Yesterday’s Eden

by KEN MALATESTA

I wish I could say I made a conscious ecological choice to plant a native midwestern garden, but my decision was, in fact, born of necessity and a kind of bereavement.

Although the initial decision was steeped in self-interest and ignorance, it resulted in something bigger than me. I am reminded of this every August when I count the monarch butterflies perched on shoots of meadow blazing star in my garden (thirteen at one time, three years ago). When I see the bumblebees and wasps and skippers and dozens of other insects I cannot identify crowding the bergamot and cone flower and milkweed every summer.  When I watch the goldfinch, sometimes six and seven at a time, that bend and sway on the Hyssop thistle as they pluck the seeds at dawn. The churning cycle of plant lives and insect lives and bird lives that will, I hope (along with human lives), persist beyond me.

I used to marvel at the way a slab of concrete weighing hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pounds, could begin to shift and buckle from the force of a sprout of pigweed or Canadian thistle. As a concrete laborer I came upon many of these scenes. A gradual and magisterial disintegration in progress. I spent eleven years forming curb and pouring sidewalks. Thousands of feet of curb that we’d roll, nose, edge, cove, and broom. Hundreds of thousands of square feet of sidewalk and catwalk. At the end of the day we’d rope it off with yellow caution tape and forget it. But our attempts to tame the world, smooth its edges, trowel its surface, always failed. Just leave some purslane or nettle or chickweed unchecked awhile. Watch it press through an irregularity in a concrete finish or the slightest crack. Give it a few hundred rainstorms, a decade or two to do its will, and you’ll see an insistence on life and procreation that perhaps only insects rival.

This isn’t what drew me to gardening, but if I ever doubted humanity’s impermanence and disruptive role in the world, growing native flowers has taught me otherwise. All those years ago, even as our work was being done, all the curbs and sidewalks laid and set, it was already gradually being undone. Like the 150-square-foot patio slab in my yard that a locust tree root is lifting and tilting, centimeter by centimeter, toward my garage foundation. The seepage and possible expense this will create aside, there is beauty in this sluggish progression and the earth in flux.

I became a gardener by accident. When I left construction and started teaching thirteen years ago, I started looking for any excuse to be outside. I sanded and restained an old coffee table that didn’t need either in the alley of our old apartment. I broke out my father’s concrete patio with a sledgehammer and a pry bar. But actual tasks were few and far between. When we moved to a condominium in Albany Park, I found gardening a suitable and consistent palliative. The building had just been rehabbed and there was no condo association, so no one objected when I planted tulips between the existing boxwoods and evergreen shrubs in the courtyard.  I made trips to Home Depot to buy mulch, I watered incessantly and plucked weeds. I did this blindly, unconsciously, to be outdoors and to fill a void I didn’t realize was there. Because even working in one of the world’s largest cities, amid the car exhaust and concrete, there were trees and birds and earth. And I’d sunk my hands in it to cut back for curb frames, and now I craved it.

The tulips disappointed immediately. They bloomed for a week and sat naked as telephone poles for the rest of the summer. The petunias and begonias bloomed in the concrete planters, maintenance free. I’d spritz them with the hose in the early evening. A neighbor gave me daylilies and hostas for a shady corner. I planted a lilac tree. I didn’t know what I was doing, but setting the sprinkler out and moving it every ten minutes gave me something to do, and seemed to reconnect me to something as intuitively human as libido.

Until I talked with my wife’s cousin, Charlotte Adelman, I didn’t realize that I had planted interlopers: invasive, fast-spreading common flowers that I’d seen and admired for their beauty, but had little or no ecological value. Charlotte literally wrote the book on midwestern native gardening, which provides detailed information on non-natives and invasive species and native alternatives based on color, heights, and bloom times. Once I read it, I didn’t see the point in ever planting anything else. In the introduction to The Midwestern Native Garden, she writes, “When planted in the right place and established, native plants tend to be reliable, disease resistant, long-lived and healthy, and rarely need watering, replacing, or costly pesticides.” She explains, “. . . prairie flowers and grasses have developed extremely deep moisture-seeking roots that trap, hold, and sequester carbon dioxide and pollutants.” I was already sold, but the damage nonnative plant species cause to native birds and insects, particularly pollinators like bees and butterflies, was Charlotte’s most convincing argument. It was too late for the condominium courtyard, but by the time we moved into our first house, at least I knew what I was doing.

