Soil & Terrain

In Search of the Perfect Lawn

Michael Dean — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 12:47:18 +0000

In Search of the Perfect Lawn Michael Dean Sun, 02/25/2024 - 07:47

In Search of the Perfect Lawn

Michael Dean speaks to us about the symbolism of the lawn.

Selections from the two-novel book, 'In Search of the Perfect Lawn' and 'The Walled Garden.'

(Part II coming in March.)

Part I: An Aural History of Lawns

INTERVIEW 1:

Is there communication through lawns?

When I’m out cutting the grass I notice how people look at me and stop for a minute. They seem to enjoy watching me work. Somehow they know that I like my work, and they watch for a while how I create a pattern in the lawn out of the longer grass.

When I look up from my machine, I see the looks on their faces. It’s a kind of peace, a harmony that they experience. I bring out the character of the lawn from the grass. I don’t fight it. I aim the lawnmower down the line of the wheel marks left from the last row that I just cut. In this way I make sure that there are no tufts of grass left uncut. Often grass gets pressed down by the wheels and then you miss it altogether and only see it when you rake it afterwards. If you’ve created a good pattern out of the grass you hate to go over the lawn again just to get those tufts.

Yesterday I was cutting the lawn after the rain and a girl walking on the far side of the street stopped and watched me. Her name was Rosemary. I enjoyed that moment.
But the real pleasure I felt was in the work.

I love my lawn and the smell of it after a rain.

Rosemary saw me through it.

INTERVIEW 2

What are the problems and their solutions in lawns?

I hate raking. And I hate clipping around the edges, unless I have a lot of time and then I like the look of neatness that this creates. I feel quite satisfied afterwards.

No matter what size a lawn is, there are always edges, and raking. Edges are just something that has to be done. I use a new electric trimmer and that helps. It will never be a love, however.

I don’t usually rake a lawn. In fact, raking can be harmful to the roots of the grass. If the cuttings are left unraked they act as a natural fertilizer to the soil, and this helps the lawn over the years. Many people prefer the look of a carefully raked 1awn. Even so, if you cut a lawn often enough, it doesn’t need raking after each cutting. I use the electric rotary mower and this helps. I find that the dual chute system of the electric helps

spread the grass, so you don’t get it collecting in strips like with the gas-powered mowers.

There will always be edges. And raking.

But the love of the mowing carries you through it.

INTERVIEW 3

Do you ever dream about lawns?

I have had this dream several times:

I am cutting a lawn. It is the front lawn of my parents’ house. I am sixteen in the dream. A girl stops on the street and watches me. Her name is Rosemary. She smiles then moves on.
Sometimes in the dream it has just stopped raining.

The lawn has an interesting shape at one edge, a rolling curve created by a line of shrubs by the front porch. What I want to do is start with this interesting edge and follow the same pattern right across the lawn. But I feel that I will never be able to resolve the far edge satisfactorily because that edge is straight and borders on the curb of the street.

What I end up doing in this dream is starting with the patterned edge and then allowing it to diminish as I go across the lawn until the pattern settles gently into a straight line at the far edge.

This also resolves another problem: there is a tree in the centre of the lawn. Normally the best way to cope with a tree is to form a square around it and work towards it from the four edges. Because of the one interesting edge whose pattern I want to follow, I don’t do this. I want very much to integrate the tree with the pattern of the lawn.

INTERVIEW 4

What is the meaning of Lawn as dream image?

I have felt different things about this dream.

At first I felt it was telling me about my life, that I had become the tree held between the tension of the edges of the lawn and that the edges were my parents – the curved edge my mother, the straight edge my father.

Then I felt the dream was a premonition. It was telling me that a great change was about to occur in my life and that this change would be triggered by a new woman in my life (Rosemary, the girl on the street).

Whenever I had the dream I felt something different about it. But the tree in the dream was always me.

Then, just after I stopped having the dream altogether, events occurred that told me I had been completely mistaken.

I was not the tree.

I was not the grass.

I was the pattern in the lawn.

It's a funny thing about lawns, most people don't even see them. They cut and tend them but seldom talk about the problems they encounter along the way.
Your lawn is more than grass.

Did you know for instance, that the lawn season begins in the fall when everything else is dying?

That's what my dream was telling me: for the truth you don't always have to look below the surface.

INTERVIEW 5

What is the natural life cycle of lawns?

Rosemary told me an interesting story about lawns: when she was just two years old one of her older brothers died. She went with her father whenever he cut the grass around her brother’s grave, and from then on she associated her father cutting grass with somebody dying.

I thought of Rosemary's story when I was visiting my mother six months ago. My mother had phoned and said I should come and see her because she had some bad news about my father.

Before my mother told me the news she met me on the front porch and asked me to stay a couple of days and cut the grass before I left. 'If it ever stops raining.'

The grass was long alright. My father hadn't been able to cut it for three weeks. It was autumn and autumn is a critical time for lawns.

Then my mother told me that my father's operation had shown his tumour to be malignant and that he had about six months to live.

I didn't stay with my mother for two days and I didn't cut the grass. My uncle came over the next day and cut it. My uncle has a good two-cycle gas mower with power start and a mulch setting.

As for my father, he never cut another lawn.

My father had never let himself get close to me, but when I visited him in the hospital he opened up and told me things I had wanted to know all my life about our lawn. He told me that when my parents bought our house they had cut down a huge, over-bearing tree in the front yard and then planted a new tree, the one that grew and became the tree in my recurring dream that I told you earlier.

It was at this point (when my father had only a week to live – as it turned out) that I knew I had been mistaken about my dream.
My father was the tree. He was also the lawn.

Lawn care is important in the fall. If your autumn lawn is left uncared for, fungus can start growing under the tangled mat of grass clippings as soon as the snow falls. This snow mould can create bare patches that show up only in spring.

My father was not an easy person to get to know, but just before he died I started believing I had been able to get close to him through lawns.

Then, after it was over and he was buried under the earth, I realized that lawns had been literal all along, and that they would somehow separate us forever.

INTERVIEW 6

What form does the pleasure take in lawns?

Lawns can play tricks with your mind. You can see things in them that aren't there. We all must struggle to see lawns for what they are, in themselves.

I have loved many lawns and I hope to love many more. Lawns are a natural part of life and we shouldn't be afraid of expressing our feelings about them.

Some people love the look of flatness and symmetry of a well-cut lawn. They aim for a one-inch bristle. Some lawns take a half or three-quarter inch bristle, but these always have a good flat surface and must be rolled.

Personally, I like creating patterns. I like watching a pattern take shape out of the long grass. I love the look of the edge between the cut and the un-cut grass. The edge moves and the truth of the lawn is revealed in the process. When someone stops on the sidewalk and watches me, like Rosemary for instance, they see a ritual being enacted. They smile and say hello as a way of thanking me for enacting it.

I've learned not to take this response personally. I know I am an intermediary between the people and the lawn. In fact the pleasure I feel is in knowing this. And in knowing I’m always getting closer and closer to the truth.

Rosemary asked me: ‘The patterns you make in lawns, are they signs of something?’

‘They are activity,’ I said. ‘Not the result of activity but the activity itself.’

Frankly, I don't think anyone could have characterized pleasure more exactly than that.

INTERVIEW 7

Is there a secret meaning to lawns?

So many of us have been wounded by lawns.

After my father died I went to cut my mother’s lawn. It was spring by then. The lawn was in good shape, except for a strip by the curb where the road salt had eaten it away.
The rain had just stopped. I looked up from my machine and Rosemary was watching me from the street. We talked for a while.

When I had finished the lawn, my mother and I had a long talk in the kitchen. During this talk my mother told me something unusual. She told me that I had been conceived on a lawn.
‘I’m telling you this now’, she said, ‘because I think it makes a difference. I think it makes a person special.’

What my mother told me helped me to see the dream of Interview 3 in its true meaning.

The tree in the lawn of Interview 3 was the symbol of a single lifetime. The lawn was the symbol of regeneration. The patterns that I had been making all my life in lawns are the activity of coming-to-terms, not with death, but with the fact of having been generated, of being alive in this moment.

That’s what my dream was saying: what begins in grass is resolved in lawns.

My father knew this. My mother- knew it. Now I know it and so do you: never take your lawn for granted.

INTERVIEW 8

Aren't you suggesting a connection between lawns and sexuality?

Yesterday, when Rosemary watched me from the street, I asked her if she'd ever cut a lawn after a rain.

She looked away.

‘It's a deep and earthy experience,’ I said, ‘There's a smell the grass gives off. The blades are swollen with the rain and they’re deep green. The bristles are fat and moist and the over-all effect is that of softness. The flat surface of the freshly cut lawn holds the tension between this hardness and softness.

‘It’s quite a sensation working with it then,’ I said, ‘It's firm yet yielding. Giving yet reserved. The lawn is a separate thing but we form a relationship in the work, a unity, like coupling.’
‘Cut grass is good as a mulch for the garden,’ Rosemary said.

‘Especially after a rain,’ I said, ‘It is rich and fertile and helps things grow.’

Rosemary said: ‘Nothing is forsaken, nothing is lost, in lawns.’

INTERVIEW 9

Aren't you asking an eschatological question and giving an ontological answer in lawns?

Last night Rosemary and I made love on the lawn. We rolled on top of each other and bits of cut grass stuck to our clothing and to the naked parts of our bodies.

‘l love it now that we're doing it,’ Rosemary said, ‘Tell me something, something important I've never known.’

‘Imagine that we're together for the first time after many years of separation,’ I said.

I brushed bits of cut grass from Rosemary's thighs describing how they looked like something transferred from the pages of a novel we were rolling in.

The grass was newly cut and wet, clinging to our bodies and peeling away onto one another.

‘What is the story of our love?’ she said, ‘Who am I and what happens next because of me?’

I was revealing for Rosemary the secret meaning of the cut grass stuck to her thighs, calling her my novel. I was reading the grass like sentences:

‘I courted you when we were young, then I went off to war in France. When I got back you couldn't wait and were married already to a wealthy man. So I too made myself wealthy and came to court you again with my personal elegance and new blue lawns. You turn me down, however, at the very end.’

‘Maybe they could find you face down in your own swimming pool,’ Rosemary said.

‘We are,’ I said, ‘a short but significant twentieth-century American novel, The ...’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘The Great Gatsby.’

Our story began unfolding even more quickly than I had expected. Our characters began revealing themselves through action. The events of the story, fore-shadowed on Rosemary's thighs, were coming to pass.

