Heritage plants—here after we're gone

June is peony season in the domesticated part of our yard, and this June, despite a cold and dry and windy spring, our peonies have outdone themselves. Here in the high-desert where water is short, I use garden water carefully (we get an average of ten inches of precipitation a year, rain and snow included, and this year's total so far has been a measly 1.84 inches). My priority is our kitchen garden, a set of raised beds that currently is producing more bags than we can eat (to our friends benefit!) of French Market and Monet's Garden lettuce mixes in an array of shapes and flavors from tangy and spicy to licorice-sweet, plus the wrinkled dark green leaves of Catalina spinach, City Lights chard with its stems in neon-bright colors, sweet and juicy Fort Laramie strawberries, and enough cilantro and dill to share with a local restaurant. (Thank you, Rene Shepherd of Rene's Garden Seeds!) The only other part of the yard that gets regular water is my peony bed, a raised bed that lines one edge of the wall containing the kitchen garden.

Why peonies here at 7,000 feet elevation in a valley so dry that cactus and fringed sage are more at home than trees? Because these long-lived plants take both Richard and me back to our childhoods--and earlier. They are part of our gardening heritage. When I advise gardeners on what to plant, especially those new to the arid, high-elevation West where the weather can range from hot and dry to a hard freeze to wind gusting with near-hurricane force to deluges of hail--and that's just in June--I always suggest they walk their neighborhood and see what is growing in the long-established yards, the neglected corners, and the old farmsteads where the houses are long gone but a few plants may remain outlining the foundations. If lilac shrubs still thrive, for instance, or banks of daylilies, or ranks of bearded iris, you know those plants will grow in your yard. The plants that have out-lived us, or the ones that live on because gardeners share seeds, cuttings, bulbs, or rhizomes are the heritage plants of any given place, the domesticated species that have made themselves at home in that particular climate and landscape.

But peonies in the high-desert? These perennials sprout clumps of leaves so early in spring that they come up tinted red to protect them from sun and frost, gradually push upwards on graceful stems, and then sprout buds oozing nectar from their seams and promptly attracting ants by the score. Helped by the ants in ways we haven't yet figured out, those buds bloom into fist-sized and larger masses of petals in white and pink and deep rose-red. Peonies bloomed through the springs of my childhood, their sweet scent drifting across the back yard into my bedroom window. And they bloomed in spring in Richard's childhood, including at his Grandma Lizzie's farmhouse near Possum Valley, Arkansas. They are rooted plants, each tuber capable of living a century or more, and they sulk when transplanted, taking several years to store enough energy to bloom again.

So when we settled here in south-central Colorado, in the town where Richard lived in early childhood, and my brother, Bill and sister-in-law Lucy gave us a gift certificate to White Flower Farm, the mail-order nursery whose catalog is a wonderland of plants, I knew where that gift would go: peonies (with a backdrop of summer-blooming lilies). I ordered a collection of unlabeled varieties harvested from the fields of a peony grower going out of business. Richard built me the bed, and I planted the tubers that fall. And Miss Alice, my mother-in-law, gave me a tuber from the peonies that grew at her childhood home in rural Arkansas. Putting those knobby brown tubers into the soil was one of my ways of rooting: as I patted the earth around one, I promised them silently I would stay to watch them bloom, spring after spring.

Just last week, my writing buddy Janet Riehl of the blog-magazine Riehlife mentioned that her father, Erwin Thompson, grew up on a farm that produced peonies. So I sent him some shots of our blooms. He wrote back a vivid remembrance of farming from the days when peonies were the market flower for Decoration Day, the June holiday when families brought cans of flowers to the cemetery to decorate the graves of their dead. On Decoration Day, we tidied up the cemetery, cutting back the long grass, trimming the shrubs, cleaning off the stones, and placing cut flowers--especially the blowsy heads of peonies, which loosed their sweet scent on the air. And had picnics. Decoration Day is long-gone, as is the farmhouse where my mother-in-law grew up, but the peonies I call "Old Home Place" bloom in white profusion in our garden a thousand miles from southern Arkansas (and 6,900 feet higher) in company with a whole bed of other peonies in blush-pink and vivid rose-red.

There's a vase of peonies on the dining table near where I write, including the pink ones pictured above. When I pass by, they loose a trail of sweetness with a hint of spice, that fragrance that only peonies can make.

