I grew this fiercely thorny rose, Rosa minutifolia, for over a decade. With wild-rose-pink flowers barely two inches across, its petals were crinkled and delicate, but the blooms were never particularly stunning when compared to the buxom, botoxed blooms of typical garden roses. The leaves were tiny to the point of almost being non-existent, and I’ve already mentioned the incredible number of thorns that made this just about the prickliest thing I’ve ever dealt with. (The only similarly thorny roses I can think of are a few heirloom moss roses like Alfred de Dalmas that I grew in my early teen rose-growing years.) So spiny is it that one of its early collectors proposed an alternate name for it: Rosa horrida. (Check out the fascinating tale of its discovery by Barbara Ertter here.)
In the end, I think I grew it partly because of its weirdly cool thorniness and its interesting story, but also because of its artificial, political rarity. In the United States, this rose is found only as a small island population along the Mexican border on Otay Mesa, here in San Diego County. This extreme rarity has placed it on California’s endangered species list. Skip south into Mexico a few dozen miles, however, and the plant begins to become a fairly common member of the chaparral plant community, forming great mounded thickets three to four feet high and many feet across. The notion that the plant is particularly rare is an artifact of national boundaries. Erase the US-Mexico border, and Rosa minutifolia becomes a mainstay of part of the pan-Californian ecosystem.
I find that to be a weird little mental game: Is the plant rare or not? What odd things do political boundaries do to how we understand the natural world that those boundaries are drawn over? Does that mean that it’s crazy to call this an endangered plant?
To that last question, I’ll answer that we really should consider it a plant to protect. We need to preserve what’s left of the diversity that remains in the world. If the plant goes extinct in California, it’s gone from California. Never mind that it has cousins south of the border.
And these days the purely conceptual notion of a national border is turning into a physical reality, as the ginormous border fence project turns the United States into a freakish zoo exhibit behind bars as this video produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology shows. (I also did a brief post related to all this recently, on the destruction of Smuggler’s Gulch.) When the only know U.S. population of this plant is further isolated from its southern kin, it becomes all the more desperate to preserve what little we have left.
When we were preparing the back yard for a small room addition we needed to move a few plants out of the way. My Rosa minutifolia was one of them. Used to near-desert conditions, the plant shoots down roots far into the ground, maybe even 20 feet deep. I guess I didn’t get enough of the roots, not to mention the fact that the transplant took place in the high heat of summer. The plant declined and then died over the course of a couple months.
I see the plant here and there. A native plant sale might have a few plants. The Tree of Life Nursery stocks it. Botanical gardens sometimes have a little thicket of it (or a massive thicket of it as is the case at Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden where “five rooted cuttings planted…in 1954 had become ‘one large tangled mass’ nearly 30 feet across by 1982” [ source ]). All these photos are from the Huntington’s Desert Garden, where the rose grows alongside cactus and other things that make its spininess look right at home.
I get nostalgic whenever I see it. My little plant, which was set in awful, dense, dry soil in a much too shady spot, never grew or flowered much. Nipping at the dead branches kept it from forming a Rosa horrida thicket. But I continued to coddle it for whatever reasons any of us coddle interesting, under-performing plants. And one of these days I wouldn’t be surprised if I plant another little thicket of it.
I’m standing in the United States as I take this picture. The hills you see are less than a mile to the south but are mostly in Mexico, across the border. The low break in the hills carries the name Smuggler’s Gulch.
The mouth of said gulch has been part of one of the more controversial terraforming projects in progress as we speak, the demonstration of enhanced fencing techniques that is the US-Mexico border fence. Ironic/pathetic isn’t it, that not that many weeks ago the news was buzzing with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, but here in many of our back yards new walls are going up? I’ll leave discussion of the ethics and human costs of the fence-building mindset to organizations like Amnesty International or even the Catholic Church, but the project’s costs to stuff like nature are pretty steep as well.
