Paradisal Plant Islands---La Rosa and Bloom

Almost everything we do as humans has its prototype in Nature, whether we want to admit it or not. And, prototypes are certainly relevant to our gardens. Of course, the mystics, poets, and artist-observers all know this. They saw reality as a continuum comprising the lowest and the highest levels of the cosmos.
   In our arid climate we need to effectively use every drop of water that we are given, and this is especially possible with the creation of Plant Islands in our gardens. A Plant Island exists in Nature as an ecological unit of flora and fauna. The best examples of Plant Islands are Pacific coral atolls and the hammocks of the Florida Everglades. We all know those Pacific atolls lushly ringed to the edge of the sea with clumps of breeze waving palm trees. And within these tree-ringed islands are plants and animals of a wide variety.
   The same ecological unit exists within the vast marshes of the Everglades, and they are called hammocks, not to be equated with those slings of summer sloughing-off. Hammocks are patches of land only a few inches higher than the surrounding marshes, appearing from a distance as green dots of trees, or, as islands; they are tear-drop shaped because of the flow of the Everglades, "the great river of grass," the seasonal waters that flow toward the south and ultimately reach the sea. I well remember walking a few miles out to those magical islands. Once I stepped inside the hammock,  I felt as though in another world; there was a sacred silence, a spell. My ears were deafened and had to adjust, and new sights and sounds emerged. The thick, black water moccasins were silent, basking in the mottled sun, emerging slowly into my sight and awareness.  Birds waited and sang. The hammock-island-home was their hidden, secret sanctuary: there were large mammals such as deer, (I saw only their foot prints) and smaller ones--possums and racoons; reptiles--snakes, frogs, lizards turtles, and gators only to mention a few; and there were a myriad of insects and crustaceans. The orchids clung to the trees and offered no challenge. Within a very small island area, plants and animal life created an ambiance richer than I have ever experienced in any zoo inclosure. It is this ambiance that zoo-keepers use as an archetype and try to create. Walking out of the hammock was like returning to another world, the world of bright sunlight and vast marshes of wind-driven grass and a kind of surface reality. Now it was time for the mile or two walk back to the roadway, hear the occasional  traffic and drive away in my car.
   So what does this all have to do with our own gardens? Well, in a "vast" area of  suburban lawn or dry substrate, we also can create Plant Islands. This is nothing new as Alan Bloom (1906-2005) created islands of perennials at his Dell Garden and nursery around his home called Bressingham in Norfolk, England. Bloom created 170 new varieties of perennials, and wrote over thirty books, his most known being "Island Beds," Faber and Faber, Ltd. His plant-island-concept fertilized the gardening world like a great swarm of honey bees.  Bloom popularized a garden feature that had been waiting to burgeon into full bloom. Just a brief addendum: Bloom quit school at fifteen, read books, and loved propagating plants. His sons still administer Dell Garden which thrives to this day.

   My own Plant Islands are ringed with mortared bricks, one or two courses high. Or, when cobbles were free for the picking, I mortared those together. The stones or bricks were shaped into circles or free forms. Gradually, over time, detritus, mulches, and added good earth have raised their interior levels two or three inches above the lawn (I am chopping it all out gradually), and now I have Plant Islands of plants. Each island contains plants of a similar kind, and I even have an island near the green house and in the back near the canyon for cacti and succulents.
   So, here it is. Plant Islands make an ecological (from the Greek, oikos, for home) environment that builds  up rich earth, retains water, and contains plants suited to each other--plant communities or neighborhoods. And, the butterflies, lizards, insects such as beautiful fig beetles, and birds find sanctuary. Oh, those beautiful birds, my favorite being the Black-Headed Grosbeak, and the many others, about fifteen varieties which include Orioles and Tanagers and Hummingbirds. I call them  my "constituents" because I love and take care them and they always vote for me, without any pressure or leaning from me of any kind! If Nature is respected with Work, Intelligence, and Sensitivity, there is no need to lean---it will take its own course, be itself, like the meander of a living river.
   I believe that our garden Plant Islands are the microcosmic mirrored images of the cosmic galaxies that Hubble observed night after night in the skies. In Nature everything is similar, but at a different level.

