IN THE SPRING OF THE YEAR: GRASSHOPPERS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/21/2012)



“In the spring of the year when kings go forth to battle (II Sam. 11:1),” King David stayed back in Jerusalem. Seeing a beautiful woman toweling herself after a bath, he summoned her for a dalliance. The woman, Bathsheba, was the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of the soldiers he sent into battle.



There’s something fishy about a beautiful woman toweling herself off in the middle of the day in plain sight of the king while her husband is off to war. She became pregnant, and the king solved his dilemma by having Uriah placed in a salient where he was sure to be killed. Thus, begins a tale of woe for King David.  One of his sons, Absalom, eventually tried to overthrow King David but was killed in the attempt. The king was saved by his son’s death.



In the spring of the year gardeners go forth to battle grasshoppers. While not as comely as Bathsheba, with them there is no dallying. They’re the gardener’s mortal enemy. There is no staying inside the house or puttering around with idle chores, such as raking up pine needles or pulling nascent, springtime weeds. If ignored, disaster will likely result.




All warfare requires an understanding of the enemy. While it’s hard to underestimate the ferocity of grasshoppers, they suffer from an Aristotelian “fatal flaw,” a moral defect. They’re cannibals. Thus, if one is poisoned, and its compadres eat him, they’ll consume the poison as well. However, the poison has to be specific to grasshoppers because no sensible gardener wants to poison other beneficial and beautiful insects, such as lady bugs and praying mantises.



Happily, such a poison exists. It’s called NoLo which is short for Nosema locustae, a micro spore that infects grasshoppers and eats away at their guts. A subtle disease, it kills slowly. Happily, it infects nothing else, plants, insects, animals, or human beings. It's a single-minded killer. NoLo is baited with wheat bran, a sticking agent, and distilled water, the grasshoppers being attracted to the wheat bran. It’s best applied where grasshoppers naturally congregate amongst foliage or grasses.



Grasshopper warfare is unlike King David’s type of warfare or even the warfare of World War’s I and II where armies are lined up against each other. It is more asymmetrical or what was once called guerilla war, the kind of war in Afghanistan, counter-insurgency. A defensive barrier at the property line to bar the grasshoppers won’t work, like the old French Maginot Line of WWII. They’re migratory and, as their names suggests, they hop. They can’t be kept out. They have to be killed after they’re invaded the garden but before they can wreak havoc.



The really creepy thing is that grasshopper eggs are already buried in the garden from last year’s grasshoppers, like terrorist cells. The enemy within, they’re already in the garden before they appear. An early spring application is necessary to poison the small grasshoppers as they emerge. However, more mature grasshoppers will invade so frequent applications of NoLo are need throughout the season.



Since the killing is slow, a sign that the NoLo is working are lethargic grasshoppers upon which it is easy to step. As a long-term remedy it’s best applied throughout the season, year after year. If a grasshopper is infected as it lays its eggs, the eggs will be infected as they emerge.



In addition to NoLo, the grasshopper wars use an aerial component, the drone-like praying mantis. A particularly voracious flesh eater, it's an ally in the fight against grasshoppers. Happily, they can be purchased for local nurseries or over the Internet and released in the garden.



In addition to the praying mantis, birds and fowl are also allies. They love grasshoppers and are quick enough to catch them. Making a garden bird friendly is one sure way to fight grasshoppers. Chickens, ducks, and geese are great, but they have to be fenced in and tend to trample the garden. My father paid me a penny a grasshopper. It may be gender bias, but small children, especially boys, are quick enough to catch them and aren’t burdened with the icky, crushed green factor.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2012

Dana Prom Smith edits Gardening Etcetera for the Arizona Daily Sun in which this article appeared on March 24, 2012.  His email address is stpauls@npgcable.com.

A PECK OF DIRT

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/21/2012)



When I was a boy, one of my family’s friends was a Secret Service agent. I thought Alf Oftedahl was “really something.” After my father died when I was eleven, I grew close to him. A farm boy reared in Minnesota, he was full of pithy homilies which were in many ways an introduction to the world beyond my home. One of his favorites was: “By the time you die, you’ll have eaten a peck of dirt.” A peck is a quarter of a bushel which is a lot of dirt.



As the years have passed, its message about not getting carried away with ourselves and our importance comes to mind, as in Genesis 2:7: “then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground.” It’s important to remember where we come from, “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”



However, since this is not a sermon, we’ll focus on eating dirt. If we’re going to down a peck dirt in our lifetime, we’d better make sure it’s the best gourmet dirt possible. This means using a lot of organic material like compost and animal manure.



In this case only vintage animal manure will do. As Orson Welles once said of Paul Masson wines, use no manure “before it’s time,” which means at least six months of curing before being turned into the soil. One of the reasons for vintage manure is to leach some of the nitrogen and salt which comes from urine. As with human beings, horses, cattle, and chickens defecate in the same place they urinate. Too much nitrogen and salt can be seen in those yellow spots on the lawn after the letting out the dog.



