My influence on an alley is spreading by nature

I feel fondly toward a small stretch of a Louisville neighborhood beyond our 1/3-acre lot in Crescent Hill. I walk along the alley behind our house and see respectable, although aggressive, wildflowers that migrated from the garden. They are thriving unassisted. My allegiance to the alley leans toward natives that are hesitant to give up ground. At the same time, I live with the alley’s misfit exotic weeds, including a few invasives. I am unable to control them beyond my own property. They are annoying and intriguing in equal measure.

My alley hideaway is a “rambunctious garden.”

In the words of Grady Clay, “To skulk through an American alley is to step backward in time, downward on the social ladder, and quickly to confront the world of trash collectors, garbage pickers, weekend car mechanics and children. Refugees, all of them, from the wide-open world of the big street and the (cultural tidy norms) Out Front.”  

–Alleys: A Hidden Resource

Frostweed (Verbesina viriginica)

My influence on the alley’s behavior came from our garden’s progeny—frostweed, northern Sea oats, American beak grass, and a redbud. They are defenders of what little is left in the alley that is native.  

Local heroes

These plants are fighting it out every week in skirmishes, with foreign thugs in the alley and along nearby hillsides too steep to mow.

English ivy, bindweed and porcelain berry may displace a handful of domestic larkspurs that persist despite garlic mustard.

Asian dayflowers are not so naughty. Weedy yes, but gorgeous blue flowers tend to get a pass.

Asiatic dayflower (Commelina communis)

Rugged pokeweeds and loads of hackberries are holding their own with Callery pears, bush honeysuckles, stilt grass, and mulberry weed. Margaret Renkl championed hackberries in the New York Times this week by emphasizing that these  “trash trees” are providing a “banquet for wildlife.” 

My friend Joel LeGris told me he’s fighting Japanese chaff weed in nearby Spencer County. “It’s impossible to remove. You pull a piece, and the better part of the root sits anchored in the soil like burdock.” Or a concrete piling.

Botanist Pat Haragan, author of Weeds of Kentucky and Adjacent States and The Olmsted Parks of Louisville—A Botanical Field Guide, has tracked its progress down Ohio River tribuaries. Japanese chaff weed (Achyranthes japonica) is now in Louisville’s Olmsted-designed Cherokee Park. It hasn’t hit my alley yet. We’re less than one-half mile away. I suspect the neighborhood will turn a blind eye when the new threat arrives any day now. The habitat will be right up its alley.

Redbuds, meanwhile, are butting heads with an unyielding mob.

A timeline of how we arrived at our alley’s ecology

The Eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis) has been around North America for at least 10-15 million years. Our alley was built in the 1930s. 

The first humans crossed the Bering Strait 15,000-20,000 years ago and found what is now Kentucky 10,000-12,000 years ago. My great-great-great-great grandfather came though the Cumberland Gap with Daniel Boone around 1775. Shawnees teamed up with the British in 1778 to slow the westward expansion of settlers who had begun flooding in. Captain Billy Bush, mythologized in my family as a conqueror of the west, was shot in the heel, running to the safety of Fort Boonesboro. Shawnees were in hot pursuit. He survived. Settlers continued pouring in. Daniel Boone soon moved to Missouri where the hunting was more plentiful. Buffaloes were killed off in Kentucky by the early 19^th century.

Bindweed and porcelain berry

The invasive porcelain berry fights it out with the native moonseed vine (Menispermum canadense). It’s not unsusal to see the occasional variegated, porcelain berry vine.

The Bushes are still here, gardening and worrying about what sort of damage armadillos and black bears will inflict on our gardens when they do overwhelm us.

Armadillos returned to Kentucky a few years ago. Though they haven’t reached here yet, they are on the march. These possums-on-the-half- shell were last known to be rooting around for soil grubs in Kentucky during the Pleistocene epoch.

Black bears are edging closer to central Kentucky again after nearly being eliminated statewide in the early 1900s.

Alley Cat

Twenty years or so ago, a squirrel, mouse or who knows what, maybe a sparrow or a cardinal, dropped a redbud seed that produced variegated leaves adjacent to the alley. The Las Vegas book would take your money, and give you ridiculously high odds, on the rare chance that a random and unique variegated redbud seedling pops up in your backyard.

I was blessed.

Cercis canadensis ‘Alley Cat’

The redbud soon caught the attention of a few plant nuts and eventually it was grafted and offered for sale as ‘Alley Cat.’

