Heady, heavenly garden scents

BURYING your nose in a bunch of lavender or running your hands along a hedge in full flower is one of life’s pleasures. Whether it’s an old-fashioned rose, a small bunch of freshly picked violets or a pungent herb, the heady smell is a reminder of the joy that nature – and gardening – bring to our lives.

Lilac trees hold a special place in my heart. My mother grew them in Nottingham and she picked the flowers in spring to bring inside so we could enjoy the delicate blooms and revel in their beautiful perfume. Likewise with sweet peas, which she grew in abundance every year.

An Australian friend got quite teary in the 1960s when he came across some gum trees while in the Canary Islands, which shows how evocative a fragrance can be.

No garden is complete without something exuding an aroma, be it a tree, vine, shrub, ground cover or herb – unless, of course, you’re highly allergic. So let’s start from the ground up.

Obvious flowers that have a delicate smell are violets, but they can be a curse when they multiply, unless you go for native violets (Viola hederacea), which aren’t quite so prolific. Dianthus or pinks (smaller relatives of carnations) have a very sweet smell. Lily of the valley has a lovely perfume and flowers on Caulfield Cup Day, but I find them tricky to grow. Then there are the many heavily scented spring-flowering bulbs such as freesias and jonquils.

Government requires more fruits, veggies for school lunches

Today the government is releasing new nutrition standards for school meals that spell out dramatic changes, including slashing sodium, limiting calories and offering students a wider variety and larger portions of fruits and vegetables. These changes will raise the nutrition standards for meals for the first time in more than 15 years.

“When we send our kids to school, we expect that they won’t be eating the kind of fatty, salty, sugary foods that we try to keep them from eating at home,” first lady Michelle Obama said in a statement. She is announcing the new standards today along with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack..

Vilsack says this is a historic opportunity “to improve the quality and quantity of the school meal programs.”

The quality of school meals has been hotly debated for years because one-third of children in the USA are overweight or obese. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to set new nutrition standards for all food served in schools. The rules released today apply to school meals; regulations for other foods such those served in à la carte lines, vending machines and stores will come later.

The changes are designed to improve the health of nearly 32 million children who eat lunch at school every day and almost 11 million who eat breakfast.

Plant hardiness map revealed

The first daffodils have crept into flower and the snowdrops have peaked already. If you think winters aren’t what they used to be, you’re not alone.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Wednesday released a plant hardiness zone map of the nation that shows generally warmer winter low temperatures than the department’s previous map from 1990.

The new map divides the country into 13 zones arranged by minimum winter temperatures, in 10-degree increments. Among the shifts: The District and most of Virginia and Maryland are squarely in the relative balm of Zone 7. Specifically, they fall in the warmer half of Zone 7 where the mercury, on average, doesn’t go below 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Previously recorded in southeastern coastal Virginia, this zone now defines the coastal communities of the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River.

The colder Zone 6, which once embraced the Piedmont area and included much of Fairfax and Montgomery counties, is now pushed west of the Blue Ridge.

“The new map is generally one 5-degree Fahrenheit half zone warmer than the previous map throughout much of the United States,” said Kim Kaplan, of the Agricultural Research Service.

Botanists agree to loosen Latin’s grip

Latin is a bit like a zombie: Dead but still clamoring to get into our brains.

In one discipline, however, Latin just got a bit deader.

For at least 400 years, botanists across the globe have relied on Latin as their lingua franca, but the ardor has cooled. Scientists say plants will keep their double-barreled Latin names, but they have decided to drop the requirement that new species be described in the classical language. Instead, they have agreed to allow botanists to use English (other languages need not apply). In their scientific papers, they can still describe a newly found species of plant — or algae or fungi — in Latin if they wish, but most probably won’t.

“The new chatter is in chemicals and molecules,” said Laurence Dorr, one of three Latinists in the Smithsonian Institution’s botany department who would help their colleagues translate. “It was heading toward extinction,” said Warren Wagner, department chair.

The change, effective Jan. 1, is more than just academic. Smithsonian botanists alone might introduce as many as 100 new plant species a year, discovered either on their travels or in the national herbarium, a collection of 5 million dried specimens housed at the Natural History Museum. Globally, scientists discover 2,000 new species per annum. As many as one in five of the world’s plant species have yet to be identified, and not until they are named and known to the scientific community can they can be protected and studied further.

Nearly 7 million bats may have died from white-nose fungus, officials say

More than five years since the deadly white-nose fungus was first detected in a New York cave where bats hibernate, up to 6.7 million of the animals are estimated to have died in 16 states and Canada, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Tuesday.

