The past two months were unusually dry for the second year in a row in my area.  Today periodic rain showers were a refreshing change of pace and a welcome sign to me that Fall is coming!

I’m currently cooped up indoors recovering after a minor surgery, but I made my way outdoors when the first ray of sunlight peeped through the clouds, to take pictures and look around.  I found a stray Poke Weed that had taken up residence under the deck stairs, and was struck at how pretty even that looked after the rain. With the right mindset anything can be beautiful!  Covered in rain drops those berries look inviting to even me, although I am pretty sure they are not what the doctor ordered!

Can You Eat Poke Weed?

I was reminded of a lecture that one of my professors gave me years ago.  He told the class that the leaves of a young Poke Weed are edible and safe to humans, as long as the plant is not producing fruit or flowers. He explained that once reproductive cycle begins, the plant, and later berries are toxic for human consumption, and that the window of opportunity around which the plant is edible can vary, thereby making it a questionable snack for the unwary. I chuckled when I remembered that random fact and tucked it back into the recesses of my brain reserved only for life-or-death survival tips likely to benefit me in the event of nuclear holocaust. Should I ever be eking out a living with nomadic tribes in the hills of Tennessee, I’ll happily volunteer to fix a poke weed salad if the others go club dinner over the head, but short of those extreme circumstances, I’ll stick with Romaine Lettuce!

With the potential risk involved, I think I’ll leave the plant and its berries to the local wildlife for now, and hope they return the favor by dropping their berry dyed “calling cards” on the neighbor’s cars and not mine! But just in case you ever do find yourself desperate, here are some hints to help you identify Poke Weed.

How to Identify Poke Weed

Pokeweed often grows rapidly in one season up to a height of 10 feet.  Generally first appearing in late spring, they prefer hearty soil, and a little moisture, and have rather fleshy stems that are easily broken, and pink, with the color deepening at the time of fruiting.  Pokeweed flowers from July to September, and produces self-pollinated fruit anywhere from late summer to mid-fall.  The flowers of the plant grow at the ends of the branches, in clusters of white flowers that are followed by clusters of dark blue or purple berries.  The berries produce a deep magenta dye that is often impossible to remove from clothing.  (Belated apologies to my mother, who made many heroic efforts against set-in stains following childhood “combat” missions at the park with the neighborhood kids)

What do you think: Is there an odd plant that you have been told could be a survival-only, Bear Grylls-style, eat only as a last resort, food source?

Summer is almost officially over, but the heat is still here.  Although fall is my hands down favorite season, it means that my favorite garden flower, the Purple Coneflower, will be on it’s way “out” soon.  I’ve been trimming back my cluster of the pink and purple blooms a lot these past two weeks, in the hopes that I can coax another wave or two of flowers forth, before they begin to go dormant.

This year I went a little crazy with my  Coneflowers, dividing the clumps in early June after they had only been established for one year, and probably could have benefited from another year to plump up more.  Luckily, the native plants seem almost unkillable in my yard, bouncing back from one issue after another and thriving just the same.  They are an ever popular plant with the butterfly, bee, and Goldfinch crowd, who I attempt to lure into my city garden every year, with great success.  How wildlife finds my yard, sandwiched like it is between Industrial buildings, and interstate 95 in a busy city, I’ll never understand, but I am always glad they make the trip to find me!

This past spring, the groundhog that lives under my back porch kicked off the growing season by foraging through my Coneflowers and eating them back almost to the ground, which posed a challenge to my goal of 2008 to “live and let live” in my yard.  After weighing my options, and the ethics of dragging the “hog” out from under my proch, rubbing his nose in what was left of my flowers, and punting his squeaky behind across the Daylilly bed, I opted to take the heigher road, if only to save my neighbors from the spectacle that would have been! “Confucious,” as I have named the animal, luckily pondered the errors of his ways, and has left my favorite plant untouched in the past months, leaving me plenty of flowers for summer arrangements.  He taught me a valuable lesson about Purple Coneflowers though, since his overzealous spring pruning trained the plants to grow to half their usual height, and produce prolific blooms that were mostly hidden under larger flowers and shrubs.

