True Dirt

Yosemite comes to Oakland

Since my last post my beloved laptop, Buffy the Microsoft Slayer II, has expired, I've leafleted the neighborhood with homemade flyers about the neighbor's plan to cut down the oak trees, dropped off my comment letter to the City of Oakland Tree Reviewer, and gone to a job interview.

Meanwhile, in the garden, the robins and squirrels have made off with most of the California grape crop (and dispersed much of it, slightly digested, on the plastic lawn chairs, the hammock, the Adirondack chair, and the deck); the racoons have mangled but not destroyed the dahlias, tomatoes and green beans; somebody (?) dug into the pumpkin, saved from the racoon pillage and set on the barbeque pallet to dry out and turn orange. It was rotting and stank so bad I had to dismantle the stack of wooden pallets it had been sitting on and which serve as our Weber mini grill cooking area, and wash everything down. And the Steller's Jays have moved in.

Standing in the front yard yesterday I looked out over the sunburnt weeds and parched August landscape and was suddenly transported to the aroma of dried pine needle and the thin heat of granite boulders from long ago Sierra camping trips. It was the rattling "sckrey sckrey sckrey sckrey" of the Steller's Jays. They are mountain birds. They are the background music of dusty campground picnic tables and shady pine groves--not exotic Indian laurels and Bermuda grass lawns. Along with the aroma of vanilla scented Jeffrey pines and the sparkle of mica in fields of stone, the sound of Steller's Jays is packed in the memory drawer with grueling half-day drives across the scorching Great Central Valley of California, stops at roadside stands to buy warm peaches and cool watermelon, the slow ascent to the Sierra foothills through sunswept tawny grasslands that give way to sparse stands of Ponderosa pines and, finally, the top of the hour-long, twisting Old Priest Grade to Big Oak Flat and the road to Yosemite.

Now here they are, the whole family of three, hopping up the branches of my scarlet oak, the silky black "mohawk" shimmying as s/he cocks his head to look through the kitchen window. Is this just a passing fancy or are they shopping for real estate? Have the Human droves littering the mountains and mountain valleys with Land Rovers and 4,000-square foot nesting boxes driven the Steller's to the city? I wonder. And I welcome them.

(photo from Encyclopedia: Yosemite Valley )

tempus fugit

There is a slight air of melancholy today in the garden. Maybe it is a hint of autumnal air or the slightly shifting shadows. Even the distant roar of the freeway is in a minor key. We bask, the cat and I, in the late summer light.

unintelligible design

Every day I nose around my garden I see evidence of the random beauty of nature. Darwin must also have felt this awe in the presence of the mighty kingdoms of Flora and Fauna. Human intelligence is so limited that we try to impose our own thinking structure on everything non-human around us. It is, apparently, difficult for us to imagine an order that is not in our mental image. To insist that Nature must have been imagined by an intelligent being is a thinly disguised argument for the universal dominance of human-like intelligence. The Greeks had a name for this sort of thinking. The word is hybris (hubris to us). Insolence to the gods, punishable with blindness. Darwin opened his eyes to the small world and found the key to Nature's genius.

extreme makeover: urban edition

I have this recurring nightmare. I wake up one morning and look out my window, or open the front door and, instead of the garden, there is an empty swathe of cement. Sometimes, there is a bulldozer plowing up the last tree, or a chainsaw gang working on the shrubbery.

I had this dream once when I was living in an apartment that was part of a complex of old brownshingles--a former family compound. The garden included a mature Tasmanian tree fern and a huge old evergreen magnolia. There was also an old purple-leaf plum that turned into a fragrant cloud of pale pink every spring.

On this morning many years ago I woke up from the nightmare in which the entire front garden had been dug up and cemented over. When I returned home from work that day, the better part of the plum tree--in full bloom--was lying across my doorstep. The chainsaw gang had left it there to be chopped into pieces the next day.

Maybe I became sensitized in childhood to the vision of blooming orchards going under the bulldozer and old farmhouses succumbing to the wrecking ball. As a kid I watched hundreds of acres of apricot and plum trees become skeletal wood frames and then treeless suburbs, each with identical front lawns and cement driveways. And out on my bicycle jaunts--past the business strips and city streets to the country roads, hidden creeks, oak groves and undulating fields of wild oats and mustard--I watched as, year by year, the roads got widened, the creeks were culverted, and the oaks and fields became parking lots, business "parks" and suburban estate homes.

