I Have Found My Tribe!

I went to a lecture today at the Cornell Cooperative Extension on "Designing with Flora of the East."  I figured I'd learn more about the brave perennial band of brothers that stagger up out of my garden every year to battle for their brief moments in the sun: echinacea, coreopsis, aster, floristan, sedum.  I wouldn't mind learning how I might be a better general for them, but I also hoped to get some ideas for a few different flowers that I could torture and/or neglect this year. 

I came into the room where the Master Gardeners were just finishing up a meeting.  To my surprise and delight, it was filled with my clones: same approximate age, same big teeth -- even the same hair, short, gray, uncluttered.  No one was skinny but no one was obese either, just pleasantly thick, again, like me. Although these gardeners, like me, were in the same genus (WASP) as the basket weavers from a previous blog, they were a different species -- or, more accurately, a different cultivar -- ex-pats rather than upstate natives. And, unlike the basket weavers who met my late arrival with dour suspicion, these women greeted my late arrival with friendly smiles, coffee, and they even found a chair for me to sit in. Coffee was at the ready with a choice of fennel or rosemary cookies.  I was home!!!  I had found my tribe!  Bring on the watercress sandwiches!

The lecture was not what I expected either. It was much better, a very interesting recorded video talk by Carolyn Summers, an expert on indigenous plants.

Here are the facts that I learned:

• Glaciers were around the neighborhood until only 10,000 years ago. (I had thought it was at least a million).
•  Indigenous plants differ from natives because they are specific to a local area (e.g., basket weavers), while natives (e.g., Flora lecture gardeners and me) can include hybrids and thrive in broad areas (e.g.. both Manhattan and Hudson).  Indigenous plants are tougher, however (e.g., basket weavers again, especially my teacher Joyce). They tend to be drought resistant and not require fertilizer, which some actually hate (and probably believe is immoral). 
•  Northern Europe's native plants are much more boring than ours because the glaciers pushed their mountains, the Alps, east to west, so that the livelier Southern seeds remained happily around the Mediterranean.  Our mountains run north to south, so seeds are able to cha cha up from the warmer nations, seducing our innocent northern stock, and, with the resulting miscegenation, produce jolly colorful lascivious offspring that stodgy British gardeners lust after.  
•  Oaks are the very best trees for the ecology, but I didn't write down why.
• Norway maples are not native and they suck.  Their seedlings come out early -- before the fabulous red and sugar maples -- so the bullying Norway maple children beat out the much nicer and younger red maple infants.  Sadly, the despised Norway looms over our barn apartment and is a constant pleasure.  A bird feeder hangs off a high branch outside our kitchen window and amuses me all winter, and, for the rest of the year, waking up to the heavy green rustling leaves outside my bedroom is pure joy.  I feel badly that I have to hate it now.
• The Karner blue butterfly is endangered because it only can lay its eggs on the Eastern lupine.  Unfortunately, it has a sinister twin, the Western Lupine, who managed to make it over the Rockies and trick the poor mother butterflies into believing it's a proper nursery, but instead it releases toxins that kill the eggs. Sibling rivalry?  (Extra fact from Wiki: the Karner blue butterfly was discovered and named by Vladimir Nabokov.).
• If you want an exotic plant, get a sterile male (this sounds like a life lesson)

Although short, the lecture and the brief introduction to my tribe have given me a possible direction here. Since our property includes an aging meadow loaded with indigenous and native plants, important pollinators and breeding grounds for good insets and birds, Michael and I own a palate. Unfortunately, it is quickly dissolving into forest and we're not youngsters. Apparently, however, one can keep a meadow going and the woods at bay just by mowing paths through it, which Michael can do, while I walk behind him picking wild flowers and throwing the occasional milkweed and oak seed onto the ground. A lazy person's garden.  Perfect. And I might take the Master Gardener course in the fall.  I can hardly wait.