The Inhospitable Wasteland

 

Let’s say you’re a seasoned gardener.

You’ve been making fabulous, soul-satisfying gardens everywhere you’ve lived for the past 40, 50 years—rainy coastal Oregon, steamy southern Indiana, happy-medium eastern Pennsylvania, the mighty Columbia River Gorge in Washington state, Indiana again.

You’ve grown thousands of different perennials, shrubs, vines, wildflowers, you name it, many of them natives.

You’ve started nigh-impossible blue Himalayan poppies (Meconopsis betonicifolia) from seed and had them bloom.

Yep. You’re mighty proud of your green thumb.

“What’s your secret?”

You actually laugh. “Plants want to grow!” you assure them. “Just plant them!”

Sometimes you even set yourself silly goals, just to make gardening a little more challenging.

“No white in this garden,” you announce. “Pale sulphur yellow instead.”

And you do it. Hey, no sweat. Plants want to grow!

You’ve dealt with droughts. With unseasonable frosts. With cold spells that won’t quit, with suffocating humidity, with snow, ice, hail, wind.

You think you know it all.

Still, you’re sympathetic to new gardeners, or to those who don’t have as much dirt as you under their fingernails. You hand out advice just as freely as you hand out starts of plants and seeds you’ve saved.

Then, with 50 years’ worth of gardening confidence—make that “arrogance”—under your belt, you move to a home at 8100’ on the east side of the Colorado Rockies. The dry side.

 1.

It’s late summer when you arrive. The meadows are splashed with wildflowers, blue asters and lavender erigeron and red Indian paintbrush and a hundred others you don’t know the names of yet.

There’s a small flower garden at your new home, a legacy of your new partner’s ex-wife, Daphne.

Red bee balm, Asiatic lilies, black-eyed Susans, a clump of daylilies, and a few red raspberries struggling for life.

“Poor things need a drink,” you say sadly, looking at the drooping heads and wilting leaves.

“I just watered them a couple of days ago,” he says.

You stick a finger into the soil. Bone dry. You don’t believe him.

“Can I water them? Poor guys are thirsty.”

There’s no running water up here, no faucet for a garden hose. But there is a huge 250-gallon tank on the back of an old truck, filled from the spring down the hill.

You haul the hose from the tank to the patch of thirsty flowers and start the water flowing.

It runs right off the soil surface, rushing down the driveway.

“Make a spray with your thumb and wet it first. Then wait a bit and water more. You need to get the surface wet before it’ll soak in.”

Huh. Okay.

It’s your first experience with mineral soil.

Decomposed granite (“rocky” mountains, indeed). Dusty as fine sand, with sparkly bits of mica. No clay to give it weight and density and to hold water.

And no humus to speak of, because the nearby forest is pines, not deciduous trees that drop their leaves by the countless bushels. Humus in the soil holds water, too.

 
 2.

You finally manage to give the small patch a good drink.

It takes more than two hours to water the 6-foot-square garden to a depth of four inches.

It sure isn’t like any watering you’ve ever done.

But the flowers are happy. And pretty. Butterflies are already fluttering in.

“Thanks, Daphne, for leaving something of such beauty,” you say to her garden.

Then you glance at the water tank. It’s half empty.

“Must be a drought year,” you think.

The killing frost arrives the next week. In late August.

 

YEAR 1

   1.

Winter comes and goes. As soon as the ground thaws, you start expanding the garden, clearing the grassy hill above the existing patch so you can plant your own favorites.

Your shovel hits a rock immediately. You try another spot. Same thing.

Oh yeah. “Rocky” Mountains.

You switch to a miner’s pick.

You rip out the tough running roots of the imported, invasive smooth brome grass and pry out a big pile of rocks.

You manage to clear a 3-foot-square patch of ground. You go into the house for a break, rubbing your already aching shoulders and muttering about rocks.

“ ‘Inhospitable Wasteland’—that’s what Daphne said once, when she kept hitting rocks,” he commiserates. “Inhospitable Wasteland!”

