Greenprints 101

SPRING 2O15

No. 1O1 $6.OO

GREEN R PRINTS “THE WEEDER’S DIGEST”

2IVE5RSARY TH

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P.14 LOOK P.74 ARE PLANTS SMART? P.26 LADYBUGS ON THE LOOSE!

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At The Gate I’ve now written exactly 100 of these intro essays. How about this time I let a reader do the honors? This letter—words and art—is from Christa Chevalier of Enosburg Falls, VT: Thank you, Pat, for having a dream and fulfilling it.

The stories in GREENPRINTS remind me of a sunny day last July when I was drawn to my kitchen window by a pink flower I spotted growing in the middle of the front yard. This was the day after a teenage boy I had hired mowed the entire yard.

I went out to take a closer look, and there was a lovely columbine—without a single blade of grass near it that was higher than the rest of the lawn. That boy must have trimmed all the grass around the flower with his pocketknife!

I am not sure how long I stood there, smiling, and flooded with joy toward a fellow human who had wanted to share something that beautiful.

That is exactly how I feel when I read all the wonderful stories in GREENPRINTS. Thank you, Pat, for sharing the remarkable flower that is this magazine.

Thank you, readers, for supporting an oddball idea I had exactly 25 years ago. GREENPRINTS is alive today because you support it, simple as that.

Pat Stone, Editor 7

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Tucker came home for Xmas. Then Becky and I visited Jesse’s family in Arizona.

REENPRINTS,

“The Weeder’s Digest”™ is brought to you by Pat (Editor, pat@greenprints.com) and Becky (Circulation, becky@greenprints.com) Stone and Circulation Assistant Julie Wander, with loving encouragement from Nate, Jesse, Sammy, and Tucker Stone (828/628-5452; www.greenprints.com). Contributing Editors: Mike McGrath, Diana Wells, and Becky Rupp. Contents © 2015 by GREENPRINTS®. Allow four to six weeks for subscription fulfillment. Please notify us when you change your address! Writer’s Guidelines (also Artist’s) available at website or by mail (send Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope). Submissions are read in Nov., Feb., May, and Aug. (send SASE).

GREENPRINTS® (ISSN 1064-0118) is published quarterly by GreenPrints Enterprises, 23 Butterrow Cove, Fairview, NC 28730.

Subscriptions are $22.97 for four issues ($26 to Canada and Mexico. $32 to England. U.S. Funds only) from GREENPRINTS, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730. Periodicals postage paid at Fairview, NC, and at additional mailing offices.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to GREENPRINTS, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730.

Cover, “Symphony of Spring,” by Christina Hess 9

Julie

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Contributors

B RC U DE D TI SS

“GO!” (p. 21) sent in by Linda R. Bell of Knoxville, TN. “Put a Flower in It” (p. 49) sent in by Tammy Troglin of Lithia Springs, GA. “The Fairest Thing” (p.47) sent in by Lisa Colburn of Orono, ME. Contribute your favorite garden quote to“Buds.” If we use it, we’ll give you a year’s subscription.

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CATHERIINE STRAUS

MARILYNNE ROACH

Kate Abbott: This is an excerpt from a memoir Sacramento, CA’s Kate is working on about her experience Donna Hicks: “I have been writing with postpartum depression. She for over 20 years on a wide variety has also written Disneylanders, a of topics. I also enjoy gardening and young adult novel. humor. (True, my gardening sometimes provides the humor.)”

Erica Myers-Russo: Myers-Russo “I’ve gardened everywhere I’ve lived: OH, WV, TX, Kerry Seymour: Seymour From Reno, NV: NY, CT, WA, and more. Surprisingly, Surprisingly “A retired Cooperative Extension the most challenging place is my nutrition specialist and Master current home in southern CA.” Gardener, I am a staunch promoter of the joys (despite the Marianne Willburn: Maschallenges) of gardening ter Gardener Marianne in the high desert.” (www.smalltowngardener. com) writes from LovettsJewel Jew el Langenderfer: Langenderfer Jewville, VA. Her lovely el, “an ardent old organic piece, “Full Circle,” ran gardener,” lives with her in GP #100. two dogs, two cats, and nine chickens in the city Elizabeth Wagner: Wagner Elizalimits of Eugene, OR. beth is a Catholic sister, Benedictine hermit, and founding Bill Hyde: From Henderson, CO: member of Transfiguration Hermit“I’m an old new farmer who is age in ME. Her fine essay, “Suscipe,” adjusting to the disparity between appeared in GP#90. theory and practice in trying to grow food.”

Robert F. Hever: Bob lives down the road in Hendersonville, NC. Julie V. Foley: PA’s Julie very funny A retired environmental engineer, “Save My Parsley!” ran in GP #94, Bob used to help on a MD Master where she told us, “If I cut myself, Gardener hotline, where he often I bleed chlorophyll!” touted the blessings of ladybugs.

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GreenPrints

Spring, 2O15 #1O1

Look .................................................................................................................. 16

By Diana Wells Fish for Fertilizer............................................................................................ 20

By Donna Hicks The Year Aunt Irene Grew Rembrandt Tulips......................................... 24

By Kerry Seymour Cat Attack! ....................................................................................................... 30

By Jewel Langenderfer Fencing ............................................................................................................. 36

By Bill Hyde Meaningless Meanderings .......................................................................... 43

By Julie V. Foley Getting Better ................................................................................................. 46

By Kate Abbott Seeds ................................................................................................................. 50

By Garrison Keillor Wishing Flowers ............................................................................................ 54

By Erica Myers-Russo A Christmas Carol? ........................................................................................ 58

By Mike McGrath My Tulip Turnaround ................................................................................... 64

By Marianne Willburn Bush Hogs, Berries, God .............................................................................. 68

By Sr. Elizabeth Wagner The Great Ladybug Escape .......................................................................... 74

By Robert F. Hever Are Plants Smart?........................................................................................... 76

By Becky Rupp Growing Up with GREENPRINTS, II .............................................................. 82

By Jesse Stone Reeck Garden Meditation ........................................................................................ 86

By Rev. Max Coots 11

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A garden is a miracle and a haven.

All you have to do is . . .

Look

By Diana Wells

ILLUSTRATIONS BY LINDA COOK DEVONA

“Who would therefore look dangerously up at Planets, that might safely looke downe at Plantes?” asked John Gerard in his famous Herball of 1597.

What a comfort the garden can be in a turbulent, sometimes puzzling world. When Gerard was comforting himself with “the earth appareled with plants, as with a robe of embroidered worke, This year I’m set with Orient pearles and garnished with going to look, great diversitie of rare and costly jewels,” views of his world were being turned over. really look His orderly universe was challenged by the at the flowers shattering concept of contemporary scientists down in my that, far from being the stable center of all garden. things, the earth itself was moving and its companions, the “wandering stars” (planets) didn’t even travel in perfect circles. The flowers, though, bloomed safely below—as they always had.

Gardeners, like little children and poets, can enter into a small universe beneath them: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour wrote William Blake. How lucky we gardeners are, especially in 17

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springtime, to be able to concentrate on miracles. Karel Capek, who wrote The Gardener’s Year in the late 1920s, lived in turbulent times: Hitler appointed Himmler and Goebbels as Nazi party leaders. Stalin was in power in the U.S.S.R. Meanwhile, Edwin Hubble discovered galaxies beyond the Milky Way and showed that they were moving away from the earth, and the universe itself is expanding.

Karel Capek was busy planting seeds, first marveling to his readers at the different seeds themselves: Some are “like bloodred fleas without legs;” others “thin like needles.” They can be “big like cockroaches,” and tiny “like specks of dust.” Big seeds don’t necessarily grow into large plants, or small ones into small plants. “I simply don’t believe it,” he writes. The world outside goes on; Capek is absorbed watching his seeds. He waits for the soil to be “silently forced apart,” and the tiny plant to emerge, miraculously “lifting the seed on its head like a cap.”

It’s the time of year for all of us to be planting seeds. As usual, I’ll put in a lot of nasturtiums, which must be the most rewarding flowers on earth: easy to grow, quick to flower—and spreading shield-like leaves that cover all garden mistakes! When first they came to Spain (1569), Nicholas Monardes described them in his book, New Founde Worlde. Each petal, he wrote, has a spot on it “like a droppe of bloode, so red and so firmly kindled in couller that it could not be more.”

Now I wonder how many of us (including me) have really noticed that red spot? The impressionist painter Claude Monet relied heavily on nasturtiums in his famous garden at Giverny, and he painted them, too, in glorious impressionist color. Did he notice Monardes’s spot? Anyway, this year I’m going to look closely for it, although maybe it has been hybridized out. But I’m going to look, really look down at the flowers in my garden.

Most flowers look up at the sun, their source of light and life.

When I plant beans, they’ll shoot straight up towards the heavens.

Unlike many of us, they don’t (I presume) wake up at 4:00 a.m. and start thinking of black holes, inter-space travel overtaking time, and the possible destruction of the earth’s atmosphere. They don’t presumably worry about their grandchildren, potential health is18

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sues, or their identity being stolen.

(I don’t worry much about my own identity being stolen. Who would want to be me, pottering around without an iPad, without a television, without a camera, talking—as you’ll see—to tomatoes?

I don’t think there’d be many takers!)

I don’t grow all my plants from seed—especially not tomatoes. Last year, however, when I was clearing up the garden in late October, I came across a tiny tomato seedling under our picnic table. What could I do? “All right, you silly plant,” I said, and dug it up. I kept it in a pot all winter. As if in gratitude, it grew, and grew, and I had to prune it until it could go outside—where there was no stopping it. Eventually, it reached 15 feet high and 8 feet across (truly), covering everything around it and filling the porch gutter. It produced an abundance of small yellow tomatoes—not the best I have ever eaten, I admit. But it had already made a miracle. What more could I ask of it?

This year I’ll get some regular tomato plants, too. They come small, each one smaller by far than the fruit I hope to harvest from it. Like the poet Tennyson, I’ll cup the tiny plants in my hand and think about it all. Tennyson wasn’t gardening, but probably strolling when he spotted a Flower in a Crannied Wall. We know he wasn’t on a cell phone (in 1869), so he was looking and his hands were free: Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.

Yes, these are turbulent times, and I for one don’t understand much of what goes on in the world outside my garden. I’m scared of my word processor (which has behaved well so far today) and can’t cope with email. I still like to pay bills by check. And if I’m depressed, I go into the garden to potter around.

And look. ❖ 19

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Fish For Fertilizer

s a parent of five children, I have become accustomed to settling arguments. Teaching Carla (13), Michelle (12), Christopher (10), Shawn (8), and Norma (5) how to work out disputes has been an ongoing battle. Every time I hear one of them shriek, “Mo-mmm!,” I mentally prepare myself for another round of conflict resolution.

