Читать книгу Gardening with a Wild Heart - Judith Larner Lowry - Страница 9
ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE Gardening at the Seam
I wish so to live ever as to derive my satisfactions and inspirations from the commonest events, everyday phenomena, so that what my senses hourly perceive, my daily walk, the conversation of my neighbors, may inspire me, and I may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me. Henry Thoreau
Biodiversity has recently become a fashionable concept to promote, but should we try to enhance biodiversity just at the state and federal level and not at the county level or even in our back yards? Should we settle for small populations of species in distant parts of our state and nation, when with protection viable populations could exist as well in our own neighborhoods?
W. David Shuford, 1993
It's not as if they learned about willows and grasses in order to make baskets, but as if they learned to make baskets by knowing willows. Mary Austin, 1912
Discovering Home
Moving fifteen years ago to a small town on the north central coast of California, I was entranced by the miles of protected land that surrounded us. My first walks into those public preserves revealed to my grateful eyes the beauty and variety of coastal plant associations.
All shades of green and gray made a rich foliar tapestry, accented in spring and summer with the rainbow colors of coastal wildflowers. Rounded forms of shrubs and trees cast beautiful shadows on soft coastal hills. Where water seeped through cliffs, willows threaded surprising ribbons through the seemingly dry slopes. Light dappled the shade-loving ferns and flowers of dim canyons. I couldn't look enough.
Yet when I visited the gardens of my town, these local plants were conspicuous by their absence, as was any conversation about them. I came to see that I lived in a uniquely protected location that reflected little of its surrounding plant communities. My rambles revealed a slow but inexorable lessening of these native plant riches, a blanking out of natural values, beginning in gardens and towns and spreading into adjacent public lands. Observing small losses adding inexorably up, part of what Paul Ehrlich calls“the nickel-and-diming to death of our environment,” I began a gardening, walking, and thinking investigation.
Walking and looking, I came to hypothesize that the group of native bluff and coastal scrub plants that hold these cliffs, hills, and valleys have just the right characteristics for the job. Their leaves filter rain to the soil in just the right way, their roots dig into the cliffs in just the right way, and the habitat structure they provide enables the greatest number of fauna of all kinds to thrive. I began to explore the ways, both obvious and subtle, in which we could benefit from the incorporation of the wild into our gardens.
Coyote Bush
I began my own garden, juggling its creation with trips into the nearby wildlands for seed and idea collecting. Without quite knowing what I was doing, I began to try to work myself into my new home through gardening on my one-acre homesite with these plants. I never drew up a plan but depended on visions gained through explorations of the surrounding wildlands. I haven't been tied to these visions but have kept open to surprises;indeed, I have come to see surprises as the highest kind of gardening experience. Gardening with our local flora has allowed me to study and live with plants in such a way that I have discovered qualities of which I was previously unaware.
Take coyote bush (“coyote brush” to some).
On my flat, once heavily grazed, piece of land, the only species representing the northern coastal scrub plant community was coyote bush,Baccharis pilularis consanguínea, an undervalued species often removed when a garden is made. When we began the removal of weedy grasses, brambles, and French broom, we left islands of coyote bush, good places for mysterious rustlings in the early morning. I began to think about and appreciate coyote bush, and slowly I found others who had thoughts about this plant. As I talked to people about coyote bush, information began to emerge. What had begun as a solitary conversation expanded to include many talkers, and eventually a loose association formed, dedicated to protecting and restoring habitat in our town. At first jokingly and then as a matter of course, we called ourselves Friends of the Coyote Bush.
SAGE LA PENA I asked Sage La Pena, an indigenous Californian of the Wintu tribe, how she learned about native plants, and how she began growing them. Sage is the manager of the native plant nursery at Ya-Ka-Ama Indian University in Forestville, California.
“It started when I was born, ” said Sage. “I don't know why I know how or when to collect seeds. I just absorbed it growing up. ”
She told of trips down the Russian River with relatives, where conversation about the plants they were passing was the background of the trip.
