Movable Quiet

or Quelling the Riots

Keller's yarrow (Achillea x kellereri)

Riots break out in pockets in my garden—explosions of glee and excitement from the flowering kingdom, but only in places.  Except in early spring, when the tulips and sand cherries and ipheion come to life, I don't really have a garden that flowers all at once; I don't have the knack of planning beds for succession of bloom.  Or, more kindly, I've chosen in a small space to prioritize perennials with evergreen foliage instead, and to let the flowers happen as they will.  The garden has bursts of color here and there:  sun roses and California poppies, and over yonder some other sun roses, and then in another bed one of the flax plants but not the others.  And some scutellaria in the corner.  Oh, and some daisies and gaura off to the side, not to mention 'Wild Thing' autumn sage, which has kicked off its own party again beside the patio.  Some parts of the garden are very colorful right now, in a random, hither and thither sort of way.

Sometimes my brain ends up in the middle of the same kind of hither-and-thither riotousness, when a feast for the senses gets out of hand—an excess of randomness or color or sound or light or input of whatever kind.  Too much sensory stimulation affects me like a tapdance in an echo chamber, or like electrically amplified bagpipes with a good dose of feedback, or like purple and chartreuse stripes with mustard-yellow polka dots.  All to say, sometimes a little less stimulation is OK.  That's heresy, I know, in this multi-tasking era of more-bigger-faster-louder, but there you are.  Not everything has to excite. 

Even a garden can be noisy, with its patches of brightness, or clamorings for water or transplanting or pruning or weeding, or squabbling birds or barking dogs next door or distant traffic sounds.  I've been thinking about noise and quiet while trying to decide what to do with three Keller's yarrow plants that didn't show to advantage beside 'Wild Thing'.  I had hoped that the cool of the yarrow would be striking against the heat of the sage, but it wasn't.  The yarrow just looked put-upon, with all that riot and rumpus going on next to them all summer.  Now the three of them are sitting in containers, waiting for inspiration to strike.  (To strike me, that is.)

I'm glad to see the yarrow up closer these days.  This variety is a quiet one and easy to overlook in the garden.  It is forgiving enough of most dry-climate conditions that once you plant it and it "takes" you can pretty much forget about it; it will need some water on occasion, but not babying.  It's small, maybe eight inches high and a foot or so across, with narrow gray-green leaves and small clusters of flowers from mid-April to mid-June or later.  I suppose the white blossoms are bright enough to be showy in their way, but they fall a long way short of spectacular.  Like many plants that become my favorites, though, no matter how unassuming Keller's yarrow may appear, it rewards a closer look.  Otherwise you might miss the creases and scallops of its clean, white petals, the gentle yellows at their center,

the way the leaves arch like quill pens, and their fine sculpting. 

Once you start exploring, this is a plant you can get lost in.  Tracing the lines of the leaves, you find yourself mesmerized, immersed in an active quietness, a kind of meditative pleasure.  The color is a gray-green so soft that you could go to sleep in it.  Jangled nerves slowly come to rest. 

I may just leave the yarrow in containers this year—I'm enjoying being able to move a little bit of quietness around to where it's needed, like the anti-matter version of a boombox, or a musical rest that you can carry with you and "sound" at will.  Not everything has to excite.

And not all excitement has to be loud.

Cussedness

or In Which We Celebrate Individuality, Whether We Want To or Not

The furnace really was more important than the Western sand cherry bush (Prunus besseyii).  I thought so last February when the temperature dropped to -7°F (a 40-year low) and the furnace broke down, and still think so now.  The repairman did a wonderful, careful job despite vicious wind and sub-zero temperatures and was cheerful the whole time.  Even so, the part of me that likes to ponder the general cussedness of things wondered what law of nature decrees that with three feet of clear space and a brick path to stand on, a workman must nevertheless step on the plants.  The Sad Sand Cherry, poor thing, was apparently in the way, and after its little adventure with big boots, it took a while to recover.  Three seasons later it's still missing half the branches on one side and looks pretty lopsided.  It didn't grow much over the summer, but it lived, and that's saying something, in an Eeyore-ish sort of way.  Now, autumn has come to it in spots.

