Riches to Rags

Or, in like a lamb, out like a lion.

Our Star Magnolia (Magnolia stellata) obviously didn't know that old adage about the changeability of March weather.

March 22, 2012

On March 21st, the day before I took the picture above, the magnolia broke bloom (a full month earlier than its typical bloom time).  A day later it was festooned with stunningly beautiful white flowers and abuzz with flying insects. 

Almost full bloom

March, 28, 2012

Then two successive nights of below freezing temperatures withered the blossoms on their stems, and there they remain, brown and bedraggled like dirty rags, yet still firmly attached!   No petals will blow gracefully from the tree and litter the ground this year.  Can't say what became of all the insects.

March, 28, 2012

In yesterday's Globe and Mail, gardener Marjorie Harris warned, as ever, of the dangers of rushing the season and the wisdom of letting the garden rest until the soil has truly warmed.  If only she could speak to the trees! I confess, like my magnolia, I couldn't wait and was out pulling the shoots of garlic mustard--my current nemesis--while the magnolia bloomed.  Today, snow and sleet returned to weigh down the heads of dozens of my early blooming daffodils who've given up and are having a little lie down in the snow.

Same tree, last year, May 5th!

Backyard thugs unmasked: Sciurus carolinensis

We've had our share of losses at the teeth of the local rodent population.  Just before bloom time each year, squirrels decapitate my spring bulbs, and rabbits have decimated many of our small trees and shrubs while searching for food in past harsh winters (see here).  This year's mild winter had lessened our worries about more property damage.  But then one balmy February morning we looked out the window to see this:

Can you spot it?  Look for the tree limb with its bark completely stripped

That limb belongs to a beautiful basswood tree (genus Tilia), which although it appears behind our fence is actually our tree. We hope to reclaim it when we re-fence the property, but only if it can survive this current onslaught.  At first we suspected raccoons because the damage seemed so extensive, but then we caught the true fiend in the act!

Caught in the act

It was a grey squirrel (well, a black grey squirrel, but same species, Sciurus carolinensis).

Oooooh, you varmint!

Now, I abhor violence, but at this moment I was really longing, like Alfie, for a Red Ryder carbine-action, 200-shot, range model air rifle BB gun.  Unfortunately, as you can see, we're in an urban area (note the alignment of neighbouring windows and offending animal) that precludes any violent action--even against known felons.  And so, we plot.   Squirrel catapult?  Squirrel scarecrow?   


Apparently, pregnant female squirrels have been known to strip the bark from several favoured tree species, especially basswood--well known as a source of cordage*--in the search for nesting material.  So, we can look forward to a rapidly expanding population of squirrels who by genetics or observation will continue to strip the bark from our trees.    Squirrel taxidermy?


*I didn't actually know about basswood's cordage potential until this year and neither apparently did the local the local squirrel population, because in twelve winters here this is the first time I've witnessed this specific form of destruction. My source was Google, but theirs? 

A dropped bundle of freshly stripped basswood cordage, now apparently sullied by snow and unsuitable for nesting

the damage done

What we do know, through experience, is that this behaviour is certain to spark copycat crimes.  And I would like to nip them, so to speak, in the bud.  Any suggestions of just desserts for bark-stripping squirrels would be welcome.

Goodbye Ferns, Hello Winter Urns

tropical upright fern/winter urn

I bid a reluctant goodbye to my three tropical upright ferns that had performed so spectacularly all summer and fall.  I brought one of them inside, but their gigantism forced me to send the other two to the compost heap, where they look very forlorn.  Even a Victorian home can only handle so many ferns on stands. In their place are three berry laden Blue Princess Hollies, well insulated with extra soil and lots of cedar and dogwood boughs.  With luck they'll survive the winter and join the far less showy Blue Prince holly in the garden in the spring.  The lovely brown of the underside of the magnolia leaves makes a nice compliment to my rusty iron urns (rust initially from neglect, now turned purposeful strategy). 

Blue Princess holly, cedar boughs, red osier dogwood twigs, magnolia leaves

For the two concrete urns at the top of the stairs I impaled two moss balls on dogwood stakes and thrust them into into my existing pots of ivy with some white pine and salal.  For all of the violence of their making, they have a calm formal look and the moss balls echo the size and shape of the ball finials on the newel posts at the base of the stairs--another subconscious design coup (I'm that good).  So, that's the fun part of putting the garden to bed, done...now I really must get back to the real chores before the final deep freeze.

