How many cans of cuttings did I fill – I couldn’t guess. Once a year, you lost your leaves and stood almost bare, but just for a few weeks. Fall – when you started losing your leaves until you were bare – seemed to take months, from the last summer days to early winter. So every season, we naturally had some mulch positioned on the ground around you. Your soft-white flowers shone for all to see when they were fresh, which was almost all year round but more plentiful in spring and summer. When the petals dropped they got caught in the spider webs around the coral bells and golden currant leaves.

It was mainly in fall that we had the most work: raking your leaves from the walk ways, hosing the spider webs off the surrounding foliage, and trimming your branches that were encroaching the electricity and telephone wires. It was in fall too that we noticed you creaking when the Santa Ana winds blew and when we discovered that you were cracking into two major parts. You really were a shrub because you had several major branches coming from the ground, not just one trunk. But size wise, you were a tree, considerably larger than our house and too large for our back yard and the wires overhead.

So today is the day the arborist came with his crew and they are cutting you down. It hurts. I try to reason but it still hurts. The garden won’t be the same. The birds will miss you and will be disappointed. We’ll plant another tree to substitute for you – not quite as large – but we haven’t made up our mind yet what species. We are grieving for you, an old friend, a companion, a provider of comfort and pleasure. We’ll keep some of your wood chips for mulch, here at your home, to become part of the soil, just as the memories of you have become part of us.

Last night though, Cliff made an amazing discovery. There was a raccoon walking in our back yard, lumbering through on our crushed stone-covered walkway, and then climbing up and hiding in the elderberry tree. We all darted outside, camera in hand, and even got a shot of it still clinging to a branch in the elderberry.  Wow! I still can hardly believe it. I know people have opossums and raccoons quite often in gardens that are adjacent to wild land areas or parks. However, our house is neither.  I wondered if it was the raccoon that had earlier in the evening, but long after sunset, startled a black phoebe so that it was flying erratically in our back porch, hitting the light and then the windows. It took a while for it to recover its senses and eventually flew back into the darkness and settled down. Maybe half an hour later, Cliff discovered the raccoon. We’ll never know what spooked the little bird but from now on, we’ll be on the lookout for our late night guest with a striped tail.

Well, after having handled black sage twigs and leaves, dry flower stalks and broken branches for two hours, my left hand (I was holding the clippers with my right hand) was literally black. Not just dirty brown, no, absolutely black.  Black sage is somewhat sticky, not quite as sticky as the more fragrant white sage, but stickier than the more grayish purple sage, which is very similar to the Cleveland sage. The resinous glands must produce this black film that covered my hand. It came off with soap and water and a hand brush, and some fair amount of scrubbing.

The reason why I hadn’t noticed this curious quality before might be that I usually do my trimming more casually, moving from shrub to shrub, clip a branch here, a few twigs there, head off some flower stalks on the next plant, but really do not work at any one plant for any length of time. I like to do the trimming the way the plant would be browsed by animals in its native habitat, and do the pruning the way it would be pruned by gusty winds from the Santa Ana’s.

Today, I focused on the three black sage shrubs that are in my front yard, each of them “volunteers” that seeded themselves from earlier plantings. One is getting almost as big as the “granddaddy” that became more than six feet tall and just as wide, so big that it seemed it was overtaking the whole front yard. I took that huge one out just because of its size.  I failed to rein it in while it was young and shapeable. But just like an old person or old dog, it’s hard to shape a mature black sage bush.  So I sacrificed it, under tears (yes, I cry for my plants) and counted on its seedlings to keep me blessed with this wonderful shrub.  It is soothingly fragrant, and while not outstandingly showy, it is reliably attractive all year round, with just a little bit of water. It’ll survive a drought in the wild without lasting damage, but if you want it green all through the dry season, just give it some water every two weeks and you’ll enjoy its foliage all year round. No other shrub attracts more beneficial insects, birds, and butterflies in my garden than do the black sage shrubs.  They are just now ending their flowering, after having provided their small but plentiful flowers for several months now.  There is not a day that I don’t see some critter in or about the black sage. And none of the critters that I find there have ever harmed me. There might be honey bees galore but I have moved around them, and among them, and they always have found the sage flowers much more attractive than me.  

