Ilex verticillate
Common winterberry produces brilliant red berries that attract birds late into the winter. Cut branches offer a colorful accent to holiday wreaths and decorations. Native to swampy areas, winterberry is a low maintenance plant that will thrive in wet or well-drained sites. Both male and female plants are required for fruit set; one male is sufficient to pollinate ten female plants.
Liatris spicata
Blazing star’s upright purple flower spikes provide a bright long-blooming accent in the garden in July and August. An excellent cut flower, Liatris attracts butterflies and is a good native plant alternative to purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria)
Amelanchier laevis
Often appearing at the edge of woodlands or along stream banks, this small to medium-sized tree is one of the first to flower each spring and also provides stunning fall color. The sweet red-purple berries in June attract many species of birds. Serviceberry is a great tree for landscapes and can be utilized as a native alternative to the invasive calley pear (Pyrus calleryana).
In recognition of April as Ohio Native Plant Month, members and partners of the Lake Erie Allegheny Partnership (LEAP) will celebrate one native plant a day. Over the past 10 years the LEAP Native Plant of the Year campaign has highlighted native species that can make exceptional additions to area landscapes and gardens while reducing the threat of invasive non-native species to the region’s biodiversity. Please visit the LEAP website and join us in celebrating Ohio Native Plant Month.
by Mark Gilson
Witch hazels arrive early to garden parties in the Midwest, too early for some gardeners! Put on your winter coat and muck-boots to catch their colorful shout-out, mostly in early March, before the forsythias and hellebores! Although their early-spring blooms may be inconvenient for the faint of heart, they are delightful, fragrant, fascinating and well worth the trip outside!
How does a winter flowering shrub become pollinated? Actually, this occurs through the efforts of a ‘shivering moth’ that makes its rounds on cold nights. Earnest palpitations raise the moth’s internal temperature by as much as fifty degrees!
We are lucky to have a plantsman and wholesale nurseryman in Madison, Ohio, who makes it his business to collect and grow these under-appreciated shrubs: Tim Brotzman, Brotzman’s Nursery. Tim invited us to his nursery on a cold muddy Saturday in early March 2019, a perfect day to witness this private pageant! At the beginning of the long spruce-draped drive leading to the house that Tim built with his father, we find two bright yellow sentinels, Hamamaelis xintermedia palida. My wife and I were unescorted at this point and thankful for the labels! Each blossom on a Witch hazel is remarkable, only an inch or two wide, tiny colorful streamers exploding like party-poppers from tight centers all along the woody stems. Flowers may accompany dried fruit capsules that popped the seeds up to thirty feet in the previous fall. Tim says horticulture makes us better observers. As we catch up with him and hike through the orderly fields, he introduces each new plant, witch hazels and other friends, as treasured personal companions, with stories of their idiosyncrasies, temperament and original collection. For an hour, we were fortunate to be the ‘shivering moths’ visiting each plant in the collection.
Tim began his horticultural education working for his father, Charlie, a renowned nurseryman, story-teller and poet. After earning a degree from The Ohio State University in the early 1970s during the golden age of OSU Horticulture, Tim studied in England and Germany. He worked with David Leitch, local world-famous hybridizer of rhododendrons, as well as distinguished plantsman at The Holden Arboretum and local nurseries. Somewhere along the way, he traveled to Tibet on a plant-gathering expedition. Among the legendary International Plant Propagators Association, Tim is recognized as a ‘fellow’ for his years of attendance and service. The best thing about Tim is that for those with any connection to horticulture, he celebrates and extracts any knowledge and experience, no matter how limited! Talking with Tim, whether a plantsman, local grower or master gardener, you are elevated to a revered place in a fundamentally important industry and pastime.
The fall-blooming Hamamaelis virginiana is native to the Eastern and Southern US. Find it in shady woods on your autumn hikes, sometimes clinging to the side of woodland ravines. Native Americans utilized it for treatment of various inflammations and tumors. A derivative is used in Witchazel’s Oil. Hamamelis Mollis is more common in the nursery trade than the native fall-blooming form, although that is changing with renewed interest in native plants. H. Mollis was crossed with H. japonica to form many cultivars of H. xintermedia common to the trade. Red-flowering varieties were selected by early developers, including Hamamelis xintermedia ‘Diane, ‘Livea’, and ‘Jelena’, all of which Tim pointed out. ‘Arnold’s Promise,’ brilliant yellow, remains one of the popular cultivars (although Tim discounts any connection to the body builder and former governor of California!). Other varieties include ‘Glowing Embers,’ ‘Strawberries and Cream,’ and ‘Orange Peel.’ There are also vernalis types, including H. v. ‘Kohankie Red.’
