gardening with nature

Last week it snowed.

In April.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I live in a state where we have fires in summer, if things aren’t wet enough, and where wells run dry. So I’m not complaining. I’m just saying, we’re about a month behind where we often are this time of year.

The cranes knew it: sandhill cranes fly over at the very beginning of every spring and fall, and they didn’t start until later than usual; I saw the last flight a month ago. The bulbs all knew it; my first daffodils are just fading, when in other years I’d be in the midst of the full spurt of tulips.

And the willows knew it.

Willows are a tree people tend to pass off for most of the year. Oh, there are basket-weavers who keep an eye on their coppices (coppicing is when you prune the willows severely, so that they grow straight and slender, young and smooth and whippy, best for weaving). And there are the famous weeping willows that get celebrated in song and story, most noticeably on blue willowware.

But mostly people pass by the willows; they are often scrubby trees that make disreputable-looking branchy knots with the other creekside, soggy-land shrubs. I’m not even sure of the identity of my own willows (and I’m the kind of person who usually checks). They may be red willows, or one of 14 other species that my usually-reliable Sierra Nevada Natural History lumps together, pictureless and undescribed.

This is the only time of year that most people pay attention to willows, and I know the reason why: their catkins.

You can see several stages of catkin pollination, here

With only soaproot, chickweed, and bittercress doing anything in the garden, it’s wonderful to see any flower.

And there’s something about the furry, quilted texture of willow catkins that’s especially appealing. Maybe the furriness gives us a sense of warmth, subconsciously?

Whatever the appeal, every year I have to go out and cut pussywillows, and bring them in.

In the hothouse of the bottle on my kitchen windowsill, they make little leaves way before they appear on the outside trees.

You can’t see it, but they are making a tangle of roots in the bottom, as well. Willows are notorious for their rooting powers; there are stories (maybe apocryphal, maybe not) of European Americans bringing willow switches from their homes in the east, over the Oregon trail to the west coast, where they stuck them in the ground and sprouted them.

Maybe. I have rooted a willow cutting I left in a bag for a month. (Not a new technique; I just forgot it.)

But I’m going to get the best use out of my willows later on, when I’m taking cuttings. Willow water is famous for helping plants to root; there’s a substance in them called auxin (found in high concentration in tip growth, and used in commercial rooting compounds) which stimulates root growth.

If you want to read more about it, there’s an article by the reliable Fine Gardening here.

Maybe if I had read that article earlier, I would have had more spectacular results. My  laissez-faire attitude: get a five-gallon bucket, put a lot of water in it, cut up a lot of new willow stems (the ones with the smooth skins, not the ones with the rough bark), and let them soak. When I want to water in transplants, I use that water, and I use it on plants that look less than well-established, too. When the water level gets low, I top it up. Sometimes I add more stems. Most of the time, to be honest, the whole thing dries up until next year.

I cut willow stems every year. Because, like willows catkins, they subtly remind us: we have lots more flowers coming. And  fruits to follow.

Despite the snow, hail, and rain so copious it forms little sheets and streams of water in the yard, there’s one native plant that’s coming up, unstoppable. Soaproot.

Soaproot was one of the first plants I got to know, many years ago, when I moved to this area. I was camping out by the river, near what turned out to be a seasonal stream, and there was a good colony of soaproot there.

Soaproot loves to colonize

Later on, I found out that soaproot really likes moist soil, and seems to prefer dirt so wet it’s underwater part of the year. But I’ve also seen it on hilltops near no obvious source of water whatever. It might have been a high-water-table indicator: there were madrone trees all around them (soaproot likes shade), and although madrones will take drought, they love water. The trouble is, I know the well on that property was a very piddly one. Did they just drill in the wrong place? Or are madrones and soaproot less thirsty than I thought? Just another mystery.

...in fact, they love colonizing so much that the storm-damaged leaves crash together sculpturally

Soaproot, as you might have guessed by the name, has a bulbous root that can be used as soap; it lathers when you mix it with water.

Trouble is, that root is about 2 feet down, and the heavy clay soil makes tough digging. Camped out there by the river, I decided to dig up my soaproot in the original style: I used a stick.

