Burn Casualties

ProfessionRoush had a fine spring day for a nice neighborhood burn yesterday.   My neighbors and I marshalled our energy and the considerable mobile fire-fighting forces arrayed amongst them and set off on a dew-covered morning to clear the prairies of weeds and invading alien plants through the ritual spring burn.   With almost no wind, the dampness from the recent rains, and a beautiful sunny day awaiting us, we were blissfully at ease to hold a nice burn.

And then, everything changed.  I believe the first mistake was that the fires were going so well, ProfessorRoush's neighbor opened his first beer before we were on the downside of the day.   Early alcohol is always a bad harbinger of things to come.   And fairly early on, after all the tasks were assigned and the backfires started to protect the distant neighbors and greater Manhattan from our exuberance, we received a call from the county that burning had been banned for the day (after we earlier had permission for the burn).  A little too late for us, the forecasts had changed to show brisk winds later in the day.   

We had completely burned the perimeters and I had safely burned around my garden and moved on to help a neighbor by 11:00 a.m.   The last neighbor's 20 acres took us almost as long as the other 140, with extra care taken as the winds were rising and we had a horse barn and arena to protect.  And then I looked up about 2:00 p.m. to see smoke coming from my back yard.

Unbeknownst to me, a little fire had made it into the grass mulch near my grapevine lines earlier and a helpful neighbor had put it out.   But, a little prairie-burning tip here from an old guy here, if fire gets to your mulch, whether hay, grass or bark, there's no putting it out.  You have to isolate the area to bare ground and let it burn itself out.  Hidden beneath a dampened cover of mulch, that little spark festered and bided time until the wind rose.

And then it scooted across the mown back yard and made it across the close-mown grass into one of my rose beds mulched with straw.  It's the bed on the right in the picture at the top.  Thank Heaven's grace, it was only one because I told Mrs. ProfessorRoush that if it was all of them, I'd have bulldozed the backyard and been out of the gardening business.  I'm not ready or spiritually willing to start completely over again at this stage.

I'm not worried at all about the grass between the house and my lower beds.  I had been contemplating burning it anyway because it had been 4 or 5 years since the area last burnt.  In 2 weeks this area will be beautifully green and I'll post another picture then to show you.  The daylilies and perennials of the burnt bed will regenerate.  And a couple of roses in this bed had already died or were ill from Rose Rosette and needed cleaning up.    There is enough Puritan in ProfessorRoush's soul to place considerable faith in fighting evil by burning.  But I'll mourn a little bit for 'Banshee' and Marianne' and "Chateau de Napoleon' until and if they regenerate.   Time will tell and life goes on.   Maybe I'll learn a new cure for Rose Rosette disease if one of the sick roses regenerates in fine shape.

Clarity in Winter

The 4th season, winter, is much maligned by most gardeners and ProfessorRoush is no exception in that regard.  As I grow older, my enthusiasm for colder weather ever ebbs and my casual glances at more southern states on the map grow ever longer.

Winter does, however, provide a gardener with one benefit in spades: clarity.  Loss of foliage and flower exposes the skeleton of a garden, highlights her hidden secrets and lays bare the flaws of our efforts.

I noticed, today, how Coralberry (Symphoricarpos orbiculatus), a common weedy shrub on the prairie, has incorporated itself unnoticed into one of my 'Therese Bugnet' rose bushes, the red fruits of the wayward shrub blending cheerfully with the burgundy-red new twigs of the rose (photo at top).   The season also throws back the curtains on my Harry Lauder's Walking Stick (Corylus avellana 'Contorta'), revealing just how badly the straight suckers of the grafted plant launch themselves skyward among the crooked branches I crave (photo at left).  Every spring I remove an armload of these straight stems and they immediately resprout to spoil the symmetry.

Winter exposes the activities of insects unseen and nesting birds in clear detail.  I found these bagworms on the top of a trellis, hanging from, of all things, a wisteria vine that provides the trellis shade in summer (right photo).  How, oh how, did these bagworms know that the wisteria would be unprotected while their preferred perches, the junipers of my garden, are all sprayed each June?

 This nest, in my 'Banshee' rose bush, is a repeat homesite for birds, although I forgot to look here this past summer to see if it was active.  One locates nests in the summer by observing the birds, not the plants, for their feeding patterns, protective dances, and loud scolding of passersby.  In the winter, a nest like this hints at a life unobserved, leaving a gardener to imagine all the possibilities it hid.  Was there a successful fledge?  Did a cowbird insert an imposter into this family?   I'll never know.

     

The gardener resolves, each year to do better as we see the bones left behind from a summer's toil.  This Lamb's Ear (Stachys byzantina) escaped my best efforts to root its invasive nature from my garden (right photo), persisting even now in the protective embrace of an enormous Russian sage.  In summer, one sees the forest and not the trees.  In winter, one is left with the details, the struggles of life laid bare, ground gained and lost, homes built and vacated.  Clarity is what a gardener gains in winter; clarity of our highs and wins, and clarity of where we must improve.    

