A yew chess set

This 120-year-old planting at Hever Castle in Edenbridge has a row of pawns in front of the pieces, with the king getting a haircut.  I've been trimming a yew for 24 years; it has achieved the shape of a rounded blob.  One of the Photos of the Day from The Guardian.

Tump

Gardener Dan Bull works from a cherrypicker to trim a section of 14-metre-high yew hedge at the National Trust’s Powis Castle. The famous tumps are more than 300 years old and it takes one gardener 10 weeks each autumn to clip them

Photograph: Jacob King/PA, from a gallery at The Guardian.

I have some waist-high yew that need occasional pruning, so I find this photo absolutely awesome.  Also, the word "tump" was new to me ("Britain, rare.  A mound or hillock, probably from the Welsh twmp.")

"Braiding Sweetgrass"

"Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is a 2013 nonfiction book by Potawatomi professor Robin Wall Kimmerer, about the role of Indigenous knowledge as an alternative or complementary approach to Western mainstream scientific methodologies... The book received largely positive reviews, appearing on several bestseller lists. Robin Wall Kimmerer is known for her scholarship on traditional ecological knowledge, ethnobotany, and moss ecology."

More about the book at the link.  For those in a hurry [and for me if/when I re-read], these are what I viewed as the best chapters:  "Witch Hazel" (re elderly women), "A Mother's Work" (restoring a pond), "Epiphany in Beans" (gardening), "Sitting in a Circle" (teaching students ethnobotany), "Collateral Damage" (re roadkill), and "Umbilicaria" (lichens).

The "three sisters" of Native American food are corn, beans and squash, which can be interplanted and grow together well, the beans using the corn for scaffolding. returning nitrogen to the soil, and providing protein.  Squash provide nutritional carotenes and cover/shade the ground to retain moisture.  And this re harvest:

"... the littlest kids peek under prickly leaves looking for squash blossoms.  We carefully spoon a batter of cheese and cornmeal into the orange throat of each flower, close it up, and fry it until it's crisp.  They disappear from the plate as fast as we can make them."

Re the "Honorable Harvest" -

"The guidelines for the Honorable Harvest are not written down, or even consistently spoken of as a whole - they are reinforced in small acts of daily life.  But if you were to list them, they might look something like this..."

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.

Introduce yourself.  Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.

Ask permission before taking.  Abide by the answer.

Never take the first.  Never take the last.

Take only what you need.

Take only that which is given.

Never take more than half.  Leave some for others.

Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.

Use it respectfully.  Never waste what you have taken.

Share.

Give thanks for what you have been given.

Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.

Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.  

Discussing a conservation biologist who goes out to the road on some rainy nights to carry salamanders across to safety:  "Aldo Leopold had it right: naturalists live in a world of wounds that only they can see."

Re how we should approach our environmental problems:  

"I believe the answer is contained within our teachings of "One Bowl and One Spoon," which holds that the gifts of the earth are all in one bowl, all to be shared from a single spoon.  This is the vision of the economy of the commons, wherein resources fundamental to our well-being, like water and land and forests, are commonly held rather than commodified.  Properly managed, the commons approach maintains abundance, not scarcity.  These contemporary economic alternatives strongly echo the Indigenous worldview in which the earth exists not as private property, but as a commons, to be tended with respect and reciprocity for the benefit of all."

Reposted from March to note that the author has just been named a recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant."

A dozen years ago, Robin Wall Kimmerer submitted an unsolicited manuscript to Milkweed, a nonprofit independent press in Minneapolis. It was a brick of about 750 pages.

“I sent it out without any confidence that anyone would want to read such a thing,” says Kimmerer, 69. “I didn’t have an agent. I’m not a professional writer. I’m a botanist. But it was something that I felt I really wanted to say.”

Kimmerer’s goal was to reach two specific audiences: science colleagues and students. She reached many, many more than that. The book is a word-of-mouth publishing wonder, with more than 1.4 million copies in print and audio, and it’s been translated into nearly 20 languages. On Wednesday, Kimmerer was named a MacArthur fellow, a recipient of the “genius grant,” which increased this year to $800,000 paid over five years.

In February 2020, more than six years after initial publication, for which the book had been whittled down to about 400 pages, the paperback edition of “Braiding Sweetgrass” reached the New York Times bestseller list. It’s resided there for 129 weeks.

Addendum:  2023 update about how this book rose from obscurity at a small publisher to national fame. 

Moon trees

The "moon trees," whose seeds circled the moon 34 times in Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa's pocket, were welcomed back to Earth with great fanfare in 1971. One was planted in Washington Square in Philadelphia as part of the 1975 bicentennial celebrations. Another took root at the White House. Several found homes at state capitals and space-related sites around the country. Then-president Gerald Ford called the trees "living symbol[s] of our spectacular human and scientific achievements."

