Self-editing garden.

I bought a planter four years ago and planted it with a mint, and some thyme. The thyme didn't take very well, and withered away. The mint, discovering that it didn't have an entire garden to conquer, died out of spite.

Over time, wall lettuce moved in, as it will everywhere. Not so fast, I said, and plucked it out. Then I more or less ignored this little blue ceramic-bound world. And look what splendour came of that!

A pair of fern gametophytes found their way in, and bumped into each other. And then a seed or two of Heuchera arrived. Lo and behold, attractiveness! My garden knows better than I do what goes where.

Arisaema on schedule.

I have an Arisaema in my garden, in one of the shadier spots. It's one of my favourite plants, and I look forward to its appearance every spring. Part of why it's a favourite is because it reminds me of my childhood in Ontario, and finding Jack-in-the-pulpits in the woods. Mine is an Asian species, which I haven't identified beyond genus. Note the extreme (and extremely cool) roll of the spathe.

Plant a year ago yesterday.

I made a series of photos of the plant as it unfolded last year. I checked the pictures last night (May 5), and discovered that by this date, the early tri-part leaves were poking up from the soil. I ran outside to look. Nothing. Oh no, had it succumbed to the unusually harsh winter, or some other catastrophe?

I was going to write a lament to a lost friend, but decided to check the garden one more time.

Plant today.

Voila! There it is! Overnight, it emerged, no doubt egged on by my concern. And today, as of half an hour ago (the picture above), it looks to be pretty much on schedule relative to last year. Such relief.

Arisaema sp., gone but not forgotten.

I worry, because I once had an even funkier Arisaema, one with the crazy palmate leaf morphology. It unfolded from the earth like an alien arthropod. It appeared and performed beautifully for three years (even fruiting), and then two years ago, failed to emerge. Gone, and missed.

Cushion spurge.

I don't have a lot of yellow in my garden, and am not a big fan of Euphorbias (although I like the name, Spurge), but this little plant has for several years provided very nice early spring colour.

I'm pretty sure this is E. polychroma, which eventually forms a nice hemispheric cluster, and is aptly named Cushion Spurge.

Wrongway rodent.

The east side of No. 5 Road in Richmond is famous for its procession of temples, mosques and churches. Who knew it was also a zoological hotspot, a place of exotic fauna? Yesterday, as I was leaving Paulik Park, one of the garden volunteers called my name. She hurried up with her friend, who had a camera. They showed me a picture of a mystery mammal seen near one of the temples.

It was a Yellow-bellied Marmot, Marmota flaviventris. This is a strange, although not unique sighting in Richmond.

Yellow-bellied Marmot, Marmota flaviventris, Richmond BC. Photo by Laura Drisdelle.

Yellow-bellied Marmots are found in the southern half of British Columbia, east of the north-south divide of the Fraser Canyon. According to Nagorsen(2005): “...it inhabits the Fraser and Thompson Plateaus, and the southern mountains, including the Cascades, Monashees and Selkirks. The western limit of the range is on the eastern side of the Fraser River; the northern limit is the Williams Lake area, although there is a historical museum specimen taken in the 1950s at Prince George.” They inhabit the grassy lower slopes of mountains, in areas where there are prominent rock features (or man-made equivalents such as concrete highway barriers) for perching to survey the surroundings and bask in the sun.

So why is one here, 150 Km west of home, in Temple Row?

This happens from time to time. In our previous neighbourhood, also in Richmond, which was still under construction while we lived there, I saw a yellow-belly wandering among half-built houses. And about a decade ago, one decided to move into a pipe sticking out of the ground in my mother-in-law’s backyard in Surrey BC, again way the wrong way for a marmot to be. Most famously, a small colony became established in the 1980s near the north end of the Iron Workers Memorial Bridge in North Vancouver. That group was eventually relocated to Manning Park, which is within their natural range.

The most likely explanation is that now and then a marmot will blunder into the back of a truck, or onto a railway car, and be transported with a load of lumber to wherever the lumber is to be used.

In the absence of a rocky perch, a pile of pallets will suffice. Photo by Laura Drisdelle.

Although the marmot looks healthy and happy, it probably doesn’t have much of a future hanging out between busy No. 5 Road and Highway 99. I have contacted a local Wildlife Rescue organization, and with luck the marmot will be live-trapped and transported back to the interior.