“I didn't think I really knew anything until I applied for a job as a naturalist; then I realized how much I had absorbed. ”
“So, ” I said, “you learned about native plants from your family. ”
“That was one way. ” she said, “But there's a second way. Like my brother wakes up with a new song, I wake up knowing something about plants that I didn't know before. I dream it. ”
We learned that coyote bush, with its late bloom, is an indispensable source of nectar in the autumn, when hundreds of insects take advantage of its nectar, including Paradejeania rutillioides, the Tachina fly, whose larvae are parasitic on numerous insect pests harmful to important agricultural crops. An electrician working on my house opened some buried electrical boxes to find soft deer mouse nests made of the fluffy pappus of coyote bush seeds. A local hiker, caught in a tight spot on a steep cliff, grabbed onto coyote bush, sturdily rooted into the cliff, and pulled himself to safety.
The soil under coyote bush is rich, good for growing vegetables or for sheltering native herbaceous plants like checkerbloom or brodiaea, native bunchgrasses like the blue fescue and coastal hairgrass. Its flowers when gone to seed cover the bush like white snow, gleaming in the winter sun.
Some birds, like wrentits and white-crowned sparrows, live their whole lives in coyote bush, finding there all they need for perching, nesting, breeding, eating, and resting. Creatures like the rare mountain beaver find homes and food where coyote bush is. Coyote bush is enough for them.
We pondered the mysteries of its many forms, from the graceful shrubsized mounds, like clouds on a hillside, to the low-growing, ground-hugging form, to those individuals that unaccountably shoot up to tree size. As we learned more, one of us said, “It's hard to remember that once I thought coyote bush was just…coyote bush.”
Some call it “tick bush” and hold it in low regard, considering it a mere interloper where there could be grasses and colorful wildflowers, but here on the coast, bunchgrasses and perennial wildflowers thrive in its gracious company. When the exotic grasses are dry and dormant in late summer, look near the skirts of Baccharis pilularis to find soft tufts of native grassesstill partly green, interspersed with late-blooming wildflowers like the tarweeds, both madias and hemizonias.
In the garden, its rich green foliage and neat mounding habit make a satisfying background plant for other, showier species. One gardener discovered that cutting coyote bush seedlings to the ground when they are small will cause them to sprout back shapely and round. In other situations, where competition causes it to grow in a distorted fashion, it can be pruned to enhance its sculptural qualities. After fires, we watch the new green shoots sprout from the crowns, under a burned hoopskirt of blackened branches. Galls form on its leaves; some of us think it is helpful to remove them, but we don't know for sure. It is to coyote bush that I turn when discouraged or in need of a reminder of all that is available to learn in my own back yard.
Visions
I began to see the dim outlines of a vision of my home, nestled into the intricate earth, surrounded by those trees, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers that at one time graced this land, and surrounded also by those birds, insects, rodents, and mammals that have slept in, eaten off, hidden in, bred in, and otherwise hung out in these plants for the past ten thousand years. Home was becoming more particularly defined, more specific, more tied to the details of smell, color, and form, as we searched out the clues and looked at the pieces. The white-crowned sparrow, famous for its different dialects, has a clear, sweet whistle, called the Palomarin, or clear dialect, heard only in the area reaching from my town to a lake three miles away. Along our coast, the California poppy occurs in a lemon yellow rather than crayon orange variety.
While the land around my house, and in my town in general, can no longer be called pristine, the kind of gardening I have become interested in appears at the place where my plant choices and the general direction of the wild landscape meet, where I can work to locate myself and my garden in the ongoing evolution of life forms as they have become evident in this postPleistocene era, on this marine terrace, at the edge of this sea.
I am increasingly eased by my association with these plants. Collecting, cleaning, and sowing their seeds, planting and transplanting them as young plants, and collecting seeds from those in turn, all create a long intimacy somewhat reminiscent of, although not nearly as rich as, the complicated, layered involvement of the native Californians that used and continue to use them. When Mabel McKay, a deceased Pomo basket weaver and doctor, heard somebody say that he had used native medicinal herbs but that they hadn't worked for him, she responded, “You don't know the songs. You have to know the right songs.”
With no one to teach us, we don't know the songs either. The native practice of dreaming songs about the nonhuman world seems as valuable and elusive as a piece of pure bunchgrass prairie or the truth about this land.
