Rainie's Corner

My Gardener

        My gardener happens to be my husband.  He disappears into the landscape, in the middle of conversations, tracks gravel across my newly vacuumed living room carpet, and dusts bits of leaves off his clothes onto our dining room table when sitting down to supper.  At the end of the month our credit card bill lists seed, clay pots, clippers, soil mix, sprinklers, and I am still trying to finish the conversation I started three weeks ago about the pipe that is leaking in the bathroom.  For better or for worse, I am married to my gardener.

        My introduction to horticulture began in Santa Cruz thirty-four years ago. As a new bride I learned from my husband how to care for an established Boston fern, a large dumb cane, a delicate maidenhair fern, and a flourishing spider plant. He quickly taught me the routine.  At the time I knew very little about plants, only what I had learned from my mother, who salvaged withered stems and seedlings.  She would place them in canning jars filled with water, and set them on the windowsill to root in her sunny mid-western breakfast room.  Once married, I found myself gingerly lowering entire potted plants into the bathtub every month to flush salts from their soil. After misting their leaves, I moved these beauties to the patio for sun and feeding.  Since this horticultural initiation three decades ago my husband and I have lived in three homes, cultivated four gardens, had a brief stint in the landscaping business, and started a nursery.

        Reticence and hesitation are two words that are never uttered in reference to the gardens we have tended together.  Almost every weekend, as new homeowners, we were outside early filling pots with soil for bedding plants, trimming vines on the trellis, transplanting asparagus ferns to tubs, pruning trees, or setting brick walkways.  On the way home from town one afternoon we came upon a young three-foot oak tree in the middle of the road, the casualty of a storm that winter, where rainwater ran off already saturated soil, resulting in a subsequent landslide. My husband convinced me that it would fit into the back seat of our Volkswagen Bug, roots and all.  The following weekend we had the thriving adolescent tree planted in a wine barrel on our deck.

        Our first landscape design and installation in those early years was a veritable metamorphosis completed in one weekend.  Launching into the backyard of the unsuspecting Palo Alto client, we tore out bushes, filled wheelbarrows with weeds, and made multiple trips to the dump, disposing of the old.  Bringing in new plants, we tilled the soil, transplanted fifteen-gallon western azaleas, and rolled out emerald green sod. At the end of the day the yard was transformed, with little reference to its former appearance. Lending a lush and restful ambiance to the homeowner’s residence, it was quite different from what we came to cultivate in our own garden years later.

         Somewhere along the way other horticulturists caught wind of my gardener’s infectious enthusiasm.  He became a teacher and has been speaking, planting, and influencing community and private gardens ever since.  It is a fulfilling life doing this work, being involved, and watching gardens evolve and mature.  Putting the obvious benefits of improved environment, property values, and aesthetics aside, gardening is simply pleasurable.  Having your hands in the soil, nurturing and watching plants grow, has proven to be a therapeutic pastime that soothes a cluttered mind.

         The challenges for me are, the disappearances of my husband when I am in mid-sentence, the bits of leaves that fall from his hair to the dinner table like sprinkles of sprouts, and the endless stream of woodchips and gravel that lead from our front door to my home office, that twice burned up the engine of my vacuum cleaner.  Add to this the bright clean acorns that I find wedged under the agitator in the washing machine after finishing a load of laundry, and the pots of seed on the stove scarifying at a rolling boil, that I have mistaken once or twice for lentil soup.  It could be worse.  At the beginning there were more cuttings in the refrigerator than groceries, an assortment of insects in plastic bags, and an occasional dead gopher in the freezer, for a plant materials, entomology, and biology seminar respectively.

         The spark to write this piece came to me one morning as I was ironing one of my gardener’s shirts.  There had been no time to pick up the ones at the cleaners before his scheduled speaking engagement.   I noticed that all the buttons on the shirt were broken in half and the collar frayed.  Looking around the house I saw that a pair of his shoes were in every room, rubber clogs, flip flops, muddy boots, running shoes, worn out loafers, all looking as if the owner had walked right out of them on his way out the door to our garden.  A pile of clothes had grown in the corner of our bedroom.  The ends of hangers were flipped up haphazardly in the clothes closet with plastic bags pulled from the laundered shirts and billowing from the closet floor like parachutes.  The only reason his shirts are done at the laundry is that our son complained about his father’s wrinkled appearance, and I threatened to give up ironing all together.  The duffle from his last trip to a southern California symposium remains on the living room sofa unpacked.

         We have two gardens now, and I think some gardeners would agree that a marriage of thirty-four years is not unlike a mature garden.  Hills and valleys can be found in both.  There is the work of tending, weeding, watering, feeding, and losses in extreme or turbulent weather.  Conversely, the oak tree that my husband and I planted in a tub almost three decades ago is now in the ground, grown, vigorous, and casting shade in our back yard.  I suppose success requires effort and daily commitment in a marriage, just as it does in gardening.  For my own comfort I thought of suggesting that my husband purchase one of those scooters to facilitate moving from one of our gardens to the other.  Maybe, he could get around faster, and I could finish some of my conversations with him.