I’m looking forward to next years batch though already, and in the coming weeks I will be able to move the conflowers in my pot designs there into reforestation areas on the property I manage, where the native plant will hopefully thrive, and prove to be useful for the wildlife there.  If the animals I plant the Coneflowers for are even half as appreicative of the early spring foliage as “Confucious” was, I will be expecting Thank You notes on “Smokey the Bear” stationary some time next May.

Your thoughts: Do you have a favorite summer flower or plant that you are going to miss?

Arrowwood Viburnum, is one of the plants on my “bullet-proof” list, that I recommend to everyone, no matter how green their thumb!  A native North American tree growing naturally from Canada to Texas, Arrowwood Viburnum can be used as either a landscaping tree, or a pruned hedge shrub.

What You’ll Love:

• This is one very hardy plant, with pest and disease resistance.
• It thrives in full sun exposure, partial sun, or total shade areas.
• It can be planted in wet areas, or dry areas.

What It Gives Back To You And Your Yard:

• Spring: The tree’s blooms are highly visible clusters of white flowers, that attract butterflies, and hummingbirds.
• Summer: What were blooms in the spring, are now large clusters of blue berries, that feed birds, and look great in table arrangements.
• Fall: The foliage darkens before it falls, in bright red, orange, and yellow color, adding beautiful color to your yard.

What It Does For The Environment:

• Like all trees it helps remove carbon dioxide, and provide cleaner air.
• Fulfills the growing need in developed areas to return beneficial native plants to naturalized, and backyard areas that have been disturbed by construction, and may be falling prey to invasive species.  (Exotic invasive species come from other countries, and often overtake native material, robbing local wildlife of suitable food sources, and habitat, and humans of recreation areas)
• Provides a natural food source for everything from butterflies, and hummingbirds, to mammals.  This can lead to fewer animals hunting for food in your vegetable patch, or trash bin.
• Provides an ecologically “greener” way to landscape, with what is consistant in, and suited for the conditions in North America.
• Adds to the overall health, and beauty of your local ecosystem.

Your Thoughts: I’ve included a picture of my own Arrowwood Viburnum, which is doing really well this year, and is covered in berries.  Have you tried this plant and had success with it, or have you found your own favorite “bullet-proof” plant?  Let me know!

This year, I wanted a change!  Instead of planting traditional arbor plants around the trellis’ in my front yard, I wanted something a little more substantial, that would feed both myself, and the songbirds I’m desperately trying to attract to my city home!  As part of my “green journey,”  one of my goals is to use multi-purpose plants to provide food, beauty, and function in my garden, while fitting into the tight space I have allotted to me.  I also want to use native plants as much as possible, to support the local eco-system, and to save myself time and money, by planting plants that are known to be hardy in my location.

When I first moved into my current house, my family brought me a tiny Blackberry plant that was a descendant from the crops of my great-grandparents farm in Maine.  Knowing how hardy the American native Blackberries are in my little section of the East Coast, I was excited that the first addition to my new fruits and veggies patch be a low maintenance plant. Happily burdened with the historical significance of the plant, I made sure it lived through the droughts of last year, and that it provided me with enough berries to top a celebratory Ice cream float!

This year, with all the rain we have been receiving, the plant was growing so fast I could hear it’s progress through open windows, so I decided to do something a little unusual with it.  I placed it in a raised planter with a square framed trellis around it, and taught it to climb up the sides, weaving it through the arched top as well, to provide me with maximum berries, with minimal thorn pricks.  Generally, Blackberries grow on sturdy stems that are covered in thorns from all sides, so harvesting berries from the interior sections of the plant can be tricky.  The stems, left on their own in the wild, will grow in three foot arches, which only means that it is a solid, woodier, and easily shaped trellis plant, than many non-native plants available in garden superstores.  Blackberries need no tying up, or excessive fiddling, to keep it attached to the trellis.

