The Power of Patience

This past week was rough. It started out fine enough with a wonderful Valentine dinner with my man and delightful day with my daughter, but the next day, all the hearts and warm fuzzies were clouded over with the dark dread of debt depression. My car got towed.

If you drive in San Francisco and you haven’t had your car towed, consider yourself lucky. There really is nothing worse than getting ready to leave the house for an anticipated destination, then walking to where you parked the car two days before, only to find that your car is no longer there. Add a fussy baby to this equation and you can very easily imagine what hell must be like. Of course, my day of purgatory did not end there.

To try and save you from too many horrid details, I will offer you a brief summary. First, I had to break the bad news to the bread winner of the house knowing that we were already low on financial funds. He did not take it well. Feeling beyond guilty, I offered to go and find the car. I tried to not seem too distraught on account that my daughter would be joining me for the bus ride to the tow lot in the Tenderloin. I told her with tears in my eyes that we were going on a ‘fun adventure’. The bus ride was an adventure, all right. Fun, no. The bus we were on ended up getting in an accident and although my daughter and I were fine physically, I was mentally aghast when I was told to leave the bus and wait twenty minutes for the next one to arrive. Twenty minutes with an irritable toddler in the Tenderloin is something I don’t even want you to imagine. After getting on the expectant second bus, I’m embarrassed to admit that I missed the stop I was supposed to get off at. Although I was only three blocks away from my final destination, toting a toddler that distance without a stroller is a true test of tenacity. We finally got to the towing facility and I faced the fact that my fate of the day was not going to get any easier. I’m not sure how long I waited for my exuberant transaction to transpire, but I will tell you that I was glad I spent the extensive time in a sequestered cell of a room because my little one couldn’t escape easily. Although our car was finally freed from the facility and both my daughter and I made it home before bedtime, the rest of the week has been dampened by this dreadful predicament of debt.

The reason I am letting you in on the details of my dramatic day/week is not because I want your sympathy, but because I find it funny that I was planning on writing about patience for a while now and it has been patience that has kept me sane during the past week. It’s quite curious how coincidental the world works, isn’t it? Because my patience has paid off and I ended my week on a positive note by planting the perennial vegetables I purchased before my week of woe, I guess I can let you know that the original title for this post was going to be: The Patience of Planting Perennial Vegetables.

Although I have been gardening, quite honestly, for as long as I can remember, I have never planted a perennial vegetable before. What makes a vegetable perennial is that unlike its more common brother, the annual vegetable, the perennial vegetable does not die after harvesting the fruit. The perennial vegetable, you could say, is a year-round responsibility. Although this permanent garden fixture sounds great at first, there is one big downside to the perennial vegetable: It usually takes two to three years before you can harvest any fruit! So, like my terrible towing experience, patience is the key when it comes to growing this slow-to-mature plant.  

For years now, I have been dreaming of planting one particular perennial vegetable: asparagus. But every time I thought of the timely investment I had to put into this plant, I quickly changed my mind about starting my own bed of these springtime shoots. I guess it didn’t seem possible to wait two or three years before I enjoyed my first harvest. To put it simply, I just didn’t have the patience.

Obviously, something changed this past year because I was finally ready to put my time in for my aspiring asparagus. I can’t really put my finger on why I now have more tolerance for time, but I’m sure it has much to do with becoming a parent. As this last week can attest, being a mom requires an infinite amount of patience.

So as a patient mother, I took the time to prepare my asparagus bed by first weeding, then turning the soil, and lastly amending the soil with some compost. I carefully set my crowns of asparagus in a well tended trench and covered my crop with what was left of my compost. I will continue to cultivate my crop until the time comes for me to cut each long awaited sweet chartreuse shoot which emerges from the earth.

It is with this patience that I plant my other permanent perennials as well. In two years time, I will not only be parenting a preschool age child, but preparing to harvest my flavorful flowers of artichoke, my tangy twigs of rhubarb, and of course, my long awaited asparagus. And I must remember this bounty I will bear the next time my day dips downward because with patience, something positive will always prevail.

My asparagus trench, artichoke transplant (bottom) and my Poppy 'seedling' (my daughter).

Legends of the Wall

When I was in graduate school, I explored the option of writing a thesis. The subject I was interested in was loosely based on the idea of enclosure and more specifically, the landscape features which often enclose a garden: walls and fences. Because I was unable to concentrate such a vast and complicated subject, I did not write the thesis, but I did become quite knowledgeable on the historical context of walls in the landscape.

