Courtesy of the Winds

Or Letting Go

The desert olives impress me most.  They have an actual strategy, and a long-term one at that.  The winds have been blowing here, you see—and blowing, and blowing:  the hard, buffeting winds of spring.  They are the real test of adaptation in these parts, and many exotics that fare well in drought and sun receive their last rites from the wind.

My oldest nephew gave me a book on wind a while back (Wind, it's called, by Jan DeBlieu), because he said it was such a leitmotif in my blog.  It does have force of character here in New Mexico, a personality you either learn to live with or—well, you just have to learn to live with it.  All across the world, of course, living things have learned in remarkable ways to cope with the wind.  Trees change shape to reduce the drag of it in their crowns, to keep the force of it from breaking them apart or knocking them down.  DeBlieu writes of different species rolling their leaves into tight cylinders or folding them in half, or even clumping together in masses:  all ways to reduce the force of wind in those top-heavy crowns.

Desert olives (Forestiera neomexicana)

The desert olives just let their leaves go.  They leaf out heavily in early spring, each twig and branch thick with apple green leaves on fragile stems.  While the days are lengthening, and the sun is still cool and pleasant, they photosynthesize like mad.  But as the seasonal winds rip through them, whole stems of delicate new growth get sheared away; the garden is littered with leaflets.  The dense shade beneath the trees begins to dapple.  By mid-June perhaps a third of the leaves are gone—mid-June, when the sun is reaching its strongest, and desert plants are ready for relief.  The olives will have harvested enough energy in spring to thrive, and in summer, thanks to the wind, they will have fewer tender surfaces that lose moisture, fewer that require it.  They use the spring winds to help them survive the summer sun.

Treating the wind as an asset, rather than something to be endured—other species have different tactics:  conifers and cottonwoods, maples and elms.  They all count on the wind to cast pollen, seed, and samara far and wide; the wind helps their kind survive.  Whole ecosystems rely on the wind.  DeBlieu writes of aeolian biomes in the extreme heights of the Himalayas, beyond the range of growing things.  Insects live there by scavenging pollens and seeds or bits of insect wing that have blown in on the wind.  I look at the ants hunting and gathering in the garden with renewed interest.  What exotic treats do they enjoy—or even depend on—courtesy of the winds?  Saguaro pollen from Tucson, perhaps, or microscopic mineral crystals from the great Salt Lake; a taste of the tropics from the Gulf of Mexico.  In the utter bareness of the Himalayas, the wind is the sole provider.  In the relative plenty of the high desert, it's harder to tell what needs might be met by the wind.  Perhaps none.  Perhaps many.

I've been thinking about aeolian biomes and windborne nutrients as the third anniversary of Microcosm has approached.  I am more astonished every year at what the winds of cyberspace bring us, and how they cast our words far and wide, scattering bits of our personalities around where they may take root or be enjoyed by others.  I'm especially astonished at the friendships and community those winds have blown into my life.  They have brought me beauty and kindness; they have made it possible to adapt to illness and thrive.  Now, though, as the winds of a New Mexico spring are fanning the fires of summer, I find that other aspects of my life are calling for attention.  I think it is time to let Microcosm go. 

I'm drafting this out on the patio, while the silky threadgrass ripples on the breeze.  The wind has been growing for a while now.  A gust almost knocks over the empty iced tea glass perched on the arm of the Adirondack chair.  It's strong enough to chase me inside, and from there I watch the desert olives twisting and bending.  A few leaflets blow onto the patio.  It seems a good moment to close—and to thank you for the gifts you've given so generously:  your readership and comments, your time and ideas, and most of all your friendship and caring.  You all mean the world to me.  May the winds of the world bring you many good things to savor.

And may you always discover the gifts they bring you.

Staying Out of the Way

or Resting Lightly

Sometimes you're just not the one who matters, and so you just don't move.  When untamed lives that are not rabbits come to a tiny, urban garden, you do your best to efface yourself, and let them experience the garden as if without you.  Photos?  Forget them.  They're not important.  The slightest gesture toward your camera, even the subtlest tilt of the lens, is enough to spook a shy being.  It's better not to move.

