Wild Gardiner

  Native plants: Curiosity, collection, cultivation rescue, restoration I have just been in a heated discussion in a native plant group where a post that distinguished between invasive greater celandine and native wood poppy turned into a brawl over whether it was ethical to favor any plant over any other plant (hello? NATIVE plant is in the name of this group?)   This wandered down avenues such as someone from a local tribe requesting the term native plants be used to distinguish it from discussion of people, and controversy over decolonizing the term “invasive” and rejecting it because it is used to promote pesticide use. After considering leaving the group I wanted to note some of the reasons and ways people care about native plants. At first pass, there seem to be five types of engagement: Curiosity, collection, cultivation, rescue and restoration.   The first two are stages of learning about native plants: learning which is which and why it might matter, lea...

In the summer of my junior year of college, I lived next to a methadone center in not yet hip Brooklyn, in a building in the process of being gentrified. I foraged the stores of my neighborhood. On Atlantic Avenue I walked into an Arab store, sacks full of beans and spices, barrels of olives and breathed deeply. I was home. All summer I returned as often as I could just to stand and smell. I don’t think it was any single fragrant thing, but the mix of it all that made me giddy and happy. I bought packets of this and that and added them to other things, or ate them by themselves. No one thing had that smell. Today, I have that same jump in my heart when I walk down a path covered with fallen leaves, poke my stick into the dark molder of forest floor to get a better look at an emerging mushroom. The robin in my back yard or the wood thrush deep in the woods announces me like the bell on the door of the shop. I pick a little of this and that and bring them home, have them by themselves ...

Not all garden brutes are invaders. At least three of the natives in my garden require a lot of careful forethought because they WILL take over an area. One I regret, one I planned, and one pops up and is easy to leave or keep. I classify thugs in the garden the same way I classify them in the world; by their drive to take over everything. Native or import, garden thugs have several strategies that support their totalitarian ambitions. They blanket, spread, poison or rise up and overwhelm. All of these are extremes of the normal strategies that plants use to spread and find a place, usually in a lovely interplay with others. But thugs tend to do this to the exclusion of other strategies Canada anemone may be a native, but it is a brute. Its roots create a dense crowding system with no room for anything else. I planted it in a spot where I thought it would have room to spread nicely, but it has actually managed to overwhelm a peony and drive mint to the very edge of the patch. It ha...

Over years, I find my line between wild and foraged blurs. Wild ramps are rare in Maine but they grow here. Consider planting some in appropriate places on your own property or maybe even introducing them where you forage. This is a delicious allium that will.grow easily in a shady moist woodland. Out in Michigan I saw (envy- inducing) acres of it, growing in sheets  mingled with white trillium, Dutchman's breeches and marsh marigold, so plant in habitats like where you find these. There are several sources to buy to get started in Maine advertising in groups such as foragers marketplace. I actually started my patch from some bundles that were being sold for the table out of the back of a car.    Keep in mind if you introduce plants from outside your area that you don't want to introduce something unwanted with the soil. Insects, fungal plant disease, weed  seeds, toxins from past treatment and jumping worms are all possible unwanted guests. Best practices ...

Early spring has me thinking about the difference between how I shop for food and the flavors of foraging. The staples I get at the store are heavy on oils and carbohydrates, sugar and fat. Sugar is the open flame of our diet, fast and sometimes destructive energy source. It rises first in the awakening circulation of barky ancients, spring sap, that morning jolt to start the cycle. Sugar in the deep throat of flowers is the sexual lure that enrolls foreign kingdoms in the mating dance of plants. Insects collect it…honey from flowers, honeydew from sap of plants. Animals are offered sweet fruit in exchange for depositing and fertilizing the next generation in new locations. Sugaring is the very earliest moment in the ritual of spring, collecting sap and drinking it directly, sweet icicles dripping of broken twigs the simplest way to do it. Or gathered in buckets and boiled down to syrup, or all the way to sugar. Fats are the batteries where the flame can be converted and held for l...

   Spring Tonic It looks like spring is here early judging by the buds on the dandelion (above). No doubt there will be more freeze, maybe even another snow, but the snowdrops are finishing off, winter aconites and crocus are in full bloom.Day lily shoots are peeking up. Daffodils are budding and tulips have emerged. Trees are budding. I need to go look for poplar buds this week, lest I miss them. I think I will post to see if anyone has seen them out yet. Will fiddleheads be early? Nettles and dandelions are up. I think it may be time for a first reconnaissance for spring foraging. Yellow dock Early spring reveals ultra microclimates in the terrain. Over here, clods of rocky snowbank persist under a coat of leaves and needles. On the sunny side of the same path new growth has pushed its way up through the same cover. Too-early dandelion leaves are dainty but frost blackened, but a new flush is starting to emerge. There is a narrow window between roots and tubers still...