In the chilly (32 degrees) dark of 5 am this morning, as I gave my dogs their morning biscuits, I admired the form of the ‘Big Dipper’ almost directly overhead. I stood, bundled up, in the center of my starlit back garden - just admiring. Five am at the height of summer, I can be getting my coffee and heading out to begin playing in the garden, but in mid-December, as we near the richly-storied winter solstice - the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere - crisp early mornings make for a great star-gazing; the entire garden is a virtual planetarium. Photo: The Moon and Jupiter in close proximity in the winter night sky. In the Northern Hemisphere, several well-known constellations are associated with winter. While many people of think of the ‘Big Dipper’ as a constellation, it is in fact more accurately an asterism - or part of a constellation or larger group of stars. The ‘Big Dipper’ is a commonly recognizable asterism of the larger constellation known as Ursa Major.

As gardeners, perhaps, we are even more aware than many of the shifts in light and its relative availability throughout the seasons and the year. Cultures across the globe have long celebrated the winter solstice and held it dear as the day on which the dark has reached its peak. As of the winter solstice, with every subsequent day, we are headed back toward the life-renewing light - the full intensity of the Sun’s energy.

Many gardeners time their planting and harvest - both the time at which they plant and harvest as well as what they are planting and harvesting - based on the phases of the moon. They do this in order to take full advantage of the powerful influence of the Moon’s on Earth as seen through tidal shifts, etc. In particular, the gardening/agricultural philosophy known as Biodynamics uses the phases of the moon as one of the critical markers for gardening tasks. According to Biodynamics.com, biodynamics, based on the teachings of Rudolph Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, is “a type of organic farming that incorporates an understanding of “dynamic” forces in nature not yet fully understood by science. By working creatively with these subtle energies, farmers are able to significantly enhance the health of their farms and the quality and flavor of food. It is ….. A recognition that the whole earth is a single, self-regulating, multi-dimensional ecosystem. Biodynamic farmers seek to fashion their farms likewise as self-regulating, bio-diverse ecosystems in order to bring health to the land and to their local communities.”

In thinking about the solstice and winter night sky in relation to my garden, I wondered about what the solstice actually was. To find out, I turned to friend and colleague Dave Schlom. Dave is a full-time science educator, and longtime host of Northstate Public Radio’s weekly program on planetary (including Earth) science, The Blue Dot Report. This week on In a North State Garden, Dave talks about what a solstice is and how it impacts us.

Let’s start with planet Earth and how it is positioned in space. The equator is what we call the great imaginary line (line of latitude) around Earth’s circumference. The equator lies half-way between the North Pole and the South Pole. Earth’s rotational axis is tilted 23.5° relative to the Sun. The Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn are lines of latitude 23.5° north and south, respectively, of the equator (Figure 3). The Sun is always directly above a point between these latitudes. In our winter, the Sun is south of the equator and in our summer it is north. What we in the Northern Hemisphere call the winter solstice, is the day that the Sun is 23.5° south of the equator, or directly above the Tropic of Capricorn. During the summer solstice, the sun is directly above the Tropic of Cancer, or 23.5° north of the equator. “That is why what we call the winter and summer solstices are perhaps more accurately referred to as the southern and northern solstices respectively,” explains Dave. Photo: NASA’s diagram of Earth’s position relative to the Sun at the time of a Northern Hemisphere Winter Solstice.

“In Latin,” he goes on, the word “’solstice” means ’sun stop’ because as ancient Roman people were tracking the arc of the Sun each day, it was at each ’solstice’ that the Sun seemed to stop in its tracks and begin to move back in the other direction - causing daylight hours to either get longer as after the winter solstice, or shorter, as after the summer solstice. The vernal and autumnal equinoxes occur at those moments twice a year when the Sun is directly over the equator, making for equal hours of daylight and dark. http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/imagee.htm

Why is it cold in winter and warm in summer in our part of the world? The seasons change due to Earth’s rotational axis being tilted 23.5° relative to the Sun. So, for half of the year (our winter), the Northern Hemisphere is pointed slightly away from the Sun. This angle makes sunlight hit the ground in the North State at a lower angle in winter than in summer. So energy coming from the Sun is spread out - and thereby made less intense - over a larger area on the ground.

