September 2000

Worlds Beyond Words

by Meg McGowan

A year ago last May, I moved into a house that was built in the 1920s by a couple who had remained on the property for more than fifty years. The woman had been a visionary gardener, and over the years she created a woodland setting that encompassed her double lot. The landscape remains, preserving the story of the original owners’ lives and containing footnotes from the renters who subsequently occupied the land.

The house itself is small — two modest bedrooms, a tiny kitchen, a dining room, and a screened porch. In the fifties a great room was added, dominated by windows, wood, and a fireplace. The proportion of house to property speaks of the owners’ values, which are underscored by the minimal storage space that exists within the house and the diversity of plant material that thrives without.

Though native species comprise the majority of the plant population, there are non-natives as well that attest to the fact that the original gardener was not a purist. The first blooms appear in February, with bright yellow colonies of winter aconite followed by drifts of nodding snowdrops. The wildflowers of spring — bloodroot, Mayapples, Virginia bluebells and trout lilies — emerge amidst a carpet of blue scilla. There are only a few bloodroot and Mayapple plants, due perhaps to renters who removed the protective and nourishing cover of fallen leaves in recent years. Numerous sugar maple seedlings left to grow into saplings may have shifted the balance as well, depleting the soil of nutrients that were not returned and monopolizing the available moisture. The strip of soil along the back fence where the sugar maples congregate is mostly barren, in stark contrast to the abundant growth elsewhere. Two peony bushes produce only a bloom or two, remnants of an area that must have once received more light before the trees matured.

Summer brings jack-in-the-pulpits that have survived and multiplied in the shade of American cranberry viburnum, elderberry, and snowberry bushes. Wild roses push through the front fence in one of the sunnier spots in the yard. Scarlet trumpet creeper vine, left to its own devices, has snaked its long, thick roots through the soil to send up shoots through clumps of daylilies and phlox, scrambling up trees and shrubs wherever it can. Untended asters and black-eyed Susans have advanced into the small areas of shade-tolerant lawn, along with self-heal and self-sown offspring of the vigorous moonseed vine. Grape vines, black raspberry canes, and rhubarb persist where there were once gooseberry and currant bushes as well, offering fruits to be made into jams. A dip in the earth that refuses to be filled marks the spot where a pond existed before the neighborhood expanded, bringing children — and safety concerns. Chunks of concrete from the pond form the basis of a small berm, now covered in Solomon’s seal, ferns, and lily-of-the-valley.

Around the same time my house was being built and its landscape enshrined, May Theilgaard Watts was living in Ravinia, Illinois, and writing a booklet urging people to leave intact the trees and woodland plants that attracted them to the area, rather than decimating them and replacing them with lawns and exotic plants.

Watts was a writer, naturalist, and conservationist. The various directions of Watts’ life all sprang from her love of the earth that led her to examine nature, find the stories there, share those stories through teaching and writing, and fight to preserve that which she valued through her work as a conservationist. She was the first to introduce the concept of "reading the landscape" to general readers. Her book, entitled Reading the Landscape: An Adventure in Ecology, was first published in 1957. It returned to print in May of 1999 under the title Reading the Landscape of America, reissued by Nature Study Guild Publishers, a publishing company started by Raymond and May Watts and now operated by their granddaughter, Bridget Watts.

"My grandmother wanted to help people understand how much is going on even in the most ordinary landscape," says Bridget. "She studied and taught people how to examine what academics now term "vernacular landscapes" — natural landscapes, not planned by architects, but shaped by human beings over time.

"She tried to pass on a sense of the interrelation of communities within the environment," Bridget explains. "When people understand this, they are less likely to want to level the existing landscape."

Watts brought to her mission not only her acute powers of observation and her own knowledge, but preparatory research and, when necessary, a geologist to help interpret clues. Traipsing through the forest at Turkey Run, Indiana, she observed that the expansive beech-maple forest, typical of Indiana, gave way to a small oak forest, such as one would find in northern Illinois. Further on she noted a narrow band of hemlocks and understory plants indigenous to northern Wisconsin, northern Michigan, or Maine. "We had not needed to travel north to find these plants, because the cold north had delivered them down here long, long ago, driving them south before the icy cold threat of the advancing glacier."

By analyzing soil, moisture, and sun considerations, she drew conclusions as to how and why the native species had been able to reclaim the majority of the area, while the transplants continued to maintain a presence. Then, in a shallow pool of rain, amidst maidenhair ferns, Watts’ group discovered the beginning of a canyon.

