On Morning Mists, Rolling Hills and the Power of Green

It’s funny how life can bring you back full circle. It’s strange how childhood impressions run so deep, even if you fight them or ignore them. It’s been quite a few years since I made a “real” trip back to California, the place I was born and the place where I grew up. On most trips, I had been simply passing through in an airport, or in the bowels of a hotel in the conference rooms. It was this way partly by accident, partly by design. This trip, however, is partly for pleasure, a trip for doing nothing in preparation for a new semester. It is also partly for another purpose: for visiting once-close family.

Now on this trip, more than 20 years after I last lived here, driving through the crowded streets and the congested gardens, I realize this is my home turf. My partner and I later walk through my sister’s neighborhood. I’m saying “hello” to all the familiar plants that I rarely see now: Olea, Tibouchinia, Ceanothus, Aeonium, Phormium, Heteromeles, Grevillea, Eucalyptus, Protea and on. We take a whiff of Coleonema, and Will decides that the name “Breath of Heaven” is more appropriate than “Wet Dog Plant.” I agree. We reach high to pull down a branch of Pittosporum undulatum, and sniff January’s citrus-sweet white bells hanging between the wavy-edged lime green leaves.

I have been living in Albuquerque for five years. Before that I lived in Palm Springs, California and before that, Philadelphia. Although I could happily garden in all of these places, my recent trip brought upon me a sudden and intense realization, that these places, while pleasurable in their own right, were not my personal ideal. What was missing from those places? Perhaps it is the year-round growth and bloom of plants, that incessant push of green life. It is what invigorates me, it is what settles me, it is what sustains me.

I am reminded of my first trip to Hawaii, as a child of 10. When I stepped off the plane, I took a deep breath of the flower-scented humid air and thought, “I am finally home.” At first this was simply a subconscious thought. Dreams of this place haunt me still, and I awake with longing. Although it wasn’t California, in Hawaii there is that vigor of plant growth, and the plant energy. In the science fiction book Red Mars, a woman calls the energy of life and growth “Viriditas.” In Chinese medicine, it is the energy of Qi. It abounds in the plant life of these areas.

Then I remember Florida. Lush, dense, heavy, oppressive. It’s like putting your key into your car in the parking lot only to realize that it’s not your car. I realize that it isn’t only plant growth that drives me on. It’s some time before I realize the difference: the terrain. In the places I love, the land and its texture is visible. Light plays on the slopes in a multitude of colors, clouds play among ridge and swale, trees cluster in the mysterious valleys.

There is something in the aroma that rises off the damp earth and the soft calls of birds or the noisy ones of cows. There is something in the warm afternoon sun as it drives off the damp of night. These morning mists, these rolling hills, and the power of green are within me.