From Gladioli to Gobo: Flowers, Food & Friendship

1st Blooms of a hardy gladiolus - a gift from a friend

When we first moved to Alberta from sunny, frost-free Brisbane, the Home Bug Gardeners hadn't much of a clue as to what we could or should grow, just a vague idea about making our yard a nice place for bugs, birds, and people. We extirpated lawns and planted the major trees and shrubs under the guidance of our friend Adrian, but the rest was up to us. We wandered the local greenhouses with starry eyes, quickly disposed of our disposable dollars, and carted home many beautiful plants in ugly black plastic pots. We still have the pots stacked high in the garage, but hardly one of those early perennial purchases survives. As to produce, we got little: mostly woody celeriac, zucchini covered with downy mildew, and green tomatoes.

Leafy bounty at the Snagwood garden

Fortunately, we soon made friend with others of like mind and far more Zone 3 experience. The Currah's garden, Snagwood, is far outside the Urban Heat Island benefits of the city, but each year they raise a stunning bounty. Even better, they meld two horticultural traditions with an interest in experimentation and are happy to share it, even with strange bug people.

Red-leghorn & Snagwood's summer flowers

The first benefit to the HBG was Gladiolus imbricatus, the flower at the top of the post. The most recent, gobo (Arctium lappa), a crunchy and yummy root crop. In between, we've been treated to innumerable tasty treats, from ginger cookies to roasted rooster, and many lively discussions. We haven't been able to return much in kind, but we would like to devote a special issue of the Home Bug Garden to Satomi: some virtual vegetables, flowers, and chickens to wish you a happy birthday!

Salt, rice, saki from Satomi to Gopher Hill

Friday Fly: A simple solitary Syritta pipiens

Hoverfly ponders the portent of new potatoes 

Give the Home Bug Gardener a sunny afternoon and a point-and-shoot camera, and the time flies. Fifty or sixty snaps later, the enthusiasm has waned, but optimism is peaking. Then comes the downer of the download. Still, attention to the advice of Alex Wild at Myrmecos and Compound Eye combined with persistence and luck saves a few images from the trash Well, perhaps more should be trashed, but I found the picture above a pleasing composition, if not a good illustration of an interesting little (~9 mm) hoverfly.

Syritta pipiens captured at cinquefoil by DSLR

To actually see the hoverfly in all its glory, we must default to HBG's better two-thirds and her wonderful, if aging, Nikon D70 and flash. And what we see is one of Linnaeus' species from 1758 - then known as Musca pipiens, but now Syritta pipiens (L., 1758). The parentheses indicate that the species has moved to a new genus from the one Linnaeus put it in (now reserved for flies like the House Fly) and the the 'L.' indicates that Linnaeus is famous enough to get along on a single letter. What 'Syritta" and 'pipiens' (the spellchecker insists the latter should be 'pippins' - a kind of apple or musical, take your pick) is more difficult to determine.

Neither pipping nor chirping, Syritta pipiens is a mystery

The genus is pretty much Old World (our species is a colonist), out of Africa, and described a long time ago by Le Peletier & Serville in 1828. I don't think an enquiring email will help. The most recent revision of the genus is silent on the subject (Lyneborg & Barkemeyer 2005). Google and Donald Borror's book on scientific word roots both fail when 'Syritta' is the challenge. Perhaps it comes from the rather free-wheeling substitution of y for i in 'sir-' - Greek for a kind of wasp (and the fly is a bit of a wasp mimic)? So, Syritta may mean 'little wasp', but the meaning of pipiens should need no explanation: making a pipping or chirping noise. When used for frogs such as Lithobates (formerly Rana) pipiens - the Northern Leopard Frog - the meaning is relatively clear, but for a hoverfly (or mosquito like Culex pipiens)?

When potatoes flower, in theory, a hungry gardener could harvest some small, but tasty new potatoes

I think this post must end in an etymological funk. If I were trying to earn my living as an etymologist (or a photographer), I suppose this would be a week when I hadn't earned my pay. Fortunately, I have other skills that Society seems to value and I have been able to nurse my potato crop along to the flowering stage. I think that tonight, one Norland will be sacrificed to test the hypothesis the flowering indicates a meal in waiting. 


References:
Leif Lyneborg & Werner Barkemeyer. 2005. The Genus Syritta: A World Revision of the Genus Syritta Le Peletier & Serville, 1828 (Diptera, Syrphidae). Apollo Books.