But there was one day that even I, Super Mom of five kids, was unprepared for. And I was just it had to do with our family garden.

Growing a large vegetable garden helps stepping out of cut corners on the food budget. It also the shower when us gives me the chance to teach my children I heard all three the art and benefits of gardening—something I felt proud of. And it is a great way for us girls shriek, to spend time together as an entire family.

“MO-MM!” Even Norma, the five-year-old, likes to help.

Actually, all three girls are helpful. The boys, in truth, prefer to search for strange insects to scare the girls with. he trouble started when I decided to save money on fertilizer by incorporating a technique my husband taught me long ago (before he died in an accident). We both love to fish, and one year, after cleaning our catch, he took the bones and fish heads and buried them in the garden.

The year we did that, the garden produced better than ever before.

Now it was time for me to teach this lesson to the children.

One day after the kids and I caught several catfish and trout, I took them and all the leftover fish parts out to the garden. I 20

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DENA SEIFERLING

They work great. But . . .

By Donna Hicks

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showed them how to bury the scraps near our plants.

“This will help our garden grow and give us a lot more to eat,” I explained cheerfully.

“I ain’t touching that stuff!” said Norma. “That fish head is looking at me!”

“Me, neither!” said Michelle.

“Me, too!” said Carla.

The three girls started heading back to the house.

“Okay, girls,” I admonished them, “but you are missing a valuable lesson.”

“You two are just scaredy cats!” yelled Christopher. Little brother Shawn just laughed.

The boys seemed genuinely interested. They did a fantastic 21

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job helping me with our all-natural fertilizer. When we were done, I headed inside for a quick shower before I started dinner.

I was just stepping out of the shower when I heard all three girls shriek, “MO-MM!” “What?” I yelled back, throwing on my bathrobe and opening the door.

“All the fish are gone!” cried Carla.

“They’re not here,” said Michelle. “None of them!”

“They dis-dapeared, Mommy,” explained my five-year-old.

Sure enough, all the fish in our aquarium were nowhere to be found: the neons, the guppies, the zebras, and the black-andspeckled mollies. I moved a few of the aquarium decorations around. Still no fish.

“What happened to the fish?” I demanded.

It was Christopher, the ten-year-old who spoke. He seemed quite proud of himself.

“I took them outside.”

“Why in the world did you do that?” I demanded. “Where are they now?”

“In the garden.”

“What?!”

And he meant in the garden. Christopher really had absorbed my lesson about the benefits of burying fish to fertilize a backyard garden. I was shocked, but I didn’t have time to think about that. I was too busy trying to get my girls to stop crying, trying to get Shawn to stop laughing, and trying to get Christopher to understand what he had done wrong. It must’ve been a half hour before I finally got things calmed back down. Even then, I could tell the girls wanted to bury Christopher in the garden!

Yes, I thought I was going to teach my children a good lesson when I decided to use fish to fertilize our garden.

But I think the person who really learned a lesson was me. ❖ 22

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April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks, “GO!” —Christopher Morley 23

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The Year Aunt Irene Grew Rembrandt Tulips She most certainly didn’t want to. Until . . .

By Kerry Seymour y Aunt Irene was not a gardener. Oh, she’d wander outside occasionally, but not to see the garden. She did it to get a moment to herself. She was the stay-at-home caregiver in the little house we shared with my grandparents and another aunt, Imogene. Babysitting me, tending to my grandparents’ needs, and housekeeping were her life’s work.

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY NICOLE TAMARIN

Her great gardening experience started innocently enough the summer I was smitten by a Breck’s bulb catalog.

We lived in southern California, so my flower world consisted of Aunt Imogene’s roses and the blooms of the single hibiscus, gardenia, and camellia shrubs that graced our small yard. I also frequently saw magenta bougainvilleas in full glorious bloom in others’ yards. So tropical and semi-tropical plants were a little commonplace to me. I had never seen anything like the daffodil and other bulbs that graced “What do you the catalog’s pages. But of them all, the picture of the Rembrandt tulip collection stole my want me to do seven-year-old heart. The large flowers, the with them?” flared petals. The explosive mixtures of colors: Her voice had H scarlet and butter yellow, maroon and cream, inky purple and pale primrose, raspberry and lost its earlier icy white. Some of the tulips were only lightly excitement. fringed by their contrasting color, while others were swirled and feathered in such abundance it was impossible to tell the base color from the overlay.

I tried to get excited about the windflowers or the daffodils, and the Little Red Riding Hood tulip caught my attention for about five seconds. But I kept going back to those Rembrandt tulips.

I had to have them. And thanks to the now-extinct postal service of C.O.D. (cash on delivery), I could have them without troubling my elders. Using my best block printing, I filled in the order form letter by letter with my name and address. I marked an X on the order form next to Rembrandt Tulip Collection, and, exercising great control, I filled in “1” for the number of collections. Finally I marked the C.O.D. box with a dark and definite X, going over it several times for emphasis. I put a well-licked stamp on the order envelope, then clothespinned it to the mailbox.

What was Aunt Irene doing at this time? As was her custom, she was sitting at the kitchen table in her faded housecoat, smoking a cigarette, drinking black coffee, and looking out the window at the comings and goings on our street. She feigned interest when I showed her the picture of the tulips, but I knew my excitement wasn’t shared.

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Toward the end of the summer (a summer memorable only for my anticipation of the tulip bulbs), our world changed. My single working mom arrived from Nevada to move me to her home in time to start the new school year. My belongings were packed and, with tears in my eyes, I gave good-bye hugs to everyone who had raised me to that point, chief among them Aunt Irene. I knew I was moving far away and wouldn’t see them again until the following summer. I forgot all about the tulip bulbs. n October, out of the blue, Aunt Irene called me. “You got a package, Sweetie. Shall I open it or send it to you?” I asked her to open it to find out the contents. After a moment, she came back on the line. “The package says ‘Rembrandt Tulips’ and there are 12 of them. They’re brown. What do you want me to do with them?” Her voice had lost its earlier excitement. I heard her take a drag on her cigarette. But my interest in tulips had been diminished by the upheaval in my life, so I said, “You plant them, Aunt Irene. Maybe I can come visit in the spring to see them.” (An unlikely possibility, I knew.)

Sounding less than thrilled, she agreed to do something she had never done before: Plant something in the dirt. “I can put them in that little patch next to the backyard patio where Mama used to grow mustard “Oh, Sweetie, greens.”

So Aunt Irene planted the tulips. I I wish you could her grumbling a bit as she rooted see these tulips. imagined around in the garage to find a seldom-used They’re the trowel. I pictured her with a cigarette in one hand and a watering can in the other, distractprettiest thing edly but dutifully watering my tulip patch.

I’ve ever seen.”

A few letters and phone calls passed between us over the winter. The conversations always included the tulips: whether there were any signs of life (“No, not yet.”) and if they would look as pretty as the picture in the catalog (“Kerry, I bet they’ll be even prettier.”). Then, mid-spring, I got a letter: “I see tulip leaves coming up. They’re pointy and there’re lots of them!

No rain lately so I’ve been watering them.” This from someone 26

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who I had never seen pick up a hose or watering can. From then on, I got weekly updates by letter and occasional phone calls. “The leaves are up six inches.” “You know, I can see little green flower buds in the middle of the leaves.” “The stems are getting really tall.” And most exciting of all: “The buds are starting to turn colors!”

About a week after that announcement, I got a phone call from Aunt Irene: “Oh, Sweetie, I wish you could see these tulips. They’re all in bloom, and they’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. They’re all colors. Some have red stripes on white, some are yellow on purple, some have their colors all mixed together. But my favorites are kind of a creamy white on rosy-pink. I sit on the porch and just look at them in the sun.”

I had never heard such excitement in Aunt Irene’s voice. She continued, “I invited some of the neighbors over to see them, and they’d never seen anything like them, either. Your tulips have created quite a stir.”

I felt I was there with her that special spring as she described the dazzling flowers and the rare event of having neighbors in the backyard. I imagined their voices and happy chatter breaking the usual garden silence.

The next year was a letdown. Aunt Irene was so disappointed when just a few leaves emerged and a couple of stunted buds.

Nothing would ever match the glory of that first spring bloom. We talked about the tulips for years after. It was a topic which always lifted her spirits. She was transported by that telling, and I like to think her spirit was lifted to someplace rare and beautiful beyond the lonely kitchen table and the endless coffee and cigarettes. oday I grow tulips in my high desert Nevada garden, but in softer colors than the Rembrandts. Yet whenever I see them in the garden catalogs, their exuberant colors never fail to bring back memories of Aunt Irene and that single glorious flush of spring bloom. ❖ 27

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LETTERS TO GREENPRINTS

I’m always grateful to hear from readers. Write me at GREENPRINTS, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730 or email pat@greenprints.com.

I cherish each word of the 25th Anniversary Edition. What a tremendous job! Thank you so much for the heart and soul you put into it. I love your magazine.

—Marcia Beese Gardiner, MT

Here’re some more letters celebrating our 25th Anniversary Year. Feel free to contribute your own! —Pat Dear Pat, I’m sure you are buried in work, but I encourage you to take a few moments to reflect on the impact you have had by sharing stories of wonder, love, and hope. Each of our lives is simply a collection of personal stories—pearls strung upon a thread of time to form a unique necklace. When I read GREENPRINTS, I take the inspiring stories to heart, and they literally become a part of my necklace, my life story. They influence the way I see the world, the words I speak, and the way I interact with other people.

What a legacy—enriching lives, making the world a better place by sharing stories. I can’t imagine a better way to spend the gift of life.

—Steven Chamblee Weatherford, TX

To all the Stones: 25 YEARS!! Congratulations! GREENPRINTS renews my faith in mankind. It calms my soul and makes me smile.

Thank you to you all.

—Mary Carbee Mellville, NY We also publish blish a regular regular, free electronic newsletter (sign up for it at our website). It, too, draws comments: What a beautiful essay on seedstarting in your January 8th e-letter. You’ve made me see the plant world differently. It is for insights such as these that I have long read GREENPRINTS. Thank you.

—Katie Walter Stockton, CA 29

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Cat Attack!

t was a lovely spring day here in the always moist and verdant Willamette Valley of Western Oregon, where gardening year-round is possible, if not mandatory, for someone with compost in her soul. I was out in the garden, noticing the abundance of weeds that were coming up in all of my lovingly tended raised beds, an event both annoying and appreciated, because a lot of those weeds grace my early spring salads: the always-persistent chickweed, which grows everywhere, the new tender and delicate dandelion leaves, the sticky and clingy cleaver vines—all the wonderful spring tonics that invigorate the body, stimulate the mind, and wipe away the foggy remnants of a long winter’s rest. But I digress . . .

