Gardener of the Month!
12:00 AM - Jul 20, 2009
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Ubergeek Botanique
Among plant collectors exists a unique subspecies of horticultural hoarders I like to call botanical supergeeks. This bunch of unbridled, lawless naturalists go beyond gardening, beyond collecting, and dive straight into the wide wide world of everything, vacuuming up libraries of information regarding all things leafy, from prehistoric fossils to modern day plant communities and ecology. Their gardens are often seemingly random collections, horticultural melting pots displaying one of everything, except in those areas designated for “everything of one” where past and current plant obsessions are carefully stored and labeled. Should you require the services of a supergeek, they are usually pretty easy to spot in a crowd, as they tend to somehow make plants a fulltime part of their lifestyle. These people are often landscapers, plant lecturers, authors, tv show hosts, and garden center managers…ahem. Look for sweaty tan people with horticultural t-shirts and bumper stickers, and even the occasional plant tattoo. Maybe because I’m in the plant business, or maybe because geeks tend to gravitate to one another with vampire-like proficiency, I tend to stumble upon these little botanical oddities quite regularly. In fact I found a real doozy right here in Austin shopping at The Great Outdoors. Her name is Alexis Bearer, and I visited her garden. She is a landscaper, a good friend, and she is our July Gardener of the Month.
Polyspecific Horticollection
If Janis Joplin could be a garden she would be this one: throaty and soulful, fashionably indecisive, consistently inconsistent. Alexis’ garden is a museum of eclecticism from curb to back fence. As I walked the winding path towards the front door, passing scores of unusual rocks and fossils, rare plants, and a large green metallic donkey sculpture whose mane and tail were made entirely of old keys (a rebus puzzle I’m sure, but one I couldn’t decipher), a thought occurred to me: this is my kind of garden. Don’t get me wrong, I love manicured formality with its clean lines, divided textures and austere simplicity, and am always amazed at those who can maintain it. But if I am to indulge my inner plant geek, my 15-year student of the impossibly strange and rare, this is the garden I visit, with its hidden treasures of potted aloe species, amaryllids, bonsai landscapes, and varieties of plants I hadn’t seen since my days working in botanic gardens. The landscape swallows the house so it looks like the front door has been carved out of raw jungle. In fact I might not have seen the door had Alexis not opened it to invite me in for coffee. The interior, walled with books and perfectly littered with fossils and artifacts, is both fascinating and comfortable, but seems to serve as much a corridor between front yard and back as it does a living space. Passing into the backyard I saw where Alexis spends most of her gardening time. More potted gems, including a very healthy Asarum, or wild ginger, and one of my favorite Florida native conifers, the endangered Taxus floridana, neither one a common site in Austin.
Rare and Rare Alike
Considering most of us don’t have any endangered species growing in our gardens, the fact that Alexis has at least four is impressive. I was most taken by a fine specimen tucked away in the very back of the garden, one Chionanthus pygmaeus, the pygmy fringe tree of Florida. This sand-dwelling counterpart to our own East Texas fringe tree is more drought tolerant and petite but bears the same white thready flowers in the spring. I also happened upon another east coast rarity, Baptisia arachnifera, or cobwebby wild indigo. With its silver foliage and rounded leaves this plant looks like a florist’s eucalyptus even in late spring when all other baptisias are starting to melt in the heat. Just across the garden path from the indigo climbs a nice specimen of our own Austin native Clematis texensis. To my knowledge this little beauty is the only truly red clematis, and is next to impossible to find on the market. The smallish scarlet urns look down on the spring forest floor where they can often be found along streamside flood planes in Central Texas, but rarely seen in gardens. The seed, although bountiful, is difficult to germinate and it’s even harder to nurse young seedlings to maturity. However, the reward is great for those who manage to do so.
Another East Coast native, possibly soon to find its way onto the endangered species list but well represented in Alexis’ garden is Water Plantain, Plantago cordata. Large glossy green hosta-like leaves form an attractive rosette on this semi-aquatic beauty offered through Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh, NC.
Cast Iron Heaven, and the Shadow of a Legend
Aspidistra, or cast iron plant, has long been a staple in the southern garden. Until recently we’ve really only had one species to choose from, A. elatior, but that is changing. The genus Aspidistra is currently in the “collector’s phase” of garden plants in which fringe-dwelling plant collectors like Alexis gather up each and every species and cultivar they can find and methodically kill them, one by one, until only the garden-worthy remain. At that point, adventurous nurseries begin to grow and sell small numbers of the most marketable survivors, followed by more widespread popularity and perhaps eventually market saturation. Alexis’s collection of Aspidistra was quite impressive, and I was thankful to learn which species were doing well and which have already begun to poop out.
Gardeners can sometimes be a nostalgic bunch, and I am no exception, so in true sappy form I nearly shed a tear when she showed me an orchid tree near her fence line. The tree is Bauhinia macranthera, or Sierra Orchid Tree from the Chihuahuan desert. It has large purple flowers and proportionately large cloven leaves. What makes this particular tree noteworthy is its origin; it is a seedling grown from a tree planted by the late (and legendary) Texas plant explorer Lynn Lowery, a friend and hero to many in the native plants world.
Knowledge Collector
Someone really smart once said that the only way to own wilderness is to know wilderness. A seasoned gardener instinctively understands this concept all too well, and is frequently reminded that ownership in the garden is a loose term at best, as we are often left with little more than knowledge in the aftermath of plant mortality. We don’t really own our plants, we are merely granted a brief period of time in which to share blessed space with them, but knowledge gained in the process is forever. Among plant collectors, knowledge is used conversationally as a type of currency, each story traded for another and all information stored for future reference. As I watched Alexis pore over a binder full of past and present garden residents, including photos, notes on bloom time, dormancy, and other notable observations, it became obvious that she is a collector of knowledge as much as of plants, and a sharer of both. She is a gardener, but more importantly she is a student of nature, a rare quality even among those in the plant industry. Thank you, Alexis, and here’s to you, a true plantswoman, and Gardener of the Month.
