Not today!
Actually, yeah.
Today.
Let’s do it.
Years ago I arrived to do a consult for an eccentric artist lady on an overgrown lot with a cowering little house. She looked surprised when I arrived, because, she told me, she’d emailed (a few minutes ago) to tell me she was out of money and couldn’t afford a garden consultation. I stayed anyway for a few minutes to visit with this odd and interesting gal.
Some years later, I literally don’t recognize the property I’m on. I don’t remember Andrea at first, until my new clients who bought a run-down house, empty for a year or more after its owner had died, tell me about the history of the place. They are taking out anything overgrown or dead or poorly-made, and lovingly preserve anything of merit.
Instead of the financially wise choice of bulldozing this cracked little farmhouse, The Fords re-used old timbers, added insulation, a foundation, replaced single-pane glass in their wooden mulleins, used traditional wood preservatives that must be painted on while warm… they poured love into the place. And they let me design and plant a wild garden around it that morphs from a face of typical mini orchard to a back wild meadow that overlooks the river, its animals, and the nuanced city of Grand Junction.
In the dead middle of the most barren stage of landscape work, when everything was gravel and dust, I spotted a plant. I half recognized the species, and couldn’t even remember the most popular common name, but oddly remembered a lesser one, which happened to describe this individual, lone, doomed, tiny, fragile thing: “Unicorn plant.” One of the client owners put a little ring of rocks around it to try to keep it from getting stepped on by any number of us in work boots. I don’t think this tiny annual plant quite managed to make a seed before frost that year, sadly.
I used a special method to prevent weeds in the meadow, it keeps the immeasurable seed bank from expressing itself. It prevents all but the largest weed seeds from growing.
And guess what grew through. A couple plants from what happen to be relatively large seeds. The common Devil’s claw, or Proboscidea louisianica. There are several species in North America. There are relatives in Africa. This was the one you’d typically find in the plains of the US. There is another species, P. parviflora, which is common in Utah, the canyonlands, et cetera, native to the interior Southwest. The closest to here I’ve seen them was in Cisco when it was still a ghost-town. Native folks have various uses for them, one being for a nice weave-able filament to add black in otherwise bright yucca-fiber baskets. The natives selected strains that have twice the “hooks” on each pod. It’s probably no accident, looking at the pods, that these plants share a scientific name with elephants.
I like to think that the seed pods were a curio that the late artist Andrea kept. I liked to think of these plants as a ghost of Andrea. The clients and I delighted in the surprise and mystique of the return of the unicorns. Leafy, luxurious velvet leaves support decadent, even silly, big-lipped flowers which emit an earthy cologne. We gathered seed, enjoyed the strange pods which look surely to have been designed by H. R. Geiger. I showed one to my neighbor and she literally took a step back in alarm like it was going to try to bite her with jaws from within jaws. We gave these imaginative natural sculptures to friends, and shared the mystery.
This is how I fell in love with devil’s claw. I greedily collected ten times as much seed as I’d ever use. I shared packets of seed to everyone. I planted them straight in the ground and in pots in the greenhouse to make sure I had some at home. These did poorly and mostly failed from obvious or not obvious causes, but where the pods had merely sat temporarily in my garden - that’s where they all came up like an angry, sweaty, forest, on their own. After the fall frost finally wilted the plants I harvested every pod because I’d read that native folk store these grabby pods in a ball to tame their wildness - they truly are evolved to grab an antelope’s ankle and take a long ride. I wanted to make such a sphere of these pods, too, just to see it.
Some three years into my love affair with them, I felt like I knew them well. I wanted to grow them from different seed sources, different species, just for fun. I even ordered packets of five seeds from ebay wanting to grow different flavors of them, (But always sadly growing these up to find them to be the typical sort. You don't have to be a botanist to sell seed.)
But a successful find of them in a different state, the pods were much smaller, the strange dry, membranous intersticial appendages being more developed, like so much grey ink frozen in mid-splash in the air. A scarce find for me, and not having many pods, I used pruners to cut into the pods to extract as many seeds as possible so that none were discarded with the pod. By cutting them this time, I found their secret. What is obvious is that a pod splits down the middle, releasing seed from between the two snarling halves of the pod. But what I hadn’t seen until using sharp pruners, is that each side of the pod encases a reserve chamber of seeds that is actually more populated than the main chamber. These seeds are so tightly held in the envelope of the woody seedpod case that the pod seems solid. I presume that many rainstorms, a fire, or years of corrosive desert sand grains are needed to chew through the pod to finally release this clutch of fighters-for-life so that they may emerge and flourish lushly in sandy arroyos. Respect. What patience.
I’m not sure I’ve met a plant with such a bipolar disparity between the girly charm of the painted flower and the demonic art of the dried fruit. It truly has its own spirit- decides where it wants to grow, and has its own strange dance to dance. And it seems to do it like a cat- without caring if anyone is watching or cares. Maybe I am hoping to learn from it- the joyful indifference of the devil’s claw.
A video of the Ford Garden featuring a shipping-container B'nB
made by a friend of theirs:
