THE VON FURSTENBERG PRINCIPLE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (10/5/09)

Diane von Furstenberg, the doyenne of New York's high fashion designers, said in an address to budding designers, "The more you can grow yourself naturally, the more you can control your destiny." While speaking to the high fashion industry in New York, she could just as well have been speaking to the gardeners, down and dirty, in anti-fashion Flagstaff, about growing their gardens naturally.

The correlation between natural and destiny is simple. Years ago when rafting down the Tuolumne River, I asked the rafter, a graduate student in philosophy at Berkeley, about the principles of rafting. He said, "You can't fight the river. It's too powerful. If you try, you'll get dumped. It's not quite like going with the flow, more like reading it and using the current." It might be called The Von Furstenberg Principle, using the current.

Modern industrial agribusiness, on the contrary, has used the same principle of exploitation as used by the coal mining and the oil drilling companies. Exploiting natural resources as though they were inexhaustible, unaware that earth is a limited sphere, they're legacy children who've never replenished their heritage, but have simply used it up, inevitably leaving themselves without resources, barren and sterile.

Sustainability, on the other hand, uses the model of replenishing, putting back as much, if not more, than is taken out. It might be called reinvesting in nature. Rather than exploiting the earth, it seeks to renew it in part by recycling and nourishing.

The introduction of too much synthetic fertilizer has resulted in soil salinization, as in California's Coachella and San Joaquin Valleys where vast tracks of land have become sterile. Too much salt in the soil is toxic because it hinders the ability of plants to take up water. In short, they die of thirst while being watered.

Salinization is not only a product of synthetic fertilizer itself, but also of water. Some of Flagstaff's golf courses are already suffering recurring bare and brown spots and dying trees. Watered, as they are, with reclaimed water, the courses are slowly being salinized because reclaimed water is saltier than spring water. With repeated usage the soil inevitably becomes salt toxic resulting which might result in courses of Astroturf with cell towers for pine trees.

What happens in agribusiness and on golf courses can also happen in pots on the deck or vegetable and flower beds in the yard. As Thomas P O'Neill, Jr., the late Speaker of the House of Representations, often said, "All politics is local." So it is with sustainability. It's local as well as global.

Dirt is not an infinite resource, as the farmers in the Coachella and San Joaquin have found out. With synthetic fertilizer blowback, garden soil can be turned sterile. It's best enriched using compost, animal manure, and organic fertilizers, such as blood and bone meal. Only horse, cattle, and chicken manure are useful because dogs, cats, and human beings eat their fellow animals and thus are likely to carry pathogens or nasties in their feces.

The purpose of sustainability is not only to grow our own food and cook it slowly, but also to rehabilitate the earth for those who follow us.
Industrialization has not only overtaken agribusiness, it also dominates the fast food industry which is nothing more than assembly line food.

Sometimes, advocates of sustainability sound like Luddites, followers of Ned Lud who at the end of the 18th century destroyed machines in reaction to industrialization. More than Ludditism, sustainability is a solution, not a reaction.

The irony of sustainability is that it requires both the high tech of rehabilitating water and the low tech of fertilizing the soil with organic material. The high tech is the sophisticated technology capable of rehabilitating water. Rehabilitation requires vast amounts of electricity which, in turn, requires sophisticated technology of using the sun and wind to generate enormous amounts of electricity. Paradoxically, the ravages of 19th and 20th centuries industrial exploitation will be redeemed by a 21st century Von Furstenberg Principle, a high-brow technological rehabilitation of finite water supplies and a low-brow fertilization of soil with animal waste and organic refuse.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

IS PLAQUE A MORAL ISSUE?

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (10/20/09)



After Patty Hooker, my dental hygienist, finished scraping, polishing, picking, and excavating debris, I asked her if she thought plaque were a moral issue. Appearing surprised, she claimed she'd never thought about it before. Patty bears an unnerving resemblance to Sarah Palin, a discomfiting experience for a gnarled, cranky old Democrat. I was puzzled about her surprise, plaque being the raison ďêtre for dental hygienists.

I assume guilt about my plaque because, as Patty explained, plaque amongst other things is the result of bad dental hygiene. Throughout my life, in one way or another, a woman in authority has been my hygienic nemesis. My great aunt Marie Aslaakson, a hygienic warrior, who resembled a Norse berserker with battle axe in hand, would often jab the air with her wooden spoon, proclaiming "Cleanliness is next to godliness."

My junior high school, home room teacher was the school's "mental hygiene" enforcer. "To dream the impossible dream," she set about in a high-pitched, nasal shrill to cleanse the minds and hearts of boys under hormonal assault while in the throes of puberty. "Nasty boys."

Reclining in Patty's dental chair with various nozzles in my mouth while she picked, poked, and scraped, I thought about my garden's plaque. Guilt.

Now, Patty, a charming and delightful woman, has become another woman in authority. Smiling, her blue eyes dancing, she disputed any connection between morality and plaque, smugly asserting scientific impartiality, all the while asking me if I flossed regularly.

