green, or ‘Green?’

I got out of my car the other day at the same time as the driver in the spot next to me.  Wild-eyed and a bit disheveled, she fairly shrieked at me: “You’re killing the planet with your SUV, one-percenter!” Did I calmly explain my particular vehicular needs and preferences to her? Did I remark on the greasy black coating of burned oil all over

Carbon offsets--not a real thing until someone figured out how to make money from them.

the hatchback and bumper stickers of her 30ish-year-old Subaru? I didn’t say anything about the pack of cigarettes on the dashboard in combination with the infant seat in the back, nor did I shout, “I own an acre and a quarter of second-growth native Northwest woodland! CARBON OFFSETS, BIZNATCH!”  Nope.  You can’t reason with the unreasonable (OK.  What I did say was, “As long as we’re on it together when it dies, then cool.” ZING!).

As my friend Elaine noted recently, the Pacific Northwest is very green.  Our wealth of forest and relatively ‘mild’ weather keeps the region looking full and lush even in the bleak winter months; but when you are restricted to Native-only plants, as I am, it can become a chromatic homogeneity that punishes your gardener’s eye for lack of variety.

The region is also very ‘Green’ as well, and this frequently manifests as a brand of environmental class-ism that can lead to plant snobbery, public policy that retains little common sense, and a feeling of moral superiority that causes breakdowns in parking lot social civility.   The Pacific Northwest was famous a couple decades ago for its rather cold, but polite, social reserve.  Now, I’d say, it is a place where anyone’s right to have a nose ends where someone else’s swinging fist begins.

The city I live in forced me to hire a Mitigation Planner who provided a woefully miserable Mitigation Plan.  Upon its failure, I went off-script and have followed my own plan: still all-Northwest-native plants; and unlike the original, still ALIVE.  Nevertheless, I am a lawbreaker, I am wrong…but I wonder if I am more or less ‘Green’ for lack of ’official’ conformity.  Periodically, I will talk with someone in a nursery or online, maybe at the Washington Native Plant Society sale;  I tell them what I am doing, and they tell me how “Awesome!” it is.  Really? Do you want to have a government body tell YOU what to plant, how to garden, try to force you to pay a third party for services you don’t want and they have shown they are not good at providing? Didn’t think so.

This is THE tree we cut down to build our house. It was lovely, and we have suitably memorialized it by framing it in a nimbus of sunlight. There were some alders too, but they were going to break off or fall over anyway.

The city I live in is also young, incorporated in 1999.  While our elected officials skew moderate- to lightly conservative, I am pretty sure we imported our bureaucrats, functionaries, and supernumeraries from Seattle and King County, government bodies with a rich and storied history of taking ‘the public good’ into the realm of ‘public babysitting.’  I love the green of the Northwest, but how I wish for the color of Cornus ‘Midwinter Fire,’ the spring herald of Azalea ’Hino crimson,’  the Autumn blaze of Acer japonicum ’Anything…’ plants, incidentally, I cannot have because they are not native–though they are hardly invasive and I cannot see what potential negative impact they or any other non-invasive ornamental plant could have upon my woods, my clearing, or my wetland margin (apart from adding a whole new layer of dietary interest for rabbits, Mountain Beavers, and deer).  And so despite the 1,500-home subdivision just on the other side of my wetland and their suburban pastiche of lawn, of English Ivy, of mow-n-blow-n-go yard services, of daily visits from TruGreen Chemlawn and Scott’s Lawn Care, it is the City’s policy of ‘Green’ that keeps me green.   ‘Greener’ than many, I’d say, and ‘greener’ than I have to be, for despite being told to fertilize and to eradicate my pernicious weeds using glyophosphate (really), I don’t do those things.  Sadly, though, for my parking lot friend, I am not going to drive a Prius anytime soon, because at six-four and 250 pounds I like my SUV just fine, and I can fit lots of native plants, organic soil amendments, and critter-cover-providing boulders into it at the same time.  Along with my ordinance-mandated litter bag.

