true dirt

A peculiar thing about the California landscape is that while it is chock full of majestic vistas and grand horizons, most people fail to find its most exquisite natural feature – its native gardens. I was thinking about this while looking at the photographs I took on a recent expedition to Pt. Reyes National Seashore. It is a popular destination for Bay Areans and out-of-towners, but most head for the mile-long beaches or the lighthouse at the end of this finger peninsula that is nearly cut off from the mainland by the most famous faultline in the world.
But if you decide to head north along the country road that winds among still-operating dairy farms and cattle ranches, you just might be tempted to pull out at the sign that says “Abbott’s Lagoon“. It would be well worth your time to take the short walk out to the dunes beyond where the lagoon, a fresh water pond fed by streams, spills over a small rill and spreads out among the dunes in turqoise shallows where the summering pelicans play.
It would be enough just to watch the marsh hawks glide above the lagoon and wander among the shadows and light of the dunes. But on a mid-June day when we took our walk, this normally austere landscape had been transformed into a fantastical paradise, shoulder-high in bloom and rolicking with bird song. Above waving plumes of purple grasses, white-crowned sparrows perched in the cow parsnips warbling arias across the fields, and on every fence post a fat California quail postured, it’s crown feather bobbling in the breeze.
Floating above the purple waves of hair-grass (Deschampsia cespitosa ssp. holciformis) were islands of sunshine yellow bush lupine (Lupinus arboreus) and a great tall stand of bee-plant (Scrophularia californica). Half hidden in the understory of the grasses were poppies and checkerbloom, owl’s clover, yarrow, woolly yellow sunflowers, jewel-like bi-color lupine and a universe of pollinating insects.
The dunes had their own gardens, spare and surprising. Clumps of dune heliotrope required eye-ball contact to discover the sugary sparkle of their tiny cups. The dune cinquefoil’s crimson tentacles formed a brilliant net across the sand, and a curious lawn of lush dune grass felt cool and soft on bare feet scorched by the coarse dune sand. And the end of the trail is the sea, a roiling roaring mass of wave and foam clawing at the steep narrow beach. It is suddenly quiet only steps away, behind the sheltering wall of sand where the glassy reach of the lagoon melts into colored gems of coarse gravel. So quiet I could hear the muffled flap of pelican wings as they glided above me.

I read this in the paper today, “We’re all so conditioned to expecting things right when we want them, and gardening is a very different approach to life”.
Well, it can be, sometimes. I see many people installing what could be called “instant” gardens with the help of often talented and inventive landscape professionals. But if you define gardening as a process and not just a result those garden owners are not really gardeners in the true sense. On the other hand, I am beginning to think I am not the gardener of my garden either. Far from instantaneous, my garden has an evolutionary history on a par with geologic time. Furthermore, it now appears to have happened mostly by accident. At least, not by this gardener’s intent. Whatever I intended has been reinterpreted by dirt, and weather, and the non-human denizens of this hill I have planted upon.
In any case, this constantly morphing botanical kaleidoscope (Greek for beautiful shape) I call my garden presents me occasionally with catch-your-breath moments of revelation. Yesterday was one. It was just the glimpse of late afternoon sun, slanting through the red oak tree, to light the lilies…. so I grabbed my trusty digital camera and ran downstairs to try an capture the illusive nature of a garden’s midsummer moment.
And for a very unusual and interesting read on some philosophically inclined bulb-hunters, check out this article by a Genia Bellafante in the NYTimes.

The Bush Tit family has vacated. It all happened so quickly. One minute they’re rushing to and from the “sock”, feeding each other and the kids and the next they’re gone. For weeks the hanging sock was a hive of activity, and it frequently vibrated the Ceanothus branch it was attached to, the leaves shivering and the sock rocking with whatever happens inside a cramped tube nest with a family of four. A few days ago the front yard was filled with the fever pitch of anxious parents and fledglings who emerged from the sock hole all at once – so tiny I could barely see them clinging to the top of the sock. By the end of the day they were all gone. I could hear them twittering in the dense canopy around the house but the sock nest hung limp and empty. I went out to peer in the front door of the sock. I felt bereft. My babies were grown up and gone. I had empty nest syndrome.

