We need to sequester carbon in the air. By now I doubt there is a person with a TV giving weather news who can argue that point. OK, OK, they need an actual brain too. Let's get past quibbling about that. One of the first things people tend to say is, "Go plant a tree." It's something which individuals can do to help clean the air. We can passively wait for the coal and oil companies to stop producing so much, or for our fellow humans to stop using so much "dirty" energy, or act ourselves in a positive way. I plant one, you plant one, everybody plants one and we have 8 billion new trees out there working for us, right?
The argument is sound. It would work a bit slowly if started right now, and should have been started 50 years ago, but better late than never. So let's all go plant a tree.
I bet you've already heard that. I do, a lot. A little hitch here, though. I am no longer physically capable of hiking out to some piece of land needing trees which also has an owner welcoming my intrusion and purpose, toting a shovel, a tree, and some water to set it in properly. 50 years ago, sure. 30 years ago, maybe not so much. Now? Not enough parts of me still work.
It's not that I don't value trees. I grew up a country girl, was traumatized when the family moved to St. Paul. When I was able to plant a tree in our -because married then- first owned, not rented yard, I planted a weeping willow. Within a couple years it had grown so fast and been pruned so well it became a climbing tree for the kids. My oldest named the tree Alice. Then we moved.
The next house came with plenty of trees, so I planted bushes, fruits, and flowers. Again we moved. Divorced. Moved again. Finally I got my own house, on an 86' wide x 180' deep lot, which when bought contained only weeds, mostly grasses 6 foot tall. Neighbors used it for family football games. Once it gained a modest ranch style home, a garage, and a driveway, we moved in. Let me tell you about that yard.
Let's start with the front, which I'll define as everything forward (east) of the front wall of the house. We had to keep the very front clear because technically the city owns that easement. A clump of three river birches went on the north side of the driveway, now so tall they have to be trimmed up annually where the branches hang way down, so people and cars can go in/out. Its roots are pushing up rows of bumps in the driveway, homes for random seeds, entry for rain. From the driveway down the slight hill to the north property line it's mostly daylilies, the double orange kind, fulva kwanzo, donations from my parent's St. Paul house just before they sold it to go rent in a senior community. They've filled in solid now and have been making their own donations to other yards. Closer to the house in that same patch is a Pink Spires flowering crabapple tree. It was sold with the description that it grew to 25 feet. That was passed a few years ago. It starts a deep pink when it flowers and over the course of a couple weeks the petals fade to white and coat the ground. Closer to the house are a couple euonymus, aka burning bush plants among whatever lawn covering tolerates the slope and mowing schedule. Currently that means crabapple and euonymus seedings, some creeping charlie, and a bit of grass. Prickly! Don't go barefoot there. Seriously.
On the other side of the driveway and closer to the house is the next birch clump, this time three paper birch. They are in an L-shaped flower garden, lined along the driveway side by what has grown into a 3-foot wide row of hostas, purple flowers with narrow solid green leaves. I admit grass invaded and has never quite gotten conquered. Lily of the valley comes out from the house, and another pair of euonymus sit under the windows. An occasional thistle manages to find a home but we work on getting those out, along with too-prolific invading lily of the valley, hundreds of invading euonymus babies, and ash, maple, and box elder babies - if you can call something which made it anywhere up to 3 feet tall a "baby". This is not the place for them.
It is the place for daffodils, crocus, tulips, dutch iris, bearded iris, brown eyed Susans, Alaska daisies (white), pyrethrum daisies, astilbe, purple coneflowers, native red/yellow columbine, blue balloon flowers, liatris, butterfly bush, purple violets, milkweeds, and about 25 varieties of daylilies. (Whew!) Originally they were planted as a rock garden, but the rocks have sunk except for the lumpiness which makes it risky to walk there. Later generations of many plants have scattered and inter-grown. Like I said, not the place for trees.
You'll find two sour cherry trees in the front yard, one replacing a pear tree which died from fire blight within a month of planting. Over by the front SE corner a huge sugar maple is embedded in a border of a variety of lilac bushes, a wild fragrant pink rose invading everywhere it can evade a mower, more daylilies, and another hosta border, this one also purple flowered but wide solid green leaves.
