Tending the garden that never was

Today (Tuesday), the morning air feels more like October than July as I take my morning coffee to the garden for the first time in several days. My frustration with the cold, wet gardening season had been exacerbated by cancellation of the Eastport July 4th fireworks display and I cannot shake off memories of my father describing his first visit to Mount Desert Island after the war as “the summer that never was.”

Annual cycles of the native shrubs in Marjorie’s garden are not disrupted by the current weather pattern; they have evolved with the vagaries of Maine’s climate. From the porch I see that common elderberries are beginning to bloom, the berries of red elder are just turning red, and mapleleaf viburnums and pagoda dogwood are ripening their berries.

As I leave the porch by the back steps, a cluster of blue aphids on the tip of a red elder stem catches my eye. At least a hundred aphids completely encircle the stem, tapping the sugar-rich sap just beneath the surface, while several winged females prepare to migrate, leaving to establish new colonies on nearby plants.

A dozen or so black and red ants work at one end of the colony, milking the aphids for honeydew by stroking them with their antennae. Honeydew, excreted by the feeding aphids and rich in plant sugars, is highly valued by the ants as food.

Drops of honeydew missed by the ants have accumulated on leaves below the aphids where they feed a growing fungus colony, commonly called sooty mold, on the upper leaf surfaces. The mold blocks sunlight from the leaf surface, rendering the few affected leaves useless in photosynthesis.

On the other end of the aphid colony, a single lady beetle larva approaches intent on eating the aphids. In the absence of the ants, there might have been more of these larvae, but the ants protect their herd of aphids from predation by killing the lady beetle larvae.

Aphids and aphid-farming ants, predaceous beetle larvae and a sooty mold, characters in a drama unfolding within the terminal 6 inches of a single elderberry stem, a lesson in garden ecology before leaving the back steps. I feel encouraged.

On the way to the vegetable garden, I pass by Marjorie’s perennial bed where the cat mint sends its long spikes of purple blooms into the damp air. Where are the bumblebees that last July kept these flowering stems swaying from dawn to dusk? I count only two of these native pollinators.

Disturbed by the paucity of bumblebees, I bypass the vegetable garden for a quick check of the flowering diervilla shrubs bordering the front steps. Typically they are swarming with bumblebees but this morning there is only a single lonely forager. I try to imagine what the struggle to survive is like for a small colony of ground-nesting bees in this cold, wet summer.

In the vegetable garden, tomato plants are not much if any taller than the week before and the cucumber seedlings seem destined to finish the season as such. The lettuce planting, on the other hand, is thriving. A mixture of two heirloom lettuce varieties, ‘Speckled’ with beautiful green leaves splashed with purple and ‘Dark Lollo Rossa’ with deep red frilled leaves, form a carpet of color across the width of a bed.

Edible-pod garden peas, a variety called ‘Sugar Ann,’ are thriving as well, offering a bountiful harvest of plump pods for eating raw in salads. This gardening season may be remembered as one of endless peas and lettuce.

I finish my garden tour and coffee and go straight to work planting more lettuce, more peas. Perhaps the sun will soon come out and there will be tomatoes after all, but time is running out and with a chill in the house and the steady drumming of rain on the roof, I’m hedging my bet.