New England 'Habitat Gardening' Blog
About Me
I am Ellen Sousa, a garden coach, author and teacher living on a small central MA horse farm landscaped as a natural habitat for birds, pollinators and other wildlife. To contact me, please visit the Turkey Hill Brook Farm web site!
My New Book on Sale!
Follow Me
Subscribe by Feed
Member of:
No Farms, No Food!
Networked Blogs
Weather in Wire Village
New England Natural Habitat Gardening
Norcross Sanctuary - Hidden Jewel of Monson, MA
The small south-central Massachusetts town of Monson (population 3,800) is home to a nature lover's dreamland, Norcross Wildlife Sanctuary. Free and open to the public - Norcross has over 1000 acres of fields and trails, beautiful vistas and an education center that offers free classes, tours and lectures throughout the year.
I'll be doing a free talk on Pollinator-friendly Landscaping at Norcross Wildlife Sanctuary on Saturday, February 23rd at 1.30pm. Reservations are required because space is limited - please call 413-267-9654 or email Leslie Duthie to reserve a seat.
It's worth coming back to Norcross during the warm season though. Norcross covers an area of over 1000 acres, containing a variety of different natural habitats found across New England, including wet and dry meadows, ponds and streams, upland and wet woods, plus cultivated culinary, herb and rose gardens near the visitors' center. If you're looking for plant combination ideas and inspiration for your own garden conditions, a trip to Norcross is definitely worth the drive!
This white-flowering Mountain mint (Pycnanthemum tenuifolium) grows in a wet meadow with the grass-like wetland sedge (Carex). This calming, pollinator-friendly combination is easy to replicate in a small area with moist to wet soil and sun:
Norcross is home to the biggest patch of black bugbane (Actaea racemosa) that I've ever seen. I think this area looks like a spooky wood when the cohosh is blooming:
A large old millpond on the property is being encouraged back into native shoreline plant communities. In summer, you can see the beautiful blooms of Plymouth gentian (Sabatia kennedyana), a plant native to freshwater ponds near the coast -- now very rare in the wild due to development on New England's coastline.
In a small sandy garden near the visitors' center is a stand of spotted beebalm aka horsemint (Monarda punctata), with its interesting pink/yellow stacked blooms:
I long to grow this plant for its impressive blooms, but it prefers sandy soil, which we do not have here on our farm. If I can find seeds for it, I may try growing it on a sunny hillside where drainage is good, but I don't have high hopes that it will ever look this good.
Because Norcross's founder established it in 1939 as a wildlife and plant sanctuary, no hunting is allowed at Norcross, which puts the sanctuary staff in the awkward position of trying to try to protect native understory plants from being grazed out of existence from the abundant population of white-tailed deer.
Unfortunately, deer fencing in certain wooded areas has been the only solution to allow native "deer candy" such as trilliums, lilies, Canada mayflower and most woody native shrubs to flourish. In the rest of the sanctuary, deer have grazed most of the native understory layer out of existence, and careful management is needed by sanctuary staff to ensure that these areas don't fill with invasive non-natives such as barberry, burning bush and Asiatic bittersweet.
Come visit the sanctuary, walk the trails, attend a free class or even take a free van tour of the sanctuary (pre-booking required). Afterwards, visit the town of Monson and stop for lunch. They'll appreciate the business. Monson was hit very hard during the Tornado that blew a terrifying path across southern MA on June 1st, 2011. The photo below was taken over a year after the tornado hit -- all the houses and trees on this hillside were destroyed. The homes have now been rebuilt, but it will be many years until the woods will fill in again.
Use Your Weeds! Violets as Groundcover
It's funny how people tend to hate violets so much..maybe because it creeps into lawns? I know that violets can be voracious growers in some soils, but if violets grow in your yard, instead of scorning it as an unwanted weed, why not find a use for it? It's a native plant, pretty in bloom and beneficial to wildlife (it's the sole host plant for fritillary butterfly caterpillars), so why not encourage it to grow in a spot where you need something low-maintenance to cover the ground?Common blue marsh violets (Viola cucullata) love the moist soil on parts of our farm and in places, they grow to epic size.
So....I use its weedy nature to my advantage...I transplanted clumps to use as a no-fuss edging plant for my raised vegetable beds:
They bloom early in the year before the veggies are planted, but grow so quickly that by mid summer, as you can see, they cover the wooden edges completely:
Another useful spot I found for blue violets is on the very edge of our horse paddock, just above the pond - I can't take credit for this idea because nature planted the violets on her own, but it makes a perfect "filter" buffer to intercept horse waste (nutrients from manure and urine) and prevent it from leaching into the pond. I'm sure I couldn't cultivate anything here and have it survive so a violet "border" is perfect - thanks mother nature!