Also, manure from meat eating animals, such as human beings, dogs, cats, cougars, bobcats, and coyotes should be avoided because the feces of meat eating animals often carry parasites and disease organisms. Eating a carrot freshly pulled from the ground is a more rewarding experience if it’s not transporting pathogens. A similar problem arises from using systemic pesticides which poison the fruit of the tree, bush, or vine.



Generally, there are three types of gardening manure, horse, cattle, and chicken. Chicken manure is potent and should be allowed to cure longer than horse and cattle manure because it contains ammonia, a poison. It also stinks because of the ammonia. However, once cured it’s a marvelous fertilizer so it’s wise to cozy up to any friends that might raise chickens. Being nice to horse people also works because equine feces contain lots of plant material, such as hay and straw.



Perhaps, the most effective use of animal manure is to compost it because in compost its strong urine component serves to foster the decomposition of the other material. A friend in Camp Verde often urinated in his compost bin until his neighbors complained which is unfortunate because human urine is very effective in compost.



The ratio of carbon to nitrogen material in a compost bin should be about 3 to 1 shovelfuls of carbon to nitrogen. Too much nitrogen yields a putrid compost bin. Too much carbon means that nothing happens. Coffee grounds and tea leaves are high in nitrogen. Coffee grounds can be picked from any of the coffee houses in town.



Carbon material can include kitchen scraps excluding meat and oil, clippings from the yard excluding woody material, beer mash, and leaves. In addition to carbon and nitrogen, a compost bin needs oxygen which requires a pitchfork to turn the material regularly. With the right ratio of carbon to nitrogen material and a steady supply of oxygen, the compost pile will “cook” at a temperate uncomfortable to the touch.



The next step is turning the compost or manure into the dirt. In Flagstaff our dirt is usually clay or volcanic cinders. The trick is to combine the water holding qualities of the clay and the friable qualities of the cinders. If the dirt is more congenial, so much the better. In any case, dirt transformed into soil with manure or compost, makes a fine dish for Alf Oftedahl’s gustatory peck of dirt, high in fiber.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2012

Dr. Smith edits GARDENING ETCETERA for the Arizona Daily Sun in which this article arrived on 3/17/2012.  His email address is stpauls@npgcable.com.

AWARE OF THE MOMENT

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/29/12)



Rather than tromping in, assaulting nature, Tom Bean, the renowned wildlife photographer, slips in to find his place, sensitively becoming aware of the scene before observing it. One can never understand anything, much less portray it, unless one understands it from within.



Setting out to photograph wildlife in a thicket of Russian sage in my front yard, Tom quietly walked through a throng of bees, looking for that moment when a grasshopper and the purple of the Russian sage coalesced, forming a frame. He almost became a part of the thicket, waiting for a vibrantly colored grasshopper to settle on a succulent tidbit. He set up his equipment, moving cautiously and gently, and then he awaited the moment. Click, click, click, and it was all over. It was a moment of stealthy gentility. Tom is a gentle man.



In an odd way, he has made his name for his work amongst the mountains of the west and their flora and fauna, but his favorite landscape is the prairie’s undulating hills and grasslands. It is almost as though he were a seafarer searching the furthest horizons beyond the rolling seas, letting his imagination “dance the skies,” or as the Psalmist wrote, “take the wings of the morning.”



Perhaps, his favorite experience is the morning after a rain storm when the skies are still clearing with dark and light clouds drifting through the sky. He likes to stretch his imagination, but then, of course, he is an artist and that’s what artists do. His imagination takes him beyond the “surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”



Another of his favorite experiences is on one of those rare days in the high country when there are mists in the meadow. He sees them first in the draw below his house. He immediately races over the few miles to the upper reaches of Walnut Canyon to experience those mists in the deeper and bolder canyon. He likes to immerse himself in the experience. He does not just “get a picture.” He waits to experience the picture before photographing it.



It’s the horizon and what’s just beyond it that draws his attention, but it’s also the tiny and the particular. His mind seems to vacillate between the two, at once talking about the sky and then in the next minute talking about the composition of a bee, a flower, and a bush.



A tall man with a full head of wavy grey hair, a splendid mustache, and a magnificent set of eyebrows hovering above inquisitive grey eyes, he is from the prairies. A graduate of Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, with a degree in wildlife biology, he began as a naturalist and interpreter with the National Park Service in the Black Hills of South Dakota. What better place for a plainsman to become a mountain man than the Black Hills, that curious anomaly of a mountain range smack dab in the middle of the plains. At the park there was a camera and some film, and thus began by fits and starts his life as a photographer, making slides for the presentations to park visitors at what were called “campfires.” So a wildlife biologist begins to become a photographer of wildlife and the wilderness.



Eventually, he roamed around most of the National Parks in the west from Alaska to Arizona, photographing as he went, learning from other photographers and the wildlife he photographed. He says that he always focuses on the eyes of his subject, be it a grasshopper or a human being. After that he sees the composition of the photograph even moving his stance to eliminate things like tree branches that don’t belong in the photograph. In addition to becoming familiar with the scene, he waits until the wildlife feels at ease with him.



