AND HOME

The Late Show was fun and inspiring.  (Fanfare for Robin Parer and everyone else who worked hard on putting it together!)   I attended on a beautiful Saturday in Sonoma.  The threatened 100 plus heat wave, in effect on Friday, was swept away by a breeze.  It was just hot enough to relish shade.

On arrival my friend Randy and I made a quick tour of the design gardens, greeting and meeting along the way.  I’d be hard-pressed to choose which design was Most Metaphoric—top choices were the Grow Melt Project (the ice had mostly melted into curb-sized chunks by Saturday—there were pictures) and the Hermit’s Garden, but to my eyes all of them were metaphors.  The water was not water but a metaphor.  Likewise the oaks and the dirt below them.  This is not a complaint.  It is what I expected, was looking forward to.  I know there was practical information to be gleaned, but I missed it.

No matter.  I heard  more potentially useful stuff than I could absorb from the speakers inside the Lecture Barn, some of which I wrote illegibly in my notebook.    I heard 5 presentations, running the gamut of garden philosophy from Conceptural/Architectual (Topher Delaney) to Plant a Native and Save a Moth (Phil van Soelen).  Roger Gossler and Tom Fischer narrated slide shows of plants that promote the kind of irrigation called drooling, while the team of Withey and Price wrestled in public with their notorious conundrum: Can a Garden Actually be “Sustainable”?  They didn’t come right out and say it, but somehow in their calculations of how much energy it took to truck stone from Pennsylvania as opposed to shipping it on the train, the answer was immured.

I don’t want to know what it is.

Back in San Francisco yesterday I finished replanting a front garden on Clay Street which I had begun Thursday, a 30- foot long, 8-foot deep,  congestion of half-acceptable plants 3 feet above the sidewalk.  Two street trees, Chinese elms, put all into a considerable shade, such that Santa Barbara daisies prosper without one glimmer of spark.  So I eliminated the daisies and the way too numerous francoas, repositioned the ferns, shovel-pruned the buddleia, shaped the pieris, created a suggestion of an outcropping with the dozen or so stones on site, and finally, scattered a spritz of white and lilac cyclamen roundabout.  Helene, a co-owner of the house, came out just as I was in the last phase of clean-up and gushed, “Oh I love it love it love it.  Oh, it’s so beautiful.  Oh don’t you love it, too?  It looks cared for. Oh I am so pleased.  I am ecstatic.”  Helene’s dial tone is exuberance; who but a grouch would mind that?

And I do like it, even as I stand back and see not one native plant, not one interesting exotic, not one bird or butterfly.  There’s nothing here that any of the speakers would glance twice at.  Most of people walking by don’t glance once.  But Helene saw it, and I do, too; an ephemeral beauty that, it might be argued, is as sustainable as anything gets.

BACK TO EARTH

Something in the description of Kate and Ben Frey’s concept for their garden design, as reported in the LSG Newsletter 2 weeks ago, has caught in my brain like a thistle on a barbed wire fence.   They call their concept, “The Hermit’s Garden.”

“Man, the individual, in his heart retains his original needs and satisfactions, but the unquenchable desire of the masses for everything the earth has to offer has drained the land of water and life.  The hermit cannot avoid the shared momentum of his destiny and strides forward toward this harsh and unforgiving future, propelled by man’s propensity to move forward, whatever the cost.”  This tone is not exclusive to them—a number of the other designers have also expressed acute, and occasionally despairing, awareness of the mess we’re in, but this is more somber than most.

Clearly everyone who has more wit than a stick can see we’ve got to change our lives, but nobody does it, not you, not me.  At least, not enough.  I’ve amped down, sure.  Light oil spray is about as toxic as my horticultural armada gets. An electric weed whacker, infrequently used, is the extent of my power tools.   Though I’m vegetarian, believing that the less that’s killed for one’s “original needs and satisfactions” the better for all involved,  I’ve willfully ignored for years the blood and bone in the “organic” fertilizers I use in my clients’ gardens.  Last week I bought instead a box of kelp meal, but wasn’t sure I wasn’t just exchanging one unsatisfactory remedy for another.  Where were they getting the kelp, and how?  Even alfalfa meal, which I put on roses, is probably being genetically engineered by Monsanto and grown on land owned by Archer Daniels Midland. Here again is the Withey and Price conundrum: Can a garden actually be ‘sustainable’?

