Apples, Tulips, and Reservoirs

What an extraordinary book is The Botany of Desire (by Michael Pollan). I have been sitting on the porch reading it, off and on, these past few days. If you are a fan of books that tell you a great many new things about subjects you thought you already knew about, it is a book you, too, might be very pleased by. I’ve only read half of it so far, but even if the second half is an absolute dud, the first half will have been plenty worth it. It is divided into four parts; the first deals with the human desire for sweetness and looks into the nature of the apple. Part two ponders the human love of beauty, focusing on tulips. Part III elucidates intoxication and marijuana, and Part IV, control and the potato. As an apple grower and tulip grower, myself (though on a very small scale, of course), I thought I knew quite a lot about both. Wrong. I’ve never grown marijuana, but I grew up in Idaho, ‘The Land of Potatoes,’ as every license plate told me, so I think I’m genetically knowledgeable about potatoes, but we will see. The book is part science, part literature, part personal observation, part general wonder, and the best parts of all of them.

It is a summer kind of book, slow, leisurely, wondering, and wandering. And we are having a lovely summer right now, with three weeks or more of no rain, 70+ degree days, the slightest hint of clouds now and then for entertainment. I sit outdoors, reading, and feel the air barely moving about me, as if it were delicately marking the edges between me and itself: this is Judy, this is air.

The sun means that flowers are flourishing, including the mallows (picture above) that appeared in our garden this year, certainly an illustration of the botany of desire if I needed one. There are five of these volunteers (brought, I imagine, by the birds), and ranging from five to eight feet tall. Their seed output will presumably be prodigious and perhaps next year, the entire garden will be mallows (which look to be related to hollyhocks but are not: instead, they are related to hibiscus).

But all this lovely summer/no rain means that we are starting into drought status, the brown lawn areas confirming it. We are supposed to use water sprinklers only on even days or odd days, I can’t remember which, largely because I don’t own a water sprinkler. If things get watered, I must stand there and make it happen, hose in hand. So watering is rather minimal. The mallows seem indifferent.

It seems so ironic that each summer brings water shortages in a land with so much rain. But the rain is all year except now: July and August. And if you don’t have much time without rain, then it doesn’t pay to build big reservoirs. Reservoirs here are small relative to the population using them and it is always a crisis of sorts in the summer. If these rainless days start to extend to a longer period due to global warming, then the crisis will be a real one. But for now…more like a possible problem than a crisis.

However, the Sunshine Coast Regional District (sort of the equivalent of a county government in the U.S.) takes the water supply very seriously. A year or so ago, they realized that with the significant increase of population here on the coast, the water supply was going to be seriously inadequate. Building new reservoirs: very, very expensive. So, in an act of what seemed to be extraordinary thoughtfulness and political courage, the District instituted a program through which the District paid for two, new, very low-volume flush toilets for every house, and paid for the installation as well. It’s an expensive program, but the District reasons that the amount of money saved by NOT having to build a new reservoir will more than pay for it. An Australian company supplies the toilets at low cost in order to have real data about how much water savings their use provides. Because flushing is a household’s major water use, it makes sense to reduce use in ways that don’t depend upon voluntary efforts.

It is nice to have somebody actually thinking about and working to solve a problem. The District reps will probably not go into history like Johnny Appleseed distributing his apple seeds, or ever be featured in a book like The Botany of Desire, the subject being toilets and all, but I salute their courage and foresight, especially during these days of no rain.