A design created with a handful of wildflower seeds

The Difference Between Gardening and Designing

I was reading Piet Oudolf and Noël Kingsbury’s book ‘Designing with Plants’ last night, a gorgeous work that dramatically illustrates how the shapes, colors, and life history characteristics of perennials can be used to manipulate the visual and emotional palette of a garden. As I gazed upon the carefully constructed designs, I began musing over the fact that I create gardens based upon what will survive in a give location, and to accommodate the handful of plants that I can easily afford. If I truly designed with plants, if I sought an expression of what I felt was really beautiful or told a story in color and form, I would first paint what I wanted to see, then buy large sweeps of artful species to fill in the places that would create the feeling that I wanted to convey. I would work harder to adjust the ambient conditions to meet my specifications, rather than humbly working with what I had. I’d have the wherewithal to rid myself of the bushes, or rocks, or trees, or whatever stood in my way.  In short, I would be an artist, coming from a sense of control and confidence. As it is, I act as an ecologist more than a designer. I’ve no grand plan for this 10 acres (on paper anyway) that tells a story beyond ‘right plant right place’. Perhaps this is the difference between gardening and designing.

My current approach to design seems to reflect my own life to some extent, which is a story of accommodation and working within existing circumstances more than making the world bend to my wishes and needs. Perhaps this a more feminine approach to life; seeking consensus, doing what we can with available resources and connections, making do with the current situation. Women have traditionally had to work within the constraints of reproductive consequences and a pervasive cultural masculinity that once limited what they could do with their lives.  As I look back upon my life choices, I think I have allowed perceived constraints to direct my life for some time. Yet I am much less constrained than most: I’ve no children, no mortgage, and I’m divorced. I’ve held steady jobs, but never taken on the financial burdens that would have forced me to stay put in a bad situation. I have many assets and few debts. I am, at this turning point in my life, essentially free to do what I want. I can dream beyond what I have done in the past.

A reevaluation of my approach to life and design could be the way in which to overcome what I now see as self-imposed limitations on what I can do. This place at this time is mine, and I can do with it what I wish. My desires need not necessarily be monetarily driven either. Large numbers of plants can be made or even acquired for free through barter. This is the time to define a story, an emotion, that I want this empty canvas to convey.  This is where I can pour my energy into expressing the story that I want to tell.  Then shall I truly be a designer and not merely a gardener.  

A Plan Takes Shape

the basic layout with eight planting beds divided by gravel paths

 The last local garden tour gave me the idea for a more formal garden within which to grow vegetables and herbs.  It would fill a flat area that was formerly a horse arena but now hosts a large shed and a pile of fill dirt. It would also create a welcoming view from the driveway, and provide a sense of order and grace in the otherwise free-wheeling universe of my previous designs.  I envision sweeps of thyme, lavender, and sage punctuated by tall spikes of color and interspersed with vegetable gardens.

 Originally, I was going to design a clump of twisting willow branches surrounded by stone as the centerpiece, but a local plant sale convinced me otherwise. I came home last week carting a seven-foot tall Magnolia x sieboldii, the sort with downward-turned flowers and bright red anthers, and have chosen it for the centerpiece. I felt the choice to be more life-affirming than dead willow branches. Large river rock will surround the central planter with small stones as fill.  The other beds will be edge with 2” x 6” wood set about halfway into the dirt. Since the underlying fill dirt is mostly clay (and immediately turns into a frictionless substance when wetted), I will be amending it with composted manure and native topsoil. I am considering a fence with espalier apples or something of the sort on the driveway side to break up the view and necessitate having to enter the garden to really see it.

Planting will start in the fall, once I figure out what to do for deer management.

hilltop garden layout

A delicious edible landscape for deer

My peace with the deer came to an end this year, when the twins borne to a local doe began exploiting a territory that expanded beyond the lakebed to include the uplands where my fledgling barn garden was located.  Starting out naïve to the ways of deer and how to manage them, I went through the standard stages of grief:  anger, denial, sorrow, etc. Then I decided to get even.

Tomato plant browsed by deer

I learned a bit about deer from my goats, which I sold in May for many of the same reasons as to why I combat the deer. Both are artiodactyls, members of a group of cloven-hooved mammals that include horses, deer, hippos, and peccaries. Deer are in the family Cervidae, while goats are members of the Bovidae. Both families consist of multi-stomached ruminants, which chew cud as part of their daily regime. Neither deer nor goats have no upper incisors, so they tear at vegetation leaving tell-tale evidence as to who ate your flowers.