(There had been brief consideration for a plant patent application. Federal law prevents a patent on any plant found in nature. A friend argued, “But it was found in your backyard.” But my backyard is nature. Technically, for a plant patent, there must be some human intervention and there was none. Some critter deserves all the credit.)

For botanic geeks only: into the deep weeds with ‘Alley Cat’

Denny Werner, breeder and Emeritus Professor of Horticulture at North Carolina State University, explained the variegated peculiarity in an email:

The variegation is not virus induced. It is heritable via seed, hence it’s a genetically controlled trait. My former graduate student, now a breeder with Baileys, shared with me that the variegation in ‘Alley Cat’ is maternally inherited (transmitted through eggs but not pollen). The mutant gene is located not in the nucleus, but in the chloroplast. Meaning any seed taken from ‘Alley Cat’ will produce variegated seedlings. 

Werner clarified that the variegation would not be uniform. Some seedlings might exhibit more variegation than others.

It is very likely that the variegation in ‘AC’ represents a new independent mutation for variegated expression,” according to Werner.  Because it is transmitted only through the female parent, it by definition has to be a mutation in the chloroplast DNA (remotely possible in the mitochondrial DNA).  

‘Alley Cat’ is a great plant.  I communicate with some nurserymen in Poland, and they say ‘Alley Cat’ is very popular. Little did you know that the little seedling from your alley would become an international sensation.

“Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World”

Alleys are a cultural and ecological free-for-all. Mysterious shadowy stomping grounds for groundhogs, deer, coyotes, skinks, frogs, garter snakes, rats, dog walkers and a rotating botanic mishmash. There is nothing pristine about it. Nor is there anyplace in North America that remains the same as it was last year. Nature is ever changing.

Seedling redbud with English ivy

Emma Marris, in her book, Rambunctious Garden—Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, makes the case for accepting a new view of nature. “Many scientists,” she writes, “are rejecting a view of the world that says a place must be completely ‘pristine’ to count as nature; that view would imply that there are only two possible future states for ecosystems: perpetual weediness and perpetual watching, or total failure.”

A “pristine” genie is not going back into the bottle.

Marris mentions “conservation icon” Aldo Leopold. “His land ethic extends to soils, waters, plants and animals the same moral obligation we currently have to members of our own human communities.”

Northern sea oats

American beak grass

There’s a good reason why they call this frostweed. Ice crystals, that look like styrofoam, are on the base of stalks on frosty mornings.

North America has been crisscrossed and damaged by humans for 10,000 years or more. None of our communities are untouched. Nature is everywhere from hellscapes, abandoned industrial sites, to alleys.

Much of it is messy. Not gardenesque. But we can take cues and watch what is growing with little intervention. Isn’t that what gardeners do? Hackberries, redbuds, Northern Sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium), American beak grass (Diarrhena americana) frostweed (Verbesina virginica) and redbuds are flourishing in partial shade in our wild alley.

Nature prepping  

Nature prepping requires a little planning but doesn’t need to be expensive.

Gardeners are notorious for planting whatever catches their eye, or what is suggested to them by word of mouth. Some plants hold a connection that comes packed with responsibility.

You might be an unwitting nature prepper by saving older cultivars and even some species from extinction. These  plants are often shared and protected as passalongs—gifts from one gardener to another. 

Eurybia (Aster) saxicastelli

Eurybia (Aster) saxicastelli was discovered by botanists Julian Campbell and Max Medley adjacent to the Rockcastle River in southeastern Kentucky in 1987. Julian gave me a piece a few years ago. It only grows in a dozen locations on the Rockcastle and nearby Big South Fork River in Kentucky and Tennessee and is considered “critically imperiled” by NatureServe.

The Rockcastle aster is happy in my central Kentucky garden. It’s a romper in sun or partial shade and has withstood this summer’s unending drought.

Making a difference

Listen to garden designer and “ecologically obsessed horticulturist” Rebecca McMackin’s 12-minute TedTalk. “Let your garden grow wild” is about the remarkable transformation of derelict East River East River shipping piers into the biodiverse, post-industrial, 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park.

On a small scale, at very little cost, you can make a difference for biodiversity,” McMackin says. “We’re facing an insect apocalypse…Abandon portions of ecologically dead lawn zones…You can be happy with area rugs. You don’t need wall to wall carpets.”

Rufus the Alley Dog stands guard in the middle of American beak grass (L) and Northern sea oats (R).

 Leaf raking?

The benefits to leftover leaves are enormous. They enrich the soil and provide a diverse habitat for butterflies, bees and not so creepy crawly things.

“They are literally called leaves. We should leave them alone.”