Last year at some point we installed a recycled-brick edging around the landscape bed at the CCC Museum. Its primary purpose is to define what is “bed” and what is “lawn”, enabling us to better manage the weeds in the bed. Encouraged by how well that has turned out, I felt that the same technique could be used around the uphill side of the Rain Garden (the downhill side is already defined by the water control berm). Today we installed this edging, shown below, using bricks reclaimed from brickwork of outdated and demolished park structures.
Our only other garden maintenance of note today was to move a fence-wire tree protector from the CCC Field where it was no longer needed, to the Native Plant Garden where the deer have been eating the new shoots off of an elderberry bush. After completing these two tasks, Eric and I rewarded ourselves with a hike around Beaver Lake to inspect vernal pools and take photographs. The Parasol Mushroom was an irresistible photo opportunity.
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A few years ago the brick walk, fountain and landscaping at the CCC Field were installed with the objective of providing an attractive space to hold outdoor weddings. More recently, the lack of maintenance has limited the usefulness of the space. Now that our volunteers have restored a measure of beauty here, the space is again serving the park as a wedding resource. The downside of our success is the inevitable litter left behind by such functions. In the slide show below is a photo showing the artificial flower petals that became part of our gardening work this week. Another task here this week was installing several plant tags linking to our PlantsMap plant information site. At the Butterfly Garden this week most of the time was spent looking, unsuccessfully, for a Monarch butterfly chrysalis. The Monarch Monitoring volunteers have registered the garden as a Monarch Waystation so they can help track the Monarchs. At the Powhatan Activity Center, we weeded the bed and watered the transplants. The New England Aster is just now coming into full bloom, and we found a Yellow-tipped Coral Mushroom among the rip-rap near the building. Views of the CCC Museum Garden and the Rain Garden are included in the slideshow below. I will be out of town for a few days visiting Claytor Lake State Park, but Eric Gray has stepped up to lead the crew for the next Thursday morning session. The front of the CCC Field was a busy place this morning, with high school runners finishing up their morning workouts. If they had needed water, they could have used the drinking fountain; it’s working again, thanks to Park Manager Josh. We finally finished lining the brick walk with a strip of mulch. With that and a little weeding, we can safely say that it is truly ready for the public to enjoy. To top it off, the sunflowers in the planting box have attracted several dazzling butterflies.
Our second and most important task this morning was to perform end-of-summer cleaning in the Rain Garden. To assure proper rain garden functioning, spent vegetation needs to be removed. Over time, if plant debris is allowed to build up in the garden, it will lose its capacity to hold and infiltrate run-off. In our case, most of the spent vegetation was bee balm, and that was removed down to the soil level. In addition, the decline of summer growth was revealing weeds that needed to be removed. The bee balm and the weeds are all good candidates for composting. Next on the agenda was a check of the CCC Museum and the Butterfly Garden, both of which presently require little maintenance. Eric wants to follow up on getting rid of the bugs on the Butterflyweed. Finally, Eric and I cruised over to the Powhatan Activity Center to water and weed the new plantings there. We found the new transplants holding up well, and the so-recently subdued weeds beginning to return. Our next trick will be to locate the important “see me” plants in the Native Plant Garden, and remove the plants that are distractions. We will have lots of grasses and sedges to chip out of that rock-hard clay soil. A rain dance would be appropriate now. (Photo of Bee Balm at the Rain Garden) Horticultural skills are in short supply in Pocahontas, thanks to a slim budget. So those of us who contribute our skills have been on the receiving end of some warm thanks from the park staff. We aren’t experts, but what we accomplish makes a difference, and it’s nice to get a pat on the back now and then.