Married to the well-known nature writer, Susan Lamb, he has a soul mate on his pilgrimage through the wilderness.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2012

Photographs courtesy of Tom Bean. Dana Prom Smith edits Gardening Etcetera for the Arizona Daily Sun in which this article appeared on 3/3/12.  His email address is stpauls@npgcable.com.

THE ANSWER MAN: What's your problem?

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

Q. Hi! I’m Willard. I’ve got a problem. I moved here from western Illinois, right along the bottom lands near the Mississippi River, where all I had to do is stick a plant in the ground, and it’d grow like crazy, and I’ve been looking for something I could stick in the ground in Flagstaff that would grow like crazy. Can you help me?

A. Ah, Willard, you’re a man after my own heart. I, too, miss places I’ve lived, especially the mosquito infested, heavily silted flood plains along the Mississippi. I think it’s called the American Bottom. We don’t have much silt in Flagstaff. We ship it down state; however, we’re also short on mosquitoes.

Also, if there is one thing I hate, it’s excessive movement: the buzzing about, high metabolism type A, the kind who gets things done that don’t need doing. I’d like just to stick plants in the ground and watch them grow like crazy. What you want is slothful gardening.

I would recommend the onion, the second most popular vegetable in the world. Just stick in the ground and watch it grow like crazy. The tomato, a snooty vegetable, is the most popular of home-grown vegetables but, sadly, requires special attention in Flagstaff. However, that second banana, the onion, is easy to grow in the North Country. Also, the onion is the most popular underground vegetable, beating out by several furlongs the rutabaga, an ugly vegetable.

I’m a tomato aficionado, fancier, and grower with all the heartache that entails. However, I must admit that the lowly onion is as dear to my heart as is the tomato. The high metabolism, type A, get-up-and-go species are good at onions. To do the job right, you need short-season tomatoes, pricey containers, measured watering, careful fertilizing, and special soil. Also, they sometimes suffer fatal air and soil borne diseases. Not to discourage you, however.

Ground is the key as it is with everything else. Onions require a soil in which they can expand, friable, loose, flowing through your fingers. If it’s clay, they have a hard time expanding. Clay when fired is pottery. If it’s sand or volcanic ash and cinders, they can expand easily, but water flows through the stuff like a sieve. The trick is to blend clay with sand or cinders. Happily, we have plenty of both clay and cinders in Flagstaff. Then to make a more perfect union, lots of organic matter should be added to the mix, like horse manure and compost. It may not be Mississippi silt, but it’s a damned good substitute. However, making this soil requires physical activity which you may find offensive.

Being a bunch of leaves, onions require soil with nitrogen which means that it’s smart to grow onions in a bed that had beans the year before. Not only is crop rotation wise, but beans leave nitrogen in the soil. You can also dig blood meal and coffee grounds and tea leaves into the soil along with a nigh nitrogen fertilizer.

Also, onions are water hogs so it’s best to plant them in a furrow, the better to save water. We’re not cheek by jowl with the Mississippi. The easiest way to grow onions is with sets. Seeds are iffy and tedious. Sets are really new onion plants. You can buy them locally at commercial nurseries or from Brown’s of Omaha at www.bopf.com which sells sweet onion sets. The sets can be planted as early as the middle of March, right in thawing mud and snow, which means a six month growing season, and they can be stored a couple of months afterward.

If you’re given to sloth, you may have an iffy ticker. Onions are good for the heart. In addition to requiring modest physical activity to keep your ticker tuned up, they’re jammed with heart healthy minerals, magnesium and potassium, folate, omega-3 fatty acids and dietary fiber. They don’t have salt, cholesterol, or saturated fat. Grow and eat onions to stay healthy. A delightful side dish: onions sautéed, alas, in butter accompanied with sliced home-grown tomatoes sprinkled with sugar. Délicieux.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2012

Dana Prom Smith edits GARDENING ETCETERA for the Arizona Daily Sun in which this article was published on 2/11/12.  His email address is stpauls@ npgcable.com.

2011 HORTICULTURAL CLASS NOTES

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (1/28/2012)

First, the necrology report. Remember good, old Jack Aspen? He suffered from Arbor nervosa. Well, he froze to death last winter. In our Class Year Book he wrote how he’d wanted to “live beside the road and be a friend to man.” At first, he was reported as “went missing,” but then in the spring after the snow melt, his neighbors found him entombed in a berm of snow, ice, cinders, and salt, buried by the city’s snow plows. Although he had extensive roots in the community, he hung around with The Aphids, a street gang, whose leader is called Slime. Looks like he suffered from road salt and “honeydew,” fell over, and was trapped in the five foot blizzard last winter.

