Gardening with a Wild Heart. Judith Larner Lowry
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around her house were a cutting garden, a formal rock garden, and some of the beloved plants that reflected her European birth. When I set up our demonstration garden, I followed her model, starting at the edge of the property with natives and working my way up to the house, where I half-consciously assumed that I too would grow exotic plants that caught my fancy.
By the time I got to the house, which took years, I was different. What I wanted to be greeted by in the mornings were the rusty green, roughish leaves of the California hazel, its horizontal twigs slanting against the office wall. I did not want to have to go anywhere to experience the sleek gray limbs of the California buckeye or the deep green leaves of the handsome coffeeberry. I wanted my fog gray house to melt into the grays of the coastal sages. These are friends whose seasons and graces go beyond novelty, friends with whom I have become quite comfortable.
I want to be able to walk directly into the coastal scrub and see it jumping with those resident birds, such as the wrentit, the bushtit, and the whitecrowned sparrow, that favor it for nesting and feeding. Quiet can make me nervous now, reminding me of what Robert Michael Pyle calls “the extinction of experience—the loss of everyday species within our own radius of reach.” He says, “When we lose the common wildlife in our immediate surroundings, we run the risk of becoming inured to nature's absences, blind to delight, and, eventually, alienated from the land.”
When I hike into the surrounding wildlands, I have a purpose, a reason to be there. As well as collecting seeds, I am seeking inspiration and information. We think we know what these plants can do, but surprises are the name of the game. Led by my friend John, who has made it the business of his retirement to know and protect this watershed, we once went deep into a coastal canyon, past marshy grasses, to a grove of Pacific wax myrtles so large that their ancient limbs created a sheltered glade. Here we picnicked, reclining on foot-deep, cinnamon-colored leaf litter. Having previously seen these plants only in their shrub form, I could only guess at how old these individuals were.
I brought back a bit of the duff to scatter at the base of my own small wax myrtles, in case some mycorhizzal connection in the soil has enabled the spectacular growth of these plants. These treasured bits of information let us know what was once and what might be again.
In the way that our coastal creeks spread out over the land in a broad floodplain before they empty into the lagoon, so the plants in this garden and in these wild gardens have begun to spread and seep out into our lives. At the end of a performance at our community center, we threw handfuls of coyote bush seed into the audience. The shining fluffy white seeds floated and drifted and landed in people's hair, adding to the layers of memories about coyote bush. Some people grabbed at them and put them in their pockets, as though the seeds were something valuable they had never seen before. For a while afterward, people would stop me on the street to talk about coyote bush.
Food
One part of the garden where the domestic and the wild meet is the food garden for humans. (The rest of the garden is food for something or somebody else.) In this area, I have planted both domestic and wild bush fruits, the domestic raspberry and blueberry alongside the wild huckleberry and thimbleberry. In the greens department, we have two kinds of every backpacker's favorite green, Claytonia sibirica and Claytonia perfoliata, side by side with domestic lettuces. The California woodland strawberry sends runners alongside Fragaria ‘Sequoia'. Asparagus beds flourish next to a plant of cow parsnip, said to have shoots that taste like asparagus. Native alliums and Bermuda onions sometimes share a bed.
Some farmers are thinking about agriculture based on natural models. Wes Jackson and others at the Land Institute in Kansas look to the prairies for possible perennial grain crop combinations that may give health back to some agricultural lands. We have used native legumes, like sky lupine, Lupinus nanus, as cover crops, which provide the bonus of a spring crop of beautiful flowers for pollinators and people to enjoy. Some wildflower species, like tansy-leaf phacelia, Phacelia tanacetifolia, and meadow foam, Litnnanthes douglasii, are used to attract beneficial insects to agricultural crops.
In order that the smells and colors particular to this place be joined by the tastes particular to it, once a year I immerse myself in food preparation tasks involving our local plants. At our annual spring open house, the menu may include roasted bay nuts, pinole made from blue wildrye, sugar cookies studded with chia seeds, miners lettuce on cheese and crackers, manzanita berry tea, and chia seed lemonade. We may not eat like this most of the time, but the ritual acknowledgment and honoring of this aspect of our local plants has come to feel compelling enough that I find myself preparing these foods and adding to the menu every year.
INDIAN LETTUCE One rainy year, our lettuce seedlings were all devoured by slugs and snails or drowned in downpours, but all was not lost. Indian lettuce, Clay tonia perfoliata, and the closely related peppermint candy flower, Clay tonia sibirica, had self-sown all around the oa\ trees, so we had succulent, nutritious spring greens for several months. Establishing native clovers, choice spring greens loved by indigenous Californians, would make our spring salads even more diverse and reliable. New shoots of checkerbloom, Sidalcea malvaeflora,although a bit furry, are also quite edible, returning every year. One round, perfoliate Indian lettuce leaf on a round cracker with a slice of a round cheese makes a pleasant hors d'oeuvre.
Once I went to visit a friend on First Mesa on the Hopi Reservation. Inquiring as to her whereabouts, I was told that she was “whitewashing the kiva,” the sacred ceremonial space. She emerged from that task with a certain virtuous glow. I remember that glow while roasting the seed of red maids, Calandrinia ciliata, shelling bay nut seeds, or cleaning bunchgrass seed to make pinole. These are mundane activities that set the stage for important events. It is a time for honoring continuous ways—in this case, ways having to do with the plants. Like whitewashing the kiva, this food preparation is the background activity for a sacred experience—the incorporation of the molecules of local foods into our bodies. As Thoreau said of native fruits, “They educate us and fit us to live here.”
WILD GRAPES For Mary Austin, the plants, landscape, and indigenous cultures of California were essential components of her writing. In her autobiography, Earth Horizon,she tells about the malnutrition she suffered when her family took up homesteading in the Tejon Valley in 1889. Surviving mainly on game, and concomitantly suffering from a deep, almost desperate passion to understand and become rooted in her new home, Mary grew wea\ and lethargic.
When the leaves fell off the grapevines in the canyons, Mary discovered wild grapes. “After a week or two of almost exclusive grape diet, Mary began to pick UP amazingly. ” At the same time, she met a local rancher able to make available to her the explicit knowledge of the Tejon region that she craved. Through eating wild foods, she regained her health, beginning an exploration of the people, animals, and landscape that resulted in literary treasures like The Land of Little Rain.
Sagebrush
Where you see coyote bush, you often see its partner in the coastal scrub plant community, California sagebrush, that plant of ineffable, shining silvery gray green. The smell and the color are the essence of California shrub lands, both interior and coastal. A good medicine smell, a heart-easing smell. A smell with some of the sharpness common to chaparral plants, which tells us where we are and seems to cut through grief or ennui.
I walk through the garden with Ann, who has worked here with me for seven years. She hands me a wand of pungent, palest silvered green sagebrush and says, “Smell this.” Wandering, we stop at a large soaproot plant and look through the stems and leaves to the shadow they cast on the leaf litter at the base of the plant they come from. We experience a certain lack of ambition. We note a marked lack of plans. Now that we have reinjected the native virus, it is, to a greater and greater degree, out of our hands. Not that there isn't plenty to do; weeds are forever, especially in a Mediterranean climate, but the balance has been tipped in the native direction. Now that the California hazel is established and thriving, we can let the rose from France next to it arch its long canes in the hazel's direction.
As the years go by and the plants develop their character, I begin to accept them at their worst. The California sagebrush, during