TIME TO SCRAPE THAT GARDEN PLAQUE!

It's those damned pine needles. Can a person love pine trees and hate dry pine needles? If they're not grabbed adroitly, they stick in that small crevice between the nail and the finger. Not only that, Jeff Lowenfels, a noted horticulturalist, during the recent Garden Conference in Flagstaff said that the pine needles should be left where they've dropped as a matter of sustainability, another moral authority. However, the Fire Department says they're a fire hazard, and the Home Owner's Association threatens fines if they aren't raked up and packed off.
Scylla and Charybdis.

Happily, Kayla Smith, a neighborhood teenager, happened by looking for work, an unusual occurrence. An avid pine needle raker, she took the bull by the horns of the dilemma and raked up pine needles thus avoiding both the FFD's disapproval and the HOA's fines.

Now, that the scraping was over, I was free to pick, poke, and floss, digging up gladiolus corms and dahlia tubers. Please don't say "bulbs" because if you do, gardeners of the snooty sort will look askance, flaring their nostrils as though they'd whiffed a foul odor.

I've concluded that if something takes a lot of work, time, and care in the garden, it probably doesn't belong there. As a result, I've committed to bulbs that don't mind our winters, like daffodils (bulbs) and bearded irises (rhizomes). They thrive with occasional care, especially the daffodils. Loni Shapiro and Hattie Braun know a lot about bulbs so I'm going to ask them for easy and unusual bulbs.

Sadly, there is more to garden plaque, called pruning and clipping, the nip and tuck of gardening. Of course, there is a difference of opinion about pruning, whether in the fall or in the spring. I'm a fall advocate, unless I don't get around to it, and then I'm a spring advocate. Situation ethics.

If it's roses, cut off old, weathered, unproductive canes and prune thin shoots and then prune the productive canes about a thumb nail above an outfacing bud. Prune the interior shoots that cross one another, leaving room for air circulation inside the bush.

If it's a tree, pay attention to the tree's architecture to achieve a well-balanced effect. When pruning a branch, leave a little knob of the branch on the trunk. Don't bother with salves and anointments over the cut. Trees have learned to take care of themselves. Don't whack or hack. Shape. Trees aren't proper targets of anger.

A reminder: enjoy the aspens amidst the pines and the maples and oaks while brushing and flossing, scraping and pruning, getting rid of horticultural plaque and feeling self-righteous.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

A REMEMBRANCE OF TOMATOES PAST

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (9/30/09)

In his sonnets, when Shakespeare summoned "up remembrance of things past," he longed for "the lack of many a thing I sought." (30). He was speaking of the Dark Lady, the elusive paramour he swore was "fair" and "bright," yet was "black as hell, and dark as night" (147).

Such has been the sorry tale of many tomato paramours with anticipations of luscious, full-fleshed, lip-locked ecstasies right off the vine but who instead got the cankered mold of late summer blight. Just as Shakespeare was "frantic-mad" and "past cure" (147), the tomato paramour, too, grieves for those tomatoes once sought, turned "black as hell" and "dark as night." However, there are lessons to be learned. In today's limited lexicon, Shakespeare had the "hots" which often produce undesired consequences, such as "buzz off," "yuck," or the Black Lady's, "not you" (145).

After lavishing their tomatoes with love and affection, care and tender-mercies, tomato paramours may suffer betrayal, caused by their hots for "too much of a good thing, such as, commercial, synthetic fertilizer with too much nitrogen. The result is luscious foliage, miraculously grown with little or no fruit, a passion unconsummated. As they say, read the label, with its three dead giveaway letters.

They are N-P-K: N for nitrogen, P for phosphorus, and K for potassium. The best ratios for tomatoes are 5-10-5, 5-20-20, or 8-16-16 with nitrogen the lowest. The reason is simple: nitrogen stimulates the growth of the plant, phosphorous the production of fruit, and potassium overall plant health. Ironically, much of commercial synthetic fertilizer is counter-productive to tomato plants because it's nitrogen heavy.

The best fertilizer is compost which isn't primarily a fertilizer. Paradoxically, synthetic fertilizer doesn't do any good and may even do harm if the soil isn't chock full of mychorizzae. They are fungal facilitators clinging to plants' roots which enable the roots to take up nutrients from the soil. Compost is a source of and stimulates the development of mychorizzae as well as providing natural nutrients.

Long before tomatoes are planted, the soil should be prepared with lots of compost and organic fertilizers. They need nutrient and organically rich soil before being planted, as well as, being watered regularly and deeply.

The cankered mold of late summer blight which has swept the East
and Middle West is best fought by preparation. Three years should pass before using the same soil, or the soil should be sterilized. The fungus, Phytophthora infestans, a water mold, may remain in the soil from years past. It's been studied as a tool in biological warfare.

