June 2010 Archives

Chokecherry Moon

These are the days of the of wild chokecherry blossoms; a time when summer in the Rockies is full on, yet utterly fresh. Most weeks it's hard to even spot the head-high chokecherry shrubs along the deep green edges of the woods. But not now, when the tips of the branches are bursting with cylinders of tiny white blossoms. For me these flowers have always seemed a kind of bridge, carrying us across the ten or twelve day pause that happens each year between the opening blooms of spring, and the fiery shows of summer.

Human lives have long been tied to chokecherry. The Crow made tipi stakes from the branches, and used the bark to clean their wounds. Plains tribes harvested the fruit for "pemmican" - a kind of mince meat, if you will, that served as a critical food source during the long months of winter. Meriwether Lewis, while stuck with a fever and severe stomach cramps on the Upper Missouri, tossed back a tea of chokecherry twigs and reported soon being remarkably better. (Better enough to get up the next day and march 27 miles.) Pioneers gathered the firm, sour cherries and turned them into jams, even wine.

Of course some people still harvest the fruits, still turn them into jams and wine. But I think most of us come to the plant in just this one week, in these days when it sits heavy with blossoms. The days when chokecherry makes us blink. The days when it pulls us out of our troubles and into the beautiful.

In my little corner of the Rockies, the past several weeks have been cold and wet. Most days we wake up to a world swallowed by clouds, then as likely as not, fall asleep to the sound of cold rain drumming against the shingles. Earlier today, June 17, I was south of town picking morel mushrooms and snowflakes were drifting through the pines. It should come as no surprise these days that when locals get together, as likely as not we'll spend time grousing about the weather - incredulous that our normal eleven weeks of honest-to-goodness summer is rapidly being pared down to a hiccup.

Yet privately, many of us are grateful. Thankful for the way this spring is unfolding across the foothills thick and slow, the land reeling with every shade of leaf and bloom: bluestem and Timothy, balsamroot and starflower and bluebells, fairy slippers and pasqueflowers and Oregon grape.

"Winter in June!" we say to each other at the Post Office or the grocery store, pretending amazement or gloom. Yet the very word "winter" comes from a Germanic word that roughly means "time of water." And in the American West, the time of water, no matter what month it happens to arrive, is surely among the finest of blessings.

Last week I had the pleasure of delivering a high school commencement address, speaking to a small group of young women and their families at a therapeutic boarding school for troubled girls. Located on the Canadian border, in the remote, pine-clad hills of the northern Rockies, the school is noted not just for academics, but for inspiring the kind of quiet confidence so often afforded those who keep the company of nature.

As I often do, at one point I asked the directors of the school if over time they'd seen any changes in the sorts of issues facing their students. Their response was one I've been hearing a lot as of late: that while today's teens are completely steeped in the virtual world of social networking, full of Facebook and texting and Twittering, increasingly they seem to be suffering from the ills of isolation. In particular, they routinely lack both confidence and social skills, which for some can dramatically increase the appeal of drugs and alcohol. But here at this small school in the woods, the girls had learned to play again. They'd come to know the pleasures of beauty and community. They'd found enough space to notice all the things emerging inside.

Outdoor schools and programs are sometimes dismissed as escapes from reality. In truth, of course, nature has no trouble laying claim to a full share of reality. But more to the point, in our time the natural world, be it the wilderness or the garden, is among the very few settings that are both enticing, yet free of spin. Places offering both the brand of contentment that slows the breath, as well as the brand that quickens it. Places where reality expands - reclaiming for us the delights of an inconceivable potential.

In the small mountain town where I live, sitting at an elevation of well over 5,000 feet, we're finally just days away from being able to plant seedlings in our produce gardens without the danger of a killing frost. As far as the world of gardening goes, this is either a land of perennially dashed hopes, or for the dedicated, a land of greenhouses and cold frames and strategic places along the south sides of buildings for the basil and the lemon grass and the dill.

Yet for all the struggle, what's pulled me into the spell of gardens as of late (besides the grand experience of eating food that tastes like food), is the intriguing history of our nation having long used them as outdoor classrooms for children. By 1910 school gardens were everywhere, in every state, championed by educators and pundits alike. Gardens were the way to teach math, said some, pointing to the calculations necessary to figure the size of plots and the number of seeds required, not to mention estimating profit after the expense of seeds and tools and fertilizer. No, said others, it was science that gardens offered up so well, pointing to elementary students investigating pollination, soil composition, aeration, germination, insect life cycles, water retention strategies. And on it went. Gardens to teach nutrition. Gardens to teach art and writing and cultural studies and critical thinking.

Even beyond all that, what impresses me most is the degree to which gardens have for a hundred years simply helped urban children access nature. Indeed, school gardens first caught fire in this country in the early 1890's - exactly the time when millions of Americans were growing anxious over the thought of the natural world disappearing from their daily lives. "School gardens should be maintained by the city," said Van Evrie Kilpatrick not long after the country's first school garden had been established in Massachusetts. "The city owes it to the children whom it has deprived of breathing places and beauty spots through want of foresight."

As a nature writer, I've long focused most of my work on sprawling wilderness areas - big animals running through big landscapes. But now I see school gardens coming back into fashion again, and it does my heart good. (Indeed, by some estimates over twenty percent of all American schools now have some sort of garden.) I know how important that kind of movement can be for our kids. And for us. And for this precious planet.