DEEPLY SPIRITUAL GOOD TASTE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (10/21/10)

Renee Henry’s odyssey as a gardener began with her taste buds. Since her parents are foodies, she began her gustatory journey with a developed sense of haute cuisine, far beyond the average adolescent’s addiction to fast food’s “burgers and fries.” She knew what good food tasted like which eventually led her to home-grown vegetables.

Her parents, though gourmets, weren’t gardeners, save for a few herbs on the kitchen window sill. It took a move to Flagstaff and NAU where she began to connect with nature. She grew up in concrete and asphalt Phoenix where it’s easy to disconnect. She had tucked away in her heart a feel for the great outdoors, stemming from her happy memories of summers spent at a relative’s ranch in Gunnison, Colorado.

At NAU, she met the love of her life, Mick Henry, a forestry student at NAU, a man who had connected with nature as a youth in the small town of Mudgee, New South Wales, Australia. Mudgee’s an Aboriginal word meaning “nest in the hills.” She was in a place that reminded her of some of her happiest times as a child with a man who loved what she loved, a life connected to the soil, the flora of the land, big skies, and fresh air.



One of the catalysts that actually prompted her to start growing vegetables was the menu at the New Jersey Pizza Company which encourages parents to grow fresh vegetables to benefit their children. If God can inscribe the divine Word on tablets of stone, there is no reason to believe that a menu at a pizza joint won’t do, also. It’s always wise to keep on the lookout for the next inscription.



After they “got the message,” since their house in perched on a steep, precipitous slope, Mick and Renee began terracing. Starting at the top, they cleared away boulders and installed compost. As they did this, they also installed a sophisticated system for collecting rainwater to irrigate their terraced garden. The first and highest terrace is well-above the roofline of the house, accessed by a narrow path up the hill. Below it is a large plateau at floor level. After that there are several narrow terraces on a steep decline down to the street. Each of the terraces is planted with various vegetables, Swiss chard, tomatoes, and carrots amongst others.



Their garden became so prolific that their two sons, Ethan, aged 9, and Kyle, aged 7, wanted to sell the surplus produce at the Wednesday Flagstaff Community Market. They asked City Councilman Art Babbott, guru in chief of the market, if their sons could sell some vegetables there. He happily agreed, and, presto, Ethan and Kyle became independent entrepreneurs. Renee says they never have surplus raspberries. Her independent entrepreneurs eat them all at the vine.



Renee points out that one of the beneficial aspects of home-grown food is educational. Her boys know where food comes from. They are not disconnected from their origins. Along with a wider knowledge of food, they also have discovered just how sweet is a carrot recently pulled from the earth. Home-grown and locally grown taste best.



Something more profound also took place with Mick and Renee. The closer they grew to the earth, the deeper grew their spiritual experience. As they pointed out, the experience of burgeoning life and the goodness of the fruits of the earth lead a person to the spirituality of the soil. There is no disconnect. As Renee said, “Gardening evolved into a spiritual experience.” Significantly involved in the life of the Federated Church, Mick works with the church group, Christians for the Earth.

Scattered throughout the plateau are huge, recently milled timbers and immense logs which Mick has gathered from his work as an arborist. Making sure not to shade the gardens, he plans to build a tree house halfway up the bank so that they may not only dig deeper but also see farther.

If people savor fine cuisine, they’ll want to grow their own vegetables, fruits, and herbs the better to please their palate and satisfy their souls.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

Photographs courtesy of Renee Henry

SO MUCH MORE THAN TREES!

Susan Lamb Bean




Here around Flagstaff, we walk among giants. Ponderosa pines frame our landscape, commanding most of our attention for much of the year. Small wonder that some people say the ponderosa forest is a monoculture, nothing more than a whole lot of trees that all look alike.

It’s true that compared to the soaring pines, plants on the forest floor can seem insignificant. In some years it may be late summer before masses of bright yellow flowers make us notice what’s right at our feet.

Yet whether we notice them or not, myriad little beings begin to emerge in the forest in March, increasing in number and diversity as the days grow longer. At first they’re inconspicuous, just ground-hugging, solar-collecting rosettes sporting modest boutonnières — bursts of white petals on alpine pennycress, Kaibab draba’s dinky yellow parasols, dwarf lousewort with its ruffly leaves and ruby snouts barely covering pale stamens pointed downward like teeth.



As the weeks go by, such low-profile flowers gradually give way to larger blossoms on taller plants in a rising chorus of color. By the time of the summer solstice, a hundred different species can have appeared, from locoweeds to lupines, bluets to buckwheats. Fortified by summer rains, warm season grasses spout flowering plumes of varied and complex architecture. More and more plants bloom higher and brighter to tempt passing pollinators: masses of yellow and purple members of the Aster Family attracting hosts of butterflies. The proliferation of flowers slows in autumn and the trend reverses, with one plant after another lapsing into dormancy.

The Flagstaff area is infamous for its erratic weather. The blooming season can last only seven months or as many as nine. Good years can bring two hundred different plants into flower in a square mile of forest, each of them unique in color, shape, and scent.

These sensational displays are not for us, of course. In synchrony with the blooming of flowers, fantastical creatures appear. Hopping, creeping, flying, wriggling, each insect visits its preferred flowers within a distinct temporal territory, a territory in time. Flowers have an impressive array of time-related strategies. Their windows of opportunity can be very limited: the few hours a fly can find an open crag lily, a moth’s dusk-to-dawn quest for an evening primrose in bloom. Fleabanes unfurl slowly each morning, freeing tiny beetles well powdered with pollen while trapped overnight. Pineywoods geraniums stay open around the clock but advertise nectar “for a limited time only.”

Along with their territories in time, wildflowers of the ponderosa forest occupy habitats — territories of place. It’s obvious that they self-organize into communities of plants with similar requirements: the sun-lovers in the open, the shade-lovers on north-facing slopes or sheltered by rocks or shrubs. Beeweed and rabbitbrush flourish in sunny openings that would be lethal for the fairy bells and catchflies glowing dimly down in cool, damp draws.