The easiest way to sterilize the soil is to put it in a black container enshrouded in a black plastic bag and let it sit in the sun cooking for several weeks. Safe soil is more easily controlled in containers. Finally, plant premium seeds because they don't carry the fungal spores which are carried by air and ground on fruit and plants. The fungal spores that caused the blight in East and Middle West were probably carried on plants from the South.

Since late summer blight occurs chiefly in hot, humid climates, it isn't "a clear and present danger" in Flagstaff, save sometimes during the monsoon, by humidification from overhead watering, or importation. Tomatoes like dry leaves and regularly well-drained wet roots. In addition to clean soil as a bulwark against soil borne fungal attacks, tomato plants should be widely spaced so that air can circulate freely to ward off air borne infestations.

A frequent complaint, in addition to lack of fruit, is blossom end rot, an affliction aptly named, because dark spots of rot slowly consume the tomato at its blossom end. No lip-lock fruit. More like yuck. The culprit is a lack of calcium as the fruit sets caused by too much nitrogen and uneven watering. The remedy: throw away the fruit and deep water.

Painful are the remembrances of tomatoes past which were "lov'd not wisely, but too well" (Othello, V, 2, 344). Growing tomatoes from seeds in clean soil, compost, and balanced organic fertilizer, with regular, well-drained deep watering are the ways to love tomatoes well and wisely.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith

SUI GENERIS: A GARDEN OF ISLANDS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (9/23/09)

"When a plant does well, I propagate it, like those lilacs along the fence in the backyard. They all came from one lilac out front. Now, that lilac's dead, but all those out in the back are thriving legacies with beautiful blooms."

A tour through Grant and Nancy Gerver's garden is a tour of propagation from bearded irises to lilacs. A nurse at FMC, Nancy says, "I'm just a farm girl. I like to get my hands in the dirt and make things grow." Indeed, her garden is a potpourri of plants, all with histories, coming from other places in her garden.

Raised on a farm on Whidbey Island in the far reaches of Washington's Puget Sound, the island metaphor runs throughout her garden. A series of islands, islands of grass, ponds, flower beds, and gazeboes with no hard-edged rectangulars, gives her garden a sense of peace and ease.

Of course, some rectangles are allowed, a vegetable garden, a half basket ball court-cum-outdoor dining room with table and benches, and off the back door a shed and a deck with a hammock under great spreading trees, but they're off to the sides of the yard where they don't intrude.

At first glance, the back yard seems random, that is, until the visitor feels the pull of that line of sight, the draw of the islands, stepping stones leading one to the other. Islands of grass surrounded by graveled paths lead the eye to scattered isles of bedded flowers and then to three isles of ascending ponds of water knit together by waterfalls all the way to a small rustic gazebo set under an overhanging tree.

The line of islands isn't straight but a soft S curve, a subtle pattern giving both a sense of ease and power. A straight line is power spent while an S curve is power latent without stressed hard edges.

An island to read, think, chew the rag, sip a glass of wine, "two for tea and tea for two," and survey the whole of the garden, the gazebo is both the end of a journey and the beginning to see the journey from the other side. A retrospective, a looking backward gives the pilgrim opportunities to see what was not seen at first sight and what things look like the other way around.

What was not seen from the gazebo is another garden, again all
islands, with one big oval bed with smaller oval patches, as though they were satellites.

Nancy cautioned that the garden isn't finished, that "there's a lot to do," but, indeed, there's always lots to do in a garden. There were some weeds, ovals that weren't complete and drifted off, but such is the case with any gardener's garden. Never finished, it is always a work in progress with things that need to be done. The best way to die is to be finished and complete.

As a graduate student toiling on my doctorate at the University of Chicago, I took a seminar with the famous theologian Paul Tillich who was at end of his career. I'd read nearly everything he's written and anticipated a fascinating seminar. Not so, I was bored by a great man who was merely tidying up his ideas and had stopped breaking new ground a generation previous.

Later, I took a seminar from Anders Nygren of Uppsala of Agape and Eros fame. Far older than Tillich, he was still plowing unfurrowed fields and drew me along on his intellectual journey scrutinized by his single, monocled eye.

Nancy Gerver's garden isn't modeled from a leftover landscaper's grid. Born of her private visions, sui generis, it's still a developing and growing place of peace and curiosity. Over to the left, unnoticed in her line of islands and pools, is a statue of Saint Francis holding a small pond of water. Once belonging to a neighbor of hers now dead but whose memory she cherishes, it is one end of an axis with the gazebo, holding those remembrances of things past, allowing the mind to follow the S curves in life, finding the other sides of reality.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

A CULINARY GUARD FOR FIREFIGHTERS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (9/12/09)

I first saw Bev MacAllister one evening across a crowded room at a fluorescently lit meeting of the Master Gardener Association. I felt an affinity. She sparkled, especially her eyes. She celebrated her age with joy, doing something for someone else without profit or aggrandizement. She develops vegetable gardens at our local fire stations, enabling firefighters to grow and eat their own fresh vegetables.

