Category — Trees

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.

 This young pine is growing out of an inch or two of granite dust, and pure granite. The red plant next to it is a succulent, probably Sedum obtusatum, a stonecrop.

There’s something elemental about high mountains. Everything’s stripped down.  Rock. Plants. Water. It’s a perfect place to see how soil begins.

As far as I know, soil starts in one of two ways: things rot (usually plants), or rock breaks down. Usually, both are going on at once.

Rock breakdown is slow; we rarely think of it in our gardens at home. But it must be the original place where soil starts. In many of the places where we garden, the rotted plant matter has accrued so much that the soil obscures the place where it came from. (Although in many places where I’ve gardened, the rock layer was not all that far below the soil, and needed breaking up with a pickaxe.) In the mountains, extreme climate and topography mean that soil-making is always in its infancy.

On bare mountain rock, threadlike parts of lichens make a strong acid which breaks down granite, feeding the lichen. High mountain conifers can grow in just a tiny bit of this crushed granite. They then break up more rock with their roots, drop needles and eventually wood which rot and make more soil, so that other kinds of plants can grow there. Animals feeding on the plants do contribute organic matter one way and another, but the bulk of rotting material is plants.

This is the same pine tree as in the picture at the top. This is its root, going straight into crushed and solid granite.

This juniper root gets its nutrients the same way, and has become a large tree.

This dead tree has helped create a small plant community around its roots. It will soon fall over and add to the soil by rotting. Probably rain will wash a great deal of its rotten wood into the lake below, but some will stay in flat places and crevices along the way.

Reference:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963. (They have recently come out with a more recent version, but this is the one I own and still use.)

Firs and other evergreens are like a skeleton to hang your garden on. Unless you’re planning major logging (which means any garden near your trees will probably be destroyed, too, along with soil compaction), if you live where evergreens grow, you will have them with you as dominating presences.

Red firs (the name comes from the color of the bark) are huge trees, and when there’s a group of them, they dominate the scene. In the nicest kind of way.

A friend of mine who gardens in the mountains has red firs standing at intervals in her yard. Her garden works and weaves through them wonderfully–but she and her husband have had to resign themselves to a shade garden in all but a few spots. Fire laws now mandate that no two tree crowns should touch near a dwelling, so some of their trees have been taken out.
Fire danger is one reason to do selective logging. And there are others. While I’m not in favor of wholesale tree-cutting, some trees become diseased or rot at the root. If these trees are within hitting distance of your house, they could do serious damage in the next storm or high wind. They could also infect the trees next to them.

The red firs in the mountains where I stayed had an epidemic some years back. I believe it was the fir engraver beetle, which gains the upper hand when trees are stressed by drought.  If you think a bark beetle is no big deal, just consider what girdling a tree does. I have seen ponderosa pines in my area, stressed by drought and infested with another kind of beetle, topple their hundred-feet lengths. When there’s a lot of this around, it gets pretty scary.

I’ve got to give the Forest Service credit where credit is due: they marked all of the diseased red firs and had them taken out. While I was horrified at first, to see how many they were marking (at the same time looking at the masses of sick trees on further hillsides), I was pleasantly surprised when the deed was done. This gargantuan tree-cutting project made for a healthier woods, and after a few years you could barely tell what had gone on. (We had some heavy-snow winters after that, which I’m sure helped, since the trees now got enough water for their health.)

In this picture, the  red fir forms a focal point. In the background, more firs repeat the theme, bringing foreground and background subtly together.

For those of you who think of conifers as monochromatic, here’s a  picture to help  change your mind:

One way to tell red firs from other types is their rounded, not pointed, tops. This year, the tops of these seemed uncommonly full of green cones. Maybe we are due for a hard winter. Maybe it’s because we had a very dry winter last year, which tends to make plants fruit frantically with desperation crops, so that their tribe will go on. Or maybe it’s neither one of these. Nature is full of mysteries, and the more of them we figure out, the more of them we find.

