Gardening with a Wild Heart. Judith Larner Lowry
an undervalued species often removed when a garden is made. When we began the removal of weedy grasses, brambles, and French broom, we left islands of coyote bush, good places for mysterious rustlings in the early morning. I began to think about and appreciate coyote bush, and slowly I found others who had thoughts about this plant. As I talked to people about coyote bush, information began to emerge. What had begun as a solitary conversation expanded to include many talkers, and eventually a loose association formed, dedicated to protecting and restoring habitat in our town. At first jokingly and then as a matter of course, we called ourselves Friends of the Coyote Bush.
SAGE LA PENA I asked Sage La Pena, an indigenous Californian of the Wintu tribe, how she learned about native plants, and how she began growing them. Sage is the manager of the native plant nursery at Ya-Ka-Ama Indian University in Forestville, California.
“It started when I was born, ” said Sage. “I don't know why I know how or when to collect seeds. I just absorbed it growing up. ”
She told of trips down the Russian River with relatives, where conversation about the plants they were passing was the background of the trip.
“I didn't think I really knew anything until I applied for a job as a naturalist; then I realized how much I had absorbed. ”
“So, ” I said, “you learned about native plants from your family. ”
“That was one way. ” she said, “But there's a second way. Like my brother wakes up with a new song, I wake up knowing something about plants that I didn't know before. I dream it. ”
We learned that coyote bush, with its late bloom, is an indispensable source of nectar in the autumn, when hundreds of insects take advantage of its nectar, including Paradejeania rutillioides, the Tachina fly, whose larvae are parasitic on numerous insect pests harmful to important agricultural crops. An electrician working on my house opened some buried electrical boxes to find soft deer mouse nests made of the fluffy pappus of coyote bush seeds. A local hiker, caught in a tight spot on a steep cliff, grabbed onto coyote bush, sturdily rooted into the cliff, and pulled himself to safety.
The soil under coyote bush is rich, good for growing vegetables or for sheltering native herbaceous plants like checkerbloom or brodiaea, native bunchgrasses like the blue fescue and coastal hairgrass. Its flowers when gone to seed cover the bush like white snow, gleaming in the winter sun.
Some birds, like wrentits and white-crowned sparrows, live their whole lives in coyote bush, finding there all they need for perching, nesting, breeding, eating, and resting. Creatures like the rare mountain beaver find homes and food where coyote bush is. Coyote bush is enough for them.
We pondered the mysteries of its many forms, from the graceful shrubsized mounds, like clouds on a hillside, to the low-growing, ground-hugging form, to those individuals that unaccountably shoot up to tree size. As we learned more, one of us said, “It's hard to remember that once I thought coyote bush was just…coyote bush.”
Some call it “tick bush” and hold it in low regard, considering it a mere interloper where there could be grasses and colorful wildflowers, but here on the coast, bunchgrasses and perennial wildflowers thrive in its gracious company. When the exotic grasses are dry and dormant in late summer, look near the skirts of Baccharis pilularis to find soft tufts of native grassesstill partly green, interspersed with late-blooming wildflowers like the tarweeds, both madias and hemizonias.
In the garden, its rich green foliage and neat mounding habit make a satisfying background plant for other, showier species. One gardener discovered that cutting coyote bush seedlings to the ground when they are small will cause them to sprout back shapely and round. In other situations, where competition causes it to grow in a distorted fashion, it can be pruned to enhance its sculptural qualities. After fires, we watch the new green shoots sprout from the crowns, under a burned hoopskirt of blackened branches. Galls form on its leaves; some of us think it is helpful to remove them, but we don't know for sure. It is to coyote bush that I turn when discouraged or in need of a reminder of all that is available to learn in my own back yard.
Visions
I began to see the dim outlines of a vision of my home, nestled into the intricate earth, surrounded by those trees, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers that at one time graced this land, and surrounded also by those birds, insects, rodents, and mammals that have slept in, eaten off, hidden in, bred in, and otherwise hung out in these plants for the past ten thousand years. Home was becoming more particularly defined, more specific, more tied to the details of smell, color, and form, as we searched out the clues and looked at the pieces. The white-crowned sparrow, famous for its different dialects, has a clear, sweet whistle, called the Palomarin, or clear dialect, heard only in the area reaching from my town to a lake three miles away. Along our coast, the California poppy occurs in a lemon yellow rather than crayon orange variety.
While the land around my house, and in my town in general, can no longer be called pristine, the kind of gardening I have become interested in appears at the place where my plant choices and the general direction of the wild landscape meet, where I can work to locate myself and my garden in the ongoing evolution of life forms as they have become evident in this postPleistocene era, on this marine terrace, at the edge of this sea.
I am increasingly eased by my association with these plants. Collecting, cleaning, and sowing their seeds, planting and transplanting them as young plants, and collecting seeds from those in turn, all create a long intimacy somewhat reminiscent of, although not nearly as rich as, the complicated, layered involvement of the native Californians that used and continue to use them. When Mabel McKay, a deceased Pomo basket weaver and doctor, heard somebody say that he had used native medicinal herbs but that they hadn't worked for him, she responded, “You don't know the songs. You have to know the right songs.”
With no one to teach us, we don't know the songs either. The native practice of dreaming songs about the nonhuman world seems as valuable and elusive as a piece of pure bunchgrass prairie or the truth about this land.
Our retreat hut in the garden is called the Coyote Bush House, and its door handles are made from the hard, twisted limbs of its namesake. We use this hut for restorative naps, on a cot so situated that what you see out the open door before you fall asleep in April is the intense blue of lupines against the creams, yellows, and golds of tidy-tips, goldfields, and the lemon yellow form of the California poppy. What you see in the winter months is coyote bush regenerating after the long time of no rain, its new leaves the freshest of greens. The structure sits low to the ground, providing a good place for guard quail to perch while watching their flocks feed—their calls spring through the garden. Here, our first plant songs might be dreamed.
The Larger Garden
Twenty years ago, when I first began working in a California native plant nursery, I wasn't sure why I was drawn to work with native plants. In the middle of a major drought, they seemed important elements of the water-conserving garden, although now I no longer focus on the droughttolerant aspects of native plants. The reasons to garden with locally occurring native plants have more to do with joining in, with setting in motion interrupted processes that are unique to this place. It has to do with recreating a garden that connects the gardener with that larger garden beyond the fence.
In that larger garden, many plant/animal relationships are finely tuned and easily disrupted. Certain butterflies, for example, are called “hostspecific,” meaning that they will lay their eggs only on one or a few different plant species. When these larvae hatch, they require the kind of food that the leaves of their host plant provide and the kind of shelter that the leaf litter at the base of the plant provides. Without that particular plant, they will not survive. One example is the pipevine swallowtail, whose larvae are found only on the leaves of one of California's most beautiful native vines, Dutchman's pipe, Aristolochia californica. Without this plant, you won't be seeing the huge, iridescent, greenish black wings of Battus philenor. It all starts with the plants.
Gardening this way has changed me in ways I couldn't have predicted. My previous employer, Gerda Isenberg, the founder of Yerba Buena Nursery, had a demonstration