The Year in Review

Social media posts this year seemed to report many of us being in a funk, bogged down by a sense of general malaise, and I have to confess that I have found myself more “doless” (to use my mother's wonderful Appalachian term) than usual. Whether this is pandemic hangover, trying to reenter a world in which figuring out what is “normal” or safe is tiring, political exhaustion, or something else is difficult for me to say. Certainly, I have not been writing much this year.

Like most years, 2022 has been a mix, and as seems inevitable, there have been losses: early in the year, a dear former student and a colleague died unexpectedly, one of heart failure and one of Covid. In the spring, a friend lost her husband and her mother within a month. Later in the year, three church friends died, one hit by a car crossing the highway one Saturday evening. A dear friend on the next block went into an emotional collapse when the dog she knows will be her last died, and our two eldest felines have begun what are likely their final declines. All the aforementioned non-humans were or are elderly, but there is something especially poignant about watching the slow fade of an animal whose adolescence one remembers.

My gardening groove never quite returned after the trauma of the gas line replacement and the loss of a foot of topsoil. Some of the poor plants dug up in the rescue attempt were being put back in the ground in late November, and a few unfortunates are still in pots and may or may not survive the winter. The gardener's lack of enthusiasm was compounded by an incorrect move while loading a large shrub and the discovery of previously undiagnosed spinal problems, fortunately nothing particularly serious but definitely annoying and limiting. Aren't we supposed to be able to keep Doing the Things as long as we want?

Looking at 2022 as a whole, though, many good things happened. During the Yucatan winter (which I will miss this year due to the failing felines), more Ohio friends got to experience that much-loved place. 

One configuration of “us” rescued a puppy before it could become crocodile food,

and  the little guy became the companion of a child dying of cancer and, eventually, of the child's mother.

Another week, a group of Wild Women celebrated a friend's 80^th birthday with a trip to Rio Lagartos. On our boat trip to various parts of that bioreserve, our nature guide's friend did a live broadcast for his radio show. Back in Ohio, a Minnesota friend visited during the May warbler migration, so of course a visit to Magee Marsh was required.  

The rest of the year, which featured no getaways of more than two nights, brought get-togethers with extended family and short explorations of eastern Ohio treasures like Cuyahoga Valley National Park, no slouch in the natural beauty department. 

Even closer to home, 2022 was a good year for Marietta projects. Through the work of our city administration and engaged (not to say stubborn) citizens, there has been progress toward improved pedestrian safety and increased public transportation. Our water and wastewater treatment systems will be getting much-needed overhaul. The pollinator habitat has expanded, its projects attracting a variety of volunteers (not to mention pollinators). It is likely that there will be accessibility improvements in the fairly near future. The Harmar Bridge butterfly garden is doing well in its first year, and the small butterfly garden in a tiny downtown park had a very good year. 

A landscape steward who recently moved back to our area in retirement has organized crews to remove invasive plants and collect, sort, and plant native seeds in nearby protected wild areas. Good things are in the offing.

And from any sort of historical perspective, most of us alive in the US today are living easier and longer lives than most of our homo sapiens ancestors. Some details mixed with personal reflection:

• Yes, Covid has caused a recent drop in average life expectancy, but most of us will live into our seventies or beyond, not the 47.3-year average at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1900, of 100,000 children born, 2000 would die before their fifth birthday. Today, that number is fewer than 25.

• 2022 was the year that found me older than my first husband lived to be (which a friend had warned me is a rather unsettling milepost) and, when I stopped to think about it, older than most of the writers I taught in my career. Leaving out the whole crew of those who died unarguably young (Marlowe, Shelley, Keats, at least two of the Brontës), writers often did not survive to what we think of as old age: Chaucer died at sixty, Shakespeare in his fifties, all the lady lyricists who were the favorite poets of my adolescent years by their mid-fifties, Thoreau at forty-four, and Austen at forty-one. They got a lot done in not a lot of time, but I suspect most would have welcomed more time

• 99.5% of us have indoor plumbing. As a child born in rural Scioto County, Ohio, in the 1950s, I was in the third grade before we lived in a home with a flush toilet. (And I do NOT miss the good old days of outhouses.)

• My family got our first telephone in 1966. It was a party line. When I was in college in the Seventies, the dorm had one phone for the 24 girls on our floor. Being in constant contact with anyone was impossible, and video chat was something out of science fiction. When someone moved away, staying in touch took real effort. Today, we can talk to anyone, nearly anywhere, pretty much whenever we want.