        Admittedly I reap the rewards of his horticultural interests, and I humbly thank his mother, a gardener herself, and her father before her, who started the whole thing by taking my husband to the Los Angeles Arboretum every Sunday when he was a little boy.  What could be more comforting than soft textured views at every window, the shade of an oak woodland, and the sound of hummingbird wings, in a natural and beautiful environment called home.  Yet, when my husband awakens on a Saturday morning, itching to get outside, dresses in socks, shoes, shirt and briefs, and eagerly starts out the front door, with pruning shearers in hand…but forgetting his trousers….well….what can I say….I am married to my gardener.        

         

SCARECROWS

While perusing the pages of several fall nursery catalogues, I saw pictured whimsical scarecrows, equipped with names, costumes, and patchwork faces that brighten the already lively displays of flowers.  They are fashioned after farmers, rag dolls and the straw man in The Wizard of Oz.  Seeing them reminds me of the stick figures that have watched over my own vegetable garden in years past. 

The addition of a scarecrow brings a mischievous touch to any garden.  They come in all shapes, sizes and styles, from homemade to store bought, with smiles that bring to one’s mind railroad tracks, needlepoint stitches, orthodontic braces, and tic-tac-toe.  Those watching over my vegetables have had noses made of buttons, and black triangle eyes inked on burlap.  The hair has been fashioned from an assortment of yarn and wool, and the bodies stuffed with paper, old rags, or hay.  Sometimes their construction was a collaborative effort between family members and neighbors.

My daughter and her friends next door made our first scarecrow.   They had planted rows of vegetables in an area of the pasture.  One child brought her father’s shirt, another her father’s trousers.  A younger sister contributed hay from the horse shed and a gunny bag emptied of molasses and oats.  I donated broom handle, hat, and marker, as we made a day of planting and creating the figure that was to stand guard over our vegetable starts. 

Weathering the seasons, it stood with one arm pointed west, while the other dangled indiscriminately to one side. The torso was stuffed with newspaper, the arms and legs with alfalfa, and the head with cotton. As time passed the scarecrow leaned farther and farther to the right.  Eight months later it had fallen to ruin, cotton brains picked by the birds and stuffing melted like sugar in the rain.

 I purchased the second scarecrow in the drugstore.  Taken, by the lively checkered pants and bright purple shirt, I whisked the fanciful figure into my shopping cart, to replace the worn and dilapidated one.  Taking it  home I planted the solid stick of a spine into the soil, straightened its beige tam, stood back to look, and found myself pleased with the result.  Prickly arms pointed resolutely toward the ground as if to say “I protect this plot of land!” Equipped with this colorful caricature, the garden seemed again complete.

By August the shirt had grown dull, the trousers drab, and the chest had begun to sag.  Our scarecrows effectiveness faded with the colors of its attire, needing the help of a few flashing strips of foil on a string.  Still, the slumping gray figure did elicit frightful shrieks from the neighborhood children, when they ran across the pasture at dusk.  Following their lead I took the tattered frame from the garden the following October, draped a black cape over its shoulders, and placed it near the front entrance to my house as a Halloween prop.

In late autumn the scarecrow was retired, leant against the fence near the garden gate.  My daughter suggested a facelift, new wardrobe and fresh chaff for padding around the crossed sticks that still held tufts of fabric.  Instead it stayed there unattended with half a smile pointing heavenward and one eye watching the land with an averted gaze.

Since then many years have gone by, and two of the children are in college while another is in high school. What was once the vegetable garden has been transformed into something quite different. Roses were planted and a second gate added. During the construction of a new fence I discovered the scarecrows remains buried beneath an overgrown hedge.

The discovery gave way to nostalgia and led to an afternoon spent constructing a new scarecrow.  Snatching a burlap sack from the pantry, I created a face by attaching large buttons for the nose and eyes, and stitching a mouth below.  Finding unused quilt squares I added patches to a worn corduroy shirt.  Lastly, a wrinkled hat retrieved from my trunk, and the doweling from a weathered stick horse under the children’s fort.  A new scarecrow was born, stuffed with straw and sitting on a bale of hay guarding the entrance to the private rose garden. With an air of satisfaction I stepped back to view the finished product.  A new steward stood protectively watching over the land with all the beguiling dignity of its predecessors.

 

 

Slender Field Sedge - a lawn substitute

My affection for lawn stems from childhood, a time when I spent hours playing outdoors with the other neighborhood children.  We made tiaras, crowns, and bracelets from the clover and dandelions that grew randomly in the lawn my father tended.  Sitting on the grass tying stems into loose knots, linking them one into the other, we were occupied, peaceful, and engaged with our environment.  On sultry summer mid-western evenings, we took turns rolling down the long green hillside in front of my house, gaining speed until each of us barreled into the hedge below, laughing uproariously.  On those hot humid nights, the cool grass was a comfort to our bare arms and legs.  

My yearning for “lawn” sparks a variety of seasonal memories.  In early childhood I played “Ring around the Rosie”, and during my teenage years there was lawn bowling at my grandmother’s house.  The scent of newly mown grass is an olfactory memory I imagine many children carry into adulthood.  In summer, from the stone pillar that stood catty-cornered to my home, I could smell the sweet fragrance filling the air as my father pushed the lawn mower.  In autumn from the same observation point I watched catalpa leaves fall, like pieces of dried parchment, creating a mosaic across the green carpet of grass.  Although my father left the leaves in our front yard, the sound of neighbors raking them into piles, is clear as rain in my mind.  Winter brought an unbroken field of white on which we rode our sleds from the top of my hill down to the level snow bank four houses below.  My longing becomes understandable when I realize that during my thirty-year marriage in California, not one of my homes could boast a lawn, until I discovered slender field sedge. 

