An ode to chamomile and shade

One day last week I got out into the garden early so that I could do a little weeding in the shade. The chamomile, which scatters its seeds rather widely next to the fence where I was working, was still shaded also, and so its petals drooped, awaiting the sunlight.

Drooping petals await the morning sun.

Once the sun cleared the tree across the alley and its light fell on the chamomile, the flowers came alive. The white petals perked up and spread out around the yellow centers, the sweet appley fragrance rose invisibly, and dozens of tiny flower flies showed up, fluttering daintily from one blossom to the next.

The flowers open, the flower flies come.

It made me think of a poem by Japanese poet Ryokan (even though it's about butterflies). 

The flower invites the butterfly with no-mind;
The butterfly visits the flower with no-mind.
The flower opens, the butterfly comes; 
The butterfly comes, the flower opens.
I don't know others,
Others don't know me.
By not-knowing we follow nature's course.

[From Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf: Zen Poems of Ryokan, trans. by John Stevens. Shambhala Publications, 2004.]

Harvesting chamomile on a not-so-hot day in the garden

I try to keep up with harvesting the blossoms to dry for tea, not so much because I drink a lot of chamomile tea, but because if I let them all go to seed, they stop blooming and the plants dry up and that's the end of it. If I keep harvesting, they will keep blooming all summer. I don't worry about picking so many that I keep it from reseeding; it's really not possible to do that.

I usually pop off the blossoms with my thumbnail and into a bag while sitting on a chair that I bring out to the garden. But harvesting those prolific blossoms can get tedious even while sitting, especially in the sun on a hot day, so with temperatures in the 80s already at 10 a.m., and climbing to 90-plus pretty quickly, I took a scissors and cut off several bunches, then sat down in the shade of our patio umbrella to pop the blossoms off and into a paper bag for drying in the garage.

A thumbnail is a very handy tool for separating the blossoms from the stems.

A lot of the flowers were already past their peak and destined for the compost, so I placed my harvest basket on the table to hold a handful at a time from the bucket where I had put all the cuttings, with my paper bag between my feet for dropping in the blossoms. A second bucket collected the compostable leftovers.

A mass of chamomile stems and flowers in the shade of the patio.

For drying the flowers, I use a grocery bag that's been cut down to half its height, plucking the blossoms so they fall into the bag until there's enough for a single layer at the bottom, then set the bag on a table in a dark spot in the garage where they won't get sunlight to turn them brown, and leave them for several days to dry; I leave the bag open for maximum air circulation. We don't put our car in the garage in summer (much easier to get our bikes in and out that way), so there's no exhaust fumes to spoil the herbs. 

A glass of iced tomato-veggie juice aids the harvest on a hot day.

I've got some spearmint growing in a pot this summer, so I'll be sure to dry some of that, too. It complements the chamomile very nicely in an herbal tea blend, which tastes pretty good iced on a summer evening, when shade from the house falls on the patio and reaches across the backyard. 

Pretty soon the chamomile is shaded too, and the petals fold down, as if tucking themselves into bed for a good sleep before the morning's visitors arrive.

Chamomile with poppy petals and a tiny bee (probably Ceratina genus), on a morning in July.

A Shamrock by Any Other Name ...

Last year's clover, in a sweet little vase from Catherine Reece pottery.

Perhaps because St. Patrick's Day occurs so close to the vernal equinox, I get a little preoccupied with shamrocks and clovers and other green growing things. 

It's the month when many Minnesota gardeners are getting ready to start seeds indoors, and although I feel the same urge, I haven't done much seed starting for quite a few years. I did plant some cilantro seeds in a peat pot a couple of days ago (they're sitting in a south window, waiting to germinate), and that may be the extent of it for me this year.

Some years I have started seeds of white clover, Trifolium repens, at the beginning of February in order to have a pot of them in time for St. Patrick's Day. I've even written about it here and here.

These are not the "shamrocks" you see in the grocery stores about now. That plant is a type of oxalis, aka sorrel, that does not grow wild in Ireland or any other part of the northern hemisphere. But it makes a much nicer houseplant than do the clovers, so I guess the greenhouse growers figured, why not?

Oxalis at Seward Co-op today, in a display with Irish oat bread. Note they're not calling them shamrocks.

The plant identified as a shamrock by a plurality of the Irish (46%  in a 1988 survey) is lesser trefoil, aka hop clover, aka several other common names, aka Trifolium dubium, which is a bit smaller than white clover and has yellow blossoms. Although not as well known as white clover, it is, apparently, about as widespread. Native to Europe and Central Asia, it's been introduced and naturalized in North America, Africa, and New Zealand. 

Phinney the Galway cat (at least, that's where his name comes from) with my watercolor illustration of T. dubium, one of the Irish shamrocks. (Phinney's much more interested in the pencil than the art.)

Now that I've been studying this plant a little, I'm pretty sure I've seen it in many of the grassy strips between the sidewalk and street (which we call the boulevard here in Minneapolis, an apparent idiosyncrasy of my city). It's considered invasive in many areas, but not always because it is a problem for native species; more often, it is said to "invade" lawns. But since lawns aren't exactly natural ecosystems, that's not really saying much. 