Both the goats and deer act like garden dilettantes, never delving into one item but rather flitting from one place to another, nipping fresh growth. In that sense, they are somewhat useful for controlling meadows of creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens) and Himalayan blackberry by nipping back new growth. Continuing attacks on the new growth of more sensitive ornamentals, however, can severely stunt their growth. Both goats and deer delighted in my plantings far more than the lush growth on the rest of the acreage. Perhaps the concentration of edible delights was an attractant.

Research suggested that PlantSkydd™ (http://plantskydd.com/), initially developed in Sweden for commercial forest applications, works well against deer, and having tried it a few times I would concur. First, I tried it on the goats, and was satisfied with the vehemence of their reaction, stepping back from the offending substance as though it was threatening their very lives.  Consisting of a mixture of blood and sticking agents, the stuff smells horrendous but is relatively easy to apply from a spray bottle and is said to last for several months. However, I would recommend it only for small areas or specimen plants given the cost. A gardener at my local nursery suggested blood meal, a somewhat less-expensive though still pricey fertilize which I can only find locally in 3 lb bags. I sprinkle it liberally on the soil and leaves, and have thus far found no evidence of damage on treated plants.

For the garden, which is about 0.1 acre, I spent the summer trying a variety of fencing methods, from a mesh work of electric polytape to barbed wire jutting three feet away from the top strand. After watching my peas and beans disappear and my currents, raspberries and gooseberries loose their leaves, I determined that deer, like goats, are more than willing to step through fences. The goats were even able to break the welds on the mesh fence of their pen through sheer force of boredom and determination.

At last, I sunk the money into a five-foot high, 1”x2” mesh fence on top of the existing three feet of wide mesh field fencing for a total of 8’ of mesh to overcome. So far, so good; one month into it and my raspberries have new growth and I can harvest my chard and turnips. Sections of the five-foot fencing also make secure cages for fruit trees and bushes, and cheap plastic bird mesh has saved my ravaged witch hazel from further damage.

However, as the growing season has waned, the eating rampage has grown less even on unprotected crops, so I cannot discern if it is my efforts or the declining palatability of aging plants that is affecting deer foraging choices.

The most recent addition to my anti-deer arsenal is the Scarecrow™ motion-activated sprinkler from Contech Electronics (http://www.contech-inc.com/products/scarecrow/).  The device gives a short burst of water when an animal is detected, frightening it away.  I’ve not had the pleasure of witnessing deer being deterred (see YouTube for that sort of entertainment), but I have two Scarecrows which I set up in various locations at different times so as to add to the element of surprise. I suspect the real test will come with this winter’s tender vegetable crop.

After I had spent the spring and summer months fighting for my right to grow vegetables and ornamentals, a fellow master gardener recommended the book Deer Resistant Landscaping by Neil Soderstrom.  This is an excellent resource not only for the control of deer but other pest mammals as well such as gophers, mice, rats, and, yes, armadillos. The author has done his homework interviewing numerous experts in the field, and delving into the life histories and habits of deer and other animals to help gardeners understand why they behave as they do. For instance, detailed information on how deer choose plants make it easier to select appropriate deterrents.  The book also features a comprehensive list of deer-resistant plants compiled based upon the experience of garden designers and growers. Take note, though, that plants can change in toxicity and palatability with the season, and that during periods of drought when natural food choices dwindle, plants that otherwise would be ignored become choice fodder. Or, as another local master gardener put it, “deer don’t read books on deer-resistant plants”.

Anything beats chasing deer around the garden at 4:00 am in bathrobe and slippers (true story), although I think my ‘crazy lady’ act has added to the deterrent effect. I can only hope.

A sampling of my personal list of what deer will and won’t eat:

WILL EAT

• Acanthus mollis – Acanthus
• Acer circinaum – Vine maple (young tree)
• Cercidiphyllum japonicum  – Katsura (young tree)
• Cercis occidentalis – Western redbud
• Cornus kousa  – Kousa dogwood (young tree)
• Geum ‘Chiloense Red’
• Hamamelis x intermedia   – Witch Hazel
• Hemerocallis – Daylily
• Penstemon ‘Garnet’ (young plants only)
• Pyracantha koidzumii  ‘Victory’  – Firethorn
• Prunella laciniata  - Self-Heal

DO NOT EAT (Not mine anyway)