Also, I’m sad to report the death of Sally Rhododendron from a failure to acclimatize. She won the beauty pageant her first year. She roomed with Susie Gardenia down in the foreign exchange student dorm. Their sophomore year, they were put on probation for “flashy behavior,” as Dean Henri Lapin-Brosse put it, during the Ice Carnival and Parade. I think he meant flaunting their bare skin while everyone else was stylishly decked out in LL Bean mummy bags suitable for 30ºF below. Officially, the probation report read, “Failure to Adapt.” He predicted they would come to no good end. Sally’s death was slow, but Susie went quickly. Susie had lush dark green hair and lily white skin and used a lot of perfume. Man, were they something! Not the kind you “take home to Mamma.”

Now, the good news. We all remember Scarlet Penstemon and her brother Rocky at the Class Day Ceremonies. Scarlet and Rocky were the first of their family to go to college. Rocky got the True Blue Mountain Award for spending every night breathing heavily on his heirloom tomatoes until the danger of frost was past, some sixty-five nights, a record.

The family even won the Governor’s Acclimatization Award. Their emphasis has been horticultural authenticity, like in Sunset Penstemon. Another authenticity advocate is Freddie Fescue. His nickname was Arazz, short for Arizona, because his great grandfather was a first-settler, homesteading a big spread out near Lava Flow. Well, anyways, his cousin Ferdie Fescue got nicknamed Sheep for reasons that don’t need to be spelled out. He got admitted as a legacy because his grandfather donated Fescue Organic Commons.


You’ll remember that Arizona and Sheep started a fraternity called The Pioneers. Some of our classmates called them The Clumps. They were finally disbanded because of their discriminatory policies for black balling some foppish dude who called himself Colonel Blue Grass. He sported a string tie instead the bolo tie. Talk about out of place. Well, it turns out that Arizona and Sheep were right. Colonel Blue Grass was a subversive, who should’ve been on the university’s Weed Watch and Ward List. Expelled in his junior year for exoticism, thought he was some kind of trophy grass.

Nobody can forget Rosy Antennaria. Her nickname was Pussytoes because she wore little fluffy things on her Wellies. She was a little low to the ground if you know what I mean. Well, anyways, she’s chairwoman of our tenth reunion festivities. She’s got several contests. One is called the Hang-In-There contest, like about surviving winter with the least damage. Jethro Juniper and Gerry Gambel have already thrown their names in the pot. Remember, Jerry was really good at the twist and won lots of dance contests. Even though it was kind of out-of date, he was so good at it that he kept on twisting himself right into a permanent cockscrew. Wouldn’t you know, I heard he’s in some kind of orthopedic treatment down at a vortex in Sedona to unwind him.



This year Pussytoes is accepting flowers only, no veggies. I’m putting in for Rose Woods. She still gets listed backwards as Woods Rose in the alumni directory. Anyways, she gets glossy red hips in the summer. Never seen them, but I heard tell they’re really something when she’s “struttin’ her stuff.” See you at Winter Fest.

Copyright (c) Dana Prom Smith 2012
Dana Prom Smith edits the column GARDENING ETCETERA for the Arizona Daily Sun in which this article appeared in 1/28-2012.  He can be reached at stpauls@npgcable.com.

A COUNTRY AND WESTERN CHANTEUSE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (1/14/12)





“Growing up with chaos, trauma, violence, and alcoholism, music became my lifeline. I picked up the guitar at around age ten and the clarinet and saxophone shortly thereafter. It was a lifeline to some form of spirit and a way to connect with my true self and others. I don’t consider myself to be, first and foremost, an entertainer or actress but music keeps me alive. I can lose myself for hours in the pursuit.”



Lori Crowe’s story is not uncommon for children growing up in domestic violence, victims of abuse, and young men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with stories of unspeakable horror. The experience is terror, a terror not just of the moment, but for months and years on end. I’ve been terrified four times in my life, but they were for a few hours, not years on end. Such a terror as Lori’s, unless it is to dominate of one’s life, eventually means some way of looking back at the experience, not as a victim, but as a victor.



Lori Crowe has dealt with her years of terror with music. She fugues in beauty, carrying her spirit on graceful journeys, not as an escape, but as a re-creation and reenactment of her life’s story. If those who’ve lived in terror want to move beyond being dominated by the terror, they eventually become psychic pilgrims, traveling from being victims, to becoming survivors, and finally to prevailing as pilgrims on life’s journey, becoming “more than conquerors.” It is a journey in which they are liberated from the tyranny of the past the better to celebrate the present and anticipate the future.

Music was Lori’s vehicle for her journey, not merely as an escape, but as a means to power. Victims first see themselves as powerless, and making music, as is any other form of art, is an experience of power, such as making a melody. It also is orderly. Chaos is the life of a victim. We thrive in the stability, knowing we have a purpose.



Another of her fugues during her childhood and adolescence was ranching, horses, and the great out-of-doors. Her father homesteaded a ranch in California’s Gavilan Hills. She experienced the gradual creation of a ranch. If anything, ranching and horses, give a person a sense of power and purpose. She felt an affinity with the land and the sky.



