Hurricane and Drought

A Garden’s Place in September Chaos

Part of the hubris essential to being human is pretending we have any real control over the world. We can plan and make preparations for all sorts of things, but at no point are we truly prepared for anything and everything. And that’s perfectly fine with me. The coronavirus pandemic only solidified my mindset that flexibility is a more valuable virtue to strive for than preparedness, although it seems rather difficult to apply that to maintaining a garden.

Looking ahead is an essential trait for even the most amateur of gardeners. That little sapling you plant in the ground is going to be a titan of your landscape one day, even if it takes a generation. There’s nothing quite as humbling as looking at a living thing, no matter which branch of the tree of life it falls on, that will almost certainly outlive you. On a less existential level, you need to account for a variety of factors when building up a garden, like how much light and rain an area will get, or how large a plant will get when it is fully grown. Growing vegetables and fruits is heavily reliant on planning around the seasons, especially if you live somewhere winter actually means something.

If you live in California or other parts of the dry American west, the all consuming drought has been looming over us for decades now, and at this point, shaping your planting choices around it isn’t really planning as much as it is being not delusional. Individuals have their part to play in fighting the drought, such as not wasting water or getting rid of thirsty lawns, but unfortunately the average gardener cannot fix the climate by themselves. The drought will continue to beat down on us, and although our California native plants are used to dry periods, I’m not quite sure this is what they had in mind.

As terrible as the drought is, it also isn’t something surprising. A hurricane, however, is certainly not part of our daily vocabulary in Southern California. I can’t imagine the percentage of us who were actively planning on one even brushing by was low, but that’s what one exactly did last week as an early September surprise.

September, at least in my memory, has always been a miserable month weather wise. It’s culturally ingrained in you to be expecting cozy fall vibes and temperatures, but instead you’re left with dry wind and scorching forecasts. We had been getting hit with nearly a week of close to or over hundred degree weather, ruining many of our Labor Day weekends I would imagine, and just to finish with some pizazz, Hurricane Kay made its way up from Baja California. To be clear, the hurricane did not make landfall or hit us nearly as hard as it did our neighbors to the south, but the rains and wind were still abnormal for this part of the year.

One of the common things you hear about gardening is that it is a way to feel more connected with nature, which is something that has largely been true for me. But there’s also a kind of disconnect that has become apparent to me. The plants native to California have evolved over millions of years in concert with each other, the land and the climate. Unfortunately, we live in a moment in which those relationships are frayed, and to me, it seems like the time to make preparations for it was decades ago. The droughts will grow longer, beyond what these plants are used to, and severe weather events like hurricanes are only going to become more common.

Nihilism and pessimism make for good thought pieces, but they are miserable compasses to direct a life around. How exactly you are supposed to plan for such an uncertain world in your garden, let alone your life, is a question I would love to have answered for me. Like I said at the start, flexibility has been my way of surviving these times, but when scorching temps were beating down and the wind was threatening to decapitate my plants, the gospel of flexibility seemed to only prescribe making peace with the fact that I might lose some of them.

However, when the storm cleared, and the winds died down, I was delighted to see that every member of my garden was all still standing. And within a couple days, the temperature came back down to acceptable, and we were back on the march towards fall and the start of the native plant planting season. No matter how uncertain and unnerving these dramatic weather events are, they do remind me that for now, life is certainly not easy to extinguish.

Come hell or high water, the only way is forward, preparations be damned, and that’s enough of a plan for me.

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