TO A CAULIFLOWER

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

A vegetable, bland of taste, and pale,

A tabula rasa which can be writ

With herbs and sauces, even steamed in ale.

A cabbage bud, a flower plain, made fit

For haut cuisine, a transformed un chou-fleur

By lemon squeezed, roasted walnuts, a dash

Of salt, a feast for any epicure

With buttered flavors of chicken, a cache

In a dish delectable of taste, if not

Une pièce de résisitance, un bon mot

In a cookpot, a toothsome polyglot

And a gustatory light fandango.

At a school reunion that once plain girl

Is now a knockout kicking up a swirl.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2008

AN HERB GARDEN AMONGST THE ROCKS: DILL AND SAGE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/18/08)

The aroma of a freshly picked sage leaf is a great way to begin the day, and the taste of freshly picked chopped dill leaves in a paste of olive oil and garlic over a baked fillet of salmon is a great way to the end the day. Scent and taste are the gifts of an herb garden along with the sight of a variety of attractive plants growing in a garden of rocks. Although touted today as seasonings, herbs are still useful in medicine and for their aromas.

Many of the most popular herbs nowadays originate in the lands around Mediterranean Sea, and it’s important to remember their heritage when planting them in a garden. Generally, they like a well-drained, light, loamy, slightly alkaline soil and lots of sun, and they dislike the harsh climes of the Colorado Plateau. Several sunny hours and protection from winds will do quite nicely. This generally means that an herb garden will do best on the southside of the house and close to the house, like the kitchen door. Avoid those low places into which the cold likes to sink.

Dill, parsley, sage, chives, thyme, garlic, savory, marjoram, mint, basil, oregano, rosemary, fennel, and tarragon are most of the herbs found in a backyard herb garden amongst the rocks. Happily, in Flagstaff we have plenty of rocks in all kinds of colors, textures, and shapes to help retain the warmth of the day’s sun during the evening hours, keeping the garden Mediterranean.

Some herbs, like dill (Anethum graveolens), do quadruple duty. Its seeds are spices, its leaves herbs, and, as a carminative, it helps settle the stomach. Indeed, the name dill comes from the Norse dylle, meaning to soothe. The seeds are more strongly flavored than the leaves, both having a sweet, grassy, tea-life aroma and flavor. Finally, the whole of it is a graceful addition to both a flower and vegetable garden, towering elegantly and delicately above the garden. When glistening with dew after an evening’s rain, it makes for an epiphanous moment. Reaching a height of three feet, it gives the feeling of a leggy colt, and, as such, should be planted to the rear of a rock garden or scattered randomly throughout a garden.

A big plus for dill is that it’s easy to grow, and year after year dill, as a volunteer, will keep popping up all over the garden. Since it’s willowy, it should be planted in small clusters, each one helping the others to stand up, or with stakes.

Dill should not be grown near fennel because dill and fennel like each other and tend to hybridize.

Used with fish and shellfish, cottage and cream cheese, and tomato juice beverages, dill weed, that is the leaves, is a favorite in the cuisine of the Middle East where it is used to season meats and vegetables, such as lamb and spinach. Germans use dill in potato soup, and the Greeks season grape leaves with dill weed. Dill is also used in rice pilaf. Needless to say, the seeds are used in dill pickles.

Dill seeds have been found in the tomb of Amenhotep II. The ancient Hebrews used it for tithing. During the Middle Ages, dill was used to ward off witches, and nowadays a sprig worn on the label could well be used while listening to politicians, television commercials, and corporate pitchmen in the employ of oil, insurance, and drug companies.

Sage (Salvia officinalis) as distinct from dill is a perennial. A bush-like, woody evergreen shrub with a piney-woody flavor, it prefers it dry and suffers with too much watering. It does very well amongst rocks and on borders and likes a warm environment with shade, but not under the trees. Happily, sage can survive Flagstaff’s winters.

A good companion for many plants, including rosemary, cabbages and carrots, it is said to repel insects and could well be planted throughout a garden although it doesn’t like growing near basil, cucumbers, and squash.
As a perennial, it is best replaced every few years. While it can be grown from seed, it is more useful to buy a sage plant from a nursery. For those who strive for horticultural authenticity, sage can be propagated from cuttings.

When picking the leaves, it is best to take only a few at a time. As with many human beings, sage leaves become “more so” with a stronger flavor as they age while the younger are less sure of themselves with a less committed, lighter taste.
The culinary and medical uses of sage are manifold from stuffing to gargle. It reduces perspiration, soothes sore throats, and flavors sausage, poultry, and fish. Its essence is even used in perfumes. While dill is a quadruple threat, sage is quintuple, seasoning, medicinal, aroma, attractiveness, and insect repellant. No wonder Martin Luther said, “Why should a man die while sage grows in his garden?” Indeed, its Latin name Salvia officinalis is the root of our word salvation.

It’s a good thing to have a friend growing amongst the rocks, on the borders, and throughout the garden. Like a good friend, it can survive a little neglect, pretty much take care of itself, make life a lot more pleasurable and dinners memorable. In short, sage is reliable.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2008

AN HORTICULTURAL MURPHY’S LAW

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D. Ph.D. (2/11/08)

Murphy’s Law, named after the aerospace engineer Edward A. Murphy, Jr., reads “If there’s more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then somebody will do it that way.” In other words, someone will always let a slice of bread fall to the floor, buttered side down. While originating in aerospace engineering, Murphy’s Law is applicable to gardening, especially to growing tomatoes and that an annoying plague on tomato plants, early blight with its circular lesions, cankers, and fruit rot.

Murphy developed something else equally as important, called “defensive design,” a way of avoiding disasters that aren’t necessarily inevitable.

Defensive design in gardening begins with sanitation. As in the bathroom and kitchen, the first line of defense against disease is picking things up and washing things off. The spores of the fungus hang out unseen in plant debris, even over the winter, so it’s always pick-up time in the garden.

They also stay in the soil of a diseased plant. Another aspect of Murphy’s defensive design is rotating crops, a practice beneficial for many reasons. Tomatoes should be planted in different beds each year for at least three years. If containers are used, clean the container thoroughly and change the soil every year. Soil can be sterilized with hot water or by covering the soil with black plastic sheets or black plastic bags over the containers for a couple of weeks. However, it’s safest to change soils.

The next defensive design is air circulation. Space the tomatoes far enough apart so that air circulates within the vine. Non-productive branches, branches without blossoms, can be pruned to increase air circulation in the plant. A word of caution: too much pruning will expose the fruit to sunburn.

Overheard watering, such as sprinkling, will likely foster early blight spores and burnt leaves. Dusty leaves are allowable in defensive design sanitation.