Interestingly, notes Dave, while the winter solstice might mark an official beginning of winter, it is only rarely the coldest day of the year. Because the Northern Hemisphere is moving only slowly more tilted away from the Sun’s rays from the summer solstice to the winter solstice, the mass of the Earth receives warmth from the sun each day and only slowly does it begin to lose more each night than it gains each day. Therefore, it takes a while after the winter solstice for the Earth to cool down as far as it is going to in any given winter.

So while the winter solstice does not mark the end of cold, but is closer to the beginning of the cold stretch for our North State gardens, this cold can be beneficial - killing unwanted fungi, pathogens and others pests. (Protect and cover your citrus and other tender plants so that the cold does not kill them.) The winter solstice does however mark the shortest day of the year - and while the cold temperatures and short daylight hours might slow your garden and you down some - things are only getting brighter from here.

Happy Winter in your North State Garden!

For more information on the solstice and stars in the winter night sky, Gateway Science Museum in Chico will be hosting related Education Station activities on Saturday and Sunday, December 17th and 18th, and on the Winter Solstice, December 21st from 1 - 3 pm each day. Docents will model the concept of a solstice, show you projections of constellations in the winter night sky, and give you pin-hole constellations cards to make and take home. Additionally, on the 21st, stories behind the winter constellations will be read in the Newberry Gallery from 1 - 3 pm.

Also, fellow gardener and star watcher, Karen McGrath wrote in to me with the interesting fact that although the winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, the earliest sunsets do not occur on this day! There is an interesting discussion about why at http://earthsky.org/tonight/earliest-sunset-today-but-not-shortest-day, which is a nice additional resource on these types of discussions.

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In a North State Garden is a weekly Northstate Public Radio and web-based program celebrating the art, craft and science of home gardening in Northern California and made possible in part by the Gateway Science Museum - Exploring the Natural History of the North State and on the campus of CSU, Chico. In a North State Garden is conceived, written, photographed and hosted by Jennifer Jewell - all rights reserved jewellgarden.com. In a North State Garden airs on Northstate Public Radio Saturday mornings at 7:34 AM Pacific time and Sunday morning at 8:34 AM Pacific time. Podcasts of past shows are available here. Weekly essays are also posted on anewscafe.com a regional news source that is simultaneously universal and positively North State.

One of the first plants I remember knowing and loving as a child was a scented-leaf geranium. As little girls, my sisters and I were privileged to attend “fancy, grown-up” dinner parties at the home of a great aunt and uncle who lived outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Featured at such dinners were finger bowls in which were floated the leaves from my aunt and uncle’s collection of potted scented-leaf geraniums. Rubbing the leaves between our fingers, we girls were delighted by the lemon or rose fragrance that magically perfumed our fingers from the soft, sometimes fuzzy, textural leaves. Photo: The bold beautiful abundance of a P. ‘Angel’s Star’ in bloom in the greenhouse of Geraniaceae. (more…)

“Once neighbors and passersby see the changes happening as you begin the process of removing your default front lawn and replacing it with something more lively and interesting,” notes landscape designer Bernadette Balics of Davis, “curiosity gets the best of them, and they ask questions. I really like the social aspect of this gardening interaction, and my clients do too. If you plant something edible, the interest level really peaks. So consider replacing your lawn with some strawberries or artichokes, and meet the neighbors.” Photo: Bernadette’s gardens are frequently marked by creative pairings of common and less-common herbaceous perennials. Here a vibrant yellow yarrow and a radiant pink buckwheat (Eriogonum grande rubescens) balance opposite corners of a rich planting around a drip-fed cut-stone birdbath. In this composition, strongly textural foliage and the focal-point of the birdbath create interest year-round - for people and for visiting birds and pollinators.
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Some plants are rooted more deeply into each gardener’s personal memories than others - the plants they grew up surrounded by, the plants grown by people they loved perhaps. Peonies are among those memoried plants for me. Each June when I was a child, my family’s dining room table would be graced by a Wedgewood-blue urn-shaped vase overflowing with opulent and sensual pale-pink and pink-flecked-white blooms of sweetly-scented double peonies grown by my mother. In this annual June arrangement, the rounded, ruffled, voluptuous peonies were accented by delicate little spires of red coral bell flowers. The composition of this arrangement - its size and shape and colors and scent - marks for me still the height of elegance and beauty. (more…)

