Pushed to the Limits...

After several months of below average precipitation, this July is already shaping up to be another brutally hot one. At this time most plants are pushed to their limits, and it now pays to have invested in drought tolerant native plants, not only for their beauty, but their ability to weather the storm, or in this case lack thereof...

Of course this doesn't leave room for disruptions from invasive species which further push their limits, often past their ability to survive. So sometimes a native gardener needs to step in to help!

the invasive Japanese beetles (popillia japonica) have wrecked havoc once more - the virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) and the wild grape are among the most severely damaged...

the beetles "skeletonize" the leaves and only the veins and outer shape remain... 

like last year I tried to collect them into a soapy bucket, but really I would have to be doing this every day several times as there are just so many!

typically gardening books say to let them drown slowly, but instead I will stomp on them...

supposedly the rotting corpses of the beetles are a deterrent to the rest of the "flock"...

but within the hour the ants had begun to dismantle them piece by piece and take them to their nests...

the flies arrived shortly after to scavenge the rest... 

The Evil Twin...

After many hours of work pulling out the bell shaped flowers, I decided to research a little further found here: http://www.coldclimategardening.com/2007/07/26/campanula-rapunculoides-the-evil-twin/ that the flowers could also be something much worse... they could be the non-native and invasive creeping bellflower (campanula rapunculoides)... the Ontario Wildflowers database listed them as native, but I think that they are mistaken...

In order to ascertain the identity of these misbehaving flowers I needed to find a way to differentiate between the similar species so I found this:

http://www.examiner.com/article/adenophora-and-its-evil-twin-revisited

"gardeners can identify their plants by taking a flower and gently pulling off the petals, leaving the style standing in the center. You will be left holding the base of the flower with a bumpy appendage (the ovary) in the middle and the style sticking straight up out of the center. VERY CAREFULLY peel off the outside of the bumpy appendage, leaving the style standing. If underneath, all you see is a flat base to which the style is attached, then you have a Campanula. If, however, you see, after the peeling, another bulb-like appendage surrounding the style, then you have an Adenophora."

So I went to work dissecting some flowers:

dome shape at bottom of stamen...

dome removed...

is this flat or bulb like?

nature is beautify close up...

Lady Bells or what?...

I was starting to rethink the identification of this plant... I was told by some old people that it was a foxglove digitalis... so I have tried to pull it out over the years so the dogs or wandering babies don't eat it and die...

This year I decided not to care about dogs and babies and let it grow in... after seeing its true form, I didn't think it was in fact a digitalis species... 

I was going to call upon more minds to help identify it but I just decided to search the shape of the flower, a bell, and found this: http://ontariowildflowers.com/main/species.php?id=241

It a creeping bell flower and its an Ontario native wildflower! Woooooooo!

But then I realized nature is twisted! It could also be the almost identical, and aptly named Adenophora confusa or lady bells... Damn...

So without thinking I got drastic and I spent a couple hours pulling the lady bells out of the garden... digging up the rhizomes and network of tubers is very labour intensive... and I know I didn't get it all because I had to be carefull digging so close to all the other plants, especially the sugar maple sapling... if I wanted it gone it would be next to impossible as its quite pervasive, spreading mostly through theses rhizomes...