Community Blooms

Point Roberts has a high proportion of retirees, and what are you supposed to do when you retire? Garden. So there’s a lot of gardening that goes on here. Gardening, of course, involves border problems. When we first moved here, you could bring annuals but not perennials across the border with no questions asked. That was good, because for the most part the border people (who are, of course, not retired) don’t know the difference between an annual and a perennial or didn’t care to discuss it anyway.

But time passed and they decided that horticultural terrorists were coming in on those annual roots, in that annual dirt, so they presented us with a new dictum saying that plants with roots can’t come across the border but plants without roots (i.e., cut flowers), can. You can always buy stuff at a Canadian nursery and pay extra to get a certificate of hygiene to accompany your rooted plant, but every plant must have its own certificate and every certificate comes at a price unless you are buying a lot of rooted plants at once, in which case a nearby Canadian plant nursery will offer you a deal on all the certificates.

In principle, you could bring your plants from the rest of Washington straight through if you didn’t get out of your car in Canada, but that is a principle I don’t care to test while travelling with plants in any quantity or with my Nexus card. So, I’m not much for importing plants from anywhere. Fortunately, we do have a small nursery here on the Point to serve the needs of the retired gardeners. And that’s a good thing.

The gardeners have also gotten themselves together into a garden club and each year they put on a garden tour and tea which is a fine summer event. But last year, they went beyond that, moving out from their own particular gardens and onto the easements of the main road. Working with the County, they started with a pair of raised areas on the corner of Tyee and Benson, which areas were planted with fancy grasses and accoutered with driftwood and rock. Then last October, they expanded all the way down the road to the International Market, on both sides of Tyee with multiple raised beds—more appropriately called dirt berms, I think—which held daffodil bulbs and then daffodils this past spring. It was a splendid show (‘ten thousand saw I at a glance, tossing their heads in sprightly dance’). There must be 12 or more of these berms on each side of the street, several dozen daffodils in each for our visual pleasure. Then came summer and the daffs went away, only to be replaced by billows of California poppies. And now for the early fall, we have towering pink cosmos. It’s a great sight and a much appreciated contribution to our lives.

Unfortunately, the corner with the fancy grasses is currently over-stocked with political signs. I’m all for free speech and all that, but those signs do seem something of an aesthetic blight in our public garden. Or maybe I’ve just been too long at the election fair.