Pile o' Pipevine

On the East side of my garden, beside the gate, is a tangled mass of pipevine (Aristolochia tomentosa) about 5 feet in diameter. I planted the pipevine years ago to feed the caterpillars of the pipevine swallowtail butterfly (Battus philenor).

This twisted mass started life as a red oak tree that shaded the bedrooms in our house from the hot summer sun. Twelve years ago, Hurricane Fran blew by, an unexpected event as our home is 200 miles from the ocean. The winds uprooted the oak, which grazed the neighbor's roof and fell with a sickening thud. It left a rootball standing 8 feet into the air.

When the woodcutter chainsawed the trunk, I asked him to leave the rootball. Thinking it might make an interesting sculpture, I spent the next many weekends chipping the soil off the exposed roots. What remained was a giant mass of twisted roots, Medusa.

The following November, an ice storm brought down a second oak tree standing nearby. This oak tree grazed the roof of the neighbor's house in the exact same spot and crushed half of my root ball sculpture. With Medusa unbalanced and broken, I hoped to create a second sculpture, twisted sister. But surprisingly, when the woodcutter cut off the trunk, the rootball jumped back, uprighting itself halfway into its original hole.

Now what? The rootball could not be budged. It was positioned on a diagonal with half the roots against the soil and the other half suspended in the air. In the end, I used pieces of the trunk to shore up the suspended rootball, creating a habitat for chipmunks. Over the top, I planted a native coral honeysuckle (lonicera sempervirens). A dogwood tree planted itself at the highest point and at the lowest, I planted a buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis).

Near what remained of Medusa, I planted the pile o'pipevine. This year, a critter of some kind is shredding what remains of the trunk beneath. I have never seen nor heard it working so it is most likely a nocturnal creature, looking for a meal of insects in that old stump.