TheMondayGarden.com

Eco-gardening is at its best in The Monday Garden
January 26, 2003, issue no. 44

It’s cold. We’re just past January’s Wolf Moon and we’re three weeks away from the full of February’s Cold Moon. They say it’s as cold as the winter of ‘93-’94 and they’re dusting off the records from ‘76-’77, when the Long Island Sound froze over. It’s clear and crisp but hard to stay out long enough to relish the view. So here’s a picture for inside where it’s warm (or at least warmish in the cold zones).

This is a wooded lot that I walk by on the way to the grocery store. Here along the coast, in protected hollows like this, there’s a deep blanket of insulating snow left over from our last big storm. Safe under the blanket are dozens of marsh marigolds getting ready to bloom in April, along with a few squirrel-planted daffodils. And there’s a miniature tunnel city, created by mice and other little critters, allowing them to forge in relative warmth, hidden from the red-tail hawk that I often see here.

The red berries are rose hips of a rosa multiflora that, over time, will create an thick barrier of thorny brambles.

The Monday Garden, Eco-gardening at its best

May 22, 2005, Issue 165

Rosa is an amazing plant family: peaches, pears, cherries, and apples are roses; strawberries are roses. In the “bramble” (prickly shrub) class, around where I live we have two disastrous foreigners, two great natives, and one in between. The “Great American” natives are the swamp rose (Rosa palustris) and the black raspberry (Rubus occidentalis). The bad, bad guys are the Rosa mulitflora, and the wineberry (Rubus phoenicolasius). The in-between is the Asian rosa rugosa, classified by some as an invasive villain, and by others as sustainable ecology hero. The first four are definitely bird-spread; there’s some question whether the birds ever get around to munching on the big, fat rugosa rose hips.

Picture: rosa rugosa Hoyt Street Alley, Stamford CT May 2005

In spring, when you’re deciding what to buy from the nursery and what to weed out from what the birds brought you last year, it is good to know your brambles, good, bad and in-between.