• Most of the world was rightly horrified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the likely war crimes that have been committed. For most of the last five thousand or so years, war and invasion were more common than not. There was a reason for all those European castles, and it wasn't to serve as backdrop for Disney films.

So my resolution for 2023 is to work on my sense of perspective. If these are not the best of times, they are probably also not the worst. 

Life goes on

 at the habitat, even at the end of November. Yesterday afternoon found a few insects making use of the late blooms despite our already having had one snow. A yellow butterfly (some kind of sulphur) refused to be photographed, but a very skittery skipper did finally settle down to feed on a Drummond's aster, though it still would not position itself to enable an ID.

The asters were still reasonably plentiful and in reasonable bloom.

Hoverflies were still hovering (though not cooperating with the photographer), and chipping sparrows and other small birds were making use of the site, no doubt because of the plethora of seeds.

Goldenrod

Sunflower

New England aster

The shrubs in the new shrub border seem to be loaded with buds, and while we will no doubt have to remove some in the spring, the spotted dead nettle has come back and will provide some of the earliest blooms for the earliest pollinators.

The end of the showy season does not mean that nothing is happening; we just need to pay a little closer attention to see what is there.

Perhaps the wrong name

A few days ago, walking the downtown river trail, I came across a Buddleia davidii, commonly called butterfly bush, in full bloom, even in mid-October. 

Who could not love that color? And while there were not many butterflies out on a chilly fall morning, the bush was hosting several fat bumblebees, of which, unfortunately, I did not get a decent photograph. And who doesn't love bumbles? Even this late in the season, the plant's leaves were in pristine condition, not a single spot or hole.

What's not to like?

Plenty. Butterfly bush is actually not a good butterfly plant. Yes, it provides a gorgous, sweet-smelling snack bar for adult butterflies over a long season, but those perfect leaves are a tip-off: this plant feeds not a single North American caterpillar, AKA baby butterfly. When we give this exotic plant a home in our yards, we are in fact reducing butterfly habitat, which must include space to reproduce if we want more generations of the fluttering creatures we purport to love. To make the case against buddleia even more strongly, more than 95% of North American songbirds feed their young almost exclusively on caterpillars: planting the misnamed "butterfly bush" also reduces the reproductive capacity of the birds whose nestlings will starve without the fat and protein provided by caterpillars. A single brood of chickadees, to give just one example, requires between 6000 and 9000 caterpillars before they can leave the nest. Earthworms are no good, being another non-native species providing little nutritional value.

This is what a leaf on a useful plant should look like in fall (unless of course it has been completely munched): spotted and full of holes.

If some of these leaves are turned over, they will reveal eggs or larvae hiding on the underside.

Something hiding on a riverside silver maple

I know that our gardening instinct calls for perfect, unblemished  plants, but nature requires imperfection and transience. Plants must be chewed for animals to live, and we bipedal primates require the interaction of plants, animals, and microbes for our own thriving.

Filling a yard with "butterfly bush" is the equivalent of feeding a child a diet of nothing but gummy bears. 

The plant needs a new name. The real "butterfly bush" is an oak, but that is a subject for another post.

The Village Grows

 The Fort Street Pollinator Habitat has become quite the happening place, with heliopsis and rudbeckia getting much taller than such plants have any right to be--and unfortunately, sometimes collapsing under their own weight--

Keeled-over heliopsis

but blooming anyway.

with their persistent blooms

Perhaps the most exciting growth, though, was the team of volunteers that came out earlier this month to create a mowing edge of bricks salvaged from a to-be-demolished building. When the bricks were offered by the building's owner a few weeks ago, some dedicated workers used crowbars and brute strength to remove them from the old floor, load them onto a truck, and unload them in a storage area made available by the church across the street from the habitat. On September 17, workers, tractors, and trailers materialized, and the bricks were moved to their new location.

At least twenty-one people showed up early on a misty Saturday morning to make this project happen. They included members of a church committee, the Rotary Club,

the leadership program of a local college,               

a teenager and his grandmother,

general community members, and a City Council representative. The team had an age range of more than seven decades. 

Our crew worked hard

but managed to have some fun along the way.

Photo courtesy of Marsha Ward

Some senior pictures were taken while the staircase was being weeded.

And in roughly four hours, the team dug out and installed edging along the habitat's 285-foot length.

A project that started with a discussion in a church basement and five geriatric committee members pinning solarization plastic to a slippery slope has become something else entirely. Volunteers from three community organizations, several faith communities, and the neighborhood have engaged in several work days on the site. Our small city has provided land and invaluable logistical support. Some local businesses have donated materials.