Tim shares detailed origination data on all his plants, including one he collected from within an armored gunnery live-fire range in Louisiana (Tim’s friend, Tony Debevc, Debonne Vineyards, flew him there in his own plane). As we walk among the rows, Tim trims flowering branches with his well-used Felco clippers for us to enjoy in our home. We comment on the odors of each, from cinnamon to apple to a pleasing but obscure vernal scent. As so many plants in our gardens are bred these days for color and other characteristics, it’s great to put our noses to work again!
Recent cold winters were hard on the Witch Hazels. One year the local temperatures dropped to 30 below zero, followed by a wet year, followed by a March with a precipitous drop to minus eight degrees. Some of the casualties remain evident in the field. Others returned to life amidst a bundle of low stems. Each cultivar seems to require its own regimen, some seed-grown, most grafted. We wonder how all this hard-won knowledge will be transferred on. Tim is no longer a young man, despite his customary energy, wit and positive engagement. Documentation of our horticultural experiences remains a challenge for our entire industry!
Other gardening treasures abound along the edges of the Witch hazel trials…columnar white pine…a beech seedling from China that has proven unsusceptible, so far, to the mysterious ‘beech blight’… unusual pines…dogwoods…many one-of-a-kind specimens.
As a businessman, Tim is consumed with inventory matters, how to record, promote and price the myriad wholesale stock in his fields. We value the time he took from his busy day to provide these precious moments…always too few in the day-to-day chaos of our chosen fields…for horticultural observation, appreciation and instruction!
by Elsa Johnson
….As Terry Pratchett has someone say, at some point, in nearly every one of his outrageously satirical, fantastical, ridiculous, compassionate, and funny novels. And we do; we surely do, I think, nearly every day, as I watch the foxes now in control of the chicken coop, the wolves now ‘guarding’ the herd, anticipatory saliva dripping from their ravening teeth.
It is not a new fight.
I am reminded of this by an essay/book review in the New York Review of Books: My Land, Your Land, by Bill McKibben (January 16th issue # LXVII, number 1). The article is ostensibly a review of two books – John Taliaferro’s Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West; and John Clayton’s Natural Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America’s Public Lands. But as usual in the NYRB, the review stands by itself as an essay with an independent internal point of view that speaks in its own right, the subject of which is precisely this moment in time where the balance of the scale has tipped heavily away from the long term appreciation and preservation of public lands as treasured entities with their own intrinsic existential value, toward the valuing of public lands for their long term resource development potential by private interests, and their short term exploitation potential, both to be achieved by deregulation and privatization. This, of course, will take them, forever, out of the public trust.
The Great Dismantling, it is called.
In this telling Grinnell and Muir are the singers/story tellers, the lyrical archdruids of saving-nature, while Gifford Pinchot stands on the other side, of managed finite resources and extraction. But as McKibben points out, before there can be dispute over how to use public lands, there has to be public lands, and all these men played a role in convincing Congress, making that happen, and these books that he is reviewing are that story. But as public land accumulated – it eventually came to account for about 25% of our land — these differences of ‘emphasis’ became clearer. While the most scenic, best loved (and lucky) places became our treasured national parks and wildernesses, McKibben tells us, “the great bulk of the land was turned over to the Forest Service and The Bureau of Land Management, ….which tended to be captured ….by the industries (mining, grazing, logging) …..And even that did not go too badly until “this current regime (which has) given the fossil fuel industry carte blanche on our public lands …. at precisely the wrong time.”
Do I need to tell you McKibben favors Democratic candidates – most of whom favor a strong emphasis on protection of public lands? We need, says McKibben a renaissance of the spirit of the early pioneers; “their combination of idealism and realism delivered us a great gift.” …a gift that is being taken away…
He’s pretty sure where not to look for that.
A few after-words from me.
Grinnell spent much of his life defending both wildlife and Native Americans. He founded the Audubon Society, and played an important role in helping to protect Glacier National Park, where a mountain and its glacier are named after him (and which I hiked up to the edge of, the summer I was 18 years old, in a pair of no-sole soft leather moccasins, which, were I to try to do today, would cripple me for the rest of my life).
Muir was something of a wild-man and a euphoric writer of wilderness. Read his A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf; or Wilderness Essays, or the collection called The Wild Muir, with its beautiful wood block illustrations. The man was driven, fearless, and riveting. In The Wild Muir I am particularly fond of one of the two pieces not written by Muir but about him. It is titled The Rescue at Glenora Peak and much of it can be found at https://books.google.com The Wild Muir : Twenty Two of John Muir’s Greatest Adventures; The Rescue at Glenora Peak, page 145. Read this hair-raising rescue on line, and enjoy Fiona King’s art, one example of which we include here.
