Even though our intense manipulation of the land saddens me in so many ways (I know the irony of that statement as a gardener), I'm forever fascinated by the beauty of our human machinations on the Earth from above.
I got lost in Google Maps the other day, thinking about water and desert ecosystems...
It's always struck me that the garden, or landscape in general, is anathema to our current quick culture pop deluxe. I grew up with the TV and fast food, and these and other things breed a need for instant gratification. Don't like it? Flip the channel. Gardening and growing takes time, sometimes a lot of time. You can plant a tree now and not see it come to full fruition for 30-50 years. To think in these long terms--growing seasons and years--is like working on an oil painting that will never dry.
So, our recent trip to Glacier National Park heightened this feeling even more. In the park, I became keenly aware (over five days time) how things were shaped in the landscape over millions of years. Rocks, soils, plants and animals all evolving together--changing together--over the major and minor shifts in climate .
One of the coolest things about learning more about native plants, both here in Texas and in Wisconsin, is being able to recognize those plants and their relatives across the American landscape. In Glacier, I recognized species (or relatives) of many--baneberry, snowberry, geranium, paintbrush, lupines, hawthorn, cottonwood, aspen, rue, anemone, aster... Many more plants than that were totally new to me.
It was an exciting and awe-inspiring place, but I don't want to go on and on about it. Here's a slide show (an experiment) of just a few of the plants, rock formations and bugs seen at Glacier. (By the way, we did also see grizzly and black bears, moose, marmots, big horn sheep, mountain goats...a true American safari!)
One of the tough lessons I'm learning this Spring, my first in the house and with the garden, is that we have some serious clay soil. Clay, clay, clay. This is old blackland prairie, folks, which is characterized by clay soil dense enough to create large shallow pools of water with just about any rain. Many of the first settlers noticed the same when they first arrived to Texas, before the blackland was tilled and turned into farms and home plots. So, it's not just compaction from construction. (But that doesn't help either). Matt White talks about the character of this area now and then in his book Prairie Time: A Blackland Portrait.
So, there was the desperate move of the desert willow from front to back (the poor West Texas native was drowning after all this rain). My two shrubs of another western species, cenizo, are just now on their last legs, too. I think the clay is simply too tough for their little roots.
That'll learn me. So, the lesson here is: a) plant things adapted for this soil (a.k.a, native blackland species), and/or b) amend the soil like a mofo with Natural Gardener Revitalizer compost BEFORE doing anything else. I get the feeling that I'm going to have some hot days this summer, working a big pile of this compost into my beds.
