Narciso's Drunken Garden

I've been obsessed with Narciso's drunken garden ever since I discovered it while reading aloud to my English class. Our school, not in the urban barrio exactly, but barrio adjacent, is set in the midst of concrete and blacktop. Helicopters fly overhead often enough that we don't really hear them anymore. Our part of the city is starved for green. It exists in astroturf and paint and precious spots, all-to-small spots where ground cover jasmine is allowed to grow. The day I first read Narciso's garden to my class, construction was happening at the school; jackhammers were tearing up the access road that ran behind our building and there was a constant din of roofing hammers as men nailed down asphalt shingles right above us. By the time Cico and Tony reached Narciso's garden, I was shouting to be heard over the din; my teenaged students were gigging uncomfortably as both my frustration and my determination to continue the lesson rose. I stopped short and dialed the main office on my room phone; someone must have said hello on the other end but the noise was so cacophonous I couldn't hear it. "I. CAN'T. TEACH. LIKE THIS!" I shouted furiously into the phone, held the receiver out the door, where a construction worker helpfully bit his jackhammer into a particularly stubborn chunk of rock in a fantastic explosion of sound. Over it all was the ping ping ping of the metal hammers on the roof and the sounds of the men shouting instructions to each other. I noticed the line had gone dead in my hand and came back into the classroom to redial but before I could, the noise outside stopped. The silence assaulted our ears with a shock like a cymbal crash. My students were all sitting up absolutely straight and wide-eyed. There was perfect quiet in the room. With shaking hands I closed the door and redialed the office. "Thank you." My voice was hoarse from shouting. "Certainly." The school secretary's crisp voice sounded strange, distorted after so much noise. I replaced the phone on its hook, turned back to my class, and opened to page 110.

"We drew closer and peered through the dense curtain of green which surrounded the small adobe hut. I could not take my eyes from the garden. Every kind of fruit and vegetable I knew seemed to grow in the garden. Even the air was sweet to smell. I was bewildered. Everywhere I looked there were fruit-laden trees and rows and rows of vegetables. The ground was soft to walk on. The fragrance of the sun-dazzling flowers was deep, and soft, and beautiful. He pulled some carrots from the soft, dark earth and we sat down to eat. I had never eaten anything sweeter or juicier in my life. 'In the spring, Narciso gets drunk. He stays drunk until the bad blood of spring is washed away. Then the moon of planting comes over the elm trees and shines on the horde of last year's seeds--It is then that he gathers the seeds and plants. He dances as he plants, and he sings. He scatters the seeds by moonlight, and they fall and grow--The garden is like Narciso. It is drunk.'"--Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

My students were silent. No heads were laid on arms on their desks. Some were sitting back, hands wrapped behind their heads, in a posture of relaxation. Some had their eyes closed, with half smiles across their faces. They were happy, thinking of it, and at the same time sad. I could see some of them were thinking about how they had never seen a place that could be described in that way: abundance. In the silence it bloomed, that green place, that place where carrots could be pulled out of the ground and not out of plastic bags, where a root could be juicy, where something could be eaten straight from the soil. In that place, "drunk" wasn't something hard and cold and sick; it could mean dancing and music and spilling over with life. For just one moment the scent of pouring tar from outside faded and I could taste it, that cool, sweet, fragrant air; and I could see that my teenagers, hoodied and tired, jaded and disillusioned already at 15, surrounded by the sensory grime of the city, could taste it too, and were revived, if only for an instant.

It haunts me, that garden. It's a magic place.

See, what Narciso inherently knew is no different from the legend of the Three Sisters planting that Native Americans were supposed to have used in their farming--some plants can inspire each other to greatness. The Three Sisters planting method uses mounds of earth in which are planted a kernel of corn, a squash seed, and a bean. The corn provides a natural pole for the beans to climb; the beans stabilize the corn stalks and fix nitrogen into the soil with their roots; and the shallow rooted squash provides a natural mulch with their huge leaves that shade weeds from growing and keeps the water in the soil from evaporating. At the end of the season the husks, squash vines and leaves, and bean plants can be turned back into the soil to build up the organic structure leaving you, miraculously, with better soil than you started with.