There I was, tickling the garlic shoots I had set out last fall, checking to see if the peas and radishes I planted a week ago were up yet, and reverI slowly reached ently pulling those weeds that I didn’t really want to eat, just minding my own business out a soft hand (for the moment—hint). The sky was blue and lightly with fluffy wisps of clouds, the birds were touched him chirping and singing, a gentle breeze was rustling the dried tops of last year’s garlic on his fuzzy, chives, a few early bees were buzzing lazily exposed belly. around. All in all, quite the magical day.

As I slowly cruised on my knees at the foot of our tall wooden fence, gently tilling the soil with my fingers, I glanced slightly to my left. There in the catnip patch lay Sid, my long-haired black cat. He was sprawled on his back with his head upside-down and his feet to the four directions, lips flapping open, exposed fangs 30

ILLUSTRATIONS BY TIM FOLEY

An idyllic Spring day . . . until . . .

By Jewel Langenderfer

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glinting in the sunlight, tongue lolling out the side of his mouth with a piece of catnip leaf stuck to it. Sound asleep. Dead to the world. I’m sure you get the picture.

Sid had come to me several years earlier, a friendly streetwise young cat who had been milking a friend of mine’s whole neighborhood for food, attention, and places to sleep. The one thing Sid wanted, yet couldn’t seem to achieve, was for someone to invite him into their house, as it was late October and starting to get cold and wet. So with the blessings of those neighbors (I think I also heard a few sighs of relief), I brought this charming feline home to live with me. He immediately proceeded to work this new neighborhood with his tomcat ways, alternately endearing and offending one and all. It soon became clear that he considered himself to be king of his own personal urban jungle.

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While in the house, Sid allowed himself the luxury of sound sleep and usually felt no need to stay alert, responding to my occasional touch with a soft mewling of recognition, then going right back to sleep. However, when napping out of doors, in a deceptively relaxed state, apparently his inner radar is always connected, ready for any emergency, the guards fully armed and in the towers, so to speak. So on this fine and magical afternoon, you’d think I’d know better than to mindlessly follow my urges.

But no. In my springtime euphoria, I slowly reached out a soft hand, with the love of the Buddha in my heart and sweetness in my soul, and lightly touched him on his soft, fuzzy, exposed belly. he explosion was immediate and, as I best recall, in fantastic slow motion. Sid shot up into the air, a twisting spiral funnel, his toenails instantly converting to tiny flashing razor blades, emitting a sound between a deflating balloon and an outboard motor. After regaining my stunned senses, I looked up and there he was, on top of the sixfoot fence, looking like an electrified porcupine with all his hairs standing out, back arched, eyes bulging like neon golf balls, glaring down the fence at his mama who feeds and loves him. We held each other’s eyes for a long moment, then I said, “Uh, sorry.”

At that, he issued an explosive combination hiss-spit-yowl, shot down the length of the fence top, and sailed into the bamboo patch, leaving me wondering why my hands and arms were suddenly on fire. By the time I got back to the garden, wearing half the contents of my Band-Aid box, Sid came strolling through the celery patch, yawned, and rubbed against my legs, all forgiveness and love. ome lessons from that lovely early-spring afternoon are obvious, others deep and obscure. I know I will never again see this beloved kitty in quite the same pastel light. But I guess if there is any real moral to this story, it would be to remember this: Never touch a stoned-out, soundasleep cat just after you’ve finally begun to heal from ripping out the blackberry patch last month. ❖ 32

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C U T T I N G S

Every fall, bulbs will be on sale in bins at my local grocery store. There’ll be lots of daffodils, tulips, and more. At first the prices are expensive—but people buy them. All the larger daffodils sell best.

One of the smaller bulbs was a daffodil named Jetfire. It makes a small, but not miniature, flower, yellow with a bright orange cup—a winner for sure, I thought.

But people weren’t buying it. Later in the fall, the Jetfires went on sale for 99¢ a bag! I bought every one left—eight bags—and planted them all over my front and back yards.

They were beautiful the next spring, just glorious!

Yesterday, I went to the Philadelphia Flower Show. Jetfire was in the show. It was on display, with a Second Place ribbon. So there you go: a loser at the grocery store but a winner at the Flower Show!

—By Doris Servis of Ewing, N NJ. 34

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Jetfire: Loser and Winner

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Short selections—both old and new— sent in by our readers.

The Power of Plants When Linda inda Cook DeVona emailed me her beautiful ar art for Diana Wells’s ’ ’s fine “Look” essay this iissue (p.14), she also sent me these words:

LINDA COOK DEVONA

This drawing practically drew itself: Tennyson poems feel very personal for me. The day my Dad died, I was getting clothes from his dresser (I thought he’d be going to the Vet’s home the next day instead of exiting this earth). I found a 3x5 card in his top drawer with part of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” on it, written in Dad’s distinctive jagged writing. A poem about dying, it concludes with “For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place/The flood may bear me far,/I hope to see my Pilot face to face/When I have crost the bar.”

I used it for his obituary and memorial service.

I believe so much that there are miracles all around us even in the midst of doubt, pain, and sorrow (and the confusing events the news brings us daily) if we but take the time to notice them. Today I went to have tea with a 90-year-old friend. As I was driving down the snowy road with whirlwinds of snow crossing my path, I passed the weathered milkhouse of a neighbor’s farm and remembered a stunning display of morning glories that grew up the wall there—a couple of decades ago!

Then I remembered towering sunflowers that dwarfed another small house along with a riot of flowers that used to grow on a small triangle of land many years ago, before a house changed owners several times.

So plants have the power to transform thoughts even long after they have bloomed and gone. Hmm . . . . just like some people we have known and loved.

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Fencing No fence? No farm. By Bill Hyde Since I was old enough to remember, I wanted to have a farm, not 160 acres of corn, but a New England type, family farm—fruit trees, a berry patch, chickens, vegetable gardens, maybe a cow, bees, a greenhouse, a few pigs. Not that I knew anything about growing things. My expertise was limited to an annual bumper crop of dandelions in my lawn. Through my youthful and ener36

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY BLANCHE DERBY

getic years, I thought that raising plants and animals would be fun. Having currently passed the age of normal retirement without retiring from anything, I now knew that this kind of fun meant work, lots of it.

Four years ago, undeterred by the tasks ahead, my wife and I bought a small property outside Denver. Aside from a rundown shed that had once been used as a chicken coop, all farm amenities consisted of potential. It is seven acres, with a spring-fed lake, and zoned agricultural, wedged between the Platte River and I-76.

Lying west, past the Platte, on the horizon, is Longs Peak, one of Colorado’s Fourteeners. On the east side is an upslope, giving our land topography and rendering the highway irrelevant. To our north and south are two families that keep horses, which we see more I was perplexed.

How elaborate frequently than their owners.

My wife and I had been looking for a system would suitable property for three years. Pam and I I need to grow were looking for rural property for different a little lettuce reasons. She wanted to be free of immediate neighbors and carefree of what she wore, or and a few didn’t wear, around the house. I wanted to tomatoes? develop a holistic, self-sustainable farm.

While images of an orchard and grape arbor intermingled with vegetables and livestock filled my head, reality forced me to think of how to protect plants and animals from plundering fox, deer, raccoon, skunk, owl, rabbit, and eagle. Early in the first season, I learned that much of my time would be spent fencing plants and animals, trying to keep some things in and other things out.

One of my first projects was to construct garden terraces on the steep eastern hillside. I went for the Mediterranean look—rock retaining walls, with grapes overflowing terraced cliffs, rising from sea to plateau above—minus the sea, the bluffs, or the grapes.

At some earlier time, truckloads of dirt and rock had been dumped in the field between the house and the lake. With a pickaxe, I dug through the piles, pulling out rocks of the right size and shape. The first season I built four terraces, laying up the stone dry and backfilling with topsoil. In two of the terraces, I planted 37

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raspberry bushes, acquired from a friend who was moving. In another I planted rhubarb. I sowed hollyhocks in the last, just because I like them and wanted some color.

As spring advanced, I checked on the new growth every few days. One day, I had to question my memory. I thought that the young hollyhocks were further along than they looked. I looked a little closer. New shoots were bitten off. Rabbits? Deer?

I erected a fence around the hollyhock using a roll of chicken wire and T-posts.

That solved the problem, but then I After about noticed that the rhubarb looked bothered.

I was beginning to learn the sequential 20 hours, the food choices of my vegetarian predators. I job was done. decided to put up one fence that included I slept well. all the terraces. After that, the rest of the growing season was uneventful in terms of For one night. munching attacks.

The following year, I built five more terraces and added blueberries, strawberries, cherries, and another patch of rhubarb. Once again I reconfigured the fencing to include all nine terraces.

Trees are a big contributor to any homestead, adding diversity, shade, safe haven, cooler temperatures, and beauty. Along with all my other duties, I planted evergreens along the crest of the hill, bamboo along the southern property line, and a variety of deciduous shade trees in the lawn.

Beside the driveway, down where it joins the road, a young loblolly pine I’d set out was having a hard time fending off the elements, including what I first thought were rude and careless drivers. Every so often I noticed that a small branch was broken and the trunk of the baby pine was scraped. I thought that one of the frequent drivers who weren’t sure where they were going turned around in our driveway and carelessly backed into the tree.

I held this belief until one morning, while preparing breakfast, I spotted a young buck rubbing its antlers against the little pine.

Instantly, I apologized to the unknown driver in my head—and knew what I needed to do. With four T-posts and more chicken wire, I gave the pine tree its own private space. It is now on my 38

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two-page-long checklist of things that need seasonal attention. I mulch it twice a year and water it when needed. In response, the pine has nearly doubled in height and now displays dark green clusters on each branch, ready for spring growth.

Much of Colorado is high prairie, including Denver, sitting at the eastern foot of the Rockies. The ground is sandy and with little topsoil. I decided to build raised beds with improved topsoil for vegetables. And now, wiser to the ways of my animal friends, I knew that the beds would need to be enclosed.

A similar scenario was unfolding with the animals that I wanted to raise. I was busy wrestling with rolls of chicken wire for the coop when Dan drove up. I had recently met him at a beekeeping workshop.

“Raccoons will climb that cottonwood tree,” he said. “Then they’ll go out on that limb, and drop into the yard. You also want to be sure the wire is buried. Skunks and fox will dig right under a fence if it’s not buried.”

Who was I to doubt him? Dan is a hunter and a fisherman and knows lots about wild animals. He doesn’t just hunt. He hunts with a bow and arrow. He hunts with a muzzle-loading musket.

