Link To Latest Published Article, “Drought Gardening for People and Wildlife” 

Wingstem (Verbesina alternifolia), a native plant, suffers in drought conditions.

 ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 

The Daily Progress (Charlottesville, VA daily newspaper) and The News Virginian (Waynesboro, VA daily newspaper) both recently published my article, “Drought gardening for people and wildlife” at the following links, respectively:

 

https://dailyprogress.com/opinion/column/marlene-condon-drought-gardening-for-people-and-wildlife/article_4bd921fa-45c9-11ef-9111-0bc7c5d7ea25.html

 

https://newsvirginian.com/opinion/column/marlene-condon-drought-gardening-for-people-and-wildlife/article_3a2d7b10-e4c9-531b-992e-d8cc8bd87b5d.html

 

If you can’t access it at either of these sites, I am reproducing it below for your convenience.

 

Sincerely,

Marlene

  

Drought Gardening for People and Wildlife

 

Once again, Virginia is suffering from a significant lack of rain. With each drought building upon the last, the pattern we are in does not bode well for our collective future. Therefore, if you own land, it’d be wise to manage it in the best possible manner to preserve water.

 

Limiting how often your property is cut is perhaps the foremost action people can take to preserve water, especially to conserve ground water. Most lawns are trimmed way too short, eliminating the "umbrella effect" gained from taller grass.

 

Longer blades shelter the ground, suppressing water evaporation from uncovered soil due to sunshine and wind. Water that goes back into the atmosphere is water that doesn't reach the water table to feed your well.

 

Leaving alone unused areas of grass, such as ditches and hillsides, would be extremely prudent for water conservation. Hillsides are subject to water runoff if there are not enough plants to hold the water in place, and ditches can collect water not only to recharge the soil moisture, but also for the use of wildlife. It’s time for aesthetics to take a back seat.

 

As early as June 25, grass cut way too short in Albemarle County had turned brown.

When it comes to gardening, you should only water when flowers begin to show signs of wilting. They can withstand this process (if it’s not prolonged), which forces them to grow more roots to help survive unusually dry conditions.

 

Common horticultural advice suggests you remove “competing” plants (aka, “weeds”) because they “steal” water from your plants, but it’s best if “weeding” is minimally done, especially during drought periods.

 

When I was young, I listened to the “experts” one time, and one time only. I reluctantly pulled wildflowers from among my veggies and quickly learned my lesson. My plants were wilted by the next day because the soil was no longer shaded by the "weeds". As with grass, you don’t want bare ground around your plants.

Of course, you can make more work for yourself by putting down a mulch layer in place of the plants you pulled, but living plants in proximity to one another do a great job of maintaining soil moisture—and you don’t need to buy them. As every gardener knows, Mother Nature is constantly trying to fill even the smallest of bare spots.

 

You should always follow Mother Nature’s examples, and this is one of them. Conservation of water is one of the reasons plants are always filling in any bare spot they can find.

 

Lastly, prepare for the future by investing in some type of water storage. Rain barrels don’t hold much liquid, but they will do if your gardening efforts are minimal.

 

For larger gardens, you’ll need to consider greater storage capacity. I have two 350-gallon containers sitting under my deck connected to the nearby downspout. I’m thus able to keep plants watered and my two small artificial ponds filled.

The oft-repeated assertion nowadays is that native plants don’t need watering. Could this be the reason so many newly planted trees around town have died? 

We can help wildlife during drought by making water available in our yards. Bird baths are great for birds and flying insects. Many kinds of 6-legged creatures drink water, or make use of it in other ways. For example, I’ve watched honeybees collect water from my bird bath to bring back to the hive to cool it.

 

Toads drink water through their skin, so placing a bird bath on the ground is a great way to help them—and mammals—to obtain water. Whether the bath is on the ground or a pedestal, it’s vital that the bath be shallow: a two-inch maximum depth at the center.

A Tufted Titmouse gets a drink of water while a House Finch family enjoy taking a bath in July of 2015.

Do not use mosquito dunks or any other pesticides in bird/toad baths to kill mosquitoes; it’s totally unnecessary. Mosquito eggs will be slurped up by animals drinking water. Additionally, all animals require clean water so you should be dumping out the water every few days anyway (preferably on your plants), which will dump any mosquito eggs within it.