Reference:

National Forest Service site

Earlier in the year, I posted a picture of California buckeye (Aesculus californica) leaf buds. I thought it was only fair to show the rest of it. The most spectacular part, of course, is the amazing flower spikes, about 8 to 12 inches (20 t0 30 cm) long, with a mild scent and amazing coloration, if you look closely.

But even apart from their flowers, buckeyes are stellar plants. Many might disagree with me, calling them shrubby or weedy. And it is true that, while they are the first trees to show that brilliant chartreuse-green in spring and then fan their leaves out, they are also the first to drop their leaves, usually sometime in September, when all the other leaves are still growing strong, and the dying falling buckeye leaves are a bit depressing in an already-sere landscape.

Buckeyes are prominent natives in my landscape, and they used to be a major food for the Pomo Indians, who leached the poisons out of them in order to eat the meaty, chestnut-like nut. Their name for this tree was De-sa Ka-la, which means “food tree”.

It may sound odd, then, to hear that other native Californians (possibly the Pomo, too) used them unleached, to stun fish: put in a river pool, fish die and float to the surface. Not a method for sport-fishing, but used judiciously, a good way to be sure of fish when you depend on them for food.

The substances that poison the fish can also poison human beings with nerve and respiratory failure: the bark, twigs, flowers, and leaves are as dangerous as the unleached nuts, which are a beautiful shiny glossy brown and fit beautifully in the palm for stroking with your fingers. (I’m sure this is stress-reducing). These toxins are also in the Ohio buckeye Aesculus glabra.

The Asian horse chestnut (Aesculus hipposcastanum), on the other hand, was used medicinally in Europe for intermittent fevers and respiratory problems-though it was also known to be a nerve poison, like its American relatives. (If you find this strange, think for a moment about the toxicity of many medical drugs today.) Its folk use was in salves for rheumatism and hemorrhoids. The skin probably filtered the active ingredients somewhat, so that it was relatively safe. These trees are often found in the eastern U.S., and have looser flower spikes with hints of pink and yellow in them, if you look close.

California buckeyes have adapted well to their environment; while they tend to like streamsides and wet places, they also grow in places with no obvious water. I don’t know if they indicate a high water table or if they are just very tolerant of a wide range of places. They grow in semishade as well as full sun.

Buckeyes also range in size and shape: they can be small shrubby plants several feet high, and they can be many-branched tall trees up to about thirty feet. I’d guess this has to do with available water and nutrients. Their bark is smooth and pale, although in my area it tends to accrue lichen and moss-both of which accentuate its appearance, to my mind, rather than mar it.

I’ve never grown a buckeye, simply because there are so many around already, I’ve never felt the need. If you want to try, I’d suggest choosing a variety that suits your area. Rather than struggling to fit the dry-summer-loving California buckeye into a cold or wet-summer place, choose A. glabra (Ohio buckeye) or A. hippocastanum (horse chestnut). Horse chestnuts are tall beautiful thick-trunked trees, so if you want to grow one of them, make room.

Winter hardiness is another thing to consider when choosing your variety. California buckeyes grow only in lower elevations, which means they will take some freezing, but probably would not do well in prolonged-cold winters.

It’s interesting to ponder that a tree that is entirely toxic can also be a food staple. Yet more proof that inconsistency is not a strictly human trait.

References

LoLo Westrich, California Herbal Remedies, Gulf Publishing Company, 1989

Charles F. Millspaugh, American Medicinal Plants, originally published in 1892. Mine is a Dover reprint.

I know. This isn’t a sweet pea. There are only so many ways I can think of to take pictures of emerging sweet pea vines, so I’m showing you one of the things that’s happening in the woods part of the garden: the buckeyes (Aesculus californica) are leafing out. The first leaves to come and the first to go. The beautiful buckeyes are somewhat poisonous, and used to be used for stunning fish (not to impress them; to catch and eat them).

