Rebirth

This is the time of year when I am always amazed my plants have survived the winter, especially the older trees and shrubs in the backyard. The apple tree, lilacs, pear tree and viburnum are leafing. The dogwood is showing buds that will become flowers two years after half of the tree died and had to be cut down. The daffodils, after several false starts when the weather turned cold, have bloomed in profusion. Many of the irises I moved to another plot last year are growing despite chipmunks at first digging them up. 

After the haircut (Margo D. Beller)

As usual in the spring deer found a way to get through a weakness in the netting to eat some of the euonymous bushes as they started to put out fresh growth. So the fence posts were straightened and increased, the netting restrung. Before doing that I hacked the euoymous shrubs back severely. The plants are secure but now I wonder how I'll be able to do maintenance when the daffodils die back in a few weeks.

I have not dealt with putting the canna pots out front yet because we've had weather see-sawing between above and below average temperatures. With the chipmunks in mind I am going to limit what pots I put out front, including any herb or vegetable I may buy to grow.

Finally, I had to give my houseplants a haircut after leaving them untended (except for watering them) all winter. They won't go out to the enclosed porch before Memorial Day, and I plan to be very careful to monitor for any insect invasion, such as last year's fungal gnats.

Before it was brought inside for the winter in 2024.
(Margo D. Beller)

The most problematic, as usual, was the big houseplant.

You'll recall I had allowed this once-small houseplant to get so big it had become very difficult to move in winter, especially up and down the three steps to my front room. Last year I tried leaving it outside but when the wind blew it would fall over, despite its bracing. I moved it inside the porch into the corner where it would get a few hours of sun. Alas, when it got very cold the plant became very stressed. I've never intentionally killed a plant and wasn't about to start. So I brought it inside to the kitchen, but it didn't get any natural light there. I wound up moving it into a corner of my vestibule where it would get some light from the front room.

After several months a strange thing happened: Despite dim light and dry heat, it started growing new leaves for the first time in years.

First that growth was at the top, the new leaves scraping the ceiling. But then the plant started growing from the bottom. Now what to do? Well, when the top leaves started dying en masse, it was easy to decide to use my lopper and chop down what had become an unwieldy tree. With the braces that had held up the plant now gone (and used to reinforce the deer fencing) it was much easier to move the pot to the front room.

Spruce at right, watching the big plant.
(Margo D. Beller)

The other morning I told Spruce Bringsgreen, the blue spruce we planted in 2007, what I had done and why his plantmate would not look the same when back on the porch this year. Last year Spruce had watched over this plant once I moved it inside and fretted about what to do as winter approached.

"That's OK," he said. "I understand why that had to be done. Rather than kill it outright you gave it a new chance to live and grow."

True, I said, and that's what Spring is all about - rebirth.

A Life or Death Decision

Believe it or not, the plant pictured below was once small enough to sit comfortably on a desk. When the person who had that desk left the job, she left the plant behind. My first mistake was I took it home. My second mistake was putting it in a bigger pot. It grew and grew.

When it got bigger I wondered if pinching it would make it bush out. So I cut the top. Boy, was I wrong. It created a two-headed monster that got bigger still. Eventually I cut off the weaker of the two heads, but that created a long, skinny plant that needed to be braced in order for it to stand upright.

(Margo D. Beller)

Getting it into the house before winter and getting it to my enclosed porch before summer has been an increasing hassle as I age. To move it now I have a small handtruck with bungee cord, the best $29 purchase I've ever made, But even here I still need my husband (MH) to hold the pot as I pull it either up or down the step from porch to house and the three to the front room where I keep my plants in the winter.

Why do I mention all this? Because of the fungus gnats, which have continued.

When enough adults and nymphs got stuck to the yellow sticky traps I decided the time had come to do something radical. I bought potting soil. I spread a tarp on the porch and dumped old soil from five of the six plants into a styrofoam box, then repotted the plants in fresh soil. I quickly took them into the house and even put some yellow sticky traps in them in case I missed a gnat.

At that point, with the table I keep out there empty of plants, I pulled up the half-filled bag of sunflower seeds - and discovered it full of gnats.

Some people would've fainted at the sight of this infestation. Some would have screamed for help. I grabbed the bag and pulled it outside, then opened and started kicking it to get gnats to leave. Then I checked the old coffee containers holding seed. More gnats and a lot of rot. Out they went. The bag of seed is in a trash bag. The seed in the containers is in a garbage bag. Both are now on the patio. The box was taped and put near the compost pile until I decide what to do with it.

One of the containers and the seed in it were clean. The other containers had to be washed for recycling. I put three of them, empty, back on the porch for possible use. I'm hoping some of the seeds in the bag are clean enough to use until I buy a fresher - smaller - bag of seed for the feeders this winter.

