“I’m not sure what this is,” Zane said, examining the plant Derek and I had been trying to identify in one of our fields. “I don’t remember that I’ve ever seen this before. I’m going to take it with me, see if I can figure it out or if someone at the office recognizes it.”
A Google search had given us a dozen options for what this particular green life might be, leaving us more perplexed than when we began. My random guesses didn’t bring much clarity to the matter. The plant identification app we asked for help dodged all our efforts to pin it down to a correct answer. Now, standing at the edge of the field, even our experienced crop consultant was stumped.
It wasn’t sagebrush, that I knew. There are always fascinating details to learn about the flora, cultivated and wild, of our region of Idaho, but I’ve achieved a hard-earned degree in sagebrush. My two daughters and I spent entire weeks in the fall and spring pulling out sagebrush roots and hurling them to the edge of the circle or tossing them in the backhoe’s front loader.
Derek is fervent and relentless in his pursuit of improving our farms. As a result, a new irrigation pivot now watered the fallow 50 acres that had been flood irrigated in years past. The pivot’s last span walked over ground that had water rights but was never irrigated due to the elevation of the land. The hardy sagebrush, which thrived on spring snowmelt and infrequent summer rains, had to come out to give room for the wheat crop we planned to grow under the pivot.
All the while we wrestled with the sagebrush, I felt unidentifiable twinges about uprooting it. I wondered if any agricultural therapy existed for this complexity I was experiencing. Then I heard a true story about Wallace from a reliable source and realized maybe I wasn’t alone in my emotional ties to scrubby vegetation.
When Wallace moved to an area devoid of sagebrush, he transplanted one tiny bush to his yard. He tended that little sagebrush with noteworthy attentiveness, and in spite of all the pampering, it rooted in and grew like it was there to stay. Not long ago, my cousin got a phone call from Wallace, who was on vacation, “Are you goin’ anytime soon to check your cows by my place? If you are, I need you to video call me when you get there. I can’t see my sagebrush on my live cam.”
My cousin drove over to Wallace’s place and video called him. “It’s supposed to be about 15 feet over from the house, close to the electrical pole,” said Wallace. My cousin and Wallace both looked for the sagebrush, one standing right there and one via satellite. The grass was neatly mowed and no sagebrush in sight. “It’s not here, Wallace,” my cousin said. “Looks like your mower guy mighta got it.”
There was a long silence on the phone before Wallace spoke. “That sagebrush was 16 inches tall already,” he said sadly.
Along with sagebrush, I’ve also expanded my knowledge of the dandelion. Dandelions have a tendency to march unbidden through an alfalfa field while your back is turned. I was telling Dana this one morning as I waited for my iced coffee. “You need to have Derek make you fried dandelions,” she said. “I was complaining about all the dandelions in our field, and a few days later Corey cooked some for me.”
That sounds like an excellent way to try to negotiate a peace treaty with the persistent yellow flower. By the time we left the coffee shop, we had instructions from Corey how to soak the dandelions in salt water before dredging them in your favorite breading and dropping them in hot oil. “If you like fried okra, I can about guarantee you’ll like fried dandelions,” said Corey. “They taste similar.”
In the struggle to coax seed to germinate in the tilled ground we’d pulled out of sagebrush, I forgot all about the plant Zane had taken with him. The long, full days of the growing season take on an intense and satisfying quality. Our day-to-day life falls into the rhythms of irrigation water running and crops maturing. Throw in a pivot center drive going out or aphids lurking in the alfalfa and I’ll fail to recall what I ate for breakfast three hours earlier.
It was remarkable, therefore, when I remembered weeks later to ask Derek what he’d discovered about the mysterious plant. “Oh, Zane said it’s in the mint family. And Seth told me he’s seen it on his farm down South. I don’t think it’s going to be a big problem, but we’ll see,” Derek said.
It might be problematic for me. I like mint. I can already feel that unidentifiable twinge if it becomes necessary to uproot it.
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