Queer by Choice

Barry and I hosted a garden tour!




Back around last November or so, Barry and I signed up to put his house on the Gardens Gone Native Tour, an annual native plant garden tour in the Sacramento area that happens every April. (My own house is too far out in the middle of nowhere to be eligible for the tour.) We had been intending to sign up since the previous spring, and planning to get various garden-improvement projects done over the summer, but the time sneaked up on us as time tends to do. We didn't get much garden-improvement done over the summer. But we signed up for the tour anyway, in November. A woman came out in early December to look at the garden; I wasn't there at the time, but Barry said she was enthusiastic about the plants but recommended that we install more paths for people to walk on and maybe collect a few pictures showing earlier versions of the garden and wildlife seen in the garden. All right, we can get around to that before April, right?

Well, very soon it was March, and I was rather frightened by how much wasn't done. We had bought some pavers in January and February to lay more paths, but I hadn't actually laid all the pavers, because there were plants in the area where the pavers needed to be laid, and I wanted to take the time to transplant the plants elsewhere. Alas, many native annuals do not transplant very well, especially if they're dug up from the ground rather than tapped carefully out of a pot, so my time-consuming efforts at transplanting them were largely wasted. So by early March, I gave up on further transplantation attempts and asked Barry to lay the rest of the pavers without attempting to save any more plants. (I asked Barry to do it because it pained me too much, emotionally, to ruthlessly murder so many plants myself.) I focused my own efforts on frantically pulling a hundred thousand weeds (cheeseweed, chickweed, bur clover, sourgrass, I could go on . . .) and was forced to admit to myself that I couldn't finish that either. There would have to be weeds there on tour day. So as tour day approached, I increasingly focused my weeding on the most visible areas, around paths, and on trying to create a new dirt path or two, in addition to the paver paths. Meanwhile, all the paver paths had vanished under floppy mounds of flowers, and even the formal cement walkway leading to Barry's front door became virtually unwalkable as flowers flopped onto it from both sides. Barry said he figured he could use an electric hedge trimmer to carve out the paths again on the day before the tour. But California poppies and other floppy annual wildflowers are not a hedge; if you trim a bunch of them back, the ones next to those just flop over to replace them. It's very difficult to carve out a path without ruining the look of the place. Rather than using an electric hedge trimmer, I decided to carve out the paths myself during the several days immediately preceding the tour. I removed an incredibly huge volume of plant material that week that wasn't even weeds - it was all very desirable flowers, but there just simply wasn't going to be room for people to walk unless we removed all those flowers. So I gritted my teeth and got it done.

Meanwhile, Barry had his own major preparations to make. He was laser-engraving 150 aluminum signs to label all the plants in the garden! I sent him the information I wanted on each sign and told him how many signs to make for each species, and he made me 150 beautiful aluminum signs like the one you see below. (You can hire him to make some for you too, if you want!)



( Click for more pictures and more story! )

Barry and I spent June 10-13 at Howard Creek Ranch Inn in Westport, California. We also stopped at Jackson Demonstration State Forest on the way there and back, and while there, we made side trips to Jug Handle State Natural Preserve, MacKerricher State Park, Seaside Beach, and Russian Gulch State Park. And now I'm going to show you pictures of all of it!

First, on our drive there on Saturday, we stopped in Jackson Demonstration State Forest. This is the largest of eight demonstration state forests maintained by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which uses them "for experimentation to determine the economic feasibility of artificial reforestation, and to demonstrate the productive and economic possibilities of good forest practices toward maintaining forest crop land in a productive condition." (Source.) We were trying to follow these directions that I had printed out in advance so we could go hiking on the "Chamberlain Creek Trail and Camellia Trail," which turned out when we got there to have yet a third name, the "Waterfall Grove Trail." I'm not sure why one three-mile trail needs three different names. Anyway, I had neglected to alert Barry to put the specific trailhead turnoff into his cellphone to give us directions to the trailhead rather than just to the forest as a whole, so we ended up having to double back for a few miles before we managed to find the turnoff. Then the directions neglected to mention that we needed to drive the last 5.5 miles on poor-quality dirt road, which was not entirely fun in my two-wheel-drive Nissan Sentra. And then when we finally made it, the sign seemed to indicate a different trail than the one we were looking for!