The rest is lawn. By this I do not mean, say, Kentucky bluegrass or red fescue, as many think a lawn should be. I do admit, some actual grass survives there. We were required to put some in when we started. The first thing we added was white clover, and there may be a few of those left as well. Crocus bulbs were dug in, widely scattered, as were scattered scillas, now closely covering most of the lawn area... all over. The violets I mentioned earlier were a couple clumps dug out of the last place and brought over, and it is still a spring project of my son Paul to harvest their seed pods just before they burst, collect their seeds, and scatter them widely. In fact this year he's started scattering them in other places, like an unmowed roundabout near where he works, along with scilla seeds, now that those have scattered themselves widely. In spring our lawn is blue, then purple, then a mix of yellow and purple, then yellow and green. After that it's anybody's guess. We tolerate dandelions, daisies, brown-eyed susans, volunteers from the "official" flower garden, the yellow whatevers which contaminated the grass seed a long-ago cable company used after digging across everybody's front yard, creeping charlie, and everything else that - again - tolerates our pattern of neglect and reluctant mowing. I've seen field and sweet clovers, sedges, baby junipers, baby chokecherries as well as sour cherries, and on and on.
This was just the front yard. The north side of the house is simpler to describe, as the tall ferns have totally filled in the slope between garage and the neighbors yard from the few planted when we moved in. One tree was pulled out two years ago, after it made it to 6 feet, but was too close to the garage-turned-extra-bedroom to keep. It grew that tall because everybody was reluctant to tromp on the ferns, but we've found out how hard they are to kill even when we're trying. Hard. For years. It's a hard slope to mow, so why not all ferns there?
The south side of the house is a fairly short area because I'm only considering between house walls and property line, just like the north side. Here we have two more cherry trees in the middle of the chaos we tolerate as lawn. Those replace the apricots which grew well but succumbed to some kind of fungus on the fruit. Inedible apricots are pointless. Along the house, spaced not to obstruct the AC and various meters which need reading, is the blueberry bed. Months were spent hauling compost, putting in soaker hoses for irrigation, planting, mulching, making borders, because they have special needs and our soil is naturally basic, not acidic. Well, then anyway. The front edge of that bed is daffodils, though the huge variety has winnowed itself out to hearty survivors, so about 4 varieties remain. Again grass and other weeds have invaded, so the blueberries are needing to be totally re-done or abandoned. I have put in last year's purple daylily varieties in one spot no longer containing bushes. By the sump pump drain a hybrid tea rose has died back to rootstock, and while bushy, blooms mostly are lacking. Thorns are still plentiful. Other weeds like thistles and lily of the valley have also invaded, and cherry trees love to start there, though now those include chokecherries.
Angling out from the house, along the front side of a chain link fence for the back yard, some highbush cranberries also survive, though they've gotten severely pruned back this spring in hopes of returning to former glory, again to be full of first spring arrival birds. Cardinals, robins, and cedar waxwings finish off the red berries right outside the dining room window. Some of the double orange daylilies and scilla now grow up between the cranberry bushes, and another row of the wide leaved hostas separate it from lawn. Continuing away from the house, across the other side of a small path of lawn left for access to the fence gate, are red honeysuckle bushes in a hedge just inside the property line, sort of a continuation of the lilac hedge line, and also sporting their own border of hostas. Occasional weed trees have to be pulled out of there, and like the lilacs, the honeysuckles need trimming back severely on occasion.
Let's head through the gate into the back yard. The fence along the south property line first has currants, struggling right now because the neighbors planted one of those weed maples which grow 80 feet tall with multiple trunks leaving their whole back yard so shaded they can't even grow grass. Now it shades a significant part of ours as well and interferes with our satellite TV dish. Next in line are two apple trees, a Haralred and a Sweet Sixteen. After those come the chokecherry hedge, another one needing periodic severe pruning. Following to the corner and wrapping around it, the hazelnuts. Continuing along the back fence are two large oaks and a blue spruce. Once past the shed which one oak drapes over, we have clumps of paper birch again, much healthier than those near the driveway, interspersed with elderberry and dogwood. Coming forward toward the house along that fence are a red maple, several service berries, and finally along the deck and its ramp are a second chokecherry hedge which the ferns are working hard to invade. All that is basically the border of the back yard.
