true dirt

tree of souls
Originally uploaded by true dirt

The Vatican has spoken: the movie Avatar substitutes worship of nature for religion, though the Pope’s newspaper concedes the movie has “extraordinary visual impact”. In spite of the largely negative review, I think the Vatican might be a little envious; James Cameron’s animated plant kingdom might get more viewers than the Pope’s Sistine chapel ceiling.

I thought the movie was truly a feast for the eye – the eye of a plant-o-phile in particular. The “natural” world James Cameron created, with the assistance of 3-D glasses and cracking art direction, put my mind to work thinking about all the many wonders of Earth’s flora and fauna, though mostly about the flora.

If I hadn’t just recently traveled to a continent (that would be Australia) where the plants and animals are so different, so “exotic” compared to what I am familiar with here in western North America, I might not have been able to think that the fantastical world of Avatar’s Pandora was not so far from the fantastical reality of our own.

On the most basic level, Pandora is Earth. Those filaments of the Na’vi’s neural network are a stand-in for the DNA/RNA information networks of life as we know it. But that’s not really what matters to me so much as the fact that so much of the artistic vision of this movie was about the “background”, the landscape and the living organisms that we humans are so often so oblivious to in our daily perambulations.

In fact, Pandora is all around us.

There is nothing quite as clever as a garden of necessity. And, as I am discovering, nothing quite as beautiful as a gardener’s desire to create their own Eden within often daunting constrictions of space, or soil, or weather, or time. A writer I knew took up gardening by moonlight as there was no other time to get away from work and small children.  She choose a preponderance of light reflecting and white blooming plants for her night garden. I read once of a garden on the coast of Brittany where the soil was simply gravel, and a constant wind precluded a garden of plants any taller than a rabbit’s ear.

Recently I went to visit a friend who has created, and had to abandon, several gardens around Berkeley. His current garden is contained entirely within a tiny wooden deck off the back porch; it’s mostly succulents and aloes, all the plants are in pots, and two rabbits live underneath it.

DW's garden

We notice when a garden is born. Enthusiasm and anticipation beget the patch of fresh dug earth with string-rows of vegetable starts, or a grandly schemed installation of lawn and flower borders. Gardens are constantly being created in the gardener’s mind and in the garden dirt. But do we know or notice when a garden dies?

Gardens are not so immortal as we might think. Yes, some live beyond the lives of their creators. Colleagues and fans take up the challenge to extend and renew a friend’s garden, and even institutionalize it, making it a monument to the garden creator. And though some gardens persist after the gardener has gone, eventually little or nothing will remain of the original’s personality.

Though gardens live in nature they are not nature, and time will erase nearly every trace of human intent. The stone-paved path and perennial border will gradually succumb to the churn of time and weather, seeds that scatter may persist but in their own obscure design, and the work of the gardener’s hand will pass into dust as the hand itself. Gardens are human in birth, and die as we do, inevitably. Sad it may be, but as I observe the decline and demise of a familiar garden I am also revisiting the days of its birth, its youth, and its prime of life.

Some years before my mother died I wrote, “Mother’s roses are old, the canes gray. Her Victorian knot garden of clipped herbs is now more of a labyrinth, with bare spots in the hedges.” She rejoiced in fulminations of color, big blowsy rose bloom and confetti of flowers, purple and pink dahlias, floppy yellow bearded iris and stately blue flags, bright red and yellow striped tulips that had to be dug out and replanted each cold and muddy November; her lavender, sage, rosemary and lemon verbena knot garden took years to mature into visible geometry, and to completely enclose her signature sundial, “I count only sunny hours”. It did and she did.

Now that she is gone, the garden shows less and less of my mother’s hand and more and more of my father’s, who lives on alone. He prefers the solid perpetuity of non-blooming and, frankly, non-living things in the garden: jade plant, cement, redwood bark, and non-deciduous trees. The albizia and paper birch trees, once venerable and immense towering over the bird bath border and spring bulbs, are now stumps, brittle and decaying monuments in a bell jar of empty space that once contained their canopies.

So my mother’s garden has been hastened toward death a little faster than if it had been allowed to dwindle peacefully toward oblivion. Still, some life cannot be chain-sawed away or die of thirst, and survives because that is it’s nature – like the iris bulbs buried and forgotten until winter rains rekindle them, and the fountaining verbena fronds in June rising from their twiggy border of senescent rosemary. Or the rosemary itself, leaping out of its knot-edge confinement in one more rebirth of verdant pungency.