( Click for much more! )

This is my boyfriend with what I have done to his yard. His life used to lack flowers. Now he is completely inundated with flowers.

He does not know yet, as I do, how much the mass of his garden will shrink back down, by June or July, to a tamer and more traditional-looking garden. But there are enough perennials under the mass of annuals that there will still be a decent garden here in summer and winter and fall. It just won't be like this anymore. Until next spring, that is. Each spring we can do this all again.

Like last month, I'm going to cover both his yard and my own yard in this Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day post, because I'm the primary gardener at both. (Almost the only gardener, for most of this year - but lately, Barry has been starting to help me out pretty regularly with the weeding and learning to recognize more and more plants, so I may have to give him a lot more credit next year!)

I'll start with Barry's yard. It turns out that I actually took more photos of his yard than I did of my own yard this month. I can't get enough of it lately.



( Click for tons more! )

It's time again for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day! I haven't participated for nearly a full year . . . the last time I managed a Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day post was in April 2016. After that, posting about the beautiful new boyfriend I acquired early that April took precedence over posting about the plants I was acquiring. But the plants have also been beautiful, and I've planted about half of them at the beautiful new boyfriend's house, so today I bring you Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day from both our houses.

I have a backlog of garden from the past 11 months that I haven't posted yet, and in the past, whenever I've missed a few months of Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, I've included my backlogged photos in the new month's post. This time, though, I've missed more consecutive months than ever before, and I simply can't possibly catch up with the backlog. Instead, for now I'm just going to try to keep up with the current blooms. Maybe when the current bloom season winds down, I might have time to go through the backlog and post some 2016 photos in the appropriate months of 2017 (June photos in June, July photos in July, and so on).

I will post about Barry's house first. And for this first picture, I do have a couple of comparisons from earlier in the year!

Here is my beautiful boyfriend's front yard, as of a few days ago. In the lower right, you can see the "Native Plants live here!" sign I received during the Fall 2016 California Native Plant Society sales. They were selling these signs but also giving them away to people who spent a certain minimum amount of money on plants. I always spend a lot of money on plants at these sales, so I got a free sign. I may get another one this spring or next fall for my own house. I gave the first one to Barry because his front yard is more nearly pure native than mine. It is all California native, and almost all locally native, except for two crepe myrtles (Lagerstroemia indica) and a Chinese pistache (Pistacia chinensis), which were the only plants in the front yard when I first went to Barry's house. The crepe myrtles (located on either side of the driveway, not visible from this angle) were planted by previous homeowners, coppiced (chopped down to ground level) before Barry bought the house, and covered with lawn. They resprouted after Barry bought the house and are now chest-high shrubs. I might try to kill them in the future. The Chinese pistache tree (visible below, currently leafless) was chosen by Barry and planted before he met me, and I plan to leave it alone, because it is a reasonably well-behaved and ornamental tree that is plausibly more marketable than a lot of the native options - and besides, if I tried to replace it now, it would take some years for a replacement to achieve comparable size (not that this tree is very big yet, but it is not fresh out of a pot, either) - so leaving it there could be a meaningful selling point for the house.

The plants currently blooming in Barry's yard are baby blue eyes (Nemophila menziesii), the only flowers you can see in this picture; Cedros Island vervain (Verbena lilacina 'De La Mina'), behind the Chinese pistache; cream cups (Platystemon californicus), on the other side of the driveway; and California buttercups (Ranunculus californicus), in the back yard. Well, and the deergrass (Muhlenbergia rigens) in the foreground of this picture. Also present in abundance, but not blooming yet, are Douglas' meadowfoam (Limnanthes douglasii), white meadowfoam (Limnanthes alba), California poppies (Eschscholzia californica), bird's eyes (Gilia tricolor), blue globe gilyflower (Gilia capitata), mountain garland (Clarkia unguiculata), and farewell-to-spring (Clarkia amoena). There's also plenty of other stuff that's less abundant, but those species are the ones I expect to make the biggest showing in the next few months. The Douglas' meadowfoam and California poppies at my house have already started blooming, but the ones at Barry's house were seeded later in the season because I was trying to beat back the weeds to make room for them, so their bloom season is being delayed due to their delayed planting time. Otherwise, they should start blooming sooner at Barry's house, because it is (as the crow flies) nearly 35 miles south of mine, and bloom season moves progressively northward over the course of the spring. None of the baby blue eyes at my own house have started blooming yet, but the ones at Barry's house are at peak bloom now.