Autumn or chicken pox?  It can be so hard to tell.

Meanwhile, across the path closer to the patio is another cherry planted at the same time two years ago.  It gets quite a bit of shade from one of the desert olives (Forestiera neomexicana) and isn't growing quickly, but it's thickly leaved and branched and looks strong and healthy.  It is now officially taller than the salad burnet, and it produced one (1) cherry this year.  I was so proud.  The Slow Sand Cherry is fixin' to enjoy some autumn, but maybe not all at once.  It's getting there, though, one easy-going, leisurely leaf at a time.

The other cherry near the patio is what I expected all of them to be—about three and a half feet tall and wide, more or less nicely shaped, thickly leaved, full of cherries, and generally well-behaved.  It's been in the ground for four years and has officially graduated to drought tolerance.  (Now there I am proud.)  The Teacher's Pet Sand Cherry is still mostly green, but it's beginning to change colors ever so delicately and attractively.  With impeccable timing, it should be at its reddest precisely when its neighboring olive tree is at its most golden-green.*

And then there's the Big Hairy Monster in the far corner.  I love that cherry.  It's about six feet tall and wide, way too large to be convenient, half again the size I thought it would be.  I end up whacking it back hard twice a year, and it still blocks the path.  But boy, is it gorgeous.  If I remember correctly, it was one of the first things I planted in the garden, if not the first.  Back then I nurtured things properly, rather than just plopping them in the ground and wishing them luck.  I watered regularly and fertilized carefully and worried and fussed, and as a reward I have a healthy, happy monster on my hands that's really way too big.  Two weeks ago it looked like this:

But now it looks like this:

For the record—because you certainly can't tell from looking—the point of planting four bushes all alike in the four quadrants of the garden was to enjoy a little symmetry.  Not uptight symmetry, not super-pruned rigid sameness or anything, just a general sense of kinship between one part of the garden and another.  The idea was to create a single, overall effect, especially in the fall, when I had hoped for a garden full of rust-red leaves.  All at once.  That is to say, all at the same time.

I don't really expect the two youngest bushes to be the same size yet as the older ones.  I understand that the Sad Sand Cherry has had a hard time.  And boy howdy—micro-climates, are they everywhere or what?  Not one of the bushes has the same growing conditions as the others, even though they're only a few feet apart.  Genes can sure be different from one plant to the next; colors do vary from year to year.  As personal problems go, having your shrubbery out of sync ranks so low that it doesn't even make the list.  And yet— 

I'm just going to mutter "Vive la différence" for a while until I believe it.

__________________________
* As a fine example of cussedness, this exemplary sand cherry is the one of which I am least fond, for no apparent reason.

Up in Flames

or Fourth of July Canyon

A day of contrasts.  The color wheel spun between fiery orange and cool blue, pine green and luminous gold.  In a shining cloud of dust on Forest Road 55, the skeletons of old trees, burned by a previous summer's fire, stood guard; at their feet, young growth played with flames of sunshine.  In the open the sun was warm by mid-morning, but in the dappled shade on the trail, seasons came and went from one step to the next.

I generally think of blue and gold as the west's autumn colors—the deep, unclouded blue of mountain skies, the gold of a sun like hot honey, and the joyful, answering glow of aspen and cottonwoods, Maximillian sunflowers and rabbitbrush.  But tucked away in the Cibola National Forest, in the Manzano Mountains about 55 miles southeast of Albuquerque, is a canyon alive with bigtooth maples (Acer grandidentatum) that turn into embers and sparks, reds and oranges that smolder against the ponderosa pines.

For a while over the summer, all of Cibola Forest's 1.6 million acres were closed to recreational use, because the fire danger was so extreme.  Just idling a car for a bare instant too long over fallen pine needles in a road, or letting live cigarette ashes drift on the wind, could start a fire that would send whole mountainsides up in flames.  How lovely, then, to see the wilderness harmlessly catching its own seasonal fire, in a canyon named for a day of fireworks, of sparking, thundering, crackling celebration.

