LATIN NAMES FOR PLANTS

Susan Lamb

I remember how bored I was in Latin class, gazing out the window at birds chirping in the trees. I’d been persuaded that Latin would come in handy for its own sake but also as the basis for lovelier languages. True on both counts, but sing-songy grammatical drills and readings from pompous elders of the Roman Republic seemed awfully irrelevant at the time. Biology class was much the same in those days: studying life sciences meant rote-learning of taxonomic terms and performing ghastly dissections. I didn’t see a connection between either of the subjects and the real world that called to me from outside that window.

But life has a funny way of creating connections, of tapping all our experiences and yearnings to assemble the creatures we eventually become. I thought I’d left those rigid disciplines behind when I joined the National Park Service but failed to consider how interpreting the natural world would bring me face to face with my old adversaries: Latin and Life Sciences.

I resisted them at first, preferring folklore to facts and stubbornly refusing to learn the Latin names of plants. Of course, this couldn’t last. Simple curiosity and the urge to do my job properly soon had me reading books and magazine articles about scientific discoveries and learning Latin names.

A world of wonders unfolded! Scientists now have the most remarkable tools to observe the infinite forms and behaviors with which life expresses itself, and they describe much of what they learn using the Latin vocabulary. There are so many stories in those clickety-clack names as well as puns, tributes, geography lessons, pharmacological tips, rapturous descriptions, and most of all, connections.

People everywhere have always given interesting “common” names to local plants they use for medicine, food, and ceremonies. In western culture, it was Greek philosophers who began to organize the known world systematically. Romans adapted Greek names into Latin forms that persisted in medieval texts about herbal remedies. During the Age of Exploration, scholars continued to use Latin in their efforts to organize the flood of unfamiliar plants and animals brought back to Europe.

In 1757 the Swedish physician Carl Linnaeus conceived the system still in usetoday. Linnaeus’ father was first in his family to adopt a last name, Latinizing a word from his local dialect for a giant linden tree on his land. Carl used Latin names to classify plants and animals according to what he thought were family
resemblances. (With the advent of DNA analysis, science is now in the process of revising the Latin names of plants using genetics instead of flower shapes.) For instance, Linnaeus placed milkweeds — a group of plants with similar flowers and potent chemistry — into the family Asclepiadaceae, a Latinized name for Aesculpius, the Greek god of medicine.

Linnaeus further divided families into groups called genera (think “generic”), based on even closer similarities in flower anatomy. He modified each genus name with a species (“specific”) name to distinguish between closely-related plants, resulting in our binomial system of paired names such as Valeriana arizonica. Valeriana is from valere which means “health” in Latin, for the plant’s tranquilizing properties later synthesized as Valium. The species name arizonica means “of Arizona” because this sweet little pale pink shade lover is a local native.

“All rootedness is learning to call things by their right name,” Confucius. Instead of spending six years majoring in Greek and Latin, it’s much easier now to discover the meaning and derivations of plant names in The Names of Plants by David Gledhill and websites such as Calflora.net/botanicalnames/.

Try it yourself! Look up Calochortus nuttalli, the Latin binomial for sego lily. You will learn that the genus of this member of Liliaceae — the Lily Family — means “beautiful grass” (a description of its leaves) and that it was named for the
English botanist Thomas Nuttall (1786-1859), who ventured into the wild American West to collect plants. Voyageurs who accompanied Nuttall described him as “some whimsical kind of madman” who used his rifle to dig up plants and store seeds. You’ll never see a sego lily the same way again.

Susan Lamb is a local writer and naturalist (www.susanlamb.net). Dana Prom Smith is the coordinating editor of Gardening Etcetera. He can be contacted at stpauls@npgcable.com.

SNEAKING FAST BALLS IN THE GARDEN

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (3/8/2011)

Bob Feller, the legendary high-kicking, pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, once said, “Trying to sneak a fast-ball by Ted Williams was like trying to sneak a sunbeam by a rooster in the morning.” Bob Feller came straight off an Iowa farm at 17 into the major leagues so he knew something about both fast-balls and roosters. His father built a “field of dreams” for him down by the barn and named it Oak View Park. He credited his arm strength and ball speed with milking cows, picking corn, and baling hay. He was reliable.



At one time, his fast-ball was measured at 107.6 miles per hour. In his entire career of 18 years at Cleveland, he pitched 266 victories and 162 losses with 2,581 strike outs. A few days after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Navy and eventually became a chief petty officer as a gun captain firing the famed Bofors on the U.S.S. Alabama.

When it comes to gardening in Flagstaff, reliability is important. Our climate doesn’t tolerate poop-out vegetables, and the best no-poop-outers are root vegetables, such as beets. Root vegetables don’t have the same panache as does a mesclun of arugula, frisée, chervil, and radicchio thrown with balsamic vinegar, goat cheese, dried cranberries, and pine nuts and served with a fine chardonnay, but like “Bullet Bob,” beets pack a lot more punch.

To begin with, beets are incredibly nutritious. They’re not only jammed with antioxidants, they’re also anti-inflammatory and foster detoxification, especially heavy and radio-active metals. Those alone would make them wunderbar, but there’s more: iron, copper, zinc, manganese, iodine, fiber, starch, magnesium, calcium, and vitamins A, B, B5, B6, C, E, and folic acid. My mother told me carrots were brain food. So are beets, and all of us need a little help there.

In addition to all that, they’re easy to grow. Any damned fool can grow them. I know because I do. Beet seeds look a little like Grapenuts but are actually small bundles of seeds. As with nearly everything else in the garden, they require a nutritious, friable soil, compost-loaded soil.

Fertilizer should be low in nitrogen for the sake of the root. The seeds are best planted one inch apart in rows 12-18 inches apart with successive sowings every three weeks for a continuous crop. When plants are a few inches high, it’s best to thin them to 3-4 inches apart so the roots will have growing space. Also, they need regular watering and weed picking.