“No kidding,” you say vehemently. Except you don’t exactly say “kidding.”

 

 2.

But at least the soil is moist. Winter snow has just melted, and you’re already dreaming about how beautiful your new garden will be.

In two days, the soil is bone dry.

Also, your lips are badly chapped, your nose is so dried out inside that you’re not even shy anymore about cleaning it with a fingernail, and your skin feels like parchment.

But hey, you’ve got a big area cleared now! Why, it must be 10 by 20 feet, at least!

Your pile of rocks is roughly the same size.

Terraces. Perfect. You spend a day setting rocks into place.

Checking the weather forecast in hopes of rain, you notice the relative humidity is 11%.

 

 3.

Accustomed to starting a new garden in spring and having it look lush and beautiful by summer, you carry on.

Your budget is too tight, and town is too far away, to load up at a nursery. But you like the wildflowers better, anyhow.

You start transplanting your favorites.

You snap off a half-dozen plants at the root before you realize that even the smallest wild pink geranium has a taproot that goes a foot deep. And isn’t pullable.

“Still a few roothairs on it,” you mumble guiltily, clawing out a hole.

What? Rocks?! Where’d they come from? Fine. You find enough of a crevice to plant your sad specimens.

You spend hours watering your new garden.

“Need more water,” you snarl at your partner every few days when the tank is empty. Again.

He, being a saint, goes and fills it up down at the spring.

 

 4.

You go back to your former home in Indiana to get the last of your belongings.

Your garden looks like a jungle. A beautiful jungle, with flowers crammed cheek by jowl. It’s grown like mad in the six months you’ve been away. Just as you expected.

You walk the yard, mopping sweat, your glasses fogging from the 80% humidity.

You’re looking at your 400 or so species of plants with an assessing eye.

You want to bring them all.

But your new home is Zone 4, even Zone 3 in some years. And it seems to be kind of dry.

You settle for a few of your mother’s flowers, sentimental favorites from her Pennsylvania garden that you’ve carried starts of to every place you’ve ever lived. Yellow sundrops, purple bellflowers, and at the last minute, two clumps of common purple violets.

You wrap their roots in wet towels and, bidding a final farewell to your beautiful Indiana garden, take them to Colorado.

You share them with your mother-in-law-to-be.

Hers, planted 3,000 feet lower in elevation, with watering faucet in easy reach, thrive.

Yours give you a piteous accusing look as they rapidly fade away. No matter how many buckets of water you lug to them.

It’s summer now, and your showpiece garden is a pathetic collection of sad sacks barely clinging to life.

 

 5.

Killing frost comes. In early August.

You’re relieved.

 

YEAR 2

 1.

You start seeds indoors, as you’ve always done. Native wildflower seeds you collected in fall. You love to see growing things in winter and dream about how beautiful they’ll be when you move them outside in spring. Blue columbines! Six kinds of penstemons! And enough other things to fill 300 starter pots.

You nurture them tenderly for months.

As soon as the ground thaws, you’re outside planting. One by one, hundreds of baby plants go into your new garden. The soil is deliciously moist after snowmelt.

You can already see your new beds—now on two sides of the house—in full bloom in your mind’s eye.

The wind picks up.

Humidity, 8%.

In two days, the soil is dry to a depth of 10 inches. You know, because you couldn’t believe it, so you dug down and measured.

Yep. Ten inches of rock dust.

You haul out the water tank hose to do triage.

Five of your seedlings survive.

 

 2.

Exploring a bit afield, you discover that cactuses are native wildflowers.

You can’t believe it.

You finally research average annual precipitation for your area.

10 to 16 inches.

“Most of that in snow,” your partner says helpfully.

“Doggone Inhospitable Wasteland!” you spit. Except you don’t exactly say “doggone.”

All around you are dense pine and spruce forests and aspen groves.

It sure doesn’t look like a desert.

