A Curious Occurrence

Every year I look forward to seeing the bright Christmas-red berries on the winterberry hollies. They don't show up against the brown of late fall. They need a snowfall for background, and then they just sparkle against the white.

The deer or the birds strip the berries by the end of December, so it has to be an early snowfall, timed just right for the holidays, to enjoy the red berries at their best.

Winterberry holly (Ilex verticillata) doesn't have much to recommend it otherwise. It's a medium green, nondescript rangy shrub with small leaves and insignificant flowers during the season. It doesn't look like anything, but it's a good filler in the border.

It's the berries that make it worth growing, even if they only show up against snow, and even if they only last a week or two before being eaten up.

I have three winterberry shrubs in this back garden, but curiously, only one has berries this year. Every other year they all put out fruits at the same time, and then were all stripped at the same time.

The two twiggy stick-like shrubs above are right next to the third one that has red berries. These two never fruited at all this fall -- not a single berry appeared.

Could it have been the severely dry summer? I lost several plants in this specific area of the garden, including a mature hemlock and a bunch of epimediums that should have tolerated dry conditions better. Did these two hollies succumb, while the third one got enough moisture being down a slight slope from the other two?

Here's the lone red-berried holly from the other side, looking back at the house.

It's an odd occurrence. The other two hollies were leafy all summer, although stressed looking from the drought. Did they simply not set fruit to conserve scarce resources -- and if so, will they leaf out and thrive again next season?

Or did they die?

No Gardening Today

I spent yesterday inside making, baking and decorating Christmas cookies. It is physically way harder than working outside digging, hauling or toting. My back hurts.

These are sugar cookies with anise extract added. Lots of anise -- the recipe calls for a quarter teaspoon and I put a full teaspoon in and a little more. By a little more, I mean three teaspoons. Plus I put anise extract in the icing too.

Not everyone likes the taste or aroma of anise, but my family loves these cookies and refuses to celebrate the birth of our savior without a plate of these in front of them.

I'll mail tins of them out west with the Christmas gifts, and keep enough here too.

It amazes me how strenuous it is to be standing and bending in the kitchen for hours. I'm not this sore when I come in from digging out an entrenched rootball or hacking down bittersweet vines or transplanting large trees.

The kitchen is sticky, my fingers are stained green from colored sugar, and my body aches. The dishwasher died last week and the new one hasn't arrived, so all the bulky tins and trays and crusty bowls have to be washed by hand.

But the house smells so good.

Abscission

I learned so much about the biological workings of large plants in this book by Peter Wohlleben The Hidden Life of Trees.

He makes gleeful, joyous observations about how trees communicate and how they sense their environment and how they even remember and maybe even feel.

Some of it is speculation, a lot is yet to be proven, but much of it is established science that he writes about in a way that a gardener like me can enjoy.

Like the process of abscission -- he tells us that when trees get ready to drop their leaves for winter, they first have to create two layers of cells in between the leaf and the stem.

A chemical process reacts to shorter days (think about this, a tree has to "tell time" by reacting to how long the light is and "remember" that yesterday was shorter than a week ago and somehow store that information chemically in its being. . .  this boggles. . . )

When the tree tells what time it is and remembers how long each day has been, and gets ready to shed leaves, or abscise them, it forms a layer of cells with weak walls. Then it forms a layer of bigger expanding cells near the stem. When the big cells expand they break the weak cells open and the leaf comes off.

It takes time to grow these cells in fall. If an early frost freezes the leaf before the cell layers have grown, the tree can't get rid of its leaves. It's too late to grow the expanding cell layer and the weak walled cells.

Japanese maples often get caught without enough time. They freeze here before they can abscise, and then the brown dead leaves end up hanging on the tree all winter. There is no expansion layer to push the weak layer off.

I've despaired about that with my Japanese maples in some winters.

Oaks and young beeches choose not to abscise their leaves on purpose. They use a whole other strategy for getting through winter.

But the trees that do drop go through a specific, timed process to make that happen.

And I've been thinking about that process a lot lately. If Wohlleben can write about the human-like lives of trees, is it a stretch to think about the botanical-like parts in us?

Is it stretch to realize I am just now growing cells, creating separation layers that will allow me in a year or two to abscise my garden and all that I have grown in it?

We will move in the future and I will leave this garden. We are planning and getting ready, and I feel myself now building emotional distance -- a layer that will let me be rid of what has been so important to me when I say goodbye to my garden and move west some day.