Age has given her the time and experience to manufacture a model of Ernest Hemingway's "built-in shockproof crap detector," the better to cope with that salient feature of modern culture. It isn't lying so much, as Harry G. Frankfurt writes, but someone who "doesn't know what he is talking about" (On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2005.)

Of its four commonest forms, pomposity, fanaticism, inanity, and authority, she's dispatched them long ago. She's not intimidated by political, corporate, academic, ecclesiastical, or professional pomposities. Well-educated, she glides by on the other side of the street. A pragmatist, she holds her beliefs deeply, especially about organic food and modern medicine, but disparages the fanaticism of ideologically-driven bigots with "daggers in their smiles."

Inane, she's not. No sympathy for yesterday's hackneyed platitudes and clichés. As in Kansas City, her mind "is up to date," ready to separate the sheep from the goats. Balancing the equilibrium between spirituality and skepticism, cynicism doesn't begrime her mind while she gracefully "cuts the crap." Spiritual without religious authoritarianism, she's secular without scientific absolutism.

Bev's "crap detector" liberates her from that "salient feature" weighing heavily on many people, leading them to waste their lives in mistaken certitudes followed by confusion, anger, and depression, unaware of the world around them.

At peace with herself, knowing her own shortcomings and foibles, Bev takes herself for what she is. She doesn't fiddle with her self-image and is free to look outward. An existentialist, her life is now.

Bev's passion, along with organic gardening, is the welfare of firefighters, especially their cuisine, cuisine being the cornerstone of health. Ill-fed, decrepit firefighters are not a good thing. Problematically, firefighters do their own cooking at the firehouse but aren't required to pass a culinary course before becoming firefighters. My son, in his early years as a firefighter and paramedic in Los Angeles County, frequently called for culinary suggestions on easy-to-fix, meat and potatoes recipes. Swiss chard hasn't been a regular on firefighters' fare which is precisely where Bev enters the scene of Flagstaff firefighting.

She does three things. She helps them grow vegetables at the firehouses, takes them vegetables from her garden and from wherever and whomever she can, and teaches them how to cook them. This is not easily done because most Americans are alienated from their senses, particularity their sense of taste after generations of fast-food. They've yet to pull a carrot from the ground or taste a tomato off the vine. Their exclusive spice is salt.

Bev is up to the task. "I don't baby sit them. I just give'em a chance to experience growth and harvest, especially finding that freshly picked vegetables taste better." While her micro task is gardening, vegetables, and cooking, her macro task is an expansion of life's experiences.

Funding the operation herself with support from Viola's, she uses containers in the firehouse gardens. "That way," Bev said, "they can move them around, like the hot peppers. They were startled at the difference in taste between the store bought and fresh hot peppers from the garden. Now, they're going to bring the containers of hot peppers into the station and grow them in sun-lit windows for the winter."

Her Firefighter's Swiss chard recipe is 2qts of washed Swiss chard, 2 chopped large garlic cloves, 1tbsp tamari. Cut stems into 1" pieces, simmer 5 minutes in ¼ cup water, covered. Add sliced leaves and diced garlic to pan and more water, if needed, bring to a boil, simmer covered 8 minutes. Add tamari, toss, and eat.

Bev not only sparkles, she's joyful. A happy warrior in the battle for good organic eats, she stands culinary guard for the first responders.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

A SHOT OF COUGAR URINE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (8/26/09)



On a summer's eve at dusk, meinie Überfrau called me to watch two baby skunks at play. They nosed around in our flower garden, tumbling and wrestling, when suddenly a squadron of squawking ravens flew overhead. The skunks scooted beneath our deck.

Best appreciated from afar, I've always had an affinity for skunks because their spray smelled from afar recalls vacations as a child. I knew we were out of the city and on our way when I smelled skunks.

Parenthetically, a client once told me that she relished diesel exhaust because it reminded her of Parisian diesel buses during her student days.

What to do? Everyone has friends and relatives best kept at a distance, having suffered their spray in times past. Email keeps them at bay. How to save the skunks, the better to relish their odor from afar? After rebuffs from several governmental agencies, Arizona Game and Fish gave me the telephone number of Dan Caputo of Arizona Wildlife Consultants.

As with everything else, it's in the mindset, that is, how to think about the problem. Dan's mindset is training, as in training a puppy, training elk, deer, squirrels, skunks, raccoons, and other unwelcome critters to keep a distance.

This is best done by making them uncomfortable. Dan says it's giving wildlife a sense that the garden is "not a safe place."

If gardeners want to keep those gorgeous elk and deer and ugly javelina from mowing down their tulips, a shot or two of cougar urine would make them feel unwelcome, indeed, threatened. Electric fencing works, but it's iffy with children. Coyote urine does the same for squirrels, skunks, raccoons, and other small varmints.

In addition to the deer and elk's senses of smell, their sight is acute, giving them a heightened sense of motion which means motion sensors during the evening and early morning feeding hours. Once the alarms are sounded, beating pots and pans, flashing lights, and streams of water makes them feel unwelcome. It would me.