Later in the summer, the violets start to extend well into the gravel pathway but once a season we hack them back to keep the path open. I love when problems solve themselves with very little effort from me! That's my kind of gardening..
Above: Common blue marsh violets mingle beautifully with other spring bloomers in moist soil near our pond. Whatever your soil type, there's a type of native violet that probably thrives in your garden...
Vegetable Gardening the Natural Way
Do you grow vegetables at home? If so, I'm sure you don't welcome wildlife into your veggie patches. Rabbits, groundhogs, deer, slugs, you name it, there's some animal just waiting to devour your plantings and destroy all your hard work. Fencing (or a resident dog on duty 24/7) is usually the only way to keep the four-footed animals out, but what about the tomato hornworms, the slugs and the beetles that can't be kept out with fencing?
In and around your veggie gardens, plant a variety of flowering annuals, perennials, shrubs, vines and trees to attract nectar-and-pollen seeking pollinators and predatorial insects such as hover/syrphid flies, soldier beetles, lady beetles, parasitic wasps and flies, and many, many more. Your aim is to keep the area buzzing with a variety of beneficial insect activity right through the seasons.
Above: The rice-like cocoons on this tomato hornworm caterpillar are from a braconid wasp that will eventually consume the caterpillar. If you see a caterpillar like this, don't kill it! You want the wasp to complete its life cycle and continue controlling hornworms every year.
Above: The kitchen gardens at circa 1730 Salem Cross Inn in West Brookfield, MA. Colonial farmers knew that food gardens interplanted with lots flowering plants helped keep pests under control.
Walk into any hardware or big-box store and you can take home a variety of cheap but toxic concoctions that will kill upon contact. Although this might stop some of the pests for the moment, spraying ultimately does more harm than good. Crop pests are well-adapted to the various poisons farmers have used for decades, and they'll usually stage a quick comeback. Not to mention, do you really want to use increasingly complicated chemical compounds -- mostly untested for long-term health impacts and their interactions with other common chemicals -- on the food that you eat?
Above: If you spray for pests, you're also killing the natural predators of the pest, such as this hoverfly (aka syrphid fly), a common non-biting fly that visits flowers for nectar - their larvae eat large numbers of our garden pests.So how can you grow food without resorting to harmful chemicals? It requires a bit more thought than just just spraying something from a bottle, but it's not complicated. Basically, you enlist the help of the natural world...and tap into its natural checks and balances.
Above: Vegetable gardens at Tower Hill Botanic Garden - colorful, whimsical, functional, and "friendly" to the "good bugs" that eat garden pests.When dealing with pests, think prevention, not cure. Here are a few Golden Rules:
Provide habitat for beneficial insects and birds who are natural predators of your garden pests. Give them what they need, and they'll help keep pest populations under control.
Confound pests by companion planting your vegetables with plants with strong scent or other characteristics that confuse or repel pests, and rotate crop plants from year to year to stay one step ahead of pests.
Grow your plants in healthy, living soil that is rich in beneficial soil organisms - healthy soil means healthy plants that can withstand a bit of pest damage. Avoid synthetic chemical "power" fertilizers that kill soil life - these actually encourage the sappy, weak leaf growth that attracts pests.
In and around your veggie gardens, plant a variety of flowering annuals, perennials, shrubs, vines and trees to attract nectar-and-pollen seeking pollinators and predatorial insects such as hover/syrphid flies, soldier beetles, lady beetles, parasitic wasps and flies, and many, many more. Your aim is to keep the area buzzing with a variety of beneficial insect activity right through the seasons.
Above: Ring your beds with single-flowering marigolds (Tagetes spp). The bright, nectar-rich blooms attract beneficial insects right until first frost. Plus, the strongly-scented foliage seems to repel (or confuse) many pests, and they are less likely to find your plants.The nectar found in flowering plants is what keeps those insects flying - it's the fuel that keeps them patrolling your garden for pests, so make sure there's something blooming all through the seasons to keep them fed. Yes, some flies are pests and certain wasps do sting, but most of the bugs flying out there are beneficial - preying on other insects, pollinating plants, and as a food source for other wildlife.
Check out this braconid wasp, which is in the process of laying its eggs inside a gypsy moth caterpillar - which means this caterpillar is doomed:
Photo by Scott Bauer/USDA Agricultural Resource Service (Courtesy of bugwood.org)You don't have to worry about these wasps hurting you - they don't have a hive to defend and they don't sting! If you grow tomatoes, you'll want to attract another type of braconid wasp that uses tomato hornworm caterpillars as its host:
If you are reading this because you have problems with hornworms skeletonizing your tomatoes, resolve to start adding plants for parasitic wasps for next year's tomato crop. They'll do a fine job keeping the hornworms under control for you.
