Lookin' Out My Back Door

 

We offer migrating birds free bed and
bath, plus all the seeds they can eat

This morning, four migrating bluebirds are luxuriously splashing about in a raised bowl in our back garden. When I went out to fetch the newspapers at dawn, I startled half a dozen finches pulling seeds from out of our Rudbeckia. And a colony of mourning doves has spread out along the ground in military fashion seeking insects, seeds, and any other edible that wasn’t there last night.

Welcome to the start of autumn at 26 Pine Street. In this, the sixth year of our grass-free, 95% native-plant garden, we are apparently well established as a five-star stopping point for migrating birds. We clean and re-fill the bird baths regularly and, while we acknowledge the Audubon Society’s warning not to put out seed feeders, we offer suet for woodpeckers and other avians with a need for a McDonald’s-style fat fix.

The Felcos have been put away for now in
order to give migrating birds seed heads from
our Rudbeckia and shasta daisies

What the birds want most of all are seeds, and we have those in abundance. All summer, our front garden was a riot of color from sweeps of native Agastache, shasta daisies, Lobelia cardinalis, Monarda, Liatris, and the aforementioned Rudbeckia. In late August, as the last of the flowers passed, we made the painful decision to keep our Felcos in the garden bag. Deadheading the beds would have given us a pleasant, uniform sea of green punctuated with the autumn-blooming phlox and oak-leaf Hydrangea. As the nearby photo shows, there’s a lot of brown in the front garden. The brown stuff is seed heads, which is why the birds are here in droves.

Our rear garden, with its mix of
shade-tolerant plants

The rear garden is another, more pleasant, matter. It is too shady for the sun-loving perennials that dominate the front of our property, so there is not a lot of past-blooming ‘stubble’. Instead, we have a hodgepodge* of ground covers, shade-tolerant perennials and shrubs, most of which flowered over the spring and summer. Now, the remaining seed heads are a bird buffet. The Ligularia ‘Othello’ has been a favorite, as well as the several dozen Astilbe that dot the landscape.

Cornus florida in bloom, early May

There is still one more scene to play out, and I look forward to it with special satisfaction. Cornus florida – the American dogwood – got a bad rap a few decades back for its supposed susceptibility to spot Anthracnose, a fungal disease that produces leaf spots and blotches. That reputation gave rise to a demand for Cornus kousa, an east Asian cousin. Subsequent research shows Anthracnose can be kept in check by the simple expedient of giving Cornus florida ample light and air. In other words, don’t stick it in a shady area hemmed in by other trees,

Cornus florida fruit is small and brightly
colored, versus Cornus kousa

The American and Asian dogwoods differ in one crucial area: the size of their fruit. As the nearby photo shows, Cornus florida produces a small, bright-red berry; Cornus kousa, a much larger, duller fruit with a thick skin.

The subtle difference came into play one late September afternoon two years ago when our pink-flowering American dogwood began shaking as though it was alive. I watched in fascination through my library window for a while, then went out for a closer inspection. There were roughly 50 birds in the tree, gorging on the dogwood berries. After an hour, the tree had been picked clean. I called friends with the Kousa variety and asked if they were sharing my experience. No, they said, their fruit had mostly fallen to the ground where it was rotting (and required periodic raking to prevent odor build-up).

Our neighbor's back lawn is all grass
(photo from Realtor.com)

I close with a photo of an across-and-down-the-street neighbor’s back yard. They’ve just put their home on the market and I scrolled through the listing photos. The first 35 showed a pleasant home – the interior professionally staged as is the custom now, to remove traces of individuality that might turn off a potential buyer. The final two stopped me in my tracks. They showed a back yard that is nothing but a perfect, green lawn surrounded by a white fence. There are no shrubs against that fence; no flowers or plantings of any kind.

It is, in its own way, staged to show an ideal safe, suburban yard where a child can play without fear of injury. It is also utterly sterile. I cannot imagine a passing flock of birds giving it a second glance.

Abigail

If we are truly stewards of the land, we ought to acknowledge that our property serves more than just a human audience. Our garden does that in spades – all the while giving the child in us (and, especially, our cat) hours of visual entertainment.

 * A partial list of the plants in the rear garden includes Actea, Astilbe, Asters, Aralia, Cimicifuga, Digitalis (foxglove), false strawberry, ferns, Heuchera, Hosta, Ligularia, Lobelia, Persecaria, Tiarella (foamflower), Vaccinium (blueberry), and Viburnum.