The ammonia of a malodorous cat's litter box offends one and all. Rags, soaked in ammonia, placed here and there in a garden will do wonders to discomfit wildlife.

Sight and smell can be used to freak out skunks. In addition to some shots of coyote urine and ammonia soaked rags, a windsock emblazoned as a hawk puts out the unwelcome mat. Cayenne pepper also irks them.

Squirrels' vulnerable senses are sight and sound. Banging pots and pans and water hoses makes squirrels feel unwelcome. Now, of course, not all squirrels are the same. Flagstaff's flagship squirrel, the Abert's, isn't as destructive as the antelope ground squirrel and the rock squirrel. The latter two relish the fruits of a garden as I discovered when I watched a rock squirrel savor a Sasha's Altai tomato on our deck and then leisurely sun itself as it digested my tomato. I was so charmed by its insouciance that I couldn't bring myself to chase it away.

On the contrary, Dan said, gardeners shouldn't train wildlife to hang around the garden. Feeding them is like throwing out the welcome mat, especially for the deer and elk, it's training them not to forage for themselves and, thus, not survive.

As for gophers, Dan suggested galvanized grates. A friend of mine urinates down their tunnels but makes no claims for efficacy other than emotional relief as in "There! Damn you." Apparently, no re-education program has, as yet, been developed for prairie dogs.

Persistence and perseverance are Dan's watch words. Training wildlife is not a one shot job. Also, trapping and releasing is just a Bandaid. The animals will either come back or others will take their place.

Sadly, Dan pleads ignorance about harvesting cougar and coyote urine, suggesting instead Googling the internet for a source.

With a passion for wildlife Dan knows whereof he speaks. Raised in Flagstaff, he graduated from NAU with a degree in biology and was for ten years a wildlife manager and biologist with the Department of Game and Fish, responsible for the area from Flagstaff to Camp Verde. His
telephone number is (928) 864-6768.
Copyright © Dana Prom Smith

A RESIDUAL VICTORIAN

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (8/14/08)

My father, a residual Victorian, often advised my two older brothers at the dinner table on social manners with women. He said, "If a woman's beautiful, tell her that she's intelligent because she won't hear that often and would like to hear it. Also, if she's intelligent, tell her she's beautiful because she'll want to hear that, too."

My mother, a bit more modern, graduating from Oberlin College in 1908, a smile at the corners of her mouth, said, "And, Tom, tell the boys what to say when a woman is both."

He paused, long enough to dig himself out of a hole, and said, "Well, Hazel, as with you, I'm speechless." She smiled in triumph. It was then I learned that women are the superior of the species.

The danger in either/or thinking is that it doesn't encompass everything. There are a lot of both/ands. Nicolas de Cusa wrote, "coincidentia oppositorum," the union of opposites. A medieval philosopher, ecclesiastic, and theologian, he said that the rigid Laws of Thought of either/or and nothing else were inadequate. Life included more than either/or and both/and. Upward isn't possible unless there is a downward although virtue is possible without vice while vice is impossible without virtue. Sometimes a virtue is a vice as when the poor steal bread to feed a starving child.

Which brings us to a garden's design. Vegetables and flowers don't have to be planted in different beds. Front yards don't have to be either Kentucky blue grass or gravel. Gardeners can mix opposites. A front yard can be turned into a vegetable garden. Even conventional Southern California water authorities have begun to advocate replacing grass with vegetable gardens. If people are nuts about gravel, they can run gravel paths amongst the vegetables.

Gravel heats the front yard. Spending a summer's afternoon in a field of boulders teaches anyone that rocks mean heat. A vegetable or flower bed is far more cooling than ground up rock. Gravel is global warming's friend.

Also, flowers can be placed amongst the vegetables. The yellows of blanket flowers (Gaillarida pinnatifida) and firewheels (Gaillardia pulchella) make an eye-catching accompaniment to the red leaves of beets. A few dill plants, slim and graceful, towering above such a bed set it off as though it were a still life painting.

The purpose of Kentucky blue grass is turf, providing a field on which people can walk, run, jump, and play. Not many front yards are used as turf. Gravel front yards, in addition to heating the property's atmosphere, make the inhabitants look unwelcoming and forbidding, something like a military disciplinary barracks for the miscreants, the AWOL, and the deserters.

If householders are too slothful to plant flowers and vegetables in their front yards but want something green to avoid heating up their property, several native grasses are gifts. In the first place, they use little water which is why they are called "native grasses." They remain green, and require an annual mowing with a weed whacker in the late spring after their seed stems drop their seeds.

For shady parts of the garden, red fescue (Festuca rubra) works well. A green sod, rather than a clump grass, it tolerates a wide variety of soils and requires only 18" inches of water a year. If uncut, the grass lies down in swirls.