Having "learned that the streams there at Turkey Run, Indiana, have it in their destiny to shape a ravine in their mud-pie childhood, and then knife out a canyon in their whittling youth, before their waters find middle-age spread in Sugar Creek, and old-age resignation in the Wabash," they loosened the debris at the edge of the pool and followed the path of the water. Their journey led them from a furrow, to a young V-shaped ravine, to a more advanced U-shaped ravine stage, to a meandering stream, through various stages of a maturing canyon and back to the beginnings of a beech-maple forest.

Along the way they noted how the plant life that began as the same on either side of the stream, shifted to be differentiated, then alike, again differentiated, and finally, again, similar. They marveled at the liverwort clinging to the side of the canyon, a plant whose design provides a link to the first plant that survived on land. "No real roots, any more than the green ribbons were real leaves; but we felt that to hold a liverwort in our hands was to hold both a record of the past, because of its resemblance to the plate-like alga that must have been its ancestor in the sea, and a promise of the future, because of this suggestion of roots, and of leaves."

May Watts seems to have found adventure and mystery everywhere. A chance remark by a local politician at the Wheatland Plowing Match — "’This, to me, is Illinois,’" he declared — led her to wonder where a remnant of life that actually originated in Illinois might exist. On the drive home, she spotted a foot-wide strip along a fence where big blue stem, little blue stem, switch grass, cord grass, and wild rye had found a haven between the reach of the farmer’s plow and the road workers’ mower. On a detour to investigate an abandoned schoolhouse, Watts and her companions engaged in a search for clues as to when the school may have closed. The educators in the group analyzed the teaching styles represented by remnants of school work left in the building and estimated the building had been closed between eighteen and twenty-five years. The botanists assessed the placement of various trees, discerning that a recently cut pear tree must have sprung up from a seed discarded by a child, rather than by a bird. In order to exist, it must have escaped the mower, which was likely to have been retired when the school closed. By counting the rings, they put their guess at nineteen years since the school had shut its doors. Indeed, this fact was confirmed by a local farmer.

In the final chapter of her book, entitled "The Stylish House" Watts recounts the changing landscape of a fictional midwestern home, beginning in 1856. Embellishing with details, such as home decor and what books might have been on the nightstand, she creates a vivid picture of how changing lifestyles and values affect the home landscape. Using approximately thirty year increments, she documents the gradual shift from a homestead with a vegetable garden and an outhouse to a subdivided lot with pruned evergreens and red barberry tucked into black plastic and white pebbles, as each new fashion-conscious owner strives to keep in step with the times. (It is interesting to note that the habit of filling a planter box with a spike surrounded by geraniums and variegated trailing vinca or asparagus ferns as an accent, has persisted since the late eighteen hundreds.)

Had the story of the house been told through present day, it is likely that plantings would feature masses of long-blooming perennials such as Sunny Border Blue veronica, Moonbeam coreopsis, Stella D’Oro daylilies, Autumn Joy sedum, and Nearly Wild rose bushes, along with some variegated and purple-leafed plants for continuous foliar interest. An ornamental grass or two may be included. An optimistic view would include at least a cultivated form of a prairie plant — gayfeather, black-eyed Susans, or purple coneflowers perhaps. Planters might be filled with purple fountain grass and Supertunias, accented by an ornamental sweet potato vine.

That final stop on Watts’ journey begs that we also examine closely what we are doing in our own little corner of the world, the space over which we cannot just hope to exert influence, but have ultimate stewardship. Fashions exist to stimulate the economy, not to support life. Monocultures, hybridized plants and plant clones cannot host the same healthy diversity of insect and animal life as more integrated plant communities.

In order to appreciate and preserve the integrity of the plant community I inherited at my current residence, I am seeking clues from the landscape itself, from books, from the previous occupant, from longtime neighbors, from the original gardener’s surviving sister and from an expert in native trees and shrubs. So far, I’ve learned that this unique landscape has never been "stylish," nor is it particularly admired by some of my more stylish neighbors. It has endured, however, and those who do appreciate it don’t just accord it passing admiration — they feel the life force of the plants. They love it passionately, and they remember it.

Resources

Reading the Landscape of America, by May Theilgaard Watts, Nature Study Guild Publishers, 1999.