Hummingbirds aren't particularly "shy beings," but they have their limits, too, the moments when they forget the roar of gargantuan hunger and remember vulnerability.  The black-chinned hummingbirds have been gorging on the agastache in the big urns this summer—the ones arm's length away from the Adirondack chair, with flowers that overhang the footrest.  The hummingbirds are often so close that the cool breath of their wings blows over my feet.   I try not to move when they're that near, but my idea of stillness is not theirs.  Some change of expression, some tiny change, will make them look up in startlement and vanish.

Perhaps to such small birds the line that seems delicately drawn to me, the fine hair between blithe unconcern and precipitate flight, is wide and nuanced.  The light speed change between feeding and fleeing may be a measured, thoughtful process to them.  The lift of a finger, such a small motion, spans the full length of their bodies.

A hummingbird's-eye view of hummingbird mint (or licorice mint, or sunset hyssop, Agastache rupestris)

At a distance details blur together.  When hummingbirds feed at the gaura in the central bed, it's hard to tell the young of either gender from the adult females.  They look remarkably alike in any case.  From inches away, though, you begin to wonder.  You see peculiarities of behavior—experiments, moments of clumsiness—that tell their own tale.  A bird will aim at a flower in a light wind and miss, several times running; it will try buds that haven't opened, insistently, perplexedly.  It will poke at the gap between a flower and its corolla, and then back off, and look, and look, through first one eye, then the other.  It will poke at the gap again, before finally finding the opening it seeks.  Its round belly will drag on the flowers below it, like a keel scraping on the shoals.  It will rest in the desert olive for minutes at a stretch, and not fight the next hummingbird that comes along.  It will feed briefly, and then find its perch to rest again.  A bird that does all those things...is most likely a fledgling.

One was feeding at the agastache recently when my toes, a foot and a half away, twitched involuntarily.  The bird startled.  Hovering, it eyed my feet in a fascinated, speculative way.  Were they a danger?  Were they edible?  Its head tilted from one side to the other.  I don't know what conclusions it came to, except the one about inedibility; I don't believe it ever made a mental connection between my toes and the rest of me.  And how could it?  Five feet seven inches of human are a lot for a bird to grasp all at once, when it doesn't really need to.

Last week for the second time (that I know of) a flock of blue-gray gnatcatchers descended on my desert olives.  They're almost as tiny as hummingbirds, only round like a ball, with twitching tail feathers and a thin, sharp bill.  They speak to one another constantly, and they move constantly, like the gnats and small insects they eat, like fish darting in an aquarium.  Their colors are subtle variations on gray flannel, lighter on the belly, darker around the crown.

Flycatchers, too.  I've seen them a few times, half again the size of the gnatcatchers, with the same restlessness under less pressure.  Their tails twitch gently as they perch or flit from branch to branch, from tree to tree.

These new birds are all probably migrants, just passing through on their way south, but I'm (almost) as thrilled as if they were nesting here.  The garden is beginning to attract Birds-that-are-not-finches, truly wild birds, no matter how briefly.  The desert olives have grown taller, their crowns broader.  They offer more in the way of shelter and safety; they attract a better class of bug.  But I have no pictures to offer of these moments of presence.  I only have memories shaped vaguely into words of that instant when your breath catches and you freeze, while shining black eyes look brightly from every tree, less than your own body-length away.

Desert olives (or New Mexico privet, Forestiera neomexicana)

You are irrelevant to these small lives, and rightfully so.  You mean them no harm.  You aren't going to hunt them for food or throw stones at them for wickedness.  You wish them well, but any good you've done them is indirect.  You've planted and nurtured the trees; you've let the sand cherries grow like weeds; you've kept the bird bath filled and clean.  You've laid the groundwork—and then you've mostly gotten out of the way, and let life get on with it.  But birds don't know these things.  They don't have the luxury to weigh degrees of harm and good.  They can't risk trust, they can't take the long view.  You will never be able to tame them, or show them likelihood, or accustom them to human presence.  So you try not to be a noticeable presence at all.  You just don't move.