I mail-ordered root plants from Prairie Moon, a nursery in Minnesota that Charlotte had recommended. Thirty-eight flowers and border grasses came in the “Butterfly-Hummingbird Kit” with suggestions for how to space and coordinate them: showy goldenrod and bergamot behind the shorter butterfly milkweed and columbine. I planted most of them in a 100-square-foot area in front of our house where we had removed evergreen shrubs. I spaced them two or three feet apart. When I ran out of room, I planted the remaining half dozen in a bed above a flagstone wall that ran along our driveway.

After my introduction to native plants, I became a bit obsessed, felt a compulsion for more that I can only equate to what I have heard people feel after they get their first tattoo. I tore out the honeysuckle and weed shrubs (which I never identified—some form of nettle that, if given some time, I imagine could have grown to the size of redwood) that girded our front and side yard, and began planting, at first prudently (I worried over heights and color schemes and bloom seasons and obstructing drivers’ views) and later, maniacally. Some stiff goldenrod here, heath aster there, sundrops and Virginia bluebells out front. I pored over Charlotte’s book, browsed catalogues. I kept a mental wish list. My New Jersey tea never took root like my ninebark had, and I needed a replacement. I wanted queen of the prairie and ironweed and Solomon’s seal. I reveled in their names—foxglove beardtongue, lanceleaf coreopsis, prairie smoke, alumroot, button blazing star, anise hyssop—even if I was unsure of their pronunciation.

I noticed natives everywhere. It has become a bit of a trend in the past decade. A few years ago, the Chicago Botanic Garden reinforced its sagging shoreline using native plants. Eugene Field Park, near our old condominium in the city, restored a swampy floodplain using natives. At the moment Charlotte, a retired lawyer, is filing a lawsuit to block the construction of the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park, primarily because of its infringement on native plant preserves on public land.

Restoration may merely be latent self-preservation. A backward look. In a 2015 article for Harper’s, Andrew Cockburn, provides some compelling counters to the native movement along with the origins of its rise and the politics that now surround it. He cites several examples of “invasive” species that have done some good and quotes Peter Del Tredici, formerly a senior research scientist at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, as saying, “re-creating a lost landscape is an impossibility, because the conditions under which these landscapes evolved no longer exist.”

This may be true in a strict ecological sense, but restoration feels like more than a simple nostalgia, a longing for the past. My garden plays a small role in the push for environmental restoration, but in moments it feels bigger; some would even deem native gardening a political act. Now in its sixth year, my original thirty-eight flowers have bloated into hundreds, thousands for all I know. They materialize in beds where I never planted them, in my somewhat maintained lawn, in the cracks between the sidewalks and the fissures of my crumbling driveway. I move what I can to the front and side yards. I give them away, to students and neighbors and whoever will take them. Shamefully, sometimes I pull them like weeds, or else risk them taking over the whole property. The mass profusion is bewildering. Absurd, if you ponder it long enough. 

Annie Dillard devotes an entire chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to fecundity. It begins with her waking from a terrifying dream where she watched two Luna moths mating: “And then the eggs hatch and the bed was full of fish . . . The eggs hatched before my eyes, on my bed, and a thousand chunky fish swarmed there in a viscid slime.”

Once you get beyond the anthropocentric version of the world most of us inherit, it’s easy to see how fecundity gives her nightmares. The postdiluvian descriptions that follow her dream are even more terrifying:

“Creatures extrude or vent eggs; larvae fatten, split their shells, and eat them; spores dissolve or explode; root hairs multiply, corn puffs on the stalk, grass yields seed, shoots erupt from the earth turgid and sheathed; wet muskrats, rabbits, and squirrels slide into sunlight, mewling and blind; and everywhere watery cells divide and swell, swell and divide.”  