I was sitting in a garden the day my mother died, a garden full of friends and roses and laughter and food. It was a wedding party, held at the home of friends whose house sits on the inner edge of San Francisco Bay, perched slightly above the sandy beach at Alameda where Oakland’s remnant wetlands and estuary meet the bay. Among this garden’s particular charms is a large magnolia tree, the grandiflora species, in full bloom. There is also a magnolia in my mother’s garden, planted when the house was built, and which now spreads part way across the roof and shades the flower beds. It is one of the two survivors among all the original trees in this garden, the apple tree long gone, and the maple a mere memory. The silk tree, or Albizia, stands leafless this spring, its once green brocaded boughs that lilted in the afternoon breeze poke stiff and leafless into the summer sky.
A week after my mother died I went walking in a very different garden, that endless carpet and canopy of deep emerald embedded in the heart of New York City. Central Park in June is a green heart pulsing with joy. Children in school games crowd the green swards, yelling and happy. Joggers clog the pathway around the Reservoir; walkers walk their happy dogs, plastic gloves in hand; families at picnic, couples in love, tourists and cameras abound. I sought out a place I had been to before in a different season, the Shakespeare Garden. It meanders up a small rise, it’s circling borders filled with, supposedly, the flowers called out in the Bard’s immortal prose: woodbine, musk rose, eglantine…. And there indeed were bouquets of white musk roses in glorious bloom, and thyme abundant in sunlit glades. No massed borders here of searing colors and architectural aplomb. Just simple small flowers in modest hues with a heavenly sweet and subtle perfume.
Returning to California after a week of respite from the duties and cares of a family death, to resume the churning pace of everyone’s complicated lives, our friends from New Orleans came to visit for a few days–a visit planned long ago. When they wanted to spend the day at Pt. Reyes I nearly declined to go. The long drive, my endless fatigue, listlessness all combined to discourage me. But I went anyway. Our destination was a small inlet on the less-traveled north side of the peninsula. Here a wetland, tucked among the cow-grazed hillsides of the treeless plains, fed into a small lagoon nestled among massive dunes by the sea. The day was clear and warm with no fog or wind, the nearly constant weather of this seaward finger of land. And when we got out of the car and began down the dirt path to the shore, I saw that the landscape was a mass of flowers and purple feathered grasses. The big yellow lupine scented the air like sweet peas and bird song punctuated the low hum of a coastal breeze. Above the wetland rushes marsh hawks soared and spiraled in play, and when we reached the deep sapphire of the lagoon waters, the smell and sound of the sea close by, a silent undulation of pelicans creased the sky above us.
I walked and was light hearted again.

When a rose dies its petals fall to earth with a gentle sigh. The silken skin mottles, wilts, and crumbles into dust. The dust becomes another rose. Another garden. I think there may be a rose spirit that rises as its mortal flower falls. The inner eye of the gardener sees it. The gardener propagates and waters, dreams and waits for the bud to fatten and burst its plain container, spilling colors of blood and flame, sun and shadow, nacre and cloud in a swirled mandala of brief perfection. In the eye of the mandala is the spirit of the rose, a future rose, another May, a different garden.
My mother’s spirit left her mortal frame today. A brilliant May day awash in the colors and scents of roses. She has tended her last rose and become one in this gardener’s eye. A vivacious red and a sunny yellow rose. A wildly rampant rose. A thorny mildewed rose that refuses to give up. My sorrow at her leaving me, her petals at my feet, is great and deep as oceans. But I went out this morning to tend her garden, water the roses, watch the squirrels at play, listen to the birds sing. And for another brief eternity she blooms.

There is the mustard seed and that straw that broke the camel’s back. Small things can have great strength and moment. I walked out into the yard this morning and nearly tread on a small surprise; a brilliant yellow primrose blooming in the cement. As I sit at my table writing, a chirping commotion makes me look up. The Robin family has congregated on the next door neighbor’s window ledge–Mom, Dad and the two kids begging for snacks. Out front, a few feet above the towering wands of grass I have refused to mow, hangs the snug sock of the Bush Tits’ nest, a speckled wattle and daub affair no bigger than a size 10. It surprised me one day, standing over the white iris, scissor in hand. The ceanothus branch shuddered and the nest appeared at eye level, magically constructed while I blinked.
Loitering with a hose in hand, the hummingbird zooms close for a shower. Looking up at a familiar sound I see the flycatcher has returned for another summer. Perched on the plum branch he sits with his mouth agape. Two more of his kind appear and join him, their mouths agape too. Then the puzzle is solved. A fourth flycatcher swoops in with a mouthful of insects to feed the famished brood. I water my shoes in wonder.
White clouds drift in a turqoise sky. Sunlight illuminates an ant. The golden boss of a scarlet rose gleams within a fading bouquet. Splashes from the bathing Towhee. Insignificant moments that I soon forget. But these small pleasures of my garden are mighty in their power to soothe and soften the hard impress of life’s great and heavy acts.

