Bird Gifts

While we are on the subject of volunteer plants (see yesterday's post), I'd like to show you another shrub that popped up on its own, this time in a border next to the house.  This is a 6 inch tall specimen of Cotoneaster apiculatus, or Cranberry Cotoneaster, that has seen fit to try to sneak in unnoticed to my landscape.  Compared to my cultivated, nursery-purchased specimens, which are attacked by spider mites and look wretched every year during August, this one is either in a spot more to its liking or it is too small yet to be noticed by the spider mites.  It is green and healthy and proclaiming its right to life, and I think I'm going to transplant it and give it a chance somewhere. 

I always have trouble pronouncing certain species and Cotoneaster is one of them.  Wikipedia tells us the phonetic spelling is  kəˈtoʊniːˈæstər, which is even worse for me than trying to interpret the Latin.  There are symbols there that aren't even English for gosh sakes. I turned, as usual to the excellent Fine Gardening Magazine's pronunciation guide which audibilizes the word for you and which I would say as "Ko-tone-e-aster."  There, now, isn't that simpler?

Because of the uncertain genetics in this volunteer, however, I suppose that I can't assume that it will stay in an expected 3 foot tall by 6 foot diameter space, so I'm trying to find a spot somewhere on the periphery of the garden where it can romp away if it feels a genetic need.  I presume that this one is from a seed spread by a bird, just as the mulberries in my yard must be, and so hopefully it will bear and increase the food available to my flying winter garden inhabitants.  Of course, this bird-sown gift may benefit the bees more, because my larger cotoneaster's are covered in white flowers every spring and the bees flock to them as an early source of nectar.  The birds helping the bees.  There's got to be a metaphor for love in there somewhere.

Whence thou comest?

I realize that I was neglecting my garden in the past few weeks of heat, in favor of my own personal survival, but how, oh how, did I miss this stray mulberry seedling to the point that it got so big? I mean, talk about embarrassing. This one popped up in a hillside bed of purple-leaved honeysuckle so it was hardly inconspicuous as soon as it got taller than the honeysuckle mounds.  If I had let this errant creature get any bigger, I'd have had to hire a tree service to haul it off!

Every verdant area of the planet, I suppose, has a group of first colonizers, "weeds," and then a group of scraggly, undesirable weed trees that make way for the more stalwart forest citizens such as oak and beech.  In Kansas, the weed trees that pop up most often in my borders seem to be mulberries, red cedars, osage orange, and cottonwoods, although russian olive trees also lately seem to be frequently trying to gain a foothold.  Of the main four, I'm a sucker for our native cottonwoods, so I commonly transplant them somewhere where I can allow a large, rustling tree.  Red cedars are easy to spot because of their foliage differences from most of the plants in my deciduous borders, and I can't allow them to proliferate because I know that any untended land in Kansas quickly becomes a crappy red cedar forest if neglected.  Osage oranges usually announce themselves by stabbing me with their thorns when I pass, so they are often both easy to find and simultaneously provide me with sufficient motivation to remove them.  The mulberries, however (I believe these are native American red mulberries or Morus rubra), blend in somehow, the right color or the right shape, and my eye often misses their incursions until the sunlight is just right to set them off from the surrounding foliage.  There are two other mulberries in my garden right now, one that I keep forgetting to remove at the base of a mature 'Carefree Beauty' rose, and another hiding out among the blackberries, whose leaf shapes aid it in camouflage.  

Red mulberry saplings don't grow to be large or very useful trees, but I often think about letting a few grow on the periphery of my garden; for the birds, you see.  There are several wild ones growing down around the pond and around my acreage and I know they've got to be valuable resources for the wildlife, whatever I think of their messiness and lack of value to humans. Okay, I know some of you eat them, but the wild mulberries here lack any sufficient flavor for me to favor them. But I have a bigger problem than that with the idea of leaving mulberries to grow for birds.  Male and female flowers usually occur on different trees, so to transplant a fruiting tree to my landscape I have to let it grow tall enough to allow me to identify it.  And by that time it is so big that moving the chert rock to create a nice planting hole would seriously test my innate laziness.  The birds, I think, are just going to have to find their sustenance elsewhere in my garden, or fly down to the pond at suppertime.

Weatherman Wrong

Well, not just the weatherman, but the entire weather forecasting system is sometimes stumped by the fickle nature of the Kansas Flint Hills.  Yesterday at 8:00am., weather.com and the local news all predicted a return to highs in the mid-100's for the Flint Hills after a brief respite in the high 90's late last week.  I hurried outside to mow and get at least some minor work done in my neglected garden before the heat rose.  A warm south wind was blowing and the temps quickly rose towards the 90's. And then low and behold about 10:00a.m., as I mowed, the wind increased rapidly and it got darker and darker and then simply ominous to the west and north.

It didn't rain, as a big summer storm slid just north of us, but I didn't complain a bit because by 1:00 p.m. the temperature was a cool 81 degrees and it didn't rise back into the 90's all day.  Last night a little rain came, and this morning it was downright chilly to my heat-wave-adjusted internal thermometer.  Forecasts for the next 10 days show a number of low nights in the 60's and only two days into the 90's.  The heat wave has broken here!  The only creatures in my garden that aren't happy about that are the cold-blooded snakes and lizards slinking around in my peripheral vision.  I don't know if my fellow Kansas blogger Gaia Garden is right in her eloquent post about global warming, but at least I know now that I'll see Winter once again in the Flint Hills.  I was beginning to wonder.  Even the sun yesterday evening, exiting with a golden sunset, seemed to want to apologize to the Flint Hills earth and gardeners for all the troubles it has caused in recent weeks.