Plants like People

MY BOTANICAL MEMORY SYSTEM

“If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.”                                        Confucius (551-479 AD)

You are looking at one of my favourite family photographs here on the left – it was taken at Expo ’67 in Montreal and it commemorates the one and only time that my two grandfathers had the opportunity to meet each other. On the left is my Mom’s dad, an Austrian named Franz and on the right is my Dad’s dad, Norbert, a true born-in-Quebec French Canadian. Today, while I was pruning a Bigroot Cranesbill   (Geranium macrorrhizum) my Austrian grandfather came to mind…it took only one or two bruised leaves for that distinct fragrance to hit my nostrils and with it, he immediately came into focus. Being an Austrian, I knew his favourite plant was Edelweiss, but my memories of him always involve that pungent aroma of the Old Spice aftershave that he wore religiously, day after day and year after year.  My other grandfather also has his own plant of sorts, which is actually just a common weed – but every time I see Buttercup in bloom my mind takes me back to an ordinary afternoon in Belleville Ontario some forty years ago. I rarely saw my Dad’s father, mostly because we lived in the west for much of my childhood and my grandfather wasn’t one to travel. But on one of those rare visits to our home I have a memory of us kidding around in the backyard. He went and picked a small bouquet of Buttercup flowers and brought them over to me. He said “let’s see if you like butter”, and then he gently lifted my chin and started brushing it with his handful of weeds. He explained to me that if my chin turned yellow that meant that I liked butter and after carefully examining it, he grinned and proclaimed …”see, I was right, I always figured you for a butter lover” and then he tussled my hair and went to play with my brothers. It’s funny sometimes the small things we encounter that bring the past back to life, and for me it’s almost always plants.  Another one of these is a rare Chinese shrub called Decaisnea fargesii. It has a very unusual common name, Dead Man’s Fingers…a reference to the bizarre bright blue sausage-like edible fruits that resemble a deceased digit. When my youngest daughter Madeleine heard about these gory edibles, she begged me to bring them home for her to try. She was about ten-years old at the time, what I like to call the macabre stage. Being an obliging father I brought a cluster home and we cracked it open to eat. The edible jelly inside the pod is whitish and very snot-like, so it takes a strong constitution to even try it (it tastes like Lychee Nut). Maddy was up for it, but neither of her two sisters would touch it with a ten foot pole. Of course, this gave her bragging rights and she was able to go to school the following Monday and tell her classmates that she had eaten Dead Man’s Fingers…and there aren’t many ten-year old’s that can make that claim with a straight face.

The Orange that Reminds Me

WHEN THE GRIEVING IS PAST

“A man knows he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.”              Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-)

It’s May again and I know this because the deep orange deciduous azaleas are blooming throughout the neighborhood. These flowers hold a particular significance for me, because exactly twenty years ago to the day I was a middle-aged landscaper kneeling below one such azalea in full glory, doing a little hand weeding. My boss had driven out to the site with some unexpected bad news…my wife had phoned the office…my father had passed away quite suddenly…I kept working for a few hours and then it finally sunk in, he was gone…I went home to grieve. As per his wishes, he was cremated and buried at sea – leaving me no grave side to pay my respects and visit. At first I resented this disconnect, but now that I scuba dive it seems that every time I’m in the Pacific he’s right there with me, in one form or another.  As for the rest of him – the young football player, the mustard and sugar sandwiches, the father who loved to watch boxing with his oldest son, the barbeque in the kitchen on those rainy summer days, the guy who woke up well past midnight and said “I was watching that” every time I switched off the station identification signal on the otherwise dormant television set – they are alive and well in my thoughts and in the reflection of the face I see in the mirror each morning, the one that looks more like his dad every day. And now that the grieving has past, those orange azaleas are just a pleasant reminder of the man I once knew.

Gauguin the Gardener

A NATURAL SENSE OF COLOUR

“The landscape, with its pure, intense colors, dazzled and blinded me…”                                                   Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)   “In nature colour is used…as a mechanism to attract. The Blue Trees attempts to waken a similar response from viewers. It is within this context that the blue denotes sacredness, something reverential.”                                                                    Konstantin Dimopoulos (Artist, 1954-Present)