The only problem with beets is cooking them because they stain. Surgical gloves keep the stain off the hands, and lemon juice removes beet stains from the skin. Beets shouldn’t be cooked too long for fear of adversely affecting their nutritive value and color, 20 minutes for steaming and nothing over an hour for roasting. Leave an inch or so of the tail and the leaves to prevent staining. The skin can easily be slipped off after steaming or roasting.

They can also be pickled, but that’s a “whole ‘nother story.” Olga Johnson has a great recipe for borsch at (http://oldfartskitchen.blogspot.com.

Happily, God has blessed us with many varieties. Several of the favorites are bull’s blood, Burpee’s golden, Detroit dark red, and di Chiogga. The last one has concentric circles of light and dark and is favored for salads. They are sweet, tangy, and a delight to the eye as well as the tongue.



In addition to the root, beet leaves are also a desideratum and can well be added to a mesclun to give it a little fire-power. Beets are often denigrated to the beer-and-brats and accordian category, but, nowadays, they’re actually dernier cri (the latest in fashion) served with a fine pinot noir accompanied by a string quartet. Some slight them because they’re a root, but no less a person than the food critic for The New York Times, Martha Rose Shulman, considers them “the new spinach,” so full are they of nutrients and flavor.

Bob Feller said, “I just reared back and let them go,” and go they did. Beets are a 107.6 mph worth of goodness and taste. Go beets! Go!


Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

GARDENING WITH THE LEFT EAR

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/6/2011)

“I just knew it! I just knew it! I’ve told you so many times 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 her. “It’s not only that,” she continued, “you just tune out lots of times, like in restaurants and noisy meetings, like you’re floating in midair in an alternate reality. It’s like where are you?”

When the audiologist peered into my ears, he said, “Oh, good, they’re clean.” Like the dentist, no matter how hard I brush and floss, my dentist, J. Thomas Montfort, always finds debris sequestered amongst my molars. He uses a wire-thin, hooked instrument resembling a miniature Spanish garrote. He calls them explorers which is better than voyagers, expeditions, or worse yet, King Arthur’s Excalibur.

That aside, I don’t have a tin ear. It’s just muffled enough to shut out what I don’t want to hear. I’m old, and after sixty years of listening to the squeaks and gibbers of all sorts and conditions of people, my ears have had enough.

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.

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, said it well: “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. It’s Elijah listening for the Lord’s presence in “a 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,” silences of indifference, deafened by 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.”

As with everything in life, it’s the small things: 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 ponderosa pine tree, that carry the weight of that soft touch of love on a shoulder. The garden isn’t a refuge so much as it’s a place to make connections with oneself. It’s gardening with the left ear, cutting out all the grating, hard-edged noises and listening to the small voice of stillness, the voice of a Presence unseen yet heard.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

VAGINA MONOLOGUES AND VEGETABLES

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/19/2011)

Many years ago, as a birthday present I took meine Űberfrau to a performance of The Vagina Monologues in San Diego. I was baffled why people were laughing and clapping at the wrong places. I felt as though I were a former colonist watching a performance in a former colony put on by former colonials about life under former colonizers. After the final curtain came down, two well-coiffed, well-dressed women sitting next to me politely smiled and asked, “And how did you like it?” On the other side, an exuberant woman who resembled the late, beloved Bella Abzug, wearing a wild hat and drenched in Navajo necklaces and rings, exclaimed, “Wasn’t that just wonderful?”

Feeling out of place at a joyous celebration is an unsettling experience, but since then, my consciousness has been raised, not without pain, by my wife, Gretchen, and my granddaughter and namesake, Dana. However, some of the bad habits my mother drilled into me are hard to break, such as standing up when a woman enters a room, opening doors, picking up the tab, “doing nice little things,” and changing flat tires. Although she strenuously denies it, even Ann Beck at the Literacy Center sometimes looks at me as though I am an amiable antique.

Other amiable antiques, commonly called heirlooms, are cool season vegetables. While tomatoes, as warm season vegetables, take extra measures to grow in Flagstaff, cool season vegetables are congenial to Flagstaff and are, serendipitously, easy to grow.

Of the beet family, Swiss chard’s a delight to the palate as well as the eye because it’s beautifully many-hued. In addition to being easy to grow, it’s wildly nutritious and a cinch to prepare. It goes well in soups, such as Above the Rim Tuscan Soup with sweet Italian sausage and cannellini beans (http://oldfartskitchen.blogspot.com. Another amiable antique, easy to grow vegetable, kale does just as well. A member of the cabbage family, it comes in many shapes and sizes, such as the Red Russian, Scottish, and Lacinato.

Since Swiss chard and kale are leaves, they need a high nitrogen fertilizer as well as a soft, friable bed chocked full of compost. Both Swiss chard and kale can tolerate frost, but kale seems to thrive on it, becoming sweeter after been nipped.

Snap beans are, also, antiques amiable to gardeners in Flagstaff.
They come in two varieties, climbing and bush. Climbers require lattices, poles, etc. on which to climb. They supposedly taste better than bush, but bush are easier to grow and harder to pick, as in bending over. They, too, want a bed of soft, friable, compost-stuffed soil, with a 10-20-10 fertilizer. The soil should be kept moist along with regular fertilizing.

Many people prefer the old regulars, such as Kentucky wonder, and while they are just as nutritious, why grow what everyone else grows. Try venturing where few have gone before with a French filet, une haricots verts. Tastier and more elegant, long and slim at 8 inches, a back friendly variety, the Maxi, offers its pods on top of the plant, rather than hidden amongst the leaves.

Another slightly more exotic bean is the Beurre de Rocquencourt, an aristocrat of beans. Alas, the 8 inches pods are hidden amongst the leaves, but, true to its name, it melts like butter in the mouth. Along with the Maxi, it matures in 51 days. If these seeds are unavailable in a local commercial nursery, they can be ordered from gourmetseed.com.