Our retreat hut in the garden is called the Coyote Bush House, and its door handles are made from the hard, twisted limbs of its namesake. We use this hut for restorative naps, on a cot so situated that what you see out the open door before you fall asleep in April is the intense blue of lupines against the creams, yellows, and golds of tidy-tips, goldfields, and the lemon yellow form of the California poppy. What you see in the winter months is coyote bush regenerating after the long time of no rain, its new leaves the freshest of greens. The structure sits low to the ground, providing a good place for guard quail to perch while watching their flocks feed—their calls spring through the garden. Here, our first plant songs might be dreamed.
The Larger Garden
Twenty years ago, when I first began working in a California native plant nursery, I wasn't sure why I was drawn to work with native plants. In the middle of a major drought, they seemed important elements of the water-conserving garden, although now I no longer focus on the droughttolerant aspects of native plants. The reasons to garden with locally occurring native plants have more to do with joining in, with setting in motion interrupted processes that are unique to this place. It has to do with recreating a garden that connects the gardener with that larger garden beyond the fence.
In that larger garden, many plant/animal relationships are finely tuned and easily disrupted. Certain butterflies, for example, are called “hostspecific,” meaning that they will lay their eggs only on one or a few different plant species. When these larvae hatch, they require the kind of food that the leaves of their host plant provide and the kind of shelter that the leaf litter at the base of the plant provides. Without that particular plant, they will not survive. One example is the pipevine swallowtail, whose larvae are found only on the leaves of one of California's most beautiful native vines, Dutchman's pipe, Aristolochia californica. Without this plant, you won't be seeing the huge, iridescent, greenish black wings of Battus philenor. It all starts with the plants.
Gardening this way has changed me in ways I couldn't have predicted. My previous employer, Gerda Isenberg, the founder of Yerba Buena Nursery, had a demonstration garden of native plants, but around her house were a cutting garden, a formal rock garden, and some of the beloved plants that reflected her European birth. When I set up our demonstration garden, I followed her model, starting at the edge of the property with natives and working my way up to the house, where I half-consciously assumed that I too would grow exotic plants that caught my fancy.
By the time I got to the house, which took years, I was different. What I wanted to be greeted by in the mornings were the rusty green, roughish leaves of the California hazel, its horizontal twigs slanting against the office wall. I did not want to have to go anywhere to experience the sleek gray limbs of the California buckeye or the deep green leaves of the handsome coffeeberry. I wanted my fog gray house to melt into the grays of the coastal sages. These are friends whose seasons and graces go beyond novelty, friends with whom I have become quite comfortable.
I want to be able to walk directly into the coastal scrub and see it jumping with those resident birds, such as the wrentit, the bushtit, and the whitecrowned sparrow, that favor it for nesting and feeding. Quiet can make me nervous now, reminding me of what Robert Michael Pyle calls “the extinction of experience—the loss of everyday species within our own radius of reach.” He says, “When we lose the common wildlife in our immediate surroundings, we run the risk of becoming inured to nature's absences, blind to delight, and, eventually, alienated from the land.”
When I hike into the surrounding wildlands, I have a purpose, a reason to be there. As well as collecting seeds, I am seeking inspiration and information. We think we know what these plants can do, but surprises are the name of the game. Led by my friend John, who has made it the business of his retirement to know and protect this watershed, we once went deep into a coastal canyon, past marshy grasses, to a grove of Pacific wax myrtles so large that their ancient limbs created a sheltered glade. Here we picnicked, reclining on foot-deep, cinnamon-colored leaf litter. Having previously seen these plants only in their shrub form, I could only guess at how old these individuals were.
I brought back a bit of the duff to scatter at the base of my own small wax myrtles, in case some mycorhizzal connection in the soil has enabled the spectacular growth of these plants. These treasured bits of information let us know what was once and what might be again.
In the way that our coastal creeks spread out over the land in a broad floodplain before they empty into the lagoon, so the plants in this garden and in these wild gardens have begun to spread and seep out into our lives. At the end of a performance at our community center, we threw handfuls of coyote bush seed into the audience. The shining fluffy white seeds floated and drifted and landed in people's hair, adding to the layers of memories about coyote bush. Some people grabbed at them and put them in their pockets, as though the seeds were something valuable they had never seen before. For a while afterward, people would stop me on the street to talk about coyote bush.
