Advance in endangered orchid cultivation shows the fungal benefits of native soils in undisturbed forests

"The team ... planted and tracked three U.S. orchid species -- all present in the East and endangered somewhere in the country -- in six study sites: three in younger forests, which were 50 to 70 years old,  and three in older forests, which were 120 to 150 years old .... Older forests, McCormick and her colleages found, had about five to 12 times more orchid-friendly fungi than younger forests, and the fungi in older forests were more diverse."

-- Carrie Madren for Scientific American on Melissa McCormick's Smithsonian Environmental Research Center team, whose work has helped to demonstrate that, even on a microscopic level, old-growth forests are a superior habitat for preserving native endangered species. 

Learn more about the experiment here.

Source: Madren, C. (2012, April).  Picky eaters club: Fungi that orchids need to grow are just as finicky as the exotic flowers themselves.  Scientific American, 306, p. 16.

Rainy Days and Five-Point Stars

I've been desperately wanting to get into the garden and put the rest of the seeds in the ground -- yes, this is belated, but I'm hoping it'll still be okay, since in normal years plants do things like go dormant and die of frost in the beginning of April, not go limp from heat.  We've had a bizarre year where few things ever bothered to go dormant and the spring ephemerals all bloomed around Christmastime, so I'm telling myself the weirdness isn't my fault.  The seeds will come out of stratification and go in the ground when we get back from Charleston next week.

Anyway.  I've been wanting to garden, but yesterday there was a wedding and today it's raining in a steady drumming fall, so it's not happening.  Instead, I designed a new little graphic for the sidebar, which you can see over on the left.

I've never done design for an entire website and I wouldn't dare try (this blog has a free Blogger layout with some tweaking).  If I ever start an independent domain I'll hire a real designer; it makes a massive difference.  However, it's not actually hard to design your own small graphics for a blog or for a frame website like Etsy or Ebay, provided you have some free time, an eye for color, and a free program like GIMP. So I made the graphic with two hours of fiddling around in GIMP from a very nice photograph of an Anemone virginiana bloom with a bee on top, which I found on Wikimedia Commons.

This Anemone species -- tall thimbleweed -- is sort of Woodburn's herb garden mascot, so to speak.  Here's why:

1. It's an upstate native that thrives even in conditions of neglect -- just like the house itself.
2. It attracts native pollinators -- which is an important purpose of the garden.
3. It offers medicinal benefits that were historically important -- while many anemones are poisonous, this one is used in wound poultices and to treat that most Victorian of diseases, tuberculosis (consumption).

There's also a more personal or symbolic reason.  I wanted to include a plant in the landscape that had a clear five-petaled shape.  Five-pointed stars are important in Woodburn's architectural iconography (read more about this here).  The original moldings around the interior doors and windows feature an inverted Federal star at the corners, as you can see in this photo from the drawing room:

 Five-pointed stars or pentacles with the point downward (though they've been adopted as a symbol by Satanists today) are a semi-common good-luck symbol found in the architecture of Charleston-style plantation houses.  They're usually tipped downward, much as lucky horseshoes are placed with the curve down in order to "catch" good fortune.

However, Woodburn also sits at the center of a natural pentacle.  Its original documents describe it as being placed at the apex of five ridges, which are roughly shown in this pretty diagram I just made in MS Paint:

While the eastern ridge has been lost to industrial grading, I suspect the remaining ones may be even more obvious from the air now than they would have been in the 1830s, because untended woodland now fills the gaps between them pretty thoroughly.  I've walked three of the remaining four -- our compost pile is actually about where the "a" in "along" is, there at the top of the diagram -- and this feature of the landscape remains intact.

Superstitious, maybe, but I have a feeling that Woodburn, as a house conscious of its years of neglect, might be rather happy to have someone add this symbol back into its surroundings.  Who knows; maybe the stars will catch some luck for our garden project and the seeds will flourish despite being planted so late.

Stuff in the Garden: Pink Wood Sorrel

A note which has absolutely nothing to do with anything: As I write this post, I'm sitting in my friend Cindi's backyard next to the maple tree, periodically tossing toys for her terriers, wearing a long skirt and a broad-brimmed hat, working on my laptop while sipping from a plastic tumbler of iced tea mixed with a generous dollop of fuzzy navel.  Am I a real Southerner yet?

Anyway, back to a much colder day in February.

"What's the clovery thing?" Megan asked me as we poked gingerly through the fluffy fennel.

