What is the best way to rid your plants of aphids? Personally, I favor the quick, easy and instantaneous method of simply squishing the bugs. Don’t want to get gooey aphid guts on your hands? Ok, try insecticidal soaps, or neem oil. Neem oil is fantastic- a natural insecticide derived from the neem tree. It has a unique odor to it, but I wouldn’t call it off-putting, just distinctive. Do be careful if you use soaps- many plants don’t like soaps and will burn easily in the sun. Always spray a small test area first and never spray in the middle of a sunny day. Since soaps aren’t residual, you’ll need to spray as often as you see the bugs. Aphids have a nasty habit of getting out of control quickly. When their populations get really big, beneficial insects fly in to the rescue. The question is - can you wait that long to let the aphids get to large numbers before the ladybugs and lacewings come in? Possibly- remember, soap and neem can still harm beneficial bugs, too, so if you go that route know that your diminishing your chances of having predators knock down your aphids. If you choose to leave your aphids to the voracious whims of predators and parisitoids (mainly tiny wasps), you’ll be treated to the daily carnage that ensues when bugs are left to their own devices. Look for ladybugs (both adults and larvae) as well as lacewing larvae chowing down on aphids. Also, look for aphid mummies- the light bown, swollen, dead aphids that will eventually have a small exit hole in their backside. This small hole shows us that more tiny wasps have emerged and are on the prowl for more aphids. It’s a bug-eat-bug world!

An Aphid Mummy!

Caterpillars are eating machines. If they could eat any plant they wanted, our Costa Rica biome would probably be reduced to twigs. Luckily, most butterflies are very host specific, and the caterpillars will only eat the leaves of a few select species of plants, often from just a single genus. We generally avoid planting any of the host plants of the butterflies that we keep. Occasionally I will discover that some species of butterfly has found a newly added plant as an acceptable host plant.

     Passion vine is the host plant of several species of longwing butterflies in our exhibit. For the past few weeks, there have been several passion vines placed on the learning cart in Costa Rica, so visitors are able to see the butterflies laying eggs. The passion vines attract dozens of butterflies and allow the visitors to really see them up close.

     You can also see how much damage the caterpillars do as they munch away all the leaves.  I had to start rotating passion vines onto the cart after the caterpillars completely defoliated the first couple of plants put out. If we were to breed our own butterflies, it would take a whole lot of greenhouse space simply devoted to growing host plants and would be much more costly. As it is, our butterfly pupas come from breeders in tropical countries. They are able to grow host plants much quicker and without the use of greenhouses.  

     The butterflies were so excited to start laying eggs on a fresh passion vine that I had put out, that one of them made a mistake and laid an egg right on my shirt.

- Nate Tschaenn

Sticking with Geckos

 
We have just purchased a pair of Mossy Tailed Leaf Geckos (Uroplatus sikorae) for our expanding collection of reptiles.  At Cleveland Botanical Garden we keep a number of animals and insects behind the scenes to rotate with animals already on display.  When we find something of interest that benefits our biomes, like the geckos, we try to acquire them.  Matt Edwards, our Animal Care Specialist, found a pair and they arrived this week. You can look for them to be on periodic display after they have adjusted to their new surroundings.  Residents of the rainforest in Madagascar, these nocturnal geckos like high humidity and full spectrum light.  These carnivorous tree dwellers will be dining on a main course of crickets and super worms, sometimes with a calcium dusting.  Yum!

Be sure to look for their adapted feet that can cling to almost any surface. They can do this because of millions of tiny hairs called setae that branch into thousands of nanoscale tips called spatulae. These spatulae are only 200 billionths of a meter wide.  The combined adhesive ability of four gecko feet is about 90 pounds. Scientists continue to create new ways to apply the design of gecko feet using what is known as geckomimetic adhesives. The benefits are far reaching since gecko feet work under water and on most surfaces. This technology could replace glue or even screws at some point in the future. So forget that insurance gecko in the commercial and “stick” with the power of science.