Some photos of T. dubium show the plant with much rounder slightly bluish leaves, but that could be a case of mistaken identity, since there are a few look-alike species, as this site explains. 

The reason I've tended to favor white clover (T. repens) as the shamrock, even though it was the runner-up to lesser trefoil in the fore-mentioned survey (at 35%), is because the seeds are easy to come by; and that's because it used to be considered a desirable addition to lawn grass seed mixtures; and that's because it's a legume, as is  T. dubium, and so "fixes" atmospheric nitrogen, which means that it makes it available for other plants to take it up, which makes the grass healthier and greener.

Now it's most often considered a weed by those who prefer a manicured grass-only lawn, an aesthetic that emerged after WWII and the introduction of broadleaf weed-killers, according to historian Virginia Scott Jenkins in her book, The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession (published by Smithsonian Books in 1994). 

In other words, it became a weed once there was an herbicide that could kill it. In fact, the target plants were plantain and dandelions, with clover being an innocent bystander, but in order to sell the chemicals to the public, the makers had to convince them that clovers were weeds too.  

Except now it's finding its way back into the good graces of those who prefer a low-maintenance, diverse lawn that's much prettier than a boring grass carpet. Clover is also very much appreciated by butterflies and bees (including several non-stinging wild bees), mammals* (yes, that includes rabbits, you bunny haters), and birds (who eat the seeds).

My recently completed watercolor of T. repens

Clovers are also edible to humans, offering both protein and carbohydrates. In fact, according to the comprehensive history by Charles Nelson in his book, Shamrock (Boethius Press, 1991), the earliest observations about shamrocks in Ireland, reported by literate visitors, were that the Irish ate them.

And that, not anything St. Patrick did with them (if he did), is the most likely reason shamrocks have become the emblem of Ireland.


* Fun fact—Other wild animals that consume white clover:

Leaves and flowers are eaten by grizzly bears, moose, mules, deer, blue grouse and the white-footed vole.

Seeds are eaten by these birds: northern bobwhite, bufflehead, American coot, several different grouse, the horned lark, mallard, gray partridge, greater prairie chicken, willow ptarmigan, American pintail, California quail, and American robin.

Many butterflies use them as caterpillar nurseries, including the eastern-tailed blue and several sulfurs and skippers. Still more butterflies visit clover blossoms for the nectar.

 (From Encyclopedia of Life)

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Backyard bee watching serves up a little slapstick

Lately I've been fascinated with watching the different types of bees visiting the flowers in my garden. I'll be sitting on the patio with my tea and the newspaper when I hear the distinctive buzz of a bumblebee on the nearby rugosa roses. When I get up to take a closer look, I notice that there are other types of bees on the roses also, and as I watch them for several minutes, I discover that the interaction between the different bees can be rather comical (which I'll describe after I introduce the characters).

The bumblebees in my yard are a little on the small side, except for the queen, who is huge. At one point when this bumblebee was hovering, I got a glimpse of a band of brown on her abdomen, which you can just barely see in this photo, leading me to suppose it might be a brown-belted bumblebee.

The description of the brown-belted species also notes that the queen is quite large, and it's a common species around here, so I'm going to say that's what it is.

Bumblebees have this habit of curling their bodies around the pollen anthers and then vibrating vigorously, which is a really effective way to get the pollen out of tomato and pepper plants because those flowers enclose the pollen in a cagelike structure and the extra vibration shakes the pollen free. The technique is called buzz pollination or sonication, and it's the reason bumblebees (and a few other bee species that do this) are the most effective pollinators of those crops. Honeybees don't do that, and neither do most other wild bees.

Bumblebees also flit about from flower to flower and back again, never spending much time on each visit. This is a very effective pollination technique for row crops because it results in a more thorough mixing of pollen.

Neither of these techniques are necessary for roses, but they don't hurt, either, unless you're a smaller bee working the same roses, and then the bumblebee's clumsy frenetic maneuvers can get rather annoying.

Here's one of the smaller bees at work on the roses. It's most likely a type of digger bee, so called because they nest in the ground. There are many such species, and I don't know which one this is, but it sure looks a lot like the one featured on this page about Minnesota bees.  There are many types of wild bees that nest in the ground, but they are solitary (not hive-forming) and harmless, so there's no reason to fear them. To help these bees it's important to not get too carried away with the mulch, because that denies them access to nesting sites. (Learn more about that in a post I wrote this spring.)

This bee was so still, I watched it for a few moments wondering if it was really alive, and then noticed that it was quietly munching on pollen. It's almost like it's kind of a zen bee, meditating on the roses.

And there's a still smaller bee, one that resembles an ant with wings, and is probably of the genus Ceratina, or small carpenter bees. They are called that because they chew holes in soft woody material, mostly cut plant stems, where they lay their eggs in brood cells. There are a few solitary bees that use plant stubble this way, and it's the reason you should leave some cut stems standing in your garden. Their jaws are not strong enough to be destructive, so no worries there.

The comical part, which I was not able to capture with my iPhone camera, came when the bumblebee visited a flower that already had another bee in it.

