A Satellite Garden for Pollinators...in Boston

Several years ago our son purchased a condo in Somerville, Massachusetts.  As is typical in a large metropolitan area, there isn't much land around the building, but Sean's been talking with me about creating a pollinator garden on the small plot that he has.  Over the 4th of July weekend, we were finally able to make that happen.

Here is the space that we started with.....

Of course, since we're talking an area that has been built on for over a century, there was plant material already in place.  Most of it was exotic, if not exotic AND invasive:  black swallow-wort (a vine related to milkweed), Vinca minor, white sweet clover, crabgrass, fescue, and a cranesbill of some sort.  We removed all of these except the cranesbill, which didn't seem to be invasive and which was creating a nice small carpet with a few purple flowers.

Then there were the native plants:  an oak seedling, 2 maple seedlings, lots of hay fern, and and a couple violets.  Pretty as the hay fern was, it was obviously too aggressive for this small an area, so we reluctantly removed it.  There was still plenty of it on the north side of the house. Of course, the tree seedlings had to go, too.  This is definitely not a big enough space for an oak or maple tree.  We did try to keep the violets...although they got pretty mangled during the whole process.

The large shrub at the north end of the garden space is an old privet which technically belongs to the next door neighbor, so we didn't try to do anything with it.  There is black swallow-wort and Boston ivy growing up in it, as well as a maple seedling or two, so Sean will have to keep a close eye on it to keep those plants from infringing on his new pollinator garden.

My biggest concern for this project was finding appropriate, non-pesticide treated, native plants to form the biological base of the new garden.  Searching online, I located Garden in the Woods, a nature area run by the New England Wildflower Society.  It's in Framingham, which isn't too far out of the city, and they sell native plants.  We fired up the cell phone navigation system and made our way out there on Saturday morning.  Woohoo!  Paydirt!  Even in early July, long after sensible people have put in their new gardens or renovated their old ones, Garden in the Woods still had a nice selection of Massachusetts' native plants.  My only regret in going there was that we didn't have time to hike their trails.

On the way back, with Sean's car mostly full of native perennials, we stopped at Russell's Garden Center and bought a few tools, compost and mulch (plus a small butterfly milkweed).  Now the car was really loaded down.

I should have taken a photo of the car, but I didn't think about it. I was too psyched about getting busy, digging in the dirt.

Luckily for me, I got to be the "consultant".  Sean did the vast majority of the actual physical labor, but I got to get my hands dirty enough to feel like an integral part of the project.  The steps were pretty basic: we pulled out and discarded all the plants that we didn't want, making sure that we got as many of their roots as possible, then we spread a layer of compost over the open soil to be worked in as we planted the new perennials.  Fortuitously, the soil turned out to be better than I expected.  Next we placed the plants and Sean dug the holes - same depth as the pot, but twice as wide - before he planted each new garden member carefully, being careful to loosen the root balls as appropriate and to water each one in thoroughly.  The final step was to mulch.

By Sunday afternoon, here is what Sean's new pollinator garden looked like....

The plant list includes red moss phlox (Phlox subulata 'Scarlet Flame'), red bearberry (Arctostaphylas uva-ursi), cranesbill (Geranium sp.), violets (Viola sp.), lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium), wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana), foxglove penstemon (Penstemon digitalis), Nicky summer phlox (Phlox paniculata 'Nicky'), showy coneflower (Rudbeckia fulgida), spike blazing star (Liatris spicata), Magnus eastern purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea 'Magnus'), wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa), butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa), poke milkweed (Asclepias exaltata), common milkweed (Asclepias syriacus), and New England aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae).

The poke and common milkweed will move around;  Sean will just pull out any that come up in a place that he finds displeasing.  Hopefully the monarchs will eventually come to visit - and maybe even to lay eggs.

The garden is planted fairly densely;  the look will hopefully be "cottage garden" in style.   I'm really excited to see how it grows and matures over the next few years.  Most of all, I'm looking forward to seeing the pollinators that it will be supporting.  Every little bit helps!

Planting Problems

[Note:  I wrote this piece last week, after a particularly frustrating day.  Since then, I've planted some of these plants, purchased others, and been given even more. Thank goodness it's been a slow spring so far!]

Okay.  It's confession time.  I find that planting - actually putting plants in a specific place in the ground - is getting harder and harder to accomplish.  In fact, it's getting downright painful.

It's not that I'm getting older and stiffer and fatter - although all 3 of those are, unfortunately, true.  No, it's different from physical difficulty.