But the territory of a flower can be more revealing than whether or not it needs a lot of sun. Plants also offer us a tour of the continent. Some are defiantly local, such as Arizona clematis and Flagstaff pennyroyal. Others reflect more distant places. Rarely seen, Huachuca Mountain morning glories bloom here on sunny, rocky ridges where conditions approach those in the center of their homeland to the south. Single big sagebrushes appear here and there in the realm of ponderosas, but flood the Great Basin with a pungent gray sea. Spike muhly is definitely here, but more at home in the southern Great Plains. Blue flag, Iris missouriensis, is a characteristic plant of the western United State that despite its name, does not occur in Missouri.

The big ponderosas are older than any human alive and will be here long after we’re gone. They have a permanence that keeps us all rooted in place. Forest wildflowers — poised to match up with their pollinators within their far briefer territories of time — connect us in a different way, drawing us into the intensity of life lived in the present moment. Each flower’s brief but marvelous blossoming reminds us that the forest is indeed, so much more than trees.

Susan Lamb Bean is a Flagstaff writer and naturalist (www.susanlamb.net)

Photographs courtesy of Tom Bean.

THE WEEDS AND FLOWERS

Tam T. Nguyen

My Dad feed the soul with flowers in the front yard of our house. He planted flowers: roses, daisies, hibiscus, etc. He took care them so carefully. He watered them and picked up the aphids for them. There was a job which I did not like: pull off the weeds. There are Bermuda, nut, and honey grass. My Dad would like me to clean them up for him.

Under the heat of the sun, the heat seems like it killed me with the sweat. It made my eyes spicy. No fun at all! I am thirsty with blurry eyes because I pull a lot of them. I tried to tell my Dad: “Even the weeds, they also have their own flowers. They are green. Why do you try to kill them? They looked nice, too. Although, we give the flowers name, they were also the weed for many years ago.”

This way I negotiate with him that he would let me free to run out with my friends to the field playing with them. He seriously looked at me: “I want you to pick weeds!” He looked scary! Then he left me there.
After the dinner, he wanted to talk to me. He told me he was sorry he was mean to me. Pulling the weeds he want me do that. It is not hard for him. He could do that by himself. But he wanted me to know how to do gardening. I just paid by sweating, and being feel uncomfortable when I could not have fun with friends. My selfish and lazy paid the price for the messy look at the front yard. The weeds are good when they stay at the forest. The natural laws will decide which ones survival or which one will be disappears.

My Dad says the weed invasive to the garden, they will take the water, nutrient and grown out so fast. I might not understand whatever my father told me, but I will understand him some days by somehow, sometimes by tear drop!

Knowing things by working hard, that was a lesson my Dad gave me. It was not easy to understand at that time. It took me for a while to realize about my Dad. I did my job because he had a power to me. I was so busy think about playing game with the neighbor kids. I just was a little girl. I did not enjoy the beauty of flowers. The flowers were simple for my thinking: colors, no spirit.

I did not understand about my Dad well. He spent the earth for flowers. I helped him to gardening work. My job did not make money or extra foods. Because all of flowers at front yard, he never sold them to take money, change for foods. Just watching the flowers bloom, feeling the subtle of them. It was non-sense for me.

My Dad is a father of seven children. He just gave us our daily bread, small house. It was no television, motorcycle, any technology. I knew my Dad is smart man. He could earn more money. He could do some job better than he was a farmer. He could make the front yard with a vegetable and fruits instead of flowers.

My father feed my soul when I was a little girl. He taught me how to know the weeds, flowers, and the wind brought the subtle of the flowers. Many things are going on with the world. They help me think about my Dad again. I understand my father is not crazy man. I am lucky to have him as father. I need to learn more to have knowledgeable of subtle. The garden pointed out for me an interesting. Everything needs a purpose, and purpose depends on the person put on it. My Dad wanted to have flowers only. I just wanted to run out with the friends so I had to accept the weeds. The front yard was full of flowers and weeds before I pulled off the weeds. My Dad say fruit and vegetables for the body, but the flowers and wind are for the soul and its subtle.

Tam T. Nguyen is in the current Master Gardener Class as well as studying at the Literacy Center where Dr. Smith is her tutor.

GARDENING AS CATHARSIS
The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (9/21/10)



Heather Bostian’s garden in Doney Park is showing signs of renewal after the devastating floods following the Schulz Fire last summer. As Heather said, “New wildflowers I’ve never seen before are growing in the front yard. They must’ve been washed down from the Peaks.” In a way, her garden is a metaphor for her life as a healer which began in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her father was a psychiatrist.

However, the real genesis of her garden began at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in acting as well as a M.A. in theatre arts from San Francisco State University. Her garden is theatre; theatre is the sense of Aristotle’s theory of drama as catharsis or cleansing from pity and fear. Heather’s abides herself as a healer, giving people the power to cleanse themselves of pity for their circumstances in life as well as a fear that their pasts will keep repeating their grip in their future.

Save for her house, her entire property was flooded and is covered with several inches of dried mud, caked hard and cracked. It appears inhospitable, and yet from its deathly gray surface between the cracks new life is emerging. For Heather it is a metaphor for her life’s work, new life emerging from destructive set-in-concrete patterns of the past. Ironically, that caked mud contains not only new seeds but also fresh nutrients, once e-coli have expired.

The basic structure of her garden has remained the same, the trees and shrubs. A thicket of Colorado blue spruce, elm, piñon, and elderberry reach out from the side of her house forming a wind break which along with the house itself protects the front yard garden from Doney Park’s winds. Behind the windbreak is another garden with a bird sanctuary, grape vines, and a cactus garden. In the midst of the windbreak is the remnant of a waterfall and pool which the flood damaged beyond repair as though there are some sorrows which are irreparable and are best quarantined, or as Jesus said, “leave the dead to bury their own dead.”

