Adapt or Die

The garden is a savage place. Here in the Piedmont it's spring. But such a strange spring it is that even in mid-April we were running outside at dusk, arms laden with any sheets not covering mattresses to shield the tender plants against the freeze. In times of global warming, my daily battle in the garden is how I, middle-aged now, face my fear of the future.

The morning is bright but cold. As I pull the soaked and dirty sheets off the vegetable garden, I see that all the tender sprouts have survived. Indeed, the crisp but moist air seems to have given an added brilliance to the green buds, the just-opened azalea blossoms, and the fleshy white flowers of the dogwood. The tomato seedlings appear to have doubled in size. But with radical global temperature and weather shifts, the battle for survival and species perpetuation becomes more pitched, more ferocious. Who knows if we'll be so lucky next April?

Now in mid-life, I don't want to be a fatalist. I want to have hope, to believe. Investing in my garden is my most material expression of hope. But, as my horticultural zone continues a slow creep into the lower and colder numbers, I find that I am battening down the hatches, thinking about retraction into a tinier home, a smaller garden. As I watch the tremulous job market totter and the tech and real estate bubbles inflate, I look for signs and wonders in May hail.

What will live will live, I say to myself. What will die will die. That goes for everything and everyone, trees and people alike. This is the way of nature, says my husband. Let it be. But human beings have so significantly altered the way of nature that these bromides are of little comfort to me. These transitional times seem to signal a scarcer and less comfortable future for all of us, and they call for practical decision-making. I try to not let my mind wander in circular hypotheticals like, "What if the plants cannot adapt to the reality of global warming fast enough?" Or, "What if the bees die off and pollination doesn't happen this year?" Or, "What if my husband dies all of a sudden, like the people in that German plane?" What if? What would I do? What would happen?

Should continue to support the unsupportable with bedsheets?

Disaster thinking comes naturally to me. As the gifted younger child of a brilliant but moody mother, I developed a razor-sharp radar system to protect me against the dramatic emotional ground shifts in my household. I developed an uncanny sensitivity to the needs of others and learned to be like bamboo, bending in the wind. Know what the big animal needs you to say and do and comply in order to avoid pain. Survival in the plant kingdom or animal kingdom comes down to the same commandment: adapt or die.

Will the skills I learned as a child help or hinder me to adapt to global economic and ecological change? Will my garden adapt with me?

Adaptation causes its own problems. The self-obliterating empathy I developed in order to survive my childhood developed into a disconnect between me and my real feelings that endured well into adulthood. It took working with a therapist for six years to untangle that mess. The good doctor and I penetrated the emotional labyrinth in which little me became lost so many years ago, and together we dragged that little girl out into the light of the present day, scarred but functioning. The process was like carefully unravelling a lovely sweater and then trying to knit it back together again with the same wool: evidence of the destruction remains and the sweater never looks like new again –-  but you can wear it. Innocence is not recoverable, and you have to be content with that damaged but serviceable sweater that is your actual life. Everyone does it.

My garden needs a therapist, too, and I have tried my best to fulfill that role. Beset by an increasingly dense human population here in the Piedmont, the introduction of invasive plant species, and rapid weather and temperature shifts, my garden was in a bad state when we bought this gracious home on its acre of abused soil. The first two years were mostly occupied with killing invaders and making dirt.

The first day I went out to survey my domain after we bought this house, the trees seemed to call to me weakly for help. So I began by ripping english ivy off the bark of a single loblolly pine with my fingernails. “Get help,” my husband said weeks later as he surveyed the bruises, scratches, mosquito bites and the third onset of poison ivy rash that covered half my body. I hired help. And with the might and persistence of six people, including a remarkable man with a machete named Carlos who was later deported back to Mexico for his own inability to adapt to the ways of American women and police, we reclaimed our patch of forest.