Above: Rudbeckia and great blue lobelia bloom their heads off in the rich soil next to our veggie beds - at the same time attracting lots of parasitic wasps and flies who prey on garden pests.
Other common predatorial bugs that you want to attract to your habitat include assassin bugs, ambush bugs and certain types of stink bug, who feed on insect eggs, caterpillars and other creatures that can harm plants. You'll find all of these in and among flowering nectar plants, weeds and wherever bugs hang out.
A garden buzzing with insect life also brings in the "big guns" of bug control, including birds, dragonflies, bats, amphibians (toads & frogs) and other wildlife whose diet consists largely of flying insects and/or insect eggs, caterpillars and grubs. Healthy local populations of these predators will cut WAY down on your pests:
Above: Nesting boxes for birds and other winged wildlife at Garden in the Woods, Framingham MA. Nesting birds can feed their hatchlings hundreds of caterpillars every day, so provide them with nesting opportunities near your gardens.Include some locally native plants in your landscaping- these are best for attracting nesting birds because they tend to support the most diversity in herbivorous insects -- in other words, plenty of caterpillars to feed hungry baby birds! Even if you don't like the taste of cilantro, parsley, fennel or dill, always try grow lots of these culinary herb plants - they are cheap and easy to grow from seed, and make good companions for tomatoes. Allow some plants to flower - their clusters of numerous tiny flowers (called umbels) contain individual portions of sweet nectar for small beneficial insects. These fellow members of the carrot family of plants are also a host for the caterpillars of the beautiful black swallowtail butterfly:
Don't kill these caterpillars! They turn into beautiful butterflies. Give them their own patch of dill or parsley to eat, or relocate them to queen anne's lace or wild carrot plants.
The tiny white flowers of cilantro attract parasitic wasps and many other beneficials:Leave some areas of bare ground in the vicinity of your vegetable beds to provide nesting opportunities for squash bees (important pollinators of squash and cucumbers) and other native bees that excavate tiny tunnels in the ground to build their nests:
Above: Not ant hills, but nesting sites under construction by a metallic-green digger bee. Photo by Beatriz Moisset.
Hang wooden blocks for wood-nesting bees and beneficial insects near your gardens. Many native bees and insect predators use tunnels in old wood or tubular plant stems as a snug winter home for their offspring:
Above: Nesting block for bees and other insects - showing telltale signs of use by mason bees, grass-carrying wasps and other beneficial insects.
Above: Bumble bees are crucial pollinators for many food plants such as tomatoes and blueberries. Although they do raise a communal hive, they are very gentle and won't sting unless physically threatened. Give them lots of nectar plants (right through the season) and a place to nest near your gardens.Problems with slugs? Slugs LOVE the moist conditions of well-mulched, well-watered vegetable gardens and can decimate plants in just a few nights of feeding. Bring in the toads - who hunt the soil at night for slugs, grubs and worms - by giving them a cool, damp place to spend their days:
Give slug-gobbling toads a "toad abode"Feed the soil, not the plants! In other words, provide habitat for the soil food web, or the (mostly micro-biotic) wildlife that lives in the soil. Each year, amend your vegetable beds with compost, farm-animal manure, leaf mold, seaweed or fish-based fertilizer - whatever you can get your hands on locally:
Pests tend to attack stressed plants. Encourage healthy plants by amending your soil with good quality compost (above) and mulch well with organic materials to help retain soil moisture and build soil tilth.
Try to rotate your crops each year to stay ahead of pests. Many pests lay their eggs in and around their host plants - in the spring, when pests emerge, they won't have such an easy time finding their favorite plants if they are growing elsewhere, and are more likely to be eaten by a predator if they have to travel in search of food. Another way of doing this (assuming you have the room) is to scatter a crop around your property instead of a single location or bed. If a pest infests one area, they may not reach them all.
Below: These raised veggie beds on our small Massachusetts farm may look a tad weedy, but the surrounding plants attract so many beneficial insects and bird predators that pest damage is minimal.
I hope this gives you some ideas of how to keep your vegetable gardens healthier for you, your children and pets, and the planet! Gardening with and for wildlife may mean your gardens might look a little messier than the "not a petal out of place, not a weed to be found" landscaping tradition, but free, natural pest control and the amazing array of predators and prey that will take up residence in your backyard? I hope you will agree, those are worth taking up a new beautiful wildlife gardening aesthetic...
NOTE: This is a reprint of my 24/Sep/2012 article "Can Vegetable Gardens be Wildlife-friendly" from Beautiful Wildlife Garden.
