First Landscaping Jobs and Seed Collecting for Life

     I was 21 years old and living in a rented house that backed up against a fir-pine woods at about 6000' elevation in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.  If you walked uphill slowly, swinging back and forth between widely spaced trunks, it might have looked like a slalom skier in rewind, going uphill, instead of downhill, in alternating arcs around trees.  Just keep going up and up and up until you'd hit a wet meadow with monkshood and lilies and sedges and Indian paintbrush and all the seemingly delicate but mountain-tough plant species that make a colorful wet meadow in the Sierras.  I was new in town, so they were all new to me, and it was love at first sight--but as with all love at first sight, I didn't know much about any of them.  One might say I was being shallow, falling for a meadow of pretty faces.  But there was more to it.

     I found work one night while eating a slice of pizza.  I was next to a guy named Roy at the counter.  Roy asked me what I was doing, if I was new in town.  In small towns that's a fair and logical question, so I took it as a friendly ice breaker.  I told him yes, and he asked what kind of work I did.  I told him I was looking for something immediate just to get myself working quickly.  He advised me to come to his jobsite tomorrow and his boss would definitely hire me.  They were talking earlier today about how they needed more guys.  It was a large lake-side estate being built, and landscaped, from scratch.  I told him I'd never done landscape work, but he said it didn't matter, they needed help.   I thanked him and he said, "What was your name again, Squirrel?"  I said "Segal."  He said ok, great, see you tomorrow.

Cornus racemosa, gray dogwood

     So I showed up at the jobsite and his boss immediately asked me who I was and why I was here.  "Did Roy mention I was coming by for a job?  I met him last night and he said you needed help."  He said something about how Roy was always saying things that weren't true and that he didn't even know if Roy was still working for him, but if I was ready to work we could start for a day and see how it went.  I moved gravel all day to lay a generously wide apron around a beachside firepit.  I tried to catch a large rolling boulder coming downhill at me by putting my shovel head under it, the way you'd pick up a lacrosse ball with a lacrosse stick if the ball were slowly rolling towards you.  The shovel handle abruptly shot up from about my chest height to over my head, missing my chin on its way by about 1/2".  My jaw would have been broken in an instant.  My new boss was right there and imparted the bossly wisdom "Never do that again, dude".  He said everything in the vernacular and tone of ski culture in the mountain west, I would come to learn.  He was old enough to be my father.  I had never heard adults talk like freshman year of college.  It was eye-opening in many ways. 

     After about 3 weeks of site prep, including days raking vast expanses of soil to remove every pebble larger than about 1", we began installing plants.  Unfortunately, much of the approach to the lake was sodded, which at the time I didn't understand or think about, but now realize was part of the eternal compromise between landscaping and ecology.  While sod or lawn provides some quick green cover, and it's useful to humans in some ways, its shallow roots are unsuited to stabilizing slopes or slowing down any real water volume over a surface of land.  But we also planted thousands of plants--ball and burlap evergreens, understory trees, large container shrubs and countless perennials.  On planting days, a Landscape Architect with the actual last name 'Plant' showed up on site wearing a bowler and holding what seemed like an ivory walking stick.  He would pace the site, impetuously tap his cane on the ground while we followed with a few species in our arms, and he'd either say nothing if we guessed correctly which plant he'd intended for his latest cane divot, or he'd say caustically "No..." until we tried another and another and finally got it right.  Sometimes he'd say "No, I'm just resting here."  Somehow we found him fun to work with.  He wasn't really a snob, he just seemed to enjoy playing the part. 

     There was a woman who worked for my boss, and on this jobsite she was in charge of plants and horticulture decisions.  At some point during this endless project which seemed to be funded with money from an offshore fortune, she started showing me some of the plants, probably because I asked her the names of a few.  I don't remember how we started talking plants, but she was nice to me, and most of us remember our first love--in my case it was columbine.  The seeds in an elongated sort of honeycomb, or fan-shaped capsule, would rattle seductively, the plant kingdom's sound of fertility (there are technical terms for many different kinds of seed-bearing structures in plants, and trust me that I learned them and know them, but I find certain generalized terms like 'head' or 'capsule' to be much more useful and also instinctive for people to grasp...moreso than the confusing 'follicle', for example).  Also the super-small but super-shiny black units, the seeds, seemed so clean, so pure, so powerful and so nearly lost and invisible to the average person.  And their sheer numbers were kind of shocking.  So many, so efficiently made and packed in this cute, durable and cosmically beautiful remnant of a flower.  I really knew absolutely nothing about plants.  And I was hooked right away. 