Food
One part of the garden where the domestic and the wild meet is the food garden for humans. (The rest of the garden is food for something or somebody else.) In this area, I have planted both domestic and wild bush fruits, the domestic raspberry and blueberry alongside the wild huckleberry and thimbleberry. In the greens department, we have two kinds of every backpacker's favorite green, Claytonia sibirica and Claytonia perfoliata, side by side with domestic lettuces. The California woodland strawberry sends runners alongside Fragaria ‘Sequoia'. Asparagus beds flourish next to a plant of cow parsnip, said to have shoots that taste like asparagus. Native alliums and Bermuda onions sometimes share a bed.
Some farmers are thinking about agriculture based on natural models. Wes Jackson and others at the Land Institute in Kansas look to the prairies for possible perennial grain crop combinations that may give health back to some agricultural lands. We have used native legumes, like sky lupine, Lupinus nanus, as cover crops, which provide the bonus of a spring crop of beautiful flowers for pollinators and people to enjoy. Some wildflower species, like tansy-leaf phacelia, Phacelia tanacetifolia, and meadow foam, Litnnanthes douglasii, are used to attract beneficial insects to agricultural crops.
In order that the smells and colors particular to this place be joined by the tastes particular to it, once a year I immerse myself in food preparation tasks involving our local plants. At our annual spring open house, the menu may include roasted bay nuts, pinole made from blue wildrye, sugar cookies studded with chia seeds, miners lettuce on cheese and crackers, manzanita berry tea, and chia seed lemonade. We may not eat like this most of the time, but the ritual acknowledgment and honoring of this aspect of our local plants has come to feel compelling enough that I find myself preparing these foods and adding to the menu every year.
INDIAN LETTUCE One rainy year, our lettuce seedlings were all devoured by slugs and snails or drowned in downpours, but all was not lost. Indian lettuce, Clay tonia perfoliata, and the closely related peppermint candy flower, Clay tonia sibirica, had self-sown all around the oa\ trees, so we had succulent, nutritious spring greens for several months. Establishing native clovers, choice spring greens loved by indigenous Californians, would make our spring salads even more diverse and reliable. New shoots of checkerbloom, Sidalcea malvaeflora,although a bit furry, are also quite edible, returning every year. One round, perfoliate Indian lettuce leaf on a round cracker with a slice of a round cheese makes a pleasant hors d'oeuvre.
Once I went to visit a friend on First Mesa on the Hopi Reservation. Inquiring as to her whereabouts, I was told that she was “whitewashing the kiva,” the sacred ceremonial space. She emerged from that task with a certain virtuous glow. I remember that glow while roasting the seed of red maids, Calandrinia ciliata, shelling bay nut seeds, or cleaning bunchgrass seed to make pinole. These are mundane activities that set the stage for important events. It is a time for honoring continuous ways—in this case, ways having to do with the plants. Like whitewashing the kiva, this food preparation is the background activity for a sacred experience—the incorporation of the molecules of local foods into our bodies. As Thoreau said of native fruits, “They educate us and fit us to live here.”
WILD GRAPES For Mary Austin, the plants, landscape, and indigenous cultures of California were essential components of her writing. In her autobiography, Earth Horizon,she tells about the malnutrition she suffered when her family took up homesteading in the Tejon Valley in 1889. Surviving mainly on game, and concomitantly suffering from a deep, almost desperate passion to understand and become rooted in her new home, Mary grew wea\ and lethargic.
When the leaves fell off the grapevines in the canyons, Mary discovered wild grapes. “After a week or two of almost exclusive grape diet, Mary began to pick UP amazingly. ” At the same time, she met a local rancher able to make available to her the explicit knowledge of the Tejon region that she craved. Through eating wild foods, she regained her health, beginning an exploration of the people, animals, and landscape that resulted in literary treasures like The Land of Little Rain.
Sagebrush
Where you see coyote bush, you often see its partner in the coastal scrub plant community, California sagebrush, that plant of ineffable, shining silvery gray green. The smell and the color are the essence of California shrub lands, both interior and coastal. A good medicine smell, a heart-easing smell. A smell with some of the sharpness common to chaparral plants, which tells us where we are and seems to cut through grief or ennui.
