The crocus are up. It’s still February and too early for flowers but maybe this isn’t a bad thing. What if there are insects that need early pollen? What if this just helps the ecosystem adapt to changes in weather and climate?
The problem, I tell the client after they broach these questions, is not that they’re wrong, but that they are not entirely right, either.
If everything shifts ahead two months we don’t get ecological business-as-usual. The ecosystem is not a machine crafted for all the parts to fit together perfectly in synchronous lockstep. It is a mess of chaos with each part of the system pushing or pulling to such a granular level of refinement you get balance.
This only works if the balance is maintained, if the other plants, insects, animals, and microbiota actually move up their schedule, too. Or, if even only the pollinator is awake at the same time the flower is blooming.
The problems is, it’s possible for things to become out of sync due to temperature-induced gaps in the flower-bloom schedule. An example of this could be pollinators hibernating while flowers bloom and then wilt too soon when a “late” freeze arrives.
It’s not the freeze that’s late, I tell them, it’s that the flowers are early…but that’s just me being selfish because I love winter, and miss playing hockey on the lake with friends.
A native plant (or exotic, depending on who you ask), Virginia creeper, theoretically, provides food for birds in winter. It is also known to be, “overly vigorous,” when it receives excessive watering—or, it turns into a wet year.
For that very reason, I must regrettably report that this summer the client asked me to remove a large patch of it that was choking out other locally native plants. It’s a tough decision but they made it because the balance no longer leaned towards species diversity.
With Virginia creeper, the problem is its voraciousness. Or, the problem is us and houses, but you can’t tell that to the man who pays the bills…
Especially in wet and rainy years, Virginia creeper will expand its solar footprint to excess, working its way up and through to outcompete other beneficial plants.
Poisonous to humans and pets, but important to birds that eat berries, yet if we remove the Virginia creeper and leave behind the Apache plume, scrub oak, and (yes, even the) Russian sage, we remove a plant that will always try to take more than its fair share and take it first (as defined on any scale other than its own) and expands its solar footprint till it consumes all resources.
Does Virginia creeper really act with such salacious selfishness? Not at all. Ironic to say, maybe, but only in the framework of everyone else’s needs should we consider it a selfish plant.
Beyond birds, it offers habitat and home for additional populations of native insects. Which means even as it chokes out native plants and trees, it is providing space for some of our most threatened ecological niches to gain additional resiliency (insects—not mice).
This is all, of course, speculation, educated guesswork, and good ol’ fashioned field observation mixed with healthy doses of colonial privilege, anecdotal assumption, and reasonably serious research. Virginia creeper is actually a beneficial plant because it provides habitat for snakes and food for birds but is that statement true if we examine the vine’s impact on Apache plume and rabbit brush’s growth rate?
We need to check this perspective and be clear it’s totally human centric. Even then, if we’re discussing perspectives in which we say randomly something like, “plants are altruistic,” or even, “plants are selfish,” it is often framed in context of evolutionary advantage.
And if that’s the case then it’s not really altruism.
Can plants actually be altruistic? Let’s say not, because the power exchange within the ecosystem is usually not self balancing…but if we look at the larger system as a whole, individual players within the ecology only behave in ways that are tangential to altruistic action. If they can’t be altruistic themselves can the larger system still transmute selfishness into a more common currency?
It depends on their needs.
This leads to questions: is it helpful to anthropomorphize intangibles like “ecosystem,” or even the broader concept of “nature”? Can the larger system work altruistically if the individual is always motivated by self interest?
Maybe best if we never know…but, if you’re looking for answers, best ask the Virginia creeper, or my bank account.
“It’s not fair.” I said, maybe the one wrong thing I could say to get fired. The property owner wasn’t happy. Some seeds got left in the sun for too long and lost the bio availability to germinate and my attitude wasn’t helping.
Technically that *was* my fault, but they only sat in that metal cubby at the base of the outdoor grill because I sprained my ankle playing hockey. And yes, I’m getting a little old to be slammed against the boards, but hockey is, or was, a necessary component of my life, supporting my social and mental health.
Sometimes I get hurt. A simple twist of fate and now the seeds don’t grow. I admit it’s true I traded professional success for an HBO binge. Four months on the couch then back to work and no PT because the Doc says gardening is it’s own therapy.
So, not the problem, I know. I was reactive in the conversation about seeds and when the property owner tried to better understand what happened I overreacted even more. I felt persecuted.
All this from bad luck playing hockey and I know it’s all my fault but they didn’t need to point it out.
Yes, saying it’s not my fault, or it’s not fair, is both unprofessional and childish but getting fired for it seems like overkill, even if it was only temporary. I know. I need more therapy than just the physical kind, but the little bits that I’ve had helped me learn how to apologize. Good enough to get my job back with conditions.
