From http://www.perennialmeadows.com/2014/08/perennials-prevent-weeds/
Late Summer Sensations In the Perennial Meadow Garden
Although I have had to neglect my trial gardens on the edge of
Amsterdam this year following a decision to move house and all that
involved, it is surprising just how well they have grown and how little
work it has been to keep them looking good. The
key to successful perennial planting is not only choosing the right
plants but planting enough of them. My borders were planted densely in
the first instance as these gardens are where I trial the plants I write
about and design with, but as the borders mature the planting densities
become even higher. The result is that there is little room left for
weeds to become established. There
are some borders in my garden that have not changed for more than ten
years and every year they seem to become easier to maintain; we are
talking about less work than an hour per year in some cases. Four
years ago I planted up two similar long borders and in the first year
the mulches were essential to keep down the weeds. This year with no
time to spare they have had to fend for themselves and apart from the
occasional towering example of nettle or willow herb that seemed to have
appeared overnight, there has been little else to deal with. Establishing
a balance between the various plants we include in our planting scheme
is never easy and involves a lot of trial and error, but when it works
life becomes a lot easier. That is not to say you have nothing to do.
The new double borders contain a fine umbellifer, Cenolophium denudatum,
which after a slow start has now decided to set seed possibly too
enthusiastically. I need to watch it and this summer decided to remove
all the seedheads before they matured – it was actually beginning to
look untidy so the borders looked better after the half hour I found for
the task. Plants
compete with one another and we as gardeners need to referee. Sometimes
I favour the thugs and allow them to take over, but in other cases some
plants need to be controlled by reducing their spread every year or so –
Inula hookeri is a case in point; I wouldn’t be without it, but it is a strong competitor. The
shrubs I have been adding to my borders in recent years are beginning
to play a role; in some cases too much of one and this is again
something I will eventually teach myself to understand and work with.
Without the weeds, nature becomes something fun and enjoyable to play
with.
Plants sold as "bee friendly" may not be all that bee friendly after all.
By Emily Main
Bees
are in serious trouble. The tiny little pollinators, which save U.S.
farmers billions of dollars in pollination services, are dying off by
the thousands—a travesty that has led many a home gardener to plant
"bee-friendly" plants in his or her yard or garden to provide a refuge
for bees, far away from the toxic agricultural pesticides many
scientists believe could be playing a role in their die-off.
But a new report, titled Gardeners Beware: Bee-Toxic Pesticides Found in "Bee-Friendly" Plants Sold at Garden Centers Nationwide,
from Friends of the Earth US, Pesticide Action Network, and the
Pesticide Research Institute finds that home gardens could be poisoning
bees just as badly as large farms. The groups bought plants marketed as
"bee friendly" at big-box home-improvement stores in the Washington, DC,
San Francisco, and Minneapolis metropolitan areas, and found that seven
out of 13 tested positive for neonicotinoids, pesticides known to be deadly to bees.
The plants purchased for the report included a number of flowers and
vegetables popular among home gardeners who want to attract bees and
pollinators to their gardens: tomato and summer squash starts, herbs,
pumpkins, gaillardia, daisies, zinnias, and asters. Most samples tested
positive for one neonicotinoid but the two gaillardia samples each
tested positive for two types of the pesticide.
"The pilot study confirms that many of the plants sold in nurseries
and garden stores across the U.S. have been pretreated with systemic
neonicotinoid insecticides, making them potentially toxic to
pollinators," said Timothy Brown, PhD, of the Pesticide Research
Institute, in a statement. "Unfortunately, these pesticides don't break
down quickly—they remain in the plants and the soil and can continue to
affect pollinators for months to years after the treatment," Brown said.
Agricultural researchers have been sounding the alarm on
neonicotinoids for years. The pesticides are systemic, meaning they're
absorbed by a plant's roots and then travel into its pollen and nectar,
the bees' food. Even if the pesticides exist in levels low enough to not
kill bees, the new report states, they can still compromise a bee's
immune system, impair its ability to forage, and exacerbate the effects
of any other infections or diseases a bee might contract.
Because these pesticides are commonly used on large agricultural
fields, they've been fingered as one of a complex set of factors that
cause colony collapse disorder, the mysterious phenomenon that has
decimated beehives since 2006. Yet, as this report shows, home gardens
could be just as toxic to bees as massive monocrop fields, given that many home and garden centers treat plants with systemic pesticides to kill insects.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has just announced that the
agency has developed new pesticide labels that will sound an alarm on
any neonicotinoid pesticide, whether for use in homes or on large farms.
The labels state that the use of those pesticides is prohibited
anywhere bees are present.