Left: This photo by April Reese from a January Land Letter shows much better than my photo just some of the earth moving that went into blocking off this canyon. [ Source ]
When people hear that the Department of Homeland Security is building a fence they might say, oh that’s nice, what harm can a little 15 foot tall fence do? Well, place your nice little 15 foot fence on top of 35,000 truckloads of fill dirt essentially forming an earthen dam designed to contain humans instead of water. Humans have more cognitive ability than water molecules, so what might contain water will just send the humans to the next available crossing point.
The rich coastal chaparral that was here has been bulldozed and buried. Hay wattles with some hydroseeded low-growing plants will be expect to take care of erosion control. Down-slope, the sensitive habitat of the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve waits to see what’s going to happen once the rains begin.
At first I thought it was a good idea. I never imagined that in some communities it would be prohibited.
During some of the recent rains I put some little buckets to catch rainwater that had drained off the roof. In this part of the state you can hardly ever have too much water, and good-quality water is extra-valuable.
One of my water-use indulgences is an experimental little bog garden with carnivorous plants. Tap water here has four times the dissolved solids usually recommended for these swamp-dwellers, so in warmer weather they get five gallons a week of reverse osmosis water from the local water store. Collecting fresh rainwater seemed like a much more sustainable alternative.
Left:Drosera Marston Dragon. Right:Drosera capensis, red form, with deerfly snack.
Yesterday’s LA Times had an article on residents in some of the dryland Four Corners states who were finding out that collecting rainwater was actually illegal in their communities. Because of a complex patchwork of water rights agreements, many homeowners actually don’t own the rainwater that falls on their houses.
Here’s a quick snippet from the article:
“If you try to collect rainwater, well, that water really belongs to someone else,” said Doug Kemper, executive director of the Colorado Water Congress… Frank Jaeger of the Parker Water and Sanitation District, on the arid foothills south of Denver, sees water harvesting as an insidious attempt to take water from entities that have paid dearly for the resource. “Every drop of water that comes down keeps the ground wet and helps the flow of the river,” Jaeger said. He scoffs at arguments that harvesters like Holstrom only take a few drops from rivers. “Everything always starts with one little bite at a time.”
I have a healthy respect for the rule of reasonable laws, but these seemed way beyond the pale. Like, are they worried these people are going to bottle the rainwater and sell it to us in Southern California?
Here within view of the Pacific Ocean, any water not retained in the ground would just wash down the storm drains and slide out into the bay. I doubt we have the same sorts of rules. But for many folks in Utah or Colorado who are trying to grow their own veggies, doing what they can to reduce become more self-sustaining and reduce their footprint on the earth, things aren’t so easy.
What do you think? Should the rainwater belong to all of us?
My local photographer friend Scott Davis sent me a link to an online petition asking President Obama to create a position of Secretary of the Arts, an idea that was first floated by Quincy Jones. Wall Street bankers collecting their measly little bonuses aren’t the only ones needing a helping hand these days.
If you read it on the internet it must be true, right? I’ve had some questions about a recent post that relayed some information on farmers in Iraq being prohibited from saving seeds. After doing more detailed research it looks like some of the exact facts need to be scrutinized a little more critically. But your conclusions on the situation may not change much.
All the bluster revolves around Order 81, a directive on plant variety protection that Paul Bremer, the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority administrator, pushed pushed into effect (at the behest of Monsanto, according to a 2008 interview with F. William Engdahl). The press release from Focus on the Global South and GRAIN that got the firestorm of opinion going declares that, “while historically the Iraqi constitution prohibited private ownership of biological resources, the new US-imposed patent law introduces a system of monopoly rights over seeds.” If you look at the current version of the release you’ll see that it’s all marked up with corrections and clarifications, with a piece of emphatic clarification at the beginning of the release:
The law does not prohibit Iraqi farmers from using or saving “traditional” seeds. It prohibits them from reusing seeds of “new” plant varieties registered under the law. In practical terms, this means they cannot save those seeds for re-use either.
So is Focus on the Global South and GRAIN thinking the law is benign and just? Their press release may be contrite about the confusion they might have caused, but in the current rewritten version still goes on to decry the order as a slap in the face against food sovereignty at the same time it drives big agribusiness into the traditional ways of traditional peoples.
