Outside My Window

Easter is early, winter is late. Few flowers are blooming in western Pennsylvania.

This weekend my surviving crocuses opened fully to receive a visit from a honeybee. He emerged with pollen pantaloons just like this bee in Marcy Cunkelman’s garden.

The bees are happy to find flowers this Easter Day.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

Snow again!  We are so ready for spring here in Pittsburgh.

The crocuses bloomed early last week but were slammed shut on Wednesday by a low of 20⁰F.  Daffodil leaves emerged and paused.  Don’t even ask about tulips.

But Spring is south of us and it’s on its way.  There’s a rule of thumb that says Spring moves north 13 miles a day.

Here’s an easy way to watch its progress.

Journey North has a Tulip Test Garden website where observers report when leaves emerge and flowers bloom from the tulip bulbs they planted last fall. Many of the tulip gardens are student projects at elementary schools such as Della Kurtzhals’ class at Clarion Area Elementary School in Clarion, PA.

So how far away is spring?   At Providence Day School in Charlotte, NC the first tulip bloomed on March 18.   Using the rule of thumb, here’s my guess at blooming times in Pittsburgh and Clarion:

• Pittsburgh is 372 air miles north of Charlotte so I estimate our first tulip will bloom on April 15.
• Clarion is about 430 miles north of Charlotte so their tulips will probably bloom on April 20.

This is just an estimate. Actual blooming times may vary.  I won’t be charged like Punxsutawney Phil was for “misrepresenting spring.”  (Click here to read about the charges made against him in Hamilton, Ohio.  The comments are hilarious.)

So while your garden is covered in snow, rest assured that spring is moving north.  You can see it approaching on the Tulip Test Garden map.

(photo from Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the image to see the original)

Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day…

The first plant to open leaves in my neighborhood is always the invasive bush honeysuckle across the street.  Though I’m not fond of the species I’m always happy to see these particular bushes green up.  They’re one of my signs of Spring.

Yesterday, March 15, was the first time the leaves were green enough to see at a distance.

A year ago the hot weather put us well beyond honeysuckle leaves and into magnolia flowers by this date.

Here’s a picture from March 16,2012.

Frankly, I’m quite happy we’re having a normal spring.

(photos by Kate St. John)

It’s poinsettia time so I went online to look for a pretty picture.  That’s when I got into trouble.

I searched Wikimedia Commons for poinsetta and found only four pictures.  Huh?  Only 4?  That cannot be possible.

One of the photos pointed to another view of the same plant and I finally got the hint.  I was spelling it the way I pronounce it.  I was spelling it wrong.

Poinsettias are native to Mexico where they are very leggy plants in the wild.  They were named for Joel Roberts Poinsett, first U.S. Minister to Mexico, who brought them to the U.S. in 1825.

The plant became popular as a Christmas decoration when Albert Ecke became fascinated by them, his son learned to make them into bushier, more beautiful plants, and his grandson promoted them on television in the 1960′s.  The rest is history.

Meanwhile, I was shocked — shocked! — to discover that there are two i’s in poinsettia and the second “i” should (or could) be pronounced.    I have never pronounced that second “i” and I wondered if this was a ‘Burgh thing (we have a notoriously vowel poor accent) so I conducted an informal poll.

How do you say the name of this plant?

So far, everyone I’ve asked says poin-SET-ah (no second “i”).  Two people knew about the extra “i” and one of them changed her pronunciation after she learned about it — but she didn’t start out that way.

I’ve heard that in some parts of the U.S. people say poin-SET-tee-ah, but if you’re from the Pittsburgh, well…    Poinsetta.

Hah!  No wonder I misspelled it.

(photo by André Karwath on Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)

When I travel east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike I’m always amazed when I reach Bedford County and see the landscape dotted with trees like this one.  They grow like weeds east of the Alleghenies, but not in western Pennsylvania.

When I saw them last weekend I said to myself, “Cedars.  Why don’t we have cedars at home?” and I set myself to find out.

My first surprise was that this tree is not a cedar at all.  It’s in the cypress family and it’s a juniper (Juniperus virginiana) whose common name, Eastern Redcedar, is probably a reference to its aromatic wood.

The second surprise — for those of us who live outside their range — is that junipers are very hardy and grow under a wide variety of conditions.  They’re pioneers in disturbed or damaged soil, especially in old fields and along roadsides, and they live a long time — up to 850 years.

To identify a juniper, look for a small evergreen with reddish-brown bark that peels off in strips.  The young trees have sharp needle-like leaves, the mature ones have scale-like leaves.  (This is hard to describe; see picture below).

The juniper’s aromatic wood is used to line cedar chests and keep moths away.  Its bluish waxy-looking berries are a favorite food of many mammals and birds, especially cedar waxwings, eastern bluebirds and wild turkeys.  People like the berries too.  We use those of Juniperus communis to flavor gin.

The first picture is what junipers look like near the turnpike in Bedford County, shaped like lollipops because they’re browsed by the overabundant deer. The picture below shows their normal shape when the deer population is in balance. I suppose we could use junipers as a deer population gauge… but they don’t grow here in Pittsburgh.

