'JAMES ROOF' GARRYA

Espalier shows this unique shrubs' drooping catkins to best effect

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FOR MY FIRST FOUR decades, I lived within 100 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. Over those decades, I became familiar with a great deal of the flora in the region. The oaks, hickories, maples, beeches, hornbeams, birches, hemlocks and basswoods of the mixed forests were like old friends. I'd know them anywhere. 

I knew that moosewood (Acer pensylvanicum) tends to grow where sassafras (Sassafras albidum) thrives, and that the tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) takes over forests where sturdier hardwoods have been logged out again and again.

I knew where the yellow trout lilies (Erythronium americanum) bloomed when sunlight reached the forest floor before the tree canopy's leaves came out. And I knew that the tall white wands of black cohosh (once Cimicifuga racemosa, but now Actaea racemosa) repel bugs, hence its common name of bugbane.

In fact, I could take you on a walk through fields and forests in eastern Pennsylvania and tell you the names and stories of many if not most of the plants there.

So imagine what happened when I pulled up stakes in my 40s and moved to northern California-the first time I'd been here.

It felt like I'd fallen asleep and awakened in a weird world! Almost all the plants were new to me. I didn't know if the trees were native. or imported. Or what the shrub with the dark oxblood wood and no bark was called. Or which plants were edible and which were poisonous. Or which would blossom in spring or in fall and which wouldn't blossom at all. I was a stranger in a strange land.