A hummingbird had come to the agastache fresh from another part of the garden.  A white petal of gaura had fallen on her head and rested there as she hovered and fed.  She flew from one flower to another and another, wings moving faster than vision, that wrinkled white petal perched on her head like a lace cap.  The sight could have been comical, but it wasn't.  The petal sat too lightly on the feather-light bird as she fenced just as lightly with gravity.  She was graceful and deft; the long tubes of hummingbird mint barely moved as she tapped them for nectar.  An adult, not a fledgling.  She had mastered the art of lightness.

Appleblossom grass (Gaura lindheimeri 'Whirling Butterflies')

A lot of gardening is about heavy lifting—the bags of mulch and potting soil, the shovels full of dirt and sand and amendments.  A lot of it is about labor.  No more than to maintain a mown lawn, but still, labor:  weeding and dividing, pruning and transplanting.  Paradoxically, the goal of all the hard work is to rest lightly on whatever earth we have.  To make a big impact, perhaps; to concentrate nature with an intensity even she might not manage on her own, and create safe conditions for wild things that compensate for losses elsewhere.  But then to step out of the way whenever possible, and let life get on with it.  We work for the sake of those moments of held breath and awed stillness, when we try to be patio furniture while a new bird perches inquisitively in a young tree.  We want to enjoy the nectar while not disturbing the flower.  We want to master the art of lightness, to our own scale.

The lightness of a fallen petal on the head of a hummingbird.

Air Apparent

or Dividing the Pie

I have certainly known cats who got frayed around the edges when their owners were absent for a few days, and were only knitted whole again when the owners returned.  So I'm not endorsing the following New Yorker-ish sentiment.  I'm just repeating it, as something heard years ago that came back to me in the Adirondack chair this week:  Dogs aren't the only animals who suffer when their owners leave; cats, too, go through a difficult phase of adjustment...as they divvy up the space formerly thought of as yours.

Now that the older plants in the garden are well-established, the new ones have begun to "take," and I'm irrigating less, the three other elements seem to be divvying up the space formerly thought of as water's.  Earth... The ants continue piling it up in heaps, in all of the gravel beds.  Those beds are expanding in the sunny areas in any case, as I plant more drought-lovers that prefer poor soil and rocky mulches.  Fire... the sun is taking a toll now on the more delicate greenery as we top the 90°F mark, even as it brings the warm season grasses and Mediterranean and high desert plants to life.  Anything that makes it through the coming baptism of heat and light without water to quench it is a garden stalwart indeed.

Air.  I've been trying to foster a greater sense of airiness in this small, walled space—to get away from the dense layering of wetter, eastern gardens (even using xeric plants) and allow the plants (and me) more room to breathe.

Silky thread grass (Nassella tenuissima), desert olive (Forestiera neomexicana), and prairie flax (Linum lewisii)

The more I learn to know and love plants adapted to the desert, the lighter the textures in the garden become.  I'm beginning to have hopes for my strategy of low ground covers (if they ever fill in) with a few taller, airier things that have space to move freely in the wind

and to toss a little sunlight around while they're at it.

It's taken me almost five years to re-invent the wheel (not that I'm done yet); the planting style I'm aiming for is one more or less recommended in my favorite books on New Mexico gardening, though not in so many words.  It took a while, though, for a particular set of garden dreams to vacate my brain, and then a while longer to divvy up the mental space that formerly belonged to them and make new ideas at home there.

I've never felt so much like a cat.

Hearing Things

or Non-Verbal Communication

The sounds have come back.  Winter's quietness is lovely in its way (I suppose) but isolating, a mild, narrow-bandwidth version of the way I imagine deafness to be.  Maybe if you grow up without hearing you learn more thoroughly the forms of communication that don't depend on voice, and you master techniques that allow you to conquer isolation.  But to grow deaf later in life, to lose one's hearing—suddenly not to notice a loved one's step crossing the threshold, or to hear voices calling from across the room—would be a loss of connection hard to bear.  In a low-level, curable, seasonal way, that's what winter's quiet is to me.