There was nothing new for me in this woman.

The crisis of the story occurred right here. I saw all of my sex life as a series of unclean thoughts and impure acts with myself or others on lawns. There were no surprises for me in Rosemary, just new words for describing the acts of sex. I was frightened that I would get bored with it very soon and that it would all end tragically.

I rolled on top of Rosemary and my throbbing member pressed against her belly. I found the centre of her moist desire and entered her like the key in the lock of a Manhattan hotel room door with the shower running in the other room, the radio on, and black lingerie over a chair.

A piece of grass from Rosemary's belly was stuck on my penis as I moved in her. I thought that this piece of lawn was the capital letter 'P' from the word Passion. I dwelt on this thought. I meditated on my passion spelled out in blades of grass on my body moving in the woman.

But the blade of grass was not the capital letter ‘p’. It was the letter ‘g'. The silent ‘g' in the word gnaw, the ‘g' of the ‘ing’ in being.

This story is the child of that coupling.

This story was fathered by the silent 'g' of being that swam into the woman, persisting and entering the central meaning of her round fertile vowels.

This story was mothered by the ‘a’ and the ‘e’ of the woman.

This story's chromosome structure spells the word age: the beginning of time, the marking of time, the events occurring in time and then their ending.

This story is what I thought about as I cut the grass on my mother's lawn after my father had died and the rain had stopped and Rosemary was watching me from the street.

This story is a collection of blades of grass on a woman’s thigh.

Michael Dean's latest book, two novels in a single volume, In Search of the Perfect Lawn and The Walled Garden, is published by Teksteditions.
www.teksteditions.com

TORONTO: Michael will be appearing alongside artist-gardener Gene Threndyle at Speaking of Wild Culture on 9th July 2013
Wild Culture Academy

Comments

As a general rule of thumb…

As a general rule of thumb grass needs about an inch or two of water per week in order to thrive. This can be supplied somewhat by the rain and using a rain gauge will help you determine how much additional watering is needed. The best way to determine if your lawn needs to be watered is by looking at the signs.

Philip Hale

Mon, 04/06/2020 - 09:30

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Human Places We Know Way Down There

European Space Agency — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 06:15:19 +0000

Human Places We Know Way Down There European Space… Sat, 09/17/2022 - 02:15

Photography & Moving Images

Soil & Terrain

Space

Human Places We Know Way Down There

Our annual collection of planet photography . . . courtesy of the generous folks at the European Space Agency.

UK Heat Wave

This summer, heatwaves struck Europe, North Africa, the US and Asia with temperatures reaching over 40°C in places – breaking many long-standing records.

The image, captured on 12 August 2022, shows the United Kingdom’s previously green land appear brown (particularly in the southeast) amid the scorching conditions. The heatwave comes after months of extreme temperatures and low rainfall left the landscape parched.

Satellites orbiting our planet play an important role in delivering data to understand and monitor how our world is changing. Their observations and data are critical for improving model predictions of our future climate, mitigation strategies and policymaking.

Monitoring land-surface temperatures is useful for scientists because the warmth rising from Earth’s surface influences weather and climate patterns. These measurements are particularly important for farmers evaluating how much water their crops need and for urban planners looking to improve heat-mitigating strategies.

Arc de Triomphe

The Arc de Triomphe, or in full, Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, is an iconic symbol of France and one of the world’s best-known commemorative monuments. The triumphal arch was commissioned by Napoleon I in 1806 to celebrate the military achievements of the French armies.

The arch stands at the centre of the Place Charles de Gaulle, the meeting point of 12 grand avenues which form a star (or étoile), which is why it is also referred to as the Arch of Triumph of the Star. The arch is 50 m high and 45 m wide.

The names of all French victories and generals are inscribed on the arch’s inner and outer surfaces, while the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I lies beneath its vault. The tomb’s flame is rekindled every evening as a symbol of the enduring nature of the commemoration and respect shown to those who have fallen in the name of France.

The Arc de Triomphe’s location at the Place Charles de Gaulle places it at the heart of the capital and the western terminus of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées (visible in the bottom-right of the image). Often referred to as the ‘most beautiful avenue in the world’, the Champs-Élysées is known for its theatres, cafés and luxury shops, as the finish of the Tour de France cycling race, as well as for its annual Bastille Day military parade.

The Rhine River Runs Dry

Water levels on the Rhine River, Europe’s second-largest river, have continued in 2022 to drop owing to soaring temperatures and lack of rainfall, preventing many vessels from navigating through the waters at full capacity.

Flowing from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea, the Rhine River is an important shipping route for many products from grains to chemicals to coal. When water levels drop, cargo vessels need to sail with reduced load, so they don’t run aground.

The phenomenon facing the Rhine is common across much of Europe after an unusually hot and dry summer – causing wildfires and water shortages.

New York City

This satellite image covers part of New York City, including the island of Manhattan at the centre, the Brooklyn and Queens boroughs on the right and the Bronx along the top-right. Staten Island is visible in the lower left, while the upper left side of the image is dominated by part of New Jersey.

With over 8 million inhabitants on a limited amount of land, New York City is one of the most densely populated cities in the United States. The city has a long history of land reclamation, most notably on the southwestern tip of Manhattan. This area was once part of the Hudson River before rock excavated during major construction projects and sand dredged from the harbour were used to create the area known as Battery Park City today.

With the populations growing across the world’s cities, apart from building vertically, land reclamation is a common practice for meeting habitation and agricultural needs, among other uses.

The American West

The contrasting landscape of the western US states of California (left) and Nevada (right) are highlighted in this image, acquired on 9 February 2011. The Sierra Nevada mountain range (snow-capped) runs along California’s eastern edge. Lake Tahoe (visible) is located in the Sierra Nevada on the California–Nevada border. Also visible in the image are the California cities of San Francisco (whitish area on the peninsula surrounding the San Francisco Bay, centre left) and Los Angeles (sprawling grey area, bottom left).

San Francisco Bay Area

In the upper section of the image from 2015, we can see the rivers’ delta and the brown, sediment-filled water flowing down into the bay. The colourful patchwork in the centre of the image is a collection of wetland areas including salt ponds, salt marshes and mudflats.

The city of San Francisco is on a peninsula in the centre left section of the image. The Golden Gate Bridge which crosses the opening of the bay into the Pacific Ocean between San Francisco and Marin County. What appears to be a straight line running diagonally from the San Francisco Peninsula down through the forest is the San Andreas Fault. This is the border of two tectonic plates, and is responsible for the high earthquake risk in the area.

Starting in the top-left corner of the image and running diagonally to the south is the San Andreas Fault. This is the border between the North American and the Pacific tectonic plates, and is responsible for the high earthquake risk in the area.

Differences in land cover are obvious in this image. Surrounding the Bay we can see densely populated urban areas in white/grey, while forests and park areas appear in shades of green. In the upper-right corner, we can see geometric shapes of large-scale agriculture, with fields in different colours depending on the vegetation type.

Distinguishing between different types of land cover is an important task for Earth-observing satellites, helping us to understand the landscape, map how it is used and monitor changes over time.

Great Lakes

Around 100 000 years ago, a major ice sheet formed over most of Canada and part of the US. As it formed, giant glaciers flowed into the land carving out valleys and levelling mountains. As higher temperatures began to melt the ice sheet, meltwater filled the holes left by the glaciers.

Many of these holes today still contain water and formed the thousands of lakes across central USA and Canada. The biggest remnants of this process are the Great Lakes. The lakes drain roughly from west to east and empty into the Atlantic Ocean.

Lake Superior, the northernmost and westernmost lake, is the largest and deepest of the Great Lakes. It drains into Lake Huron via the St. Marys River at an average rate of 2000 cubic metres per second. Lake Michigan lies south of Lake Superior and connects with Lake Huron through the six km-wide channel Straits of Mackinac in the north. Lake Huron is the second largest of the Great Lakes and is bounded by Michigan, US, on the north and by Ontario, Canada, to the east.

Lake Erie is the shallowest and southernmost of the Great Lakes. Green algal blooms are visible on the lake. These toxic blooms have been a problem for the lake in recent years. Caused by heightened levels of phosphorus – found in fertilisers and common household products – finding its way into the water, these blooms have caused harm to the lake’s fish population.

Lake Ontario is the easternmost of the Great Lakes and also the smallest in surface area. It is bounded on the north by Ontario, Canada and on the south by New York, US, whose water boundaries meet in the middle of the lake.

In this image, captured in March 2020, a large quantity of ice and snow coverage is visible north of the lakes, yet the amount of ice cover on the lakes is minimal – extremely unusual for the ice season which typically runs from 1 December through 30 April.

Parts of the Great Lakes typically freeze every winter. As Earth’s climate changes, rising air and water temperatures have led to less ice cover on many lakes in North America, including the Great Lakes. Ice cover on the Great Lakes can fluctuate dramatically from year to year, depending on several patterns of climate variability. Years with lower-than-normal ice cover appear to have become more frequent during the past two decades.

English Channel

The two identical Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites carry radar instruments, which can see through clouds and rain, and in the dark, to image Earth’s surface below.

Here, hundreds of radar images spanning 2016 to 2018 over the same area have been, compressed into a single image.

The sea surface reflects the radar signal away from the satellite, making water appear dark in the image. This contrasts metal objects, in this case ships, which appear as bright dots in the dark water. Boats that passed the English Channel in 2016 appear in blue, those from 2017 appear in green, and those from 2018 appear in red.

Owing to its narrowness, as well as its strategic connection of the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea, the Channel is very busy with east-west ship traffic. Because of the volume of vessels passing through daily, a two-lane scheme is used, in order to avoid collisions. The two lanes can easily be detected in the image.

Many vessels crossing at the narrowest part of the English Channel can be seen in the far right of the image. Connecting Dover in England to Calais in northern France, the Strait of Dover is another major route, with over 400 vessels crossing every day.

The cities of London and Paris, other towns and buildings and even wind turbines in the English Channel are visible in white owing to the strong reflection of the radar signal.

THE EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY (ESA) is an intergovernmental organization based in Paris of 22 member states dedicated to the exploration of space, with the purpose of "providing for, and promoting, for exclusively peaceful purposes, cooperation among European States in space research and technology and their space applications."

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Letting the Garden Be

Rebecca Weil — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 07:36:37 +0000

Letting the Garden Be Rebecca Weil Sun, 06/05/2022 - 03:36

Finding & Foraging

Gardenalia

Soil & Terrain

Letting the Garden Be

A little knowledge can go a long way, but too much often keeps us from noticing what's going on right before our eyes. Devoted to her scholarly resource materials on soil science, the author decides to leave them behind and pay closer attention to her garden's self-determination.