The Fourth of July trail climbs to a spring and continues on to the mountain crest.  I only walked a short spur of it called the Crimson Maple Trail, and even so spent much of the time sitting on the occasional bench.  (One especially lovely clearing had so many benches I wondered if they'd pupped.)  These photos, then, are only of the tiniest part of the canyon, and we may never know what hidden wonders we missed.

Even that fraction of a trail did not run short of wonders, though.  On one stretch of the path you'd walk amid the clean, resiny scent of junipers, or catch the faintest trace of vanilla from a stand of ponderosas.  Around the next curve you'd encounter the sweetness of deciduous forest; each step would release the must of fallen leaves from beneath your feet.  The wind sent white noise rushing through the pine trees' crowns.  It pattered among the maples' dying leaves; branches rubbed together high overhead, creaking.  A gust might fling a host of leaves into flight all at once and then let them settle in a whirl of color and light.  The forest floor, sheltered from the currents in the treetops, let only a light breeze pass, just enough to have hands seeking the warmth of pockets, and to prove the jacket to have been a wise choice after all.  In some places the season was just taking hold, in others the flames already dying out.

And everywhere the light was diffused, deflected, magnified by storms of translucent leaves, by the almost-invisible haze of dust shimmering in the air.

Amid the kaleidoscope of light and shadow, a bench offered a moment of quiet among the trees, a time to listen to the silence behind the wind, behind the hiss of leaves touching down, or the call of a mountain chickadee, the hoarse bark of an Abert's squirrel in the distance.

A day of contrasts, when cool and quiet could make your heart catch fire.

Double Duty

or The Pleasures of Forgetfulness

For some reason salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor, or Poterium sanguisorba) makes me think of water—rills of fresh, cool water.  Maybe it's the way the leaves fountain out of a central point, and then go cascading downward, or maybe it's their cool, blue-green color.  It could just be the simple fact that they have the broad leaves of moist-climate plants.  Or the dark shadows they trap beneath them—dense, woodland shadows rather than the shimmery dappling of most southwestern perennials.  (Ironic, since salad burnet is native to dry, grassy meadows.)  And of course, from dense woodland shadows to rippling woodland streams is but a short mental step (in this free-associating little head, at least).

One of the almost unbreakable rules of thumb I use when choosing plants for my small garden is that everything should fill more than one purpose—provide both spring blooms and fall color, say, or bird sanctuary and summer shade.  Winter interest or windbreak, bee-pleaser or kitchen herb, all of that is fine, but unless it's a tulip or a crocus, a plant has to do double duty at the very least.  Edible salad burnet, with its mild, cucumbery flavor, ornamental shape, and evergreen leaves that shade to red in winter, seemed ideal from its catalog descriptions, but I assumed it would be too thirsty for the southwest.  It isn't.  It has a long taproot (as I found out the wrong way the first time I transplanted one, poor little burnet) and, as long as it's kept in partial shade, can handle almost anything.

For such a soft plant it can be astonishingly sculptural, especially when it's stretching out new leaves in spring or fall:

While its petal-less flowers aren't ornamental, they are definitely intriguing. 

I'm not always sure how to integrate burnet with other garden plants.  It pairs well with rue and other things with fine or dissected leaves, as well as with the taller spikes of irises, but something else is still missing to make them all come together.  (Oddly, I don't care for it with grasses, which in a meadow plant seems wrong.  But there you are.)  Despite that little perplexity, though, I am still as smitten by salad burnet as I was my first year here, after first seeing its winter leaves turn red.

Imagine my surprise when I was idly looking through an old garden notebook from the Vermont years and came to the end-of-summer assessment, which said, "Salad burnet:  dull as dishwater.  Don't bother with it again."

Huh.  My standards of excitement were maybe a little higher ten years ago than they are now, and yet... what more did I want?  There's no knowing, since I didn't even remember having grown burnet in Vermont until finding that notebook.  It's just as well that I did forget, or I wouldn't have bothered with it again and so wouldn't be enjoying a garden full of salad burnet now.

