What Water Does

            We live in a water garden. Water falls from the sky, it runs in rivulets and streams through the low places, it settles in hollows as pools or ponds.  The land we cultivate is really an island.  Giving water its rightful place in our garden design can manifest in many ways.  The way we contour the land we cultivate mirrors the work that water has done to the larger landscape.  Imbuing our landscape with the markings of water: ravines, worn boulders, and wetlands brings our garden into harmony with what already exists on a geological scale.  If we desire it to, it breaks down the barrier between us and the forces of nature, making our garden seem less of a fortress and more of an Eden.

            Every garden site is challenged with conditions that are favorable to some plants and unfavorable to others.  The abundance or scarcity of water is often the most challenging of these conditions.  Fighting our water-reality can exhaust our enthusiasm as well as our budget.  If we turn to Nature for advice, we see that each environment, wet or dry, offers possibilities that, if collaborated with, will produce a beautiful landscape.

            Because garden design is inherently a matter of human creativity exerting itself on Nature (or is it the other way around?), we do get to make choices that manipulate the plot of land we are given to cultivate.  Each person’s efforts towards their dream garden may include an impossible task within the conditions of their site. Here is where brilliant collaborations with Nature are born.

A Bit of Green

A garden can live wherever a plant can grow. When we scan our surroundings for a place to begin, we look for soil. All the soil on earth is either ground up rock or decomposed plant matter. One of my favorite small ecosystems is the top surface of giant boulders. There is a cliff nearby in my town. Below the cliff face lie hundreds of car-size granite boulders wedged together in a massive jumble of caves and tilted tables. Oaks and maples have wedged themselves between the tumble of fallen rock and over time, rock-cap ferns have grown in the leaf-made humus and now carpet the upper surfaces of these giant rocks. In this one hillside, I can look up hundreds of feet to the sheer wall of rock and from there I can scan the slope to my feet on the ferns. It is the whole story of soil.
On the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, all the soil has been made by the inhabitants. Over ten centuries, islanders have hauled baskets of seaweed and barrows of sand until the walled fields could support their grazing stock and their intensive vegetable gardens. Perhaps it all began with a fisherman wishing for a bit of green to go with his fish dinner.
This garden has been planted on the fireboat dock below the Oakland Bay Bridge in San Francisco.

Existential Bah Humbug

Open ground in nature is ruled by an observable and shifting hierarchy.   If you go into the woods the tall trees dominate the soil.   Smaller trees and shrubs either thrive in the under-storey or hang on until a big tree falls and a piece of sky becomes available.  In the redwood forests of coastal northern California, Douglas fir seeds sprout on the fallen trunks of redwood giants where one piece of sky has opened.  You may see a perfectly straight line of mature Douglas firs and know where an ancient redwood fell hundreds of years ago.  Walking through a redwood forest one does not ask the silly existential question about the tree falling when no one is there to hear it.  The impact of a fallen tree reaches from the original crack and boom to the vibrant structure of today’s forest.

Beneath the shrubs are the woodland perennials that we know as wildflowers and vines.  In many instances they need the cover of trees. 

In meadows and mountainsides, where trees could not or have not seeded in, every inch of ground that can provide a foothold is taken.   Hayfields that go unmown will shrink as the forests on their edge seed into the open ground.  When human or natural forces strip the soil from the underlying rock, centuries will go by before the land will return to its old vitality.

Opportunity

The first year after a seed sprouts may bring drought, predation, flood, uprooting, fire, lawnmowers, herbicides, and the gloved hand of humans.  With each passing year, it is a requirement that some seedlings fail.  Each species has its required space.  In the Mojave Desert, creosote bushes secrete a substance that inhibits any other creosote bush from growing within a precise perimeter.  This results in both sufficient water for each bush to mature and make seeds and it also produces an eerie regularity to the landscape.

In contrast, “weed” trees like poplars grow neck in neck.  It may take twenty years for the strongest trees to muscle out the weaklings.  In the meantime, fire, browsing and other hazards will make the abundance of seedlings seem wise.  A fifty-year-old poplar is rare.

