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Fierce Revival

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After two weeks of warm spring weather, blossoms everywhere, bees buzzing…it snowed. A lot. The balmy temperatures plummeted, and I wondered what would happen to the plants and creatures that had emerged from winter.

Blossoms emerge from a late spring snow storm Photo: PKR

It took a day or so for the snow to melt, and then I went out for a walk. It was cold, there was a brisk wind, hawks and woodpeckers hovered and swooped. No butterflies yet, but there were a few intrepid troopers, warming themselves on the path.

Readers, feel free to correct me, but I think this angry animal is a kind of rove beetle. Specifically, because of its elegant scorpion pose, I think it might be Ocypus olens, a Devil’s coach horse beetle. In any case, that’s a metal rock star name for a fearsome beetle, so I’ll take it.

A beetle gets defensive Photo: PKR

This one didn’t get as huffy when I approached, but shone in emerald iridescence beneath the late afternoon sun. I think it’s a kind of tiger beetle, but which kind?

A tiger beetle minding its own business Photo: PKR

The bird feeders in the garden were all but empty, considering the abundance of food available. But once everything was covered in white again, I refilled and watched the dozens of winter visitors return.

It’s not that we’ve never had late snowfalls before in our region of eastern France. They’re rare, but we have them. What’s been strange this year is how very early the weather turned warm, and how far along spring had progressed before the snow fell. I don’t know what this cold snap will mean for flowers and insects that were developing weeks ahead of the usual season.

Then a day after heavy snowfall, spring was back with a vengeance. Branches that had been bowed by the wet snow were straightening, and buds burst forth again. Still waiting for the bees to return, though.

Oh, wait. This solitary bumblebee showed up!

solitary bumblebee
A bumblebee forages on forest floor Photo: PKR

Tough Puffs

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Dandelions are one of those plants that people love to hate. They’re tenacious, perennial, copious; their tap roots run deep and even cut blossoms will still turn to seed heads if they aren’t culled early enough. Their leaves spread flat and wide, smothering anything beneath.

If we didn’t hate them, we’d love them for their reliability and bright sunny beauty. But the fact is, even though they were first introduced in the United States as a salad variety in the 1600s, the general consensus is that dandelions are weeds.

That’s why any weedkiller worth the name is made to wipe out dandelions. Oh, they just come back again – that’s just what dandelions do. As I ran by a freshly tilled field, I noticed bright globes of white scattered like rice at a wedding. Dandelion puffs, all in full seed, probably cut when the tractor was skimming the margins of the field.

Dandelion heads, farming, agriculture,plowed field

Severed dandelion puffs seeding a freshly tilled field.
Photo: PKR

Regardless of which crop is going to be grown on the field this season, it will include a healthy portion of dandelions. Unless, of course, the farmer sprays the ubiquitous glyphosate weedkiller – under trade pressure from the US and swayed by the vote of the Germany in support of Monsanto’s RoundUp in late 2017, the import and use of glyphosate has been extended for another five years in the European Union. This in spite of numerous studies showing the danger of the herbicide to the environment and to human health.

Dandelion heads, farming, agriculture,plowed field

Dandelions on the edge of a freshly plowed field.
Photo: PKR

At least the other chemical bugaboos of industrial farming, neonicotinoids, were banned by the EU for the foreseeable future. Good news for bees and other pollinators! It would be great to see the US follow suit.

Jurassic Garden

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There’s a lot of evidence that gardening with plant species native to one’s area can promote a healthier ecosystem for plants, insects, animals and birds. But how do we even go about planting a truly native garden, and what are the challenges involved?

A few years ago, I walked around the hedgerows and fields of our corner of rural France, picking a few wild plants that I thought were native for relocation into our small garden. I’m a mediocre gardener, so my attempts weren’t met with much success. Only one of the plants, I think it’s a Scabiosa triandra – a pincushion flower – really showed any signs of feeling at home.

Native flowers of the Jura mountains, France

Jura narcissus
Photo: Les Fritilaires

At some point, I realized that many of the plants I saw on walks and hikes probably weren’t local in the first place. All those pansies and daisies had likely escaped from gardens, where the seeds or plants had been purchased at a garden store. As Jeff Ollerton recently wrote in a blog post about the shifting baselines of conservation, what’s considered local or ‘normal’ depends on how far you are willing to go back in time. Do we eliminate most roses and tulips because they aren’t native to Europe?

My neck of the woods has been farmed, cultivated and planted for hundreds of years, so where do I go to find truly native plants? How has animal life changed to adapt to the plants that we have on offer in our various gardens now?

