Botanical Explorations Across Time
Snug as a bug in my sun-filled studio in Nevada City, I am traveling back through time, retracing the history of flowering plants in gardens around the world. With John Grimshaw’s The Gardener’s Atlas spread open across my lap, I am on the world’s first recorded plant-hunting expedition—a mission organized by Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut in 1495 B.C. to the Land of Punt in eastern Africa--on a quest for incense-bearing plants. My eyes shift to a map of Africa and the region around the Great Rift Valley--a region of tropical woodland and grasslands that is the home of former President Barack Obama’s Kenyan ancestors.
Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, concludes with his first trip to Africa in 1993 to learn the stories of his long-absent Kenyan father. In Nairobi, he goes with his half-sister Auma to the downtown city market and breathes in the smell of ripe fruit and fresh meat. I know this market. I can still smell fruit that was trucked in from highland farms and see stalls arrayed with woven baskets, hemp bags with broad leather shoulder straps, Crayola-colored African fabrics, and carved wooden figures of Africa’s wildlife.
You never forget the moment you first set foot on the continent of Africa and breathe in its ancient past. For me, that moment was March 3, 1988, when my Pan Am flight from London landed in Nairobi, Kenya. My friend Chomsri and I were visiting my sister Molly, brother-in-law Jim and their son Christopher. My journal from that trip includes pencil drawings by four-year old Christopher of a giraffe family and a whiskery fish cat I drew with the caption “Meow.” Tucked into the journal is a sheet of lined paper from a school tablet. Topher (as I called him) had drawn a sun, a big crocodile in water and me standing next to a tree. “My Aunty Cathy”, he wrote, “came to visit us from America. We went to see a huge crocodile that was asleep with its mouth open.”
There is also a brochure from the Karen Blixen Museum. It gives a glimpse of the author’s life from 1917 to 1931 when she managed a coffee farm in the Ngong Hills above Nairobi—immortalized in her Isak Dinesen classic Out of Africa. After returning to Denmark, Dinesen wrote, “The introduction into my life of another race, essentially different from mine, in Africa became to me a mysterious expansion of my world. My own voice and song in life there had a second set to it and grew fuller and richer in the duet.”
Thumbing through that 1988 journal now, I find sketches of village huts made of dried red mud and sticks along with small, irrigated plots of maize. I note that “Only 20% of the land in this country the size of Oregon is suitable for agriculture. Kenyan scientists are doing research on many other vegetables and fruits—cabbage, kale, carrots, onion, cucumbers, cowpeas, tomatoes, citrus, avocados, mangos, passion fruit, apples, pears, peaches, plums, grapes, and pawpaw.”
In his memoir, Obama recalls sampling pawpaw fruit while visiting his Luo grandmother in her Kenyan village. Did the future president know of the pawpaw’s importance to Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and the Corps of Discovery? President Thomas Jefferson tasked them with measuring and mapping the course of the Missouri River, and they were also to observe and collect “vegetable productions; especially those not of the U.S.”
Lewis, who had studied botany at an early age and learned the medicinal properties of plants from his mother, dutifully observed, collected, described, and preserved plant specimens over the course of the 1804-06 expedition. On the lower Missouri, they sampled wild plums, pawpaw, cherries, grapes, raspberries, persimmons, walnuts, and hickory nuts and took cuttings from Osage orange trees—the first of 178 species of plants gathered during their mission.
For 30 years, I learned most of what I know about gardening while living in the country near the Missouri River. Since moving west three months ago, we’ve settled comfortably into our new home in the Sierra Foothills on a .8-acre lot that faces a stand of tall ponderosa pines, incense cedars and Douglas firs. There is no grass to mow. Sun-loving hibiscus, crepe Myrtle and dahlias thrive in large emerald green Chinese urns on our three-tiered deck. And in semi-shade beneath two dogwood trees, an aging brick flower bed has been replaced by a raised redwood bed masterfully crafted and filled with blended soils enriched with chicken manure from Rare Earth Landscape Materials.
Designed and constructed by John Johnson of Yuba Land Management and his son Johnny, our new garden launched a botanical exploration to learn what grows in our new Sierra Foothills world. What plants do deer and local squirrels the size of chipmunks eat? What will grow here a mile above the snowline? Will peonies, irises, daylilies, and Russian sage that thrived in our Missouri meadow and shade gardens grow here in Nevada City?
After trips to Hills Flat and Weiss Bros nurseries, I’ve now filled our flower bed with a kitchen garden variety of herbs, stands of French and Spanish lavender, roses, peonies, hellebore, irises, daylilies, ferns, and ornamental grasses. Like our new home, the garden is smaller and a more manageable scale, but it is magical. By the way, the Sierra Foothill Iris Society is having a rhizome iris sale at Weiss Bros Nursery on July 24th and 25th. I’ll be there when it opens at 9 am next Saturday.
As for books, we now have a “drive in” library annex in the garage. One can never have enough flowers or books. But that, dear readers, is another story.