Solitary Corn

I got to hug my mama this week in advance of her 80th birthday.  But more about that in a second. 

In front of my preferred breakfast joint is a small patch of scraggly grass, eking out a hardscrabble existence between the asphalt of the road and the concrete-hard soil adjacent.  It is not lush.  It is not pretty.  More weed than grass, it has hung on despite two major episodes of construction.  

In the middle of the patch of grass grows one solitary stalk.  Somehow, a single corn plant has volunteered between the still-under-construction hotel and the newly resurfaced asphalt of the Waffle House parking lot.  

(I stole Joshua Kovak's published photo in the Argus Leader article here.) 

Two miles down the street,  I have had a work hobby for the past few years. In front of our office building are a series of concrete barriers, placed alongside the building to protect us.  They are three feet high, and are filled with dirt.  Planters.  For the first few years of my time working there, they were occupied by dead trees.  It was truly awful.  

And so it came to pass that one day I dug the trees out, added some soil, and dropped some plants in.  Then some seeds.  Then more seeds.  I have written before about my devil-take-the-hindmost chaos of my planting process, and this fits my modus operandi perfectly.  A tangle of volunteers and weeds and heirloom plants and flowers. 

Somehow, two years ago, I had three random stalks of popcorn that pushed their way past the surface, growing past the crowded tangle of pumpkin and oregano and kale in the understory.  Those three stalks grew strong, and they got a cup of water every day as I walked out of the building. 

A co-worker stopped me one day.  "Crorey, you do know that you will not get any corn from that, right?"

Um, no, I replied.  I did not know that. 

"Yeah.  Pollination of corn happens by wind, so you need a field full of corn to get enough windborne pollen to make corn.  That is why fields of corn always have rows packed so tight.  So that the wind blows the pollen over to the other stalks and the pollen from the tassels get picked up by the silks of adjacent plants."

Huh.  And sure enough, the corn ears I eventually harvested were puny to the extreme.  Three kernels on a curvy cob.  Five kernels.  Not even enough to keep for replanting. A little internet research confirmed his statement.  Corn does not thrive in isolation -- it requires a group of similar plants to do well.

Back to the visit with Mom.  We celebrated her 80th anniversary this week, and made a big fuss over her.  A couple of dozen members of the Parker family traveled from Washington State, Idaho, Illinois, Massachusetts and Mississippi, all come to SC to celebrate with her.  Lawton clan members also showed up to love on her, and she received messages from the Beltram clan from Tokyo, Prague, Dallas and the UAE.  

It was a lovely weekend.  We all -- both sides of the family -- connected and reconnected and got to know one another as adults and made family once again. 

I have been a solo stalk for a long time.  Growing up with Sunday dinners with all of my Lawton cousins every week, and monthly visits with Parkers, I have always known what it is to be surrounded by family.  And in the years since I left home, I have found the isolation of living a long way away from that family to be difficult.  I have local connections, and I have built community around myself, and have been accepted into communities far from my family of origin.  I have a rich life filled with music and theatre and art and bees and work and home and friends and acquaintances....  But I miss family.

I arrived in Anderson, SC, and hugged Mom.  A long hug.  I hugged Jake, my cousin who works so hard to keep us all connected.  I hugged my sister, who organized the whole weekend and managed to reduce chaos within a wildly chaotic group.  I held long conversations with Andrew, who visits me on his annual trip to retrieve alligator brains from SW Louisiana.  And with Chris, whose ship repair business is thriving.  With Brian, who told me of a lateral relative named Gus, who collects rocks in the US Southwest.  With my Idaho cousin Kirstyn, who combines a response career with a preventative career (she is a nurse working in two settings).  With Chelsea, a cousin I have not seen since she was seven, some thirty some odd years ago.  With Michael and Parker and Jonathan and John Mark and and I think there might have been a Steve and an Otto in there somewhere. 