Heather’s understanding of both gardening and therapy is as an integrating coalescence in which all the elements are a part of a pattern. For instance, her plantings are either edible or medicinal or both with such plants as sage, garlic, wild lettuce, kale, red cabbage, and elderberries. At first glance, her garden appears random, especially after the flood, because there are no neatly defined beds. After a long look at ease, a pattern appears: the back half of the garden is for those plants that can survive without much help, but the front part of the garden is for healing and nutritious elements. She plants them where they seem to do best, not where they ought to be planted by grid.

Simply put, therapy is often a liberation from the trammels of the past, those imprints, grudges, tragedies, and slights that hold people back from a renewal of their lives. Since we often embed these psychic blights in our flesh with a stiff neck, an aching back, a headache, knotted hearts into knotted flesh, Heather fuses her therapy with massage and hypnotherapy, touching both the flesh and the secret self, the soul.

Therapy is not only a liberation from the lockups of the past, it’s also a leading out into the light of the new. The word “education” comes from the Latin, ēdūcĕre which means to draw out or lead out. Even with its devastation Heather is planning to transform the ugly sandbagged berms surrounding her house into lovely, meandering planters for her medicinals and edibles.

A metaphor for renewal in which life is neither a squirrel cage, repeating the same old things, nor a slinky with slow improvements over the years, her garden is a journey, transforming the old into the new. While sitting on a patio still encrusted with debris, one can see the old reliables in the yard, still abiding. Also, in the cracked and hardened mud a new and surprising life grows out of the calamity with new shapes and forms never thought of before. What a metaphor for life!
Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

WATER CONCENTRATES THE MIND WONDERFULLY

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (9/18/10)

James Boswell in his Life of Samuel Johnson quoted Dr. Johnson as saying, "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Indeed, it does. After my troopship foundered and split in half at the base of sheer cliffs on the Alaskan coast, I waited for rescue on a disintegrating hulk for a couple of hours, knowing that I wouldn’t last in the frigid water more than five minutes. My mind was concentrated wonderfully. Happily, I was finally taken off by breeches buoy.

The recollection of that experience always brings me back to essentials, fresh air, clear water, and the sun’s warmth, the things that make Flagstaff so desirable. Of course, this is about gardening, that marvelous and mysterious fusion of seed, soil, water, and sun. The prospect of running out of fresh water is akin to the prospect of running out of either air or sun.

In this case, the issue is grass, one of the loveliest aspects of a garden, and one of the most problematic in Flagstaff. The problem is Kentucky blue grass (Poa pratensis), the grass most people favor, consumes lots of water. Although some people seem to suffer from a prodigal son syndrome, everyone else knows that drinking water is precious. Not only is water scarce, it’s also becoming scarcer and more expensive. The city is hiking the water rates, especially for homeowners.

But the problem at hand is the front yards of Flagstaff. Some people favor gravel as a means of solving the water issue. The problem is that it’s ugly, especially when decorated with cattle skulls or rusted-out plows. Worse yet, it heats up the atmosphere, turning yards into a reflecting ovens.

Lawns can be beautiful, cool-looking, neatly trimmed expanses of green. Sadly, they’re, also, ill-used and waste water. Unless, someone is into playing badminton, croquet, or lawn tennis in the front yard, Kentucky bluegrass lawns are wastes.

When in doubt, go native because native works best. When the forest is left alone to do its own thing, it seems to do pretty well, like native grasses. During our dry spells, they need to be watered only once a week to be kept green, and this can be done by watering them with rain water saved in a barrel. They require mowing once a year with a weed whacker after their seeds stems have finally cast off their seeds.

Three very attractive native grasses are Arizona fescue (Festuca arizonica), sheep grass (Festuca ovina), and creeping red fescue (Festuca rubra).

All three can be planted from plugs or by seed. In any case, the ground should be prepared by turning compost into the soil a few inches deep as would be done with any grass. If sown by seed, anytime of the year is all right, save winter, but the best is during monsoon and the second best is early spring.

Arizona fescue is a bunch grass, that is to say, it doesn’t form a smooth sod but grows in clumps which can be grown closely enough together to form a continuous green lawn. As such, it is not a turf grass which will bear lots of foot traffic, but generally front lawns are not heavily trod upon. It throws off a bluish haze.


The sheep fescue is also a bunch glass that forms attractive mounds and swirls, much like a turbulent pond. It’s green. A very interesting variation of sheep fescue is blue fescue (festuca ovina var. glauca.) It is distinctly blue and is best planted in plugs. Its uses are in edging and plots and even randomly scattered.



Creeping red fescue (Festuca rubra) is not a bunch grass, but a turf grass which spreads by seeds and rhizomes. It tolerates shade. If left to grow, it forms, as does the sheep fescue, whorls and cowlicks which are far more attractive that the usual military buzz cut from which front lawns suffer.

There you have it: more interestingly beautiful lawns on less water, less work, and at less expense. Less is more, go indigenous!

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

GARDENING WITHOUT ADULT SUPERVISION

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D




It all began when “Jimmy went crazy,” as Nancy De Blois describes it. To be sure, there was a garden in their backyard before Jimmy took leave of his senses. It was un jardin ordinaire, unconventional, mind you, a haphazard affair, just what one might expect from a differently wired couple. You see, Jimmy’s a well-known musician and performance artist, and Nancy, just as well-known, is an artist who fashions eye-catching mannequins and creates intricate luminaries, those lanterns designed to beckon a visit from the Christ Child at Christmas. To be sure, there were tomatoes and flowers, a circle with chairs and a table, and various things hanging from the limbs of old trees, but nothing to mark it as un jardin extraorinaire.

That is until Jimmy had his vision. It was no grand design accompanied by fiat, “let it be done,” but a vision evolving from looking at fifteen foot high metal leaf. From that a garden began to unfold, an evolution in which one thing led to another as though it were a garden fashioned without adult supervision.

