Category: Botany for Gardeners

Committing Tree-icide: Planting

20200522_101626

It’s spring. Perennials are emerging from underground. Spring bulbs are in bloom. The buds on are bare branches are bursting into leaves. Except for those that aren’t. A look around indicates that a lot of my neighborhood trees didn’t survive the winter.

Trees are not cheap. There is a significant cost when it comes to purchasing and planting a tree, especially one large enough to satisfy the HOA. It’s easy to blame their subsequent demise on Colorado’s notoriously capricious weather. Easy, but you’d be wrong. By far, the primary reason our new neighborhood’s trees don’t survive is improper planting.

It’s not the weather that’s killing the trees. It’s us.

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Hayfever Means Spring

Cottonwood flowers_CanonCity-CO_LAH_0788

We’re all tired of being confined at home, and many of us are looking for any excuse to get outside—even though we’re pretty much limited to a walk in our neighborhood or puttering in our yard. But as much as I love to garden, I’m finding myself limiting my time outdoors. There’s pollen out there!

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The Birds and the Bees

Bee on Tithonia_DBG_LAH_7606

There we were, a gaggle of pre-adolescent girls approaching puberty, giggling as we shared the details of the recent talks we’d each had with our mothers. Apparently, the parents had gotten together and decided to synchronize their lectures about the birds and the bees. That was smart on behalf of the parents—armed with the facts, we wouldn’t be sharing misinformation.

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Megafauna & Obsolete Fruit

Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera)
Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera)

I try hard to create original material for my blog. After all, you can go read someone else’s writing somewhere else! But when I read this article, I knew I had to share it with you. It was that good.

We tend to think of geologic time on a huge scale, and the ice ages happened an incredibly long time ago. We forget how short our human history really is. This article made me look at the world with new eyes. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

The Trees That Miss The Mammoths,
by Whit Bronaugh

Meet the Euphorbiaceae

Poinsettias_20091218_PLH_5602

I can guarantee that you are familiar with at least one member of the plant family Euphorbiaceae. Especially at this time of year, we decorate our halls not just with boughs of holly, but with Poinsettias. Typically bright red, you can now purchase plants with flowers in shades of white and peach, and even a variegated combination.

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Mallows

Who doesn’t like marshmallows? Floating in your cocoa, shaped into a peep, or toasted over a campfire and smashed into a s’more, we all love the squidgy sweetness. I have always wondered where the name came from. What’s a mallow, and what is it doing in a marsh?

Turns out, Malvaceae is yet another family of plants, and one that most gardeners will recognize.

Malva hyb.

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Shhh… the Plants are Listening!

Corn silks_LAHQ: What has ears but cannot hear?
A: A field of corn.

Q: Why is corn such a good listener?
A: Because it’s all ears!

Q: Why shouldn’t you tell secrets on a farm?
A: Because the potatoes have eyes, the corn has ears, and the beans stalk.

Are you groaning yet? We make (bad) jokes about ears of corn, but it appears that plants might really have ears.

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Deadly? Or Delicious?

Devil’s Trumpet (Datura sp.)
Devil’s Trumpet (Datura sp.)

Eating just a few leaves or berries will leave you writhing on the ground. Your mouth dries, your pupils enlarge, and you run a fever. Within minutes, you gasp as painful cramps turn into vomiting and diarrhea.  First your pulse races, then it slows, as does your breathing. Your head pounds, and then the hallucinations start. You’ve become paralyzed.

But soon, none of that matters any more—because you’ll be dead.

Happily, if you do manage to get to a hospital in time, there’s a good chance you’ll recover, although the symptoms can last up to three days. Eating an unidentified plant is never a good idea, but if it happens to be one of the more dangerous members of the nightshade family, it could be fatal. Continue reading “Deadly? Or Delicious?”

Beautiful Buttercups

Potentilla sp.
Shrubby Cinquefoil (Dasiphora fructosa)
Potentilla neumanniana

Buttercups. The word brings to mind a field of yellow flowers, or perhaps a young girl sniffing the flower and dusting her nose with pollen. And indeed, some of the flowers in this family, the Ranunculaceae, do make you think of a little cup filled with bright yellow butter. And some don’t.

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pH for Gardeners

Daylily
Calendula
Butterfly bush

To a gardener choosing which plants to grow, pH is an important consideration. While the pH of most soils falls somewhere between 3 and 9, the majority of common landscape plants prefer a pH slightly on the acidic side, say 6.2 to 6.8. However, some plants, such as blueberries and rhododendrons, prefer an even more acidic soil (with a pH in the 5 to 6 range) and other plants, green ash trees and clematis, for example, do best under more alkaline conditions, with a pH above 7.

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