The Audubon Society published a Survival by Degrees report in 2019, and recently reminded Gardenopolis of its Birds and Climate Visualizer component. Type in your zip code and see how climate change is predicted to affect your area and the birds that visit your backyard.
Rising temperatures mean that many birds will lose habitat and struggle to survive. Gardenopolis supports efforts to slow climate change and preserve habitat for wildlife.
by Elsa Johnson
The Goddess is about life the all of it
the ever sprouting ever growing
ness : tender shoot in
tended garden and rampant weed that runs
and runs and overtakes But also she is about
the mole the vole the cat the hawk
the blood the fur that’s left behind
so ripped so torn one cannot say what was
it She is about life the equality
of its dying ness To her It’s the same Eden
Rose and thorn of rose thistle flower and thistle
prick fur of mouse bone of bird rock
tree sky cliff gut glut the streaming
stream and driest dust : She does not hold
one thing more precious
(that’s the job we give to God)
They are you are we are all
just skim just skin just pulse until we’re
not (not mind not heart not flesh)
She is everywhere in everything
Not cruel not kind
fecund indefatigable
Praise her
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 Scott Beuerlein; originally printed in Horticulture, Jan/Feb 2019, Vol. 116 Issue 1. Reprinted with permission
LET’S FACE IT, not all people are equal. Perhaps in the eyes of God. Maybe under the law. But in the court of my opinion, they’re just not. Some are way the hell better than others. And the best ones are gardeners. Not new gardeners, God bless them. I’m talking about the battletested old guard. Gardeners on their second round of knee replacements. Weathered, worn and wizened types.
Alchemy happens to those who’ve gardened a long time. The audacity to continually shuffle bits of nature around in the face of cold, hard Darwinian reality, hoping only to nurture a small piece of ground into verdant beauty—well, that’ll teach a person. It’ll smooth rough edges and knock chips from shoulders. In the words of every authority figure from my youth, it builds character.
Which is apparently what you’ve got left after your ego has been blown up, your confidence shattered, your intellect exceeded, your body exhausted, and yet you persevere. And even succeed a little. Anyone who’s gardened long enough knows what I’m saying. Anyone who’s gardened long enough might call it wisdom.
Being outside with nature is the essential ingredient. Other people nurture. Other people are tested. Nurses, for instance. But I’ve seen enough movies to know there’s something seriously wrong with nurses, and my own experience is they force you to wear hospital gowns and chase you around with needles. Too much time inside a hospital will turn the sweetest pea into Nurse Ratched; whereas time outside with the birds, bees and flowers will turn any old jerk into Mr. Green Jeans. Because all that nature reminds us that life is fleeting and of this moment, and it will be here when we’re not. And it will be beautiful just the same. Subconsciously, we garden to find peace, and with enough time working the soil, peace comes.
Yep, gardeners are the best people. They know what they know, and they know that it isn’t even a fraction of it. And gardeners are okay with that. Among what they know is this: gardening is a relationship with nature. And the strongest partner in any relationship is the one who needs it less. In other words, nature has the upper hand on us. And gardeners have come to be okay with that, too.
So, if you want your kids to be good people, start them gardening and yell at them if they try to quit. That’s my advice. Getting sued? Forget a lawyer. Bring a gardener to court with you. If you’re choosing between two surgeons, choose the one with dirt under his or her nails. And, for God’s sake, let us make it a law that a gardener is assigned to every elected politician. Wouldn’t we all sleep better knowing that a friendly, weathered sage with bits of mulch and stems in their pockets has got a pair of dirty boots on that person’s desk, and is saying, “Not so fast, Whippersnapper.”
Scott Beuerlein is a Horticulturist at the Cincinnati Zoo Botanical Garden.
by Heather Risher
I hate multiflora rose. Hate it. With a passion. Why? In the summer of 1998, I was a field technician in a Phase I Archaeological Survey on property owned by the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. The land had been residential in the 1950s, and after the airport purchased the land, the houses were razed and the area fenced in. Thanks to the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, federal projects require an Environmental Impact Statement to be prepared before construction can begin. Part of an EIS is a survey for artifacts, both historic and prehistoric.
We were looking for anything of cultural significance. What we discovered were jungles of multiflora rose so thick that machetes were necessary to hack paths between our shovel tests. We spent more time traveling the fifty feet to our next test site than we did digging each pit. Crawling was frequently more efficient than walking.
For those of you blessedly unaware of multiflora rose, it is a species native to Asia, imported to the United States in the 1700s, and misguidedly provided to landowners as a conservation measure in the 1930s. Now, depending on the state you live in, it is classified as a noxious weed, a prohibited invasive species, or banned. It had been planted in the area ignored by the airport, and spread like the weed that it is.