The author's vegetable garden on a misty morning. [Author photo.]

Once there was a sagging shelf of books that told me the perfect way to make soil. They told me a scientific process so specific it gave me an ache and internal paralysis with the worry of doing it wrong. The books were so certain.

In the garden when I was working in the rain the books got wet and muddy and torn. To protect them I left them on the shelf. One might say I let go, and the garden and I were better for it.

I started to notice things, particular things. The weeds I had been pulling were beautiful in their blooming; and they were strong and independent, seeding themselves where they liked. Surging up early and blossoming far sooner than any domesticated flower I could plant, they beckoned the early pollinators, helping the other crops along. Sending their roots down deep, breaking up the clay and bringing up the minerals, they made way for the more domestic roots to gather strength. Who hasn’t wondered at the depth a burdock can go with its tenacious taproot?

My layering became a loose and casual affair of adding almost anything that was at hand . . .

Despite a fence to keep them out, the rabbits built nests under the blueberry bushes. In their downy nests of breast fur I found the curled, warm bodies of the breathing kits — rapid hearts tapping, yet fearless in their mother’s home. They were too young to move so I peeked at their still closed eyes, ears tucked in close to their heads. There in the blueberries was the mother’s entry where she could come and go to nurse, an open door for her dusk to dawn visits.

The dog caught voles in his jaws and shook them fiercely to snap their spines. In reflex, I scolded him and he stopped. The voles had begun channelling through the potatoes and beets, leaving tooth mark evidence and runnels in the soil. Wondering about a vole’s life underground, I realized that by tunnelling in the dark soil they were probably contributing in a way I didn’t understand, I planted more root crops so there was enough for our family and the voles, too.

In the late summer harvest, I missed some garlic bulbs and the next year found their spring shoots in bunches, tender and mildly pungent and full of whimsy. From then on I began leaving them to spread where they wanted — to harvest as early greens before anything else was ready.

"I realized that by tunnelling in the dark soil the voles were probably contributing in a way I didn’t understand. Illustration by Sheri Amsel [o].

Somewhere along the way I stopped tilling. The soil here was heavy clay, so dense that even the trees had trouble, surely it seemed it would need to be turned. However, our donkey, horse, and chickens provided ample manure and leftover hay, so by layering those into the ground then adding leaves, vegetable scraps, wood ash from the stove, or anything at hand, the beds were a good meal of different flavours.

The books I had studied proposed a precise balance of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, and many very different and very scientific ways to perfectly compost. Turning and testing and temperature taking. Thankfully their hold on me was now gone and my layering was becoming a loose and casual affair of adding almost anything that was at hand. And, letting the worms and voles and plants work the soil into something loamy and luscious.

In turn, they announced when the pile was ready to plant. I would stack hot manure on an area until early-winter, and then let it sit to run its heat out and settle down. By the time spring came and I could no longer smell the manure. With the worms thick in it, I figured it must be ready. (What worm would lie?) Planting tomatoes and squash right into the nutrient-heavy bed, they thrived. These days I roam the garden, adding hot toppings to a bed that then rests for a season, then adding broken-down compost as top dressing to the other beds so they can take the more tender seeds in the spring. Common sense comes into the mix: don’t add raw manure where you are planting to eat; let things break down; let the weather work its way through the pile.

The 'lasagna garden' plays off of the author's discovery of using a variety of findings to build up a bed. [o]

As layering took over and the tilling stopped, self-seeding came in with glorious abandon. The kale dropped seed and came back, and the hardier kale, not pulled in the fall, re-sprouted from the stalk. The dill, coriander, calendula, sunflowers, and the blues of borage, scattered to where they found footing — where they wanted to be, choosing their pH, not me. All these plants were stronger for self-placing. It became a spring game: to identify who was sprouting, or where the mice had planted seeds. Sometimes the mice moved an entire bed of pumpkins. Looking at the empty hills, puzzled, I wondered what had happened. Then I saw that the pumpkins and squashes were sprouting up behind my back, in a different arrangement than I'd done.

Was it laziness that led to not watering after the seeds germinated? Perhaps it started that way. Mulching rapidly became my friend. As I layered old hay on the beds it retained moisture and reduced weeds, while making it made the worms happier as they now had a cool topping to the soil and more organic matter to work on.

The acidic pine needles and bark that the blueberries craved were welcome terrain for the wild and sour sorrel to expand its hold, a ready patch for soup, and an indicator of good pH for the blueberries. No test kit needed. As the wild came in, the lambs quarters became my quick spring spinach, and showed me where the barn had increased the soil nitrates. When the lambs quarters got too leggy, or more than we could keep up with, they became greens to feed the delighted chickens, true to their nickname of 'fat hen,' and translated into richness in the hens’ eggs. Purslane arrived, too, low and succulent – and I nipped it into my salad bowl.

The wild from the meadow and the hay fields enters each year now, all on its own. The wild vetch blooms along the edges of the beds, cheerful and full of spring insects and bees. Toads arrive and I feel immeasurably lighter, as if something is right in the garden when a toad sets up home.

Perhaps one day, I will bury those perfect garden books in the soil to return their words to the ground, so they too can become wild, weedy, loamy. ≈ç

REBECCA WEIL (previously published name, Rebecca A. Reynolds) is the author of award-winning Bring Me the Ocean, Nature as Teacher, Messenger, and Intermediary. For ten years she was the director of The Nature Connection, bringing nature and animals and the arts to people to build connections. She co-founded the group Growing Community Cooperstown and the Community Harvest Supper, bringing people together to share gardening knowledge and to grow and share food. She lives in Cooperstown, New York.

Comments

What a wonderful piece,…

What a wonderful piece, Rebecca! I love that final sentence so much!

Mon, 06/06/2022 - 08:05

So fabulous! Thank you!

So fabulous! Thank you.

Syd

Mon, 06/06/2022 - 22:12

That piece is deliciously…

That piece is deliciously lovely. I giggled and enjoyed myself as I read it, envisioning the images of animals and plants and the worms nourished by the lovely soil layers. Your garden reminds me of my mother's when I was a kid. Much appreciation for sharing your story.

Carolina Martinez

Wed, 06/08/2022 - 21:51

This is so wonderful,…

This is so wonderful! I love your commitment to the natural environment and the beauty of your prose in sharing your vision and experience. So happy you were found by such a fecund environment for your fertile imagination. Much love to you and your family.

Hal Robinson

Thu, 06/09/2022 - 20:00

"Toads arrive and I feel…

"Toads arrive and I feel immeasurably lighter, as if something is right in the garden when a toad sets up home." Love that!

Sarah

Fri, 06/10/2022 - 07:00

A beautiful early evening…

A beautiful early evening read to make me smile as I have lived thru so many of the things you put into words??. Thank you, Rebecca. You have made me happy with your words put here to share. A really nice gift.

Doris Reynolds

Tue, 07/12/2022 - 19:27

What a wonderful world of…

What a wonderful world of garden and valves and mischief and compost — and nature doing its marvellous things, all at once. Loved every word. Thank you.

Susan Goldstein

Thu, 08/25/2022 - 20:35

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Cherry Ingram's Blossom Fetish

Angela Lord — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 10:13:36 +0000

Cherry Ingram's Blossom Fetish Angela Lord Sun, 03/13/2022 - 06:13

Ecologies

Gardenalia

Soil & Terrain

Cherry Ingram's Blossom Fetish

"What a strange thing! To be alive beneath cherry blossoms," wrote Kobayashi Issa. We couldn't agree more. Nor could Collingwood Ingram, who made it his life's work.

"Flowering and full bloom dates depend on the temperature patterns from the autumn of the preceding year." [o]

Cherry trees blossoming — a welcome sign of the arrival of spring in many parts of the world. Some might say "a glorious seasonal mark in nature's calendar."

The cherry blossom is the national flower of Japan and its appearance is celebrated annually during Hanami, which means “flower viewing.” This short window of opportunity begins at the end of March or in early April and lasts about two weeks. When the flowers are in full bloom, the heart-shaped petals caught on the breeze, float like snowflakes and carpet the ground in pale pink or white.

According to the Japan Meteorological Corporation, the timing is weather-dependent and the flowering and full bloom dates of cherry blossoms depend on the temperature patterns from the autumn of the preceding year. Using this method, it’s possible to make a reasonably accurate prediction of expected blooming times. For example, the Yoshino cherry, the most popular variety of cherry, or sakura, is usually expected to start flowering by the end of March. When the flowers appear, it’s time when people celebrate with picnics in the park.

On one of his trips to Japan to search for new specimens but was dismayed to see a huge loss of local diversity.

The “Great White” flowering cherry known as Tai-Haku is an ancient tree often depicted in historical drawings and traditional Japanese artworks. At one time, it was thought that it had died out and its natural beauty was feared lost — preserved only in paintings. Fortunately, it has been saved for future generations with the help of an Englishman named Collingwood Ingram, who became known as ‘Cherry’ Ingram for his love of the trees and their blossoms.

His story is told in a book entitled Cherry Ingram: The Englishman who saved Japan’s Blossoms, by Naoko Abe. Ingram dedicated much of his life to the cultivation and preservation of the cherry tree. On one of his visits to Japan to search for new specimens, he was dismayed to see a huge loss of local diversity due to the widespread introduction of a cloned cherry variety, the Somei-yoshino, which was becoming predominant in the landscape.

During this visit in 1926, he was shown a painting of a beautiful white cherry, then thought to be extinct in Japan. He recognised it as one he had seen in a state of neglect in an English country garden, the result of an early introduction from Japan. He had taken cuttings at the time to preserve part of the tree. Cuttings were later sent to Japan and after initial setbacks, were eventually grown successfully.

Mr Funatsu brought me out one or two old pictures of cherries amongst which was one by his great grandfather probably painted about 120 years ago. (Mr F. is an old man). This kakemono depicted very accurately, if somewhat crudely, the large-flowered single cherry I found at the Freeman’s which I have named Tai Haku. Apparently its correct name is Akatsuki – meaning “daybreak” or “dawn”. The fine shape of the flowers and its pure whiteness contrasting with the pale golden bronze young foliage are clearly depicted. The diameter of the flowers – about 6cm if my memory does not fail – is also about right in the painting. Mr Funatsu said he had long been searching in vain for this Akatsuki variety! It is a curious thing that it should be found again in a remote Sussex garden.