I confessed I didn't know, but pointed out, "there's more there ... and there ... oh, God, if this is really a hardy clover, we'll never kill it."

We had to wait for flowers at the end of March in order to positively identify it, during which time we went on calling it "clovery thing" -- but it's not clover, and we'll still probably never kill it.  But at least that's something we're happy about now.  In fact, it's a welcome addition to this old Southern garden's herb list.

The clover-like perennial mounder with tender, three-lobed green leaves turned out to be a wood sorrel -- either pink wood sorrel, Oxalis articulata, or violet wood sorrel, Oxalis violaceae.  Obviously we'd prefer the latter, as that garden-friendly shamrock relative is a native forb beloved of bees and other pollinators, but we should be so lucky.  However, judging by the stubby petals and darker centers of the flowers, it's not Florida's plaguing invasive creeping northward, so we're letting it be either way.

 Pink wood sorrel at Woodburn, late April.

At Woodburn, the Pinckney, Adger, and Smythe families might have used their wood sorrel in teas to soothe a mild fever.  Slaves and tenant farmers might have plucked a few stems when going to work in the hot sun -- the lemon-bitters flavor of the crunchy edible herb quenches thirst, so it would have tided them over between drinks of water.


Click below for more about the cultivation and cultural uses of wood sorrel, as well as links to wood sorrel recipes both modern and Victorian, plus an embarrassing picture of the blogger!

Gardening Report: Hoeing, Oh God So Many Gladiolus, and ... Tomatoes?

I must regretfully report that the race against time has been lost to gladiolus.

Note: Since this is my first Gardening Report post, I was seriously contemplating backdating posts to fill in since last February ... but then I realized that they would all read, "We pulled weeds, fought mightily against the oregano, and moved gladiolus.  The end," and it just wouldn't be interesting.  So we'll start last Thursday, a stormy Thursday toward the end of April, and work our way up from here.

 A pretty moment around 3:00, sandwiched between thunderstorms.  Ah, the early Southern summer.

Also, as of a couple of weeks ago, I am fully prepared to declare the hoe to be the most important invention of mankind short of the laptop computer.  But more on this later.  Back to gladiolus.

Woodburn's garden is absolutely filled with heirloom gladiolus (gladioli? ... glads).  At some point, someone seems to have planted them along the southern border of the garden, and they have now mounted a hostile takeover.  In my experience, gladiolus don't flower unless they're extremely happy with their location, but when they are ... ohhh brother.

On the upside, gladiolus are an absolutely stunning tall element in a summer garden.  

On the downside, they don't belong in this one.

The time to transplant gladiolus is after they've flowered.  However, if we'd waited that long, we wouldn't have been able to see the garden for the gladiolus, so we've been digging them and moving them to the edges.  Since these flowers get insanely tall (though heirloom glads are shorter than hybrids, some of ours are looking me in the eye already), we'd like them to serve as a border to stop people treading on the plants.  Transplanting the gladiolus is a tedious process, because it involves disentangling the corms (roots) from one another and from the roots of the crabgrass that has also moved in.  It also means that they probably won't grow again until next year, since gladiolus don't like to be disturbed after they've put up leaves.

If they've put up not just leaves but flowers, however, moving the glads can kill them.  It takes a lot of energy for bulbs (and corms) to flower, and they need the photosynthesis time afterward to build up energy for next year's flowers.

Sometime in the first half of April when M and I were horribly ill, they've flowered.  We have lost this battle for time.  But we will win the war ... when they're done flowering.

Scores for 4/27/12

Heirloom Tomatoes Planted: 3
Other Plants Planted: 5
Types of Seeds Planted: 4
Wheelbarrows Added to Compost: 1
Wheelbarrows of Soil Returned to Garden: 1
Horribly Painful Thorny Weeds Grasped: 3
Tree Saplings Removed: 4

Things on the To-Do List Now:

- plant the seeds currently cold-stratifying in the refrigerator
- plant the foxglove, thimbleweed, chamomile, and catnip seeds
- prune the fennel again
- continue policing for oak saplings
- moisten the compost heap
- plant marigolds near the tomatoes
- build tomato cages out of sticks

Things to Be Done at Some Point which Is Not Now:

- move the rest of the glads
- dig the pond
- do something about the brick path sliding down the hill

More photos and tales of seeding, including the question of why on earth we're planting tomatoes, after the jump!