I recently took in an art exhibit, Gauguin & Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise, with my two oldest daughters. I had always been drawn to the style and vibrant colours of his latter works, and since Seattle was this show’s only stop in the United States, we thought it was worth the trip down…and we weren’t disappointed. The exhibit was a series of galleries showing Gauguin’s progression from an his art collector / friend of impressionists / young artist years right through to his death in 1903 on the Marquesas Islands. His early works definitely shows the influence of the emerging impressionists and although he was personal friends with the likes of Pissarro, Paul Cezanne and van Gogh (who he lived with briefly in 1888), he never really felt like he was a part of this new direction in art. Then at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris (the same one that erected the Eiffel Tower) he becomes fascinated with eastern culture after visiting the elaborate mock Javanese village and Cambodian pavilion. This obsession would eventually lead to the breakdown of his marriage and the first of two trips to Tahiti, which was then at the furthest reaches of colonial France. It was here that Gauguin immersed himself in the native culture and more importantly, the intense beauty of the natural landscape. He would become a gardener of natural colour, harvesting the hues of this strange land and fixing them to canvasses rich in culture and symbolism, so that over a century later, I could visit his Polynesian haunts with my own two eyes. His work here emerged as something more primal, less contrived than many of the impressionists he had admired back in France and yet he still managed to incorporate that unique sense of colour later made famous by such artists as Picasso and Matisse. In essence, Gauguin had found his muse in Tahiti. The exhibit also included many Polynesian artifacts of the period, carvings and ornaments that would have affected his outlook at the time – so one really felt that you had immersed yourself in his world, at least while you were in the galleries. On our way back to the parking lot from the exhibit, we stumbled upon an interesting art installation in downtown Westlake Park. The Blue Trees by Konstantin Dimopoulos looks exactly as it sounds…with the trunks and scaffold branches of the Honey Locusts (Gleditsia triacanthos) painted in a startling biodegradable cobalt colour. Call it coincidental, but I was really struck by the fact that it reminded me of Gauguin’s work, particularly the predominance of blue in many of his canvasses. I had to wonder how many future artists were being inspired by these blue trees, and if some day, say a hundred years from now, people would be viewing their collected works in the gallery I had just come from.

Our Garden of Sorrows

FLOWERS OF REMEMBRANCE

“Life is short, break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that made you smile.”                    Mark Twain (1835-1910)                                      “Thank you, Crystal, for making everyone around you that much more happier. You shined, and that did not go unnoticed.”                                                 Online Tribute                                                          “Life is too short and this proves it, he hadn’t even lived his life yet.”                                                        Accident Witness

It was 2:25 on the morning of February 5th 2012 when two vehicles were driving in opposite directions going down one of the main streets that passes through my town. One vehicle was a green van with three teenaged boys, the other a Honda Civic with three young women. For reasons not important to this story they crashed head-on and the accident took the lives of 16 year-old Dawson Spencer and 18 year-old Crystal Weaver. I know this because a make-shift garden now stands in the place where they both died. It sits in front of an old, time-worn fence that hasn’t been painted for years. Perhaps that is why the brightly coloured flowers, most of which are artificial, seem so out of place…like they don’t really belong here. It is an unlikely place for two young people to have lost their lives, but I suppose that none of us gets to choose the spot where we take our last breath. I had read the story of this tragic loss in the local newspaper and had driven by the memorial many times on the way to work, but I didn’t actually stop to look until I found it completely abandoned one day. In past I had seen dozens of people gathered around that fence, but it is April now and those days are gone – all that remains are the memories and the ephemera of better days strewn upon the ground. One can find personal photos, a plaster angel, poems, a hand-carved bench, toys and even a plastic tiara…each item has a personal significance, each serves to console those left behind, ordinary people left to deal with the palpable grief of a sudden loss. This is a garden borne of sorrow and as such, it will one day no longer be needed. When that time comes, friends and family will instead cling to those happier memories and the bitterness of reality can be left here, in this roadside memorial. The unkept grass, dandelions and blackberries already springing to life will soon cover most of it. Over time, fewer and fewer people will visit and one day a sheepish city worker will no doubt load all of it into the back of a truck and take it away. But that won’t mean that these two young people are forgotten, it will just be the time when this garden of sorrows has simply served its purpose and that those of us left behind have healed enough to go on living without Dawson and Crystal. That said, I’ve decided to post their garden here on the internet, where it can live just a little bit longer.

The Kid With All The Questions

WHY IS IT CALLED..?

“Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.”                                          Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

I have to admit that any job in retail sales can be a bit trying at the best of times, and selling plants is no exception. There are days when I get sick and tired of those ‘avant-gardeners’ turning their noses up at anything that isn’t a new introduction or those idealogues searching for the plant that never gets disease, prunes itself and flowers year-round in full sun, partial shade or even total darkness. I was in one of those jaded nursery manager moods several weeks back when I was teaching a seminar on using native plants to a group of about 30 people. One of those in attendance was a ten year-old boy who had accompanied his mother and seemed somewhat resigned to his captive state. Despite the video game in hand, he actually appeared to be listening and it wasn’t long before he sheepishly raised his hand, as if in class. When I stopped and asked him if he had a question, he perked right up and asked if smoking kinnick-kinnick was better than smoking cigarettes. To give you a frame of reference, I had been talking about the native groundcover Arctostaphylos uva-ursi and how indigenous peoples used to smoke the leaves. After the ambient chuckling died down, I tried to explain (as tactfully as possible) that this was an ancient practice and that smoking anything (including native plants) probably wasn’t the best of ideas. I then proceeded with the talk but soon learned that I had piqued his interest, as the questions kept coming fast and furious. The problem being that they were quite insightful, and so I spent the rest of my remaining time answering them, with the banter between us going something like this…Do Sundews have teeth? No, they are not like Venus Fly Traps. Instead, they have sticky hairs that catch flys and gnats. Why is it called Deer Fern? Because Elk and Deer rub the sore spots on their heads on Deer Fern clumps after they shed their horns. Wouldn’t their food stink if they used Skunk Cabbage leaves like waxed paper? Skunk Cabbage flowers smell bad to attract the flys that pollinate them. Their leaves only smell when crushed and indigenous peoples generally just lined baskets with them. Aren’t all slugs bad? Actually Banana Slugs (the yellow ones) are native here and are an important part of the ecosystem, helping to break down organic matter into soil and dispersing seeds and spores. Why don’t the Hummingbirds just wait for the currant berries? Most Hummingbirds don’t live here in winter, they migrate south where it’s warm. When they return they need to eat right away and the nectar from Red-Flowering Currant is usually the first food they find. Also, it doesn’t make very good berries.