She was drawn to NAU because it was set in the midst of a wilderness. Both she and her husband, Jeff Karl, graduated in 1975. She studied sociology because she liked it and to “gain insight into her childhood.” She says: “I was able to squeeze in classical guitar and saxophone classes, and I found I could make some extra cash playing guitar and singing at various venues around town.” She became a country and western chanteuse.



When she moved into her present home, she replaced the grassed-over front yard with native plants, wanting something of the wilderness, such as blue fescue and wild gooseberry, but in her backyard she set about gradually reclaiming the land for a garden of berries and vegetables. She started out with a couple of small fenced parcels with high anticipations of gradually turning the chaotic debris and detritus left by the contractors into backyard garden. Gardening for her is, as is it for everyone else, an experience of power, turning chaos into a design, enriching the soil, and drawing both beauty and food from the earth.



And so it is that she became a tutor at The Literacy Center, wanting to share the power of language by equipping others to read, write, and speak English so that they could read a menu, a manual, a ballot, a magazine, and a newspaper, as well as carry on a conversation and get an education.



Speaking as a pilgrim, she says; “There is always so much to learn and relearn. So I try to play as much as I can and see what comes of it. My hope is that the listener can feel a similar connection to the musical muse that I do and be uplifted by it.”

Copyright (c) Dana Prom Smith 2012 

Dana Prom Smith edits GARDENING ETCETERA for the Arizona Daily Sun in which this article appeared 1/14/2012.  His email address is stpauls@npgcable.com.

GARDENING WITH THE LEFT EAR

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (12/31/2011)



“I knew it! I just knew it! I’ve told you so often that you never listen!” Meine Űberfrau was responding to the news that I’ve lost some hearing in my left ear for high decibel, highly pitched voices and sounds, the ear I use when listening to lots of people. “It’s not only that,” she continued, “you just tune out lots of times, like in restaurants and noisy meetings, like you’re floating around in midair in some kind of alternate reality. It’s like you’re not there, and I wonder where you are.”



When the audiologist peered into my ears, she said, “Oh, good, they’re clean.” What a relief! After sitting in a claustrophobic cell straining to hear barely audible sounds, she showed me a chart on which the lines plummeted at high-pitched sounds. Then she asked me if I could hear what people were saying in the next room. Puzzled at the question, I said, “Why should I?” I’ve heard enough for a lifetime.



The Preacher in Ecclesiastes was close, “There is no new thing under the sun.” While that’s true, there’s more to it than that. There’s too much noise. There’s not enough time to think, let alone to think before speaking. We live in a society of hard surfaces and rectangles, reverberating harsh messages in strident voices, the clipped brutalities of corporate functionaries. We are overwhelmed by noise. The Swiss philosopher, Max Picard, wrote: “Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence.”



The silence of life in a garden is a boon to the ear, left or right. It’s not the absence of sound, but the silence of life. There is a great line in Genesis 3:8, “And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” The prophet imagined hearing a footfall, the brush of branches against a thigh, a sigh on catching the scent of a rose, the hushed flurry of insects, all indicating a Presence yet unseen. It’s quiet in the cool of the day when the noise of the day is over. It’s in that pause after the heat and clamor when the gloaming draws nigh. Eugene Mason, an English poet at the turn of the 20th century, wrote: “I all but touch Him with my outstretched arm.”



Such a time is the reward of gardening. It’s that time when one can sit down and gather the pieces of oneself, having been scattered throughout the day. There’s something special about a garden in the cool of the day. It’s elemental, connecting all the five senses to the sensations of the garden. It’s gardening with the left ear when everything has been said, shutting out the hard-surfaced noises of shiny, impenetrable buildings, and listening to the silences of life, to Elijah’s “small voice of stillness.”



Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence is about an urban bleakscape where the voices are “talking without speaking,” and “hearing without listening.” It is the silences of indifference, deafened in the racket of subway walls. The voices of a garden’s silences are different, not hard-edged, but soft, the kind that one strains to hear for the listening.


Every garden needs a bench, a chair, or a large rock on which one sat sit and listen to the silences of nature. Cicero, the Roman nobleman, statesman, and father of rhetoric, said, “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”



A good resolution for the New Year is a life attuned to the silences of a garden, a winter’s snowfall, the scent of a rose haunting the air, the songs of birds, the scurrying of squirrels chasing each other upon and down the trunk of a tree. What Picard said of the forest can be said of a garden: “The forest is like a great reservoir of silence out of which the silence trickles.” In a society geared to the harsh, to strident voices, to false promises, to everything hard-edged, the garden is a place to hear a Presence unseen yet heard in silence.



Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

Dana Prom Smith edits the column, GARDENING ETCETERA, for the Arizona Daily Sun in whcih the above article appeared on December 31, 2011.  He can be reached at stpauls@npgcable.com .

