My best flea-market find of the summer so far is a photograph of a family and a cabin. I have no idea who the family is. I don't know where the cabin was. I don't even know for sure what state it was taken in. But one thing is for certain: they knew how to garden.
If you travel in the same plant-nerd circles I do, you have probably heard the buzzword "permaculture." It's a word bandied about college campuses, in coffeehouses and at sustainable agriculture conferences.
It is so new that spell check doesn't even recognize it yet. It's so trendy you can take terrible online courses in it. But my ancestors and most definitely yours were practicing it way before it was cool.
For the uninitiated, permaculture is simply sustainable agriculture. Think going organic but taking it all the way. No pesticides, no fossil fuels, no factory farms, growing all you need locally and enhancing the land's fertility while you're at it.
Purveyors of permaculture promote biodiversity, free-range livestock and planting perennials. The idea is to limit inputs and maximize outputs without drastically affecting or destroying the ecosystem you live in. Google "food forest" and let your imagination go wild.
So what's that look like in practice? I suspect in Appalachia it looks a lot like this picture. Like Mama always said, "Everything old is new again." For $3 I bought a history lesson.
What can we learn from the photo? The first thing I see is a peach tree. Who doesn't want a peach in the middle of July? Now how about dozens of them that you can pick from your porch?
But the placement goes beyond that. Peaches are hard to grow this far north; they are fickle and prone to blight, frost and pests of all kinds. You're more likely to nurture something you see everyday, so why not plant it right out the window?
Then I noticed the picket fence around the inner yard. The American Dream right? Maybe, but I'm willing to bet they built it for more than just looks. Permaculture, remember? Free-range animals: chicken, sheep, pigs, maybe a cow or two wondering around the yard. You'd have to keep them out of the fragile stuff.
Oh, how I wish I could see all that was inside that garden fence. Herbs, maybe some blueberries and medicinals, I'm sure. That garden was the inner sanctum. It's where the special stuff was. It was nurtured and watered and cared for.
One of the prime tenants of permaculture design is to create spheres of influence; you can't maintain it all, so keep the stuff you care about close.
If you look up the hill behind the house in the photo, you will see a neatly grazed hill. Look at those trees. See how they're eaten up even to the ground?
There's no yardman pruning them, that's the work of cows and horses. In the agriculture department, the cool kids call that a silvopasture, but it's just the novel idea of grazing animals under trees. Forestry and farming all in one place. Neat, right?
After the peach tree, the next plant I could positively identify was the grape vine growing up the side of the house. Again, a perennial fruit - remember this was in the days before the gas station candy counter. Could you imagine how wonderful those first ripe grapes tasted in the summer?
But wait! If you started noticing a fruit trend, let me throw you for a loop. What's that in the back corner next to the displeased little boy? A hydrangea! You can't eat those, but the pollinators sure can.
The heart of permaculture is plant diversity. Monocultures are unsustainable. Even if we can't eat it, we might as well plant something pretty and feed the bees through the summer, too. As my grandmother always says, "Everything is good for something."
Finally there's the big locust tree in the corner. The native black locust is probably the strongest tree we have in the region. They have beautiful-smelling, edible flowers and bean-like fruit that can make a powerful fall tonic. These people set up shop in the shade of this tree on purpose, and they were in it for the long haul.
Leaning up against that tree is a scythe, a symbol of man's dominion over nature. One of the men, no doubt, had to neaten up the yard before putting his Sunday clothes for the family portrait.
But look at what he left, all around them - he could have cut them down, but he didn't. Even in the cracks of the sidewalk, they are surrounded by flowers, and whether you call it permaculture or just good judgment, don't we all just want that?
Alex Cole is a native of Fraziers Bottom who's been landscaping all of his life and currently lives off the grid in a small, solar-powered cabin he built on a 217-acre farm that has been in his family for six generations. Alex has expertise in permaculture design, maintaining vegetable gardens, repairing riparian zones and creating all new perennial and pollinator gardens. Reach Alex at alexcole989@gmail.com.