It’s all fascinating reading that gives more nuance and background to the conclusions that people were coming to. In the end it’s not only a case about people’s ways of life being destroyed, nor is it a simple case of protecting intellectual property. Here are a few samples of what’s out there:
I really would like to see a contemporary analysis of the situation. Was all this bluster? Or has the situation played out as many feared? Based on stories of the social and environmental costs of reliance on Monsanto crops has created in some parts of India, for instance, I suspect things can’t be going well in Iraq.
Here’s a bit of political unpleasantness I read about in a seed description in the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog listing for the Iraqi tomato variety, Rouge D’Irak:
Saving seeds was made illegal under the “Colonial Powers” of the United States. Under the new law, Iraqi farmers must only plant seeds from “protected varieties” from international corporations.
First Hiliburton, then Blackwater, and now monster agribusiness taking advantage of the war. I wish I was surprised.
The Baker Creek online catalog actually lists five different plants of Iraqi origin, in case you’d like to help preserve varieties that Iraqi farmers now can’t legally grow from their own seeds: four tomatoes, Tatar of Mongolistan, Rouge D’Irak, Al-Kuffa, and Nineveh; along with a melon, Baghdad Long. Aren’t you heirloom tomato specialists looking for new varieties to try? How about these plants with an amazing contemporary history?
Let me start with a piece of advice: New hiking boots plus old, thin socks can be a painful combination!
Yesterday I tagged along with a group of hikers that I’d done a trip with a couple years ago. The destination this time was a cluster of four survey benchmarks along the U.S.-Mexican border. One of them appeared on the map as “Bennie.” The others quickly got tagged as “the Jets,” after the old Elton John song.
Some hikers prefer leisurely strolls over flat, carefully maintained paths. This group isn’t made up of any of that variety. At one point on the hike, while we were crossing a broad, flat, sandy valley, one of the core members apologized to me. “Our hikes are are usually a lot more uphill than this.”
That was what I recollected from the last trip I’d taken with the group. But I’m not in the same condition that I was for that earlier hike. Yesterday, thirteen and a half miles of travel—which included climbing up the slick face of a dry waterfall, two stubbed toes and five blisters on my feet—was adventure enough for me!
Here are some of the hikers, including Parasol Patsy, who set a high standard of looking cool and casual in the wilds.
Say “desert” to anyone and they’ll probably think of cactus. This is the California barrel cactus, Ferocactus cylindraceus. It proved to be a common presence all along the trip whenever we climbed above the dry stream beds.
The next image shows the hillside terrain, complete with barrel cactus, cholla cactus (Cylindropuntia sp., in the center, front), and—most dramatic to the left—ocotillo, Fouquieria splendens. Almost anyone who has hiked in these areas knows that a common name for some cholla cactus species is “jumping cholla,” a piece of urban legend deriving from the fact that the plants can break apart into little bits anytime anyone as much as touches the plant. The little barbs hold on to your clothing or your skin and work themselves into your clothes or your skin, taking a piece of the plant with them. It only looks like they jump. (Anyone looking for an idea for a horror movie?)
The ocotillos were leafing out, a sure sign that it’s rained in the area recently. The plants can grow and shed their leaves several times each year in response to rainfall. Some were developing buds at the ends of their stems in preparation for the outrageous flowerings of tubular orange-red blooms that these plants are capable of.
Another sure sign of recent rains was this massive desert lake, in the heart of Davies Valley. Few plants grew in the immediate area, letting you know that these desert plants prefer occasional sprinkles of water rather than wallowing in it.
This being the desert, signs of lack of water were all around…
A trip to this area gives you the feeling that the border between the U.S. and Mexico is a purely arbitrary one. Gosh, there isn’t even a welcome sign or a border fence in these parts. How rude.
These are two views into Mexico from the promontories we climbed on the trip. Occasional pieces of discarded clothing, abandoned empty water bottles and—weirdly—a frying pan let you know that this was an area that was used for border crossings. On this late-December day temperatures reached the mid-sixties, perfect hiking weather. Border crossings done at other times of the year, when the temperatures would be over 110, would prove a lot more dangerous.