Early blight comes about because of conditions favoring the fungus Alternaria solani. In Flagstaff, those conditions are the monsoon season, July through September, when the winds circulate from the south and southeast rather than the west and northwest, bringing moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of California. In other words, Alternaria solani like it moist and hot. Sadly, blight strikes only after gardeners have watched a tomato plant come to maturity. Grief happens.

Tomatoes are best planted early during the dry season so that they have time to develop and thus can more likely resist infestation. If beginning with seeds, make sure that the seeds are certified as disease-free. If seedlings are purchased from a commercial nursery, choose disease resistant varieties and inspect them with a fine-tooth comb. Commercial nurseries like hospitals are hotbeds of disease.

If old tomato plants are used in compost, make sure that they aren’t blighted. It may be wise not to use that compost to enrich the soil where tomato plants will be grown again, just in case spores were undetected.

Since the Alternaria solani are invisible to the naked eye, early blight can only be detected with magnification or after it’s begun. The signs are brownish black bulls-eye circular lesions on the older leaves, and as the blight grows the tissue around the spots may turn yellow. If the affliction is advanced, the stems will be girdled with the cankers and the fruit will rot with freckled and spotted lesions. This means daily inspections.

If these defensive designs are breached, then treatment is possible, such as sulfur dust or the fungicides chlorothalonil, commercially named Bravo and Daconil, and azoxystrobin, known as Quadris. As with any pesticides, read the labels and follow the directions exactly.

Sometimes, defensive designs don’t work and the slice of bread hits the floor buttered side down. At the first sign of infestation, cut, prune, and send the blighted leaves, stems, and fruit to Environmental Services, remembering the times when ripe dusty tomatoes were plucked warm from the vine on sunny afternoons and eaten, bent over with chin-dripping juice.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith

TO A ZUCCHINI

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/8/08)

Sadly, some deny zucchini a fair

Time to shine in gastronomy’s domain.

They disdain such facile veggies as fare

For the crude when they’re suited for champagne.

Sautéed in olive oil, oregano,

A touch of salt, they’re a palate’s delight,

For frittatas a cuisine apropos.

So productive are they, they’re deemed a blight

By some, cheap by others, though they’re held dear

By those favored with discernment and taste.

Sautéed, fried breaded, they’re without a peer.

Even baked in bread zucchini is graced.

Friend, come not asking for my tomatoes

While at my zucchini you flare your nose.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith

LEWIS AND CLARK AND SACAGAWEA

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/2/08)

While watching our three-legged aging yellow lab, Roxie, find a place to defecate, I calculated the time I’ve waited for dogs to relieve themselves. Roxie’s slow, given her age and missing leg, so I had plenty of time. After cruising by the Psalmist’s limit (90:10) of “three-score and ten” or “even by reason of strength fourscore,” I figured I had totaled three months on “defecation watch.”

Meine Überfrau had commissioned me to supervise Roxie while she finished dressing and putting on makeup. Roxie was faster, so I waited again. Backing the car out of the garage, I mumbled “waiting for women and dogs.” When we hit the street, I was shot with a rejoinder, “Well, what about the time you lost us in that crime-ridden neighborhood in San Diego while you were looking for that fancy restaurant in La Jolla? Just how many times have you gotten us lost? By the way, do you know where we’re going?”

I replied, “Life’s an adventure into the unknown, just like Lewis and Clark.” Before I finished, Gretchen fired, “Well, at least, they had the good sense to ask Sacagawea for directions.”

Gardening in the High Country requires a Sacagawea who knows the territory, like the National Weather Service. The first one is: Don’t Fight the Seasons. Don’t even rush them. They have a way of winning. After hints of warming, people stream to the nurseries, wanting to break winter’s bleak grasp with colorful plants, unaware that “one swallow a summer does not make.” Generally, the last date for a frost in Flagstaff is June 10. Bet on it! I’ve lost good money betting against it.

Also, it’s not only a question of the last frost when the air temperature reaches 32°F., but also the last hard freeze when the soils’ surface freezes. The average date for the temperature to dip to 28°F. is May 28.

Now, gardeners don’t have to sit on their thumbs until June 10 if they keep in mind May 28. Some flowers and vegetables tolerate cold. Pansies, violas, and delphiniums tolerate the cold quite well, even a fleeting hard freeze. Planting tulip, daffodil, and crocus bulbs and iris rhizomes in the fall is a sure fire to enjoy pre-freeze colors in early April. Once the tulips and daffodils are spent, wildflower seeds can be sown in the same beds for flowering during the summer and fall.

Onion sets can be planted by the middle of March after the ground
has thawed. Cole crops like kale, kohlrabi, and broccoli love cool weather and tolerate frost well, and, surprisingly, spinach, sugar snaps, and lettuce do, too. Kale is even sweetened by frost.

Also, early spring is a good time to clean out the garden of last fall’s debris and set out NoLo and carbaryl bait to zap hatching grasshoppers.

Then there are tomatoes. A voluptuous and savory treat, frost kills them. Sadly, the answer lies in plastic, that particularly offensive gift of industrial chemistry, to stave off winter’s death rattles. Mini-portable greenhouses, walls of water are a circular series of connected plastic flutes which when filled with water are advertised to protect a tomato seedling down 16 F.

Five-gallon, black plastic containers are excellent pots in which to grow tomatoes because the black absorbs the day’s heat. While the fastidious and fashionable disdain their appearance, they help keep tomatoes warm during the frosty evenings.

Tomato blossoms only set when the evening temperature is above
50°F. Funereal shrouds of black plastic debris bags hung over wire-caged tomato plants help hold in the days’ heat, especially if the plants are next to the house’s radiant heat. Gardening cloth, sold at nurseries, looks better than black plastic, costs more, and works as well. An attractive possibility is double-duty, old-fashioned, heat-producing Christmas tree lights hung on the wire tomato cages, lit for a colorfully spring evening’s delight.

Flagstaff’s growing season is 103 days. As the Psalmist said, “Teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom (90:12)” so that we don’t plant flowers and vegetables before their time.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2008

GRASSHOPPER COUNTER-TERROISM TACTICS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (1/22/08)

Robert Benchley, the great humorist of two generations pervious and grandfather of Peter Benchley of Jaws fame, while leaving the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, asked a uniformed man at the curb to hail a taxicab for him. The uniformed man replied, “I’m sorry, but I’m an Admiral in the United States Navy.” Benchley replied, “O, that’s all right, then get me a battleship.”

I learned more about human anatomy reading his parody, “Through the Alimentary Canal with Gun and Camera,” than any textbook I ever read.

