Last fall, I purchased two bottlebrush buckeyes by mail order and set them temporarily in the kitchen garden. Yesterday, I finally picked out the right spot. I cleared some weeds, carted over a generous supply of the well-dried, and transplanted the buckeyes into their permanent location on a slope that's been difficult to maintain, just at the edge of the sheep pasture. It's an experiment; I've never seen a bottlebrush buckeye this far north. But hey, they made it through their first winter with flying colors and the climate is warming up.
The bottlebrush buckeye is one of those magnificent flowering shrubs that I first encountered years ago in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It's a plant that will take three years to flower and a decade to mature, so it's touch-and-go whether I'll see it in its glory -- assuming that it survives when we have one of those snowless frigid winters that turn nominal Zone 4 into actual Zone 2.
In addition, I planted a four foot tall bur oak (also new to the norhern neighborhood). I like to plant an oak tree even though it will be a decade and a half before it makes an impact on the landscape. Oaks are for the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren, should there be any. And for the planet. Although this part of Vermont is rich in oaks, our particular property was oakless when we arrived. We now have many northern reds, a swamp white and a bur. I'm on the lookout for other varieties that can tolerate the winters.
Not everything's going up. Coming down, yesterday, a huge mature balsam fir, which was in the wrong place and needed to go. We finally bit the bullet yesterday. It took my neighbor Ed's big chainsaw and his Massey-Ferguson tractor, along with chains and cables to fell it. It will take a whole day to cut it up and prepare for the big bonfire. On the way down, the fir took some limbs of a beech and made quite a mess of the front lawn. We've replaced the divots and re-seeded and mulched the hard-hit areas. The beech will recover eventually, but it will take a couple of years. It can now see the light.
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