Home and Garden
By Eleanor Whitney
I’m on my knees in my sandy desert backyard, shaded by an ostentatious sun hat and stabbing a sharp tool into the soil. My mission is to rip out invasive London rocket and redstem stork's bill. I remove the weed’s roots, which are already deep and grasping just a few weeks after germination. I gingerly work around the few native wildflowers that have pushed through the packed sand and are blooming tentatively.
My patch of the Mojave was scraped bare by a previous owner out of a fear of snakes or fire, leaving me with a sterile, sunbaked lot. The idea seemed to be one of destroying a landscape to keep yourself safe from that landscape.
When I arrived in the Mojave in the summer of 2020, my life felt scraped as bare as my lot. After a fire destroyed my Brooklyn apartment in April 2019, I was seeking connection, grounding, and a new beginning. A tale as old as the place we call the United States. I sought to put down some kind of roots, but ended up in a place that is very far from the forests, fields, and marshes that surrounded me as a child in Maine.
In my flattened desert yard, I’ve planted a variety of native plants in hopes of creating a refuge for birds, bees, and myself. As I water my transplants and encourage them to put down deep roots, the unwelcome visitors have invited themselves as well. The weedy, yellow flowered rocket are in the mustard family and are toxic to other plants, as well as the desert tortoise. The redstem stork's bill are quick growers with delicate lavender flowers and edible leaves. They were one of the first invasive plants to arrive in North America, tagging along with the Spanish. These plants will grow with abandon, pushing out the flora I want to encourage. So here I am, kneeling on the unforgiving sand, prying them out by their roots.
My mother is a landscape architect and an avid gardener. She was inspired by the aesthetic of the English country garden: precisely and fully planted to seem wild, like the flowers burst forth to create a romantic idyll purely of their own will. At our house in Maine, she spends hours each fall digging hundreds of holes for new bulbs, so in the spring daffodils and tulips emerge from the grass, as if by pure serendipity. In the warmer months, roses climb and spill off of a trellis, clinging to the side of the house, foxgloves bloom in the half shade of maples and pines, lilies light up around an old chicken coop, and gladiolas’ many flowered stems wave in the summer breeze. Rock walls curve around the house and creeping thyme dips over a small granite pool with a water spout, where each summer a frog, far from its home pond, moves in.
Under my mother’s tutelage, I hammered together two-by-fours, dug up the grass that was clinging to our gray-blue New England clay soil, and mixed in peat moss and horse manure to make a raised bed to grow vegetables. I started with peas, carrots, and lettuce. Soon we built more beds and cultivated cucumbers, zucchini, and pole beans. I added a pumpkin patch and marveled at the orange orbs that emerged like many small suns.
While Maine isn’t known for its long growing season, and while it never quite got hot enough to ripen my bell peppers, the gardens teemed with life. In the spring I would start tomato seedlings in a hothouse frame I made out of an old windowpane. I sold the extras through “E’s Seedling Supply,” where I peddled leggy tomato babies to neighbors from the back of my ten speed bike. If I forgot to weed my raised beds during the summer, which was frequent, the meadow grasses would grow waist high. I stopped tending the vegetable gardens in my early teens, feeling like an obsession with seedlings and soil composition was profoundly uncool.
As a teenager I dreamed of an escape to the big city. There I would edit literary magazines and play in punk rock bands. My mother tried to reach out to me and continued to nurture me, dutifully listening to my shrill punk music and letting me borrow her Saab to drive to band practice. I repaid her with resent. “Central Park will be enough nature for me!” I announced when I decided to attend college in New York City. I wanted to uproot myself, branch out, and was convinced I needed new soil, a different growing zone to flourish. After high school graduation, I departed for the west coast for a year, with plans to move to New York for college soon after.
In the sliver of a year I lived in Oregon, I stayed in a tidy but ramshackle house of unevenly employed indie rock musicians. While I had ached to put as many miles between myself and Maine as possible, I missed the rhythms of home. In a bout of punk energy and homesickness, I decided to grow a garden. My housemate Andrew and I broke up the sod in the clayey back yard and stuck in seedlings he had procured somehow, perhaps liberating them from the local Fred Meyer. I relished the familiarity of digging, of firmly patting down the rich earth around each young plant, the mixing of fertilizer and water, the waiting and hope. But in the vibrant busyness of the Pacific Northwest summer I neglected my plantings. The weeds grew in and after I moved away in mid-August 2001 for college in New York, I heard that my roommate had flattened the garden with the lawn mower.