I'm not ready yet. It's taking some time. I have to go through a process of growing those layers first, but I can feel it just as surely as the trees outside my window grew their own cells of separation for winter.

Wreaths and Sleds

December begins in Wyoming with putting up wreaths.

And in Connecticut too, where the weather is warm and wet, kind of unseasonal.

And this year, in addition to the wreaths I added some old sleds for decorations too. One is by the front door and one against the brick garage wall.

I found these two antique sleds and a 6 foot tobboggan in our basement.

I've been cleaning out our distressingly cluttered basement for weeks. Since one son got married and the other bought a house this year, I've been going through the junk down there and finding things to send to them to keep now. I've mailed out keepsakes and boxes, and then had the overwhelming task of sorting through what remained -- immense piles of junk, theirs and ours, to throw out.

Down below a bunch of furniture and boxes and linens and books and crap were these two sleds. I didn't even know we had them. I'll have to do some research to see if they are of any value as antiques at this point. Both were Jim's childhood toys, well used more than fifty years ago.

And well hidden with a lot of other stuff that got stowed in basements of different houses over different decades and moved, moved again, and forgotten.

It's amazing what showed up when I started going through long sealed boxes and jumbled piles. A Keurig machine we never used. Payroll stubs from my father's first job at Allis Chalmers in the 1930s (why did I even have those?). A croquet set.

The sleeping bag I froze in on the top of Mt. Washington in 1967 (it's mildewed). Tax returns from 1993. A Soviet newspaper in Russian from 1969 (I could still read the headlines, but the story lost me). Ski maps from an area that closed thirty years ago. Prodigious snarls of Christmas tree lights in giant living tangles. Phone jacks.

So. Much. Random. Stuff.

If only I knew where my old doll Mary was. I did not find her.

Holiday Rain

We got almost three inches of rain yesterday -- well, exactly 2.75 in my rain gauge. And more than an inch is expected again today.

In darkest November, wet days are particularly dreary. But mahogany brown and olive green tones of a sweetbay magnolia outside the bedroom window suit the gloom beautifully, and drip with sparkling jewels of raindrops.

This is the rain we should have gotten in summer when it was so desperately needed. It's good now -- the trees and shrubs need it going into dormancy for winter, and so in this season of thanksgiving I am grateful.

But it would have been really, really appreciated on the 4th of July.

Leaf Blowers

I have been annoyed for a long time at how noisy it is to live in the suburbs. In the nicest seasons, in summer and fall, lawn machines and leaf blowers are a constant, loud, and annoying irritant all around our neighborhood, our own yard included.

This article titled "The Case Against Leaf Blowers" sums it up well.

Although bans on gas leaf blowers have been enacted in some places, the noise of landscaping machines is with us in most suburbs. Just as it is here. We keep a grass lawn and we mow every week all summer and fall.

We use a leaf blower in autumn, although it is electric and so less polluting but just as noisy and irritating.

All our neighbors have landscapers who mow and use leaf blowers too.

You can't escape the noise and I don't think we are going to realistically get to a point where power tools are completely banned across the country.

The article agrees, summing it up: "ours is a nation too vast to be groomed by hand tools."

At our ages, we could not continue to live here in this green, leafy suburb if we had to use a reel mower and rake by hand. No landscaping company has the manpower or could afford to provide hand maintenance for hire.

But eliminating yard maintenance and moving to a condo in the suburbs simply means the hired help does the maintenance of common lawns and cleans up the walkways and leaf drop -- that doesn't solve the noise problem. It merely means we aren't doing the leaf blowing, a maintenance company is getting paid to do it for the condo owners.

So . . . move to a city? No lawns, little greenery, but blessed relief from leaf blowers?

People move out of cities to escape the noise and pollution of urban life, then find the open spaces and green refuges have their own irritants of noise and pollution. I like how the article ends, with this observation:

"One might wonder why we’ve chosen to make our homes in places that cannot be maintained without annoying each other so flagrantly. Perhaps this goes to the troubled heart of the suburban promise: These are environments conceived as peaceful respites from human disorder, places predicated on the assumption that other people are fundamentally irritants. And when we move there, we discover just how true that can be."

The answer of course, is to eliminate  suburban lawns entirely and let fallen leaves replenish the soil as they decay, as nature does in the forest.

