Elm Excogitation

I took a walk today, a "noon constitutional" as it might have been termed in another more gracious age.  I took a walk and strode in a single instant from complacency to sorrow, contentment to loss.  From sunlight into the shade of a massive American elm was only a few steps for a man, but a mile for my mindset.

As gardeners we all, I'm sure, know of the previously ubiquitous American Elm and the disastrous impact of Dutch Elm disease on the species.  Intellectually, we understand that the American Elm (Elmus americana) was a valued tree in the landscapes of the 19th and early 20th centuries, so-called "tabernacles of the air."  Viscerally, however, gardeners of my age have no memories of a cool picnic under the elms or the spreading chestnuts of history.  Our blood does not stir from loss of such things as we've never experienced.

On this 96ºF sunny day, however, I ambled to the K-State Gardens and, passing under the massive canopy of its surviving and much-pampered American Elm, was instantly struck by the stark drop in temperature and stress I experienced.  If it wasn't 20 degrees cooler under the tree than in the sun, then I'm a mange-ridden gopher.  I understand now, acutely and intimately, what civilization lost when DED was "accidentally" introduced through the hubris of man.  The K-State Gardens elm was planted in 1930, is currently 60' tall, and requires $1000 injections to prevent Dutch Elm every 2.5 years.  While it seems presently healthy, I'm not encouraged for its long-term survival, knowing that administrators and politicians inevitably appropriate every possible dollar for their own pet projects and needs. 

In our callous daily existences, we don't often emotionally feel the tragic loss of a unique species of rainforest frog, or the potential extinction of a subspecies of rhinoceros, but you CAN come to K-State and experience with me the last years of the American Elm.  Echoing and borrowing the sentiment from an excellent essay by astrophysist Dr. Adam Frank that I read this week, I would say that the Earth will survive, but the Elm may not.  The Anthropocene HAS arrived and we should perhaps better start to contemplate that our time is measured, just as the elm's.   

Corpse Flower, indeed

Despite our existence in the "flyover states," there were many fantastic activities in Manhattan Kansas this weekend.  The Bill Snyder Half-Marathon, for instance, tied up a number of city streets and traffic policepeople for most of Saturday morning.  For those hip individuals in the know, however, the real attraction was the imminent blooming of a Titan Arum, Amorphophallus titanum, right here in the Little Apple.

I was alerted to the potential bloom from Tuesday's K-State Newsletter, and I made a trip over to the greenhouses soon after that, so I would know where the darned thing was when I needed to get to it.  The picture at the upper right is from that Tuesday visit.  Believe it or not, the white line running into the bloom was the work of a chemistry graduate student who was taking a baseline sample of the air in preparation for the stench.

Live Camera Feed 5/18/2018

Soon afterword, the digital wizards at K-State placed a live camera feed on the plant so that extreme nerds onlookers could monitor when the actual bloom occurred, including a clock in the venue so you could see that it was live.  Being the nerd that he is, ProfessorRoush bookmarked the camera feed and began checking it several times daily.

Image property University of Wisconsin

The Titan Arum, native to Sumatra, is the largest inflorescence (made up of many flowers) in the world, the record for the "shapeless phallus" being 10 feet or so tall.  This lime-stone-loving rainforest plant stinks like a rotting corpse (hence the common name) to attract the carrion beetles and flesh flies that pollinate it during its one-day bloom period.  Every botanical garden that has one makes hay (sic) when it blooms, because of the crowd drawn to the stench and the fact that a plant takes 7-10 years of growth before it can support a bloom.  Most recently, the Chicago Botanical Garden's Arum provided some delayed gratification after several teasing incidents and finally bloomed in April, 2018.

True to the prediction of the local expert, Dr. Chad Miller, our Titan Arum began to bloom Friday evening, slowly opening to reveal its blood red center.  Can't you just feel the excitement?  The Titan Arum grows from a corm that typically weighs over 100 pounds and can weigh over 300 pounds, the largest corm in the world.  When it blooms, the temperature within the flower rises to 98ºF, to better volatize the odor around the area.

Titan Arum in full bloom, K-State, 5/19/18

On Saturday morning, Mrs. ProfessorRoush and I ran pell-mell over to see it in person.  The stench at that time was not nearly so bad as advertised, but I'm told it was at its strongest around midnight the previous evening.  According to the chemistry gurus, the odor is caused by dimethyl disulfide (Limburger cheese), dimethyl trisulfide, methyl thiolacetate, isovaleric acid (think sweaty feet) and  trimethylamine (rotten fish).   A regular one-day chemistry factory, this inflorescence.









