Gardening with a Wild Heart. Judith Larner Lowry
land, to find in it some glimpse of the perfection indigenous peoples attribute to their homelands. The feeling that it is “just right,” that everything needed is present on the site. A willingness to accept its winds, slopes, and exposures with all the pleasures and challenges they bring.
In most cases, the general outlines of what used to grow on the land are apparent without my early morning ramble. But it makes a welcome interlude between the drive and the work and provides an opening for the appearance of the unexpected, a rare fritillary or surprising patch of grassland.
And it is a way to clear the mind for this work. A moment to imagine the past, acknowledge the ghosts, and be reassured by the presence of the natives, still coming through. Yes, we are still around, they say. We have survived plowing, logging, mining, ranching, and now, gardening.
In some cases, it is the gardener who delivers the final blow.
What Is Happening to California?
Once I saw a beautiful piece of land for sale not far from where I live. It was adjacent to a national park, offering views of ocean and bay, and was richly clothed with a mosaic of Bishop pine, sword fern, Pacific wax myrtle, and huckleberry. Soon, the fortunate new owners began to build their home.
Shortly afterward, a hedge was planted. Not a hedge of the species already present on the site—coffeeberry, wild lilac, Pacific wax myrtle, coyote bush, Pacific reed grass, coast live oak, and California hazel—but one of a non-native plant with strong associations of the freeway. The newcomers to the neighborhood had chosen to plant oleander.
There is no shortage of oleander in California. Anyone wishing to see it can drive along Interstate 5 and many other freeways. Everywhere, the “oleanderization of California” proceeds apace. There is, on the contrary, a shortage of relatively intact Bishop pine forest and its floral and faunal associates. Multiply this scenario by the thousands, and you will glimpse how the landscape of California has been changed in the name of gardening.
I once saw a back yard entirely planted with iceplant, creating a perfect rectangle of bright pink flowers in the middle of one of those textured, tufted, woven mosaics of grays and greens unique to the California chaparral. Perhaps the owner had been advised to plant iceplant to prevent erosion, although the chamise, sagebrush, ceanothus, and manzanita had been doing that perfectly well for thousands of years.
In these situations, a new homeowner (sometimes from another state, sometimes not) buys a home or lot partly because of its natural beauty and then immediately proclaims ownership by planting a tree or a hedge or a flower garden that bears no relationship to the surrounding flora or land forms. I call this behavior “planting the flag” gardening, often an early stage in the development of gardeners, who may or may not evolve beyond it. I myself left behind in beautiful upstate New York a relatively pristine hillside that did not benefit from my early gardening activities. Following the advice of an enticing catalog, I planted crown vetch, an invasive exotic plant, to cover the banks of our newly excavated pond, and through my gardening practices introduced weeds that were not previously present.
Organic gardening was my first gardening framework, and Ruth Stout's How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Bac\ my inspiration. Her secret was mulch. Mulch on top of mulch, lots and lots of mulch. She said that you could never have too much mulch. Spoiled hay was her greatest source of mulch, and it was also mine, with the difference that she was able to use salt hay, relatively free of weed seeds, while my hay bales, the only ones I could find, included seeds of Johnson grass, one of the most noxious of weedy grasses, and burdock, the farmer's bane in that part of the country. Everywhere I mulched, I introduced these invasive species, nevermore to be absent from this piece of land.
Recently, a homeowner newly arrived from the Midwest was given a consultation with me for his birthday. He had transplanted around his property a hedge of French broom, which had reseeded down the hill, moving into coastal scrub and native prairie. When I expressed dismay, he said,“I had no idea you'd be such a fanatic.” I guess I was a disappointing birthday present. Now I make it clear in advance that a fanatic is being hired.
I was not born a fanatic. I became this way gradually because of what I have seen and learned doing this work. When I lived in a pink stucco house in the Santa Clara Valley, I looked back with nostalgia to Blossom Valley's agrarian past, planting apricots and pruning almond trees. For five years, I kept cutting back the annoying scratchy plant sprouting from a stump under our hammock. It took me that long to realize that it was a coast live oak, a precious reminder of the dense riparian forest that had probably once covered my neighborhood. Later, by the channelized creek down the block, I found an ancient elderberry, larger and older than any I had ever seen, another survivor.
Although I was working as a propagator at a native plant nursery, collecting acorns and growing native oaks, and although it was dreadfully hot in the summer, and shade from an oak would have been a welcome thing, apricots and plums were on my mind, and I kept cutting back that oak sprout. But it kept coming up again. My pruning only seemed to make it more vigorous.
I was not comfortable in that neighborhood. I wanted to live in a wilder place What a strong wild impulse that oak demonstrated, repeatedly crown-sprouting, borrowing strength from its ancient root system. The wildness we are buying second homes to experience, eating up the remaining open spaces of California and driving up and down freeways to find, may be in our back yards, knocking at the door.
Restoration Ecology
I ask my clients to write out a list of their questions, concerns, priorities, and dreams. We read through it together, then walk the land. They are the local experts, the ones who see the water stream past the side of the house after a storm and feel the intense heat where the sun beats down in late summer. The work is a collaboration, where I arrive with my experience and perspective, but the gardener is the inhabitant, the one with local knowledge, the one who is continually gathering on-site information.
Restoration ecology teaches us a sense of how much there is to know about every place, guiding the mulching, planting, pruning hand to move with knowledge behind it. Gardeners as land managers, people who make decisions about how land will be used, invest some
A gardener plants pampas grass in the front yard, and three years later that single plant has spawned a whole field of baby pampas grass down the road. Somebody plants Cape ivy to hide an unsightly shed, from which it spreads into and destroys a whole coastal scrub remnant, a willow grove, or a thicket of native blackberry. A gardener chooses capeweed, Arctotheca calendula, as a “ground cover,” and it moves relentlessly into a small remnant coastal prairie. In all these cases, it is gardeners, not logging companies, mining companies, or shopping mall developers, who take steps resulting in an unintended but nonetheless devastating loss of scenes and relationships from which we might be learning.
Mike Kelly, president of the Friends of Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve, consisting of 3,700 acres near San Diego, writes of the inventory of weed problems in the preserve. Of the eight or so invasive species he names, six are present because they have been planted by gardeners and public agencies as ornamentals.
I day dream of a law requiring that no planting be done by a new homeowner during his or her first year of ownership, until the new owner has watched the sun rise and set on the land many times, walked the paths, felt the wind and noted how it changes through the seasons, experienced drainage in the rainy season, and let the land do its work, talked to the neighbors about what weedy problems they contend with and which plants they regret having planted.
Mitigation for the Gardener
In the field of restoration ecology, the term mitigation refers to the legal requirement to make reparation for harm done—in other words, for the developer who builds a shopping mall on a wetland or condominiums where vernal pools once went through their seasonal changes to create equivalent wetlands or vernal pools elsewhere.
Although