In a grasshopper invasion, gardeners often feel the need of a battleship such as the U.S.S. Iowa with its 18 inch rifles ablaze. The problem is “collateral damage,” a military euphemism for killing of innocent people. Rather than big guns, grasshoppers are better fought with cunning by defeating them with their weaknesses.

Akin to a blitzkrieg, a lightning war, an invasion of grasshoppers can only be fought with counter-terrorist tactics. In war the difference between strategy and tactics is the difference between a plan of action and the means by which that plan is executed. With an inexhaustible reservoir of grasshoppers annihilation isn’t possible. A pre-emptive strike won’t work because they’re everywhere.

The strategy is to cripple and reduce them to ineffectiveness with a series of tactics both repeated and diverse, a comprehensive defense well in place before the attacks begin.

The first line of defense is a lethal series of traps. A fixed line of defense, such as the French Maginot Line in World War II, won’t work because the grasshoppers will pull an end-run, just as the Germans did in 1941. In a mobile defense, the traps are placed where grasshoppers are likely to attack, such as those bare undisturbed spots where the pods of eggs are buried, especially in the garden’s perimeter.

An effective trap is both attractive and lethal. Grasshoppers find wheat bran toothsome. Mixed with either NoLo or Sevin, it is both attractive and lethal, a real winner.

NoLo, short for Nosema locustae, isn’t a poison, but a disease which favors grasshoppers and isn’t a threat to anyone else, such as children, pets, and birds. Sevin is the commercial name for the pesticide carbaryl. While there have been no reports of human deaths from carbaryl, it’s still a poison and must be used carefully as with any deadly weapon. As a recipient of friendly fire years ago, I urge caution since carbaryl is lethal to a gardener’s allies, honey bees, parasitic wasps, birds, and lady bugs.

If carbaryl is sprayed as a big gun, collateral damage will result so it’s best used instead with wheat bran. Happily, carbaryl disintegrates rapidly, loosing its lethal potency, but this means repeated use.

The traps are best laid in barren spots and amongst tall grasses where our allies won’t suffer collateral damage and far away from bird feeders and plants attractive to honey bees. An in-depth defense for those grasshoppers who make it through the perimeter defense are tin cans with both ends cut out, partially sunk in the soil, placed in the middle of the garden with the bait placed inside the can.

Older and more developed grasshoppers will take longer to die than the nymphs. They will become lethargic, jumping about as though drunk, easy target for their cannibalistic kindred.

Since grasshoppers never stop, NoLo and Sevin should be applied regularly from early spring to late autumn. Happily, NoLo has a residual effect and may carryover from year to year, gradually building up a lethal arsenal, even afflicting the egg-laden pods.

The next line of defense is airborne, such as squadrons of birds and praying mantis. Several bird feeders throughout the yard help to develop a resident corps of birds ready to attack from the air. Pods of praying mantis eggs purchased from commercial nurseries can be hung in trees. When hatched they favor grasshoppers. Turkeys and other domesticated fowl, if allowed by local government, devour grasshoppers with gusto.

When spotted, the only response is that of Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, Jr., of World War II fame. “Strike, Repeat Strike.”

Copyright © Dana Prom smith 2008

THE GRASSHOPPER LADY
The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (1/10/08)

An attractive, bright-eyed, well-dressed woman stood beside her car’s trunk handing out plastic baggies filled with an unidentified substance. A stream of customers forked over greenbacks. In the cushy environs of University Heights, the scene had the furtive quality of customers buying illegal herbal substances from a shady entrepreneur on the mean streets of Phoenix. The woman was actually passing out baggies full of wheat bran laced with NoLo, a grasshopper bait. As I approached her, I asked her if she were “the grasshopper lady.” She stiffened and politely replied, “Yes, I’ve got the NoLo you asked about.”

When I told meine Überfrau about it, she said, “Well, just what would you expect? How would you like ‘the manure man’?” “No big deal,” I replied. "D.P., you're really clueless."

Jean Hockman, the woman in question, is head honcho of Flagstaff’s Garden Club, a loosely organized group of Flagstaff gardeners. They meet occasionally to share seedlings and seeds, to listen to an expert, to visit one another’s gardens, and just to hang out with like-minded people. Jean has taken it upon herself to distribute NoLo to her fellow club members in the spring of the year. My curb-side purchase was at one of the irregular meetings. The stuff’s not free. She orders it and divvies it up for Club members.

By the way, if anyone wants to belong to a low demand, no dues club with friendly, intelligent members who love to garden, the Garden Club is a sure bet. Just email Jean at djhockman@npgcable.com to get on the club’s emailing roster.

Back to grasshoppers. They’re a formidable enemy, bringing to mind accounts of mass suicide attacks, coming in wave after wave, unstoppable fanatics, impervious to fear. One theory about grasshopper fanaticism is their cannibalism. The front lines fear being eaten by the rear lines if they stop their forward march.

During advanced training in the army, a retired brigadier of the Irish Guards told me, “Sergeant, never underestimate the enemy. Know him like the back of your hand. Find his weakness, and when he’s on the cusp of an attack, strike at his weakness, not his strength.” So it is with grasshoppers. Gardeners have to know them and never underestimate them, and when they begin to attack, strike at their weakness.

The first thing to know is that they are already in the garden buried in pods of eggs in the soil, laid by grasshoppers last fall. Terrorist subversives, they can’t be seen, but be assured if there were grasshoppers last fall, they’re lying low now during the winter, underground and unseen cells, waiting to attack in the spring.

Grasshoppers have two weaknesses: they’re gluttons and they’re cannibals.

NoLo, short for Nosema locustae, is bait made of flaky wheat bran, sprayed with a suspension of distilled water, a sticking agent, and Nosema locustae spores. Non-toxic to human beings and other forms of life other than grasshoppers, the spores carry a disease fatal to grasshoppers. The death isn’t sudden. Once ingested, the spores pierce the mid-gut and slowly destroy their digestive systems.

In the spring before the grasshopper nymphs have hatched, the tactic of choice is to spread NoLo around the yard’s perimeter in the bare spots where the eggs have been laid. The reason is that NoLo works best on grasshopper nymphs and doesn’t work as well on mature grasshoppers. As Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate cavalryman, said, “I git thar fustest with the mostest.”

As the gluttonous grasshopper nymphs hatch and emerge, they’re ravenously hungry and eat their favored wheat bran laced with Nosema locustae and slowly die. Since grasshoppers are cannibals, NoLo is a gift that keeps on giving as their comrades in arms eat their diseased, dead, and fallen comrades, thus ingesting the disease once again.

