Making It Grow Minutes

Lonicera sempervirens is a native, non-aggressive honeysuckle wonderfully attractive to pollinators, including hummingbirds and butterflies.

For a home garden, you may want a medium-sized trellis as it tends to flower at the ends of vines.

Clematis armandii, named ‘Apple Blossom’ has buds that are a lovely soft pink, and even when the flowers open, the lower part of the petals retain that color against the pure white center.

Swamp jessamine doesn’t have the sweet fragrance of yellow jessamine, but it blooms in the spring and the fall.

Our state flower is actually a vine. Yellow Jessamine, Gelsemium sempervirens.

Common seedling redbuds can grow to twenty feet pretty quickly and that makes it hard for me to reach the flowers which are at the ends of the branches.

Redbuds make our woodlands beautiful with their early purple/pink flowers. Breeders have gone to town with this native and all sorts of cultivars are available.

Cercis canadensis, our native eastern redbud, is an early bloomer. With protein rich pollen and sweet nectar, it’s an important food source for many native bees, including the blueberry bumble bee.

When people from the the Mediterranean areas of Europe came to North America and saw native redbuds, they called them by the familiar name of Judas tree.

Well, as soon as you think you’re giving the right information, you find something that makes you back track. Our native redbuds prefer partial shade but driving down Devine Street in Columbia recently, I marveled at the beauty of the redbuds growing in absolute full sun.

Cercis canadenis, redbuds are in bloom in South Carolina and what a distinctive and lovely understory tree they are.

Like many birds, they also enjoy fruits and berries, in season, which are a consistent part of their diet.

Male sapsuckers spend several weeks drilling out a nesting cavity, preferring trees with heart-rot fungus if possible as they are softer to drill into.

If you are worried about a tree used by sapsuckers, you can wrap small gauge chicken wire or such around the trunk.

Amazingly migratory, this bird nests in our part of the country as well as in Alaska and Canada and drills sap wells into trees, over years they are lined up perfectly above the depressions of earlier drilling.

This is the only woodpecker that doesn’t actively drill in tree trunks looking for insects to eat

Well, the poor yellow-bellied sapsucker gets a bad rap, as it sounds like these are cowardly birds when really their name comes from their attractive, light yellow breast.

It is a day of joy when my puppy Blue and I walk with my friend Ann Nolte. She and her husband Hank Stallworth live on a portion of what was his family farm.

In my home county of Calhoun, a heavily irrigated farming area, the aquifer is dropping, and many people are having to redrill their wells, so this is not just a west coast problem.

If trash is not removed from the LA river culvert, it goes straight into the Pacific Ocean.

We know from our storm water experts, that when water flows over soil, many of the pollutants can be removed and microbes in the ground can safely decompose them. In the case of the Los Angeles River, everything goes right into the Pacific Ocean.

There is now a movement to enhance any space on the LA river that could be considered an urban park where people could get a glimpse of nature in a profoundly densely-packed city.

During the twenties, thirties and through the forties tons of asparagus vegetables were shipped to northern markets.

When Hurricane Hugo came through South Carolina, Sumter County was really hit hard. The magnificent Swan Lake Gardens lost several hundred pine trees exposing camellias and azaleas to unwelcome sunlight. But only a few bald cypresses were lost. If you come across a young bald cypress, shake it and you’ll find that is flexible, even adult trees are not brittle like pines.

Dendrochronology is the study of information obtained from tree ring growth. It is used in several different fields – archaeologists can date wooden artifacts, dendrologist – tree scientists – can use tree rings to determine the local climate. But perhaps the most interesting is climate science.