It is.

It’s the breaking point.

Your arrogance and confidence go down the drain.

You cry on your now-husband’s shoulder.

“Inhospitable Wasteland,” he murmurs, ego-consolingly.

“Inhospitable Wasteland,” you whimper.

Finally, you realize why all the wildflowers have such deep roots.

Finally, you realize why so many of the wildflowers are snugged up against rocks or growing in their crevices—the granite boulders help keep the moisture beneath from evaporating.

You resolve to keep plugging away. Garden smarter.

You splurge and order bulbs for spring flowers. Clumps of tulips will sure look pretty among the wildflowers.

 

 3.

Lightning ignites a wildfire a few miles away.

With smoke billowing like an atom bomb and flames racing through the trees, you evacuate. For weeks.

 

 4.

You come home to black matchsticks on the mountains all around.

Your home and surroundings are fine, saved by firefighters.

Your garden is mostly dead. Not from fire. From lack of water.

And that pretty little original patch of Daphne’s? It’s buried more than a foot deep in soil, the workings of pocket gophers. Who have also eaten nearly every one of the 300 tulip bulbs you planted before you evacuated.

You smooth out the gopher mounds, fill in the holes where tulip bulbs had been, apologize to Daphne in your head for being such a poor caretaker, while simultaneously being relieved you won’t have to water her always-thirsty non-native plants anymore.

Then you collect wildflower seeds from the mountain meadow, and scatter them everywhere.

You’re still a gardener. If a humbled one.

The only flowers still blooming are under the birdfeeder. Sunflowers.

Snow comes in early September. It kills them in their prime.

It dawns on you that your growing season is 10 weeks long. In a good year.

 

YEAR 3

1.

You don’t start seeds indoors. You’ve already sown them outside in fall, just like Nature does.

As soon as you can get your miner’s pick into the ground, you transplant those wildflowers you know you can move fairly easily—two native artemisias, erigeron daisies, golden banner, harebells, yellow corydalis, field aster, one species of our four penstemons. Plants with fibrous roots or running roots, not taproots.

Eight species of native wildflowers. Out of a couple hundred.

Everything else has unbelievably enormous roots. Stout woody things as thick as your thumb that go down for a foot or two.

Still, you have eight that are fairly easy to dig.

“Going plant shopping,” you call, grabbing your digger and heading out to the wildflower spots yet again. You’re grateful to have a “nursery” right on your own place.

You’ve learned to recognize the winter-killed foliage of the tap-rooted guys, too, so you can move them early, before the first leaves peep out. That way, the roots can settle in before they need to take on the task of supporting foliage.

You don’t move many of those. It takes an hour to dig up just one, feeling for roots with your fingers, loosening rocks around them, levering them out, hopefully without fatal damage.

You now understand why the “native plants” selection at the fanciest nursery in town looks so sad. And includes plants from more-hospitable parts of the state, hundreds of miles away and thousands of feet lower in elevation. And from other states.

You shovel snow from shady spots onto the flowerbeds. Water is precious. Every bit counts.

You get a backache from walking around bent over, peering at every tiny seedling that sprouts—and there are many.

You learn to recognize them as soon as they break the ground. Columbine. Cinquefoil. Itty-bitty rosettes of mountain candytuft. Gaillardia. Fuzzy purple phacelia. Rosy red anemone.

“The garden is going to be beautiful this year!” you crow.

It is.

 

YEAR 4

“I hate ‘learning experiences’,” my son Dave announced years ago. “It always means you’ve screwed up somehow, and now you feel dumb, and you have to start all over.”

Gardening here has definitely been a learning experience.

It’s mid-June. The last snow fell a month ago—2 feet, gone in less than a week.

My beds are bigger than ever. More of the invasive smooth brome grass around the house has been hacked out, more of the hills terraced, more wildflowers transplanted, more plants sprouting from scattered seeds.