That notebook is a funny one—at least on the surface it was a typical attempt to record what worked and what didn't, and to keep track of weather patterns and all those good things.  But the entries are detailed and enthusiastic only from the moment I planted the first indoor seeds in March until just after the last frost, around the first of June.  Then they come to a screeching halt until fall, when the weather there starts getting nippy again.  The journal seems to have done double duty, helping me track the biggest transition seasons, yes, but also jollying me along through the tail end of winter, letting me start the growing season early and hang onto it late, even if only on paper. 

I came across a Slate article by Libby Copeland the other day about Susan J. Matt's Homesickness:  An American History and still find myself thinking about its last sentence, which describes rootedness "as an expression of a basic human craving: continuity with the past."  Many of us who have been nomadic seem to long less for a particular place than we do for continuity.  We want to feel that the disparate parts of our lives have some ongoing link between them, and not as though we have been cut-and-pasted from one life into another.  (Chronic illness, I think, presents the same challenge, an ache for some sort of connection with who you were before.)

Gardens are certainly generous givers of continuity; many of you have written about cuttings or seeds or plants you cherish because they came from gardens of people you love.   Even when the link is less direct, it can still be strong.  Despite burnet's sturdy compatibility with growing conditions in the southwest and its grassland provenance, at some not-quite-conscious level its shape and color evoke for me a land of broad-leaf forests and shadows and streams; a land of ferns.  It's a tiny thread connecting the third of my life spent in the northeast with the present.  It doesn't quite "go" with much of the rest of the garden, but it still belongs.  Like the Vermont garden notebook, its real purpose is turning out not to be the one I thought it was.

As if being edible, ornamental, and evergreen weren't enough, now it has yet another job to do. 

Salad burnet with native silky threadgrass (Nassella tenuissima)—hmm.

Well Fed

or On Pink and Plenty

Vegetables—so wholesome, so useful, nourishing, and sensible.

No, no, no, no, no. What I meant to say is, Vegetables—so vibrant, so artsy, fanciful, and extravagant.

Yes, that's better. The “Flamingo” chard in the microgarden is going like gangbusters these days, and when the sun catches those neon stems early in the morning, you fall in love with sunglasses all over again. (I've cropped some of the photos but haven't altered the colors at all.)

I'm not actually a huge fan of pink, though I've come to terms with it over the years, but this hot pink is an exception. On paper or in a paint store it would mean an instant migraine, but in the natural world it tickles me no end. Still, where chard is concerned, it wouldn't matter if the stems were orange, blue, or purple—what I love about them is their vividness and intensity, that incredible saturation of color. They are a short step away from being pure light.

I looked up the word “saturate,” because—well, really, there is no because. I just wanted to see what would happen. (Living dangerously, Microcosm style.) I knew it was related to satisfy and satiate and so on but was delighted to see that the Latin root, satur, means “well-fed.”

Well fed. Oh, what a lovely phrase, occupying that happy middle-ground between hunger and gluttedness where you purr with the contentment of enough, where your needs are not only met but met pleasantly. If the Cosmic Serving Dish of Pinkness were passed again, the chard would say, “No thank you, I do not need any more pink just now. I am full up with pink. I am so wonderfully full of pink, I could not absorb any more if I tried.”

Looking at it, I find myself feeling well fed, too. It's about more than the color—it's also about the need for a certain intensity of experience, a particular kind of sensory feast. Tracing the stems and veins and rivers, trying to absorb them, to soak up their color...for that moment one lives fully in the wonder of the world.

And on top of all that, chard is a vegetable: an edible, tasty, nutritious vegetable, the stuff of which good dinners are made. (Or at least, it will be, if I stop writing and get busy cooking.)

It is a fine, fine thing to be so very well fed.

_____________________________________




A P.S. that didn't fit anywhere else:

"The brave little mantis seeks its fortune in Beta Vulgaris, the giant forest of Chard."

Fragments

or 4 x 4

The quilting materials my mother inherited from my great-grandmother some 25 years ago were a jumble of tiny jewels—diamonds and triangles of fabric that had been cut but not yet pieced together, or that had been pieced into building-blocks but not joined into larger sections.  Really, the fabrics were just "plain goods"—calicoes, bits of feed and flour sacks, simple cottons—but they were old, some dating to the early 1900's, and so somehow exotic.  In the box, pale yellows jostled lurid pinks and lavenders, softer aquas, true reds; delicate florals and tiny dots hobnobbed with bold checks and pinstripes.  They were fascinating fragments of cloth (of a woman's history, of an era), probably leftovers from other projects; there weren't enough pieces of any of them to make a completely matching quilt.  But they were what great-grandma had, and she made the most of them.