Blog versus web site--why both? what's where?

I've been "talking" in email with blogger Janet Riehl of the blog-magazine Riehlife about how I see the connection between my blog, which I started just about a year ago to see how it would work and my long-time web site. The question came up when one of my articles for Audubon magazine, "Creating Buzz," on North America's 4,000 or so species of native bees, the ubiquitous and largely uncelebrated pollinators of garden flowers, crop plants, and wildlands, won a "Harvey" Award from Colorado Author's League. Janet asked if I was going to link to the online version of "Creating Buzz" from my blog. I hadn't intended to, because I see that kind of news as belonging on my web site.

Here's how I explained it to Janet, and to myself as I wrote, a great example of "thinking out loud" via writing:

I think of blogging as a way to explore the longer pieces I might write, and I do that thinking in public because that holds me to a higher standard and often leads me to fuller realizations. Some of my blog pieces become weekly columns or commentaries; others are the seeds of even longer pieces. I have a mental list of blog entries and commentaries that I see as the beginnings of my next book, Rooted: Living Thoughtfully, in Place.

My web site is where I announce my news. I see it as my polished work, including news of my writing and workshops, plus my archives, and the blog as a more personal thinking place. I should make that clear on both. Since I started the blog as an experiment, I guess it's time to give it a permanent place in my web presence! Sometime this summer when I get a break in magazine deadlines, I'll work on linking it more closely to my web site, and my web site more closely to the blog.

Isn't it interesting how explaining something to someone is a way to learn it more fully yourself? That's what happened as Janet and I explored the subject in email. So thanks, Janet. Now I understand why I blog!

A blessing from the land

When my husband and I adopted the half-block of degraded industrial property where we now live, it was a forbidding sight: colonized by knee-high clumps of prickly invasive weeds native to distant lands, littered with industrial junk that even Richard, who collects rusted metal and such for his sculpture work, didn't want, and surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. The "soil" was a mix of river gravel from eons ago when the nearby Arkansas River once flowed here, along with more recent additions of fly ash, clinkers, broken concrete chunks, and a layer of coarse "roadbase," which is just what it says. Still, we imagined restoring the native high-desert grassland, while seriously questioning if anything besides tumbleweed and cheatgrass would ever take root on our half-jokingly labeled "decaying industrial empire."

But we were determined to do something positive with the site gave us a historic building for Richard's studio and would eventually sprout our house. So we called Alex and Suzanne of Western Native Seed down the valley, and asked them to consult on a mix of native plants that might help us return the place to some semblance of its wild community. One hot afternoon, they came, walked through the weeds, shook their heads, and went away. A week later Alex called to say that they'd come up with a mix of locally collected native species that might be tough enough to survive on our harsh site. They called it Roadbase Mix.

That fall, we prepared a test patch about 50 feet long and ten feet wide at one edge of the property: we raked the dry soil into ridges so the winter winds wouldn't blow the seeds away, scattered our precious mix, spread a layer of wood-chip mulch, and snaked soaker hoses through the area so we could water now and then to mimic natural precipitation. And then we waited.

The next spring a pale wash of green sprouts came up through the mulch, and most of them weren't weeds. We were elated. By mid-summer, the rectangle seeded with Roadbase Mix was awash in tiny native plants: blue grama, sand dropseed, and needle-and-thread grasses; and wildflowers including scarlet bugler and violet-blue Rocky Mountain penstemon, golden blanketflower, mahogany and yellow Mexican hats, pink Lambert's loco, and best of all half a dozen tiny Indian paintbrush plants tipped in scarlet. The plants were all miniature, because the "soil" they rooted in was so shallow. But they were there, returning to the place they had once called home.

When Alex and Suzanne stopped by, they stood gazing open-mouthed at the dwarf display. They hadn't really believed that any of the seeds would germinate, especially the Indian paintbrush, one of the trickiest of our native plant community to grow because it requires blue grama grass or sagebrush nearby for its roots to tap into.

The next year our high-desert plants were a few inches taller, and more species appeared. Eleven years later, our wild front yard stops traffic when the wildflowers are in full bloom, and each year we find new species—including mystery arrivals that weren't included in the original Roadbase Mix. There's the microbiotic crust, a miniature community of mosses, lichens, fungi, and algae that bind together the surface of dust-dry desert soils, trapping moisture and creating an insulating layer. The scatter of golden-banner that puts up short stalks topped with sunshine yellow sweet-pea sized flowers in May and June. And the solitary clump of Rocky Mountain iris, the same species that paints wet meadows in a mist of pale purple flowers in early summer.

