Poet's Ivy

English ivy is a common vine we all know well as a houseplant or as an aggressive climber in the shady woodland garden. But ivy does something strange that turns it into an interesting, beautiful shrub for the garden.

When an ivy vine reaches the end of its structure or the top of a tree and it has nowhere further to climb, it matures.

When ivy matures it changes genetically. The leaves lose their lobed points and become rounded. The vine stops being a vine and the topmost part of the plant becomes shrubby and dense.

If you take a cutting from the shrubby mature part of the ivy, it will keep its altered genetic characteristics -- you get another mature shrub form of the plant.

But if you plant the seeds from the mature flowering ivy, you get an immature vine, and you are back to having rampant vining English ivy.

Immature vining ivy leaf on left / Adult rounded form on right

I first saw the adult form of ivy at Wave Hill Garden in the Bronx in 2013. I wrote about it here. It was a tidy, elegant, round shrub, flowering in late October. The flowers were yellow-greenish and really interesting; not colorful, but alive with late season bees. The foliage was glossy green -- deepest, darkest, light-grabbing, mysterious green.

Shrub ivy -- the adult form -- at Wave Hill in late October, 2013.

This April I found adult ivy -- Hedera helix 'Arborea' -- at Broken Arrow nursery, and brought home two plants to put in the two empty spots along the front walk where the deceased heath plants had been.

These are sometimes also called 'Poetica Arborea' or Poet's Ivy. Pliny in his Natural History mentioned that poets used the adult ivy with its light colored berries for their wreaths. You can look it up.

Louis the Plant Geek has a great write up about Poet's Ivy here. He mentions the need for fantastic winter drainage and some problems getting adult ivy through a cold, wet New England winter.

Louis Raymond's photo

Even so, I'm excited about this. I've wanted an adult ivy ever since I saw them at Wave Hill. And I despaired at what to replace the tidy round heaths with, until I found these and thought how perfect the round shrubby shape and dark evergreen foliage would be against the brick garage wall.

The strip in front of the garage gets warm south sun and has pretty good drainage I think. I hope the spot will provide plenty of wreaths for when poets visit my garden.

Yellow Spring Flowers

There are simply no forsythias blooming this year.  It's April 12, two weeks after the ubiquitous shrubs normally explode into their hot yellow masses everywhere, and there are none to be seen.

When we drove down toward the shore there were plenty in bloom, but none up here. The early April snow and cold temperatures came at exactly the wrong time and killed off this year's flowers.

Not forsythia.
Cornus mas (Corneliancherry)

I didn't think that could happen. Forsythias are indestructible, everlasting and impossible to kill. That's why every homeowner over the past 80 years planted hedges of them in every suburban yard.

They hold soil on highway embankments. They surround public buildings and parking lots. Their screaming yellow color is as reliable as spring mud. They never fail to bloom riotously.

Not this year, it seems.

I do have yellow spring flowers, though. Not forsythias, but yellow blooming dogwood trees. Cornus mas.

These are Corneliancherry trees, not the typical pink or white flowering dogwood that blooms in May.

While Cornus mas is sometimes mistaken for forsythia -- both yellow, both bloom very early in the season -- they really do not look similar.

For one thing, Cornus mas is a tree, not a big arching shrub. For another thing, its flowers are tiny and subtle, and more of a light haze from afar than the riot of bright yellow that forsythia sports.

The Cornus mas tree at the back of the yard flowered well at the very end of March. This one was a large 15 gallon plant that I planted in 2011.

It seems to flower at the bottom and middle, but there are no blooms along the top of the tall upright branches.

The other Corneliancherry tree along the driveway had a sad and tortured history. I planted it in 2010 as a tiny plug, just a few inches high. I always have such hopes for my baby trees and am not daunted by how little they are at first.

But in 2011 it was snapped off to the ground by heavy snow, and was pretty much given up for gone.

Now, five years later, it has regrown from nothing to the same height and size as the 15 gallon dogwood I planted at the back of the yard. In 2016 this is already a real tree. I have problems with it tilting in the wet soil where it is planted, and so it is staked, bound, and trussed.

It isn't as flowery as the other one. The flowers on this one are subtle to the point of not being noticed.

Maybe it just needs a better background -- evergreens or woods behind it. Also, the cultivar I bought was 'Aurea Variegata', with gold margins on the leaves, but I've only ever seen green leaves. I think when it got chopped off it regrew from the original rootstock, so I won't see any variegated foliage.

Given its rebound from dead stick to full tree in just five years I should be generous with my expectations.

Both of these golden yellow dogwoods got a little discouraged when early April cold and snow arrived, but they do still bloom on, although not as brightly now in mid April.

The daffodils that had popped up before our snow and deep freeze are now very sad looking. Still blooming, but their heavy yellow heads droop.

And no forsythias flowering anywhere. That's never happened before.

