Nature's Schiddiest Garden

There isn’t much funny to be had in this stupid virus, except for the fact that I took my temperature, orally, with what turned out to be the cat’s rectal thermometer. Maybe that’s more cringe-worthy than funny. The good news is that the cat has been dead for a while so there’s no chance of her catching anything from me via that thermometer. If you’re wondering, my temp was 97.2. Is that in cat degrees?

One of North America's rarest plants, Kalmiopsis leachiana. [www.siskiyoumountainclub.org]

Sure, gardening while sheltering in place is good for the soul and teaches us to appreciate living in the moment, blah blah, blah. What Deb and I really needed was to get the hell out and take a long drive. Like, socially way-out-there distanced. We needed a big dose of raw nature to restore our faith that plant life will ultimately take over the planet when we’re finished fucking it all up. So we drove out to nature’s schiddiest garden, the Kalmiopsis Wilderness.

The Kalmiopsis is schiddy through no fault of its own. This rugged, rocky, 180,000-acre outpost has some of the rarest soils in North America and a correspondingly unique botanical oeuvre. There are plants here that grow nowhere else, such as the diminutive Kalmiopsis leachiana, a small flowering shrub from which the wilderness takes its name.

The Kalmiopsis Wilderness, a legacy of wildfire.

But despite the floral potential and the incredibly glass-clear Illinois River that flows through its heart, the Kalmiopsis Wilderness is heartbreakingly austere and bleak. Blame the thousands of blackened and bleached-white dead trees that stretch across the landscape like an army of Harry Potter’s dementors—testaments to the massive wildfires that have repeatedly ravaged the area over the past several decades. Although the underbrush of manzanita and tanoak are galloping along and thriving, the towering stands of fir, pine, and cedar have been burnt to a crisp, to the point where you look at the enormous landscape and several million scorched and denuded snags and think, Wow, bummer! It must have been so beautiful!

One of the happiest little flowers, tarweed (Hemizonia) chuckles across the hillsides.

Nevertheless, you can see the indefatigable schiddygardener in the current version of the Kalmiopsis. Beat down and counted out, Nature is staggering up off the canvas and staging a gut-check comeback. Carpets of bright yellow tarweed flow across the flanks of ridges, fat leaves of Pacific rhododendrons flare up from the burnt husks of their former selves, and tender young conifers are beginning their journey to become the mighty forests that are their birthright.

Normally, the Schiddygarden blog is a font of wry observations and unbounded wit (my personal objective analysis) on the sad state of just about anything. But this time I thought I’d just let Nature do some talking while I, blissfully, shut the hell up.

(Okay, one more thing: Many thanks to my friend and botanist extraordinaire, Wayne, who was kind enough to tolerate my inquisitions and provide me with the genus and, where possible, the species of the wildflowers of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness.)

Siskiyou iris (probably Iris bracteata)— is this a cool wildflower, or what?

Dichelostemma multiflorum — try saying that ten times fast, although, why would you?

Rhododendron rising from the ashes of its former, larger self.

Polygala californica — is it just me or does this name sound orgy-istic?

A clump of Phacelia corymbosa growing in the strange serpentine soils of the Kalmiopsis.

Sidalcea malvaeflora — cute as a bug!

Speaking of cute bugs, a mountain fritillary.

The Illinois River (no, it's not in Illinois).

Kiss My Ash (goodbye)

This tree is an ash. It’s located at the corner of our property to the southeast, and it throws a lot of shade. It’s a good 3 feet across at its base, and it has an absolutely awesome wingspan that soars out over ours and the neighbor’s property with ginormous limbs.

It’s also dying.

It’s a gnarly old bastard (editor’s note: I don’t think trees can be bastards in the technical sense) as you can see by the twisted trunk and the giant suckers that are shooting up everywhere. Our tree guy, Mack, says that the tree is probably good for “another five to six years,” which is an event horizon that seems ominously speculative.

Trouble is, I love this tree. It’s the old guy sitting on a park bench in the sun telling feeding pigeons and telling stories with cracker crumbs in his beard that you desperately want to brush away but don’t. It’s a bodhisattva, a sensei. Stellar jays crawk from its branches; raccoons poop appreciatively in the crotches of the big limbs; it’s a Grand Central Station for squirrels. It has known so much. And it’s dying.

I love it for its tortured soul, it’s stubborn desire to keep going even as old age begins to soften its insides, eat out its heart, invite disease. Each pruned branch reveals a dark and emaciated core. The leaves are prolific in a panicked sort of way, as if they’re in a giant hurry to produce chlorophyll that—if they only knew—will only temporarily postpone the inevitable. Exhausted, the leaves begin falling in mid-summer.

Comfort station: Raccoon poop lovingly deposited in the crotch of a big limb.

Which brings me to an existential dilemma. Or more accurately, an existential Russian roulette. How long do I let this big tree linger before it becomes a danger? If it falls in any direction, the consequences would be dire. Toward my neighbor’s property, it would take out their new fence and their flowering plum—a truly decent tree in comparison to our unruly behemoth. Falling the other way would deposit much of its bulk on our roof and the guest bedroom, which theoretically wouldn’t endanger anybody except guests, who might be considered expendable anyway, depending on how long they’ve been visiting. And cue the insurance snakes.

In any circumstance, I’m sure the vipers that compose our homeowner insurance company would boost our rates to unimaginable heights after devoting copious actuarial hours to seeing how they can screw us out of our savings, which (they will discover) is laughable easy to do.

