Gardening

Sites for Sore Eyes, Black Thumb Brigade or Sons of Toil Covered in Tons of Soil

The Mangroves of Mangal Cay

The mangrove forests of the world are making more news than ever before these days. Often destroyed to make way for shrimp farms or vacation ventures, recent studies demonstrated that some communities in coastal southeast India were protected from the December 2004 tsunami by just such mangroves. Communities either side of them not so protected were devastated.

Mangrove forests reinforce tropical coastlines, filter runoff, and house throngs of terrestrial and aquatic organisms, notes the journal Science, praising this web site of the Smithsonian Institution.

Visit Mangal Cay in Belize with its peat bog, stopping two dozen times on this virtual tour to learn more about these remarkable trees, their ecology and that of the zones that develop around them. You can even plunge underwater to get a fresh perspective while being assured you will not become chow for a crocodile.

www.mangroves.si.eu/Trail/VirtualTour.html

Canadian Peony Society

Take care of your peonies and your dahlias will look after themselves is a hoary horticultural adage. The imperial flower of China has long found favour in Canadian gardens but, strangely, no organization to ring their praises was formed here until 1998.

The Canadian Peony Society is busily correcting that deficiency, disseminating cultural information, encouraging development of Canadian hybrids, sponsoring events both national and local, conducting seed exchanges and root sales and many other related activities, including a quarterly newsletter.

Membership in the society is just Cdn$15 per year for Canadian residents, US$18 annually for those outside the country. Cheques may be sent to Canadian Peony Society, P.O. Box 69507, 109 Thomas Street, Oakville, Ontario L6J 7R4, or e-mail .

http://www.peony.ca/e_html/home.htm

Alien Invasion

Whether labeled invasive species, illegal immigrants, plain weeds or worse, plants that have been accidentally or intentionally introduced can raise wrath. In the absence of natural controls, they often run rampant, smothering native species into near extinction.

Know your enemy is an ancient adage of value, none more so than when it comes to whacking weeds. Early in the last century when swallowwort, Cynanchum nigrum, some how snuck into southern Ontario from the Ukraine, few noticed. No one raised so much as a hoe against it. By the 1980s and 1990s, environmental change possibly additional nitrates from vehicular pollution kick-started it into public notice. It even acquired a new and more ominous name: dog-strangler vine. Journalists usually uninterested to any plant they cant smoke commenced writing about it.

In an effort to circumvent such, the U.S. National Park Service offers the site Weeds Gone Wild. Offering fact sheets on, to date, over 50 invasive aliens causing havoc in natural areas, it presents a disturbing and depressing but very necessary explanation of the threat they offer. Since this is a U.S. site, it of necessity concerns itself with such south of the border. Nevertheless, we in Canada know full well that what afflicts our neighbour will all to often spread eventually spread up here.

www.nps.gov/plants/alien