• Kniphofia uvaria – Redhot poker
• Lavendula spp.  – Lavendar
• Origanum vulgare – Oregano
• Rosemarinus officinalis – Rosemary
• Salvia officinalis – Sage
• Senecio greyi – Senecio
• Tagetes spp. – Marigold
• Thymus spp. - Thyme
• Viburnum plicatum var. tomentosum ‘Mariesii’
• Yucca spp. – Yucca (green and variegated)

The Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanical Garden: a landscape like this can take a lifetime to grow

Gardens take a long, long time to establish. A year and a few months have shown me this valuable lesson. Somehow, I’d been led to believe that three years later, the trees and shrubs would be approaching full size, groundcovers would sprawl verdantly about the landscape, and everything would be well on its way to looking like the landscapes in my favorite parks and gardens.

How wrong I was. Somehow, the jarring realization that it decades to achieve mature garden status had not occurred to me until sometime earlier this year when seeing that one year had passed with only mere inches of growth achieved led me to recognize the obvious. I suppose that I’d been too focused on the plants to see the garden, so to speak.

The trees I’d planted – the peaches, the pawpaws, the redbud, the Kousa dogwood, the katsuras, maples, cedars and crab apples – take a decade or more to reach a mature size sufficient to dominant or fill in a landscape. So I do the math, and realize that at 43, I’ll be at least 53 before things look they way that I wish. In the meantime, I’ll be finding ways to fill the spaces between the long-lived plants that will someday expand into one another to form the green jungle that I had envisioned. 

The unfortunate thing about this is that unlike many of my generation and those previous, I have lived a comparatively rootless life with no more than three years in any one place. I have initiated many gardens, but seen none to fruition.  Now, choosing to settle for at least a few more years than usual, I see the time that I spend moving as having been frittered away from a gardening perspective. Nor can I easily return to the sold houses or torn down rentals to review the progress of my plantings.

Beyond the daunting linearity of garden time are the broader dimensions of spatial distribution. Like old friends or lovers, garden elements grow together with time, shaping each other, relying on another, building shade for some, creating soil for others. Dependencies develop, and relationships change as plants grow and senesce. How did I miss this? How did I mistake the photos for a singular finality? I feel as though I’ve missed out on a long-term marriage. Some things in life do take time, and are worth more so for the effort.

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Yet, here I am, and my obsession with gardening is still strong and so I continue my efforts to design and landscape my own territory so that perhaps in 20 years, when I am a respectible yet spry 63, I can enjoy at least a semi-mature garden. If I can keep the deer at bay….but that will be the subject of another post.

The Barn Landscape Project: A Story in Photos

During the months of my silence, I have been building my new businsess, Belle Terra Landscape Design LLC www.belleterradesign.com , and working slowly but steadily upon my most recent project, the well-abused landscape that surrounds what was once my old horse barn. This is the first sight that greets visitors, not the main house. As a barn with surrounding horse corral, it wasn’t bad. After that, my father removed the fencing and added a few civilizing touches – a sidewalk and brick-and-lattice entryway, flowers along the foundation, and a tiered basalt planter on the left (south) side that held up a bank that was once a manure dump. The rest took care of itself to create a snarl of grass and weeds.  In the first photo, the front side is being used as a wood pile.

The full effort took about 8 months, and some $500 worth of plants, fine gravel for a path, basalt rock for the retaining wall, newspaper for mulch, and shredded bark topdressing (which I later got for free from the local tree grinding service working on county roads). Topsoil, goat manure, and large landscape rock was free, as was the excavator work to remove a large Douglas fir stump.  Deer and goat damage was an external cost which, along with a plant list and specific planting techniques, I will cover in subsequent posts.  The result is a drought-tolerant perennial garden and shrub border comprised of native hardscape materials that compliment the rather rustic surroundings and give visitors some hope for what comes next. Not shown here is the nascent berry patch that I have started around the right (north) side of the barn as a tribute to my dedication to permaculture.  That too, will be fodder for subsequent posts.   For now, I can’t help but smile everytime I see the colorful flowers that now grow here!

This is my first spring here, and I now come close to completing the cycle of seasons that began for me when I arrived last May. I’ve learned every detail of this place: where the fine red pyrrola stalks grow, where the thimble berries emerge from the blackberry briers, the moist crumble of forest soil, the mysterious barred owl whose silhouette occasionally emerges from the dusk and whose startling hoots and howls awaken me at night. My mother knew this place, too, when it was 40 acres. She knew it by being here every day while my father and I were away at work and school, respectively, and she knew if far better than either of us for that. Now, I take her place carrying a borrowed knowledge that was left with me when she left it behind.

