Extension News: July 2007 Archives

Gifts of stinky candles and soaps pile up in our guest bathroom. We keep hoping a visitor will sneak away with the whole inventory of these ubiquitous gifts of friendship.

Fragranced shampoos, conditioners, lotions: ick. Perfumes, incense, and most cleaning products repulse me. Chemical air fresheners attempt to smell like a summer breeze or a spring rain. Our culture has, sadly and all too successfully, removed itself from the natural world. Does anyone know what spring rain actually smells like anymore?

When I look at a container of personal care or cleaning products, a quick glance at the list of ingredients determines whether it will come home with me. Chances are good it won’t. Olfactory marketing fails on me. Those chemical odors, mimicking some chemist’s vision of nature, give off volatile organic compounds that mask the smells of parabens, alcohols, lauryl sulfates, and other manufactured compounds. These smells may sell products, but I don’t want to smear those products on my body.

Air fresheners cover the smells of stale air. Moisture and stale air lead to mold and mildew, which don’t smell good. We instinctively avoid these odors, and hopefully we know to eliminate the underlying problems that cause it. Molds can devastate a person’s well-being, triggering asthma and other lung ailments, headaches, and worse. Proper ventilation and air circulation usually remedy these problems, unless they are really big problems. An open window on a cool day might even let in that summer breeze.

I revel in the seasonal fragrances that float in the air. An occasional whiff delivers a gift: lilac on a warm spring morning, garden soil after a hard rain, rotting leaves in autumn’s shortening days. Peonies overpower as we scurry by their showy frothiness. Thyme, mint and oregano greet us perkily as we trudge across our shaggy yard. Lavender, citrus, fennel, mints: I appreciate nature’s perfumes.

How easily we ignore the fact that those fragrances aren’t really there for us, silly humans. Flower shape, color, fragrance, bloom time, size, and location work magically together to woo birds and insects. Pollen and nectar are exchanged in nature’s economy, nature’s smell of money.

My favorite fragrance? Milkweed.

Don’t tell the perfumeries, they’ll get it all wrong. Delicate, yet embodying summer’s heft, it is sweet, alluring, perfect. Isn’t that the ideal combination?

To me, milkweed smells like the moments between a humid summer day, the sky hazy and stubborn, and that much-anticipated cooling crack of lightening. Can you smell it now? It smells like a pungently sweet flower way off in the distance. Scanning your horizon, you can’t pinpoint the source. Right there step back and look under your nose, humbly, subtly, wafting into the air.

Not a showy cut flower, milkweed oozes a milky stickiness and its flower droops once cut. Enjoy it in situ. The mauve flower buds turn a delicate pink as they open, luring insects to drink their nectar. Grooves in the flowers trip up the insects, holding them captive while they struggle for freedom, covering them with pollen.

As we walk the road to our mailbox, we monitor their growth and anticipate their blooms. Over the years, slowly, the patch spreads along the road, intermingled with a cacophony of wildflowers and tall grasses each with its own moment of brilliance yarrow, meadowsweet, daisies, asters, vetch, goldenrod, Canada lily.

Asclepias syriaca, a native roadside weed, has made a comeback since the Monarch butterfly depopulation grabbed our collective attention. The orange and black larvae (caterpillars) of the Monarch feed only on milkweed. The toxins in the plant are ingested by the larvae and protect it from predation; those same toxins can destroy the value of hay or silage for cattle, and milkweed is tough to eradicate. And so the battle between conservation and eradication of milkweed began. Long considered a noxious perennial weed by farmers, it reestablishes itself if cut back or tilled under. Extraction by the roots is difficult, as remaining pieces may reincarnate a plant, fine for our field, maintained for wildlife and not livestock.

Hybrid varieties abound at garden centers showier flowers, variegated leaves, even purple leaves, but my favorite, without question, is the rough-and-tumble, classic, fragrant weed.

Ah, but I doubt a milkweed candle would sell.

By Laura Richardson, Master Gardener

Two stately European beech trees stand by the old Portsmouth library. I marvel at such magnificent trees in this crowded space. I feared the opening of the new library a few blocks north would spell disaster for the two sentry trees, but although one is now damaged, both still remain.

The delicate three winged nuts that fall to the ground around them are more numerous some years than others, producing a bountiful mast crop every one to three years. I pick some of them up on autumn days to put in pine cone wreaths.

Lately I’ve noticed other wondrous beech trees about town. A muscular European beech on South Street stretches three trunk sized limbs to the sky in a graceful twist. The sinewy gray trunks take on a silver cast in the evening light. Habitually a late bloomer, it unfolds a canopy of maroon leaves that shades the elephantine trunk all summer. By late November all of them disappear save for a few that hang resolutely on the lower branches all winter.