And somewhere in the middle of all of these recollections and reconnections, I received a gift. 

Back around 1984, I spent a couple of weeks of my summer helping Granddaddy Lawton.  He would have been around 70 years old, and I was available for doing some yard work up at the mountain house (I also suspect that mom needed a little less 14-year old energy for a week or two).  Under Granddaddy's supervision, I built thank-you-ma'ams to channel water off of the gravel road.  I helped harvest and weed and pick and shovel and do general cleanup.  I got fed steak and eggs, and ate like a king every meal. I went exploring in the mountains after the work hours were over, and delighted in discovery --  finding minerals and waterfalls and mushrooms and flowers and trails and ridges galore.  

During that week, I also dug holes for some 40 thousand daffodils along the edge of the driveway, taking bulbs that granddaddy had divided and spread out and made into a floral town crier, announcing the annual arrival of spring in Cleveland, SC.   

Granddaddy's daffodils, re-homed.  Twice.  Photo by Roxana Evans.

The daffodils exploded on the landscape every spring, lining the road to Grandaddy's mountain house with a riot of yellow, ivory and orange.  When the next generation sold the land, several family members went and dug up bulbs to replant in their own yards.  Chip's daffodil bulbs were then split to become Roxana's daffodils.  

This week, Roxana gave me two bags of bulbs.

In her description of it, Roxana explained, "...all of these bulbs originally came from just twelve daffodils my grandmother gave my grandfather in 1955, planted at their mountain home in Cleveland, South Carolina.  That property has since been sold and is now part of a 365-acre conservation area in a natural trust. And somehow that makes me happy... imagining the animals quietly walking through those same daffodils each spring."

I am now back in Mississippi.  

"How was the week?" my coworkers all asked.  My response, somehow, captures none of the magic of being a single stalk who is fully pollinated.  Of the connection that I felt through storytelling and the reconnections that happened as myriad ghosts linger around our every table.  Of food that makes you want to weep for the joy of it.  Of gift giving and pictures passed around, each a prompt for one more story. 

"It was fine.  It was a very good weekend," I offer, lamely.  But let me tell you:

This lone stalk has returned with a very full heart.  Connected.  Re-rooted.  

Finding Your Bees

I went out for a walk (OK, it was my once-a-week smoke break) during my lunch hour yesterday.  Across the street from my office is a seedy, no-name motel - the kind of place that you seldom notice.  It is typical 1960s motel architecture: run down, no shade, with little-to-no green space, located in the middle of a downtown area.  Parking lot to one side, now-defunct bank on the other.  Not the most welcoming of places.

Testing the theory that stolen food tastes better

A year ago, I spotted a volunteer eggplant in the patch of grass next to the street.  On my walk this week, I wandered over to see if the volunteer had re-volunteered another generation of plants.

Sure enough, near the original spot, there was a big, green plant.  I lifted the canopy of leaves to find a host of small, beautiful, lavender eggplants.

I smiled, and picked one, slipping it into my pocket, while marveling at how wonderful nature was, to volunteer plants where there was once just a patch of weedy ground and a discarded eggplant.

Yeah, I don't know who discards eggplants, either.  That is to say, I don't know of anyone who discards raw eggplants in weedy lots.  I know plenty of people who discard cooked eggplant, and when I was a kid, I was responsible for some such discards when Mom was not looking.  But I don't think that kind of discard results in many volunteers.

But I digress.

Not much space.  Not much green.

The eggplant bush was in a tiny grassy area.  I looked around, and there were a bunch of weeds along the opposite edge of the parking lot, interspersed with decorative plants.  The nearest of the weeds, though, looked an awful lot like a pepper plant.

Dang.  Sure enough, it WAS a pepper plant.

A little further down, another pepper.  And another.  Twelve plants, interspersed in with the ornamentals. On a narrow strip of ground between the parking lot and the grungy parking garage of a sad motel.