We’ve been working at the CCC Field on a few things, one of which is to make the walks more attractive by lining them with mulch to cover the cement which holds the bricks in place. This is still unfinished and is now a high priority. While there, Andrea Hasenfus, Volunteer Coordinator, paid us a visit. One of her bits of news was that she had received permission for us to clear away the bee balm at the Rain Garden, so that will be an upcoming task. This week we decided to skip the Aquatic Center due to time, and we moved to the CCC Museum and then to the Butterfly Garden. Both of these were quickly cleared of the few weeds that have appeared (or that we missed) since last week. Both also afforded the opportunity to talk plants and insects, among other things. To finish our morning, Eric and I spent a few minutes weeding the Native Plant Garden. Bryce Wilk, park Assistant Manager, stopped by and spent a few minutes looking over the new plant tags. He suggested that it would be helpful to have mulched, open approaches to the tags that are not close to the parking pavement. Yes, I agree, and that will be something we can work on. The garden we’re now calling the Native Plant Garden was originally planned as a landscape bed with a few native plants from a nursery and a ton of mulch. It came together one Saturday morning with a few volunteers, a small assortment of plants, the mulch and some tools. We dug a few holes, plugged in the plants, spread the mulch and walked away.
Well, landscaping is not so simple. Turn your back and the immigrants, the colonizers, arrive to stake their claim. In a few weeks the landscape bed was pleading to be rescued, singing a siren song to a susceptible garden geek. Yes, I would come to the rescue. But the geek in me saw value in some of those immigrants, new plants to get acquainted with, new plants to invite others to get acquainted with. With plant labels, the bed could be more than just landscaping; it could also enlighten and perhaps spark a thirst for more. I looked around for affordable plant labels and found the older style that you may still see in the garden. Not convenient to print; not sturdy enough for a public space; not resistant to fading. This year I got word through the Virginia Master Naturalists of a new option. The new tags you now see in the garden, and will see in other gardens, come from a start-up company that is maintaining a corresponding plant information web site. We are now able to link the label you see in the garden, via the QR code on the label, to a page on the web site which provides additional information about the plant. Our set of plant pages on the plantsmap.com web site is organized into collections (Tree Trails and Landscape Gardens) and sub-collections (two tree trails and several individual landscape gardens). The easiest way to find our collections is to go to URL http://plantsmap.com/collections/30033 and explore from there. This is still very much a work in progress, but there is currently a plant page for each plant label in the garden. If you have a smartphone but need a QR code reader, the company recommends purchasing the ad-free version at http://scan.me. This a whole new world for a garden geek who still has a flip-phone, so feed-back is welcome. Look for me in the garden! A group of young runners was just finishing up their morning workout when we gathered at the CCC Field for our gardening session. We didn’t need to run to get our workout; we had a tree to plant and the manual edger to run along the brick walk. The tree is a small White Fringetree, purchased to continue a tradition of honoring outgoing presidents of our sister organization in the park, the Pocahontas Chapter of Virginia Master Naturalists.
Planting the tree was relatively easy, compared to working the edger, so the edging work will be continued next week, along with general weeding of the landscape beds. We moved to the Pool Gardens for a bit of cleaning up, then checked the Anniversary Garden. That was still in good shape, so we moved on to the Butterfly Garden, finding a few weeds and one Pearl Crescent butterfly. After that a few minutes at the CCC Museum, and finally ending up at the Rain Garden. We have finally arrived at the “sweet spot” of garden maintenance, where a few minutes weekly at each garden is enough, provided that there are several of us doing the work. The Pool Gardens and the CCC Field are so much cleaner and more attractive than they were in the summer last year, it’s ironic that our new park manager, Joshua Ellington, did not get to see the transformation. (Photo of a small wildflower at the CCC Museum) Landscape bed gardening tends to be mostly mundane work, pulling weeds and grass, trimming over-growth, spreading mulch. One of the rewards of this work is surprise discoveries of interesting things that are easily overlooked by those not getting their hands dirty. Today’s surprise was finding a small snake that seemed ill. Alerting my fellow gardeners, we all watched as the little Red-bellied snake wiggled around weakly, showed us his bright orange belly and then appeared to expire. It was an almost convincing act, but I suspected a trick. Sure enough, after we moved to another area of the CCC Museum garden, the little trickster came back to life, only to repeat the act for us when we came to check on it. This behavior is well described at animaldiversity.org. It’s the kind of thing that keeps us coming back to see what other surprises are out there.