My mom finished several of the quilts.  It's astonishing how the pieces disappear into the larger pattern, all those separate vivid prints and colors, all the mismatches turning into subtle shadings as they take their place in the design.

I was thinking about parts and wholes today while looking at the garden.  Its winter identity has been shorn away, all the seed heads and stems and branch structures that gave it dignity and integrity.  They have been reduced to an awkward, gangling mess of spikes and stalks and lumps that have no apparent relationship to one another, no balanced proportions, no sense of shading into a whole.  The crocuses, while lovely on their own, are too newly planted to be more than random dots of blossom—rather than blooming en masse, each one seems to be following its own rhythm.  Instead of providing charming swaths of color to distract from the spikes and stalks and lumps, they are acting as charming exclamation points drawing attention to every little awkwardness. 

Until the spring growth fills in, it's a scrap-bag of a garden, a jumble of fragments divorced from a design.  But how fascinating those fragments can be... One 4 inch by 4 inch patch of ground, for example, home to a handful of waterlily tulips, kept me occupied for longer than I care to admit.  The tulips' leaves are just beginning to stretch out in earnest, and they are a study in curves, from nautilus spirals to new-moon arcs to flamenco swirls.  They capture light and funnel it along the leaf edges; they radiate warmth in the morning and cool in afternoon shade; they are a good argument for wearing vertical stripes.  They are still so small that they can barely be seen from the patio; once they bloom, the leaves won't be noticeable at all; once the sand cherries leaf out, the tulips will disappear into the larger pattern of green.

In the meantime, they are what we have—let us make the most of them.

Vestiges

or Skeletons in the Closet

A few years ago I was hanging out with an international group of friends, trading favorite figures of speech and laughing at the way the idioms translated into our different languages.  Somehow the phrase "fixin' to" came up, and I can still see the delight on one friend's face—his joy at this manner of saying that no, you're not doing anything yet, but you might be at any time; that while you may look idle, you're actually working on thinking about getting ready to accomplish something.  Soon(ish).

Of course, it's a lot more fun being the one who's fixin' to do something than the one waiting for it to happen.  Right now, when winter is fixin' to head for another hemisphere and spring is fixin' to arrive, there's a lot of anticipation floating around without anything to attach itself to.  It's actually one of my favorite times of year, despite how painful the suspense can become.  Every day the excitement builds, and some tiny but significant change rewards your vigil—a twig that's come to life with richer color,  a bud that's opened up a hairline fracture in a bleary, Monday-morning peek at the world, a single leaf flaunting its green enthusiasm amid the skeletons of winter.

Make no mistake:  those skeletons still predominate, old snake-skin remnants of the previous year—the trimmed stalks and leaf-mulch, the sprawling dead growth on plants that still need cushioned against frost, the bare earth where the mulch has blown away.  This is actually the one time of year when I'm embarrassed to have people see the garden, as if all those skeletons are skeletons in the closet—as if this phase of transition is something to hide from all but the most tolerant eyes.

And yet, the vestiges of winter have their beauty, too—a decomposing leaf with its warp and woof unraveling, a study of tensile strength and fragility; the haphazard palisades of tarragon stalks, protecting tender new growth; the paisley swirls of dried leaves punctuated by dots of green.

I will not miss winter when it goes, but despite the suspense and the eager wait for greenery and blossoms, I may as well enjoy it while it stays.  To try to see winter beauty on spring terms is to miss it altogether—almost as pointless as berating winter because it hasn't yet yielded to spring.

After all, it's fixin' to.

A Study in Scarlet

or A Conundrum

(After a brief derailment last Wednesday, I am back on track today, ready to remember that when we struggle to find beauty in our circumstances, looking at them more closely often helps—as does counting our blessings.) 


