Canadensis, Latinized Canada with the ending meaning -from the place of. Alas, not native across the country, only in the east, as are most of the plants bearing that name.
Primula ‘Nefertiti’
Nefertiti is an odd choice of name for a primrose cultivar. Queen Nefertiti and her pharaoh husband Akhenaten exerted a bloody dictatorial theocratic rein over Egypt. They were despised for their violence and for their arrogant insistence that no god but the Aten (the sun disc) should be worshiped. After his death, Akhenaten’s name was struck from the King Lists, and his images were destroyed. Mention of his name became forbidden. Akhetaten, the new capitol he and Nefertiti consecrated with treasury-breaking gilded pomp, was abandoned, as was the Aten-worship obsession, and he was then mentioned thereafter only as “That Criminal”.
Petasites x vitifolius
One of the first native species to bloom is this hybrid coltsfoot, a cross between the commonP. palmatus and the nowhere-to-be-seen-near-here P. sagittatus. The nearest population of the latter that we know of is about 8 km north. Maybe we’re just not looking hard enough.
Camassia ‘Blue Heaven’
We’ve grown this camas for a few years now. Each year we’ve had a significant increase in the number of bulbs. In fact, the increase has gone exponential. We now have enough to pit-roast for a traditional feast.
It’s the terrible blue weed. Irresistible, though. Great evolutionary strategy, to be a deceptively pretty invasive.
Ranunculus glaberrimus
The sagebrush buttercup. In 19th Century Spokane (the place but not my time of origin, unfortunately), there were contests for school children to be the first to find a sagebrush buttercup in flower. This took place in early spring, when children (and some adults) were eager to see the first of anything in bloom after the long, drab winter (winter in Spokane is dreadful).
Globularia meridionalis
A large, robust patch, but with only one flower head. It could do better. But couldn’t we all?
Viola macloskeyi
Or something like that. Our wild western white violets are poorly understood. Under this name, we have two species native in the garden and in the surrounding wetlands: This smaller one, here growing in the lawn, with leathery leaves and an early flowering time, and a later-flowering larger one with thinner leaves. I’m delighted to see a part of the lawn as suitable habitat for this native violet. I’m not sure if the form in the photo is typical (true) V. macloskei. This needs study. Lawns are not a usual venue for plant taxonomy. Or they haven’t commonly been so since the 19th Century.
Like many northerners do, we could fly away in winter to gawk at screaming-bright colours sizzling under a blazing tropical sun. But for Trevor and me both, flying is deadly torture. So we stay at home through the cold months thinking dark, drab northern thoughts. We do monk things. We read, we sleep, we walk, we work, we dream deeply. Sombre ascetic pastimes.
But then winter fades away before spring is ready. As anyone in a cold climate knows, the early spring thaw uncovers the moldy brown of poverty. Monks’ robe brown. Post-apocalyptic brown. It’s brown season.
And then, out of the thawing silence of this monastic season of brown, during the high-pitched piccolo-trill song of a varied thrush, the first extravagant glints of colour spurt up, and my writing turns florid.
“And all the deaths I’m heir to/turn a little from their tasks and look at me“
–Lorna Crozier, from Whetstone
I had a whopper of a hypoglycemia attack last week. Couldn’t sit up. Couldn’t even lift an arm. Trevor said I turned “ashen”. My pulse was rapid and weak, and I had pins & needles creeping up my arms and starting in my face. I thought I was going to die. The paramedics came.
I’ve recently reduced the fat in my diet. I was told my cholesterol reading was too high. So for the past few weeks, I’ve been trying obediently to function on more carbohydrates and less fat. Doctor’s orders.
My body does not have an easy time making and storing fat. I’m 51 years old now, but I have no paunch, no extra energy reserves. So when my blood glucose goes down, my body has precious little fat to turn to for energy. I eat a lot, throughout the day, to keep my blood sugar steady. I’ve had hypoglycemic attacks so often throughout my adult life that I’ve had plenty of opportunities to learn how to prevent them. But I’ve been working too hard, and my new diet just wasn’t keeping up with the energy expenditures. Too much carbs, too little fat. Even by my standards, this latest hypoglycemic collapse was extreme.