Sweet Peas: what kinds are good and where to get them

The other trick for sweet peas in hot-summer climates is to choose older varieties more closely related to the original Italian wildflower which was brought back to Northern Europe and became the rage (especially in England, where sweet peas seem to be almost a religion. Read an English seed catalogue and you’ll be amazed at the huge number of sweet peas offered. Unfortunately, there are very few places in North America where they will grow easily, since they like cool summers).

These older varieties don’t have the beautiful big flowers of those glorious English hybrids, but they are beautiful, they actually bloom—and they have a stronger fragrance than the later hybrids, which is a good thing in a sweet pea.

Cupani , which I think is the same sweet pea called Matucana, is supposed to be the (or an) original wild form. Or else it’s closely related to an original wild form—these things get lost in the mists of time, and I’m not sure which of the various stories is the straight one. Supposedly, a Father Cupani brought this sweet pea from Sicily to England in the late 1600s, falling in with the tradition that combines gardening with Christian holy orders. (It was, after all, the convents and monasteries that preserved many of the Mediterranean medicinal plants.) Anyway, you can tell by looking at Cupani/Matucana that its small, brilliant blooms were never hybridized by any ambitious grower. They are violet-purple and red-purple, keep going in the heat, and smell like a sensuous heaven—more Islamic paradise than anything in Christendom.

Pink Lady is a medium rose pink sweet pea with a white lip, also supposed to be a near-wild variety. Old Spice is a mix of several of these older varieties, giving you a range of colors and sweet scent. A newer, but still vintage, hybrid mix, Royal Family, lays claim to being heat-resistant, and my experience is that that ‘s true—but they are less hardy in the heat than the other antique kinds.

Royal Family does have the larger flowers most people associate with sweet peas, though, and the colors are varied and beautiful.You may read about perennial sweet peas in some garden catalogues. Usually these are accompanied by photos of these flowers in various colors, which means you’ve entered the land of deception in two ways.

Perennial sweet peas are considered a weed in my area, so I know them well. First off, they aren’t sweet: they have no scent whatever.And while I think they’re quite pretty, especially for a no-care flower, their blooms are mostly bright purple-pink, with a few sports to white and, occasionally, white with a pale pink blush.

A friend of mine once took me to an abandoned orchard which was covered with wild sweet pea vines, and it was a beautiful sight: they were clambering all over the old plum and pear trees, spilling over the ground in thigh-high mounds, in each of the three colors. It was the first time I’d seen the rare blushed-pink version, and I gathered seeds, thinking I’d grow them in my low-water garden, more delicate and subtle than the bright pink-purple.

Alas when I got the seeds in the ground and they came up, they reverted to the purple-pink form, so clearly they aren’t true from seed and what you get is the luck of the draw. Perennial sweet peas are still quite pretty and don’t require water when established (though they may be lusher if you give them some). They stand heat, blooming well into summer. But blossoms picked fade and turn a bruised blue within the hour in the vase, and the flower form is a good deal less delicate than the annual sweet peas. Use perennial sweet peas as a low-water low-maintenance groundcover (they spread but are easy to remove), but don’t expect the heavenly smells and sights of the true sweet pea.

If you want older sweet pea varieties, you can find them at:

locally:

Renee’s Garden seeds—available through your local dealer for instant shipping-free gratification, or at: www.reneesgarden.com

and online:

Cook’s Garden

J. L. Hudson, Seedsman

Select Seeds

Pinetree Garden Seeds

Perennial sweet peas can be found at:

Gurney’s

Pinetree Garden Seeds

more on locating sweet peas: If you have a cooler climate, you’ll be delighted at the selection that Thompson & Morgan has in their catalogue (some are also available through Select Seeds and Renee’s Garden, and I’m sure many British seed companies). I know good gardeners in my area who plant them and come up with fistfuls of good blooms. Maybe I should interview one of them and report back.