Cold Climate Gardening

One thing about an old house, there are lots of nooks and crannies for creatures to find their way in. It’s a fact of life. Call it sharing habitat. While we try to minimize it, there is no way we can keep everything out, especially since our house is on a stacked stone foundation and rises and falls with the freezing and thawing of the earth.

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This just came to my attention. Barbara Damrosch dishes the dirt about these rodents in A Game of Whack-a-Vole:

No sentiment please. No matter how reverent we gardeners may feel about the web of life there are times when the list of predators must include you.

We’re on the same page, Barbara.

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This is one of the better reasons for trimming back all your perennials in the fall. Less hidey-holes for the resident rodents. There are probably half a dozen of these holes in the Birthday Garden alone, and there are plenty in my other garden beds, too.

Where’s a feral cat when you need one? Or an owl?

When I feel like torturing myself I think of all the delicacies the voles are feasting on. Expensive corydalis. The lilies I grew from seed that my grandmother had given me.

There are two holes near the base of the rose bush I …

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Isn’t this a stunning specimen of Polygonum cuspidatum? The generous rainfall we’ve had this season has brought it into top form. Too bad it’s on America’s Most Wanted list. Yes, this is Japanese knotweed, aka Japanese bamboo, Mexican bamboo, fleeceflower, and Fallopia japonica. (I’ve been told that it’s also known as privy weed, but I couldn’t find any confirmation of this on the web. However, the luxurious stand pictured above is growing right where I was told the outhouse was located, back in the days when our house lacked indoor plumbing. Presumably the leaves were used as a makeshift toilet paper.) And all this luxuriant vegetation will be knocked down by the first frost, only to rise again next spring. Vigorous scarcely begins to describe this ambitious plant. It is invasive. It is beautiful. Who said villains are always ugly? And if you like to play with fire, Plant Delights Nursery sells three Polygonum cuspidatums that they claim do not spread by rhizomes. Two of them are variegated, and they are wow! plants. But will I buy one? Let’s just say, “once burned, twice shy.”

A lot of the weeds are looking really good.

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Okay, I am not big into lawns. We ourselves have what Ken Druse calls a “cropped meadow.” But to each his own. If you were affected by this summer’s drought, and your lawn has seen better days (or years), go read Yard & Garden Line News, published by the Minnesota Cooperative Extension, for some good advice on how to deal with the damage.

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There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.–Robert Benchley

When it comes to gardening, there are two kinds of weeders in the world, those who say, “When in doubt, yank it out,” and those who “On a whim, leave it in.” I am one of the leave-it-inners. If I wasn’t, I would have yanked out Oriental poppies, lupines, and ‘Zebrina’ mallow out of my newly acquired garden, relics from the previous gardener that I didn’t recognize. My friend Bub calls them “wait-and-see” plants.

Well, I will be the first to admit wait and see is a double-edged sword. If I had followed the advice of my father-in-law, who told me, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s a weed,” I would not be pulling motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca) out of my shade garden every year. In its first year, it makes an intriguing rosette of foliage, quite ornamental. In its second year, it shoots up and makes many seeds, and its flowers aren’t all that eye-catching.

Last year, way in the back of my north border, I spied a very attractive plant with blue-green leaves and maroon stems. I didn’t know what it was, so I decided to wait and see what the flowers looked like.

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It was April. I had just come back from a cabin-fever-induced tramp over our field and through our woods. I had noticed this red-leafed vine growing all over:If our field is 5 acres, then this was easily growing on two acres of it. It lined the main walking path and carpeted the ground near my favorite sitting spot. And then I read Judith’s post about poison ivy. Uh-oh.

It’s a vine. It has three leaves. It has the lovely red fall color that is supposed to be characteristic of poison ivy, carried through the winter into spring. (We had had rather mild winter temperatures, and not too much snow.) How could it have grown all over without my realizing it was happening?

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