Rose Campion

Day 248: Good old Rose Campion! Even though the Barren Wasteland could use some serious weeding, Silene coronaria rises well above the tangle of old grass, last year's Rudbeckia stalks and the yarrow I've been totally unsuccessful in eliminating. I don't do much to the Barren Wasteland these days, preferring to let the tall "volunteers" hide the sins of my neglect. The Rudbeckia tends to get out of hand and the ones closest to the sidewalk interfere with trips to the garage. When I get tired of detouring around them, I yank a few. They re-seed and repopulate readily, negating any feelings of guilt I might have about removing them. The Rose Campion is another story. I would encourage it to spread, but it doesn't seem to want to expand its territory. But then, the Barren Wasteland is about survival, and any flowering plant which doesn't have plans for world domination is welcome there.

Rose Campion

Day 269: Rose Campion (Silene coronaria) is one of the survivors from the various packages of mixed wildflower seed I've thrown into the Barren Wasteland over the years. Those "regional" mixes often include species which may be considered invasive in certain areas of their specified "region" (an example would be California Poppies, included in almost all blends for the Pacific Northwest), and they often include non-native, non-aggressive species as well. I have found that Rudbeckia (Black-eyed Susans) will quickly dominate any space, so every few years, I pull out the older plants, leaving a few to keep the colour going. Rose Campion has never been a problem, although it's spread within the confines of the Wasteland itself. Pink or not, I enjoy its bright eyes, borne on stems two feet or more in height, with soft, fuzzy, silvery foliage. I always allow it to go to seed where it stands since it is so well-behaved.

Rose Campion With Hoverfly

Day 260: I can't count the number of times I've seen a Park visitor freak out when a "bee" hovered in front of their face, to then be disbelieving when I try to explain that the insect in question is a hoverfly, a bee-mimic and harmless. The combination of yellow and black stripes pushes the panic button in most people, and not without good reason. This of course works in the hoverfly's favour, keeping it from being snatched up by a bird. Besides not having a stinger, hoverflies (aka "flower flies" or syrphid flies) differ in appearance from bees in several ways, most notably that they possess only one pair of wings. Bees and wasps have two. Adult Hoverflies are known to suck "honeydew" from both aphids and scale (another insect pest), and Hoverfly larvae feed primarily (and voraciously!) on aphids. "Flower flies" are important pollinators, so count yourself doubly lucky if you have syrphids such as this specimen of Eupeodes fumipennis in your garden.

No Longer Barren

Day 304: There is a 10-foot wide strip of land between my house and the garage which, with the ambition of a new homeowner, I decided to turn into a garden when I first moved here over thirty years ago. A portion of it was occupied by a heavy wooden lid over the pit where the captive-air tank lives (the system which pressurizes water to the house) and a concrete slab over what must have been an old well. The rest of the space was overgrown with grass and weeds, so I set about digging and tilling, preparatory to planting beans and corn. I should have known the project was doomed just by looking at the soil: a pale brownish-grey substance with no tilth to speak to its ability to nourish plants. I was rewarded with some spindly, tough beans and nothing else, but even so, it took several years for me to admit defeat as far as produce was concerned. Changing tactics, I began trying to establish wildflowers in what had by then become known as the Barren Wasteland. Many experiments later, this is what the Barren Wasteland looks like today, a riot of chest-high colour. Despite being no longer barren, its name shall endure as a testament to my labours and the amazing determination with which black-eyed susans and rose campion vanquish all invaders.

Tomentose

Day 108: Botanical word for the day: tomentose, i.e., a covering of fine, woolly hairs. It derives from Latin "tomentum" which, to my great amusement, means "cushion stuffing," although today's cushions are largely stuffed with polyurethane foam. What advantages would there be for a plant to have evolved tomentose foliage? Several, as it turns out, the first being that the woolly surface is more difficult for insects to navigate and thus they tend to avoid tomentose leaves. The matted hairs of the tomentum (here used in the non-cushion sense) also insulate tender surface cells from frost and wind. They also reduce the rate of transpiration and reflect harsh sunlight. Harking back to an earlier point in this discussion, an article in a recent issue of Scientific American suggests that plants which have more textured leaf surfaces are affected by fewer insect pests. Scientists monitored the difficulties beetles had in traversing leaves with various microscopic surface structures and found that they took longer to cross a given distance on a textured leaf than on a smooth-surfaced one.

