The longer I live in L.A., the more I have come to see it not as urban wasteland patchworked with garden oases, but as a city thriving with nature in all of its parts.
Ayla Gard
Bioregional Address
In a backyard where lilac verbena springs from redwood mulch carried from wet northern forests, where palm trees brought from Baja California cast their shadows on bougainvillea, where bees heat-collapse and rats leave lemons to rot on Spanish tile.
In a neighbourhood where coyotes patter from chaparral kingdoms along trails of warm asphalt, peer through fences and assess nutritional values of fluffy dogs on greengrass lawns.
In a city where weeds and wildblossom spring from banks along freeways: sunlight poppies, violet lantana, car tyre, blue tent. Where the air is fragrant with black sage and combustion.
In the Arroyo Seco Watershed that stretches from the San Gabriel Mountains to downtown Los Angeles, part of the ancestral, unceded territory of the Tongva people (Gabrieleño), traditionally also visited or inhabited by the nearby Chumash.
i
It was spring when I moved into the ground floor apartment at the base of a hillside neighbourhood in northeast Los Angeles. The apartment came with its own backyard, and I was inspired by its untended green chaos: a spacious courtyard with a raised garden bed that ascended to a main road above. The slope and fence were tangled with ivy so thick it had sealed the upper gate shut, and without a machete or similar, nobody was getting out, and nobody could see in. At the front edge of the garden bed there was a scattering of California poppies and two thriving black sage shrubs which were, as far as I could tell, the only native plant species in the whole arrangement. Come summer, the purple flowerheads along the silver stems of sage dried and hardened, and I contemplated them each day as I tried to find the motivation to prune. Everything dry in the valley heat.
There was space at the front of the garden bed for more plants, so I contacted a landscaper whom I’d met at a California native plants identification course at the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley. Emerson usually worked for a native garden in Beverly Hills, but I asked if he’d do a small job for me, helping me identify which natives to plant in my backyard.
Later in summer, I met him at the Theodore Payne nursery, and we bought small pots of seedlings: lilac verbena; white sage; wild buckwheat that promised lacy white flowers; lemonade berry plant with glossy, dark green leaves; and some milkweed for the monarchs. Emerson and his uncle planted the seedlings, covering the dry dirt around them with redwood mulch.
“You’ll need to water these every day for the first month,” Emerson said, explaining that in a year they should be established enough to not need watering at all.
He showed me how to save the seeds of the orange California poppies and told me to sow them in autumn so they’d flower again the next year.
“Should I prune these?” I pointed to one of the two large bushes of black sage.
Emerson held a stem between his fingers. “Cut it right down to here,” he said, showing me a point low on the stem where there were green buds. “But don’t do it now; wait a few more months.”
“But I can cut the dead flower heads now, right?”
“I’d prefer you leave them,” he said. “Leave them for as long as possible. These flowers look dead, but they’ve still got a lot of seeds in them, you know, they’re a food source for birds and provide habitat for all the little creatures you don’t see.”
When Emerson and his uncle left, I sat on my bed and admired his work through the glass doors to the courtyard: the promise of abundance in seasons to follow. I was also hopeful that we’d just added a few more yards to the neighbourhood wildlife corridor.
Every day after that, I looked out at the dead flowers in my backyard and wondered who was feasting. I’d seen hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies visit those sage plants in the spring, the silver-green bushes offering clusters of soft purple florets the perfect shape for little beaks and straw-tongues to suck out the nectar. But once those juice-flowers fell, with only dry seed bobbles left, I hadn’t thought about all the invisible visitors that might be cut off by a zealous deadheader. Kinship is a verb, I reminded myself, thinking of an interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer I had read. To be in reciprocity with my garden and its inhabitants meant leaving the sage shrubs alone. In service to this neighbourhood of tinies, I resolved to leave the sage bushes unpruned until the bobbles had crumbled to the ground.
Months later, after significant crumbling, I texted Emerson asking if it was safe to snip the dead flower heads yet. He told me to wait until just before the winter rains came.
Then, a few days later, he texted asking how the verbena plants were doing. He’d dreamed of them last night, he said, and they’d told him they wanted a little more water.
I told him I thought it was amazing he dreamed about plants. It was like they had told him they were thirsty.
“I always dream about our plants,” he replied in a voice note. “I’m more connected to some plants than others, like with the salvias; sometimes they tell me if they don’t feel well being planted in a certain place.”
I often think of how deeply Emerson cared that I didn’t prune those flowerheads, and of what it must be like to be so connected to a landscape you converse with it in your dreams.
The following spring, the verbena are ten times bigger than when we planted them; green foliage and fluffy brown seed clusters spill over the retainer wall. I walk outside to see who is partaking in the browning verbena and sage flowers. There are no insects visible, but when I look closer I see the delicate networks of spiderwebs strung between stems of the verbena, sage, and buckwheat. Flecked with tiny bug constellations, they tell me there is plenty of living here.
Los Angeles, with its 4,000 native plant and animal species, is a cradle of biodiversity. And it is the landscapers who steward the pockets of earth that remain between so much concrete shell, who advocate for their clients to fill their gardens with native plants, who tend to these precious ecosystems. Though Los Angeles is perpetually cracked open, burnt and bruised, it is the landscapers—who commune with this land in their dreams—who are healing the city. Yard by yard, garden by garden.
ii
The longer I live in L.A., the more I have come to see it not as urban wasteland patchworked with garden oases, but as a city thriving with nature in all of its parts. A few years ago I came across an article in The Believer, “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.,” by nature writer Jenny Price. A play on Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Price’s 2006 essay still lives in the front room of my mind. We need to tell new stories about nature, Price says, in thirteen different ways. Look past the empty lots and the freeway overpasses and you’ll see nature everywhere. Twenty years on, it’s a story we still desperately need to tell.
So excited by this revelation, I started talking to everyone about it. Did you know, I told whoever would listen, that the mango body butter you buy at the department store is nature, too? I mean, of course it is, but have you ever really thought about it? About the mangoes on the trees, picked by farmworkers in Mexico and moving through the supply chain to join other parts of nature until finally we smear the arrangement thick onto our skin.
I started seeing nature everywhere in L.A. Not in mango body butter, but in everything else in my house. Underfoot I felt the cool of wooden floors, and I saw a bamboo forest in China, cut and shaped into perfectly straight boards and carried across several bodies of salt water on a ship—a ship made of steel that was forged of iron ore that was sucked from the earth in Western Australia, a ship powered by heavy fuel oil made from petroleum which is, after all, the fossilised remains of plants and algae.
In his book The Order of Time, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli says, “We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes.” We can think of the world as made up of things, he argues, or we can think of it as made up of events, of occurrences, impermanent, in continual transformation.
When I look at an object, and really notice it, I no longer see it just for what it is now. I see time folded and flattened into it, a series of processes stretching backwards to its origins in the earth, forwards to their movement through a supply chain and into the future, when they will, at some point, end up in the earth again. A room of things is not a room of things, but a consolidation of many different ecosystems extracted across time.
Natural systems are so entangled with every facet of our economy that once you start thinking about this, it’s hard to unsee. All of which to say, I see nature in everything now. I see it in all the fabrics and materials and objects in my home. I see it in the digital ecosystems I navigate: somewhere, a throbbing data centre built on natural land. And then I go outside, and I see nature there as well—that’s obvious, but now I also see it in the places I’d never thought to look before. Like alongside the freeway.
When I look at an object, and really notice it, I no longer see it just for what it is now. I see time folded and flattened into it, a series of processes stretching backwards to its origins in the earth, forwards to their movement through a supply chain and into the future, when they will, at some point, end up in the earth again. A room of things is not a room of things, but a consolidation of many different ecosystems extracted across time.
iii
It’s spring now, and a hundred thousand people or more are leaving L.A., or have left or will, to see a super bloom. They have merged onto the county’s 527-mile matrix of freeways to look for wildflowers, to capture the colourful mountain-blanketing blooms in a moment in time.
California’s super blooms happen when wet winters are followed by warm temperatures in spring, and hillsides up and down the state light up in coats of wildflowers: orange poppies and yellow desert brittlebrush, purple lupine and red desert paintbrush. I’ve never been to a super bloom. For no reason other than I just haven’t gotten around to it. And anyway, while half of L.A. is on the road looking to get out of the city to see wildflowers, I’m on the road in L.A. looking at the only super blooms I need: the freeway flowers.
Driving east along the 101 from Hollywood, a car-bound traveler can look leftward and admire gold and orange nasturtiums spilling towards the grimy shoulder in their beds of green, or lilac puffs of wild lantana uncomplainingly sucking up exhaust fumes. You might see a hillock covered in the famous sunny brittlebrush or even a scattering of California poppies. Every spring these colourful displays appear along the banks of L.A.’s ugliest veins, and every spring they surprise me so much that I have to remind myself to focus on the six-lane frenzy I’m supposed to be navigating. It makes me wonder why we so aggressively overlook the pockets of beauty in L.A.’s urban spaces in favour of nature far away.
Some of these freeway blooms happen naturally; others, I have learned, are the fruits of guerrilla gardeners who fling wildflower seedbombs out their car windows in protest against the California Department of Transportation’s widespread application of herbicide along roadsides.
L.A.’s freeways tell us all kinds of nature stories. They tell stories of Black and Latino communities sliced through the centre, of pollution inequality, of land acquisition and hills blasted and dirt carried away, of trees and vegetation and topsoil stripped and replaced with geotextiles, of crushed rock base layers and smooth concrete poured into the ribbons like cake batter. They tell us of disenfranchised tent communities on eroding embankments; of dead coyotes, cats, and crows; of Roundup seeping down into the groundwater. But if we look long enough, they also tell stories in vibrant tapestries that pour down their margins. Look, they say. Spring is here. Look how nature wants to reclaim the land.
This is the nature I want to see. Because it is the truth of nature. I don’t want to see a perfectly pruned and hydrated garden, or a photo of an influencer in an unspoiled field of wildflowers, no other humans in sight. Show me the plastic water bottles and the trampled poppies, the mile-long line of cars idling as they wait to get into the national park. Show me the spontaneous super bloom in an abandoned lot next to the supermarket, and the lone poppy plant sprung from a seedbomb on the side of the 110. Show me, on the packaging to every toaster or cake or cosmetic, the complications of its origins in nature. Show me the dead flower seed buffet that bristles with life in your backyard.
I don’t want to see a perfectly pruned and hydrated garden, or a photo of an influencer in an unspoiled field of wildflowers, no other humans in sight. Show me the plastic water bottles and the trampled poppies, the mile-long line of cars idling as they wait to get into the national park.
Words by Ayla Gard
Ayla Gard writes fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Her work appears in Orion, Scientific American, Barnstorm Journal, and Pile Press and is forthcoming in Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment. She has an MFA in nature writing and poetry from Western Colorado University. Originally from Darug land in rural Australia, she now lives in Los Angeles. You can find more of her work at aylagard.carbonmade.com