There’s a danger in getting narcotized by doom-laced thoughts.  Isn’t this a central raison d’etre for the Show, to come together and get ideas and inspiration for the way forward, to forfend the “harsh and unforgiving future” the Freys allude to?  Say yes.  We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden, back to earth.

Meanwhile the raison d’etre of this blog, the Show itself, will soon be a thing of the past.  I called the first post, “In Orbit”.   The line on which to hang my musings, the metaphor of berrypicking, has turned out to be sturdier than I might have imagined.  I hope, dear Reader, you’ve had as good a time as I in this hazy precinct of the blogosphere.  Perhaps we’ll meet face to face at the Show and recognize each other for the half-fictions we are.

TOMATOES FROM FRUITVALE

It was unusually humid this morning after a weekend of even more unusual weather for September: lightning with vigorous thunder, and brisk showers. Tumbled clouds graced the blue sky; remnants of Hurricane Linda, somebody said. I was walking to BART behind a young woman in tight jeans.  I am not the most observant of persons, but I couldn’t help noticing how the eyes of most of the men she passed were yanked in her direction, as if on a leash. Even the ancient mariner sipping from a paper cup outside Adelita’s Café cocked his head as if he still had plumage.  Guys, I thought, it’s not even 9 AM, but in the jungle, there’s always the roar of the loins.   One guy passing dropped a wicked phrase into her ear as if that would make her lift the gaze she kept fixed on the sidewalk 10 feet ahead.  Not a chance.

Something in the air made it feel like a lucky day, and sure enough, as I descended the station steps the train arrived, PLEASANTON, my direction.  I was on my way to have a Tarot reading from my friend Isabelle.  Yes, I know, Mom if you’re reading this, you’re wondering what’s with the foolishness, but think of this, you love to play cards and there are times, (can’t you feel it?) when luck coats your fingers like talc and you’re in a zone. I’m talking about intuition or insight or whatever you want to call it, some connection with the deeper currents that is a gift, and Isabelle has it in spades, or whatever the equivalent of spades is in her deck, the esoteric Tarot de Paris.  (Isabelle Choiniere-Correa, insights4sights@mac.com.)

I’ve had one of her readings before, about 5 years ago.  The issue was (surprise!) relationships.  One in particular.  I wanted a weather report.  I drew 5 cards, and the message was, UNSETTLED, NO, A SLIGHT CHANCE, HOW ARE YOU AT WISHFUL THINKING, and FERGIDDABOUTIT.  Something like that.  The trouble with Isabelle, sweet as she is, is that she gives you leeway to go ahead and make your own mistakes and see them as preparation for something better.

Fruitvale Village, a large sign announced above the plaza near the station where I disembarked, as if there was a need to identify the intention to be folksy and down-home, but never mind, the place was surprisingly congenial even at that early hour, with custodians in uniforms tidying up from the weekend; a there there in Oakland, at least a few square blocks of it.  I was going to buy flowers but the flower shop wasn’t open yet, so I ordered a scone and a cup of coffee and sat at the nearby café until Isabelle arrived.

The reading, which took place at her house, was as insightful and suggestive as my previous one.  Certain words resonated in uncanny ways.  What was it about? Relationship, if you must know. Again.  I know, Mom, what you’re going to say.

After it was over, we went out into her and her husband Mark’s garden.  When she bought the house, the yard was a sloped, badly maintained weed patch, and now it is a terraced paradise with three apple trees, an olive tree, a grape arbor, a tomato patch on one side and a vegetable plot on the other.  The apples are Anna, Fuji, and Gravenstein, and each tree looks robust.  “It was you who suggested apples,” she said.  I was happy take a bit of credit.

And take home a paper bag full of ripe tomatoes.  They were, and continue to be, delicious.  Did you know, dear Reader, that, botanically speaking, a tomato is a berry?  I didn’t think so.

DO YOU MISS MAYBERRY?

