Woman With Shovel

Each spring I take a critical tour of my garden to assess what needs changing. My trees and shrubs tremble at what they know is coming. The four most fearsome words in my garden are "she's got the shovel."

I have a transplant shovel, a digging spade and a fork. This year Jim bought me an entrenching tool. It's actually a Tactical Military Folding Shovel Pick Entrenching Tool and Survival Spade. The one in the picture online has a bottle opener on it. Mine doesn't, but I've used the tool on a trial basis for the past week and find I can live without a bottle opener.

No tree in my yard is safe now, no shrub in my borders can rest. Here are a few of the things I've managed to accomplish so far:

I filled the open spot in the hedge of bottlebrush buckeyes where one was taken out last fall. I dug root suckers from the established plants and moved them into the open area. As always with most of my transplanting efforts, the procedure involved ripping out roots and probably killing them in the process.

This is the good-sized sucker that I dug from nearby bottlebrush buckeyes in the hedge
and transplanted to the empty spot, along with some other smaller ones. It has buds.

• I dug up the post that the wireless weather station was on. I don't use it any more, so I took it out. I filled the deep hole that remained with a lot of dirt and a tiny sassafras sapling. Of course I did. It's spring and I think I have planted sassafras trees on the back hill every spring I have gardened here. This one will be a lawn tree, not part of my developing grove on the back hill.

• I dug up several of the blueberries that were out in the meadow and put them in spots on the back of the spruce berm where they'll do better and where I can see them.

The half-high blueberries (3 kinds) in the meadow were bright spots in fall, but were lost all summer
in the meadow weeds. They'll do better and be prettier on the berm or at the back of Meadow's Edge garden.

• I transplanted the blue beech sapling (Carpinus caroliniana) that was on the west side of the gravel garden. I moved it to the back of Meadow's Edge garden, but in its new spot it is too near the red maple that dominates that garden. Even I can see it's too crowded there. Tomorrow I'll re-dig it and move it to the  left end of the chevron strip at the back of the yard where it will anchor that strip and get a little afternoon shade, which it likes.

Carpinus caroliniana - blue beech, or ironwood. A slow grower, this little sapling would not
provide shade by the gravel garden for a long, long time

• In the empty spot at the back of Meadow's Edge where I had thought the beech might fit, I'll dig up and replant the remaining blueberries from the meadow. Just as soon as I move the beech tree. There's a domino effect to all this moving about.

• I planted a new Stewartia where the blue beech had been on the west side of the gravel garden. It will give me afternoon shade to sit in (the blue beech was going to take years to do that, since it's such a slow grower.) This Stewartia is 'Skyrocket' and will be tall and vertical for this narrow space. It's a substitute for the gloriously beautiful Stewartia monadelpha I lost a year ago.

The new Stewartia henryae 'Skyrocket' -- already tall and slender and leafing out.
It will quickly provide shade for the gravel garden sitting area.

More moves are planned. More transplanting needs to occur. I have more than one shovel in my arsenal and I plan to use them all.

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.