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The Monday Garden, January 2, 2005, Issue 145
Eco-gardening at its best

In the Hoyt Street Alley , there are numerous representatives of the conifer clan: arborvitaes, junipers, red cedars, hemlocks, yews (non-native), and white pines. It is only appropriate that the white pine, the Northeast’s dominate pine, also dominates in the alley. It is said that in pre-Columbian times, we had millions of white pines, which were, by the late 1800’s, turned into so many piles of lumber by the European settlers -- an astonishing 3.4 billion fbm (foot board measure), if you count such things.

However, the white pine is tough, fast growing and good at reforestation, which it can accomplish on its own or when planted by humans. So despite the previous devastation, today, in the Northeast, we are once again blessed with many, many white pines.

Picture: The squirrel pair who inhabit the mini-grove of white pines at the foot of Hoyt Street Alley, playing on the trunk during this past week’s warm spell. Stamford CT, December 2004

The Westerners have their Douglas firs, tall and straight as an arrow, craggy and pyramid-topped. Here, in the East, we enjoy a few Douglas firs, with their curious little “snake-tongue” pine cones. Our “default” pine, though, is the eastern white pine (Pinus strobus), with its long, feathery needles.

While vast hordes of Douglas firs march up and down the Rockies, straight and pointy as soldiers carrying spears, the white pines create dramatic Eastern sun-set scenes with their soft, wind-swept outlines and upward curving branches.

The Monday Garden, February 6, 2005, Issue 150
Eco-gardening at its best

Hemlocks, the trees, are members of the pine family, and had nothing to do with poisoning Socrates-- that villain was an herbaceous plant related to parsnips. Instead, our native hemlocks are rare in that there are few big trees that can be accurately described as “cute”, “dainty”, “airy”, “graceful”, “feathery”, “delicate”, and “fine”. The cones are especially adorable and, fortunately, come in large numbers and stay on the tree most of the year.

picture: hemlock (Tsuga) cones in winter, Morgan Street at 3rd Street, Stamford CT January 2005

In North America we’re blessed with three native hemlocks – the cool-loving eastern hemlock, Tsuga canadensis, the more southern Tsuga caroliniana, and the gigantic western Tsuga heterophylla.

Eco-gardening is at its best in The Monday Garden
December 18, 2005, Issue 190

When we talk about preserving biodiversity by preserving our native plants, part of the reason is so that our native insects with specialized diets will have something to eat. This statement may puzzle the gardener who thinks that bites out of the roses are a bad thing. After all, who needs bugs? Yeah, some of the "bugs" pollinate the flowers so that we have fruits and vegetables, some till the soil, some make the honey, some spin the silk, and some break dead things down into their original components for re-use, but…well, who cares about the rest of them?

PICTURE: Left to their own devices, our wonderful native eastern white pines grow tall and straight. Sunset at the corner of Strawberry Hill and Hillandale, Stamford CT November 2005. view larger image

Our small creepy-crawlies actually come from several families. There are the eight-legged spiders and mites, the six-legged the insects, the zero-legged worms, the centipedes and millipedes with too many legs to count, the armor-plated pill-bugs (related to shrimp), and a whole host of microscopic guys. For our purposes, they are all "bugs", even if to a biologist "bug" means just one kind of "insect" and "spiders" aren't "insects"...