Snowflakes on the limbs create a lacy pattern. Snow also accentuates the elephant skin bark. Huge branches twist together as the tree grows upward. I watch this tree in all seasons, and delight in the web like patterns cast by its shadows.

Beeches grow throughout Portsmouth. According to Cooperative Extension Forest Resources Educator Phil Auger, at the turn of the 20th century, European beech and Norway spruce were the favorite to plant in formal gardens. These trees are slow to grow, and we are privileged to see them in their mature grandeur. They’ve lived more than a century, no longer on the outskirts, but within neighborhoods, as Portsmouth grew and surrounded them.

You can find a large weeping beech on Woodbury Avenue, a subtype of the European beech. In summer, cascades of thick dark green leaves grow profusely, waiting until fall to reveal the tree’s thick, braided trunks. One might think it a willow in the summer, the way the branches bend over in a gracious bow.

I imagine the picnics held years ago under its canopy and the young boys climbing on the branches. Were poor folks allowed to enjoy these trees, or did they just tend the gardens of Frank Jones, the beer magnate? Years later when his mansion became the Poor House on the outskirts of Portsmouth, impoverished folks definitely could play there. The mansion, stables and outer buildings are now apartments.

There are other massive beech trees around town, each competing for the title of most beautiful. How wonderful to find such treasure! Two more European beeches grow off Maplewood, just before it crosses Woodbury Avenue, near the Frank Jones Mansion. One can imagine this landscape in years past.

Others love visiting these beeches as much as I do. One woman from Dover told me she visits two beech trees on Austin Street every time she comes to Portsmouth. Strength and beauty and history stand firm.

Although Portsmouth preserved the old for decades, when richer cities tore down for the latest fad, the city has rapidly lost many open spaces to large blocks of nondescript buildings and generic landscaping that looks the same wherever in the world it appears. Passersby a hundred years from now will see no grand beech trees in front of these buildings.

In spite of the changes around them, I am grateful for the fidelity of the trees I love, and for the Victorians who planted for future generations. Each expert I ask knows whereof I speak and also marvels at the beauty of these European beeches.

By Carla Marvin, Community Tree Steward

If we are fortunate enough to spot a large shape through the trees, moving silently across the swamp, we grab the binoculars and head for the viewing area. It’s just a spot where a few trees have fallen, giving us a somewhat less-obstructed view of the heronry in the swamp behind the house.

The adult great blue heron glides in on wide wings, then tilts and curves around behind the nest before extending its legs and folding in its wings as it lands on the cluster of long, dead branches.

Often one or more of the nestlings has been watching and when they spy the coming meal, a wild racket breaks out. Eager necks stretch up and long bills open wide. “Me! Me! Me!” each one cries.

The parent cocks its head for a moment, looking for the right bird, then pokes its own bill deep into one nestling’s gaping bill. The parent sits there for a moment, silent amidst the eager squawking of the young, then lifts its wings and swoops low off the tree, gathering speed, and heading out of the swamp and back to the nearby lake to look for more frogs or fish.

The young don’t settle down immediately, though. Now that they’re up, they begin to fight for space. In early July, they are as big as the adults. Only their fuzzy feathers allow us to tell them apart from the parents. In a nest of two, the noise and jostling isn’t too bad. There’s room for them as they stretch, test their wings, and move around. In other nests though, the situation is different.

I’m always astonished that three or four heron young can fit into one nest so well that from the ground, it’s impossible to tell how many birds are there. One head will poke up, followed by a long neck and then the body. That movement disturbs a second bird and soon another head comes up. And then a third and sometimes, a fourth.

They struggle for space and I fear that one will be pushed out. They’ll stand on the edge of the nest, stretching those wide wings and long necks, and they argue, squabble, and even fight. One beak pokes into another and pushes the second head and neck down. “This is my space keep out of it!” On some summer nights, the fighting and noise continues long after dark and we sit near the open windows to listen in.

Some summers we saw two nests in the swamp, others one, and one long, sadly quiet summer, there were no active nests at all. An adult had returned in March, but its mate never showed up and their old nest fell apart.

This spring, the usual two pairs returned and set about refurbishing their homes after the winter winds had stripped away some of the branches. Then we began noticing more activity. An adult returned repeatedly to a tree off the edge of the swamp. How much do they need for this nest, we wondered. A closer inspection with the binoculars revealed the exciting answer: our resident two pairs had been joined by a third! I dubbed them the Newbies and noted they had nested in a tree shorter than the trees chosen by the original two pairs.

