From Word To Word

Red Currants were among the plants that I tried to grow from seed this past spring, and they were also among those that entirely failed to germinate.  I was disappointed because they are an edible plant that will tolerate my Black Walnut trees, and they are quite attractive besides.

Someone told me that I could propagate Red Currants merely by clipping stalks and then planting them eight or ten inches into the dirt.  I disbelieved, but I tried it anyway.  The stalks have been sitting there for several weeks now, so I checked them yesterday.  Much to my amazement, two if them are indeed producing leaves, though they will obviously not bear any fruit this year.

I was so excited that I went back to the parent bush to see if there were other likely candidates for planting in this way.  I thought it would be interesting to experiment with how late I could plant these cuttings successfully.  As I was looking through the bush, however, I noticed that some of the lower stalks had become covered with earth and mulch, so I went to uncover them, only to realize that they also had rooted.

I went and got my little garden spade to transplant the new seedlings, and I was just starting to dig when I made a third discovery: there, poking up from the mulch, were perhaps fifteen or twenty Red Currant seedlings that had germinated without any help from me at all.  I had been under the impression that the seeds needed to pass through the intestinal system of a bird in order to germinate, but there seemed to be too many of the seedlings too close to the parent bush for this to be the case.  Nevertheless, there they were.

So, though I had feared that I would have no new Red Currants at all, I now have two successful cuttings, two successful rootings, and twenty odd successful seedlings.  My pleasure is inordinate.

I do not often just relate events as they happen to me.  I am less interested, usually, in what has happened than in what these happenings mean.  I do not write to capture the events in my life.  I write to relate the meanings of my life.  This is even one of the ways that I would define the function of writing.

However, I offer the following events without any analysis or commentary.  Let them be what they are.

The Mayapple that I planted last year has sprouted.  It was a gift from Bob Brown, and I planted it immediately before leaving on vacation last summer.  It was crisply brown by the time I returned, and I thought that I had killed it, but it has emerged as healthy as when it was first planted.

The Trilliums that I was forced to transplant last fall are also up and blooming.  They have even multiplied.  They are an exception to my edible principle, because they are native to this area, and because they are my provincial flower, and because they are beautiful in my memory.

Andrew Teale has given me a large Elderberry cutting, and it is now planted beneath my Walnut trees, which it is supposed to tolerate.  It is growing well.

Paul Wismer has given me some Strawberry plants, and they will be planted in the sideyard beside the Peonies that Willie loved so much.

My neighbour down the road has given me a currant bush.  It has not yet flowered, so we are not sure what kind it is yet, but any sort of currant will be welcome.

I discovered a bee hive in the rocky area that lies between the backyards of the neighbouring houses, and the bees are busy at the just opening blossoms of my Apple trees.

I do not think that these things would benefit from anything that I might say about them.

Some of you may remember the ethical dilemma that goutweed posed for me last year, where I ended up compromising my organic principle in order to make my yard into something other than a goutweed farm.  I am now discovering, however, that even herbicide is not capable of eradicating goutweed completely.  Here and there, poking through the mulch or creeping up from around rocks and shrubs, those distinctive little leaves are beginning to emerge in my garden.

I was lamenting about this to a neighbourhood woman this morning.  She is an older but not elderly woman, retired, and she was taking her daily walk past our house.  She stopped to chat, as she does when anyone is out in their yard, and I explained to her about my goutweed woes.  Her reply took some time.  She never speaks quickly, and she has a deliberate way of laying a broad foundation for anything she is going to say, but her point was essentially this:  Goutweed is something that you fight but not something that you beat.

She told me that she had at one point actually planted goutweed in her yard, the variegated kind that has white edges to its green leaves.  She liked the look of it, and it was a fabulous groundcover that was tolerant of almost any conditions, shade or sun, wet or dry.  She soon noticed, however, that it was attacking her lawn and choking out some of the smaller flowers.  She first tried just digging it back, but it always seemed to sprout worse than before.  She then tried spraying it, but it came back the next year, only without the variegation.  She tried everything, but in the end, she was reduced to digging it out by hand, every spring, wherever she found it.  She does this still.  She waits until there has been a heavy rain, like last night, and then she looks for where there are sprouts, digs around them, and tries gently to pull out as much of the root with it as she can.

