My Own Personal Jungle

I awoke this morning to the distant sound of tree frogs. When I walked outside to feed the goats, a tiny flock of song sparrows flew up from the ground and sang in the trees as I delivered the hay. Glimmers of color emerge from the brown earth as a few of my hundreds of crocus begin flower along the walks where only mud and weeds had been last year.

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.

I have never had difficulty in dropping large sums of money on plants. Even when renting homes, I couldn’t seem to pass the first month and suppress the need to rework the landscape, usually just to make it livable. Now, I am a place with no end to the room in which I can plant. And plant I will, starting with 314 plants, a mix of native shrubs and trees, fruit trees, and berry bushes.

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.