November 2014

The value of waterfront properties in the Northwest is outrageous. There is plenty of it here what with coast of Puget Sound wobbling like a drunken fractal, creating coves and beaches, bluffs and bays. Then there are the islands as intricate and multitudinous as the petals of a hybrid tea rose. There are also inland waters. Lake Washington in Seattle is prime real estate. Then there are the many minor lakes. And, of course, the rivers. We live about 100 yards from the Snoqualmie River. We do not own water front property though.

What we own is wetlands.

And this past week they’ve been very wet with back-to-back floods. Our property backs up to Carnation Marsh, a 150 acres of protected wildlife habitat. Actually our property by modern zoning laws is not legally habitable. But since it was first homesteaded back in 1929 we have the right to stay.

I wouldn’t say it is my first choice. I always thought of myself as living on a rocky bluff with grand views, maybe a sea, or at lease a river, distant and lovely. Now that the leaves have fallen I can see from my office window the snow flocked foothills of the Cascade Range to the east. I can see the very close river too, but only because it is at flood stage, filling to the brim it’s banks.

There are a great deal of challenges to farming and gardening here. But Michael and I attack them, usually, with good humor and a fair amount of energy. We have adapted our plant choices toward those that love water and heavy soils. We have adopted a non-committal attitude to the survival of plants. One flood sent a log floating through the yard, decapitating our favorite magnolia. Many plants have just rotted out with their root in the soils, which can remain anaerobic for months. We have adapted and you’d be surprised how many plants actually thrive in those conditions. Birches and arborvitae, even some maples stand in water for months and don’t seem to mind. I have always loved the obvious choice: willows. My collection has grown to nearly 50 different specimens, not to mention the 3 wild species on our land. Michael loves hydrangeas and I continue to be shocked how well they handle our sodden soils.

But still I can’t resist trying plants that can tolerate neither our winter temperatures nor our heavy wet soils. Way too many plants in pots! I swear each year I’ll slow down, but this year wasn’t one of those. I’ve been running around dragging plants up out of the flood onto the deck. Plants that were safely winterized in the greenhouse, now had to come out on the deck. There was only room fro a few to remain. A few which would be able to tolerate being out of the greenhouse have landed in the extra bedroom. There’ll be temperatures in the low 20s tonight. All my little sub-hardy treasure will be lost. And it is only November!

After the worry and rush of preparing for a flood is over, it becomes as benign and pleasurable as a snow day around here. The road is closed, so we can’t part. The weather was very warm, so I couldn’t bear to be in the house all day. I wandered in my chest waders among the floating pumpkins with a heron and a flock of mergansers.

The spiders, slugs and other creepy-crawlies use them as life rafts. It is hard to believe there where dahlias blooming and cabbage burgeoning under all this water just a month ago. I just threw the last two sorry tomatoes out yesterday, but we still have a few peppers left.

As I write the waters are receding and our waterfront property is slipping away. Snow falls covering some of the grim residues of the flood waters

Now it is winter, so I can start looking for signs of spring.

Many years ago my grandfather gave me a resurrection plant that he bought at a roadside tourist stand along the highway in Arizona. It was a strange little balled up thing, brown and seemingly lifeless, debris really. But when I put it in a bowl of water it amazingly opened up, uncurled from the fist of debris it was.

As soon as it was unfurled, I got bored and dried it out on the heat vent so I could watch it unfurl again. After probably one-too-many dehydratings and rehydratings it finally died, refused to open or close. If I remember correctly it was over a month before the abuses of this amateur botanist took their toll.

I only learned later that this plant was actually a fern, Selaginella lepidophylla to be exact. Native to the Chihuahuan Desert, it can survive months, and some sources say, even years of total desiccation. But it couldn’t take my abuses. I’m much better with plants now, not so interested in testing their endurance. I’m moving decidedly away from zonal denial.

My grandfather gave me more than a dried up old fern. He gave me a deep and abiding interest in the green world. He spent the last working years of his life as an estate gardener, like I do now. He had spent much of his life outdoors engaged with nature. As a youth he hung phone lines in the jungles of Brazil where he was born. He worked as a logger in Alberta. Farmed in South Texas and sheep ranched in Montana. He even travelled to the Yakima Valley to pick fruit during the Depression.

The worst years of his life he told me were when he had a factory job in Milwaukee.

He has been gone over 30 years now, but still he is with me. Especially when I rake. He taught me to rake. Or when I am out hiking and I can here his oft-repeated axiom: Stop, Look and Listen. He showed me not only how to look at nature, but how to love it. He wasn’t a churchgoer but quoted Confucius, and used Indian fairy tales to elucidate his life views. Still he seemed closer to god to me than anyone I knew.

When he gave me that dried up fern so many years ago, it was more than a botanical lesson. He was showing me his version of the resurrection, not the Christian resurrection, but the constant resurrection of nature. At this time of year when we celebrate death in all it’s gore and horror, I like to look as the leaves fall. It is only a beginning.

These rotting poppy pods burst with new life in this very warm and rainy November here.