While wandering about yesterday I ran across a fallen pine that had gotten hung up in another tree on it’s way down. It hadn’t fallen completely to the ground and in it was a small woodpecker home. The entrance hole was not nearly as easy to spot as it appears in the photos but that’s one of the things I love about the woods. The closer you look, the more you see going on.

The entrance hole is only about 3′ off the ground. This one is most likely a Downy woodpecker as the hole size is about right, 1-1.5 inches across and the depth correct as well, about 6′ deep. Downy woodpeckers frequently nest in smaller stubs that are an average 7″ in diameter and lean downward. The entrance is most often located on the underside of the stub, excavated in wood which has been infected with fungus that softens the tree, making excavating the nest easier. Usually the entrance is a bit higher off the ground but they have been known to nest lower, anywhere from 3′-50′. Downys are monogamous and in winter they will roost in separate holes but can bee seen together during the day. Right now a male downy is roosting in one of my chickadee bird houses at night.

Then again, perhaps it is not a Downy woodpecker. Still, I love the small discoveries any patch of woods will be filled with.

I am not a lawn person. I’ve never cared a whit about having expanses of green. I grew up in the woods – I love trees and the only worth of a lawn is as a firebreak between the woodland edge and house. Needless to say, since I’ve moved into my home the lawn has been totally neglected. Now I did toss out some fescue seed at one point but really ignored it altogether. In the back of my head I’ve thought that I needed to do something about it but lawns are so uninteresting to me, they just go against my habitat gardener’s mind. The roommate likes Bermuda grass and the whole golf course look, which I flat refused to plant since I think Bermuda is nothing but short, sneaky English ivy. It’ll creep and get in everything and it never stops. Uggh. And lawns are work. If I enjoyed work I wouldn’t be a native gardener. Give me low maintenance any day. I want to garden when I want to garden, not because I have to. So to end the argument of what to do with the lawn, I did nothing.

Still, the yard looks like rat’s fanny and finally I’ve decided it’s time. After reading a post at Beautiful Wildlife Garden – The Wildlife-Friendly Eco-Lawn and over at clay and limestone – Clover I’m joining the ranks of clover based lawns. This is something I can handle and will actually help me to discover my inner lawn love – what could be better? Low maintenance, low water, looks pretty and attracts bees. So today I plan to stop at the feed store and see if they carry Dutch white clover seeds, and my property is full of tiny native violets, I’ll be moving some of those out into the lawn area…plans within plans. The roommate will be fine with it, he’s a critter lover and found the benefits of having life in the yard worth far more than the cookie cutter landscapes he knows. So it’s all good.

I may even finally like my lawn.

The Oakleaf Hydrangea Hydrangea quercifolia Alice is still looking just lovely on this February morning. She always has something to offer. I don’t think that there is a time of year when she’s not a quiet beauty. She changes with the seasons, always different, always showing me something new. Read about Oakleaf Hydrangea Hydrangea quercifolia.

Photo from February

The same plant in May

Gardeners are strange people. All gardeners know this, but sometimes it’s a secret. The beauty of our strangeness is that we can hide it very, very well. We can smile and look perfectly normal while people admire the pretty landscape we have created.

What others don’t see is the darker – or weirder – side of gardening. They don’t see the manic glee in our eyes when we are in our backyards up to our eyeballs in cow plop, the oh-so-sexy wardrobe of construction worker boots and 20 year old tee shirts, the frantic struggle to get that huge @%$# shrub (@%$# means dang of course) OUT OF THE GROUND so we can move it to a better location while telling said shrub we are helping it…just talking away to a shrub. This is all normal for the gardener but we are fairly careful not to let the neighbors see this behavior.

Until blogging. Then suddenly we decided, heck, let’s just tell the world about our weirdness. Just throw it right out there. Of course we hope our neighbors don’t read our blogs but hey, rest of the world, you all get to know about our habits beyond the pretty flowers.

