Although it is technically still winter, our unusually warm weather has sent me into garden dreams. Still suffering from an infection, I can't actually get outside to work. But I can shop for ideas and scheme. Here is my plan for creating a little bit of Tuscany in my own backyard in spite of the obvious climate differences.
Existing Pond, Path & Grill Pad
1. The Site
There is a narrow gravel path that runs from the driveway, past a small pond, to a series of three outdoor rooms partially enclosed and separated by three structures--a hanging bucket garden, a grill pad (above) and a pergola. The three outdoor rooms are well defined and work well together as three interlocking spaces. The pond also ties in nicely and reflects the grill pad. But, between the driveway and the pond, planting seems unrelated and once the spring grass dies back, the pathway lacks definition.
2. Tuscan Inspiration
Besides being my favorite garden style, a Tuscan style garden is perfect for Dry Creek because we only receive 12 to 15 inches of rain annually. Although we can't grow many types of Mediterranean plants here because of our cold winters, I believe I can find enough substitute plants to make it work. In particular, the natural rabbit brush can provide the soft grays of rosemary.
3. Existing Tuscan-Like Features
On top of that, I already have a few old-west features, such as my hanging bucket garden and pergola that give a nod towards traditional Tuscan garden structures. I don't want to so much recreate a Tuscan garden as use a Tuscan garden as a familiar reference point and transform it with references to the American west. I believe there are enough similarities between Tuscany and the West that I can blend the two into an effective hybrid garden.
Existing hanging bucket garden. After this picture was taken,
my grape vine took off and softened the structure.
Pergola with grape vine beginning its way up nearest post.
Vegetable garden wraps around two sides.
4. Lessons Learned from an English Cottage Garden Pathway
4a. Use of Pots
Although the above video models creating a traditional English cottage garden, I found inspiration in the even spacing of ceramic pots along the path to provide pattern and structure to what is otherwise an informal, winding path. I will place ceramic pots along the south edge of my path, alternating plantings of skyrocket juniper and red geranium in them. On the north border of the path, I will place lamp posts with lights over the pathway and hanging baskets both sides. This will continue the verticality of the garden structures out towards the driveway.
4b. Shrubbery in Patterns
Although you can't grow Italian Cypress here, skyrocket juniper are a good substitute. Not only will they enhance the verticality of the garden structures and lamp posts, they will provide a common Tuscan reference point to build the rest of the garden around.
5. Stay True to Your Site while Playing with the Exotic
Although I have never been to Tuscany, and most likely never will be able to afford such a trip, I don't think it will be hard to create a little nod towards that distant land in my own backyard while still honestly acknowledging the western structures, plants and landscape that exist here.
To me, that is what gardening is all about: work with the topography and history of your site while playing with it until you create something that both respects the past and nods towards the exotic or new.
It's only been a day since the last storm and the haze is back. It use to take at least a week, and then a few days. Even with the oak and maple along the canyon slope, the cottonwood rising from the stony creek bed, and the wall of loose stone and ceder on the ridge beyond, it's hard to be here fully in the moment. Quite simply, winter moments here are no longer the same. For now, spring and fall are still crisp, but pollution is eroding away our days, our weeks, our months, our seasons. Maybe some don't notice. Maybe some don't care. But to me the sky is everything: my connection to light, and through that light, my connection to the world around me. It's not just about global warming; it's not just about public health. It's about being in a world that sheds light on the sacred. Pollution dims our connection with creation.
This morning I read Chapter 2 and 3 of The Grapes of Wrath. Chapter 2 doesn't necessarily provide any lessons in sustainable living, but the writing is spot-on and made me long for simpler times. Obviously, not better times. I've tried not to be pulled into ubi sunt, or the unnatural glow of the past, where we long for a rose-colored yesteryear. I'm not Ronald Reagan. I'm aware the good ol' days included lynching and constant insinuation that your wife and daughters were inferior. But, there was a directness to living that has vanished even since I was a child, and that had already faded compared to my parents' generation. Steinbeck captures so well that period when people were fewer and even strangers were more connected:
A huge transport truck stood in front of the little roadside restaurant. The vertical exhaust pipe muttering softly, and an almost invisible haze of steel blue smoke hovered over its end... Inside the screened restaurant a radio played, quiet dance music turned low the way it is when no one is listening. A small outlet fan turned silently in its circular hole over the entrance, and flies buzzed excitedly about the doors and windows, butting the screens. Inside, one man, the truck driver, sat on a stool and rested his elbows on the counter and looked over his coffee at the lean and lonely waitress...
When I lived in Dallas, I longed for such scenes. As a student at a nearby university, I'd drive home each weekend on the back road, the old highway, instead of the interstate, because it was lined with barely surviving cafes from better days--left overs from the forties and fifties. I longed for that slower life, the one I'd grown up with. I'd take great road trips in search of an America lost, an America I was almost too young to know, but not quite.
