Category — Rants

I feel a special satisfaction looking at these snow-capped pots of bulbs. Not only did I get all my bulbs in before it snowed; I also got them all fertilized, old and new. My bulbs are nicely tucked up under their coverlets.

How did it happen that I, practiced procrastinator and taker-on of too many projects that are left undone, burier of bulbs in freezing rain and snow - how did it happen that I did this in perfect timing?

I think it had to do with listening. It’s something every gardener, naturalist, or farmer comes to learn: listening to that quiet inner voice that says: do this now.

This year I actually did that. I listened to the voice that said, no matter what my desires, a small bulb order was the best thing for this year. So I got what (for me) amounts to a modest fall bulb order: 150 tulips, 10 fritillaries, 10 iris bucharica. Bulbs are incredibly beautiful, but don’t ever let anyone tell you that they aren’t work to plant.

Maybe it’s the way they say birth-labor is: once you see the beautiful results, you forget all that went before. But this year I remembered that when I buy hundreds of bulbs, it isn’t just more beauty: it’s also more pots, more potting soil, more amendments. And more planting time.

So this year, I remembered to get a smaller amount of bulbs (especially since I was ordering late in the year). And I did all the other work in small increments. I bought the soil one day and name tags one day, bought pots another. I thought about where everything would go: some of my early gregii tulip bulbs got put in the top of pots already filled with late tulips. (If you’re interested in more details, check out my succession planting posts.) By the time the gregii tulips are ungracefully fading, the bigger parrot and lily tulips will overshadowing their dying foliage (hopefully not enough to keep it from getting the sun it needs to make gregii bulbs for next year).

And then, when the weather and the day gave me hints, I planted, not all at once, but in small amounts; pouring in soil and amending it here, tucking in fritillaries with sages there, adding the early bulbs to the tops of old bulbs two or three pots at a time. I never worked more than ten to twenty minutes at once, and unlike other years, I wound up planting when it was actually comfortable to be outside and my hands didn’t freeze.

It’s got me wondering about the frenetic activity of former years. What would have happened if I’d listened to all those hints from wind, weather, moon, sun and experience before, instead of insisting on the big rush with the biggest possible amount of bulbs?

Light green hose coil: a brilliant contrast to ‘Apricot Emperor’ tulip

You may think of garden hoses as just unassuming, servicable garden tools.

Coil of hose repeats a variation of the curving lily foliage around this black hollyhock

But I’m here to tell you, they’re flaming egos. They like to hog the spotlight. And I’ve got photographic evidence.

Garden hose relaxing in evening with opening Nicotiana alata.

As my pictures come up on my computer screen, I respond to a plethora of them like this: “Nice picture, if the garden hose weren’t in there.” They’re sneaky, too. No matter where I’m taking pictures, hoses insinuate themselves, like ubiquitous snakes.

Just a slice of hose adds the contrast of artifice to dull foliage.

I could go into Photoshop and clone them out. But that entails more time than I’m really willinng to spend. I mean, first I’d actually have to learn Photoshop, instead of just tinkering with it here and there. And then I’d have to sort through all my photos and find the salvagable ones with hoses in, and then I’d actually have to take the time to do them all…I’d rather just use the photos without hoses.

Curving line of garden hose leads the eye to the curl of aging ‘Lady Jane’ tulip

For those of you who don’t wish to blame your failings on an inanimate object—there must be one or two in the world—a tip: the hose, which is invisible in our daily lives, must be paid attention to. (You see what I mean about them being egomaniacs.) They must become visible, and you must  compose your photograph away from them. Either that, or do what I do only on festive days: coil the hoses up, so they’re actually out of the way.

Garden hose lurking in background of a potentially arty sweet pea shot.

Or you can try this handy tip: write a blog post about hoses in photos, and use up some of your hosey photos there.

Tangle of hose contrasts color yet repeats shape of ‘African Queen’ twig supports

I know only the tiniest bit about bonsai. But when I see trees growing out of rock, wind- and weather-shaped, I can’t help wondering if the inspiration came from high mountain trees like this. (Well, that and the ever-enticing concept of having a small world which you can shape and enter into entirely.) This tree, though huge by bonsai standards (a few feet tall), has a form and surroundings that bring to mind less-shaggy bonsai.