These beans are so lusciously tasty that they are best served steamed al dente with a little butter, salt, and pepper. If gilding the lily, add some crispy French fried onions or toasted slivered almonds.

If gardeners want to gain a jump on our limited growing season of approximately 100 days, all of these vegetables can be started indoors on a sunny window sill using those mini-greenhouses sold in commercial nurseries.

My father often added to my mother’s drill that marriage was a life-long courtship. So it is with vegetables. My parents had no daughters; however, I can hear my father saying to a daughter, “Aye, Lassie, hear me now, stand proud.”

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

A LIFE OF EXPLORATION

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/13/11)

Rachel Wilson’s life as an artist has been a life of exploration, at first glance an exploration of the external world through paintings that are out-there at arm’s length, perhaps a landscape. Actually, she was exploring the farthest reaches of inner space, especially transformations of the soul’s inner reaches. Modern art does not pretend to represent a static, external world of convention but rather the chaos of those inner worlds by means of the splintered and distorted forms of conventional reality.

The recurring theme in her work is transformation, such as the transformations embedded in the geological strata of the Grand Canyon, then it slowly seeps in that she’s really painting the transformations embedded in the historical strata of human experience, social and personal.

As an explorer, she ventures out without a clear picture of where she’s going. She doesn’t envision the completed work in her mind’s eye, merely the beginning point, her work always being a work in progress, an act of faith. As with Abraham of old, who “went out, not knowing where he was to go,” the Muse leads her into the terra incognita of inner space.

In an odd way this sense of exploration is her history. She began as a girl who was good at drawing horses. Coming from a family of academics, she tried graduate school three times, always falling back to her beginning point as a little girl who loved to draw horses, so she started where she began, becoming a painter.

Speaking of transformations, Heraclitus (540-480 B.C.) wrote, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Not only does reality go through transformations, so do the observers of those transformations. Called the parallax principle, the observer never sees the same object the same way because the observer and the object are never in the same place or time again.

As Rachel looked out a window in her home in Doney Park near Cosnino Road, she said, “The view has changed. The bark beetles killed off the taller piñon, and all we have left now are the junipers. We can see farther, but we can see less. No longer the beauty of the piñon’s green, but now the empty beauty of the sky’s endless blue.” With her view transformed, she has been transformed.



Rachel loves the landscapes of the southwest. One of her paintings of the grasslands, actually steppes, a few miles down the road from her house, she has filled the landscape with the transformations of history. Images of petroglyphs, Texaco and Mobil signs, float through the painting and line the bottom and middle as though these civilizations have passed through the land, but in passing through they changed the land and were changed by it.



In addition to being a painter, Rachel is also a Master Gardener. Her garden, as would any garden in the outer reaches of Doney Park, is a work in progress, an act of faith. It wanders amongst the surviving junipers: no fixed beds, occasional trails amongst native and adaptable plants. Gardening in Doney Park is an exploration, finding out what works and what doesn’t in a soil of volcanic cinders with cold winds sweeping off the San Francisco Peaks and high water prices.

Her garden seems to start wherever one is standing at the moment, never appearing the same again. She waters her plants beneath the surface of the soil, so her garden is devoid of irrigating contraptions while avoiding surface evaporation. Now that it’s legal, she and her husband, Stephen, a mathematics professor at NAU, plan to use both captured water and gray water. As befitting a gardener, Rachel is a woman of the soil, the water, the wind, and the fire, and this identification is seen in her paintings which are often at the intersection of nature and history.

Her aptly named Somewhen Studio sits amidst her garden’s trails where she paints what Edvard Munch called “The study of the soul.” She and her paintings can be visited at www.somewhenstudio.com.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

THE TOZAN TEA HOUSE GARDEN (Part 2 of 2)

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/6/2011)



Beauty is often touched by a tragedy, such as in the building of the Tozan Tea House and Garden. The tragedy was the death from leukemia of Aaron Macy, a promising young ceramics student at NAU who was coming of age as a potter. His father, Douglas Macy, a well-known landscape architect in Portland, Oregon, grieving his son’s death, wanted to memorialize him with a legacy of beauty. At the suggestion of Don Bendel and Jason Hess of NAU’s ceramics department, he agreed to supervise the construction of the Tozan Tea House and Garden in his son’s memory.

With the 1989 blueprints of Hirotomi Ichikawa, the famous Japanese landscape architect, already in hand, Douglas Macy began the cultural and horticultural translation of a tea house and garden from Japan to Flagstaff.
Funded by Betty Peckard and other donors from Japan and America, the project lurched ahead over the years.


Serendipitously, Brad Blake and Phil Patterson from the NAU Research Greenhouses, discovered the project and offered their services in securing plants apropos to Flagstaff. As with any good translation, the garden’s design and plantings had to be faithful to the original as well as to the new. Now, some cognoscenti are likely to say, “Something’s going to be lost in the translation,” as though there are no plants indigenous or adaptable to Northern Arizona that would quite do the trick as well as plants native to Japan. However, often as not, something is also gained in translation, as in the gifts of the new language and the arts of the translator. So it is with the Tozan Tea House and Garden.

One of the principles of Japanese landscaping is using plants native to the site. Thus, the Tozan Tea House Garden is not a tit-for-tat, literal translation, but rather a faithful adaptation. Happily, much of the garden’s land was undisturbed so that the garden is already covered with native ponderosa pine, pinyon pine, and Gambel oak. The understory includes various penstemons and wildflowers along with native grasses, such as mutton grass, muhly grass, and spike muhly.