The past month’s outdoor work has been intense as we’ve done so much to limb-up trees and clean up the wood debris from the forest floor to reduce ladder fuel, and to burn the waste, in a hurry, before the pending ban on open burning. We can’t leave the waste sitting on the land all through the fire season. Unless the current drought abates, we could be facing one of our worst fire seasons this summer.
And because the spring thaw was about three weeks early, I have a lot of accelerated work to do in the garden to clean up the beds and to give all the seedlings a good start. Plus firewood chopping. Plus the energy costs of keeping Buki happy and well exercised (4–5 hours per day of walks, and frisbee-chasing, and various high-energy games). Plus contract work, and housekeeping, fire brigade duties, and errands.
And I’ve been going to the gym for weight lifting to build and maintain muscle. The workouts have burned up much of my thin veneer of subcutaneous fat. I’m leaner than ever, without any extra fuel to burn. Spring and summer keep me in such a high state of physical activity that from April to June, I usually lose about 10 pounds of muscle (and whatever fat I started with). And then I have to re-earn the muscle yet again during the next late fall-winter off-season. I’m now in my 50’s. It’s time to think ahead to old age. I don’t want low bone density, and I don’t want to be one of those skinny men who becomes a sadly skeletal old man. Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder, the same one that makes me so slender, thin-boned and tall, can lead to osteoporosis. I want a good sheath of muscle around every bone, and I want to work my limbs and core and pecs to strain the bones to make them stronger.
This morning’s article in The Guardian gives the right idea:
And, I might add, the body building is making me look pretty good. Some might even say “sexy”…(?). Not bad for 51 years old, anyway.
For the body-building to work, along with all the rest of the hard physical work in my daily life, I need a high-fat diet. My doctor is not wrong to be concerned about my cholesterol. But from the menu of maladies, I’d rather order death by cholesterol-caused massive stroke than an osteoporosis-caused broken bones and a depressingly sedentary life.
My ancestors were mostly northern Europeans. Dairy people. Consumers of whole milk and cream. Lean, tall, hard working, cold-climate people who understood that fatty foods get you through the winter and dairy and meat are what you need to get the job done. Those ancestors’ genes still live on, inside of me, in all my tissues. They tell me what to do, on a cellular level. They say “Eat fat.” They also say “Reproduce.”, but that’s not my job. I am a genetic dead-end, and I’m content with that. I’d rather leave a legacy of knowledge and ideas. The ancestors seem satisfied with my explanation.
Severe bouts of hypoglycemia come with the risk of a progressive damage to the pancreas and eventual onset of type-II diabetes. So I decided to resume my usual high-fat, high-protein diet. Carbs don’t do it for me; they just raise my insulin to levels that cause my glucose to collapse. I might dine differently if I lived a sitter’s life, staring all day at a television machine, or if I had different ancestors murmuring genetically inside my cells. But given my lifestyle and my peculiar genetics. I’m going to revel in the diet that my ancestors tell me I need. Like this:
A heap of potatoes, mashed with heavy (36%) cream, fried in a lot of butter, with five fried eggs, roasted tomatoes and tomatillo sauce. All home-grown or local except the butter, salt, and pepper. I would die without such a high-fat, high-calorie diet. In a famine, I’d be one of the first to perish.
This is the sort of breakfast it takes to feed my ancestors’ genes. This is the sort of breakfast I need to face all the hard work of helping to keep Edgewood going. Trevor and I are immersed in the vital, high-energy world of these ten acres, with all its demands for hard physical work. It’s kind of like a farmer’s life. Kind of like what I imagine my ancestors did to survive and thrive. I want to have enough harvest from the garden and enough gathered from the wild each year to support our annual dietary needs. After a lot of intense work to develop the gardens and learning how to preserve the harvests, we’re nearly there. It’s better than a starvation diet, anyway.
But all that work takes a lot of energy. It requires dietary fat, and muscle, and strong bones. Though the main fat and protein sources in my diet don’t come from Edgewood, most of the rest does. This is the land of Edgewood incorporated into my body, and returning to the land again. This is a human life intricately and intimately tied to the land and visa versa. A more sustainable way of living than grocery shopping and dining out. I have my hands in the soil of these gardens, and their harvests are inside of me. It isn’t easy, but it’s a delicious life.
When I finished the last bites of my breakfast, I was sorry there wasn’t more. I commented to myself: “Mmm, that was good.” And so I fed my ancestors, to their satisfaction. And then I went out and chopped wood, thinking thoughts about how I’ve not produced any descendants to feed my genes after I’m dead.
