaplin – The Southern Gardener’s Book of Lists: The Best Plants for All Your Needs, Wants, and Whims
This is one of those books that is a lot of fun and very helpful at the same time. If you can think of a list that could apply to a southern garden, it is in this book. Substitutes for Bradford Pear? Yep, a list. Annuals that attract butterflies? Yep, a list. Perennials that can take sun all day? Yep, that list is in there too.
James R. Cothran – Gardens and Historic Plants of the Antebellum South
When we think of the southern garden today we tend to think of the suburban dogwood/azalea/camellia garden of the mid twentieth century. This wonderful book, a gift to me from my daughter Heather, explores gardens, plants, and gardening in the south up to the Civil War, much of it plantation gardening. It is fascinating to see how many familiar non native plants got firmly situated in the southern garden so early on.
Bob Polomski – Carolinas Month-by-Month Gardening: What to Do Each Month to Have A Beautiful Garden All Year
It is hard to keep everything straight in our heads about what to do when and where in the garden – even if the information is up there somewhere. Polomski divides his book up into types of plants – bulbs, lawns, houseplants, perennials etc., and does a month by month guide for each category with nice helpful hints scattered throughout. I use this a lot.
Steve Bender – The Southern Living Garden Book: Completely Revised, All-New Edition (2004)
This is the one book in the list I do not own, but I asked my gardening friends what gardening encyclopedia they enjoy and use the most and they pretty much all said this one.
Michael Pollan – Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education
This is about as perfect a non fiction book as can be written, and Pullan’s ruminations based on his experience in his own garden are enriching. His exploration of the difference between nature and culture is worth the cost of the book.
Andrea Wulf – The Brother Gardeners: A Generation of Gentlemen Naturalists and the Birth of an Obsession
It’s hard to imagine botanical collectors as cultural rock stars, nor the collecting and sharing of plants across oceans as an industry unto itself. But centered in England this international trade sent American plants and trees all over the world, thanks mostly to the dedicated life labor of John and William Bartram. It also brought a lot of plants here!
Gardening Club of Columbia – Gardening Notes for South Carolina
This quaint little guide put together by the Columbia Gardening Club not only has a month by month calendar but lots of interesting (and somewhat random) information about plants common to the SC midlands gardens.
Gil Nelson – Best Native Plants for Southern Gardens: A Handbook for Gardeners, Homeowners, and Professionals
I am a big fan of native plants. Amidst the tidal wave of non native plants and cultivars, natives have become rare jewels among thorns. It is my hope that over time Midlands gardeners will gradually fill empty spaces and design new ones with plants adapted to our region. Nelson’s is an extraordinary guide for doing just that.
Lee Reich – The Pruning Book: Completely Revised and Updated
If there is any particular gardening skill that seems in short supply it is pruning. I have not read all the available pruning guides but this is a good one.
Allan M. Armitage – Herbaceous Perennial Plants: A Treatise on Their Identification, Culture and Garden Attributes
What Dirr is to woody plants Armitage is to perennials. This book is what it says it is – a treatise. It is a reference book but also makes for great casual reading. If you get one book on perennials get this one.
Perhaps you can email me back suggestions for other books that I might read and recommend in a subsequent article.
John King – Reaching for the Sun: How Plants Work
This is not a book about gardening per se, but it is an excellent and accessible introduction into the workings of plants. I have found myself reading it through several times because it is a good read. In my experience just a better understanding of how plants work would be greatly beneficial for most gardeners. There are other basic botany books such as Brian Capon’s Botany for gardeners.
Michael Dirr – Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, and Propagation and Uses
It’s hard to imagine that such a long tome on the woody plants would be fun to read, but Dirr is not only THE expert, but an entertaining writer as well. With a common name or scientific name you can learn more than you thought there was to know.
Rodale Press – Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Gardening and Landscaping Techniques
Rodale books are fun, quirky and very accessible, and this one is stocked full with information and wonderful illustrations. It covers the gamut, well, except in true Rodale fashion there is nothing in this book about chemicals.
Lois Trig Chaplin – The Southern Gardener’s Book of Lists: The Best Plants for All Your Needs, Wants, and Whims
This is one of those books that is a lot of fun and very helpful at the same time. If you can think of a list that could apply to a southern garden, it is in this book. Substitutes for Bradford Pear? Yep, a list. Annuals that attract butterflies? Yep, a list. Perennials that can take sun all day? Yep, that list is in there too.
James R. Cothran – Gardens and Historic Plants of the Antebellum South
When we think of the southern garden today we tend to think of the suburban dogwood/azalea/camellia garden of the mid twentieth century. This wonderful book, a gift to me from my daughter Heather, explores gardens, plants, and gardening in the south up to the Civil War, much of it plantation gardening. It is fascinating to see how many familiar non native plants got firmly situated in the southern garden so early on.
Bob Polomski – Carolinas Month-by-Month Gardening: What to Do Each Month to Have A Beautiful Garden All Year
It is hard to keep everything straight in our heads about what to do when and where in the garden – even if the information is up there somewhere. Polomski divides his book up into types of plants – bulbs, lawns, houseplants, perennials etc., and does a month by month guide for each category with nice helpful hints scattered throughout. I use this a lot.
Steve Bender – The Southern Living Garden Book: Completely Revised, All-New Edition (2004)
This is the one book in the list I do not own, but I asked my gardening friends what gardening encyclopedia they enjoy and use the most and they pretty much all said this one.
Michael Pollan – Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education
This is about as perfect a non fiction book as can be written, and Pullan’s ruminations based on his experience in his own garden are enriching. His exploration of the difference between nature and culture is worth the cost of the book.
Andrea Wulf – The Brother Gardeners: A Generation of Gentlemen Naturalists and the Birth of an Obsession
It’s hard to imagine botanical collectors as cultural rock stars, nor the collecting and sharing of plants across oceans as an industry unto itself. But centered in England this international trade sent American plants and trees all over the world, thanks mostly to the dedicated life labor of John and William Bartram. It also brought a lot of plants here!