I started companion planting this year in an effort to capture the magic. I had already tried planting garlic cloves at the roots of my rose plants to great effect--I haven't had a single aphid since, and to my surprise, even though I just used old, sprouting cloves from my crisper drawer, the garlic sprouted and formed new bulbs, giving me an inexhaustible supply of super pungent "spring" or "new" garlic, like bulbous green onions and even more flavorful. Encouraged by my success, I turned to my books (The Complete Guide to Companion Planting; Carrots Love Tomatoes; and Groundbreaking Food Gardens) for inspiration and set out to make sure that every thing I planted this year had a friend in the garden.

Blue-purple borage plants attract bees.
Healthy strawberry plants set runners
alongside chocolate mint, that creeps
throughout. 

Having struggled with slugs getting into my strawberry beds I arranged the new bare root plants around a central chocolate mint plant (any mint will do, I just happen to like the complex scent of the chocolate mint in the air and in my tea). Slugs supposedly hate the smell of mint, so I had the option to either mulch with the mint leaves or plant the mint in the bed directly. One of the main problems with mint is its abundant runners, but I decided to try an experiment and see whether I could train the runners where I wanted them to go (between the new strawberry plants) and by cutting it back when it got out of hand, keep it under control. The mint did grow like gangbusters; but by pulling up its runners and setting them between the strawberry plants (and out of the way of the new strawberry plant runners as they emerged), and regular cutting for tea and bouquets in the house (I really liked the freshness of a handful of rough mint stems and leaves in a jelly jar in each bathroom), so far the mint hasn't overwhelmed the strawberries. For pollination, I planted borage seeds in each corner of the bed and along the midsection of each side, as borage is supposed to be a huge bee attractor. I was not expecting the enormous three foot high plants with their amazonian leaves (like nettle-textured lettuce leaves but the size of my arm!) to come exploding into my strawberry beds! The bees definitely go crazy for the star-shaped bright blue flowers--at any time of the day, despite the dearth of bees in California in general, I can always find bees working the borage flowers--but their huge leaves were crowding out my strawberries. I was able to transplant several of the mature plants to other beds successfully, though the seed packet doesn't recommend transplantation, and the rest I thinned out a few handfuls of leaves at a time, feeding the succulent leaves to my chickens and putting them down as a mulch for weeds. No slugs, lots of bees, and a very healthy strawberry bed.

A lot of borage. Probably too much borage. An embarrassment.  Of borage.

A blue borage flower pokes into the tomatillo
vines, which are already setting round,
husked fruit. Hot Serrano peppers,
with white flowers and dark green fruit
like tiny eggplants, mingle with grassy
stalks from Walla Walla onions. Roma tomato
vines bear delicate yellow flowers, hiding
fat pear-shaped fruits under the leaves. Basil
sprouts straight up from amid the cacophony.

I turned to my tomato beds. One of the biggest mistakes I made in bad companions was in my early years of mainly tomato and strawberry gardening, by placing them together. Tomatoes and strawberries are susceptible to verticillium, a soil-bourne fungal disease that can stay in the soil for as long as five years; so they should never be planted where either has grown within that time frame. Once I straightened myself and my garden out, separating the tomato plants from the strawberries, I also moved them into all of the other beds, to keep the aphids from descending upon them. I had used marigolds the year before to some success but this year I decided to add nasturtiums, a "trap" plant that attracts the aphids and can be uprooted and discarded when it becomes infested, keeping the aphid colonies away from the precious tomatoes. Basil went into the center of the beds where the tomatoes were, supposedly improving the growth and the flavor of the tomatoes while benefitting from the tomatoes with more flavorful leaves itself, as well as repelling flies and mosquitoes. Borage went into the corners of these beds too, a deterrent to tomato worms, and said to also improve the tomatoes flavor and growth. The bee activity from the borage also means that my tomatoes are fruiting months earlier than I've ever seen them; typically I have a very late crop, and in past years I've had no crop at all unless I shake the vines to pollinate the flowers. Onions tucked in between the plants fight disease. Bush beans in some of the tomato beds were a good succession planting crop: they fixed nitrogen into the soil and by the time the beans were done for the season and uprooted for mulch, the tomatoes were just starting to spread out into the spaces they left behind.

