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.

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?

Give Me Shelter

or A Nook in the Middle of Nowhere

The wind chimes are jangling frantically, chaotically.   In a gentle breeze, their tones ring true, but not in a blast like this one.   The wind is back in force after a few days' lull, this time heralding a cold(ish) front on the horizon.  From the kitchen, I can hear it battering at the windows.  The damper on the vent above the stove "chk"s constantly, like the hi-hat on a drum set.  The glass in the porch light rattles.  The slight gap between the front door and its frame (which for reasons I won't bore you with can't be properly weather-stripped) whistles, anticipating the tea kettle, which is just coming to a boil.

I'm curled up on the bench by the kitchen window, watching the wind scything through the garden, and am intrigued by how irregular its pattern is.  One tree is quivering along its full length, its upper branches whipping wildly.  Eight feet away, the tree closer to the house is almost still.  The autumn sage and rue along the east wall are all but flattened; the sand cherry beside them dances frenziedly.  Right next to it, in the corner, another sand cherry waves a bit in rhythm but otherwise seems unaffected, while the oregano seed heads in the bed across the path swirl in fits and starts.  I am always realizing anew just how tiny the "micro" in micro-climate can be.  The garden has all the dead corners, active spaces, open sweeps, channels, and funnels of a pinball machine.

Still intrigued, I pick up my mug of tea and walk out into the garden.  After righting a footstool and rescuing a seat cushion from the autumn sage (or alternatively, rescuing the autumn sage from a seat cushion), I start around the circle path.  My hair whooshes into an Einsteinian mop; my eyes are half-shut against blowing dust, and one hand covers the mouth of my mug.  I approach the south wall and kneel down, wanting to inspect the tarragon in the central bed for frost damage.  (None yet.)  As soon as my head drops below the height of the wall—it's quiet.

It's so quiet.

For whatever reason, this is one of those spots that the wind—or at least, this wind—can't reach.  In the middle of a windstorm, in the middle of a garden path, it is warm and calm and sheltered.  If I stretch out my hands in any direction, my fingertips will brush blowing leaves.  Above the wall, tree tops reel drunkenly.  But right here, in this little two-foot area out in the open, the wind doesn't come.

Astonished, I sit cross-legged on the path and try a sip of tea.  Sir Marley, who has been curled up under the sand cherry (the blasé one, not the frenziedly dancing one), uncurls and stretches laconically before moseying over to rub his head against my hand.  (The one holding the hot mug of tea, of course.)  I begin to understand his smugness—the extra smugness that doesn't just come from his being a cat.  Even though none of this is my doing, I still feel rather pleased with myself, like a child building a fort out of a blanket and a chair and hiding gleefully in plain sight.

Tea finished, I brave the wind again to return to the house, while Sir Marley takes over my spot.  I right the footstool again and rescue the cushion, this time weighting it down with a rock.  I duck into the kitchen, lock the door, and settle back into the nook by the window.  The door frame whistles, the glass rattles, the vent "chk"s, the wind chimes jangle.

On the path in the garden, Sir Marley curls back up to sleep.

Tilt!

or Micro-Mastery

One of the feverfew plants in my garden has decided to bloom a second time this year—not an entirely unexpected event, although I didn't exactly plan any parties around it, either.  Whereas the stalk that bloomed in June stood up properly, the fall-blooming stalk isn't so lucky.  The sun has shifted, and now the plant has to lean over to reach the light.  The flowers have tilted at an angle to the almost horizontal stem.

A lot of my garden plants end up tilting at sunlight.  A small townhouse garden surrounded by walls is essentially a checkerboard of micro-climates with the added trick that the squares morph spontaneously from one climate to another as the seasons change.  In a place with a short growing season, this wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but in an environment where I can reasonably expect some plants to continue blooming into December (go, Wild Thing autumn sage!), it really kind of is.  Light is the biggest issue.  Areas that receive full sun all summer might be in full shade all winter; flowers that bloom happily while the sun shines from the north begin leaning desperately toward the light when it heads back south again.  I'm not sure whether I'm learning to garden so much as learning my garden—learning which incredibly specific needs each square foot of ground has and finding what will thrive in that one tiny, idiosyncratic space.

It's a lot like doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.  (Really.)  I've finished book after book of the collected puzzles over the last few years—enough that now I can generally finish the Sunday puzzle in about 30 minutes, or maybe more if the Sunday morning pancakes are especially tasty and distracting.  It's not as if I actually know the answers, though—for the most part I've just learned what to expect from the New York Times crossword.  I feel like I could meet Will Shortz, the puzzle editor, and be in comfortable mental territory.  We would have a fascinating conversation about French needle cases (a four-letter word starting with E:  etui), and I would be able to supply every third word or so in his sentences; one of those words, I can tell you now, would be Esso; chances are good that another one would be snee.  I am familiar with Shortz's style, his editing, the bent of the clues he approves from his different puzzle authors.  But give me an older puzzle edited by Eugene Maleska and I'll be sneaking peeks at the answer key in short order.  I haven't mastered puzzles in general, just (more or less) the New York Times crossword as edited by Will Shortz.

Similarly, an elderly friend (who would be most upset with me if she knew I was calling her elderly) recently moved house for the first time in about 50 years.   For weeks she complained that the new house was confusing—the light switches were in the wrong places, the drawers weren't where they ought to be, the dishes weren't in the right cupboards.  While those of us who have been more nomadic have learned that you just have to keep opening (different) cupboard doors and eventually dishes will appear, it was a shock to my friend to learn that she hadn't mastered the art of living in Houses in General but just of living in one particular house.   

One of my favorite lessons from gardening is how limited mastery is.  You learn to work with a particular location, to enhance the gifts of your little plot of earth, but you don't necessarily master gardening at large, any more than you ever master living:  you just master (if you're lucky) the art of living within your own set of circumstances for right now.  A well-suited plant adapts to new demands with remarkable grace.  The feverfew may be leaning and twisting and growing in strange directions, none of which will show up in a botany text or plant catalog or internet database, yet it is every inch a feverfew, fulfilling its genetic destiny, living out its feverfewhood, no matter at what angle.  It has mastered the art of blooming in October, 2010, in a tiny little corner of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

And that's all anyone could expect it to do.