Gardening Club of Columbia – Gardening Notes for South Carolina
This quaint little guide put together by the Columbia Gardening Club not only has a month by month calendar but lots of interesting (and somewhat random) information about plants common to the SC midlands gardens.
Gil Nelson – Best Native Plants for Southern Gardens: A Handbook for Gardeners, Homeowners, and Professionals
I am a big fan of native plants. Amidst the tidal wave of non native plants and cultivars, natives have become rare jewels among thorns. It is my hope that over time Midlands gardeners will gradually fill empty spaces and design new ones with plants adapted to our region. Nelson’s is an extraordinary guide for doing just that.
Lee Reich – The Pruning Book: Completely Revised and Updated
If there is any particular gardening skill that seems in short supply it is pruning. I have not read all the available pruning guides but this is a good one.
Allan M. Armitage – Herbaceous Perennial Plants: A Treatise on Their Identification, Culture and Garden Attributes
What Dirr is to woody plants Armitage is to perennials. This book is what it says it is – a treatise. It is a reference book but also makes for great casual reading. If you get one book on perennials get this one.
Ten Way to Die Gardening
Arterial Bleed
I was very safely up on the ladder cutting a large limb off of a dying dogwood. Since the whole tree was coming down I was not worried about the neatness of the cut. As is my habit I made the cut about a foot out from the trunk (this is always best to avoid bark being pulled back from the trunk of the tree). This was a large limb and I was barely halfway through it when it snapped, not neatly. I was safely out of the way of the kick back. Let me add here that when cutting down any tree or or larger shrub, the kick back of the trunk is very dangerous. If you are cutting while up on a ladder it is doubly dangerous. Don’t let your face be any where near the kick back zone.
Well, back to my story, I had been sensible about kick back but had not thought of one thing. The part of the limb that hit the ground first was the soft springy outside limbs and twigs, which compressed as the weight of the limb pushed it to the ground. It then sprang up with surprising force. On the way up the sharp end of the broken limb stabbed me under my arm pit. It cut fairly deeply and started to bleed immediately. Of course the first thing I thought of was that scene in Cellular where Kim Bassinger’s character kills the bad guy by cutting into his brachial artery. Thankfully the limb missed my artery.
Moral of the story – beware of kick back and bounce back when cutting trees.
Venom
The client mentioned to me that there was a fire ant hill down by the new outlet off the secondary pump near the small creek. So I went to check. I couldn’t find the outlet. But I did see, right by the small creek leading into the lake, a small utility box, maybe one by two feet, and about six inches high or deep. It had a lid. Maybe the buggers are in there I thought. So I leaned down to take the lid off the box. What greeted me was a large open white mouth of a water moccasin about two feet from my face. Needless to say, I said a bad word. I must have offended him (or her) or frightened him with my breath because before I could say lickety-split he dove head first into a hole, and I saw his body pop out of the creek bank into the water. Whew!
Though it is unusual to encounter a water moccasin, they being inclined to slither away quickly and quietly, copperheads are another story. They are pretty much all over the place. And good luck seeing them. I think copperheads are incredibly beautiful. They blend in so well with leaves they become invisible. Their reaction to possible threat is to be very still. I have been on more than one hike where it was the fifth or sixth person back who saw the copperhead coiled in the trail. Everyone else stepped over or by and did not see it. But step on or too close and they will strike.
Moral of the story – wear good boots when gardening.
Fractured Skull
I spend a lot of time pulling vines. One can’t really renovate a flower bed with decades of wisteria, Virginia creeper and smilax smothering everything. So this one place was downright Amazonian. The very think wisteria vine was all wrapped around a very large oak limb on the way up to higher limbs. I doubted I could budge it but I gave it a try. I didn’t even consider that the limb might be dead, and yes, of course, it was directly above me maybe 25 feet up. So, yank, snap, pull – POP - and the giant limb broke near the trunk and crashed behind me, missing me by maybe two feet. It would have smashed my skull and pushed my head into my torso I think! Really really dumb.
Moral of the story – watch out for limbs directly above you and on occasion wear a hard hat.
Anaphylaxis
People often ask me if I am worried about getting bitten by snakes or black widow spiders, but when it comes to dangerous critters the one critter that does actually concern me is the common yellow jacket. I have managed to get completely swarmed by several nests of yellow jackets at least once a year each of the last four years, usually of course in the fall. Typically I get many dozens of stings and it hurts like hell. Thankfully so far I am not allergic, though an allergic reaction could develop at any time. The problem is yellow jackets stings are really hard to predict or avoid. One really has no idea where they are.
The last time I got swarmed I was casually walking through an open wooded area of a local property and saw a thick smilax vine. I sliced my transplanting shovel deep into the ground beside it and popped out the tuber. But as I realized later I also popped out the biggest yellow jacket nest I have had the privilege of seeing (since they can be hard to see being in the ground and all). I didn’t see it at first. You never really know you’ve stumbled into a yellow jacket nest until they start stinging.
Like fire ants, yellow jackets swarm first and sting second, all at once. I am familiar with the pain and now know how to react – and the key word here is calmly. Walk away swiftly, don’t flail around, and immediately start taking off gloves and long sleeves and pants if necessary. The little buggers like to crawl up under clothes. And then commence to squishing them as swiftly and as mercilessly as possible. In so doing you can reduce the number of stings by the scores. The pain and danger difference between a few dozen and several hundred stings is significant.
Moral of the story – pray you won’t stumble into a yellow jacket nest, think ahead how you will react if you do, and if you are allergic to bees, yellow jackets or fire ants keep an EpiPen handy.