Japanese Beetles, Chickens and the Habitat Farm
Here on our small farm, we love our small flock of chickens - their delicious and healthy eggs, their comical antics and their expert bug control are all reasons why we'll always keep a few chickens around. One additional bonus? Chickens LOVE to eat Japanese beetles!!!
Anybody who gardens in New England is almost definitely familiar with the damage that Japanese beetles can do to plant foliage and lawns. Their grubs (juvenile form) eat plant roots and wreak havoc on the shallow roots of chemically-treated lawns.
The adult beetles cause extensive damage to foliage when they congregate in throngs during July and August, mating and feeding on plants.
The frustration for gardeners and landscapers is that Japanese beetles are not simple to control. Because they are an imported pest, very little local wildlife are adapted to use them as a food source and they have few natural enemies to keep their numbers in check. Even if you spray all the grubs and beetles dead with a toxic concoction, very soon they will be back, usually arrived from neighbors' properties. It's not worth it, especially because the poisons also kill the beneficial insects that you want to encourage.
The encouraging news is that natural predators of Japanese beetles introduced by biologists do appear to be having an impact on their populations. Parasitic wasps and microscopic nematodes attack beetle grubs during the time they spend in the soil. A parasitic (tachinid) fly imported from Japan by biologists targets the adult beetle and does appear to be having an impact on breeding populations. I don't think we'll ever see Japanese beetles disappear completely from our landscape, but from these natural controls I do notice fewer beetles each year in the gardens of central Massachusetts.
In the picture below, the Japanese beetle on the left has a white dot on its thorax (behind its head), which is the egg of the parasitic tachinid fly. Many beetles will "wear" multiple dots. These eggs hatch into larvae that burrow into the beetle and consume its tissue from within, eventually killing the beetle within 5-6 days. Don't kill these beetles! You want the eggs to hatch and the fly to complete its life cycle to continue its work on beetle populations.
The beetle on the right has no spots on its thorax - but does have rows of 10-12 white spots on both its sides - these are NOT the eggs of the parasitic fly.
So what can you do if a favorite plant is swarming with adult beetles? The least-impact method of controlling adult Japanese beetles is manual removal. In the morning when the beetles are lethargic, sweep them (with your fingers or a small brush) right off the foliage of infested plants into a jar of water. They will thrash around in the water but can't fly away. You can then flush them down a toilet or, if you have a chicken coop, throw them into the coop! Your chickens will go crazy for them! Because adult beetles lay eggs in the soil where they mate and feed, the more beetles you can remove from your property during their mating stage, the fewer grubs that will hatch out into beetles next year.
My hens Millicent and Betty follow me around during my "beetle sweeps" so they can gobble the beetles right from my collection jars:
As for grubs (the juvenile form of the Japanese beetle that eat grass roots), avoid at all costs the chemical grub control based upon Imidicloprid (sold in the US by the trade name Merit) a chemical that's been banned in several European countries due to links between its use and the collapse of honeybee populations (aka Colony Collapse Disorder). If parts of your lawn are dying and you suspect grub damage, your lawn is under stress and chemical treatments will not fix the problem. You can try applying beneficial nematodes (microscopic wireworms) to attack the grubs in the short term, but longer term, if you convert to an organically-maintained lawn where grass roots can grow deep into the soil, the impact of the grubs will decline. And, supply suitable habitat for ground-feeding birds and the parasitic insects, and let them do their thing. It's healthier for your lawn, your family, the bees and the planet.
To support those tiny parastic flies and wasps, make sure you have lots of nectar plants blooming to supply the sugary substance these beneficials need to fuel their flight. Without nectar when they need it, they won't stick around. Pictured below are New England native plants boneset, Joe Pye weed and goldenrod blooming in late summer:
Mulch - Use What You've Got!
If you grow vegetable gardens, you probably know that mulching around plants is essential - not only does a thick layer of mulch control weed growth in your beds, but it shades the soil, keeping it cooler and helping retain soil moisture during the dry spells of summer.
You don't have to spend a fortune on bagged mulch, though. Look around. You might have materials that can double as mulch and save you money. Cut sheets of cardboard into long strips and lay them between rows of vegetables to cover the soil. Stockpile your dry fall leaves, and run them through a chipper or shredder to use as mulch for next year's gardens. If you bag your lawn clippings during mowing, use a few inches of clippings as a nutritious garden mulch that will also feed the soil as it breaks down. Important: NEVER use grass clippings from lawns that have been treated with Weed & Feed or other pesticides! You don't want those chemicals in your food.