Now, well into spring, it's as if that lost bandwidth has been restored.  The neighbor's aspen trees have begun pattering in the wind again (such a different sound than their dry, mid-summer clatter) while the sand cherries' new leaves rush like whitewater.  Say's phoebes whistle and blow raspberries from the roof; bees and wasps play the wash-tub bass amid the desert olives; yesterday I heard the first sonic boom after a hummingbird zipped past.  The ice cream truck has been playing "Red Wing," just like the ice cream truck of my childhood.

Forestiera neomexicana

With the wind whispering through the transparent young leaves and the bees diving in and out among the flowers, the largest of the three desert olives (Forestiera neomexicana), the male tree, has been extra-good company this week.  In the late afternoon warmth in the walled garden, the blossoms' fragrance—like mango with a hint of pineapple—has lured everything that buzzes and drones into its radius.  The tree has been talking, too.  Not in so many words (or in words at all) and not particularly to me, but I think that it has preferences to convey, opinions about strength and weakness and growth.

I've been thinking about that tree anyway.  It worries me a little:  like other things I planted in the garden's first year (the biggest sand cherry, the five foot tall agastache, the waist-high arugula), it grew too big too fast; I almost wonder whether the contractors "salted" the ground with fertilizer or something, as nothing has grown at that rate since.  The tree's fast initial growth seems to have weakened it.  By late spring every year even the main trunks start bending under the weight of new leaves.  Staking helps some, but pruning after the first flush of growth is over, just before summer heat sets in and the tree goes sleepy again, seems to work best.

So I've been studying the tree hard, marking water sprouts and weak Y's with string so that I can find them even once the leaves are fully grown, and trying to figure out where to balance the growth.  I've been trying to listen, too, to what the tree is saying through the blossoms.  Only certain branches on certain of the multiple trunks have flowers, you see.  The rest have plenty of leaves, but no blooms.  The flowering branches seem like the tree's language of approval, its vote of confidence in the strength of those trunks and branches and stems.  These are the ones entrusted to carry on their half of the species so that the female trees can set fruit.  The honeybees and bumblebees and carpenter bees and hoverflies and wasps in their relentless circling and settling have given the tree's approval a sonic form.  Their buzzing isn't just noise but a message, an endorsement, and a loud one at that.  At any rate, I'm letting those flowers guide me in which branches to keep, and which to prune away.

I just wish I could be sure that we are really speaking the same language.

Thinking Out Loud

or Fun with Nuts and Bolts

Well, I don't know whether we'll have that much fun. In fact, this will be the kind of straightforward post I almost never write.  I apologize if it's long and dull, but I'm hoping you'll be kind enough to bear with me and offer me your suggestions. (Apologies also to those of you who aren't into this much gardening nitty-gritty.  We will return to our regularly scheduled program on Sunday.)  I'm still thinking through plans for the garden and beginning to put some of them in practice, but I thought I'd run them past you before I reach the point of no return so you can warn me if I'm doing something insane before I've actually done it.  

The Goal—to create an open-feeling, airy space that evokes the outdoor places I love so much in the high desert landscape, in a 15' x 15' (actually 14' x 14') walled, urban planting area. The point isn't to make it seem bigger, just more airy and less "clogged up."  



Though a bit dark, this photo gives a good idea of the shape.  I've already removed the densest plants and mostly emptied the central bed, replacing the gravel there with pecan shells.  (I'm still waiting for some oomph and inspiration to move the pots of gravel to a new home.)  The sand cherry by the blue bench is kind of a big, hairy monster, but overall I like this level of airiness and now want to fill in the blanks without changing the general feel.

The Conditions—earling morning to mid-day sun for four to six hours, depending on the location. The most open light is right in the center, with dappled shade along the periphery beneath the three small trees and full shade between the two largest bushes on the left. Seriously alkaline soil with fair drainage and no nutrients; mixed clay, sand, and decomposed granite.  An average of eight inches of moisture per year.  USDA hardiness zone 7, AHS heat zone 8.

