Читать книгу Gardening with a Wild Heart - Judith Larner Lowry - Страница 11

CHAPTER TWO Planning Back-Yard Restoration Gardens

He who owns a veteran bur oak owns more than a tree. He owns a historical library and a reserved seat in the theatre of evolution. Aldo Leopold, 1949

I cannot think of a more tasteless undertaking than to plant trees in a naturally treeless area, and to impose an interpretation of natural beauty on a great landscape that is charged with beauty and wonder, and the excellence of eternity. Ansel Adams, 1966

Hints and Clues, Remnants and Relics

I arrive early for my appointment. There is time, before ringing the doorbell, to scout the neighborhood surrounding the home where I shall be doing a landscape consultation. It may be a tract house in a crowded subdivision, a summer home converted to a residence on ten acres of woods, a ranch house on five hundred acres of grasslands, or a mini-mansion built “on spec.” Maybe the land was once a beanfield, and before that, riparian forest. It may have been converted from apricot orchards to houses and yards, or directly from oak savannah to houses and yards, but somewhere in the neighborhood, I am going to find some native plant life.

An oak sprouting by the sidewalk, a small patch of miner s lettuce in the grass, toyon thrusting dark red berries through a fence. Coyote bush along a right of way, the seed stalk of an annual lupine. Hints and clues, remnants and relics. The survivors.

I make a list, a neighborhood flora for the client. It will tell the names of the survivors, those species possibly easiest to bring back, and provide clues to the land's natural history. I may find places for collection of local seeds, to be grown out by me or the client, or plant combinations that seem like good ideas.

Rare is the land that has not experienced some hard history of use. Usually the “herb layer,” which includes the native grasses, wildflowers, and perennials, is least in evidence. When there are venerable oaks or madrones, dramatic and beautiful, they are often spending a lonely old age with no young ones coming along. To suggest taking measures to encourage baby, teenage, and young adult oaks is a way to gauge the long-range interests of the client. Is the imagination stirred by the thought of an oak grove that the owner might not live to see mature? The owners response provides a clue, a necessary hint, about this particular land manager.

The flora is for the clients, to honor their land. I am usually excited by what I have found, and hope that they will be too. As I talk about what I have seen, I begin to assess how much complexity is of interest to them and what their motive is for wanting a garden of native plants. Sometimes they want to include a few native plants for interest's sake; sometimes they want to lower their water bill. They may want to attract hummingbirds or butterflies or quail. A multitude of motivations are possible. I have seen repeatedly that one thing leads to another and that I can never predict from an initial encounter what the outcome will be.

Once I had my kitchen redone, a major improvement. The carpenter kept saying how small it was. I was thrilled with the changes but couldn't enjoy them till the carpenter had left. I want my clients to love their land, to find in it some glimpse of the perfection indigenous peoples attribute to their homelands. The feeling that it is “just right,” that everything needed is present on the site. A willingness to accept its winds, slopes, and exposures with all the pleasures and challenges they bring.

In most cases, the general outlines of what used to grow on the land are apparent without my early morning ramble. But it makes a welcome interlude between the drive and the work and provides an opening for the appearance of the unexpected, a rare fritillary or surprising patch of grassland.

And it is a way to clear the mind for this work. A moment to imagine the past, acknowledge the ghosts, and be reassured by the presence of the natives, still coming through. Yes, we are still around, they say. We have survived plowing, logging, mining, ranching, and now, gardening.

In some cases, it is the gardener who delivers the final blow.

What Is Happening to California?

Once I saw a beautiful piece of land for sale not far from where I live. It was adjacent to a national park, offering views of ocean and bay, and was richly clothed with a mosaic of Bishop pine, sword fern, Pacific wax myrtle, and huckleberry. Soon, the fortunate new owners began to build their home.

Shortly afterward, a hedge was planted. Not a hedge of the species already present on the site—coffeeberry, wild lilac, Pacific wax myrtle, coyote bush, Pacific reed grass, coast live oak, and California hazel—but one of a non-native plant with strong associations of the freeway. The newcomers to the neighborhood had chosen to plant oleander.

There is no shortage of oleander in California. Anyone wishing to see it can drive along Interstate 5 and many other freeways. Everywhere, the “oleanderization of California” proceeds apace. There is, on the contrary, a shortage of relatively intact Bishop pine forest and its floral and faunal associates. Multiply this scenario by the thousands, and you will glimpse how the landscape of California has been changed in the name of gardening.

I once saw a back yard entirely planted with iceplant, creating a perfect rectangle of bright pink flowers in the middle of one of those textured, tufted, woven mosaics of grays and greens unique to the California chaparral. Perhaps the owner had been advised to plant iceplant to prevent erosion, although the chamise, sagebrush, ceanothus, and manzanita had been doing that perfectly well for thousands of years.