She has been at this for something like fifteen years, she says, and this year she has only found two sprouts.  She is hopeful that she will find none next year, though she is unwilling to make any wagers.  When I showed her the extent of my former goutweed plantation, she apologised and guessed that I might be at it as long as she has been, but she then said something quite profound.  She said, “By the time it’s gone, you’ll have been fighting it for so long you’ll almost miss it.”

Suddenly, the whole goutweed problem was changed for me.  It ceased to be something that needed an immediate solution.  It became a quality, however disgareeable, of this place where I live.  I did not lose any of my desire to root it out, but I gained a kind of appreciation for what it was.  The task of fighting it, in that moment, become part of the labour of my home, part of the ethic of my home, something to be undertaken and even to be enjoyed, no matter how difficult, because it is bound up in the labour and the ethic of the home.  It became something, even, perhaps, though I do not yet see how, that I might miss when it is gone, fifteen years from now.

I do not know if anything can still be said about seeds that will not immediately fall into the most obvious kinds of romanticism and cliche.  This sort of idealization is a large part of the reason why I often claim to be cynical about spring and romantic only about autumn.  Even so, I need to confess that there is something unavoidably compelling about planting seeds, about pushing them into the soil with my fingers, about knowing what they might become.

There is something so perfectly anticipatory about planting seeds, something that looks so absolutely toward what might come.  It may very well be romantic of me to say so, and I might very well contradict my self proclaimed cynicism in so saying, but there is something miraculous in the seed, something that perhaps only escapes cliche when I do it with my own hands.

Some of you may remember that I am trying to grow trees from seed, which is why I have been stratifying seeds in my refrigerator all winter.  At the beginning of this month, I planted the first seeds, Flowering Quince and Oregon Grapes, into pots, but I had low expectations that they would actually germinate.  Neither species is native to our area, so Henry Koch does not mention them in Growing Trees from Seed, the book that I have been using as my guide.  This meant that I had to guess about the length of their stratification period from his recommendations about other similar species, so I knew in advance that successful germination would be the result more of luck than of anything else, and it seemed that my meagre expectations would be confirmed.

The Flowering Quince fared much as I feared they might.  There is a single sprout, but it looks decidedly unlike a tree seedling, and I am suspicious that I am growing a weed.  I am giving it the benefit of doubt at this point, having never actually seen the seedling of a Flowering Quince, but I feel as though I am probably harbouring in my flower pot the vegetable equivalent of a cuckoo egg.

The Oregon Grapes seemed to be just as unproductive.  Actually, they seemed even less productive, since they had not managed to give me even a weed.  Yesterday, however, there was a sprout, tipped with the correct seed casing, undeniably the beginning of an Oregon Grape.  Today, there was a second sprout.  I am as excited as my sons are, who have to be restrained from watering the little plants on an hourly basis.  It is almost enough to make me romantic about spring.

The Dinner and a Doc group met on Saturday night to watch The Real Dirt on Famer John, which is directed by Taggart Siegel.  We accompanied it with homemade mushroom soup, with a beautiful sourdough bread that I bought from a new vendor at the market, with apple cider from a farmer for whom I used to work, and with some desserts that people brought despite my explicit instructions that they bring nothing at all.

This was the first time I have screened a film that I have never seen before.  I chose it because it connects well with the discussion group that my wife will be running in a few weeks, because it has been recommended to me by many people, and because I wanted to see it myself.  I had intended to preview it so that I would have some idea of what I was going to inflict on people, but, as is usually the case, other things were more pressing.  So, as we sat down to watch, I was truly in the position of a viewer, as I very seldom am any more, and enjoyed the experience very much.

Among other things, I began to realize the amount of knowledge that has been lost, not only the general population’s loss of knowledge about working the earth in any way, but the farm community’s loss of knowledge about how to work the earth apart from the chemical and industrial techniques that are gradually destroying the earth itself.  Though he was a farmer all of his life, John had to relearn almost everything in order to begin farming organically.  So completely had the previous generations accepted the superiority of chemical farming that they had not modeled any other approach to working the earth, leaving their descendants almost completely ignorant of the farming practices that had been universal only several generations before them.

