Wilting Plants, Weeds and Wasps Can Make for Long Day’s Labor
One thing leads to another in gardening. You discover that some job requires you to do another, and that inevitably leads to yet another, until what started as a two-hour project ends up lasting all day and you find yourself planting by porch light.
As an example, I recently noticed that a few summer flowers were looking rather spent. Removing them tidied up the garden but caused a spectacular Aster ericoides to topple.
A profusion of tiny half-inch-wide white daisies covered the aster’s 5-foot stems like migrating monarchs, and the flower-laden branches collapsed in a heap when those surrounding were removed.
If you are unfamiliar with this native American aster of the dry prairie, it can often be found in nurseries this time of year (in quart pots, it may be sold as Monte Casino). The plants won’t have much foliage and age does not improve this shortcoming. Although this aster will grow to 4 or 5 feet tall, most of that is flower-covered stem. Leaves are few and narrow, and by the time the plant blooms, those leaves near the bottom have already shriveled.
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This is why my lone example was surrounded by other plants, so they would hide the base of the plant, but not the explosion of tiny white daisies. These plants also helped hold it up, so when I took them out, I had to use plant ties and stakes to prop up the aster.
That led to hiding those ugly plant ties by placing something else in front, and to keep this from happening again next year, I decided to plant perennials so they wouldn’t need to be pulled out at precisely the wrong moment.
This required a quick trip to the nursery.
While the aisles were empty of customers, the benches were surprisingly full of plants for this time of year, and I quickly found another kind of aster in bloom and a handsome plant Eastern gardeners call snakeroot that was still in bud.
This Eupatorium was a cultivar named “Chocolate” and had stems that were a purplish-brown with leaves of the same color on their backsides. This went nicely with the bright purple flowers of the aster, named Frida Ballard. Both were new to me, grown by an adventuresome wholesale nursery called Mariposa Gardens.
As I got ready to plant in the fading afternoon light, I found weeds that needed pulling, which resulted in my planting by porch light.
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This late in summer, if you linger too long in the garden (or head out too early to get the morning paper), you’re likely to get trapped in some spider’s web and, sure enough, as I stood up, I walked right into a big one being built right over head. Creepy-crawly or flying things are a big part of the late summer garden. Those fat, yellow-splashed garden spiders, called golden orb weavers, seem to double in size every day as their webs grow large enough to snare a small car. Butterflies are everywhere and wasps are busy foraging for food in the garden, flying low in search of caterpillars and spiders.
As I worked, iridescent blue mud wasps hunted their spider prey while golden polistes, those thread-waisted wasps that make the hanging, umbrella-shaped nests, looked for caterpillars.
I have rubbed elbows with these many times in the garden and found them not the least interested in me. But this year they built a nest inside a birdhouse in a flower bed. My wife had been watching their nest building when one day a worker darted out and stung her. It started to fly away, then turned around andcame back to sting her a second time, as if to say, “And another thing.”
The late Charles Hogue in his “Insects of the Los Angeles Basin” (Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 1993) says that the golden polistes workers are “fairly easily provoked and sting forcibly.” My wife reports that the stings weren’t too painful but that they sure did itch for several days.
I found out about the sting of a bumblebee a few days later when I picked one up with some weeds and got stung. Like the wasp sting, it hurt for a few minutes, went away, but itched for days. Wasps and bumblebees, unlike the honey bee, can control the severity of their sting and they can sting more than once. Maybe next time they won’t go so easy on us.
Soon most of the insects will disappear, the weeds will have set seed and summer will be gone.
In the Garden is published Thursdays. Write to Robert Smaus, SoCal Living, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053; fax to (213) 237-4712; or e-mail to robert.smaus@latimes.com.