There is an article in this week’s Sunday New York Times about a battle in Ridgewood, New Jersey, over whether to build a concrete swimming pool to replace Graydon Pool, a natural swimming hole that has been a feature of the town for a century.  Mainly it’s the younger residents, often new parents, who view Graydon Pool as unclean and unsafe and want to replace it with something disinfected and transparent.  Older, longtime residents are for the most part opposed to the change. Mark Ferraro, a lawyer whose grandfather was a lifeguard at the pool and who is part of the Preserve Graydon Coalition, was quoted as saying, “If they do what they’re planning, it would be just another thing lost to the wrecking ball of suburban sterility.”

The rift between younger and older is a manifestation of the fact that the upcoming generation, reared in the suburbs, is significantly different not only from my Boomer generation but every other in history, having grown up with no intimate, essential contact with nature.  Nature is something to run a machine over or call the exterminator for. In the lives of their kids this is even more pronounced. There are no dark woods to explore by moonlight, no creek to follow in its divagations, no bird or bug or berry to open a portal into the mysterious. No danger and no excitement.  Even the green lawn, which once offered a bit of range, has been squeezed into inconsequence by ever-swelling McMansions.

“When I drive past the schools in this town, you wouldn’t believe the number of parents who drive the children to school,” Timothy Cronin, the director of Parks and Recreation, was also quoted as saying.  “My parents never took me to school.  I took the bus or walked.”  Even that possibility for the unexpected has been foreclosed, as Mr. Cronin put it, “out of a high level of concern about safety issues.”

Safety issues.  This country has them, and no wonder.  We hear endless news of predators and pedophiles and other sundry dangers.  Is the situation any worse than ever?  Statistically, no, but perception is what matters.  The reappearance after decades of an abducted girl in Antioch becomes a national celebration. We memorialize trauma, as if that would make us immune.  In the same Times is a report of a plan to disperse thousands of pounds of steel from the World Trade Center to communities throughout the U.S. to use in 911 memorials.  Icons, you could say, of the last cohesive myth this country can rally around.  Manifest destiny has become (unsurprisingly) collective victimhood,

Four of my siblings live in suburbs.  I like visiting them but their pretty neighborhoods parch my soul.   The gardens, trim and trig, one after another, are less interesting than the pasture behind the house where I grew up.  You get the feeling that people in the neighborhood are looking for something to complain about; the “unapproved” color of the trim of a house, the trailer sitting in someone’s driveway, the dog that barks.  I’d rather live in the Tenderloin, or a small town, maybe like Ridgewood, New Jersey, though now, apparently, it’s turning into suburbia.

The small town used to be part of the national mythos.  Last year Rascal Flatts recorded a song, “Mayberry.”   “I miss Mayberry/ Sittin on the porch drinkin ice cold cherry coke/  Where everything is black and white…”  There’s a phrase for this kind of gooberism: lard-coated caca. I bet if you got Doctor Phil in there he’d find out a few things about Barney and Gomer and probably even Aunt Bea that could curl your toenails.

I grew up in a windblown, High Plains town. Mayberry it wasn’t.  The town has two cemeteries that contain significantly more citizens than its lit houses.  Nobody walks at night but nonetheless streetlights on every corner burn so bright all true darkness is smitten down.  One can, at least relish the quiet and tranquility, no?  The 6 days and night I was there in August, preparing for the auction of the house I grew up in and its contents, and navigating the aftermath, a grain dryer at the elevator ran nonstop, a blast of noise like an idling jet that has on previous visits driven me to the edge of may(berry)hem.  Where I live in San Francisco is much quieter.

Even so, in this compromised setting, over those 6 days there was a sampling of an undomesticated natural world: cicadas, having left their shells clamped to the bark of the ash trees, shrilling overhead; a big bull snake idling across the grass; bullfrogs; and fireflies inordinately incandescent.

One night Justin, a buddy of my nephew Chris (they’d driven out from Washington state) came into the house, bearing his sleeping bag.  “Not sleeping outside tonight?” I asked.  There was a beautifully starry sky, despite the obnoxious streetlights.  I thought he might be someone who might appreciate the sight.

“No way,” he said, “there are spiders everywhere.”  (He had seemed reasonably rational as well.)  “You want to see?”