During our visit, I noticed this glass jar containing blue desiccant in the bottom and, upon inquiry of Dr. Miller, learned that he planned to pollinate the flower within the next hour.  The pollen in the jar was from the recent bloom at the Chicago Botanical Gardens ("fresh pollen") and he was giving it more time to dry since it was a little moist and clumped.  The male flowers in the base of the inflorescence open up about a day after the female, a natural barrier to self-pollination as the female flower has begun to fade at that point and has presumably already been pollinated.  I didn't voyeuristically stay for the grand pollination, but I'm sure it was a satisfying moment for everyone involved.

ProfessorRoush is happy, however, a Nerd in Paradise as-it-were, to have finally seen a Titan Arum bloom, a horticultural bucket-list checkoff item at its finest.  I had always wanted to experience the stench first hand, ever since I read about it years ago from Henry Mitchell, writing in One Man's Garden, who, having seen one in 1937, said "Sometimes you don't need to paint a picture, but should just stand there amazed at one plant..." and termed the Titan Arum a "miraculous thing to behold, and it didn't paint any picture, it just sat there by itself."  Clearly, a thing worthy of missing the Bill Snyder Half-Marathon just down the street.

K-State Adaptive/Native Plant Garden

I risk being accused of a new shallow approach to the intellectual content of this blog, and perhaps of  random promotional content and motivation, but while the iron is hot and before the weather turns hotter, I want to place another Manhattan attraction on the radar of those who may visit.  Appearing every day, approximately 364 times more frequently each year than the Manhattan Area Garden Tour, is the most excellent display at the K-State Gardens of the John E. Tillotson Sr. Adaptive/Native Plant Garden.



Those of you who are native plant enthusiasts should plan a whole trip around this garden because it is, in my experience, unequaled for the use of native prairie forbs in a garden design. Here columbines, milkweed, echinacea, butterfly milkweed, yucca, coreopsis, penstemon, prairie larkspur and evening primrose, all mix in glorious harmony and mature abundance.  The display is at its peak now, in early June.    

This view, down the long axis of the garden looking towards the old conservatory will give you an idea of the flowing masses of perennial forbs that make up the display garden.  Coreopsis in the foreground and Pale Purple Coneflower (Echinacea pallida) in the background provide the basis of a pastel palette for your pleasure.


I often find myself trying to take a peerless photo of a group of these echinacea in the fruitless pursuit of  photographic perfection.  It is most definitely an exercise in frustration for an amateur like myself, but there are lots of opportunities here to experiment with depth of field, framing, focus and shadows.  The hardest choice for me is always where the focus should be;  the plant in the center or the plant closest to the lens?   Sometimes, I capture a pretty nice image, only to realize that, on closeup, one of the flowers is damaged or blemished, marring the effect of the photo.  

The honeybees were going crazy over this newly-opened Butterfly Milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) during the Garden Tour.  The whole area was alive with bees moving quickly from bloom to bloom, humming with excitement and loud enough to drown out the noise from nearby traffic.  Does anyone else wonder, while viewing closeup photos of bees, how they ever lift those pudgy bodies with such small delicate wings?








I assume this is a form of Showy Evening Primrose, (Oenothera speciosa), but I've never seen it quite so blazenly pink in the wild.  I don't know if it is a collected species or a commercial cultivar, but the delicate petals laugh in the face of the hottest sun.  According to Internet sources, some of the Showy Primrose that start out pure white age to pink, like these, while others stay the pure white that I associate with the wild species.


 


Years ago, walking around the K-State Garden, I noticed an enticing sweet scent that seemed to be coming from some 6 feet tall, large-leaved plants.  In an embarassing display of naivete and stupidity, I asked what they were, only to find out that they were Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), the same weeds I'd grown up with in Indiana and fought hand-to-hand in my father's garden and fields.  They are a perfect example of how blind we can be to the good qualities of a plant that pops up in the wrong place.  I had no idea Common Milkweed was fragrant, nor that it would grow so tall if left alone.


I'll leave you with the sight of these bronze wildcats (the K-State mascot, for those who were unaware), which languidly observe the garden visitors during the day and come alive to patrol the native garden at night.   Sited in Phase I of the garden, right next to busy Denison Avenue, you can tune out the traffic and suddenly you're out in the middle of the Flint Hills.  I know that some gardeners (yes, I'm talking to you, Benjamin Vogt) believe that such an ethos is the only way we should be gardening.  When I view the success of this design, here at the Kansas State University gardens, I can only agree and encourage everyone to drop by and leave with some new gardening ideas.