Native flowers of the Jura mountains, France

Jura Fritallaria
Photo: Les Fritilaires

I recently sat in on an online discussion by Desiree L. Narango on the impact of non-native plant species on the abundance and health of the animal ecosystem, even if the non-native species were related to native plants. The short version of the discussion is that native animal species often can’t simply adapt to related but non-native species. Reproduction goes down, and in general the animals – from insects to birds – don’t thrive as much as they would on a native diet. No surprise, really, since flowering plants and the animals that rely upon them developed side-by-side in the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods. They were, quite literally, made for one another.

 

The message was: Every garden that is planted with native species can make a difference.

Okay, so where do I start in my garden in the foothills of the Jura mountains? The local nursery, which stopped carrying all artificial pesticides several years ago and promotes organic gardening, still doesn’t sell a range of plants from this area. For all its good intentions, I imagine that the development of site-specific seed products isn’t commercially viable for a nationwide gardening chain. France has a wide range of landscapes and ecosystems – what works on the coast of Brittany is probably different from what works here on the elevated plains and mountainsides at eastern limits of the country.

There’s a seed company in the United Kingdom, Seedball, that caters to gardeners who want to plant native. The product range offers a variety of native plant species seed mixes to support butterflies, birds, bats, and so on. But what’s native in the UK might not be native here.

Native flowers of the Jura mountains, France

Jura willowherbs.
Photo: Les Fritilaires

I found one French nursery that grows and sells native plant products, but it’s on the Atlantic coast, eight hours by car. So I guess I would have to go back to hiking and picking out a few specimens for cultivation and seed gathering – after verifying that the various species were, in fact local, and not endangered.

Apart from my own interests in ecology and conservation, gardening with native species faces another challenge: Do the native plants conform to our sensibilities and trends with it comes to garden aesthetics? We have, for example, some very delicate and pretty native orchid species in our area, but they are tiny things, barely the height of a forefinger. Not very showy. And the bigger flowering plants are what most people would identify as weeds. Planting native might mean adapting gardening trends to biodiversity, and not the other way around.

Looks like I’ve got some redesigning to do, and then some hiking in the company of a guidebook and a gardening trowel.

Fossil flowers, sea lily, urbangardening

Fossilized sea lily crown with stem
Via: Urweltmuseum

 

 

Vehicular Pollination

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A cold winter and a short spring have left a short window for many species of trees and plants to release wind-borne pollen – so they are doing it all at once. It’s an adaptation for them, and we have to adapt. Part of that adaptation, I suppose, is that all of our vehicles are now purveyors of pollen.

I washed the first batch of pollen off my car less than 48 hours before the image here was taken, and my grey car is already completely yellow again. Pollen. Some types of pollen have a remarkable ability to fold in upon themselves for their flight, allowing them to retain moisture, and then unfold upon arrival in a hospitable destination, ready to reproduce. My guess is that the folding pollen types remain folded on the hot roof of my car, waiting for a better home.

folding pollen, springtime, hayfever

A variety of pollen grains in different stages of folding
Image via ScienceFriday / Slow Muse

This isn’t the first year I’ve seen all the cars turned the same golden color, but it might be one of the most intense. And of course, it’s not just the vehicles. It’s on every possible surface. But then, I don’t generally suffer from hayfever – otherwise, my concerns would be elsewhere.

How many different species of vegetation are represented on the top of my car?

pollen bomb, pollination, trees, adaptation

Pollen horizon: A golden blanket of pollen atop my car.
Photo: PKR

If their pollination season is usually spread over several weeks, and they’ve all released at the same time, what impact does that have on the various animals or plants that interact with them according to a seasonal schedule that has been drastically accelerated?

These are the questions I ask myself as I look out over the dusty hood of my car. Meanwhile, if you are in an area where pollen is carpeting everything, here’s a good article on how to keep those fertile little motes from damaging the paint on your vehicle.

 

 

Silly Bees

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Every year, solitary carpenter bees make themselves at home in our wood window casings. I can see their little bee butts working away in there. The question is, what to do about it?

bees, urban gardening, conservation

A window casing hole still plugged with growing bees.
Photo: PKR

Now, I admit, the drainage holes in the windows look mighty inviting. But because the windows open and shut, any growing bees are at risk of getting crushed before they can mature.

I really don’t mind sharing parts of our home with other creatures, and at the end of the season, the remains of the nests and pollen are easy enough to clean away. I know people don’t like the fact that these bees can burrow into wood – but after all, the casing holes are already there, and the bees don’t do any real damage.(It’s indicative of how these bees are viewed that most of the images of carpenter bees that I found were from pest extermination services – it took me a while to find one that wasn’t.)

Still, even our window sill haven is not a particularly safe solution for the bees.

The nests are intricate constructions of single cells for each single egg, with partitioned walls and a lovely supply of pollen for each egg to get a good start.