Insects and animals can disgust with their blind and astonishing proliferation, but Dillard concedes that “. . . in the plant world, and especially among flowering plants, fecundity is not an assault on human values.” Maybe so, but it is no less astonishing. She describes an (“legendarily”) Asian torture that “capitalizes” on bamboo’s ability to grow three feet in twenty-four hours. Read it and squirm. And an experiment that measured the root growth of winter rye that yielded “378 miles of roots” in just four months—“14 billion root hairs . . . In a single cubic inch of soil, the length of the root hairs totaled 6,000 miles.” Her anecdotes from Rutherford Platt’s The Great American Forest make the forces at work on my patio slab look like matchsticks. Dillard writes, “Fecundity is anathema only in the animal. ‘Acres and acres of rats’ has suitably chilling ring to it that is decidedly lacking if I say, instead, ‘acres and acres of tulips.’” This may not worry Dillard on the banks of Tinker Creek, but I consider this fecundity and its force right outside my house with some trepidation.

Golden Alexanders are usually the first to bloom. Dozens of three-foot stalks with clusters of tiny yellow buds the size of a needle’s eye. The Virginia bluebells come early too, bending like supplicants at the neck of their stems.

The American columbine, the only red flower that remains, survive only because they bloom in April, before they can be crowded into the shadows of the mid- and late-summer bloomers, bergamot and goldenrod. Thin stems and clover leaves appear in the rock wall and in the trenches I dig every year between the lawn and flower beds. (Royal catchfly, which delivered on its guarantee of ruby-throated hummingbird visits, and cardinal flower were short-lived. Crowded out by flowers in the mint family and asters, neither lasted more than two seasons). They didn’t begin to multiply this obscenely until the third or fourth year. Nature hadn’t taken its course.

In her preface, Charlotte describes gardening with “old favorites” and perennial ornamentals. Much like what I had done in our condo’s courtyard. She doesn’t notice the dearth of insects and birds until she sees a goldfinch “. . . extracting seeds from the center of a purple coneflower.” Later, she writes, “During another walk in a local park, I noticed the hostas and daylilies from China did not attract much of anything. In contrast, and to my astonishment, numerous butterflies, skippers, and bees surrounded the native Blackeyed Susans, coneflowers, and blazing stars.” There is really no way to communicate the amount of insect life in a native garden. Watching it is like watching the unbroken movement and blinkering of a pinball machine. Bumblebees, twenty or more at a time, nuzzle in the bergamot. They are first to arrive in the morning and last to leave in the evening. In deep summer, I can see them till nearly dark.  Honeybees and wasps drift in and out uninterrupted from dawn till dusk. Cabbage whites, red admirals, painted ladies, black swallowtails. Moths and fritillary species I can’t even begin to identify flit from blossom to blossom, sipping nectar. The pearly blooms of hairy mountain mint attract great black wasps—menacing-looking things, long as pinkie fingers, with an iridescent blue sheen and dangling stinger. In high summer it is a daily smorgasbord.

Having a pathological fear of bees (as I assume many people do) while nurturing an ecosystem that invites them to my front door has been therapeutic. I have learned they are much more interested in the flowers than they are in me (at least, that is what I tell my sons when they scamper from the hovering darts of wasps). Even when I bend to pluck a weed or disrupt their feasting with an occasional lawn mowing, I’ve never been stung. Still, the daily scene can paralyze me. I think of all that’s happening invisibly, beyond the pollination and the familiar beauty. Bees and butterflies sucking nectaries until flowers turn pale, wasps eating katydids and parasitizing caterpillars, caterpillars eating leaves fattening themselves to be eaten by birds. It is a veritable slaughterhouse, as much ingestion as gestation. I intervene very little as everything drifts in and then off to their nests, to other gardens, to wildflowers along highways, to the whims of the wind and hopefully to crop plants. Bugs are eaten and seed after seed is dropped and more flowers come and cross-pollinate and food somehow ends up in the grocery aisles and on my kitchen table. I don’t mean to sound ignorant, but it is a strange miracle, or rather billions of small ones every season that still awe me.  

Lanceleaf coreopsis is particularly bountiful. The two root bulbs I planted during the first year disappeared for a season and then reemerged the third where I had originally planted them, and in areas a hundred feet away. Two hundred feet away. As of this writing, late June, I have at least thirty scattered about and blooming, and this does not account for the twenty I gave away in the spring or the dozen fledglings sprouting from the flagstone wall along the driveway. Nor the ones in the creases of the driveway and the catwalk, beneath the evergreens and in garden beds, where I never planted them. They grow outward, near horizontal when they fully mature, in tangles of long stems with aureolin marigold-like blooms. They are supposedly a rabbit deterrent, but every year I see rabbits pulling at their three-foot stems to get at the dark amber seeds.