I walk through the garden with Ann, who has worked here with me for seven years. She hands me a wand of pungent, palest silvered green sagebrush and says, “Smell this.” Wandering, we stop at a large soaproot plant and look through the stems and leaves to the shadow they cast on the leaf litter at the base of the plant they come from. We experience a certain lack of ambition. We note a marked lack of plans. Now that we have reinjected the native virus, it is, to a greater and greater degree, out of our hands. Not that there isn't plenty to do; weeds are forever, especially in a Mediterranean climate, but the balance has been tipped in the native direction. Now that the California hazel is established and thriving, we can let the rose from France next to it arch its long canes in the hazel's direction.
As the years go by and the plants develop their character, I begin to accept them at their worst. The California sagebrush, during its long summer and fall dormancy, turns a ghostly pale color and looks, with its empty seed stalks, as though it had just got out of bed. But ours is not a relationship based only on looks. The wrentit uses scrapings from its bark to make its nest, bound together with cobwebs. Dried sagebrush leaves are sold as local incense at our Christmas Fair. If, as you walk through the scrub, your coat brushes the sagebrush, you become redolent of a fine fragrance, at once spicy and sweet.
Music and Baskets
Twice a year, a Pomo Indian named Milton “Bun” Lucas used to visit our garden. We would place a chair for him between two elderberry bushes. From there, he would direct us as we scurried about cutting elderberry shoots for him to turn into carved clapper sticks and flutes, musical instruments used by many Californian tribes. Our cutting goals included fostering those stems that next year would be the right size and shape for a clapper stick or flute.
Gardening can be an anxious pastime, as the demands of weeding, watering, fertilizing, and pruning accrue. I have never experienced such peaceful gardening moments as when we planned for next year's “music bush”harvest. “Cut here,” said Bun, “and cut here.”
Now that Bun is gone, the bushes don't look the same. Some native peoples say that plants not honored by being used become sad and don't flourish. No one attends this tree anymore to make gambling pieces out of the twigs or to carve parts of the limbs into beautiful clapper sticks and whistles, so that music can be made.
Obtaining suitable basketry materials can be difficult for native California basket weavers. Lack of access and policies involving the spraying of herbicides and the control of fire are all stumbling blocks in the way of the pursuit of this art. Basketgrass, Muhlenbergia rigens, used by a number of California tribes, is hard to find and often not of suitable quality. At the same time, however, this grass has become extremely popular in landscaping. A large, fine-textured handsome grass easily grown horticulturally, it is being planted very extensively throughout California and seems to be adaptable to many conditions; there is no reason for indigenous basket makers to go without. One fall, I was able to offer sheaves of its beautiful pale seed stalks to a Yowlumni basket maker.
I have talked with other indigenous Californians about plants they used to see but can no longer find, plants of cultural importance to their tribe. These include a plant gathered for its edible leaves, a variety of wild tobacco that no one has seen for a while, and an elusive grass with seeds as large as wheat. All these might be found and brought into the native garden. Recent anthropological theories about Indian land management indicate that to the indigenous people of California, there was no “wilderness.” Human activities have always transformed the landscape. The distinction between the garden and the wild blurs further. The seam shifts, cracks in some places, holds more closely in others.
Illuminations
I am a patron of used book stores, alert for the odd find that may illuminate some hitherto unknown aspect of this kind of landscape and these plants, of previous human interactions with them and reactions to them. Except for the redwoods, our coastal plants go largely unsung. They have no John Muir. Easily removed for development or ranching, of little evident economic value, they are the underdogs of California plant communities. I think of myself as becoming of them, becoming “of the coastal scrub.”
For this kind of garden, plant lists are not taken from charts in glossy garden books. Ideas for plantings come from local floras, from hikes with naturalists into nearby undisturbed areas, from visits to botanic gardens, from the recollections of old-timers, and from the oral histories stored in our museums and libraries. They come from the diaries of early Spanish explorers, from the journals of wives of doctors living in gold-mining communities, from the casual asides of English tourists.