Banshee & the Brown Thrasher

'Banshee'

Visualize this, my friends.  You are strolling through your garden on a warm spring evening, calm breezes and quiet murmurs from the growing grasses, harsh sunlight making harsh shadows and long shapes on the ground, squinting your eyes against the glare of the setting fire as you stop to admire the delicate beauty of a shy new blossom.  Blushing, it peeks from within a shadow, luring you closer for a moment of admiration and lustful indulgence.

Suddenly, an explosion occurs from inches away, a brown blur bursting from within the branches, startling you into instant flight, survival and safety foremost in fright.

All this, and more, I experienced when I stopped to admire 'Banshee', a Damask shrub rose traced back to 1773 by some sources, but listed as 1923 in Modern Roses 12.  My particular specimen came via a purchase from Hartwood Roses a number of years ago.  Once believed to be an older Gallica, she is now thought on helpmefind/roses to be a turbinata known under a variety of other names.  'Banshee' is, in fact, known as "The Great Impersonator" among roses.   'Banshee' is a 7 foot tall shrub for me, nearly as wide, with long lax stems and few or no thorns.  She is extremely healthy and completely cane-hardy in my climate, strongly and sweetly scented, with loosely arranged double (17-25 petals) white blooms blushed strongly with pink.  She blooms once a year over a long period of spring, and although most sources suggest that she balls up in wet weather, I haven't noticed her do that nearly as badly as 'Maiden's Blush' does in my garden.  Since the "balling" seems to be mentioned so ubiquitously, could it be that I've got an impersonator of 'Banshee' here?

The aforementioned "brown blur" was a Brown Thrasher, Toxostoma rufum, presumably a female of the species.  Once my heart rate slowed down from the adrenaline rush, I looked closer and found that I had disturbed her incubating a clutch of  five pale blue-speckled brown eggs in a delightful, but rough, little nest of twigs.




Brown Thrasher's are abundant east of the Rockies, and I'm pleased to make the acquaintance of this otherwise nondescript little bird of my prairie.  They are said to have the largest song repertoire of all birds, over 1000 different types of song, but since I have never taken the time to learn bird identification by song (except for the "Bob White" of quail), I don't know how many of the early morning choir outside my bedroom windows may be Brown Thrasher's, but I suspect they may represent a large portion of the chorus.  An omnivore, it will evidently eat anything and it is fiercely territorial around nests, even attacking humans.  I'll give this nest a wide berth in the next few weeks since I don't want to initiate a mini-replay of Hitchcock's 1963 The Birds here in Kansas, even less with myself in the starring role of frantically-pecked-to-death human.

That's life in my Kansas garden today, a rose that might-or-might-not be 'Banshee', harboring a perfect little potential family of avian Von Trapp's.  And lots of sunshine and, finally, more normal summer temperatures than the recent and long cool spring.  If you need me, I'll be in the garden.

Banshee or Banshees?

My reading is causing ProfessorRoush an identity crisis about a rose.   'Banshee' is a great rose in my climate, but the rose I call 'Banshee' may be one of several different roses known under the same name, sort of a reverse alias, if you will.  My faith that I have the "real" 'Banshee', if there is such a plant, is only based on my faith in Connie of Hartwood Roses, from whom I purchased 'Banshee'.  She obtained her plant from a cemetery in King William, Virginia.

'Banshee' is a pink Damask-like once-blooming shrub known prior to 1773.  My specimen is four years old and approximately 5 feet tall by 6 feet wide and is still growing .  Blooms are lightly double (17-25 petals) and start out medium pink, but quickly fade to blush.  Individual flowers last about 5 days before petal drop and are intensely fragrant.  Leaves are light green (sometimes described as pea green) and usually come in compound leaflets of 7.  She reminds me a lot of 'Maiden's Blush', in bush form and in flower, but she exhibits none of the wet weather balling and blight that 'Maiden's Blush' does here.  'Banshee' is completely hardy here, surviving last year's very cold Zone 5 winter without any cane dieback or loss.  I don't recall seeing any hips form but will watch again this fall.

Paul Barden has a lot to say about 'Banshee', in fact reproducing a 1977 American Rose Annual article by Leonie Bell titled "Banshee: The Great Impersonator".  Bell  regarded "the Banshees" as a strain rather than an individual rose, and believed her to be a Gallica.  Newer sources suggest that it is a R. turbinata hybrid.  The real 'Banshee', or one of her suspected full sisters, should have an acorn-cup shaped hip and a calyx more than twice the length of the bud and glanded.  And the pea green leaves.  The blown up photo at the left is a good example of the long calyx and the glanded bud.

'Banshee', faded and older flower

'Banshee' is a rose that is either loved or hated, perhaps dependent upon climatic influence and on whether a particular rose is the real 'Banshee' McCoy or an impostor.  In my climate, my 'Banshee' doesn't ball up or drop 90% of the buds before opening as other writers complain about, although 'Maiden's Blush', often been marketed as 'Banshee', does.  'Banshee' does seem to be a bit unorganized in habit, opening later to a flat and mussy flower with lots of stamens.   I have seen no blackspot or other fungus on Banshee, and in fact it seems an iron healthy rose.  Or a healthy family of roses, as the case may be.