Summer Garden-

the turning...

Summer has peaked and the days are getting shorter, though you can barely notice as yet. The rest of the season belongs to the late bloomers.

A Pawpaw tree (Asimina triloba) has arrived in the Glen to keep Charlie’s Acer palmatum company (above). The Pawpaw is most often an understory tree in the wild so I have planted it in the understory. The deer have decimated my hostas there but they won’t eat the Pawpaw, whose leaves, bark and twigs contain a potent neurotoxin, annonacin. The ripe fruit is edible, however, with a texture and flavor similar to bananas. My tree won’t bear fruit (it takes two). Pawpaws don’t fruit until they are about seven years old, in any case. At my age, seven years is about as long as a hundred.

Although I’ve posted about it before, I couldn’t resist one more image (below) of the Plumleaf Azalea (Rhododendron prunifolium) which has bloomed profusely this summer, a month after the other native azaleas have dropped their flowers. I passed more than a few minutes this afternoon watching hummingbirds fight over it.

The adelgid have discovered the Grand Fir (Abies grandis) you can glimpse in the lower right corner of the photo above. This is the same woolly adelgid that has decimated the hemlocks in the Southern Appalachians. My little fir is fortunately still small enough that I can keep them at bay with regular sprayings of neem oil solution. We do this drill every summer.

Walk in hope-

-henry

NOTE: The third installment of Laurel Falls will be live for paid subscribers at noon.