( Click for more! )

On Sunday my wonderful boyfriend and I went to Lake Berryessa. I don't remember ever having been to Lake Berryessa before, and it seems ridiculous for me not to have been there before, because I've always lived within a 1.5-hour drive of it, all my life, and for much of my life I lived within a 1-hour drive of it, and it's a pretty big and readily accessible lake to just randomly never go to. But now I've been to it. It was Barry's first visit there also, but his previous neglect of the place was more excusable than mine since he grew up in Arizona and only gradually worked his way north from there toward this end of the state.

I researched the trail options the night before the hike and quickly settled on two: the Smittle Creek trail, which is a fairly flat, 5-mile round-trip, out-and-back trail between Oak Shores Day Use Area and Smittle Creek Day Use Area, and the Stebbins Cold Canyon trail, which is a rather steep, 4-mile loop trail at the far southeast end of the lake (the nearest end to us). I decided on the Stebbins Cold Canyon trail, because it was nearer to us. However, when we arrived, we found that the trail was closed, shut off behind a chain-link fence for repairs.

So we decided to look for the Smittle Creek trail instead. However, we were already out of range of cellphone signals, and we remained out of range for the rest of the drive, so Barry's cellphone would not give us directions. What it did do was show where we were going (using GPS) and where our intended destination was. It just didn't tell us where any of the streets were between us and our intended destination. But we set out to find our own way, using tried-and-true methods such as "Look for a right turn somewhere. If you see a right turn, take it." Barry was driving, and I was watching our GPS dot move around on his cellphone. Eventually we found the correct turnoff - actually, we found our way all the way from Stebbins Cold Canyon trail to Smittle Creek trail without taking a single wrong turn at any point, and with no particular stress at all over getting lost. Barry even said he likes getting a little lost now and then. This is a very desirable attitude to have when lost. I feel that I have now confirmed that Barry is a good person to get lost with.

This is a basic view of the lake from along the trail, before I get into the chronology of the pictures I took.



( Click for more pictures. )

Spring may be more than a month away by our human calendars, but my plants have already begun their celebration of its arrival. Daffodils everywhere! Even several of my shrubs are blooming. And the first of my California native annuals! I have far more to show you for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day this month than last month.

This is in my front yard. The blue flowers are a non-native hybrid larkspur (Delphinium belladonna 'Bellamosum') that I'm trying out this year for the first time, and the yellow daffodils in the background came with the house.



( Click for more pictures! )

My garden has been less than spectacular this summer. I skipped July Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day because I had so little to show, and I have equally little to show this month. But at least now I have a backlog of pictures from July to add to the ones from August, and I guess it adds up to enough to merit making a post.

The big excitement in August has been that my tiny pomegranate tree (Punica granatum 'Wonderful') is blooming for the very first time ever. This "tree" is about three years old but still only about one foot tall. I was surprised to find a flower bud on it.




That bud has now turned into the flower you see below.




( A few more flowers. )

I went camping! Alone except for Boston. I'd never been camping without another human being before, but I was tired of waiting for an acceptable other human being to agree to join me, so I decided to go it alone. It was fairly successful!



When I was trying to pick a place to camp, I fairly quickly narrowed the choices to two places: Silver Lake Campground in Plumas National Forest and Camino Cove Campground in El Dorado National Forest. (They are both small, free campgrounds with no running water.) Then the area near Camino Cove caught on fire, forcing the closure of the nearby highway, so that settled my decision in favor of Silver Lake.

I left home Saturday evening and returned Tuesday evening. I had originally hoped to leave Friday evening, but I knew this was a long shot that depended heavily upon my being able to finish all my packing and preparations during the work week. There are some weeks when I can get a fair amount done on short breaks in the middle of my workday and in the evenings, but on this particular week, the work I was doing required intense concentration to a degree that made it very difficult to switch back and forth between work and camping preparation tasks. No matter: I'd taken Monday and Tuesday off work, so leaving on Saturday evening still allowed me enough time to camp for three nights.

