The plants I chose to grow at my farm was based on my personal experiences. There were many more or less random events of people contacting me with seeds or accidentally finding plants as I went through my daily life. I would find these ideas as a source of seeds first which would then allow me to see the full range of expressions from that species as I grew the plants. My farm is pretty much nothing but that and little else. There are no grafted trees or varieties. They are all seedlings. For some people all seedlings are too random and not defined. Yet in the natural world, there are no varieties either so why not follow that idea to the end and search for the broadest possible expressions. That was my thought. It too seemed random in the course of clothing my land with trees. Why would I do that?

The trees on the right of this polyhouse are mature hybrids of chestnut and bur oak. Quercus prinus x macrocarpa.The trees on the left are English and white oak hybrids. Quercus robur x alba. The English crosses were found as street trees in front of a school when I took a short cut from the hardware store to a place I was working at the time. Random discovery. The chestnut oak hybrids were purchased as acorns from an electrician who loved oak trees and collected acorns in a public park with his son. Random phone call. As the trees grew, I thinned them, cut down the weak trees and removed the lower limbs. The photograph above captures a blimp that happened to fly by at the time. A light orb was created by my lens creating this image. The blimp was random. The light was random. The clouds are amphorous and random. The trees I planted were kind of random discoveries of oak seed sources. I didn’t know what would happen when I planted them. They existed only because of my desire to grow trees and capture diversity of the oak genus in some way. The greenhouse I put up came with instructions so that is not random. All of of this allowed me to grow plants that I felt were not adequately used today. A lot of order was created by my random acts of planting. That worked out far greater than I expected. It is especially poignant in that I used primarily exotic plants from around the world and mixed them with many North American species.

Today when I look at the all space filling plant communities at my farm I see nothing but order. It is not random. Upon closer inspection you begin to experience the full range of ecological integration of plants in a universal scale. Here there are connections to be made, selections to be done while previous incarnations may decline and disappear while new plants colonize and improve the soil and community as a whole. The blimp fly by is a look see of a new animal or insect. It might be a woodcock, bobcat or white Admiral butterfly all of which periodically visited my farm. The clouds are all space filling and change over time depending on the conditions of the plants. The orb are the ideas in this picture. The human part is the polyhouse as knowledge has wedged itself between the oaks that I love to grow. I might be the pawn in the game of life but I am the novelty in the equation able to preserve, regenerate and evolve the plant assemblages in front of me. Order comes without effort all from my random acts.

The Ullong-do Cherry, Prunus takesimensis: Found on a remote island South Korea. Harvested for its sweet cherry like fruits.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus