A friend called a single flower that emerged from a thin cosmos plant on my office window this week the “miracle on Main Street.” November first is not when we expect fresh blooms, but the real miracle was that the plant, and a companion, survived at all in their seed-starter plugs. From the library driveway next door, the flower appears a dot of orange, not much to look at, but a small sign of perseverance, nonetheless.
With only a few square feet of garden at home near the bay, I grow only a few things beside cosmos. Some years back after seeing Robert Gardner’s 1986 masterpiece, “Forest of Bliss,” about life and death on the Ganges River, I got interested in marigolds, which play a key role in so many ways in India. They also do well down by the beach. Bees of some sort or another lounge drunkenly on the marigold blooms.
Rudbeckia, arugula, and kale seem indifferent to the salty air. Lavender, a few apple trees, and most herbs do, too. When I have put in tomatoes — and helped the soil along with compost — their harvest has been great. The conditions appear less tolerable for other kinds of plants; carrots, peas, and cabbages have been failures.
Looking over my garden list, though, I noticed that it was heavy on nonnatives, despite warnings that I have heard but only marginally heeded about the crisis among insect pollinators. That said, I don’t use pesticides and let nearly everything that wants to grow remain in the lawn, but again, there are nonnatives and invasives.
A guest column by Gail Pellet, a founder of the newly formed ChangeHampton, about revitalizing the grown environment appeared in the paper last week. In it, she described the group’s mission of building diverse and resilient habitats, and her own yard planted with milkweed, Joe Pye weed, asters, echinacea, and cardinal flower.
Town Hall, which has already had a small pollinator garden, has come onboard; work on a new, much-larger native-plant meadow began with a groundbreaking there last week. Edwina von Gal’s Perfect Earth Project has been making the case for eliminating groundcare chemicals and restoring landscapes. It is all pretty convincing. While I may still grow a few cosmos and marigolds next year, natives will take a starring role.