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A changing, and challenged, landscape

October 30, 2018

Acer japonicum 'Acontifolium' fall color

We’ve been enjoying a particularly beautiful fall here. Beautiful not in terms of weather, as gray days have far outnumbered those crisp, sunny fall days with royal blue skies, but the trees have put an amazing show.

My entry in the Leafstack Challenge

Have you heard of the Leafstack Challenge? Here’s my attempt and an excellent way to procrastinate on doing garden cleanup.

Last year, a late-summer drought stressed trees, plants and gardeners alike, dropping leaves to the ground before most had a chance to develop much in the way of color. But this year trees have been hanging onto those leaves and putting on quite a show in the meantime. 

Acer japonicum 'Acontifolium' fall color

Acer japonicum ‘Acontifolium’ is always the star of the fall garden and it is particularly good this year.

Acer japonicum 'Acontifolium' fall color

But the beautiful wooded landscape is changing here. Little by little, year by year, it has slowly crept into the treetops. Where there were once fiery hues of fluttering leaves there are now bare branches. In larger stands of trees, such as the state park by our house, the scene is one more fitting a story of a haunted woods than the picturesque piece of nature it once was.

Emerald ash borers are to blame. These invasive but astoundingly beautiful bugs (they are plentiful enough here that it’s not uncommon to find one sunning itself on your windshield) have been here for some time and their main food source is ash trees. Eggs are laid in the craggy bark of ash trees and larvae feed on the tree, tunneling under the bark to the cambium layer and, ultimately killing the tree.

Ashes are prolific reseeders, so wooded areas here are loaded with them. Or were. They were also a commonly planted tree in city parks and landscapes. Some homeowners and municipalities opted to treat trees, beginning year ago and many are responding well to this expensive treatment. A representative from the USDA recently told me that they have every expectation that treated trees will continue to fend off attacks from emerald ash borers, but that theory won’t truly be tested until untreated ash trees are gone.

Fall color

The fall color in the wooded part of the yard is great, but the large, bare ash to the left lurks.

I’ve watched the ash trees in our yard and the ashes on roadsides, in parks, in woods and beyond decline. Every year the leaves would drop earlier. A large limb would not leaf out in spring. And then another limb. 

We started having ash trees on our property cut down a few years ago. At first we wouldn’t let the wood leave our property for fear of spreading the bugs to other areas. Now that’s no longer a concern. Emerald ash borers are within any reasonable distance that someone would drive for fire wood. 

We don’t remove all the ash trees that have failed here; it’s costly and I don’t mind leaving dead trees in some of the more wooded areas. But we do have them removed where they are in danger of falling on something important (like a house), or are unsightly.

That means that tree more trees are on the chopping block the next time we get our tree guy to come out. A big one along the driveway is in no way welcoming, and another large ash on the edge of the woods should probably go. Perhaps saddest of all is the large ash near the house where the climbing hydrangea grows. I guess we’ll just have that one cut off on top of the vine and hope that in time all you see is the vine.

Fall color in the garden

The garden is awash in color, but if you look up you see the unsightly bare limbs of a failed ash tree.

Climbing hydrangea growing up dead ash tree.

The climbing hydrangea that grows up this dead ash is doing great, its host tree not so much.

But wooded, mostly unmanaged areas, will retain that haunted woods look that lasts all year. 

And there isn’t much anyone here can do other than replant with a wide variety of trees, so when the next invasive species or disease comes along the landscape is not so dramatically changed.

In the meantime I’ll just enjoy the fall colors. 

Orixa japonica fall color

Orixa japonica has such lovely color, and a small Japanese maple peeks out behind.

Fall color in the garden.

The beech tree in the distance to the right, ‘Acontifolium’ on the left, with spirea and Cornus ‘Venus’ in the middle make a pretty, autumn-toned picture.

emerald ash borer fall fall color trees
by Erin @ The Impatient Gardener 
3 Comments

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Comments

  1. Kathy M. says: October 30, 2018 at 6:16 am

    Just starting to see some autumn color here in the Piemont of N.C. So sad about the situation with the Ash trees. Keeping a close watch on mine but so far still healthy. Ash Borers .??These are the alien invasions we should be worried about.?

    Reply
  2. Linda from Each Little World says: October 30, 2018 at 4:02 pm

    Interesting how much looks great but I think our Dawn Redwoods ate not going to color for the second year. We had an ash at our first house and I loved it. The fall color was so distinctive and gorgeous..

    Reply
  3. Lisa at Greenbow says: October 31, 2018 at 9:51 am

    I planted a Climbing Hydrangea at the base of our Ash Tree a couple of years ago. It is still small. We have been treating our Ash. So far so good. We will have to wait to see if treatment helps. I had not heard of a leaf stack. I like yours. After it stops pouring rain here I might go see what I can come up with. This rain is causing a large leaf drop.

