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Gardening for the Birds

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At this point in a Toronto winter, with loads of snow remaining on the ground and most days still well below freezing, it is such a joy to watch the bird life in my garden. There isn’t the chirpy avian soundtrack of spring, not yet, but the flash of cardinals zooming at full speed right into their nest in the big cedar hedge, the busy foraging of juncos, the darting to and fro of chickadees – it’s all a pleasure. Over the years, I’ve observed the birds here in my garden through my large kitchen windows; at the cottage on Lake Muskoka; in various public gardens; and in the nearby cemetery where I photograph trees and shrubs. In doing so, I’ve compiled a visual record of how gardens can attract birds without using bird feeders. Here are some ideas.

Conifers for Shelter and Food

Birds need places to nest and take shelter in winter, if they’re not migrating. My garden has two eastern hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) at the back of the garden that I planted in the 1990s. They’re not beautiful, they developed multiple trunks and lost limbs and look a little ragged, but the birds do love them, like the male cardinal below.

Between my next-door neighbour’s property and mine is a large white cedar or arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis) hedge. This might be the very best garden habitat for birds. We keep it sheared so its growth is dense, helping to protect its inhabitants from the weather and predatory raptors. I’m always amazed that the birds know exactly where their home is inside this long leafy condominium, and fly at very fast speed right at it, disappearing into the lacy branches.  (That purple birdhouse is more for looks – the birds haven’t taken up residence

In autumn, I see birds eating the arborvitae seeds, too, like the house sparrow below.

At our cottage in Muskoka just a few hours north of Toronto, chickadees, below, pine siskins and loads of other birds forage in the white pine trees (Pinus strobus).

Song sparrows with their wacky, beautiful melodies use the pine trees too….

…. as does the occasional ruffed grouse.

Fruit 

There is nothing that attracts more birds to a garden than the fleshy fruit of trees and shrubs.  Of course, that can be a negative if you’re trying to harvest your own grapes or cherries and need to net the fruit to deter birds as it ripens. But in my garden I have a few excellent woody plants whose fruit is dedicated to the birds. The first is crabapple – in my case, a weeping Malus ‘Red Jade’ over my pond (that sadly has likely lived its last summer, with increasingly intractable viral blight).  Its small fruit and proximity to the water has always made it an extra-special treat, for robins….

…. and northern cardinals.

I have a pair of large, native serviceberry shrubs (Amelancher canadensis) that are a cloud of white blossoms in early spring followed by summer fruit that ripens from red to blue. It’s quite delicious, but I rarely get to pick a handful before the fruit has been eaten by robins….

…… or sparrows….

….. or cardinals, like this one tucking into a fruit on my deck railing.

My Washington hawthorn (Crataegus phaenopyrum) is a favourite tree. Though its late spring flowering is not exactly an olfactory treat, its mottled autumn colour and abundant clusters of red fruit (haws) make up for it.  The fruit seems to need some cold weather to reduce the astringency, but I love watching the robins on it….

….. and the cedar waxwings, below. However, it’s usually my garden’s intrepid squirrels that finally strip the tree clean.

Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) is one of the most abundant native shrubs in the northeast, but it can be problematic in a garden. In short, it suckers far and wide. Though I grow a select cultivar called Tiger Eyes (‘Bailtiger’) featuring chartreuse foliage followed by lovely, apricot fall colour, it has the same tendency to pop up in surprising places quite removed from the main plant. That’s it below with another bird-dining favourite, white flowered, alternate-leaved dogwood (Cornus alternatifolia) behind it.  It is my favourite shrub of all; I cannot recommend it highly enough where it is native, i.e. throughout much of eastern North America. Interestingly, my neighbour’s pale-pink beauty bush (Kolkwitzia amabilis) on the far right, an Asian native, has seeds that feed many birds in winter

Cornus alternifolia produces clusters of dark-blue fruit that are consumed quickly in early summer. 

As for the Tiger Eyes sumac, lots of birds enjoy rooting for the seeds in the fuzzy red fruits, including blue jays….

…. and the cardinal family that lives in the hedge adjacent to it.

I made a little video of the male cardinal foraging on my sumac.  (It’s not easy to hold my little, old Canon SX50 zoom camera steady from my kitchen window, which is 40-50 feet away from the sumac, so I’m always happy when I can capture a scene like this).

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At the cottage on Lake Muskoka, the sumacs are all wild and their suckering doesn’t bother me, except when they try to creep into my meadows. They are not only a favourite browse for white-tailed deer but a valuable autumn-winter food for birds, including black-capped chickadees, below.

This autumn, I was surprised to see a pair of northern flickers on my old fence where the native Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) grows in a tangle. Likely on their migration route, they took turns keeping watch while their mate nibbled on the fruit.  Though it won’t win any awards, I was delighted with this photo showing the male’s yellow tail feathers. 

There are other good native shrubs and trees to attract birds, including Northern spicebush (Lindera benzoin), below, nannyberry (Viburnum lentago), American mountain ash (Sorbus americana),  elderberry (Sambucus pubens, S. canadensis), hackberry (Celtis occidentalis), black cherry (Prunus serotina), winterberry (Ilex verticillata) and various other dogwoods (Cornus racemosa, C. sericea).

And though it cannot be recommended, don’t be surprised to see birds eating mulberries (Morus alba) in older neighbourhoods where these European trees were planted long ago. It’s estimated that more than 60 bird species eat the fruit of mulberry trees– much to the chagrin of those who have to clean the purple stains off their outdoor furniture!  

Flower Seeds and Weeds

Without a doubt, in my experience the best garden plant for providing nutritious seeds for birds is purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea). I caught these goldfinches foraging in the Piet Oudolf-designed entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden one autumn.

When I posted the video below on Facebook back in 2015, it was eventually shared almost 2 thousand times. My message?  Don’t deadhead your echinaceas!

Here is a flock of goldfinches on my own pollinator garden echinaceas in October 2021.

Goldfinches also love coreopsis seeds, like those of C. lanceolata.

Rudbeckias also offer seed for birds. These goldfinches are on cutleaf coneflower (Rudbeckia laciniata).