This year's surprise was a slender plant with narrow, deeply divided leaves that came up through a dense bunch of fine-textured native grass. I didn't even notice the plant until it bloomed in flat-topped heads of many tiny yellow flowers. But when I stopped to look at this mystery arrival, something tickled my memory. I headed for my wildflower books, and sure enough, I knew this plant, although it had been decades since I'd seen it last. It's called nineleaf biscuitroot (Lomatium triternatum for those who are fluent in botanical Latin) and it is a characteristic resident of sagebrush country, the part of the arid West dominated by the gray-green shrub with the three-tipped leaves that flavor the air with its signature scent, a mix of turpentine and orange blossom with a hint of spice.

Of all the landscapes I've lived in—from the shore of Lake Michigan and the flat former fens of Cambridgeshire in England to the sandstone bluffs of southern Illinois, from the high-desert basins of northwest Wyoming to the dark hills of West Virginia and the rain-drenched shores of Washington's Puget Sound, from the dramatic rise of the Rocky Mountain Front to the prairie-turned-cornfields of central Iowa and the wide-open Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico—I am only truly home where sagebrush grows. Nineleaf biscuitroot is the same: it only flourishes in sagebrush shrublands. To see it here, sprouting from seeds that must have survived dormant in the soil through more than a century of industrial disturbance since finged sage last colonized this site, is a gift. Its flat heads of tiny yellow flowers and slender form are like a blessing from the land. "Good job," they say. "Thanks for welcoming us home."

I return the thanks, as my patch of decaying industrial empire re-greens itself, inviting the native species back to thrive on this ground we now share.

Making lemons into lemonade

Richard and I drove to Denver last Tuesday to prepare for his surgery for bladder cancer. First came a day at the VA Hospital--a wonderful place despite the many difficult cases it serves, because the staff has a culture of caring and competence. (It's what healthcare should be, with equal emphasis on "health" and "care.") After six hours and lots of tests, we found out that he's very healthy, but for that "beautiful" carcinoma with its filmy petals waving gently in the current of his bladder and for the fact that his blood is too thin--it's not clotting well. So he's got to give up his daily pot of green tea and give his blood time to thicken up, and his surgery has been rescheduled for July 1st.

Hearing his surgeon say that she was pushing back the surgery for a month was like sucking on lemons. We just wanted it over with. But you can only feel sorry for yourself for so long. So we made lemonade: We spent the rest of the week we planned for his surgery in Denver with my folks and Molly, our daughter, who had already flown in from San Francisco. It wasn't a vacation. But we did take all five of us in our Subaru Forester on a picnic to Barr Lake, northeast of Denver, where we walked a boardwalk over a lapping marsh--my Mom clumping along in her special boot after foot surgery and my Dad spotting birds passing on the breeze. We saw more orioles in the spring-green cottonwood trees lining the shoreline there than I've ever seen at one time in my life. And Molly and Richard spent a morning exploring art galleries. We took walks through the Capitol Hill neighborhood where we stayed, admiring the architectural details in the old stone mansions and 1920s apartment houses. We smelled irises and roses and lilacs in gardens growing from spring into summer.

And when we returned home, our kitchen garden was bursting. We picked a huge bag of spinach along with the first harvest of mixed lettuce. When we sat down to dinner that night our thoughts were not of bladder cancer or postponed surgery, but of the culture of caring at the VA Hospital, the chatter of orioles, and of tender new greens flavored by our very own patch of ground.

It seems to me that being healthy is not just about the technology and pharmacology of modern medicine. It's about how you take what comes, whether you use the lemons for lemonade, or let them lie bitter on your tongue. It's about taking joy where you can, and never forgetting to stop and smell the lilacs drooping over the garden wall, to walk hand in hand with the people you love, and to savor the taste of new lettuce, fresh from the soil.

Love does make the world go round

Last Friday we set out for Steamboat Springs in northwestern Colorado, bound for Colorado Art Ranch's third "Artposium," a weekend devoted to exploring what art has to say about some subject important to life in rural Colorado. In this case, the issue was land conservation, and the weekend's doings took place at The Nature Conservancy's Carpenter Ranch twenty miles down the Yampa River west of Steamboat, in the shadow of the towering stacks of the coal-fired Hayden Power Plant.

