From a drought, a year that has died,
Gone down into deadness. -- William Everson
Everson’s writing is lush and provocative, but he got autumn wrong. Far from being a season of senescence, it’s a period of incredible growth and preparation in the plant world. Perennials take advantage of the last warm days, translocating every last shred of carbohydrates from soft tissues into their storage roots. They are storing moisture, too - leaves have openings called stomata which plants can expand and contract as needed. It is through evaporation out of those open stomata that plants wick water from the ground up into their structures. Once the leaves fall (or, in the case of evergreens, groundwater becomes frozen and unavailable) the plants cannot take up moisture. Here in New England we are experiencing unprecedented drought, and it’s our final chance to get water to our woody plants before winter sets in.
We might imagine the bulbs we set into cool soil - tulips, narcissus, even garlic - are quiescent until spring, but that isn’t so at all. Come Thanksgiving, dig up a bulb planted in early October, and you’ll find it has grown a healthy set of roots in preparation for breaking bud. The cheerful crocus slicing their way through frozen ground didn’t start growing in March - they were doing it all along.
Shrubs set their flower buds back in summer, as soon as the old flowers had passed, and they are just waiting for the least encouragement to open the new ones. Stress or strange weather patterns can trigger early blooms. These serve as a welcome stop for torpid pollinators, and of course we are charmed to see them, but it does mean that particular branch or stem will have to wait a whole additional year to try again.
Probably the most fascinating thing that is going on with fall plants, though, is what the weeds are doing. There are more types of weeds than most of us realize. There are the perennials, of course, behaving just like all their domestic siblings and beefing up their storage roots (but with more efficacy). There are biennials - plants that spend one growing season producing the green foliage needed for carbohydrate synthesis, and the next using that stored energy to fuel a massive flowering and fruiting effort. There is even a bizarre cross of these strategies, plants which grow biennial stems from a perennial “crown” - most of the brambles utilize this strategy. Annuals have a wide range of strategies, too. When we think of annuals, we think summer annuals - those which germinate from seed in the spring and summer, reproduce, and die come winter. But there are also winter annuals, which are actively growing right now. Tiny, prolific, and cold tolerant, they are beautifully adapted to take advantage of the bare soil left behind by the summer annuals. Winter annuals use a similar strategy to biennials, but they do it in only a single calendar year - germinating in late summer, growing actively through the fall, and using their stored energy to flower and set seed in early spring, before other plants even have a chance to get moving. If you live in an area that has already had a couple of frosts, go out in your yard or garden, and look for small rosettes of green leaves on the ground. These are likely winter annuals, escaping your notice for the moment, because it’s “too cold for anything to be growing”. They’ll have reproduced and scattered their seeds before you even start working the soil in the spring.
My favorite weed strategy, though, is employed by the violet. The violet is a tough perennial which reproduces both vegetatively and by seed – and also through cleistogamy. Cleistogamy comes from Greek roots for “closed marriage”. The violet is one savvy customer which does not count on other plants for reproduction. Many plants can self-pollinate, hedging their bets against a lack of attractive neighbors, but the violet takes this to an extreme. In the spring you’ll see the diminutive purple flowers the plant is named for, open and waiting for any passing bee. But the violet is blooming right now, too - only you can’t see it. In the fall, cleistogamous flower buds are growing underground, where they will self-pollinate, set seed, mature, and be planted automatically in favorable conditions right next to the mother plant. Lawn aficionados everywhere wonder why they can’t win the war against violets, and that’s the reason. Cryptic reproduction.
Here’s a weed poem by Robin Turner. The weed in question is a perennial, a bulb, and already it is setting up roots under the soil.
crow poison
in this telling
the girl wears
a boy’s faded plaid flannel
she wears black leggings ripped
across generous wide thighs
short shorts and muck boots metallic ink blue
she has named herself april
she is beginning again
in this telling
she has kept the crown of flowers
ditching daisies for crow poison delicate and wild
she wears their dark name
against her dark hair heavy with heat and intention
she slides on her thick eyeglasses
in this telling
she has left the old gossamer getup
down in some long-ago riverbed
let it pool there
between stones and shimmer awhile
into the last of the day’s late light
Robin Turner’s “crow poison” can be found in her collection bindweed & crow poison, available from Porkbelly Press. https://porkbellypress.com/2016/08/31/bindweed-crow-poison-small-poems-of-stray-girls-fierce-women-robin-turner/
Lovely essay
Posted by: Donna Hilbert | October 13, 2016 at 10:39 AM