— From the journal of Collingwood Ingram, 1926

A back garden in the English countryside might seem like a surprising place to find such a rare tree, yet it wasn’t that uncommon. International horticulture was very fashionable during the reign of Queen Victoria when botanists became ‘plant hunters’ searching the world for unusual specimens.

The flowers and foliage associated with the changing seasons in Japan were depicted in a set of silk screen paintings sent to the Queen in 1860 as a diplomatic gift. These included a scene of Mount Fuji in the spring, surrounded by cherry blossom. After being poorly repaired and wrongly catalogued, the silk paintings lay forgotten for years. They have now been restored and are to be displayed for the first time in an exhibition at Buckingham Palace entitled Japan: Courts and Culture.

Cherry blossoms in Jerte Valley, Cacares. [o]

Most Japanese plants and trees adapt well to the British climate and following the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, an exchange of seeds and saplings took place with the planting of hundreds of Japanese maple and cherry trees at Kew Gardens in London. The Sakura Cherry Tree Project https://japanuksakura.org/ launched in 2019 has continued the tradition, marking 150 years of Japan-UK friendship by planting saplings in multiple locations, providing a legacy for future generations. Paul Madden, the British ambassador to Japan, said of the project: “It is particularly pleasing that one of the varieties chosen is the Taihaku, or “great white”, which had become extinct in Japan, and was re-introduced from the UK.”

Over 7,000 trees have now been planted in parks and gardens throughout the United Kingdom as a symbol of the lasting relationship between the two countries. Three varieties of cherry trees were chosen for their variation in colour, blossoming times, and historical significance: Somei-yoshino, Beni-yutaka and last, but not least, the Taihaku, allowing the Great White to spread its roots on the next stage of its journey as it continues to flourish. ≈ç

ANGELA LORD is a freelance writer with a degree in Modern Languages and a background in print journalism. Originally from South Yorkshire in the UK, she is now based in Surrey.

Comments

Thanks for this. Friends and…

Thanks for this. Friends and I were just discussing how we must meet under a cherry tree again this spring.

Cria Pettingill

Sun, 03/13/2022 - 07:26

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How to Lay a Hedge

Mandy Goddard — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 07:02:24 +0000

How to Lay a Hedge Mandy Goddard Thu, 01/27/2022 - 02:02

Design

Gardenalia

Soil & Terrain

How to Lay a Hedge

“Your hedges are very bad for tourism," she said. " ‘ow can we see the view?” She was right, and the author, unaware of what was ahead of her, found herself inside a thousand years of rural craft and continuity.

Ancient hedgerows were used as property boundaries, defense barriers, and livestock paddock dividers. [o]

I have a small log on my bookshelf I have kept for nearly ten years. It is a section of ash about ten inches long and four inches in diameter, with bark changing from the smooth grey of a young ash to the fissured grey-brown of an older tree. I keep it is because at each cut end the growth-rings are very clear. It reminds me of those huge stumps of felled trees you sometimes see in old parks — with carefully labelled rings with dates of key historical events to show what the tree has ‘seen’ in its long life.

My ash log is a baby in comparison, only seeing eleven years of growth. It was born just before 9/11 and lived through much of the Blair government and the financial crash of 2008. I like it especially because it’s a record of my first eleven years living and working on a small piece of land in Somerset.

While some were deliberately planted, it is thought that others are remnants of ancient woodland that were left in place when the woods were cleared for agriculture. “The ‘ghosts’ of woods,” Rackham calls them.

The log was cut from a hedge that I planted with some friends on a crisp winter day at the end of 2001. Together we made four hundred slots in the ground along the fence line, dropping a small vulnerable tree into each slot, pressing them down with our heels. Blackthorn, hawthorn, dogwood, hornbeam, guelder rose, dog rose, elder, and a few ash. By the end of the day it looked less like a hedge than a double row of spindly twigs sticking out of the ground. Looking back at our handiwork in the failing light I could hardly see them. You need faith to plant a hedge.

I found a few snapshots of that day just recently, lurking in the bottom of my box of unsorted photos, the colours as washed out as my memory of it. I can still name the people in them, although, I realise, sadly, there’s only one or two I still keep in touch with.

This part of South West England is rich in hedges, many of them extremely old. Landscape historian Oliver Rackham calls these hedged areas Ancient Countryside,’ contrasting it to the Planned Countryside of much of the country. Ancient Countryside, Rackham says, “is the product of at least a thousand years of continuity,” where some field boundaries date back to pre-Roman times. It explains why fields here are generally small and irregular, the hedgerows sinuous. While some were deliberately planted, it is thought that others are remnants of ancient woodland that were left in place when the woods were cleared for agriculture. “The ‘ghosts’ of woods,” Rackham calls them.

These trees and shrubs of hedgerows, the "patchwork quilts of the English countryside," serve as historic and contemporary boundary lines. Somerset. [o]

The reason they survived is because they were useful as a boundary marker that could be made stock-proof (resistant to livestock) by laying the hedge every eight to twenty years. This was essential before barbed wire became widely available in the 1970’s, but today hedge-laying is a dying art, kept alive by enthusiasts and a few farmers. To lay a hedge, you cut each tree or shrub part way through its stem, then bend it over and lay it down horizontally to make a barrier from which strong new growth extends upwards. But of course it’s not as simple as that. Hedge-laying is hard, time-consuming, skilled work.

Most field hedges in the UK these days are managed using a tractor-mounted flail mower. Down the road, our neighbour cut his hedge so low and so frequently that it barely clung to life. I found the sight of it painful, a sad indictment of modern farming. I decided to leave mine alone. It grew for eleven years (the ash log among it) until it was five-foot wide and fifteen-foot tall. People started to complain. The same neighbour moaned that the branches caught the plastic on his silage bales as he drove past. A French woman said to me once, “Your hedges are very bad for tourism. ‘ow can we see the view?”

Clearly the hedge needed attention. I called Callum.

Callum is lanky as a leggy ash tree and part of a younger generation of professional foresters who care deeply about trees and about the legacy they leave. He is pragmatic enough to use chainsaws and respectful of historical ways of working.

A tractor-mounted flail mower . . . our neighbour cut his hedge so low that it barely clung to life. [o]

A couple of weeks later Callum’s pickup rolled down the track. The chainsaw roared and screeched all day as he turned the hedge from a row of spindly trees into a horizontal barrier, one small tree trunk stacked neatly on top of another. A pile of brush and offcuts accumulated in the field behind him as he worked. We extracted the usable firewood from the pile and dragged the rest to the middle of the field where it lay for weeks until we burnt it on a bonfire.

Nothing would have been wasted in centuries past. Long, flexible hazel rods were used for hurdles; ash and maple for tool and door handles; oak, if big enough, for building; blackberries, sloes and hazelnuts to eat; rosehips and herbs for medicine; brushwood for temporary stock barriers or dead-hedges — barriers constructed from cut branches, saplings, and foliage. Wood not useful for anything else was burnt for fuel, even the twiggy bits which were bound into faggots, three or four foot long, to go straight into a huge inglenook fireplace.

Collecting ‘hedgebote’ — any product from a hedge — was a valued right for the lucky few in medieval times. Historical court records are full of accusations by landowners that peasants with no rights of hedgebote were stealing from their hedges. Even in the late twentieth century, older farmers recalled the trimmings from laid hedges being sufficient firewood for a farmhouse for the whole year. Before gas cookers, coal, and electricity, hedges would have provided the only source of energy for all uses: cooking, heating, hot water and lighting in the dark winter months.

Callum worked solidly all day — cutting, twisting, bending, trimming, stopping for half an hour at lunchtime. It was slow work, even with the chainsaw. By the end of the day he had done about 12 metres. The 100m hedge took nine days.

Not how Callum did it. [o]

It gave me a new insight into the labour of maintaining the countryside of the past, and the reason for flailed hedges. If we consider the miles and miles of hedgerow in the South West (33,000 in Devon alone), and how expensive labour is, and that you have barbed wire to keep your stock in, and central heating and a gas cooker in your farmhouse, why on earth would you carry on laying your hedges? The wonder is that a few farmers still do.

Today, at my new home on the Devon coast, it’s time to tackle the huge pile of cuttings from the overgrown elaeagnus hedge we recently cut down. I get the loppers and soon there is a pile of twigs and branches, ready to be cut into lengths. Having just installed a woodburner in my writing shed, this hedgebote is too good to waste. Yet, I’m out of step with the times. There is news in the UK of the pollution caused by burning wood, even of the possible banning of woodburners in towns. But I reason that, cosy in my wood-heated shed, I am avoiding using the gas central heating in the house. Since burning wood is a carbon-neutral form of energy, and I am using wood that would otherwise go to waste. It seems to make sense.

I keep looking at that well-seasoned bit of ash on the bookshelf. It would fit nicely in the wood burner.

The downside is that the wood burner is tiny. Unlike country folk in the past with their huge fireplaces, I have to cut lengths of wood to ten inches or less. It’s painstaking work for a small amount of fuel that I won’t be able to use until it dries out, a year at least. But it’s satisfying to turn a waste product into something useful. And I have the leisure time to do it these days. Meanwhile, it’s cold and I’m short of dry wood to burn. I keep looking at that well-seasoned bit of ash on the bookshelf. It would fit nicely in the wood burner.

But I won’t burnt it,for the same reason I wouldn’t burn an old washed-out photo of friends. Even if I no longer keep in touch with them. ≈ç

MANDY GODDARD is a market gardener turned writer. Writing from her own life experience, she is inspired by the human interaction with the natural world. Currently completing a PhD in creative writing at Exeter University, she lives with her family on the South Devon coast.

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Silently Name-Checking the Flowers

John Davis — Sun, 20 Jun 2021 07:25:16 +0000

Silently Name-Checking the Flowers John Davis Sun, 06/20/2021 - 03:25

Spoiled Worlds

Soil & Terrain

Borders & Crossings

Silently Name-Checking the Flowers

Few can toss off a piece of cultural history and nature writing woven into an argument about where we've been and where we're going — girded by five recent books about the state of ecological progress in the modern world — but John Davis can.

SINCE I BEGAN running chaparral trails regularly in April 1999, I have made it a point of honor to run directly from my house. For the nine of those years that I lived in Santa Monica Canyon, Will Rogers State Park, which effectively constitutes the north western wildland border to the great urban presence of Los Angeles, was close enough to count as being on my doorstep. For the past dozen years in Upper Ojai, I have lived at the Wildland Urban Interface, which in practical terms means that a short run from the house enables me to access the Sespe Wilderness, a part of the Los Padres National Forest.