Sheep fescue (Festuca ovina) is a perennial bunch grass, rather than a sod. A green native, it is found in forest clearings and rocky slopes. Tolerating various soils, it can be grown in part and full sun, requiring only 12" of water a year. When densely planted it forms peaks and swirls. A variation of sheep fescue is blue fescue which can be used as a lawn or as an ornamental. It is really quite beautiful.

Arizona fescue (Festuca arizonica) is another bunch grass that cohabits well with ponderosa pines. Blue/green, bunches can be planted close enough together to give the effect of a lawn. It cannot be used as a turf but covers the earth quite well.

Going native in the grass is a virtue and beautifully intelligent.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2008

WHEN MY FATHER DIED
The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (11/6/09)

My father died when I was eleven, leaving my mother with three boys in the Great Depression. Everything changed. The country club membership was terminated. We moved from a large Spanish style house in the foothills to a small bungalow in the old part of town.

No longer "Dr. Tom's son," my biggest change, as I look back, was Oedipal. I drew closer to my grandfather Brynjolf, an intellectual mystic, and my uncle Rolf, an outdoorsman and mechanic. My mother heroically held the family together. I had to pay for my college education, cobbling together the G.I. Bill, savings, scholarships, loans, and work.

In college, a houseboy for a wealthy, elderly woman, I swept leaves and shoveled snow on her sidewalk, down from Albert Einstein's house on Mercer Street, named after General Hugh Mercer, killed at the Battle of Princeton (1777) and one of Johnny Mercer's forbearers.

I made sure I was on the sidewalk when Einstein took his walks. At first, he paid me no mind, then he nodded, after a few more times he smiled, and then he asked me if I were a student. Replying that I was, he asked me about my courses. I said, "Physics, Greek, Shakespeare, Plato, and Medieval history." "Ah, Greek?" he asked. "Yes, sir," I said, "With Dr. Goheen to read the New Testament." He smiled and said, "You tell Dr. Goheen that you can learn just a much about God from physics as from the New Testament."

Dr. Robert Goheen was a considerable person, OSS officer during World War II, Professor of Classics, President of Princeton University, and then United States Ambassador to India.

Dr. Einstein walked on, head bowed, and hands clasped behind his back, leaving me with the question, where is God encountered, or more accurately, where does God encounter? I was fired for spending too much time on the sidewalk.

Dr. Goheen once replied to a question about finding God, "My dear fellow, God is not lost. We are. God finds us, not we him."

After sixty years, I've concluded "everywhere," Jesus' point in Matthew 25, especially where least expected, not shrines or holy places, unless the poor, sick, and dying are holy places. It's not so much a finding as it is an awareness of having been found.

After spending six months off and on in a Dominican monastery
and a Jewish Seminary and studying with Jungians, Buddhists, and Native Americans, I found I meditate best when I'm working in a garden. While gardening is therapeutic, more importantly, it's spiritual, not so much centeredness, but a connectedness, an awareness of a presence.

Soil flowing through one's fingers, plants brushing against one's legs, watching budding seedlings, abiding the withering and death of a treasured plant, admiring a delphinium's beauty, and tasting fresh vegetables are all experiences of vitality, the vitality of God's Presence. Gardens abet an awareness of a Presence, not as an object, but as an aura, a shadow, a Presence, not specific or concrete, but a milieu.

Beyond syllogisms and complete sentences, God is neither an object nor a subject. Any such mindset is an attempted deicide, a fool's errand. What better place to experience the Presence than in a garden, enmeshed in life, the place to which Jesus repaired.

As humans we are limited to our five senses. The spiritual is experienced through the carnal. Gardening's carnal experience uses all of our five senses. It is difficult to walk through a garden, much less work in it, without seeing, tasting, hearing, smelling, and touching, all those carnal experiences freighted with the spiritual.

Some might say this is merely imagination. Albert Einstein would reply, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Imagination is what makes a caress the experience of love. "How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable" would life be without imagination. My mathematics professor, Dr. Alonzo Church, a deeply spiritual man, in an offhand remark after a class on symbolic logic,
said, "Mathematics demands clarity, especially the clarity to know there's mystery." We wonder as we wander out under the sky, holding infinity in the palm of our hands and eternities in an hour.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

A SCRATCH ON THE FACE OF ETERNITY

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7/29/09)

"A scratch on the face of eternity" was the phrase William Faulkner of Yoknapatawpha County used to describe the arts and artifacts of human civilization, such as the petroglyphs left by the "Ancient Ones" on the Colorado Plateau.

As a phrase, it well-describes gardening because gardening is a human artifact, an activity beyond merely hunting and gathering, something human beings do to alter the creation, to leave a scratch on the face of the earth.

Ralph Baierlein is leaving a "scratch on the face of eternity" by leaving some scratches on the face of the earth. A retired professor of physics from Wesleyan University in Connecticut with a doctorate from my alma mater, he lives in a fenceless Continental neighborhood where he grows magnificent tomatoes which may be the crowning achievement of his life. For the clueless, growing tomatoes that mature in the middle of July in Flagstaff is a crowning achievement and seemingly defies the laws of nature.