Maybe I should provide some context. I have one older brother and one younger and when I was seven I felt overlooked. I never saw the work my older brother put in to earn his freedoms and I certainly didn’t see the endless grind of parenting necessary to keep us happy, whole, and safe. I may have said more than my fair share of, “it’s not fair”.
In fact, I am learning it may even have come to define my worldview unconsciously to such a foundational extent it became a lens through which I view all conflict. A lens looked through irrationally, held up in ignorance, distracted by the event itself placed in my path. I know better now, and begged off for past mistakes.
The boss was kind enough to offer me my job back on a probationary basis as long as the next round of seeds germinates successfully. Here’s to second chances and another season of growth!
Attached note from Property Owner: After reading this I have to shake my head. So melodramatic! I never “fired” the guy. I always planned to bring him back. He just needed a cooldown period before the next task. Good help is hard to find and everyone has their quirks. The key is finding someone whose crazy is compatible with my crazy. This hothead? This I can deal with.
Sure, half his thoughts got refereed by a therapist, but he does good work, shows up on time, and is affordable. Best of all, there was a time he knocked a chunk out of a painted pillar so the raw wood showed through and he told me. So, I know I can trust him.
But he is right. I will fire him if the new seeds don’t grow.
The pollinators flit amongst a botanical smorgasbord yet all I see are inverse Jack-and-the-Bean-Stalk metaphors: in the real world the giants are us. *We* are the megafauna. The flowers are skyscrapers serving all day buffet, so if you’re a pollinator, do you diversify or stick to ready staples, same thing everyday?
I’m the type of person who likes to change up their diet over time, with some seasonal variety sprinkled in as needed, and so while I watch the native bees hyper fixate on the Russian sage for months in a row I wonder what drives them to return to the same meal. Taste, accessibility, pollen-count-per-visit?
If I were a native bee I wouldn’t stress about spiders, or garbage trucks, either, because you’d hope one would respect the stinger and the other is so big and lumbering in the driveway it is easy to avoid. The biggest threat, however, is continuously countered by the bees who wear orange or yellow stripes across their furry backs, making it clear they should be considered off limits to birds.
Russian sage.
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Butterfly milkweed.
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Butterfly milkweed and cowpen daisy.
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Butterfly milkweed and weeded cowpen daisy.
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Cow Pen Daisy, native to Texas and parts southwest, are self-seeding, and notably allopathic, meaning it produces chemicals that suppress other plants to various degrees.
Lucky for me I weeded it in early August and the milkweed rebounded nicely.
Lucky, indeed, because I didn’t even know until recently what caused the problem. I thought it was because the cowpens were blocking the sun, or sprinkler, or taking too much water from their roots. But now I know better, thanks to the research I did for this post. We still have it on the property, it’s a great pollinator, too, but now try to make sure it only suppresses plants we don’t want.
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Apache Plume.
Of the top three plants favored by pollinators on the property, native bees consider the transplanted Russian Sage to be top tier, second only to the native Apache Plume. A sentiment of controversial popularity as their are other insects that think for both plants the flowers are too small, too big, the pollen tastes somehow wrong, or the terrain is dangerously spaced, or, even otherwise inaccessible.
Think about being a butterfly and get wingsuit base jumping as your superpower. Skimming these towers of flowers, avoiding spiders and those monstrously larger garbage trucks. Would you ever want to go anywhere other than your happy place?
The Milkweed was planted late, artificially cold-straited, and hand planted into ground wet from lawn sprinkler overspray where the high altitude sun only cooked the soil a little bit.
Here was the balancing act. Once the seedlings germinated we needed strong light but they wouldn’t germinate if the soil dried out at all.
I was skeptical. The butterfly milkweed seed’s need to have moist soil for almost 90 days uninterrupted, but the pressure was starting to build. If I didn’t succeed what happens to my relationship with the client? This is the second year they’ve bought organic milkweed seed, and it might be the soil or climate or me but nothing’s emerged. Nothing much, actually, from that first season except two lonely plants (Asclepias syriaca L.).
Now the client tweaked the next purchase hoping we’d have better luck with a different species (Asclepias Tuberosa) but even if I don’t screw up the cold striation, the hot weather might sink the project. Then whose fault is that?
The only thing to do is cheat, fess up, and buy mature plants to plant in May, as a guarantee something might flourish.
When asked about it, I’d say it’s probably better to leave the seeds in the freezer for longer rather than let them thaw out, best to simulate a deeper winter than an early summer. Then when it’s time to plant, the seeds go from a freeze cycle to immediate planting in the wet ground.
The requirement that the soil remain moist for 60-90 days created some skepticism. We have to limit our watering and I wondered if the sprinklers would be up to the task. Hence the extra plants. I wonder if I’m operating on more luck then skill.
I get asked this over coffee and surprised even myself with the answer. Sometimes you must take care of the garden, and other times you let the garden take care of itself.