Basil, too.  And mint.  And lemongrass.  Suddenly, I am seeing that this is not a volunteer location.

Instead, I had just raided someone's garden.  In a motel parking lot.  I looked around for the inevitable cameras that recorded my petty theft.

And then shrugged, with full smile on my face.  Someone had taken a crappy little corner of the universe and made it theirs.  They had found a way to bring something positive out of the peeling paint and auto-exhaust begrimed surfaces, and brought forth life for their table.

I love that idea.

A friend likened it to my hunt for bees.  For most people, having an infestation of stinging insects is not something to meet with joy.  But everywhere I go, I always keep an eye out for any bees, anywhere, especially hives that I could steal, bring to my house, and give them a new home.  My friend challenged me to write about it.

So the "Finding Your Bees" series is dedicated to everyone who has taken something that is overlooked and made it into something wonderful.  And I ask for you to share it with me - either in the comments or in email form.  Examples can include:

New Orleans Container House....

• Artists who make things with found objects 
• Repurposing artists (my brother Parker is a master at this!)
• Guerrilla Gardeners - who tame abandoned lots and make them into community gardens
• People who build houses out of shipping containers (not as novel now, but somebody did the first one not so long ago)
• Scientists who are working at re-introducing lost seeds to farmers
• Archaeologists who are introducing old techniques to help improve the lives of modern folk 
• Linguists who are working to revitalize languages in indigenous communities
• Brewmasters who re-introduce old recipes, based on either historic data or archaeological evidence
• Someone who figured out what to do with kudzu (or nutria, or water hyacinth, or Asian carp, or...)
• Someone who makes musical instruments out of unusual stuff, or that make sounds that are unexpected (left handed sewer-flutists like Michelle Bowe need apply!)

If you know of a Johnny Appleseed character, group, or collective, let me know about it.  Or if you are doing something where you are taming - or wilding - a piece of the world in a novel way, I want to hear the story.  

Non-profits and other programs are fair game.  My sister pointed me to a news story that talked about writers who were invited to move to areas of Detroit that were hit hard by the economic downturn - with the idea that creative folk can lift up a neighborhood (see the story at http://www.writeahouse.com/).

The world is an amazing place, filled with incredible people.  I love it when people see things in a different way than usual, and see possibility when the rest of the world sees none.  It is almost like they are giving the world the gift of a visual pun.

Tell me yours.

1876: Pueraria Montana

Today's entry is a guest blog by Dr. Chris de Francisco.  This will be the first in a series of GMO discussions.

The year was 1876.  At the Philadelphia Continental Exhibition, a small ornamental plant from Japan is introduced to this continent.  In its homeland it was used as a material for basketry, as a source of medicine for vertigo and tinnitus, and even as part of the cuisine.  In the New World it was noted that it grew quite rapidly.  A half century later, in the wake of the Dust Bowl amid concerns about the rapid erosion of topsoil, American farmers were paid almost $20 a hectare to plant it on their soil, and during that time three million acres were covered with the plant on purpose using taxpayer money.  Scientists, using nature to solve a problem brought on by insufficient knowledge and foresight… with insufficient knowledge and foresight.  The plant was kudzu.  It kills the plants it covers, and it buries power lines and structures in its path; it is still spreading at a rate of 120,000 acres a year.  It costs power companies about a million and a half dollars a year to keep it clear of their lines, and it costs up to half a billion dollars a year to keep from swallowing up forest and farm.  And it’s all natural.