 

Help hummingbirds by hanging sugar-water feeders for them. Water-deprived plants can’t make much, if any, nectar to feed these small birds. Or grow nectar-producing plants in pots that can be kept watered.

 

During drought, most native plants are not getting the amount of water they need. Now is the time to be realistic, rather than idealistic, and embrace so-called invasive plants. Most of these plants, such as Black Knapweed (Centaurea nigra), do fine in drought and continue to feed our pollinators (and deer) that could otherwise starve.

 

Drought will likely bring a dearth of seeds come fall for seed-eating birds. Please consider putting out bird feeders for them when that time arrives.    

Placing unwanted tomatoes in the yard, especially during drought, helps Box Turtles to get the liquid they need.

NATURE ADVICE:

 

If global climate change has brought recurring droughts to your area, it’s time to prepare for similar future scenarios. Homeowners, as well as government entities, such as highway departments, and farmers who cut grass for hay, must rethink how they manage landscapes under their control. It’s no longer business as usual; changing weather patterns require changing routines.

 

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Link for My Latest Published Article on “Invasive" Plants

When people like nonnative plants, they don’t complain about how far and wide they spread. At a facility near the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, alien crocuses have spread throughout the lawn over the course of decades. Would anyone ever refer to these flowers as “invasive”? Probably not, because they create such a lovely sight. 

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS  © Marlene A. Condon

 

On July 12, 2024, The Daily Progress (the daily newspaper of Charlottesville, VA) published my article regarding the value to wildlife of so-called invasive species, such as the Mimosa-tree (Albizia julibrissin). You can find it at the link below, where half a dozen photos make clear the reason for the spread of naturalized plants (now usually referred to as “invasive”) as well as provide examples of some of the wildlife that makes extensive use of the alien Mimosa.

  

https://dailyprogress.com/opinion/column/marlene-a-condon-theyre-not-invasive-species-theyre-naturalized/article_d65069bc-4031-11ef-b27f-3774d5c1dde3.html

 

If you can’t access my article at this site, I am reproducing it below for your convenience.

 

Sincerely,

Marlene

Exotic Mimosa-tree Provides Food and Beauty

 

You’ve probably noticed the tropical-looking trees with gorgeous pink puffs of flowers that are currently blooming around the area. Known as the Silktree (or Silk Tree), Mimosa-tree, or just Mimosa (Albizia julibrissin), it presents a sight that most folks enjoy viewing, but others do not because they consider this nonnative tree “invasive”. But is it? Not at all; it’s “naturalized”.

Untended areas, such as the one in this photo, serve as important food sources for our native wildlife trying to eke out a living in urban areas. Here, a blooming Mimosa-tree helps to ameliorate the pollinator food-desert resulting from the nearby native trees having long since flowered. 

The lovely blooms and fern-like leaves of the tropical-looking Mimosa-tree provide landscape color at a time of year when it’s hard to find a native tree blooming.

If you’re a gardener who has lived long enough, you’ll recall that decades ago, plants that became established and survived on their own, able to spread in a region where they were not indigenous, were considered wonderful additions to the landscape. You got more plants for free and more beauty to savor in your surroundings.

 

Even today, some plant catalogs tout naturalizing: “For a carefree, colourful display year after year, let your bulbs go wild! Flowering bulbs will keep your garden ablaze with colour when other plants are just emerging or have faded. Naturalizing is the process of imitating nature with bulb plantings.”

 

https://www.brecks.com/how_to_landscaping_with_bulbs_naturalizing

 

Note the final sentence that imparts the wisdom that “naturalizing is the process of imitating nature”. This statement reveals recognition of the fact that plants spread when conditions suit them in the natural world. In other words, what folks today refer to as invasiveness is a misreading of a natural process that is neither mysterious nor mystical, nor hard to understand.

 

Old books don’t complain about “invasiveness”; to the contrary, they treat naturalization as the normal—and often desired—outcome it is for some alien-plant species.

