The Green Wall (6/7/2018)

Sitting in our gazebo and looking at the late May/early June woods behind our home, I am awestruck by what we euphemistically call our “green wall.” It is a pallet of different levels of green and different textures being contributed by different species of trees and shrubs. Sitting here I see a pyracantha that we are training up the gazebo. Behind it there is our red maple tree that survived hurricane Isabel in 2003 as a mere sapling, but now is a big tree. Next to it is a strange blue spruce that we got as a life Christmas tree one year and is completely out of place here in southeast Virginia. I also see azaleas, dogwoods, a redbud, a red tip, sassafras, a yellow popular (also known as a tulip poplar), white oaks, red oaks. more red maples, sweet gums, loblolly pines, American hollies, a winged sumac, beauty berries, paw paws, viburnums, one butterfly bush, a fringe tree, two magnolias, a Carolina jessamine, and a hawthorn bush. That is only in our small backyard; no wonder we had a shade garden. I am really hunting around to find sunny spots to put my bonsai trees. They really need sun to thrive. You can see that in the understory of our yard where we have a lot of ferns. However, in one sunny spot we have native sunflowers, goldenrod and milkweed. I hate to admit it, but we have a horrible invasion of Japanese stiltgrass.

Two photos from our back yard.  The bottom one gives the view from the gazebo.  As you can see it is pretty darn green out there,  with the sun peeking through the holes in the canopy, also known as sun flecks.   It is woods as far as they eyes can see.  The bottom photo may be a little fuzzy because the gazebo is screened in and I am taking the photo through the screen.

I am probably forgetting some plants in our yard, so be it. Our yard surely is not master piece of landscaping, that will come once we retire and can spend more time out there, and work on the design. But one thing will be for sure, I do not expect that we will change the aspect that our yard runs right into the woods behind our home. Having such a yard that runs into a forest, we hardly can see the edge between the two, and so does the wildlife and nature that lives in the woods behind our home. Although often frustrating, deer make our yard one of the first stopovers in their daily migration into our neighborhood. Tasty plants don’t stand a chance. Over the winter, they even pulled one of my azalea bonsais of the 5-foot-high table to nibble on. Oh well, they did to that tree what was long overdue and what I did not dare to do. In addition to all the plants and the deer, we have so many different bird species visiting our little plot; we have skinks everywhere, frogs, toads, a couple of snakes, bunnies, turtles, squirrels, mice, moles, voles, just to name a few. And let’s not talk about all those daddy longlegs that are out there in our yard right now.

This is the azalea bonsai that was pulled of the table this winter.  It is currently blooming, but as you can see the left side was completely defoliated by the deer that got to it before I got to the deer.  Anyway, the defoliation is probably long overdue.

But one thing is for sure, the green wall in our back yard is in contact and communication with the woods behind our home. Others in our neighborhood have cut all the trees in their yards, turned their yards into managed lawns, hit them with fertilizers and pesticides. They created a biological and ecological desert.

In his wonderful novel “The Overstory” Richard Powers writes a short story about a Ph.D. student who discovers how plants communicate with each other by releasing volatile chemicals in the air, warning each other of pending insect attacks. She gets vilified by the establishment to be proven correct years later after she has dropped out of science. While this is just a story or fiction, it probably comes very close to how communication between plants was discovered. It seems that the Soviet scientist Boris Tokin was the first to describe in the 1920s and 30s that trees gave off volatile chemicals. Boris had an inkling that this was for self-defense, but I do not think for communication between plants or as he called them “phytoncides.” On a side note, it seemed he was an interesting character and being a politically correct communist, he published about his effort of integrating the philosophies and thoughts about Darwin, Marx and Engels. As I mentioned in previous posts, researchers in Japan, among them Tomohide Akiyama and Dr. Qing Li discovered in the 1980s that some of these phytoncides were actually beneficial to humans and introduced the world to the concept of “forest bathing” or “shinrin-yoku.”

But it is not only through the air that plants communicate. We are finding that even through the roots and by way of mycorrhizal fungi plants can communicate with each other over large distances and even exchange messages and even food like carbohydrates with each other in times of need (watch this great YouTube video). I would therefore not be surprised if the trees or the plants in our yard are communicating with the others in the woods. I also wonder if people who put all those pesticides on their lawns, in particular fungicides are severing those connections and isolating the few remaining trees on their properties; making them weaker and more susceptible to insects and diseases, let alone weakening them by pumping chemicals into them.

