A cook county almanac

April

I stood in Home Depot today, studying the shape of the trunks of the baby magnolia trees that were sitting in the corner of a fenced in makeshift nursery in the parking lot. I noticed one of the trees had a little trunk section before branching out four or five different ways. Most magnolias grow like bushes, but this one already had the shape of a tree. I had a thought that maybe when this tree grows into something very large, a couple of stories tall, that my grandchildren might sit on that trunk, then climb up these limbs and sit amongst the blooms.

It's weird to have these private thoughts about decades in the future, standing in in the middle of a parking lot in suburban Chicago outside a big box store. I think these kinds of contradictions are what I’m trying to consider here in my Cook County Almanac. How do you talk and think about the natural world when you’re standing at Home Depot?

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I went overboard this year. I always get romantic at plant nurseries, my weakness. I can just imagine a future where I am overcome by their beauty and abundance. My home dripping with flowers and fresh berries. Each day I go out into the garden tending are harvesting. So much abundance I become known for the little gifts of home grown bouquets and jars of blueberry jam. Funny what one can imagine staring at a little stick in the soil in a plastic pot in a parking lot.

One time in a developmental psychology class I was reading about the development of an embryo into a fetus and eventually an infant. I read that any toxins ingested by the mother or negative events like a very high fever early on can have amplifying effects on the baby. The earlier in the pregnancy, the more it effects the fetus. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, how the things we do now have amplifying effects in the future. So for that reason I am hasty. I really can’t wait. The time to act is now.

In all of my years in and out of organic farms, industrial agriculture, homesteads, farmsteads, permaculture, I am most inspired by forest gardens. Permanent plantings curated by people to be half wild, half cultivated. A forest, with the light touch of human interference, becomes Eden. I love the idea of cultivating permanent food or flower producing environments. Hedges and orchards and vines ripe with berries. I never loved the idea of annuals.

I never really understood the idea behind starting fresh every single year with a new plant, when these plants that persist and grow bigger and more abundant every year exist. Sure there are some foods, fiber, fuel and medicine I still adore from annuals, but more and more I am trying to build my life around a perennial way of thinking. And if you are thinking perennially, the first thing you need to do is get something in the ground.

So this April I am adding to our garden. I already have the apricot, pear, two grapes, three mulberries, two cherries (one espalier), three apples and the blueberry bush. Plus the peonies and rhododendron I transplanted from my mom’s garden seem to have survived. Oh, and the potted lemon tree that produced one (1) singular most delicious and fragrant lemon I have tasted in my life.

This year I am adding flowers! Like I said in the first of these almanacs, I used to think in utilitarian terms about flowers. What use are they? What a spreadsheet brain I was! I am a spreadsheet brain in recovery. Takes one to know one. Besides the raspberry bush, I added eight different type of perennial wildflowers, to attract the pollinators, hydrangeas, marigolds, tulips, daffodils, hyacinths. All such cheerful little flowers! Outside of our farmstead in Uruguay we had the most gigantic lavender and rosemary bushes, so I got those both on a shepard’s hook for the girls to smell on the way in the house – as smells are the sense that most trigger memories – and I don’t want them to forget that time for our family together.

I added irises, which I’ve always found to be such an elegant flower, as elegant as an orchid, but in our part of the world. The orchid of the Midwest. This year I planted a row of giant sunflowers, all alongside gangway, as we call it in Chicago, the narrow passage between the brick walls of adjacent homes. I can imagine the joy of my kids this summer, as the flowers tower over them. Not with a foreboding energy, but with cheer. Friendly giants.

Sometimes I sit in the garden and look at all these pathetic little fledglings. So helpless and small. If a hungry squirrel were to attack, it would be over for them. But then I have a fantasy, five or ten years down the road, on a summer day. Making breakfast for teen girls, walking into the garden to snip some peonies for the most beautiful and fleeting bouquet. Later in the summer, I’ll have some hydrangeas, and the always ready for service, lavender.

I planted grapevines on both on my back window and by my front window on a trellis so that in the summer months, the grapevine leaves will block the sunshine from entering, and in the winter months the leaves will fall and the sun will enter again. This is called a passive solar principle. I can imagine, in this future summer, watching as the sunlight trickles through the leaves into my living room. What if in my little secret urban homestead in the future I walk over to my living room window and open it up and pluck myself a fresh bunch of grapes and bring it into the kitchen to wash, wash. Little bits of abundance everywhere, overflowing.