by Jill Severn | May 12, 2016
Years ago, when I lived on Bainbridge Island, an elderly neighbor sold his five acres of forest on an idyllic inlet to a couple from California. They clear cut it.
Although Bainbridge had been logged within decades of the first white settlers’ arrival, that initial logging had been selective. So the five acres included majestic old fir, hemlock and cedar trees, huge big leaf maples, alder, cascara, willow, hazel, and native dogwoods. Beneath the canopy were wild trillium and honeysuckle, sword ferns, elderberries, salmon berries, and oso berries. Lacy deciduous huckleberry bushes crowned the enormous, rotting old growth tree stumps left by early loggers.
Within weeks, it was all utterly destroyed by giant bulldozers.
I was complicit in this destruction, since the firewood from that debacle warmed my little house down the road for several years.
Twenty-five years later, I returned to the Island for its annual garden tour, and that same five acres was one of the showplace gardens. And it was truly a showplace – a McMansion surrounded by paved paths, thriving flower gardens and well-chosen shrubbery, a rock-lined stream, and a large boathouse, suitable for entertaining corporate clients.
I’ve carried the sadness about that garden – and a truth about gardening it revealed to me – for many years now. So last week, when I read a news story about a local garden show, I was mortified but not surprised to read a quote from one of the chosen gardeners who described her place as having been “a blank slate” before she and her husband built a house and started planting flowers.
I know that every neighborhood – from the urban core to outermost exurbia – was once wild, free land, managed by the light hands of First Nations citizens who never felt the need to scrape away native vegetation for the sake of Shasta daisies or daylilies. So it’s silly to disapprove of people wresting gardens out of the wilderness when my own neighborhood has the same history.
But there’s another truth about gardening that’s been troubling me as well: it’s become just another form of consumption. In fact, Americans spent $36.1 billion on their gardens in 2015.
On my morning walk, I pass fields of nursery crops – tidy pyramidal shrubs, rows of tiny trees, and listen to the Spanish language chat of the field workers. The workers plough, spray, pot, and fertilize. On the far side of the fields are enormous greenhouses, and a small fleet of trucks to haul these living products to nurseries. I often wonder what percentage of these crops will survive in the city yards and newly built suburbia for which they are destined. And I wonder how much lettuce, corn, or broccoli rides in another fleet of trucks, from California and beyond, because this land has been turned from agriculture to horticulture.
Heaven knows I’ve bought my share of perennial plants at the nursery, and geraniums at the grocery store. I’ve tossed out those black plastic pots that nurseries refuse to recycle.
And the two semi-dwarf crabapple trees in front of my house must once have grown in a field just like the one I pass. Once again, I am complicit.
But the longer I garden, the more my regret and misgivings grow. I’ve been thinking about what my neighborhood would look like if no one gardened or mowed. What if we just cleared paths from the road to our houses, and left the rest to go wild? It’s a lovely but ludicrous idea that I’m quite sure my neighbors would abhor.
And I do love my flowers and shrubs, and my little vegetable garden. And more than that, I love sinking a shovel in the earth, watching seedlings sprout and grow, and thinking about which combinations of colors, leaf textures and plant personalities should be grouped together in my shady back yard.
So I can’t say I’m gardening any less, but over time, I’ve come to garden differently. I value the plants swapped with friends rather than bought at a nursery. I grow more from seed. I spend less.
But I still grieve the loss of that five acres of native woods, and all the other five acres of native woods that have been sacrificed for the gardens we can’t seem to live without.
by Jill Severn | Apr 8, 2016
By Jill Severn —
Today a friend asked a good question: At what age do we stop thinking dandelions are wonderful? Whatever it is, it’s a very sad occasion.
Who among us doesn’t remember the childhood discovery of the roundest, yellowest, gladdest flower in the world? And who could forget blowing those perfect spheres of dandelion seeds into the air? This was bliss.
But a lot of today’s adults’ minds were warped, early in life, by parents who paid them a penny apiece to pull dandelions, or by parents who yelled at them for blowing dandelion seeds all over the place. Children who had been thrilled to the toes by dandelions in their earliest years were, by the time they turned 10, deceived into betraying their own best aesthetic judgment. Our innocent little minds were poisoned with anti-dandelion prejudice, and the result is a multi-billion dollar industry in death-to-dandelions chemicals.
Early teaching that there are “good” plants (like rhododendrons in beauty bark) and “bad” plants (like those rogue dandelions who thumb their noses at that beauty bark) inhibits people’s ability to grasp the basic facts and concepts of botany. This, in turn, makes for a lot of lousy, linear, uptight gardeners.
More important, to lose the love of dandelions is to lose the capacity for a fully spontaneous and open relationship with nature. It is to become a fashion victim; a person whose tastes are shaped by the dictates of others rather than what truly suits you.
We could truly make the world a better place by simply not teaching the next generation to scorn dandelions. If children’s natural instincts about plants were left to take their own course, what would our gardens look like? And what would our cities and suburbs become? I can only think that they would be better – untidier , perhaps, but freer, more varied, and with more surprises and eccentricities on every block. And I’m quite sure there would be a lot less beauty bark and a lot fewer death-dealing chemicals.
Once long ago, I actually saw dandelions seeds advertised in a garden catalogue. They were being sold to vegetable gardeners as a highly desirable salad green. I wish now that I’d bought some, just to bolster their value.
But every year, there’s another chance to rectify our relationship with this extraordinary flower, and this is it – the golden moment when dandelions are at their irresistible best. To overcome the alienation of affection between dandelions and adults, go for a walk and find the tallest dandelion within a block of your house. In the first week in May, there’s a good chance it will be two feet tall or more. When you find the very biggest one, please pick the flowers that have gone to seed, and blow them all over the place.
by Jill Severn | Apr 4, 2016
John James Audubon, born to French parents, emigrated to the United States in the 1800s and became North America’s foremost ornithologist, naturalist and chronicler of birds. His paintings and his life inspired the Audubon Society, dedicated to protecting waterbird populations. Here are some samples of his paintings.
Here’s part of an editorial tribute to Audubon in today’s Olympian newspaper, written by Jill Severn.
“Audubon’s contribution to our appreciation of birds and the natural world they inhabit is incalculable. But there are also vital lessons from his life history. Today, he is a hero, lionized for his pioneering role as an artist, ornithologist, and writer. But if he were to try to do today what he did as an 18-year-old – that is, to flee from war and immigrate to this country with a fake passport – he would be deported instantly. Had this country done then what we are doing now, Audubon might well have died young under Napoleon’s command, without ever painting a single bird.
“So today, as we celebrate Audubon day and watch the absolute freedom of birds in flight, we might consider foregoing the labels that confine people – draft-dodger, illegal alien, Muslim, and others not fit for print. And instead of worrying so much about the risk of letting people in, we might pause to wonder what we are losing by keeping people out.”
You can read the entire editorial here: http://bit.ly/1MWylvS
by Jill Severn | Mar 13, 2016
By Jill Severn —
My neighbor’s flowering cherry tree had a pink blossom blizzard this morning. It didn’t take much wind to set it off; the tree has been blooming its heart out for about a week, and all those petals were ready to let go and fly through the air. It’s a good sized tree, and I am quite sure we got into the billions of airborne petals swirling and dancing their way to earth.
Now there are pink drifts in his driveway, along the street, and in the grass. The wind has died down, and the tree-weather has calmed to occasional brief showers.
Still, it looks every bit as fluffy and pink as it did before, so I have more to look forward to as I sit at my dining room table, sipping coffee and gazing out the window.