Get creative! Do you have anything growing that you could sacrifice for mulch? One plant growing in abundance here on our farm is hay-scented fern (Dennstaedtia punctilobula). This aggressive native fern takes over my planting beds, so I occasionally pull up armloads of the stems to keep the ferns from invading nearby garden areas.
Hay-scented fern makes an excellent natural-looking mulch!
You can bundle small amounts of fern foliage together and fit them between rows in your garden. The green fronds dry quickly and unlike other weed plants, ferns won't bring scads of unwanted seeds into your beds.
Below: the green fronds dry out and turn beige after a few days.
It's easy to fold the stems into angles to neatly fit around each plant. Always keep mulch a few inches away from plant stems to prevent stem rot and the introduction of pathogens.
Another great "free" mulch is the trimmings from ornamental grasses when you cut them down to the ground in early spring. Dried stems and leaves make great mulch for strawberry plants or potatoes. I've heard of gardeners who grow large grasses just for the sheer bio-mass they produce, which can be used to feed compost piles too.
In the woods of New England, hay-scented fern colonizes areas of moist shade, such as this slope at our farm. There was once a garden here, but the fern has taken over completely:
Below: Hay-scented fern growing out of our front steps. Yep - this is one of our most tenacious weeds...
Do you have weeds that can play double-duty as garden mulch? I've been known to use the enormous leaves of burdock leaves as a temporary mulch around newly planted veggie seedlings to shade the soil. Be careful what you choose though - don't pull up weeds that have gone to seed, and don't introduce roots from weeds that spread through underground rhizomes (milkweed, some goldenrods) - they may root in your garden.
Groundcovers for Moist Shade
I've heard a lot of questions lately about substitutes for the 'old standby' shady groundcover plants Japanese Pachysandra (Pachysandra terminalis) and Periwinkle (Vinca minor). Both of these imports have been used for generations for the shady blanket effect under trees, but for nature-friendly gardeners who want to increase biodiversity in their yards, these plants offer very little value to birds, beneficial insects and soil health. Not to mention, but they can also become invasive in moist woods where they spread out of control - read about my ongoing battle with Japanese Pachysandra.
Here are some suggestions for native groundcover plants for New England to replace the invasives:
Running Foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia) - this is my all-time favorite native New England groundcover. In early May, it's covered with a sea of soft white gasp-inducing blooms:
The rest of the year, its foliage forms a nice weed-suppressing mat - as long as it's grown in moist, rich woodland-type soil. An area under deciduous trees where leaves and duff are allowed to build up in the soil is ideal.
Wild Ginger (Asarum canadense) is an essential component of New England native plant gardens as green "filler" to weave in and around larger plants - forming a living mulch that keeps the soil cool and prevents weed formation. Its dull-red flowers form in early spring - at ground-level to cater to ground-dwelling pollinating insects.
Shown below at the right of the photo, the heart-shaped leaves of wild ginger mingle beautifully with ferns and other woodland plants - remaining green and lush after the spring ephemerals are long gone:
Another native plant that will quickly cover a moist shady area is Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum), shown here growing under oak trees at Garden in the Woods in Framingham MA:
Mayapple will dominate surrounding plants, so give it an area all its own where it won't dwarf its neighbors.
Bunchberry or Creeping Dogwood (Cornus canadensis) is a native woodland plant with late-spring flowers that look like small dogwood blossoms:
Bunchberry is late to fully form its foliage in the springtime, so it's not as effective at suppressing weeds at Pachysandra, but if grown in a cool, moist soil, it will happily spreads into large patches that can be occasionally mowed to keep other weeds at bay.
Last but not least, did you know there is a Pachysandra native to the eastern US? Allegheny Spurge (Pachysandra procumbens) grows wild in rich woods from West Virginia and Kentucky south to Louisiana and Florida, but it is quite hardy in most of New England (to zone 4). It's semi-evergreen (unlike its evergreen Asian cousin Japanese Pachysandra) with spring flowers that smell like cinnamon:
In my experience, Allegheny Spurge needs consistent moisture in its first few years, but becomes quite drought-tolerant once established. It's most happy with some summer shade in New England, and spreads nicely from clumps rather than the aggressive underground runners of the Asian variety which invade moist woods here in Massachusetts.
Native wildlife gardening purists might disagree with using southern native in the northeast where it's not traditionally native, but as average temperatures continue to rise in the coming decades, we may find that growing southern species here in New England will support their co-adapted pollinators and other specialized insects as they migrate north in an effort to survive. As we struggle to maintain biodiversity in an era of mass species extinctions, these kinds of assisted migrations may become essential...
NWF and ScottsMiracle-Gro? No!