These days, when I visit my parents in the town where I grew up, the suburb that I witnessed being created from farmland is itself being bulldozed to create a newer suburb. But this transformation is happening house by house instead of acre by acre. Now, the old single-story house is razed, the almost-50-year-old trees removed, and an imposing castle-like mansion replaces it, complete with instant landscaping.

When I left home to go to college I remember thinking that I would never have to go back to that suburb where my childhood paradise lay buried under asphalt and shopping malls. In the city where I came to live, the farmland was long gone and surprisingly jubilant gardens and old trees melded with the rows of close-packed houses. Here, it seemed, the landscape was safe from mass transformation.

But I was wrong. And in the years I have lived in this alternately charming and aggravating city I have witnessed both mass destruction and incremental loss of old landscapes. Over ten years ago an apocalyptic fire destroyed hundreds of acres of the city, burning over two thousand houses, killing fifty people, and obliterating oak and eucalyptus groves, willows, laurels, creekside plants, and countless gardens.

Today, the neighborhoods of the fire are a wood-frame Manhattan of sky-scraping mansions bulged out to their property lines. From the flatlands the view of the hills is a solid line of rooflines and multi-story picture windows elbowing each other for the same view.

And now, down in the flatlands, a firestorm of real estate speculation is fueling an incremental transformation. Much of it is an improvement for dilapidated neighborhoods and a boon for city coffers. Although most city dwellers are not able to afford to buy. And many of the young couples planning families have left to look for cheap housing in the inland valleys where the last of the farmland is being bulldozed for more suburbs.

On my street the genteel remnant of a turn-of-the-century real estate boom is itself becoming the victim of the latest hot market. The house may stay, it's white clapboard and columed front portico set back from the street behind a picket fence. But it's generous lot and gardens, neglected for decades but awash in the dappled shade of its grand trees--redwood, cedar, live oak, acacia is likely to become a swathe of cement and plywood.

Yesterday, the inevitable notice from the City arrived in the mail. The "revised" notice that the neighbor intends to remove "Eight (8) Trees" in addition to trees within ten feet of proposed construction that "may require removal".

And last night, my nightmare came back.

mid-summer bloomers

for coastal California, that is. The garden painted a new canvas in recent days, revealing forgotten plantings and the sad state of my memory and garden notes. I had to paw through a yellowing folder full of plastic plant tags, scraps of plant lists, magazine clippings and 5x7 cards with scribbly drawings of odd garden plans to find out the names of the bloomers. Bless the internet for it nameth everything. And a couple of hour's hunting provided me with lost plant names and a few bits of trivia.

This lanky "bluebell" stands about 4 feet high now and is laden with bright blue blossoms not truly represented by a photograph. The leaves and stems are hairy-sticky and bright green. I couldn't find it named on my purchase lists even though there are two campanulas that apparently didn't survive since I don't see them in the garden: Campanula formankiana and C. sarmatica. It seems to be Campanula primulafolia, though you wouldn't know it from the photo at Annie's Annuals. I did find an interesting slide show on the net of wildflowers from the Serra de Monchique, Portugal. Other sites refer to the species as "Spanish bluebell" (well, close) and "Blue Oasis" which appears to be an old garden hybrid from Europe. It apparently reseeds well and this spring I discovered several babies in open dirt and replanted them in the central border, not realizing they were C. primulafolia.

The wily Japanese anemone hides out most of the year under the perennial leaves of the Heucheras until mid- to late summer. I thought I had planted the white-flowered one but, guess what? This one is a sort of bruised lavender.

An odd little plant I picked up because of the unusual mottled leaves. It turns out to be a "hawkweed," Hieracium maculatum. There are many Hieraciums native to the Americas but this one is revealed by the USDA web site to be introduced, and invasive in some northern Michigan county. Another site appears to indicate it is native in England. In my garden it is decidely solitary, putting out a stem or three of cheery yellow dandelion flowers each year.

