How the roadside native weed and Mojave native, Eriogonum deflexum, may ease my conscience yet
I must confess an egregious sin. I keep a cat that spends some of its time outdoors. It is a cruel cat, leaving all sorts of wretched little gifts around the house. I almost stepped on a lizard tail, fresh and still twitching. I don’t know the record for nerve survival for lizard tails, but this one twitched long enough for me to notice it, walk coolly to the bedroom to grab my phone, walk back to the crime scene, and take a video of the tail, still moving. A half-hearted tribute to Dr. Frankenstein (the Mel Brook’s version).
Now that the evenings and nights are finally cooler—the days are still a climatological disaster, unfolding like a storm-drenched newspaper, sodden and illegible, a papier-mâché mess—the cat spends much more time outside. Sometimes the whole night. At least at night the birds are safe.
Not so the other morning when, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of an Oleander-shaped hat, he leaped into the sky and returned to earth with the frail, dead body of a Say’s phoebe (I think). Would that it were a pigeon, or a Mourning dove. There are plenty of house finches. They come like drunken fraternity brothers to the Tecoma hybrids in the front garden, ripping off the tiny trumpets and throwing back their heads like they are shotgunning cheap beer.
The other day, the cat stalked a pile of leaves near the vegetable garden, an impromptu compost heap that will not compost in our climate. I thought for sure another lizard was gone. Out jumped a rat, straight into the cat’s mouth. Not for long, though. The rat got away.
Not so the little bird, whatever kind it was.
My son and I held a service. We moved aside a large rock in the back garden and dug a hole with a garden trowel. I scooped the bird up with the trowel and placed it in the hole. I went to hand the shovel back to my son, so he could bury the bird, but he had already started pushing the soil back with his hands. That he had forgone a tool, and instead touched soil, with small but growing hands, touched me.
He and I and all of us spend so much time on screens, in worlds of our own making, that the tender, unmediated act of pressing sand and stone into the shallow grave of an unnamed bird seemed both heavy with purpose and also as light and sensible as a bird taking flight.
We moved the rock back to its place (the dog would dig the bird up without it) and said a few words. Together we made a marker and my son placed it over the grave.
Here lies a bird.
I hate to see that cat, an old tom with hardly any sense, be such a skilled and heartless hunter. I hate it especially because my principal orientation in the garden is ecological. I garden for beautiful flowers and stunning plant forms, and I garden for wildlife.
I learned recently that that the caterpillars of the Mormon metalmark butterfly, which look like a homely Painted lady, rely on buckwheat as host plants. One of those buckwheat plants is skeleton weed, Eriogonum deflexum. And it is a weed—growing everywhere and all about my garden.
In the spring, pretty leaves shaped like little lily pads first emerge. They are woolly and grayish green, almost pearlescent in the right light. Then they grow an awkward, bony stem that takes all summer to expand itself into a little canopy. By fall they look like miniaturized umbrella acacias, Acacia tortilis, that dot the Serengeti. From their tiny branches hang hundreds and hundreds of little bells, upside down buckwheat flowers. Birds eat the seeds and I wonder if I have not created little birdie booby traps in the wilder parts of my garden.
Of course, almost any buckwheat will do for the Mormon metalmark. There are far showier buckwheat, like California buckwheat, Eriogonum fasciculatum. But I have the hardest time getting these to grow. I’ve thrown seed numerous times. As of this moment I’m trying to germinate them in pots. There are pots inside, and outside, and in the fridge. So far, nothing.
Out of penance for that bird, I will have to settle for a weed. As the temperature changes, if it does this year, Erigonum deflexum will dry out, leaving brittle stems that will age red and then black, a skeleton of itself, and the reason for it’s common name. I will let these plants be at least until then, a miniaturized African savanna, replete with tiny cats and tiny birds.
I’ll keep this weed not out of penance alone. While the flowers are almost white—that’s all I ever see in my own garden or the open lots around the neighborhood—the field books suggest that it comes in pink, too, with little red stripes on the flowers. Pink candy cane flowers. I am enchanted by photos I’ve seen and believe they would make beautiful hangouts for ravenous caterpillars. Their appetites might eventually suppress the surplus population of skeleton weed that is sure to be the natural consequence of my letting this Eriogonum run wild in the garden.
I hope the cat will leave the caterpillars alone.
Mojave Gardener 