Spring Wildflowers: Fighting Back
Spring at last! We’ve survived the long bitter winter of snow and ice and bare branches. For us humans, winter is the rough season. But for plants, winter is spent dormant and snug under the snow. Spring is the time when they have to battle for survival. The first greenery is a welcome sight, not just for humans, but for rabbits, deer, slugs, insects and other herbivores, all thin and hungry and longing for a square meal. The first spring wildflowers unfurl into a world of hungry mouths waiting to eat them. An April trillium or hepatica runs a much greater risk of ending up in an herbivore’s...
Read MoreA Lesson in Leaves
Hurrying along the sidewalk outside Colonie Center mall on a blustery day. I wasn’t expecting to find a lesson in tree identification spread out on the pavement at my feet. It’s amazing how many ways nature can invent to say “leaf.” All these specimens were blown at random into a corner by the icy wind. There must be a dogwood around here somewhere, because there’s a smooth-edged oval leaf, round and bright as an Easter egg. Next to it is a sharp-edged red oak leaf, brown and crisp as toast. There’s a lot of the familiar five-pointed shape of the maple...
Read MoreVirginia Creeper: Blood Red
Now there’s a scary name for a plant. The Virginia Creeper. Sounds like something you’d want to stay away from around Halloween, for sure. It’s a native American plant that’s common in wooded areas, and it grows so prolifically that you’d think it would be easy to encourage it to grow in your backyard, but like all wild things, it’s tricky to domesticate. Wildings have a tendency to grow where they darn well choose, living life on their own terms, ignoring humans’ best efforts to pamper them. I’ve tried to lure the Creeper up my trellis, get it to drape...
Read MoreGood Lawn/Bad Lawn
I saw a sight this morning that froze my blood. There was a toddler, a hapless infant, sitting on a lawn. Not even a blanket underneath him, mind you—the poor child was sitting right on the grass. Made my blood run cold. Why? Because it was a bad lawn. It was nothing but blades of grass. Close-cropped and bristly as a Marine’s haircut. Not a weed to be seen, not a leaf of clover, not a dandelion, not a plantain leaf. Nothing but grass. So what? That’s what a lawn is supposed to be, right? Yes. But it doesn’t stay that way naturally. Weeds like dandelion, clover and plantain are highly...
Read MoreMilkweed: Tough Native
Usually when I spy a plant bursting forth from a crack in the cement like this, it’s a non-native plant, an invasive “weed” of some sort. I tend to think of native plants as timid souls, needing shade and rich forest loam–dainty wildflowers, fragile ferns, like that. But milkweed, a native American plant, packs a bit of muscle, it seems. It pokes up in all sorts of unexpected places. Milkweed is the plant where Monarch butterflies are concerned–common milkweed and a few other closely related plants in the Asclepias genus are the only plants Monarchs will lay...
Read MoreLily Pad Lifestyle
Floating along without a care in the world. Such effortless beauty. No wonder Monet couldn’t stop painting them. At the New York Botanical Garden, my favorite place is the the water lily pool. Its giant surface is covered with lily pads and fringed by tall lotus blossoms with leaves the size of bicycle tires. Reflections of the sky and the white conservatory buildings mingle with the lilies and the lotuses–it’s sort of a cross between between Paris and the Nile. The thing about a shallow, still pool like this is that you can’t see all the way to the bottom. Water lilies,...
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