Since no one tactic destroys grasshoppers, one shot of NoLo won’t do the job and should be repeated every few weeks throughout the year. It’s a conflict with many skirmishes. Consequently, there’s more to come on the tactics of grasshopper counter-terrorism, so stay tuned. Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, Jr., said it best, “Hit hard, hit fast, hit often.”

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2008

CYNTHIA WARZECHA

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (12/20/07)

In a time when angst, alienation, and vitriol are fashionable, a conversation with Cynthia Warzecha is refreshing. She isn’t angry at her parents or ashamed of the place from whence she has come. She embraces them and sees her life as an adult a continuation of her life as a child in northern Minnesota. Her face shows it as do her hands, resting comfortably in her lap. At ease with her background, she’s at ease with herself and thus with other people.

As she said, “In a Lake Wobegon kind of small town in northern Minnesota there aren’t many diversions, except the local tavern and the outdoors. My family chose the outdoors. I went fishing and agate hunting with my Dad. An outdoorsman, hunting for him wasn’t just a sport, but a way to put food on the table.” Never losing her love of the outdoors, as an adult, she has worked to sustain that world, the natural world, as the artificial world encroaches on it.

As such, she is currently the Area Assistant Agent, Natural Resources and Agriculture with the Coconino County Cooperative Extension, all of which means that she is on the faculty of the University of Arizona’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She’s the first natural resources agent in Coconino County.

Rather than merely embracing her childhood in northern Minnesota, using it as a foundation, she’s has developed it. Her family valued education, but being of modest means, they couldn’t help her. As the first member of her family to seek a college education, she had to pay for it with work, grants, fellowships, and loans. So when she graduated from the University of Minnesota with both B.S. and M.S. degrees, her education was an achievement. She always wanted to accomplish something with her life and saw education as the way to do it.

She has taught English in Germany and worked for the Department of Transportation in Michigan, mitigating the adverse effects of new road construction on the environment, both natural and social, such as the disruption of communities. Her life then and now has been two-faced in that she faces two ways, natural and social and the intra-action betwixt the two.

For her, the world doesn’t work like a machine with interchangeable parts, but as an organism with feedback, each member affecting the others. Rather than external, human relationships with the environment are internal. For her, nature isn’t “out there,” something that human beings observe as an object apart from themselves, such as “going out into nature” as though they were going out into the backyard. Nature isn’t a part but the whole of something, not an object, but the subject. In short, human beings are as much as part of nature as the Ponderosa or Arizona fescue. Her task is to see that the two don’t destroy each other, such as wildfires, which means that she has to work with “all sorts and conditions of men,” as the Prayer Book reads.

Her task is the sustainability of nature, that is, the conservation of natural resources, such as keeping the watersheds healthy and unpolluted. In addition, she works for the welfare of those unprotected biological communities as they intra-act with those pesky creatures who seem bent on befouling their nest. In working with human beings, her ease with herself is her secret weapon. Graciousness always seems to work.

She isn’t on a crusade. She’s doing a job. The job is to sustain nature so that human beings can continue to enjoy themselves as members of nature. For her, the Biblical mandate to subdue the earth is a call to sustain it for generations to come.

A tall, slim, attractive woman who likes to wear sweaters, Cynthia Warzecha is making the world richer for her presence. One of her enrichment activities is teaching a Master Naturalist Class in the fall. Then it all comes together that nature is not only out there, but right here. For her, sustainability is self-preservation for the human race.

MASTER GARDENER CLASS: EXPANDING HORIZONS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (12/3/07)

When I was an adolescent, I thought that Bob’s Big Boy cheeseburgers were the ultimate in fine dining. My mother took me to a fancy French restaurant in Santa Monica, Le Petite Moulin, to expand my gastronomical horizons. Baffled by the menu, I asked her, “What’s escargot?” She said, “It’s French for snails.” I hit the bœuf button. I got filet minion with mushroom sauce. After I scraped off the sauce and mushrooms, I asked the waiter for ketchup. The maitre’ de, a sallow-faced Frenchman with slicked down black hair, a thin mustache, and a flickering sneer, came over to the table and said, “Young man, you may ask for ketchup, but you cannot have it.” At the time, I wasn’t up to the lexical shift, but I got the idea. This wasn’t a drive-in with cheeseburgers, French fries, hot dogs, Cokes, and malts. Eventually, I learned that over the rim of my horizon lay a whole world of cuisine.

So it is with the Master Gardener Class coming up Wednesday, February 6. There is a lot more to gardening in the High Country than horticultural chili dogs. Freddi Steele who is in the current Master Gardener Class is also a naturalist with the National Park Service at the Grand Canyon. She’s said, “It’s an excellent opportunity to study with the best in the fields of horticulture, water conservation, high altitude gardening, and arboriculture in the Southwest.” This coming from an expert herself. There’s nothing like getting it straight from the horse’s mouth especially on subjects about which so many people have opinions but little information.

Karen Cooper, our City Council member, after years of listening to political flapdoodle, said it plainly and simply. “It’s really nice to hear from people who know what they’re talking about.”

When Dave and Jean Hockman retired to Flagstaff several years ago, Jean signed up for the Master Gardener Class. “It was a great decision,” she said, “introducing me to an absorbing new hobby and to new friends.” The absorbing new hobby is getting closer to the earth, an activity much needed in a time of so much glass, steel, concrete, and asphalt. If someone is looking for down-to-earth friends, gardeners are a safe bet. As with a lot of people who work with their hands, they’re open, congenial, and convivial.

Linda Chan’s experience has been simple. She wanted to be a better gardener than she already was. “It’s been things like compost for my garden. I knew a little about it, but now I know a lot more, and my garden’s better for it.” As an insurance agent, Linda knows the value of property and how much a good garden increases property values.

The people who take the Master Gardener Class are a cross-section of Flagstaff, but they all have one thing in common. They want to be better gardeners. This means expanding their knowledge of gardening. In the class a person not only learns about landscaping, plants, soil, water, and fertilizer, but also how to find out more. In addition to that knowledge, they also become a part of a community of gardeners. In a society in which so many people are strangers, a sense of community goes a long way.

The final test of a course is the pay-off. There’s no better pay-off than a beautiful yard, great flowers, and abundant vegetables. Just learning about growing tomatoes in Flagstaff is reward enough.

