Seeds and saplings

I've started volunteering at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. Founded in 1938 by David Fairchild, an eminent botanist, the garden consists in an enormous (83 acre) site. The garden is arranged around several small lakes, and has areas dedicated to, amongst other things, rainforest plants, butterfly favourites, succulents, tropical fruits, and replications of tropical ecosystems like the coastal Florida Keys and the spiny forests of Madagascar. The list of individual plants growing there runs to 291 pages, a catalogued collection of palms, vines, flowering trees, orchids, cycads, and a host of other incredible, beautiful things. Walking around the place is wonderful, a visual, aural, olfactory delight.

I asked for a horticultural placement, rather than anything to do with education, staffing gift shops, or the like. As it turns out, most of the gardening jobs get filled pretty quickly in the Miami winter; come the summer, they're more freely available as everyone prefers an air conditioned working environment. So rather than working in the garden proper, I've been set to at the Centre for Tropical Plant Conservation.

The CTPC is part of Fairchild's research and conservation work. It's located about a mile from the garden, on a nondescript site behind locked automatic gates. The security is not just for show; some of the species under cultivation in the greenhouses and outdoor growing areas behind the fences are both rare and valuable. In the chaos following the last hurricane, some opportunistic thieves turned up with a truck and helped themselves to plants worth hundreds of dollars. The section of the CTPC to which I've been attached has two main projects. The first involves a set of lab experiments designed to assess the viability of the seeds of various tropical species under storage conditions. The work feeds into the seed bank project in Colorado; samples those that are found to be sufficiently robust are sent for storage there, to allow for reestablishment of the species in the event of their extinction (similar to the planned seed vault at Spitzbergen).

Though this is, of course, tremendously important and exciting stuff, lab work is not really my forte, and so I've been assigned to help out with the other project. This is a massive, ongoing effort to cultivate specimens for reintroduction into the wild, or to replicate fast-vanishing ecosystems. For example, the pine rocklands of South Florida, which used to sustain a wide variety of succulents and associated wildlife, have been under severe pressure from development, climate change, the usual factors. At the CTPC, there's a host of plants being carefully grown in containers for replanting, either within the garden or in protected locations elsewhere.

So my four hours of contribution to this yesterday mainly involved re-potting a succession of seedlings, vines, and saplings. Pleasant, vacant work. The Americans, it seems to me, have a habit of making some good efforts at conservation and environmental friendliness, but not getting it quite right. Recycling points only accessible by car, trying to reduce dependence on petrol by investing in bio fuel, that kind of thing. So I was only mildly perturbed when told that the potting soil used in huge quantities at the CTPC is mainly peat. Anyway, that aside, I left after my morning's work feeling happy that I'd spent some time mucking around in muck, doing something useful, and not thinking about logic. Although, given the massive rainstorm that soaked me through on the cycle ride home, I could have saved myself the effort of watering in my new charges.

Wherever I lay my hat

America is the only non-EU country I've ever visited, so I don't know if you have to fill out interminable customs forms when travelling elsewhere too. It at least gives you something to do whilst sitting in the departure 'lounge' trying not to gag on the smell of fast food and travel sweat recycled by the air conditioning. Apart from the obvious environmental reservations, I quite like air travel, especially things like the view of Grand Bahama, grey-blue and blending with the ocean in the dusk as you approach Florida. But the parts at either side of the actual travel - airports, customs, embarkation, check-in - sometimes seem designed by double-agent Greenpeace activists within the relevant authorities to dissuade people from flying altogether.

I mention the customs forms not because they're annoying - though they are - but because one question in particular gave me pause for thought (two, actually. 'What is the value of all goods that will remain in the USA?'. Errr, I have a cake. It won't be leaving the USA, but I don't know if you can say it'll be remaining there...). It appeared on two forms, once plainly, once pompously: 'Where do you live?'; 'What is your country of residence?'.

Both times, I wrote 'UK' without hesitation. It was only later, queuing for passport control and re-checking my forms, that I questioned myself. Nobody in uniform did so, they waved me through happily (as happy as border police get, anyway). But was it the right answer? How do you tell? By most measures, surely, it was wrong. Even if I spend all my holidays over the next few years in the UK, I'll still be spending the majority of my time in the US. I pay taxes here, my official status is 'resident alien'. When people, strangers, inquired about my occupation over Christmas, I said that I live and study in Miami.

It's irrelevant that being back in the UK felt like putting on a comfortable pair of trainers after a day spent in cripplingly unfamiliar footwear. Being at home is always cosy; that's been the case in the past whether I've been living in Sheffield, Bristol, anywhere. I suppose I now think of the UK in a wider sense as 'home'; previously, the term only really applied to Durham, whereas this time, I got that warm feeling in the pit of my stomach as soon as the tube from Heathrow left that airport hinterland and started to pick up commuters on the way into central London. But where you call home, and where you live, can of course be two different things, and in my case, it should be clear that they are.

So why do I write 'UK'? And why do I balk somewhat at the thought of doing otherwise? The answer's obvious, really. Despite all the considerations that suggest I live here, I feel very much like a visitor still. I can isolate three reasons for this. The first is that the culture, the lifestyle, the climate, remain surprising and strange. I'd forgotten, after just three weeks, how big the city was, how warm, how bloody awkward for anyone without a car. The second is that my lifestyle, at present, feels like one in which I've accommodated myself to the place, rather than settled into it. This applies in particular to my house, in which I feel somewhat more like a long-term hotel guest than a resident (through no fault of my landlord - I imagine this is just a general feature of lodging). Both these factors will dwindle, I suspect, as time goes on, my lifestyle changes, the city becomes mundane, I move house.

The third reason, though, I think will be constant; indeed, will become more acute as time passes. Despite the fact that I'm here for a while, despite the fact that I spend most of my year here, I'm on a finite time scale. A long time scale, for sure; very different from a fortnight's break on the beach. But I know that, once I've exhausted my visa and got the piece of paper from the university (fingers crossed), I'll be coming home. It may be a long, drawn-out, involved trip, but I'm really just visiting here. In my heart, I live elsewhere.

Well, that was all rather self-absorbed, wasn't it? Don't worry, I'll find something less navel-gazing to write about next time...