Tending my firewood garden

(DrTom with his firewood pile, cut and moved without the help of his wife, who was talking to her sister on the phone in Ohio.)

For the past few weeks I have been “bringing in” the firewood that will heat our home for the next five months. Cutting down trees, sawing them up, and moving the pieces to the house from the woods is a laborious process that I work on from spring to fall, whenever the weather is not too hot and not too cold. This is really hard work, but I enjoy it for two reasons: my wife and I benefit from the “harvest” in the form of inexpensive heat from November to March, and it is gardening at its best. How can this be gardening?

When gardening, we normally think of starting with a bare patch of earth, adding some seeds or small plants, and then nurturing them until they produce something usable. When I cut firewood, I am selectively removing individual trees from an already crowded palette. When this old cattle pasture was abandoned about 50 years ago, wind-blown seeds of maple, ash, and aspen wafted onto the site from the old forest across the road and took hold. Decades later the stem density of trees was so high that it was difficult to walk through this woodlot in places. So I have been reducing this density by removing trees that are misshapen or diseased, or trees that after removal will open up much-needed space for adjacent trees that I have decided are more valuable. Sun is limiting in such an environment, so opening up the canopy on two sides of a tree you hope to encourage is sufficient to hasten its growth. This is essentially like thinning a row of carrots or radishes that is too dense to allow these root crops to develop to a decent size.

Now, cutting trees down is potentially dangerous work. My wife worries about this and so she insists that I take one of our handset phones with me, because it has an intercom feature on it that allows me to call the house. If a huge branch falls on my head and knocks me out, it doesn’t help. If a tree falls on me and pins me to the ground many yards away from the phone, it doesn’t help. The other day, I thought I would test the system. I pushed the intercom button to the house, the phone was busy. I waited a half hour, tried it again, busy. And a third time, busy. What the hell? What good is this system if it is always occupied with my wife talking to her sister in Ohio? I’ll bet her sister doesn’t have a chain saw in her hands during their conversation. I decided if I was in real trouble in the woods, I would just scream loudly. That probably worked for centuries before we had all this technology.

But what is really interesting is that my forest garden has been changing. Originally populated by maple, ash, and aspen, whose seeds blew in from adjacent older forest, I now have hundreds of nut tree seedlings and saplings that have appeared since I moved here in 1980. Gray squirrels and probably blue jays have moved those nuts from mature oak, hickory, and beech from my neighbor’s forest to mine, and I didn’t pay a cent for them. It certainly appears now that my woodlot canopy will be dominated by these species several decades into the future, and I am helping this process along with my thinning. I always leave oak or hickory trees over red maple or white ash when I decide what to cut, because I have so many of the latter compared to the former. In other words, my gardening is helping Mother Nature move in the direction she “wants” to go anyway, and I benefit by obtaining thousands of British Thermal Units (BTUs) of heat.

But what about the global warming/carbon footprint aspects of woodlot gardening? I am burning wood, which releases carbon into the atmosphere. But I am thinning my forest, which increases the growth rate of trees left in the woods that are sucking carbon out of the atmosphere to support that growth. If the pounds of wood added to these trees due to my thinning exceeds the wood that I cut and burn, then there would be a net gain in reducing carbon. But to determine if that is true would require measurements I have neither the time nor expertise to make, so I can not be sure.

On the other hand, if I were not burning wood, I would be heating my house with electricity, which also contributes to carbon inputs. My colleagues who know more about this than I do say that I am doing about as well as one can. And so, I continue to garden in the forest, to heat my house, to stay physically fit, to enjoy the changes I witness in bird populations due to my "gardening", to admire the new palette, to endure bruised shins, to marvel at the changes, to justify it to students, to fight off leg cramps, and to sit with a scotch and a cigar in its midst. It is all good.

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?)