Before we proceed much further, we have to understand that Jimmy and Nancy, as grassroots sustainers and renewers, create out of that which other people have cast-off and rejected, the new out of the old. With the exception of one or two items, everything else in their backyard is either a throw-away or a reject.

They had picked up the begetting leaf at ERIC’S. Now, don’t ask why they would buy a rusty fifteen foot steel leaf. That would require a study into the whirly-gig minds of people who’ve tipped over from conventionality into creativity. At any rate, it was leaning against the trunk on an elm tree when he awakened out of his dogmatic slumbers to creatio ex purgamentum (create out of cast-offs.) He set about removing the rust after which Nancy painted in the veins, and then he attached a Noah’s Ark of refrigerator magnets of various creatures both great and small with sharks at the base. Setting in his “garden theater” are figures of deer from Las Vegas, masks, female figures topped with military helmets, and pots and plants.

Once he had fashioned his masterpiece, he had to create a fetching path from the front yard to the back which he lined in ground with old-fashioned glass insulators from a telephone line which had been strung from Seligman to Lake Catherine, California, in 1929.

As the path rounds the corner into the backyard, it bifurcates into a short path that leads into a delightful, covered patio with chairs, table, and fire pit, surrounded by a low wall topped with containers of flowers and vegetables. These are largely Nancy’s doing. At the divergence are large containers of various types of tomatoes on some kind of jerry-rigged irrigation and fertilization system.

The other path, “less traveled by,” leads to Nancy’s studio past a huge dead tree trunk about twelve feet high with a mannequin perched in the tree’s crook. The dead tree trunk marks a point of privacy beyond which is the door into Nancy’s studio on the one side of the path and a large flower bed on the other. Nancy often sits outside the door creating her intricately beautiful luminaries out of discarded tin cans of various shapes and sizes while listening to classical music. Listening to a Strauss waltz, she felt she was dancing with the asters and cosmos as they swayed to the wind.

Her studio is a wonderland of mannequins, all shapes and sizes, all sexual persuasions, in various states of repair and renewal. Nancy is one of a select group of artists who repair and renew mannequins.

Jimmy’s favorite haunt is the patio where he can play his classical guitar while watching the ants scurry along the patio’s floor made of tiles from a closed-out retailer.

Not only are Jimmy and Nancy beguiling artists and conscientious custodians of the earth, they are also custodians of people. Nancy recently gave a kidney to her sister.

As Paul Jones, the city planner and educator, said, “This is the most creative garden in Flagstaff,” un jardin extraordinaire.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

HORTICULTURAL WRANGLER

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (8/30/10)

NormaLee Roudebush, a third generation Arizona wrangler, following her father, spent her early years breeding, breaking, and training horses, including thoroughbreds, in the Valley of the Sun. She got her start gentling an Appaloosa, but only after being thrown three times. “True grit,” or as the Prayer Book reads, she “perseveres therein to the end.” As a single mother she raised three children and collected two master’s degrees along the way in sociology and education. She came to the High Country when the ranches, fields, and groves of her childhood were turned to asphalt and concrete.

In other words, she’s a tough as nails, wearing the sobriquet, “desert rat” with pride. She’s also kind, tender, warm-hearted, and thoughtful. Walking the halls of Kinsey School, children wave at her, greet her by name, and run over to hug her. They’re all her helpers.

NormaLee’s not only the head honcho of the garden at Kinsey School, she’s also the only honcho. Having finished the Master Gardener Class, she decided to fulfill her volunteer hours creating a garden at the school where she is a substitute teacher. Starting out with hard scrabble, much of it detritus or debris, between two long rows of classrooms, she’s developing a flower and vegetable garden for the school children. The land lies on a slope and is subject to flooding during the monsoons which means mini-gully washers. However, she is indefatigable, this wrangler of yore, going back after every washout, restoring the beds and plants, resulting in a garden of small paths ambling up a slope amidst vegetables and flowers.

She began terracing, using old railroad ties she’d scrounged here and there. As with a lot of gardeners, she’s a scavenger, never throwing anything away and always on the lookout for stuff someone else has thrown away. She started creating soil out of the ground, best described as loose material, hauling out the big rocks to make a teaching circle for the children and then turning compost and organic matter into the remaining loose material, creating soil.

She’s also a finagler, having taken a grant for one project and extending it into three projects by means too complex for ordinary comprehension.

Wall-Mart, Warner’s, the School District, and the City all pitched in, giving her equipment, a composter, tools, and a shed. Also, she has the warm support of the teachers and staff at Kinsey, particularly the principal, Carolyn Hardy. However, she needs more help in funds, material, and sweat equity. Call (928) 773-4060 and leave a message.

In addition to being a wrangler, gardener, teacher, and mother, she’s also a volunteer landscaper at Kinsey School which is how she found herself digging in the schools’ dirt. She saw the need for a teaching garden. Her motivation is providing a garden in which the children, accustomed to concrete, asphalt, junk food, and packaged goods, can dig in the soil, letting it run through the fingers, rubbing a basil leaf in their fingers and smelling the aroma, eating a tomato off the vine, and picking a squash. In an age of electronics, cell phones, computers, iPods, and texting, grounding children to the ground may be one of the most crucial educational tasks.

Perhaps, even more important than connecting with the ground is teaching the children by example the process of creation, how to make something. Most children know how to use things, even use them up, but not much in how to create things, to have a vision and accomplish it. Everyday the children at Kinsey School can look out of their class room windows and see NormaLee fulfilling her vision of the creation, even helping her. It may not be ex nihilo, as did the Lord God in the creation, but certainly wrangling soil out of left-over dirt, making the earth bloom, creating life out of that which was rejected.

She does this, for those who are hale and hearty, with a bad back, wresting from the mute, dumb earth a garden that speaks to the children. The garden's metaphorical message is the meaning of beauty, food, creation, transformation, work, and in persevering “therein to the end.”