That method took me two days and a good share of my patience. You can’t pull the root up; the stem breaks off, as I repeatedly found. So, I kept digging.

I dug only a couple of hours a day. Digging through clay with a stick is a little like serving up sugar with a needle: if you’re diligent, it works, but it’s slow. Probably the Maidu of the area had more patience than I. And maybe better digging skills.

When I did get down to the hairy, bulbous root (the outside has fibrous covering) I found it difficult to deal with. It has many layers, like an onion, only more slippery.

This soaproot is almost at full height; the plants in the pot aren't even up yet

The reason I was digging up soaproot was that I had heard it was a remedy for poison oak, and which I had a case of. (Poison oak is not at all picky about where it grows: shade, sun; wet, dry: it’s all good.) I did manage to get the root to lather, and it did help with the itching, but I’m forced to say that Fels-Naptha laundry soap did a better job, and was less sticky. (This was before I heard about the torture by testing animals get, or at least got, at the Fels-Naptha labs. I stopped buying their soap. It seems to me that there are a lot better and more interesting ways to test soap.)

I did not use the hairy outer covering of the soaproot as a brush, or try roasting and eating the bulb, as Indians who live in soaproot’s range used to do. I’ve eaten a lot of bitter, acrid, and acidic wild foods (at least once), but the idea of roasting one of those slippery, soapy roots is not appealing. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’re like onions, and get sweet when you roast them.

Although I am unlikely to dig up any soaproot with a stick this year, I enjoy its cheerful, persistent, burgeoning presence, and look forward to the stems of delicate white flowers– sometimes only a couple of feet tall, sometimes towering to four feet, glinting white in the shade.

In the center of the rosette, the stalk is just beginning

P.S. To any regular readers: this is why my comments and posts have been scarce recently: sometimes I get to do what I want, and sometimes my health has the last word. I’m looking forward to getting back in your gardens as soon as I can.

It might seem an odd time of year to be writing about watercress. It’s a thing we usually associate with summer: cress sandwiches, cress in the salad.

But at a mountain hot springs I found a little warm stream where watercress grows year-round. You can see frost sculptures on the grasses right next to it, but the watercress thrives. You can’t see the snow, because it doesn’t start until you get a bit away from the stream, but it’s there. Frozen hard.

This is one of the things I like about wild plants. They are opportunists. They live, on bare rock,  in shade, in dry and very wet and inhospitable places – and they ask nothing of us. Although when I met up with this cress, I offered my appreciation for this brilliant green in a winter landscape, and I took a few leaves.

There’s something about wild food that’s unlike any other. It may have to do with the way the climates and soil and exposure shape the plant, and give it nutrients you often don’t find in cultivated ones. It may be that when you eat a wild plant, it connects you to the landscape you’re in.

The many Maidu who lived near that hot springs would not have had watercress in their diet, because watercress is a European plant. I have found it growing wild in more than one California stream, though. Probably it was brought here by gold miners looking to avoid scurvy. Or maybe it was brought by the many horticulturalists who followed the gold miners. Whoever brought it, it has settled in happily.

It would have helped with the scurvy many miners suffered from (they ate nothing but beans and whiskey, or close to it), as it’s high in C, as well as vitamin E and beta-carotene. For minerals, you have phosphorus, calcium and iron.

If you want to gather watercress yourself, remember that, while it only grows in flowing water, it will grow in polluted flowing water. So be sure the stream is clean. Juicy plants such as watercress and lettuce are chock-full of whatever pollutants and pesticides are in the ground and water, and I wish commercial lettuce growers would think of this.

Watercress is pretty easy to recognize, especially if you’re a gardener: it’s in the cabbage family, and it has the rounded leaves a lot of brassicas do. In the case of watercress, the leaves are strung on the arms of loose rosettes of the plant, which spread in all directions, lolling in water.

One of the easiest ways to recognize watercress, though is the taste: a peppery greenness that reminds you of its relative, nasturtium.

I’ve never had enough watercress to cook – I just eat a few leaves plain, or pick some to put on bread and butter – it’s classic. But some people like watercress soup, or watercress salad.

