Archive for category Class Announcement
A Few Updates
Posted by piedmontgardener in Class Announcement, piedmont gardening on December 16, 2020
A healthy farm in Snow Camp, NC
Greetings, faithful blog followers! I apologize for my lapse in communication. I am busily writing these days for organizations I support. Just published today is a piece I wrote for the blog of the New Hope Audubon Society about a cattle farm in an adjacent county that is being managed to maintain biodiversity. I was lucky enough to tour this farm last month. I found it inspirational on many levels. It was also quite beautiful. If you have the time, please visit the link above and read about the great work done by the farm’s manager, Nick Harper.
In a moment of perhaps excessive enthusiasm, I agreed to write several articles for the spring edition of Conservation Gardener, the magazine of the North Carolina Botanical Garden. That magazine is a benefit of membership, so if you’d like to read it and you aren’t a member, please consider joining. Articles in the upcoming edition will all address various aspects and issues concerning biodiversity, including a piece I’m writing on ways to increase biodiversity in your home landscape — and why that’s a good idea. Those articles are still in process, so I may not be writing here as much as I’d like until I crank out what I’ve promised.
Finally, in a nod to what I hope will be a post-COVID world by late spring of next year, I am considering ways I can share my years of experience with small groups. A younger friend of mine recently pointed out that my greatest asset is my breadth of knowledge about the southeastern Piedmont landscape. I am considering offering small classes to be held on my five acres of green chaos. Topics would reflect the interests of attendees, but I could offer tips on vegetable gardening, how to recognize and enhance microenvironments in a landscape, favorite shrubs, favorite trees, pollinator gardens, plant propagation, native plant identification, invasive species, and so on. If there’s interest, I could also offer tips on writing about the natural world and nature journaling. These classes would be held entirely outdoors.
I’m thinking attendees could compensate me in one of two ways. Either they could pay me whatever fee we settle on, or if attendees are able and willing, I’m toying with offering a class in exchange for a hour or two of weeding time by attendees. Certain parts of my yard are being overwhelmed by invasive, non-native Asian Hawksbeard. My aging joints cannot pull these weeds as fast as they are appearing. I would welcome help in exchange for some teaching time from me.
If you live within an easy drive of the Chapel Hill, NC area and you think you might like to attend a small class, please write me at the e-mail address listed on the About page. If you do so, please mention the topics that would be of most interest to you. If there’s a topic you’re interested in that’s not listed above, please mention it in your e-mail.
I hope to offer a post on the occasion of the imminent winter solstice, but if I don’t make it, please know how much I appreciate you, my blog readers, and I wish you all a very safe and happy holiday season.
One of the ponds on the farm I recently visited.
Time and Transformation
Posted by piedmontgardener in Class Announcement, piedmont gardening on January 9, 2019
Witchhazel ‘Amethyst’ blooming on New Year’s Day
This April, Wonder Spouse and I will have lived on the same beloved five acres for 30 years. When we arrived in 1989, the previous owner had landscaped the property like a park. Naturally occurring large canopy trees were underlain by a carpet of grass. The only understory trees were dogwoods; the only shrubs, Asian evergreen azaleas and forsythias.
We set to work slowly adding in the layers of a Piedmont forest that should have been there. Our ultimate goal is to eliminate the grass entirely, and in parts of the yard, the many happy shrubs and understory trees have done a fine job of shading out the grass. As we’ve added native trees, shrubs, and wildflowers, exploiting the many microhabitats on the property, native wildlife has responded with enthusiasm. We now share our lush, green (during the growing season) paradise with a diverse array of birds, amphibians, reptiles, insects, and mammals. This is our happy place, our sanctuary, our haven from human-wrought chaos in the world.
Flood on November 13, 2018
Because about two acres of our property is an active floodplain, terraforming floods have been part of life here. Transformation was always active, but last September, the floods were different. Hurricane Florence dropped over ten inches of rain on us — an amount we had never seen before. Her rains were followed by much, much more rain, resulting in a record rainfall year for my area. Excessive precipitation has continued; our floodplain area has been permanently altered by a transformation so stark that — if I could subtract the water — I might imagine myself treading the surface of Mars.
I was already preparing myself for big changes on the floodplain. This is likely the year that non-native Emerald Ash Borers will find and destroy the stand of 37 canopy-size Green Ash trees that currently occupy those acres. I was imagining the area might come to be more dominated by the wetland wildflowers that have always occupied one edge of the floodplain. Now I wonder if any of those wildflowers will even manage to survive. This is what that area looked like early last summer:
Wetland wildflowers June 2018
This is what that same area looked like on New Year’s Day of 2019:
Same area New Year’s Day 2019
The entire wildflower area had been buried by many inches of sand and silt deposited by repeated flood events.