We went outside.  Strapped around his head was an LED lamp, with a beam that he directed not toward tree branches, as I expected, but to the grassy areas all around us.  “See that red dot, that’s its eye, and there’s one, and there.  They’re everywhere.”  I couldn’t see what he was talking about, but then he crept forward and pointed down to where the beam now rested, and I still didn’t see anything, until he leaned in closer and suddenly there was an abrupt movement, and I saw spider legs disappear down a dime-sized hole.

“Wow, that was a huge one,” he said.  He pointed out another spider hole, another and another, and then I started seeing those spooky little red dots sprinkled amid the grass, spider eyes, staring back, everywhere.

For many years every night in summer I slept on a quilt in the grass under the stars, never once aware I was lying down in a world of spiders, and no harm ever came of it.  Now would I sleep outside, knowing what I now know? A little knowledge can ruin just about anything.  But then, I’ll never go back.  That book is shut.

Do I miss it?  No.  What I realized when I was there is that it’s in my bones and I can never really be separate from it, and that suits me fine.

POKEBERRY

I’m meeting a potential client in a garden on Sanchez Street.

“So I told the guy at the nursery, give me the fastest growing tree you have, and this is what they gave me,” Kari says.

“And how long has it been in the ground?”

“I don’t know.  About 3 years.”

Three years!  It’s as high as the roofline of the 3-storey house.  The large, shallow-lobed leaves look familiar.  I should know it but I don’t. “Do you know what kind it is?”

“All I know is he said it was a monkey palm.”

Palm.  It’s definitely not a palm.  Whatever it is, it is a serious tree to grow in this encroached-upon space, the encroachment mainly coming from the illegal addition to the house on the east, a big and cheaply constructed wall broken by one cyclopean window and tracery left by ivy pulled down.  The reason for the tree was to hide that ugly wall but it’s more intent on hiding the sky, what there is between buildings.  From the highest deck it is pretty spectacular, but what Kari wants is a garden at ground level where now there is a scattering of thirst-unto-death plants and a goodly accumulation of big fat leaves.

Coming over the north fence (the only fence) from the adjacent garden is a large pokeberry elbowing its way through a tangle of jasmine and potato vine.  Some of the berries on the clusters have a glossy, near-black ripeness.  Others are a rich magenta.  I crush one with my fingers, another I put in my mouth.

“You can eat those?” she asks.

“If you don’t bite on the seeds.  They’re poisonous.”

She gives me a deeply skeptical look.  Most of the homeowners I work for are suspicious of the plums and apples and pears that happen to be growing in their own gardens, especially if they come across one that some critter has gnawed on or pecked at or made an escape tunnel through.  Discovering such, the usual response is to go back into the house and wait till all the fruit falls off the tree and the gardener disposes of it. I don’t know if Kari is like that, and won’t find out because this garden is too shady for much of anything besides ferns and the like.

(A few summers ago in my parents’ garden in Kansas there was the rare voluminous apricot harvest (the buds almost always get zapped by a late frost), but each fruit was partially worm-spoiled.  My mother cut out the bad spots on each and every one.  She gets my first nomination as an Icon of Sustainability. (Note to Reader: joke.  See 1^st blog, In Orbit).)

I was showing off by eating the berry, as if I do it all the time, though it was the first pokeberry I ever ate, and I swallowed it so fast I didn’t taste it, much less bite on the seeds.  In herbal lore an infusion of pokeberry is said to be an immune system enhancer, as well as being a remedy for arthritis and an antidote to Lyme disease.  I have, thankfully, no direct knowledge of the veracity of this.

Knowledge along another line came later at home, after I poked around the internet.  The fast-growing tree in Keri’s garden is Chiranthodendron pentadactylon, the 5-fingered, monkey hand tree.  I am indeed familiar with one, a large specimen in Strybing Arboretum near the succulent garden.  The flowers have the wonderfully peculiar protruding stamens, the “hand” as advertised, but even better, often contain within their upturned cup of sepals a thimbleful of sweet liquid.  If you really want to show off, take a sip in front of friends, but don’t let the gardeners catch you.

Now for you, dear Reader: a gentle poke from my five-fingered monkey hand.  Get your tickets to the Late Show Gardens now.  You too can become an Icon of Sustainability.

