Putting in pawpaws

The pawpaw tree (Asimina triloba) has so much of what I like in a plant. It is a good looking ornamental tree with big tropical leaves. Although something of an oddity, it is native to these parts and is host to the zebra swallowtail butterfly. You can grow it in part shade. And on top of all that, it makes an edible, creamy fruit.


photo Wikimedia


I think I have a perfect location for a row of pawpaw trees. Our garage apartment on the north and the neighbor’s on the south create an alley. It gets intermittent or dappled sun from miscellaneous trees and the neighbor’s garage. The soil is damp there longer than anywhere else in the garden. The soil was not as rich or well draining as needed, so steps were taken to fix that.

Ms Brenda, garden lady, dug the 8’ by 60’ wasteland along the back fence. All I asked was that the ground to be broken and weeds removed, but she likes to dig down as deep as the fork and to turn the soil over. All manner of corroded metal and concrete chunklets were removed. A plastic horse, aluminum fence post finials, and a buckle that may be silver turned up.

To build up the bed for the pawpaws, I mined some mounds of soil created during the garage construction project, and wheeled loads of it around to the new bed. In one area I found a Neapolitan confection of soil: a layer of bright white leftover mason’s sand, over the deep black of a former compost pile, on pale brown clay.


The builders had excavated some clay in clods up to the size of a basketball. That’s a representative chunk sitting on top of the load (photo below). Now those clods have been hacked to pieces and worked into the rest of the soil.



I didn’t do a soil test here, but I had some granular sulfur already and I tossed it over the piles. Our soil tends to be alkaline and pawpaws prefer more acidic soil. Some Microlife, an organic fertilizer, was also tossed on. The last amendment added was the ashes of sweet dog Thorn (Read about her here). The pale yellow of the sulfur and the blue-white of her ashes made a strange visual.

When the bed was leveled out, it had a nice crown in the center. Digging holes for the 7-gallon container sized rootballs was as easy as playing in sandbox, thanks to Brenda. The soil is so well prepared back there, it feels like brown sugar on the shovel.




The trees are 10’ on center. They don’t have much presence in this photo, being leafless. The vines being trained to the fence are Carolina Jessamine (Gelsemium sempervirens), also native.

Pawpaws must cross pollinate, so I picked several varieties of trees. For a fruit no one ever seems to have tasted, there are a lot of varieties available. Several of mine are an ungrafted ‘native’ variety. They are younger, yet taller, than the two grafted varieties I chose. The grafted “Wells’ matures later than ‘Rebecca’s Gold’ but both have large fruit. (Memo to self: Wells is on southeast side and Rebecca is on southwest) In the nursery, they expected the trees to be temperamental producers throughout their youth. We’ll see. The pawpaws that grow wild on a piece of land we own in Nacogdoches are very small but fruitful, like this one below. There is a small green pawpaw about mid-photo:


The small fig-brown flowers of the pawpaw are pollinated by flies. I recall that the speaker on fruit trees at the Master Gardener class said his trees’ productivity increased when he brought home some roadkill! I'm hoping funky old sandwich meat hung on the fence will work, instead.

Holiday Road Trip Part 2

Yes, we have Thanksgiving at an off-road vehicle park. Lots of people did. I sure do like to get free and muddy, but as it turns out, a 4-wheel motorcycle making sounds of intestinal distress isn’t my cup of tea, or rather, can of Bud. Doesn’t matter. It is tradition now for cousins, aunts and uncles to converge there in the cabins down by the creek with sugary white sand beaches.















Curiously named Red Creek has white sand.

My cousins own Red Creek Offroad. There is no gardening to speak of, but the woods are full of trees and shrubs that have made the landscaping bigtime, so I find it interesting to see them at free range.















Huckleberry or farkleberry or something Vaccinium is in foreground.
Berries tasted not so great.



Going home (50,000 calories richer)...

Isn’t it terrific to find a world class gem somewhere unexpected?
Right off the interstate and behind the Wallmart in Picayune, Mississippi, is the Crosby Arboretum. (My mother’s people are from nearby Poplarville.) I went there for the trees, vaguely aware there was something else there in the woods.