I have empathy for this place, for its trees, for its soils. As a biologist, I see it raggedness, its mistreatment, the scars of logging, and slashing, and road building. I have known it long enough to realize that the encroachments of scotch broom and ivy are recent. I see where plants that once thrived have now been choked out by blackberries. I mourn the loss of diversity, and the muddy ruts that replace what was once grass. I try to enfold it in my arms, to protect it, to beautify it, but I realize that I am too small to carry it entirely.

So, I do triage. I make selections in my head as to what can be resuscitated now.  My plans exist in my mind, and on the many bits of paper that follow me from meeting to waiting room to classroom, scratched onto notepaper as I waited or listened, drawing out plans and schemes that if collected together would doubtless now make an entire volume of writing. Now and then, I break forth from my mind and take measurements and plan how many, how much, how long. It works, and I move on, bank account wincing, and I yet unsatisfied with the small progress that I am making.

My virtue is not patience. It is creativity. It is in seeing the entire panoply in my mind, fully formed. I work without a blueprint, without lists, because I see in my mind how it will look in the broader view. I know the endgame. The large-scale details require contact with earthly methods like pencil and paper, but beyond that, I happily paint without guides or anything else that would otherwise resemble a plan to onlookers.

Sometimes I feel as though people watch me slogging through the mud with a few stones in my wheelbarrow and wonder why I’m wasting my time here, a small woman without a job trundling about pointlessly. Sometimes, I step away and watch myself and seeing the same view, wonder what I am doing as well. Yet, unlike my detractors, I see a garden of earthly delights surrounding me, already perfected and complete, and I know what others don’t. With my magic goggles, I can see the future and live for it even as I endure the wet, the cold, the mud. I see what they don’t, and while I suppose that is the very first sign of crazy, so be it. I’d rather see my view because it keeps me alive.

Mostly, I work on faith, on the faith that I can own this place someday, that my father won’t run out of money or become ill and sell it. I hope to create a paradise on earth with garden beds and walking trails that will elevate this place in the minds of those who might care, and might give to see it perpetuated. Yet I do so in the realization that it might never be, and that the time that I put into it could have been time elsewhere at a high-paying job that might have supported the cause without my being there. But that wouldn’t be living. That wouldn’t be me. I took this chance for me.

A conundrum indeed.

My focus will be lake and garden. In and around the garden will go a host of fruit trees and various berries, some of which I’ve never heard of before but seemed tasty enough in the catalog:

The medlar is one of my experiments. The soft, brown fruits are described as having a custard apple flavor, almost too good to be true I fear. Seaberries are touted as a common berry in Europe that produces a profusion of golden fruit high in Vitamin C; couldn’t turn that down.  The blueberries were chosen for their tolerance of moist soils and will go to exploit an otherwise neglected area by the garden.  The other berries will be distributed in various places around both garden and barn as their cultivation requirements demand.  They will go well, I hope, with the wild Southern cherries that my father grew from North Carolina seed 30 years ago, and the equally aged grape arbor that I recently pruned up.

The rest are mostly natives, which will be tucked into various locations about the property with emphasis on the lake.

The natives are courtesy of the Pierce County Conservation District, whose annual plant sales offer excellent deals on bareroot stock. The remainder are from either Burnt Ridge Nursery in Onalaska, or One Green World in Molalla, Oregon.

The winter garden before the goat attack

After looking into the cost and effort of building a protective structure to keep the goats and frost at bay, I set my sights on rehabilitating the greenhouse. After a year of being used as a storage facility by friends of my father, the owners of the stuff finally cleared it away and I decided to take the opportunity to put the greenhouse back into service.

 The greenhouse

Reminiscing on my Costa Rica experience and the lettuce box that I observed there, I have begun creating a similar setup.  My materials are simple and my methods easily replicated. Using scrap wood, a chop saw, and 1 ½ screws, I cobbled together three boxes about 18” wide, 8” deep, and 4’ to 5’ in length and lined each with clear, thick plastic using tack nails. I then set up two wooden crates that I’d acquired from a tile store, each of which was about 36” x 48” x 30” , and placed two 12’ x 6” boards on top to form a bench sturdy enough to support 200 pounds of wood and dirt.