In fact, my photo of a goldfinch on that native perennial was featured on a recent cover of The American Gardener magazine.

Canada or creeping thistle (Cirsium arvense), below, may be a pesky, invasive European weed, but there’s no doubt that goldfinches enjoy it – and help to spread it far and wide!

My meadows on Lake Muskoka attract many different birds to feed on flower and grass seeds in late summer and autumn. Wild beebalm (Monarda fistulosa), my most abundant perennial, attracts goldfinches, below, and chipping sparrows frequent the paths to eat fallen seeds, including those of my big prairie grasses: big bluestem, switch grass and Indian grass.

Ornamental grasses offer seeds for birds, provided they have a place to perch. The sparrow below stood on leadplant (Amorpha canescens) while eating seeds of switch grass (Panicum virgatum).

At the Montreal Botanical Garden, I enjoyed watching house sparrows foraging on the dark seeds of the ornamental millet Pennisetum glaucum ‘Purple Baron’.

Other good choices for seed include oaks for acorns and beech and hickory trees for nuts.

Needless to say, many trees also offer a variety of insects for birds, especially important for springtime feeding of nestlings. Oaks are recommended as a top genus by entomologist/ecologist Douglas Tallamy because of the huge number of insects that feed on them, up to three hundred.

Nectar for Hummingbirds

I’ve already written a blog on good plants for hummingbirds but I made this little video to add some nectar sweetness to this post. It features the ruby-throated hummingbird, which is the only native Canadian hummingbird east of the Rocky Mountains.

Water

Everything needs to drink, and birds are no exception.  So while I don’t have a bird feeder, I do offer water in the form of my old pond. When I dug it in 1987 I had dreams of aquatic plants with gorgeous flowers, and I did grow waterlilies and floating plants for a while. But marauding raccoons were a constant irritant and eventually it was too difficult to lift out heavy pots to store for winter, since the pond is just a few feet deep. So today it’s a giant birdbath and water fountain (must fix the pump!) surrounded by too many weeds and prone to algae in summer, but it is so popular with the birds I cannot imagine my garden without it.  Here it is with a pair of juvenile robins drinking and bathing.

Cardinals love the pond, too.  This is a male and female pair in spring.

And here are cardinals bathing – such fun to watch (from a distance).

I have seen some sweet birdbaths in gardens, like the one below, but a pond fulfils that objective very nicely.

Dead trees and Snags

If you enjoy watching woodpeckers, you’ll know that they often frequent trees that are diseased or damaged, like the red maple below being visited by the hairy woodpecker.

Some are even dead – like my poor ash tree (Fraxinus pensylvanica), a victim of emerald ash borer a few years ago.  But I left the base of the trunk in place, mainly because it would have cost a fortune (more) to cut it to ground level, grind the roots and repair the fence.  It has become a stop on the foraging route of the woodpecker in the video, below.

******

Without foliage on the trees, winter is a good time to observe birds in the garden.  On days when the local Cooper’s hawk, below, is searching for a tasty feathered meal, I am usually alerted by the persistent warning squawks of blue jays. It was a thrill to see this raptor perched in my crabapple tree.

This week, I watched chickadees, cardinals and dark-eyed juncos, below, eating the seeds of my next-door neighbour’s beauty bush (Kolkwitzia amabilis).  A big, beautiful, old-fashioned Asian shrub, it also attracts lots of pollinators in June.

But spring will be here before we know it, and the robins will be searching for worms among my flowering bulbs….

… and in the lawn.

And Madame Cardinalis cardinalis will find a flowery forsythia in which to dry off and groom her feathers after a spring dip in my pond, while being serenaded by Monsieur Cardinalis cardinalis  high up in my black walnut tree.  I cannot wait!

Cruising the Eastern Arctic – Ilulissat

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I have been on safari in Africa; I’ve crossed the Andes and walked the streets of Paris, London, Rome, Athens, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Buenos Aires. But August 2nd was one of the most memorable and magical travel days in my life. It was a glorious morning as we awakened in Disko Bay off the central coast of West Greenland and gazed out at the massive icebergs littering the calm ocean surface. Disko Bay or Qeqertarsuup tunua in Greenlandic, is considered a southeastern inlet of Baffin Bay.

Overnight, we had sailed north from Sisimiut (which was the subject of my last blog) and navigated around Disko Island into this bay or “bugt”, as it’s called in Danish.  That massive white expanse covering most of Greenland (the largest island in the world) on the Google Earth photo map below is ice, some 1.71 million km² or 660,000 square miles. Greenland’s ice sheet (also known as Inland Ice) covers 79% of the country and is second only to the Antarctic ice sheet, which is ten times as big. Together, Greenland and Antarctica contain almost three-quarters of the world’s fresh water. At its thickest point, Greenland’s ice sheet is 3 km (1.79 mi) thick with a volume estimated at 2.85 million km3 (684,000 mi3).  Greenland has more than 100 glaciers (e.g. Kangerlussuaq, Helheim, Petermann, Hiawatha, Kong Oscar, Midgard) that flow out through its rocky margins each summer and send icebergs into the sea, but the Jakobshavn Icefjord or Isbrae (Danish) – Sermeq Kujalleq (Greenlandic) is the biggest, and the one we were here to see.

Fishboats were out in the bay, its waters rich in halibut, cod, Atlantic redfish, Arctic char and wolffish.

These guys just heading out were as curious about us as we were about them.

I loved the cheerful colours of this little fishing boat….

….. and the contented look of the fisherman about to head to work.

Turning towards shore, we saw the village of Ilulissat with its colourful houses arrayed up the rocky hillside under a massive mountain wall. (Greenland has myriad mountain ranges, many still unnamed). Established as a trading post by Danish merchant Jakob Severin in 1741, it was originally known as Jakobshavn. The third-largest city in Greenland after Nuuk and Sisimiut, Ilulissat has a population of 4,670 (2020).

Kalaallisut is the Greenlandic language of West Greenland (East Greenland has its own) and the Kalaallisut word for “icebergs” is Ilulissat! So there was no question why we were here; indeed, this is the town closest to the Ilulissat Icefjord UNESCO World Heritage Site that we were about to visit.

