Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Hope Springs Eternal

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Leonard Moorehead, GoLocalWorcester Gardening Expert

Admit it. Somewhere deep inside a garden blooms. A sweet garden, one innocent, pure, full of goodness and joy is visible. Rooted in hope, colors straight from the heart, robust vegetables, stringent herbs, love’s blooms move us to a better place. Admit the desires, the needs for clean air, a place where nutrition is the natural companion to silent approval, the music of bird song, soft soil under the feet. A place where the spirit turns our hands, moves each finger, rejoices in the transitory moment of now. I admit it, I succumb to garden magic. Listen carefully to your inner voice.

Let’s have fun

Let’s have fun. Bundle up and visit garden shows. Arrive early, like the day lily that blooms in the morning, check in your heavy coats, bring along a notebook for ideas and a few bucks to spend. Do not rush. Much gardening is learned at early ages, be tolerant of youngsters and consider the lilies of the field. These are the places and the times where long lived seeds are deeply planted, like the locust, to emerge transformed in many 21 year cycles.

Winter is a pause

Winter is a pause before the future. Our soils are living robust levels of life. Secure under thick frozen blankets soils are not passive. Slow trickles of water wash nutrients garnered from the atmosphere into the soil. Water is a powerful solvent. Mulches are porous barriers, saturated and natural filters, snow transforms from simple to complex crystals and finally yields to sunshine and melts. Snow melt is the first bath. Many of us are on the prowl from those defiant spring blooms that ignore the snow and bloom. Yes, we are on the crocus watch, the hazel watch, the Lenten Rose watch, those doorkeepers to the future. Winter is a pause, not the destination.

Roam the garden

Roam the garden shows. Most of my gardens are composed of found objects, re-purposed or rescued materials, and prospers mightily from our cultures wasteful alienation from nature. Make your garden a place where leaves regain their role as generous hosts to microbes, leaves that manufacture complex hydrocarbons from the atmosphere, binding CO2 and N from the air with minerals found below the soil, each a unique shape, abundant with trace nutrients frozen for a few months in digestible forms, everyone a banquet for myriad forms of life. As you wander among the garden show exhibits slow down, breath the fragrant air and consider: you too will carry away inspiration and maybe a new bulb or two.

Gardens define space

Gardens define space. Many exhibits are miracles of engineering, each brick, pipe, wire, pump, light and plant for sale. True, one may simply buy a garden and visit. I suspect you’re more like me, I visit to absorb the interpretations of water, light, and gawk a bit at blooms out of season, carefully nurtured out of their natural cycles for our pleasure. Although I understand the reason for exhibitions and the refreshing entertainment, there is an undeniable sadness behind it all. After the last notes are played and the band goes home, the dumpsters will be veritable heaps of former gladiators. Surely we can do something about the waste. Please assure visitors the bales of hay, the forced turf, the gardens of forced blooms will not become another wound inflicted upon the earth, especially volunteers as examples for the wholesome desire to garden. Let’s remove the irony from entertainment and education.

Everyone has favorites

Everyone has favorites. My nose leads me through gardens. I sniff and sort out complex fragrances. Scent allures. My feet turn to the fragrant and consider myself triply rewarded if color, scent and form unite in a trinity I understand. A reoccurring success story at flower shows are the native plant exhibits. Seek native plants for your garden plots. This is not a comparison of virtues. Rather, gardeners employ the pragmatic to manifest vision. We harvest a world’s variety of plants. Horticulture reaches in constant exploration for new species or finds rare varieties to assuage our constant appetite for better medicines and more nutritious foods. Sometimes discretely or more rarely in your face, native plants are the hoi poloi of the garden.

Do not dismiss

Do not dismiss native plants. North America has given the world a treasure trove of botanical wonders. We’ve accepted many plants brought home. The native plants are much abused. Cut down, mowed, so many have perished in the colloseum of power, replaced with foreign crops, consumed by insects freed from controlling predators, they live in flux and rarely treasured simply for being but judged according to use. I argue as many others they need no justification for worthiness. Being is enough. Admire the shadbush, the Lady’s Slipper, the Pitcher Plant, the fiddlehead fern or “brakes” as my grandparents called them. We are fortunate to have enthusiasts who cull out foreign intruders and display fragrant witch hazel, who make annual census of our native fora and nurseries that propagate the American Holly, blueberries, cranberries, and may even have the Pilgrims savior, the Bayberry bush, the fragrant coastal shrub whose waxy berries formed the first candles in the New World.

Plants adapt

Plants adapted to local climates are best for your garden. Pay a little more to our hardworking local nurseries. Large corporate box stores have made many horticultural products more affordable, such as gladiola and tulip bulbs, originally from Africa and the Middle East. We have lost in savings the local rose cultivator who has roses grown in local climates and known to thrive. Everyone benefits if we purchase a plant grown locally, many roses to continue the example, are grown in Texas or Central America and shipped world-wide. Your climate most likely conforms to the plants requirements in the general sense but not in the particular. Extra snow? It rarely snows in Texas. Black mosaic virus among tomatoes and roses? It probably came with them, not sprung from your carefully made compost.

Participate, friends

Participate friends. Leave a section alone and await the surprise. Wander around garden shows and do attend symposia. Make friends. Find new plants to cultivate and up-date your appreciation for water features vast and miniscule. Breath in the fragrances of blooms, enjoy the colors.

Winter is transitory. Soon the great melt begins. Soon the snow will sink into the soil and bring new life into being. Become part of this eternal process. Enjoy the moment. A seed within will sprout and again hope prevails over the trials of wind and gale. Every year each generation learns the lesson. Hope is eternal. Triumph is ours. We will rise again, life’s full circle.

Leonard Moorehead is a life-long gardener. He practices organic-bio/dynamic gardening techniques in a side lot surrounded by city neighborhoods in Providence RI. His adventures in composting, wood chips, manure, seaweed, hay and enormous amounts of leaves are minor distractions to the joy of cultivating the soil with flowers, herbs, vegetables, berries, and dwarf fruit trees.