Daffodil in the snow
When I wrote that I was unsure how to live within a Western landscape in drought, it it immediately seemed that Nature took offence and sent snow and precipitation directly at us. We’re still in a drought, but the winter storm that forced us to reschedule Susan Tweit and Jim Steinberg certainly illustrated another way to live within the landscape.
I’ve been watching the quiet declaration of drought conditions with an eye more curious than fearful. The US drought monitor classifies the current conditions as moderate drought, or D1, which is pretty low on the scale. The gardeners around me, however, range from “not on my weather radar” indifference to head-shaking, ground-staring, “I knew this day would come” pessimism. It would make a fascinating study of human personality, I think, but also, I wonder if it reflects their gardening interest.
For me, transplanted easterner that I am, I don’t yet know what to make of it. Do I water obsessively or give up on anything the wet side of Opuntia? The gardeners whose gardens I admire most do neither–or at least, neither is their priority. Instead, they live within the landscape, the nature that underlies the urban landscape of Metro Denver. They pay attention to structures, winds, hollows, moist pockets and a sense of the biota that surrounds them. The ecology of the space does not escape them, even when they attempt to bend or defy it.
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