He hunts with a rifle. He does this each year—in two states. It was easy to believe him when he said that he didn’t buy meat in stores. I was just enclosing the chicken coop and yard with chicken wire to keep predators out. But I was proud of my handiwork and crestfallen when my friend informed me that I wasn’t half done with the real job at hand.

A few days later, another friend, a park ranger, dropped by as I was enclosing the newly constructed raised beds with sections of six-foot-high, chain-linked fencing to keep out the deer. Matter of factly she said, “Deer can clear eight feet.”

What kind of super athletes are these animals? Did I really have to consider the jumping, climbing, rappelling, and swooping ability of all predators?

I was perplexed. How elaborate a system would I need to grow a little lettuce and a few tomatoes? To have a few chickens? I felt as though I had to defend my stock and garden from über-animals taught escape and evasion tactics at the Marines’ training camp.

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Evidently, these animals were able to do many things to breach my maximum security compound, which up until this moment had been known as a family farm.

I was beginning to wonder if growing my own food was even possible. I began restoring the chicken yard by raising the wiring to the same height on all sides—about nine feet. With fresh rolls of chicken wire and a stepladder, I began sewing strips of wire across the top, going the full distance from one side to the other.

The task was tedious.

As I struggled with the sewing, my mind drifted to the objective of what I was trying to do—to protect a few plants and animals within my own property borders, to lay claim against nature for a particular meal. While it may seem trivial, it’s a serious matter, at least for my competitors. If I fail, I go to the grocery store. If I succeed, some animal must work harder for its next meal, which means it must get more aggressive and craftier to survive. More determined, more feral predators are now eyeing my meals.

After about twenty hours, the job was done. I slept well, knowing my chickens were safe from land, sea, and air attack.

For one night.

What to my wondering eyes should appear at dawn but ten inches of wickedly heavy, wet April snow in one of those freak spring Rockies snowstorms. I looked out the window to see my new chicken wire cage all caved in: The wet snow had clumped and stuck to the netting. It even bent inward the inch-and-a-quarter metal posts that supported the mesh. In many places, my barrier was down to half its original height. My wife and I went around with brooms whacking at the overhead snowdrifts, covering ourselves with icy snow in the process. I would have to build another structure made of 2x4s inside the existing cage to support the chicken wire throughout the yard. I felt like I was enacting some modern-day version of “The Three Little Pigs.” Mother Nature had huffed and puffed and blown my house down. But, hey, it was nothing another thirty hours couldn’t fix.

I did. I now have this lovely, maximum security compound.

Nothing gets in or out without my permission.

Unless I forget to latch the gate. ❖ 40

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If I see dirt, I just have to put a flower in it.

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Meaningless Meanderings Or were they? By Julie V. Foley My eyes were barely open as I sipped my first cup of coffee. Mmmmm, breathe. Again. Mmmmm, breathe. Again. Mmmmm . . .

As soon as my brain circuits reconnected, I began planning my day. I am a list maker. The List is usually way too long. I rarely stop during the day because of The List. And I beat myself up mentally if I don’t accomplish everything on it.

The List for today: 1. Start the laundry (how can two people have so much?).

2. Try to balance the checkbook (again!).

3. Write my friend Pearl a letter.

4. Hang the wash.

5. Prune the winter kill off of the lilacs.

6. Start the sauce for pasta.

7. Check on the plant order.

8. Email the Master Gardeners a meeting reminder.

9. Take out the trash and pick up the mail at the post office.

10. Add to The List as I think of more to do.

Today was March 30. We had just come through the winter that broke the one-hundred-year record for cold and snow here in Pennsylvania. We still had patches of deep snow on the ground, despite a few mild days. Mild? Ordinarily, I wouldn’t call 25° temperatures mild, but in this year, yeah, mild.

While my mind pondered The List, my eyes scanned the woods outside our patio doors—and noticed a slow-moving animal. As it came closer, I recognized it: a possum. I have seen possums before here, and they have always fascinated me. Curious little mammals, usually nocturnal, they are the only marsupials in North America. We even caught one once in our Hav-a-Hart trap 43

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when we were after the Plant Terminator, Phil the groundhog.

I watched the possum as he sniffed the ground and followed the scent of something, moving in an irregular pattern. He went behind the garage and came out just beyond the patio, coming closer and closer to the doors. He stopped about five feet away.

His homely little face looked up at me, his pink nose and ears twitching. His hairless pink feet must have been freezing on the cold pavers, I thought. I could see raccoon-like markings around his eyes.

I wondered if his scraggly fur was as bristly as it looked, or would it be soft if I touched it.

Again he started meandering, towards a nearby tree—and began climbing it. I didn’t know that possums could climb!

The trees on our little Pocono mountaintop are skinny, having been clear-cut 40 years ago when this was a blueberry farm.

The wind kicked up, but the possum climbed higher and higher.

The branches were getting thin, and I was sure they would break.

But no, they held, and he went almost out to the end of a branch, balancing his round body with his tail curled around the limb.

The tree swayed in the breeze, but he held on. What could he be thinking? Do possums even think?

Eventually, he turned and went back down the trunk. When he reached the ground, he started sniffing again in an irregular, zig-zag pattern, until he left my line of sight.

What did that curious creature accomplish on his seemingly meaningless journey? I’ll tell you, he did something that most human beings can’t do. He got me to stop, watch, and ponder, without rushing off to start The List. ❖ 44

ILLUSTRATIONS BY P. SAVAGE

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Getting Better

had the Zoloft. I needed to take it. But I was just standing in my kitchen, staring out the back door at my garden—looking at it but not really seeing it. How could this pill be strong enough to pull me out of this hole I couldn’t get out of on my own? This tiny pill, I thought, was stronger than I was.

I wanted to take it. But I also hated to take it and admit I had a problem that I couldn’t fix on my own. Taking the pills could save me; I wanted them to save me. But at the same time, it would mean admitting, finally, completely, that I needed them to be myself.

To be who I used to be, if I could even be that person anymore.

A person who got dressed, and worked in the yard, and looked forward to spring and planting seeds.

Following my nurse Lynn’s carefully written instructions, I positioned one small I looked at him pill on a paper towel, then found my tiniest, in astonishment. sharpest knife and quartered the pill, sending some dust specks falling. I held one quarter I felt like in my palm, barely able to feel it. It was about I hadn’t seen the size of a single Nerd candy. I put it on my tongue, and sipped some juice—I couldn’t him in a long even tell if I’d swallowed it. I stood in my time. kitchen, listening to my son Henry drink his own juice in the high chair, watching me and kicking his feet. I didn’t want to move just yet. Stupidly, I waited for something to happen. I knew it would take a couple of weeks to feel any effects.

I knew this dosage probably wouldn’t even do anything.

Henry knocked over his juice and started crying. I got a dish 46

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HEATHER GRAHAM

Coming back to gardening—and mothering.

By Kate Abbott

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towel and went over to sop it up. He flipped his spoon out of his mashed sweet potatoes, sending them flying onto the floor, the walls, and me. I looked at myself, at the whole situation, and wanted to cry. They weren’t working yet; they weren’t going to cure me today. This was another day I wouldn’t be going outside.

I took my carefully quartered pills for eight days with no effects—bad or good. Every morning I thought, Maybe today will be the day it will all change. The day that I will change. But I didn’t feel better. Then I noticed I was able to take a shower a couple of days in a row and even get dressed. Was it working? While I wanted to be skeptical and not get suckered into some placebo effect, I was feeling better. And when I could be with my son and not feel utterly exhausted or angry or sad, I didn’t care if this was a placebo effect or not. I just cared that I was starting to feel better. By now I was taking one whole pill a day.

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hen one morning, I woke up and thought that it looked like a nice day outside. Maybe Henry and I would go in our little backyard and look around at our plants.

We hadn’t been out there in so long. I wandered over to the window at the back door—and it was like I was looking at someone else’s yard. The patio we’d built had weeds taller than Henry growing up through every space between the paver stones.

The plants I’d collected over the years looked dry and dead, even though it was spring.

How had this happened so fast? I thought. And then it hit me: It hadn’t happened fast at all. The weeds had been slowly growing since the summer. My plants had been dying since the summer.

For eight months. I’d hardly looked at them.

I scooped up Henry, both of us in our pajamas. Henry giggled on my lap, and I actually giggled back at him, grinning at his smile, at his gums and his two perfect little white teeth. I looked at him in astonishment. I felt like I hadn’t seen him in a long time.

“Where have you been?” I said. He blinked at me.

“Mom-om-om,” he said. “Mom” had been his first word, a couple of months ago. I had felt unworthy then.

“Yes, I’m your Mom-om-om.” I bounced him. I saw him, like I saw my plants. He was a baby, but almost not. He had a full head of blonde hair now and it was getting long. He was chewing with his sharp little teeth and his hard gums. I could see him.

That’s when I knew I was getting better. I could see him and the plants and the weeds and the sunny day outside. I saw my pajamas, not matching, but also not what I would be wearing all day anymore, either. I realized that each day that week, I’d been having longer “good” times. Today, maybe the good times would even be longer than the bad times.

We went out to water plants. I cared about my poor, neglected plants and my poor, unseen baby and my sad attempts at motherhood. I wanted to dig up dead things and pull old weeds and plant new seeds. I wanted to start everything over again. And even if it was just pulling weeds, I hadn’t wanted to do much of anything in a long time. Starting with the weeds was just fine with me.

Henry and I both couldn’t wait to get our hands dirty. ❖ 48

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The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure!

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Last issue, in GP #100, I was fortunate enough to uncover and share a hysterically funny Mark Twain agricultural stor story. That, I admit, was a coup: No one I know had ever heard of the piece before!

This time I have a wonderful tale by the man who could quite rightly be called the Mark T Twain of today. Lady and Gentleman Gardeners, for f your 25th Anniversary Year reading pleasure, let me present . . .

Seeds

A tale of sprouts and sales from the public radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion.”

By Garrison Keillor ❖

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY MATT COLLINS

t has been a quiet week in Lake Woebegon. It was cloudy most of the week, and a cold wind blew in off the lake and picked up some dust off the street and blew it right in your face. You walk around in dim light carrying ten pounds of wool and look down a cold gray street lined with miserable yards and taste dust in your mouth and then get some dirt in your eyes, it brings your life to a halt. You’ve got to find your mother, your teacher, Sister Arvonne, to wipe your eyes, but you can barely see, standing helpless, weeping, cold; it’s no wonder at that moment you think, “Albuquerque. Why didn’t I think of Albuquerque? Why didn’t my parents think about Albuquerque before I was born? I’d be a native Albuquerquian, There comes or Albuquerquer.” It never gets cold and you don’t grow old because you just stay young a point where lying in the sun, oh the sky is never murky you have to in Albuquerque. stand up to Do Albuquerquians ever long for Minnesota? I imagine they do. I imagine they would reality and envy us even more than they do if they knew deny it. more about us. I imagine that atheists like it fine in Albuquerque, but the ones who know God and talk to God have asked God, “God, what is your country?” And God told them, “Well, I don’t like to single out one place over another, because of course there are good people everywhere, but if I had to pick one place, based on what I know, which is everything, I guess I’d have to say Minnesota.” Those Albuquerquians (and God knows there must be a few of them) must want to live here in the worst way. And March is a month when you can do that.

