It has probably been twenty-five years since I began to hear their voices—the voices of the wildflowers of the high country. On visits with my children to Mount Rainier and Yosemite, I first ventured above the tree line, the elevation above which trees don’t grow. I felt strangely at home in these spare, rocky, lonely mountains, more than 10,000 feet high. I felt a kinship to Hans Kastorp, who, in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, thought he was going up from the flatland for a few weeks and stayed for years.
I was already an avid hiker at home and making an effort to learn the names of the flowers I discovered along my lowland trails. Outings with the California Native Plant Society (CNPS) introduced me to the plants of Sonoma County and their habitats, which undulate from sea level to 4,000 feet. But the high country was different. The tree line, not officially roped off, but quite visible, marked the entrance to another world.
I gave myself over to fully entering that world when I found Ann Zwinger and Beatrice Willard’s book, Land Above the Trees. I came across it by chance as I rummaged through the natural history section of a bookstore in Ashland, Oregon. Zwinger’s simple, elegant black and white botanical drawings drew me under the spell of a sun-washed, wind-shorn land.
After that, it was only a matter of time before I joined a CNPS field trip to Saddlebag Lake, at the top of the Sierra Nevada not far from where the Tioga Pass road tumbles drunkenly down into Lee Vining and Mono Lake. Saddlebag Lake and its meadows lie in a rocky bowl situated right at 10,000 feet, snoozing in sun and storm beneath rugged snow-covered peaks that rise a few thousand feet higher. A July day spent here demands little climbing or scrambling, just strolling through meadows beside ice-cold lakelets and busy little streams. On this field trip I became acquainted with several new-to-me species of lupines and asters. I met paintbrushes and shooting stars that live only in the high meadows. I saw that wild mountain penstemons are much prettier than the overbred kind for sale at garden centers down below. Buttercups and monkey flowers, monkshoods and louseworts, larkspurs, elephant heads, and mule ears—I fell in love with them and with their names. Since then, I returned many times on my own, content to visit these plants on their home ground, with no desire to take them with me—just enjoying quiet conversations under the wide sky.
The CNPS trip leader lived near San Francisco where he maintained an alpine bog garden—in a near-drought area at sea level! I thought he was nuts. I already knew enough about plants to realize that it’s folly to try to grow them in a place different from their natural homeland. Yes, I can enjoy vibrant crotons in my mediterranean-climate garden in the summer, but I can’t expect these tropical beauties to survive even one of our mild winters. Despite what vendors assure me, orchids that come from Asian cloud forests won’t thrive in my low-humidity house. I pitied that misguided man who was going Against Nature.
But a subversive, seductive seed had been planted, one that would not begin to manifest itself for several years. It had started quite innocently. One year, wandering around the annual May sale that raises money for the San Francisco Botanical Garden (SFBG), I kept returning to the tables of alpine plants, so tiny, so cute, so taking up minimal space. A sign announced a need for volunteers to work at the nursery propagating plants for the monthly sales. I had already lost several alpines that I had bought on a whim. Perhaps it was time I learned the right way to grow them, if there were such a thing, and how better to do it than under the direction of experts.
The first thing I learned at the nursery was that the alpine section is unique among its many departments such as Natives, Perennials, and Vines. In Alpines we rid our diminutive plants of weeds such as moss and liverwort using tweezers, the dental kind with curved pincers. Nothing is grown in pots larger than three inches wide. Not all our plants are strictly alpines, that is, originating in the European Alps or, more broadly speaking, above the tree line. Some come from farther down the mountain, but they are all small, anywhere from two to twelve inches tall. They all require excellent drainage and none are truly drought tolerant. Most do not like winter wet, precisely what we get in our climate. I was amazed to learn that the SFBG Society, a nonprofit, community-minded organization, encourages a way of gardening that local water departments are attempting to wean people away from. Fortunately, alpine gardens in our area are seldom larger than a few terracotta pots.
I have brought many a three-inch pot home from the nursery and lost . . . well, I don’t keep count. Who would have imagined that the climate forty miles north of SFBG would be too arduous for many of those little sweethearts—too hot and too frosty and too lacking in the insulating properties of snow. Some of my experiments have survived and thrived, but I don’t pat myself on the back for being knowledgeable or lucky—I admire their toughness and I’ll-show-you attitude. My consolation is that I have heard a numberof well-known alpine experts mourn over their own list of losses.
Why do intelligent, educated, and experienced people who should know better waste time and money trying to grow plants where they don’t want to live? Those gardeners do it because they can't accept no for an answer, because they have a thing for cute little flowers, because if not alpines they would be obsessed with something else. I do it because I miss the high country. I long for its no nonsense–no frills attitude, its pure clean air, its silence but for the wind and murmuring rills born of snowmelt. The big blue gentians we sell out of the nursery are not nearly as lovely as the modest species I have found hiding in the grass in high wet meadows, and the small alpine penstemon growing in a pot on my deck makes me weep for her sisters nestled against boulders far, far away in their own mountains. Mine has never bloomed. Is it homesick? This kind of gardening is a bittersweet calling.
Still I persist, at home and at the nursery. As a volunteer, I have learned to make more alpines through cuttings and divisions. Some take right away—the junipers (that will eventually be all of two feet tall) and willows (that will never grow more than a few inches high). And the gentians; I have rarely had a failure with a gentian. Others, like spirea, just sit there and rot. At first, I left this kind of work at the nursery. Now I have flats of new starts in the shade under my backyard trees.
When my supervisor and mentor retired, the one who had given freely of his time to the nursery for more than thirty years, I was elevated to Alpine Volunteer With The Most Seniority—four years. Suddenly, I was the one who had to answer questions, make decisions, teach others how to compose a proper soil mix. In the course of almost a hundred SFBG plant sales I have met people who are new to alpines and look to me for tips on how to grow them. I have also come to know the fanatics who buy from specialty nurseries at home and abroad, attend alpine conferences and study weekends across the country, and cry on my shoulder about the ones that died. I commiserate—and sell them another three-inch pot of something too cute to resist.
This nattering is supposed to be about voices as the title leads you to expect, and I have avoided saying too much about them because you might think I’m ready for the loony bin. However, I have probably already proved that by admitting I’ve joined the ranks of Lowland Growers of High Elevation Flora (LGHEF). It is their voices I hear, the voices of the saxifrages, the potentillas, the eriogonums, and their legions of cousins. I have had to heed their utterances because they won’t listen to mine. I hear them saying, we want to live next to a rock, we don’t like to get too wet during the cold months, we want to put our roots down into pebbles and sand, not in your fancy potting mix. And by the way, we’d like the company of a pika or two.
Sounds like a great life to me. Someday I’ll join them, or at least my ashes will. In the meantime, I hear their voices.