    Reply

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The Impatient Gardener

Do you love gardening? Me too! I'm Erin and I garden in Southeastern Wisconsin, zone 5. The Impatient Gardener is all about real-life gardening: the good parts, the bad bits and even the funny stuff. It's part information, part inspiration and a little bit commiseration. Thanks for visiting.

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Erin Schanen 🌿 The Impatient Gardener
I fell in love with gardening through container de I fell in love with gardening through container design and it’s probably still my favorite type of gardening. My trip to Philadelphia area gardens was full of so many excellent ideas. For several years I’ve been enamored with clustered pots, but in my opinion they work best when they are able to stand alone in a space. And you probably know me well enough by now to know that as far as I’m concerned, the bigger the pot, the better. Feast your eyes on these beauties and use your zooming fingers to really get into those nooks and crannies. 

Don’t forget to save your favorites because you know you’re going to be looking for them come next spring. 😀

Photos 1 & 2: Amazing container cluster at @longwoodgardens  that works particularly well because of the restraint used in the design. Also how many different ways is the universe going to tell me I need to grow agave before I actually listen?

Photo 3: This was probably favorite display I saw the whole time and of course it’s from the masters at @chanticleergarden This is a master class in texture. It’s also probably not attainable for the average home gardener because it relies heavily on tropicals that need proper overwintering in order to reach a good size. But there’s no reason why I (or you) couldn’t use this as inspiration to create a similar feel with other plants. 

Photo 4: Strappy foliage, bright orange and colorful pots create such a good doorway collection at @chanticleergarden 

Photo 5, 6 & 7: Similar colors were used at a patio doorway at Steve and Ann Hutton’s Owl Creek Farm home garden. A pot is perfectly framed by an arbor off a side patio. The front entrance has a pink theme (and an amazing feature pot that I couldn’t show here because all my shots are vertical). 

Photo 8: Back to @chanticleergarden where I could have studied this container planting for an hour just to soak up all the detail. 

Photo 9: And while I love a pot with a lot going on, never underestimate the power of a simply planted, gorgeous pot, like this one at @abunting64 garden Belvidere. 

#gbfling2023
I think every garden probably needs a little bit o I think every garden probably needs a little bit of water, even if it’s just a bird bath. All of the fabulous gardens I saw recently in the Philadelphia area incorporated water into them. Here are just a few examples of how lovely these water features were. 

@paxsonhillfarm @northviewgarden @brandywinecottage @longwoodgardens #gbfling2023
Gardens must have places to relax and enjoy the vi Gardens must have places to relax and enjoy the view even though we all know that most of us rarely take the opportunity to use them. The seating I saw in gardens in the Philadelphia area reflected their gardens and all were special. 

Make sure to share your favorite!

Photo 1:  I adored these perfectly lichen-covered chairs at @brandywinecottage

Photo 2: Great lichen game on this bench at Wayne Guymon’s mind-blowing garden WynEden. 

Photo 3: Perhaps my favorite seating moment of the whole trip was this chair in @jennyrosecarey @northviewgarden . Not only was it perfectly lichen covered (are you sensing a theme here?) but a volunteer cleome was growing right up through the middle of it. Unfortunately this photo of it isn’t grata because by this point in the trip my phone (I didn’t want to use my DSLR in the middle of the tropical storm so I switched to my phone) was getting very grumpy about the rain. 

Photo 4: I’d be happy to hang out on these chairs in @abunting64 ‘s gorgeous garden Belvidere. I loved this space. 

Photo 5: Color was the name of the game on this patio at Steve and Ann Hutton’s Owl Creek Farm. 

Photo 6: The most original table and benches I saw were at @abunting64 garden. This was a portion of the garden that was actually on the neighbors’ property adjacent to Andrew’s. It had been a vegetable garden but is getting a bit too shady so it will soon have a new life. 

Photo 7: We visited Barbara Tiffany’s Mill Fleurs in a deluge, which is a shame, and dotted throughout the property are examples of her husband Tiff’s amazing furniture. This was, called the Centipede was upholstered and quite different from the others. All were amazing works of art. 

Photos 8 and 9: The @scott_arboretum at @swarthmorecollege had some excellent seating, from brand new @deebenarc chairs to more lichen-covered charmers.

#gbfling2023
*** I can already see that some people do not unde *** I can already see that some people do not understand humor so let me just say this: 1. I was fully aware of the escaped convict situation (I’m an avid follower of the news, which is common for us journalists). 2. It’s ok to laugh about the fact that I’ve missed the Longwood meadow twice through weird circumstances while being a rational adult and realizing that I’m not making light of the situation that led to the meadow being mown. ***

I missed seeing @longwoodgardens beautiful meadow the first time I visited so I was excited to see it the second time. Not so fast! Turns out it had to be mown down during the search for an escaped convict who was hiding out there (at least that’s what I was told was the reason for the mowing). He’ll never see goldenrod the same way again! 😀

That whole situation was really unfortunate for @longwoodgardens (not to mention everyone who lives in the area), which had to be closed for about a week while the hunt was on!
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