Heat Stroke
I lived away from Columbia for 23 years, and though it may be hard to believe, I missed our summers. I mean, what is summer without miserable heat and humidity? I don’t really mind working in the summer either, much preferring the higher temps and lower humidity of the afternoons to the cooler temps and 100% humidity of the mornings. My work is vigorous and I lose a lot of water, so hydration is really important. I even worked the day it was 109 summer before last. I just poured water over my head every little while and was frankly very proud of myself. I need to get a tee shirt made commemorating the event, sort of like my I Climbed Mount Washington tee shirt.
But one must take the heat seriously. Last year I started about 11 AM one day weeding a hill that I had planted with Asiatic jasmine. It was tedious and took me close to three hours right in the middle of the day and in full sun. That was not smart. As we get older it takes much more energy for our bodies to regulate our core temperature, putting extra demand upon our hearts. This explains why we get more tired working or even standing in the full sun than we did when younger. If we overdo it our core temperature can rise, and rise dangerously. Heat exhaustion is not uncommon, and this, combined with dehydration can be deadly. In my case I started feeling light headed, then dizzy, then nauseous. I drank some water and kept going. More of the same. I noticed that my heart rate was quite elevated and decided I better stop. I just walked away leaving my tools and drove home and went to sleep. I was loopy.
Moral of the story – stay hydrated, wear a good hat, and remember, you’re not as young as you used to be.
Spearing, or Being Run Through
Pulling vines can be fun. I remember one place where there was a huge nest of smilax growing up into some very high very overgrown camellias and small cherry laurels. I cut the vines at the base, gathered them in my hands, and started pulling. Back and back I walked and pulled. The vines weren’t budging but the bushes and tress were bending. Now by this time in my gardening career I was wise enough always to look behind me in case the vines popped or loosened suddenly. In this case I did in fact slip, the the trees straightened and the vines dragged me swiftly on my derriere across the grass. I did it several more times because it was fun. Eventually I gave up and just cut the vines as high up as I could. But pulling vines can be dangerous. It is easy to fall, and often the vines let go or pop quickly.
A few months before I was pulling some vines in a crowded area where I had already cut some small saplings a foot or so high. I like to go back and dig them out and need to see them. So I was pulling some vine and it gave way and I fell straight back like Mohammed Ali in the first Ali-Frazier fight. I landed flat on my back about a foot from a sharp sapling stump I had just cut. That my friends could have been ugly.
Moral of the story – always ALWAYS look backwards when pulling vines and adjust your body when pulling so that you will fall on your side, not your back. Because you will fall.
Eyeball Slice
Ok, so this one may go under the heading When You Wish Who Had Died Gardening. It was a beautiful day, early spring, and I was doing something I love to do – pruning camellias. I was standing firmly on the ground. Now camellia stems and leaves have this tendency to sort of droop down and the leaves then situate sort of flatly, horizontal to the ground. Camellia leaves as you know are pretty stiff and have serrated edges. So I am pruning away, and enjoying the beautiful day, when I did the unthinkable – I turned my body. I know…dangerous. Problem was I turned my head too, and as I did, just above the top rim of my glasses, a camellia leaf sliced across my eyeball. Yep I said that right. Now I am going to tell you – that hurt. My eye filled up with fluid and the sunlight was painful. Like a dumb ass I drove myself to the Doc in a Box. Thankfully the slit was only through the the cornea, and not quite deep enough to warrant stitches. I wore a patch for a couple of days.
Moral of the story – WEAR SAFETY GLASSES!
Neck Snap
So, yes, I was pulling vines again, and in this case wisteria. I was in the back of a deep bed filled with very large old photinia bushes, in a cramped space, my back against a big wall. Wisteria vines were attached to a large tree high above. There was no angle, just a straight down pull. I tried a quick snap which often works for wisteria, but it didn’t budge. So I thought I’d try brute strength. I grabbed the vine with both hands and pulled straight down, using both my impressive gardening guns and my core muscles, as hard as I could for a sustained time. I was probably red in the face from exertion. Well, the vine detached or popped, and when it did my head jerked down so fast that my chin rammed my chest, and then my head bounced back equally fast against my upper back. Everything went black. I fell back against the wall and slumped to a a squatting position, staying still for some time. Slowly the cobwebs cleared, and with my eyes closed I started to assess if I had broken my neck. Was I breathing? Yes. Could I move my fingers, my toes? Yes. Could I see? I opened my eyes. Yes. Could I turn my neck (very slowly)? Yes. I sat there for a few minutes and then got up. I was fine, thankfully.
Moral of the story…don’t try to be a he man, and don’t be stupid.
The Walker Death
I have an old heavy mattock with a wooden handle that I have had for 35 years. I am partial to it for some reason. It comes in handy quite often, especially in getting out small stumps and smilax tubers. Mine is a pick mattock with one of the blades being an adze, which is like an ax but with the blade perpendicular to that of an ax, and the other being a pick, a strong pointed piece of metal. I use it a lot. I have never failed in all the years I have used this tool to look above me and behind me before every swing. Because the pick, on the back swing, could kill somebody as fast as heavy knife through a walker brain, the use of this tool is not to be treated lightly. I never assume with mattock in hand that I am alone. Nor should you. That people walk up behind me when I am swinging that thing mystifies me, but they do.
Moral of the story – never EVER walk up on a person swinging an ax, or mattock, or any tool really. And if you are the one doing the swinging always, ALWAYS look behind you first....
Mortification
I have no decent ladder stories because for some reason, despite learning on the job many other ways to get hurt (and thus many ways to be careful), I have always been cautious on ladders. Falling from ladders is the most common cause of injury and death for homeowners working in a yard. The time it takes to secure a ladder is very important, and being sensible once up a ladder, even a step ladder, is crucial. Step ladders in particular can kick out sideways very easily with improper weight distribution, usually caused by leaning. Ladder injuries are all too common.