In the Mojave, my hands remember these gardens as I dig in the sandy soil. But gardening in the desert necessitated that I develop a new language because the climate, soil, flora, and fauna are so different from anywhere I had lived before. At first I thought the California high desert was all cactus, Joshua trees and nameless scrub, an indistinct palate of browns and greens. However, I slowly learned the difference between Joshua trees and Mojave yuccas, pencil and teddy bear cholla. Creosote with its small, oily green leaves initially bored me with its ubiquity, until I learned it grows in rings that can be thousands of years old. Desert willows, which I purchased at Home Depot for my yard, are ice age remnants with unexpected purple and white flowers. One day I went for a walk through a sandy wash with a biologist friend and she pointed out the different ericamerias, golden bushes, and rabbit brushes, which all looked exactly the same to me—piles of dead sticks. I still have a long way to go to really understand how to read the landscape.
In a flush of enthusiasm I bought nearly fifty plants from the local desert land trust’s plant sale my first fall in the Mojave, anxious to build my desert refuge. On my way to pick up my plant haul I was giddy. A whole new garden would be mine! I would heal the land, attract pollinators, and grow a desert oasis! But when I pulled into the land trust parking lot I was underwhelmed. Small pots full of sad sticks and withering leaves awaited me. The plants had been set outside to “harden up” the volunteer explained. She gave me a quick primer on how to get my new garden started: In each hole mix a one-to-one ratio of garden and desert soil. Don’t make it too rich; these plants want poor soil. I needed to protect the seedlings from dehydration with strategically placed “nurse rock” positioned to block the strongest wind. It was also imperative I follow a strict watering schedule for the three months: first watering everyday and gradually tapering off, but continuing to water weekly for the first three years of the plants’ lives, until they were fully established. I wondered if my own desert roots would be fully established in three years.
Car full of garden hopefuls, I stopped at Home Depot for 50-pound bags of dirt and, even more essential, chicken wire. Two hundred feet of chicken wire in rolls 50 feet long and three feet high. The rabbits I saw cutely hopping around my yard would be tantalized by my tender transplants and level them in an instant. I built cages to protect them, secured with “earth staples” acquired from a garden supply website, pounding them into the hard sand, pleading with them to hold the cages fast. The rabbits found a way in anyway. Soon UPS delivered an order of “Rabbit Mace,” a foul smelling concoction of mint and cayenne pepper, I applied it with a 2-gallon sprayer, goggles, and mask, like a fumigator on Mars.
Despite timed watering and rabbit protection, some plants immediately died. Others struggled through the winter, bloomed in spring, and withered away. How, I wondered, did desert plants establish themselves in the wild at all?
I called my mom.
“Why are my plants dying!” I lamented, “What do they need to thrive?”
“Time,” she answered, “All a garden needs is time.”
My mother of course was right. The desert olive’s leaves came back in spring, and new shoots besides. The brittlebush exploded with yellow flowers, quickly growing through its rabbit cage, so I spent an afternoon combing through its woody stalks, surgically removing chicken wire piece by piece. Now the bees bury themselves in the prickly pear’s magenta blossoms, hummingbirds flit to desert lavender, and quails scratch the ground around the desert willow before leading their brood of chicks to the small pan of water I’ve set out. At night I catch a glimpse of kangaroo rats, their eyes big and glowing and their long switch of tail, skittering shyly under the globemallow’s canopy. Slowly, the plants are establishing themselves and my backyard paradise is emerging.