The Parameters—I'd like the garden to be all of the following:

1. Interesting in all four seasons.  I'll be out on the patio every weekend morning all winter, so I don't want too many of the kinds of perennials that fade away to nothing, or that look gorgeous for three weeks a year and then have nothing further to say for themselves.
2. Not very thirsty.  Plants that might look better with additional water, but that can survive on just rainfall are ideal.
3. Friendly to wildlife and able to withstand the neighbors' cats.
4. Easy to create and maintain.  I'm really not saying the following because I want sympathy or anything—I really kind of don't—but because it's a critical factor that has to be taken into account.  This year my CFS/ME has worsened; even just this summer I've lost about another 10% functionality.  Literally the only fun, non-sedentary activities left in my life are occasional, vacation-day trips to the outdoors, and gardening.  If the downward trend continues, they will have to go as well.  I'm not planning on that happening, but because I love being out in the garden so much, I want to make sure that I can continue enjoying it no matter what.  I'd like to set the stage for it to run itself a little more if need be without losing its general shape or fizzling altogether.  With my current energy levels, any changes I make will be piecemeal—a few small things here and there.  It will take me a couple of months to do what a healthy person can do in a weekend.  All to say, the easier the better.



There are actually two young sand cherries along the sides, growing slowly in part sun.  I've unearthed the soaker hoses from the mulch so I know where to plant; I currently run them once a week but would like to cut that use at least in half.



The Assumptions—By all means, correct me if they're wrong...

1. A loosely constructed, naturalistic look will probably hold up better under neglect than a carefully planned design.
2. A circle path in a square bed by a rectangular house ought to be enough shape for anyone.  With that much geometry in such a small space, a naturalistic look won't descend into chaos.
3. Seeds:  boy, are they easy to strew about.

The Plan—To leave all the big things in place.  I kind of wish I'd planted one of the desert olives about two feet further west, but I didn't, and now it's happy where it is.  The three trees and four sand cherry bushes will stay where they are, as will the brick path.  That leaves me with a central 5' diameter circle bed in open sunlight, and one continuous, irregularly shaped bed around the perimeter, mostly in dappled shade. 

I'd like to take advantage of that contrast.  The multi-trunked desert olives are already quite airy-looking.  With low-growing (one foot tall or so) plants at their bases, the perimeter beds could have a kind of canopy-and-forest-floor feel.  With the densest plants removed, only the ground-covers are left; they're beginning to settle in, and I'd like to give them a chance.  In the blank spots, then, I'll direct-sow seeds of natives that can handle part-sun—silky thread grass, flax, scarlet globemallow, and at the sunnier edges, California poppy.  (A plant list with links follows, for those of you who are gluttons for punishment interested.)  In sunnier areas, I'll try sand lovegrass, purple prairie clover, and angelita daisies.  Except for perhaps the clover, those are all self-seeders, some of them quite prolific; none of them needs much, if any, additional water.



A view the other direction, showing the general shape of the funkiest desert olive tree.


The central bed will be more of a "bowl of sunshine" out in the open, with short-grass prairie type plants  (also from seed).  Blue grama grass will be the primary planting, with rough menodora, long-flowered gilly (an annual), and more flax, all of which are 12-18" tall (according to my books).  (An experimental milkweed is already growing there, and as it's doing well, it may as well stay and make some more of itself.)

I do have vines planted, but they're still either in their sleeping or creeping years; hopefully next summer they'll begin to leap and cover the walls in earnest. 

The Concerns—I'm hoping the prolific re-seeders will help the garden be more self-sustaining, but I might end up making too much work for myself with extra weeding.  When sturdy, native, drought-tolerant, indestructible grasses with six-foot deep roots start coming up between the bricks in the path, I might really regret this.  An alternative might be to continue planting a tapestry of groundcovers of different heights and textures. Also, what I'm hoping will be kind of an unbuttoned, easily natural look might just end up being a mess.  Thoughts?  Warning bells?

