Human Flower Project
Ecology
Denver, Colorado USA
Hollywood, California USA
Ho Chi Minh City, VIETNAM
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Ash Assassin
Taking out one endangered tree seems to cause more alarm than the threat to a whole species. Allen Bush takes out an ash and takes on the neighborhood.
The Emerald Ash Borer (Agrilus planipennis B)
Photo: Zin
By Allen Bush
Arborists cut down our big white ash tree a few weeks before Christmas. It had stood in the front yard since 1974. My neighbors weren’t happy with me. My pleas for any understanding fell on deaf ears throughout the holidays in coffee shops, at parties, on the street. I promised everyone that there would be a better tree that goes in its place.
“Good luck,” I was told.
“We’re tree huggers!” one critic added. No one seemed to know what kind of tree it was, or even care why I’d taken it out. None of that mattered. Our tree was their tree. “What a bummer,” one passerby lamented.
At least the neighbors weren’t marching down Top Hill Road in solidarity, carrying Louisville Slugger baseball bats made from white ash wood, at least not yet. “I see you took the down the tree,” is not a neutral declaration. It means I have looted the neighborhood. I am the ash assassin.
Nobody cared that the tree removal was a preemptive strike, ahead of the emerald ash borer (EAB). This insect has already launched an assault on tens of thousands of ash trees in Louisville alone.
Our white ash (Fraxinus americana) should never have been planted in the first place, at least not in our front yard. (White ash grows naturally from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, south to northern Florida. It extends west to eastern Texas and eastern Minnesota.)
Thursday, December 15, 2011
The Unforeseen: Yahoo Falls
Plantsmen Allen Bush and Paul Cappiello, hunting for pink muhly grass, fall down a rabbit hole of botanical wonders in McCreary County, Kentucky.
Silene rotundifolia blooming near Yahoo Falls
McCreary County, Kentucky, November 2011
Photo: Allen Bush
By Allen Bush
I had no idea what was in store last spring, when Paul Cappiello began talking about an autumn day-trip to Eastern Kentucky. Paul is the Executive Director of Yew Dell Gardens in Crestwood, Kentucky. The premise – or the excuse for a fun walk in the woods - seemed simple enough: try to find cold-hardy native stands of the pink muhly grass, Muhlenbergia capillaris. They were there, somewhere in the Cumberland Mountains; we knew that. Julian Campbell had said so. And Julian knows where just about every native plant is, in every nook and cranny across the state. He had found pink muhly seedlings in Rowan County earlier in the year.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Glimmer Twins of the Western Slope
Talk about a dream hike in the Rockies…two expert mountain plantsmen meet at last, and lead the way to Pike’s Peak.
A “bun” of Phlox condensata
growing at Colorado’s Cumberland Pass
Photo: Allen Bush
By Allen Bush
Eighty-two % of Colorado’s population lives on the Front Range megalopolis—north and south of Denver—but, if you’ve got a shred of interest in alpine flowers, curiosity will lead you west across the Continental Divide to hidden treasures on the Western Slope. Two gifted gardeners first met here over the July 4th weekend: one a Western Sloper by birth, the other a Western Sloper by the grace of god. (Pardon the variation on the Southern USA car bumper sticker.)
Panayoti Kelaidis is the pride of Oak Creek. Kirk Alexander is the best-kept secret in Carbondale. Lucky is anyone who has the good fortune to travel for a few days with them, the very best talent the Colorado Rockies have to offer.
Their meeting place, with an arresting view of snow capped Mount Sopris, was the spectacular hand-built home and garden that Kirk Alexander shares with his wife, Sue. They live in the hills above the Roaring Fork River, a tributary of the Colorado near Carbondale.
Monday, August 08, 2011
Torreya taxifolia: Seeing Is Inciting
Some plants are worthy of a pilgrimage. And as any pilgrim will tell you, such journeys have a way of changing one’s view of the world.
By James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary
EarthScholars™ Research Group
Surviving native range of Torreya taxifolia in northwestern Florida
Map: The Torreya Guardians
The month is August. It’s sunny and nearly 100° Fahrenheit outside, with 92% relative humidity. We have journeyed by pick-up truck to sparsely populated northwest Florida, near the small city of Bristol, to an area long ago claimed to be the site of the Garden of Eden by one Elvy E. Callaway.
We have come for a live plant encounter with one of our nation’s most venerable, rare, and critically endangered species, Torreya taxifolia, commonly called the Torreya tree (pronounced tor-REY’-ah). Only about 500 specimens of this tree, a conifer and primitive member of the yew family, are estimated to be left in the wild, and this is the best place in the world to see some.
Having survived over 100 million years, according to the plant fossil record, the Torreya tree is now teetering on the edge of extinction. (The aforementioned Mr. Callaway thought this tree was the biblical gopher wood tree used to build Noah’s Ark—hence his Garden of Eden claim.)
It should be noted that the tree’s namesake is the famous American botanist John Torrey (1796-1873). His eponymous genus, Torreya, has six species—but Torreya taxifolia is by far the rarest. All six species are small-to medium-sized evergreen trees, ranging from 15 ft. to 60 ft. in height when mature. Torrey is also honored today through the famous Torrey Botanic Society Journal and the renowned Torrey Pines Golf Course near San Diego, California.
The trees we visited were growing inside Torreya State Park, a 12,000-acre Florida State Park which lies along the Apalachicola River. It cost us only $3 to enter the park, a well maintained, lush, and serenely beautiful area.
We found that few park visitors come here specifically to see the Torreya trees. Surprisingly, our analysis of 276 of the most recent handwritten, spontaneous visitor comments in the park’s guestbook uncovered no comments written specifically about the Torreya trees!