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

A QUINTET OF GARDENS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (8/24/10)

Ann Marie Zeller’s garden is a quintet of gardens, each one playing off the others, elaborating variations on a theme, fuguing now and then to parts unknown, sometimes far from the beginning, and then returning to the beat and theme. A quintet is a conversation either amongst strings, winds, brass, or voices. It can be a conversation amongst friends or internally within ourselves amongst the various personae we’ve accumulated over a lifetime. In short, a quintet of gardens is the internal conversation within the gardener or, perhaps, within the gardener’s family.

The garden facing the street, the presenting self, as the shrinks like to say, is the garden that visitors first see, the one that Ann Marie first developed. Somewhat of a fairie garden, its tiny steps and flowering chives lining a narrow path pass under a huge, overhanging pine tree into the back yard. A feminine yard of yarrow and columbine, it welcomes the visitor in a fine lyric soprano, such as Dame Kiri Te Kanawa singing “Come to the Fair,” floating over the path, beguiling the visitor farther into the garden.

But there it ends. Once around the corner in the line of sight
is the wild side garden straight up a steep embankment where the treading is uncertain and the discoveries are those of an abandoned forest, pine, sumac, Gambel oak, tufts of grass, and drifts of this and that. Anne Marie’s daughters hide out in the wild side garden when they want to be rid of boring, responsible adults which means that it’s a garden with hormones out of kilter. It’s a garden of giggles, screams, shrieks, growls, and howls, especially in the dark of night, with the voice of a throaty cabaret contralto, a Tallulah Bankhead voice, trained on alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, beckoning the unaware out of their comfort zones into hidden but forbidden delights.

Smack dab next to the wild side is the stable side, a back yard that looks like what a back yard should look like with a strong baritone voice, something like Thomas Lampson, belting out, “God Bless America.” A proper backyard has to have a lawn, a big expanse of green grass on which children can roll and tumble, games can be played, and dogs can run in circles leaving a few yellow spots here and there. It is a backyard for an old-fashioned 4th of July picnic with Old Glory flying high, hot dogs and hamburgers, sack races, well-worn war stories, and some ruffles and flourishes.

Such a yard gives a sense of stability amidst the swirl of life’s conflict and demands, a refuge of comfort. Maple and fir trees form a backdrop while bearded irises, blanket flowers, yarrow, California poppies, red hot pokers, and lilies border the lawn. Over in a corner next to the house and the wild side are a fire pit, table and chairs, and an outdoor grill sheltered under a canvas canopy.

Literally, there’s a garden’s gate leading from the comfort zone into a garden of organized chaos, a place of vegetables, vines, fruits, a place of burgeoning life and fruition. There are no straight lines, but rather a meandering path amidst a cornucopia of goodness, a tomato plant here and there, a couple of artichoke plants, climbing grape vines, some towering dill, raspberries, huckleberries, mint, lavender, anything that can be eaten. One half expects to see a full-figured Mother Nature standing somewhere amidst the bounty holding out her apron, filled with the fruits of the earth. The only voice possible is a rich, lush contralto, a Marian Anderson singing a Negro spiritual out of the depths of a black American’s experience of the gospel.

Finally, a very small garden on the side of the house with chairs facing a lattice filled with sweet peas, a place of quiet contentment. A place to listen to the three tenors, Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, and Luciano Pavarotti sing “O Sole Mio,” “What a beautiful thing is a sunny day.”

Anne Marie’s garden was one of the two winning gardens in the 2010 Flagstaff Garden Competition. She enjoys visitors, but call ahead.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

Photographs courtesy of Tom Bean.

THE WIDOWS’ GARDEN

James Mast

“Rake that dirt some more, Jimmy. We want it nice and level.” It’s springtime in 1958. I’m in my Grandpa Mast’s expansive back yard in Orrville, Ohio. It’s time to plant the “widows’ garden,” and I’m finally old enough to help. Edna Miller from down the street brought over lettuce, radish, and beet seeds yesterday. Mrs. Yoder from around the corner has just left after dropping off some cabbage plants and a big bag of seed packets–carrots, green beans, yellow beans, corn, spinach, mustard greens, summer squash, and pumpkins (my favorite.) Dorothy Hostetler’s onion sets, tomato plants, and pepper plants are sitting on the back porch.

After Grandmother’s death, Grandpa decided to convert his big vegetable garden into an even bigger communal garden for the many widows in the old neighborhood. The ladies provide the seeds and plants, and Grandpa and my dad and now me, too, plant and raise the garden. Then, we deliver the produce back to the ladies when it is ready. It keeps Grandpa busy and is a great way for him to socialize.

The soil is rich and ready to work. One Saturday, the previous November, Dad and I drove out to the Paulus Turkey Farm and got a load of manure. We covered the whole garden with it so it could sit and soak in over the winter. Grandpa has faithfully done his “garden pits” since fall. He digs a hole in the garden and puts vegetable scraps into it daily until it fills up, and then he covers it with dirt and starts another hole. Eventually, most of the garden has a layer of compost under it.

Dad and I help Grandpa finish the spading, turning every bit of soil as deeply as we could with the shovels. Next, we chop up the clumps of clay and rake the soil into a smooth beautiful bed.

After that, we lay out the rows. Grandpa believes they must be perfectly straight and exactly three feet apart, except for the rows of corn, which have to be wider. He tells my Dad, “Get the stakes and the twine out of the garage.” It takes the three of us an hour to set up the rows, carefully measuring where each one goes and pounding in the stakes to mark each end. Then, we string the twine from marker to marker creating twenty precise rows, aligned from north to south to get the best light. Grandpa shows me how to pull the edge of the hoe against the twine down the length of the row to make the seed trenches.

Finally, we start planting. The pictures on the seed packets are very colorful and the names sound so interesting: Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce, Champion radish, Red-cored Chatenay carrot, Detroit Dark Red beet. Grandpa let me do the radishes. The radish trench is shallow because the seeds are very small.