DEW DROPS, TEAR DROPS, DIAMONDS, and FLAGSTAFF


Tam Nguyen



I never thought that a pure, white diamond really existed. I laughed when my Dad told me: “Come on, sweety, we are going to see the diamond!” I said to him, “It will not make us full or make money. I want to sleep more! I want to get up late and lie with my warm blanket.” But he still got me up and took me out into the yard. He gave me a glass of hot tea and pointed to the droplets on the leaves, saying “Those are all the pure diamonds”

The early mornings in the highlands of Viet Nam are cool and fresh with mists hanging in midair. The sun peaks through the coffee leaves, casting shadows on the ground, as though the sun in waltzing through the morning.

There were dew drops on the leaves. They were beautiful, glittering in the early morning sun. I played with them, collecting all the tiny tear drops on my glass. I wonder why we had the dew drops because my Dad had not watered the trees yet.

They came from the air, an essence. The mists made them when the temperature and humidity were just right. The process has been working all night before while I was sleeping, relaxed and enjoying my dreams. The earth was still working hard.

While I was playing with the dew drops, my Dad told me about the tear drops. He told me whenever I understand about meaning of a tear drop, I will have an different angle on life. I would appreciate how much life has given me so many wonderful things. The tear drop from mother’s eyes will be forever. She always cares for her children and her family. The sweaty drop from father will be different because he will work and protect his family and provide the food and a house to live. The impurity of sweat and tears is purified by the love of a mother and father.

It was made a pure diamond. It was without price for value. I watched the colors of dew drops with different colors. One is pure, one is have colorful, and another glitters. The dew drops never break down. They just break into two other tear drops when I try to cut it and when I fold the leaf together the tear drop will come together. It was a game that did not last long for me because the sun came up, and all of them disappeared. They dried out.

The value is understanding it! It came from the ideas. We named the dew drop a diamond. The talent of human is one of elements make difference of world. The pure diamond never has the value as the value of working to change the value of world.

The molecules of dew are so wonderful because of flexible of form. They begin from water molecules, and from there they form dew, snow, ice, and water. All these things are process of water to change from water to gas, liquid, solid. Playing with dew drop was a game for me since I was a little girl at country village. Dew drop was evaporated just wonder for me that because of the sun, and the sun was seem as an enemy for dew drop. I was hearing my Dad tell me a story more than listening to him the meaning which he tried to tell me. Years later, I comprehend it. My Dad kept my childhood full of story. It did not make full my stomach of food. But dew drop gave me a wonderful game and a point to thinking. I appreciated my Dad took me out into the yard at early morning and show me dew.

The wonder when I came to Flagstaff in the winter. I looked out from window at the snow, the ice, the crystals, the icicles. It was field of diamonds. The sky was blue. Snow danced with light from sun bright and clear. I opened the door. I freeze-dried. I ran back get mittens, hat, coat, gloves. No more dew drop but crystals.

Tam Nguyen is a Master Gardener and a student at NAU and The Literacy Center. She is taking her oath of citizenship on December 19. Dana Prom Smith edits GARDENING ETCETERA for the Arizona Daily Sun and emails at stpauls@npgcable.com.  This article appear in the AZDS on Saturday, December 17, 2011,

DIRTY HARRY ON GARDENING

DIRTY HARRY ON GARDENING

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (Dec 3, 2011)



Dirty Harry once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” More importantly, Georges Braque, the famous French 20th century Cubist, said: “In art, progress lies not in extension, but in a knowledge of limitations.” So it is with gardening in the high country. If we don’t know our limitations, we’re in trouble, but if we do, then we can have beautiful gardens.

Now, some local negativists gripe and whine about the limitations of gardening in Flagstaff, fondly recalling other climes and cultures where “all you had to do was stick a plant in the ground.” Now, those fondly-recalled climes are often hot, humid, sticky, and buggy, swathed in mosquitoes. More importantly, however, than their short memories of yucky climates is their tendency to “look at the present through a rear-view mirror” to quote Marshall McLuhan. Lot’s wife also stole a fond rear-view glance of Sodom and Gomorrah as she fled their destruction and for that was turned into a pillar of salt (Gen 19:26.)

Rear-view, salt-preserved people aside, gardening is a tutor for the way inevitability and necessity beget creativity. We all work within limits, and it’s important to know them. For Calvinists, it’s the doctrine of freedom within destiny. Freedom is always within limitations, such as being born male or female. This awareness of limitations applies not only to art, but to gardening in Flagstaff.

Although gardens are artificial, human constructions, as are paintings, they’re extensions of the wild, or else they won’t work. The wilderness is the testing grounds for gardens.


Braque began his career painting landscapes in 1908; however, he, alongside Picasso, discovered the advantages of painting still lifes instead. Braque explained that he, “… began to concentrate on still-lifes, because in the still-life you have a tactile, I might almost say a manual space… This answered to the hankering I have always had to touch things and not merely see them.”

Braque likened the genius of gardening to a form of art. It’s reaching out to touch, hear, taste, and smell, to bring life up close and personal. Seeing often keeps things at a distance, as in “over there.” However, if something is tangible, it is limited to time and circumstance. As Robert Frost said, “I play tennis better because the net is there.”