Each plant’s life is determined by an interwoven set of circumstances.  There is no, “in general”, when it comes to seed to seedling and seedling to mature plant ratio. All plants are genetically programmed to produce offspring.  That one plant needs three weeks to make seed while another needs twenty years is often reflected in their structural character.  We can get to know what to expect from a given species if we know it as an individual.  Take an oak for instance.  Place a red oak from Maine next to a canyon oak from California and the difference will be startling.  Look at a red oak atop a ledge in Crawford Notch and one in the deep glacial till of coastal Maine and except for bud and leaf the contrast will be great.  If you live near an oak, or any other large old tree, you will come to know it as more than its species name.  If you are fortunate to watch a tree grow old, it will grow into you.  In this way, there will be no other tree like it.  This is one of the opportunities of the gardener.

We say that someone who lives where their family has lived for many generations has deep roots; someone who wanders has shallow roots.  The origin of these metaphors is in the plants around us. Plant a deep-rooted tree such as an oak or maple, and you make a commitment to the future, an immovable object, a sentinel.   When I plant a deep-rooted tree, I see the future giant in the sapling.  Planting thyme, sedums, dianthus is done lightly, experimentally. Hens and chicks can be moved almost daily; they are the doodles of the cultivated plant world. 

Survival

Every plant needs a few basic elements: light, water, and food.  When we walk in natural places we see plants adapting to the balance of those elements that the land and weather provide.  A spruce growing in the deep bottomland of a river valley grows tall and broad.  Its genetic cousin, sprouted in a crevice on a mountainside is dwarfed and shaped by hardships.  A short walk anywhere will reveal hundreds of species living in apparent harmony.  Each plant sprouted in a moment of optimum light, warmth, and moisture.  Often, that plant represents a minute portion of the seeds offered by the parent plant in that particular year.

In any given year, only a fraction of a plant’s seeds sprout but by shear volume the parent plant still produces hundreds to thousands of seedlings.  It is the seedling that has the hardest time surviving.

The Primary Source

Nature is our primary source for knowing plants.  All garden plants, from potted geraniums to clipped yews, originated in the wild.  From a design perspective, the names are not important.  Like streets and highways, you’ll know them when you need them.  In nature, a plant grows where it can.

Sometimes, when I walk in the wild, I notice a plant or community of plants that I never see in cultivated gardens.  A viburnum called “Hobblebush” grows on a steep hillside above one of my favorite streams.  It is a sinuous shrub with broad spade-like leaves.  The impression of hundreds of them growing waist-high up the rocky hill is lyrical.  They seem to be the shape-equivalent of the flowing water.  Their upturned leaves harvest the scattered light that falls through the maple and beech canopy. 

I notice them because I am enchanted by them.  I’ll remember them.  Now, why do they grow there in such abundance?  Simply put, it is because the conditions are just right for them.  Perhaps it is because the stream-side hill has not been logged.  Or the springs that seep out of the mountain provide the constant moisture they need.  Or I can go to my wildflower guide and discover what botanists say about their habits.  Ultimately, they remain in my mind as living forms associated with that beautiful stream.  The association with the forest and stream broadens my vocabulary of form and habit.  Although I may never transplant one of them into a cultivated stream-side garden, I have impressed my memory with one way in which hillside harmony can be created.

Organizing Force

How often do we come upon a natural place and say that it is like a garden.  We recognize some organizing force that has thinned the trees, placed the stones, and brings focus to the scattering of wildflowers.  Farther along, on a stone ledge we come upon a simpler garden.  A fissure in the rock contains sky-blue flowers all in a line.  From somewhere below, water strikes high notes as it falls. 

If all natural places were equal to our senses, we would have no guide when we set about making a garden for ourselves.  Nature offers us models of balance and harmony as well as ones of change and chaos.  Natural gardens teach us about natural harmony and give us clues about the harmony that we seek for ourselves.  Our attraction to similar settings is a good first step in developing a garden vocabulary.  However the fluency that will create an eloquent garden requires that we reach beyond our preferences.  Noticing the multitude of garden forms that nature sets before us is one of the pleasures of human existence.