The hotel in the distance is one of three in town catering to tourists and scientists. In 2015, there were 22,000 international tourists and 15,000 local tourists, with the majority coming in July and August.

A plane passed overhead bringing passengers from Iceland as part of a seasonal schedule.

When Zion Church (Zion’s Kirke) was dedicated as a Lutheran church in 1779, it was the largest man-made building in Greenland. According to the Geological Survey of Denmark website, “During the Napoleonic Wars supplies from Denmark were limited, and the time from 1807 to 1814 in particular was a period of great hardship. In Jakobshavn, the hunters were forced to re-melt the lead from the roof and windows of the Zion Church in order to make rifle bullets.” It was moved to this location from lower ground in 1929, and services continue there today.

I admired these rocks at the shoreline, below. According to Canadian geologist, Dr. Marc St-Onge, Senior Emeritus Scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada, who has worked throughout the Arctic: “The bedrock geology of the Ilulissat region comprises dominantly 2.84–2.76 billion years old Archean orthogneiss (gneiss derived from a plutonic precursor), reworked and metamorphosed 1.88 billion years ago by the Nagssugtoqidian orogenic belt.”  In fact, Greenland has some of the oldest known Archean rocks on the planet, with a zircon crystal from the tonalitic gneiss protolith (the original rock before being metamorphosed) at Amîtsoq near Nuuk U/Pb-dated to 3.872 Ga (Giga annum or billion years ago). Incidentally, the Greenland rock is younger than the oldest-known exposed rock in the world, the Acasta Gneiss dated at 4.02 Ga and found in 1983 by Dr. St-Onge and his geologist wife Dr. Janet King 300 km north of Yellowknife, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. 

Once docked, we set off on foot to the outskirts of Ilulissat, passing the inevitable sled dogs on the way.

Before long, we arrived at the boardwalk leading to the edge of the icefjord.  The boardwalk passes through the Sermermiut Valley, which was once an Inuit settlement. At 1.4 k (.87 mile) in length, it is a pleasant, easy hike, but one with a spectacular terminus that showcases one of the planet’s most awe-inspiring phenomena.

I marked the Google Earth map below with yellow arrows to show the boardwalk and its relationship to town.

It is simply impossible to describe how thrilling it was to walk through this gentle meadow with its delicate little ecosystems of plants and ancient rock toward this massive parade of glacial ice slipping, sliding and booming towards the ocean.

In 2004, as it was creating the International Heritage Site designation, UNESCO described the site and determined that it met two criteria:

“The combination of a huge ice sheet and a fast-moving glacial ice-stream calving into a fjord covered by icebergs is a phenomenon only seen in Greenland and Antarctica. Ilulissat offers both scientists and visitors easy access for close view of the calving glacier front as it cascades down the ice sheet and into the ice-choked fjord. The wild and highly scenic combination of rock, ice and sea, along with the dramatic sounds produced by the moving ice combine to present a memorable natural spectacle.

The Ilulissat Icefjord is an outstanding example of a stage in the Earth’s history:  the last ice age of the Quaternary Period. The ice-stream is one of the fastest (40 m per day) and most active in the world. Its annual calving of over 46 km3 of ice accounts for 10% of the production of all Greenland calf ice, more than any other glacier outside Antarctica. The glacier has been the object of scientific attention for 250 years and, along with its relative ease of accessibility, has significantly added to the understanding of ice-cap glaciology, climate change and related geomorphic processes.”

As usual, I was distracted with all the photography opportunities in the meadows flanking the boardwalk, and had to hurry along to catch up.  (Thankfully, my friend Anne snapped this photo of me, something that rarely happens when I travel.) It was so warm that lovely day in the Arctic, I didn’t need the jacket I’d brought along. However, according to the World Metereological Organization, Greenland also boasts the lowest temperature ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere, -69.6 C (-93.3 F) on December 22, 1991 at Klinck, with an elevation of 3,105 metres near the topographic summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

The calved ice loomed ahead, but I also loved seeing all the plants, like ubiquitous Scheuchzer’s cotton grass (Eriophorum scheuchzeri)…..

….. with its fluffy white fruiting heads.

The meadow was a tapestry of heath plants, blueberries, mouse-ear chickweed, willow and….

…. dwarf birch (Betula glandulosa).

In the damper spots, mushrooms emerged from luxuriant carpets of moss.

Greenland bellflower grew in drier places, (Campanula rotundifolia subsp. gieseckiana).  

Alpine catchfly (Viscaria alpina) showed off its magenta flowers.

A little Lapland longspur (Calcarius laponicus) eyed me as it ate a seed.

Nearby, creeping crowberry (Empetrum nigrum) was exhibiting serious browning, a result of warm weather.

Tufted saxifrage (Saxifraga caespitosa) is one of ten saxifrage species that grow in the meadows, according to the UNESCO list of flora.

Everyone had their cameras out.

The boardwalk took us down near the meadow’s edge, where the sheer majesty of the icefjiord was on display.

You could view it from there….

….. or from the top of the rocky cliff overlooking the fjord. This was one of my favourite photos from the entire trip, simply showing the scale of the massive icebergs clogging the fjord.

Sometimes the word “spectacular” is just not descriptive enough.

There were stairs to a higher location for those who wanted a different vantage point. In fact, there are a few marked trails for those who want to venture further on the site.

From up there, I looked down on Adventure Canada’s intrepid photographer, Dennis Minty, whose photos from the various expeditions are simply beautiful.

If we ventured too far down on the rocks, someone would yell: “Move up further. If one of those icebergs cracks and breaks away, the tsunami would wash you away.”

Visitors are also warned not to stand on the rocky beach along the fjord.

To get an idea of how daunting the tsunami waves can be, have a look at this video showing a massive iceberg cracking, then turning over: 

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According to Wikipedia, “Some 35 billion tonnes of icebergs calve off and pass out of the fjord each year. Icebergs breaking from the glacier are often so large (up to a kilometer in height) that they are too tall to float down the fjord and lie stuck on the bottom of its shallower areas, sometimes for years, until they are broken up by the force of the glacier and icebergs further up the fjord.” 