But most of all this MYRB review/essay reminded me of how much good nature writing I have read and loved over the years, (though not so much recently — who has the mind for it amid all this craziness?) – Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire; John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country; Annals of the Former World; Encounters with the Archdruid…. And I think, in these a-little-too-interesting times, in these darkest days of winter-but-not-very-winter (mixed thanks to global warming) it’s good to go back to and revisit the absorbing power of alchemical books.
I invite you to read.
by Elsa Johnson
What do gardeners/garden designers/environmentalists do when we visit relatives in other climes?
Weather permitting, we get out and hike, or seek out public gardens. Or both. Over the holidays this December, after chalking up one day to non-stop cooking, and another to non-stop eating (g r o a n), we managed to stay pretty active three out of five days. There are good hiking sites just a little west of Charlotte, in a connected series of parks in South and North Carolina comprised of King’s Mountain (S.C.), The Pinnacle, and Crowder’s Mountain (both in N.C). On an unnaturally balmy (even for South Carolina – 70 degrees) December 26th we dedicated our overeating penance to the climb up the Pinnacle, a metamorphic outcrop.
It seemed that half of Charlotte had the same idea. Not counting the small girl having a total meltdown on the way down after tripping on a tree root, it was delightful — and steep, and sweaty — for we found ourselves in the company of a friendly global community of every color and place of origin, which was delicious, and we felt right at home. Of course, we are getting older, and I am still recovering from my knee replacement and needed to stop and rest every couple hundred feet in the steepest places near the top, while the younger hikers politely breezed past. The next day, a bit sore, we stayed closer to Clover, and walked in the very flat city park, with its interesting naturally exposed bedrock.
On our final day, rather than revisiting Stowe Botanical Gardens, which we have been to many times, we drove to the Botanical Gardens at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. This is comprised of a greenhouse, which was not open, and two distinct gardens set within a hilly glen with a small stream flowing through.
The less interesting of these, at this time of year, was the entirely natural (in its aesthetic) Ralph Van Landingham Glen, located entirely within a gated exclosure. The Glen, we are told, contains a major collection of rhododendron and azalea shrubs, as well as 900 species of native trees, wildflowers, vines, and ferns, but, although pleasant, there was nothing in bloom – everything was dormant — so there wasn’t much to see.
The more interesting garden at this time of the year was the more “designed” (mostly in an architecturally Oriental theme) three acre Susie B Harwood Garden. There was a waterfall feature and a stream running through the valley, an Asian style gazebo, various other designed water channels, and a moon gate where we took each other’s pictures to send out as New Year greetings. Many foliage plants looked tropical and very green and thriving, though it is technically winter. The camellias were in bloom, and there were late season figs on a fig tree – imagine that!
Our last stop was Freedom Park, just south of downtown Charlotte, on the edge of an affluent neighborhood. Whoever was not hiking the Pinnacle and Crowder’s Mountain seemed to be there. Once again – a very cosmopolitan and global population. We were looking for demonstration community gardens I had read about, run by local Master Gardeners. Alas, we never found the gardens, but during our search we encountered some lovely examples of flowering humanity.
Here’s to 2020!
by Elsa Johnson
Two Things:
#1 – One of the most effective things we can do to combat climate change and the perils of a warming planet is plant trees. Lots and lots of trees.
#2 – Cleveland has lost 6% of its tree canopy, a recent regional study shows.
Enter the Heights Tree People.
It all began when several Heights residents, who had taken the 2018 Tree Stewards training program given by Holden Arboretum and The Western Reserve Land Conservancy, were looking to put their training to use in their own balliwicks, the inner-ring suburbs of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights. Although both communities have significantly better tree canopy coverage than the City of Cleveland, still, the knowledge of canopy loss proved motivating. Furthermore, many of Heights trees (both Cleveland, Shaker, and University) are aging, especially in those areas earliest developed, now 100 years old. Aging trees hold more carbon, but are vulnerable — to insects, disease, and, as recently experienced, to wind damage from climate-change driven micro-bursts. Then too, some specific neighborhoods offer considerably less canopy than others.
A core group of Heights Tree People was quickly formed in the winter of 2019 and a mission established:
1.) To plant and care for trees in our neighborhoods, the Cities of Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights, University Heights, and the upland areas of the Cities of Cleveland and East Cleveland.
2.) to share knowledge and advocate for an enduring tree culture; and
3.) increase the health, vitality, and happiness of our local habitat, and, through it, the planet.