My garden is not the wild, but it looks to and is in conversation with the wild. It backs on and is backed up by natural systems. The goal is that the quail living next to us will find in our arranged mosaic of coastal prairie, coastal scrub, and wildflower fields the forbs they need for greens, the seeds they need for protein when nesting, and, in our shrubs, the habitat structure for shelter and protection. Subclover, Trifolium subterraneum, a plant widely sown for forage, will not be found in our garden, as it is in nearby lots, since it is now known that this plant contains chemicals that inhibit reproduction in quail. Nor will the naturalizing pyracantha, for although its berries may seem to make birds amusingly inebriated, they actually expose them to prédation and interfere with the activities necessary for their survival. Instead, we plant toy on, Heteromeles arbutifolia, with its bright holly like berries at Christmas time, the shrub for which Hollywood was named.
With plantings of toy on, we join the great feeding schedule, whereby food is available at the right time for the right creature. In early summer, the buckeye blooms, sometimes for three months. Its great pendant blossoms attract the insects that nourish the protein-hungry nesting birds. Even birds that are usually herbivorous require animal food while nesting. In midsummer, annual and perennial seed crops ripen, bee plant, poppy, miners lettuce, clarkia. By early fall, the native honeysuckle drapes succulent red berries on trees and shrubs. Midfall brings acorn and hazel harvests, and late fall sees the ripening of madrone and toyon berries, while the coyote bush pumps out the nectar. In January and February, the flowering of pink flowering currant coincides with the return of the rufous hummingbird
An editor of a gardening magazine questions whether this kind of gardening, where ethics and aesthetics merge, using local natives and natural models, is truly representative of the fine art of gardening. “Some might consider such simplification the abandonment of gardens as art,” he says. But choices have been made, plants have been arranged, an aesthetic has been developed. It embraces all I know, all I hope to know, and all I wish I knew about this set of ancient processes and associations.
Is it the way of a lazy gardener, as he implies? I find that the horticultural challenges are many. For example, I want to establish a stand of Indian paintbrush here, a hemi-parasitic plant that probably grew here once but has so far not survived in my garden.
Indian paintbrush, appearing in a radiant palette of apricot, scarlet, and yellow, hosts a particular kind of aphid-eating mite. This mite lives in the flower, where it eats nectar, till a hummingbird comes along to share the nectar. At this juncture, the mite runs up the hummingbirds beak and into its nostril, where it sits tight while the hummingbird flies down to Baja California. As the hummingbird approaches a nectar-producing plant, the mite gets ready, rears up, and races from the nostril, down the beak, and into the flower. Since it must move so quickly, this creature is equal in speed to the fastest animal on earth, the cheetah. By establishing this flower in the garden, with its as yet elusive cultural requirements, we may be facilitating this mind-boggling nasal journey.
The Beginning of the Eucalyptus Story
My town is bordered on the north by Jacks Creek, which feeds a rancher's stock pond before wending its diminished way to the ocean. As along many creeks in California, the north bank of this creek was planted with a windbreak of eucalyptus trees. Under these trees, which continually drop large, acidic leaves, little is able to grow except French broom and brambles, shallow-rooted, non-native plants. The bank on this side is continually crumbling and eroding, as the eucalyptus trees, now some eighty feet tall, become increasingly top-heavy.
On the other side of the creek, the bank is covered with native plants from the coastal scrub, including monkeyflower, sagebrush, coyote bush, lizard tail, mule's ear, and cow parsnip. The bank on that side is intact, verdant, complete, even down to the smaller plants, such as the tiny, narrowleaved native plantain (a larval food plant for the endangered Bay checkerspot butterfly) and the spring-blooming bulb named pussy ears for its pointed, fuzzy white petals.
Where Jack's Creek empties into the ocean, the bank becomes a steep bluff. On the northern, eucalyptus-covered side of the creek mouth, the tree currently nearest the end of the bluff will cling precariously for a while, providing dramatic photo opportunities, and then fall, taking with it a great chunk of cliff. The beach below is already littered with bleached eucalyptus trunks, resembling an elephant's graveyard. One by one, the trees fall, and the end of the cliff moves further back into the land. The other side of the bluff, where the native plants grow, erodes slowly, imperceptibly, at a leisurely Californian pace. Recently, I saw that a eucalyptus sapling has appeared in the previously intact coastal scrub on the south bank. This young tree will, in not too many years, be the progenitor of its own grove of cliffdestroying eucalyptus trees.