When I was a pastor, a fellow in our church had fallen off a ladder and was in the hospital in very very bad pain Let’s call the fellow Don. Don’s family had requested prayers on his behalf, and so I sent out an email bulletin to the congregation. I asked for prayers for Don and for the doctors as they decided the course of action. Don, I explained, had fallen off a ladder and injured his back, and specifically had suffered a slipped disk. Except, I learned after I sent the email, I had misspelled the word disk. Can you guess how?
Moral of the story – there are many ways to die my friend, many ways…
I was very safely up on the ladder cutting a large limb off of a dying dogwood. Since the whole tree was coming down I was not worried about the neatness of the cut. As is my habit I made the cut about a foot out from the trunk (this is always best to avoid bark being pulled back from the trunk of the tree). This was a large limb and I was barely halfway through it when it snapped, not neatly. I was safely out of the way of the kick back. Let me add here that when cutting down any tree or or larger shrub, the kick back of the trunk is very dangerous. If you are cutting while up on a ladder it is doubly dangerous. Don’t let your face be any where near the kick back zone.
Well, back to my story, I had been sensible about kick back but had not thought of one thing. The part of the limb that hit the ground first was the soft springy outside limbs and twigs, which compressed as the weight of the limb pushed it to the ground. It then sprang up with surprising force. On the way up the sharp end of the broken limb stabbed me under my arm pit. It cut fairly deeply and started to bleed immediately. Of course the first thing I thought of was that scene in Cellular where Kim Bassinger’s character kills the bad guy by cutting into his brachial artery. Thankfully the limb missed my artery.
Moral of the story – beware of kick back and bounce back when cutting trees.
Venom
The client mentioned to me that there was a fire ant hill down by the new outlet off the secondary pump near the small creek. So I went to check. I couldn’t find the outlet. But I did see, right by the small creek leading into the lake, a small utility box, maybe one by two feet, and about six inches high or deep. It had a lid. Maybe the buggers are in there I thought. So I leaned down to take the lid off the box. What greeted me was a large open white mouth of a water moccasin about two feet from my face. Needless to say, I said a bad word. I must have offended him (or her) or frightened him with my breath because before I could say lickety-split he dove head first into a hole, and I saw his body pop out of the creek bank into the water. Whew!
Though it is unusual to encounter a water moccasin, they being inclined to slither away quickly and quietly, copperheads are another story. They are pretty much all over the place. And good luck seeing them. I think copperheads are incredibly beautiful. They blend in so well with leaves they become invisible. Their reaction to possible threat is to be very still. I have been on more than one hike where it was the fifth or sixth person back who saw the copperhead coiled in the trail. Everyone else stepped over or by and did not see it. But step on or too close and they will strike.
Moral of the story – wear good boots when gardening.
Fractured Skull
I spend a lot of time pulling vines. One can’t really renovate a flower bed with decades of wisteria, Virginia creeper and smilax smothering everything. So this one place was downright Amazonian. The very think wisteria vine was all wrapped around a very large oak limb on the way up to higher limbs. I doubted I could budge it but I gave it a try. I didn’t even consider that the limb might be dead, and yes, of course, it was directly above me maybe 25 feet up. So, yank, snap, pull – POP - and the giant limb broke near the trunk and crashed behind me, missing me by maybe two feet. It would have smashed my skull and pushed my head into my torso I think! Really really dumb.
Moral of the story – watch out for limbs directly above you and on occasion wear a hard hat.
Anaphylaxis
People often ask me if I am worried about getting bitten by snakes or black widow spiders, but when it comes to dangerous critters the one critter that does actually concern me is the common yellow jacket. I have managed to get completely swarmed by several nests of yellow jackets at least once a year each of the last four years, usually of course in the fall. Typically I get many dozens of stings and it hurts like hell. Thankfully so far I am not allergic, though an allergic reaction could develop at any time. The problem is yellow jackets stings are really hard to predict or avoid. One really has no idea where they are.
The last time I got swarmed I was casually walking through an open wooded area of a local property and saw a thick smilax vine. I sliced my transplanting shovel deep into the ground beside it and popped out the tuber. But as I realized later I also popped out the biggest yellow jacket nest I have had the privilege of seeing (since they can be hard to see being in the ground and all). I didn’t see it at first. You never really know you’ve stumbled into a yellow jacket nest until they start stinging.
Like fire ants, yellow jackets swarm first and sting second, all at once. I am familiar with the pain and now know how to react – and the key word here is calmly. Walk away swiftly, don’t flail around, and immediately start taking off gloves and long sleeves and pants if necessary. The little buggers like to crawl up under clothes. And then commence to squishing them as swiftly and as mercilessly as possible. In so doing you can reduce the number of stings by the scores. The pain and danger difference between a few dozen and several hundred stings is significant.
Moral of the story – pray you won’t stumble into a yellow jacket nest, think ahead how you will react if you do, and if you are allergic to bees, yellow jackets or fire ants keep an EpiPen handy.
Heat Stroke
I lived away from Columbia for 23 years, and though it may be hard to believe, I missed our summers. I mean, what is summer without miserable heat and humidity? I don’t really mind working in the summer either, much preferring the higher temps and lower humidity of the afternoons to the cooler temps and 100% humidity of the mornings. My work is vigorous and I lose a lot of water, so hydration is really important. I even worked the day it was 109 summer before last. I just poured water over my head every little while and was frankly very proud of myself. I need to get a tee shirt made commemorating the event, sort of like my I Climbed Mount Washington tee shirt.
