Another Day in the Country
Who will survive?
© Another Day in the Country
Once upon a time, when Napa Valley still was full of orchards and pasture land, my husband — who started out studying architecture in college — began fiddling with a design for a house.
We managed to buy from a co-worker half of a three-acre plot— land that was up on one of those high hills surrounding the valley.
The house we planned was small, modern, and efficiently designed but a lot of work. We were desperate to find a place to live.
Building that house was probably one of the smartest things we did during our 30-year marriage.
The next smartest was having kids. My daughter’s family still lives in that house.
Whenever I go back to California to visit, I roost in a bedroom that once housed my oldest child.
We called our little house the Wickwam. It sat in a clearing that we created on a little hill in the middle of a forest.
When we built the house, we felt isolated — even though a paved street ran past the front of the tiny acreage. Now, there are cultivated acres and houses all over Howell Mountain.
When I go back to visit my family, I see the bamboo that I planted outside that bedroom window 50-plus years ago.
Instead of curtains or blinds in this little room that looked out into the woods I decided there would be nature’s curtain — a patch of bamboo. I loved the idea. To this day, it’s a favorite view of mine.
In front of the window that is now my grandson’s room I planted rhododendron and ferns. They still bloom every spring, so eager they have to be cut back.
Sometimes — well, let’s be truthful, always — I worry about those plants that I put into the ground and nurtured for so many years.
Would they die from neglect because everyone was too busy to tend to them or too stingy with water or just didn’t even notice them?
But I discovered during my last quarter century in Kansas that those plants I planted back in California are survivors.
The ferns, the African daisy, the oleander, the bamboo, the iris, the ivy and the rosemary plants are still there — sometimes a little worse for the wear, but keeping on keeping on!
And then it hit me: These plants, which have been making it without a lot of care, will outlive me.
I like that idea. I don’t have to worry about them. They’re managing to take care of themselves. Long after I’m gone or even after my family’s tenancy on the land, in the house we built, the ferns will sprout new fronds, the bamboo will send up new shoots, and the rosemary will reveal its scent as you brush on by.
One day, driving down K-4, I saw irises blooming in a ditch. Who knows how they got there. A flood of anything hammered at their roots. They were yanked out and thrown in a heap, neglected.
Yet, in a year or two, they found a scrabble hold on a little dirt and summoned up courage to send out shoots of hopefulness, tendrils of tenderness and blossomed, showing off their colorful personality.
Such intricate marvels of nature’s artistry should be treasured in the Louvre, yet here they stand in a ditch in Kansas.
Have you noticed? It may not have been what a Clara, Erna, Martha, or Frieda intended when she first planted those iris rhizomes in Kansas soil, but here they still stand, doing their bit, living their life.
This is why I’m a gardener. This is why I plant trees. They’re survivors. Many of them have lifespans much longer than the humans who mow around them.
Perhaps it is instinctual in our family, but we are tree planters.
One of the first things my Grandpa Schubert did when he bought a piece of prairie in Kansas well over 100 years ago was to plant trees.
He called it a wind break, and some of those trees survive, no longer bearing fruit but still sheltering wildlife.
I was reading an article in The New Yorker about the importance of trees in our environment — especially as the climate gets warmer.
You all know the difference a tree makes. You can feel it on any hot day in the summer when you move into the shade and the temperature drops.
Trees are cooling the weather every day. They also are cleaning the air that we breathe, and they are beautiful.
Fall is coming. It’s a good time to plant trees. Why not seal your legacy, improve your environment, and plant a tree?
When we built a home for our mother, who’d come back to her hometown to live out her life, she made a list of the types of trees she wanted around the house.
We planted a bald cypress, magnolia, apple trees and a couple of cherry trees. We added liquid amber, a tulip tree, Japanese maple, spruce and even a cottonwood that came up in the garden by the pond the year her great-grandson was born.
We transplanted that cottonwood to the edge of our property. It now towers above all the other trees.
Mom didn’t live here long enough to welcome her only great-grandchild, but she knew he was coming.
A few of those trees we ambitiously planted in Kansas soil in 2002 didn’t thrive, but most of them did. And they’re still doing their thing — on another day in the country.