I wrote right up to the time we left, putting my computer to sleep with just enough time to whip up a picnic lunch, including steamed asparagus spears, sweet and fresh from the garden, and then hop into the car. It took me the half of the drive to decompress. As we headed out of Kremmling, passing through stunted sagebrush shrublands on the gradual climb up Muddy Creek toward Rabbit Ears Pass, I looked around for spring wildflowers.

I was scanning the high desert when I noticed what looked like clumps of wet snow on the bare, crumbly soil between the twisted sagebrush. Only it was a warm afternoon, in the mid-seventies; what I was seeing couldn't be snow. Then I realized: phlox! It was Hood's phlox, a mat-plant that covers itself with starry white blossoms in spring if winter snows wet the soil.

I pointed the "snowflake" phlox flowers out to Richard as we whizzed along; he pulled over and we got out to look. Wandering among the sagebrush, we spotted other wildflowers not visible at 60 miles per hour: clusters of ball-cactus with pink flowers, a ground-hugging locoweed with ivory blossoms tinged with purple, and a desert-parsley with lacy green leaves and tiny sulfur yellow flowers. All were flagrantly advertising their availability to passing pollinators, whether flying or crawling, all gambling their energy on reproduction. I stopped to photograph a particularly nice pairing of phlox and ball-cactus and as I was composing the shot above, a steady chorus insinuated itself into my awareness from the wet meadows across the highway.

It was peepers, western chorus frogs, calling for mates from the shallow ponds created where the winding creek, full with snow melt, had overflowed its banks. I stood up to listen, and grinned.

"It's spring," I said to Richard. "The peepers are calling for mates, and the wildflowers are hollering for pollinators. Everybody's focused on reproduction."

As we drove up and over Rabbit Ears Pass, where the high country was still deep in snow, Richard reminded me that a quarter-century ago, I had first shown him his first glacier lilies somewhere along this very highway. We dropped down the west side of the pass, and I spotted bright yellow flowers on a hillside.

"Glacier lilies!" I said.

Richard braked, whipped a u-turn in the highway, and drove back. We parked and dashed across the road, hand in hand. Sure enough, there on the road-bank were unmistakable glacier lilies, sunshine yellow atop grass-green stalks above wide lily leaves. I stopped to photograph one clump. Crawling all over the flowers with their reflexed petals and yellow anthers dripping rich pollen grains were small beetles. The insects were alternately gathering pollen--thus fertilizing the flowers--and copulating. The whole landscape, it seemed, was in the mood for love.

What does art have to bring to land conservation? Just this: like the snowflake blossoms of the Hood's phlox, the western chorus frogs, and the pollen-gathering beetles on the glacier lilies, it reminds us to stop and pay attention. It shows us the same old world in a new light. And sometimes it shows us that love, whether for one wildflower or a whole landscape, does indeed make the world go round--or at least parts of it.

My annual Mother's Day planting orgy

Yesterday was Mother's Day, or in my household, plant-the-pots day. Here at 7,000 feet above sea level in our valley in the southern Rocky Mountains, Mother's Day marks the date after which hard frosts are very unlikely. So my tradition is to visit the local greenhouse, choose from the enticing offerings of annual flowers, and spend the day wallowing in soil, potting my collection of planters to decorate our various porches, patios, and decks.

Between our cottage across the alley (the historic brick duplex where we used to live, which now belongs to a friend, although I still tend the landscaping for him) and our new house, we have one deck, two terraces, and five porches--plenty of space in which to indulge my Jones for planters! After the crocus, daffodils, and tulips scattered here and there around both yards have finished blooming, and before the wildflowers begin their summer riot of color, I put out pots of annual flowers, partly to give migrating hummingbirds and early-hatching butterflies nectar to feed on.

This year for the first time, I grew some of my own annual flowers: in March, I planted seeds of alyssum, a spring-blooming mustard with clusters of small white flowers and a fragrance that draws bees and butterflies; a mix of salvias, relatives of mint with fragrant leaves and spikes of flowers in shades of red and blue; sweet william for its spicy scent; and cosmos, favorites of butterflies. On our trip to the greenhouse to buy the rest of the annual plants, I told myself I would be restrained. And I was--mostly. Richard helped me pick out petunias in a mix of vibrant colors, verbenas with their lacy foliage and clusters of pink and purple blossoms, sapphire blue lobelias, ivy geraniums in crimson and white, a collection of coleus with wildly patterned leaves, and some dwarf zinnias in magenta and fiery orange.

