Sturgeon Super Moon Newsletter

Hi Plant People,

Happy Super Sturgeon Moon!

Late again, but life is wild. I’ve just moved out of Brooklyn and into a barn in CT. Off to Harvard next week. Please ignore me till Mid-September, when I hope to be able to email and schedule again.

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I totally cried reading this lovely article about me leaving Brooklyn Bridge Park. The generous Mr. Christopher writes, “Parks have long served as way stations for wildlife passing through cities such as migrating birds, but the ambition at Brooklyn Bridge Park has been to create places where the wildlife could actually live and reproduce.”

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And if you’re interested in learning more about other public parks working towards ecological stewardship, you can watch this webinar I moderated for the City Parks Alliance, presenting the work of the Vancouver Parks Board and the Presidio in San Francisco.

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HUGE congratulations to Ronnit Bendavid-Val upon receiving the APGA’s Award of Merritt! She was both my manager and mentor as a young gardener for NYC Parks.

GARDEN NOTES

The northeast is in a severe drought. It’s minimal compared to what the rest of the world is dealing with but given trends, we all need to get smarter about irrigation. If you are in a drought zone, please consider the following strategies:

• Watering plants in a drought is important not only to keep plants alive, but also to keep soils from losing all water. When soils go hydrophobic, they actually repel water: think about how hard it is to soak up water with a bone dry sponge. This can be dangerous, as water tends to sheet off hydrophobic soils, preventing percolation and increasing runoff. To avoid hydrophobia, water long and deep, minimizing evaporation and runoff with drip or gators.

• Water your trees. Water your neighbors’ trees. Water the trees on your block. Keeping trees alive is, frankly, more important than other plants. Their roots are mostly in the top foot of soil and a prolonged drought can damage a tree for life. Also don’t prune trees during drought! As that can stimulate new growth.

• Keep lawn grasses as long as you can manage (~3.5”). This shades the soil, among other benefits. But also consider just letting turf go dormant without allowing soils to dry completely.

• If things get really bad, and you’re facing triage, consider making a “drought ark.” Collect seed and take cutting that will be easy to keep and propagate when conditions improve. Pick one or two of each favorite species and water just those, again with the goal of re-populating the garden in some future time when we’ve figured out how to live in harmony with the earth.

RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT

• Punk rock parents growing native plants? Yes please. Jared Rosenbaum of Wild Ridge Plants has started a new series of short videos on plants and ecology. Here is a wonderful video on Beebalm that clearly illustrates the importance of native plants.

• Here is a fun tool out of Britain that shows the potential for technology in garden design. Pollinator Pathmaker uses artificial intelligence to design and animate a plant pallet based on inputed environmental conditions with a focus on pollinator diversity. It’s cute! And technically, it’s art. I wonder if it’s useful?

• Our favorite New Perennialist, Tony Spencer, contributed to a beautiful new book on gardens of the world. He of course focused on the wildest gardens like Le Jardin Plume, Landschaftspark, and The High Line.

IN THE NEWS

• There is a growing movement to give legal personhood to rivers, mountains, forests and groups of animals in the USA. Other countries have already done this successfully, thereby protecting those entities. But of course our country has a far easier time giving personhood to corporations than it does to anything potentially exploitable. Here is a fascinating episode of the podcast 99% Invisible on the effort to give our native rice (Zizania palustris) the legal protections of people.

• Margaret Roach did a piece on native annuals for the Times. Annuals in natural systems “are called upon to play a critical first-responder sort of role….becoming the first layer of succession.” But they’re also super pretty and helpful in the garden.

• Stoneleigh is a new botanic garden in Pennsylvania that has the fascinating mission of using native plants to create a classically ornamental American garden aesthetic. Favorite blogger Jared Barns recently visited and took many photos for us. He also interviewed their Dir of Hort in his new and marvelous podcast.

• An unusually awesome Canadian Honeybee flew down the throat of Ontario Premier Doug Ford, just as he was talking about plans to privatize health care in the province.

• Liberal media is going hard against turf. The NYT made a funny, short video on why it’s time to kill your lawn and the Washington Post did a step-by-step how to.

