Too much of a good thing

They look so innocent, those sweet pale-blue blossoms that are one of the year's last flowers. Ditto the little plants that sprouted at the foot of the boxwoods, just looking for a little sun. Of course I had to let them blossom and move a few of the plants to a better neighborhood, right?

Not necessarily. Looks can be deceiving. Despite all its good qualities, which are many, this aster (which has been variously identified as large-leaved, heart-leaved, and Short's) has turned into the bully on the block. I will start with the good news.

• This late-blooming aster is an absolute pollinator magnet.
• It can bloom (sporadically) as late as the first week of December in southern Ohio, providing food for any bumblebees that venture out late in the year. 
• It blooms in both sun and shade.
• It tolerates drought and poor soil--basically, it asks for nothing.
• It's pretty and makes a decent cut flower.

The perfect plant, right? Not always, it turns out. 

My garden happens to have good soil, the result of millennia of flooding and leaf mold and decades of tending by a passionate and talented gardener whose work I inherited. (Don't hate me.) This aster is a plant that behaves VERY BADLY in good conditions.

The first year after being introduced to the garden, it played well with its aster cousins in the wildflower bed, making this lovely October display. I dug up some extras for a potted pollinator patch on the back patio and put others in the local plant sale.

The second year, I gave away dozens of asters to friends who wanted to improve their pollinator habitat and dozens more to the plant sale.

The thinning was not enough. At the beginning of their fourth season as more-or-less cultivated plants, these lovely asters are attempting to replicate Ohio native General Sherman's march to the sea.  For the last year, I have been pulling baby asters out of sidewalk cracks, flowerpots, the brick walkway to the back patio, the pollinator bed, and the entire north-facing lawn strip around the corner from the pollinator bed. Asters have invaded the hosta and hydrangea bed and surrounded the lilac, encroached on an ostrich fern planting, and filled an entire corner where they are attempting to choke out the violets and left room for barely a thread of creeping charlie. (Okay, maybe this last is not a bad thing.)  Today I filled a bag that once held forty pounds of potting soil with the corpses of baby asters--and no doubt left some roots lurking in the soil, where they will laugh and send out more runners and create even larger aster patches. 

The moral of the story: no plant is a good plant for all situations. Now that I know what it is, I see this aster growing in fields and meadows and getting along just fine with the other plants there. No monoculture seems imminent. In rich soil, though, it becomes a bully, and if I donate any to a plant sale (whenever we can hold such things again), I will send along a warning label. 

• Give this plant a lot of room. Wild meadows and woodland edges are its natural habitat.
• Do NOT plant it in rich soil. This is a plant that needs to be kept on a diet.
• Do NOT include it in a formal setting, unless you can keep after it all the time.
• Consider confining it in a large container, where it will overwinter with no problem. You will still have to dump the container and dispose of excess asters every couple of years.

It is indeed possible to have too much of a good thing.

Flores de Yucatan, part 1

This winter finds me back in the Yucatan, which has far better winter weather than Ohio generally does (unless one is a fan of rain, mud, snow, ice, and gray skies with occasional bursts of sun). This morning my perambulation took me to Parque de las Americas, a large park in the Garcia Gineres neighborhood of Merida, home to bigger-than-average trees for this city. The park is worth its own post, but my color-hungry Northern eyes are focusing on flowers this week.

This lovely thing is growing in a neighbor's yard,

up a wall, and out over the sidewalk.

It was also full of bees, though none were willing to hold still long enough to permit much of a photo.

Thanks to the sharp eyes of a participant in a plant identification group on Facebook, this beautiful mystery-to-me plant was quickly identified as Petrea volubilis, or purple wreath vine, native to much of Central America, including the Yucatan peninsula. Not only are its flowers gorgeous in multiple stages of their existence,

they are attractive to butterflies and hummingbirds, as well as the bees I saw darting among the bloom clusters. The plant is also a traditional medicinal, with its leaves used as a wound salve and in the treatment of diabetes. In earlier times, its blooms were combined with those of another native shrub in a tea used as a morning-after drug by women seeking to avoid pregnancy.

The plant is useful even in death. Its wood is reportedly dry, fast-burning, and useful as fuel. Queen's vine (another common name for the plant) is definitely more than another pretty face.

Sanguisorba canadensis

Many perennials have stopped blooming by now, but in the Toledo Botanical Gardens this morning, a clump of something I did not know was working with so many bees that the stems were vibrating. 

Fortunately, the plant was labeled. It was Canadian burnet (Sanguisorba canadensis), which, contrary to its name, is found in many parts of North America, though it is rare in much of that range. As much of a wildflower enthusiast as I am, the botanical gardens are the only place I remember seeing this plant, and today I was lucky enough to see it at peak bloom.

A single glorious stem

The plant in its context in the perennial border

Burnet is in the rose family, though it looks nothing like any rose I know. While the specimen I saw is flourishing in a garden setting, in the wild it is a plant of wet prairies, meadows, swamps, and fens; it is not a plant for dry areas. The root system is woody and spreading, making it a useful plant along stream banks, where it will help hold the soil.