On The River

We took a boat tour down the lower Connecticut River yesterday afternoon and saw bald eagles and ospreys and loons and cormorants. We passed through three separate eagle nesting territories and saw their giant stick nests high in the trees, all inhabited with nesting pairs.

Not visible in this photo, but clearly seen through binoculars, were the eagle parents, who were sitting high up because there are hatched chicks in the nest. Breeding is well underway this spring.

Through binoculars we could see the eagles dipping their heads and craning necks, feeding their chicks.

Both males and females take turns leaving the nest to soar above, hunting the river for fish to bring back to the nest.

It was a guided tour, so the naturalists on board the boat educated us on eagle behavior, how they court and nest and hunt the river and raise their young. They know these birds as individuals, and they know which eagle dad is an indifferent hunter and sketchy nest sitter, which couple failed to raise their young successfully last year, and which juvenile had yet to figure out that you can't catch a fish by its tail, it has to be heads up.

It was all fascinating, but almost beside the point when an eagle parent took to the sky and all that mattered was how majestic this bird is against blue sky and rolling clouds.

Eagles do not fly, or even soar or glide. They simply own the sky. They are motionless, barely moving their huge wings as they ride the air.

The Connecticut River is a fact of life I've grown up with -- it bisects our tiny state right down the middle and you have to cross it all the time to go anywhere here. What a different perspective to be on it, in a small(ish) boat, seeing the marshes and islands and wild rice and abandoned stone quarries up close.

The highlight, of course was seeing bald eagles.

There were plenty of osprey pairs too, and we learned about them from the naturalists and checked out their stick constructions of nests and watched them soar to hunt too. We spotted all the other birds along the river, and ogled the expensive houses along the river bank and kind of froze to death in the chilly April air on deck.

A great day on the river.

Trees Falling Down

It snowed and it has been well below freezing. and this is entirely unreasonable. Not unexpected -- New England in April can be wildly unpredictable, but even so. The strong April sun is melting some of the snow, but whole areas on the lawn and in the woods are still covered.

From my desk under the kitchen window I see directly out to the back yard and up the hill to the road that passes behind our house. In April it's just a tangle of brown trunks and roadside electric wires, with the only greenery the garlic mustard spreading on the woodland floor. From a distance my eye caught this one trunk all askew.

It's right at the edge of the road. I went out and climbed the hill to investigate.

The trees along the road are all weed trees, and they are tangled up in bittersweet and poison ivy vines. I don't do anything to tend the road edge. This tree seems to have been broken off at the base and the only reason it's not lying on the ground is that it got caught in a snarl of vines on other trees.

I couldn't even see what had happened to the trunk. It was just uprooted.

Just a few feet away to the left, two other trees were uprooted and tilting over in the opposite direction.

Earlier this spring I found one of the trees I had planted years ago, a 'UConn' white pine, uprooted and lying on the ground with barely any root mass left. It was also at the top of the hill, near the road, but not right on the roadside edge.

I know trees fall down in the forest all the time. And this narrow strip of untended, vine-clogged, trashy trees along the road is hardly a healthy forest.

But what is causing so many trees to break off at the root flare and fall down all at once this year?

Heavy Wet Snow

Snow fell last night, damping the sunny enthusiasm of the daffodils. They looked so great this year, popping up all over the back hill and on the berm under the spruces.

With the mild winter behind us and a lot of warm spring days, I had put out the patio furniture on our new patio, hung the hummingbird feeder to attract the early scouts, and even put out the pillows on the chairs in the gravel garden.

Spring clean up and cutting back and transplanting was well underway in the garden. The star magnolia had started to bloom.

Everything today is under a coating of wet sloppy snow. There is more coming, and high winds, and it's all entirely unwelcome.

This

It looks like my old Saab 9-3, which I loved and drove for 9 years.

It looks a little like my Prius, sort of egg shaped but much sleeker. After the Saab, I drove the Prius for another 9 years.

This car is powerful and fast, but uses no gas and has no moving parts to service or maintain other than the tires. It will go 215 miles on a full charge. Where there are Tesla Supercharging stations all across the country the electricity to charge the car is free. No maintenance costs, no fuel costs for as long as you drive this car. The base price is $35,000, or $27,500 after tax credits. I could afford that.

At home you plug it in and would have to pay for the electricity, but we have solar panels, so there's no fuel cost there.

It's the Tesla Model 3 and it won't be available until 2017, probably later, but I can wait.

This car has my name on it.

Snow Fairy Attack

Last summer the herbaceous caryopteris 'Snow Fairy' got too large and bushy for its position so close to the walkway. I had to do some awkward chopping on the left side of the plant to keep it in bounds.

So during spring clean up activities this year I tried to dig it up, with the intention of moving it away from the walk somewhat. Just a foot or two back from the bluestone path and closer to the gravel side of this border strip.

I still wanted to keep it in the same general location. It's a plant that looks full and frothy from a distance, but really needs to be seen close up as you walk by, especially when in flower. The blooms are so tiny, they are best appreciated right where you can see them as you pass by.