I interrupt the scheduled.... um - recent silence - of my blog to put up a quick rant. As many of you know, many years ago we certified our small farm as a National Wildlife Federation Backyard Habitat (certified habitat #71074) as a way to raise awareness of the ways we can all (homeowners, farmers, patio gardeners, and foresters) help birds and other at-risk wildlife in our backyards. I've always been proud to support the NWF for their efforts to reconnect people with nature and to help gardeners support wildlife in backyards. However, I heard something yesterday that was very disappointing... the NWF has formed a partnership with the ScottsMiracle-Gro company.
Huh? Did I miss something? Isn't "Eliminate Chemical Pesticides" and "Eliminate Chemical Fertilizers" in the NWF's very own manual for certifying a backyard as a habitat? Where exactly do ScottsMiracle-Gro products, including Roundup (a weedkiller linked to fetal cell malfunction and several cancers in people and animals), and the chemical lawn fertilizers which destroy soil life and the health of our lakes and ponds, fit into a mission of "inspiring Americans to protect wildlife for our children's future"? No matter which way they are spinning this, the NWF has sold out....
Let the NWF know that they are betraying their own values by accepting money from the corporation that profits the most from selling the chemicals that are poisoning our farmlands, our water supplies, and our own health! Carole Brown's Ecosystem Gardening blog suggests some ways to contact NWF to express your disapproval:
Call NWF: 1-800-822-9919
Post your thoughts on NWF's Facebook page (make sure you click the tab that says "Everyone" under the photo bar)
Leave a comment on their website
Tweet your message to NWF on Twitter, including @NWF in your message
Thank you for listening!
When Life Gives You Storm Damage, Make Habitat!
Dear readers, if I have not been writing much lately, here is just one of the reasons why:
The freak Halloween nor'easter that hit New England on October 29th dumped 18" of wet snow on our farm, wiped out our power for nearly a week, and caused extensive damage across the region. We will be cleaning up from this for many months...
We lost several trees that we were very fond of, including the beautiful red maple above that was a focal point of our small farm. Here's the tree in happier times:
Interestingly, this particular red maple was some kind of Acer rubrum cultivar, selected by plant breeders more for its beautiful glowing fall color than its ability to withstand freakish New England weather. We have a number of wild-seeded red maple trees on the farm that survived the storm intact. Those trees are really well adapted to early or late snow, and most of them just lost a few branches here and there.
We did lose one of the native red maples, just next to our driveway, which was topped completely:
But look at the habitat that was created from the storm. A brand new snag! Check out the pre-drilled woodpecker holes. This red maple snag may be newly created but clearly it's already been used by wildlife for years...
Conveniently situated with a clear view from the house, this is our new wildlife viewing zone for the winter of 2012. The snag may have to come down completely in future years -- if it starts to lean over the driveway -- but for now we’ll be able to watch the comings and goings of birds, squirrels and other wildlife making use of its many resources.
So the storm wasn’t all bad! Wildlife are grateful! Old trees and branches are part of natural ecosystems and support a huge variety of wildlife, from hawks, owls and bats, to lower life forms such as invertebrate insects, amphibians and even reptiles. In the spring, sapsuckers will drill the remaining living portion of the trunk for sap, attracting insects with a 'sweet tooth', many of whom will get stuck in the sticky sap and become food for birds.
But what to do with all those tree branches and brush that have fallen? If you have the room, use them to build a brush pile! We built what we consider the mother of ALL brush piles at the side of our pasture:
This (ahem) carefully constructed brush pile (aka Winter Wildlife Resort at Turkey Hill Brook Farm) features snug bedrooms with fragrant pine bough ceilings, a lovely screened-in sunroom with a southerly view to safely bask in the sun on a bright winter’s day, as well as several large, fully-stocked pantries. If you’re a chickadee, you’ll find plenty of hemlock and pine cones to pick at all winter long. A chipmunk looking for a safe spot for your stash of acorns? Plenty of safe cover plus acorns free for the taking. If you’re a ground-feeding junco, hopefully you can forage for seeds around the edge of this brush pile and dive into it when the neighborhood cats come prowling. Any woolly bear caterpillars still looking for a place to hibernate can burrow into the dead leaves under the pile.
OK, I know that most built-up areas can’t support a brush pile of this size in everybody’s back yard, but even if you have a small area to work with, a more modest brush pile still works:
So if you're faced with tree damage from the crazy weather we've experienced in the past year, remember that if life hands you tree debris, instead of burning it or sending it away with the trash, you can always just leave it alone. And call it a habitat!
