Throw caution to the wind and let your garden grow
There is a beautiful and achingly lonely beech tree at a cemetery just outside of Boston in Cambridge. There are many beeches in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, of many species and cultivars. This old tree may no longer be there, as many have succumb to beech tree decline. But in 2017 it stood tall and proud.
I was in Boston for work, traveling with my friend and colleague. She suggested we take a walk to Mt. Auburn. Apart from being the burial place for many important Americans and many more unimportant Americans, it is also a landscape garden.
The cemetery was fashioned in the early 1800s as a first-of-its-kind, marking the beginning of what is known as the rural cemetery movement. At its heart, the rural cemetery is a designed landscape that also features burial plots. A design landscaped enhances the topography of a place by mixing pastoral open spaces, shady woodlands, and intimate garden settings. At its heart, it is a park, made to look natural. Many cemeteries are modeled on Mt. Auburn, though they are poor imitations.
One of the most memorable features of Mt. Auburn is Washington Tower. It sits on the highest point in the landscape. Stone steps circle around the inside of the tower, taking you 62 feet higher than the hill you just climbed. Atop the tower is a viewing area; the whole cemetery spreads out before you. The Boston skyline is visible in the distance. When I was there, the leaves were turning the color of autumn and the air was misty with rain.
But it is that lonely tree, and not the tower, that brings me back to that autumnal afternoon. It stood sentinel, pendulous branches hanging near the grassy floor. It formed a sort of dwelling there, beneath the branches. A room formed around its thick, sturdy trunk, like a natural tepee. The center drawing up earth, and energy, from the ground, while pulling down light from the sky. A whole world was contained among those branches. I felt the loneliness of its perfection, as I stood there, sheltered by those great, bold limbs.
A copper plate was nailed to the trunk of the tree.
In nature, large trees grow together—and their forms develop accordingly. They grow strong, their roots weaving in and among each other, anchoring one another. The leaves in their canopies just a hairline apart. In the wind their leaves gently sway; they breathe on each other. The forest is alive with the breath of trees.
But not for this perfect and lonely beech, existing only in the world of men.
There is a school of thought that views our floral ecologies through the lens of competition. Plants compete for scarce territory by colonizing earth and air for water and light and precious nutrients. Some plants are indeed competitors. The roots of our native creosote (Larrea tridentata) inhibit the growth of plants in their vicinity, though the mechanism is not well understood. This trait is called allelopathy. Researchers suspect that creosote roots release a substance of some kind that inhibits the growth of nearby shrubs. Think of it as the creosote’s roots telling other plants, including their own kind, not to grow near them. (When two Larrea meet in the Mojave scrub, which one wins? I wonder.) But not all plants take this approach.
White bursage (Ambrosia dumosa), another desert shrub, works more cooperatively, at least among its own kind. When ambrosia comes into contact with other ambrosia roots, it mediates its own growth, so as not to interfere with its sister’s roots. It detects the presence of other Ambrosia roots and adjusts its growth accordingly, ensuring that limited desert resources, namely water, are shared by others of its kind. The ambrosia coordinates resources, instead of competing for them.
In our own gardens, we tend to adopt roles that plants play just fine by themselves. We don’t need to. The plants will sort it out. Desert plants are especially good at managing scarce resources.
Some will adopt competitive strategies that inhibit other plants. We can grow a few of these, but we should be judicious with how we use them. Others will grow in cheerful community, coordinating with their own species and generally ignoring those around them. Either way, the plants will sort it out.
We could let this happen in our gardens. We could resist the urge to be constant intermediaries in the lives of our plants. Instead, we become the arbiter of whose roots are allowed to touch. In the desert garden, we are even more brutal, declaring that the parts above ground are not allowed to touch each other either.
The result? We have impoverished our suburban landscapes.
Take a walk in even the most desolate region of the Mojave desert and you will see plant life in every square foot. But take a walk through almost any desert neighborhood and you will instead see solitary plants, punctuating the dreary, desolate rock beds we have so carefully cultivated in a misplaced effort at water conservation.
We think to grow the perfect version of a shrub, like that bereaved tree, and in achieving the idea of the thing, we lose it’s substance, it’s materiality, it’s physical presence in the world. And here in the desert, we are in fact worse, because we hack our shrubs and trees into shadows of themselves. We tell ourselves that we are gardening.
I am glad there are arboretums so that we can see and study trees and plants as individuals. But I am never sure, really, if we are studying happy trees in these environments. It may be that these trees are major depressives, and so what we think of true tree-ness or true shrub-ness or true forb-ness is really a kind of mental illness. A mental illness we induce in them, and subsequently in ourselves, in our vain attempts to create more ordered spaces.
We can, and should, plant more in our gardens. Pack them in! Give them what they need in terms of water and light to get rooted and going in your garden. Then: stand back. Let the plants figure it out. We will all, plant and human, be happier for it. Yes, you will lose some plants, but that’s OK; you have planted many of them, and many of the same kinds of plant. And many of these you have planted by seed, so the cost of loss is very little.
This approach to gardening is sometimes called re-wilding. We should think of it instead as climate adaptive gardening. Or just gardening. Our gardens are not museums, shadowy sedimented segments of time. They shouldn’t look like yesterday, or last year, or the decade before that. They are as alive as you and I—when we are our best selves, that is.
Try this: plant your shrubs closer than the label recommends. The same even for your trees. Your cactus can touch, too. Put the hedge trimmers down and let your plants grow in riotous harmony, part competition and part coordination. Do not force them into lives of solitary sadness. In doing so, you may find yourself less sad and less lonely, too.
Mojave Gardener 