What we were looking at from our vantage point was the mouth of the glacier with its iceberg-clogged fjord. We couldn’t actually see the ice sheet itself, but it must be something to fly above its massive expanse and gaze down in summer at the meltwater lakes and rivers, as shown in the NASA photo below. Research on the ice sheet takes many forms, from Landsat and Grace Satellites with radar probing imagery to determine ice loss to long-range high-tech-equipped flights over its surface.  A project called GreenDrill planned for an area near the Hiawatha Glacier in north Greenland aims to drill down into bedrock to determine the last time the ice disappeared. Last year, researchers discovered that, rather than retreating as it had done for the past few decades, Jakobshavn Icefjord had actually slowed, re-advanced and thickened for three consecutive years, mainly due to colder ocean temperatures at the outlet in Disko Bay.

Photo by Maria-José Viñas-NASA Earth Science News Team

The photo below shows Swiss Camp, run by the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and set up to study the Jakobshavn glacier. Tragically, its long-time director Konrad Steffen fell into a crevasse on the ice sheet and drowned on August 8, 2020.  

Photo by Lino Schmid & Moira Prati – Licensed under
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

Operation Ice Bridge has collected data from Jakobshavn Glacier itself for many years. In the video below, you can see the actual calving front.

I love this photo because it contrasts two different planetary timescales:  Archaean rock that is more than 1.8 billion years old and icebergs containing frozen water that might be tens of thousands years old.   

To view a truly stunning gallery of images from Ilulissat, have a look at this site featuring the work of photographer Kristjan Fridriksson.

Returning from the icefjord to town was a little anticlimactic, to say the least, but it was lovely to come down to earth at the museum that was the home of famous Greenland explorer Knud Rasmussen (1879-1933).

The son of a Danish missionary and his Danish-Inuit wife, Rasmussen became an explorer and anthropologist, making seven expeditions between 1912-33 throughout Greenland and Arctic Canada as far west as Nome, Alaska.

Rasmussen was the first European to cross the Northwest Passage via dog sled.

The front door of the Rasmussen museum opens onto a spectacular view of Disko Bay – a view that likely remains mostly unchanged from his days in the house.

We inspected a typical Greenland sod house at the front of the Rasmussen museum.

Then we walked to the top of Ilulissat for a good view of the bay and a quick stroll through the residential neighbourhoods.

This house might have won the Greenland colour prize, but all the houses seemed to celebrate brilliant colour – not surprising in a place where winter lasts most of the year.

The ubiquitous false mayweed (Tripleurospermum maritimum) was in full bloom. Such a lovely native, adapted to growing in the salty air and soil of the far north seaside.

After lunch on the ship, it was time to head out on a Disko Bay zodiac excursion. The captain in this zodiac was marine biologist Deanna Leonard-Spitzer, who did the whale-spotting on our expedition.

We got as close as we could to the big calved icebergs. Given that only 10% of an iceberg is above the water surface, you get an idea here of the size of these monsters.

Photographing icebergs is a little addictive.

Although I had been warm enough to take off my coat walking down the icefjord boardwalk, being out on the water was definitely cooler.

Seagulls enjoyed perching on the icebergs as they fished. I think these are Iceland gulls (Larus glaucoides glaucoides).

For the most part, icebergs are sparkling white with the accumulated snow from… who knows how many winters?  Icebergs, after all, are just massive aggregations of winter snow that has fallen on the ice sheet – packed, condensed, frozen, surface melted, refrozen, repeat, repeat, repeat – before finally calving off from glaciers in chunks and floating away in the ocean While 96.5% of earth’s water is saline, ice sheets, glaciers and permanent snow account for 1.7% (the balance is groundwater and lakes, etc.) with the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets accounting for 68.7% of earth’s freshwater. That massive volume combined with an increase in global warming  resulting in melting of the ice sheets leading to sea level rise is one of the major focuses of climate scientists today.

We cruised past an iceberg beginning to melt and noticed the soot embedded in the snow. Scientists have noticed an increase in darkened snow on the ice sheets (and even in the snow atop the Himalayas) due to soot from forest fires and pollution; that darkness becomes a positive feedback loop by reducing the albedo in the ice sheet and absorbing more solar radiation, resulting in faster melting.

At the base of the iceberg, you could see the air bubbles that form part of the iceberg’s structure. These bubbles, trapped between snow layers year after year become part of the ice. When cored as part of ice sheet research, they give scientists many clues as to the composition of the atmosphere at the time they were formed, and now.

For an excellent article on The Secrets in Greenland’s Ice Sheet, read Jon Gertner’s masterful 2015 story in the New York Times Magazine. He has also written a book called The Ice at the End of the World, available in paperback from Penguin Random House.

After our zodiac tour and dinner on the ship, we were treated to a dance party by Adventure Canada’s entertainer, Thomas Kovacs.  These social events were such fun and the resource staff participated on each occasion….

…. including photographer Dennis Minty, left, and now-retired Adventure Canada founder Matthew Swan, right, whose daughter Cedar Swan is now CEO of the company. 

While I loved hearing them sing, as the skies darkened I found myself drawn to the quiet of the nearby deck where I was transfixed by the icebergs, now dark mauve in the golden twilight, the seabirds wheeling, the Greenland coastal mountains hulking behind.

I felt so privileged to have seen this remarkable place, to have the opportunity to glimpse the setting for one of earth’s most critical and endangered systems, and to expand in a small way my understanding of the Arctic.

*******

This is the 6th in my Eastern Arctic blog series. Be sure to read about:

Iqaluit

Butterfly Bay and the Waters off Baffin Island

Pangnirtung

Sunneshine Fjord

Sisimiut

Cruising the Eastern Arctic – Sisimiut

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After our overnight crossing of Davis Strait, we arrived in Sisimiut, Greenland on the morning of August 1st and cleared customs.  The second largest city in Greenland after the capital Nuuk which lies 320 km (200 mi) to the south, Sisimiut has a population of 5,582, mostly Greenlandic Inuit. Although the town was founded in 1756 by the Danish as the mission and trading station Holsteinborg, it has been occupied for 4500 years, including the Thule people (1200-1400 AD) who are ancestors of the modern Inuit.  Following colonization and the Napoleonic Wars, Greenland, originally a dependency of Norway (the Norse settled here in 1000 AD), became part of the Kingdom of Denmark in 1919 (contested by Norway but ultimately settled in court in 1931). Greenland has its own parliament (home rule) and Greenlanders also have Danish citizenship. Here you see the port and off to the right is the Royal Greenland fishing fleet freezing house. Sisimiut’s main industry is fishing, primarily shrimp as well as cod, turbot, haddock, saithe (pollock) and crabs.

