Migrations
I'm in Maine now, and the garden at midseason poses all sorts of problems, as it always does.
What we have here is, for the most part, a native woodlands garden. By this I mean it's in the woods, and it's meant to be all native. But nowadays, staying native is kind of like swimming against a current.
When our house was built, twelve years ago, building codes required that barricade to be built around the construction site. This was made of hay bales, and it was intended to prevent the bare soil from eroding. It was a very sensible plan, but one of the unintended consequences of this was that the gulley below that barricade, which slopes down to our little salt-water cove, is now full of native - but not local, and certainly not appropriate - meadow grasses from those innocuous hay-bales. These include goldenrod, thistles and creeping brambles, and they have established themselves with characteristic weedy vigor in the little ravine. That area was particularly vulnerable to colonisation because some of the trees had come down during the building process, letting in new light. So there was disturbed earth, changes in the habitat, and then the arrival of this wild band of invasive marauders, charging into the new countryside like a band of nomadic terrorists, horticulturally shouting and swinging their swords. These guys are tough, they're determined and they're mean.
For the first few years I liked them.
One new presence along the little streambed is buttercup, which creates a vivid golden river in the spring. Also there are native sedges, big beautiful sprays of hardy green, with the characteristic biting edge - sedges have edges, in case you didn't know how to distinguish them from grasses - and their wonderful surrealistic interruptions along the leaf. I don't know sedges very well, so I can't name them, but some of them have lacy "tremblant" decorations along the top third of the leaf, which nod in the wind and catch the light, glittering like dangling earrings. Some of the sedges have rough burr-like interruptions on the stalk, stiff triangulated sculptural things like small art deco flowers. All these plants are native, hardy and handsome, and why would I want to see them go? But how am I to get rid of the goldenrod, the thistles, the brambles, which are shooting inappropriately up the pine-needled sides of the little ravine, even as I type this?
Being an all-organic gardener makes this sort of situation difficult. I asked the local landscaping service what they would charge to dig up the plants that are there and plant big swathes of native ferns - ostrich, sensitive and hay-scented, just for starters. He said it would cost $10,000 just to dig it up, and we could talk later about the cost of the ferns, and planting them.
I've thought about how this problem would have been solved twenty years ago, fifty, a hundred, two hundred years, before there were chemical sprays, or building codes that required me to truck in these big bales of invasive seeds. It seems that fossil fuels play a part in a lot of this. Without fossil fuels you didn't use non-natives without enormous expense. Imagine bringing a bale of hay from another state by horse-drawn carriage. Imagine bringing Chinese bittersweet, African lilies, kudzu, or any other non-native invasive from another continent, and then disseminating it all across our own, without the use of fossil fuels. Just getting to another county would be a real journey. Time moved slowly before the combustion engine.
There have always been migrations within the plant world, but they always moved slowly. There were seeds or plants that were carried by wind or water, or the fur of animals, or the bellies of birds. These forces were controlled by natural elements - birds digested seeds within a certain distance of where they'd eaten them, animals shed their fur within their own territories, wind and water were indifferent to the survival of seeds, and so most seeds perished. These movements were slow, and the force of inertia was against them. We're speeding up that process, as well as many others. It's hard to say what will happen.
What we have here is, for the most part, a native woodlands garden. By this I mean it's in the woods, and it's meant to be all native. But nowadays, staying native is kind of like swimming against a current.
When our house was built, twelve years ago, building codes required that barricade to be built around the construction site. This was made of hay bales, and it was intended to prevent the bare soil from eroding. It was a very sensible plan, but one of the unintended consequences of this was that the gulley below that barricade, which slopes down to our little salt-water cove, is now full of native - but not local, and certainly not appropriate - meadow grasses from those innocuous hay-bales. These include goldenrod, thistles and creeping brambles, and they have established themselves with characteristic weedy vigor in the little ravine. That area was particularly vulnerable to colonisation because some of the trees had come down during the building process, letting in new light. So there was disturbed earth, changes in the habitat, and then the arrival of this wild band of invasive marauders, charging into the new countryside like a band of nomadic terrorists, horticulturally shouting and swinging their swords. These guys are tough, they're determined and they're mean.
For the first few years I liked them.
One new presence along the little streambed is buttercup, which creates a vivid golden river in the spring. Also there are native sedges, big beautiful sprays of hardy green, with the characteristic biting edge - sedges have edges, in case you didn't know how to distinguish them from grasses - and their wonderful surrealistic interruptions along the leaf. I don't know sedges very well, so I can't name them, but some of them have lacy "tremblant" decorations along the top third of the leaf, which nod in the wind and catch the light, glittering like dangling earrings. Some of the sedges have rough burr-like interruptions on the stalk, stiff triangulated sculptural things like small art deco flowers. All these plants are native, hardy and handsome, and why would I want to see them go? But how am I to get rid of the goldenrod, the thistles, the brambles, which are shooting inappropriately up the pine-needled sides of the little ravine, even as I type this?
Being an all-organic gardener makes this sort of situation difficult. I asked the local landscaping service what they would charge to dig up the plants that are there and plant big swathes of native ferns - ostrich, sensitive and hay-scented, just for starters. He said it would cost $10,000 just to dig it up, and we could talk later about the cost of the ferns, and planting them.
I've thought about how this problem would have been solved twenty years ago, fifty, a hundred, two hundred years, before there were chemical sprays, or building codes that required me to truck in these big bales of invasive seeds. It seems that fossil fuels play a part in a lot of this. Without fossil fuels you didn't use non-natives without enormous expense. Imagine bringing a bale of hay from another state by horse-drawn carriage. Imagine bringing Chinese bittersweet, African lilies, kudzu, or any other non-native invasive from another continent, and then disseminating it all across our own, without the use of fossil fuels. Just getting to another county would be a real journey. Time moved slowly before the combustion engine.
There have always been migrations within the plant world, but they always moved slowly. There were seeds or plants that were carried by wind or water, or the fur of animals, or the bellies of birds. These forces were controlled by natural elements - birds digested seeds within a certain distance of where they'd eaten them, animals shed their fur within their own territories, wind and water were indifferent to the survival of seeds, and so most seeds perished. These movements were slow, and the force of inertia was against them. We're speeding up that process, as well as many others. It's hard to say what will happen.
Labels: Migrations
posted by Roxana Robinsonat
4:06 PM 0 Comments