     She showed me coral bells and other North American native perennials commonly used in landscapes and especially in the mountain west.  I learned that some didn't make seed.  I'd do all the things the plant asked of me: be patient first, waiting till the capsule was a nice dryish tan, than I'd touch it gently, seeing if seed rattled out, or listening for the rattle.  Then I'd pinch a head and bring it up to head height and inspect more closely--where are the seeds?  Some plants, I would learn later, don't make seed because we've made sure they can't.  Or we've inadvertantly made them eunuchs.  But since most plants have both male and female parts in the same flower (and in botany this is called 'perfect'!), eunuch may not be quite right, but rather the sterile word 'sterile'.  Sterility as an accidental fate, or sterility as a virtue in plants...those are topics for another day.

     About this same time, during my seed awakening with plants, I noticed other plants magically doing the same thing--synchronized seeding.  It felt like a conspiracy.  All around me, plants that wowed everyone with their shows of color in flower followed their opening act with a subtle encore even more fascinating, and equally essential: they made seed.  Outside my local bank and grocery store, there were casual plantings of Cosmos and other flowering annuals and perennials, and I stopped to visit them regularly, scouting to see if any seed was ready to sneak into a little brown bag.  I collected cosmos seed, California poppy seed, lupine, and about 15 or 20 other kinds.  I stored them in those paper bags on my fireplace mantle.  As they began to pop open and explode in various ways (dehisce is the verb), I felt they were introducing themselves to me in more depth.  We were getting to know eachother, the plants and me.

   Ten years later I was more hooked than ever, and started a small mail order seed business called Californica: Seeds of the Golden State.  Californica is the botanical second name (species name) attached to many different kinds of plants native to California.  I collected all seed myself and spent zillions of follow-up hours cleaning, bagging, and mailing seed out to the modest horde of other plant crazies who found this strange, meager currency valuable.  In fact, some found it more valuable than money.  Letters came from Holland requesting seed of western US native plants for their research; I got a letter from a student in Scandinavia who just loved native perennials of the western US mountains for their hardiness.  The most touching letter of all was from an old timer in San Diego who lamented bitterly the loss of habitat and species he remembered from his childhood spent roaming the scrub behind his home.  Now all he wanted was some Viola pedunculata seed to grow as a token memory of his youth.    

Asarum canadense, wild ginger, from seed


  Here in 2011, in the Finger Lakes of Central New York, seed collecting is still the essence of my time out in the field, but the window is narrow here.  Also, fewer people here seem to value the currency of locally hand-collected native plant seed.  But I still do it, and it's still the basis of our plant inventory at the nursery.  Not so much by volume, but in meaning.  The plants we grow this way, from local seed we raise from scratch, has so much more inherent meaning to me.  We can't always work with those plants, but when we get to use our own-grown plants, the plantings have a certain secret, underlying glow that probably no one else sees.

Baseball, Weather Records and A Rest in the Woods

     Last weekend, just before Thanksgiving, in the woods of the Finger Lakes of Central New York, it could have been colder.  It's hard to say 'should have been' colder, because in truth, we don't know what it's supposed to be like on any given day or weekend.  Yes, if you like to see minute snippets of weather--single day high temps, for example--as passing bytes of proof that climate is changing, then you would say it should have been colder, more raw.  If, on the other hand, you believe that climate is changing, but you also see any given day's weather as an expression too ephemeral to represent the whole, then you just take a warm day in stride.  Or a warm weekend.  How about a warm month?  I think you can still take those in stride.  But the larger the data set, the harder it is to dismiss.  And larger data sets are, of course, collections of small bits of data--just as the streambed is a moving collection of cobbles and gravel, and while any one cobble isn't the streambank, well, in a cosmic way, it is.  Our aim should be to understand things at multiple scales and on several levels before we take a strong stance.  Scientists know this, which is why biologists study cells and organelles, but also organisms and systems, and why astronomers need to understand fundamental laws of physics and chemistry: the infinitessimal, and the infinite.