People get a little cultlike around watercress. There’s even a site dedicated solely to it. For those of you who have enough watercress to cook, watercress.com (the link will take you to the recipes page) offers suggestions on pasta soup, quiche, baked eggs, and a number of dishes so delicious-sounding that I may have to go and find a bigger patch of watercress…

Chinese New Year. Lunar new year. Groundhog Day. Imbolc. Candlemas. St. Brigid’s day. Whatever the name, it’s about the first signs of new life.

This year, we had an auspicious meeting of lunar and solar holidays. The lunar holiday is the Chinese new year; the Chinese keep the old system of a lunar year with 13 months, so they don’t wind up with extra bits of day in the year, the way the Gregorian system does. So the Chinese new year is the lunar new year.

Plants for this holiday are, most famously, citrus, especially oranges, because of their round golden-orangeness: this is symbolic of money (pieces of gold), as well as sweetness and other kinds of prosperity.

The Gardening with Wilson site also lists that strange citrus known as “Buddha’s hand” as a lunar new year plant. He says they aren’t for eating, but they are fragrant and symbolize good luck, abundant wealth, and longevity. The only Buddha’s hand I’ve seen was in a public greenhouse, so I wasn’t able to test out the fragrance, but I love the looks.  The show-what-it-looks-like photo is at the top of this post, but I loved this view:

That citrus is in season around this time is, I’m sure, another reason they’re associated with the lunar new year. And, when you think about it, this really is an ancient sign of long life and prosperity: fruit in season. In a time when commercial sugar was not easily available, the sweet treats of citrus must have opened new dimensions of abundance and pleasure.

The solar holidays are Groundhog Day, Imbolc, and Candlemas – markers of the seasonal calendar in the northern hemisphere. While they have different names and backgrounds, these holidays are really all about the same thing: the return of life.They’re at the midpoint between winter solstice and spring equinox, a time when gardeners itch to get outside or begin sowing cool-weather plants, depending on the climate.

David Beaulieu points out that Groundhog Day is the only holiday solely devoted to the weather. I always have to look up whether spring comes sooner if the groundhog sees the shadow, or if it doesn’t. According to Beaulieu, spring comes early when the groundhog doesn’t spot a shadow, and this year was a shadowless year. The geese already flying over, and the buttercup leaves that have unfolded in protected spots in the warm spell are other predictors, but as usual, time will tell best.

Candlemas is basically a Christianized version of Imbolc, an ancient Celtic holiday, as is Brigid’s Day. Brigid was one of those goddesses they tried to tame by making her into a saint.

Candlemas day is another weather predictor. Lindy Washburn says that the basic idea is the same as for Groundhog Day, but couched more poetically. “If Candlemas Day is bright and clear, there’ll be two winters in the year.” In New Jersey, it was clear, unlike in Philadelphia where the Official Recording Groundhog resides. Will the weather be different in New Jersey and Philadelphia? What about the rest of us?

Historically, Candlemas was the day on which candles were blessed. That may seem strange to some now, but in a time when your ability to see, work, and even walk at night depended on candles, candles were important. Most people made candles in winter, when there was time off from farm work and fires were going all the time anyway.

Candlemas plants would then be all flowers (since beeswax is one of the traditional waxes) and the bayberry bush, which white settlers in New England made into candles. It takes a lot of berries – a whole lot of berries – to do that, so those colonists spent a lot of time in the bayberry bushes and surely must have associated them with the blessing of the candles. The major “plant” for Candlemas would have to be a cow, though, since most people used the less-expensive and less labor-intensive tallow for their candles. These days, I guess Candlemass plants would be fossilized plants that have become the petroleum which we now use for candles.

Another beeswax contributor

Brigid’s Day is also called Imbolc, the older Gaelic name (it’s not pronounced the way you’d think, but don’t ask me to give you the right pronunciation). Imbolc means “in the belly” and referred to the fact that, in the UK, this is the very beginning of lambing season.