However, it's unlikely those labels will show up on plants. Your best move? Go organic. • Seek out USDA- certified-organic seeds and plant starts. They're prohibited from being treated with pesticides of any sort. And that goes for flowers as well. • Evict pesticides. Even though the EPA's new labels
will help protect bees, why risk killing any in the first place? The
new report lists 55 pesticides sold to consumers that contain
active neonicotinoid pesticides toxic to bees. In saving the bees,
you'll be saving yourself: The inactive ingredients in pesticide
formulations are often more harmful to human health than the active
ingredient.
• Plant WILDflowers.Attract and feed wild bees
by growing lots of flowering plants from spring though fall, especially
native wildflowers, which attract not only bees but also birds and
other wildlife that thrive in your local climate.
• Go au natural. Leave a part of your
landscape uncultivated. Many native bee species are solitary, rather
than social, meaning they don't build hives. Some nest in the ground,
others, in shrubby, weedy areas.
• Call your congressman! A bill currently floating
through Congress, Saving America's Pollinators Act of 2013, would call
for national measures to protect bees, beyond simply labeling
pesticides.Tell your local reps to support the act here.
From http://www.organicgardening.com/living/is-your-yard-killing-bees, you can find the links there.
Nowadays,
the word "native" has taken on a kind of glamour among gardeners. Many a
catalog or garden center makes the adjective a selling point, often
promising lower maintenance and butterflies. But how native are your
native plants? And does it matter?
Many virtues are claimed for
native plants: They can handle the local climate, are drought-tolerant
(at least if they come from the prairie) and require less maintenance
(if you choose the right native plant for your garden's conditions). And
native plants provide food and shelter for native wildlife.
But
if you buy a pot of coneflower, tickseed, little bluestem grass or
smooth hydrangea from a garden center or catalog, it's probably not
exactly the species that grew here centuries ago. It's more likely to be
a cultivar, or cultivated variety, selected for some characteristic
that makes it more attractive or useful and easy to sell to gardeners.
Sometimes
the change comes from the normal variation that occurs in every
generation of plants. In other cultivars, it was deliberately sought by
careful crossbreeding, even between different species. Sometimes
cultivars of native plants are referred to as "nativars."
A
cultivar may have more conspicuous blooms, like Annabelle hydrangea
(Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabelle'), which has much larger fluffy white
flower clusters than the native smooth hydrangeas. It may be more
compact, like Kim's Knee High coneflower (Echinacea purpurea 'Kim's Knee
High'). It may bloom longer or at a different time than the native
plant, or it may be less susceptible to diseases and insects. It may
have a leaf color or bloom shape not found in nature, like coneflowers
and coreopsis with flowers that are double or downright odd.
In
the form of cultivars, many native plants — or sort-of native plants —
have been welcomed into the mainstream of gardening. But there's a
question: Do they really work like native plants? Do they still serve
the functions of native species, particularly in supporting animals?
For many enthusiasts, that's the most important reason to use them: To provide habitat for a wide variety of other species.
The
manifesto of these gardeners is "Bringing Nature Home: How You Can
Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants" by University of Delaware
entomologist Douglas Tallamy (Timber Press, 360 pages, $19.95; bringingnaturehome.net).
And cultivars worry Tallamy because he fears that altering native
plants to make them more attractive to people may make them less useful
to animals.
If the plant blooms earlier or later in the year than
the original species, will it still be in sync with the life cycles of
the insects that pollinate it? If the leaves are purple instead of the
regular green, has the chemistry changed enough to turn off insects that
use it as a food source?
Hello
Yellow butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa 'Hello Yellow'), with bright
yellow flowers instead of the normal orange, appeals to Peggy Anne
Montgomery, publicist for American Beauty Native Plants, a partnership
with the National Wildlife Federation that markets cultivars as well as
straight species.
"I think it's kind of fun to have another color," she says. "And the insects don't care."
The
problem, though, is that we don't really know whether the insects care
or not. "Nobody has studied this in a scientific way," Tallamy says. The
first attempts to answer the question are just beginning.
Other
advantages claimed for native plant cultivars that matter to gardeners —
drought-tolerance, hardiness, low maintenance — can be tested in the
marketplace. But only careful scientific study can hope to discover
whether cultivar differences matter to birds, insects and
microorganisms.
Such research has started at the University of
Vermont, where doctoral candidate Annie White is studying whether
insects such as native bees that gather pollen and carry it from bloom
to bloom will visit cultivars as often as they visit the straight
species.
In her first year's data with a small number of plants —
hardly enough to settle the question — the results were suggestive: Six
of nine native species attracted more native pollinators than the
cultivars she planted with them. The light purple flowers of the
straight native species New England aster (Symphyotrichum
novae-angliae), for example, got more than a dozen times as many visits
as the popular cultivar Alma Poetschke (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae
'Alma Poetschke'), whose blooms are vivid magenta.
