Essays

Moseying: Living La Vida Llanero

Winter memories of water walks
January 11, 2004

“A garden, like a life, is composed of moments. I wish mine could always be as it is right now…” Janice Emily Bower writes in “A Full Life in a Small Place.” I know what she means. One night last summer a Mediterranean Gecko appeared on the window of our house at Gone Native. Folks in town have geckos, but not us folks that live out in the county. Where did this one come from? It was so tiny and delicate, its skin so translucent that we could see its organs inside. It jumped around and ran about with such vigor. It seemed so joyful, and I was so happy to see it!

What we choose to do should enrich us, and help us grow as humans. Gardening is a choice. Gardening offers us a chance for impassioned involvement with the world around us.

Watering the garden is an utmost necessity in west Texas. It has to be done. I have tried everything except an automatic system, and someday I might even try that. I like the personal involvement of observing the plants and only water where it is most needed. During the hot months I usually have water running every night. When I leave in the morning, I carefully place drippy hoses to spot water new plantings slowly and deeply. To know what to water when, I must do ritualistic water walks.

I love the water walk – I do it every night and every morning. Part of the joy of the water walk is watching a plant perform – I get so excited when something pops into glorious bloom for the first time this year. In the Frances Williams Memorial Bog Garden the cardinal flower bloomed for the first time in late July. Suddenly two dozen deep red blossoms shouted out, “We’re happy!” I planted them last year on the island where there is a moss rock bench (from the Central Mineral Region of Texas.) A phantasmagoric wood carving of a duck sits on the bench and a butterfly-attracting Buttonbush shrub arcs over it, the sweet-smelling white spheres of its blooms complimented by brilliant bluebells.

I have planted cardinal flowers before, but have always lost them, not understanding why. I think I have learned their needs – I believe they need several years of the development of a soil-flora of bacteria and fungi attached to the roots of other plants. If they are placed in freshly turned and bare soil they can not partake of the products of symbiotic community. Seeing the blooms inspires the thought that Frances, my late mother, is participating in the process. She really is, for her ashes were interred on the island. The ashes are nutrients for the plants. The hummingbirds at the cardinal flowers and the butterflies on the buttonbush are symbolically sharing her life-long love of their wild antics.

At present I water with a sprinkler that wets the soil in a hundred-foot circle. Usually I only run it at night, but in shady tree areas such as the Sacred Grove of Arizona Cypress and Eastern Red Cedar I will let it run during the day. I recently returned home in the evening to find scores of doves gathered to bathe and drink in the spray. As I neared, the sound of their wings flapping in panic ripped the quiet afternoon with a deafening flatulent thunder. In seconds all were gone, leaving dozens of tiny down feathers floating along their wake. One feather caught the ubiquitous west Texas wind and drifted upward, the anomalous sight emphatically underscoring the power of water’s attraction to life in the aridlands.

I have seen other images of the unexpected that are similar visible contradictions. On one evening water walk I had to make way for a five foot bull snake going pell-mell down the trail, with a cotton rat nipping at its tail. The explanation for such a reversal of roles was soon evident, for in the mouth of the snake was a baby rat squealing in anguish. Neither animal was aware of my presence in the twenty yards of the chase that I witnessed. They disappeared into the kidneywood and littleleaf sumac thicket at the bend of the path, and when I ventured that way to search out the denouement, it was if it never happened.

My water walks often occur after the sun goes down. A number of the plants in the arboretum are night-bloomers, opening only when no direct sunlight can blast their delicate white corollas. The white blossoms seem to possess incandescence of their own. Drawn by their glow I drift to them like the sphinx moths I find drunk on the nectar of datura (moonflower or jimsonweed.) I have stood within inches of a moth blundering from 6-inch bloom to 6-inch bloom, the whir of its wings progressively becoming more and more irregular. Folklore relates that if a datura is planted under a bedroom window, a person’s dreams become vivid and bizarre on the moonlit nights that it blooms.

Years ago I dug up a white ruellia I found growing under the native pecans of the North Concho River. Subsequently it has seeded itself prolifically. Up to a dozen white trumpets, each 2-inches in length, punctuate the twilight as they grace each 8-inch mound. Their blooms seem phosphorescent. They seem to prefer the gravelly edges of the path, so they serve as faux garden lights leading my way.

I am quite partial to the slender blossoms of angel’s trumpets with their 5-inch long corollas tipped by a tiny half-inch cup. Out in the pasture they only bloom after rains, a blossom or two at a time on 4-inch stalks, but in the garden they twine vine-like for a yard on and among neighboring plants and send forth dozens of flowers. On closer examination, one out of a hundred turns out to be a close kin, the moonpod. Moonpod blossoms are an inch shorter and have a pale lemony wash to them, and the plants, even when irrigated, remain as tighter clumps of foliage.

In the humid air of the pre-dawn the night’s irrigation gives body to the most wonderful smells. Sometimes it is that of good rich earth. At other times the sweet scent of a blooming plant is magnified exponentially until I feel that the odor is physically bathing my skin. When I breathe deeply I sense that the sweetness is entering me in osmotic penetration. It is as if I inhale the garden.