Hattie Braun is the impresario of this horticultural repertoire company, not of thousands, but of about ten. Her shows, matinees all with a different show each afternoon, run on Wednesday afternoons from 1:30 to 4:30 with an intermission, starting their run on February 6 and finishing on May 14. The stage will be dark March 19. The tickets are $200.00 for the fourteen shows and includes the Arizona Master Gardener Manual, a comprehensive playbill. The theater is the East Flagstaff Community Library, 3000 N. 4th St. For tickets email Hattie Braun at hbraun@ag.arizona.edu or call 774-1868, ext 17. Sorry, no the cheeseburgers or escargot.

SLOW GARDENING

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (11/17/07)

Meine Überfrau runs upstairs, hops in the shower, jumps in her jeans, and runs to the store. She’ll be back in a minute. A junket to Trader Joe’s is just a hop, skip, and a jump. Yeah, sure, hopping right over the Mogollon Rim, skipping Black Canyon City, and jumping onto the 101. She hasn’t pole vaulted upstairs yet. I live in dread of clearing the hurdles.

I like to mosey into the day, sneaking into it so that it won’t know I’m there, that is, until I hear that chirpy voice, “I’m awake.” Then, I know my cover is blown. Gretchen says my sotto style is a carryover from my times of stealth in military counter-intelligence and that it’s time for me to change. Fat chance.

What’s appalling is that she’s not unique. Most of the women I know are always running somewhere. When leaving a meeting, they don’t just get up and leave, saying “See ya ‘round.” No, they’ve “got to run.”

Quick living afflicts men as well as women. I watched a middle-aged guy I know fast-walk up the sidewalk in front of our house with stopwatch in hand. He’s reasonably sane, actually quite enjoyable, but, there he was, racing against time, rather than enjoying his walk.

There aren’t any stop watches in gardening. It’s like scratching a dog’s belly. Slow time. Seeds don’t respond to commands, such as, “Hop to it.” When I set out my tomato seedlings in the spring enclosed in their walls of water, I don’t shout, “Now, hit it.” If I did, they’d wither. I wait, slow time, for a couple of months, and then they produce more than we can eat. If people don’t want to wait, then they’re destined to eat those supermarket papier-mâché wannabes.

Like a good pot roast, gardening is done slow time, especially with plants. It’s best to plant them small and let them grow big, allowing them slowly to get acquainted with their surroundings. If they’re double- timed planted big, they don’t acclimate well, suffering shock and desiccation. Besides, who wants a gang of instant teenagers? Part of the pleasure is watching them grow up.

The seasons aren’t on speed dial, either. Some yahoo always wants winter “get a move on.” Such language will likely result in June snowstorms. Pushing the seasons elicits a push back. As my Greek professor said, “Gentlemen, we don’t break God’s law. We break ourselves against it.” That’s certainly the case with global warming.

Into instant gratification, speed gardeners are global warmers who gravel their yards or plaster them with concrete and asphalt. After heating themselves up with their radiator yards, they go inside the house and flip on the air conditioner.

One of the worst things the English ever did was to invent the clock. Actually, the malady of keeping time goes way back to 7th century Muslims. However, the mechanical clock was invented by Richard of Wallingford in 1336. The problem with the clock is that some damned fool is always trying “to beat the clock” which is akin to running “a race against time.” Another chronological malady is being “on time” or, worse yet, “being late.” I’ve even heard fast track, stopwatch gardeners say that their tomatoes are “late this year” as though they were tardy and needed an excuse for the gardener.

A garden takes “its own good time,” like the tortoise in the tortoise and the hare. By now, we should know enough to bet on the tortoise rather than the hare, but we don’t. Harried, we continue betting on the hare. Better yet, we should sync with real time.

Several years ago when rafting down the American River, the rafter, a doctoral student in philosophy at Berkeley, philosophized about running the rapids. “The first principle is: don’t fight the water’s power. You’ll lose and crack your head on a rock or get sucked into a whirlpool. The second is: cooperate with it and you might win. No guarantee, but a fighting chance.” Don’t fight the natural processes, use them, relax, enjoy the ride, and you might get there. No speed trials.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2007

SHOOT OUT AT THANKSGIVING

Dana Prom Smith (11/21/07)

Several years ago meine Überfrau and I had a shoot out at Thanksgiving over the gravy. She asked me to make the gravy and stuffing, writing out the steps for gravy making. I compressed a couple of steps. The gravy clotted with free-floating 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 “just so.”

A tense time was had by all. The gathering was composed of people who ordinarily don’t sit down together for dinner. An inclusive dinner, we invited my mother-in-law and my former wife. My children, all adults at the time, not wanting their mother to be alone on Thanksgiving, asked us to invite her. We also invited two couples, a veganesque Wiccan priestess who ate all the mixed nuts and her husband, a hummingbird feeder salesman, and an Assyrian Orthodox deacon and his Sephardic Jewish wife from South Yemen. 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. As my mother used to say of my academic achievements, “The potential is there, but the actual isn’t.” The alpha and omega of successful gardening is soil, and soil is “what you make of it.”

The best guests for a soil dinner are those strangely-worded creatures called mycorrhizae which are not discreet entities like a rock or a gas tank, but fungal associations or symbiotic relationships between nutrients in the soil and the roots of a plant. Growing in the tips of plant roots, they are 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. Of course, 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 ones are called mutualistic and the bad ones 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 fertilizing a garden with artificial fertilizer withers the plants.

Indeed, 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. The mycorrhizae facilitate or enable the plant through its roots to take up nutrients from the soil.

As the middle men of a thriving garden, 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, by cooling the planet through water conservation and foliage rather than heating it with concrete, asphalt, and gravel. 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 had read and 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.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2007

A RHODODENDRON CAVEAT EMPTOR
The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (12/12/07)

My grandfather, Brynjolf Prom, was a Norwegian ship’s master who left the sea after his brother was swept overboard during a Caribbean hurricane. After leaving the sea, he used his navigational skills as a surveyor, charting the course for the Great Northern Railroad across the high plains. A seaman and a plainsman, he was always on watch, scanning the horizon, deeply set, steel blue eyes underneath great craggy eyebrows peering into the unknown.

He also said, “If you look at the horizon where your line of sight leaves the earth’s curve and travels straight into space, Dana, you’re looking into eternity, and if you could see clearly enough, you just might see the face of God, but, alas, no one never sees that clearly.”

A tough-minded mystic, Brynjolf gave me a sense of wonder and a critical turn of mind, something similar to Ernest Hemingway’s “built-in, shock-proof crap detector.” He often said that doubt is “the growing edge of faith.” As for atheism, he snorted, “Ach, what merit is there in believing in nothing?”

Gardeners need a sense of wonder and a critical turn of mind in the High Country. Beginning in wonder at the beauty surrounding Flagstaff, gardeners have to consider whether or not a plant belongs here. When meine Überfrau and I moved to Flagstaff several years ago, I knew I couldn’t bring my camellias, avocados, and figs, but I craved a rhododendron and some forsythia.