Like other Greenland towns, Sisimiut’s houses look like they came out of a paintbox, so vivid are the colours. They are a mix of traditional, single-family houses, and communal housing in prefabricated structures shipped from Denmark. An apartment block built in 1966 turned out to be a less-than-ideal accommodation for fishermen who had to keep their equipment and nets along with their catch on the balconies. That building was torn down in 2012.

As in Nunavut, buildings in Greenland are constructed on high ground and on elevated foundations drilled right into bedrock.

The harbour was crowded with fishing boats…..

….. and some sat at anchor in a quiet bay.

We took a walking tour of the town, passing by houses with Iceland poppies (Papaver nudicaule subsp. radicatum) in flower behind fences…..

…. and fields of white cotton grass (Eriophorum scheuzerii) grew in abundance.

We saw dwarf fireweed (Chamerion latifolium)….

…. and alpine bistort (Bistorta vivipara).

Flies were foraging on the false mayweed, aka seaside chamomile (Tripleurospermum maritimum).

There was a beautiful drift of lupines, but this species, Nootka lupine (Lupinus nootkatensis), is native to northern British Columbia, Alaska and the Aleutians is considered an invasive exotic in the Eastern Arctic.

Up the hill behind the picturesque old boats was Sisimiut’s “Old Church” or Bethel Church, consecrated in January 1775.

Nearby was the “New Church”, consecrated in 1926.

We met Sisimiut residents walking  down the road….

…. and saw some riding bicycles.

There was even a bus in Sisimiut!

The Taseralik Cultural Center (Kulturikkut) is a beautiful building on the shore of Nalunnguarfik Lake. The center hosts concerts, theatre and art shows.

I loved this reflection of a neighbouring building in the lake.

Mare’s tail (Hippuris vulgaris) is a circumpolar marginal aquatic plant and it offers food for….

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….. ducks!

We saw a variety of traditional earthen/turf huts in Greenland. This one was behind a house…. maybe a root cellar, storage for firewood or a garden shed?

Hunting trophy? I suspect it’s a caribou jawbone.

At one time, sleds and sled-dogs were essential to hunting and fishing in Greenland, but that has changed in the past few decades. Today, sledding is mostly a tourist activity and hunters and fishermen use snowmobiles (which used to be banned for hunting in Greenland).

Nevertheless, we were interested to tour the valley where the sled dogs are kept, their numbers rapidly depleting – to the consternation of cultural historians. Come the winter, they will be teamed in front of sleds for tourism sledding tours.

The Arctic Circle near Sisimuit is the southernmost point in Greenland where sled dogs (Canis familiaris borealis) may be used, i.e. the point at which sea ice is present in winter. South of here, no sled dogs may be owned, owing to the dog’s wild temperament, which can be dangerous, and also to keep the breed as pure as possible. Similarly, no non-sled-dogs can be owned north of the Arctic Circle. These are not at all like Alaskan sled dogs, which are mixes of husky, Malamute, Samoyed and other breeds.  

They are not pets, they are labourers, and no one was petting them.

I was intrigued to see a little group of Icelandic horses in the valley too.  Though only the size of ponies, they are long-lived and hardy.

Circling back, we stopped at a quiet bay enclosed by ancient rock outcrops. The water surface was so still, the reflections were mesmerizing.

I could have stayed there all day, photographing.

According to geologists, the rocks here in West Greenland are orthogneiss basement aged between 2.87 – 2.81 Ga, Interestingly, some of the oldest rocks on the planet – 3.8 – 3.9 Ga – have been found in the Isua Greenstone Belt near the capital Nuuk.

Heading back towards the ship, we visited a store that sold fishing gear and repaired nets.

And we popped into a market that sold freshly-dug potatoes…..

….. and all manner of harp seal (Pagophilus groenlandicus) parts.

 As we were climbing the stairs to board the ship, I turned to see a couple of Sisimiut fishermen coming up the steps behind me…..

….. carrying big bags of freshly-caught Acadian redfish (Sebastes fasciatus). I knew what would likely be on the menu soon!

After dinner, we convened in the ship’s lounge for a lecture from ecologist and Yellowstone-based bear specialist, Jim Halfpenny, with sobering statistics on the year-to-year loss of Greenland’s permanent ice cap.

He also explained the albedo effect. To quote from the Arctic Warming website: “A positive feedback mechanism is the albedo effect. The Arctic’s highly reflective snow and ice cover reflects the sun’s energy back into space, keeping the Arctic cold and balancing Earth’s regional temperatures. As the white Arctic snow and ice melts it is replaced by darker water and land surfaces, which absorb more energy from the sun, further warming the surface of the region and accelerating Arctic and global warming. This self-reinforcing loop is called the albedo affect and it is one of many positive feedback mechanisms. As dark ocean water absorbs heat, it expands. This thermal expansion, along with freshwater runoff from melting ice sheets and glaciers into the ocean, will cause sea levels to rise.”

Jim’s lecture prepared us for our visit the next day to Ilulissat, where we would tour the renowned UNESCO heritage site at Sermeq Kujalleq (Jakobshavn Icefjord). That spectacular day — one of the most thrilling I’ve experienced in all my travels — is coming up in my next blog!

One Steppe at a Time

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Last June, during my visit to Denver with the Garden Bloggers’ Fling, I spent a little extra time in the fascinating Steppe Garden at Denver Botanic Gardens. I had been there once before during a late April visit when wild Tulipa greigii, Fritillaria pallidiflora and Iris bucharica from the Central Asian steppe were in flower. I blogged about my 2018 spring visit at the time.

