Bulb update: It's all over now

When last heard from, I was cherishing hopes of still being able to plant a bunch of tulip and allium bulbs. These laughable hopes were dashed. After two weeks in the 20s, with nights in the single digits, the ground is frozen like concrete.

I guess my only option now is to pot the tulips up and try to beg space in somebody's garage to overwinter them. They need to spend at least 14 weeks below 40 degrees, but without the soil freezing. As always about this time of year, I wish Santa would bring me a garage or a crawl space.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

I, TreeKeeper

New TreeKeepers tramp through the North Park Village Nature Center preserve beneath a majestic oak, older than Chicago, liberated from choking invasive shrubs.

I'm feeling pretty jolly today. It's almost Christmas, I'm warm and well fed, and things that could have worked out badly have worked out rather well.

Saturday, at the North Park Village Nature Center, I was officially anointed as a TreeKeeper -- one of the volunteer urban foresters organized and trained by Openlands to help care for trees in parks and along streets in the city.

In fact (she says modestly) I was the valedictorian of my TreeKeepers class, apparently for doing well on the test (yes, there are written tests and field tests, and seven weekly classes, with homework).

I was more surprised than anybody. I have never been the valedictorian of anything; in fact, at certain points in my educational career there was some doubt that I would ever be a graduate of anything. However, on Saturday I was honored with a diploma; valedictorian's edition serious Felco pruners, the kind that come with a special adjusting tool that TreeKeeper Jim admonished me not to lose; and a badge that says "TreeKeeper No. 973."

TreeKeeper Jim is Jim DeHorn, who has been teaching volunteers to mulch, plant and prune trees for decades. He wears an (always sharp) pruning knife on his belt everywhere he goes, he is the only person I have ever known with genuine muttonchop whiskers, and he will never read this unless somebody prints it out for him, because he disdains computers. But he sure does know trees, and he sure does know how to teach people to love trees.

TreeKeeper Jim pointing out something
you'd never notice about a tree.

After we shared our potluck lunch and received our diplomas, badges and green TreeKeepers sweatshirts, a few hardy souls followed Jim out for a tree identification walk through the nature preserve. It was lovely, although it was about 15 degrees and it would have been nice if we had been issued green TreeKeepers long johns in addition to sweatshirts.

Tree ID, especially in the winter, is one of my weaknesses. My late father, a great tree lover, used to be able to walk in the Michigan woods in January and call every tree by name. I wish I had paid more attention. Jim says he learned all his tree lore on tramps through the woods with the late great Dr. George Ware of The Morton Arboretum, a dendrologist who bred many new cultivars of trees and who helped found TreeKeepers.

Bur oak has corky bark

on its intermediate
branches that can resist
the heat of a prairie fire.

Jim led us along the crunchy snow-packed paths and challenged us to tell a bare bur oak (corky bark on its medium-size branches; adapted to open savannas; can survive a prairie fire) from a swamp white oak (peeling bark on medium branches; adapted to moist soils; good street tree because it can survive compacted clay soil) and explained why most hawthorns don't have thorns on their main trunks (don't need 'em. They only need thorns to protect their young branches from deer).

Jim pointed out huge old oaks which, he says, you couldn't even see a couple of decades ago, when they were barricaded by invasive buckthorn that competed for sunlight and choked out oak seedlings. There's still some stubborn buckthorn -- there's no end of volunteer work to do here -- but the oaks now stand clear and majestic.

The 46-acre nature center on the Northwest Side is an amazing place. There are spots where, even in the middle of winter with the trees bare, you can stand and look out over woods and marsh and not believe you're in Chicago, until you notice a church steeple poking above the tree line and tune in the sound of the trucks on Pulaski Road.

Looking north over the wetland in the North Park

Village nature preserve, at about Pulaski Road
and Bryn Mawr Avenue.

This was a tree nursery in the 1800s, before it was a tuberculosis sanitarium where people with consumption were quarantined. There still are trees that were planted as nursery stock. But it's now an official nature preserve, having been saved from development after the sanitarium closed in the 1970s, and only Illinois natives can be planted.

TreeKeepers do a lot at North Park. We have a 30-hour-a-year volunteer work requirement, but many dedicated TreeKeepers do much more. They don't just plant, mulch and prune in parks, boulevards and parkways, but take tree inventories (there's one underway of the elms in Grant Park), lead tree walks, and do all kinds of natural areas restoration and community greening projects.

My only worry is that I was already a University of Illinois Master Gardener, with volunteer obligations there, too, so I will be volunteering madly next season. But fortunately, there is substantial TreeKeeper activity in the winter.

Next spring's TreeKeepers class will be No. 40, and the program will be 20 years old. It was founded, with the cooperation of the arboretum, the Chicago Park District, the Bureau of Forestry and professional arborists, to provide manpower to do basic maintenance for the city's park and parkway trees. Even 20 years ago, when there were hundreds of thousands fewer trees in the city than there are today, there were far more than the city could hope to tend and far more places that needed trees than the city could hope to fill.