On the other
hand, the bees were equally happy to visit either cultivars or straight
species of wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) and giant hyssop (Agastache
foeniculum).
White's guess, she says, is that "real ecological
trade-offs" come in when the plant is very different form the straight
species, with a distinctively different color or flower form.
For
most gardeners, the debate over cultivars and natives is almost moot,
because only cultivars are available. True native plants are difficult
to find in garden centers.
Natural Garden Natives, a line of
native plant species from locally collected seed, finds a market largely
through plant groups' spring sales. "There's a two-week window in May
when you can find them," says Trish Beckjord, who specializes in native
plants at the wholesale grower Midwest Groundcovers in St. Charles, Ill.
Otherwise, you must persuade your local garden center to order them.
Tallamy
wishes gardeners would take that step. "I would like to see the
homeowner say to the garden center, 'I would like to have the choice of a
real native species,'" he says. "You can still have the cultivar."
Some
say that cultivars have value, even to the cause of native species.
"Cultivars can help the starting gardener or help someone make the
transition to more native plants," Beckjord says.
Perhaps there is
a range of native-ness in which every gardener can find a comfort zone.
Tallamy and co-author Rick Darke have just published an inspirational
book, "The Living Landscape: How to Design for Beauty and Biodiversity
in the Home Garden" (Timber Press, 392 pages, $39.95), to help gardeners
create attractive and accessible habitat gardens.
In smaller or
less casual gardens where big plants won't fit, perhaps lower, tidier
native species might find a place among the foreign-born peonies and day
lilies.
A short coneflower may still feed a goldfinch in a tiny
garden where its tall ancestors would flop. And it may be the first
plant to connect a 21st-century gardener to the prairie past.
Abstract: Trees remove air pollution by the
interception of particulate matter on plant surfaces and the absorption
of gaseous pollutants through the leaf stomata. However, the magnitude
and value of the effects of trees and forests on air quality and human
health across the United States remains unknown. Computer simulations
with local environmental data reveal that trees and forests in the
conterminous United States removed 17.4 million tonnes (t) of air
pollution in 2010 (range: 9.0-23.2 million t), with human health effects
valued at 6.8 billion U.S. dollars (range: $1.5-13.0 billion). This
pollution removal equated to an average air quality improvement of less
than one percent. Most of the pollution removal occurred in rural areas,
while most of the health impacts and values were within urban areas.
Health impacts included the avoidance of more than 850 incidences of
human mortality and 670,000 incidences of acute respiratory symptoms.
Full article PDF available at http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/46102.
Although I have had to neglect my trial gardens on the edge of
Amsterdam this year following a decision to move house and all that
involved, it is surprising just how well they have grown and how little
work it has been to keep them looking good.
The
key to successful perennial planting is not only choosing the right
plants but planting enough of them. My borders were planted densely in
the first instance as these gardens are where I trial the plants I write
about and design with, but as the borders mature the planting densities
become even higher. The result is that there is little room left for
weeds to become established.
There
are some borders in my garden that have not changed for more than ten
years and every year they seem to become easier to maintain; we are
talking about less work than an hour per year in some cases.
Four
years ago I planted up two similar long borders and in the first year
the mulches were essential to keep down the weeds. This year with no
time to spare they have had to fend for themselves and apart from the
occasional towering example of nettle or willow herb that seemed to have
appeared overnight, there has been little else to deal with.
Establishing
a balance between the various plants we include in our planting scheme
is never easy and involves a lot of trial and error, but when it works
life becomes a lot easier. That is not to say you have nothing to do.
The new double borders contain a fine umbellifer, Cenolophium denudatum,
which after a slow start has now decided to set seed possibly too
enthusiastically. I need to watch it and this summer decided to remove
all the seedheads before they matured – it was actually beginning to
look untidy so the borders looked better after the half hour I found for
the task.
Plants
compete with one another and we as gardeners need to referee. Sometimes
I favour the thugs and allow them to take over, but in other cases some
plants need to be controlled by reducing their spread every year or so –
Inula hookeri is a case in point; I wouldn’t be without it, but it is a strong competitor.
The
shrubs I have been adding to my borders in recent years are beginning
to play a role; in some cases too much of one and this is again
something I will eventually teach myself to understand and work with.
Without the weeds, nature becomes something fun and enjoyable to play
with.
Bees
are in serious trouble. The tiny little pollinators, which save U.S.
farmers billions of dollars in pollination services, are dying off by
the thousands—a travesty that has led many a home gardener to plant
"bee-friendly" plants in his or her yard or garden to provide a refuge
for bees, far away from the toxic agricultural pesticides many
scientists believe could be playing a role in their die-off.