Returning from New Orleans last week, after reports from family and friends that the week of our absence had been seasonally cool, it was a shock to wake up to an unseasonally warm and profusely blooming Bayview garden. All the roses had, in our six-day absence, commenced to burst their buds in a coordinated show of color, the mulleins had added a foot or so to their spires and popped out purple and yellow buttons to decorate them. The golden columbine sent shuttlecocks of bloom skyward, the Nigella was in mad production of both misty “love” and bushy “devils”, and the regal lily towered, pagoda-like, over the blue saucers of tri-color Gilia and the bright yellow disks of Pt. Reyes meadow foam.
It seems ages ago (actually, March 19) that I had brought home the Gilia and Limnanthes (meadow foam), Phacelia and columbine (Aquilegia) from Annie’s Annuals nursery in Richmond and planted them in ceaselessly falling rain. When the rain finally stopped in late April I thought the plants would be near ready to bloom but they just sat there, no bigger than when I planted them, as the snails and slugs threatened to reduce them to stubs. The weather continued rainless but grey and cold. The sweet peas were still no higher than six inches and I despaired of their ever reaching the bottom ends of the twine and wire trellis I had imagined them covering by now with fragrant flowers.
The fact is, this year’s weather may not be so unusual or the ominous harbinger of imminent Global Warming (though I have my suspicions) and it is simply that in the larger, and longer, scheme of things it’s just Nature in one of her countless guises and moods. What is unusual is how much my life, and others’ lives have been affected by weather in the last eight months, from the half million residents of the city of New Orleans and Gulf coast residents hit by last September’s hurricanes to my own month-long duty as basement bailer during the Bay Area’s March “monsoon”. Now startled New Englanders are watching the flood waters rise in places nobody alive has witnessed before.
When I surveyed the heat-scorched borders this Sunday in my mother’s garden where I had so excitedly installed exotically colored poppies in late March I wasn’t prepared for the scene. Amid the fading clumps of moulting Iris leaves, finished for the season, only the plant tags remained of the poppies I had planted: “Persian Princess”, “Drama Queen”, and “Poppy of Troy” were no more than names on yellow plastic stuck in dry dirt and surrounded by empty snail shells. It’s not The Grapes of Wrath, I admit, but a gardener’s heart can break at such a sight.

I’ve just come back from our annual trek to New Orleans to visit friends and go to Jazz Fest. It’s a major miracle that Fest exists this year, and also that our friends are back in their undamaged house in Uptown and working. That said, New Orleans is a changed place, probably forever, and our friends were quite obviously in a sort of grief depression despite their good fortune.
Miles and miles of neighborhoods–not just the infamous Lower Ninth near the levee breaks–are ghost towns. This includes poor, rich, and middle class streets of bungalows, mansions, and restored vintage houses that stand but are empty of people and possessions. Some have been gutted and await the insurance check, the FEMA flood map, or a government loan to be repaired to livability. Others were left as is after Hurricane Katrina, standing amid piles of debris and demolished roof parts, broken yard furniture, drowned cars, downed tree limbs. All are marked on the front with spraypaint: an “X”, a date, a record of what was left for dead or removed. Every door or house front in New Orleans bears this mark except the few that have been painted over by returning residents. One thinks of the plague where medieval houses of the sick were marked as a warning to others.
A faint brown line traced on clapboards and brick, windows and parked cars–straight as a laser beam level across the city–marks the flood line. The peculiar sight of shrubbery top green, bottom brown is another reminder of the brackish water that rose so high and stood for so long that twenty-foot magnolia trees turned brown, lost their big glossy green leaves, and died in the swampy goo. Most of New Orleans’ gardens died too, unable to withstand the weeks of inundation, half-salty water, and swirling bits of junk. Palm trees stand decapitated on the remains of front lawns, now just sandy dirt. Hibiscus and jasmine, tea plants, begonias, berginia, camellia and gardenia are all missing or dead.
The survivors are the natives, of course. The southern oaks that line the boulevards and cast their gnarled, ferny and mossed limbs across the city in a layered canopy, simply dropped their leaves in the maelstrom and are now pushing out new ones. A few succumbed to the waters and fell, unearthed giants laid on their sides in broken heaps. But the deep green ceiling of old New Orleans will live on. Some thrived after the waters receded. The native cyprus trees are brilliant chartreuse with new growth, firmly rooted and wondrous apparitions amid the grey-brown wastes.
In the islands of slightly higher ground, among them the French Quarter and downtown, the Garden District, and Uptown, New Orleans gardens are in the full flush of an exuberant spring. Flowering roses, gardenias, ginger, and hibiscus create a delirious swirl of color and scent walking the lanes of Uptown where only the occasional blue tarp covers a roof and the ubiquitous white rectangle of FEMA trailers is a rare sight. The tree canopy has been severely diminished, however. By chainsaw-wielding clean-up crews with a mandate to clear any limb within four feet of a telephone wire. In a random patchwork, large trees fell–often on roofs–and have been removed. In my friends’ garden the disappearance of several large sycamore trees in the neighbor’s yard has flooded their small bricked courtyard with sunlight. The bromeliads and staghorn fern are thriving.
I kept thinking about another, closer disaster as I toured the devastated streets of post-Katrina New Orleans, now eight months after the flood. I thought about the Oakland Hills firestorm of twelve years ago and how completely the monster waves of flame consumed an old and architecturally-layered, densely vegetated neighborhood of over 2,000 homes. Today the fire zone is a largely treeless, strangely homogenous district of McMansions packed property-line to property-line, expensively landscaped with “fire-safe” shrubbery and inhabited by people too rich or too busy to spend their Saturdays tending the front flower border, or pulling weeds and talking to the next door neighbor. One is hard pressed to find a door, or a neighbor among the walled compounds.
The people of New Orleans are waiting. For decisions by the politicians in Baton Rouge and Washington D.C., for insurance companies to settle their claims, for the Army Corps of Engineers to finish their levee repairs, for the new flood zone boundaries to be redrawn, for hurricane season to begin again. They wait in tiny FEMA trailers, and friends’ spare bedrooms, in Houston, Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles to see if they can come home again. And the gardens of New Orleans wait too, the ones barely hanging on in deserted neighborhoods and the ones that exist only in the imaginations of the gardeners who created them and for whom they are never entirely gone.