“No, no, not too close. Spread the seeds out more so the plants will have enough room to get big.” After the seeds are down, I carefully cover them with dirt and tamp them down with the end of the hoe. The empty seed packet is placed on the marker stake so we will know what’s in that row. I ask Grandpa, “Are we going to plant all of this stuff today. “Oh, no, we’re only planting the greens and the radishes, carrots, and beets today. The cabbage plants can go in next week, but the tomatoes, peppers, and corn will have to wait a few weeks until it warms up some more. Go get the onion sets. We can put them in today.”

“Yellow Stuttgart” it says on the bag. Grandpa shows me how to plant each little bulb, top side up and root side down, exactly two inches apart as we worked our way down the row. I cover them with an inch of soil as he follows me tamping them in with the hoe.

“Whew! A lot of work today! But soon everything will be coming up and the widows will be stopping by to see how “their” garden is doing.”

(Dr. James Mast, a dentist in Flagstaff, is one of the original Master Gardeners in Coconino County.)

A SEREDIPITOUS MOMENT

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (8/23/10)

A serendipitous moment it was for Corporal Pam Koch, a Coconino County Sheriff’s Deputy on patrol, when she checked out a car parked on Koch Field Road to see if she could render assistance. Inside the parked car was a young man, neither inebriated nor stoned, counting the number of cones on a pinyon pine. The cone counter was a graduate student studying ornithology with Professor Russell Balda of NAU who is famed for his knowledge of birds in the Southwest, particularly the pinyon jay.

Counting the number of pinyon pine cones, of course, is related to the study of the feeding patterns and habits of birds which led to an ornithological relationship with Dr. Balda, banding of pinyon jays in her yard. You see, Pam Koch is a birder herself who has attracted over 80 varieties of birds to her yard. She’s been featured in articles by Cornell University’s famed ornithological laboratory along with her photographs of birds. She’s also published an article in Wildbird Magazine on her participation in Project FeederWatch, a citizen scientist program. In addition to cruising the highways and byways of Coconino County as a sheriff’s deputy, she’s made her mark as a birder and photographer.

However, that is only the beginning of Pam’s story. She’s also a Master Gardener who’s designed and built with the help of her husband, Lt. Ken Koch, of Flagstaff Police Department, a garden that’s won the 2010 Best Native Plant Garden of the Flagstaff Chapter of the Arizona Native Plant Society. All this has been done in Doney Park where her garden is blessed with great soil, having once been a bean field, and cursed with wind whipping down from the San Francisco Peaks.

The genius of her garden is the relationship between native plants and birds. To attract lots of birds a garden must have lots of native plants, a crucial correlation for gardeners who want their gardens to attract birds. The principle is simple. Native plants grow the kind of food that birds like, especially in the High Country.

First off, her garden is beautiful, not the kind of image that comes to mind when thinking of the forest floor with its scrub grass and occasional struggling wild flower. It is authentically lush. Meandering through the front yard is a stream bed of river rock whose chief function is to drain off water from the neighborhood. Various native plants have been planted on the street side of the stream bed, such as Sunset Crater and Rocky Mountain penstemons, Virginia creeper, Gamble and Pin oaks, and chokecherry. On the house side is a thick green lawn of native grasses.

The front yard is a bit of a teaser. When one rounds the house through the side yard, one finds a horticultural jewel, again a lush lawn of native grasses, a fountain, and a pond, all ringed with native and adaptable flowers, such as Shasta daisies, bearded irises, yarrows, agastaches, black-eyed Susans, and bee balm. A haven, it is a rest for those with stressing occupations, such as policemen and sheriff’s deputies. The effect is complete, the songs and colors of the birds, the scents and colors of the flowers, the soothing pond, a lush, thick green lawn, and the murmuring of the water fall, a garden of its own enclosed by a wooden fence.

Of course, a haven needs protection. Surrounding the inner garden, a sanctum sanctorum, an outer garden forms a protective perimeter, shielding the inner garden from outside onslaughts, particularly Doney Park’s winds and unwanted animals. Enclosing the outer garden of chokecherries, lilacs, sumac, Gamble oak, and mock orange, is a chain link fence hidden by the native plants.

Pam’s garden, the whole of it, but particularly the inner garden, is like Bobbie Burn’s “melody that’s sweetly play’d in tune.”

Next week, Ann Marie Zeller’s winning “A Quintet of Gardens.”

On Sunday, take a Self-Guided Tour of the 13 Gardens from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Maps are available at Warner’s, Winter Sun, and Flagstaff Native Plant and Seed on Saturday and only on Sunday at the Flagstaff Community Market from 8:00 a.m to noon.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

Photographs courtesy of Tom Bean

GARDENING WITH THE NET UP

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (8/10/10)

When going to a party where everyone else is a stranger, it’s nice to have along a friend who knows lots of guests. When Hattie Braun arrived in Flagstaff in 1995 with a master’s degree in horticulture from Penn State, she was a stranger to gardening in the High Country. So, she promptly signed up for the Master Gardener Class, led then by Tom DeGomez.

Instead of stand-offish strangers, she met lots of friendly gardeners who shared their knowledge of gardening in Flagstaff, such as the four challenges of gardening in the High Country: soil, water, wind, and short growing season. The Master Gardening Class turned gardening around for her from woe-is-me to opportunity.

After Tom moved on to other tasks in the forest, she became the Coordinator of the Master Gardener Horticultural Soirée and Fête. In addition to knowing a lot about gardening in Flagstaff, she, also, understands the horticultural shock for transplants from lush lowland climes. She knows what works and what doesn’t.

In addition to that, she’s collected a gang of horticultural virtuosi who know things that only veterans know, good and bad insects, plants that look good and do well, plants that look good but don’t do well, smart watering, and shrewd fertilizer. They’re book-learnt to be sure, but they’ve been around the block more than once and know a lot about gardening in the High Country.

Soil is the starting point of gardening, and as she found out, soil in Flagstaff isn’t what it’s like back home. It needs lots of help. As she says, “It’s almost like we’ve got to make our own.” It has nutrients, but little to no organic matter. There’s a whole class session on adding organic matter to the soil called composting.