I moved west in the midst of a seven-year drought.  My husband promised me an emerald green landscape in winter, yet year after year I saw only brown hills.  Our first home was an apartment with a deck covered in green Astroturf.  The front and back yard of our next home was entirely ice plant, and two years after that we lived in a house surrounded by gravel and rock.  My present residence began as rural acreage of oak stumps and exotics.  For me a lawn seemed to have become a thing of the past.  At the time xeriscape was becoming a trend in landscaping. Inquiring at a local nursery, I learned that I could plant a drought tolerant native grass called Carex praegracilis. 

When I found it would withstand some foot traffic I wanted to experiment beneath my daughter’s play structure, to see the plant’s response to the activity of children.  Early one fall morning I enlisted the help of two boys who lived next door.  We planted numerous liners of the Carex beneath the swing set in my backyard.  The plants received full morning sunlight and late afternoon sun, with filtered light during the interim through the wide spreading branches of a 200-year old oak tree.  I hand watered the young plants through the first summer as they established their roots.  Then the green carpet spread and flourished without irrigation, but with four reasonably wet winters.  

Since that time I have planted slender field sedge on my side yard in a shaded area, and massed it on a berm beside the road.  Whether neatly trimmed, or left long and wispy, slender field sedge easily serves as a lawn substitute.  From my kitchen window I have watched children playing games of chase across this green patch, making nests in the sedge, playing pretend games, and stroking the tufts of foliage with their bare toes as they swing back and forth.

Although it looks like grass, Carex praegracilis is technically sedge, and if I remember correctly the verse from my youth, the difference is “sedges have edges, rushes are round, and grasses have joints”.  However, a plant taxonomist certainly might offer a different opinion. Apparently slender field sedge has received attention in horticultural circles in recent years, but what I have learned has been through observation in my garden.  The sedge thrives in sandy loam, making it suitable for my home, which sits on a stabilized sand dune.  Living in a semi-arid climate, in a state with growing water issues, slender field sedge becomes the perfect choice for my garden.  Yes, it will turn brown in summer without water, but I have easily kept it green with modest supplemental irrigation.

I once overheard a landscape designer speaking to my husband. “I came to your Woodland Garden presentation, and at the time you recommended Carex praegracilis.  You seemed to feel so strongly about it that I took a risk.  At the time I had a client who was six months pregnant.  She had a few plum trees in her back yard, and she did not want a lawn but she did want a surface that her child could play on, so I suggested slender field sedge.  That child is now a toddler playing on a soft rich green surface.  I want to thank you.”  Hearing this story was validating, but it was not the first time I was to hear positive remarks about this lawn substitute, and it would not be the last.

Two other episodes captured the essence of what I miss from childhood, but managed to recapture in my present landscape.  Returning to work after lunch one day, I passed the now six-foot area in the side yard that is covered with slender field sedge.  The long threads were pressed to the ground in the perfect imprint of someone napping.  In the office I learned that an office colleague had fallen asleep there, during her lunch break.  In the evening of that same day I saw my neighbor, a teenage boy, sitting on a swing in the backyard, dragging his feet across the sedge, and singing.  He was one of the boys who helped me plant the Carex liners years earlier.  He was still singing, as I stood at the kitchen window washing dishes after dinner.  As the sky darkened and the hour grew late the singing stopped.  It was then that I found the young man’s note, wedged between my backdoor and the doorframe.  It read “thank you for giving me such a beautiful place to think.  Your garden is soft.  It inspires me to sing.  It creates a mellow side of me.”  At the bottom of the paper was a rough sketch of the grass, tree, and a heart on a swing.

- Photos Melissa Berard.

Letters of Gratitude

Sometimes it is easy to overlook the central point of children’s words and behavior.  Many years ago, I accepted an invitation to speak to a classroom of first graders at the local elementary school.  The day I arrived there was a rainstorm.  Rain lashed the windows in invisible sheets. Try as I might I could not hold the children’s attention.  Even their teacher could not contain them.  They gathered round the two panels of glass enthralled by the sight.  Every attempt on my part to engage them in a lesson plan, was in vain.  Finally their teacher and I realized that in their lifetime they had never witnessed rain.  This was the first storm after a seven-year drought.  What appeared at first to be disregard, was in fact a deep and reverent gratitude for what they witnessed.

Since then I have been fascinated by glimpses of children’s gratitude.  In 1986 I watched a pre-school class release ladybugs at the nursery.  Grasping the sides of little burlap bags each child pulled, mesmerized by the red beetles emerging en masse up their arms and into the air.  Their responses ranged from gasps to giggles as the ladybugs scurried and tickled their skin.  Wide-eyed, mouths agape they watched and followed through the blocks of plants as the ladybird beetles took flight.

Another time, in the 1990’s, I was working in a community garden with a group scheduled to plant wildflowers.  Plug trays filled with California poppies lay on tables waiting to be placed in the ground while parents and children worked the soil.  A very young boy, perhaps four, stood beside his father at eye level with the table.  In each fist he clenched a poppy plug.  His eyes, the size of saucers, stared at the little plants with dewy fern-like foliage that glistened in the sunlight.  “Daddy they sparkle!” he whispered.  His appreciation showed over his entire body as he visibly trembled with excitement.