We massacred wisteria, bamboo, English ivy and other invasive species that had colonized the woods with their stoloniferous highways, strangled trees and bushes, and had created habitat for voracious rats, voles, snakes and mosquitos. We kept most of our land's organic waste, churning it up into mulch instead of putting it out on the corner to be carted away by the city. The piles of leaves and sticks weren't pretty, but then therapy rarely is. A couple of winters and a lawn mower ground the waste down in fine mulch which I deposited into the stripes of clay and sand as I planted native bushes and flowers, cooking up a topsoil that could support life again. Tree bark is scarred, a holly tree trunk still seems to have scoliosis, and a 100-year-old pine was too far gone to save and had to be cut down. But we've basically restored our little bit of Piedmont woodland. I want it to survive after me. But will it?

Human beings do speedy damage to the land that takes years of labor and treasure to fix. Humans brought non-native invasive plants and put them into this garden. Humans seek to frack the gas out of the very ground under our feet without putting anything good back. Humans fight light surface transit in favor of the almighty automobile. And as I continue to spray vinegar and salt on the wilting survivors of the wisteria colony, I am sometimes chased indoors by the percussive onslaught of damaging hail and Biblical-level flash floods. In light of the bigger picture, my forest restoration project is like bailing the Titanic with a tea spoon.

But I still do it. Often working silently and alone outside, I get into my "zone" and experience the meditative feeling that gardening is for me. I generate with my hard, dirty labor the quiet prayer of hope that my garden is. Someday, someone else will live in this gracious house and, I hope, will care as much for this tiny patch of forest and garden as I do now. Leaving the land in good health is my love letter to unknown people living in an unknown and unknowable future. Working the land, I battle my anxiety about what may come, and leave my mark. Service to the soil is how I repent for the sins of my species, and help the garden adapt to conditions that are both unjust and unnatural. It is how I have hope.

Ordinary Miracles

Hemerocallis (Day Lily) root

In the Fall, I dug them all out to make room for the herbaceous peonies: nearly 200 hemerocallis. It was a weekend's work to unearth them, split them, knock off the dirt, dry them and pack them in brown paper. I hid them as best I could in my garden shed from the gnawing mice, hoping they wouldn't freeze out there in winter, hoping they wouldn't rot. 

On Saturday I spent the afternoon digging a new bed, peeling back sod and weeds to expose sandy soil that needed mulch and manure to make it just okay. Then I held my breath and dared to look in the shed. They emerged from the brown paper wrinkled as mummies having consumed their tuberous roots as sustenance these many months. And a miracle: a ghostly sprout is there. 

Plants don't bother with hope or fear. They just do, surviving until there's nothing left to live on. Now tucked safely in my newly dug bed, they will fatten on water and manure. They'll go on as if nothing had happened, ordinary miracles.

Invasive Species

The terms "alien", "exotic", and "introduced" have slightly different meanings but generally are used interchangeably to refer to plants which are not native. Some exotic species are vigorous growers which are displacing our native plant and animal species, hence the term "invasive". (North Carolina Native Plant Society)

I am eliminating English ivy from my yard. Honeysuckle and wisteria, too. The poison ivy is dismissed with prejudice, though not without guerrilla counterattacks from its side. My all-out war on invasive plants has raised some eyebrows, especially among my Northern friends who are used to being grateful that anything survives the winter in their yards. 

The North Carolina state flower and bird. 

"Ruth has a beautiful wisteria," sniffed Ann when I told her.  "She prunes it carefully, of course. You have to take care of them," she added with emphasis, as if I were simply remiss, as if it were my personal failure that had caused these thigh-sized vines to wind around the oaks until they screamed for help.  The wisteria alone had pretty near overwhelmed every native variety in our small forest, including the noble pines, some boxwood, native hollies and azalea and an established stand of Camellia sasanqua. What the wisteria hadn't gotten, the ivy and honeysuckle were in the process of finishing off.  I could hear their low munching sounds. It horrified me.

I grew up on Ivy Lane. I went to an Ivy League college. I have warm associations with the vigorous, glossy leafed hedera helix. Now I am its worst enemy.