All noble goals — and the Tree People let no moss grow under their toes – in the planting season the group planted 111 trees: 1 in East Cleveland, 3 in Shaker Heights, 12 in Cleveland, and 95 in Cleveland Heights. Not a shabby start for an all-volunteer organization.
Forty four different species of tree, both native and non-native species, were planted, but considerably more native species were planted than non-native species, and included diverse oaks and maples, as well as birch, blackgum, dogwood, redwood, redbud, hornbeam, locust, cypress, Kentucky coffeetree, sourwood, stewartia, larch, sassafras, and more.
How did it work?
Upon request the Tree People gifted people in the Heights and nearby Cleveland neighborhoods with a correctly planted tree on their property; trees were planted in the neighborhoods of Antisdale and Grosvenor, Potter Village, Fairfax between Lee and Coventry, and East 130th Street, which organized itself and planted 11 trees on their street “changing the landscape of the entire street”. Requests for tree-lawn trees were relayed to the City Forester. In addition, the group planned, with City support, a Reconciliation Tree Planting at the Cleveland Heights Community Center after this fall’s divisive election, and one HTP member worked with Tree Stewards from the Western Reserve Land Conservancy to stake and cage (to protect from deer rub) young oak saplings in the Great Meadow area of Forest Hill Park in East Cleveland.
The Heights Tree People are taking requests for spring planting. To make a request for a tree on your property contact heightstreepeople@gmail.com.
Thinking big?– organize your street, like E. 130th did.
by David Adams
And, through and over everything,
A sense of glad awakening.
—“Renascence”
Edna St. Vincent Millay
—For Leslie Henry and Dorothy Quimby, librarians, both, and stewards of our words.
The fog below, the clouds above, the mists between.
I remember well the times when that pewter lens
Was all this altitude revealed. So I looked,
As always, within it for the way beyond.
On that day of unexpected clarities
From atop the mountain we could see
The whole reach of Penobscot Bay
Where the sun could shift its shape across
The waters, the islands once so close,
So familiar, dispersed like children,
The spruce dark mystery no one solves.
One winter a friend and I had paddled out for lunch.
There was a cabin crumbling to its cellar.
Some logs and blocks, a rotting squirrel.
But the shafts of light between the trees
Speckled down on everything. We almost spoke.
But suddenly the wind came back northeast,
And we beat hell for home like frightened prey.
Later there was time to wonder what we’d learned.
All of that was someone else’s life now long ago.
Once in summer, I made the climb alone,
Tracing the very steps she took between
The sun and the footfalls of shadows
In ghostly firs, as if bracketing a line
That quivers between hope and desolation.
From there that water that could terrify
Seemed quiet as a mirror. It may be
The oldest tale: water, stone and wood,
The light, the dark, and those who see.
So many years ago I left a cruel interment
In the valley of the Carrabassett, a daughter gone,
Her hope extinguished by a patch of ice,
The dark trees welcoming beneath the stars.
Christmas looming. It happens that way.
When I was so alone, I used to listen for the silence
Between carols on the radio. Waiting.
As if each soul would find the moment there
To seek ransom from its captive life.
I am guessing that she would understand.
That sunny day atop the mountain,
We crouched where she would crouch to contemplate
A life as open and as fearsome as the Bay.
Lights on the rocks like words,
Burning even on the glyphs of lichen.
Tonight the snow is spinning, and we are home
In Ohio, almost a universe away. I should know.
I do not need a photograph to see your smile,
To feel your hand half around my waist.
A night ago I watched you light a little candle.
I wanted to say something. I have stories
Like candles, but I decided just to watch and wait.
I think I know the tricky craft of hopefulness.
“Look one way and the sun is going down,
Look the other and the moon is rising.”
“Father, do we go to heaven,
Or does it come to us?”
But thinking makes nothing quite so dear
As the breaths we share. Tonight they wind above
Our shoulders like a prayer.
A prayer is a story, too.
I believe that she would understand.
To friends both near and far. Leslie and I visited Mt. Battie this autumn past. It was a perch that drew me many times and in different moods and seasons during my nearly 30 years living in New England. The image stayed with me, especially after rereading the plaque bearing the lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s famous poem “Renascence.” I went back to that poem, and one of my own began to stir. By November, having visited my mentor Frederick Eckman’s paean to Millay, I realized I had stumbled on the next Advent poem. A curious poem about the hope of the season, perhaps. But aren’t they all?
The first set of quoted lines near the end are from Randall Jarrell’s poem “The Mockingbird.” The second set came from my older Advent poem, “Advent at the Looking Glass River.” They seemed to fit.
photos by Lois Rose