I note these changes as I walk the yard that, increasingly, appears to me in double vision–the garden I remember and the garden that I see. A brown and brittle camellia replaces the pale pink-studded shrub of last year. Jade plants sit like green gnomes where orange poppies use to crowd. But again Persephone has worked her magic and the garden’s lifeless forms of March now flourish in June: garish pink geraniums, tufts of Spanish lavender and pale blue salvia, wandering sweet alyssum, and the popsicle rainbow of tea roses are smaller islands than before in a sea of chunky redwood bark. The terra cotta pots are empty or host to twigs and bare soil. The gazebo awning is frayed and fading and the canvas chair seats torn. Nobody sits at the patio table to sip ice tea and gossip anymore. Family gatherings are done. But for the wind and a rasping wren the garden is silent.

Yesterday, pondering the weeds in the cracks of the brick patio, I looked up to see the old queen of Betty’s garden. The massive Rosa Madame Alfred M. Carriere, fallen over in a winter storm, has engulfed the raised border, the dwarf peach, and half the path and patio. Jutting out from its border, unfurling pale porcelain blooms, the old rose tilts into the sky like a maiden on a galleon’s prow sailing out to sea. My mother would have re-righted the old dame and pruned her to sobriety. But I rejoice in Madame Carriere’s sly refusal to accept either boundaries or death. And here, at last, I can put to rest the mortal remains of my mother’s garden. It is not a final resting place–there is no such thing in nature as every gardener knows. But on the imaginary tombstone it is written:

Here lies Betty’s Garden
Born 1962 Died 2009
“I Count Only Sunny Hours”

I finally did it. My weed whacker and ten-dollar spools of nylon twine are history. So are the rampant armies of exotic weeds–bristly ox tongue, burr clover, Bermuda grass, cutleaf geranium, and who-knows-what–that send in understudies to replace them as fast as I can remove them. The cascades of Eugenia berries from the neighbor’s untended giants will no longer mound in unmown winter grass tufts to sprout a million little Eugenias each spring; goodbye to hours of knee-aching grubbing out of the tenacious tree-lets until my fingers are numb. Farewell to hidden cat plops that unerringly locate my unsuspecting shoe soles. No more prostrate tug-of-war with Bermuda grass rhizomes in a race to claim every inch of garden soil. I am done with all that. Today is the last day of Lawn.

For years I have imagined the digging up of the green sod, smashing through the green netting embedded in grey adobe soil that allowed the grass carpet to be sown in a land far away, carried on a flatbed truck many miles, and deposited on my front slope over a decade ago, when we first moved into our little bungalow on Bayview Avenue. Being renters we had little say in the matter. We did not have to worry about home resale values or whatever it is that requires homeowners to roll out green carpeting on every available surface of their property.

Of necessity I ignored the front yard for years, concentrating on making of the small enclosure at the back of the house a gardener’s retreat and folly. But as the years went by the front yard, with its southern exposure and lack of obstacles–rotting garage and old metal clothesline, cement driveway, precipitous incline, and chainlink fencing–grew into an oasis of native shrubbery and pleasing cycles of seasonal beauty. All except for the useless patch of lumpy lawn in the middle of it all. Nobody sat on it or played on it or even noticed it. It was just something I had to attack once a month or whenever the neighbors made comments, or the “mow/blow/go” guys pestered me to pay them to blow my eardrums out with their gasoline mowers. I’d suit up in long pants, ankle boots, long-sleeved shirts, gloves, bandana head-wrap and plastic safety goggles and let loose with the electric weed whacker, two spools of heavy green cord snaking from the front hallway to the far corners of the front yard. And whack away until the nylon string was gone. $9.99 and an hour later the lawn would look about the same except for the mounds of whacked stuff that I would then have to rake and haul to the green bin. You couldn’t even compost the stuff – it would just go anaerobic and slimey.

In my wildest dreams the front yard would become an extension of the living room, french doors replacing the picture window and opening onto a terra cotta tiled patio with tinkling fountain and potted dwarf citrus, all enclosed by a low wall over which the ceanothus and live oak tree would drape their canopies. Such is the stuff of garden magazines, not the Bayview gardening budget.

This is a drought year. We have had barely five inches of rain since last July – and almost none this January, the most reliable rain month. The front lawns of Oakland will go brown by late spring and it will be a struggle to keep most garden plants alive unless they are genetically tuned to the dry cycle – the wild lilac, manzanitas, buckwheats, oaks, and California buckeye trees will be fine. The rhododendrons and azaleas will struggle. The old roses will survive. The hydrangeas may not. It just seemed like the right moment to exorcise the green demon and make magic with a bit of crushed granite, a few tumbled bricks, and a nice rock for contemplation–a little space under the wild lilac tree for a simple bench where somebody might sit and watch the sunlight play.