With Trellis Blackberries, I can do three key things:

1. Provide Food: I can maintain a smaller part of the shrub for my own food harvesting, in a bed raised above the reach of mammals, and protected by netting from  birds,  while leaving the upper portions of the plant on the trellis available for birds.  This attracts the wildlife I want to my yard, providing them with natural food sources that don’t cost me a cent!
2. Add Beauty: Spring and summer, the plant sends out clusters of small white flowers, that once pollinated, will provide fruit through the late summer. This translates into visual interest around the arbor from spring through summer.  The shrub, also is a hardy one, that provides a solid, and easily maintained green color from early spring, through late fall.  It also will attract pollinators, and songbirds to your yard, which makes gardening all the more enjoyable, and “green,” providing for the local eco-system.  This is a great way to keep your berry bushes neat and tidy too, if you are working with a small yard, or even a balcony garden.
3. Fulfill A Function: The native Blackberry works well in fulfilling it’s roll as a an arbor plant, providing seasonal greenery, without the care that comes from “training” up other flowering-but-floppy arbor vines.  A trellis provides greater, and easier access to the fruit as well, since the plant is growing on a structure, and not just in a tangle of thorny branches.

I’m happy with what I’ve harvested so far this year, and I’m encouraged to be able to add home grown blackberries to my summer food supply.  Being an outdoorsie person too, I hope that the nutritional benefits of the berries will not only meet my dietary needs, but also fulfill a roll in my overall health, and skin care regimine.

Your Thoughts: Have you tried any new ways to incorporate fruits and veggies into your garden design?

White Ash trees have a reputation for having very strong and flexible wood, but when I drove past this tree on my job site, I knew I had a serious problem! Generally a tree bent and straining in this manner is suffering from severe drought conditions, and is in danger of losing branches under the strain of holding it’s own weight up! This year has been particularly rainy on the east coast, so this type of appearance in a tree was a little confusing at first, especially in a tree that had shown no signs of insect damage.

White Ash trees are an American native tree, rarely prone to disease, although they are vulnerable to the Emerald Ash Borer and Verticillium Wilt. I quickly checked the tree and saw no Borer holes entering the tree’s trunk - although insects and birds seemed to be showing a peculiar interest in this and two other surrounding trees. The branches on all three White Ash trees showed healthy summer leaf growth and color, even though they were bowed way down over the nearby sidewalk. To my eye, these trees did not appear diseased, so diagnosing the cause of their stress related appearance was out of my league.

I contacted a knowledgeable arborist, who found a simple answer to my puzzle. Heaps of green flowers and red clusters of what looked like tiny dried Chili Peppers, were clinging to the branches all over the tree, in what was an off-season burst of blooms. Bees, wasps, and birds were constantly darting in and out of the tree, in what turned out to be a feeding frenzy, rather than a sign of insect infestation, as several neighbors feared. Apparently, several types of birds feed on the seeds of Ash trees, and the pollinators, and carnivorous bugs were feeding on the massive amounts of nectar, or tiny pests that had been drawn to the tree. The arborist was perplexed to discover that the tree had both leafed-out for the summer, and exploded in an unprecedented amount of blooms, when the two functions on the tree are not supposed to occur at the same time. Blooms on a White Ash tree are supposed to precede leaf growth, and be small, and barely noticeable! This tree was simply weighed down under the weight of it’s own abnormal fertility, and the prescription for the tree was to simply let nature take it’s course. The White Ash blooms will dry up, the rest of the “chili pepper” seed pods will drop off, and the tree will regain it’s upright stature in the next few weeks.

This is one of those times when the simplest answer to a problem can be staring you right in the face, and you don’t even see it, because you are going “by the book.” I am not sure if the unusual amount of rain we received, or the cooler than average temperatures contributed to the trees apparent fertility confusion, but either one could have thrown the tree off it’s regularly scheduled program.

I am doubly glad though, as I am writing this, that I did contact someone with the experience to recognize the cause to my problem. This tree apparently did not read the textbooks on how it was supposed to behave, and had I applied any treatments to the tree to keep the birds, and wasps off of the tree, I would have robbed the local ecosystem of what was apparently a valuable food source.

Your thoughts: Have you ever run into something in your yard or garden that just didn’t quite seem to make sense and later realized it was something fairly unique going on?

This year, the East Coast is experiencing an unbelievable boom in Poison Ivy! From woodsy borders, and the sides of the highways, to backyard fences, this American native plant is spreading at an amazing rate just since the spring of this year! Working in property management, I try to keep an eye open for future problems as they occur, and to maintain a balance between the people I work for, and the natural environment. I did some research into this unusual phenomenon, and discovered that I was not the only one who had made some links between the higher levels of rain, and stable temperatures, and the spread of this plant.

Read the rest of this entry »