There are two main routes of traveling from here to there. The larger, more traveled route is Highway 70, which follows the north fork of the Feather River for the majority of the distance between here and there, and therefore offers spectacular views of the river and the rocky cliffs sloping down to it on each side. The smaller, less traveled, and slightly shorter route is Highway 162, which offers the compensatory advantage of traveling through dense forest for the majority of the distance between here and there, and also allows you to travel for miles and miles without ever seeing a single other car. Basically, both highways are spectacularly scenic, but on Highway 162 you're enclosed and shaded by tall trees all around you to the point that you can hardly see any sky, whereas on Highway 70 the view is mostly of rocks and water and is more open to the sky, less closed in by trees. I took the forest route on my way there and the river route on my way back. I liked the fact that the forest route made me feel that I'd already arrived in wilderness extremely quickly after leaving my house.

The California Camping book I consulted when choosing a campground sometimes notes the poor quality of roads to and from campgrounds, but it failed to warn me that the last seven miles of the route to this one were on a dirt and gravel road carved into the side of a steep cliff, with no guardrails. I actually quite like driving on winding mountain roads carved into the sides of cliffs - the quality of concentration required for it is pleasingly meditative - but I could have done without combining this with a dirt and gravel road. My little Nissan Sentra does not have four-wheel drive, but I felt a need to put it all the way into first gear to try to get a decent grip on the road. Also, I happened to be arriving at the exact time of the evening when the angle of the sun lights up every speck of dirt on the windshield to the point of turning the entire windshield opaque - because dirt roads do not waste any time getting car windshields dirty - so I had to drive the road practically blind. I came to a complete stop very regularly while straining to figure out where the road in front of me was located and where the sheer cliffs without any guardrails were located.

But I survived! ( And I have lots of pictures! )

I made a firm decision to get out of the house this holiday weekend, picked a place or two to go to, started packing, and then discovered that the hydration reservoir on my hiking backpack has broken irreparably (an important piece of plastic broke off). Since I live in the middle of nowhere, traveling to buy a new one before the weekend is over would mean traveling significantly in the opposite direction from wilderness, which would cut into my wilderness time quite inconveniently.

However, I adapted to this news by deciding to swim rather than hike. I drove today to a swimming hole on Dry Creek in Spenceville State Wildlife Area, the same place I went last year and various previous years. First, though, I thoroughly sunscreened the entry hall of my house. Can someone please invent a sunscreen for single people that can be easily sprayed onto hard-to-reach spots on one's back? I have a spray-on sunscreen that I thought would do the trick, but the sprayer is awkward to grip, and becomes all the more so once my fingers are slippery from sunscreen; I found that I needed two hands to make it spray, and the need to use two hands really interfered with my ability to aim it. The result was that it took me twenty minutes to apply sunscreen to myself, and by the end of it, I had also applied large quantities of sunscreen to the mirror, the tile floor, an area rug, the wall-to-wall carpeting, a potted plant, my front door, and a chair. Then it took me fifteen more minutes to clean up the mess. I guess my entry hall will not get sunburned anytime soon. The good news is that I also do not seem to have gotten sunburned, so it seems I managed not to miss any spots.

The drive is 45 minutes long, of which the last 13 minutes or so are on a rough gravel road that it feels somewhat foolhardy of me to take on in my eleven-year-old Nissan Sentra without the benefit of four-wheel-drive. I take some comfort, however, from the fact that even if I lost control of the car, there's really not much I could possibly crash into. As long as I could manage to miss the occasional oak tree, it's just miles of dead annual grasses. Anyway, I did not lose control of the car, so it wasn't an issue. I arrived safely. And I always forget how beautiful this place is! I never feel that I can safely bring my camera with me, because my camera is expensive and came with warnings that I should not leave it sitting in a hot car because parts of it might melt. And if I didn't leave it sitting in a hot car I'd have to leave it unguarded on the bank of the creek, where it might fall into the water or get stolen or, again, simply melt in the heat. So I leave it at home. But this means I can't properly show you how beautiful the place is. I will just have to describe it for you as best I can.

