Thursday, January 24, 2013

Lost in Translation

or As Cheap as Dirt

Find an old adobe home in New Mexico's pinyon-juniper country.  Junipers planted along the north side of the property might offer a windbreak.  An elm or so to the southwest, close to the house, will extend shading arms.  Otherwise not a single thing will be growing near the house—not a lilac bush, not a weed.  The house will be surrounded by bare earth, hard-packed by the tires of pickup trucks and booted feet and the paws of the lanky mutts who come running to greet you.  Walk on that bare ground, and you won't raise a cloud of dust.  Walk on it barefoot, and you'll feel the give of the land and its gently uneven texture.  It may not be soft like grass, but it's friendly underfoot, more yielding than concrete or flagstone or brick.

Once upon a time, not that many years ago, my garden had earthen paths. 

January, 2008, right before the sand cherries and their pals took over. 

I liked walking on them barefoot on a hot summer's day, but I didn't think living with them long-term was a good plan.  When I lived in Vermont or in western New York, where Precipitation Happens, dirt all too often turned into mud.  Luther was a great tracker of mud on clean floors.  He was good at escaping from towels, running through multiple rooms, and then leaping onto the sofa to give himself a zealous grooming on the upholstery.

Luther T. Dog, Champion Dirt Tracker

In damp kinds of places—the kinds of places where gardening books almost all seem to be written (perhaps because they're good places to garden?)—hard-surfaced garden paths are useful.  Gravel, brick, pavers, bluestone, flagstone:  they all keep mud from your door, and give you stable footing over soft, wet ground.

Deserts, if I may keep stating the obvious, don't often have damp conditions.  When I started my garden here in Albuquerque, Luther tracked wet dirt—you couldn't really call it mud—into the house a good three, four times a year.  Even after a rain, the ground just doesn't stay damp for long.  Now Luther's gone, and nobody has to track dirt in at all.  If my shoes are wet, I can just slip them off and take awestruck photos of them at the door.

August, 2012

So why did I want brick-style pavers?  Probably because I was still in Soggy Northeastern Mode.  But also because pavers, or flagstone slabs or travertine tiles or whatever, stand for a kind of polish.  Their usefulness may not translate well to this climate, but they still have a certain social cachet.  Gardens in magazine photos do not have packed-dirt paths. 

It's a pity that I don't actually like the paved paths as much as I liked the bare earth.  Why, I'm not quite sure.  Maybe they add hardness in an urban environment where hardness already abounds.  Maybe they make the circle shape of the path too strong and obvious.  Maybe they seem a little too highfalutin for my low-key lifestyle (let alone this mostly very lowfalutin state).  Maybe not every hard surface in the garden has to be terra cotta-colored.

The pavers get hot underfoot in summer and shelter waterbugs under their cozy, sun-baked warmth in winter.  They glare in sunlight. 

(A not particularly xeric section of) the Albuquerque Botanic Garden, April 2012.
Even the crusher fines used here—a great choice for constant foot traffic—glare in the light.

It's that last bit that's pushing me to rebellion.  They glare in sunlight. 

Social cachet is such a silly thing.  It may have its genesis in usefulness, but once that usefulness has been sloughed off (by scorching desert winds), cachet does not get to trump comfort in my book.  And when that cachet is an idea you've imported from abroad, with no basis in the culture where you now (happily) reside, it's time to eat a bowl of green chile (or red, if you prefer) and get your perspective on straight.  So I'm about to throw polish to the winds.

Dirt paths are cheap.  No goods have been conspicuously consumed to create them.  No one will be impressed by their elegance.  But they go well with New Mexico's rough-and-tumble landscape and informal lifestyle, its long history of old adobes and haphazard coyote fencing, the rough shagginess of native plantings.  Sometimes you just have to observe, and think, and realize that people in old adobe homes did know what they were doing, and let social cachet and garden magazines be hanged.

An Albuquerque garden featured in the Native Plant Society's garden tour, August 2012.
To me the randomly placed flagstone shows how soft and comfortable the dirt paths really are.

I won't do anything radical yet—those pavers took six weekends of precious physical energy to put down, and I'm not in a hurry to pick them up again.  But they'd make a good sized raised bed on the patio by the kitchen door, just right for a cold frame of winter veggies.

Now that would be useful here.

20 comments:

  1. Totally good idea! Bare ground (I don't like to call it 'dirt') paths are so natural and real, and the bricks will make a great raised bed.

    Maybe picking them up will be easier than putting them down and anyway you can do a little at a time.

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    1. Elisabeth, you are such a trooper to keep up with my various wafflings about the garden! Thank you, and thanks for the vote of confidence. I really do want that kind of easy, gentle, natural look. I'm sure you're right that picking up the pavers will be much easier--I just hope that once they're up I don't wish they were back down again...

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  2. Probably the first time ever that a brick path has been called "highfalutin". I love the idea of walking about the garden barefoot, but it's not possible due to slugs and various types of droppings.

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    1. Slugs would definitely put a damper on the whole barefoot thing, one way or another. The worst problem I have going barefoot is getting bitten by ants, but if you wear shoes, the ants just bite your ankles instead, so you haven't really gained anything.

