Mishka

I can't think very well right now but I really want to record an experience.

With humans I'll often circle them a bit before they catch my attention and I interact. I think it's a lot of backbrain work, where I pick up on information about them and then eventually decide they're safe and interesting enough to spend my time on.

I grew up in the pacific northwest and was pretty much familiar with all the plants about me with the exception of the ornamental ones, which I picked up quickly as a tour guide at the botanical gardens and as a landscaper (consider those plants part of a friends group, with a formal introduction).

When I moved up north I had the experience, for the first time, of living in a place where I didn't know the ecosystem. I did not know all the plants. I was working in forestry and doing things like ecotyping which required me to learn them, and I learn plant names more easily than doing almost anything, so with a little effort I picked them up. But they weren't family, in a sense. I didn't have a multidimensional understanding of their habitats, related plants and animals, human uses, range of phenotypes, lifecycle, and a kind of bone-deep familiarity with them week-by-week through the year like I did back home.

Even now most of the plants here I'm familiar with in that way are the domestic ones.

This year I think I'm starting to develop that kind of deep relationship with amelanchier -- june or saskatoon or serviceberry, as you like. This is the time of year when it flowers, and even the first year there were whole power cuts full of fluffy white bushes in full bloom that were just so striking and noteworthy. This house came with what I'm fairly sure now is a Smokey cultivar, the one with a milder berry taste but the distinct overtone of almonds. The previous tenant said the sweetest saskatoons were behind the chicken coop.

Last year or the year before (what is time?) I noticed that pretty much every tree on the property, both deciduous and coniferous, have young saskatoon bushes under them. This must be from birds, nibbling, sitting, and then dropping seeds. It really drives home how drought-tolerant these plants are if they can grow, not only right on the south slope of places or on exposed areas, but also right in the middle of those snaky shallow spruce roots that instantly suck up every drop of water.

Someone in Canada with Oak Summit Nursery did some experimental grafting of apples onto saskatoons a couple years ago and it worked and the grafts are still good. It brings the apples into precocious (early) bloom and probably dwarfs them. One of the more interesting permaculture methods is grafting fruit trees onto existing native plants, so for instance on the Islands putting apple trees onto crabapple trunks, high enough to avoid deer and on that established and suited-to-conditions rootstock. Well, saskatoons are hardy far far colder than here, they're drought tolerant, what's not to try? It doesn't hurt that a developmentally disabled vocational school's horticulture class was selling scionwood to raise funds for a pizza party* so I have some apple scionwood around

And then I started poking around more. I learned that the first year the plants grow very slowly, only 4-6", and they don't start leaping until later. There are a bunch of species that seem to hybridize, though I haven't learned the differences between them yet. I haven't sorted out their evolutionary history yet, nor have I grown my own from seed yet, but those will come. My time and thought are, after all, very limited these days. At some point I'll taste different bushes more concertedly.

But I have... a new friend. It's a friend on the landscape, that I can easily see at this time of year when driving, and also that I know in several different spots and shapes in places around town and around my property. It's neat.



*there is nothing about that I don't love with my whole heart. My image of these kids working with plants and getting pizza, and being able to do it in high school, is one I hold as a shield against the darkness of these times