                

For instance, did you know that the ‘Great Wall of China’ was not always the revered manmade marvel it is today? In fact, for many years the wall was seen as a defensive disgrace or a last resort tactic to keep the invading Mongols from gaining more ground. If it weren’t for some Western wahoos wandering upon the wall, and their ideals of historical perseveration, the ‘great’ wall might be nothing but rubble today. Can you imagine what that pile of rubble would look like from outer space? I guess not much different than the wall itself. Hmmm.

A satellite image of the 'Great Wall of China'

Also, the first historical walled garden, which I’m aware of, is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Although there is no physical evidence of this famed structure, artists, poets and musicians have been rendering its illustrious tale for thousands of years. My favorite rendition is a love story. It is said that the King during these ancient times planted a ‘pensile paradise’ because his wife was homesick for the mountainous landscape of her youth. I, of course, imagine this lovely lady wandering through her fabulous fake forest, picking fruit from trees which resemble something almost forgotten. A tear rolls down her cheek as she bites into its fleshy and fragrant skin. Oh, what a fantastic fairy tale.

Artistic rendering of the 'Hanging Gardens of Babylon'

 I can also educate you on the walled gardens popular in medieval Europe. It is often argued that these ‘secret’ like gardens represent the battle between man and nature during that time. The controlled, man-made environment within the walls is a safe haven, while what lies outside the walls is the unknowable wildness of nature. It is interesting to imagine a wall which represents the line between what was considered good and evil. It also kind of makes me want to read “The Secret Garden” again, so that I can dissect what the wall in that book really symbolized.

Medieval walled garden

Similarly, the picturesque gardens designed by followers of romantic writers like Thoreau and Emerson and their reverence of nature, contain walls whose purpose is to contain livestock without obstructing the view of the landscape. I’m not joking when I tell you that these walls, called ha-has, are very similar to the retaining walls many of us know today. The only difference is that the ha-ha, usually had a ditch on one side, rather than level ground. So, this wall represents quite the opposite of the wall of the medieval garden. Is it wrong that I giggle a little when I think of a wall which puts nature above man?

View of the Chirk Castle ha-ha found in Denbighshire, North Wales.

  

 As you can probably conclude by all this talk of walls, I have been busy with my own wall. I started building a three foot high retaining wall out of recycled concrete chunks, otherwise known as ‘urbanite’, in my back yard. Like many landscape designers and architects, who draw up plans and details as to how to construct a retaining wall, I have never actually built one before. I didn’t draw up plans or use any specifications for this wall either. I just started stacking my concrete chunks, hoping that the final result would somewhat resemble a wall that could hold back the dirt behind it. Although the process was somewhat slow at first, I soon felt like I was a true mason.

I forgot to take a 'before' photo again, but this is another part of the yard where a wall needs to be replaced.

As my wall began to take shape, the theorist in me began to wonder if this wall was more than just a pile of concrete holding back the dirt behind it. Like the Great Wall of China and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, did my wall have a story to tell? Or did it make a statement about my relation to nature as the walled gardens of our past have? As I began to ponder these questions, I instinctively tried to analyze what the word ‘retaining’ actually meant.

To retain, has many definitions. The one which usually accompanies the wall is ‘to hold in place’. But as I stood back stretching my aching arms to admire my emerging retaining wall, I realized that this wall was doing more than just holding dirt in place. It was ‘retaining’ in another sense. I was ‘obtaining possession’ of the land with each heavy slab of urbanite I placed on the wall. This, of course, doesn’t mean that I actually own the land because I am only renting one unit in a six unit apartment complex. But maybe what I am saying is that this land, my ‘shared’ yard, wasn’t really mine to garden until I decided to permanently mark it with the construction of my wall. For some reason, the physical action of placing more than plants on the land, gave me validity to turn this fallow land into my garden.

So I guess you can say that the story of my wall is still being written, but so far, it is not mournful, enchanting or very symbolic. Up to this point, building my wall has been an enlightening experience. I have learned that ‘growing’ a garden is not just about putting plants in the ground, but claiming that ground to belong to you as well.

My wall

Pruning

A week ago, I took a pruning class at a local community demonstration garden. This educational class not only gave me more confidence in pruning, but it also inspired me to get back into gardening after my winter days of waiting. Because of this class, I now have a beautifully trimmed Camellia tree in my backyard and a new insight on how pruning can metaphorically influence me as a landscape designer.