THEM’S THE BERRIES

So there I was at Esalen last night, under a half moon and resplendent Jupiter, in view of the pulsating sea, great graceful swells the sound of which might be mistaken for a high wind in the trees if the air were not perfectly still.  I was just back from a soak in the hot tubs with a bunch of other naked people, having a cup of anise tea, and found myself on the periphery of a conversation hijacked by a guy who, overhearing someone mention he was from Canada, shared his dilemma about whether to move there or not.  He had dual citizenship, so it was possible.  He was seeking a safe place to raise his kids, afraid of the implosion that he saw coming for this country.

Down in hot tubs the conversation had been much less apocalyptic, though how reality-based I’m not one to judge; one woman fantasizing about putting a wind turbine on her roof, another about growing a vegetable garden, inspired by the gardens up the hillside.  Someone did mention, in passing, something about the fires down south.  A man quickly changed the subject by wondering out loud what those constellations were overhead.  Did anyone know?  Someone just happened to have his electrogizmo handy, and sure enough, there was the summer night sky at our latitude but nobody was interested at that moment (blessed be) in an antiseptic bit of info on a tiny screen.

It was my first time at Esalen.  The reputation of the beauty of the place was not exaggerated, and not only the setting.  It was easy to see why that woman was inspired by the gardens, though inspiration wasn’t my response.  I didn’t get past the homage stage.  Heavens, they are extravagant; robust lettuces and broccoli, stately kale, tender spinach, parsley, basil, baby bush beans…row after long row.  Interspersed among edibles are great swaths of sweet peas, sunflowers, dahlias, marigolds, and much more.  I had to laugh; it is such a muchness.  I won’t even mention (except for the anise tea) the apotheosis of all this gorgeousness: the bounty spread before us each mealtime.   If the office still had a copy in stock, I would have bought the Esalen cookbook.  (My friends, should you read this, don’t die of shock.)  Perhaps I was inspired.

As for the workshop, the excuse, if you will, for shelling out the beans, the lettuce, the berries, the cabbage, the cherries…the hard-earned greenbacks, in other words—what about it?   It was entitled, What You Practice is What You Have, and led by the Zen teacher, Cheri Huber.  “My all-time favorite quote,” she said, “is, ‘The quality of your life is determined by the focus of your attention’.”  During one session she asked participants for words that might apply to the kind of awareness practice she teaches, and among the usual ones such as “accepting,” “compassionate,” and “peaceful,” someone said, “sustainable.”  At another point, she asked what had we been practicing.  “Fear,” “resentment,” “intellectualizing,” “dissatisfaction,” “stress,” and “criticizing” were some of the responses.

One of my father’s occasional phrases, “Them’s the berries,” might be translated, “It is what it is.  Deal with it.”  In that there’s a simulacrum of acceptance, generally of something that one might not have chosen and would rather do without.  Another slang meaning of  “the berries” is a card hand so good it’s practically unbeatable.

Life is the berries.  Which meaning applies (now and then I get a glimmer of this) depends on the focus of my attention.

COFFEEBERRY AND ELDERBERRY

It’s 4:10 AM; I might as well get out of bed.  I don’t usually have trouble sleeping so mild insomnia is not unwelcome.  Moreover, it’s my last day of being in my 50’s so I better milk it. A splash of milk sloshes coffee over the rim of a cup, first of the day.  Fuel in hand, I drift to the computer.

The LSG newsletter features the designer Loretta Gargan.  As the focus of her design, she is using one of California’s glories, the coast live oak, Quercus agrifolia.  She calls the oak a “model of sustainability,” mentioning the 5,000 insect species that thrive in the live oak community, as well as “more than 100 species of birds during the breeding season.” Prevalent in the community are plants such as California sagebrush, ferns, monkey flower, coffeeberry, and elderberry.

Coincidentally, last night I listened to a 2005 broadcast of Forum with Michael Krasny in which the guest, William Bryant Logan, talked about his book, Oak: The Frame of Civilization. Fascinating facts fell like acorns.  Depending on who’s counting, there are from 250 to 600 species of oaks.  Oaks thrive in habitats from desert to swamp, sea level to 4,000 meters. Logan’s thesis is that civilization advanced as it did thanks in no small measure to oaks and their byproducts; nutrition from acorns, wood for multiple purposes, ink for manuscripts, etc.  The council groves were groves of oaks, where the sacred was summoned.  “Druid” means one who knows the oak.

