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.

February, Piedmont Garden

Dry Pods (R. Taylor Monk)

The Sun has come out in Piedmont at last, just enough to melt last week's thick cover of snow and ice into patches, carving an atlas of irregular, dun-colored continents into the ground of our yard. Beneath the melt, the dominant color is brown, and the shrubbery shows crisp patches of destroyed foliage and broken branches, visible damage from a hard freeze of unaccustomed duration.

In our big kitchen window there's a sprig of kitchen rosemary that I rooted unintentionally in a glass of water; now I'm helping it take its first tentative steps toward independence in a pot of moist loam, dug from under last year's leaf pile. I am distrustful of the thin white water roots because so many times they've proved too feeble to handle the richness of real earth. Rooted cuttings placed too soon or too late in soil will crisp and die, so you must feel out that precise moment when the young plant is still excited enough to develop a real root system, and not made so lazy by water's lack of resistance that its thin, white roots will despair and rot when buried in real ground. I recognize that this "feeling" of mine is not scientific, and occasionally I look up such matters online in an effort to discipline my gardening efforts; then I promptly forget what I've read. I simply feel out the moment, and I try to love my garden to life.

Also in our kitchen is a rosebush that Dog and I found on a walk the other day, just before the big storm, a beautifully bowl-shaped knockout rose that some fool had jerked out of the ground, shearing off most of its roots in the process. I am speechless in the face of the violence that humans do to living things. But a single root still trailed from the thick stalk, and so I brought it home, sinking it in a pot of loose earth and pruning its live wood hard, amputating half of the bush in an effort to help it understand that all of its energy must now go toward making roots. I keep it good and wet in a plastic lined cardboard box full of earth, and I move it around the kitchen every day to expose it to every possible minute of the feeble February sunlight. Perhaps the rose will find the courage to put forward another vein-like root. And then another.

Whether the rosemary makes it or not, whether the rose makes it or not, will it be destiny? Or will it be because of me?

I am not above thinking that I am an instrument, a small but stubbornly hopeful scrap of a larger logic or spirit. I don't give that thing a name, I just feel it numinous around me and hope that human failures like ego and pride are far beneath it, whatever it is. I have not been given the gift of belief in dime-store gods. But I do feel the force of will behind the movements of the earth and in the sighing of the wind. I feel, and I obey.

It's the nature of conscious beings, and I include Dog in this, to be at their most desperate when they feel themselves utterly alone, solely responsible for the outcome of their lives and the lives of those they love. Dog looks to me to make things happen; my husband and I look to each other as well for comfort and protection; and neighbors are charmed when a word or gesture indicates that the reassuring tendrils of love extend, if only slightly, from your house to theirs via a card, a lunch invitation, or a wave hello. But as those tendrils become hyper-extended and aim at a wider circle of influence, it is common for the love inspiration to become something more like a desire for power, something like control, something harder and less connected to the true source. We begin to wish that we could erect fences around all those whom we love to prevent the necessary chaos of life from hurting them. We begin to want to dominate.

I love the fragile young rosemary. I love the abandoned rose. I love the azalea I planted last year whose crown has taken on a stricken look from frost burns. I love the tiny "remaindered" fig tree that I bought for one dollar at the end of last season and sunk casually into the dark earth at the edge of the forest where it has been since preyed upon by ravenous deer. I love the old bent beech tree that arcs toward the afternoon light like a dancer; and I feel an abiding sisterhood with the little native holly that my husband rescued from a ravenous wisteria vine, not unlike the way he rescued me six years ago. The abundance and health that the holly now enjoys extends itself to the bees who will drink its nectar, and to the robins who will nest this spring in its strong, homely branches. We are all of us charged with spreading our good fortune to others.

I'll admit it: I am afraid to go out to the field, to the forest, to my trampled beds to see what damage winter has done to my garden. I am terrified that I may discover that the hosta, spider lilies and rust-colored ferns that I sunk into the forest floor in autumn will be found rotten and lifeless. Will all my efforts to cultivate this small Eden have come to naught? Am I fully responsible for what happens on this piece of earth, or is it destiny?

Spring is not without its terrors. But the sun is shining, albeit thinly, and I hear birds singing. So I'll screw up my courage, pull on my rubber boots and canvas gloves, and I'll head out to the garden today with my bypass pruner jammed into the pocket of my old jeans. I'll start cautiously by gathering fallen branches, and then perhaps I'll touch some of those crisp leaves and twigs, turning them over in my fingers and inspecting them for signs of life. And if by chance I do discover some green shoot emerging, responding to the gentle tickling of this thin February sun, I'll pause for a moment and look. And what I feel will be love.

The Growing Season

Comes the Growing Season.