But a year later, it had filled in nicely and I was fascinated with all the unusual plants. As DBG says on its website, “The Steppe Garden is an ambitiously diverse collection of tough and unique plants from steppe biomes, some of the most rugged habitats on Earth. This quarter-acre garden brings together the North American, South American, Central Asian and Southern African steppes to explore the diversity and similarities of their cold, dry grasslands and shrublands”. Designed by Didier Design Studio and installed in 2016, the garden is still filling in. The photo below (courtesy of Denver Botanic Gardens) shows an aerial view of the Steppe Garden as it was in 2017. I have numbered the individual gardens: 1) Patagonia; 2 and 3) Central Asia; 4) cultivated steppe (hybrids and plants influenced by human hands; 5) Southern Africa; and 6) Intermontane steppe of North America.

Drone aerial of the Steppe Garden – 2017

Let’s take a walk through, below. That’s South Africa on the left and the Central North American steppe of the Great Plains on the right. Denver, of course, is part of that steppe biome and DBG has focused on the unique ecology of steppe plants in this space. 

As the sign says, the plants found in this garden are native to eastern Colorado and grow in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains.

In June, that means penstemons! Here we see a mix of lavender-purple Rocky Mountain penstemon (P. strictus), pink showy penstemon (P. grandiflorus) and wispy foxtail barley (Hordeum jubatum).

I grow showy penstemon myself at our cottage north of Toronto and I know what a tough hombre it is for dry, stony soil. But it looks so refined in the Steppe Garden, below.

Just outside the Steppe Garden itself is the Laura Smith Porter Plains Garden, featuring plants endemic to what was once native shortgrass prairie, with seeds sourced within 30 miles of Denver. Under the frieze here is soapweed yucca (Yucca glauca) and blue Nuttall’s larkspur.

Walk out the path and you get a feel for the shortgrass steppe or shortgrass prairie of the Great Plains. It’s these wonderful approximations of ‘what used to be’ that make Denver Botanic Gardens so special.

Here is Nuttall’s larkspur (Delphinium nuttallianum), named for Thomas Nuttall, the Yorkshire-born botanist who collected extensively in the United States from the Great Lakes to Kansas, Wyoming and Utah, then to California and Hawaii, followed by time in the Pacific Northwest.

Plains prickly pear cactus (Opuntia polyacantha), another shortgrass native, is in bloom in June.

Let’s go back into the Steppe Garden and enjoy this view over the water to the Central Asian Steppe Garden.  

As the sign states, this is the largest steppe on the planet

Visitors walk through a microcosm of the species that grow in the Central Asian Steppe. I love that the gardens here look more like meadows than botanical garden collections, but each geographic section has been carefully sourced and the plantings designed by the Steppe Collections curator and plant explorer Michael H. Bone (more on Mike later).

The Altai mountains are in the Central Asian Steppe and located where China, Russia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan come together. And this is the Altai onion, Allium altaicum.

This is Angelica brevicaulis from the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

I love the Eurasian horned poppies (Glaucium corniculatum) and photographed them growing with roses in the garden of Panayoti Kelaidis, senior curator and director of outreach at Denver Botanic Gardens. (Read my blog on Panayoti’s Denver garden here.)

Most gardeners are very familiar with opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), which has long been naturalized in Central Asia, as well as many other regions of the world..

Phlomoides oreophila is a new plant for me, native from Central Asia to Northwest China.

Leaving the Central Asia Steppe, we come to a part of the garden that is still being developed, the South American Steppe, featuring the plants of Patagonia.

Looking over the water again, we see the main path through the Steppe Garden featuring two beautifully crafted stone sculptures. Behind is the South African Steppe.

Let’s take a closer look at the farthest sculpture, which is actually a beautiful water feature that serves as a special crevice garden for chasmophytes, i.e. plants that make their homes in narrow openings in rocky outcrops in the steppe regions. The open part is a trickling water fountain.

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Look at these little jewels! I photographed the plants below, including the lilac-flowered Iberis simplex (I. taurica), in April 2018. It grows in the Taurus Mountains in Southern Turkey.

Here is the top of the water feature in June 2019….

….. and another view. What exquisite stonework!

The South African Steppe is the star here, in my opnion, given DBG’s long history with plants from the region.. Let’s have a look at some of the plants, such as….

…. the strange-looking caterpillar grass (Harpochloa falx).

Apart from plants growing in the large, rocky structures, there are some beautiful container vignettes that will inspire visitors with restricted space – like this assemblage of species from southern Africa.

I love this border with blue cape forget-me-not (Anchusa capensis)and magenta ice plant (Delosperma cooperi).

And as a confirmed bee photographer, it was fun to capture a honey bee nectaring on the anchusa.

Here’s a long view of this section in the South African Steppe.

South Africa, of course, represents the largest floristic province in the world, and the Steppe Garden divides plants into the Western South African Steppe….

…. and the much more lush Eastern South African Steppe.

There is a lot of fireweed (Senecio macrocephalus) in bloom in the eastern steppe in June.

And kniphofias, of course, are signature South African plants.

Look at this brilliant stone work.

Another grouping of containers highlights plants of the Eastern South African Steppe.

But Denver Botanic Gardens is famous for its ice plants, and they are featured prominently here in the part of the Steppe Garden devoted to garden introductions.

This one is called Delosperma Jewel of Desert Grenade. Isn’t it lovely?

More examples of the delosperma cultivated rainbow of colours, as seen in the South Africa Steppe.

I know I’ve probably missed a lot of detail and might even have mixed up the odd steppe region in my rush through the garden, but I do consider myself fortunate to have met the garden’s curator, Mike Bone, aka #steppesuns, below, this March in Toronto when he spoke to members of the Ontario Rock Garden Society. Mike is an enthusiastic plant propagator, seed collector and explorer who has spent decades working at DBG, acquiring plants from the four great steppe regions of the world and getting them displayed not just at his own garden, but other botanical gardens throughout the world.  I know his mentor, Panayoti Kelaidis is very fond of Mike – or “Ghengis Bone” as he calls him in this blog he wrote about travelling with him in Mongolia.

