New Learning

Despite advanced age, there is yet much to learn about one’s self and one’s life. For example, I take it as a given that gardening is essentially a solitary activity. When I first began gardening, during WWII in our Victory Garden, my father would assign each of his three (then) children his/her own individual plant areas to tend to. Mostly we were responsible for weeding, but occasionally we would be required to do the dreaded ‘thinning’ (how hard is it, 65 years later even, to pull up something that has grown solely at one’s request and with one’s tending?), and eventually the glorious harvesting. But weeding was probably 80% of the time commitment.

I imagine he did this to keep us away from one another and prevent our constant bickering. But, when you are a kid, you don’t really realize how irritating kids' bickering is, of course. So I thought he was just teaching me the nature of gardening, if I thought anything at all.

In the decades since then, I have almost always been a solitary gardener. There were a few years when my older daughter, a life-long, devoted gardener could have shared the experience with me, but I was busy with other things and was just happy to turn over gardening, for the most part, to her. So she mastered the art of solitary gardening. My son didn’t take to gardening much until he was an adult and many states away from me, and my younger daughter never much took to gardening. And the husbands…not gardening types.

So how surprised was I yesterday to find that gardening is NOT a solitary activity? The Garden Club requested residents’ help in digging out blackberries and horsetail from the beautiful main street ‘beds’ that they have built and planted. They are not exactly beds; more like the berms in roads as they are raised up from the dirt, but not surrounded by anything that would make them raised beds other than the piled up dirt and mulch itself. They are filled right now with wilting daffodil leaves, California poppies, the remains of croci leaves, a smattering of cosmos seedlings, and an ample supply of the offending invaders.

There are about 20 of these planted berms, each maybe 6-feet long, and I expected we would each be assigned to one of them and to do our work and leave. When we got there, there wasn’t anybody to assign our work to us, so Ed started in on one and I started in on the one next to him. A few minutes later, other people arrived and one of them set to work with him and one set to work with me.

I suspected that telling the newcomer to go work in his own berm wasn’t the way to work in the Garden Club’s ‘community flower beds,’ but it is surely what I felt like doing. He gave me some instructions on the best way to proceed (Did I ask for any instructions about how to weed a flower bed?), whacked away for awhile with a large shovel (while I used a narrow trowel and a dandelion digger in order to provide the least disturbance to the adjoining plants), and then moved on to a berm with a larger group of social gardeners. I finished off the berm, worked on a couple of others alone, and went home when it was all pretty much finished.

So, you can learn several things in a day: Gardening can be a social activity, and I am even more of a hermit than I thought. Also, horsetail like blackberry appears to be a tenacious plant. I suspect we'll be cleaning it out for several years at a minimum. And maybe I'll learn to talk while gardening.

Honesty

I’m generally supportive of the border agents' intolerance toward bringing rooted plants back and forth over the border.  I think of all that bind weed and all that herbe robert in my garden and I truly would not want anyone to be accidentally taking it up to British Columbia.  The trouble, though, is that the plants have their own route, their own ideas about where to grow.  I already have both bindweed and herbe robert up in my B.C. gardens, although not anywhere to the extent that they are in the Point Roberts garden, and I am not the agent of transmission.  Birds, I think.  In fact, the major bindweed infestation in my Canadian garden seems to be seriously slowing down after the neighbors very judiciously exercised their Round-Up option.  And I can keep the herbe in check with hand weeding every so often.

The Point Roberts Garden Club is finding its own invasion problems in the Tyee Drive flowerbeds that its members have so generously planted for all our visual delectation, but with horsetail, which I am pretty sure is a native, rather than a noxious weed.  We have it around in both properties, but it mostly grows in the grassy areas rather than in the planted ones so I have a live and let live relationship with it.  It is a plant that, I am told, dates back to the dinosaurean age, and it certainly looks like it. “[It is] the only living representative of the very ancient and primitive class Sphenopsida, tree-sized members of which were prominent in the land vegetation of the Carboniferous era (353-300 million years ago." It is a very elemental kind of plant, but it is infesting their flower beds and they have called for the community to come out and help them get rid of it next Tuesday.  I’m interested in joining them if only to find how you get rid of it.  In my experience, it just breaks off at the soil line, its dinosaur brain planning well for its future growth.

Yet another plant that is growing all over my yard this year is the lunaria plant.  I am seriously hoping that it is not invasive because I planted it myself with full intention.  A few years ago, there were two volunteer lunaria plants and I saved the seeds and planted them and soon there were very many lunaria plants.  I remember them from childhood.  They were a feature of cottage gardens and because of their strange seed pods and their in some ways even stranger name, they caught your attention.  The Latin name is lunaria (from luna, the moon), but I knew them as ‘silver dollar plants.’  They also go by the name ‘honesty’ and ‘money plants,’ and Wikipedia tells me they are known in Holland and Denmark as ‘Judas’ Coins’ and somebody else says they are also called ‘moonwort’  (‘wort’ means ‘plant’ or ‘herb).  How can a plant be named both ‘honesty’ and ‘Judas’s coins’?  

They bloom early in the spring of their second year with beautiful red violet flowers on stalks and then within about 6 weeks, they begin to form the ‘silver dollars’, many of them on a stalk, and each of which holds several seeds.  The dried pod comes in the early fall and lasts everlastingly; a big vase of them is in my kitchen window, shining silver in the sun.  And if this plant turns into a problem plant, I’m going to be seriously disappointed.