 

My 1988 Peterson Field Guide to Trees tells the reader that Mimosa is “[n]ative to S[outh] Asia but widely planted and naturalized in the eastern U.S.” My 1983 Illustrated Book of Trees informs us that “[the Silktree] has become extensively naturalized from Virginia southward and often grows by the wayside.”

 

The latter book points out that Mimosa “is able to thrive on even the poorer soils”. My 1980 book, The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees, concurs. It tells us this tree occurs in “[o]pen areas including wasteland and dry gravelly soils.” And the 1981 University Press of Virginia book, Trees and Shrubs of Virginia, adds “[w]ood borders, clearings, [and] roadsides”.

 

What do each of these locations have in common? Every single one of them results from people having impacted the soil at some point in a site’s history. Otherwise, the area would be filled with old-growth trees, the original landscape of eastern North America.

 

A 1998 Timber Press book, Trees of the Central Hardwood Forests, makes the mistake of telling the reader that the value of Mimosa is “[n]ot significant to any native wildlife species”. Indeed, this declaration has been much used by people, such as activist-entomologist Doug Tallamy, to disparage plants they view as alien invasives in need of removal. But I must beg to differ.

 

In 2019, I had the opportunity to document the life in the canopy (the upper layer of a mature tree) of a Mimosa. I had noticed this plant growing alongside a bridge I have crossed numerous times while exercising. As Mimosas are fast-growing trees, it didn’t take many years for this one to get large enough to bloom at the level of the bridge where I could observe the goings-on.

A day-flying Hummingbird Clearwing moth(Hemaris thysbe) is happy to feed upon nectar from a Mimosa-tree bloom.

In addition to this Spicebush Swallowtail butterfly (Papillo Troilus), you could see a Tiger Swallowtail (Papillo glaucus) and Silver-spotted Skipper (Epargyreus clarus), as well as small bees, obtaining nectar from Mimosa-tree blooms.

This large, healthy caterpillar was probably close to pupating after feeding upon the leaves (still closed here in early morning) of this nonnative Mimosa-tree.

Hummingbirds, small bees, several species of butterflies, a day-flying moth, and even caterpillars were getting food, courtesy of this foreign tree. Obviously, these animals could get food from native plants, if the appropriate plants existed nearby—and there’s the catch.

 

People seem to think “invasive” plants have stolen space from native plants that could be growing there, but most native plants can’t survive in the degraded soil where you typically find the nonnative plants designated as “invasive”.

 

I’ve found that what’s true for the Mimosa is also true of the many other so-called invasive plants that I’ve studied. The wildlife value of these plants is, without a doubt, certainly of significance when you consider that we are living in a world where development—that robs wildlife of habitat and destroys the soil profile for most native plants—never seems to end.

When people come upon “invasive” plants filling an area, they don’t consider its prior history of native-plant removal and soil damage that inevitably invited alien plants to grow there. The notion of “invasiveness” developed out of context to this bigger picture; without taking the whole story (i.e., background) into account, it’s easy to misinterpret the result.

Additional attributes of the so-called invasive plants—including Mimosa—is that they can withstand drought and often are tolerant of pollution, whether it be in the air or the soil.

 

Thanks to climate change, drought has become a more-frequent occurrence that can kill plants. (Along the river near where I live, some species of large trees are seriously suffering right now, even some located within the river!) Without drought-tolerant “invasive” plants, there could come a time when little habitat will exist. All plants, native or not, provide a living space for wildlife in some way.     

 

In a 1989 conversation with PBS journalist Bill Moyers, the novelist E. L. Doctorow, said, “When ideas go unexamined and unchallenged for a long enough time, they become mythological and very, very powerful. They create conformity. They intimidate.” His comments apply well to the “invasive”-plant narrative.

 

Orville Wright pointed out that, “If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.”  I would adjust this truism to read that, “If we all work on the assumption that what is accepted as true about invasive plants is really true, there is little hope of conserving our wildlife.”

 

DISCLAIMER:

 

Ads appearing at the end of e-mail blog-post notifications are posted by follow.it as recompense for granting free usage of their software at the author's blog site. The author of this blog has no say in what ads are posted and receives no monetary compensation other than the use of the software.