Creek Running North

He is plainly tired of my petting him, and I go outside.

Along the back fence, along the path he used to walk at night, are a few native shrubs. I planted them five years ago when we first moved here. There is a holly-leaf Mahonia, a little hybrid monkeyflower, a Catalina currant. At the end of the path, at the center of the point of interest as seen from our back door, is a Garrya elliptica: a coast silk-tassel.

Garrya elliptica is an evergreen shrub distantly related to oaks, native to the Coast Ranges in California and Oregon and generally found not more than 20 miles or so from the ocean. Twenty years ago I got a job in a nursery in Berkeley and was put in charge of the California native plant inventory, and I spent a few hurried weeks learning everything I could about what we sold. Since that day I’ve wanted to plant a silk-tassel. Out of bloom it is an unassuming shrub or small tree, rounded waxy leaves dark green on the top and lighter on the bottom, from a distance not much more than a source of subtle two-tone green for much of the year. In winter, though, it puts out flower buds that vaguely resemble alder catkins, tight little imbricated sheaves of purple-tinged gray, and then those buds open into chains of little bells. Each plant grows only male or female flowers. The males are longer and showier. Coming upon a mal Garrya in bloom in the wild is an unforgettable experience: living Christmas tinsel growing out of a modest shrub.

For the few years I worked as a landscape designer, I recommended Garryas whenever a client had a dryish, partly shady spot that needed something sturdy, something not too labor-intensive. What I really wanted was to plant one of my own. But I was a renter then, and would be for another 15 years. Garrya elliptica was a plant on my “someday maybe” list. Someday I would have a garden in which I could expect a longer tenure than the renter’s gardens I had then, and I would plant a Ceanothus “Julia Phelps” and a Dr. Hurd manzanita, fruit trees and asparagus, and always hiking in the Coast Ranges in winter I would find a Garrya and stop, look at it wistfully, and think about how time was slipping through my non-home-owning fingers.

When we bought this little house I was 42 years old. The Garrya went in that summer. It has put out new leaves steadily since then, if slowly. Each winter I’ve looked to see if it was budding, and each winter I’ve come away a little downcast at findng none.

It’s hard not to assign more meaning to plants than they deserve. The redbud intertwines in my mind with my grandfather and my nephew. Redwood trees irrevocably remind me of her. I had always imagined Garryas as standing for permanence, for settlement.

And of course I was wrong. Five years it has grown there. Five years without bloom. Until today.

I will let it bloom, let it scatter its pollen around Zeke’s yard. I will give it that much. And then I will pull it out of my garden, root and branch.