The other two sages are much smaller, only about 3 feet tall. One appears to be a hybrid between a groundcover and a regular shrub. That one is near the border to my neighbor to the west, and it has turned out to be a quite attractive hedge, shapeable, getting trimmed by the neighbor and me at any time, and providing habitat to birds and lizards, butterflies, and native bees.   

The trimming I did this morning was not hard yard work, to me, it was like working on a piece of art: finding its natural shape, carefully untangling the twigs and leggy branchlets, giving it light to grow in my preferred fashion, cutting out the deceased, and preparing it for the next season.  Even though the sun shone, it was satisfying and fulfilling, on soothing to my hurried soul.

It’s a little early in the year to do major trimming or pruning. I usually wait until late fall, leaving the fruits and seeds to provide food for wildlife, but this year, I decided to this early in the season. But I made sure to leave some of the dry flower stalks that give an artistic character to the native garden and food for the birds.

 Gabi

But the low water use is not the main reason I love my garden. I love it because it gives me a place that makes me feel at home, connected, within nature, full of life, where troublesome things fall back in place, and fix themselves. If I accidentally break a branch, it will grow again. If I forget to water, it’ll green up the next time I remember, if I am too tired to mend, it will mend itself. And it is always ready to surprise me with a wisp of an unknown insect, with the soothing smell, with a new bud, or a ripe fruit. The garden is forgiving, persistent, and undemanding; I spend time in it because I want to, not because I have to maintain it. Like picking a branchlet of Cleveland sage to put in my pasta water, or picking ripe elderberries to make jelly, or collecting some evening primrose to put in a vase.

Oh, those evening primrose flowers, what an amazing experience. They open at dusk, and shine their big bright yellow flowers through the failing evening light. Even at night, I can see them from the porch. In the early morning, they still display proudly, but two hours later, they start to wilt. But you would never know that each flower lives for only one night because every evening, there are new buds opening. Except if you look at lunch time, all the flowers are wilted and the doubt creeps up if the flower bonanza will now have come to an end. But no, come 7 pm, here they are again. If you take your time, you can sit there and see the blossoms open. You can see the hummingbirds take a nectar sip, and the finches probing for the seeds in the fruits. Some of my evening primrose plants have grown to be eight feet tall, and have been in flower since early June, and they continue growing new buds and flowering every evening. So this is where I am going to go now, out in my garden, and admire the evening primrose (Oenothera elata) and the critters that visit her.

Gabi

I feel really good about our summer garden. We’ve watched a Selasphorus hummingbird at the evening primroses, Oenothere elata, that have grown super tall, up to 8 feet, with plenty of flowers, even though each one lasts only for one day! I had been surprised to find the hummer at the yellow wide open flowers, not at all what is usually described as a hummingbird attracting flower, neither in color nor in shape. But like I often comment, the birds don’t read the books. Our hummers like the evening primrose, it’s not the first time we have observed them.

While it’s summer already and most nestlings have fledged, we still (or again) have a mockingbird begging for food, presumably still in the nest, since the peeping keeps coming from the same place in our neighbor’s lemon tree.  I know the bushtits have finished nesting because yesterday a flock of them, maybe 12, visited our toyon, mountain mahogony, cleveland sage, and palo verde. They frequent our garden quite regurlarly, just like the black phoebes, house finches, anna’s and allen’s hummingbirds, and of course the mockingbirds and house sparrows. I wished we had less of those sparrows, but we don’t know how to discourage them from coming into our garden without keeping the rest of the songbirds away too. Does anybody out there know?

Gabi