For almost all of her almost eight decades, Jeanne Zimmerman has been gardening and for a good part of that time she has been growing - and loving - the elegance and hard-to-beat beauty of clematis flowers and vines. “The radiant colors, the long bloom time and the ease of growing them - here and in Minnesota where I learned to garden - make them the perfect garden plant,” Jeanne says warmly. “Besides, they so nicely cover any ugly fence.” From a farming family, and a long-standing member of the Chico Horticultural Society, Jeannie is a natural gardener and naturally generous in sharing her experience and knowledge. “I am no expert,” she is quick to say, while other experienced gardeners and plants people smilingly dismiss this modesty: She is an expert with her clematis, they nod. Photo: Clematis ‘Dr. Ruppel.’ (more…)

They catch the light - especially the low, soft slanting light of Autumn; they dance in the slightest breeze; they hold dew drops and rain drops like pearls, winking on a string; they arch and drape and cascade, adding both vertical and horizontal beauty and interest to any garden; they are often drought tolerant and deer resistant, and many of them provide both forage and shelter for native and migrating song birds. They are ornamental grasses, and with more varieties, colors, shapes and sizes (and native choices) available to home gardeners every year, there is one (or 30) to brighten and dress-up just about any garden throughout the seasons. Photo: Deer grass under planted with blue fescue in the California display garden at the McConnell Arboretum & Botanical Gardens. (more…)

An arid summer is a fact of life for North State gardeners. It’s the dry side of our Mediterranean climate. But ever-increasing awareness around the need for water conservation and creative use and re-use of water (as well as all of our resources including time and money) is a fact of life no matter where you live or garden. Photo: The dry creek bed and its planted edges in Michael Cook’s Sense of Place and Lawnless garden in Chico. (more…)

This piece was originally published in August of 2009, but beautiful plants are always worth revisiting, especially in high summer. Enjoy.

Have you noticed how the concept of beauty evolves as you grow older or as you garden longer? Just ten years ago, if you had told me that I would consider a bouquet of carnivorous plants as lovely a sight as I had ever seen, I would have replied (politely, I hope) that I was really more of a pansy, peony or poppy girl. So no-one was more surprised than I was when I recently encountered a bouquet of carnivorous plant spent flower heads and traps and I thought to myself that they were some of the most strikingly lovely plants I’d ever seen. It’s not that I have forsaken peonies, not at all. Rather, I can happily attest that one of the benefits of growing older as a gardener (and as a person) is that your concept of beauty deepens and widens to include all manner of beauty. Photo: A sample of David and Cathy Walther’s carnivorous plant collection, including the double-flowered, speckled white trapped Sarracenia leucophylla ‘Tarnok’.

David Walther, co-owner with his wife Cathy of Spring Fever Nursery in Yankee Hill, has been intrigued by carnivorous plants and been growing them in his home garden for close to 10 years. His collection currently includes many plants comprising multiple varieties of half a dozen or so species. I first saw David’s collection in mid-spring, when a handful were beginning to bloom. I visited them again in late-summer and their dramatic colors, structures and over-all interest were still going strong. While many carnivorous plants have very attractive and showy flowers, it is the traps and the spent seed heads that persist and that, in my opinion, hold multi-season interest for the gardener. Photo: Sarracenia flava, the tall plant with dangling yellow flower petals, in bloom and Sarracenia leucophylla x. willisii ‘Dana’s Delight’ in bud.

