Tiny Spears At Ten Paces

I don't know exactly why the sumbitch is in my garden in the first place.

That is not true. I do know. I put it there. It was before I understood the point of planting natives in the garden. I still bring in plenty of exotics because I am a flawed human but I'm working in a backbone of natives too. This sumbitch is no native.

I was visiting my sister Bobbie in Colorado. She and her husband have a huge cactus garden. It looks amazing. Like it all got dropped off by aliens. They don't get a lot of water there and the cacti do very nicely. There are fat ones and skinny ones and flat ones and globular ones and some of them don't know which way to turn so they turn all the ways. Every now and then they get a whiff of rain and they all bloom, damn near audibly. I love it.

Not only that, but the garden scenically contains authentic Southwest fauna posing picturesquely all the time as though they were in a diorama and the museum curator wanted one of everything. There are bunnies. Lizards. Quail. Salamanders, for some unknown reason, even though I tell them, Psst, it's way damper where I live, and they just shrug their noodle shoulders and stay put. There are owls in the cactus holes.

My brother-in-law was tending the beds when I came up and admired them loudly, and he said "Would you like to take a few home with you to see how they do?" I couldn't imagine they'd do very well in my climate, which is, or perhaps I should say was, quite soggy at times. But the exotic-plant beeper of joy went off in my head and I said "Sure!"

I pointed at a few favorites. He went in with delicate precision like he was playing Twister on a wobble-board and snapped off a few pieces and dropped them in a cardboard box.

With extra-long barbecue tongs. In retrospect, a clue.

No dirt. "Just take the box home and open it up and leave it outside for a couple weeks to let them harden up and then lay them down where you want them," he said.

 

Around here we dig the hole twice as big as our plants and half-fill with compost and unicorn poop and fluff the roots and tamp down carefully and raise a soil ring around to hold water and cross our fingers. We most certainly do not bake them in the sun and chuck them on the ground.

 

But they took. Three of them made it all the way through the damp winter. The tall squiggly one petered out the next spring and another one sulked and rotted a bit later. But the Prickly Pear was quite happy. It kept flapping out new ears and even bloomed, briefly but beautifully. I had it in a corner I don't always reach with the hose. Fun! But after a few years it was getting obstreperous. I tried to go in and weed around it but even if I didn't touch it, tiny hairlike spines flew through space and lodged in my knuckles. It was like one of those medieval armies where everyone throws their spears at once. After a while you just decide to go conquer something else.

 

I wouldn't get within a yard of it. But it kept growing, flinging out new flappets. It was backing me into the peonies. Ultimately I quit tending the entire corner and the little bench I had there fell apart from anxiety and weeds lurched up through the gravel. This area is right inside the wall near the street. People who glance at our garden and say "Ooo, pretty" and tilt in to see over the wall? That's the first thing they see. Brown crap, neglect, and a terrorist succulent.

This year I'd had it. I had a thriving prickly pear but no owls and no bunnies or lizards and nary a quail so I armored up and went in there with a spading fork. I stabbed at it and tore it apart in chunks--each chunk miraculously packed with water that it got from who knows where, because we're in a major drought--and dropped it in the yard debris bin. I think it's gone now. But it'll be a year before I even try to clean out the rest. I know how terrorists work. Even if they're vanquished, the sumbitches leave landmines behind. That corner isn't a portrait of neglect. It's a hostage situation.

Happy birthday to Bobbie!

The Rise Of Mr. Happy

There was a time when we thought Mr. Happy would never rise up, would remain just a withered stump of a thing. But we were wrong. Mr. Happy is standing up straight and proud and pink, a little disheveled around the dark curls at his base, but still a sturdy spike of glory. He's magnificent. One look at him and you can tell he doesn't belong here. You can hike all summer long around here and not run into another ten-foot-tall tower of flowers. The other way to tell is to remember how many days Dave had to wrap him in a blanket with a light bulb for heat and read "Charlotte's Web" to him last winter. It ain't natch'l.

So I'm not getting away with anything here. If I was planning to get an official certification as a Backyard Habitat, Mr. Happy would put the lie to it. It would be like trying to shoplift a refrigerator under my overcoat. People can tell.

I've only recently become aware why someone would want to have a certified backyard habitat. Rules aren't stringent. Someone needs to come by and see that at least five percent of your vegetation is native to the area. Five percent. Why would anyone want to have a garden with just the same straggly stuff you could see in the local woods anyway? Glad you asked.

It's a little lesson in evolution. Every living thing is trying to get along. Get along in life, that is, and not necessarily with each other. Definitely not with each other. It's eat or get eaten. You have a plant that wants to eat sunlight, and a raft of caterpillars that want to eat the plant, the plant is going to have an opinion. And it's going to back up its opinion with some chemical defenses. And sooner or later some branch of the butterfly family tree is going to do an end run around those defenses, and that's where the eggs are going to be deposited. If the emerging caterpillars manage to chew the plants all up, then they've screwed themselves too. But if the birds pick off most of the caterpillars, leaving just enough of them to keep the butterfly franchise going, everyone makes out. What you are witnessing in a natural landscape is the truce that remains after everyone's done duking it out.

This balance the plants and insects are achieving as they dance through time together can get to be pretty precise. Many butterflies are adapted to one host plant only. You start carting them out and replacing them with pretty flowers that evolved somewhere far away, you'll find your insect population at a complete loss. You strip-mine the Midwest with Roundup so you can replace the native milkweeds with corn and soybeans, you'll crash the monarch butterflies. They don't have thousands of years to come up with a new plan.

This is not good news for the birds that are counting on the insect hatch to feed their own young, like

our chickadee friends, the Windowsons. It takes a whole lot of grubs to raise a baby Windowson. They're hauling them in so fast it looks like Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz doing an episode in a sausage factory. Visualize an endless chain of links pouring into the birdhouse. Your pretty new garden does not provide enough little green sausages for the bird population.

Fortunately for you, you don't remember when there were ten times as many birds. Or ten times that many. That was in your mom's era, or your grandma's--might as well have been the Cretaceous. So you're free to enjoy your exotic flowers. I know I do.

But I'm still keeping my favorite invasive species, Tater Cat, indoors, and when Mr. Happy finally shrivels up--he can't last forever--I'll think about slipping in a nice local flowering currant.