If the vines and thorns of multiflora rose weren’t trouble enough, the mosquitoes were brutal. The ground was swampy enough to provide thousands of stagnant puddles, perfect for mosquitoes. We spent most of the summer filthy, scratched, and bleeding, surrounded by swarms of bloodthirsty beasts. Even the nonsmokers resorted to carrying lit cigarettes or cigars in an attempt to ward off the airborne attack.
That’s not to say we missed the beauty in the abandoned land. Occasionally we discovered fields of day lilies that had naturalized into a brilliance of yellow. I discovered the secret hiding place of a young fawn – twice, as the first time its terrified stumble led it directly along my transect. The air was filled with birdsong, and I’m sure I would have counted dozens of species if I had stopped cursing the thorny vines long enough to look.
Lunches were eaten outdoors, along one of the roads, usually providing a welcome respite from the mosquitoes. We sometimes spent hours waiting for airport employees to unlock the gates so we could enter or exit the property, and if we’d attempted to leave for a midday meal most likely no work would have been done that day. There is great contentment in a mushy peanut butter and jelly sandwich eaten in the sunshine after a tough morning’s work.
Despite screening the dirt thoroughly, we found very little of cultural significance in our test pits. We did, however, find things that held our interest. I once spent a long afternoon sketching a map of a foundation and a well while my very manly male coworkers cut down saplings in an attempt to determine the depth of the water.
One notable find was a field where marijuana had been grown. We notified airport officials, who called the DEA, who visited and left business cards scattered around the site. My boss had worked on other airport projects, and shared that the crew had discovered pot on each one. As airports are unwilling to shut down air traffic for helicopter surveys, flight paths are perfect places to grow marijuana. Possibly the airport employees were so reluctant to grant us access in the mornings because they knew their growing operation would be discovered.
We also discovered that the dirt near the I-X center smells of bubblegum. Decades of deicer had soaked into the ground, saturating it with an odor that wouldn’t dissipate. If the I-X center soil was disturbing, it had nothing on that of NASA-Glenn. The crew chief, a new father, asked the men to cover that segment of the survey, as he had no idea which chemicals had been dumped, and what exposure to them might do to the reproductive systems of the twentysomething childless women on the team.
We crisscrossed airport property all summer, and eventually moved on to another airport, another pipeline, another renovation. I loved that job, and cried when I left. My paycheck wouldn’t cover my student loans plus a car payment and rent. I always wanted to go back to the field, but my grandmother got sick and died, I found a better-paying office job, got married: life happened. I planted roots, which made it difficult to walk halfway across New York State, stopping to dig a hole every fifty feet. Or to drive to Maryland on a moment’s notice because the Navy wanted to remodel a golf course.
But even though that summer’s tangle has since been bulldozed and covered with asphalt, I still hate multiflora rose.
It’s true. If left undisturbed, invasive multiflora rose takes over. In Connecticut near where my granddaughters live, multiflora rose has taken over along a power line right of way; it is wall to wall multiflora rose — and where it’s not rose, there are blackberries. Both like growing in open, sunny conditions. Meanwhile, in the woods there, growing under the tree canopy, there is barberry, which is known to harbor ticks – and, as I discovered when I had one growing under a front window, also fleas.
The multiflora rose and the barberry are both invasive, non-native species and should be removed. How do you eradicate a plant that eagerly bites back? The answer, of course, is very carefully.
This is how I do it. First, armor your body with densely woven clothes. Wear gloves. Cut the canes back in short manageable sections. I yard-bag them. When you have cut them back all the way to the ground, this is the time for the careful and limited application of glyphosate directly to the cut cane surface at ground level. All it takes is a tiny, tiny amount. Check back later in the growing season for regrowth. If there is regrowth that is the time for application of glyphosate to the leaves of the plant, since, having minimized the plant’s footprint, the plant is now much smaller, and weaker. You can spread plastic or newspaper under the leaves at ground level to avoid killing anything other than the prickly thing you’re trying to kill. Again: wear gloves. Check back in a week. It can take a while for the glyphosate to reach the roots. Use the minimal amount of glyphosate necessary. Wait. Be patient. Use the same system to remove barberry. Do not spray glyphosate on rose or barberry fruits. Animals eat these.
See the Ohio Department of Natural Resources site for more on invasive species and their removal. Fire is another option.
As for blackberry, which, although native, can be invasive: blackberry can usually be controlled by mowing early in the season, before it gets tall. If you want it to produce berries, don’t mow. It fruits on second year canes. Repeated mowing weakens the plant.
The first full week of September promises to be a busy one!
First, The Cleveland Museum of Natural History is hosting its annual Conservation Symposium. This year’s theme is Biodiversity: Life in Balance, and boasts a lineup of excellent speakers on fascinating topics. The symposium itself takes place all day on Friday, September 7, and field trips and workshops are offered on Thursday and Saturday. Gardenopolis is particularly looking forward to the American Chestnut Workshop.
