Iowa farmers used to call a stalk of corn growing in a soybean field a "volunteer." I've always loved the personification lurking in that use of the word, as though a cornstalk among the soybeans were like a zealous schoolgirl sitting in the first row of desks, arm thrust in the air after every question....
Walking back to the barn, I crossed a slope filled with maidenhair ferns, not a bit different from the cultivated one we put beside the hostas last spring. The hillside, once a field, had filled with saplings. A couple of years ago, you might have mowed them down with a bush hog. No longer. They've passed the point where they could accurately be called volunteers. Now, they've made the place their own. (81-83) Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life
The grounds of NOLD are filled with volunteers, the unexpected shoots and saplings of vegetation not cultivated but the result of seeds carried along by nature and planted with serendipity to surprise the gardener. The most astonishing volunteer I discovered so far is the Dawn Redwood or Metasequioa, one of three species of deciduous conifers known as redwoods. I am thrilled to no end after my recent visit to
Muir Woods.
The Dawn Redwood had left me clues, innumerable small pine cones like the one above strewn across our back drive. Unusual in size, hardness, and shape, I had never seen pine cones such as these until I ran across a piece on them in Margaret Roach's blog,
A Way to Garden.
Sure enough, just over the stream on our neighbor's property stands a majestic Dawn Redwood with its characteristic red colored bark, bundled trunk, and long, lean lines. I have a difficult time photographing it, but it is the tallest tree around in a community of large, old growth.
The species was thought to be extinct until rediscovered in China in the 1940s. The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University collected and distributed seeds in 1948 for research and study, reintroducing this "living fossil" to North America. I have yet to find out how this Dawn Redwood ended up next door.
In the meantime, I discovered three volunteer Dawn Redwood saplings thriving in a flower bed nearby. I had nearly pulled and composted the trees, because they appeared dead after our bitterly cold winter, having shed their browned needles. I didn't realize that conifers could be deciduous.
Come autumn, two Dawn Redwoods will be transplanted in the front of the property with ample space conducive to their mature size, and one will be sent to the property of friends nearby. Clearly, they chose NOLD and have made it their own home. I am more than happy to comply.
Three Dawn Redwood volunteers discovered in the underbrush. The finding that ancient giants may live in our midst without detection, without really being seen, seems mysterious and magical. All I can say for certain is this: I have been given an exceptional gift, an enduring reminder to always embrace serendipity in life as in the garden, plain and simple.
