Garden Journal
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Bio Profiles
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Mulching season has begun, and every season, the question is whether there is a better way.
A memory of a nursery in Holland stayed with me over the years. I couldn’t fully remember the name or location until it appeared on a social media feed in the past year. I don’t recall exactly what the post was, but it caught my attention and triggered a memory: I had found De Hessenhof again!
I watched the elm for many years.
It stood tall and pristine, a straight trunk over fifty feet high and nearly two feet wide, and I knew what was coming. Dutch elm disease doesn’t rush; it arrives slowly—a yellowing branch, then another—thinning the crown and taking branches one by one. Each season, I examined it more closely—not just for its decline, but for its shape, its structure, and what it had already made.
A native longhorn beetle
On warm spring days, this slender beetle sometimes appears on the sunlit side of a recently fallen hardwood.
I don’t often see this moth during the day. When I do, it’s pressed against the pale bark of a willow or young cottonwood, with wings folded tightly and body angled upward, as if it grew there.
At first, it disappears.
I usually notice this one only after it has already stopped moving.
Pressed flat against bark or siding, the wings held open and still, the moth looks less like an insect and more like pattern—something woven into the surface itself.