Fire in the meadow

Don't be alarmed, this photo was taken at Owl's Hill Nature Sanctuary this past Monday at a controlled burn.

burns are especially useful to maintaining a moist meadow where many species nest

The meadow around the ponds had gotten clogged with growth and burning is one way to insure that unwanted thatch, weeds, undesirable woody vegetation and some invasives can be killed. It's an ecologically sound way to improve a wildlife habitat without resorting to big gun chemicals.

I was very excited to see one...

As you probably know there are fire regulations that wisely keep people from burning their land without supervision.

that's kerosene in the canister to fuel the fire

For our meadow, field and woodland edge burn Owl's Hill staff called the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Management Agency. Their fire specialists know the best conditions under which trees and other plants will burn to get the best results safely. They take into account the temperature, humidity, wind, moisture of the vegetation, and conditions for the dispersal of smoke. They only burn if the conditions are right and Owl's Hill had been trying to get a burn scheduled for quite a while.

Sometimes you don't know that a burn will happen until the last minute! As it turned out, weather conditions were right, but, the fire didn't burn into the woodland where we had hoped it would kill the invasive honeysuckle. All kinds of conditions can keep a fire from burning as hot as hoped: in our case it was probably soil moisture and not nearly enough combustible plant matter.

But, it was still pretty cool and much of the brush was burned.

Controlled burns mimic what nature has always done: improve wildlife habitat and enhance native plant communities. Some ecosystems ( prairie, savanna, chaparral and coniferous forests) and their plants evolved with lightening strike fires (prairie grasses and forbs have deep root systems that fire or heat don't kill) and many species are dependent on fire to maintain the habitat in which they live.

burning a forest opening will help the woodland regrow where deer have eaten the plants

Native Americans were the first who used fire extensively to encourage the growth of wild food plants, provide open hunting areas and clear undergrowth for planting crops. After decades of fire suppression ecologists are now prescribing controlled burns to mitigate some serious consequences of fire suppression, and  to help with prairie restoration, to kill unwanted plants and to improve wildlife habitats.

If anyone asks you why periotic burns are important, you can tell them this:

"Fire acts as natures gardener by trimming back trees and over mature shrubs that shade out sun-dependent plants such as grasses and prairie flowers. After a burn, the blackened soil quickly absorbs sunlight. The warmed earth encourages seed germination. Charred plant remains turn into a rich fertilizer, encouraging new grass growth to sprout from the network of root systems deep below ground." (source)

All good!
Nature is so amazing.
xoxogail

"The uniformly rich soil of the Illinois and Wisconsin prairies produced so close and tall a growth of grasses that no tree could live on it. Had there been no fires, these fine prairies, so marked a feature of the country, would have been covered by the heaviest forest." 
from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There


Gail Eichelberger is a gardener and therapist in Middle Tennessee. She loves wildflowers and native plants and thoroughly enjoys writing about the ones she grows at Clay and Limestone. She reminds all that the words and images are the property of the author and cannot be used without written permission.

Trillium Time

Little Sweet Betsy is abloom and dancing with the Spring ephemerals.  Middle Tennesseans put on your hiking gear and head to one of our many natural areas. Davidson county residents, we are lucky folks to have the Metro Parks nearby (Warner Parks, Shelby Bottoms, Beaman Natural Are are but a few). Williamson County residents, of course you should pop over to visit Metro Parks, but,  you have a treasure in Owl's Hill, call them to sign up for wildflower hikes on Tuesdays and while you're there you can get acquainted with their resident owls.

Closer to home, Sweet Betsy (Trillium cuneatum) can be seen in remnant woodlands all over my neighborhood. Sixty or so years ago roads were bulldozed  through farmland and woodlands west of Nashville to build one of the city's first planned communities for the growing post war population. Our little bit of the neighborhood with its shallow soil and exposed limestone bedrock had never been farmed, but, had been logged, what you see now is secondary growth with a few untouched areas in the hills and ridges surrounding us. The indigenous wildflowers~ False Soloman's Seal, Spring Beauties, Rue Anemone, Trout-lily, False Garlic, Blue-eyed Grass, Wild Sweet William and Sweet Betsy, never disappeared and each spring delight residents with their arrival. 

some of the flowers of spring

The first spring in our new home I found blooming Toadshade (another common name) in the wayback backyard and transplanted it to my new woodland garden. That was 25 years ago, but, I remember carefully digging around it to get all the rhizome and roots and gently placing it in the garden. They survived and thrived despite my gardening ignorance.

a simple and graceful perennial

Trillium cuneatum typically flowers from early March to mid April. It can be found in rich, mostly upland woods, but, it is especially happy growing on Middle Tennessee's Ordovician limestone soils (neutral to basic soil). The two I transplanted have multiplied to many and as long as it isn't crowded by aggressive perennials it's happy. Trillium Plants can live for 25 years or longer and usually do not flower until they are several years old. It's found growing across Alabama,  Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. I read that it can even be found in Michigan~makes me wonder how it "escaped" to plant itself there!