The only thistle that keeps coming back for me. By the end of the summer the blue bracts metamorphose into metallic silvery blue.

This charming little mint, Yerba Buena (Satureja douglasii) is native to the West Coast growing in shady moist places, often in live oak groves. For years I tried starting it in the garden from pinchings I collected in the wild. It never lasted. Then I found a little pot of it at Ace Garden and stuck it in a 5-gallon pot with a rose in it. It flourished, spilling over the sides of the pot and rooting in nearby soil. The leaves have a delicious scent and it is a traditional tea herb of the Californios, as well as the name of the little island in the middle of San Francisco Bay that separates the "Oakland" and the "San Francisco" pieces of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge. And it was the early (1849) name of the little port that became the City of San Francisco.

Another mint native to California, this one planted for its wonderful salmon colored flowers. It has intertwined it's light green leaves with silver-green leaves of the Zauschneria californica or wild fuchsia.

too wildlife-friendly gardens

The lament is too familiar. My friend Sylvia told me about her attempt to produce a colorful spring tulip bed--the bulbs laid in the ground and the long wait for spindly stems to arise from the foliage and, finally, the green buds of promise swelling to the bloom point. One morning when she was sure the flowers would be open she went into the garden with great expectation. Here is what she found: neat rows of headless stems, "as if someone had come by with scissors and snipped off every tulip bud at the same height." Only one creature could be responsible for the exquisite delicacy of such beheadings. Deer.

Other garden visitors are not so dainty. This morning I went into the garden, as usual, to remove the lid on the barrel fountain and refill the bowls of water, emptied the night before. This summer routine is necessary to put a damper on my raccoon visitors who would otherwise use the aquatic facilities and leave the yard looking like the morning after an Animal House toga party.

But this morning they found a new delight: ripping apart the pumpkin and squash vines and strewing pieces of the plants around the yard. Plus, a piece of twine staking a lily plant to a stick was untied and the lily stems lay, detached from their roots, on the dirt. Of course, there were the usual divots and holes dug about, including a largish excavation at the roots of the tomato plant. The sole surviving pumpkin, green and battle-scarred, sits divested of its vine in the clover.

Besides the feelings of helplessness and aggravation I couldn't understand why the raccoons went to such extremes this time. So I tried to find out whatever I could about urban raccoon behavior. This is what I found....

Like the rest of us, they prefer to live in cities: In urban areas, exceptional numbers of raccoons, as high as 100 per square kilometre, have been recorded.

Their family geneaology, 100% American, is venerable: The name raccoon is derived from the Algonquian Indian word arakun, meaning "he scratches with his hand."

They have eclectic palates and are enthusiastic omnivores: While they prefer crayfish, raccoons also consume muskrats, squirrels, rabbits, waterfowl eggs, and freshwater clams. In the summer, plant material, including fruits and nuts, becomes more important. Wild cherries, gooseberries, elderberries, wild grapes, strawberries, and garden items such as potatoes and sweet corn are relished. As is garbage and pet food.

They are quite social and the males bond over shared activities (do they have cable, we wonder?): “We have found that raccoons are fairly tolerant of each other. Even if they don’t live in packs, they live in close proximity to each other, even sharing dens. Their home ranges usually overlap: they share ranges, dens and feeding spaces. So when you cut hunting and trapping, as is the case in the city, raccoons have even more chances for contact and reproduction. Cubs spend a long time with the mother in the family unit, and adult males seem to spend a lot of time together, too. This is a very unique social behavior.” Ohio State University Extension wildlife specialist Stan Gehrt.

Much useless advice has been promulgated on raccoon deterence: "home gardeners have resorted to a wide variety of anti-raccoon tactics, from planting vining winter squash around sweet corn to putting flashing lights or blaring radios in the garden, sprinkling unpleasant substances on the ground around the garden. The best way to keep raccoons out of the garden is to fence them out. Two- or three-wire electric fencing, a floppy, C-shaped chicken wire fence or a barrier of sturdy cloth may be effective. Raccoons may ignore a garden they cannot see if it is enclosed in cloth or plastic."

If I enclose the entire garden in cloth they won't notice it? Christo, I have a project for you!!

the remains of the day before...