Rather than importing plants from out of our histories or imaginations that don’t belong in Flagstaff, it’s far better to garden with the plants that work in Flagstaff. The sad fact is that we can never fully trust the advice of someone who anticipates making money off their advice whether it’s cars, clothing, or plants. It’s called caveat emptor, buyer beware. It’s not that they can’t be trusted, it’s that their advice needs to be checked. The late President Reagan said, “Trust and verify.”

Most of us have the greatest ever research tool available sitting somewhere in our homes or at work. It’s called the Internet. The things to look for in the search
are climate zones, last and first frosts, length of growing season, water, soil, and so forth. Perhaps, the best guide for gardening in the high country is Busco and Morin’s Native Plants for High Elevation Western Gardens. It’s the real skinny on plants suitable for Flagstaff’s gardens.

We live in one of the most beautiful places in the world. If we take our cues from the splendor around us, we can have gardens in Flagstaff that will rival gardens anywhere. It’s all a matter of accepting the limitations inherent in the beauty of our environment. We’re not necessarily limited to native plants, but if we go beyond, we have to make sure they’re adaptable and not invasively toxic. As it is psychologically, so it is horticulturally, it’s a matter of authenticity, being faithful to ourselves and our place, and not pretending to be someone else somewhere else or, worse yet, wanting to be someone else somewhere else.


Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian and philosopher, told the story of an aged pious man, Rabbi Susya, who became fearful as death drew near. His friends chided him, "What! Are you afraid that you'll be reproached that you weren't moe like Moses?" "No," the rabbi replied, "that I was not Susya."

“Dana Prom Smith © Copyright 2011 Dana Prom Smith edits the column GARDENING ETCETERA for the Arizona Daily Sun in which this article appeared 12/10/2011.

CONCENTRATING THE MIND WONDERFULLY

WATER CONCENTRATES THE MIND WONDERFULLY

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (11/12/11)

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 frugal, do indigenous!

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

Dana Prom Smith edits the column GARDENENING ETCETERA for the Arizona Daily Sun in which this article appeared 11/12/2011. He can be emailed at stauls@npgcable.com.

SHOOT OUT AT THANKSGIVING

SHOOT OUT AT THANKSGIVING

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (11/11/2011)

Several years ago meine Überfrau and I had a shoot out at Thanksgiving over the gravy. She’d asked me to make the gravy and stuffing, writing out the steps in gravy making. I compressed a few. The gravy clotted with free-floating radical lumps. “I just knew it!” she said, “You’re always taking short cuts. You’ve just ruined the whole dinner.” A former first-class flight attendant during TWA’s days of glamour and glory, Gretchen likes things done elegantly down to place cards.


A tense time was had by all. The gathering was composed of people who ordinarily don’t sit down together for dinner. We’d invited my mother-in-law and my former wife. My adult children had prevailed upon us to invite her fearing she’d be alone. We’d also invited two couples, a flame-tressed veganesque Wiccan priestess of fungoid theology who ate all the mixed nuts and her husband, a fleshy carnivorous hummingbird feeder salesman who dislocated the pot rack while leaning over to gaze down my nubile granddaughter’s bosom. The other couple was a sallow Assyrian Orthodox husband, complete with ancient indignations and orthodoxies and claims to ecclesiastical exclusivity, and his Sephardic Jewish wife from South Yemen who was glad to be alive. A malaise underlay the gathering until dispelled by Gretchen’s magnificent feast.

Some gardens suffer the same malaise, something is going on in the garden just below the surface, resulting in a garden that doesn’t thrive. The problem’s deep in the soil. Successful gardening is soil, and soil is “what you make of it.”


The best guests for a soil dinner are those strangely-worded mycorrhizae which aren’t discreet entities like a rock, but fungal associations or symbiotic relationships between the soil’s nutrients and the plant’s roots. Growing on the tips of a plant’s roots, they’re little strands of fungi that pass from just outside the root to inside it. Spooky looking, they resemble a diaphanous spider web or that gossamered stuff used at Halloween. They can’t be seen with the naked eye, lying well below our visual radar screens.

In corporate-speak mycorrhizae are facilitators and in psycho-babble enablers. Although they can be bought, it isn’t necessary because they’re in the soil already, but to function effectively they need soil amended with organic matter, such as vintage cattle, horse, or chicken manure and compost.


Some mycorrhizae are good and some bad, the good are called mutualistic and the bad parasitic. If the soil isn’t composted and too much artificial fertilizer is used, especially heavy doses of phosphorous, the mycorrhizae sometimes turn bad or parasitic. Ironically, sometimes artificial fertilizer withers plants.

As in life, good relationships mutually benefit everyone in the relationship. The plants take up the nutrients and release carbohydrates to the fungi all because of the mutualistic mycorrhizae. Everyone wins. The parasitic mycorrhizae suck nutrients out of the plant and don’t deliver carbohydrates to the fungi. Everyone loses.