In addition to soil, the Master Gardener Class deals with vegetables, flowers, native plants, ornamentals, insects, and water-wise gardening. If people are inclined to go native, the Master Gardener Class prepares gardeners to dress their gardens like a fancy slice of the forest. On the other hand, there are techniques for creating eye-catching gardens, loaded with ornamentals and flowers. For those who want to garden all year, there is a greenhouse tour. And who knows? Someone might discover an entirely new way to garden.

If a gardener wants to turn the yard into a truck farm with row crops of corn, beans, squash, peas, and so forth, the Master Gardener Class is the place to learn. Also, front lawns, the pride and joy of householders everywhere else in the country, are problematic with Flagstaff’s water restrictions and impending rate increases for water.
There are water-smart ways to have beautiful front yards, and the Master Gardener Classes are the place to learn how to make them without reducing front yards to gravel pits with ornamental cattle skulls.

Since Flagstaff is smack-dab in the middle of a Ponderosa pine forest, it’s smart to learn something about one’s environment, like wildfires, bark beetles, and the care of pines trees and their forest friends. St. Ambrose advised St. Augustine who’d moved from Milan to Rome about fast days in Rome, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” In other words, get the lay of the land and hang with it.

The classes, fourteen in number, run from September 14 to December 7 on Tuesday evenings from 6:00-9: 00 p.m. at the Southwest Forest Service Complex at NAU, Room 133. There will be no classes on November 23 and two Saturday classes on September 25 and October 9.
The fee is $250.00 of which $50.00 is refundable on completion of volunteer hours. The Arizona Master Garden Manual is included in the fee.

For applications call Hattie Braun at (928) 774-1858, x 170 or email her at hbraun@cals.arizona.edu.

When asked his opinion of free verse, the poet Robert Frost said that it was like playing “tennis with the net down.” Gardening in those lush lowland climes is like gardening with the net down. The Master Gardener Class prepares gardeners to garden Above the Rim with the net up. It takes more smarts, and it’s a lot more fun.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith

GARDENING AS MEDITATION

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (8/1/10)

Meine Überfrau, a gracious, warm-hearted, and vivacious woman, said to me over oatmeal one bright winter’s morning, "If I were chairman of a committee, I'd sure never pick you as member." She was referring, I believe, to my disposition to prefer my own company. As a high-flight extrovert, she sometimes takes umbrage at my introverted ways, as in, “Come on, say something!”

Gardening can be either an introverted experience or an extroverted one, witness Loni Shapiro’s gang of green thumbs at the Olivia White Hospice Gardens. It’s mostly introverted for me. An occasional passer-by or visitor is just fine. Company is great as long as I am left alone now and then in the garden.

The reason for my churlish behavior is simple. Gardening for me is my principal form of meditation. I cannot meditate sitting still as do some of my Buddhist friends, transfixed by a candle’s wavering flame. My mind gets diverted by my bum knee when kneeling. Besides, the customary stance in the Bible for prayer is standing up straight, a stance of dignity.

My physical body has to be active for my spiritual body to focus. It's not that I'm hyperactive. I'm actually lethargic and prone to sloth. It is pleasant physical activity, such as taking a shower, which relieves my consciousness of everyday existence so that I can experience the ordinary extraordinarily.

Rudolph Otto in Die Heilige called this experience a "mysterium tremdendum et fascinans," an experience that is at once awesome, mysterious, and compelling. Long ago I gave up trying to talk to flat-line thinkers, such as secularists, about spirituality. Now, I just get another glass of wine, shaking the dust from my feet, leaving them to their cynicism as I head for the hors d’oeuvres. If they want to live in a world without mystery, a world “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,” so be it, and a boring choice it is.

The chances are that when gardeners are alone working away in their gardens, they are meditating. It's something like driving on long stretches of a lonely highway. The mind is set free. The tasks of gardening aren't mind-bending. They’re simple once a person gets the hang of it. The real pleasure is not in clipping, spraying, digging, pinching, and planting, but in moving amongst beauty, feeling life slapping one's thigh, catching the faint, subtle aromas of life, and relishing the beauty of flowers, leaves, and even bark. As Gretchen said on watching seedlings sprout out of dry seeds, "I don't see how anyone could not believe in God if they watched this miracle."

Meditating is basically zoning out so that one can zero in. I found this out the several months I spent at a remote Augustinian monastery years ago. For several years, I had been on a spiritual quest to find a way to meditate that was congenial to me, and the Augustinian monastery was a stop on my journey that ended the journey. The monks walked around a courtyard garden chanting and invited me to participate. The more I participated, the freer was my mind to focus.

Their theology didn’t beguile me although I relished theological conversations with them. It was their method. I learned how to pray. And so it is with gardening. If someone wants to pray, the mind must be set free because prayer is at heart an experience beyond the pedestrian, a sense of a Presence, beguiling a person beyond the “dark backward and abysm” of the ordinary into the insurgency of eternity in an hour, infinity in the immediate, and a Presence in a moment.

Albert Einstein said it well, “The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science.”

What better place than a garden? It is not by chance that Jesus repaired to the Garden of Gethsemane to find his destiny. A garden frees our minds of the everyday clutter of obligations, ideologies, and certainties, and allows us to move into the mysteries that one must experience to be able to believe everything else or in anything at all.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

BEARDED IRISES: MESSENGERS OF THE GODS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7/25/2010)

While daffodils are the first wave ashore in the struggle to reclaim gardens from late winter’s doldrums, bearded irises are the second wave, securing spring’s beachhead. A poor man’s orchid, they are one of the most complex and beautiful flowers ever to grace a garden. Indeed, the word “iris” is a Greek word meaning “rainbow,” “halo,” or “messenger of the gods.” John of the Apocalypse writes: “Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, and his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire (10:1).”

