Can a Nature-Lover Love a Garden? Plums, Paradox, and Poison Sumac
with a cabin update and a nod to Christie Purifoy's lovely new book, A Home in Bloom
I don’t typically use the words “pursuit” and “attack” when I’m talking about trees. Nevertheless, my July did feature a tree attack and a tree pursuit.
The attack happened in Michigan, where we were building a dock for our eventual writer’s cabin. Reaching our lake means walking through damp sphagnum studded with ferns and blueberry bushes. Many people prefer to buy land where lawn extends all the way down to a sandy shore, but not us. Did you know that the sphagnum in peat bogs can hold up to 20 times its weight in water? Peat bogs only account for a dwindling 3% of the earth’s surface, but they store more carbon than all the world’s forests. Rimming a spring-fed glacial kettle scooped out by the ice age, our bog is a beautiful climate-change warrior. All the same, we’d really rather walk above it instead of through it when we want to go for a swim. Thirteen people, some very primitive camping, and at least four days of work later, and the dock I’d been planning since November was reality. Then some of us began to itch.
By the time we got home, hard red stripes crisscrossed our skin. When I unbent my knees to get out of the car, I found a rash on the back of my lower thigh that mirror-imaged the one on my upper calf -- a Rorschach blot of inflammation that had developed as I drove. Blisters formed and oozed. A doctor prescribed anti-itch pills just so that my dad could sleep. Looking through our pictures to try to figure out what we’d gotten into, my parents finally found the culprit. It was a tree that we had configured the dock to avoid, but that anyone directly involved in setting the posts had touched. Poison sumac.
Poison sumac contains urushiol, the same oily resin inflicted by poison ivy and poison oak. Urushiol is even more concentrated in poison sumac than in the other two. Yet poison sumac is also lovely. It can grow up to 25 feet, its spreading canopy the first to turn crimson in the fall. Avian species like our beloved kingbirds look to poison sumac berries when the lake freezes and they can no longer skim for their aquatic food supply. The urushiol doesn’t bother them a bit. Quintessential cabin-writer Henry David Thoreau said that poison sumac is “as beautiful as Satan.” The plant’s hydra-like tenacity can send up a crop of new sprouts anytime a single trunk is cut, and heaven forbid you burn the branches, for urushiol smoke can be deadly to lungs. Herbicides kill poison sumac eventually, but we prefer to use those sparingly, if at all. So what to do? Should we put a sign on the pretty thing and instruct future guests to avoid it, or do we declare a multi-year war on a native plant? I have a feeling that whatever we do will ignite some strong opinions.
The fervor with which plant-lovers eradicate certain plants and protect others makes me think of Hal Herzog’s title Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals. Along with bacon-eating dog-lovers, nature-loving gardeners can veer pretty close to contradiction. Does it even make sense to be a nature-loving gardener when nature is all about wildness and gardening is all about cultivation? Sometimes us nature-lovers daydream about trees conquering the uglier human developments – vacant lots, tumbledown buildings, and (dare I say it?) pointless McMansion lawns. Yet while I’m sure a few of the most stringent back-to-nature folks would gladly watch a wild forest poke through the glass domes of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, I’ve never met such a person. Most of us value gardens.
Toward the end of her lushly-photographed celebration of gardening, A Home in Bloom: Four Enchanted Seasons with Flowers, my friend Christie Purifoy wrestles with the role of cultivation in nature.
Can those who have known the enormity of deforestation, nuclear disasters, oil spills, acid rain, and climate chaos feel anything but cynical about humanity’s interference with the natural processes of the earth? Even the seemingly smaller degradations of invasive plants and pests that make it difficult and sometimes impossible for our native species to flourish are enough to make you want not a deer fence but a human fence, one designed to keep us from ruining one more vital place. Understandably, there is a growing chorus of voices calling for land to be “re-wilded” – not gardened in the traditional sense at all. I believe that might be the best option for many places, but I don’t think it is the only option we should pursue as we seek to give better care to our places.
I am a committed gardener, yet I am not immune to the tug of despair. Why go on gardening when we have often done more harm than good? Why grow ornamental plants at all? Why not turn our places over to the weeds? Setting aside the fact that many places, if left to manage themselves, would only become wastelands of invasive species, I yet believe that the idea of cultivated space has an intrinsic value worth reviving and preserving and passing on.
The moment we began work on our Michigan land, I felt the thrill of anticipation inextricably blend with the pull of responsibility. It still aches a bit to watch the videos we took of the land before we logged the cabin site, cutting down nature in order to allow us to get back to it. Yet the land wasn’t even virgin when we bought it, the red pines having been planted decades ago in rows that we have carefully softened with the selective application of a chain saw. Are we gardening or re-wilding when we do such things?
A few years ago, someone suggested that I landscape the lake property. “No, I want to leave our land to native plants and nature” I answered a little indignantly, forgetting how before we thinned them, the trees had stood in rows.
“Well, if you do, invasives will seed into all the soil the excavators overturned” came the reply.
I hadn’t thought of that, but it is true. Like Christie says, re-wilding may not be possible, at least not without the near-irony of cultivating native plants. Yet my sense of responsibility grows apace with my questions. Back at home in Illinois, the responsibility is more about pulling weeds, mulching to minimize water use, and keeping the lawn mowed until I can plant more pollinators. I love gardening. I love caring for our woodland and bog. I used to consider them completely different tasks that served the same end. Now I am not sure.
When we embarked on our dock-building adventure, three of us had just returned from Europe, where I had encountered a tree that I instantly wanted for my Illinois garden. At breakfast on our first jet-lagged morning, I spied a hand-written label on a jar: “homemade Mirabelle preserves.” They tasted sweet-tart and floral, with just a hint of pineapple. It may be the best jam I’ve ever had. But what on earth was a Mirabelle? Googling told me that it is a type of golden plum grown in much of Europe. Despite being readily available in people’s gardens, the species is under an appellation restriction that only allows commercial sale of Mirabelle fruit from the Lorraine region of France. The trees alone can be bought in America, and not easily.
I, who did not even like plums before, took up the challenge and found a grower that would let me sign up for an alert when Mirabelle trees became available for preorder. The alert arrived at 2am on a Saturday. By the time I saw the email, only a few were left, but I made sure that one of them was mine. Next spring will find me planting a little tree with luminous fruit out of a fairy tale. In five years, perhaps I’ll have a jar of jam.
I love that sort of thing. A traveler’s discovery brought home and treasured. The souvenir one didn’t know to look for but fell in love with while sampling a different life. A living memento that connects me with the botanical explorers of old. These things always grant the traveler a story to tell, and I’m sure I’ll bore my young son with the Mirabelle tale for years to come. Yet both my July trees – the Mirabelle we’ll plant in Illinois and the sumac we’ll steer clear of in Michigan – have a story, and my little boy will hear them both. He has to, so that he can remain safe in the bog we love.
I treasure my Mirabelle with the joy of the traveler. I treasure my poison sumac — if I can call it mine— with the reverence of the vanquished. Yet despite my delight in the cultivated tree, it is the wild one that most captures my imagination.