The Plants—
Blue grama grass (Bouteloua gracilis)
Sand lovegrass (Eragrostis trichodes) (This doesn't get to 5' in NM—the seed heads top out at more like 2', and they're all air.)
Silky threadgrass (Nassella tenuissima)
Angelita daisies (Hymenoxys acaulis)
Blue flax (Linum lewisii)
California poppy (Eschscholzia californica)
Long-flowered gilly (Ipomopsis longiflora)
Purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea)
Rough menodora (Menodora scabra)
Scarlet globemallow (Sphaeralcea coccinea)

The Note of Thanks—

I really do appreciate your help on this.

The Chicken

Spring leaves with last summer's fruit

or The Egg

You wouldn't believe how long I debated which of those titles should come first.  A disclaimer, though—no actual chickens (or eggs) were involved in the making of this post.  We're in metaphorical chicken-and-egg land, thinking about priorities in general.  My desert olives have been blooming, you see, and for some reason, those trees always make me think.  (Just wait until I start pruning them—then the philosophical excitement really begins.)

Desert olive (or New Mexico olive, or NM privet) (Forestiera neomexicana)

Let's step back a bit.  A recent kerfuffle on Garden Rant reminded me of the book Plant-Driven Design, by Scott Ogden and Lauren Springer Ogden.*  The basic premise of the book is that gardens are more satisfying when plants, rather than hardscape, are the starting point of the design—an idea most gardeners I know would agree with, but maybe not (some) landscape designers.  I certainly have a number of books on small garden design that go nuts about expensive brickwork, expensive water features, and theatrically expensive lighting designs, and then describe the plantings only as "mixed borders."  The Ogdens focus instead on landscapes where each plant is allowed to showcase its strengths, where its character is given a chance to shine.  At one point, they talk about facing a choice in their own garden about whether to prune a tree drastically to make room for a path, or to move the path to allow the natural character of the tree to develop; they chose to move the path.

Male tree

To return to the desert olives.  I planted them for all kinds of sensible reasons, but one of the most important was that they provided food for songbirds.  That is, some of the trees do.  This species has separate male and female trees.  Both are needed to produce fruit, but (obviously) only the female plants have actual "olives."  If you plant them young enough so that they stand a chance of surviving (at least, in my garden), you won't be able to tell which is which—you just plant several and hope for the best.

My very first plantings in the garden were three desert olive trees, two of which have turned out to be female, and one male—the optimal mix.  Today, several years on, even without the fruit as a guideline I can see the difference:  the male tree's blossoms are more golden, and they open before the leaves do.  They have a faint scent—one book describes it as honey, but I would describe it more as "proto-honey," maybe just the scent of nectar—which the bees love.  The female trees have (so far as I can tell) scentless, greenish blossoms that open with the leaves.**

Female tree

I can't help wondering what I would have done, though, if all three trees had been female (or male).  Would I have uprooted a perfectly healthy tree and killed it, replanting in the hope of mixing the genders?  (It's a small garden—planting more isn't an option.)  I certainly enjoy the trees on their own merits, but half the point of planting them was to provide food for songbirds.   What is the threshold of choice, between what I keep and what I discard?  What do I prioritize?  What comes first, the tree's life (a tree! not some measly annual!) or the birds' winter food?  I don't have a ready answer, and fortunately I don't need one this time around.  But I can't help wondering what I might have done, or how others have solved these problems; what kinds of choices you've made, which "small" lives you've prioritized, when it comes to the habitats you've created in your own gardens.

What comes first?

________________________
* I understand (deeply) what the critics say about the authors' self-righteous tone.  But for a westerner (or for anyone from a climate that's light on medieval ruins and mossy statues of Greek deities, and heavy on drought-tolerant grasses, sunflowers, and their ilk), it's a fabulous book.  Its photos show actual western gardens, none of which feature a stark but brightly painted adobe wall, yards of gravel, and a single sculptural yucca.  The photos (and descriptions!) instead show lush plantings that actually grow in the west (i.e., that 50% of the U.S. that is completely neglected by 98% of American gardening books).  When you're used to extracting only general principles of design from a book while discarding all the actual information, it's a pleasure to be able to use the information, too.  (Diana @ Elephant's Eye in South Africa—you might enjoy this one.)