Bony apetite!
P.S., Trevor and I want to thank our good neighbour Chris Nowak for his first-aid help during my medical emergency. Thank you Chris & Amber for being such excellent people!
“I don’t know how you can live in that climate” –More than one friend
This climate is a cold one. We’ve had temperatures as low as -38C, cold that pushes its way into the house no matter how we try to keep it out. The snowpack can linger for as long as six months. It’s Zone 3, which counts as one of the “shameful” gardening zones. We are not ashamed, actually. We truly like it here. Our winters are beautiful, all our seasons are.
There are benefits to growing a garden in the far north. For one, all those YouTube videos that give bad gardening advice obviously don’t apply to us, so there’s no chance of getting misled by those shams. We find little guidance in videos or books or from some well-meaning friends on how to grow a garden in this climate, and that’s a good thing. We have to figure it out for ourselves. We are idiosyncratic.
The Alder Garden
The last snow patches usually melt from Edgewood in the first week of May, and the first, at least non-lingering snows can come in September. The frost-free period can be just 3 months. We live topographically in a cold-air drainage. After the day’s thermal uplift ends at sunset, dense, cold alpine air is no longer kept up in the mountains. It flows down over us and pools about. Even after a hot day, the nights are always chilly. It’s good summer weather for sleeping, but not good for growing melons or eggplants.
The growing season is short here, and intense. While gardeners in lazier climates can linger on their tasks unhurriedly, we have to get it all done very hurriedly, all tasks condensed into few weeks no matter how tired we feel. The weeds must not win. The wilder parts of the land must not be highly flammable. The harvests must be brought in. It is utterly exhausting. But the winter months give us a hibernator’s rest.
And yet…
Our climate is changing fast. In all the recent growing seasons, previous smashing records have been smashed by new records again (we topped 160 frost-free days in 2023), and in that year, we had no frost in May, which had never happened before. Heat waves were the norm in the summers of 2021, 2022, and 2023. What will 2024 bring? So far in our current winter, we’ve bottomed out at only -28C (briefly), which puts us in a warm version of Zone 4. In June 2021, we recorded an impossible +42.7C. Where is this going? Where is this taking us?
In the Gift Garden
Our gardens must work as hard as we do. We rely on the vegetable and grain beds to keep our grocery costs low and to feed us with good quality nutrition. Our crops keep us healthy enough to work hard at growing more crops. We and the garden are in it together.
We experiment with crops, a lot. In the garden blogs, I’ll report on findings that will build on what we’ve discovered so far: foxtail millet is an easy crop, but prone to marauding birds; for early harvests, corn can be sowed in pots in a greenhouse if you let the root-wad density increase until the soil is sufficiently tightly bound to allow gentle planting-out into the garden in May; upland rice will grow here, but (due to the chilly nights or periodically too-dry soil?) most of the florets have so far been empty; teff is the easiest grain to process–no dehulling needed, and we can get three harvests from each plant per year, but the yields are low; jalapeno-type peppers are the best to grow outdoors in a chilly climate, they produce more outside than in the greenhouse…and so forth. We grow a lot of variety in the edible gardens, and what we learn we share with others who live in cold climates in exchange for what they learn.
The upper vegetable garden
Edgewood Garden is a galaxy of biodiversity. Some of it is native, some of it is fostered as garden plants, and some of it is unwanted non-native pestilence (weeds, spider mites, mealy bugs). There is much in the garden that is grown for taxonomic study: native dandelions that have no scientific name, sedges and grasses that are best studied comparatively side-by-side in the living state, seasonally dimorphic Artemisias, and North American and Eurasian species of stemless poppies. Overall, we have in Edgewood’s gardens over 1300 permanently cultivated perennial and woody plants growing for ornamental and scientific purpose. And the gardens are busy night & day with pollinators, songbirds, toads, rodents, spiders, salamanders, and bugs of all sorts.
We may be living in one of the unsophisticated garden zones, but it’s good enough for us. And good enough for an astonishing array of beings, surprising and intentional, who live in our garden. And good enough for a lot of stories. Walks in the garden with a camera never have me coming back to the house empty, or bored. The garden blogs are an invitation to join us on those walks.