My next steps will be to fill the bottoms with a few inches of pea gravel followed by a loose mix of peat, vermiculite, and potting mix. Into this I’ll plant the veggies that I started last August in my winter garden:

Cabbage – Early Jersey Wakefield

Kale – Red Russian

Onion – Evergreen Hardy White Bunching

Radish – Relish Cross Daikon Hybrid

Beets – Boro Hybrid

At present, the greenhouse is unheated in part due to the cost of the electricity that it would take to keep it warm. I am contemplating low cost heating systems such as small wood or oil stoves that would maintain it around 55 degrees Fahrenheit, but in the meantime I’ll probably insulate the plants with an additional cover of plastic. So far, the weather has been on my side with persistant rain and lows around 45 degrees.

The larger plan is to use the greenhouse to grow both winter vegetables and starts for the summer garden. Hopefully, with about 0.25 acre in cultivation I can produce enough for year ‘round home consumption plus extra for sale. I will also need to set up a propagation area to grow the large number of ornamental and native plants that I will need to acquire to complete my landscaping projects.

En route to the greenhouse, I passed my Helleborus foetidus with expectant green buds,

and the three, six inch high Sarcoccocca confusa loaded with tiny white blooms, well worth getting down on my knees to smell.  

These small things do not yet fill my garden in the way that I wish they would, but then every journey must start with a single step.

An additional and unexpected benefit, however, was a timely introduction to tropical permaculture.

During the cold, muddy season that comprises the typical Northwest winter, I’ve been studying landscape design and considering its applications both to my future career and the 20 acres I’ve been pondering since May.  Seeking a way to mix both agriculture and landscape design, I recently picked up two books on permaculture, Gaia’s Garden, by Toby Hemenway, and Permaculture:  A Designer’s Manual by Bill Mollison. Both have held be transfixed. At last, I’ve found the link between my studies of ecology and the more creative aspects of landscape design.

Permaculture, a shortening of the terms “Permanent” and “Agriculture”, is a way to apply a knowledge of natural processes and patterns to create an efficient and sustainable system for food production. I began looking to it as a way to help myself, as an individual of finite means and physical strength, to create a system for managing and maintaining a large property in a way that will produce food and recreate a functional ecosystem in a diverse, attractive setting.

The words and ideas enthralled me. Hydrology, soils, even pattern analysis all work themselves into a new way to design landscapes. More than just creating beautiful landscapes, I could build something that appealed to my more pragmatic side as well, and Costa Rica supplied me with abundant examples.

Costa Rica prides itself upon its green tourism industry, touting not only a large number of national parks and reserves built upon private and public partnerships, but also programs that encourage recycling, conservation, and even sustainability within the industry. One example was the resort that we stayed at for four nights north of San Ramon in the Canton of Alajuela. Villa Blanca Cloud Forest Hotel, Spa, and Natural Reserve is a five-leaf award winner in the Certification Program for Sustainable Tourism.  Located adjacent to the private Los Angeles Cloud Forest Biological Reserve, the property offers cloud-forest tours on the premises, and has its own gardens, greenhouses, and composting sheds with which to grow and recycle food used in its kitchens.

I spent many hours walking the property and surrounding farm lands gathering ideas for creating and irrigating a low-till garden with associated animal pens, compost bins, and water supply. Since the mountains of Costa Rica experience a long rainy season, much like Western Washington, I found that many of the solutions for runoff management were applicable to home, and I carefully photographed and noted drains, swales, and gutters of stone, cement, and natural vegetation in hopes of replicating the same.

   An intricate rock catchment system at Villa Blanca.

 Beyond the resort, I observed terraced farmlands practicing polyculture with a patchwork of different crop types shaded by trees. The rainforest has been substantially reduced by clearing, but it was heartening to observe that at least the smaller farms were adopting practices that reduced runoff and encouraged a healthier management of resources. Whether or not this is an old practice among the smaller farms, or fincas, or a new approach to agriculture I don’t know. I contrasted this, however, with industrialized farms further inland towards Arenal where acres of land had been shrouded in plastic to grow ornamental plants.

One of the more novel ideas that I observed was the concept of the living fence, which in the tropics can be easily achieved by simply placing green branches in the ground as fence posts and letting them sprout.

