The Garden of Contemplation

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In a previous essay, I speculated that, a couple of centuries into the future, there may be no truly natural world. Instead, I said, “nature” may consist mostly of areas such as municipal parks.

But perhaps a better example of “nature” in the future is my Garden of Contemplation. This garden is just my back yard in rural Oklahoma. Every evening that I can in May and June, I sit in it, sometimes grilling meat, sometimes just drinking and listening silently, trying to ignore the loud pickup trucks driven up and down the street by men whose entire significance of life consists of making fumes and noise.

My son-in-law made this sketch of my Jardin de Contemplation.

This “garden” is certainly not natural. The original ecosystems where I live were tallgrass prairie and cross-timbers forest. No species from either of these natural ecosystems exists in my “garden.” All the plants are adapted to the moist conditions that have come with urbanization and fire suppression.

Furthermore, it is not really a “garden,” hence the quotation marks. I really do not do very much to it. I let “nature” take its course, for the most part, except:

• I mow the grass.
• I pluck up or cut down the seedlings and saplings of trees that squirrels planted too close to the house (water oak, red oak, pecan).
• I try to force the plants to play nicely with one another. That is, I take action against bullies, mainly by cutting back the most aggressive vines.

All of this, of course, is unnatural, especially my action against bullies. But I have planted very little. It is a managed ecosystem that formed from plants that happened to find themselves associated with one another. Here is a little more detail about it.

• The largest tree is a huge sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), and the second largest is a water oak (Quercus nigra). A squirrel planted the water oak about 2002, and today it fills a large part of what was once a grassy area. Both are species native to Oklahoma, even if not to my precise location.
• A male Kentucky coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus) has grown near the carport since 2001. Recently, it began spreading clonally, and now there are about five sprouts.
• A pyracantha (not native) dominates the corner of the fence.
• I planted a couple of redbuds (Cercis canadensis).
• A barrier of privet bushes (genus Ligustrum) protects my yard from the stupidity of the road. Privets are not native; indeed, they are one of the dirty dozen of Oklahoma invasives, and if I lived in the country I would feel obligated to cut them down (only to watch them resprout).
• But it is the vines that celebrate my hands-off approach. Wisteria, from Asia, is very aggressive, but so are the native mustang grapes (Vitis mustangensis) along the side fence; the muscadine grapes (V. rotundifolia) along the alley; the catbriars (Smilax bona-nox); and the snailseed vines (Mennispermum coccineum). All of these vines want to smother my pyracantha and redbuds and even my water oak.
• Shady microclimates have Geum canadense flowers (not very showy, but quite natural) and Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia).
• Birds are always planting mulberries (Morus alba) and sugarberries (Celtis laevigata). These trees like to destroy fences, so I spend a lot of time clipping them back. The wind blows in seeds of Asian lacebark elms (Ulmus parvifolia) from across the street.
• In spring, two species of daffodils, lots of weedy sedges, the hairy species of speedwell (genus Veronica), Hustonia, and both of the Lamium species that real gardeners despise (L. amplexicaule and L. purpureum) fill the yard while the grass is still dormant.

False dandelions (Krigia) fill large areas of my front yard, suppressing grass in the spring. I mow the Krigia like grass, getting milky sap on my flipflops. But I left them as long as I could. The little corner of yellow composite-flowers that opened in the morning stood in contrast to the well-mowed areas around it, and I hope this let people know I deliberately left the Krigia. I also have one of the biggest crape myrtles in town, and a lot of Vinca.

Is this a view of biodiversity in the future? A minimally-managed spot where even the guy who lives there can be surprised at what he finds. And the animal life seems to like it also. Even without a bird-feeder, I get the mimid trifecta (mockingbirds, brown thrashers, catbirds), and cardinals. “Weed” birds such as grackles find my yard too wild and never visit it. As for insects, I have lots of lightning-bugs (lampyrid beetles). The cat is a visitor, not a resident.

It is nothing like natural biodiversity. But there is enough biodiversity that, someday, my granddaughter can explore it and keep asking, What’s this? What’s this? Enough biodiversity, at least, that she will not grow up thinking that a tree is a tree is a tree.

Of course, if civilization collapses—and there are many ways this could happen—then a lot of biodiversity will return in its absence.

The Human Age

I have been reading Diane Ackerman’s The Human Age. As usual, I read good books several years after they come out.

The point of Diane Ackerman’s book is that humans have completely transformed the Earth to such an extent that no place is truly natural—nor is there, perhaps, any place that is entirely artificial. Humans have so completely transformed so much of the Earth that even the places we seemingly have not touched are now different, for example by global warming. But at the same time, all kinds of species have “invaded” the human landscape, whether transported by humans such as many invasive species (starlings from Europe, for example) or simply by exploring their way into our cities (as with coyotes downtown in cities).

Ackerman must be the world’s best science writer (in English, anyway). Try these quotes:

About urbanization: ...like splattered balls of mercury whose droplets have begun flowing back together, we’re finally merging into a handful of colossal, metal-clad spheres of civilization.