Along with dogwood and eastern red bud, they reminded me of my four halcyon years at Princeton when the world of the mind about which Brynjolf had so often spoken opened up for me. Born and raised in the desert of the West where beauty is sere, severe, and austere with its browns, grays, reds, greens, and granites I was stunned by the voluptuous beauty of Princeton in the spring. After winter’s stillness, all at once the campus erupted in a blazing potpourri of colors, reds, purples, pinks, yellows, roses, whites, and greens. I wanted a remembrance of things past. By the way, my tuition in 1947 was $600 a semester, $2,500 a year including room and board.

In spite of meine Überfraus cautionary words, “I don’t see any rhododendrons around here,” I was determined to have a rhododendron and forsythia. Even with large holes in the clay stuffed with organic material and special care, my rhododendron shriveled each year while my forsythia flourished. Determination a flourishing plant does not make.
Purchased locally, I should’ve “stopped and thunk,” but my lust for a rhododendron kept me from doing “due diligence,” as the brokers say. Asked about rhododendrons in Flagstaff, the sales person looked away, answering faintly, “Well, they’ll need a lot of care.” However, when asked about forsythia, the eyes were straight and the voice firm, “Yes, they do well.” That should’ve been a clue.

Even such a premier gardener as Jacki Hainsworth tried a rhododendron, wanting to bring a little of Pennsylvania with her, but, try as she might, “winter kill,” a Flagstaff malaise, knocked it off. A woman with whom no sensible person would care to mess, Jacki hied herself back to the nursery complaining that she was sold a plant not suitable to Flagstaff, only to be told, “Well, people want them.”

Caveat emptor, Let the buyer beware!

Rhododendrons don’t do well because our soil isn’t acidic enough and doesn’t have enough organic matter. Our climate is too harsh with low humidity and aeronautical winds. Rhododendrons like humidity, protection, acidity, and organic soil.

Jacki has a beautiful, flourishing garden. A Pennsylvania pragmatist, she likes things that work, and as a Master Gardener, she learned what works in Flagstaff.

By the way, a gift of the tuition for February’s Master Gardening Class would make a fine gift for a loved one who loves to garden. Being taught by experts, people who know what they’re talking about, is a rare gift in this age of spin and hype. They not only teach the facts, but also how to find out the facts and, what’s important, how to think horticulturally.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2007

UNDERSTOOD BACKWARDS, LIVED FORWARDS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (11/5/07)

After I signed onto Social Security at 62, I began receiving “get ready” advertisements. First were cheery notes from the Neptune Society. Then, when I went on Medicare, they escalated. After my triple by-pass, they flourished. Insurance companies sent angst-laden, lachrymose messages, reassuring me of their profound concern about my eventual death and my survivors’ anguish as though these concerns had somehow slipped my mind. If I planned ahead, cemeteries offered bargain prices for graves, morticians for embalming, and Arkansas casket companies for caskets. All suggested financing, but no one proposed “buy now, pay later.” Finally, at 80 I got an advertisement from a crematorium. Immediately, images of the gaping, flaming maw of Don Bendel’s mile-long kiln flashed through my mind. Soon, I’ll see vultures circling in the sky dropping notes of condolence

However, lurking in this necrological avarice is a truth. Preparing for inevitabilities frees a person to focus on present. In addition to our memories, today is all we have. Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” Today’s a flash in the pan without hope of living forward. I learned from my heart attack that if I wanted to live longer, I had to change what I ate. Oddly, some heart attack survivors continue to smoke and eat heart clogging foods. Perhaps, Freud was right about death instincts.

The same message is now being delivered to everyone. Unless we change the way we consume our planet, we are in danger of going coronary with floods and droughts. After ravishing our planet, we can hardly expect a tête-à-tête intimacy. Organically enriching the soil, as in composting, is the price for continued bounty.

Although the coming of spring cannot be proven, we assume it as an act of faith. Since the future is unknown and unknowable, save for our beliefs, planning for it is full of ironies. Albert Camus, the French philosopher, novelist, partisan of the French Resistance in WWII, and Nobel Prize winner of a generation previous, wrote: “I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t a God and die to find out there is.”

Yet, planning ahead is a form of art as well as an act of faith. Art is first agitated in the artist’s mind long before it is ever crafted into an artifact. As with life, it begins with conception. Gardeners who’ve bedded their gardens down for the winter begin planning during the winter for the unknown of spring. Their minds’ eyes are canvases on which they express their wintered imaginations. As a “movable feast,” to use the Prayer Book’s phrase, gardens can be fashioned anew each year as the gardener’s insights grow with experience.

Louis Monza, the primitive painter, once said to me during an interview that his paintings began in his dreams. He would get up in the middle of the night to sketch what he had dreamt, and finally, in the morning, begin painting. Gardeners have the same opportunity with their limitless palettes. Monza drew from his unconscious processes in the depth of the night and painted in the daylight what he most deeply felt during those midnight watches.

Art is a confession of the artist’s faith just as a garden is an expression of the gardener’s. Sadly, some gardeners’ faith is bleak with graveled expanses, weed-choked yards, and neglected beds, expressions of a faith gone sterile, hunkered down, barren of hope, without love of the soil.

As Saint Paul wrote, “So faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” The gardeners’ greatest is a love of life and living things. Gardeners even pray for worms, those squirrelly, elusive creatures who enrich our soil. After the wintered midnight of the gardener’s creativity, spring’s day dawns and the gardeners can once again express their faith with their palettes and canvases, shaping their gardens’ designs, refurnishing the soil, and choosing the plants, bulbs, and seeds that best express their dream in the renewal of life.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2007

A GREASE MONKEY’S GERANIUMS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (10/5/07)

I first met Tom Perpich feet first. Lying flat on his back underneath a car on a mechanic’s creeper only his feet stuck out. The garage’s floor was as clean as a fire house’s, scoured and scrubbed, unlike some garages which resemble the Black Hole of Calcutta. However, it was a lot more than a garage for “automotive service;” it was also a nursery for geraniums and other exotics along with being an automobile museum for a classic red Mercedes.

My automotive knowledge is limited to my fading high school memories of an old 1931 Model A Ford which I sold on leaving for the army in 1944. Nowadays, I need guys like Tom Perpich.

Tom, a bright-eyed, smiling, alert fellow, is interesting in himself. After military service in Korea and trying college at ASU and NAU, he decided to follow his heart and do what he liked. Fascinated by cars as a youth, he became a mechanic. In 1975 he opened a shop with Bill Dunnam. Most people go for the money and end up with “lives of quiet desperation,” to use Thoreau’s phrase, but Tom found what he loved, did it, and earned money in the process, “the old-fashioned way.” He “earned it.”