I hope to achieve similar results using willows and plantings of entangling plants such as Rosa and Spirea to create my own livestock and deer barriers. I also took notes on the use of piling materials on top of harvest beds to enrich the soil and minimize tilling. Villa Blanca used an extensive drip irrigation system for both greenhouse and outdoor crops, and used several methods of composting, including Bokashi, a natural fertilizer comprised of manure, coffee pulp or rice hulls, yeast and molasses. The smell, however, might prevent my adoption of that particular technique.

Throughout the trip, and perhaps somewhat to my travelling partner’s chagrain, I snapped hundreds of photos and sketched out my revised garden plan which I shall share in future postings. Returning from my vacation, I felt a curious mix of both relaxation and exhileration. It certainly beats the way I used to feel when I returned to my ‘real’ job.

I defected to Southern California this Thanksgiving to visit friends. The weather was warm, as usual, and I spent two days drawing and taking photographs at the Los Angeles County Botanical Garden in Arcadia, one of my most favorite places. Still, I was glad to return to this place where I was raised, where the sun never gets much above the horizon in December, and the ground is already saturated and muddy. Of course, it is wet, chilly, and above all, gloomy in winter. Yet looking beyond the human need for warmth and light, it is only just another place on earth with its own grace and beauty beyond what we demand of it. Peace can be found anywhere, and the tone that we set for own lives makes us flourish despite the weather.

My outdoor activities have slowed considerably in the wake of the heavy rainfalls. I have injured my shoulder, and the soil that I had hoped to place in my new rock garden is too wet and heavy to haul. Still, there are numerous chores requiring less endurance that await me, one of which is planning.

Between my design and business classes, I have sketched and schemed until I have the layout for my penultimate garden firmly fixed in my head. How to get it onto paper is a far different matter. A back issue of Pacific Horticulture featuring a man near Woodinville with a 30 acre garden surrounding two wetlands that he restored after years of logging gave me hope. If he can do it, so can I.

I need a landuse plan first of all, something that inventories what I have and where I want to go with it. I know what the final outcome will look like, now, how do I get there?

The Lake – Fall 09

My goals are as follows:

1. House and three acres: A Northwest Naturalistic landscape (after Ann Lovejoy) that incorporates both natives and non-natives in a mix of perennial gardens, rock gardens, meadows, and rhododendron gardens.
2. The rest: A natural woodland devoid of invasives such as ivy and blackberry, with a few trails that allow an easy walk around the lake and up through the back of the property to the house.
3. Around the barn: A small permaculture-based agricultural section with a chicken house, blueberry field, vegetable garden, fruit trees, and potting area. Some of this is already in place.

The information that I need to map so that I can develop a plan for where things should be placed will be:

1. Gradient – I have a contour map in AutoCad that I can start with.
2. Soils – based upon the web-based Natural Resource Conservation Soil maps.
3. Vegetation – my own inventories of vegetation types, mostly upland Douglas fir with evergreen huckleberry, swordfern, and salal, lowland redcedar and red alder, willow riparian, and wetlands ranging from skunk cabbage marsh to seasonally inundated sedge and cattail wetlands.
4. Exposure – based upon observations of wind and sun.
5. Wildlife habitat – the deer bed in the lake, pileated wood pecker nests, barred owl nests, etc.

 Future sitting area by the lakeshore

 I am fortunate enough to have already spent 10 years on the property in the 70’s and 80’s, so that I already know the lay of the land. Now, I view it not through the eyes of child, but as an adult ecologist, so I see it quite a bit differently now.

My rules to live by will be:

1. No deliberately introduced invasives (including ivies and periwinkle (Vinca))
2. Maintain areas of no non-natives, particularly around the lake.
3. Maintain snags and wood piles for wildlife.
4. Restore and maintain the original channels that feed the lake.
5. Maintain soil integrity to the extent possible, which translates into minimal grading.

Each day, I observe the patterns of the sun, the shady areas, the wet areas, where the water flows in winter. I have noticed that the driveway has potholes in the low areas and have planned where the water bars should go. I’ve learned where the seeps area and planned how best to allow the water to cross the driveway and reach the lake. I’ve noted which Douglas firs are too spindly and close-set to survive and should be removed. I see the barred owl pair that peers at me in the thin light of dawn from an alder, and wonder where they nest. I mull over which snags the pileated woodpeckers prefer, and I see the Douglas tree squirrels moving to warmer quarters under my father’s shop.

My head spins with plans. It will be my challenge, both with this project as with my life, to take a deep breath, set my priorities, and find the strength and tenancity to see each one through to its conclusion.

