Review: Naturalist by E. O. Wilson

Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson (Island Pess, 2006).

"Most children have a bug period," Wilson writes. "I never grew out of mine."

Pulitzer Prize-winning entomologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson tells his life story in this lively autobiography, tracing his path from the small child poking in mud puddles, to becoming one of the world's experts on ant biology, to developing a new science of sociobiology and receiving several prestigious science and literary awards awards. His choice of insects as the subject of his live study, and especially ants, came about quite by accident: as a child, Wilson was fishing on a dock one day, and as he hauled in a type of fish called a pinfish, one of the spine on its aptly-named dorsal fin pierced his eye. The eye became inflamed, leaving him blind on that side. This left him able to study things he could bring close to his face. Insects filled the bill. Knowing that ants had been studied little, giving him scant competition in the field, Wilson devoted his live to the study of ants, racking up discovery after discovery, new species after new species, in some of the most remote places on earth.

Wilson's honesty and candor bring to life the world of science, from productive partnerships to ego-filled infighting in the halls of Harvard. His frank opinions of James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, give a whole new insight into the story as Watson tells it in The Double Helix. Wilson rubs shoulders with many big names in science: George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, Niko Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz, and others, yet never loses his Southern small-town charm.

I had the pleasure of attending a talk that Wilson gave at the centennial celebration of Willamette University's Biology Department last month. The talk centered on biodiversity and the importance of preserving endangered habitats, and his involvement in the ambitious Encyclopedia of Life. Wilson gave a similar, though shorter, talk when he received the TED prize. See the video here. Happily, I got my copy of Naturalist autographed!

The Ugliest Corner -- the Transformation Begins

Only a gardener would get all excited about a pile of dirt:

The bark dust company delivered that this morning -- okay, several hours after they were supposed to have shown up, but it finally came. That's eight cubic yards of a light sandy topsoil, which looks like mostly mineral soil. That'll be fine, especially for the paths between the beds. I have compost cooking away that I'll mix in when I start forming the beds.

After two and a half hours, the pile looked like this:


And I went indoors for some ibuprofin, a hot bath, and a bit of a lie-down.

Back at it tomorrow...

Garden Rant has a challenge for you

The ladies over on the Garden Rant blog set up a challenge on DonorsChoose.org. Check out the Garden Rant Global Garden Blogger Challenge to raise $10,000 for garden-related projects in low-income schools. I've added my donation for Walk in the Wild, and outdoor learning garden that a school in Louisiana is hoping to construct. Who else would like to step up and contribute?

The Ugliest Corner of my Yard

Several other garden blogs, in the name of full disclosure, have revealed the ugliest bits of their gardens. Here is what mine looks like -- or rather, looked like -- a few weeks ago:


That would be a useless, cracked, mossy, stained, nasty-looking concrete pad, about 22 feet on a side, that the former owners put in for their kids to play basketball on. Right in front of the house. Our kids never played basketball on it, so there it sat. But take it out? "No, Mom," they'd say. "Don't take it out. We could have a garage sale there."

Said garage sale never materialized, and the concrete kept getting uglier and uglier, with more cracks and more moss. Well, the moss was an improvement, really. At least it was green in the winter.

The kids are out of the house and I've lived with this monstrosity for too many years now. The poor "Hobbit tree" is dead and needs to come down, so with the promise of no shade on that part of the yard, and with sunny bits at a premium, it was time. Past time really, but time to do something a bit more organic with the spot.

So last Monday the concrete guys came with a big noisy machine and took away all the concrete. Now look at it!

Errr... ummm... it's, uh, dirt. Nice... well, not even nice dirt. Sticky red clay. But NO CONCRETE! Yaaay! There wasn't even a bed of gravel under it (which was probably one reason that it didn't hold up). I tried loosening the soil up with a digging fork, but while the soil was pretty soft to begin with, since we had a good rain this week, all it did was ball up in a sticky mass on the digging fork and on the bottoms of my feet. Ah, takes me back to my youth, growing up on a Christmas tree farm on a hill made almost entirely of red clay that stuck to our rubber boots until we looked like we were wearing basketballs. I sowed the whole thing with gypsum and called it good. At least that should prevent hardpan from forming.