The land immediately around a Japanese tea house is planted with Arizona fescue. A hedge customarily flows in parabolic curves throughout the grounds of Japanese tea house garden, drawing the mind to take wing and fly to the uttermost parts of the imagination, shielded from the distractions of the hurly-burly. Since hedges are not native to Flagstaff, a hedge cotoneaster was used. A low water plant, it hails from Siberia, Eastern Asia, and the Caucasus, a hardy horticultural immigrant for the Colorado Plateau. Finally, along Lone Tree Road a line of New Mexican Locusts and Riles Roses from the NAU campus will buffer the garden.

A good translation always begins literally, but then transcends into style. The gain for Flagstaff is not in the plants, that is, in the content, but in the style or process. Ultimately, reality is in process, not content. How a thing is said is more important than what it said. The Tozan Tea House and Garden give everyone an opportunity to see the familiar in a new and different way, to see life steadily and to see it whole, to take that parabolic curve beyond the perimeters of paranoia into the journey of freedom, to travel into the outer reaches of inner space.

The Tozan Tea House Garden is Japanese in essence in its form and economy, and Southwestern in its horticultural language. It offers the lucidity of simplicity, as in Occam’s Razor of not multiplying entities beyond necessity and Robert Browning’s “less is more,” remembering that profusion leads to confusion. The Garden also offers that lucidity in the beauty of the Colorado Plateau.

For a moment of composure, the Tozan Tea House and Garden are located on Lone Tree Road, south of Pine Knoll Road on the right hand side of the road. Look for the great wood-fired kiln as a beginning point on a path up the hill to lucidity where a tragedy begat beauty.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

TOMATOES: THE ENDURING VISION

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/6/2011)

As an old friend of mine was being led away for a cataract operation, the surgeon said, “You might see of a bright light in the center of your field of vision.” My friend, a devout Roman Catholic, began chuckling, and the surgeon asked, “What’re you laughing at?” “Oh,” he replied, “do you mean that I might have a vision of God?” The surgeon replied, “Not in here, you won’t.” After the operation, he said to the surgeon, “Well, I didn’t see God after all.” The surgeon said, “I should hope not.”

While the surgeon may have disparaged visions in patients, they’re necessary for growing tomatoes. Visions of eating home-grown tomatoes help sustain tomato growers during the trials and tribulations of la saison des tomates.

Indeed, growing tomatoes for everyone is an actus fidei, to quote my friend, because various, maddening afflictions, such as blossom end rot, white flies, and the wilts, arrive unannounced. Especially sad are the blossom end rots which arrive later in the season just as the plants are on the cusp of fruition. First off, several precautions can be taken to avoid various types of late season malaise.

Tomatoes are best planted several feet apart in sterilized soil. Drowning them in too much water increases the likelihood of an affliction. No fools, tomatoes don’t like to stand in water and need good drainage. They also like a rich, friable soil. Using containers makes it easier to cleanse the soil and control watering and fertilizing. Soil can be sterilized by putting it in a black plastic container, covered with a black plastic refuse bag, for ten days.

Flagstaff’s relatively short growing season, averaging a hundred and three days, requires tomatoes which produce early. The average last frost (32º) is June 10 and last freeze (28º) is May 28, and the average first frost is September 21 and freeze October 6. Of course, the best thing is to check with the National Weather Service at www.wrh.noaa.gov/fgz/.

Walls O’ Water, which are 18″ diameter fluted, plastic, mini-greenhouses, extend the growing season by protecting tomato plants down to 16º. Seedlings can be planted outside 6-8 before the last frost and may produce fruit 30-40 days earlier than otherwise. For more information its website is www.wall-o-water.com.

An alternative is circling a tomato plant with 7 two-liter plastic bottles filled with water, remembering to leave no air space between the bottles. In any case, remember to warm the soil a few days before transplanting.

If buying tomato seedlings at a commercial nursery, Early Girl (59 days to maturity) and Better Boy (70 days) are often the favored. Be sure to check the plant for any signs of unwanted insects, such as white fly. If starting from seed, many varieties are possible, especially Canadian and Siberian tomatoes. Seeds for several varieties of these tomatoes can be ordered from seedstrust.com which specializes in tomatoes suitable for our climate. My favorite is the Galina (69 days), a golden Siberian cherry tomato of a sweetly complex taste. Also, the Canadian Prairie Fire )60 days) and the Siberian Sasha’s Altai (59 days) are early producers of good taste. There are many more from which to choose.

Starting from seed isn’t a cinch, but it’s a pleasant chore. Commercial nurseries sell very small mini-greenhouses with translucent covers for sunny window sills with pods for the seeds. Plant the seeds about the last half of March and await the miracle of life as the seeds sprout into little seedlings. When they develop true leaves, they can be transplanted into pint-sized containers and allowed to grow into small plants. Along about the middle of May, the small plants can transplanted outside protected by Walls O’ Water. Special containers can be purchased for a fancy price, or five gallon black containers can be used just as well.

The soil should be kept moist but not wet, and a fertilizer of 5-10-10 should be sprinkled regularly throughout the growing season. Too much nitrogen will produce a lovely plant with few tomatoes.

Remember the vision: eating a warm tomato, freshly picked, at the vine, bending over so that the juice can drip off the chin. Keep the faith.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

THE GARDENS AT THE TOZAN TEA HOUSE: I

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7/5/05)

The gardens at the Tozan Tea House were designed with tea in mind or, more accurately, the experience of drinking tea. For the Japanese, the experience of drinking tea is not just consuming a pleasant beverage, as in having a “cuppa”, but an experience of rootedness and connectedness within oneself, a getting one’s bearings, a regaining of one’s temper after having lost it.

Coffee is for energy, tea for composure.

Since the tea is served in a bowl, rather than a cup, drinking tea is a two-handed experience. Unlike the cup which is kept at a distance and raised to the lips as though it were a foreign object akin to a knife or fork, drinking tea from a bowl requires that people draw the bowl to themselves, warming their hands, encompassed in the experience.