Wan that Aprille with his rhubarb soote: Spring in the Home Bug Garden

Living in a transitional zone between two extremes, boreal forest and prairie, at the northern fringe of Zone 3 is always interesting, mostly in that perhaps apocryphal Chinese curse kind of way (‘may you live in interesting times’). The last few weeks, however, have been cursed only by a too strong, too persistent, and too dry wind. Temperatures have been moderate, sunshine common, the snow and ice in retreat for the moment, flocks overhead, and flies basking in the sun.

Other than flies, the first sure sign of spring in Edmonton is the appearance of the Ring-billed Gulls, cawling over the HBG sometime between 26-29 March in my records (27 March this year). The herbaceous sign of spring, as Calgary Gardening Adventures notes, is when the rhubarb shoots break ground, usually between 2-16 April in the HBG (15 April this year). So my most reliable indicators say an average spring is in the offing – a pleasant change after the last two cold and miserable ones and one the spring bulbs are relishing.

I also try to keep track of a variety of other indicator species, e.g. the Mourning Cloak (Gardening Zone 3b and Gardening with Latitude both have captured this spring treat) and Milbert Tortoiseshell butterflies. Both usually show up in mid-April, as they did this year, but you need both sun and warmth to bring them out: cloudy days are not optimum butterfly watching times. Today is a bit of a dud for butterflies. Less obvious Lepidoptera are around, though, as one can see from the margins of the variegated firespray tulip leaves.

The first bumblebee queens are on the wing and enjoying the crocus and coltsfoot, again more or less in the mid-range of my observational record. The coltsfoot, mid-range for emerging and near the early side for flowering, is doing extraordinarily well with over 20 flowering shoots up and beginning to open (vs a maximum of 8 in previous years). That means there will be a good supply of pollen and nectar in the backyard for the native bees over the next couple of weeks, and perhaps a snack or two for me as well.

Coltsfoot, more properly known as Petasites frigidus (‘Like a hat in the cold’), occurs in a variety of forms and is widely distributed across northern and western North America. You could explore some of this variety by visiting the Natural Selections exhibit at the Royal Alberta Museum, where it is on display in the botanical section. The HBG form is P. f. palmatus, or palm-leafed coltsfoot, and wandered into the HBG in a plug of forest soil salvaged from a field experiment. At the time, I had only seen coltsfoots with rather coarse, hairy leaves vaguely shaped like the print of a colt’s foot or arrowhead, so the deeply divided, rather elegant geranium-like leaves were a bit of a mystery. That mystery only deepened the next spring when thick, asparagus-like stalks bolted from the plug and covered themselves with white, composite flowerheads. The leaves appeared only much later on the wandering rhizomes far from the flower stalks, so it took me a while to figure out what was worming its way through the moist and deeply shaded bed (NB – coltsfoot will spread aggressively if it is happy).

Another name for coltsfoot is sweet butterbur and according to Linda Kershaw’s Edible and Medicinal Plants of the Rockies (Lone Pine, 2000), the flowering stalks can be eaten roasted, boiled, or stir-fried and the leaves used like fuzzy spinach. Plants for a Future also claim coltsfoot is edible (although only rate it 2 out of 5) and suggest boiling the young flower stalks before the flower buds (edible but bitter – possibly from unpleasant alkaloids) appear or munching on the peeled leafstalks. A related species, Petasites japonicus – fuki or giant butterbur – has long been used as a vegetable in Japan (and the leaves as umbrellas by children – so this is a much, much larger plant than coltsfoot). Eric Toensmeier in his informative and stimulating book Perennial Vegetables (Chelsea Green Publ., 2007), reports boiled giant butterbur stalks as being like “slightly gelatinous celery with a bit of a medicine taste”. Celery jelly? Yum, I’m sure. The alkaloids present in all Petasites are potentially dangerous too, so perhaps I’ll just enjoy the flowers and their bees and flies, and leave the culinary experience for some other time.

Curb Appeal, Co-existence & The Wildlife Garden

When the Home Bug Garden first started, I was worried that the neighbours might think I was an eccentric bugger with an eyesore frontage. As grass disappeared and the uniform mulch gave way to increasingly irregular eruptions of ‘wildflowers’, unmanaged horticultural variants of former wildflowers, grow-where-they-wish shrubs, and fallen autumn leaves, any claim to conformity with community norms was quickly lost. Nonconformity is rarely valued in our culture and under the relentless barrage of a monolithic media we are increasingly given one view of what is true, what we should think, and what we should not. Nonconformity, even in science, is denigrated and demonized. Living in Alberta, of course, I do have 6-7 months of a kind of conformity every year – the blanketing snow.