As the middle men of a thriving garden, enabling and facilitating the uptake of nutrients, mutualistic mycorrhizae are the sine qua non of gardening. They improve nutrient and water uptake, root growth, and plant growth and yield. They also reduce transplant shock and drought stress.

Amending the soil with organic matter does something else. It helps save the planet, by replenishing the earth rather than consuming it and by cooling the planet through water conservation and increased foliage. Concrete, asphalt, and gravel heat it. It’s thinking globally by sustainable gardening locally. What better way to thank God at Thanksgiving than having a sumptuous feast of manure and compost for the earth!

The Sephardic woman from South Yemen and I got along swimmingly because we both spoke the same Sephardic dialect of Hebrew. She rescued the gravy, vigorously smoothing it out with a wire whisk. The stuffing turned out well. I followed the directions. “For just once in your life, why don’t you do as you’re told?” The shrinks tell us that men often marry women like their mothers.

“Thank” is a transitive verb. It requires a direct object. Remember your direct objects, especially the Presence who is not an object, but the Subject. As the Lord told Moses, "I am." Pity the agnostics and atheists. They just don’t get it.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

Dana Prom Smith edits GARDENING ETCETERA for the Arizona Daily Sun in which this article appeared on Nov. 19, 2011. He can be contacted at stpauls@npgcable.com.

DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES AND GARDENS

DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY




“Dysfunctional family” is an epithet often thrown around nowadays, masquerading as a diagnosis. The problem: it’s meaningless because all families are dysfunctional in one way or another. A diagnosis without a difference, it’s like accusing someone of breathing.

We perceive our experiences through the prism of our personal metaphors. Some think that human relationships are like a machine in which everything works efficiently without intimacy, the parts being interchangeable. Others think of them as if they were cupboards or a parts department, pigeon-holing members as though they were objects unrelated to one another. Both metaphors in terms of family relationships lead to alienation because there are no intimate connections.

More functional metaphors for a family are an organism or a fabric in which the members are involved with one another or closely woven. As John Dunne wrote in Meditation XVII, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”


Dysfunctional families pretty much parallel our gardens. When we first moved to Flagstaff 8 years ago, one of the first things I did was to plant a rhododendron and several forsythias largely because I was still enthralled with the beauty of Princeton in the spring, a halcyon experience now 65 years old. A hymn reads, “New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth.” I’d forgotten that.

I enjoyed Latin in school, but not my sons. A year of frustrations and anger was misspent enforcing Latin. I thought they would like what I liked and become what I had in mind. A folly it is to impose our expectations on others contrary to their interests, abilities, and inclinations. Happily, they’ve forgiven me. When they were in their early twenties, I took them out to dinner with my daughter and asked for their forgiveness for all the ill-tempered and stupid things I had done. I would recommend such an event for every parent.

So it is with gardens. Many wonderful plants don’t do well in Flagstaff, but many do. I kept that rhododendron alive for four years as it withered year after year. The forsythia, Shasta daises, blanket flowers, penstemon, and Arizona fescue have prospered beyond my expectations. One sure sign of dysfunction, nay, insanity, is to keep repeating a failure expecting a success. In short, what works are native and adaptive plants.


Our sense of beauty needs to change when we move from one place to another. I was raised in California with orange trees, Meyer lemons, camellias, bougainvillea, avocados, and azaleas. I miss them, but that should not blind me to the beauty of the ponderosa pines, Gambel oaks, sheep fescue, and quaking aspen.

When I moved to Tucson years ago after 8 years in the East and Middle West, I first thought the desert was a waste. After a year, I began to see its beauty, and when I left, I missed its beauty. I still smell creosote bush when it rains. So it is with the High Country. No azaleas, but, ah, the wildflowers.

Also, that maple I planted at the same time as the rhododendron and the forsythias now shades a once beautiful flower bed. The flowers are now pitiful, pathetic, and dysfunctional. I have to transplant them and put in what the arborists call “understory” plants. Gardens evolve just as do families. Those reluctant Latinists are now worthwhile middle-aged men planning their retirements. My daughter now does the Thanksgiving dinner.


Since we’re all dysfunctional, it’s important to look at the whole of the garden and family. Sometimes plants don’t prosper no matter how much care they’re given. No point in blaming the plant or Flagstaff. The big dysfunction is in not accepting one’s dysfunction. As Oliver Cromwell told the Westminster Parliament in 1650, “I beseech you, in the blood of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” The Westminster Parliament didn’t. We should.



Families bond much like a soldier’s “band of brothers” where forgiveness, tolerance, and trust are the sine qua non of survival and prevalence. So, too, is a garden. Not every member is the same. Not only that, they change with time. Gardens, like our families, are organisms constantly evolving into new shapes and forms. So “faith, hope, love abide.” Gardening is an act of all three.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

Dana Prom Smith edits GARDENING ETCETERA for the Arizona Daily Sun in which this article appeared on 11/5/2011. His email address is stpauls@npgcable.com.