Why Dirty Hands Save Our Land

After parking my truck along the curb on a backstreet in Missoula, Montana, I sit and witness a pilgrimage of sorts. My wife had already left on her own personal journey through the tightly packed serpentine aisles of plants placed into a former front yard on Third Street. Yes, there was still a house there, apparently Marchie’s own, but it rests silent in the midst of a dense arrangement of intriguing botany. Inside, there are boxes and papers haphazardly stacked near the windows, some pressed against in a semblance of abandon. It is a house that no longer serves as a living place, but as a storage for things.

In another minute, a middle aged woman pulls up across the street from me (there is no parking lot), and steps out of her 1990s era Subaru. She walks quietly into the apparent chaos of foliage as if venturing into the hallowed halls of library or Catholic Church, joining others making their way through the maze of green.

I step out of my truck to observe, rolling my cowboy boots silently over the black landscape netting fabric that covered the weed-free grounds. I become aware that I am using the same walk that I used when stalking elk.

Besides me, it’s all women at Marchie’s Nursery on this beautiful fall day. My lovely wife appears to be one of the youngest; in her mid-fifties she is at the low end of the typical pilgrim demographic. Occasionally, they talk to each other, motioning toward a particular plant, or waving their hand toward another apparently random aisle. The graying hair of pilgrims is tossed in the breeze that sweeps the foliage to rustling. Cottony clouds scoot across a smokeless (from wildfire) blue sky, and a fragrant and refreshing chill air makes me wonder if that sweater should be worn or left in the truck. The sounds of traffic on busy Third Street inevitably evaporate as I am lost the world of Marchie’s autumnal displays.

As I meander down the twisted aisles, it is clear there is method to the maze. Plants are carefully spaced and grouped according to variety and some other reasons that I do not understand. These aren’t your typical generic plant displays you might find in a Costco or Ace Hardware; they were carefully selected by someone for sheer loveliness and beauty of habit. In addition, they are perfect fits for the environment of the Northern Rockies.

There are myriad flowering plants in shrub and perennial; a display of hardy and drought-tolerant native plants; quince to zone 4; apples and grapes to zone 3. A rating of 3 means that even in the high Pahsimeroi, one could enjoy the beauty of fruit and flower at 5500 feet elevation and the potential for frost any month of the year.

And that is why the pilgrims come. Most of them I surmise were transplants from warmer and moister climes that now lived in these mountain valleys. Some also had to be enlightened natives. They all had in them a need for a green and flowering beauty in their personal world. It was in their genetic material to yearn for such despite the forbidding high altitude environs of the Northern Rockies.

The undulating Basin and Range of the northern mountains was a place where the seemingly unending prairie (that grew easy tomatoes) reared up to frozen tundra covered heights if you were coming from the East. If you migrated from the West Coast, a maritime Pacific flow that brought guaranteed precipitation and humidity abruptly ended in the high desert rain shadow created by the same broad province of this Rocky Mountain uplift.
It’s a tough place to garden. Costco flowers, beautiful in display, quickly succumb to the unrelenting cycles of desert dry and Arctic cold. They are a false promise that disappoints. But at Marchie’s, one could find plants that would grow and thrive, varieties selected by 2 generations of plant lovers.

And so, here in this unimposing little nursery, the informed intently browse through the green inventory. Some come only to look, thinking someday, they’ll have the cash to carry their heart’s desire homeward. My own bride, Caryl, is one of these more often than not. Sure, we always leave with something, but I recognize the look on her visage as we load the few plants: “What if we could afford the oak?”

And she knows, as do I, that the decision of affordance is not limited to satisfying the hunger of Marchie’s cash till. It goes way beyond that. For years we will need to care for that plant’s needs, for even with well adapted plants, it is a battle. Plants will require water that the clouds will rarely yield, and we’ll need to offer permanent and relentless protection from winter winds, wild elk, mule deer, porcupine and badger. It is the cost of living in a wild environment. It could turn Arctic in an afternoon with one Northern wind from the Yukon pipelining down the Rocky Mountain Trench.

She points to today’s trophy. It is on special marked well below retail. It is a John Davis Rose. It is hardy to 40 degrees below zero (Celsius and Fahrenheit scales agree at this one low temperature; it’s the only place where the rest of the world and Americans agree on, and it happens to be bone chilling cold). We get that cold on occasion, but it never lasts. “Could you pick up one of those roses?” she says. There is a row of them, in 5 gallon pots.

