felling the mighty oak

seedling.

As I've grown older, I've come to appreciate more and more the California landscape, in particular how it must have looked before civilization. I'm more concerned with preserving what's left as opposed to taking the urban sprawl ideology. Unfortunately, being pro-environment has somehow taken a political turn; I mean, can there actually be people that are anti-environment?

In the part of my garden that I've converted to native plants, the lushness and growth has been surprising - I'm wondering how much bigger the plants are going to get! The space is running out of room for the plants that I've planted, let alone for the volunteers that are sprouting up too. And I am finding it especially difficult to pull out the volunteers of native plants as if they were mere weeds. Maybe it's because I know how much more beneficial they are to the soil and fauna than lawns and the typical plants that are available at local nurseries. I happen to love spending days around my native plants observing the multitude of insects that busy themselves around them: the coffeeberry, the toyon, the native sages and penstemons, etc.

Not even being limited to the native part of my garden are the many oak seedlings that I keep finding. Valley oaks, blue oaks, coast live oaks (at least to my untrained eye) - beautiful all, but there's no room for them to grow. Some sprout within inches of a wall, others if allowed to mature will block out the sunlight from other plants and crowd and compete amongst themselves. I let one particular coast live oak grow to roughly my height before I decided to remove it a few years ago - it's in my native plant area and would outgrow the Western redbud it was growing next to. But soon enough, the oak returned, only multi-trunked this time. And I'm letting it grow again. It's already a slender 10 or so feet tall, and I don't know what I can expect from it. The leaves are kind of pointy and prickly, a bit more menacing than the blue oak seedling with soft smooth leaves that has sprouted this season, maybe two yards away. Another reason I find it difficult to remove oak seedlings is the idea that the acorns they sprouted from were most likely tucked in the ground by scrub jays, doing what they've been doing for countless generations.

Yet for all these little worries that I have about native plants and oaks sprouting up in unexpected places, I feel such satisfaction in cooperating with the earth instead of trying to control it by forcing fertilizers, insecticides, and soil conditioners upon it. And for this 900 or so square feet part of the garden filled with native plants, no having to water either!