And nature is doing the rest. What had been a hillside of invasive Johnson grass and poison ivy is now home to bumblebees butterflies, and songbirds, and gives humans a reason to stop and take pictures.

Why old people should perhaps reconsider their leisure(?) activities

Yesterday I spent two hours at the pollinator habitat with a young friend, engaged in the ongoing attempt to keep bindweed, hairy crabgrass, and poison ivy at bay. The two hours resulted in areas that actually contained only plants we wanted, 

like Rudbeckia and hardy ageratum

or heliopsis and aster

but as any gardener knows, a weeder's work is never done. Even though some of my aging muscles were reminding me that they are not fond of working on hills, this weekend is taking me out of town, so this morning found me back at the habitat, with more bags to fill with unwanted vegetation.

     The work went well. Bindweed ripped out easily, crabgrass gave up its grip on the soil, excess zinnias got deadheaded. But as I progressed along the top of the slope, I noticed that a number of large, unfamiliar plants had infiltrated the site and were in some cases taller than I am. Given the propensity of large plants to shade out young things that we actually planted, and given that these invaders looked ready to go to seed, Something Had to Be Done.

   Having left my digging fork further up the bank, the ground being soft from an earlier rain, and being somewhat of the lazy persuasion, I opted to give one of the invaders a good yank to see if it would come up on its own. This was not one of my more brilliant ideas. 

     I had stepped out of the mulched area and onto the top of the slope itself. The ground being soft, yours truly being no longer young, and my stance being undoubtedly less than balanced, my attempt to uproot the plant found various body parts making contact with the (fortunately soft) ground, further cushioned by vegetation (fortunately, none of it poison ivy or stinging nettle). I managed not to slide too far down the hill, and no glasses or human body parts were broken. Alas, the same could not be said of the aster and echinacea on which I landed, though at least the Polygonum was one of the invasive types.

Casualties of the weed war

     Already on the ground and partway down the slope, I took advantage of the position to remove more bindweed, crabgrass, and Asiatic dayflower. After achieving verticality (a most ungraceful process, which fortunately had no human witnesses), I got revenge on the invaders by removing all I could safely reach, bringing up the entire root systems. However, what I had thought was the wild lettuce on Ohio's list of noxious weeds turned out to be Erechtites hieraciifolius, our native fireweed and an enthusiastic colonizer of disturbed sites. Since it has very little pollinator value, I was not terribly troubled by its demise--and am sure it will be back. 

     But I did find myself thinking--why exactly do I do this?

Eutrochium Euphoria

     Joe Pye weed to me is the essence of an Ohio summer, its poofy, pale-pink blooms decorating every unmown roadside and field and probably too much of my small yard. But it is such a sociable plant, attracting more tiger swallowtails than any other bloom I know. Yesterday afternoon, a single plant was hosting six, though they would not agree to cluster in camera range.

                    Formerly part of the genus Eupatorium, Joe Pye has now been given its own genus, but whatever it is called, the plant is a pollinator magnet. Summer afternoon entertainment around here includes checking out the activity. A fifteen-minute period today found bumblebees, honeybees, hoverflies, both the yellow and dark morph forms of tiger swallowtail, a black swallowtail, a great spangled fritillary, several silver-spotted skippers, a hummingbird, and the year's second monarch. Wildlife-watching without leaving my favorite porch chair. 

     In addition to being a nectar host for any number of adult butterflies and moths, Joe is a larval host for swallowtails, skippers, painted ladies, blues, and assorted moths and provides fall seed for small birds. Left standing, it can provide cover, and its hollow stems host cavity-nesting insects.

     This is not, however, a plant for timid gardeners. Dwarf cultivars of Joe Pye can reach five feet in height, and some species are downright enormous. The photo below is a specimen that volunteered in my yard, taken early in its second season in 2019. The tree in the background is a mature "Bloodgood" Japanese maple, more than fifteen feet tall.

The photo below was taken this evening, after the plant had been beaten down by heavy rain. The tallest stem is somewhere around ten feet, or maybe twelve. 

     In more civilized parts of the yard, I prune Joe Pye, cutting it back by a third the first weeks of June and July to keep it between four and six feet tall. These plants start blooming a few weeks later than the one left to its own devices but do just fine, and extending the bloom season is never a bad thing.

     And for me, being surrounded by so much buzzing, fluttering life is the major joy of summer.

 

Silver-spotted skipper

You fix one problem. . . .

     As any gardener knows, any new (and maybe just any) garden is likely to be plagued with weeds, and when that garden is in a public place and maintained by volunteers, this could be a problem. When the butterfly garden in front of Harmar Village's historic railroad cars was being created, a generous donor supplied heavy landscape fabric for the entire site, and a volunteer team installed it. When the site was planted, other volunteers cut holes in the fabric and tucked in our baby landscape plugs. It was a good day.

