ࡱ> 9;8#` 3bjbj\.\. .$>D>D3 ( Y@@@@@$hw@@ @@@4 o )0YWWW N= I  Yd Lessons, Native Flowers Abound in Bruce Griffiths Garden By Juanita Bouser Teschner April 12, 1991 Truth and beauty. Those are gifts a visitor takes away from Dr. Bruce Griffiths garden. Delicate blossoms provide the beauty. Griffith conveys the truths he has distilled from years of working in the soil. A history professor and director of the General Education Division at Catawba College, Griffith nurtures students during the day, teaching them about Confucius and the Buddha, about Pericles and Thomas Jefferson. But in the evening, as the birds offer a wild accompaniment, he nurtures native wildflowers with names that roll off the tongue, like anemonella and trillium, and names that stick in the mind, like fernleaf bleeding heart and toad flax. Griffith is a gardener, a serious gardener. He has more than 80 different Siberian irises. But his is more. He is a collector of wildflowers. He has hundreds of species native to North Carolina and the Southeast and so many variations of each species that he needs a card file to keep track of them all. I like the diversity, he says. There are a lot of people who like to have big blocks of one thing, but generally I like to have it the way you find it in the woods a scattering of a lot of different things. His experience with gardening goes back to his childhood in Connecticut. My father was an avid gardener, he says, but as a full-time blue collar worker, he couldnt spend nearly as much time as he wanted to on his garden. Griffith has fooled around with gardening for some time, he says, vegetables mainly at first and in recent years, flowers. He explains the fascination with native plants. First of all, the flowers are pretty, and, second, theyre ecologically sound, he says. The natives are really well adapted for our climate and our pests and diseases. Most of them have had millions of years to adapt to it, so theyre relatively carefree. That doesnt mean that they dont require work, however. Griffith has had to claim the flower beds at his home on East Colonial Drive from areas clogged with blackberry briars, honeysuckle vines and the dreaded poison ivy. He typically clears a plot, piles leaves on it for a year, and then plants flowers he has ordered from nurseries in Maryland, South Carolina and North Carolina. Then the daily work begins weeding, enriching the soil periodically and replanting, experimenting to find the area that is just right for a particular flower. Gardening with natives is about knowing what they need and knowing your garden well enough to find the spots that suit them, Griffith says. Amending the soil is the easiest way to prepare their home. Watering is a cop-out and should be considered only as a last resort. Griffiths approach to gardening is 95 percent organic. If I run into a choice between a plant and the insects, Im not averse to using pesticides, he says, and when working with poison ivy, I use an herbicide. Im not going to fool around and try to dig that out. But he uses chemicals as little as possible. If youve got a lot of different plants, you should eventually, with all that diversity, get a natural balance, he says. The problem with earth management is when you grow a lot of one thing, then youre going to get a lot of the bugs that like that one thing. When you grow a lot of different flowers, theres not enough food for any one of the insects, so they tend to keep in balance. Gardening brings Griffith satisfaction. Its a good thing to do in terms of making things prettier than they are, healthier than they were, he says. A lawn is not a healthy ecology. He simply loves flowers. From this time of the year on, its like Christmas every day because you come out and something different has opened up, something you didnt notice is coming along. Things youve raised from seed are kind of like children, and sometimes it takes two or three years before they bloom for the first time. Gardening provides great lessons, too. Its a reminder that the world runs in cycles, Griffith says, and that a lot of the most beautiful things are things we cant really control. He admits, though, that its anxiety producing then the weather turns warm too soon. Everything starts coming up, and you know youre going to get a late frost, he says, and its going to kill everything in the garden. Griffith gardens mainly for therapy. It gives me exercise, he says, but, more importantly, it gets me in touch with the slower and uncontrollable patterns of nature. Weve gotten to where we, living in cities, think that nature is an inconvenience to be handled. No gardener can think that. This historian gardener hopes eventually to oversee the birth of a new variety of flower. Jefferson said nobody could do more for a nation than introduce a new plant worthy of cultivation, he says. In the meantime, however, he will nurture the plants that he has the woodland phlox and coral bells, the columbine and Johnny-jump-ups. And he will learn anew every day as he digs in the dirt and weeds around the ruellia carolinensis, that theres a biblical lessons in gardening. Eventually you get some of that Ecclesiastes notion that to everything there is a season, he says. 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