The Wild Side

These days are busy. The plants are busy making flowers, the insects are busy collecting pollen, and I am busy trying to balance work with play. Maybe one day I will find a way to make a living crafting yard sculptures from fallen sticks and moving little plant colonies around in effort to understand what contributes to their happiness— projects I seem to have endless capacity for— but for now, I am grateful to have an art practice that supports my outdoor endeavors.

Every time I am in the yard, my mind is flooded with musings, and it feels nearly impossible to get to the computer to spill them all out in time. I mentioned the Speed of Summer in my last writing, and it’s become my mantra. The day’s kinetic energy is palpable and manifests in ways both positive and negative. Two of our neighbors were in car accidents last week. There have been tragic shootings in our community recently. The sun’s powerful rays feed the plants in our gardens and the angst in our post-vaccination summer emergence.

In addition to cultivating a vegetable garden, there is an entire wild side of the yard I’ve yet to touch on. The neighbors have told me that this home used to have a landscaper, but that this changed years ago in favor of giving the task to the tenants. With this change, the yard fell into years of neglect, and nature had its way of reclaiming the space. This has resulted largely in aggressive native and invasive non-native species dominating the landscape. The previous tenants did some work with the wild they inherited, and I’ve picked up where they left off, though in some cases too optimistically.

My first lesson of the yard has been this: wait until things start leafing out. I learned this after a day of pulling what I thought was just English Ivy vines, only to break out in a rash the next day. A month of torture and paranoia followed— how could I be having such a strong reaction from what I thought was a very small exposure to Poison Ivy from another area in the yard? I was convinced that all of our belongings were tainted, and spent hours googling, watching youtube videos and reading research papers on how the oils effect our immune system. And then, as spring advanced, the PI vine started to reveal itself and the discovery was made that I had, in fact, spent the entire day getting down and dirty with the urushiol oil. I have since located several spots of the vine and, together with my partner, have developed a tedious method of regularly keeping these itchy communities in check.

Dioscorea polystachya and the hundred-year-old deck. The branch to the left was added yesterday in hopes of coaxing the vine even further over the walkway. My dreams are tunnels of green.

One of the most exciting wild plants I am experimenting with this year is the air potato, Dioscorea polystachya. When I first started working in the yard I kept discovering these weird little bulbils that looks just like tiny potatoes. After lots of research, I was able to identify them as part of the wild yam family. D. polystachya is not native here, and it very invasive, so I enter into this experiment with trepidation. It was difficult to get clarity on the identification of this vine because there are many similar— and sometimes poisonous— varieties, such as D. bulbifera. Eventually I did find a great write-up on telling them apart. The key is in the direction in which the vine twines. As it turns out, this is also the key to identifying different types of wisteria, and other vines. Plants are endlessly fascinating to me.

I wondered if the impressively fast-growing polystachya would make for a good arbor cover on our porch, while providing a simple way to harvest the bulbils when they are ready, and serve as a method for containing the aggressiveness of the species. Wherever an air potato meets the dirt, it will grow. I regularly spend hours pulling air potato and morning glory sprouts from all over the yard. Assuming it is somewhat contained with this method of hanging over the porch, I am content to watch the plant in its madness, and am in awe of its virility. The underground root of these vines is prized in parts of Asia, and I learned a trick from Joe Hollis recently that you can grow the tuber horizontally in a buried pipe for easy harvesting. I have my eye set on that process for next year.

For now, I am transfixed with the evolution of this vine arbor. I have not come across any pictures of the flowering component of D. polystachya, but it is said to smell of cinnamon when in bloom. And, if all goes well, we will be eating tiny potatoes in the Fall.