I'm experiencing a mental disability about planting....

Let me backtrack just a little so that I can try to fully explain what I'm fighting against.

I am a plant collector and I have a plant collector's garden.  To those of you who don't know what that means, just imagine "One here...one there...3 over here...one way back there..." on a garden-wide scale.

My plant passion is basically "native" plants - here in south central Kansas, that means prairie plants.  While the idea of gardening with native plants has caught on fairly well in many other areas of the country, it's still in its infancy here in the heartland.  For that reason, there aren't many places to find native plants around here, especially native plants that have any local provenance, which is ideally what I'd like to have in my gardens.

Oh, the garden centers carry a few - mainly just the perennials with horticultural varieties that create a splash.  Even the box stores have a few plants that are native to the prairies, but they are even more likely to be horticultural varieties.  My two best sources are 1) a man who lives a county or two to the east of us, who drives in each Saturday morning during the spring and early summer to sell the plants he's grown at the Farmers' Market, and 2) a biannual weekend sale held at Dyck Arboretum, about an hour north of us.

With such transitory sources for my plant material, I tend to buy... 1) what I intended to buy - if they have it with them or in stock, 2) anything that looks particularly healthy or good that I think I can use, 3) anything that might work in place of what I wanted to buy that's out of stock, and 4) anything that's particularly interesting or unusual that they may never have again.

Thus, I always end up with more than I intended.  And all of it is COOL, COOL stuff.  Stuff I can't just waltz down the street and buy at 123 Nursery.

Now, here comes the hard part.  I'm home.  I've got a couple boxes crammed full of plant material, most of it unplanned purchases.  Much of it is actually something I've only seen in books or, if I'm lucky, out in the field.  Sometimes the only reason I come home with it is because Kevan says, "Oh, you'll love this!  You've got to try it!"

Now I actually have to find places for all my new plants.  Places that give each of my new little sprouts a chance to grow and mature and strut their stuff.  Places where they can be seen, where they won't get lost or hidden by their neighbors.  Places where they look "right", where they look like part of the garden and, better yet, like part of a plant community.

Most of the time, the plants I planned on purchasing were sought to fill specific holes in my flower beds.  Okay, those go in quickly.  That 20% was easy.

Now to find spots for the rest of them....  "This one will be perfect here, at the back of the bed.  And this one will slip right in there, near the front.  But I've got 12 Liatris of 3 different species!  Damn!  What were their differing requirements?  I know that mucronata is basically like punctata...but I don't really have any open spots that are dry and sunny.  I used some of those for the common milkweed...and there's that area of the corner bed, but there's still some crown vetch lurking there and I don't want to accidentally Round-up the wrong plant.  Hmmm.  I'll have plenty of room when I get the Bermuda weeded out of that new bed I've outlined, but can I get that done before the plants die on me?  I've been wanting to put a couple perennials out in the tallgrass under the fence!  Would these work there?"  And on it goes...and goes...and goes.

With luck - and good weather - I might get them all in this spring.

Each planting day, though, is filled with decisions and counter-decisions, with research and tentative placements, followed by more research and rearrangements.  Then, to make matters worse, as I start the tentative placements, I start finding the tombstones.  You know what I mean - the little tags left over from the last plant you tried there, the one that didn't make it.  "Oh, blast.  If Jack-in-the-Pulpit didn't make it here, will rue anemone fare any better?  And will THIS spring's Jack-in-the-Pulpit's - which look better than any I've seen for sale look before - do okay over there?  Or will that site be too dry for them?"

I remove the tombstones and put them in a pile.  Some day I'm going to go through and figure out which plants I've tried - and killed - and tried - and killed - and tried again - and killed again.  Maybe I'll remember not to buy them again, then.  Meanwhile, as the pile mounts, I start feeling depressed.  "Why am I even bothering?!  It is so hot and dry and cold and windy and awful around here!  Why do I even TRY to garden?  Why don't I just give up, plant grass, and let Greg mow it while I sit inside and read?"

"No. No. No. No.  What would I read about?  I read about plants!  Besides which, I'd go stir crazy!  Okay, I can do this.  Next time I won't buy so many plants, though.  Let's see...."

And the agony goes on.  Am I the only one who experiences this planting pain?  Please, tell me that others share my neuroses in this regard!  Misery truly would love company.  And maybe, then, Misery would feel less depressed and could even get all her plants in the ground in a particularly timely manner this spring!