After the Thomas fire, however, my old route across the hills west of Koenigstein, that took me to a precipitous slope down to Sisar Canyon, just north of the first creek crossing, became untenable. Missing the hand holds provided by chamise, mountain mahogany and ceanothus branches that bordered the declivity, this section of my trail (almost no one else ever used it) had become a charred chute, booby-trapped with newly exposed rocks, roots and fire-loosened earth.

He reaches back beyond the Renaissance to note that human history and natural history were forcibly separated at the birth of civilization . . .

I returned to check on its status about a year ago and found that the chaparral had taken the opportunity to obliterate this section of the trail. I eventually picked my way down the slope but failed to establish a new, viable route. Now, my honor be damned, I drive the mile or so over to Sisar and then run two and a half miles to the ‘look out’ which projects south over the upper valley after a steep climb out of the canyon. The real payoff, in terms of view, is not the residential and agricultural details of the valley below, which reveal themselves south from the lookout, but the recto verso experience as one turns to retrace the route. Beyond the wooded canyon to the north east, the spalled rock faces of the Topatopas rise out of the chaparral with an emphatic majesty.

This northerly view offers an opportunity to experience what Peter Linebaugh calls the ‘pre-existing condition’ – nature unburdened by the state and potentially available for the commingling of human labor by which our physical sustenance, spiritual connection with the sublime and societal relationships have long been achieved. In other words, an opportunity to be aware of the raw power of an unmediated natural world which, for most of humankind’s existence, has provided for our means of survival.

"Mechanical contrivances, such as the steam engine, disrupted the last vestiges of pre-modern comingling." [o]

Although within a ‘National Forest’ and under the jurisdiction of the US Forest Service, the Sisar trail, while gated, is largely unpatrolled and thus essentially ‘unburdened by the state.’ This republic, and the bureaucracies that do its bidding, are constructs of modernity and reflect ideologies that reach back at least as far as the European Renaissance. It was this era, based largely on a revival of Greek anthropocentrism, encapsulated in Protagoras’ dictum that ’Man is the measure of all things,’ which led directly into the development of Humanism and the Scientific Revolution both of which depended upon an idealization of consciousness that imagined it disengaged from the natural world. In this essentialized form, the human mind flattered itself that it was capable of the ‘rational’ study and exposition of that world. This perverse conjuring of human sentience – set against an inert backdrop of the non-human - remains at the root of modernity and functions as the defining trope of Western civilization.

Marx introduced an antidote to this idealism by developing an understanding of humans as historically shaped by their material conditions rather than their floating free, as the independent, sine qua non of terrestrial existence. This perception arose during an era in which mechanical contrivances, such as the steam engine, which were the practical applications of newly acquired scientific knowledge, disrupted the last vestiges of that pre-modern comingling of human labor with an enveloping natural world to which Linebaugh refers. As Andreas Malm has noted, mills driven by the essentially free motive power of falling water were quickly replaced by those powered by steam whose location was based on the availability of cheap labor rather than hydro-geomorphology.

Hans Holbein, the Younger, 'Portrait of Henry VIII' (1536-7), and Vincent Van Gogh, 'Portrait of the postman Joseph Roulin." 1889. "The contrast reflects how art changed as capitalism developed." — John Molyneux. [o]

The inevitable subtext – fully comprehended or not – of a walk (or run) up Sisar, or any consciously ‘present’ experience of the wildland is the dialectical relationship between one’s consciousness and the flora, fauna, micro-organisms, and the geologic and atmospheric conditions that, broadly speaking, constitute the environment through which one is passing. Such ratiocination does not depend on the extraordinary, such as the Topatopa view, although its majesty is undoubtedly an adjunct to the expansion of awareness, but it can also be realized in the minutiae of plant life, the markings of the seasons, the ruffle of the katabatic wind that streams down the canyon early morning, the behavior of birds and other fauna and, indeed, in the geological processes that generate the reality of the rock and soil beneath one’s feet. It is, however, the phenomenon of the Topatopas, embedded on the southern flank of the Santa Ynez mountain chain, that most often provokes within me this highly caffeinated jolt of existential enquiry. Any such disquisition depends on the level of engagement with the natural world one is willing to risk. Total engagement will, I suggest, inevitably shake loose one’s allegiance to the ideological foundations of modernity.

This relationship between human consciousness and the wild is at the core of most ‘nature writing’ of which this blog, over the last decade or so, has often been a humble exemplar, and is echoed in its masthead tagline, ‘Reintegrating Human and Wild Cultures.’ It is also the subject matter of a great deal of my reading. Dipresh Chakrabarty reaches back beyond the Renaissance to note that human history and natural history were forcibly separated at the birth of civilization which began to develop about ten thousand years ago at the end the geologic era known as the Pleistocene. As the planet warmed, farming became a viable means of subsistence and led to the rise of cities in the riverine settlements of the Middle East, and eventually to the development of the major world religions which established humans as the exclusive vessels of spiritual essence – a quality previously taken to exist throughout Creation.

He noted that the “universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”

Modernity, which began to emerge five or six hundred years ago, further severed western consciousness from those vestiges of animism that had survived in the medieval world. Now, in the 21st century, the long process of our species’ alienation from the natural world is beginning to be reversed, at least partly because nature, hitherto taken to be a reasonably stable back drop to human activities, has been profoundly disrupted by our burning of fossil fuels for a quarter millennium, and most egregiously, post 1950. We now understand that our species’ survival is contingent on adapting to the wildly unpredictable consequences of climate change and to be thoroughly co-mingled with the fate of all other terrestrial life forms – whose plenitude is diminished daily as our bloated population takes its toll of extraction, exploitation and extinction.

Running, early morning, through the riparian woodlands bordering Sisar creek, I silently name-check the spring flowers: monkey flower, California everlasting, yellow pincushion, Solanum, Antirrhinum (pink snapdragon), virgin’s bower (the native Clematis), Eriodictyon (yerba santa), morning glory, white sage, chaparral yucca (Our Lord’s candle), deerweed and poison oak, and note the exuberant foliage of mugwort, waiting to flower in a few weeks’ time. I listen for the muffled hoot of the great horned owl, the doleful coo of the mourning dove and the chirpy notes of the chaparral wren-tit – its song sliding down the musical scale – amidst a dawn’s chorus of indistinguishable avian chatter. Oak, walnut, bay, and sycamore shade the trail, and as you begin to rise out of the canyon, Cottonwoods reach for the sky, beyond the riparian canopy. Their temerity was punished by last fall’s violent santa ana winds which have left many snapped mid-trunk, their fallen limbs strewn across the creek.

The Sespe Wilderness . . . "Running through the riparian woodlands bordering Sisar creek, I silently name-check the spring flowers . . ." [o]

Thomas Berry, a leading twentieth-century cultural historian and spiritual philosopher, intuited a return to a more democratic devolution of spiritual essence, succinctly noting that the “universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” The native American writer, Robin Wall Kimmerer, of Braiding Sweetgrass fame, bemoans the lack of a “grammar of animacy that might acknowledge the autonomy of plant life”. The massed wildflowers along the Sisar trail, energized by the opening of the canopy following the Thomas Fire and nourished by the nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sulfur released by its ash, demonstrate a life-force that demands an appreciation of their sentience – an acknowledgement, in other words, of their animacy.

In Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert Macfarlane references the reputedly pagan philosopher and novelist, Albert Camus, in noting how strangeness emanates from the ‘denseness’ of the universe. Macfarlane confronts the ice-wrapped lithic landscape in Greenland as one that “could not be communicated in human terms or forms.” What is present, Macfarlane claims, is the weird language of ice and stone. Both elements represent mute presences that nevertheless have a profound resonance at the frequency of the human soul. It is thus that the spalled face of the Topatopas speaks across eons in the basso profundo of the cosmos, reverberating within the deepest levels of human consciousness. ≈ç

CITED TEXTS

Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, 2014
Dipresh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History: Four Theses, 2009
Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, 2016
Robin Wall Kimmerer, 'Speaking of Nature,' Orion Magazine, April, 2017
Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, 2019

JOHN DAVIS is a California-based architect who also writes a blog, Urban Wildland, and is a regular contributor to The Journal of Wild Culture. He lives in the Upper Ojai.

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Life is an Outlaw: A Biologist Challenges the Central Doctrine

Whitney Smith — Fri, 14 May 2021 04:10:23 +0000

Life is an Outlaw: A Biologist Challenges the Central Doctrine Whitney Smith Fri, 05/14/2021 - 00:10

Dissent

Agriculture

Soil & Terrain

Life is an Outlaw: A Biologist Challenges the Central Doctrine

THE WILD CULTURE INTERVIEW: IGNACIO CHAPELA. Unlike math and physics, biology is a messy science whose essence is diversity. What if the so-called natural laws that keep agribusiness on well-worn paths are bad for nature — and self-destructive for us? Chapela, a biologist at UC-Berkeley and an active member of the European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility, explains what kind of mentality is needed to win against the new biotechnologies. Interview by Whitney Smith and Chris Lowry.

Drawing by Efrain, 12, El Porvenir, Guatemala. “A man and his son are working cleaning the crops because it is the time of the year to do it. Corn and beans are important food for Guatemalans. What I also represent is the value of planting our food.” [o]

WHITNEY SMITH In terms of the work you’re doing today as a biologist and ecologist, what most concerns you?

IGNACIO CHAPELA A very important problem today is our failure to fruitfully understand, interact and deal with a fundamental principle of biology: diversity. It's not only the fact that we're losing diversity, but that we're losing it because we lack the imagination and intellectual capacity as a culture to understand and to behave coherently in relation to this principle. High input monoculture farming implies loss of genetic diversity. Why do we need to do that? There are many ways of dealing with food production, agriculture and forests, many ways that do not require monocultures. But it is our way of understanding and approaching biology, approaching life that eventually forces those diverse systems to become less and less diverse, more and more homogeneous, to fit our idea of what is optimal or what is good.

You cannot have sustained collective critical inquiry at the same time as having a hierarchical structure.

What moves biology is diversity, change, fluidity, the fact that nothing is set, and that there are no rules and no laws. The effort of trying to produce something equivalent to Newtonian physics in biology has failed over and over, and yet we stubbornly keep coming back and attempting to impose these laws of nature that don't exist onto nature that is crying back to us about how wrong we are. You see it over and over again in biotechnology. It doesn't deliver on its promises, ever. And yet, we stubbornly continue to expect those laws to rule the biological world, when they don’t.