In the very first of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries, A Study in Scarlet, the great detective tells Watson, "There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."  Then, in what one can't help but feel is an anti-climax, he adds, "And now for lunch..."

I'm afraid I don't have anything quite as racy as revenge or poison pills to offer with the toasted cheese sandwiches and tomato-cumin soup, but really, that's probably for the best.   We shall content ourselves with enjoying the more benign scarlet threads that run through the colorless skein of winter, savor our meal with perhaps a cup of tea afterward, and go on from there.  (And we will not wax rhapsodical about some violinist's transcription of a "little thing of Chopin's," chirping "Tra-la-la-lira-lira-lay" and "caroling away like a lark," as Holmes apparently did, so you can all relax.)

Or are the scarlet threads benign?  I find myself tugging at a moral thread these days.  (You can all tense up again.)  It is tied to Nandina domestica or "Heavenly bamboo," an ornamental shrub introduced from east Asia.  I love this species for its winter color in many shades of red—a color that enlivens stems, leaves, and berries—as well as for its delicacy and for its translucent glow in sunshine.  But as with so many introduced species, it is invasive in the right circumstances.  While I don't think that the dry climate of Albuquerque counts as the right circumstance, I can't be sure.  It doesn't seem to invade in people's yards, but birds do eat the berries and spread the seeds elsewhere, where vigorously growing seedlings might disturb the balance of an already fragile ecosystem.  And yet those gorgeous scarlet stems and tangerine-orange leaves...I'm almost willing to be immoral and grow an invasive species for their sake.

Well, really, I am willing.  I do grow it.  I have it growing in a large container, which is one of those compromises that pleases no one, including the Nandina domestica.  On the one hand, in a pot its root system can't possibly spread out of bounds and invade; on the other, it requires extra water in order to thrive.  It hasn't flowered and produced berries yet, but surely it is only a matter of time until it does.  Once it does bear fruit and the birds find it, then the seeds will be dispersed far and wide.  And yet, without delving too deeply into the mysteries of birds' digestive systems, birds do seem to function in an, um, "easy in, easy out" sort of way.  "Far and wide" can be that far and wide:  I can't imagine that the birds will carry the seeds far enough to deposit them in any damper, more congenial climate.  Common sense and mildly deductive reasoning would indicate as much, but I don't know whether that's the case.

I'm not actually losing sleep over this (I expect I'll just trim any berries before they ripen—another compromise that pleases no one), but it does illustrate in a way that never fails to disconcert me how small choices can have broad effects—effects for which we are responsible.  It's a conundrum, but one, frankly, that I care about more in June than I do in January, when Nandina domestica casts a glow over the landscape.  During the dead season it's a pleasure to unravel the scarlet threads, isolate them, and expose every inch of them—a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. And now for dinner.

(It's still anti-climactic.)

Hearing a Who

or From Microcosm to Nanocosm

In Horton Hears a Who, the 1954 children's book by Dr. Seuss, Horton the elephant hears a cry for help coming from a speck of dust.  It's made by a Who, one of the many Whos in Whoville, a tiny city on the tiny bit of fluff that is in danger of drifting into the cool of the pool in the jungle of Nool.  Horton saves it and, after many difficulties, he and the Whos convince the harder-of-hearing animals in the jungle that the Whos really do exist.  At long last, the other animals agree to help protect the tiny world.  It sticks in my mind (though I may be mistaken) that the 1970 TV special ends with a Who, on its just-rescued dust mote planet, hearing a cry for help from an even tinier atom of a world, starting the process all over again.

I found myself thinking about ever-decreasing, nesting worlds as I was looking at frost patterns on leaves in the garden, especially on the salad burnet, Susanna Mitchell marguerite daisies, and oregano.  The frost had been so particular, so choosy about where it settled:  on the ruffled edges of the salad burnet, with only a light tracery elsewhere on the leaves, and on the very tips of the hairs on the daisy and oregano leaves—hairs I wasn't really even aware of until the frost caught them.

