Читать книгу Gardening with a Wild Heart - Judith Larner Lowry - Страница 6

PREFACE

When I started my mail-order seed business specializing in California native plants, I thought I would spend my days on sunny hillsides and within shadowed canyons, gathering jewel-like seeds of all shapes and colors. I thought I would be largely involved with seed cleaners and drying racks, with packets, scales, and catalogs. Yet it has turned out quite differently. Much of my time for the past twenty years has been spent in conversation.

More or less willingly, I have been a participant in countless conversations about many aspects of native plants. On the way, I have become fascinated by the assumptions, both implicit and stated, that govern gardening choices. I have gotten a sense of what people wanted to know, what I needed to learn, and where it all might lead. The activity of gardening with locally native plants has become a vehicle for ranging freely over the rich territories of land use history, local ecology, and land management.

I've tried to put it all together here, a long, lingering look at many aspects of this kind of gardening, from specifics on techniques of wildflower sowing to musings on the subtle effects of restoration gardening on a town. From a personal essay on wildland seed gathering to information on the linkages between voles and grasslands. While answering frequently asked questions of a practical nature, I seek at the same time to enliven the personal sense of living in a specific place with a complicated human, literary, and natural history.

The more I work with clients, the clearer it becomes that gardening as a restorationist has much to offer in strengthening newly established human roots and in deepening those ties to the land we inhabit that have been a given in human life for centuries. By seeing your particular piece of land as part of a larger plant-animal community and seeking to enhance old and established relationships through your style of gardening, you join that community.

Along the way, we find ourselves living in gardens of pleasure and hope.