It was a quiet week. Josh, a salesman for Inspirational Systems, visited Pastor Ingqvist’s tiny office in the Lutheran annex on Wednesday, selling a worship program for Advent called “Actualizing the Child in Ourselves.” Bud took the snowplow off the truck Wednesday evening, being tired of driving around with it banging up and down. He said, “It’s sure to snow now, but it’ll just have to melt, I am through thinking about it.”

My attitude exactly. I put away my parka in April and put on a jacket. If it turns cold, that’s not my problem, I refuse to accept 51

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winter anymore. If we get a blizzard, let someone else worry about it. I won’t. There comes a point where you have to stand up to reality and deny it. Rain, rain, go away, come again another day.

O-U-T spells Out. When I got fed up with weeding the garden, I’d look at the weeds and say, “That’s not weeds. I say that’s spinach, and I say let it stay where it is.”

When Ruthie had her baby out of wedlock (actually not “out” of wedlock, just not All the seeds he quite far enough into wedlock, about six and a half months), as the wedding approached spilled in there people said, “Oh, I don’t think she’s heavier. will blossom She always was big-boned, you know.” As if into a little we had bones in our bellies. When the baby forest of flowers came, people fussed over it and said, “My, I can’t believe how big it is.” At 8 pounds, 4 on wheels. ounces, it was the most gigantic baby ever born two and a half months premature.

Down the block, at the Feed ‘N Seed, Harold has set up the old wooden bins to put seed packets in that’ve arrived from the Milton Seed Co. in Northrup, South Dakota. Big corn and bean packets, plain yellow envelopes, and this year he’s ordered more of the packets with color pictures on them and is even hanging up green and yellow crêpe paper that the Milton salesman gave him and signs saying “Festival of Gardens” and “Top Quality, Best Value.” The salesman, Ritche, says this could almost double seed sales, he’s seen it happen. He says to Harold, “You got to build excitement, make a visual appeal to the passers-by and your walk-ins, you got to make them think seeds the minute they come through the door. Did you know that one-third of all seed sales is pure impulse? People walk in—BAM—they gotta have some seeds right now!” Mass displays, more color, and these new seed packets with the Scratch ‘N Sniff pictures: They were a big hit in the test market last year.

But seeds are all the Feed ‘N Seed sells—that and feeds—so if you weren’t already thinking seeds you probably wouldn’t come in unless it was to hang around with Harold and talk about the basketball tournament. Anoka won, and Harold won $24 when 52

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they did. It’s spring itself that builds excitement and makes a visual appeal for the passer-by, and if prospects of spring don’t excite you, probably crêpe paper won’t have a big effect. But Ritche believes this is going to be it, the big year, the great garden boom, when Milton triples tomato-seed sales—big growth in the carrot-and-beet sector, cucumbers up this year, beans, pole beans way up, gross national kohlrabi, eggplant, everything up this year. Ritche is 25.

Already he is one of Milton’s best. Richard is his name but he uses Ritche because it gets noticed. People see it, they remember you, name recognition is important in sales.

He lives in Marshall: He and Cindy bought a townhouse on the edge of town; they are expecting a baby in July, and he believes that in seed sales and in his own life, things are starting to turn around. Driving on to the next call, 10, 20, 30 miles away, he gets excited when he sees the town, its big grain elevator on the horizon.

He says, “Come on. Let’s go. Let’s go, big team. Let’s go, sales!” He’s on the road for Milton six days a week, crisscrossing the district in his ‘78 rambler wagon. It’s full of crêpe paper, Styrofoam cups, and burger cartons. The carpet is ripped and the floorboards are mulched with dirt from a hundred little towns. Old seed samples take root there. The rambler has almost a quartermillion miles on it, and soon it’ll go to a junkyard and sit.

Corn and beans will grow up in it and muskmelon vines come out of the seats. All the seeds he spilled in there will blossom into a little forest of flowers on wheels, vines trailing out of it. The plants will reproduce for years. All the old seed salesman’s cars become pots for plants. And the most luxurious ones grow on the seat where he sat. It’s all waiting for spring to happen. ❖ From Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Woebegon Stories by Garrison Keillor.

Copyright © 1987 by Garrison Keillor. Reprinted with permission of Viking Penguin, Inc., 40 W. 23rd St., New York, NY, 10010.

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Wishing Flowers

bought two flats of ice plant today. Ice plant was a sensible choice. Extremely drought- and salt-tolerant, it thrives in the poorest soil, forming a ground-hugging mat of succulent foliage covered with fringed flowers.

It even naturalizes here in arid Southern California.

The colors I chose, however, were not sensible. The first flat was red, a nearly incandescent red. The red isn’t zinnia red or strawberry red—it’s the red of dying embers, the red of ominous sunrises and lovers’ hearts laid bare.

And that wasn’t enough. I wanted more. So I bought a second flat: a mixture of magenta, fuchsia, and bubblegum. The pink flowers are nearly pornographic. They prompt you to don sunglasses. They beg you to stare, She laughs at while implying you should look away. my inanity and I love these colors, though they do not make sense. I am planting them on a neglected, helps me plant erosion-prone slope in my suburban front yard our yard in the that is currently covered in vinca. Subdued brightest colors: vinca, with its small green leaves and purple Scandalous Red flowers so delicate they’re nearly Victorian.

I should not be drawing attention to the and Kiss Me slope. I should not plant anything this bright Pink. anywhere in the front yard, but opt for subtler colors. Colors that complement. Colors that submit.

But I have always had a tendency to avoid convention in favor of flash and whimsy. When I was a child, my mother bought me clothes in navy and rust, gray and wine. A-line plaid wool skirts (with slips!) and Pilgrim-collared blouses. I detested them.

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I—and my daughter—like color. Lots of color.

By Erica Myers-Russo

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I wanted to dress like a flamenco dancer. She gave me my first bits of make up—pale peach blush in taupe lipstick. Who has taupe lips? I wondered. I secreted my allowance away until I could buy electric blue eyeliner and emerald eyeshadow, lipsticks in Scandalous Red and Kiss Me Pink.

Poor choices, all of them, but I wanted my lips to be lip-colored but better. What was the point of wasting time with makeup or wardrobe in neutral? I wanted color, riots of color. I wanted my Midwestern life to look like a tropical reef or a ballet folklorico.

My mother would sigh and hold up other girls as examples: “See how Heather wears her make up? It’s so tasteful. And Melissa always looks so nice. So tailored.”

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est thing to gaudy is their jasmine, the chaste, white-star flowers wafting their philandering scent the entire length of the street.

I love the fragrance, and I will probably plant some jasmine as well—just because I can. But I will put it on the backside of the bougainvillea trellis, where its tendrils can climb among the bougainvillea’s gaudy vermillion bracts.

I want my Southern California yard to look like Southern California but better. I scoff at the Tudor-style homes, the landscaping meant to disguise this area as something it is not—verdant and receptive to suburbs and golf courses and manicured lawns.

So I plant my two flats of ice plant. I do have at least one person’s approval: my six-year-old daughter. She is dressed for the occasion, and takes extra pains to avoid trampling the hem of her big-sky-blue taffeta dress in the dirt. A streamer of tulle crinoline, torn from some previous adventure, flutters behind her in the breeze. She wears purple-flowered shorts beneath—a practical concession “so the neighbors won’t see my undies,” which (trendsetter that she is) has become all the rage among the kindergarten girls at her school.

As the sun rises, she abandons her party-colored cardigan, but the bunny-eared headband stays on.

“Pull that weed, honey,” I say, pointing with my trowel. She follows my gesture and gasps.

“That’s not a weed, Mom! That’s the plant that makes the pretty yellow flowers. The ones that turn into wishing flowers!”

From foliage alone, she has identified her favorite flower. I am impressed.

I study her earnest and dirt-smudged face, aghast at my mistake.

I realize she is offering me a bit of grace: I can claim ignorance.

I study my neighbors’ yards, putting-green uniform and devoid of wishing flowers. She nudges her toe in front of the weed, as if to hide it from my gaze.

“Oh,” I say, as if that explains everything, “I had no idea.

Definitely leave it then.”

She relaxes, laughs at my inanity, and helps me plant our yard in the brightest colors: Scandalous Red and Kiss Me Pink.

And Dandelion Yellow. ❖ 56

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A Christmas Carol?

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he first spirit to appear had a skirt so wide it had to leave the room to change its mind. “I remember you,” I said. “You’re the ‘Christmas tree’ I cleverly planned out many Christmaseseseses ago! You were the top of a giant spruce that was a month shy of growing into the power lines, and I convinced the electric company’s tree-cutting guy to take the top eight feet off and drop it down as gently as possible so we could use it as our Christmas tree that year!”

The tree spoke. “Remember when you brought me into the house?”

“Yes! You big dummy! You were so wide your branches were knocking things off the countertops in other rooms!”

“I was, admittedly {cough}, a little . . . eh, “husky.” Really sorry about your wife’s 1950 Tinkerbell statue from Germany, by the way.

“Get your wife ever get . . . ” a Christmas tree, Did“you . . . the wings glued back on? Nooooo; you old Scrooge! thank you very much, Butterbranches! And you weren’t “husky,” you were eight by Goodbye!” eight! You weren’t a ‘tree’! You were a squareshaped giant green box of doom!”

“You should be thanking me. Your counters were so cluttered back then you would have been featured on an episode of “Hoarders” by Easter. And YOU’RE the one who brought me into the house without measuring me first. Were you ever able to . . . ” “ . . . fix that door frame? Noooo; thank you very much, Mr. Prunus Maximus!”

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SO botanically ignorant! You couldn’t find your Ranunculus with both hands in a brightly lit room . . . “ “I bet I can find my bow saw with both hands in a dimly lit shed, Widus ridus—”

“Now, now; no need to get nasty. Besides, you can’t saw me!

I’m a spirit—the first of three who will visit you this night . . . ” “Only three? I remember one night back in college where . . . ” “Shush! You want me to rattle my chains and wake up your wife? That’s why I’m here—because you’ve turned into a big old grouch and you’re being mean to her! Christmas is a week away, her children are grown and out of the house, you decorate less and less each year . . .”

“Not true! Look out by the mailbox; it’s Macy‘s window out there!”

