Botany Buddy

I’ve been a bit lax on my blogging the last couple of weeks as we have buried in our next release.  I actually started this post earlier in the week, but it has taken me until Christmas Eve to get a chance to relax and finish it off.  There is not doubt the greatest gifts I have been given are my wife and daughter, but next to that it has to be the nature around me and the place we live.  Nothing has brought out the best of all three recently like the 18″ of snow that trapped us on the mountain for a few days with no phone and Internet.  So for Christmas…I thought I would share some of the scenes with you (the link is at the bottom).

In recent years I have become a purist when it comes to habitat gardening, and there is now doubt that it is due to my relocation from the heart of the city to our little farmette.  After years of trying to emulate nature in a completely unnatural setting, I have found myself blessed with the best of both worlds surrounded by The Blue Ridge Parkway National Park, and still being on ly 15 minutes from downtown.  To give you a brief rundown, about 1/2 of our property is natural woodland and meadow, and rather than adding to it, I spend most of my time promoting the natives and removing invasives.  The rest of the yard is devoted to homesteading with our vegetables and animals, and to playing with my daughter and dogs.  With everything we do, we try to enhance the natural habitat for wildlife as well as ourselves, and we make sure whatever we do we leave our property more natural and ecologically secure than we found it.

Last year my biggest project was reclaiming about half of my creek from beneath 6 feet deep mats of invasive Honeysuckle and Bittersweet.  It also involved pulling them out of trees, removing the dead ones, and cleaning up the ones that remained.  As much as a hate the construction in the woods beside me, the new driveway made this project possible because it provides a barrier that will keep the invasives out now it has been removed.  In the end it gave me a great new creekside garden that I like to call my summer office.

Nothing brought out the beauty of my efforts and proof of our habitat development than the 18″ of snow we received last week.  While the beauty of the wildflowers is wonderful, nothing reveals how our garden is inhabited better than a nice thick blanket of snow.

I have created a photo album on our facebook page to give you a tour of the “snowscape”.  Please take time to check it out and have a great Holiday Season!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=131757&id=91659935689

Merry Christmas and if I don’t make it back this week have a Happy New Year!

You all have heard about my love of  Christmas and how it is rooted in the garden and garden centers.  You also know that I try to be as “green” as I can, and try to do whatever I can to help others be green too.  However, when it comes to living Christmas trees I have already written about “choosing the greenest tree” and explained that there are greener options but living trees are still a good one.  Unfortunately this year, when it comes to living Christmas trees, it seems that greed and the over commercialization of the season are taking their toll again.

More and more I am seeing the roadside stands that sell cut trees selling living trees too.  These are beautifully sheered 8-10 foot tall trees that are balled and burlapped and arranged in beautiful little forests along the side of the road.  Now when you are looking at a cut tree for $50.00 vs. a living tree for $150.00, this doesn’t sound too bad.  Especially when you consider a perfectly shaped specimen like that from a nursery would easily cost $300.00 or more.  Well there is a reason for that.

There is a new phenomenon happening.  Trees that have been grown for 8-10 years for the sole purpose of being cut are now being balled and burlapped and sold to be replanted for an incredible price.  A conifer that has actually been grown to be planted will have been hand pruned and carefully trained to promote a proper branching structure year after year, not sheered with a mower blade on the side of a tractor like the ones on the side of the road.  A tree that is being grown to be planted will also be “root pruned” by having its roots cut regularly to stay proportionate to the canopy.  This develops a thick enough root system to survive transplanting.  These roadside living trees have had all their roots cut off after 8-10 years of growing freely.  Finally the trees in a nursery have been cared for.  They will be properly healed into mulch or potted up, and have been properly watered from the time they got off the truck.  Most of these roadside stands don’t even have a hose, let alone anyone who would actually know that they need to use one.

The living trees we see on the side of the road with their perfectly clean burlap balls (as not to dirty your trunk) are not living at all.  They have essentially been murdered.  There roots have been cut off and they have been starved of food an water.  Now grant it, they were originally planted to be cut down anyway.  That is no excuse for selling them under a false pretense and taking your money only to have your heart broken when your tree dies.  These trees may look green and healthy, and even stay that way until spring or summer.  However, once there roots have been through the torture they have received they will not be able to regrow and the tree will eventually die.  I am not saying don’t buy a living tree.  The experience can be an invaluable lesson for the family, but don’t buy it from a green tree scammer.

If you want a living tree, only buy it from a reputable nursery where you can actually learn something about what you are buying.  Ask them how it was grown and cared for and make sure you are getting the right tree for where you want to plant it.  A good nursery will even give you proper instructions on how to care for and plant it, both during the holidays and once it is in the ground.  This will also give you somewhere to go for help if it starts to have problems later on, because come December 25th that guy on the side of the road will be gone and so will your money.   In the end, buying a living tree from your local nursery will add to your Christmas tradition and may even become one.  If you buy it from that guy on the side of the road you will be waiting for Easter to see if it comes back to life instead of hiding eggs in its branches.

Alright, I admit that I am a sap for cheesy music (as well as the good stuff) and I have a weakness for great song writers.  Writing a great song is so similar to designing a great garden that I just can’t help it. Today it’s Billy Joel.  I have been writing in app speak for about a week straight without blogging, and breaking out the Greatest Hits was a sure fire way to get me back to my native tongue.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love the challenge of trying to hone together information into perfectly worded phrases designed to interact with on another on a technical level.  Writing an interactive book is actually great because it reigns in my run on sentences and teaches me to speak without analogies and innuendos.   However, is it me trying to change myself to try and please you…or is it me?  I think as long as I continue to be myself that I will come through in the end.  That is the key to writing a great song.  Finding the best in all of us, learning to bring it out and bring us together with the most efficient use of words, patterns, rhythm, is at the heart of music, writing, gardening and all the arts.

One of the key things I have learned to do in all of this is not change me and to be myself.  I learned a long time ago as a designer that when I did my best work, I let myself come out and tried to blend it with the essence of my clients and the space we were working in.  The same is true with plants.  Plants do their best for us when we put them where they want to be, not where we can make them do what we want.  As gardeners, too often we ask this of our plants and our spaces only to change ourselves too in the end.  By butchering them and controlling them to the point that they are no longer who they want to be (people, places, or plants) they cease to be the things we love and become all to unfamiliar.

So while we sit and reflect this winter and lust over catalogs to find the perfect plants for the prefect spots, let’s remember that the perfect plant is the one that can be who it wants to be and bring out the essence of the space and ourselves in the process.   If we do this we will get the gardens we want because those spaces, our needs, and the needs of the plants that will live there will bring us the diversity we crave.  If we don’t we will just ruin all the things we love about each other and our love of gardening.

We’ve all been in that bad relationship, and as designers in our desire to create and be something different we can make the greatest mistake of all  “She’ll promise you more than the garden of Eden.  Then she’ll carelessly cut you and laugh while your bleeding but she’ll bring out the best and the worst you can be.  Blame it all on yourself cause she’s always a woman to me.” Sound like something we’ve all done to a shrub or two.  How often have we done this?   When will we learn that our plants, clients, spaces and selves are what and WHO they are.  Only when we learn to respect that and learn that we have to live together will we achieve that love we long for one another.    If we don’t we will just ruin all the things we love about each other and love of gardening.  So when we think of ourselves as gardeners let’s think of ourselves as cheesy songwriters.

“So don’t go changing to try and please me.  You never let me down before…Don’t imagine your too familiar and I don’t see you anymore…I would not leave you in times of trouble.  We never could have come this far…I took the good times.  I’ll take the bad times.  I’ll take you just the way you are.”