Now, to an American eye the garden at the Tozan Tea House is not yet developed, but to a Japanese eye the garden is already there in the way the land lies, the grasses, the bushes, and the trees, and, oh yes, the rocks and the critters. Rather than impose a foreign, geometrical grid on the land, a Japanese design draws its form from the lay the land. Much as a wise parent rears a child, drawing out rather than an imposing upon, the gardener cultivates the land’s gifts.

The design’s purpose is lucidity. Form and economy are the means used to accomplish the lucidity. The lines of the design reflect the contours of the land, not merely replicating them, but enhancing them, using the old principle of compare and contrast, rather than duplication and contradiction.

Since Japan is a group of small, heavily populated islands, land is used economically, drawing from it, rather than replacing it. Unlike the Western experience in which land is thought inexhaustible, as in a housing subdivision in which the land is cleared and regimentally planted, the Japanese conserve the land knowing it is finite. The tea house’s garden is indigenous, the tea house and its garden reflecting the land’s contours, flora, and fauna. Instead of being a beautiful picture painted by the designer for people to look at, the tea house garden is an experience.


William Temple, the late, great Archbishop of Canterbury, in his commentary of the Gospel of John wrote of lucidity, “To see life steadily and to see it whole.” Seeing life steadily and seeing it whole is the heart of the experience of tea at the tea house and its garden.

The garden is brain-child of Dr. Don Bendel, professor emeritus of ceramics at NAU and his alter ego, the late Yukio Yamamoto, master potter of the Tozan Kilns in Japan.

Located at the bottom of a hill just off Lonetree Road on the NAU campus, the first step into the Tozan Tea House’s garden is a few paces from the giant, wood-fired kilns where the tea bowls are fired. The garden encloses a rising path past the ceramic studio where the bowls are thrown. The path then crosses over an earthen and wooden bridge and on up to the Tozan Tea House where the tea is not merely consumed, but also experienced.

Since the Tozan Tea House is set on a rise, it offers vantage from which people can see not only the trees, but also through them, and beyond them to the forest.

The lintel of one of the doors into the Tozan Tea House is low which by tradition was for the use of the samurai warriors. They could not get through the door with their swords, forcing them to leave their swords outside. Similarly, a Navajo was once asked why the entrances into a hogan were so low. The Navajo replied, “So that when people enter our homes, they must kneel.” Such is the tea house. No body armor. No pretenses.


The quiet experience at the garden at Tozan Tea House is necessary for lucidity. Frenzy does not make for clarity. Since the garden is at peace with the land, people can be at peace with themselves and gain that lucidity to see life steadily and to see it whole.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

ONIONS AND THE IDES OF MARCH

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (1/9/2011)

The Ides of March, March 15, bear ominous messages, beginning with the assassination of Julius Caesar by Brutus, Cassius, and other noblemen in 44 A.D. At one time, income taxes were due on the Ides of March, but the federal government reconsidered and moved them to April 15 in a vain attempt to make them less irksome.

However, the Ides of March also bear a benevolent message. It’s just four days away from the first day to plant onion sets on the 19th and, consequently, break that one hundred day horticultural grip on growing things in Flagstaff. Onions allow us a seven month growing season, starting in March and going clear through to October.

Although warmth is beneficial, onions need sunlight, and March 19 is the first day in the year with enough sunlight to grow onions in Flagstaff. Onions come in three categories, short day, intermediate, and long day. Short days, such as Vidalia, are down south, and long days, such as Walla Walla, are up north. Magnificent onions are grown in the Matanuska Valley in Alaska. While I was a Sgt/Maj, Special Troops, in Alaska, we played baseball at midnight in the summer when not tracking down miscreants and saboteurs. Flagstaff’s intermediate days are betwixt the two. Actually, Flagstaff is a favorable place to grow onions because of our dry climate and warm summers. Onions need at least six hours of sunlight a day, preferably full sun.

As with anything else in the garden, the first thing about growing onions is the soil. It should be friable, easily flowing through the gardener’s fingers, which means lots of compost. “Objets d’amour,” onions need soft beds, and not only soft, but rich as well which brings us to fertilizer.

A couple of weeks before planting, the bed should be strewn at about a five inch depth with a 10-20-10 fertilizer. This assumes that the gardener is using onion sets, which are the easiest, most productive, and priciest way to grow onions. Seeds can be sown in the spring, but they are chancier. Sets are akin to seedlings but far hardier.

Parenthetically, much to meine Űberfraus vexation, I’m slothful, leaving dirty socks where I took them off, books and magazines where I took off reading them, dirty dishes on the table, and generally letting things go. A cinch for the slothful, all onions need after they’re first planted is a little care.

Once the soil has been prepared, the next task is digging a trench in which the sets can be planted at the bottom. Onions require lots of moisture, and a trench allows for frequent watering without waste. In addition to water, onions favor a slightly acidic soil and a side-dressing of high nitrogen fertilizer every other week.

Onions do not take up a great deal of space and can be planted a few inches apart. Later in the spring along about June, the onions can be thinned to six or seven inches apart, the thinning yielding a crop of green onions, so that the remaining onions can grow into those large, opulent, luscious globes of late summer.

When I had my office on Westwood Blvd. in Los Angeles, I often ate lunch or dinner at an Iranian restaurant on the street. The waiters munched on onions like apples. Astounded then, now I do the same with my home-grown sweet onions. And onions like apples will keep the doctor away. An Arab proverb runs, “Every man should be given his breath.”

The second most popular crop after tomatoes, onions are used in nearly every cuisine and for good reason. In addition to being flavor-filled and flavor-giving, they’re health-giving, being anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-allergic, and anti-oxidant. For those of us who fret about our hearts, onions are our friends, and the same goes for cancer fretters.