Here I've just been learning to recognize the microclimates in the garden—to trace the patterns of light and wind and cold from one square foot to the next—and along come the nanoclimates, clamoring for attention, showing that the conditions from one millimeter to the next on a leaf can be just as varied.  I wonder, if we were to descend one level of awareness further, whether we would find that each micrometer has its own set of climatic conditions, too.  And so on, and so on, and so on.

Sometimes, the smaller a world gets, the larger it gets.  Those delicate patterns of ice were so precise and so intriguing (not to mention beautiful) that I found myself (in a mild sort of way) researching frost, nanoclimates, broadleafed evergreens, botanical protections against climatic conditions, and several interesting dead ends and charming byways en route.  I've never done that for mere "leaves"... Sometimes, when a world becomes small, it can expand exponentially.

Does anyone hear a Who?

Visiting Cards

or Dropping In

I was sitting on the bench by the kitchen window, staring out the glass door, stumped by a clue in the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle.  While part of my brain was churning over words and growling at them when they weren't seven letters long with a third letter of M (which didn't exactly encourage other words to show up), another part in the background was absentmindedly tracing the angles of an oak leaf caught between the stepping stones in the walkway, enjoying the contrast with the softer rosettes of dragon's blood sedum, wondering whether the sedum would fill in enough next summer to make it worth while to keep, savoring the combination of earth-brown and rust-red.  At some point, for no particular reason, background shifted to foreground.  I suddenly registered what I was looking at and thought, "But I don't have an oak tree."

It wasn't exactly an earth-shattering revelation—I mean, I've known for a while now that I don't have an oak tree; they're not the kinds of things that just sneak up on you.  But it started my mind on a new puzzle, trying to figure out where this particular leaf had dropped in from.  After taking a mental walk around the neighborhood, I'm pretty sure it came from some new landscaping in the commercial building across the street to the southwest—puzzle solved.

A sycamore leaf amid marguerite daisies

Curious about who else in the arboreal world might have come to call, I started prowling the garden in earnest.  I spotted fallen aspen leaves from the neighbor to the north; cottonwoods from the plaza a little farther away; Siberian elms from just about anywhere (if trees were e-mail, Siberian elms would be the spammers); sycamores from the west; seedpods from the golden rain tree to the northeast; ornamental pear leaves (I think, but I'm not very good with trees) from the neighbor on the east; desert willows from the south.

A couple of ideas struck me:

1. "Prevailing winds," my foot.
2. Enjoyment of the whole—"fallen leaves"—takes on an even richer flavor when you're aware of the individual leaves that comprise it, too.

A golden raintree seed pod with more daisy leaves

I'm keenly enjoying these "calling cards" the trees have left in my garden—the soft interplay of colors on the sycamore leaves, like the sheen of oil on water; the living brown and crisp lines of the rain tree's seed pods; the spare, ruffled edging on what we are calling the pear; the contrasts between tree and herb, evergreen and brown, seed and leaf and pebble.

This could very well be an ornamental pear leaf.

I've been blogging for a little over six months now.  Looking back as the New Year begins, I can't quite believe that it's been that long—that this is my 58th post, that I've bypassed 42,000 words.  Those aren't exactly milestones, but still, I didn't believe any of this would happen when I began.  You, my readers, have blown in from all ends of the globe—from Russia, Denmark, Slovenia, China, South Africa, South Korea, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and of course, my own beloved USA.  Amid the swirling winds of cyberspace, you have touched down briefly in my garden and left your visiting cards.  It has been my honor and pleasure to have you here.   Thank you for reading, for commenting, and for sharing in my microcosm.  You have added immeasurably to my enjoyment.

A cottonwood leaf with yarrow and oregano

Happy New Year to you all—may you find joy under every leaf and stone.

