Mary's Green Thumb

The other night I took a stroll around the back yard in Alexandria with Sofie and Gracie. With everything so lush and green after our recent rains, I noticed again a couple of special trees that Mary has nurtured back there, and I thought I might write a short post about them. These trees are "volunteers" - Mary started them from little seedlings that came off of a parent tree, or from a twig or branch that was carefully rooted and now grows as a mature plant on its own.

The first one is this curly willow. This actually started from a cut branch - no more than a stick, really - in a flower arrangement that Mary received back in the year 2000. After the flowers passed, she kept the little branches because they made an attractive arrangement on their own. A couple of weeks later, they'd sprouted little leaves, and she got the idea she might be able to root one of them. Here we are, nine years later, and we have a tree.

This next one is a little Japanese Maple. A friend had a larger tree in her yard, up in Kensington, MD. Every year, as it cast its seed, there would be two or three little saplings that would spring up in the yard underneath the tree. We took one of them home - it was no more than a foot tall, a fragile little sprout. Now it's been seven or eight years - this has even survived a savage beetle infestation a couple of years ago.

The last one is my favorite - the Rose of Sharon Hibiscus. We got this as a seedling from the parent tree in the yard at our townhouse on Linden Street. The spot where this is planted can be viewed from the kitchen window, so when the purple-throated white flowers show up from July to September, you can have a quick glimpse of them from there.

We have a new volunteer that Mary collected from the hibiscus. It's in a pot, and we'll probably take it to the Hawksbill Cabin with us later in the year and transplant it there, where it will be a connection to this house and our previous one.

As for the curly willow, they are fairly easy to propogate - our friend Eric showed us two that he has grown in the same way that shade his yard (and help soak up a very wet back yard). They are more than 20 feet tall, and are only five or six years old. So we are thinking about starting a few more that we can plant along the stream bed at Beaver Run, which runs along the property line out there.