But one must take the heat seriously. Last year I started about 11 AM one day weeding a hill that I had planted with Asiatic jasmine. It was tedious and took me close to three hours right in the middle of the day and in full sun. That was not smart. As we get older it takes much more energy for our bodies to regulate our core temperature, putting extra demand upon our hearts. This explains why we get more tired working or even standing in the full sun than we did when younger. If we overdo it our core temperature can rise, and rise dangerously. Heat exhaustion is not uncommon, and this, combined with dehydration can be deadly. In my case I started feeling light headed, then dizzy, then nauseous. I drank some water and kept going. More of the same. I noticed that my heart rate was quite elevated and decided I better stop. I just walked away leaving my tools and drove home and went to sleep. I was loopy.
Moral of the story – stay hydrated, wear a good hat, and remember, you’re not as young as you used to be.
Spearing, or Being Run Through
Pulling vines can be fun. I remember one place where there was a huge nest of smilax growing up into some very high very overgrown camellias and small cherry laurels. I cut the vines at the base, gathered them in my hands, and started pulling. Back and back I walked and pulled. The vines weren’t budging but the bushes and tress were bending. Now by this time in my gardening career I was wise enough always to look behind me in case the vines popped or loosened suddenly. In this case I did in fact slip, the the trees straightened and the vines dragged me swiftly on my derriere across the grass. I did it several more times because it was fun. Eventually I gave up and just cut the vines as high up as I could. But pulling vines can be dangerous. It is easy to fall, and often the vines let go or pop quickly.
A few months before I was pulling some vines in a crowded area where I had already cut some small saplings a foot or so high. I like to go back and dig them out and need to see them. So I was pulling some vine and it gave way and I fell straight back like Mohammed Ali in the first Ali-Frazier fight. I landed flat on my back about a foot from a sharp sapling stump I had just cut. That my friends could have been ugly.
Moral of the story – always ALWAYS look backwards when pulling vines and adjust your body when pulling so that you will fall on your side, not your back. Because you will fall.
Eyeball Slice
Ok, so this one may go under the heading When You Wish Who Had Died Gardening. It was a beautiful day, early spring, and I was doing something I love to do – pruning camellias. I was standing firmly on the ground. Now camellia stems and leaves have this tendency to sort of droop down and the leaves then situate sort of flatly, horizontal to the ground. Camellia leaves as you know are pretty stiff and have serrated edges. So I am pruning away, and enjoying the beautiful day, when I did the unthinkable – I turned my body. I know…dangerous. Problem was I turned my head too, and as I did, just above the top rim of my glasses, a camellia leaf sliced across my eyeball. Yep I said that right. Now I am going to tell you – that hurt. My eye filled up with fluid and the sunlight was painful. Like a dumb ass I drove myself to the Doc in a Box. Thankfully the slit was only through the the cornea, and not quite deep enough to warrant stitches. I wore a patch for a couple of days.
Moral of the story – WEAR SAFETY GLASSES!
Neck Snap
So, yes, I was pulling vines again, and in this case wisteria. I was in the back of a deep bed filled with very large old photinia bushes, in a cramped space, my back against a big wall. Wisteria vines were attached to a large tree high above. There was no angle, just a straight down pull. I tried a quick snap which often works for wisteria, but it didn’t budge. So I thought I’d try brute strength. I grabbed the vine with both hands and pulled straight down, using both my impressive gardening guns and my core muscles, as hard as I could for a sustained time. I was probably red in the face from exertion. Well, the vine detached or popped, and when it did my head jerked down so fast that my chin rammed my chest, and then my head bounced back equally fast against my upper back. Everything went black. I fell back against the wall and slumped to a a squatting position, staying still for some time. Slowly the cobwebs cleared, and with my eyes closed I started to assess if I had broken my neck. Was I breathing? Yes. Could I move my fingers, my toes? Yes. Could I see? I opened my eyes. Yes. Could I turn my neck (very slowly)? Yes. I sat there for a few minutes and then got up. I was fine, thankfully.
Moral of the story…don’t try to be a he man, and don’t be stupid.
The Walker Death
I have an old heavy mattock with a wooden handle that I have had for 35 years. I am partial to it for some reason. It comes in handy quite often, especially in getting out small stumps and smilax tubers. Mine is a pick mattock with one of the blades being an adze, which is like an ax but with the blade perpendicular to that of an ax, and the other being a pick, a strong pointed piece of metal. I use it a lot. I have never failed in all the years I have used this tool to look above me and behind me before every swing. Because the pick, on the back swing, could kill somebody as fast as heavy knife through a walker brain, the use of this tool is not to be treated lightly. I never assume with mattock in hand that I am alone. Nor should you. That people walk up behind me when I am swinging that thing mystifies me, but they do.
Moral of the story – never EVER walk up on a person swinging an ax, or mattock, or any tool really. And if you are the one doing the swinging always, ALWAYS look behind you first....
Mortification
I have no decent ladder stories because for some reason, despite learning on the job many other ways to get hurt (and thus many ways to be careful), I have always been cautious on ladders. Falling from ladders is the most common cause of injury and death for homeowners working in a yard. The time it takes to secure a ladder is very important, and being sensible once up a ladder, even a step ladder, is crucial. Step ladders in particular can kick out sideways very easily with improper weight distribution, usually caused by leaning. Ladder injuries are all too common.
When I was a pastor, a fellow in our church had fallen off a ladder and was in the hospital in very very bad pain Let’s call the fellow Don. Don’s family had requested prayers on his behalf, and so I sent out an email bulletin to the congregation. I asked for prayers for Don and for the doctors as they decided the course of action. Don, I explained, had fallen off a ladder and injured his back, and specifically had suffered a slipped disk. Except, I learned after I sent the email, I had misspelled the word disk. Can you guess how?
Moral of the story – there are many ways to die my friend, many ways…
Sweet Bay
Today I had the privilege of working at a property in Forest Acres in a somewhat hidden neighborhood between Covenant Road and Forest Drive. As is often the case when an original owner is quite elderly, and the spouse has passed away, and the children are in their 50′s and 60′s, vines and saplings and weeds have gotten out of hand. Thankfully these wonderful folks are restoring the gardens for their mom to enjoy in her late years.
