Camino Canon - Flowers

It's that time of year when Santa Fe's Canyon Road, which I continue to think of as my Camino Canon, is rampant bloom from the beginning of the street to its distant terminus. Much of this is due, of course, to the commercial art galleries which over the years have fostered extensive plantings in gardens once modest (or bare) when the camino and its adobe structures were primarily residential. I see many tourists with cameras obviously more interested in photographing flowers than the numerous outdoor sculptures and paintings displayed on exterior walls. They're ostensibly here to view the hyped art, but go figure.

Early this morning on the otherwise deserted street when I emerged from the house to fetch the newspaper, a Japanese man had a tripod set up on our terrace fronting the gallery. Intensly studying a Jackmani clematis stretched tall on a climbing rose, he was for long seconds unaware of me. I watched him click shutter time and time again before we acknowledged each other in greeting. In heavily accented English, he told me he'd spent the past three mornings on the Road, beguiled by early light on profuse bloom, thankful that he'd found what he considered among the best of all photo ops on his tour of the United States. He wanted to know the name of the roses in our terrace and driveway hedges, what the ground cover was (creeping phlox), and if the lilacs did well along a western wall. If I leave studio chores to step outdoors for a few minutes in summertime, I nearly always encounter a flower lover loitering on the property.

When my wife and I moved into this house in 1956, it sat on a lot of bare scorched earth, hardly a weed, and certainly no plants, modifying the stark exterior. One of our first tasks was to enclose the small back field with a wall, create a safe play area for our two small children. That barren yard was bordered on the east side by a low rock, mud plastered wall which provided glimpses into a neighbor's extensive gardens and fields. The neighbor was artist Olive Rush, celebrated for her paintings, and the mistress of an historic adobe home which also served as the Friends' Meeting House. Much pleasure to my wife, children and I was to look over the wall and see the little white-haired old lady lovingly tending plants. Often she worked with local young men obviously familiar with Santa Fe soil, who knew which flora did well here, how best to prune trees, divide perennials. I would stand in my bare expanse of dirt and look admiringly on what was afoot next door. And know how ignorant I was of the skills needed for such a garden.

If Olive had accepted the neglect of property by the previous homeowners, she was quick to notice our feeble attempts to introduce color into our drab landscape. Her gardens required frequent divisions, she said, wouldn't we like to have some sedum, a few iris, violets. She would come to the wall with a handful or have one of her handymen bring a container of them to our door. With each year, there were more. "I must thin the Tears of Job," she would say, "or that rambling Yellow Rose of Texas. You could use them." And so our gardens grew. And grew. Now I give away iris when they need division, have gladly welcomed friends who want clumps of the sedum and violets which have spread widely, find it necessary to remove numerous runners from the Yellow Rose of Texas, hope someone will accept them. Olive is long gone (though her lovely home remains the Friends' Meeting House), but with us in gardens owing much of their conception to her.