Although the dictionary defines the act of pruning as cutting or lopping ‘superfluous or undesired twigs, branches, or roots from’ a plant, I would advise that there is much more to pruning than just this. As my instructor taught me, pruning is not only the act of trimming unnecessary branches and twigs, but of aesthetically and spiritually ‘shaping’ the plant as well. Although I can go on for days about how all these pruning concepts can be transferable to the landscape, I will try to limit this rant to the basics.

When pruning, a ‘good start’ is to look at the ‘3D’s’ of the tree or shrub you are to trim. These branches include the 1) dead, the 2) damaged and 3) dysfunctional. Because the first two characteristics are pretty self explanatory, I’ll divulge on the latter. What makes a branch dysfunctional is that it is not promoting to the function of the plant. If a branch is crossing over another, it may be deemed dysfunctional because it is taking light, water and space for growth from the other branch. Hence, that branch should be pruned. This sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. When two or more branches are crossing, the pruner has to decide which branch is better fit to serve the function of the plant. Wow. I now understand why I was intimidated for so many years when the topic of pruning came up in the garden. How do you know which branch will serve the plant best? What if you pick the wrong branch? What if you make a mistake? Well, as I quickly learned while pruning my Camellia, mistakes happen and inevitably you will choose the wrong branch to cut. I will not go into how devastated I was when I cut the wrong branch on my Camellia, but I will tell you this: I learned that the flaw I created not only extenuated the adaptability of the shrub, but my own flexibility as well. The Camellia quickly showed me that the hole I created with my trigger happy pruners could be filled by another branch and all I had to do was encourage that branch to fill it.

An 'after' photo of my Camellia (I forgot to take a 'before', but try to imagine a big ball of a bush.)

I hope I haven’t lost you in all this talk of cutting, crossing and Camellias, because I would now like to explain how the concepts of the ‘3Ds’ are transferable to the landscape. Unlike an artist approaching a blank canvas, the landscape architect; designer; gardener never gets to start anew. No matter how empty or unused a landscape may seem, it is part of an evolving, living world that is anything but blank. With this in mind, the architect or designer must look at the landscape and see what may be 1) dead, 2) damaged and 3) dysfunctional.

As with pruning, finding the dead and damaged material of the land is not a difficult task. But how does one decide what is dysfunctional? If you have ‘weeds’, are they serving a purpose, a function in the landscape? Are they taking light, water and space from another ‘branch’ or plant in your garden? If your answer is yes, then maybe the weeds need to go. This is a simple example, like an easy to see branch that needs to be pruned, but like the shrub, not all dysfunctional ‘branches’ in the landscape are so easy to fix.

In my yard, there are many dysfunctional characteristics, but one, not so simple to solve is the overabundance of shrubs and trees crowding the yard. Because there are so many woody plants, the very large yard, seems to be dwarfed by their numbers. So, what am I to do? Should I immediately plan to remove plants that are not promoting to the function of the yard? And how do I deem which plants those are? This is where I think I will take the advice of my pruning instructor and ‘start small’. Instead of going in and looping down random trees, I think I will start by pruning each tree and shrub. By doing this, maybe I can start to see if each plant serves a function in the yard.

Like I learned while pruning my Camellia, I know that as I move forward as a gardener and landscape designer, I will inevitably make mistakes. Although the land is just as adaptable as my pruned shrub, I must remember to look and see what the landscape has to offer before deeming too much unnecessary. Whether this is in my own backyard or a large public park, I must also try to be just as flexible as the land I encounter.

Winter

The book I just finished is titled: Winter. Because this book was written with such eloquence and simplicity, the author, Rick Bass, is now one of my favorites. Like many of my favorite authors, he is a naturalist. He writes with such lucid reverence for the ‘natural’ world, that at times I felt myself sigh as I read his prose. This nonfictional account of Rick Bass’ first winter in a remote valley of Montana, not only gave me an escape from the warm, congested city life of San Francisco, but it also brought about reflection on what winter meant to me.

Raised as a cold season gardener, winter has meant one thing to me: waiting. Because I come from a place where frost covers the land three to six months out of the year, winter is spent indoors, by the heater, anticipating the green season to come.

Although I have lived in California for many years, first San Diego and now the Bay area, I guess I still have yet to acclimate to the year-round garden. Even though the weather is warm and the ground is anything but frozen, I still find myself snuggled tightly under a blanket during winter, waiting for the symbolic red-breasted robin to magically appear to let me know that spring has sprung. I find myself waiting, when no waiting needs to be done.