Reference

Nagorsen, D.W. 2005. Rodents & Lagomorphs of British Columbia. Royal British Columbia Museum.

Botanical lessons learned at Paulik Park.

It's so nice to have a large, eclectic garden in the neighbourhood. Today and yesterday, as part of an open house organized by the Richmond Garden Club, I led nature walks among the trees and flower beds of Paulik Park, and because both times I was accompanied by members of the club, I probably learned as much as anyone. Spring is really racing along, and I believe we were all surprised at how quickly things are developing.



Among today's finds was this colourful Euphorbia, which yesterday was still sound asleep.

This Rhododendron was quite an eyeful too. The leaves are almost purple, and the flowers are not white, but very pale green.

At some point we started talking about the rhubarb-like plant. Not Gunnera, there'll be time for that later in the season. Right now, it's the one with the large rounded leaves, Petasites japonicus, which turns out to be two plants in one. (Apparently a trait of the genus, which occurs throughout the Northern Hemisphere, including here in southern British Columbia.)

What I mean by that is that early in the spring, when the soon-to-be large, round, rhubarby leaves first emerge from the soil, there is already a flowering plant, a short, leafy-stemmed, aster-like thing standing there, blinking confusedly amid the absence of other plant life. I had seen this in another locality, and puzzled over it. How odd to see two very different and distinctive, obviously exotic plants growing side by side, and nowhere else.

And then I witnessed this again, early this April in Paulik Park. I took photos.

A member of the garden club had identified the round-leafed rhubarby thing as coltsfoot, which is the name of a plant I know, but a different plant with deeply cut leaves (Petasites palmatus). But pictures in a gardening book showed neither the plant I knew, nor the round-leafed rhubarby thing, but the leafy-stemmed, aster-like thing, and the common name was given as sweet coltsfoot, or Japanese butterbur, or fuki (Petasites japonicus).

Oh. Both plants are sweet coltsfoot, or Japanese butterbur, or fuki (among other common names). The flowers appears first, and don’t last long. Throughout the rest of the spring and summer the leaves expand, and eventually end up slug-eaten and mouldy. There are a couple of batches of fuki in the park (the name I prefer because it’s the easiest to type, and that’s the only reason). We looked in vain for a remaining flower.

Fortunately I still had the pictures I took in April. Here’s what a fuki flower looks like.

Thank you to the Richmond Garden Club for inviting me to participate in this weekend’s events. I had a lovely time.

Perplexing bees and pretty trees.

Today at Paulik Park, on a nature walk, we saw bumble bee queens, one of which was identifiable (the Yellow-faced Bumble Bee, Bombus vosnesenskii), and one of which was not. The following is the mystery bumbler:


The bee was conspicuously large, and was moving quickly among tufts of grass, not cooperating for a photo. Nevertheless, from the somewhat blurry photo I was able to take, it seemed to key out unambiguously (here) to Bombus perplexus, the Confusing Bumble Bee. However, confusingly, it didn't look a lot like any of the online images. None showed that big black abdomen. Confusing indeed. Bombus perplexus ranges from Alaska to Maine, and south to Georgia, but the map at the bumble bee site showed no instances from southwestern BC and region. Absence of data, or incorrect diagnosis?

And on another note:

The fragrant and pastel-hued Flowering and Blossoming Trees Edition of Festival of the Trees is now up at Orchards Forever. Click on over, and join in the springtime (northern hemisphere version) celebration of trees in flower.

Torontonians, Look! Look!

University College, University of Toronto, and Chimney Swifts.

(Simulated.) (Not very well.)

May 1st. This was usually the day that Chimney Swifts returned to the downtown campus of the University of Toronto, or at least the day I first noticed them as they chittered across the sky at rooftop level. They nested in different chimneys in different years, sometimes in the tall one at the east end of University College, other times in a chimney on one of the older buildings of the Faculty of Law.

In the evenings they would swarm, and chipping madly, funnel down whichever was the chimney of the year, like billowing smoke in reverse. “Look! Look!” I would yell. Everyone looked at the crazy guy yelling “Look! Look!”

I wrote this note in the past tense, as if this thing no longer happens, as if Chimney Swifts no longer strafe the University of Toronto. They probably do; I haven’t been there for a few years. If you frequently wander the downtown campus, now is the time to look! Look!