Grass or Squaw Carpet?

I was chopping some humongous poison oak the other day. You know what I'm talking about: an inch in diameter with twenty foot long runners intertwined through a trellis of dead manzanita. Industrial strength poison oak! My wife says "Buy the poison spray and don't come in the house... ever!" Fortunately we have a secluded residence, so I can disrobe outside and drop every stitch of clothing in the washing machine on the way to the shower. So far, that routine has worked out pretty well. Just a tip: it's a good idea to leave the boots and gloves outside.

When engaged in such enjoyment of our property I think about the land we own, all fifteen acres of it, a veritable lifetime of potential cost-free aerobic exercise, and I ponder larger questions. Why join a gym when I have yards of poison oak, or possibly even miles of it? I am amazed by some of my neighbors and dearest friends, no names mentioned here, who have expansive tracts of beautifully watered, mowed and manicured green grass lawns. Boy, that sure looks terrific. But wait... we're not in the city any more, we're many miles out in the country. Isn't a lawn a city thing?

I've had my fill of mowing and have the scars to prove it, ten stitches at a time to remove basal cell carcinomas my dermatolgist says are from years of mowing grass with my shirt off. Hey, I was once young, strong and stupid... why not mow without a shirt? Now I know why. I'm older now, less strong, and hopefully a little less dumb, so I'll take the poison oak and wear a shirt rather than the grass with no shirt.

My thoughts wander thus as I do mindless physical labor. It's such a luxury to just let them go that way, unchanneled, unobstructed, unfenced, undisciplined... free to roam. I thought of my art school days, a beginning sculpture class where we learned the two basic approaches to creating sculpture: additive or subtractive. Never good at math, I still was able to grasp it. Additive is when you get a lump of clay and keep adding more lumps until you arrive at an object of recognizable beauty. Subtractive is like Michelangelo taking a cube of Carrara marble and chiseling away until a David emerges.

I realized that my approach to land management falls into that latter category: subtractive. I tried the additive method once... planted 2,500 pine seedlings. All but 50 died in the first dry winter. Subtractive methodology is a lot more fun. You just look at what you've already got and remove what you don't like. However, I am finding that's more easily said than done.

In my case, I have discovered amidst the tangled jungle of poison oak and manzanita some interesting and, to my mind, more desirable plants such as redbud and lilac. Western redbud is indigenous to our California foothills and a tough survivor. It has heart-shaped leaves with a pleasant blue-green color in the summer. In the fall the leaves present a panoply of autumn color, from copper hues to crimson. I always relish the drive on Wildcat Road just along the western edge of Black Butte Cinder Cone... such a spectacle of nature's palette where the redbud abounds. It is equally showy in the spring, before the leaves appear, when redbud becomes a fountain of pink to violet blossums, usually around Easter time. So I set out to liberate my redbud... performing subtractive sculpture.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to eliminate all the poison oak and manzanita from fifteen acres of land. I like a little exercise. I'm not a gluton for punishment. Besides, I've come to realize by observation that some critters in the forest actually eat manzanita berries. Not sure if anyone eats poison oak. But I like the foxes, coyotes and other creatures who call our place home. And I have to admit, poison oak in the fall can also put on a spectacular color show. Older manzanita often is spectacular as well, the shiny twisted trunks resemble red ebony free form sculpture. I just want to have some redbud and lilac along my driveway. It's already there, so I'm just encouraging it by removing the competition.

As for squaw carpet... probably never heard of it, right? It's a low-growing evergreen ground cover prevalent at our foothill elevation, between 2,500 and 3,000 feet. In the spring it erupts in a carpet of lavender blossums which transform the forest floor for a few weeks. My wife's step-dad says the Native Americans who lived here for thousands of years used this ground cover as a portable playpen. A blanket or animal skin was placed down on the squaw carpet, the baby set on top of that, while the mother went off to gather berries. Squaw carpet has very prickly leaves, so when the infant crawler approached the edge of the blanket, it would venture no further. A perfect mobile playpen. Clever.

Perhaps this was a case of something subtractive having an additive value!

Tom Knight, Broker
MANTON REALTY