Oh—and I’ve also extended my wood chip paths outward from the garden beds, claiming the wildflower meadows and rock outcroppings beyond the yard as part of my gardens, too. Centuries of Mother Nature’s care beats my feeble efforts by a mile.

It’s not lush, and it never will be.

It’s the way Nature intended it here—plants widely spaced, not cheek by jowl, so that each one can draw the water and nutrients it needs to survive.

I’m still pouring hundreds of gallons of water onto the newer beds every week, to give the not-yet-established plants a fighting chance.

The older gardens? They’re on their own now. Clumps are slowly getting bigger, plants are sowing more progeny, and happy surprises are showing up as wild seeds come in.

Slowly, I’m learning.

The biggest lesson in all of this?

Humility.

And compassion, for other gardeners in the same boat.

If you’ve never gardened in the high, dry West—without a built-in irrigation system, and without an unlimited nursery budget—count your blessings.

I thought I knew how to garden.

Nope. I’m learning all over again.

The inhospitable wasteland is enough to bring any gardener to her knees.

Still, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I love our place, I love the wildflowers, I love my gardens.

And I love complaining. Or is it bragging? Some days, it’s hard to tell the difference.

 

P.S. It was an unusually wet fall last year, and a winter of good snows—triple the water we usually get. The wildflowers this spring are glorious. And my mother’s violets, the ones I brought from Pennsylvania to Oregon to Indiana to Washington to Indiana to Colorado, actually bloomed!

 

 

CASE HISTORIES

(Or, Count Your Blessings, Gardeners in Hospitable Climes)

 

1.

A COLUMBINE LIKE NO OTHER

 

This is a native blue columbine (Aquilegia caerulea). Our state flower. I’ve grown columbines all my life, including every American native except this one.

When I used to transplant a columbine, I did it early in spring, digging its new hole first and “muddying in” by filling the hole with water, letting it drain, then doing it again. Then I dug a good shovelful of ground with the plant and slid it into the hole, filled in, and voila! The transplant hardly missed a beat.

Not so with blue columbines. Husband Matt loves them too, and before I got here, he moved one himself from the woods. He dug a ball of soil about 3 feet wide and 3 feet deep—“weighed about 150 pounds, the size like you’d dig for a tree.” Surely all the columbine roots must be in there undisturbed?

Maybe they were, but for whatever reason—“plants up here just don’t like being moved,” we often say—the columbine wilted and died. The next spring, it put up a few weak leaves. It took it 5 years to recover, even with regular watering, and 2 more years to become the big, dense plant it is today, with at least 100 buds.

He’d told me the story. But I figured it must’ve been a fluke (somebody say arrogance?).

So last year, I dug out a columbine of my own, a big hefty one, after preparing the planting hole as I’d done for every other columbine in my half-century of gardening. Yeah, you can already guess the ending—the leaves wilted and died within days. This year, it managed to push up a few small leaves. Five years? Fine. I’ll be well into Social Security time.

 

2.

THIS’LL BE EASY! UH, NOPE

 

These adorable lavender daisies are “beautiful fleabane” (Erigeron formosissimus). Their tidy tufts of foliage pop up among pasque flowers, red anemone, lupines, showy white field chickweed (not the common winter weed of many places, but Cerastium arvense, a close relative of the popular gray-leaved snow-in-summer (Cerastium tomentosa) ), and other wildflowers in a natural meadow near our house.

“So small, they must be easy to move,” I reckoned. Nope. A spray of fleshy roots go out in every direction, like a spray of fireworks, to a diameter of at least a foot. And just as deep. For a 3-inch-wide, 2-inch-tall plant!

It took me four hours to transplant these eight daisy plants. And 60 gallons of water, hauled by hand in buckets, to plant them. Another 30 gallons of water every couple of days (mineral soil dries out fast), to keep them happy until they decide whether they like their new home. That’s about 10 hours of hard work, and counting, for 8 little plants.