The Prairie Style gateways and notice board, and nicely constructed bridgeways were clues that resolved in a splendid pond-side pavilion designed by the late Fay Jones.I assume it was mentioned in a May 2007 article in Landscape Architecture magazine, but I forgot about that. What I remember from the article is that people walking around on site have asked the staff, So where is the arboretum? The plants are Mississippi natives in their own wild habitat, and that is the intent of the Crosby Arboretum. Some people can’t see the trees for the forest.


















The structure of the pavilion speaks softly of a weathered barn gradually coming apart.




































We were given a bag of pellets for the pondlife. Turtles were a no-show; hibernating. In the main pond, perch came up, looked hard at the floating pellets, and left. They were sick of pellets. In the backwaters of the pond the fish were not so choosy.
















Canted benches—so you don’t roll into the water by accident if you are asleep, the Husband says.

Vistas came and went around the pond, like a Japanese stroll garden. In fact, even without a stalk of bamboo, this was more of a Japanese garden than the Jungle Gardens (see Part 1) with its various Asian decorations.

















There were other sections left unvisited, such as a large meadow called the pitcher plant bog. Prospects of lunch down in New Orleans, just an hour’s drive away, got pretty hard to ignore.
From there on, the trip was roads and restaurants--too tangential for this garden blog.

Leaves from a red maple / Acer rubrum

Live, oaks!

This sounds like cautious good news for Galveston, our sister* city down on the coast. After Hurricane Ike, the old live oak allees along Broadway are not looking so live.

Galveston would be a different city without their year-round deep green intermingled canopies. They tie together the city’s signature mix of the god-awful tawdry with the timelessly elegant.

But it sounds like most of the live oaks will recover, with care. The browning was mostly due to windburn, not salt water poisoning, and some new growth is emerging.

Scorched live oaks visible beyond the palms. This is not autumnal color! Photo thanks to Mr Nelson.

*My friend Ms Alex says Galveston is more like an old auntie to Houston. Galveston is gracious, slightly stinky and half-mad, born into class but with shocking bad taste. Gotta love her.

Plants to Plant: Texas Wild Olive/Cordia boissieri

Texas Wild Olive is pretty drought tolerant but you wouldn’t know think it by looking at those lush leaves. This little tree is a fast grower and wants to be as wide as it is tall, about 15'. I prune mine up to reveal more of the multi-trunks. The pruning of the branches is tricky since it tends to fork with three stems at the same point.

Wildlife...
This tree is not indigenous to Houston—it hails from South Texas some 600 miles away. But when I plant something from further down the migration pathway, I like to think that some critter gets to enjoy the last Texas Wild Olive on the way to Canada.

I have heard that to attract hummingbirds, one should plant flowers in order of their preference from red (the highest) through oranges and yellows to White (the least preferred). But get this: I see hummingbirds getting into the Texas Wild Olive flowers before the sun comes up. At that time, white is the only color that stands out. I have also seen a sphinx moth visiting the tree at the same time as a hummingbird, and you can’t really get them mixed up.
Black swallowtails are the butterfly that seems to like Texas Wild Olive best.

There is a green olive-sized fruit that never seems to get eaten. Certainly not by me, as I’ve heard it’s inedible. I am a big fan of weird fruit, but maybe in this case ‘inedible’ is a nice way of saying poisonous.

Hardly any cons...
I only want to criticize this tree when it molts in March while everything else is springing forth with fresh vitality. The Texas Wild Olive just stands there with spotty brown and yellow leaves and looks like crap.
Also, Texas Wild Olive has scentless flowers which are just a missed opportunity. The white flowers of the world have a monopoly on the best floral odors: magnolias, butterfly ginger, crinums, natal plum, gardenias, jasmine…



One last thing: I planted my Texas Wild Olive to commemorate a wedding. Ms Alex, this is what has become of the nursery gift certificate you gave me for hosting your shower!