If I’m remembering rightly, Japanese culture has a spiritual and aesthetic reverence for things mountainous.

Including rocks. One my one visit to Japan, I visited one Shinto shrine which had a rock that was famous for curing respiratory diseases. (If you’re interested, I was exposed to a respiratory flu in Japan that lasted for six violent weeks when I got home. After it was over, my susceptibility to bronchitis did seem to taper off.) Buddhist and Shinto shrines always featured rock and plants, in one way or another.

Shinto is the indigenous spiritual practice of Japan; like most indigenous spirituality the world over, it concentrates on the cycles of nature. It was inspiring to me to be in a country where this type of worship had been respected, instead of systematically killed off as much as possible, as it was in Europe and the United States. Shinto seems to thrive along with the different sects of Buddhism, Christianity, and the other religions of Japan. People don’t seem to consider it exceptional to visit more than one kind of worship place; the religions aren’t in competition with each other.

While many Buddhist shrines had beautiful gardens,  I was most fascinated by the tiny plots of ritualized country that formed the Shinto shrines. There were so many of them in Tokyo, in amongst the skyscrapers and traffic noise.  At least one for every neighborhood, it seemed. With the help of an English-language guidebook, I walked to different ones each day and spent time sitting in them, listening to the sound of water from the bamboo fountain, watching suited businessmen come in for a quick prayer before going on with their day.

In my culture, religion is formally separated from nature (although a lot of gardeners heal that rift), a legacy of a time when nature, and those who understood its voices, were enemies of the church/state. In Japan, the connection between nature and spirituality seems to be a given. I can’t help feeling that anyone who has experienced time in nature knows that for truth.

I remember walking by a very small local shrine, a low fence enclosing a small triang

le of bare ground maybe ten square feet on a narrow city corner. I don’t know what kind of shrine it was, and since I had about ten words of Japanese, I couldn’t ask. My book didn’t  say.

I saw many dark rocks, smoothed by time, any carving or elaboration long since worn away. It gave me shivers. Ancient things do that for me. I feel somewhat the same way looking at Sierra granite, still holding on to the polishing glaciers gave it millenia ago.

There’s a reason why this isn’t a picture of a gardenia. My gardenia is still in the same limbo it was in the last time I posted on it. Except it lost the single dead leaf.

This photograph of ‘Schwartzkop’ aeonium is the only peaceful thing on this page. Enjoy it.

OK, so I’m reading Robert Smaus’s 52 Weeks in a California Garden. (I picked it up at the thrift store. I tried to keep away from the book department. I knew I didn’t need any more books. But a powerful magnetic force grabbed me by my chest, and there I was, haplessly taking books down from the shelf.)

And do you know what he says about gardenias? He says that they should be grown in the sun. Even though he lives in Southern California, which is a heck of a lot hotter and sunnier than where I am. He says even in interior valleys where it’s blazing hot, gardenias like sun. He says he doesn’t know where all this nonsense about gardenias needing shade comes from.

From the Sunset Western Garden Book, that’s where. “Filtered shade in inland valleys,” it says. “North and east exposure in the desert.”

And that’s just the beginning. Logee’s catalogue shows the sun/part shade icons for their gardenias. And I trusted them. But they’re in Connecticut growing in greenhouses. I suppose they can be excused.

Hot Plants for Cool Climates says that gardenias grow best in light or part shade, but do OK in full sun–only if it’s not too hot.

I’m sure I remember the little name markers in gardenia pots having that same semi-shade icon. It’s unlikely I would have bought them otherwise, since I knew I didn’t have any space in the sun for them.

Smaus said that gardenias-in-part-shade was a widespread belief in nursery and horticultural circles. He wasn’t kidding.

Do you know how irritating this is? It’s not my fault, I had bad information. Do you know how irritating it is that I paid attention to that bad information, and not to the evidence of my eyes and hands, while all those gardenias were dying? (Yes, the full truth can be regretfully revealed. That gardenia I talked about almost killing before–it wasn’t my first gardenia. I’ve had many gardenias. And I’ve killed them all.)