The small bee would be quietly minding its own business when the bumblebee stumbled into the flower and bumbled about, actually knocking the smaller bee off to the side away from the pollen.

Elbowing it out of the way like it was the roller derby!

Most of the time, the smaller bee moved out of the way and waited for the bumblebee to leave, which it did before long, and then the small bee would resume its meal.

But on another occasion, when I noticed both digger bees and bumblebees on my wild rose (Rosa blanda, a volunteer I decided to keep), the digger bee appeared to be attempting to fend the bumblebee off. I saw its tiny front legs come out on one side in a waving motion, as if it were trying to push the bumblebee away. The bumblebee appeared oblivious to this effort, buzzing right on the top of the smaller bee before moving along.

I just couldn't help but think it was like a bee version of a Laurel and Hardy routine. Who knew that backyard bee watching could be so entertaining?

Digger bee: "I think I'll wait for those galoots to leave before I attempt a landing."

Saving more bees: How and why I'm rethinking mulch in my garden

For years I have been a member of the chorus of natural gardening advocates who tout the benefits of using mulch liberally to suppress weeds, maintain soil moisture, control disease by keeping dirt from splashing onto plant leaves, and keep soil-dwelling pests at bay.

Even better, I have said, is to put down layers and layers of newspapers to form a solid—but natural! decomposable!—barrier to really suppress the weeds for a full season or longer. 

Between the boxwoods: lots of mulch, and emerging crocuses

Then I learned about ground-nesting solitary bees. These gentle hardworking pollinators include several genera of wild bees, sometimes called digger bees or mining bees, and they need access to bare soil to excavate their nest tunnels. 

This 5-minute video from the University of Minnesota condenses an hour of effort by one such bee (genus Colletes), diligently working to move a couple of small wood chips out of her way and then digging a tunnel in a sheltered spot next to a rock. Imagine that bee laboring to move several wood chips out of the way and then encountering a thick barrier of newspapers—or worse, black plastic. Game over, little hapless bee.

The widespread use of mulch is a matter of real concern to bee advocates, like those at the UC Berkeley Urban Bee Lab, who call it "mulch madness"—and the use of black plastic weed barriers they dub BPI  for "black plastic insanity." (If you click on the link, you'll see a photo of a beautiful little green sweat bee,  genus Agapostemon, emerging from her underground nest.)

There's no reason to fear these gentle bees; they don't have a hive to protect, and it is very unlikely they will ever sting you. While the Cornell Department of Entomology says these bees will not sting unless handled, many species will even tolerate gentle handling, as the children of Sabin Elementary School in Portland, Oregon, will testify. Their playground is home to thousands of Andrena bees—the kids call them "tickle bees" and have adopted them as the school mascot.

A little patch of bare soil to the left—the beginning of a more bee-friendly garden

So what's a conscientious gardener to do?

Mulch less, mulch sparingly, mulch lightly—and don't replenish those bare spots that emerge as our old mulch breaks down or gets moved around. Plant groundcovers for living mulches that leave space for the bees. Get into the zen of pulling weeds once in a while. When we don't have the time or inclination to weed, we can focus on edging to give the perception of a neatly contained garden.  (Trust me on this—I have gotten compliments on a very weedy garden with tidy edges.)

And no more laying down of layers of newspapers—unless we want to shred them first, as researchers at the University of Ohio did to encourage ground-nesting squash bees, which they found to be more effective than honeybees at pollinating squash, pumpkins, gourds, and other related crops. They determined that a mulch of shredded newspapers and grass clippings was best at both keeping weeds down and supporting these valuable pollinators.

Other loose, lightweight mulches, such as leaves and the hulls of various types of nuts, are also good alternatives to wood chips and barriers. These are not only easy for the bees to work around, but they also get blown about by the wind, exposing a bit of soil here and there in the process, as found by the Xerces Society in their test fields in California.

Ground covers make attractive natural airy mulches. In one of my gardens, I planted periwinkle (Vinca minor) amongst the bulbs and perennials and a chokeberry (Aronia) shrub.  The periwinkle has spread and interwoven itself throughout the garden so that I really couldn't spread woodchips without burying it, so I stopped trying to mulch it, and have found that I only need to pull a few weeds from time to time.

Tulips emerging amid a very loose mulch of leaves, plant debris, and perwinkle

This garden is lightly mulched by happenstance with the leaves that fall on it, the debris from previous years' ferns, astilbe and other plants, and the periwinkle sprawling everywhere. I have come to appreciate the aesthetics of the variety of textures and shapes in this mix of light mulches and plants. And by mid June, the perennials hide most everything else anyway. 

Most importantly—for the bees especially—here and there, patches of bare soil have become exposed. And that's where I first noticed little bees hovering over the ground last spring, shortly after learning about them.

Another part of the same garden, with coral bells, emerging star of Bethlehem (Ornithogalum), more periwinkle, and a little bare soil, which you can see in the lower right 

I didn't plan it that way, but now I'll be looking to replicate that happy mix elsewhere in my yard.

Gathering nectar while they can

The bees and the skippers sure have been loving the lavender this fall.