Despite my attempts at habitat restoration, in the desert, I am an invasive species. My Puritan ancestors came to what is now Massachusetts seeking religious freedom for themselves and violently attempted to subjugate Native Americans with a sense of moral superiority over the land and the people who already lived there. While my family did not cross the plains and stayed “back East” until the mid-20th century, I have benefitted from the legacy of the white settlers who did. Desert lands have been depleted through centuries of cattle grazing, mining, ground water extraction, unsustainable farming, military base installation, and nuclear testing. The land deemed “useless” for mining or military use was parceled up into homesteads, first 160 acres, and then a patchwork of five acre “small tracts.” Half of one of these lots is my yard.
In California, Spanish padres may have introduced fast-growing black mustard as a metaphor for the spread of Christianity, or to mark the Camino Real with its golden flowers. Now the plant covers the chaparral hills, shading out native poppies and poisoning the soil. Another European introduction, tamarisk trees, put out roots so deep they’ve changed the water table in some places. However, a zeal for removing these invasives can verge into a dangerous purity doctrine. In The Next Great Migration journalist Sonia Shah charts how many Western naturalists, historians, and scientists have positioned plants, animals, and other creatures that crossed borders as “trespassers, invaders, and aliens who threatened the natural order.” In 1999 President Clinton established the National Invasive Species Council, which was charged with repelling “alien species.” After September 11, 2001, that function was folded into the new Department of Homeland Security, connecting the idea of policing “natural” borders into a national security infrastructure.
Who gets shut out, who gets let in, and who is determined to be the right inhabitant of a place, and who is doing that determining has a wide ranging impact. In college I turned towards complicated theory to try to untangle these threads. Compared to my brush with academia, gardening seems naively straightforward, but it brings me to the same thorny questions. Despite my devoted but scattershot plantings of palo verde and desert olive, monkey flower, sage, and penstemon, I can’t turn back time to a pristine desert. I know these plants need different conditions to thrive, so the notion I’m healing the land and myself could seem presumtuous. It’s not as simple as planting chia and desert bluebell seeds that were collected by a Cahuilla and Apache native plant educator. My plants don’t absolve me from historical harm, but they do enable me to dig into its complicated legacy. Perhaps my garden is better viewed as a kind of harm reduction. It’s a small act of repair, service, and devotion. I’m trying to cultivate my own patience while growing narrow leaf milkweed, in hopes that it will attract monarch butterflies in time.
On our weekly phone calls my mother and I talk about the mysteries of plants, why some flourish and others wither. Our gardens are also a shield for some of the more thornier topics I learned to treat lightly on over the years: My decisions to remain unpartnered, to not have kids, and to build a life apart from my family, 3,000 miles away, the lawsuit about the fire that destroyed my old apartment building, still unresolved after nearly a decade. However, while I’ve landed in very different soil, we’re more connected than we have been in years, together in the project of continuously making and nurturing our homes.
I relish the idea of marking time by my plants’ growth, the brittlebush expanding and seeding themselves, the palo verde and mesquite trees getting taller, the cholla cactus thickening, all maturing and settling into their lives as I age along with them. But even with strong roots our future is not fixed. I don’t know what will happen to the water table, the temperature, the climate in the Mojave over the next twenty or thirty years, as it already is getting rapidly hotter and drier. I don’t know what will happen in my life either, where I’ll be called to be as my parents age, what my life will necessitate.
Planting is an act of hope, a prayer for the future, a bargain with time. The desert plants in “my” yard are a reminder of my own resilience, but show that it takes patience, care, and effort to adapt. Even the hardiest plants when brought into new places need some extra support to adjust, even if it's their home climate. And some of the newcomers I resent are considered naturalized: The Storksbill, Erodium cicutarium, that takes over my yard in abandon is also a favorite snack of the desert tortoise. My skin and hair now resent New York City’s greasy humidity and when I’m there, yearn for the clarifying dryness of the Mojave. But I’m still a surprising transplant, working and waiting to put down roots and feel at home.
Eleanor C. Whitney is a writer, musician, and community builder based in California’s high desert. She is the author of Riot Woman and Promote Your Book, published by Microcosm Publishing. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from CUNY Queens College. Her work has appeared in the Weird Sister anthology, published by Feminist Press, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, and Architectural Digest. She is a Nonfiction Editor at MAYDAY magazine. Find her on Instagram @killerfemme and her newsletter at eleanorwhitney.substack.com.