I did most of my classwork last spring in the basement of the Washington Park Fieldhouse. We learned not just techniques for tree work and streetwise knowledge about the life of urban trees (it's not easy having a sewer line blasted through your root zone), but a fair amount of botany, plant physiology and entomology of such invasive species as gypsy moths and emerald ash borers. Our speakers included professionals from Bartlett Tree Experts, The Care of Trees, the Bureau of Forestry, the arboretum, the Park District and other agencies and businesses that enthusiastically support the program. Suzanne Malec-McKenna, the head of the city's Department of Environment, who set up TreeKeepers in 1991 when she worked at Openlands, taught us tree identification, taking us for a walk in Washington Park to peer at soon-to-open buds and consider whether they were linden, maple or ginkgo.

I missed a couple of classes and had to make them up in the fall session (that's why I didn't graduate until Saturday). So I was lucky enough to get a pruning class this fall from Larry Hall, a founder of The Care of Trees and an early supporter of TreeKeepers. ("Put that back!" he barked after I snipped one too many twigs off a crab apple tree in Green Briar Park with a pole pruner. Then he grinned. It'll grow back.)

Scott Jamieson of Bartlett Tree Experts took this shot of me wielding a pole pruner under the eye of Larry Hall.

TreeKeepers has inspired public-private partnerships all over the country, not just for forestry, but for other urban nature and urban greening volunteer programs.

If you're interested, the spring session will be held at Chicago State University, 9501 S. King Drive. Check it out here and call TreeKeeper Jim at 312-863-6259. He doesn't do e-mail. You can try e-mailing an inquiry to info@openlands.org, and somebody might print it out for him and he might call you back. But it's easier to call him.

So, here's what almost went wrong: I lost my camera -- this very camera here, the one I took these pictures with. Got home from the tree trek Saturday and sat down to write a blog post and couldn't find it. Ransacked my house and car, and finally concluded that it had slipped from the pocket where I had carelessly jammed it in with my gloves and hat somewhere at the nature center.

On Sunday I drove forlornly up there to scan the parking lot and the nearby trails. No luck. Too much to expect that anyone who found a perfectly good camera in a busy public place (they had a Winter Solstice Festival Saturday) would turn it in.

I left a no-hope note with Cathy at the desk, who had only a pile of hats and mittens in the lost and found. I was sorry I had lost my bur oak bark pictures, mad at myself for being so heedless and resigned to replacing the camera. I headed home wondering if I could make a deal with Santa.

But late Sunday afternoon I got a call -- it turned out my camera had been buried in the pile of lost hats and mittens, and I had missed another phone call Saturday telling me that it had been found. Picked the camera up today, and got my oak pictures!

So: good, honest, helpful people; great city, true believer do-gooders, volunteer programs that work and help and last; trees, nature, fresh snow on the way. And Felco pruners. More than enough for Christmas.


Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Plantmaps: localized weather data for gardeners

I don't know why it has taken me so long to catch onto this cool blog called Plantmaps. It compiles interactive maps of different states and regions that can be made to show all sorts of statistics of interest to gardeners -- average last frost dates, first frost dates, drought conditions, AHS heat zones, even North American distribution of some native plants. Here's the one for Illinois.

There's a zip code search so you can really narrow it down -- which can make a significant difference in a large metropolitan area such as Chicago, with a major weather-bender like Lake Michigan. There are substantial differences -- frost dates may be a month apart -- between Chicago's lakefront and its far western suburbs.

I'm troubled, though, that it is so fuzzy exactly what data these maps are based on. The Illinois map appears to be based on the 1990 USDA climate zone map, but some of the maps, such as the one for Minnesota, are said to be based on a broader set of data (although which data is not clearly stated). There's considerable controversy about climate data, as I mentioned in an earlier post, so these are relevant questions.

I wish I could ask the folks who run Plantmaps, but I can't seem to figure out who they are. They don't identify themselves anywhere on their blog.

So I will enjoy these maps for their niftiness and potential usefulness (as the seed catalogs start to pour in). But I will be appropriately skeptical, since I am considering data whose source is unknown.

Meanwhile, when I want to geek on really local up-to-the-minute weather data, I can always check out CoCoRaHS, the Community Collaborative Rain Hail & Snow Network, made up of backyard meteorologists who post their measurements online. And I can also turn to the website of the Illinois State Climatologist, which posts regional data on soil moisture, drought conditions, temperature and precipitation.

Or I can stick my nose out the back door, get it flash-frozen and pull it back in.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Yet more citizen science: The Christmas Bird Count

When I wrote a post the other day alluding to citizen science data collection projects (which we'll be discussing on today's edition of the Mike Nowak Show, 9-11 a.m., WCPT 820 AM) I totally forgot about the granddaddy of them all: the Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count, which has been going on since 1900 and yielded plenty of good useful ornithological data. This year's bird count runs from Dec. 14 to Jan. 5. Find out more here.

Speaking dates coming up

I've got a couple of speaking dates coming up.

On Jan. 17 at 7 p.m. I'll be speaking on shade gardening at the Proksa Park Garden Club in Berwyn. It's at 3001 S. Wisconsin Ave. in Berwyn. Guests are welcome.