I was being stalked by a chicken. I kept seeing her (a hen, I think) out the front window but she disappeared when I ran to get my camera. Nobody believed me. Then I see her again as I’m getting out of my car in the driveway. I try to follow her but she runs a fast clip down the sidewalk and vanishes. Then there are two chickens. And this time I get my camera in time. I’m calling them Betty and Arlene. They are very 1940s chickens. Big, red-feathered, yellow-footed hens. A friend looked at my photos of them and said, “Rhode Island Reds.” They do look classic. And the Red is a classic American chicken. The official bird of the state of Rhode Island where it was first bred in the mid-nineteenth century, it appears to be the only chicken commemorated with its own monument
Betty and Arlene seem attracted to the culinary opportunities of my front yard, an admittedly unkempt landscape of hardy and drought-tolerant native shrubbery and ersatz “lawn” that regularly elicits advice from my neighbors about how to clean it up, or remove the vegetation entirely.
Betty and Arlene showed up in my front yard the other day, utterly blase about my chasing them around with a camera, and the wary observations of Fraidy the Cat from the safety of her front stoop. They stayed for a thorough inspection and bug-eating tour of the lawn and borders and then trottled off down the sidewalk. I am happy they find my insectary pleasing to their palates.
Maybe I’ll find a big brown egg out there someday…

My friend Brenda, a dedicated birder, found a yellow warbler on the sidewalk in front of her office in downtown Oakland the other day. Hoping the bird was just stunned, she picked it up. But it was dead, likely the victim of a high-rise office window. Oakland, California is no different than any other city with multi-story buildings with large windows and often 24-hour lighting. An article by Gail Swainson in the Toronto Star tells a familiar story:

Every year, more than 10,000 migrating birds crash into Toronto’s highrise towers, then plunge to the sidewalks below, where a heavy-hearted Michael Mesure helps scoop them up in the early morning hours for disposal.

Studies show that window glass, mostly in high-rises, kills more birds than any other human-related factor, anywhere from 100 to 1000 million deaths worldwide each year. Accidental death from power lines, lighted communication towers, cars and trucks, and of course, pesticides, affects several 100 million more birds each year. It is a problem that one individual has little power to do much about.
But there is something entirely within your power to do to help the birds, and it could save a lot of them. In your own back (or front) yard, you could save 15 to 18 birds in a year. Nationwide, we could save perhaps a 100 million birds every year. All we have to do is keep our pet cats from roaming outdoors, and making a real effort to rescue stray cats and give them permanent shelter.
If you think your perfectly sweet, well-fed, even aging, Tabby wouldn’t hunt, or kill, a bird, here are some facts:
Cats kill prey regardless of whether they are hungry.In one study, six cats were presented with a live small rat while eating their preferred food. All six cats stopped eating the food, killed the rat, and then resumed eating the food. (Adamec, R.E. 1976.The interaction of hunger and preying in the domestic cat (Felis catus): an adaptive hierarchy? Behavioral Biology 18: 263-272). Just substitute “bird” for “live small rat” here; I’m guessing that live birds weren’t available – or just unacceptable bait for this science experiment.
Don’t bother to bell the cat. The Mammal Society, in England, conducted a survey of animals brought home by domestic cats. During a five-month period in 1997, 964 cats killed more than 14,000 animals. The mean number of catches or kills per cat was 16.7, and birds were 24% of the prey. The mean kill rates for belled cats was 19 and for no-bells 15. (The Mammal Society. 1998. Look what the cat’s brought in!). In other words, cats wearing bells killed more birds.
What you don’t know will kill the birds. A study conducted in Wichita, Kansas of cat predation in an urban area found that 83% of the 41 study cats killed birds. In all but one case, when feathers were found in scat, the owner was unaware that their cat had ingested a bird. In fact, the majority of cat owners reported their cats did not bring prey to them. Instead, the owners observed the cats with the bird or found remains in the house or in other locations. A de-clawed cat killed more animals than any other cat in the study. (Fiore, C. and K. B. Sullivan. Domestic cat (Felis catus) predation of birds in an urban environment).
In answer to the argument “but my cat only kills mice/rats/snakes/gophers”, be assured that, whether it’s laid at your doorstep or not, a cat that hunts small mammals is also killing birds 16 to 20% of the time. Often, it’s fledglings who aren’t yet skilled at avoiding predators, or peeps in the nest who have no protection from predators–just the willingness of their parents to die or be maimed trying to protect them.
It’s a jungle out there.Consider giving your free-roaming cat the gift of a long life: according to the humane society, the estimated average life span of a free-roaming cat is less than three years-compared to 15-18 years for the average indoor-only cat.
And as for the birds, there are some nice things you can do for them to make up for the havoc we’ve caused them (I forgot to mention earlier that human-caused loss of habitat is the largest single factor in declining bird populations worldwide)….