NEXT: Part Two: green, or ‘Green?’ : The rise of the new Pharisee, ‘Green’ building, ‘Eco-scaping,’ and what they have to do with my backyard

The Moss Garden in Winter

Exploration and Discovery

Almost a year and a half on the property, and just about exactly a year since I hollered ‘do overs!’ on the original Mitigation Plan, and I am still finding the new about my patch

A peaceful composition at wetland's edge: water, nurse log, salal, cedar, and snow.

of woods, wetland, and clearing.  Whether the thrill of believed-to-be-extinct wildlife, the serenity of a snow dusted pool of wetland, or a mundane-yet-vivid fungus, there is hardly a day that I don’t find something I have never seen or noticed before.

This weekend, I stole a few hours to continue post-storm cleanup around the clearing, marveling at my forest’s ability to manufacture windfall branches.  From the amounts on the ground it is a mystery that there are any left on the trees.  The Pacific Northwest is enjoying what I call ‘False Spring,’ a regular February phenomenon of unseasonably beautiful weather.  Sometimes just a day or two, right now it has lasted a week and is forecast for several more days.  It is caused, I think, by an unusually stable mass of high pressure and may be influenced by the keen and wail of thousands of Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers; it will likely come to an end when some benighted soul says, ‘Wow, we’ve had sunshine for a few days in February. I think I’ll wash my car!’

The wetland margin has suffered this winter from wind, snow, and ice, and there are a number of broken trees, canes of salmonberry forced down under their weight, and years, perhaps decades of accumulated windfall branches and debris.  As I cleared away forest litter I exposed a salal covered log and just behind it a lovely stump wreathed in salal as well.  As I lifted away two newly fallen trees and a tangle of ancient sodden branches, the stump revealed itself, like a sculpted wooden vase filled with greenery: an ikebana of forest and bog, framed by the wetland view, now in the spotlight of silvery midwinter sun.

Where forest, clearing, and wetland meet

Sometimes I will come across a boulder poking out of the constant ebb and eddy of forest duff, one that I can lift and will nicely dress and texture the clearing; other times I press through woodland scrub to enter an arched cathedral of vine maple and happen upon a ‘mother field’ of moss I had not previously encountered.  These are the times I feel like Henry Morton Stanley, or even better: my own self as a boy, Tarzan-ing about my yard, lost in the irrepressible joy of just being. There is no expressing this Indiana Jones feeling when I come indoors: “I found a rock” sounds like only that and no more in a world composed of mostly rock and moss.  “I cleared that area down by the wetland,” I said, as I shed sweaty camouflage and fleece. “Oh.  Look at that stump!  It’s beautiful!” my wife replied. Yes.   Exactly.

Not Even the Genius Nostradamus Could Have Foreseen This

Just a couple weeks ago, I was declaiming the virtues of Red Alder, and pointing out  their significant

'Please, Red Alder! Leave me alone!'

flaw: a well-documented unwillingness to remain upright for long periods of time.  Then came the snow, then came the ice, then came the wind, and then came my grove of Red Alders, lurching toward my house like the Poltergeist tree: two reaching toward my bedroom window as if to

'I'm Red Alder, and I'm comin' in your window!'

snatch me from my bed, and three others leaning in close behind, as if to get a better view.

Miraculously, the tandem of  fallen trees came to rest not on my roof but upon the jagged top of a previously broken-off alder;  precariously

S-t-a-a-a-a-a-a-y...

balanced, swaying gently, branches and dried catkins lightly brushing my roof and window.  The same cannot be said of a small, previously anonymous hemlock tree.  Under its load of ice, it announced its presence from the middle of a stand of young cedars, arching toward the living room and looking like the class clown in a school picture.   And just like a class clown not getting enough attention, the tree later snapped, the stored energy in its deep bow flinging the treetop toward the back wall and living room window of my home.  Fortunately, there was no damage, but the startling impact out of the power-outagey blackness injected a huge amount of adrenaline into the cocktail hour.

After putting some mental effort into figuring how to notch the alder so that gravity and tension would cause the crown to fall away from the house; the Tableau del Diablo; the Hanging Gardens; and me, thereby saving everything and proving me to be a super manly woodsman guy, the next day the ice melted and the tree lifted off its perch by five feet or so.  Then gravity took over and the tree slowly laid itself to rest on the roof. 

‘Hazardous? Yes, sir, I guess so. That’ll be $200.”