They are everywhere. At first it seemed like nature’s peculiar magic, but the goldfinch are to blame. God bless them. Skittish little things, they come at dawn, before the house sparrows awaken to bicker in the evergreens. The quietest creak from my screen door can spook them, and they disperse, spilling seed from twittering beaks. Most books and websites describe their flight as “undulating,” and this is true, but they seem to bound up molecular staircases ascending into the safety of nearby trees. They have grown less wary of me over the years (or I’ve grown quieter, a virtue when watching birds). By late August when they come back for the hyssop, I estimate they have seeded at least a hundred new flowers.

The cup plant spreads by way of goldfinch too. And wind. And leaf blower. The first one, a gift from my mother-in-law’s garden, is now positively Jurassic. Over ten feet tall, it seems to swallow the earth around it. The serrated leaves, dense and coarse to the touch, unfurl by degrees. Imagine a giant slowly opening his fist. None of its offspring are as hulking because they compete for space among older flowers. But they poke out of thickets of stiff goldenrod and cast shadows over the yellow coneflower (everything on the east side of the house seems to bloom yellow though I hadn’t planned it that way). They are difficult to uproot. You have to get to them early if you’re going to gift them, but every spring when I see the sprouts of new cup plant, I can never dig deep enough. So they remain. Some flourish. Some wither. At this point it all seems excessive and beautifully beyond my control. In full surrender to fecundity, I’ve stopped counting the joe-pye weed and the smooth blue aster, and the black-eyed Susan and common milkweed brought from elsewhere by bees and butterflies and birds. 

This cyclic grace, flowers jockeying for sunlight, reproducing as if conscious, has become more predictable. I still read and research plants, but I prefer to watch them. The seeming miracle of them. The humility in tending. How little I am needed for their efflorescence (other than the first season, and when I’ve replanted, I’ve never needed to water them). How small a role I play, Horatio to their Hamlet. How the entire process obliterates the ego, and invites something like transcendence.

Del Tradici says, “The world is a totally different place as a result of human activity. There’s no going back in time.”

Perhaps not. And that was never my intention. But I never saw goldfinch with such regularity and never knew the great black wasp existed until I planted natives. Nor am I ever completely convinced that anyone, even scientists, knows better than anyone else. We are human after all, and humans have done much more than bat a wing to instigate the environmental disintegration of the past few hundred years.

I don’t understand more than I do, and sometimes I prefer it. Some things are better left a mystery. Like the monarch migration and the timeline of our eventual extinction.

There is beauty in the waiting. “The waiting itself is the thing,” wrote Dillard.  Which is the case for most things, particularly gardening. If you live in the Midwest or someplace like it, winters, especially of late, are oppressive. Bleak, sunless, and cold. A cold so convincing that you can start to believe summer, spring, seasons do not exist at all. A cold that always was and is. A cold so pervasive “fecundity” seems a cruel impossibility, a fairytale. These are days, if the brief hours of light can be called days at all, for dreamless slumber. Days to think of other places, other days in other places that seem far away even when what you conjure is your own front yard. Warmth is a forgotten state of being. At the least it is an association, a memory.

Most of the year my garden is bare stalks. Little blue stem and sideoats grama faded and stripped of seed. Naked dogwood branches weighted by frost. Leaves, fallen and windblown from the neighbor’s ash and our locust, the ones I miss during the autumn clean-up, cling to the base of blanched milkweed stalks. I let it be till the spring. The bent stalks sapped and achromatic. An occasional cardinal or hated sparrow will settle on them in January, searching for an errant seed or insect incubated by leaves.

In February the Prairie Moon catalogue arrives along with the waiting. The hope. The anticipation is sometimes more satisfying than the garden in full bloom. By summer I start to dream again.

Sometimes I dream I can’t tame them. I dream their absurd reproduction and the hypnotic susurrus of bees. I dream the wasps have burrowed into the eaves, nested, and replicated into the millions, and I wander into swarms when I go out to fetch the Sunday paper. I dream the garden’s roots, the geometric progression, my foundation and my kitchen under siege, and the inside becomes out, or there is no difference and never was. I dream I am a root winding my way through earth—Dillard’s endless miles—and that we all are. Digging, rooting, clinging. Reproducing. Children, thoughts, plastic waste. Every exhalation is a something and we are all holding our breath.