As I listened to Tom about my aging car’s engine and its ills, I noticed vigorous geraniums throughout his shop, a huge split leaf philodendron, a fiddle leaf ficus touching the ceiling, and way in the back against a wall a gothic appearing Norfolk pine, unexpected sights in an automobile garage. At the time, meine Überfrau was having only limited success with her geraniums. So Tom’s geraniums intrigued me. They were so large and colorful that they looked like tropical flora in the upper reaches of the Amazon River.

Now, I’ve never been fond of geraniums. Raised in Southern California, my father thought of them as invasive, noxious weeds. One of my garden duties, in addition to snailing, was to chop them out with a hoe all the while getting a whitish, stinky, sticky, itchy slime all over my clothes, hands, and arms. However, as James Russell Lowell’s 1844 poem, The Present Crisis, reads, “new occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth.” I married a high stepper who likes geraniums.

I asked about his geraniums. Growing them as a year-around plant in Flagstaff, they have to be grown indoors for part of the year. This means the sun of south-facing windows or glass doors. They cannot survive the winter outdoors. Neither native nor adaptable, they are along with tomatoes “trophy flora.” All of Tom’s geraniums run along series of windows facing south.

Tom waters them regularly, using a drip system of his devising which keeps the soil moist so that it never dries out. Geraniums like to keep their feet damp but not wet, delicate creatures that they are. They aren’t drought tolerant.

They like their beds both soft and firm, so either native soil well supplied with compost or potting is a must. As “heavy feeders,” they like a steady supply of nutrients, a balanced diet of equal parts of nitrogen, phosphate, and potash. Tom uses All Purpose Miracle Gro with an attachment to his drip system. However, hand watering and fertilizing will work, also. Geraniums cannot be neglected, like bearded irides, tulips, or daffodils, and still flourish.

As trophies, they need grooming. If they aren’t pruned, they get leggy. The purpose of pruning is shaping the plant and inducing a profusion of blooms. The cut should be made just above a bud and at a slant so that water cannot stay on the cut. A sharp knife or clippers ensure a clean cut. Pruning is best done in the winter months to ensure blooming in the spring.

I asked a friend of mine why there was so much fuss about such problematic, foul-smelling, icky plant. She said, “Because they’re so beautiful, so welcoming on a front porch.” Gretchen tells me that it’s time to change the set of my 1930’s mind. Paraphrasing Saint Paul, “When I was a child, I thought like a child, but when I became a man, I gave up my childhood ideas.” An old dog can be taught new tricks. So, it’s go, geraniums, go.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith

MISS EDITH AND COUSIN EVA

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (9/25/07)

My first parish was in the hills of Kentucky where the cash crops were moonshine and tobacco. With no black church nearby, Miss Edith and Cousin Eva, members of the church, supported my efforts to welcome a black family into the church. The family was delightful, with the wisdom, warmth, and strength of the oppressed who yet believe. Well-liked in the village as long as they stayed in their place, they would’ve been rich additions to the church. Integration is, after all, a change of place.

Miss Edith resembled Popeye’s girl friend, Olive Oyl, only with cane, ear trumpet, and hearing aid. At the village post office, she often passed out birth control literature to worn-out country women trailing broods of tattered children. She always sat in the front pew, ear trumpet in place and hearing aid attached.

Cousin Eva, strong as a horse at 86, stooped, grey-haired, and bright-eyed, took care of a frail Miss Edith at 51. They lived in a large house on a “nob”, a term used in those parts for a small hill. With running water and a newfangled flush toilet, they flushed daily to conserve water. With their peculiarities they were dedicated way back in 1953 to racial integration, birth control, and, oddly enough, water conservation. Ironically, God seldom uses establishment, country club types, but rather the odd and seemingly daft.

While members of the church either supported or acquiesced to the invitation of the black family, the local sheriff’s deputy, leading a gang of rustic thugs low on the evolutionary scale, threatened to torch me and the church. Amidst midnight torches and burning crosses, Miss Edith and Cousin Eva, like Amos of old, cried out for justice in a wasteland. The state is a greater threat to the church than ever the church to state.

Life in other parishes, marches down State Street in Chicago, and demonstrations and jail in Selma, made me realize that integration enriches communities. As in food, it betters our palates with tacos, pizza, barbequed ribs, pot stickers, and even fusion cuisine in uptown eateries. And so it is with gardening. Integration is not simply mixing; it is integrating diverse elements into a whole. Look at the forest around us! It is an integrated organism, each species enriching the others.

An excellent model for gardens, the forest is not rectangular, symmetrical, or geometrical. It was not laid out with a rule, a T-square, or a triangle. Lines are neither vertical nor horizontal, boxing the mind, but lead the mind off on trails of imagination. In the forest, there is always a sense of mystery.

Rather than a buzz-cut front lawn, bound by borders, a wandering path of a sheep fescue, strewn with flat stones, amidst various tall grasses and pockets of irides and daffodils sets the mind and heart free. Curved lines, like the S lines of crouched skiers, are more powerful than straight lines, like the spent lines of vagrants leaning against lamp posts.

Some favor ersatz gardens of gravel, asphalt, and concrete whose rectangular forms stifle the mind and spirit. They spread no joy. They bear no welcome. They have no black-eyed Susans beckoning a mind to wonder at their annual beauty. They sprout only weeds on their barrens.

Speared gladioli and lascivious dahlia set amongst red peppers, dwarf Roma tomatoes, and purple egg plants are French cuisine for the eye with all the color, texture, and taste of meine Überfraus coq au vin.

Integrating a garden, ghettoed beds of flowers and vegetables can be brought together into a whole. Some vegetables make excellent flowers, such as zucchini and artichokes. A wandering line of yellow, purple, and red beets deeply colors a garden. And what a beauty is a sweet red pepper plant laden with fruit. Towering over the whole, serendipitous sentinels of dill add a sense of the ethereal, especially in mornings when seeds beaded with droplets water glisten in the morning sun as though they were crystals of ice. On the wings of our gardened mornings, we can sense eternity in a moment and in the twinkling of an eye fly to the uttermost parts of the universe.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith

AUNT EMILY

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (9/4/07)

Aunt Emily was an elderly, pale, downy-faced myopic Fundamentalist with killer halitosis and a bristling mustache. For seventeen years during my childhood and adolescence she repeatedly announced that the end of the world was “just around the corner” and that I had best get ready for the coming apocalypse. The last time I heard her end-of-the-world sermon was the day I left home for shipment overseas. I feared that the end of my world was just around the corner. Like James Thurber’s “The Get Ready Man,” she was a community curiosity along with the man who kept himself from falling down by hanging on to strap around his shoulder.