Next weekend the barkdust company across town is bringing in a load of topsoil. That I'll spread, pile into beds, and have me a raised bed garden. And THAT will finally be an improvement.

To dig up: potatoes, turnips, Viking treasure hoard...

From the National Geographic website: Viking Treasure Trove Discovered in Swedish Garden.

Aw, and to think that the most exciting thing I've ever dug up in my garden was a lost Koosh ball.

Now there was the time when I was in third grade, when we lived in a rental house that had been a farmhouse, and my brothers discovered a trunk buried in the garden. After much digging and soaking the hard clay soil with a hose, they finally extracted it. To their dismay and disgust, all it contained with some kind of animal skeleton, probably a large dog.

But if there are any Vikings out there wondering where to bury their treasure, I've got a lovely garden...

Anyone want to buy a native plant nursery?

Wally Hansen is retiring from the nursery business, and is selling Wallace Hansen Nursery. It's a well-established native plant nursery that many folks in the mid-Willamette Valley area have come to know, love, and rely on. It appears that Wally would like this to continue as a nursery business. If you or anyone you know has a burning desire to run a nursery, has some nursery business know-how, and would like to live in Oregon, this is a terrific opportunity. Property, house, nursery, existing stock, greenhouses and all are included in the sale. See http://www.wallyhansennurseryforsale.com/ for more information and tons of pictures.

On a more selfish note -- someone please buy this and continue it as a native plant nursery, because if it goes away, there's no other place around where I can get native plants for my garden! If I'd gotten my graduate degree in horticulture instead of science education I'd be all over this.

Erosion control

It's because the driveway in the back of our house goes like this:


that there's a bit of an erosion problem at the bottom of the drive.

Access to the back driveway is by means of a blind alley, and on the other side of the alley, the ground slopes steeply down into the neighbor's yard. Winter rains go sluicing down the drive and can tear up the slope, which the downhill neighbors keep barkdusted and free of weeds, so there's nothing to hold the slope together except some photinia bushes. The neighbor kids go running up and down the thin strip of bare dirt that technically belongs to the people on the side of us, but the neighbors don't take care of it, and then they go down the steep barkdusted slope, tearing furrows in the already threatened banks. Their experiments in using a hose full blast to carve canyons into the slope didn't help any, either. After I carefully raked the dirt back into place they kinda got the hint that maybe that wasn't a good idea.

I'd placed a row of rocks along the edge of the paving, trying to divert some of the water, but I'm not sure how effective it's been. So I took stronger measures this weekend. After picking up the rocks, I dug a trench along the edge of the pavement and the top of the slope, piled some of the dirt on the slope side of the trench, and mixed the rest with some compost and steer manure to increase the organic content of the red-clay-and-rock mix that serves as soil in this neighborhood. Then I set the rocks against the small ridge I'd raised, making in effect an very narrow "rain garden" -- or rather, a runoff garden. Here 'tis, freshly dug:


Since our monsoon season is late October through the end of June or so, I planted some native spring-blooming damp-meadow plants, specifically Sidalcea (Checker mallow) and Camas, which I picked up at the fall sale at Wallace Hansen Gardens. I know where I can collect Camas seeds in the spring, too, so I'll sow the plot with seeds later. Since the slope bakes in the summer, I ordered some native Goldenrod and some Zinnia grandiflora, both western prairie plants that do well in dry areas and tolerate clay. I just ordered a few from High Country Gardens to try out. If they can tolerate damp winters, they should flourish in the dry summers. All of these plants are butterfly plants, so if they colonize, I may start getting a healthy population of butterflies around here.

As for the bare dirt slope, I wanted to plant that with something that would hold the slope together, but wouldn't need much care, since it's an awkward place to get a hose into. I also wanted something good for birds or beneficial insects. My Red Hot Poker plants needed thinning, so as I was pulling out big, fat corms I thought, "Well, why not these?" They tolerate shade pretty well, they propagate easily, they exist on little water all summer, they're green in the winter, and the blossoms feed hummingbirds and finches. I collected a bucketfull of healthy corms, used my mattock to dig holes in the compacted soil on the slope, and planted the whole bank in Red Hot Pokers. If I'd thought of that sooner, I'd have tried ordering some fall-blooming ones. Oh, well, these were free. I gave the slope a thorough soaking with a sprinkler while I went inside and cleaned out the guinea pig cage, then lightly mulched the slope with the used shavings.

