Читать книгу Here on the Coast - Howard White - Страница 13

Starting was always the strongest point of my gardening. Follow-through was my downfall. By August my gardens were always a ruin of weeds. I will say, though, that the weeds inside my garden were always healthier and handsomer than the weeds anywhere else in the neighbourhood, which gave me a twisted satisfaction. This placed me in a good way to appreciate the fashion for gardening with native plants that came to the fore a few years ago. Not only were native plants truer to our own place and time, these new-wave xeriscapers preached, but they grew naturally without the help of polluting fertilizers and wasteful amounts of water.

This seemed like a kind of gardening suited to my natural talents and there was a plot in front of our office that seemed a perfect place to put it into practice. It had been occupied by a large cedar tree the previous owner had cut down, leaving a handsome stump with a sprig of huckleberry just starting to grow out of it. Around the base was a small clump of the plant old-time gardeners like my mother considered their greatest natural enemy—salal. Nothing in the rainforest plant community is harder to dig out and nothing is as determined to re-invade any clear space wrested from its wiry grasp. The sight of it made my hands itch for a mattock, even as my soul filled with despairing conviction all resistance was ultimately futile. But now this formidable foe was in my corner! Nothing in fact was held in higher esteem by the new zero gardeners, who even published instructions on how to artificially introduce salal to areas where it was not already smothering every other form of growth. My enthusiasm for this new kind of gardening swelled.

The question was, what was left for me to add to this already happy little ecosystem? Well, the assemblage was not very colourful, unless you were into infinite shades of green. I decided something from the warm end of the spectrum would look good. There was a considerable patch of crab grass and mint that wanted replacing, so I dug up a wild rose bush and inserted it a safe distance from the salal. That would add a splash of redness in the early part of the summer. For later, I considered foxglove, but the native gardening website denounced that ubiquitous plant as a non-native usurper. Fireweed was sanctioned, so I went to a burnt-over slash I knew to be covered in fireweed in July and sleuthed out a few brownish remains I figured might be fireweed roots and tucked them next to the roses. For blues I visited the cutbank along the Langdale bypass, where I remembered a carpet of lupines, and after digging for about two hours, I excavated a couple of massive roots. It seemed like every lupine on that hill was connected. On the way home I collected about two hundred dried-up pearly everlasting plants from various stretches of roadside and placed them in all the remaining spaces as a neutral backdrop to set off all my bright colours.

This was a lot harder than blowing by Canadian Tire with my Visa card unsheathed, but I consoled myself with the thought that once I had the stuff in the ground, I would never have to touch it again. Then I waited. And waited. By July it was clear none of my transplants had taken, except a few spindly and shocked-looking pearlies. So I cheated and went out and collected some fireweeds, lupines and tiger lilies that were thriving in their natural settings and transplanted them on the go as it were. This drew compliments for about a week, whereupon they wilted and fell over. I gathered some more, telling myself I was actually engaging in a sophisticated kind of planting, since these mature plants would ultimately scatter their seeds over my plot, begetting rich growth the next year. Not.

The next spring my plot was full of promising little shoots that turned into either crab grass or mint. I did realize a little plant I had overlooked the first year was turning into quite a handsome Oregon grape, and there were some small sword ferns emerging from roots that the previous tenant probably thought he had eradicated. But nary a hint of anything not green. The salal grew a bit fuller and began choking out the one plant that did produce a little redness, the huckleberry.

I invested in a weighty tome called Gardening with Native Plants by one Arthur Kruckeberg and tried again, carefully assessing soil types and light conditions, but still no dice. Meanwhile the salal expanded, the Oregon grape sent up three new heads and the sword ferns unfolded like green umbrellas. It occurred to me this little plot of west coast nature had a mind of its own and I was only getting in its way. Five years later the whole area is a dense, green mass of salal, Oregon grape and sword fern. It’s natural. It’s healthy. It requires no human intervention whatever. My only problem is getting passers-by to understand that this apparently wild clump of brush is a carefully planned horticultural event. I have been considering planting a little sign, but can’t come up with quite the right wording.