“Macy’s in May, maybe. You call THAT a holiday display?

Three plastic yard-sale candles with light bulbs inside their flames and six LED stars that are still out there from last Christmas?”

“I turned them off after the Epiphany.”

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you up tonight!”

“Oh, I generally get up anyway right around now, especially tonight, since a friend brought over a growler of really hoppy beer for dinner.”

“You mean with dinner . . . ” “Yeah, sure. Anyway . . . ” “Get back in bed! GetyourwifeaChristmastreeyouoldScroogeGoodbye!” {POOF} My Sainted Wife awakes. “Honey? Who were you talking to?

And why does it smell like a pine tree in here?”

“You’re dreaming. And I farted.”

“I AM NOT A PINE!” “OK—now what was that?”

“I farted again?”

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n hour later . . .

“Remember ME?” “Yeah—you were the really live tree; the one we bought balled and burlapped our first year in the house—before we realized what a root ball weighed!”

“Oh, stop complaining; you had three friends to help you get me in the ground. Sorry about that one guy’s fingers . . . ” “What? It was hard work, but nobody got hurt.”

“Then what was that blood-curdling scream when you finally dropped my root ball into the hole?”

“Ha! That was Steve Heacock. He spilled his beer.”

“Yes, the first tree told me you have a drinking problem . . . ” “I do not. And you’re lucky I already recycled dinner or I’d boil you in your own Christmas pudding like the first tree!”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know. But Ebenezer Scrooge said it, and I want to, too.”

“Speaking of that, you’re getting away with murder already —a story about Christmas trees in the Spring issue? I mean, really!

Have you no shame?”

“No. But that’s Pat’s problem, not yours. Now—are you here to critique my Christmas lights, too?”

“No—although one of the candles IS out.”

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“If it’s the one in the middle, it’s a design element. It’s, you know, evoking the ‘sense’ of a third candle . . . ” “Oh, stop. Now: Your wife loves Christmas, and you didn’t have a tree in the house last year . . .”

“I had a complete tear of my rotator cuff last November! I couldn’t lift a tree! I could barely lift . . . a . . . a . . . ” “You were going to say a ‘drinking glass,’ weren’t you?”

“Look, I recently learned the magical secret to getting you cursed conifers to vanish, so . . . ” “Get her a tree, Scrooge!” {POOF}

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he third spirit to appear could not speak. It just dropped needles all over the floor and glared at me. Then I realized!

“You’re the tree with the really fat trunk that I trimmed all the bark off of to fit into our stand! Man, that must have been 30 years ago and we still step on your needles . . . ” “Mmmrrrfff!”

“Yeah, sorry. Hey—wait a minute. This is how you’re going to convince me to get a tree this year? Merry memories triggered by visitations from the Failures Three? The only bad thing that hasn’t happened to us yet at this time of year is a Christmas tree house fire! You want me to go for the Hat Trick?”

“Mmmrrrfff!” {POOF}

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ut I knew they were right; it wasn’t very Christmasey in the house without a tree—again. But my shoulder still hurt. And I wasn’t supposed to lift anything heavy until at least next June.

But Kathy loves Christmas, and . . . and . . .

Oh, no—they did it! I been Scrooged! Oh, bitter day . . .

So I go down to my friend’s garden center, which is now cluttered with ornaments, lights, giant inflatable Homer Simpson Santas—and trees. Maybe I can find a small tree and get them to cut it in half. I could probably handle the top couple of feet (as long as my surgeons didn’t see me; then I’d be the one to get handled).

It would look pretty cool up on the island in the kitchen . . . . . . and then I am stopped cold in my tracks. There in the 61

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middle are the typical cut trees leaning against those wooden pyramids that you only see at Christmas time, but all the way in the back are six pigmy trees, each hanging down from a beam on a rope, their cut wooden butts swaying in the wind. My friend, Tom, who owns the place, sees me and walks over.

I’m as close to speechless as it gets for me, but I am finally able to point to the trussed-up Tannenbaums. “Were they bad?”

“Ha! No,” he says. “Those are our ‘table-top’ trees. Every year, more and more people ask us for small trees that they can put on a counter or table. So this year, we took the ones with the best tops, cut them in half, and pruned back the sides so they’d be compact all around. We use the bottom parts to make wreaths.

You want one?”

“Yes—this perfect one right here.”

He yells to his helper: “Hey Charlie! Cut ‘er down! Hey—wait a minute,” he says, suddenly eyeing me. “Are you allowed to be lugging trees around?”

“Er, yes,” I lied. Then I remembered that I had to hire Tom that Spring to set up a batch of half-whiskey barrels on my patio (to replace my previous containers, which got accidentally back-hoed to the snow dump during the Polar Vortex) while I pretended to smile. He knew; he had seen me in full-blown, just-after-surgery, right arm (and other body parts) in-a-sling mode, back when a cough felt like a car accident. “I’m good,” I lied again.

So he drove it home for me and we (he) cut off the bottom branches to make it the PERFECT size—and to provide me with greens to decorate those half-barrels. Heck, I even replaced the light bulb in the one candle.

Take THAT THAT, Dickens!

Kathy came home from work later that day, dragging as we can only drag the drag of those who are already exhausted and it’s only the week before Christmas . . . and she smelled it before she saw it.

Then she saw it. Then she cried.

Good job, trees. ❖ 62

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C U T T I N G S The Rhodora

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

The purple petals, fallen in the pool, Made the black water with their beauty gay; Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, And court the flower that cheapens his array.

Rhodora! If the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being: Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask, I never knew: But, in my simple ignorance, suppose The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

—By Ralph Waldo Emerson. Sent in by Janet Parkerson of Asheville, NC. 63

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My Tulip Turnaround

n a cold day in February, not so long ago, my daughter nudged me in the grocery store and pointed her gloved fingers at the profusion of color brightening up an otherwise quiet corner stocked with root vegetables and canned soup.

“Look, Mom, tulips!” she cried. My face instinctively broke into a smile as I grabbed one of the cellophane-wrapped bunches and lovingly placed it in my cart.

Tulips! She knows my weakness for this particular flower.

Strong stems, strappy leaves, waxy petals, brilliant, glossy color.

My favorite cut flower bar none. However, there was a time when I did not embrace these fleeting, aristocratic blooms—and for good reason. In the garden, Tulipa gesneriana moved in the upper echelons of the bulb world, maintaining a strong sense of superiority over her spring cousins. Not content to naturalize or bloom annually like the lowly crocus or humble daffodil, she required much more from the “’Ere luv,” beleaguered gardener—and I wasn’t willing to provide it. she barked, and For the most part, a tulip left in place thrust an extra returns weaker in subsequent years, until large bunch of nothing remains but a slip of strappy leaf, a purple and white nuisance growth to be dug and discarded.

Given a choice, I’d have taken a daffodil tulips at me. any day over the bulb world’s version of a temperamental poet dying slowing and romantically from consumption—handsome, admittedly; sexy, certainly—but way too much work. As cut flowers, I found them difficult. They often sported more foliage than flowers. They had an irritating way of flopping over after a few days, dropping their petals one by one 64

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What changed my mind. By Marianne Willburn

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on the wide planks of my kitchen table. “Give me a spray of lilies,” said I, “a pert little gerbera—a resilient head of hydrangea!”

In short, I was not a tulip lover. hen, things changed—quite literally overnight. It was seven o’clock on the Friday evening before Easter weekend, many years ago. I was walking to my train station on grey London streets, the promise of a long weekend in front of me. At the corner of an alleyway just before the station entrance, a flower-seller was packing up her stand. She motioned for me to come closer to the half-empty white buckets and vacant green benches.

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“’Ere luv,” she barked in a sharp Cockney voice, and thrust an extra large bunch of purple and white tulips at me.

I shook my head slightly and replied quite truthfully, “I haven’t any cash, sorry.”

She shook her head in return. “No, luv, I mean take ’em—I’m closin’ up.”

I stammered again about not having any cash to give her, but she shook her head decisively, wrapped the flowers in white, wax-lined paper, and put them in my hands. “’Appy Easter to yer!” she called as I turned the corner, bewildered, and made my way towards a train to take me home, grasping a large bouquet of Peace on Earth in my gloved hands.

Perhaps you are not surprised by this gesture, but then perhaps you have never lived in a country where you had to pay 10p for a packet of ketchup to go with your McDonald’s hamburger.

To be given an expensive bunch of flowers by a total stranger was extraordinary, trust me. Those lovely messengers of goodwill sat quietly on my table for the next week, encouraging me with each glance to be kinder to others, and in unexpected ways. Forever after, I have considered the tulip worthy of my time and effort. nd so now I buy tulips. More importantly, I grow tulips.

I consider them annuals in my garden, and when they do come back the next year I am pleasantly surprised.

When the foliage-to-flower ratio starts to climb, I dig them, and as I don’t have room to send them to the equivalent of a clinic in Switzerland, I give them to someone who does. Furthermore, putting a few species tulips in over the last few years has enhanced my love affair, allowing me delicate blooms year after year without any further nursing on my part.

I am notoriously terrible at cutting flowers from my garden to bring indoors, but with my tulips I make an exception. A vase of tulips sitting on my kitchen table is a simple, beautiful symbol of human nature at its best—a reminder to cut a few stems for a friend, or even to give a bouquet to a complete stranger. For who can foresee the traditions established in the life of another human being through a random act of kindness? ❖ 66

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Bush Hogs, Berries, God A nun finds a connection between blueberries and her life. By Sr. Elizabeth Wagner ❖

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e feast this day the death of death,” we chant as the tractor chugs down the driveway. We are beginning Lauds of Easter Saturday, the seventh day of the Octave dedicated to celebrating Easter joy. I finish the hymn, but then must leave the chapel to speak with the driver. The bush hog has arrived.

He came early, Tom explains, to finish before it rains. I hadn’t heard about rain, but I don’t care. He and his bush hog have a date with our overgrown blueberry field—the next step in our project of bringing it back into production.

Tom unloads his bush hog and prepares for work. I walk the field with him, explaining that I want as much cleared as possible, especially the I sense a juniper. We have an abundance of juniper, that creeping evergreen shrub with the prickly kinship with needles. It thrives in poor, rocky soil, the same the blueberries. type of soil that the blueberries like, but it’s a This is their big bully of a plant, crowding them out and starving them of soil and sun. Today, however, niche. This place it has met its match in the bush hog. is my niche, too.

Tom starts the tractor and the bush hog moves noisily down the hill and onto the field. Chips, needles, and long shreds of trunks spew out behind it. I remain safely uphill, well away from the melee. The sound and sight are most satisfactory; I’ve had it in for that juniper ever since I first saw it.