The drab moth had been on my bathroom wall for several days before I poked it to determine if it was really alive.  It was pressed flat to the tile, approximately 2 inches across, and marked with a distinct pattern of brown waves and scallops on its forewings with a thin white border of white on the edges.  The color and complexity of the pattern rendered it compatible with pine bark, but noticeably out of place on blue-and-white bathroom tile. Yet, I’d seen these kinds of moths many times before, and learned to call them ‘miller moths’ in accordance with my southern mother’s terminology. 

I pulled out my thin paperback moth guide, Macromoths of Northwest Forests and Woodlands (Jeffrey Miller, Paul Hammond USDA Forest Service, FHTET-98-18, 2000) and flipped through the pages until I found something closely resembling the specimen at hand. It was, I concluded, a barberry looper moth (Coryphista meadii), with a caterpillar revealed on bugguide.net to look just like the gray and white loopers with red heads that I had observed on my Berberis thunbergii Crimson Pygmy planted in June shortly before it became a network of defoliated twigs.

It was an ah-ha moment. We had had no barberries on the property before this, and yet suddenly here was a moth that looked like one I’d seen all my life suddenly taking on a new aspect completely unbeknownst to me. I’d never even thought of what its caterpillars looked like, but now I knew its life cycle and suddenly, it affected me and my ambitions. Presumably there might be other plants in the family Beriberidaceae on the property that might have harbored them, or perhaps the eggs came in from the nursery supplier, for of the four plants that I bought, only this one was eaten by loopers.

I am reminded of the song about the hole in the bottom of the sea, where sat a frog on a log, with a bump and a wart and a hair and a flea and so on until the microscopic world had been achieved on that one frog. Then the kids singing the song gave up for lack of ideas beyond bacteria. How little did I realize when I was a child that I was singing a song that celebrated biodiversity. 

The other day, while removing the plastic clips that hold electric fence tape from a series of fence posts, I noticed that nearly every clip harbored a tiny, pale brown spider.  The little beasts were flattened to where they could lie almost two-dimensional on any surface, and apparently liked the narrow space of the clip designed to hold the polytape because of the shelter it offered. As I worked to pull the clips off one set of posts to move them to another, I witnessed a tiny arachnid paratrooper dropping from nearly every clip. Every other clip seemed to hold a small white package of spider eggs. I had created habitat in spite of myself. 

Of course, both moth and spider were probably here long before I was, and my surprise was merely that of my own unexpected discovery. Still, everyday that we open our eyes to the variety around us, we are richer for it. From mushrooms, to moths, to spiders, I am sure that this property has untold thousands of species I’ve yet to discover. But they don’t need my knowledge of them to validate their existence. They have every right to go on, even if they encroach on my world now and then.

Last week, I found what I believe to have been a shaggy mane mushroom that had emerged next the hose cache. There it was, already half-eaten, and I’d never even seen it before. Besides that, there were no others with it, just this four-inch tall white matchstick-shaped fungus jutting out of the earth. The following day I found but a fallen white stem that I would have mistaken for a stick except that I recalled the mushroom growing there from the previous day.

Sometimes, as I’m weeding or planting, I’ll notice threads of white or yellow mushroom hyphae clinging to the soil particles for dear life. Fungal mycelia have invaded my pile of woodchips and bark pieces, now four months into rotting. In September, a cloud of little white button

mushrooms covered the back of the pile, then vanished, but when I dig, I find the bark pieces clumped together by fragile white fibers. Thanks to action of these fungi, the wood pieces break down into into a richer and more nutritious mulch than what I started with earlier in the summer.

I’ve seen at least 10 different types of mushrooms so far, starting as far back as August when a rainshower brought them forth from the ground. I’ve heard that fungi-loving gardeners can now obtain fungi plugs that can be placed into pre-drilled holes in stumps and logs to create a personal ‘shroom garden. Now, your own chicken-of-the-woods crop is within reach. Given my ignorance, I’m still a little gun-shy though. Photographing these ephemeral creatures in their many forms is enough for now.

*** For those amateur mycologists who know mushrooms better than, please feel free to step foward and identify the ’shrooms that I could not!****

Places to acquire edible mushrooms for cultivation: 

http://www.fungi.com/plugs/plugs.html

http://www.gmushrooms.com/Plugs/index.htm

http://www.thymegarden.com/site/561124/page/2353037

http://www.groworganic.com/browse_384_Mushroom_Growing_Kits__Plugs.html?welcome=T&theses=6244736