In these situations, a new homeowner (sometimes from another state, sometimes not) buys a home or lot partly because of its natural beauty and then immediately proclaims ownership by planting a tree or a hedge or a flower garden that bears no relationship to the surrounding flora or land forms. I call this behavior “planting the flag” gardening, often an early stage in the development of gardeners, who may or may not evolve beyond it. I myself left behind in beautiful upstate New York a relatively pristine hillside that did not benefit from my early gardening activities. Following the advice of an enticing catalog, I planted crown vetch, an invasive exotic plant, to cover the banks of our newly excavated pond, and through my gardening practices introduced weeds that were not previously present.

Organic gardening was my first gardening framework, and Ruth Stout's How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Bac\ my inspiration. Her secret was mulch. Mulch on top of mulch, lots and lots of mulch. She said that you could never have too much mulch. Spoiled hay was her greatest source of mulch, and it was also mine, with the difference that she was able to use salt hay, relatively free of weed seeds, while my hay bales, the only ones I could find, included seeds of Johnson grass, one of the most noxious of weedy grasses, and burdock, the farmer's bane in that part of the country. Everywhere I mulched, I introduced these invasive species, nevermore to be absent from this piece of land.

Recently, a homeowner newly arrived from the Midwest was given a consultation with me for his birthday. He had transplanted around his property a hedge of French broom, which had reseeded down the hill, moving into coastal scrub and native prairie. When I expressed dismay, he said,“I had no idea you'd be such a fanatic.” I guess I was a disappointing birthday present. Now I make it clear in advance that a fanatic is being hired.

I was not born a fanatic. I became this way gradually because of what I have seen and learned doing this work. When I lived in a pink stucco house in the Santa Clara Valley, I looked back with nostalgia to Blossom Valley's agrarian past, planting apricots and pruning almond trees. For five years, I kept cutting back the annoying scratchy plant sprouting from a stump under our hammock. It took me that long to realize that it was a coast live oak, a precious reminder of the dense riparian forest that had probably once covered my neighborhood. Later, by the channelized creek down the block, I found an ancient elderberry, larger and older than any I had ever seen, another survivor.

Although I was working as a propagator at a native plant nursery, collecting acorns and growing native oaks, and although it was dreadfully hot in the summer, and shade from an oak would have been a welcome thing, apricots and plums were on my mind, and I kept cutting back that oak sprout. But it kept coming up again. My pruning only seemed to make it more vigorous.

I was not comfortable in that neighborhood. I wanted to live in a wilder place What a strong wild impulse that oak demonstrated, repeatedly crown-sprouting, borrowing strength from its ancient root system. The wildness we are buying second homes to experience, eating up the remaining open spaces of California and driving up and down freeways to find, may be in our back yards, knocking at the door.

Restoration Ecology

I ask my clients to write out a list of their questions, concerns, priorities, and dreams. We read through it together, then walk the land. They are the local experts, the ones who see the water stream past the side of the house after a storm and feel the intense heat where the sun beats down in late summer. The work is a collaboration, where I arrive with my experience and perspective, but the gardener is the inhabitant, the one with local knowledge, the one who is continually gathering on-site information.

Restoration ecology teaches us a sense of how much there is to know about every place, guiding the mulching, planting, pruning hand to move with knowledge behind it. Gardeners as land managers, people who make decisions about how land will be used, invest some 23 billion every year in their visions. This amount of money may well be more than is spent on managing all our public lands, national parks, seashores, and forests put together. It matters what gardeners do.

A gardener plants pampas grass in the front yard, and three years later that single plant has spawned a whole field of baby pampas grass down the road. Somebody plants Cape ivy to hide an unsightly shed, from which it spreads into and destroys a whole coastal scrub remnant, a willow grove, or a thicket of native blackberry. A gardener chooses capeweed, Arctotheca calendula, as a “ground cover,” and it moves relentlessly into a small remnant coastal prairie. In all these cases, it is gardeners, not logging companies, mining companies, or shopping mall developers, who take steps resulting in an unintended but nonetheless devastating loss of scenes and relationships from which we might be learning.

Mike Kelly, president of the Friends of Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve, consisting of 3,700 acres near San Diego, writes of the inventory of weed problems in the preserve. Of the eight or so invasive species he names, six are present because they have been planted by gardeners and public agencies as ornamentals.

I day dream of a law requiring that no planting be done by a new homeowner during his or her first year of ownership, until the new owner has watched the sun rise and set on the land many times, walked the paths, felt the wind and noted how it changes through the seasons, experienced drainage in the rainy season, and let the land do its work, talked to the neighbors about what weedy problems they contend with and which plants they regret having planted.

Mitigation for the Gardener

In the field of restoration ecology, the term mitigation refers to the legal requirement to make reparation for harm done—in other words, for the developer who builds a shopping mall on a wetland or condominiums where vernal pools once went through their seasonal changes to create equivalent wetlands or vernal pools elsewhere.