One would expect a professor of physics to be thorough, physics
being the kind of enterprise that doesn't allow for messing around. From a distance, something that looks like a space station which has lost its way in the galaxy and mistakenly landed in Ralph's backyard is, in fact, his tomato patch.

First of all, the raised bed is protected. It's surrounded by a stout wire fence to keep away deer, elk, and other tomato eating varmints like raccoons. Ground squirrels have been a nuisance some years, but this year, a pair of gray foxes, raising a family under a neighbor’s front porch, eliminated the problem.

The frame—8 feet by 12 feet—is constructed from pressure-treated 4 x 4 inch lumber, joined at the corners by a reinforcing bar. On the inner sides of the frame, a layer of roofing paper and then sheet aluminum keep the chemicals away from the tomato plants.

After the roots of a nearby cottonwood invaded the garden in search of water, Ralph disassembled the frame and added a layer of galvanized sheet metal between the first and second 4 x 4’s.

The tomato bed, about a foot and a half high, is filled with custom soil with annual doses of compost and horse manure. A drip system, controlled by turning on the water at the other end of a garden hose, waters individual plants. Lest the various metal sheets produce a swimming pool, five perforated PVC drainage pipes cross the garden deep underground but on top of the sheet metal to provide drainage.

Ralph's enterprise starts around May 18th with gallon-container-sized tomato plants surrounded with Walls o' Water. The soil is covered with black weedcloth with holes about a foot in diameter for the tomato plants. Planks provide a footing for working around the plants without compressing the soil. An exercise in the conservation of energy, it pays off.

Growing tomatoes in Flagstaff is chancy, and successful tomato gardening reduces the chances of failure. As such, it is a mirror of life. Ralph prepared the soil, protected the tomatoes, fed and watered them regularly. The result has been bounty in some years and disaster in others. Tomatoes “by the bucket daily” in 2004. Curly-top virus killed almost every plant in 2005.

Scientists keep records, not relying on memories which tend either to exaggerate or fade. Ralph has a well-thumbed record book, dating back to 2001, recording the earliest appearance of a fine, rich red tomato and, then, the quantities, like baskets, of fruit he's reaped. Sometimes the tomatoes hit near the middle of July, and more often just after the 20th. This year he began harvesting on July 12th, but productivity has been slow.

Meeting a physicist can be daunting, especially for someone who's messed around in sloppy disciples like literature, theology, philosophy, and psychology, but Ralph's basic pleasantness seeps into the conversation with tidbits of dry, wry humor. He's a New Englander, no frills, fundamental decency, deeply-set integrity, thorough capability, and a bit flinty. A clue is the floor of his and Jean's house, an old-fashioned beautifully kept solid oak floor. Ralph's "scratch on the face of eternity" just might be his backyard tomato patch.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

A GLEAM IN HIS EYE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7/18/09)

"A gleam in my eye" is the way Virgil Frye describes his feelings when in late February and early March, he starts planting his tomato seeds. In his mind's eye, he sees them maturing through spring and early summer, and then later in the summer he sees himself savoring their luscious fruit. His relationship with his garden is not mechanical and distant, but immediate and simpatico. His garden is family.

A longtime widower whose grief is near spent, traces remain, a catch in his throat, misted, down cast eyes, but, happily, he's soon to wed again. Something of a recluse, living near the edge of nowhere on the outskirts of Winona, he's fashioned a place of peace for himself on a slope of land in a forest of junipers at the end of the road. For him gardening's a solitary sport. "Group gardens, like communes, fail because some people work hard but most don't." He believes in self-reliance.

At the entrance to his land are the ruins of the original settlers' cabin, the place they chose because the Ancient Ones had chosen it before them. Occasionally, he finds shards of the Ancients Ones' presence. His place has an aura of history. Virgil believes that present-day inhabitants of the Colorado Plateau would do well to follow the Anasazi in the way they use the land. "We like to think we're just too smart," he says, "and sometimes we pay for it."

Authenticity is his watchword. He didn't haul in dirt to make his garden. He cleared the land of rocks and added organic matter to make the soil. Then he built a walled enclosure of plastic sheeting with a roof he can cut way when the danger of frost is past. Next, he covered the soil with straw which he keeps damp, "a tomato swamp cooler."

He begins his tomatoes from seed because, "boughten tomato plants" are strangers, not family. Using pint-sized containers, he covers the seeds with a few inches of soil, and when the plant emerges, becoming a few inches high, he adds more soil to develop the root system. "I grow root systems not stems." He's committed to what the eye doesn't see, rich, deep soil and roots.

A son of the soil himself, he grew up on a farm in northwest Iowa. A self-confessed vagabond, he settled for a time in Oregon but migrated to Arizona to get away from the wet and rain. One senses he's found a home on that slope once farmed by the Ancient Ones.

