Hummingbird Food

Day 188: Red-Flowering Currant (Ribes sanguineum) is native to Washington, and grows as a sprangly shrub, eventually producing a crop of tasteless, insipid black berries with nothing to recommend them to humans. However, its flowers have an irresistible appeal to hummingbirds, and of course given that I am basing my landscaping/gardening around providing habitat and food for birds and pollinators, I simply had to have a currant somewhere in my yard. But where to get one without having to pay through the nose for a nursery-grown plant?

There is a verb in popular use among my friends, "to pip," i.e., sneak cuttings, snitch rooted specimens (never the entire plant, though!), or to otherwise "liberate" a specimen for the garden. The origins of "pipping" lie in another gardening friend's nickname. She's notorious for her ability to pocket slips from nursery stock, and has the skills to propagate almost anything she nicks. I'm not quite as good, although I've lifted a few cuttings from parking lots and such, so I've been watching for unattended currants along the roadside. I wasn't having much luck. The only ones I was finding were too big to dig. I wanted a plant with just a few stems, something I could prune and train without the need for major surgery. Evenutally, I found not one but two "pippable" specimens of just the right size. I brought them both home to keep my hummingbirds entertained.