Recently two classrooms from a nearby school came to visit the nursery and garden.  For two hours the aisles were humming with the chatter of childhood.  My husband showed them snowberries, strawberry trees and chocolate flowers.  They followed him into the greenhouses and learned how to grow plants from cuttings, seed and division.  Jennifer led them along the paths and through the garden pointing out grasses and trees.  They learned not to “toch the leaf that makes you ich” (Fremontia).  When the tour ended, each child picked out a plant to take home.  Delight shone from their faces, and a week later their gratitude came through the mail in  thank you notes illustrated with their drawings. The phonetic spelling endeared me to the simple meaning of gratitude behind any expectation of words I might have had.  Their comments went something like this:
      “I wish I had a nother trip”
      “The part I liked best was wen you give us the flower”
      “I learned the parts of plants roots leaves stems seeds”
      “I know roots hold a plant in the ground they take water and
        minerals from the soil”.
      “The part I like the best is wen you told us not to get ponsen   
        ive.”
Then there are the more subjective and inquisitive interpretations:
“I like the plant that smell of the Blue Moon”
“I like the chock plant”
“Jenifr did you like plants when you wer a girl”
“My favorite part was wen we got to sit on the council circle”
“I learned that snowberries do not have to eat”
“I wish I had a yard”
“Dave how did you become the boss”
“My favorite part was when the sprinculers whent on and some people got wet”
“I learned how to keep my plant safe”.
Their accompanying illustrations portrayed the necessary elements for a vigorous life; sunshine, water, rainbows, and care. 

Some of the pictures had rainbows, all had trees or flowers, most of the pictures show clouds floating by and brilliant suns shining.  There are children watering flowerbeds, children smelling flowers, boys with spiked hair and windblown hair, girls with curly hair and a dog appearing like a woolly sheep.  Smiling bumblebees and whimsical butterflies peer from the depth of their drawings. The strawberry trees and the chocolate flowers were particularly popular. Whether their pictures included block figures in crayon or the smiling faces of workers, round oaks, or straight columnar tree trunks, all the children remembered tall straight plants with strong roots, colorful flowers and an area to play.  In the end the consensus seemed to be that everyone had experienced genuine gratitude for what they had encountered in the garden.

NESTING

I first became intrigued by the composition of bird nests when observing a male and female Hutton’s Vireo, through my dining room window, flitting under the eaves, from the roof of my house to an oak, with pink fluff secured in their beaks.  At the time I was eight months pregnant and folding baby clothes.  My husband said I was “nesting”.  Peeking out the door I saw bits of pink insulation strewn along the front walkway.  The cup-shaped nest was soon completed and not long afterwards, one bird could be seen, settling onto the clutch, tail feathers up, as the other brought food.  In fourteen days the peeping of four babies began as their scarlet throats gleamed in anticipation of sustenance brought by both male and female parents.  Two weeks later after the fledglings flew away, I reached under the eaves to pull the nest from its forked twig.  In addition to tufts of insulation from my attic, it was bound with spider silk, woven with pine needles, and lined with fine, dry grass and oak leaves, making it a deep round enclosure.

The intermingling cycle of materials discarded by one member of a community and utilized for living by another became strikingly clear when my husband brought me two more nests from our garden.  One was loosely woven and saucer-shaped, made of crossed sticks, grass, stems, and discarded dental floss.  It was found near the ground on a horizontal branch, perhaps constructed by a male and female Mourning Dove.  At first glance the other nest looked like a vintage purse crocheted from chenille, the color of serpentine.  Woven by a male and female Bushtit, the pendant shape resembled a pouch, or sock.  Closer observation revealed cocoons, lichen, flowers, moss, and bits of lint from my clothes dryer, all bound together with spider silk.  Another pouch-like nest of identical dimension and substance was located a few days later in a Pittosporum ‘Silver Sheen’ next to the house.  I noticed the second, hidden, nest only when the uppermost branches of the shrub began quivering with life, as a female Bushtit entered the front aperture of this hanging pocket enclosure.

From my neighbor I have learned that some birds go about their business prudently, undeterred by the fact that humans have built a house or two in their district.  A ringing telephone interrupted dinner, when the woman next door called asking for help to investigate an unusual noise in her house. Aided only by flashlights and our curiosity my husband and I searched her home and discovered that a barn owl was nesting in the chimney.  Typically they choose caves, buildings, or cavities to nest.  We determined that the owl could not have been there long.  Its call resonated through the metal lining creating an eerie and at first unidentifiable quality to the bird’s voice.  The chimney must have appeared to be a perfectly reasonable place to nest, something akin to a hollow tree trunk.  The night air was brisk, prompting our neighbor to desire a fire in her hearth.  By gently teasing a bed sheet up and through the flue we encouraged the inhabitant to exit the top opening.  The owl was seen at dusk several nights later, swooping down into the pasture from an abandoned barn fifty yards away.

