In the nursery one often engages in conversation about plants--with customers, with each other as staff members, and sometimes in my own head, solo. Why does this one never grow well in pots, but it's so vigorous in the ground? Why does this one die in the winter even though it's absolutely cold hardy in our region? Where did I get this lone plant that's hiding out in an odd-size pot in the corner of a hoop house? Didn't we just pot those 4 weeks ago--look at all those roots already coming out from the drain holes in the pots...whoa. Some plants prove themselves as the nursery equivalent of excellent house guests--not necessarily doing dishes but being pleasant companions in an ephemeral sort of way. Other plants are like the other kind of house guest--they are happy to stay as long as we let them. All plants behave uniquely in our care and under our wings.
Thinking about them as unique beings is the conversation I have most often
with plants. I may sing among them, but I don't sing to them. I feel they sing to me, and I'm grateful. The music isn't literal--it's more like seeing music with no sound. Conversation with these evocative creatures--truly out other half, in a cosmic sense going back to earliest evolution, but also in terms of metabolism. They live on what would otherwise be one of our most toxic waste products, and in return they make the very air that swaddles us breathable. It's truly hard to fathom. So it should be no surprise that conversation with plants is an ancient, articulate, intimate affair grounded in observation and silence. It's quiet time.
The most beautiful thing about being a grower is just that--being a grower. Growing plants is the beautiful part. Creating any satisfying landscape is perhaps analogous to a chef's presentation on the plate--important, but it's an effect noticed way down at the end of the process, when the final product is in view. Growing plants is more akin to the chef's creative act--cooking. As growers, our conversations with plants often begin in the field, with their parents. Some idle small talk, admiration, maybe some light flirting: "You look pretty in the early light" or "The frost brings out your natural color". Later, we try to figure out how to allow them to germinate in our care. There are a few basic tricks with most native plants, ways to treat the seed. It's like anything else in life. You find out what you need to add to the equation to make it work. Once seedlings sprout, we as growers need to pay close attention--if you've raised kids, this stage is entirely analogous to the infant stage of human life. Very unforgiving. You try to control all exposure to the elements, and to anything else--too dry, too wet, too cold, too hot, one stray predator, one lapse of judgment--all have consequences. But with seedlings, everything is sped up compared to human life, so within a few days or weeks, seedlings 'harden off'--this is a nice old-timey nursery term for toughening up, which takes a lot more than a few days or weeks for people...
At every step, we have conversations with plants. Most growers have these chats in our heads. Talking about plants with other people is fun, but communing with the plants themselves is the richer language. Raising them in this accelerated way to adolescence--when they are ready to go out on their own, into the world, into someone's garden--is sweet and wistful. Some growers I've known don't really want to sell any of their plants. In a comical way, they will decline sales as they walk around with a nursery customer: "Oh, no, those aren't for sale, sorry..." as they grab the flat of 4" pots and whisk them off to some fake "SOLD" area or some faux infirmary. Of the 400+ species we raise or tend to each year, there are always a few we really don't want to part with. It's probably how a dog breeder feels, and why some dog breeders accrue dogs over the years. Our Nursery Manager (Kathy) grew a world-class crop of bunchberry (Cornus canadensis) two years ago, and we all really resented when people bought them. We even priced them prohibitively, or so we thought--out the door they went. Our latest example of this is a crop of native wild ginger (Asarum canadense) Kathy also grew from seed I collected seed in early June, near Clinton, NY. I was lucky to stumble on a sprawling patch at its single-best seed-bearing day of the year--ripe fruit but not open yet. Seeds of wild ginger are borne in soft, plump thumbnail-sized fruits on spindly stalks that either hide under the leaves and blend into the colors of the forest duff, or they actually slink under the duff. Either way, very hard to see, very hard to find. Adding complexity to shyness, the fruits open quickly, and the seeds are ferried off by ants who relish the little appendage clinging to the seed--the eliasome. Ants probably hasten the fruits' opening as well.
I like to think of all our native plants in the nursery as passing through. These particular plants, our first crop of wild ginger seedlings, grew quickly, proving to be a truly rhizomatous plant, becoming themselves in a matter of months, filling the little seedling cells with crisp white roots, then filling the next size after we transplanted them. I also like to think of their time with us as an interlude. We interrupt their natural cycle in the wild, but out of care, love and consummation. Then once the seed sprouts and the seedlings are ready for life out in the world--adolescence, time to leave the nest--we send them back out to the wild. Sometimes the wild is just that--a real woods where they can smell the leaf litter and remember the sound of the wind. Sometimes it's a garden someone's made to mimic, or honor, the wild--a natural garden, a native landscape. As long as there's some love there, I like to think the plants are happy to be back 'out' in the world.
We want that for them also. For any native plant, life in the wild is the ideal. Life in a garden isn't bad either if you like conversation...
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