A solitary bee nest.
Image: All You Need Is Biology

Quite impressive, as long as they’re situated in a good spot.

bees, urban gardening, conservation

A vacated nest. I saw one of the new bees emerging from this spot yesterday.
Photo: PKR

Bees of various species are struggling in our corner of France, as elsewhere. If these bees are, as I suspect, Osmia cornuta – a solitary European orchard bee that pollinates fruit trees – then they are not yet considered endangered. But they are in decline in France, retreating to places with less pesticide use. In any case, this year in the spirit of conservation, I set up alternative bee houses with holes of a similar size in front of the favorite window sills.

What did the bees do? They chose the other casings that didn’t feature any manufactured wood homes. So until they’ve all left the nests, we’ll be opening and closing the windows very carefully.

Silly bees.

Next year, I’ll have to try harder to entice them to other nesting spots.

bees, conservation, orchard bees, burrowing

Solitary orchard bees burrow into someone else’s window casing.
Image: Lamiot via Wikipedia

 

Spring Pops

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The past 48 hours or so have brought about several changes. Most of them I expected. One of them I didn’t.

First, the mirabelle plum tree in the garden.

In just the space of less than two days, it went from this:

Buds on a plum tree

The mirabelle tree on the cusp of blossoming.
All photos: PKR

To this:

Mirabelle tree in spring

The sky was a little cloudier, but the tree itself is a cloud of white blossoms.

And someone must have told the bees, because the entire tree is thrumming with pollinator excitement. This particular tree makes me especially happy, because when we moved here it was just a dry stump. We tended to it, and as a reward, we started getting plump, sweet yellow mirabelle plums. Not to mention this luscious display of blossoms in spring.

The other expected change was along my running route. I’m so grateful that our region of France stopped using pesticides and herbicides to keep country roadsides clear.

Roadside blossoms in spring

Violets that might not be native, nestled among other flowers that probably are. A tiny corner of roadside biodiversity.

Every few weeks from spring through late fall, large trimming tractors cut back any green growth like massive herbaceous shavers, cutting back everything from grass to weeds to tree branches in the fauchage. I’ve rarely seen any roadsides in the world as tidy as those in France.

orchids bloom in spring

Tiny native orchids that enjoy the altitude and cold winters of our mountainous region.

In the inbetween times, this approach allows the growth of wildflowers along the roadsides, which is good for plants and pollinators alike.

The one unexpected change brought by the warm weather and the past day was the fencing in of my running route. There had always been a grazing pasture one one side. Now, the path is flanked by a second pasture for the first time in the twenty years we’ve lived here.

Fenced farmland in France

The fence to the left forms a new boundary to my regular running path.

At least, I’m assuming it’s a grazing pasture because of the electrified fence. Every year, this field has rotated wheat, corn, clover and other crops – I guess this year, grazing dairy cattle is more profitable than any of those crops.

 

Left To Its Own Design

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Five weeks is an eternity in summer gardening, and five weeks is how long I neglected the garden because of an injury. At some point, I stopped going out there because I couldn’t stop myself from trying to weed and clip, even when every movement was painful. Easier just to watch it from a distance and figure that if there’s one thing a garden doesn’t absolutely need to keep growing, it’s a gardener. I am there to impose my own order, but when it comes to growing, the garden does just fine on its own.

I could probably have hired someone, but that would have felt like an imposition – not on the person hired, but on the garden. On me. It’s my little patch to tend, and my little patch to let run amok.

So when I took a stroll around last week, splints finally off both arms, I was pleased to see that the garden does fine on its own. It might not be going in exactly the direction I would have chosen, but it picks its own path.

There were still a few gems here and there, just blossoming away, bees buzzing and birds singing, the weeds having a wild climb in forbidden places.

There won’t be the harvest I would have wished; the lettuce is shot and and the tomatoes a mess, but it’s still a fine little patch.

Nature finds a way, in gardens and elsewhere.

All Abuzz

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A friend challenged me to take nature photos for a week, and it resulted in several very nice shots of our garden, if I do say so myself.

But one of the most enjoyable aspects of the exercise took place when I went to take pictures of the two lavender bushes in front of our house. I planted them a few years ago, replacing ones that had gotten woody and sparse. These two bushes are veritable pollen engines, and the air around them is usually humming.

Photo: PKR

But it was only when I leaned in to take photos that I realized just what a busy miniature ecosystem these two plants have become. There were at least three different bee species in addition to the humble honeybees I usually see there – unfortunately, I couldn’t get all of them to pose for me. Several of them kept insisting on harvesting from lower branches, out of easy camera range.

And then there were the hummingbird hawk moths, the closest thing we have here in France to hummingbirds, at least in terms of size, movement and preferred food source.

