The point for the gardener, of course, is not to try to duplicate these wild arrangements, but rather to absorb a sense of them, a feeling for how entirely correct they are in their place, and to have that sensibility inform our efforts as we move, however haltingly, toward gardening in harmony with natural landscape patterns.
For the Birds
Only a misanthropic misfit might propose that a garden would be better without birds; nevertheless, there lingers at least a ghost of ambivalence in even the most avian-aware gardeners. Because, notwithstanding the charm of their antics, their perfection of song and flight, the offbeat companionship they offer, birds can also be a damned nuisance in the garden.
I’ve complained for years, and shall continue to complain in the pages that follow, about the habits of American robins and towhees, their repeated ruining of our mulching schemes and pilfering of berries. Barred owls, whose nocturnal hootings haunt the springtime night, have a habit of perching in big trees around our clearing and repeatedly swooping into the yard to seize basking garter snakes. Thanks mostly to the owls, our snake population has plummeted, which is a disaster to any gardener who loves snakes for both their beauty and their prowess at devouring slugs.
But it’s the woodpecker family that comes close to taking the blue ribbon for general mischief-making. Minor miscreants in the family include the flickers, who largely confine their incursions to devouring blue elderberries and courtship drumming on our satellite dish. Their big cousins, the pileated woodpeckers, are with us year-round and are especially welcome in winter, but less so in autumn when they set about chipping holes in the ripening apples, forcing us to harvest them prematurely.
No, the real hooligans in the woodpecker family are the red-breasted sapsuckers, a brightly plumed subspecies of the sapsuckers found all across the continent in breeding season. They make their living by drilling parallel rows of small holes into the bark sheathing the trunk or limbs of a living tree, later returning to drink sap pouring from the holes and eat any insects stuck to the sap. My bird book tells me they are “quiet, retiring and easily overlooked.” That’s scarcely the case at our place where every spring several pairs move in to court and nest nearby. Noisy, brazen and destructive, they’re about as easy to overlook as a mob of biker dudes in the kitchen.
They drill their holes in apple and crabapple trees, in cherries and plums, magnolias and even large lilac bushes. The holes take on a depressing aspect, like oozing pus, and can severely damage a tree by exposing it to fungal or other invasions. The bird’s favourite food sources at our place are birch and mountain ash, whose thin bark they chip away in lozenge-shaped patches, leaving a scanty lattice-work between the holes. Over the years, they have killed two mountain ash outright by entirely perforating most of the trunks’ bark, and have seriously crippled a couple of others. Our little copse of European white birches stubbornly clung to life despite repeated seasonal assaults by sapsuckers, but ended up so wizened and forlorn-looking that we eventually removed them for decency’s sake.
Unlike most woodpeckers, sapsuckers seem not at all shy of humans. Tapping away at a trunk, they’ll allow us to walk right up to them, almost close enough to touch them (and, believe me, I’ve been tempted). When startled, they utter a single, truncated cry like the wheeze of a scolding seagull and fly off with the pulsing flight pattern typical of woodpeckers.
Efforts at deterrence have proven futile. I’ve tried attaching fine mesh wire around the trunks of susceptible trees; I’ve repeatedly smeared the drill holes with tree-wound paste. But to no avail. The birds either drill fresh holes on unprotected parts of the trunk or switch to new trees. I’ve employed shouting, throwing stones—even, at one point, training a border collie to chase them off—without long-term success. I’m told there is a toxic substance that can be painted onto the trunk as a repellent. We haven’t fallen to this foul resort (yet).
Neither have we descended to the tactic favoured by tyrants for millennia: destroying the homes of the enemy. We’ve always made a point of leaving certain large dead trees standing in the forest as “wildlife trees.” Various woodpeckers excavate holes in the trees, in search of food as well as for nesting sites. These eventually accommodate other cavity nesters, both birds and mammals. But, resorting to the vernacular, it’s a bit of a piss off that two of the most regular cavity tenants are among our worst tormentors: sapsuckers and denning raccoons. Despite provocations, we’ve spared the snags, but considerable rectitude has been required.
In a creative moment it occurred to me that a possible stratagem for outwitting the sapsuckers could arise from the notion of the sacrifice plant. This is a plant that one retains for the purpose of attracting pests to it in order that they’ll leave more desirable plants alone. We’ve experimented with this in the veggie patch, using ‘Red Russian’ kale as sacrifice plants for aphids. Would a similar approach work with sapsuckers? Installing more mountain ash seemed the order of the day. Speaking frankly, in the sometimes brutal world of gardening realpolitik, I’d rather sacrifice a surplus mountain ash or two if by doing so we can save the magnolias, cherries and apples. Admittedly, this element of sacrifice-plant theory smacks of an end-justifies-the-means approach whose ethical implications it’s probably wiser not to explore.
But here’s the rub: Does one, by planting a species particularly attractive to certain pests, sometimes defeat one’s purposes by encouraging additional pests? Will planting several more mountain ash, as we were now proposing to do, even knowing them to be doomed, keep the sapsuckers happy and allow our other trees to grow in peace? Or, will an expansion of their favourite food source simply encourage more sapsuckers to take up residence, their escalating populations eventually dooming other trees besides the mountain ashes? Is this the moral equivalent of dim-witted leaders making war in the name of peace?
If, on the other hand, one were to eliminate mountain ash as well as birch trees from the place—something the sapsuckers are well on their way to accomplishing already—would the wretched birds go elsewhere to find their favourite foods, or would they continue nesting close by and switch to attacking other prized trees? Experimentation in these areas is far more easily conducted with annuals and biennials than it is with trees, where a poor choice today could spell humiliation eight or ten years from now.
As I write, there’s a sapsucker tapping away at the trunk of a gleditsia just in front of the house. I shan’t run out and shout at it, or throw pebbles. I like to believe that I’m perhaps developing a more Zen approach to the matter. Or, in more realistic moments, I simply recognize that the sapsuckers have both outwitted and outlasted me.
Feat of Clay
I recently had a chance encounter with a young woman whose garden was encumbered with heavy clay soil. Daunted but far from defeated, she maintained an admirable stiff upper lip, as clay-based gardeners do, if they’re not to despair. I’ve long maintained that dealing with heavy clay soil builds character and that every gardener might be a finer person for having a patch of rough clay to contend with.
Needless to say, our place has one, a low-lying area at the north end of the garden where our standard sandy gravel gives way to lumpish and intractable clay. I imagine it was once a prehistoric pool in which tree ferns flourished and brachiosauruses wallowed. A couple of big rambling roses have thrived there for years, but otherwise the area’s been a bit of a disgrace, much of it given over to invasive lemon balm, hairy apple mint and variegated creeping dead nettle.
Heavy clay is almost always difficult to deal with. When wet it coheres like malignant gumbo; when dry it hardens to obstinate concrete. One looks for windows of opportunity for improving things, and indeed such a window opened for me when an uncharacteristic dry spell dehydrated the soil enough that it could be worked without compacting it badly. I first dug out the invasive ground covers—and received a welcome reprieve from what I had anticipated would be a protracted campaign. Revelling in surface moisture, the mint, dead nettle and lemon balm had each spread a thick matting of rootlets near the surface, but none had plunged deep into the clay. Using a heavy mattock I was able to rogue their roots out with relative ease.
Although a bully-boy attitude helps when tackling clay, care was required at