In Queensland, not smiling and saying hello to someone on a neighbourhood street would be unusual. Perhaps it is the constant sunshine, but an easy if superficial friendliness is the norm. Canadians seem far less welcoming to strangers on the street. I think the weather here encourages one to mind their own business and get where they are going before they freeze or are hailed upon. Most of those hurrying past the Home Bug Garden don’t stop to smile and pass the day. Those that do, however, have been uniformly pleasant and positive about my ‘woodland’. Even a door-knocking politician claimed to ‘like what you’ve done with your yard’. Well, maybe this office-seeker was just relieved there wasn’t a slavering dog or an old car up on cinderblocks. Still, none of these passersby had to say anything at all about the yard, let alone say something nice about something that is far from finished.

Of course, when neighbours ask, I am careful to describe my gardening as ‘wildlife friendly’, not as ‘bug friendly’: birds, bees, and butterflies come readily to my lips, wasps, spiders, and maggots almost never. I know then that I am on safe ground, because Wikipedia has pages for ‘Wildlife Garden’ and ‘Butterfly Gardening’. Never a reliable source of facts, Wikipedia, in its own 1984-ish kind of way, is a good guide to what are acceptable dogmas, politically correct attitudes, and proper forms of self expression. And according to Wikipedia (this morning anyway): “When one wildlife gardens, one acts always in accordance with the idea of keeping plants that are native to the area preeminent in the garden.” Sounds like a reasonable formula, I mean ‘native plants = native insects = native birds etc.’, right?

So how does one tell that a plant is ‘native to the area’? Unfortunately, ‘native’ isn’t a scientific term, but a collection of cultural concepts. As an adjective, it comes to us from Old French via the Latin ‘nativus’ for ‘produced by birth, innate, natural’. Appropriate to the season, ‘native’ has the same root as ‘nativity’, but also less savory derivatives such as ‘nativism’ and when used as a noun in Latin referred to a ‘natural slave’ – one born into bondage. As well as a plant bound to an area by birth, a ‘native plant’ is often taken to mean one that lived in an area ‘before people’ or, in a racist way common among some ideologies in North America, ‘before white people’.

The part of Edmonton that I live in was developed after World War II from a mixture of farmland and wetland. The wetland probably existed before European colonization, so its plants would count as ‘native’ by one usage. A pond is a great addition to any wildlife garden, but who wants to live in a slough?

Possibly there was some aspen forest earlier. That would be better, but if I converted my yard into an aspen forest there’d be little sun, lots of mosquitoes, clogged water and sewage pipes (aspen is bad), no veggies, and not many flowers. I suppose the largest plant in my garden is a ‘native’ spruce, so perhaps I could argue that I meet the ‘preeminent’ criterion, but a spruce forest would be a dark and oppressive place to live. If we try to expand our concept of ‘native’ and treat all peoples as equal, then the Clovis culture (~11,500-13,000 years ago) left the earliest human artifacts anywhere near here. But back then glacial ice covered all and algae was the only likely ‘native plants’. No thank you, I don’t think that kind of garden would be at all good for wildlife.

Should wildlife gardening be fun or a chore? Does ‘native’ have to imply a slavish devotion to what once grew in an area? Surprisingly, Wikipedia has a page called ‘Native Plant’ and (at least this morning) starts out with a not unreasonable definition: “A Native plant is one that develops, occurs naturally, or has existed for many years in an area.” Since I usually cannot afford the most recent horticultural fads and have no interest in putting in plants that are not going to develop, I think that a functional Home Bug Garden can be built around this concept of ‘native’. Moreover, such a garden could become a refuge of diversity in the increasingly developed and depauperate blotch of an ever-expanding Edmonton. Could be fun too.

Even for someone who has no interest in insect conservation, gardening does not have to be incompatible with bugs. Perhaps the biggest barrier is in the vegetable garden, because it is unfortunately true that there are a lot of insects that are far more efficient at harvesting our crops than we are. Tomatoes, potatoes, beets, spinach, radishes, arugula, lettuce, carrots, cabbage, and the like host far too many pests and many are of little use to foraging bees and butterflies. If you let your mustards (arugula, radish, and others in one of those plant families with two-names: Brassicaceae or Cruciferae) bolt they provide bees with some solace. Solanaceae (tomato, potato, pepper, ground cherry, eggplant) are better. But beans and peas (Fabaceae-Leguminosae) are probably the best veggies for bees. The more acceptable insects and the not too entomophobic gardener, however, can share the wealth of culinary herbs without any worries. That will be the topic of the next post.