For dating things, an oak is more accurate than carbon dating, its rings so expressive that a dendrologist can tell not only what year but often in what season the tree was cut down.  The history oaks tell is vast by human standards.   The oldest trees in Denmark, in Lithuania, in the Czech Republic, in Bulgaria and Belgium are all oaks over a thousand years old.

Now it’s dawn, this particular day.  I’m on my second cup of coffee. There’s a swaying reflection on the side of my screen, a cluster of balloons tied to the pine left over from the birthday bash catching the gray light.  All sag except the gold mylar with “Happy Birthday” printed on it.  Aren’t mylar balloons noxious in some way I can’t quite remember?  And those cards that play music when you open them.  Ugh.  Cut it out, everybody!  Let’s lower, not raise, the trash quotient.  We are not amused.

Well, maybe a little. A sock puppet that drones when you open the card, “You were born, long ago, long ago, long ago,” made me laugh.

Cut it out anyway.

Long ago.  Not compared to Angel Oak in South Carolina, which is over 1,500 years old.  Life is short.  All those tedious folk who said so, they were right all along.

My friend Bill, who turned 75 earlier this year, said lately he often wakes in the morning with this line from Psalm 118 going through his head: This is the day which the Lord hath made,/ We will be glad and rejoice in it.

Beats a droning sock puppet any day.

POISONBERRY

The Free Online Dictionary defines poisonberry:  “Eurasian herb naturalized in America bearing white flowers and poisonous hairy foliage and bearing black berries that are sometimes poisonous but sometimes edible.”  Solanum nigrum is given as a synonym. It makes me think my sister, speaking of schwartzbeeren, may have been onto something when she said, there are good ones and bad ones.  I thought it was simply a matter of ripeness.  I’m not sure where the hairy foliage comes in.

And ripeness, we’re told, is all.  I’m turning 60 this week, my hairy foliage migrating toward my ears.  What’s that about?  I’m trying to be a man about it, throwing the doors open and having a party.  Come all.

(“Sometimes poisonous and sometimes edible.”  Isn’t that just like life?)

Tomorrow morning I’ll spend grooming the garden.  It could use a drill sergeant but will get a manicurist.  Its teenage rowdiness is charming.  That’s what I maintain.  When I get real, I admit it too is well past teen years.  There’s the question of questionable upbringing.  Is it too late for discipline?  I might ask myself the same.  I may not be disciplined but I am ripe.

The late summer garden.  It’s so easy to make it a metaphor.  The pippins are increasing their girth.  The tree has never looked more robust, thanks, I think, to worm excreta from my worm bin. Surely it’s not a coincidence, but since the last of the semi-feral cats that graced the garden died, a rat (or more) has been paying regular visits to gnaw at the ‘Lodi’ apples, which ripen early. If it ate the whole apple, well, that would be one thing, but the sampling…  If one of cats got the rat, I’d be delighted but here I am, debating what I can, in conscience (or out) do.  I hear it this second scurrying on the roof.  It sounds like a cascade of pebbles.

Trap it and set it free?  Snap trap?  Poison?

A birthday present: after it’s over, I’m going to Esalen for a weekend.  Never been.  The theme of the workshop I’ll attend is, We are shaped by our thoughts.  We become what we think. (Buddha)

Let’s not think of rats and hairy foliage.

SCHWARTZBEEREN

There were no homicides. We got rid of the stuff, decades-worth, from my parents’ house, their home for 6 decades.  Last month in this blog I referenced the odd book of photos of people around the world seated outside their dwellings, with their possessions washed up around them.  That’s what this was like, only the stuff was on eight large trailers that put together would have made a good sized lake.  Plus there were all the other treasures too large or too heavy to be lifted on a trailer, bedroom sets, a snow blower, a dead television and old stereo consoles that my father bought for two bucks at a sale just like this sale god knows why. It took us three days nonstop of purging the house.  My siblings all pitched in and it seemed the river of stuff would never end.  (FYI: I have 7 siblings.)  If we had a little more time, we might have gotten awfully sentimental, for this was still “home” for each of us.