Local ordinance states that any tree less than five inches in diameter may be removed without a permit; however, to cut ANY tree within 200 feet of a wetland–and my share of the wetland was about 100 feet away before the storm, and is about 70 feet away now–requires a permit for each tree.  To obtain such a permit first requires that a licensed arborist condemn the tree.  I would love to stimulate the economy by hiring someone to tell me that a tree leaning on my house–or several others that were vertical on Tuesday but nearly horizontal on Thursday–are a ‘hazard.’  But I have enough troubles with forehead-slapping property restrictions, and I also have a very strict “No trees falling on my loved ones or my home ” policy.  Cutting off some trees that pose a clear threat to those items seems like the kind of thing you do when it is an emergency, and then apologize for later if you have to.  So Saturday morning, my dangerous trees had to go.  There was nothing to do with my Poltergeist Pair but slowly cut through the fractured trunks and hope that the larger tree would fall slowly rather than landing full force on my Weber grill…which it did, saving Steak Night and allowing me to de-limb the crown while standing comfortably on my well-shoveled patio. Because of the urgent nature of the surgery–‘tree-age,’ if you will– I didn’t have time to section up all the trunks and instead cut them to 10- to 12 foot lengths that I could quickly hurl out of the way.  In all, there were five alders and one hemlock that I lost to the Oddball Ice Storm of 2012, and there are two more alders in the same grove that are taller still than the ones that laid over–well tall enough to reach my house, but currently leaning ever so slightly the other way.  Regrettable as losing the trees may be, I am warning you, remaining Red Alders: I’m watching you. If there is any upside of the whole affair it is that when the next Highland Games roll around, I am well fit for the Caber toss.

That’s A Snappy Looking Tree

Red Alder says, "Firsts!"

The edge of my clearing and the dense woods beyond are punctuated with stands of Red Alder, small groves of tall, skinny trees interspersed among the Bigleaf Maples, Western Red Cedar, Western Hemlock, and occasional Douglas Fir that form the highest plane of my forest ‘ceiling.’  Lanky and narrow even at the canopy, this alder–a genus commonly referred to as ‘Northwest bamboo’–plays an interesting role in the Pacific Northwest forest.  Common in disturbed areas such as road cuts (or my once-clear-cut land), this ”pioneer tree” roots easily and grows rapidly.  This rapid growth, often in concert with Bigleaf Maple (of which I also have many), shelters the seedlings of slower growing climax trees such as the cedars, hemlocks, and firs.  Further, the tree is a ‘nitrogen fixer,’ a process that requires a number of different scientific symbols, some things from the periodic table that I have long forgotten, probably photosythesis, maybe symbiosis, and quite possibly a wizard.   Suffice to say, they take nitrogen from the air and put it in the soil where other plants can use it, making your dirt more fertile–improving ‘dirtility,’ in Calvin-speak, except it happens all science-y.

This dirtility is in turn enjoyed by the understory plants of the Northwest forest, and indeed, each grove of my alders wears a ‘skirt’ of vine maple, sword fern, and an oddball shrub here or there–I don’t have an enormous amount of plant diversity on my land, but most of the naturally ocurring understory is beneath the alders.

But this selfless first-responder of the forest has downsides as well.  The bark, a pleasingly

Up close, the bark has the abstract quality of a Von Wicht painting

mottled pale gray that stands out in winter’s gloom, is also thin and prone to blistering.  This makes it an appealing home to carpenter ants and other woodboring insects, which in turn attract the birds that feed upon them.  One of my most enjoyable mornings last summer was watching the brown creepers–a bird I identified using my daughter’s Where Would I Be in an Evergreen Tree–circle up the trunks of the alders, only to flutter to earth, pause for a moment, and begin their upward spiral yet again, picking at the bark and feasting as they go.  The trees themselves look healthy enough, but each of these bark incursions will likely result in greater insect occupancy.  And that is when the woodpeckers take over.

While determining what plants I have on my property and researching the most promising

This alder, about 15 feet from the house, broke off about thirty feet up. Fortunately, the house wasn't there at the time. Photo by Corene Caley

additions, I noted from my reference books that alders have a ‘tendency to break off.’   Now that winter has disrobed the woods, it is easy to see the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of jagged spires that point toward the sky, each looking like a ragged exclamation point that says, ‘I gave my all to these woods.’  In truth, the dying and dead alders continue to give to their plant community, as the more freshly broken trees continue to leaf out in their lower stories while the longer-dead are pocked with dozens of woodpecker borings and nest holes, the lower bark often peeled away by animals also seeking an insect-y treat.  In time these trees will fall over, and their woody corpses will then truly give their all to the soil.