Evidence of carnivorous plants dates back to the Cretaceous Period (1144 to 65 million years ago). Currently, botanists believe that there are close to 600 species of carnivorous plants and fungi, from something like 15 genera and 7 families, and which live around the world. Several carnivorous plants are native to California including the California pitcher plant (Darlingtonia californica) and a sundew (Drosera). Photo: A small venus fly-trap (Dionaea muscipula)

Carnivorous plants could also be referred to as insectivorous plants, as insects of all kinds are their normal prey. Carnivorous plants the world over have evolved at different times in response to impoverished circumstances – be it very dry soil without sufficient nutrients or very wet and acidic bog conditions. As result of poor growing conditions, the plants could not derive the nutrients they needed in order to survive and reproduce and so they developed means of getting their nutrients from nutrient-rich insects in the vicinity. The technical definition of a carnivorous plant is one that attracts, captures, kills and digests its prey, but many plant people include as carnivorous plants that just do some of these steps. Photo: David cut open a Sarracenia trap for me to demonstrate how many bugs the plant has digested. While they do capture a lot of bugs, they are not actually effective bug control.

In general, carnivorous plants attract different insects for food than they do for the purposes of pollination. Furthermore, carnivorous plants do not use their reproductive parts (flowers) in order to capture or digest insects and their digestive parts are not involved in pollination or reproduction. Photo: An ant crawling on the operculum or lid of a pitcher trap. The shape of the operculum helps to protect the trap from overflowing with rainwater and helps to direct bugs into the trap.

Beyond botanical classifications, carnivorous plants are categorized by their degree of carnivory – full-time, meaning they do not obtain any of their nutrients from the soil, or part-time, meaning they get some of their nutrients from their soil/water and some from insect prey. They are also categorized by the kinds of traps that they use – active or passive fly-paper (wherein bugs are attracted to a sticky liquid on the plant’s leaves that binds them like glue), pitcher/pitfall and lobster-pot traps (wherein insects are attracted by a scent inside of cup or pitcher which they cannot get back out of) and steel or snap-traps (wherein the traps actually close around the trapped prey, such as the venus fly traps), and finally mousetraps, which are only found on aquatic carnivorous plants and are in the form of a bladder which when triggered inflates itself and sucks in water and its prey. Wow. Amazing, but less lovely in a bouquet, I would think. Photo: David points out the structure of a Sarracenia flower. The petals are the yellow parts hanging down the longest, the sepals are less long and hang down over the petals. David is lifting one up. The stigmas (pointing up and tucked under the petals) are all joined together by an upside-down umbrella-shaped style to form a little basin beneath the pollen-bearing anthers and filaments.

While some plants have been recognized as carnivorous for a very long time, other plants have only recently been recognized as such, including some species of Bromeliads. You might have noticed that bromeliad leaves often form a little cup, which prior to the 1980s was believed to be only for conservation of water. In the 1980s it was discovered that some bromeliads actually absorb and use the nutrients of the insects that (inadvertently or by design) drown in these little water basins. Some other plants’ flowers – like the famed dutchman’s pipes (various Aristolchia) or jack-in-the-pulpits (various Arisaema), look a lot like carnivorous traps, but they are in fact flowers trying to attract pollinators, not traps trying to attract food. Photos: Carnivorous looking non-carnivores. A Dutchman’s Pipe on the left and an Arisaema on the right.

David Walther’s carnivorous plant collection has developed a little each year since he originally became interested in them. Since many carnivores grow naturally in peaty or boggy conditions, David grows his planted in old wine-barrel halfs, which he fills with 50% sand and 50% peat or sphagnum moss. These he keeps watered well. “It’s not that they drink a lot of water, but more that they like wet feet and the materials in which they are planted retain a lot of water, so I don’t actually water these more than I water my other plants,” explains David. Because they generally grow in humid as well as moist conditions, and thrive under stress, David also plants his containers quite tightly, and then overseeds them with a small delicate grass or restio. This grassy cover helps to keep water from evaporating too quickly and keep the plants’ roots cool. While the conditions should be wet, they should not be stagnant. David has mesh-covered drainage holes in his barrels and he prefers his wooden containers over plastic ones because they allow for respiration and evaporation. Photo: David inspecting his carnivorous plants.

