Saturday, April 19, 2008

The Good Damp Earth and The Things We Grow In It


I'm just back from the Goodwood plant sale on a drizzly Saturday morning and I just feel so good.

I didn't buy much. A native azalea, a begonia, an old rose.

I hadn't been to the sale in years and probably wouldn't have gone this year, either, but my friend K. invited me to go with her and so I did. I think the rain kept a lot of people away this year because it wasn't very crowded and no one was knocking anyone over to get to the camellias. But the people who were there very cheerful, despite the drizzle; a typical Tallahassee mix of black folks and white, men and women, old and young, dressed in everything from pearls and ponchos to overalls and rubber boots with no common bond except for that of being passionate about plants.

This has gotten me wondering why exactly it is that humans just love to plant things. It's probably firmly encoded into our DNA by now to cultivate the plants and trees that we eat the fruit of. That I can understand. But where does the impulse come from to grow plants that offer us nothing but flowers? Why do we plant trees that offer us nothing but the delight we get from the way the wind sounds in their leaves?

I don't know, but I'm one of the people who definitely have the impulse.

I can be seduced by the spring offering of gaudy annuals from Lowe's and Home Depot and Target and I adore my pots of ornamentals on my porch, but what I really love, what makes me almost giddy with delight are the plants I find at places like Native Nurseries and Goodwood. And nothing in the world makes me happier than finding ferns in the woods and digging them up and bringing them home. I love the plants that are native to the area. Ones that I don't so much cultivate as just bring home and allow to flourish. The ashe magnolia, the oak leaf hydrangea, the palms, the ferns, the wild violets, the Buckeye.

I'm also a fool for camellias, which strangely, this yard was severely lacking in when I moved here. There was one lone bush, grown almost to a tree, but I have planted a dozen more and this year's relatively rainy weather has given them all new growth, and me great hope that one day they, too, will be big, strong, adult camellias, offering their color to winter's drab gray. I get as much pleasure from seeing new growth on something I've planted as a mother does, seeing her child go from baby to toddler to child, learning to walk, to talk, to read.

When I was a young gardener, I ordered a rose from Burbee that I planted next to my garden fence and over the years it took off, climbing the fence and giving me deep red, almost magenta roses that were full and as fragrant as any rose you can imagine. I used to pick the blossoms and put them in a bowl and their scent would fill the house. I have spent the ensuing thirty years since I left that house trying to figure out just what in hell that rose was. I've never been able to find it again but yesterday I drove past a yard where an old house has recently been torn down and there, growing on a fence, was a rose that I do believe may be the same kind. I instructed my husband to go by with his knife on the way home and cut me a few pieces and I am trying to root them right now. The delight I am getting from those four pieces of rose plant stuck in a pot with rooting hormone is beyond what I can quite describe. There is no pleasure greater for me than taking pieces of plants or seeds I've collected and nurturing them into something that will grow in my yard.

It probably has something to do with my maternal instinct and I'm not ashamed of that.
I can think of no scenerio for my future that makes me any happier than to be an old, gnarled woman in a big hat with a trowel, clippers, and a shovel and garden cart, moving stiffly from one area of my yard to another, trimming, weeding, transplanting, planting.

Perhaps it is this impulse to plant green things that really differentiate us from the animals. It's certainly not tool-making, we're discovering. I don't feel any need to separate myself from our great ape brethren but I think it's interesting that we plant stuff and as far as we know, they don't, although some chimps seem to treat illness or injury by hunting out specific plants and eating their leaves, which indicates a knowledge of plants that transcends what's good to eat and what's not.

All things to ponder as I enjoy this quiet morning, a perfect morning to plant my new (old) rose, my azalea, and my begonia which sit in their pots waiting to be introduced to their new homes.

The mother in me, the human ape in me, the old Southern lady gardener in me- all of these parts of my soul are completely content to putter around in the wet, black earth, getting dirt under my fingernails and planting things that hopefully will bring joy to future generations as I receive joy from the things that have been planted in this yard by people unknown to me, many of them long, long gone.

I planted a tiny live oak tree in the yard of the last house I lived in and sometimes I drive past that house, just to see how big it's getting. It'll be two hundred years before it's anywhere near as big as the oaks in this yard and I'll be long dead by then, but instead of depressing me, that thought just brings me joy.

Nothing lasts forever, not a good meal I've cooked or words I've written or a clean kitchen floor but a live oak- plant one of those and it'll last, if not forever, long enough.

And of course a rose won't last that long and certainly not a begonia, but the babies of the rose, the offshoots of the azalea might.

And even if they don't, just the momentary pleasure I'll get from putting them in the ground and tucking the soil firmly around their roots and then watching them flourish is plenty.

More than plenty.

It will be a joy.

It will make me feel good.

9 comments:

  1. Oh, I am sucker for trees also. Today I bought four dawn redwoods, 1 winter king hawthorne, four sassafrass, 2 paper birch, and some forsythia. Our soil and water had a seedling sale along with ours so I splurged at $1.00 a seedling LOL. We sold evergreens and berries. I am gonna end up with a spruce forest if they don't get picked up next week and a currant patch. Last years unclaimed raspberries were a real treat. Trees are my passion. Tommorrow we are visiting the tree farm I worked at for five years to look at trees. I'm not taking the truck!

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  2. Do you remember those giant camillas that grew next to each other in the back yard of the Randolph house? May and I lived in those like monkeys. I'll always remember racing from branch to branch, up and down, with our little "house" set up in the dirt under the bushes.

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  3. Trees are the best. And yes, DTG, I well remember that.
    I surely do.

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  4. Have you read "botany of desire" yet? It's a keeper. You're post made me think of it :)

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  5. I've read most of Botany and want to read some of Michael Pollen's other books. He has a good mind, doesn't he? And a great name, too. He's the one who wrote the book about eating and food called "In Defensive of Food: An Eater's Manifesto" in which he offers this advice about diet:
    Eat food.
    Not too much.
    Mostly plants.

    Simple wisdom, I'd say.

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  6. I can always tell when you are in a good mood, because you describe plants. I like it. It makes me think I should do somthing in my yard other spray weed killer.
    w.b.

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  7. HWB- it's like ya know me or something. Dang.
    I've been trying to comment on your latest post for two days and for some reason, my comments just don't get through.
    But I wanted to tell you just how beautiful I think that post was.
    I'll keep trying.

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  8. Thanks, It's one of those that you put up, and fight your finger to not push the delete button.
    w.b.

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  9. I'm glad you didn't delete. That one's a keeper.

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