Next, on Saturday, September 8. Gardenopolis will be hosting its annual Garden Party. Look for invitation details in your email if you’re a subscriber; if you don’t subscribe check out the details on Facebook, or send an email to gardenopoliscle@gmail.com to be included.
We hope to see you in September!
by Lois Rose, Master Gardener Educator
All photos from Ann McCulloh
By February in northeast Ohio we are looking forward to some sign of green. We are hoping to be caressed by the humidity and warmth of early spring, the scent of bulbs pushing up through the soggy soil.
And then there is the coming of the Great Big Home and Garden Show at the IX center. I have been attending these shows for many years in a specialized capacity, answering questions from the public about gardening.
When I have a bit of time off of the answer table, I can wander freely and take on the sights and sounds of the show. And I have to say that this has been a more and more disappointing experience over the years and this year is no exception.
I observed walking into the hall from the Exhibitors’ entrance that there seem to be fewer stands and vendors this year taking up less space. I have not confirmed this as a fact but I know that there were almost no vendors selling plants or plant accessories.
And the gardens that are installed with a mountain of sand, a city of bricks and a lake of water features are less and less what I hope or want to see.
Perhaps I am behind the times, out of sync and outside of the mainstream, but what I saw was primarily hardscape….paths leading in a U-shape through each exhibit. Large patio scapes with fire pits or grills and bars and outdoor seating for entertaining. Oh and there were some plants thrown in.
What plants you ask? All of the perennials and shrubs and trees and bulbs and annuals have to be forced into bloom at nearby greenhouses. 
This is a challenge and a science and an expensive effort.
There were some triumphs in some of the gardens. For example there were white-flowered hellebores in some of the displays that were tall and showy.
There were a myriad of daffodils and hyacinths, some with excellent fragrance.
There was a forsythia bush in full bloom and a Cornus mas or Cornelian Cherry and a few other fruit trees with good blooms showing.
BUT… I have often groused about the displays of early- mid -late spring flowers shown at the same time as if you would be able to achieve this kind of show in your own garden. Tulips and forsythia and azaleas and fruit trees….February and March and April and May joined together in unity.
I wonder if the average show-goer realizes that many of these plants bloom consecutively and not at the same time…
One display had a charming large metal pot planted with a water garden, papyrus and water hyacinth.
And a sunken Hosta and fern garden under a sidewalk grate.
There was a construction of a house front with a balcony fitted with mannequins reclining near a full complement of jazz band instruments…evoking New Orleans during Mardi Gras, with a small albeit conventional garden below with a very old decrepit upright piano with plants in the top.
It was dark and quiet in the garden display area, with many fewer people so the experience was a respite from the main hall.
They cleverly placed a bistro in this quiet area so that you could eat a nice meal in relative calm. Expensive but quiet.
And on the other side of the ledger there were a few displays that had houseplants as their prominent green material. They were integrated into borders with outdoor plants but still, houseplants with large leaves. Is this fake news?
So I conclude that the public wants hardscape for their yards and the companies know this and therefore provide it in their displays.
The plants and displays that I remember from the nineties, interesting foliage plants for example, newer cultivars, are clearly a thing of the distant past. I did not find anything much to buy for my garden….metal frames of animals, gnomes, little owls and cute little ….not for me.
But you can ride the ferris wheel for 2 bucks, and buy fudge and a super mop.
That is the home part of the show which is fully realized. Too bad the garden section has been diminished.
Sloth Wears Pajamas
With regard to gardeners’ sins, I would like to put in a good word for Sloth. In particular, I think that there is something to say for Pajama Gardening. Does everyone do it, or just the members of my extended family? I know that in England there is a Nude Gardening Day, but that is only one day per year. One can garden in some variation of pajamas almost any time of year, especially in the summer, when morning and birdsong begin early. What could be more pleasurable than wearing one’s nightie, carrying a cup of coffee and plucking the spent daylily flowers?
Watch for future posts…we have a lot to say about Sloth.
Gluttony
You know that feeling, deep in your belly, when you walk into a plant nursery?
It tingles and it commands action…quick and a lot of it. Right?
Well, I’ve got it bad.
I have to have that little red Echinacea…it’s calling to me…really, three (3) or five (5) would be better….isn’t that the rule: odd numbers?…well, maybe seven (7.)
If there really is no reason for another Echinacea, how about that Cimicifuga? Five (5) of those would fit.
And that adorable Sedum, just one of those. But, I’ll need a small pot for it.
Luckily, I have found that there is a limit to my gluttony—that’s when my car is topped up with plants. The scent of the flowers, leaves and bark, the moisture in the air, and the oxygen filling my lungs. That’s satisfaction…I hope you have it, too.
–The Plant Glutton Has Spoken
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