Most carnivorous plants are delicate when it comes to replicating their desired conditions. David’s carnivorous plants generally like good amounts of bright light. They do not like being fertilized and he makes sure to water them with rested water – meaning water that you have let sit out in a watering can or a bucket for 12 – 24 hours. This helps to ensure that any added chemicals like chlorine have dissipated. Photo: Two of David’s carnivorous plant containers. David does not cover or take his plants in in winter and they do fine each spring at his 2300 foot elevation location.

Because carnivorous plants allocate their energy perhaps even more carefully than other flowering plants, their structures are fascinating. Unlike other flowering plants that grow leaves primarily for photosynthesis and flowers primarily to attract pollinators so that they can reproduce and ensure the survival of their species, carnivorous plants have to do at least twice that and get it done with less: they grow their traps as well as their flowers, produce their sticky liquids and muscillage to attract insects as well as the enzymes to kill and break the bugs’ down into nutrients. In the winter, when light is low, temperatures are low and bugs are scarce, many carnivorous plants send up leaves called phyllodes not related to the plant’s traps but just for the purpose of additional photosynthesis. Photo: The speckled pattern on Sarracenia traps.

“It is amazing how the many parts all work together – beautifully – towards the ultimate goal of capturing food,” David says to me with evident respect for his plants. He goes on to explain: “Most of the pitfall or lobster-trap style plants have a sort of top – called an operculum - which helps to keep the trap from overflowing with too much rainwater. Most operculum are shaped in such a way that they also help to direct and funnel potential prey in the direction of the trap.” Photos: Left, photo courtesy of David and Cathy Walther: A little frog peeking out of a trap - waiting for a snack. Right: A spider dealing with a bee beneath a spent Sarracenia flower head.

While most bugs should use caution in the presence of a carnivorous plants, some creatures have developed an understanding of how to work with them and take advantage of other insects being attracted to them. While examining some traps, David and I see a green spider that has set up its web on the lip of a Sarracenia’s spent flower head. It is very busy wrapping a bee for later. “Small frogs will creep into a trap backwards and wait for their dinner to come to them,” David tells me. “The business of evolution and survival is ingenious.”

And oddly enough, it is strikingly beautiful at the same time.

Carnivorous Plant Societies:

International Carnivorous Plant Society: www.sarracenia.com/faq.html

Bay Area Carnivorous Plant Society: www.bacps.org/ Photo: Sarracenia rubra.

Carnivorous Plant Books: (of which there are many, so look around) Photo: David showing which traps go with the Sarracenia leucophylla ‘Tarnok’ flowers.

Carnivorous Plants of the United States and Canada, Donald E. Schnell; Timber Press, 2002.

Glistening Carnivores: The Sticky-Leaved Insect Eating Plants, Stewart McPherson; Redfern Natural History Production, 2008.

Carnivorous Plants - Care and Cultivation, Marcel Lecoufle; Blandford Press, 1990.

The Savage Garden: Cultivating Carnivorous Plants, Peter D’Amato; Ten Speed Press, 1998.

Insectivorous Plants, Charles Darwin; originally published in London in 1875; re-issued most recently: University Press of the Pacific, 2002 (paperback).

Carnivorous Plant Nurseries: Photo: One of David’s fork-leafed sundews (Drosera).

Spring Fever Nursery, Yankee Hill. Open by Appt: 5683 Wendy Way Yankee Hill, CA; 530- 534-1556, also at the Chico Saturday Farmer’s Market and the Paradise Tuesday Market.

Magnolia Gift & Garden, Chico (www.magnoliagandg.com) 1367 East Avenue, Chico; 530-894-5410. They carry a selection of Spring Fever’s carnivorous plants.

Hortus Botanicus, Fort Bragg – (www.hortusb.com/) 20103 Hanson Road, Fort Bragg, CA 95437; 707-964-4786.

California Carnivores: www.californiacarnivores.com/
Photos: Sunlight through a Saracenia trap, left; Sarracenia minor, right.

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