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
