Category — Rants

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.

…and then there’s what actually happens.You can relax and put your feet up while you visit this site. I’m not going to make you guilty or wistful with images of unattainable perfection—mainly because I can’t. My aim is to show the beauties of an imperfect garden, and to share what I’ve learned: from woo-woo to science; from practical to ethereal. My garden is the place where I meet head-on (and hands-on) with the way my human nature makes a working relationship with the rest of nature—and the mayhem and beauty that ensue.

I do quite literally grow tulips in the woods. But the title of this blog is also suggestive of the way I garden (and the way I garden is suggestive of the way I live). I love garden plants from all over the world. I also deeply appreciate the landscape I live in. I don’t want to turn it into an English cottage garden or an Italian formal garden or a showplace of the latest in plant decor. I get a little surly about this sometimes. If people think the area I live in is so beautiful (and they do), why do they want to turn it into someplace else the minute they start a garden?

On the other hand, I’m no don’t-tamper-with-nature purist. Gardening, like all life on earth, seems to involve a certain amount of corruption. My feeling is it’s best to admit it and just do the best we can. I’m glad there are people who garden only with natives (I like natives, too, in my garden and out of it), but after decades of living with my landscape, I know that what I see and touch was shaped partly by heavy logging, mining, road- and house-building, and imported plants that made themselves at home, sometimes driving out the natives. I myself am an import whose ancestors drove out the natives.

What to do? Some kind of marriage is in order. Some kind of compromise. Some kind of understanding.

For me, it starts with the siren call of plants. My earliest memories contain blazing pyracantha berries, springy green dichondra, and tough, scruffy grass—there was something about them that made me want to look at them and listen to them and be with them. I didn’t know then that they weren’t native plants; I didn’t know they were cliché Southern California suburb plantings. They were just the plants I knew.

Wild plants came later, in a suburb on the other side of the continent. But they were blended with the imports: there I was in fall, watching the the ginkgos my mother planted whump down all their gold fan-shaped leaves at once–unlike the native oaks and maples, which gently wafted many-colored leaves down, a few at a time. I marveled equally at the weirdness of jack-in-the-pulpits springing up pale in the dark woods, and the taste of the fat sun-warm strawberries my father planted. (My father grew up on a farm and wasn’t remotely interested in doing that kind of work again, but it did give him a taste for fresh strawberries.)

I started rambling in the woods, and in the herb section of libraries, working my way deeper and further, learning my way around. I traveled and looked at and used plants everywhere I went, a hunter-gatherer of plants and knowledge.

I was in my twenties, out in the woods and dreaming I was self-sufficient, when I became a gardener. I made my plans: two beds shaped like a crescent moon and the glyph for the planet Venus (the same as the symbol for a female). My garden was going to be full of esoteric meaning, not boring like everyone else’s.Then I started digging.

few inches into the soil I hit decomposed granite. Then I hit solid rock. More digging showed it to be a big rock. I had to use a pickaxe to break it up. Ten minutes later, I hit my second boulder of granite. I changed my garden plan to “wherever I can dig without hitting rock”.

Gardening is like that. The land’s as likely to talk to you as you to it. And the weather. And the plants. Gardening’s a conversation, not a dictation. Every garden (even a pot on a windowsill) involves us, our cultural mores, the native plants, the imported plants, the weather, the soil, the birds, the insects, and a lot of other beings. In a good conversation, everyone has a voice and, hopefully, everyone has a good time and comes out of it different than they went in.

I hope you’ll join in, too.