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.
PART II
Tipping the Balance
in a Native
Direction