Given the potential for disaster, the sale went well.  Early in the week the weather had been remarkably benign, temperatures in the 80’s with light winds, but by Friday the winds were blowing hats off and we were back in real Kansas.   The high on Saturday, the day of the auction, was 105, but Kansas is full of Kansans and this was August, so they came, they bought and they took it all away, praise the lord, even the dead television and stereo consoles. ($1)

Even with all there was to do, I spent some hours getting the yard in shape.  Since May, when I was last there, weeds had begun to take over the flowerbeds, the pushiest a plant the Volga Germans who settled this part of Kansas called schwartzbeeren. It’s a solanum, in the nightshade family.  They brought the seed from Russia, and used the berries in their Kuchen and Knebel. My father likes to eat them in a bowl with cream.  I suppose anything edible so willing to grow in western Kansas should merit esteem.  It is said they are sweet when dead ripe, but they tasted bitter to me the few times I ate them.

Curiously, this plant has started to appear in some of my San Francisco gardens. One has grown to overshadow a ‘Guardsman’ phormium in my own secluded and shady one.  There is another in a garden near the beach which I didn’t get around to pulling and which my client now finds ornamental and wants to keep.

These August coincidences, like so many coincidences, seem to imply an underlying meaning, connections which in turn hint at the possibility of true home achieved and found satisfying when all voyages end.  I don’t really believe it, but then, as my friend Elizabeth said to me once, I don’t have to.

BERRY BROTHERS TOWING

You may remember a few weeks past, the newsletter featured speakers Glen Withey and Charles Price who presented the “conundrum:”  “With the concern growing every year over the impact we have on our environment, can a garden actually be ‘sustainable’?  For the two of us, the jury is still out.”

The jury has a lot of evidence to consider.

For the last week I’ve been installing a garden on a shank of Bernal Hill. Before I began, the more-or-less trapezoidal space between 2 houses boasted dusty pyracantha, undaunted anise, 2 wan badly-pruned apple trees and the most dejected agaves you’ve ever seen.  The agaves were under the windows of the facing house, planted years ago as a burglar deterrent.  Are burglars deterred by ugliness?

I had arranged for a delivery today from a local supplier of 3 yards of rhododendron blend and 3 yards cedar mulch.  A delivery day is always good for stress, especially when the destination is a site where streets are narrow and steep and creatively angled, where if you meet another car you might have to back up.  When you order from this supplier the dispatcher gives you a window of 7 to 1, to mess with your head, I guess. I called this morning at 7:45 to see if could narrow the window, and was told, “I don’t see your paper work.  I don’t know why she wouldn’t have written it out.” “It wasn’t a she,” I said.  After further discussion, he managed to locate the information in the computer and we agreed a delivery would occur.  I gave up knowing more nearly when, except “sometime after 10.”

At 9:30, the driver called, “I’m here.”  He was cool, waiting until I got across town, and cool backing the truck onto the driveway, just missing the red Toyota by 1/16^th of an inch, and cool when the front tires jumped the opposite curb, his fender nearly smashing the elaborate iron fence of the sensational garden opposite.  “It’s enough to give my poor insurance adjustor’s heart an attack,” my client said.

While the bed lifted to dump the soil blend, I said to the driver who, despite all, I did trust, “You have a problem with your truck.”  This was not cool. A black fluid was pooling under the engine and around the wheel. He finished unloading, and managed to move the truck a half a block away.

John and I hauled in the 6 yards.  We planted camellia sasanquas under the sad apple trees along the drip line.  We planted aeoniums and Agave celsii, sages and grasses and ceanothus and day lilies called ‘Orange Empire’.  Except for the drip line, everything was organic, green, sustainable in the sense that someday it would all rot happily away, return to earth. Here was the green cherry, the beginning garden, in the sun (metaphorically) ripening.  Who would not want it?

But what it took, the not-so-sustainable, sat down the street, waiting for a tow truck.  Three hours later it arrived.  (A big window of arrival time, too.)  I didn’t want to watch the procession, the tow truck, surprisingly long, hitched to the dump truck, inching down the street. I felt a bit like it was my fault.  When they passed my truck, I looked.  The cab of the dump truck was empty.  Maybe the driver took the rest of the day off. Maybe his day would get better.  Mine was. The tow truck driver’s, on the other hand, was not improving, you could see that in his face. He stopped the truck momentarily, taking a breath, before the plunge downhill.