The impaled moss ball topiary (slightly askew from this angle)

The long and the short of it

The backyard as meadow (or meadow mullet)

Dear ?
We apologize for our recent lapse in lawn maintenance. We know two and a half weeks of moderate spring weather can have an encouraging effect on the various species of flora that make up our lawn. Two and half weeks was the timeframe given us by the small engine repair shop where we took our languishing 10yr old mower to be serviced after it putt-putted to a halt on its first outing of the year. During that time we borrowed a high-end European-made battery-powered electric lawn mower from the neighbours two doors up, but because that mower was itself borrowed, sans recharging apparatus, our mow (but not our lawn), was cut short (ahem). Then, after a trying time of avoiding eye contact with passers by and attempting to appear extremely busy/preoccupied on every dash to the car, we confessed the cause of our furtiveness to our next door neighbour who that very evening mowed all of the yard visible from the sidewalk (short in front and sides, long at the back—a veritable mullet for the lawn). What neighbourly generosity! Front lawn mown, we took to holding our heads high and even greeting people as they walked by.

Garlic Scapes in the Landscape

Our harvest of garlic scapes

Last year we started to despair that all of the garlic in our local grocery stores was imported from overseas, which seems outrageous since garlic grows so beautifully here in southern Ontario. So during the months of August, September, and October we bought dozens of garlic bulbs from the local farmers' market and directly from some farms we visited. We ate most of our local garlic stash, but kept a dozen or so bulbs, to separate and plant in our own garden. We don’t have an assigned vegetable garden yet, so I planted both hard and soft neck varieties anywhere I could shoehorn them in around our other plants. This year our young garlic is thriving and blocking out some other plants, notably our new yellow roses bushes (which are extra small after being eaten down to the ground by rabbits). Garlic is not quite as inconspicuous in the landscape as I’d thought it might be. Next year I will designate a garlic growing area.

Bling scape

Today we harvested the first fruits of our garlic crop: the scapes. A garlic scape is the flower stalk of the garlic plant. As the flower stalk grows, its stem coils, making it very easy to distinguish from the rest of the plant. A farmer we’d spoken to said that removing the scape encourages a bigger bulb below ground. This necessary harvest is a delicious early harbinger of the garlic crop to come. We’d noticed the appearance of the developing flower stalks a couple of weeks ago, and today they seemed at the perfect degree of curliness to be harvested. As I snipped the pale green stems, I discovered that the cut scapes can be conveniently worn as bracelets--allowing me to keep both hands free. The smell of the freshly cut garlic scapes is delicious, like garlic, only milder, and with an underlying bright fresh green scent. The scapes I’ve bought from farmer’s markets before have been fairly tough, but these freshly harvested ones are crisp, tender, and easily bitten.

Today for lunch, we had garlic scape pesto over linguine, a recipe which a quick Internet search reveals in many variations. Essentially, garlic scape pesto is one in which the scapes take on the dual role of the traditional basil and garlic.

Garlic Scape Pesto

Our Garlic Scape Pesto recipe included:

• Garlic Scapes (about 40 with the tougher flower end removed)
• Olive oil (several tablespoons)
• Parmagiano reggiano (a generous grating—maybe ½ cup)
• Pine nuts (about a ½ cup)
• Salt to taste (less than a teaspoon)
• Lemon juice (of half a lemon)

I made the pesto, not in the food processor, which I was too lazy to haul out of the cupboard, but in our new two-speed Osterizer blender (which we bought to replace the Kitchen Aid after I broke the blender jug. We kept the base of the Kitchen Aid and will replace the glass part if we come across one, but we are delighted with the handsome new Osterizer so far).

Our perfect, pungent lunch

The pesto was beautiful: bright pale green, and very, very pungent. The pesto had a fresh green taste with a strong undertone of garlic and quite a bit of heat after a few bites. The garlic taste is not nearly as intense as raw garlic, but unless you are a true garlic lover, this pesto won’t delight you. We we’re delighted. This pesto was wonderful on pasta, but tonight we might try it on a wild salmon fillet, which we plan to barbecue if the rain stays away. The garlic scape harvest will definitely be an anticipated yearly event for us (provided we remember to plant our garlic in the fall).

We’ve Got to Get Ourselves Back to the Garden

Muscari bulbs awaiting transplant

Blog entries will likely be sporadic over the easy outdoor months when it’s so much more gratifying to walk out the door and visit my garden than type on this machine.

But May marks an anniversary I can’t leave unrecorded. We are celebrating the first year of our tiny formal gardens flanking our front brick walkway. Last year over a couple of weeks in May, N and I planted what we aggrandisingly refer to as our mini-Versailles (it was actually André Le Nôtre’s Vaux le Vicomte, not Versailles, where we took our inspiration, but since no one seems to know of Vaux le Vicomte, the reference doesn’t obtain). The gardens consist of two tiny boxwood-hedged beds along our brick front walkway, and another along the driveway, one with three stately fastigate European hornbeams--Carpinus betula ‘Frans Fontaine’, and all filled with narcissi and tulips in the spring. Our love of formal gardens has been creeping up on us since our first visits to France over a decade ago, but last year was our first real attempt to introduce some formality to our previously free-form gardens. Our house is no castle; it’s a modest Victorian, but we’re having fun echoing on a miniature, modest scale some of what Le Nôtre did on a vast one.

