True Dirt

lost in s p a c.........

that's what happens when the internets go away. Actually, only if your Model T broke down on the highway and you had to walk through the desert to find a mechanic.

Dirt is back after a slightly longer pause than usual and yet, it being late on a hot and smazy July evening, I may just head out back to sit by the whiskey barrel water fall with a gin & lemon, scratch my mosquito bites and wait for the moon....

spring cleaning

a note to readers...

True Dirt will be unavailable for a period of up to a week (starting in the next few days) in order to make needed improvements to our server. I will be back with a new post as soon as we are up and running again.....

Briggs

rights of spring

It exists in Slow Time, that place where there are no deadlines, no telephones vibrate, and there is no season of new television comedy. It is spring. Coming at its own pace. Once in twelve, or thirteen, moons or so. Nothing is definite. No weather, no memory, no seed reliably germinate. Rain, sun, wind, planetary spinning. Spiders appear, and the migrant birds. Today I saw a swallowtail swerve and cling to flowerless stem. Hopeful, perhaps. That is the metaphor. Hope. Spring. We poor species, us humans. We are the annuals; we live once and die. The delightful, impatient, and fragile froth of the garden, bred for show, aimed at brilliance, collapsing after the season concludes. But so beautiful and entrancing. Our genes crafted for maximum effect in a brief performance. In my garden I have given them the center for attention.

The gift of spring is subtle, no matter how showy the effect. It is perennial. Except if, as Rachel Carson feared, it was silenced, or ceased. But then nothing and nobody would be left to care. And that is the secret charm of our peculiar species - we care about these things. These quiet and noisy acts of nature. We think them acts anyway. They are, I think, less acts - like magic - than knowings. Plants know spring like humans know love.

As the garden comes awake I too must leave the slumberland of wintery retreat and lumber from my slow dark cave. The towhees and chickadees, the solitary wren have all come out to inspect the new year and so do I. It lives. I live. The wisteria must be lavender and bloom again.

the hybernating gardener

ok. I missed January. and most of December. I didn't even look in the backyard until I had to wrap the potted dwarf lemon in plastic last week to keep it from freezing. I have spent most of my time under the down quilt with my ibook not even looking at nursery catalogs. I began to think I would abandon gardening altogether. I went for a little hike with a friend - the first all winter - out in the East Bay hills on the first Saturday in ages that it was sunny. I had forgotten about the oak groves of winter. I had forgotten some of the most beautiful gardens anywhere are tucked into hollows of deeply creased Miocene sandstone where small creeks, hidden for most of the year in tangled underbrush and poison oak, and often dry during the summer months, emerge gurgling and plashing over fallen logs and tumbled rocks, ponding beneath mossed tree roots where the offspring of amorous newts returned briefly to their aquatic nurseries will turn from gelatinous blobs to bright orange swimmers and finally take their first steps, like the amphibians they are, upon dry earth.

We walked through the day, among sunlit groves of deciduous oaks carpeted with the neon green of new grass, and past steep slopes of blue oak and still wizened grasses, and in the alluvial plains of ancient creeks we passed the stately, leafless sycamores with their multi-hued puzzle bark trunks. And finally, still sweating with effort that chilled us in the evening breeze, a full moon began to rise over the hilltops and silhouetted groves. A buck trod leisurely from the shadows into the last golden pool of light on a grassy knoll, and we strode silently under the darkening canopy of twisting oaks back to the car, and home.

The winter oaks were harbingers of a new era in their geologic youth. They emerged in the last phase of the Miocene epoch, about 7 million years ago, when the rain forests and savannahs of North America were disappearing along with the giant vegetarian mammals and their predators whose abundant bones lie buried under the oak groves and creek beds. The summer rains began to disappear as well, while the Sierra Nevada and surrounding Coast Ranges began to rise up. The trees of the Beech family had become well established and diverse, with Quercus species divided among evergreen (coast live oak) and deciduous (valley and blue oak).

Whatever the causes, the long summer of the Miocene came to an end some five million years ago. The great North American savannas, with their multitudes of hoofed mammals and attendant predators, gave way to a world more like our own. Modern plant communities, such as live oak woodland and chaparral, took shape during that transition. Grasses continued to diversify, and other plant families - composites, legumes, mints, mustards - produced an array of new species. The advent of dry summers favored the evolution of annuals - plants whose seeds can wait out unfavorable conditions.

I am depending on those seeds that can wait out unfavorable conditions, much as the traveler on a long, discomfiting journey waits out the mental millennia of the road for a a transcendent vista of some long-imagined paradise.

the season's greeting

In the dark days of the garden I avoid the tasks that would take me into the shadow land of the back yard where the day's light penetrates only a sliver's worth across the fence and the borders are brittle with last season's petrified leaf. There is no transforming snow to bury the sad scene in mounds of glistening white, and so far not even the soggy mulch of rain soaked debris. There are no birds and no sound but the whoosh of cars on the freeway, and even the squirrels are scarce, tucked in their bowers sleeping away the long hours of winter.

Last night, as I stood on the front porch at dusk, the full moon rose in the southeastern sky through winter mists, and a tiny companion, the red planet Mars, floated in the moon's halo. This morning, Christmas eve day, I walked out the front door to get the paper and happened on sunrise--the first after the longest night of the year: a gilt-rimmed bank of clouds in the southern sky suddenly breached by a blinding ray of that familiar star.

Though the earth be lifeless and still as a grave, the celestial mechanism still moves in perpetual rhythms, with and without us.

Moon & Mars photo
Sun rays photo