This might seem a bit strange—perhaps it really is a bit strange. The blueberries bring out all my protective instincts.

For one thing, they’re tiny, only about 6 to 8 inches tall. These are wild berries, not the cultivated highbush kind. They are tiny, with tiny berries, but oh, so delicious! They’re also hard to pick—it’s necessary to bend over constantly and use a tined instrument, a combination rake, comb, and bucket. Blueberries don’t make you rich, either, as the price isn’t all that high. And blueberry fields only produce every other year!

So why would we go through all this work to bring back the blueberry field? Certainly, clearing the field will help keep our view open for years to come, and we love our view of the distant hills. It opens us up to transcendence and leads us into prayer.

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Certainly, we hope we will at least break even on cost. A new community, we struggle financially.

Certainly, too, it will be attractive for our guesthouse and retreatants. Blueberry fields, called barrens here in Maine, are amazingly enchanting. They produce impressionistic swathes and drifts of subtle color, from deep to pale green, to gold, to rust and tan, and all over the cream of the tiny white blossoms. Just six inches high, they are interspersed here and there with the thrusting curlicue heads of new ferns, with young birch and poplar, and with knolls of rock outcrop. The overall effect is an invitation to prayer, a beautiful reflection of the God who created all beauty and is Beauty itself.

All of these are good reasons, important reasons. Yet I personally harbor another, secret reason. I sense a kinship with the blueberries, a subterranean identification.

They belong here. They just naturally want to grow here. This soil is right for them, the Like those climate is right for them, everything is right blueberries for them. All they need is a helping hand to get overwhelmed by back into the sunshine, and—varoom!—they will hurl themselves into new growth, throw the juniper, out underground runners, recapture territory I often felt long surrendered to the invading juniper and I’d go under. other shrubs and trees. They love it here. This is their niche.

This place is my niche, too, and the niche of any who dwell here, those who are called here to live a life of prayer and solitude, prayer and community. Our particular form of monastic life is called semi-eremitical, which means “half solitary.” Most monasteries are cenobitic, that is, they focus on prayer in community. A few are exclusively oriented to prayer in solitude. Fewer still foster a blend of both elements, prayer in solitude and in community. It’s a very unique blend, and it’s very difficult to get it right. Yet for those called to it, it’s vitally important. It’s our niche.

Finding our niche, our location in life, is sometimes easy, but sometimes extremely difficult. The more unique one’s calling, the longer it sometimes takes to discover it.

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Growing up as I did on a small farm in Connecticut, I already knew I was different from all the others in school. But I was way too different! I found it impossible to fit in. This wouldn’t have been so bad if I had another mold to fit into. But what mold? I wasn’t raised Catholic, or even religious.

I liked books and long solitary walks, not parties, sports, and surreptitious smoking in the school girls room. As I entered my senior year, I stumbled into a course on the intellectual history of Europe. The class had only eleven students—and was a revelation!

I wasn’t bored, I was challenged. It was an intellectual awakening for me, and something more.

The teacher was Catholic, an adult convert who taught as if ideas were important, as if they counted for something. His faith influenced him, and while he never proselytized, it was clear he had a sympathy for matters of faith and spirit. One day he offered me a book about a saint, a great contemplative saint, Theresa of Avilla. I was captivated, entranced, overwhelmed! My heart opened, and I knew my calling.

But there were some hurdles, such as not being Catholic, not thinking I actually believed in God, and not having any idea how to find a monastery. Not to mention that I was signed up to go off to college.

One B.A. later, I was still struggling, still on the roller-coaster ride between faith and no faith. I signed up for a seminary, foolishly thinking these issues could be decided by reason alone.

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and God reeled me in.

Even so, it’s been a long journey to find this niche. The journey has led me through an established monastery, through leaving it, through the trial and error of looking at other communities, and finally to a life of solitude here in Maine. It was always a struggle, a pioneer journey, or so it seemed. At times I thought there would never be a right place, that there wasn’t a place. At times I felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the world, and how different it is to have a calling to solitude and prayer. Like those blueberries overwhelmed by the juniper, I often felt it was impossible, and I’d go under. But now I understand that God provides what we need to live out our own unique call. God always upholds us on our journey when we are truly searching. Like Abraham, we journey in faith without a roadmap. Each one is called in a unique way, and each of us must respond.

Today I am again in a monastery, one in which we devote ourselves to prayer. We devote ourselves also to a life shared together in community, a life in which we try to give each other the necessary space for solitude and the transformation in God that can happen in solitude.

How comparatively easy it is to describe the outer journey.

Yet the inner journey, the road to deepening intimacy in God, is the heart which drives the outer. Transformation into the one we desire and an ever-expanding heart for others is the goal and the path and the signpost of this journey.

As with the blueberry field, this takes time. Slowly we shed the layers that keep us from this path, the major obstacles, the lesser encumbrances, and the tiny things that cloud our vision. This is the labor of resurrection, and it is hard work.

The blueberries are returned to sun and warmth. We return, ever so slowly, to the sunshine and warmth of God’s love and life.

The blueberries grow well here, but they need our helping hand.

We grow well here, too, with God’s help. Everyone grows well, when they are in the right soil, the right climate, the right space.

Everyone grows well when they’ve found their calling, their vocation, their niche. Everyone grows well, and bears fruit, abundant fruit, fruit that will last. ❖ 72

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Planting Potatoes

By Bonnie Townsend

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARILYNNE ROACH

I would be the first to tell you that I am not a gardener. A dairy farmer, yes.

But a gardener? No. Mom was always the gardener in the family.

Still, the second year after I bought my own home, I got the itch. I had Dad plow up a small section of lawn behind the house. Then I set to with gusto: In one day I planted my first rows of tomatoes, carrots, beans, and flowers.

Lastly, I got rid of the potatoes that had been sitting in the refrigerator crisper. They’d been in there so long that their long white vines snaked out the bottom of the door whenever I opened it too fast. Some of these stems were two feet long!

I carefully took all the potatoes out to the garden. Then I cut out the eyes—with a good section of potato each—and planted them in the rich dirt, staking up each stem. I had plenty of stakes and baler twine to tie the stems up.

Just as I was finishing up, Mom came over to inspect my garden.

“What are all those stakes for?” she asked.

I proudly showed off my great potato-stem staking job.

“Those aren’t stems. They’re runners. They need to buried!”

Oops.

So, painstakingly, I replanted all my potatoes, with their runners underground. The good news is that they grew very well. In the fall, I enjoyed my first batch of homegrown potatoes.

Once I dug them out of the ground.

What’s your worst gardening mistake? Send it to GREENPRINTS, Broken Trowel Award, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730. If we print it, you’ll get a free one-year subscription and our GREENPRINTS Companion CD! 73

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The Great Ladybug Escape On our carpet? By Robert F. Hever It all started with my noticing puckered, corrugated leaves on my river birch. It is still a young tree and susceptible to the ravages of critters and disease. At a local nursery, a young man immediately offered a diagnosis, a cure, and an analysis of the cost: “Aphids.

Buy ladybugs. Release them at 8:30 in the evening. They come 1500 to a container, and the container costs only $5.95. That’s 0.4 cents per ladybug, a real bargain!”

I invested the $5.95 as advised.

About 8:25 that evening, I decided to The lid popped remove the lid of the container to assure myself that the ladybugs were well and happy. off, and 1500 ladybugs began (My criterion for ladybug happiness? If they’re crawling all over each other, they’re to scatter. happy.)

As I walked slowly through our dining area toward the sliding glass door, I carefully wound the lid off. The ladybugs were doing their usual thing—crawling all over each other—so I assumed they were happy. As I set the lid back on, rather loosely I admit, I thought about the possibility that I might drop the open container on the carpet.

Within seconds, somehow, I had done just that.

The container landed on the carpet, the lid popped off, and 1500 ladybugs began to scatter. I was amazed to see that all of the ladybugs seemed to scurry along radial lines extending outward from the “drop zone.” As far as I could tell, not one ladybug doubled back, wandered aimlessly, or went in a circle. It was as though they were all implementing a well-rehearsed plan of action: “Head outward at top speed, and we may get away! It’s now or never! Move!”

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY HANNAH ENGLAND

their happiness were immediately dispelled; they were obviously ecstatic at being loose. I couldn’t believe how those teeny-tiny legs could propel the creatures so quickly. I understand that birds flying in a group tend to move toward the center, thereby keeping a tight formation. My ladybugs were—rapidly—doing the opposite.

I used both hands to sweep the furthest ladybugs back toward the center of the moving population. When I felt that I was gaining on them, I would scoop a handful back into the container.

Meanwhile, those outside the scooping area kept their little legs moving rapidly.

It took many sweeps to corral them all.

All? Not exactly. Even after I had released most of my catch into the birch tree, I was informed by my wife—ever vigilant in these matters—that there was yet another ladybug on the carpet, two on the draperies, one on the ceiling, and several on me. (I suspect that more than a few ladybugs became a part of our family.)

During the next two weeks, I turned my attention to newly arrived black spots on two of our roses and to powdery mildew on the lilac bush. When I remembered the river birch problem, I was pleased to see a happy tree, apparently without aphids and, surprisingly, without ladybugs. Well, the ladies had done a good job, and they deserved a vacation elsewhere.

I learned later that the aphids were probably Witch-Hazel Leaf Gall Aphids, and their descendants were likely to appear on my trees every spring. I could banish them with a spray of insecticide, but I’m rather partial to my now-proven method: Wait until the problem is serious, then unleash 1500 eager ladybugs.

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Are Plants Smart?

Well, are they? By Becky Rupp Think about this much and it’s a downright creepy question. I mean, consider what we do to plants. We prune them, mow them, cage them, tie them to poles and fences, pick parts of them and eat them, and uproot them and toss them on the compost pile.

We chop them up and burn them in the woodstove, hang things on them, and repeatedly stomp all over them, in spite of all those admonitory signs ordering us to Keep Off the Grass.

Then it turns out that plants might actually be . . . intelligent.

Botanist Daniel Chamovitz, in What a Plant Knows (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), writes ominously, “Plants see if you come near them; they know when you stand over them. They even know if 76

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY BLANCHE DERBY

you’re wearing a blue or a red shirt. They know if you’ve painted your house or if you’ve moved their pots from one side of the living room to the other.”

Urk. The plants are watching me. I haven’t been able to get this one out of my head. It’s the same sort of nervous-making feeling you get as a little kid when you find out that Santa sees you when you’re sleeping. Until now, I’d never viewed the vegetable patch as a lurking surveillance system.

The plant intelligence question, now hotly debated in botanical circles, isn’t as straightforward as it sounds—and revolves in large part around just what your definition of intelligence is.

