Beware of Boxwoods

ProfessorRoush would like to call down a pox on all those garden authorities who have advocated various winter hardy boxwoods to be excellent landscaping plants.  A further pox on the "Big Box" stores who sell the cheapest boxwoods available and thus limit the selection of available cultivars to us.  Boxwoods are everywhere these days.  Southern Living, for instance, has an 18 page internet extravaganza on boxwoods as "the backbone of Southern gardens for centuries".   Boxwoods for landscaping.  Boxwoods as the perfect container plants. Trim and tidy boxwoods. Lavender and boxwood gardens.   Boxwood...BS, I say!

 

I jumped onto the boxwood welcome wagon a number of years ago when I grew tired of mustache landscaping with junipers and arborvitaes.  In Kansas, those two conifer stalwarts are plagued annually by bagworms, leaving the gardener only a choice between marathon hand-picking sessions or toxic wastelands.  During the landscaping of a new home, I went with less traditional choices for my front entry; large-leaved evergreens such as hollies and boxwoods.

 

I was so enamored by the survival of my first boxwoods that when it came time to screen the wind near my front door and outline the circular driveway (or, if you prefer, to slow and divert the feng shui flow of qi in the area), I chose to buy 12 inexpensive Buxus microphylla koreana 'Wintergreen' plants to create a hedge.  I will admit openly that the effort has created a really functional low-maintenance hedge over the years, at times a bit winter-damaged as I've noted previously, but a very nice screen as pictured above.

 

Functional, yes , but undesirable.  You see, the one thing that most boxwood advocates fail to disclose is that boxwoods, at certain times of the year, smell like....well, they smell like cat urine.  Unneutered male cat piss to be exact.  If you realize the source of that stench around your house comes from the boxwoods, then search terms such as "boxwood" and "cat piss" will turn up any number of entrys about the problem, ranging from how it will diminish the sale value of your home, to sources where the authors claim to like the odor, claiming "it reminds me of happy hours spent in wonderful European gardens, surrounded by brilliant flowers, the hum of bees and the redolence of boxwood."   I'm sad to confirm that if you park your car in my circular driveway right now, the odor as you step outside the car will not remind you of happy hours in European gardens.  Until I read that the stench should have been expected, I thought my cats were using the area as a toilet.

       

Adding insult to injury, however is not beyond the reach of the most diabolical garden authorities.  One D. C. Winston, author of an EHow article I found titled "How to find a boxwood that doesn't smell like cat urine," is a prime example. The advice given in the article?  Avoid the Buxus sempervirens cultivars because they are have the strongest "acrid" odor.  Seek out the species Buxus microphylla.  Mr. Winston specifically recommended 'Wintergreen'.  Ain't that a hoot?

 

Take it from me,  don't plant boxwoods by your front door. Ever.

 



Charred Satisfaction

Yesterday was Prairie Burn Day for my neighbors and I.  We waited till very late to burn the prairie this year compared with previous years, all the better to suppress invasive sumacs and other brush plants which are now fully leafed out and more susceptible to fire.  In fact, the burn went slowly because of a lack of wind and all the green grass underneath last winter's detritus.  There were no casualties this year, not even to any of our electrical boxes or minor outbuildings.  Most of my prairie is presently characterized by blackened earth punctuated by smoldering piles of donkey poo.

Burn Day's are communal and family events.  My wife and daughter both participated, tolerating my constant direction about water stream and fire spreading technique as they complained incessantly about spider webs and the possibility of giant female-eating ticks.  Burning Day also allows me to burn my garden debris piles in relative safety (surreptitiously photographed by my wife in the upper right picture) and they are a chance to burn out pack rat nests which accumulate in the woods around the pond.

This year, I took advantage of the occasion to check on the health of my son's Scotch Pine, shown here next to my daughter.  It was a gift from some well-meaning foresters at his elementary school some 17 or 18 years ago, a tiny seeding that I planted near the pond in hopes that it would be isolated and escape the rampant Scotch Pine disease in the area.  Its stands now almost 20 feet tall and healthy as an evergreen ox.