• More evidence that this movement is gaining steam: the Wall Street Journal interviewed Benjamin Vogt on layered gardens and matrix plants, Penn Live dove deep into Kelly Norris’s approach to “new naturalism,” and Slate interviewed Doug Tallemy on a podcast.

• There is an upside down forest in Times Square. Roots, the first of three public art projects by artist Charles Gains opened last month. Seven massive and ghostly Sweetgum trees are inverted and set against the chaos of Times Square. The work is an analogy to “the pervasive repercussions of America’s legacy of cultural displacement and violent subjugation of property for capital gain.”

• Plants moved to land nearly half a billion years ago. Pollen was the strategy they evolved to take an aquatic reproduction system into the air. It brings me unending joy to think of pollen as a sperm spaceship, and those spaceships needed strong hulls to protect DNA from damage. Thus “sporopollenin” evolved, a molecule so strong, that spores were found to withstand compression rates of 725 tons per square inch. Researchers called it the “diamond of the plant world” and were only recently able to break it into its components. This is a fascinating story of that process. Revelations include that gymnosperm pollen is far better protected than flowering plants, as angiosperm pollen tends to travel on shorter trips and flowers themselves do a great job of shielding pollen from drying out. Worth the long-read.

• Yo-Yo Ma performed this moving piece in a forest, specifically written for both cello and birdsong.

• I have a theory that the “native plants vs exotic plants” debate is often a red herring. No one’s coming for your peonies, Dorothy! Even some invasive plants should be accepted and even respected, like the seeds of food plants sewn into the braids of enslaved people as they crossed the Atlantic. They reflect a history that is important to address and I like how James Golden talks about “accepting reality.” Anyway, if we collectively took all the energy we expend fighting with each other on Facebook and directed it towards the true enemy, we could make more lasting change. And who are these enemies, you ask? Nurseries selling known invasives for profit. Seriously, what the hell? How is this allowed? In CT, Burning Bush (Euonymus alata) has taken over the entire understory of much of the state. But it’s still for sale because it makes people money. The science doesn’t matter because of lobbying. This is the case for thousands of other plants nationwide. I know it’s not as fun as gardening, but I encourage you (and me) to organize in your state to expand lists of prohibited plants when they come under review. You can also organize your garden club to write letters to your local nurseries asking them to stop selling invasives and suggest alternatives. It’s not glamorous work but it is absolutely critical.

• Relatedly, a new study out of Romania found that invasive (mostly North American) plants were popular with generalist pollinators in the short term, but because they shifted plant community dynamics, will lower specialist pollinator diversity over time.

• But also it’s important to remember that conserving and encouraging pollinators is crucial because of the dynamics between pollinators and plants. Sometimes people get excited to “save the bees” and forget that the plants are an equal part of the equation. Plants rely on pollinators for reproduction and when bees and others disappear, or select different (possibly exotic) plants to visit, our native plants suffer. Researchers saw this with Golden Monkey Flower (Mimulus guttatus) when they isolated the plants from their pollinating bumble bees. While plants adapted quickly to self pollinate more efficiently, they lost nearly a quarter of their genetic variation in only 9 generations.

• Here is an awesome and comprehensive article on the importance of planting native plants if you do want to help pollinators. A great piece to send to your friends who have not yet gotten on the bandwagon.

• Jennifer Jewel interviewed two people also named Jen about their incredibly cool project in LA, Test Plot. It was originally a Terremoto side-project focused on community based ecological restoration, but has expanded to celebrate the labor involved in land care, something all too often invisible and undervalued.

• Preliminary good news on invasive insects: Spotted Lanternflies might not be as damaging to fruit trees and even grape vines as predicted. And those plague-like populations may be an ephemeral phenomenon. I really love everything Marielle Anzalone has to say about all of the bug-stomping in this piece. Meanwhile biocontrols for Emerald Ash Borer seem to be working.

• A 10 year UK study found that managing farms ecologically did not reduce yields. While an 8-year New Jersey study in chemically managed farms saw wild bee populations plummet 58% and watermelon yield drop by half.