(This is a reprint of my article posted on Wildlife Garden: Redefining Beautiful on Nov 21, 2011)
The Year I Shall Win the Pachysandra War
Anybody who has heard me talk about gardening knows that I have an uneasy relationship with Japanese pachysandra (Pachysandra terminalis) which is easily the Number 1 planted shade groundcover in New England gardens. Oh sure, it spreads quickly to form a solid green mat in the shade under trees, and its evergreen foliage stays green all winter. You can find this plant at every garden club plant sale and divisions of it have been passed from gardener to gardener for at least a generation. There is probably not a single neighborhood in Massachusetts that doesn't have an acre or two of of what horticulture guru William Cullina calls "the vinyl siding of landscaping" (an expression that makes me giggle every time)...
But this plant has a darker side, through no fault of its own other than the fact that it's a foreign import into a landscape where it has no natural controls. Unfortunately, when Japanese pachysandra is planted near moist woodlands in New England, it can quickly spread into the woods through its underground roots, choking out anything else that happens to be growing there and threatening unique and fragile woodland plant communities. There are few (if any) native herbivores (insects or other leaf eaters) that can digest the foliage of this alien plant, or co-evolved pests that control its growth in any way. And once Japanese pachysandra is established in an area to its liking, good luck removing it. Ever!
In the photo above, this lush border of pachysandra needs to be rigorously "pushed back" with a sharp spade twice a year, to keep it from becoming an entire backyard of pachysandra....
When we moved onto our small farm six years ago, we were delighted to find a beautiful stream flowing through it, and even more thrilled to discover unique native plants such as trilliums, jack-in-the-pulpit, Christmas and sensitive ferns, and winterberry holly growing in the rich, moist soil along its banks. I did find some Japanese pachysandra also growing along with Japanese barberry (another invasive planted by a previous well-meaning gardener), but I targetted those for removal in hopes of expanding the populations of the native plants. I spent a few hot summer days standing in the cool water of the stream pulling the roots out by hand (it was not a very large area), and thought my work was done.
Fast forward a year or two, when I noticed that not only was the pachysandra still holding on along the streamside, but that it had literally jumped the garden gate, and had spread at least 10' into the woods:
I began beating back the pachysandra again - trying carefully not to damage tree roots and the now-tattered jack-in-the-pulpits. I do not use the weed killer Roundup (or its cousin Rodeo) because of its negative impacts on amphibians, not to mention the fact that this heavily-used neuro-toxic herbicide is being increasingly linked with fetal cell death in humans, along with other alarming impacts to people and wildlife. So armed with only a small garden fork and my hands, I have opted for hand-to-hand pachysandra combat. This spring, I declared 2011 "The Year I Shall Remove the Pachysandra Regime", and each day I've resolved to pull out pachysandra roots for 15 minutes until the pachysandra is completely GONE. Wish me luck! I hope to report back in a few years on the newly restored native plant populations that should be making a comeback!
Jack-in-the-Pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) is one of the cool New England bog plants that I'm trying to save from a thickening mat of Japanese pachysandra in our "wet woods":
Photo of jack-in-the-pulpit copyright Trudy Walther
A note about hand-weeding: Pulling weeds by
hand might seem like a lot of work, but its slow and steady pace is great for teaching you about the makeup of your soil and how certain plants impact their surroundings. I've noticed that where my pachysandra roots form a tangled mass of stolons (runners), they seem to suck up all the soil moisture from an otherwise boggy area, and the resulting soil becomes dry and lifeless. In my pachysandra monoculture, I find no other plants, no tiny decomposing insects or butterfly caterpillars looking for leaves they can eat, no salamanders or frogs, nothing at all except the thick white pachysandra roots. It's clear to me that the pachysandra has, in a few short years, impoverished my rich woodland soil, and nearby plants (and their associated wildlife) are all suffering from these rapid changes to their environment.
If you're also battling pachysandra, please share your control stories from the trenches!
Virginia Rose
Have you always loved roses, but hate the spraying, fertilizing, watering and pruning they require to keep them from looking a mess? Please meet the lovely Virginia rose (Rosa virginiana). Unlike its highly-bred, cultivated cousins (hybrid tea roses and modern cultivars of climbing roses) this native eastern rose is hardy to the coldest parts of New England, grows happily in almost any soil, needs little to to no irrigation except for rainwater, and blooms its head off through June with pink flowers with the most heavenly fragrance. Not to mention, their beautiful red fruits (hips) persist right through the winter, feeding birds and providing winter interest when the landscape is otherwise white and brown. What's not to love?
Most Virginia roses bloom in light or medium pink, although there are white-flowering cultivars available too (I've not had good experience with the white-flowering form, however). Their flowers might not have the fluffy allure of the larger double-formed hybrids, but their single-flowering form makes them much more attractive to butterflies and other pollinators, who don't have to fight their way through many layers of petals to access the sweet nectar and pollen at the center of the flower. And did I mention its fragrance?