On Jan. 22, I'll be speaking on small-space vegetable gardening at the Porter County Master Gardeners Garden show in Valparaiso, Indiana. This is an all-day show, and quite a big affair. Find out more at pcgarden.info.

On the radio Dec. 12: houseplants, squirrels and Christmas trees

This Sunday, Dec. 12, I'll be back on the radio, guest-hosting the Mike Nowak Show from 9 to 11 a.m. on WCPT. That's at 820 AM, if you live within about half a mile. Otherwise, you might find it at 92.7 FM (north),
92.5 FM (west) or 99.9 FM (south).

Mike will be off that day, with the singing Frozen Robins, caroling at the Chicago Botanic Garden (hear the Robins here, caroling about Rahm Emanuel). No politics this week on the show, though; I'm planning to stick pretty close to the garden.

We'll talk about winter houseplant care with Jean Bragdon from Lurvey's. Shawn Kingzette from The Care of Trees (I know, he seems to be on about every other week, but he's sucker enough to keep getting up early on Sunday morning) will chat about the practicalities of live Christmas trees.

And we'll talk about squirrels, and studying squirrels, and helping scientists study squirrels, and yes, keeping squirrels from eating your crocus bulbs, with Steve Sullivan, curator of urban ecology at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Lincoln Park.

Steve runs Project Squirrel, which enlists kids and other members of the public, such as, for instance, you, to collect data on the competing populations of gray and fox squirrels in northeastern Illinois.

It's one of a number of "citizen science" programs in our area, including Project BudBurst, Monarch Watch and -- my personal favorite, simply because I have never met anyone who can pronounce the perversely unforgettable acronym -- CoCoRaHS. Call it Wikipedia for weather geeks, only probably more reliable.

Resourceful producer Heather Frey will be there to handle all the technical radio stuff and bail me out of whatever trouble I get into. We'll try to get to a garden question or two. It won't exactly be Glenn Beck, but isn't that a good thing?

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Gray squirrel photo courtesy of Project Squirrel.

Still planting bulbs with snow on the ground

Well, there I was today, once again, digging under the snow to get bulbs in the ground.

It seems like this happens to me every fall. Somehow, the weather always catches me by surprise, even though the one thing I should know about Chicago weather is that you can't depend on it for anything whatsoever.

It's not like I don't plan ahead; I ordered the bulbs back in July. The trouble is that they arrived in early October, when, according to the statistics used by reputable bulb companies to decide when to ship, it's supposed to be just about to freeze in Chicago. In fact, it was balmy and desert-dry and, as it turned out, a month from the first light frost. The soil was still way too warm to plant bulbs; it would have made them sprout instead of root.

So what did I do? I stashed the scilla, daffodil and muscari bulbs in the trunk of the car -- because I don't have a cool basement to store them in -- in clear violation of the rule that you should plant bulbs as soon as you get them. And there they languished, until it got cool enough to move them into the vestibule, where, I figured, they would be handy for planting. If I had planted them.

But in late October I was still planting shrubs. In early November it started to get seasonally chilly, but I was busy gathering and shredding leaves. In late November it was finally freezing a little bit, and it even rained, for the first time in weeks and weeks. But by that time I had deadlines.

I flung a few cheap yellow daffodils into the ground in an out-of-the-way spot. Then, one afternoon when it was already too late to garden, I planted 100 white daffodil bulbs in the pitch dark. The rest of this year's grand vision -- of the white daffodils along with blue scilla and white muscari in the new shady bed I created last spring -- remained in a box.

And then they started predicting snow. Inches and inches! Tomorrow! so I snatched an hour from deadlines to carry big armsful of leaves from the big pile and slather them over the bed for which I had the vision. The next day it snowed 5 inches. Every day since it has been in the 20s with nights in the teens.

Today, I snatched another hour -- not because I don't have deadlines, but just because I needed to garden at least a little bit or I would go nuts. I was fatalistic: Despite my attempts at insulation, I was sure the ground would be frozen and my scilla and muscari would have no place to go but the compost heap. People with cool basements or crawl spaces can pot up spare bulbs and overwinter them for forcing, but I have no such luxuries.

So there I was, out in the snow again, cursing my own disorganization and the Midwestern weather gods. At least it wasn't as bad as the January thaw a couple of years that found me hip-deep in freezing mud for hours, planting hundreds of bulbs that had been caught out of the ground by a 20-inch early December snowfall that never seemed to melt.

But I stepped my shovel through the snow and leaves and, by golly, the soil was loose. Chilly, but loose.

I gave a rude shock to some unfortunate earthworms and l'm pretty sure I uprooted some perennials that won't be too happy about it either. But I got those bulbs in the ground. Some of them were pretty dried-out -- there's a reason you should plant 'em when you get 'em -- and they didn't all end up exactly 3 times their length deep or exactly pointy end up. They did not end up in the elegant array of my vision. But if any of them sprout, they will have met a better fate than death in the vestibule.

Not that there isn't still a box of tulip bulbs in the vestibule. But maybe some time next week I might get a chance to check if the rear bed remains unfrozen.

And next year -- or some year -- I'm going to work it out perfectly, so that I never once have to shovel snow or mud to plant bulbs or plant daffodils in the dark.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.