Mountain ash shows scarlet clusters
Published Tuesday October 14th, 2008
Amazingly, the colour this week surpasses that of last as the maples and birches reach their peak. Nestled here and there amidst the bright foliage are splashes of scarlet red that will endure long after the last leaf flutters to the ground.
These are the heavy clusters of rowan berries, the fruit of American mountain ash, or rowanberry tree (Sorbus Americana). The name rowan comes from Old Norse and Germanic words meaning "getting red," a reference to both the foliage and berries in the fall. Its common name in North America, mountain ash, is a misnomer based on the similarities of the foliage of the two trees, both with large compound leaves. Mountain ash is not a true ash at all and not related to the ashes. It is in the large rose family and more closely related to apples and hawthorns. Even the fruit is improperly referred to as a berry - it is a technically a pome, more like an apple than a berry. This shows us why scientists like to use Latin names for species and technical terms for describing plant parts, as the common names can be so misleading.
American mountain ash is a small tree native to eastern North American forests. There are many other related species in temperate forests around the world. In the landscape industry, we often use its cousin, European (or Russian) mountain ash, which looks nearly identical, but with finer branches and a more slender trunk. It is extremely cold hardy. I have seen stunted mountain ash growing way up on Mount Washington where only the toughest stunted spruce and fir can survive the extreme wind and cold. It is fairly common in Newfoundland and Labrador, where yet another common name, dogberry, is used for it.
Like chokecherry and serviceberry, mountain ash decorates the spring landscape with a lovely flush of white flowers that last a week or two. By late summer the flower clusters have evolved into large heavy bunches of berries that actually weight the tree down noticeably. As you can see in this photo taken just the other day, they have achieved their full scarlet red by mid-October. Rowan berries are extremely bitter to the taste when fresh, containing sorbic acid (named, indeed, after the tree's genus, Sorbus). You don't see many birds feeding on them at that stage. But with several freezes and thaws, they become softer and less bitter, and a regular menu item for grouse, jays, thrushes, waxwings and robins. The latter really tank-up on rowan berries during their southward migration. Though I've never seen it, apparently robins can become fairly intoxicated eating fermented rowan berries, once they have been softened by several frosts. I suppose I might want some antifreeze too if I was winging my way through November skies.
Join me this Saturday, Oct. 18, for the special two-hour pruning clinic (10 a.m. to noon): I will demonstrate my thinning pruning technique on many kinds of evergreens and flowering shrubs around the property, which allows you to prune all species anytime you want, controlling size and shape while keeping the natural appearance. Dunc's Birthday Cake for all who come. That's rain or shine at the Brunswick Nurseries Garden Centre, 306 Model Farm Rd., Quispamsis.
Garden correspondents with Harvey McLeod in Hampton
I'm assuming it may be that the frosts just haven't been that frequent or hard, but Harvey reports the same persistence of colour in his garden that Peter and Judy have in the last two weeks. And we're well into October. Good soil moisture could also be helping to keep flowers coming a little longer than usual, I suspect. Here's a portion of the blooming still under way.
"The asters, which you pointed out the limitations of last week, are looking lovely, as are the tall Japanese anemones, plus of course the everlasting autumn joy sedum, penstemmon, coneflowers and helenium, and many other subtle sources of colour."
I mentioned to Harvey that I too had suffered the same rotting loss of tomatoes and potatoes to the fungal disease "tomato end rot" that Peter, Judy, and Dick had all had to various degrees, and he said it had hit his garden too, taking most of the potatoes, but sparing the red ones, while the Yukon gold were all lost.
"It really hits them fast when it comes and makes a mess of them - they go dark looking, with oozing juice and a foul odour. I'm worried that this disease is getting to be a regular thing in area gardens every year."
I replied to Harvey that perhaps the strange combination of good snow cover over unfrozen ground we had last winter allowed the fungus to survive dormant here more than in normal winter conditions, and thus was around in great concentrations this summer. Just speculation"¦
Other crops in the garden fared much better for Harvey.
"We're still eating fresh beans out of the garden, mainly from a third or fourth planting of bush beans, but also from the scarlet runners." (I must admit I have never grown these red-flowered climbing beans and didn't realize that you could eat their pods like any other bean).
"We just finished eating the last of the broad beans, which are similar to limas. Gina isn't too fond of them, but I am. The crop I have gained even more respect for is beets, as I decided to try some of the huge ones that escaped earlier fresh cooking and pickling, and are now the size of turnips. One of them is enough to feed the two of us three or four meals, and they still taste just as tender and sweet as in June. That was a revelation to me, as I had had the impression that they got woody by this time of year. Not so, I found out!"
Finally, another deer story from Harvey's garden collection.
"We arrived home one night to find a couple deer inside our fence, much to our surprise and dismay. They did a bit of damage to the fence when they exited in a hurry trying to jump out. The way they got in was to hop over where there was a slope above the fence on one side. Although the fence is seven feet tall, from where they jumped in it was only five feet or less. It was a different story to jump back out once they were inside. In just that short time they did quite a lot of nipping of flower and vegetable tops. Makes us appreciate how valuable the fence has been to our gardening sanity. I soon added another four feet to that section, which is now 12 feet tall and nobody has jumped in since!"
Duncan Kelbaugh is a gardener living in Quispamsis. His column appears Tuesday.
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