Like any other gardener, my property is my bubble and it’s a happy place I love it here you can come in but if you are a pain in the butt or carry bad karma you can just leave now thank you very much ta ta I don’t see you any more I’m very busy…

But my latest weirdness made me realize that I am  truly a nut. What is my latest weirdness? This:

What is this? Well I’m not really sure what I am doing. In fact, I rarely know what I’m doing but that’s another post. What I was attempting was to feed feral honey bees. There I was, taking a rest from yard work, and I realized that there were honey bees flying around. Not a few – a lot of honey bees. We are having a warm spell and suddenly here the bees were. My habitat gardener mind instantly went into overdrive and I was looking up how to feed feral honey bees, what is the morality of this, should I feed them or let nature handle it, what do they eat, etc.

I read a zillion web pages but took a recipe from WikiBooks Beekeeping of 1:1 ratio of sugar and water to make a syrup. Now anything recommended for feeding bees did not apply to me as I wasn’t dealing with hives I kept and had no idea where the wild hive was located. Not that this stopped me. Next thing you know, I am getting spring water, anise extract and, not happening to have a bee feeder on hand, searching for any saucer I had with color in it. All of my dishes are white, I love white, no color, dang…and stealing nandina leaves from a neighbor. Nandina is a dirty word in GA but I’d finally found an application for it.

So I read, ran to the store, tried to figure out what to do and had an absolute blast in my bubble watching the little bees. Did it work? Heck no. But still, I had fun. It was interesting. And I’ll try to learn a lot more about it so that I might actually know what I am doing.

Still, I grasp how strange it is to get in a flutter over the bees. I do understand that they have stored winter food and don’t need me. It’s Gardener’s OCD.

I also got busted. Someone came to work at the house and asked me, very kindly as if they might set me off, what the dish of liquid was. My reaction was to ask the man, “Do I have to admit what that is?” But I’ll post it on a blog and tell the world.

But my property is my bubble and it’s a happy place I love it here you can come in but if you are a pain in the butt or carry bad karma you can just leave now thank you very much ta ta I don’t see you any more I’m very busy…

For an interesting read on feral hives, please visit: SaveTheHives Feral Bee Project.

One native plant that I have naturally occurring on my property is Partridgeberry Mitchella repens L.. When I first discovered it, the plant was in an area of dark, overgrown shade and doing just fine. It looked healthy enough but for the first two years never flowered or berried and I kind of ignored it. I was happy to see it there but had so many other things to attend to outdoors that I didn’t focus on it.

Later I cleared out a few trees shading my patch of partridgeberry, and while it is still in plenty shady, wow did it respond to a bit of sun. That spring it was covered in tiny white flowers. This winter, while the world is brown, I have a carpet of evergreen partridgeberry which is a deep shade of green and has many small red berries on it. It’s a beautiful detail in the habitat. Plus, by golly is this plant tough. It’s in dry, rocky shade, under a huge pine and I have walked all over it repeatedly. Still it excels.

The photo below was from early summer.

Partridgeberry is classified as a perennial vine but it behaves politely and acts like a nice ground cover. I don’t really see the vine behavior so much, nothing shoots out a mile away where I have to keep it in check in the manner of Virginia creeper Parthenocissus quinquefolia. It reminds me of the more northern American Wintergreen Gaultheria procumbens.

For wildlife value in the habitat garden, partridgeberry Mitchella repens L. is supposedly eaten by wild turkey and ruffled grouse, neither of which I have in residence. In January I still have berries so assume it’s not a woodland songbird favorite, however I like having an extra food source in case other berry crops fail or run out. Perhaps the partridgeberry will be consumed at winter’s end when not much else is available. In spring it did have bees on it, while it was not a major food source for them, I always like bee food in my garden!

The berry is supposed to be tasteless. I can’t tell you. I didn’t eat any and will take other’s word for that.

Below photo was taken in January.

It is native to pretty much all of the east, from Texas to Florida up through Canada. Check USDA Plants Profile for exact maps. If you need a polite, no maintenance ground cover for a difficult shady spot, I can recommend Partridgeberry Mitchella repens L.. It’s been a lovely addition to my woods.