Then one day I noticed something at the far side of the swamp, in another shorter tree. Yes! A fourth pair of herons had built a nest. The population had doubled and we hoped it was going to be a very noisy summer.

Sometime later, after the other four females had been sitting on their eggs for a few weeks, a fifth pair showed up and built a nest in a very tall tree nearby. Why were they nesting so late? Had their original nest been destroyed? Had one heron lost its mate and only now found another one? We’ll never know why they joined our group this late in the season; we just hope their young will have time to grow and fledge before the fall migration.

Now, in early July, the swamp is filled with arguing young. The original pairs have four and two youngsters in their nests. The Newbies are the proud parents of three blue gray young. I can’t see the far nest too well, but there appear to be two immature herons there. The fifth couple is still sitting. The racket is music to us.

All too soon, the young will test their wings and fly off after their parents. The swamp will become quiet again as we begin to speculate on how many heron pairs will visit us next summer and how many of their young will entertain us with a raucous cacophony of heron music.

 By Susan M. Poirier, Master Gardener

One day in late summer about a year and a half before my mother’s death, I took her for a short walk on the dirt road near her central Vermont home. Afflicted with Parkinson’s disease and increasing dementia, mom shuffled along slowly, using an old ski pole for a cane, wearing her faded denim hat with a gigantic fake sunflower pinned to its folded-back brim. (She always wanted the visiting tourists to know they’d met “a real Vermont character.”)

Suddenly she stopped and sucked in her breath, pointing to a spectacular roadside display of purple asters and goldenrod against a backdrop of tall ferns and towering hemlocks.

“Oh look!” she gasped. “How beautiful! No human hand could have created that landscape. Do you know why those flowers take your breath away, Peggy? It’s because they grow to suit themselves.”

My mother, Gertrude Alice Martin Boyles - an extraordinary human known to all as Trudy - allowed her three children to grow to suit themselves, though she tended us in such a way that she sculpted our deep interiors with her values.

From her, I got my frugality, my belief in self-reliance and the general competence of ordinary people, my work ethic, my politics, my love of words and, especially, my connection to the natural world and to the important work of home food production.

Unintentionally, Trudy also taught me to hold within myself the necessary tension between the awe of things that grow to suit themselves and the human need to tend things, to manipulate our natural environment to meet our needs.

Trudy grew up as one of nine siblings on a dairy farm, which helped explain why ours was the only house in the neighborhood with a huge vegetable garden and fruit plantings that extended around the house to the edge of our lot.

Decades before the word compost entered our common lexicon, we maintained a big fenced-in pile in one corner of the vegetable patch. Every summer, we planted, weeded, harvested and canned hundreds of jars of corn, shelled beans, peas, green beans, tomatoes, berries, applesauce, jams, jellies, relishes and pickles. We stored potatoes, cabbages, winter squash, beets, carrots and onions in the cellar. We foraged for dandelion greens, blackberries and wild blueberries. We raised chickens in the space over the garage we called “the barn.”

As a child conscript in the family food-producing enterprise, I hated the endless weeding, picking, shelling, peeling and canning, but most of it sank in. When I planted my own first garden I had a storehouse of knowledge about when and how to sow and tend and harvest.

I think about Trudy nearly every day, but especially on bright summer days like today, when she would rise before dawn, set bread dough to rise, and roll out two or three pie crusts before heading out to harvest raspberries (or strawberries or apples) and peas (or green beans or tomatoes).

When we’d come down for breakfast, Trudy would have half a dozen loaves of bread and a couple of pies cooling on the kitchen shelf and a dozen jars of jam boiling away in the canning kettle.

For 37 years, I’ve lived in the house and grown food on the land Trudy bought in 1969, when, driving home from visiting her daughters in Cambridge, she passed a house with a For Sale sign on the lawn and a white stallion galloping around on the hillside behind it.

“That magnificent white horse drew me in,” she told me later. “I took him as a sign, a signal that this was the place, a real place that could feed my grandchildren and teach them about the important things in this world.” She went into that house, sat down at the kitchen table with the farmer and his wife, and signed a sales agreement that day, paying for the place with insurance money my dad had left when he died five years before.

Almost every day for more than three decades, I’ve eaten something grown on the land Trudy bought that day. I spend most of my vacation days working in my bony hillside garden. I’ve done much of my most important pondering and grieving and raging and celebrating while tending my peas and cabbages and squashes.

Last year, we cut way back the size of the lawn we mow. This morning, I visited one of the overgrown areas. There among the tall grasses, I saw daisies and violets and buttercups, Indian paintbrushes, baby’s breath, and, sure enough, asters and goldenrods, poking through in bold self-assertion, growing to suit themselves.

By Peg Boyles, Writer/Editor