Does your garden have a bird spa? Birds love bathing. Robins are total bath hogs, sitting in the bowl for ages while smaller birds wait impatiently on the sidelines. Give ‘em all a chance. No matter how many bird baths you install, they will all find customers. Make sure they are shallow so the tiniest bush tit doesn’t have to learn to swim. I’ve seen hummingbirds take a dip, and goldfinches nestle down for a good soak.
Refill the bird baths daily. The plumbing, afterall, is primitive. Also, visiting racoons and possums will turn them to mudbaths after dark. You don’t need anything fancy – a cheap terracotta dish for potted plants, set on a stump or another pot, will do. Try to place them in open areas so sneaky predators (cats) can’t surprise attack from the shrubbery. They look nice sitting amid flowering plants in your summer annuals bed, or under a tree or rose bush that supplies convenient perches for drying off.
Better than bird feeders, the bird bath offers close-up viewing and cute antics without the problems of squirrel seed-hogging, seed chaff messes, and feeder cleaning. It’s also a great boon to birds that in many places – urban areas, rainless summer regions – lack natural water resources for their bathing (and drinking) needs.
In my own garden I have many more, and more kinds of birds since I noticed the popularity of the bird bath and added several more. Birds will come for something specific (the wren and the flycatcher value the compost bin’s ample soldier flies; goldfinches like the Rudbeckia seed pods; towhees and sparrows ground-scratch for seeds and random nibbles; hummingbirds favor nectar from the abutilon flowers, and tiny bugs in the Albizia and Ceanothus trees attract flocks of bush tits and warblers)–and then stay for a bath.
And as for the cat, we are both a lot happier since she became an “armchair birder”, content to indulge her predatory fantasies from the inside of the window.

A little wilderness goes a long way in gardens, I think. You don’t need a hundred acres, or even one, to find yourself lost in the bliss of a towering bean patch, or a fulmination of dinner-plate dahlias. Wandering squash vines among fountains of hollyhocks, or a lone laden apple tree on a windswept hill–there are varieties of sensation to be found in a slightly wild, or eccentric garden.

Imagine 125 such gardens in one spot! And each one only 100 feet square. That is the vision of the Fort Mason Community Garden where I found myself last Sunday on a breezy, fog tinted afternoon. My friends share one of those 20×5 foot plots with a third friend, after waiting for several years on the perennial waiting list.
Somehow, each plot was completely different from its neighbor plot and yet formed an integrated whole with repeating themes. Dahlias were in their glory and most were giants. In the retarded growing season of the northern California coast, where the hottest days of the summer are still more than a month away, pole beans and squashes, tomato vines and pepper plants are still in their youth. Even lettuces have not bolted in the cool July weather.
Flowers and vegetables mingled in a most congenial chaos. One gardener’s utterly austere design: a japanese sand garden with a single dwarf maple and a stand of fountain grass, but in the spirit of the place, perhaps, including a small patch of Genovese basil. Another’s whimsy: elegant wrought metal garden table and chairs in the midst of a plot overgrown with jasmine and sages.
While Pat and Dick pulled out invading oxalis, and harvested zucchini I began to explore the labyrinthine paths, cul de sacs, and terraces of the hillside garden close on the shores of San Francisco Bay. The alabaster city tumbled down Telegraph Hill in the distance, and the pungent aroma of a eucalyptus grove wafted through the light fog.

One section of plots sported a flock of whirligigs that whistled in the constant breeze. Another plot contained just a grape vine – of the winemaking variety. Everywhere the gardener’s tools of the trade dangled from homemade trellises and plant supports; re-purposed plastic bottles were everywhere, hugging tomato starts or stacked for future use; hoses coiled on rusting wheel wells nailed to posts, displaying the ubiquitous motto of the garden: “save water”.
Instructions and garden rules are posted on the central kiosk – a welcoming monument chronicling the events of the garden, with photos of a recent BBQ. There are no instructions or rules for how to create a unique garden style, yet every plot exhibited the creative genius of its gardener, who had made of a small plot of dirt a wonderland far larger in imagination than many grander landscapes.
Though the damp breezes tugged at my hoodie and sunlight remained fitfully obscure, I found myself warmed through with happiness in this urban paradise – this community garden.

more photos of Fort Mason community garden

that’s what happens when the internets go away. Actually, only if your Model T broke down on the highway and you had to walk through the desert to find a mechanic.
Dirt is back after a slightly longer pause than usual and yet, it being late on a hot and smazy July evening, I may just head out back to sit by the whiskey barrel water fall with a gin & lemon, scratch my mosquito bites and wait for the moon….

