A Hawk's Garden

It never fails.  Every spring, ProfessorRoush is a neat freak in his garden, and then, come every autumn, I'm exhausted by the constant effort to stay atop the endless chores, acceding to the clamor of chaos, and waving the white flag in surrender to the wildness of weather and weeds.  And yet, somewhere in between spring and autumn, there always appears an opportunity to choose.  To choose between anarchy and intent in my garden, to choose between disorder and design, between entropy and enlightenment.

Such was my choice, this past summer, to perhaps remove this blackened Cottonwood stump or to leave it in place.  Once a mighty, young, and hearty tree, its health was wrecked by an ice storm years ago and it spent a decade struggling to regrow damaged limbs from exposed heartwood and then, last year, the final large branches fell and it failed to grow any leaves at all.  I let it burn with the prairie around it this spring, and indeed encouraged it to burn by piling dry debris at its base, hoping to erase its presence and its memory from my landscape, but this blackened and hardened stump persisted.

For some time, I contemplated asking a friend to fell this stump along with another dead and starkly-branched tree in the back yard, but then one day I saw a plethora of Tufted Titmouse (Titmice?) using the latter as a gathering spot and decided on the spot to postpone removing these blights from my yard.  Blessedly, what was once a spur-of-the-moment random decision has become a monument to my garden's nature.  Thank you to the Titmice and the Hawk.

The Red-Tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) pictured here and above has been hanging around for the past few months, using the cottonwood stump as a primary hunting perch as it lives out its hawk-life existence on the prairie.   I've also caught it sitting higher on the house roof twice as I came home from work, and once on the frame of my shade house, as you can see pictured here and below.  In the meantime, the eternally hungry rabbits have all but disappeared from my garden beds and I have high hopes that the local pack rats are quaking in their urine-soaked, disgusting debris-pile homes.  Red-tailed Hawks are the most common and the largest bird of prey on the tallgrass prairie and you can see that this one believes it is King (or Queen?) of all its domain.

Once, while mowing, I barely missed snapping a picture of what I call "my" Hawk lifting off from the ground, snake carcass in its talons, but I will never forget the thrill of that final "swoop" and the calm Hawk sitting in the grass looking satisfied at its catch. Gardening friends, if you face a similar choice, I promise you won't regret letting hawks be hawks, and in a broader sense occasionally allowing nature to be in control for a day, for a week, maybe even for a season.  Some say a garden is defined by its boundaries, by the vision of the Gardener, but I submit for your consideration that our best efforts are spent in concert with the natural world around us, not fighting against it. And I can't help but feel that this Hawk agrees with me.    

Resilent Regrowth

I've worried myself to distraction, this past month, concerned about the true costs of our April hailstorm on the garden.  The loss of a year's worth of irises, peonies, and non-remonant roses is disappointment enough, but what of other garden inhabitants?   In all the years I've gardened before now, I hadn't experienced hail that struck at the peak of spring, just as the garden year was beginning.  I knew that roses and irises and peonies would survive decrepit and tired, building sugars from damaged factories until they were reborn next year, but what about other plants?   If I grow tired of shredded iris leaves, I can always cut them off and force a rebirth, but gardens contain other lives that need to persist beyond a single cycle.

Foremost,  I wondered, what would become of the trees, the eternal trees, pummeled just as they opened their leaves, an entire year of stored energy wasted in seconds?  Garden experts wrote fleetingly about possible regrowth on trees and other plants, regrowth that seemed too dependent on this condition or that condition, but I could find little documentation for my comfort.  I wondered how the trees could possibly know if there was enough time left in the summer to try again or whether it would be better to save their resources for next spring?  But I offer these pictures, captured one month after the hailstorm, as encouragement to those searching after me.  For myself, they are lesson again that life can be both fragile and resilient in the same moment.




The first two photos above are of new growth on two different Maples in my yard, the first an "October Glory" Red Maple, the second a Paperbark Maple.  Both display their damage and regrowth at the same time, as do most of my trees that were so foolish as to get an early start on spring, hanging on to damaged leaves for sparse nourishment, but rebuilding with a vengeance.  The third photo is a Redbud, an understory tree, also exhibiting torn and shiny new leaves on the same branches.  Together, they are all evidence that this year is not a total loss, for me or for the trees.

In these lessons about hail, I also learned something about Darwinism and survival of the fittest.  The least damaged trees of all in my garden were the trees that are traditional Kansas natives.  My oaks, walnuts, and cottonwoods are all seemingly untouched, the first two because they kept their buds tight until well after the hailstorm and the latter because it seems that the bouncing poplar-like leaves of the cottonwood either dodged the hail stones or turned aside at the slightest touch, nimble as ninjas in the wind.  There are many lessons here that the Homo-sapiens-introduced maples can learn from.  The particular Homo sapiens also known as ProfessorRoush now understands again that despair is fleeting and hope is eternal.

Dry Times and Desperate Measures

The dry time has come, my friends, when a gardener's principles of xeriscaping and letting plants fend for themselves has smashed into the proverbial hard spot.  As a gardener on this bit of prairie, I try mightily, sometimes seemingly against my better judgement, to have as little impact as I can on my environment.  Minimal extra water use, lots of mulch, pesticides only in emergencies, no inorganic fertilizer, plants selected for the conditions of my region.  I fail mightily as well, harvesting corn drenched in insecticide (growing corn here in Kansas at any time qualifies as an emergency), watering marginal plants in dry times, and choosing some plants because they are unusual or interesting or pretty, even if they are better adapted to Costa Rica than this mid-continental desert.

I understand, however, on some basic level, that an attempt to garden at all must inevitably result in some effects on the environment.  I can't give Mrs. ProfessorRoush a rose garden, for instance, without displacing the native prairie grasses that would otherwise outcompete the roses.  I can't plant a tree on the prairie without shading out some of those same grasses.  I can choose a Miscanthus sp., or select among the excellent cultivars of Panicum, but the first is not native here and the second may not drawn the same insects, or the same birds to its seeds, or provide the same benefits to the soil as the native forms.  As noted by Michael Pollan in the classic essays of Second Nature, ornamental gardening means finding "a middle ground between the two positions of domination of a piece of ground or acquiescence to the natural conditions of the area."

I have drawn the line against nonintervention this weekend while worrying about my trees.  I'm quite pleased, these days, with the growth of several maples and oaks and cottonwoods that I have planted, and I'm quite distressed to see them turn silver leaves to the sky and begin to die.  Go away, Charles Darwin, and stop whispering in my ear.   I cannot stand by and let the pressures of Natural Selection, represented by this extreme and unusual drought, dictate which trees survive in my garden.  I cannot coexist here with a garden of Red Cedars and Osage Orange.  I need my Sweet Gum, my Black Gum, and my 'Patriot' Elm to create the illusion that I have some control over my garden.  I need them to linger here after I'm gone, keeping my presence after the end of days.

So I'm watering the trees today, deeply and individually, with a sprinkler that will cover most of the root extent.  I'm watering them in order of my love for them; my daughter's accidental Silver Maple first, next the native Cottonwood (pictured here) ravished first by ice storms and then drought, the 'October Glory' Red Maple that I hold dear in the Fall was third, and so on to the others.  My apologies to the Flint Hills aquifer, but I'd like someday to see a tree here large enough to support a squirrel or two, maybe to serve as a perch for a hungry owl, and perhaps to provide a little shade to rest from the Kansas sun.  As I water, however, I see that the backlit spray of water just looks like another clump of grass on the prairie, a quiet reminder to me of what God really intends to be grown here.