One Step Ahead

or A Rake's Progress

The earnest, much-pierced young stock clerk at the natural foods co-op was doing his best to persuade me that spending $26 for the 32-oz. bottle of certified organic maple syrup was a good idea.  The ex-Vermonter in me, on the other hand, was doing her best to convince the clerk that all maple syrup is produced organically, and that spending an extra $10 for the label was just plain wrong.  The conversation went something like this:

Clerk:  Organic producers can't use pesticides.
Me:  Sugar maples grow in forests.  The trees aren't sprayed.
Clerk:  Then how do they keep the insects under control?
Me:  Well, the trees grow in forests, where there are natural predators.  Besides, the sap starts running in early spring, before the insects are out, and anyway, it comes from deep underground, where insects aren't a problem. 
Clerk (sceptically):  Sap?
Me:  Uh-huh.
Clerk (visibly debates calling security and changes his mind):  And the land has to have been chemical-free for three years.
Me:  The syrup comes from trees.  Trees take a lot longer than three years to grow.  And they're growing in a forest, not in an orchard or on farmland.
Clerk (confused):  How can they grow in a forest?
Me (confused):  They're trees.  Trees do that.
Clerk (sceptically):  What, on their own?
Me:  Well, you know, with ferns and brambles and birds and deer and stuff.
Clerk:  But that sounds like one of those Eastern forests.
Me (confused):  Yes.
Clerk:  How do they harvest a forest?
Me:  They go around and tap the trees.
Clerk (possibly suspecting a conspiracy):  "They?"  Who are "they?"
Me:  Guys.  Just, you know, guys.
Clerk:  You mean farmers.
Me:  No, just a bunch of guys in the woods.  They get permits to tap trees on state or national forest land, and maybe ask if they can tap their neighbors' trees.  You know, guys. 
Clerk (startled):  You make them sound like the guys around here who harvest piñon nuts.
Me (startled):  Yeah, I guess so.
Clerk:  But that's, just, like, some guys in the woods.
Me:  Yeah.
Clerk (desperately):  OK, but for maple syrup to be organic they have to use organic fertilizer, too.
Me (blank confusion):  It's a forest.
Clerk (blank confusion).

(Light dawns:  the clerk is young, maybe 20, and a local—he's probably never seen a deciduous forest.  He knows pine and juniper woods, with the occasional deciduous tree thrown in as make-weight, but nothing that would support large-scale commercial production.  The orchards he's encountered have been heavily managed apple or pecan orchards; his experience of "soil," if any, is mineral-rich, nutrient-poor "decomposed granite."  Deciduous forests occupy a theoretical place in his awareness, but he hasn't had a reason to think them through.)

Me:  When the leaves fall every year they just stay there on the ground and get covered by rain and snow.  They pretty well decompose by spring.  It's like the trees are self-mulching and self-composting.
Clerk (light also dawning):  Oh, like in an eco-system or something.
Me (beaming):  Exactly!

With that little misunderstanding cleared away, we both go about our business feeling pleased with each other, as if we are mutual converts to...well, we don't know what, but we're both pleased.

All to say, I'm not planning to rake the garden this winter.  The sand cherries and desert olives have never shed enough leaves for raking to be an issue before, so this is the first time I've actually faced the choice.  Whether to rake can actually be a rather heated issue in the gardening world—the impulse to tidy the garden for winter is deeply ingrained (and yes, some of us are just getting around to that now here in Albuquerque), and many of the reasons for doing so are good.  On the other hand, my garden doesn't exemplify any of the good reasons:  it doesn't have lawn or easily smotherable, delicate perennials; it's in the high desert where crown rot and slugs are ogres we frighten badly behaved children with, not things we ever expect to encounter in real life; and garden-magazine tidiness is not really an issue.

I did consider gathering all the leaves into a pile, putting them in a corner to compost, and then replacing them on the garden beds come March, but besides not having the energy to do any of that, something about the process struck me as...redundant.  The whole sense that raking is something I "ought" to do was making me feel like the serious young stock clerk, whose ideals were perhaps one step ahead of his information.  Like most of us when we're in a fundamentalist mode, he just wanted to do the right thing.  Yes, zeal and a pure heart do count for a lot, but weighing circumstances correctly is even better; the right choice doesn't always have to be the most difficult one.

The sand cherries and desert olives are native plants; somehow they manage just fine in the wild without having someone come along to rake the leaves and compost them specially before returning them to the soil.  A tiny, urban garden may create different growing conditions than, say, the vast expanse of the Gila Wilderness, but I don't see any reason why these plants shouldn't be as self-mulching and self-composting as they would be in the wild. 

Ooh—like in an eco-system or something!