Making It Grow Minutes

Back in the day, when Silver Queen sweet corn became widely available, it was transformational for corn on the cob lovers. Sweet corn differs from field corn it the actual amount of sugar versus starch it contains when mature.

If you are fortunate enough to have a farming friend who plants lots of sweet corn and lets you come pick it, you’ll learn how to choose the best ears.

In those days, Silver Queen was the finest sweet corn available, and a relative grew several acres of that for friends to come and pick.

Corn is a new world crop, along with tomatoes, potatoes, and cashews.

Most grits you get to cook are from regular modern field corn, and they can be delicious. But make some choices for the best results – don’t even think about cooking (is it even cooking?) instant grits.

One native milkweed, Asclepias tuberosa, called butterfly weed, was super attractive to all sorts of bees, while common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca was the red-headed stepchild and completely ignored.

Monarch butterflies are specialists which puts them at a certain risk. Their larva can only eat milkweed plants – with habitat destruction and the use of certain herbicides on large acreages of crops, milkweed plants, once common across the country, have vastly diminished.

When we were filming the pollinator garden at Irmo Middle School, kids were throwing balls and racing around after their lunch break. Another athletic skill some students develop is based on activity in the garden, trying to capture adult butterflies with insect nets. Monarchs get a sticker applied to a spot on their wing, tags supplied by the national Monarch Watch tagging program.

At the Irmo Middle School, maypops, Passiflora incarnata, found their way to the pollinator garden without being planted. Probably they started when a songbird, many of which love maypop seeds, flipped its tail and deposited that seed when it landed in a shrub growing there.

We visited Irmo Middle School recently to see their pollinator garden. Originally started by science teacher Will Green to help migrating monarch’s use their only larval food source, milkweed, on their trip back to Mexico for the winter, this garden evolved into a teaching facility.

Sometimes laurel thickets are called laurel hells and there are tall tales in the Appalachian Mountains about men and hunting dogs getting lost in them never to be seen again.

Although the common name of Kalmia latifolia is mountain laurel, you can find this handsome evergreen native plant growing, often in thickets, from the mountains to the sea.

Kalmia Gardens in Hartsville was the creation of Mrs. D. R. Coker, affectionately called Miss May. The property, originally owned by the Hart Family who built the 1820’s structure, had become a dump during the depression. Coker dedicated herself to turning a garbage heap into a free, public garden.

Recently, our team went to Hartsville and filmed at Kalmia Gardens. Director Dan Hill took us down the slope on that property which drops sixty feet to Black Creek. Several plants there are glacial relicts – they moved down ahead of the glaciers during the Pleistocene era.

In cockscomb celosia the fasciation trait is reliably carried in the seeds. Cactus plants also seem to spontaneously develop this peculiar growth habit.

Herrick Brown, now the curator of the A C Moore Herbarium at U S C, visited us recently with eye-popping examples of fasciation in plants.

A native weedy plant, Eupatorium cappilifolium has the common name of dog fennel as supposedly the peculiar smell of crushed stems and leaves is attractive to dogs.

Flowers, of course, are supposed to be perfect and just cut but an arrangement of just flowers can be rather dull – but add an interesting stick or branch to grab your attention and you’ll stop to smell the roses, so to speak.

Herrick Brown is the new curator of the A C Moore Herbarium at the University of South Carolina, taking over from our friend Dr. John – a k a Dr. John Nelson. Fasciation was the feature of some specimens Herrick brought to Making It Grow recently – a weird type of plant growth when the something goes awry in the apical meristem – the specialized group of cells at the tip of a plant –and instead of elongating they flatten out and divide.

The glorious deep purple Judge Solomon Southern Indica hybrid azalea graces many Southern gardens and the drive into our prized national treasure Brookgreen Gardens.

A move to Florida for his health lead to the creation of a real beauty.

Brookgreen Gardens is a national treasure with stunning, sometimes whimsical sculptures set in acres of horticulture splendor. Not long ago, I was visiting, and although beautiful at any time of the year, the long drive in was breathtaking as the Formosa and Judge Solomon, both purple pink but with a subtle difference, were in full flower.

I went to Brookgreen Gardens recently where the drive in was at peak beauty with the Indica azaleas in full bloom. Some of the old Indica azaleas are named for people with curious histories.

When I was young, Momma would sometimes ride us around to look at the beauty of springtime in Columbia. People tended to have the same plants in their yards – backbones of spring beauty were the Southern Indica azaleas, with the scientific name Rhododendrum indicum.

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.

You can easily see large majestic bald cypress trees if you walk the boardwalk at the Congaree National Park. But retired DNR wildlife biologist John Cely who has explored the Park extensively, you might enjoy his blogs (at Friends of the Congaree Swamp) had found large cypress inaccessible except by boat and took Professor Dave Stahle, the world’s expert on bald cypress, to that area.