It seems to me that this same loss of knowledge is a fundamental problem facing many of those who would seek to live differently in their homes and their communities.  It is not only a matter of identifying the areas where we would like to live differently, and it is not only a matter of finding the will and the resources to make real changes in these areas, but it is also a matter of recovering knowledge that would have been commonplace to our great-grandparents but that is almost completely lost to us now.  I have not the least idea of how to grow an organic backyard vegetable garden, for example.  I am beyond my expertise at every step, relying on books, on friends, on google, and often, when these things fail, on my own experimentation.  This knowledge is no longer commonplace, and there is much else that has similarly passed from the common knowledge of our communities, to their detriment.

The second idea that I appreciated in the film was its insistence on the role of the dirt, of the land, of the earth itself.  In the initial few scenes of the film, Farmer John takes a handful of dirt, eats a sizable mouthful, and declares, “The earth is good today.”  John is obviously playing to the camera, as he loves to do, but the gesture reminds me of my own impulse to do just that while planting my apple trees.  The words ‘good’ and ‘earth’ in such close conjunction also remind me of a book I have just read, Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, which represents the earth in ways that are often similar to the film.  This second connection was further reinforced by a later scene, where John’s elderly uncle approaches tears as he describes how the new housing developments have “poured concrete over all that good earth.”

It occurs to me, watching these moments in the context of my own recent experience and reading, that our culture has lost, and has long been losing, this almost spiritual sense of the earth.  Distanced as we are from working the soil, manic as we are about cleanliness, we are unable to conceive of soil as something living, as something that we might put into our mouths and eat, as something good and wholesome and even spiritual.  In The Good Earth, Buck several times depicts the earth as healing farmer Wang emotionally and psychologically.  Whether he is suffering from the lust for a woman or from the anxieties of his family, the remedy is always to walk barefoot behind his plow, to turn the earth in his hands, to lie along the freshly plowed furrows and sleep in the sun.  He is always cleansed by this connection with the land.

It is not, as the examples of both farmer Wang and farmer John show clearly, that this connection with the earth is easy, for working the land is always a great and never ending labour.  It is only that this labour is wholesome and good in a way that cannot be replicated in any other way.  There is no substitute for real dirt, for real labour in the earth.  Not that this precludes other sorts of labour, of course, but that the other labours need to reconnect themselves to the labour of the land.

I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, when he is staying with a tutor, preparing for his university entrance examinations.  Lewis relates how he would go to his tutor in the garden and how his tutor would take the book in his dirt covered hands and guide Lewis through whatever difficulty he was having.  Lewis is horrified at this disrespect of his books, buti I always saw something apt in this story.  The intellectual, at least in this instance and in my ideal, is not someone whose hands stay clean, literally or figuratively, but someone whose hands are as used to working with earth or with food or with wood as they are used to working with the word.  If our books are too clean, our hands are probably too clean also, and we have failed to make our thinking a real part of our living.

If I have in some of my posts given the impression that I am in any way an accomplished gardener, let this post serve to dispel it.  While I can recall our family having a vegetable garden when I was very young, gardening was not something that my family did.  When I moved out, I lived solely in apartments that had no dirt at all and then in a little bungalow that had a garden fairly well begun before I even I arrived.  It is only in the past year, since we moved into our new place, that I have had a substantial amount of space to garden and the growing desire to do something with it.  Though I do love to garden, though I do want to become a better gardener, I am, at the moment, almost completely incompetent.

For example, I wrote a month or so ago that I was trying to grow sancherry bushes from seed.  Having no idea how to go about this properly, I did what I usually do.  I made a completely uninformed attempt to do things on my own, planted the seeds immediately and without any preparation, waited impatiently for them to sprout, and was horribly disappointed when they did nothing of the sort.  I could have researched the process online, of course, and there are probably many books available at my local library just down the street, but I have a fundamental antipathy to the usual kind of approach to instructional material.  They are either impersonal and dull in the extreme, or they are personal and insipid in the extreme.  I have encountered only very few exceptions, and I treasure them very highly.