Adaptable to the climatic rigors of High Country, irises are both tough and beautiful. Tough means they’re hardy, but it doesn’t mean they can be neglected. They need care, such as nutrients and bedding, and if cared-for well, they will return the care with a nonpareil beauty. Care begins with bedding. The makings of good bedding are aplenty in the High Country, clay, cinders, and compost.

If a gardener has clay, add cinders, and if cinders, add clay. Irises like a soft, friable bed. They also like lots of compost. The best bed has good drainage because they don’t like a soggy bed. But who does? Irises will tend to rot if swamped out.

With irises it’s important to start out well because unlike annuals the beds can’t be enriched with compost each year. Those rhizomes are going to be stuck in that bed for several years. One of the big items in caring for irises is being fertilized with a low nitrogen and high phosphate fertilizer (6-10-10) six weeks before they bloom and right after they bloom and with super-phosphate or bone meal (0-10-10) in the fall. Since irises are all root, they need phosphorus to promote root development. With too much nitrogen, as in lawn fertilizer, they will tend to rot.

Irises do best in a sunny location with at least six hours of sunlight a day. As far as water is concerned, they’re a xeriscaper’s dream. In the High Country, they need water when they’re planted until the new center leaves appear. During dry spells, they’re best watered every 3 to 4 weeks, and again in the spring before blooming. Also, they’re best mulched before the snows of winter with the mulch removed after the last hard frost.

The best time to plant iris rhizomes in the High Country is the middle of August, giving them enough time to get their roots established before the winter freeze comes. After the soil has been enriched, make a shallow hole in the soil about twice the size of the rhizome with a small mound of soil in the center. Put the rhizome on top while draping the roots down the sides of the mound. In Flagstaff because of our cold winters, the soil should slightly cover the rhizome. Do not plant them deep.

Irises can be attractively planted in groups of three throughout a yard, 12” apart, with the toes pointing inward in a triangle. If planted in rows, all the toes should point in the same direction to avoid crowding, spaced 18” apart. Remember to keep the soil in which the rhizomes are planted moist for two or three weeks until the first news leaves appear.

After blooming, the stalks on which the flowers appear are best removed, not to drain energy from the plant. Every three to four years, irises should be replanted to prevent overcrowding and to encourage renewing. This is generally best done a month or so after blooming. Clumps can be renewed by removing the old center of the clump or by digging up the entire clump and removing the old plant and replanting the newer rhizomes with the fans attached.

Irises come in many sizes for many tastes. The tall bearded irises when planted in a circle or triangle appear as though they were a lush aureole of exotic colors hovering above the garden betraying their name “rainbow” or “halo.” When studied, one can even hear the voices of those messengers of the gods.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

EVERY LEAF A FLOWER

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7-2-10)

In the middle of summer with autumn a month and a half off, Albert Camus’ sentence, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower” comes to mind. Every season has its own beauty, especially autumn when the trees’ haunting beauty displays hues of life as the slumber of winter looms. The exception is late winter’s bleak grasp when the snow no longer glistens white, but a dull gray, and the ground is covered with winter’s dead debris. That’s the time to break the dismal spell.

Oddly, late summer is the time to think about that grim interim season when the first flowers break bleak winter’s faltering grasp. If there is anything that would break that grasp, it’s Wordsworth’s daffodils “fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” Autumn’s the time to plant them, and the late summer is the time to order them to get the best bargains and best quality.

While nothing is ever a cinch in the garden, daffodils come close. For the fussy and pristine, they have only one drawback. After flowering, the stalks should be allowed to whither and dry in plain sight. Only when they’re desiccated, should the husks be swept up and taken way. The reason is simple: the bulbs are drawing nutrients back into themselves. After such a glorious display, tossing “their heads in sprightly dance,” it’s heartless to deny the bulb its place at the dinner table. It’s also unwise because if denied, the bulb will retaliate with an ever decreasing glory, ending up like a fashion model sans make-up. Also, after the blooms are spent, the blossoms should be picked.

As with most things, success with daffodils begins with preparation, that is, the preparation of the soil. First, pick a site with good drainage, else the bulbs will be prone to rot. The soil should be friable. If clay, add either sand or volcanic cinders. Compost should be dug in a foot in depth along with 5-10-10 fertilizer. Don’t use a high nitrogen fertilizer because nitrogen will induce rot or excessive leafage. Also, dig in bone meal. Then plant the bulbs about six inches deep. Their “jocund company” looks best either strewn out in drifts or in spots of four or five bulbs here and there throughout the garden. Marching them in line doesn’t do justice to their “sparkling waves.”

They need about 5-6 hours of sunlight a day, so depending upon where they’re planted, their blooming season can be extended. A southern exposure will produce earlier blooms while a northern exposure will produce later blooms, stretching out their blooming time.

After blooming, when the dead stalks have been carried away by the wind or at the hand of a tidy gardener, it’s time to fertilize them with the same type of fertilizer with which they were first planted. Before winter sets in, they should be covered with a layer of mulch.

Also, daffodils can be planted in pots. Indeed, a few pots with blooming daffodils are a cheery greeting on a front walk or a delightful sight from the kitchen window on a back deck. Planting in pots isn’t difficult, but the bulbs are best replanted the next season outside in the ground to be rejuvenated. Pots aren’t their natural habitat. The pot should be six to eight inches in depth and should thoroughly cleansed before using to prevent rot. It’s best to use potting soil because of ease and clean soil. Daffodils require at least thirteen weeks of cold weather. If an early bloom is desirable, after the 13 weeks cold spell, the pot can be brought inside and maintained at 60ºF. three to four weeks.

A display of daffodils is often enhanced with companion plants like grape hyacinth (Muscari armeniancin) or even a variety of daffodils to lengthen the blooming season. When everything is spent, wildflower seeds can be sown in the same plot or drift or other annuals can be planted, extending the blooming season.

While daffodils bring a early beauty to a late winter’s melancholy eye, they also bring the heart pleasure. Wordsworth said it best: “My heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.”

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010