The first glimpse that always gets to me is the sight of the deergrasses lining the entire bank of the creek: huge, fluffy, bright green grasses, native grasses that I grow at home in my garden, but they're a brighter green when growing on the bank of a creek. Seeing them lining the entire bank of the creek makes me think I've wandered into one of those Dr. Seuss books in which characters are transported to strange landscapes full of billowing pillows everywhere.

I always enter the creek at the first place I come to, directly under the bridge that I park next to. For some reason, no one else ever enters the creek here. Everyone else walks downstream to a wider spot in the creek, where the water is a bit deeper and there's a rope swing that many people jump from. But at the spot where I enter, the water is deep enough that my feet occasionally can't touch the bottom, and even when they can touch the bottom, I can choose not to let them and swim up and down the creek for a bit farther than the length of most backyard swimming pools. I descended the bank, which was dotted here and there with California poppies, and hung my car keys on a dead tree branch, and placed my sunscreen at the foot of the tree; I'd locked all my belongings in my car except for these. Then I walked into the water. The water was not particularly cold; in fact, in a few places it was shockingly warm, to the point that I could have sworn it was heated. It wasn't that warm where I first got in, but it wasn't cold enough to be at all difficult to get used to. Immediately I saw fish swimming around me, fish about the length of my hand, greyish in color but with white outlines around the edges of their fins. They were shaped like sunfish, but I don't know what species they were. There were two of them; they seemed to stay in a very small area in the shade of the bridge at all times, because whenever I looked for them, they were always still there. Above me, the underside of the bridge was covered with cliff swallow nests, and I could see a few cliff swallows poking their heads out of their nests to look at me. All the birds I saw seemed less afraid of letting me come close to them than birds usually are; I had the impression that when I was submerged in water except for my head, the birds perceived me as a much smaller creature, only the size of my head. In addition to the cliff swallows, I saw several dark-eyed juncos and some house finches. I also saw dragonflies and damselflies galore, and quite a number of monarch and swallowtail butterflies visiting the buttonbushes blooming along the creek. I also saw a Pacific tree frog sunning itself on a leaf. And I glimpsed a lizard between some rocks, though I didn't get a good enough look at it to be able to identify it.

Eventually I made my way downstream, wading in the creek, toward the wider and deeper spot in the creek where everyone else always congregates. It would be much quicker and easier to get out of the creek and walk on the bank; the creek bottom is uneven and painful to walk on in thin-soled water shoes, and I always fall down a few times. But it always feels like more of an adventure to wade in the creek than to walk on the bank, and anyway, I'm pretty sure that walking on uneven rocks is good for strengthening the arches of my feet, which is considered important for preventing plantar fasciitis, which I've had quite enough of in the past and would not like to encounter again. So I wade in the creek. Much of the distance from the place I enter to the larger swimming hole is too shallow to actually swim in, so I have no choice but to wade. Along the way, I help myself to the invasive Himalayan blackberries, which have crowded out the native Pacific blackberries that ought to be there, and I admire the remaining native plants: field mint, mugwort, rosillas, ragweed, common horsetail, California grape, white alders. I've grown most of these in my garden - everything but the ragweed (too ugly and weedy), the horsetail (too impossible to control), and the alders (water-guzzling trees that I don't want to allocate adequate space and water to). There's something amazing about seeing a wilderness area in which nearly all the plants present are the same plants I'm growing at home.

Eventually I emerged through some minor rapids into the main swimming hole. I stayed and swam around there for a while, but the rope swing had been commandeered today by a group of teenage boys and young men probably in their early twenties who had very little sense of caution; they were riding the swing two or even three at a time, trying to do simultaneous backflips within inches of one another, and this made me increasingly uncomfortable. I felt that by increasing the size of their audience I might be partly responsible if one of them got maimed for life, so I decided not to stay there any longer; I crossed to the opposite side of the swimming hole and continued to follow the creek further downstream until I reached an impassible barrier: at a particularly shallow spot in the creek, all manner of large branches and small twigs had piled up across the full width of a creek. It looked like a beaver dam at first, but on closer inspection I wasn't so sure; perhaps the current had piled eeverything up on its own. Anyway, there was no good way to get out of the water there and go around the barrier, so instead I turned around, waded back to and through the main swimming hole, and returned to my original spot under the bridge until the sun set.