To top it off, as I prowled my library looking for writeups on gardenias, I came across a final puzzler: Ruth Stout’s famous gardenia (one that she grew huge and gave away many starts from) was, by her account, “carefully kept out of the sun.” And it thrived.

Huh???

But that was in Connecticut.

References

Robert Smaus, 52 Weeks in the California Garden, Los Angeles Times Syndicate, 1996

Logee’s catalogue, Late Spring 2008 (and by the way, Logee’s is usually very reliable, and specific, cultural information. And they grow a great selection of plants (they are the source of many of my late lamenteds), and ship them in beautiful shape. And no, I didn’t get paid to write this.)

Susan A. Roth and Dennis Schrader, Hot Plants for Cool Climates, Timber Press, 2000

Ruth Stout, How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, Cornerstone Library, 1976 (reprint of 1968 and 1955 editions)

Calochortus albus, Fairy Lantern, Globe Lily. “With this plant the whole world would seem rich, though none other exists.” John Muir

There’s an easy path through the woods in my area, maintained by the forestry service. A small parking lot at its head (like a large pullout) makes it convenient, and the path is flat and wide, with a lot of nice vistas. Locals and tourists go there.

I was in the little parking lot one day when I saw two people staring down at a piece of paper.

“The brochure says that the best wild flowers are this week,” one of them was saying indignantly. “But I don’t see anything.”

They studied the piece of paper and went back and forth on this. They were irritated, the way people are when they’re in a crowded restaurant, and they don’t get the service they’ve been expecting. Cheated.

I was glad they were so wound up in their disappointment that they didn’t notice what was going on around them, because it was a small parking lot we were in, and I was trying not to crack up. What is this touching faith we have in the printed word? Why don’t we realize that the humans who write things down are just interpreting as much of the information around them as they can take in– and that that information changes all the time? And when the writers are just taking down something that somebody else told them–watch out. That’s when it gets really abstract.

None of us has the power to encapsulate or predict natural life, any more than we can reduce it to one single meaning. Yet each of us, concentrating on our own piece of paper, seems to believe (or hope) that the human-made words carry more power than the non-human world.

It’s the power of myth over experience. As children in our culture we’re trained to value what we’re told over our own senses. “Oh, it isn’t really bothering you.” “You’re just tired.” “You like that? Try some of this, it’s better.” That we may really be bothered, sad, or like the scorned item better doesn’t matter. With the best of intentions, our personal narrative gets rewritten, our lives get edited, and we forget what it was like before.

Maybe part of the reason our culture has worked out this system is the hardship of facing up to the rest of nature. It’s not so long ago that all of us had to be out in freezing rain, walk up steep hills, suffer heat without relief, eat moldy food or eat the same food every day because that’s all there was. Being fully aware of our surroundings is not a big benefit then. It’s one of the reasons storytelling has been so popular through the ages, in all its forms. A story or song can wake you up on one level while it shuts out the pain and wretchedness.

And it’s still true–and a part of us knows that–that at any moment, the powers of the natural world can make our human concerns into nothing. Our cities don’t mean much to an earthquake or melting polar caps. Our ambitions and talents are no concern of pneumococcus virus, drought, and dust storms. Our thoughts and memories can be drowned and dissolved in the slow insidious creep of Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.

A part of us knows that any day we can be wiped out entirely. That we are a tiny fleck in a huge universe. That the struggle of human nature with the rest of nature is one we will never win.

There’s a weird power in admitting that vulnerability. Vulnerability is a wound–but it’s also an opening. In the moments when we remember to feel all of what we really feel, to open our senses to what’s around us–those are the times when we’re most alive. Those are the peak experiences we strive for in a vacation or a career or a new life.

But we don’t need cataclysms or dramatic action, order or perfection to get it. That giant surge of aliveness is all around us. All we have to do is look up from that abstract, two-dimensional world and take it in.

That’s the moment when the world speaks to us.