Now is the time to order onion sets. I order mine from Brown’s Omaha Plant Farms in Omaha, Texas, at www.bopf.com. I’ve had good fortune with Hybrid Candy, Hybrid Superstar, and Hybrid Yellow Granex which is an heir of the famous Vidalia.

P.S. Trees need slow watering during our dry spell.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

KEITH RICHARDS AND GARDENING

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (12/29/2010)

Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones in his addict’s journal, Life, writes: “Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down you can see it. I think some of it is that there is so much pressure to be that person that you become it, maybe, to a certain point more than you can bear. It’s impossible not to end up being a parody of what you thought you were.”

Highly intelligent and widely-read, Richards alludes to T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men: “Between the emotion / And the response / Falls the shadow.” “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Of course, both Richards and Eliot drew their inspiration from Shakespeare’s Macbeth on hearing of Lady Macbeth’s suicide, “Life’s but a walking shadow.” The theme continues through Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to Genesis’s imago dei in which human beings are created as shadows of God, “image” in Hebrew meaning “shadow,” a form without substance.

As with Richards and Macbeth, we’re often burdened with what “we should’ve been,” “what someone else wanted us to be,” and “what we’d hoped to be,” “what we could’ve been,” but never were, so on in finitum. Its Eliot’s “striding shadows” unaware of whom they are.

Anxiously free-floating is difficult while letting rich soil run through our fingers, listening to the wind whistle through the pines, smelling a flower’s fragrance, or eating a warm tomato just off the vine. The senses reassure us by connecting us to our origins in the earth. Our five senses allow us to forsake the shadowed world of images, paying attention to those sensations at our finger tips. Gardening is the working of both muscles and senses.

The first connection is making compost. We can’t take our pretensions seriously when mucking around with compost, horse manure, coffee grounds, and kitchen scraps. The shadows take flight when turning a pitch fork in that moldering mélange, especially as the warmth and earthy aroma rise from that gardener’s stew. Composting is not a time for shadows and images. It’s a time to save our souls.

The next step in soul-saving is turning the decomposed mélange into the soil. Most of us spend our time in despoiling the earth, but improving the soil is one sure way we can improve the earth by enriching its fertility. Shoveling manure and compost into the soil takes us beyond our shadows, riveting us on the immediate.

Once the soil is ready with manure and compost, another way to move beyond Richards’ “long shadow” of self-parody is to plant seeds and wait around for them to sprout. What first appears is seldom what it will be fully grown, but all the while it is growing, it is growing into what it is, not what it should be. A seedling is always faithful to itself which is what Richards doubts about himself. Seedlings are good tutors to living.

Then comes caring. Lots of people don’t give a damn about the world around them so focused are they on themselves, settling old scores, rectifying old grievances, justifying old wrongs. Gardening pulls us out of that inner turmoil and centers us on the welfare of the plants. Our worth is tested by those things about which we care. While gardening doesn’t match loving someone else, it hints at the rewards of leaving our self-interest and caring for something or someone immediate, like the up close and personal.

Caring means tending to, such as watering, fertilizing, grooming, and picking weeds which are the pimples, warts, and blackheads of gardening. A gardener has to play attention to whether a plant’s wilt is from disease or lack of water, to yellowing and curling of leaves, to little nasties lurking under the leaves, and all manner of predators, flying, crawling, and slinking. They all require an outward focus.

Finally, there are the rewards which encompass the classical Greek virtues of truth, beauty, and goodness, the truth of the soil, the beauty of the flora, and the goodness of the fruits of the earth. Perhaps, Richards should take up gardening.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

TREASURING THE GIFT

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

Although Christmas is often celebrated as the birthday of Jesus Christ, more accurately it’s celebrated as the gift of the Christ Child. Actually, celebrations can encompasses all “sorts and conditions” of believers. The idea is simple. Life’s a gift as are the sun, water, and soil. We treat gifts far differently than we do possessions because a gift means someone else thought well enough of us to give us a gift.

All gifts aren’t the same. Some are contemporaneous, others are legacies. We treasure legacies far more. Nearly everyone has them. I have my father’s pocket watch, my mother’s fountain pen, my grandfather’s carefully crafted, folding ruler, magnifying glass, and his one hundred and seventy eight year old legacy, oil portraits of my great, great grandfather and grandmother. They gaze on me everyday, that stern Norwegian ships’ master, Herr Capt. Poul H. Proms, saying, “Be smart about it, boy.” With a twinkle in his eye, my grandfather often quoted his grandfather to me. Gifted legacies are visible signs bringing to life presences from the past. Sir Isaac Newton wrote to Robert Hooke, “If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of the giants.”

Possessions can be replaced but gifts cannot. The meaning invested in gifts makes them far the richer than possessions. As a matter of fact, a life lived in gratitude is far richer than a life lived as a possession. The meaning invested in the Christ Child for believers is the treasure of God with us, not against us. There are other gifts which all people hold dear, such as old friendships, loved ones, and mentors, enhancing the meaning of the present.

We can start with life itself. No one has earned it. It was given to us in trust. I have never met a person who was successful at living who in some way or another has not lived in gratitude and treasured something from the past.

The successful life is fundamentally the thankful life. The verb “to thank” is a transitive verb. It needs a direct object. It just doesn’t hang out there in a sentence all by itself. How sad it is not to have direct objects, leaving our subjects and verbs bereft of companionship.

One of the hallmarks of gardeners is gratitude for the sun, soil, and, water. They celebrate these gifts of life. In Flagstaff people are wont to curse the dirt and envy those in climes rich with dark, humus laden soil. Alas, envy is a sin without a reward, unlike lust or greed. It feeds upon itself, making the envious feel more miserable than before. However, with every temptation there is a means to overcome the temptation. In this case, it’s the shovel, such as shoveling humus into the soil. All it takes is a little “sweat equity” to make a rich soil lush with humus.

