A Day at Garland's Nursery I

A Sunday afternoon in the early July. That's what it was yesterday, and I spent the afternoon with a friend at Garland's well-known nursery, about five miles East of Corvallis, OR. Many people who go to nursuries in the spring or summer do so to get their plantings for the season so they can run home and put them in the ground. I, in contrast, went with pad in hand, taking notes on dozens of varieties of growing things that struck my fancy before returning home last night to "study" online images of these things. I tell friends that I am in the "Adamic" stage of my physical and mental development. Just as in Genesis the Lord God brought living things to Adam to see what he would call them (cf. Gen. 2:19), so I am fascinated with learning the names of all living things these days. I spent the 1980s memorizing people's names as I tried to "make it" in the political world; after that didn't work well for me I gave up memorizing names for about 20 years. Now I have something to focus my attention on again, and I have been impressed/touched/inspired by the beauty and learning that can come by patient attention to non-human living things. At this stage in my life I have no interest actually in using any of this knowledge--such as in planting or cultivating these things. For now, just give me the names and stories about the names. I bask with wonder at them.

Some Trees

So, as I was wandering through Garland's yesterday in the 85 degree heat, I would frequently be the only person in the exposed areas. I would feverishly scratch notes so that I could "remember" what I saw. Helpful people from the nursery would wonder what I was doing and if I needed any help. I just asked them questions about some of their flowers or trees until they left me alone. I was in heaven. I remember sidling up to a magnolia tree. The first time I recall loving magnolias was when our family moved from CT to Northern CA in 1967. We had spreading magnolias in the back yard, and I must have picked up 10,000 magnolia leaves over the years. But their flower is also beautiful; the gnarled trunk of the tree reminds us of the complexities and "gnarled" nature of life that produces beautiful things; the tender tendrils and cone within the ivory-white petals encourage you to stop and take a good long look. Here is a dramatic photo of the bud of a Magnolia grandiflora.

Well, on the way to more trees I decided to stop by the pyracantha for a moment. The noted Hellensitic Age Greek botanist Dioscurides used the word pyrakantha to denote an unidentified shrub, and Linnaeus applied it to the evergreen thorny shrub with white flowers and scarlet berries which we know as Crataegus Pyracantha, or firethorn, today. Here is a picture of the bright red berries, which make birds drunk and humans smile, of the pyracantha. Here is even a better picture of the berries, along with a story by the person posting the picture of how Javelinas, aided by Coyote, ended up eating them all from the plants by his home. The berries only grow in the summer and early fall, after the five-petalled flowers burst forth in the spring.

I was quite taken by the weeping Katsura I found. A picture of the entire tree, Cercidiphyllum japonicum 'Pendulum,' from the Oregon State Univ. collection is here. One online source talked about the fact that its leaves looked like a "shimmering waterfall." A closeup of one of the orange spring leaves of the Cercidiphyllum is here. Keep that image of the Katsura leaf in your mind, because as I was studying the tree, I learned that it is related to the Rosebud (Cercis) tree in the following way. Someone made the observation that the weeping Katsura's leaves looked "like the Rosebud," and so its Latin name means "Leaves like Cercis." Well, this isn't Fox News, but you be the judge. Here is a Rosebud leaf. What do you think? Other than the color being different, the structure of the leaf looks almost identical. Just as the magnolia is the state tree of Mississippi, the Eastern Rosebud is the state tree of Oklahoma. Ah, another list of 50 to memorize I see.

I also learned an interesting story about the Cercis. The Cercis siliquastrum is called the "Judas tree" either because it was the tree on which Judas was said to have hung himself (Acts 1) or because it might derive from Judea's tree-- a common tree in Palestine/Israel. In any case, I wonder how the first story might have gotten started. There is no support for the theory in the text of Acts, but then there is little Biblical support for lots of things that subsequently were believed (like the fact that Christian tradition says there were three wise men, while the text of Matthew 2 is mum on that one).

Conclusion

I only got to about four plants/trees in this essay, but it is a start. Take your time and soon you will be filled with good things.

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