Any trip to the border regions isn’t complete without an encounter with the U.S. Border Patrol. This was out first contact, a flyover by an agency helicopter. Later, at the end of the hike, as we were packing up our cars, we were visited by agents in two SUVs. For officers who don’t know what to do with the desert it must be a dusty, tedious job. I like to think that attending to a group of tired hikers was a fun break in their routine.
The visit by the Border Patrol was a fitting end to the trip. This only looked like a trek through unspoiled wilderness. The truth is that this is an area that’s complex with political intrigue and history, and where the tensions of economic survival coincide with issues of basic human endurance and survival.
I try hard to find landscapes that to me feel pure and untouched by the ways of humanity. But a trip like this tells you that such a place doesn’t exist.
Here are a few mostly unrelated things I’ve been storing up.
Shopping for Pumpkins
McLean, Virginia photo by Joel Sternfeld
First off, I wanted to share this fun(?) photo that’s only a few days late for Canadian Thanksgiving or a couple weeks early for the US holiday. (Be sure to click it to enlarge it to get the full effect.) The image is “McLean, Virginia (1978)” by photographer Joel Sternfeld. It’s his best-known photo and the cover to one of the editions of his book, American Prospects.
A big part of photography can be being in the right place at the right time. But then you have to know when to snap the shutter. Sternfeld nailed this one!
Ornamental Grasses
Grasses have been used as lawn materials for centuries, but the last couple decades have seen an explosion in the use of ornamental grasses that you don’t attack with lawnmowers. The Canadian firm, Bluestem Nursery, has assembled one of the better brief guides to dozens of commonly-used ornamental grasses. When does a grass bloom? How much water does it need? How large does it get? Just take a look at the great summary. Click on the plant name for photos and a more detailed description. It doesn’t have every plant you’ll run into in a seed catalog, but it has plenty of the hardier species.
Penstemons from Seed
A few weeks ago I was planning to sow seeds of a couple species of penstemon. Some of the species in the genus require a cold snap to germinate, others require light, while some respond to a fairly elaborate string of temperature changes. And some just spring to life after you sprinkle them in some soil and water them in. I had no idea what kind of treatment my species required until I went trawling the web. That was when I ran across Jim Swayne’s penstemon seed germination methodology pages.
There you’ll find several hundred penstemon species listed, along with brief germination notes on how you make the little seeds come to life. (For example, one of the more elaborate routines, for P. hartwegii, goes something like: “Sow fresh seed @ 70ºF (21ºC), sow stored seed under thin cover 8 wks @ 40ºF (4ºC), move to 50ºF (10ºC) under light; if no germ. in 4 wks, move to 60ºF (16ºC).” Fortunately my two species were closer to the “just add water” category.)
An Election Video You Haven’t Seen
Leaving the garden, I wanted share this clip in recognition of the elections just concluded. It may be the last election footage you’ll need to watch this season: a promo for Please Vote for Me, a Danish documentary from 2007 on an election for Class Monitor for a third grade class in Wuhan, China. It’s a little Sesame Street in parts, but it’s got its Lord of the Flies moments as well.
Unless you’re reading this blog using a bicycle-powered generator in the desert outback somewhere east of Perth you’ve heard of the revolutionary change in the leadership of the United States. It’s the culmination of tireless work for equality and civil rights by generations of good people. In Tuesday’s California elections, in addition to voting for Barack Obama in a landslide, voters also overwhelmingly approved Proposition 2, a worthy initiative that mandates more humane cage conditions for chickens and other farm animals.
I should be happy, and I am genuinely happy—about those and many other things that happened election day.
This gardener is pissed
But politics is a messy beast, and this gardener is having a bout of bad attitude. It started on Monday with the first signs of a bad cold and then worsened as some of the political fallout from Tuesday’s elections became clearer. So often, along with the good and revolutionary, you get delivered the vile and reactionary. In the same California elections I referred to the populace narrowly approved Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment rescinding the rights of gay and lesbian citizens from marrying each other, thereby upholding the traditional values of having gays and lesbians marry people of the opposite gender.
In effect, in their actions, the voters of California decided to grant additional civil rights to poultry, while at the same time rescinding rights for the state’s gay and lesbian population.
