Still Spring Garden in September

From https://www.bbg.org/news/weed_of_the_month_white_snakeroot:
"One of the last wild natives to flower, Ageratina altissima (white Snakeroot) is a godsend to hungry insects like bees, moths, and flies furiously foraging before the weather turns cold and food becomes scarce.

Sadly, white snakeroot played an unfortunate role in American history. In the early 19th century, European settlers, unfamiliar with the plant, allowed cows and other domestic animals to feed on it. A toxin in the plant called tremetol tainted the cow’s milk, causing sickness and death to those who drank it, calves as well as humans. Milk sickness, as it was called, claimed the lives of thousands of people, including, it is thought, Abraham Lincoln’s mother. Native Americans, who made poultices with snakeroot, knew of its toxic properties, but their botanical knowledge was frequently overlooked by settlers, to their detriment.

Eventually, a frontier doctor in Illinois named Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby learned of the cause of the sickness from a Shawnee medicine woman. Bixby helped control the disease locally by instructing settlers to remove white snakeroot from their fields, but she too was largely ignored by the medical community, and research confirming the connection between snakeroot and milk was only published much later. Today, for better or worse, industrial agriculture has all but eradicated milk sickness. Since milk from thousands of cows is now combined when processed, the occasional toxin-containing contribution would be diluted to harmless levels."

We'll probably see scores more walnuts on the ground. Watch your step - it's easy to roll on one of them.

Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) marching over the ground reminds us why we value native species. It hosts the majestic Pandora sphinx moth (by contrast, English ivy, the vine of choice in suburbia, hosts nothing), according to Douglas Tallamy in Bringing Nature Home.

Enjoy the gem-like pink roses. And keep an eye on the newly transplanted blackberry. Or is it shrub rose? As gardeners like to say “We’ll know for sure when it blooms!”