When the land was purchased and the house was custom built back in the early 60′s, care was taken to protect the beautiful trees. In fact, the placement of the house was shifted over quite a ways from the original plan so as not to interfere with a big beautiful magnolia bay tree. The sweet bay magnolia was big then and is only a little bigger now than it was then, and still healthy!
As much as I love the grande dame of magnolias herself, southern magnolia, or Magnolia grandiflora, there is something delicate about the sweet bay magnolia that draws my attention, from its looser form, to its smaller more cream colored flowers, to its smaller leaves.
There is another native tree that also goes by the common name of sweet bay, the loblolly bay tree of the Carolina coastal plain. Now I flat out love this tree, and try to encourage folks to plant them whenever I can. A while back I had opportunity to plant several of them, and in the process of reading up and such I discovered that there are actually four plants that go by the common name “sweet bay”!
I first learned of “sweet bay” in Dr. Wade Batson’s renowned Spring Flora class at USC back in 1979. The class had “visited” a Carolina bay site in the coastal plain. Now I put the word visited in quotation marks because in Dr. Batson’s classes areas were not merely looked at, they were experienced, often up to the waist in water or knee deep in muck.The well known Carolina bay areas are rich in botanical diversity and great for a botany class outing, and there I first came upon the “bay” or “loblolly bay” or “sweet bay” tree. This has been the “sweet bay” tree in my head all these years.
Thus I have had some confusion since, as I said, there are in fact four different species of plants found in our area that may go by the name “Sweet Bay.” And the most common one is not even the sweet bay of Carolina Bay fame but the magnolia sweet bay.
The four kinds of “sweet bay” are:
1. Sweetbay (Magnolia virginiana) (Magnolia family) – Swamp Bay, Laurel Magnolia – native (Check out the Duke and Wikipedia articles).The photo below was taken in one of my customer’s front yards.
When the land was purchased and the house was custom built back in the early 60′s, care was taken to protect the beautiful trees. In fact, the placement of the house was shifted over quite a ways from the original plan so as not to interfere with a big beautiful magnolia bay tree. The sweet bay magnolia was big then and is only a little bigger now than it was then, and still healthy!
As much as I love the grande dame of magnolias herself, southern magnolia, or Magnolia grandiflora, there is something delicate about the sweet bay magnolia that draws my attention, from its looser form, to its smaller more cream colored flowers, to its smaller leaves.
There is another native tree that also goes by the common name of sweet bay, the loblolly bay tree of the Carolina coastal plain. Now I flat out love this tree, and try to encourage folks to plant them whenever I can. A while back I had opportunity to plant several of them, and in the process of reading up and such I discovered that there are actually four plants that go by the common name “sweet bay”!
I first learned of “sweet bay” in Dr. Wade Batson’s renowned Spring Flora class at USC back in 1979. The class had “visited” a Carolina bay site in the coastal plain. Now I put the word visited in quotation marks because in Dr. Batson’s classes areas were not merely looked at, they were experienced, often up to the waist in water or knee deep in muck.The well known Carolina bay areas are rich in botanical diversity and great for a botany class outing, and there I first came upon the “bay” or “loblolly bay” or “sweet bay” tree. This has been the “sweet bay” tree in my head all these years.
Thus I have had some confusion since, as I said, there are in fact four different species of plants found in our area that may go by the name “Sweet Bay.” And the most common one is not even the sweet bay of Carolina Bay fame but the magnolia sweet bay.
The four kinds of “sweet bay” are:
1. Sweetbay (Magnolia virginiana) (Magnolia family) – Swamp Bay, Laurel Magnolia – native (Check out the Duke and Wikipedia articles).The photo below was taken in one of my customer’s front yards.
Magnolia Virginiana - “Sweet Bay” Magnolia
2. Loblolly Bay (Gordonia lasianthus) (Tea family) - Holly Bay, Black Laurel, Summer Camellia - native ( see the Duke see and Wikipedia articles.
This is the the Sweet Bay I first learned about in botany class. It is a beautiful and wonderfully fragrant native tree.
Gordonia Lasianthus - “ Loblolly Bay”
3. Swamp Bay (Persea palustris) (Laurel Family) - Swamp Redbay, Sweet Bay - native (note the Duke and USDA write ups).
This is a small tree native to the coastal plain and which I also learned of years ago, but had lumped together with the Loblolly Bay. It has small creamed colored flowers that bloom in the leaf axis - somewhat like tea olive, and has small very dark blue fruit.
This is a small tree native to the coastal plain and which I also learned of years ago, but had lumped together with the Loblolly Bay. It has small creamed colored flowers that bloom in the leaf axis - somewhat like tea olive, and has small very dark blue fruit.
Persea Palustris - “Swamp Bay Tree”
4. Bay Laurel (Laurus nobilis) - Bay Laurel, True Laurel, Sweet Laurel, Sweet Bay - this bay tree is native to the Mediterranean. See see Wikipedia and Exploring the World of Trees articles).
This is the famous culinary "bay leaf" tree and the least common of the "Sweet Bays" in our area. We are at the northern end of its range but it is planted here and has escaped and become naturalized.
This is the famous culinary "bay leaf" tree and the least common of the "Sweet Bays" in our area. We are at the northern end of its range but it is planted here and has escaped and become naturalized.
Sweetgum
When I was a kid, maybe 10 or 11 years old, a friend of mine from school lived in a house with a huge backyard including a great field for playing baseball. He also had some of the best climbing trees anywhere. My favorite, due to the ease of getting very very high, was a tree with these pointy little balls all over the ground and hanging from the ends of the limbs. I really didn’t know what the tree was called. But we could climb so high – this tree was higher than the surrounding old loblolly pines. Of course, being kids, we’d go to the very top and sway back and forth. It was such a great way to feel alive! I am talking about the venerable old sweetgum tree, Liquidambar styraciflua, a tree which people love to hate these days.