The estimate, drawn from surveys by wildlife officials mostly in Northeastern states where the disease thrives, confirmed the worst fears of biologists who have been counting dead bats covered in the powdery fungus in mines and caves every winter and worrying whether the little brown bat, the northern long-eared bat and the tri-colored bat will survive.

“We’re watching a potential extinction event on the order of what we experienced with bison and passenger pigeons for this group of mammals,” said Mylea Bayless, conservation programs manager for Bat Conservation International in Austin.

“The difference is we may be seeing the regional extinction of multiple species,” Bayless said. “Unlike some of the extinction events or population depletion events we’ve seen in the past, we’re looking at a whole group of animals here, not just one species. We don’t know what that means, but it could be catastrophic.”

Bats are a top nocturnal predator, picking off night-flying insects that feed on agricultural crops and forests.

Tropical Gardening – Vitamins abound

Tropical Gardening — Vitamins abound
Sunday, January 15 2:10 am

Lucky we live Hawaii, but we can learn a lot from gardeners on other tropical islands. Right now, we are in the Dominican Republic working with farmers on a project sponsored by the Florida Association for Volunteer Action in the Caribbean and the Americas, or FAVACA.

Voltaire Moise, who is from Haiti, is working on the uses of edible crops while I work on some of the production problems. Like the folks in the Dominican Republic, we in Hawaii can grow almost anything. We have many climates, depending on elevation and whether you are on the rain-swept eastern side or the dryer leeward part of the island.

Below 2,000 feet we grow the tropicals and above we can grow the warm, temperate and even cool season crops. Tropical fruits are the favorite for most, since they are varied and unusual.

Many of these fruits are high in vitamins, minerals and energy.

So instead of popping vitamin pills every day, we should consider fruit. Those vitamin pills on your shelf, besides being pretty expensive items, are not nearly as palatable and eye appealing as fresh fruit — especially when it is grown in your own backyard.

All about Palms with William Merwin and Leland Miyano

MALP Educational Meeting—Free to the public

Date: Tuesday January 24, 2012
Place: Maui Community Service Bldg next to CTHAR Extension Services (Map) on the UH Maui campus.
Time: Pupus will be served at 6:30 pm and the talk will begin at 7:00.

On January 24th MALP is proud to host guest speakers: William Merwin and Leland Miyano as they share with us their vast combined knowledge about palms. Their talk will include information on Hawaii’s palms, palm growth habits and conservation efforts.

William Merwin, who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and is the recent US Poet Laureate, has lived and gardened on Maui for over 30 years. Most of his focus has been on cultivating palms from around the world. He has gathered approximately 800 different species of palms, creating a truly unique palm jungle within the rainforest of Maui’s north shore. His enduring gardening passion along with his legacy of being a successful poet will be preserved with the recently created “The Merwin Conservancy“.

Leland Miyano, a good friend of Merwin, is an artist, landscape designer and author from Oahu. Leland has years of experience working with native palms throughout Hawaii and has worked extensively with many highly respected people in the field of horticulture and design. Leland’s numerous books include: Hawaii’s Beautiful Tree’s and Hawaii, A Floral Paradise. Leland’s own 1-acre garden in Kahalu’u is renown for its design and features numerous palms.

CLICK HERE for full information on this truly notable event.

Tuna, meat labeling disputes highlight WTO control

You might have missed this while you were busy taking the kids to school and preparing for the holidays, but last fall, two U.S. food labeling programs suffered serious legal setbacks that threaten to confuse consumers and thwart the intentions of the “dolphin-safe” tuna and “country-of-origin” labels.

The details are complicated, but in September and November, two dispute panels for the World Trade Organization in Switzerland sided in part with Mexico and Canada on complaints against the voluntary dolphin-safe label and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s mandatory country-of-origin labeling (COOL). Mexico argued that U.S. dolphin-safe standards are misleading and discriminate against the controversial fishing techniques that Mexico employs to catch tuna. Canada argued that the COOL program discriminates against imported cattle and hogs.

Reactions to the WTO rulings have ranged from tranquil to concerned to downright outraged. Major U.S. tuna producers say they won’t change their dolphin-safe sourcing standards even if they have to change their labels. Pork and beef producers worry that Mexico and Canada might apply tariffs to U.S. meat imports if the U.S. government doesn’t comply with the WTO rulings on COOL, a regulation the meat industry has had mixed feelings about since its implementation in early 2009.

And some nonprofit groups are frustrated that the United States finds itself in this position at all. They’ve long predicted that America’s binding membership in the WTO could lead to this: sacrificing important U.S. environmental and public-safety laws in the name of free international trade.