On another occasion I saw a rather elaborate ritual involving a dusty unused bicycle helmet that sat atop the water heater casing near my back door.  Two Bewick’s Wrens came to inspect it, darting one at a time, in and out of the helmet then alighting side by side on the branch of an adjacent Japanese maple, their heads bobbing about as if in dialogue over the suitability of this contraption as a home.  It must have proved satisfactory as both birds began carrying twigs, grass, and feathers into the helmet opening, where eggs were soon laid.  I observed the birds every day for fourteen days, as the male bird hovered near the helmet house bringing food while the female incubated the eggs, and each day afterward as both tended their young.  Eagerly, I waited  for the babies to fledge so that I might examine closely the materials used for building.  At last with nest in hand I inspected the contents, and discovered twigs, small feathers, bits of yellow twine from the nursery field, green dental floss, and long coarse hairs from the mane of my daughter’s pony.  Lining the depression was gray wool fuzz, from an old sweater that hung on a fencepost.  I placed the nest on my mantelpiece and left the bicycle helmet undisturbed in hopes that it would again become the home of a Bewick’s Wren.

There have been a myriad of nests found in the garden, made with an equally remarkable collection of materials.  One made by a Plain Titmouse was composed of grass, pine needles, forbs, and woven with strands of reddish hair that looked to be from my hairbrush.  A rather large nest of unknown origin was discovered toppled to the ground.  It was created from oak leaves, spent seed heads, spider silk and lined with matted animal fur from the neighbors pet-grooming brush.  A few twigs jutted from its sides along with pieces of orange yarn and a knotted bundle of twine.  A tiny chocolate-brown nest made entirely of ironwood leaves was found in the crook of a tree.  This collection is now going to my sister, who teaches young deaf children, and looks for opportunities to introduce them to the natural world.  Packed in a brown cardboard box, the nests are en route to her students, as I look forward to discovering the repertoire of resources gleaned from the garden by next years nesting birds. 

Rainie Fross June 2002

Burn Pile

Through three seasons of tending the garden, an assortment of pruned branches, slash, leaves and debris had accumulated at the periphery, near the oak forest that marks our property line.  By name it was called the “burn pile” and having grown to unusually large proportions it sat waiting for winter rains and it’s destiny.  The day came after a week of storms, when my husband set the pile ablaze. 

Together we watched its size slowly diminish, I raking embers and he watering the edge of its trail.  Flames spit and sputtered until the pile became smaller and the area opened, revealing naturalized seedlings nearby.  In our excitement we crouched to examine the new discoveries: manroot, Dutchman’s pipe, and Keckiella cordifolia.   One had crept toward a mound of twigs, entwining around and over it, inadvertently constructing the shelter inhabited by a wood rat.  Wiry tendrils of another, meandered across the path over oak leaves, and into the gooseberry bush.  The Keckiella joined an adjacent Vitis, weaving a stairwell to the oak canopy that would gleam half vermilion in fall.  Surrounding the base was a carpet of yerba buena, its herbal scent emanating from the warmth of the fire.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            We took care to protect the young plants from the fading flames and when the burn pile was reduced to merely a bed of ash, I spread the gray powder and watered it into the earth.  For a few years the plants flourished, their undergrowth amongst the oaks and ferns, spreading threefold. We delighted in their vigor during subsequent walks through the garden.

The burn pile grew again, of course, a few yards from its original location.  To its expanding bulk, I added grass clippings and bundles of spent flowers.  During winter months, I added the cold ashes from our wood stove, before starting a fire at night.  One early morning, after my daughter left for school, and I was headed back to bed for another hour of sleep, the telephone rang.  Before I could reach it, the message machine clicked on, revealing an urgent voice.  “Get out back!  There’s a fire in the forest…near the fence!”  My husband and I rushed outside in long shirts, and barelegged, meeting our neighbors at the fence line.  Flames ahead spread twenty feet and fiery tongues sprang up to the lowest oak branches.  With shovels, rakes and hoses we contained the fire until the dense screen of smoke was indistinguishable from approaching storm clouds. “I was sure the ashes were cold last night.  I checked them three times before going to bed”,  my husband said.  Then I heard him murmur softly.  “My Dutchman’s pipe…it’s gone”.

We apologized for frightening the couple next door, and thanked them profusely for calling.  Feeling assured that the fire was out and the ground soaked, the four of us were able to sigh, chuckle and shake hands before parting for morning coffee in our respective kitchens, but not before I promised to find a safer place for wood stove ashes.  Despite our errors the garden is forgiving.  As spring approached there were already green shoots at the base of a charred stem and buds that promised new growth on the Dutchman’s pipe.                  

 

Griff's Wonder

He arrived on a summer day in 1981 riding a dilapidated Schwinn bicycle and dressed in worn khaki trousers, an old t-shirt, and sneakers.  In a gravelly voice he inquired about employment.  There were no jobs available at the time, but Griff quietly volunteered, returning each day to water, prune, label and sow seeds, waiting for the opportunity to stay.  During lunch he could often be found in the orchard sitting beneath the apricot tree, the fruit of which he insisted was the sweetest on earth. At some point, everyone who worked at the nursery, indulged in its offerings, but it was to Griff that I conferred when a deep crevice became visible in the trunk.  Together, for a couple of years, we tried numerous remedies in our attempts to save the tree but it was eventually lost and a bare- root apricot planted in its place.

