Prairie Camouflage

I believe that some of the most fascinating aspects of Flint Hills gardening have been the examples of local fauna adaptation that are everywhere around me, hiding alongside the prairie grasses.  I could wax long and hard on the invisibility of the various prairie snakes that tend to announce their presence at the best possible moment to give me heart palpitations.  But I'm not going to because I have deeply suppressed those memories of brief panics that make me a serious contender for the Olympic high jump. No, I'd like to present a couple of unique and more cuddly creatures of the prairie ecosystem.

One delight of gardening in Kansas is the stealthy appearance of the stately Praying Mantis.  From my childhood in Indiana, I was sure that the Praying Mantis was always light green, a green that made it invisible among the plants in my father's garden.  I would have bet that the Praying "Manti" of Kansas would be green as well, perhaps the exact green of big bluestem or Indian grass, but obviously I didn't know better.  In reality, the Mantis in Kansas has evolved to be present in greatest numbers in the Fall, when insect populations here have reached their peak, and they are not green, but are simply brown.  The brown of drying Fall prairie grass.  A brown tone mixed with the brown  color and the pattern of the dust that fills the air during the heat and droughts of summer.  I actually transferred the Mantis (I don't know the exact species) pictured at the right from the tall grass to the brick wall of my house simply so that it could photographed.  I'd never even have found it in the grass if it hadn't moved as I reached forward to fondle a Miscanthus seedhead.

If there were an award for camouflage, however, I'd give it to the Common Nighthawk (Chordeiles minor).  Below, you can see a female Nighthawk who chose to nest a few summers back in the mulch surrounding a walnut tree in my yard.  Nowhere in my yard was there a better background for it to choose to hide against during mid-summer than that mulch and the flint rock surrounding it.  And it was obviously planning well, for behind it, if you look closely one of the things that looks like a rock is a Nighthawk chick, invisible against the mulch except for the beady little black eyes.  That chick and two other siblings survived an entire month after hatching, flat out in the open front yard, surrounded by predators both on the ground (my bird-loving Brittany Spaniel and a pair of cats, as well as hungry coyotes and sneaking snakes) and in the air (owls at night and Red-tail hawks during the day).  In reality, the biggest danger to this cute little ball of fluff was likely my lawn-mower, because during mowing, the chicks would run out into the grass, moving back and forth as I mowed next to the mulch.  I spent an entire month waiting for a horrendous little "pffft" and a tuft of feathers from the lawn mower deck, but somehow these little creatures survived all the hideous noise and the machinery that helps me keep the snake population down in the immediacy of my surroundings. 

Nature is sometimes incredibly brilliant in its designs and methods, is it not?
  

Ballerina Dances

It perhaps will come as a surprise to serious rosarians that the Hybrid Musk rose 'Ballerina' grows and flowers well here in the Flint Hills. Or to a really serious rosarian, perhaps it is not a surprise.  It is rated as a Zone 6 rose in many sources, so trying it out in my garden was one of those occasional (okay, frequent then) stretches that many gardeners seem to take in a fit of zone-envy.  The upshot of this experiment is that I've got several own-root specimens of 'Ballerina' growing in my garden and in all respects, 'Ballerina' is a trouble-free, hardy rose here in the Zone 5B Plains region.

'Ballerina', released in 1937, is a cloud of pink flower trusses during the main rose season, and it reblooms sporadically over the summer and fall.  Blossoms are single with bright yellow stamens and the blush pink tones often fade quickly as the hot sun burns the petals in the Kansas sun.  It is a fragrant rose, as advertised, but I find the fragrance fades with the pink color here in the wilting Kansas heat. I leave the blooms alone without deadheading because I enjoy the small orange hips that form a spectacular display as Autumn and Winter come along.  As an own-root rose, 'Ballerina' stays about 4 foot tall wherever it grows in my garden and I have not detected any winter dieback in the past decade.  I've seen a wondrous five foot specimen in the Denver Botanical Garden as well, so I know it will take the winter in other Zone 5 areas as well.  I never spray the rose and it does not become denuded by blackspot in the worst of summers.  It also tolerates shade exceptionally well for a rose, blooming profusely in my back landscape bed close to the house and overshadowed by a  7 foot tall NannyberryViburnum  (Viburnum lentago).  'Ballerina' makes an excellent hedge and its thick foliage can be pruned to shape or the thin canes allowed to spill over a wall or other structure.

I originally purchased Ballerina because I recalled it was listed as a "dancing" rose in a 1993 American Rose Society article where the author, Anya-Malka Halevi, described four of her favorite roses that have flexible canes that dance in the wind.  I've got plenty of wind available and my biggest problem with wind is that it breaks off new rose canes.  I hoped Ballerina would thus be strong in the wind and in fact, the flexible canes stand the wind well.  Unfortunately, checking the original article again, I see that I had a bit of a senior moment and probably confused the Ballerina name with the desired activity, for the four roses described by Ms.Halevi were 'Therese Bugnet', 'Madame Plantier', 'Honorine de Brabant', and 'Sir Thomas Lipton'.  Ballerina, it seems, dances only in my mind.  But as long as she thrives in my climate, she's welcome to stand in as a dancer in my garden anytime.

Gardening Eternity

I have always known that gardeners, as a general lot, comprise some of the most optimistic and even-natured humans on the planet.  The very nature of planting and growing something in defiance of the vagaries of wind and weather systematically weeds out the pessimists and those individuals who combine angry outbursts with a weak cardiovascular system.  Planting tomatoes well past the expected last frost date and having them wiped out in a freak spring freeze is brutally Darwinistic.  So is watching an ice storm take down the paper-bark maple you coveted for a decade before planting and have been nursing along for the past five years.

Recently however, I was simultaneously humbled, and almost driven to tears, by the words of a friend's father, a life-long gardener, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and told he has mere months left to live, with many of those precious weeks likely spent in decline.  According to my friend, her father has taken the news with a calm acceptance that has eased the minds of his family, saying only that "he is looking forward to planting his garden this spring as always, even though he knows he'll never see the harvest."

Dear God, what depths of faith are relayed by that simple sentence. Just as all religions state the concept in one way or another, Christian scripture cautions that  "we know not what shall be on the morrow" (James 4:14). Few of us garden or live, however, as if the end WERE going to be tomorrow.  It is one thing for me to know logically that, at 51 years of age, I will likely not live to see the second semicentury of the scarlet oak I planted a few years back. It is another thing entirely to recognize and accept that I might not live to see ripe tomatoes from the seeds I am preparing to start indoors in a few weeks.  I do not know my friend's gardening father, but I have known two of his children personally and professionally and if his garden matches his family, I am sure I would be awed by the vigor and beauty of his plants. He leaves behind a legacy that will not just be this Spring's peas and this Fall's potatoes.  His legacy is bequeathing the wisdom, to all those he touches, that living well is about doing every day exactly those same things we would choose knowingly to do in our last months.

I know not what life's end will bring.  I cannot know for certain if there is an Eden above for gardeners to spend eternity dabbling in the soil, or whether I will return in the next life as a squash bug, or whether my soul and chemicals will simply merge with Mother Gaia.  Like many in this Age, I feel sometimes that I lack the faith that I was raised on and should have, for I have seen far too many bad things happen to keep an unquestioning faith blindly intact. But I do know, looking out my window now at the snow and ice blanketing the ground in mid-Winter, that I can follow one brave gardener's path and plant again this Spring, even though I may not ever see the harvest.