When it's happy, which is in any decent soil with good drainage and plenty of sunshine, Virginia rose will spread fairly rapidly within just a few years, so if you have a large area you'd like to fill in quickly with a wildlife-friendly native plant, Virginia makes a great choice.
In bloom, a pink tapestry of Virginia rose mingles beautifully with foxglove, cranesbill and other late spring bloomers and will form a low, thorny hedge that offers excellent year-round predator protection for the birds visiting your gardens. This sunny hillside of our farm was planted with a single container of Virginia rose in 2006, and by June 2009 it had happily spread to form a sizeable thicket:
As you might imagine, its spreading habit (through underground roots that snake in every direction) makes Virginia rose unsuitable for small gardens, where its roots will eventually take over surrounding plants and form dense canes that shade them out. A better-behaved but just as pretty wild rose is Virginia's closest cousin, Carolina or pasture rose (R. carolina) which spreads by slowly enlarging clumps rather than spreading roots.
In the thicket above, an annual mowing stops Virginia rose runners from spreading into the adjacent lawn, but you can also contain its advancing roots with a hard root pruning every few years with a sharp shovel. A driveway also makes a good boundary, as long as you don't use large amounts of salt to de-ice your driveway.
Note: Please let it be known that I would dearly love for the above Virginia rose thicket to spread and cover the entire hill, but hubby has drawn a literal line in the sand (with rocks!) where his lawn cannot be further encroached! I am hoping he won't notice the line has moved a few times 
So planting Virginia rose in beds with other perennials is not a good idea, but in a new planting of a large area, you can interplant with self-seeding annuals, biennials or short-lived perennials to fill the bed for the first few years while the rose spreads....I initially planted the above bed with common sage, purple coneflower, cranesbill, foxglove, cosmos and cleome, and after 4 years, mostly only the foxglove remains in the area, probably because its seedlings are more shade-tolerant than the others. The others I have simply moved to other areas of the garden or given away to friends.
If you've grown roses before, you'll appreciate that Virginia's foliage is very resistant to most of the common diseases that disfigure roses. Like all roses (wild or cultivated), Japanese beetles love to eat its foliage, but if your plant is healthy and vigorous, it should shrug off any damage. These roses bloom in June in central Massachusetts, and Japanese beetles don't tend to arrive in large numbers in our area til early July, so by the time the beetles start chewing, you should have other beautiful blooming plants to distract you from a few holes in their leaves.
Virginia rose canes top out at about 4', so you should never need to prune them for height, especially because you'd be cutting off one of the plant's best features, its plump red hips that you barely notice until the first winter snows suddenly bring them to life:
The hips must be pretty sour to taste, because the birds don't seem to touch them at all during the winter. They disappear around the beginning of spring here, so winter's deep freezes must sweeten them up a bit, or else late winter birds are too hungry to be picky. I often see their thorny stems used as a temporary hideout by foraging winter birds, who get spooked by hungry hawks hovering around my bird gardens and feeders. The white background makes tiny birds much more visible to larger predators (my dogs will confirm this because they constantly mistake them for chipmunks!) but even a cat is unlike to risk those nasty thorns and go in after them...
If your garden conditions are boggy or wet, the best native roses for garden use are swamp rose (R. palustris) and New England rose (R. nitida), although these bloom a little later than the field roses in summer.
If you look, you may still find native roses growing wild in natural areas. More often than not, though, roses that you see in the wild are the invasive multiflora rose (R. multiflora), which is often assumed to be native but is an introduced rose from Asia that has been steadily overtaking old fields in New England for decades:
Although birds do eat their berries, multiflora rose has a highly negative impact on its surroundings, forming enormous thickets that crowd out the native plants that underpin balanced and healthy ecosystems. Chances are, if you see a large, fragrant sprawling wild rose with white flowers and arching stems, it's multiflora rose. Removing these from your property can be a great contribution to protecting local biodiversity...you can either replant with one of our native New England roses, or use the "wait, weed and watch" approach, which means simply rooting out any remaining multiflora canes that pop up over time, and allowing any native plants that are still hanging on to make a comeback.
If you try the wait, weed and watch approach, be prepared for a funny thing to happen. You'll begin to notice an increasing variety of birds, butterflies and other interesting wildlife that visit your naturalized area, many more so than your more cultivated garden areas, and eventually you will realize that your wildlife garden, with all the life it attracts, is your most beautiful and favorite garden of them all...
** BY THE WAY ** Apologies to my email blog subscribers who received a half-written article on Wednesday by email - I hit the "Publish" button instead of the "Save" button and the article went out as is {deep embarrassment}. The complete article is available here: Gimme Shelter...for the Birds