By the end of the seminar we had collectively learned more from a 10 year-old’s sense of curiosity than I could have ever conveyed with my three decades of gardening experience. He had reminded all of us that the only ‘killjoy’ in life is really the biases we pick-up over time and the subsequent tunnel-vision we acquire as we narrow our focus on the often unimportant things in life. Looking back on the experience, I feel badly that I didn’t even ask him his name – but whoever you are kid, I justed wanted to thank you for reminding me why I still love being a gardener.

Things my Grandmother Taught Me

SOMEONE ELSE’S LIFE

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”                                                          Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)                                              “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”                                                                            Steve Jobs (1955-2011)                                                     “At the bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth;                                   Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

She was a skilled gardener and the woman who taught me to savour Salal berries. My grandmother was also the cement that bound my mom, dad, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, brothers and sister into an unlikely amalgam that she called ‘the family’. She did this without the benefit of past experience – as her only sibling, a brother, died as a young man fighting a fire and their extended family lived thousands of miles away in England. And yet somehow she became a matriarch…the head gardener of her own family tree, carefully preserving our collective memories and tending to the many living branches. She was a woman of eclectic interests who passed unto to me her love of gardening, geology and natural history, but perhaps her most enduring quality was her ability to love you for exactly who you are. I witnessed this first hand at a family reunion in the early 1970′s when I met her dad, my greatgrandfather, for the first and only time. I knew from heresay that my grandmother had a difficult family life as a young girl, much in part to her father’s drinking and gambling at the time. And yet when she spoke of him it was always stories of better times when her and her dad would take the ferry to North Vancouver and go hiking for the day – eating Salal berries and visiting the many logging camps nestled in the then wooded slopes. He looked uncomfortable when he first arrived at the reunion and to be honest, none of us knew what to expect…and yet it only took one loving glance and a hug from his daughter for him to fit right in. Needless to say, we had a lovely day. Many years later I was working as a landscape foreman in and around those same north shore forests that she and her father used to hike, only now they were known as the British Properties. As was my habit, I would often wander through the forest during my lunchbreak and one day I came across the remains of an old logging camp in the form of a wooden dam and flue. I couldn’t help but wonder if I hadn’t stumbled into one of Gran’s happy memories and I have to admit that the Salal berries growing there were particularly sweet. To this day I try to hold true to one thing she taught me, that the best person you can be is yourself.

A Matter of Perspective

INCONSEQUENTIAL

“Do not let trifles disturb your tranquility of mind…Life is too precious to be sacrificed for the nonessential and transient…Ignore the inconsequential.”  Grenville Kleiser     (1868-1935)

When I began writing this blog about a year ago I was looking to share some of the life lessons that I had learned while working as a gardener these past 30 years – and I think it goes without saying that to be a good gardener you have to have some sense of nurture. And since taking care of a garden is much the same as taking care of a planet (albeit on a larger scale), I find myself writing more and more about environmental issues. All of these ‘issues’ are of our doing and whether we like to admit it or not, we are, without a doubt, the biggest problem on this planet and yet we don’t really seem to be serving any meaningful purpose, at least in a biological sense. We are not a part of any species food chain, we don’t pollinate or disperse seeds, in fact the only thing we do seem to be good at is running this planet into the ground per se. And yet the world we know changes with perspective, and how we view it will ultimately determine our stewardship or destruction of it. The truth of the matter can be very hard to find and it is only in those places where we clearly don’t belong, where we are the intruders, that one gets a real sense of perspective – the opportunity for a blunt self-appraisal of our worth as a species. For me, those places are only found when I go scuba diving or spelunking, meandering through the caves and cracks that lead into the heart of the earth. While I realize that these adventures aren’t for everyone, if you ever find yourself hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the earth, try sitting down and turning off your headlamp for just a few minutes. Here in total darkness, with no interruptions but the beating of your own heart, the obvious becomes apparent… we are insignificant. I get this same sense when I’m diving, particularly when I look back up to the surface expecting to see the sky, only to realize that I’m not in a place I could call ‘my’ world and its needs don’t revolve around me. The epiphany being that below the surface of the waters I am inconsequential. If tomorrow this planet was devoid of human beings, the only things that would perish would be our cities and factories, and the roads that connect them – the infrastructure or veneer that we like to call civilization. The rest of the planet would go on as normal – the tides would surge, the insects pollinate, the flowers bloom and go to seed, the animals hunt, the rains fall, the sun set – we just wouldn’t be here to see it all and take the credit.