• Drought in prairie systems favors clonal shrubs whom, unlike forbs and grasses, have been shown to use their deep roots to access water in a drought. This creates a problem for grasslands, as native clonal shrubs like Sumac and Dogwoods outcompete all other prairie plants. Prairie ecologist Chris Helzer lays out why this is actually a big problem.

• The latest episode of the In Defense of Plants podcast covers how to grow plants on the moon!

• In 1982, artist Agnes Denes grew a 2 acre wheat field on what is now Battery Park. It was lovely and powerful, an intentional confrontation. She said at the time, “ To attempt to plant, sustain and harvest two acres of wheat here, wasting valuable real estate and obstructing the ‘machinery’… was an effrontery that made it the powerful paradox I had sought for the calling to account.”

• Close ties between academia and pesticide manufacturers are seriously problematic and sometimes outright corrupt. Iowa State University was recently discovered to have allowed their funders (Bayer and Syngenta) influence over how studies on neonics were performed. It’s important to keep the unethical strategies these corporations use in mind when assessing the safety of their products.

• There have been some fascinating new discoveries about moths recently. Clovers are famously pollinated by bees but new research found that moths perform 1/3 of flower pollination under the cover of darkness. Researchers put tiny transmitters on the Deaths-head Hawkmoth and found that wind does not throw their migration off as much as once thought: moths will fly low to the ground in unfriendly winds and ride high in the sky in favorable weather, but are always guided by internal compasses. And lastly, tiger moths had been known to jam bat-sonar with ultrasonic clicking, and now researchers have found potentially thousands of other species with similar abilities.

• More and more evidence emerges that tree planting, as it is currently practiced, is not a beneficial method of climate mitigation or ecological repair. One option for restoring forested land is to simply let the forests regrow.

• I do not love the phrase “ecosystem services” and the hierarchy it implies, but this is still a cool study that comprehensively lists all of the “non-material” ways nature has been scientifically shown to benefit humanity. Article here.

• As you know, plants are not objects. Like all living organisms, they live as parts of interdependent systems. New research shows how fiddler crabs deliver beneficial bacteria to the roots of mangroves, and the grazing of otters on eelgrass was shown to increase flowering and keep populations healthier than those without otters. Researchers also found that fungal and bacterial communities will return to soils after native plants are replanted.

• So many elements of plant-morphology are determined by their pollinators. The fringy white petals on the White Egret Orchid were discovered to function as a handle for hawkmoths to grab onto while drinking nectar and pollinating. And the long thread on the top of the spathe of some Jack-in-the-Pulpits has been found to attract fungus gnats to pollinate the flower, but no one has any idea why gnats find this appendage so alluring. It can be helpful to keep the functionality of flower morphology in mind when picking flower cultivars with altered colors and shapes.

• It’s very “duh” but scientists have shown that bees are sentient and “likely” feel pain. It matters because it might lead to ethical standards for invertebrates used in research.

• The New York Times published a legitimately cool feature that illustrates the basics of dendrology (dating trees) by touring us through the life of a 500 year old Douglas Fir.

• And for those of you intrepid readers who made it this far: red seaweed has been shown to be pollinated by marine isopods!!! Pollination people like me are losing our minds because this might mean that pollination evolved in the water, before plants traveled to land. Cool footage here.

UPCOMING EVENTS

• The Nibbled Leaf

  September 1, 2022

  Virtual

  The Garden Conservancy is hosting two trail blazing ladies, Page Dickey and Edwina von Gal, to discuss their naturalistic and organic garden tours this summer.

• Hollister House Garden Study Weekend Symposium

  September 10, 2022

  In person and open to the public

  Super thrilled to speak about Brooklyn Bridge Park in my hometown (CT!) at this fabulous symposium.

• Arborists Are from Mars; Garden Designers Are from Venus

  October 5, 2022

  Virtual

  Christopher Roddick is doing a webinar for the ELA on how to design landscapes and gardens with both new and existing trees.

www.rebeccamcmackin.com