Several feet inside that last stretch of fence and parallel to it is a large fenced off rectangle with the remains of the raspberry patch. Admittedly it needs work but it is doing a fantastic job of supporting a humungous section of Virginia creeper vine, lovely in fall with its red leaves and blue berries, not so much in summer as it strangles everything it can reach and climb, aka everything. However it doesn't keep the birds out of the the nesting boxes on the fence poles which over the years have been homes to tree swallows, bluebirds, wrens, and (in another part of the yard) a tree frog. That patch is also our family pet cemetery, with several residents. The neighbor on that side, north of our yard so they don't much shade our plants, has a couple large Norway pine trees. I will prune branches which dangle over the fence on our side, providing I can reach them. If I can't, what grows beneath them is short enough to get sun.
That far back corner, the northwest one, was the low spot when we moved in. Spring thaw left it a large puddle, as did any heavy rainfall. I put in a pair of weeping willows, about 6 foot tall. Just like "Alice" they grew exceedingly rapidly, got pruned into climbing trees, and entertained young children. My rule was one had to be large and strong enough to make it into the first branch themselves. If they could do that I figured they were safe in the rest of the trees and had permission to go as high as they felt safe, as long as they could come down themselves too. The world looks way different to a kid from in a tree. The willows both grew fast and died fast, but the kids in question outgrew them before we cut them down and replaced them with the birch, dogwood and elderberries. The willows had done their other job well of breaking up the clay so the area could drain.
Still not done yet, along the back of the house and deck, there have been a variety of things, grown with more or less success. Since our climate zone was changing, several things were tried and made a year or six, including a tulip poplar, and a couple different peaches. The green ash died from emerald ash borers, the Wealthy apple tree made great apples but was short lived, the Nanking cherries were pretty but my son wanted to try something else he could actually eat, honeyberries, which now are trying to out-compete the sow thistles. The race is neck and neck.
Under the living room picture window, because our house plan puts it in back, are more daylilies and a couple red prince wigelia bushes, thriving very well despite a several-year fern invasion, now mostly dug out. The large fish pond used to sit right in front of there until the vinyl liner needed replacing and we decided it was too much work and expense. We're slowly converting that back to sloping yard, but I miss the water lilies and other tropical water plants kept there along with either koi or shubunkins. All had to be returned to the basement in late fall or die as ice totally froze down to the liner. Neighborhood frogs welcomed the pond too, but we found out the hard (heartbreaking) way that they couldn't survive there with no mud to burrow into. Fall cleanings included taking a bucketful of those to a nearby lake before it iced over. Latecomers were out of luck, found and removed in spring.
The back stairs cut in to the yard, then a terraced drop to a basement egress window. This time there are two rows of variegated hostas, one topping each terrace. The lawn continuing south from the house hosts a growing patch of tiger lilies, a favorite since childhood. The fence still extends further, but this time we're on the back side of the cranberries. On this side it's what passes for lawn, generously covered with all kinds of branches from previous prunings where energy lasted just long enough to cut and pile them, not move them way back. The pile leaves room for the corner gate to swing either way.
There were two smaller lined ponds more into the middle back yard which contained lotus for a couple years. Those ponds hatched out tadpoles ("toadpoles") for the yard and dragonfly nymphs as well. The forms still sit there holding whatever rain/snow falls, each year filling in with more dirt. Volunteer cattails started to take over and yellow iris began to compete with them, decaying back and building up dirt levels. We leave those to do their thing.
Also in the middle of the back yard is a grape arbor, with green grapes on one side and purple on the other. Near them is a bird feeder on a pole. Further back but far enough from the oaks is a fire ring, used for bonfires for entertaining and roasting brats and marshmallows for s'mores, fueled by dropped or pruned wood from the rest of the yard. We may have to rent a chipper one of these years as the piles of potential firewood are accumulating way faster than they get used. More mulch won't hurt.
There is some open space there, both for visitors for those backyard parties along with needed tables and chairs, and for kids to run around in when they visit. We're eying one of those oaks with a high, sturdy, and nearly level branch as a spot for a tire swing or such, some day soon, but a bunch of dead, nearby low blue spruce branches will have to be trimmed off first. Milkweeds like to spring up here and there out back and we let them go to seed, even harvest and spread those seeds very much elsewhere. New varieties of ferns are volunteering, and mushrooms spring up in the fall if it's wet.
Now that you've had the tour of the yard, the one place I can still get to and manage a bit of work in, I ask you: I keep hearing people tell me I need to go out and plant trees to save the earth. So... keeping all this in mind... where?
No comments:
Post a Comment