They even collaborated on a 2015 book called Steppes: The Plants and Ecology of the World’s Semi-Arid Regions,co-authored by Dan Johnson (whose garden I blogged about recently), Mike Kintgen and Larry Vickerman, all of Denver Botanic Gardens.  As the book’s description states, “steppes occupy enormous areas on four continents. Yet these ecosystems are among the least studied on our planet. Given that the birth and evolution of human beings have been so intimately interwoven with steppe regions, it is amazing that so few attempts have been made to compare and quantify the features of these regions.”

I’m so happy to have had the chance to visit DBG’s fascinating Steppe Garden, and look forward to exploring it in other seasons in the future.

Brown Eyed Girl(s)

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Let’s stick with Sir Van Morrison in this, the ninth blog of #mysongscapes. The year before he recorded ‘Astral Weeks’ with ‘Madame George’, my favourite song and the subject of my last blog, he had a smash hit with the pop-infused ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ of 1967. As usual with Van, however, the song’s meaning was confusing. He originally wrote it, he has said, with a calypso flavour as ‘Brown Skinned Girl’… “kind of a Jamican song”.. but changed the words to make it more radio-friendly. The lyrics were racy for the time (even though 1967 was the hippie-flavoured summer of love). “Making love in the green grass/behind the stadium with you/My brown-eyed girl” didn’t make it past the censors for a lot of radio stations, who substituted different chorus lyrics when they played it. But it’s still the song that gets entire tables of women of all ages up dancing when it’s played by the deejay at that wedding reception. Because who doesn’t want to be Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl”?

BROWN EYED GIRL

Hey, where did we go?
Days when the rains came
Down in the hollow
Playin’ a new game
Laughing and a running hey, hey
Skipping and a jumping
In the misty morning fog with
Our hearts a thumpin’ and you
My brown-eyed girl
You, my brown-eyed girl

Whatever happened
To Tuesday and so slow?
Going down the old mine
With a transistor radio
Standing in the sunlight laughing
Hiding behind a rainbow’s wall
Slipping and sliding
All along the waterfall, with you
My brown-eyed girl
You, my brown-eyed girl

Do you remember when we used to sing
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da
Just like that
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da, la te da

So hard to find my way
Now that I’m all on my own
I saw you just the other day
My, how you have grown
Cast my memory back there, Lord
Sometimes I’m overcome thinking ’bout
Making love in the green grass
Behind the stadium with you
My brown-eyed girl
You, my brown-eyed girl

Do you remember when we used to sing
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da, la te da
(Bit by bit, by bit, by bit, by bit, by bit)
(Sha la la la la la la, la te da, la te da
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da, la te da
(La te da, da da da da da da da da)

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My Brown-Eyed Girls

Okay… you knew where this was going, didn’t you? Yes, I do love my rudbeckias, whether they’re called black-eyed susans or blackeyed Susans or brown-eyed suzies or coneflowers.. whatever. In fact, at our cottage they were once the only flower I grew. Seriously. In 2002, when we were trying to keep the freshly delivered soil from sliding down the hillside at our newly-built cottage on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto, I mixed a few ounces of the tiny seeds of the native Rudbeckia hirta or wild black-eyed susan, into a sack of red fescue (Festuca rubra) seed and raked it in. Because this species is biennial, that first summer the little rosettes of foliage formed. But the following year, they flowered in golden profusion and my hillside looked magical.

Every time I walked down my stairs, it was into a sea of black-eyed susans.

I spent a lot of time crouched down photographing them.

That summer of 2003 was so magical (and I knew it was once-in-a-lifetime) so I did some impressionist stuff like this….

…. and this….

…. and this butterfly. And the following year I had a photography show to celebrate my “black-eyed susan summer”.

I asked my 92-year-old mother-in-law (then still living down the lake shore from us) to hold a little bunch of them in her hands. Ten years later, it became the final image in the slide show at her funeral service.

The black-eyed susans attracted lots of pollinators to the true flowers, the little yellow specks you can hardly see arrayed around the brown eye or cone.

Rudbeckia hirta’s botanical name means “hairy”, and you can see the hairs on the sepals and involucre, below. They also line the stem and leaves.

With so many thousands of black-eyed susans in my meadows, it was fascinating to explore them carefully. Doing so allowed me to see that nature often makes mistakes, like this mutant double flower.

And I was fascinated with the difference in size and vigor between plants grown from seed I had sown in rich, moist soil and those I’d sprinkled in dusty, dry soil near the roots of white pine trees. This phenomenon is not part of the evolutionary journey of the species, but is the result of “phenotypic plasticity”, i.e. the ability of a species to adapt to conditions without any mutational change in its genetic makeup.

As the years passed, the black-eyed susans became just part of the cast of characters in my cottage flora. They looked lovely with butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) and pink musk mallow (Malva moschata) …..

….. and  hoary vervain (Verbena stricta)……

….. and peeking around the big, fragrant blossoms of the Orienpet lily Lilium ‘Conca d’Or’.

Rudbeckias are part of the massive Asteraceae family of composite species evolved to offer compound inflorescences composed of colourful, insect-attracting ray petals and masses of tiny “true” flowers. In my meadows I grow several of these yellow composite “daisy” flowers, including Rudbeckia hirta and Rudbeckia subtomentosa as well as Heliopsis, Silphium and Ratibida species. Not shown in the tapestry below are Coreopsis and Anthemis, also in my meadows.

For late summer, I love sweet blackeyed susan (Rudbeckia subtomentosa). This species gets its name from the subtle fragrance of the flowers that appear in clusters atop tall stems. Its newly-emerging central cone is truly brown, unlike the very dark cone of Rudbeckia hirta.  Later it turns black.

In my meadows, it flowers at the same time as New York ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis), below and also Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium maculatum).

Throughout summer I gather blackeyed susans for bouquets. One year, I photographed a vase in my meadow filled with what was in bloom there in mid-July. Apart from Rudbeckia hirta, there’s pink Monarda fistulosa, lilac Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Fascination’, orange Asclepias tuberosa  and yellow Heliopsis helianthoides and Coreopsis lanceolata.

One rainy August day, I lined up some vintage apothecary bottles filled with what I found in bloom or fruit. Black-eyed susans were just a small part of that lovely abundance.