[The sun] reaches into the mumbling corners of our private universe, spurs growth, sheds light on all our episodes and exploits, transfigures daily life. Its edible rays feed the green plants on land and sea, which animals graze upon, and we dine upon in turn, and so it quivers through our blood. Every molecule of our being, every mote inside us, every atom and eave in the mansion of the body and the penumbra of the mind was forged in some early chaos of a sun.

And finally: Sometimes it seems as if Gaia were so pissed off she finally decided to erase her workmanship, atomizing the whole shebang and flicking our Blue Marble back into the mouth of the supernovas where our metals were first forged.

Years ago, someone who wrote a blurb for the jacket of my second book compared my writing to hers. Only now, upon reading Ackerman for the first time, do I realize what a compliment that was.

Much of Ackerman’s book is filled with small- or large-scale success stories of people who have capitalized upon the increasing desire among humans to reduce our impact on the Earth. She seems particularly impressed by natural buildings and vertical farming. All of this optimism is set against a background of terror, that humans are changing the Earth so much that we will no longer be able to fit our civilization into it, but she doesn’t talk about this very much. It is never very far, however, from the reader’s mind.

It was certainly never very far from my mind as I read the book. I was helping to supervise my ten-month-old granddaughter, who is exhaustingly cheerful. She loves exploring, or having attention paid to her, or being left alone to bang on things, and (we are lucky) she even likes most foods. She must have some incredible smile-muscles. And I kept thinking over and over about what kind of world she will encounter, a world messed up by earlier generations. It is not just my love for nature that makes me write and teach about environmental issues. I can always see her silhouette against our picture window with a view of flowers and leaves whenever I teach or write.

My Green, Green Happy Place

Sometimes I like to go to my happy place. This time, it was so that I could relax and enjoy my happiness at being a new grandfather. For some people, their happy place is a fantasy inside their minds. But for me, it is an actual place: the forest. In particular, the forest on Turkey Mountain outside of Tulsa.

The forest is a place with layers upon layers of stories. It is a palimpsest, that is, a document with layer upon layer of writing. On this particular like, I already knew almost all of the stories. One story was the geological history of the landscape. As I looked down from the mountain onto the Arkansas River, I remembered that this mile-wide river was once ten miles wide, as the glaciers up north melted. Another story was about human impact. The forest all around me grew in just the last century, since the time when this mountain was covered with oil derricks. Each species of tree, and each tree, had its own story: an evolutionary story of adaptation, and a developmental story of how each individual tree adjusted to its immediate environment of shade and sun, of deep soil or rock outcrop. The story is written from moment to moment. When I hiked, a drought was underway, and many leaves were wilted. Wilting is not completely a bad thing; by drooping down, a leaf has less of a heat load from the sunlight and avoids some of the damage it would otherwise experience. There are also many stories of food webs, whether it is of insects that have eaten the tender leaf tissue between the veins, or fungi eating dead branches. There is the story of the hard, green, inedible persimmon fruits that keep animals away until the seeds are ready to disperse, and only then do the fruits become ripe and delicious. There is the story of stumps sprouting back to life.

I knew all of these stories, but I just wanted to see them again on this hike. But I kept my eyes open, just in case there was a new story. And I found one—just one. A mimosa sampling was hit hard by the drought. Mimosas have lots of little leaflets which, after being held horizontally to face the sunlight in the day, close upward at night for reasons that nobody knows for sure. The leaflets also close upward during moderate drought, thus reducing their solar heat load. The leaflet movements are caused by bags of water called pulvini (singular pulvinus). When the bags of water exert pressure, they push the leaflets; when the bags lose pressure, the leaflets return to their original position.

But what I did not know was, are the pulvini on the top of the leaf or the bottom? If they are on top, then the water pressure pushes the leaflets open; their nocturnal closure represents only a loss of pressure, a relaxation, going to sleep. If this is the case, then the closure of the leaflets at night does not need an explanation. The plant is saving energy by letting the leaves relax. But if the pulvini are on the bottom, then the nocturnal closure demands an explanation: why would the mimosa leaf deliberately close its leaflets at night? This requires the expenditure of energy. The same is true for leaflet closure during moderate drought. If the pulvini are on the top, leaflet closure is merely the result of drought; but if they are on the bottom, then leaflet closure is a deliberate act to prevent drought damage. Of course, the pulvini are too small for me to see.

But I saw one leaf that was so stressed by heat and drought that the leaflets were starting to curl up and die. And in this leaf, the leaflets were horizontal. This tells me that the pulvini are on the bottom. I know this because, when severe drought causes the pulvini to stop working, the leaflets are horizontal, not vertical. In the photo, the drought-damaged leaflets are on top, the leaflets that are actively responding to drought are on the bottom. The damanged leaflets are horizontal, and the responsive leaflets are almost vertical.

To me, this was a new story that I learned on my hike. But I enjoyed re-experiencing the thousand other stories in the forest that I already knew.