The Federal Government declares Feb. 26 to March 3 (contemporaneous with my birthday) Invasive Species Awareness Week, and I am celebrating by learning all I can about how to restore my little piece of Paradise here in Piedmont to its native glory. But I am doing some thinking about how far I am willing go with this restoration project. For instance, I recently found out that periwinkle (vinca, both major and minor) is an invasive species, too, so if I were a purist I would be ripping it up by the roots along with the ivy. I am not. I like its tiny lavender-blue blossoms, the first to bring color to the spring. 

And what to do about the well-established Japanese holly, the big-hipped English holly, the arms-akimbo Syrian fig and the delicate Japanese laurel? What about the marvelous crape myrtle, emigrant from the India that seems to do so well here? All are clearly illegals in a native garden. But we love the smooth, fleshy trunk of the myrtle and its long-lasting raspberry colored blooms which stay from spring to the end of fall.  Indeed, I recently and gleefully accepted a specimen of the latter from a neighbor and plopped it into a space which I had cleaned of....wisteria.

So you see, the business of eschewing the non-native in favor of the native is not so simple. Favorites are played, rules are stretched. And while it's easy enough to muster an attack on poison ivy, nobody can get hot and bothered about a pretty little crape myrtle that offers a nice puddle of shade by the patio and blooms for half the year. Can they?

So what to do. After pondering the matter for a while, I decided that my policy would be as follows: True invasives, the murderers of the plant world, will be destroyed, though it may take years to do so; exotics may stay; and from now on, only natives will be brought into our near acre of Paradise. The only exception to the latter will be food plants in the vegetable garden and the few fruit trees. Not growing tomatoes, that sweet Aztec jewel, would be just plain self-denying. Anyway, Central America is still America, right? Right?

But last week, I was smitten by an anise tree: It's long, dark green leaves smelling faintly of licorice, it's dark red buds...I could not help myself, I bought it. It is from Japan. And the big, broad-shouldered Delaware Valley azalea in 10 gallon pots I bought (too good a deal to pass up!)? The same genus but not the same clan as our lacier, fuzzier-leaved native azalea. And what of that coral pink quince that I covet? Japanese, Japanese, all Japanese!

Again, I ask you: What to do? It sounds great to say native garden, as George Washington did way back when he planned the gardens at Mount Vernon keeping them 100% American, or so they say. It's another thing to confine oneself to the indigenous in the 21st century, when so many lovely foreign varieties are perfectly naturalized,  inoffensive and oh-so available, and the selection of true natives is so very slim.

So --  My revised immigration policy for my tiny kingdom is currently as follows: 

• True invasives, the assassins of the plant world, will be eliminated with prejudice.
• Foreign plants who are naturalized, well-established and do not harm other plants may stay.
• Plants that are annual and produce food may come on a seasonal basis, though they are to be confined to specific areas (for their own good) and they are not invited to seed themselves here. 
• Plants that are native receive priority for land resources, and those natives who have lost their footing due to the depredations of the invasives will be given subsidies to re-establish themselves. 
• Specific funding will be targeted to reclaiming land for the fern, ginger, phlox tribes and other blooming ephemerals, and I will help them to establish small communities in forested areas. I consider such horticultural affirmative action to be both necessary and desirable for the overall health of the land.

So what have I learned so far? For one thing, carefully planned plant immigration is not only possible but also desirable. After all, while our native dogwood is lovely and graceful in its short blooming time, only the Asian myrtle offers that wash of lipstick pink that lasts and lasts like the Energizer Bunny. Also, as I slowly clear and pick encrusted bits of plastic, glass, mop heads, broken bathroom tiles and even a metal file cabinet from my soil, I've learned that it's a lot easier and cheaper to destroy an environment than it is to build it back right.  But there's enormous satisfaction in taking on the job.

Now I feel that little tickle in my mind, that familiar Utopian wiggle in my step as I stride out to the forest, putting my back, time and money into the reconstruction of this earthly little slice of Piedmont Paradise.