CHRIS LOWRY Yes, driven by man as homo economicus — that everything is seen through the lens of profit maximization. A person who is part of the dominant paradigm would say biotechnology works well. “Monsanto’s monoculture works very well, thank you very much.”

CHAPELA And makes money.

LOWRY And maximizes yield. And they would say, from their point of view, biotechnology is a success.

CHAPELA I agree with that, except that the economic maxim is a daughter of the problem. It is not the problem, it is simply one of the expressions, one of the descendants of the root problem. And the root problem is, it's a misalignment between the way we understand and the way things are. So yes, Monsanto makes money, which is really the product. They do not necessarily produce more volume. For instance, the productivity of a monoculture in the American Midwest is just terrible, and it's coming to an end. Whereas the productivity of our high diversity field in Oaxaca, in a Milpa system [a traditional intercropping system of regional vegetables], productivity and yield are very high. There are many ways of analyzing this, even with the concepts of econometrics. If you look at yield, and you include the yield not only of the carbohydrates you're pulling out in the form of grain but also the nutrition in vitamins and minerals, if you include health factors as yield, there's just no comparison between an acre of Iowa cornfield and an acre of Oaxaca Milpa. An acre in Iowa is mining that will never be sustainable, whereas an acre in Oaxaca has been producing for 10,000 years and will apparently continue to produce for that long if allowed to do so.

A combination of factors increase microbial diversity. Green arrows indicate higher diversity and red arrows indicate lower diversity with arrow thickness representing the strength of the effect. [o]

SMITH From the beginning of our conversation you’ve said that the loss of diversity is largely through a lack of imagination in our culture. When you talk about imagination, do you mean openness, and the act of opening one’s mind to possibilities we might not be used to?

CHAPELA Yes, I think that is the point, it's openness to the other. In my world as a biologist, which is the world of the living, I need to make a strong distinction between the living and the non-living. The world of the living is so diverse and different that it takes training of the human mind to recognize that there are other ways of being. For example, a rewarding part of the process of becoming a mature biologist is to learn about the incredible diversity of sexual systems and reproductive systems (while acknowledging that sex and reproduction are different subjects). If you look at fish, then look at mammals, then if you look into the world of microbes, whoa! The world is bewildering in its diversity of sexual systems, reproductive systems, and systems of interaction that, on first inspection, we would have interpreted as sex, but then turn out not to be sex. This is a process by which a biologist is trained, through the exploration of living systems, to keep the mind open. In our education systems we seem to be anti-prepared for the world of the living; we seem to be hell-bent on bringing it into bounds and resistant to the possibility of other ways of being and other ways of living.

SMITH So in a sense, to have imagination is to have an image of the other, but also to have an image of how the other sees the world.

CHAPELA Yes, beautiful.

LOWRY And it requires humility. You were referring to, in a way, an all-species perspective in biology, and, as a biologist, you become aware that you want to think that the other is other living things, other creatures, other species, as well as other humans. However, as much as you want to, you can't. As David Ehrenfeld said in The Arrogance of Humanism, the problem with our humanist tradition, coming from back to Plato, is that it's arrogant, anthropocentric and hierarchical. We're on top and we're looking down on everything nonhuman.

Diversity in marine biology . . . How does species richness vary with ecosystem productivity for phytoplankton? The hump-shapes offer a clue. [o]

CHAPELA If you are humble, like you said, and if you have the opportunity to meet the Other, either in your backyard or in the soil, or by travelling the world, this Truth of the Other jumps out and becomes self-evident. I was raised in Mexico and I didn’t go to college in the US, but I’m very interested in questions about education. I remember in the 80s when an education policy in the US removed three subjects from the curriculum of elementary school teaching: biology, geography, and history. These subjects teach you about the other: knowledge about the other living things that are non-human; knowledge about the other that lives in different parts of the world; and the other that has lived in different times in history. That was an incredible moment in the 80s of closing down the focus and saying, hey, now we're really just focusing on us.

SMITH And it was in 1987 that the book The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom, became a huge bestseller.

CHAPELA Exactly.

SMITH Here’s a scenario I’d like you to consider. You’ve been invited to speak at a conference of elementary school curriculum designers, and you’re there because they want to know more about this question that you have about the lack of understanding and imagination in relation to the subject of diversity. This is a priority for them, and they want to figure their way out of it in the next ten years, it's not a quick project. How might you steer them?

CHAPELA Embracing the openness of diversity is a very scary prospect. It becomes very threatening, very daunting, and there is a huge amount of resistance. I have tried, and I continuously keep trying, on the biology curriculum. To give an example, there is a concept out there called the central dogma. It is the idea that you have a code somewhere that is written up, that has the instructions for how you're going to make things so that their form and their function are pre-encoded in this code. The concept of central dogma is something we all have to accept in order to pass exams, in order to graduate, all the way to the professional geneticists and ecologists who have to contend with it. So, you say to a middle school teacher, “You're going to teach without the central dogma. In fact, you're going to teach against the central dogma.” They're going to say, "Well, how am I going to explain heredity and evolution? Give me something equivalent that is as powerful and as useful that applies throughout all fields in biology, and I’ll go with you.” It reminds me of where I come from, which is from a Catholic background in Mexico. To change the way we teach about biological diversity is similar to the ideological and imaginary castle of Catholicism — a stable institution and frame of mind. The Catholic Church has survived nation states, empires, world wars, whatever you throw at it, partly because it has such beautiful and elegant imagery and makes so much sense — as long as you don't question the fundamental dogmas. We have come to a time in the development of biological practice and teaching that feels and looks very much like religious trappings of something as beautiful and as toxic as the Catholic Church.

On the one hand, this is one kind of science. The other science that also carries that word, as a label, is one that my friend Ian Ball, the historian, defines with four words: sustained, collective, critical inquiry. It is a human activity that is about asking questions, doubting, and doing it collectively. This means we share with people who are alive and people who are dead, sharing our understandings and not giving up on questions. Sustained, collective, critical inquiry. This way of understanding does not lead to a pyramidal hierarchy. It is a more flexible, horizontal and dynamic network of people committed to inquiry. You can see how one is completely opposed to the other. You cannot have sustained collective critical inquiry at the same time as having a hierarchical structure. You cannot have them both. This is the schizophrenic nature of science today, in that ‘science’ is a word behind two different understandings of who we are in the world and what the world is about — and it’s a continuous back and forth between these two ways of understanding.

The monolithic “rule of the laws of nature" mentality wants one answer to solve every problem.

SMITH I want us to go back to this place where you’re about to finish your talk at the conference of curriculum designers, and they're inspired by what you're talking about, but they're confused. They're thinking, okay, I’m on board, but how do I do it? What are you going to leave them with?

CHAPELA I'd leave them with a practice, a practice that requires exercise that, first of all, includes what Chris mentioned: humility. And secondly, a practice that invites curiosity for the world, and openness to accept what the world has to say, instead of imposing what we think the world is supposed to say back to us when we inquire about what it's doing. So, as a first step, the humility is necessary, and it needs to be practiced. We are born arrogant and we are raised arrogant. And so like any muscle, it requires exercise. And then the practice of observing and watching, but watching in order to learn from the other, in order to accept what the other has to say, rather than what I’m expecting the other to tell me.

LOWRY How would you advise them to defend themselves against the dominant paradigm as they go on this path and as they teach others — since it takes a lot of strength to be a nonconformist in any way?

CHAPELA I’m a member of the European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility, ENSSER, and within this organization, this is something we're confronting a lot. The people I talk to within that group are the biologists rather than the physicists, and that is a common understanding we have in ENSSER. And yet we also are in common understanding of how dangerous it is to try and butt heads against a system that is very monolithic and very strong and very powerful. So first of all, I would say, you need to survive as an individual, as a teacher, and in a network.

So networking and supporting is what we do in ENSSER. Making sure, before we come out bashing GMOs, we make sure that we are on the same plane. No going out wild as individuals. Develop networks, survive as an individual, teacher, survive as a network and reproduce – these are fundamental questions of our times. The fundamental motivation of the 20th century was produce, produce, produce! The key questions are biological questions: survival and reproduction.

Ignacio Chapela speaking on a panel about GMOs at an ENSSER conference, 2018, entitled, 'Bound to fail: the flawed scientific foundations of genetic engineering." [o]

SMITH In relation to what you’ve said about the lack of imagination in our culture, if you think ahead 30 years from now, you're an older man looking back, you still have your wits about you, and you heard about it, or read it in a newspaper that something happened that you never thought was possible — what would that be?

CHAPELA I don't want to read about it in the newspaper, I want to see it happening out in the world, at the smallest possible scale. Part of the monolithic “rule of the laws of nature" mentality is that it’s a mentality that wants one answer to solve every problem, whereas I strongly believe in transformation that comes through answers that are small, localized, and time-specific. Detecting the appearance and maintenance of happiness through diversity is something that we are really good at detecting, really good at sensing it when it’s there and not there. When you walk into a field and you see people dealing with a field that is diverse, powerfully rooted in its history, and deep in the physical roots of the soil, that’s where there is an enormous amount of happiness — and it is very local.

SMITH Foraging for the diversity vibe . . .

CHAPELA Exactly. You can feel it when you’re working with these two ingredients: small scale and local time. I believe in that and I have no doubt about it because I see it all the time. However, it’s a struggle I don't think is going to go away in 30 years. ≈ç

IGNACIO CHAPELA is a microbial ecologist and mycologist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for a 2001 paper in Nature on the flow of transgenes into wild maize populations, as an outspoken critic of the University of California's ties to the biotechnology industry, and for his work with natural resources and indigenous rights.

WHITNEY SMITH is the Publisher and Editor of the Journal of Wild Culture. He lives in Toronto.

CHRIS LOWRY is a media producer and singer. Before working for many years in international development and sustainability, he made films on art and music. Chris was part of the original team that created The Journal of Wild Culturein 1986 and served as the magazine’s Senior Editor. He lives in Toronto.

Comments

Amazing piece with Ignacio…

Amazing piece with Ignacio Chapella! So wonderful his definition of science as collective critical inquiry., and so interesting his data about geography and history courses withdrawn from US school curriculum. It made me better understand its people. Thanks for this!