No matter the season, it’s easy to know when you’re standing underneath a sweetgum. Scattered on the ground are those round prickly balls, about an inch and half in diameter, with little holes between the prickly parts. These pointy balls house the seeds of the sweet gum tree, and are commonly referred to as “gum balls.” If it’s winter and you find yourself stepping on gum balls in a parking lot or in someone’s yard, look up, and you’ll usually see many more gum balls still hanging onto the tree by their three inch long stems.
No matter the season, it’s easy to know when you’re standing underneath a sweetgum. Scattered on the ground are those round prickly balls, about an inch and half in diameter, with little holes between the prickly parts. These pointy balls house the seeds of the sweet gum tree, and are commonly referred to as “gum balls.” If it’s winter and you find yourself stepping on gum balls in a parking lot or in someone’s yard, look up, and you’ll usually see many more gum balls still hanging onto the tree by their three inch long stems.
The gum balls can be messy in a yard, and they hurt to step upon barefooted. I advise folks to rake up the gum balls and toss them into the back of a flower bed or into a compost bin – they decompose and crumble eventually, and provide organic matter for our sandy soils. For what it’s worth, some animals don’t like walking on sweetgum balls either, nor do slugs like crawling on them. Sweet gum balls make nice Christmas tree ornaments when painted, and they are a pretty decent golf ball substitute for practicing a golf swing.
These fruit balls provide food to many species of bird and mammal. One day I sat in my car and watched a gray squirrel sitting on a fence in front of me systematically nibble off all the spines of a sweet gum ball to get at the enclosed seeds. So the next time you feel like griping or cursing over all those prickly gum balls, remember, to a lot of animals they are food for the winter. You can learn to love them, you can! Well, maybe not...But tolerate them, yes!
Notice the tree trunk, fairly dark, mildly furrowed, and heavy looking, with somewhat of an “alligator” skin appearance. The limbs tend to come somewhat horizontally off the trunk and somewhat evenly spaced in altitude, to make sweet gums, even very large ones, some of the best trees for climbing, as many brave children will attest.
These fruit balls provide food to many species of bird and mammal. One day I sat in my car and watched a gray squirrel sitting on a fence in front of me systematically nibble off all the spines of a sweet gum ball to get at the enclosed seeds. So the next time you feel like griping or cursing over all those prickly gum balls, remember, to a lot of animals they are food for the winter. You can learn to love them, you can! Well, maybe not...But tolerate them, yes!
Notice the tree trunk, fairly dark, mildly furrowed, and heavy looking, with somewhat of an “alligator” skin appearance. The limbs tend to come somewhat horizontally off the trunk and somewhat evenly spaced in altitude, to make sweet gums, even very large ones, some of the best trees for climbing, as many brave children will attest.
Sweetgums grow up to 80 to 120 feet, and even taller ones can be found deep in southern bottom land forests. There is a huge sweetgum in the front yard of one of my clients. It is only about three feet in diameter but is very very tall. It grows amongst some of the tallest loblolly pine trees in Richland County and is as tall as they are, so I guess its height at 120 feet. The tallest sweetgum of all is in Congaree Swamp measuring 160 feet high!
The leaves of the sweetgum are very distinctive, usually five pointed, six or so inches across, with a star or perhaps starfish shape and appearance. The top of the leaf is glossy or shiny, which, given its star like shape, adds to its beauty. In the fall the sweetgum leaves tend to turn a deep crimson red, adding splash to the yellow dominated palate of the Midlands autumn. Below is a photo of a thick glossy new leaf in spring, and below that two dry leaves in the fall.
The leaves of the sweetgum are very distinctive, usually five pointed, six or so inches across, with a star or perhaps starfish shape and appearance. The top of the leaf is glossy or shiny, which, given its star like shape, adds to its beauty. In the fall the sweetgum leaves tend to turn a deep crimson red, adding splash to the yellow dominated palate of the Midlands autumn. Below is a photo of a thick glossy new leaf in spring, and below that two dry leaves in the fall.
If crushed in the hand the leaf has a particular odor called “resinous” by the tree books. That may be the best way to describe the sappy, tart odor. Often the small branches and twigs of the sweetgum have little ridges growing out on each side. These corky ridges called “wings” also show up on “winged” elm trees.
Walk through any recently abandoned field and you will probably find many young sweetgums mixed with the usual opportunistic pine trees. Though slower growing than the pines which are usually first to take over a field, and thus left in their shade for a time, the sweetgum is one of the first hardwoods to rise above the pines and begin the transition from pine to mixed hardwood forest.
So, why is this tree called a “gum” tree anyway. The sweet gum tree produces a sap or resin (that flows more freely the farther south you go, giving it the name liquidambar) that when hardened can be chewed as a gum. This resin of the sweetgum tree was long reputed to have medicinal qualities, used for the treatment of skin sores. It was widely used for treatment of dysentery during the Civil War.
The sweetgum tree provides one of our most important furniture woods, used mainly for veneers, but also for cabinets and boxes and toys, and even as pulpwood.
I have loved sweetgums my whole life. I took the photo below, or sweetgum leaves on water, in about 1977, from the top of the dam of a small pond near my house in the Forest Lake area.
Walk through any recently abandoned field and you will probably find many young sweetgums mixed with the usual opportunistic pine trees. Though slower growing than the pines which are usually first to take over a field, and thus left in their shade for a time, the sweetgum is one of the first hardwoods to rise above the pines and begin the transition from pine to mixed hardwood forest.
So, why is this tree called a “gum” tree anyway. The sweet gum tree produces a sap or resin (that flows more freely the farther south you go, giving it the name liquidambar) that when hardened can be chewed as a gum. This resin of the sweetgum tree was long reputed to have medicinal qualities, used for the treatment of skin sores. It was widely used for treatment of dysentery during the Civil War.
