bright: North wind shifts to South: 35ºF

Squirrels can't seem to pass a plot of newly spread leaf mulch without poking around in it and scattering their diggings on walks and trails. They do it to bury acorns. Who could argue? But I knew there was more to it when I saw that much of their earth moving is flighty and their holes much too shallow. Most of the work that squirrels do is just scratching in the mulch. Unlike dogs who take burying things seriously; squirrels don't.

So I thought until I read an article on how crafty squirrels can be. A researcher who studies squirrels with more than a passing interest found that after they bury an acorn, they move to other nearby sites where they poke around in the ground pretending to bury their nut. Some squirrels vary the drill by digging many holes first and then bringing an acorn back to just one of them. This furtive shell game that squirrels play is meant to confuse and deceive other animals that might want to feast on a squirrel's cache. The investigator doesn't say so, but I suspect that the other animals are mostly other squirrels. I wonder if as con men themselves, the squirrels fall for the same con they pull? Anyhow, now I know why squirrels make such a mess in the coverings of leaf mulch.

Some other burying going on: Spring bulbs are being spotted in both of major bulb gardens. I saw lots of hyacinth and tulip bulbs lying on the ground waiting to be buried. Positioning is the easy part of the job. Planting and covering takes more work. I wondered how the Garden keepers organize the job of planting several thousand bulbs. Do they recruit and an army of volunteers and outfit them with bulb planters? Probably not. More likely it's a staff job with two-person teams: one person who uses a gas-powered auger to make holes of uniform depth and diameter and the other who drops in the bulbs and then covers them.


Mid-November ought to be seed making time for plants. Not the Cranesbill (Geranium 'Gerwat') though. I could find few of the distinctive bird's beak seedpods among the still wildly blooming violet flowers. I hate taking pictures of violet-colored flowers like the Cranesbill because I'm forced to look at the owner's manual of my Olympus D-510 camera again. Somewhere in there I know I will find something that will tell me why the camera insists on coloring any violet flower it sees as blue. So far, I haven't found the setting that will set it straight, so I have to depend on Photoshop to exchange blue for purple.

The leaves on the ginkgo trees have colored. About half of them have fallen. Most have a distinctive palm-fan shape that evokes images of ancient pharaohs being fanned by court lackeys. Today I read in the book The Curious Gardener that the ginkgo has widely different leaf shapes. Author Jürgen Dahl writes "The leaf shapes are surprising and unexpected in a tree that is so ancient . . . I find something distinctly playful in this . . . when I see how a plant genus or species seems to try out all the possible variations that lie hidden in its basic form." I hadn't seen what Dahl saw. Next week I plan to pick up a handful of ginkgo leaves and enjoy their "playful" splits and contours.


I have two large, prize clay pots. They were made in Italy and are decorated with fanciful fern fronds that I think were drawn on the soft clay by fingers and a thumb before the pots were fired. I don't want the winter to crack either pot, so I pulled out the leggy plants of summer, washed both pots, and stored them in basement until I think its safe for them to come out again. I thought of my two pots as I looked inside a shapely clay pot in the Garden that had cracked, but was still being used. The cracked piece of the pot was fitted closely to the whole. Inside the pot and over the crack I saw a patching fabric that looked like the material I use at home to bridge plaster cracks. Over that, the preservers had brushed on generous dollops of some waterproof adhesive. I'll remember this, just in case in some other fall I don't get around to keeping my pots away from winter.