Aunt Emily urged me “to set my house in order.” I never understood what she had in mind. However, now I do. The end of the summer is upon us, and the first freeze, une petite apocalypse, is statistically scheduled to arrive September 21. It’s time to set our gardens in order. There is always some unpleasantness on the horizon for which we must get ready, April 15, final exams, I-17 to Phoenix, and September 21. For the skier, it might be the harbinger of glories to come. What’s one person’s meat is another person’s poison.

What the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. We’re on the threshold of taketh away time in the garden. After the good times rolled during summer’s garden party, it’s time to clean up and put away. Even well-tended gardens accumulate debris, and debris is often a haven for creepy crawly, clandestine horticultural terrorists. Get rid of the debris and their cover is blown. It’s CIA outing time in the garden.

Once while I was taking a respite from picking weeds, Aunt Emily found me sleeping behind a huge eucalyptus tree. Poking me with her cane, she screeched in a thin crackle, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways.” Aunt Emily favored the Book of Proverbs. As a ten year old dawdler, I was a sluggard at picking weeds. Alas, now that I’m well past Aunt Emily’s age, I realize that autumn is not a time for sluggards or dawdlers. It is pruning time, a time to get ready for the death, desiccation, destruction, and decay of autumn and a time of gloriously beautiful trees.

The first to feel the knife are those spent, dried-up shoots, vines, and stalks, the likes of corn, hollyhocks, and sun flowers, those annuals and perennials who’ve lost their bloom or been blighted with powdery mildew. It’s sans merci. If pruning and pulling times are put off, then l’apocalypse grande will overwhelm a garden with piles of debris.

In addition to cut, pull, and trim, it’s save time, as in gladiolus corms and dahlia tubers. After the autumnal blitz has struck, they have to be saved because they cannot inherit the winter’s freeze. In short, like high maintenance beauties, they must needs be dusted and saved in a peat moss comforter.

After cut, pull, trim, and save, it’s time to get ready for spring, as in pruning trees and bushes to get rid of dead, diseased, and non-productive branches and stems so they’ll perform better next year. Pruning requires an artist’s touch to groom aesthetically.

It’s also a time to plant the rhizomes and bulbs of such beauties as irides, tulips, and daffodils. If there is one constant in gardening, it’s that there is always some pleasantness on the horizon. The trick is to plant now for glory in six months. Along with planting, nearly everything in the garden needs to be covered with some kind of mulch for the coming winter.

Finally, it’s time to prepare the soil in the vegetable and flower beds for spring, as in spading, digging in new compost and manure, and raking. After the get ready time of autumn, winter gardeners, like sluggards can lie down for a snooze. As they nap and nod with their seed catalogues and gardening magazines, they can dream of spring when, as the Cajuns would say, “Laissez les bons temps rouler” (Let the good times roll).

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith

THE BEAUTY OF COMPOST

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (8/22/07)

As I was turning my compost with a pitchfork, meine rothaarige Überfrau, leaning over the railing of our deck, informed me that Martha Stewart uses only the best and freshest ingredients. I had just dumped coffee grounds, grass clippings, beer mash, garden cuttings, kitchen scraps, and horse manure into the composter. I replied that Martha was talking about the end of the food chain while I was working at its beginning. The fact is that soil is enriched with horticultural off-scourings, gardening beginning with depleted organic refuse transformed by decomposition into fresh nutrients.

As I contemplate the many meanings of turning eighty, I’m grateful to my father for many things, his insistence on education, his Scottish Calvinism, his good humor and generosity, his love for my mother, his moral and physical courage, his ability to tell a great story (my mother accused him of “witty improvisations on the truth”), his love of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Rabbie Burns, and his devotion to fly fishing and gardening. He taught me love of the soil which in these days of asphalt, concrete, and gravel is a great gift. I never quite got the hang of Scotch (Aye, a wee dram), golf, and haggis (oats and sheep innards boiled in a sheep’s stomach,) but I did get the hang of fly fishing, gardening, and love of the soil.

Love of the soil is at the heart of gardening. It’s not seeds, plants, vegetables, flowers, trees, and bushes because they all assume soil. Whether people advocate native plants, immigrant plants, or adaptive plants, they all beg the question of soil. Now, soil is not dirt which is usually clay, sand, and silt. Our dirt in the High Country doesn’t have much silt. It has some sand and has lots of clay which means the need for even more compost. However, we do have the advantage of nutrient rich volcanic rubble which can substitute for our shortage of sand to break up the clay.

Soil has a steady charm. It arrests a person’s attention. In short, soil is a spiritual experience. We come from the soil. Genesis has it that the Lord God fashioned us from the earth, as though we were breath-infused mud pies. We’ve all heard, “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” We’ll all eventually return to the soil. We are of the earth, earthy, for all of our ethereal pretensions.

Enriching the soil, we enrich ourselves, but more importantly, enriching the soil, we become involved in the ongoing processes of creation. When we explore the soil with our hands, we’re no longer observing creation, but entangling ourselves in it. As the great Jewish theologian and philosopher, Martin Buber, might have said, “Working with the soil is an I-It encounter which leads to an I-Thou encounter.” In short, gardening is not merely an avocation, it’s a spiritual quest because spirituality is not experienced ephemerally, but tangibly by touch. Enriching soil is a naturally occurring sacrament, the tactile experience in which we enrich ourselves as well as the soil.

While visiting the gardens at Olivia White Hospice during its annual tea, it hit home once again the spiritual significance of soil. In a facility that deals with the penultimates of life, there is a garden, a garden that is not merely a diversion of beauty but an experience of renewal.

The trails in the garden wind amidst a soil so enriched with compost that it blooms with beauty, each turn of the trail leading to a fresh enchantment and finally a graceful gazebo. Its floor carpeted with paving stones of remembrance, it is a fitting place amidst beauty’s bloom to recall those whom we’ve loved and more importantly those who’ve loved us. As Loni Shapiro, the garden’s major domo, said, “We began with truck loads of compost from Fort Tuthill, and it worked miracles in our garden.” The beauty of the garden bears witness to the miracles of its humble origin.

Gardeners treasure water. A soil enriched with compost saves
water, making for a water-wise garden. Compost begins with the commonest of the common, refuse. “Waste not, want not.” Compost gardening is more than a mere minimal sustainability, it’s an affluent luxury.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith