Writing

Going Native:  Creating an Ecosystem One Plant at a Time

Bees, Birds and Bird watching, Culture, Ecosystems, Enviroment, Gardening, Growing Things, Home Gardening, Invasive Species, Landscaping, Mowing and Lawns, Native Plants, sense of place, Sharing, women and nature, Writing Leave a comment

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Early Spring – Post Cutting of Invasive Species, Pre-New Native Planting

For Christmas Kevin gave me an arborist – Sue Hunter. She came to our acre on Hickory road one cold and rainy early January morning to walk about and advise us on how to make our woodland more native, more diverse, more eco-friendly, more bird and bee friendly, and altogether more beautiful.

As we tagged Sweet Cherry trees, European Black alder, and Double-file Viburnum, invasive species from Europe and Asia, she complimented us on leaving our autumn leaves to rot in the woods and lying in open places our neighbors would have surely mowed. In our sunny leaf-covered spots, we had wild violets, bloodroot, and wood ferns that had begun to grow in wandering irregular patches. Kevin had spent many hours each spring and early summer pulling garlic mustard weed and the insidious Japanese Stiltgrass thus encouraging our native violets, bloodroot, trout lilies, and wood ferns to spread.

Sue has been in the nursery business for 35 years. She’s had three farms in Pennsylvania and Maryland where she raised native trees, shrubs, and plants. Seven years ago, Sue bought a farm right up the road from us, Heartwood Nursery. For the past five years, we’ve purchased our Christmas wreaths there. Beautiful wreathes made from the plants she grows. No two wreaths are alike; many are made from unusual hollies like the American yellow-berried holly. And since Sue is the president of the American Holly Association this figures.

Sue, Kevin, and I spent two and a half hours together, all of us cold and enthusiastic about what we could do in the next couple of winter months before planting in May. She told us to rip out and cut down all of the invasives, create brush piles tucked into our woods where they would make natural barriers between us and the sometimes noisy road and the sometimes nosey neighbors. She explained that birds love brush or stick piles and that we’d have more birds than we did now. We thought we had pretty many – at least two pairs of pileated woodpeckers, red-headed woodpeckers, wood thrushes, wrens, goldfinches, and all of the other usual suspects, robins, blue jays, wrens, titmice, and catbirds.

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Original Native Oak Leaf Hydrangeas

After Sue’s visit I looked up invasive species. I wondered why they were called invasive and why were they bad. I found out invasive species can and do aggressively move into surrounding ecosystems eradicating habitat and food for native trees, plants, and animals. They are usually quite good at crowding out natives thereby destroying diversity and upsetting the balance.

For example, invasive trees are a problem because they can shade out forest understories and displace native vegetation. Native vegetation is important because it is beautifully adapted to a specific environmental niche. Natives have natural controls that keep them in balance. Invasives go ‘wild’ over-running the landscape and reeking havoc with that balance. Eventually, most birds move away to find a habitat that supports them. That is what had happened at our home-spot even though we’d never realized it until Sue.

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Brush Pile On South Side of House

On the Sunday after Sue’s visit the sky was clear and blue and cold, and I was itching to get started. I put on my corduroys, insulated underwear, and a fleece. I began with the two golden Hinoki False Cypress trees I’d misguidedly planted in the beds in front of our home ten years earlier. The Hinoki Cypress tree is not unattractive in a Japanese garden, but in a Pennsylvania woods, it looks ridiculous.. The cypresses were supposed to max out at six feet but had risen to fifteen, covering part of our living room bay windows. They looked beyond ridiculous. Not only were they too tall but I’d topped them a few years earlier when the windows were almost entirely covered with their branches. We had more light but with deformed flat–topped Hinoki Cypresses, not something one would choose as a landscape statement.

Once I began sawing down trees and bushes with a hand saw, I couldn’t stop myself. A handsaw is slow compared to a chain saw, but it’s quiet. I’m not strong enough to wield Kevin’s Stihl chain saw; though I ‘d love to experience the instant gratification. After sawing down the 6 inch diameter Hinoki Cypress trunks, I cut off their gold and green branches and carried them to one of the two brush piles I’d begun. It was so much fun to see the ugliness disappear and to build giant stick and brush piles. I felt like a child building forts in the woods, places to hide and pretend. I was creating bird habitat. I was a woman on a mission.

Physical work outdoors is one of my favorite things to do, and I’d quite forgotten through the years of my daughter’s illness and my mother’s death how energizing and cathartic it truly is. When I am digging, chopping, pulling, hammering, hauling, or sawing, I am nowhere else. I forget time, jobs, and worries. My mind forgets about itself. It stops planning lessons, tending children or students, making lists of all those things that never seem to be done. I am nowhere and everywhere. I am air, earth, water, breath. I am. I am not. How lovely.

Kevin, impressed with my progress, joined me several February and March Saturdays and Sundays. He can and does use his chain saw, wiping out a score of invasive species in a short afternoon. I dragged the branches into one of our now four stick piles. Two are over twelve feet high and twelve feet wide. They’ve begun to attract more winter birds, and as spring begins in March we enjoy the early robins, tufted titmice, and purple finches.

On another March Sunday, per Sue’s instructions, we dug up and moved seven mature

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Newly Moved & Planted Hydrangeas

hydrangeas to a side of the house where they join four other mature ones. Wha-lah, we’ve created a massive planting of ‘endless summer’ blue hydrangeas 20 feet wide and three feet high. Sue believes in intensive planting. She says they have a visual impact that three measly bushes couldn’t have. She’s right. Even in late winter we can see the difference eleven leafless bushes can make.

As Kevin and I continued our deconstruction and dismantling, we noticed the neighbors slowing as they drove by. I’m sure they couldn’t imagine what we were up to. But since we’re professors, they figured it was probably something new and weird. Our neighbors, all of whom live in the same type of woodland environment as we do, endlessly rake and mow their ‘yards’. Since woodland soil is acid and isn’t capable of supporting grass, their yards are primarily packed earth with patches of rough bluegrass, ryegrass, and shorn dandelions. Nevertheless, each week from April until November they mow on riding tractors fit for sunny fields or golf course fairways.

My first autumn on Hickory road 15 years ago, brought my next door neighbor, Steve, over when he determined in late November that I wasn’t going to rake my leaves and burn them as everyone had done a month earlier. Steve politely said that I was going to kill my grass if I didn’t rake soon. He added that he knew I must not know about such things since I was a single mom who must be new to living in the country. (He didn’t know I’d owned a farm before I’d built this new home or that I’d purposely moved to the woods so I wouldn’t have to mow.) I, just as politely, explained that I had no intention of raking because I didn’t want a ‘lawn’. His eyes became quite large, and he walked away shaking his head from side to side, doubtlessly thinking what a kooky new neighbor he’d acquired.

As April began, we looked over the site plan Sue had emailed in early January and imagined how all of these native bushes and plants would look. She had designed natural looking beds around the house of high-bush blueberries, viburnum nudums, foam flowers, dwarf winterberry, Virginia sweetspire, and blue lobelia – all densely planted. We talked. We thought. We decided. This May we’d do the entire front of the house, the driveway entry, and the border around the patio out back.

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Newly Planted Natives Around Patio

May fourteenth arrived and I was up, dressed, and outside waiting when Sue and her helper, Luke, arrived. Luke, a quiet and responsible home-schooled teenager worked for Sue and happily he was going to work with me, planting and then helping me through the summer. We all unloaded the 200 plus plants and shrubs. As Luke wheel-barrowed loads to the various beds, Sue placed then exactly where she wanted them planted. I hand-carried dozens and placed them next to the beds where they’d grow and thrive. In a couple of hours, we’d arranged the plants in the front of the house, out by the entry drive, and around the patio in the back. Even sitting in their pots, they were an impressive sight.

Between teaching and the rain, it took Kevin, Luke, and me almost two weeks to get them into the ground. When we’d finished we were so proud and happy. Beauty was all around us. Not only did we have dozens of rhododendrons, azaleas, Solomon’s seal, Jacob’s ladder, and white wood aster in our woods but we had the most birds we’d ever seen.

At first Kevin and I thought we might be imagining there were more birds. After all we’d spent a lot of time cutting and building stick and brush piles and wanted our work to have paid off. But as the woods turned green and the brush piles disappeared in the verdant tracery surrounding them, we couldn’t deny that we lived in a bird sanctuary.

From dawn until dusk wood thrushes, scarlet tanagers, indigo buntings, cardinals, blue jays, titmice, wrens, woodpeckers and many others sang and sang. The wood thrushes are our favorites. Their fluty floating sound is a tonic, a calming peace-filled melody one never tires of hearing. Not only did we have bird song, but also we had ruby throated hummingbirds sipping from the Agastache flowers around the patio.

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Native Ferns and Favorite Wood Thrush Spot

In the evening we’d sit on our Adirondack chairs and watch as wood thrush parents brought their fledglings out to learn how to find insects under the leaf duff. They’d come within feet of us, safe in this place. We could hear and see Baltimore orioles that nested from their hundred foot high branches in the tops of our Hickory trees. Everywhere there was more – more life, more sound, more happiness.

Now when we arrive home after a long miserable traffic-filled commute from the big city of Baltimore, we come home to a sanctuary, a home-spot retreat that rejuvenates and restores us. We come home to a native habitat, a real Garden of Eden that we created with the help of our neighbor arborist and newfound friend.

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Endless Summer Hydrangea

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Post Script:

If you’re interested, listed below is Sue’s plant list.

Section #1 – Driveway entrance – Right side:

American Holly – female – 3 BB

American Holly – low, spreading – 2

Summersweet –  pink –  9 containers

Virginia sweetspire   9  containers

Coneflower   12   containers

White wood aster – 12 containers

Jacob’s Ladder — 12 containers

 

Driveway entrance – Left side :

Rosebay rhododendron – 12  containers

Gable azaleas – 12 containers

White wood aster -12  containers

Jacob’s Ladder -12  containers

 

Section #2 – front of house – both sides :

Viburnum nudum –  24 containers

Highbush blueberries – 24  containers

Foamflower – 36  containers

Dwarf Winterberry – 3 containers

Virginia sweetspire -15 containers

Blue lobelia – 24 containers

 

Section  #4  –  Garden adjacent to deck :

Clustered Mountain mint – 5 containers

Bee balm  – 5 containers

Various herbs :

Rosemary

Lavender

Chives

Oregano

 

Snippets from the ADK — Circles — Returning But To a Different Place

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College of Liberal Arts Building, Towson University

College of Liberal Arts Building, Towson University

When I walked through the university parking garage; the old anxiety reared its head for a heartbeat. I breathed, walked on.  I am back on campus, but this time to pick up a key for my new office.  When I envisioned my perfect job more than a year ago, I’d imagined teaching writing full-time in the English department in the beautifully new and light filled College of Liberal Arts building. It would mean teaching with colleagues who love reading and writing in an open, free environment.  I would have weeks to myself in the summer where I could be in my beloved Adirondacks. I would have time and energy to think, to write, to be.

And here I am sitting in my new office, real wood furniture, no window but next to an old friend and colleague I’ve known for 15 years. Surreal to make this circle back to where I began teaching 14 years ago.  I check out my classrooms in this huge  290,000 sq.ft building.  Three out of four classes will meet in small conference room style rooms with tables grouped in a large rectangle and ringed with comfy, swivel office chairs. I smile. The intimacy and dynamic I’ d imagined right before my eyes.

Next week, we begin a 15 week journey together — these 84 students and I.  Joyful anticipation!

 

The Magic Tray

Adolescence, Civility, Classroom Management, Education, Families, Middle School, Poverty and education, Sharing, Teaching Teens Civility, Teaching Writing, Teens, Teens and Writing, Title I Schools, Writing, Writing programs, , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
The 'magic' tray we used in our Young Writers' Club

The ‘magic’ tray we used in our Young Writers’ Club

There once was a class of writing students who were terribly behaved around food of any kind. After school they acted as if they’d been starved for days, rushing up and edging one another out-of-the-way so they could get at the table laden with bags of Oreos, Chips Ahoy, and Synder’s pretzels. One would imagine they had just come off a 10 day trek on the Gobi desert by the way they ripped open the plastic loops holding the Deer Park water bottles. As they gingerly negotiated the classroom desks getting back to their own, their 13-year-old hands overflowed with eight or ten cookies (Were they hypoglycemic?), three or four pretzels (Were they salt deprived?) Then once seated (and that was a tricky business if they’d pushed their chairs back under their desks) each child stacked and sorted their loot in his or her own way upon the napkin I’d placed there. Some stacked their cookies six high, some in short stacks of two or three. Either way they wiped out the snacks on the snack table within minutes. It was a frantic and chaotic business at the start of each and every club meeting.

Reminding them to share and slow down made absolutely no difference. These young writers were deaf to me and to the other two teachers who coordinated this Young Writers’ afterschool program for middle school adolescents who actually love to write. This love of writing made them anomalies of their Title I middle school. They were the smart ones, the ones who lived and loved to read and write and talk about fiction and poetry with one another. One often overheard them discussing their latest work, “I based this story off the Anime series Sazae-san”. They were a polite and serious group of over-achievers so their uniquely sensitive behavior juxtaposed to their Darwinian behavior when it came to cookies was hard to fathom. Why did they greedily and without regard for one another attack the snacks I brought each week? Were they truly that hungry? Or was it something else?

