Tag: Urban nature

First Week of April: Trees

A roundup of quick Sidewalk Nature updates: one warning and three wonders.

Trouble with Double

Kwanzan cherry trees don’t feed pollinators or birds. They look great two weeks of the year but they don’t support our foodweb. Prunus serrulata ‘Kwanzan’ / ‘Kanzan.’

My concern is that when people have room to plant one tree, this is the one they’ll want. It is cultivated for pretty, and pretty it is, but it doesn’t have nectar, doesn’t make fruit, and as a nonnative congener, its leaves support only a fraction of the Lepidoptera species a native Prunus / cherry can.

But at the Cherry Blossom Festival this month, festival-goers can walk away with a free Kwanzan cherry tree from the Nashville Tree Foundation.

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Secret Sidewalk: eight late-November wonders

As fall drifts toward winter, nature doesn’t slow down, not really. Amazing things happen all around us, all the time. This site’s tagline: “Everyday wonders in everyday habitat loss” includes not just “natural” areas, but our own yards, trash alleys, parking lots, roadsides. For example, our Secret Sidewalk …

The Secret Sidewalk is a shortcut through 3 neighborhood blocks, but rather than running along a street, it runs between homes. It’s a 5-foot-wide Metro right-of-way flanked by property lines, and it feels intimate, despite crossing four roads, and despite tall privacy fences. It takes walkers past a mix of cultivated and wild. Exotics, natives, volunteers, invasives: all here. Signs of the season change daily.

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Driveway Hoverfly

hover fly
hoverfly

Here’s a “driveway moment,” but not the National Public Radio kind:*

After hovering around our faces for a comically long time, this little hoverfly decided the most attractive thing in the driveway was the eraser of a new Ticonderoga pencil. It hugged the pink tip while we examined it (such big eyes you have!), while we took photos, while we passed it between us, and even after we had to set the pencil on a rock because our hands had gotten tired.
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Meadow Katydid (in the driveway)

Meadow Katydid .jpg
the antennae go on and on, out of frame

I grew up thinking there was one kind of katydid: the big green jobs that sang their name at night. But apparently, there are oodles. We found this one, a Meadow Katydid (Conocephalis nemoralis?), lounging under the passionvine in the driveway. It didn’t seem to mind being borrowed for observation. It groomed itself nonstop in the cage, flicked its crazy-long antennae like an fly-fisher casting for trout, and sort of murmured.  Continue reading “Meadow Katydid (in the driveway)” →

Driveway-Crack Flowers: Perilla

“It’ll take over,” our neighbor warned, followed by: “I cannot believe you planted Perilla.” But, I didn’t plant Perilla. Perilla just happens. This was years ago, and the first time I’d heard the name. Until then, I only knew it as the maroon thing that fluffed in every flower bed (and pot and driveway crack) if allowed, and that the leaves looked like basil but smelled like licorice. Continue reading “Driveway-Crack Flowers: Perilla” →