I’m with my family on a field trip to Brazil (where kudzu is used to cover the destroyed patches of the Amazon) when my old friend Crorey Lawton and I get into a little internet debate about GMOs.  I’m delightfully not worrying about them right now, eating corn that tastes like corn tasted when I was a kid, tomatoes that have real flavor, and beef that’s raised for taste and not maximum industrial capacity.  I’m eating the natural species that have been modified over centuries by farmers to become larger and more fun to eat. The difference in taste is as distinct as the difference between soda made with sugar and soda made with high fructose corn syrup.  Before the mid-1990s, everyone in my homeland of America was doing the same as my Brazilian friends, before our main cereal crops were shifted to the new version...  If you want to call GMO wheat and corn the same plant as corn and wheat – really they are now different species entirely thanks to the genetic modifications introduced to make them more tolerant of the toxic glyphosate chemical weed controller which is made by the same corporation that brought all of the genetically modified seeds used in American industrial scale agriculture.  Farmers use their seeds so they can use their herbicide without killing the plant.  All of this was done with minimal testing and introduced on a grand scale – far more focused in intent than the introduction of kudzu, and using American human beings without their informed consent as a large scale test population.  Insufficient knowledge and foresight brought to bear to ‘solve a problem’ caused by insufficient knowledge and foresight, but this time with huge profits in store for the promulgators.

I’m not actually a person who enjoys argument and debate anymore, but I find myself drawn into them often enough over things that bother me… like gun control.  And like gun control, GMO stirs

1622 Apis mellifica

The year was 1622.  A ship arrives in the New World.  A small sample of organisms were carried with the cargo, with the specific intention of releasing them on the new continent.  Once introduced, they immediately spread across the continent, only stopping briefly at the Rocky Mountains.  (They eventually crossed over to Utah and California in the mid-1800s.) 


Larson's take on invasive species in North America. Not the species I am talking about.

These invasive species pirated resources that the native species had relied on for millennia.  They fought with the natives and quickly destroyed them. More and more, native population levels plummeted, unable to compete with this invasive species. 

And they are still out there today.  They were almost defeated recently, but not quite. In 2007, their population dropped precipitously; a result of a poorly understood combination of chemicals and unintended consequences.  But even this drop was not enough - the numbers have returned, and they are ever increasing.  This scourge of the New World has now infested every corner of the globe.

Like the Asian carp.  Like the zebra mussel.  Like kudzu. And as is the case with all of those other invasives, we need to enact anything necessary to eliminate the threat from this predator species.

Silly?  Yes.  But it really illustrates the problem of the one-size-fits-all solution.  The call to eliminate all invasive species will result in the removal of the water hyacynth, but also the Assateague horses from Maryland beaches (as well as the beautiful feral horses on the Outer Banks.)  It would result in the removal of wheat, and rice, and most species of grass from our shores.  Cows and goats. Our herds of wild elephants.  (OK, I made that one up.) 

And worst of all: barley and hops?  Gone.

We can't let that happen, obviously.

It all comes down to a question of limiting the scope of what we want to change.  My agency has a mission of ecosystem restoration.  But the question always has to be answered: restored to what?  Are we restoring what was there in the 1920s - the period before the swamps were drained to facilitate agriculture?  To the era before white man arrived with an army of new invasive species? Before humans arrived on the continent?

What is our benchmark?

Recently, I have been involved in some pretty contentious discussions with people that I highly respect.  One of those people - Dr. Chris deFrancisco - gets very hot under the collar about GMO issues.  I get hot back - very quickly countering that there is plenty of baby in that bathwater, and that painting with too broad a brush yields indefensible conclusions (he is in favor of keeping barley and hops, for what it is worth).  He reminds me that science does not always result in ethical decisions, especially when there are huge profits involved.  I counter that without the profit motive, there is limited reason for investing in larger, juicier tomatoes. He points to the dangers of unintended consequences.

We have held most of this discussion offline.  We have kept it civil.  We have locked horns on stuff before, and have remained friends for decades now. We are skeptical of each other's viewpoints, but are both reasonable and can be swayed.  We are scientists.   We use rhetoric, but also are able to see the other side. 

So it is with delight that I throw down the gauntlet.  Chris - how about it?  Let's take turns.  I'll open this weekend with a brief piece talking about one side of the GMO debate.  I'll then publish a response piece.