At the CCC Field, those Yucca plants you can see in the background have been blooming and producing seeds for years, though perhaps not all the way back to the CCC days. Consequently, there have been lots of little Yuccas in the landscaped areas here. Until now. We’ve taken most of them out, as in the bed in the foreground. I cut and discarded the spent flowering stems this year, to discourage volunteer seeding, but I could have taken another course. According to Helen Hamilton in Wildflowers and Grasses of Virginia’s Coastal Plain, the immature fruit can be cooked and eaten after the seeds are removed. With the sidewalk cleaned and this Dogwood bed weeded, we moved to the Pool Gardens to take out the invading Nutsedge, Horse Nettle and Bermuda Grass. That was pretty well in hand (though seemingly never complete) when the arriving pool visitors shattered the quiet of the morning. So we moved up to the CCC Museum where grasses and Dandelion were beginning to return. Here there was also an unrecognized small wildflower that is proving difficult to identify. From there to the Butterfly Garden, finding a few weeds and a few insects of interest, though no butterflies. Eric found a very patient dragonfly, and we think we found a bee-mimic fly. With the Butterfly Garden well in hand, we traipsed over to the Rain Garden, with a nod to a large Fowler’s Toad in passing. Again there were just a few weeds to be picked out, some Bee Balm to admire and photograph, and that completed our morning’s gardening task. Before leaving the park, I took time to visit a bathhouse in the New Campground where there have been some Ailanthus (Tree of Heaven) trees. The last photograph shows the resprouts from the roots of these trees, which must be pulled or cut several times each summer to keep them from growing back. Invasive Species Volunteer Squad, or IVSquad, originated back in August, 2013, in discussions with Irene Frentz, the Pocahontas Natural Resources Officer. I had made an offer to help with invasive plant removal, which she accepted. But she then requested that I leverage my effectiveness by engaging other volunteers to help. This was accomplished with the help of the scheduling websites used by Pocahontas VMN and Friends of Pocahontas. We started with an experimental Stiltgrass removal project in August and September. The next target was a large infestation of Oriental Wisteria. The Wisteria project started in November, 2013, and continued into July of this year.
The current phase of Wisteria control is herbicide treatment by a crew of trained applicators. Manual control by IVSquad will resume in spring when the effectiveness of the herbicide treatment can be observed. Meanwhile, we can turn our attention to other invasive plants in the park. There is no shortage of targets: Stiltgrass, Tree-of-heaven, Honeysuckle, Perilla Mint and others. The schedule is now for three hours a week, on Mondays, posted on www.meetup.com/Friends-of-Pocahontas-State-Park. Pocahontas VMN and Friends of Pocahontas volunteers are invited to help move IVSquad into its third year. Gardening in the Park is not just weeding, trimming and cleaning up. It’s also about enhancing esthetic value, or beautification. So we collectively need to make decisions about arranging plants and garden accessories. For the CCC Field, we felt that the arrangement of benches in a straight line along the walk was uncomfortable and unappealing, so we moved them around to take advantage of comfort, views and shade. While there, we also worked on weeding, mulching and keeping the walks clean.
From there, we answered a call to help restore manageability to the landscape bed in front of the Park Office. There was a good deal of crabgrass and Bermuda grass overrunning the bed, and that was all removed, along with a couple of unwanted Nandina shrubs, which are not native. We’ll continue to keep an eye on this bed, but one of our Master Naturalists has volunteered to maintain it. Our final stop was the Butterfly Garden, where an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail was a tease. The plantings are progressing nicely, with just a few “weed” plants trying to take root. Eric got a nice photo of the garden, which I will use for establishing a plant “collection” at plantsmap.com |
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