The seedy side

Photo: Alison Gillespie

Black-eyed Susans seeds in snow

There’s a certain amount of relief that comes with November. The shocking beauty of October’s colored leaves gives way to a peaceful, cold, quiet landscape that only the trees, standing like hostages in an old western bank robbery, seem to witness.

For gardeners it’s a chance to go from being in charge to being the audience. No more weeding to be done, no more flowers to tend and no more food to harvest. The leaves have all been raked and the snow won’t need shoveling for a while yet. Time to relax and watch the birds eat.

Although I used to love having seed feeders, I gave up using them in my yard many years ago when I was living in a little rental row home in Baltimore. The rats in my neighborhood were so big and so fierce I half expected one to take my keys and steal my car. Nothing scared them. More than once I stood up from weeding the garden to find one on the lawn behind me, calmly watching me work, and although I loved having birds dance around the feeders we had outside our windows I hated the idea that the rats were also getting fat on my subsidies.

Around that same time I became interested in native plants and realized many of my favorites were chock full of seeds each fall. By selectively leaving seed heads on the plants as winter approached I could encourage birds to visit. By adding shrubs with berries we got both birds and winter color. Meanwhile, there were no feeders to clean or fill, and I saved a ton of money.
If you start feeding the birds this way, you will wonder why you ever bought seed in the first place. In some ways it feels a lot like eating fruits and vegetables from your own garden. There’s a healthy feeling to the whole thing, a sense that you are in tune with nature’s cycles and the seasons and not just a hired hand hauling 50 lb bags home from the hardware store.

I also guarantee that you will see a diverse group of birds in your yard if you take up this practice. You may not have the huge crowds of birds every day that feeders tend to bring, but it is quite exciting to discover what each species likes to eat and how they like to eat it.

Almost every year, for example, we are visited by a huge flock of Goldfinches a few weeks before Thanksgiving. They arrive in the morning descend upon the brown Joe Pye (Eupatorium purpureum) and Ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis) plants left in our garden. We see feathers of olive, yellow, brown and grey in the six foot tall stems, and as they feast a huge cloud of puffy seeds floats out over the patio. We stand at the upstairs windows and watch the show, which sometimes lasts all day. It is really fun to see them balance on the tops of those brown branches as they eat, swinging to and fro like kids on swing sets.

There’s also a Mockingbird that spends long afternoons feeding on our Winterberry bushes (Ilex verticillata) , just outside the kitchen window. The contrast of the bird’s grey feathers against the bright red of the berries is a cheerful sight on a cloudy, dull day, and the incredible fighting flight patterns it makes when other birds approach is like a scene from a John Wayne war movie.
Tiny Kinglets will also come to flit in and out among the leftover plants, in every way the complete opposite of the Mockingbird. Although these migrants prefer insects over seeds, the plants left from the bounty of summer house plenty of food for them, too, including spiders and aphids. These birds are so small and so well-camouflaged against the garden that I hardly notice them unless I am really looking closely. Then, just when I realize I’m face to face with one, it flies directly up with a quick flash of yellow or red and I wonder if I really saw it at all.
Many birds large and small also like to eat my Black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia) in the winter, and provide quiet a show during snow storms. The plants stick up like small black Q-tips in a white blanket, and after the snow stops many birds will come to dine, leaving tiny foot prints and a scattering of seeds behind in the snow when they go.

In addition to the native plants, many non-natives will provide seeds for the birds. Zinnias, those colorful annuals which provide nectar for butterflies all summer, are sometimes left to stand the winter in my yard where they serve the duel role of providing seeds for birds and seedlings for next year.
I am concerned, however, about the destructive power of invasive exotic plants, and so I stay on constant vigil to make sure that nothing in my garden harbors destructive potential. For this reason I avoid non-native plants which are known to be particularly problematic. (See below.)

It is confusing, I think, for novice gardeners to figure out the ecology behind that. I’ve had people ask why it is bad to plant something that birds like to eat, such as Porcelain-berry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata). If the birds like it, how can it be bad? The problem is that a bird eats the seeds of those vines, then deposits them elsewhere in a park or wild area. In your yard that vine might not be allowed to take over, but untended in a park it becomes an aggressive monster, killing trees and destroying the places which birds need to nest or mate.

There’s another, more hidden problem in such situations, too. Birds and plants which are native to our area have evolved over thousands of years together. Because of those relationships, the plants sometimes provide certain nutrients which the animals need. When they eat non-native foods they may miss out on those nutrients and may not migrate as successfully or reproduce in abundance. They may lack defenses needed to cope with other environmental stressors, too.

That said, I do have a rather small urban lot and I have to make some judicious decisions among my native plants when autumn arrives. Like the director of a large Broadway chorus line, I have to be thick-skinned and think of the overall effect that the dying plants will have on the appearance of our tiny yard. Some of Black-eyed Susans don’t make the cut, for example, because they are growing too close to a path and will flop over and become ugly. Some Joe Pye Weed gets cut back to the ground because its tall branches block a kitchen window, an effect we love in summer but disdain in the darker days of winter. And Liatris (Liatris spicata) is a great native plant which birds like, but would surely take over my entire yard if I let it, so once Halloween is over I cut all of its stems back.

But even the seeds which get cut do not always go to waste. They are given to friends and neighbors or swapped at various plant exchanges. Most of them are so easy to grow you don’t need a lot of gardening experience to make them work, you just clear some space, sprinkle them down and forget about them until spring, which is a nice way to not garden in the cold, peaceful weeks of November.

*For a long list of invasive exotic plants to avoid in the garden, please visit the MD Native Plants website at: http://www.mdflora.org/publications/invasivesframe.html.

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