It exists in Slow Time, that place where there are no deadlines, no telephones vibrate, and there is no season of new television comedy. It is spring. Coming at its own pace. Once in twelve, or thirteen, moons or so. Nothing is definite. No weather, no memory, no seed reliably germinate. Rain, sun, wind, planetary spinning. Spiders appear, and the migrant birds. Today I saw a swallowtail swerve and cling to flowerless stem. Hopeful, perhaps. That is the metaphor. Hope. Spring. We poor species, us humans. We are the annuals; we live once and die. The delightful, impatient, and fragile froth of the garden, bred for show, aimed at brilliance, collapsing after the season concludes. But so beautiful and entrancing. Our genes crafted for maximum effect in a brief performance. In my garden I have given them the center for attention.
The gift of spring is subtle, no matter how showy the effect. It is perennial. Except if, as Rachel Carson feared, it was silenced, or ceased. But then nothing and nobody would be left to care. And that is the secret charm of our peculiar species – we care about these things. These quiet and noisy acts of nature. We think them acts anyway. They are, I think, less acts – like magic – than knowings. Plants know spring like humans know love.
As the garden comes awake I too must leave the slumberland of wintery retreat and lumber from my slow dark cave. The towhees and chickadees, the solitary wren have all come out to inspect the new year and so do I. It lives. I live. The wisteria must be lavender and bloom again.

ok. I missed January. and most of December. I didn’t even look in the backyard until I had to wrap the potted dwarf lemon in plastic last week to keep it from freezing. I have spent most of my time under the down quilt with my ibook not even looking at nursery catalogs. I began to think I would abandon gardening altogether. I went for a little hike with a friend – the first all winter – out in the East Bay hills on the first Saturday in ages that it was sunny. I had forgotten about the oak groves of winter. I had forgotten some of the most beautiful gardens anywhere are tucked into hollows of deeply creased Miocene sandstone where small creeks, hidden for most of the year in tangled underbrush and poison oak, and often dry during the summer months, emerge gurgling and plashing over fallen logs and tumbled rocks, ponding beneath mossed tree roots where the offspring of amorous newts returned briefly to their aquatic nurseries will turn from gelatinous blobs to bright orange swimmers and finally take their first steps, like the amphibians they are, upon dry earth.
We walked through the day, among sunlit groves of deciduous oaks carpeted with the neon green of new grass, and past steep slopes of blue oak and still wizened grasses, and in the alluvial plains of ancient creeks we passed the stately, leafless sycamores with their multi-hued puzzle bark trunks. And finally, still sweating with effort that chilled us in the evening breeze, a full moon began to rise over the hilltops and silhouetted groves. A buck trod leisurely from the shadows into the last golden pool of light on a grassy knoll, and we strode silently under the darkening canopy of twisting oaks back to the car, and home.
The winter oaks were harbingers of a new era in their geologic youth. They emerged in the last phase of the Miocene epoch, about 7 million years ago, when the rain forests and savannahs of North America were disappearing along with the giant vegetarian mammals and their predators whose abundant bones lie buried under the oak groves and creek beds. The summer rains began to disappear as well, while the Sierra Nevada and surrounding Coast Ranges began to rise up. The trees of the Beech family had become well established and diverse, with Quercus species divided among evergreen (coast live oak) and deciduous (valley and blue oak).

Whatever the causes, the long summer of the Miocene came to an end some five million years ago. The great North American savannas, with their multitudes of hoofed mammals and attendant predators, gave way to a world more like our own. Modern plant communities, such as live oak woodland and chaparral, took shape during that transition. Grasses continued to diversify, and other plant families – composites, legumes, mints, mustards – produced an array of new species. The advent of dry summers favored the evolution of annuals – plants whose seeds can wait out unfavorable conditions.

I am depending on those seeds that can wait out unfavorable conditions, much as the traveler on a long, discomfiting journey waits out the mental millennia of the road for a a transcendent vista of some long-imagined paradise.