Botanic garden, Kousa dogwood, and kicking the shut-in habit

Photo of a Seattle bungalow in fall or winter, by Wonderlane, Flickr Creative Commons license.

**

One of the things I’ve learned in the past 10 days: When in a dark, rainy place without the need to leave home for work, and while living in a lovely Arts & Craft house, well-insulated and well-gardened, it’s easy to become a sleepy shut-in.

But, here at the housesit house, I’m leaving my slumber. I’m happy to say that soon I start a copywriting contract gig at an ecommerce company. Also, I’ve done some political canvassing.

Here’s to the vigorous productivity and growth that follow any plant’s necessary dormant period, right? Ha.

And, as we watch those flood waters slowly recede from New Jersey and New York—where I once lived, have dear friends, and remember well the turn of the streets and sounds of people’s voices—it’s good to know progress occurs.

(Last night I ordered a pizza and specified the “South Philly,” in honor of areas affected by Hurricane Sandy. Because it’s the least I could do, the “Brooklyn Bridge” was more expensive, and I figured I could add my own bell peppers, after all.)

Photo of pizza by Arnold Gatilao, Flickr Creative Commons license

**

On an active weekend recently, I took a field trip to Kruckeberg Botanic Garden. It's a 4-acre public garden in a north Seattle suburb, founded as a private garden in 1958 by

husband-and-wife botanists and horticulturists Arthur Kruckeberg and his wife Mareen. 

The place has more than 2,000 plant species, collected over 50 years.

Kruckeberg, a University of Washington botanist for decades, is known in regional horticulture circles for ground-breaking writing about Pacific Northwest and Western native plants.

His book, Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest (UW Press, 1996), is a comprehensive primer considered enviable by many regions.

The fact is, West Coast bio-climates are unique on the North American continent. They vary widely according to proximity to mountains, valleys, and the Pacific and other water -- and much of the contemporary planting research has taken place since the 1950s, including Sunset magazine’s Sunset Western Garden Book and Dr. Kruckeberg’s research.

What I mean is, these people have done important work -– so I looked forward to seeing Kruckeberg Garden. It has about 30% native plants and 70% exotics.

On a Sunday bus schedule, I took the bus to a spot five blocks east of the garden. I didn't realize that the blocks were long and terraced, descending toward Puget Sound’s Richmond Beach. The views of the Sound were pretty, but the streets were curving and sometimes steep. Luckily, no disabilities hindered my trip. (To those who go later: It's possible to transfer to a bus that travels further down the hill, then walk a level street to the garden.)

Plants seen along the way:

Pacific crabapple. I had been on the lookout for these, with their trademark oval shape. They are smaller than crabapples from some other regions – each an inch or less in length. They had rosy sides, and grew on trees in front of an elementary school. I’ve read that crabapples can vary from tree to tree; these had an unripe, bland taste. I collected a few, in case they’re better in jam mixed with berries.

Photo of (clockwise from top) spindletree (inedible), crabapple (edible), magnolia (inedible), and rose hip (edible), by Leslie Seaton, Flickr Creative Commons license. 

**

Red huckleberry bushes, with their light, multi-leveled grace, grew by someone’s mailbox. Unlike in most places around here, huckleberries still remained on the branches. They were next to the usual salal ground cover, which grows everywhere in the Northwest.

Photo of red huckleberries by waferboard, Flickr Creative Commons license.

**

An apple tree in a front yard was hung heavily with large apples. They were rosy and buoyant, indicative of the plenty that is everywhere if we let nature grow.

After winding down the hill and past many houses, I found myself outside the garden and its small, almost residential-sized parking lot.

Trees clustered gracefully at the lot’s edges. A Kousa dogwood, native to Asia, had fruit caught on slender limbs. Each was a small red sphere flecked with bumps. The flavor is mild; I’ve eaten several more since then, and their taste has grown on me. They are light-weight, white inside, and remind me of the light sponginess and look of a cerimoya.

Photo of Kousa dogwood fruit (not yet fully ripe/red), by liz west, Flickr Creative Commons license. 

**

Keep in mind that Kruckeberg Garden is a small public garden, not a standard-sized city arboretum. Once you're there, the trail passes MsK nursery, where native plants are sold -- then descends a slope to a spacious lower garden. This lower area is part statuary and setting for restful glades, and part labeled plants and trees. If you go, check out the online walking tour.

On the slope above the lower garden, a 100-foot-tall Giant Sequoia towers. It inspires awe, with a 20-foot trunk that fans wide like a woman’s hips at its base and becomes narrower higher on the trunk. This tree was transplanted to the garden by the Kruckebergs in 1958 as a six-foot sapling. Now it is the height of a 10-story building, and towers gloriously, with branches fanning like so many umbrella spines up its trunk.

Next time, when it isn’t raining, I’ll see more of the garden. I’ll look for the birds, since more than 40 species are found there, and because the garden is free of herbicides and uses organic fertilizers.

