Category Archives: Flora of Lavender Mountain

Late summer color

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For about two years we have been staring out our bedroom window at a bare, red-clay area between the house and the driveway. This is how it looked.

I was just getting ready to start some landscaping when I took this photo. Now it looks like this.

There is actually a small Japanese maple in the middle of the bare area between the foreground vincas and the back ground vincas. The vinca plants have been doing quite well. Unfortunately, it has been so hot and dry here that they were beginning to wilt. I put about 30 gallons on them on Saturday, all from one of our rainwater collector tanks, which you can see at the left side of the house.

The hot and dry weather has caused some of the hardwoods to start turning color. I had not noticed this maple until Saturday.

The color is nice, but it’s way too early. Some other maples have started to turn red. Some of the other hardwoods, including oaks, which usually turn brownish yellow, are starting to turn brown. No color. That is sometimes a bad sign, especially for dogwoods. I have noticed that dogwoods whose leaves turn brown late in the summer often don’t come back next spring. I have mentioned before that we have lost most of the native dogwoods that used to grow on our property. We will probably lose more after this summer.

Clematis reborn

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My parents had a clematis growing on their mailbox. It was a healthy and profusely overgrown. We wanted one for our mailbox, so we planted one last year. It was small, but it grew. Early this summer it began to bloom. It had large, lavender flowers.

And then one day I noticed some of the leaves had turned brown. I cut the branch off. Then a few more leaves turned brown. Then they all turned brown and shriveled up and died. I looked up the symptoms, and it seems we had a fungal infection, called clematis wilt.

There is apparently no treatment for clematis wilt. It eventually kills the plant back to the ground. So where we had a nice vine with a good bloom before, we ended up with a bare trellis and mailbox. The information I found gave some hope that the roots would survive, so we thought maybe the clematis would come back next year.

Surprise. It came back this year. I noticed a couple of bright green leaves at ground level first. I wasn’t sure it was actually the clematis, but it kept growing. Fast. So fast it seemed that if I turned my back on it, it would grow two inches by the time I turned back around. And it had lots of buds. One of them bloomed some time between Thursday evening and Friday morning. It rained lightly overnight, and a the flower was still wet when I took this photo.

Clematis comes in various forms, some shrubby and some climbing, like ours. There are some varieties that can grow quite tall, up to maybe 20 feet. Ours is not one of those, although it would be nice to have one like that. They are fast growers, as I can attest from ours. They are deciduous in our climate, so ours will lose its leaves over the winter, assuming it survives. If it keeps going as it is now, we should easily get a dozen or more blooms before cold weather.

Big cedar

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Cedar trees are not common on the mountain, but they once were. They exist today mostly, but not entirely, as fallen, dead trees. I have scavenged a few downed cedars in the past for firewood. My miscalculation on how much firewood I would need this winter sent me out in the yard on Tuesday to cut up another one.

This tree is about 30 feet from our driveway in the most overgrown part of our property. A small part of the property on the north end has fairly mature hardwoods. The eastern and southern parts of the yard were apparently clear cut, or almost clear cut, and have grown back in a thicket of densely-packed, small pines with a few larger pines and maples.

I have not seen one live cedar on the property, but this dead one must have been a giant among cedars. Here is my chainsaw for scale.

It’s hard to see the size of the trunk at its base. I counted about 50 rings in the branched trunk next to the saw. The main part of the trunk is a minimum of a yard in diameter. Here it is from a different angle.

My chainsaw is just visible on the left. Note that the bar on my chainsaw is 20 inches.

This tree was a monster of a cedar, or, more properly, a juniper. This is from the Wikipedia entry on the eastern red cedar:

Juniperus virginiana is a dense slow-growing coniferous evergreen tree that may never become more than a bush on poor soil, but is ordinarily from 5–20 m or 16–66 ft tall, with a short trunk 30–100 cm or 12–39 inches in diameter (rarely to 27 m or 89 ft in height, and 170 cm or 67 inches in diameter.

 This tree is certainly at the upper end of the usual trunk diameters.

Another web site calls the eastern red cedar a “moderate to long-lived evergreen,” and says that some specimens have been known to live more than 500 years.

Our specimen fell to the ground a long, long time ago. This type of cedar is resistant to rot and insects, so they can lie on the ground for years without rotting into mulch like most trees in our area. This tree has certainly been on the ground for longer than the almost 14 years we have lived on the mountain. It probably fell a good bit before I started building our first house, and that was 20 years ago. Given the rot-resistance and the condition of some of the tree, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it fell 30 or 40, or even 50 years ago. And, given its size, it might well have been growing on the mountain during the civil war.

There has been some rot. Some of the ends of the branches have dried out and have begun to simply disintegrate. But some of the wood is still firm, and it still produces that characteristic cedar smell when it is cut. Once the moisture from the recent rain has dried, I expect it will produce a decent, aromatic fire.

 

Dogwood blooms

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We lost most of the native dogwoods on our property as a result of the hot, dry summer of 2016. In fact, a few weeks ago I was cutting dead dogwoods to eke out enough fuel for the last cold nights of the winter. We didn’t see any blooms last spring, so we feared there were actually none left alive. But now the dogwoods seem to have recovered, and we’re noticing a few on our property and lots more in the woods.

I took this panorama Tuesday as I walked down Fouche Gap Road into Texas Valley.

There are several, somewhat hard-to-see dogwoods in this image. As native, understory trees, they are kind of leggy, without the nice, full shape of a specimen plant in a landscaped yard, but I was happy to see them scattered here and there in the woods. I was also happy to see at least three blooming right outside our dining room window.

There are also several native azaleas blooming down in the wetter lower slopes.They have pink blossoms that look like honeysuckle blossoms. There is at least one in the image, but it’s really hard to see. This is a closer look.

Our native azaleas are deciduous, unlike the types most people plant in their yards. We planted one at our old house, but it never did much. They may need more moisture than we had there.

Cannas couldn’t

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We planted canna lilies early in the spring in a flower bed next to the top of our driveway. They surprised us by growing much bigger than we expected from the packaging. They kept blooming for a long time. This is a shot from December 4, a few days before we got our surprise snow.

And then the following Friday we got snow. This is what they looked like then.

I wouldn’t say they liked it, but they looked OK. At least for a while. This is what they look like now.

Apparently wikipedia is correct when they say that canna lilies are a tropical or subtropical plant. They apparently are (or can be) native to this area, but obviously do not like to be frozen, which is what a coating of snow will do for you.

I assume (hope) that the cannas will come back next spring.

The green foliage to the right is some other type of lily, or, more correctly, an actual lily, since cannas are not true lilies. The bulbs for these lilies were given to us by a neighbor. They grew well but didn’t produce any flowers. In the background you can see some of the seed fronds of the ornamental grasses we planted on the slope at this side of our house. They were almost flattened by the snow but sprang back up well enough that I don’t plan to cut them until maybe early spring, just before the grass begins to turn green.