Plants are so much more intelligent than they get credit for. Many use color, fragrance and flavorful nectar to get insects and animals to disperse their pollen for them. Some provide fruit for animals that inadvertently take and disperse their seeds. Others use barbs or sticky substances to attach their seeds to unknowing animals that take them away. Plants have all sorts of techniques for exploiting those who are more animated than they are. After all, immobility has certain disadvantages.
Because plants can not get away from the animals and insects that eat them, many have developed techniques for being unappealing. Plants that live in deserts where edible foliage is relatively scarce are famous for their nasty thorns and spines, like those of cacti and agave. Hellebore and poinsettia have caustic sap that make them unpalatable. The naturally aromatic foliage of many edible herbs, like rosemary and lavender, is actually intended to repel grazing animals with sensitive noses.
Some plants unfortunately rely on toxicity for protection. Many plants are only partially toxic. For example, apples are intended to be eaten safely by animals that disperse the seeds within, but their seeds are toxic enough to avoid getting eaten by rodents after dispersal. Potato, tomato, rhubarb, asparagus and elderberry plants all produce edible fruits or vegetables, but also have poisonous parts. Some edible fruits and vegetables, like grapes and onions, are edible to humans, but toxic to dogs.
Foxglove, angels’ trumpet, morning glory, yew, rhododendron, azalea, oleander and castor bean are some of the more notably toxic plants often found in home gardens. Wisteria, holly and ivy produce toxic seeds and fruits. Dieffenbachia is a popular but very toxic houseplant. Although mostly safe, toxic plants can be a problem where young children might put things into their mouths, or where puppies are in that chewing phase.
The ‘politically correct’ designation for them now is ‘flowering cherry’. We all know what it means, but it is not quite as accurate. After all, they all flower. Fruiting cherries can not make fruit without flowering first. The old fashioned designation as ‘fruitless cherry’ is more accurate, but not so appealing. Besides, after half a century, the work of these two deteriorating old fruitless cherry trees has not been in vain.
This unhappy native white alder, Alnus rhombifolia, had been deteriorating for quite a while. White alders do not last long even in the wild. A few nearby have already been removed. This one is next. They were nice and shady when the landscape was new. Nicely maturing sycamores and a bigleaf maple can take over for this one now.
Oh, the stigma of juniper never gets old! No matter how many cool new cultivars get introduced, and how many specie get rediscovered, they are still though of as those nastily prickly ‘tams’ that were too common in the 1950s. Even some of us who really like junipers dislike tams, not only because they share their stigma with all other members of the genus, but also because they really are nasty and prickly, and not as useful as their overuse would suggest. Are they deep ground cover or shallow shrubbery? They might work for a few years, or maybe many years, but they eventually crash into each other or other plants and pile up into a dense thicket that can not be pruned without being deprived of all dignity.
Tony Tomeo 