We have at least five senses – and we garden for all of them! The Elizabeth and Nona Evans Restorative Garden is the perfect place to explore that idea, and this summer there are sensory treats of all kinds to be found within its tranquil spaces. I think most people expect to enjoy gardens with their eyes. The Restorative Garden was designed from the start to please all the senses.  This is the first of several posts discussing the way that gardener Robin Johansen enhances this garden with a wealth of enticing plantings to smell, touch, taste and admire.

Who among you has ever taken care of a houseplant? Let’s see a show of hands. Ok, nice. Now, who among you has ever KILLED a houseplant? All of those hands should have stayed up, and if you put your hand down, you’re lying. I blame my mom, Nijole, for my borderline obsession with houseplants. I say borderline, because I strongly feel that if I don’t continually check myself, my house would have no room for guests, my dogs, or my husband. And thinking about it right now, I want to go find new succulents for my porch – I MUST NOT GIVE IN!!  Growing up, we always had a house full of plants and they always looked fabulous. When I left for college I felt something was lacking and immediately started collecting my own plants. And most of them died. I blame those losses on college life and taking Genetics three times. But once I had my own apartment my plants started thriving. And growing in number. I was either dividing my own plants, buying new ones or getting some from friends and family, such that my tiny collection started looking like a jungle. Happy times! And yes I had learned some key points on plant care from my mom, and by trial and error (see above), and sometimes you need a good reference book to get you through. I’m very visual so the ideal book came in the form of the Ortho’s All About Houseplants, which has a new version printed in 2007. It is very easy to read and understand, contains lots of pictures to identify plants and their pests, steps on repotting and propagation, plus the skinny on pots, soil and light requirements. What makes this book great and worth the price is that a beginner can glean so much worth from its pages, and so can someone who’s taken care of plants for decades. When I get a new plant, one I haven’t necessarily had before, this is the first book I turn to for its general care. And when I notice some brown spots, or yellowing leaves, I read through the troubleshooting section in search of answers.

This isn’t going to have every plant you might possibly have in your house, but it sure is a good start. Enjoy!

I love foxgloves! They remind me of stately, old English gardens. Late June is when they look their best and are standing tall — except if it rains. I don’t normally stake my foxgloves, but find it necessary when we get a pounding rain, like we did yesterday. As long as the flower spike isn’t snapped, they can be slowly stood up and tied to a thin bamboo stake. We have several species and hybrids - Digitalis lutea, the yellow flowering foxglove is bit understated compared with other showier varieties, but it tends to be longer lived and you should see them persist in your garden for 5-10 years. Digitalis purpurea ‘Chamelot’ series reliably blooms the first year and it is making a real show right now in my yard! The bumblebees love it too! If you don’t want seedlings throughout your garden, be sure to remove the flower spike when there are just a few flowers left to bloom on the tips. Don’t forget, these are biennials and will produce a flower spike one year and a rosette without a spike the following year. Foxgloves are most effective in the garden when they are massed in groups and make outstanding verticle accents in any garden.

Digitalis purpurea ‘Chamelot Rose’

Hershey Children’s Garden Cool Plants
(#6 in a series of 10)

Giant Plants: Giant Sunflowers (Helianthus helianthemum)

Some adults bring their children to Hershey Children’s Garden and become engrossed in exciting adventures and programs — and possibly miss some of the horticultural nuances of this great garden space. Hershey Children’s Garden is a sophisticated and — now in its 10th anniversary season — mature garden with many plantings that any adult gardener or garden enthusiast would love to have in their personal greenspace. Who can blame them?

Here is the sixth plant in our series of 10 of our staff’s favorite Hershey Children’s Garden plants, along with their special and unusual properties to appreciate with a child.

What more could you ask for?

