Botanists Are Fun People Too

(and how growing food is better than growing plants for cats to pee on)

I'm noticing a trend in teaching methods at my Master Gardening classes. Many activities are prefaced with "This is an activity that we use to teach children...blah...blah...blah" or "This is an activity that has proved very successful with children..."

I look around the room and think to myself: now, I wonder if any one of these senior citizens finds it insulting that most of the activities in the Master Gardening course were designed for children? Then I realize that I'm probably the only real senior citizen in the room. The seventy year old crowd seems to love games.

So we were learning plant parts yesterday by building weird food creatures. I suppose this is to loosen us all up and make us realize that botanists are cool people too. Personally, I thought it was plenty exciting looking at the ova of an alstroemeria at a 10x magnification. I dislike silly activities that are designed to loosen curmudgeons up and help us all shake our social phobias and learn that doing group activities is invigorating.

I do not like group activities or games.

And no, I don't think that makes me cool. And no, I am not proud of it. If you knew how much it makes my innards rearrange themselves with anxiety you would realize that my happy brash way of announcing to everyone in the world how much I hate games is me trying to get it out in the open and out of the way in order to avoid the inevitable heckling and weird arm wrestling people often do to try to get me to "have (their version of) fun".

Did I mention we were supposed to name our food "creatures"? All I could think of was Melvin which was in my head because Elizabeth of The Late Bloomer has a new guinea pig named Melvin which I think is a great name.

Botany doesn't need games and "fun" group activities to keep me from napping in class. I feel like doing that little food activity wasted some valuable time in which I could have been using my pocket lens to look at other cool plant parts and be learning more about how plants do what they do, which, is pretty amazing.

In spite of the fact that almost shouting out loud "Damn, that is SO COOL!!!!!!!!!!" when looking at the alstroemerias sexual organs under magnification proves I am a plant geek of the first order, it will always rankle me when someone gets gushy over ornamental shrubs that don't, for all I can tell, actually do anything cool. Just because I could look at a cross section of that shrub's fleshy matter and get as excited as a kid before Christmas doesn't mean I want to see that shrub 365 days of the year doing nothing interesting in my landscape. When I hear someone say about Pieris "Oooh, that's a wonderful shrub!" I just want to ask "Why? What is so wonderful about this shrub that every cat in the neighborhood comes in my yard to pee on?"

I know that some people in my class (who will remain identity-less, though I have fond pet names for them here at home) have gardens full of almost exclusively ornamental shrubs. Gardens in which no food is being grown. Gardens in which flowers are not prized as highly as shrubs that are green. In my opinion, vegetable gardens are the most ornamental of them all. What riot of color and shape you can arrange with them! I feel that there is room in every garden for some interesting plants that neither feed people nor animals, but I also feel that what Americans really lack is an appreciation for the beauty of food producing plants.

Many Americans see food producing plants and trees as "work", or "messy", or "too much work" or say things like "The fruit falls on the side walk and then I spend all season trying to clean it up. It's too much work."

THAT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT EATING THE FREE FOOD, YOU FOOL!!!!

Part of the problem is we haven't all tweaked our lives to accept free food. We haven't figured out where it fits into our busy world. Fruit producing trees and plants are an incredible gift to us where ever they grow. I would wager that in most countries, where a plant grows delicious fruits, people do not let it drop to the ground in a heap of waste.

I must admit that we let a lot of fruit molder on the ground around our very old and diseased pear tree. It has a terrible mite problem that we didn't address vigorously enough last winter and most of the fruit was spoiled before it matured. But this year we will attack the problem more intently.

If only I could show people the wonderful kitchen gardens all over the world, the front yards in Britain and France in which vegetables are allowed to be seen by the neighbors ("Good God! Is it true?!"). If only I could show them how even in winter, a potager* can shine because of it's planned structure. If only I could show how artfully herbs can be grown. When flowers for beneficials are integrated with your kitchen garden you have eden in miniature. But most of all? How beautiful the most chaotic vegetable garden is when you just think of the people who are being nourished by it's bounty.

I am left cold by ornamental shrubs. Or anything that can be described as "landscape plants".

I built my last garden into a semi-formal potager and it was really satisfying. I surrounded it with roses and herbs and we had fruit trees and all of it compact, fit into a smaller lot than I have now. I wish I could access my pictures of it but most of them are trapped on our old hard drive (another little bit of fun the universe threw our way after breaking our bones and all the other fun). I have a city lot. It isn't farm sized. It isn't even a quarter of an acre.

But it's bigger than what I had before and I have yet to make it shine like my last one. Something wonderful about this new garden of mine is that I can grow peonies here. I can grow berries here. I can grow rhubarb, which I will learn to love because I've got a gorgeous little patch of it that was already here. I see now that what I need to do is show McMinnville that vegetable gardens can be so much more magical than a yard filled with "low maintenance" plants.

Dare I hope that this year I will have time to dedicate to the cultivation of my own private heaven?






*A more formal kitchen garden in which a kind of symmetry is built into the plan and structures such as arches, pergolas, and boxwood give it a more formal backbone.