If you happen to come across a pawpaw patch in the springtime, when the trees have covered themselves in small, deep red blossoms, please don’t be tempted to step closer to smell the flowers. Admire them from afar. Zoom in to take a photo. Like skunk cabbage and jack-in-the pulpit, pawpaw flowers have a putrid odor to attract the flies and beetles that pollinate them, and the dull color of their flowers resembles rotting meat. Pawpaw’s small flowers, rarely...
The Elements of Life Water, light, and air fuel our lives. We depend on them, as does every plant and animal. Light energy powers the chemistry of photosynthesis to transform elements like carbon and hydrogen into sugars, food. Oxygen fuels the production of life energy in every living cell. And water fills every cell of every living creature; gives us sap and blood; powers every process of life. There is no life, not even the tiniest microbe, without water. ...
May, 1607 Jamestown Island was uninhabited and covered in native vegetation in May of 1607 when the first English settlers chose to establish their colony on a small peninsula in the Powhatan River, now the James River. That peninsula, along with most of the shoreline of the lower river, was under the control of the Powhatan Chiefdom, a confederation of thirty tribes by that time, based to the north at Werowocomoco, in what is now Gloucester County. This chiefdom of...
Have you ever planned a party, set up the bar and buffet, and then felt disappointed by how few people turned up to enjoy your hospitality? We are left wondering what went wrong. Curious gardeners planting flowers to support pollinators have sometimes been left feeling that way in recent years. We plant a tempting array of all the right plants and then sit watching and waiting for hummingbirds, butterflies, bees, and other winged pollinators to swoop in to enjoy...
What To Do in May and June Avid gardeners find lots to do during May and June as spring melts into summer. The enjoyment of spending time outside watching things grow and listening to the birds can distract us from our spring to-do list. But taking care of business early in the season will result in a more attractive garden and more success through the summer months ahead. The days are getting noticeably longer and warmer as the first flush...
The Living Fence Gardening is the art of domesticating the wild, of creating living geometry within our landscapes. Order, symmetry, lines, and boundaries please the eye and soothe the spirit. We are inclined to organize and define our spaces by dividing them up into smaller pieces we can manage, to protect them within walls and behind gates. We contain what is ours, setting aside sacred space, our own ‘paradise,’ from the wider world. We exclude the unwanted wildness living...
“I use only native plants, native to the planet Earth. I am using indigenous plants; they are indigenous to this part of the universe.” Bill Mollison, Founder and Director of The Permaculture Institute In the Beginning… Let’s begin with the obvious: we live within an ever-changing ecosystem. Europeans came to North America more than four centuries ago, cutting trees, planting fields, building homes and roads. Native Americans also cut trees, built homes, planted fields, hunted, and lived...
A Mystery and A Memory We found several large evergreen shrubs in our new yard that we couldn’t immediately identify, when we moved here over a decade ago. We could pick out the boxwood and Camellias, but we were especially curious about the very tall, open shrubs that the birds loved the most. It was August, and tiny bluish gray drupes were ripening along this shrub’s woody stems. Its leaves were fragrant. Birds gathered in its dense and twiggy...
We can consider winter as the ‘weekend’ of the gardening year, both the last month and the first months of the year when we can enjoy a much-needed rest from the regular routine. A period of rest and renewal restores energy to both the garden and the gardener. It allows us time for reflection on the successes and challenges of seasons past and an opportunity to plan and prepare for the seasons to come. If winter is the weekend,...
The United States Department of Agriculture released an updated Plant Hardiness Zone map on November 15 that reflects changes for about half of the country. This updated map, the first since 2012, is based on the average coldest winter temperature, on the coldest night of the year, for each region of the country. The trend shown on this map paints an accurate picture of how many parts of our country are warming. The USDA cautions, however, that the data...