And in Piedmont the autumn nights are chill and pungent with pitch and cut wood.  Our shortened days shine in shades of true green, deep blue and butter yellow like Kodachrome memories of my Idaho childhood summers. Sometimes, a steady, massaging rain falls and percolates through the pine needles, the sandy loam and the firm nutritious clay, deep into the forest where you can hear the trees drinking deep while occasionally shaking themselves clean of golden leaves. More often, the sun shines and warms the steaming garden soil causing roots to expand in the dark mulch. This is the Growing Season.

When we first got here, weary from our titanic moves from the New York City fourth floor walk-up to Tiny Town PA, and then from Tiny Town to Piedmont (half a world away), the singeing summer sun was on high broil. Piedmonters, who are steeped in Southern hospitality (which is real,  not some sort of kabuki mask as some Northerners would have you believe) apologized for the heat as if they themselves had been remiss and had left the thermostat up. It's not always like this, they said, mopping their brows in late July. You just wait, yes, you just wait 'til autumn! Why it's like a second spring 'round here!

Our turnip greens.

In September in Piedmont, everyone plants pansies and it's said that their multicolored petticoats will last through December. Lawns are fed and seeded,  bushes and trees are pruned hard, and winter gardens are 'put in'. On our .79 acre and without benefit of mule, we have been working hard all summer and fall alongside our gardener Pinewood L. Palustris and his intense, silent Chiapan sidekicks Bendito and Jesús. It was Pinewood who first mentioned Winter Gardens, a term that for me had always before signified a concert venue in the Financial District of New York City. One day in late August gazing around the yard he said, "Well I guess it's time y'all be wantin' to put in the winter garden," and of course we obediently did; Pinewood is a descendant of the Piedmont's African Cherokees, and we follow his instructions to the letter.

Pinewood smiled tolerantly when he saw how many kale and cabbage seedlings I had bought; he knew it was too much. He showed up one morning unannounced and spread some secret seeds in the the dark, humid soil of the fenced-in vegetable garden. They sprouted within hours, glow-in-the-dark green and promising good things. It's a collection of root vegetables, he told me, probably some turnips and I don't know what else. Within weeks we began to harvest the intense green leaves,  and we marveled at their tenderness and slight peppery taste when cooked parboiled and then sauteed with butter and garlic.

In the growing season the deer and other forest creatures are in rut, and in the early morning and even sometimes in the slanting sun of late afternoon they stand in our forest, still as plaster statues, watching us, unmoved even by the dog's attention. A red fox has taken to pacing the length of one of our fences. And suddenly hundreds of squirrels have descended upon us, as if brought in by buses to winter here. The bird population changes and grows, but the feeder won't be necessary until later because there's an abundant harvest of grubs and seeds for them; by November, petite acorns from the willow oaks stud the ground everywhere. Rabbits lope easily across the back lawn at dawn's early light. This is the Growing Season, when the gentle rains bless the earth and everyone drinks his fill. Cool nights smell of rosemary and pine and promise comfort and joy.

But how to break the habit of seasonal dread? The patterns of 22 years in New York City are built into my bone and muscle and I feel my spirit begin to contract with the old morbid fear of the harsh, concrete freeze to come even as my new garden expands into the soft Piedmont earth, here and now. I feel my habitual resentment of the coming winter and it persists in my spirit, conflicting with my actual knowledge that I have in fact escaped to a kinder, gentler place. It's as if the shortening daylight flips a fear and loathing switch in me that won't quite turn off despite my current circumstances;  I remain alert to this old emotion, stomping out the bitter embers of the bad mood that habitually creeps upon me at this time of year, cleaning it off me every morning so that I don't poison the innocent creatures growing in my southern garden with my own dark, vestigial emotion. Slowly, Piedmont is taming me to see that the world's not so harsh after all.

Remember: There will be no blocks long sheets of ice to walk to work on this year; there will be no layers of  always slightly sodden and smelling woolens, no grim-faced struggles against the unnatural wind gusts slicing through the iced canyons of downtown, the bitter winds that sucker punch pedestrians just for fun and offer constant resistance to every muscle in one's body. There will be no more resentful throngs jockeying for position as they stand waiting for ever-fewer and every-later subway trains on the frigid, filthy platforms. There will be no exhausted trek at the end of the day up four flights of puddled stairs to my small cell of safety, no brooding sense of the dark destruction of all life that turns one uselessly existential. I must remember: This is the Growing Season.

I must remember that here in Piedmont it's the Growing Season, and that we are working the earth. Here in Piedmont, the soil responds to our efforts; it gives us food. There is so much to do, that there is barely time or desire to write about it, a sure sign of contentment. We are writing our lives in this soil, planting our very selves in the woody stalks of pruned lagustrum and nandina, and the new mounds of turned earth around our young fruit trees; we participate in the great process of the earth with inexperienced but eager fingers and, sniffing the fragrant southern air, we slowly train ourselves to believe that it is safe to relax into this dark, soft, southern winter night.