Showing posts with label hedging plants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hedging plants. Show all posts

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Good Hedges Make Good Neighbours







BOTTOM: HOLLY
2nd: LAUREL
TOP: CEDAR


Many people value privacy. This holly hedge may be from the original holly farms that existed in its neighbourhood (Foul Bay/Quamichan Street) early in the 20th century. If anyone has a deer problem - make a holly hedge. (It works better and looks better than a chainlink fence.) Holly is often found around oak seedlings in natural woodland - Nature knows how to protect baby trees, which sprout from the acorns hidden by caching creatures like birds and squirrels, from browsing creatures like deer. If we follow Nature's ways in our gardening and urban planning, we won't go far wrong and could keep our landscape alive. And of course hedges are great as noise buffers and shields from overlooking windows in densely-packed neighbourhoods.

UPDATE, JANUARY 11th:

The common cormorant or shag
lays eggs inside a paper bag
The reason you will see no doubt
is to keep the lightning out
But bears may come along with buns
and steal the bags to hold the crumbs

Ogden Nash's nonsense verse seems like nature really is, sometimes. We don't always understand the whimsical twists and turns she takes in her ever-shifting dynamism of adaptation and mal-adaptation, competition and symbiosis, overpopulation and underpopulation ... The Garry Oak Ecosystem Recovery Team reminds us that in this part of the world holly is not a native tree, and if we plant it birds may come along, scatter its berries and spread holly much further and wider in our gardens than we would like. It loves the crevices in our natually-occuring rock and Earth loves it back, pulling it adamantly down into herself and making it almost impossible to uproot. It's loved by people at Christmas for bringing in glossy colour during the greyness of winter -- a real Solstice tree -- but when its leaves finally dry up they are hopeless in compost, so it is a problematical plant all round, not only for the deer.

It is interesting that holly is indigestible both to animals' stomachs and to Earth's soil when it dies and decomposes ... it is apparently the northern cousin of Central-South American cacti, which also have that toughness that allows them to thrive in a dry rocky environment (or a desert-sandy one: rock ground down). Will we see more holly if the climate warms here in the rocky temperate north? Do bags keep lightning out? Nature often makes nonsense of our predictions - so who knows?

Birds may come along with beaks
and propogate holly in a matter of weeks ...

(apologies to Ogden Nash)


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