I have been shoveling a variety of vintage local muds to create new flowerbeds and transplant shrubs and perennials. The days leading up to the winter solstice are not a recessional during which the vegetable kingdom takes some time off and goes to sleep. Far from it. These rainy, muddy weeks with their intermittent bursts of warm sunshine and chilly overcast are a period of intense activity for plants, most of it underground. Taking a spade to the established beds turns up the roots of the perennials being moved and the crocus bulbs that just happen to be there, both charged with activity. The crocus bulbs, or croci as we laughingly call them, have thick bushy beards of white root underneath and hard white horns like the horns of extremely tiny goats on top, basically ready to foliate and bloom possibly as early as mid January. The narcissi are starting to think about spiking too.
One puts these disturbed little bulbs back carefully into their friendly mud. Meanwhile the roots of the perennials are fat and white and anything but sleeping. Invasive spreaders like monarda are running strands of fibers sideways through the mud, not an inch deep; but under the iris rhizomes, the roots are bloating up on water and heading straight down, vertical. Moving big clumps of old herbaceous peony, we find silvery white stalks like an incipient asparagus, some turning pink, branching off the woody roots and climbing up to within a few centimeters of the soil surface, there to poise for a couple months before starting out of the ground like celery stalks. This is not rest; it is self-aggrandizement, co-optation, the marshalling of resources before the days of sun-warmed aggression when, as Lear said, “Ripeness is all,” and all the hot irons strike, sending the insects
mad.
mad.
We have three kinds of mud. The least interesting is the new garden center dirt for the garden expansion, which has been screened and mixed with a bit of aged manure. It is a silty mud from the other side of the
mountains, mud from the Shenandoah, pH neutral, not a simple product and no doubt reasonably bacterial and fungoid to a limited extent, but containing no fauna visible to the naked eye. This comes by truck and gets dumped in holes.
Then there is the mud of established beds. This dirt has some local history. Obviously some of it was once Julius Caesar and a lot of it was mastodon dung, back in the day, but we also find the remains of the charcoal briquets from the great 4th of July grill-out of 2011, and fireplace ashes, areas of decayed peat moss, the relics of former mulches, flowerpot shards, a lost marble, and of course worms, bugs, aerated holes, strands of vegetal and fungal life, and invisible bacteria; this stuff’s as alive as any great city, and the rains of autumn turn it not so much into the slimy mud of lore and legend as into something a little like chocolate cake. The beds are man-made. They’re part midden, and if no one feeds them, it’s hard to imagine how such beds would form. They look natural, they smell natural, and they’re full of organisms. When you find this stuff, it’s evidence by itself that humans are close by, using tools.
mountains, mud from the Shenandoah, pH neutral, not a simple product and no doubt reasonably bacterial and fungoid to a limited extent, but containing no fauna visible to the naked eye. This comes by truck and gets dumped in holes.
Then there is the mud of established beds. This dirt has some local history. Obviously some of it was once Julius Caesar and a lot of it was mastodon dung, back in the day, but we also find the remains of the charcoal briquets from the great 4th of July grill-out of 2011, and fireplace ashes, areas of decayed peat moss, the relics of former mulches, flowerpot shards, a lost marble, and of course worms, bugs, aerated holes, strands of vegetal and fungal life, and invisible bacteria; this stuff’s as alive as any great city, and the rains of autumn turn it not so much into the slimy mud of lore and legend as into something a little like chocolate cake. The beds are man-made. They’re part midden, and if no one feeds them, it’s hard to imagine how such beds would form. They look natural, they smell natural, and they’re full of organisms. When you find this stuff, it’s evidence by itself that humans are close by, using tools.
The third mud around here is the real natural local substance, red clay. This clay is the truly ancient byproduct of long-ago erosive cycles that featured an awful lot of leaching and saprolitic decay as the local metamorphs sloughed back into their constituent Precambrian elements. It has the texture of unfired pottery. Virginia red clay lavishly supports mainline forest, climax trees like the hickories and oaks and maples, and understory trees like wild cherry and dogwood, indeed a tremendous variety of trees and shrubs and floor plants. What it won’t for the most part support are the tame, effete, cosmopolitan boutique plants that we might purchase for our established beds. Plants that have lived their whole young life in mineral chocolate, so to speak, often just sigh and die if placed in some grisly crevice hacked out of the brutal clay. This stuff’s for hero plants, not for ornamentals; it’s for plants that have it in their nature to be the scaffold of the created world.
If you spade the yard grass off your red clay, you find a root system less than 2 inches deep, indicating just how tenuous your weedy yard really is, and a useless scurf of disappointed organic material being fought over by the worst and most desperate kinds of piratical ants. Below that, red clay appears to be just about sterile. And yet it has worms. Not many and not commonly. You find more beetle grubs than worms. Really, it’s perfect for beetle grubs. Nothing will bother them there, while they pursue their inexplicable
metamorphosis. But it’s not perfect for worms and you wonder what they think they are doing. Are these bitter worms, worms in denial, outcasts, just lost worms; or are they pioneers, explorers, visionaries?
One would like to interrogate these worms. They are either much stupider or much more ambitious than the usual sort.
metamorphosis. But it’s not perfect for worms and you wonder what they think they are doing. Are these bitter worms, worms in denial, outcasts, just lost worms; or are they pioneers, explorers, visionaries?
One would like to interrogate these worms. They are either much stupider or much more ambitious than the usual sort.
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