“There has been widespread concern,” wrote the nonpartisan advocacy group Public Citizen after the dolphin-safe ruling in September, that the WTO could “second guess the U.S. Congress, courts or public by elevating the goal of maximizing trade flows over consumer and environmental protection.”

Broussonetia papyrifera: Paper Chase

Eat the Weeds
by DEANE

If you are a forager, you will be told two things constantly: One is that the plant of your admiration is “poisonous.” Sometimes they are, often they are not. The other thing you will hear is that a particular species is a “trash tree.”

When I first asked about this species I was told by a knowledgeable botanist that it was a trash tree though at the time he did not know what species it was. Over the years I wondered about its identity. It resembled a basswood tree but wasn’t one. It was certainly prolific, growing in hursts everywhere, often in low spots or gullies and ditches. I watched it for several years but it never seemed to fruit. While it did form colonies I also saw an isolated tree now and then. I presumed it could either fruit or reproduce by cuttings and the like. In hindsight, compounding the issue is that a young tree’s leaves look very different than a mature tree’s leaves. Indeed, it was a lone young tree near a bike trail that got me on the track of solving the identity of my mystery tree.

What I discovered was that while it might be an invasive species it is far from a “trash tree.” Also know as the Paper Mulberry, the Broussonetia papyrifera (brew-soh-NEE-she-uh pap-ih-RIFF-er-uh) has been used for thousands of years to make paper and cloth. Young leaves are edible cooked — chewy — and in the right climate it produces orange pom-pom-like fruit. The tree, with extra large leaves, soft on one side, rough on the other, is also a common source of woodland toilet paper.

Native to the cooler regions of Asia they were taken to the Pacific Islands for paper and cloth. Someone had the bright idea of taking only sterile male clones to control their proliferation plus the male trees produce the better bark for cloth and paper. However, they can clone themselves by runners. Big mistake. The Paper Mulberry was in Florida by 1903 with someone also introducing female trees as well. With males and females being able to clone plus seeds from the female the species went gangbusters.

Two things compounded my identification and appreciation of the Paper Mulberry. The first, already mentioned, is that the leaves of the young Paper Mulberry look very different than the adult. They are palmate and very indented, resembling an ornamental, Chinese pitchfork. Older leaves are very large mittens with one or two lobes looking like left or right thumbs, double thumbs or no thumbs. The second issue was the species is from a temperate climate. Florida is not temperate. In my sub-temperate area they never fruit. Eighty miles north of here they do fruit but in years of watching they’ve never fruited locally (They might, however, if we have an exceptionally cold winter producing the necessary chill hours.) It took tid bits of observations over many years to finally sort out the species’ identity.

To call the fruit an orange pom-pom is actually quite accurate. It starts out as a green ball about the size of a large marble on the end of a two-inch stem. The ball is pitted much like a Bread Fruit, which it is related to, and the Osage Orange. Then the ball grows white hairs which eventually make the orange pom-pom part, which is edible. The ball is not edible as far as I know. The fruit is sweet, juicy and fragile. It does not travel well and is best eaten on the spot. Fruiting starts around April and ends by the end of June. Young leave for food are steamed though they do have a texture issue. You can also chop them up and boil them as well. The larger leaves can be used to wrap food in for cooking.

At one time the Paper Mulberry was grouped with other mulberries, and is closely related, but was given its own genus Broussonetia named after Pierre Maria August Broussonet (1761-1807) a professor of botany at Montpelier, France. In the US the tree can be found From Massachusetts south to Florida, west to Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

Green Deane’s “Itemized” Plant Profile

IDENTIFICATION: Paper mulberry is deciduous with milky sap to 45 ft. (15 m.). Twigs hairy reddish brown, on young trees zebra stripped, older trees tan, smooth, furrowed. Wood is soft and brittle. Leaves are hairy, lobed or mitten-shaped, alternate, opposite or whorled along stem. Leaf edge sharply toothed, base heart-shaped to rounded with pointed tips, upper leaf surface is rough feeling. Separate male and female flowers in spring. Male flower clusters are elongate, pendulous, 2 ½ to 3 in. Female flowers globular about one inch in diameter. Fruits orange to reddish purple.

TIME OF YEAR: In Florida April to June, summer in northern areas, February to April in warmer climates.

ENVIRONMENT: Open sunny fields but also low areas such as ditched and gullies. Grows very fast and can be fruiting within 18 months.

METHOD OF PREPARATION: Fruit out of hand (orange parts only.) Young leaves steamed or boiled. Bark can be used to make paper and cloth (tapa). The fruit (grown in Thailand) is very high in calcium, potassium and magnesium. It also has trace amounts of arsenic (0.62 ppm) as many foods do. Deer like to nibble on the leaves.