It was in the spring of 1983 when I saw Griff retreating repeatedly to a corner of the garden, intently focused on cross-pollinating a flannel bush and monkey paw tree.  Methodically, all spring, he kept at the work of hybridizing Chiranthodendron pentadactylon and Fremontodendron ‘Pacific Sunset’, a formidable task according to most horticulturalists.  I remember a late afternoon, when my husband called me over to our living room window, pointing toward Griff who was standing among the sprawling branches of a large ‘Pacific Sunset’ in the garden.  With white beard and a shaggy crown of silver hair he appeared wizard-like as he went about sprinkling pollen.  In one tightly squinting eye he held a lens.  Stooping over a stem, he dusted pollen from the monkey paw into a waiting flannel bush flower. 

Griff’s presence, when he arrived at the nursery, was so unassuming that I did not realize at first his vast knowledge of botany.  He was quiet, uttering only such periodic comments as to describe a flower.  “Cruciform” he would say almost in a whisper, referring to its shape.   I learned that he was an authority on the genus Camellia, that he had attended graduate school in Florida and was later a doctoral candidate at Claremont College.  His work, while at Claremont, remains a mystery, the mystique of which would probably please him now if he were still alive.  In the 1960’s he served as curator to the Los Angeles Arboretum Herbarium in Arcadia. 

In later years he settled in Oceano, California where he developed a relationship with the staff of Pismo State Beach Park Service, through environmentalist Kathleen Jones.  There he compiled data from Mussel Rock to Black Lake Canyon and on to Pismo Beach, identifying the plants that were eventually included in the book Dune Mother.  It was during this period that Griff started working in the nursery garden.  I knew him to strive for meticulous botanical detail, requiring repetitious and painstaking data collection, much to the exhaustion of my staff.  I am filled with memories of him. 

Every week he brought my young daughter butterscotch candies, who now at the age of twenty-one, still remembers him.  Her first  rag doll was a gift from Griff.   She was sitting in an infant seat when he entered the house, bobbing the colorful cloth figure with polished button eyes, in front of her.  She responded with fits of gleeful cooing, kicking her stocking feet like an Irish dancer. On his way to work he would often glean the recently harvested vegetable fields, bringing brown paper bags filled to the brim with lettuce, broccoli and cauliflower for the nursery employees.  Fresh and flavorful they were frequently the answer or accompaniment to a fretful mothers dinner plans.  My son, then a teenager, was the recipient of unexpected rides from high school on rainy days when Griff drove his vintage truck to work.  Just recently I learned, much to my chagrin, that on occasion he brought the boy a beer for the ride home.  My son has reassured me that it was a memorable experience, akin to a rite of passage.

At Christmas parties, Griff posed as Santa’s helper, arriving at our door with an armload of packages and wearing a red felt hat trimmed in white faux fur.  After passing out gifts to the children and sharing in holiday fare he joined in the conversation, games and frivolity.  It is his laughter I remember most, not easily forthcoming, yet robust and contagious once in the air.  Every holiday for eight years he joined us in a celebration, until we were no longer to have his company. In 1988, the day after Christmas, Griff’s wife called to say that his heart had stopped.  “He died peacefully in the night on Christmas Eve” she said. 

On the far slope of my garden stands the original hybrid that resulted from his cross-pollination, ×Leelenzia ranchorum.  When in bloom the flowers are reflexed, and following a storm their large felted bracts become filled with rain.  Overflowing one morning, after a night of showers, six birds danced a frenzied tarantella above a cluster of flowers, then swooped to drink.  Deciding to have a taste myself I soon understood their apparent enthusiasm.  The liquid was like nectar.  Griff’s hybrid survived him and was released into the nursery trade after his death under the name ×Chiranthofremontia lenzii.

During the years that he was with us, our business was more relaxed. The potting shed and propagation area of the nursery, at that time, was in my garage, where I remember Griff sitting on a high stool below a fluorescent light that hung on a thin wire from the rafters.  Perusing botany texts, sowing seed, dividing and transplanting chaulk lettuce into flats, or peering into a microscope appeared to bring him a measure of peace and contentment.   After a full day of working, most of the staff stayed to commiserate and tell stories.  Griff’s blue eyes would flash between merriment, at finding a place that valued his eccentric genius; and brooding, when recalling tales of his twenty-five missions over Germany as a navigator in World War II.  We are left with the rich memory of these stories, and the lingering reminders of his presence in the garden; apricots, the scent of butterscotch and nectar from the flowers of ×Chiranthofremontia lenzii, a plant I call  'Griff's Wonder'.

Generations

In the spring of 1982 the National Science Foundation sponsored a trip to Santa Cruz Island. Fighting seasickness for the hour and a half, I accompanied my husband and his field botany professor to the island, in a motorboat. Once on land again, I was ready to hike, and would soon see Quercus tomentella for the first time in the wild. I left the island later that day hoping to someday have one of these dignified and majestic trees, commonly called island oak, growing in my garden.

The following December my husband and I drove south to collect acorns from mature island oak at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. Having secured permission from the director, we arrived on a Saturday morning and went right to the coppice of trees. Eager to reach them, my husband was marching briskly along, while I, three months pregnant at the time, followed at a slower pace. As soon as I caught up with him I struggled to my knees, to fill my burlap sack with the bountiful supply of seed that covered the ground.