     Records in sports and weather are of two kinds: the meaningless and the meaningful.   The three things I follow most closely in life (aside from family) are weather, our emotional relationships with nature, and sports--not in any order.  In sports, we see humanity's main themes expressed somehow, so as an ex-jock but also as an observer of life, I think there's fundamental meaning in sports.  Meaningless sports records are ones that are either broken regularly, or that are statistically insignificant.  Often those two criteria are met in the same records.  For example, say a baseball player had more walks than anyone else since 2009.  Trumpeted as a real feat by announcers or statisticians, this means that such record has been broken twice in 3 years.  So is it a record, in the sense of a real accomplishment, or is it really just a statistic that reflects some artificial change in the way the game is played, managed, or officiated?  Or a team hitting its highest number of triples since 2007.  Compare that calibre of feat with something like most shutouts by a pitcher in one season since 1974 or most stolen bases by a player since 1981.  Of course, the idea is that rarity matters, scope matters, margins matter.  That's what makes records meaningful.  We understand the governing influences of baseball pretty clearly--and other sports--so most people tend to agree on the meaningful vs. meaningless distinction in sports records.  I am using baseball because of its deep history of stats. 

     With weather, it's not exactly equivalent, but we do have our share of meaningless records, and some that seem more meaningful.  Breaking the record high temperature for a given day in a given place, by a couple of degrees, may be analogous to someone breaking a sports record by a very small margin--250 innings pitched vs. 248 innings--or to breaking a very singular, isolated record that by definition is subject to the occasional low-probability outcome--maybe most throwing errors in a night game following a day game, for example.  The enhanced ability to track all types of data now allows for more data, more qualification of data, and therefore, more records.  However, this doesn't make weather data inherently meaningless, just because there's more of it.  In the above example, a record would be much more meaningful if it were broken by a wide margin.  There's nothing inherently interesting about Syracuse breaking a July high temperature record by 1 degree.  But breaking it by many degrees, or breaking single-day records many times in a given year, or breaking monthly averages several times over several years--that's when the gravels and cobbles start to become a streambed, and it's hard not to see them that way. 

     So that's the long way around to saying you can't extrapolate from little bits if information, but you can't ignore them either.  Isn't this just re-stating the law of averages?  Maybe.  I think of it more visually, as a fractal view.  Each scale of reality stands alone, but is also embedded in ever-larger scales.  In ecology this is called an 'organismal' approach--where we see cellular structure and organization as small-scale expressions of the same principle we see organizing larger systems in nature.  As if all scales are not only related, but together make up a larger organism, a cohesive whole.  For some, the organismal approach is just symbolic--a model or an idea--while others take it literally.  I take it literally.

     Thanks for the Ecology segue--overdue.  Ecology is really the study of all nature, and where we observe all rules of nature playing out.  Some rules play out in deep space, but then again, everything is deep space, even right here.  Darwin was an ecologist, just showing us a mechanism by which we might understand most rules of nature.  He was also tormented by his own awareness that his insight into ecology would more or less permanently weaken a religious explanation for everything.  By most accounts, Charles Darwin was a religious man who called nature as he saw it (this would make him a true scientist, practicing observation rather than projecting ideas first), and tried neither to stage, or avoid, a battle between opposing views of life.  To him, his observations were compatible with his belief in God, but he knew others would have trouble seeing it that way.

     So last weekend, just before Thanksgiving, in the woods of the Finger Lakes of Central New York, it could have been colder.  Maybe it should have been colder.  But either way, on this given day, trying to enjoy the moment and trying not to read context into the momentary weather, it was a sweet chance to spend a mild day in the woods with my 11-year old son.  We visited a local nature center and spent a few hours walking trails.  We wandered paths through some brutally disturbed struggling woods, with an understory of pure multiflora rose, privet and invasive honeysuckle.  He said he didn't really like those trails and I hoped it was because he was picking up on the absence of native vegetation, so we talked about that a little as we walked.  I suggested that people sense that even if they don't always pinpoint it.  He showed me where he found crawdads in the creek along this same trail earlier in the year.  Then we headed upslope between two small gorges, on a gentle jutting ridge of bedrock, and wandered into a much more promising oak woods with a supporting mix of ironwood, hickory and maple.  We found a semi-open gap in the forest, with the ground strewn with a perfect pad of soft crinkly oak and maple leaves mostly.  My son spontaneously sat down and then laid down to look up at the sky.  I asked him redundantly if he wanted to stop and take a rest here.  He said yes, it seems like a good spot.  Between us and the gray sky a hawk raked the canopy and prowled the woods.  We watched treetops move in a light breeze but the air was mostly still.  For a few minutes it was nice to just recline and rest in silence, taking in the subdued, rich tones of fall with a boy who will someday, with his peers, inherit the earth.