Thrive
What grows grows best in its own soil
Last week my husband and I spent some time in the North Carolina mountains, our usual getaway. As we have done for almost two decades, we spent those days hiking, finding new trails and revisiting favorite ones. The Appalachian Mountains are unique in that it is a temperate rainforest which has two seasons: a long, wet winter and a short, foggy summer. This humid and dripping region thrives with a variety of plant life and hiking is the best way to get up close and personal to it. They also hold a particular beauty that we anticipate enjoying each year.
There is a rhododendron growing next to my deck that has reached about 12 feet. Its fuchsia blossoms are magnificent each spring, inviting bees and butterflies and nesting robins. It thrives in that spot, out of day long direct sunlight, but after our two-weeks of “wow the weather is so delightful” goes right to “the deck is giving my feet second degree burns,” the evergreen droops and wilts by midday. Beneath my rhododendron, safe underneath its shade, my faithful ferns dutifully appear year by year — never multiplying or spreading, but lovely still.
In those damp spaces where gutters empty I have tried to coax moss to grow and tumble over the stones, which are strategically placed to keep the soil beneath moist. The moss stays to itself, clinging closely to the shaded spaces, unable to spread its green.
My neighbors, whose garden I occasionally water, are cultivating several blueberry bushes beside their vegetable garden. The canes are about a yard long, skimpy and sparse, but growing still in their little patches of backyard soil and sun. They will each yield a few handful of berries to do up in a cobbler or something.
In the Blue Ridge Mountains, great forests of oak, fir, and maple tower over smaller forests of rhododendron that, unlike my landscaping that features only two of these “shrubs,” grow to enormous size. We love to walk under the canopied trails where spent blossoms carpet the ground in white and pink. The dense waxy leaves are giant, deep blue-green, offering protection from sudden rain showers. They are innumerable and massive, reigning majestically on the mountain sides.
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Blanketing the rocks, exposed root systems, rotting trunks and stream beds grow mosses in thick carpets of chartreuse and deep green. They seep into the cracks, crevices, and stony surfaces, spreading and sprawling freely in the dripping dampness. The mosses add texture to the wood, water, and rock with the browns and blacks of forest soil, red bark, and grey shadowed rock, threading the shapes together in balancing contrast.
And how lovely grows the swaths of fern brakes, with leaves darting upward and outward, uniform in posture, graceful in the fringed beauty, softening the hard outlines of rock and balancing the vastness of the great trees.
Have you ever grazed the Balds at Carver’s Gap when the blueberries grow in thick bunches from masses of bushes, clustered so that the term “blueberry plant” seems an absurd idea? Have you ever glutted yourself on handfuls of grape-sized berries, with flavor found in no purchased pint?
We can tend, coax, and cultivate a garden to nourish and beautify our homes with its fruits and flowers. And how enriching it can be to tend cultivars whose home is not naturally our neighborhoods of manicured lawns and sidewalks.
But to behold these beauties in their own places is another thing entirely.
An obedient fern suspended in a plastic tub is nothing like the lush cool bracken we encounter in quiet rain-drenched trials. But it’s a sweet reminder to me of it. And that is good.
A garden is an echo of Eden. A sample of the far better Original. A backward glance of a Promise Yet to be.
And that is very good.