Plants obviously can’t solve quadratic equations, write Hamlet, or compose Beethoven’s Ninth; they don’t exhibit the sort of creative abstract thought “Plants know that we equate with human intelligence. But for all that they seem to just sit there, they’re when you stand smarter than they look. over them.

Prime mover in the modern field of plant They even intelligence is botanist Anthony Trewavas know if you’re from the UK’s University of Edinburgh.

Trewavas defines intelligence as the ability to wearing a red sense the surrounding environment, analyze or blue shirt.” the results, and then, based on these, make decisions about how to behave. Plants, says Trewavas, have this ability in spades, but we tend not to notice it much since plants are generally slow responders. Anchored in place as they are, their most common response to input—sun, shade, water, rocks, other plants—is to change their growth pattern, which in the short term isn’t exactly exciting. There’s a reason that “like watching the grass grow” is a synonym for really, really boring.

Add time-lapse photography, however, and the plant world suddenly becomes a far more active and interactive place. Take, for example, the dodder vine. Dodder—a relative of the morning glory—is something none of us want in our gardens, since it lives by wrapping itself around other plants and sucking the life out of them. (Among its nicknames are devil’s ringlets, hellbine, 77

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strangleweed, and witch’s shoelaces.) Its murderous behavior, however, isn’t a matter of random snatch and grab. A young dodder seedling literally sniffs out its prey, analyzing the organic volatiles released by neighboring plants, and then heading for the tastiest and most tempting of the bunch—choosing, for example, tomatoes in preference to wheat. Once attached, it then performs some version of a cost-benefit calculation to determine how many times to wrap around its victim: the more nutritious the host plant, the more coils generated by the climbing dodder vine.

Experiments by Australian ecologist Monica Gagliano seem to indicate that plants They may not only modify their behavior based on cues at least talk from the environment, but actively learn and form long-term memories. Gagliano works to each other with Mimosa pudica, also known as the sensiabout us. tive plant or touch-me-not because it rapidly folds up its fern-like leaves if bumped, shaken, poked, landed upon by a bug, or approached with a lit match. In Gagliano’s lab, potted mimosas were dropped from a height of about six inches onto a foam pad—a harmless jolt that nonetheless caused the plants to nervously close their leaves. After repeated drops, however, the plants ceased to respond, having apparently analyzed the situation and determined that dropping wasn’t dangerous. They did, however, continue to close their leaves when shaken or poked.

Furthermore, over a month later, the plants still remembered their experience. While untrained plants clapped their leaves shut in response to a drop, the trained plants—knowing they were perfectly safe—stayed calmly open.

It makes you think, doesn’t it? Every year Randy and I go out, armed with clippers, and prune our grapevines. What if they remember us? And if they do, what if they hold a grudge?

Some indications are that they may at least talk to each other about us. Plants communicate with themselves, each other, and the outer world via a sophisticated battery of chemicals. Sagebrush, for example, when it feels crowded, produces a volatile chemical called methyl jasmonate that keeps other plants from growing underneath it. Tobacco plants, attacked by bacteria or viruses, 78

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produce compounds that warn neighboring tobacco plants of trouble, causing them to ramp up their defense mechanisms. Corn, tobacco, and cotton, beset by caterpillars, release a chemical cry for help that attracts caterpillar-destroying parasitic wasps.

According to forest ecologist Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia, forests are vast interconnected webs, welded together by an underground system of mycorrhizal fungi that connect tree root to tree root, allowing the trees to share information and exchange needed nutrients. “Mother trees” use the network to nourish at-risk seedlings; evergreens use it to provide spare sugars to struggling deciduous trees to tide them through the winter.

However smart they may be, though, plants don’t have brains.

(A group called the Society for Plant Neurobiology, repeatedly attacked by purists pointing out that plants don’t have neurons, recently caved and changed its name to the Society for Plant Signaling and Behavior.) The closest plants come to having anything brain-like may be a section of the root called the transition zone, located behind the root tip. The transition zone is electrically active—like human nerves—and it contains a hormone that regulates plant growth, which it ferries from cell to cell as needed in membrane-enclosed vesicles. It’s in the transition zone, scientists guess, that sensory cues picked up by the root tip—information about gravity, light, oxygen, water, and soil conditions—are translated into commands directing the root how to grow and bend.

Still, smart is as smart does. However bright plants may be, it’s clear that they don’t think like us. If anything, plants are an alien culture. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said, “If a lion could talk, we would not understand him,” because people and lions have no common ground. There’s even less between us and even the most vociferously communicating tomato plant, cucumber vine, or stalk of corn. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing going on there.

These days, while I potter about in the garden, I wonder if the plants like the red shirt or the blue shirt best. I worry about how they’re getting along with their neighbors. And when I pick up the pruning shears, I apologize.

Because now I know they’re watching me. ❖ 79

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Growing Up with GREENPRINTS, Part II The children of Your Editor report on life with a magazine in the house. By Jesse Stone Reeck ❖

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Editor’s Note: Normally, when GREENPRINTS has an Anniversary Issue, I step out from behind the publisher’s curtain and write a piece about the person—me—who puts this magazine together. This time, though, I thought I’d ask our four (now grown) children if they’d like to share their versions of living with a small home-publishing business. To my surprise, they all jumped on the offer!

So as part of our special 25th anniversary year, each issue in 2015 will contain a piece by one of our offspring about “Growing Up with GreenPrints.” Last issue, we started off with a piece from our oldest, 35-year-old Nate. T This go-round, it’s 32-year-old Jesse’s turn!

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t wasn’t always easy being a part of the GREENPRINTS family.

Just try answering this stumper: “What does your dad do?”

“Um . . . well, he kinda . . . he works from home . . . and he publishes this magazine . . . no, you probably haven’t heard of it . . . it’s all garden stories . . . No, not like that. Like, ‘I was sad and I went in my garden and it made me happy’ kind of stories. Yeah . . . I know. But it’s cool.”

Or just try answering the phone: “Hello? Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is GREENPRINTS. How can I help you? Um, no, I don’t know anything about that and my dad’s not here—I mean, Pat’s not here. The guy who knows. And who turned our house into a And when business. Where I’m scared to answer the deadlines rolled phone even when I’m waiting for my friends to call!” around—stand Or mailings! Hours of stuffing envelopes, back! peeling labels, and sorting by zip code. The timeless Stone family tradition: “Gather round, kids, and let’s . . . stick on some stamps!” Though we were always baffled that those same friends (when they finally got through on the phone) were overjoyed every time they came over and it was time to do a mailing. I suppose there’s something to be said for that whole grass is always greener thing.

And when deadlines rolled around— stand back! We couldn’t stay far enough away from Dad’s office and his frenetic final efforts to put ‘the mag’ together.

But there were some pretty sweet perks, too. Those same deadlines taught me how to proofread: $1 for every mistake I could Jesse Then find in the final draft of stories. And I am still amazed at the beauty of the artwork the magazine brought into our home; the only piece of art I’ve purchased in the last five years is a print of a recent GREENPRINTS cover. (Every once in a while we got to do a little piece of art for a story, too!)

Before cell phones, when my parents got a dedicated 1-800 line, 83

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I could call home from anywhere, anytime. And once that phone line got a special ringtone in the house, as long as I called “nose goes” (not it) fast enough, I didn’t end up in too many more of those awkward business calls.

But best of all, my dad and mom did work from home. As an adult, with two children of my own and a husband who is gone 8 to 12 hours evJesse Today, with Family: ery workday, JJackson, Adam, & Isabel I’ve come to appreciate that all the more. When my dad had the chance to take the chief editing job at a prestigious gardening magazine in a Jesse & Jackson big city, he turned it down to stay in the mountains of Western North Carolina, to grow GREENPRINTS—and to grow us. In doing so, he taught us the value of pursuing your passions, of believing in your imagination, of choosing beauty over money, and of choosing loved ones over all. And that’s what growing up with GREENPRINTS truly gave me: the hope that hard work and wild ideas really can add something Jesse & Izzy good to the world, and the trust that my parents will always have the time and space to be there for me, just Bonus Izzy Picture! a 1-800 phone call away. ❖ 84

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Inheritance

T

By Nancy J. Rodwan

he bag contains all the necessary tools, Shovel, compass, map, peanut butter sandwich.

Even though the map is a crude rendition You are quite sure your trip will be a success.

Climbing the steep hill shortly after dawn You rest under the crabapple tree.

Once again studying the map Using the compass to check the coordinates.

Scurrying along the rose bushes To the grapevines you drop to your belly And crawl on elbows and knees Past the cabbages ďŹ nally reaching the rhubarb.

Most deďŹ nitely the treasure is buried here.

Checking the map one more time You realize you are standing on the spot Marked with a big red X.

LINDA COOK DEVONA

Plastic shovel in hand you get to work.

A long-eared rabbit watches you suspiciously While it nibbles on a leaf of spinach.

You offer to share your sandwich.

After wiping the peanut butter off your hands The digging resumes.

The clunk of plastic hitting tin Makes your heart leap.

Grandma sits at the breakfast nook frowning.

Working feverishly with magic markers She draws a diagram of the attic.

They are calling for rain tomorrow.

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And from the very ďŹ rst GREENPRINTS, exactly 100 Issues ago . . .

Garden Meditation For children who are our second planting, and though they grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away, may they forgive us our cultivation and fondly remember where their roots are.

Let us give thanks; For generous friends . . . with hearts . . . and smiles as bright as their blossoms; For feisty friends, as tart as apples; 86

ILLUSTRATION BY CATHERINE STRAUS

Let us give thanks for a bounty of people.

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For continuous friends, who like scallions and cucumbers, keep reminding us that we’ve had them; For crotchety friends, sour as rhubarb and as indestructible; For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and as elegant as a row of corn, and the others, as plain as potatoes and so good for you; For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels sprouts and as amusing as Jerusalem artichokes; And serious friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as delightful as dill, as endless as zucchini, and who, like parsnips, can be counted on to see you through the winter; For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the eveningtime and young friends coming on as fast as radishes; For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils and hold us, despite our blights, wilts, and witherings; And finally, for those friends now gone, like gardens past that have been harvested, but who fed us in their times that we might have life thereafter.

For all these, we give thanks.

—Rev. Max Coots Rev. Coots passed away in 2009. He was minister of the Canton, NY Unitarian Universalist Church for 34 years. He was “an inveterate punster, a poetic preacher, wise counselor, and general church handyman.” A visitor to the church once mistook him for the church custodian and was surprised to find him in the pulpit when she attended services the next Sunday.

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If unusual plants are your passion, there is QUACKIN’ GRASS NURSERY. Come and be enchanted.

Visit our online only catalog at www.QuackinGrassNursery.com.

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GREENPRINTS P. O. Box 1355 Fairview, NC 28730