     Say you were considering planting a small ornamental landscape tree and you were considering a serviceberry tree and you wanted to find out some of the benefits of this tree. If you were to ask someone in a nursery selling the tree, they would hopefully be able to tell you that they have showy white flowers in the spring that last a week or two before they leaf out; they have great fall color with a number of cultivars selected for excellent color; they are native; they are often multi-branched; and the fruits are attractive to birds.  If you are still not sold, one of the last things you may or may not hear is that the fruits are edible. But they are not just "edible" as in, ‘Hey did you know you can eat these redbud flowers?" — not quite tasty but an interesting fact if you were starving, I guess – they are "edible" as in quite tasty and produced in abundance with very little effort (unlike most fruit trees). 

     Many of the online sources that note that the berries are edible and tasty also seem to suggest that the wildlife will get to the berries first and strip the trees clean.  I have not witnessed this myself on any trees in the urban and suburban areas where I’ve seen them in central or northern Ohio. On the contrary, I usually find that many good berries go to waste and shrivel up on the tree. This may not be the case in southern states or rural areas where there is more wildlife that find the fruits appetizing or fewer sources of food. I have been carefully watching the serviceberry tree in the Campsey Stauffer Gateway Garden and have only seen a few cedar waxwings in the branches — and there are currently plenty of ripe berries to spare.

     Obviously I am a big fan of serviceberries, and I’m excited to share how tasty and useful they can be because they are starting to ripen this week.  The berries are similar in size, shape, and taste to blueberries and can be used to replace blueberries in just about any dish. I think that serviceberries are often a bit sweeter and have a bit of cherry flavor to them, but the fruit size and flavor varies among the different species and cultivars (try Amelanchier laevis or Amelanchier x grandiflora for Northeast OH). They are also fairly common landscape shrubs. Last year I was cutting through parking lots and came across a small serviceberry shrub full of ripe fruits planted in the dismal landscaping of a fast food restaurant. I grabbed a handful and went on my way.

As with most anything, there are some downsides to the berries. They are pretty fragile when picked. I recommend picking them stem and all and removing the stem just when you are ready to use them. The berries, like the flowers, seem to last only a couple of weeks on the tree (whether or not they are eaten by animals), and they also don’t seem to have a very long shelf-life. Nevertheless, they make a great snack that can be eaten out of hand straight from the tree, so enjoy them while they last.

As a side note, I recently used serviceberries in my famous blueberry bread pudding, and it won first prize in the dessert category of our recent staff cook-off at the Garden.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nate Tschaenn has left the building for the day. When he returns, we will impress upon him the importance of sharing his blueberry bread pudding recipe with readers of this blog.

 I know we are violating some of the basic rules of pruning. But sometimes we push plants to do things out of the ordinary. In this case, we are dealing with a row of plane trees in a formal terrace garden. These trees form the western boundary of the Garden’s Geis Terrace and are deliberately topped and shaped into a rectangular hedge. One of the horticulturists here calls them a “hedge on stilts.”

I feel compelled to add “don’t try this at home” — unless you are committed to regular pruning. Our eight trees took 16 hours with a hand pruner this spring.  And I’ll be going back up this summer to shape and snip any wayward growth.  The middle of the tree can be climbed but the edges are all done on ladders.  I couldn’t do this with a pole pruner because I had to be up-close-and-personal with each cut in order to re-direct the growth at the ends of branches into a plane.   Each snip was made about a quarter of an inch after a bud that was pointing in the desired direction.

 

We have some new denizens in the Costa Rica glasshouse — the Amazon Milky Tree Frogs! While they are still young frogs, they look surprisingly like bird droppings sitting on a leaf. I’m sure that’s because they want predators to leave them alone. After all, would you want to eat a bird dropping? They’ll get up to almost four inches long when they become adults. Right now we have ten frogs in our glass enclosure and they look just fantastic! We know that if they feel threatened, in the wild,  they exude a milky liquid from their pores which can be poisonous. However, this is not true with with captive reared frogs, such as ours. Ours are not poisonous because they don’t eat the same diet in captivity as these frogs do in nature. At the Garden, we feed them crickets and mealworms. In the Amazon, they feed mostly on ants, which likely makes these frogs toxic!

Come see our new frogs soon!