It's worth it for the sequoia alone.

Photo of a Giant Sequoia (taken at California's Kings Canyon NP) by upsilon andromadae, Flickr Creative Commons license.

**

Rose hips and herb nerds with brown paper bags

Photo of rose hips by Audreyjm529, Flickr Creative Commons License.
**

Today I've been collecting sun-softened, ripe rose hips into a brown paper bag that I begged off a counter-person at Rainbow Naturals, an apothecary that mixes its own herbs on Capitol Hill in Seattle. When I asked her for somewhere to transfer my bristly handful of rose hips, each the beating color of internal organs, she rustled out the bag and said in an undertone, "We're all herb nerds here, so I understand."

It was good. I wonder what Rainbow Naturals does with their rose hips, and I'll have to ask.

Meanwhile, I have a brown lunch bag lined with their rosy rounded forms, each with its autumnal, prickly leaf-stem. Lovely, what a dying rose leaves behind. If this is recycling, then I like it.

I'd always seen the bright orange hips, seemingly in such abundance on bare fall shrubs. But I never knew that they were things that ripened, that grew soft and tore at the edge when unhinged from the stem, so that each tear resembles a gash in a tomato.

So far, I'm just peeping at them proprietarily every so often. Tonight I'll settle on whether to make jelly, puree, chutney -- or even rose hip and vegetable curry.

What do you think?

Hawthorns and clippings of small presses from 2009

Photo of hawthorns (European) by Maura McDonnell, Flickr Creative Commons License
**

Lately, hawthorns have been my quarry, though I've only gathered a 2-pound margarine container full of them and left them in the refrigerator, so far. What can I say? I was expecting to have to move this week! I was knee-high in boxes and making decisions about papers and treasured clippings about small presses in New Jersey from 2009.

Why is it that every review of our small items makes me think that a) I should become a hard-core Buddhist and relinquish all material items, going from door to door with a proffered hat and never again thinking about Comcast and (b) that every piece of paper, each wing-nut from a project and each pearlized button is irreplaceable and that I must keep it for all time to remind me of the fall of 2010?

Did I say that I did not move? Not yet, at least. I gave notice, then thought about whether I'm ready to go flying off to another time zone to live on a couch until I am able to find a peaceful share with a like-minded person who (hopefully) does not come in at 2:30 a.m. and cook aromatic soups of chicken and spices, at the very least. Because one of my former roommates in New Jersey did just that, and the scent was tempting enough to get a person out of bed and rubbing her eyes.

It is just the beginning of October, hawthorn and rose-hip season. Our weather here in Seattle is still bright and sunny, and sometimes I swear that we all are living in a waking dream in which we think that it is June. Honestly, I get confused, although on the nippier days (which I love), I notice that the evenings come earlier now as our planet tilts.

The reason for thinking of moving was partly weather. I'm a person who loves sunlight, or at least loves it in its indirect forms: dappled, glowing into a room at the window, emerging through tree branches, on a light and breezy summer day, and in its amber-bright autumnal glory.

Often, in late summer, I can hardly stand to think that the sharp concentrations of color that we see here in Seattle in August and early September might change. That said, I am happiest when I live near (by which I mean, keep aware of) the plants and air changes of season.

That is, knowing which plants are now in season -- hawthorns, rose-hips, the last of the huckleberries at high elevations -- it makes me notice the days better, to walk with a quickness of step.

So, how shall I prepare those hawthorns? I'm thinking of making a kind of apple sauce, having boiled and mashed and strained them, then adding cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice.

Late summer and fall, free from a tree. Good start!

Cold air and snow brace us

Photo of lobster mushroom, by gabriel amadeus on Flickr Creative Commons license
**


Lately my mind has been consumed with foraging. I think of mushrooms and their fluted caps, rose hips swaggering on branches, bull-whip kelp in brash sections on the beach.

I know little about my topic, though. I look at many blogs, and I went chanterelle-hunting for the first time a few weeks ago. My knowledge is nascent, but I'm building on it.

The weather here in the lowlands of the Pacific Northwest is turning unpleasant for me, wet and full of leaf rot. The past few days have been dusk-dark at mid-day. They aren't just shorter since last week’s time change, but full of looming catastrophe in the hanging darkness and just-deferred downpour.

Walking in Seattle in the dim noonday, taking care not to slip on damp leaves piled along the sloping sidewalks, I think of Snoqualmie Pass and the Cascades. As of this morning, they have received fresh snow and an order to don tire chains.

The air at the Pass, I know, is brisk and cleansing to the lungs. Looming mountains lift the eyes into clear air or air hazed by snowfall. One feels the elevation of the barometric pressure, and steps with energy on snowshoes.

Sometimes the air and the snow are the cold water in which we can swim.

I look forward to diving into this land, to finding the rose hips and making a syrup to pour over cake -– to eating that cake and making other starches from chestnuts. 

To gathering. It is endless, the possibilities.