Trying Too Hard

Every climate has its limits and its strong points with respect to gardening. I’ve lived in a lot of places and had to learn in each place an entirely new set of both. In Idaho, you have impossibly dense clay soil, intense but brief summer sun, and no rain ever. In California, you have all the sun in the world, no rain and easy, reasonably rich soil. In Washington, it’s thin and sandy soil, endless rain, and no sun. You want to work with those strong points and steer away from the limiting factors, rather than try to fight them. At least that seems like what you’d want to do.

Nevertheless, I have noticed that there is a propensity for gardeners not to follow that rule. For example, in Los Angeles, somebody was always trying to grow midwestern lilacs which need winter freezing to bloom in the spring. They would try to get around that severe limitation by watering the bushes with ice water during the winter. Here on the U.S.-Canadian border, the town of Tsawwassen, which is right on the other side of the border from Point Roberts, I find the local government’s landscaping division has decided that what Tsawwassen really needs is palm trees, despite the fact that they get snow and fierce winter winds and not much in the way of summer heat. There is an entire row of very short palm trees parading down the main street and they are a sorry sight in the winter when the winds have just torn their fronds to tatters. Similarly, a little farther north toward Vancouver proper, in a part of town largely housing immigrants from India, you will see every so often a house that is sheltering banana trees. Buy bananas, people!

So much work to get those things to happen and the results are never exactly what you had hoped for or, at best, are a dimmed reminder of what one envisions. Having said all that, I found myself this spring planting about fifty seeds of red Mexican sunflowers sent to me by mail by my daughter who lives in New Mexico and is the real gardener in our family. Sending me those seeds suggested a confidence in my gardening abilities that seemed largely misplaced. You can grow sunflowers here in Point Roberts if you put them in a sunny place. I have precious little sun because our land is mostly heavy in tall evergreens and maples, but nevertheless there are places that are sunnier than others. On the other hand, these are Mexican sunflowers and there is nothing about this climate or this soil that is reminiscent of Mexico.

However, I put the seeds in the faux-greenhouse I keep, early in the spring—maybe March--to give them plenty of time, and the seeds took weeks to germinate. Most of them just quit at that point. But the remaining maybe ten seedlings I nursed up for awhile and then moved them over to pots. I needed to put them in big pots so that somebody else would water them when I wasn’t here. They did grow, but ever so slowly, and by late August they had the beginnings of buds. And now, the flower itself.

I suspect it is a very dim reminder of the actual Mexican red flower as it manifests itself in its homeland. The tallest of the plants barely got to four feet, but most reached only two feet. The flowers are barely 2 inches across. They’re pretty in a delicate, unsunflower-like way: these plants are more like bonsai Mexican red sunflowers. Well, good try, guys! [Correction: after I posted this, I actually measured the flowers and they are two inches, not four inches as I originally wrote.]

Why do we do this? Why not follow the advice in paragraph one, above? For some, I think it’s the challenge; for some, it’s a yearning for something they had someplace else; for some, it may be an appreciation of a kind of aesthetic contrast. For me, it was more a package of free seeds. But it was an awful lot of tending to do for the results. I'm sure there's an aphorism that would fit this situation: maybe something about trying to get a camel through the eye of a needle?