By September, the meadow has fewer species in flower but in the tiny bouquets below, sweet black-eyed susans (Rudbeckia subtomentosa) looked lovely with long-flowering Heliopsis helianthoides, ‘Gold Plate’ yarrow (Achillea filipendulina), goldenrod (Solidago rugosa) and the native asters, including lavender Symphyotrichum azureum, purple New England aster (Symphyotrichum nova-angliae) and white lance-leaved aster (Symphyotrichum lanceolatum).

Another year, I combined Canada goldenrod with New York ironweed and sweet black-eyed susans for a September bouquet.
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In my front yard pollinator garden in Toronto, I use the ubiquitous, award-winning perennial black-eyed susan Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’.  It likes to seize ground so I occasionally pull it out when it wants to invade its less aggressive neighbours…..

…. but I like the rich gold as an easy, long-flowering filler plant with the pinks, blues and purples of echinacea, perovskia, liatris and sedum.

Here it is with late-blooming rough blazing star (Liatris aspera).

‘Goldsturm’ black-eyed susan is a mainstay in my friend Marnie Wright’s beautiful Bracebridge, Ontario garden, along with summer phlox and hydrangeas. (Have a look at this blog I wrote about Marnie’s garden.)

When I travel, I take note of different black-eyed susans used effectively in designs. This is sweet black-eyed susan (R. subtomentosa) in an exuberant display on New York’s High Line.

At the wonderful Legacy Prairie at Niagara Parks Botanical Garden, Rudbeckia hirta is used throughout. Here we see it mixed with wild beebalm (Monarda fistulosa)…..

…. and here with a cloud of white mountain mint (Pycnanthemum tenuifolium) and orange butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa).

Here it is with purple dense blazing star (Liatris spicata) at the front, tall vervain (Verbena hastata) in the middle and gray-headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata) at right.

Native grasses can be good partners for black-eyed susans. At the Toronto Botanical Garden (TBG), I photographed Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’ with little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium).

But the TBG has lots of gardens and here we see Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium maculatum ‘Gateway’) partnering with ‘Goldsturm’.

Another summer, I photographed ‘Goldsturm’ with tall, pale-yellow Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’ behind it and smoke bush (Cotinus coggygria ‘Purpurea’) beside it. The spike seedheads are from ligularia.

Another late-summer perennial at the TBG is great blue lobelia (L. siphilitica), which looks beautiful with R. ‘Goldsturm’.

The TBG also uses a quill-petalled cultivar of Rudbeckia subtomentosa called ‘Henry Eilers’, combining it nicely with rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium).

I adored this lighter-than-air combination of R subtomentosa ‘Henry Eilers’ matched up perfectly with the dark bottlebrush flowers of Japanese burnet (Sanguisorba tenuifolia ‘Purpurea’).

But the best design I saw using ‘Henry Eilers’ was at Terra Nova Nurseries in Oregon, where it was combined with the snakeroot Actaea simplex ‘Black Negligee’, its dark foliage accenting those dark cones perfectly.

Breeders continue to work with black-eyed susans, especially at Chicago Botanic Gardens where numerous taxa are assessed in the Bernice E. Lavin Plant Evaluation Garden, below.

There are other species of Rudbeckia native to North America that are often seen in gardens. This is brown-eyed susan (Rudbeckia triloba), below, a short-lived perennial which is often described as weedy or invasive, but its small flowers can be a good addition to a rich, moist meadow.

Rudbeckia nitida or shiny coneflower is tall with reflexed yellow petals, prominent greenish cones. The cultivar ‘Herbstsonne’ is the one most often available (though some experts believe this cultivar is actually a hybrid between R. nitida and R. laciniata).

Rudbeckia laciniata or cutleaf coneflower is usually seen in its old-fashioned double forms, ‘Hortensia’, below, or ‘Goldquelle’.

Among the showiest black-eyed susans are the gloriosa daisies, which are tetraploid versions of Rudbeckia hirta. That means they have twice the normal chromosomes, a condition created by treating them with colchicine (from autumn crocuses) or radiation. Tetraploidy results in larger flowers than normal, and the condition persists in seedlings so gloriosa daisies come true from seed. Like regular R. hirta, gloriosa daisies are usually biennial, but may flower the same year if seeds are sown indoors in winter.  Gloriosa daisies exhibit myriad colours or streaks of colour. Or they might have doubled petals.

At the Montreal Botanical Garden (MBG) one summer, I photographed a delightful meadow of gloriosa daisies – a wonderful variety of cultivars mixed with blue cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus) and orange cosmos (C. sulphureus).

 

Along the central strip in MBG’s magnificent perennial garden, they had planted rainbow chard with the dwarf gloriosa daisy ‘Toto’ and a curly carex edging.

At the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington, Ontario, I liked seeing native bottlebrush grass (Elymus hystrix) interplanted with gloriosa daisies.

I’ll finish my Van Morrison-inspired musings with a few gloriosa beauties. This is ‘Autumn Colors’ (which is a very variable cultivar)…..

…. and ‘Denver Daisy’….

…. and ‘Cherry Brandy’…..

….. and ‘Irish Eyes’ with its lovely green cone.

Speaking of Irish eyes, mine happen to be green.  The genetics of eye colour is incredibly complex, but depends on alleles in your parents’ genome and the concentration of melanin in the iris.

I am the only one in my family of six to have green eyes – my parents both had blue eyes, and my children all have blue or greyish-blue eyes. If I wanted to be Van Morrison’s brown-eyed girl – laughing and a running hey hey/skipping and a jumping – I’d have to buy tinted contact lenses, something that makeup artists frequently use in film. I didn’t want to go that far, but I do have Photoshop. What do you think?

*********

This is the ninth blog in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading, have a look at the others beginning with

  1. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’;
  2. Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography;
  3. Vietnam and Songs of Protest;
  4. Galway Bay and memories of my grandfather and Ireland;
  5. Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme;
  6. The John Denver lullaby I sang to my first grandchild, Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine.
  7. Gordon Lightfoot for a Snow Day
  8. Madame George by Van Morrison – my favourite song in the world

And please do feel free to leave a comment below. I love to read them.