The sweetgum tree provides one of our most important furniture woods, used mainly for veneers, but also for cabinets and boxes and toys, and even as pulpwood.
I have loved sweetgums my whole life. I took the photo below, or sweetgum leaves on water, in about 1977, from the top of the dam of a small pond near my house in the Forest Lake area.
An Autumn Masterpiece - Black Gum
Black Gum in Full Fall Regalia
In the yard where I grew up in Columbia, out near the street, was an area we would call a natural area these days. It contained several old dogwoods, two scrub oaks, two big pines, and a tree which looked very much like a dogwood, but which wasn’t. I always had a particular affection for that tree. It is still there, not much bigger than it was forty years ago. When I say that it looked like a dogwood what I mean is that it had leaves very dogwood like, though much glossier and waxy, and a little bigger.
Black Gum Leaves in Summer
The bark, like dogwood, was very dark, fissured both horizontally and vertically, giving it an alligator skin appearance like dogwood bark.
Black Gum Bark
Like dogwood its leaves turned a deep red in the fall, actually a deeper red than dogwood leaves, and sometimes with a dash of orange thrown in as you can see in the picture at the top.
But it wasn’t a dogwood. It was a black gum. It didn’t have red berries but small blue-ish berries which dangled from little stems. And it was taller and bigger around than a dogwood. And its leaves, rather than growing out in pairs on opposite sides of the stem, rather alternated one side to another up and down the stem. Black gums tend to be very gnarly looking, limbs twisting this way and that way in their search for light.
But it wasn’t a dogwood. It was a black gum. It didn’t have red berries but small blue-ish berries which dangled from little stems. And it was taller and bigger around than a dogwood. And its leaves, rather than growing out in pairs on opposite sides of the stem, rather alternated one side to another up and down the stem. Black gums tend to be very gnarly looking, limbs twisting this way and that way in their search for light.
Gnarly Old Black Gum
Like dogwood, black gum wood is extremely hard. Because of this quality, black gum like dogwood was long revered for uses where high shock resistance was useful – such as in the growing industrial textile industry, or for toys, pulley rollers or gun stocks, or even as handles for mauls or heavy axes. My neighborhood was full of opossums. And ‘possums love the little berries or drupes of the black gum. Have you ever heard the jig ‘Possum Up De Gum Tree? Well, it’s the black gum’s little blue berries that that ole opossum is after in the song. Black gum drupes are eaten by squirrels, deer, raccoons, and even bears – and by dozens of native songbirds.
Black Gum Drupes - Jeffery S Pippin
Black gums are not that common, and for some reason they don’t live that long generally. They tend to grow as an under story tree in the mature forest, and they do very well growing in the mottled shade provided by large pines. In upland parts of the sand hills black gums do not grow very large. I see them most often as somewhat small volunteers growing up in flower beds of Columbia gardens. Though I generally take out volunteers like cherry laurel and hackberry I encourage my clients to leave the black gums. They grow very slowly and for all practical purposes are a small tree in that setting, and one of the best small native trees I know of. If clients are skeptical I usually ask them to withhold judgment until fall. Once they see the deep reds and orange leaves they tend to be sold. Black gums are wonderful trees for natural areas.
Black gums can get large however. A couple of years ago I noticed one in the woods across the road from all the plants at Cooper’s Nursery. I walked back to look at it, It was one of the biggest black gums I had ever seen in South Carolina, about two and a half feet in diameter, maybe 65 feet high, with a wonderful spread of limbs suggesting it grew up in a field or open area around a house. It was smothered in vines but the good folks at Cooper’s have been de-vining. I’ve been told that an arborist said it is the largest he has ever seen in the Midlands.
But the largest black gum I have had the pleasure of seeing is in Green Hill Cemetery in Greensboro. It must be well over a hundred years old. Black Gums grow slowly and the Green Hill Gum is almost three feet in diameter.
Black gums can get large however. A couple of years ago I noticed one in the woods across the road from all the plants at Cooper’s Nursery. I walked back to look at it, It was one of the biggest black gums I had ever seen in South Carolina, about two and a half feet in diameter, maybe 65 feet high, with a wonderful spread of limbs suggesting it grew up in a field or open area around a house. It was smothered in vines but the good folks at Cooper’s have been de-vining. I’ve been told that an arborist said it is the largest he has ever seen in the Midlands.
But the largest black gum I have had the pleasure of seeing is in Green Hill Cemetery in Greensboro. It must be well over a hundred years old. Black Gums grow slowly and the Green Hill Gum is almost three feet in diameter.
Huge Green Hill Black Gum
By the way, the scientific name for black gum is Nyssa sylvatica. Nyssa is a Greek word meaning end or post or trunk. Nyssa is also a Scandinavian word for elf or fairy. I am not sure which is the true origin of this tree name – whether post of the forest or elf of the forest.
Black Gum may also be called Black Tupelo.
I hope you will consider planting and growing this wonderful native tree!
How to Find a Gardener
I wanted to share with you an interesting article from plantamnesty.org (a tongue in cheek name for a fun and interesting organization devoted, amongst other things, to good pruning, rather than what it calls mal-pruning)! The article is entitled "How to Find - and Keep - a good Landscape Gardener." I see some of myself in her description of such a gardener and would be interested in your view of the article. Click HERE for the newsletter and article.
Link:
https://mlsvc01-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/8fee9ff7001/ea43ca2c-aabf-4f64-957d-ad385b95c623.pdf
Link:
https://mlsvc01-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/8fee9ff7001/ea43ca2c-aabf-4f64-957d-ad385b95c623.pdf
He Planted a Garden
"And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden..."
So, gardening has a pretty good pedigree!
"The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it."
Working and tending the Father's garden...I like that..lots of meaning packed in the little sentence!