Now to go talk to the kid next door about the problems of erosion...

The Kitten Saga continues

Readers may remember that our yard was blessed again with kittens in May (see Kittens: The Sequel). The story didn't end with that post, obviously. When the kittens reached six weeks, I was ready to get them indoors. Alas, if I'd only started a few days sooner -- poor Gadget was taken by some predator and found dead one street over. The neighbor's nosy kid found the nest of survivors in our yard (grrr!) and came over to report that his mom was going to call the Humane Society and have them taken away (double grrr!). That accelerated the plan, and after getting a spay certificate from the local no-kill shelter, I got Toast, the mother, trapped and rounded up the babies. Toast went to the vet and got spayed and came back home.

Here are the babies a couple days after we caught them. I put together a "playpen" in the living room made from those wire squares that go together to make storage cubes. This kept them safe, and and the same time kept them around people.

This is Sprocket...


And here are Edison and Gizmo.

Toast still hangs around the house. She's a smart little girl and saw me take her babies in, so when she came home from the vet, she came up on the deck to peek in the windows until she found them. I feed her regularly, and she's slowly getting used to people. I think she's a little lonesome; when I go out into the garden, she often follows me around.

So the idea was that we'd foster the babies for the no-kill shelter, and then they'd be adopted out when they were past the delicate stage and had been fixed and microchipped. We were quite sure that six cats would be too many for this house.

Only...

... we're kinda used to them now. And rather attached to them. Edison, the goofy little brother of the trio, is a lovable little purr machine. Sprocket has the most winsome face and loves to cuddle. And while Gizmo is more independent, she can be a loving little thing, too. They're all doing fine with us, but are still shy of strangers.

So it looks like we're going to have to have a word with the shelter about these three:

Gizmo

Sprocket

and our darling Edison.

The Literary Gardener Calendar

It's here! For garden literature enthusiasts who need some inspiration for their own journals, here is the Literary Gardener Calendar for 2008.

This calendar features original photos from my garden, inspiring quotes from fine gardening literature, and journal prompts for each month to help when you out when the words run dry.

I'll keep a link to this calendar in the sidebar, as well as to the books quoted on each month's page -- naturally when you read the quotes, you'll want to read the books as well!

Thanks to the magic of Lulu.com, the calendar is available on demand and at a reasonable price until the end of February 2008. Delivery time is about a week after ordering, but allow more time during the holiday season, as the demand for calendars will be higher and the mail volume will increase.

Rebel Gardeners Risk the Law for Forbidden Fruits (and Veggies)

From the Associated Press: Front Yard Veggies Improve Diets, Homes

This upbeat title was replaced in our local newspaper with the slightly more ominous, "Front-yard vegetables fill tables, but rile neighbors."

Used to be, in the U.S. suburbs, in the days of big front porches and convenient back alleys, that the front of the house was for show and socializing, while the back of the house was for service. That's why the kitchen garden was stuck in the back -- rows of vegetables weren't pretty, no more than rows of laundry hanging out.

Then came the post-WWII suburbs and the ranch house, with the loss of alleys for garages, garbage, and delivery. The front became the service entrance, and people moved their living spaces to the back.

Where did the vegetable garden go to? Into oblivion. Just before the turn of the century, about 30% of food was produced at home. By the post-war years, less than 10% was produced at home as people ripped out old-fashioned victory gardens and replaced them with landscaping and in-ground swimming pools. And the number continues to decline. Today less than 3% of food is in the U.S. is produced at home. (See Kitchen Gardeners International: What is KGI? for statistics -- of course, some of the perceived decline may be due to the enormous increase in agribusiness production during the 1950's.)

Now, rising gas prices and the subsequent rise in consumer prices, plus an increasing awareness of global issues and a desire to "live green" has aroused a new interest in gardening. But with urban and suburban land at a premium, and houses in modern 'burbs sit in postage-stamp-sized lots (which is nothing new -- houses in this town built during the 30's were also on tiny lots). Where do you put a veggie garden? Some folks solve the problem by ripping out the lawn, whether it is in the front or the back of the house.