During every burn, I learn more about the prairie and my little portion of it.  This year my daughter found and rescued this little turtle crawling in the grass about 50 feet from the pond and wanted to keep it.  She was less excited when I told her it wasn't a box turtle but a snapping turtle searching for water.  We left it down by the pond, safe from the prairie fire sweeping in its direction.  I can't count all the rabbit and pack rat sightings of the week.

I rest now, content to let the passage of a few days clothe these burnt hills in emerald green.  In the picture below, you can see the blackened prairie to the north of my house, and the green hills of K-States Beef Unit, burned three weeks ago, beyond.  Soon the entire horizon will look like those hills, a sea of green grass ready once again for the summer passage of ghostly prairie schooners.    

Good Lilac Intentions

What was the old aphorism about the "road to hell being paved with good intentions"?  Or maybe, "no good deed goes unpunished?"

Each year, as the lilacs and peonies bloom, ProfessorRoush tries to brighten up the desk staff and waiting room by occasionally bringing in fragrant flowers (of appropriate purple, cream, or lilac colorings since those are the school colors).  This morning, I gathered a bouquet of lilacs, light 'Annabelle', and darker 'Patriot' and 'Sensation', unceremoniously stuck them in a Mason jar, and drove them into school to place them in the waiting room.

I often wonder if the practice will have to end when a client will finally complains about the strong fragrance offending them or setting off their allergies (what a world we live in now!), but if that occasion ever occurs, the flowers can be easily moved.  What I never dreamed of is finding, as I did several hours later, that they would attract bumblebees into the building.  I suppose it is possible that this little guy could have been hidden within a blossom as I collected them, torpid from the cold night air.  Surely, however, the warmer air of the Jeep would have awoken him as we drove.  An alternative, but hardly more likely hypothesis is that somehow this bumblebee followed the fragrance and found these flowers through double doors about 30 feet away from the outside.

If his presence had been widely noted, I'm sure it would have called for much clamor and strife, but luckily he seemed satisfied to perch on the same spot for awhile and then disappeared about ten minutes later, never to be seen again.   I do hope he found his way back out through the double doors and stocked his larder up from the trip so he doesn't return later.

I Think That Any Rain is Good Rain

And if that's true, then this morning we had a great rain. Thank the skies above, I heard the thunder at 4:30 a.m. and then rose with the patter on the windows reminding me to close the windows that were open. One thunderstorm followed another and by 7:30a.m., I woke singing to an old Bachman Turner Overdrive song;

"She said, I've had it comin' to me

But I wanted it that way

I think that any love is good lovin'

So I took what I could get, mmh

Oooh, oooh she looked at me with big brown eyes

And said, 

You ain't seen nothin' yet

B-b-b-baby, you just ain't seen n-n-nothin' yet"

Rain on the Kansas Flint Hills is always a time to rejoice. Parched spirits are replenished along with the thirsty hills who are just waking to Spring. In the midst of euphoria, I had enough presence of mind to set up the iLightningcam app so that I could capture the moments of lightning and rain on my greater garden. In the photo above, you can see the paths of the garden turning green, emerald against the prairie grasses still cloaked in winter gold. My tower of Sweet Autumn clematis is greening in the center, and behind it, a Jane Magnolia holds onto it's last rain-soaked blooms. At the left foreground, my iris bed readies a banquet of blooms, the aptly named 'First Edition' already in flower. An early viburnum or two stand out white against the dark foliage of the early morning in the greater garden. Even in the golden carpet of the foreground, you can see the forbs greening up, the genesis of wildflowers that will come along as the seasons mature. This is the area of native prairie between the house and garden that I mow just once a year, every Spring, to allow the wildflowers a chance to compete. Fed by the rain and by the nitrogen generated out of the lightning, all this is going to explode these next few weeks, a bounty of foliage and flowers miraculously generated from dead twigs and brown earth.

It's 10:30 a.m. now and I just braved the continuing lightning and sprinkles to check my closest rain gauge. There is 2.4 inches in the gauge and it is still coming down, more slowly now as if the skies know the earth needs some time to bask in the glory of wetness spreading deep beneath the surface. According to this morning's sodden newspaper, we were 2.86 inches behind average rainfall for 2014 yesterday and an inch behind April's average rainfall. No more. Now the promises of the peonies and the roses are freed to fill us again with joy and beauty and grace.