Moreover, our native burnet is a magnet for bees, both native species and honeybees, and its late bloom season makes it a valuable addition to the fall garden. Anyone with a damp, sunny spot should probably give it a try.

After all, what's not to like about a gorgeous plant for difficult conditions that feeds the pollinators?

Feeder visitors

For someone used to having a variety of birdfeeders, having to cut back has been frustrating, especially since the arboretum across the street attracts so many birds. Our in-town neighborhood is full of outdoor cats, and as fond as I am of our three felines, invasive, non-native predators on the loose are a Very Bad Thing. Unless one has a barn in need of rodent control, all specimens of felis domesticus should be kept indoors as they really do not belong on this continent. I also do not like having to collect the corpses of the cats that periodically get run over in front of our house. (Rant over. On to the actual subject of the post.)

Being unwilling to sponsor the neighborhood Hunt Club any longer, I sadly took down our birdfeeders. Fortunately, we do have a small walled patio where I was able to install one pole in a large tub that held annuals over the summer and hang two mesh sunflower feeders. Birds, not being birdbrains in the pejorative sense of that term, have found their way to the free food. Over the last couple of days, we have had

• a pair of white-breasted nuthatches
• chickadees
• titmice
• house finches
• cardinals
• juncos
• at least one goldfinch
• house sparrows (who have not gotten the memo that they don't like sunflower seeds)

and of course, squirrels.

The last flower of 2017

For three years now, this aster has been the last flower blooming in our yard. This photo was taken today, November 18th, following at least one hard frost that left ice on the cars.

Have not seen any pollinators for a week or so, but this little beauty is waiting for them.

The plant has been tentatively identified as Short's aster, Symphyotrichum shortii, but plants with this flower have demonstrated a variety of leaf shapes and sizes around here, leading me to ID it variously as large-leafed aster, sky-blue aster, and arrow-leafed aster, depending on what the leaves of that particular plant have decided to do. Since all are volunteers, some in sidewalk cracks, and all are native to this area, we could have all four showing up. Or perhaps they have been getting friendly with one another, as is the way of many compositae. Who knows?

All of the plants are important nectar sources for fall bees and butterflies, as well as seed sources for birds. They are also indestructible, asking for nothing from humans save to be left alone to grow. Last year, one was blooming near the library of December 1.

It will be interesting to see how long this little guy keeps going.

The blooms of October

By mid-October, the floral year is winding down around here, with most things either dormant or going to seed. (But what a year it has been for seeds! I keep giving seeds away, other people keep sharing them with me, and if all goes well, the Mid-Ohio Valley should have greatly expanded pollinator plantings in 2018.) But a few hardy plant souls have kept going (a good thing, considering the lack of leaf color after September's drought).

Few people are likely to be surprised that some asters are still in bloom

or that many grasses are at their loveliest.

But after sulking through all of 2016 and the spring and summer of 2017, the shrimp plant on the back patio finally decided to bloom.

I had been about to give the thing away--or compost it--but it has now been forgiven.

Some of the annuals are hanging on, like salvia, snapdragons, and a potted verbena bonariensis that is still doing its part to feed the bees.

The centaurea montana not in an optimal setting has decided to bloom again, and its ridiculous blue fireworks are popular with both pollinators and people.

But the real surprise was today's opening of an old-fashioned red canna, which had languished as a naked rhizome in a friend's garage since last November and has been in the ground here only a little over a month.

Plants--they do keep on keeping on.

Fields of gold

September is a good month for prairies, even though the year is winding down. The summer flowers and grasses are going to seed, making lots of creatures very happy, but this was the highlight of a recent walk at Blue Creek in Whitehouse, Ohio:

a knock-your-socks-off swath of goldenrod. Further along, there were acres of solidago of various species, including at least one that was wafting an absolutely delicious scent along a mile or more of trail. In my seventh decade, I had never before noticed that goldenrod has scent.
 

My wanderings had taken me to the nursery fields of the Toledo Metroparks, from which some 2500 pounds of native plant seeds are harvested each year to be added to the various sites the park system is restoring.

Serendipitously, my walk coincided with a royal visit. The monarch was surveying the fields of gold.

Have to believe we are magic

A true confession: I was one of those kids who wanted fairies to be real. I would have loved to communicate with the spirits of the flowers and talk to the dryads when they decided to come out of their trees. Didn't happen.

But looking at some landscapes, it is not hard to understand why our ancestors felt spirits there. Forests in particular have this effect on me.

Sometimes I half-expect to see magical beings rising up from the woodland floor.

And who wouldn't love to hear the conversations these polypores are having with the lichens?

A few days ago, an old, not particularly impressive-looking field, now part of a northwestern Ohio park,

was alive with tiny creatures whose wings flashed silver in the sunlight. Could they be--fairies? Alas, no; they turned out to be small grasshoppers. Today, when of course I had no camera, I came face-to-face with one as it munched on a blossom of weedy Canada thistle. When not in flight, these grasshoppers are a very ordinary-looking gray or green. But--a tiny, green and silver flying thing that dines on thistlebloom--isn't that a kind of magic?