But if you live in a neighborhood where covenants or municipal codes govern what you can do with your front yard, and front-yard farmers risk running afoul of the law. When people think of "vegetable gardens," they think of the old-fashioned American kitchen garden with rows of corn and peas in the summer and bare dirt all winter, not something they want to look at as they drive through suburbia. Or around here they think of little hippie houses with a mad tangle of half-neglected herbs, some of them legal.

Yet with a little inspiration from the French potagers and from the "edible landscaping" concept, people are designing beautiful front gardens with herbs, salad greens, berry bushes, and other food plants that are as nice to look at as they are to eat. What would look nicer: a French-inspired kitchen garden with neat paths, patterned beds, trained fruit trees, and clipped herbs, or a dead brown lawn? (Okay, dead brown in the winter for you folks back east, dry and brown in the summer for us folks out west.) What some front-yard gardeners are finding is that while their gardens may cause raised eyebrows, they also bring the neighbors over to talk, often for the first time.

I know my house, and some houses around here, have shrubs in front instead of lawn. I've been sneaking chard, tomatoes, and other edibles in the front landscaping for years, and this year I'm determined to take out the increasingly ugly concrete pad that the former owners used as a basketball court and replace it with raised beds. We'll see what the neighbors have to say about that!

This weekend's project: flagstone paths

A yard of sand, a pile of salvaged flagstones, a sorta cool (though humid) weekend, et voila! -- my new flagstone paths.

Okay, so it wasn't quite that easy, as my aching shoulders will attest.

The stones originally came from my grandmother's house, and where she got them from, I don't know. My mom had them for years, and when she sold the old homestead last summer, I hauled as many as I could find home intending to use them.

This summer, I decided, I'd have me some stone paths. I ordered sand last week, and spent this weekend excavating the woodchipped paths. The old woodchips went in another part of the yard, and I dug out a few inches of dirt all along the path (the dirt pile is just visible by the fence). I filled in the excavated paths with sand, and sank the stones into the sand. Some are still a bit wobbly, so I'll keep working on individual stones to make them more stable. There was enough stone to do about 10 feet on the other side of the sidewalk, this 25 foot path, and the 15 food fork off to the left, plus a few large stones for stepping stones and some smaller ones to pile up at the base of the pole that holds up the bird feeder. The smaller stones lining the path are ones I've been digging out of the yard ever since we moved in here about 10 years ago. I need a few more to finish the edging of all the paths, so I'll have to look around and see where I can find some.

Next project: That horrid concrete pad in front of the house that the former owners put in as a basketball court, and is now cracked, mossy, and ugly, is going to go. In its place will be a raised bed potager. Alas, the old "hobbit tree" of a crabapple has died and I'll have to take it out later -- I'm leaving it in until fall, since the Lincoln Constance rose that's been scrambing up it still casts some shade on the house. Once that's out, I'll be putting in some fruit trees in front.

The renovations never end, do they? But then that's what gardening is all about. What fun would it be if you got to the point where you said, "I'm done" and had to stop?

Friends of Bush Gardens Plant Sale

If you're in or near Salem, Oregon, and are planning on visiting the Salem Art Fair this weekend, don't miss the Friends of Bush Gardens plant sale. I put in a 3 hour shift this afternoon in the plant holding area, and saw lots of gorgeous plants going off to new homes. There were hummingbirds visiting the crocosmias, which I'm sure the amazing Gretchen Carnaby ordered just for demonstration purposes.

The Bush Gardens surround the historic Asahel Bush House Museum. Of course you won't want to miss the gardens themselves, and the historic greenhouse. House tours are going on all during the fair. The Bush House was home to Asahel Bush, who founded the Ladd and Bush Bank (the original building is now a branch of U.S. Bank). In 1953, the Bush family donated the house and land to the City of Salem, along with much of the original furnishings, making it unique among the historic houses of Salem.

Among the offerings at the plant sale are heritage roses grown from cuttings taken from Miss Sally's rose garden. I also spotted lots of fantastic herbs, rock garden plants, lovely foliage plants, huge hanging baskets -- and of course came home with a few goodies myself!

The sale has a holding area for people who want to buy plants and park them while they look at the rest of the art fair. I spent my shift trotting plants out on a cart as people pulled their cars up to pick up their plants. If you're in the area, come on down!