I look for annuals in colors, shapes, and scents that will appeal to the nectar-feeders I love to watch: hummingbirds go for red, tubular flowers, while butterflies like orange and yellow blossoms, and evening-feeding sphinx moths are attracted to flowers that advertise their nectar with scents that carry on the night air.

Back at home, I gathered the first batch of pots, dumped the potting soil they held from last season into a wheelbarrow, and added organic aged cow manure to renew its nutrients and water-holding capacity, and filled the pots again. Then I began to arrange plants, designing the collection in each pot to suit the environment where it would sit (hot and sunny, shaded most of the day, morning sun only, and so on) and to offer colorful and textural vignettes through the season.

By the time I straightened my aching back and went inside to scrub the soil from under my fingernails that evening, I had planted two dozen--yes, 24!--planters, windowboxes, hanging pots, and big architectural pots.

This morning, I heard the trilling wings of a male broad-tailed hummingbird as he zipped by overhead, migrating north toward summer breeding habitat. His trilling did an abrupt about-face when he spotted the pots on our front porch and winged down to check them out. At lunch, Richard and I watched the first western black swallowtail of the year flutter through the yard, pausing to inspect the pots of annuals for sip of nectar.

I garden because I love plants, and I love fresh food. And because I can choose plants that provide my neighbors, the many other species that make up the community of the land, a place to call home too.

Gardeners: optimistic by definition

"It's easier to deal with crises like this in the spring," a friend said today after hearing about my husband Richard's cancer. "It's such an optimistic time."

I puzzled over her remark all day. This evening, I stepped out into the kitchen garden. The wind was blowing hard up the valley, the air temperature was plummeting, and the storms that might have brought us moisture had passed without dropping the rain or snow we sorely need. It's been an extraordinarily spring dry so far. Today marks seven weeks since our last measurable precipitation--and two weeks since the doctor scoping Richard's bladder said cheerfully, "And that's a big carcinoma."

There's nothing optimistic about this spring, I thought with distinct grumpiness.

Then I looked at the asparagus bed--and counted six fat new spears poking up through the dry soil.


Not only is our valley sliding into drought, the season has been bitterly cold too. Last week the nighttime temperatures dipped to 22 degrees F--twice.

And still the asparagus spears are pushing up from their octopus-like skirts of roots a foot deep, headed unerringly toward light and the chance to produce more food and make new life as surely as their kind have done every spring for millions of years.

As I turned to head back into the house, I passed the tomato bed. One of the plants cocooned inside the insulating tepee-shaped walls-o-water caught my eye--a costoluto, for you heritage tomato fans. It boasted half a dozen tiny flower buds, readying itself for the warmer weather and the buzz-pollinating bumblebees it is sure will come.


I shook my head in wonder. That's optimism, I thought.

And then, as if a light had switched on in my brain, I understood my friend's comment. Spring is an optimistic time: here in the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere, life awakens from its frozen slumber, and pushed by instincts far more experienced than mine, sprints into the lengthening days, aiming for light and renewal.

I'm a gardener: I should understand optimism. I'm the one who presses tiny tomato seeds into damp soil of seedling pots in early March, when here at 7,000 feet elevation in the Southern Rockies, the days are still short and dark, and the nights long and frozen. I'm the one who watches the rows of pots each day for the first sign of green, exulting when the pairs of slender cotyledons push their way out of the seed. I plant in the belief that spring will come. And it does.

It occurs to me that I can rely on that same optimism that leads me to plant tomatoes in late winter to cope with Richard's cancer. Only in this case, it's not a seed I want to sprout, but a carcinoma I hope will be destroyed. I'm after stopping that growth, not encouraging it. But that's gardening too: cutting off a diseased limb to save the tree it grows from.

The optimism my friend meant, I think, is about believing in the continuing cycle of life. It's not hard to apply that to Richard and his bladder cancer. He's blessed with caring people dealing with him and they're upbeat about his prognosis. So I'll just press my seeds of hope and rejuvenation in the soil of the universe, in the belief that spring will flower for him, time and again.