Although mitigation may be seen as representing a real shift in consciousness, questions of the possibility of such replacement of natural systems inevitably arise. Do we understand enough about natural systems to begin to recreate them, or to evaluate the mitigation effort once it has been made? All those associated with this field recognize that the cost of attempting to replace functioning natural systems with artificial ones is astronomical, that it would be better simply to protect them in the first place. But development proceeds, roads are cut through wildlands, houses sit on vernal pools, video parlors occupy coastal scrub, and the landscape of California is changed for the worse in ways both apparent and hidden.

In an ideal world, the restored wetland would be created first, before the building project was begun. It would be observed for a number of years to see if it could actually meet restoration criteria before the first bulldozer arrives to destroy the original site. Critics point out that restoration in this arena serves to legitimize destruction, but the revolutionary aspect of even this kind of restoration is that it recognizes that the world cannot absorb endless destruction. It legalizes the concept of “payback,” or returning the gift, and gives the natural world the status of a player.

Back yards, where fewer economic motives usually prevail, offer direct opportunities to ally ourselves with the forces of restoration. Planting native penstemons instead of petunias won't take food out of your mouth, but it may put it into some other creature's, somebody you didn't know about but will be glad to meet. Grizzlies and wolves will not appear in your urban yard, but there's a lot else that can happily inhabit the place where nature and culture meet. The endangered San Joaquin kit fox may not build a den by your deck (although a gray fox, with cubs, lives comfortably near one of our clients), but if your home at the edge of the wildlands is a rich, chirping, buzzing, yowling island, with no invasive plants leaking out from its edges, possibilities abound.

If the vegetable garden takes up a quarter of an acre, a food garden for birds and turtles might take up an equal amount. If the construction of a new home disrupts a woodland, let the builder plant another. If the commute to work requires roads that bring weedy species to wildlands, vow that your yard, and then your neighborhood, will be pest-plant free.

A sense of atonement is not inappropriate for the back-yard restorationist. Neither craven nor guilt-ridden, but almost practical, it points a new way. To look at what has been done to the land and begin its redress at the back door brings concrete relief, soothing like hands patting the dirt around the roots of a young oak. With the premise that all land is sacred land, the gardener finds herself doing important work. While corporations are forced to mitigate, homeowners can do so voluntarily, joyfully.

I know a woman who planted capeweed in the yard of her rented home. Eleven years later, when she moved, the capeweed had spread throughout her yard and into adjoining farmlands, beyond her physical means to remove it. Where it will stop is anybody's guess, but that land adjoins a national park where volunteers spend weekends removing this very species.

She might make reparation by tackling some restoration project in her next yard, something within her capabilities. She might “mitigate” for damage done by joining a volunteer group working to restore public lands. She might pressure her local nursery owner not to sell capeweed and talk to her friends about the significance of their gardening choices. Such actions would reflect a change in consciousness, assuming responsibility for our gardening choices.

MY KIND OF CLIENT I am at the beginning of a consultation. I am not sure yet what I can do for this client—the gardening problems he wants to solve seem to require plants not found in the native palette, such as evergreen vines that form thick privacy screens and are fragrant through the summer.

Then he shows me three oa\ saplings on his property, two valley oaks and one coast live oak. One of the valley oaks has been jay-seeded right next to a recently built gardening shed, We admire its shapely promise. “Of course, we'll have to remove the shed,” he says matter-of-factly. Now I know I can work with this client.

I don't expect clients to tear down their buildings for native plants, but it's nice when one offers.

Tipping the Balance

After walking the land with a client, I walk it alone, then sit in the best place I can find to ponder on plant associations to be recreated and how they can be combined with what already exists. Important information to elicit is which plants the client wants to keep.

I seek to avoid the tearing out of well-loved plants. Ripping out roses and fruit trees, a fragrant daphne, or a time-honored wisteria is not the way I like to begin. The kind of gardening described in this book simply sets in slow motion the process of tipping the balance in a native direction. Returning the natives, seeing how they work, making thoughtful choices, the gardener can move slowly to a vision of commitment arising, not from a sense of loss or deprivation, but rather from a sense of enrichment.

Roses and fruit trees can be protected from deer by encircling them with coyote bush or Oregon grape, Mahonia aquifolium, In coastal gardens, coyote bush can visually tie a garden together; its rich green foliage makes a good background for roses, particularly the climbing roses that don't require spraying and coddling. The back-yard orchardist may find that the only nut trees that do well on the coast are the native hazels. When the raspberries are done, the berry lover can head for the native huckleberries.

Fruit trees can be underplanted with native bunchgrasses, whose slow and steady intake of water and deep fibrous root systems make them good cover crops for orchards and vineyards. The native grape, Vitis californica, tangy and sweet after the first frost, is well worth growing. Food growers, including permaculturists, who focus on perennial crops, and organic truck farmers might profitably begin serious conversation with native plant people.