After returning home the next day, I poured the acorns into a large bucket of water to see how many would float. The majority fell to the bottom, indicating they were viable. These were sown into a flat, watered, and placed in the greenhouse. Within a short time the acorns sprouted and a crop of seedlings grew. The Quercus tomentella seedlings were transferred to liner pots, and several months later, shifted to one-gallon containers. Watering, weeding, and general maintenance of the plants was carried out by my high school age son and his friend after school. When the one-gallon plants were fully rooted and filling the can, the boys shifted them into 5-gallon containers.

The following year I planted one five-gallon island oak, from that crop, beside the front gate of the nursery. In 1985 the rest of the crop was donated to the local high school for a campus beautification project. My teenage son and his friend, then seniors at the high school, delivered the remaining trees to the school, where a crew of parents, students, and teachers eagerly awaited planting them.

Seventeen years passed, and my daughter was enrolled in the same high school, when one early Sunday morning in November 2002 there came a knock at the entrance of my home. An unusual time for a visitor, I wondered who was calling. Opening the door I saw a tall slender gentleman clutching a brown paper bag.
“Is your husband in?” he asked. “I have something for him.” Stretching out the palm of his hand he revealed three large chocolate-brown acorns. Recognizing him as the local arborist, and the large acorns as those from island oak, I stepped away from the door and motioned for him to enter. After inviting him inside, I called my husband from the next room. The two
men greeted one another and shook hands.
“I was passing by the high school and noticed a Quercus tomentella had set seed. That was one of the trees you donated to the high school wasn’t it?”
“Yes, seventeen years ago.”
“I thought so”. He opened the bag he was holding and stretched it out in front of him. “These are for you and your wife. I collected them from that tree. It is full of fruit!”
“Remarkable” my husband said, peering into the sack that was filled to the brim with ripe acorns from the tree. “Are there more?”
“There will be soon, on the other trees.”
Over the course of the next few weeks my daughter collected them on campus whenever she passed the trees. After school each day she would leave two or three acorns on her father’s desk, seed from our first crop of island oak.

When a large branch had to be removed from the grown tree next to the nursery entrance, I noticed many acorns scattered in the leaf mulch below. Gathering them into a bucket, I counted a total of three hundred. This island oak was from the original crop that went to the high school campus. A low branch was obstructing legal clearance for a fire truck to enter in an emergency. Removing the branch did not compromise the tree, and several logs were salvaged in the process, to use as fuel for my wood stove. Collecting the logs in a wagon I stacked them near the house to dry.

We are now approaching December 2007. My daughter graduated from college eighteen months ago, and is applying to graduate school. She no longer collects acorns, even though her father and I do, but there is another generation of neighbor children. Two young brothers come knocking at my door when they need a little extra spending money.
“Will you pay us to collect acorns?”
They know I will say yes, and if they are willing to float them, I will pay them by the pound.

Children and grownups seem to enjoy collecting acorns. I returned home late at night on the Monday after Thanksgiving, and found a bag sitting on the walkway in front of my door, next to the stack of dry wood. In the bag was a note from the arborist that read “I collected these acorns with my son. They’re from the trees at the high school. Have a happy holiday”. I smiled to myself, as I carried a couple of island oak logs, into the house to build a fire. Soon the hearth was blazing and the air had lost its chill. I thought to myself, with this bag of acorns there will be close to four hundred, and when they are planted, and sprout into seedlings, we will be well on our way to three generations of Quercus tomentella flourishing.

Rainie Fross Dec 2007

Leaning Pine

While attending a spring garden party on the California Polytechnic University campus in San Luis Obispo, I had the opportunity to rediscover the Leaning Pine Arboretum. The event was a formal affair hosted by President Baker and his wife for their advisory committee, and held in the arboretum. The time was late afternoon, and a string quartet played in the gazebo, while horticulture students answered questions, and guided guests through the garden. Bishop Peak could be seen in the distance. The evening air was at first balmy, then turned cool as fog crept inland from the sea.

Director of the Arboretum, Professor Emeritus Thomas Eltzroth, called guests and students to gather in front of the gazebo for introductions, and a toast to the evening's festivities. He gave a brief overview of the arboretum's development, introduced students and fellow colleagues, then honored the distinguished and generous sponsors whose contributions of time, energy, funds, and materials make Leaning Pine’s continued growth possible. Minutes later individuals mingled in groups, and moved about for a closer look at the Mediterranean regions and their plant collections. I decided to begin my walk in the formal garden where I could view topiaries, and signage that helped me to identify the species. Junipers spiral into corkscrews, golden cones, and blue pyramids. Japanese boxwoods form hedges, and columns of cypress converge to create a welcoming entry that drew me further into the garden, like Alice into Wonderland.

Across the adjacent lawn, a path led to the palms, and an intriguing array of aloes, from the diminutive to those towering above my head. I browsed through the Australian section where bottlebrush, banksia, and tea myrtle cover one bank.  Bluebell creeper, knife-blade wattle, and grass tree meander along the opposite berme. Parts of the garden boast a multitude of colors, some as vibrant as those on a Van Gogh painting. In the Mediterranean Basin section, scents of lavender elicit images of southern France.  Continuing to the New Zealand plant community I brushed past bobbing blossoms of snowflake, stream orchids, and strap-like leaves of flax, through which the glimmering evening light shone bronze. Each region offered its own unique appeal, demonstrating the rich plant palette that arises from semi-arid climates.

