A riot of Rudbeckia

(You just can't have enough of this plant in your garden.)

My wife is always saying that our gardens are not lush enough. They just don't look as "full" as Mrs. Lydiya's gardens, the Latvian neighbor with a green thumb. "Why do we have all those gaps between the perennials in the flower gardens or all that space between those squash plants in the vegetable garden? You are so stingy with your planting. Buy more, divide more, plant more, fertilize more." Jeez o'Pete. I am the one who is out there swatting deer flies, swallowing gnats, squishing Japanese beetles, and lifting 20,000 year old rocks out of this forlorn clay soil. Do I get no respect at all? If I quit weeding I'll bet the gardens would look lush enough.

But then, I discovered a panacea to my perennial gardening space problems: Rudbeckia. More specifically, I think I have Rudbeckia hirta, or black-eyed susan. Plant a clump of this one and your worries are over. It spreads like crazy from its original patch and it pops up in bare ground from the previous year's seeds. In fact, it is almost a weed once it gets started, although it is a very attractive weed. It makes me feel like I am doing something right in the garden, that Mrs. Lydiya really doesn't know something I don't know, and it makes my wife proud. What a plant!

The passive approach to nature education

(My wife must have been listening all those years, even though she always appeared as bored as these students.)

My wife and I have almost nothing in common, even though we will celebrate our 41st wedding anniversary in a couple of weeks. I mean, we share few hobbies and interests and it has always been that way. I like to poke around in our forest to find bird nests, she likes to watch HGTV. I like to identify wildflowers, she would rather sip a glass of wine and read a Daniel Silva novel. I like to garden, she likes to tell me where the garden should be. She also complains that the garden does not seem "lush" enough, as she points out of the living room window with one hand while turning the page on her book with the other. (Try this sometime. It isn't as easy as it sounds). I plant, water, and weed the tomatoes, she picks the fruit. I tend to sow, she tends to reap, at least when it comes to activities outside of the house.

Nonetheless, I have talked to her about the natural history of all sorts of organisms, and she has endured hearing about my studies of white-tailed deer, ground squirrels, bobolinks, and Costa Rican birds. She has received the gospel according to DrTom with respect to human reproductive behavior, evolution of species, avian habitat selection, multiple paternity, natural selection and a multitude of other biological topics that were potentially boring enough to make a college freshman switch from biology to late-18th century Italian art. But she always nodded dutifully, said "that is interesting", and bemusedly resumed reading the exploits of Gabriel Allon. I was sure she neither heard a word I said nor grasped the finer points that so engrossed me.

But I guess I was wrong. A few months ago it began. She was sitting in the living room quietly, and as she put down her wine glass, she nonchalantly announced that an indigo bunting had just flown by the window. Then she asked me, "why don't we have European starlings around our house, you know, Sturnus vulgaris". I hadn't mentioned the scientific name of that bird since we attended a lecture together at Ohio State in 1967. What the hell! Then, a few days later, "I suppose with the huge human population on earth, that highly virulent viruses will not be selected against as they were in the past, given the ease of transmission from human to human now." Holy crap! And finally, yesterday she came up with this one while watching Entertainment Tonight on tv: "I understand the tendency of human males to strive for high status to attract females to increase their reproductive success, but wouldn't females be better off if they selected males with slightly less status to lessen the competition for that male with other females?" Judas Priest!! Is the sky falling?

What was that information doing all these decades in that blond-headed body of hers? Had she just been holding out on me, or were those data locked away in some impenetrable place only to be released now by some chemical interaction? Is this some form of dementia, where you can't remember what you had for breakfast that morning but you can remember the latin name of a bird you learned four decades ago? Should I be worried or pleased, rather than just perplexed? Or, is this a hint of what is to come? For example, will the students I had in my last course a year ago wake up some morning in 2040 with an explosion of biological understanding that they never had until then? This is pretty scary stuff, so you can see why I took two ibuprofen last night and went to bed at 8:30 (at that point, Robin muttered something about humans going to sleep at night might have evolved to reduce the chances of their being found by predators). Stop!!!

I awoke this morning and realized that females really can multitask. My wife could read a book and listen to my ravings, and assimilate both. But the really important conclusion is that she really was absorbing a good part of what I had been saying all those years, even though it appeared that she could not have cared less. Maybe this is the way it will work with the public in general as well. Maybe there will be a great awakening, and everyone will be chattering knowledgeably about climate change, and loss of biodiversity, and human population growth, instead of whether Michael Vic should be rehired by the Eagles. Perhaps the public had been listening all the time, but something kept them from admitting that they cared. What is the key to unlocking that flood gate resulting in a collective attack on serious problems? Somebody please tell me.

Did you ever sniff a spider up your nose?

(DrTom is about to suck a crab spider up his nose and transport it to another flower.)

My favorite flowering plant at DrTom's is the butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii). I have purple and white varieties. This woody perennial gets about 8 feet tall and several feet wide. I have taken to planting so many of them that I am not sure the sun will ever hit the ground near our house. They flower profusely beginning in July, and the flowers remain until frost. The flower spikes contain hundreds of tiny individual flowers, which are visited by a huge assortment of bees, spiders, hawk moths, hummingbirds, butterflies, and other insects. The plant attracts an entire community of organisms by its visual display and its flowers' highly aromatic fragrance. Even I can smell the flowers when I am several meters away.

At this time of year, our evening Happy Hour usually consists of sitting on a small patio I am constructing adjacent to two butterfly bushes accompanied, of course, by a scotch and a cigar. The patio is designed to sit facing downhill, with the bushes at your back. But the plants are so full of life when they are in flower, that we have turned the chairs around to face the plants. I sit there, sip scotch, puff on a stick, and simply watch the show like it was an HBO action thriller. Great entertainment, and cheap.