Fortuitously, I have just discovered a book that is just such an exception, one that serves both my purposes and my tastes entirely. My mother happened to leave it on the dining room table, a book called Growing Trees from Seed, by a man named Henry Kock, who was an Interpretive Horticulturalist at the University of Guelph’s Arboretum and the founder of the Elm Recovery Project.  My mother, who worked with him at the arboretum, describes him as probably the most amazing man she has ever met, and his book is equally remarkable.

Its appeal is not in the information it provides, though it covers its subject exhaustively.  Its appeal is in the way that he tells the story of growing trees from seed precisely as a story.  There are some writers who introduce anecdotes in order to make a text less dull, but often in ways that seem forced and unnatural.  Kock’s anecdotes are less an insertion into a broader textual structure than they are the structure itself.  He writes as if he is sitting with his reader in the garden, pointing out this or the other detail of a specimen, demonstrating a particular technique, or relating the story of when he first saw a certain variety of tree.  He does not lecture on the subject of trees.  He narrates a passion for them, a life of dedication to them.

This sense of being alongside Kock as he works in the nursery makes the book much more than a reference volume.  While it would certainly serve this purpose, it deserves to be read whole, quite apart from any immediate need for the information it conveys.  It deserves to be read with the spirit that it was written, with a passion for seeing native plants conserved and reintroduced in their former habitats, with a passion that never fails to see something mystical in a tree emerging from a seed, with a passion that understand planting native species as “a nearly sacred act.”  It is written by someone who knew how to honour the uniqueness of his immediate environment, and he inspires his readers to discover how to honour in this way also.

I was planting apple trees yesterday: a Redcort, an Empire, and a Honey Crisp.  The dirt smelled moist and mineral, like autumn, so rich and beautiful that I had a compelling urge to eat some.  Maybe, I thought, we have it wrong when we tell our kids not to eat dirt and sand.  Maybe it really tastes quite good.  Maybe we have all been missing out on something our whole lives, training away an appreciation for a taste that we could share with the trees.

I remembered suddenly a passage in C. S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair, where the moles are preparing dishes from different types of earth and feeding them to the dryads.  Lewis describes the confections made from loam and sand, some looking almost like chocolate.  I have always liked that part of the story, but being surrounded by the smell and feel of dirt for much of yesterday afternoon made me appreciate it a little differently.  I was not taken away by it so much as to actually taste the earth myself, but I could no longer see the dirt as anything but food, maybe not for me, but for something else, and I could not resist the strange sensation that I was digging in a kind of arboreal kitchen, a chef preparing a feast for my newly planted trees.

The Senior High class I teach at my church met at our local coffee shop this morning, and we got on the topic of found fruit, which is a term that is often applied to the fruit that can be found and harvested for free in urban areas.  For example, I have for years been harvesting apples and pears from behind one of the city community centres where there had been an orchard when the building was still a nurses’ residence for the local hospital.  I also pick serviceberries and elderberries from various housing developments around the city, and there are places where I can also find wild grapes, red currants, rose hips, and raspberries.  Then there are the various neighbours who have planted fruit trees but do not harvest them and let me pick grapes and cherries and whatever else.  All this saves me a not inconsiderable amount of money, and it also lets me use what already grows around me and would otherwise go to waste.

Picking found fruit in this way seems very natural to me.  My parents often took my brothers and me to collect windfall apples from the side of rural roads, apples that could not be eaten but were great for making applesauce.  We also picked the berries that grew in the housing developments where we lived over the years.  When I was first married, I discovered and began picking the wild grapes that grew near our apartment, and I was eventually joined by several of the other residents for the yearly harvest. Though I have moved from these places, I still return to them to gather fruit each year, and I am taking cuttings from some of these plants for my own garden.

Though this behaviour seems very normal to me, however, my students were clearly a little disconcerted with the idea.  They wanted to know whether I had to pay people, which I never do, or get their permission, which I always do unless the fruit is on public land.  They also wanted to know whether this kind of fruit might be more likely to carry bugs or diseases.  The whole thing seemed a little inapropriate to them, something like sneaking into a movie theatre or hacking a computer.  It might be possible, they seemed to imply, but surely there was something about it that was immoral if not actually illegal.