Once I found it in Terlinqua, Texas with a girlfriend from Germany. We sat in a small cafe and stared out at the white stone desert listening to Patsy Cline over a small radio while drinking Blue Sky soda and I thought I was in heaven. I could almost see a bright red truck pull up with OKLAHOMA CITY TRANSPORT COMPANY in twelve-inch letters on the side.
True, the time periods did't line up--Grapes of Wrath predating Patsy Cline--but for me, it was close enough. Ceiling fans whirled overhead. Patsy sang "I Fall to Pieces" and my beautiful biologist friend went on about symbiotic relationships, while I looked out the window into a distant time.
Chapter 3, my favorite one of the book, does provide a couple of lessons in Sustainable living. It's the turtle chapter that serves as a metaphor for the struggle the Joad family will endure. As Steinbeck was good friends with marine biologist Ed Ricketts, he had a deep understanding of nature, which bubbles up in his writing:
THE CONCRETE HIGHWAY was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog’s coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse’s fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep’s wool; sleeping life waiting to be spread and dispersed, every seed armed with an appliance of dispersal, twisting darts and parachutes for the wind, little spears and balls of tiny thorns, and all waiting for animals and for the wind, for a man’s trouser cuff or the hem of a woman’s skirt, all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement.
The first sustainable living lesson from this chapter is that nature is designed to take care of itself. In many ways, industrial farming treats nature as the enemy of agriculture. Weeds are wicked. They are plowed up. Bare soil is the birth of life. But it isn't. Steinbeck seemed to sense this. Foxtails, unpleasant, weedy and thorny shit, are the pioneers of life. After the turtle finally crosses the road, he inadvertently plants the seeds to repair the soil disturbed by the drought and wind:
The wild oat head fell out and three of the spearhead seeds stuck in the ground.And as the turtle crawled on down the embankment, its shell dragged dirt over the seeds. The turtle entered a dust road and jerked itself along, drawing a wavy shallow trench in the dust with its shell. The old humorous eyes looked ahead, and the horny beak opened a little. His yellow toe nails slipped a fraction in the dust.
Permaculture, like Steinbeck, recognizes the weed as the first cultivator of life. Rather than being the devil, the weed is the heart and soul of Eden. One starts ones garden the way nature does--with weeds--and then, by studying the natural processes, works with nature rather than against to achieve a desired outcome.
The second lesson we learn from Chapter 3 is a Buddhist principle, which is the practice of loving kindness. It's slightly different than the Christian principle of brotherhood, in that it recognizes that every living thing has its own purpose, its own journey to complete. Instead of being thy brother's keeper, one steps lightly, so as not to cause undo harm to life around you, which is demonstrated by the two drivers in the chapter:
Now the going was easy, and all the legs worked, and the shell boosted along, waggling from side to side. A sedan driven by a forty-year-old woman approached. She saw the turtle and swung to the right, off the highway, the wheels screamed and a cloud of dust boiled up. Two wheels lifted for a moment and then settled. The car skidded back onto the road, and went on, but more slowly. The turtle had jerked into its shell, but now it hurried on, for the highway was burning hot.
And now a light truck approached, and as it came near, the driver saw the turtle and swerved to hit it. His front wheel struck the edge of the shell, flipped the turtle like a tiddly-wink, spun it like a coin, and rolled it off the highway. The truck went back to its course along the right side. Lying on its back, the turtle was tight in its shell for a long time.
I believe that both Christ and the Buddha had it right. With people, there are times, we are our brother's keepers, and must offer others the grace offered us when we lose our way. With nature, we must at least practice loving kindness--harming no life unnecessarily, to allow each creature to fulfill the measure of its creation.
With this thought process, the grasshopper becomes as meaningful to the garden as the hummingbird or butterfly. The workings of man develop habitat rather than destroy it.
I remember one beautiful afternoon I spent watching a wasp drag a dead tarantula from one end of my garden to the other. I was amazed at how quick he was, how diligent, and the obstacles he overcame. At the borders of my pond, he encountered what to him were enormous boulders. I was sure his home was there in a crevice between two rocks, and was surprised when he toiled on.
It gave me strength to toil on with an infection I had experienced for months. It brought peace. It is in these small noticings, these small acts of loving kindness, these steps back with humility, observing rather than participating, that we find the true measure and purpose of our creation. If you kill the little birds (or the wasp), you can't learn from the the little birds (or the wasp). You're aligned with the wrong energy.
My favorite scene in Seven Years of Tibet is where Heinrich is asked to save the worms when building a movie theater for the young Dalai Lama. Whether that really happened or not isn't significant. It's taking the time to do that sort of thing that would lead to a kinder, more sustainable civilization.
