November 20, 2002
Eve's Garden
The way some people talk you'd think the demise of the First Garden was due not to the eating of forbidden fruit but to the planting of a non-native. Somehow over the last few years the campaign to elevate our appreciation of native plants has taken a dangerous turn—onto that path of righteousness that doesn't necessarily lead us away from temptation, or the planting of seductive foreigners in our local habitat. The recent uproar over a certain park committee wanting to restore poison oak to its former habitat in San Francisco is a case in point.
In the same way that California has been a magnet for people in search of a new place to drop their hat, or make their fortunes, or just bask in sunshine the better part of the year, it has also been a place that plants from afar could drop their roots and thrive. California is not unique in this respect. The English have been famous for appropriating plants and making a place for them in their gardens for centuries. But in California the lack of extreme winters and the variety of accommodating niches for many types of plants has encouraged the botanical multitudes to prosper in ways that they could not even in their home ecosystems. I don't mean just that I can grow orchids or banana trees in my garden but that some plants, introduced intentionally or by accident to California's open spaces, have displaced or crowded out the plants that were part of the natural ecosystem of that place.
I don't understand why people won't plant California Oaks or why they want an Eastern lilac in their yards when a perfectly nice California lilac will do better. I do understand that people's yards and gardens are their own domain to create whatever fantasyland or nostaliga trip they may. There has been a movement afoot in the arid West to encourage gardeners to use plants that need less water and less fertilizer—usually the plants that grew there before gardeners altered the landscape (and developers before them). A good idea in theory, especially if you live in a place where water is scarce or pricey. Good particularly for public landscaping. Not so good for those of us who have a penchant for botanical exotica and cannot contain our enthusiasm to a narrow palette of plant forms.
The debate as it concerns wild spaces is not merely theoretical. There we are talking about the destruction of wilderness. It may not be so obvious as a redwood forest but from the bug's eye view it's enormous. Or from the bird's eye view. Or the butterfly's. For these creatures we are talking about removing their sustenance, their nesting places, their offspring's chances of survival. If ivy covers over the wild violet's territory it also wipes off the face of the earth the wild Mourning Cloak (a butterfly) who claims it as a cradle for its larvae. And don't get me started on golf courses. The look of our neighborhoods with their tree-lined streets, lawns, and shrubbery-framed houses is the look more of New England than California.
To me, the perfect garden is an Oak grove on a grassy hillside where a secret stream lies hidden in its cleft among Big Leaf Maple, wild cucumber, monkey flower, flowering current, and yes, a bit of poison oak.
wild Collinsia and Poison Oak...
