CHAPTER TWO
He who owns a veteran bur oak owns more than a tree. He owns a historical library and a reserved seat in the theatre of evolution. Aldo Leopold, 1949
I cannot think of a more tasteless undertaking than to plant trees in a naturally treeless area, and to impose an interpretation of natural beauty on a great landscape that is charged with beauty and wonder, and the excellence of eternity. Ansel Adams, 1966
Hints and Clues, Remnants and Relics
I arrive early for my appointment. There is time, before ringing the doorbell, to scout the neighborhood surrounding the home where I shall be doing a landscape consultation. It may be a tract house in a crowded subdivision, a summer home converted to a residence on ten acres of woods, a ranch house on five hundred acres of grasslands, or a mini-mansion built “on spec.” Maybe the land was once a beanfield, and before that, riparian forest. It may have been converted from apricot orchards to houses and yards, or directly from oak savannah to houses and yards, but somewhere in the neighborhood, I am going to find some native plant life.
An oak sprouting by the sidewalk, a small patch of miner s lettuce in the grass, toyon thrusting dark red berries through a fence. Coyote bush along a right of way, the seed stalk of an annual lupine. Hints and clues, remnants and relics. The survivors.
I make a list, a neighborhood flora for the client. It will tell the names of the survivors, those species possibly easiest to bring back, and provide clues to the land's natural history. I may find places for collection of local seeds, to be grown out by me or the client, or plant combinations that seem like good ideas.
Rare is the land that has not experienced some hard history of use. Usually the “herb layer,” which includes the native grasses, wildflowers, and perennials, is least in evidence. When there are venerable oaks or madrones, dramatic and beautiful, they are often spending a lonely old age with no young ones coming along. To suggest taking measures to encourage baby, teenage, and young adult oaks is a way to gauge the long-range interests of the client. Is the imagination stirred by the thought of an oak grove that the owner might not live to see mature? The owners response provides a clue, a necessary hint, about this particular land manager.
The flora is for the clients, to honor their land. I am usually excited by what I have found, and hope that they will be too. As I talk about what I have seen, I begin to assess how much complexity is of interest to them and what their motive is for wanting a garden of native plants. Sometimes they want to include a few native plants for interest's sake; sometimes they want to lower their water bill. They may want to attract hummingbirds or butterflies or quail. A multitude of motivations are possible. I have seen repeatedly that one thing leads to another and that I can never predict from an initial encounter what the outcome will be.
Once I had my kitchen redone, a major improvement. The carpenter kept saying how small it was. I was thrilled with the changes but couldn't enjoy them till the carpenter had left. I want my clients to love their land, to find in it some glimpse of the perfection indigenous peoples attribute to their homelands. The feeling that it is “just right,” that everything needed is present on the site. A willingness to accept its winds, slopes, and exposures with all the pleasures and challenges they bring.
In most cases, the general outlines of what used to grow on the land are apparent without my early morning ramble. But it makes a welcome interlude between the drive and the work and provides an opening for the appearance of the unexpected, a rare fritillary or surprising patch of grassland.
And it is a way to clear the mind for this work. A moment to imagine the past, acknowledge the ghosts, and be reassured by the presence of the natives, still coming through. Yes, we are still around, they say. We have survived plowing, logging, mining, ranching, and now, gardening.
In some cases, it is the gardener who delivers the final blow.
What Is Happening to California?
Once I saw a beautiful piece of land for sale not far from where I live. It was adjacent to a national park, offering views of ocean and bay, and was richly clothed with a mosaic of Bishop pine, sword fern, Pacific wax myrtle, and huckleberry. Soon, the fortunate new owners began to build their home.
Shortly afterward, a hedge was planted. Not a hedge of the species already present on the site—coffeeberry, wild lilac, Pacific wax myrtle, coyote bush, Pacific reed grass, coast live oak, and California hazel—but one of a non-native plant with strong associations of the freeway. The newcomers to the neighborhood had chosen to plant oleander.
There is no shortage of oleander in California. Anyone wishing to see it can drive along Interstate 5 and many other freeways. Everywhere, the “oleanderization of California” proceeds apace. There is, on the contrary, a shortage of relatively intact Bishop pine forest and its floral and faunal associates. Multiply this scenario by the thousands, and you will glimpse how the landscape of California has been changed in the name of gardening.
I once saw a back yard entirely planted with iceplant, creating a perfect rectangle of bright pink flowers in the middle of one of those textured, tufted, woven mosaics of grays and greens unique to the California chaparral. Perhaps the owner had been advised to plant iceplant to prevent erosion, although the chamise, sagebrush, ceanothus, and manzanita had been doing that perfectly well for thousands of years.
In these situations, a new homeowner (sometimes from another state, sometimes not) buys a home or lot partly because of its natural beauty and then immediately proclaims ownership by planting a tree or a hedge or a flower garden that bears no relationship to the surrounding flora or land forms. I call this behavior “planting the flag” gardening, often an early stage in the development of gardeners, who may or may not evolve beyond it. I myself left behind in beautiful upstate New York a relatively pristine hillside that did not benefit from my early gardening activities. Following the advice of an enticing catalog, I planted crown vetch, an invasive exotic plant, to cover the banks of our newly excavated pond, and through my gardening practices introduced weeds that were not previously present.
Organic gardening was my first gardening framework, and Ruth Stout's How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Bac\ my inspiration. Her secret was mulch. Mulch on top of mulch, lots and lots of mulch. She said that you could never have too much mulch. Spoiled hay was her greatest source of mulch, and it was also mine, with the difference that she was able to use salt hay, relatively free of weed seeds, while my hay bales, the only ones I could find, included seeds of Johnson grass, one of the most noxious of weedy grasses, and burdock, the farmer's bane in that part of the country. Everywhere I mulched, I introduced these invasive species, nevermore to be absent from this piece of land.
Recently, a homeowner newly arrived from the Midwest was given a consultation with me for his birthday. He had transplanted around his property a hedge of French broom, which had reseeded down the hill, moving into coastal scrub and native prairie. When I expressed dismay, he said,“I had no idea you'd be such a fanatic.” I guess I was a disappointing birthday present. Now I make it clear in advance that a fanatic is being hired.
I was not born a fanatic. I became this way gradually because of what I have seen and learned doing this work. When I lived in a pink stucco house in the Santa Clara Valley, I looked back with nostalgia to Blossom Valley's agrarian past, planting apricots and pruning almond trees. For five years, I kept cutting back the annoying scratchy plant sprouting from a stump under our hammock. It took me that long to realize that it was a coast live oak, a precious reminder of the dense riparian forest that had probably once covered my neighborhood. Later, by the channelized
