From Baja to Wales is not so far
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/06/16/...
Diana Rathbone
June 16, 2004
I have just returned from my first trip to Baja, and what a stunning landscape it was. It looked like a huge, moonlike desert, a vast expanse of burnt
yellow sand stretching as far as the eye could see, dotted here and there with weird and splendid flowering shrubs and monstrous growths of cactus.
The same baked golden earth covered the ground everywhere, from the unpaved roads to the sparsely planted yards to the vast arroyos carving their way
down from the mountains to the sea.
At first I thought nobody bothered to garden, which does not mean that the villages were not colorful. The bougainvillea was so brilliant, so
multicolored, it seemed almost to be moving in the light, even when there was not a breath of wind. It was just that I thought the plants dotting the
yards were as wild and random as the ones along the highway and the winding streets.
It took me a while to discover the truth. My friends had the use of a swimming pool in a nearby beach house, and I was lazing there one afternoon when
I saw a gardener clearing out the deadwood from a thorny, desiccated shrub. A gardener! I looked around more carefully and realized with shock that
every plant had in fact been painstakingly placed in its chosen spot, the whole thing set up to echo the spiky, olive green effect in the surrounding
desert.
Earlier that day we had gone for a long walk into the coastal hills separating the Sea of Cortez from the Pacific Ocean, and our stroll had got off to
a tearful start when my friend's little daughter, who seldom wears shoes, repeatedly stepped on splinters from shrubs along the road.
Such was Baja, according to my friend, a spiky, prickly, almost extraterrestrial place that tolerates its human denizens, but just barely. Tarantulas,
snakes, cactus, thorns -- everywhere you look, she said, the environment has its feelers out, if not to get you, at least to keep you at a distance.
And get you it will, if you are not careful. Lying in the shade one afternoon, I watched fascinated as a huge iguana scrambled up the mean spikes of a
gigantic cactus, the outrageous baubles of bright red flowers reverberating in the midday heat. I felt almost embarrassed at my own puniness.
Indeed, the impact mere human beings can make on an environment like this appears minimal; as a species, we seem pretty much irrelevant. For six
months of the year, the climate is heaven on earth, attracting fishermen, windsurfers, holidaymakers, dancers and writers, old hippie dropouts,
everyone who loves the heat and the sand, the silky ocean and the colorful fish.
But then comes summer, when it is too hot to move, turning people into lumps of burned-up human flesh, focused inward on a tiny remaining spot of
human-ness. This is followed by hurricanes, which destroy everything in their path, keeping people trembling in their homes as winds roar by at 100
mph and water rushes down the arroyos from the sierra, washing away bridges and sweeping all before it.
And yet those who have made their home here have done so with grace and even whimsy. One family had gathered rocks from all over the region and turned
them into brightly colored replicas of iguanas, chickens and dogs. Their backyard, scrambling up a sandy hillside, had been transformed into a
sculpture garden, the stones as simple and clear against the bright blue sky as the carefully placed succulents.
While I was there my brother-in-law died, and I had to fly directly to the United Kingdom. The contrast with Mexico could not have been more complete.
He had been ill for a long time, and the sadness of his funeral was somehow softened by the balmy peacefulness of Wales in early spring.
Everything was green and growing, lambs frolicked on the hillsides, and nature and people existed on almost equal terms. The gardens themselves struck
me as being as entangled as people's lives, a veritable "Masterpiece Theatre"- type enmeshment of roses, verbena, deutzias, everything subtle, pastel
and feathery, drawing you in, enfolding you in the pale sun and gentle clouds fluttering overhead.
My sister's gardener lives in a small house in a rural subdivision, and in this tiny spot he has re-created the gardens of the world, from a French
lily pond to a Chinese pagoda, replete with bamboo. It was whimsy, English style, very "Alice in Wonderland" in its effect, very playful, almost
effete, entirely pastoral.
The day I returned to San Francisco I stopped on the way home to have the first good cup of coffee I had tasted in three weeks. There was a sharp wind
blowing off the ocean, a clean and brilliant sun shining down from a deep blue sky, and I felt a sort of joy that I could not altogether explain.
On the street-side patio, I noticed with amusement that English verbena and Mexican cactus were growing alongside each other and that crimson
bougainvillea and climbing roses, albeit not quite as good as the ones I had just left behind, were fighting for space on a nearby garage wall.
There's a peculiarly American freedom that goes with that.
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