I enjoy the fall color of vine maples, love the perfume that the cedars lend to the winter woods, and for now will pretend that I enjoy the surplus of soil amendments that my Bigleaf Maples offer me;  but I am fairly certain that the Red Alder is my favorite tree that was on my property before me.  It is kind of like the Labrador Retriever of the woods: handsome of mein, it gives mightily, sheds freely, and ages rapidly as a result of all its selfless exertions.  Some of my alders do give me pause, however: the trees my family and I refer to as the ‘fishing poles.’  These 60+ foot tall trees arch rather gracelessly over the clearing, running parallel to the ground for the uppermost twenty feet or more and bouncing crazily up and down at the merest zephyr of a wind.   A sixty foot tree that breaks off at the twenty-foot mark is fine if it’s more than forty feet from your house (Math-y!)*, but the fishing poles are all ten to thirty feet away.  I only hope that when they break, and they will, that I won’t be standing right underneath them, or that the wind will be blowing away from the house.

*Actually, a sixty-foot-tall tree that broke off at the twenty-foot mark would not fall forty feet, probably more like about thirty-two.  To see how this works, take a pencil, a ruler, and a piece of paper.  Make a six inch vertical line intersecting at 90 degrees with a second six inch horizontal line. Make a mark two inches from the bottom on your vertical line.  Measuring from your vertical ‘mark,’ determine where ‘four inches’ crosses your horizontal line and mark.  Then measure from the base of your vertical to your horizontal mark.  It should be 3.5 inches, (or 32.5 feet, to scale). That’s because the tip of the tree scribes an ARC from the vertical to the horizontal axis!  SUPER MATH-Y!  Props to Mr. Mackey, my 10th grade geometry teacher!

Sing We Now of Post-Holiday Monotony

The Snuggie of 2010 (it’s a blanket you can wear!) metamorphosed into the Forever Lazy

There was hail, there was graupel, and then we awoke the morning of New Year's Eve to a light dusting of snow

of 2011 (it’s a blanket you can wear AND still get up to get more chips!) Hardworking product designers are already devising technological advances in Blanket Wear for next holiday season. The decorations have been put away–by me, and not the elf who put them up.  There is already food and coffee staining my 2012 desk blotter.  That’s right…the Winter Doldrums are here. 

You know the season.  It’s the Demilitarized Zone between New Year’s and spring.  It can manifest as the Children’s Gift Shakedown Birthday Party Season, as parents gladly pay small ransoms to get the kids out from underfoot on the weekend. The time when the melancholy of Autumn gives way to the resignation of Winter.  A time to focus on your resolutions (so far, The Year I Stopped Getting Out of the Way of People Who Are Too Busy Texting to Pay Attention is going superbly.  I’m gonna make this one stick!), and a time not to think about that leftover white wine in the fridge…that for some reason actually sounds pretty good, even though it’s just after breakfast.   

Snow. It's like a Slanket for your moss...which is like a Snuggy for your dirt.

The Winter Doldrums: dreary, boring, lassitudinous, remarkably phlegm-y. 

I’m not really the type to sip herbal tea while leafing through my gardening catalogs, whiling away winter’s dark while dreaming of spring.  The Doldrums are the backbone of the gardening year, because I can so clearly see the backbone of my garden.  The ugly, the needy, the bare and the out-of-place reveal themselves in winter’s heart.  With a tip ‘o’ the trowel to the economy and a healthy assist from my customers who don’t like to pay their bills, it is now also the season of Gardening for Free.  If I can dig it, tidy it, trim it, cut it, move/remove it, or transplant it, it’s on my garden plan for the foreseeable near future.  Perhaps I’ll even extend the boundaries of ‘gardening’ by getting active with some of that project lumber that has been eyeballing me lately.  There are things that I will do, and things that I want to do (and I can’t even talk about some of the things I have done…the Garden Police may be listening, Shhh!). Who knows? Other than “I got a new calendar,”  who can really say what is in store for this year? Perhaps, even, the next phase of blanket-based loungewear will prove to be shorts and a sweatshirt, cementing my fashion-forwardness once and for all.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Peace and Goodwill to All

I hope your holiday season is magical