A true 'before' shot from April 2006

The formal front garden nearing its first birthday this May

Excerpts from last year’s wiki entries documenting the formal bed planting efforts (in our pre-blog days):

May 15, 2007

The weather was sunny and almost hot, then dramatically cloudy with theatrical thunder, lightning, and rain--light, then heavy and straight, then gusting--followed by the most dramatic winds we have ever witnessed from our front porch. Branches fell to the road. Leaves were blown off trees.

The storm would've made for good drama if it hadn't done such damage to our newly planted trees. All day we worked to plant our three lovely fastigate hornbeams in our narrow planting strip by the driveway. We laboured to make sure they were perfectly straight and evenly positioned. When the rain seemed immanent around 5:00 we enjoyed a beer at our back table on our new bench under our umbrella and surveyed our backyard from our new lower vantage point (without the deck) against the dark backdrop of storm clouds. The neighbour’s huge apple tree is covered in white blossoms which were very dramatic against the dark grey sky. Finally the rain came and we were forced to go inside where we looked at radar and realized more bad weather was still to come.

Aftermath: the once straight trees have a definite lean

Moments before the big winds hit we had been standing on our porch complementing ourselves on the straightness of our trees. Then, the wind struck and when the storm was over, our trees had shifted dramatically. We'll try to straighten them, but our hard work of today was definitely compromised.

May 26, 2007

(truck) bed of buxus

The hornbeams have been straightened and staked. Our truck is completely full of boxwoods: 126 one-gallon pots for our hedge. N is out looking for the right fitting to solve our irrigation system draining problem.

Underground drama--irrigation lines and drains

later the same day...

Planting in progress (and, how NOT to leave a rake)

Today we planted half of our hedge and we think it is beautiful. We enclosed the rectangular area next to the driveway. It doesn't look like an afterthought anymore, but like a purposeful garden. Tomorrow we'll plant the other side of the path. Unlike today's hedge which had hard surface guides all around, this one will require a bit of grading to keep the soil level even, and more accurate measuring. We seem to have bought more boxwoods than we actually need, so our hedge may go farther than we thought and enclose the bed between the driveway and the porch.

One side done

Back to the present

When we first began gardening about a decade ago, we loved natural curving lines. On our visits to botanical gardens, the underlying structure of gardens escaped our notice as we were captivated by the profusion of unruly blooms. Only gradually as we realized that flowers alone didn’t produce the gorgeous gardens we loved, did we begin to see past the blooms to the supporting forms of trees and shrubs, the edges on the beds and the definition of hardscaping elements like paths, fences, and rocks. Somehow, it took subsequent visits to grand Chateaux in France where the gardens are overtly formal, for the true possibilities of imposed structure in the garden to really occur to us. Gradually, in our own urban lot, we’ve been containing our garden areas—shaping them with boulders and paths and defined edges, but only recently have we been imposing a more calculated geometry. We are emboldened by early results. The definite architecture of clipped hedges and brick walkways make the gardens they contain look even more natural by comparison—like the perfect frame. Our garden will never be entirely formal. We have a native woodland garden on the west side of our house under the shade of tall sugar maples and a curving front bed anchored by a glorious red Japanese maple (Acer japonicum ‘Bloodgood”). The garden has more formal elements close to the house and becomes more informal as it moves away.

In our small city lot, it seems ludicrous to try to match the natural style of a managed woodlot like this one in Waterloo Region, where I hiked earlier this week

I will leave true nature to the gorgeous natural woodlots and protected tracts of land where I love to hike. In my own little plot I am bound and determined to employ all the art and artifice I can muster.

The fledgling formal garden (May 2007)

Bad Rabbits

The (possibly fatally) wounded crabapple with new wrap

A pair of rabbits girdled my crab apple tree last night, despite my twilight attempts to scare them away. All that remains is a ½” strip of bark connecting the canopy to the roots. I planted that tree in memory of my beloved Nana and I can’t believe it might be destroyed. I had wrapped the trunk of that tree and many others in the fall, but we’ve had so much snow that most of my protection is buried. In the spring I am going to try bridge grafting the bark, but I think the damage may be too great. I am devastated. The crabapple is not the only casualty—my flowering dogwoods and magnolias are badly damaged, my mugho pine stripped of needles, and my sand cherries, which I don’t care about so much because they grow so vigorously, are virtually chewed to the ground. I am channeling Elmer Fudd right now, but I’m sure my efforts to control the rabbits will be just as ineffective as his.
For the first time in my life I am considering a pet dog.

This afternoon I was looking out at my wounded crabapple and watching the birds at the feeder when I was sure I saw a butterfly flit by. I did! And here is my proof:

I have never seen a butterfly this early. Where could it have come from? I have no idea of the species. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a photo of it with wings spread, but it is more dramatically marked inside with some bright pale spots and darker wings. If anyone can identify it, I’d love to know what it is. This must be one of the earliest sightings of a butterfly in our region. It’s certainly mine.
Does this look like butterfly weather to you?