One of the little critters sitting patiently on a flower spike of my butterfly bush is a little spider known as a crab spider. It is called a crab spider because its body is shaped like a small crab and, duh, it IS a spider. It is obviously sitting there waiting for the appropriate insect to land and become its next meal. But I made an amazing discovery the other day when I was observing, up close and personal, a bright yellow crab spider nestled in a flower spike in ambush pose. I decided to take a deep inhalation of that beautiful flower scent and I immediately felt a strange sensation inside my nose (left nare, to be exact). You guessed it. It was then that I also noticed that the crab spider, which had been right in front of my face, was gone. I toppled to the side, still surrounded by flower spikes, and aggressively blew through my nose to relieve the tickly feeling. To my astonishment, the yellow crab spider flew out of my nose and plopped onto a new flower spike, none the worse for wear.

You biologists will immediately see the significance of this story. I had, in effect, served as a dispersal mechanism for the spider. I enabled it to get from one flower spike, which might have been depleted of insect prey, to another spike where the hunting might be more productive, without having to climb all the way down one spike and out to another one. We are all familiar with dispersal mechanisms that plants and animals employ to get from one place to another. I published a paper once about the pollen that sticks to hummingbird beaks and, therefore, get moved from flower to flower. But an arachnid using a mammal nose to disperse or emigrate from point A to point B? That is fascinating. Did I simply suck up the spider when I inhaled? Did the spider see that beautiful schnoz hovering above it and jump into it? We know that this species has good eyesight, but does it have a "search image" for mammalian noses?

So there are lots of unanswered questions here and plenty of room for graduate research projects. I can imagine someone going from one type of flower to another and documenting the animal contents of his nose after visiting each species of plant. There's a scientific publication for the journal Science. I can imagine quantifying the animal contents of your nose in spring vs. fall. There's another one. I can imagine determining the relative proportion of eggs to larvae to adults of organisms produced from your nose. That's a good one for Nature. This approach could even develop into a new census technique for sampling arthropod abundance on various plants as the investigator simply walks a straight line through a field while inhaling deeply at each flower he encounters. Throw those insect sweep nets away, discard insect pheromone contraptions, and forget about those messy sticky traps. This is a sampling device you will never leave home without.

(Had this anecdote actually been true, I would have written it up as a short note and submitted it to the journal Ecology for publication. But isn't this the kind of craziness from which ideas develop?)

Compost: The Holy Grail

(I wish my compost pile smoked like this.)

My wife and I always have a large vegetable garden. It has never produced all that well. My wife blames me; I blame the soil. Our soil here in southern Tompkins County is clayish and is always in need of more organic matter. It tends to be soggy in early summer and then bone dry in late summer. It is obvious that one answer would be to add that rich, black, loamy material that one can produce by composting. Ahhh, compost--farmers' gold, Jayhawks' jewels, pioneers' platinum, homesteaders' heaven, cornhuskers' crack. Well, you get the idea--it is rich stuff.

To produce compost you simply mix together "green" material with "brown" material. Green material is fresh plant stuffs like grass clippings or kitchen waste, and the greens are your source of nitrogen. Brown material is dried plant stuffs, like old leaves or straw, and this is your source of carbon (=sugars). The nitrogen to carbon ratio in the compost pile is critical to get the pile to do what a proper compost pile is supposed to do--cook. If mixed properly with sufficient moisture, microorganisms multiply in the pile, and their biological activity raises the internal temperature of the pile to about 170 degrees F. The high heat, naturally produced, decomposes the plant material, kills insects, pathogens, and weed seeds, and results in a beautiful mound of black, loamy compost that can be used to amend your lousy soil. I have this vision of looking at my compost pile from afar one cool morning and seeing steam slowly rising from a smoldering heap.

Has never happened. I have built compost piles for about 20 years, and I can never get the temperature of the damn thing warmer than the gravel in my driveway. On the other hand, my younger brother Bill, who lives in Corvallis, Oregon, loves to call me and describe the trash cans full of fantastic compost that he has produced. He produces so much compost that his entire backyard of perennial flower and vegetable gardens is grown in compost only. He doesn't even use the Willamette Valley soil that God put behind his house some time ago. He uses only compost, HIS compost, HIS BEAUTIFUL compost, HIS BEAUTIFUL COPIOUS amounts of compost. I now use my caller ID not to answer the phone when I see that Oregon area code, because I can not stand to hear about HIS compost victory one more time.

And then yesterday morning, it happened. I dutifully checked my pile like I always do and, what the heck, there was heat. Not scorching heat, but an unmistakable increase in temperature that I could feel with my hand. I had to tell Robin right away. I ran to the house screaming "We have heat!", stubbed my large toe on the top rung of the garage stairs as I skipped up the steps, fell into the laundry room just inside the house, and banged my head on the washing machine. I was excited, happy, angry, in pain, and out of breath, all at the same time. I was like a carbon:nitrogen ratio that had gotten all out of kilter. I described to my wife that we had heat in the compost pile but, I must say, she was not nearly as impressed as I had hoped. But, never mind, I had a prideful lilt in my step all day, aside from a small limp.

But by evening, it was gone. What the hell? No heat at all. What kind of a cruel joke is this? Had I imagined the whole thing? Had I incurred that lump on my head for nothing? What will Robin think now? What happens when my brother calls? Within an hour, I had calmed myself into my usual passive state about how life is not fair and don't expect it to be. If my soil sucks and I can't grow beautiful veggies, so be it. Farmers in Iowa might have great soil, but they don't have the Finger Lakes. My brother might have great compost, but he has larger slugs. New York pioneers might have been able to live off the land here, but they didn't have a Toro rototiller. So I'm doing ok. And after all, we can buy tomatoes Saturday at the local Farmers Market.