I reach for the fullest one, but as I lift it, I find a few yellowing leaves. I pick the next nicest one, and lift it up, like a hockey player lifting the Stanley. A quiet, medium sized gray-haired lady emerges from behind a nearby bush. She wears a fall jacket, a little bit soiled that says “Marchie’s” on it. She smiles, looking up, shifting her bifocals to see what I have. “Oh. A John Davis!” She turns toward Caryl (she knows who to tell). “They are on special this week!”

I bring it over to the till. It’s under an aging fiberglass awning. There are bits of green algae and moss making a living on everything flat in the remnants of soil from years of plants being handled, repotted, transplanted on these benches. I commence to place dollars down on the worn and dirt-polished wood. A tiny paper bag, filled with soft goods, presents itself next to my bills, apparently already packing some secret of plant life that Caryl found to her liking.

 “Are you Marchie?” I ask the jacketed woman.

“Well, no. Marchie was my parents.” She didn’t make it clear if they were collectively Marchie or just one was. No matter.

“Were you raised here?” I nod over at the nearby and obviously unlived-in house.

“Yes. I’m Beverly.” She reaches out her small but calloused and slightly dirty hand. We shake. “My parents are both gone now. I am still working through the things in that house. It might take me the rest of my life.” She smiles sadly, more to herself than me, and begins to handwrite a sales receipt. The way she writes it, in a very precise script, is the way the Marchies had done it before her, I think. Likely unchanged for 60 years.

“I’m Glenn. That’s my wife, Caryl.” I gesture at my still-looking-at-plants bride. She smiles and turns back to the greenery in front of her. “We love this place,” I say, as I look down to count the bills onto the dirt and wood surface. “Thank you for being here.”

“Oh, I recognize you. I’ve seen you both here before. I have many regular returning customers.” She smiles again and counts my change into my open hand.

I wonder how many were like us: pilgrims we were, from the reaches of the austere Mountain West. We were over 4 hours drive from her nursery, but always made it a point to check in when we were in town. Usually we bought things, but occasionally not.
I load John Davis into the truck. He was to share the bed with a few herbs for the windowsill and that mysterious little bag.

“What’s in the bag?” I ask Caryl as I shut the tailgate.

“It’s those.” She points to elegantly blooming fall crocuses in a bed along the sidewalk. I had been walking alongside them; they were all over Marchie’s. I think I didn’t see them because my subconscious derailed my ability to acknowledge them. Crocuses. In Fall. Quite impossible, my brain assumed. But Caryl had seen them.

“They are gold.” She catches my eye. “Beverly told me about them. They multiply, she said. And they thrive in where it is dry; they hardly need water. “They were 6 dollars a bulb. I bought three.” She waits for me to wince (18 bucks for 3 bulbs?), but I’m high-centered on some of her words.

They thrive in the dry.

I never heard of such flower bulbs. But Marchie’s knew. Or Beverly, or both. As we pull away, I marvel at the beauty of the rosy clusters of color, when all else was drying and browning at the end of high summer. It’s a balm for the soul of life in the high desert.

Adaptation. Not by the organisms but by people. People who with a lifetime of learning and observing and studying adapt to their environment and learn to work with it instead of against it.

I see the same thing in some of the older ranchers around here, who have grown up in this country and know it like the back of their hand. And older farmers who know every inch of their fields, not needing precision GPS technology to coax the best yields from every spot. It’s the real crisis in agriculture: that of the aging farmer population and the loss of years of intimacy with the land. The older folks are dying, literally, and the knowledge of the land is dying with them.

And the younger folks, desperately trying to make it in an agriculture now so highly competitive worldwide, are lacking the margin to stop and feel the dirt in their hand. And smell it. And count the worms. And taste their production. In fact, much of their production is not to be tasted. Instead it feeds an industrial juggernaut more intent on converting plants into automobile fuel than food for the table.

But for now, we’ll enjoy places like Marchie’s, where Beverly quietly and contentedly works away, handcrafting plant life that fits the needs of people who care about plants, like my wife. I don’t know what is in store carrying the Marchie’s legacy to the next generation. Perhaps Beverly has this covered.

Caryl and I can relate to her journey and that is probably another reason why we continue to be a part of what Beverly is doing in her small nursery packed into a front yard of an old house on Third Street. We too handcraft a product that is adapted to fit the landscape, and as a result, create wellness, health and happiness for our partners. We have to stand firm against the siren song of bigger and better and faster, and instead try to listen as best we can to the land and to learn from it.

And like Beverly, we have the blessing of “many regular returning customers.”

Happy Trails
Glenn, Caryl, Girls and Cowhands at Alderspring.