Gardening with a Wild Heart. Judith Larner Lowry
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turns a ghostly pale color and looks, with its empty seed stalks, as though it had just got out of bed. But ours is not a relationship based only on looks. The wrentit uses scrapings from its bark to make its nest, bound together with cobwebs. Dried sagebrush leaves are sold as local incense at our Christmas Fair. If, as you walk through the scrub, your coat brushes the sagebrush, you become redolent of a fine fragrance, at once spicy and sweet.
Music and Baskets
Twice a year, a Pomo Indian named Milton “Bun” Lucas used to visit our garden. We would place a chair for him between two elderberry bushes. From there, he would direct us as we scurried about cutting elderberry shoots for him to turn into carved clapper sticks and flutes, musical instruments used by many Californian tribes. Our cutting goals included fostering those stems that next year would be the right size and shape for a clapper stick or flute.
Gardening can be an anxious pastime, as the demands of weeding, watering, fertilizing, and pruning accrue. I have never experienced such peaceful gardening moments as when we planned for next year's “music bush”harvest. “Cut here,” said Bun, “and cut here.”
Now that Bun is gone, the bushes don't look the same. Some native peoples say that plants not honored by being used become sad and don't flourish. No one attends this tree anymore to make gambling pieces out of the twigs or to carve parts of the limbs into beautiful clapper sticks and whistles, so that music can be made.
Obtaining suitable basketry materials can be difficult for native California basket weavers. Lack of access and policies involving the spraying of herbicides and the control of fire are all stumbling blocks in the way of the pursuit of this art. Basketgrass, Muhlenbergia rigens, used by a number of California tribes, is hard to find and often not of suitable quality. At the same time, however, this grass has become extremely popular in landscaping. A large, fine-textured handsome grass easily grown horticulturally, it is being planted very extensively throughout California and seems to be adaptable to many conditions; there is no reason for indigenous basket makers to go without. One fall, I was able to offer sheaves of its beautiful pale seed stalks to a Yowlumni basket maker.
I have talked with other indigenous Californians about plants they used to see but can no longer find, plants of cultural importance to their tribe. These include a plant gathered for its edible leaves, a variety of wild tobacco that no one has seen for a while, and an elusive grass with seeds as large as wheat. All these might be found and brought into the native garden. Recent anthropological theories about Indian land management indicate that to the indigenous people of California, there was no “wilderness.” Human activities have always transformed the landscape. The distinction between the garden and the wild blurs further. The seam shifts, cracks in some places, holds more closely in others.
Illuminations
I am a patron of used book stores, alert for the odd find that may illuminate some hitherto unknown aspect of this kind of landscape and these plants, of previous human interactions with them and reactions to them. Except for the redwoods, our coastal plants go largely unsung. They have no John Muir. Easily removed for development or ranching, of little evident economic value, they are the underdogs of California plant communities. I think of myself as becoming of them, becoming “of the coastal scrub.”
For this kind of garden, plant lists are not taken from charts in glossy garden books. Ideas for plantings come from local floras, from hikes with naturalists into nearby undisturbed areas, from visits to botanic gardens, from the recollections of old-timers, and from the oral histories stored in our museums and libraries. They come from the diaries of early Spanish explorers, from the journals of wives of doctors living in gold-mining communities, from the casual asides of English tourists.
My garden is not the wild, but it looks to and is in conversation with the wild. It backs on and is backed up by natural systems. The goal is that the quail living next to us will find in our arranged mosaic of coastal prairie, coastal scrub, and wildflower fields the forbs they need for greens, the seeds they need for protein when nesting, and, in our shrubs, the habitat structure for shelter and protection. Subclover, Trifolium subterraneum, a plant widely sown for forage, will not be found in our garden, as it is in nearby lots, since it is now known that this plant contains chemicals that inhibit reproduction in quail. Nor will the naturalizing pyracantha, for although its berries may seem to make birds amusingly inebriated, they actually expose them to prédation and interfere with the activities necessary for their survival. Instead, we plant toy on, Heteromeles arbutifolia, with its bright holly like berries at Christmas time, the shrub for which Hollywood was named.
With plantings of toy on, we join the great feeding schedule, whereby food is available at the right time for the right creature. In early summer, the buckeye blooms, sometimes for three months. Its great pendant blossoms attract the insects that nourish the protein-hungry nesting birds. Even birds that are usually herbivorous require animal food while nesting. In midsummer, annual and perennial seed crops ripen, bee plant, poppy, miners lettuce, clarkia. By early fall, the native honeysuckle drapes succulent red berries on trees and shrubs. Midfall brings acorn and hazel harvests, and late fall sees the ripening of madrone and toyon berries, while the coyote bush pumps out the nectar. In January and February, the flowering of pink flowering currant coincides with the return of the rufous hummingbird
An editor of a gardening magazine questions whether this kind of gardening, where ethics and aesthetics merge, using local natives and natural models, is truly representative of the fine art of gardening. “Some might consider such simplification the abandonment of gardens as art,” he says. But choices have been made, plants have been arranged, an aesthetic has been developed. It embraces all I know, all I hope to know, and all I wish I knew about this set of ancient processes and associations.
Is it the way of a lazy gardener, as he implies? I find that the horticultural challenges are many. For example, I want to establish a stand of Indian paintbrush here, a hemi-parasitic plant that probably grew here once but has so far not survived in my garden.
Indian paintbrush, appearing in a radiant palette of apricot, scarlet, and yellow, hosts a particular kind of aphid-eating mite. This mite lives in the flower, where it eats nectar, till a hummingbird comes along to share the nectar. At this juncture, the mite runs up the hummingbirds beak and into its nostril, where it sits tight while the hummingbird flies down to Baja California. As the hummingbird approaches a nectar-producing plant, the mite gets ready, rears up, and races from the nostril, down the beak, and into the flower. Since it must move so quickly, this creature is equal in speed to the fastest animal on earth, the cheetah. By establishing this flower in the garden, with its as yet elusive cultural requirements, we may be facilitating this mind-boggling nasal journey.
The Beginning of the Eucalyptus Story
My town is bordered on the north by Jacks Creek, which feeds a rancher's stock pond before wending its diminished way to the ocean. As along many creeks in California, the north bank of this creek was planted with a windbreak of eucalyptus trees. Under these trees, which continually drop large, acidic leaves, little is able to grow except French broom and brambles, shallow-rooted, non-native plants. The bank on this side is continually crumbling and eroding, as the eucalyptus trees, now some eighty feet tall, become increasingly top-heavy.
On the other side of the creek, the bank is covered with native plants from the coastal scrub, including monkeyflower, sagebrush, coyote bush, lizard tail, mule's ear, and cow parsnip. The bank on that side is intact, verdant, complete, even down to the smaller plants, such as the tiny, narrowleaved native plantain (a larval food plant for the endangered Bay checkerspot butterfly) and the spring-blooming bulb named pussy ears for its pointed, fuzzy white petals.
Where Jack's Creek empties into the ocean, the bank becomes a steep bluff. On the northern, eucalyptus-covered side of the creek mouth, the tree currently nearest the end of the bluff will cling precariously for a while, providing dramatic photo opportunities, and then fall, taking with it a great chunk of cliff. The beach below is already littered with bleached eucalyptus trunks, resembling an elephant's graveyard. One by one, the trees fall, and the end of the cliff moves further back into the land. The other side of the bluff, where the native plants grow, erodes slowly, imperceptibly,