A disclaimer that is not about chickens this time:  I have not been paid a blessed thing to review this book, gosh darn it.  These are my own (all too freely expressed) opinions, independent of the influence of filthy lucre.

** Both genders have what can only be described as insignificant blooms—I promise I'm not obsessed!***

*** But wait until I get going on the salad burnet!

Fruition

or When a Plan Comes Together...

I usually think that gardening is about hope, though lately I've been wondering if it isn't more about Master Narratives. But no matter what I think, my actual experience is that it's a leap in the dark.

My desert olive trees have olives, you see, so naturally I'm a bit confused.

One of my friends is fond of saying that we make our own realities, that our world is as much a product of our perceptions as it is of objective truths. I see this perspective playing out in the way I view my garden, and the ways its successes and failures are shoe-horned into a Master Narrative, an archetypal story—in this case, “It's all going according to plan.”

The desert olives are a case in point. They are among the plants I didn't really know much about when I put them in, although the same could be said for almost everything else in my garden. Even though I grew up in the west, I learned about perennial gardening in New York state and Vermont—antithetical regions to the high desert of Albuquerque. I designed my garden based on research into native plants, a lot of ideas from British gardening books, and (some) common sense.

In case you were wondering, research is not the same as experience. You can read all the right books, haunt the online forums, prowl the botanic gardens, question the people in the biggest, floppiest hats at your local garden center (strange but true fact: the people in big, floppy hats always know the most), etc., etc., but you don't really know what a plant will do until you know its life history in your garden. That is to say, you only really know what it will do once it has actually done it. The whole endeavor is a leap in the dark, a lesson in hope—but once it works, it's what you had planned on all along.

To return to the desert olive (Forestiera neomexicana). What I read in my books is that it is a large shrub or small tree with delicate leaves, golden fall color, and small, olive-like fruits that attract songbirds. The branches bend at unpredictable angles, giving mature trees distinct personalities and winter interest. They're deeply taprooted, so they are suitable for small spaces. I'd never seen one in action, so to speak, but they sounded perfect, so I planted three of them.

All according to plan...

Four years have passed since then. The first two were not easy, even for native plants that scoff at ease, as almost every single leaf on all three trees was eaten by leaf-rollers before the summer was half gone. I didn't know whether the trees would survive, but what do I know about New Mexican plants? They did, and even put on 18 inches of growth each year. They had grown enough by last summer that I could begin the gradual process of limbing them up. They're taking nice little shapes. The trunks are beginning to twist and bend. The leaves are even (mostly) still on the branches, well into August—I may actually see some fall color this year. And for the first time, the two female trees have fruit—enough to feed several birds several meals this winter. The trees are beginning to settle in, to thrive, to do what nature programmed them to do, to fulfill the Grand Plan built into their genetic code. And even though I'm just now finding out what that is, I am as full of “ta-da!” about it as they are.

Of course, one hopes when one plants trees that they will grow, leaf, and fruit—it's rather the point of trees. But telling the story, “My trees are doing just what I'd planned on them doing; my garden design is all working out” ignores the fact that my garden is on its fourth Master Plan in four years, that those three trees (and two bush cherries) are literally the only things still growing where I initially put them (if at all), that some of those unpredictably bending branches are shading what used to be direct-sun beds which will now need replanting, and that the finches have defoliated all the upper branches by perching in them so that they (the branches) look really silly.

All those things get brushed to the side, simply because the trees now have olives, and have done what desert olive trees (apparently) do. The failures, changes, re-thinkings, quirks, and disappointments are all recast as sketches, rough drafts, part of the learning process leading to this ultimate end. That's the story I tell.

But really, it was all just a leap in the dark.