the block, I found an ancient elderberry, larger and older than any I had ever seen, another survivor.
Although I was working as a propagator at a native plant nursery, collecting acorns and growing native oaks, and although it was dreadfully hot in the summer, and shade from an oak would have been a welcome thing, apricots and plums were on my mind, and I kept cutting back that oak sprout. But it kept coming up again. My pruning only seemed to make it more vigorous.
I was not comfortable in that neighborhood. I wanted to live in a wilder place What a strong wild impulse that oak demonstrated, repeatedly crown-sprouting, borrowing strength from its ancient root system. The wildness we are buying second homes to experience, eating up the remaining open spaces of California and driving up and down freeways to find, may be in our back yards, knocking at the door.
Restoration Ecology
I ask my clients to write out a list of their questions, concerns, priorities, and dreams. We read through it together, then walk the land. They are the local experts, the ones who see the water stream past the side of the house after a storm and feel the intense heat where the sun beats down in late summer. The work is a collaboration, where I arrive with my experience and perspective, but the gardener is the inhabitant, the one with local knowledge, the one who is continually gathering on-site information.
Restoration ecology teaches us a sense of how much there is to know about every place, guiding the mulching, planting, pruning hand to move with knowledge behind it. Gardeners as land managers, people who make decisions about how land will be used, invest some
A gardener plants pampas grass in the front yard, and three years later that single plant has spawned a whole field of baby pampas grass down the road. Somebody plants Cape ivy to hide an unsightly shed, from which it spreads into and destroys a whole coastal scrub remnant, a willow grove, or a thicket of native blackberry. A gardener chooses capeweed, Arctotheca calendula, as a “ground cover,” and it moves relentlessly into a small remnant coastal prairie. In all these cases, it is gardeners, not logging companies, mining companies, or shopping mall developers, who take steps resulting in an unintended but nonetheless devastating loss of scenes and relationships from which we might be learning.
Mike Kelly, president of the Friends of Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve, consisting of 3,700 acres near San Diego, writes of the inventory of weed problems in the preserve. Of the eight or so invasive species he names, six are present because they have been planted by gardeners and public agencies as ornamentals.
I day dream of a law requiring that no planting be done by a new homeowner during his or her first year of ownership, until the new owner has watched the sun rise and set on the land many times, walked the paths, felt the wind and noted how it changes through the seasons, experienced drainage in the rainy season, and let the land do its work, talked to the neighbors about what weedy problems they contend with and which plants they regret having planted.
Mitigation for the Gardener
In the field of restoration ecology, the term mitigation refers to the legal requirement to make reparation for harm done—in other words, for the developer who builds a shopping mall on a wetland or condominiums where vernal pools once went through their seasonal changes to create equivalent wetlands or vernal pools elsewhere.
Although mitigation may be seen as representing a real shift in consciousness, questions of the possibility of such replacement of natural systems inevitably arise. Do we understand enough about natural systems to begin to recreate them, or to evaluate the mitigation effort once it has been made? All those associated with this field recognize that the cost of attempting to replace functioning natural systems with artificial ones is astronomical, that it would be better simply to protect them in the first place. But development proceeds, roads are cut through wildlands, houses sit on vernal pools, video parlors occupy coastal scrub, and the landscape of California is changed for the worse in ways both apparent and hidden.
In an ideal world, the restored wetland would be created first, before the building project was begun. It would be observed for a number of years to see if it could actually meet restoration criteria before the first bulldozer arrives to destroy the original site. Critics point out that restoration in this arena serves to legitimize destruction, but the revolutionary aspect of even this kind of restoration is that it recognizes that the world cannot absorb endless destruction. It legalizes the concept of “payback,” or returning the gift, and gives the natural world the status of a player.
Back yards, where fewer economic motives usually prevail, offer direct opportunities to ally ourselves with the forces of restoration. Planting native penstemons instead of petunias won't take food out of your mouth, but it may put it into some other creature's, somebody you didn't know about but will be glad to meet. Grizzlies and wolves will not appear in your urban yard, but there's a lot else that can happily inhabit the place where nature and culture meet. The endangered San Joaquin kit fox may not build a den by your deck (although a gray fox, with cubs, lives comfortably near one of our clients), but if your home at the edge of the wildlands is a rich, chirping, buzzing, yowling island, with no invasive plants leaking out from its edges, possibilities abound.
If the vegetable garden takes up a quarter of an acre, a food garden for birds and turtles might take up an equal amount. If the construction of a new home disrupts a woodland, let the builder plant another. If the commute to work requires roads that bring weedy species to wildlands, vow that your yard, and then your neighborhood, will be pest-plant free.
A sense of atonement is not inappropriate for the back-yard restorationist. Neither craven nor guilt-ridden, but almost practical, it points a new way. To look at what has been done to the land and begin its redress at the back door brings concrete relief, soothing like hands patting the dirt around the roots of a young oak. With the premise that all land is sacred land, the gardener finds herself doing important work. While corporations are forced to mitigate, homeowners can do so voluntarily, joyfully.
I know a woman who planted capeweed in the yard of her rented home. Eleven years later, when she moved, the capeweed had spread throughout her yard and into adjoining farmlands, beyond her physical means to remove it. Where it will stop is anybody's guess, but that land adjoins a national park where volunteers spend weekends removing this very species.
She might make reparation by tackling some restoration project in her next yard, something within her capabilities. She might “mitigate” for damage done by joining a volunteer group working to restore public lands. She might pressure her local nursery owner not to sell capeweed and talk to her friends about the significance of their gardening choices. Such actions would reflect a change in consciousness, assuming responsibility for our gardening choices.
MY KIND OF CLIENT I am at the beginning of a consultation. I am not sure yet what I can do for this client—the gardening problems he wants to solve seem to require plants not found in the native palette, such as evergreen vines that form thick privacy screens and are fragrant through the summer.
Then he shows me three oa\ saplings on his property, two valley oaks and one coast live oak. One of the valley oaks has been jay-seeded right next to a recently built gardening shed, We admire its shapely promise. “Of course, we'll have to remove the shed,” he says matter-of-factly. Now I know I can work with this client.
I don't expect clients to tear down their buildings for native plants, but it's nice when one offers.
Tipping the Balance
After