     For the most part, the fabric did its job. This spring's weeding team found no dandelions or bermuda grass, and with regular rains most of the plants thrived, with the exception of a few too close to a thirsty-rooted tree. But--we did discover a problem.

    The lovely dark organic mulch used to cover the landscape fabric created a perfect home for Glecoma hederacea, AKA ground ivy or creeping Charlie. We removed at least one wheelbarrow load of that particular unwanted vine and made the decision to remove the landscape fabric as well.

     Rather distressing was the discovery that the several dozen monardas on the site had completely failed to root into the soil. As we slashed and lifted the fabric from the site, entire monarda plants came with it, their root systems spreading through the mulch above the fabric but no feeder roots developing in the native soil.

     This could have developed into a serious problem, but with all plants now rooted in actual dirt, the site's bee balm patch seems to be doing fine.

We have since learned that landscape fabric does best with inorganic mulches like stone, so it has been banished from our pollinator-friendly space. 

     Our team was happy that most of our site's weeds were killed off, but our adventure with this particular garden product reminded us that solving one problem sometimes creates another (and that the right plant in the right place wants to live, and can survive a gardening mistake).

A long time between posts

     Back in Ohio since April 1, and much to report. 

    An event that set me back more than it should have was the much-needed replacing of our street's 100+-year-old gas lines. 

Obviously in need of replacing--but nearly fourteen weeks after the first heavy equipment was parked in front of the house, the very heavy piece of ancient (well, in technological terms) pipe is still lying next to what remains of our front-yard sidewalk. The gas company has not hauled it away, the sidewalk repair crew has not hauled it away, and my suspicion is that the trash removal company doesn't want it, either (and it weighs more than I am allowed to lift or even drag these days).  At least the removed sections of sidewalk are finally being replaced. The frames went in today, which I hope means the concrete will be poured on Monday.

    Unfortunately, digging up the old line and running the new one required very large holes. A distressingly large amount of what had been gorgeous dark topsoil is now several feet underground, replaced by the nearly hardpan--and probably nearly sterile--clay subsoil that had been in that subterranean zone. I have to confess that I grieved as if for a death and found myself not able to do much outside work for a ridiculously long while.

The restoration company has promised topsoil, but amazingly, some plants have started to grow even through that unfortunate clay. Hardy geranium "Rozanne" is thriving in the rock-and-clay zone,

some plants--like gladioli!--are showing up in new places, and most of the plants beyond the most heavily damaged areas are seeming relatively unscathed.

And while spring was late this year and summer heat early, the pollinators are back.

    Sighs of intense relief. 

    On the non-personal gardening front, teams of volunteers have added to the butterfly garden near an historic railroad bridge

though we are seeing more bees than butterflies thus far.

Around the corner from the railroad bridge butterfly garden, the riverbank pollinator habitat is doing just fine. 

Photo courtesy of Cody Henderhan

The rest of the summer should see lots of positive things happening. Stay tuned. (I will try not to stay away so long.)

Where the road ends

     On a recent gray, gloomy afternoon, I took the beach road until it ended. 

Not the actual end of the road, but definitely the feeling one gets

     

     This is one of my favorite Progreso walks, as this end of the beach is often nearly deserted, seeming populated mostly by small boats awaiting their next outing.

 

Though on this windy afternoon, kite surfing was popular.

     While it is listed on Google Maps as the Calle Playa, past a certain point, the road becomes too narrow for most motor vehicles, and somewhere around Calle 140, closes to vehicular traffic altogether to protect the sea turtle nesting zone. 

I have never been lucky enough to witness turtle season, but a very dead fish in a probably dead shrub indicated how high the tides can get here (and how wild the winds). This unfortunate creature was about four feet up in a bush a good hundred feet from where the Gulf was on this afternoon.

     The road actually ends here, at a tidal flat near the Yucalpeten marina, a spot that was hosting a flock of probably fifty tiny shorebirds on this particular afternoon.

Some larger birds, like this handsome sandpiper, allowed themselves to be photographed.

     But the real reason for walking to the road's end is this: to sit on a rock with no humans in sight, watch the waves crash, smell the sea, and occasionally get splashed.

Such a spot feels, literally, elemental, allowing the human visitor to be in contact with wild air, ocean, and ancient stone.  

            And this wild place, with its feeling of meditative isolation, is only a forty-minute stroll from a favorite restaurant with fresh seafood and cold beer. How perfect can life get?