The back-yard gardener, with no deadlines to meet, no committees to please, has the opportunity to change slowly. No massive replantings or clear-cuts need be scheduled in the back yard. We remove one or two Monterey pines a year around my house, replanting oak trees, buckeyes, and red elderberries as we go. If any creatures have adapted to existing garden plants, we aim to provide them with alternatives before eliminating their habitat.

Appropriate Expectations

In working out the sequence of events for the homeowner, I hope to establish that less than total certainty is the essence of this kind of gardening. Surprise, both good and bad, provides opportunities to learn more about a particular site. Accumulating information about what works where, sometimes developing site-specific techniques, and using that information to rework the project as it proceeds are part of the evolving native garden.

In order that expectations and reality mesh, I make it clear that some native plants have a longer adjustment period after planting than nonnative plants commonly used in the trade. They may not begin to thrive till the fall after planting, or till two or even three years down the line. I want to avoid the situation where the homeowner, used to the “quick off the mark” growth rate of standard landscaping plants, gives up just as the plants are about to come into their own.

Where slow-growing plants are used, I include quick-growing annuals and perennial wildflowers and native bunchgrasses to give the homeowner immediate satisfaction and pleasure. The early garden is often quite different from the mature garden, which expresses the realized forms of trees and shrubs. I often plant willows, elderberries, or alders with slowergrowing oaks. These riparian plants are quick to take off and provide good screening fast. It usually takes about five years for the oak to overtake them.

I am alerted to potential problems when a client indicates particular flower color dislikes or preferences. The client who dislikes pink, all pinks, from lavender-tinged to nearly red, from opaque to translucent, or all yellow flowers, may be applying “interior design” principles that indicate a critical difference in our perspectives. I recall an experience I had on one of my first bird walks. Pausing in an opening near a creek, we were asked to count the number of bird calls we heard. Trying to decipher which one was under discussion, I asked, “Do you mean the musical one?”

“Musical is in the ear of the beholder,” said one participant.

That little comment revealed to me that in the bird world as in the plant world, personal tastes differ. I have often been confused by a customer's request for “something pretty” in the way of wildflowers, since “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Many times I have fielded requests for a wildflower mix that includes nothing yellow, or nothing pink, or nothing red.

I have never been asked for a mix that excludes blue flowers. People almost universally like blue flowers. To most bees and day-flying butterflies, however, blue is not attractive. Which perhaps accounts for its relative rarity in the world of flowers, and, therefore, its appeal for novelty-seeking humans.

The other relatively rare flower color, red, attracts birds rather than insects. Because most insect pollinators do not see pure red as a color, such flowers are to a certain extent an unoccupied ecological niche, available to the birds that do “see red.” “Bird red” is a particularly valuable color for long-range attraction. It stands out starkly from all colors in the background and is clearly visible even early in the morning and late in the afternoon—times when many birds prefer to fly.

Bird nectar seekers not being as common as bird berry eaters, there are correspondingly fewer red flowers and more red berries, including, here in California, toyon, hairy honeysuckle, red elderberry, wild rose, and chokecherry.

Discussing this kind of plant/bird interaction may produce either startled attention or stifled yawns. I try to establish whether or not the client wants to see plants in this full way, and whether considerations of providing food for a wide variety of creatures can influence preferences.

I also assess the degree of seasonality, including dormancy or semidormancy, the client can tolerate. Some native plants may demonstrate change through the seasons more dramatically than the kinds of nonnatives chosen for freeway, shopping mall, and bank parking lot. The gardener's pruning hand helps keep dormant plants tidy, but attention through the year is required. To the best of my ability, I attempt to make all this clear to the clients.

A tricky juggle is being performed here. I weigh the preconceptions of my clients concerning a desirable landscape, the vision that has formed in my investigations, and an assessment of the difference between the two. A moment may later arrive, which I try to imagine now. It comes after we have done the planting, watering, and final mulching. It is a time before the inevitable problems of watering, weeding, and the unexpected. Sitting in my car in a crowded neighborhood that I believe was once solid oak woodland, I salute the small oaks we have planted, the bunchgrasses, brodiaeas, calochortus, and toyon. I regard the huge old valley oak down the block that validated my assumptions about this piece of land. It is a moment of cloudy triumph, acknowledging the unknown ahead, while resting for the moment in the hope of having done something for that which is thought valuable.

In anticipation of that moment, I go through the private, final phase of the initial consultation, before discussing my ideas with the client. I ask,“Help me know what it is that the land wants.” Whom am I asking? I'm not sure, and I know there will be no one answer, but rather a series of them. Still, I ask

Part-opening illustration: Blue oak. Drawing by Ane Carla Rovetta.