Here’s what one of my favorite spots in that area looked like last May:
Atamasco lilies and cinnamon ferns
And this is what it looked like on New Year’s Day:
Buried wildflower area, January 1, 2019
I thought I was comfortable with the dynamic nature of our property; I embraced the changes, rolled with Nature’s whims, celebrated the plants and animals that adapted and changed over time. But this — this has been a test of my resiliency, and of the occupants with whom I share this space.
I’ve generally found it helpful that my birthday is in early January. Turning another year older just after the calendar turns magnifies that whole new-year vibe. To put it in the vernacular, transformation slaps me up the side of the head every January. This new year, transformation feels more like a punch to the gut, but I am coming to terms with it.
My birthday gift from Wonder Spouse — a wildlife camera
Early morning deer captured by the wildlife camera
Any illusions I had about being the overseer of my landscape have been permanently cast aside. Like the fish flopping in receding flood waters, I was gasping for air for a while there. But as I watched those fish being gobbled up by patrolling great blue herons and a gang of garrulous crows, I realized that Nature has always been in charge.
I will still grow vegetables at the top of the hill, where floodwaters never reach — if they don’t drown in rainfall. But otherwise, I think this year will be my Year of Watching. I will walk our land often, looking for clues about who is still here, what is thriving, what has disappeared. I will listen to the rattle of kingfishers as they celebrate the expanded wetland. I will watch and wait and ponder what time and transformation have in store for me.
Floodplain sunrise, January 7, 2019
A note for those living near Chapel Hill, NC:
I’ll be teaching a class on nature writing this spring at the North Carolina Botanical Garden. Follow this link for details.
Celebrate the Unfolding
Posted by piedmontgardener in Class Announcement, Favorite Plants, piedmont gardening on May 12, 2017
Ashe Magnolia bud
I have been watching the natural world closely since I was around three years old. My earliest memories involve skinks and chipmunks (at different times) that I watched for hours as they conducted their lives in my yard. I planted my first wildflower garden when I was ten, grew my first tomatoes around age fourteen, and gloried in my first full-fledged vegetable garden at age twenty-three. I’ve grown a vegetable garden every year since then, and as soon as Wonder Spouse and I bought our first house, we’ve also been adding as many native plants as we could.
Caterpillars of the Viceroy butterfly eating a wetland willow tree.
With more than five decades of gardening experience behind me, you would think I would have cultivated more patience. But every year, I find myself wondering if the shiny green globes on the tomato plants will ever morph into red juicy delights, if the bean vines scaling the top of their trellis will ever produce the long green flavorful pods we adore, and if the expanding buds of my native perennials will ever open so the pollinator party can get fully underway.
Chrysalis of a Monarch Butterfly
I found myself doing it again earlier this week. I was standing in front of the purple milkweeds in the pollinator garden exhorting them to hurry up and open. They still haven’t, by the way, but at least I can now see hints of color in some of the buds. I added Fire Pinks (Silene virginica) to that garden last fall. In the last few weeks, they’ve been sending up many flower stalks laden with promising buds. But the recent cool, cloudy spell of weather put them into suspended animation. Finally, just yesterday, a single flower on one of the plants managed to open. It took it all day, but late-afternoon sun finally coaxed this single crimson flower into fully opening.
Fire Pink bud just opening
I confess I visited this flower several times during the day, photographing it at every stage of its unfolding. That’s when a little epiphany went off in my brain – Nature unfolds at its own pace. Impatience is a human weakness, not a failing of the flower. The point, I belatedly realized, is to celebrate the unfolding, observe and appreciate every moment of the lives around me – and my own!
Fire Pink almost fully open
I know – duh, right? Like most folks, I juggle a fair number of projects, interact with a number of different people, and it is very easy for me to get lost in the machinery of my brain as it attempts to find a way to finish everything on my infinite to-do list. Duh, again – infinite to-do list? Who am I kidding?
The “pink” in Fire Pink refers to the “pinked” (serrated) edges of its petals, not the color.
From this point forward, I am going to do my best to stay in the moment as often as I can. Instead of tapping my toes impatiently at tightly closed flower buds, I will breathe deeply beside them and try to tune into the tempo of their lives. I will try to relish every stage of Nature’s unfolding, chill out my runaway-freight-train brain, and seek peace in every beautiful moment of every day.
An Ashe Magnolia’s floral beginning (bud) and ending (cone/fruit)
Ashe Magnolia blossom
Piedmont Gardener 