 

DO WHAT YOU LOVE---JOEL GREY at EIGHTY

Saturday, June 9th, 2012
I heard Joel Grey say on KUSC that tomorrow he will be Eighty! When asked where he derives the energy to perform six times a week now at 80 in a Broadway show, he said, "It's what I love to do. When I don't like it anymore, I'll quit." I feel the same way about a lot of things that I do every single day, especially tending my garden. Tending garden is both an art and a dharma for me. Tending is actually caring; what the existentialists like Heidegger call "Sorge"----tending; care for, concern for in the face of universal mortality. I find  a great joy in doing what I like to do, having the energy and intentionality to do it. Intentionality comes from the word "tend."  Grey is one of the most brilliant artists, and he has given us all so much. What Grey did in "Cabaret" is the same as what George Gershwin did in "Rhapsody in Blue", an uncompromising caring. What wonderful artists to be proud of, and Americans at that! We would be abject,  impoverished, without them or their work. Which leads me to the observation that each of us doesn't have to be a great anything (whatever that is). John Keats said it best---it is not important to be a great writer, but to be a Writer! Love the art, and do it with the best that one is. That is enough.
    The late Saturday afternoon air is ambiant with gently, cool breezes from the sea now. The Light is lovely but fading ever so slowly.There is that quality of afternoon light (composed of light and darkness in shadows, actually)  so glowing and rich, one could almost eat it. It makes one weep to see it on buildings and trees as James McLaughlin once said on his wonderful NPR music program, St Paul Sunday.

Gardening Grandparents, 2 June, 2012

Most people today have a very difficult time recalling who their grandparents were, not to mention their great-grandparents. It is all a sign of our disaffected times, or perhaps people exist in a cozy, mindless, comfortable vacuum. My gardening grandparents, like my artistic grandparents, have influenced me quite a bit in my gardening interests as well as in gardening in general. On the distaff side, the Carusos always had  gardens in Sicily and also in America. My grandfather Sam Caruso had a backyard nursery in Miami. He had a primitive, natural touch for propagating and growing plants---I think that our earliest primitive ancestors had the same touch. He is credited with being the first to grow and sell lots of Fig trees in South Florida. As a young boy, I helped him in his nursery, making cuttings, planting-up cans of plants, and best of all, going around to the housing sub-divisions on Saturday mornings with a truck load of plants to sell. Best of all, I loved sprouting the Coconuts that we sold later as young trees; there is an epiphany in seeing a coconut sprouting--such a powerful life force. We always returned home with our supply of plants sold out, and I can say that he loved propagating plants as much as selling them. He loved cutting a deal with people, "turning a buck" as he said, which I also like and do to this day. After all, he was a retired produce trucker for A and P; he had owned produce trucks and was in the midst of it all down at "the yards."
   My father's family, the La Rosa-Mazzas, always had gardens, as well. They dropped the Mazza when they came to America, but in some instances I retain Mazza which means mallet or hammer, the same Indo-European root as martel, as in Charles Martel. My grandfather had a Fig tree in Pittsburgh that he dug up every fall and wintered  in his cellar. Later, when the Fig had grown too large, he wrapped it in old sheets and rugs and covered in layers of straw. It looked like a real mummiform tree that any ancient Egyptian would respect. I suppose that is what the ancient Egyptians meant about resurrection, the afterlife. It always survived through to Spring, spread its light-green, delicate ourant leaves to the sky, and produced i Figi. He also grew rich, tasty, succulent tomatoes, not like the wretched "things" sold in the supermarkets today. Neither he, la famiglia, nor I would have  condescended to put such things in our mouths; kind of like eating canned Chef Boyardy spaghetti, something real Italians and any lovers of good food don't do. To this very day, my children Angela, Andrew, Marianna, and Charles La Rosa grow exquisite pomedori every summer, and that's why we don't have to eat "cardboard" tomatoes to this day. My son Joseph really knows how to cook with them, too. Mi piace la sua pasta! Also, my grandmother Lucia La Rosa once gave me a big pocketful of Four O'Clock (Mirabilis jalapa) seeds from her garden which she called "Fourclocksa." That got me started on my great love of germinating seeds as I've written about in a previous numerous times---writing, words, and seeds.
   Well, the upshot of all this is that I learned the essential gardening skill from my grandparents. It is all about Observation; watching what a plant or any other living creature does on a day-to-day, even on an hourly basis, when they are growing, especially when they are ill or suffering. Plants are wonderful, non-demanding living beings. Observation and Focus add up to Attentiveness, or LOVE. Attentiveness is love. You do not give much Attention to a person who you think you do not Love. That is why I have no favorite plant. My grandparents observed and knew what plants were doing as much as Goethe did in his essays and in his  perfect little book The Life of Plants, proving that it is not what you think you know, (that gets in the way) but instead, how well you you Watch with sacred calm,  with a kind of "empty mind," to quote Krishnamurti. The opposite of course is being "full of oneself," what the English aptly call being a Nosey Parker in "BBC Gardening."
   Well, I could go on to my Artistic Grandparents (some ancient, of the past, contemporary, some of blood) which also have taught me Care, Focus, and Love, but that will be a Gardening-Art Blog of another sort, and for another day.