Little non-showy flowers abound in the spring - look closely.

Most people fail to notice flowers that are associated with wind pollination because generally they lack showy flower parts.  Sometimes people notice the pollen-producing flowers if they are aggregated together to form long dangly catkins or aments.  At one time botanists thought that the rather cone-like aments were primitive because they were more like the cones of conifers.  But this idea was falsified in the early part of the 1900s.  So people notice the long dangly catkins on my filbert, Corylus americana, but fail to see the small but rather showy pistillate flowers.  Actually the only part you can see are the bright red, somewhat feathery, stigmas that stick out of the buds to pick up pollen.  So here you are both types of flowers, dozens of pollen flowers and 2-3 pistillate flowers.  TPP does not like calling them male and female although that is common enough usage, but wrong.  Lots of temperate deciduous trees use wind pollination; they flower in the spring before leaves expand an get in the way of pollination.  Welcome to the early allergy season.  

First it snowed, then it leafed

Our area got about an inch of snow last evening, the first of the winter, and not so unusual for November 12.  And then the temperature dropped to 19 F (-7 C) over night. Again nothing so unusual for this time of year.  But the fall has been lingering and late, so this is rather sudden cold and a hard freeze.  TPP decided that the gardening season was over and harvested the last of the bok choi and moved a couple of small boxes of parsley indoors.  Several of our trees really never did change color, and they were holding fast to their leaves.  Only the sugar maples had really dropped most of their leaves.  But this morning if leafed.  To explain, TPP's book editor is big on parallel construction, so "snowed" "leafed"; that's parallel right?  All those leaves that were hanging on literally dropped all at once.  It was leafing hard on the back half of the estate this morning and it was kind of magical and sort of pretty; if you had stood there with a basket it would have filled pretty quickly.  It was quite a sight except for all the leaves falling into the lily pond.  A sudden leaf drop usually this happens with ginkgo trees, but these other trees not so much.  Now there's a leaf-snow-leaf sandwich on the ground that's 3-5 inches thick.  Raking season has officially begun. 

Fall - When deciduous is a dirty word

Gardening is our exercise program, and this is not a complaint, but just about now deciduous becomes a very dirty word about this time of year. Big trees, and several in excess of 4 feet dbh grace our gardens, and big trees drop lots of leaves, so even for those of us who are not overly fussy about what constitutes a lawn have a simple choice, remove the leaves or watch your yard revert to a woodland, quickly. Actually in many parts of our yard, spring beauty, bluebells, trillium, and wild ginger grow willy-nilly here and there, and parts of our yard are dedicated to spring ephemerals and a woodland landscape, so you end up drawing a line somewhere. A garden service already removed a great many leaves when we were too busy to do so, and today the Phactors spent their day removing a second accumulation of no small proportions, and the oaks and hackberries (yes, more than one) have yet to give up the majority of their crowns, so another accumulation is in the offing. If left until all the leaves were down, the accumulation would be inches deep in many places, so perhaps letting it revert to woodland is not such a bad idea, but the gardens look so nice across a green sward. So we got our exercise today. Now leave us alone!

Deciduous trees

Here in the temperate zone most of our woody plants are deciduous; they drop their leaves seasonally. This poses a gardening challenge for those of us with large, shady yards because if the leaves are not removed from lawn areas and some garden areas the entire area begins converting back into a woodland. Without my intervention this would only take a few years, and in fact it was well on its way when team Phactor acquired this property. And so seasonally, with the aid of a very large leaf mulching vacuum, a rental bargain, leaf removal and relocation only takes a few weeks, or so it seems. Fortunately several gardens of woodland plants are ready to receive their annual mulching of leaves. This image shows a small section, about one-fourth, of the problem, with only a fraction of the leaf fall complete, and this is all behind a quite adequately large set of lawns and gardens surrounding our abode. This way the Phactor's scientific field work smoothly transitions into gardening field work, and not a moment is lost watching football or baseball. The sugar maple, a 110 foot tall giant, always looks a bit depressed this time of year.