Sheep were the source of food and warmth (in the form of wool). They were hugely important in Celitc agriculture. This is probably where our Groundhog Day tradition came from: the story is that on this day the old Cailleach goes out and looks for firewood. (The Cailleach is an ancient female spirit, who may sometimes be Brigid in one of her guises.) If the day is bright and sunny, it means she has a lot of time for gathering firewood – which means winter will last longer. If it’s cloudy, spring will come soon.

In a way, all plants are associated with this day, as Brigid is goddess (excuse me, I mean saint) of fertility, creativity, healing, and poetry, and is associated with fire (such as the returning flame of the sun). In Ireland, as in my area, grass often starts to spring up about this time.

Traditionally, last year’s wheat stalks were woven into an image of Brigid to celebrate this day; she was dressed and laid in a basket. The symbology of planting a seed is clear.

An extension of this tradition brings us some of the same symbology  as for the Chinese New Year: in many places, this is called Pancake Day. Gingerbread snowflakes points out that golden, round pancakes represent the sun. By this time, it’s easy to tell it’s staying light later and earlier. And the inclusion of last year’s harvest seems like a natural form of priming the pump for the coming year.

And, I realize, those mandarin oranges that are so popular for Chinese New Year gifts must do the same thing – along with representing money. Because the deepest source of human wealth is returning plant growth. Everything we do depends on it, now as in ancient times.

Dormancy.

It’s one of the things we take for granted, in the gardening world, unless we’re in the tropics. Maybe even in the tropics there is dormancy that reveals itself to a knowing eye.

But when you think about it, dormancy is miraculous. Something dies, and we expect it to rise again. Have you ever considered  what it is involved in taking that for granted? Maybe that’s why gardeners are more trusting in nature than the general population.

In an annual, dormancy has an aspect of transfiguraiton: the plant starts from a small  hard grain,

amazingly sprouts a soft green substance many times its original size,

and then, against all reason, continues to get bigger and create yet another variation: a flower.

And if that flower gets pollinated – and it has all sorts of tricks to make sure that happens – its soft, flimsy zygotes undergo a change, a change that brings them back to that hard little grain that started it all.

Although it is kind of a chicken and egg question, whether the seed is the start of things, or whether, in some dimension of time, a plant just had a mad whim to flower and fruit, instead of going on the same old way, like algae, dividing cells and dividing cells.

Bruce Lipton, the renegade cell biologist from Stanford, says that when cell conglomerations get large, they can choose to make communities, where some cells have special functions. Our own bodies are cooperative communities of trillions of cells.

Plants are also cooperative communities. Having had the privilege of seeing mitosis under a microscope – my mind got expanded to an airy thinness in that tiny field.  Mitosis is when cells divide, and also where they arrange themselves to take on certain work. The cells in plants, like our own cells, agreed to split up the tasks. (“OK: I’ll make a leaf bud. And I’ll mostly do photosynthesis, but I’ll do a couple of other things on the side. I like variety.”)

One thing cells do, Bruce Lipton says (and this is why he’s a renegade, though no one has been able to scientifically refute him) – one thing cells do is they respond to the environment. In fact, our own cells respond to environment, not to our DNA as the textbooks have it. DNA is just a kind of architect’s plan; we can change the plans by changing our environment: by chemistry, sound, feeling, temperature, and probably many other signals that we’re not even aware of.

Plant-cell communities also responded to their environment. At some point, they must have decided to be flexible, to roll with it, to go with the seasons. They could have decided, on the basis of winter, “Well, better keep hard and small and protected, the world’s obviously a hostile place for growth.”

And, in a sense, they did. For a time, they did decide that. But they also decided to respond to the expanding warmth of spring, when it came along.  And to the long days of summer. They kept their options flexible. Annuals allowed hard impermeability to last only for the season where it serves a purpose. They turned what might have been a killing hardship into an extravagant magical display: now you see it, now you don’t.

And perennials, those plants that get ever dearer to gardener’s hearts as we go along in life. perennials decided to shed their fluffed-out leaves and honey-scented blossoms (or even their tiny leaves and scentless unnoticeable flowers). They cast off all softness and extravagance – so they can get bigger next year, and create even more lush fertility, more and more every year.