Shamrocks in LA?

Sure, it's the Luck of the Irish, so it is... 

A rogue shamrock appeared in the courtyard of our suburban Los Angeles home, settling itself between gangly blue chalk sticks and an overgrown bush lily. How clever of Mother Nature to arrange for a plant which thrives in the drizzly damp of Ireland, to take root in turf that’s often plagued by drought. Yet, there she was, a purple shamrock no less, kindred to a lilac or jacaranda, fragile as a springtime violet, embedded into our soil and mulch.

It was an accidental journey, unlike that of my 18-year-old grandfather, who deliberately migrated from Ireland in 1905. He planted roots in a New York tenement, amid concrete and bridges and streetcars, a world removed from the gentle green hills of his homeland, and a family tree grew in Brooklyn… in Manhattan, and beyond.  

My father was the youngest, a first-generation Irish American, ambivalent about his ancestry, but my mother’s gusto made up for it. A generation removed from her own immigrant grandparents, she was buffered from famine, starvation and religious oppression. When it was my turn to go to Ireland, I took tea with hospitable cousins who still reside on the County Tyrone homestead where my father’s people were tenant farmers, and where everyone had stayed except my grandfather who, family legend has it, climbed out the window to elope. 

The Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte writes, “To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance.” I felt the pulse of generations when I planted my feet on the ancestral land and wondered if this was one of the “thin places,” where the physical and spiritual worlds co-exist. 

I inherited from my mother the habit of baking soda bread and buying shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day. They become available each March in supermarket floral departments, sharing space with mixed bouquets and succulents, and when I saw the traditional bright green shamrocks alongside their deep purple compatriots, I brought home a pot of each. It should be noted that, just like green beer (ahem!) did not come from Ireland, neither did my grocery store shamrocks. They were
probably grown in a greenhouse up the road in Ventura County, adjacent to rows of strawberries. Indeed, despite its strong identification with Irish lore, an image search of my shamrock suggests it’s a member of the wood sorrel family with roots in South America. Others have debunked the story that St. Patrick used the shamrock to teach the Irish people of the blessed Trinity, but how very like the Irish to pass down such a tale. 

Ireland’s patchwork landscape of verdant variegation is evidenced in books and postcards and views from an Aer Lingus window seat. Despite that, and the fact our ancestors were farmers, nobody in our family has a particularly green thumb. Still, while living in the Midwest, I planted basil and tomatoes most summers, and when the August swelter descended, we dined on caprese salads and pasta with fresh pesto as the scraggly hanging baskets on the west-facing deck withered away like store-bought shamrocks in April. 

A couple of years ago, instead of drooping their way into the shabby brown, dried-out expiration of seasons’ past, my grocery store shamrocks thrived. Enough so that they outgrew their cheap plastic containers and I lovingly repotted them. When the purple shamrock began to flag, my husband – whom we’d only just learned through DNA has nearly as much Irish blood as he does Italian – set the pot on the patio for a wee bit of sun, as if it were an elderly aunt we wheeled into a solarium at the old age home for a change of scenery. We fed the shamrock Miracle-Gro and sips of water, but despite our best efforts, the purple plant was on life support, and when it eventually gave up, we tossed it out unceremoniously with the yard waste.

That fall, a full six months after the purple shamrock’s expiration, its spawn appeared in the garden – a small cluster of three-leafed stems with delicate, tiny, white flowers. I had the brief sense of a miracle, like stigmata or a statue of a weeping Madonna. Despite taking only rudimentary high school biology, I had enough of an inkling of nature’s workings to know there was science involved in this trickster elbowing her way into a planter designated primarily for succulents, even if I was unclear as to the exact details. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have a botanist give me a birds-and-bees lecture to please explain how the bumblebees or hummingbirds or house finches had carried pollen or seeds from my droopy supermarket shamrock across the yard to blossom in a patch where it was never intended to grow. 
Maybe it was the Santa Ana winds that launched the shamrock’s migration across our courtyard, just as the Atlantic Ocean propelled the SS Columbia, which carried my grandfather to his own unfamiliar and often rocky soil. I can’t say how firmly he was planted or how tenderly he cared for his own. Facts gleaned from a ship’s manifest, census forms, death certificates and my own father’s silence, point not merely to an arduous narrative, but also to a story of survival. 

In the dog days of the following summer, my husband replaced the unruly bush lily with a very needly cactus and a fuchsia bougainvillea. I feared they would push out the shamrock or leach whatever nutrients she required to persevere and prepared myself for her demise, as if she were a hospice patient. She has played peek-a-boo a few times and I’ve been sure she was gone forever, but the purple shamrock always reappears, conquering heatwaves and parched soil. She is a heroine of legendary Celtic proportion. 

We Irish are a determined lot, adapting to our surroundings no matter how far we wander from our ancestral home. Despite the blarney and folklore, though, we are realists to whom death and loss are no strangers. If and when my shamrock succumbs again, I’ll remind myself of the words of the late Irish Poet John O’Donohue, who imagined “death is rebirth,” and I’ll wait to see where the scrappy lass turns up next.