Junipers grow wild in the far southwest corner of Pennsylvania, in Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, the Appalachians, and eastern Pennsylvania.  They grow from southern Maine to Georgia, from Delaware to Kansas (see map).  Why not on the Pittsburgh and Allegheny Plateaus?

I haven’t found the answer.  It’s still a mystery.

(photo credits:  Deer-browsed juniper by Paul Bolstad, University of Minnesota, Bugwood.org.  Juniper berries by D.E.Herman, USDA. Eastern juniper at Sandy Hook, NJ by Miguel Vieira on Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photos to see the originals.)

Why are there so many robins in Pittsburgh right now?  Food.

What are they eating?  You’re looking at it.

These are Bradford callery pears, the fruit of a popular small street tree that has pretty white flowers in early spring.

This particular cluster is from a row of trees next to the Pittsburgh Board of Education on Bellefield Avenue but I’ve found Bradford pears at Carnegie Mellon, at Pitt, on neighborhood streets, in mall parking lots … they’re everywhere.

And they’re imported. Callery pears are normally thorny trees.  Native to China they were first brought to the U.S. in 1918 as an experiment in producing rootstock for pear orchards, but that didn’t work out.  Instead, one of the experimental trees grew without thorns, was recognized for its ornamental value and became the “Bradford” cultivar.  By 1982 Bradford callery pears were the second most popular landscape tree in the U.S.

As usual with non-natives, they are easy to point out in late November because they still retain their leaves.  Before they fall the leaves turn yellow, orange and then deep red, another reason for the tree’s ornamental value.  In spring the flowers bloom earlier than our native trees.  (I happen to think the flowers smell bad but most people don’t notice it.)

Since their introduction, callery pears have become naturalized and in some places invasive.  It’s easy to see how their seeds spread when you watch a flock of birds feasting on them.  This year the fruit is especially prolific and so are the robins and starlings.

As soon as the fruit is gone and the ground is covered with snow, the robins will go.  Until then, it’s a party.

(photo by Kate St. John)

On Saturday while hiking with KTA in the Quehanna Wild Area we encountered an area of low vegetation and waist-high stumps. The only trees were those growing on top of stumps like the one pictured above. These were not live sprouts from the old stumps.  They were all different species.

It was an oddly barren place where tree regeneration was prevented unless the seedlings were nurtured in the core of a stump.  Here’s a Wikimedia photo by Ruhrfisch, taken in the same area.

The stumps were white pines, felled a hundred years ago.  State Foresters wondered how old the trees were when cut so they studied stumps with intact rings and discovered that they were all the same age –  200 years old.  Something had caused the area to regrow from scratch around 1700.

And they were all cut down at once at the turn of the last century.  Loggers clear-cut the entire state, each tree felled by two men with a cross-cut saw.  When they were done Pennsylvania looked like this (Tioga County, 1914):

It took a long time to recover from this damage.  The clear-cuts were ravaged by fires and erosion.  During the Great Depression some areas were replanted by the Civilian Conservation Corps.  In other places the land is still challenged.

And so we have a few barren reminders of the time when Pennsylvania exploited trees.

(photo of a tree growing on a stump by Kate St. John, other photos from Wikimedia Commons — click on those photos to see their originals)

Pretty berries, right?

Wrong.  You don’t want them!  These are the fruits of mile-a-minute weed (Persicaria perfoliata), an invasive species that earned its name because it grows really fast — up to 25 feet in a single growing season.

Mile-a-minute arrived in Stewartstown, PA from Japan in the late 1930′s and spread from there.  Because birds and animals eat the berries, the plant spreads easily to new and remote locations. I’ve seen it growing on top of Laurel Mountain; Dianne Machesney photographed these berries at Green Cove Wetlands.

Mile-a-minute can take over a sunny spot very quickly and choke out every plant that underlies it.  You can recognize it by its triangular leaves, barbed stems (it’s called a “tearthumb”) and cup-shaped shield leaves at the stem joints.

Because mile-a-minute is an annual with shallow roots you can eradicate it if you’re vigilant.  Put on stout gloves and pull it out.   If it’s gone to seed — as it has by now — collect the seeds first, then pull.

Here’s what to do in a fun video from the Home and Garden Information Center at the University of Maryland Extension.

(photo of fruit by Dianne Machesney, photo of leaves in the public domain from Wikimedia Commons, video from University of Maryland Extension)

Sometimes seed pods are just as interesting as the flowers that produce them.

These many-faceted globes are Wingstem (Verbesina alternifolia) gone to seed.

(photo by Kate St. John)

Are you collecting fall foliage to dress up a flower arrangement?

Don’t touch this plant!

Poison ivy is putting on quite a show as it turns beautiful shades of red and orange that highlight its white berries.  Birds love the berries but most humans develop a rash — or worse — from touching the plant.

If you’re not sure how to identify poison ivy, click here for the clues that will spare you an itchy experience.

Leaves of three, let them be!  … even when they’re red.

(photo of poison ivy in Schenley Park this week, by Kate St. John)