This winter has not been much different from the years past. In fact, if I think about it, I have been waiting much longer than just this winter. Yes, I had a small vegetable garden last summer, but the waiting I am speaking of is not in reference to me gardening. I have been waiting in other aspects of my life.

Almost two years ago, I found myself waiting for the new life which began inside my womb to enter this world. My daughter was born, and I still found myself waiting for her grow beyond her baby ways. Because I always envisioned having a toddler, not a vulnerable infant, I patiently waited for her to roll-over, sit, stand and finally walk. Now that my toddler is here, I look back and wonder if I was waiting, when no waiting needed to be done. What I’m getting at is that maybe my waiting was preventing me from being in the present and enjoying every minute with my daughter. Although I didn’t miss any of her milestone moments, I can imagine appreciating them more if I wasn’t so focused on what she would do next.

This realization about my relationship with my daughter saddens me slightly, yet I must learn from it. I must remember to walk in the present with my daughter with no future expectations. We both deserve nothing less.

The other aspect of my life I have been waiting on is for the perfect job to come knocking on my door. As I write these very words, I wait for the phone call or email from a perspective employer, instead of updating my portfolio. My portfolio is long over due for this update, yet I wait, when no waiting needs to be done.

As the sun shines on my back this warm winter day, I have decided that my winter days of waiting have passed. I will do as Thoreau wrote and, “live each season as it passes.” I will cherish each day with my daughter, get to the task of updating my portfolio and build the garden I have been dreaming of throughout these winter days. Rick Bass explains that winter is no time to be timid, and so I move forward with his advice:

Love the winter. Don’t betray it. Be loyal.

When the spring gets here, love it too – and then the summer.

But be loyal to the winter, all the way through – all the way, and with sincerity – or you’ll find yourself high and dry, longing for a spring that’s a long way off, and winter will have abandoned you, and in her place you’ll have cabin fever, the worst.

Repeat

As I got up to attend to my 15 month old teething daughter for the third time that night, a common thought came to my mind: not again. She again needed my attention, I was again moved to her bedside and I was again asked to stay awake until she fell back to sleep. As I lay awake with her nursing, I reflected on the past months and the one thought that seemed to pulsate behind my sleepy eyes was the word again.

I'm not sure why it is I seem to get fixated on words, but for some strange reason, they resonate with me for awhile before they get lost in my thought cloud of day to day life. This night, my word started as again and it soon subconsciously transformed into the prefix re. I began to pass time by thinking of as many words that started with re. They floated by my closed eyes: renew, resolve, remove, replace, recycle, reply, and repeat. The word game progressed as I removed the prefix and imagined each word followed by the word again: new-again, solve-again, place-again, cycle-again, ply-again, and peat-again. My eyes flew open wide, peat - peat, like the soil amendment? Does this word have another meaning which I never chose to see? If this word in fact means what I think it means, then the word repeat means to reapply fertilizer or amend the soil again, I thought to myself. Suddenly, this word which only seconds ago gave off a dull negative vibe, now, seemed to strike a new chord with positive energy.

I will have to note now that as a landscape designer and avid gardener, I love words that are used in everyday language which originated to describe working the land. Some of these words include: reap, harvest, sow, amend, cultivate and, of course, plant. This might explain why this new revelation about the word repeat was so exciting to me.

This new definition of repeat also awakened me because, lately, my life has seemed to be stuck on repeat. I have repeatedly attended to my daughter, I have repeatedly been looking for a job, and I have repeatedly played out the same day over and over again. The monotony of it all seemed slightly insignificant until repeat took on this new meaning. Because repeat now meant to attend to, my day to day life had a new meaning. I was no longer repeating without reason. Like the application of peat to the soil, I was encouraging growth and cultivating success with each repetition!

Before this revelation, I, of course, knew that each time I comforted my daughter, our bond with each other is strengthened and every time I send out a job application, my chances for employment increases, but this confirmation was exactly what I needed at the moment. I no longer felt lost in a uniform existence, but tied back to where I belonged – the Earth. The earth, the soil, the peat – it is a reminder that all my actions are a part of something larger than myself and that each time I re-peat, I am adding nutrients to that ground. The ground to which I speak of is not only mine, but that of my daughter’s, my loved ones and even those whom I have never met. I guess you can say that the word repeat has reminded me that we are all connected, not only on this earth, but with it.

Now, as I leave to attend to my daughter…again, I am reminded of a childhood joke: Pete and Repeat were on a boat. Pete falls off, who is left?