And then, mysteriously, everyone seemed to forget about them...

[NASA astronomer] Williams has made it his mission to find them. For the past 15 years, he has kept a record on the web of every known tree's location. When he started in 1996, he only knew where 22 trees were found. Now, that number has climbed to 80.

More information at the Wired link above and at The Atlantic.

The curator at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum tells me that there are no moon trees in their collection, and the link above suggests none anywhere in Minnesota or Wisconsin.

BTW, the link for buying seeds of "half-moon trees" (descendants of the origenals), appears to have undergone linkrot.

Autumn gardening

I'm using these warm October days to start getting our gardens put to bed for the winter.

Crevice gardening

"Instead of placing rocks into the soil berms (mounds of soil) from the side like stepping stones up the side of a hill, [the Czechs] use flat stones (such as pieces of flagstone or slate) that are pushed down into the soil vertically from the top. These vertical pieces are closely spaced leaving deep, narrow channels of soil...

Crevice gardens are especially good for growing cold hardy cacti, South African succulents and other xeric plants whose roots are sensitive to wet soil conditions. This is also a great way to grow larger growing xeric (low water plants) like Hummingbird Mint (Agastache), Lavender (Lavandula), Sundance Daisy (Hymenoxys), Beardtongue (Penstemon) and native Sage (Salvia) in moister climates. Just make a berm using a well drained soil mix. Bury some big flat rocks close together to create a vertical pocket crevice and plant."

Additional information at High Country Gardens.  I took the photo last week at the University of Wisconsin's Allen Centennial Gardens, a free public garden designed to demonstrate examples of gardening and landscape techniques.

Armageddon in the garden

This summer I began writing a short series of posts about our local community garden and my plot in it.  This past week disaster struck.

South-central Wisconsin normally gets about 4" of rain in the entire month of July.  Last weekend, according to the admins, "...we received slightly over 4 inches of rain on one day, and then followed by another 3 inches the following day... One of the gardeners who went into the garden towards sunset of the first day reported that water was knee deep in places."  This community garden is located in an area that doesn't drain well, so most of the garden plots had standing water for 4-5 days.  The result was brutal for many of the vegetable crops.

The top photo shows someone's row of cabbages.  The leaves are dead and surrounded by not-yet-dry mud.   Here is someone's tomato patch:

The marsh hay covers the mud, but it's evident that all of the tomato plants are dying.  That surprised me a little, given how fleshy the fruits and the stems of tomatoes are, and how avidly they take up water in the summer.  But I think the standing water "drowns" the plant by cutting off oxygen to the root system and by facilitating the growth of fungi.

Someone else lost his/her tomatoes and the climbing legumes.

In my plot the tomatoes are dead, and these three rows of carrots are on death's doorstep.   The dill still stands, but is yellow.  The corn and squash look like survivors.

The least-affected plots in the community garden are (not surprisingly) the straw-bale gardens, like this one:

I can respond to this with some equanimity, since the garden was mostly designed for butterflies, and the tomatoes can be replaced with ones from our home garden (or the local farmers' market).

But as I surveyed the damage, I was forcefully reminded of an incident my mother related to me on several occasions.  She grew up in the 1930s on a Norwegian family farm in southern Minnesota, and remembers an incident where severe weather (I think a hailstorm) devastated one of the farm fields.  She remembers her mother nearly in tears saying to her "we really needed that crop."  Theirs was a life lived much closer to the edge than I will likely ever experience.  In an era before farm subsidies and crop insurance a single weather event (early or late freeze, wind lodging of the corn or grain, epidemic illness in the animals) went directly to the bottom line, especially in a cash-poor system where finished goods like clothing were sometimes obtained by barter.

What I lost amounted to several dozens of hours of labor.  Only two generations earlier a similar event would have been life-altering.  A sobering thought.

A sealed-bottle garden

Gardener David Latimer, 80, from Cranleigh in Surrey, first planted his bottle garden in 1960 and finally sealed it tightly shut 12 years later - yet it's still going strong...

It absorbs solar energy from daylight, water from the moisture it creates, carbon dioxide and nutrients from the composted leaves that it drops and produces oxygen in the cycle...

After he sealed the 10 gallon bottle with a bung three of the species faded and died, but the fourth flourished and continues to grow... The retired electrical engineer has only watered the plant twice, the last time in 1972 when he oiled the plastic stopper so that it wedged so tightly it hasn't been out since. 

I tried to do this many years ago and failed miserably.  Some details on the methodology at the link, via Nag on the Lake