We teachers tried sending them to the snack table one or two at a time, but this strategy left the last students with the broken bits and only one or two whole cookies a piece. We said over and over again, “Remember your friends are hungry, too. Only take two cookies and two pretzels at a time.” This sort of worked. But as soon as our attention shifted to working with the student writers individually, their club-mates stealthily made their way to the snack table and grabbed as many cookies and pretzels as they could without our noticing. When at last we did notice, we saw that the original two cookies and two pretzels on each student’s desktop had suddenly been replaced with Oreo cookie towers ten high and mountains of fifteen Synder’s thin pretzels. Empty containers tipped sideways their crumbs spilled out on the floor were all that was left behind from the snack invaders.

After many months of watching this weekly drama unfold and our attempts to contain and modify their attacks failing each and every time, I decided to come up with a plan. I wasn’t sure what this plan would be, but I was determined to change this uncivil and uncivilized behavior. But how?

That very weekend of my resolution, I was going to visit and help my father sort out and clean out closets and drawers at his home, the home in which I’d grown up. The home that was crammed full of 50 plus years of stuff. My mother had died a few months earlier, and I was helping my dad sort things out. His desire to ‘clean out’ was his way of mourning and moving through my mother’s passing. They had been married for 60 years. As we worked together on the kitchen cabinets, we came upon the tray cabinet which held 3 dissimilar trays, one circular plastic coated gold leaf, one chipped painted metal, and one clear plexiglass with the initials “SVCC”.

As we worked, my dad often asked, “Do you want this vase?”; “Do you need a cookbook?” “Should we throw this away or give it to Good Will?” So as we looked at the trays, he said, “I want to keep the gold one, but you can have the other two if you want them?” “Okay,” I said, “I think I’ll take both. We could use them at home.” And so I left that Sunday afternoon with two trays, one with chipped paint and the other a brand new looking plexiglass.

The metal cream-colored tray with a chipped scene of red and blue winding flowers and two black unicorns was ancient. When it was new and un-chipped, my mother had used it as our ‘sickroom’ tray when she brought me toast and tea after a night spent with a fever or vomiting or both. We never saw or used it at any other time. The plexiglass tray, on the other hand, was a prize won by my mother at a golf tournament. My mother was crazy about golf and had played for 50 years. Although she was never a great golfer, she was an impassioned one, playing and practicing several times a week. This prize was from the country club at which she had played hundreds of times. It was one of the very few golf prizes she had ever won. In fact, it was one of the best prizes she had ever won.

And so that next week when I awoke as usual at 4:00 AM thinking about work or children or both, it suddenly came to me, an epiphany, “Use a tray for our Young Writers’ club”. Yes – I would serve them their snacks, water, and napkins on a tray. In this way, they would be honored and taught at the same time. I was so excited to try it. But which tray to use? The ones at our home were in constant use, and I wanted to leave a tray at the school which was an hour’s drive away. Surely not the chipped one; these children didn’t deserve a battered looking tray. That left the plexiglass with the initials SVCC aka Saucon Valley Country Club. As an otherwise unmarked, simple rectangle with 2 inch sides (those sides would help eliminate things falling off as I moved about the classroom), it was perfect. I couldn’t wait to try it.

The other two teachers thought the tray was a good idea too and were eager to try it. So that Wednesday, I brought the usual Oreos, Chips Ahoy, pretzels, and water along with the unusual, my tray. As the teachers and I unloaded the snacks, I explained to the children that I would be serving them their snacks on this tray. They watched as I opened the cookie containers and the pretzel bag and placed them in the middle of the tray. Next I stacked the napkins in one corner and lined up the water bottles in the other. It all fit, perfectly! With the two slotted handles, it was easy to carry the tray around the room stopping at each child’s desk and asking, “Would you care for a snack?” That first time, they looked questioningly at me as they stretched out their hand to the cookie container, asking out loud or silently with their eyes, “how many?”   In response, I said, “Let’s take two cookies now, and I’ll be around again a little later.” The effect was instant. These grabbing, gobbling children became 19th century drawing room aristocrats, ever so slowly and carefully taking one or two cookies, a napkin, a pretzel, and water. As if we’d always had our snacks in this way, they spontaneously said, “yes, please” when offered the tray and “thank you” as I moved on to the next student. It was magic to see and hear their transformation from ruffians to refined gentlefolk.

Now eight months later, the tray has worked even better than I’d imagined. It brings out the best parts in our young writers, the civil, caring part. They love the tray and being waited on. Now when the students want more, they ask if I’m coming around again soon. And so this tray won by my mother at a golf tournament at a fancy country club has traveled to a very different place, a place filled with children who love to write. Each week as I set up the tray with snacks, I thank my mother for giving me this great idea. Because of an afternoon spent cleaning out her kitchen cabinets, I discovered a simple and elegant way to change our student’s weekly snack attack. Who’d have thought it?