Planted any daisies lately in your more-hospitable garden? Half an hour, tops, right? Dig hole, dump out potted or transplanted plant, fill in hole, water, done.

Yes, it’s worth it. No, it sure ain’t easy.

 

3.

ANNUALS SHOULD BE A CINCH, RIGHT?

 

It took me a couple of years to realize there are almost no native annuals up here. Nearly everything is perennial, except for a couple of biennials (wallflower and yellow corydalis).

The only native annuals are fairy candelabra (Androsace septentrionalis), a tiny thing, and charming, but hardly a showstopper; a little annual gentian with barely visible flowers; and the much showier strawberry blite (Blitum capitatum), which gets odd crimson bumbles all along its stems. I treasure them.

Yearning for a blast of color one year, I planted zinnia and marigold seeds. Both are really quick to bloom, 8 to 10 weeks after the seeds sprout. Both were killed by frost when they came into bud. Can’t plant those seeds ’til June; usual first frost, August. But frost can settle on the garden any month of the year. (Natives are adapted to that; non-natives curl up and die.)

Perennial plants—which includes nearly all our native flowers—here in the Inhospitable Wasteland require years to develop those incredible roots that keep them alive through dry summers, frigid winters… and wildfires, which are a natural part of life in the western forest.

The High Park Fire two summers ago burned so hot that it melted the glass and metal of vehicles that got caught in it, and scorched the earth to ash.

 

These pics are all from our friends’ Mary and Tim’s place a few miles away from us. We took the pics  months after the High Park Fire of 2012, and if you look close at the melted-metal pic, you’ll see some native plants already sprouting.

Mary took this photo a week ago. The wildflowers came back with a vengeance from those deep, tough roots.

 

4.

SEE? I AM A GARDENER, SHE PROTESTS

 

 

 

Zone 6 and 7 gardens in Pennsylvania and Indiana, same thing. A cinch to plant in spring and have a gorgeous yard by summer; even better the following year, as you add more plants. Not inhospitable wastelands.

My high, dry Zone 3/ 4 Colorado garden is harder than any other gardening I’ve ever done in my 61 years on earth, and not for lack of trying.

Look at a High Country Gardens catalog, and you could easily be led to believe that gardening in the wild West is even more fun than gardening anywhere else in the country. All those fabulous penstemons! All those golden daisies! All those other “xeric” plants that you wish you could grow, if only you didn’t get so much rain. And so many of them natives, oh boy!

Ha. Ha.

If you live in an Inhospitable Wasteland (Hi, Colorado! Hi, Wyoming! Hi, Utah! Hi, all other high, dry, short-season regions!), and you want a garden like that catalog cover, be prepared to invest in an irrigation system, for starters, or to spend many, many hours watering. Even xeric plants need at least a full year of coddling (two years is even better) to establish roots that can survive dry times—unless you start them from seed sown in place, and have years of patience to wait for them to reach blooming size. (While some native perennials here bloom the following year from seed, many take 3 to 5 years to produce flowers.)

Notice, too, how many of those garden pictures and designs—not just the individual plant pics—incude non-natives. Yes, many of them are easier to get going than the finicky natives. And look lusher. And bloom longer.

Maybe one of these days I’ll win the lottery, install an irrigation system, and buy everything in that whole catalog. No, make that, 10 of everything. Heck, make that 100 of everything: my gardens flow outward from three sides of the house now, and hold thousands of plants.

But until then, it’s learn by doing, one small step at a time. And that means, every seedling that sprouts here gets a huge welcome. “Yay, so happy to see you!” “And you!” “And you!” “Wow, you actually grew, too? YAY!”

These are two-year-old seedlings of leafy cinquefoil (Potentilla fissa), also known as “wood beauty.” Which should bloom in only another two or three years.

 

 

This is a blue columbine seedling (next to a young erigeron). Not even guessing how long ‘til we see flowers. But when it does bloom, it will be beautiful. The high, dry West may be inhospitable, but it sure is gorgeous.

 

 

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