This response, now that I think about it, was a predictable one given our culture’s ideas about property.  We have so internalized the notion that everything is and should be owned and that everything does and should cost something, that we are immediately wary when something appears to be unowned and available to be used freely.  I have seen very similar responses to open source software, for example, or even to the neighbourly gesture to shovel a driveway.  We assume that these things can only be free to hide another kind of cost.  We assume that everything must have an owner, and that what is owned by one person would surely not be freely given to another except as a kind of advertisement or loss leader.  What is freely given or freely found, we believe, will be of worse quality and will obligate us in other ways.  We worry that the real owner of these things will appear and demand that we pay for them in one way or another.

We feel this way, unfortunately, because it is too often the case that what is free does indeed come at a hidden cost, but this should make it all the more necessary that we actively use those few things that are in fact freely found and freely given.  To pick and use found fruit, or to use open source software, or to lend tools freely between neighbours, these become ways, not only to save money, but to maintain economies that do not circulate around money at all, but around the local community and the local environment.  They become ways to value things apart from the dollar value that might be attached to them.  They become ways to understand value differently, to reevaluate, to value more highly what is given and discovered without any value at all.

Midway through canning tomato sauce yesterday, my children began to lose patience.  This is understandable.  Tomato sauce day is a long, hard day.  So we turned off the pots, gathered ourselves, and set off for the park.  We picked up a neighbourhood friend along the way, a girl of five years old, one of the few children I have met who is capable of matching my eldest for energy.  Our time in the park was a good respite for everyone concerned, and we left far more agreeably than we had come.

On the way home, I discovered a small shrub growing in a garden along the street.  It had leaves reminiscent of a rosebush and small, yellow fruit that looked much like a miniature apple or pear.  As I was trying to determine, with my rudimentary gardening knowledge, what exactly this plant was, our young friend decided to pick one of the fruit and bite it.  We stopped her before she swallowed anything, and there are very few fruit that will do any great damage in small quantities, but I thought it might be best if I could identify it as quickly as possible.  I could hear the owner of the house behind the back fence, so I leaned over and asked if she knew what species the plant was.  She had no idea that the little bush even grew fruit.  All she could tell me was that it had pretty flowers in the spring, which was rather less than helpful.

By the time we reached our young friend’s house, she was still showing no ill effects, and her parents informed us that she had eaten almost every berry in the area once already in any case, but I was still interested to know what plant we had discovered.  A brief internet search revealed what many other people probably would have known from the beginning, that it was a flowering quince, or a chaenomeles japonica, which is not only harmless but often used in jams and jellies.  The flowers, which range from white through pink to red, are quite attractive, and I have decided to plant a few in my garden.

What intrigues me though, is that none of the books or the sites that I have read, and I have read more than a few, ever listed flowering quince among the edible plants that could be grown in our climate.  Of course, none of them listed may apples or paw paw trees either, and I am curious about why these lists are so limited.  Many even omit common edible berries like saskatoon berries and elderberries.  Is this simply because they are not a viable commercial crop?  If so, how did the commercial viability of a food crop come to be equivalent with its edibility, where lists of edible plants include only the small fraction of edibles that are grown on a commercial scale?

These questions interest me because I wonder whether this is another way in which gardening can become a guerilla activity.  I have already mentioned my one friend who plants flower gardens in unattractive public spaces, and my other friend who rescues interesting local specimens from areas that are about to be developed.  Various others, including myelf to some extent, do what might be called guerilla gardening by growing only those plants that are local or those that are edible.  Many of us, though I have had some difficult decisions in this regard, have made a similarly guerilla decision to garden organically.  Might there also be a necessity for an intervention with respect to the kinds of edible plants that are grown, not just in terms of growing noncommercial varietals of commonly grown commercial crops, which is certainly necessary, but in terms of growing plants that are not viable commercially at all?  Is there a need for the home garden to develop these plants precisely because commercial gardens will not?  Is this a place where home gardens might perform a useful intervention?

I am not sure to what degree these questions are significant, but I am discovering that much of what commercial agriculture has passed over is good and useful and viable in the home garden, and I will make it a part of my gardening practise to include these plants whenever I find them.  It may not ever be very effective as activism, but, if nothing else, it will make my own cooking and my own table more varied and more interesting, and this is no small thing in my estimation.