As always, the proof is in the pudding. His tomatoes are
spectacular. It's like an alternate reality, once a person steps over the threshold into his large plastic enclosures. Row upon row of tomatoes, some shoulder high, laden with fruit, some as big as baseballs, all in the middle of July. He fusses over his tomatoes as though they were his children. "I want to see my tomatoes progress, rather than just staying alive."

Virgil plants by the moon and credits it with his bumper crop of tomatoes, but he also carefully composts his soil, using only a little synthetic fertilizer at the beginning of the growing season to give his tomatoes a "jump start."

Once a visitor has recovered from the shock of stepping into his first plastic enshrouded tomato Eden, Virgil opens up a second, similar in structure, identical in horticultural opulence, hidden down slope behind some junipers. When asked if he planned to sell his tomatoes, Virgil, stunned in quizzical disbelief as though he had just heard an unspeakable sacrilege, finally replied, "You don't sell your children. This is food, not some old washtub. It's too important for money."

He gives much of it away, but he also cans his own tomato juice and tomato sauce, keeping some of his family around him during winter's cold fury.

Virgil won the "Special Interest" award in the contest of gardens by
the Arizona Native Plant Society and the Flagstaff Xeriscape Council. A tour of all the gardens is from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm, Sunday, July 26. A map is available on line at www.thearb.org.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

Photographs courtesy of Tom Bean

RONALD REAGAN AND TOMATOES

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7/12/09)


An unintended of consequence of President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy was a boon for tomato fanciers in the High Country. When he demanded on June 12, 1987, at the Brandenburg Gate that President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union "tear down this wall," he was referring to the Berlin Wall, but the consequence was "glasnost," an opening up of the Soviet Union which, heretofore, had been a closed society. Actually, under Gorbachev's leadership there had been a gradual glasnost earlier in the 1980's.

"Glasnost" meant, amongst other things, an opening up of Soviet agriculture which meant in turn an opening up of gardens and gardeners in Siberia. Russians have long been known as excellent gardeners, but Siberian gardeners were a special breed of Russian gardeners.

While President Reagan had hydrogen bombs and an end to the Cold War on his mind, a result was the discovery of Siberian heirloom tomatoes. For decades the Soviet Union had been a closed society, especially after the end of World War II, but long before that. Winston Churchill in 1946 said, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent." Actually, an iron curtain had descended soon after the Russian Revolution of October 1917. This meant that the Soviet Union had been a closed society for about 70 years.

During those years of isolation, Siberian farmers had slowly, year after year, developed superior heirloom tomatoes, taking the seed from the best tomato plants and planting them the following year, developing hardy tomato plants with a short growing season. There had been no artificial hybridization from Western capitalist commercial agribusiness, but just natural selection, producing strong, reliable, heirloom tomatoes.

Soviet paranoia about Western imperialism kept the agricultural capitalists out of Russia, leaving the Siberians to themselves to develop robust heirlooms. The Siberian tomatoes are amongst the ironies of horticulture, the blessings of a communist blowback.

Of course, tomatoes that would do well in Siberia would certainly do well on the Colorado Plateau. One of the problems for gardeners in Flagstaff is that many of the old favorites have a long growing season. The famous heirloom Brandywine takes from 80 to 100 days to mature, leaving the Flagstaff gardener feeling the nip of frost before the first tomato.

Sad it is, but most commercial nurseries don't stock these Siberians, preferring to merchandise the old reliables of Better Boy and Early Girl, which are great early-producing tomatoes. However, the variety has been limited, except for Stupice, another early producer (52 days) from Czechoslovakia.

Perhaps, the most delightful of the Siberians is the Galina with a vine that resembles an adolescent in the throes of growth, all arms and legs. An ungainly vine that is easily espaliered, the fruit comes in clusters of golden cherries, so sweet of taste that they seldom reach the kitchen. Unlike our loppy capitalist adolescents, the Galina is productive, being both early (59 days) and abundant.

Another pleasure is Sasha's Altai which hails from the Altai Shan mountains near China. So remote, that it was considered terra incognita by Renaissance cartographers and was even designated by Medieval cartographers as hic sunt dracones (here are dragons.) Sasha, a barefooted Siberian gardener, walked, unshod, eight miles one way to give Bill McDorman, the tomato seed hunter, seeds from his own heirloom tomato plant.

The plant isn't loppy as is the Galina, but compact and bushy, reminding one of a short, sturdy, hardy Siberian gardener. An early producer (59 days), it is prolific with a prize-winning taste. Unlike Galina which falls out of a cage, Sasha's Altai can easily be contained in a medium sized cage. They are sort of the Mutt and Jeff of the Siberians.

Two other Siberian good-producing cultivars are Perestroika and Glasnost, but if one is looking for a replica with taste of those round, full-figured tomatoes in the supermarket, another Siberian, "Market Miracle," is a good bet.

President Reagan can be forgiven trying to palm off ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches because in his Cold War triumph he opened up Siberian tomatoes for High Country gardeners.

Copyright (c) Dana Prom Smith 2009