Some addled with ambition or conquest have even taken credit for the sun, claiming powers to manage it, but they have all passed into the annals of absurdity. There it is, this terrible, frightening, gaseous, flaming ball in the sky giving us light and life, peeking over the horizon early in the morning, promising life for the next day! One can understand why the Anasazi worshipped the sun, at Chaco Canyon organizing their buildings around the patterns of the sun and the moon. They understood a gifted legacy.

Called “a national treasure” by the Smithsonian, the Sons of the Pioneers’ famous close harmony about “water, clear, cool water” haunts us today. Idols from our history, formed in 1933 by Roy Rogers, they bear witness to a legacy from the past about the gift of water because if we treat water as a possession we lie to ourselves, an act of mauvais foi, “bad faith.” We’ve had a history of despoiling it while, in fact, it’s one of those legacy gifts that we’d be wise to treat as a treasure, holding it dear, since we can’t live without it. “Be smart about it, boy.” Treasure the gifts, especially the gift of life. Merry Christmas!

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

EXPERIENCING THE SMELL OF FLOWERS

Tam Nguyen

When I was a little girl, I always followed my Dad to the town center. It took us about forty-five minutes by bus from our village. He went to town to visit his friends or to take me around town and show me the life of the city. There were candy shops, toys, clothes, and restaurants. The streets were always busy with
people.

I loved to walk around with my Dad and his friends to the flower park. There are many kinds of flowers with colorful. My Dad gave me cotton candy and told me about the color and smell of flowers. He not only tell me one time, but he also repeat to me many times. I remembered it because I listened to him many times. But it is so funny! I did not understand him at all.

He showed me the color with red, pink, white, orange, etc., the different shape of flowers, iris, pansy, daisy and rose, and how to look close to a flower’s petal, how to connect in images. Iris look like mouths with the tongue, throat, and lips. Pansy looked so nice with the different color of the petal. The color made it as a butterfly. Daisy is with bunch of tiny petals white with color. It wasn’t easy to come close to a rose. It has many prickles. I got bleeding while I was trying to touch with roses. Each kind of flower had different look. This was not a big deal for me to think of them.

My father told me to smell them. It was not easy for me to describe aroma for him. Some of them have sweet, whiff lightly, intenseness. The level of smell also change depends on the color. Dark color has strong aroma more than light color. A wavelength of aroma also changed with each minute. They smell strongest at early morning or late afternoon. This thing my father and I did it slowly, each time we got together. I put all of my senses to sniff the flowers, feeling the soft of petal. A lot of people walk through life and never smell of flowers.
Butterflies flew around them. They say each up and down of butterfly’s wing changes
the world. But I did not see any change unless dinner was coming.

Day by day goes by, season changed every single second, spring is gone by and summer is coming. My father spent time studying the four seasons, practicing to get through the four seasons and circle of life in flowers. I learnt from him to empty my brain and let the aura of the flowers come in. Seeing the essence of the color and the smell of aroma, the aura changed with time as I practiced it. It changed from dark color with strong smell to colorless and fresh smell. It took me awhile to find out that colorless water with the sun will change to rainbow. Fresh smell is like spirit. I could not touch it. I could not imagine a shape, how it looked like.

Anyways, it brought me to a belief on something. It is as the aroma will expand all over the atmosphere. Later on, I grew up and understood that is the beginning of meditation. It makes sense to smell the aroma and see the aura, the experience of believing something I cannot see.

It is like climbing the mountain with different levels of aura. I like to study their meanings more to know about it. The flowers are out there and growing up every day in the wind, rain, and sun as the earth still spins in the universe. Understanding auras also explains human beings. It is simple as the air people breathe every second. I think not many people care about spirit. If we develop the spirit and be generous, we can feel the change. Actually, if we are quiet and do not change, we feel the change in auras.

Tam T. Nguyen has completed the Master Gardener Class and is a student at the Literacy Center where Dr. Smith is one of her tutors.

A GARDEN AS A USED CAR

Dana Prom Smith

Approaching my 85th year, I’ve been thinking about growing old, especially after receiving an invitation to my 60th college class reunion. Old age took me by surprise. It’s something like that used car I bought when I was in high school. A 1929 Model-A Ford Coupe, it had no floor boards and was sans a right front fender; however, it had a rumble seat. It ran, but something always needed fixing.

Since we never look back on old age and there’s no future to it, I’ve become an existentialist. Everything is now. Given the alternative, I’m grateful for my creaky knee, arthritis, left-leaning, friendly-fire hole in my back, slightly damaged ticker, and Selma-gifted, racked-up left shoulder. Alive in good health, no longer suffering fools gladly, I always need fixing.

All of this is like a garden. Something always needs fixing. Two fixable problems are aphids and grasshoppers. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the existence of demons has never dealt with grasshoppers and aphids. Evil is random. It doesn’t make sense. We’ve all suffered for our sins and stupidities, but with evil there’s no quid pro quo. Random, demonic forces strike without reason. We ask, “Why me?” A bit paranoia helps.

However, we can strike back! NoLo bait spread throughout the garden before the grasshopper larvae hatch in early spring will lay waste grasshoppers; not instantaneously, but gradually; not merely over the season, but throughout the years. NoLo is a targeted weapon, sparing everything else, including human beings. It’s an eco-healthy malaise. Cannibals, grasshoppers eat their own who’ve fallen with NoLo, ingesting their fallen comrades’ NoLo. It’s an affliction that keeps on afflicting.

Actually, the grasshoppers aren’t attracted to the NoLo but to the wheat bran in which it is served, something like cyanide in lemonade.

Also, we’ve an ally in a fellow flesh-eating predator, the praying mantis, who could well be called the preying mantis. Waiting in ambush, when a grasshopper comes close, our friend grabs it with spiked forelegs and devours it with a gluttonous lust. An asymmetrical warrior, it’s adept at camouflage, looking for all the world like a leaf.