Kittens: The Sequel

It's been over a year since our third kitty, Wild Bill, was born to a feral mother in our backyard. Now we've got a whole new kitten adventure going on. Another feral, whom we dubbed Toast for her black-and-brown tortoiseshell coloration started turning up in the spring. I tried to catch her a couple of times to get her fixed, but one or more tomcats got to her first, and she turned up pregnant:


I kept feeding her, hoping she'd stick around, and she did. Four week ago, she turned up looking disheveled, a little dazed, and a whole lot thinner. After a bit of searching, I found her nest in the backyard with four tiny babies in it.

They're toddlers now, and though she's moved the nest once (urk -- I got a little too nosy with the camera), she's still in the back yard. I'll keep luring her with food and toys, and see if I can get the little ones to play as they get bigger. My hope is to tame them so that they can be housecats. At the very least, get them fixed and keep caring for them. My fear is that if I let them live here with their mama, someone is going to start saying, "What's with all these cats?" and call in animal control -- or worse yet, the known cat poisoner who lives somewhere down the block will start leaving out tuna-and-antifreeze cocktails again. So taming them and finding homes for them would be ideal.

Before Toast moved the nest, I got this shot of the babies when they were three weeks old:


The grayface tortie in the front is Gizmo. Immediately behind him is a darker tortie, Gadget. The calico behind them is Sprocket. And the shy black-and-white to the right is Edison.

The garden -- such as it is -- in January

Last week we had snow. This week we got an unexpected blast of arctic air that the weather gurus thought would bring snow, but brought freezing rain ahead of it in the wee hours of the morning, then snow on top. Traffic has been a mess, schools have been closed, and while the main roads were clear today, getting out of our own neighborhood was the most hazardous part of my drive in to work today. I waited until things thawed out a bit this morning before I ventured out onto the roads. The cats were whining for a walk yesterday, but sleet and snow don't make good kitty walking conditions. This morning I took them out on their harnesses, and got some garden pictures while I was at it. Amazing. Even in January, it's possible to find some garden eye candy.

Remember Wild Bill from last summer? (Feral Kitten Update and Wild Bill is in the House) He's become a sweet-natured house kitty, a bit of a clown, and even at seven months, still kittenish cute. He sometimes still cringes when we try to pet him, as though he expects to be attacked, but more and more often he rolls over to show, "I'm not really afraid." He's also learned that sitting and looking cutely at me when I'm on the couch sometimes gets him a kitty treat. Alas, his mama that we were caring for disappeared just before Thanksgiving. We think she may have been a victim of a suspected cat poisoner in the neighborhood. Yet another reason we keep our kitties indoors and only take them out on a leash.

Here's Wild Bill, looking up from his busy sniffing, with an expression of, "What's that crazy lady pointing at me now?"



A few pieces of old slate stacked up make a nice platform feeder for ground-feeding birds. Here an Oregon Junco searches for birdseed in the snow.



My little birdbath, made of three clay pots and a clay saucer fastened together with silicon glue (ten minute crafts -- something I can actually finish), and full of ice. Keeping water out for the birds in this weather is a real trick. I try to pour some hot water into the pans in the morning to thaw out the ice from the night before. At the base of the birdbath you can see some disks of ice that came out of the birdbath on the prior days that still haven't thawed.



Snow-glazed Daphne leaves, with the buds turning pink already. We should have some fragrant Daphne soon.



Brilliant Cotoneaster berries, dusted with snow, brighten the winter landscape considerably. The robins have been munching on them, too.



Our house has a garage in the back, and the access drive was still covered in snow. There was a neat line of raccoon tracks leading from the wooded lot behind the houses across the street, down our drive, and into the neighbor's yard.

Brrr, I hope we thaw out soon. I still have garden chores to do that I was supposed to do in the fall!

Hummingbird in the snow

I finally caught our little Rufous hummingbird on film, but it took the video camera to do it. It's backlit, so you can't see the few sparkling orange feathers on his throat that are his winter plumage (in summer his whole throat is metalic orange), but you can see he's still active in spite of today's freezing rain and snow. The little chirps you hear are not the bird; it's Belle, my little kitty, who spotted the hummingbird and wants to go play with it.




If that doesn't show, click on Hummingbird in the Snow Movie. Plays with Quicktime.