Frankly, I’m easy to dupe. I’m gullible. I have this innate desire to believe in the best in my fellow humans, that they aren’t really out to cheat, lie, and steal everything they possible can from me. Most people are good, I tell myself. There’re a few bad apples, sure. But getting lied to from a cable company? A car mechanic? The insurance company you pay to protect your life and property? I mean, that kind of distrust goes against my Oh well nature.

But not Deb.

She is the archangel Michaela come to smite the end-arounds, the bogus brake jobs, the hidden fees, the third glass of sauvignon blanc that mysteriously appears on the bill. Injustice is the weed into which she plunges her flaming trowel of truth. Don’t mess with Deb when it comes to money—she will rip the fingers off your hand to get at the pennies clutched in your fist. She is the demon of the family finances, such as they are, and fiercely devoted to protecting the bottom line. So insurance folks, if you’re reading this, you’ve been warned.

Back to the dying ash tree.

"My disease grew upon me..." Edgar Allan Poe, The Telltale Heart.

Its magnificence is unmistakable, inspiring. I can’t help but root for this old fart (no pun intended) as I tour around its fat, contorted, arthritic base, noting the fresh pile of raccoon poop resting like a bumpy bicep of one of its massive outstretched limbs. I weigh the cost of removal (around $3,000) and the resulting safety against the pleasure of its presence in our everyday lives. And I always come to the same conclusion: we won’t be taking it down today, and probably not tomorrow. But soon, we’ll have that reckoning.

And yet, some ten feet away from the ash is a comely vine maple, and it’s flanked on its other side by a fetching mountain ash. Replacements are standing by, and we’ve even engaged in heretical thoughts of planting a substitute flowering plum when the old ash finally gives way. That’s a compelling thing about gardening—it’s a snapshot of existence within the confines of even the most pathetic yard: trial, error, failure, success, reward, progeny, phylogeny, and inevitably, dead-ology. And through it all, there is hope.

Wisteria Hysteria

Quiz: Can you tell the xenomorph from the wisteria? (Hint: wisteria is on the right)

After several unsuccessful attempts to grow vining clematis and morning glory on our backyard arbor, I finally planted a wisteria. Many friends tried to dissuade me, saying that wisteria was a close relative of the extraterrestrial xenomorph from the movie, Alien. They said it would likely devour our arbor and possibly our house. “You’ll be sorry,” they said, smugly.

How a cute little potted vine fresh out of the greenhouses could ever get so destructive was beyond our ken—okay, my ken—but at that point I was really wanting some vining action and I was willing to give wisteria a shot. So I planted one at the foot of an arbor post and pointed toward the sky. “Grow that-a-way,” I encouraged.

After several halting, unpromising years featuring stunted growth tips and renegade tendrils that flailed about in empty space, the wisteria finally managed to twist itself around the support post and work its way up to the top of the arbor. I figured it soon would spread out and add its big purple flower clusters to the backyard gestalt.

Sure enough, it began to luxuriate in the raw sun and open air, growing thick as it sprawled across the arbor like a python that had just swallowed a whole goat. In the spring of its fourth year the wisteria produced several of the big, luxurious flower clusters that wisteria is famous for. Hooray! We were on our way to wisteriastic bliss!

Wisteria attempting to strangle our smoke tree.

Flash forward another year. From my observation post on the back patio one day I noticed that wisteria tendrils had extended spectral arms across open space and had begun to weave their way into the innocent branches of our smoke tree, our zelkova, and the across-the-back-fence neighbors’ mountain ash. The wisteria had become subversive and was looking to annex the branches of nearby trees that were tantalizingly close to its arbor lair. It was engaging a covert infiltration designed to quietly extend its empire—clearly our wisteria had plans to take over the neighborhood.

I got the ladder and trimmed tendrils, quietly admonishing the plant for disrespecting other plants’ personal spaces. But from this elevated perspective, nose-to-nose with the wisteria’s leafy soul, it was clear that I’d underestimated a wisteria’s prime directive, which is to beautifully and elegantly overwhelm everything. Its twisting viney stems were thick and woody, its leaves vibrant, its relentless tendrils hunting for fresh purchase in every direction. The fact that so many trees and large shrubs had been planted so close to its clutches—perhaps human error was involved—meant frequent tendril-removal maintenance chores for moi (chores I may or may not accomplish, depending on my attentiveness which, let’s be frank, is spotty).

Keeping the wisteria in check will be an annual challenge that I’m doomed to lose by virtue of the plant’s superior cunning and will power. No doubt one day we’ll see wisteria blossoms drooping from the top of the zelkova and populating the branches of the smoke tree. Ultimately, the entire arbor, backyard fencing and several nearby houses will collapse in a kerfuffle of leaves and tendrils and overmatched lumber.

Of course, overcrowding has a solution, and judicious pruning is certainly one of them. So is digging up and relocating plants, and of course prior to purchase it wouldn’t hurt to pay attention to a plant’s pros and cons, checking to see if a particular plant has unfortunate habits, such as being predisposed to strangle arbors and neighbors.

Yeah, you're pretty. I forgive you.

A more intriguing option—and one that’s less work—is letting the plants figure it out for themselves. Survival of the fittest—which is a basic tenet of Schiddygarden and an idea that’s largely endorsed by doomsday preppers all over the world. (I’ll add with a bit of environmentalist snobbery that we garden organically, without chemicals, meaning that even if our garden is less-than-stellar, it’s organically less-than-stellar.)

Should I really let our plants duke it out, unsupervised? Good question! I’m going to sit right here in the patio sun, listen to the finches twittering in the zelkova, and keep an eye on those tendrils. I've got to admit, wisteria earns a lot of forgiveness by being good-looking, and in our garden, looks beat common sense every time. And if our wisteria’s Darwinian urges need some restraint, I’ve got my clippers at the ready.