Ana Ruiz Díaz

Wed, 09/29/2021 - 18:04

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Faces of the Planet: Landscape Photography From On High

Whitney Smith — Sun, 09 May 2021 07:18:05 +0000

Faces of the Planet: Landscape Photography From On High Whitney Smith Sun, 05/09/2021 - 03:18

Photography & Moving Images

Soil & Terrain

Space

Faces of the Planet: Landscape Photography From On High

The European Space Agency's mission is "to shape the development of Europe’s space capability...and deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world." One citizen benefit we're grateful for is the remarkable gallery of images the ESA has captured from satellite cameras. Though these images are produced by scientists and technicians using various photographic modifications to enhance their usefulness, the results add up to more than the sum of technical decisions. To the innocent viewer, these images also function as pictorial artifacts that exist in the transition zone between representational and figurative art on the one hand, and abstract art on the other.

Amazon River

This image shows the Amazon River meandering through one of the most vital ecosystems in the world – the Amazon rainforest in South America.

This image has been processed in a way that shows water bodies, such as the Amazon River, in blue. The Amazon river begins its journey in the Andes and makes its way east through six South American countries before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean on the northeast coast of Brazil. The river has a length of around 6400 km – the equivalent of the distance from New York City to Rome.

The Amazon is considered the widest river in the world with a width of between 1.6 and 10 km, but expands during the wet season to around 50 km. With more than 1000 tributaries, the Amazon River is the largest drainage system in the world in terms of the volume of its flow and the area of its basin. As a consequence of its ever-changing flow, older riverbeds can be seen as thin lines around the main river at the top of the image.

One of its tributaries, the Javari River, or Yavari River, is visible as a thinner blue line weaving through the tropical rainforest. The river flows for 870 km, forming the border between Brazil and Peru, before joining the Amazon River.

In the image, cities and built-up areas are visible in cyan, for example the cities of Tabatinga and Leticia with two airports are easily identifiable in the far-right. The yellow and orange colours in the image show the surrounding Amazon forest.

As radar images provide data in a different way than a normal optical camera, the images are usually black and white when they are received. By using a technology that aligns the radar beams sent and received by the instrument in one orientation – either vertically or horizontally – the resulting data can be processed in a way that produces coloured images such as the one featured here. This technique allows for a better distinction of features on the ground.

ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTES: The colours of this week’s image come from the combination of two polarisations from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar mission, which have been converted into a single image.

São Miguel, Azores

This image from over the Azores island of São Miguel features a volcanic complex called the Sete Cidades Massif.

The circular crater or caldera dominates the image and measures about 5 km across. The interior has lakes, volcanic cones, lava domes and maars – or shallow, flooded craters.

The Lagoa das Sete Cidades – or Lagoon of Seven Cities – is comprised of two ecologically different lakes that are connected by a narrow passage, visible at the centre of the image. The lake to the north is known as the Blue Lake while to the one to the south is the Green Lake for the colours they reflect.

According to the legend, the protected daughter of a king escaped to the surrounding hills, where she met and fell in love with a young shepherd. When the shepherd asked the king for his daughter in marriage, the king refused and forbade his daughter from seeing the boy again. The two met secretly one last time and cried until their tears filled the valleys to form the two lakes: one green as the Princess's eyes were green, and the other blue like the shepherd’s eyes.

In the surrounding area we can see the distinct lines where vegetation grows along waterways radiating from the circular massif. Between these lines are agricultural plots.

ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTES: This image was acquired by the Spanish Deimos-2 satellite on 6 December 2014. With its high-resolution optical imager, the satellite can see down to a 75 cm ground resolution.

Saharan Desert, Algeria

This satellite image was captured over southeastern Algeria in the heart of the Sahara desert.

The heat and lack of water render vast desert areas highly unwelcoming, making satellites the best way to observe and monitor these environments on a large scale.

Satellites provide information on desert ecosystems and their expansion, and about areas at risk of soil degradation, erosion and desertification. Data from spaceborne sensors also assist in the water management of inhabited arid regions, and can track and help predict the movement of dust storms.

Optical imagery of deserts from space is arguably the most fascinating: the diversity and untouched state of these landscapes produce unique and striking scenes.

In this image, a large area of rock appearing purple stretches across the right side of the image, with fluvial erosion patterns testament to an earlier time when the area received more rainfall. Today, this area sees an average of about 10 mm of rainfall per year.

Wind-shaped sand dunes are visible on the left. The area at the bottom appears to be flat, with tiny specks of vegetation.

Just south of this image lies the Tassili n’Ajjer National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site, renowned for its 10 000 year-old cave art. The drawings and engravings depict culture and the environment from a time when climatic conditions were more favourable to human occupation.

ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTES: Japan’s ALOS satellite recorded this image on 28 January 2011.

Alberta, Canada

To the north, blue lake waters are visible, interspersed with rivers and creeks. This area makes up the world’s largest freshwater inland river delta, where the Peace and Athabasca rivers converge on the Slave River and Lake Athabasca (the water body in the upper right).

Lake Claire to the left is also part of this delta system, and lies within the Wood Buffalo National Park – Canada’s largest.

The lower half of the image is part of a wider area known as the Athabasca oil sands, which has the world’s largest known reservoir of crude bitumen, which can be upgraded to crude oil using technology that extracts the oil from the soil using chemicals.

Boreal forests and peat bogs in this area are being destroyed by open-pit mining. Boreal forests cover nearly half of the province, but about .2% has been disturbed by open-pit mining, some of which are visible in the lower-right. In addition to deforestation, these activities cause pollution and push wildlife from their preferred habitats.

ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTES: This is a Landsat-8 image from 13 April 2014.

Kumbunbur Creek, Australia

This false-colour satellite image shows the Kumbunbur Creek in Australia’s Northern Territory, about 260 km southwest of the city of Darwin.

The image was acquired near the end of the dry season. The dry areas with a somewhat dull colour become flooded mudflats during the rainy season.

The green ‘branches’ of what looks like a tree are the waterways of runoff that flow into the Timor Sea (not pictured).

The false-colour makes vegetation appear bright red, and we can clearly see how vegetation grows mainly along the waterways. Vegetation is more evenly dispersed across the plain to the north.

The rainy season occurs during a tropical area’s summer months because of increased heat from the Sun’s more direct impact angle. Higher temperatures lead to an increase in evaporation and rising, warm air masses. This air expands and cools, leading to the formation of cumulus clouds, and almost daily rainfall and thunderstorms.

As seasons change, the location of these rainfalls travels to areas with the highest Sun impact angles, resulting in wet and dry seasons in different zones of the tropics.

ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTES: The image was captured by the Kompsat-2 satellite on 20 September 2011.

Rub’ al Khali desert

Rolling sand dunes in the expansive Rub’ al Khali desert on the southern Arabian Peninsula are pictured in this radar image from the Sentinel-1A satellite.

Rub’ al Khali – also known at the ‘Empty Quarter’ – is part of the greater Arabian Desert. Its sand dunes reach up to 250 m in height and in some areas are interspersed with hardened flat plains, evident at this bottom half of this image. These plains are what is left of shallow lakes that existed thousands of years ago, formed by monsoon-like rains and runoff.

Today, the region is considered to be ‘hyper-arid’, with precipitation rarely exceeding 35 mm a year and regular high temperatures around 50°C.

Rub’ al Khali has experienced major desertification over the past 2000 years. Until about the year 300 AD, trade caravans crossed what is today an impassable wasteland.

In the upper part of this image, we can see a road snaking through the remote desert and leading to Kharkhir (not pictured), a Saudi village near the border with Yemen.

ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTES: This is a radar image from the Sentinel-1A satellite from 2014.

Uluru/Ayers Rock — 'Island Mountain'

Under Australia’s dual naming policy, the formation is officially called by both the traditional Aboriginal name and the English name.

Uluru stands over 340 m above the surrounding desert and measures about 9 km around. In addition to being a geological wonder, it is a historical one as well: ancient rock art can be seen at points along the base of the formation. Many of these paintings were created by the elders of Aboriginal tribes to teach younger generations how to track and hunt animals – much like how a teacher uses a school blackboard.

The rock formation is an Inselberg – German for ‘island mountain’ – a prominent geological structure that rises from the surrounding plain.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, this part of Australia was a shallow sea. Layers of sandstone settled on the ocean floor and were compressed. These hardened, horizontal layers were uplifted and tilted almost 90º upwards to their present position. The rock eroded slower than the surrounding softer deposits until the monolith stood high above an otherwise flat surface.

From this perpendicular angle of the satellite acquisition, we can see those layers that were once horizontal and now appear to cut across the top of the formation.

This area in the southern part of the Northern Territory is home to a variety of animals, including the red kangaroo, dingo, hopping mouse, marsupial mole, various bats and over 70 species of reptiles.

ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTES: The Korea Aerospace Research Institute’s Kompsat-2 satellite acquired this image on 15 September 2011.

Westfjords peninsula, Northwest Iceland

Located in the North Atlantic Ocean east of Greenland and immediately south of the Arctic Circle, Iceland is the westernmost European nation, and has more land covered by glaciers than the whole of continental Europe. The country sits on the mid-Atlantic Ridge, where two tectonic plates are moving away from each other, causing strong geothermal and volcanic activity.

The grey area that is somewhat shaped like a Christmas tree is land, while the colourful spaces between the 'branches' are long fjords – long, narrow arms of the sea that stretch far inland.

During the ice ages both ice and rivers carved deep valleys in the mountains. As the climate changed, most of the ice melted, and the valleys were gradually filled with salt water from the coast, giving birth to the fjords.

The white dots along one of the fjords close to the centre of the image are radar reflections from Westfjords peninsula’s largest town, Ísafjörður. More radar reflections from other towns can also be seen scattered along the coastline.

ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTES: This image was created by combining three Envisat radar acquisitions from 11 September 2004, 14 April 2007 and 3 May 2008 over the same area.

WHITNEY SMITH is the Publisher and Editor of The Journal of Wild Culture. He lives in Toronto.

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In the Shade of a Frond

Jenna Gersie — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 06:10:27 +0000

In the Shade of a Frond Jenna Gersie Sun, 02/14/2021 - 01:10

Finding & Foraging

Gardenalia

Soil & Terrain

In the Shade of a Frond

In her recollections as a child on the family property and as an adult in fields and ravines on different continents, Jenna Gersie tracks how she came to love what grows wild on the forest floor.