Praying mantises are mercenaries. They can be bought and sent into battle to devour the demonic. If gardeners are fleet of foot and swift of limb, they can grab a grasshopper in flight, squeeze it, feel the crunch of death, and then wash off the green residue. I, for one, prefer the mercenaries.

Next in our demonic litany is the aphid, an icky, soft-bodied, foul-looking manifestation of evil. It lies in wait underneath leaves, sucking out their life-juices and then emitting at the end of its alimentary canal sweet offal, favored by ants. As a matter of fact, ants farm aphids just to eat this gooey mess, commonly called honeydew.

Aphids signal their presence by yellowing, curled leaves and a plant’s withered death. Also, if they overgraze, they produce flying aphids, clouds of them, which spread to trees like aspen and drop their honeydew on cars, fouling the finish.

Initially counter-attack with a hose, nozzle attached and turned down, washing off the buggers underneath the leaves, sending them to a watery grave. If that fails after a couple of tries, then it’s time to use insecticidal soap, again blasting away at the leaves’ underside. Generally, one time doesn’t do it, the conflict being a war of attrition, wearing the bastard’s down. Also, if there are aspens in the yard, spray them, too.

Of course, we have allies, chief amongst who are lady bugs, green lacewings, and parasitic wasps, all of whom like to dine on aphids. Lady bugs can be purchased from local commercial nurseries but are best sent into battle in the evening hours, lest they fly away. Fickle, the best thing to do is provide them with an attractive bivouac, buying their loyalty by planting sweet clover, spearmint, sweet fennel, and Queen Anne’s lace, their favored confections.

As our gardens age, be grateful. They’ll always need fixing along with the rest of us. This means fighting the good fight, finishing the race, keeping the faith, persevering therein to the end, and laying waste the demons.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2011

SHOOT OUT AT THANKSGIVING

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (11/20/10)

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 whom my adult children had prevailed upon us to invite fearing she’d be alone. We’d also invited two couples, a veganesque Wiccan priestess who ate all the mixed nuts and her husband, a carnivorous hummingbird feeder salesman who dislocated the pot rack while gazing down my granddaughter’s bosom. The other couple was an Assyrian Orthodox husband, complete with ancient indignations and orthodoxies, 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 fertilizing a garden with artificial fertilizer withers the 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.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

HER OWN ROOM WITH A VIEW

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

After a migrating life, Susan Lamb Bean is standing still, the better to continue her journey. Her traveling life prepared her to stand still because now she knows what to look for. As a child, she moved often with her mother, 11 schools in 11 years, but she continued as an adult, going to three different colleges to get her bachelor’s degree in the Classical Civilization and on to England to get her master’s degree in Aegean Prehistory. Studying the ancient poets, she grew to envy the celebrations of their intimacy with nature.

She kept on traveling, working as an interpreter and writer for the National Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution, acquiring a vast amount of information as she honed her capabilities as a writer. Studying Latin and Greek taught her how to think, so she knew what to do with the knowledge she’d acquired.

Still and all, she needed a place, as Virginia Woolf wrote, A Room of One’s Own. The first room of her own was in her heart, a faith she acquired through the Roman Catholic Church and then in a house she shares with her husband, Tom, out off Lake Mary Road on the edge of the forest. Once she had a room of her own, she acquired A Room with a View, to use the title of E.M. Forster’s novel.

Beginning as a wildlife biologist Tom morphed into a wildlife photographer. His photographs, taken in front of their house, are featured for January and February in the Arizona Highways 2011 Wildlife Calendar.

The homily of a priest finally affirmed her ease with Roman Catholicism. “The greatest heresies are prejudice and bitterness because they close our hearts to one another and to love.” As Susan says, faith has given her a room with a view.

What a room and what a view! Perched on the lip of a draw in the Fay Canyon wilderness, Susan and Tom have the wild at their front door; however, their view is unique. As wildlife naturalists, they see nature as a sacrament in which a divine Presence emerges from the flux and flow of nature with a sense of the holy without the trappings of holiness.

The garden is fashioned after the wilderness: a rock garden with plants drawn from the forest. As the garden flows around the house, at each of its three levels, a wilderness garden is at the door. To understand the garden one must first understand the house.

Just beyond the entryway, a simply framed complex of rooms leads the eye to a top to bottom, clear across one side of the house, window of panes. On the left are the kitchen and dining rooms and a few steps straight ahead lead down to an airy living room. The rich wood of the walls with their Native American artifacts and wildlife art create a perfect setting to view the forest and the draw.

The gardens around the house are transitional spaces between the house and the forest where one can pass from the pleasant confines of the rooms into the mystery of nature.

Susan’s garden is not static, but evolving and emerging. She speaks of plants “traveling” from one part of the garden to another and of offspring “thriving” while parents and grandparents fade and disappear. The catalogue of plants seems without number, but a few are pussytoes, blanket flower, Woods rose, pennycress, St. Johns wort, golden columbine, quaking aspen, and Gambel oak. A few paces down slope, the “rabbitat,” a rock warren built by Tom provides a safe haven for the rabbits. The fact is that her garden is actually the forest and meadows where the geologist’s sense of “deep time,” the aeons it has taken to grow the garden, emerge as a sacrament of the Creator of “all things visible and invisible.”

Susan and Tom have recently written a book on their journey following the footsteps of Santa Francis: The Natural World of Saint Francis of Assisi. Susan writes, “To understand the natural world―to love its landforms and life forms―makes sacred ground of everywhere we are.”

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

Photographs courtesy of Susan and Tom Bean.

DEEPLY SPIRITUAL GOOD TASTE

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

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

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

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



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



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



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



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



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

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

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

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

Photographs courtesy of Renee Henry

SO MUCH MORE THAN TREES!

Susan Lamb Bean




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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographs courtesy of Tom Bean.