On the gravel road in and out, I noticed signs for Camp Far West Lake, which reminded me that I've never been there yet. I'm resolving that next time I go swimming, that's where I'll go.

On Saturday I drove to Oakland because a native plant nursery that I'd never been to before, but that I had long aspired to go to, was having a sale. My hopes for this nursery were sky high: its website gave me the impression that it carried hundreds of species that no other nursery in the state carried, and on top of that, its owner is a Facebook friend of mine and a frequent contributor to various online discussion forums that I read regularly, and, well, he consistently impressed me on all sorts of different levels. You might say he was a gardening idol of mine. So I was very excited to finally visit his nursery.

Most native plant nurseries have lists on their websites of what plants they have in stock. These lists, in my experience, are usually years out of date and bear no relation to what they actually have in stock. In this case, though, the owner specifically stated that he'd updated the list last week. Also, the list included a feature I don't usually see on such lists: an indication of exactly where in the nursery each plant species was located. I was impressed by the thoroughness. I downloaded the list, deleted all the plants I wasn't interested in, sorted what remained by location within the nursery, and felt brilliantly prepared to march in and locate exactly what I wanted.

The visit did not go quite as well as I'd hoped.

The first thing that happened, almost the first moment that I arrived, was that a sudden ripping noise alerted me that a rusty wire protruding from a post had torn a four-inch gash in the skirt I was wearing, around mid-thigh level. You know how it feels to be excitedly looking forward to an extremely fun outing and then realize you're going to spend the whole time embarrassed by some unexpected problem with your appearance? That happened. The rip was on my left side, and a bit too low down to be covered by my purse, but I switched my purse to my left shoulder anyway and pretended to be left-handed for a while, just because putting my purse there blocked the rip from my own line of sight, even though it didn't block it from other people's. It is awkward, though, pretending to be left-handed when you're actually not. Especially when bending down over plants a lot, when purses tend to swing around and you need to use your hand to keep them under control. Really, perhaps I should just take to carrying a few safety pins with me at all times in case of wardrobe malfunctions. It might at least somewhat reduce the feeling of awkwardness.

Having driven two hours to get there, though, I certainly wasn't going to turn around and go home without doing my plant shopping. So I forged onward. Where was the first plant on my list? No sign of it. Where was the second plant on my list? No sign of it either. More to the point, there were hardly any signs of any plants. This was a nursery full of thousands and thousands of plants, but only about 1% of the plants in the nursery had any labels to tell you which species they were.

Okay. Deep breath. This particular problem was not a problem I had ever encountered at a nursery before, nor even imagined ever encountering at a nursery. But surely there must be some way around it. How do they sell any plants at all here? Well, at least I did have the list of where each plant was supposed to be. Unfortunately the locations given on the list only narrowed it down to something like "This plant must be one of the 300 plants in this row," and only about 3 of those 300 plants had any labels, but still it was something to go on. I had a decent idea of what most of the plants I was looking for should look like, either because I'd owned or seen them before or because I'd owned or seen other plants in the same genus, or at least in the same plant family, so I could take a guess about which plants might possibly be the ones I was looking for. A lot of the plants I was looking for were plainly not there at all; presumably someone else had bought them during the past week. But others I was able to locate. Often if I could pick out a group of 50 pots that were all obviously the same species as one another and that looked as if they might possibly be the species I was looking for, I could eventually find a plant label in one of those 50 pots. Unfortunately many of these labels were obviously wrong (no, this fern is not a redwood tree, and no plant label claiming it's a redwood tree will ever convince me that it is), and a vast number of other labels were simply blank. It was maddening. And a few plants sometimes turned up in different locations than where the list said they would be! Argh.