I guess for right now I will not be able to prove any of this, but all I know, our backyard teams with biodiversity: the trees, shrubs, animal life, and as I described in one of my posts even the little spiders with their iridescent eyes that reflect light from our headlamps at night. I know that our backyard looks pretty darn healthy (with the exception of the stiltgrass); it has not seen many chemicals in a very long time and it seems that nature is thanking us.

Nature-deficit disorder (Yorktown, 11/25 and 11/27/2015)

A real term or not?  I strongly believe it is.   Just like attention deficit disorder (ADD) is, there is something to being too long away from the natural world.   While people with ADD can not focus on one thing for an extended period , I believe if you have nature-deficit disorder you need a regular nature fix or you can no longer fully focus on life or the task ahead or other things like depression set in.

I did not invent the term, or the concept.  I was introduced to it by Richard Louv in his books "Last Child in the Woods ..." and "The Nature Principle."  While maybe no literary masterpieces  (says this non-native English speaker and amateur blogger), the books introduced me to some great concepts and ideas that I intuitively knew, but never articulated.  They really are great books.  Being in nature recharges me and brings me inner peace.  Mr. Louv even has examples of bringing peace to inner city gang members by bringing them to nature. (See also this webpage on the movement he started).

Readers know I am a biologist, a naturalist and an educator who loves the outside, both the blue and the green.  I suffer terribly from nature-deficit disorder, I need to get out there after a few days (just to recharge and get my sanity back).  If you are a regular reader you should know, and just look at the labels, there are at least 21 posts where I used the term.  So on my first day off on the long Thanksgiving weekend I took off for a walk in the woods with the dogs.  It was just above freezing and sunny; perfect.

To me walks like this are like meditation, the mind goes where it wants to and you observe it.  If it goes too far you call it gently call it back.  You don't speed walk, but just observe.  But still, I actively look around, observe and take photos.  Here are a few photos I took during my walk:

Teaching my wetland class, I always walk around with my teacher hat on and had to take this photograph of three multi-stemmed red maples in a row.  A clear sign that this site may be wet, or at least as I say in my class, "a red flag."

I was somewhat surprised to find this turtle on my path.  It was a cold morning and I was expecting that they were in hibernation by now.  The dogs sniffed it and you could hear it clicking in the shell making sure it stayed closed. 

Right after seeing the turtle I was struck by the way the sun was shining through the trees and striking the ground, the trees, and my face.  I just had to take this picture.   At home I converted it to black and white.   

I found it so encouraging that the outdoors store REI started the #OptOutside movement for Black Friday.  They did not open their stores on Black Friday  and encouraged their employees to enjoy the great outdoors.   We did the same, we took the sail boat out and enjoyed blue nature. It all fits in with fighting Nature-deficit disorders.

Enjoying Blue Nature on Black Friday.

Being out there is so important to me.  Try it, it is good for the soul, the mind and for those creative juices.

Snapping Turtle (5/25/2014)

On the way to the marina on Sunday, I all see a big turtle struggling to get across the road.  The county was building a new sewer pumping station in the area, and I am sure that dislocated some animals.  Knowing that this general area is not very environmentally friendly (I’ve seen trucks going back and forth over a black rat snake, which is non-poisonous and a great way to keep rodents down in your yard), I stopped the car, put on my hazard lights and was going to move the turtle.

I immediately identified the turtle as a snapping turtle.  Snapping turtles are famous for biting and painfully so.  From the point of its tail to the tip of the nose this one was 1.5 feet big.  Realizing it was a snapper, I had to do something.  I knew the next car was going to kill it; if not for its prized meat in turtle soup.

This guy was nasty, just touching his shell made him snap at me and knowing its reputation I decided to not go any further.  So I went to the car and got a teak board that I had in the car (I was going to the boat remember) and when I approached him with the board he struck it violently and hit it with a big bang.  He did this one more time and seeing I could not encourage him to get off the road, I rolled him over twice with the board till he was at the side of the road.  The board was slimy when he had hit it.  So here he was sitting looking at me angrily.  I took a photo and went on to the boat.  Coming back two hours later there was no squished turtle on or near the spot, so my relocation project was successful.  A good Sunday.