Despite being known as Little Sweet Betsy it's the largest of the eastern sessile trilliums, sometimes topping out at 15 inches tall.  In case you wondered, sessile means stalkless and what appears as a stem is actually an extension of the horizontal rhizome. The leaves, petals and sepals of all trilliums come in groups of three.

The trillium is a simple, graceful perennial that is one of the most familiar and loved of the spring woodland wildflowers.

Trillium luteum

But, you don't have to take my word for it~Just check out  Trails and Trilliums this weekend in Monteagle. You can attend talks,  hike and buy wildflowers. They may even be selling trilliums!

xxoogail

Gail Eichelberger is a gardener and therapist in Middle Tennessee. She loves wildflowers and native plants and thoroughly enjoys writing about the ones she grows at Clay and Limestone. She reminds all that the words and images are the property of the author and cannot be used without written permission.

Garden Blogger's Bloom Day At Owl's Hill

It was a marvelous golden day to be in the garden and if I couldn't spend time in my own, then spending time at Owl's Hill with a group of nature lovers was the second best thing that could happen.

Owl's Hill is a 160 acre nature sanctuary and their mission is conservation, restoration, research, and species protection. (here and here) Set among the rolling hills of Williamson County, on land that was heavily farmed for hundreds of years, Owl's Hill founders set about almost two decades ago to restore the land to a natural habitat.

There are enormous 300-year-old trees, vestiges of the great eastern deciduous forest that once covered Tennessee, among the pioneer trees, seasonal wildflowers and ponds and wetlands. Owl's Hill is home to more than a dozen amphibian species, 125 species of birds and almost all the mammals found in Middle Tennessee.

It is also the site of my Tennessee Master Naturalist classes...Lucky me, I was accepted into the second training session and over the next ten months the class lessons will be touching upon the major components of Tennessee's natural biological systems.

You couldn't ask for a better place to study nature.

Gray Hairstreak dropping by to hear instructor Steve Murphree

Saturday was bug day! To be accurate, it was pollinators, predators, pests and parasitoids day!  Steve Murphree, a Belmont University professor gave an excellent and informative talk and then we headed out to the garden of native plants.

Verbesina virginica and nectaring friends

After all, that's where all the flowering plants and critter action can be found.

So join me in a Bloom Day celebration of a few of the marvelous flowers in bloom at Owl's Hill (a few of the critters we saw, too) and don't forget to stop by May Dreams Gardens and take the Mr Linky magic carpet ride to more gardens than you can imagine seeing in one day!

Verbesina alternifolia was blooming all over the place! When I say blooming all over the place, I mean it was a major player along the pond where it has the moist soil it prefers.

More often known as 'Wingstem', it was marvelous and golden against the blue skies. I don't know about you, but, I have a special place in my heart for rough and tumble wildflowers and these rough looking golden flowers really fit the bill!

Also in bloom is a close relative, Verbesina virginica.  It's another of the rough and tumble wildflowers that has captured my heart! It's known as 'Frostweed' because of the unique frost flowers that develops on cool mornings (Have You Seen The Frost Flowers and Frost Flowers Blooming the Garden), but, there's more to these beauties. They are true pollinator magnets.

'Frostweed' always has pollinator visitors (I can save seeds for you)

They bloom for an extraordinarily long time and attract every pollen and nectar seeking moth, skipper, soldier beetle, honey bee or bumble bee.  That's a lot to get from a flower. Don't you agree?

It's a host plant for one of my favorite butterfly, the Silvery Checkerspot

If your heart is open to rough and tumble wildflowers, I have another flower to share! This one may surprise you, although, not my good friend Frances of Fairegarden...She feels the same way about them.

Thistles were making a beautiful and dramatic statement in the wilder places at Owl's Hill.

Possibly Circium muticum/Swamp thistle

They were stunning in the sunlight and utterly and completely charming to look at.

Yes, I did use stunning and charming to describe thistles!

They were. I fell for their good looks when I saw them standing tall among a field of Solidago, Verbesina, Asclepias and Vernonia. I am guessing they might be Circium muticum, a biennial that grows in moist fields. But, the name matters not, their real charm required an up close and personal look into their beautiful rose pink flower faces.

They were lovely and the flower heads were quite soft, and bees, beetles, skippers and other critters crawled in, on and around with ease.

I will suggest that if you want to get close, that you be careful where you hold on to the stem,  they are thistles after all.

xxoogail

PS If you live in Middle Tennessee, call Owl's Hill to make an appointment to stop by and see the wildflowers and the owls!  Yes, they have owls!

Gail Eichelberger is a gardener and therapist in Middle Tennessee. She loves wildflowers and native plants and thoroughly enjoys writing about the ones she grows at Clay and Limestone. She reminds all that the words and images are the property of the author and cannot be used without written permission.