'My father would pull dead leaves from the basket and water the fern. It stayed alive for years.' [o]

MY MOTHER, who recently became a snowbird, leaves her home in rural northwest New Jersey once the leaves fall and trades oak and pine for sawgrass and palm. I spend the winter and spring living alone in the log house my father built. In winter, I watch snow clump on the branches of oak and maple trees and listen for the barred owl’s regular evening call as the golden sunlight slants through the trees. In spring, I prepare for my mother’s return, combing the yard for sticks and yanking weeds from the vegetable garden. I pull up fistfuls of purple dead nettle, shaking black dirt from their delicate roots and tossing them into buckets. I tug at tufts of grass and dandelions and squeal whenever an earthworm comes up, tangled in tendrils of root hairs.

Bending so I can reach underneath a wrought iron chair that sits in the garden, I stretch my arm to grab another handful of purple dead nettle and notice a small fern growing in the chair’s shade. The fern is made up of only one blade, and its pinnae are pale yellow. Ferns grow all over the forest just feet from the garden, but I’m surprised to find one growing here. I pull the purple dead nettle from the earth, but leave the fern where it is.

What romantic irony that such sex cells, in order to grow, should find each other in the shape of a heart.

When I was a child, my father brought ferns, tiger lilies, and hemlocks home from the forest. Most were planted outdoors, but a giant fern sat in a large basket on the top floor of our house, a balcony that opens to a cathedral ceiling and the living space below. Dry brown leaflets from the fern would fall and float to the main floor below. My father would pull dead leaves from the basket and water the fern. It stayed alive for years.

At a nearby ravine where he would take us hiking on weekends; there are more than 250 fern species, all in the wood fern family. I learned to identify Christmas fern, named because the plant remains green throughout the year and can therefore be used as decoration at Christmastime — but memorable because each tiny pinnae has a small hook at the base of one side, making it the shape of a tiny Christmas stocking. I learned cinnamon fern, whose chestnut-brown spore-bearing fronds sprout upright from the center of the plant. And I learned northern maidenhair fern, with its lacy leaflets and pink fiddleheads.

The author, her older sister, and a supervisor in their back yard.

My father brought ferns home from the forest because he loved green things. Our yard was small, but he planted trees there: Norway spruce, Douglas fir, blue spruce, and white pine. Rhododendrons bloomed in front of the house, and rabbits nested under a juniper bush. Our garden began as an unfenced patch of dirt where he grew asparagus and cherry tomatoes and zucchini. My mother wrote a poem for him, ‘On Being Loved by a Man with a Garden’

Romance, I plead. You
bring vegetables.

He grew broccoli, snow peas, tomatoes that she turned into sauce.

Under the sturgeon moon
I see your bent form hunting melons
and squash. The plumpest ones you give
to me. All summer, I’ll unwrap
leaves of lettuce and find heart.

The garden took a new shape when I was ten. My parents built an addition on the house, trusting an old friend to cut through the logs with a chainsaw to connect the old part of the house to the new. They put a fenced-in pool in the backyard, and my dad used the old logs to build raised beds within the fence, where he continued to grow vegetables that fed us through the summers. But he would only push seeds into the black dirt for a few more years.

'The cells unite over a film of water, then begin to grow into a new fern plant.' [o]

After my father died, my mother wondered what would become of the garden. She didn’t think she had the green thumb my father had, and to this day, she calls herself a half-assed gardener. But that first summer, she decided to plant the garden. Summer after summer, my mother learned how to make things grow, and I adopted my father’s love of all things green. I went to live in Australia and spent time in its tropical forests, where ferns covered the shaded ground, grew rootless on trunks of trees, and reached into the lower canopy. Tree ferns, perfect parasols of diaphanous leaf cover, stood ten, twenty feet tall. I would look up through their leaves — black lace umbrellas that let just the right amount of sun through to the damp ground — and search for their giant fiddleheads, uncurling from thick stipes.

Ferns appeared in the fossil record more than three hundred million years ago, the earliest vascular plant form and the most advanced of seedless plants, representing a middle ground between other seedless plants — algae, fungi, lichens, mosses, and liverworts — and the seeded plants that evolved next. Instead of seeds, ferns have spores: minute powdery units (brown, black, or yellow) that develop in small capsules that are released when ripe. Germinating in damp places, the spores grow into tiny, thin heart-shaped plants with male sex cells at the pointed end of the heart and female sex cells in small pockets in the notch of the heart. The cells unite over a film of water, then begin to grow into a new fern plant. What romantic irony that such sex cells, in order to grow, should find each other in the shape of a heart. Left with this image, it’s easy for me to associate love with this plant. I love that I can find it in ecosystems all over the world, in places as different as Australia’s tropical rainforests and New Jersey’s temperate hardwood forests, and that my father loved a particular fern enough to dig it up and tend it in our home for years.

The author with her father and big sister.

When my sister and brother and I left the house for college and then jobs, my mother decided to fill the pool in with dirt. One of the raised beds built from logs still stands in the shady part of the garden, but new raised beds fill the space where the pool once was, built with the help of friends. Those same friends planted a gingko tree just outside the garden fence: a tribute to my father. He admired the gingko trees planted along the avenues in New York City, where he went for chemotherapy. The leaves of the gingko reminded him of the tiny leaflets of a maidenhair fern.

A few days after discovering the fern in the garden, I go out to check on it. There is sunlight in the garden, and the crowns of trees are in that baby green state of no longer buds but not quite leaves. The fern has eight green leaves now, and a tiny fiddlehead sprouts from the middle of the plant, its curl smaller than the fingernail on my pinkie. I’ll come out in the mornings, and watch for it to unfurl. ≈ç

LINKS

FERN IDENTIFICATION. The RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) site provides detailed information about different types of ferns and other plants.

FERN FAN CLUB. The American Fern Society, established in 1893, has a site rich with information about ferns, lycophytes, and pteridophytes — plus many opportunities to gather resources, connect with others and even exchange spores. It is also the publisher of the American Fern Journal.

JENNA GERSIE is researching log cabins in American literature while studying for a PhD in English at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Zoomorphic, About Place Journal, and The Fourth River. Jenna divides her time between the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and the Appalachian Mountains in New Jersey.

Snapshots courtesy of the author.

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Present to the Non-Human

David Hawkins — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 04:58:31 +0000

Present to the Non-Human David Hawkins Sun, 09/27/2020 - 00:58

Prose, Poetry & Poetics

Soil & Terrain

Wildlife & Wilderness

Present to the Non-Human

A poet and naturalist with a remarkable ear for the sound-colour of words and phrases jams on the relationship between inhabitants and habitat, climate change and edgelands, the possibilities of re-enchantment, and 'wildness' itself.

[o]

HEREDITIES

To cuckoo the first

spring in hear

makes a mockery

bushes move between takes

and blushes also

to keep on taking bluish eggs

replace sing them with mock-eggs

both-andscape paint

liberally misapplied

y(our) face: a Welsh

dresser, a picture

of mountains in spring re-

vegetating

your face is mountains in spring

meanwhile, knotty

oaks from the hanging wood — exactly that

expression

stained through use

but homely, modesty, between

a table motioned

spins its tell-tale grain

such sweetly wandering

your teeth

a cuckoo clock spits

mocking a makery of such

ancient ideas — repeated

moist

but with larvae inside

creeping brain halved

like a walnut

coracle

bundles over unmapped

a springhead dazzled

with star-snot

the cuckoo’s ‘fuck-you’

too true.

[o]

DIAGRAM OF A BIRD-SCARER

An electronic falcon

unspirals the tree:

hyperobjects to roosting:

all the little birds

wanting to shudder

under night’s loamy wing:

disperse and disperse:

to find unreconnoitred

somewheres in new

haunts of an unsung world:

spread out through

end-tetherings

of unsure light:

canarying from balcony

to balcony as if they were

a banned packet of sweets:

disperse and disperse

they sing obliquely

so as not to be overheard:

decreasing stubs of songs

that stult in the throat:

attenuated refrains

of diminishing returns

they call

unrepresentatively

in rough

cross-hatched shade:

where the backgrounds

aren’t properly filled in:

seeking refuge

in an unforeseen zone:

~outside of time

or not worth it: real

creatures made imaginary:

the indescribable: made real

meanwhile among the garden’s

enhanced realities:

this automated raptor

hangs glitching:

ejaculates stormcoloured code:

wherewithal attention traps:

forcing the passerby

to slip on noise-cancelling

headphones and complete

the rupturous puzzle:

with words alone.

[o]

THE FUTURE NEVER GETS OLD?

churning mistletoe’s

late season chrome yellow

bifurcates year on year

these leaves doubly divide

thumbprint thick

tonguing through fog

with the dispersal radius

of a lost mistletoe marble*

flown sputtering and tiny

totally ignoring the rave

mistle thrushes and blackcaps

shit and smear the next

generation between

lattices of shadow

between rupture/rapture

a bark-wound that breathes

equally a mistletoe weevil

finicks across well-

thumbed sky-stained leaf

margins all forking late

yellows and hungover

following the freest party

known to humanity

or more importantly

let us at least remark

in a depauperate song

slim silent bittersweet nothings

where their notes should be

only tomorrow’s unfinished

drafts and partial recognition

* A micromoth looking like a very lovely bird-dropping: slate blue, charcoal grey, mistletoe green, shifting mousy brown and scampering black on a mute white ground.

[o]

M4 WESTBOUND

beyond the crash barriers:

hemlock skeletons

and oily yellow wild parsnips

flights of ripe rubbish

an exploded buzzard

many species of rain

through roaring shadows

and high earth banks with

long symbolic gaps between yellow cars

we milky passengers

huddled like pigeons

around the engine warmth

nodding asleep/jolting

awake in phase time

this repeated movement

always fractionally different

as a brightly vested person

lops overhanging branches

on the infinite verge

a wet cement sky

folding into itself

reflects our grey stratum:

road and plastic and road

sadly/luckily the highway will run

out before the thought

is completed – we can’t be

pioneers more than once

there are no sunflowers to sow

nothing indigenous in the true sense

so feel free to dig

until the tectonic

seams are revealed

and their drift

can be interpreted: today

we’re all cascading, declining,

processing into the west

and the idea of the West

burns like a flare

at the end of the motorway

somewhere near Caerfyrddin.

DAVID HAWKINS is a writer, book editor and naturalist. Recent work has appeared in Arc Poetry, Blackbox Manifold, BlazeVOX, Datableed, Entropy, Interpreter's House, Magma, Molly Bloom, Otoliths and White Review. He was awarded second prize in the 2015 UK National Poetry Competition. David lives in Bristol, England.

Comments

This post is invaluable…

This post is invaluable.

richardmcilveen

Mon, 11/14/2022 - 11:59