That leaves the big plant. It is too big and trussed up for me to pull out of the pot easily to put in new soil. For now, I have a time-released water feeder in the pot so the majority of the top soil can stay too dry to support eggs. There are yellow sticky traps and vinegar traps in the pot and both types have been effective. 

Sticky traps, vinegar traps in the cups (with clear wrap
on top) and glass water feeder.
(Margo D. Beller)

I still find the occasional gnat and there is always the fear one will get into the house and infect the plants. So I have to decide: somehow pull out the plant, change the soil and bring it inside; leave the plant either outside or on the porch over the cold winter and watch it fade and die; or cut it down now, dump out the pot and hope my gnat problem is finally over.

I hate the idea of killing a living plant, especially one that I've had for at least 14 years. It wasn't its fault that when I gave it suitable conditions it went from a desk plant to a tree. Over the years through trial and error - mostly error - I've learned which plants to pinch, which to keep moist and which to leave alone. Like my evolving outdoor garden, my indoor plants have changed over the years. Some die, some are replaced. 

I've never intentionally killed a plant but whether I leave this one out in the cold to die slowly or hack it down now, that is looking more likely. 

No red-bellied woodpeckers at the feeder yet, but one will surely come.
(Margo D. Beller)

Meanwhile, I took seed from the one container that had no rot or gnats and put it in the house feeder. I put the feeder outside. Since then it has drawn cardinals, chickadees, titmice, white-breasted nuthatches, jays, a goldfinch and a house finch. Normally this feeder would've gone out in September (and my plants taken inside in October), but we've had September-like weather this week. Maybe now the feeder will draw some southbound migrant birds I wouldn't have otherwise seen. 

The birds are providing an unexpected benefit from what had been an unmitigated disaster.

Goings-on in My Garden

It was pouring in my part of New Jersey on this Saturday of the Memorial Day weekend. My office allowed us Friday off for a long weekend, and I used the sunny, warm day to go to a few garden centers to look at things I am considering for my property.

Hepatica (white flower) and vinca (purple flower) in front netted garden plot
(Margo D. Beller)

Turns out hundreds of other people had the same idea.

In this time of coronavirus, scared people have been stuck at home for over two months. But now that it is finally feeling less like winter, there is a pent-up urge to get out. But to where? Many are ready to hit the beaches (at approved social distances) or the mountains but the rest of us are still staying close to home. So I should not have been surprised the three places I visited were filled with a lot of people buying vegetables, flowers, mulch and other garden supplies. I would say the ratio of buyers to store employees (everyone masked) was 3:1, all trying to make up for lost time. In the end, I bought nothing,

Even so, I have been doing work in the garden because it allows me to be outside, away from people and work, and do something that creates loveliness.

Azaleas (and growing daisy plants) protected from deer
(Margo D. Beller)

I have been lucky. I have perennials that come back year after year, although sometimes there is winter damage. For instance, the peony buds froze during the unexpected cold snap early in May. But the rest of the flowers and shrubs have done very well with the cooler temperatures and abundant rain. The red azaleas are the best I've seen in years, columbine that have sprouted from seeds thrown in various beds over the year are flowering and the daffodils were glorious while they lasted. I even had a flower bloom I haven't seen in years - hepatica, a woodland flower that got into one bed and I've left alone, waiting for it to flower. I've only seen it bloom one other time before now.

After my first attempt at growing peppers from seed for this year failed, I threw more into a small pot. When warm sunshine started hitting the window sill more frequently, nine seedlings appeared, crowded together. They are now spread (socially distanced?) between two bigger pots on the sunny window sill. They will be staying there until they get big enough to put into bigger pots that will be protected in a chicken-wire cage from chipmunks, which have already dug up rosemary I had in a pot and almost ruined the dahlias I planted.

Pepper seedlings, 2020 (Margo D. Beller)

Unfortunately, when you look at pictures of my flowers you see the deer netting. I've learned to make it disappear in my mind's eye but I can't do that in reality because of the deer, many of which have been passing through the yard in recent days now that there are bushes and other plants to eat.

Chipmunks, however, can easily get behind the netting and in some ways are more deadly to the plants with their digging, looking for nuts they buried last autumn. I surround vulnerable smaller plantings and those like the dahlia not big enough yet to fill their pots with old metal gutter fencing to keep the diggers out. It works, for the most part.

Houseplants on the porch with seed containers (Margo D. Beller)

Only recently has it been warm enough for me to move most of the houseplants to my north-facing enclosed porch. The humidity will do them more good than being inside a house where the air conditioner will be on soon enough.

As for the birds, the other day I heard a male blackpoll warbler singing in one of the backyard trees. This bird, whose spring mating colors makes it look similar to a black-capped chickadee, has a distinctive song that sounds like a braking truck and has one of the longest migration routes of the birds passing through here. It is usually one of the last migrating warblers, so hearing it prompts mixed feelings - it's a warbler but it's also the end.