In The Barren Wasteland

Day 273: The 10' strip of yard which lies between the back wall of the house and the garage is known as the Barren Wasteland. Much of it is occupied by the cover for the pit in which the captive-air tank of my domestic water system sits, and a concrete slab of similar size which has no obvious reason for being there. As I discovered early on when I tried to locate a vegetable garden there, the soil is poor, rocky, nutrient-depleted fill. Still, I wanted something in that space so, being the type of person who doesn't want to kill a perfectly good flower outright, I began transplanting the things I didn't want in my flower beds with the thought that if they survived in the Barren Wasteland, they were worthy of admiration, and if they didn't...oh, well. The plot also became a repository for the contents of free wildflower seed packets, those "especially selected for your area" envelopes which tend to be filled with non-native species and outright weeds. I figured I was in for some serious weed-pulling, but also that I might get some colour in the long term. In other words, the Barren Wasteland was destined to become a home for the unruly, the mildly obnoxious, the problem children who deserved a chance to redeem themselves to become useful members of society: Oriental poppies, Rudbeckia, mint, English bluebells, Phlox, Pigsqueak. Somewhere along the line, Rose Campion crept in, and every year it surprises me when it opens its bright magenta eyes at the tops of 3' stems. How it grows so tall before I notice it is anyone's guess. I suppose it's because I overlook the Barren Wasteland's faults and accept that it's doing the best it can to please me, and please me it does, even though its population of rejects leans rather toward the pink end of the spectrum.

When Pink Is Permissible

Day 284: I take a lot of flak from people who know I detest pink when they see these flowers in my garden, but above all, I respect Ma Nature, and since she's insisting that these self-sowing, persistent volunteers be given their time in the sun, I'm not going to object too loudly. All four (Rose Campion, Deptford Pink, Cosmos and Nigella) are on the "magenta" end of the scale, not even close to the "baby pink" which causes my gorge to rise. They give a bit of colour to the flower beds now that the blues have mostly gone by, and for the most part, they remain below the taller yellows and golds (Snapdragons and Gaillardia) which currently dominate the Barren Wasteland. Bright reds are woefully lacking in my yard other than Crocosmia, somehow brushed aside when I was planning a "no-theme" planting scheme. My one main consideration was to avoid pink, yet here it is, and though it pains me to admit it, I'm glad to have them. Magenta...I'm tellin' ya, they're magenta! Shut up with the "pink" already!

Barren Wasteland

Day 287: I call it the Barren Wasteland: the ten-foot wide space between my house and garage. When I first moved here, I thought to turn it into a vegetable garden, working around the concrete and wood dead spaces which cover the pit where my water system's captive-air tank lives. Little did I know that nothing but weeds would grow in that soil...not radishes, not zucchini, and definitely not corn or peas or tomatoes. A few years' experiments with bush beans yielded rather sickly crops, so after several attempts at trying to draw blood from the proverbial turnip, I threw in the towel and let the Barren Wasteland go. Then one year I hit on the bright idea of making it a wildflower garden. I bought a mix of seeds "designed for the Pacific Northwest" without paying too much attention to the content. It came up mostly California poppies which, despite being pretty en masse, are undesirable for their tendency to go out of control and into monoculture. My vision of a rampant English-garden style space refused to go according to plan until I relocated a vigorous Rudbeckia to one corner, apparently providing just the "lift" the Wasteland needed to take off on its own. I even found that some of the wildflower seeds germinated long after they'd been sown, delicate Deptford Pinks shooting up here and there accompanied by orange Wallflowers and the occasional Tall Phlox from some prior point in history. I added Rose Campion (purloined from a friend's yard) and more Rudbeckias, even a wild currant. Little by little, the Barren Wasteland filled in. Today, it's far from barren, but the name persists for this "wild space" where colour now crowds out the weeds. I'm happy with it, even though I am still pulling California poppies.