(AJ Jewell)
We are deep in winter by most reckonings of the season, although it only recently started feeling that way.
Winter in Southern California is usually a glorious three months. Winter is when it rains and wildflowers grow! Unlike barren Chicago or Boston, winter here is green with new beginnings!
Yet winter this year was dry up until the very end of January. No wildflowers grew, and there were no new beginnings. Instead, this winter has been bitter and cruel. The Eaton Fire, fueled by dry conditions and climate change, killed 17 people and turned much of our neighboring city to ash.
Although it is not my home, I know little shops in Altadena that burned, and I spent time in houses that are no longer there. In every lot down countless blocks, the tokens and treasures the residents spent lifetimes gathering are gone. I know that this is a profound loss. A home — the physical place, not the spiritual one — is a cipher for memories. To lose a home means to lose a special kind of access to your own past.
It is a terrible loss, but I believe that Altadena will flourish again. Cities can survive radical change and loss. They’re like gardens in that way.
It rained the past two weeks, thus the natural world reanimated. Sagebrushes color-shifted to green and native buckwheats prickled with a stubble of tiny leaves. Native yellow currants are utter maniacs and horribly impatient, so they started leaf-budding and blooming bright canary-yellow simultaneously. Many wildflowers and weeds germinated and are still small enough it’s difficult to tell them apart. They’re just a cute patina of cotyledons on the top of the soil. If you sowed seeds this year, take a “gardener’s squat” to inspect the constellations of tiny leaves: try to guess the species. I have gotten especially good at picking out elegant clarkia and cutleaf geranium. It is a joyful way to spend 5 minutes.
With rain, this winter has again become a season of new beginnings. Wildflowers will grow and blossom. Our neighbors will rebuild and Altadena will flourish again. But I am sure that that won’t fully soothe the losses. And I know that the melancholy of winter will be especially hard for many of our friends and neighbors this year.
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I said that cities are like gardens. So I want to say something about the consolation of gardens in dark times. Firstly, gardens are more than the sum of their parts. That is a cliché, I realize, but I don’t know how else to put it. I mean that gardens are not like Christmas lists or passwords – change an element of either, and they’re not the same password or list. They’re mere collections of elements. But gardens are not mere collections of plants and hardscape. They survive radical change like living creatures survive change and loss.
When a tree dies in a garden, like one of Arlington’s old oaks did in 2023, the garden may be diminished for a while, but it persists. One thing I find remarkable about gardens, compared to, say, a bunch of plants on a hillside, is that they can outlast their gardeners and even their plantings by centuries – the astounding Botanical Garden of Padua has lived for 500 years! That is twice the age of the United States and its venerable institutions.
Gardens can survive indefinitely, if there are people to tend them. But gardens and their gardeners are not wholly distinct things. To illustrate:
- The Arlington desert section includes unusual Malagasy plants, like Alluadia procera, because the section was planted by volunteer Thomas Juhasv, who happened to have an interest in the spiny forests of Madagascar. With respect to Arlington, this interest was not entirely arbitrary, since Malagasy plants can grow here, but it was unexpected and unplanned. Absent Juhasv, there would be no giant Alluadia next to the cardons.
- Pasadena Unified students rest at the end of every field trip in the Pomegranate Amphitheatre. This amphitheatre exists at all, because of the support of volunteer Sabra Clark, her family, and her friends. And it looks the way it does, because (apocryphally, anyway) some beneficent soul dropped off white pillars at the garden in the dead of night, which we used to construct the supports. According to the story, no one knows who left them.
- The orange grove continues in 2025 to supply Washington navel oranges for our marmalade, in large part because a crew from Outward Bound Adventures fixed major problems with the irrigation system back in 2022.
My point is just the common-sense one that a living space like Arlington Garden is both sustained and shaped by the community of people who support it. We are — perhaps even more than other gardens — an accretion of individual dreams and labour. In a sense, all the members of our community are gardeners, and this place is their garden and their legacy.
Arlington’s designer, Maya Dinos, once said to me that all gardens are songs. The structure and melody and timbre and all the rest of it is set by the performers as they play. And as the musicians cycle out (they may take a temporary break or leave the venue) new ones replace them. But the song as a whole is the song it is, it has its unique identity and beauty, because of all the performances — not only how it ends, but how that end developed from the triumphant middle, and of course, the tentative first notes.
Gardens always carry a trace of their gardeners within them. Because of this, I am comforted by the thought that our gardens, like our cities, are not the sum of their parts. These living things survive change and loss, and they can and do outlast us. I often daydream that in 200 years Arlington’s cardons will still be growing, towering 60′ over what was once a sidewalk. Or, if not our cardons, then their massive progeny. Perhaps the cardon grove will have become a forest chewing up the sidewalk. I wish desperately I could see it.
WINTER UPDATES
The rains started especially late this year. The garden lost a few shrubs to the extended drought, but most plants survived. Long dry periods are not wholly out of the ordinary for these species, and we did some watering to prevent too many losses.
The January windstorm moderately damaged the garden, and we closed for several days to clean up. During the first few days of terrible fire after the windstorm, we took care to ensure the garden’s safety. We are nearly four miles from the conflagration, but it felt as though new fires were popping up everywhere. We tended to fallen branches, and watered deeply to decrease our susceptibility to fire. Following recommended best practices, we washed garden furniture, permeable surfaces, and work areas, and purchased N95s and other PPE.
Thanks to the tireless work of Arlington staff, the garden reopened by the weekend. We set out donated board games*, fresh drawing supplies, and papers and string (for the wish trees), so people affected by the fires could have a place to rest and recuperate.
Our winter/spring program series was quickly reimagined to respond to the emergency. Our new monthly Post Fire Series launches this weekend with a free informational session about soil testing and bioremediation. A yoga and live music monthly series debuted from our friends Living Earth, and later this month we will host Pasadena-based Hands in the Soil for more free arts programs. We continue to offer the garden as a healing, gathering, and educational space to those affected by the fire. If your organization or group was displaced due to the fires, please reach out.
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Earlier this winter, we replanted the native plant walk designed by Tim Becker using many species from the original plan. We are currently in the design phase of the construction of the new oak table gathering space, and we hope to break ground soon. Thank you to everyone who donated to last year’s successful We Are An Oak Campaign – your financial support made this possible!
On the subject of change and loss, over the summer and fall, we cleared and mulched the site of an old coast live oak that succumbed to disease. The loss of this tree created an opening in the tree canopy, which gave us the opportunity to plant wildflowers. We have taken the opportunity very seriously. In response to the fire, we extended the wildflower patch into a wildflower path using many pioneer species. This flower road will meander through the garden, connecting the street to the labyrinth along the northern edge.
The opportunity to grow wildflowers in this part of the garden arose because of the unexpected loss of the old oak. The flowers we planted will support pollinators, the pollinators will support birds and other predators, and so on, reverberating throughout our local food web. The loss, in other words, created an opportunity for a whole new chain of life.
The title “Gardening in Winter” may seem like a conceit, because in most of the country gardening in winter is impossible. Winter here nonetheless is a season for gardeners.
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