Walking further up the arboretum I could see revealed the subtleties of our western flora, and expansive views of the Santa Lucia Mountains. I admit to favoring this native garden, as I remembered from past visits, its varying seasonal changes, from cool lakes of blue California lilac, to pear-like fruits that hang against the white silhouette of buckeye like ornaments on a Christmas tree. Contrasting textures of rocky outcroppings, oak forest, and prairie create a smaller canvas against nature's backdrop. Honey-colored sycamore trees in fall, dry creek beds, and rocky chambers await winter rains. These are just a few signatures that bind the surrounding hills and canyon to the California native garden, luring a visitor’s gaze from the arboretum to the wild beyond.

In conversation with Professor Eltzroth that night, I commented on the striking flower arrangements that decorated one of the tables. He informed me that they were obtained from the Eucalyptus against the fence line on the hill. “I think you planted some of those trees” he said. Looking up to where he was pointing, I suddenly remembered a weekend project thirty years earlier, planting with my husband who was a graduate student at the time, and complaining about the difficulty of digging in clay soil. Until that moment I had forgotten my personal involvement. The arboretum was then in its infancy, making the growth and change since, all the more dramatic.  Continuing with other guests through the flora of five continents represented, we sipped wine and tasted hors d’oeuvres prepared in the ethnic cuisine of each region. The entire experience was a reminder to me of this precious community resource, prompting me to write about the event, and commit to revisiting Leaning Pine with greater frequency. The evening culminated with a formal dinner served on campus at the Performing Arts Center.

Conceived by the Ornamental Horticulture Department in the nineteen sixties, the arboretum makes education its primary mission, providing a hands-on laboratory and learning tool for students, professionals, and public citizens, to explore the garden's design features. With gardening on the forefront and water conserving efforts a central issue in our state, Leaning Pine has adopted progressive steps, such as replacing part of the traditional lawn with drought tolerant native sedges. Throughout the year the arboretum hosts cultural programs, social events, workshops.  Far from separate and isolated, it is the subject of conversation in the community at large.

Now, four decades since its inception, Leaning Pine has also become a focal point on campus. I visualize the garden maturing and growing, with fingers reaching up Poly Canyon. Working in conjunction with other departments at the University, does not seen beyond its scope. Imagine fostering a children's garden in conjunction with the child development department, or hosting an eco-psychology gathering in the council ring. With continuing sponsorship and enriching ideas, the Leaning Pine Arboretum will remain for the community of San Luis Obispo County in perpetuity, but to simply visit at dusk and encounter wildlife such as birds, jackrabbit, coyote, and deer, or find respite in the shade on a hot September afternoon, is enough reason to stroll along its half-mile self-guided tour.

Leaning Pine

CHICAGO

I was traveling for a week, and had just returned home.  Opening the front door, I entered a small hallway and touched the voice mail button on my telephone.  There was only one message, from my gardener, who watered the newly planted perennial beds during my absence.  She is also my neighbor, and my daughter’s closest friend.  With only a few years experience she has become a dedicated plantswoman, and has grown to appreciate the wildlife population that my garden has to offer.  Past encounters include, discovering baby opossums in an empty five-gallon container, looking eye to eye with hummingbirds while watering, happening upon red-shouldered hawks bathing in the fountain, and fox climbing in the oak tree.  Her message was long, and began with the usual update, but as she continued, the timbre of her voice changed.  Higher in pitch, it rose to a crescendo, almost shrill, relaying what had happened while I was away, and saying the word "Chicago" over and over again.  I had to replay the message in order to grasp her story.

Walking across the pasture from her yard, on the weekend, she had just entered my garden gate to irrigate when she came upon the birds. 
“That’s when I saw them…a covey of quail”, her voice said in the message, “scurrying from the fence to the rosemary hedge!  Two parents and their babies…maybe twelve…..ooooh they were soooo cute!  But then I saw our neighbor’s cat… crouching nearby!  The babies got separated from their parents.  They went the other direction!  Towards the cat!!  Then I remembered when I was a little girl my best friend told me how a mother and father quail call their babies.  They call ‘Chi-CAG-o, Chi-CAG-o, Chi-CAG-o’. So I tried it!  I kneeled on the ground where the parents went under a bush, and I said Chicago, Chicago, Chicago….and those babies came running to me, up my arms and shoulders…oooh it tickled….it was wonderful!” she said, her now mellifluous voice riddled with giggles. Laughing aloud, I listened again.

Midway through, my husband walked out of his office and into the living room.  He was working on a symposium to be presented that night, for a local garden club.  The topic was birds and native plants. "I'm having trouble with the introduction" he said, not so much speaking to me, as he was muttering to himself.
"Well, listen to this" I insisted, pressing the button again to play the voice mail from the beginning so that he could hear it in its entirety.  No convincing was needed for him to incorporate my gardeners story into the beginning of his presentation.  That evening I sat in the second row listening to the introduction  What followed were audible "ooohs" and "aaahs" rippling throughout the audience. 

Several days later a package arived in the mail from one of the guests who had attended the symposium.
I opened the brown box and found inside a soft quail stuffy- complete with crest or topknot.  On the breast a tag read "squeeze me".  When I complied with the instructions, out came the sound ‘Chi-CAG-o, Chi-CAG-o, Chi-CAG-o’.  I placed the stuffed animal on my daughter’s dresser, as a reminder to tell the story of how her dear friend, my gardener, had saved the baby quail in our garden.

Rainie Fross 1999