I perservered. I came to see it as a test of my plant identification skills. Other customers resorted to simply grabbing a nursery employee and telling that person which plants they wanted, and getting the nursery employee to go retrieve the plants for them. But those customers were generally buying 5 or fewer plants. I was buying . . . well, I ended up with 28 plants, but the list of plants I was trying to find was a lot longer than the list of plants I actually succeeded in finding and buying. It wouldn't have felt reasonable to me to make a nursery employee spend an hour looking for a hundred different plants for me. So I did my best on my own. Mostly I did okay. A few times I resorted to asking for help. Once I asked the nursery owner, "Is this Sidalcea calycosa?" Yes, it was. Another time I asked two employees, "Which of the grasses in this row is Poa secunda?" (There were about 15 different species of grass in that row, and in most of them, none of the pots had any labels.) The two employees looked at each other blankly and resorted to Googling for pictures of Poa secunda on their cellphones to try to figure it out. Eventually they took a guess and brought their guess to the nursery owner for confirmation. Was this Poa secunda? No, it was Festuca idahoensis. Poa secunda was somewhere on the other side of the nursery entirely, not in the location where the list said it would be. The employees retrieved it for me.

It was abundantly clear that the nursery owner knew instantly exactly what every plant was and had no need for plant labels. It was equally clear that nobody else was anywhere near as skilled at identifying things. One of the drawbacks to being brilliant is that one may have difficulty comprehending how much less knowledgeable other people are and properly accommodating other people's limitations. The nursery owner is brilliant with plants but less brilliant at understanding how hard it is for other people to navigate a nursery without any plant labels. I will forgive him his failings, because I like him, but I'd probably have bought more of his plants if I'd been able to find them. I decided that a lot of them weren't important enough to bother asking someone to find them for me if I couldn't find them myself.

Also I was convinced I'd already spent a ridiculous amount of money, although it actually turned out that I'd spent less than half of what I thought I had. The plants were cheaper here than plants normally are. He could probably charge more money for his plants if he bothered to label them.

As I shopped, a nursery employee who spoke Spanish almost exclusively (there was clearly no sense in torturing him by trying to ask him to identify plants for me, even if the actual plant names were in Latin rather than English) fairly unobtrusively but fairly dedicatedly followed me around for an hour, taking plants out of my hands over and over and carrying them all to a table for me, since there weren't any shopping carts. Then the nursery owner came to the table where my plants were grouped and tallied the plants for me, and gave me tips on how to take care of some of them, and commented on what unusual plants I'd chosen. Yes, that's because I already owned the more usual ones and only bothered driving to Oakland to find the less usual ones. One of the employees who had helped me locate Poa secunda told the nursery owner, "She really knows her plants. She did all that shopping almost entirely by herself!" That's right, but I would have done more shopping if it hadn't been ridiculously difficult.

While tallying my plants, the nursery owner noticed that one of my plants was not what the label claimed it was, and exchanged it for me for the plant I actually wanted. (I wanted Viola glabella and mistakenly picked up a pot of Viola adunca that had been mislabeled as Viola glabella. It wasn't in bloom, so I couldn't tell that the flowers were the wrong color, and I'd never seen Viola glabella before.) After I got home, I realized that another of my plants was also not the one I actually wanted. I had wanted "goldenfleece" (Ericameria arborescens, pictured here), which is native around here, but I ended up with "goldenbush" (Isocoma menziesii, pictured here bearing ridiculously close resemblance to goldenfleece), which is native only within about 100 yards of the Pacific Ocean. The goldenbush probably will not survive here. I did not intend to drag it to a terribly ill-suited location and slowly torture it to death. But this is what happens when a nursery has no plant labels.

The Spanish-speaking employee helped me carry my plants to my car. I had parallel parked, which was probably only about the fourth or fifth time in my life I've ever needed this skill, and was blocked in, and I was proud of myself when I managed to escape from the parking spot successfully. (Though it was easier than it could have been; I had more maneuvering room than is sometimes available.)

Then I went home. Along the way, I took a slight detour through Sacramento, where I saw the cutest gay male couple ever to exist, walking down the street holding hands in front of the state capitol. When they paused to wait for a street light to change so they could cross the street, one of them kissed the other, and I may possibly have died of the cuteness. But if so, I was miraculously resurrected and continued driving home.

On Sunday I planted 11 plants. Only 17 left to go!