Dead Maples & Award Winning Gardeners

An October installment of Rootbound Clippings

I’m careful not to trip as I make my way up to the podium. I look out at the large crowd, hold up the award I’ve just been presented and exhale deeply. I’m temporarily speechless but, eventually, I begin –

“This dream began on a summer day in 2020 when I covered our lawn with the very first rectangle of cardboard. That was my first of many days of sheet mulching. I hoped it would yield something special but it’s turned into something even more spectacular than I imagined. This collection of perennials and shrubs and trees is more than just a native garden. It’s an ecosystem. A bustling habitat. A time machine that transports its visitors to the Squirrel Hill of a thousand years ago. Obviously, the award is nice but I didn’t do this for the award. I did this for you.”

I gesture to the audience and my eyes scan the inhabitants of this woodland amphitheater. I see chipmunks furiously applauding with their tiny front paws. The grackles whistle. The cardinals trill. The jays squawk. The eastern carpenter bees buzz joyously.

And that’s the end of the dream sequence.

A few weeks back I learned that I won a Sustainable Garden Award from Phipps. Our garden was chosen as the winner in the category of Native Planting and Wildlife Gardens. After entering the competition for the last three years, I was delighted to receive this award. There wasn’t a grand event or official presentation ceremony but the folks at Phipps awarded me a hori hori knife, a crevice weeder and an official sign that I proudly installed in our garden.

I’ve only been gardening seriously for five years so it’s hilarious (and thrilling!) to be able to call myself an “award-winning gardener.” Though I planted nearly all these plants with my own hands, I feel like I can’t take too much credit. This garden wouldn’t be anything without the knowledge/skill/magic of John Totten and Linda Kramer who know Western Pennsylvania's native plants better than anyone else I’ve met. They’re my garden gurus and they knew exactly which plants would thrive on each corner of our property. They grew many of them from seeds and cuttings and sourced the others. Practically everything we planted flourished within a season or two. Even they were impressed how quickly our sloped prairie became established.

Although Brooke says she doesn’t do much in the garden, I think she’s just blocking out all the sweaty hours we spent schlepping tufa rock as we put together the rock garden. Brooke also puts in a lot of time pulling out bindweed which is a personal passion of hers.

Like I mentioned in my imaginary acceptance speech, the garden wouldn’t be nearly as interesting without the butterflies visiting the echinacea, the hummingbirds sipping on honeysuckle and the goldfinches pulling out seeds from the spent cutleaf coneflower.

So thanks to everyone, human and otherwise, who contributed to this now-award-winning garden. You can also read a short write-up about our garden that was published in one of the local newspapers.

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And hello to those new around here! This is a semi-regular edition of the newsletter that I call Rootbound Clippings, where I share articles, videos and other plant-centric odds and ends.

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A Heartfelt Goodbye to Another Maple

I recently wrote about the maple tree in our yard whose days are numbered. I was touched by this much more heartfelt piece by fellow Pennsylvanian, Daryln Brewer Hoffstot, about the loss of her maple tree. It comes from her collection of essays, A Farm Life: Observations From Fields and Forests and was excerpted in the NY Times last week. I love how she writes about her maple’s lifespan:

And what, I wondered, had she witnessed in her long life? Horse and buggy, farmers who lived in log houses with corn cob daubing, a barn raising, cold winters with piles of snow, many more birds, more insects, lots of bats (which are almost gone from the farm now). Darker skies, brighter stars, years with no airplane noise and then Flight 93 hijacked overhead. She’d watched the pond being dug, the house modernized, the land altered, by us, to divert new floodwaters.

You can read the whole article here.

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Thousands of Mums! Three Weeks Only!

It’s the time of the year when the horticulturists at Phipps finally display the chrysanthemums that they’ve been growing and training since spring. It’s a tradition that dates back to 1894 making this the longest running fall flower show in the country. KDKA’s Talk Pittsburgh sent me to Phipps to chat with the show’s designer Laura Schoch about this year’s installment:

The Phipps’ Fall Flower Show is open through October 27th.

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Rats!

Brooke’s written and drawn about our troubles with backyard rats so I was excited when fellow Substacker and compost expert

cass marketos

published a newsletter titled “On Rats.” It’s nice to know that we’re not the only ones who live near a healthy rodent population:

In general, rats want two things in life: shelter and vittles. That means they tend to set up shop if they can find a place to hide that’s near a regular food supply. In our garden, that “place to hide” was a mulch pile that had grown to absurdly feral proportions over the course of the summer. The “regular food supply” was our compost. We had to fix both things.

You can read Cass’ newsletter here. I make the decision to stop composting for a few months this summer and, thankfully, the rats seem to have moved on.

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Is anyone else out there struggling with backyard rats? Or has anyone seen a great fall flower show recently? I’d love to hear about it

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And one more thing: At the Pittsburgh Art Book Fair (one of my favorite local events of the year) I picked up this zine:

Here’s a sample page:

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