Hummingbird hawk moth (Macroglossum stellatarum).
Photo: Wikipedia

There were several other small pollinators, flitting black creatures I couldn’t catch on camera, as well as wasps, which I left alone. And then there are the lizards that lurk on the stone wall and the countless birds in the branches of the climbing vine, all waiting for an easy meal.

Photo: PKR

All this around two lavender bushes, a small world on our terrace. One more argument, if any were needed, on the value of planting for pollinators, even in limited spaces.

Photo: PKR

Beneath the Sea

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It always counts as a surprise when we find out that unexpected networks have been operating right under our collective noses. We use the word ‘discovery’ to describe the newness to our understanding, even if, in retrospect, it might be a bit like describing a city’s take-out food delivery system as a ‘discovery’ just because no one had noticed a connection between all the scooters with restaurant names and the arrival of restaurant food at private homes.

The discovery, in this case, is something that makes a lot of sense: At least one kind of sea grass that flowers underwater manages to employ underwater pollinators in a manner similar to terrestrial flowering plants that use airborne pollinators like bees, bats and birds.

A meadow of Thalassia testudinum, turtlegrass. Photo: ICMyL via DGCS

A meadow of Thalassia testudinum, turtlegrass. Photo: ICMyL via DGCS

There aren’t many plants that actually flower under water – most produce their flowers above the water surface. Thalassia testudinum, known as turtlegrass, grows in large meadows, and produces small flowers near the seabed. The male flowers release pollen in the evening, and until now it was thought that the pollen was carried to female plants solely via water currents.

But a study published last fall in Nature Communications showed that there is another factor that increased the distribution of pollen. In a series of aquarium-based experiments, it was demonstrated that a variety of invertebrates, from spider crab larvae to tiny crustaceans to marine worms, are drawn to the male and female flowers, and these fauna were proven to fulfil the criteria of being characterized as pollinators* even in the absence of water flow.

The researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico state that that other, larger animals might also contribute to pollination, but that these were not included in this particular study. Unlike bees, there’s no hive or honey involved. But, like their terrestrial counterparts, the fauna here were attracted to the flowers for feeding, and moved between the blossoms in search of more food.

A male turtlegrass flower releases its nocturnal pollen. Photo: ICMyL via DGCS

A male turtlegrass flower releases its nocturnal pollen. Photo: ICMyL via DGCS

Look at the intelligence of turtlegrass. It has small flowers, and they aren’t packed densely together, waving in the breeze. Rather, they are close to the sea bed and spaced well apart. Relying solely on water flow to pollinate might not do the trick. Why not make the petals sticky and attractive to the myriad small creatures abundant in the water, and get them to do a bit of the heavy pollen lifting for extra evolutionary insurance?

I applaud lead researcher Brigitta van Tussenbroek and her research team for noticing and studying this fascinating network of activity, which they have given the name zoobenthophilous pollination, i.e. pollination carried out by animals close to the sea bed. The discovery of the role fauna play in underwater pollination could help better understand and protect these ecosystems, which, as van Tussenbroek and her colleagues state, “are amongst the world’s most productive ecosystems. (They) improve water transparency, stabilize coastlines and store carbon, and also provide food and shelter to a diverse faunal community.”

I have the feeling it may just be the beginning of a deeper understanding of many things that are right in front of us, but which we aren’t yet seeing. All it requires is a willingness to shift our perspective.

A female turtlegrass flower with visiting invertebrates, bits of pollen and sand. Photo: ICMyL via DGCS

A female turtlegrass flower with visiting invertebrates, bits of pollen and sand. Photo: ICMyL via DGCS

*From the study “Experimental evidence of pollination in marine flowers by invertebrate fauna” the criteria for the animals to be considered pollinators are:

(1) both male and female organs (of the flowers) are visited, (2) the visitor carries pollen, (3) the visitor transfers pollen between male and female sexual organs, (4) pollen deposition by the visitor results in successful fertilization, estimated as pollen germination on the stigmas, pollen tube growth or seed set.

End of Year Buzz

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Everyone’s talking about the unseasonable weather. Too hot, too cold, no snow, too much rain.

Here in eastern France, after a glorious autumn and then a first snowfall that was properly timed and then quickly melted, it’s been warm.

So warm, in fact, that a few of the bees under the eaves left their protective winter huddle and ventured out to explore the winter landscape, which sees our hydrangeas budding and otherwise dormant flowers starting to blossom.

Bee on a window shutter Photos: PKR

Bee on a window shutter
Photos: PKR

The bees wander around the outside of the house.

They attempt winter pollination of the holiday floral decorations.

They must be so confused.

As are we.

Bee on a winter rose (Helleborus orientalis)

Bee on a winter rose (Helleborus orientalis)