But the suburb is not a forest, and can't be. Alternatives to lawns or pseudo wild environments have their own issues . . .  and yes, hefty and annoying irritants.

Maybe those irritants are more aesthetic issues or maintenance conflicts rather than the Gaah, make it stop torture of roaring leaf blowers.

I'm not ready to rip out our lawn or let the forest take over. I do think I'd like to live somewhere quieter, though. The noisy city has appeal.

November Thanks

Happy Thanksgiving all . . .

Cold Squall

A cold rain squall roared through last night and stripped the red maple's leaves off.

The day before it came through was mild and nice and we sat on the glider in the gravel garden, admiring how stunning the maple's color was. Today is cold and raw and wet and the color is all on the lawn.

We cut back the ornamental grasses while it was warm and pleasant yesterday. I wanted to cut back the tired 'Sheffield Pink' mums, but when I got close enough to start in on them with the hedge trimmer, I saw how many bees were still swarming the spent blossoms. There's not much for them to feed on right now, so I left the mums alone, lying on the ground and looking awful, but entertaining the bees.

Even after last night's squall, the second of our two red maples still has a lot of its leaves. They'll come down soon too. It won't take much now.

We bought three turkeys plus fixings this weekend -- one for us and two to donate. Ours is in the refrigerator thawing. With the cold wind, dropped leaves, early dark evenings, and traditional foods in the pantry, it feels like Thanksgiving is close upon us.

Timing

Fall clean up is all about timing. Although the photos in this post are from about a week ago, the garden still looks good. There are still warm enough days to be outside in it, and I don't want to start cutting back perennials or grasses. I'm not ready to look at empty areas yet.

The grasses are at their best now, but since the shot above, the purple asters have gone by and that little bitty stick of a dwarf ginkgo under the windows has dropped all its yellow leaves. Who knew the climbing hydrangea had golden fall color -- I haven't seen that before.

Pink 'Sheffield' mums are still blooming, but they have all laid down in the dirt to rest. Dried seedheads on many plants are standing upright, and many shrubs, like fothergilla and blueberries are still brilliant red.

So things still look good enough. But if I wait too far into November it gets cold, and then cutting back and tidying up is a pain.

So I started cleaning up. I cut back the clematis by the patio, and the anemone, all the zapped daylily foliage, and all the catmint, which was still full and made a nice blue-green cool contrast with the bright red 'Gro-Low' fragrant sumac nearby.

I hated to cut that back, or any of the ornamental grasses, while they still look good. But. . . timing. If not now, on a comfortable day, when?

I've waited until December in the past, and that's a mistake. Too cold, or sometimes ice or snow arrives early and makes the chore impossible.

I've left things all the way until spring in the past too. There is no such thing as "winter interest" for perennials in this climate, but still, I have left everything standing some years. But that's worse. When spring comes the ground is so cold and wet and clean up chores are a miserable bit of work then.

So, on a cool but nice day in mid November, I started getting things tidied up. I emptied containers on the patio too -- some of them still looked good despite recent freezing nights, but it's time.

There's still more to do. I left the grasses for another day, and there are still things that need to be trimmed. The key is to time it just perfectly to finish it all up before winter sets in.

Blackhaws

Blackhaws are hanging on viburnum branches in big navy blue clusters right now.

This Viburnum prunifolium in the center of the back yard had a tough season. I had become quite proud of how I trained this thickety shrub into a little multi-stemmed tree. It had twisted trunks that branched low, and it looked quite graceful.

But long before the dry summer -- last year in fact -- the back half died off. Mike and Chris from Bartlett both looked at it and could not figure out the problem. By the middle of this summer it was clear the dead half had to be cut down.

What remains is half a tree, canted to the side, bare in back and full only in front. It's sparsely leaved, oddly shaped and fall color was nothing much. I'm this close to taking the whole thing out.

Then it went and put out these striking dark blue berries and I'm wavering. I don't even remember the tree flowering much this spring, but it must have. There are fruits.

So I'll let it continue to grow and see what it does next spring. There is always the hope that a malformed, severely pruned tree will fill in the empty spots over the years as sun hits the now open branches.

Especially such a stiffly branched plant that wants to sucker like blackhaw viburnum does. It has oddly angled branches when full and healthy, and my hope is that those awkward branches will angle out to fill the empty areas in back.

Anyway, I like the blue black haws.