The local “garden center” might just as well be called the “flower cemetary” because most everything that is bought at those emporiums of cheap and colorful plant flats will die within the week. And likely nobody will mourn if they do. I remember watching a neighbor of some years ago–flush with the enthusiasm of the new homeowner–cart home flats of petunias on Saturdays for placement along the front walkway. They would be dead by Friday. Usually because he had forgotten to water them. This went on for the entire summer until he finally figured out that they were all going to die no matter what he did–so he put in lawn.
House plants are notorious death mongers. A friend once asked me about a wilting specimen–it had been a gift–of a large leaf oxalis or wood sorrel. The thing was trying to go dormant for the season but my friend thought it was dying. I explained that the plant was a sort of bulb and would come back next spring. But this is not a good trait for a houseplant and I believe it was abandoned, or perhaps planted, soon thereafter. I have been rescuing a giant philodendron from near death on a regular basis for over a decade now. Always on the verge of expiring, I reluctantly revive it with a soak in the bathtub for another month. It was a birthday present from my brother and some deep rooted familial obligation compels me to keep it alive.
When the beautiful pink-flowered albizia began to die in my parents’ garden, however, it was a deeply felt tragedy. The tree had graced the patio for decades with its lacy green boughs, cooling an otherwise unbearably hot spot. It decayed and failed, year by year, to replenish its leafy branches and now looms like the Grim Reaper over the garden. My parents cannot not bear to replace it, preferring to see the old tree to its end.
I’ve had many small deaths in my garden, mostly experiments of short duration; flowers that couldn’t take the heavy soil or lack of summer rain; native plants too sensitive to grow anywhere but their preferred rare habitat; and a mature Meyer lemon that up and succumbed one summer to what I think was oak root fungus. But no major losses have left me bereft.
This spring, the wettest in a hundred years, has affected my garden in contradictory ways with some plants thriving on the abundance of water and others delaying their normal growth period or seeming to fade away altogether. I began to notice that one of my two Ribes (R. sanguineum var. glutinosum) or pink-flowering currants was wilting. The new leaves just pushed out at the branch tips and froze in time, seemingly petrified while its sister plant six feet away was busily pushing out lush new growth. The currant was one of my first plantings over ten years ago, the reliable March robin of my garden, its drooping pink panicles signaling to the rest of the plants that spring was near. Now the dead currant is a brittle skeleton rising above my blooming Heucheras.
The second tragedy this April is another old friend, the Oyama magnolia (Magnolia sieboldi). It was my first significant garden “structure” plant. I was too ignorant then to really know where it should go and stuck it in an awkward corner where the dirt was particularly heavy. It never thrived but persisted in its charming way, delighting me with its graceful presence and, sparingly, its exotic flowers. Now it too is dying. Only two of its slender branches have leafed out. The others are stiff and leafless, the wood lacking that visible pulse of life that spring brings to deciduous trees.
While my old plant friends expire, the scarlet oak is pushing off its mantle of dead leaves and unfurling the pale green lace of a new gown. The Japanese maples are chartreuse with new life. And the rose canes are sporting the distinctive russet of new leaf. Just as they do every spring.
The garden, however, will not be the same garden. There is an intimacy that grows between a gardener and a garden. It may be my garden but the plants are themselves, entities of their own realm. I may plant another Ribes but it won’t be the same individual that died. And although I have planted and protected these plants, worried about them, fed and watered them, shaped them and admired them, they have in some way merely acquiesced to being my garden. When they go, some of my gardener’s heart goes with them.

The old elm at Crawley, by Jacob George Strutt

It stopped raining. One glorious sunny day. My deep lugubriousness vanished and I rushed out to bask in radiance. The skies were electric blue. The garden glinted and vibrated with color. I grabbed my camera to capture some of the exuberant light.