"Alaska Mix" nasturtiums, poppy red, climb up the outside
of roma tomato cages while Walla Walla onions send up
strong grassy stalks in the corners of the bed. "Spookie"
pumpkins vine around the beds, shading the soil and keeping
moisture in. 

I put marigolds around my apple and cherry trees and the aphids magically disappeared. My peppers, both hot and sweet, went into the tomatillo beds with basil and a tomato plant or two. I thought of it like a salsa bed where, by the end of the summer I'd be harvesting everything I needed to go into a perfect jar of spicy, flavorful deliciousness.

Finally, a "drunk" experiment. I have one bed where despite the full sun, the well-drained, well-amended soil, the alpaca and chicken manure and the abundant worm castings, nothing would grow all winter, not even lettuce, a great cool weather crop for California that grew in my other beds October through February. I tried seeds, I tried seedlings, I tried bird netting, but nothing would grow there but weeds. Finally, in desperation, I took the sack of sunflower seeds I'd harvested from last year's sunflowers and a packet of zinnia seeds I'd gotten in a card and anything I had in my seed box that looked like it was about to be expired. At least I could, I don't know. Fertilize the ground with them or something. Feed the birds if nothing else. As February started to warm up into true spring, I scattered the seeds in mixed handfuls and covered them with a layer of compost, expecting nothing.

Certainly not expecting seven foot sunflower stalks. 

I had a few pumpkin seedlings so I put those in there as well. We'll just see what lives. It was a challenge. Would flowers live? Would lettuce seeds live? Could gourds, notoriously short-lived and unfruitful in my garden, live in the Death Bed? Here. How about some poppy seeds. I started to channel the drunken ecstasy I imagined Narcisso finding as he danced and sang the magic songs in his moonlight garden. Here. Live! Live! I threw in seeds with abandon. Ten seeds weren't enough? Try this! Here's a thousand seeds. Grow and shade each other and cover each other from the birds. Maybe some of you will live. Maybe some of you will grow fruitful. It became an exercise in possibility.

And astonishingly, it bore fruit. Sunflowers came up first, strong and solid, their stems thickening up quickly, the ones that survived the birds pushing up past the bitten-down corpses of their brethren. Zinnias and poppies came up between them, shorter and crooked, the poppies tentatively shaking out delicate ferny skirts and the zinnias stubbornly poking up chubby round flower heads, the first signs of yellow and orange to draw the bees back to my garden. The birds gobbled up poppies and zinnias seeds and while they were sitting on the edges of the raised beds eating baby sunflower sprouts, distributed the seeds into the grass around the beds, so that the flowers bloomed and spread all over the edges of the garden, spilling out in crazy, messy abundance. The pumpkins stretched their legs and twined up the sunflower stalks, sending out spiraling brilliant green tendrils to pull themselves up the sturdy poles and burst into insane fireworks with explosive yellow blooms and pollen so thick it fell in piles into the petals. I found bees sleeping inside the flowers every morning, drunk from gorging themselves on the golden ambrosia. Pumpkins swelled and bloomed as the vines climbed out of the bed, spreading between the other beds in the garden, curling around the other plants protectively, shading the soil with enormous deep green leaves a foot across, hiding the pregnant female flowers as they filled out in glorious, round-bellied curves.

I haven't found anything in any companion planting books about drunken planting, or how zinnias and poppies and sunflowers and pumpkins make each other happy, but somehow where that sullen patch of dirt had been glowering in the sun, a garden grows. The Death Bed became my Drunken Garden, a little corner of that magic place I'd only read about, orange and gold and vermillion and crimson and blooming and fruiting and dancing. I'll always companion plant by the book, but I think I'll always save one little corner for a Drunken Garden, where I can wade among pumpkin leaves up to my knees, shaded from the summer sun by the sunflowers growing far above my head, seduced by the fragrant mixed perfume of flowers and tomato leaves and the droning hum of the bees. The abundance curls its tendrils around me and climbs irrevocably inside.