Empty wren box (Margo D. Beller)

I know there are plenty of other birds still heading north, but my yard has gone quiet as the birds staying here have begun their nests and don't want to draw attention to them. No house wren claimed the nest box this year, although once in a while I've heard a wren singing nearby. My two seed feeders seem to be drawing a lot more jays, house finches and grackles, so when they are empty that will be it for feeders until autumn, save for the hummingbird feeder that usually draws one or two in June into July.

By then it will truly be summer and the flowering plants of this spring will have faded except in my memories.

Onward and Upward in My Garden

After finishing a collection of letters between garden writers Katharine S. White of North Brooklin, Maine (and the New Yorker) and Elizabeth Lawrence of Charlotte, NC (and the Charlotte Observer), I was inspired go to back and re-read my copy of Ms. White's New Yorker columns "Onward and Upward in the Garden," which was the title of her 1979 collection, edited by her husband (E. B. White) and published two years after her death.

Clockwise from bottom - Christmas cactus, trout begonia, a pot holding the Chinese

evergreen, orchid, humidifier, amaryllis (Margo D. Beller)

I read this book of columns many years ago after reading an interesting biography of KSW by Linda H. Davis. I found the collection in a used bookstore in Marblehead, Mass., and the owner was so impressed by my knowledge of White and gardening (learned, in part, by watching my paternal grandfather) she gave me the book. (It didn't hurt that MH was buying other books for himself. Bookstores never go hungry when he visits.)

It was not long after reading this book the first time that I found the book of letters, in another used bookstore (this time I paid for it).

Ms. White is a woman after my own heart. She claims she knows nothing much about gardening but she knows what she likes and the simpler the better. She is not shy about stating her opinions. She complains that the harsh Maine winters kill many of her plants but she buys more anyway, for use indoors and outdoors. Despite increasing physical infirmities, she just can't help herself.

She says she has no room for the potted plants she brings inside; that is my complaint, too. Our house faces southwest and our front room (originally a company room but used mainly to hold books and CDs) holds my plants, either on the large window sill or on some nearby tables where the plants get light but not direct sun. There are several different ecosystems in this one room, and unfortunately the other south-facing rooms aren't big enough to hold a plant table along with the other furniture.

Books, geranium in its hanging pot and a small pot of cactus to its right.
(Margo D. Beller) 

The one orchid I have - a moth orchid, a gift from an orchid-loving friend who thought I would love it as much as she - would do very well in one of my humid, windowed bathrooms, but both face north and are rather dark. My enclosed porch, where every summer I put the plants that, like the orchid, need light but not sun, faces north and is not insulated for all-year use. So in winter my orchid stands near a small humidifier, which also helps the nearby Chinese evergreen and another huge plant I can't name that started out as a little guy in a pot on the desk of a co-worker who left it behind when she went to another job.

Most of my plants I did not buy but are either gifts or orphans I took in - the latter include a red annual geranium that was pulled from a window box of a restaurant in town and dropped on the sidewalk, a pot of snake plants that I inherited from my maternal grandmother, miniature cactii from an office move, a coleus pulled from a planter in the middle of Times Square (it is very easy to take cuttings and root them in water. I now have great-granddaughter plants from the original.), a trout begonia from a friend's office (this one is also very easy to root) and a jade plant from the late father of a friend of a friend who didn't know what to do with it.

From left to right: begonia (with pink flowers), rosemary, citronella plant,
rescued geranium, 2 pots of pepper seed and one of two
great-granddaughter coleuses. (Margo D. Beller)

All of these plants have thrived and, in the case of the snake plant, grown almost too well. Recently I received a gift basket of houseplants from my mother-in-law, I bought a second geranium for its hanging pot (and then couldn't bring myself to dispose of the plant when it started flowering) and a small rosemary plant that is now a huge rosemary plant, so huge I could cut some, root it and give the daughter plant to the same friend who gave me the orchid. Another friend was eager to unload some of her citronella plant and I battle it each summer to keep it from overgrowing.

It can be a hassle to take care of so many plants, but it is certainly easier than fussing with deer netting while testing my knees and my back putting in or tending to outdoor plants.

As KSW says, "I find that the chief pleasure of growing things indoors is that it can be a natural process - a simple way to bring nature into the house."

She reads garden catalogs like literature, and I reminded MH that our one visit to White Flower Farms in Litchfield, Conn., was because of her many references to the company. She also cites, among others, Wayside Farms. Both are still around and now have websites popping with plants. But KSW sought a real catalog to thumb through and dream over. You can still do that, too.

I won't be doing it, however, because, as she would be the first to admit, that way madness lies.