What kind of resilience plant are you?                         

What is resilience? The ability to withstand a force without deformation? The ability to regain your shape after an external force subsides? A personality positive or a character curse?

I will give you the bottom line up front, I don’t like resilience, and I see it as a slow and slippery slope to ruin. I think it is a failing to take a stand, I see it enables bullies and shames victims. I have no interest in blaming victims. Never. I also have no interest in language that empowers the bully or their target.

But I am an educated thinker with an ability to play with words and craft clever metaphoric; analogous to reality as I see it. So back to resilience we go…

In one of my professional development groups a peer asked for a better definition of the word and a few text book answers were offered. They helped me as much as they did him; that is enlightening more to the sales of dictionaries to middle management rather than providing any lexical learning.

I mentioned that it is easy to view in engineering term, looking at the physical properties of materials such as steel, glass, plastic and wood. Imagining the effects of shocks or sustained pressure on each substance. I took the wood analogy a little further and offered my story that I see myself like a gum tree. Actually, a gumtree was the only essential extra inclusion that I required when I purchased a home in the winery regions south of Melbourne.

The gum tree has phases of resilience and resistance to force; none are enduring or limitless though. The trunk is substantial; anchored by deep roots in the good strong Mornington peninsula soils. The branches sway gently in the wind and creek and ground in the storms. The small tips are covered in leaves and hustle in the lightest breeze. In stronger winds, the leaves may detach, lowering the overall torque on the trees. This is generally the life of the gum tree. I must point out that sometimes, be it in storms or without other warning, some gums will just drop branch and destroy all that lay in the path of the Newtonian destiny.

I see myself, psychologically, just like that gum tree. I sway under light pressure and in storms, stay true. I will occasionally just drop my bundle.

But all this is worthless text on a page when the axe is swung, the lumberjack may have his way, or just leave a convenient fault line for future felling…

The Life Centre of plants.

I am an amateur well-intentioned but lacking horticulturalist. This does not stop me though from playing with plants, tending to seed rising and controlling unwanted foliage. I pondered the age old question of “why do weeds flourish when the desired saplings did not?”.

I began our stay in a rental house situated on one of the inner rings around the Nation’s Capital by hacking away at the autumn garden. I filled an old walled pathway with all kinds of leaf matter and mulched branches and just started planting random stuff. Corn went well, beans, tomatoes and herbs all made it to the plate alone with some lovely potatoes that grew from out of date store bought spuds forgotten about and tossed out the kitchen window…

But my main aim was pumpkins; giant pumpkins to be certain. I purchased these dicotyledonous seeds on line for a little more than a latte each and tended them carefully before moving them to the garden bed. To cut a very long story short, I had success with only one seedling and of this only about 19 KG of fruit eventuated, merely 10% of what I expected.

So I did a bit more research on plants and my learnings followed the familiar network terminology of my Engineering profession. I started to classify platforms as we would classify IT or communication network. Networks are generally described by the interconnection between nodes Such as

Star: there is one central node from where all others radiate from, operations cease if this node fails

Ring: there are multiple nodes, all able to continue functioning if one node is halted

Bus: there is one controlling node from where all others are served from, if the bus is cut, operations cease if for any other service further along the bus away from this break

Branch: similar to a conventional picture of a tree, that is one main node that branches out to two or more lines, and continues in this iterative split until all services are distributed. All service ceases for all smaller branches from the cut node onwards, if the main node is cut all service ceases.

Hybrid: any combination of these.

I think that all plants function in some way like these IT networks and in order to promote success (desired plant) or eradicate the unwanted (undesired plants) you need to understand this. I will not refer to them as weeds as even a beautiful plant in the wrong location could be called a weed. We have mint growing rampant in the back yard, we like making refreshing minted lemonade so these are not a desired feature, but in other parts of the garden, they are certainly not needed.

So where is the heart, the primary node of a plant? For the mint, it is a very robust hybrid network, sending out bus like runners that drop roots to form another plant. There is wisteria on the front porch; a most virulent branch network that multiplies at every twist and turns like the wrought iron it plays on. There are gums in the front yard and fruit trees in simple branch layouts. the hedge, whilst generally branch like, often sends up a few shoots from a ground level node making it a little like a star network.

Now my final point, aroused by watching a pumpkin seedling emerges from its encasement. “Where is the true heart of a plant?” and was this the answer to “why do weeds flourish when the desired saplings did not?”? The heart is the point of the plant that when cut skyward above the plant could remain viable, when cut below this point the plant would cease to be. A little morbid in language, but essential for removal of undesired, you really need to dig down. When watching the pumpkin seed spring, you see the roots drop and leaves unfold from the pointed part of the seed. This point is the true and beating heart of the plant; it needs to be cared for in planting and controls the spreading of vines, the flowering and the eventual growth of fruit from the fertilised fronds.

Next year I plan to again try the pumpkin planting. But we also want to adopt the southern American Pilgrim method of planting the trilogy. That is Corn, Peas and Squash. The corn grows upright, the peas climb up here to the sun and avoid the frost, the squash covers the ground helping to retain moisture and avoid frost.

We will perhaps also plant some spuds, or at least try our hand again wish kitchen scraps. I made a note in my diary that relates here; it is amazing how good able we can be to bury scraps and hurts deep underground, some day we gotta get them up, we gotta just get digging.