Battle with a Forsythia

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The forsythia was in the northwest corner of my backyard when we bought the house. It is non-native and does not do anything for my yard’s ecosystem – no pollinators visit its blooms; nothing eats its leaves. I have been trying to keep it controlled for the past few seasons, but it always seems to grow faster than I can prune it. I should have cut it and painted the stumps with poison last fall.

I did manage to cut it back more than ever before one morning last week and will go back to cut more soon. It was a lot of work, and I managed to clog my pruning chainsaw; that will take some effort to get it working again. I did most of work with my manual long handled pruners.  My gardening seat worked well….I slowly moved it around the plant cutting everything I could reach. My back only started hurting when I started carrying the trimmed branches up to the patio to dry (and then burn in a few weeks in the chiminea).

Last year I waited until after the plant had bloomed and it was a big mistake. This year there were a few flowers open….but I cut it all away from the plant! I am going to plant some native plant seeds in the soil left bare – it will be a bonus if any come up. I’ll keep cutting the forsythia back as severely as I can over this next season to give the other plants a chance to take over.

Kousa Dogwood

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Our Missouri house came with a kousa dogwood – an Asian dogwood. It does not fit my ‘plant natives’ goal but I’m leaving it. During the winter, when its leaves are gone, I always notice that it has a nest or two in it, so it does provide shelter for breeding birds. I also like that it flowers and produces interesting seeds.

This spring I happened to take some closer looks at the terminal buds – noticed that they have a covering that splits in the spring – forming a little hat on the buds!

The hat eventually falls off, and the buds begin the process of enlarging and eventually opening. I’ll try to catch a series over the next few weeks to show what happens to the buds.

I am not doing formal phenology logging on the tree, but my monitoring for eastern redbuds, common hackberry, American beautyberry, and red buckeye has increased my awareness of the phenological phases of other plants. For example – my hybrid maple is blooming right now!