In other places, seeking to save their sea-bluff properties, homeowners have planted species reputed to help in erosion control, such as iceplant. Used in many places throughout California, iceplant quickly covers the ground, but it is not deep-rooted and does not lace the soil layers together as will the deep-rooted native bluff species. I have seen its heavy, succulent leaves pull down sections of cliff. When the plant dies, too, the salt stored in its leaves changes the chemical properties of the soil into which it decomposes, impeding the germination and reestablishment of native species.
The native plants have become the exotics, lone voices in a chorus of eucalyptus, passion flower vine, French and Scotch broom, Cape ivy, English ivy, and so on. I speculate that one reason so little respect is given to native plant communities in my town is that they are now so little in evidence. The thrilling sweep to the sea of low-growing prairie, scrub, and bluff plants that must once have been here is hard to visualize, interrupted as it is now by mini-forests of eucalyptus, pine, and cypress. Where coastal scrub still exists, it is usually diminished by the rampant growth of Himalayan blackberry or ivy, which eliminate the beautiful herb layer, one of the elements that distinguishes northern coastal scrub from southern coastal scrub. It is hard, and getting harder, to get a sense of what the land used to be.
I can base my gardening choices on information gleaned from naturalists and scientific papers, on data on habitat for songbirds, butterflies, insects, voles, and lizards, motivated by the hope of providing hospitable surroundings for these creatures. Yet it may be that they will not come, or that only some will.
I shall still want to be surrounded by these plants. Knowledge of their qualities seems to fill some of that cavity of longing for knowledgeable connection with our tribe, both human and other, that some of us carry around like an empty burden basket. I no longer see plants as isolated acquisitions, representing triumphs of my horticultural skills, although I use those skil from propagating oaks from acorns to pruning California hazels into the elegant, horizontally branched form they can assume.
My goals, perspectives, and visions have so changed through this endeavor that a beautiful flowering plant at the nursery that might once have fired my blood with the longing for ownership is a matter of some indifference to me now. Most noticeably, I can no longer be disappointed in my expectations of what plants might do. “I have these pictures in my mind of how the garden will look. But it never looks that way,” one client complained. “I know,” I said. “Isn't it great?” It's all information on the characteristics of old friends. Surprise, change, and flow are the stuff of gardening life to me now.
Protecting, enhancing, and bringing close the coastal scrub and other native plant communities has become my business, and my life is punctuated by phone calls and seed orders and scheduling, but behind it all somewhere always are the color of the litter made by wax myrtle leaves and the smell of coyote bush in the rain.
The Seam
Once I spent some time at a hot springs in Mendocino County. The facilities included a “cool pool” for swimming, built by damming the creek on three sides with poured concrete. The fourth side of the pool was formed by the rocky base of the hill, along which flowed the creek. On the hillside, native clarkias cast a pink net through the grasses.
When, after swimming my laps, I pulled myself up and out of the pool, I found that one hand was on concrete and the other on native rock. Regarding the seam between the two materials, a hardened flow between substances, it occurred to me that this is the place where I have come to garden: at the seam between the wild and the cultivated, where they merge and mingle, the shape of one giving shape to the other.
It is this conversation, the back-yard, over-the-fence conversation between the gardener and the larger garden beyond the fence, that forms the subject of this book. Sometimes I find myself standing motionless in my garden, a plant in either hand. My neighbor laughs at me over the fence, “What are you doing?”
“I'm thinking,” I say. I'm remembering a piece of coastal forest where I first saw these plants, called milkmaids, in a sunny opening created by the demise of an old Douglas fir. My mind flickers through a couple of hundred years of land use history, speculating, evaluating, I imagine myself next spring lying down among these white flowers, watching the white butterflies that frequent them, lost in the fog-bound trembling of this gentle, solemn, silvered land.
Part-opening illustration: Wild grapes. Drawing by Ane Carla Rovetta.