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    2. ankle biters were children in my vocabulary ;~)

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    3. Diana, at this point in my life, I think I'm relieved only to have ants instead!

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  3. In the last photo, where the flagstone is seemingly randomly placed, it shows that there was some thought to the path - the bare earth in the pathway is *intended*. I think you should definitely take most of them and use them for a raised bed. But maybe you should keep a few here and there on the pathway to show that you have bare earth on purpose - planned and intended. (And then take delight every time you walk barefoot on the soft ground!)

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    1. Holley, that's a really good point. I've thought about marking a few "points of interest" with large, round river pebbles, rather than the pavers--I think they might go well with the beds that have gravel mulch. They might feel really nifty underfoot, too!

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  4. Hmm...I have a good imagination so I can imagine your dilemma, but I must admit it is a situation I have never had to deal with. Taking OUT a nicely paved area so one can walk bare feet on the ground – would have been madness in England but I believe you when you say it works in New Mexico. Fortunately, taking the bricks out is just a bit of elbow grease :-)

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    1. A part of me is wondering whether I'm insane, Helene, and forgetting any problems of the earthen paths. Any more, though, we only seem to get rain about once every two months (including yesterday!!), so I'm willing to run the risks...

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  5. Hey, there's Luther! I've heard so much about him and yet don't think I've seen him before. He was very handsome, Stacy but does look a real mud-traipser; Hobbes on the other hand just loved to be towelled off, wriggling and grunting with a somewhat disturbing pleasure. Solo hates being towelled however, and snarls and growls like a Tasmanian Devil. The brick paver paths do look nice at the Priory - they never glare; far too mossy for that. But they are lethally slippery in winter. I'm constantly warning visitors to tread with care – and most days I nearly come a cropper. At least you don't have that problem. For what its worth, I think the dirt (non-muddy) paths look mighty fine. Dave

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    1. Luther was such an Adventure Dog, Dave--he was so outsizedly happy outside. Definitely a mud-traipser and proud of it, right up 'til the moment when he landed in the bathtub. Why am I not surprised that Solo's reaction to toweling is the exact opposite of Hobbes'?

      Thanks for the input re: the paths--I really appreciate it. I took out a handful of pavers this weekend in places where they were already uneven and am pleased. I think. The Priory is sounding more and more dangerous all the time. Take it easy out there!

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  6. Hi Stacy, hard-earth or bare-ground paths turn to mud very quickly here. I do like the block runner path you have, but I wonder if you want to take a few of the blocks out and plant thymes in the gaps. It's one of those "trendy" things to do and have been on gardening TV quite a few times (just like planting drought-tolerant plants because of climate change).

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    1. Hi Sunil--it doesn't sound like the ground has often had a chance NOT to be muddy in the UK this past year. We finally had 1/10 inch of rain this weekend. VERY exciting! Thanks for the suggestion about the thymes. That was actually my original plan, but thyme turned out not to be all that xeric, which surprised me. It needed at least twice as much water as my other plants. I've thought about some other, dry-climate creepers but concern about using (yet more) water still stops me. :/

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  7. I love that you have spent enough time with your garden and with your State to realise that dirt paths fit. A raised vege bed sounds like an excellent way to re-use the pavers, and could be constructed a little at a time, so that the dirt path gradually returns and roots your lovely garden more strongly into the surrounding culture and landscape. Would be a total disaster here, where even the grass has turned to mud and I begin to doubt the wisdom of my grass paths in the vege garden...

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    1. Janet, thank you--I'm a little frustrated with myself that it takes so long to come to what later seem like obvious realizations! I also seem to have expected an urban garden to be by its nature more divorced from the landscape and culture and to be its own little world. It's been a (pleasant) surprise to find out that a sense of place is still really important. I do hope you all dry out soon over yonder--you are owed a little sunshine by now!

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  8. I love the rough and tumble design of NM gardens with adobe and coyote fencing...your dirt paths are perfect and who needs garden magazines...your garden is lovely enough for garden magazines of NM!

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    1. Donna, thank you for that lovely and sweet endorsement!

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  9. Stacy, It seems like this is part of the learning process of gardening. When we start to garden in a new place, we want all the things that said "garden" in our old gardens. It takes a while to figure out how to take advantage of what the new garden has to offer. Sometimes I look at my garden in Gettysburg and shake my head at the fact that it is mostly full of divisions of plants from my Maine garden -- very comforting and helps to make this garden a home away from home during the school year, but why didn't I take advantage of the opportunity to grow things that I can't grow in Maine?? Your idea of going back to the original New Mexico bare earth paths makes sense and continues your embracing of the New Mexico landscape.

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    1. Jean, I like the way you put that--the things that say "garden." It's almost like comfort food in a way, as you describe in your PA garden. You really do have to rethink what makes something a garden in a new climate. It's funny how your eyes and expectations slowly adjust, too. I completely resisted gravel beds when I first moved here, in reaction against the "gravel + sculptural yucca" xeriscaping that is (perhaps a little too) prevalent here. Now I have three gravel beds... And when I see genuine greenery, I often think, "How vulgar and ostentatious."

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