My friend Susan posted a photo on Facebook this week of herself planting a tree in her Minnesota town, part of a campaign to plant a thousand of them. It’s a sweet photo. She squats at the base of the tree, one begloved hand on the ground as if to steady her, the other on the sapling’s thin bole. She smiles up at what will be the tree’s crown.
Her gaze is clear and open, directed at the sky. But when I look at the photo my own gaze is drawn downward, fixed by the patch of upturned Minnesota soil and compost around the rootball. I want to sink a spade into it, stick my fingers into it the way Susan’s doing, except without the glove. I want the humus beneath my nails, the thin rime of black in the furrows of my hand.
I miss that kind of soil. I haven’t felt it in a while.
Soil like that is hard to come by in California. Black soil, deep soil, soil alive with nematodes and earthworms, springtails and salamanders, soil that only begins to lighten into clay at two spades’ depth, what is soil like that but water slowed to a crawl? A landscape that gets less rain than it is capable of evaporating is generally called a desert. Much of California is above that threshold. Most of California gets enough water to support actual forests, thick growths of meadow grass. And in some California places where there is abundant water, deep humusy soils do form. Alpine meadows in rock bowls carved out by glaciers, where solid granite holds the rainwater in; the floors of redwood forests in places where the bedrock is not so shallow, the edges of Central Valley rivers.
But in most places in California, even outside the deserts, building humusy soil is about like filling a birdbath. It’s not that hard to do, what with composting and trucking in soil amendments and watering even in winter, but you have to keep doing it all the time. Stop for a year or two and the soil reverts to the native type: in the most fertile parts of the California Coast, that’s an inch or two of humus, oak leaves and sedges and the spent remains of annuals, above a hard-baked clay.
There’s another climatic threshold, I think, where the amount of water in the landscape not only exceeds the amount that can be lost to the air, but it exceeds the ability of large organisms to contend with it at all. The landscape’s only hope is to sequester that water, to tie it up with CO2 into long chains of cellulose and chitin, bury it under layer upon layer of itself in sowbug runs and mole galleries. The earth where I grew up was like that, moss-captured dust and organic matter and clay ground fine by glaciers over tens of thousands of years, stirred by sumac roots and maple, intermixed with the shaley remains of crinoids and brachiopods dead 300 million years. I slid shovels into it and sulked bleak curses at my father for forcing the labor from me.
I got a note from my ex-wife last week. She is restoring what was our garden, and sent word that much of what I planted there has survived four years of complete neglect. The olive? the apple? I didn’t ask for details. When we moved in a decade ago I sank a shovel two inches into the soil and hit bedrock. It was diatomite, a nicely porous and aquiferous bedrock if you had to have one a hand’s breadth down, and in a way it fed the garden the same way a Minnesota glacial till would: a bottomless sponge with its abyssal seat in a reservoir. Two inches of oak leaf mould were enough for the Bishop pine and Ribes, and I sank my arms up to the elbows in the compost pile when I needed more than that.
These days my nearest shovel is in a storage locker. The nearest organic soil of any depth is eight thousand feet up San Jacinto. In the desert, soil is rock of varying sizes. Some of it flows freely before the wind and flood, and some of it is cemented together near-permanent as caliche. There are places where you can carelessly collapse burrows as you walk, ruin the homes of ground squirrels and rabbits and palo verde root borers and other tunnelers. The soil is alive here too, but fragile. Call it a difference between East and West: East of the 100th meridian, turning your soil over is an uncomplicated thing, possibly beneficial and likely harmless. With foot-deep humus, turning the top foot of soil over merely aerates the soil. West of that Stegner Line in places like Coastal California the same practice buries the most fertile part of the soil under ten inches of clay. Eventually, it may heal, but it’s a setback to fertility. In the desert? You kill a soil crust that may have taken five thousand years to grow, and as soon as the wind kicks up the silt beneath will all end up in the next county.
That square meter of loosened soil at the base of Susan’s tree seems profligate to these desert eyes, seems reckless. That same act out here, while not exactly unheard of, bears a completely different ecological subtext. Loosen the soil without battening it down, spreading burlap or something else to trap the dust? Reckless. It seems harder to care for the desert sometimes, harder to live in it without hurting it. Sometimes I miss living where you can stick your arms into the soil up to the elbows without getting bitten. Of course in Minnesota you get bitten sticking your arms into the moist air. Not so many mosquitoes and blackflies here. The desert does have its compensatory luxuries.
So, plant what you love most in pots. I live in the northern Santa Clara valley, and the stuff I have for “soil” would make excellent bricks. So I put veggies in raised beds, and plant my beloved lavender in large pots. Sometimes, you just need to acknowledge that the ground you have to work with isn’t viable, however splendid it may be.
There is nothing more reviving than planting new life, working in a garden, or building soil. I love the process of building soil with compost, leaf mulch, seaweed, and nutrients. I love, even more, the resulting vegetables and fruits.
And planting trees, nothing could be healthier for our planet these days. What a wonderful way to spend some time.
Wild Bill,
That doesn’t often work in the desert. I’ve seen it work, at the house of a man in Owens Valley, CA, who planted a few cottonwoods for a windbreak, and spends his time watering them. Mind you, if I lived in Owens Valley, I’d do something for a windbreak, too. The local winds can stir up sediment from the (artificially) dried lake bed and toss them about something awful.
At my own “getaway” house in the eastern Sierra Nevada, which is basically High Desert, I have a host of trees that are dying because the previous owner took out the native sagebrush and planted water-loving trees. We’re taking out the trees and encouraging the sagebrush seedlings. Idiot! I want something that understands how to live in that climate.
And when I retire there, I’ll have lavender in mesh-covered, deer-resistant pots.