So, are we to conclude that, in a state where it takes 55% of the vote to raise property taxes, all it takes is a slim majority of the population to take rights away from thousands of its fellow citizens? Have the California voters said that my commitment in marriage last June to John is now null and void? Not so fast!
The lawsuits have begun, and one of the arguments is that very issue of the size of the vote necessary to revise a basic right that’s in the constitution versus merely amending it. Legal challenges often get a bad rap in this country, but if it had been left exclusively to the popular vote we’d still have things like segregation and industrial runoff igniting the rivers of the Northeast.
My current cold will pass, along with my current bad attitude. No matter the immediate outcomes of the challenges to Proposition 8, so too will pass this country’s romance with intolerance. No matter what transpires, John and I will continue to consider ourselves married.
It’ll take a while for the culture to change, but the signs are everywhere. Although people over 30 voted for California’s Proposition 8, the population 30 and under soundly rejected it by a margin of two to one.
Another sign: Let me quote the final sentence of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, in which he sets the bar for the changes that would need to take place. Notice the list, the agenda King sets.
…And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
And let me compare that the agenda Barack Obama set in his speech Tuesday night at Chicago’s Grant Park. His list, his agenda, his America resides in the third paragraph from the very beginning.
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference.
It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.
We are, and always will be, the United States of America.
At no time in his campaign did Obama defend gay marriage. That would have been political suicide. But it’s telling that we are no longer invisible as we were in King’s day. This is a different vision of America that will come to be as the next generation finally gets its say.
The most radical thing you can do is stay home. —Gary Snyder, quoted by Rebecca Solnit in the current Orion
With all my apologies to Gary Snyder, Saturday included a quick trip up to Tree of Life Nursery in Southern Orange County, one of the main specialists in California native plants. I found it something between tragic and funny that I traveled an hour and a half to look at plants that lived four houses away. But then there were all those unusual plants that I’d never see in a lifetime of hiking around California.
Camp Pendleton
Vehicle tracks at Camp Pendleton
The trip from my house in San Diego traverses the coastal I-5 corridor, which in these parts is characterized by suburban sprawl with intermittent splices of something resembling nature. The first big splices are the lagoons: Los Peñasquitos, San Elijo, Batiquitos. And then, after Oceanside, you hit the open hillsides of Camp Pendleton that go on for miles. A freeway runs through it, so it’s anything but pristine. Also, many days you see helicopters by the highway and amphibious craft just off the coast, staging some sort of military takeover of California. Saturday was relatively quiet, however, with just the constant grind of the traffic at your back as you looked out to sea. Still, the scraped foreground didn’t help develop any sense of communing with the earth.
Soon the twin seaside domes of the San Onofre nuke plant lay down the signal that civilization is about to take over again. A few more miles of homes and businesses takes you to Ortega Highway, where a turn to the east gets you off the interstate.
You’re almost to the nursery, but not quite. Two final miles of roads through homes in San Juan Capistrano remind you that there’s an election just a few days away, and the tenor of the dozens of signs reinforces whatever stereotypes you might hold of Orange County being a conservative wonderland. (Of course, progressive Laguna Beach—which is to Orange County what Austin is to Texas—is only a few hillsides away.)
The Ortega Highway, heading to Tree of Life Nursery
Finally, for the final five miles to the nursery, the road opens up through the open shade of an oak woodland habitat. The morning is quiet and there are only a few cars and motorcycles on this tour route that eventually leads to Lake Elsinore.
Tree of Life Nursery sign
But long before you get to the lake, you find the nursery.
Tree of Life Nursery from Parking Lot
Even the first view of the place from the parking lot is promising.
Casa La Paz at Tree of Life Nursery
The main sales area centers around Casa La Paz, a scenic adobe set among the oaks. It’s easy to imagine yourself in early Alta California before the arrival of petunias and the non-Spanish White Man. This is a place that’s perfected the theater of shopping for native plants.
Inside the Casa, you’ll find a thoughtful selection of books on native and Mediterranean-climate gardens, as well as books on the local flora. In the fall, and once again in the spring, they offer free classes on replacing your lawn with California natives. But it’s the plants that bring most people here.