And the foliage smells sharply of fresh cut green peppers when you touch it, so the plant needs to be close by where I can rub my fingers over the leaves each time I walk by. Later in summer the foliage gets whitish and frothy looking (like a snow fairy?) but earlier in the summer the leaves are medium green, crisply outlined with white edges, and best seen close up.

In the digging up process I kind of broke it apart. It's an herbaceous form of bluebeard (meaning it dies back to the ground in winter), but the root system is as woody as a shrub, and just as hard to uproot.

I really botched it. I ended up with two large broken-off pieces of bare root structure, so I planted one in the Birch Garden at the back, and one at the rear of Meadow's Edge. If they survive I'll be surprised. If not, nothing lost, I guess.

But I do hope what is still left of the original plant along the walkway makes it. I still want 'Snow Fairy' to get all frothy and billowy in late summer, and I want to touch the white edged leaves and admire the tiny flowers as I pass down the walk each day.

I didn't mean to hack it to pieces so badly. Will it survive my attack?

Archimedes

This is my new rain gauge.

It uses Archimedes' principle of water displacement to show how many inches of rain fell.

The tube rises as the water fills the copper collection cylinder. The blue plastic tube is marked upside down -- one inch at the top, and 5 and half inches at the bottom.

Since the tube magically rises as rain fills the cylinder, the lower rainfall inches are at the top, so you can see an inch of blue rising from the cylinder from inside the house when an inch of rain has blessed your garden.

When there has been no rain, there is no blue tube sticking up -- it's housed inside the copper cylinder.

It needs no mounting on a post or stake. It's a tabletop version, so it will sit on the patio table, or maybe on the top of the stone wall around the patio. How easy is that?

Okay, I'm ready for some rain to test whether Archimedes knew what he was talking about or not.

This is Archimedes. He was Greek, and he lived 250 years before Christ.

I like to think that ancients and ancestors and people who came before me are with me in the garden every day. I need all the help I can get.

I Need a New Rain Gauge

When they tore down our cedar deck, my rain gauge lost its home. It had been attached to one of the posts. It's a giant plastic tube from Lee Valley Tools, and I liked it because it was easy to read from afar, easy to empty, and indestructible.

There is no place to mount it on the railings where the new steps are. The railing posts have large caps, so the collection tube would be sheltered by the cap.

So I set out to mount my rain gauge on a freestanding stake in the ground. Near the patio, visible from inside, as before.

I won't go into the travails of finding a suitable stake, waiting for the drill to charge to screw the tube's mounting frame on, finding Elmer's glue when the stake split, looking for clamps to get it back together. . .

I won't go into the ordeal of sawing off the bottom of the stake to make it just the right height, digging a hole deep enough, looking for the bubble level to make sure the stake stood up straight. . .

I won't go into the details of all the other steps, miscues, repeat steps and complications involved in mounting a plastic rain gauge on a stake in the ground.

But I will say the indestructible rain gauge destructed into four or five pieces when the stake was hammered into the ground and the plastic mounting frame shattered. It is now totally kaput. Fertig. Verfallen. Verlumpt. Verblunget.

Verkackt.

I guess I need to get a new rain gauge.

New Patio & Steps

After all the unseasonable warmth and daffodils coming up and irises popping, it got cold again. It was 25 degrees F on Saturday morning and again on Sunday.

The patio renovation and deck removal is done and it came out great. For the moment ignore the brown plants (it's still March) and the fact that the house siding needs a serious power wash.

Everything is so neutral -- the steps, the pavers, the workbench and shed -- but with greenery around and plants on the patio it will look good. I wish it was a prettier time of year to take pictures.

The steps are composite material, and there is just a narrow landing and steps down, instead of a whole raised deck. It leaves so much more room on the patio below.

I'm not crazy about the shed and potting bench side by side -- it looked better when the potting bench was centered under the large window and the shed was off to the side. But it's a work area, it functions, and when the patio table and chairs and all my nice potted plants are about, it won't be a focal point at all.

The change in color between the old pavers in the distance by the wall and the newly laid paver bricks in the foreground marks where the deck used to be. The difference is slight and the new pavers will fade to a more even tan just as the older ones did in no time.

The best part of this renovation is all the extra space where the new pavers are. Look at all that room now.

Before, the deck came out into the area so much that the patio set was cramped up against the wall. It looked nice enough under the shade of the tree in summer, but there was no room. It was awkward to maneuver around the chairs.

Now, with room to spread out, the table and chairs will be much more comfortable.

There is still room for the compost tumbler off to the side, not visible when sitting on the patio, but it's there in all its green plastic elegance, convenient enough to the back door.

In the patch of dirt in front of the new low wall there is a small Japanese maple sapling. It replaced the beautiful 'Bloodgood' tree that I lost last year. When this little sapling grows it will fill that area at the juncture of the walls and add some shade and enclosure.

This re-do really doesn't look like much. Just some beige steps and a paver patio off the back of the house. Nothing expansive or fancy. But what an improvement!