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
